British Columbia Magazine, Spring 2010

“On our way to [Sheep] Camp we were overtaken by an ox-team, the owner of which lifted little [Emilie] and placed her on the loaded wagon, which gave her quite a rest. There were so few children on the trail that our little girl attracted a great deal of attention and every one had a smile for her. One day a man said, “God bless you dear, you are just the size of my little girl at home,” and tears sprang to his eyes as he pathetically spoke of his child.”

            —Lulu Alice Craig, Glimpses of Sunshine and Shade in the Far North, 1900.

 On March 2, 1898, nine-year-old Emilie Craig of Denver, Colorado, arrived at the summit of the Chilkoot Trail with her Aunt Lulu and her parents, Morte and Nelle. The windswept mountain pass marked the boundary between the United States and Canada and the halfway point between Dyea, Alaska, and Bennett, British Columbia. Straddling the Coast Mountains and providing a link between the Pacific Ocean and the headwaters of the Yukon River, this 53-kilometre wilderness pathway was the most direct and inexpensive route to the Klondike gold fields.

Throngs of men and a few women milled about on the pass, waiting to report to the North-West Mounted Police officers who manned the border crossing and collected customs duties. Spotting Emilie, warmly dressed in heavy leggings, a knee-length coat, and a wool hood, one of the Mounties came over and congratulated her on being the second boy to reach the pass.

“I’m not a boy. I’m a girl,” she protested, tugging off her hood to reveal a tumble of long dark curls.

“Well, in that case,” he replied, “you’re the first little girl to climb the Chilcoot [sic].”

Despite her considerable accomplishment, Emily Craig wasn’t as much of a pioneer as she was led to believe. Long before the Chilkoot Trail was adopted as the road to riches by the Klondike stampeders, it had been a key trade route for the coastal Tlingit and inland-dwelling Tagish and Tutchone peoples. Generations of children had made the demanding journey with their parents.

Non-native prospectors, too, had been using the trail since the 1880s to reach the upper Yukon River basin. As the number of fortune hunters on the Chilkoot route increased, local First Nations men, women, and children found regular seasonal work helping to pack supplies over the mountains.

Arriving from the B.C. gold fields in 1887, Ben Moore was surprised to find “[n]ative women and their young daughters and sons from ten years of age up . . . packing from fifty to seventy-five and one hundred pounds on their backs for miners, earning from ten to twenty dollars per day.”

And so, little Emilie Craig was not the first girl to reach the Chilkoot summit. Nor was she the first non-native girl to cross the pass. That distinction goes to California-born Crystal Snow.

In 1887, George and Anna Snow had moved from Seattle with their daughter, Crystal, and son, Monte, to perform vaudeville theatre in Juneau, Alaska. There, the siblings’  song–and-dance numbers so charmed audiences that the children often had to take shelter in the wings as miners showered the stage with silver dollars and gold pieces. When the deluge ended, the children would emerge to take their bows and gleefully scoop up the coins.

George Snow decided to move his family on again in 1894, this time to Forty Mile, a rough gold-mining community midway up the Yukon River. In April, joined by two of George’s friends, the family headed up the Chilkoot Trail. Through mud and slush, Monte, then 12, and Crystal, almost 10, dragged a sled loaded with a portable organ and other theatrical accoutrements. The men packed the rest of the party’s outfit in relays; at times, they had to carry the children across fast-flowing river channels that cut the trail. Crystal got no rest the first night, remembering later how “the forest whispered overhead and every sound . . . was a bear.”

It took the Snows five days to travel the roughly 20 kilometres to Sheep Camp—the last habitable stopping place before the Chilkoot Pass. There they camped for two weeks while the men transferred the supplies to a cache on the B.C. side of the summit, returning to camp each night.

Anna and the children knew that the more than six-kilometre climb to the summit would severely test their fortitude. Worst would be the final kilometre, where the trail shot skyward at a nearly 45-degree angle. At the height of the Klondike stampede, in the winter of 1897–1898, this gruelling section was dubbed the Golden Stairs after some entrepreneurs chopped 1,500 steps into the snow, rigged up a rope handrail, and started charging all climbers a fee. In April 1894, though, the precipitous incline was a featureless snowfield.

The first time the Snows tried to reach the Chilkoot Pass, a blizzard drove them back to Sheep Camp. On their next attempt, a storm trapped them on the mountain. They had time only to throw their tent over a hole in a snowbank and drag their grub box and stove inside. For three days the wind raged and their canvas roof sunk ever lower. Crystal later recalled that she and her brother “played eskimo . . . happily ignorant of the fact that had the blizzard lasted a half day longer rescue would have come too late.”

By the time the weather cleared and passing travellers dug the family out, the Snows had eaten most of their food on hand. They were forced to return to Sheep Camp for the night, only to set off again before dawn, fuelled by a meagre breakfast of cold biscuits and leftover roast grouse. The men broke trail through the deep, fresh snow, while Anna, Monte, and Crystal struggled along in their wake. This time, they conquered the summit, and Crystal celebrated their success by bursting into song.

Only one other non-native child is known to have travelled the Chilkoot Trail before it became world famous. Vera Barnes was seven when she made the crossing with her parents in March 1896.

“I would get cold—ooh, so cold!” she later told a newspaper reporter. “I would have to stamp my feet and slap my hands together to get them warm. I did walk fifteen miles in one day, though—without any dinner, too. The summit is a steep, steep place. . . . I slipped once and nearly fell, but one of the men caught me and straightened me up again. It was so high and steep that nobody wanted to look back.” 

While the Klondike gold rush dramatically increased traffic on the Chilkoot Trail, youthful travellers remained a rarity. Few parents were willing to expose their children to the perils of the journey, and some that did paid the supreme price.

Juneau residents Fred and Ella Card set out in the spring of 1897 with high hopes and their firstborn child in their arms. They made it only as far as Lindeman Lake, about 15 kilometres into B.C., before their seven-month-old daughter succumbed to an unidentified illness.

Among those who comforted the parents were Mr. and Mrs. J.D. McKay. Little did they know that, a few weeks later, they would bury their own infant daughter beside the Card baby. The bereaved parents built a picket fence around the two little graves, then carried on.

The markers in Lindeman Lake’s stampede cemetery have long since been weathered beyond legibility, but a few kinnikinnik-shrouded burial mounds are still visible today—a reminder that the Chilkoot Trail was a place of tragedy for some of the 20,000 to 30,000 Klondike stampeders who passed this way.

Fortunately, of the few children who took part in the Chilkoot adventure, most survived and look back on the experience with pride and even pleasure.

“Of our group, father and I fared best,” Emilie Craig told a Victoria Daily Colonist reporter in 1959. Although her mother and aunt “were near the end of their endurance” when they reached the summit, Emilie was full of energy. An Australian doctor had carried her halfway up the Golden Stairs on his shoulders, and her father had taken her the rest of the way. 

Florence Barrett was 11 when she trekked the trail in 1897 with her parents and her two brothers, Freddy, 5, and Lawrence, 13. Florence also rode to the summit in style and never forgot the thrill.

“I remember my father’s settling me on his shoulders and, with staff in hand, beginning that last heart-breaking, dangerous climb that sent many more of the faint-hearted back to the lesser dangers of civilization. To me . . . it was a glorious game.”