Gold Diggers

by Charlotte Gray

  WHITEHORSE: Carl and Liz Rumscheidt offered both hospitality and friendship. Thank you. The Nancy McPherson/Sally McLean network embraced me: thanks to Pat Halladay, Audrey McLaughlin, Laurel Parry, and Mary Cafferty. At the Yukon Archives, Leslie Buchan and Donna Darbyshire showed me material I could never have found on my own. Susan Twist helped with photo research. Dave Neufeld, Parks Canada’s Yukon historian, shared his extraordinary knowledge of the Gold Rush era. And Rick and Maureen Nielsen showed me the most exciting aspects of Yukon mountains and fashion. I will never forget my airborne luge down the Chilkoot Pass.

  BERKELEY: David Kessler at the Bancroft Library guided me through the process of accessing the Helen Lyon Hawkins Papers, which include the Belinda Mulrooney memoir. Damaris Moore welcomed me to the Library Development Office at Berkeley. Susie Schlesinger and Michael Ondaatje made my visit to Jack London’s ranch memorable.

  OXFORD: Dr. Ken Orosz at the University of Maine at Farmington generously led me to Flora Shaw’s letters in the Brackenbury Papers, and John Pinfold at Rhodes House helped me locate them.

  EDMONTON: The staff at the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta went out of their way to make Sam Steele’s newly acquired Yukon correspondence available to me; many thanks to Special Collections Librarian Jeannine Green, and Robert Desmarais, Mary Flynn, and Jeff Papineau. I greatly appreciated sitting next to Dr. Rod Macleod, who was happy to share his knowledge of the legendary Sam and to help with Steele’s handwriting. He was also kind enough to review the Steele chapters. Dr. Merrill Distad, Associate Director of Libraries at the Cameron Library, was particularly helpful, and Shona Cook made living in a student residence bearable.

  OTTAWA: As usual, I found the staff at Library and Archives Canada exceptionally helpful, especially the former chief archivist, Dr. Ian Wilson. I appreciated being able to draw on the encyclopedic knowledge of Jim Burant, Chief of the Archives and Special Collections.

  Many other people were generous with time and resources while I was knitting together six disparate stories. In Toronto, Phil Lind allowed me to work in his private collection of Gold Rush materials, which is comprehensive, unrivaled, and tremendously exciting. In London, Peter Stone gave me materials about the White Pass Railway. In Ottawa, Chris Randall was generous with technical assistance.

  Special thanks to readers who suggested further dimensions for the book, directed me to new research, corrected my more egregious errors (those that remain are entirely mine), and offered encouragement. They include Ernest and Marta Hillen, Maurice Podrey, Patricia Potts, Dr. Sandy Campbell, Dr. Duncan McDowell, and Dr. Bill Waiser. I would also like to thank the usual suspects: Wendy Bryans, Maureen Boyd, Judith Moses, and especially my airborne friend, Cathy Beehan. My three sons, Alexander, Nicholas, and Oliver, infected me with their spirit of adventure and, as usual, my husband, George Anderson, was generous with time, attention, and excellent advice. He was also a great companion on our Yukon road trip.

  At HarperCollins Canada, Phyllis Bruce is the best editor anybody could hope to have, and she is backed up by a remarkable team: Noelle Zitzer, Camilla Blakeley, Ruth Pincoe, Greg Tabor, Dawn Huck, Margaret Nozuka, and Melissa Nowakowski. I was given a warm welcome to Counterpoint Press, Berkeley, California, by editor Roxanna Aliaga. My agent, John Pearce, at Westwood Creative Artists was helpful at every stage of the process.

  Finally, I am grateful to the Office of Cultural Affairs in the City of Ottawa and to the Canada Council, for financial assistance. Their continued support of writers is not only a reflection of the importance of Canadian stories in a global culture: it is also of inestimable value to recipients.

  SOURCES

  Events, characters, and dialogue are taken directly from primary sources.

  Chapters 1-5

  Most of the information in the early chapters comes from William Haskell’s Two Years in the Klondike and Alaskan Gold-Fields, 1896-1898: A Thrilling Narrative of Life in the Gold Mines and Camps (1898; repr., Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1998). Additional details about placer mining, the journey north, and Yukon vegetation come from the memoirs of other prospectors, listed in the bibliography. Two useful official sources were George M. Dawson, Report on an Exploration in the Yukon District, N.W.T., and Adjacent Northern Portion of British Columbia, 1887 (Ottawa: Geological Survey of Canada, 1898) and William Ogilvie, “Lecture on the Yukon Gold Fields (Canada),” Victoria Daily Colonist, November 6, 1897. “Life in the Klondike Gold Fields,” by J. Lincoln Steffens, appeared in McClure’s Magazine, September 1897. I also relied for many details on The Klondike Stampede (1900; repr., Vancouver: UBC Press, 1994) by the excellent reporter Tappan Adney.

  Two later sources that capture the frenzy of the search for gold are Kathryn Winslow’s Big Pan-Out: The Klondike Story (London: Travel Book Club, 1953) and Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899, the 1972 revised edition of Pierre Berton’s bestseller Klondike: The Life and Death of the Last Great Gold Rush (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1958). Hal J. Guest, a Parks Canada historian, produced three fascinating and sober research reports on Dawson City: “Dawson City, San Francisco of the North or Boomtown in a Bog: A Literature Review,” Manuscript Report Series no. 241 (Parks Canada, 1978); “A History of the City of Dawson, Yukon Territory 1896-1920,” Microfiche Report Series no. 7 (Parks Canada, 1981); and “A Socioeconomic History of the Klondike Goldfields 1896-1966,” Microfiche Report Series no. 181 (Parks Canada, 1985). Information about Yukon’s Hān people came from two books I borrowed from the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Heritage Centre in Dawson: Helene Dobrowolsky’s Hammerstones: A History of the Tr’ondëck Hwëch’in (Dawson City: Tr’ondëck Hwëch’in, 2003) and Han, People of the River, by Craig Mishler and William E. Simeone (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2004).

  For insights into the impact of the Gold Rush on First Nations, particularly the Hān and Tlingit peoples, I turned to Julie Cruikshank, “Images of Society in Klondike Gold Rush Narratives: Skookum Jim and the Discovery of Gold,” Ethnohistory 39, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 20-41. The various versions of the first discovery of Klondike gold reflect the malleability of history. Cruikshank argues that “neither oral nor written versions can be treated simply as historical evidence to be sifted for ‘facts’; furthermore, combining the two kinds of account does not really give us a synthesis, the ‘real story.’” Events and power relationships are too complex, she argues, to accept only one kind of record. “Instead, both kinds of account have to be understood as windows on the way the past is constructed and discussed in different contexts, from the perspectives of actors enmeshed in culturally distinct networks of social relationships.”

  Chapter 6

  Father William Judge appears in the memoirs of several prospectors, but the most important source for his story is the book his brother, Charles, wrote: An American Missionary: A Record of the Work of Rev. William H. Judge, 4th ed. (Ossining, NY: Catholic Foreign Missionary Society, 1907). This includes several first-person accounts of the priest collected after the Jesuit’s death. Information about nineteenth-century missionary activity comes from Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire, by James Morris (London: Faber and Faber, 1968).

  The bathing habits of Dawson’s residents are described in Edward E. P. Morgan’s God’s Loaded Dice, Alaska 1897-1930 (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1948).

  Chapter 7

  In 1927-1928, Belinda Mulrooney dictated her memoirs to journalist Helen Lyon Hawkins of Spokane, Washington. Ms Hawkins never found a publisher for the subsequent book, which she provisionally titled “Miss Mulrooney, Queen of the Klondike.” Ms Hawkins’s notes and manuscript are now lodged in the Bancroft Library, at the University of California, Berkeley. I discovered these papers thanks to the excellent biography of Belinda by Melanie J. Mayer and Robert N. DeArmond, Staking Her Claim: The Life of Belinda Mulrooney, Klondike and Alaska Entrepreneur (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000). Belinda was in her late fifties when she described her adventures, but her voi
ce comes through loud and clear—blunt, humorous, ruthless. Ms Hawkins could barely keep up with her subject’s exuberant narrative: two archival boxes are full of random, hastily scribbled notes (BANC MSS 77/81).

  In the Dawson City Museum there is a rich collection of newspaper clippings about Mulrooney. Many of them are interviews with an elderly Mulrooney, on yellowing newsprint and detailing Belinda’s carefully edited version of her life. Belinda’s plans to build at Grand Forks and the opposition she faced are described in Frederick Palmer’s In the Klondike (New York: Scribner’s, 1899), 141-47, and in Norman Bolotin’s Klondike Lost: A Decade of Photographs by Kinsey & Kinsey (Anchorage: Alaska Northwest Publishing, 1980).

  Melinda Mayer’s Klondike Women: True Tales of the 1897-98 Gold Rush (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989) amplified my understanding of the life of women stampeders and the different levels of “respectability.”

  Chapter 8

  Tappan Adney was the source for much of the circumstantial detail about the scenes in California when the first Klondikers arrived. The role of the Hearst papers is touched on in Ken Whyte’s The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (Toronto: Random House, 2008). There was also valuable information in Guest’s “Dawson City, San Francisco of the North or Boomtown in a Bog.”

  For biographical information about Jack London, I relied on Russ Kingman’s A Pictorial Life of Jack London (New York: Crown Publishers, 1979); the Introduction to The Letters of Jack London, vol. 1, 1896-1905, ed. Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz III, and I. Milo Shepard (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988); and Alex Kershaw’s Jack London, A Life (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1977). However, the last-mentioned places the Klondike in Alaska. Charmian London, Jack’s widow, wrote several memoirs of her marriage, including The Book of Jack London (New York: The Century Company, 1921), and Jack London and His Times, An Unconventional Biography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1939). Two excellent sources on London’s Yukon experiences are Franklin Walker’s Jack London and the Klondike: The Genesis of an American Writer (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1966, 1994) and Dick North’s Sailor on Snowshoes: Tracking Jack London’s Northern Trail (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2006). The Klondike diary of Fred Thompson was produced as a pamphlet entitled To the Yukon with Jack London by the Los Angeles Zamorano Club in 1980, edited by David Mike Hamilton.

  All the Jack London stories and books from which I quote are still in print.

  Chapter 9

  Details of Belinda Mulrooney’s spat with Alex McDonald, including verbatim conversations, come from Belinda’s unpublished memoir. Information about Jack London’s activities comes from his widow’s books and Kingman’s Pictorial Life. Edward E. P. Morgan described Dawson saloons in God’s Loaded Dice.

  Chapter 10

  Miners’ nicknames come from an unpublished memoir by John Grieve Lind, a stampeder from Ontario who became a Klondike millionaire. Descriptions of the Grand Forks Hotel menu come from Morgan’s God’s Loaded Dice, and details of the hotel bedding from Jeremiah Lynch’s Three Years in the Klondike (1904), republished in 1967 with an excellent historical introduction by Dale L. Morgan (Chicago: Lakeside Press, R. R. Donnelley and Sons, 1967). The plight of scurvy sufferers is vividly depicted in Kathryn Winslow’s Big Pan-Out.

  Recollections of Jack London from his Split-Up Island companions are taken from secondary sources, particularly those by Franklin Walker and Charmian London already cited, and from Emil Jensen’s unpublished account, “Jack London at Stewart River,” in the London Collection at the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

  Chapter 11

  The story of Belinda, Big Alex, and the boots is told in Belinda’s memoir and retold in Mayer and DeArmond, Staking Her Claim, and Stephen Franklin, “She Was the Richest Woman in the Klondike,” Weekend Magazine 12, no. 27 (1962): 22-23, 28-29.

  Tappan Adney, in The Klondike Stampede, described ice-out in the spring of 1898, and information about health issues is included in M. K. Lux, “Disease and the Growth of Dawson City: The Seamy Underside of a Legend,” in The Northern Review (Summer/ Winter 1989): 96-117.

  The turf war between the Oblates and the Jesuits was explored by George Edward Gartrell in “The Work of the Churches in the Yukon during the Era of the Klondike Gold Rush” (MA thesis, University of Western Ontario, 1970).

  Chapter 12

  Freda Maloof appears in Jack London’s stories “The Wife of a King” (included in The Son of the Wolf, collected stories published in 1900) and “The Scorn of Women” (Overland Monthly, May 1901). His story “The One Thousand Dozen” (included in The Faith of Men, collected stories published in 1904) has as its theme the shortage of eggs. Charmian London reprinted Jack’s journal of his trip down the Yukon in Chapter 16 of The Book of Jack London. Jack’s account of the trip, “From Dawson to the Sea,” appeared in the Buffalo Express newspaper on June 4, 1899.

  The nuggets in the cuspidors anecdote can be found in an unpublished memoir by Ethel Anderson Becker, held in the Dawson City Museum archives.

  Chapter 13

  The early days of Dawson newspapers, and particularly Eugene Allen’s Klondike Nugget, are vividly described in Russell A. Bankson’s The Klondike Nugget (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1935). From this point onward, the Klondike Nugget and the Yukon Midnight Sun (available on microfilm at Library and Archives Canada) are invaluable sources. I also relied on Edward F. Bush, “The Dawson Daily News: Journalism on Canada’s Last Frontier,” Manuscript Report Series no. 48 (Parks Canada, 1971).

  Jeremiah Lynch, the San Francisco financier who arrived this summer, mentioned Dawson’s iniquitous interest rates in his memoir, Three Years in the Klondike. The best sources for banking activities in Dawson City are Victor Ross, A History of the Canadian Bank of Commerce, vol. 2 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1922); Percy C. Stevenson, The Yukon Adventure (New York: Yorktown Press, 1932); and Craig R. McIvor, Canadian Monetary, Banking and Fiscal Development (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1958). Two unpublished Parks Canada reports contained a wealth of information: Richard Stuart, “The Bank of British North America, Dawson, Yukon, 1898-1968,” Manuscript Report Series no. 324 (Parks Canada, 1979); and Edward F. Bush, “Banking in the Klondike 1898-1968,” Manuscript Report Series no. 118 (Parks Canada, 1973). Duncan MacDowall’s Quick to the Frontier (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993) explores the strengths of Canada’s chartered banks (in this case, the Royal Bank) in the late nineteenth century.

  Chapter 14

  The increase in the number of steamers on the Yukon River in 1898 is noted in “The Postal History of Yukon Territory,” by Rob G. Woodall, an unpublished manuscript in the private Lind Collection. Mary E. Hitchcock described the northern trip that she undertook with Edith Van Buren in Two Women in the Klondike (New York: Putnam, 1899). Neville A. D. Armstrong described the typhoid epidemic in “Klondike Memories,” The Beaver (June 1951): 44-47.

  The main source for the story of Flora Shaw’s trip to the Yukon, in Chapters 14, 15, and 16, is her unpublished correspondence with her sister Lulu and her editor, Moberly Bell, which is included in the Brackenbury Papers in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. They are housed, appropriately enough, in Rhodes House, headquarters of the Rhodes Trust, which was established by Flora’s hero, Cecil Rhodes. There is also a biography by E. Moberly Bell: Flora Shaw (London: Constable, 1947). Other sources include an unpublished manuscript by Joshua Gagnon, “Flora Shaw (Lady Lugard), Paving the Way for Women: From Struggling Writer to Powerful Journalist and Political Activist”; Stephen Usherwood and Elizabeth Usherwood, “A Lady in the Gold Fields,” The Beaver (October-November 1997): 27-32; and the Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 34 (Oxford, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2004), 725-27.

  For background on Flora Shaw and her times, I used The History of The Times, vol. 3, by S. Morison and others (London: The Times, 1947); Joanna Trollope’s Britannia’s Daughters (London: Hutchinson, 1983); James
Morris’s Pax Britannica; and Lawrence James’s The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (London: Little, Brown, 1994).

  Martha Louise Black described her encounter with Flora at Bennett Lake in her memoir My Ninety Years, edited and updated by Flo Whyhard (Anchorage: Alaska Northwest Publishing, 1976).

  Chapter 15

  Flora Shaw’s “Letters from Canada” are available on the Times microfilms: I read them in Library and Archives Canada.

  Information about Dawson’s social life comes from Jeremiah Lynch, Three Years in the Klondike, and Mary E. Hitchcock, Two Women in the Klondike, and information about Grand Forks from Norman Bolotin, Klondike Lost. The anecdote about Father Judge’s chess games comes from Sourdough Gold: The Log of a Yukon Adventure by Mary Lee Davis (Boston: Wilde, 1933). Lewis Green explains Canadian mining regulations in The Gold Hustlers: Dredging the Klondike 1898-1966 (Anchorage: Alaska Northwest Publishing, 1977).

  Chapter 16

  Harold Innis described the number of claims in the Yukon in Settlement and the Mining Frontier, vol. 9 of Canadian Frontiers of Settlement (Toronto: Macmillan Company of Canada, 1936). Details about the White Pass and Yukon Railway are taken from Wendy Vaizey’s A Brief History of Close Brothers (London: Privately published, 1995). Benjamin Craig’s unpublished diary is held by the Yukon Archives in Whitehorse.

  The papers of Samuel Benfield Steele have recently been acquired by the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton. The collection includes an extensive amount of material, including official reports, correspondence, diaries, journals, photographs, military memorabilia, and scrapbooks. I focused exclusively on Steele’s eighteen months in the North. When I consulted his letters from the Yukon to his wife, I was one of the first people to read them since Marie herself slipped them out of their envelopes. All the Steele quotations in Chapters 16, 17, 18, and 19 come from this collection.