Gold Diggers

by Charlotte Gray

  The priest’s brother, Charles Judge, heard about this encounter from the young man himself, although the latter never gave his name. But he did tell Charles that he found his friend Henry in a small, second-story ward with fifteen other scurvy patients. The walls were untrimmed lumber with moss and rags stuffed into the cracks. The men, clad in shabby, stained underwear, lay listlessly on crudely made beds, covered in patched and soiled blankets. Henry’s first question was “I don’t suppose you’ve brought any potatoes?” Once that sad matter was dealt with, conversation moved on to the priest himself. The visitor allowed that Father Judge appeared to be a popular sort of fellow. “Popular!” protested Henry. “Don’t use the word ‘popular’ here. He’s the finest man that God ever put a soul into. Where’d we all have been this winter without him, I’d like to know. He’s just killing himself trying to take care of everybody.”

  Henry’s visitor, who had no time for the Roman Catholic Church, looked skeptical, but his misgivings were swept away. Henry stated bluntly that religious affiliations were irrelevant. “Why, God bless me, here’s a bunch of sixteen of us here now in the room, and not a blessed Catholic in the lot. But Father Judge is making Catholics fast. Never preaches or talks doctrine or forms of faith, you know, unless you ask him or show him your mind is uneasy on that score. No! He just does all a mortal man can do for you, and evidently wishes he could do more. Then he jollies you along and goes to church, and you feel you’d give one of your two useless legs if you could follow him. Whist! Here he comes.”

  The young man watched how each patient sat up and lifted his face as the Jesuit walked into the room. “Oddly enough there was a smile on every sick face; only the priest looked dull and old.” Father Judge immediately made his way to a bed in the center of the room and began to talk softly to the desperately sick patient who lay there, swollen with scurvy. The newcomer watched the priest’s solemn face light up with an inner glow as he spoke softly to his patient: “I’ve been praying for you. If it is the good Lord’s will, you’re going to get well. The medicine is beginning to come down the river. Your good old mother is going to see you again if prayers and medicine can avail. Say your prayers, my boy. I’m going down to the chapel again, and I’ll leave your case in good hands.” The man’s eyes filled with tears as Judge stroked his hair from his forehead, and he grabbed Judge’s hand and raised it to his lips before burying his face in his pillow.

  Judge made his way from bed to bed, rearranging one man’s pillow, tucking another man’s feet under the threadbare bedding. “I’ve got good news for you all,” he announced. “There’s a whole scow-load of potatoes just landed! What do you think of that! Now I do hope the good Lord will not require me to steal them.” There was a moment of silence, then a chorus of laughter. Judge assured his patients that he wouldn’t steal them: “We’ll just pray . . . It’s quicker.” After another quick tour of the room, “petting the big fellows like great children,” he prepared to leave. First however, assuming a Baltimore Irish accent, he said, “Now, don’t ye all be after getting down-hearted. The boats do be coming in by the hundreds, and I’m going out now to have them send ye down what’s good for ye.” His departure was the signal for a flood of stories about him from men who knew the priest was the only barrier between them and death. Years later, the newcomer told Judge’s brother, “I have never in all my eventful life listened to such a stream of adulation for a living man.”

  As people and supplies continued to stream into Dawson, prices of provisions dropped. Soon Father Judge could buy dried milk for $1.00 a can, a sack of flour for $3.00, fruit for $1.00 a piece, potatoes for $0.50 a pound, tinned mutton for $2.50 a pound, and eggs for $3.00 a dozen. The waterfront took on the appearance of a fairground, with market stands for the sale of vegetables, clothing, furs, moccasins, shoes, groceries, meat, and jewelry. “In the brief space of a few days there seemed to be nothing that could not be purchased in Dawson,” wrote Tappan Adney, “from fresh grapes to an opera glass, from a safety-pin to an ice-cream freezer.”

  Suddenly, it was carnival time. The floodwaters ebbed, the saloons restocked, and a cluster of hookers’ “cribs” sprang up behind Second Avenue. In Dawson’s bars, newcomers were dazzled by descriptions of rich pan-outs from sluicing operations on the creeks. Up at the Grand Forks Hotel, triumphant prospectors arrived from their sluicing operations staggering under the weight of filled leather bags, Bull Durham tobacco tins, and old jelly jars. Despite the punishing efforts required to find the dust and nuggets, the miners were astonishingly casual about their riches, flinging them at Belinda Mulrooney’s manager, Walker Gilmer, for safekeeping. “Those gold pokes were the worry of Walker’s life,” Belinda recalled. He refused to take them unless the miners put their names on so he could tell them apart. “I got sick of the dust—would rather see a pile of cord wood than sacks of gold dust. They were mean to handle—heavy and hard to pack. They were like a piece of lead when you put ’em on your back—would work into your backbone and shoulder.” The gold was usually taken out in a batch by mule or dog train down to Dawson. At the start of the season there was no bank in Dawson, so the Alaska Commercial Company and the North American Transportation and Trading Company continued to accept the sacks of dust and nuggets until they could all be shipped Outside. Unless, of course, the owner of a couple of those sacks decided he had earned a little fling and withdrew his poke from the trading company’s safe. In those cases, that particular stash was likely to disappear at the faro tables.

  Early on the morning of Sunday, June 5, the giddy high living was sharply interrupted. Cries of “Fire!” rang out—an ominous sound in a town of tents and resinous log cabins. People rushed out of the dance halls and bars as the roar of flames competed with the fiddles and laughter. A column of smoke rose at the north end. Was the hospital on fire? Hundreds of men grabbed buckets and blankets from their cabins and ran toward St. Mary’s. It was the Church of the Immaculate Conception, not the hospital, that blazed fiercely—but the two buildings were so close that the latter was in danger. While one work party carried the sick out on beds and stretchers, another formed a line and passed pail after pail of water from the river to those on top of the hospital, who poured it over blankets stretched over the roof to douse any sparks.

  At first, Father Judge stood in the flickering firelight, his thin face contorted with anguish like a figure in an El Greco painting. The edifice for which he had labored so hard, the altar he had carved himself, everything necessary for religious services, was gone. And the worst of it was that it was his fault. Late the previous night he had gone over to the church to say Compline, the final service of the day, and he had stuck a candle on a wooden support. In the midst of his prayers, somebody had run over from the hospital to tell him a patient was dying. In his haste to administer Extreme Unction, he had forgotten all about the candle. Now all that was left of Dawson’s first Catholic church was a smoldering ruin. “My nice church,” he wrote to his brother two weeks later, “in which I took so much pride, all the altar furniture, vestments, flowers, lace curtains, and everything for Mass and Benediction were burned.”

  Yet before dawn had broken, the priest’s expression had improved markedly. “Imagine my surprise,” one onlooker wrote afterward, “when, espying Father Judge, I beheld the only gleam of tranquility and unconcern—yea, even mirthfulness—to be witnessed in that entire assemblage. Indeed the dear Father’s features seemed radiant with emotions of glad cheer, as he flitted about among the almost panic-stricken [staff] of the hospital and, by words and actions, made light of their intensely anxious concerns.”

  What had caused this mood change? When asked, Father Judge explained, “I had promised our Lord to erect for Him a more commodious temple, and he probably thought I would fail to keep my promise unless the old and inadequate building were destroyed.” Judge’s saintly reputation was so pervasive that most people accepted this virtuous explanation, but he was being disingenuous. In the middle of the hubbub of shouts, scre
ams, hissing flames, and falling roof timbers, Alex McDonald had whispered to the priest that he would assume the whole expense of rebuilding. As Judge phrased it in the letter to his brother,“I am building a new church three times as large as the old one, and one of my new friends will pay for it.”

  The success of the Jesuit mission in Dawson City was sweet reward for “the Old Priest,” as he was often called these days. Working alone, he had won the respect of a hard-living, hard-drinking community as he fulfilled God’s purpose. He was truly oblivious to the earthly riches that his congregation contributed to the new church, to be called St. Mary’s Church—but others weren’t. There is nothing like a gold mine for triggering interest and competition. When the richness of the Klondike gold fields had first been confirmed, various Americans had asserted that they lay on American territory. Now that the wealth of Dawson City’s residents was established, it caught the attention of other Christian churches and Roman Catholic orders.

  The Anglican Church, which had been active in the Yukon for more than three decades, now had six ordained priests in the area, including, in Forty Mile, the redoubtable Bishop William Bompas, who had first arrived in the North in 1865. It also had a small church in Dawson City, which boasted window glass held in place by dough—until the warm weather arrived, the dough rose, and the windows fell out. The Presbyterian Church was busy establishing missions at Skagway, Bennett Lake, in Dawson itself, and on the creeks, and planned a second hospital for Dawson: the Good Samaritan Hospital would open in August 1898. The Methodists and the Salvation Army were also on their way north. But these were all Protestant initiatives. Unknown to Father Judge, within the Roman Catholic Church a turf war was brewing, based as much on financial as on spiritual concerns.

  The Jesuits’ firm hold on Dawson’s Catholic population had started to irritate a smaller, poorer, French-speaking Roman Catholic order, the Oblates. Oblate missionaries were already active among native peoples in the Canadian north, and Rome regarded Alaska as Jesuit territory and Canada as Oblate. When Father Judge first strayed east along the Yukon into Canada, his activities had not aroused much comment because this distant, icy region was thought to contain only an aboriginal population and a few hundred prospectors. But things were different now. As Bishop Emile Grouard, the Oblate superior of the Mackenzie River district in Canada’s Northwest and vicar apostolic of Athabasca-Mackenzie, wrote, “Our Mackenzie missions are very poor; the Klondike mines will provide us with plenty of funds.” Grouard’s archbishop, Monsignor Louis Philippe Adelard Langevin, Archbishop of St. Boniface, made the same point in a letter to the superior general of the Oblates: “The Yukon could provide us with precious resources for our missions in the North if, as I hope, you wish to help them.” (Le Yukon peut procurer des resources précieuses à nos chères missions du Nord si, comme je l’espère, vous voulez bien aller à leur secours.)

  The first sign of ecclesiastical rivalry for Father Judge came with the arrival of the steamer Portus B. Weare, only seven days after his church had burned down. He was just finishing his morning rounds at the hospital when he saw a hesitant younger man in a black cassock walking toward him from the river. This was Father Joseph-Camille Lefebvre, an Oblate who had been working on the northernmost edge of Canada, above the Arctic Circle, in the Mackenzie River delta area. Father Lefebvre had been reassigned to Dawson City by Bishop Grouard because his mission in the Far North had been a spectacular failure. American whalers who had sailed into the Beaufort Sea had undermined his efforts with the Inuit by introducing alcohol and contagious diseases.

  As far as Judge was concerned, Lefebvre’s arrival was literally a god-send. The newcomer brought with him a traveling chapel, including Communion wine and vestments, so the older priest could once again say Mass. He resumed his regular Sunday services in a tent under the Moosehide Slide. But three weeks later, three more Oblates arrived: Father Pierre Edmond Gendreau, Father Alphonse Marie Joseph Desmarais, and Brother Marie Auguste Jude Dumas. Suddenly, Dawson City had five Roman Catholic priests, but four of them were French-speaking Canadians in a primarily American town where little French was heard on Front Street. It would have been an uncomfortable balance at the best of times, and the fact that the English-speaking American Jesuit was widely regarded as a saint whom the Canadian Oblates wanted to dislodge didn’t help. “You would find it hard to believe how delicate and embarrassing our position is,” Father Gendreau wrote to Bishop Grouard. (Vous ne sauriez croire combien la position était délicate, embarrassante et embarrassée.)

  The next few months were a pantomime of money squabbles dressed up as ecclesiastical dialogue. Father Judge’s Jesuit superior, the Reverend Father J. B. René, made the long trek from Juneau, in Alaska, all the way to Rome, to petition the Pope to transfer the whole of the Yukon water-shed to the Jesuits’ Apostolic Prefecture of Alaska. The Pope refused, so Father René shot off a message to Father Judge telling him to stop all building activity. Then he turned round and traveled 11,000 miles back to North America and north to the Yukon to assert his authority. He arrived in Dawson on July 28, intent on settling accounts and escorting Father Judge back to Alaska. A sharp-elbowed negotiator, Father René announced to the Oblates that the Jesuits were ready to leave as soon as the Oblate mission had assumed responsibility for all debts incurred, finished all building projects, and paid compensation for the land and building work already done. In response, the Oblates pointed out that the Jesuits had not used their own funds for Father Judge’s mission: the hospital and the church had been financed locally by both Catholics and Protestants, thanks to Father Judge’s personal charisma. But Father René brushed aside the argument that these institutions therefore belonged to the citizens of Dawson themselves. Father Judge, he pointed out, had paid $300 out of his order’s funds for the land on which the church and the hospital stood. That land was now worth somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000. Did the Oblates really expect the Jesuits to hand it over for free?

  The situation was complicated by the much-anticipated arrival of the Sisters of St. Ann, to help Father Judge in the hospital. Suddenly the north end of town was aflutter with cassocks, habits, and crosses. The black-robed nuns couldn’t sleep in their designated hospital wing because their beds were occupied by patients, so they moved into the parsonage that had been earmarked for the Oblates. And Father Judge, with quiet intensity, made it clear to his superior that he was most reluctant to abandon his flock. Dawson was his vocation. He had ignored Father René’s instruction to stop all building activity, arguing that the latter didn’t know that the original church had burned down. Now he mused about whether Big Alex’s benevolence would continue if he himself disappeared.

  Father Gendreau was a very different personality from Father René. Besides having the Pope (if not God) on his side, the Oblate was by nature a peacemaker. He solved the compensation issue by avoiding it. He requested that the Old Priest be allowed to stay in Dawson as chaplain of the hospital, over which he would exert both temporal and spiritual authority. This allowed Judge to continue administering to his American parishioners and to see the completion of the new church. Father René was not happy to be outsmarted by Canadian Oblates, but he knew when he was defeated. After giving Father Judge firm instructions to begin no new construction, to settle all his debts, and to leave Dawson when the river opened the following spring, Father René returned to Jesuit headquarters in Juneau.

  By 1903, the capacious new Roman Catholic church and the three-story hospital would dominate the north end of Dawson City.

  From now on, Father Judge preached and sang Mass every third Sunday. Father Gendreau welcomed him as a colleague, partly because the Oblates had some difficulty communicating with their flock. In Gendreau’s optimistic estimates, the Dawson area contained about 15,000 Roman Catholics, half of them French Canadians. He probably exaggerated the numbers, but the Catholics who did turn up for Mass each Sunday were mainly English speaking and couldn’t understand a word of the Oblates’ French serm
ons. So the Old Priest’s status as the public voice of Roman Catholicism in Dawson remained unchallenged, and his congregations were twice as large as the Oblates’. The younger priests spent more of their time hiking up the creeks, administering to French Canadians within the cramped log cabins on their claims. A fifth Oblate who arrived reported that he had said Mass in one cabin where “sixty miners were packed in, one pressing against another . . . During the whole mass, they were obliged to stay standing or lying on their beds, because they couldn’t move.”

  Perhaps the happiest day in Father Judge’s life arrived on August 21, 1898. His superior, Father René had left; his own position within Dawson was confirmed; he finally had medical help in the hospital; and today he was preaching at the opening of his grand new church. A congregation of over 500 people looked reverently at the much-loved figure standing before the new altar. The Jesuit’s deeply lined face, with its sunken cheeks and wispy gray hair, radiated piety: his hands, with their broken nails and flaky skin, were clasped so tight that the gnarled blue veins were taut on the surface; his voice, with its Irish lilt audible through the quiet message, was low and steady. He was so gaunt that his black robes almost engulfed him and his vestments hung limply over them. When he preached, he stood erect, hands immobile, and spoke quietly about God’s will. “He always said he was no preacher,” an observer later recalled, but “every word that fell from his lips sank into his hearers’ hearts . . . I do not think the sublime character of the Mass was ever better impressed upon any of us in the grand cathedrals of the States.”