Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  “Here, Sam – here y’are. Poke for you. Good-by.”

  In spite of this lamentable performance, Big Alex was chosen again to make a presentation to Lady Minto, the wife of the Governor General of Canada, when the viceregal party visited Dawson in 1900. This time the gift was a golden bucket, filled to the brim with curiously shaped nuggets, with a miniature golden windlass above it. Again Big Alex was carefully primed and rehearsed in a speech written especially for the occasion, but when the awful moment came, the King of the Klondike simply reached out his great ham hands towards Her Ladyship and said:

  “Here. Tak’ it. It’s trash.”

  To McDonald, gold was always trash. He continued to use it to buy more land. When his claims on Bonanza and Eldorado were worked out he bought up new ones on more distant creeks. He had twenty claims on Henderson Creek alone, in the Stewart River country; none was worth a plugged nickel. In his last years he lived by himself in a little cabin on Clearwater Creek, still prospecting for gold, his fortunes long since diminished. One day a prospector happened upon his cabin and found McDonald’s huge form lying prone in front of his chopping-block. He had died of a heart attack while splitting firewood. Because Belinda Mulroney had once persuaded him to take out a life-insurance policy, his widow was able to live on in some comfort.

  It is pleasant, in the light of all this, to report that the two most industrious men on Bonanza and Eldorado enjoyed continued success and fortune for the rest of their lives. Louis Rhodes and Clarence Berry, who sank the first two shafts to bedrock in the Klondike while their fellows twiddled their thumbs, did not dissipate their riches, but, on the contrary, added to them.

  Berry took a million and a half dollars from his claims on Eldorado. Then he and his brothers moved on to Fairbanks, where they struck it rich a second time on Esther Creek. They returned to California, secured oil property near Bakersfield, and made another enormous fortune. At various times they owned both the Los Angeles and the San Francisco baseball clubs.

  Berry never forgot his original benefactor, Bill McPhee, the saloon-keeper. In 1906 McPhee’s saloon at Fairbanks was destroyed by fire and the ageing barkeeper lost everything but the clothes he wore. Berry wired him from San Francisco to draw on him for all the money necessary to get back into business again. In his declining years McPhee lived on a pension from Berry, who died of appendicitis in San Francisco in 1930, worth several millions.

  Louis Rhodes invested his Klondike fortune in mining property in Mexico and lost everything. Without a moment’s hesitation he turned prospector again and headed for Alaska. With all the industry that he had shown in the early Bonanza days he began to explore the newly staked country near Fairbanks. He found gold-bearing quartz on a tiny outcropping of unstaked land and parlayed it into a mine which yielded him a profit of three hundred thousand dollars. He retired to California’s Valley of the Moon and lived out the rest of his days in comfort.

  As might be expected, the liveliest Klondike sequel is provided by Swiftwater Bill Gates. When Swiftwater reached Nome he repeated his Eldorado success in a mild way by taking a lay on a claim on Dexter Creek. He made four thousand dollars, but lost it just as quickly gambling. Broke again and back in civilization, still as irrepressible as he was irresponsible, Swiftwater left his young wife and ran off with a comely seventeen-year-old named Kitty Brandon. The affair was climaxed by the usual wild chase from city to city with an angry mother in hot pursuit, until finally in the town of Chehalis, Washington, Swiftwater collared a preacher and made an honest woman of the schoolgirl. The marriage was complicated by the facts that (a) Swiftwater was still married to Bera Beebe, and (b) Kitty Brandon was Swiftwater’s stepniece.

  He solved this problem by discrediting the unfortunate young woman a few months after the wedding, but he had scarcely made himself a free man again when, to his discomfiture, his first mother-in-law, the much abused Mrs. Beebe, banged on his hotel-room door with vengeance in her eye. It is a tribute to Swiftwater’s way with women that he swiftly talked her into pawning her diamonds so that he could go north again to recoup his fortunes; and it is a tribute to his prospector’s instincts that he did just that, on a lay on Number Six, Cleary Creek, Fairbanks.

  Swiftwater took seventy-five thousand from this property, only to discover that he now faced the ire of two mothers-in-law – both of whom had followed him north. He gave Mrs. Brandon (who was also his sister) the slip; but Mrs. Beebe, who had had more practice by now, was not so easy to shake off. She pursued Swiftwater down the coast, and when the two reached Seattle she had him jailed for bigamy. In her memoirs Mrs. Beebe recounts that Swiftwater’s answer to this was to call in lawyers, deputies, sheriff, judge, and reporters and present each of them with a twenty-dollar bill wrapped around a nugget. This eased matters considerably, especially as he had by now talked Mrs. Beebe into putting up bail. Somehow his marital difficulties were untangled, both girls were properly divorced, and Swiftwater announced he was ready for a new wife. At this point his story begins to get repetitious. There are more flights to Fairbanks; more enormous sums mined from Cleary Creek; more reconciliations; more betrayals. For thirty-odd years Swiftwater’s name continued to turn up in the public prints here, there, and everywhere. None knew exactly where truth left off and myth began in his garbled but lively tale. He ended his days in Peru, where he was supposed to have wangled a twenty-million-acre silver-mining concession. He died there in 1935, and the Alaska Weekly dug up a photograph of him in his late years. It shows a wizened little man in a miner’s hat, with sunken cheeks, an enormous white handle-bar moustache, and unrepentant glittering eyes – the perfect prototype of the traditional grizzled Hollywood prospector. But Hollywood has not filmed the story of Swiftwater Bill, perhaps because it is too farfetched to be credible.

  The non-mining members of the Klondike élite met fates that differed only in detail from those who made their fortunes directly from the golden creeks. Harry Ash, who built one of Dawson’s first saloons, went mad; his wife committed suicide. Tom Chisholm, who took seventy-five thousand dollars in profit from his Aurora saloon, ended his life as a caretaker in a small town in the Peace River country; he died in 1936 with scarcely a penny to his name. Sam Bonnifield, the gambler, moved to Fairbanks during the Tanana boom and opened the First National Bank, which shipped out three million dollars’ worth of gold dust. In the depression that followed, the bank failed, and Bonnifield, who never worried about his own money but was vitally concerned with funds entrusted to him, suffered a nervous breakdown. One day passers-by saw him kneeling in the snow before his bank crying “O God! Please show me the way out.” He was killed in Seattle in an automobile accident in 1943 at the age of seventy-seven. He had been living in a flophouse, and his body lay unclaimed for a week in the city morgue.

  Bonnifield’s partner Louis Golden lived the transitory life of a gambler after the stampede. One memorable winter’s night in Nome he sat down at the faro table and played for seventy-two hours running until he had lost one hundred and eighty thousand dollars-everything he owned. He died at eighty-three in Reno, Nevada, still pursuing his uncertain profession. All the Klondike gamblers seemed to attain a ripe old age. The one-legged Jack Marchbank was seventy-nine when he died in 1947. A one-time owner of the Tanforan race track, he left an estate of five million dollars to his secretary, whom he had married seven months before his death.

  Gene Allen, the founder of the Klondike Nugget, was bankrupt before leaving Dawson City, the result of overextending his operations by launching an abortive express company. The Nugget itself folded in 1903. Allen remained a newspaperman for the rest of his life, working on small papers until his death in 1935. He helped found the Seattle Press Club. Stroller White, who worked on the Skagway News, Bennett Sun, Klondike Nugget, and Dawson News, continued as a northern journalist, later editing the Whitehorse Star. In 1920 he began publication of Stroller’s Weekly in Juneau and continued it until his death in 1930. A mountain peak near the town bears his name. E. A.
Hegg, the photographer, followed the golden trail to Nome and, after that boom subsided, visited and photographed other Alaskan communities until he drifted back to Bellingham to reopen his studio. He ran it until 1953. Two years later, aged eighty-eight, he died. His collection of photographs, now at the University of Washington, is the best-known pictorial record of the stampede.

  John Healy of the N.A.T. Company died well-to-do, but Captain Hansen of the Alaska Commercial Company, his old rival during Dawson’s starvation winter, took to drink and was fired in 1902. He never recovered from this blow; and one day a few years later, while working as a seaman on an Alaska-coast steamship, he jumped overboard. Of all the various trading firms that sprang up like mushrooms during the stampede, none survived. Only the A.C. Company, which had been in Alaska from the beginning, stayed in business. It still operates under the name of Northern Commercial.

  In the late twenties a murder trial in the United States briefly made headlines because of the curious name of one of the witnesses. He had been born aboard a Yukon River steamboat when the vessel stopped to take on wood, and was named Michael after his father, Edward after the reigning monarch, Seattle after the boat, Yukon after the river, and Woodpile after the circumstances. And thus Michael Edward Seattle Yukon Woodpile Bartlett testified at the trial of his father, the one-time packer Mike Bartlett, charged with murdering his wife, Mollie, whom he had met and wooed in the days when she was a pretty girl cooking meals at a station on the White Pass.

  Other famous Klondikers turned up occasionally in the news, often enough in court cases. In 1905 Alexander Pantages, the theatre magnate who had got his start as a waiter in Dawson, found himself sued for breach of promise by Kate Rockwell, a one-time dance-hall girl. When Pantages, a Greek immigrant, arrived in Dawson he could hardly speak the language, but before he left he was operating the Orpheum Theatre, the most successful in Dawson. In 1900 he became enamoured of Kitty Rockwell, a teen-aged dancer who wore a fifteen-hundred-dollar Parisian gown, a belt of twenty-dollar goldpieces, and a headdress of lighted candles, and who claimed to be the convent-educated daughter of a prominent jurist. In her court testimony Miss Rockwell swore that she bought seventy-five-cent cigars and fifteen-dollar silk shirts for Pantages, and that when they left Dawson together the following year she paid all the travelling expenses. She asked for twenty-five thousand dollars, but the theatre magnate settled out of court for less than five thousand. He went on to build his theatre chain into a fifteen-million-dollar asset, but he died a broken man in 1936 after two lengthy bouts of litigation. He was found guilty of attempted rape, and, coincidentally, his wife was convicted of second-degree murder – the result of an auto accident. Both verdicts were ultimately reversed by higher courts, but the cases undoubtedly ruined Pantages. As for Kitty Rockwell, she took the name of “Klondike Kate,” capitalized on her dance-hall career, and was a favourite of newspaper feature writers until her death in 1957.

  One great figure of the Klondike lived on quietly in Seattle until the mid 1960’s. Few of her neighbours knew the part played in the great stampede by a little grey-haired woman named Mrs. Charles Eugene Carbonneau. For this was Belinda Mulroney – the Queen of Grand Forks, the mistress of the famous Fairview, a figure in the novels of James Oliver Curwood, her dog immortalized by Jack London in Call of the Wild, hailed by Scribner’s magazine as “the richest woman of the Klondike.”

  In spite of her prim ways and her plain Irish features, Belinda was undoubtedly the best catch in the Klondike for an enterprising bachelor. Such a man duly arrived on the scene. He sported a monocle, kid gloves, spats, a small, jet-black moustache, and a tall, bearded valet. From an elegant leather case he produced an engraved card:

  M. Le Comte Carbonneau

  Représentant

  Messieurs Pierre Legasse, Frères et Cié

  Bordeaux Paris New York

  He was a champagne salesman, and he became enamoured of Belinda. Every day a bunch of red roses arrived at the Fairview from the Count, who was staying at the Regina. Belinda succumbed. In October of 1900 the coal-miner’s daughter from Scranton became a Countess. It did not matter to her that Tom Lippy’s French-Canadian foreman, Joe Putraw, had positively identified her husband as a barber from Montreal’s Rue St. Denis – and no count at all. Off the couple went to Paris, where they rode up and down the Champs-Elysées behind a handsome pair of snow-white horses, with gold-ornamented harness and an Egyptian footman, who unrolled a velvet carpet of brilliant crimson whenever they stepped out.

  Belinda continued to prosper in the Yukon. She became, indeed, the only woman mining-manager in the territory – and of the largest mining company. The Gold Run Mining Company had got into financial difficulties largely because the owners were running a gaming-table and their employees were stealing gold from the property in order to gamble at it. The local bank-manager put Belinda in charge, and she pulled the company out of the hole in eighteen months. Her first move was to throw out the roulette wheel and replace it with a bridge table. Her second was to drive the female camp-followers from the property. As a foreman (or, more correctly, a forewoman) she was a holy terror. One old sourdough, C. W. Hamilton, retained vivid memories of working for her. The morally severe Belinda would allow no smoking on the job. Hamilton tried to break this edict, but before he had a match lit Belinda gave a low whistle, crooked her finger, and said sharply: “Get off this claim before nightfall.” Hamilton obeyed.

  Belinda and her husband went on to Fairbanks during the Tanana mining boom and left the north finally in 1910 to buy a ranch near Yakima, Washington, and, in the style of so many Klondikers, to build themselves a stone castle on the property. They commuted each winter to Europe, where Carbonneau became a bank director and a steamship magnate. They sank all their money in the steamship company and were wiped out when World War I brought an end to merchant shipping. Carbonneau became a purchasing agent for the Allies and was killed by a German shell during an inspection tour of the Front. Belinda returned to her ranch at Yakima, which she later sold. She lived with her memories in Washington State until her death.

  Most of the Mounted Police officers who served in the Klondike went on to promotion and glory. Two of them – Perry and Starnes – achieved the Force’s highest rank, that of commissioner. A third, Zachary Taylor Wood, became an assistant commissioner, and his son, following in his footsteps, rose to commissioner. Sam Steele was chosen to recruit a cavalry battalion – the Lord Strathcona Horse – which fought with distinction in the South African war. Two of his old Klondike colleagues, Belcher and Jarvis, who had commanded the summits of the White and Chilkoot passes, fought with him. Steele went on during World War I to a knighthood and a generalship. He died in 1919.

  Constantine suffered a different fate. This steadfast officer, the first Mounted Policeman to enter the Yukon Valley, was placed in charge of the Athabasca district after leaving the Klondike, and here he was handed a monumental task. The federal government, in 1905, decided to build a road along Moodie’s old trail, seven hundred and fifty miles from the Peace River to Teslin Lake. A force of police, under Constantine, set about the job, bridging bogs and rivers, hacking through forests, and constructing rest stations every thirty miles. After three years and three hundred and fifty miles the government abandoned the project. By then the health of many of the men was wrecked; Constantine was among them. He died in San Francisco in 1912 as a result of his northern privations.

  And what of the original discoverers of the Klondike – Carmack, Henderson, and the Indians?

  Carmack abandoned his Indian wife, Kate, in 1900. She had been living rather unhappily in the civilized world, going to jail occasionally in the company of one of her Indian relatives after a drunken fight. She was staying with Carmack’s sister when he wrote and gave instructions that she be sent back north. She returned to her home at Caribou Crossing on Lake Tagish and lived there on a government pension, wearing the cheap cotton clothing affected by northern Indian women, but always with a
necklace of nuggets taken from the famous claim on Bonanza Creek that had started the gold rush. She died about 1917.

  Carmack married again almost immediately. His wife was a pretty, dark woman named Marguerite Laimee, who had been on the fringe of three gold rushes – in South Africa, in Australia, and in the Yukon, She was pretty obviously a camp-follower, and in Dawson she ran what was known as a “cigar store,” a phrase that was often a euphemism for bawdy house. Whether she dispensed cigars or something more exotic is not known, but business was so good that each morning, on panning the sawdust on the floor, she was able to realize about thirty dollars in gold dust.

  She and Carmack lived happily until his death in Vancouver in 1922. He invested in Seattle real estate, built an apartment house and hotel which brought him an income of five hundred dollars a month, and operated a mine in California. He died a respected member of the Masonic Order and left a healthy estate. His wife, who died in California in 1949, inherited his money.

  Tagish Charley sold his mining properties in 1901 and spent the rest of his years at Carcross, where he operated a hotel, entertained lavishly, and bought diamond earrings for his daughter. He was treated as a white man and so was allowed to drink heavily. One summer’s day, during a drunken spree, he fell off a bridge and was drowned.

  Skookum Jim was treated as a white man, too – but this was not enough. He wished to be a white man, and so, although his mining property was paying him royalties of ninety thousand dollars a year, he proceeded to live the hard life of a prospector, travelling ceaselessly across the North vainly seeking a quartz lode, often going for days without food, so fierce was his quest. In the end his magnificent physique was weakened. He died, worn out, in 1916.

  Robert Henderson outlived them all. The Canadian government belatedly recognized him as co-discoverer of the Klondike and awarded him a stipend of two hundred dollars a month. For the rest of his life Henderson continued to look for gold. He sought it on Vancouver Island, on the Pelly River, and in northern British Columbia. In 1932 he joined two mining promoters in a pitchblende and placer discovery in the Upper Pelly country. A party was organized to fly into the area on a prospecting trip, but when the time came Henderson was not with them. He died of cancer in January 1933, still talking of the big strike he yet hoped to make.