Alaska (101 page)

How glorious it was, in an ordinary year, to be in Nome at the beginning of June and watch as the first of that season's vessels hove to in the roadsteads. Men would fire salutes, and study the ships' profiles, and run down to the shore to greet the first arrival of the year. It was the custom for the local news sheet to print in bold letters the name of the first man ashore: HENRY HARPER, FIRST IN 1899

And each year the cry that greeted every newcomer as he stepped ashore was the same: 'You got any Seattle newspapers? You got any magazines?'

This spring of 1900 was to be entirely different, for the desire of many to reach Nome was so great that on 21 May a heavy whaler pushed its snout through the ice, and two days later a legitimate passenger ship arrived, to the astonishment of those who felt that to approach Nome before the first week in June was folly.

But it was what happened next that amazed the citizens, because in swift succession two more passenger ships arrived, then three more, until, amidst the lessening ice, forty-two large ships lay at anchor. Since docking facilities could not exist on this turbulent roadstead, the ships sat about a mile and a half offshore, while improvised barges and lighters ferried back and forth to disgorge more than nineteen thousand newcomers. Nome, in those hectic weeks of thaw, was a more important harbor than Singapore or Hamburg.

And as the stampeders streamed ashore, eying the beaches already crowded with the bizarre machines of prospectors, each hopeful man tried to identify the spot to which he would hurry to pick up his share of the gold. Some had tents, which they erected quickly; others less prudent had to scrounge around for sleeping places; the Belgian Mare rented space, rotating four customers in a bed every twenty-four hours; and Tom Venn had to keep one employee watching the store 612

at night so that men endorsed by the R&R office in Seattle could sleep on the floor.

As more and more ships arrived the chaos in Nome became indescribable, and now the lack of civil government posed a fearful threat, for as health problems mounted, so did crime, and for the same reason. Crime, like disease, can be kept under control in a crowded society only by the exercise of constant policing powers, and if those powers are not allowed to exist, tranquillity cannot exist either.

But one of the big ships arriving on 20 June, with sixteen hundred new miners, brought newspapers confirming the news for which men like Lars Skjellerup and Tom Venn had waited: Congress is about to pass an Alaska Code and the district will receive two additional judges, the more important one to be assigned immediately to Nome.

Sober men cheered the news and even drunks agreed that the time had come to bring order into this vast disorder. Skjellerup sent Sana searching for the Siberian, and when Arkikov stood before him, the Norwegian cried with unwonted enthusiasm: 'Arkikov!

Your judge, he's coming,

Seven Above

will be yours again,' and a broad, robust smile illuminated the irrepressible reindeer herder's face: 'Me glad.'

IN A SMALL TOWN IN IOWA IN THE YEARS PRIOR TO THE

Civil War, a mediocre lawyer developed such vaulting ambitions for his newly born son that he named him John Marshall, after the greatest of the Chief Justices of the United States. The boy could remember that when he was only five his father walked him past the county courthouse and predicted: 'Someday you'll be the judge in that building,' and during his early years the lad believed that the famous jurist was his grandfather.

John Marshall Grant, alas, had none of the qualities of that noble proponent of justice, for he was essentially a weak human being who developed none of the flint hard character a judge should have. He slouched his way through high school and did poorly in one of Iowa's small colleges. He played no games, avoided books as well, and was notable on campus solely because he became increasingly handsome as the years passed. He was tall, well formed, with even features and a head of wavy hair which photographed so handsomely that people said, when his proud father displayed the cards he carried with him: 'Simon, your son looks like a judge!'

At the University of Pennsylvania Law School, one of the best, the future judge did so poorly that in later years his 613

classmates often wondered: 'How did John Marshall ever become a judge?' He became one because he looked like one. And as his father had predicted, he was installed in the little Iowa courthouse, dispensing a garbled kind of justice but his decisions frequently had to be overturned by higher courts because he had failed to understand the simplest common law as applied in courts like his throughout the other forty-four states and in Great Britain.

He was so handsome and so pompous in Fourth of July orations that politicians began thinking of running him for major office, but he was so flabby and lacking in determination that no one knew whether he was Republican or Democrat, and those who knew his pathetic record joked: 'Whichever party loses him is to be be congratulated.' When some Republicans sought a safe candidate who could be elected to Congress, they asked the judge's father what party his son favored, and the old man said proudly: 'My son the judge wears no man's collar.'

He would probably have bumbled his way to innocuous obscurity, harming few because his worst errors could always be reversed, had he not been invited to address a legal convention in Chicago, where a noted lobbyist heard him speak.

Marvin Hoxey was at age forty-five a man difficult to forget, once he had buttonholed you and stared penetratingly into your eyes. Portly, crop-headed, careless in dress and characterized by a huge unkempt walrus mustache and a perpetual cigar, he derived his considerable power from the fact that he seemed to know everyone of importance west of the Mississippi or in the halls of Congress. Protector of the more powerful interests in the West, he could always find a friend willing to do 'a little something for Marvin.' He had parlayed his skills into a position of some importance. For his help in gaining South Dakota's admission to the Union in 1889, he had been named National Committeeman for the Republican party in that state, a position from which he orated about 'the growing power of the New West.'

He thought globally, a man without a college education who could have taught courses on political manipulation. He saw nations as either rising or falling and had an uncanny sense of what actions a rising nation like the United States ought to take next. It then became his job to see to it that only those steps were taken which would serve his clients.

He became interested in Alaska when Malcolm Ross, senior partner of Ross & Raglan in Seattle, employed him to obstruct any national legislation which might give Alaska home rule, for as Ross pointed out: 'The destiny of Alaska 614

is to be governed by Seattle. The few people who are up there can rely on us to make the right decisions for them.'

At Ross's suggestion he had taken two cruises on R&R ships one to Sitka, which he found disgracefully Russian, 'hardly an American town at all,' and one up the great river to Fort Yukonas a result of which he knew Alaska better than most residents.

He saw it for what it was, a vast, untamed area with a shockingly mixed and deficient population: 'Not in mental or moral ability, Mr. Ross, but deficient in numbers.

I don't think the entire area has as many people, I mean real people, not natives and half-breeds, as my county in South Dakota, and God knows we're thinly staffed.'

It was his opinion, stated loudly in Seattle and Washington, that 'Alaska will never be ready for self-government.'

Whenever Hoxey lobbied against legislation for Alaska he repeated the pejorative phrase half-breed,

spitting it out as if the offspring of a hardworking white prospector and a capable Eskimo woman had to be congenitally inferior to someone purebred like himself with his Scots-English-Irish German-Scandinavian-Central Asian heritage. He believed, and he worked hard to convince others, that since Alaska would always be inhabited by people of mixed derivation Eskimo, Aleut, Athapascan, Tlingit, Russian, Portuguese, Chinese and God knows whatit must always be inferior and somehow un-American: 'Stands to reason, Senator, a land filled with half-breeds will never be able to govern itself.

Keep things as they are and let the good people of Seattle do the thinkin'.'

During sessions of Congress, Marvin Hoxey sometimes single-handedly defeated the aspirations of Alaska for self-rule. It was not allowed to become a territory, that honorable preparatory step to statehood, because the firms profiting from conditions as they were could not trust what a self-controlled territorial government might do to diminish their advantages. It was not anything, really. For some years it had been known as a district, but mostly it had been simply Alaska, vast, raw and unorganized, and Marvin Hoxey was engaged to keep it that way.

At the legal convention in Chicago he had already buttonholed several delegates when he learned by telegraph from an aide in Washington that despite all his efforts, a bill was going to be passed giving Alaska a modicum of self-government about one-fiftieth of what was justified including two additional judges to be appointed by a superior court in California. There was some talk of choosing them locally, but Hoxey had that killed instantly: 'There aren't two half-breeds in all that forlorn region qualified to be judges. I've been there.'

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He was wandering the halls of the convention, pondering how he could get the right kind of man appointed judge in the Nome district, when he happened to drift into the back of the room where Judge Grant was orating. His first impression was: I could make a man like that President ... or an important judge, but it was not until he heard Grant deliver one of his typical sentences in praise of home that he realized that he had come upon something special: 'The American home is like a fort atop a mighty hill that keeps its powder dry in preparation for the day when assaults from the swamps below, and you can never know when these are going to come, the lawless conditions in our big cities being what they are and fights to resist the agencies of contamination, keeping the flag flying to ensure that it always has a constant supply of gunpowder to do such.'

As soon as the judge ended his speech, Marvin Hoxey hurried up, shoved his walrus mustache and cigar close to Grant's face, and said with great feeling: 'What a magnificent address! It's of the utmost importance that we talk.'

And there, at the rear of a public room in a Chicago hotel, Marvin Hoxey's plan was formally launched. It was magnificently simple: he was going to steal the entire Nome gold field. Yes, with the assistance of Judge John Marshall Grant of Iowa, he would steal the whole damned field. If what the papers said was true, it could amount to fifty million dollars, and if they continued to dredge gold by the bucketful from the beaches, it might run to eighty million.

'Judge Grant, the leaders of this nation are searching for a man just like you to save Alaska. It's a forlorn place that cries aloud for the staunch leadership that only a judge like you can give it.'

'I'm flattered that you should think so.' He asked for Hoxey's name and address and said that he'd think the matter over.

As the lobbyist bade Judge Grant goodbye, he caught a final glimpse of the handsome, white-haired figure: That's the phrase we'll use to get him the job. Eminent jurist.

Even better:

Eminent Iowa jurist.

Defeated in his efforts to kill this legislation favorable to Alaska, he left Chicago for an urgent meeting in Seattle, where he placated his clients, especially Malcolm Ross, whose R&R ships and stores stood to lose some of their freedom under the new rules: 'Trust me, we lose a battle but we win the war. Our task is not to fight the new law but to

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use it to our advantage, and the first thing we have to do is to make sure we get our man into that judgeship governing Nome.'

'You have some local man in mind?' Ross asked, and Hoxey said: 'Too blatant. Never be blatant, Mr. Ross.'

'Who, then?'

'I have in mind an eminent Iowa jurist. Fine-looking man. Knows Western life.' This was a cliche of the period, that anyone who had ever been in Denver or Salt Lake automatically understood Alaska.

'Can we get him appointed?'

'That's my job.'

And as soon as he returned to Washington, the Eastern one, he launched his campaign.

Every Republican leader he had worked with as a national committeeman heard confidential reports on the distinguished Iowa jurist John Marshall Grant, and repetition of that resounding name inspired such confidence that the White House began to receive calls supporting Grant for the appointment 'to this here new judgeship in Alaska.' By simply stating that his new friend was an eminent jurist, Hoxey was making him one.

In late June 1900, John Marshall Grant was assigned to the new court in Nome, and many newspapers applauded a decision free of even a suspicion of political influence, and shortly thereafter he and his mentor Marvin Hoxey sailed on the steamer Senator to his new duties.

On the evening prior to arrival at the Nome roadstead, Hoxey laid down the law that Grant was to follow: 'John Marshall, if you play your cards right in Nome, you'll attract so much favorable attention you'll become a United States senator. The name of this ship is an omen, Senator Grant, me and my friends will see to that.'

'How do you see the situation, Mr. Hoxey?'

'I've been to Alaska, you remember. Know it like the back of my hand.'

'And your judgment?'

'Nome is in a terrible mess. The claims are false as hell. Mining law was not followed in making them. They're not in legal form. And they should all be vacated.'

The eminent jurist, knowing nothing about mining law and having neglected to bring along any books which would unravel its arcane lore, listened attentively as it was explained according to the doctrine of Marvin Hoxey: 'What you must do, Judge, and do it fast, is to declare . . . let's say fifteen of the major claims invalid. Present owners are disqualified, on the best legal grounds. Then appoint me as the impartial receiver, not the owner, you understand. Oh, of course, you 617