Chilkoot Pass: The Ton of Goods

The photograph taken in the winter of eighteen ninety-seven shows a column of men climbing a wall of white. The slope is steep enough that steps have been cut into the ice near the summit. Each man is bent forward under a pack. The column stretches to the horizon. There are thousands of them, and they are all going the same direction.

The Canadian North-West Mounted Police had established a checkpoint at the summit of the Chilkoot Pass, and they were enforcing a rule: no one entered the Yukon without a year's worth of supplies. Two thousand pounds of goods. A ton.

Most stampeders did not have two thousand pounds of gear when they arrived in Skagway or Dyea. They had to buy it first, from outfitters who had set up in those towns specifically to supply this need at elevated prices. Then they had to carry it over the pass. Because no pack animal could manage the ice steps near the summit in winter, and because the Mounted Police would not let them proceed with less than the full requirement, the stampeders had to make multiple trips, caching loads partway up and going back for more.

The average stampeder made between twenty and thirty trips. Some made forty. Each round trip was roughly sixteen miles of steep mountain terrain in subarctic weather.

On April third, eighteen ninety-eight, an avalanche buried a section of the trail above Sheep Camp. Sixty-five people died. The column kept moving the next day.

Most of the men who completed the crossing, who reached Dawson City in the Yukon and staked their claims, found nothing. The productive ground had been claimed before they arrived. The ton of goods they had hauled over the mountains fed them while they discovered this fact.

The Chilkoot Pass trail is still there. You can hike it today, in summer, in thirty-three miles over three days.