Gold Diggers

by Charlotte Gray

  But Father Judge knew what was expected of him. In mid-November, after his regular evening visit to the twenty patients in his hospital, he retired to the little cabin that was his personal residence, put another log on the stove, and carefully balanced a small inkpot on top of the stove. Slowly, the warmth of the stove melted the frozen lump of sooty ink. Then he lit a candle, found a sheet of paper, pulled a stump up to the crudely built table, and dipped a steel-nibbed pen into the inkpot. It was time for his regular report to the Reverend Father J. B. René, prefect and superior of the Alaskan Branch of the Jesuit Order.

  “Reverend and dear Father Superior: Pax Christi!” he wrote. “I have so much to tell your Reverence that I fear I shall forget at least half of it . . . This morning was the coldest we have had, viz., 20 degrees below zero; but it moderated during the day. The first and most important news is that the Sisters of St. Ann did not get here . . . When I found that the Sisters were not coming, I made arrangements for a permanent staff of nurses, cooks etc., and everything is working as well as could be expected under the circumstances.”

  The priest wrote about the influx of stampeders through the summer. His report was factual and his tone stoic: he was a loyal servant of Christ. Self-sacrifice was his raison d’être. He described how, each Sunday, he celebrated High Mass and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament and delivered a sermon. He assured his earthly boss that he was supervising health care in the hospital and keeping the accounts. He mentioned that “there is only one thing spoken of here, and that is ‘grub’”; nonetheless, he had enough bare essentials to last the winter. But he couldn’t resist hinting at his own exhaustion: “Of late my own health has not been as good, at times, as it might be, but I cannot complain. I had a slight attack of the chills a few weeks ago, but I was not laid up at all. I have not missed Mass a single day, nor have I been prevented from attending to my duties. However, the work here is too much for one priest. I know your Reverence realizes the fact, and that you would leave nothing undone to send assistance . . . If God spares me, I hope to keep everything in good order. Your humble servant in Christ, Wm. H. Judge, S.J.”

  Then the gaunt priest laid down his pen and prepared to do a final round in his log hospital. As his moccasin-shod feet crunched on the dry snow, he looked up and saw the aurora spread green across the sky while the stars twinkled brilliantly in the arctic night. He felt a chill in his bones, this lonely man, and he wondered if God would spare him.

  Jack London had no such gloomy thoughts when, just before the river froze, he arrived in Dawson City in the Yukon Belle to register his claim on Henderson Creek. For him, the Yukon was still a great adventure—a test of his own stamina and an escape from his dreary, debt-ridden life in Oakland. He, Thompson, and two other men had left their companions and most of their outfits at the island at the mouth of the Stewart River, and brought a tent and three weeks of provisions with them to the mouth of the Klondike. When they rounded the bend in the Yukon, they must have been dazzled by the size of the remote mining camp. As far as they could see, from river rim to mountainside on both sides of the Klondike, was a carpet of tents, cabins, and warehouses. The riverbank was lined with dories, rafts, canoes, and barges. Eager to explore, Jack left Thompson with the boat and went off to find somewhere they could stay. He soon ran into men they had met on the trail, including Marshall and Louis Bond, the Yale-educated sons of a prominent Californian judge. The Bonds had reached Dawson a couple of weeks earlier with their large dog and established themselves in a cabin. Jack pitched his tent nearby.

  Jack London spent six weeks in Dawson on this visit. Neither he nor Thompson recorded their impressions at the time, but Jack was busy soaking up stories and atmosphere. He explored what was by now the most famous mining camp in the world but was careful not to draw attention to himself in this rough town of frightened, and often inebriated, men—most of whom were older and bigger than he. “His face was masked by a thick stubby beard,” Marshall Bond would later recall. “A cap pulled low on his forehead was the one touch necessary to the complete concealment of head and features, so that that part of the anatomy one looks to for an index of character was covered with cap and beard. He looked as tough and as uninviting as we doubtless looked to him.”

  Jack had always loved animals, and the Bonds’ dog was one of his greatest delights. The large, shaggy black animal, a cross between a St. Bernard and a Scottish collie, idolized his masters. That winter, dogs ruled Dawson. Since dogsleds were the main source of transport, strong, healthy dogs were highly valued. Such dogs were fearless, ferocious, and unscrupulous: many were said to have wolf blood in their veins. Harnessed into powerful teams, with bells jingling on their yokes, they hauled logs and firewood around town and freighted provisions and supplies up to the mines. But many of the stampeders had brought small, weak dogs with them that were of no use. Now abandoned and starving strays, they were treated with vicious cruelty. The streets rang with barks, howls, yelps, growls, and the sound of snapping jaws as ugly fights erupted. Jack took it all in. A dog’s struggle for dominance mirrored, in his imagination, a man’s fight for supremacy. A dog’s devotion to its human master reflected, he chose to believe, the natural hierarchy of power. The howling of huskies (“an old song, as old as the breed itself”) would haunt his dreams for the rest of his life.

  In the Yukon, Jack London watched dogs save lives, fight for survival, and work harder than many of their owners.

  Dawson looked bleak that fall: when it wasn’t shrouded in a chilly fog, snow or freezing rain fell from a pewter sky. But the bars offered the same welcome that Jack had enjoyed in Oakland’s waterfront bars, and besides, the place was stuffed with the kind of personalities Jack loved to talk to. He hung out in dance halls like the Orpheum; he watched cardsharps gambling and big spenders losing their fortunes in saloons like the Monte Carlo and the Eldorado; he strolled round the North-West Mounted Police barracks at the south end of town and Father Judge’s hospital and church in the north end. His favorite occupation was talking to stampede veterans. He drank in tales of men driven mad by the cold, corpses frozen to death, gunfights in isolated cabins, noble Indian warriors protecting the helpless. The sight of this yellow-haired youth sauntering round the dirt streets and stopping to watch bar-room brawls and dogfights soon became familiar to Dawson residents. “It seemed to me,” recalled Edward Morgan, another stampeder, “that whenever I saw him at the bar he was always in conversation with some veteran sourdough or noted character in the life of Dawson. And how he did talk. London was surely prospecting, but it was at bars that he sought his material.”

  Jack particularly enjoyed the unexpected contrasts he discovered in Dawson—the strange clash between isolation and convention. For Klondikers like Bill Haskell, this same contrast produced an aching homesickness, but Jack London saw only rough grandeur and a race of American heroes. In his opinion, rugged prospectors who had spent years in the North embodied the primitive modern male. The northern lights were spectacular (“bubbling, uprearing, downfalling . . . this flaming triumph”), the girls were beautiful (“one of Gainsborough’s old English beauties stepped down from the canvas to riot out the century in Dawson’s dancehalls”), and the atmosphere enthralling:The crowded room [at the Opera House dance hall] was thick with tobacco smoke. A hundred men or so, garbed in furs and warm-colored wools, lined the walls and looked on. . . . For all its bizarre appearance, it was very like the living room of the home when the members of the household come together after the work of the day.

  Kerosene lamps and tallow candles glimmered feebly in the murky atmosphere, while larger stoves roared their red-hot and white-hot cheer.

  On the floor a score of couples pulsed rhythmically to the swinging waltz-time music . . . The men wore their wolf- and beaver-skin caps, with the gay-tasselled ear-flaps flying free, while on their feet were the moose-skin moccasins and walrus-hide muclucs of the north. Here and there a woman was in moccasins, though the majority danced in frail ball-room sli
ppers of silk and satin . . . A great open doorway gave glimpse of another large room . . . From this room, in the lulls of music, came the pop of corks and the clink of glasses. (A Daughter of the Snows, 1902)

  On November 5, Jack made his way to the log cabin on Front Street that was occupied by Gold Commissioner Thomas Fawcett. The cabin was as dimly lit and grimy as every other building in Dawson. Untidy piles of official forms were stacked up on a rough-hewn desk, and Fawcett had the air of a man overwhelmed by paperwork. In August, the government in Ottawa had established a royalty regime on all gold taken from Canadian territory in the Yukon basin, in order to pay for its administration. Oblivious to the expenses of getting to and living in the Far North, Ottawa had set the rate at 10 percent on gross output, or 20 percent on claims producing more than $500 a day. The miners were furious, and had made plain to the man charged with collecting the royalty their objections to both government regulation and such an iniquitous tax. Fawcett had developed a profound dislike for outspoken Yankees—and here was another rude, badly dressed American demanding instant service. The Canadian bureaucrat greeted Jack curtly and told him how to register his claim. Jack solemnly swore that he had discovered a deposit of gold on placer mining Claim No. 54 on the Left Fork ascending Henderson Creek, and paid a total of twenty-five dollars in fees: ten for a mining license and an additional fifteen to file his claim. He received a claim certificate as proof of ownership.

  Next, Jack crossed the Klondike River, and walked up Bonanza Creek to see for himself the claims that had triggered the Klondike stampede. This was where men toiled like animals—crowded together in damp cabins, scraping at the frozen earth, surviving on their dreary diet of the three Bs. In London’s 1910 novel, Burning Daylight, the sweaty, monotonous existence became a scene of Dantesque drama in which men struggled to conquer a hostile landscape: “The hills, to their tops, had been shorn of trees, and their naked sides showed signs of goring and perforating that even the mantle of snow could not hide. Beneath him, in every direction, were the cabins of men. But not many men were visible. A blanket of smoke filled the valleys and turned the gray day to melancholy twilight. Smoke arose from a thousand holes in the snow, where, deep down on bed-rock, in the frozen muck and gravel, men crept and scratched and dug, and ever built more fires to break the grip of the frost. Here and there, where new shafts were starting, these fires flamed redly . . . The wreckage of the spring washing appeared everywhere—piles of sluice-boxes, sections of elevated flumes, huge water-wheels—all the debris of an army of gold-mad men.”

  Yet Jack never forgot the Fabian socialism that he had embraced before he was swept away by Klondicitis. Sometimes, when conversation in the Monte Carlo or the Yukon Hotel turned from prospecting anecdotes to political issues, he spoke up. One evening, Jack sat quietly beyond the circle of lamplight while others, including Marshall Bond, started to argue about the difference between socialism and anarchism. “Then from out of the shadow,” recalled Marshall, “came a quick-speaking, sympathetic voice. He took up the subject from its earliest history, carried it on through a rapid survey of its most important points and held us thrilled by the hypnotic effect which a profound knowledge of a subject expounded by an exalted believer always exerts. Intellectually he was incomparably the most alert man in the room, and we felt it. . . . He was refreshing.”

  By the time Jack saw the hills around Bonanza Creek, the landscape was shorn of trees and scarred by mine shafts, piles of dirt, and sluice boxes.

  Jack’s political convictions shaped his reactions to the whole endeavor of panning for gold in the Far North. Yes, the wild stampedes and frontier camaraderie were intoxicating. But in the end, only a handful of lucky prospectors would make their fortunes, and most stampeders would barely cover their expenses. When he wrote Burning Daylight a decade later, his main character saw the cruelty of Bonanza Creek: “It was a gigantic inadequacy. Each worked for himself, and the result was chaos. In this richest of diggings it cost one dollar to mine two dollars, and for every dollar taken out by their feverish, unthinking methods another dollar was left hopelessly in the earth. Given another year, and most of the claims would be worked out, and the sum of gold taken out would be no more than equal [to] what was left behind.” What was needed was collective effort—but the Klondike was not about organized labor. Instead, it spoke to an outlaw’s drive for individual triumph, or to a writer’s craving for epic stories.

  Jack London fell in love with the Dawson of late 1897. It was, he would recall, “a Golden City where dust flowed like water and dancehalls rang with never-ending revelry.” But in early December, it was time for him and Fred Thompson to leave. The sun’s rays edged above the horizon for a mere four hours each day, yet the glittering white of the frozen Yukon and the hard-packed snow on the trails made travel easier. Except for the crunch of their feet and the occasional sharp crack of a branch snapping in the cold, they hiked through a silent, frozen world. Newly fallen snow was different from anything Jack had known Outside. “It was hard, and fine, and dry,” he noted. “It was more like sugar. Kick it, and it flew with a hissing noise, like sand . . . It was composed not of flakes, but of crystals—tiny geometrical crystals. In truth, it was not snow, but frost.” No birds sang in the relentlessly white landscape that stretched forever under a vast sky. After five days, what a relief to see the wisp of dark smoke from the cabin where they had left their companions in mid-October! In this tiny cabin, measuring only ten by twelve feet on the inside, Jack would spend much of the next five months alongside at least three other men, eating, sleeping, smoking, playing cards, cooking, talking, entertaining visitors from other cabins. There was little hope of privacy for the most basic human functions—and this would lead to trouble.

  While twenty-one-year-old Jack looked forward to his first arctic winter, thirty-one-year-old Bill Haskell was wondering if he could take a second hungry, cold winter on the creeks. He and his partner, Joe Meeker, faced a dilemma. Canadian mining regulations decreed that a claim would be forfeit to the crown if it was not worked at least once in a six-month period. The partners did not want to lose their claim, but they were worried that their supplies wouldn’t last. Should they tough it out? Could they find anybody to work the claim for them? One evening Bill and Joe sat down by the crackling stove, lit their pipes, and began to talk about the coming months. The logs of the cabin walls had shrunk since Bill had built it, and the men could feel cold drafts whistling through the gaps between them. Joe was still convinced that “there may be millions in those mines,” and was prepared to grit his teeth and keep digging. But Bill was weary. He knew there might be only “frozen muck and gravel and hard work,” and the men available to work the claim for them had neither experience nor provisions.

  Then Bill had another idea, which he tentatively raised. They could probably sell the claim for about $50,000. And there was lots more gold in Alaska—“better diggings, I’m thinking, than these British moose pastures, especially if the government concludes to take a large share of the profits.”

  Gradually Bill pushed Joe toward the conclusion that a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush: it was time to cash in. They could sell up, travel south over the frozen river to the coast, then return in the spring with a bigger outfit. Joe hated to leave the claim he had poured so much effort into. He stoked the stove and puffed silently on his pipe. The two men held their hands to the brief burst of warmth from their battered little Yukon stove. Then Joe nodded. They would walk south.

  The two men left the Klondike in a blinding snowstorm. The mercury in the miners’bottles was frozen solid, which meant the temperature was forty degrees below freezing point. The pack ice on the Yukon River was frozen into humps and bumps “and the only way to maintain a tolerably smooth course was to cross back and forth . . . It was hard, cold drudgery for Joe and me.” Every mile felt like ten. Along the way, they encountered dozens of boats that had been locked in the ice when the river froze a few weeks earlier. They met travelers with froz
en cheeks, noses, fingers, and feet. They passed injured men abandoned in the swirling, stinging snow by companions who were desperate to leave the godforsaken country. Bill and Joe turned their faces away from these agonized victims of a Yukon winter. They knew the men were too far gone to save and that they themselves must not slow their pace. They left them to die.

  “Joe and I, who, by spending a winter on the Klondike, had learned how to prepare for cold weather and rough trails, worked our way along very well over the rough river.” Where the river ran swiftly through a narrow gorge, they narrowly escaped plunging into the furious current and sliding under the ice. When walls of ice lay ahead, they crawled upward on hands and knees, dragging their sleds.

  Each night, the two men pitched their tent, cut boughs of evergreen to sleep on, lit their Yukon stove, and boiled up beans and bacon. By now they were like an old married couple: each knew what the other was thinking before he opened his mouth. For years they had worked together, suffered together, bickered and argued, and learned to trust each other. Joe’s lack of imagination exasperated Bill, and Bill’s boyish optimism irked Joe. Yet they had looked after each other and, despite their differences in temperament, they rarely disagreed on important issues. But one night, Bill got a surprise. Staring into the red hot stove, Joe said, “A fellow’s life ain’t worth much till he gets out of a place like this.” Bill shot him a quick glance; Joe wasn’t usually so philosophical. Bill reminded Joe what he had said when they first discussed seeking their fortunes in the Yukon valley.

  Joe didn’t take his eyes off the stove. “Yes,” he replied, “It takes grit, but we have made pretty well for two years of roughing it, and I was just thinking that if I ever got out of here I would not be fool enough to return. Colorado is good enough for me. You too. We’ve got a snug sum, and what we need now is to get it out with our lives.”