Romancing the Klondike
Canadian Historical Brides (Yukon) Book 3
By Joan Donaldson-Yarmey
Digital ISBNs:
EPUB 978-1-77299-265-6
Kindle 978-1-77299-266-3
WEB 978-1-77299-267-0
Amazon Print ISBN 978-1-77299-268-7
Print ISBN 978-1-77299-269-4
Copyright 2016 by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey
Series Copyright 2016 Books We Love Ltd.
Cover art by Michelle Lee
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Dedication
Books We Love Ltd. Dedicates the Canadian Historical Brides series to the immigrants, male and female, who left their homes and families, crossed oceans and endured unimaginable hardships in order to settle the Canadian wilderness and build new lives in a rough and untamed country.
Acknowledgement
Books We Love acknowledges the Government of Canada and the Canada Book Fund for its financial support in creating the Historical Brides of Canada series.
Chapter One
August 1896
“Isn’t this captivating?” Pearl exclaimed to her cousin Emma. She leaned over the rail of the sternwheeler and looked down at the mighty Yukon River. During their voyage, it had changed colour from clear blue to muddy brown and gone from wide and slow to narrow and rapid. “I love the way the paddlewheel churns up the water behind us.”
“You’ve been saying something like this just about every day since we left Halifax,” Emma said with a grin.
“I don’t think so,” Pearl protested.
“Oh, I do. The prairies you saw from the train were expansive and beautiful, the coast you saw from the steamship was wild and incredible, and now on this voyage up the river you’ve described the mountains as being majestic, the walls of granite we passed through as being proud, and the river as being lovely, treacherous, frightening, and now captivating.”
“It’s just that so far this trip has been everything I hoped it would be.” Pearl shook her head. “I still have a hard time believing that I am on my way to Fortymile to write articles and do sketches about life in the north for the Morning Herald.”
“Well, you are.” Emma put her arm around Pearl. “And I’m with you.”
Pearl leaned her head on Emma’s shoulder “Yes, and thank you for coming. I’m so glad you and I are sharing this trip. You’ve made it so much more fun.”
Even though Pearl had a writing assignment and a monetary advance from their hometown newspaper, her parents had thought that, at nineteen, she was too young to make the long journey from Halifax to Fortymile alone. But they gave their blessing and some money to help with expenses once twenty-one-year-old Emma decided to leave her job and come with her.
Pearl grinned widely. Her sense of euphoria had not lessened in the two months since she’d boarded the train, even when the long days became tedious and boring. She was on an adventure, an adventure as great as that of Mrs. Anna Leonowens who had taught the wives, concubines, and children of the King of Siam in the 1860s and wrote about it in The English Governess at the Siamese Court. Mrs. Leonowens opened the Victoria School of Art and Design in Halifax and Pearl had attended it for two years learning how to write and sketch. During that time she’d had articles and illustrations accepted by Collier’s Weekly: an Illustrated Journal, Harper’s Magazine, and the Morning Herald.
At the same time, her cousin, Sam, had been sending home letters about his experiences in the north looking for gold. He’d gone there five years ago with two friends and while they had not found a big strike, they had found enough gold to keep themselves in money while they continued the search. Those letters had made the north sound so romantic and they had been the basis for her pitch to the newspaper publisher.
For the first part of the journey up the river, the weather had been warm and she had enjoyed drawing the hills, the animals, and the birds she had seen from the deck of the ship. She’d also sketched some of the Indian summer camps they’d passed. Their houses were shorter and had rounded roofs, much different from the teepees she’d seen in the prairies. Then, after leaving the post of Beaver, the hills had slowly disappeared. Now, as they watched, the water flow became sluggish and it was as if they were steaming out onto a lake instead of up a river.
“Is this still part of the river?” Pearl asked one of the crew.
“Yes,” the crewmember answered. “It’s known as the Yukon Flats.”
“How long do the flats last?”
“We will be sailing north by northeast through them until we cross the Arctic Circle and reach Fort Yukon.”
Pearl watched as they passed islands and sandbars where a few ducks and geese swam in the quiet water. The dinner bell rang. Pearl and Emma headed to their table. After their meal, they joined an older couple for a game of cards.
Later, before going to bed Pearl walked around the deck enjoying the twilight at such a late hour as ten o’clock.
It was late in the next day that they crossed the Arctic Circle and arrived at Fort Yukon. Pearl had learned that the fort had been a Hudson’s Bay Company fur trading post in the early 1860s even though it was Russian territory. When the United States bought Alaska from the Russians in 1867, they ousted the British fur traders. Pearl quickly drew the few buildings of the post that she could see from the sternwheeler. After an overnight stay, they began steaming south and soon were out of the flats and back onto the river.
* * *
Sam Owens sat at a rough-hewn, wooden table in the smoke-filled Fortymile Saloon and stared at his drink. He barely heard the boisterous laughter and clinking of glasses around him as he tried to find the right words to say.
He and his friends, Gordon Baker and Donald Miller, had just returned to their cabin after panning a creek twenty miles inland from the town of Fortymile. They had trekked over permafrost, around sloughs, and through the bush with backpacks only to find nothing more than a few cents of gold per pan.
Their discussion at the table about whether they should head back home to Halifax on the next boat out or stay for one more winter was going nowhere. It was the first week of August and the riverboats only plied the river until mid-September when freeze-up began. They had to make up their minds soon. Did they want to make one last attempt to strike it rich, or just give up their dream and return to a normal life in Nova Scotia?
Sam, who had convinced the others to come north in the search for gold, had voted to stay. Donald Miller wasn’t sure which way to go, but Gordon Baker wanted to go home.
“I think we should give ourselves more time,” Sam said.
“More time?” Gordon banged his fist on the table. “My god, we’ve been here five years. How much more time do we need to figure out this whole thing has been a waste of our time.”
Sam stared at his friend as Gordon gulped down the last of his beer and signaled for another one. He was worried and had been for the past few months. Gordon had changed. Gone was the carefree, happy man he and Donald had come north with, had shared many experiences, good and bad, with. In his place was a man who could erupt in anger at the smallest thing, whose face sometimes took on a demented look, and whose eyes darted from place to place as if fearful of someone or something.
Sam had heard stories about men who had gone mad while living in the north. Men like the guy only known by the nickname, Old Maiden, who kept a bundle of old new
spapers with him because he said he needed them to refer to if he got into an argument. Or Cannibal Ike who kept a moose carcass in his cabin and ate the meat raw.
Was Gordon going that same route? Had five years of looking for the big strike affected his mind?
“Well, I wouldn’t say our time here has been a waste,” Donald said, tracing one of the many gouges in the tabletop with his finger. He looked up with a smile. “It certainly has been a grand and splendid venture.”
“Yes, it has,” Sam agreed heartily. “And I really don’t want to see it end.”
“That’s because you’ve become a northerner,” Gordon snorted.
The three of them had been unlikely friends since grade school. Donald had been the shy, quiet one, Gordon the outgoing and athletic one, while Sam had been pudgy with a sense of humour. They’d left their homes in the province of Nova Scotia six years ago heading first to the Cariboo gold fields of British Columbia. Even though that strike had happened in 1860, some still found gold in the area. After a year with no success, they came north to the Yukon River in the Northwest Territories. For the past five years they had tramped all over the territory, sinking shafts and shovelling gravel on creek after creek and had nothing to show for it except their run-down cabin here at Fortymile and a claim that produced five cents of gold with each pan, and that was on good days. Sure, it kept them in supplies and they always had some money, but like all men who searched for gold, they wanted to strike it rich.
In spite of trekking up and down miles and miles of rivers and creeks, and following every prospector’s direction to where he had panned gold, they hadn’t found a better paying claim. The only reason they had the cabin was because an old prospector from the 1886 Fortymile gold rush was heading south to live with his son and he offered it to them for whatever gold they had on them. Before that, they had rented a cabin in the settlement for the winter and lived in a tent in the summer.
“I’m tired of stumbling through the tough wilderness, fighting the elements of heat and cold, and going hungry,” Gordon continued, taking a drink of his beer. “I don’t want to spend another cold winter here. It bothers me that I am cut off from the rest of the world for eight months unless I want to trek six hundred miles up the frozen Yukon to Lake Bennett, go to Lake Lindeman and over the Chilkoot Pass.”
“Why don’t you join the theatre group with me?” Donald asked. “Rehearsing for the plays and building the set gives me something to do during the winter months.”
Gordon just glared at him.
“Or we could put you in charge of keeping the stove going all day and night,” Sam grinned, trying to lighten the mood. “That would keep you busy.”
“That’s another reason I want out of here. We either spend some of our summer chopping down trees and cutting them into lengths for our stove in the winter or we use most of the gold we find to buy wood.”
Sam scratched his short black beard and sighed. He really hated to see his friends leave and he had tried every argument to make them stay. He thought he had Donald convinced but Gordon seemed set on going.
“I guess there’s nothing more I can say,” Sam said, his voice subdued.
“No, there isn’t.”
“Are you taking the next boat?”
“Well, I’d like to make one last trip to Ogilvie.”
“That’s a hundred miles upriver,” Donald protested.
Sam felt like kicking Donald under the table. Maybe a trip up the river would change Gordon’s mind.
“I know,” Gordon said. “But Joe should be back from his visit to the Outside by now and I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye to him.”
Sam nodded. Joseph Ladue had been one of the first men they had met when they’d arrived. He was a co-owner of the trading post at Ogilvie and, not only had he outfitted them for their first search for gold, he had explained what they were to look for. He had become their closest friend in the north.
“We haven’t seen him since he left last year, so this will be a good reason to go,” Sam said.
“If we make it back in time for me to take the next boat, fine,” Gordon said. “If not, then I will book passage on the last one in September.”
“What about you, Donald?” Sam asked. “Are you leaving, too?”
Donald kept his eyes on his glass. “I’ll decide when we get back from Ogilvie,” he said.
Sam nodded. That was the best he could expect for now. “Let’s head out tomorrow,” he said, keeping his voice warm and affable to hide the deep disappointment he was feeling. “We have a lot of upstream poling to do.”
The others agreed. Gordon signaled for another round.
“I’ve had enough,” Sam said. He finished his drink then stood to leave. “I’ll see you later at the cabin.”
Sam ducked his head to miss the kerosene lamps hanging from the ceiling as he walked through the wood shavings on the floor and out of the saloon. He breathed deeply of the warm summer air and started walking along the wooden sidewalk. He loved this town he now called home. From what he had heard it had begun as a lonely village until someone discovered gold on the Fortymile River late in the fall of 1886 and about twenty miners camped near the mouth of the river for the winter. The smattering of log cabins along the water became a town of about 200 in 1889 when the Alaska Commercial Company sternwheeler Arctic began delivering regular supplies and equipment.
Because it was so far north, spring, summer and fall were usually lumped together from May to September. The nearest outfitting ports were thousands of miles away in San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, and Victoria. Steamers with passengers and supplies sailed north as far as St. Michael, near the mouth of the Yukon River. There the passengers and supplies transferred onto sternwheelers like the Arctic and the Weare. These stopped at the posts along the river, Fortymile being one of them.
Miners, some flush with money from a summer working their claims, moved into Fortymile for the seven to eight months of winter. He knew most of them and found them to be an odd assortment. There were men who suffered from wanderlust and went wherever there was a suggestion of a gold strike. Some of the men had taken part in the American Civil War. Others came from all over Canada. Still others came from England, men whose parents had shipped them to North America because they were a disgrace and embarrassment to their family. These men were paid money to stay in the far-off country and were called remittance men. There were also women in town that worked in the dance halls or set up businesses as bakers, laundresses, and seamstresses.
Many of the miners were well educated and they had built a theatre where they put on plays. He, himself, enjoyed the lending library with its reading material. There were also six saloons, several restaurants, a billiard room, and two well-equipped stores. Other businesses included a watchmaker, a dressmaker with the latest fashions, and two blacksmiths. If anyone got sick or injured, two doctors made Fortymile their home.
Really, Sam wondered, what more could a person ask for in a place to live?
Chapter Two
Pearl and Emma shared what passed for a stateroom. It was a small room with bunk beds, a writing table with chair, a separate wing chair and a small closet where they had hung some of their clothing. They had brought their own bedding and pillows—otherwise they’d have had to sleep on bare mattresses—and their own papers, pens, and ink. The Weare was approaching Circle City and their excitement was high at the idea of having a full day to explore the town.
“I’ll do your hair if you will do mine,” Emma suggested.
“Okay.” Pearl smiled. She had always thought her long blonde hair was her best feature and she wanted to keep up with the latest fashion news in hairstyles. She spent hours poring over the Delineator, the New York fashion magazine that came out every month.
Through reading the magazine, she’d learned that there was no other item of her toilette so influential in emphasizing or lessening her natural attractiveness than the arrangement of her hair. This crowning glory could al
most be a disfigurement if not done becomingly. But if the tresses were carefully dressed, they would lend a decided charm to a plain face. The protruding knot at the crown of the head, known as the Newport, was the present rage.
“Let’s do the knot for a slender face today,” Emma said. She was always encouraging Pearl to try something new. Emma liked to change her hairstyle every month.
“I’ve tried it and it doesn’t seem to look right on me.” Pearl sat down in front of the large mirror over the writing desk.
“To you maybe, but I’m sure it would be the perfect one for your face.”
Pearl thought about the article she had read. The Newport should sit just below the crown of a woman’s head if her face is round, but to secure perfect becomingness it could be raised above the crown for an oval face or made into a longish knot for the long slender face.
“I’m just not sure what type of face I have.” Pearl had gone over the article many times but had never found a description of what full and round, oval, or long and slender looked like. She had tried the different adaptations until she found one she thought added a perfect becomingness to a plain, oval face. Once she’d settled on the style, Pearl hadn’t varied from it.
“I keep telling you it is slender.”
Pearl sighed. “Okay, let’s try it.”
“Turn your back to the mirror so you can’t see it until I am finished,” Emma instructed.
Pearl turned the chair around and sat. She pulled at her bangs while Emma took the chimney off the alcohol lamp used to light their room at night and lit the wick. She put the chimney on again and balanced the waving tongs on the opening at the top to heat.
“I wish I’d inherited grandma’s hair like you did,” Emma said, as she combed out Pearl’s long hair.
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