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Postmen
Excerpt - Pioneering postmen
The best bunk in the roadhouse, the best seat at the dinner table and the first service of pancakes in the morning was the mail driver’s due, wrote Judge James Wickersham in “Old Yukon.”
 During the gold-rush era, Dawson mail workers, pictured right, kept busy sorting thousands of piece of mail destined for stampeders in the Klondike and points beyond.
Photo courtesy of Yukon National Archives
All other vehicles had to give way to the mail teams as they swung along the trail. There were no hardier, braver or more capable men than these pioneer mail carriers of the Yukon, Wickersham said. Sporting a striped-denim parka trimmed with wolverine fur, which does not gather frost, and wearing a gaudily beaded pair of Tena gauntlet gloves, the mail carrier would unhitch his team when he reached the station or roadhouse at the end of the day’s run, turn all his dogs, except the leader, loose to rustle for themselves, and then bring his leader into the roadhouse.
“The leader slept under his bed at night – and woe unto him who complains about it!” Wickersham wrote.
One of the best and most widely known mail carriers was Ben S. Downing, the man who laid out the first mail route from Dawson to Nome. The tall, sinewy mail carrier from Maine, a typical frontiersman, had left his New England home as a lad, followed the sea for a while, and then turned his attention to Texas and the cattle ranges. He wound up in Montana after driving cattle herds over the Chisholm Trail, but the discovery of gold in the Black Hills lured him to South Dakota. There he pulled freight and mining supplies to the diggings, until he was injured in a fight with a band of Indians who swarmed down on his wagon train. Ben carried an Indian rifle ball in his body for the rest of his life as a token of that experience.
 Gold seekers who pitched tents and scrambled to find gold on the beaches of Nome, seen here in 1899, longed for letters from home.
Photo courtesy of University of Washington
Arthur Churchill Warner, WAR0390
News of the Klondike strike in 1897 drifted down from the North and drew him to the new land of opportunity. But Downing found a claim that had few takers: to set up a mail route from Dawson to the new gold metropolis of Nome where thousands of prospectors waited anxiously for news from home.
Stampeders gather in Nome
By the fall of 1899, more than 3,000 people were in Nome, with thousands more on the way. The stampede from Dawson and other gold mining areas began after “Three Lucky Swedes” – John Byrnteson, Erik Lindblom and Jafet Lindeberg, who was actually a Norwegian – discovered bits of gold in Anvil Creek west of Cape Nome in 1898. Soon the trio had staked out 43 claims between them and, by power of attorney, 47 others for friends, relatives and backers.
 A crowd gathers outside the new post office in Nome in 1900.
Photo courtesy of University of Washington
Wilhelm Hester Collection, HES237
When word of this leaked out, hordes of gold seekers descended on the Nome area, unaware that the Swedes had not yet found anything close to a major gold strike. The chaotic scene that unfolded involved rampant claim jumping and litigation. Adding to the confusion were the countless claims filed by power of attorney for individuals who, in many cases, didn’t exist.
Confusion and unrest reigned in those early stages of the rush, and the three Scandinavians must have felt anything but lucky as the blame for the whole fiasco began to fall on them. Rumors spread that they had filed on all the productive prospects when, actually, little gold had been found by anyone.
But two men soon changed all that. A soldier, assigned to a small detachment sent up from St. Michael to guard the unruly settlement of disgruntled miners, and an old prospector from Idaho named John Hummel, found gold in the sands of Nome’s beaches. Within days, gold was discovered for 40 miles along the water line in either direction from Nome.
A town exploded into life along the beaches, and almost overnight Nome turned into a bustling city filled with crowded streets, 100 saloons and dozens of stores, restaurants and “hotels” in tents and hastily constructed wooden buildings.
Frenzied digging on the beach ensued. One observer noted, “Every man in Nome, be he physician or carpenter, lawyer or barkeeper, dropped his usual vocation and went to work with a shovel and rocker.”
During the summer of 1899, gold worth more than $2 million was taken from the beaches, and by the summer of 1900, the Nome “poor man’s gold rush” reached its peak. More than 20,000 people crowded the city and beaches looking for gold – and mail….
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