Gold Diggers_Striking It Rich in the Klondike

by Charlotte Gray

  In a Koyukuk village, Jack bargained for some beadwork with a young woman. In his journal he described her as a “squaw three quarter breed with a white baby (girl) (2 yrs.) such as would delight any American mother. Unusual love she lavished upon it. An erstwhile sad expression. Talked good English.” She told Jack that her child’s father had deserted her; Jack flirtatiously offered to be her man and bring her flour, bacon, blankets, and clothes from St. Michael. The young woman was more honest—and realistic—than the young, sex-starved Californian. Her response was unequivocal: “No, I marry Indian, white man always leave Indian girl.” Jack revealed his fundamental insensitivity toward such a woman when he expanded the incident for his Buffalo Express article. Striving for solemnity (and overdoing it), he noted, “In the course of trading with natives, one soon learns much of the sickness and misery with which their lives are girt . . . In the most cursory intercourse, one stumbles upon pathetic little keynotes that serve as inklings to the solemn chords of heartache with which their lives vibrate.”

  Jack London was not an Indian hater like Bill Haskell, but he shared the assumption of Anglo-Saxon superiority common among his contemporaries. During those long, cold weeks in the icy cabin on Split-Up Island, Jack had enjoyed Rudyard Kipling on the British Empire, Charles Darwin on evolution, and Karl Marx on the oppression of the working classes. Now, during the endless, light-filled evenings floating down the river, he attempted to filter the intense experiences of the past twelve months through the perspectives he had absorbed from these writers. He had the self-taught man’s weakness for (in E. L. Doctorow’s words) “the idea that Explains Everything,” and managed simultaneously to embrace two mutually exclusive ideas—egalitarian ideals and white supremacy. He scribbled in his Yukon journal, “Indian seems unable to comprehend the fact that he can never get the better of the white man,” and the following year would write to a friend, “The Teutonic is the dominant race of the world . . . The Negro races, the mongrel races . . . are of bad blood.” Yet he also harbored the idea of the “noble savage” from a previous era. He took note of aspects of Indian culture that had allowed the different peoples to survive a harsh climate and unforgiving land: their respect for elders, their warrior instincts, their strength and resilience. Although he never identified with them, he sympathized with the challenges met by peoples who had lived for centuries in the North.

  Eleven days after leaving Dawson, the three men arrived at a little town called Anvik. By now, Jack London was in terrible shape: “Right leg drawing up, can no longer straighten it, even in walking must put my whole weight on toes . . . almost entirely crippled . . . from my waist down.” A local trader offered fresh potatoes and a can of tomatoes; Jack almost wept as he gulped them down. “These few raw potatoes & tomatoes are worth more to me at the present stage of the game than an Eldorado claim—What wots it, though a man gain illimitable wealth & lose his own life?” He felt strength return to his body and the ache in his joints diminish. He recognized that the gift of potatoes was a generous gesture from his hosts: “Quite a sacrifice on their part. White through and through.”

  The following day, the travelers reached the Holy Cross Mission, the Jesuit headquarters where Father Judge had begun his Alaskan mission. They watched a group of Indian girls playing in a schoolyard and others weaving nets, tanning leather, making rope out of bark, and sewing mukluks out of buckskin. “Indians have better appearance—always do around missions,” Jack scribbled. The next challenge was to locate the correct passage through the vast wastes of the Yukon delta. The men took no guide, and if they had chosen the wrong channel through the thousands of islands, they could have lost days and risked their lives. “Threading the maze, keeping to the right,” Jack jotted in his journal, as he navigated the 126 miles to the delta’s northernmost outlet at Kotlik. “No signs of human life. No white man since Holy Cross Mission.” He did manage to catch a final “beautiful king salmon, with cool, firm flesh from the icy Yukon.” At last, the travelers felt the “smack of old ocean” and fell asleep in sight of the open sea.

  But there were still eighty miles to go to St. Michael. To reach the old port that was the departure point for southbound ocean steamers, Jack and his companions had to travel along the Alaskan coast on the open ocean in their shallow, flimsy skiff. It took five hair-raising days. “Midnight—southeast wind blowing—squally, increasing, splash of rain. Dirty sky to southward. Quite a task of running boat out through surf.”

  The dangers were exacerbated by the presence on board of a fourth man: a Jesuit priest whom Jack had picked up when he saw him attempting the same perilous trip in a flimsy little three-hatch kayak. Jack was fascinated by Father Robeau, a beefy, bearded loner who had spent twelve years in Alaska. Multilingual and incredibly resourceful, the priest had devoted much of his time to compiling an Inuit dictionary and grammar. As a bitter wind blew and the men huddled together in the little sailboat as it scudded through the pounding waves, Jack questioned the Jesuit about his life and listened to his bellows of fearless laughter as he described his dealings with the native people. Jack couldn’t help contrasting Father Robeau with Father Judge back in Dawson. Where the Irish-American Father Judge was fragile, ascetic, and saintly, Father Robeau was “an Italian by blood, a Frenchman by birth, a Spaniard by education . . . and his whole life was one continuous romance.” Exuberant and energetic, with his “tanned skin and brilliant black eyes,” he demonstrated a “vivid play of emotion so different from the sterner, colder Anglo-Saxon.” When the Jesuit finally left Jack’s boat and paddled off alone, Jack noted in his journal, “Never heard of again—lost in some back slough most likely.” But the dedication of Catholic missionaries in the North enthralled Jack, whose single-minded intensity as a writer could match a priest’s commitment to his vocation. Father Robeau would live on, under his own name, as a principal character in the title story of Jack’s first book, The Son of the Wolf.

  “Our last taste of the Bering Sea was a fitting close to the trip,” Jack would write in his Buffalo Express article. “Midnight found us wallowing in the sea, a rocky coast to leeward and a dirty sky to windward . . . Removing the sprit and bagging the afterleech, we shortened to storm canvas and ran before it.” Jack London, Charlie Taylor, and John Thorson reached the harbor of St. Michael on Wednesday, June 28, twenty-one days after they had cast off the lines at Dawson and less than a year since Jack had joined the Gold Rush. They quickly found a steamer heading south to Victoria, British Columbia, from where Jack would continue home to San Francisco. The last entry in Jack’s Yukon journal reads, “Leave St. Michaels—unregrettable moment.” Jack probably worked his passage by shoveling coal into the ship’s furnace: in John Barleycorn, he described “eight days of hell, during which time we coalpassers were kept to the job by being fed whisky. We toiled half drunk all the time. And without the whisky we could not have passed the coal.”

  The Klondike had nearly finished Jack London, but Jack hadn’t finished with the Klondike. The Gold Rush gave him the felt experience— the thrilling mix of endurance and exuberance—with which he would make his name. He returned to San Francisco in mid-July with a few flakes of gold from his Henderson Creek claim, and vivid memories.“It was in the Klondike I found myself,” he later mused. “There . . . you get your true perspective.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Rags and Riches, May-June 1898

  DAWSON CITY’S GROWTH was meteoric. When Bill Haskell arrived there in late 1896, a few hundred people huddled on the mudflat. By June 1898, there had been a fiftyfold increase and 20,000 people crowded onto the same site. And it was still growing.

  The summer of 1898 saw the peak of the Klondike Gold Rush: the Mounties counted more than 7,000 boats setting off across Bennett Lake, and hundreds more people appeared via different routes. Dawson’s extraordinary growth had made it the largest city west of Winnipeg and north of Seattle. There were roughly 8,000 Americans, 8,000 Canadians, and the rest were drawn from every other corner of the world. T
here were still nine men for every one woman. And there were almost no services, except for those required to answer basic needs for food and shelter. The place stank and the streets were filthy. Yet thousands of people had willingly made the dangerous, exhausting, miserable journey to reach Dawson’s overcrowded squalor, and thousands more were on their way.

  Belinda Mulrooney could handle any amount of deprivation as long as she was making money. She was determined to be ready for the human flood coming down the Yukon River, as she supervised construction of her new hotel, the Fairview, on the Dawson waterfront. She boasted that the Fairview would rival the finest hotels in San Francisco, Chicago, or Seattle. With characteristic ruthlessness, she bribed the sawmill operator to divert scarce lumber her way and promised big bonuses to her workmen if they finished the three-story building by midsummer. She was hell-bent on making Bill Leggett pay the $5,000 bet, and her foreman, Harry Cribb, was so keen to confound his boss’s critics that he told her, “I’ll put that blame hotel up if I have to tie it together with wooden pegs.” By late June over 30,000 people had faced death in the mountains in the frantic race to get rich quick, and the building project gave Belinda a grandstand view of the surge of newcomers.

  Dawson’s expansion may not have surprised Belinda, but despite being a connoisseur of human incompetence, even she was amazed by how few of the newcomers knew what they were doing. Stricken by gold fever, they had made the nightmare journey without any plan beyond reaching the subarctic Xanadu. They staggered off the boats like zombies. Confronted by the cold, hard facts that Dawson’s streets were not lined with gold, that all the best creeks were staked, and that gold mining in the North was a brutal occupation, the great mass of stampeders milled around helplessly. Hundreds sold what was left of their outfits for anything they could get, without ever seeing a sluice box or a rocker, and retreated home.

  There were other novel sights on the streets these days—horses (skeletally thin after the cruel trek), steers (slaughtered on arrival and sold to restaurants), a cow that produced fresh milk for thirty dollars a pail, even a few youngsters. Even so, Belinda would recall, “children were so scarce they were like a zoo [animal] or a regular work of art.” And among the throng were characters who were frankly out of place on the frontier, men with soft hands and city manners, who stared in wonder at the grimy shantytown. Belinda realized that Dawson was evolving before her eyes and these were the people who would nudge the frontier town toward semi-civilization. The Klondike had already caught the attention of church organizations, eager to save souls and fill coffers. Now, secular institutions were on their way. Thanks to those soft-skinned city types, Dawson would soon acquire two features essential for any self-respecting community in late-nineteenth-century America: newspapers and banks. Belinda couldn’t have been happier: this was the professional class she wanted to attract to the Fairview Hotel.

  Newspapers arrived first. Up until now, Klondike prospectors had made news but had had limited opportunity to consume it. A slight, sharp-faced Seattle newspaperman called Eugene C. Allen was determined to be the first to give Dawson a weekly dose of news. Gene Allen was an indefatigable busybody, for whom joining the Gold Rush stampede was both “a corking adventure” and a chance to “clean up the gold faster than those boys dig it out of the ground.” He and three friends had hauled a heavy printing press plus a year’s supply of paper stock over the White Pass. The three-month journey had dampened some of Allen’s enthusiasm. “It sure seems a lifetime since we left home,” he confided to his diary. “That former existence is something out of another life, while we have the feeling that we have always been mushing along the snow-bound trail into the teeth of this awful Arctic wind, with the thermometer 25 to 35 degrees below zero.” Allen’s distress was compounded when he heard that he wasn’t the only newspaperman careering north. G. B. Swinehart, editor of Juneau’s Mining Record, was ahead of the Seattle gang on the trail to the gold fields, with a superior printing press. Not to be outdone, Allen arranged to travel in advance of his friends so he could get established and start news gathering in the mining community before either of the two printing presses was finally unloaded. He reached his destination in mid-April with barely a cent in his pocket.

  Allen weaseled his way onto a small, empty lot near Father Judge’s hospital, where he pitched his tent before setting off to walk the sixteen miles up to Bonanza and Eldorado creeks and figure out the gold-mining operations. He discovered several old friends from Seattle, most of them working as paid employees of claim holders and eager to greet a familiar face. Allen was a sponge for the latest stories: who had struck paydirt, who had started a fight, who was reckoned to be pulling far more of the yellow stuff out of the ground than he was admitting. He heard how the “bench claims,” staked on hillsides above the creeks, were proving as rich as claims along the creek bottoms. Best of all, a Seattle friend with a rich claim tossed him a small leather sack about the size of his thumb that contained $100 of gold dust. Back in Dawson, Allen could finally afford a decent meal, plus his first haircut and shave in months. Before that, he joked in a memoir, a couple of sourdoughs had mistaken him for an ape man.

  Gene Allen was eager to rush into print, but his printing press was still hundreds of miles away. Undaunted, he bought enough lumber from Ladue’s sawmill to make a bulletin board, and erected it in a prominent position on Front Street. Then he sat down to compose, on a borrowed typewriter, the first issue of the Klondike Nugget. As he finished each page, he tacked it up on the bulletin board.

  The very first page read:THE KLONDIKE NUGGET

  Vol. 1. No. 1. Dawson City, North West Territory. May 27, 1898

  THE FIRST NEWSPAPER TO BE PUBLISHED IN DAWSON

  Until our plant arrives items of interest which may come under our notice will be bulletined from day to day. It is hoped that we may be of some benefit to the greatest mining camp in the world, and that the venture may prove of slight benefit to the publishers.

  E. C. Allen, Business Manager

  G. E. Storey, Chief of Staff.

  (Allen had run into Storey, a former colleague from a Seattle newspaper, in Dawson and immediately appointed him manager of the composing room, even though there was still neither room nor presses to compose on.)

  In his own view, Gene Allen had won the race to publish a newspaper in “the greatest mining camp in the world.” The nature of the Nugget was clear from the get-go: pornography and corruption would sell papers. The first issue included items about the Mounties confiscating photographs of “an obscene and immoral character,” the muddle about competing claims on Dominion Creek, and speculation about an issue that Allen would make a meal of in the months to come: the royalty that the Canadian government was trying to levy on the miners. Maybe Dawson’s first weekly newspaper was only a single copy of a badly typed gossip sheet, containing more brio than facts. No matter. As Allen himself had predicted, it was an instant success. Crowds of people gathered around the bulletin board to read about sin and scandal. Once the water began to rise in the horrendous floods that year, entrepreneurs started offering boat rides over to the board to read the news. “Venice hasn’t anything on us!” crowed Allen. Soon he had found a site for the Nugget’s offices on Third Avenue, close to Dawson’s business section but on high, dry ground, and persuaded a local lawyer to finance a structure that would house the press.

  Ten days after he had tacked up his first page, Allen had erected a canvas tent over a wooden frame and was ready for the rest of his gang. He had also signed up 400 subscribers, charging each of them an ounce and a half of gold dust. This was more than twice the price of an annual subscription for most newspapers Outside, but Allen grasped that Dawson economics bore no resemblance to any normal town’s because both demand and quantities of gold dust were apparently limitless. “Money was cheap. I saw at once that an ounce and a half, or $24 a year, could be had just as easy as $10.” He also started gathering classified ads ($1 a line), orders for regular advertising ($10 an in
ch), and orders for printing jobs. Three weeks after he first set foot in the place, there wasn’t a Dawson businessperson or official who didn’t recognize this bouncy little hustler with beady eyes, a jaunty step, and a corncob pipe, who never stopped asking questions, cracking jokes, and exuding the confidence that he was a player in this booming town. Although he was $4,000 in debt, he reckoned he had $15,000 worth of business lined up.

  To Allen’s horror, the Juneau printing press arrived before his Seattle press reached town. His rival, G. B. Swinehart, cranked out the first, eight-page issue of the Yukon Midnight Sun on June 11. Swinehart’s opening editorial pulsed with lofty intentions: “It is with no small pleasure that with this issue of the Yukon Midnight Sun we see fulfilled our repeated promises to furnish the people of Dawson a weekly newspaper . . . The Yukon Midnight Sun will be a clean, bright sheet, free from domination by any class, clique or organization. It will be conscientious in the effort to be reliable on all subjects at all times, reflect the social and business life of the city and be an intelligent exponent of the great mining and other valuable interests of the Yukon valley.”