Gold Diggers

by Charlotte Gray

  The previous fall, Sam Steele had promised Marie that he and Commissioner Ogilvie would clean up Dawson, and as far as he was concerned, the fire had done some of his work for him. Across North America, the temperance movement was in full swing, campaigning for a clean-up of red-light districts in major cities. Members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, like Nellie McClung in Canada and Frances Willard in the United States, were busy handing out abstinence pledge cards to men who promised to give up alcohol. Ottawa politicians, keen to demonstrate that they were as shocked by moral turpitude as anyone, had decided that Dawson’s reputation as Gomorrah on the Yukon needed attention. An order to prosecute the prostitutes had been sent north.

  Two weeks before the Dawson conflagration, hookers who plied their trade on and behind Second Avenue had received police notices that they must vacate their premises by May 1. “No longer may the woman in scarlet occupy the choicest city lots and flaunt her crimson colors on Dawson’s crowded streets,” reported the Klondike Nugget. “No longer may the seductive window tap beguile the innocent prospector or hurrying man of business. The reign of the scarlet letter is on the wane, and one of the institutions most cherished and nourished in the halcyon days of yore is about to be degraded.” The Nugget suggested that there were about 300 “soiled doves” (in the paper’s exquisite euphemism) in the tenderloin district, who charged, according to one old sourdough, from two dollars to four ounces of gold “for a very hurried entertainment.”

  Thanks to the fire, the women were now homeless. Most were pathetically grateful when Colonel Steele told them they could occupy two blocks bounded by Fourth and Fifth Avenues, just west of the Mounties’ headquarters and well away from the business district. “The New Tenderloin,” announced the Nugget, would be ready by June 1. Sam Steele was priggish about prostitution, but he was also a realist. He didn’t believe that it was possible to eliminate prostitution in a mining town with so many single men, and he certainly didn’t want to spend all his time chasing hookers out of Dawson. “These girls seem to be in the eyes of the majority of the community a necessary evil,” he reported to the commissioner of the NWMP in Ottawa in May. Besides, the regular fines for unruly behavior and fees for medical inspections were a useful source of revenue. So Dawson prostitutes continued to be tolerated in a way that was by now unthinkable in the rest of North America.

  Each week, in Montreal, Marie Steele pasted into her scrapbook any cuttings that mentioned her husband. Many came from Sam himself. On May 28, he sent his wife some copies of the Nugget along with the instruction “Please paste the good ones in your scrap book, the children may need to have it after a time, and it is part of my record.”

  The family was particularly proud of a widely reproduced dispatch written by Faith Fenton, which was guaranteed to buttress the Sam Steele legend. It read, in part, “Col. Steele should be given a special vote of thanks by Parliament. No man ever deserved it more. Besides having his men under such a remarkable state of discipline he has done wonders in many other ways. We are now having a weekly postal service . . . He has located nearly every crook in Dawson . . . He is always looking ahead, always planning ahead. That is the kind of man required in a country like this.”

  Sam Steele didn’t see his three young children, Harwood (left), Gertrude (center), and Flora (right), for eighteen months, but they saw his picture in the papers.

  American newspapers also carried articles on Steele of the Mounties. Seattle newspapers published accusations from disgruntled American prospectors about dictatorial officials and government corruption in the Canadian gold fields, but these did not find their way into Marie Steele’s scrapbooks. Instead, she gave a whole page to a clipping from Chicago’s Sunday Chronicle of May 14, 1899: “Colonel S. B. Steele . . . is a whole army unto himself. He was born to rule in a country where he must become dictator for he is . . . far away from assistance, from advice and from supplies.” Sam was well on his way to becoming that rare phenomenon—an icon in a country that distrusted celebrity.

  CHAPTER 19

  Stampede to Nome, Summer 1899

  IN THE SPRING OF 1899, the outside world was catching up with Dawson. “Yukon Breaks Its Icy Fetters” proclaimed the Nugget in mid-May: “Thousands of people cheer in unison with the tooting of steam whistles and the baying of malamutes.” For the third consecutive year, two armadas of vessels appeared, the first from upriver, then a few days later a second paddling against the current from St. Michael, at the river’s mouth. A crowd of prospectors in shabby wool pants and greasy slouch hats milled around the riverbank in the spring sunshine. As usual, they pestered newcomers for news about everything that had happened Outside in the previous six months. The sourdoughs had specific questions, about boxing champions, Derby winners, government scandals, and imperial wars. Was Queen Victoria, now aged eighty, still alive? (She was.) Had Britain crushed the pesky Boers and their truculent leader, Paul Kruger, in the Transvaal? (They hadn’t.) Would the French government finally release Captain Alfred Dreyfus from jail? (Not yet.) Had Spain and the United States made peace? (Yes, the previous December Spain had ceded to the United States control of Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. But since then there had been an uprising in the Philippines.) A couple of British toffs wanted to know the results of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race.

  Yet as newcomers and old-timers mingled on Front Street, Dawsonites sensed that life south of the St. Elias Mountains was changing. The economic depression that had sent many of them north was lifting: steel rails were criss-crossing North America, bread lines were shrinking, prairie farms thrived, and there was talk of a canal in Panama to link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, financed by the American government. As the millennium approached, cracks had appeared in the stifling conformity of the Victorian era. Women were agitating for the vote and working men were flexing political muscles. The first horseless carriages were being seen in larger towns, swarms of bicycles took off into the countryside every weekend, and there was even the astonishing suggestion that in future people might fly through the air in airships held aloft by hydrogen. Drinkers in the newly rebuilt bars along Front Street heard about weird new trends such as dances with names like the “Cakewalk” and paintings made up of colored dots. The new railroad from Skagway up the White Trail had now almost reached Bennett Lake and would soon link Whitehorse to the coast. The journey in and out of the Yukon was becoming incomparably easier. Miners who had not made a nickel since they arrived in Dawson City began to dream of going home. Belinda Mulrooney and the Klondike Kings, who had bags of cash, fantasized about flaunting their wealth among the high rollers of San Francisco, Chicago, and New York.

  The outside world was catching up with Superintendent Steele, too. Throughout the winter, while Dawson City was cut off from communication with Ottawa, his word had been law—and as Faith Fenton had reported, it had been an effective law. There was still no telegraph wire linking Dawson to the Outside, but with spring ice-out, dispatches now took only a few days between Ottawa and Dawson instead of up to two months. Sam could no longer ignore stresses facing his own men or orders from Ottawa.

  The most immediate tension, which had been building for months, was that government salaries were pathetically low in a community where gold nuggets were playthings and prices ranged between two and ten times the level of those Outside. A Mountie constable was paid $1.25 a day; a laborer in the mines could earn the same amount in an hour. Bank clerks were in the same bind as officials. In the hope of recruiting new clients, a Bank of Commerce officer had strolled into a saloon called Tammany Hall when he first arrived in Dawson the previous spring. There a new acquaintance introduced the banker to some old-timers, among them Skiff Mitchell and Johnny Lind, who were drinking champagne that, in the words of the banker, “came thick and fast.” Soon it was the newcomer’s turn to buy a round. He was horrified to learn that it would cost him $120—small change for a miner fresh from clean-up on the creeks, but more than a month’s pay for a ba
nker. He had just enough in his pocket, but “prudence induced him to see in the crowd an imaginary individual he ‘simply had to speak to.’ He went to his bed and for some time thereafter sought business in less exciting circles.”

  Dozens of paddle-wheelers converged on Dawson City during the Yukon River’s five ice-free months.

  Belinda Mulrooney professed pity for men who “couldn’t live and meet their expenses in Dawson on their salaries.” Compassion didn’t stop her exploiting their predicament. When Frederick Coates Wade first arrived in Dawson in February 1898, he had ignored Belinda and settled on Big Alex McDonald as the man to buy the Dawson waterfront. But Belinda realized that Fred Wade was for hire, since he combined his government responsibilities with a private practice. She recruited him as her “legal adviser,” probably with a retainer. By the spring of 1899, Wade was crown prosecutor and Belinda was full of admiration for his cavalier behavior as “judge, lawyer and everything else—if he did not want a fellow to go to court next day, he’d take him out and lick him or get him drunk so he wouldn’t show up.” By then, she was also describing him as her “business partner” because she had set him up in some lucrative mining deals. Under her own name she also purchased shares in claims for other officials, including Captain H. H. Norwood, Inspector of the Mines. She insisted that the deals were all legitimate and her clients “were square shooters, lots of the property they picked up was worthless, but they picked up enough good ones to make it worthwhile.” It was worthwhile for Belinda, too. In return for her help, “I had lots of favors from the officials.”

  Sam Steele knew that an open system of kickbacks flourished in the allocation of timber rights. He knew that in the gold commissioner’s office crooked officials schemed with powerful mining interests to buy up individual prospectors’ claims by fair means or foul. He read the Klondike Nugget story on May 3, 1899: “The country abounds in snakes of all kinds. The most venomous, which poisons the public peace and pollutes even the stream of public administration, is known as the ‘Voracious Clerkibus Intolerens.’” But Sam’s hands were tied. Clifford Sifton, the Liberal minister whom Flora Shaw had met in Ottawa the previous October, continued to regard the Yukon as a rich source of patronage and to give Dawson jobs to men who were more interested in lining their own pockets than establishing good government.

  The weekly meetings of the six members of the Yukon Executive Council in the NWMP barracks were a covert battleground. Superficially, they were relaxed get-togethers for men who were far from home and trying to bring order to a rough-and-tumble town. Commissioner Ogilvie presided at the head of the table, puffing away at his pipe and inclined to digress into anecdotes about the bad old days. But of the six men, only Steele and Ogilvie were not making money on the side: the other four, including Fred Wade, were all Sifton cronies. At a meeting in March, Sam voted down a motion that council members should give themselves a hefty salary increase. He told Marie that he was particularly exasperated because Commissioner Ogilvie offered only “half-hearted opposition” to the idea of voting himself a raise: the commissioner was finding Dawson hard on the wallet.

  These issues were especially difficult for straitlaced Sam because he himself was strapped financially. In the early 1890s while posted at Fort Macleod, he had accumulated debts that would come due within months. All his NWMP salary was paid directly to Marie Steele in Montreal; in Dawson, he survived on the fees he earned for supervising police courts (about $200 a month) and because he got free board and lodging in the police barracks. At some point in early 1899, surrounded by Klondike Kings, he had succumbed to temptation and bought shares in a couple of new claims on Sulphur Creek and one on Bonanza. He was not the only Mountie to take a flyer on a gold claim; his friend and subordinate Inspector Bobby Belcher had done the same thing.

  When Steele and Belcher acquired the shares, it was not officially illegal for government officials to own property on the mines, but that changed in April 1899. In Ottawa, the government published an order-in-council prohibiting the staking or recording of mining claims in the Yukon by officials in their own or any other names, or securing any interest in any claim, or acting as agent for anyone in regard to any claim. Sifton’s pal Fred Wade—by now land registrar, clerk of the court, crown prosecutor, adviser to the gold commissioner, and member of and legal adviser to the Yukon Executive Council—was specifically exempt from this regulation. The Edmonton Bulletin noted that Wade was told “there was nothing in the mining regulations to prevent [him] from staking a claim in his own name.” Sam Steele was not mentioned, but there was a tacit understanding that government officials already in the Yukon were exempt from the new rules. Sam continued to acquire claims, writing to his wife in August that “Belcher is working the claim and we are going to get a share on 66 below Sulphur and on 18 above further north at the rate of fifty percent of the proceeds. One alone might pay our debts all right and have a good margin.”

  But Sam Steele knew that his own holdings might stain his reputation with the new regulations in place, and then the Ottawa wolves would circle. As he strode through Dawson, he ruminated on the challenge of staying “clean.” On the evening of May 28, when daylight lingered in the sky until nearly midnight, he penned a hurried note to Marie: “My dearest, I have just thought that you had better get a miner’s certificate in Ottawa even if you have to go up there for it. I cannot hold mining property but you can. Send also a power of attorney made out by Auguste [Marie’s brother, a lawyer] so that I can act for you.”

  Sam Steele was right to worry. An unholy row was brewing in Ottawa about corruption in the Yukon, and every official in Dawson risked being sideswiped in the melee. The Conservative opposition in central Canada was on the attack. They were genuinely shocked by what was going on in Dawson, now regarded as a Babylon of bribery. They were also eager for Sifton’s head. In April 1899, the formidable orator Sir Charles Hibbert Tupper, son of a former Conservative prime minister, took the Tory lead. Tupper alleged that “if Mr. Sifton had been given the Yukon District to exploit for his own personal gain, he could not have left anything undone that he did, acting in the capacity of the Minister of the Crown.” Tupper demanded a commission of inquiry into Sifton’s shenanigans that included, he charged, “taxes and royalties that would make Oom Paul [Paul Kruger, president of the Transvaal during the Boer Wars and a wildly unpopular figure within the British Empire] blush, the appointment of corrupt and incompetent officials, favoritism in the granting of licenses, leases and contracts, gross mismanagement of transportation, and neglect of all sanitary precautions.”

  Stirring stuff. But the attacks didn’t bother Sifton himself one whit, as he continued to hand out contracts to cronies. Sam Steele tried to hold the line: he refused to allow a Sifton pal to receive the contract to supply meat to the Mounties, challenged several other appointments, and insisted that mining royalties should be collected by Mounties, not civilian officials who were Sifton appointees. A showdown between minister and Mountie was inevitable. Despite all Sam’s efforts and self-promotion, throughout the spring of 1899 rumors of his impending transfer out of Dawson rippled through the Yukon. The strain began to tell on Sam, who stopped bragging to Marie that he had not touched a drop of liquor. On July 15, he noted at the back of his diary that he had bought two bottles of Scotch, at six dollars each—$120 per bottle in today’s values.

  Sam Steele was not the only person about whom rumors were swirling that spring. Belinda Mulrooney was also attracting gossip—and not the sort she liked.

  The previous summer, an intriguing new figure had stepped off a steamer from Whitehorse onto the Dawson waterfront. At first glance, Charles Eugene Carbonneau seemed entirely out of place in the Arctic boomtown. In his tailored suit, patent leather shoes, spats, and kid gloves, he strolled around Dawson, cane in hand, speaking politely to people in a cultured French accent and creating an impression of wealth and sophistication. His calling card identified him as Count Carbonneau, a representative of Messrs Pierre Lega
sse, Frères et Cie, well-known wine merchants of Paris and New York. He let drop that he had important connections in Ottawa (although there was no evidence of this). The dapper aristocrat moved into the Fairview Hotel, and immediately complained about the price of a bottle of wine.

  In truth, Carbonneau was simply a better-dressed version of a type well-known on Dawson streets: the con artist. Yet his act was so polished that Belinda was taken in. At first, the Fairview’s proprietor didn’t think much of a guest who flaunted his title and challenged her prices, but she soon found herself drawn to this “dashing sort of chap [who] wore good clothes,” as she would remember him. “His eyes were large with a sort of sleepy, gentle look some Frenchmen have, and he had a heavy moustache.” Besides bedroom eyes, there were other attractions. Belinda’s dog, Nero, who usually had no time for anybody except his mistress, “was fond of Carbonneau, liking him better than anybody else excepting me.”

  Ostensibly, Carbonneau had traveled to the Yukon not to sell French wines but to represent a group of London investors interested in Klondike gold. He bought some claims on Bonanza Creek from an old-timer called Thomas Pelkey. After his August 1898 visit, Carbonneau returned to Europe to establish the Anglo-French Klondyke Syndicate and to find more investors. He returned to the Yukon in January 1899, after braving the winter trails and temperatures as low as forty below zero, and moved back into the Fairview. Belinda was awed by his outfit. “He . . . had magnificent furs and other equipment—tents, spirit lamps, steaks and other fine food stuffs. The ordinary tent wasn’t good enough for him. He had to have silk tents. His cot—you know the rest of us put down pine boughs and would think them a great luxury, but he had some blessed thing that knocked down and was padded especially with curly hair.” Carbonneau, now the Dawson manager of his mining company, dined with Belinda whenever she was available. She “found his conversation restful and interesting, especially his description of life in Europe.” She also noticed that her chef “had more respect for him than for me. I never bothered, took what they gave me . . . [Charles would] get into the kitchen and show him if he knew he couldn’t cook.”