Gold Diggers

by Charlotte Gray

  “Now, that’s kind of you,” Belinda replied, “and may I ask if you would like something to drink?” The miner was surprised at what he took as an offer, and said he would. Belinda told him sharply that it wasn’t an offer. “If you or any of the other boys were hungry or thirsty, you’d . . . walk sixteen miles to Dawson and back for it, wouldn’t you? And the boys going over the divide to Dominion or Sulphur, when they break the journey at The Forks would hang up in a tree over night before they’d sleep in a hotel, wouldn’t they now?”

  The miner stared at this forceful little figure for a few minutes, then grinned. “You’ll pass, Miss Mulrooney, you’ll pass,” he replied. “You kin take care o’ yourself all right. With that head of yours, you’ll own the Klondike by the time you’ve been in the country as long as I have.” It was a prescient remark.

  The Grand Forks Hotel was finished by mid-August. Its bar was immediately thronged with thirsty men in checked shirts and heavy boots. The ground floor of the roadhouse was divided into a bar and a dining room: there were no gaming tables. Upstairs, in one long room, two tiers of wide bunks, each with a blanket and curtain but no sheets, could accommodate any number of exhausted men. One visitor recalled how each lower bunk was wide enough for two: an occupant “might be awakened at any hour by a nudge, and ‘Pardner, sorry to trouble you, but I guess you’ll have to move over a bit to make room for me.’”

  Belinda poured the drinks, served the bacon and eggs (outrageously priced at a dollar for each egg), and listened to the miners’ talk. Soon she had to bring Sadie O’Hara up from Dawson to help her. To escape the roadhouse bustle, Belinda had a private cabin built for Sadie, herself, and her closest companion of these years—a huge, good-natured St. Bernard mix called Nero, with a white nose and legs and silky brown ears and head. The dog had been left with her by a destitute miner from England, who had lost his outfit on the way downriver and had no way of feeding the ravenous, lanky puppy he had brought with him. Together, Belinda and Nero became one of the best-known partnerships along the Klondike. She harnessed Nero to a sled for the journeys between Dawson and Grand Forks. All the love and warmth that Belinda withheld from any man who came too close was lavished on her faithful dog.

  The hotel’s iron safe filled up with nuggets, and its proprietor heard about gold strikes and grubstaked prospectors before the news had even reached the big trading companies in Dawson City. Soon she was working on her next scheme.

  The same week that Belinda Mulrooney had arrived in town, about eighty mud-encrusted Klondike millionaires had left Dawson City for Seattle and points south. Each carried between $5,000 and $500,000 of gold. Clarence Berry was one of them, along with his wife, Ethel, who wore a nugget necklace. Joe Ladue, who had not left the North for thirteen years, was en route to Plattsburgh, New York, to propose to the sweetheart he had left behind. “Professor” Tom Lippy, who had been a YMCA instructor before heading north and acquiring Claim No. 16 on Eldorado, was leaving with a suitcase full of gold that weighed 200 pounds. On the day that the Klondike Kings sailed out of Dawson on the first steamer of the season, the receipts in one saloon amounted to $6,500.

  They and their fellow millionaires began the long voyage down the Yukon River on the Portus B. Weare, which belonged to the North American Transportation and Trading Company, and the Alaska Commercial Company’s Alice. The nuggets and dust, packed in jam jars, tobacco cans, leather sacks, caribou-hide pokes, trunks, belts, and bottles, weighed close to three tons, and the steamers’ decks had to be shored up with extra wooden props. The little Yukon paddle-wheelers were so heavily loaded that they almost ran aground several times before they reached St. Michael. There, the treasure and its owners were transferred to two ocean-going steamers: the Excelsior and the Portland, both bound for the U.S. Pacific Coast.

  Belinda knew that once the Klondike Kings disembarked, the Yukon Gold Rush would begin in earnest. Dawson City had seen nothing yet—but when the stampede hit, she would be ready.

  CHAPTER 8

  Jack London Catches Klondicitis, July-October 1897

  “GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! Sixty-Eight Rich Men on the Steamer Portland. Stacks of Yellow Metal! Some have $5,000, Many Have More, and a Few Bring Out $100,000 Each . . . The Steamer Carries $700,000.”

  In Seattle, an enterprising reporter named Beriah Brown had decided to go for broke. When news of the Portland’s imminent arrival reached him on July 16, 1897, he was determined that his paper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, would be first with the story. The steamer was still at sea, so he chartered a tug to intercept the boat as it entered Puget Sound, shinnied up a ladder to the deck, and interviewed as many passengers as he could before the vessel docked. As the Portland’s mooring ropes were thrown over the capstans on Seattle’s wharf, Brown was already filing his story. Readers learned that some of the passengers were carrying nuggets the size of guinea fowl eggs, and most of the big strikes were “made by tenderfeet.” By the time the Portland’s gangplank was in place, 5,000 people were standing on the waterfront. The crowd surged closer to see the Klondike Kings, and when the first miner lifted a fat leather satchel to his shoulder and stepped onto the gangplank, a cheer went up: “Hurray for the Klondike!”

  In single file, the miners staggered off the Portland—unshaven, lean, and ragged. Their faces were lined and they squinted into the crowd. They were weighed down with moosehide sacks and sailcloth bundles: only a few carried the usual travelers’ luggage because most had no personal belongings. Just gold.

  In a subsequent edition, the Post-Intelligencer printed a quarter-page map of the Yukon valley with the caption “The Land of Gold,” and speculation that before the end of the year, $10 million of gold (approaching half a billion dollars’ worth in today’s values) would be taken out of the gold fields. In the next few weeks, the two Seattle newspapers, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Seattle Times, did everything they could to promote gold fever. The Klondike never left their front pages. At the end of July, the Post-Intelligencer published a “Special Clondyke Edition.” (Spelling of the Klondike varied wildly for the next several months.) The Seattle Times described the Klondike as a wonderland of “fabled riches.” Seattle exploded with excitement. Within days of the Portland’s arrival, the city’s streetcar operators had walked off the job so they could head north, and twelve members of the local police force had resigned for the same reason. Soon, both papers were carrying advertisements for Seattle companies offering complete outfits for anybody who was hurrying north. The Cooper and Levy Company’s half-page ad read, “Klondyke! Don’t get excited and rush away half prepared. You are going to a country where grub is more valuable than gold and frequently can’t be bought for any price. We can fit you out better and quicker than any firm in town. We have had lots of experience, know how to pack and what to furnish.”

  The Klondike Kings and their treasure ship made great headlines. Privately, most of the reporters recognized that news of the Portland’s arrival was not really a scoop. Gold from the Yukon basin had been shipped south since 1895, when Bill Haskell had first heard of Alaska gold. Belinda Mulrooney had caught wind of the Klondike strike in the fall of 1896, when she was on the Seattle-Alaska steamers. The first Klondike nuggets, and estimates of the river’s wealth, had arrived in Seattle five months earlier and been noted by the local press. What made the Portland’s arrival in July different was not the amount of gold it was carrying but the collective decision by local newspapermen to spin the news for their own purposes. They wanted to sell this story to the big eastern newspapers and pump up Seattle’s economy, which had been in the dumps for too long. Up to now, they had been infuriated at the way their stories—any stories—won them little attention beyond the Pacific Coast. Beriah Brown himself had discovered “the insurmountable difficulty which existed in inducing any Eastern newspaper man to take any interest himself, or to believe that the readers of his newspaper would take any interest, in gold discoveries made in such an isolated region as Alaska.” But the Portla
nd’s arrival was their big chance, and they worked hard to find a hook to snag the attention of New York editors.

  The hook turned out to be a simple headline over one of Brown’s articles: “A Ton of Solid Gold.” By 1897, the depression across the United States had intensified as gold supplies contracted, people began to hoard what they had, and pools of capital available for new businesses shrank still further. In the summer of 1896, when Bill Haskell scaled the Chilkoot Pass, the populist politician William Jennings Bryan had campaigned for the American presidency under the slogan “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” He had failed in both his bid for the presidency and his campaign to liberate the value of the dollar from its rigid link to the government’s supplies of gold. Instead, the demand had intensified for new sources of precious metals to finance renewed economic growth. Everybody was mad for gold.

  This was what Brown and his newspaper colleagues capitalized on. One of them noticed that a New York journal had galvanized Wall Street early in the summer of 1897 with a story about a shipment of “ten tons of silver” bound for France. A buzz of excitement, and speculation about what the French government was going to do with all that silver, ran through New York’s banking world—until someone calculated that the shipment was worth only $120,000. The Seattle reporters got the message: talk in weight, not dollars. They sent off stories on spec to eastern editors mentioning the weight of the Portland’s cargo, rather than its value of about $700,000. The replies were better than they had hoped. Almost immediately there was a demand for the very stories that had been rejected all winter.

  The phrase “a ton of gold” appeared in headlines across America and Canada, and Seattle stringers gleefully supplied thousands of words about the new eldorado. News dispatches were followed by a barrage of special articles, telegrams, features, and supplements describing the Klondike’s incredible potential and Seattle’s advantages as the place to buy an outfit and a ticket. “Klondicitis” swept the continent. By late July 1897, 1,500 people had already embarked at Seattle for the voyage north and nine more ships in the harbor were crowded with “Klondikers” and ready to weigh anchor. Seattle, according to the New York Herald, had “gone stark, staring mad on gold,” but the city had secured its status as the premier departure point for the Yukon. Four days after the Portland had docked, a triumphant Post-Intelligencer declared, “Prosperity is here. So far as Seattle is concerned the depression is at an end.”

  The Portland’s sister ship, the Excelsior, had landed at San Francisco two days before the Portland tied up in Seattle, but it had caused less of a stir. The San Francisco Examiner, owned by William Randolph Hearst, gave more attention to another newly docked vessel, the Annie Maud, which had arrived from Calcutta carrying several people suffering from bubonic plague. Then the Excelsior’s big spenders got to work in the city. One grizzled veteran ordered nine freshly poached eggs and tipped the waitress with a nugget. A group of the new arrivals commandeered a four-horse truck to take their loot to a local smelter. When they tipped out the contents of their sacks, jelly jars, and tobacco tins, the gold lay on the counter, according to one observer, “like a pile of yellowed shell corn.” At the same time, the wave of Seattle hysteria rippled down the coast and excitement exploded.

  Carefully crafted reports of the Portland’s and Excelsior’s cargoes triggered an insatiable hunger for information about the town the Klondike Kings had come from—this magical metropolis where the streets were apparently paved with gold. Correspondents were immediately sent north. Hearst was furious that his San Francisco paper had missed the biggest story in a year of lackluster news, and now ordered all-out coverage in all his papers. He chose Joaquin Miller, a flamboyant, black-cloaked character known as the “poet of the Sierra” who was a veteran of earlier Rocky Mountain stampedes, to represent his chain. In New York City, Harper’s magazine commissioned Tappan Adney to supply both news and photographs of Dawson City and the Klondike creeks. Since it would take weeks for these men to reach the Yukon valley, some editors resorted to outright fabrication to maintain circulation and reader interest. A special Klondike supplement to Hearst’s New York Journal included the startling information that “there abound reminiscences of the slaughter of innumerable bands of early colonists and explorers. Near by are the ruins of what was once the largest post of the Hudson’s Bay Company west of the Rocky Mountains.”

  Tappan Adney, correspondent for Harper’s magazine, purchased his snowshoes and Métis sash in Winnipeg.

  Within weeks, printing houses across the United States, Britain, and Canada were pumping out Klondike guidebooks. The Liberal government in Ottawa, warned earlier in the year by Ogilvie of the oncoming stampede, had already rushed into print a set of mining regulations and dispatched north additional officials and Mounties to reinforce Canadian authority in the new gold field. Now the hastily written guidebooks combined copies of the Canadian regulations with plagiarized newspaper features, lists copied from advertisements of items required for an “Alaska Outfit,” and dubious maps. In Chicago, E. O. Crewe published Gold Fields of the Yukon and How to Get There. In Philadelphia, L. A. Coolidge produced Klondike and the Yukon Country, in which one of the miners who had arrived on the Excelsior claimed that Dawson had a population of 3,500 and “all the ambitious scope of a bonanza town.” The well-known naturalist Ernest Ingersoll, who had never strayed much beyond the forty-ninth parallel, wrote Gold Fields of the Klondike and the Wonders of Alaska, in which he described Dawson as “the metropolis of the Klondike country and if not the largest city in the world, it now takes first rank among the liveliest and most thriving.”

  As gold fever mounted, thousands of desperate people jammed the streets and docks of Pacific ports. Horses, oxen, dogs, mules, and goats set up a cacophony of neighing, barking, and bleating as they were herded onto overcrowded steamers. Many of the horses, according to Tappan Adney, were nothing more than “ambulating bone-yards . . . afflicted with spavin and spring-hat, and many with ribs like the sides of a whiskey-cask and hips to hang hats on.” Outfitters and shipping lines watched business soar, as customers snapped up anything—soup, glasses, boots, medicine chests—that was labeled “Klondike.” The standard Klondike uniform consisted of wide-brimmed hat, high-top boots, heavy wool socks, thick long underwear, a buckskin shirt, and a suit of coat, overshirt, and trousers made of “mackinaw,” a heavy plaid woolen fabric. Then there were all the supplies required to feed, clothe, and house each man for a year, in a region and climate where it was usually impossible to obtain supplies. Yet many travelers, noted Adney, filled their packs with bizarre items. “One man has taken . . . one case of thirty-two pairs of moccasins, one case of pipes, one case of shoes, two Irish setters, a bull pup, and a lawn tennis set.” Adney asked the fellow whether he was going to sell the stuff, only to receive the reply that the owner was going “just for a jolly good time, you know.”

  The stampede was immediate, intense—and suddenly, a source of concern. In Ottawa, Canadian authorities realized that the Yukon summer was already so advanced that most of the stampeders would not reach Dawson before freeze-up. It published a warning that anybody leaving now risked starvation and should wait until spring. On July 28, the Colonial Office in London issued a bulletin advising Englishmen to wait until the following spring before setting out for the eldorado. But the tide was too great to turn: a collective madness had taken hold. Before Tappan Adney had even reached the Pacific coast from New York, he had stopped at the Hudson’s Bay Company’s store in Winnipeg for an outfit and discovered it was cleaned out of fur coats and hats. He had to make do with a Hudson’s Bay blanket coat and a Métis sash, but in the photo he supplied to his employer for his first dispatch he did look incredibly dashing dressed up as a voyageur.

  In San Francisco, a restless twenty-one-year-old was gripped by the frenzy. The Klondike Gold Rush was made to order for Jack London, a sturdy young man bursting with muscle and guts. On the wharves of Oakland, across the bay from San Franci
sco, Jack was already a well-known figure, with his rolling sailor gait and two front teeth missing from a brawl. One contemporary recalled that, with his brilliant blue eyes and open-necked shirt, he looked like a “strange combination of a Scandinavian sailor and Greek god.” Jack was hell-bent on making his mark on the world, but he hadn’t yet settled on what kind of mark he would make. Insecurity and unrealized ambitions gnawed away at him. The Gold Rush would change all that. Within a few short years, Jack London would establish an international reputation as a writer—a reputation that would long outlast him.

  So far, nothing had really worked out for Jack. His frustration and insecurity sprang from a deeply unsettled childhood, during which his mother, Flora Wellman, and stepfather, John London, lurched from one financial crisis to the next and moved house constantly. Flora was a selfish little woman enthralled by spiritualism; John was a soft-spoken failed storekeeper. Jack’s real father was William Chaney, a blustery con man who had abandoned Flora when she was pregnant and denied Jack’s paternity when the latter confronted him. The son was permanently scarred by the father’s rejection.

  Always a keen reader, Jack had been forced to leave school at fourteen to help support the family. He spent the next seven years holding odd jobs and rebelling against routine. A nineteenth-century cross between Jack Kerouac and Ernest Hemingway, Jack London had been a salmon fisherman, a roustabout on the wharves, a longshoreman, a cannery worker, a binge drinker. Seeking adventures both inside and outside the law, he became an expert sailor and used a little skiff to loot the commercial oyster beds in San Francisco Bay. At seventeen, he sailed as far as Siberia and Japan with the sealing fleet. His raw, animal physicality and mop of golden curls made him dangerously attractive to women.