Alaska (98 page)

THE YUKON RIVER PRESENTED ITS OWN PROBLEM, Because the Jos. Parker, on its last trip upriver before the freeze, carried with it news of the unique find, and even before the boat docked at Dawson, a deckhand was shouting: 'Gold found on the beach at Nome!'

The effect was not electric, it was volcanic, because every 594

miner who had missed the big strike on the Klondike knew that he had to get to the next one fast, and within half an hour after that first shout, eager men were crowding the riverfront seeking passage to Nome. As one old miner expressed it to Tom Venn, who was in charge of selling tickets for his R&R's Jos.

Porfeer's homeward run back to St. Michael: 'Stands to reason, don't it? It's winter in Nome, just like here, and they cain't no ships get into Nome from Seattle till next June. If'n I kin get there on your boat, I got the field all to meself. This time I stake me a claim.' He was distressed when Tom had to tell him: 'No bunks left, mister. Last ones sold off fifteen minutes ago.'

'What kin I do?' the old man asked, and Tom said: 'Sleep on deck,' and the miner almost shouted: 'Gimme a ticket,' and with it clutched in his hand, he ran off to fetch his bedroll for the long trip.

The sleeping bunks had been preempted so quickly because within ten minutes of that first shout of 'Gold at Nome,' the Belgian Mare had called to her ten girls: 'Pack!

We're off to Nome!' and she had rushed to Venn's office to grab eleven berths. Like the fabled rats whose departure signaled the sinking of the ship, this departure of the Belgians from their cribs gave notice that Dawson was doomed. For two years it had been a golden city; Nome would be the next thing higher than that.

Tom was preoccupied with trying to calculate how many more deck spaces he could sell on the Parker

when he received a jolt from his manager, Mr. Pincus, an old R&R hand who had run stores at various locations for the big Seattle firm: 'Tom, chance of a lifetime.

I'm going to ship everything we have down to Nome. I wish I could get approval from Mr. Ross first, but the motto of our company is ”If it has to be done, do it.” Dawson is finished. Nome will have fifty thousand people this time next year.' He smiled at the boy and asked, 'How old are you?' and when Tom replied 'Seventeen,' giving himself the benefit of a year, the manager said: 'You're old enough. You've seen what can happen in a gold field. Sail down to St. Michael with the Parker, then move your goods over to Nome, build a store, a big one, and give honest service.'

'You mean . . . ?'

'I do. Son, it's either you or me, and frankly, it's more difficult to close down a store than to open one. I'm needed here. You're needed there.'

As Tom started to tremble, overcome by the gravity of the proposal, the manager called him to his desk: 'A wise old man gave me these gold scales, Tom. I've used them on three

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different fields. There's no rust on them, is there?' When Tom studied the handsome little balances and the set of weights for weighing gold dust, he could see no rust.

'I mean moral rust. Tom, I do believe those scales have never weighed a dishonest poke. Keep them polished.'

Sailing of the Parker

was delayed one day so that practically the entire stock of goods from the R&R store in Dawson could be crammed aboard, and while Tom was supervising the placement of the valuable wares for which he was now responsible, he heard such giggling from the cabins booked by the Belgian Mare that he concluded her fare was going to be repaid by the end of this first night in port.

In one important respect the delay was fortunate, for at dawn on the second day, three people of great importance to Tom appeared, two of them seeking passage. They were Missy Peckham, Matthew Murphy and, to Tom's amazement, tall, dour John Klope.

Missy and Murphy were the ones who wanted to depart, but they had no money, the gold fields had not been good to them; and since Klope had found no colors deep in his shaft, neither did he.

They had come to throw themselves on the mercy of their common friend Tom Venn, and Klope did the speaking: 'Tom, you're like a son to me. I beg you like your father might if he was here today. Take Missy and Matt to Nome. Give them another chance.'

'I'd have to charge passage, company rules.'

This was a heartbreaking moment, for these three who had striven so valiantly, who had endured between them all the agonies of the gold rush, had nothing to show for their courage and toil. They were broke, dead flat broke, and two of them sought money to escape. For Klope, it seemed there would be no escape; he was locked into his futile shaft forever.

When Tom asked: 'Who helps you now?' he said: 'Sarqaq. His leg never healed. He can't run dogs no more, but he sells one now and then. We live.'

After these diversionary remarks, Tom had to give the waiting trio the bad news: 'The boat can take only one more,' and without hesitation Matt pushed Missy forward: 'She's the one,' but then Tom had to say: 'Her fare has to be paid ... by someone.'

In the discussion that followed, three things were clear: Missy had to get to Nome; Matt would follow later as best he could; and none of the three had the money required for passage.

Klope waited for one of the others to speak, then took Tom aside: 'She looked after you . . . when your father died, when you were a kid in Dawson, and at our mine.

It's your job to look after her now,' and with that, he pushed Tom back to 596

confront the woman with whom his young life had been so closely intertwined.

'Missy,' he said in a fumbling manner, 'you were better than a mother to me. I'll pay your fare.' In silence Missy accepted the ticket, for her hard life on the gold fields had led her to expect no acts of generosity. However, she did look at Tom, wanting to mutter some words of thanks, but when she saw that he was equally embarrassed, she said nothing.

The journey had to be swift, for ice was beginning to form; there could be no more trips this year, and Captain Grimm snorted at the calls for speed: 'Two years ago, everybody in a great hurry to get to Dawson. Freeze my boat in the Yukon. This year, everybody in a hurry to get out. Maybe we freeze again.'

'Oh my God!' a miner cried. 'And miss the claims again?'

'Forced draft, if you'll load the wood promptly at the stops.'

Now, since the Jos. Parker

had become part of a regular shipping line, when Grimm pulled into a wood depot the waiting cords were earmarked for him, as an R&R regular, so it was possible to maintain a forced draft. But even so, it was a touchy race, because as so many riverboat captains had learned in past years, the mouth of the Yukon often froze nearly solid while the upstream parts were still open. This year, however, he slipped through, but as he left the river for the Bering Sea he watched behind him as the great river closed down. His would be the last boat through.

PASSENGERS FROM THE PARKER

WERE THE LAST PEOPLE into Nome before the winter freeze clamped fingers of ice over the town. The beaches now contained thirteen miles of canvas tents stretching to the west and another eleven miles reaching eastward toward Cape Nome. At some places the frozen Bering Sea edged to within ten yards of the tents, its icy hummocks towering above them. How will those poor men survive the blizzards? Missy asked herself when she saw the endless string of flimsy white tents, but then she laughed: Wrong question.

How will I survive?

After much searching, she found a one-room shack in an alley, but now the question became: How can I pay for it? and the solution arrived in a curious way. For as she looked down at the pathway in front of her shack, she saw that the entire area was encased in a yellow glacier two feet thick composed of frozen urine, and as she stared in disgust at the icy sewage, men from the saloons on Front Street came out to use the alley as a toilet.

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She was so enraged by this that she asked the owner of her shack: 'Aren't there any public closets in this town?' and he said: 'There isn't anything. No closets, no services, no law of any kind,' and she asked: 'Well, isn't there a doctor?' and he directed her to a tentlike affair in which a young man from Seattle struggled to tend the health problems of Nome.

Blustering into his tent, she asked: 'Do you know that the alley in front of my shack is two feet deep in frozen urine?' and he said: 'Look at the alley in back of my tent,' and when she did she saw a massive pile of human feces.

'Good God, Doctor! This town's in trouble,' and he said reassuringly: 'Not until the thaw. Then, of course, people will die of dysentery. And we'll be lucky if we escape epidemics of typhoid and diphtheria.'

'You need my help, Doctor. I can keep records and keep track of your medicines and help with your women patients.' The young man was barely earning enough to support himself, but was persuaded by Missy's strong plea: 'Just till my husband gets here.

He's in Dawson, but he'll be down one of these days.' And in that way she acquired a job that would at least sustain her till Matt arrived.

During her first days at work, she was further shocked to learn that the few wells which had been dug for drinking water had been placed so that anything could flow into them, while the Snake River, from which most of the town's water came, also served as the town's sewer. When Missy protested the situation, the doctor said: 'Don't tell me! I saw it three months ago. I can't understand why half the population isn't deathly ill right now. A miracle must be protecting us, but don't drink a drop of water that hasn't been boiled.'

With no one responsible for streets, the thoroughfares of Nome were frozen cesspools into the cold morasses of which horses sometimes casually disappeared during a temporary thaw. Theft became common; the Belgian Mare opened her cribs right on the main street; children did not go to school; and there were three saloons for every grocery store.

Not far wrong was the newspaper editor who cried: 'Nome is a hell on earth.'

Missy had been in town only a week when she had an opportunity to witness just how lawless the place had become. Near her shack clustered several canvas tents, each occupied by one man, and following the discovery of gold on the beach, it was likely that in any given tent there would be a small poke filled with the precious metal.

Gangs of ruthless thieves had devised a bizarre method of stealing such gold: they scouted saloons until some lone miner rolled home, but since they knew that every miner went armed after the shoot-598

ing of Horseface Kling, the gang did not attack him till he was in his tent and safely snoring. Then they crept up, slit the canvas near his head, and poked through the hole a long stick with a rag soaked in chloroform tied on the far end. When the miner succumbed to the vapors, the thieves entered casually, spent ten or fifteen minutes methodically taking the place apart, and in this way laid hold of much gold. It was a kind of painless theft, because when the miner woke up, all that was missing was his gold, and when he returned to the beaches he could replace that.

On the night involving Missy, things went wrong as two different gangs worked the tents. In the first one, either the victim had received an inadequate dose of chloroform or the thieves dawdled, because the man awakened, saw through the film over his eyes that two strange men were robbing his poke, and bellowed. This wakened Missy, who ran out in time to see the robbers escape with the gold. Seeing that the victim needed help, Missy ran for the doctor, who easily detected from the smell what had happened.

Together they brought the miner back to full consciousness.

While the doctor stayed to care for the man, Missy went to check the other tents.

Most of the occupants were still in saloons, but when she came upon a tent with a ripped canvas and peered inside, she saw lying on the cot an inert miner with a big wad of chloroformed rag over his face. Instinctively alarmed, she shouted: 'Doctor!

Come here!' and when a crowd gathered in the cold November night they found the miner was dead. The fracas in the first tent had frightened the second group of thieves, and they had fled, but when they pulled away the long stick, the heavily dosed rag had fallen off, covering the miner's mouth and nostrils, and asphyxiated him.

When the doctor led Missy back to her shack she bolted the door and propped a chair against the window. 'This is a dreadful town,' she said as she sat unsteadily on the bed. 'You have to protect yourself every minute.'

However, after the miner was buried she had a chance to inspect Nome more carefully, and she concluded that two establishments were well run, the Mare's cribs and the Ross & Raglan store, where Tom Venn, only sixteen but more mature than most of his customers, ran a taut shop. He was willing to buy almost anything that destitute miners wanted to sell and to offer it to others at decent prices. She saw Tom at his best one day in mid-November when he came running to her shack pleading for help.

'What's the matter?' Missy asked, and he blurted out: 'That idiot who had the little general store before I came down to set up R&R. Can you guess what he did?'

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'Steal the funds?'

'Worse. He was stupid.' And he led her to an improvised warehouse about which he had just learned. The roof had blown off and a huge stack of canned goods shipped up from Seattle during the summer had been drenched by so many rains that the labels had soaked off.

'Look at them! Five hundred, six hundred cans. All from the same cannery. All alike.

And nobody can tell what's in them.'

In disgust he applied a mechanical opener at random: 'Sweet corn, cherries, plums, sweet potatoes.' Missy inspected the four cans, and had to agree that they contained no outer clue which would help identify other like cans in the mess.

'What'll I do?' Tom wailed, but Missy was busy tasting the contents, which, with a smack of her lips, she pronounced delicious. And that's when Tom Venn proved capable of making a practical decision. Taking a huge square of cardboard, he worked in his rude office while Missy and a helper moved the stack of label-less cans to the roadway in front of the store, where they constructed an eye-catching pyramid in front of which Tom placed the sign: