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

backwater, shouldered their packs, and began to trudge through the wet mosses and black muck and the great clumps of grass “nigger-heads” that marked the mouth of the Rabbit. As they went they prospected, dipping their pans into the clear water which rippled in the sunlight over sands white with quartz. As Carmack sat on his haunches, twirling the gold-pan, he began to recite Hamlet’s soliloquy, “To be or not to be,” for he felt that all prospecting was a gamble.
    “Wa for you talket dat cultus wa wa?” Tagish Charley asked him. “I no see um gold.”
    “That’s all right, Charley,” Carmack told him. “I makum Boston man’s medicine.”
    He raised the pan with its residue of black sand.
    “Spit in it, boys, for good luck.”
    They spat, and then Carmack panned out the sand and raised the pan to show a tiny streak of colour.
    On they trudged, stopping occasionally to pan again, finding minute pieces of gold, wondering whether or not to stake. They came to a fork in the frothing creek where another branch bubbled in from the south, and here they paused momentarily. At that instant they were standing, all unknowing, on the richest ground in the world. There was gold all about them, not only beneath their feet but in the very hills and benches that rose on every side. In the space of a few hundred feet there was hidden gold worth several millions of dollars. The south fork of the creek was as yet unnamed, but there could be only one name for it: Eldorado.
    But they did not linger here. Instead they hiked on up the narrowing valley, flushing a brown bear from the blueberry bushes, stumbling upon Joe Ladue’s eleven-year-old campfires, panning periodically and finding a few colours in every pan, until they reached the dome that looked down over the land of the Klondike. Like Henderson, they were struck by the splendour of the scene that lay spread out before them like an intricate Persian carpet: the little streams tumbling down the flanks of the great mountain, the hills crimson, purple, and emerald-green in the warm August sunlight (for already the early frosts were tinting trees and shrubs), the cranberry and salmonberry bushes forming a foreground fringe to the natural tapestry.
    Below, in the narrow gorge of Gold Bottom Creek, a pale pillar of smoke marked Henderson’s camp.
    “Well, boys,” said Carmack, “we’ve got this far; let’s go down and see what they’ve got.”
    Skookum Jim demurred; Henderson’s remarks about Siwashes still rankled. But in the end the trio clambered down the gorge to the camp where Henderson and his three companions were washing out gold from an open cut.
    Exactly what happened between Carmack and Henderson has long been in dispute. Carmack later insisted that he urged Henderson to come over to Rabbit Creek and stake a claim. Henderson always swore that it was he who urged Carmack to prospect Rabbit – and if he found anything to let Henderson know.
    Two facts are fairly clear. First, Carmack did promise Henderson that if he found anything worth while on Rabbit he would send word back; Henderson offered to compensate him for his trouble if the occasion arose. Second, the Indians tried to purchase some tobacco from Henderson and Henderson refused, possibly because he was short of supplies but more likely because of his attitude towards Indians, since it was against his code to refuse a fellow prospector anything. This action was to cost him dearly.
    Carmack tried the prospects at Gold Bottom, but did not stake, and the trio headed back over the mountain almost immediately. The way was hard. They struggled over fallen trees and devil’s clubs, a peculiarly offensive thorn, and they forced their way through interlaced underbrush, brier roses, and raspberry bushes. On the far side of the mountain they floundered into a niggerhead swamp that marked the headwaters of Rabbit Creek, and here they had to hop from clump to clump on their slippery moccasins or sink to their