Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  The ante at stud poker was one dollar, but it might easily cost five hundred to see the third card. A night on the town – which meant a night in Joe Ladue’s bare-boarded saloon, drinking watered whiskey – could cost at least fifty dollars. Few minded the expense; it was so easy to pan out a few shovelfuls of dirt from the dump to pay for the fun. One man went to work in the morning and came back to town at night with fourteen hundred dollars in gold. In Ladue’s he ordered two whiskeys, toasting his former self in the one and making believe his former self was drinking the other, then stuck two cigars in his mouth and smoked them together. This behaviour was less peculiar than it seemed, since it was undeniable that every man’s life had been changed by the strike; on the day he reached the pay-streak and realized that he was rich, he became a different person. Some men could no longer eat or sleep at the thought of mining so much gold. One, who had washed out thirty thousand dollars, became so obsessed by the fear of being robbed that he suffered a mental collapse and shot himself.

  4

  A friend in need

  By midwinter the haphazard staking on the creeks had brought about a state of complete confusion. The original staking of Bonanza had been so frenzied and unorganized that both the ownership and size of many claims were in dispute. Work stopped; men argued and fought; and by January, when William Ogilvie arrived to survey the Ladue townsite, the miners begged him to re-survey Bonanza and Eldorado. Ogilvie agreed on the condition that his decisions should be accepted as final.

  Few men were better fitted for the task of unsnarling the Klondike tangle, where the shifting of stakes by a few feet might mean the loss or gain of thousands of dollars. Ogilvie was as incorruptible as he was scrupulous, and no one would dare attempt to bribe him. He firmly believed that no government servant should enrich himself by virtue of his position, and stubbornly refused to stake an inch of ground or to turn a single cent of profit from the Klondike strike. This sense of propriety had become an act of faith with Ogilvie, and he insisted that his son, Morley, who was with him, hew to the same creed. Only one other man in the Yukon felt the same way, and that was Charles Constantine, the NWMP superintendent, who also left the country poor but respected, though some of his constables staked out fortunes.

  With his round, solemn face and his dark beard, Ogilvie had the features that were later to be associated with reigning British monarchs, but this gravity of appearance masked a puckish sense of humour. His whole character, indeed, was an unlikely alloy. The face that he presented to the public was that of the dedicated government official, punctilious and sedate. But in private he was a clever mimic, an unregenerate punster, a practical joker, and an accomplished raconteur known for his dialect recitations and for his ability to play anything on the piano, especially Scottish reels. He went about his tasks on Bonanza and Eldorado with professional seriousness, for his tidy civil-servant’s mind was shocked by the raggedness of the original staking. At the same time he carefully filed away in the neat pigeonholes of his memory a small anthology of anecdotes which, embellished and sharpened, served him as after-dinner stories in the years that followed. He was both dismayed and amused, for instance, to discover the way in which one prospector – a Mounted Policeman at that – had located a claim in the twisting section of Lower Bonanza. Instead of measuring off five hundred feet in a straight line, as the law required, he had followed the wriggling line of the creek, which doubled back on itself in such a way that when Ogilvie surveyed it he discovered that the unfortunate policeman had got eight feet less than a claim.

  As the maximum legal stake was five hundred feet, many oversize claims were chopped down by Ogilvie’s survey, leaving thin wedges of land sandwiched in between the new boundaries. These fractional claims could be very valuable: one on Eldorado, for instance, just ten feet wide, was thought to be worth between ten and twenty thousand dollars, and another, a mere five inches wide, was sold to the owner of the adjacent claim for five hundred. Jim White, an Irishman from Circle City, was convinced there was a fraction between Thirty-Six and Thirty-Seven Eldorado. He staked it and used the ground in an effort to bully the owners on either side to come to terms with him. He waited on tenterhooks for Ogilvie’s survey to set the proper dimensions. In order to madden White, whom he considered a scoundrel and a blackmailer, Ogilvie deliberately delayed the work. When the ground was finally surveyed, the fraction turned out to be just three inches wide. For the rest of his days its owner smarted under the nickname of Three-Inch White.

  The richest fraction of all lay hidden on Bonanza Creek just above Carmack’s discovery. Here, almost at the juncture of Bonanza, Eldorado, and Big Skookum Gulch, one John Jacob Astor Dusel had staked Two Above. In order to take in the mouth of the gulch, he had bitten off too much land. When Ogilvie measured the claim, he found left over a pie-shaped piece of ground eighty-six feet at its broadest point.

  One of Ogilvie’s chainmen, a Circle City prospector named Dick Lowe, gazed meditatively upon this sliver.

  “Had you thought of staking it?” he asked Ogilvie.

  “I am a government official and not permitted to hold property,” the surveyor replied, as he had so often before. “You go down if you like and record.”

  Lowe felt at a loss. It was really a very small piece of ground, and if he staked it he would lose all rights to a bigger claim. On the other hand, he had reached the Klondike very late: there was not much left to stake.

  He was a rugged and wiry ex-mule-skinner who had already made and lost one fortune. Years before, he had struck gold in the Black Hills and invested it all in a transportation outfit, only to have it wiped out by the rampaging Sioux. In the years that followed, he had trekked through Idaho, Montana, and Alaska, trying without success to recoup his losses. Now he was faced with a tricky decision. He told Ogilvie he would look for a larger fraction before staking the little wedge on Bonanza, but the search proved fruitless and he took the fraction. It did not excite him. He vainly tried to sell it for nine hundred dollars and then he tried to lease it, but there were no takers – it was just too small. In the end he decided to work it himself. He sank one shaft and found nothing. He sank another and in eight hours cleaned up forty-six thousand dollars. The claim eventually paid out half a million, and remains for its size the richest single piece of ground ever discovered. It could have been Ogilvie’s – but in all the surveyor’s letters, articles, pamphlets, and memoirs there is no hint of regret; indeed, it is doubtful if the possibility ever crossed his mind. As far as he was concerned, the gold might have been on the moon.

  The fraction that came into Lowe’s possession was situated on the most promising spot in the whole district. Two of the richest creeks, Bonanza and Eldorado, met here, pouring down their gold onto his property. A third stream, Big Skookum Gulch, cut directly through another ancient alluvial channel of whose hidden presence nobody was yet aware. Just above stood Gold Hill, still unnamed, still unstaked, but heavy with coarse gold, much of it washing down onto the property below.

  Lowe’s ground was so rich that a wire had to be strung along the border of his claim to prevent trespassers. Whenever a nugget was found along the boundary line, its ownership was determined by a plumb bob which slid along this invaluable wire. A single pan of paydirt, scooped up from the adjoining claim in August, 1899, a few feet from Lowe’s fraction, yielded one thousand dollars in gold, including three large nuggets each worth one hundred dollars. It was said that as much gold was stolen from Lowe’s property as he himself recovered from it, for in some places glittering pieces were visible from a distance of twenty feet. And, like all the others, Lowe was never the same man again. Almost from the moment of discovery, he got drunk and stayed that way.

  After Lowe’s strike, fractional claims assumed a greater importance, and Ogilvie tried to be dispassionately fair about them. When he discovered a fraction over the legal five hundred feet, his only way of making it known was to mark it on the posts bounding the end of the claim for any sharp-eyed stranger to
see. Only in one memorable instance did he depart from this procedure.

  It was a bitterly cold spring day, about ten below zero, and a biting wind was whistling up the trough of Eldorado when Ogilvie reached the upper limit of Clarence Berry’s Five. Dusk was falling, and, as his assistants gathered up his instruments, the surveyor stood working out the figures in his notebook to see how long the claim really was. Around him was gathered the usual group of miners, all guessing at the claim’s size; for months they had been searching and measuring on their own, hoping without success to discover a fraction on Eldorado. Now Ogilvie whistled in surprise when he discovered that Five was forty-one feet six inches too long. It was on this section of his claim, and on this section only – one of the richest locations in the history of placer mining – that Berry had done his winter’s work. Hundred-dollar pans were the rule here; five-hundred-dollar pans were not unusual. Now it turned out that Berry did not own this rich sliver of land. Nor could he stake it, for he had used up his staking rights. His dump of paydirt stood on the fraction; it could not be washed out until spring. Ogilvie realized at once that if he announced the fraction Berry would lose everything he had worked for that winter, and also that a riot would probably ensue as dozens fought to stake ground known to be worth hundreds of thousands. And now in that conscientious mind, so used to the rule book, a struggle ensued; should he cling to procedure and take the consequences, or should he depart from the rigid path he had set himself? His solemn, bearded face did not change expression as, turning to Berry, who was standing near by, he said: “Let’s go to supper. I’m cold enough and hungry enough to eat nuggets.”

  A ripple of suspicion ran through the throng, and Berry sensed it as Ogilvie hurried towards the cabin.

  “Is there anything wrong, Mr. Ogilvie?”

  “Come out of hearing,” the surveyor whispered. He had made his decision.

  “What’s wrong?” cried Berry, in an agony of impatience. “My God, what’s wrong?”

  Ogilvie maintained his cracking pace. “There’s a fraction forty-one feet six inches on claim number five, and nearly all your winter’s work is on it.”

  “My God!” Berry almost shouted. “What will I do?”

  Ogilvie’s civil-servant mask returned. “It is not my place to advise you,” he said. And then – another rent in the rule book: “Haven’t you a friend you can trust?”

  “Trust – how?”

  “Why, to stake that fraction tonight and transfer it to yourself and partner.”

  Berry thought at once of George Byrne, who was at work on a claim five miles up Eldorado. He rushed to the cabin, told his wife to get supper for Ogilvie, then dashed up the creek.

  He returned with Byrne about half past nine, and in the presence of a baffled Mrs. Berry a strange charade took place. The two men meticulously questioned Ogilvie about the proper method of legally staking a fraction, and Ogilvie replied courteously and impersonally. There was no suggestion that this was anything but an academic discussion, but the surveyor took the trouble to draw a detailed plan of the method of staking on a sheet of wrapping-paper, which he handed to Byrne. In the small hours of the morning Byrne staked the fraction, which in that single season produced for Berry one hundred and forty thousand dollars; in return Byrne got an equal length off the lower unworked end of the property so that Berry’s block of land would remain unbroken. As Ogilvie wrote, “A friend like that, in such a need, is a friend indeed.”

  Ogilvie himself later that spring washed out a pan of dirt taken at random from Berry’s shaft. On it was one hundred and nineteen dollars’ worth of gold, or, as he remarked, “about half a year’s salary for many a good clerk.”

  And yet Berry and his wife lived under the most primitive of conditions in a twelve-by-sixteen-foot hovel without floor or windows, whose only furniture was two home-made chairs and two rickety bedsteads built of unplaned lumber and curtained with calico. By the door stood a sheet-iron stove which the Berrys had packed in over the trail. Beside it was the panning-tank of dirty water in which one of Berry’s twenty-five workmen periodically tested the paydirt. A small glass kerosene lamp and a pair of copper gold-scales supplied the only other ornament.

  The gold was everywhere. The wages Berry paid totalled one hundred and fifty dollars a day, which he washed out himself each evening. When Mrs. Berry needed pocket-money, she merely walked to the dump and with a sharp stick smashed apart the frozen clods and pulled out the nuggets. One day she went down to call her husband for supper and, while she was waiting for him to come up the shaft, picked up fifty dollars’ worth of coarse gold.

  Ethel Berry’s only female neighbour was Tom Lippy’s wife Salome, a sinewy little woman from Kinsman, Ohio, who lived with her husband in another tiny mud-roofed cabin, about a mile up the valley. Lippy, like Berry, was industrious, sober, level-headed – and lucky. A sudden and inspired hunch had brought him to the Yukon; a blind trade had given him his present claim.

  He had started life as an iron-moulder in Pennsylvania, but his almost fanatical belief in physical culture had led him into the YMCA and thence west to Seattle as a physical-training instructor. As a volunteer fireman he had once held the title of world’s champion hose-coupler, and, like everybody else who came in over the trail, he was tough: solidly built, dark, good-looking, and clean-shaven, the prototype indeed of the Arrow Collar man. An injury to his knee had forced his retirement from the YMCA, and a strange intuition had sent him north in 1896 on borrowed money. Now he had one of the richest claims in the Klondike. Although this was the most memorable winter of Thomas Lippy’s life, it certainly was not the happiest, for the Klondike, which gave him his fortune, took the life of his adopted son, and not all the gold in Eldorado could have saved him.

  5

  Big Alex and Swiftwater Bill

  The winter passed slowly, dreamlike in its unreality. It was hard, sometimes, to disentangle tangibility from fantasy. In their dark hovels the miners watched in fascination and disbelief as the small heaps of gold accumulated in jars and bottles on the window-sills. Fortune, chimerical, seemed to be making game of them; and yet the gold was palpably there. It supplied the only ornament on the naked walls, glittering in the flat light of the sunless noons or in the precious luminescence of hoarded candles. In such a setting do myths have their beginning. It was a time for fancies and illusions; it was a time for fables; it was a time for legend.

  Now, subtly, two of the most durable legends of the Klondike began to take form. One was the Legend of Big Alex McDonald, the King of the Klondike; the other was the Legend of Swiftwater Bill Gates, the Knight of the Golden Omelet. Of all the human specimens placed on public exhibit by the great strike, none were destined for greater immortality than these two oddly dissimilar figures, the one a towering and sober Scot, the other a diminutive but flamboyant Yankee.

  Both of these men acquired their fortunes because of the “lay” system which the lumbering and taciturn McDonald introduced into the Klondike. He had come to the north after fourteen years in the silver mines of Colorado and a stint at Juneau on the Panhandle. Although he had no money at all, he had developed a shrewd sense of values while working as a buyer of land for the Alaska Commercial Company, and by the time of the strike he had an abiding faith in the value of property that amounted to a religion.

  While other men owned a single claim and worked it themselves, McDonald determined to own a great many and let others do the work. He began by acquiring half of Thirty Eldorado for a few groceries. He made no move to mine it, but instead let a section of it out on lease or “lay,” as it was called, to Charley Myers and Dick Butler, receiving from them a percentage of the take. In the next forty-five days the two lay men took out thirty-three thousand dollars. McDonald got half.

  As fast as the lay men gave him his share, McDonald bought more property. His policy was to make a small downpayment and give a note for the balance, payable at the time of the spring clean-up. To raise enough money for these downpayments he
borrowed funds at exorbitant interest rates, and in some cases he paid as much as ten per cent for a ten-day loan, which is a rate of 365 per cent per annum.

  By late spring McDonald’s speculations were the talk of the camp. Clean-up time was approaching, and it was no longer possible to work in the drifts and shafts, which were filling with seepage. The miners were building flumes and log sluiceboxes and paying a higher price for the rough lumber than they would have paid for mahogany in New York. An air of expectancy hung over the camp. Not until the gold was washed out from the gravel of the winter dumps would anyone know exactly how much he was worth; until this process was completed it was mere guesswork.

  Bets were laid as to whether Big Alex would be bankrupt or wealthy by summer. His creditors were demanding payment; his notes were falling due; and often enough he fulfilled his obligations at the last moment with gold still wet from the sluiceboxes. On one occasion Fate stepped in to save him from ruin. He owed forty thousand dollars to two brothers, and when the note fell due he still had not washed out enough gold to cover the debt. Then, at the eleventh hour, one of the brothers conveniently died. The ensuing litigation delayed all payments until McDonald was able to meet his obligations.

  Before the summer of ’97 was out, McDonald had interests in twenty-eight claims and his holdings were reckoned in millions of dollars. “I’ve invested my whole fortune,” he remarked complacently, “I’ve run into debts of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars besides. But I can dig out a hundred and fifty thousand any time I need it.”

  The King of the Klondike presented a deceptively simple face to the world, with his painful articulation and his great ham hands and his blank oval visage, which rarely betrayed any animation; but the deals he made were often staggering in their complexity. In June of 1897 he walked into the tent office of Ron Crawford, a former Seattle court clerk who was setting up in business to draw up legal papers for prospectors. McDonald deposited his huge frame upon the three-legged stool in front of Crawford’s rough spruce table and announced that he wished to borrow five thousand dollars. Crawford, who had just twenty-five cents to his name, asked him how much interest he was willing to pay.