Gold Diggers

by Charlotte Gray

  Banking in Dawson City was unique. During the endless daylight that summer, both banks were open for twelve to fifteen hours a day—double the banking hours Outside. From early morning, a crowd milled around the door, and the bank tellers had just finished recording one transaction in the deposit ledger when the next customer was clamoring for attention and waving his poke of gold dust around. Horses, mules, and dogs loaded with gold dust frequently stood outside both banks for hours, swishing their tails against the swarms of blackflies and relieving themselves on the boardwalks. The Commerce would finally shut up shop around eight o’clock in the evening, when the crowd was drawn away by the blare of cornets, the pounding of drums, and the strident and far-reaching tones of the “caller-off ” in the dance halls. Once the doors were closed in the hot, windowless little hut, tellers would light a couple of candles and in the smoky fug try to write up the day’s work. They would store cash in an old, unlocked tin biscuit box and sacks of gold dust worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in an iron-lined wooden chest. But they were frequently interrupted by revelers. One night, an indignant drunk threw a rock at the canvas sign, and shouted, “I’m from Missouri, and you have to show me where they have six million dollars in that bum little shack.” Another time, a customer pounded on the door at four in the morning, determined to cash a check. When told that the bank would open at eight, he grumbled, “That’s a hell of a time to wait for a drink.”

  In addition to being Ottawa’s agent, the Canadian Bank of Commerce had another advantage over its rival. It had brought with it the plans, fire bricks, and chemicals required for an assay plant to test the purity of gold dust, and three staff trained in assaying techniques. Two weeks after Wills had set up shop, he decided the bank should start assaying some of the dust and nuggets it had already accumulated. Much of the “commercial dust” in circulation in Dawson was laced with black sand. Now many of the customers who had received advances on their gold dust, intent on traveling Outside for the summer, wanted to find out what their gold was worth and get the rest of their cash. A melting furnace was constructed, the acids, fluxes, delicate Troemner balances, and all the other paraphernalia of an assay department prepared, then the charcoal was lit. The theory was that the gold dust would melt down, the dross could be scraped away, and the molten mass of pure gold would then cool in a brick mold and be weighed. But the Commerce’s first attempt at an assay was a disaster. When the furnace was opened after forty-eight hours, Wills found a lumpy mass that could neither be returned to the customer nor assayed.

  Weighty bags of gold were loaded onto men, horses, and dogs all summer, as tons of dust and nuggets were brought in from the creeks.

  Knowledge of this disaster would damage the bank’s reputation, as well as making it the laughingstock of its rival bank’s employees. Bank officials agonized about what to do as their customers grew impatient. The bank staff tried to placate them, and conceal the mess, by taking them to the Monte Carlo for a drink. It was in the bar that the problem was finally solved. One of the Commerce’s tellers bumped into an Austrian called Jorish who had studied at Vienna’s School of Mines and was looking for work. Jorish spoke only a few words of English, but as soon as he was ushered into the room where the furnace sat he saw the problem. With a big grin, he took a chisel and knocked out a couple of fire bricks to increase the draft. Wills promptly hired him as stoker for fifteen dollars a day—little more than the going wage for Dawson laborers but far more than his trained tellers were paid.

  The last gold shipment of the year weighed 1.5 million tons. It left Dawson City on September 14, 1898.

  Despite the free-for-all atmosphere, the long hours, the tellers’ chronic fatigue, and the lousy accommodation, both banks had a very profitable summer. At the end of June, the Yukon Sun recorded that three stern-wheelers, the Portus B. Weare, the Bella, and the Hamilton had left for St. Michael laden with no fewer than nine tons of gold—much of it in sealed wooden boxes banded with iron, belonging to the banks. In Dawson City itself, the scales on every store counter and saloon bar began to disappear, as paper money slowly replaced gold dust. Not everybody appreciated the switch. Dishonest miners had often “stretched” their gold dust with brass filings. Unscrupulous bartenders had embraced the fashion for keeping their fingernails long and their hair greasy. When they were on duty, they ran their fingers through their locks after weighing out the dust; once they got home, they would filter gold dust from the sink in which they washed their hair. But for merchants, traders, and hoteliers like Belinda Mulrooney, Dawson’s gradual transformation into a respectable community with a professional class could only be good for business.

  Gold scales were still features of Dawson’s bars and stores, even after the introduction of paper money.

  Maybe some of the Gold Rush magic disappeared along with the unruly pioneer ways, but the new boom meant even more opportunities for making a fortune. Both Wills and Doig had approached Belinda about giving them some of her business. She had no time for the pompous Chief Wills, as she called him, who one day announced to her in a portentous tone of voice that “my credit was good at the Bank if I wanted to do any buying.” Belinda, who had always operated on barter and partnerships, snapped, “What could you buy at a bank?” Anyway, she had already decided that David Doig might be more useful to her. Doig enjoyed whiskey, cigars, and women, and made a habit of drinking a pint of champagne for breakfast. A shipment of Mumm’s extra dry had recently been assigned to him, but Belinda decided it would be more appreciated at the grand opening she was planning for her nearly completed Fairview Hotel. “There were eighteen cases of champagne in the lot. I told the bank to take it out of my account.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Flora Shaw, “From Paris to Siberia,” July 1898

  ON JULY 27, the three-story Fairview Hotel, which towered over the tents and shacks round it, opened its doors. Belinda Mulrooney had won her bet with Bill Leggett, who now gritted his teeth and handed over $5,000. Leggett wasn’t the only prospector who had bet and lost against Belinda’s hopes of finishing her hotel. The twenty-six-year-old businesswoman and her crew made over $100,000 on wagers against the completion of the Fairview. (The hotel cannot have cost much more than $100,000 to build, so Belinda’s bets went a long way to covering her expenses.) On the ground floor was an elaborately furnished bar with painted canvas walls and a dining room featuring starched damask table linens. Dawson’s other hotels offered overnight accommodation in one common sleeping room with tiers of bunks, like Belinda’s Grand Forks Hotel, but the Fairview was incomparably grander. The second floor had individual, wallpapered bedrooms—too cramped to contain more than a bed but boasting Brussels carpets, brass bedsteads, and lace curtains. Only residents realized that the elegant wallpaper was glued onto sheets of canvas nailed to wooden studs, which meant that the slightest whisper could be heard in the next room. The top floor was left open for the first night’s dance but would soon be partitioned into equally tiny bedrooms.

  Belinda had thought of everything. The basement furnace (built by her old friend Julius Geise) was circled with wires on which miners could hang wet socks. There was a side entrance for ladies, to protect them from having to walk through the bar. There were electric lights, thanks to a steamboat tied up to the riverbank in front of the Fairview that generated electricity with its paddle wheel. There were telephones, connecting the Fairview with other Dawson establishments: a network of telephone wires had been strung up in town and around the creeks a month earlier, and Belinda had had the foresight to offer a room in the Fairview as the telephone switchboard. There was even a bathhouse, constructed on two barges lashed together in front of the Fairview. This was particularly popular because two of the attendants spoke only German. “The miners . . . used to follow them around . . . asking them over and over, ‘Where do you work?’ just to hear the boys answer, ‘In de bad house.’”

  The Fairview Hotel was the first three-story building in Dawson City, and the ultimate proof (if
any was needed) that Belinda Mulrooney always won her bets.

  A few details were still missing—this was the Yukon, after all, where it took three months for goods ordered from Outside to arrive. Muslin was tacked over the bedroom windows to keep the bugs out because as yet there was no window glass, and there were no bedroom doors. The legs for the dining room chairs had been left on the dock at St. Michael, so a local carpenter was hurriedly cobbling together new ones. Belinda did not let these trivialities handicap her. Ecstatic to have been proven right, she went all out to flaunt her success on opening day.

  The tone of Belinda Mulrooney’s memoir as she describes her big bash is shamelessly gloating. This was the culmination of all her efforts, all her dreams. Throughout her life, she had been out to prove that she was smarter, better, tougher than the men around her, and the Fairview Hotel was the undeniable evidence. She had turned herself into a successful businesswoman in an era when such a type was so unusual that the term was most often used as a euphemism for a brothelkeeper. With success, another Belinda emerged. She was still a lot of fun, and loyal to those who were loyal to her, but a nasty streak surfaced. She became a bit of a bully, with no time for losers.

  First, however, came her hotel’s grand opening. “The opening of the Fairview was an immense thing,” she recalled. “For the boys who had built the hotel in such a short time it was one big potlatch . . . Bill Leggett was pretty sore. It took him until 12 o’clock to loosen up.” Belinda organized a barbecue for her crew of workmen and served them a washtub full of punch on the porch. For Dawson’s “society,” she served an elaborate menu prepared by a chef from San Francisco. A sense of social inferiority still lingered in Belinda’s tough persona, so she took particular delight in the way that everybody wanted to be at her opening. Dressed in her usual forbidding uniform of navy blouse and dark skirt, and with her unruly dark hair pulled back into a bun, she personally welcomed Colonel James Domville, a member of the Canadian Parliament from New Brunswick, government officials like Frederick Coates Wade, who was now land commissioner as well as crown prosecutor, and “the boys from the bank.” A handful of these professionals had even persuaded their wives to make the grim journey north, and these women flocked to the Fairview. The sense of feminine style that had prompted Belinda to bring gorgeous, flimsy silk undergarments to sell in Dawson made her appreciate the women’s “doll rags which were all new to us and brought a touch of the Outside.” Sadie, Belinda’s loyal employee with the infectious laugh, took their wraps, and the society wives either didn’t know or didn’t care that the motherly woman serving their tables was the notorious Effie, with her checkered past.

  Even the Klondike Nugget’s Gene Allen was impressed with what he described in the next edition of the paper as “an immense affair.” He was too busy tucking in to take detailed notes of what he was eating. “The spread would make your mouth water to give an account of it in detail,” he reported. “Suffice it to say that the menu was equal to anything produced in the centre of a more pretentious civilization, while the wine list was an eye opener to those who suppose the principal convivial drink of Dawson to be ‘hootchinoo.’ Mumm’s extra dry flowed freely.”

  The only person who didn’t enjoy himself was Harry Cribb, Belinda’s foreman, who had built the Fairview in less than eighteen weeks. The miners had taken over the third floor and dragged up a fiddler, an accordion player, and a harmonica player for a hoedown. Once the dancing started, Cribb kept running a finger around his collar and looking anxiously at the ceilings. “God, I hope the place [doesn’t] fall down,” he muttered. The celebration lasted until six or seven in the morning. When they left, half the guests said to the proprietor, “Put up another hotel and make it six storeys next time.”

  Belinda’s timing was impeccable. She had opened her spiffy new log palace just as a new class of visitor was arriving in Dawson City. In the previous year’s stampede, almost all of the cheechakos had been dirt-poor prospectors, escaping the depression that still held North America in its grip. Men like Bill Haskell and Jack London were penniless dreamers and gamblers, ready to risk everything in the hope of striking paydirt. Many had already returned south—a few, like Bill, with bags of dust and nuggets, far more, like Jack, with nothing but a body wrecked by hardship and a head full of memories. Most of those who remained in the Klondike gold fields had little time for the damask napkins or silverware in the Fairview’s dining room, and couldn’t afford the $6.50 a night that Belinda charged for one of her stuffy little second-floor bedrooms.

  But this year, the human avalanche included a scattering of a different kind of cheechako. Alongside bank managers and newspaper proprietors were wealthy thrill seekers looking for comfortably upholstered adventures. Although most people in the 1890s were still suffering from the sting of economic depression, this was also the Gilded Age, in which the rich were getting richer. On New York City’s Fifth Avenue, the Astor family was busy building the world’s largest (and most prestigious) luxury hotel, the Waldorf Astoria. In Newport, Rhode Island, Cornelius Vanderbilt had just completed his seventy-room mansion, The Breakers, at a cost of more than $7 million. At the bottom of the social pyramid, a weary army continued to toil in the shipyards, railroads, workshops, and department stores of the new industrial age. But between the two extremes of super-rich and wretched poor, enough shrewd investors were making money from the country’s rapid industrialization to expand their own horizons.

  Publicity about Klondike Kings and Dawson’s dizzy bar life fired the imaginations of Americans with wanderlust. “Dawson is gold, whisky and women in a riotous whirl,” wrote Edward Livernash, a Hearst reporter paid to gush hyperbole. In the New York Journal of October 6, 1897, he had compared the Yukon settlement to the camps of previous gold rushes: “Not Leadville in vermilion heyday, nor Tombstone with the lid off, nor San Francisco in the flush of ’49, had more picturesqueness than this camp has today . . . Front Street never sleeps.” In the spring of 1898, such shameless exaggerations had drawn north travelers who never dreamed a year earlier of steaming up the Yukon. Many took the easier all-water route, a 3,000-mile voyage from Seattle to St. Michael followed by the 1,400-mile journey up the Yukon River to Dawson. Weather permitting, the entire trip took about forty days. In 1897, only five paddle-steamers had made the Yukon leg of the journey, but between June 8 and September 20, 1898, thirty-eight steamers paddled from the Bering Sea to Dawson City and back. Fifteen made the round trip twice and three made it three times.

  The very same day that Belinda’s Fairview Hotel opened with such fanfare, the S.S. Leah tied up at the waterfront after a twenty-one-day voyage from St. Michael. On board was a diverse collection of sight-seers, including fifty-year-old Jeremiah Lynch, a debonair figure in suit and polished leather shoes who was a published author and a former president of the San Francisco Stock Exchange. Lynch had made the trip with a vague plan to buy a gold mine and a firm determination to see what all the fuss was about. As Lynch would write in his 1904 narrative, Three Years in the Klondike, his fellow passengers were a motley crowd. They included a former U.S. senator from Arkansas intent on opening a law office, a widow and her “piquante daughter Georgie, of good old Virginia stock,” an elderly German couple from Sacramento called the Wichters, and “two ladies of mental and physical altitude.”

  The two women of altitude and, as Lynch remarked, considerable girth were Mrs. Mary Hitchcock, widow of a U.S. naval officer, and Miss Edith Van Buren, niece of the former U.S. president. This commanding pair liked to explore exotic locations each summer, preferably in picturesque outfits. Their gold-mining garb consisted of blue serge knickerbockers, striped jersey sweaters, large sombreros, and heavy cartridge belts to which were strapped fearsome handguns. Lynch marveled at their baggage: “Two gigantic Danish dogs, a tent that would entertain seventy-five people . . . a collection of pigeons and rare fowls, boxes and boxes of pâté de fois gras, truffles, sardines, olives farcies, several kinds of musical instruments, and a bowling alley
.” Mrs. Hitchcock, a grande dame with a sharp tongue and hot temper, was furious when told she had excess luggage, and refused to be parted from her Edison motion-picture projector, her ice-cream freezer, her air mattresses, or a single one of her birds (several canaries, two cages of pigeons, and a parrot).

  Two thousand miles from the nearest city, surrounded by wilderness, Dawson’s Front Street was crowded night and day with men looking for entertainment, gold, work—or a way home.

  Most of the Leah’s passengers, including the two fat ladies, the U.S. senator, and Jeremiah Lynch, stepped ashore once the vessel docked at the waterfront and joined the crowds on Front Street. But compared to the glittering city of gold described in newspapers, the bawdy reality of Dawson City was a ghastly shock for others. The Wichters announced that they were not leaving the Leah. Frau Wichter, who weighed over 300 pounds, remained planted on the large chair outside her stateroom. “From this upper deck I can see the town pretty well, and I am afraid,” she confided to Lynch. “It’s no place for us, with all these men and bad women. I don’t know why we came here.”