Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  The hard-pressed Mounted Police, who had become jacks of every trade in the Yukon, took over the handling of mail in October, 1897, and were still in charge when the main rush reached Dawson. It was a task for which they were neither trained nor prepared. William Ogilvie reported to the Minister of the Interior that the Dawson post office entailed as much work as that of a city of one hundred and fifty thousand because there was no delivery. One arriving steamboat brought fifty-seven hundred letters in a single batch. Every resident had to collect his own mail. Some waited vainly in line three days, until the price for a place in the queue rose to five dollars. Women made wages holding places for wealthy prospectors who could not afford the time to wait for their letters. The supply of stamps was so inadequate that the police were forced to dole them out two to a customer. No matter what the denomination, the price was always twenty-five cents because there was no small change in the community.

  Against this background the cauldron of Dawson boiled and steamed. There was even talk of revolution, but none dared to flout the iron rule of Sam Steele. The Nugget continued to rail at the government, while the two other papers, the Midnight Sun and the Miner, took the opposite side. Canadian mining regulations were considered harsh by the Americans, who tended to forget that on the other side of the border no foreigner could stake or own a claim at all. Because most of the Klondike claims were held by foreigners who were intent on taking the gold out of the country, the government imposed a royalty of ten per cent on everything that was mined. This almost unheard-of regulation, which came into force on September 11, 1897, stuck in the craw of Canadians and Americans alike, especially as it was increased to twenty per cent if the output of any mine exceeded five hundred dollars a week. As a result, every kind of deception was used to falsify the amounts being mined, so that today no true record exists of the real value of gold taken from the Klondike, and all figures showing output during the peak years can be considered low. Major Nevill Armstrong, who operated rich claims on Bonanza Creek and on Cheechako Hill, wrote: “I do not believe more than one-tenth part of the correct tax was ever recovered from individual miners.”

  The royalty underwent many changes. On June 1, 1898, Commissioner Walsh reduced it to a straight ten per cent on output, with an annual exemption of five thousand dollars. This still did not satisfy the miners, who held bitter meetings of protest and dispatched delegations to Ottawa. The Nugget called Fawcett and Walsh grafters, and when the former was finally relieved of his post in November it ran a sardonic headline: “Goodbye Fawcett!” The harried gold commissioner must have been happy to depart. Thrust into the maelstrom of the Klondike from a quiet sinecure in a British Columbia backwater, he had never been equal to the task. He much preferred the quiet of a Dawson Sunday, when he led the choir of the Presbyterian church and forgot the hurly-burly of the weekday.

  Of the two government figures, Fawcett, the gold commissioner, and Walsh, the commissioner (or governor) of the Yukon, it is Walsh, the ex-Mountie, who in retrospect seems the more tragic, for his truly great career was blemished by his Klondike experience.

  When he arrived in the Klondike, charged with governing the Yukon, Walsh still bore himself with the military vigour that matched his background. His iron-grey hair was brushed back from his broad and weather-beaten forehead. His moustache and short beard bristled. He still stood straight as a rapier, a broad-shouldered, square-jawed, athletic-looking man of fifty-four. Although he had been retired from the police for fifteen years and had become a coal dealer in Winnipeg, the aura of a legend still surrounded him. This was the same commanding figure who, a quarter-century before, immaculate in pillbox hat and polished boots, had been the first uniformed man to ride into the armed camp of Sitting Bull and his warriors, from whose saddle horns the scalps of Custer’s men still joggled. This was the man who had literally kicked the famous medicine man in the pants, and who had humiliated White Dog, the fierce Assiniboine, in the presence of hundreds of armed Indians. This was the conqueror of Little Child, the horse-stealing chief of the Salteaux.

  But Walsh lasted only two months in the Klondike. In August he was recalled and the post of commissioner of the Yukon given to William Ogilvie. It was Ogilvie who presided in midwinter at a royal commission investigating charges of government graft brought by the Nugget and by others. He was hampered by the fact that the commission’s terms of reference did not extend past August 25; by the time of the hearings most of the witnesses had left the country. For this reason, and no doubt for political ones, its results were inconclusive, but it did throw a long shadow over the hitherto unsullied character of Walsh. The ex-commissioner’s cook, Louis Carbeno, testified under oath that he had got his job only by signing a document giving three-quarters interest in any claim he staked to either Walsh or Walsh’s brother Philip. This was particularly damning because Carbeno was one of the men who had successfully staked claims on Dominion Creek during the infamous stampede of July 1898, and Walsh of course had inside knowledge of Dominion.

  The Dominion Creek stampede provides the best evidence of the chaos and chicanery that existed in the government offices in Dawson that summer. The thirty-mile-long creek flows down from King Solomon’s Dome, directly opposite Hunker, and into the Indian River. So rich was it that half a century after the stampede two dredges were still taking large quantities of gold from it. Within a few months of being staked (June, 1897) some of its claims were selling for as much as forty thousand dollars. But it was staked so haphazardly, especially along the benches, that a large section had to be closed until a proper survey could untangle the endless disputes that sprang up about overlapping claims. It was announced that no new claims after November 15, 1897, would be recognized, and that the creek would not be reopened for staking until July 11, 1898. It was further announced that nobody could prospect on Dominion without a permit; these permits would be given out at ten a.m. on July 11. This meant that – on the face of it, at least – all comers would be given an equal start from Dawson, which lay forty miles from the head of the creek.

  In spite of these arrangements, a large number of stampeders, including Walsh’s man Carbeno, headed for Dominion Creek three days before the deadline, without bothering to wait for permits. Carbeno did so with Walsh’s permission. The morning after he left – July 9 – a notice appeared, dated July 8, announcing that no permits were needed after all, and all claims were open. Thousands headed for Dominion, forcing their horses through forty miles of brush and muskeg, but the government favourites were already on the site, staking out the best ground. Carbeno turned over his claim and that of two Indian helpers to the commissioner’s brother Philip, who, he swore, had provided him with the inside information. The barefaced audacity of the Dominion Creek muddle brought tempers to boiling-point and resulted in the royal commission hearings. But because of the lack of conclusions, there were no indictments. Little was published about Walsh’s part in the affair, except in the fine print of the commission’s report, which was relegated to a dusty shelf in Ottawa.

  The Mounted Police kept out of this cesspool, did their duty, and asked no questions. But their relations with the veteran ex-Mountie must have undergone considerable strain, for Walsh still felt himself in charge of the force. It was his occasional habit, as commissioner of the Yukon, to place parties of police under his own civilian staff to perform tasks that were not properly part of their duty. Constables found themselves being ordered about like servants, chopping wood for civilians, until the habit of having a Mountie do one’s chores spread to other government officials. This irksome and touchy situation came to an end when Walsh departed, but to the incorruptible Steele it must have been maddening. If so, he betrayed no hint of it. He was working twenty hours a day, seldom retiring before two in the morning and always rising at six. He was out of doors by seven, and in the next hour walked briskly for five miles over the Klondike hills. All day until midnight he officiated on boards and committees, squeezing his routine work in between, but always m
aking a point of seeing every one of his fifty prisoners daily. And he was not too busy to perform small gallantries. One day Faith Fenton, the Toronto Globe’s woman reporter in the Klondike, came to him in tears. Three Indians had been scheduled to hang for the murder of two stampeders in the Tagish area the previous spring, and she had arranged to scoop her competitors by writing the story in advance and shipping it out by fast dog-team. Now a postponement had come because the execution had been unwittingly scheduled for All Saints Day, a religious holiday. Steele instantly dispatched a dog-team on a fifty-mile run to recapture and destroy Miss Fenton’s premature report.

  He ruled his men with the same good sense with which he ruled the town. One night his sergeant-major rapped on his door to report that some of the constables had been breaking barracks and were not at their beds when night roll-call came. Steele waved the complaint aside.

  “They’re young,” he said, “and they’ll never see a mining camp like this again. So long as they do their duty, it won’t hurt them to go a bit large.”

  For Sam Steele understood, far better than most men in the Klondike, that he was presiding at a bizarre and unforgettable moment in history.

  Chapter Eleven

  1

  Soapy Smith takes over

  2

  Alias Robin Hood

  3

  The Committee of 101

  4

  Dictator of Skagway

  5

  Shoot-out at the Juneau dock

  6

  No escape

  1

  Soapy Smith takes over

  Skagway … the Fourth of July, 1898 … Independence Day in a town that has known little real independence. The streets are gay with miles of bunting and acres of flags and rockets, with firecrackers and popping six-guns, with exploding dynamite and blaring bands and marching men.

  Down Broadway Avenue the procession advances, and at its head, mounted upon a handsome dapple-grey, is a pale-faced man with the eyes of a poet and the beard of a Mephisto, who waves his spotless white sombrero in greeting to the crowd. And the crowd waves back and cheers as Jefferson Randolph Smith, the marshal of the parade and the dictator of Skagway, goes riding past.

  Little children are munching Jeff Smith’s free candy and peanuts; the male adults have had their bellies warmed by his whiskey. Behind the dance-hall band that follows his lead down Broadway come the Skagway Guards, Jeff Smith’s personal military unit, armed and uniformed and marching in step to the music. And threaded in among the mob, at every street corner and intersection, are the members of the carefully organized spy system through which he controls the town.

  On the procession moves towards the flag-draped platform where Jeff Smith, once known as “Soapy,” will be joined by the Governor of Alaska himself for the official Independence Day ceremonies. It is Smith’s supreme moment: he has come a long way since he began his career in Leadville a quarter-century ago. Now that career has reached its climax; let him savour it; in just four days he will be dead, and there will be none to mourn his passing….

  The means which Soapy Smith employed in his subjugation of a town of ten thousand were tried and tested in the school of experience. He knew exactly what he was doing because he had done it all before; Skagway was the crowning-point in a long and rich career of knavery.

  He had been born in Georgia and liked to give the impression that he was the son of a prominent Southern family, although this fact has ever been in dispute. But the Dixie background had contributed a soft accent and a courtly manner that remained with him and were of immeasurable value in convincing the unwary that he was a man of honour and upbringing. He had, indeed, studied for the Baptist ministry as a youth, and often boasted that he could “straighten out Greek hexameters with the best of them.” He had a wife and six children in St. Louis, and a brother on the editorial staff of the Washington Star, and he maintained a vast and often rewarding correspondence with congressmen, Senators, civic officials, and prominent citizens throughout the western hemisphere.

  It was in Leadville, the stamping-ground of Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok, that his career had its chequered start. He had arrived from Texas driving longhorn steers up the old Chisholm Trail; it was the last time he soiled his hands in common toil. He learned the soap game from its inventor, a man named Taylor, and prospered so mightily that he earned the nickname which clung to him long after his death. He became a master of the shell game, the standby of all bunko men. And he could make a pack of cards do anything he wanted.

  In the con man’s pantheon Smith occupies an honoured place, for his contributions to the craft were considerable. The phrase “sure-thing game,” with its companion phrase “sure-thing men,” came into the language as the result of a retort made by Smith to the Clerical Association of Denver, which fought him vainly.

  “I’m no ordinary gambler,” Smith declared. “The ordinary gambler hazards his own money in an attempt to win another’s. When I stake money, it’s a sure thing that I win.”

  One of Smith’s cohorts, Doc Baggs, was the inventor of the famous gold-brick game. In Denver, one of the most corrupt towns on the continent, Smith, as king of the underworld, operated almost every known bunko game. He even had the barbers working for him: they would nick the necks of wealthy customers as a signal that they were ripe for fleecing.

  Smith had come to Denver from Leadville. In 1892 he moved on to the mushrooming silver camp of Creede. This roaring community, entirely without government or police, served as a sort of training-ground for Smith’s later conquest of Skagway. His gang simply moved in like an invading army and took over the town, their only serious rival being Bob Ford, that “dirty little coward” who, ten years before, had laid Jesse James in his grave. Smith easily brought Ford into line and went on to rig the election, name the police chief, select the executive council, and appoint every civic official from justice of the peace to coroner. He controlled the town until the silver boom petered out, and then returned to Denver, which remained his operating base until 1897.

  He was a man of considerable imagination and dry humour. Once, when haled before the fire-and-police commission on a charge of bilking two visitors out of fifteen hundred dollars, he produced such an ingenious and farfetched defence that it won his acquittal. He argued that his gaming-house was really an educational institution, similar to the famous Keeley Institute, affording its patients release from the curse of gambling. Smith went on to nail down his arguments by explaining that in his establishment gamblers had no chance of winning – and were told as much by a sign displayed prominently at the head of the stairs: “LET THE BUYER BEWARE.” (TO give the place a suitably high tone, the words had been rendered in Greek.) Smith ended his harangue by exclaiming that as a result of his ministrations the two victims would never gamble again:

  “In fact, gentlemen, I should be recognized as a public benefactor! Praise, instead of censure, should be our portion.”

  Occasionally, circumstances were such that Smith found it prudent to leave Denver temporarily, but when this occurred he merely transferred his operations elsewhere. There was the time that the dictator of Mexico, Don José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz, suddenly found a “Colonel Smith” on his doorstep, a slender, grey-eyed gentleman, sallow of face and smooth of tongue, who claimed to be a military organizer and martial genius. Before Diaz quite knew what was happening, he found himself persuaded to set up a Mexican foreign legion under Colonel Smith’s command. There was only one catch: the bearded colonel wanted eighty thousand pesos to do the job. The canny Diaz countered with an offer of four thousand, which Smith accepted. Back in Denver he actually opened a recruiting office, but Diaz, who was no easy mark, sent out spies to find out who Smith was and the scheme collapsed.

  Smith was one of a generation that had grown up on the success stories of Horatio Alger, and he was in the habit of keeping the door ajar to anticipate the knock of opportunity. When the news of the Klondike strike flashed through Denver, he sensed that
his hour had come and that he must move swiftly, as he had at Creede, before the new boom towns were properly organized. He made his decision at once to go north. By August he and his men were running shell games on the Skagway Trail.

  He took five men with him as a nucleus for a new organization. His closest henchman was the “Reverend” Charles Bowers, who had been with him since Leadville days, a notorious bunko man whose saintly appearance, gentle voice, and benevolent mien made it possible for him to masquerade as a man of the cloth. Bowers’s whole being exuded sanctimony, but he was as hard as sheet steel beneath the velvet exterior. There is a story that he once shot a peace officer, whom he recognized only when he had rolled him over. “Looks like I shot the sheriff,” Bowers drawled, placing his foot on the corpse. “Ain’t that too bad.” Because of his personality Bowers was a first-class “steerer”: he guided suckers to the various fake business establishments where other members of the gang lay in wait to fleece them. He was also known as a “grip man,” for he had mastered the secret handshakes, signals, and distress signs that embellish most fraternal orders. Once Bowers had disarmed his victims with the fraternal signal, they were putty in his hands.

  Two other long-time confreres of Smith went along to the North – Syd Dixon and George Wilder. Wilder, who acted as advance man for the gang, gave the impression of being a prosperous businessman, his personality suggesting such financial well-being that he was useful in playing the role of a stockbroker letting a new-found friend in on a sure thing. Actually he was a shrewd and thrifty man, and the only one in Smith’s entourage who had a bank account and drew interest on it. Without his available funds, the sextet would never have been able to quit Denver. Syd Dixon came from a wealthy family and looked the part; a playboy and a globe-trotter, he had been driven to the gutter by an opium addiction and had taken to fraud only to raise money to buy more drugs. His dress, his manner, and his obvious gentility made him a valuable member of the gang. These men and two newer members, Slim Jim Foster and Red Gibbs, formed the hard core of the organization that was to dominate Skagway.