Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  All of them realized at last that none had won the great race to the Klondike; the best ground had long been staked out by men who were on the spot before the name became a byword. Yet none had lost either. There was a strange satisfaction in the simple fact that they had made it. Suddenly they uncoiled, like springs that have been wound too tightly, and hundreds began to seek out, sheepishly, the former friends with whom they had quarrelled in the tense months on the trail, until the sweet laughter of reunion rippled across the canvas city.

  All summer long, thousands of aimless men shuffled up and down Front Street, still dressed in the faded mackinaws, patched trousers, and high-laced boots of the trail. Their faces, like their clothes, seemed to be the colour of dust, seasoned in the crucible of the mountains; they wore their fur hats, many of them, as a kind of badge, with their snow-glasses still perched above them, and many retained their unkempt beards as if in memory of the winter of their travail.

  They were like a crowd on a holiday, sightseers at the carnival of the Klondike. They jostled each other and they pointed as the Eldorado kings went by – at the Berrys and the Stanleys, at Big Alex, the Lucky Swede, Dick Lowe, and Antone Stander. These men, who a few years before had been cheechakos themselves, were now the star attractions of the Front Street midway as they played to the grandstand from their boxes in the Combination dance hall, where each door was marked with the name of a famous creek and where every pint of champagne was worth two ounces of gold.

  Down the boardwalk the newcomers trudged, and through the sticky ruts of the roadway, bent slightly forward as if the memory of their packs was hanging heavy on them – the same men who had once formed the liquid line over the Chilkoot. Behind them, like a hastily built theatrical backdrop, were the false-fronted dance halls and gambling-houses, some of them only half finished: the Pioneer and the Dominion, the Opera House and the Monte Carlo, the Bank Saloon and the Aurora, the Combination, Pavilion, and Mascot. A hodge-podge of banners, pennants, signs, and placards, suspended from door and window, tacked onto log walls and slung on poles across the street, advertised the presence of a dozen mining exchanges, transport companies, outfitters, information booths, gold-dust buyers, dentists, doctors, lawyers, and merchants.

  “Gold! Gold! Gold!” the signs read. “Gold dust bought and sold … Jewelry … Fine diamond work … Watches … Tintypes … Cigars … Souvenirs and fine native gold.”

  At eight in the evening the crowd thickened about the dance halls as the callers, megaphone to mouth, stepped outside and for ten minutes barked out the merits of their wares to the accompaniment of tinkling pianos, scraping fiddles, and blaring horns. On the inside, silk-clad women danced, liquor flowed over mahogany counters, chips clicked on green felt tables, vaudevilleans cracked stale jokes, stock companies staged earnest if awkward dramas, while Projecto-scopes and Animatagraphs, the mechanical wonders of the decade, flashed pictures that actually moved on bed-sheet screens, showing U.S. soldiers en route to Manila, or Gentleman Jim Corbett trying to regain his heavyweight title.

  Outside on the crowded street, in the light dusk of midnight, an enormous magic lantern projected advertising messages on the side of a frame building. Dogs dashed madly up and down through the mud, harassing Gerry the Bum, Belinda Mulroney’s drunken donkey, who staggered about poking his nose into the saloons and cadging drinks from the patrons until the barkeeps threw him out. Racing spryly along the duck-boards, “Uncle Andy” Young, the town’s crack newsboy, sixty-five years old, cried over and over again: “The Nugget! The Nugget! The dear little Nugget!” with such vigour that he sold a thousand papers of an evening. And from the wharves could be heard the hoarse whistles of steamboats disgorging new arrivals, or departing with a load of disillusioned argonauts.

  Just off the main street, from a niggerhead swamp behind Silent Sam Bonnifield’s Bank Saloon, came the wheezing sound of a portable organ and the light tap of dancing feet. The crowd flowed towards it nightly, for here the Oatley Sisters, two pretty, petite girls, danced and entertained on a rough platform while a big pompadoured German made music for them. After twenty dances with the customers at a dollar a dance, the sisters stopped for breath and sang sentimental songs; and as their clear, bell-like voices piped in two-part harmony in the bright evening air, a hush fell over the throng clustered about the little stand. They sang “Break the News to Mother,” and they sang “A Bird in a Gilded Cage,” and they sang “I Love Her, Yes I Love Her Just the Same.” And as they sang, each man fell silent, alone with his thoughts. Most of them were two thousand miles from home; some ten thousand; and the sound of the organ and the words of the familiar songs brought tears to many eyes.

  “A lot of those songs are graven on the walls of my memory,” Bert Parker wrote fifty years later. “I stood there with my mouth open, listening to the Oatley Sisters sing those sad ballads. I never knew them personally and didn’t have enough money in those days to get near enough to really get a good look at them. But they sure helped me to put many a lonesome night behind me and gave me something to think about when I crawled into my bunk at night and parked my weary head on a pillow made of my two high boots.”

  The little organ groaned on. The girls finished their song. The canvas above their stand rippled in the breeze. Then the spell was broken as the organ struck up a bright two-step and the dance began again. Up onto the little stand the men climbed and paid their dollar for three rounds with one of the sisters or with one of the other girls who worked with them. All night long, with the sun still bright on the horizon, up and down the length of Front Street, the dance whirled on. Only at six or eight a.m. did the revelry cease as the men by the thousands drifted off to their tents and the exhausted girls were free to collapse into insensibility.

  If by night Dawson was a great carnival, by day it was an enormous bazaar. Thousands who had thrown themselves body and soul into the task of dragging their ton of goods over the mountains and down the rivers were now intent on selling everything in order to realize enough money to go home. The wet sand-bar in front of the city was tjuickly laid out into two principal thoroughfares, Wall Street and Broadway Avenue, and these were lined with goods selling, for the most part, at half the prices they had fetched in the Pacific coast ports.

  You could buy almost anything under the sun during that climactic summer in Dawson City. You could buy clothes and furs, moccasins and plug hats, shoes and jewellery, fresh grapes, opera glasses, safety pins, and ice cream. You could buy peanuts and pink lemonade, patent-leather shoes, yellow-jacketed novels, cribbage boards, ostrich feathers, and oxen on the hoof. You could, if you were so inclined, buy for one hundred dollars the tusk of a prehistoric mammoth, dredged out of the frozen ground by prospectors – or, for twenty-five cents, a slicker coat with a bad cigar thrown in as premium. You could have your palm read, your picture taken, your back massaged, or your teeth filled with nuggets. You could buy Bibles and sets of Shakespeare and pairs of gold-scales by the hundreds, for these had been standard equipment with almost every man. You could buy rifles by the gross at one dollar each; they were worthless in a town where nobody was allowed to pack a gun. Many men stripped off the barrels to use as pipes for transmitting steam into the frozen ground and thawing the soil at the mines, and others bought them by the score and shipped them back Outside at a profit.

  Down to the market place the crowd swarmed. Signs flapped in the breeze above tents that had been turned into emporiums by men who were trying to scrape together enough money to leave the Klondike forever.

  DRUGS DRUGS

  Rubber boots shoes Etc. bacon, flour, rolled oats, rice, sugar, onions, tea and coffee, fruits, cornmeal German sausage, Dogs Dogs

  Vegetable and fruit stands, like booths at a county fair, crowded against tents selling dry goods or hardware. Women hawked ice cream made from condensed milk, while others stood perspiring at open bake-ovens redolent with the odour of steaming bread. Piles of clothing and piles of provisions lay in heaps in the open, unprotected from
the summer rains, while inquisitive men picked at them and bargained, Arab-fashion, with their owners.

  Some piles contained musty flour and clothes that had been washed and rewashed, mended and remended, and provisions that had obviously been soaked, dried in the sun, and soaked again. These were leftovers from the Edmonton trails and the portages over the Liard, the Gravel, the Rat, and the Wind rivers.

  Just two years before, this flat had been silent and empty, the domain of Carmack and his Indians, the province of the moose and the migrating caribou, the croaking ravens and the spawning salmon. Now for two miles along the river it throbbed and quivered like the aspens on the hillsides.

  Once again the law of supply and demand was at work. Few had thought to bring in brooms over the trail: these were now so scarce that they sold for seventeen dollars. The building boom was gobbling up twelve million feet of lumber as fast as the twelve sawmills could disgorge it, and nails were selling at almost eight dollars a pound. It cost five dollars to cash a cheque in Dawson and seventeen to call a doctor. Gold-dust weighers were paid twenty dollars a day, and teamsters one hundred. Lawyers made as much as five thousand a month. (In the rest of North America workingmen that year were receiving an average dollar-twenty-five a day; union carpenters, about one dollar and a half.)

  The carnival was building to a climax, and on July 4 the climax came. For days, tension had been building in the community because of rumours that no American holiday could be celebrated on British soil, but the Mounted Police tactfully decreed that both Dominion Day and Independence Day would be marked by common festivities. At one minute past midnight a rifle shot rang across town, and within a few moments hundreds of others exploded. But this was not enough. Men scurried about procuring anvils, on which mounds of blasting-powder were placed, and upon these other anvils were piled, so that a piece of red-hot iron run between the two touched off a sound like a cannon’s roar.

  Across the bowl in the hills the explosions reverberated. It was as if each man had been waiting for this moment to celebrate his conquest of the mountains and the rivers. By five a.m. the din was so ear-splitting that four hundred dogs, driven to near-panic, fled through the madding crowds, leaped into the river, and swam across it in one long animal streak. Most of them came back after the festivities had subsided, but about one hundred preferred to remain wild in the forest, where they ran like wolves, never to return to the crazy community on the banks of the Klondike.

  3

  Champagne for breakfast

  Pat Galvin of Bonanza Creek summed up the spirit of ’98 in a few pithy sentences of advice given to his nephew, who had arrived from the Outside that summer and, observing Galvin’s free-handed methods, muttered a few cautionary words about expense.

  “Expense! Expense!” cried Galvin. “I am disgusted with you. Don’t show your ignorance by using that cheap Outside word. We don’t use it here. Never repeat it in my presence again. You must learn the ways of Alaska. That word is not understood in the north. If you have money, spend it; that’s what it’s for, and that’s the way we do business.”

  This might easily have stood as the Klondike’s creed in the year of the stampede. The gold which had lain hidden for so long in the frozen gravels now moved as swiftly as those nuggets which Pat Galvin gave away like souvenirs to any passing stranger who would listen to the story of his life. The kings of Bonanza and Eldorado, who had been common labourers two years before, saw themselves as captains of industry and determined to invest their money in an assortment of schemes and enterprises. Some built hotels and fitted them out with Persian carpets and mahogany furniture. Others financed restaurants that served everything from oysters to sherbet. Dozens were sucked into mining companies, syndicates, trading firms, and transportation companies.

  By the end of the summer, thirty more trading and transportation companies had joined the two pioneer firms, the A.C. and N.A.T. companies, in traffic on the river. They operated sixty steamboats, eight tugboats, and twenty enormous barges. One Seattle shipyard knocked together twelve stern-wheelers for the Yukon trade that year and moved ten of them safely to their destination; they were “built by the mile and cut apart in proper lengths,” as one of their officers put it. There seemed, sometimes, to be a boat around every bend in the river, and there could be as many as a dozen tied to the bank along the Dawson waterfront. Ship after ship puffed into town, many of them loaded with champagne and brightly plumaged dancing-girls, pennants, flags, and bunting fluttering gaily from their masts, clouds of white smoke bursting from their yellow stacks, a Niagara of spray churning back from their orange paddle-wheels.

  Many of these new vessels were floating palaces in every sense of the word. The Alaska Commercial Company, which was a Jewish-owned firm, launched the three biggest of all that summer, the Susie, Sarah, and Hannah, naming them, as was its gallant habit, after the wives and daughters of its directors rather than after the directors themselves, as the crustier N.A.T. Company did. They were built in Louisville, Kentucky, these monoliths, and designed after Mississippi packets, with palatial dining-rooms of mahogany, and staterooms equipped with two or three berths, and upper decks that ran the length of each vessel. Directly behind the big twin stacks the company’s bold red pennant fluttered, and on each boat the specially made silver service, dishes, bed linen, and blankets all bore the firm’s monogram. It was a far cry from the crude days of the New Racket or the airless cells of the little Bella.

  Up the river at top speed that summer came the dashing John Irving aboard his trim steamboat, the Yukoner, on the fastest trip ever recorded from St. Michael to Dawson. A great gold eagle was fastened in front of his pilothouse as a talisman, and a huge picture of a bulldog hung, at his whim, in the dining-salon, while an enormous Negro bodyservant stayed constantly at his side during the journey. Irving was as skilled in navigation as he was eccentric in personality, an old-time river man who had waged many an epic steamboat war on the Fraser River decades before against his fierce rival – the same William Moore who founded Skagway.

  He was a man who did everything with flair, and this record trip from St. Michael to Dawson aboard the Yukoner was unlike any other voyage made on the river. Irving launched his ship with pomp and ceremony: a stunning blonde, en route to a dance-hall engagement, was recruited to smash a bottle of vintage champagne across the stern – an appropriate beginning since the cargo consisted almost entirely of wines and spirits, while the passenger list was composed largely of theatrical people, dance-hall entertainers, and gamblers. An orchestra contributed to the general air of festivity and bonhomie.

  Like all the steamboats on the run, Irving’s Yukoner was a wood-burner, and thus regular stops had to be made to take on cordwood, which was stacked at depots on the riverbank along the way. Most pilots nudged their craft gingerly into the shore, loaded the wood at top speed, and pushed off as quickly as possible, but Irving made an adventure and a ceremony out of this prosaic task. On spying a cordwood depot it was his practice to aim the bow of his boat directly at the bank, pull the whistle cord wide open, order the engines full speed ahead, and charge. At the very last instant he would order full speed astern, calculating the distance so nicely that the boat would come to a shuddering halt a few inches from the bank. The scene that followed was always flamboyant. The captain, leaping from his ship, would invite the delighted woodcutters aboard for a round of champagne, while the band, assembled on the deck, played furiously and the girls, in their finest satins and laces, danced wildly to the music.

  Irving handled his steamer as if she were a spirited mare and he an accomplished rider. Nothing appeared to give him greater pleasure than a charge through the waters at some object. On the return trip from Dawson he nosed his boat out of the delta and into the Bering Sea, where he spotted the ocean steamer Danube, the ship which was to pick up his passengers and cargo. Irving promptly charged the Danube, but miscalculated his speed by a fraction with lamentable results. Unabashed, he puffed on to St. Michael, where, to
keep his hand in, he charged the dock, almost reducing it to matchwood. This was the climax of his voyage. He quickly unloaded the Yukoner, for forty-five thousand dollars, to Pat Galvin, the man who bougnt steamboats the way others buy a suit of clothes.

  Galvin was a one-time town marshal from Helena, Montana, who had run a hardware and tinsmith shop at Circle before the Klondike strike. Enriched by his Bonanza claim, he sought, like so many of his fellows, to form a corporation and become a financial titan – not so much for wealth as for fame. His new firm bore the proud title of “North British American Trading and Transportation Company, Pat Galvin president.” Galvin insisted that his name, and his alone, stand above the doors of all the trading posts and appear on all merchandise and canned goods which he proposed to import into the Yukon and sell at various points along the river.