Gold Diggers

by Charlotte Gray

  And yet, as Bill recognized, there was still an aura of make-believe about the Klondike gold strike. Half the hard-bitten prospectors who had pulled their boats up on the mudflat and set off to Bonanza were acting out of force of habit. This was just one more roll of the dice for them. They had staked in previous stampedes, and they would stake again. Once the ritual was performed, many of them were happy to take refuge in the crowded little cabin that was Ladue’s home and office, light their pipes, and try to sell their claims to the next eager arrival. Bill Haskell could see that, sick and discouraged by years of poor diggings, they thought the Klondike “a last chance, merely, and a mighty poor-looking one at that. They had nothing better to do and so rushed in.” They didn’t believe any of that “all the goold in the worruld” rubbish: their goal was to find suckers who would buy their claims off them. Bill himself watched how “claims which were afterwards worth thousands could have been picked up by the dozen in September or October for a hundred or two dollars.”

  Nevertheless, Bill himself was young enough to cling to the dream. He was swept along by the unbridled enthusiasm of those convinced that this was a gold field to beat all others and would make their fortunes. In Joe Ladue’s cabin, Bill was one of the optimists, insisting that in all his days in Colorado, he’d never seen a better prospect. It was thrilling to be on the ground floor of a real stampede—one of the guys in the bar who could tell the greenhorns that the trail was hell but the payoff worth it. He bought Ladue’s vision of a city that would outshine all the other mining towns in the North. Bill sent word to Joe Meeker in Circle City, advising him to come upstream and join him on the Klondike.

  Once the sun set these days, the temperature dropped like a stone, and in early November a thin layer of snow covered the ground. The Yukon froze, and Bill Haskell was faced with a choice. Should he hang around Joe Ladue’s townsite and earn some cash working in the sawmill? Even George Carmack himself, the Bonanza discoverer, was compelled to cut logs for Ladue in order to afford the provisions he needed for a winter on the creek. Or should Bill, who still had a bit of cash left, get straight back to his claim and prepare the cabin and the ground for a long, cold season of digging?

  At first, Bill thought he would stick around on the mudflat until his partner arrived. He was fascinated by the way that the community grew from day to day: every evening there were new faces in the saloons, every few weeks there was a new saloon. Lines of canvas tents, most less than six by six, crept up along Second, then Third Avenue. The streets might be dirt tracks, but a city was emerging from the bush—just as two years earlier first Forty Mile and then Circle City had emerged on the banks of the Yukon.

  The Yukon River was frozen solid by early November, cutting all links with the world south of the St. Elias mountain range. But the Klondike was a magnet for the hundreds of prospectors who had been in the great Northwest for years and who now made their way to Ladue’s townsite, then headed for the hills. Both Bonanza and Eldorado were already staked, but weather-beaten veterans refused to work on somebody else’s claim—even for wages of fifteen dollars a day that beat anything they could earn Outside. They wanted to stake their own claims on the dozens of nearby creeks that might, just might, prove even richer.

  Prospectors were not the only people who swarmed to the Klondike. Bartenders, merchants, cardsharps, pimps, and hookers arrived from the bars, brothels, and stores of Forty Mile, Circle City, and other trading posts. Ladue’s townsite now had over a thousand residents, but it remained a lawless community. The line between those making an “honest” living and those catering to baser instincts was often hard to define. There were two laundries, for instance—one on Queen Street that doubled as a bakery, and a second on Second Avenue that doubled as a brothel. The subject of gold dominated everything. In Joe Ladue’s Front Street bar, Bill and the newcomers lapped up tales of unbelievable strikes by miners fresh from the gold fields—a pan of $65 at No. 21 on Bonanza Creek, then a pan of $57 on Claim No. 5 on Eldorado, then upward of $80 nearby, then a pan of $212 on Claim No. 16 on Eldorado. Was it real? wondered Bill. Or was it braggadocio from prospectors eager to jack up the value of their claims?

  There was certainly money to be made from all the frenzy. As the population of the trading post and the creeks swelled, prices skyrocketed for flour, salt cod, salted pork, dried fruit, flannel shirts, rubber boots, wood, tents, and, in particular, for land. Bill was thankful that he had stocked up with provisions before the rush. He knew he would have to haul it all up to the creeks by himself because he couldn’t afford a dog.

  Finally, Bill could stand it no longer. He’d never heard anything like the yields that were being taken from these pans. “Nothing in the history of the world,” as he put it to the other fellows in the bar, “has ever been found to equal this.” He had to find out if he was going to get rich. Leaving directions to his claim for his partner, Joe, Bill stuffed his pack and a sled as full as he dared, crossed the frozen Klondike River, and started the climb toward the creeks. He was carrying and pulling everything he needed to build a shelter, to keep warm, and to feed and clothe himself for several weeks: he had a little tin Yukon stove and tin plates, nails and canned salmon, flour and bacon, thick mitts and a heavy fur robe, a tent, axes, saws, and a large bag of nails. His shoulders ached before he had reached the first summit, but he gritted his teeth and hiked on.

  Once on his claim, “I set to work to construct a place in which we could make life endurable for the winter.” The logs were green and the ground on which he built his cabin was frozen solid, but Bill thought he did a pretty good job filling the chinks between the logs with moss and mud.

  Nothing had prepared the twenty-nine-year-old for the frigid loneliness of winter just below the Arctic Circle. “The snow fell nearly every day, mantling the great frowning hills. It was a scene of solitude, and a time of deep silence broken only by the wailing of the wind.” Occasionally, he would see a passing figure, muffled in thick winter clothing and hauling a sled, shuffling along the creek. There were a couple of other miners within half a mile, working their claims. But there was no time or excuse for sociability. The daily routine, as days grew shorter and shorter, was relentless.

  Each morning Bill reluctantly emerged from under the cover of his lynx blanket, made from the skins he had bought the previous summer, and stuffed some of his carefully prepared kindling into the stove. Once the fire was lit, he put the kettle on to boil. After a mug of tea, he pulled on mitts, hat, heavy, knee-length woolen stockings, fur socks, moccasins, and a hooded Indian parka made of wolverine fur—over the woolen long johns, undershirt, shirt, wool pants and jacket that he rarely removed—and ventured outside. He spent the day chopping down the pitch pines and building a woodpile that would last him and Joe through the winter. They would need firewood to keep them warm in their cabin and for the nightly fires that would melt through the frozen muck where they dug a shaft. He had to make sure that his clothes and supplies stayed dry, and his face and fingers were free of frostbite—he had already seen too many men missing fingers, toes, and noses. Every night, Bill shaved splinters from a log, to be dried on the Yukon stove for starting the fire the next day. Every day, he melted enough ice for cooking, drinking, and washing. Most days, he just ran a damp rag over his face; he took his clothes off and washed the rest of his body only when the temperature had risen slightly, or the lice, the itching, and his own smell got too much, generally about a couple of times a month. His toilet was an old can, which he had to remember to empty outside before the contents froze solid.

  His world shrank to the size of his 500 by 500 foot claim: he had no idea what was going on next door, let alone in Ladue’s township or Outside. Some nights, he played solitaire with a greasy pack of cards by the light of a “bitch”—an old meat can filled with a loose wick stuck in discarded bacon grease. Candles were too precious to waste on such diversions. Other times, he allowed himself to daydream about books. Once, travelers’ tales, adventure stories, and book
s about history and myths had fed his imagination. Now, he was starved of reading matter. “A trademark on a pick handle becomes fairly eloquent in that solitude.”

  Life improved once Joe arrived. Joe was not the chattiest fellow in the world, but at least he was company. The two men got to work at the spot that looked most promising. Each evening they lit a fire. Each morning, when the ground was thawed and loosened, they scraped off the ashes, dug out the muck, and piled it next to the shaft. Every other day, they melted a pan of ice to see if they had reached any color. Days went by—nothing showed up in the pan. As December wore on, the sun’s rays glimmered over the horizon for increasingly brief periods, and they grew heartily sick of bacon, beans, oatmeal, canned goods, and salt meats. It was hard to keep the faith.

  Joe worked the ground with single-minded determination, while Bill did all the cooking and became quite proud of his baking. “My method was simple. I would take a quart of flour, throw in a couple of tablespoonfuls of baking-powder and about half a teaspoonful of salt, and mix till quite stiff with water . . . Then I would grease the tin with the best grease that was obtainable [and] push the tin into the oven, and in half an hour take out a loaf of bread which, in the ravenous condition of our appetites, would make our eyes water. The only difficulty was that a loaf would disappear at every meal, so that as long as our supply of flour continued abundant I was compelled to bake two or three times a day.” It was naked hunger that caused the loaves to vanish. The bread was coarse, leaden, and indigestible. Bill joked that his bread often had a greater specific gravity than gold itself. “A winter in the Arctic, devoted to digging dirt out of a frozen hole, is the only complete dyspepsia cure I ever saw.”

  By Christmas, the two men were starting to bicker. In the tiny cabin, there was no escape from one another’s coughs, smells, habits, snores, opinions. It got so bad they could scarcely communicate. Joe was supposed to be the guy who could find gold, but they still hadn’t located paydirt. He was snappy and morose, and Bill was losing patience. They knew of other cabins where partners came to blows with a savagery bred of frustration and despair. Bill recognized that they needed a change. He suggested they strap on their snowshoes and tramp down to the mouth of the Klondike to see what was going on: “anything to break the monotony.” Bill didn’t admit to Joe that he particularly yearned for the sound of a female voice—he rarely saw the two white women who had accompanied their husbands to the creeks. It wasn’t sex he wanted (though that would have been welcome) so much as a change of conversational chemistry. The monotony of male company was getting to him.

  The trail back to Ladue’s townsite wound through a landscape so white and silent that it might have been carved out of carrara marble.

  Bill envied miners who could afford a dog team to carry loads from the sawmill to the creeks.

  Shapes of men and windlasses stood in black silhouette against the pale skyline. As the men walked, they noted which other claims were being worked, how many shafts had been dug, how big the tailing piles were. There were fewer than four hours of dim light a day, but on a clear night the moon reflected off the snow and they could easily pick out the trail. On cloudy nights, however, it was too easy to lose their way; then they took refuge in the cabins of friendly prospectors. With men whose words they trusted, they compared notes. They avoided blowhards who exaggerated the size of their take. When pressed about their own claim, Joe would shrug and Bill would mutter, “Not yet.” They were not having a good time.

  There was little action at the trading post on Christmas Day, 1896. The guys in the bar asked anxiously, “Well? Any color?” Their faces fell when they heard the grim answer. Joe and Bill celebrated Christmas in a scruffy “restaurant” located in the front half of a wooden shack, with a couple living and preparing meals in the back. Since turkey, plum pudding, or mince pies were all unavailable for love or money, the Christmas dish was moose. There was no church of any denomination in which to hold a service. The major concern was to keep working and keep warm, so even on Christmas Day Ladue’s sawmill was busy. “Outside,” recorded Bill, “it was a cold, cold world. The wind howled and the snow fell . . . The thermometer outside registered fifty degrees below zero.” The likelihood of an entire new city blossoming on a scrubby few acres of riverbank still seemed remote. Everything depended on what lay trapped within the frozen earth. Was the Klondike strike just another foolish bubble, inflated by hope and desperation? Or would it be the eldorado that people like Joe Ladue and Bill Haskell were banking on? Bill began to wonder how long he could bear to stay in the Yukon. “It is a splendid country to leave whether one has gold dust or not.”

  Back on the creek, the two men abandoned the log cabin in January because it was too damn drafty. Instead, they pitched their tent in front of it, set up their stove with a metal chimney stuck through the canvas roof, and used the hut as a storeroom for tools and supplies. Snow drifted and banked up and over the tent, protecting the interior from the cutting wind (although whenever one of them lifted the flap, an icy blast penetrated). The thermometer edged above zero for four days in February 1897 but then fell steadily, reaching seventy-two degrees below freezing point on a particularly bitter March day. Until mid-April, the snow did not thaw a particle. The wind blew constantly in frigid blasts, often filled with swirling snow. On the worst days, the men abandoned any thought of digging and focused simply on staying alive: it was far too cold to go outside. On these days, Bill could actually hear his breath strike the air as he rose to light the stove. “There was a sort of crackle when the warm breath met the cold atmosphere, and it was at first painful to draw such cold air into the lungs.” When he ventured out to grab some logs off the woodpile, “My eyelids kept freezing together, but I had to be very careful about pulling off my gloves to thaw them apart.” Several times his hands nearly froze before he could pull his fur-lined mitts on again.

  On and on winter dragged, and the partners were way beyond bickering. Most communication consisted of grunts, although occasionally their former camaraderie revived as they lay in their separate bunks at night, recalling some of the colorful characters they had met. But they were weary—tired of Bill’s bannocks, tired of hauling up gravel on the windlass and tipping it on the dump, tired of dashed hopes when they tested a panful of gravel and found only a few cents’ worth of gold. Since mid-March, the only provisions they had had were dried beans. “We nearly starved, or, at least we thought we did. It would not have been much of a job to get together a million dollars’ worth of gold dust along the creek, but such a thing as a good square meal was not to be had.”

  The chilly darkness rendered Joe almost catatonic: only Bill’s continued curiosity about the world around him kept his own spirits up. The sound of wolves howling still sent shivers down his spine; the crackle of the northern lights could still occasionally drag him out of bed. Older miners shook their heads as they saw the young American strapping on his snowshoes and climbing up a hillside to get a better look at the brilliant reds, greens, and violets swirling across the wide night sky. A true romantic, Bill found them mesmerizing. “The more I reflect on this life and the hereafter, the more I am in doubt as to whether the gold in frozen placers is in itself worth going after. But the aurora . . . is worth seeing, even if you have to live on short rations of bacon and beans for three months and find no gold.”

  Slowly, the days began to lengthen. In late April 1897, light lingered in the sky until well after ten o’clock, and the piles of muck besides the shafts on each claim formed sizable hillocks. The miners began to prepare for the spring clean-up, when they could wash their piles of paydirt through running water and pan out any gold. It was a time of anxious laughter. Men who had staked near the Discovery Claim were confident that they would do well for, as Bill grimly noted, “the gold fairly stuck out of the dirt.” Bill and Joe began to hear of big pans all along the creek: “Clarence Berry took out over three hundred dollars to the pan, James MacLanie over two hundred dollars, and Frank Phiscater over o
ne hundred and thirty dollars.” Miners working a claim on Eldorado had found a pan containing $800. But the farther you were from the Discovery Claim, and the shallower your shaft, the less likely you were to pan out. And before you could even start the process, you had to build a sluice box. Since the Klondike hills had already been stripped of timber, this meant a hike down to Ladue’s mill to buy lumber at the exorbitant prices he was now charging.

  Joe Meeker kept digging. Bill Haskell set off down the trail, now muddy with spring run-off, to buy lumber. Along the way, he heard story after story about men who had been paupers the previous fall and were now millionaires. But he also saw plenty of half-starved men who had toiled all winter long on the creeks and come up empty handed. “The lucky one did not strike the pocket because of his ability as a miner,” Bill mused. “Chance favored him, that was all.” He still didn’t know whether he was one of them. Had he and Joe struck lucky, or had they drawn a blank?

  Bill Haskell crested the hill above the Klondike, and looked down the slope toward the Yukon River. He stopped in his tracks. He didn’t recognize the vista below him.

  CHAPTER 5

  Sourdough Success, April-May 1897

  BILL HASKELL RARELY ESCAPED the icy claustrophobia of that winter on the creek. “Joe and I have poor luck,” is the steady and depressing refrain as he describes those bleak months in his memoir, and only occasionally does he give readers a glimpse of what was happening in the wretched mining camp at the mouth of the Klondike. But while Bill was away, the makeshift trading post that was Joe Ladue’s personal fiefdom had morphed into a town. It had also acquired a new name.

  The changes flowed from decisions taken 3,000 miles away. The political leaders of the young Dominion of Canada had noticed that something was happening in their country’s vast northern hinterland. Up until now, the national government in Ottawa had ignored its subarctic wilderness. It had been tough enough for Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, to bind the country east to west with a railroad in the 1880s. The North appeared to offer no benefits for a thinly populated country scrambling to coalesce into some kind of nation. It was cut off from the rest of the country for up to eight months a year by ice, and the possibilities for agricultural settlement (on which the former British colony relied for expansion) were zero. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thanks to the European appetite for hats made of beaver fur, the North had underwritten the success of two powerful trading companies, the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company. But by the mid-nineteenth century, beaver hats were out of fashion and the trading companies’ stranglehold on northern development had been swept away. Trapping in the North continued because there was still a market for arctic fox, moose, lynx, wolf, and beaver. But Canadian politicians, busy with developing the prairies, had no interest in taking on treaty obligations with the North’s aboriginal peoples.