Gold Diggers

by Charlotte Gray

  Despite the Fairview’s electric lights and the Canadian Bank of Commerce’s assay plant, Dawson remained a dauntingly crude society. There were still only three public latrines on the waterfront. Private scavengers had been contracted to carry refuse outside town limits, but they could not cope with the tide of garbage in the streets. The water from the Yukon River was undrinkable, and although the floods had receded, the dusty streets were lined with pools of stagnant water. A typhoid epidemic had broken out a couple of weeks earlier, and word on Front Street was that about 120 people were dying every week. An undertaker named Charlie Brimstone advertised on a canvas sign: “Bodies embalmed and shipped to the ‘outside.’” And Mrs. Wichter wasn’t mistaken about those “bad women.” A whole new crop of prostitutes were openly touting for business on the streets. Mattie Silks, a famous Denver madam, had just arrived with eight of her “boarders” and set up shop in a big frame building on Second Avenue. When she hustled her girls south three months later at freeze-up, she would take $38,000 with her.

  Jeremiah Lynch wandered along Front Street at ten o’clock one night, when it was still broad daylight. Through the open doors of cavernous saloons, a low hubbub of men’s voices and fiddle tunes escaped alongside the mingled stench of sweat, tobacco, vomit, urine, beer, and whiskey. Lynch stuck his head into one saloon, in which hundreds of people were “pushing and jostling around the faro and roulette tables, some to play and some to see.” He caught sight of a Mephistophelian figure in shirtsleeves and suspenders, who sat silently in front of a huge pair of gold scales “and was ever busy weighing, from the sacks of gold-dust handed him by the gamblers, quantities of dust in value from 50 to 1,000 dollars, for which he gave them ivory chips to bet with.” Professional gamblers, nicknamed “Coal oil Johnnies,” ruthlessly and relentlessly shifted the chips from the punters’ side of the table to their own. Lynch shuddered: “The whole environment of the place was that of another and a worse world.”

  Ironically, by the time that Lynch, the Wichters, and the Hitchcock- Van Buren duo reached Dawson City, the American press’s infatuation with the San Francisco of the North had already faded. In the spring of 1898, New York proprietors had a sensational new story with which to sell their papers: the American war with Spain over Cuba. Caribbean naval battles knocked Klondike gold strikes off the front pages. But on the other side of the Atlantic, the Klondike Gold Rush was getting more attention than ever—not for colorful anecdotes about death on the Chilkoot Pass but for analysis of the mining prospects in the gold fields. What was fact and what was rumor? Which of the American press articles was sheer boosterism? Would modern technology increase output? Where could anybody discover reliable information? In 1898, the Times, the Manchester Guardian, the Daily Graphic, and the Illustrated London News all sent correspondents to the Dominion of Canada. These writers provided more sober commentary on the northern Xanadu than any of the Hearst boys had done.

  By far the most important and influential of the reporters who arrived in Dawson City this summer was the Times’s emissary. Within the macho gold-mining world, “the Thunderer’s” choice of reporter was also the most surprising. The colonial correspondent of what was then the world’s most influential paper was a petite forty-six-year-old single woman called Flora Shaw. Flora shared with Belinda Mulrooney a stamina and ambition that left most of their male competitors in the dust, but in every other respect these two Yukon pioneers could not have been more different. Belinda had made the hideous journey to Dawson City to improve her own fortunes. Flora made the 8,000-mile journey from London with a much more ambitious goal: to strengthen the British Empire. She wanted to see if this inaccessible, ice-bound gold field was a good investment for British capital. Her visit would be crucial for the future of gold mining in the Yukon.

  Wherever she found herself, Flora Shaw never forgot that she was a representative of the largest empire in the history of the world, which, in 1898, comprised nearly a quarter of the land mass of the earth and a quarter of its population. Today, “empire” is a word with negative associations, and it is hard to stomach the aggressive patriotism of many of the British Empire’s subjects, including those in British North America, a hundred years ago. But for Flora Shaw’s contemporaries, that splash of pink across the globe had a sense of inevitability about it. The previous year they had celebrated Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee—sixty years on the throne—and 50,000 troops, from all corners of the earth, had marched up the London Strand. It was a vivid illustration of the comment of British historian James Morris: “The nineteenth century had been pre-eminently Britain’s century, and the British saw themselves still as top dogs.”

  The British Empire had been acquired in a fairly haphazard fashion through the previous century, but by the 1890s it had achieved almost the status of a faith. The New Imperialists, of whom Flora Shaw was one, assumed that it was not merely the right of the British to rule a quarter of the world; it was their duty to spread British values, laws, political institutions, and social habits. At the same time, it was the obligation of Britain’s overseas possessions and partners to send an endless flow of goods—furs, food, fruit, skins, wool, cotton, tea, minerals, rubber, wines, diamonds, and gold—back to the imperial capital to ensure the prosperity of the Empire. Now London travel agencies were arranging passages to the Yukon for adventurers, and the Daily Chronicle had printed a Gold Rush ballad:Klondike! Klondike!

  Libel yer luggidge “Klondike”!

  Theers no luck dawn Shoreditch wye,

  Pack yer traps and be orf I sye,

  Au’ ’orf an’ awye ter Klondike!

  Spurred on by this vulgar interest, Flora Shaw had suggested to her editor that perhaps the newspaper should investigate what was going on in the Empire’s most northerly regions. After all, the Times was practically the mouthpiece of the Empire. As the paper’s official history puts it,

  Flora Shaw, correspondent for the Times of London, was “as clever as they make them . . . and talking like a Times leader all the time.”

  “For The Times, Imperialism, by which the paper meant the Union Jack and what it stood for, had by 1890 taken rank before all other considerations.” The paper of record should see if this new gold strike could be an important imperial asset. And Flora Shaw insisted that she was the writer to send.

  Unlike Belinda Mulrooney, Flora Shaw began life with certain advantages. Born in 1852 into a talented Anglo-Irish family, Flora had access to a good library and a network of family friends. Life was not easy: her mother died when she was young, and she had to help raise several younger siblings. She was also enmeshed in Victorian restrictions on women’s behavior. But Flora was one of those tough-minded women in late-nineteenth-century Britain whose stiff spine and starched manners hid a will of steel. A slim, self-possessed young woman with neatly dressed auburn hair and intelligent, dark eyes, she listened carefully to what people said, then quietly made up her own mind on issues. She had published five novels before the age of thirty-four, and she undertook social work in London’s East End. The overcrowding and poverty she saw in the slums and the insufficiency of private charity appalled her. Unlike many contemporaries, she didn’t argue that the problems should be fixed by economic and political reforms at home. Instead, her exposure to industrial poverty in Britain inspired a passionate belief that the answer for her country’s poor and destitute masses lay overseas—in Britain’s colonies. This sparked the zeal for Empire that infused her later journalism. In “distant lands,” she noted in her diary, slum dwellers could “pass from sin and dirt and misery to space.”

  Thanks to family connections, Flora Shaw traveled extensively outside Britain. She made friends with important people such as Rudyard Kipling and Cecil Rhodes, whose views coincided with her own. She particularly admired Rhodes, the bull-necked South African diamond magnate who was the prime minister of South Africa’s Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896; she shared his conviction that it was the destiny of Britain to spread through the heart of Africa. In
fact, she was half in love with Rhodes: she was mesmerized by muscular imperial heroes and would eventually marry one. Flora regularly sent reports to London publications from her foreign travels. Her big break came in 1890, when Moberly Bell, the newly appointed assistant manager at the Times, offered her a regular column under the title “The Colonies.” A couple of years later, he sent her off on a year-long tour of Africa and Australia, returning by way of the United States and Canada. In the Transvaal, she visited the gold fields that had been discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886.

  In 1893, Flora Shaw was appointed colonial editor at a salary of £800, or $4,000. She was the first woman on the staff of the Times and among the highest-paid women journalists of her day. It helped that her enthusiastic belief in the British Empire as a civilizing force echoed her employer’s editorial line. In the 1890s, Flora wrote over 500 articles, columns, and leaders for the Times promoting British imperial interests.

  Flora’s views were definite and her influence was considerable, but part of her success was thanks to her calculations about which conventions to challenge, and which to observe. She never rocked the boat in the gentlemen’s club that constituted the Times. She was rigidly proper: she always wore black, and in later years would join the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League alongside Gertrude Bell. Her articles were written in the same cool, lucid tones as those of her male colleagues, and when her byline first appeared it was simply “F. Shaw.” This approach was quite different from the florid style adopted by most late-nineteenth-century women writers; one editor complained that she never wrote anything “to bring a lump to the throat.” But Moberly Bell applauded her disdain for emotional appeal. “You don’t seem even to have mentioned anything about the Dominion on which the sun never sets,” he chortled about one of her pieces. “This will never do!” Her contemporary Mary Kingsley, another fearless woman traveler who deliberately dressed like a maiden aunt, observed that Flora was “as clever as they make them, capable of any immense amount of work, as hard as nails and talking like a Times leader all the time.”

  Government officials treated the Times’s colonial editor with such awe that they regularly invited her to private briefings on matters of state. On occasion her close relationships with on-the-ground sources (especially Rhodes and his cronies) got her into trouble. In 1897, she was accused of having prior knowledge of the Jameson Raid in South Africa, in which one of Rhodes’s lieutenants led a raid into the Boer Republic of the Transvaal, aimed at instigating an uprising and seizing the gold-rich Transvaal for Britain. The plan failed, and Flora was called in front of a select committee of the British House of Commons to explain her role. With icy dignity, she parried MPs’ questions. “It is not possible,” wrote the Times’s historian, “to doubt that Miss Shaw used her woman’s wits rather to conceal than reveal.”

  Like any good reporter, Flora Shaw was always on the lookout for a solid story that would burnish her professional reputation and imperial ideals. She was well aware of the value of South Africa’s gold fields and diamond mines to the British Empire: once in production, the Rand mines (two-thirds of which were owned by British stockholders) would provide a quarter of the world’s supply of gold and make the Transvaal government the richest in Africa. As soon as she heard the first rumors of gold strikes in the most remote corner of the British Empire, Flora plunged into research on the Yukon. Were British interests at risk? “If the Yukon is really as big a thing as it promises to be,” she wrote to Moberly Bell in early 1898, “I think it is important British as well as American capital be encouraged to flow into the gold fields.” In a diffident response, Bell raised the possibility that Flora herself might make the arduous trip to this bleak and distant corner of the Empire. She grabbed at the chance, and made appointments with the Canadian high commissioner, various senior bankers, and several mining authorities to prepare for the assignment.

  On June 22, Flora settled herself comfortably in the dining car of the London and North Western Railway train, bound for Liverpool docks and the White Star Line’s steamship Britannic, on which she would sail to New York. At London’s Euston Station, she had waved goodbye to her sister Lulu and a “circle of dear kind faces on the platform”; now she was finally able to relax and enjoy the railway company’s idea of a “Light luncheon—consommé printanier, curried mutton. Roast beef, beans, potatoes, fruit tart, lemon jelly.” Afterward she returned to her compartment, opened her leather writing case and began a short note to her sister. “Dearest Lulu, I love you all. I believe that is chiefly what I want to say.” Tucking the luncheon menu into the envelope, she gazed out of the window at the smoky industrial towns and gently rolling countryside of the British Midlands. Ahead of her, as she traveled to Dawson City by way of New York, Montreal, Winnipeg, and Vancouver, lay far more dramatic and magnificent vistas—and also the opportunity to escape the stifling British expectations of a “lady” and to chase a good lead.

  During her Canadian trip, Flora would write four “Letters from Our Colonial Correspondent” that appeared in the Times. They were well-researched, sober accounts, weaving together information about the gold fields, the Dominion’s economic prospects, and the shortcomings of Canadian officials. But she also wrote far more revealing letters to her younger sister, Lulu, consisting of several sheets of onionskin paper covered in her elegant, slanting script. In the intimacy of this private correspondence, Flora did not muffle her strong opinions or disguise her snobbery. During her previous travels in North America, she had confided to Lulu that San Francisco’s streets gave her “the disagreeable impression of having got hopelessly astray in one vast servants’ hall from which there is no escape.” Now, as soon as she was settled into a large deck cabin on the Britannic, she took the same line in a quick note to her sister. She declared her fellow passengers to be chiefly American “of I fancy a distinctly second rate order but it is early to have opinions of a sweeping character.” She didn’t think much of the dining room, either. “Dinner was served in the American fashion which to English tastes is unseemly, all of it being apparently ready at once and everybody ordering that part of it which they preferred. My neighbour was at strawberry ice when I was still eating underdone roast beef.”

  What Flora’s fellow passengers thought of her is unrecorded, but they were probably intimidated by the well-spoken English woman, with her patrician profile, flawless complexion, and polished remoteness. Neatly dressed in well-tailored black suits or elegant gowns, she had the direct gaze and firm chin of a bitingly intelligent schoolteacher. In a later era, she might have played a leading role in the kind of events about which she wrote—as an imperial administrator, or elected politician. As a journalist, she was always hungry for facts. On the Britannic she quickly buttonholed a Mr. Monroe, a badly dressed, noisy passenger who would never have met her exacting standards had he not recently returned from the Klondike. Flora and Monroe spent hours together, heads bent over Flora’s maps as Monroe described what lay ahead.

  “His accounts of the hardships to be encountered are at first somewhat staggering,” Flora wrote to her sister. “The bedrock of ice melting constantly under the summer sun turns the ground into one sea of mud through which you have to wade. The mosquitoes are such that a strong man could not live for two hours and a half if exposed to them without protection in the bush. You are always foot sore, bruised and cut with falling over logs and stones. The food is insufficient because everything has to be carried on men’s backs and at night there is no rest but such as you can make for yourself when you are dead tired by cutting boughs and heaping them upon the damp ground.” After this recitation of horrors, Flora had asked Monroe how much personal luggage she should take. The grizzled old prospector hooted with laughter and told her she didn’t need any. Flora blenched and asked about a change of linen. “Change?” replied Monroe. “You won’t want to change the clothes you stand up in till you get out of the country again!”

  The idea of dirty underwear didn’t bother Flora as much
as Monroe’s guffaw at the very idea that she could make the trip from Montreal to Dawson City and back in sixty days, as she had planned. It would take at least three months, he told her. She was also stunned by the supplies he said she needed. In addition to provisions, she would have to arrange for the carriage of numerous articles: “A small cotton tent, a camp stove and utensils, a waterproof sleeping bag and a revolver, with two complete changes of [outer] clothes and two pairs of blankets makes up the rest. I add a further 101 lbs of luxuries chiefly condensed soups, candles, matches . . . and a few necessary drugs.” But the Times special correspondent had no intention of letting standards slide: “I suspect my Klondyker of being of a pessimistic temperament and much inclined to make the worst of things.”

  Flora assured her sister that she would enjoy a daily sponge bath, wear a flannel nightgown for bed, and would wash her feet with alum each night. And she planned to pack a few extras: a costume like a bee-keeper’s outfit to shield her from the mosquitoes, a small tin kettle and spirit lamp in a canvas satchel so she could “make a cup of tea whenever I feel so disposed,” split peas, haricot beans, rice, and a bottle of curry powder. “When I am tired of eating boiled bacon and pease pudding I shall eat curried bacon and rice with haricot soup made from the scraps and bones for a third variation . . . It will only amuse me to do my own cooking and washing.” Finally, Flora assured Lulu that she would not take stupid risks. “What The Times has sent me for is to send them good letters . . . They have not gone to the expense of my journey for the purpose of leaving my bones in Canada.”