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.

Fig 1 : 

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.

Fig. 2 :An horse on the ground, White Pass 
(Source : Tappan Adney, )

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 sarcely 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 occasion, 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. 

Source :

1. Heggs, Eric A. (1889) Klondikers with packtrains on the White Pass Trail near Bennet, British Columbia. September, 6, 1889 [Photograph] University of Washington Librairies, Special Collection Division
2. An hourly occurence Tappan Adney, The Klondike Stampede , 1900 [Photograph]
3. Pierre Berton, Klondike, The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (1958),  Canada, Anchor Canada, p.123