C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

XXVIIITHE LADIES, THE GWICH'IN, AND THE RATswampy Peel River Portage. When, in June 1888, he surveyed it for theGeological Survey of Canada, William Ogilvie proposed that the pass be namedfor McDougall (Ogilvie 63, 64). The name stuck, but the HBC had alreadybegun to curtail its interest in the route; in 1867, with the annexation of Alaskaby the United States, any route that involved passing at some point throughforeign territory lost its appeal.If geo-political developments prevented the fur trade from making the Ratfamous, the gold rush rectified matters at the end of the nineteenth century."The back door to the Klondike," as it became known, served as the chosen routeof some 400 of the more than 500 men and women who descended on FortMcPherson during the race for the precious metal in 1897 and 1898. "Of all theEdmonton routes to the Yukon," wroteJ.G. MacGregor, "the Mackenzie-RatRiver route, the longest, took the least time. It was also the easiest and by far themost practical. ... The 1898 Lamoureux contingent crossed by that route andtheir elapsed time from Edmonton to the Yukon was eighty-six days" (Klondike166). Not all writers have agreed with MacGregor; Charles Camsell, himself aveteran of the punishing Liard-Pelly River route, considered the Rat "the mostroundabout and impractical route of all. Most of those who followed it turnedback and never reached their destination" (59). Certainly, not all Klondikerscould match the Lamoureux' break-neck pace, Travelling over the route in thesummer of 1898 with her husband, Mrs Horsfall eventually reached the Dawsonarea; so did Emily Craig and her husband (MacGregor, Klondike 59. II5, 169). butthey spent two winters en route. (An editorial note to Chapter 15 contains moreinformation about Emily Craig's journey [272-73].) Along with Mrs LeFrancois.Craig spent the winter of 1897-98 at Destruction City (MacGregor, Klondike169). According to some, this place garnered its name because so many prospectors"had either perished by drowning or had lost all of their gear" (Zealley,"Lazarus" 3). In a memoir apparently written in 1947, Englishman AlphonsoWaterer recalled that Destruction City had first been named Little Dawson; thechange of name for the eleven log cabins "was most appropriate as [tl here waswhere the scurvy first made its appearance and where many parties came to grief'(28). (Waterer spent much of the winter, probably 1898-99 [Robert Gordon656], at Shacktown, twenty-nine kilometres farther upstream [48]). Accordingto other sources, about forty Klondikers, anticipating the steep ascent of the Rat,halted at the end of the slack water, and" cut down their boats. Since this placesoon became littered with discarded parts of boats, the men called it Destruction