Gold Diggers

by Charlotte Gray

  Then as now, however, nothing fired up Canadians so much as the suspicion that Americans were encroaching on their territory. In the early 1890s, the steady flow of American prospectors like Bill and Joe into a remote corner of Canada caught the attention of the Canadian government. Missionaries at Forty Mile had complained to Ottawa that aboriginal people were being debauched by the miners. And if there really was gold in those godforsaken subarctic regions, it was Canadian, not American, and Canada should benefit. But the Ottawa government recognized that, to assert its ownership of the Yukon creeks, it needed some muscle up there. Muscle, in the Canada of the 1890s, meant the red-coated Mounties. Founded in 1873 by John A. Macdonald, the North-West Mounted Police had already controlled American whiskey traders in the West and helped suppress a Métis uprising on the prairies. The force was a curious blend of uniformed traditions—deliberately, as Macdonald had specified that it should be “a civil, not a military body, with as little gold lace, fuss, and fine feathers as possible: not a crack cavalry regiment, but an efficient police force for the rough and ready—particularly ready—enforcement of law and justice.” In its short existence, it had established an impressive esprit de corps, attracting recruits from Britain as well as from well-to-do families in Ontario and Quebec.

  In 1895, a detachment of twenty Mounties under the command of Inspector Charles Constantine was dispatched across the St. Elias Mountains and down the Yukon River to Forty Mile. Constantine was a gruff and incorruptible Yorkshireman with the rigid views and lack of imagination that twenty-four years in uniform can produce. His job was straightforward but dauntingly large: to assert Canadian authority (which meant, at this stage in the country’s existence, raising the British flag). The various roles of magistrate, mining inspector, crown land agent, timber agent and, by default, Indian agent all devolved onto his portly figure, since his detachment was the national government’s sole representative in the region. When Constantine and his men marched into Forty Mile, they spelled the end of random shootings, cardsharping, and rough justice in the settlement. In the spring of 1896, when Bill Haskell watched French Joe being summarily convicted in a Forty Mile saloon of stealing an ounce of gold, he was also watching one of the last (and by then, illegal) miners’ meetings held on Canadian territory.

  Constantine and his Mounties had been joined at Forty Mile by William Ogilvie, an employee of the Geological Survey of Canada. Ogilvie, a bearded Scotsman who was a great raconteur, was an old hand in the North: he had first traveled there in 1887, with George Mercer Dawson, one of the survey’s most senior scientists. Ogilvie had overseen the first official surveys of the Chilkoot Pass and the Yukon and Porcupine rivers. Now, he was the official with whom prospectors had to register any claims made on Canadian territory. When hundreds of men started rushing into his humble log office in the fall of 1896 to register claims on the creeks of the Klondike, he was astonished by the quantity and quality of the nuggets he was shown. He sent word to Ottawa that this strike was the first real whopper within Canadian borders, and it would startle the world. The territory’s population would exceed 10,000 within two years, he predicted, and the new mining camp at the mouth of the Klondike would be the greatest yet in the Canadian North. At the time, it was easy to dismiss Ogilvie’s predictions as ridiculously inflated—another tremendous tale intended to hook an audience’s attention. In fact, they would prove to be accurate. Equally astonishing was that it took two months for his message to travel to Ottawa, and then several more weeks to creep up the ranks of government officials.

  In Forty Mile, as winter fell, Charles Constantine and William Ogilvie watched prospectors, saloonkeepers, camp followers, and traders disappear upriver and knew they couldn’t wait for politicians in Ottawa to decide what to do. Ladue had already bought his 160 acres, and now other Yankee speculators were applying for similar townsites. The two officials had to move now if they were going to stop a bunch of rough-neck Americans from getting out of hand on Canadian territory. Inspector Constantine sent a group of Mounties ahead of him to establish a post at the mouth of the Klondike and start collecting customs duty. He persuaded Ogilvie, in charge of the land registry, to reserve forty acres near the Ladue townsite for “Police and other Government purposes.” He had his eye on a wooded area around a slough, so he could use the timber for a police barracks to be erected in the spring. All Constantine’s anti-American hackles rose when he heard that the Alaska Commercial Company, the most powerful trading company on the Yukon, had already planned a warehouse on Ladue’s land. ACC managers often weaseled out of Canadian customs duties, he snapped. In another message to Ottawa, he wrote (with absolutely no supporting evidence but with the vehemence of rank prejudice) that they were “all Jews and not to be depended on.” He insisted that the NWMP do business only with the rival North American Transportation and Trading Company.

  William Ogilvie could see that he, too, needed to move fast. Joe Ladue might claim ownership of his 160 acres, but the township needed an official survey before squatters overran the area. Although lots were being snapped up, street lines were still crooked and many had tree stumps in the middle. Moreover, the original staking of the creeks, particularly Bonanza and Eldorado, had been so frenzied that there were regular arguments and fights between neighboring claimants. Claim jumping was rampant, as latecomers tried to take over claims that the owners had staked, then left unworked. In January 1897, Ogilvie arrived at Ladue’s site with his surveyor’s chain and compass and began to pace out a proper rectangular grid, with the streets intersecting at right angles. The avenues, which ran parallel to the Yukon River, were a conventional chain’s width, or 66 feet wide, while the cross streets were 50 feet wide. Ogilvie was able to mark out only a few individual lots, measuring 100 by 50 feet, as the snow was thick on the ground. Any unfortunate squatter who discovered he had pitched his tent in the middle of one of Ogilvie’s carefully drawn streets was sharply told to relocate.

  Dawson City, 1897-’98

  Ogilvie also gave the townsite a new name: Dawson City, called after his boss, George Mercer Dawson, who had recently been appointed director of the Geological Survey of Canada. Ogilvie followed the practice of naming the avenues common in the West: the closest to the river was Front Street, and behind it ran Second Avenue, Third Avenue, and so on. When it came to the cross streets, Ogilvie couldn’t resist reinforcing Dawson City’s ownership by giving them decidedly un-American names—King, Queen, Princess, Albert, Duke, and York. There were no drains in Dawson City, and merchants and restaurant owners dumped their garbage on the frozen Yukon, knowing it would be swept away when the ice melted. The squalid reality of smelly outhouses along Princess Street was a delicious contrast to Ogilvie’s lofty street names and grand vision of a northern metropolis. But who knew? San Francisco had started from such humble beginnings only fifty years earlier, and was now a wealthy port with a population of over 300,000. Anyway, the Canadian surveyor had done all he could for now, so he tramped off to the creeks fifteen miles away, to sort out the problems there.

  The arrival of representatives of the Canadian government brought some stability to the mining community, but it brought only grief to Chief Isaac and the Hān people. By the spring of 1897, miners had completely overrun the traditional Hān fishing grounds on the southern bank of the Klondike River, and had torn down the fishing racks so they could erect their own tents. Chief Isaac had assumed that the newcomers would share the territory’s resources in the same consensual way that most aboriginal groups did, respectful of both each other and the land. He quickly realized that they had no interest in negotiations and were destroying the Hān way of life. They brought new diseases with them, like measles, chicken pox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and tuberculosis, which decimated villages, and they shouldered aside Hān fishermen from their traditional fishing spots. They traded alcohol for food supplies, and respected Hān elders could now be seen stumbling helplessly down Dawson’s muddy streets. Worst of all, the newcomers treated all Hān
people with unveiled contempt and threatened the safety of women and children. It was evident that southern racism meant the two communities could not integrate.

  At first, the Hān tried to relocate to a small plot of land on the Dawson side of the Klondike. But this was the wooded area that Inspector Constantine had already earmarked for the NWMP compound. With his usual gracelessness, Constantine made it clear he didn’t want to share his compound with the very people who had peacefully occupied the land for centuries. Although he had spent little time in the North, he shared the widespread prejudice against the Yukon’s aboriginal peoples. In an official dispatch to Ottawa, he dismissed the Hān as a “lazy, shiftless lot, who were contented to hang around the mining camps. They suffer from chest troubles and die young.” Finally, Chief Isaac negotiated a deal with Constantine and the Reverend William Bompas, Anglican bishop in Forty Mile—representatives of the two most powerful institutions in the Canadian North. Thirty Hān families were moved three miles downstream of Dawson City to a reserve known as Moosehide Village, which was the same size (160 acres) as a standard homestead occupied by one family on the prairies.

  A century of misery lay ahead of the Hān. They would never be able to use their ancestral fishing camp on the Klondike again, and their requests for more land were refused out of fear that the land might contain gold. They were not welcome in Dawson except during the long winters, when they could supply meat. But even here they faced competition from non-native hunters, and soon game reserves were depleted. Moreover, since Moosehide Village was below Dawson, the Hān’s drinking water was contaminated by Dawson sewage, so dysentery and diarrhea took their toll. By 1904, sickness and starvation were so acute at Moosehide that the Mounties were obliged to distribute food. In the years ahead, the Hān would see their children shipped off to residential schools, and watch their language and their culture gradually disappear.

  The dramatic developments in Dawson in a few short weeks meant that an entirely new settlement met Bill Haskell’s eyes when he crested the hill overlooking the mouth of the Klondike River in early April 1897. Before he had even crossed the Klondike, he noticed that the Hān dwellings had gone and construction had spread beyond Ladue’s original townsite. He saw the rough wooden headquarters of the NWMP, laid out like a military barracks to the south of the town, and heard orders being barked out by a man in uniform. And to the north, next to a large white tent, the first logs in an entirely new, two-story structure had been laid. What was this?

  Bill hurried down the hill, across the frozen Klondike, past the Mounties’ half-built barracks, and toward the Yukon Hotel, on Front Street. Once outside the saloon, he leaned his sled against the wall, stamped the mud and slush off his boots, pushed the door open, and made his way through clouds of tobacco smoke to the bar. There, his fellow drinkers were happy to answer his questions. The place was now called Dawson City, Bill heard, and Joe Ladue was doing fine: lots were selling for as much as $300 each. It was still a small, dirty settlement, and the only clean water came from a spring in the hillside under the Moosehide Slide. But there were already three saloons—ramshackle canvas constructions that offered rotgut whiskey and faro tables that operated twenty-four hours a day. And that large structure to the north of the town? That was going to be Dawson’s first hospital. In January, several stampeders from downriver had overtaken a middle-aged man struggling alone through the snow, pulling his sleigh alongside a single dog. It had been Father William Judge, the Jesuit priest Bill had seen at Forty Mile, making his way to the Klondike to see if the rumors were true. The priest had taken one look at the boomtown and felt his calling. He purchased three acres at the north end of town from Joe Ladue for $300 and hired men to start clearing ground for St. Mary’s Hospital and the Church of the Immaculate Conception. The hospital would be, he prayed, “a means of leading . . . sheep back to the fold.”

  By April 1897, Dawson’s building boom had begun. Newcomers roamed the dirt roads, and makeshift stores were springing up along Front Street.

  Bill’s informants told him how this scrawny Catholic priest, with a soft voice and intense gaze, had wasted no time in setting up a tent and offering medical care to anybody who was sick. Next thing the denizens of Dawson’s saloons knew, the black-robed priest himself was coming around, asking for money to build a permanent hospital. He had raised $1,400 by public subscription for St. Mary’s Hospital, and he had promised Dawson that the Sisters of St. Ann, a nursing order stationed in Alaska on the lower Yukon, would come and take charge of it.

  But Bill’s fellow drinkers were less interested in some crazy priest’s actions than in the news from Bonanza. What could Bill tell them about the clean-up on the creeks? Were the claims paying out? Plenty of gamblers were eager to buy claims sight unseen if there was any hint of gold. They planned to sell them to the greenhorns who would arrive once the Yukon River was open. Dawson’s future depended on the Klondike region’s being a real gold field. If Eldorado and Bonanza lived up to the promise of their names, Dawson City might fulfill Ladue’s prediction as the San Francisco of the North. But if talk of big pans turned out to be ill founded, Dawson City could disappear as fast as Forty Mile and Circle City.

  Dawson’s explosive growth put a new spring in Bill’s step. Surely there was some foundation for all this optimism. He purchased the lumber that he and Joe needed to build a sluice, and hauled it over the melting snow, back to Bonanza. There, the two men set to work hammering a sluice together, then diverting the creek down it. Every few days, they stopped the flow of water down the sluice and examined the debris caught behind the riffle bars. “It was well towards spring,” Bill Haskell recorded in his memoirs, “before our pans began to make any unusual yields.” But finally the gold showed up: amid the black sand and gravel the two men saw the seductive yellow glitter of flakes. That long, lonely, cold winter of burning and digging, burning and digging, had paid off. Bill didn’t tell his neighbors that he and Joe took gold worth about $50,000 (over $2 million in today’s values) off their claim. Many of the miners were close-mouthed about their yields, since they had no intention of paying Canadian royalties on them. But success made Joe and Bill happy—and friends again. All the containers they could lay their hands on—coffee cans, tobacco tins, leather pokes—were soon filled with dust and nuggets, and plugged shut.

  In mid-May, Bill and Joe carefully stuffed their haul into their packs. The gold dust weighed them down, it was so heavy, but they just grinned at each other as they shouldered the clumsy canvas backpacks and took the track to Dawson City. They soon found themselves in a crowd of miners heading toward Dawson’s saloons. Bill reckoned there were 400 valuable claims stretched along Bonanza and Eldorado, and every digging “was a fabulous mine of gold . . . Men who had stumbled over the rough trail in September, poor and disheartened, disgusted with their condition and sick of the country, came down in the spring as millionaires and threw their gold dust about like so much grass seed.” The men greeted each other as “sourdoughs,” the nickname for those who had survived at least one brutal northern winter, living on bread made with wild yeast. Like Bill, these tough, emaciated men were clad in the prospectors’ uniform of thick wool pants held up with suspenders, heavy boots, worn flannel shirts, and misshapen felt hats. Their eyes, like Bill’s, were bloodshot from wood smoke and bouts of snow blindness, and the prevalence of tangled beards and unkempt mustaches made the crowd look like an assembly of Old Testament prophets. And like Bill, they poured into Dawson City, eager to put the bitter winter behind them.

  As the torrent of gold hit the scales on the counters of saloons, hotels, restaurants, and a newly established dance hall, spirits soared in Dawson City. Relief and exuberance suffuse Bill’s memoir, as he describes how his gamble on Bonanza had paid off and what it felt like to mingle with other successful prospectors. Rumors flashed up and down Front Street about which prospector had sold his claim too early, which rookie had washed out $24,480 in one day, which of the creeks was the most productive.
Clarence Berry’s wife, Ethel, had poked around the dumps on her husband’s claim and picked up $10,000 worth of nuggets. A young fellow from Seattle who had bought a share on Eldorado Creek for $85 the previous November had sold it five months later for $31,000—and he’d never even visited the place!

  Everyone gossiped about the brawny, booted men on Front Street, pointing out who was a loser and who a millionaire. One of the first “Klondike Kings” to attract everybody’s attention was a tall, stout, crop-haired Nova Scotian called Alex McDonald. Bill reckoned him “a good-hearted working man,” although he was also a canny businessman who didn’t miss any opportunity to buy up claims, trade shares in particular mines, or sell services such as hauling provisions on his mule train. Tangle-haired, dirty-nailed, his boots encrusted in mud and his pants patched, Big Alex could have been taken for a hobo by a stranger. A fervent Roman Catholic, he didn’t drink and he didn’t boast about his wealth. In fact, he was unusually taciturn, and when he did speak it was in a voice so soft it was more like a whisper. But he turned up at the Alaska Commercial Company’s warehouse that spring with $150,000 worth of gold, including $12,000 in fat nuggets. Bill was also in the warehouse that day, and he watched Alex spill out his riches under the astonished gaze of a newspaper correspondent called Alice Henderson. Big Alex loved business more than he loved gold, and he casually invited Alice, “Help yourself to nuggets. Take some of the bigger ones.” When Alice hesitated, wondering what her acceptance might imply, Alex gave her a sweet smile, rubbed his stubbly chin, and whispered, “Oh, they are nothing to me! Take as many as you please. There are lots more.” Alice chose a nugget that weighed ten ounces, worth about $200 back then and perhaps fifty times that amount today.