40 SMITHSONIAN.COM | November 2019
his life. Jack knew Father Judge, and almost certain-
ly borrowed the incident for his famous short story
“To Build a Fire.” After generously sharing her re-
search, she sent me up the hill to see Jack’s cabin,
moved to Dawson City from its original location, and
the small Jack London Museum.
In December 1897, at the coldest, darkest time of
year, Jack left Dawson and snowshoed 80 miles up
the frozen Yukon River, sleeping under blankets next
to a fi re. Weather records, and Jack’s recollections, in-
dicate temperatures close to 70 below zero. Reaching
the Stewart River, he joined his three partners in one
of the log cabins they had found. It was 10 by 12, and
even when the metal stove was red hot, meat would
stay frozen on a shelf eight feet away.
They lived on sourdough bread, beans and bacon,
supplemented by game meat, and they chopped wa-
ter out of the river with an ax. Thawing the ground
with fi res, they dug for gold but found very little.
They played a lot of cards, and visited back and forth
with men in other cabins. Jack’s company was val-
ued because he was an excellent conversationalist
and storyteller, with a cheerful, generous person-
ality. Nearly all the men on the Stewart River that
winter ended up in his fi ction, and one of them, a
broad-shouldered, big-hearted prospector named
John Thorson, became John Thornton, Harrison
Ford’s character in The Call of the Wild.
In 1965, literary sleuth Dick North, traveling by
dog sled through the snow, found the derelict cab-
in where London spent his fi rst and only winter in
the area. He was able to identify it because Jack had
signed and dated his name on the wall. Handwrit-
ing experts confi rmed the signature as genuine. The
cabin was then dismantled, and its logs included in
two replicas—one in Jack London Square in Oak-
land, California, the other in Dawson City at Eighth
Avenue where the poet Robert Service used to live.
There’s no exaggerating how primitive the cabin
is, or how cramped and smelly it must have been with
four men living in it. They slept on spruce boughs
and animal hides. The fl oor was ice and snow. When
they ran out of candles, they burned bacon grease
in a homemade lamp, and Jack smoked incessantly.
They all got scurvy, or “Arctic leprosy,” from the lack
of fresh vegetables and exercise. The disease killed
many prospectors in the Klondike, and put an end to
Jack’s brief career as a miner.
When the river unfroze in May 1898, he and another
man dismantled a cabin, turned it into a raft, fl oated
down to Dawson City, and sold the logs for $600. Jack
managed to fi nd some potatoes and a lemon, which re-
lieved his symptoms, and at Father Judge’s hospital he
was told to get to fresh food as soon as possible.
With John Thorson and another man, London set
off down the Yukon River in a small rowboat. Weak-
ened by scurvy, they had to row 1,500 river miles to
the Bering Sea, where they hoped to catch a ship to
Seattle or San Francisco.
On the day they left Dawson, Tuesday June 8, Jack
started keeping a journal in gray and then purple
pencil on loose lined notepapers. It was a thrill to see
the original in his collected papers at the Hunting-
ton Library in California, but it proved a fairly dull
read—brief notes about places reached and small in-
cidents of travel, a few descriptive passages, very little
about himself. Only once does he mention his scurvy,
“which has now almost entirely crippled me from the
waist down.” He is more concerned with the torments
infl icted by “thousands of millions” of mosquitoes bit-
ing “through overalls and heavy underwear.”
At the end of June, after a tough but fairly unevent-
ful journey, they reached St. Michaels on the Alaskan
coast, and Jack landed a job as a coal-shoveler on aTourists at the
Dawson City
Trading Post
may snap up
gold nuggets,
while mining
conglomerates
investing in
the region are
betting there are
mother lodes yet
to be discovered.Dawson City’s
Jack London
Cabin contains
period artifacts,
from snowshoes
to gold-panning
gear. London
described life
in the cabin as
“forty days in a
refrigerator.”He had been suddenly jerked from the heart of
civilization and fl ung into the heart of things
primordial. No lazy, sun-kissed life was this, with
nothing to do but loaf and be bored. Here was
neither peace, nor rest, nor a moment’s safety.
All was confusion and action, and every
moment life and limb were in peril.
The Call of the WildRichard Grant, based in Jackson, Mississippi,
wrote about John Steinbeck in last month’s issue.
Vancouver-based photographer Grant Harder
braved the Sourtoe cocktail for Smithsonian.BYLINES