The man appeared to be in his forties, a wispy sort of fellow unsure of himself, as if he were waiting to hear directions from his employer. A clerk perhaps, the watcher thought. The wife was in her twenties, an undistinguished sort of woman, and their son, who seemed standard in every way, was probably thirteen or fourteen.
The man watching started to chuckle as the three argued among themselves as to whether they should all enter the shipping office or only one, with the wife making the decision.
Placing her hand in the middle of her husband's back, she shoved him toward the open door and turned to watch him enter.
The onetime Confederate studied the husband as he tentatively approached the counter, then heard him say to the shipping clerk: "I've got to get to the Klondike."
'Everyone does,' the clerk said, 'but our big ships are sold out, every inch of space through the October sailings, when ice closes down all the major ports.'
'What am I to do?' the man asked in a kind of desperation, and the clerk said: 'I might find you space on a converted tugboat, seven hundred dollars, and grab it, because tomorrow it'll cost eight.'
When the man winced, the clerk showed a twinge of sympathy and said: 'Between you and me, pardner, the price is too high. Our big ships are the rich man's route. Take one of our little R&R boats to Skagway and climb over the Chilcoot Pass. Save yourself a bundle.'
Since the man was now confronted with conflicting decisions, he told the clerk: 'I better discuss this with my wife,' but as he was about to leave the office he felt his arm being grabbed by someone he did not know, and looked up to see the smiling face of a Confederate officer, who asked: 'Are you by any chance seriously considering entering the gold fields in one of their leaky saucepans?'
Startled both by the general's appearance and by his question, the man nodded, whereupon the stranger said: 'I shall offer you invaluable advice, and trust me, it's worth more gold than you'll ever find along the Klondike.' He introduced himself as the Klondike Kernel and produced three clippings from Seattle newspapers attesting to the fact that this honored veteran of a North Carolina regiment, who had fought with both Lee and Stonewall Jackson, had prospected in the Yukon from 1893 through the height of the discoveries in 1896, and had come south on the Portland 'with a gunnysack of gold bars so heavy two members of the ship's crew had to help him drag it to a waiting cab, which rushed him and the gold to the assayer's office.' The papers said that the Klondike Kernel, as he was favorably known among his fellow tycoons, refused to give his real name 'lest avaricious relatives descend upon me like a flock of vultures,' but his gracious ways attested to his good breeding in North Carolina.
He wanted to talk. Having been immured in lonely cabins for so long and having wasted so many years in fruitless search before striking it rich on Bonanza Forty-three Below, he was now eager to share his knowledge and counsel with others: 'Did I hear you say you had three in your party?' and when the nervous fellow said: 'I didn't say,' the Kernel explained: 'I saw you talking with your wife and son. Fine-looking pair.'
Then with an all-embracing smile he added: 'I'd better meet them so you'll all understand the situation.'
When they stood together in the street the man said: 'We're from St. Louis,' and the Kernel said effusively, with a low bow: 'Ma'am, you are mighty young to have a boy that age.'
'He's a fine boy,' she said.
'Dear friends,' the Kernel assured them, 'I have nothing to sell. I seek to steer you to no store where I receive a commission. I'm a man who scratched his way from one end of the Yukon to the other. I loved every minute of it, and seek only to share my experiences so that good people like you don't make the same mistakes.'
'Why did you leave?' the man asked defensively.
'Have you ever seen the Yukon in winter?'
'If you have all this money, why don't you go back home?'
'Have you ever seen North Carolina in summer?'
He said he could save them both money and heartache if they would but listen, and he was so persuasive, so congenial in the way he seemed to be trying to protect them, that they accepted his invitation to lunch. The wife assumed he would take them to some fancy restaurant, and she was eager to go, for she had not eaten well on the journey west; prices on trains were too costly.
'I take my lunch at a little saloon down the way. Excellent food for twenty cents.'
Stopping in the middle of the wharf, he said: 'I live as if I was a poor veteran of the war in a small town in Carolina in the year 1869, which was a very poor year indeed. I still cannot believe that my gold is in the bank. I'm sure I'll waken and find this all to have been a dream.'
That lunch lasted four hours, and repeatedly the Kernel assured his guests that they were doing him a favor: 'I like to talk, always did, kept my men moving forward in the darkest days of the war.'
'Were you a general?' the man asked, unable to resist the charm of this amiable man.
'Never higher than a sergeant. But I was the one who led the men.'
Starting in the second hour he instructed his guests as to just what they would find on the gold fields. Asking the waiter, whom he tipped five cents, for a pencil and paper, he drew with remarkable skill a detailed map of the path from the ship's anchorage at Skagway, across the mountains and down the twists and turns of the Yukon: 'Understand two things, my dear friends. In Alaska the ship does not land you. There are no docks to land at. It anchors way out here at the edge of a great sand flat. You have to work like animals to move your goods ashore before the tide engulfs them.
'Then you carry them, piece by piece, nine miles inland over roads that are merely trails. Then you come to this very steep mountain, not even horses can climb it, and in deep snow you lug every single pound of your goods up and over that mountain.'
He shocked them with the angle of the climb: 'Thirty-five degrees. Inhuman.'
The boy studied the drawing and said: 'Any steeper, a man couldn't climb that in snow,' and the Kernel said: 'Even the way it is, many can't.'
Then, when his listeners seemed properly awed, he asked: 'And how much weight are you going to have to transport over that mountain? I mean each of you. You, Mrs. ... I didn't catch the name.' When she offered no response, he accepted the rebuff:
'How many pounds of gear do you think your frail little arms are going to have to carry up that mountain and over?' Somberly he stared at each of the travelers, then said slowly: 'One ton. You will each have to carry one ton over the mountains. You, ma'am, will have to lift up one ton and carry it up an angle like this in the snow.'
Leaving his guests open-mouthed, he got up and started moving about the saloon, asking politely if this man or that would lend him his gear for a moment, and within a few minutes he had accumulated a small pile, with the owners standing in a circle watching his performance. Lashing many of the borrowed articles together, he said: 'I'd judge this to be about fifty pounds, wouldn't you?' and men who were expert at that sort of thing agreed that yes, that was about fifty.
'The reason we use fifty is that's about the best a man can do heading up that mountain.
So if you've got to haul a ton across'
'Why so much?' a watcher asked, and the Kernel turned to face him: 'Son, at the top of the mountain there's a Mounted Police station, and they will not let you enter their country unless you bring with you a ton of supplies.'
'Why not?'
'They don't want you starving to death in Dawson City. I went six days without food in Dawson, and some went longer. We buried them.'
He now turned to the boy: 'Young feller, can you divide fifty pounds into one ton?'
'How much is a ton?'
The Kernel stared at the boy's mother: 'Ma'am, don't you teach your son anything?'
She was not awed by this bearded stranger, for she recognized him as a man with a compulsion to talk, to share his experiences, so when he asked loudly, to impress the watchers: 'Ma'am, I'll bet you don't know how much a ton is,' she laughed and said: 'It's a lot,
that I do know.'
'Young feller, it's two thousand pounds. Now, at fifty pounds a load, how many trips up that mountain will you have to make to hoist your tons of goods across?'
'Forty.'
'You pass. Grade of C.' And with that he hoisted the load of goods, borrowed a strap, and tied it to the wife's back: 'Now, young woman, I want you to walk out that door, down to the corner and back,' and he shoved her on her way.
When she returned she was not smiling. For the first time since leaving home she had some understanding of the adventure on which they had embarked: 'It's heavy.
I don't think I could climb a mountain with it.'
'How about you, son?' and he strapped the burden onto the boy's back and sent him down to the corner. When he returned he, too, was subdued and willing to learn.
-'I'm not going to send you, Mr.... What did you say the name was? Because if you can't handle fifty pounds straight up the face of that mountain, you have no right to leave Seattle.'
He spent the third hour sharing with them the secrets of survival: 'You must take with you two essentials besides the food. A good whipsaw for cutting the logs you'll need to build your boat at Lake Bennett, and be sure to buy the best, because whipsawing logs is the worst job in the world.' When the wife asked what it consisted of, he asked for more paper, tipped the waiter another nickel, and proceeded to draw an excellent sketch in perspective of a log whose bark had been removed. It was perched over a pit, with one man down in the pit holding to one end of an eleven-foot saw, while above him, on a low platform, stood his partner holding on to the other end:
'Up and down you go, the man on top swearing that the man below is not pushing the heavy saw back up, the one on the bottom cursing because the man on top isn't pulling his weight.' He turned to the couple: 'I hope the minister who married you tied a tight knot, because it's going to be tested when you whipsaw the boards for your boat.'
'What was the other essential?' the wife asked, and he said: 'A coal shovel. Because when you climb that mountain forty times, which you'll have to do, there's another route parallel to it, much steeper, so when you get to the top and stow your goods'
'Who watches them?' she asked, and he said: 'Nobody. You make a little pile at the top and mark it as yours. A stick, a flag, stones, anything. That's yours, and as long as you work on that mountain your goods are safe, even though you're at the bottom and they're alone at the top.'
'There must be thieves.'
'Occasionally. Very occasionally.'
'What do you do about them?'
'In my day we shot them. Fifteen, sixteen miners in a cabin. Man in charge says:
"This here fellow, name of Whiskey Joe, he stole Ben Carter's cache, Ben almost died.
What's your verdict?"And we'd all say: "Shoot the son-of-a-bitch, stealing a man's cache and two minutes later the thief was shot dead." One of the men who had gathered near the table to listen said: 'He's telling the truth.'
'You ever shoot a thief?' the boy asked, and the Kernel said: 'No, but I voted to have it done and helped bury the body after. Son, if you ever stole anything wherever it is you came from, don't do it in the Yukon or you're going to be shot dead.'
'What is the shovel for?' the wife asked, and he nodded slightly, his beard brushing the table: 'Thank you, ma'am. Sometimes I wander. Buy the lightest-weight shovel you can find. Carry it up to the top every time. Because after you stow your goods at your cache ... Now, you understand, there may be a thousand other caches up there alongside yours. It'll look like a Persian market on a busy day, and when the snow comes, it'll all be covered in white six feet deep.'
'So that's why you need the shovel.'
'It is not. When snow hits, people just push and shove and kick and scrape, and pretty soon their goods are uncovered, as good as new if they've been properly packed. The shovel, ma'am, is for coming down. You walk about fifty yards from where your goods are, and before you lies a very steep hill, you couldn't possibly climb it coming up. And you couldn't walk it going down. So what you do, you sit on your shovel, handle out forward between your legs, and you give a push with one hand, and zooooey! You get the damnedest ride down the face of that mountain.'
'Could two ride one shovel?' the boy asked, and the Kernel said: 'If you were both skillful,' and he sent one of the watchers to fetch a shovel, and since there were sixteen or eighteen establishments nearby specializing in the outfitting of would-be miners, a broad shovel was soon produced.
'Too heavy, much too heavy. But the size is right. Ma'am, you sit in front, knees drawn up if you can. Son, you fit this board under your mother's seat and let it stick out a little in back. You sit on it,' and when they were perched precariously on the shovel, he gave them an imaginary shove and cried: 'Zooooey, down we go!'
When the shovel had been returned, he said: 'Two other things are advisable. A good square. Very light, weighs almost nothing, but you'll need it when you build your boat. And at least three good books apiece. Tear the covers off to cut down weight, but get books of substance for the long days of waiting. There's much to be said for a long book.'
With the skill that he had manifested before, he drew a sketch of the boat they must build on the shores of Lake Bennett, and the wife complimented him: 'You draw very well.'
'General Lee said I should've gone into the Engineers, but I had no schooling.'
'You speak so well. You use bigger words than I do,' and he said: 'In the Yukon you read a lot. You might walk forty miles to trade books, and the man you're heading to visit is overjoyed to see you. One man had a dictionary, traded it to me for a novel by Charles Reade. A dictionary can be very exciting when the night is six months long.'
'How long is that boat you're drawing?' the man asked, and the Kernel penciled in the dimensions of a boat he had once used, 23' long 5' 6" in the beam: 'It's got to carry three tons and three people. I do declare, ma'am, you're a slight woman to have a son as big and sturdy as this one.'
In the fourth hour he reached the core of his advice. Pushing back his chair, he asked: 'Would you good people care for a little food as we approach the real problem?' and he ordered four more twenty-cent meals. The food was copious and good, but when the waiter asked: 'Drinks?' the Kernel said: 'Never touch it,' and the waiter said:
'For the twenty-cent meal you're supposed to buy drinks, too,' and the Kernel said:
'Give four beers to those men over there and four more that'll cover lunch to those over there.'
He then turned solemnly to his guests, and in carefully chosen words, spread their options before them: 'Now, from what I've said, two things ought to be obvious, the first realistic, the second cruel.'
'Yes?' the wife said, leaning forward. He liked this tough-minded little woman and addressed his two explanations to her: 'First, if you sail to Alaska now, no matter where you go, St. Michael or Dyea, there is no way you can get tb the gold fields this year. The lower Yukon will be frozen, so that way's blocked. And if you did succeed in getting over the Chilkoot Pass before the heavy snows, which I doubt, you'll find Lake Bennett and the others frozen up, so somewhere, at great expense of time and health and patience, you'll have to hole up for the winter.' He paused to let this harsh truth sink in.
'Is that the realistic thing or the cruel one?' she asked, and he said: 'That's realistic.
Now, the cruel fact you must already have figured out for yourselves. When you do reach the gold fields next spring, which is the earliest you can get there, you'll find that every likely spot for digging gold has been staked out. I got there four days after the big strike in 1896, and I had to settle for 91 Below on Hunker Creek. Turned out to be the poorest creek of the bunch. I don't know what the numbers will be next year. Maybe 291 Below, 310 Above, if there's that much land available. And even if there is, it won't be land with any promise.'
'Then we're too late?' the man asked, his face ashen.
'Yes.'
'But you just said you started with a poor claim,' the wife said,
boring in. 'And you came out with a fortune. The papers said so.'
'I started with a bad one on Hunker Creek. Wound up with that good one on Bonanza.'
'How did you do it?'
The Kernel patted her on the cheek: 'So complicated, that trade, I'd be ashamed to tell you.'
'Did you steal it?'
'The other man thought so.' He shook his head, partly in embarrassment, partly in disbelief that he had been able to conclude such a swap.
'Then our chances aren't good?' she asked, and he said: 'They are not, and any honest man who came south on the Portland with me will tell you the same, if he has any interest in your well-being.'
'Then why do the newspapers ...?'
'Seattle wants to keep this alive. To keep the stores open. The shipping companies.
The bars like this one.' Then he added a sagacious observation: 'And it's people like you, streaming in, who help keep the rush alive.'
'Is it all a lie?' she asked, and now the Kernel rocked back and forth before his plate of savory stew. He wanted to explain an intricate fact, and he wished attention to be paid: 'Oh no! It's not a lie. It's just that the facts are different from what they say.'
'How do you mean?' she asked, and he explained: 'You'll not get any gold up there.
Believe me, if you took a hundred men like me who knew the fields like a book, men of enormous experience ... Only two or three of us out of a hundred found any gold to speak of.'
'But they came off the Portland in dozens, I saw the photographs.'
'They didn't photograph the hundreds who stayed behind, the old men in the tiny cabins, the young men freezing at the bend of the creek.'
Rapping the table with her spoon, she demanded: 'Tell us what you're trying to say.'