7. Chilkoot Pass
It began to rain while we dug Jack Clarke’s grave. The shotgun shell filled with gold lay heavy in my inner coat pocket.
“Crazy bastard,” Roland grumbled as our shovels bit into the earth. “Why did he have go and do such a thing?”
Eleanor stood with her arm around Anna, who’d been crying softly ever since Clarke’s shocking death. “Some injury of the mind, no doubt,” she said. “Perhaps hunger and hardship ate away his sanity.”
“Or guilt over abandoning his partner,” Steve suggested. “Whatever the cause, he’s done us a good turn if this creek is as rich as he claims.”
Doug didn’t look happy at the suggestion we’d all be traveling there together, but said nothing. We finished the soggy grave as quickly as we could, water collecting at the bottom from both rain and the saturated soil.
If Clark had any possessions other than the gold he’d given me and the revolver he’d used to shoot himself, he’d abandoned them on the trail. We sacrificed one of our blankets to wrap him in, then carefully lowered his limp form into the grave. Muddy water immediately soaked the cloth, and I wished we’d at least had some sort of coffin to put him in.
As we refilled the grave, Eleanor fashioned a cross out of discarded wood. Once it was in place, we stood around for an awkward moment.
Should I say anything? I knew nothing about him.
The way he’d picked us out of the line of travelers, his intense stare, his demand I swear to fulfill what turned out to be his dying request…I didn’t know what any of it meant, but it made my skin crawl.
“May he find peace in the arms of the Lord,” Steve said at last. The rest of us murmured a reflexive “Amen.” Thus released from our feelings of duty, we took up our packs and sledges again and hurried up the trail, looking for a place to camp. No one suggested staying and camping near the grave.
It was after dark when we found a suitable spot, and even later by the time we’d cooked and eaten our dinner of bacon and rehydrated soup. Everyone else retired to the tents, but though I was tired, I knew sleep would evade me.
Clarke’s death replayed again and again through my mind. What did he mean by “it’s done?”
If only I’d realized what he was doing faster. Maybe I could have saved him.
I couldn’t save my own sister. What made me think I could save anyone else?
I took out the heavy shotgun shell and pulled out the cotton plug. Gold dust glittered inside, but this time I thought I spotted something smooth and solid. It didn’t look like a nugget.
I took out my pocket knife and used the blade to hook through it and pull it loose. Raw gold didn’t emerge, but rather link after link of a chain. As it came loose, the dying firelight flashed on a heart-shaped gold charm.
It was Bessie’s bracelet.
“What’s that?” Doug asked from just behind me.
I jerked, nearly dropping the shotgun shell. With a hiss of impatience, he grabbed it out of my hand. “Here, before you spill the gold. And where did that come from?”
I gingerly let the bracelet slip from the knife blade to the palm of my hand. I flinched when it touched my skin—for some reason I was certain it would be burning hot.
“It’s…” My voice caught, and I cleared my throat. “It’s Bessie’s bracelet.”
Her name hung between us, spoken for the first time since we’d left home. We’d made a pact: our old life was gone, erased, never to be thought of again. We were new people, remaking ourselves at will, untethered from anything but the needs of the present moment.
And now I’d broken that pact.
“Don’t be stupid.” Doug reached out his hand for the bracelet. “There are thousands of bracelets exactly like that.”
I didn’t give it to him, instead turning over the charm. My heart seized in my chest at what was on the back. “Her initials. Doug, her?—”
“For God’s sake.” Doug glared at me until I tucked it away in my pocket. “You know it was buried with her. This belonged to some sweetheart of Clarke’s, he kept it for sentiment, and stored it with the only other valuable thing he had while he traveled.”
Doug was right—of course he was. The gold bracelet, heated by the flames of the burning train, had seared itself into Bessie’s flesh. Removing it would have been both pointless and gruesome.
It wasn’t her on the deck of the ship. And this wasn’t her bracelet, given back to me by a man who’d used the same hand to end his own life.
It couldn’t be. And yet some part of me feared it was.
* * *
The next nine days on the trail passed in a slog of mud and near-constant drizzle. At last we reached Sheep Camp, a rough town of wooden hovels mixed with tents, settled in a bowl at the foot of the Coast Mountains. Dogs howled, men sang, and women laughed. Abandoned horses milled about aimlessly. Smoke from fires mixed with the fog that had dogged us all the way from the coast, and the air stank of too many people jammed into too small a place.
But it was what lay beyond the camp that grabbed our attention and robbed us of our breath. The forest fell away and the mountains loomed overhead, their flanks clad in white. Waterfalls flowed down from the glaciers enclosing the canyon ahead, ice overhanging it at more than one point. At the far end of the canyon, in a notch between the mountains, a ribbon of black wended its way up the sheer mountainside, stark against the snow.
The ribbon was composed of men, packed into a single-file line, stepping in the footsteps of the man ahead, their backs bent beneath the weight of their packs.
“Oh God,” Anna moaned. “We have to climb that? Roland, I’ll never make it.”
“Of course you will,” he assured her.
I exchanged a look with Steve, saw the same worry in his eyes that I imagined reflected in mine. The trail from Dyea had risen steadily, but it was nothing compared to this. No wonder pack animals had been left abandoned in Sheep Camp; no horse could make it up such a steep slope. Everything we owned would have to be taken off the sledges and strapped to our backs.
Doug must have sensed my dismay, because he clapped me on the arm. “This is the last real obstacle,” he said. “After we make it over the pass, we’ll travel the rest of the way by boat. Easy.”
I doubted it would be quite that simple—we’d have to build our own boat, for one thing—but as least we’d be moving with the water rather than fighting gravity for every step. “Right,” I said, straightening my shoulders.
We spent the night in Sheep Camp, though we pitched our own tents rather than enjoy the services of any of the “hotels”—really just wooden shacks where men slept on the floor. Snow reached down from the mountain, painting a layer of white over the mud and manure, giving the camp an almost pristine appearance.
From there, we hiked and dragged our supplies to the base of the steep pass, an area referred to as the Scales. The reason quickly became apparent; professional packers swarmed around it, offering to carry our burdens for the princely sum of a dollar a pound.
“That’s two-thousand dollars an outfit,” Steve said, shaking his head. “Maybe these fellows have the right idea, eh? You could work for a month and never have to lift a finger again.”
“And break your back doing it,” Doug replied, lip curled. “No thanks.”
A commotion caught my attention. A group of Native packers stood to the side, the one in front shaking his head as a White man gestured at him.
“Not today,” he said firmly. “Rain is coming.”
I glanced automatically at the sky, but saw nothing that would indicate a change in the weather.
The White man let out a hiss of frustration. “Look, all them other packers are going! They’re full up, and I can’t drag everything up myself—I’ve got a bum leg. Tell you what, I’ll pay you an extra ten cents a pound.”
The Native man shook his head again, and his compatriots murmured among themselves and peered up at the pass and the dark line of men crawling up its sheer surface. “No. It isn’t safe.”
With that, the leader turned and headed back toward Sheep Camp, the others following him. Their would-be employer shouted imprecations after them.
Eleanor frowned. “Do you think we should wait here, at least until tomorrow?”
A ramshackle town of tents had sprung up at the Scales; we wouldn’t be the only people waiting. But Doug shook his head. “Wait for what? Why? Just because some packers got cold feet?”
Steve shifted uneasily. “Back home, when I was studying the wildlife, I hired Tulalip guides often. They know the land better than any White man.”
“I know something, too,” Roland said, putting a hand on his son’s shoulder. “I know that every day we delay, more and more prime claims are getting snapped up.”
He spoke aloud the dread we’d all felt: that we’d arrive at the gold fields to find nothing left. After all this money and effort, such an outcome was unthinkable.
Steve hesitated…then sighed. “You’re right, Pa. Let’s get started.”
* * *
If getting from the coast to the pass was misery, Chilkoot Pass was perdition itself.
There was no more dragging gear and food by sledge, no pack horses or mules, no way of moving goods up what was referred to as the Golden Stairs except on our own backs. Nor was it a one-time trip—with a full outfit weighing upward of a ton, each miner was consigned to scaling the height up to twenty times.
Anna remained behind to watch over our supplies at the Scales, while the rest of us tackled the climb. It took all of my concentration. The almost vertical ascent over a field of snow-covered boulders would be difficult enough, without being packed into a line of men and women crawling single-file up it. There was no place to rest; getting out of line would mean having to force oneself back in. We climbed nose to foot, bent over from the steep grade and the weights of our packs. High above the tree line, the world became a monotony of white and black, which softened to gray as we climbed into a bank of swirling fog. My world shrank to keeping pace with the man in front of me, forced to step as he stepped, so tightly were we all jammed together.
Then at last the world grew less steep, and I stumbled exhausted onto the mountain’s backbone. Eleanor was behind me; I turned and pulled her up and to the side. Her face was pink from exertion, breath coming hard, and she dropped her pack from her shoulders the moment she could.
“Lord,” she gasped, when she had her breath back. “I don’t ever want to do that again.”
“You won’t have to,” Doug said, shedding his own pack beside hers. The weary Kilgores did the same. “When we leave, it will be aboard a steamer loaded with gold, all the way from Dawson City to Saint Michael, then back to Seattle.”
“The rest of us will have to do it again immediately,” Roland said, rubbing at the small of his back. “Come on, lads; the sooner we go back down, the sooner this will be over with.”
While Eleanor remained with our possessions at the summit, we slipped and slid back to the bottom and began the whole process over again.
The day turned into a blur. My muscles burned, and the straps rubbed my skin raw even through my clothing. I alternately sweated then froze, as we moved from sun to fog and back again. Over and over we rejoined the line, our backs bent, using both hands and feet to grind our way up to the summit.
Many men didn’t make it. Some of them stepped out of line and sat bereft in the jumble of rock, snow, and ice, sobbing alone into their hands. Others began to glumly sell off whatever portion of their outfit remained at the bottom, or had been dragged to the top. One collapsed beside the line of climbers, lying there unmoving until one of the professional packers took pity and helped him back down.
Doug used their example to spur the rest of us on. “More gold for us,” he’d say cheerfully. Or “Pain is temporary—gold is forever.”
The reminder of what we were doing all this for goaded us on. As we climbed, I daydreamed of buying a nice house somewhere, of settling down. Perhaps I’d invite Steve to visit, once his family was moved into their new mansion. Doug wouldn’t want to stay in one place; he’d send me postcards from all the exotic lands he visited, the luxurious hotels he stayed in across Europe and Egypt.
It happened on our final ascent. Finally, after nearly twenty trips up the Golden Stairs, we wearily slung the last packs onto our backs. Anna had no choice but to come with us, and trudged slowly after Doug, with Steve behind giving her a boost when needed. Her long skirts fouled in the snow, and I thought I heard her weeping more than once, though it was hard to be sure. Roland followed behind me, his breath wheezing in and out of his lungs. He wasn’t as young as the rest of us, and I glanced back frequently to make certain he was all right.
About two-thirds of the way up, the rain the Native packers had predicted finally swept in. It pounded us with freezing drops mingled with sleet, and softened the snow around us. The fog cleared away, revealing the dead white of the glaciers overhanging the valley; the rivulets pouring from them quickly swelled into streams.
I bent my head, striving to keep my face out of the worst of the rain. We were trapped on the side of the mountain, with nowhere to pitch a tent or get out of the foul weather until we gained the summit. Within minutes, I felt as though I’d sunk into some kind of purgatory, crawling up an endless slope with only the sight of Steve’s boots to keep me company. I longed to look up, to see if I could spot the summit and the tent city sprouting there, but the Golden Stairs were too steep. I’d topple back if I straightened.
A strange sound cut through the symphony of groans and pounding rain. For a moment, I thought it was thunder, until I realized that rather than fading away, it was growing louder.
“Avalanche!” someone screamed.