The Gold Hunters of the North

The Gold Hunters of the North by Jack London

Jack London's "The Gold Hunters of the North" traces the history of prospecting in Alaska and the adjoining Canadian territory, opening with the Russian governor Baranov at Sitka in 1804 warning a Slavonian hunter to conceal gold nuggets, lest Americans and English "rush in on us by thousands." Baranov and his successors suppressed the news, so when the United States bought Alaska in 1867 it was valued only for furs and fisheries. American prospectors from California, Fraser, Cassiar, and Cariboo, believing the gold streak did not "peter out" in British Columbia, immediately pushed "farther north" into the unmapped interior. London recounts the region's remoteness: in 1847 Hudson Bay Company agents crossing from the Mackenzie mistakenly thought the Yukon flowed into the Arctic Ocean; Russian traders downstream did not know the river's source; only later was it learned they occupied the same stream. Frederick Whymper voyaged to Fort Yukon under the Arctic Circle, and an English company deserter in 1867 became the first white man to cross by land from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Dr. W. H. Ball of the Smithsonian gave the first accurate description of the Yukon, which rises in Crater Lake, thirty miles from the ocean, and runs twenty-five hundred miles to the sea. A gold hunter named Holt was the first white man to cross the Chilcoot Pass (dated variously 1872, 1874, or 1878), reaching the Hootalinqua and reporting coarse gold. In 1880 Edward Bean led twenty-five miners from Sitka across the Pass, and other parties built boats and drifted down the Yukon. For twenty-five years unsung prospectors battled frost and famine, living on "rabbit tracks and salmon bellies," clothed in walrus mucluc and moosehide moccasin. London illustrates the land's vastness with Harry Maxwell, a sailor from the whaleship Fannie E. Lee who reached Point Barrow in 1880, built a cabin east of the Mackenzie, prospected nineteen years, met Warburton Pike, and only after amassing $20,000 in dust learned that Yukon gold hunters had been his neighbors all along. Jack McQuestion, with Al Mayo and Arthur Harper, entered the Yukon from the Mackenzie in 1871 and built Fort Reliance in 1873, six miles below the Klondike River; London recalls meeting him at Minook in 1898. Frank Dinsmore of Auburn, Maine, crossed Chilcoot repeatedly from 1882, prospected the Upper, Middle, and Lower Yukon for eleven years, once carried thirteen fifty-pound flour sacks on a wager, and danced all night after a forty-mile run; he found his fortune at last but died in a San Francisco hotel still planning to go "farther north." Famine was chronic; partners drew straws each fall to decide who would risk the trail to salt water and who would winter in the Arctic dark. Despite the Alaska Commercial Company's and later the N. A. T. & T. Company's steamers, the population always outran supply, forcing a government reindeer relief expedition in the winter of 1897-1898. Strikes multiplied moderately at Forty Mile (named for its distance below Fort Reliance), Sixty Mile, Miller, Glacier, Birch, Franklin, and the Koyokuk, while miners dreamed of a fabled "Too Much Gold" creek. Robert Henderson, prospecting alone for three years on Indian River tributaries, crossed to a Klondike feeder, found eight cents to the pan, named it Gold Bottom, and with Munson, Dalton, and Swanson washed out $750 — the first Klondike gold. Returning to Sixty Mile for supplies from Joe Ladue's post, Henderson met George "Siwash" Carmack fishing salmon at the mouth of the Klondike with his Indian wife and relatives, and urged him to join the strike, refusing to admit Carmack's Indian kin ahead of his old Sixty Mile friends. Carmack, with brothers-in-law Skookum Jim and Tagish Charley, took a shortcut up Rabbit Creek, panned "colours," and promised Henderson word of any find. Instead, after Skookum Jim found rich prospects, Carmack and his party staked the creek themselves, renamed it Bonanza, and filed before Captain Constantine at Forty Mile — never sending word to Henderson, who learned of his loss only weeks later from passing strangers and, per Tappan Adney, "was some time before he could speak." Old-timers from Forty Mile and Circle City, absent during the initial stampede, dismissed early reports as a "Siwash" bunco game, "leaving it to the Swedes." But truth outran even the miners' habitual exaggeration as pan yields rose from a dollar to ounces. Eldorado Creek, a Bonanza feeder first scorned, proved richer still, averaging a thousand dollars a foot; the Swede Charley Anderson, gotten drunk and duped into buying claim No. 29 for $750, wept at his folly but took over three-quarters of a million dollars from the ground. Only after Frank Dinsmore investigated and wrote back that he'd "never seen anything like it" did Circle City believe, emptying itself in a stampede that left only twenty people behind. London closes by noting gold has since been found in benches, on Monte Cristo Island, and in the sands at Nome, and speculates that gold hunters, driven by an ineradicable faith and love of the quest, may yet be the ones to reach the Pole.

By Jack London · First published 1905 · Genre: Adventure, Historical Fiction, Western · 5,868 words

First lines

"Where the Northern Lights come down a' nights to dance on the / houseless snow. "

"Ivan, I forbid you to go farther in this undertaking. Not a word about this, or we are all undone. Let the Americans and the English know that we have gold in these mountains, then we are ruined. They will rush in on us by thousands, and crowd us to the wall -- to the death."

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The Gold Hunters of the North is listed on Textopian as a short story by Jack London, dated 1905 CE.

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Adventure · Fiction · Historical Fiction · Literary Fiction · Novel · Classic · American Literature · Gold Rush · Prospecting · Mining · Frontier Life · Pioneers

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