There was no sun the afternoon we came off the ship in Skagway. It was half past one, and I had been awake since three that morning, so by the time my feet hit the dock, my body had lost track of what time zone, or what century, it was standing in.
Maybe that is why the first thing my mind reached for wasn’t gold, or glaciers. It was Jonathan Harker.
You know the scene. The carriage climbing the pass, the wind howling down off the mountains, not a scrap of sun in the sky, the horses uneasy and the dark pressing in. That is where I was. Not Alaska, but the Borgo Pass, bound for something ancient and enormous that had not yet decided whether to welcome me or swallow me whole.
And understand: I am not a woman easily spooked by a mountain. I have crossed real passes in my life, the Gotthard and Stelvio among them. But this grey, sunless one had me reaching for Bram Stoker before we had cleared the harbor.
Except the carriage was a tour van with twenty-three strangers in it, and the thing waiting at the top of the pass was never a castle.
It was gold.
And like everyone the wind has carried up that pass for the last hundred and twenty-eight years, none of us yet knew the secret of the place: the mountain does not change what you have. It changes what you are.
The Dead Horse Trail
The gold sat at the top of the pass. To reach it, you walked.
In the winter of 1897, the trail out of Skagway earned the name it still carries: the Dead Horse Trail. Men drove their pack animals up the White Pass until the animals could be driven no further, and then drove them further still. Three thousand horses died on that mountain. They starved; they snapped their legs in the rocks; some lay down in the mud and refused to rise; some walked off the cliff’s edge as though they had chosen it. And the men who survived did not survive unchanged. The trail turned their hearts to stone, and the hearts that would not turn to stone simply broke.
That is the bargain Skagway has always offered. You will not leave the way you came. Whether you leave better is between you and the mountain.
The ones the gold erased
Skookum Jim, Dawson Charlie, and Kate Carmack. The gold was theirs first. Three Tagish people, Keish, Káa Goox, and Shaaw Tláa, almost certainly found the first glint at Bonanza Creek in 1896, then watched the claim filed under a white man’s name, because a Native fortune might not survive the writing-down. They lit the fuse on the whole stampede, and the legend thanked them by forgetting their names.
Captain William Moore. He owned Skagway before Skagway existed. He staked the flats in 1887, foresaw the rush, built the wharf to meet it. When the flood came, it laid its streets across his land and shoved him off his own deed. He was right about everything, and being right nearly ruined him.
The ones the gold remade
Jack London. He came for gold and left with scurvy, his teeth loosening in the dark, his body coming apart. The Klondike gave him nothing to spend and everything to write, and he bled it into *The Call of the Wild.* The pass took his health and handed him immortality.
John Nordstrom. He actually struck gold, then was wise enough to sell the claim and walk away with thirteen thousand dollars. He spent it on a Seattle shoe store. The creek made him a little money; the shoes made him a dynasty.
Alexander Pantages. A penniless Greek who came over the pass for nuggets and found a theatre instead, running shows for lonely miners in Dawson. He went looking for ore and discovered an audience, and built one of the great theatre empires in America.
Tex Rickard. He traded a gold-camp saloon for the boxing ring, built Madison Square Garden, and founded the New York Rangers, still nicknamed “Tex’s Rangers.” The gold gave him nothing but a taste for the roar of a crowd.
Belinda Mulrooney. She never dug. She built roadhouses and a hotel and grew rich sheltering the men who did. It was the smartest fortune in the Klondike, made on hospitality, not ore: a woman who arrived with almost nothing and left one of the wealthiest souls in the North.
And the shadow
Soapy Smith. A Colorado con man who came north and crowned himself king of thieves: rigged tables, a telegraph office wired to nothing, a gang to bleed every newcomer, all behind a churchgoing smile. Skagway could not tell its benefactor from its predator; they wore the same coat. He died on the wharf in 1898, trading fatal shots with a surveyor named Frank Reid. It was the same Reid who “died for the honor of Skagway,” and the same Reid who had drawn the survey that stole Captain Moore’s land. Honor and theft, buried a short walk apart.
Where we actually went:
Our own small stampede never reached the goldfields, of course. We climbed the White Pass by van instead of by boot, up switchbacks past waterfalls and avalanche signs that warned us not to stop, over the border into British Columbia and back, past a weathered sign welcoming us home to a country we had left only an hour before. Down in the town we wandered the boardwalks of a place that is somehow both a national park and a working harbor, past the Arctic Brotherhood Hall, its entire face shingled in some eight thousand sticks of driftwood: a clubhouse a band of stampeders built for themselves out of the dead wood the tide left behind. Even their meeting hall was an act of making something from nothing.
Our guide drove the van. She was from Phoenix. She had come north a few years ago, in the middle of a divorce, chasing a grown son who had taken a summer job up here. And somewhere on the road between the desert and the pass, she became a woman who spends her summers in Alaska. April to October, every year, two thousand miles from the life she used to have. She’s someone who arrived at the edge of the map and quietly built a new self there. The town is still doing to people exactly what it has always done.
And me? I came up the Borgo Pass braced for a castle. At the summit there was no count, no carriage, no Dracula. Only the freezing wind, a busload of strangers, and that strange northern light that will not quite go dark. We took our photographs. We climbed back into the van. And we came down the mountain just slightly other than we had gone up it…which, in Skagway, is the only thing that has ever happened to anyone.