Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  Nobody then knew, of course, that this was the richest placer creek in the world, that almost every claim from One to Forty was worth at least half a million, that some were worth three times that amount, and that a quarter of a century later dredges would still be taking gold from the worked-over gravels.

  But in that first winter enormous untapped fortunes changed hands as easily as packages of cigarettes, and poor men became rich and then poor again without realizing it. Jay Whipple, for instance, sold claim One almost immediately, for a trifle. The purchaser, a lumberman from Eureka, California, named Skiff Mitchell, lived for half a century on the proceeds.

  Frank Phiscator, on Two, saw fortune slipping from his grasp on two occasions, but in each instance retrieved it. He had scarcely hammered his stakes into the ground when F. W. “Papa” Cobb, known as one of Harvard’s best quarterbacks, tried to seize it from him. Cobb insisted that Phiscator already had a claim on Bonanza, therefore could not legally stake a second one on Eldorado. This was true, but Constantine of the Mounted Police, who always tempered justice with common sense, decided that Cobb was too greedy since he could easily have staked close to Phiscator without causing a fuss. Thus did a fortune elude Cobb. Yet Phiscator thought so little of his claim that he sold half of it for eight hundred dollars, only to buy it back later in the year for fifteen thousand.

  Charles Lamb, who had been dismissed from his job as a Los Angeles streetcar conductor and had come north as the result of a swindle, hung on to claim Eight. Two years later he and his partner sold it for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

  George Demars sold half of Nine for eight hundred dollars. Within three years it was valued at a million.

  William Johns, the newspaperman, immediately sold half his claim, Twelve, for five hundred dollars and considered himself lucky to unload it. Three months later he sold the other half for twenty-five hundred. The claim was one of the richest on the creek.

  On September 5, a few days after Eldorado was discovered, the Alaska Commercial Company’s steamer Alice arrived at the Klondike loaded with men from Fortymile, and the rest of the creek was quickly staked.

  A group of Scotsmen from the British Columbia coal-mining town of Nanaimo staked Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, and Seventeen. Rather than keep all their eggs in one basket, they abandoned Sixteen and Seventeen in order to retain staking rights on another creek. The other creek turned out poorly, but Sixteen was the most incredible claim of all Eldorado. It was re-staked by a muscular, God-fearing young man named Thomas Lippy, who had been a YMCA physical instructor in Seattle and had thrown up everything the previous spring because a hunch told him to head north. Lippy had already staked higher up on Eldorado, but, because his wife was with him and wanted to live in a cabin, he decided to move down the creek where the timber was better. It was a providential move. There was little gold in the upper reaches of Eldorado, but Sixteen produced $1,530,000 for Lippy.

  Two of the Nanaimo boys next door to Lippy got cold feet when their shaft reached the eighteen-foot level. They were unsure of finding gold and were happy to sell out their interests to Bill Scouse and his two brothers for fifty thousand dollars each. A third man hung on. His share of the clean-up that spring came to fifty thousand, and there were hundreds of thousands left in the ground.

  On the other side of Lippy’s claim was Seventeen, also rejected by the Nanaimo group. It was staked by French Joe Cazalais, who sold it almost immediately for six hundred dollars to Arkansas Jim Hall, a veteran of ten years in the Yukon, and to his partner, a French-Canadian squaw man, N. E. Picotte. The pay-streak on this claim was the widest in the country, extending five hundred feet from rim to rim, and when Picotte and Hall discovered how rich it was, they gave French Joe seventy-five feet of it as a consolation prize.

  So the roulette wheel spun around on Eldorado. Al Thayer and Winfield Oler had staked out Twenty-Nine and, believing it worthless, returned to Fortymile, looking for a sucker on whom to unload it. They found their quarry in Jimmy Kerry’s saloon in the person of Charley Anderson, a thirty-seven-year-old Swede with a pinched face, who had been mining for several years out of Fortymile. Anderson was so doubtful of the Klondike that he had delayed his trip to the new field until all the ground was gone. Now he was drinking heavily, and Oler, a small and slender man from Baltimore, saw his chance. Anderson woke up the next morning to find he had bought an untried claim for eight hundred dollars. He went to the police post to ask Constantine to retrieve his money for him, but the policeman pointed out that his signature was on the title. Anderson glumly headed for Eldorado. He had no way of knowing yet that a million dollars’ worth of gold lay in the bed-rock under his claim and that for the rest of his life he would bear the tag of “the Lucky Swede.” As for Oler, he became the butt of so many jokes that he fled the country in disgust.

  Next door to Charley Anderson, on Thirty, the groundwork for the most staggering fortune of all was being laid. The claim had been staked by Russian John Zarnowsky, who thought so little of it that he let half of it go for a sack of flour and a side of bacon. The purchaser was an elephantine Nova Scotian known as “Big Alex” McDonald, who until this moment had known neither weal nor leisure. But the pay-streak on Thirty was forty feet wide, and a man could, and did, pan five thousand dollars from it in a single day. With this purchase McDonald began his lightning ascent from unlettered daylabourer to Dawson aristocrat. Any ordinary creature would have been content with this single piece of ground which was rich enough to maintain a platoon for a lifetime, but McDonald was not ordinary. This fortuitous acquisition unleashed within him some hitherto inactive demon, which drove him on for the remainder of his days with an intensity of purpose in sharp contrast to his ponderous appearance. Because of his size and his awkward movements McDonald was known as the Big Moose from Antigonish. He spoke slowly and painfully, rubbing his blue jowls in perplexity, his great brow almost hidden by a shock of sable hair, his heavy lips concealed by a moustache of vaudevillean proportions. The effect was primeval, but Big Alex in spite of his Neanderthal appearance, was one of the shrewdest men in the North. While others sold, he bought – and he continued to buy as long as there was breath in his body. Within a year he was famous, hailed on three continents as “the King of the Klondike,” sought out by Pope, prince, and promoter.

  And yet, who is to say which were the lucky ones in the Eldorado lottery? Many who sold out and left the country ended their lives in relative comfort. Many who stayed behind to dig out fortunes lost all in the end. William Sloan, a Nanaimo dry-goods merchant who sold his interest in Fifteen for fifty thousand dollars and turned his back on the Klondike forever, invested his money wisely and rose to become a cabinet minister in British Columbia’s provincial government. His son became Chief Justice of that province. But the King of the Klondike died penniless and alone.

  5

  Henderson’s luck

  All this while, on the other side of the Bonanza watershed, Robert Henderson continued to toil at his open cut on the creek he had wistfully named Gold Bottom. Boats were arriving daily at Dawson; shacks were being clapped together helter-skelter on valley and mud flat; Bonanza was staked for fourteen miles and Eldorado for three; and men were spraying across the whole of the Klondike country searching for new discoveries. Henderson knew nothing of this: he had seen no one but his partners since that August day when Carmack had gone off, promising to send word back if he found anything on the other side of the blue hills.

  Then one day – some three weeks after the strike – Henderson looked up and saw a group of men coming down from the divide. He asked them where they had come from, and they replied: “Bonanza Creek.”

  The name puzzled Henderson, who prided himself on a knowledge of the country. He did not like to show his ignorance, but finally curiosity overcame pride. Where was Bonanza Creek?

  The newscomers pointed back over the hill.

  “Rabbit Creek! What have you got there?” Henderson asked, with a sinking feeling.<
br />
  “We have the biggest thing in the world.”

  “Who found it?”

  “McCormick.”

  Henderson flung down his shovel, then walked slowly over to the bank of the creek and sat down. It was some time before he could speak. McCormick! Carmack! For the rest of his life the sound of that name would be like a cold knife in his heart. The man was not even a prospector …

  When he gathered his wits about him, Henderson realized that he must record a claim at once before the human overflow from Bonanza arrived at his creek. He had explored a large fork of Gold Bottom and discovered much better ground yielding thirty-five cents to the pan. Here he had staked a discovery claim, and it was this that he intended to record at Fortymile. He divided up his small gleaning of gold with his partners and set off at once.

  But Fate had not yet finished with Robert Henderson. He had moved only a short way down the creek before he encountered two long-time prospectors. He knew them both. One was Charles Johnson, tall, bearded, and tough as a whalebone, a farmer and logger from Ohio; the other was Andrew Hunker, better known as “Old Man Hunker,” a native of Wittenberg, Germany, a man with chiselled features and a dogged face who made a practice of reading Gibbon nightly and who carried six volumes of the Decline and Fall about with him. Both men were veteran prospectors of the Yukon Valley and of the Cariboo before that.

  Hunker now revealed to Henderson that he, too, had staked a discovery claim on the other fork of Gold Bottom Creek. The partners had got as much as two and a half dollars a pan from a reef of high bed-rock, and they were carrying twenty-five dollars’ worth of coarse gold with them, all of it panned out in a few minutes. Obviously the Hunker claims were far richer than the ones Henderson had staked.

  What was Henderson to do? A discovery claim was twice the size of an ordinary claim. He could insist on his own prior discovery and take a thousand feet of relatively poor ground. But it would be a Pyrrhic victory, since the richer ground was obviously in the area of Hunker’s find. The only answer was to allow Hunker the discovery claim and for Henderson to stake an ordinary claim of five hundred feet next to it. Thus the entire watershed became known as Hunker Creek, and only the fork which Henderson originally located was called Gold Bottom.

  Henderson, having swallowed this second bitter pill, pushed on down the Klondike Valley. Soon a new prize was dangled before him. He ran into a Finn named Solomon Marpak who had just made a discovery on another tributary of the Klondike called Bear Creek. Henderson staked next to Marpak, his spirits rising; Bear Creek looked rich.

  He now believed he had three claims to record – on Gold Bottom, on Hunker, and on Bear – but when he reached Fortymile, Fate dealt him a third blow. He was told that the law had been changed: no man was allowed more than one claim in the Klondike mining district, and that claim must be recorded within sixty days of staking. In vain Henderson protested that when he had staked his ground the law had allowed a claim on each creek, with no deadline for recording. The mining recorder did not know him. Henderson swallowed hard and recorded only the Hunker Creek claim.

  “I only want my just dues and nothing more, but those discoveries rightly belong to me and I will contest them as a Canadian as long as I live,” he said with force and bitterness. And so began the long controversy over which man was the rightful discoverer of the Klondike. It rages still, and almost always along national lines: the English and Canadians say that Henderson should have the credit; the Americans stand by Carmack.

  Henderson’s troubles were not over. Indeed, it might be said that they never ended. All through the following winter he lay ill from the old injury to his leg. He was unable to work his claim, but he refused to be disheartened, and the following year, when his injury healed, he was off again. A less restless man might have gone to work on the Hunker claim, which was obviously a good one, but it was typical of Henderson that he ignored it in order to continue the search for new gold-fields. He trudged the length of Too Much Gold Creek, which contained no gold at all, and then, still supremely optimistic, headed for the Stewart River country. Here, too, he searched in vain, though he left his name behind on one of the Stewart’s smaller tributaries. At last he decided to return to his wife and children in Colorado, whom he had not seen for four years. He boarded a steamboat for St. Michael, anxious to be away, and here, for the fifth time, ill-luck descended upon him. The steamer was frozen in at Circle City, and Henderson, trapped in the country which had brought him nothing but misfortune, fell sick again. In order to pay his medical bills he was forced to sell his claim on Hunker Creek. He received three thousand dollars for it, and that represented the total amount that he took from the Klondike district. Yet each of the claims that he had staked and tried to record was worth a great deal. The Hunker claim eventually paid a royalty on four hundred and fifty thousand dollars, after which it was sold for another two hundred thousand. For decades it continued to be a valuable property, but Henderson got none of it.

  He reached St. Michael ultimately, the following spring, and boarded a steamer for Seattle. He had eleven hundred dollars left in Klondike gold, but his troubles were still not over. The years spent in the country of the open cabin door had not equipped him for civilization’s wiles. Before he reached Seattle all his gold had been stolen. Disgusted and disconsolate, he tore an emblem from his lapel and handed it to Tappan Adney, the correspondent for Harper’s Illustrated Weekly.

  “Here, you keep this,” he cried. “I will lose it, too. I am not fit to live among civilized men.”

  Adney examined the little badge curiously. It was the familiar insignia of the Yukon Order of Pioneers, with its golden rule and its motto: “Do unto others as you would be done by.”

  *Although there is no contemporary record of his presence, a small boy, Patsy Henderson, is said to have been present. Years later, in Whitehorse, his account of the incident was recorded on tape.

  Chapter Three

  1

  Clarence Berry strikes it rich

  2

  The death of Circle City

  3

  The birth of Dawson

  4

  A friend in need

  5

  Big Alex and Swiftwater Bill

  6

  City of gold

  1

  Clarence Berry strikes it rich

  The story of the Klondike is remarkable for the fact that in an extraordinary number of cases the industrious and sober prospector profited little from the gold-fields, while the ne’er-do-wells and profligates often amassed great, if temporary, wealth. It was perhaps coincidental that Horatio Alger, Jr., should die when the great stampede reached its climax, but it is certainly true that many Klondike success stories made mincemeat out of his accepted formula. It seemed almost axiomatic that the Harpers and the Hendersons should seek but never find, while the Swiftwater Bills and the Diamond-Tooth Gerties retained the golden touch. There was, however, one shining exception. The tale of Clarence Berry and his gold is unique in the annals of the stampede.

  Berry, a one-time fruit farmer from Fresno, California, not only made millions as a result of the strike, but he also died at a ripe age with his millions intact. His history is marked by none of those anecdotes of personal eccentricity that enliven so many Klondike legends. He was sober, honest, hard-working, ambitious, and home-loving, and he stayed that way. Of all the original locaters on Bonanza and Eldorado, there is scarcely one other to whom those statements apply.

  Berry owed his fortune to an encounter in Bill McPhee’s saloon with Antone Stander, the Austrian who had staked on Eldorado. The handsome Stander was back in Fortymile, without funds, without food, and, to his pain and bewilderment, without credit at the Alaska Commercial Company’s store. It had been refused him by the company’s newly appointed agent in charge of the entire Yukon Valley, a merchant of aristocratic tendencies whom the company’s own history describes as arrogant and dictatorial. His name was Edgar Mizner, and his two brothers, Addison the architec
t and Wilson the bon vivant, wit, and playwright, were to become engaging if eccentric figures in the folklore of twentieth-century America. Edgar lacked their charm. He did not believe in McQuesten’s system of unlimited credit and was heartily disliked by the miners, who called him “the Pope” and dispatched letters of protest about him to the company’s office. When Stander arrived back in Fortymile he discovered he would need a guarantor before the A.C. store would advance him provisions. He was desperately seeking a friend when Berry, who had been tending bar in McPhee’s saloon, volunteered to help him. The grateful Stander traded Berry half of his Eldorado property for half of a claim that Berry had staked on Upper Bonanza. With this simple gesture Berry laid the foundations for one of the largest personal fortunes to come out of the Klondike.

  Berry had gone north in 1894 as a last resort, a victim of the depression of the nineties, purchasing his outfit and passage with money borrowed at exorbitant interest. A giant of a man with the biceps of a blacksmith and the shoulders of a wrestler, his magnificent strength sustained him when his fellows faltered. Of a party of forty that crossed the Chilkoot, only Berry and two others reached Fortymile. All the rest turned back, discouraged, after a storm destroyed their outfits. But Berry would not give up; he pushed ahead relentlessly with little more than the clothes on his back. A year later he trekked out to California, married his childhood sweetheart, a sturdy waitress from Selma named Ethel Bush, again started off for Alaska, his bride strapped to a sleigh which Berry dragged over the mountains and down the river to Fortymile. He found no gold, so he went to work tending bar for Bill McPhee and in this way was on the spot when Carmack entered with his shellful of nuggets. With a grubstake provided by the open-handed McPhee, Berry left at once for Bonanza, where he staked Forty Above, and it was this claim that he now divided with Stander in the shrewd belief that Eldorado was a much richer creek.