Gold Diggers

by Charlotte Gray

  Bill had never expected Joe to turn his back on their Yukon dreams. What had prompted these remarks? What did they presage? But it was late, and Joe was not inclined to talk further. Tomorrow they had to clamber over the perilous ice shelves alongside the roaring waters of the White Horse Rapids. Ahead of them lay the chain of lakes and the awful St. Elias mountain range. They should reach Dyea in a couple of weeks.

  Once again, Bill’s mouth started watering for a big, thick beefsteak. He put his companion’s comments out of his mind. If Joe didn’t want to return to the Klondike, their partnership would work just as well in the Rockies, wouldn’t it? Soon the tent was filled with the snores of two exhausted men.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Pioneers’ Show, January-March 1898

  ON DECEMBER 31, 1897, the sun’s rays reached only the mountain tops around Dawson and its creeks during the four hours of daylight. For five gloomy weeks, the sun had never risen high enough in the sky to shine directly into the valleys. At each end of its brief appearance, there were long twilights, and if there was a half-decent moon during the arctic night, enough light bounced off the snow to allow people to see their own cabins or tents. Beyond them, deep darkness loomed.

  The cold was worse than any newcomer had ever imagined. The temperature never rose above minus thirty degrees that bleak New Year’s Eve, and it was dangerous to venture outside. White spots of frostbite quickly appeared on cheeks and noses; ice crystals gummed eyelashes together; tightly wrapped scarves trapped the moisture from breath, then froze as hard as wood. Icicles festooned every building, and ice glued doors shut. Most days, Dawson residents spent their time sleeping, drinking, working in the sawmills, or huddling around roaring stoves, occasionally dashing outside to split more firewood. On the creeks, miners kept busy—digging, emptying buckets at the top of the windlasses, cutting firewood, and trying to stay alive and healthy. The only advantage of bitterly cold spells like this was that you could easily split wood for stoves. But if you left a splittinfg ax outside, the handle would split too.

  It was now more than sixteen months since George Carmack and his Hān relatives had first found gold on Bonanza Creek, and more than five months since news of the Klondike gold strike had blasted across North America. Many of the professional prospectors, like Bill Haskell and Joe Meeker, had scooped up their wealth and escaped. Those early gold diggers were already vastly outnumbered by the gamblers and dreamers—people like Belinda Mulrooney and Jack London—who had flooded into the Yukon valley. The population of Dawson City had grown tenfold in 1897, from 500 in March to over 5,000 by September. Thanks to the famine panic, the population of the town and the surrounding creeks had dropped by the end of the year, but those who soldiered on through the winter grabbed at any chance to get together. Human company around a saloon’s roaring stove was a welcome relief for men living in badly heated cabins, weary of their partners’ stale smells and staler talk.

  Sixteen miles outside Dawson, New Year’s Eve was celebrated with particular gusto at Belinda Mulrooney’s Grand Forks Hotel. From lunchtime onward, company-starved miners began trudging toward the two-story log building, where lamps glowed in the windows and the smoke from its chimneys settled onto the roof in the icy air. Once the door was shut behind them, the men stamped the snow off their boots, wiped the frozen snot from their noses, and made for the steamy good cheer round the stove. The noise level gradually rose as more men crowded in and Belinda’s barman, Andrew, a frail fellow who always wore a white shirt and tie, hurried to keep up with the orders. Between walls decorated with colored lithographs and cigarette advertisements, the air was thick with tobacco smoke and the odor of thawing hair, unwashed clothes, and human sweat.

  It was a typical mining crowd: some of the men had been in the North for more than a decade and greeted each other by nicknames such as Tin Kettle George, Handshaker Bob, Windy Jim, Slobbery Tom, Montana Red, Happy Jack, Circle City Mickey, Long Shorty, French Curly, Hootchinoo Albert, or Tom the Horse. Successful miners like Johnny Lind and George “Skiff ” Mitchell paid for their drinks with gold dust; gold-nugget watch chains were strung across the front of their filthy checked shirts and wool vests. Men like these had come close to killing each other in drunken brawls, and they had saved each other’s lives in blizzards. Now they listened to braggarts talking about next summer’s strikes, and they exchanged anecdotes about the challenges of winter. There were peals of laughter as an old-timer related the story of a cheechako who had made an unpleasant mistake. Freezing temperatures involved a mounting column of human excrement in every outhouse, with no way of dispersing it or digging a new hole. The man had foolishly fired a shotgun in the hopes of destroying the solid column of shit. Instead, he had been peppered by hard bullets of the stuff flying back in his face.

  As the clock struck midnight on the last day of 1897, everyone raised their glasses to toast each other and the coming year. Belinda, clad as usual in a prim starched blouse and a long skirt, paused for a minute to join the cheers, before bustling off to check the stove.

  Through careful housekeeping, and the purchase of outfits from men who had retreated south, Belinda’s food cache was well stocked. The shelf behind the Grand Forks bar, a narrow counter of spruce boards, was laden with bottles. In the dining room, meals were served round the clock on a couple of long tables covered in clean cloths. Customers paid $3.50 for a dinner served on china dishes, or $12 a day for board and lodging. In addition to the inevitable bacon and beans, there was always canned beef, canned mutton, or ham, and on each table a bowl of applesauce (made from dried apples) that the cook refilled regularly. For men hungry for sugar and fruit and at risk of scurvy, applesauce was nectar. From time to time there were even eggs at a dollar each, “at the diner’s risk.” If the first egg proved too old to be edible, the guest could order another one as long as he paid another dollar. And for special occasions like today, there were unusual delicacies such as moose heart roasted with bacon, or pickled nose of moose.

  In its first three months, Belinda’s roadhouse had become a trading post, a repository for gold dust, and an informal brokerage center where people could buy and sell claims. When the weather allowed Father Judge to hike up from Dawson, it even doubled as a church. Prospectors would kneel quietly behind rough benches while the priest, clutching his wooden cross, said Mass and spoke about God’s infinite love. “Father Judge told the boys they had got all the gold and riches for a reward for their faithfulness under hardships. It was a gift of God for a good purpose.” Belinda was always surprised at how the toughest old miner would listen intently to the priest and then debate the sermon long after the cassocked figure had hiked down the hill.

  Roadhouse rules were simple: no spitting, no swearing, leave your dogs in the kennels behind the hotel, and always have a word with the proprietor about the latest goings-on. The Grand Forks bar was Belinda’s own private gold mine. She heard about every new strike days before the news reached Dawson, making her the best-informed person in the gold fields. “You happened to be in place, and the men were going to stake, a stampede was on. They wanted to exchange an outfit for an interest.” The canny businesswoman grubstaked prospectors from her store of axes, shovels, picks, clothing, whipsaws . . . She even had a portable sawmill and a team of dogs so she could deliver lumber to claims. Soon she had three claims on Eldorado and ten claims from new strikes. Along with five other claim owners, she also became a partner in the Eldorado-Bonanza Quartz and Placer Mining Company, which was incorporated in Missouri for the purpose of raising capital to finance heavy mining equipment. The legality of a woman owning a mine was dubious, since mining was traditionally a male industry and in English common law a “person” still meant “male.” Belinda simply ignored convention, and nobody dared challenge her.

  Belinda continued to maintain her own privacy in the snug little cabin behind the hotel that she shared with Sadie O’Hara and Nero. Keeping her distance from the men increased their respect for her, even if there wa
s speculation about the nature of her relationship with Sadie. In the cabin she was warmed by a blazing stove and the knowledge that she was making money almost as fast as Big Alex McDonald. On days when the north wind dropped and the temperature rose, she would harness Nero for the sixteen-mile trip down to Dawson, to catch up with news and developments there. But most of the time she could be found in the Grand Forks Hotel, giving a curt welcome to any bundled-up figure, swathed in furs against the icy air, who jerked open the door and stumbled toward her.

  Stampedes sparked by rumors of a new gold-bearing creek always ignited a hullabaloo of men shouting and dogs barking. One day, Belinda decided to join the fun. She and Sadie wrapped up warmly in parkas, thick shirts, buckskin skirts, long underwear, fur mitts, and moccasins. With a dog team and sled, they plunged off with the crowd for a twenty-mile hike through thick snow across a mountain to Dominion Creek. “We came back that night exhausted and slept in the hotel. That was our one night in the hotel. The place, except for the little room for women, was filled with miners, tired from their long round trip to Dominion and back again. We went in because we didn’t want to warm up our own cabin.”

  Belinda soon discovered she couldn’t stand to live in her private gold mine. “The lumber of the hotel had shrunk. There were wide cracks everywhere, so you could hear everything.” Men of assorted nationalities and types lay elbow to elbow in tight rows, and the stench of filth, tobacco, and human exhalations was suffocating. The blankets were filthy and lice ridden: one traveler complained that a previous occupant of his bunk had failed to remove his boots and had then slept with his feet at the head of the bed, which was now “ornamented with globules of dried mud of varying size and appearance, which adhered firmly to the black blanket.” There was an endless chorus of snores, belches, farts, and moans, and the anguished cries of those lost in nightmares. Belinda discovered that “the whole place rocked with the noise.” After a couple of hours she shook Sadie awake and announced, “This is surely a man’s hotel.” Sadie started to laugh, then went into such hysterics that Belinda threw a bucket of water at her.

  The only person unwelcome at the Grand Forks Hotel was Alex McDonald. When he asked Belinda if he could use her hotel as the headquarters for his freighting business, she refused: “This is our home, and we have not enough provisions.” When he offered to buy it from her, she told him the price was an outrageous $100,000. When he protested that the building was only a log shack, she laughed at him. Belinda understood better than most the ephemeral nature of wealth. “It may be just logs, but what are your claims?” she retorted. “Just dust. It’s only a state of mind anyway.”

  Big Alex began to see he had made a formidable enemy. For the second time in his dealings with this Irish firebrand, he blinked in surprise, scratched his chin, then leaned down and whispered, “You’re not mad at me?” Once again, Belinda pretended she wasn’t. But she hadn’t finished with the Nova Scotian yet.

  Miners on more distant creeks didn’t have the luxury of a roadhouse nearby. Eighty miles up the frozen Yukon, Jack London’s world had shrunk to the handful of log cabins on the small, windswept island that in his stories would be known as “Split-Up Island.” (It earned the name because so many prospecting partners split up when they reached this point, unable to stand each other’s jokes, tempers or personal habits for another day.) About thirty men had holed up at the mouth of the Stewart River, grimly waiting for spring. In the cabin Jack shared with Fred Thompson, Merritt Sloper, and Jim Goodman, the most important daily duty was to keep logs blazing in the Yukon stove. Even when the sheet-iron was red hot and the faces of the men crouched around it were beaded with sweat, their feet tingled with cold. Anything more than a couple of feet from the stove remained frozen. Chunks of bacon and moose on the meat shelf by the door were rock hard. The walls were covered in a half inch of dry, white, crystallized rime. Frost glistened in the chinking between the cabin’s logs, and the frozen moisture of men’s breath coated the small square of oiled paper that constituted the sole window. Each day began with one of the men shoveling out the ice that had accumulated on the bough-covered floor.

  Most of the island’s residents had already decided that mining was not for them. The group included a judge, a professional gambler, a doctor, a professor, and an engineer—though many had rocky professional reputations. An old-timer called “Doc” Harvey, for example, was well known as a drunk. Most had traveled north on impulse and were hopelessly unsuited to hard manual labor. Instead, they spent the time playing whist, cribbage, and chess. Jack’s hunger for literature was frustrated by the shortage of light (candles were precious) and books. According to one companion, Jack had carted an extraordinary library over the Chilkoot Pass: Herbert Spencer’s The Philosophy of Style, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Once, for lighter reading, he walked seven miles to borrow a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s The Seven Seas from a man camped upriver. Two of the only recreations available to him were talking and arguing—and he was excellent at both. Soon a visit to his cabin became the favorite break in the monotony of winter for adjacent cabin dwellers. A fellow miner, Bert Hargraves, left a vivid account of such a visit: “I remember well the first time I entered it. London was seated on the edge of a bunk, rolling a cigarette. He smoked incessantly and it would have taken no Sherlock Holmes to tell what the stains on his fingers meant.”

  Goodman was preparing a meal when Hargraves arrived, and Sloper was repairing a piece of the cabin’s primitive furniture. Jack, nonchalantly swinging his legs and smoking, was challenging Goodman’s faith in God by insisting that there was no scientific proof of divine existence. Years later, Hargraves would tell Charmian London, Jack’s second wife and biographer, how “Jack interrupted the conversation to welcome me. His hospitality was so cordial, his smile so genial, his goodfellowship so real, that it instantly dispelled all reserve. I was invited to participate in the discussion, which I did, much to my subsequent discomfiture.”

  Jack’s cabin appears, from Bert Hargraves’s account, to have been a subarctic debating society, with Jack playing the role of devil’s advocate in every argument. “He applied one test to religion, to economics, to everything . . . What is the truth? What is just? It was with these questions that he confronted the baffling enigma of life. He could think great thoughts.” Hargraves was impressed: “One could not meet him without feeling the impact of a superior intellect . . . He possessed the mental equipment of a mature man and I have never thought of him as a boy except in the heart of him . . . the clean, joyous, tender, unembittered heart of youth.”

  Another miner, Emil Jensen, told Charmian London that the young Jack “stood ever ready, were it for a foraging trip among the camps for reading matter, to give a helping hand on a woodsled or to undertake a two day’s hike for a plug of tobacco when he saw us restless and grumpy for the want of a smoke.” Jack even surrendered a precious quart of whiskey that he had carefully hidden from Doc Harvey for use as a painkiller during emergency surgery on a man’s ankle. “The doctor and the patient emptied my bottle between them and then proceeded to the operation,” he recorded in John Barleycorn, the memoir he wrote in 1913 of his drinking life.

  But Jack was young and energetic, and hated being penned in for weeks. He must have made at least one visit to his claim on Henderson Creek, several miles away, during which he carved on the back wall of a cabin belonging to a miner called Charles Taylor the inscription “Jack London, Miner Author, Jan 27 1898.” He learned all the tricks of northern survival—how to break trail in snowshoes, how to keep biscuits and bacon warm against his skin, how to bake sourdough bread, how to rig up a shelter with a blanket, how to avoid frostbite. Like Bill Haskell and Belinda Mulrooney, he felt both rapture and awe as he observed the immensity of the North and the icy stillness of winter there. He would capture the sense of human inconsequence in his short story “The White Silence,” publish
ed in the 1900 collection The Son of the Wolf : “All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice. Sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world, he trembles at his audacity, realizes that his is a maggot’s life, nothing more. Strange thoughts arise unsummoned, and the mystery of all things strives for utterance.”

  On the opposite bank of the Yukon River lived an intriguing couple: a man called Stevens and a redheaded woman. One day the couple crossed the frozen river and dropped in on Jack’s cabin. According to Emil Jensen, Stevens introduced his companion as “Mrs. Stevens,” but the woman quickly made it clear that they were not in fact married. Stevens settled down near the stove and began bragging about adventures in the jungles of South America, which featured fierce tribesmen, wanton women, and ferocious animals. Stevens’s tales were farfetched, but Jack loved them.

  It was stuffy and smoky in the cabin, but even in the dim light Jensen could see that the woman was at least a decade older than Jack and “smoke-tarnished.” She was the first non-native woman the men had seen for weeks, and “notwithstanding . . . her bedraggled appearance generally, she was comparatively fair to look upon; besides, she was unreservedly frank, and her voice was soft and caressing . . . and there was music in her laugh.” Her presence in the cabin was electrifying, and the men’s eyes kept drifting away from Stevens to her. She had a way of meeting their gazes without flinching, and her eyes were full of incitement, full of promise—and yet there was a mocking glimmer in them too, as though she was challenging the men. She was distracting, disturbing, and the smell of her sweat pierced the masculine fug. The men stared as though mesmerized by the sight of her ankles; they groped toward a half-remembered gallantry as they offered tea.