I have come into the Yukon Territory from Alaska. The trip from the land of Uncle Sam to that of John Bull was made over the route followed by thousands of gold seekers in the first great Klondike rush in the winter of 1897, when the prospectors made their way on foot over that frozen pass. It is now summer, and I have come from Skagway to White Horse, where I am now writing, on the White Pass Railway.
My first journey into the interior of the Yukon has been a motor trip of a hundred miles on the overland trail that runs from here to Dawson. The car was of American make, the chauffeur was “Caterpillar Ike,” and the time was yesterday from midday to midnight. We dashed through virgin forests, climbed mountains, flew around dizzying curves, and skidded along narrow cliffs until my heart was in my throat but my soul was full of thrills.
The overland trail begins at White Horse and runs through the wilderness for a distance of three hundred and fifty miles to Dawson at the mouth of the Klondike. It is more than one hundred miles shorter than the river trip to the gold mines, and it is used to carry mail, passengers, and freight during the cold winter months when everything in this region is locked tight by Jack Frost.
The road through the forest climbs over ranges of mountains, winds its way through the valleys, and crosses swamps, bogs, and sloughs of mud that sticks like cement. In many parts of its course it twists about like a corkscrew, as though the surveyors had laid their lines along the trail of a rabbit, and a drunken rabbit at that. Here it is bedded on rock, and there it half floats on a quicksand covered with corduroy logs. In the spring of the year the six-horse teams of the mail stage are often mired to their bellies, and have to be lifted from the waxy clay by a block and tackle attached to the trees.
My ride over the trail took me as far as the crest of the range beyond Little River, whence I returned to White Horse to go down the Yukon by steamer. The motor trip was a moving picture of the wonders of nature. On each side of the roadway the country is the same as it was when Columbus discovered America; it is the same as when the Scandinavian navigators drifted down our coast about 1000 A. D.—yes, I venture, the same as it was when old Cheops built his great pyramid on the banks of the Nile. With the exception of several log huts where meals are served to travellers, there were no signs of human habitation, and aside from the roads, old and new, not one mark of human labour. We were in no danger of meeting other machines or farm wagons, although we might have run down a covey of birds instead of the usual chicken, or a fox or a bear in place of a dog. At one time a lynx leaped across the trail in front of our machine, and later a great flock of grouse passed over our heads with a whirr. I am told that hunters sometimes bag a good lot of birds on this route by shooting them from automobiles.
All sorts of animal tracks were to be seen as we rode over the trail. The woods are full of bears, brown and black, caribou in great numbers, and wide-antlered moose. There are foxes and lynx and millions of rabbits. We passed groves of small trees, every one of which had been killed by the rabbits. They had eaten the bark off during the winter, beginning when the snow was two or three feet in depth and biting it away inch by inch as the snow melted, until a belt of white a yard wide girdled each tree. The bark above and below was dark green or brown, and the white shone out like ivory. Beavers and muskrats abound in the streams, and there are many kinds of squirrels, as well as gophers, that burrow like moles under the roadway. We crossed many such burrows, our motor car hitting them with a bump that shot us from our seats, so that our heads struck the top.
Upon starting from White Horse we were told of a narrow escape from a bear that one of the railroad clerks had had only the night before. This man had gone out to a lake in the woods about five miles away and made a good catch of fish. He was riding home on his bicycle when a big black bear rushed out of the forest and upset him. Fortunately, he fell near a dead root. He seized this as he jumped up, and hit old Bruin a blow on the snout. Then, before the bear had time to recover, he mounted his bicycle and sped away. But the bear got the fish.
Our first stop was twenty-two miles from White Horse, at the Tahkeena road house, on the Tahkeena River, where there is a famous Irish cook, Jimmy. The road house is built of logs and heated by a stove made of a hundred-gallon gasoline tank. The tank lies on its side, resting on four legs made of iron pipe. A stovepipe is fitted into the top and a door is cut in one end. The result is an excellent heating device, and one that is common in many parts of Alaska and the Klondike. We got a snack at this road house on our first stop and had an excellent dinner there on our return.
We crossed the Tahkeena River on a ferry boat attached to a cable worked by the current. We then rode on through a parklike country, spotted with groves of pine trees, each as high as a three-story house, as straight as an arrow, and, branches and all, no bigger around than a nail keg. I cannot describe the beauty of these trees. Where they were thick we rode for miles through walls of green twenty or thirty feet high, and in places where the trees had been burned by forest fires the walls were of silver, the dead branches having been turned to the most exquisite filigree.
The trees here are like those of most parts of interior Alaska. They grow in the thin soil, nowhere more than six inches or so deep, which is underlaid by strata of earth that have been frozen for thousands of years. The moss on the top of the soil acts as an insulator and keeps the ice from melting except on the surface. The roots go down to the ice and then spread out. When a tree dies one can easily pull the stump out, roots and all, and throw it aside. The overland trail was cleared in this way, and the sides of it are fenced with piles of such trees.
We are accustomed to think of this part of the world as all snow and ice. That is so in winter, but in summer the whole country is as spotted with flowers as a botanical garden. During our ride we passed great beds of fireweed and motored for miles between hedges of pink flowers, higher than the wheels of our automobile. The woods that had been swept by forest fires were dusted with pink blossoms, and in the open spaces there was so much colour that it seemed as though Mother Nature had gone on a spree and painted the whole country red. In one open place where we stopped to put on a new tire, I picked nineteen varieties of wild flowers. Among them were roses of bright red, and white flowers with petals like those of a forget-me-not. There were also blue flowers the names of which I do not know, and daisies with petals of pink and centres as yellow as bricks of Klondike gold.
The mosses were especially wonderful. One that looked like old ivory grew close to the ground in great patches. It reminded me of the exquisite coral of Samoa and the Fijis. I am told that this moss is the favourite food of the reindeer, and that the caribou paw their way down through the snow to get it. Another curiosity found here is the air plant. I have always thought of orchids as confined to the tropics, but in this part of the world are polar orchids, great bunches of green that hang high up in the trees.
The character of the country varied as we went onward. Now our way was across a rolling plain, now the road climbed the hills, and again it cut its way through the mountains. At one break in the hills we could see the Ibex Range, with glaciers marking its slopes, and its peaks capped with perpetual snow. In other places the mountains were as green as the hills of the Alleghanies, and they had the same royal mantle of purple. Just beyond the Tahkeena River we rode through a valley walled with mountains from which the earth had been torn by a cloudburst a few years before. The faces of the green hills were covered with clay-coloured blotches and they looked as though they had been blasted by leprosy or some earthy plague.
We crossed one little glacial river after another, and rode through valleys that are covered with ice in the winter and become soup sloughs in the spring. A great part of the way was over what is known as glacial clay. This clay is solid when dry, but when moist it has the consistency of shoemakers’ wax and, like a quicksand, sucks in anything that goes over it. A railroad track built on it and not well protected by drainage may disappear during a long rainy season.
The labour of keeping the overland trail in order reminds one of that of Hercules cleaning the Augean stables. The road bed has had to be filled in and remade again and again. The route is changed from year to year. Now and then we passed an old roadway that had become so filled with boulders that a man could hardly crawl over it. This region had no rain for three months until day before yesterday, when enough fell to change the whole face of Nature, and make this glacial clay like so much putty. Our automobile weighed more than two tons, and we had to go carefully where there was any doubt as to the condition of the clay. At one wet spot we found ourselves down to the axles, with the wheels held fast in the mud. We had brought with us an axe and a long-handled shovel for use in just such an emergency. We cut down trees and made a bed of branches in front of the car. A pine track was put under the wheels and a pine tree used as a lever to aid the jack in getting the car out of the mud. It took us about two hours to dig the machine from the clay and get it on the firm road bed. After that when we came to soft clay we turned out and sought new roads through the grass or rushed over the wet spots to prevent the car from sinking.
The overland trail is used almost altogether during winter, although the Canadian government keeps it in such a condition that it is fit for travel in summer. It is, on the whole, better than most of Uncle Sam’s roads in Alaska, and in the winter makes possibles regular mail service into the Klondike. The freight and the mail are carried on great sleds hauled by six horses, with relays at the various road houses. Each house has stables for the horses and at some of them there are sleeping accommodations for passengers.
At the Tahkeena road house I saw a great stack of horse feed that had been brought up the Tahkeena and cached there for the winter, and at the Little River road house I saw one of the sleds used for carrying foodstuffs and other perishables into the Klondike during the cold season, when the thermometer may fall to seventy degrees below zero. The sled was a covered one, large enough to carry three or four tons. It was so arranged that carbon heaters could be placed in troughs around its bed. These heaters keep the tightly covered load from freezing. Such sleds are drawn by four or six horses, according to the state of the roads.
The Canadian government has already spent a great deal on this road, and its upkeep costs thousands of dollars a year. Within the last few years the trail has been much improved for the use of automobiles. The first time an automobile road was proposed many people scoffed at the idea and said that it could not be done. The matter came up before the Parliament at Ottawa and was discussed pro and con. An appropriation of fifty thousand dollars had been asked. The objections made were that automobiles could not be run in the low temperature of the Yukon, and that the road was so rough that the machines could never make their way over it.
This discussion occurred in the midst of the winter, and while it was going on the Honourable George Black, who was then Commissioner of Yukon Territory, decided to show parliament that the undertaking was practicable. He made an arrangement with C. A. Thomas, the resident manager of the Yukon Gold Company at Dawson, to take a forty-horse-power automobile over the trail. With a chauffeur, the two men left Dawson when the road was covered with snow and the thermometer far below zero. The long winter nights were at hand and the sun shone only an hour or so every day. The darkness was conquered in part by a locomotive headlight on the front of the car.
The trip to White Horse and return was made within fifty-six hours, of which thirty-six hours was actual running. The distance of seven hundred and twenty miles was covered at an average speed of twenty miles an hour for the running time of the round trip. During the journey the thermometer fell to fifty-six degrees below zero, but the air was dead still, and wrapped up as they were in furs, the men did not realize how cold it was until they came to a road house and read the thermometer.
It was necessary to keep the machine going continuously, for during a stop of even a few minutes the engine would freeze and the oil congeal. At one time their gasoline gave out and they had to stop twenty miles away from a road house they had expected to reach. A dog team was found and sent on to the road house, but while they waited the engine froze and the oil became stiff, and they had to build a fire under the car with wood from the forest before they could start off again. When they had completed the journey and returned to Dawson the bill for the road appropriation was just coming up for action. The news of their trip was telegraphed to Ottawa and the bill was passed.