Three Years in the Klondike

On June 11, 1898, the new steamship St. Paul left San Francisco for St. Michaels with 275 passengers, bound for the Klondike via the mouth of the Yukon River. A faint rumour of the misfortunes that had occurred to many of those who essayed the Chilkoot Pass the previous winter already pervaded the city, and partially induced others, as well as myself, to choose the longer but safer water route.


In a week we came to Dutch Harbour, in the Aleutian Islands, where the St. Paul anchored three days to coal. Other steamers and sailing vessels were there and at Unalaska, three miles distant, all laden with passengers for the Klondike. Three thousand people, including scores of women, were of the number; we made a strangely assorted assemblage with our motley costumes. A shipload from Boston, which had arrived six weeks earlier, was camped on the shore, waiting for the ice to break in the Behring Sea, and also for a steamer that had been chartered to carry them to St. Michaels.


These adventurers were mainly from the New England and Middle States. They were ill-prepared to live in tents, and suffered cruelly in the cold mist, which was never absent. The steamer owners or charterers had contracted to land them at St. Michaels, but had disembarked them at Unalaska instead, and then sent the vessel back to Seattle for additional supplies. No provision had been made for this exigency, and many lacked shelter, clothing, food, and money. It may be thought that people, especially women, should not have ventured on such an expedition without some means. But if we all had wealth there would be no more enterprise, and the world would be stagnant.


Several river steamboats for the Yukon were in process of building at the island. They were constructed to draw but 4 feet of water, fully equipped and loaded, with ample space for 150 passengers and 200 tons freight. When completed they would be towed to St. Michaels, it being deemed hardly safe for such shallow craft to traverse the thousand miles of sea with their own steam.


I wandered in the bleak, muggy atmosphere for the three miles separating Unalaska and Dutch Harbour, and over the soggy ground covered with tents and filled with anxious, worried faces. No sun was visible; it was rain, snow, or mist, or all three combined; not a cheerful halting-point on the way to wealth. The land directly back from the shores was barren, desolate, and mountainous, with neither trees nor shrubbery.


A small Russian church, two or three trading stores, log huts and tents for employes of the ship agencies and for the artisans imported to build the boats—no more. It gave us all the blues; for if this was the land and climate at Unalaska, how much worse must it not be a thousand miles still farther into the frozen North?