A tale of horrid suffering, ending in a tragic suicide, is brought by the mail steamer Warrimoo from Vancouver. A young Englishman named G.E. Richardson and two other adventurers, allured by the stories of wealth to be found in the ice-bound regions of Alaska, started from Ashcroft to Glenora, in the Klondyke district.
Misled by an advertisement, they only took provisions for a journey of 840 miles, whereas they had to traverse 1,400 miles. Before they could reach their destination their food gave out. Then they ate their horses, and finally they became separated. Richardson met some Indians, who told him that at one spot where he counted the bones of a hundred horses, the man had lain down and died rather than eat the half-starved beasts of burden which had helped them to wallow on through the mud and mire to that spot.
Then Richardson struggled over thirty miles of soggy moss, which was the scene of a thousand horrors. Emerging at last from the morass, he struck the 'Poisonous Plane,' so called because of the presence of a weed fatal to animals. The stench here was awful from the carcasses of hundreds of horses, the victims of eating the plant. Still dragging himself on, he continually passed partially putrid bodies of horses, abandoned by desperate prospectors.
After escaping one quagmire he came to a tree on which was printed 'Eat here and turn back. Beyond is he Slough of Despond.' He ate, but such a meal! A handful of roots and a mouthful of rotten horse. When on the point of death he was found by a party of Indians, who conducted him to the camp of two prospectors, where, frenzied by the sight of food, he rushed at their fire, seized some half-cooked pieces of bacon which were being fried there, slid on the floor and ate the food ravenously. The prospectors rose to resent the theft, but when they saw the emaciated wreck of what had once been a man, and heard him sob out the story of his sufferings pity took the place of resentment.
Next day Richardson wandered from the camp to an Indian burying ground, where, crawling on to one of the platforms on which the Indians place their dead to safeguard them from the ravages of wild animals, he blew out his brains, and was there found by the prospectors lying dead across the skeleton of an Indian.
From a 19th century newspaper
Keywords: Klondyke, Klondike, tragedy, suicide
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