The Legion Lost – Part II

by Timothy J Jarvis

Part II of ‘The Legion Lost’. The first part can be found here.

A TALE OF PENURY, BLOODY MURDER, CARD-SHARPING SWINDLES, SHAM SÉANCES, AND THE REALMS OF THE FOUL OLDEN HORRORS THAT PROWL THE PRIMEVAL LIGHTLESS WAYS THAT RIDDLE THE EARTH
SKAGWAY, 1897

My fund of eldritch narratives is now all but exhausted; there remains only one story left to be told. However, it is the most significant of all, for it is that I heard first; that which sparked my mania for wandering the wild and barren places of the earth seeking men of that strange band, the Legion Lost, striking up acquaintances with them, and asking them to recount for me their bizarre tales of woe and hardship; the yarn that, like a drug, got me craving others of ilk. Therefore, I will give a more detailed and lengthy account of the context than I have done for the other stories related in this volume: the frame here constitutes an interesting tale in its own right, that of the kindling of my life’s obsession.

It was the autumn of ’97. I was young and foolish. Lured by tales of Yukon Gold, I, along with tens of thousands of other poor venturesome sapskulls, outfitted myself in Seattle and secured a berth on a ship bound for Alaska. In doing so, I spent most of an inheritance I had been bequeathed by a rich uncle, a banker. I disembarked at Skagway, the Alaskan port from which one could most easily make one’s way to the gold fields in the vicinity of Dawson City. Before the rush, Skagway had been an outpost of the fur trade, a dismal place of churned mud and clapboard shacks, inhabited by a mere handful of brutish men who bludgeoned seals to scrape a living, but by ’97 it was moiling with unscrupulous provisioners, whores, and crackbrained missionaries, all there to waylay, gull, and fleece the frantic, reckless, and easily duped stampeders who passed through. I myself tarried there a deal longer than I should have, mainly due to the ministrations of a pretty young moll named Laura. It was only when I noticed the nights were waxing longer than the days, I realized I would have to light out if I was to make it over the mountains into Canada before winter set in and the notches became impassable. I paid a visit to the Tlingit camp just outside of town and took on three Indians to lug my food and equipment, then found a ferry prepared to take me over to Dyea, a small settlement at the head of the trail.

On the morning of the second day I reached the foot of the Golden Staircase – a set of steps cut into the snow and ice, by the Tlingit, long before – that snaked up a steep slope to the Chilkoot Pass. It was a cold and gray day, exceedingly cold and gray. At the foot of the steps was the Scales, a tent city, with a saloon and a couple of restaurants, that had sprung up around a Mountie checkpoint where packs were weighed to ensure all stampeders carried at least a ton of supplies, reckoned a year’s worth – a measure put in place to prevent those bound for the gold fields from being driven to desperate acts of plunder against Canadian homesteaders. This stipulation meant that many, those too poor to afford to pay Indians to help them carry their load, had to make several trips between campsites lugging their provisions – the rigors of the route were too much for pack animals. The weight of my baggage was found to be sufficient, and I was allowed through the checkpoint with my bearers. There was a primitive horse-drawn tramway offering to haul loads up to the highest point of the trail, but the fees being charged were exorbitant, and besides, I preferred to trust my things to my reliable Indians, than to a ridiculous contraption.

I set out, up the staircase, clinging to the guide rope with a fierce grip, eyes narrowed against the sleet squalls that beset us, seekers of gold, guides, and pack bearers all. A great number of us, hooded against the bitter cold, trudged up the steps. We looked pilgrims bound for a shrine containing a precious relic – in a way, I suppose, this is exactly what the prospectors among us were, though it was to gold that we pledged our devotions and made our supplications. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say we resembled an order of flagellants, for if the man in front, fatigued, slowed, many would – the way being strait, and they, frantic to cross the ridge before nightfall when temperatures would plummet – drive him on by striking out with anything to hand. Lengths of hempen cord served as makeshift lashes, walking staffs and pickaxe, mattock, and shovel handles were used as goads. Or perhaps with our clothing ragged and our belongings bundled up on our backs, we looked more like bindlestiffs or hobos.

About halfway up the staircase, at the pass’s famous false summit – a ridge that appears to be the highest point of the trail until reached, when a further steep climb can be seen beyond it – there was a ledge of rock beside the path offering respite from the arduous ascent. This shelf was narrow and beetled over the void, but a large number of bone-weary stampeders, careless of the bluff’s edge, sprawled or milled about, querulously bemoaning the hardships of the trail, as if they walked it at the behest of some potentate, rather than of their own volition; the noise they made was similar to one commonly heard at dusk by the sea, that of a colony of gannets roosting. Standing in knots, talking low, the Indians looked askance at their employers, no doubt contemptuous of the bellyaching – that proud race had been climbing the trail for generations. Sitting down, I took off my hobnailed boots and thick socks, and rubbed lard into my swollen, blistered, and chilblained feet.

This done, I looked about me. A man, who, seemingly oblivious to the commotion about him, stood gazing out at the prospect of snow-tonsured peaks, attracted my notice. His clothing marked him out – while we men under the spell of gold were clad alike in hooded furs and oil-slickers, and the natives were dressed in garments sewn from bearskin and deerhide, he wore a stained and torn military greatcoat, fastened with frogs of faded golden braid, a thick woolen scarf, and a beaver hat with earflaps which were tied under his chin with string. His thick matted beard and the locks of hair curling from beneath his hat were speckled with gray, and his back was bowed, though the impression this conveyed of decrepitude was at odds with the suggestion of sinewy vigor there was about him. I could not reach a firm conclusion about his age, however, for his back was to me and I could not see whether his face was that of a young or elderly man. He carried only a small satchel, seemed to have no pack bearers, and I wondered how he managed to get past the Mountie checkpoint. It appeared he found something enthralling in the scene before him; perhaps he perceived evidence of the Maker’s workings even in that desolate place. I, too, looked out at the view, but it gave me no solace: I felt no numinous awe, saw only a harsh unforgiving landscape – I had lost my faith on the death of my dear wife just over a year before.

My musings were soon disturbed – a man a little distance away took off his footwear, as I had, and, discovering several of his toes grey and shriveled, threw a conniption fit.

The afflicted stampeder was a very small wiry man, with a face like the blade of a hatchet, honed to keenness by life’s grind. His eyes were shrewd, his lank greasy blonde hair straggled down over his ears and nape, his incisors were prominent, and his beard was pale against his red chapped skin. In short, he was of the type of the luckless rat-like petty miscreant of innumerable popular novels. He was railing about his ill luck and cussing in gruff tones, casting about him with his gimlet eyes, fixing other wayfarers with his glare as if he blamed them for his suffering.

Standing at the rat’s side, looking down, dull, agape, at his ruined feet, was another man, seemingly his traveling companion. No two more dissimilar individuals could be imagined. The frost-bitten wretch’s friend was tall and hulking, had hands like ham hocks. He had thick matted hair, and a full grizzled beard. He resembled a bear. And, or so it appeared from the way his mouth was hanging open to catch the swirling flakes of snow, was something of a dolt.

After a few minutes, the rat’s bawling began to roil some of the other stampeders. There were grumbles, then a brute yelled at him, calling for him to hold his tongue and keep his head. The brute’s nose was squashed flat against his face, probably a legacy of a life of brawling, and that, combined with his apparent irascibility, gave him the air of a pit dog.

‘I’m not taking orders from someone who looks like the kind whose sister’s also his daughter,’ came the rat’s jeering response.

The pit dog looked bemused at first – it took him a while to unravel the insult. Then he snarled, drew a Bowie knife from a sheath at his belt.

‘I’m going to cut you open from crotch to craw, you little weasel,’ he said, then bounded at the rat. The bear stepped into the pit dog’s path and swatted him to the ground with one of his giant paws.

What followed was reminiscent of a scene I witnessed once in a pit in southern California where they were baiting a grizzly with lions brought over from the Dark Continent. Men of the pit dog’s party pulled blades and flew at the bear to avenge the insult. Most on the ledge gathered around, yawping; only the dignified Indian porters backed away, looked on the ruckus with disdain. On hearing the uproar, the man in the tattered greatcoat turned away from the outlook. My conjectures as to his age were ended then – judging by his countenance, he was, while no longer young, only just entering his middle years. However, the hoar flecking his hair, and the stoop I had thought might betoken he was elderly, together with something I had not noticed before, that he had lost his right arm at the shoulder – his sleeve was pinned across his chest and flapped in the wind, gave him the air of one ravaged by a hard life and old beyond his span.

The scuffle ended with the big fellow still standing, panting through clenched teeth, steeped in blood running from many shallow wounds to his arms and chest. His adversaries had fared much worse, however – lay strewn about nursing cracked ribs and broken heads. The rat sat looking smugly on, his frostbite, for the moment, forgotten.

That would have been the end, had not the pit dog, recovered from the blow that had knocked him down, sneaked up behind the bear, blade in hand, meaning, it seemed, to hamstring him. At that the one-armed man took a revolver from his greatcoat, leveled it at the pit dog, and shouted, ‘Enough!’

His roar brought silence to the ledge.

‘That’s enough. Leave him be.’

Then, looking down, shaking his head, he said, as if to himself, ‘Shameful animals.’

He seemed to have some inborn sway, for the pit dog and his injured comrades melted into the throng.

After putting his gun away, the one-armed man crossed over, knelt down beside the rat, and looking askance at him, began speaking to him in a low voice. Furtive, ashamed to be eavesdropping, but too curious to repress the urge, I drew closer, hoping to catch some of what was said. I overheard their introductions, learned the one-armed man was Duncan, and the rat, Peter. Much of their subsequent conversation was lost to the wind’s howl and the tumult of the other stampeders’ complaining and talk, but I managed to make out that Duncan was attempting to get Peter to abandon his hopes of making a fortune in the Yukon, and return to the Mountie camp where he could get his feet tended to. At first Peter was reluctant, but on being told he was otherwise certain to lose toes and struggle thenceforth to walk, he seemed, suddenly, to see the good sense in the course being advised him.

Duncan then turned to the bear, sought to persuade him to help his companion back down the mountain. This loyal friend, after only a moment’s bovine pondering, agreed. His name, it transpired, was Paul; Duncan smiled on hearing that. After putting his boots back on for him, Paul helped Peter to his feet. The two men then shambled off, Paul all but carrying Peter bodily under his arm.

I had been moved and surprised by Duncan’s bravery and kindness – such compassion being a rarity in those bitter climes – and went over to strike up a conversation. I expressed my admiration for the way he had acted. His stammered reply demonstrated humility, but also self-righteousness.

‘I think most people would have been moved to help. That no one here was, is merely evidence of the way gold preys on their minds. I, though, do not hunger after earthly riches.’

I noticed a faint trace of Scots lingered in the man’s accent, but he had clearly been in America some years, for it was almost buried.

We were having to shout to make ourselves heard above the clamor, and Duncan suggested we take shelter from the noise behind a large rock at the far end of the ledge. I turned to ask my Indians to wait for me, then followed Duncan behind the boulder. Once we were ensconced in its lee, I asked him what, if he was not a fortune seeker, he was doing out there in that hostile waste.

‘I am a preacher and it’s my calling to succor those in bleak circumstances. Where better to do so? I came out here to help, where I can. And, what’s more, I succumbed once to the enticements of fabled wealth, and it eases me some to comfort those who’ve likewise fallen prey.’

My admiration and respect for Duncan was fast souring, curdled by the rennet of his priggish manner; that he was a priest only irked me further.

‘That gold isn’t fabled,’ I said, belligerently. ‘I’ve seen some of it with my own two eyes, back in California.’

‘Was just a figure of speech is all. There is gold in some of the Klondike’s creeks, as you say. Most of the claims are taken, though, and even if you were able to gang together with some others and stake yourself a place, you’d most likely be driven off by roughneck claim-jumpers before you’d even had a chance to thaw out a patch of earth to dig.’

‘I can look out for myself.’

‘Well, it’s not just toughs you’ve got to look out for, there are outlandish-cruel men out there who get up to things as would freeze your blood quicker than a night out in the open at the pole.’

He struck a pose, with his arm held out before him, began declaiming:

‘There are strange things done, in the midnight sun, by the men who moil for gold. The Arctic trails have their secret tales, that would make your blood run cold.’

Of course these verses are now familiar to me as the first lines of ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ by Robert W. Service, but back then they were novel, and that great poet of Yukon life, the ‘Canadian Kipling’, was yet to publish them. The only explanation I can think of is that Duncan must have encountered and discoursed with Service during his wanderings. Service hailed from Glasgow, as, I was later to discover, did Duncan, and it is possible, had the two men met in the frozen Yukon, so far from the city on the banks of the Clyde, they might have struck up an acquaintance over reminiscences of that place.

‘Also,’ Duncan continued, ‘digging isn’t as easy as you’d think. It’s back-breaking labor. And even when you’ve got down to the gravel layer, chances are you’ll find it isn’t pay dirt and’ll have to try delving elsewhere.’

‘Oh, I think I’m doughty enough,’ I said, sardonically. ‘And, besides, I’ve outlaid far too much on provisions and my passage from Seattle to Skagway not to go on.’

‘You’d be better off reckoning that sum lost through ill fate and turning back now. You may have wasted money, but, as yet, you’ve risked and endured little. All the dangers and hardships lie ahead of you.’

He went on to evoke these for me, in a harangue filled with the lurid parlance of the evangelic pulpit. His description of the White Horse Rapids struck me particularly, it was so turgid, and I can recall it practically verbatim:

‘At one point the river runs through a narrow gully, the Miles Canyon, then courses down a steeply shelving rock-strewn reach, known as the White Horse Rapids. This is not far down the Yukon from the winter camps, you know. Yes, it is a right poetical name, isn’t it? It’s said they were christened by early pioneers who were reminded of the wind-tousled manes of hoary steeds by all the spume. Dangerous? Yes, perhaps the most treacherous stretch of the whole river, and it is at no point along its course a calm waterway. A large number of craft have been capsized or wrecked shooting the rapids, and this has resulted in the loss of provisions, and occasionally of life, for some have been dragged under by eddies, and smothered by roily waters. Yet, many stampeders still tempt providence in spite of this, for they are a foolish and rash breed. What’s even more astounding is that there are alternative routes, land trails that are well-known, and fairly easy-going. Impatience? Brute avarice I would call it. Fittingly the roar of the rapids sounds as the tumult of the damned in Hell must, for those that have drowned there will, for their greed, have been cast down forthwith into the infernal lake of fire.’

Once he had concluded his catalogue of risks and adversities, Duncan looked up at a skein of geese who were flying by far overhead. He continued staring into the sky long after their silhouettes had been lost against a dark high mass of cloud moving in from the east. I said nothing, a little rattled, for I realized that, if the tone of Duncan’s disquisition had been risible, in tenor it was probably an accurate reflection of the hardships of the route. Then, after a time, his eyes still fixed on the heavens, he sighed.

‘And you would put yourself through all of this,’ he said, ‘for material gain, which God frowns upon.’

That irked me. I resented his Pharisaical stance on the, in my view, natural hankering after wealth.

‘Thanks,’ I blustered, ‘but I’ll take my chances, and go on. I’m not gutless.’

‘I’m not impugning your pluck. Just warning you, is all. Doubtless you’ll make it to Dawson City without coming to harm. But, like I say, when you get there you’ll find local miners have taken all the gold-bearing creeks.’

Most of those who reached Dawson ended up living on the settlement’s fringes in shanties built using broken-up river craft, disappointed, milling about town, biding their time while deciding how best to make the journey back south, Duncan said. Furthermore, he claimed that, due to the huge incursion, disease was rife and the city now teetered on the brink of famine.

‘Therefore, you may find you’re able to do some good, if you’re inclined to, and you insist on pressing on,’ he continued. ‘That’s why I’m bound there. If so, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’re lending a hand to a community in dire need, or rather two hands, which is more useful, when all is said and done, than just the one.’

He grinned, almost diffidently, plucked at his empty sleeve.

I was disarmed by Duncan’s joke at his own expense and began to wonder whether I had allowed my prejudice against clerics to fog my judgment. After all, for all his cant, Duncan had only been trying to alert me to the trials I would face. The thawing of my opinion was attended by a sudden onset of cold. Heavy snow began to fall from the black rack overhead, which now shrouded the entire sky. I looked round the corner of the rock behind which Duncan and I had been conversing, and was perturbed to see one of my Indians sitting on the floor, clutching his head and shivering. I crossed over to find out what was wrong. It emerged he had taken very ill of a sudden. Concerned for him, the other Indians implored me to let him return immediately to Skagway. I could hardly refuse their earnest pleas, in any case it did not look like the sick man had the strength to take up his pack again. I was resigned, therefore, to abandoning some of my provisions, and was just about to sort out a pile of the least essential items to leave behind, when Duncan approached, asked what was the matter. When I explained, he said, ‘Well, as you know, I think it’s foolhardy to go on at all, but since you’re determined, and I’m going that way anyhow, I may as well help you out by toting what I can.’

I gratefully accepted this offer of aid, partly out of desperation, and partly because my glimpse of Duncan’s streak of self-deprecating humor had, as I say, endeared him slightly to me, given me to think he might be more pleasant company than I had hitherto thought, though I still considered him a prig. Thus, as a consequence of the vagaries of fate and a weak jest, I heard the story that fired the great obsession of my life.

To be continued…