In July 1897, the steamers Portland and Excelsior arrived simultaneously in Seattle and San Francisco. They had sailed a month earlier from St. Michael, Alaska, a former Russian fur trading port located on the Bering Sea near the mouth of the Yukon River. On board the two ships were scores of miners, three tons of gold, and tales of a rich placer discovery on Rabbit Creek, a tributary of the Yukon River in what is now the Yukon Territory. The miners had travelled 2800 km down the Yukon River to St. Michael, and another 4800 km south to reach Seattle.
Electrifying newspaper accounts of the discovery started the Klondike Gold Rush. Within a year an estimated 100,000 "stampeders" tried to reach the gold fields. Only 30,000-40,000 would finish their journey, and by then Rabbit Creek would be known as Bonanza Creek.
There were many routes to the Klondike. The all-water route was favored as it required less physical effort than the land routes. The reality was the trip up the West Coast to St. Michael, and then up the Yukon River to Dawson City, involved a 7600 km journey by steamer and stern-wheeler. Many of the travelers who used this route in 1897 were caught by the short navigation season on the Yukon River, and arrived more than 300 days after they had started, to find the gold fields completely staked.
Of the dozens of land routes to the Yukon, the most popular approaches required a sea voyage from Seattle to Skagway or its sister town of Dyea, Alaska. There the stampeders were faced with an arduous overland trek by one of two trails. Both the Chilkoot and White Pass trails involved dangerous terrain and back-breaking effort moving a ton of supplies per man into the headwater of the Yukon River. Pack horses could be used at White Pass, where they died by the thousands. On the Chilkoot Pass manpower and a tram carried supplies up the Golden Stairs to a high mountain pass. More than 60 men were killed in an avalanche at the Chilkoot on April 3, 1898. Abandoned gear still litters these trails.
Once at Lake Lindemann or Lake Bennett, the stampeders built rafts or small boats to float downstream to Whitehorse, and finally to Dawson City. In the spring of 1898 when the ice went out, a reported 7,100 craft took to the river at the lakes within 48 hours. Within days, one hundred and fifty of these small vessels were wrecked at Squaw and Whitehorse rapids before the NW Mounted Police forcibly took control of the situation.
Despite these hardships, the Skagway/ Dyea trails were less onerous than the myriad of longer, and less travelled trails through northern Alberta and British Columbia. Here the bodies of men were found who had broken under the toil. They pinned notes to a tree, and shot themselves rather than continue.
There was an immediate demand for marine transportation at sea and on the Yukon River. Retired and condemned vessels were brought into service to ferry miners and materials to St. Michael, and the worst of these vessels were nicknamed "coffin ships". A similar boom occurred with the construction of stern-wheel vessels. Some 266 stern-wheel and side-wheel vessels known to have operated on the Yukon River and her tributaries. Of this number, 131 vessels were constructed in 1898 to service the Klondike. These stern-wheelers were built in over 44 shipyards as far south as Southern California, and as far north as Dutch Harbour and St. Michael in Alaska. The largest efforts occurred at St. Michael and Seattle where 43 and 38 stern-wheelers were constructed, respectively. A fleet of 12 identical, 176 ft. stern-wheelers were constructed in the Moran Bros. Shipyards at Seattle, and then moved north in convoy. Other builders avoided the hazards of ferrying stern-wheelers up the Inside Passage and through the Aleutian Islands by prefabricating vessels in southern yards for assembly in Alaska.
At Lake Bennett twenty stern-wheelers were constructed to service the headwaters of the Yukon River. These vessels were diminutive due to the limited amount of water in the upper reaches and the effort to get their components over the passes. Once the White Pass and Yukon Railway was completed, many of these small stern-wheelers made the one-way trip downstream through Miles Canyon to find work on the Whitehorse to Dawson Run.
The larger vessels worked on the upstream run between St. Michael and Dawson City, or on the downstream run from Whitehorse through Lake Laberge and the Thirty Mile. The latter run contains the dangerous Rink Rapids and Five Finger Rapids. The Thirty Mile Section was less difficult but longer, extending from the northern end of Lake Laberge to Hootalinqua. Here the Yukon River flows through a meandering and rocky canyon where more than 30 large vessels were reportedly lost.
Lake Laberge, 28 km due north of Whitehorse, remains frozen until late May, and it is the last body of water to lose its ice between the headwaters of the Yukon River and Dawson City. A winter road was established from Whitehorse across the frozen lake to Lower Laberge, where smaller steamboats picked up their cargoes for Dawson City. Once the ice on the lake had broken up and the water rose in the Thirty Mile, larger vessels could make the run with barges.
By 1899 there were more ships on the river than was economic, and a series of steamboat company takeovers ensued. A standard practice was to winch vessels out of the water in the fall to avoid their destruction by the winter river ice. Frequently abandoned or retired ships were left on shore in winter quarters. These sites included the `boneyard` at West Dawson, where seven vessels now lie abandoned in the woods, and St. Michael.
By the early 1920s only the British Yukon Navigation Company, the Alaska Railroad and the American Yukon Navigation Company still ran fleets on the river. The construction of the Alaskan Highway in 1942 precipitated the retirement of the last stern-wheeler in the Yukon Territory in 1951.
Julia B., Seattle No. 3 and Schwatka in their final resting places. Photo by John Pollack.
Ken Butler and the hull of Gleaner near Carcross. Photo by John Pollack.