32 SMITHSONIAN.COM | November 2019
The Sourtoe
Cocktail is a
signature libation
at Dawson City’s
Downtown Hotel.
The toe, stolen in
2017, was soon
returned by
mail with a note
signed “From a
Drunken Fool.”At Diamond
Tooth Gerties
gambling hall,
a prospector
named Bruce
Nibecker tries his
luck. “I felt the
call of the wild,
here in my chest,
the day I got
here,” he says.And you can still see his cabin and his old stomping
grounds in Dawson City, the former capital of the
Klondike gold rush, where my plane lands with a
crunch on an unpaved runway.
BECAUSE HE WAS ONLY 21, it’s easy to assume that
Jack London was innocent and naive when he set out
for the Far North. But that wasn’t the case. He grew
up poor in a broken home, and at age 15, he joined
a gang of prison-hardened oyster pirates who risked
their lives in small boats at night, trying to outwit the
armed guards who watched over the oyster beds in
San Francisco Bay. Jack soon became an expert sail-
or, and an accomplished drinker and brawler in the
waterfront saloons. At 17, he sailed across the Pacifi c
and up to the Bering Sea on a seal-hunting ship. He
also worked 16-hour days in a Dickensian canning
factory in Oakland, hoboed from coast to coast on
freight trains, learned to beg and steal, spent 30 days
for vagrancy in a vicious New York jail, and became a
confi rmed socialist—all by the age of 19.
In July 1897, he had just quit a job in a laundry
when the steamship Portland docked in Seattle and
the Excelsior in San Francisco. Miners came down the
gangplanks hefting three tons of gold from far north-
west Canada. Newspapers and telephones spread the
word almost instantly, and sparked one of the biggest,
wildest, most delusional gold rushes in history. Expe-
rienced miners and prospectors were joined by great
hordes of factory workers, store clerks, salesmen, bu-
reaucrats, police offi cers and other city dwellers, most
of them completely inexperienced in the wilderness
and clueless about the Far North.
Jack was desperate to join them, but he couldn’t
raise the money for passage or supplies. Fortunately,
his 60-year-old brother-in-law James “Cap” Shepard
also became infected with the “Klondicitis,” as the
gold fever was known. Shepard mortgaged his wife’s
home to fi nance the trip, and invited Jack along be-
cause of the young man’s muscle and skill at rough-
ing it. They bought fur-lined coats and caps, high
heavy boots, thick mittens, tents, blankets, axes,
mining gear, a metal cookstove, tools to build boats
and cabins, and a year’s supply of food. Jack, a vo-
racious reader with little schooling and vague ambi-
tions to become a writer, threw in volumes of Milton
and Darwin and a few other books.
They sailed away to Alaska on a ship packed with
gold-seekers and partnered with three of them: “Big
Jim” Goodman, an experienced miner and hunter; Ira
Sloper, a gritty carpenter and adventurer who weighed
barely 100 pounds; and a red-whiskered court report-
er, Fred C. Thompson, who kept a terse, deadpan diary
of the trip. Disembarking at Juneau, they hired Tlingit
canoes and paddled up a 100-mile fj ord to Dyea, where
the infamous Chilkoot Trail began.
To reach the Klondike, they fi rst needed to get
themselves and all their supplies over the Alas-
kan coastal range, on a trail too steep for horses or
pack mules. They sent 3,000 pounds of supplies
to the summit with Tlingit packers, at 22 cents per
pound, and carried the rest on their backs. Several
sources state that Jack hauled about a ton, which
was average. A strong man who could backpack 100
pounds had to make 20 round trips, walking a total
of 40 miles, in order to move that burden one mile.
The going was rough and muddy, with patches of
quagmire. They had to cross and recross a raging riv-
er on felled trees. “They are very hard to walk on, with
water rushing underneath and one hundred pounds on
your back,” Thompson noted in his diary. Men who fell
were usually drowned by the weight of their packs; they
were buried in shallow graves beside the trail. Nine
miles out from Dyea, Cap Shepard was in so much pain
from his rheumatism that he said goodbye to the other
men and turned back down the trail.
The others pressed on through heavy rain and deep-
ening mud. They picked up an elderly gold-seekerThe Eldorado emptied its occupants into the
street to see the test. The tables were deserted,
and the dealers and gamekeepers came forth
to see the outcome of the wager and to lay odds.
Several hundred men, furred and mittened,
banked around the sled. Men off ered odds of two
to one that Buck could not budge the sled.
The Call of the Wild