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

But they had one trait in common: an incurable restlessness had dominated their lives.
    Carmack was the child of an earlier gold rush. His father had crossed the western plains in a covered wagon in ’49, heading for California, and Carmack had been born at Port Costa, across the bay from San Francisco. He had gone to work at sixteen aboard the ferryboats, shipped to Alaska as a dishwasher on a man-of-war, jumped ship at Juneau, and pushed steadily north. In 1887 William Ogilvie, the Canadian surveyor, encountered him at Dyea. By that time Carmack could speak both the Chilkoot and the Tagish dialects, and was exerting considerable influence over the Stick Indians from the interior or “Stick” country. At a time and place when every man was a prospector, Carmack appeared to be a misfit. He alone of all men did not want gold. Instead he wanted to be an Indian in a land where the natives were generally scorned by the white man and the word “Siwash” was a term of opprobrium. His wife Kate, a member of the Tagish tribe, was the daughter of a chief, and it was Carmack’s ambition to be chief himself. (Among the Tagishes, descent is through the chief’s sister.) He worked with the other Indians as a packer on the Chilkoot Pass, and by the time he moved into the interior with his wife and her two brothers he had three or four half-breed children. He had grown an Indian-type moustache that drooped over his lips in Oriental style, and when anybody said to him: “George, you’re getting more like a Siwash every day,” he took it as a compliment. He did not in the least mind his nicknames “Stick George” and “Siwash George,” for he considered himself a true Siwash and he was proud of it.
    While other men scrabbled and mucked in the smoky shafts of Fortymile and Birch Creek, Siwash George was slipping up and down the river with his Indian comrades. His temperament, which was indolent and easy-going, matched that of the natives, who were a different breed from the fiercely competitive and ambitious Tlingit tribes of the coast. When it suited Carmack, he bragged of gold discoveries he had made. It was certainly true that he had discovered a seam of coal on the Yukon River, but nobody took him seriously as a prospector, including Carmack himself. In the words of a Mounted Police sergeant at Fortymile, he was a man “who would never allow himself to be beaten and always tried to present his fortunes in the best possible light.” The men at Fortymile summed him up more tersely with a new nickname. They called him “Lying George.”
    Yet he was no wastrel. He had an organ, of all things, in his cabin near Five Finger Rapids on the Yukon, and a library which included such journals as Scientific American and Review of Reviews . He liked to discourse on scientific topics, and occasionally, as on Christmas Eve in 1888, he wrote sad, sentimental poetry. (“A whisper comes from the tall old spruce, And my soul from pain is free: For I know when they kneel together to-night, They’ll all be praying for me.”)
    He was also something of a mystic. In May of 1896 he was sitting on the bank of the Yukon near the ruins of old Fort Selkirk, and here, if one is to believe his later recollections, he had a premonition. He stared into the blazing sunset and came to the conclusion that something unusual was about to take place in his life. On a whim he took his only coin, a silver dollar, from his pocket and threw it in the air. If it came down heads, he told himself, he would go back up the river; but if it showed tails, he would go downstream to test whatever fate had in store for him. Tails it was, and Carmack loaded his boat and started to drift the two-hundred-odd miles to Fortymile.
    That night he had an extravagant and vivid dream in which he saw himself seated on the banks of a stream watching grayling shoot the rapids. Suddenly the fish scattered in fright and two enormous king salmon shot upstream and came to a dead stop in