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Sev en •————————————• Inside, Hell Begins Perrin and Knudson’s journey had a rough start as soon as the Taku left Juneau. Lynn Canal, a long fjord that is a thousand feet deep in some places and lined with the gloomy Coast Mountains, can turn from placid to stormy in a matter of minutes. That was exactly what happened on their trip: a howling wind attacked the ship shortly after it left the docks. By 1:00 am, about eight hours after its departure, the boat had made only a few miles when the fire died in the steam boiler. The Taku began taking on water. The waves shoved the boat onto the rocks, and as the crew desperately tried to restart the engine, the captain contemplated abandoning ship. After hours of pumping out the water and fiddling with the boiler, the harried crew managed to start the fire again and floated the battered vessel off the rocks, heading north once more. But by now the storm had increased in strength, almost as if there was a bottled-­ up hurricane blasting around the channel, and the captain decided to drop anchor in Bruner Bay to ride out the powerful winds in safety. After several more hours, the Taku started again for Dyea, only to stop at Seward Harbor for wood and other supplies. Perrin also noted in his diary that “a Siwash buck and three squaws” climbed on board.1 Finally, at 9:00 am on June 9, the little steamer chugged up Taiya Inlet and reached Dyea. The voyage, which normally took only hours, had lasted two days. It was a harbinger for the perils that lay in store for Perrin and Knudson. 68 h a r d s h i p s The small settlement of Dyea (pronounced “Dy-­ EE”) was, like many other Alaskan names, an Anglicized corruption of an Indian word, in this case Taiya. This word means “pack” or “load,” which is certainly appropriate, since Dyea was the terminus for the Chilkoot Trail, which leads into the Yukon River valley.2 Although there were many ways to enter the Yukon country, the two most popular routes began at Dyea and Skagway. Each place was then little more than a cluster of cabins, separated by about four miles of trail. Skagway, another bastardized English version of an Indian word—Skagua, or “windy place”—was the gateway to the White Pass, little more than a footpath through the mountains, and about 600 feet lower than the Chilkoot.3 But the White Pass itself was not an easy trail, and had its own dangers. A seasoned prospector summed up the two routes best: “There ain’t no choice. One’s hell. The other’s damnation.”4 Dyea sat on a flat piece of land and was no more than “an Indian village of 250, a white town of four.” A forlorn, muddy little patch of squalid tents and cabins that had sprouted up around John Healy’s trading post, the village was located at the end of a long inlet and possessed no harbor or unloading dock. Any vessel that wished to land passengers or goods had to bring the cargo to the shore by way of rowboats or barges. The teamsters running the small boats generally dumped the goods wherever they chose, right onto the rocky beach. What made it especially frustrating for travelers was that the packers typically charged twenty dollars an hour when the tide was out and then fifty dollars an hour when the water came barreling up Taiya Inlet.5 Perrin and Knudson’s steamer anchored about two miles from shore, about as close as the ship could go without running aground. A rowboat took their provisions off the Taku and brought them to within about three hundred yards of shore. From that point on, the two men had to carry the entire load on their backs, making several trips through the thigh-­ high icy water as they ferried their goods to dry land. After two hours, with all their provisions safe, the half-­ Inside, Hell Begins 69 frozen and exhausted men barely had enough strength to draw themselves up onto the shore. They hired a teamster with a wagon and moved their goods about a mile inland over a rough road to John Healy’s trading post. The two men sat down to dinner at Healy’s—the first meal they had eaten all day. Then Perrin began negotiations with some Chilkoot Indians...

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