MIKE MAHONEY-MORE ABOUT FREIGHTING WITH DOGS IN THE KLONDIKE

When writing about the history of sled dogs and dog mushing, primary sources can be a problem. The main reason for this is that dog mushers are not the most reliable raconteurs, they tend to romanticize or embellish or even fabricate. And it is not just dog mushers themselves who are guilty of this. Jack London is perhaps one of the best examples of a respected author who never let the facts get in the way of a good story.





Blogging is a bit different from researching and writing historical articles. It seems to me that blogging is much more interactive and maybe a little more forgiving It’s o.k. for a blogger to say that they really don’t know the specifics of a particular situation and it is fine to ask for feedback and help from others (readers) who just might have the answer, in some ways not unlike a wiki, that invites all readers to collaborate in the production of the final product. Having said that, I do believe that the ideal is to post blogs that contain information that is as accurate as possible, information gleaned from what are termed primary sources.


So I turned to Google, specifically the University of Illinois library website, for the following definition of what is termed a primary source. “If you are seeking to learn about the past, primary sources of information are those that provide first-hand accounts of the events, practices, or conditions you are researching. In general, these are documents that were created by the witnesses or first recorders of these events at about the time they occurred. Primary sources also include first-hand accounts that were documented later, such as autobiographies, memoirs, and oral histories. However, the most useful primary sources are usually considered to be those that were created closest to the time period you’re researching”.



So it was with this debate in my mind that I started reading the book Klondike Mike -- An Alaskan Odyssey, written by Merrill Denison and published in 1943. I may have heard of this book in the past but I think I also may have confused it with a movie called Mr. Mike, which I seem to remember starred Nelson Eddy and was about a newly married couple travelling to the north by dog team, mounties and someone singing “I am calling you……”. In any event, I was a bit sceptical when I picked up this book but was intrigued when the author devoted the Forward to addressing the whole matter of primary sources. She writes, “although the story is told in the third person, for many practical reasons, it belongs to Klondike Mike. It is a record of his own experiences as they appeared to him at the time. I have put down what he has told me, without taking liberties with the material…documentation would have been entirely possible. My research uncovered many newspaper clippings, old receipts and memoranda, as well as the testimony of other sourdoughs who corroborated the salient details of his story”.



This is a book about the Klondike experiences of Mike Mahoney who journeyed to Dawson City before the big rush of ‘98 when he was only 21 years of age. Born in Buckingham Quebec, Mahoney was a big powerful young man and he became noted for his feats of endurance and strength. The more I read of this book, the more I was convinced that it was factual. At the time it was written, Mahoney was in his early 60’s and was a successful businessman living in Ottawa Ontario. He shared his Yukon experiences with the author when they would meet over a period of about ten years.



What is perhaps most relevant for this blog is the fact that while Klondike Mike Mahoney was a gold miner and a labourer, he was first and foremost a dog musher and a freighter. The sections of this book that are devoted to this aspect of his northern experiences provide very valuable, and I believe credible information about sled dogs and dog mushing during the Klondike Gold Rush. This material augments those things that I have posted in earlier blogs regarding freighting during this period. Having said that, there are clearly errors as well as some myths presented in this book, which suggests that when writing about anything from the past, a primary source of information alone is often not enough. I propose quoting, primarily from Chapter 4, and then commenting on each section, with my comments in square [ ] brackets.



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“Of all the work he had seen around Dawson or up the creeks, the kind that most appealed to him was freighting. It was clean, a man was his own boss, and it gave him a chance to get around and see something of the country. At Forks [Grand Forks, at the junction of Bonanza and Eldorado Creeks] dog teams kept leaving [sic] and departing, and drivers told him that there was far more business than they could handle. The current rates were thirty cents a pound, a good dog team could haul 800 to 1,000 pounds a trip, and money could also be made filling orders for the mines in Dawson. There were also passengers to carry at $25.00 a trip and a profit to be made buying stuff in town and selling it at the mines” [Here Mahoney is talking about carrying freight between Dawson City proper and the mining claims that were within 15 or 20 miles of Dawson City, travelling over well-used trails and roads].



Mahoney set out to acquire a dog team and the necessary equipment. His first dogs, including his lead dog Scotty came from his closest friend Johnny Gavin. “Use Scotty and Glassy; I’m not working them”. Another neighbour was looking for a home for a big tawny-coated animal named Goldie… “I wish to God I could find a good kind of home for Goldie, he’s got a sweeter disposition than a woman but he eats like a starving wolf”. His fourth dog came from none other than the famous Belinda Mulrooney [Belinda went on to become one of the wealthiest persons in the gold fields, making her money primarily in the hotel business]….“Take Siwash. She don’t seem to belong to anybody. She’s the damnedest thief I ever saw but you’re welcome to her if you want her”. The team was rounded out with two additional dogs, “Joe, a light-coated animal bought from an Indian for one hundred twenty-five dollars, and Jingle, a female husky won by Gavin in a poker game”. [Except for Joe the $125.00 dog, (which sounds about right as the going rate for a team dog during the Klondike Gold Rush), Mahoney was certainly doing the heart-warming thing by rehoming a number of unwanted animals especially when they went on to become one of the finest teams in Dawson City. It does make you wonder just a bit if the author isn’t choosing to embellish the story].



“Mike had one of the most promising-looking teams to be seen around Dawson. Three of the dogs were Huskies and three Malamutes, which meant a cross between the native husky and any one of half a dozen working breeds that had been brought into the country from outside. Scotty and Glassy for example, were both heavy, black-coated animals with the Newfoundland strain predominating. Like many sled dogs Scotty’s tail had been docked, a practice followed so that the breath of one dog would not freeze the tail of the dog ahead of it [this is news to me, I have never heard of this practice before…perhaps a good example of a northern myth]. Goldie had Great Dane and Setter among her forebears, but a garbled lineage combined to give him the disposition of an angel and a heart as big as all out-of-doors. In the three remaining dogs the wolf strain predominated; Siwash looked and behaved as if she were three-quarters wild [It‘s difficult for me to figure out just which dogs were the ‘Huskies‘ and which were the ‘Malamutes’. I believe that the Malamutes referred to are those animals with very mixed breeding, these are the dogs that Jack London referred to as the ‘Outlanders’ in his book The Call of the Wild. His famous dog Buck was an Outlander. So the author is using the term Malamute totally incorrectly for there were indeed Malamutes in the Klondike, beautiful working dogs that came from Alaska and which looked like…..Malamutes. The ‘Huskies’ therefore were the dogs that looked like sled dogs and most-likely were dogs that were native to the north, either Malamutes or what we would term husky crosses, they could also have been Mackenzie River Huskies and even Eskimo Dogs].



“Mike made enquiries at the N.C. [Northern Commercial] store about a sled. There’s one here you can have for twenty-five dollars complete with harness, the clerk said. It came from downriver somewhere and it’s a sort of hybrid, not one thing or the other, that’s why I’m letting it go so cheap.[Downriver would refer to Forty Mile or even Circle City, areas that were settled before gold was discovered in Dawson City and where freighting with dogs had been ongoing for some time]. This sled is sixteen inches between the runners, like a standard seven-foot Yukon model, but it’s over eight feet long. It’s got both a gee pole and handle-bars and the lash ropes aren’t strung the usual way. The main difference is it’ll pack a bigger pay load but it’s harder for the average man to handle. Most drivers won’t touch it because they say an extra foot makes it unhandy on turns and bad going up and down short pitches [This description sounds very much like the typical Yukon sled made famous during the gold rush, essentially a platform designed for use with dogs, horses, humans and even oxen. The musher ran along beside or behind this sled (there was no standing on the back of the runners), the gee pole was used to help steer or slow down the sled. The handlebar was probably just two tree branches fastened along the sides of the sled].



“In working condition, the dogs averaged from one hundred ten to one hundred forty pounds each and from the beginning made an unusually effective team”. [These are big dogs, over twice as large as current long distance dogs. Speed was no-doubt being sacrificed for strength when it came to freighting]. “They were hitched in the conventional Yukon fashion, in which each dog except the sled or swing dog was attached to a single pair of long traces that drew on a small whiffletree in front of the sled. The swing dog worked in a separate pair of traces and could help steer the sled by jumping out of the track and applying its weight at right angles. Next to the lead this was the most important position”. [The author confuses the term swing dog with what should be wheel dog. The dogs were run in tandem, using padded leather collar harness with leather traces. I suppose that the wheel dog could be hitched directly to the sled while the rest of the team would be hitched to the whiffletree (or singletree) that was fastened to the front of the sled. The idea of allowing the wheel dog more freedom to move and therefore to break the heavy sled free seems like a good one. Remember that the musher would no-doubt be standing beside the wheel dog when this was happening, urging the dog on].



It is interesting to read about just how a freighter using dogs actually made money. “In a week from the time he first resolved to become a freighter, he left the N.C. warehouse with a four hundred pound load for one of the claims near the head of Bonanza Creek. He took it gently that first trip to break himself and the dogs in, but on the third day he was back in Dawson with enough orders to make up a bigger load……averaging eight hundred pounds a trip, at thirty cents a pound, and taking two days up and one day down, he was able to clear, what with passengers and commissions, fifty dollars a day after paying for the dogs’ food and his own”.



“While returning from a routine trip above Discovery on Eldorado late one night in December [1897] Mike noticed down the Klondike Valley a strange red glow in the sky. When he reached Dawson an hour later most of the business section lay in ashes…..There had been talk before the fire, of getting mail out but now it rose to an insistent clamour. All those who had been burnt out were anxious to place orders in Seattle or San Francisco for goods to come up with the first boats in the spring. The trading companies, still functioning as the camp’s only bankers, had important drafts to forward. Mine operators and others were eager to send out mail”. [In 1897, Canada had only been a country for 30 years and extending regular mail service to the remote Yukon was in large part just wishful thinking. It is true, there were designated post offices in the Yukon and even designated post masters, but actually getting the mail over the Chilkoot Pass and down the Yukon River, especially in the winter, was easier said than done. In actual fact, much of the government-provided mail service was facilitated by the NWMP and private individuals and companies also provided mail service (for a fee), much as was the case before Canada became a nation].



“Mike received many suggestions that he make the trip. Freighting up the creeks, where there were road houses every ten miles or so, was child’s play compared with what he might encounter on the 650 mile journey over the frozen Yukon to Skagway. Allowing an average of twenty-five miles a day the trip would take a month and he would have to leave Dawson with food enough for the dogs and himself for the entire distance. Allowing two pounds a day for each dog and three to four pounds for himself, that meant 450 pounds dead weight; 500 with firewood, blankets and a stove. With only 500 pounds of pay load, he could not see how he could make as much money as he was making on the creeks”.



"His friend Gavin pointed out that there were posts at Stewart and Selkirk and that from Whitehorse in to Skagway he would probably find numerous outfits frozen in. The N.C. manager convinced him that he would get a dollar an ounce for letters and a good rate for any gold that he could carry…..Mike served notice that he would be leaving for the outside soon after Christmas and would accept letters at one dollar each and express at proportionate rates. He also accepted commissions that he would fill in Skagway or Seattle. Some men gave him spectacles and glasses to be mended, others messages to telegraph to wives, one gave him money to forestall the foreclosure of a mortgage, another a death notice”.



“He decided that he could get along on a diet of two and a half to three pounds a day, consisting of fat bacon, beans, flour, tea and sugar. The dogs presented a much knottier problem. They were all big animals and ferocious eaters. Had it been possible to get dried fish or dry fatty meats like winter-killed caribou, a pound to a pound and a quarter per day per dog would have been enough. The only dog food left in Dawson, however, was fresh frozen fish and so high in water content that each dog required three pounds of it a day. But fortunately he was told about a miner on Hunker Creek who had a cache of frozen horse meat. Mike traded him flour for it, pound for pound. This cut in half the weight of dog food that he needed to carry”. [This suggests that there was a sound understanding of the nutritional needs of working sled dogs. No-doubt, had he been able to cook the food, he would have added oatmeal to this diet as well. Certainly the weight factor explains why dried fish as opposed to fresh frozen fish was preferable when heading out on an extended journey].



“The going was tough for the first two hours. Ironically they proved the hardest of the long white journey up the Yukon. Rested and eager, the dogs sensed that high adventure was in the wind, and with Mike’s cry ‘Get on my beauties’ [there was no saying mush for this fellow] broke into a six-mile trot that held steadily for the first three hours and took them almost to Indian River, where enough miners had located during 1897 to maintain a well-packed trail to Dawson. In no other way could even the big fresh dogs have swept the heavy sled along at such a rate and Mike had to call upon his last reserves of pride to keep up the pace they set”. [This makes it clear that the musher was running along beside or behind the team, definitely not riding on the sled. As the tale of this journey goes on, the dogs settle into a 3-4 m.p.h. pace and occasionally slower as the musher had to snowshoe in front of the team to break trail….but he made it all the way to Skagway in fine style].