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

country was ankle-deep in nuggets, and had been extolling its possibilities to every prospector who stopped at his post. Indeed, he had so annoyed the prospectors at Fortymile with his stories of the Indian River that they had all but driven him from camp. As it turned out, Ladue was right about the Indian (and wrong about the Thron-diuck), but he would have been astonished to hear it.
    The ragged men, in their thick gum boots and fraying mackinaws, were welcomed into the trader’s spartan quarters, whose grimy walls were ornamented with yellowing woodcuts torn from old newspapers. They sat down at a rickety table, and over beans and tea Ladue talked of the Indian River.
    Henderson was ready to try anything.
    “Let me prospect for you,” he said. “If it’s good for me, it’s good for you. I’m a determined man. I won’t starve.”
    His two companions were less enthusiastic. They chose to quit the north and return to Colorado. But Henderson stayed on, lured by Ladue’s promise of a grubstake, and for the next two years he stubbornly combed the Indian and its tributaries for gold. He searched with that same inquisitive restlessness that had governed his life, shifting from hill to creekbed to island but never settling for long at any given spot. He found gold, but never enough to satisfy him. On the surface bars of the main river he found gold as fine as sifted flour. On Australia Creek he found gold as delicate as lace. He dragged his sled up Quartz Creek, and here he found gold as coarse as sand. It still was not what he was seeking. It is possible, indeed, that had he found a cache of twenty-dollar goldpieces or a mountain of solid gold, he would have felt a vague chagrin, for with Henderson it was the search itself that counted.
    Ill-fortune and misadventure served only to stiffen his resolve. He suffered the agonies of leg cramps from constant immersion in the chilling streams, and of snow-blindness from the ceaseless glare on the white slopes. On Australia Creek he endured a harrowing experience when, falling across the broken branch of a tree, he was impaled through the calf and suspended over the rushing torrent like a slab of beef on a butcher’s hook. For fourteen days he lay crippled in his bivouac; then he was away again, living off the land, eating caribou or ptarmigan, limping through the forests or travelling the shallow streams in a crude boat made from the skins of animals.
    Occasionally he would raise his eyes northward to examine a curious rounded mountain whose summit rose above the other hills. The creeks of Indian River flowed down the flanks of this dome, and Henderson guessed that on the other side more nameless creeks flowed into another river – probably the Thron-diuck or “Klondike,” as the miners mispronounced it. At last his prospector’s curiosity got the better of him. He climbed the dome to see what was on the other side.
    When he reached the summit a sight of breath-taking majesty met his gaze. To the north a long line of glistening snow-capped peaks marched off like soldiers to vanish beyond the lip of the horizon. In every other direction the violet hills rolled on as far as the eye could see, hill upon hill, valley upon valley, gulch upon gulch – and each hill of almost identical height with its neighbour, so that the whole effect through half-closed eyes was of a great plateau creased and gouged and furrowed by centuries of running water.
    From the summit on which Henderson was standing, the creeks radiated out like the spokes of a wheel, with himself at the hub. three falling off towards the Indian River and three more, on the far side, running to some unknown stream. He could not know it, but these were six of the richest gold-bearing creeks in the world. They wound through beds of black muck and thick moss, bordered by rank grasses from which the occasional moose lifted its dripping snout; they twisted in sinuous curves across flat valley floors whose flanks, notched by