“I don’t want to pay interest,” said McDonald in his slow way, rubbing his chin. “Interest is always working against you, and I can’t sleep at night when I think of that. But if you let me have the money, I’ll give you a lay of a hundred feet on Six Below Bonanza at fifty per cent. I’ll also give you thirty-five per cent of thirty-five feet of Twenty-Seven Eldorado and a mortgage on Thirty Eldorado as security.”
Considering the value of the three claims involved, this was an enormous sum to pay for the use of five thousand dollars. Crawford, stalling for time, promised to give McDonald an answer by morning. Then he rushed to a neighbouring saloon and raised five thousand dollars from the owner in return for a half-interest in the mortgage on Thirty. After the loan was made, Crawford sold part of his share of the section of Twenty-Seven for five thousand dollars to a Dawson barber. The barber worked it the following winter and took out forty thousand dollars.
McDonald’s example was widely copied, and claims were swiftly carved up like so many apple pies, to be mortgaged, leased, traded, loaned, and lost. Carmack, for instance, sold half of Tagish Charley’s claim for five thousand dollars. The purchaser made a five-hundred-dollar downpayment, and from a fourteen-foot tunnel took out eight thousand, from which he paid the balance. Ogilvie, who liked to work with figures, reckoned that on this basis the claim could be worth up to two and a half millions.
“My God,” cried the new owner aghast, “what will I do with all that money?”
“I wouldn’t worry,” Ogilvie told him. “It’s hardly possible your claim will average anything like that,” and he went on to reason that if the only wealth on the claim was on the one fourteen-foot strip, there would still be eighty-three thousand in the ground. “Which,” he added dryly, “is enough to kill you.”
It was this lay system that catapulted Swiftwater Bill Gates into the notoriety which he craved as fervently as McDonald craved property. Gates was one of a group of seven men who were finally persuaded to take a lay on Thirteen Eldorado, which, because of the jinx implied by its number, had been shunned by all. The new lay men sank seven shafts before they hit the pay-streak, but when they did they saw at once that it was incredibly rich. To keep the find a secret, they burned in the sides of the shaft and then let it be noised about that they were getting a paltry ten cents to the pan. The owner, J. B. Hollingshead, was delighted that April to part with the property for forty-five thousand dollars, a sum which the new owners were able to dig from his former claim in just six weeks.
Until the moment of this discovery there was little to distinguish William F. Gates from his fellows. He was an unimpressive five foot five in height, and his moon face was ornamented by a straggling black moustache that gave his features a comic cast. Nobody had ever taken him seriously, even when, to attract attention, he boasted of his former prowess as a boatman on the Coeur d’Alene River in the placer district of Idaho. They laughed and dubbed him Swiftwater Bill.
Like most of his companions, Swiftwater Bill Gates was nearly destitute. But all he needed to transform his personality was gold. One season he was a nondescript dishwater in Circle City, begging jobs from George Snow of the Opera House; the next he was a man in a Prince Albert coat, with a top hat, a white shirt with a diamond stickpin in his tie, and the only starched collar in Dawson. It was said that Swiftwater Bill was so proud of this unique collar that he took to his bed while it was being laundered, rather than be seen without it. He was a small man; all his life he had been inconspicuous. He did not intend to remain inconspicuous any longer, and in this resolve he triumphed.
He could not wait for his share of the gold to be hoisted up the shaft of Thirteen Eldorado. He borrowed money at ten per cent a month so that he could play pool at a hundred dollars a frame, or throw his poke on the faro table and cry: “The sky’s the limit! Raise ’er up as far as you want to go, boys, and if the roof’s in your way, why tear it off!”
William Haskell, an old prospector, watched Swiftwater lose five hundred dollars in a few minutes one evening in ’97.
“Things don’t seem to be coming my way tonight,” he said, rising casually from his seat. “Let’s let the house have a drink at my expense.”
The round cost him one hundred and twelve dollars. He threw his poke on the bar, lighted a dollar-fifty cigar, and strolled out.
Like Big Alex, he hired others to mine his property, but whereas Big Alex used all this time to acquire more gold, Swiftwater needed every waking moment to get rid of his. Like Big Alex, he paid his workers in land rather than in funds, and he paid them well. One of his helpers was a former milk-wagon driver from Seattle named Harry Winter, who worked one hundred days for Swiftwater and received in return a fifty-foot-square plot. From this ground he took five thousand dollars, and with that sum he bought from his former employer a second plot, thirty feet square. This, in turn, yielded eighty-five thousand, which meant that Swiftwater had, in effect, paid Winter eight hundred and fifty dollars a day for his labour.
Swiftwater Bill allowed no wine to touch his lips (though he occasionally bathed in it), but he indulged in other pleasures of the flesh. It was his habit to escort dance-hall girls in coveys to his claim and let them clamber down the shaft to pan out all the gold they wanted. They turned out to be as expert as seasoned miners.
Bill’s favourite was Gussie Lamore, a comely strumpet of nineteen who had come to Dawson from Circle City in the spring rush, and who shared top billing with him in an incident which has become the liveliest of the Klondike’s imperishable legends. Gussie, it developed, was inordinately fond of fresh eggs, possibly because they were as scarce as diamonds in the Dawson of 1897. One day, so the tale goes, Swiftwater Bill was seated in a restaurant when, to his surprise and chagrin, he saw Gussie enter on the arm of a well-known gambler. The pair ordered fried eggs, which were the most expensive item on the menu, and it was then that, in a fury of jealousy, Swiftwater achieved a certain immortality by buying up every egg in town in an attempt to frustrate Gussie’s cravings.
There are many versions of this tale. Arthur Walden, the dog-puncher, who claimed in his memoirs to have witnessed the incident, wrote that Swiftwater had the eggs fried one at a time and flipped them through the window of the café to a rabble of dogs outside, commenting to the gathering crowd on the cleverness of the animals in catching them. Other versions have it that he presented the entire trove of eggs to Gussie as a token of his true emotions; or that he fed them to other dance-hall girls in order to awaken Gussie’s jealousy. Belinda Mulroney, a famous Klondike innkeeper who arrived in Dawson early that spring, recollects that there was about half a case of eggs involved, and that these had been brought over the ice from the Pacific coast and were fast growing mellow. Mrs. Iola Beebe, one of Swiftwater’s several future mothers-in-law, wrote that there were two crates of eggs and that Swiftwater paid for them with a brace of coffee tins filled with gold. The details of the story have thus been obscured, for there was no writing-paper in Dawson at the time to set them down, and no scriveners either, since every would-be historian was too busy seeking a fortune to attend to such footnotes. Whatever the details, the fact remains that the incident brought Gussie to heel, at least temporarily. She offered to meet Swiftwater Bill in San Francisco that fall and marry him, failing to mention that she was already wed to one Emile Leglice and had been since 1894.
Swiftwater’s journey to San Francisco was ostensibly for business. He had gone into partnership with a shrewd entrepreneur named Jack Smith to establish the most famous of the Klondike’s palaces of pleasure, the Monte Carlo Dance Hall and Saloon. Smith was an old showman who had a variety troupe in Fortymile at the time of the strike. He had reached Bonanza with the first wave, staked a claim, sold it for one hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars, opened up a small saloon on the creeks, and turned a handy profit. The transaction convinced him that it was easier to dig gold out of miners’ pockets than out of the ground. He quickly saw the potentialities of Dawson’s Front Street, and in the
spring established the Monte Carlo in a tent. He made only one error of judgement, but it was a whopper. He persuaded Swiftwater Bill to put up some of the funds for a permanent building, and then allowed him to go out to San Francisco to rustle up a cargo of furnishings, liquor, and dance-hall girls. Sending Swiftwater Outside to bring back girls was like sending a greedy child to a candy shop and hoping to get a full box back. But the awful realization of what he had done did not begin to dawn on Jack Smith until the following summer.
6
City of gold
Dawson grew slowly all that winter, as the news spread through Alaska and sifted as far south as Juneau on the Panhandle. By April 1897 there were about fifteen hundred people in the community and the camp had became a carbon copy of Fortymile and Circle City, its customs and traditions as yet untarnished by any large influx of strangers.
All winter long a thin trickle of men – one thousand or more – had been scaling the Chilkoot and hammering boats together along the shores of Lake Bennett on the headwaters of the Yukon. Now they waited on the frozen lake for the spring thaw. Their destination was Circle City; if they had heard of the Klondike at all, it was only in the vaguest terms.
At noon on May 14 the rotten ice in front of Dawson snapped with a mighty rumble and the whole mass began to crack and heave and move slowly off towards the sea. For two days a solid flow of ice cakes, some of them the size of houses, drifted past the town, until by May 16 the ice had thinned to the point where boats could navigate the river. The first small vessels to arrive belonged to men who had wintered somewhere along the river, but the main body of boats was only a few days behind.
The newcomers, sweeping around a bend in the river, came unexpectedly upon two tent cities scattered raggedly along both sides of the Klondike at the point where it joined the Yukon. The first city on the south bank of the Klondike was known officially as Klondike City, but rejoiced in the more common title of “Lousetown,” for it was the site of the old Indian salmon camp. On the far side, on the swamp beneath the scarred mountain, was Dawson City proper. The two saloon-keepers in Lousetown had erected a large sign – “Danger Below: Keep to the Right” – to mislead the newcomers and prevent them going on to Dawson, where Joe Ladue was planning to sell them the last of his whiskey. Within twenty-four hours some two hundred boats had landed at Lousetown with the first news from the Outside: “The Pope’s alive, the Queen’s well, there’s no war, and Bob Fitzsimmons knocked hell out of Jim Corbett!” Then William Ogilvie conceived the impish idea of tying down the steam whistle on Ladue’s sawmill, and as its piercing shrieks echoed through the Klondike hills the makeshift fleet left Lousetown and moved down to Dawson, which swiftly became the hub of the gold-fields. Soon boats of every size and shape were pouring in day and night.
Harry Ash, the big, florid bartender from Circle City, was one of the first to benefit from the influx. His Northern Saloon was little more than a plank floor with a tent covering, but the very sawdust on the floor glittered with fine gold. On May 23, Monte Snow, a teen-age boy from Circle whose father had arrived with a theatrical troupe, walked into the saloon and was greeted by Ash, who pointed to the sawdust-covered space in front of the bar.
“Take that sawdust, go down to Joe Ladue’s and get two more sacks. Pan it out, and I’ll give you what you get.”
Snow did not think this worth while, but when Ash offered him twenty-five dollars for all the gold he could pan from the sawdust he changed his mind. In two hours he took out two hundred and seventy-eight dollars in fine dust which had sifted out of miners’ pokes slapped onto the bar above. All business was transacted in gold. Bank-notes, indeed, were so scarce that when the occasional twenty-dollar bill turned up it could be sold for twenty-five dollars.
By June, Ash was taking in three thousand dollars a day. On the night that he opened his saloon in a permanent log building he took in thirty thousand, perhaps because he had the only piano in Dawson. The previous fall he had written to an old friend in Juneau, Billy Huson, to bring a piano in to Circle City, and all that winter Huson and his wife had been lugging the instrument over the Chilkoot in bits and pieces, the sounding-board carefully wrapped in wool yarn for protection. It was a tiny upright, made in Hong Kong for the steamer trade, and within a month every dance-hall girl in town had scratched her name on its surface with hatpins. As for the wool yarn, Mrs. Huson knitted it into sweaters which sold for a handsome profit. Within three months of the opening Ash was able to leave town with one hundred thousand dollars.
Before summer’s end there were ten saloons in Dawson, none taking in less than three hundred dollars a night. Some were only tents, like the Blue Elephant and the White Elephant, so named because of the colour of the canvas. Others were substantial log structures like Jimmy Kerry’s moved down from Fortymile, or Bill McPhee’s new Pioneer with its stuffed moose-heads. In front of one saloon there hung a great ship’s bell which rang every time a Klondike king laid down his poke, as a signal for everyone to crowd in for a free drink. Bartenders were paid twenty dollars a day and soon learned to underweigh gold dust, so that a customer could expect to lose a dollar and a half for every ten he laid out.
Once the gold was taken, wet and glistening, from the sluicebox, it seemed to shift from poke to poke as if carried by the winds. Money ceased to have value. Dance-hall girls were paid a hundred dollars a night; town lots were selling for as high as twelve thousand. The Alaska Commercial Company was planning a warehouse that could have been put up for four thousand dollars in any midwestern town but which cost ninety-three thousand to erect in Dawson. Log cabins sold for as much as two hundred dollars per square foot of floor space. Bacon and tea cost seven to eight times their Outside values.
The more enterprising of the new arrivals quickly realized that there were easier ways to garner Klondike gold than to mine it, and that there were business opportunities everywhere for a man of imagination. In six months a Pennsylvania cigar salesman turned his small stock into a hundred-thousand-dollar fortune. He sold his ten-cent cigars for a dollar and a half apiece and used the profits to make downpayments on a dozen city lots. In less than twenty days he had turned over the lots for a net profit of twenty thousand. He reinvested this money in a number of ingenious ventures – hiring Indians, for instance, to peddle fresh water at twenty-five cents a pail, and women to bake bread at a dollar a loaf – so that by fall he was ready to ship two hundred pounds of gold to the coast. In this fashion he grew rich without ever setting foot on a mining claim.
By summer, with the population nearing thirty-five hundred, with the ring of hammer and axe heard all over town, with buildings sprouting up in helter-skelter fashion and the muddy roadways encrusted with chips and sawdust and blocked by newly planed logs, Dawson had lost its original character. The old rules and customs which had made the Alaska-Yukon camps cohesive communities no longer applied. The Golden Rule of the Yukon Order of Pioneers was honoured only in the breach, and the old sourdoughs no longer felt free to leave their cabin doors ajar for all who passed by. Constantine, coming up from Fortymile, looked over the newcomers with contempt and wrote to his superiors that some of them “appeared to be the sweepings of the slums and the result of a general jail delivery.” He was closer to the mark than perhaps he knew, for that eddying multitude concealed at least one murderer and, pressing close behind in that same throng, his Nemesis, an indefatigable private detective who had travelled twenty-five thousand miles searching for his man and who now found himself, somewhat to his own amazement, in the midst of a gold rush.
The murderer’s name was Frank Novak. His pursuer was Detective C. C. Perrin, an athletic and square-jawed employee of Thiel’s Detective Service in Chicago. The chase had been on since February, when Novak, having gambled away his firm’s funds on the Chicago grain market, had killed and cremated a farmer in Iowa in the naïve belief that his insurance company would confuse the victim with himself and pay off Novak’s family. A coroner’s jury easily identified the corpse, an
d the relentless Perrin was put on the murderer’s trail. The chase had zigzagged back and forth across the continent, from Iowa to Maryland, back to Iowa and on to Nebraska, then finally to Vancouver, British Columbia, and north up the Pacific coast to Alaska. When Perrin found that his quarry was heading for Canadian territory, he had to entrain for Ottawa to get extradition papers and then speed back to the coast, five weeks behind his victim. The detective reached Alaska in June, searching for his man in the faces of the crowd that climbed the Chilkoot. At one time pursuer and pursued were only a few miles from each other, respectively building boats on Lake Lindemann and Lake Bennett. Indeed, both started off on the same morning, and at one point Perrin actually passed Novak’s scow without knowing it.
In Dawson, while others scrambled for fortune, hunter and hunted moved warily through the throng, oblivious of their strange surroundings. At this point both could have made themselves wealthy, for they had arrived unwittingly in the gold-fields before the Outside world yet knew of the strike. But neither had any interest in gold. From tent to tent the dogged Perrin moved, staring fixedly at face after face without recognition. Then he came upon one tent that excited his suspicions. He noticed that only two of its three occupants moved about by day, while the third emerged stealthily after midnight for a quiet stroll about the unfrequented parts of the camp with his miner’s hat low over his eyes. Perrin settled down to a long vigil, seeking to make out the features concealed behind a matted beard. In the end he identified his quarry and, with Constantine’s co-operation, made the arrest. He had been six months on the trail and history was being made all around him, but he was a man with a single purpose. Once his job was done, he left town with his handcuffed prisoner without another glance at the bizarre community that gold was building on the banks of the Yukon.
Klondike Page 12
