University of Virginia Library

Few indeed are the survivors of the Chilcoot terrors, but they are loyal and loving as veterans of the Civil War. Now and then a bent old man, with white flags of truce fluttering from his temples, climbs my steep and sits silently down and we repeat the lines:

From my Journal, Aug. 6, 1897.

Bravo! We are now through the great canyon of the upper Yukon and below the fearful White Horse Falls. Captain McCormick, in charge of the barge, has shot the canyon and the White Horse Falls of the upper Yukon this hour without loss or serious damage. The feat is the most remarkable thing that has taken place in the history of this country.

The White Horse Falls has been the terror of all travelers on this river. It has never been shot with cargo, crew and passengers before. It is a truly terrible place, magnificently terrible. It is called the slaughter pen. How many have perished here no one can say, as these cataracts rarely give up their dead. This is one of the portages, and all boats have always stopped at the head of the canyon and falls to take out effects, leave all passengers and all the crew that can be spared or who do not care to take the chances, and then the boats are, as a rule, let down and guided by long, heavy cables.

But many times strangers have been drawn in here and made to take the shoot whether they would or not. It is stated on good authority that twenty-three men have perished here in these precipitous waters, all having been strangers and drawn into the canyon before knowing their peril. Of course there is no such danger if the boat is emptied and the usual care taken. But so great is the danger to strangers that the Canadian government has set up red flags all along either bank for more than a mile before reaching the canyon and falls, and just at the entrance to the “Slaughter Pen” is the peremptory order, “STOP!” We may all have to answer for what has been done, but the divine audacity and the glorious sensation of it is worth almost any sentence that can be imposed. And all brute courage, do you say? “Foolhardy excitement?” Pardon me, nothing of the sort. Never yet did men dare death for a higher purpose or a nobler cause. There are thousands on their way to the Klondike. There will be tens of thousands on their way in the spring. Are there supplies in the new mines? Will men suffer if not informed by this hasty and swift expedition? And will tens of thousands sacrifice their small fortunes to rush to a false field of discovery? We were sent out to see and to say. That is the situation. This is our reason for the boldest captain and the best crew and some devoted scribes taking their lives in their hands and rushing on and on and on. To have stopped and made the portage would have taken at least two days to carry over our cargo—time enough to lose or win a Waterloo.

Let me tell you of our wild dash right here on the banks of this regiment of wild and terrible white horses, for it is from their resemblance to a great band of plunging white battle steeds that the White Horse Falls take their name. The Canadian officer waited at the head of the canyon with another barge and hailed us as we passed, pointing out to the captain the point to land and unload, for the portage.

“I am going right through. They want me to go through, and I am going.”

“What! What! You!—, and then I heard, as we flew on over the little white hills that were growing higher and bigger at each bound, the first real hard swearing I have met with in this expedition. Loud and long above the roar of the canyon and falls that dismayed officer called as he came running down to the foaming river and up the steep bluff that looks down into the foaming white canyon in its narrow, perpendicular basalt walls. And as he ran the miners, boatmen, other government officers and all ran after him, leaving their boats and their packs and stores and all to take care of themselves.

Men beckoned to us, but we could not hear their cries above the roar of the mad, wild waters. Boom! Bang! We were literally loaded into a cannon, shot in and down and out as though out of a gun into a very hell of waters, and then the shout that went up from the hill top with the tossing arms and waving hats! It was hearty, heartful, human. A wild, wild, Western shout from the strong Western men, yet a shout with tears in it.

But the regiment of unbridled white horses still plunged and leaped and charged in our narrow way. Ten thousand gleaming white horses—these must be ridden down in one desperate dash. There was no old guard to follow if our first brave charge failed. We must ride them down this instant or be ridden down. The special expedition, all the time quietly planning for this time-saving venture, had the day before forgotten to take down the American flag, although on British soil, and with all respect to the honest Britons. And never flew flag so gloriously— indeed sublimely beautiful. It is the only American flag seen along the upper Yukon, although we are never out of sight of boats.

And now, as we paused a second on the waves at the lower end of the canyon, ready for the final and more desperate charge, the excited people above us suddenly caught sight of “Old Glory,” and such a shout—and then they broke forth in a tempest of cheers and song, Canadians and all, in which the “American Flag,” “Dixie,” “Marching Through Georgia,” and “John Brown” were heard; anything to give vent to the pent-up hearts as we rode the mad charge into the flying white battle horses.

They smote us right in the breast till the waters plunged ten feet in the air and drenched even the captain away back at the helm. The oarsmen were knocked down, but again they grasped their oars and again we plunged on and again they were knocked down and the boat was sent reeling to the right. And then from our rear the rushing cateract came and we spun almost like a top, drifting and tossing as if from one white horse to another as a toy. The captain now guided his boat from the bow.

Again the barge was knocked around and whirled about in the white sea of white horses until the captain once more stood in the stern. Of course there was wild excitement with us—some of us—and there were oaths from the grand old captain, for his boatmen did not understand the nautical terms of the old sea-dog and Alaska steamer captain; and so confusion followed and the oaths often came like a thunderstorm.

That is, in brief, the story of the most daring enterprise in which I ever took part; and I am no child in either years or adventure. Our crew and passengers are all Americans. One is an old Yankee soldier of the Civil War. Two are from Illinois, and are father and son, the boy but fifteen. It makes me proud to be an American when I find such courage and cool heads in a lot of men from far apart, who were strangers but yesterday, and who are entirely, as a rule, untrained to handling water craft. Captain McCormick was born and reared on the shores of Lake Erie. He is tall, strong, and has a voice like a lion. But we did not know he had such a voice till we were in the whirlpool and the foaming canyon, and had charged into the camp of wild white battle horses.

We have no official survey of the canyon and falls as yet, but the canyon is simply a white sea of foam in a cleft of black basalt, and it is said to be, by mountaineers and boatmen, eighty feet wide and three-fourths of a mile long. Some idea of its velocity may be had from the fact that the parties on the bluff above, who were waiting to get their own boats through, and hence were deeply interested, held their watches on us from start to finish, and found that we made the plunge and pass in one minute forty-five seconds. The canyon and falls together make up a dash of two and a half miles. The falls are counted the more perilous because of the hidden rocks. While I have been writing this, two more large boats, not loaded, have come through.

Aug. 7.—We tented in an aspen park, a world of waters before us and behind us, and almost entirely around us, for the river debouching into the lake is many miles wide. Our beautiful camp, at the head of beautiful Lake La Barge with its one island, was also in a graveyard. Here we were not troubled by mosquitoes; they seem not to like the quaking and restless aspen leaves. I learn that they are not found in these sweet groves, as a rule. A dolorous loon kept diving and disappearing between his melancholy cries as some men with Winchesters took turns at trying to hit the red crown that blossomed from his black head. And then a great white owl, as white as his melancholy companion was black, and as mournful as any board in the grass at the head of a grave, came out to see with his great big eyes, if he could see in the golden twilight, what the men were shooting at. I expected the men to turn loose on the owl with a will. They did not. Quietly they sat waiting for the loon to come back. Quietly they suddenly sat down on the edge of the steep bluff by the graves. Quietly they sat there with their guns in their laps across their knees. The loon came back at last, close by, too, but they did not lift a hand nor say a word.

The fact is, they had suddenly seen something else: a white, white face upturned to the great white moon from without the swirling water; then another white face, then another, swirling and sweeping around and around and around.

They sat there in the golden, awe-inspiring Arctic twilight, silent, a loon in the water, with his crimson crown at their feet, a snow-white owl as big as a pillow at their side, the six dead men in their graves under the grass there, and none could say which of all was the most silent—the dead men under the grass, the great owl out of the aspen grove at their side, the crimson-crowned loon at their feet or the armed argonauts with their rifles lying across their laps, with their weary feet dipping to the dark, still waters.

Then the loon cried again and was gone, the owl lifted like a little white cloud back into the aspen trees and the men melted away one by one in silence to their tents.