Gold Diggers

by Charlotte Gray

  As Belinda traveled between Grand Forks and Dawson that March, she noticed the first hints of spring: the gurgle of running water under the ice of the creeks, the slow shrink of snow drifts, and the occasional arctic hare scampering across the trail. It would be weeks before bears came out of hibernation or the jam of people on Bennett Lake could begin the last 600 miles of their journey. Dawson was still small enough for most of its residents to know each other by sight if not by name, but Belinda knew this would change when the new crop of stampeders arrived. More rules and less freedom lay ahead, more “civilization” and less glorious, thigh-slapping, bloody-minded liberty. It made her nostalgic even to think about it. She threw herself into a special celebration held in the Alaska Commercial Company warehouse on March 17 to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.

  The sun shone and the air was crisp that day. Everyone was dolled up for the occasion: a handful of women sported summer straw hats, decorated with ribbons. “With winter footwear, mukaluks of hair seal to the knees, fur coats or parkas, and those blessed silly hats stuck on top of their heads, they were a scream,” Belinda recalled years later. Somebody hollered out, “My God, a dog race!” and immediately a course was agreed and two teams of huskies harnessed. One belonged to the Mounties, the other to Belinda’s friend Joe Barrette. Father Judge arrived to watch the fun. As a shot rang out from a starter’s gun, the two teams raced off down Front Street. Onlookers cheered their favorite and the rest of Dawson’s dog population barked fit to burst. “It was just splendid to watch those magnificent animals strain all their muscles and fight with their might for every inch of ground,” Belinda remembered. “Up to the finish none of us could name the winner—they were neck and neck.” When Joe’s team beat the dogs that belonged to the North-West Mounted Police, the crowd bellowed with glee.

  Next, the fiddles came out for square dances, waltzes, and jigs. “There was an undercurrent,” according to Belinda, “of feeling like a big family that dreaded some unknown danger. I think it was covered by an old timer who couldn’t sing or dance, but had to make a speech. He asked us all to have a good time while the country still belonged to us. He hoped to the Lord that the mosquitoes would chase the new arrivals back to where they came from, so we could live our own lives and be happy in God’s country.” The dancing continued until daylight, when coffee and pancakes were served. Then the dogs were fed, and weary miners started up the trail to the creeks.

  Hibernian high spirits had not blinded Belinda to business. During the dancing, she had inveigled Joe Ladue onto the dance floor and made him an offer for a piece of land two blocks from the saloons. “I knew as much about dancing as a pet bear, and old man Ladue knew less,” but they had cut a deal. Now she was ready to confound her critics and start building her three-story hotel. No question, 1898 was going to be a helluva year in Dawson City.

  PART 3 : MONEY TALKS

  CHAPTER 11

  Gumboot Diplomacy, April-August 1898

  BY MID-APRIL, DAWSON CITY was clear of snow, and the sun did not set until hours after cities like Toronto and Boston had seen the last of its rays. The white silence of winter had been replaced by a symphony of sounds—the chirp of birds, the rustle of branches in the wind, the creak of ice on the rivers, and the gurgle of melted snow that turned creek beds into rushing streams. Almost overnight, wild heliotrope, starwort, fireweed, and wild roses colored the hilltops on the north bank of the Klondike.

  Spring brought a smile to Belinda’s square, pugnacious face. The moment had arrived when she could settle her score with Big Alex McDonald. Within days, streets, cabin floors, claim shafts, and paths to outhouses would all turn to mud, and everybody in and around Dawson would shed their winter footwear and be desperate for thigh-high rubber waders. She already had a big stock of gumboots from the cargo she and Alex had purchased in the fall—the cargo from which he had grabbed most of the foodstuffs. Now she told her men to buy up every additional pair of rubber boots they could find. In particular, they should persuade anyone working for Big Alex to give up his boots in exchange for warm wool socks, or a nip of hooch, or anything else he fancied. When one of her crew asked why she wanted a pile of old boots, she gave a ridiculous answer: “Because they are the best things in the world . . . to use to start a fire. In the woods if you have just a five inch square of rubber, they make the best fire starter.” She also bought up every candle that she could find in Dawson.

  “The men suspected something, but they didn’t know what. Before long I had every boot in Alex McDonald’s outfit.” Alex himself had no clue what was happening; he continued to assume he could buy what he needed in Dawson. But when he finally visited one of the trading companies’ warehouses, he was told that the town was clean out of gumboots and the only person who had any for sale was Miss Mulrooney at Grand Forks.

  As he trudged up the trail to Grand Forks, Big Alex must have rued the day he underestimated Belinda Mulrooney. Sure enough, she had a grin as big as Alaska on her face when he asked how much she was charging for boots. The going rate, he knew, was fifteen dollars, but Belinda had other ideas. “Thirty dollars,” she snapped at him, “and if you take one pair, you take cases and cases of these boots.” As she recorded in her memoir, “Honest Alex McDonald, the Nova Scotian cod fish, had to buy every one.”

  Those rubber boots were cheap at the price. With the spring thaw came vivid reminders that Dawson was built on a swamp on top of permafrost. January’s ice-hard streets had become black, reeking bogs by April. The mire on Front Street was so bad that anybody who fell off the duckboard sidewalks would sink knee, hip, or even waist deep in the stuff, as floodwater surged through town and the underlayer of frozen ground thawed into sludge. Tappan Adney, the Harper’s magazine special correspondent, was horrified to watch buildings spring up on the unstable, melting muck “like mushrooms in a night . . . Several buildings of dressed lumber, intended for use as stores, hotels and theatres, were as handsome as one would care to see.” News of the crowds now pouring over the mountain passes and building boats at Bennett Lake had prompted speculators like Joe Ladue to accelerate construction projects. Three sawmills, running night and day, were unable to keep up with the demand for lumber, which was selling for $150 to $200 per 1,000 feet. Men stood with dog teams, waiting to take the boards as they fell from the saw. Nails were so scarce that the price had risen from $1 a pound to $6. Big Alex could afford Belinda’s gumboot games because he was leasing out for $8 to $12 a foot per month the riverfront land for which he was paying the government only $1 a foot.

  Excitement ran high, as builders waited for the rush of newcomers looking for shelter, and miners prepared to sluice their dirt piles and collect their gold. On May 1, Bonanza Creek was clear of ice, so sluicing could begin. But the creek was soon running faster and fuller than anybody had expected. It flooded the cabins on its banks, including Tappan Adney’s, and the Harper’s correspondent discovered that it wasn’t much fun “having to wade about the house in rubber boots, fighting mosquitoes, trying to cook a flapjack or make a cup of tea over the stove, and climbing in and out of a high bunk with boots on.” He decided to return to town. At the junction of Bonanza and the Klondike River, he watched as a couple of huge ice floes picked up a stout wooden bridge over the Klondike “as if it had been a bunch of matches.” With a roar of surging water and splintering timber, the mountain of moving ice destroyed five of the bridge’s seven piers.

  People started to worry. The previous year, the end of winter had been a much smoother event. In 1897, water had lapped over the wharves, but there had been nothing like the mountainous pile-up of ice that now obstructed the Yukon River. Hundreds of anxious men watched with alarm as the water flowing in from the Klondike rose rapidly behind this ice blockade. They stayed up all night, fearful the river would overflow its banks and sweep the town away. Inspector Constantine strode up and down the waterfront, pulling at his mustache and expecting the worst. He saw one mighty ice floe, forty feet wide, strike the ice barrier, half ris
e out of the water, then dive under it. A similar monster was not far behind: this one crunched into the barrier with a dull roar and remained there. Every now and then an empty boat sped along in the current, struck the ice jam, and was sucked under it by the river’s mighty pull. It was a forcible reminder to onlookers that this was a land where water, wind, and weather could wipe out a puny human settlement in a few terrifying minutes.

  But at four o’clock in the morning of May 8, the bridge of ice cracked, groaned, then slowly began to move. The shout finally went up: “Ice-out!” In a few minutes there was nothing but a wide, powerful river, as tons of water rushed onward, pushing cakes of ice as big as cabins out of its way and onto its banks. Nevertheless, the water level stayed high, transforming the streets closer to the river into channels of gumbo.

  Not long after the ice had gone out, a roughly made raft with a handful of men aboard swung into view. These were not emissaries of the next crop of stampeders but some of Split-Up Island’s winter residents, among them Doc Harvey and a pale, weak Jack London. As soon as Harvey had seen open water in the river, he and his pals had torn down their cabin and built a raft with the lumber. Then they had made the perilous trip downstream, knowing that they could be tipped into the frigid water at any moment if the swirling current or jagged pans of ice upended the clumsy craft. Jack, the practiced sailor, insisted on taking the main oar, or “sweep,” although it was hard to grip it with hands crippled by scurvy. He cursed the water, the cold, the current, and the gravel banks with all the obscene ferocity of the oyster pirate he had once been, as the oar was swept out of his hands and the raft nearly capsized. Once Harvey had landed their frail vessel at Dawson, the waiting prospectors surged forward to hear about the state of the river. Was the ice on the Stewart out? Had they seen any boats coming down from Bennett yet?

  Jack staggered ashore, wincing when he put weight on his legs. His knees were black and blue from internal bleeding in the joints. As he waited for Doc Harvey to come and help him, he looked around with dismay. Dawson in the spring of 1898 was nothing like the Golden City of the previous fall. Instead, it was “dreary, desolate Dawson, built in a swamp, flooded to the second story, populated by dogs, mosquitoes and gold-seekers.” With longer daylight hours had come hotter days, and men wandered about dizzy from heat and sleeplessness. The central part of the town was under from one to five feet of water. A small river separated the Mounties’ barracks from the downtown area, and Thomas Fawcett, the gold commissioner, had been forced to relocate from his Front Street cabin to a tent on higher ground. A filthy scum of garbage, logs, human and dog feces, discarded clothing, and old cans floated on the floodwaters. The stench of human sewage was almost unbearable but impossible to escape. Enterprising boatmen were charging passengers fifty cents a head to pole or paddle them down the main street. Some men had been forced to pitch tent on top of their cabins. Tappan Adney’s tent was on the steep hillside above Tenth Street and from there, he told the readers of Harper’s, “I would see a man at, say 11 p.m., push off from shore, pole over to a cabin, clamber out onto the roof, take off his shoes, walk over to a pile of blankets, unroll them, take off his coat, place it for a pillow, and turn in for a night’s sleep—all in broad daylight.”

  Jack London was in no state to care about any of this. There was only one man he wanted to see—Father Judge. The Jesuit’s reputation as a miracle worker who cured scurvy and saved lives had spread along every rocky creek and into every filthy cabin in the Klondike region. There were several doctors in Dawson, but they all charged two ounces of gold dust a visit and were, in the words of one miner, “the bummest lot you ever saw.” Many were quacks with little training and no knowledge of either the causes or the remedies for scurvy, although the disease was well understood by the medical profession at the time. One insisted that it was caused by lack of sunlight, another attributed it to the consumption of partially decomposed food, and a third swore it was triggered by “thickened and vitiated” blood. Father Judge, the same miner estimated, had saved “mor’n a thousand [lives]. He was the only one of us as had time, or wasn’t crazy about gold.” Jack London had long ago spent all the money he had brought into the Yukon, but he would be able to pay for any medicine that the priest could give him. Harvey had raised $600 by selling the raft to lumber-hungry builders.

  St. Mary’s Hospital was overflowing: scurvy patients jammed the wards, the corridors, even Father Judge’s own house. More hastily hammered-together beds were lined up in temporary canvas additions. When Jack first limped into the hospital “office,” there was nobody in the bare, simply furnished room. He touched a bell on the table, and a tired-looking man with thin gray hair and a care-lined face appeared. Jack looked at his long, dark, shabby coat and heavy boots, then met Judge’s gaze and noticed that a wonderful light seemed to shine from his eyes. For his part, Father Judge eyed his visitor thoughtfully, and sighed. The hospital’s supplies of lemons, raw potatoes, and spruce-needle tea—the only sources of vitamin C available—were almost gone. But the priest did what he could for the young American, carefully rationing out grated potato and a little lemon juice to him and massaging his inflamed joints. But Judge couldn’t give Jack a bed in the hospital. Luckily, Jack’s friend Emil Jensen, from Split-Up Island, had pitched a tent nearby and offered him a bed.

  Father Judge was more anxious than he had been for months. Jack London was the first, he knew, of the thousands who would appear now that the river was open. The priest was right to worry: 1898 was the year the stampede to the Klondike gold fields would crest at numbers that still, over a century later, seem incredible. Driven by desperation and the dream of instant wealth, over 100,000 people set off this year for one of the most remote, inhospitable places on the globe. Father Judge already recognized that alongside sourdoughs like Jack, who had arrived the previous year and wintered on distant creeks, he could expect all the newcomers who had struggled over the coastal mountains within the past few months. Stampeders were camped for more than sixty miles along the shores of lakes Lindeman, Bennett, and Tagish, impatient for the ice on the lakes to break up.

  Judge had no idea of the extent of the human torrent about to hit Dawson. Estimates of numbers rose daily—would five thousand people turn up? Ten thousand? Thirty thousand? But he did know that Dawson City was about to be invaded by an army of emaciated scarecrows with ragged beards and patched clothing. And many of them, their skin withered and discolored by malnutrition, would be sick. It wasn’t simply the shortage of medical supplies that worried the priest. The hospital was deeply in debt. Judge was usually oblivious to financial matters, trusting in the Lord to provide. And he had instituted a system to cover his expenses: he promised any man who gave him two ounces of gold that for a year he would be guaranteed a bed if he needed it at St. Mary’s. But the proceeds of this scheme were pitiful, since everybody knew the priest never turned anyone away.

  On June 8, 1898, the first boat in the flotilla of new arrivals rounded the bend in the Yukon and steered toward the Dawson waterfront. For the next month, day and night, more and more vessels appeared—a huge armada that would eventually number over 7,000 homemade boats. There were skiffs, rowboats, primitive rafts, slender ten-foot-long canoes, graceless forty-foot freight scows—most fashioned out of green lumber by amateur builders and designed for a single, 600-mile voyage downriver to the Klondike’s golden valleys. They tied up side by side along one and three-quarter miles of Big Alex’s waterfront, soon forming a floating platform of vessels five or six deep.

  Each morning the priest walked down to the wharf to see the motley throng of new arrivals, most of whom were exhausted by their travels, stunned by Dawson’s squalor, and too listless to do much more than stare at each other. There were, as Tappan Adney recorded, “Australians with upturned sleeves and a swagger; young Englishmen in golf-stockings and tweeds; would-be miners in Mackinaws and rubber boots, or heavy, high-laced shoes; Japanese, negroes—and women too, everywhere.” Some pitched their tents on
their scows; others slept in the open on higher ground, under robes or blankets. “The crowd of newcomers,” Judge wrote to his brother, “is increasing every day and giving our little town the appearance of a large city, the street being too crowded to be comfortable.”

  In the spring of 1898, homemade boats formed a floating platform for almost two miles along Dawson’s waterfront. The town was so crowded that new arrivals pitched tents over their vessels.

  Father Judge was among those bargaining for fresh supplies. At first, the prices were out of sight because enterprising merchants had raced ahead of the crowd to get top dollar for their goods. The first case of thirty dozen fresh eggs sold for $300. Potatoes were $10 a pound. Oranges, lemons, and apples sold for $5 each. All winter, Dawson’s millionaires had had nothing to spend their newfound wealth on. Now they would splash out on any novelty. One entrepreneur traded kittens for an ounce of gold each; another made $15 on an ancient newspaper used as food wrap. Belinda Mulrooney could afford the food prices for her hotel because she could pass on the cost to her customers. But the desperate, ailing men in St. Mary’s Hospital couldn’t afford them. The priest realized he would have to go “on the beg,” as the miners put it, to get what he wanted.

  One of his first targets was a young American who strolled into the hospital because he had heard that his friend Henry was sick with scurvy there. Judge met the newcomer and asked him with twinkling eyes, “I don’t suppose, now, you’ve got such things as potatoes with you?” The American was astonished by the question. “Potatoes!” he exclaimed, then added, “I suppose you are hankering for a mess of potatoes after the food famine of the past winter.” The priest was equally astonished by this suggestion. “Why, bless your heart, no,” he replied. “I don’t want potatoes. But I’ve got a big houseful of fellows here with scurvy, and medicine has been about gone for months. Potatoes would fix ’em though.” The visitor had no potatoes, so Judge told him where to find his friend Henry. As the young man started up the stairs, Judge called after him, “You want to cheer him up till I can get some medicine or potatoes for him. We must keep them alive on hope, you know.”