Alaska (99 page)

DELICIOUS FOOD

GUARANTEED WHOLESOME

CONTENTS UNKNOWN

5

Within the hour all the cans were gone and the drifters of Nome were telling one another what a good sport this young fellow who ran the R&R store was.

This imaginative action caught the attention of Lars Skjellerup and the other responsible men who were trying to maintain some kind of order, and despite Tom's youth he was invited to become a member of Skjellerup's informal governing team, as Tom explained in a letter that he dispatched to his superiors in Seattle: Under the leadership of men like Skjellerup this town has enormous potential, and although Dawson proves that a gold town can go bust in one year, I find no similarity between the two places. Dawson is landlocked at the far end of the Canadian road, of no interest to anyone but miners. Nome is a seaport at the crossroads between Asia and America and must prosper.

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During a clear spell I rode a reindeer sled out to Cape Prince of Wales and could see Siberian Russia only sixty miles away. Boats pass easily between the two coasts and I would expect traffic between them to multiply.

I must warn you about one thing. We are making huge profits, and when forty or fifty steamers lay to off our coast come June, we shall make more. But Nome has no government, none at all, and no system of fire prevention. If one building catches fire, the entire city will go up in flames. Therefore, I shall keep inventory low and remit all money to Seattle as promptly as possible, for one of these days I expect to see my beautiful store in flames.

However, there is hope that we shall soon be allowed to have a government. There's talk that Congress is about to pass a law giving Alaska two judges, and if that happens, one of them is to be stationed here. Then things must improve and I shall expect our young city to forge ahead.

As the last days of 1899 approached, the citizens of Nome, eager for any excuse to hold a celebration, decided to organize a slam-bang affair to welcome the birth of the twentieth century, even though sensible men knew that would not occur until midnight on 31 December, 1900, and during preparations Lars Skjellerup assured Tom: 'The days of no law in this city are passing. When the ice breaks next May or June, and the federal judge arrives, things'll begin to hum. No more claim-jumping, no more.'

'Can a federal judge do all that?' Tom asked, and Skjellerup had to admit that he did not know, but he did know a man called Professor Hale, a former schoolteacher who would. He was a cadaverous fellow with a huge Adam's apple and a thunderous voice who loved to give his opinion on everything, so on the festive day before Christmas an informal meeting was held in the Second Best Saloon, and Hale demonstrated his wide knowledge.

'In our American system a federal judge is about the finest official we have.'

'Better'n the President?' a miner shouted, and Hale snapped: 'In some ways, yes.

The judge serves for life, and in the long history of our nation, no federal judge has ever been found corrupt. When all else fails, you turn to him for justice.'

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'You mean, they're responsible only to Washington?' Skjellerup asked, and Hale replied: 'They're responsible only to God. Not even the President can touch them.' He became almost evangelical: 'Gentlemen, I thank you for inviting me here today. A year from now, with a federal judge on the bench, you won't recognize Nome.'

Skjellerup and Hale were wrong in jumping to the conclusion that the incoming judge would be from the federal bench but right in assuming that he would arrive with plenipotentiary powers. If he was the proper choice, he could bring Nome quickly into the ranks of civilized society.

'One thing he'll do for sure,' Professor Hale told Skjellerup, 'he'll restore Seven Above

to your Siberian friend,' and as the old century ended, nearly everyone in Nome, except the chloroform gangs, was prepared to welcome the powerful judge. They were ready, and perhaps even eager, to be regulated in an honest way, for anarchy had sickened them.

NOME HAD CELEBRATED NEW YEAR'S DAY ONLY THREE

times. In 1897 the entire population, three unsuccessful miners, had gathered in a bitterly cold tent to share a hoarded bottle of beer. As 1898 began, again the whole population, only fourteen and still all men, had celebrated with whiskey and pistol shots, and as 1899 started, with the golden sands about to be discovered, a mixed population of more than four hundred, including the pioneers known by then as the Three Lucky Swedes and Lars Skjellerup's team, had had a high old time with songs in many languages.

But at the end of December this year, the three thousand citizens of Nome, aware that their number must soon explode to more than thirty thousand, brought out caches of whiskey which had been hidden in the big boxes that served as root cellars. Of course, it was impossible to have real cellars; the permafrost would not allow it.

On the last day of what men insisted on calling the dying century, one of Tom Venn's clerks asked: 'Everyone says Nome may soon have twenty or thirty thousand more people.

How can they know that? If no news can't get in here, how can any get out?'

Tom became defensive: 'They don't know for sure, but if you want to know how I made my guess, just listen. When news of gold on the beaches trickled up to Dawson City, our riverboat, the

Parker,

was about to leave with sixteen passengers. Within half an hour we had more than one hundred, and when it sailed, nearly two hundred were aboard, and I do believe it could have picked up another fifty at Circle and 602

fifty more at Fort Yukon, if it could've held them. People slept standing up!'

'What's that mean?' the clerk asked.

'It means you better get that addition finished, because I know in my bones that Seattle and San Francisco are filled right now with people aching to get to Nome.'

For a variety of reasons the Nome gold strike was trebly attractive. The gold was on American soil, not Canadian. A miner could get to it on a luxury steamer in no way inferior to those that sailed to Europe. And when he landed, all he had to do, he thought, was to 'sift sand and ship the gold bars home.' This was prospecting deluxe. And there was a final attraction: anyone who had missed the earlier strikes in Colorado, Australia and the Yukon could compensate in Nome.

There were drawbacks. Because thick ice captured the Bering Sea early and firmly, ships could operate only from June through September, and even then at grave risk, for the town had no docking facilities and could have none. And the hours of daylight available for gold seeking oscillated radically through the year: four hours in winter, twenty-two in summer; and since these endless winter nights could be formidable, the people of Nome welcomed any diversion, such as the beginning of a new year.

As the sun went down at two in the afternoon on the thirty-first of December, citizens began assembling in saloons, and at the Second Best, Lars Skjellerup assured everyone of three things: 'Congress will pass the law giving us a government. We'll get a good judge. And gold on the beaches will never run out, because it goes twenty or thirty feet deep. Any new storm, it uncovers new concentrations.'

His listeners spent much of the afternoon arguing as to how the Nome gold got to the beaches, for this had happened nowhere else on earth. One miner who had collected a small fortune said: 'The Bering Sea is filled with gold. The tide brings it our way.' Another reasoned: 'There's this small volcano ten miles out under the waves.

It spews gold regular.' Others claimed that at some past time a river of lava had run out of a land volcano, now vanished, and had dropped its gold as the rock pulverized in the sea. It was Arkikov's idea, which he had trouble expressing except through wild use of his hands, that the gold was no different from that of the Yukon: 'Many years ago . . . little river . . . comes across rocks with gold. Many years . . .

gold wash free . . . reaches shore . . . me find . . . me know.'

But his broken words failed to convince even his own partners, each of whom had his own bizarre theory. The gold

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of Nome was regular in every detail except in the way it finally came to rest . .

. and its abundance.

When Tom Venn joined the celebration after closing his store for the year, someone shouted: 'A drink to the benefactor of Nome,' and men cheered.

'What did the young feller do?' asked a miner who had walked overland in November cold from his unrewarding diggings on the Kyokuk River, and another man told the story of the cans of good food which Tom had sold for five cents each: 'He'll be the John Wanamaker of Nome.'

At a minute to midnight the banker leaped upon the bar and whipped out his watch: 'We'll count down to welcome the greatest century Nome will ever have. Forty-five, forty-four, forty-three, forty-two . . .'

When he reached ten, all in the bar were shouting in unison, and as the new year dawned, men started kissing any women in sight and clapping new acquaintances on the back. Tom Venn sought out Missy Peckham and kissed her fervently: 'I've wanted to do that since 1893,' and Missy said: 'High time.'

IN THE THREE LONG MONTHS FOLLOWING THE CELEBRAtion, Nome went into its yearly hibernation, for life in a frozen mining camp could be unbelievably monotonous. Even Tom Venn, who preferred the town over Dawson, saw that it had disadvantages, which he was willing to discuss with his customers: 'It's farther north. Days are shorter. And Dawson never had that bitter wind that whips in from the sea. There's a lot wrong with Nome, but its spirit, that's for me!”

The things Nome did to entertain itself were ingenious, but two diversions were especially regarded. Professor Hale, who had never taught anything beyond grade seven, was prevailed upon to give readings from Shakespeare. Before large audiences of miners who packed one of the halls, he sat in a chair on a platform, clad in a togalike garment which reached to his toes, and with a tumbler of whiskey at hand to keep his voice lubricated, he read aloud in powerful tones the more popular plays.

He took all parts, all voices, and he had always had such a love for Shakespeare that as the action quickened, or when he came to some part he especially liked, he would rise from his chair, prance about the platform, and shout the words until the smoky hall echoed. When he was required to depict Lady Macbeth or any of the other heroines, he manipulated his toga in such a way that, combined with his high, queru-604

lous voice, he became a distraught murderess or a lovesick Juliet. Indeed, it was so much fun to hear Professor Hale that when the cycle of plays ended, the miners insisted that he start repeating them, but this he refused to do. Instead, he advertised a special evening in which he would 'deliver in sonorous voice the immortal sonnets of the Bard of Avon.'

The hall was filled when he came onto the platform, and those in front could see that in addition to a slim volume of the sonnets, he had brought with him a much larger tumbler than before: 'I am not at all certain, ladies and gentlemen, that I can make these sonnets, all to be read in the same voice, as interesting as the plays, but believe me, if I fail, the fault is mine and not Shakespeare's.'

He had not reached the great sonnets, those with the singing lines, before he began reading certain ones as if a young girl were uttering them, or an old man, or a warrior, and when he came to the final dozen, with his tumbler near empty and the audience enraptured by his flow of words, he began to let himself go, reading the sonnets as if they were the most powerful and dramatic of the Bard's writings. He was shouting, mouthing, posturing, leaping forward and slinking back, always maintaining the powerful voice which thrilled his listeners. Rarely had the sonnets been accorded such a rousing performance.

The second treasured recreation was the Eskimo Dance, a bizarre and almost dreamlike affair which had been invented in response to one of Alaska's preeminent features.

For the greater part of its recent history, Alaska has had the problem of men's coming into the district without women, as when the Russian traders came in numbers but without women; or the western explorers probed the seas for years without seeing women of their own kind; or when merchant whalers from New England arrived, always without women; or, more recently, when the gold seekers poured into the area, always forty or fifty men to one woman.

As a consequence, the story of Alaska has had to focus upon the friendships between men, their trustworthiness, their tragedies, their triumphs at the conclusion of incredible heroics. When women did appear in these highly structured affairs they were apt to be prostitutes, or native women already married to some Eskimo, Aleut or Athapascan. In the mining camps, wherever enough men concentrated, the ritual of the evening dance developed, where men hungry for entertainment and any kind of association with women on even bizarre terms would hire a fiddler or two, most often native men who had more or less acquired the skill, and a dance would be announced.

Admission: Men $1. Women free.

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There might be in the area one white woman who would don her best frock and be expected to dance with each of the men; the rest of the women, perhaps as many as eight or nine, would be natives of any age from thirteen to fifty, and they would come shyly to the dance, often well after the fiddler had started, edging in and standing along the wall, never smiling or giggling or looking directly at any particular white man.

After a period of social thaw, one of the women would step away from the wall and begin a monotonous dancelike motion, mostly up and down but with her shoulders swaying, and when she had done this for a moment or two, some miner would step forward, face her, and without ever touching her, go through his own interpretation of a dance, and so they would move as long as this set of music continued.

Once the ice was broken, and that is not an inappropriate idiom, for the temperature outside might be thirty-below, other women would begin to dance in their own dreamlike way, and other men would join them, never touching, never speaking. Since the women did not remove much of their clothing, they looked like round furry little animals, and some added to that impression by dancing with babies strapped to their backs.