Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  One towering figure on the streets seemed to have stepped straight out of a wild-west show. This was Arizona Charlie Meadows, the old Indian-fighter and rodeo king whose portable saloon had been swept away in the Chilkoot flood. He suffered a series of mishaps, including a devastating boat wreck on Tagish Lake, but within four months of his arrival in town he had made a small fortune. He conceived the idea of producing a souvenir newspaper which would glorify the Klondike kings, and swiftly raised fifty thousand dollars for it. Charlie rightly regarded Front Street as better mining property than any to be found on the Klondike watershed, and by the winter of 1898–99 was hard at work planning the Palace Grand dance hall and theatre, which, he promised, would be the most lavish establishment of its kind in the North.

  Dawson in its climactic year remained a town of nicknames. Half the community, it seemed, went under such pseudonyms as Limejuice Lil, Spanish Dolores, Deep-Hole Johnson, Billy the Horse, Cassiar Jim, and Two-Step Louie. There were Spare-rib Jimmy Mackinson, so thin that his landlady was said to have refused him sheets for fear he might tear them with his bones; and Waterfront Brown, the debt-collector, who haunted the riverbank in order to capture fleeing defaulters; and Phantom Archibald, who spent twenty-five thousand dollars in gold on a colossal binge and thought himself pursued by a long black python; and Doc Stearnes, the “Gambler Ghost,” a wisp of a surgeon turned faro-player; and Hamgrease Jimmy, the dance-hall caller; and last, as well as least, that curious little creature known as the Evaporated Kid because he was so small that he “looked like a bottle with hips.”

  At first glance, this mélange of humanity seemed to be an odd and insoluble mixture of nationalities, races, and pursuits, yet it was really remarkably cohesive. Although the men and women who reached the Klondike came from every corner of the globe, and although their backgrounds were entirely dissimilar, they had one thing in common: they were there. Others, with weaker wills and weaker constitutions, had given up the struggle and retreated, but each of these disparate citizens had succeeded in what he had set out to do. They were like war veterans who, having served their time in action, now found themselves bound together in a camaraderie born of fortitude. They were all part of a proud élite who, in spite of every vicissitude, had managed to reach their goal.

  3

  The false fronts of Front Street

  Although Dawson covered several square miles, spilled across two rivers, and was squeezed up the sides of the surrounding hills, its pulse beat swiftest in those three or four short blocks of Front Street where the saloons, dance halls, and gaming-houses were crowded together. This was the most unstable as well as the liveliest section of the town. The buildings here were continually burning down and being rebuilt, changing ownership and managership, being lost and won in gambling-games, and sometimes changing both name and locale, so that the street was seldom the same from one month to the next. And yet, in another sense, it never changed, for any man who walked inside one building might be said to have walked inside them all. The outer façade of the street was a deceptive one. The carved scrollwork, the ornate bay windows and balconies with their intricately wrought balustrades, the elaborate cornices and pillars presented a rococo elegance which was as false as the square fronts which hid the dingy, gabled log building behind. Hollywood films have presented the Klondike dance halls with Parisian splendour, but the real edifices were cheaper and shabbier than their dreamworld counterparts. So were the girls who danced within them, especially in the early days. Like the furniture and the trimmings, they had to be brought in over the mountains, and thus they were plain, sturdy, serviceable, and without embellishment. Most of them ran to weight; only the huskiest, after all, were able to withstand the rigours of the journey.

  The interiors of the dance halls were of a piece – and a description of the Monte Carlo serves for them all. It was a hastily erected two-story building with large plate-glass windows, on which its name was inscribed, facing the street. Upon entering it, the newcomer found himself in a small, rather dark room dominated by a sheet-iron stove, with a long polished bar to his left, behind which the bartenders in starched shirts and aprons, with white waistcoats and diamond stickpins, stood reflected in the long mirrors at their backs.

  Beyond the saloon was a smaller room, where faro, poker, dice, and roulette were played continually, day and night, and behind this room was the theatre, consisting of a ground floor (with movable benches), a balcony (three rows and six boxes), and a small curtained stage. The remainder of the establishment’s upper storey was given over to about a dozen bedrooms, which could be rented by the night or by the week for any purpose, even including slumber.

  This layout differed only in detail up and down the street. One dance hall sported elaborate murals (“Midnight on the Yukon”); another was lighted by acetylene lamps instead of the usual oil. (Electricity did not come until later in the season.) But each contained the same divisions of gallery, boxes, and common dance floor.

  A sign on the balcony of the Opera House reminded customers that “gentlemen in private boxes are expected to order refreshments,” and these instructions were rarely ignored, for it was a mark of affluence for a man to be seen in an upper box, encircled by a bevy of soubrettes, drinking champagne at sixty dollars a quart. The men of the Klondike craved such outward signs of success more than they craved the actual champagne or the favours of the women; their presence in the balcony surrounded them with a kind of aura which proclaimed to all who watched that they had won a hand in the hard game of life. The private box in the Dawson dance hall thus became a sort of symbol; suspended above the turbulent and sweaty masses on the floor below, a miner flush with gold could feel that he had indeed risen in the world. In a single night in the Monte Carlo one such celebrant had seventeen hundred dollars’ worth of champagne brought to his box.

  To some, the dance hall itself became the supreme emblem of achievement and nothing would do but that they own one outright. Many a Klondike king invested his gold in a palace of pleasure, although not always with crowning success. Charlie Kimball, who built the Pavilion with one hundred thousand dollars which he received for his mining property, took in twelve thousand on opening night in June, 1898. He was so delighted by this new way of mining gold that he began to celebrate. The bender lasted three months, and during this period Kimball made – and spent – three hundred thousand dollars. When he eventually sobered up he had lost his dance hall and was penniless. But for one brief whirl he had been Somebody.

  In the larger establishments the bar, gaming-room, dance hall, and stage entertainment were operated as separate concessions. The bar ran twenty-four hours a day, except Sundays, and so did the gambling. The dance hall came alive about eight in the evening and ran until six or seven the following morning, but actual dancing did not really begin until after midnight, being preceded by lengthy entertainments: a drama first, and then a series of vaudeville turns on the tiny stage.

  The most versatile of the entrepreneurs was John Mulligan, who with his wife, Carrie, had been staging vaudeville and burlesque in the various Pacific coast towns before coming north. Mulligan wrote the entire show himself, a series of bawdy and satirical commentaries on the times made up from suggestions he received from gamblers, miners, dance-hall girls, and bartenders. His best-remembered drama was The Adventures of Stillwater Willie, a satire on the exploits of Swiftwater Bill which Mulligan produced first in the Combination – or Tivoli, as it was renamed – and later repeated by popular request in the Monte Carlo. With a fine sense of casting, Mulligan starred Nellie Lamore, the youngest of the three Lamore sisters in the play. Swiftwater Bill would occupy the finest box in the theatre and applaud the caricature cheerfully – while the audience laughed. Swiftwater did not mind the laughter: he was being noticed, and that was what mattered. Nellie, thus emboldened, appeared at a masquerade ball in October, 1898, wearing a Prince Albert coat, a silk hat, and a placard inscribed: “Stillwater Willie, the Mayor of Lousetown.” She won first priz
e.

  Gussie Lamore was back in town, her reputation enhanced by the legend of the eggs, and she, too, was a popular favourite. From the stage of the Monte Carlo she would sing directly to Swiftwater in his box:

  Give me a pen, I’ll make my will,

  I’ll will it all to Swiftwater Bill.

  I loved him once and I always will,

  For he was certainly good to me.

  All eyes would turn upward to the little man with the Prince Albert coat, the diamond stickpin, and the comical moustache, applauding furiously; and the cheechakos in the pit would nudge each other and remember, years later, that they had once seen the legendary Swiftwater.

  Another occasional stage entertainer was Wilson Mizner. He had a clear tenor voice, much in demand for the charity affairs and church socials at which, with a fine sense of impartiality, he also entertained. According to Mizner’s biographer, Alva Johnston, one of these dance-hall appearances saved Mizner from a jail term. His girl friend was Nellie Lamore, who was also known as Nellie the Pig, perhaps because of her attractive retroussé nose, or possibly because once, in a heated moment, she bit off the ear of a bartender who she felt had insulted her. Nellie was making a handsome profit by selling tiny pieces of chocolate at a dollar a morsel, and Mizner, no doubt spurred on by the example of Swiftwater Bill and the eggs, decided to lay an enormous amount of chocolate at her feet. He held up a restaurant which sold the delicacy, but discovered to his chagrin that, although gold was to be had by reaching for it, the more valuable candy was kept locked in a safe. To confuse the issue he took the cash register with him, tossed it aside, ripped off his mask, ran to a saloon where he was known to entertain, and appeared, somewhat breathless but otherwise in good voice, singing “Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt,” thus establishing an iron-clad alibi.

  Mizner fancied himself as a singer and as a piano-player during his year in Dawson. The most famous pianist in town was the Rag Time Kid at the Dominion Saloon, said to be the model for Service’s subsequent Jag Time Kid in the famous poem about Dan McGrew. The Kid’s mother was a Chicago music teacher, and it was his boast that he could play anything that was requested. Mizner, who came from a good family, was sceptical of the Kid’s musical knowledge and rashly bet that he could play something the Kid could not copy. The Kid accepted, whereupon Mizner sat down and played “The Holy City.” “Move over,” said the Kid contemptuously, and before Mizner had finished the final notes he was rendering the grand old song in ragtime.

  The incidental entertainments in the dance halls were usually supplemented by more serious dramas. Most of the plays of the day, from East Lynne to Camille, found their way to the Dawson stages, although a certain amount of invention was sometimes necessary in the properties department. In Pygmalion and Galatea, for instance, a Dawson stock company, vainly searching around for a faun, had to make do with a stuffed and mounted malemute. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin the bloodhounds were represented by a single howling male-mute puppy drawn across the stage by invisible wires, while newspapers were used to simulate ice floes. The critics, however, praised the realistic performance of the actress who portrayed Eliza; it was obvious that she had really seen people making their way across floating ice.

  The pièce de résistance at Arizona Charlie’s Palace Grand was a full-blown production of Camille. The ambitiousness of the production suited the theatre. To build the Palace, Charlie Meadows had bought and wrecked two steamboats, and to open it he had held a banquet for forty persons and laid a hundred-dollar banknote upon each plate. The stage production, alas, was not entirely successful, owing to a monumental piece of miscasting. The restless audience swiftly noted a distinct lack of ardour between Armand Duval and his consumptive lady. It appeared that George Hillier, the actor playing Duval, was the divorced husband of Babette Pyne, the dance-hall girl playing Camille. Babette hated him so much that she could not bear to speak with him in the wings, and at the end of each performance was in a state of nervous prostration from being forced to make love to him on the stage. This was only one of several flaws in the Camille production. The girls on stage also worked as box hustlers during the dancing that followed, as well as during the intermissions, and this double duty brought its own impasses. One night Babette Pyne, in her role as Camille, called over and over again for Prudence, her neighbour, but no Prudence appeared, and the action came to a dead stop. In the end, after repeated entreaties, the actress, Nellie Lewis, her hair tousled and her face flushed, poked her head from between the curtains of a wine box in the gallery and in a high-pitched and nearly incoherent voice called out: “Madame Prudence isn’t here! Call all you like, but Madame Prudence ain’t a-comin’ tonight. Don’t you think she’s a-comin’.” And although she was carried from the box by force, neither cajolery nor threats would force her to go onstage.

  When such entertainments failed, Arizona Charlie could always rely on his shooting skill to pack the Palace Grand. Dressed in his familiar fringed buckskin, with his black locks hanging to his shoulders, the old scout presented a commanding figure. From his position at the far end of the stage he would shoot glass balls from between the thumb and forefinger of his pretty blonde wife. One night he missed and nicked her thumb, and from then on the shooting exhibitions ceased.

  Crude as they were, the stage shows in the Dawson theatres brought enthusiastic crowds to Front Street six nights a week, for the town was starved for entertainment, indeed, the whole community was indulging in a gigantic year-long binge: those who had struck it rich were celebrating their good fortune, and the remainder were celebrating anyway after the long months on the trail.

  Young Monte Snow and his sister once picked up one hundred and forty-two dollars thrown at them as they danced and sang on the stage, while little Margie Newman, “The Princess of the Klondike,” sometimes stood heel-deep in nuggets after she rendered a sentimental song. The sight of this nine-year-old girl and the sound of her piping voice brought tears to the eyes of men far from their wives and families. They showered her with gold, and one even wrote a poem to her:

  God Bless you, Little Margie, for you made us better men

  God Bless you, Little Margie, for you take us home again.

  When at last she left town, Frank Conrad of Eleven Eldorado tore off his solid-gold watch and nugget chain and tossed them to her as she stood on the steamer’s deck. She smiled, and he pulled out a fifty-dollar bill, wrapped it around a silver dollar, and threw that. She smiled again, and he produced a hundred-dollar bill, wrapped it around another silver dollar, and threw that too.

  A different form of entertainment consisted of prize fights, which also took place on the dance-hall stages. Although the main object of all the stage shows was to pack the house with customers in order to keep the bar going, the fight-promoters were able to get as much as twenty-five dollars a seat for the better matches. Frank Slavin of Australia, the Empire’s heavyweight champion, known as the Sydney Cornstalk because of his tall, agile figure and long, loose arms, figured prominently in the most memorable of Dawson’s matches. Although Slavin was past his fighting prime and embittered by his failure to meet either John L. Sullivan or Jim Corbett for the heavyweight championship of the world, he was still more than a match for most of the men put up against him. He fought one Australian named Perkins for fourteen rounds and gave him such a beating that Perkins died eighteen months later from internal injuries. One night a rowdy named Biff Hoffman knocked Slavin to the floor in the Monte Carlo saloon when both men were drunk. The fighter took his measure and said: “You can knock me about when I’m drunk, but I’ll show you what I can do in the ring when I’m sober.” Wilson Mizner, who was weighing gold in the Monte Carlo at the time, heard these words and saw the incident as a heaven-sent opportunity for a grudge match. The fight was profitable but disappointing. Slavin did not even bother to don the regulation trunks, but climbed into the ring immaculate in white turtle neck sweater and white flannel trousers. He swung a right, knocked Hoffman cold, and collected one thousand dollar
s from Mizner. Another fight between Slavin and a wrestler named Frank Gotch (who later became world’s champion) was less decisive. Gotch was faring badly until he clamped a half-nelson on Slavin and threw him out of the ring. Each fighter insisted loudly and threateningly that he was the winner until the terrified referee called “No contest.”

  Although the promoters tried to bill every fight as a grudge match, most were mere exhibitions between men who knew each other well. Slavin had come into Dawson in the company of Joe Boyle, his Canadian sparring-partner, with whom he had barnstormed around America. Boyle later became one of the great figures of the Klondike, securing an enormous concession on the main river, building the largest dredges in the world, and ending his years as “the Uncrowned King of Rumania,” where he was popularly believed to be the lover of Queen Marie; but in 1898 he did duty as a bouncer in the Monte Carlo. Tex Rickard, who went from penury to fortune and back to bankruptcy again in Dawson, gained some early experience in fight-promoting by matching the two friends against each other and making the crowd believe they were enemies. He billed Boyle as a man who had defied Soapy Smith in Skagway, and he referred to Slavin as “the Sydney Slasher.” He talked both men into acting infuriated whenever they saw each other, and, to whip up interest in the match, placed Slavin in a prominent position in a Front Street saloon where the crowd could see him. Rickard was disgusted to discover one day that Slavin’s chief drinking-companion, in full view of the entire town, was Paddy Flynn, who was also billed as the referee, Rickard hustled Flynn out of town until the night of the fight and then extracted twenty-five dollars from every customer, including those who crowded in for standing room only. Boyle, when he grew wealthy from his mining concessions, did not forget his old sparring-partner. He put Slavin on his payroll in an imaginary job at a good salary. As for Rickard, he headed off to Rampart and thence on to Nome, Alaska, without a cent to his name. Within a year he had one hundred thousand dollars.