Winter would be late this year but the pace nevertheless quickened out on Front Street and along the waterfront and in the shops. Men hammered loose boards into place and lashed down the buildings, anchoring them against the wind. The Moon Springs Water Company turned off the town's only plumbing, two crude pipes running down from Anvil Creek. Holes in the wall were patched up in preparation for the blizzards, and the surfmen from the local U.S. Coast Guard station prepared to move down to the beach to haul up Nome's fleet of skiffs, schooners, and lighters.
The arctic ice pack was inching ever closer to the narrow Bering Strait and ice was forming along the shores of the Bering Sea. The sea became "an ocean of slush rolling ponderously up on the sands, crashing and splattering an icy enamel on everything it touched," said naturalist Frank Dufresne, a town resident.
On the deck of the Alameda, the captain knew he would have to retreat south soon or risk being crushed in the vise of the encroaching ice. It was time to batten down the crates and send out a clear message: get on board or stay behind for the winter.
As the sound of the whistle echoed across the shore, carpenters dropped their hammers, housewives paused in the street, and sled dogs roaming free on Front Street cocked their heads and, in sympathy with the Alameda, let out their own mournful wail.
The last lighter raced out to the ship, picked up its cargo, and returned to shore. Black smoke rose from the Alameda's stacks as it built a head of steam, and the anchor went up. Finally, the bow of the ship began its slow turn southward and all of Nome took a deep breath.
They were on their own, at least until spring.
"It seemed to me that half of the people of Nome had managed to stow aboard the old steamer," said Dufresne. "I had the feeling of being deserted on an ice floe...It was the worst day I ever spent in Alaska."
In a few weeks, the tundra's rivers and creeks would freeze over and the frozen surface would become smooth and transparent to reflect the night stars like "tips of small torches held up from the depths." In town, hoarfrost would coat every object, and out on the Bering Sea, the waves would flatten out as the sea turned into thickening sheets of ice that might stretch as far south as the Pribilof Islands, 550 miles away.
On shore, the floes piled one on top of another in towering hummocks; a little farther north, the pressure of the sea ice had been known to force up great slabs and eject them 50 feet onto shore, crushing everything in their path. The Eskimos of the Northwest called it ivu —"the ice that leaps."
As the weeks passed, the sun would sink lower beneath the horizon and the fields of ice and snow would be transformed from the purest white to a wash of gold and then to a violet twilight. The days were shorter now, just four hours of sunlight, and the temperatures plunged. Finally, a cavernous silence would descend on the coast like a "great listening."
At night, as the cold hung over the land, all of Nome's wildlife and every dog and his master would hunker down. The slightest movement could puncture the arctic stillness, for the extreme cold amplified each sound. Far out at sea, one could make out the thunderclap of floes crashing into each other, and a hunter on land could hear the crunch of reindeer hooves on the crisp snow a few miles away, or the sound of a dog chewing on a bone.
Then the blizzards descended, choking gusts of snow that one resident said draws "the breath out you, then fills your nostrils and drives it back again down your throat." Another simply stated that a blizzard in Nome could feel "as if an unseen hand were clutching at my throat." One had to fight against the shrieking winds of Nome's winter storms, square one's shoulders, and lean forward with all one's weight to keep going. A short walk home through town could turn into an hour's haul and one could easily lose one's way and end up dead on the tundra behind the town.
It was as if the Great Ice Age had returned.
Dr. Welch had gone through his checklist more than once in the final days before the Alameda left that fall. There would have been cotton balls, ether, tongue depressors, thermometers, and medicines that needed replacing. While most of the medical supplies had arrived safely, one item was missing. Earlier that year, in the summer of 1924, Welch had noticed that the supply of diphtheria antitoxin had expired, and he had made a point of ordering up a fresh batch through the health commissioner's office in Juneau. In all of his eighteen years practicing medicine on the Seward Peninsula, he had not seen a single confirmed case of diphtheria, the deadly childhood disease. There was only the slimmest chance that he would ever need the antitoxin, yet he could never be too sure.
But now the waterfront was silent, and Welch reckoned that the order had either been ignored or misplaced. He would have to do without until next spring.
At about the time the Alameda left town, an Eskimo family with four children arrived from Holy Cross, a village near the mouth of the Yukon River. The youngest child, a two-year-old, had taken ill, and when Welch examined the toddler, he found him "very much depleted and emaciated." The child refused to eat and Welch noticed that his patient had extremely foul breath. The mother told him the child had been treated for tonsillitis in Holy Cross, but the diagnosis hardly explained his weakened state. Welch questioned the parents carefully and asked whether other children in their village had tonsillitis or severe sore throats—symptoms that resembled those of diphtheria.
The parents assured him they had not.
To Welch's relief, the child's three siblings appeared healthy and robust, and he set aside his concerns: diphtheria was highly contagious, and if the siblings were infected they would have shown clear symptoms. He guessed the child might be suffering from a less severe infection.
"Many cases have come under my observation in these eighteen years that looked very suspicious, but time had always before proved that they were one of the various forms of inflammatory diseases of the throat," Welch would note in his medical records.
By the following morning, the child was dead.
1: Gold, Men, and Dogs
A crowd on Front Street during the heyday of gold rush Nome in the summer of 1900 (Photograph courtesy of Terrence Cole)
"Nothing in the world could have caused the building of a city where Nome is built except the thing that caused it: the fing of gold..."
- Archdeacon Hudson Stuck, and Alaskan missionary
There were few worse places on earth to build a town, but Nome had gone up almost overnight after two Swedes and a Norwegian found a nugget the size of a small rock in a creek near the beach. The men came to be known as the "Three Lucky Swedes" and their discovery in 1898 would set off a stampede.
The three men had initially come to Northwest Alaska as herders for a U.S. government program designed to introduce Eskimos to reindeer as an alternative food supply. Nearly half a century of commercial whaling in the Bering Sea had devastated the Eskimos' traditional food source, which included seals and whales, and reindeer meat was thought to be a workable alternative. The youngest "Swede" was twenty-four-year-old fisherman from the north of Norway - which at the time was run by Sweden - named Jafet Lindeberg, who had signed up for the program despite the fact that he knew almost nothing about reindeer. Lindeberg's colleagues were equally unskilled. John Brynteson got the job because he knew the reindeer program's architect, and Erik Lindblom had been a tailor in San Francisco who was said to have been shanghaied in a bar and loaded onto a whaler headed for the Bering Sea.
When the reindeer expedition was canceled, the three decided to look for gold. They had heard that there was color in the creeks of the Seward Peninsula and reckoned they had little to lose. They had about six months' prospecting experience between them, but according to one contemporary, they could barely tell "a placer from a potato patch." Either way, they knew the difference between a rock and nugget, and within weeks they were rich men. News of their good fortune spread east across Alaska into Canada and south into the United States.
Nome was not the first town in the far north to have sprung into life on the prospects of finding gold. In the summer o
f 1896, prospectors had found gold in a creek near the Klondike River, just east of the Alaskan border in Canada's Yukon Territory: the Klondike was a rich find, and newspapers and magazines ran sensational stories about the millions of dollars in placer gold discovered there. Invariably, they failed to list the perils of northern travel. Of the more than 100,000 men and women who set off from all over the world on the months-long trek, fewer than 30,000 would reach Dawson City, the boom-town that served as a gateway to the Klondike gold field. 1 Fewer still would strike it rich. Good fortune smiled more often on those with the patience or entrepreneurial skills to open up a general store or a saloon.
1. Among the tens of thousands of prospectors to the Klondike was a young writer named Jack London, who used his experiences as inspiration for writing The Call of the Wild (1903) and other stories.
But gold mining was a powerful addiction. The promise of gold offered a way out of tough economic times in the United States. Years of unchecked speculation on Wall Street and faulty federal policies (one of which obligated the government to pay gold in exchange for coinable silver at values above market) had finally come to a head in 1893. Nearly fifteen thousand companies and more than six hundred banks failed, and 20 percent of the American workforce lost their jobs. Thousands of people had no savings to buy food or pay the rent. The effects of the panic were felt around the world. Thus, even with the odds stacked against them, prospectors kept coming to the Klondike. Then, in the winter of 1898, word traveled to the region that gold had been discovered on a creek on the Seward Peninsula, clear across Alaska, a distance of about eight hundred miles as the raven flies. Thousands of prospectors in the Klondike district decided to abandon their barren claims and, with picks and shovels in hand, make their way to the next shining prospect. The only route from the Klondike to Nome is along the mighty Yukon River, which stretches 2,300 miles from its headwaters in Canada across Alaska to its mouth at the Bering Sea. But by then, the Yukon River had already frozen over. The prospectors, willing by now to take just about any risk, ignored the freeze and set out by any means they could find, by dogsled or horseback, on foot, and even a few on bicycles or ice skates. The pilgrimage across Alaska's Interior to Nome was weeks long and the line stretched out for miles. It was said that the campfires along the route were seldom extinguished. "You never saw a more frenzied bunch of men impatient to get to Nome to get their crack at all this gold," said Carrie McLain, an early resident of Nome.
Several hundred miners arrived in Nome in the winter of 1898. How many didn't make it or turned back will never be known. What is clear is that those who did arrive were mostly tough and experienced trail veterans and prospectors, who were hardened by at least one far northern winter. They were known as "sourdoughs" because they often kept a supply of yeast in crocks held close to their chests. This was used to make bread on the trail and it ensured that the miner would never go hungry.
During the first winter of 1898-99, the sourdoughs settled along Anvil Creek, some five miles up from the beach where the Lucky Swedes had discovered gold. When the ice on the Bering Sea melted that summer, a new group of prospectors from the states began arriving by boat. Before long over a thousand more had set up their white tents in what was then known as the Cape Nome Mining District. 2
2. When the miners registered the town with the U.S. Post Office to receive mail, they initially named the mining district Anvil City after a nearby rock that looked like the blacksmith's tool. The postal authorities, however, rejected the name because another Alaskan mining camp had already claimed the tide, and so instead the boomtown was called Nome, after the cape of the same name thirteen miles to the east. The naming of Cape Nome is widely believed to have been the result of a cartographer's bad handwriting. A draftsman aboard HMS Herald, which was in search of the missing crew of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, had apparently written "? Name" on his map when the ship passed by a cape on the Seward Peninsula that had not been marked. When the map was later drawn in permanent pen, the cartographer mistook the question mark for a C and "Name" for "Nome." Some locals in Nome believe in another version. The Eskimo expression kn-no-me means "I don't know" and is thought to have been the answer Natives gave when foreign visitors landing on the shore asked the likely question, "What's the name of this place?"
The sourdoughs called the new arrivals "cheechakoes," a combination of Native Indian words meaning "newcomer." The new boys brought a dangerous element to the mix: they were, for the most part, naive. Few of them had ever been this far north; they had only the slightest notion of the harshness and isolation they would face once winter came and the Bering Sea froze; and their food and fuel would soon run out. Nome's establishment considered the newcomers a threat and worried that the town was in for a rough time. Everyone knew that more prospectors would be coming.
Early that summer, an aging Idaho prospector named John Hummel, too sick to hike up to Anvil Creek to hunt for gold, had decided to try out his luck on the beach. He talked a younger man into doing the physical work for him, and soon the beach was yielding $100 a day. The news went out that Nome's beaches were made of gold and that there were enough nuggets for anyone who could bend down and pick one up. Gold, they said, came in with the tide. But by the time word of Hummel's luck had reached the states late in the fall of 1899, the Bering Sea was frozen over and winter had set in. There was no way to reach Nome until the following year. Through the winter, the legend spread from one port city to the next, across the United States and beyond its borders, and thousands of would-be entrepreneurs began to prepare for the trek up the Pacific Northwest for their summer assault on Nome in 1900.
Reports of the new diggings on the edge of the Bering Sea reached the governor of Alaska as well: one of the miners had made it his business to travel by boat and trail to warn Governor John G. Brady that mayhem and lawlessness threatened the new camp. They needed help. Brady contacted federal officials and requested that troops be sent in to uphold the law. "These men are mad with the lust for gold," Brady reportedly said upon hearing the news. "Conditions will be desperate unless a restraining influence can be exerted...You can hardly imagine to what depths a mining camp, shut away from civilization for eight months by a thousand miles of impassable ice, may descend..."
By the summer of 1900, as the ice melted out on the Bering Sea, more than fifty ships were waiting off the coast of Nome. It was a ragged armada of steamers and ungainly paddlewheels, some more seaworthy than others. On board were thousands of would-be prospectors who had come straight from San Francisco and Seattle and others from St. Michael, the deepwater port nearest to the mouth of the Yukon River, where they had been stranded en route from other small mining camps in Alaska and the Yukon Territory.
The journey had been difficult enough: many of the prospectors had had to wait in one of the harbors of the Aleutian Chain until the ice melted and the boats could pass through to the Bering Sea. After weeks on board, they were anxious to step out onto the gold-rich beaches and try their luck; but first they had to disembark. In the heaving surf, passengers with bags and cargo scaled down the towering steamship decks to the lighters below. The boats banged against the hulls, rising and falling to the rhythm of the sea, and after everyone had piled on, the lighters were hauled to shore with heavy ropes.
For those who had risked everything to come this far, to turn back empty-handed would mean a return to a life of certain poverty, with the added sting of ridicule. They fell onto the beach with picks and shovels and immediately went to work. According to one account, one desperate miner dropped to his hands and knees when he came upon shore: there was not a single nugget in sight. Grief-stricken, he cried out, "It's all a lie!" Then he shot himself in the head.
Geologists would later discover that there had been only a limited supply of "Hummel's Gold" on the beach, trace deposits left in the sand by eons of erosion. Furthermore, the miners had been facing the wrong way: the real gold lay on the tundra behind them, in the creeks and rivers outside of tow
n.
More than twenty thousand cheechakoes arrived that summer of 1900, and they propped up their white camp tents along the beach. The tents stretched out for thirty miles along the coast. "It seemed as if a great albatross had settled on the shore," one eyewitness said. "Its wings—the white tents of the busy gold seekers—stretching up and down the coast; its gray-breast the huddled group of stores and cabins hastily constructed of driftwood."
There was no need to register a claim, for the beach was considered public property, and no sooner had anyone landed than they threw down their tools and set to work in the sand. There were Norwegians and Frenchmen, Russians and Americans, a babel of languages above the pounding of the surf. Along the shore, a line of wooden rockers stood like a phalanx of defensive artillery. The tall, unsteady devices had a narrow rectangular sluice box lined with copper plating and quicksilver to catch the gold. There were other, more elaborate mechanical contraptions with wheels, engines, and pulleys. The sound could be deafening: the jerry-built machines clanged and coughed and the miners shook their rockers as the water pushed through in a cascade of gravel and sand. The surf boomed.
On Front Street, above the beach, they built gambling halls and saloons from the cords of lumber, windows, and tools hauled in from the states. There was scant consideration given to the tides, and many of the buildings were set dangerously close to the edge of the sea, just yards away from the driftwood and jetsam. The builders would eventually regret their haste and imprudence.
By the end of summer the town had risen on the tundra. There were sixteen law offices open for business along Front Street, as well as twelve general stores, four real estate offices, an equal number of drugstores, five laundries, four bathhouses, three fruit and cigar stores, as many watchmakers, and a masseuse. One section of the street called the "stockade" was for the bordellos. This was the first stop for the miners who came up from the beach or hiked down from the creeks. The prostitutes lived behind Front Street in rowhouses no better than shacks. "Hoo-Hoo" Henderson, one of the most popular, knew every trick in the book and earned her sobriquet by shouting, "Hoo-Hoo! Hoo-Hoo!" whenever she faked orgasm.
The Cruelest Miles: the Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic Page 2
