Alaska (75 page)

He also laid claim to three other five-hundred-foot sites: Number One Above, Number One Below and Number Two Below. Carmack, as the principal claimant, was entitled to

Discovery and One Below, the other two were for Shookum Jim and Tagish Charley. Henderson's interest was not protected.

The habitues in the little settlement, accustomed to Carmack's lying ways, refused to believe that he had found anything. However, when he produced the empty rifle cartridge in which he kept his largest nuggets and dumped it onto the assayer's scales, the men's eyes widened. As prospectors long in the field and meager scatterings of gold had been known in this region for a dozen years they were familiar with the qualities of gold peculiar to each site along the Yukon. This came from none of the established mines. It was new gold; its quality was supreme; and the size of the nuggets suggested that it came from a major find, not from the weak tail of some small placer.

The great gold rush was on! Before nightfall, hungry prospectors from Forty mile were speeding upriver to stake their claims above and below Carmack's Discovery.

When fresh hordes streamed in they rejected the traditional names of these trivial streams. The Thron-diuck, a name of maximum difficulty which no one could pronounce, was quickly changed to the Klondike. Carmack's little Rabbit Creek was given the traditional gold-field name Bonanza, while an even smaller contributor which would prove richer than any of the others was appropriately called Eldorado. It was these enchanting names that would flash around the world.

Almost every facet of this fabulous stampede, perhaps the largest in history, had its ironic aspect, none more striking than the one which launched the field. Said a Canadian in a letter home to his wife: We Canadians are resentful of the fact that our fellow countryman Robert Henderson, of Nova Scotia, New Zealand and Australia, has been so badly treated in these gold fields. We are certain that he made the first find and that the disreputable American, the squaw man George Carmack, and his Indian helpers defrauded him of his rightful claim to half their find.

However, I must confide to you alone, and do not speak of this to anyone, but I think that maybe Henderson

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deserved what he got. I heard him say long before the find was made that 'I do not (ugly words) propose to let any (ugly words) Indian (ugly words) share in my finds of gold.'

We have reason to believe that Carmack's strike is so wonderfully rich that Henderson's refusal to work with Indians has lost him more than two million dollars.

A second irony of the great discovery on the Klondike was that although it occurred in mid-August 1896 and was widely known along the Yukon, verifiable word of its amazing richness did not reach the Outside until 15 July 1897. How could information of such a bonanza, to borrow the name of the creek where it happened, be so long concealed?

The Yukon River, 1,993 miles long with much of its course close to the arctic, freezes early, some parts in September, and thaws late, some segments not until June or occasionally July. So for those months, August 1896 till July of the next year, Carmack and his fellow millionaires were frozen in with their secret. But now a determined little Yukon River boat, the stern wheeler Alice, of

meager draft, forced a passage through the June ice and puffed into Dawson City, the boomtown, which incoming miners from the region had hastily constructed at the mouth of the Klondike.

When the crew learned of the tremendous strike and saw the boxes and bundles of gold the lucky prospectors intended taking to the Outside, they quickly unloaded the life-saving fruit and vegetables they had brought to the near-starving community and turned their little craft around in hours, loaded it with the new millionaires, and headed downstream to where ocean liners would be waiting near the mouth of the Yukon. As the Alice

pulled out of Dawson another sternwheeler arrived, so that all the miners who wished to return to the States found passage.

After a journey of nearly fourteen hundred miles, the two little boats reached the Bering Sea, where they turned north to deposit their historic cargo of men and gold at the entrepot of St. Michael. There, after several days of vast dinners consisting of fresh fruit, vegetables and delicious canned foods, heavy in vitamins to fight off the incipient scurvy from which so many suffered, the argonauts with their gold were lightered out to either the Excelsior,

bound for San Francisco, or the more famous Portland, for Seattle.

As the two steamers approached mainland United States, few passengers could anticipate the storm of publicity they were about to cause, for they assumed that news of their 458

staggering finds must have percolated to the outer world. Word had been forwarded to Canadian officials, who dismissed it as just one more exaggerated report from the Yukon: 'We know there's gold up there. Always has been. But never in such amounts.'

Also, a daring dog-team driver had made a heroic trip up the Yukon and across the forbidding Chilkoot Pass to alert American officials stationed in that area, but since these men could not believe the extent of the find, word was not sent south.

And a Chicago newspaper received an account from one of its reporters, but since they did not trust him, they printed almost nothing.

The Portland

achieved immortality by accident, for although she left Alaska first and made the long journey home in less than a month, and although her course was shorter than the

Excelsior's,

she did not arrive in Seattle until two days after the latter had already docked in San Francisco. There was, of course, some excitement along the California waterfront, but its newspapers failed to appreciate the magnitude of what had happened at the Klondike.

William Randolph Hearst's fledgling Examiner, always eager for spectacular stories, almost ignored the arrival of the gold, and only cursory stories were circulated nationally by rival .San Francisco papers, the Call and the Chronicle.

However, by the time the laggard Portland pulled into Schwabacher's Wharf in Seattle on the morning of 17 July, the citizens of that city had already been informed by San Francisco that adventurous men with great hoards of gold were coming home. An imaginative reporter, one Beriah Brown, who deserves to be remembered, had shown ingenuity by going out at dusk in a little boat to intercept the incoming ship and had through the night interviewed its passengers.

Preparing his story for that day's papers, he pondered how most effectively to report this striking story, and he must have considered phrases like 'a huge amount of gold'

and 'much gold' and 'a treasure trove of gold.' Discarding them all, he hit upon one of the memorable phrases of American journalism: At 3 o'clock this morning the Steamer Portland from St. Michael for Seattle, passed up the Sound with more than a ton of solid gold aboard.

Those words, 'a ton of gold,' sped across a nation hungry for the metal and seriously in need of it. In banks, in small business houses, in homes where killing mortgages had to be paid off and in the hearts of men yearning for a more accom-459

modating money system, the words 'a ton of gold' became an enchantment, a lure that could not be resisted.

How did men react to this thundering bugle call? In a small Idaho town one John Klope, unmarried and embittered by reverses, heard the summons and cried: 'At last! Gold for all!'

And in a cramped, rickety house in a mean quarter of Chicago, a man whose optimistic father had named him after a President of the United States, Buchanan Venn, was forty years old and disgusted by how sadly his life had deteriorated. Half afraid to voice the revolutionary thoughts which assailed him, he whispered to himself: 'Dear God!

Perhaps!'

IN THE NORTHERN CORNER OF IDAHO'S PANHANDLE, NOT

far from the Canadian border, lay the little town of Moose Hide. It was visited by no railroad, for the trans-Canada line ran to the north through Winnipeg and Calgary, while the nearest American road, from Chicago to Seattle, ran to a junction some miles to the south at Bonners Ferry.

News came late to Moose Hide, and good news sometimes not at all, so on the eighteenth day of July 1897, its citizens did not learn from their newspaper, for they had none, of the arrival in Seattle the day previous of a ton of gold. John Klope, a taciturn young man of twenty-seven, remained ignorant of an event which would in due course mean much to him.

Klope was the son of an Idaho farmer who had in the race of life kept just a few yards ahead of both the sheriff and president of the small bank in Coeur d'Alene to whom he had mortgaged his farm some years before. In order to help pay off this loan, son John had had to quit school at thirteen to work at any jobs available, but since these were years when the supply of gold in the United States was severely limited and the circulation of paper money even more so, the Klopes had a difficult time paying

off

their mortgage. But because they stinted themselves on the luxuries of life and many of the necessities, they succeeded. The farm was now theirs, but it represented not a bountiful life, only the victory of Slavic stubbornness.

Incredible as it might seem to others who took pride in their ancestry, John Klope did not know for sure where his ancestors had originated, or what their name had been in the old country. In school his mates had called him 'that Polack,' but from something his father said one evening, he judged that he was not Polish; however, the alternative was not spelled out, and he concluded, correctly, that the original 460

Klopes had lived in a territory near the Carpathian Mountains which had changed hands many times. He was satisfied with that status, which was good, because his father could not have clarified the ancestry had he wished, and his mother knew even less about hers.

He was John Klope, not a Pole, not a Scandinavian and not a German merely an American and happy to be one, like many of his neighbors. In the Klope family one never heard the lament 'I wish I'd'a stayed in the old country,' because if vague fragments of memory did adhere to that cliche, they were not pleasant.

Klope did not resent the fact that because of poverty he had been denied an education, for he would have had little success in any subjects then being taught, but he did most furiously object to the stranglehold which banks and the money system imposed upon the lives of hardworking families like his, and had he chanced to live in some large city, Chicago or St. Louis, he might well have become radicalized. Sometimes in the evening when the young men of Moose Hide lounged on the street corner after supper, John would listen to those brighter than he explain the difficulties under which the local farmers suffered, and he would say nothing, but later, when the discussion had changed to girls, he would suddenly blurt out: 'The man who has the gold sets the rules.'

In 1893, when terrible panic gripped the nation and when the freight trains of the Great Northern chugging in to Bonners Ferry carried little cargo, Klope's preoccupation with gold seemed less arbitrary, for now neighbors who had not paid off their mortgages began to feel the icy sting of the nation's inadequate money system. Farm after farm was foreclosed, and many young people with whom he had associated when he still attended school had to move away to the slums of cities like Chicago and San Francisco.

This painful removal of people had an effect upon Klope that even he did not understand at the time. During his school years he had been vaguely aware of a small, lively farm girl named Elsie Luderstrom; he had never approached her and certainly he had never walked her home, but he knew that she was kindly inclined toward him and he felt that when they both grew older he might very well want to speak with Els
ie.

Before he could do so, her family farm was taken back by the bank and she was whisked away in the silence of the night, as it were, to Omaha.

He never saw her again, but with her departure went his chance for a normal life of awkward courtship at nineteen, marriage at twenty-two, children at twenty-four, and the inheritance of either his father's farm or hers in his thirties.

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Without his knowing it, Elsie Luderstrom had held the key to his life, and the key had been lost.

'Banks is what did them in,' he growled one night as the young men met, and from that solemn judgment, not entirely correct but still relevant, he began to focus upon the need for a man to control his own sources of wealth. A farm was not enough; what seemed at the moment to be a good job on the Great Northern was not enough; and even one's own responsible character was inadequate, for there were no better men in America than Klope's father and Elsie's. They had struggled; they had saved; they had been frugal; and they had been overtaken by this nationwide panic. If there was in all America one young man to whom the call of Klondike gold would seem imperative, it was John Klope.

On the afternoon of 20 July 1897 he heard about the strike. A business traveler from Seattle to Chicago had changed trains in Spokane and come up to Bonners Ferry and made the customary joke: 'Where's the ferry?' and old-timers had explained for the fiftieth time: 'It used to cross the Kootenai,' and later the jokester would refer to it as 'the Hootenanny which runs through Bonners Ferry.' Many local people would have been just as happy if such travelers stayed home, but this one brought sensational news, for he carried with him newspapers from Seattle, and when people in the rooming house read the headlines and asked if they could have one of the papers, he said: 'Keep it. I'm sure the Chicago papers will have the story.'

By afternoon of 20 July word had filtered up to Moose Hide, and it so excited John Klope that he dashed in to Bonners Ferry and asked to see the man who had brought the news. When he found him, he asked: 'They said you had two papers. Could I see one?'

'Here, with my compliments.' Then he laughed: 'If you go to the gold fields, good luck.'

On the way home Klope stopped three times to read the article about the ton of gold, and he became so excited that by the time he reached his farm he was prepared to leave immediately for the Klondike. There was nothing to stop him. He was not really needed to run the farm; his mother and father between them could have managed a place four times the size of their few acres. He was, if the truth were known, a drain on their resources and he knew it. He was not even peripherally involved with any young woman, so his departure would not prevent the formation of a useful marriage.