Gold Diggers_Striking It Rich in the Klondike

by Charlotte Gray

  At the same time, Belinda had grasped that some investments were riskier than others. Businesses could go bankrupt; buildings could burn down. But one investment seemed rock solid: gold. When the economy took a downturn, gold took an upturn. Gold was always worth having—if you could find it. One of the attractions of the Alaska run was that she was soon hearing rumors of gold strikes. Her curiosity about the vast land beyond Alaska’s coastal mountains grew: “I wanted to see what was over those hills.” She had already decided to jump ship when, in late 1896, she heard about a fabulous gold strike on a tributary of the Yukon River called the Klondike River. By April 1897, she was climbing the Chilkoot Trail.

  A tailor in Seattle had provided her with practical clothes of her own design: “I ditched corsets . . . I had three suits—one of corduroy, one of tweeds, and one of navy serge.” Her kit included dried fruit, canned butter, cornmeal, coffee, flour and bacon, and a fox-fur sleeping bag lined with eider quilts. There were also several long and mysterious tin cylinders, the contents of which she refused to divulge. Belinda’s physical stamina was tested by the long, grueling journey over the St. Elias Mountains, which she made twenty-three times before she had hauled all her possessions over the Chilkoot Pass. On the final, vertical climb, she just gritted her teeth and focused on each step. But her entrepreneurial instincts never flagged. “Such a small percentage [of those who started] made the Summit . . . They’d make one trip to the top and knew they’d have to relay to get sufficient food for one year. Before they’d make the round trip they’d give up and say, ‘Impossible.’ I bought their outfits.”

  Few crossed the Chilkoot Pass alone: the party that Belinda joined included about eighteen people. Once they were en route to Bennett Lake, where they would build boats for the river journey, Belinda made herself useful to the party. She hated cooking, having seen too many women stuck in that dead-end job, but she realized that she was more useful as cook than boat builder so she became camp cook without complaint. She was first up in the morning, lighting a fire, cooking the dogs’ breakfast of dried fish and cornmeal, then preparing flapjacks and bacon for the men. She and two men were assigned to get fresh food. “The men were always hunting moose and never found any. There was an abundance of fresh fish.” Belinda was adept at chopping a hole in the ice, dropping in a line, and pulling up enough to feed everybody. Then she would fry the fish in bacon fat on the stove and serve it with ladlefuls of beans.

  The men learned to respect this forceful, no-nonsense character who snapped their heads off if they cheeked her. “I never got friendly,” Belinda recalled. “I held to myself, was nice to anyone with knowledge.” Yet she lavished on animals a tenderness she rarely showed humans. She had picked up six dogs from miners who had turned back, “and trained them with little pockets for freight hanging down on each side of them. Poor things! They’d slip and their feet would get full of ice packs. They’d be miserable and cry like children. The sharp ice would cut into the tender part of the foot. I’d take it out and had the Indians make them little shoes out of hide. We’d lace them on. I’d do all I could to protect them, but all I could possibly do was to render bacon and pour grease in the cracks. The salt would smart and the dogs would cry. They’d be ready to bite, snap at me, and then lick my hand [to show] they didn’t blame me.”

  Belinda was captivated by the endless daylight and the sublime scenery of the North. She saw “lots of tragedy” in Miles Canyon and White Horse Rapids, but shattered boats and dead stampeders just increased her determination to beat the odds. The woman who was brisk and short tempered with her fellow travelers revealed a dreamy, romantic streak when she contemplated nature. “The beauty . . . You can’t possibly overdo it. It seems to me that every day and every night is different. You just feast on it. You become quite religious, seem to get inspiration.

  Or it might be the electricity of the air. You are filled with it, ready to go . . . You couldn’t keep your eyes off the heavens.” After three weeks on the water, Belinda’s party caught sight of the Moosehide Slide around midnight on June 15. A couple of hours later, the tents and saloons of Dawson City swung into view. Belinda listened to the din of dance hall music, took one look at the miners surging through the saloons’ swing doors, and decided to build her cabin two blocks south of the busiest part of Front Street: “I wanted to be where I could be by myself.” And then she flung her last quarter into the water.

  Several people watched this defiant gesture and were intrigued. One of them was Esther Duffie, the motherly woman who had spent years in the North and scraped a living from a handful of menial jobs, shares in various claims, and occasionally selling sex. Esther could see that the new arrival, who was half her age, was probably a kindred spirit—a woman who was nobody’s helpmate or victim. She was also curious to see what was in those mysterious long tin cans Belinda had brought with her.

  The following day, after Belinda had made herself comfortable in the newly built cabin and strolled around the shabby mining camp, she was ready to set up business. By now, she had introduced herself to Esther (she didn’t have much choice, since Esther had plopped herself down on a stump and followed Belinda’s every move with curiosity), plus two other women who had strolled past. Like Esther, these two sisters—Catherine, who was married to Harry Spencer, co-owner of the Pioneer saloon, and Lizzie, wife of tinsmith Julius Geise—were longing to know what was in the cylindrical cans.

  “I opened one to let them look,” Belinda always enjoyed recalling. A long roll of soft, silken fabric fell out, then unfurled like a butterfly. The three women stared at a pile of flimsy dresses, petticoats, nightgowns, and underwear—the kind of luxury goods Belinda had been peddling in Alaska when she was working on the City of Topeka. Esther, Catherine, and Lizzie fondled the gorgeous fabrics, rubbing them against their faces. Belinda was delighted. “Girls,” she said to them, “I’m going to start a store, and you folks will have to help me. You know the people here and the gold dust. I don’t understand gold dust or the right prices to charge. It’s all new to me.” The women couldn’t wait. Esther disappeared and returned with the kind of scales that sat on the bar of every saloon, so Belinda appointed her cashier and head saleswoman. In no time at all, Esther was standing behind a little board counter, yelling, “Next? Who wants a beautiful night dress?” to the women in the rapidly growing crowd in front of Belinda’s cabin. Esther refused to open the next tin until she had sold everything that was already unpacked, which added to the sense of anticipation.

  Belinda chuckled as she watched Esther. “A lot of things the women bought they didn’t know how to wear, but they had been so long separated from luxuries, they just wanted to possess them, to feel ’em,” Belinda recalled in her oral memoir. “They didn’t care what they paid, either. I just looked on and let Esther run the business.” Many of the miners had Tutchone or Tlinglit wives who were just as interested as the non-native women in the delicate garments, and their husbands were soon separated from their money. “I can see those old-timers now,” Belinda remembered, “standing around, be-whiskered and dirty, protesting, ‘What’s that good for?’ as Esther would hold up a silk something . . . The squaws would just eat the things up. I remember one old duffer grunting when his squaw came back for more. It was a night gown this time. ‘That’ll be a fine outfit when the mosquitoes get after you’ . . . Things vanished as fast as Esther showed them.”

  Commerce in camisoles boomed. Belinda could see that Esther was a hard worker and a smart woman, and knew everybody in town. She learned a lot from the dexterity with which Esther traded in gold dust. “She had her little scales, and I don’t think she ever changed the weights. After she poured the dust on the empty [pan], she’d pour my share through a funnel into a big sack. How she soaked them, those old-timers!” Belinda calculated that her new friend had netted her a profit of 600 percent on the sale of her goods. But the men’s derisive familiarity with Esther, and the implication that she was “easy,” bugged Belinda. She could see why the
men behaved like that: “When she was drunk, she was a holy terror.” Belinda learned to close her eyes when Esther went on a spree. Their friendship also persuaded her to insist that men call her “Miss Mulrooney.” Nobody was going to take advantage of her.

  Belinda also used these first couple of weeks to explore other chances to make money. She noticed that most of the men, though rich in nuggets, were hungry for a meal that offered a little more taste and variety than the three Bs. So she converted her cabin into a restaurant. (She had already paid off her traveling companions for the boat from which she had constructed her shack.) She hung a canvas curtain toward the back to conceal her own sleeping quarters. Since she disliked cooking herself, she commissioned Julius Geise to make a good stove and hired Lizzie Geise as the cook. The restaurant was open round the clock. Meals cost a flat two dollars, and patrons ate whatever was cooking that day. Belinda solved the problem of inadequate supplies by purchasing in bulk from any supply boat that arrived, and by buying the outfits of any newcomers who pulled up their boats on the bank near the cabin. “I’d see the men come in and tell them if they’d turn over their food and outfit to us, they’d get credit in cooked food in the restaurant. Or they could sell for cash. They were glad to give up their stuff because they hated individual cooking—all that chopping bacon with an ax and the waste, the packing and repacking of supplies.”

  Soon business was so brisk that Belinda had to hire another girl—Sadie O’Hara, a well-brought-up Canadian youngster with an infectious laugh. “The men used to come in just to see her, as she was handsome, and to hear her laugh.” But Belinda stayed firm behind her boundaries: she never palled around with the clientele, and if anybody asked her where she was from she would reply, “It’s a long story. I’m awfully busy. Wait until winter and I’ll tell you.” She dressed in a severe navy shirt and long black skirt, and Lizzie nicknamed her “schoolteacher” because she was so aloof. When one diner complained that she was overcharging, she took him by the collar and threw him toward the door so hard that the whole building shook. Her blood boiling, she yelled at him, “You’ll say we are crooks and dishonest?” The poor man stuttered that it was just a joke, but Belinda would not be mollified and told him he had better get out and stay out. Only when Lizzie Geise took the victim’s side, and her brother-in-law, Harry McPhee, announced that the victim would now buy a drink for everybody in town, did Belinda calm down. But she never let the man back in her restaurant. Nobody could nurse a grudge like Belinda.

  With Esther, Lizzie, and Sadie running the restaurant, Belinda turned her attention to her next venture. By late June, Dawsonites knew there were plenty more gold diggers en route, and Belinda could see that there was nowhere for them to stay. Moreover, many of the men out on the creeks intended to spend some of the winter in Dawson, and they would need somewhere to live. So Belinda Mulrooney turned herself into a property developer. She bought several building lots, organized a team of men to cut lumber for her, and hired a carpenter and two other men to begin construction. The first cabin sold so fast for $500 that she doubled the price for her next sale. Soon Mulrooney cabins were selling for over $4,000 because they had amenities that no others offered. “We’d clean tarpaulins from the packs by tying them to a rope and letting them stay in the Yukon River current,” Belinda recalled. “Then we’d take them out, stretch them and dry them. Canvas was useful stuff for lining cabins and making partitions.” Belinda had a small army working for her: besides construction workers, it included a young woman to make curtains, two men to make furniture out of barrels and birch poles, and a salesman to drum up business. She was good at details, like hooks to hang clothes on and a little cache for food. “The thing that pleased them most,” she would chortle, “was a doghouse . . . We also gave a lot of service. After he bought a cabin, a miner . . . would find the first night he was in possession water in the barrel and a meal prepared. We’d send a cook up from the restaurant and give him moose steak.”

  Belinda, second from left, in carriage, quickly emerged as a sharp-elbowed entrepreneur who held the reins of several enterprises.

  Belinda Mulrooney had her finger on the pulse of Dawson’s development. Raised a Catholic, she had little time for religion. (Later in life, she would tell Catholics she was a Presbyterian, and Presbyterians she was a Catholic.) But she had paid her respects to Father Judge because she admired what he was doing for the sick. She got to know Inspector Constantine. She also secured strategic introductions to Dawson’s wealthiest citizens because they were obvious marks for her enterprises. Her most successful catch was Swiftwater Bill Gates, the flamboyant character whose gambling habits had already caught Bill Haskell’s attention.

  Gates was one of the good old boys who had been in the North before the Klondike strike, having spent the previous spring as a dishwasher in Circle City. His nickname derived not from a heroic passage through the swift waters of the White Horse Rapids but from being too scared to stay on his boat: he had stumbled round the foaming torrent with the women in his party. By mid-1897, however, he had a one-seventh share of a rich claim on Eldorado Creek, was flush with dust, and was a well-known gambler. “When he broke loose,” Bill Haskell recalled, “the dust was sure to fly.” One night Bill followed him into a saloon, where Gates sat down at the faro table and dropped $7,500 in gold nuggets in just one hour. Bill loved Gates’s insouciant reaction to this reverse. Gates stood up, stretched lazily, then announced, “Things don’t seem to be coming my way tonight. Let the house have a drink at my expense.” Along with the rest of the saloon’s customers, Bill Haskell dashed to the bar. “That round cost Bill [Gates] one hundred and twelve dollars.” But Swiftwater Bill didn’t blink. He lit a dollar-and-a-half cigar and strolled out into the evening light.

  When news of Gates’s style reached Belinda’s ears, she got to work. She had an elderly German man who had been a scenery painter in his past life working for her; she told him to follow Swiftwater Bill around, and sketch him and his dog team. Then she hung a canvas bearing Gates’s likeness on the wall of her newest cabin. (“But we had the canvas only tacked on, so we could turn it around if he didn’t buy.”) This cabin also had linen on the bed, chairs with padded hide seats and backs, and a pail of clean water with a dipper in it. Knowing Swiftwater Bill’s interest in dance hall girls, she added a final touch that would appeal to the girls themselves—bedroom curtains made out of silk nightdresses. When Bill Gates returned from his claim and was shown the cabin, he protested that he could have built it for himself in four days. Why would he pay $6,500 for it? But Belinda was a brilliant saleswoman, and Swiftwater Bill bit. The following week, he announced that he wouldn’t sell it even if he was offered $10,000.

  By the time she had been in Dawson City a couple of months, Belinda Mulrooney had three thriving businesses: a store, a restaurant, and a property development company. She operated on instinct: “The miners never knew how little I knew and I never got close enough for them to find out.” But she faced competition: other entrepreneurs in Dawson were eager to mine the miners. The Alaska Commercial Company already had several warehouses near the waterfront, plus a sawmill on the north bank of the Klondike to provide lumber for its store and warehouses. The North American Transportation and Trading Company was establishing and stocking a rival empire. Between them, the two companies imported and sold a wide range of merchandise, and as there was still no bank in Dawson, they often gave miners extended credit.

  The summer days were long and warm, and most of the stampeders arriving in Dawson spent only a few days in the town before setting off for the creeks. In her restaurant, Belinda had picked up valuable tips about which new creeks were being staked and which old claims were changing hands. She decided it was time to explore opportunities on the creeks herself.

  The latest batch of prospectors had discovered gold where veterans had sworn none could exist—on hills above Bonanza Creek that were now named Gold Hill, Cheechako Hill, and French Hill. These “bench claims” tapped into
stream beds that had dried up millions of years earlier, and had proved unexpectedly rich. Ancient waterways that showed up as streaks of white gravel had flowed through these hillsides, depositing nuggets and dust in sandbars on the slopes. In midsummer, Belinda took Esther with her on the trail to Bonanza to explore the hills. But once the two women had hiked the sixteen miles to The Forks, where Eldorado Creek flowed into Bonanza, it wasn’t the muddle of sluice boxes, tailing piles, diggings, flumes, and shabby cabins that caught Belinda’s eye. She was fascinated by the volume of traffic. The junction of the two creeks was the perfect spot for a roadhouse.

  The Grand Forks Hotel was Belinda’s own personal gold mine, as miners gossiped about prospects in the bar.

  The sight of two women pacing out the bare wedge of land between the two creeks aroused plenty of interest among observers. Most scoffed at the short woman in a long skirt, who announced in a broad Irish brogue that she was going to build a hotel bigger than any Dawson establishment. When Dawson saloonkeepers heard the news, they said she might as well start building at the North Pole. But in no time at all, Belinda was dragging lumber up to The Forks behind an old mule called Gerry, and her Dawson builders were constructing a two-story log roadhouse, with capacious kennels behind it, to which Belinda gave the pretentious name, “The Grand Forks Hotel.” According to Frederick Palmer, who was working a claim on Eldorado at the time, a miner walked over from a nearby claim to tell Belinda that she should stick to Dawson.