Searching the Chilkoot Pass for What Gold Rush Migrants Left Behind

In spite of the thousands of people who crossed the Chilkoot Pass during the Klondike Gold Rush, historic debris does not litter the trail: artifacts are rare and often concealed. In 2016 and 2017 National Park Service archaeologists looked for them in a new place, the margins of melting ice patches high in the pass, where snow and ice might have preserved objects. They documented a handful of artifacts that between them record four ways of moving goods into Alaska: on foot, by pack animal, by tramway and by boat. Shawn Jones and Andrew Tremayne of the Park Service describe the project in Alaska Park Science.

From 1897 to 1899 thousands of prospectors carried supplies over the Chilkoot Pass (NPS/Library of Congress).

The migration behind the trail

People have been migrating into and through Alaska for over 14,000 years, the authors write, and the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896 to 1899 was a particularly intense but brief wave. It began in August 1896 when Skookum Jim Mason, Dawson Charlie and George Washington Carmack found gold in a tributary of the Klondike River in Canada's Yukon Territory. In 1897 and 1898 thousands of stampeders poured into southeast Alaska. The U.S. Census counted Alaska's population growing from 32,035 in 1890 to 63,592 in 1900, and the boom brought mines, trading posts, homesteads and boomtowns, and many more encounters between Alaska Natives and newcomers. The tent cities of Skagway and Dyea became prosperous outposts, Dyea at the foot of the Chilkoot Trail and Skagway at the foot of the White Pass Trail. Historians say most prospectors were young men from the western United States and Canada, along with foreign-born migrants from as far as Scandinavia and China.

Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, in Skagway, Alaska (map from the Park Service's article).

The Chilkoot Trail begins at Dyea and runs 33 miles, climbing 3,500 feet over a pass into Canada's Yukon Territory. The Tlingit had used it and other passes for thousands of years to reach the interior and trade with Athabaskans, and obsidian from Mount Edziza in British Columbia at a 10,000-year-old coastal site in southeast Alaska suggests that coastal people used such routes once the glaciers retreated. The pass is a poor place for a village, so the authors expect its pre-contact sites to be short-term camps and hunting stations, while historic sites hold objects of mining and freight.

In 1898 prospectors marched up the pass in single file, making many trips to haul the thousands of pounds of supplies they needed, and then had to build boats to float down the Yukon River. Wealthier stampeders sent their outfits over by tramway; others used pack animals from Dyea to Lake Bennett in the Yukon; many simply carried their gear on their backs. At times the loads grew too great, and weary travelers jettisoned gear and left exhausted animals behind.

Looking in the ice

The 2016-17 survey focused on ice patches, and on the lichen-free ground that melted patches had left, in the alpine part of the pass south of the Canadian border. Ice patch archaeology in the Yukon and Alaska has already told a great deal about subsistence hunting and prehistoric weapons, because caribou and other animals went to the patches to escape heat and insects and hunters followed. One goal here was to find out whether gold rush artifacts would be as well preserved by the deep snowpack and ice.

The ice patch survey area along the Chilkoot Trail, in the Coast Mountains directly south of the border with Canada (map from the Park Service's article).

Teams scoured the ground for anything that was not part of the natural environment and explored the margins of melting snow patches for preserved organic artifacts. When they found one, they recorded its position with GPS, photographed it and made notes on the setting. They also revisited known sites to check the condition of artifacts. A goal of park cultural resource management is to preserve historic objects in place along the trail, and when archaeologists note threats or disturbances at a site they look for ways to reduce the damage.

Snow patches in the Chilkoot Pass; archaeologists found preserved gold rush-era artifacts thawing from the margins of some of them (NPS photo).

What turned up

The survey found three new historic sites and one possible pre-contact site, and it assessed the condition of one well-known historic site.

Finds from the pass: (A) abandoned remains of knock-down boats at the summit; (B) a gold miner's shoes, chains and tools left behind for unknown reasons; (C) the skeleton of an ox that died crossing the pass; (D) a modified wood implement, possibly part of an ice probe (NPS photo).

• Knock-down boats. The known site holds the wood and canvas supplies for building a number of boats, hauled to the top of the pass and abandoned there. The authors do not know why. The most plausible of several theories is that crews carried them up for a company, and they think it likely that Canadian officials refused the boats entry out of concern that they would break up and kill their passengers on the Yukon River. Either way, the remains show how much depended on water transport and that some projects failed before they reached the rivers.
• A tram. At one new site the team recorded heavy chains and hardware from a trail-length tram, one of five built in the region and erected in 1894. People were already using the pass before the 1896 discovery, so hauling gear was big business before the rush itself. Before the trams, many companies had paid Tlingit men and women to carry loads on their backs, and by the end of 1898 the tramway and pack animal caravans had taken most of those jobs away.
• A pair of shoes. Clothing is rare in the archaeological record. The worn-out shoes were presumably lost by a prospector, and the authors can only speculate about the owner. Many prospectors died in the pass, including nearly 70 people in a single avalanche.
• Ox bones. The bones of one ox lay scattered among boulders. The steep, rugged trail took its toll on pack animals, and some were shot and left behind.
• A wooden implement. The crew found a wooden artifact, most likely an ice probe for travel over glaciers and snow, radiocarbon dated to 140 years before present. The authors take that to mean Tlingit or Athabaskan travelers probably left it a few decades before the Gold Rush, a reminder that the prospectors of 1898 were not the first to cross the area.

What the finds add

Archaeologists have completed only a small part of the possible survey of Klondike-related resources in the pass itself, the authors say, and each new survey turns up some preserved artifacts and new evidence. These finds give four lines of evidence for mobility: foot power, pack animals, tramways and boats. Most men walked, others used pack animals or tramways, and almost all relied on boats to carry gear down the river.

For many migrants the pass was the gateway to a new homeland. The harsh climate and the competition with hordes of prospectors crushed many dreams, but the rush also ushered in an era of colonialism that the authors say eventually affected the lives of all Alaskans, Indigenous or migrant. Many of the boomtowns are now major Alaskan and Canadian cities, and others, such as Skagway, are preserved for tourists. The article says about 2,000 hikers a year take the trail, compared with 1,000 people a day at the gold rush peak, and that hikers can still find objects the stampeders left. More ice patch surveys in adjacent areas are needed, the authors add, to document the prehistoric sites that surely exist there.

Sources

• Shawn Jones and Andrew Tremayne, National Park Service, The Klondike Gold Rush: A search for the archaeological traces of an historic migration event, Alaska Park Science, Volume 17, Issue 1; rewritten in hubnx's own words.