Buried in the sands of Cape Nome, an isolated knuckle of land jutting out into the Bering Sea from Alaska toward Siberia, pockets of gold dust were discovered in 1898. At first, Dawson boosters denounced the Nome rumors as a scheme of St. Michael shipping companies to trigger a stampede and create business for their vessels. But in June, a Seattle newspaper brought in from Outside confirmed the strike. The impact was immediate. When the steamer Sovereign pulled away from the Dawson docks on the sun-filled evening of June 10 and paddled off downstream toward the Bering Sea, it was crowded with men and women heading to the new gold field. Gene Allen tried to sound a note of caution when he saw the Klondike Nugget’s subscribers disappearing downriver. “It was a rarely edifying sight to see a steamboat load of people leaving the Klondike on a 2,000 mile stampede with little, if anything, more tangible in the way of information than the story of a sensational newspaper in Seattle.”
Nome was the new Klondike (although it was nowhere near so rich). At the very moment when isolated Dawson was finally connected to the Outside, the world had moved on. There was still gold in the Klondike but its lure was lost, its luster gone. The exodus from Dawson City gathered momentum all summer, as grizzled prospectors surged to the new frontier. Hot on their heels went the whole colorful jamboree of saloonkeepers, prostitutes, restaurateurs, professional gamblers, bakers, ironmongers, dance hall girls, and churchmen. Within a few weeks, the editor of the Klondike Nugget would himself disappear downriver, leaving large debts. At the same time, Sam Steele and Belinda Mulrooney were on their way south. Before freeze-up that fall, the population of Dawson City was halved.
After three years of feverish activity, the Yukon Gold Rush, which had brought so many strange, intrepid characters to the Klondike gold fields, was over, and the giddy days of the San Francisco of the North were gone.
CHAPTER 20
Mythmakers
DESPITE THE 1899 NOME STRIKE, prospects continued to look promising for the Klondike gold fields in the early twentieth century. As Flora Shaw predicted, large mining operations such as the Guggenheims’ Yukon Gold Corporation and the Canadian Klondyke Mining Company Limited arrived to reap millions on the creeks with large-scale hydraulic methods and immense floating dredges. The army of gumboot miners had vanished to Nome, but gold production continued to rise—to a value of $16 million in 1899 and $22 million in 1900. The total payout between 1896 and 1909 was nearly $120 million.
Meanwhile, the Canadian government started to take the mines’ potential seriously and invest in Dawson’s future. Thomas W. Fuller, an Ottawa architect, designed six government edifices, including a commissioner’s residence, the territorial administration building, a court-house, and a post office, plus homes for government employees. The plans were shipped north, and when they arrived in the Yukon a few weeks later, Fuller’s splendid neoclassical buildings were quickly built from milled lumber. When the town became an incorporated city in 1902, officials and businesspeople began for the first time to consider it as a permanent home rather than a treasure chest to be looted. Journalist Faith Fenton, who continued to entertain Toronto Globe readers with breathless accounts of Dawson’s “airs of a metropolis,” made a personal investment in the expansion of the new “metropolis.” On New Year’s Day, 1900, aged forty-two (but admitting to thirty-nine), she had married John Brown, a genial physician seven years her junior. Brown was both the Yukon’s territorial secretary and its medical officer of health. Faith was soon holding “at homes” every Wednesday and being described as one of Dawson’s leading hostesses.
It was all wishful thinking. Edwardian Dawson’s pretensions to greatness could not last. In the end, the Klondike Gold Rush never yielded as much gold as feverish gold rushes elsewhere. Nor did it have much long-term impact on the Yukon, although it helped boost the economies of Seattle, Vancouver, Victoria, and Edmonton. The 1849 California Gold Rush had hastened the arrival in the West of the telegraph in 1861 and the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869. The 1851 Australian Gold Rush effectively doubled the country’s population. But the Klondike Gold Rush was, literally, a flash in the pan, in a region too inaccessible and too hostile. Dawson City’s very isolation protected it from pandemics: in 1918-1919, it was one of the few places in the world beyond the reach of Spanish influenza. When the gold dried up, so did the number of residents. From its dizzy 1898 peak of 30,000 people, the population had already sunk to 5,000 in 1902 when Dawson was incorporated. By 1920, fewer than 1,000 people lived there, the forest had reclaimed Ninth and Tenth Avenues, and the Fairview Hotel was boarded up.
The stampede north did not change world history, but it drew attention to the hidden mineral wealth of Canada’s North—although it would be half a century before that wealth once again attracted national interest. The stampede also exemplified an aspect of Canada’s resource-based economy that remains unchanged: a dizzying boom-and-bust cycle. Finally, it illustrated a vivid difference between Canadians and their southern neighbors. The presence of the red-coated Mounties had brought a sense of order to Dawson that was unknown in American frontier towns. Corruption among officials might be widespread, as the Klondike Nugget and Sam Steele had discovered, but participants in the Klondike Gold Rush came away with the indelible impression that Canadians were more law abiding than Americans.
Many stampeders, like soldiers returning from war or mountaineers who have scaled Everest, came to believe that they had been part of something bigger than themselves. Fired up by the temptation to get rich quick, they had pitted themselves against the elements and survived. As the first residents of a wild frontier town, they had felt both the exhilaration of achievement and the terror of the unknown. They had packed a lifetime of experiences into the briefest of spans and seen sights that they would never see again—the northern lights, the midnight sun, gold glinting in creek beds, and nuggets piled high on blackjack tables. It is these elements that have continued to resonate down the years, rather than the grubby rush north and the squalor of the frontier town. The last great gold rush generated its own mythology of heroism and greed.
Dozens of the men who had scaled the Chilkoot Pass struggled to record the experience in memoirs now long out of print and forgotten. But three professional writers did capture the magic and nurture the Klondike’s mythology.
The first and greatest of these storytellers was Jack London, whose life was dramatically affected by his year in the Yukon. His meteoric rise to fame began only five months after his return from the Klondike in August 1898—but those were five long, wretched months. In California, he returned to the same challenges he had faced in 1897: how to get food on the table and his foot on the literary ladder. While he was in the Yukon, his stepfather had died and his mother, Flora, was raising a grandchild. At twenty-two, Jack was head of the household, with no visible means of support. His only physical mementoes of the Klondike were a bad case of scurvy and $4.50 in gold dust. He recovered his health with remarkable speed (although one pressing expense was a new set of teeth, since most of his own had fallen out), but despite all his efforts he failed to find full-time work. He pawned his watch, bicycle, and a raincoat that was his father’s sole legacy to him, and he applied for a position in the postal service. However, it was the Klondike that would deliver him from poverty, because he began to shape his adventures of the previous year into articles and stories.
All that fall, Jack spent his days hunched over a rented typewriter, drawing deeply on hand-rolled cigarettes as, by trial and error, he learned the craft of writing. To improve his style, he studied the work of successful writers. Rudyard Kipling became his model: he copied out Kipling’s stories until he had internalized the older author’s vigorous rhythm and clipped voice. The rejection slips kept coming—forty-four by December—and the young writer grew increasingly despondent. His account of the voyage down the Yukon River was returned by the San Francisco Bulletin with the comment “Interest in Alaska has subsided in an amazing degree.” He also tried mailing out some of the essays, po
ems, and stories he had completed before he went to the Klondike, but by now, according to one account, the pile of rejection slips was five feet high. Thanks to a few odd jobs mowing lawns or cleaning carpets he could afford the postage, but his patience and his supply of stamps quickly dwindled. The abandoned claim on the Stewart River began to look more promising than a literary career. He wrote to a friend, Ted Applegarth, “My partners are still on the inside and it all depends as to what they write me whether I go back in February or not.”
Finally, in early December, Jack sold his first story, to Overland Monthly, a Western magazine originally edited by Bret Harte, the master storyteller of the California Gold Rush. Jack’s story was “To the Man on Trail,” and it featured Malemute Kid—a rugged sourdough with a heart of gold who would appear frequently in Jack’s Arctic tales. Malemute Kid was a composite character based on Jack himself and the men he had met on Split-Up Island. The story throbbed with the camaraderie of survivors in a cruel land: “Malemute Kid arose, cup in hand, and glanced at the greased-paper window, where the frost stood full three inches thick. ‘A health to the man on trail this night; may his grub hold out; may his dogs keep their legs; may his matches never miss fire.’” All the captivating details Jack had absorbed during his Yukon sojourn were there: the crunch of a sled on snow, the snapping jaws and wolfish snarls of sled dogs, the moose-meat fry-ups, and the “barren struggle with cold and death.”
Although publication thrilled Jack, he was crestfallen to learn that Overland Monthly would pay only five dollars for the story. But his confidence in a literary future was restored, especially when the same month he received forty dollars from a less prestigious publication, the Black Cat, for a piece written a couple of years earlier. This was a third-rate horror story entitled “A Thousand Deaths,” but the fee allowed its author to pay off some debts and keep writing.
Soon Jack’s northern stories were appearing regularly in Overland Monthly. The magazine raised its rate to $7.50 a piece and gave Jack’s name prominence on its pages. By October 1899, he had caught the attention of New York editors, and he sold a Yukon story to the Atlantic Monthly for $120. Jack churned out stories at a gallop, averaging 1,000 words a day without fail. His labors paid off. In 1900, ten more Klondike stories appeared in New York-based magazines with higher rates, larger circulations, and more readers than Overland Monthly. There were seven more Klondike stories in 1901, nine more in 1902, and four (including Call of the Wild, a novella) in 1903. His first book, The Son of the Wolf, appeared in North America in 1900 and Britain in 1901, and contained nine Klondike tales that had already appeared in magazines. Soon he extended his range beyond the gold fields, turning to Marxism and to South Seas adventures for material. But his reputation was built on the “Northland stories” he had gathered in the Yukon.
Three years after Jack London left Dawson City, he was known as the Kipling of the Klondike, and he had become the most highly paid short story writer in North America. With his square jaw, tousled hair, and laughing eyes, he was a celebrity—the most popular young author of his day. Newspapers reported breathlessly on his marital adventures, sailing expeditions, and speeches promoting socialism. He loved being in the limelight, playing to the gallery with outrageous public behavior. But his success rested on his storytelling ability, and his stories resonated with readers because, in an era of rapid cultural change, he embodied both old ideals and new ideas. His rags-to-riches career, a paradigm of the American myth of success, meshed with one of the most dramatically turbulent periods in American history. These were the years when the Jeffersonian dream of an agrarian republic gave way to the harsh reality of an industrial superpower. The frontier was closed, yet it still exerted a powerful appeal. And Jack combined nostalgia for an era when men were men with a progressive sympathy for the underdog.
The underlying theme of Jack’s books is a curious, often contradictory concoction of values taken from the books that had seen him through that long Yukon winter. (“Forty days in a refrigerator,” he later quipped.) Like many self-taught individuals, he had cherry-picked the ideas that had an intuitive appeal to him, from writers as diverse as Kipling, Darwin, and Marx. Evolution and dissolution, survival of the fittest, the supremacy of the white race, atheism, determinism, and individualism—a blend of ideas current during his lifetime underpins many of his stories. He admired Indian peoples and sympathized with their sufferings, yet he clung to his belief that Anglo-Saxons were superior. He preached that only collective action could improve conditions for the working man, but he also glorified the rugged individualism that characterized the ethos of America’s pioneer past. As he put it in his own words, he raged “through life without end like one of Nietzsche’s blond beasts, lustfully roving and conquering by sheer superiority and strength.”
Jack’s contradictory beliefs, racism, and patronizing treatment of female characters might have irritated some readers had they not been swept along by his unvarnished realism. It was such a welcome contrast to the saccharine prose of much Victorian literature. Jack London’s characters speak in dialect, frequently swear, and face horror and loneliness.
The tough-guy modernist style that characterized later authors, including Damon Runyon and Ernest Hemingway, is foreshadowed in Jack London’s tales. Jack wrote from experience: his best fiction was created out of real people and events, and these are often clearly identifiable. Swiftwater Bill and Father Robeau both appear under their own names; a “padre” closely resembling Father Judge makes sporadic appearances. Hoary old anecdotes from Dawson’s bars, such as the hustler who hiked over the mountains with twelve dozen eggs, or the entrepreneur who arranged public readings from an out-of-date newspaper, are dramatized and embellished. “I never realized a cent from any properties I had an interest in up there,” he later wrote of the Klondike. “Still, I have managed to pan out a living ever since on the strength of the trip.”
Jack London’s best-known work, which was an enormous commercial success and brought him a readership that was loyal to him throughout his life, was his novella, The Call of the Wild. The book is a parable about the thin veneer of civilization and about individual self-realization in a mythic wilderness. The hero is Buck, a sort of Nietzschean superdog who is stolen from his Californian home and ends up as a sled dog in the Yukon. As London biographer Franklin Walker has pointed out, a dominant theme in the book is Buck’s adaptability, resourcefulness, and courage as he learns to defend his rights and become a pack leader. “With no more training to make him a good sled dog than London had to be a writer,” suggests Walker, “he uses brains and brawn to win his way.” In the end, Buck (a cross between a sheepdog and a St. Bernard) joins a wolf pack to live in the forest and howl under the stars for the rest of his life. Buck’s return to the wild reflected Jack London’s escape from the confining elements in society.
Jack was not the only Klondike storyteller of his day, but he rose above the competition because he understood the market. This was the golden age of the magazine: new printing techniques and inexpensive paper, combined with a more literate public, had transformed the magazine industry from a genteel diversion serving a well-to-do female readership into big business serving a mass audience. Aggressive editors such as John Brisben Walker of Cosmopolitan, George Horace Lorimer of the Saturday Evening Post, and Frank Munsey of Munsey’s Weekly were hungry for adventure stories. Their literary demands were straightforward. In the words of Munsey, “Good easy reading for the people—no frills, no fine finishes, no hair splitting niceties, but action, action, always action.” During the first decade of the twentieth century, hardly a month passed without an action-packed London story appearing in the Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, or Century. The Call of the Wild was originally published in four installments in the Saturday Evening Post, before it appeared in book form in 1903. Jack’s omnipresence in print, combined with his larger-than-life personality, gave the Klondike Gold Rush a literary glamour that was never part of the reality. He created, then
fed, an appetite across North America and beyond for stories about survival in the cruel North.
Jack was only forty when he died of kidney failure after years of drinking and overwork. By then he had published over fifty books, yet the impulse that had sent him over the Chilkoot Pass was undimmed. Just before his death he bragged, “I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dryrot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.” No wonder this self-made millionaire attracted such media attention. Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria died the night before Jack London did, on November 22, 1916, but the American press gave far more space to the loss of the author who had romanticized a get-rich-quick event than the demise of a monarch who had presided over the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire for over sixty years.
Jack’s style seeped into every subsequent account of the Klondike Gold Rush, particularly into the ballads written by his immediate successor in the Klondike myth-building business, Robert W. Service. Like London, Service had an unconventional upbringing. Born in Lancashire in 1874, he was shipped off to Scotland to be raised by his grandparents in a tiny Ayrshire village. Also like London, he never finished his education. Service emigrated to Canada when he was twenty-one and then, like Jack, spent several years on the road, mainly in California. For both men, Rudyard Kipling was a hero. Robert Service would later write, in a poem called “A Verseman’s Apology,”The classics! Well, most of them bore me
The Moderns I don’t understand;
But I keep Burns, my kinsman, before me,
And Kipling, my friend, is at hand.
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