“There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold.”
My brother’s recitation of “The Cremation of Sam McGee” was the first time I ever heard epic poetry delivered—as opposed to read—and I was spellbound. (That he followed it up with Ruth Moore’s “The Ballad of the Night Charlie Tended Weir” was icing on the cake.) I loved the poem and went on to read most of Robert Service’s work, but it was years before I really understood the importance of the Yukon Gold Rush.
In “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” Service tells the story of McGee “from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and grows,” who had “left his home in the South to roam round the pole,” although why, “God only knows.”
In fact, as Service well knew, his character McGee left home to find a fortune in the Yukon Gold Rush.
On August 16, 1896, a group of four people found gold on Rabbit Creek in the remote Yukon Territory of Canada. A Tlingit and Tagish woman known as Kate Carmack; her brother, known as Skookum Jim; her husband, George Carmack; and a third man, nicknamed Dawson Charlie, made up the family group.
Reports suggest that it was Skookum Jim who made the initial discovery, but since his white brother-in-law would be far better able than an Indigenous man to protect his mining claim, it was Carmack who filed the first legal claim for gold on the creek that would soon become known as Bonanza Creek.
Nearby miners rushed to the Klondike to stake their own claims, and news began to filter out to the rest of the world. By the following summer, 30,000 to 40,000 men, known as “stampeders,” had rushed to the Yukon to try their fortunes there.
There were many routes to the gold fields, but most cost a lot of money. The poorest adventurers took the straightest route in, leading them only about 33 miles from the Pacific waterways to a lake where they could buy or build a boat that would take them down the Yukon River to the gold fields. While short, that route took them up Chilkoot Pass: a high mountain pass they traversed by trudging up 1,500 steps cut into ice. The winter journey was easier than the summer version. In the summer, the rocks that littered the path were treacherous.
Stampeders had to carry their gear and the year’s supply of food the Canadian authorities required to prevent starvation. Altogether, the supplies—150 pounds of bacon, 400 pounds of flour, 125 pounds of beans, 15 pounds of salt, 10 pounds of coffee, mosquito netting, axes, 2 suits of heavy underwear, and so on—weighed about a ton, transported by 50- to 80-pound packs and left at a cache while the prospective miner went back down to make the ascent anew with more gear.
Most of the stampeders were unprepared for the harsh environment of the Yukon and had little knowledge of prospecting. They died of disease, violence, avalanche, exposure, scurvy, and malnutrition. Men—and a few women—made the trip to the unforgiving Yukon because it seemed their best bet in a nation crushed by a depression and torn between the haves and the have-nots.
In 1892, just five years before the stampeders struck out for the gold fields, voters had put Democrat Grover Cleveland in the White House and Democrats in charge of Congress, giving the Democrats full control of the government for the first time since before the Civil War. Their vote was a rejection of Republican president Benjamin Harrison and his pro-business administration that had added six new states to the Union to make sure they could control the Senate, had raised tariff rates, and was responsible for the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre.
As soon as it was clear voters had put Democrats in charge, Republican industrialists panicked. Their industries were protected by a high tariff that had enabled them to dominate the domestic market and raise prices, while a lack of labor laws and protections for farmers drove down workers’ wages and agricultural profits. The tariffs had made industrialists very rich indeed, and they insisted that Democrats’ promises to lower tariff rates to help the workers and consumers who paid the tariffs would collapse the economy.
Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” one businessmen’s club declared, and losing that administration would be a calamity, especially since, according to Republicans, Democrats were socialists and anarchists who wanted to destroy America. The Chicago Tribune told readers that a lower tariff would destroy industries and throw people out of work, but it seemed fine with the prospect: “The working classes of the country need such a lesson.”
Republican newspapers warned of an impending collapse, and fearful investors pulled their money out of the market and out of U.S. bonds. Gold began to flow out of the country as Europeans brought their money home. The outgoing Harrison administration refused to reassure investors, insisting there was no financial problem even after financier J.P. Morgan rushed to Washington to urge Harrison to do something. Treasury Secretary Charles Foster commented publicly that the Republicans were responsible for the economy only until March 4, the day Cleveland would take office. His job was only “to avert a catastrophe up to that date.”
He didn’t quite make it. On February 17, the Reading Railroad Company collapsed, and then, one reporter wrote, “the bottom seemed to be falling out of everything.” Harrison’s men remained unmoved. Foster spent his last few days in office sitting for his portrait. Then, when he handed the Treasury Department over to his successor, he told the newspapers that “the Treasury was down to bedrock.”
Cleveland took office with a financial panic in full swing and a depression right behind it. By 1894, desperate workers were demanding government relief programs, adding fuel to Republicans’ charges that workers were dangerous. When officials at George Pullman’s Palace Car Company outside of Chicago cut wages five times without lowering rents in company housing and then fired members of an arbitration committee, workers went on strike. By July 1894 the nation’s transportation system had ground to a halt, and the federal government sent troops to Chicago, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Wyoming, California, Utah Territory, and New Mexico Territory. Clashes destroyed $250,000 in property.
As Democrats tried to revise the tariff and replace missing revenue with an income tax, Republicans insisted they were socialists. In the 1894 midterms, Republicans blamed Democrats for the economic crisis, strikes, and desperation. They associated the Democrats with economic disaster and anarchy and promised a Republican victory would dramatically improve the economy. In the midterms, voters turned Congress back over to Republicans.
But the fight was not yet over. In 1896, a handsome young Nebraska Democrat speaking at the Democratic National Convention stood firmly for the people. “There are two ideas of government,” William Jennings Bryan said. “There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up and through every class which rests upon them.”
Democrats nominated Bryan for the presidency, while Republicans stood behind former Ohio representative William McKinley, a staunchly pro-business lawmaker who was chiefly responsible for the high tariffs of Harrison’s term. While McKinley stayed home and kept his mouth shut, Republicans flooded the country with speakers and pamphlets charging Democrats with trying to instigate “class warfare” and saying Bryan was a “demagogue” who hoped to create a “red welter of lawlessness as fantastic and as vicious as the dream of a European communist.”
He was planning to change the government of the people, for the people, and by the people into “a government of a mob, by the demagogue, for the shiftless and the disorderly and the criminal and the semi-criminal.”
In the 1896 election, the issue that most clearly divided the Democrats and the Republicans was that of money. Democrats noted that Republicans had stopped the coinage of silver in 1873 in a routine reworking of the nation’s currency laws, just as silver strikes in Nevada would have poured silver into the market. Workers, farmers, and entrepreneurs wanted the government to coin silver as well as gold to expand the currency, making it easier for them to borrow to develop new businesses to rebuild prosperity.
But more money might also create inflation, enabling them to pay back loans in cheaper dollars, and Republican financiers, creditors, and established businessmen insisted that the security of the nation depended on a gold standard. Looser money would decrease the value of their holdings and unsettle businessmen, making them unwilling to invest in the economy to help fuel a recovery.
In the election of 1896, Republican “Gold Bugs” backed big-business representative William McKinley, while Democratic “Silverites” backed Nebraskan William Jennings Bryan. The election was one of history’s most vicious. When Bryan complained about Republicans’ rhetoric, Republicans retorted: “This is a fight for the country and the flag.”
McKinley won in 1896, and the Republicans immediately hiked tariff rates even higher. Poorer Americans could see little hope for their future, and news of a gold strike on Bonanza Creek in Yukon Territory seemed providential.
In the end, few of the stampeders made fortunes and many more lost their lives. The biggest winners in the Klondike Fever were those from the newly booming city of Seattle who supplied the miners, and the writers who saw romance in the frigid dream: Jack London, whose most famous novel, The Call of the Wild, showed how love and loyalty trumped gold; and Robert Service, whose poems explored the cruelty of life in the Yukon but also the humor, sentimentality, and above all the loyalty and friendship of those who realized they must help each other or die.
Enough gold poured into the United States from the Yukon to give Gold Bugs a gold standard and Silverites an expanded currency. The economy, which had already begun to recover anyway, got a boost as the Yukon Gold Rush pulled the fangs of the currency issue, giving Americans one fewer division to overcome before they could reform the country during the Progressive Era.
“The Arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold….”
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