Gold Diggers

by Charlotte Gray

  They made an unlikely twosome. Tough little Belinda, with her prickly manner, sharp tongue, and prim collars, was beguiled by a Frenchman who was “immaculate in dress, appearance and table manners” and courted her with flowers. She didn’t care that many of the old-timers dismissed him as a dandy and a phony. She refused to listen to gossip that far from being a French nobleman, he was a French Canadian who had been either a baker or a barber on Rue St. Denis in Montreal. Carbonneau got along well enough with Belinda’s professional pals, like Fred Wade and the bank managers, but the miners didn’t warm to him and he turned up his nose at them, complaining that the men on the creeks never shaved. But Belinda liked Charles. She softened in his company and giggled when he flirted with her. Once or twice, he even made her blush. She was amused by what she saw as “an eternal childish quality” in her beau, who was fifteen years her senior.

  How did Carbonneau penetrate Belinda’s defenses? Perhaps she feared that if she confined her friendships to tough old boys in the Fairview’s bar, she would spend the rest of her life as one of them. Maybe she was tired of insinuations that she preferred women to men. Perhaps, now that she was acknowledged as the richest woman in the Klondike, she had lost the widespread (and justified) female dread that once a man possesses you, he assumes power over you. At twenty-seven, she may have felt the first stirrings of a desire for a different life, with a gallant husband and perhaps some children. Maybe all those snubs from Superintendent Steele had stung, stirring memories of the humiliation she had felt in Pennsylvania when other children laughed at her thick Irish accent. The respectability of marriage to a dignified and titled Parisian would confer a status that, up to now, she had never thought she needed—but something must have changed.

  Carbonneau was a cunning suitor. He did what no man had ever done to Belinda: he treated her like a beautiful woman. He returned from one of his frequent trips Outside with a trunk full of elegant gowns. Belinda’s first reaction was fury. “I blew up like a balloon! He thought I’d be tickled to death with them. He thought he’d done something wonderful for me when he opened the trunk and showed me those clothes. I was shocked.” Belinda’s atavistic instinct to beat men at their own game surfaced. How had he so misjudged her? Did he think she was a woman who could be bought with finery? Was he trying to tell her she should dress in a more feminine style? They had a furious row, and Belinda said she would give the gowns to Sadie. But Carbonneau knew what he was doing—he had played on her insecurities and longings. Somehow, the trunk stayed in her room. When she was by herself, Belinda would hold the lacy blouses and long, sweeping skirts against her body. She fondled the delicate fabrics, rubbing them against her cheeks. “I wouldn’t wear the things, but they were tempting enough at that . . . It was fun to feel the silks and satins, the beautiful hose.”

  The flirtation bubbled on as winter turned into spring, and Belinda and Carbonneau pursued their businesses. Belinda promoted her new water company, Hygeia, and regularly visited her claims on the creeks, where she watched the introduction of steam pumps to speed up the thawing process. Carbonneau was buying and selling claims, on at least one occasion borrowing from Belinda when he needed capital. Carbonneau also entered into a contract with her to build an extension to the Grand Forks Hotel and to buy 50 percent of the value of her inventory. He insinuated himself into a deal in which Superintendent Steele was involved, and was soon on the easy terms with the Mountie that Belinda had never achieved. In March, Belinda and Carbonneau hiked up the trail to Grand Forks together. Belinda, arms swinging and small feet fairly dancing along the rutted path, outpaced her portly and panting suitor. Finally, Carbonneau grabbed her arm and exclaimed, “For God’s sake, stand still long enough, I want to talk to you.” He told her that he had been offered a government post. Belinda asked him why he didn’t take it, and recalled in her memoir that he replied, “A man loses his influence if he takes a job. I make more money as it is now. Besides, I feel as if I’d have to be a miner or a sourdough to get you interested in me and I want to get married.”

  Belinda was not surprised by Carbonneau’s declaration and, she admitted, “I knew long before that I was interested.” Carbonneau made it clear that he was in a rush. Belinda began her side of the negotiations. “I told him I had no knowledge of a home, or of caring for a house. He told me he would never think of his wife doing house keeping. I told him, ‘That suits me.’” Even as she sorted out these domestic details, Belinda knew there were more dangerous snags. By law, married women could not own property: if she and Carbonneau wed, he could have the right to claim ownership of her hotels and mines. In her memoir, she never acknowledges that perhaps this was what her suitor was after. The woman who had bested Big Alex refused to admit that her judgment was not always flawless. Instead, she equivocated on the grounds that disentangling her businesses would be complicated. “I had so many partners. I had to dissolve so much before I ever thought of marrying anyone.” She suddenly remembered the parents and siblings she had left behind in Pennsylvania almost a decade earlier. “There was my duty to be discharged to my family, which I wanted to do.” But Carbonneau had given Belinda a glimpse of the world beyond the gold fields, where he was comfortably at home and to which he would give her an entrée. “We decided to be married in the fall of 1900 and go abroad after that.”

  Belinda insisted that their engagement remain secret. She was not ready to shock the insular little society of Dawson with the revelation that the redoubtable Miss Mulrooney had succumbed to her debonair suitor. She knew that old-timers would “resent my marrying a man who carried his steaks in a portable ice box and had his own brand of toilet water.” At the same time, she stealthily began to wind up her properties, selling the Grand Forks Hotel in May and making plans to sell the Fairview, too. (Eventually, she would lease it to a man called Fred Kammueler at $1,200 a month for three years.) It was a good time to sell property. Dawson City was booming, as scars left by the April inferno were quickly erased in a flurry of new buildings. Wooden sidewalks snaked along the unpaved streets, and this year there were no spring floods. The Nugget relished the way that “the Klondike is rapidly taking on the airs and mannerisms of the effete East.” Belinda was less impressed. “Society had hold of Dawson very strong. The ladies were dressing elaborately and there was a different atmosphere. The amusements had changed. Dawson was absolutely in the hands of the Outside.” She was too much of a go-getter to yearn for the good old days. Who in their right mind would return to the rough-and-tumble times of dysentery outbreaks, frostbitten fingers, and dog excrement all over the streets? But if she was going to live an Outside lifestyle, she wanted the real thing.

  Besides, aspects of the new Dawson irked her. Flora Shaw had loftily suggested in her Royal Colonial Institute speech that the place needed more women to civilize it: “Man wins the battle but woman holds the field.” In Belinda’s view, women were ruining the place. Intense rivalry erupted between Americans and Canadians about whether May 24, Queen Victoria’s birthday, or July 4, American Independence Day, was the more important holiday. In the past, both days had been celebrated with parades, speeches, and parties. “They gave us two days of fun instead of one,” recalled Belinda. “We were as happy in one as in the other.” But now that the wives of many officials and miners had arrived, “If the [British] flag was an inch higher than the American, the women got into each other’s hair.”

  On Queen Victoria’s birthday in 1899, bands played on Front Street, and large crowds gathered to watch such Scottish diversions as caber-tossing, shot-putting, sword-dancing, and a bagpipe competition. There were sack races, running races, a packhorse race, and a chopping contest. Sam Steele noted in his NWMP official diary, “Feu de joie by the YFF [Yukon Field Force] and a salute with the Maxim by the police force. New sports of all sorts and all orderly. All hands busy. Canoe races.” Belinda told a different story. A Canadian woman tore down the Stars and Stripes, so a furious American woman retaliated by tearing down the Union Jack. “There
was an awful mess as the husbands took sides,” according to Belinda. She had organized a tug of war, with a Fairview prize of $500 for the winning team, but the sourdoughs abandoned the whole event. “It was the rottenest 24th of May we ever had.” Belinda began to plan a triumphant return to her family in Pennsylvania and a visit to her grandmother in Ireland. She commissioned a local goldsmith to fashion gold from her claims into several small cigar cases. Most were gifts for her family, but a couple were for friendly officials in Dawson. The one intended for Frederick Coates Wade had his initials picked out on it in emeralds and diamonds.

  Queen Victoria’s birthday, on May 24, was celebrated with races and a bagpipe competition. Hān women and children from Moosehide Village came to watch (lower right).

  Charles Carbonneau was several steps ahead of his fiancée. He had already announced that he would leave Dawson on one of the first steamers out in early June. He purchased a ticket on the Victorian, and Belinda, along with half the town, went down to the boat to wish him bon voyage. She was demurely shaking his hand when the Frenchman grabbed her and pulled her toward him. A master of manipulation, he then pressed his lips against hers. A ripple of shock ran through the crowd. Carbonneau’s fellow passenger H. T. Wills, manager of the Bank of Commerce, grinned from ear to ear. Fred Wade, who was waving goodbye to the passengers, found the sight hilarious. Belinda was “stunned, gasping. It was a good thing the boat was ready to pull out. I was never so embarrassed in my life.”

  Americans celebrated Independence Day on July 4 with a fervor that reflected their exasperation with Canadian rules.

  She stomped back to her office in high dudgeon, furious that the whole town now knew her business. Before Wade could say a word to her, she snapped, “We’re engaged to be married.” Wade remarked, “He seems a nice enough fellow, but he is a man of the world. There isn’t much in common between you. You are North and he is Europe.” Belinda had reinvented herself so many times already that she resented being stereotyped like this, but her fiancé’s gesture had infuriated her. She began to rethink the engagement. “It will disturb the peace of mind of my partners,” she admitted to Wade. Her “business partner” gave a knowing smile. “I think that’s what he did it for,” he said.

  Fred Wade promised to make a few inquiries about Count Charles Eugene Carbonneau. He proved a poor sleuth. He never heard about Carbonneau’s riotous night on the town as soon as he hit Vancouver. The Province, Vancouver’s leading newspaper, reported on July 25 that “the rich and titled Frenchman, whose prodigious spending proclivities, likewise his convivial habits, are well known” had spent the night with a woman called May Evans, then accused her of stealing $3,300 from him. When May Evans was arrested, she protested that she had taken only $650, and the evidence seemed to bear her out. Neither the police nor the local paper thought much of the high-living count. Although not prepared to condone theft, the Province editor noted that “‘Count’ Carbonneau . . . is a debauchee and a libertine” and deserved little sympathy. But Belinda knew none of this. She booked passage to Whitehorse on a little steamer called the Flora, scheduled to sail on October 5.

  Sam Steele’s diary and letters through the summer of 1899 kept up the rhythm of “Fine weather. Busy day.” He organized the execution, finally, of the three Tlingit men who had been convicted the previous summer of murdering a prospector and had spent a year in jail. He dealt with a delinquent officer, Sergeant Harper, who had lost his head to a notorious dance hall girl called Diamond Tooth Gertie and subsequently been spurned by her. (Sam told Marie that Harper had “spent hundreds of dollars a month on her and she didn’t care a scrap for him.” Sam reported his errant officer to Mountie headquarters, because the “hundreds of dollars” had come out of fines levied in the police court.) He tried to ignore reports from Ottawa that the Canadian capital seethed with talk that Steele of the NWMP was undermining his boss, Minister Sifton, by speaking out about maladministration in the Yukon.

  A sword was hanging above Sam Steele’s head. It fell on September 8. That was the day a momentous event occurred in the Yukon Territory. The first telegraph message, which had traveled over a newly strung line from Bennett, was received in Dawson. Suddenly, the town’s total isolation from the rest of the world evaporated. And just as suddenly, Superintendent Steele’s regime ended. One of the first telegrams to be received over the wire was a message from the minister of the Interior to the chief of the North-West Mounted Police in the Yukon. Sam was tersely informed that his Yukon command was terminated. He was to report immediately to Regina, the Mountie headquarters in a region then known as the North-West Territories, and that would soon be the separate province of Saskatchewan.

  In the midnight sunshine of June 21, 1899, Sam Steele (left) allowed himself to be photographed in civilian dress, with friends.

  Sam had seen it coming, but nobody else had. He noted in his diary, “Great deal of dissatisfaction in the district during my move into the N. W. Territories. I am told steps taken, hope not.” Steps were indeed being taken. Dawson now had three outspoken newspapers: the Klondike Nugget, the Dawson Daily News, and the Yukon Sun (successor to the original Yukon Midnight Sun). As a general rule, the three rags were vicious rivals, but they were unanimous in reflecting popular fury that Sam had been sacked. The Daily News insisted that Sam’s departure would damage the community. It declared that “Lieutenant-Colonel Steele has proved himself the miner’s friend.” Under the headline “Wrong is Triumphant,” the Klondike Nugget described Sam as “the most highly respected man on the Yukon today,” and let rip at “the nefarious schemes of the Sifton gang of political pirates.” The editor of the Sun took advantage of the new telegraph line to send a telegram to the prime minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier: “For the good of government beseech you to suspend order removing Colonel Steele from command here. Will be terrible blunder.”

  A public meeting was held in the Criterion Theatre on Saturday, 16 September 16, chaired by a well-known prospector called Joe Boyle. Boyle proposed a motion to be sent to Ottawa expressing “the feelings of dissatisfaction of the entire population of this Territory at this, the removal of our most popular and trusted official . . . It would be a direct injury to the Territory should he be taken away.” Five hundred miners, many of whom had walked in from the creeks, listened solemnly, then raised calloused hands in the air to approve the motion.

  Sam’s professional mask, as a solid soldier, never slipped. “Busy all day, paid off all my outstanding accts.,” he wrote in his official diary on September 21. He issued a public statement: “On no account would any influence induce me to remain unless I were ordered and then it would be against my will.” On his final day in Dawson City, September 26, he signed his official report and tried to slip away. But Dawson’s grateful citizens—the gamblers and the drinkers, the hookers and the miners, the piano players and the prospectors—would not let their hero slink out of town. They streamed down to the dock where the police paddle-wheeler was moored. “Ladies waved their handkerchiefs . . . whistles blew on all steamers,” noted Sam in his diary. Alex McDonald had been chosen to present Sam Steele with a bag of dust and nuggets to take to Marie Steele in Montreal. Big Alex was also supposed to deliver a parting address, but at the last moment he was tongue tied. Finally he whispered, “Here Sam—here y’are. Poke for you. Goodbye.”

  The vessel steamed upriver to Whitehorse. As it passed each of the twenty-six police posts that Sam had established, the officer in charge dipped the Union Jack in Sam’s honor. But nothing assuaged Sam’s private hurt at being “treated in this very shameful way after working hard and honourably for the people of the Dominion and the honour of the government of our country.” In his diary he wrote, “Curse the day I ever served such a country.”

  Yet despite the hurt, Sam had found gold in the Klondike. The reputation for integrity he established in the North stuck with him to the grave and beyond. He would later serve in the Boer War in South Africa, where he was involved in a nasty scandal. But
the scandal would soon be forgotten while Steele would always be remembered because, as the Yukon Sun noted on October 3, “He did not come here for money, and no money in the Klondike could buy him.”

  Sam’s departure was a shock to Dawson City, but the northern eldorado itself was being quietly undermined by larger forces. Old-timers who had seen both Forty Mile and Circle City develop from empty moose pastures to booming mining camps and then to ghost towns could almost hear the wheel turning. These were restless men like Bill Haskell, driven not by a determination to “civilize” the North but by the hunger for gold and the taste for adventure. They didn’t care one whit for new sewers or the Sunday curfew; they hankered after the adrenaline rush of the stampede’s early days. For months now, they had heard whispers of gold strikes elsewhere, in remote Alaskan locations with Indian names like Koyukuk and the Kotzebue Sound. In the spring of 1899, they began to hear about an unexpected gold strike on land as far to the west as a man could travel in North America.

  Buried in the sands of Cape Nome, an isolated knuckle of land jutting out into the Bering Sea from Alaska toward Siberia, pockets of gold dust were discovered in 1898. At first, Dawson boosters denounced the Nome rumors as a scheme of St. Michael shipping companies to trigger a stampede and create business for their vessels. But in June, a Seattle newspaper brought in from Outside confirmed the strike. The impact was immediate. When the steamer Sovereign pulled away from the Dawson docks on the sun-filled evening of June 10 and paddled off downstream toward the Bering Sea, it was crowded with men and women heading to the new gold field. Gene Allen tried to sound a note of caution when he saw the Klondike Nugget’s subscribers disappearing downriver. “It was a rarely edifying sight to see a steamboat load of people leaving the Klondike on a 2,000 mile stampede with little, if anything, more tangible in the way of information than the story of a sensational newspaper in Seattle.”