Free Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 by Pierre Berton

the dour look that betrayed his Scottish ancestry. He wore his broad-brimmed miner’s hat proudly, as if it were a kind of badge. All his life he wore it, on city streets and wilderness pathways; it proclaimed to the world that Robbie Henderson was a prospector.
    Henderson and his companions had drifted for about one hundred miles when they reached the mouth of the Sixtymile River, whose tributaries curled back towards the headwaters of the Fortymile. Here, on an island, they espied a pinprick of civilization – a few cabins and tents, a sawmill and a big two-storey trading post of square-cut logs operated by the white-bearded Papa Harper and his partner, Joseph Ladue. This little community had been named Ogilvie after William Ogilvie, the Canadian who surveyed the boundary between Alaska and the British Northwest Territories.
    Harper was away, but Ladue – a swarthy, stocky figure of French Huguenot background, and a veteran of the river since 1882 – was on the bank to greet Henderson. From delta to headwaters, for two thousand miles, he was known to Indian and white man alike simply as “Joe.”
    He too had been obsessed with the idea of gold for most of his life. It had a very real meaning for him, because without it he could not marry his sweetheart, Anna Mason, whose wealthy parents continued to spurn him as a penniless drifter. She was waiting faithfully for him three thousand miles away while he sought his fortune here in a starkly furnished log post on the banks of the Yukon.
    For twenty years Ladue had pressed the search, ever since heading west from his foster-parents’ home in Plattsburgh, New York. In the Black Hills country he took a job operating a steam engine in a mine. He knew nothing about engines, but he could learn, and within eighteen months he was a foreman. He knew nothing about mining either, but he could study at night, and within a few more months he was superintendent. But Ladue did not want to mine other men’s gold, and he was off with the herd at the whisper of a new strike – from Wyoming to New Mexico, from New Mexico to Arizona, from Arizona to Alaska. He was one of the first to scale the Chilkoot, and in the next half-dozen years he dipped his pan into scores of gravelly creeks from the Stewart to Nuklayaket, including one gurgling stream whose name would later become world-renowned as “Bonanza.” But for Ladue there was no bonanza. When prospecting failed, he tried farming. When the frost ruined his cabbages and his barley, he set up as a trader. When trading was slow, he built a sawmill and sold sluicebox lumber. He did not daunt easily, for he was a confirmed optimist, wiry, keen-eyed, and cheerful to the point of enthusiasm.
    Now he expended some of this enthusiasm on the dour, dogged Henderson and his two companions. It pleased Ladue to see prospectors arriving, for, with his promoter’s mind, he foresaw that sooner or later one would find what all were seeking, and then each would be rich. If there had been a chamber of commerce in the Yukon, Ladue would have been president, for he was a born booster. The slightest trace of a colour in a pan prompted him to talk in glowing terms of a new Eldorado. He was the first in a long line of northern outfitters who realized that a gold strike often brought more fortune to merchant than to miner – but he was by no means the last. Within a few years there would be a thousand Ladues exploiting the wealth of the Yukon Valley.
    Ladue’s post lay roughly one hundred miles upstream from Fortymile. Between the two settlements, two other rivers flowed into the Yukon from the opposite side: the Indian River, about thirty miles downstream from Ladue, and then the Thron-diuck River, another thirty miles farther down. Ladue had explored the Thron-diuck in the old days, and had gone so far as to make out an affidavit swearing that there was no gold on its streams. In spite of this, he now professed to believe that the neighbouring Indian River