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

front of him. In place of scales they were armoured in gold nuggets and their eyes were twenty-dollar goldpieces. It reveals a great deal about Carmack that he took this as a sign that he should go fishing; prospecting never entered his head. He determined to catch salmon on the Thron-diuck and sell it for dog-feed; and so here he was, with his catch hanging to dry under a small birch lean-to, when Henderson encountered him.
    His Tagish friends had joined him at the Klondike’s mouth: Skookum Jim, a giant of a man, supremely handsome with his high cheek-bones, his eagle’s nose, and his fiery black eyes – straight as a gun-barrel, powerfully built, and known as the best hunter and trapper on the river; Tagish Charley, lean and lithe as a panther and, in Carmack’s phrase, “alert as a weasel;” the silent, plump Kate with her straight black hair; and Carmack’s daughter, known as Graphie Gracey because no white man could pronounce her real name. * It was this group that Henderson approached with news of the strike at Gold Bottom. Carmack later set down his version of the conversation, which does not differ substantially from Henderson’s briefer account:
    “Hello, Bob! Where in the world did you drop from and where do you think you’re going?”
    “Just came down from Ogilvie; I’m going up the Klondike.”
    “What’s the idea, Bob?”
    “There’s been a prospect found in a small creek that heads up against the Dome. I think it empties into the Klondike about fifteen miles up and I’m looking for a better way to get there than going over the mountains from the Indian River.”
    “Got any kind of a prospect?”
    “We don’t know yet. We can get a prospect on the surface. When I left, the boys were running up an open cut to get to bedrock.”
    “What are the chances to locate up there? Everything staked?”
    Henderson glanced over at the two Indians who were standing near by. Then he uttered the phrase that probably cost him a fortune.
    “There’s a chance for you, George, but I don’t want any damn Siwashes staking on that creek.”
    He pushed his boat into the water and headed up the Klondike. But his final remark rankled.
    “What’s matter dat white man?” Skookum Jim asked, speaking in Chinook, the pidgin tongue of the traders that prevailed on the river. “Him killet Inchen moose, Inchen caribou, ketchet gold Inchen country, no liket Inchen staket claim, wha for, no good.”
    “Never mind, Jim,” said Carmack lightly. “This is a big country. We’ll go and find a creek of our own.”
    And, as it turned out, it was to be as simple as that.
    2
    The exculpation of Lying George
    Carmack did not immediately follow Henderson’s suggestion to go upriver and stake at Gold Bottom. He was less interested in gold than he was in logs, which he hoped to chop on Rabbit Creek, a tributary of the Klondike, and float down to the mill at Fortymile for twenty-five dollars a thousand feet. Skookum Jim had already reconnoitred the creek and in passing had panned out some colours, for, just as Carmack wished to be an Indian, Jim longed to be a white man – in other words, a prospector. He differed from the others in his tribe in that he displayed the white man’s kind of ambition. He had, in fact, earned his nickname of Skookum (meaning “husky”) by his feat of packing the record load of one hundred and fifty-six pounds of bacon across the Chilkoot Pass. In vain he tried to interest Carmack in the prospects along Rabbit Creek; the squaw man was not intrigued.
    It was as much Carmack’s restless nature as his desire for fortune that took him and the Indians to the site of Henderson’s strike some days after the meeting at the Klondike’s mouth. They did not follow the river but decided to strike up the valley of Rabbit Creek, which led to the high ridge separating the Klondike and Indian watersheds. The ridge led to the head of Gold Bottom.
    They poled up the Klondike for two miles, left their boat in a