Horses

180807Tu Melbourne Herald Sun - camel cart and the camel station.
The Dodge came with the same article: a set of outback murders. The culprit was hanged.


Roderick.

180812Su Melbourne 'Herald Sun' - Egypt, camels.
Roderick.

180817F Melbourne 'Herald Sun' - Mt Buller, huskies.

Roderick

180907F Melbourne Herald Sun - Clydesdale.
Roderick.

180912W Melbourne 'Herald Sun' - Royal Melbourne Show, horse (jinker?).

Roderick.

Roderick,
We would call that a sulky, this one was on a nearby farm that had changed ownership. It had been left there the day that petrol rationing was ended, Mother had been visiting and she said "You can drive me home in the car"
David.

My uncle at Lake Rowan in Victoria told us that when he was a teenager in the 1920's the farmers would all arrive at the Saturday dance in their sulkies.

When the dance was underway the boys would sneak out, unhitch the horses and take them into the paddock, push the yoke poles through the wire fence and reattach the horses. At midnight everyone would come out (the blokes usually well primed) to find a row of carts on one side of the fence and the horses - attached - on the other.

Lang

I went to check sulky vs jinker with my family-album photo. It is captioned buggy, and I can see why as I prepared the photo for posting: it is a four-wheel vehicle.
Boorcan (Vic.): My grandfather's buggy. 1926-27. (Bob Gillespie, Roderick Smith collection).
My grandfather was the railway stationmaster, a position of importance in a country town. I guess that the buggy could fit the two adults and two children, plus luggage.
The younger of the two is my future mother, now 93. I will have to ask her if the buggy went to subsequent relocations, or if it was relinquished when the depression and drought hit.
My grandfather obtained his car licence during his next posting (Berriwillock, late 1920s into early 1930s), but didn't own a car until the late 1940s (an Austin A40, then a ~1954 Vanguard Spacemaster).

Roderick.

180930Su Melbourne Herald Sun - Broome (WA) camels and a Finland dogsled.

Roderick.

Back to horses as transport.

The Yukon gold rush of the 1890's produced a flood of ill-prepared inexperienced people. Those with the money could use a horse. Unfortunately, the horses were not up to the freezing conditions and steep climb out of Skagway. They say hardly a single horse survived the walk and over 3,000 died. White Pass, commonly called Dead Horse Pass, is still a steep and fairly remote climb today in a car. I did it a few years ago and would hate to be walking, particularly in winter.

Of particular note in the first photo you can see stacks of supplies at regular intervals alongside the trail over the mountain. This was because the Canadian Mounties would not let anyone cross the border, further up the trail, unless they had a ton of specified supplies. Naturally the blokes could not carry that much, so they went, often a hundred miles or more, by carrying stuff forward creating a stockpile then going back for more. On and on for weeks! Of course theft, fights and murders happened at these stockpiles.









White Pass : "The Dead Horse Trail"
The Chilkoot Pass was one of the most famous, and more populated pass on the way to the Klondike gold field, but another way was also well known at the time, and principally used by prospectors with pack animals : White Pass. If this path was largely used at the time, therefore quite famous, it was also for a more gloomy characteristic; also called the "Dead Horse Trail", this path had seen most of the pack animals died on their way to the Klondike.
This path is not represented in the movie nor in the novel, however it was an important route during the Klondike Gold Rush and presents another part of the perilous aspect of this Klondike stampede.

The White Pass is often described as "deceptively easy", for the first few miles were wide enough to let wagons through, but soon the path will narrow and allow only person to go, creating, here again a long line. The journalist Tappan Adney wrote in his book The Klondike Stampede (1900) "No one knows how many people there are. We guess five thousand - there may be more - and two thousand head of horses... A steamer arrives and empties several hundred people and tons of goods into the mouth of the trail, and the trail absorbs them as a sponge drinks up water."
If it was a hard path for the Klondikers, who had to spend time loading their animals, and waiting in line, it was worse for the said animals. They would often fall due to the poor state of the floor, and would block the path to other prospectors who had to wait for the fallen horse to be loaded once again. According to Adney, this was a common sight at the time, for many of the stampeders had never worked with pack animals before, and leading and even loading a horse was a complicated task for them. Moreover, because of that inexperience, they treated harshly their animals, and scarcely gave them time to rest.

During these tedious delays the wretched horses for miles back had to stand, often for hours, with crushing loads pressing down upon their backs because no one would chance unloading them in case movement might suddenly resume. An animal might remain loaded for twenty-four hours, his only respite being the tightening of the pack girths, and this was one reason why scarcely a single horse survived of the three thousand that were used to cross the White Pass in '97.

The wait, the inexperience, the broken bones due to the many falls and heavy carriage, all those elements added together resulted in the death of many animals on this trail, which gave it its surname of "Dead Horse Trail". The stampeders didn't bother buried or sometimes even push aside the corpse of their dead animals; if some executed their poor animals, it is to think that not all of them care to give them a quick death, for I believe a bullet could be seen as the time as an important supply. Horses and oxes had to walk over the corpse of fallen animals, and some animals had even tried to kill themselves had reported some journalist.

The Dead Horse Trail was a name given to a portion of the trail, and not all of this path was this dangerous, but as for many other occasions, the harsher part of an adventure, even a part of it, will be more famous than the rest. Many journalist and stampeders had written about that particular part of the pass, and all of them said that they had been strongly marked by these events.