James Frey was hardly a trendsetter when he shocked the
literary world with the things he made up in his memoir. You can’t do much
better for embellishment in nonfiction than the team of George Carmack and
George Snow, collaborating on Carmack’s memoir.
When George Carmack rushed to Fortymile to show off the
$12.75 in coarse gold he’d tapped into a Winchester
cartridge, he got a lukewarm reception from the prospectors there. “They would
not believe him, his reputation for truth being somewhat below par,” said
William Ogilvie, trusted surveyor and commissioner of Dawson
City
George T. Snow was an actor who brought vaudeville to gold
camps at Fortymile, Circle City Dawson City Yukon , Snow
got several of his mining friends, including Carmack, to write down their
experiences. To these he applied his showmanship.
It’s tough sorting truth from fiction in the memoir started
by Carmack and finished by Snow. This week I’ve been writing about the divided
loyalties of Kate’s family, to their Tlingit relatives on the one hand and
George Carmack on the other. Of primary importance to the region was access
from the coast to the Yukon River over the Chilkoot
Trail, a route tightly controlled by the coastal Tlingit.
There was another way in, over what came to be called the White
Pass , but out of fear and respect for their Chilkoot relatives,
the Tagish were reluctant to speak of it. In June of 1897, with much
encouragement of Ogilvie, Kate’s brother Jim led Captain William Moore over the
pass, an arduous journey that involved a lot of bushwhacking, as the trail was
used only in winter.
In Carmack’s handwritten memoirs, there are two sentences
about Jim taking him, too, over the White Pass. “I was
about the second white man that ever went over that pass,” Carmack wrote. “I
camped overnight near the place where the station is on the summit.” That’s all
he says on the subject.
Did Jim really take Carmack over the White Pass
that year? Maybe, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense, given Jim’s reluctance to
defy his Chilkoot relations, not to mention the poor condition of the trail.
Writing years after the railroad went in through White
Pass , Snow wrings quite a story out of Carmack’s two sentences:
We went up the Skagway
and over the White Pass; I went to look this route over to see if a peak trail
could not be built from salt water to the Lakes, although I could see that pass
was nearly a thousand feet lower than the upper pass but it was some ten miles
longer and the west side very rough and a pack trail would be very expensive. I
camped one night at the summit right near where the station now is, and sitting
by our campfire I got to thinking about that great unexplored country expanding
for more than a thousand miles North of me. I seemed to have a vision of the
future. I saw a huge locomotive with its long string of coaches gliding through
that rocky divide and heard the echo from its hoarse whistle reverberating from
the mighty granite cliffs. I turned to my companion and said Jim, by and by you
hear big toot, toot, and seem big fire wagon go this way. Jim just gave a
grunt… turned his back to the fire and went to sleep and left me to my visions.
Keep in mind that as memoir, this version doctored by Snow
is used as a primary source. With this sort of embellishment, the nonfiction
writer has a good deal of sorting to do.