Gold Diggers_Striking It Rich in the Klondike

by Charlotte Gray

  The Jesuit priest was not surprised by the miners’ attitude: he had already spent six years in Alaska, and had seen the best and the worst of the North. As he confided in letters to friends, “O, if men would only work for the kingdom of heaven with a little of that wonderful energy [they exhibited on the creeks], how many saints we would have!” Yet if Judge differed from the gold diggers in the focus of his energies, he shared with them the obsessive dedication to a goal.

  William Henry Judge was dedicated to a life of piety almost before he was born. A member of a sprawling Irish family from the Roman Catholic-dominated city of Baltimore (besides his brother, Charles, the priest, there were three sisters who became nuns), he was such a sickly child that his parents feared he was too frail to pursue his religious calling. He left school early and went to work in a mill, but at thirty-five he could resist his mission no longer. In 1885, he entered the Jesuit order. His sense of vocation was punishing: despite his ill health, in 1890 he volunteered for the toughest assignment available. He offered to join the newly founded Jesuit mission among the indigenous peoples of Alaska: the newest American territory and the final frontier in the American imagination. “May God grant me grace and strength to do and suffer something for his glory,” he wrote to his superior the day before he sailed from San Francisco, bound for St. Michael, close to the Yukon River delta.

  Glory was in short supply, but there were plenty of chances to suffer. Yet although William Judge was frail, he was not feeble. In fact, he was as practical as he was saintly. At the mission’s Alaskan headquarters at Holy Cross, he constructed an ingenious boiler attached to the kitchen stove so that in the hideous winters hot water was always available. The Sisters of St. Ann, who ran the mission, were captivated by this modest priest who went on to build a bake-oven and take over all the baking for their school. Scurvy was endemic among both natives and non-natives, since there was so little fresh food in the diet. Father Judge invented a system of Turkish baths to alleviate the painfully stiff joints that resulted from the disease. At the same time, he demonstrated a profound respect for the local Indian peoples and their herbal remedies for common diseases—spruce bark for scurvy, for example, or cranberries for bladder infections. He also followed the well-established Jesuit tradition of learning and translating the local language (Koyukuk in this region). He compiled a Koyukuk-English dictionary. The children who boarded at the mission loved the soft-spoken priest who played the flute and made violins for them out of birch wood. And he loved them. He wrote to a fellow priest that the “Indians . . . are fine-looking, fond of work, anxious to learn and very good-natured. I think they would make good Catholics.”

  For four fulfilling years, Judge did the rounds of Koyukuk and Tanana villages in the interior of Alaska, where he said Mass, taught hymns, prayers, and the catechism, and baptized people of all ages. It was a demanding, exhausting way of life: one winter, the only protein available was arctic hare. That year, he made his congregations laugh by telling them that he felt his ears each morning when he woke to see if they were growing longer. The scattered communities welcomed the solemn man of God, whose blue eyes shone with what they believed was celestial inspiration (but was in fact hopeless myopia). Father Judge shared his communicants’ hungers and sorrows, joined their annual feasts, blessed their children, and taught them new songs. His attitude was a welcome contrast to that of coastal traders, who haggled fiercely about prices and devastated communities with alcohol.

  Then new orders arrived from the Jesuit superior in Holy Cross Mission, Alaska. Father Judge’s heart sank as he learned he was to transfer to the new mining camp of Forty Mile, several hundred miles east of the region he had come to know well. Now the suffering for which he had once prayed really began. He would be the only priest in a community of cynical, tough-talking men; he would have no communication with other Jesuits for almost ten months a year. Most of his work would be Sunday Masses and funerals: he would have little opportunity to officiate over joyful family occasions such as baptisms and weddings. And he knew that miners, as he confided to one of his sisters, “as a rule, ain’t no saints . . . I would prefer to remain with my Indians, but I know that what is done from obedience is more pleasing to God.” Man proposes, God—and the Jesuit Order—disposes.

  Father Judge packed up his meager belongings, and took a steamer up the Yukon River. At Forty Mile, he soon got the measure of his new flock. These men worked hard, drank hard, and despised the aboriginal peoples for whom Judge had developed affection and respect. “A great part of the miners seem to be men who have been running away from civilization as it advanced westward in the States, until now they have no farther to go and so have to stop here.” One man had clung so tightly to the frontier as it moved west that he had never even seen a railroad. The priest learned that in mining communities, the best way to start a conversation was to ask, “What’s your story?” He met Civil War veterans, British remittance men, criminals on the lam, and runaway wives. He accepted everyone he met as a child of God whom he might lead back to the Lord. Even the most wayward soul warmed to a man who treated everybody equally, listened sympathetically, had no interest in material gain, and who frequently put himself at risk by giving away his own coat, mitts, or boots to those in need.

  It is a wonder that the far-from-robust priest survived these years. In January 1896, Judge set off with his dog and sleigh in a temperature so cold that the mercury in his thermometer had frozen. After about three miles, his sleigh broke through the ice and he had to walk up to his knees in the freezing water for about 200 yards. “I pushed on,” he wrote to his sister, in a letter that must have made her wince, “trying to keep my feet from freezing by walking as fast as I could. But the sleigh was made much heavier by the ice that formed on it and the snow that stuck to it after it had passed through the water, so I could not go as fast as I ought to have gone.” By now the light had gone. Father Judge could not even feel his feet in their sodden boots, and he was dizzy with exhaustion. He thought about stopping, wrapping himself in his blanket, and waiting for divine intervention—even if it arrived in the form of a merciful death. But the dog gave a sudden yap and lunged ahead. In a few minutes, they had reached a deserted cabin on a high bank. The cabin had no floor, no window, no hinges on the door—but there was a stove and a woodpile.

  Judge’s trial was not over yet. The wood was so cold that he could not light it with a match. This meant he had to go outside and fetch a candle from his sleigh, which he had left at the bottom of the snowbank. He tried to pull on his big fur mitts but discovered that, like his boots, they had got wet, and they were now frozen so hard that he could not get his hands in them. He struggled down the bank on elbows and knees, trying to keep his hands covered by his sleeves, found the candle, then had to haul himself up the bank, once again keeping his hands hidden. Eventually he lit a fire, but “as soon as I started to thaw the ice off my boots, I felt a pain shoot through my right foot, so I knew it must be frozen. At once I went out and filled a box that I had found in the cabin with snow, then took off my boot and found that all the front part of my right foot was frozen as hard as stone . . . I could not make a mark in it with my thumbnail. So I had to go away from the fire and rub the foot with that awfully cold snow, which is more like ground glass than anything else, until I got the blood back to the surface, which took at least half an hour.” Finally he was able to crouch near his fire, but it took another hour before his foot was completely thawed out. Judge knew that “with such treatment, no harm follows from the freezing. But if you go into a warm room, or put the frozen part to the fire before rubbing with snow till it becomes red, it will decay at once and you cannot save it.”

  Such ordeals, in the priest’s opinion, were God’s way of testing his faith. He offered his Lord humble thanks for delivery, then pushed on with his ministry.

  Father Judge watched Forty Mile turn into a ghost town in the fall of 1896, when news of Carmack’s gold strike on the Klondike River came down the
Yukon. He knew immediately that he must follow his flock. “One would think,” he commented wearily, “that gold is the only thing necessary for happiness in time and eternity, to see the way in which men seek it even in these frozen regions, and how they are ready to sacrifice soul and body to get it.” After his January scouting expedition to the new camp at the junction of the Klondike and the Yukon, he returned to Forty Mile and packed up his cassock, biretta, flute, demijohn of Mass wine, and limited supply of native medicines. He hauled them upriver to the acres he had secured for his church and hospital, then set about erecting his buildings, cooking for the construction team, and procuring enough provisions.

  Father Judge was forty-seven on April 28, 1897, and he felt his age. His hair was thin and gray, his body gaunt and stooped, and deep grooves etched his forehead. In his thirties, despite a weak chest and thin frame, he had been capable of shouldering any amount of lumber and wielding a bow saw for hours at a time. Now, his back ached if he spent too long bent over letters, drawings, or his little stove. “Age begins to show its effects,” he admitted in a letter home. Yet he quickly added, “but only at times, and not sufficiently to prevent me from performing all my duties.” Besides, wasn’t his suffering proof that his life was committed to Christ?

  In Dawson he was needed as never before: his faith and his medical knowledge were in short supply. As Bill Haskell noticed, “The excitement of washing and accumulating the gold was so great that many men devoted their time to it when they should have devoted some to cooking, cleanliness and the rest . . . Some men lived on barely nothing, and that half-cooked.” The priest watched Bill’s fellow miners limp in from the creeks, their feet bound in sacking and their hair hanging to their shoulders, suffering from pneumonia, rheumatism, broken limbs, or scurvy. He saw crowds of newcomers arrive with little idea how to deal with frostbite or gangrene. He knew that malnutrition was inevitable since there was still almost no fresh food. And the townsite was filthy. A reporter from the San Francisco Examiner noted with dismay this summer that Dawson was a death trap because of “this dripping moss, this putrid water, these dismal swamps, this rotting sawdust, this vileness as to sewage.” Sick men lined up outside Father Judge’s tent begging for food and shelter, although St. Mary’s Hospital was still half finished and he had almost no medicines or bedding. By early June, he recognized the symptoms of typhoid in five of the men he was treating: insanitary conditions were taking their toll. The hospital had been intended as a way to reintroduce Roman Catholics to the consolations of their faith, but Judge now insisted that the sick should be admitted regardless of their religion. At the same time, he began to count the days until the arrival of the Sisters of St. Ann, who were expected at the end of September and would take over nursing duties.

  There was little ego to Father Judge, but there was a burning sense of mission that appreciated recognition. As the spring of 1897 wore on the busy priest, in his tattered and mud-splattered cassock, felt his sense of fulfillment blossom as he urged on his builders, bargained for provisions, and celebrated Mass. The merchants and saloonkeepers on Front Street started to tip their dirty felt hats to him and call out friendly greetings. Bill Haskell noted that the hospital did “good work under the greatest difficulties.” Women offered shy smiles to the cadaverous figure. Big Alex McDonald, the Nova Scotian who was one of the richest Klondike Kings, made himself known to Judge, assuring him that he was both a teetotaler and a Catholic, and that the good Father could expect to see him at Mass when he was in town. The priest’s public image gradually shifted from eccentric oddity to the one person in the gold fields who would give disinterested counsel and spiritual support. People looked up to a man so selfless that he would give the coat off his back and the food off his plate to somebody in worse straits than himself. He became a symbol of nobility in a town where altruism was rare.

  Judge’s living conditions were still wretched—a drafty tent he shared with two of the men building the hospital. But suffering was good for the soul, he believed, and when the buildings were completed, he would have, he boasted to his brother, “the finest place in town.” As Father Judge considered his situation, he had to suppress a sinful spurt of pride in what he had accomplished. He had no interest in finding gold nuggets, but in his life there were other forms of treasure.

  While Father Judge was creating a slice of heaven up in Dawson’s north end, downtown, entrepreneurs were gleefully flirting with hell. These were the hurdy-gurdy, throw-the-dice, devil-may-care streets that gave this instant settlement the reputation of “the town that never sleeps.” Bill Haskell loved this side of the town, and couldn’t wait to throw open a saloon’s swinging doors as soon as he reached Front Street. “In the matter of iniquity,” he observed, “Dawson was not slow in eclipsing all rivals on the Yukon.” In the spring months, during the few hours of darkness, there was a dreamlike quality to the isolated community. When lamps were lit inside the canvas shelters, they glowed like diamonds as the music spilled out into the chill northern air. By the summer of 1897, the camp was “the liveliest town imaginable . . . When it was light all the time, the public resorts were wide open every hour of the day.”

  Harry Ash, who had watched the clientele disappear from his bar in Forty Mile the previous year, had set himself up in a ramshackle canvas structure called the Northern Saloon. Other proprietors from Forty Mile and Circle City had also shown up in Dawson and now ran similar drinking establishments, with names like the Pavilion and the Monte Carlo. They stood open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. (Once the Mounties arrived, they were meant to close on Sundays, but the back door was often open.) Along one wall of each of these raucous watering holes stood a long wooden bar, its shelves filled with bottles of what purported to be rye whiskey but was more likely raw alcohol and “tincture of kerosene.” Tattered pictures of half-clad women were pinned to the walls. On chilly evenings, the wood stoves glowed red hot, inviting patrons in to warm themselves and play poker, faro, or roulette. Many of the tables were rigged, according to Bill Haskell. “The dealer generally knew what to do when it was necessary to make a certain card win. He who sat down to a promiscuous poker table was either reckless or ignorant . . . The professional gamblers reaped the harvest, and the tenderfeet and the hardworking miners paid the fiddlers.” Since saloonkeepers did not have to pay for liquor licenses, their costs were low and their profits sky high.

  Bill was no gambler: he had worked too hard on his claim to throw away his earnings. But he loved the spectacle—the backslapping fellowship, warm air thick with blue smoke, long-haired waiters bustling about balancing trays of shot glasses, champagne that cost thirty dollars a pint and tasted like sugared fizz, and the swagger of a man like Swiftwater Bill Gates, who didn’t think twice about losing nearly $8,000 of gold nuggets in a single evening. Bill Haskell once saw a fellow known as Shorty try to slip out of a saloon leaving debts unpaid. Shorty “edged toward the door and was about to push it open when the bartender called to him: ‘Say, Shorty, haven’t you forgot something?’” Bill recounted in his memoirs, still relishing the excitement. There was a sudden flash of flame, a ringing report in that low-ceiled, smoke-darkened room, and as the door swung closed, “it stopped half way and a draught of icy air came in . . . [It] was obstructed by the body of a dying man . . . ‘Shorty’ was buried the next day.” Within weeks, the Mounties had declared that it was an offense to carry firearms into Dawson’s drinking establishments. But they couldn’t stop the fistfights sparked by claim disputes, drunken insults, or accusations of cheating.

  When Bill Haskell tired of watching miners blow their fortunes, he would wander along Front Street and into one of the dance halls. The first dance hall opened when a piano arrived on a steamer that had chugged upriver from Circle City. This hall was a ramshackle, cavernous structure with log walls and a canvas roof, and it soon faced competition from rival establishments. By mid-May, the clamor of construction and howling dogs had been joined by other sounds—the squeaking of a vi
olin, the jingling of the piano, and the harsh voice of the prompter—“balance all,” “ladies change,” “swing yer pards.” The dance halls opened around seven in the evening and, as Bill observed, by midnight would be “crowded with gallant beaux, the most of them having spiked-bottom shoes, broad-brimmed hats, costumed in the regulation mining suits, and with cigars between their teeth . . . They sit around the hall on the benches, smoking and talking and immensely enjoying the relaxation from the hard monotony of the mines.” Through the blue haze, a couple of musicians would be visible, fiddling away or banging the keys for dear life, while the dance hall girls were spun around the floor by partners who paid them a dollar a dance. The girls kept half plus any tips: the rest went to the dance hall owner. Every time the door swung open, passersby heard polkas like “The Ashland” or waltzes like “The Blue Danube.” Girls might make as much as $100 a night on the dance floor, but the dawn would find them, according to Bill, “a tired and disheveled lot.”

  For men, Dawson was a town without boundaries. But it was also steeped in Victorian prudery, and although women constituted a tiny minority (about 200 among the 2,000 residents in June 1987), they found themselves slotted into a rigid hierarchy. Bill Haskell could tell at a glance which ones were respectable and which were “loose.” The most respectable women were the wives of prospectors, and he always greeted them politely—unless they were the Tlingit or Tagish wives of old-timers who had been in the North for years, in which case he ignored them. One rung down the ladder were the “artistes” who sang music hall favorites on the stages rigged up at the back of the saloons: Bill tipped his hat to them but was not above tossing a cheeky remark in their direction. Further down the ladder were the girls who made their living twirling around the wooden floors of dance halls with lonely miners. The women that Bill did not mention in his memoir were those on the lowest rungs of the hierarchy: the prostitutes. But on Front Street, he couldn’t miss them, in their thick woolen skirts (worn short enough to get them thrown into jail in Chicago), bloomers, and broken boots. Like the men, these women smelled pungent: nobody in Dawson’s early days washed more than once every two weeks, or bathed more than twice a year. Their lips were as chapped and their skin as rough as the miners’, and most matched the men drink for drink, for the same reason—to anesthetize themselves against cold winds and broken dreams. As an old dog driver recalled years later, “The girls looked beautiful enough to men who had been isolated in this wild environment for months or years, but I guess they would have been pretty terrible compared with any ordinary woman back home.” Once the Yukon was open in 1897, they were joined by women from Seattle, San Francisco, and other West Coast cities, whose clothes were cleaner but whose avarice was sharper. In these early days of Dawson, Inspector Constantine and his red-coated Mounties were too busy trying to control cardsharps and violent criminals to worry about prostitutes roaming the streets looking for business.