Legends of the Old West - KLONDIKE GOLD RUSH Ep. 1 | “No Turning Back”

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

When news of gold along the Klondike River in Yukon Territory reaches the American west coast in the summer of 1897, the stampede begins immediately. Jack London, the soon-to-be-famous author, rushes ...north from San Francisco on the adventure of a lifetime. He quickly learns that the challenge of reaching the gold strike will push him to his limit. Go to Surfshark.com/legendsdeal or use code LEGENDSDEAL at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN! Thanks to our sponsor, Quince! Use this link for Free Shipping and 365-day returns: Quince.com/lotow Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial. On YouTube, subscribe to LEGENDS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 The SS Umatilla churned through the swells of the Pacific Ocean on July 25, 1897, carrying an unlikely pair of fortune seekers. 21-year-old Jack London stood at the rail of the ship beside his 60-year-old brother-in-law, James Shepard. James was a grizzled Civil War veteran whose body bore the scars of prison camps and whose joints ached with rheumatism. The past eight days had been a blur. That's all it had taken for the youngster and the veteran to leave their lives in California
Starting point is 00:00:44 and race for Yukon territory in northwestern Canada. News of a gold strike in the frozen heart of the Yukon had traveled down to America, and Jack and James caught gold fever. James Shepard was married to Jack's step-sister, Eliza London, and Eliza caught the fever too. Eliza and James mortgaged their house to bankroll the mad dash to the gold strike, and Eliza made Jack promise that he would take care of her husband. Jack had no choice. Without their money, he'd be watching from the docks of San Francisco
Starting point is 00:01:18 as other men chased their fortunes. The promise would haunt Jack through many of the 2,000 miles of journey ahead of them. There was a 1,500-mile steamship journey up the Pacific coast of North America from San Francisco, California to Juneau, Alaska. Then there was another 100 miles of river journey from Juno to Dye, Alaska, during which the travelers would pass the Gold Rush Boomtown of Skagway, where the infamous Old West Swindler Soapy Smith would set up shop a few months after Jack London passed through the area. At Dye, the real fun began, a 600-mile journey through rivers, forests, and mountains
Starting point is 00:01:59 that was the craziest idea since Hannibal led the Carthaginian army and a herd of war, elephants over the Alps to attack Rome 2,000 years earlier. On the steamship, Jack London needed to be realistic. He would need help to make sure he kept his promise to Eliza that he would keep her 60-year-old husband alive. As their ship churned up the Pacific coast toward Juno, Jack recruited three companions, Jim Goodman, a seasoned miner and logger from the American West, Ira Sloper, a carpenter and boat builder, and Fred Thompson,
Starting point is 00:02:39 a court reporter from California who would document their ordeal. When their steamer docked at Juno, the five men hired native Alaskans to canoe them 100 miles up the waters of the Chilkoot Inlet to Daiyi, and they had to do it fast. They were racing against the seasons, and like the Donner Party 50 years earlier, they had started their trek too late in the year. When the group of five travelers reached Daiyi in their canoes,
Starting point is 00:03:07 it was August 7, 1897. That meant they had just two months to cross 600 miles of territory to reach the home of the Gold Rush, Dawson City, to stake a claim. If they couldn't make it to Dawson City in the Yukon by October, winter would lock the rivers in ice
Starting point is 00:03:25 and they would be trapped until spring. They had cut it as close as they possibly could, and maybe too close. As Jack's team prepared to leave Dye to begin the 600-mile trek to Dawson City, Other stampeters, as the fortune seekers were called, staggered back down the trail. Their faces told stories of torment. Each person and the vast majority were men, had to haul hundreds of pounds of food, clothing,
Starting point is 00:03:53 and equipment throughout the 600-mile journey. The first 33 miles had to be done on foot. Stampeters who had the money could hire men or pack animals to help carry the loads of supplies. But stampeters like Jack and James didn't have the money to hire help. They would have to carry or drag hundreds of pounds of supplies, one load at a time, mile after mile. The task was almost incomprehensible, and the defeated stampeters who returned to Dai'e told tales of lugging their supplies through hopelessly deep mud, across fallen logs over
Starting point is 00:04:29 raging rivers, and up narrow trails which had been hacked out of the forest. and all those challenges came before the worst part, carrying all the supplies of 500 feet of rocks and boulders to Chilcote Pass in the Coast Mountains. The mountain range was the border between the American territory of Alaska and the Canadian territory of Yukon. Each stampeter had to conquer the challenge and reach Chilcote Pass in order to continue the journey. Jack's confidence wavered as he listened to the testimonies of the men who turned back. Then one weathered stampeter looked at James Shepard and delivered his verdict. The man said, you ain't going to make it, son. It's already August.
Starting point is 00:05:13 You and the rest of them can't get over those mountains and down the river to Dawson before the river freezes in October. You just ain't going to make it. The man spoke from brutal experience, and that would have been the time to turn back, but Jack and his companions didn't. What followed was one of the greatest adventure stories ever told. From Black Barrow Media, this is Legends of the Old West. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling stories of the Condite Gold Rush,
Starting point is 00:05:52 where famous author Jack London and 100,000 other people raced through Alaska to the Yukon in search of riches. This is episode one. No Turning Back. When 21-year-old Jack London and his 60-year-old brother-in-law, James Shepard, boarded the steamer from San Francisco to Alaska, only eight days after learning of gold, they were by no means alone. The decks were crammed with frantic men, women, and children,
Starting point is 00:06:28 and thousands of pounds of supplies. The travelers stood shoulder to shoulder and had the same feverish dream to find gold in the Yukon. And like the world-famous gold rush centered in Deadwood of Dakota Territory 20 years earlier, the Klondike Gold Rush wasn't only about getting rich just for the sake of getting rich. For some people, it was about survival.
Starting point is 00:06:50 The Dakota gold rush of the late 1870s was fueled in part by an economic crisis called the Panic of 1873. Exactly 20 years later, the same type of economic crisis struck again. The panic of 1893 hit like an avalanche when the nation's railroad empire came crashing down. Throughout the 1880s, railroad barons had gorged themselves on expansion, laying thousands of miles of useless track across the country. continent. They followed the example set by the godfather of railroad fraud, Thomas Durant, during the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. Companies borrowed recklessly and sank themselves into debt as their stock prices soared far above the real value of the business. In February 1893, the Philadelphia and Redding Railroad Company, one of America's largest
Starting point is 00:07:43 employers, collapsed. Like a train driving off a cliff, the railroad company at the front of the line of cars, dragged down everything connected to it, investment firms, banks, and entire financial networks. Unemployment skyrocketed. Poverty ran rampant. And so, four and a half years later, when news of a gold strike reached the American West Coast, thousands of people thought the journey was worth it. In August of 1896, a group of four people discovered gold along Rabbit Creek, a stream that fed into the Klondike River about 1,200 miles north of Vancouver and 250 miles east of Fairbanks, Alaska. It took a year for the news to filter south to cities like Seattle and San Francisco. And by that time, 21-year-old Jack London was already a seasoned explorer who was familiar with hardship and hard work.
Starting point is 00:08:43 Jack's biological father abandoned his mother, Flora, just before Jack's birth. Flora was shattered and sick and she couldn't care for her newborn son. A neighbor named Virginia Prentice, who was a former slave, stepped in to help care for the infant. When Jack was eight months old, Flora married John London, a struggling grocer and Civil War veteran who brought two daughters, Eliza and Ida, to their makeshift family in Oakland, California. Jack was young enough to believe John was his biological father, which provided some stability. So with the help of Virginia Prentice and John's two daughters, the London's cobbled together a family dynamic despite living in crushing poverty. By 13 years old, Jack was grinding through odd jobs at 10 cents an hour.
Starting point is 00:09:32 At 15, desperation drove him to take bigger risks. He borrowed money from Virginia and purchased a small sailboat. Then he joined the ranks of the oyster pirates. The young raiders illegally dug up oysters after nightfall. It might sound a little comical, but it was serious business in the early 1890s in Oakland. Armed guards patrolled the oyster beds with rifles. Rival pirate crews attacked each other in vicious battles as they raced their stolen cargo to market before dawn. After two years as an oyster pirate, Jack was ready to step it up a notch in risk.
Starting point is 00:10:10 At 17, Jack London earned a spot on the Sophie Sutherland, a schooner that hunted seals in the frigid water, of the North Pacific. The demand for seal skins was insatiable, and the pay promised a life beyond the docks. The captain was initially hesitant about Jack's age. The ship wasn't hugging the coastline like a little oyster boat. It was going to go all the way out into the Pacific Ocean toward the Bering Sea and beyond. The captain brought Jack on board,
Starting point is 00:10:39 and Jack proved his worth during the storm of a lifetime. With as much time as we all spend online, It's a given that we're being watched or tracked by someone. It's not a mystery as to why you start seeing ads for things that you shopped for five minutes ago. With a VPN, a virtual private network from Surfshark, you can keep your personal data and your internet usage private from snoopers and trackers. Surfshark VPN allows you to use servers around the world to shield your location, which helps with privacy, but also allows you to get better deals on things like hotel rooms and flight reservations,
Starting point is 00:11:16 and it allows you to watch shows which might be geoblocked in your location. You can protect all your devices at once, your phone, tablet, and computer, especially when you use a public Wi-Fi connection. And probably my favorite feature is the ad blocker. That one you can see instantly when you go to a website that's notorious for bombarding you with pop-up ads. With Surfshark VPN, those pop-up ads are gone. For those features and many more, go to Surfshark.com, or use the code Legends Deal at checkout to get four extra months of Surf Shark VPN.
Starting point is 00:11:53 That's surfshark.com slash legends deal or use code Legends Deal for four extra months of Surf Shark VPN. The link and the code are in the show notes of this episode. In an episode of the podcast Expedition Unknown from Discovery, explorer and adventurer Josh Gates poses the question, what happened to the stolen money the Dalton gang reportedly buried before their final ride into Coffeyville, Kansas in 1892. Josh heads to Kansas and Oklahoma with treasure hunters to try to find the lost fortune of the Dalton gang, and the podcast episode takes the audio directly from the TV show. In other authentic roughshod journeys, Josh hikes through the jungle to try to find El Dorado,
Starting point is 00:12:38 the fabled City of Gold, the city at the center of the famous poem by Edgar Allen, Poe, which serves as a through line for one of my favorite John Wayne Westerns. Josh rafts through tunnels in search of treasure stolen by the Third Reich. In truly epic adventures, he retraces the steps of Moses and examines some of the mysteries in the biblical story of Exodus. For those investigations and many more, listen to Expedition Unknown, wherever you get your podcasts. On April 10, 1893, after 51 days at sea, the Sophie Sutherland had crossed the Pacific
Starting point is 00:13:15 ocean and was near the coast of Japan. The sky turned black, the sea rose in a fury, and a typhoon roared through the ocean. The ship groaned under the assault of monstrous waves and lashing rain. For two hours in the middle of the storm, 17-year-old Jack London took his turn at the helm. He tied himself to the wheel to avoid being washed overboard, and he used every ounce of strength to steady the vessel as it whipped and bucked in the wind and waves. Jack didn't falter. He and the crew survived the typhoon, and Jack received praise for his heroics. Jack also used the experience to take the first step into the career that would make him famous. When the ship returned to California, he entered a descriptive writing contest with an account of the ordeal called
Starting point is 00:14:04 Story of a Typhoon off the coast of Japan. In November 1893, he submitted the story under the name John London, and he, with only a primary school education, beat out entries from students at Stanford and UC Berkeley to win the $25 prize. The contest lit a spark. As an avid reader and a natural writer, he threw himself into his studies to make up for lost time.
Starting point is 00:14:30 He crammed four years of high school into one, and he earned a place at the University of California, Berkeley. He headed to college, but the dream was short-lived. After just one semester, his money ran out. At 19 years old, Jack was thrown into the suffocating grind of factory work. The economic crisis in America was in its third year, and it showed no signs of improving. Jack London didn't like the work, but any job was better than no job. He toiled for more than two years until the magic word drifted down to California in the summer of 1897.
Starting point is 00:15:06 When the news of gold in the Yukon reached San Francisco on July 17th, it took little more than a nudge for 21-year-old Jack London to agree to another adventure. Jack was 5'7 and 160 pounds, and his experiences since the age of 13 had steeled him against the dark rumors of the Klondike gold rush. The stories of the Yukon's unforgiving conditions didn't scare him. They called to him. All he needed was money for supplies. His step-sister Eliza and her husband James Shepard took a big risk to provide for the venture. They mortgaged their house to finance the expedition. The process happened fast. Just eight days after learning of the gold strike, Jack London and James Shepard were on a steamship heading north to Juneau, Alaska. On the ship, they teamed up with three more fortune seekers,
Starting point is 00:16:08 Jim Goodman, Ira Sloper, and Fred Thompson. When the ship reached Juneau, The five men hired local guides to take them farther north by canoe to Daiyi, Alaska. Like Independence, Missouri, 50 years earlier for people racing to California during the first big gold rush, Daiyi was the official starting point for people heading to the Yukon for the Klondite gold rush. Dai had been the site of a seasonal fishing village for the native people of the area, the Klingit, and now it was a raw, bustling hamlet that would expand into a full boom town within a a year. Crudely built shacks rose above the shallow waters of the Taya River, the waterway that took Jack London's canoes to Dai'i. The hastily built town was a chaotic surge of humanity. Lawyers,
Starting point is 00:16:57 teachers, doctors, politicians, farmers, and fishermen all converged on the muddy strip of land that was the beginning of the 600-mile trail to Dawson City, ground zero for the gold rush. Many were well acquainted with hard physical labor, but some were not. As Jack London looked at the group of stampeters, he saw plenty of men who had never hauled a fishing line or plowed a field or swung an axe. They were average, everyday people. None of them, including Jack, who had already seen his fair share of adventure, had any clue about the monumental challenge they were about to undertake.
Starting point is 00:17:35 In the days long before strength training, endurance training, elite military training and professional athletics, these average everyday people would have to transport upwards of 2,000 pounds of gear per person across 600 miles of terrain that featured every natural obstacle imaginable. The stampeters who had just arrived at Dai'i had no idea what they were in for. But a stampeter who had returned from Dawson City did. The man took one look at 60-year-old James Shepard and said, he's not going to make it.
Starting point is 00:18:09 Just the first 16 miles of the trip would wipe out many of the hopefuls, and there were still 584 miles to go after that for the survivors. The first 16 miles of the Chilcote Trail ran from Dai'i to the Coast Mountains, which marked the border between Alaska and Canada. Those 16 miles were divided into three phases.
Starting point is 00:18:36 The first 13 miles were packed with rough terrain and obstacles, but the trail only rose a gradual 900 feet between Daiyi at sea level and a staging area called Sheep Camp. From Sheep Camp, the last three miles to the mountains were brutal. The trail rose another 1,600 feet during those three miles. Every bit of it was an uphill climb, and the final phase was the worst. The stampeters had to muscle their supplies up the side of the mountain to reach the summit called Chilkoot Pass. In the summer months, when Jack's group did the trek, the process was basically a hand-over-hand climb upward through giant boulders. In the winter, when the side of the mountain was covered in snow and ice, the stampeters carved 1,500 crude steps into the ice so they could trudge up to the top in a long, single-file line.
Starting point is 00:19:31 The steps quickly became known as the golden stairs. And, as the stampeters frequently heard, there were plenty of people who never even made it to the first stop at sheep camp, let alone to Chilcote Pass at the top of the mountain. As the man returning from the gold strike predicted, James Shepard was one of those who didn't make it. After nine of the 13 miles from Dai'i to sheep camp, James surrendered to the inevitable. It wasn't a bad effort for a frail, 60-year-old man, but his dream of Yukon gold was done. It was a somber moment for James and Jack. They had envisioned returning home together as rich men with the honor of a shared family triumph, but it wasn't to be, though in the long run it was for the best. Jack had promised his step-sister Eliza that he would take care of James. If James had
Starting point is 00:20:29 tried to continue, Jack surely would have buried him along the trail. James was alive, but as Jack watched him limp back down the trail toward Daiyi alone and defeated, his departing Archer felt like a bitter failure. James and Eliza had stretched their finances to the limit to fund the trip, and Jack couldn't turn back. Though now he would have to do something that was unthinkable to most stampeters, he would have to haul two outfits of supplies, all of his gear and all of James's gear. They had bought the supplies, and Jack couldn't let them go to waste. In the summer of 1897, the Canadian government had not yet placed a minimum requirement on the amount of supplies that stampeters had to transport in order to go to the Yukon.
Starting point is 00:21:17 A few months later, in the early spring of 1898, Canadian authorities required each person to haul 2,000 pounds of supplies. There were two reasons. After the brutal winter of 1897, the authorities wanted to make sure people didn't starve on the trail, and they wanted to stop bandits. There were a few merciless, parasitic fortune seekers who climbed the trail with nothing more than a gun, a knife, and a bedroll. On the other side of Chilcote Pass, after some poor, exhausted stampeter had transported his outfit over the hardest part of the journey, the bandit robbed the stampeder of his supplies.
Starting point is 00:21:57 In August of 1897, it's hard to know how many pounds of supplies Jack London transported. After James Shepard left the group, there are references to Jack, hauling 800 pounds of supplies, which would have been his outfit plus James's outfit. Other estimates placed the total at a little over a thousand pounds, some go as high as 2,000 pounds. Whatever the amount was, it was probably a minimum of 800 pounds of food and equipment. Wealthier men used pack animals, horses, mules, and donkeys to carry their outfits the first 13 miles of the trail to sheep camp. Even then, the trip was treacherous. many of the animals suffered injuries or died.
Starting point is 00:22:41 And the ones that survived had to stop at the camp. From there, the trail to the Coast Mountains was too steep for animals. From that point forward, every man had to carry or drag his supplies. True to his stubborn nature, Jack refused to use animals. For those like Jack who carried every load of supplies on their backs, the 13 miles to sheep camp was an agonizing, slow-motion, never-ending relay race. Jack strapped a load to his back and trudged forward for as long as he could. Then he dropped the load, stashed it in a hidden spot, and walked back to his stockpile to get the
Starting point is 00:23:19 next load. He repeated the punishing, methodical cycle as many times as necessary to move all of his supplies mile after mile from Dai'i to Sheep Camp. The 13-mile trip took 14 days. On August 23rd, 1897, Jack and his three companions staggered into sheep camp and joined a thousand other exhausted stampeters. Their backs were torn up, their shoulders throbbed, their leg muscles cramped and burned. Jack had grown stronger during the trek to the point where he carried an average load of 100 pounds per cycle, and sometimes up to 150 pounds, but he was still smoked like the rest of the stampeters, nearly all of whom were many years older than he was. And yet, there was no time to rest.
Starting point is 00:24:09 Sheep camp was just a pit stop. Where are my gloves? Come on, heat. Winter is hard, but your groceries don't have to be. This winter, stay warm. Tap the banner to order your groceries online at voila.ca. Enjoy in-store prices without leaving your home. You'll find the same regular prices online as in-store.
Starting point is 00:24:41 Many promotions are available both in store and online, though some may vary. Sheep Camp was a depressing pit. Photos from the time make it look like the earliest days of Deadwood. A mile-long tent city stretched across churned-up mud that was broken only by tree stumps and large rocks. It was populated entirely by rugged, dirty men who hadn't bathed in weeks. The smell would have been unsavory. And tensions flared as rumors persisted that the stammered. Peters were already too late to make it to Dawson City by winter.
Starting point is 00:25:18 Arguments exploded into brawls, and Jack's team wasn't immune. On the trail, Jim Goodman and Fred Thompson had clashed over their duties. Goodman hunted while Thompson cooked, and Thompson always felt he drew the short straw. In camp, Jack intervened, but he saw fractures forming in their bond. He worried that the situation was not sustainable, and they had precious little time. to fix it. Their savior, of sorts, was 66-year-old Martin Tarwater. Jack met Martin in camp, and Martin offered wisdom, companionship, and a willingness to cook. Martin proposed a deal. He would cook all their meals in exchange for a spot on a stable team. The others were hesitant. Martin
Starting point is 00:26:04 was six years older than James Shepard, but Martin seemed to have boundless energy. And since there was no minimum requirement on supplies at that time, Martin was traveling light. He wasn't going to add hundreds of pounds of gear to the effort. Martin's energy and upbeat attitude and his promise of consistent meals earned him a place in the group. They were back to a five-man team, and they had just one night in sheep camp to prep their gear and fortify themselves before they tried to conquer the Coast Mountains. During their only night in camp, Jack's group had to be ruthless. when sorting their gear. The three bees, beans, bacon, and bread were sacred. They had to be included. Fur-lined coats, waterproof boots, wool socks, tents, blankets, cookware, and rifles were
Starting point is 00:26:58 necessary for basic survival. Whipsaws for building boats and tools for mining, axes, shovels, picks, and pans were non-negotiable. Virtually everything else was considered a luxury item and was cast aside. Cookies, cakes, and cheeses were the first to go. A second coat was an indulgence. Extra pairs of socks and boots were jettisoned. Even forks and spoons were too much. The men could eat with their hands. At dawn, the five companions, along with hundreds of others, shouldered the first load and began shuttling their supplies three miles up the trail to the base of the mountains. Base camp was eventually called the Scales, the place. where Canadian authorities weighed each man's outfit and approved him to continue.
Starting point is 00:27:48 The journey from sheep camp to the scales was a deceptive three miles. Stampeders dubbed it the Long Hill, which was a sarcastic understatement about the unforgiving gain in elevation. Sheep camp was at about 900 feet of elevation. Base camp at the scales was at about 3,000 feet of elevation. It took Jack London three to four days, to to haul all of his supplies up the three-mile slope to the scales. And his reward for completing phase two of the first leg of the journey to the gold strike was to immediately begin phase three, the hardest part of the trip. At the scales, the stampeters were above the tree line.
Starting point is 00:28:30 They were pummeled by wind and frequently drenched by rain. And they stared up at a towering wall of rock that rose 500 feet above them. They would have to climb up that with heavy power. on their backs, then climb back down and do it again, and again, and again. Just the thought of it drove some men mad. Frustration, desperation, and exhaustion turned to rage. Rage led to shouting and then fighting. A few months later, enterprising businessmen built a gasoline-powered tramway, a cable
Starting point is 00:29:03 car, to carry supplies to the top of the mountain. But of course, the extravagance was only affordable to people who were already well off. wasn't an option for most stampeters, which undoubtedly added to their frustration. For Jack London and the stampeters of 1897, they had to do it all by hand, which prompted another round of ditching supplies that had seemed vital before, but were now disposable. Random pieces of gear littered the ground at the scales and all the way up the rock wall to the summit. On August 28, 1897, Jack and his crew joined the long line of stammer. Peters, whom Jack later called a column of ants and started to tackle the mountain.
Starting point is 00:29:52 Some of Jack's companions, likely Jim Goodman, Fred Thompson, and Iris Sloper, had enough money to hire local packers to help them haul their hundreds of pounds of supplies from the base camp at the scales to the summit of the mountain at Chilcote Pass. Jack London did not have the money to hire help. Jack hefted loads of up to 100 pounds onto his back and started climbing up through the fowlder field toward the summit. He, like all the others, worked from dawn to dusk. And if dusk fell while he was in the middle of a climb, he laid down in the rocks and went to sleep on the side of the mountain. For some, the effort was literally back-breaking work. Men suffered serious injuries and died during the climb. As Jack scaled the heights, he was battered by constant wind and soaked by
Starting point is 00:30:42 frequent rain. At the summit, it was cold enough for the rain to turn to snowflakes. The weather was on a constant rotation of extremes, which seemed designed to punish the stampeters for believing the trip was a good idea. For three full days, Jack climbed up and down the mountain. On the fourth day, August 31st, the last day of the month, Jack completed the challenge. He dropped his final load of supplies at the summit. Thick fog blanketed the summit, but, when it cleared, he took in the view on both sides of the mountain. In one direction, he looked at Alaska, at the stampeters who still struggled their supplies to the summit, to the graveyard of supplies at the bottom of the mountains, to the path through
Starting point is 00:31:31 the trees that led to sheep camp, and across the distance toward Daiyi, which seemed impossibly far away, yet it was only 16 miles down the trail. He had finished all three phases of the first leg of the journey, and though it was only 16 miles of distance, he had actually walked hundreds of miles as he shuttled all of his supplies along the trail. At the summit, when he turned in the other direction, he looked at Canada and the second leg of the journey. Jack and his companions had to carry their supplies down the backside of the mountains and then cover about 16 miles of ground to Lake Lindemann. At Lake Lindemann, they needed to build a boat from the materials around them. When they completed the project, they needed to sail
Starting point is 00:32:16 or paddle the boat up to the larger Lake Bennett, and then into the Yukon River, which fed the lake. On the river, they needed to tackle the final leg of the journey. They needed to travel 500 miles north to Dawson City before the river froze and winter forced them to stop. Earlier Stampeders said Jack and his crew needed to be in Dawson City by October to avoid being trapped by winter. October 1st was 30 days away. They were cutting it very close.
Starting point is 00:32:46 which meant there was no time to waste taking in the view. Jack and his companions immediately began the long process of hauling their supplies down the mountains toward Lake Lindemant. The first 13 miles were basically the mirror image of the 13 miles from sheep camp to the summit. They carried their supplies down the barren rock of the mountain and into the trees below 3,000 feet of elevation. They slogged through more mud and endured more drenching rain,
Starting point is 00:33:13 which increasingly mixed with spitting, snow, which was not a good sign. On the Canadian side of the divide, the equivalent to sheep camp was called Happy Camp. It took three to four days of relays to move the supplies to Happy Camp, and the travelers dropped from exhaustion just as they had when they made it to Sheep Camp two weeks earlier. And as Sheep Camp had been three miles from the mountains, Happy Camp was three miles from Lake Lindemant. The weary companions just had to lug their supplies three more miles before they could build a boat to carry their supplies the rest of the way to the gold strike. And that was when they heard the news that crushed the spirits of many of the stampeters.
Starting point is 00:33:55 A man who had just returned from Lake Lindemant said there were no trees left near the lake from which to build boats. Every chunk of wood worthy of construction had already been used up. Jack London wrote later that men broke down and cried beside the trail. But for Jack, after all he had been through, how could he possibly turn back now? Next time on Legends of the Old West, Jack London's team continues to trek to Lake Lindemann while praying the rumor of no wood for boats isn't true. But even if the journey can move forward, time is growing very short to reach the gold strike. Back along the Chilkoot Trail, stampeters are still braided.
Starting point is 00:34:45 the winter weather to make it over Chilcote Pass, and in the spring of 1898, the men on the golden stairs suffer a deadly disaster. That's next week on Legends of the Old West. To binge all the episodes of a new season, and to listen to every episode of the podcast with no commercials, subscribe in Apple Podcasts, or sign up through the link in the show notes
Starting point is 00:35:20 or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. This series was researched and written by Mandy Wimmer. Additional research and writing by me, Chris Wimmer. Original music by Rob Valier. Thanks for listening.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.