ARCHIE SATTERFIELD

TRAVELS WITH A PHOTOGRAPHER


The Klondike gold rush was a boon to the fledging photographic industry; it seemed every party had at least one camera, often more. It was certainly one of the most photogenic events of the period because the route north looked almost like a nation in retreat. Some of the best photographers in North America appeared on the trails and the river with their heavy loads of equipment and took photos astonishing in their clarity and composition.
This is all the more remarkable when one considers that roll film did not exist, and that the photographers had to mix the chemicals to coat the glass plates, then make the exposure, then process the plates to make a negative, and then, at last, make a print of the negative. All of this was done in tents during the daytime, sometimes behind trees on moonlit nights. Their devotion to craft is hard to believe.
One such photographer was Ashael Curtis, who was 22 when the stampede began. He was the youngest of a family of three boys and one girl. One of his older brothers was named Edward Sheriff Curtis, and by the time Edward S. was old enough to vote, he had his own studio in Seattle, across Puget Sound from the family home near Port Blakley, and soon Asahel went to work for him as an assistant. Both boys were strong willed and they never got along well. Asahel found Edward bossy and Edward thought Asahel was stubborn and ungrateful.
When the gold rush came, Edward made a deal with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to supply them with photos of the stampede, and Edward sent Asahel to the Klondike to take those photos. Edward would remain in Seattle to capitalize on the new business flooding the studio. Stampeders wanted photos of themselves with their Klondike goods to send home. Storekeepers wanted photos showing their goods piled head-high outside their stores.
Curtis boarded the steamship Rosalie in the autumn of 1897 with his cameras, glass-plate negatives, chemicals, paper and clothing and headed north. The skipper was the colorful Capt. John A. (Dynamite Johnny) O'Brien, the popular skipper who had befriended Soapy Smith. The purser was Charles V. LaFarge. Both seamen knew Curtis and took good care of him on the trip. LaFarge put Curtis into an empty stateroom and told him to keep the door locked and not to come out until they were well under way because the stateroom had been sold several times. Curtis did as he was told, and each night he dined with the captain and purser.
When they reached Skagway, LaFarge put Curtis in the first boat to go ashore, without his camera gear, which would arrive later on one of the lighters used to transport goods between the ship and shore. Before that could occur, a storm blew in and O'Brien weighed anchor and steamed down Lynn Canal for the sheltered water at Pyramid Harbor. Curtis stood on the beach watching the ship depart, feeling very alone. Of course O'Brien brought the Rosalie back when the storm cleared and the cameras landed safely.
Curtis later wrote that Skagway was filled with newspaper and magazine correspondents, and some who just said they were. Most hung around town waiting to interview people to return from White Pass. A few were returning from the Klondike that fall and winter, but most were people who were admitting defeat and going home.
On Curtis's arrival, one of the correspondents asked him if he was going to the passes and Curtis said he was going all the way to the Klondike.
"Ha!" the newspaperman snorted. "You won't get as far as Liarsville."
Curtis had his revenge. "Two weeks later they [the skeptical correspondents] wanted to buy my undeveloped negatives."
Not only did Curtis hike over the passes with his gear, he became the unofficial postman by picking up mail for men he knew along the trail; he returned to Skagway once with nearly 100 pounds of mail. He inspired part of this mail by taking photographs, printing them as postcards and selling them for $1.50 each, a reasonable price because at that time a plate of soup cost one dollar and a plate of canned tomatoes cost two dollars.
All winter long Curtis alternated between the two trails and he was impressed by the wild country and the drama of the gold rush. He kept a diary sporadically, and sandwiched between orders for photos, recipes and formulas for photo chemicals, he waxed poetic because he was smitten by the poetic muse, a not-unusual occurrence in the harsh, beautiful land. An example follows:

Tales of the Yukon

Prelude--The mistic [sic] beauty of the mountain lake with the calm unruffled surface 'neath mountain crags with tiny cascades leaping merrily down from glaciers and ice fields above. The narrow winding of lake, more river than lake . . .
Watching the throngs constantly changing what better could his chance be than that of the thousands who are before him. Seemingly every degree of the social scale has its representatives. Every possible kind of garb is to be seen.
“Those who are elbowing one another represent every degree of wealth, from the richest claim holder to the poor unfortunate whose condition will compel him to go out.
“The look of abstraction and gloom on many a face is heart-rending. The probable cause is the same in many cases; a mortgaged home or a farm or business that has passed into other hands [so] that the Eldorado could be reached. Those fair hills far away between which ran streams whose beds were pebbles of gold have faded. Weeks and months of hard work coupled with in many cases poor food have left the system weakened. . . "

Curtis had no burning desire to go on down to Dawson City because he was enjoying the drama of the passes and earning a good living taking photos of the stampeders, selling prints and keeping the negatives. No record remains of the agreement with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and few if any of the photos were published. Nor is it possible to determine how many glass plate negatives he sent back to Edward's studio. Apparently he didn't send many because they were still in Asahel's possession when he died.
In March, 1898, when winter had several more weeks to go, Curtis met some old friends from Seattle on Lake Tagish, Eugene C. Allen and Zach F. Hickman. Allen was a printing salesman for Metropolitan Press in Seattle and Hickman was a printer for the same firm. They had talked the owners into staking them to a newspaper in Dawson City and sent Hickman up the previous winter to look over the situation. Hickman returned with the news that "gold is like flour up there. We'll clean up a million."
Allen and Hickman spent the rest of the winter in Seattle preparing for the trip. They spent two weeks training two dog teams hitched to sleds. Allen always had misgivings about the dogs because Seattle's dog population had been drastically decimated by the gold rush; the best and biggest had already either bought or stolen, so most of Allen and Hickman's training period was spent stopping fights, untangling harness and shouting until they were hoarse.
In February 1898 the two partners boarded the City of Seattle with their newspaper equipment and dog teams. Like most, they headed for the passes rather than the St. Michael route. They were certain someone else would see the need for a newspaper and they wanted to be the first down the river with a press. They knew they could travel overland with dog teams and arrive long before the first boats would arrive from St. Michael. They took a small press for job printing and a portable flatbed press for the newspaper, enough type for normal job printing orders, nonpareil type for the newspaper and enough paper to last a year.
This was in addition to the required year's supply of food and $600 in cash.
Two more men had decided to join them in the dash: George Allen, Eugene's brother, and Ed Brandt, a relative of Hickman.
Outside Skagway Allen met a Seattle friend named Joe Dizard, who decided to accompany Allen and help him build a cabin to have ready while the other men came as fast as possible with the newspaper equipment.
Allen and Dizard were on their way to Dawson City when they met Curtis on Windy Arm of Lake Tagish. They had no trouble enlisting Curtis to go along and share experience in the area.
The three men with a three-dog team pulling a sled struck out for the Mounties' Tagish Post and here they ran into problems because they were traveling too light. Allen and Dizard were traveling with only about 200 pounds of food and Allen had only about $15 in his pocket. Curtis was carrying his camera equipment, a change of clothes, a few dollars and very little food.
It was a touchy situation because the Yukon ice was beginning to break and there were stories of men falling through the rotten ice and drowning. Allen was in a hurry to stake his newspaper claim in Dawson City, and Dizard was in a hurry to
stake a gold claim on Walsh Creek, where he had heard a new strike had been made. It didn't make that much difference to Curtis because he was along for the adventure and would return to the passes when Allen and Dizard were safely on their way.
There was only one way they could get past the Mountie post at Tagish and that was for someone to go back to the post on Lake Bennett and get passes the Mounties there could issue to permit people to go down the river with less than the required equipment. Curtis volunteered to go for them since he had more snow experience than the others. It was 60 miles each way, on soft snow that made walking difficult and lake ice that was turning blue. Yet Curtis made the 120-mile trip in only four days.
The next few days terrified all three men, and Allen later wrote that they were the most dangerous of the trip and perhaps of his entire life. The Mounties advised them to sit still for the next several days while the ice thawed but they were in a hurry and went ahead.
“After the snow got soft and the ice rotten," Allen later wrote, "it was almost suicide to move over the Klondike Trail. We were now facing that danger with the advance of April. But Joe was all pepped up over that reported gold strike on Walsh
Creek--which did not interest me at all--and I was just as determined to get to Dawson.
“What I wanted to do was get past the death-defying White Horse Rapids in Fifty Mile River [the Yukon between Marsh Lake and Miles Canyon] while I could still get across on the ice. That would let me get down to the foot of Lake Laberge, at the start of the Thirty Mile River. There I would be in a position to shoot that river on a raft into the Lewes River and so on into the main Yukon and to Dawson, while the other stampeders were held up on the lakes behind, waiting for the ice to break up.
"Fifty Mile and Thirty Mile Rivers were swift streams. The ice would break up first in them, while the lakes behind were still frozen. There was no trail on the right below Whitehorse because of the precipitous cliffs, so that to get below them the stampeders either had to portage around the right hand side of Miles Canyon, then cut across on river ice below the canyon, and portage around Whitehorse on the left hand side, or else it was necessary to wait until the ice was out of the whole river and shoot both Miles Canyon and White Horse Rapids on a raft, scow or in a boat.
“You can see what it meant to me to get down there and across the river between Miles Canyon and Whitehorse before the river ice broke up, and already the reports were coming in that the ice was going out any day, and was already too dangerous to travel on."
On April 8, 1898, the three men got up at 3 a.m. and began the dangerous three-day journey. They traveled 10 miles down the river below Marsh Lake, and Allen said that the ice was breaking "like rotten cloth, and every step we had to watch that we did not plunge to death through an air pocket or a rotten spot."
Several times during that day they were caught on floating cakes of ice, three men, three dogs pulling a loaded sled, twirling down the frigid river in a dangerous Keystone Kops routine. Each time the ice broke free beneath their feet, they were able to jump to more solid ice or to shore without getting too wet.
“Lord," Allen wrote in his diary that night. "I hope the ice holds up and gives us a chance."
Nobody slept well that night. They broke camp early and headed down the moving, snapping ice toward Miles Canyon, where the water was so fast that ice seldom formed. On the way they were struck by a severe snowstorm that held them up for a few hours. The portage trail around Miles Canyon led over a steep hill and when Curtis and Allen went ahead of Dizard and the dogs to scout it, they found the ice covered with running water.
“The ice is still there," Allen wrote in his diary, "but there is nearly a foot of water over it now and it may go out any minute. Lord, but what next is going to happen to us?"
The day was clear and the sun bright, and on the way back to Dizard and the dogs, Allen was stricken with snow blindness.
"This minute I can see nothing in the light and my eyes are throbbing as though they were being torn from their sockets," he wrote, "and I can hardly see to write these lines. Yet tonight we must work all night packing our outfits on our backs up around Miles Canyon and across that rotten ice below. No one but a fool would dare death like that, but we are going to make it!"
The next day, Sunday, April 10, Allen wrote that he worked with eyes that throbbed incessantly and stayed with Curtis and Dizard all night, packing everything over the portage. When they prepared to cross the river, water was swirling over the ice a food deep or more. Allen took a stick and walked out onto the ice, paying out a rope fastened to a shovel handle anchored in the solid shore ice. He still could hardly see and suffered a mild case of vertigo as the ice swayed and bucked beneath him. He reached the opposite shore safely and fastened the other end of the rope to a tree so they could use it as a safety line. Then, the two other men carried their loads across. By the time their gear and dogs were across, the water was knee-deep.
“Hardly has we made that final trip when the ice went out with a sickening, crushing roar," Allen wrote that night, "and now the river between Miles Canyon and White Horse Rapids flows unhampered behind us. That was the nearest I ever came to death, and about as near as I ever want to get until my time comes.
“We're across! That's the big thing. Nothing can stop us from making it through!"
The trio arrived at Lake Laberge on April 15, where they caught up with a rival printing plant they had heard was ahead of them. It would be delayed until the owners could build a raft large enough to carry it safely. Allen and Dizard made arrangements to float down the river on a large passenger raft that was almost complete. Curtis turned around and went back to the passes, taking the dog team and sled back to meet Allen's partners.
After spending a year on the trails, Curtis decided he should go on down to Dawson City before freezeup in 1898. He stayed until the high lakes began freezing. A friend from Seattle named Wesley Young was with a group of young men on the White Pass Trail and Curtis said he warned them against trying to cross on the ice. They ignored him and two men went through the ice and drowned.
He later told of being so destitute at one point that he was walking along the river trying to get the courage to beg for food when he found a few coins on the bank, enough to save him the indignity of begging. Years later he also told of watching a boat go through the White Horse Rapids that appeared doomed because it went crosswise to the current and the dark figure at the stern did nothing to help. At the last moment a side current caught it and spun it back around with the bow into the rapids. Curtis said he was impressed with the occupant's boat-handling abilities and he watched as it raced past him. The dark figure in the stern was a large black dog, apparently set adrift by accident.
Curtis hiked on down to Lake Bennett and joined a group of men who were building boats for the trip downriver. He only identified one of them in his diary and in photo captions, Charles Ainsworth. They went down the river and that fall filed a claim at 60 Above Sulfur, which means theirs was the 60th claim upstream from the discovery claim on Sulfur Creek.
They built a snug spruce log cabin and put real glass in the windows, probably some of Curtis's plates for negatives. The cabin was the only worthwhile thing the men built; the claim was worthless. It was near the streambed and every time they tried to sink a shaft, the creek waters seeped up into the hole. Like all Klondike miners, they worked through the winter when the streams supposedly would be frozen and wouldn't flood their shaft. Then they could build a fire in the hole, keep it going for several hours, put it out and dip out the water, mud and ore-bearing gravel, then build another fire.
Because the creek was so near, to be safe they built a dam to divert it away from their claim, but as Curtis's diary entries show, nothing worked right:

December 25, 1898: A little colder. Kept working on dam to freeze it as much as possible. Got a lot of wood. We had 2 hours' sunshine today. The success of our winter's work hangs upon this one thing; whether the dam holds or not.

January 1, 1899: Watched water rise slowly. The bench on west side of Sulfur must have discharged gold on the surface and perhaps there is still a deposit on the hillside. This may be small but rich. Two small streams flow down the bank, each seeming to carry gold and at the foot gold is found. This is not on bedrock but on muck which also carries a little gold.

January 3: Clean out for morning and evening fires. Day clear and cold probably about 30 below. A little water drains into hole each day but probably only the ice in the ground. Put in evening fire but do not light it until 9 p.m. When Charley goes to light he finds water dripping from northwest corner and so did not dare light a fire.

January 4: Get up very late. Day cold. Water still dripping in hole and also forcing on top of ice. We cut a trench from below trying to tap the stream and although we get water we still do not decrease the force above the dam. Boys from 63 came down for a game of cribbage.

January 12: Fletcher, Fredericks and myself go down to 57 Above. Go down in shaft. They seem to have bottomed the hole on a hill of bedrock. They have drifted off on three sides down an incline. In one place behind a boulder they found some pay. Bedrock seems in waves. A very thick layer of gravel. Later I was at 63 and down in shaft. They have gone through considerable slide and yellow clay. They went eight feet through bedrock and later came back up and built a platform. A very thin layer of poorly washed gravel. Depth of hole, 19 feet four inches; to windlass floor, about 18 feet. I fire No. 2 as we plan to sink it to bedrock if possible, otherwise we have decided to abandon the claim.
Curtis's last diary entry is on Thursday, February 16, 1899, when he had given up on the claim and was back concentrating on photography. He and Eugene Allen had planned for Curtis to work as photographer and engraver on the newspaper Allen founded, the Klondike Nugget, but the newspaper was never very profitable for Allen, although it outlived its competitors. Allen eventually lost it through bad investments.
“If I had a few more friends such as I have I would succeed very well," Curtis wrote as his last diary entry.
He went back to Seattle later that year after being gone nearly two years. He returned home very much his own man after the experience of the Klondike. During Asahel’s absence Edward had gone to Alaska with the Harriman scientific expedition and returned with excellent photos that attracted a lot of attention throughout the country, and equally important, he had made contacts on the expedition that transformed him from a local studio photographer into a famous documentary photographer. When Asahel at last returned, he and Edward had a serious quarrel over who owned the negatives of photos Asahel had taken on the trip. They never spoke to each other again. Edward became the foremost photographer of Native Americans in history, and was underwritten by J.P. Morgan. Asahel operated a studio in Seattle for nearly four decades, documenting the growth of the city and much of the Northwest. He was one of the three founders of The Mountaineers, and resigned a few years later after several heated debates with club members on the growth vs. conservation issue.
When he died in 1941, his children sent a telegram to Edward. Edward never responded.