Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  The following day the town returned to normal. At the Tivoli, where, less than a month before, Father Judge had received the homage of the camp, John Mulligan was winning applause with a topical new song:

  Nigger Jim just wanted to know

  If a fresh cheechako could outrun a sourdough.

  Jim himself sat in his box, with Lottie Oatley beside him, and laughed and applauded while the champagne ran as swiftly as the water in the sluiceboxes on Eldorado.

  7

  Tales of conspicuous wealth

  The mining élite had become a distinct social class. They occupied royal boxes in the dance halls, stood shoulder to shoulder at the bars in Grand Forks, the town at the junction of Bonanza and Eldorado, and drove their fashionable dog-teams down the hard-packed snow of the Klondike Valley.

  Indeed, the dog-team had become the chief symbol of conspicuous wealth in the Klondike. It was the Cadillac of its time. The more affluent saloon-keepers, gamblers, and mine-owners all kept expensive teams with expensive harness. Coatless Curly Munro, for instance, lavished, in a single season, 4,320 pounds of bacon, fish, and flour, at one dollar a pound, on his embryo team of six husky puppies. Nigger Jim’s prize team of eight dogs was worth twenty-five hundred dollars, and his sled enjoyed the added refinement of a built-in bar. This was a specially made tin tank he kept filled with alcohol, which he poured out by the dipperful to mix with hot water and sugar so that he might treat his friends wherever he stopped.

  If there was conspicuous wealth, there was also conspicuous waste. Dick Lowe, the ex-mule-skinner who had, on Ogilvie’s suggestion, staked the famous fractional claim on Bonanza, could be seen of a Sunday driving a spanking team of trotting-horses out along the Klondike Valley with a dance-hall girl on the seat beside him, or, of an evening, flinging a fortune on the bars at Grand Forks to treat the crowd. On Dominion Creek two neighbouring miners each installed a butler in his log cabin. On Eldorado, Clarence Berry, the ex-fruit farmer from Fresno, enjoyed a peculiar luxury. Berry, who had been the first on the creek to hit bedrock, now owned the only cow in the valley, a pure-bred Jersey who supplied fresh milk from her sawdust-padded stable and munched hay worth four hundred dollars a ton. His wife, who had come into the country strapped to a sled, now travelled in style, and when she complained that her stateroom on one of the steamboats was too small, the owner immediately hacked down some partitions so she might have the space she needed. In front of Berry’s cabin, along the Eldorado trail, stood a coal-oil can full of gold and a bottle of whiskey beside it. A sign between the two of them carried the blunt but inviting message: “Help Yourself.”

  The old-timers were dying. Ladue was dead, and so was Harper. Bill McPhee, the giant barkeep from Fortymile who now ran the Pioneer Saloon, lost both of his partners, Harry Spencer and Frank Densmore – each of them veterans of some fifteen years in the North. Typhoid, pneumonia, and tuberculosis had taken their toll, but the real killer was the Yukon climate, which, over the years, had wasted the constitutions of these early prospectors. Now those who survived began to spend their fortunes as if they, too, had death at their heels.

  George Carmack arrived in Seattle and announced that he was building a yacht to sail to the Paris Exposition, the South Seas, the Mediterranean, and the Orient. His Indian wife, Kate, who had never been away from her native Yukon, was ensconced with him in Seattle’s Butler Hotel – a situation which she found bewildering. To her the hallways and staircases were like a labyrinth, and in order to find her way back to the room she produced her little hatchet and blazed a trail, Indian style, on banister and doorway. With her brothers, Skookum Jim and Tagish Charley, she continued to make headlines. They loaded up with champagne and were arrested and fined for drunkenness. They caused a near-riot by throwing banknotes and gold nuggets from their hotel window until a scrambling crowd, fighting for the money, brought traffic to a stop. Meanwhile, Carmack himself was riding up and down the streets with an expensive cigar in his cheek and a sign emblazoned on his carriage identifying him as “George Carmack, Discoverer of Gold in the Klondike.”

  Clarence Berry’s partner, the handsome Austrian Antone Stander, landed triumphantly at San Francisco with his new wife, Violet Raymond, the ex-dance-hall girl. He planned to take her on a honeymoon to China and he had one thousand pounds of gold, as pocket-money, in his stateroom, which was the finest on the Humboldt. Violet wanted to go ashore, but Stander feared to leave his treasure. “It would be hard to tell which [he] guards more jealously – his bride or his gold,” a reporter for the Examiner wrote. It was a hard choice; the only solution seemed to be to give the gold to Violet, and this Stander did, bit by bit, until it was all gone.

  Charley Anderson, now known universally as the Lucky Swede because he had bought a million-dollar claim while drunk, was on his way to Europe accompanied by his wife, Edgar Mizner’s former inamorata Grace Drummond, the toast of the Monte Carlo. Grace had promised to cast off Mizner and marry the Lucky Swede if he would pay fifty thousand dollars into her bank account, and the Lucky Swede was delighted to do just that. Off the happy couple went, arm in arm, to Paris and London and New York and finally to San Francisco, on whose outskirts the Lucky Swede built a monument to his bride in the form of a turreted castle worth twenty thousand dollars.

  Big Alex McDonald went to Paris, too, and thence to Rome, where he was granted an audience with the Pope and made a Knight of St. Gregory on the strength of his donation to Father Judge’s hospital. Then he was off to London, a huge and awkward figure in his formal clothing, with his immense ham hands fairly bursting from his gloves. He spent a good deal of his time riding up and down in elevators, which he referred to as “heists,” having never been in one until this time. Before he returned to Dawson, in April 1899, he married Margaret Chisholm, the twenty-year-old daughter of the superintendent of the Thames Water Police. The story went around that, on emerging from Alaska, Big Alex had seen his first pretty girl and asked her name; it had been Chisholm, and in his mind the word had been forever identified with desire.

  There seemed no end to his wealth. In Dawson that spring his fifteen-mule pack train, laden with gold, was a familiar sight on the Klondike river road. On one of his claims a single man was able to shovel in twenty thousand dollars in a twelve-hour stretch. One payment made by McDonald to the Alaska Trading and Transportation Company amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand. He erected his own building, The McDonald, in Dawson and lived lavishly on its first floor. On his sideboard there rested a bowl containing forty-five pounds of large nuggets. When Alice Henderson, a newspaper correspondent, dropped in, McDonald waved airily at this treasure.

  “Help yourself to some nuggets,” he said casually, with the attitude of a man proffering a box of chocolates. “Take some of the bigger ones.”

  She hesitated, and McDonald made a gesture of impatience.

  “Oh, they mean nothing to me,” he said. “Take as many as you please. There are lots more.”

  His contempt for gold was quite genuine, for it was not nuggets McDonald desired. His mania for property was still unsatisfied. It was to him what champagne, dog-teams, and dancing-girls were to his fellow claim-owners. He could not stop buying, but roamed farther and farther from the Klondike, amassing more and more claims, turning down offers of millions for what he had, always accumulating land. As one newspaper wrote, his life “in point of riches promises to outrival that of the fabled Count of Monte Cristo.” But, as events turned out, the newspaper was wrong.

  While McDonald was in Rome and London, Swiftwater Bill Gates, unabashed and unrepentant following his ill-fated venture with Jack Smith of the Monte Carlo, was cutting his own swath across North America and Europe. He and Joseph Whiteside Boyle, the sparring-partner of Frank Slavin, were off to London to raise money for a company which was to exploit the mining concession on Quartz Creek that Boyle had wangled from the Canadian government. How much of that money the company would ever see was problematical, since Swiftwater, now hailed in the pres
s as “the Klondike Prince,” was publicly offering to bet seven thousand dollars on the turn of a card with anybody who cared to challenge him.

  In Seattle, where he arrived en route back to Dawson, Swiftwater became embroiled in another of those astonishing marital adventures that marked his life. He was occupying an elegant suite in the Butler Hotel when Mrs. Iola Beebe, a Seattle widow, visited him. She had been to St. Michael the previous fall and was now trying to secure backing to open a hotel in Dawson. Swiftwater received her in his black Prince Albert coat, his patent-leather shoes, and his boiled shirt from whose centre a fourteen-carat diamond glittered. In the hallways outside, a shouting mob was trying to gain admittance, but the Klondike Prince had eyes only for Mrs. Beebe – or, more accurately, for her two daughters, Bera, aged fifteen, and Blanche, nineteen, both just out of convent school.

  Swiftwater wasted no time. Mrs. Beebe’s back was scarcely turned before he had spirited both her daughters aboard the Humboldt, which was about to steam north. Their alarmed mother took up the scent, stormed aboard the ship, and discovered Swiftwater cowering under a lifeboat. She rescued the girls and took her leave, but her adventures were by no means over. Undeterred by this brush with a Klondike prince, she determined to go on to the north and seek her fortune. With her daughters she landed in Skagway some days later to find Swiftwater lying in wait, his ardour in no sense dampened. This time his blandishments were more successful. Mrs. Beebe awoke one morning to find that the fifteen-year-old Bera, a plump, pink-cheeked, and blue-eyed morsel, had decamped for Dawson with her Casanova. Before she could overtake the errant couple, they were man and wife. When the newlyweds reached Dawson, Swiftwater presented his bride with a characteristic gift: the town’s only melon, price forty dollars. Mrs. Beebe’s account of all this, which was privately printed some years later, leaves something to be desired. Her exasperation with Swiftwater is evident, and yet here and there a note of tenderness creeps into the narrative. No matter how badly Swiftwater behaved, Mrs. Beebe always forgave him, and the reader is left with the inescapable suspicion that Mrs. Beebe, like her two daughters, was enamoured of the little man in the Prince Albert coat. How else to explain her subsequent mollification? Far from financing Mrs. Beebe in the hotel business, Swiftwater Bill managed to extract from her all the money she owned, thirty-five thousand dollars, which he sank into his Quartz Creek mining venture. Swiftwater’s talent in raising money was always equalled by his ability to get rid of it. By the end of the year he was magnificently bankrupt and had run up bills that totalled one hundred thousand dollars. Off he went, down the river, with his child bride and his incurable optimism, leaving his wretched and now destitute mother-in-law to care for a four-week-old granddaughter.

  There were other bankruptcies equally catastrophic. Pat Galvin, the free-spending Irishman who had sunk the profits from his Bonanza claim into a transportation company, was teetering on the edge of ruin by the spring of 1899, as were so many of the successful Klondike claim-owners who had ventured into the business world. Galvin’s first steamboat, the Mary Ellen Galvin, which he had designed to be the finest vessel on the river, was a complete failure; although she had four decks and was advertised as “mosquito proof,” she drew too much water to cross the Yukon flats and had to be abandoned. His second boat, Captain Irving’s Yukoner, lay stranded in the ice fourteen hundred miles downstream, a mutiny brewing aboard her. Galvin had planned to have one of his boats in Dawson in time to steam upriver and pick up a load of cattle he had ordered brought in over the Dalton Trail at heavy expense. But with no transportation available the animals had to be slaughtered and the meat went bad, and his plans for a Yukon packing business melted away.

  An even heavier millstone around Galvin’s neck was his financial manager, James Beatty, whose silken moustache, iron-grey hair, courtly manner, and English polo-playing background had earned him the nickname of “Lord Jim.” Lord Jim was even more indulgent than Galvin. Not only did he import the finest china and bed linen for Galvin’s proposed chain of Yukon River hotels, but also he imported the best-looking girls to be had in San Francisco for himself. He did this out of frustration: he had been sending fifteen-dollar breakfasts to the bedroom of a Dawson soubrette for weeks on end as a gesture of his affection. The price was steep even in Klondike currency – the voracious young lady seemed to be eating enough for two. Lord Jim investigated and learned that this was only too true: his intended was in the habit of sharing both breakfast and bed with a faro-dealer. There was nothing to do but replace her with an import, and this was one of the reasons why the company’s auditors found forty thousand dollars unaccounted for in Lord Jim’s books. Lord Jim was arrested and charged with embezzlement, but Galvin had him released on bail and paid his way across the border. Once on Alaskan soil, Lord Jim promptly forged a cheque and lit out for South Africa with a troop of detectives behind him in what was billed as the longest manhunt on record. Galvin by now had lost everything, but he was not a man to whimper. When he learned of Lord Jim’s defection, he merely shrugged.

  “He was a good fellow,” he observed.

  8

  Money to burn

  More than one visitor to Dawson during the stampede remarked that the wealthier miners seemed to have money to burn. In this observation there was literal truth. Although there are no recorded instances of men lighting cigars with fifty-dollar bills, there are dozens of examples of others who put tens of thousands into a frame hotel, saloon, or dance hall and then watched it reduced to ashes.

  Dawson’s two worst fires occurred in its gaudiest year. The winter of ’98–99 began and ended with conflagrations that destroyed, in each case, the most expensive section of the town.

  The first fire took place almost exactly one year after the Thanksgiving fire of 1897 and, by coincidence, was started by the same dance-hall girl. Half a million dollars’ worth of real estate went up in smoke because Belle Mitchell set off for Lousetown leaving a candle burning in a block of wood. Three Eldorado fortunes were badly dented by the inferno that followed. Arkansas Jim Hall saw his Greentree Hotel burned to the ground. Charlie Worden saw his Worden Hotel follow. Big Alex McDonald watched his post-office building, which he rented to the government for a substantial sum, vanish in the flames. The fire roared up and down the street and back towards the hills, leaping from cabin to cabin and crib to crib along Paradise Alley, while two thousand men chopped up neighbouring structures to stop it from spreading.

  In front of John Healy’s N.A.T. store the town’s newly purchased fire-fighting equipment lay in a state of disassembly; it could not be used because it had not been paid for. Building after building, in which scores of men had flung pound after pound of gold dust, toppled and crumbled because the community as a whole would not raise twelve thousand dollars for reels and hoses. Men had bet more on a single card at the faro tables.

  The following day a finance company hurriedly signed a note, and a fire-fighting company of one hundred men went into operation. Dawson breathed more easily with this safeguard, but its sense of reassurance was premature. In April, when the newly trained firemen asked for better wages, the town council demurred. The firemen struck, and the fires in their boilers died. And then, at this crucial moment, late on the night of April 26, 1899, a tongue of flame shot from the bedroom of a dance-hall girl on the second floor of the Bodega Saloon. Within minutes a holocaust far worse than the town had yet known began.

  Scores dashed to the river in the glare of the flames and tried to break through the ice to reach the water supply. With the boilers cold, fires had to be set to melt the frozen surface so water could be pumped to the scene. In the meantime, half of Front Street was ablaze. The temperature stood at forty-five below – so cold that the heat had little effect even on those standing close to the spreading flames. Many discovered that their fur coats were scorched and charred, and yet they felt nothing. There was no breath of wind, and the tongues of flame leaped vertically into the air like flashes of lightning, causing cl
ouds of steam to condense into an icy fog which soon encompassed most of the city. Within this white envelope the ghostly and frantic figures of the fire-fighters dashed about ineffectually against the background of the crackling fire. As the dance halls and saloons began to char and totter, hogsheads of liquor were overturned, and whiskey ran into the streets, where it instantly froze solid in the biting cold. Behind dance-hall row, Paradise Alley was aflame again, and the prostitutes poured, naked and screaming, from their smoking cribs into the arms of the fire-fighters, who ripped off their own coats to bundle up the terrified women.

  The men on the river had meanwhile burned their way to the water supply; the pumps were started, and the hoses, long in disuse, slowly filled. But as the water was ice-cold and unwarmed by boiler heat, it froze solidly long before reaching the nozzles. Then there came a ripping, rending sound as the expanding ice tore open the hoses, followed by a moan of despair as the crowd realized the town was doomed.

  “What’s to be done?” cried Tim Chisholm, as the flames darted towards his Aurora Saloon.

  Captain Cortlandt Starnes of the North West Mounted Police, plump and red-faced, his mustachios stiff with his frosted breath, supplied the answer: “Blow up the buildings in front of the fire!”

  A dog-team went racing to the A.C. warehouse for fifty pounds of Giant blasting-powder so that Starnes and his police could demolish the Aurora and Alex McDonald’s new building to leave a blank space in front of the moving wall of flame.

  By this time the fire was occupying the energies of the entire town. Thousands struggled in and out of the condemned buildings carrying articles saved from the blaze until the marsh behind the business section was littered with chattels. Many were offering ten dollars an hour for help, and any two-horse team and driver could command one hundred dollars an hour. David Doig, the fastidious manager of the Bank of British North America, pledged one thousand dollars to anyone who could save the building, but the offer was made in vain.