Murder on the Chilkoot
Trail
by Charles Shugart Jr.
EXCERPT
Prologue
Skagway Alaska – 1898
Eighteen-year old Jonathan Tibbs watched from shore as the
ship backed away from the Skagway pier and out into deeper
water. Slowly it turned, aimed south, and began its long journey
to San Francisco. Michelle Lee Foster was aboard – on
her way back to her grandparents in Boston.
Hers had been a strange and unexpected trip to the top of
the Inside Passage. On the way to St. Michaels and the mouth
of the Yukon River, her ship had hit a reef – and sunk
– just north of Juneau, Alaska. Among the missing passengers
was her father. Michelle and a few others were rescued by
a ship bound for Skagway. Penniless and alone, the sixteen-year
old girl was forced to become a dancer in a Skagway saloon,
working for Klondike Nell.
It was there that Jonathan first saw her, and it was immediately
clear to him that the girl wanted desperately to be rid of
Nell before the singer forced her to do things that Michelle
didn’t want to do. After saving her from life in the
saloon, Jonathan and Michelle had become good friends, being
together whenever they weren’t working. Enjoying each
other’s company as much as they did – plus, of
course, there was the mutual physical attraction – had
led to romance. But it hadn’t been a serious romance,
because both knew they’d be going their separate ways
in two or three months. They had their whole lives ahead of
them, and being in Skagway for three months during the excitement
of the Klondike Gold Rush … well … there was never
a shortage of thrilling things to do or talk about.
But Michelle was now gone, and Jonathan was ready to take
on the Chilkoot Trail. Some months earlier, newspaper headlines
had announced “A TON OF GOLD,” and Jonathan was
one of thousands that heeded the call. Leaving his family’s
Kansas farm, he went by train to Seattle, and then up the
Inside Passage, where robbery and murder became part of his
adventure. In Skagway, Jonathan had worked for Soapy Smith
– the town’s “dictator.” He had to
get enough money to buy food and supplies for the next phase
of his adventure – packing up the Chilkoot Trail to
the high mountain lakes and the beginning of the Yukon River.
It was the mighty Yukon that would take Jonathan down river
to Klondike gold, but only after Jonathan and thousands of
other Argonauts had built their boats and rafts. And only
after the lakes and the river were free from the grip of winter’s
ice.
Walking toward town, Jonathan was anxious to continue his
adventures on the trail to gold – the trail that led
to the Klondike.
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