In photographs of the 1898 Gold Rush, a child's face occasionally peers back at the camera: a Chilkat boy with a bundle slung on a tumpline around his forehead; a toddler standing on a bundle of supplies; a baby slung under its mother's shawl.
At least three children are buried along the Chilkoot Trail alone, but babies were also born on the trail and in the Klondike. Ella Card, who buried her infant daughter at Lindeman in 1897, bore another child, Freddy, a few months later in the Klondike. Martha Louise Black gave birth to her third son on January 31, 1899, in a cabin in Lousetown.
Older children also accompanied their parents north. Ethel Anderson (Becker), at age five, crossed the White Pass by train, wagon, and tram with her mother and two brothers: "Somehow mother fed us and washed us, diapered Clay, and soothed him to sleep with a sugar tit, but it was an experience she would never talk about in later years."
Ten-year-old Edith Feero (Larson) arrived at Skagway in August 1897, along with her mother and three siblings. Her father, John, worked as a packer on the White Pass Trail, and the family lived in Skagway and White Pass City for the next year. After John died in a snowstorm in 1898, his family made a new life for themselves in Skagway. Like Ethel Anderson Becker, Edith Feero Larson retained largely happy memories of a Gold Rush childhood throughout her long life.
