The importance of guarding your equipment:
One challenge along the trails was watching over one ton of supplies. This posed many difficulties in watching over them and people did this in a number of different ways.
Generally, an honor code kept supplies safe, but there were instances of thievery on both trails. To guard gear, stampeders had few options. They could employ enough packers to move all of the supplies in one day, thus ensuring it stayed together and was safe. Unfortunately, with the amount of gear most people had, this meant a person needed a lot of packers and thus money to pay them.
Some stampeders may have used their money to buy the assistance of people to guard their supplies. Tappan Adney describes hiking the Chilkoot Pass in September 1897, "each [of us] with packs of stuff that we could not trust to packers, leaving the boat lumber in [the] charge of a trustworthy man."
Nevertheless, some thefts did occur. Everett Barton described one early in September 1897: "A man was caught stealing at Deya [sic] yesterday and was shot three times. A fellow stole a watch here yesterday and the people held a meeting to see what to do with him but I have not heard." Regulating groups were often established in some of the more concentrated areas to hand out punishments for rare crimes along the trail. Tappan Adney described one so-called court at Sheep Camp in the fall of 1897:
Klondike historian Pierre Berton describes an incident that occurred when a Frenchman was found to be stealing from someone's pile of goods along the White Pass Trail. An elected committee found him guilty and sentenced him to a whipping that ultimately ended with him being shot to death. Berton recounts another instance on the Chilkoot when a thief by the name of Hansen was sentenced to fifty lashes for theft of supplies at Sheep Camp. The man was tied to a post, allegedly whipped only 15 times, then forced to march back to Dyea wearing a sign proclaiming "THIEF."
All this to say, having the proper equipment was essential, and people took measures to defend themselves from thieves accordingly.
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