Alaska (82 page)

Klope asked: 'If he was here a year ago, why didn't he get one of the good claims?'

and Kirby said: 'Even then it was too late.'

In no way did the officer suspect Craddick of trying to pull an illegal trick, for he was a decent man, but Kirby did think it best if he knew what was going on: 'Is he trying to sell you a claim?'

'Yes.'

'Where is this claim?' he asked Craddick, and when the latter said: 'On the hill at Eldorado,' Kirby said with guarded enthusiasm: 'That's a serious site. Good things have been happening around there.'

He did not want to know how much the seller was asking, but when the figure, fifty dollars, slipped out, he whistled and told Klope: 'If you don't take it, I will.'

With that, he saluted the Mare and moved on.

Klope had the money and a burning desire to own a gold mine of any sort, so he said that he would buy, cash in hand, if the miner would show him the claim and sign a transfer of sale at the Canadian government's office.

Eager to dispose of what had been nothing but an irritation, the miner said: 'You know, you're getting a cabin, not finished altogether. That goes with the sale.'

'Let's go see it. Now.'

So Klope paid for the Mare's breakfast, untied Breed, and set out with the miner to walk the thirteen miles to Eldorado, and when they reached there, Klope found that everything the man had said was true. He had a claim. It was atop a hill. He had started to dig deep into the frozen earth. And he had already built about three-fourths of a one-room cabin. It was, the man said, the best damn buy on the Yukon: 'I don't think there's a flake of gold down there, but it's a real claim in a real gold field.'

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It was now late in the afternoon of the twenty-second, and neither man wished to take that long hike back to Dawson, so the miner suggested: 'Why don't we stay here?'

and they made rude beds in the half-finished cabin. As the man was about to go to sleep, he suddenly cried: 'Damn near forgot!' and when Klope inquired, he explained: 'You got to start your mix at night if you want flapjacks in the morning,' and when he left his bed to rummage among his stacked goods for some flour, Klope asked: 'Do you put some sourdough starter in the flour?' and the man replied: 'No other way.'

Now Klope rose to make a hesitant proposal: 'I brought some sourdough all the way from Fort Yukon, and I was wondering if it was still any good.'

'Try it someday and see.'

'Could we try it now?'

Craddick studied this, then gave a judicious answer: 'Mine's run out. I borried some from Ned down the line. I know this is good. If we just try yours and it ain't, we got ourselves no breakfast.'

Klope considered this, then made his own proposal: 'Why don't we try both?' and the miner said: 'Now, that makes sense.'

In the morning he was up before Klope, whom he awakened with good news: 'Pardner, you got yourself some real live sourdough!' and he explained how a substantial pinch of old dough rich in proliferating spores of yeast, when mixed in with ordinary flour, a little sugar and water and allowed to ferment overnight in a protected place, would generate the finest cooking yeast in the world and produce a new dough that produced delicious flapjacks.

'Looks to me like your dough did three times as good a job as Ned's,' and when Klope studied the two pans of rising dough, he agreed.

The first pancakes made from his leaven were, he proclaimed forcefully, the best he had ever tried: chewy, tasty, excellent when flooded with the almost frozen syrup from a big can. 'They'd be even better with butter,' the miner said, but even he had to admit that just as they were, they were pretty good.

'You got yourself a good strain,' he said. 'It'll work well up here as you dig your shaft.'

After breakfast he instructed Klope in the intricacies of this type of mining: 'What we do, every man on this hill, is light a fire every night, from September when the ground freezes hard to May when it begins to thaw. The fire softens the ground, maybe eight inches. Come morning, you dig out that eight inches and pile it over here.

Next night and every

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night, you build yourself another fire. Next morning and every morning, you dig out the eight inches of thawed earth till you have yourself a shaft thirty feet deep.'

'What do you do with the earth?' Klope asked, and Craddick pointed to a score of earthen piles, frozen solid: 'Come summer, you sluice all that earth and maybe you find gold.'

The miner shouted down the hill to a man working on a lower level: 'Can we see your dump?' and the man shouted back: 'Come ahead, but hold that dog.'

So Klope, Craddick and Breed climbed down to the lower level, halfway to the rich creek below, and studied the large pile of frozen muck. The owner said: 'Cain't tell as how there's much color in there, but Charlie, three claims down, says he believes he'll sluice forty, fifty thousand dollars outen his pile of mud.'

'How does he protect it when he's down below working?' Klope asked, and both miners laughed: 'There's millions lying around these diggings this wintry day. And it better stay right where it is, because if any man touches a thimbleful of my frozen muck, there's fifty men will shoot him dead.'

On their way up the hill they passed a grizzled man in his sixties who had a larger-than-average pile of frozen earth beside his cabin. 'Louie,' Craddick said, 'I hear you found real gold,' and the man said: 'Hasty assay said maybe twenty thousand dollars.'

'Could I see what real gold looks like?' Klope asked, and the old man kicked at his pile until he broke loose a frozen fragment, and when he and the California man looked at it their faces broke into glorious smiles, for they were seeing a rich deposit.

But when Klope looked he saw nothing and his face showed his disappointment.

'Sonny,' the man said, 'it don't come in minted gold pieces like the bank has. It's them teeny-weeny flecks. My god, this is a rich deposit!' And now when Klope moved the chunk of earth in the sunlight, he saw the flecks, golden and pure and extremely small. So this is what he had come to find, these minute particles of magic?

Back at his own mine, Craddick took Klope down the square opening he had so laboriously cut through the frozen soil, and for the first time in his life Klope heard the word permafrost:

'Our curse and our blessing. We have to work like hell to dig it loose. But it's so permanent, here forever, that we don't have to timber our hole the way my pappy did in California. We dig a hole, it remains same size till doomsday or an earthquake.

And when you do reach bedrock . . .'

'What's that?'

'Where the ancient river collected its gold ... if there ever 499

was a river, or gold.' He sighed over lost dreams, and added: 'When you reach bedrock, you just build more fires and melt sideways rather than down, and the permafrost holds everything together . . . even the roof of your cave.'

They were about seven feet down when the miner said this, and when Klope looked up he asked: 'How do I get my thawed earth up to the pile?' and from bitter memory the man laughed sardonically: 'You load it in this bucket which I'm givin' you and you climb out of the shaft, takin' this rope with you, and you haul it up and dump it, and then you climb down with the bucket and do it all over again.' He stopped and chuckled: 'That is, unless you can teach that dog of yours to haul up the bucket and dump it.'

'Is that how all those men . . . ?' and the miner nodded: 'That's how they all did it. The men like me who found nothin'. The lucky ones who took out half a million.'

The two men walked back to Dawson, with Breed in tow, and next morning they appeared at the Canadian registry office, where they met Sergeant Kirby filing a report. 'I bought the claim,' Klope said, and Kirby replied: 'You won't regret it.' And minutes later Klope had in his possession the valuable paper which stated that a transfer had been made and that he now owned 'Eldorado Crest, Claim # 87 in Line, formerly in the legal possession of Sam Craddick of California, now belonging to John Klope of Moose Hide, Idaho, this

24th day of December 1897, $50.00 U.S.A.'

As night fell and a group of sentimental miners toured the frozen streets singing Christmas carols, Klope felt that he knew the rock-bottom fact about gold mining on the Klondike: Luck. I was lucky to get here alive. I was lucky to meet Sarqaq before it was too late. I was lucky to find a helpful woman like the Mare. And I was damned lucky to buy as good a lease as I did. I know the chances of finding gold in that hole are a thousand-to-one against, but no wiseacre back in Idaho will ever be able to laugh at John Klope: 'That fool farmer! Went all the way to the Yukon and never found hisself a mine.'

ON THE LAST DAY OF JULY 1897 A TALL ELDERLY GENTLEman, garbed in the uniform of a Confederate general, complete with a big Robert E.

Lee kind of hat and a pair of cavalryman's boots, was lounging in the offices of Ross & Raglan, one of Seattle's principal shipping firms. Idly inspecting the hordes of would-be gold seekers from all parts of the globe who cluttered Schwabacher's Wharf, his inquisitive eye fastened upon a family obviously from somewhere to 500

the east, and even more obviously ill at ease. 'They're running away from something.'

he muttered to himself. 'They're nervous, but they do look decent.'

The man appeared to be in his forties, a wispy sort of fellow unsure of himself, as if he were waiting to hear directions from his employer. A clerk perhaps, the watcher thought. The wife was in her twenties, an undistinguished sort of woman, and their son, who seemed standard in every way, was probably thirteen or fourteen.

The man watching started to chuckle as the three argued among themselves as to whether they should all enter the shipping office or only one, with the wife making the decision.

Placing her hand in the middle of her husband's back, she shoved him toward the open door and turned to watch him enter.

The onetime Confederate studied the husband as he tentatively approached the counter, then heard him say to the shipping clerk: ”I've got to get to the Klondike.”

'Everyone does,' the clerk said, 'but our big ships are sold out, every inch of space through the October sailings, when ice closes down all the major ports.'

'What am I to do?' the man asked in a kind of desperation, and the clerk said: 'I might find you space on a converted tugboat, seven hundred dollars, and grab it, because tomorrow it'll cost eight.'

When the man winced, the clerk showed a twinge of sympathy and said: 'Between you and me, pardner, the price is too high. Our big ships are the rich man's route. Take one of our little R&R boats to Skagway and climb over the Chilcoot Pass. Save yourself a bundle.'

Since the man was now confronted with conflicting decisions, he told the clerk: 'I better discuss this with my wife,' but as he was about to leave the office he felt his arm being grabbed by someone he did not know, and looked up to see the smiling face of a Confederate officer, who asked: 'Are you by any chance seriously considering entering the gold fields in one of their leaky saucepans?'

Startled both by the general's appearance and by his question, the man nodded, whereupon the stranger said: 'I shall offer you invaluable advice, and trust me, it's worth more gold than you'll ever find along the Klondike.' He introduced himself as the Klondike Kernel and produced three clippings from Seattle newspapers attesting to the fact that this honored veteran of a North Carolina regiment, who had fought with both Lee and Stonewall Jackson, had prospected in the Yukon from 1893 through the height of the discoveries in

1896, and had come south on the Portland 'with a gunnysack 501

of gold bars so heavy two members of the ship's crew had to help him drag it to a waiting cab, which rushed him and the gold to the assayer's office.' The papers said that the Klondike Kernel, as he was favorably known among his fellow tycoons, refused to give his real name 'lest avaricious relatives descend upon me like a flock of vultures,' but his gracious ways attested to his good breeding in North Carolina.

He wanted to talk. Having been immured in lonely cabins for so long and having wasted so many years in fruitless search before striking it rich on Bonanza Forty-three Below,

he was now eager to share his knowledge and counsel with others: 'Did I hear you say you had three in your party?' and when the nervous fellow said: 'I didn't say,'

the Kernel explained: 'I saw you talking with your wife and son. Fine-looking pair.'

Then with an all-embracing smile he added: 'I'd better meet them so you'll all understand the situation.'

When they stood together in the street the man said: 'We're from St. Louis,' and the Kernel said effusively, with a low bow: 'Ma'am, you are mighty young to have a boy that age.'

'He's a fine boy,' she said.

'Dear friends,' the Kernel assured them, 'I have nothing to sell. I seek to steer you to no store where I receive a commission. I'm a man who scratched his way from one end of the Yukon to the other. I loved every minute of it, and seek only to share my experiences so that good people like you don't make the same mistakes.'

'Why did you leave?' the man asked defensively.

'Have you ever seen the Yukon in winter?'

'If you have all this money, why don't you go back home?'

'Have you ever seen North Carolina in summer?'

He said he could save them both money and heartache if they would but listen, and he was so persuasive, so congenial in the way he seemed to be trying to protect them, that they accepted his invitation to lunch. The wife assumed he would take them to some fancy restaurant, and she was eager to go, for she had not eaten well on the journey west; prices on trains were too costly.

'I take my lunch at a little saloon down the way. Excellent food for twenty cents.'

Stopping in the middle of the wharf, he said: 'I live as if I was a poor veteran of the war in a small town in Carolina in the year 1869, which was a very poor year indeed. I still cannot believe that my gold is in the bank. I'm sure I'll waken and find this all to have been a dream.'