The entertainments that lightened this monotony were scanty and primitive. One of the main amusements, apart from the saloons, was a folk-rite known as the “squaw dance.” Josiah Edward Spurr, a U.S. government geologist who visited Fortymile in the nineties, has left a description of one of these affairs:
“We were attracted by a row of miners who were lined up in front of the saloon engaged in watching the door of a very large log cabin opposite, rather dilapidated with the windows broken in.… They said there was going to be a dance, but when or how they did not seem to know.…
“The evening wore on until ten o’clock, when in the dusk a stolid Indian woman with a baby in the blanket on her back, came cautiously around the corner, and with the peculiar long slouchy step of her kind, made for the cabin door, looking neither to the right nor to the left.… She was followed by a dozen others, one far behind another, each silent and unconcerned, and each with a baby upon her back. They sidled into the log cabin and sat down on the benches, where they also deposited their babies in a row: the little red people lay there very still, with wide eyes shut or staring, but never crying.…
“The mothers sat awhile looking at the ground on some one spot, then slowly lifted their heads to look at the miners who had slouched into the cabin after them – men fresh from the diggings, spoiling for excitement of any kind. Then a man with a dilapidated fiddle struck up a swinging, sawing melody and in the intoxication of the moment some of the most reckless of the miners grabbed an Indian woman and began furiously swinging her around in a sort of waltz while the others crowded and looked on.
“Little by little the dusk grew deeper, but candles were scarce and could not be afforded. The figures of the dancing couples grew more and more indistinct and their faces became lost to view, while the sawing of the fiddle grew more and more rapid, and the dancing more excited. There was no noise, however; scarcely a sound save the fiddle and the shuffling of the feet over the floor of rough hewn logs; for the Indian women were as stolid as ever and the miners could not speak the language of their partners. Even the lookers on said nothing, so that these silent dancing figures in the dusk made an almost weird effect.
“One by one, however, the women dropped out, tired, picked up their babies and slouched off home, and the men slipped over to the saloon to have a drink before going to their cabins. Surely this squaw-dance, as they call it, was one of the most peculiar balls ever seen.…”
This aboriginal background appeared all the more bizarre behind the thin varnish of civilization that began to spread over the community as the years passed. There were saloons that contained Chippendale chairs; and stores that, when they sold anything, dispensed such delicacies as pâté de foie gras and tinned plum pudding. There were Shakespeare clubs formed to give play-readings, and a library whose shelves contained books on science and philosophy. There was a dressmaker with the latest Paris fashions, and an opera house with a troupe of San Francisco dance-hall girls, and even a cigar factory, all housed in log buildings strewn helter-skelter along the mudbank above the Yukon and surrounded by intervening marshland littered with stumps, wood shavings, and tin cans.
The social life of the camp revolved around ten saloons, which at steamboat time served whiskey at fifty cents a drink (heavily watered to make it last) and the rest of the year peddled hootchinoo, a vile concoction compounded of molasses, sugar, and dried fruit, fermented with sourdough, flavoured with anything handy, distilled in an empty coal-oil can, and served hot at fifty cents a drink. It was sometimes referred to as Forty-Rod Whiskey because it was supposed to kill a man at that distance. By the peculiar etiquette of the mining camp, a man who bought a drink bought for everyone in sight, though such a round might cost a hundred dollars, while a teetotaller who refused a drink offered a deadly insult – unless he accepted a fifty-cent cigar in its place. Hootch, like everything else, was paid for in gold dust, and the prospector who flung his poke upon the bar always performed the elaborate gesture of turning his back while the amount was weighed out, since to watch this ritual was to impugn the honesty of the bartender.
Fortymile thrived on such unwritten laws, its residents enjoying a curious mixture of communism and anarchy. It had no mayor or council, no judges or lawyers, no police or jail or written code. Yet it was a cohesive community. No man went hungry, though many were destitute. Credit at Harper and McQuesten’s store was unlimited. If a man had no money, he could still get an outfit without payment. There were few “bad men” in Fortymile; on the contrary, it was a community that hewed surprisingly closely to the Christian ethic. Men shared their good fortune with their comrades, and it was part of the code that he who struck a new creek spread the news to one and all. Each man’s cabin was open to any passer-by; such a traveller could enter, eat his fill, sleep in the absent owner’s bed, and go on his way, as long as he cleaned up and left a supply of fresh kindling. This was more than mere courtesy in a land where a freezing man’s life might depend on the speed with which he could light a fire.
Although Fortymile itself was within the Canadian border, it was really an American town, getting its supplies from the United States without customs payments and sending out mail with U.S. stamps. A number of the mines were on Alaskan soil, and the social characteristics of the district were those of the American Rocky Mountain camps. It was from these parent communities that the legalistic device of the miners’ meeting was borrowed.
Canadian and U.S. mining camps grew up with varying legal customs which, to a considerable extent, point up the very real difference between the Canadian and the U.S. character. The American, freed by his own will of what he considered colonial bondage, has always insisted on running his own affairs from the ground up – especially on the frontier. The Canadian, who never knew the blood bath of revolution, has more often preferred to have law and order imposed from above rather than have it spring from the grass roots.
In the three British Columbia gold rushes, constabulary and courts of justice enforced a single set of laws in the British colonial tradition. Mining law was the same everywhere, and the gold commissioner in charge had such absolute power that the lawlessness so familiar to American mining history was unknown in the B.C. camps.
But in the Rocky Mountain camps of the United States, and later in Alaska, each community had its own customs and its own rules made on the spot. The American prospector, with his long tradition of free frontier life, smarted under any restriction imposed from above. Authority was vested in the miners themselves, who held town meetings in the New England manner to redress wrongs or dispense justice. Like the mining process, this institution had its origin in California.
These twin concepts, the one stressing order and often caution, the other freedom and sometimes licence, were to meet head-on during the great international stampede to the Klondike. On Alaskan territory, during the hectic days of 1897–98, there was no organized machinery of government, to speak of; rule was by local committee, sometimes wise, sometimes capricious, always summary. On the Canadian side there was, if anything, too much government, as the graft in Dawson City was to demonstrate; but there were also, at every bend in the river, the uniformed and strangely comforting figures of the Mounted Police.
The American miners’ meeting, which operated in the Canadian town of Fortymile, had the power of life and death over the members of the community. It could hang a man, give him a divorce, imprison, banish, or lash him, and in Alaska all these functions were performed in the late eighties and nineties. (The Fortymilers hanged at least two Indians for murder.) Any prospector could call a meeting simply by posting a notice. An elected chairman performed the function of judge, while the entire meeting acted as jury. Both sides could produce witnesses and state their cases, and anybody who wished could ask a question or make a speech. The verdict was decided by a show of hands. Seldom has the democratic process operated at such a grass-roots level.
When the first saloons began to appear in Fortymile, they served as headquarters f
or the miners’ meetings, and it was perhaps as a result of this that the meetings began to degenerate. On several occasions when a man called a meeting to seek redress, he found himself fined twenty dollars by the miners for daring to call one at all, and the sum was spent immediately on drinks. In 1893 the moment came when a man rebelled at the authority of a miners’ meeting.
The rebel was as typical a Fortymiler as it was possible to find, a man who for all his life had been seeking out the wild places of the northwest. His name was John Jerome Healy, and he was as tough as hardtack. With his cowlick and his Buffalo Bill goatee and his ramrod figure, he looked the part of the traditional frontiersman. He had been hunter, trapper, soldier, prospector, whiskey-trader, editor, guide, Indian scout, and sheriff. He had run away from home at the age of twelve to joint a band of renegades who made an abortive attempt to seize part of Mexico and establish a Pacific republic. He had been in Salt Lake City in 1857 at the time of the Mormon wars, and he counted himself a crony of Sitting Bull. He had built the most famous of the whiskey forts on Canadian territory, ruled it like a feudal baron, and dubbed it “Whoop-Up,” thereby giving a name to the great block of untamed Indian country that straddled the Montana-Canadian border. When the wild wolf-hunters of the prairie formed an armed band known as the Spitzee Cavalry, attacked Fort Whoop-Up, and tried to bargain with him, Healy broke up the confab with a lighted cigar held over a keg of gunpowder – a threat that sent them packing. As the hanging sheriff of Chouteau County, Montana, he pursued rustlers and Indians with a zeal that left some students of the period wondering where crime-control left off and lawlessness began. Then, with the frontier tamed by his own efforts, the restless and aging Healy headed north to virgin country, still hungering for the adventure that had driven him all his life. He followed gold to Juneau on the Alaska Panhandle as he had once followed it through Montana, Idaho, and Athabasca. He pushed on to Dyea Inlet at the foot of the Chilkoot, where he built the trading post into which the dying Tom Williams brought news of the Fortymile strike. Healy quickly saw that there was more than one way to get gold out of the Yukon. Off he went to Chicago and convinced an old Missouri crony, Portus B. Weare, a respected mid-western businessman, that there was profit in the Alaska trade. With the help of the Cudahy meat-packing fortune, these two set up the North American Trading and Transportation Company to break the monopoly of the entrenched Alaska Commercial Company. They laid plans to establish a series of posts along the river, built a fleet of steamboats, and launched a price war on the Yukon. In his post at Fort Cudahy, across the Fortymile River from the main town, the bearded Healy with his fierce Irish face was no man to accept quietly the ruling of a miners’ meeting. He had always been a law unto himself, and he did not relish the prospect of knuckling under to the eccentrics of a Yukon mining camp.
He ran afoul of his fellows shortly after his arrival. Although he was successful in bringing down prices in Alaska and the Yukon, Healy was never popular with the Fortymilers, for he was a crusty man who insisted on sending out bills promptly at the end of the month, a presumption to those accustomed to Jack McQuesten’s unlimited credit. When his hired girl haled him before the miners’ court, his enemies were waiting for him.
The case was an odd one. The girl, whom Healy and his wife had brought in from the Outside as a servant, insisted on staying out late at night and sometimes, indeed, all night. Healy forbade her to go out again to one of the squaw dances being held in the main town. When she disobeyed him and tried to get back into the house, he locked her out. This autocratic attitude in a settlement where freedom of individual action was almost a religion enraged the miners. They decided in favour of the girl and demanded that the trader pay her a year’s wages and her full fare back home.
Healy paid under protest, but prepared to deliver a counter-blow. He wrote to his old frontier friend from the Whoop-Up days, Superintendent Samuel B. Steele of the North West Mounted Police, and asked for the protection of the Canadian constabulary.
At almost the same time Bishop Bompas was sending a similar letter to the authorities at Ottawa. The miners, he said, “were teaching the Indians to make whisky with demoralizing effect both to the whites and Indians and with much danger in the use of firearms.” The reference was to a shooting affray over a poker hand: Jim Washburn, known as the meanest man in town, had slashed a card-player across the belly and received a bullet through the hips in return.
These submissions to Ottawa ended Fortymile’s free-and-easy existence. In 1894 Inspector Charles Constantine of the North West Mounted Police arrived – thickset, gruff, and incorruptible, the first Mountie to enter the Canadian northland. The following year a detachment of twenty joined him. They had scarcely established their barracks before a meeting was held to take away a claim from a man charged with defaulting on wages. Constantine reversed the verdict and abolished the miners’ meetings forever. He had been eight years in the police force, was known for his ability in a rough-and-tumble fight, and never spared himself. He called himself “chief magistrate, commander-in-chief and home and foreign secretary” of the town, and he took his duties so seriously that he had three tables in his cabin, each with a different kind of work on it; he moved continually from one to another, and this brief change of scene was the only respite he permitted himself. His iron hand was quickly felt in various small ways in the community: one of his first acts was to stop the dance-hall girls from wearing bloomers. Another was to collect the excise duty on all locally made hootchinoo. With these edicts, some of the freer spirits decided that the time had come to move again. Once more civilization had caught up to them.
4
The land of the Golden Rule
Was it coincidence that in the same year when the first force of constabulary was embarking for the Yukon, an even more unconventional town was springing up farther downstream, to the northwest, on Alaskan soil? Probably. But for anyone chafing under new restraints, Circle City was a welcome haven.
Circle was McQuesten’s town. For years he and Harper had been grubstaking men to seek out the legendary “Preacher’s Creek,” on which a missionary had once seen gold by the spoonful. Two Russian half-breeds outfitted and encouraged by McQuesten finally found it in 1893 on the headwaters of Birch Creek, near the Arctic Circle. Within a year the region was producing an annual four hundred thousand dollars.
McQuesten built his new town in the dreariest section of the Yukon Valley, one hundred and seventy miles downstream from Fortymile, at the point where the river spills over the Yukon Flats. Here the hills suddenly lose their grandeur and seem to sicken and die until they decline into monotonous wastes of sand, while the main stream, broad as a lake and sluggish as a slough, describes its huge arc across the Arctic Circle for one hundred and eighty miles. There is no scenery here in the grand sense; only hundreds of islets and grey sand-bars on which ducks and snow geese and plover nest by the million.
The town was as drab as its surroundings, a hodge-podge of moss-chinked cabins scattered without plan along the curve of the riverbank and stitched together by a network of short streets which were little more than rivers of mud in the springtime. The mines were some eighty miles back from the river, for Birch Creek ran parallel to the Yukon before joining it at the end of its arc. The trail between Circle City and the mines led across a no-man’s land of swamp and muskeg and stunted spruce, empty of game but swarming during the summer with mosquitoes so thick that they blotted out the sun, suffocated pack horses by stopping their nostrils, and drove some men insane.
In this lugubrious settlement McQuesten was king. Above his two-storey trading post – the most imposing log structure in town – there rose a flagpole whose cross-arm was handily located in case a hanging should be required. Each year when the squaws, by custom, tossed every white man in a moose-skin blanket, McQuesten was honoured by being tossed first. It was traditional to let him escape, then bring him to bay in a mock battle. He invariably landed lightly on his feet, no matter how high he was tossed,
and only at the last ceremony, in 1896, having grown old and bulky, toppled onto his back, whereupon the fat Indian women clustered about him, murmuring and patting him as a sign of sympathy.
By 1893 the trader’s former partners had scattered: Mayo was farther down the river at the mouth of Minook Creek, in the region where Ed Schieffelin had once poked about for gold; Harper and his partner, Joseph Ladue, had poled their way up the river, deep into Canadian territory. McQuesten staked everything he had on Circle. His credit was so liberal that by 1894 the miners owed him one hundred thousand dollars.
William Ogilvie, the Canadian government surveyor who established the boundary line between Alaska and Canada, once witnessed McQuesten’s credit system in operation. A miner came into the store from the creeks and asked McQuesten how much he owed.
“Seven hundred,” said the trader.
“Hell, Jack, I’ve only got five hundred. How’m I going to pay seven hundred with five?”
“Oh, that’s all right. Give us your five hundred and we’ll credit you and let the rest stand till next clean-up.”
“But, Jack, I want more stuff. How’m I going to get it?”
Klondike Page 5
