Maddie wasn’t on the wharf when the S.S. Portland docked in Seattle that summer of 1897. Chester was, though. He was among the throngs down at Schwabacher’s wharf to greet the newly wealthy passengers aboard the steamship from the northland. He even hired on with one of the prospectors to carry his bags of gold to the Scandinavian American Bank—the federal assaying office having not opened yet in Seattle—and was paid five dollars for his efforts. Which was good solid money, Chester told Maddie later that day, and not just some featherbrained pipedream, but good solid money! Maddie replied that she supposed it was.
The riches aboard the S.S. Portland that heralded new bounty for Seattle instilled in Maddie the exact opposite idea that it inspired in Chester. She thought they should stay in Seattle and set up shop supplying the stampede of gold-fevered prospectors racing north that was certain to follow—most of whom would stop first in the Seattle to stock up on provisions. She had a hunch that that’s where the best business sense lay, and not in risking everything they had (scarce little at that) for a chance to pan a few ounces of yellow dust (if they were lucky) from an ice-clogged stream in the frigid and barren north. Besides, she had come to grow fond of Seattle in the short time that they’d been there, even if they did live below the Deadline, in one of the city’s most notorious districts. She was occasionally able to get out into the other neighborhoods, where she could imagine a better life for them eventually, if they just stayed on.
To seek their fortune, however, was why they had ventured out to Seattle in the first place, Chester reminded her. Indeed, well before the headlines spread across the nation with news of the S.S. Portland’s “ton of gold,” Chester had already contracted gold fever. They’d gone to Cleveland from Trenton because he had heard that all the good manufacturing jobs were there and that a man could rise to floor manager in no time and, with drive and the right wits, even become company president. But in those depression years of the mid-1890s, every city in America was struck hard, including Cleveland, and the manufacturing plants weren’t hiring. Any work at all, even streetsweeping, was scarce. So after just one year on the shores of Lake Erie they packed up and came to Seattle on James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railroad all because Chester had heard there might be gold in the region, even as close as 50 miles north of the city, in the foothills of the North Cascades. Looking back on that time in her marriage to Chester, Maddie realized she couldn’t have guessed just how desperate her young husband was becoming, and probably had been all along. She’d fallen in love with him because he’d seemed like the stable, hardworking type that her father had been—her father had even helped bring Chester along with his railroad job—and because, well, he was darn good looking and knew how to sweet talk a girl, which she didn’t discourage none. Losing her innocence to Chester just weeks before they were married had convinced her she was in love with him.
For two years after their departure from Trenton, they lived off the small inheritance and insurance claim from her parents—both of whom died in a train wreck only a year after Maddie and Chester wed—yet by their fourth month in Seattle this modest fund was nearly all gone. They moved out of the Providence Hotel and into a $7-a-month flophouse two blocks below the Deadline. It was a despicable clapboard tenement made up of a dozen flyblown rooms with paper-thin walls, dirt-smeared hallway commodes, scurrying baseboard rats, drunken vomiting boarders, and a savage proprietor who let rooms to anyone who could pay and booted out anyone who could not. Vacating this sorry excuse for lodging after six intolerable months was the one positive result of her husband’s determination to head north for the gold fields.
The day the S.S. Portland made dock, Chester was already busy packing their few remaining household belongings into their steamer trunks when Maddie arrived back at the flophouse from one of her walks, bolted past the leering old man in the foyer holding a bottle in his lap, and rushed up to their room on the third floor.
“Look,” he said the instant she opened the door and entered. He held something up between his thumb and index finger for her to see. Whatever it was, it was too small for her to make out in the room’s dim light. She began unlacing the tie on her bonnet and set it carefully on top of the battered dresser drawers. She had been out looking for housecleaning work, inquiring door-to-door. Her knees ached and her ankles were swollen, and she was tired to the bone.
“What is it?” Then, looking about the room and seeing their trunks out and open, she stared at Chester and said, “What are you doing? Have you been packing?”
“It’s gold,” her husband declared and brought it up to her face for closer inspection. “Put out your hand.”
Maddie laid open her hand and Chester placed a thin yellowish sliver with roseate tints and rough, uneven edges in her palm. Despite its course and tarnished appearance, the object was soft and seemed almost iridescent. As she held it, Chester told her how it was the very same stuff, just in the raw, that the delicate chain and locket her mother had bestowed on her on their wedding day was made of. (The same chain and locket, Maddie recalled looking back on that moment, that they’d pawned two months earlier, a detail that had slipped Chester’s mind in his fascination with the gold sliver.) Maddie handed the piece of gold back to Chester without comment.
“One of the men off the boat gave it to me,” he explained, almost whispering in his excitement, perhaps afraid one of their neighbors would hear him and try to steal his treasure, “along with five dollars for helping him carry the rest of his gold to the bank.” He turned and motioned toward the four open trunks in the room, then put the gold sliver in his shirt pocket, buttoned it, and took hold of both of Maddie’s wrists. “We’re going to the Klondike, Maddie. That’s where all the gold is. We’re going to be rich, Maddie, just like that man I helped off the boat today.” He produced a copy of the Post-Intelligencer. “Here, you can read it all for yourself. This is what we’ve been waiting for.”
Maddie didn’t know what to think—of the little sliver of precious metal, of Chester’s fervency, of her wretched life in the Seattle flophouse, of their decision to leave Trenton for Cleveland, Cleveland for Seattle . . . any of it. She didn’t respond to her husband, but just let him go on telling her how wonderful their lives were going to be from now on.
During the next several days she watched as the city worked itself into a frenzy to get to Alaska and the Yukon. Chester would have left that very afternoon if they could have afforded to, but they didn’t have enough money to book passage on one of the many steamships that were now heading north, much less buy all the provisions people said were required for the overland trek to the Yukon gold fields once you reached Alaska by sea. For the next several weeks they had to work—Maddie cleaning rich folks’ houses on First Hill, Chester down on the docks as a stevedore—and then they had to sell the last few items of furniture and jewelry that Maddie had held onto from her family’s home in Trenton, and finally, within seven weeks, working almost eighteen hours every day, they had enough—by which time Maddie’s initial doubts about the entire undertaking had grown into grave apprehension for their personal safety and welfare, as well as for their marriage.
It did not take a clairvoyant to see that not all the desperate souls pouring into Seattle ravenous to get rich up north would achieve this goal. Most would not. Most would likely come back more destitute, more physically ravaged and morally disillusioned than they had ever been before the gold rush news broke. Already, just one month after the S.S. Portland’s fanfare arrival in Seattle, there was evidence of this—families split, marriages ruined, men begging on the streets, broken by their own misguided ambitions. Even to this day, eight years after the event and six years into the new century, secure now in her own home, Maddie took pride in the fact that she had recognized then the emptiness of the gold rush promise, that she could read the telltale signs—despite the fact that she could do nothing to stop the feveredness in her husband. Chester was simply too determined, and was going to have his way.
The three hundred dollars they scrapped together in the next seven weeks could have bought them a small (but pleasant) house north of the downtown. Already it was plain to see that the people profiting from the gold rush were the Seattle merchants. When she wasn’t cleaning houses, Maddie was stitching tent canvas for Cooper and Levy, Pioneer Outfitters, at their warehouse several blocks south of their store on First Avenue. Outfitters throughout the city were finding it hard to maintain their stocks. When Maddie first broached with Chester the notion of their staying in Seattle and setting themselves up in business, he scoffed at her. When she mentioned it again the next week, he shouted her down for even suggesting such an idea, said she was a fool for not seeing the opportunity that lay before them plain as day, and accused her of disloyalty to her wedded husband. Then, after she tried to placate him, he seemed to plead with her. “This is our one big chance, Mads, dontcha see? Dontcha want to be rich and wear the fine dresses like those ladies you clean house for? Try to understand, Mads. It’s now or never.”
She wasn’t persuaded. Yet she gave up trying to change Chester’s mind. His intransigence on every consideration she raised made Maddie increasingly ill about the whole undertaking. At one point she even hinted that perhaps he should go alone, that she would only be a hindrance to him and would be better off waiting for him in Seattle. But he insisted on needing her with him in Alaska, and promised her they would be back in Seattle within a year. This was the one time she had ever regretted not being able to bear them a child. If they had had a child, she knew, she would never have gone north with him.
After selling the last of their few belongings to outfit themselves with the necessary equipment and provisions—a Klondike stove, blankets, parkas, knee-high boots, wool-lined mittens, a red Union suit each, beaver hats, and then (by way of food stuffs), 50 pounds of flour, 20 pounds of dried beans, 10 pounds of lard, sacks loaded with potatoes, cabbages, and acorn squash, and 10 pounds of cured beef (although Chester swore he would provide them with fresh meat—“You don’t mind caribou, do ya, Mads?”—with the second-hand Remington rifle he bought)—they still came short of the year’s worth of supplies the Canadian Mounted Police required of prospectors crossing the border from Alaska into the Yukon. In lieu of all her work sewing canvas for them, the proprietors of Cooper and Levy, the two Jewish merchants Aaron Levy and his son-in-law Isaac Cooper, let Maddie have a large tent, complete with poles and stakes, on top of her regular wages. This savings left her and Chester barely enough to book steerage aboard the steamship Rosalie, due to depart for Skagway on August 29.
On that morning Chester hired a horse-drawn wagon and, along with another man and his wife who had recently moved into their same flophouse and were also Alaska-bound, they transported all their provisions down to the wharf. It was just before dawn, dark still. The waterfront was as chaotic as the day the Portland arrived—and perhaps more so, since with each passing day and the quickening approach of winter, people became more desperate to depart for the gold fields and claim the fortune that they deemed rightfully theirs. The wagon driver hurried them through Pioneer Place and across the Great Northern railroad tracks and north along Railroad Avenue to Atkinson’s Dock where the S.S. Rosalie waited. As they approached the dock—with Maddie and Laurette sitting on the back of the open wagon holding onto the trunks and twined bundles of canvas, bedding, and tools, while Chester and Morris rode up front on the bench with the driver—Maddie listened to the cacophony of waterfront noise . . . ships’ steam whistles piercing the morning fog, seagulls screeching, mast lines clacking, davits groaning, pylons creaking, the shouting of men and whinnying of horses. It was a relatively calm morning, so each noise became that much more distinct. For the first time since Chester placed the gold sliver in her palm on the day the Portland docked in Seattle, Maddie physically feared what lay ahead for them. For the first time since leaving New Jersey, then Ohio, she held in deep in her chest an anxiousness toward her husband, the man she married at age 22 when her parents warned her to marry and bear children or else become a lonesome old maid. In light of the current perilous circumstances, and how little she dared place her faith in Chester in confronting these circumstances, such a dour fate as the one her parents warned her of seemed comforting.
She raised her head and looked over the top of their provisions at Laurette, whose bonneted face seemed leaden in its hard stare at the road passing beneath them. Only when the wagon hit a bump, jolting everything and everyone in it, did she reveal the slightest grimace across her set lips. The younger woman, only nineteen, must have sensed Maddie watching her because she turned her head and forced a wane smile upon making eye contact with her.
“I pray the boat provides a smoother ride,” Laurette said loudly over the rattle of wagon wheels.
“Let’s hope so,” Maddie shouted back and gripped the sideboard as another deep rut sent the wagon jarring forward.
The two women resumed their silent endurance of the wagon ride until at last they reached the dock. As Chester and Morris unloaded their supplies, Maddie looked eastward and observed the dawn lighting the sky above the cluster of brick, stone, and wood buildings climbing the hill from the waterfront. To the south, on what she had heard derisively called “Profanity Hill,” there rose the large center cupola of the County Courthouse, while to the north atop Denny Hill, like in a fairytale, appeared the eminent and ornate Denny Hotel. Since their arrival in Seattle she had begged Chester to take her up to the hotel, just to see it up close, but he repeatedly told her he’d been up there and that the hotel was nothing but a big, empty shell, nothing to see at all. “I’d like to go anyway,” she said, “for the view,” and thought how when they returned to Seattle wealthy with gold—should they be lucky enough return at all—she would persuade Chester to buy a house on Denny Hill near the hotel that so majestically overlooked the city.
As it turned out, Chester had arranged to team up with Morris not only on the transfer of their provisions from the flophouse to the dock, but all the way to Dawson City. From there, according to his plan, they would be partners in staking a claim. To Maddie’s surprise, Chester had already arranged with the ticket office for Morris and Laurette Robertson to share a rear cabin with them, a space smaller than a rail car compartment, with only two bunks that the four of them would have to share and through which billowed the sooty coal furnace exhaust from the flue at the center of the ship. It was agreed the women would share one bunk and the men would take turns sleeping in the other. The provisions, which Maddie learned they would also be combining with the Robertsons’ to help disguise to the Mounties the deficiencies in both, were stored mostly on the forward decks.
By the time of its scheduled 8:00 a.m. departure, the S.S.Rosalie was overrun with humanity. Yet it seemed to Maddie that she and Laurette were the only two women aboard. As the whistle blew a long, sustained blast and the ship began to pull away from the crowded dock, Maddie, already separated from her husband, who stood jawing with a group of men near the bow, leaned against the railing at the stern and watched the city’s horizon widen. Noting the bustle of the streets as the business day commenced, watching the large homes atop First Hill and Capitol Hill come into panoramic view, she hated having to leave, and as the ship moved into the harbor and proceeded north through Elliott Bay, she edged her way around the deck’s railing, keeping sight of the city until the very last. Then, at the moment, having also lost track of her husband and not having yet truly befriended Laurette, Maddie felt about as alone and displaced as a person could.
For the next two week the Rosalie steamed northward through the coastal passages of British Columbia and Alaska. On board, Maddie and Laurette became fast friends, preparing meals, playing cards, reading to one another from Anthony Trollope’s novels (which Laurette had packed into one of her trunks), and generally keeping one another company. Maddie also made the acquaintance of a clean-shaven man (one of the few aboard the ship) who was about her age and who had the peculiar first name of Asahel. Asahel Curtis, or Mr. Curtis, as she addressed him. He was traveling to Alaska not solely to prospect for gold but also to document the life and adventures of the prospectors with his camera, a large wooden box-shaped apparatus propped atop long, stilt-like wooden legs. With the help of his assistant, a rugged, bearded man named Lyle, who was approximately Laurette’s age, he took a picture of the two women aboard the ship as it stood in dock at Prince George, British Columbia, to load coal. He showed them the negative of their image on the glass plate and promised to give them each a copy of the photograph once they had all returned to Seattle. He explained how he would be sending all his plates back to his brother Edward at their studio in Seattle for developing, and how one day his photographic chronicle of the great historic event of the gold rush would be renowned.
Maddie was impressed by his clear purpose and quiet confidence. She and Asahel Curtis continued to converse as the Rosalie resumed its voyage through the coastal passages, between the craggy and densely forested islands and farther into the northern cold and wilderness. Maddie expressed genuine interest in his vocation, so popular of late but still, according to Asahel, in its infancy. He explained how he wished to be out among his subjects, not distancing himself from them as so many studio photographers did—which was why he was venturing north.
“I want to experience what they experience, first-hand and for myself. Or you might even say, I want the camera to experience what they experience.”
Based on her only two occasions of being photographed, this simple comment made sense to Maddie. The first time was in Cleveland when Chester wanted to have a man-and-wife portrait made by a professional photographer—a project that cost them nearly a full day’s wages, only to have the photographer endlessly arranging their attire and scolding them about not holding their pose; and the second time, aboard the steamship the previous day, when Asahel Curtis engaged the two ladies in conversation as he adjusted his equipment, made them feel at ease, told them to relax and be themselves, and then with only a second’s warning, without any chance for them to get into position or become self-conscious (or “unsincere,” as he phrased it), he squeezed the rubber shutter bulb and took their picture. Maddie tried to protest that her hat had been in disarray and Laurette worried aloud that she had been slouching and might have blinked, but Asahel reassured them they had both looked splendid.
For the remainder of the passage north, Maddie would see Asahel on deck everyday. In his wool cap he seemed very boy-like. He would sit quietly on deck and watch the men discussing their plans for reaching Dawson City once the boat arrived in Skagway, where best to seek a claim to stake, how best to spend their new-found riches. He also wrote in a small notebook with a pencil that he would periodically sharpen with his penknife. If not for the fact that his assistant Lyle was accompanying Asahel Curtis, Maddie would have feared for his fate in Alaska and the Yukon. Like the prospectors themselves, he seemed too preoccupied by matters apart from merely surviving. Yet, unlike the prospectors, he didn’t strike her as a man driven by his ambition for easy wealth. Rather, he seemed content to merely observe and to take his many photographs, immune to the gold fever that gripped the other men. Maddie estimated he took two dozen photos or more every day.
She saw little of Chester during these two weeks aboard the Rosalie. Chester and Morris let Maddie and Laurette set up house in their steerage cabin and most nights took their bedrolls and bunked on deck in the open air with the other men, smoking cheap cigars and drinking rotgut through the extended dusk and well into the night. One morning just past dawn, while Maddie strolled along the ship’s foredeck, she saw Chester sprawled out asleep between a pile of mooring ropes and another man, a stranger. The stranger was wrapped in the fine wool blanket that Maddie’s grandmother had spun and woven as a young women in Scotland and that Maddie’s mother had handed down to her as part of her marriage dowry. Maddie wanted to kick her husband for his disregard for her and yank the blanket away from the stranger lying next to him . . . yet she restrained herself, and when she looked away from the horrid sight of the two men and toward the shore, she saw for the first time the coastal mountains pitching straight up from the white-misted shoreline, so high and steep she had to lean her head back to see their peaks. The sight startled her. She wanted to rush to the cabin and draw Laurette out to show her, then find Asahel Curtis and help him carry his camera to the deck to take a picture. But then, as she continued to stare at the frighteningly beautiful mountains, she also remembered the warnings she had overheard about the passes, Chilkoot Pass and White Pass, and understood what those warnings portended.
When she looked back across the foredeck of the boat, the provisions piled high, the sleeping men strewn about, she spotted Asahel, seated quietly on one of the capstans, his legs crossed, his cap pulled down low on his forehead, and an arm resting across the ship’s metal gunwale. His camera was set up beside him, not aimed at the mountains in the short distance as Maddie would have expected, but on the men sprawled across the deck.
“A good morning to you,” he said from across the deck after she spotted him.
“Good morning to you, too, Mr. Curtis,” she answered.
“Some of these men won’t make it,” he said offhandedly as she stepped over and around the bodies to reach where he sat.
“It appears that some of them already may not have made it,” she returned. “My husband perhaps among those unfortunates.” Maddie pulled her light wrap tighter about her shoulders. When she reached the port side of the ship, Asahel stood and offered her his seat on the capstan.
“I have to check the light,” he said and stepped behind his camera and tossed the black drapery hanging from its back-end over his head. Maddie heard the shutter snap, and when he emerged he slid the plate from the side of the camera and set it in a large leather case next to the camera. “The roll of the ship may be a problem,” he said, “but we’ll just have to wait and see.” And then, coming from behind the camera to stand beside Maddie, he added, “Don’t worry about your husband. He’ll make it. And so shall you.”
Solely on the basis of Asahel Curtis’s own calm, even-measured sense of the world, Maddie accepted this reassurance, groundless as it might have seemed to her right then. Indeed, she was grateful for it, and in return she wished him success in his endeavors as well, and resumed gazing at the mountains.
Fog obscured the narrow inlet as the Rosalie steamed toward the Skagway docks. Two other steamships and a paddlewheel boat were already at dock in the small harbor. Through the fog, the surrounding mountains faintly appeared, snow already whitening their sharp peaks. White Pass, she could plainly assume, cut straight up the middle between the two parallel ridges receding northeast-ward, away of town. The inlet was like an arrowhead pointing through the town laid out on the edge of the tideflats, to the base of the mountains, and straight through the pass.
The commotion among the men on board that had been stirred up as they realized they were coming into Skagway subsided as The Rosalie slid through the chill fog and eased up to the dock of rough-hewn timbers. Maddie and Laurette stood beside each other at the boat’s stern and when it lurched upon first bumping into the dock, Laurette grasped Maddie’s arm. Maddie knew Laurette’s alarm extended far beyond her temporary loss of balance. Throughout the entire voyage Laurette had maintained a longaminity that Maddie could not help but admire, and felt lacking in herself. Rather than complain even once, Laurette spoke repeatedly of Morris’s skills as a craftsman and outdoorsman, and of his unflagging determination, fortitude, and devotion to her.
“It’s all right,” Maddie whispered to her now as she pressed her hand on top of Laurette’s.
Laurette looked at Maddie and then removed her hand from her arm and bravely leaned over the railing to watch the men on the dock tying down the mooring ropes. Suddenly, as the ship settled itself against the dock, a cheer went up from the men standing three or four deep along the starboard side where the gangplank would be let down. Maddie looked up and saw Morris coming toward them.
“Where’s Chester?” she called to him as he pushed past the men to reach them. Without answering her, he took Laurette by the arm and began to lead her back to the cabin. “Where’s Chester?” Maddie asked him again.
Morris looked over his shoulder and nodded toward the bow, where the mass of men was crowding its way toward the gangplank just then being lowered to the dock. Picking her husband out from the crowd was impossible. Most of the men wore either a bowler or some variety of wide-brim felt hat, though a few were smart enough to have fur caps on their head. Maddie finally just shouted out his name, once, twice, three times, and each time waited for his reply. Only after the third call did she see an arm rise from the crowd and was able to follow it down to Chester’s familiar face. When she waved back, he signaled to her to stay where she was. “I’m going ashore,” she heard him shout back to her. “Stay on board ‘til I come for you.”
She lowered her arm and watched as Chester inched forward toward the ship’s railing and eventually descended the gangplank. Once he set foot on the dock, she quickly lost sight of him.
A moment later, Morris and Laurette returned, he carrying one of their trunks and she with a valise in each hand.
“Chester’s gone ashore,” Maddie told them.
“He’s probably gone to get a handcart and wagon,” Morris told her, and guided Laurette forward down the ship’s side. “We’ll find him,” he added, leaving Maddie frustrated that Chester had not consulted with her on how they would proceed once the ship docked.
She looked up again at the mountains looming over the small, hastily built former mission town, and returned to her cabin to wait.
It took half a day to unload the Rosalie. Two more steamships entered the inlet and docked adjacent to the Rosalie during the successive hours that Maddie, having eventually made her way by herself down the gangplank and onto the dock, waited for the ship’s crew to unload the hold and deliver her and Chester’s provisions to them. Chester and Morris paid a wagoner by the hour to wait with them, at the ready, while Maddie and Laurette sat patiently on their steamer trunks watching the commotion along the dock. Dozens of Indian men, Chilkats, accompanied by their women in headcloths and toting children, worked the docks, haggling with prospectors in an effort to contract with them to haul their gear through the pass. Maddie watched from a distance as Chester, growing more frustrated with the delays by the ship’s crew to unload the hold and itching to start the long trek to the gold fields, pushed away an Indian man who pressed his services on him. A scuffle ensued. Two more Chilkats—short, compact, powerful men—came to their fellow’s aid, shouting in their language at Chester, who now began peering anxiously about the dock as if seeking a weapon to seize hold of, someone to back him up, or else an escape route. Morris quickly interceded, placating the men by offering each a generous plug cut of his tobacco. Yet when the Indian men accepted his offer and moved on down the dock, Maddie could hear Chester still cussing them.
“Damn Injuns,” he fumed as he came up to her, shooed her off the trunk where she sat, and after opening it begin rummaging through its contents. “Damn animals get right in your face . . . What’s a fellow to do? Where’s my Bowie knife . . . ?” When he found the long-handled knife in its leather sheath, he tucked it inside the front waist of his pants and pulled his canvas jacket over it. He closed the trunk lid and, without another word to Maddie, returned to where Morris and the wagoner sat on the back of the buckboard wagon.
Later that day, Maddie asked him if they ought not to go into town to find lodging, and Chester said no, that from now on, or at least until they reached Dawson City, they would be sleeping outdoors. “That’s why we have to get a move on before the lakes and rivers freeze,” he told her. “That’s why we can’t be standing around waiting like this, dammit.”
Maddie hadn’t heard anything about the lakes and rivers, just the mountain passes, and wondered what her husband was talking about. It wouldn’t surprise her, though, if he had kept from her some vital piece of information about their journey. Since the day the S.S. Portland arrived in Seattle and he came back to their room at the flophouse with his sliver of gold, Chester had become increasingly distracted and uncommunicative. Sometimes, when he looked at Maddie, she had to wonder if he even recognized her. The change in his behavior at first did not fully register with her, but before long it seemed to take over the man who, back in New Jersey, could so readily charm her.
When their gear and supplies were finally unloaded from the ship and piled onto the wagon, their foursome made its way into town, the edge of which was just a few hundred yards from the docks. From what Maddie could gather, the plan was to have the wagon haul their gear to the trailhead outside of town, where they would make camp, and then from there begin the successive trips required to pack their gear and supplies over the pass to the first of what she now understood would be a series of the lakes they would have to cross.
As they entered Skagway, the town throbbed with activity, offering a scene like none Maddie had ever witnessed or could have imagined. It seemed as if all the taverns, gambling houses, flophouses, floozy hotels, cheap eateries, and overpriced outfitting stores that comprised the area below Seattle’s Deadline were compressed into Skagway’s four-block thoroughfare. The street was planked, yet the boards had long ago sunk below the surface of the ankle-deep mud and horse manure. With no room on the wagon bed and the team of two mules struggling just to pull the weight of their provisions, the four of them trudged alongside the wagon as best they could while the wagoner held his mules by their bridles and pulled them forward. Maddie was relieved that she had taken the time to pin up her skirts during the long morning wait, allowing her knickers to serve as mud spats. She was helpless, however, against the wet that had already soaked through both shoes and stockings to her feet and ankles, chilling them to the bone. She and Laurette clung to one another’s forearm for balance and slogged on the best they could.
The progress of everyone else through this slough of mud and manure, especially those people right off the boats, whether on foot or with hired wagons, tended north through town toward the trailhead leading up through the mountain pass. The more Maddie saw of the town, the greater her relief that they would not be stopping there for the night. It presented a reckless, dangerous appearance, men and horses everywhere, a din of drunken, angry, riled-up shouting punctuated by frequent and apparently random gunfire. For the first time since leaving New Jersey, Maddie had a severe pang of longing for her Trenton homeplace. It all seemed so distant and so long ago . . . her childhood, her parents, her simple home beside the railroad tracks. She knew it could never be regained. She would instead, if she had her wish, be content simply to return to Seattle. If she could only make it back to Seattle, she thought, knowing that the most arduous leg of this journey still lay ahead . . . if she could only make it back..
Toward the middle of town, Chester and Morris called to the wagoner, a grizzled old-timer with a torn and soggy cigar stub stuck in the corner of his mouth, to stop and wait for them while they entered an outfitting store. The store was the last in a row of three storefronts that were part of a two-story wood-plank structure, the Red Onion Cafe and Pay Streak Saloon being the other two. As Maddie and Laurette waited for their husbands to return, Maddie spotted Asahel Curtis and his rough-bearded assistant, Lyle, exiting the Red Onion Cafe. She wanted to call out and greet them, but she knew such forward behavior, even here on the streets of Skagway, was unbecoming a lady. Yet to her delight, when Asahel Curtis turned from Lyle and saw her and Laurette standing there beside the wagon, he hopped down from the raised boardwalk and came forward to greet them.
Maddie nodded to Asahel and Lyle as they approached, and said, “I’ll have to insist, Mr. Curtis, that no photographs be taken while we’re in this compromised condition,” and indicated their muddy shins and then the mules’ rear end behind which they stood.
“I wouldn’t dare,” said Asahel, “though you two ladies present the most dignified and charming aspect of this mulish town,” and then looking about added, “Welcome to Alaska, ladies. We’ll no doubt be crossing paths again in the course our mutual portage inland.”
Barely had he finished speaking when Chester and Morris came around the side of the building where the outfitting store was, pulling three sleds behind them through the mud. They heaved each sled atop the tottering wagon and then turned to face the two men speaking to their wives. Maddie made the introductions, surprised that her husband and Asahel Curtis had not once met during the entire two-week sailing from Seattle. Upon being introduced, Asahel extended his hand, but Chester, instead of shaking hands with him, turned and tossed a rope over the top of the sleds stacked on the wagon.
“You’re that picturetaker, aren’t you?” Chester said and fastened his end of the rope to a hook on the wagon’s sideboard.
“Yes,” Asahel replied. “Maybe I can take a photograph of you all sometime.”
“I don’t think so,” Chester answered him. “We’re here to find gold and that don’t leave time for posing for pictures. That goes for my wife and me alike.”
“I’m here to find gold, too,” Asahel said, “and to take pictures.”
“Well, good luck to you,” said Morris, stepping in, again filling the role of conciliator.
“Good luck to you, too,” said Asahel, and stepped back from the wagon, tipping his newsboy cap to Maddie and Laurette as Chester signaled the wagoner to get a move on.
Disgusted at her husband’s behavior, Maddie nodded to Asahel and Lyle, took Laurette’s arm again, and followed behind the wagon in its tracks. They quickly left the town behind and joined the tattered line of people trudging along the wagon trail that gradually inclined toward the encampment at the base of White Pass. The entire way, she didn’t speak a word. It seemed that the ugliest aspects of Chester’s character had come to the fore since their docking in Skagway. She had seen this side of him before, off and on, rarely in Trenton, but more frequently in Cleveland and then Seattle—his irritability, his short-temperedness, his ill-manner toward others—and she didn’t care for it. He complained incessantly about their money and grumbled that everyone else had an unfair advantage over them in the rush to the gold fields. She repeatedly told him aboard the Rosalie—that is, when she saw him—that if this undertaking was beyond their means or too strenuous for them, then they ought to do the smart thing and turn back. Which only made him lash out at her for making such a proposal.
“Then stop complaining,” she told him the last time this exchange occurred, leading him to push past her out of the ship’s cabin, not to be seen or heard from again until they reached Skagway.
About four miles out of town the wagon tracks they followed narrowed and grew more steep. The air turned colder as they advanced into the mountains and night came on. They passed a waterfall that seemed to pour straight from a rift in the mountainside, sending up a cloud of mist as the water crashed onto the mossy rocks below. The leaves on the trees had already turned—mostly brown and yellow, some red—and were beginning to drop to the forest floor. When a breeze blew, a shower of leaves fluttered across the path of the wagon track. Finally, along with a caravan of a dozen or so other groups, some on foot with their gear on their backs, others with handcarts, and still others with hired wagons, they arrived at an open pasture beside a wide stream flowing directly from the mouth of the mountain pass that receded northward and eastward before them.
Prospectors overran the pasture. It were as if a whole new town were forming at this very spot to rival the one they had left behind just hours earlier. Dozens of tents were pitched about the grounds. Dogs roamed between the tents or were tied to posts. Men chopped wood, smoked, and played cards on overturned fruit crates while at various fire pits women stirred long wooden spoons in pots and skillets. There was even a scattering of children—which broke Maddie’s heart, to think of the hardship these babes would be made to endure. The scene resembled a vast army camp or field hospital, similar to Matthew Brady’s daguerreotypes of the war between the states, which made her understand all the more why Asahel Curtis had come here. Maddie guessed there were over a thousand people crammed into the pasture, all waiting their turn to traverse White Pass.
Their wagon slowed to a stop at the edge of the encampment and the wagoner looked down at Chester from the driver’s bench and growled to him, “Pick your spot, mister.”
“All these people come looking for gold?” Chester asked him.
The wagoner pulled back the brake on the wagon and laughed. “Them, you, me, my two mules here, even the right honorable mayor of Seattle. It ain’t the scenery we’re here for, mister.”
Even before leaving Seattle, Maddie had heard the story about the city’s mayor, how after hearing about the gold while visiting San Francisco he had cabled in his resignation and hired a team of men to take him straightaway to Alaska. It was just one more sign that something was wrong with all this gold fever. People were acting crazy. And looking now over the hordes of gold seekers spread out across this streamside pasture, their faces haggard and their tents and flannel shirts mud-caked just a day or two after they’d disembarked from the boats that brought them here, Maddie knew her ill sense of this venture was well founded. But it was too late now, for her or all the others alike. They would all be going forward. Even from where she stood at the pasture’s edge, she could see men moving up the pass, their backs burdened with loads piled a yard high over their heads, while other men loped wearily back down the trail without packs, returning to fetch the next load. Maddie vowed to herself then and there—a moment she remembered still—that, riches or no, she would survive the ordeal that lay head for her. Scared as she was, she wouldn’t let it defeat her.
When the wagoner asked again where to, Chester pointed to a spot between two tents near the trailhead, and the three men, because the wagon could not advance any farther, began carrying their combined outfit to that spot. As they did so, Maddie and Laurette set about clearing the ground for the tent, finding wood for the pit fire, and unpacking the food provisions so they could prepare their first meal in the Alaskan wilderness.
Later that night, shortly after Maddie and Laurette finished scrubbing the skillet and washing the coffee pot in the stream, snow began to fall from the pale night sky. People in the camp stopped talking, suspended their chores, and looked up as the first white flakes drifted down. The scene seemed to signal both wonderment and dread—the soft air so quiet and still, the prospect of a heavy downfall so ill-boding.
Maddie and Laurette returned to their tent area from the stream and found Chester and Morris strapping portions of their outfit to the sleds they had bought in town.
“We’ll pack out tomorrow,” Morris said, speaking to Laurette.
Chester pulled hard on a rope from one side of the sled. “Get on top and push that down,” he told Maddie, and following his orders she climbed atop the load piled high on the sled and pushed down on it so the rope would slacken enough for Chester to tie it down.
“How many trips do you suppose it will take?” she asked him.
“People are saying at least twelve, maybe as many as twenty. But with you two pulling a sled between you—” he raised his chin to indicate Laurette—“we can cut that down.” He took his Bowie knife out and cut the rope above the knot he’d just made.
The snow was becoming a steady swirl through the air, clinging to the creases in the tent, gathering in the cresses of the oilskin canvas covering the sleds, and dusting the ground where there wasn’t yet mud.
“This will be our only night here,” Chester added and put his knife away. “So do what you need to do and turn in.”
It was still dark when, a mere four or five hours later, Maddie heard stirrings outside the tent and woke up. She climbed out from beneath the blankets where she lay next to Laurette, put on her coat, mittens, earmuffs, and hat, and stepped out of the tent to discover that several inches of snow covered the ground—and that it was still coming down. Morris saw Maddie emerge from the tent and told her to wake Laurette.
“We’ll need breakfast ‘fore starting out,” he said.
Maddie ducked back inside the tent, roused Laurette, and then set about mixing biscuits and grinding coffee. She didn’t know what time it was and didn’t much care. She had gotten some sleep, but not nearly enough to keep her from feeling groggy almost to the point of nausea. She also thought that maybe her woman issues were coming upon her sooner than usual. Laurette eventually joined her in preparing the breakfast, and by the time the food was cooked and they were all eating it, the sky was turning less dark and the snow was easing up.
As they brought the plates, cups, and skillet back to the stream to clean them, Maddie and Laurette again encountered Asahel and Lyle. The two men had an entire sled loaded with photographic equipment and supplies. The camera, propped on its three-legged stand, stood before their tent. They all four greeted one another in passing but didn’t stop to chat. When Laurette stumbled and dropped the plates she carried, Lyle quickly stepped up to aid her. He was about to tip his hat to her, but when he realized he was hatless, he just smiled at her instead. Laurette smiled back and continued on her way to the stream.
When they returned to their campsite, Chester told them which sled they would be pulling and showed them the best way to do so—in tandem, holding in front of them a yard-long pole to which a pull-rope to the sled was tied, and then walking steadily forward. He and Morris, who would each be pulling his own sled, then picked up the pull-ropes for their sleds and showed them how.
“We’ll go slow,” he said, and repeated, “but steady,” and then with a tug began pulling his sled out of camp, followed next by Maddie and Laurette, with Morris taking up the rear.
Less than fifty yards past the encampment, the trail turned far more narrow and steep. It was also slippery, and Maddie and Laurette had to wedge their boots into the snowy slush for traction. Fortunately, one advantage of the snow was that the sled pulled more smoothly than it would have over mud. They had been pulling for about twenty minutes when just ahead of them a large outcropping of rocks forced the trail to curve to the left and out of view. Seeing this obstacle, Maddie and Laurette paused long enough to let Morris pass. Maddie turned to look back at the encampment that now lay below them, and at its edge she saw Asahel Curtis with his camera aimed directly at them. She nudged Laurette with her elbow, and again the two of them put their combined weight and strength into pulling their sled up the trail.
It took their group two trips back to the encampment that day to advance all their gear just five miles into the wilderness. At one point along the trail they passed the treacherous ravine where a dozen horses had already fallen or been thrown when they became too exhausted to go any farther, and now lay dead, their carcasses rotting. To Maddie, it began to feel at times as if Chester were pushing them in a manner not unlike the owners of those dead horses, fearful as he was of not reaching Lake Bennett before it froze and having to wait out the harsh winter on its shores.
By the end of the day, Maddie’s boots were again wet through to her skin and her skirt black with mud nearly to her waist. In several places, usually along the steepest passages along the trail, ice had already begun to form. Every once in a while Maddie, and sometimes Laurette, would lose her footing and fall. Twice the men had to backtrack to help the women haul their sled past the next cutback in the trail, which only frustrated Chester, who began to blame Maddie for delaying them.
“Do you want to end up like one of those packhorses back there, your carcass at the bottom of a gulch?” he said to her at one point. “Is that what you want? Because if you do, that’s what you’ll get. Or better yet, we’ll all freeze to death with you when we can’t reach Dawson by winter.”
Maddie refused to respond to these outbursts. She knew better. Hadn’t she always heard that, worse even than being unprepared in the wilderness, was losing one’s head and panicking? Well, she wasn’t about to lose her head or panic, even if her husband did. She took the pull-rope from him and continued hauling her and Laurette’s sled up the trail.
One week later they reached Lake Bennett, a long icy-blue stretch of water high in the Yukon mountains. The encampment along the shore of the lake appeared nearly as large as the one just outside of Skagway at the head of White Pass. Men were busy felling trees and burning and carving them out for canoes, or planing them to tie together into flatboats, or generally constructing any manner of craft that would float them the remaining 500 miles to Dawson City. There were also boats for hire, including a small paddlesteamer. To Chester’s credit, the reason he had refused to hire Indian packers, he now told their party, was to hold back enough money to book them passage on a boat. Yet as they soon discovered, the paddlesteamer was beyond even their combined means and they would have to settle for hiring a common flatboat instead. The boatman they eventually found to take them had already made seven trips that summer and boisterously assured them that he could get them safely to Dawson City.
They stayed shoreside for two nights in order to rest the first day and loaded the boat the second day. Then on their third morning at Lake Bennett, they pushed off with all their provisions aboard what seemed to Maddie little more than a floating wagon, and began their long drift even farther northward. Though still short-tempered with Maddie, Chester seemed satisfied: they had outrun the hard freeze that would have trapped them on the lake’s shore until spring.
The first several days aboard the flatboat went by smoothly as they traversed the four connected lakes—Bennett, Lindemann, Tagish, and Marsh. By the fifth day, after Lake Marsh, as they entered the headwaters of the Yukon River flowing from the lake, the passage narrowed and turned more turbulent. Before they entered Squaw Rapids, their boatman brought the craft ashore and battened everything down with extra ropes, and then warned his passengers that the next bit of river might turn a bit rough and that the men would need to work the oars exactly as he told them to.
The warning frightened Maddie, and, as it turned out, rightfully so. As they made their way into the rapids, the roiling waters churned brown and tossed the flatboat about like a child’s float toy. Maddie and Laurette clung to their battened-down outfit while the men plied the oars in the water and the boatman worked the rudder to guide them through the treacherous whitewater. A constant spray soaked their clothes and chilled them even worse than their initial fear of the rapids. Finally, they seemed to make it through the worse section of Squaw Rapids, yet a short while later the boatman informed them that they were approaching Whitehorse Rapids and shouldn’t bother to dry off.
Along this next series of rapids, which were fiercer than the last, Maddie could make out the wreckage of boats that had broken up and been scattered along the river’s boulder-strewn shore. At one point, when the front of their boat rose nearly vertical into the air and came down with a loud slap, she feared their boat might be next, that it would just disintegrate with the next series of rapids. Yet the small flatboat remained intact and soon the waters smoothed out again, and that night they made camp at the northern most end of Lake Laberge, where the boatman declared that they were half way to Dawson City.
Over the next several days they passed the confluence of the Teslin River and the Big and Little Salmon Rivers, and, in fulfillment of these rivers’ names, every night the men caught sockeye salmon as big as a baby and laid them between two grill racks to be turned over the open fire until the tender reddish meat just flaked away from the oily skin. Maddie caught much of the salmon grease and mixed it in with the cornmeal and flour and made cornpone that everyone said tasted good and soon began referring to as Maddie’s famous salmon biscuits. One night Morris shot a deer that wandered right down to the river’s edge, and they skinned and gutted it and ate venison steaks that night and for the remainder of the trip.
At night the temperature dropped, occasionally bringing more snow, and in the morning they had to chop away at the ice along the shore to free the boat. At Five Fingers Rapids, when they hit a particularly violent sequence of rapids, the boatman slipped and lost control of the rudder, which sent the boat into a spin as Chester and Morris desperately tried to straighten it. They collided with several rapids, backwards and sideways, and it seemed they wouldn’t be able to regain control of the boat when, by skill or good fortune or some of both, the three men managed to guide the boat through the last of the rapids and pull it ashore. When the boatman plunged his arm down into the frigid water and reached below the boat to feel for damage, he found the rudder had snapped in half, so for the rest of the afternoon they had to work to fashion a new rudder from the debris that they found from less fortune craft—the same debris Maddie had begun to notice a few days earlier.
When at last they glided past the Klondike River where it met the Yukon River and floated into Dawson City, the boatman congratulated them all on successful voyage, dropped their outfit onto a short rickety dock, collected the second installment of his fee from Chester, and pushed off for farther down river where he said he had a little shack where he stayed. The four of them—Maddie and Chester, Laurette and Morris—stood on the dock and looked at the sprawl of hastily built two-room houses and two-story buildings and large and small tents that spread out from the river and right up to the hillside behind the booming city. No one, not even Chester, who had spurred them on to get to Dawson City as fast as they could, knew what they would do next or where they should go. Supposedly Morris knew of an agent who contracted men to work the valley around Eldorado Camp on Bonanza Creek, but he couldn’t remember the man’s name right now. Chester counted their money and proposed that the men keep guard of their outfit on the dock while the women take a room in one of the clapboard hotels on Front Street, which stretched from one end of the riverfront to the other. In the morning, Chester told them, they would find Morris’s man and hire a wagon to take them to the gold fields.
