The discovery of gold in the Klondike region of the Yukon Territory brought both the possibility of enormous wealth and the reality of achieving such wealth. Shipments of gold returning to Seattle brought untold prosperity to the Pacific Northwest. Many were eager to seek their fortune. The Filson Company, founded in 1897, outfitted many who made the journey north.
However, to get to the Klondike gold, one had to make an arduous journey, first by steamship to the ports of Skagway or Dyea, and then overland to the Yukon district via the Chilkoot Pass Trail from Dyea or the White Pass Trail from Skagway. All of these men and women relied upon a supply system that primarily used pack horses and mules to shuttle equipment, supplies, and the occasional mother lode of gold over the trails.
The White Pass Trail was especially treacherous from White Pass City along the final four miles to its summit. This part of the trail, with its steep grades, jagged rocks, and coating of ice and snow, was traversable only by pack animal and on foot. Between 1897 and 1898, the trail became the final resting place of over 3,000 pack horses and mules that perished as a result of mistreatment, malnutrition, and exhaustion from being overburdened with loads that weighed upwards of four hundred pounds. The death of these animals represents a dark chapter in the story of the Klondike gold rush. For some of those who took part in it, the memories of this sacrifice lingered on for years.
Florence Hartshorn was one of those who had survived the Klondike. Her initiation to the great northern regions was to travel over the White Pass Trail in 1898, to the trailhead of the summit known as White Pass City, where her husband served as the village smithy for the prospectors who followed. Like countless others who passed along the trail, she bore witness to scores of horse and mule carcasses that lay scattered across the mountainside.
Their hearts turned to stone- those which did not break- and they became the beasts, the men on the Dead Horse Trail." -Jack London, Journalist. The God of His Fathers, Doubleday Page & Co., New York, 1914, p. 70-80
In 1928, Hartshorn and other members of the White Pass Memorial Committee paid a visit to the sculptor James A. Wehn in Seattle. The group outlined their desires for a new plaque to be designed by the sculptor, dedicated to the pack animals of the Klondike gold rush. However, funding was still in short supply for the new memorial. A solution came in the form of a new patron, someone who had also lived and survived the Klondike experience firsthand.
John “Packer Jack” Newman had settled in Seattle later in life, after going north to seek his fortune like so many others shortly before the arrival of the 20th century. His profession was keyed to his trademarked name: as an animal packer, he first operated a train of pack mules out of Dyea to transport freight over Chilkoot Pass. He later worked for the Brooks Packing Company in Alaska, which operated pack trains over both Chilkoot Pass and White Pass Trail. At the time, packing Klondike freight over the White Pass Trail was in high demand, and one of the quickest ways to become rich, given the extortionist prices many packers charged for their services.
“There ain’t no choice, one's hell and the other damnation.” -Martha Ferguson McKeown, The Trail Lead North: Mont Hawthorne’s Story, 1948.
In Newman’s case, he had made his fortune both in gold prospecting and providing packing services for others seeking their fortunes in the Klondike. In a candid assessment of his own role in this orgy of animal cruelty, Newman observed, “I was as brutal as the rest . . . but we were all mad—mad for gold, and we did things we lived to regret.”
Not long after Hartshorn’s group, Newman paid his own visit to the Wehn studio. The meeting led to financial backing finally in place to have the memorial plaque designed, modeled, and cast first into plaster, then into bronze. The former packer offered to pay the entire cost of the commission, with one caveat: he would write the inscription to accompany the surface of the plaque. the official agreement for the commission took nearly a year to complete, at which point he returned to the sculptor’s studio on July 3, 1929.
The memorial plaque Wehn designed offered a somber view of two animals—a pack horse and a pack mule—both with heads down, burdened with heavy bundles, walking in a line to the right. The rocky trail lies beneath their hooves, as each animal lifts a leg to continue onward. The sculptor has captured a still shot of an action that was repeated tens of thousands of times. On the left side of the plaque a rising sun peeks just above the rim of the trail, its rays radiating out in sharp lines.
The dead are speaking in memory of us. Three thousand pack animals that laid bones on these awful hills during the Gold Rush of 1897–1898. We now thank those listening souls that heard our groans across the stretch of years. We waited but not in vain.
In late August 1929 the completed bronze plaque was dedicated at a spot called Inspiration Point, at an elevation of 2,400 feet above sea level, near the summit of White Pass, seventeen miles from Skagway. The memorial was set into a square stone pedestal (overlooking the morbidly named “Dead Horse Gulch”). Florence Hartshorn unveiled the memorial in the presence of over two hundred observers, which included many who occasioned to be touring the north while traveling aboard the steamship Dorothy Alexander. Many of those in the audience were surviving “sourdoughs” who had originally participated in the Klondike gold rush.
Today, visitors to Inspiration Point can still view the bronze memorial to the pack horses and mules. Newman’s choice for the memorial’s inscription was poignant, and still serves as a reminder of the cost that was paid in suffering:
The dead are speaking in memory of us. Three thousand pack animals that laid bones on these awful hills during the Gold Rush of 1897–1898. We now thank those listening souls that heard our groans across the stretch of years. We waited but not in vain.
