Gold Diggers

by Charlotte Gray

  Stevens talked on, but Jensen noticed that the woman’s eyes had now fastened on Jack’s handsome young face. Then she deliberately struck a provocative pose, throwing her head back and smiling as she lifted her thick curls away from her neck. It was deeply erotic. “Despite the soiled, unkempt apparel, her small, well-rounded figure showed soft and yielding in the tight, dilapidated dress. I remember well her dark blue eyes, the innocent baby-like stare, and teeth small and white gleaming between red-blooded, rather sensuous lips.” Jack noticed those lips and breasts too.

  When Stevens finally pulled on his parka and made his way to the door, the woman dutifully followed him. Then she turned, and invited everybody to visit their cabin. “Come soon!” she said, speaking directly to Jack.

  Jack couldn’t resist the invitation. “Baby eyes in a woman of her age spells trouble,” Jensen warned the young Californian, but Jack ignored him and set off across the river alone. Once inside Stevens’s hovel, he settled down for another dose of blood-curdling braggadocio. But Stevens’s welcome cooled when he saw that his “wife” was moving steadily closer to Jack. His mood changed. “Have you ever seen straight shooting, Mr. London?” he inquired. Without waiting for an answer, he took a Winchester rifle from its hook upon the stove and strode outside. He then proceeded to blast ten bullets into a tin target nailed to a tree in the space of a few seconds.

  Jack finally realized that Stevens was not a man to tangle with—particularly in a frozen wilderness where many a traveler simply disappeared. Without bidding farewell to the woman, he headed back across the river to his own cabin. There he confessed to Jensen that “it surely was the quickest, straightest, surest shooting that I ever saw . . . That man is afraid of nothing. Of nothing, I tell you, not even the truth.” Jack did not revisit the Stevens household. But lodged in his memory were the smoky atmosphere, the woman’s looks, the man’s fearlessness, and the heady eroticism of male rivalry.

  Sometimes it felt as though spring would never come. Tensions developed between the Split-Up Island residents, who were desperate to leave this frozen hell. How many more weeks must they drag heavy buckets of water up from ice holes in the river? How many more arguments about the existence of God would be started by the bumptious youth who smoked too much, quoted Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx too often, and kept asking, “What is the truth? What is just?” Jack would catch the intolerable tensions that built up among idle men cooped up together in his story “In a Far Country,” which appeared in The Son of the Wolf in 1900: “The intense frost could not be endured for long at a time, and the little cabin crowded them—beds, stove, table, and all—into a space ten by twelve. The very presence of either became a personal affront to the other, and they lapsed into sullen silences which increased in length and strength as the days went by. Occasionally the flash of an eye or the curl of a lip got the better of them, though they strove to wholly ignore each other during these mute periods.”

  In Jack’s story, the two main characters murder each other. In his own life, there was a shake-up between cabins after he had borrowed Merritt Sloper’s splitting ax once too often and dulled its edge by using it on ice. Jim Goodman had also grown exasperated with Jack’s insistence that visitors stay for dinner, even when their stock of beans and dried fruit was running short. Jack left Goodman, Sloper, and Fred Thompson and ended up with Doc Harvey.

  Jack London never lost his sense of wonder at the vastness of land and sky: his friend Emil Jensen would later describe how Jack was “ever on tiptoe with expectancy, whether silent with wondering awe, as on a night when we saw the snows aflame beneath a weird, bewildering sky or in the throes of a frenzied excitement while we watched a mighty river at flood-tide.” But as the days lengthened, the toll taken by the bitter, claustrophobic winter showed in the men’s dull eyes and shrunken muscles. Lassitude overwhelmed Jack: his teeth loosened, his joints ached, his gums bled. When he pushed his thumb into the puffy skin of his legs, the dents remained. Months without fresh vegetables had produced the first signs of scurvy, or “blackleg,” as Klondike stampeders called it because it turned men’s legs dark purple with bruises. The miners dreaded it because they knew it was caused by lack of vitamin C and the most effective remedies (lemons, raw potatoes, salad greens) were unavailable. Had Jack’s companions been prepared to trust the Hān people, they would have learned to brew up some spruce tea—but they didn’t.

  All over the creeks in cold, lonely cabins, men who had survived through the winter on beans and bacon were suffering from tuberculosis, bronchitis, or scurvy. Scurvy was the worst. The excruciating pain in their limbs would leave them too weak to get out of bed, and they would lie there until their bodies were bloated and black and they rotted to death. Those who had partners might get a decent burial in the frozen ground, but if the grave was not deep enough, parts of the recently buried body would be seen lying around, dug up by wolves or sled dogs. Scurvy killed more stampeders than accidents on the Chilkoot Pass or in the mines. Doc Harvey knew that he had to get Jack to Father Judge’s hospital in Dawson City as soon as it was safe to travel.

  For months, men had been struggling down from the creeks to the hospital. One man, brought in by sled, had spent thirty days in his cabin on his back; he survived by mixing sugar and flour in a tin cup and making a paste with ice he had picked off the wall and melted against his body. He was rigid to the hips when a fellow miner discovered him, and his gums had puffed through his lips. “We have had as high as fifty in the hospital, about half of them scurvy cases, and all new men who came last summer,” the priest wrote to his brother early in March. Since the hospital had opened seven months earlier, 168 patients had passed through its doors. Nobody was turned away, regardless of their religious views. The Jesuit’s days were filled with comforting the dying, burying the dead, overseeing the hospital’s extension, cheering the convalescents, coaxing the obstinate, praying with and for his fellow Catholics, planning meals from an almost empty larder, and saying Mass.

  The work was endless. There was still no glass in the windows and the shabby blankets crawled with lice, but Father Judge was not discouraged. In fact, his mood was lighter than it had been the previous fall. Fears about the coming winter had proved groundless. “We have great laughs at what is printed in the papers about these parts. Everything is so exaggerated, both the good and the bad.” Sure, the temperature had dipped below minus sixty degrees in February, but he had good helpers in both the hospital and the church, and his provisions had proved adequate. There had been music in the church at Christmas, and parishioners had often left hunks of caribou or moose on his door-step to supplement his diet. His own health had held up. “The papers have us all dead or starving, and yet for my own part, I feel as if I were back in civilization again.”

  Father Judge’s contentment sprang from his careless disregard for his own comfort (lice never seemed to bother him) and from his total conviction that he was doing God’s work. “About a month ago we had a beautiful death,” he confided to his brother. “A man well known outside was converted while in the hospital by reading ‘Plain Facts for Fair Minds.’ He received the Sacraments with great devotion, and died most happily.” A few days after he sealed the letter to his brother, he sat down in his cabin to write a similar missive to his sister. “The hospital has been the means of leading quite a few sheep back to the fold . . . I am glad that I am here to give some consolation to the great number of Catholics . . . and to sow good seed among the many non-Catholics. I have abundant consolation in all my labors.”

  There was an additional, worldlier cause for the Jesuit priest’s improved morale. More than ever, he was his neighbors’ touchstone of integrity, his selflessness a beacon of compassion in a brutal world. His unwavering yet naive faith that the Lord would provide had become a self-fulfilling prophecy because he brought out the best in others. One day he accepted twenty more patients than there were beds in the hospital. Before dark, three bales of blankets were dumped at the door, and the unknown dr
iver hurried off. Another time, in the dead of winter, he had struggled to dig a grave in the frozen ground. He was about to give up in despair when two burly strangers arrived with picks and shovels and did the job for him.

  “A saint,” the hard-bitten miners called him, grateful for his presence in their uncouth community. The proof of their respect was that they had raised the funds he needed to finish and furnish his buildings. Many of Dawson’s most important citizens belonged to the Yukon Order of Pioneers, established some years earlier in Circle City. Only prospectors who had been in the Yukon valley before the 1896 Klondike strike were eligible to join this service club. These veterans guarded their exclusivity jealously, even as they chanted their motto: “Do unto others as you would be done by.” (It is a sign of Belinda’s forcefulness that she was admitted as an honorary member although she was a woman and had arrived in 1897. Apparently nobody dared refuse her.) In early March, the Pioneers organized a benefit for St. Mary’s Hospital in appreciation of Father Judge’s efforts to provide medical care. Belinda Mulrooney hiked down from Grand Forks to help run the fundraiser in the newly erected Pioneers Hall. There were dance hall girls, a fiddler, a caller, and the gratifying sense that it was all in a good cause. The miners, giddy at the chance to throw their wealth around, raised over $50,000. “Looking back on the money we made that night,” Belinda would recall later, “always made the pickings of the usual church fair on the Outside somehow seem small to me.”

  Belinda particularly enjoyed the droller aspects of the fundraiser, including a raucous dancing competition and hefty fines for those who danced or talked too much. In the guttering light of the oil lamps, couples twirled around while the thick crowd of men standing against the walls shouted insults at the dancers. According to Belinda, the crowd was roasting the master of ceremonies, saloonkeeper Bill McPhee, “and they were having a lot of fun out of it.” But a couple of killjoys thought all this cursing and derision had no place at a benefit for the Roman Catholic church and went off to complain to Father Judge. “Father Judge came . . . down to look at us,” remembered Belinda. The priest, who was at least twenty years older than most of those present, gently admonished the revelers: “Children, children. Just children.” But he ingenuously added, “You mustn’t make people give money.” Belinda went right on collecting the fines, reassuring Father Judge that it was just a lot of miners enjoying themselves. “This is the Pioneers’ show. They like to stand up and argue.”

  After the dancing came a raffle. Belinda’s employee Sadie had contributed a leather pillow that she had made and stuffed with moss. Sadie and her laugh were immensely popular, and the pillow emerged as the most desirable object in the world. “My Lord!” Belinda loved to recall. “The bidding was a scream.” In an attempt, perhaps, to ingratiate himself with Belinda, Alex McDonald was determined to win it: “[He] certainly spread himself that night. I think it was the first time in his life he’d ever had a good time.” The bidding war was so fierce that Belinda feared “the damn bit of moss and leather would go to $100,000, or we’d have to pull it apart.” Big Alex finally won it for $5,000.

  Belinda faced a trickier situation when Esther Duffie pressed into her hands a heavy purse filled with $20,000 of dust, nuggets, and coins collected from Esther’s friends among the dance hall girls and prostitutes. What would the holy-rolling killjoys think of this? “I was razzed pretty strong for a little innocent fun,” she confided to her friend Joe Barrette, a French Canadian dog musher. “They’ll think it dirty money.” Joe suggested that they exchange the nuggets and coins for gold dust: “That’s clean enough.” Belinda gave short shrift to that idea. “It’s not that . . . It’s where it came from.” Joe was all for casting convention to the wind, insisting that the donors were “fine women! Give for churches! Good as anyone! I know it! You know it! Make the rest know it!” Belinda did know it, and usually she had no time for moral superiority either. She had no intention of slamming the door on such well-meant generosity.

  Belinda Mulrooney always took a broad-minded view of successful business-women, no matter what the business. Those such as the “Belgian Queen,” shown here, had plenty of customers.

  But on this occasion, she held her tongue, handed over the purse, and would describe it only as “a gift.”

  The fundraiser demonstrated more than affection for Father Judge. Dawson’s old-timers had had it with the Canadian government, which was eager to squeeze a large royalty out of the Klondike and to impose Canadian law but reluctant to spend a cent on civic improvements. Ottawa had made no attempt to bring any kind of order to the town other than to lay out its streets and send the Mounties. There was no local government, no library, no effort to improve communication with the outside world by telegraph lines or better routes. Dawsonites realized that the town needed better organizations, particularly if its population expanded, and they themselves would have to provide them. Making sure St. Mary’s Hospital stayed solvent was only the first step.

  By mid-March there were more than twelve hours of sunlight each day, and the hard-packed snow on the trails was turning yellow and slushy on warm days. News began trickling down the trail from Whitehorse. Most of the talk was of the crowds of frenzied stampeders waiting to reach the world-famous San Francisco of the North. At least 30,000 people had crossed the St. Elias Mountains and were now camped at the head of Bennett Lake, ready to launch homemade boats as soon as the Yukon River was open.

  But there was also one horrifying piece of news that shook Dawson old-timers. Joe Meeker, Bill Haskell’s partner and a man familiar to all the original prospectors on Bonanza and Eldorado, was dead—drowned on his journey to the Outside. In Dawson’s bars and saloons, news spread of how Joe had lost his footing while the two men had been inching their way along an ice shelf adjoining the White Horse Rapids. It was a ghastly fate: Joe had slipped into the Yukon’s raging current and instantly been pulled under the ice, taking his precious bag of gold dust with him. He was gone before Bill Haskell realized what had happened. For men who had worked alongside Bill and Joe, this was a grim reminder of the river’s treachery and the dangers of their lives. They could only imagine Bill’s horror—how he had stared at the churning foam and nearly dived in after his partner, how he had forced himself to continue along the trail to Dyea, sick with grief.

  When word of Joe’s death reached Dawson, many a tired old-timer wondered whether he would ever escape the North with his life. Sourdoughs speculated on Bill’s future. Would he return to the Yukon as he had intended, now he had lost his partner? Was the dream of a big payout worth the risks they all took, the hardships they suffered?

  Break-up was imminent, Dawson’s population was about to explode, and the town was totally unprepared. Belinda attended a meeting of nervous town leaders held at the Alaska Commercial Company warehouse. One pioneer insisted that the townsite must be drained. Another proposed more cabins. Belinda suggested that the buildings along Front Street should all add another story and install bunks. She was furious when the men laughed at her and ridiculed her idea. Jutting her chin forward and standing with arms akimbo, she announced that she was going to build a three-story hotel. “That caused an uproar. They all just screamed. I was boiling. I made up my mind to make the bluff good.” A prospector called Bill Leggett with a rich claim on Eldorado bet her $5,000 that she wouldn’t get a three-story hotel built by the summer, and “If you ever did get it built, you couldn’t get it heated afterwards.” Belinda narrowed her eyes, gave Leggett a filthy look, and took the bet.

  The Canadian government also began to realize how ugly life might get when the population of Dawson City mushroomed and only a handful of Mounties were there to police it. The triangular mudflat squeezed between river and hills would overflow with old-timers and newcomers, entrepreneurs and gamblers, dancers and sled dogs, crooks and hookers, cardsharps and Christians, the sick and the lame. An official party was sent to oversee the orderly development of Canada’s most northerly settlement. The first bureaucrat to
arrive was Frederick Coates Wade, a Canadian crown prosecutor with orders from Ottawa to clean up land ownership in this distant mining camp.

  Wade was an outspoken bully of a man, with a big mustache and a bigger ego. He had made his name as a crusading journalist in Manitoba, and he had wangled the Dawson job thanks to his friendship with the prominent Liberal politician Clifford Sifton. Sifton was both minister for the Interior, responsible for settling the prairies, and minister for Indian and Northern Affairs. He regarded the North as a convenient source of patronage for loyal friends. Now Fred Wade focused his energies on controlling what he liked to describe as “these U.S. freebooters.” He was appalled by what he found in the township: squatters living along the riverbank without paying rent, no public sanitary facilities, no clear property rights. He made the unilateral decision to find a private citizen—an entrepreneur—who would lease the strip of land along the waterfront and then take over the job of cleaning up the waterfront, erecting decent buildings, collecting rents, and installing three public toilets.

  Wade didn’t give Belinda Mulrooney a second look: she was doubly disqualified by being both American and a woman. But Alex McDonald was exactly the kind of man Wade had in mind. Describing him to Sifton, his political boss in Ottawa, as “the most responsible man here,” Wade gave Big Alex and a partner a sweetheart deal for the property for a mere $30,000—less than the community had raised in one night for Father Judge. Wade did not tell Sifton that he thought so highly of Big Alex that he had offered to act as his solicitor and had therefore got a cut for himself. Conflict of interest was never a problem for Frederick Coates Wade. But it was a problem for Dawson’s American residents, who raged at the way Canadian officials ripped them off while acting as if they embodied virtue itself.