Gold Diggers

by Charlotte Gray

  While Short whipped up curried bacon and washed Flora’s napkins, Flora got busy. Within five days of her arrival in Dawson, she had walked all around the town and spoken to most of its more respectable citizens. She was looking for answers to two related questions. How much gold was here? And was there enough to continue to draw people to the district for a period of years sufficient to achieve, in her words, “the permanent and civilized settlement of the country”?

  Finding the answers involved polite but relentless grilling of Dawson’s prominent citizens. She made appointments with both the affable David Doig of the Bank of British North America and the thin-lipped Mr. Wills of the Canadian Bank of Commerce, so she might learn how much gold had been deposited in their tin chests. Knowing that the trading companies acted as repositories for miners’ pokes and as lending institutions for prospectors needing a grubstake, she walked into the offices of Captain John Jerome Healy, general manager of the North American Transportation and Trading Company, and Captain J. E. Hansen, general manager of the Alaska Commercial Company. She spoke to Mike and Sam Bartlett, who ran the largest packing business in the city, about the amount of gold their mule trains carried down from the creeks. She questioned the NWMP commander about how much gold was being circulated in the town.

  One of Flora’s most important interviews was with Thomas Fawcett, the gold commissioner whose office was now even more cluttered with piles of paper than when Jack London had met him. Flora questioned Fawcett closely about official and unofficial gold production statistics. How much gold was evading the royalty fee? The Klondike Nugget’s campaign against Commissioner Fawcett was going full bore while Flora was in the Yukon. A week before she arrived in Dawson, editor Gene Allen had accused Fawcett of favoring certain claimants in a recent stampede up Dominion Creek and displaying utter incompetence in fulfilling his duties. “The Rottenest Piece of Business and Rankest Injustice the Gold Commissioner’s Office Has Yet Perpetrated” read the Nugget headline. A few days after Flora arrived, a Nugget editorial entitled “How Long, Oh Lord?” thundered, “We . . . have never before run across a public officer so universally condemned for vacillation, incompetence and disregard of the individuals composing the public.” The Klondike Nugget also fulminated against the royalty regime imposed by the Canadian government, pointing out (with justice) that this was taxation without representation, since the Yukon had no voice in Ottawa. According to the Nugget, the offensive royalty was throttling the development of the creeks. In vain did Fawcett point out that the royalty was the government’s only means to reap any benefit for Canada before the gold disappeared into the States. The large number of American prospectors shared the Nugget’s indignation, and Nugget sales soared: “Uncle Andy,” the sixty-five-year-old paperboy in charge of street sales, was sold out before he had finished his cry, “The Nugget! The Nugget! The dear little Nugget!” The Nugget’s huffing, puffing tone of outrage would not have appealed to the Times’s correspondent, but Flora Shaw certainly heard the message.

  Between business meetings, Flora picked her way along the wooden sidewalks of Front Street, noting a mob of about a thousand men idly staring at boats tied up at the wharves, wagons driving up and down the street, or any other passing show. “They appear to be for the most part in the prime of life, sturdy, well fed, and in a rough sense, well dressed: they also appear to have nothing in the world to do.” She was puzzled by their lassitude in the midst of such a buzz of activity: the ceaseless whine of sawmills, the yells of stevedores unloading freight, the hammer blows of builders erecting yet more false-fronted buildings, the shouts of hustlers drumming up business. A man might easily find work, so why were so many slouching around with their hands stuck in their pockets? She also told the readers of the Times that there was scarcely a woman to be seen, although this was not strictly true. As she made her way down Second Avenue, she would not have been able to avoid prostitutes, wearily soliciting clients, outside their cabins (“hutches” or “maisons de joie” in Dawson lingo). But Flora had developed that essential characteristic of a Victorian lady, the ability to remain oblivious to “fallen women.”

  One night, between midnight and two o’clock, Flora went with a male escort (almost certainly a police officer) on a tour of some of the twenty-two gambling salons and music halls operating in the town that summer. These were the dives Jack London had loved—music hall melodies bashed out on honky-tonk pianos, bottles lined up behind the long mahogany bars, the warm light of coal-oil lamps reflected in gilt-framed mirrors. But it was not Flora’s world. She cast a cool eye on the professional gamblers, the blowsy hookers, the long-nailed barmen with their sleeve garters and bowler hats, and the throng of boozy miners. As she reported to the Times, “The gaming tables are habitually crowded and are piled with counters representing substantial sums . . . Some calculations put it at hundreds of thousands of dollars a night . . . The price of liquor ranges from half a dollar for a glass of beer to forty dollars for a bottle of champagne; but everybody drinks.” Her escort pointed out to her several men who regularly spent $5,000 to $10,000 at a sitting, treating their friends. She noted how, despite the Canadian Bank of Commerce’s bills, gold dust remained the universal currency and “every house of business has its gold scales.”

  In the Times, Flora reported her observations without comment. To Lulu, she wrote of her night on the town, “It was not a pretty sight, but it enabled me to form a more complete estimate of the miner’s life. It was the miner at play. I shall probably respect him more when I see him next week at work.”

  Flora Shaw was all business, judging by her Times dispatches and letters to Lulu. She had no time for the lives of those not directly involved with gold production. There was no mention of the Hān people, struggling to maintain their Moosehide community a couple of miles downriver. She was too busy writing up her notes to socialize with the handful of Dawson residents who might have approached her social standards. Every steamer from St. Michael brought in more affluent tourists, and they were changing the look and feel of the isolated town. There was even a whiff of sophistication. Miss Van Buren and Mrs. Hitchcock had established themselves in West Dawson, the new settlement on the western bank of the Yukon River, safely removed from Dawson’s typhoid epidemic. They had pitched their huge circus tent and were serving anchovies, mock-turtle soup, roast moose, pâtés, stuffed olives, and peach ice cream to the gratin of Dawson. Their guest of honor was often Big Alex McDonald, gussied up and uncomfortable in a starched white shirt and stiff collar for the parties. Belinda Mulrooney’s Fairview Hotel was thriving; Mary Hitchcock had visited it and widened her eyes with astonishment when she read a menu that began with “oyster cocktails.” Father Judge was delighted to discover among the newcomers a fellow Baltimorean, a physician, with whom he could play chess and discuss philosophy.

  The decks of little Yukon steamers had to be reinforced to take the weight of gold when it was shipped out at the end of the summer.

  None of these notable characters appeared in Flora’s account of her subarctic sojourn. The only hint of conversations with strangers beyond official circles is a reference in her third Times letter to a handful of women who had wintered in Dawson. When asked if Dawson was dreadful in January, they assured the fastidious Londoner that “winter is the pleasantest season.” One, more outspoken than the others and sounding suspiciously like Belinda, had retorted, “Why, we get a great deal more daylight than you ever see in London in the winter.” If this was Belinda, Flora never mentioned her by name, and probably treated the fiery little Irish-American woman with her customary crisp sense of superiority.

  The only person Flora felt on equal terms with was the husband of a distant English acquaintance, whom she had met on the street. She invited him to supper in her cabin, and her handyman, Short, managed to rustle up a four-course dinner featuring mulligatawny soup. As Flora told Lulu, her visitor marveled at the sophistication of Flora’s quarters, regarding them as “luxurious” because, as Flora remarked, �
��I happened to think of bringing half a dozen dinner napkins with me and I have one put in the middle of my [packing case] table.” Flora herself had no interest in accepting invitations to dinner in cabins where “people sit on packing cases for chairs and dinner is served on tin plates which you wash as you use them.”

  After five days in Dawson City, Flora set off to visit the gold-bearing creeks. The stamina of this forty-six-year-old woman, accustomed to English mansions and Westminster pavements, was impressive as she set out alone to see things for herself. She pulled on canvas leggings under her skirt and a seasoned pair of leather boots and headed out of town for four days. It rained for two. The mud was terrible, and she frequently found herself wading through streams or balancing on tree trunks that had fallen across them. Nevertheless, her letters reveal that despite the hardships she was exhilarated by the midnight sunsets and “the sensation of immense solitudes the very moment you are out of sight of occupation. One realizes the newness of it too by the tameness of the birds . . . They don’t appear to have learned yet to be afraid of man and the wild canaries and other birds will almost perch on your head.” In common with many women who went north, Flora enjoyed the chance to strike out on her own, unshackled from the stifling social conventions of life back home.

  Flora Shaw was as shocked as Jack London had been the previous fall by the desecration of a landscape now buzzing with activity. Valleys that had once been carpeted each summer with soft green moss and wildflowers were glistening expanses of black mud, through which creeks snaked. The miners’ insatiable need for timber to build cabins, windlasses, flumes, and fires had stripped the hillsides naked, making the scenery, in Flora’s word, “monotonous.” A network of sluice boxes, elevated wooden tubes, threaded its way from creek mouth to canyon. Rockers, boilers, winches, and trestles littered the ground in every direction.

  An army of gold diggers worked like horses and lived like dogs here. Their homes were filthy, surrounded by lines of soiled, flapping undergarments drying in the summer sun, and a debris of rusty old cans. Sled dogs roamed free, and the primitive outhouses attracted flies and mosquitoes. Flora was grateful for her beekeeping veil. Inside the cabins, sheds, and shacks, furniture was makeshift and minimal, dirt floors unswept, and spittoons filled with evil-looking tobacco juice. But where Jack had seen exploitation of the working man, Flora saw business potential: “It was extraordinarily interesting to see the gold being taken at every point out of the ground.” Nobody could hope to cover in four days the hundreds of square miles around Dawson where between 4,000 and 8,000 miners were working, but Flora Shaw did her best. On the first day she walked sixteen miles from Dawson along the lower stretch of Bonanza Creek to Grand Forks, where Belinda Mulroney had established her roadhouse. Flora stayed in this boomtown, which was home to almost 10,000 people this summer, for the next three nights. She spent the day after her arrival exploring the mines on the upper section of Bonanza Creek, the next visiting the claims on Eldorado and Hunker creeks, and returned to Dawson on the fourth day. Altogether, she walked at least seventy miles and probably saw most of the 165 claims on Bonanza, the 56 claims on Eldorado, and several of the 90 claims on Hunker Creek.

  Throughout the Klondike Gold Rush, these three creeks ran through the busiest and most productive valleys in the whole district. Their bare slopes were criss-crossed with flumes bringing water down to sluice out those great piles of paydirt. Flora watched thousands of men digging into mounds of gravel and muck, then tipping spadefuls into the running water with the same sense of crazed urgency as if they were digging for bodies under a recent mudslide. There were so few weeks to find gold before winter set in again and everything froze. But when the miners saw this imperious Englishwoman striding along the creeks in her veil and leggings, they paused, open mouthed. Flora herself was relentless. At several claims, she pulled out her notebook and had a long chat with the men about what they were doing and how much gold they were finding. She soon grasped the system—how land was staked, how the miners spent the winter deep underground, excavating muck, gravel, and paydirt until they reached bedrock, how the paydirt was shoveled into sluice boxes or rockers in the spring, and how running water then washed away the dirt, leaving the gold behind.

  The almost fabulous wealth of the creeks stunned Flora. On one claim, she watched a prospector collect the gold from the bottom of the sluice boxes after only two days of sluicing. “I stopped for a few minutes, and while I stood there they took, besides nuggets, 500 ounces, or close upon £2,000 worth of gold-dust from the open boxes.” The yield from that clean-up in today’s terms was close to $500,000. On another claim, she heard that $400,000 of gold (over $20 million in today’s terms) had been taken in the previous weeks. She was staggered to see how the men casually threw gold scrapings from the bottom of the sluice boxes into shallow pans that were “as carelessly exposed as if the yellow heaps they hold were so much sawdust or brown sugar.” Throughout the diggings she inspected, “Gold might be seen spangling the ground, and there were places in which gold dust and nuggets might be scraped together with a spoon.” She also marveled at the amount of gold coming from the bench claims overlooking the creeks, where ancient, dried-up river beds were proving immensely productive. Flora told Times readers, “On French Hill and on Skookum, overlooking the El Dorado and Bonanza Valleys, I have myself picked up nuggets and seen gold washed as freely as in the phenomenal river-beds two or three hundred feet below.”

  Flora had expected to hear appalling language and was even prepared for disrespectful attitudes. But her decorum quelled obscenity. Her new acquaintances, she noted, seemed determined “that ‘the lady’ would be spared any unnecessary acquaintance with the coarser side of life.” When asked for their views on the gold fields, many gave her an earful about the 10 percent tax that the Canadian government demanded on what they took out of the ground. When Flora apologized to one man for her indiscreet inquiries, he guffawed: “Oh, you can ask me anything you like! When I don’t want to tell you, I shall lie. That is how we manage. The Government has made perjurers of us all in this country.”

  Flora Shaw also discovered that not all the hobnail-booted miners were laborers or “foreigners,” despite living conditions that would shock a working-class Englishman. Some she might even have met in London, although they were well disguised in their filthy shirts, bushy beards, and battered felt hats. (“No-one cleans their boots in this country and there is no blacking,” she told Lulu. “I have had a pot of Trumpers complexion cream which I have shared daily with mine.”) On Hunker Creek, she stumbled into the smoke-filled cabin of a man called McFarlane, who, she discovered, “is the sort of man who in London would probably belong to one or two good clubs and enjoy all the luxuries of civilization.” There wasn’t a book, decanter, newspaper, or piece of silverware in his shack. Instead, three or four of McFarlane’s friends were seated on packing cases drinking weak tea and gulping down corned beef off tin plates. Despite the down-at-heel surroundings, McFarlane treated Flora with the utmost courtesy. “I’ve just had a clean-up at the mine,” he remarked. “Would you like to see my gold?” When she said she would, he casually put two gold pans in the middle of the dirty floor and emptied his leather sacks into them. There was about a thousand ounces—worth, according to Flora’s calculations, over £3,500.

  Flora was astonished at the careless way prospectors stored their treasure. This man had $1.5 million of gold stacked in his cabin.

  In other cabins, she saw rows of old tobacco canisters and apricot tins filled with gold, lined up on windowsills. Nuggets were stored with as little security as peppermint candies. “It is extraordinarily curious,” she confided to Lulu, “to see the contrast between all the piles of wealth which lie about in the most careless manner and the extremities of poverty in which everybody lives.” Successful miners rarely carried their own harvest back to Dawson, since gold was so heavy. Instead, they sent it down on pack trains that regularly moved up and down the creeks. “One little pack train
of three mules brought down a few days ago £24,000 worth of gold in common sacks . . . tied at the mouth with common twine,” Flora noted. The mule driver had the foresight to fasten some sailcloth over the sacks to prevent them getting ripped open if a mule fell or they were snagged by an overhanging branch.

  Throughout her tour of the creeks, and despite the miners’ reticence to tell her their total yield, Flora was busy assessing the output of the mines. One of the firms of packers, which handled about one-third of the total business, told her that their pack trains had brought down from Bonanza and Eldorado around 45,000 pounds in weight in the previous two months. Flora made a rough calculation that the output so far in 1898 of the creeks she had seen was around £2 to £3 million, or $10 to $15 million in 1898 values.

  On the strength of these calculations, Flora decided that “this subarctic province,” as she described it to Mr. Buckle, the Times’s business editor, was more interesting than she had expected. She knew she was not alone in her conclusions: Close Brothers, a London bank, had recently plunged into an extraordinary engineering venture: financing the construction of the White Pass and Yukon Railway, which would transport stampeders from Skagway to the summit of the White Pass. Flora sent Buckle a locally printed map: “I think the business world might be glad to have a map of the Klondike district in which the principal creeks should be marked.” And she tried to convey her own sense of the region’s potential by mentioning, “Capital is beginning to come here. Rothschild and others have experts on the spot.” The previous January, the Ottawa government had enacted new regulations that allowed the gold commissioner in Dawson to approve twenty-year dredging leases to large corporations. Flora had already heard that at least two companies were interested: the English mining promoter Arthur Newton Christian Treadgold and the Guggenheims, the wealthy mining family from Philadelphia.