The Yukon Riverboat Disaster of 1906 | Episode 101

The Yukon River is famous for its remoteness and scenic vistas and history where very little may seem to happen. But in nineteen oh six, one man's lack of situational awareness and fine motor skills created the greatest cattle based pyrotechnics displayed the world has ever seen. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and uninspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's special Not So Mini Sod, you will see how miners and prostitutes used to travel in style in the far Subarctic North. You will hear what may be the clumsiest bad day at work episode we have ever discussed, and you will find out at what point an incinerating how flips from peaking your appetite to inducing eye watering vomit. And if you were listening to this on Patreon, you would learn about the most unusual haunted home ever built in the history of human habitation. You would hear how today's story could be considered more punishing than the Uruguayan Rugby disaster, the Greely Arctic disaster, and the Donner Party, and you would hear the debunked tale of a man in full diving gear who became part of a forest fire. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating, or even in mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's dig in. When people talk about the Canadian Yukon, they tend to talk about the scale of the place, the unspoiled beauty, and obviously the rarely broken stillness and silence. And remember that I said that it's easy for one to feel like this is a part of the world that still remembers what the earth was like when only animals trotted across its face. That said, this is also one of the first places in the Americas to wear a human footprint, more than twelve thousand years ago. It became a human postal code after they crossed into North America during the Last ice Age, when the bearing straight froze into a kind of ice bridge. People followed their stomachs and chased animals across it, then had to get their mail forwarded after the ice retreated. It wasn't bad, though. They did pretty okay for themselves. This new world was home to huge herds of caribou rivers practically made out of salmon and Yukit eat berries till you barred, seven days a week. These early adopters had a pretty good thing for thousands of years, at least until Whitey moved in. The Russians started sniffing around the area from the west in the seventeen seventies. Scottish Canadians brought casse role in some Hudson's Bay blankets from the east in the eighteen forties, and together they started skinning the pelt off anything that moved and hauled it home. The Yukon is one of Canada's three northern territories to get with the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, and these three connect to Alaska, running along the top of the continent. The Yukon is subarctic territory. But if you fare far enough north and you are going to run out of trees and wreck your shoes in the tundra. And remember that winter last eight months up here. Snow could easily pile up in drifts taller than horses, and temperatures could drop to minus fifty degrees celsius. For whatever reason, not a lot of people settled in the Yukon, so they never ended up building massive cities. Imagine a population around forty five thousand settled in an area larger than California. You can pick up a one of the lowest population densities on Earth bumper sticker in Whitehorse. People came for a good time, just not a long time, and never more than between eighteen ninety six eighteen ninety nine. Tens of thousands poured into the area because a newspaper headline had said that there was gold in them bar hills. It was too good to be true, literally, and once the gold fever broke and most went home, some could just never quite give up how real life felt here and dug in for the long haul. Now we've done a few stories about places that were basically defined by the rivers they border, because they fulfill every important aspect of their survival, and the Yukon River is no different. For thousands of years, the Yukon River acted as the transportation lifeline for people like the Han and the Kuijin and the Kuyukhon and the Yukik. Most life in the Yukon centered around the river. There were no highways, no all season roads, winter effectively shuts down overland travel for most of the year, and no rail line extended beyond Whitehorse, so the river was the road. In nineteen o six, the Yukon territory was enormous and sparsely settled, and the only feasible way to move goods between major settlements like Dawson and Whitehorse and forty Mile, and of course the mining camps was by riverboat. Food, medicine, mail, prostitutes, even news of the outside world all came by water. The Yukon River remains one of the last truly wild rivers to be found anywhere on the continent. It does get its fair share of traffic, though today you might hear the hum of a small motor boat a few times a week as local residents travel between rural communities, But in nineteen oh six it would have felt more like highway traffic. The Yukon provided one of the busiest transportation corridors in the north, and the most popular ride were stern wheel steamboats. Picture a long, shallow draft boat with a flat bottom, white wooden decks and a big red paddle wheel of rotating timber slats at the rear, throwing spray with every rotation, and smoke burping out of a tall funnel behind the wheelhouse. They look almost too big, about five times longer than they are wide, and people describe them as being kind of tiered, like a wedding cake. To watch one in motion is a little like watching a building paddling horizontally down a river, more like a warehouse. Really, people romanticize them, but they weren't exactly cruise ships. You'd sleep in a small, thin walled cabin, listening to cattle farting and carrying on. On the freight deck. You'd feel constant vibrations from the engine and the boiler, and you would smell engine oil and wood fuel burning all the livelant day, and every now and then you would run over and strike a sandbar, and then you'd let out a little part of your own. Sometimes you'd have to stop on shore in the middle of the night to cut down more firewood for the boilers, while wolves and moose and bear stag and stalked you from the tree line. If the ship were crippled for any reason, you would end up drifting helplessly to the bearing sea and die. But not to day. This is the kind of trip you only take because you have to. After the gold rush fizzled, sternwheel steamboats remained the primary way to move cattle, mining equipment, explosives for open pit or drift mining, fuel, food, hardware, mail, and prostitutes and non prostitute passengers alike. And today we'll be spending our time aboard the Columbian. She was a freight stern wheeler built specifically to handle anything that the river could throw at it. She had a light draft with a wide, flat bottom hull, which means she could axle, grind over a gravel bar or shoal, and handle channels only a few feet deep with the greatest of ease. She's almost like a skateboard, but better because she doesn't have the wheels and trucks to grind on. The Yukon River was only really navigable from late spring to the early fall. That's a pretty narrow window to ship an entire year's worth of supplies, and today we will be spending our time aboard one of these floating freight houses. On one of those runs, the Colombian was capable of carrying one hundred and seventy five passengers and cargo, but today she only held a crew of twenty five with one single passenger. And it wasn't even a prostitute, so you can quit asking. It wasn't even a passenger really, so much as a stowaway. Mist Winstanley was a miner from Dawson City who snuck aboard pretending he was the caretaker of the cattle. I don't know what he was thinking, but I'm guessing he really didn't want to pay for a ticket. Asides from the wheelhouse staff, most of the crew were decans who filled in where needed when not handling cargo, and engineers responsible for keeping us all moving and alive. The crew were mostly young decans in their teens and twenties. Piloting the Colombian today will be Captain J. O. Williams. They say he was the kind of seasoned pilot who could read the water like a book. He'd been doing this for seventeen years working for the Canadian Development Company and later the British Yukon Navigation Company. Working backwards, that means he had been doing this back in the heyday of the Klondike Gold Rush, so we already know he is battle tested and hopefully today's journey will be a little less stressful. But let's see. Today's story takes place September twenty fifth, nineteen o six. The Columbian was making steady time down river. Were traveling from Whitehorse to Dawson City, ferrying twenty one live cattle, about one hundred and fifty tons of food supplies, and just shy of three tons of blasting powder destined for the Tantalus coal mine on behalf of the British Yukon Navigation Company. It was late in the afternoon as she approached the stretch known as Eagle Rock, where the river becomes broad and calm. These boats were designed to handle skiffs and sandbars in all kinds of situations. Like we said, but this part of the river would be easy sailing. The only real sound was the rhythmic slapping of the paddle wheel across the water. And here is where this all begins to morph into a high interest story. Philip Murray was only nineteen years old at the time, just a lowly deck boy, and it's hard for young men in the middle of nowhere to make friends above your station. At this point of the trip, he tried his luck, eager to impress the twenty four year old onboard fireman, Edward Morgan, and in the tradition of kids bringing a little contraband to school to show off at recess, Philip showed Morgan what he had smuggled on board and what was it? A gun, most likely a Winchester lever action repeating rifle. They were lightweight and reliable and cheap, and the single most common and popular of the era, and certainly the most popular in the area. In the early days, marketers called it the gun that won the West. Now there are rules about how having firearms on board boats. A riverboat was never the place for a loaded rifle. They were anti persona non grata. The decks of a stern wheeler were tight, and a riverboat was never the place for a loaded rifle. They were packed with cargo and livestock and crewmen working elbowt at elbow. Hence the reason that guns were for boating, slipping on a wet deck or getting jostled by any number of things could lead to an accidental firing, not to mention how popular they become in drunken fights. Accidents with guns had happened on at least five ships before, so they'd just banned them for everyone's safety. But here we are. So you've been staring at some of the most beautiful landscape in the country for hours when some overly eager kid comes up, giggling and looks around and then hands you a loaded rifle on deck. Would you know what to do? Well, First, don't spin around and try to place them under citizens arrest. You are just as likely to put a hole in them and then spend the rest of the trip shackled in the hold. That said, you don't have to just pitch it overboard, either, So let us review a few sensible rules for the care of a rifle, as practiced by reliable men in the North. I said it that way just because that's how they might have phrased it at the time. Rule Number one, treat every firearm as if it is loaded. Always assume it's loaded and ready to errate you. By accident. People have blown their own feet and knee caps off trying to confirm if a gun is loaded or not. So if you are not one hundred percent comfortable checking, don't bother. Just assume it's loaded, and never point it at anything or anyone unless you are willing and able to pay to replace it or to go on trial over it. Keep the business end pointed to the ground or, in this case, the river. My rule of thumb is, never ever point a gun at someone unless you have every intention of deleting them from the phone book, because you might. Accidents happen all the time, and you don't need to derail your whole time on earth because of a preventable accident. You might not like your job, but you'll like it better than a prison sentence. And as long as you're going to be holding a gun, remember it's just as easy to keep your finger resting on the trigger guard as the trigger, So why not just never rest it on the actual trigger until you are ready to fire. If it helps with your ego, just pret that you are a professional sniper where touching the trigger is literally the last thing they do. Same goes for the safety. There's no need to release the safety unless you want to ventilate something. There are reasons that we store ammunition separate from firearms. There are reasons we don't run with guns. There are reasons we don't juggle bags of groceries while holding a gun. There are reasons we don't use the firing pin to open beer bottles. A gun is going to put a hole in something and maybe whatever is behind it too, So always be aware of your target and your surroundings. It's the same reason we don't fire blindly through a door. Now, I am trying to create a mini so here, so I will not really have the time to walk you through how to handle your entire court proceedings. So just listen to what I have said, and I promise you are going to save a ton of money on unexpected legal fees. Now, to this point, there has always been an inherent risk when handling firearms, like we said, but Morgan and Philip had it well in hand. That was until a group of ducks greeted the Colombian passing by with a round of animated waving and happy quacks, and Philip was all ducks and Morgan was all ducks. Now it's more traditional to use some kind of shotgun to hunt birds, not rifles. But beggars can't be choosers, and Morgan found himself filled with the need to teach a lesson not to be so welcoming. While Morgan was positioning himself to turn a duck into a cloud of feathers, something incredible happened. He tripped over some deck ropes or something fell backwards and on unloaded the rifle into a large tarp under wraps on the forward deck. I cannot tell you if there were crates or barrels or kegs under that tarp, but within a fraction of a second that detail became irrelevant for hiding under that tarp. On its way to be used in the mining settlements of the Far North, was almost six thousand pounds of blasting powder being stored on deck. And a few of you might be saying, hey, isn't black powder less energetic than straight up TNT? Well, yes, that is true. Three tons or six thousand pounds of the stuff is equivalent to about only thirty three hundred pounds of TNT. But since you've interrupted, let me ask you a question. Would you even care? We are talking about maybe two thirds of the blast energy from the nineteen ninety five Oklahoma City bombing. The only difference and saving grace is because the powder was on deck and not stored in some kind of steel magazine, some of that pressure would be blown clear instead of fully detonating in a compressed explosion. However, again, like it matters, the entire four deck where the powder was stored vanished. The force released was enough to obliterate the mid section and superstructure of the ship, spreading lethal overpressure and splinters across the entire hull. The front third of the Columbian disappeared into a rolling globe of white orange fire as much as eighty feet across. A violent and powerful rolling sheet of flame ripped along the deck and up through the superstructure, instantly igniting timber and cargo. When the powder detonated, the explosion blasted out the sides of the vessel, blowing men and cargo into the water. And I don't mean to sound glib, but you might almost prefer to have died in the explosion. Just understand, the Yukon River is largely fed by glaciers and melting perma frost, and in September that water is going to be hovering just over the freezing mark and the cold water shock for anyone landing in it would be pretty much instant. If you were somehow able to make your way back on board, you could always try warming up by the fire, which was currently growing and devouring the vessel, which was mostly wooden. Within five minutes, the entire interior of the ship was up in flames. Captain Williams had been at the wheel when the blast occurred, and after punching his chest a few times to restart his heart, he realized the stern wheel was now spinning loose and steering was gone. He quickly called down to the engine room, but nothing. The communication wire had also been severed by the blast, so he raced down to the flight deck, shouting for the engineer to stop the engines. Now the shift drifted helplessly by the whim of the water, and as it approached a bend in the river, Williams had an idea. He ordered the engines restarted, waited till the bow drifted in line with the riverbank, and ordered ramming speed full ahead. After the bow hit the shore, the stern started swinging around in the current, so he ordered full of stern to back the vessel up onto the shore. His quick thinking an excellent boatsmanship allowed the survivors earned leading half blind and most likely deaf, to stagger off of the deck into the brush and escape the burning vessel. Those that had survived their unexpected exercise overboard scrambled to shore as well. Now, between the cat battle and the provisions, the ship had been carrying roughly three hundred and twenty thousand pounds of food that was now very very well done, and to clarify, the fire within Colombian's gutted hull would have reached as high as a thousand degrees celsius or over eighteen hundred fahrenheit, basically a few times hotter than your oven, more like a foundry or a carcass incinerator. Really hot enough that a cow's body wouldn't just cook, it would char and crack, and as the last of the fat and collagen burned up, the bones would crumble like chalk. For those first few minutes, it would have smelled like a grotesque open air cook house, like a rich and fatty, if not disturbingly loud, barbecue. Fast forward a minute, and as the hides and hair kindled and deeper tissues began to burn, the scent would have morphed into a mix of singed hair and burning leather and greasy, acrid smoke that would make you gag and probably never eat beef ever again. On shore, the men had basically three wet crackers between them, and the September sun was already hanging very low in the sky. If they wanted to survive the night, they were looking at a thirty mile or almost fifty kilometer hike up river to the nearest telegraph station at Tantalus. And I'm not going to describe a jaunty nature hike. I am talking about a slog in mostly torn or burned or wet clothing, probably barefoot, with the sun and temperature dropping, surrounded by wolves and bears who were thinking that you would fit quite nicely in their stomachs during hibernation. And you do all of this in total darkness, fumbling and palming your way through tightly packed woods, with branches endlessly lying at your face and raw burnt skin, and the only lanterns available are already on fire back on the boat, and the only weapon probably landed in nune of it. It would have been like walking blindfolded through a roomful of knives in wet socks, over roots and stones and needles and frost. And here's the thing about burnt skin in the cold. As skin tightens, every movement can feel like tearing cloth. It also takes smoke damaged lungs and makes breathing harsh and painful. And burnt skin can lose heat up to five times faster than unburnt skin, which can lead to hypothermia. The men probably would have hallucinated and fallen asleep while walking, so you can only imagine the look on the telegraph operator's face when this troop of half dead monsters arrived after midnight woke his ass up slapping on his windows zombies. The telegraph operator then tippy tapped a message to Whitehorse about the disaster, but it was after midnight, so no one was paying any attention until after nine the next morning. Two stern wheelers, the Victorian and the Dawson, raced to the scene, arriving later that next day to collect the injured and the dead. By that time, Carl Christensen, John Woods, and Lyle Neil Kadogan also passed away from their injuries. The purser lyle Nol cowper had completely burst into flames, and the custom at the time was to wrap him in an oily blanket and start him on Strycht nine pills before switching up to mercy killing him with opiates. Young Philip Murray, he was the boy with the rifle. He was actually the son of another highly respected ship captain, Frank Murray was the captain of a sister ship in the same fleet, the Bane a King. And there is some kind of irony in the son of a man whose entire job was keeping his ship safe utterly destroying another boat in a moment of irresponsibility. As bad days at work go. Compare the sh U eight after the last thing you screwed up at work to Philip's day. Not only was he responsible for handing off a loaded gun in direct contradiction to White Pass restrictions against even having weapons on board like that, he also died in terrible agony from his burns. The body of mate Joe Welsh was found days later on a sandbar about twenty five miles or forty kilometers away, because he'd been carried there by the river, not because he landed there. That would have been awful. Well, maybe not as awful as the fact that he was only found because some people spotted a lynx on the riverbed chewing out something weird looking that turned out to be a human body. And I hate to say it, but between the links and the explosion and the unexpected flight and landing of his burning body, he wasn't what will charitably call easily recognizable. Let's just say he was found to be largely burnt and naked, with impact injuries and shoe marks, but they were able to identify him from brass buttons on his vest coat that had melted into his body. That is actually not the first time that this has happened in the history of this show. Ernest Winstanley, the non prostitute stowaway we described, was the only person who was close to the explosion when it happened who managed to survive, and he had been saved by his underwear. If you're of a certain age, you will remember watching old cartoons growing up, where our prospectors wore these full body woolen underwear suits with a button up flap in the bum. Well, Win Stanley had been wearing one of those, and, amazingly, probably because of it. Being so wet and durable, it was able to absorb enough of the heat and energy to save him from outright dying by fire. Mind you, the fire did manage to burn and scar every other exposed part of his body terribly, and although he survived and made a full recovery, the undies gave him a permanent case of the worst farmer's hand you have ever seen. Edward Morgan, the fireman who butterfingered the rifle and who experienced the explosion face first, had been blown off the boat. No real surprise there, and his mortal remains were never seen again. And because of the nature of the explosion, it's easy to imagine that he could have simply been vaporized to a mist and blown away, but it is far more likely that he was thrown halfway to Skagway, and his remains would have spent the rest of their existence hanging like some smoky scarecrow in a tree somewhere. Many pointed out the irony of Morgan being the ship's firemen and also responsible for burning the boat down to the water line, and of course a coroner's jury was convened. They found that the victims had died as a result of burns received in an explosion of powder on the forward part of the deck. Like we said and decided, the surviving officers and crew deserved none of the blame. Anyone worth blaming had already been reprimanded by the dynamics of detonation physics and their maker. There was no need for further punishment. There was no one left to punish after the explosion. The hull burned down to the water line, we said, but the vessel's machinery, the boiler, and the engines were later salved from the wreck and taken by barge to Dawson City, where they were later installed on another steamer named the Kaska. The burnt hull, what was left of it, at least, had become a bit of a shipping hazard for other navigators, so it was floated downstream and abandoned in a side channel off the river that became known as the Colombian Slough. A memorial was erected in the White Horse Cemetery bearing the names of all of the victims. The Colombian had exploded near Eagle Bluff, and if you find yourself in the area, you can pop by the site of the disaster at the Eagle Rock pullout at kilometer five hundred and fifty five on the Robert Campbell Highway. Most people have never even heard of the Yukon, and not without good reason. To us mortals, it's far and remote and largely unknowable. This was a human story of poor judgment and clumsiness. We rarely get to do clumsy day at work episodes that backfire quite this badly into a chain reaction this deadly. But it was so much more than that. This was also the story of a captain's brave and selfless attempt to save his crew, and the tale of a trek of badly injured men who were forced to walk an unimaginable distance in unimaginable conditions to save themselves and the lives of their injured shipmates. The Yukon riverboat disaster of nineteen oh six is not only considered the deadliest riverboat accident in the history of boating along the Yukon River, was also considered the deadliest and most dramatic thing to happen along her banks in more than ten thousand years of human habitation. It's been a while since we've done a story in my own home country. Of course, the Yukon River sits about forty four hundred kilometers or two thousand, seven hundred and thirty miles from my door, so my statement is technically true, but I do feel a little removed from it. And I want to tell you that I got this story from a listener named Johnny Wilke, who lives there and told me about this insane story, which by itself inspired me to want to incorporate more minisodes from story suggestions that you have all supplied that didn't necessarily have enough beef on them to inflate into a full episode, but are just too damn good to not to want to share. I've done many sods in the past, and I've always ended up calling them not so many sodes because I'd like to teach and they never turn out as short as intended. But no matter. This was our first trip to the Yukon, obviously, and I could not have been more excited by it. In fact, if you ever have a chance to talk to Johnny, he would probably say that, yeah, he seemed maybe too excited. Well, the fact is I love to visit new and exotic places around the globe. But being chained to an office chair ten feet from where I sleep means that I'm never realistically going to get to visit the Yukon. So this is as close as I will ever probably get. And I am unendingly appreciative to Johnny for this chance to visit it, at least in the theater of my mind, and for sharing this absolutely bugnuts story. And I encourage you to feel free to send me yours. And this story reminded me of a video I saw recently of a water main that broke under a road and funneled all of its fury straight through somebody's house, removing a good part of everything that it touched along the way. And it wasn't lost on me. With a full three hundred and sixty degrees of direction for the break to spray, it managed to target the one and only property in the entire area. It could have even sprayed over the house or carved out their lawn, but nope, straight through the front wall and out the back of the roof. And this was literally the same thing here in an entire sphere of directions that this bullet could have flown. It just had to hit the massive stack of explosive powder. So remember when you are feeling unlucky, like the universe is conspiring against you. It absolutely does target people unfairly, so keep your head up high, just as long as you're constantly ready to duck. If today's safety segment saved you a ton of money on legal fees and COREK costs, why not consider becoming a supporter of the show at Patreon dot com slash Funeral Kazoo add free episodes, extra content, my yuppie mug and all the other good stuff. The majority of Patreon supporters sign up, make a small monthly donation and help sustain the show they love, and then, just like Morgan, disappear. Failing that, you could always simply visit buy me a coffee dot com slash Doomsday, and show your support with a one time donation. And I want to give a quick but heartfelt shout out to Patrick McWilliams, Sonia Turner, The Blood Angel, Tyler Williams, Paige Bailey, and Jessica Crow two. Jessica, I know we've been talking, but I've never actually pronounced your last name before, so I apologize if I stunk. My larger point being thank you all for helping support the show on Patreon. Everybody is welcome to reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or just fire an email to Doomsday at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found wherever you've found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. I always thank all my Patreon listeners, new and old, for their support, but at the same time, I also always ask that if you could spare the money and had to choose, I ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They are often the first and sometimes only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over six million people across eighty nine different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmedic dot Ca. On the next episode, you may think that the scariest thing about skiing down a ten thousand foot mel mountain might be gliding off a cliff or getting wiped out by an avalanche and freezing to death. But I promise there is a zero percent chance of any of that happening in our next story. In fact, you're going to learn that sometimes the scariest thing about skiing down a mountain is getting there. It's the Koprune funicular ski disaster of two thousand. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off, and thanks for listening.