Career journalist, Ross Anderson, worked for over 30 years at the Seattle Times, covering everything from the police beat and courts to commercial fishing, though most of his time was spent writing about politics, serving as chief political writer, congressional correspondent and political columnist. Among other awards, he won a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, which he shared with three Times colleagues for coverage of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. Today he is a freelance journalist who enjoys life on Pacific Northwest waters and talking with other writers about the differences and likenesses of journalism and first-person writing. This week, we are reprinting the first of a series of articles he wrote for the Seattle Times in 2008 merging journalism with first-person narrative after reading a book by a Washington State gold-rush prospector. Ross retraced the prospector’s journey, book in hand.

Return to the Klondike! Our Intrepid Reporter Retraces Route Carved By Restless Dreamer In 1897
By Ross Anderson

One hundred years ago, Mont Hawthorne quit his job at a Puget Sound salmon cannery and went home to Astoria. He sat silently for a while in his favorite chair, gazing out the window at a steamship as it eased away from the docks and sailed off into the dusk. Then he announced to his aging mother: “Mama, I’m goin’ Up North.”

His mother was not surprised. She had been expecting this, now that the entire world knew about the steamer Portland and its “ton of gold” arriving in Seattle. That event had triggered a stampede north to the Klondike country, and Mont was bound to catch the fever.

So it was that Mont Hawthorne resumed the quest for fortune, adventure, elbow room or whatever it is that continues to lure Americans westward and, in Seattle’s case, northward.

 Now old Mont Hawthorne is goin’ Up North again. And this time, I’m goin’ with him. By the time you read this, Mont and I will be on our way to Alaska, the Yukon Territory and Dawson City, all in observance of the Klondike Gold Rush centennial.

The Klondike stampede, which began in July 1897, was perhaps the single most dramatic event in Pacific Northwest history. It made Seattle a household word around the world, luring an estimated 30,000 Klondike-bound fortune-seekers to these streets and transforming a frontier port into a booming metropolis.

For Mont, the journey is a return engagement. Like thousands of other men and women, he made the journey a century ago, hauling a ton of supplies onto a steamer and up the Inside Passage to Skagway, Alaska, over the snow-clogged Wrangell Mountains to Lake Bennett, then 500 miles down the mighty Yukon River to Dawson, the City of Gold.

And your reporter? A former editorial writer, worn-out but recovering, approaching his 50th birthday and yearning for an adventure. Like Mont a century ago, I’ve spent weeks collecting my gear, haunting the outfitters, trying to figure out what I need and what I don’t. I have a comfortable backpack, a nylon tent that weighs 6 pounds, polypropylene fleece, freeze-dried foods and a miniature stove that weighs nothing and boils water faster than my kitchen range.

For company, I have old Mont Hawthorne in the form of a dog-eared copy of “The Trail Led North,” long out of print, in which he tells the story of his Klondike adventure. OK, I’m well aware that he’s been dead half a century. But Mont climbs out of those pages larger than life. So does his dog, Pedro. They will be fine company. And they don’t eat much.

Why are we doing this? Good question. First, some history:

In the early summer of 1897, the Klondike was little more than a rumor drifting south from the virtually unexplored wilderness surrounding the Yukon River. Nearly a year earlier, in August 1896, a couple of prospectors took a wrong turn in those rugged hills, some 1,500 miles from nowhere, and stumbled onto a stream. In the stream bed, they found a gold nugget, and then another. In the months to come, those few acres of wilderness were to become one of the richest gold fields in history.

Word spread up and down the river, and prospectors converged on the Klondike Country. But it took months for the news to find its way south to The Outside. Even then, the news was greeted with skepticism; most such reports turned out to be wild exaggerations, if not outright fabrications. That changed in July 1897, when two steamers from the Yukon arrived on the West Coast. On the 15th, the tiny Excelsior tied up at San Francisco with 40 prospectors carrying perhaps $750,000 worth of gold — a staggering statistic for its day. The larger Portland arrived July 17 in Seattle with even more — the storied “ton of gold.”

Within hours, the stampede had begun. Thanks to telegraph lines and an extraordinary advertising campaign, Seattle soon became the gateway to the Klondike, starting point for the steamships and chief supply center for the prospectors. A motley fleet of ramshackle steamers headed north loaded with fortune-seekers. They were men and women, white folks and black folks, old-timers and towheaded schoolboys. They were Seattle Mayor W.D. Wood and former Washington Gov. John McGraw, a promising young novelist named Jack London and a mediocre poet named Robert Service. They were Swedish boatbuilders and Chinese railroad workers, Russian sailors and British nobles, a great tide of humanity all determined to reach the same God-forsaken corner of a frozen Canadian wilderness.

Most of them never made it. If you were rich, it wasn’t too rough; you could buy comfortable space on a steamer to St. Michaels, at the mouth of the Yukon, then travel by riverboat some 1,700 miles upstream to Dawson. Most, like Mont Hawthorne, were not rich. So they traveled the hard way. They collected up to a ton of supplies — clothing, tents, mining equipment, guns and ammunition, sacks of flour, sugar, beans, bacon . . . even horses, mules or dogs. They loaded their outfits onto crowded steamers or sailing ships and spent a couple of weeks beating into North Pacific storms to Skagway or other crude Alaskan ports.

Most crossed the Chilkoot or White passes in the dead of winter, enabling them to haul their gear much of the way on sleds. Temperatures dropped well-below zero and stayed there. Blizzards lasted for days. The summit of the Chilkoot was too steep for sleds, so many had to haul their outfits over one pack at a time — 20 or more trips hauling 100-pound loads up and over a rugged mountain pass. At Lake Bennett, they went to work sawing logs into planks for rudimentary boats. Mid-May, when the ice finally broke up, thousands launched their homemade boats onto the lakes and resumed the exodus — 600 miles across vast lakes, through whitewater rapids and mosquito-infested bogs. At each obstacle in the course, there were those who threw up their hands, sold their outfits and limped back home. Others persisted, endured. Hundreds died for their efforts — shipwrecked on the rocky Northwest coast, murdered for their outfits, buried in snow avalanches or frozen in their sleep, drowned in the Yukon River rapids or fallen by dysentery or other diseases in the muddy streets of Dawson.

Pierre Berton, a Canadian historian, figures 100,000 people set out for the Klondike in 1897-99. Of those, about one-third eventually reached it. Perhaps half of those actually worked in the gold fields, and a few hundred actually got rich. And most of those who found their fortunes squandered them on booze or bad investments before they made it back to civilization — if, indeed, they made it back.

Mont Hawthorne made it to Dawson, but he did not find much gold, barely enough to make his expenses.

And then he went home. What did he and thousands like him get for their efforts? Why this Herculean struggle to reach a virtually unmapped wilderness where the richest claims were staked out long before most fortune-seekers left home? What was this stampede about? That’s why we’re going back — me and Mont and Pedro. To see if we can figure that out.

Maybe it was simple greed, a need to get rich quick. Maybe it was desperation. Maybe it had to do with the raw beauty and challenge of Mother Nature, with that foggy notion of Frontier and The American West. Maybe it was the mystery of the unknown, an age-old love for adventure.

Whatever it was, Mont seemed to understand. It kept him moving for some 80 years — from the family farm in Pennsylvania to the plains of Nebraska. Then to the Black Hills country, on to the mines of Wyoming and across the continent to San Francisco. From there it turned him north, up the coast to Astoria and Puget Sound. And, finally, to Alaska, the Yukon and the Klondike.

It’s a powerful thing, Mont says. But he can’t explain it. He knows the feeling but not the words. Gotta go and see for yourself, he says. You gotta steam up the Inside Passage, where the glaciers slither down the mountains to meet the Pacific Ocean. Gotta step off the boat and resist the sinpots of Skagway, hoist a 60-pound backpack, climb Chilkoot Pass in a 40-mile-an hour gale. Gotta ride the big water through Five Finger Rapids.

You do it, says Mont. And then you’ll understand why I did it.

So there you have it. Mama, we’re goin’ Up North.

****

Visit Ross Anderson’s website for more of the story he wrote over many weeks in Alaska. Then think about what interests you, what books you may have read by authors who had first-hand experience of a particular event or place. Or think about stories relatives have told that sparked your imagination. How might you “go along” on an adventure to re-create their experience of time and place? Whether you actually undertake the journey as Ross did or work from research, the writing you produce is bound to be informative first-person travel writing or journey-for-insight writing. Ross has inspired me — I can’t wait to get started planning such an adventure and writing project.

Next week, we’ll post an interview with Ross about journalism and personal essays.