Gold Diggers

by Charlotte Gray

  The same positive note crept into the third of her letters to appear in the Times. “Impeded as the work has been by the exceptional difficulties of climate and position,” she told readers, the gold field’s 1898 output “is in itself remarkable enough to deserve the attention of the business world.” She pointed out that costs were high because everything was done by hand. Flora had learned enough about the mining industry in South Africa to know that, with some capital investment, the digging, shoveling, drilling, and sluicing could be mechanized. Hauling the heavy dredging equipment out to the creeks would be expensive, but once it was installed a successful claim would need a workforce of three to five men, instead of between twenty and forty. Not only would labor costs drop sharply but so would the incredibly high bills for packing provisions and supplies out of Dawson to the creeks.

  After twenty days in Dawson City and on the creeks, Flora Shaw decided she had enough material. Her notebooks were full, she had purchased a small gold nugget for each of her sisters, and she had already eaten the mustard and cress she had planted around her tent. The brief northern summer was drawing to a close, winds were icy, the sky was filled with geese flying south, and she was impatient to escape. On August 11, she embarked on the stern-wheeler Anglian, steaming upriver. The journey home was rougher than her trip north. The Anglian was more comfortable than the steamer she had taken downriver—she even had her own cabin—but she was traveling upstream now, and the journey to Whitehorse took eleven days instead of six. The boat had to stop almost daily to collect wood for its furnace from the cordwood piles located at regular intervals along the bank. Then the boilers broke down, causing a day’s delay. Next, supplies ran out: “We had practically nothing but beans, but we found ourselves coming in contentedly like horses to their mangers to eat them three times a day.” Flora had developed a grudging regard for men who had fought their way north to chase their dreams of gold. “I lived on deck and slept with the cabin windows open, and did nothing but talk to the miners—queer, rough men, who put themselves at once on a footing of complete equality and were very kind and even chivalrous in their own way. One learns a lot about human nature on a trip of this sort.”

  From Whitehorse, there was still a lot of ground to cover. Desperate to get out of the Yukon, Flora was too impatient to wait for comfortable transportation. She crossed four lakes huddled under a tarpaulin in a scow, climbed the northern side of the Chilkoot Pass in a baggage train, scrambled on hands and knees over the summit, then slithered down a glacier on the other side. At Dyea, she staggered onto a Victoria-bound steamer only two weeks after she had left Dawson. Despite the pessimism of Mr. Monroe, her shipboard adviser, she had completed her journey in and out of the Yukon in fifty-three days. It was only ten weeks since she had waved goodbye to Lulu in London.

  Our Special Correspondent telegraphed her final two letters about the Klondike gold fields to the Times from Victoria, on August 29. She had been overwhelmed by the potential of the fields and the amount of gold that was being hauled out of the ground by primitive windlasses. Her calculations about the impact of mechanization were prescient: within a couple of years the pick-and-shovel prospectors would be replaced by well-funded corporations with steam-driven equipment.

  But Flora Shaw also had her scoop—although it was not the story that she had expected to bring home. Her fierce criticism of what was going on in Dawson City would not endear her to her hosts.

  CHAPTER 16

  Scandal and Steele, September-October 1898

  AFTER REACHING VANCOUVER, Flora Shaw made her way slowly east as a guest of the Hudson’s Bay Company. In the new pioneer settlements of Alberta and Saskatchewan and the booming city of Winnipeg, she took copious notes about agriculture, climate, the fur trade, and the lumber industry for future “Letters from Our Colonial Correspondent” for the Times. She was still on a campaign to export Britain’s excess population to distant colonial corners, and wrote to her sister Lulu that the land would benefit from an influx of “poor clergymen’s and soldiers’ and sailors’ daughters as well as sons.”

  Yet her Yukon adventure had widened her horizons. With her main objective accomplished, she was more open to new sights and people—especially the Indians she met. Impressed by the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Cree and Métis employees, she questioned the Indian wife of an HBC officer extensively about her people’s religion and customs, and a few days later, in northern Ontario, she admired the quill- and beadwork of a “pretty and graceful . . . young squaw.” Relentlessly intrepid, in late September she took a ten-day canoe trip with an HBC factor and two Ojibwa guides in the Rainy River region north of Lake Superior to study the sturgeon fishing industry. She was captivated by the dramatic, rocky scenery, and she visited an Indian camp where she was intrigued by a way of life so remote from her own. But her attitudes were colored by the self-serving assumptions of government and HBC bureaucrats and the romantic novels she had read as a child, particularly those by James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans. She swallowed the conventional wisdom that Canada’s indigenous peoples belonged to a “rapidly-dying race.”

  As Flora traveled east, she quietly speculated on the impact that the four letters she had so far telegraphed to London would have on both editors and readers of the Times. She knew that the first two letters would not cause a fuss. The first had appeared on August 27, 1898, with the dateline July 12, and was accompanied by a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid: “Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, Auri sacra fames?” (To what do you not drive human hearts, accursed craving for gold?) The editor introduced the letter with a preface: “It is not so long ago that Canada was regarded by a certain class of politicians as a troublesome dependency of no great value to the British Crown. Did such an idea linger still in the minds of Englishmen, it would be dispelled by such an account as we publish today.”

  Both this letter and the next one, which appeared on September 10, were thoughtful travelogues. But the next two letters were written and telegraphed after Flora had left the Yukon, and they covered her Dawson experiences. She had already written to Lulu that “the corruption among the Canadian officials is a shock to my faith in British institutions for which I was not prepared. It is absolutely scandalous but I trust that an end will be put to it when it is exposed.” Flora had seen government corruption in the Transvaal, but in her view it was nothing compared to what was going on in the Klondike. Government officials, she told her sister, “sell everything down to the right to enter a public building and poor men cannot get their gold claims recorded unless they give a part interest to the officials.” Flora’s imperial pride was outraged, and she was going to set things right. The third and fourth letters, published in London on September 19 and 23, respectively, each occupied an entire page of the Times and sparked both thundering editorials and correspondence.

  Flora was as forthright in the Thunderer as she had been to Lulu. The potential of the gold fields thrilled her, but “to put the position as plainly as it is daily and hourly stated on the mining fields and in the streets of Dawson, there is a widely prevalent conviction not only that the laws are bad, but that the officers through which they are administered are corrupt . . . It is impossible to talk for five minutes on business with anyone on the mines or in the streets without some allusion occurring to the subject, and it is a painful experience for Englishmen proud of the purity of the British system of government to be compelled to listen to the plain-spoken comments of Americans and foreigners.”

  What exactly was Flora Shaw talking about? Until her letter was published in the Times, most of the tales out of Dawson had been a combination of horror stories about conditions and climate and good-old-boy anecdotes about the brotherhood of prospectors and the incorruptible Mounties. Now here was this woman from London, who had only reached the Klondike thanks to the Canadian government, the NWMP, the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the Hudson’s Bay Company, writing that more than just the townsite stank. She was arguing that Dawson City was
a moral blot on the map of the British Empire.

  Flora’s accusations focused on two particular issues. The most important was the behavior of Canadian government officials. They were on the take, charged Flora. The gold commissioner’s office deliberately dragged its feet on recording claims, surveying mining districts, and publicizing areas available for staking in order to facilitate bribery. “A half or a quarter interest is frequently quoted as the price at which good claims can be recorded,” she wrote. The post office was just as bad. “Scarcely a day passes in which some fresh story does not become current of the number of dollars which it has cost to obtain letters.” A delivery of mail to the post office, located in a log cabin on Front Street, could produce a line-up to receive longed-for letters that stretched along the wooden sidewalk for several blocks.

  With no system for sorting mail at the Dawson City post office, the line-up outside would stretch for several blocks and last for days.

  The second issue was the royalty of 10 percent on gross output that Ottawa had imposed on the mining industry a year earlier. The Times was not the first major newspaper to protest the royalty, but Flora backed up the argument with facts. She recounted conversations with miners about the economics of their claims: she had come across one prospector who had spent $26,000 on a claim that had yielded gold to the value of $21,000 in the same period. “The owner under the law was not only the loser of $5,000: he remained the debtor of the Government for $2,000.” Some mine owners had told her that they were leaving their dumps of paydirt unwashed, “thinking it a better investment for their gold to remain in the ground than to be taken out to pay ten percent to the Dominion Government.” The excessive royalty, Flora wrote, would drive away capital and slow the development of the region.

  The prospectors were also riled by a recently announced regulation that the government should be allocated every alternate claim on creeks currently being surveyed. “For the law to halve the rights of the public only in order to take the whole amount so saved for the Government is resented as a gross injustice to the local prospectors who have borne the burden and heat of early development.”

  Flora’s style was more elegant than Gene Allen’s in the Klondike Nugget, but she shared his indignation. She had heard the complaints on the creeks, where American prospectors resented the Canadian government’s attempt to regulate their freewheeling world. (Most of them ignored that on the American side of the border, a non-American was not allowed to stake or own a claim at all.) Flora also made a more fundamental point about a town that was now two years old and had already remitted to Ottawa a substantial revenue. It was “ineptitude and inattention,” she charged, “on the part of responsible officers . . . that there are as yet no roads, no trustworthy mail arrangements, no sanitary organization of any kind, and no clear distribution of streets and town lots in a town of nearly 20,000 inhabitants.” Ottawa was treating Dawson City as a cash cow. “The Yukon district feels itself to be corruptly administered and badly governed.”

  In her final paragraphs, Our Special Correspondent sounded a more optimistic note: “A change is at hand which renders it unnecessary to labour the subject of the need for political reform.” The Ottawa government had recently announced the appointment of William Ogilvie to the post of commissioner of the Yukon. A member of the Geological Survey of Canada, he had done the surveys twenty months earlier of both the Dawson townsite and the creeks. Flora had met Ogilvie in London the previous spring and considered “his name . . . as the synonym of disinterested integrity.” She also suggested that most of the loafers on Dawson’s Front Street would leave town as soon as they had run out of provisions. And once a telegraph had been installed, capital from Outside would be attracted to the rich gold fields. “There seems no reason why the Yukon district should not soon be counted among the pleasant and prosperous centres of British settlement.”

  In Britain, Flora’s descriptions of the wealth of the Klondike gold fields had the desired effect: British investors turned their attention to the gold fields in Canada’s remote North. But Canadians were thin skinned about British criticism, and her articles caused a sensation. Flora’s final letter from Dawson was given additional punch by an accompanying editorial in the Times about “our Correspondent’s grave allegations.” After repeating the assertion that nothing got done in Dawson City “unless some official’s palm is greased,” the Thunderer roared that “the iniquitous burden of corrupt exactions and obstructions should be immediately removed” before the Klondike fields would look inviting to investors. Both editorial and article were reprinted in several Canadian newspapers, including the Toronto Globe and the Winnipeg Daily Tribune, both of which were usually bastions of support for the Liberal government in Ottawa. The Tribune’s front page on October 5 was an avalanche of headlines about Flora’s report: “Thunderer has spoken. Leading newspaper of Great Britain on the Reported Scandals in the Yukon—Result of the Investigation by Its Special Correspondent. A Discreditable State of Affairs in Officialdom. The Toronto Globe Pays a Tribute to the Writer. An Investigation must take place.”

  In Ottawa, Flora’s accusations spelled trouble for the Liberal government of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, prime minister since 1896. The cabinet minister responsible for the Yukon was Clifford Sifton, Minister of the Interior and Superintendent General of Indian Affairs. Sifton, a Manitoba lawyer, was the chief political organizer of the Liberal Party and a master of machine politics and patronage. Sifton immediately telegraphed the Times demanding that it publish a retraction of Miss Shaw’s statements. But huffing and puffing was not enough; he was an agile enough politician to know he had to defuse the scandal. He immediately launched an official inquiry into the charges of “official malfeasance” made by the special correspondent of the Times and announced that Fawcett would be replaced as gold commissioner. The Times could not have been more unctuous as it reported Sifton’s action and took credit for the initiative: “This inquiry . . . will assuredly act as a warning to officials of doubtful integrity, and we receive with not a little satisfaction the testimony that this is due in no small measure to the courageous intervention of our Correspondent.”

  Flora was comfortably settled in a first-class carriage on the eastbound Canadian Pacific Railway train when the local Hudson’s Bay Company manager handed her a bundle of newspapers containing her fourth “Letter from Canada” and accounts of Ottawa’s reaction. The headlines in the Manitoba Free Press on October 8 read, “Searching Enquiry to Be Made into the Administration of Yukon. Mr. Fawcett Replaced. The Minister of the Interior Acts Promptly.” As the train pulled out of the station, she must have felt a surge of pride in both her journalistic coup and the power of her employer. But as she gazed out of the carriage window at the dry autumn stubble of farmlands and the steely gray waters of rapidly chilling lakes, she must also have wondered what lay ahead. In Ottawa she was scheduled to stay at Rideau Hall, home of the governor general of Canada, and she planned to interview several cabinet ministers, including Mr. Sifton.

  The visit to Ottawa started badly. Flora’s train was scheduled to arrive in the mid-morning, but it was delayed by an accident on the line. Flora was too self-disciplined to allow a note of panic to creep into her voice as she repeatedly asked the conductor what was happening, but she was worried. Governor General Lord Aberdeen and his wife had organized a dinner in her honor at Government House, at which she would meet those whom she had sharply criticized. The gown she intended to wear was in storage at the Ottawa rail station. She had shipped most of her bags directly to the Canadian capital several weeks earlier, after hearing from Mr. Monroe about Dawson’s social life. Before she left London, all her smartest clothes had been sewn tightly in canvas bags to keep out the dust. How could black silk taffeta be anything but a crumpled rag when she finally unlocked the trunk, cut open the canvas, and shook the dress out?

  The train finally pulled into Ottawa’s station at eight in the evening, and the Governor General’s carriage was waiting to take Miss Sha
w the half-mile to the viceregal residence. “You can fancy the comfort,” Flora wrote to Lulu, “of unpacking and dressing under the circumstances in less than half an hour.” Lady Aberdeen’s personal maid rose to the occasion, and Flora appeared only a few minutes late at the dinner table, looking calm and unruffled. The guests stayed talking until after midnight. Though Flora drooped with exhaustion, she managed to speak coherently and intelligently despite feeling quite ill after the wine and rich food. Afterward, she took the time to write to Lulu, “I am at Ottawa resting in the luxuries of Govt House sleeping in sheets, having a bath, wearing an evening dress, and submitting to the same ordering of my ways which prevails in an English country house.”

  The following day, several interviews with ministers had been arranged. But first Flora found herself dragged off in a carriage by the impossibly bossy Lady Aberdeen to inspect all her viceregal projects. Our Special Correspondent had to visit women’s organizations and nursing homes before escaping her imposing hostess’s firm grasp. At last Flora sat down with, among others, Clifford Sifton. “You may have gathered,” she wrote Lulu, “that my Klondike letters have been the occasion of somewhat animated controversy here.” She disclosed that the minister of the Interior felt “very sore,” and he and his cabinet colleagues “would all have been glad if they could have had fair grounds to prove my account inaccurate or exaggerated.” In a phrase with a wonderfully modern ring, Flora and Sifton had “some long frank talks.” Flora wouldn’t budge an inch: she catalogued all the horrors she had seen in Dawson and the rumors she had heard about the amount of bribery in government offices. She gave the names of both the accused and their accusers. The tone of the conversation was “fair and courteous,” but Flora found the meetings disagreeable. The following day, she told Lulu that the members of Laurier’s cabinet expressed “horror and surprise at the facts which I have been able to lay before them,” but it all struck her as a bit of playacting. Sifton’s assurances and newly appointed inquiry did not impress her. “They have left me more doubtful than I like to be of the desire of the government to take effective steps.”