Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (13 page)

And yet, who is to say which were the lucky ones in the Eldorado lottery? Many who sold out and left the country ended their lives in relative comfort. Many who stayed behind to dig out fortunes lost all in the end. William Sloan, a Nanaimo dry-goods merchant who sold his interest in
Fifteen
for fifty thousand dollars and turned his back on the Klondike forever, invested his money wisely and rose to become a cabinet minister in British Columbia’s provincial government. His son became Chief Justice of that province. But the King of the Klondike died penniless and alone.

5

Henderson’s luck

All this while, on the other side of the Bonanza watershed, Robert Henderson continued to toil at his open cut on the creek he had wistfully named Gold Bottom. Boats were arriving daily at Dawson; shacks were being clapped together helter-skelter on valley and mud flat; Bonanza was staked for fourteen miles and Eldorado for three; and men were spraying across the whole of the Klondike country searching for new discoveries. Henderson knew nothing of this: he had seen no one but his partners since that August day when Carmack had gone off, promising to send word back if he found anything on the other side of the blue hills.

Then one day – some three weeks after the strike – Henderson looked up and saw a group of men coming down from the divide. He asked them where they had come from, and they replied: “Bonanza Creek.”

The name puzzled Henderson, who prided himself on a knowledge of the country. He did not like to show his ignorance, but finally curiosity overcame pride. Where was Bonanza Creek?

The newscomers pointed back over the hill.

“Rabbit Creek! What have you got there?” Henderson asked, with a sinking feeling.

“We have the biggest thing in the world.”

“Who found it?”

“McCormick.”

Henderson flung down his shovel, then walked slowly over to the bank of the creek and sat down. It was some time before he could speak. McCormick! Carmack! For the rest of his life the sound of that name would be like a cold knife in his heart. The man was not even a prospector …

When he gathered his wits about him, Henderson realized that he must record a claim at once before the human overflow from Bonanza arrived at his creek. He had explored a large fork of Gold Bottom and discovered much better ground yielding thirty-five cents to the pan. Here he had staked a discovery claim, and it was this that he intended to record at Fortymile. He divided up his small gleaning of gold with his partners and set off at once.

But Fate had not yet finished with Robert Henderson. He had moved only a short way down the creek before he encountered two long-time prospectors. He knew them both. One was Charles Johnson, tall, bearded, and tough as a whalebone, a farmer and logger from Ohio; the other was Andrew Hunker, better known as “Old Man Hunker,” a native of Wittenberg, Germany, a man with chiselled features and a dogged face who made a practice of reading Gibbon nightly and who carried six volumes of the
Decline and Fall
about with him. Both men were veteran prospectors of the Yukon Valley and of the Cariboo before that.

Hunker now revealed to Henderson that he, too, had staked a discovery claim on the other fork of Gold Bottom Creek. The partners had got as much as two and a half dollars a pan from a reef of high bed-rock, and they were carrying twenty-five dollars’ worth of coarse gold with them, all of it panned out in a few minutes. Obviously the Hunker claims were far richer than the ones Henderson had staked.

What was Henderson to do? A discovery claim was twice the size of an ordinary claim. He could insist on his own prior discovery and take a thousand feet of relatively poor ground. But it would be a Pyrrhic victory, since the richer ground was obviously in the area of Hunker’s find. The only answer was to allow Hunker the discovery claim and for Henderson to stake an ordinary claim of five hundred feet next to it. Thus the entire watershed became known as Hunker Creek, and only the fork which Henderson originally located was called Gold Bottom.

Henderson, having swallowed this second bitter pill, pushed on down the Klondike Valley. Soon a new prize was dangled before him. He ran into a Finn named Solomon Marpak who had just made a discovery on another tributary of the Klondike called Bear Creek. Henderson staked next to Marpak, his spirits rising; Bear Creek looked rich.

He now believed he had three claims to record – on Gold Bottom, on Hunker, and on Bear – but when he reached Fortymile, Fate dealt him a third blow. He was told that the law had been changed: no man was allowed more than one claim in the Klondike mining district, and that claim must be recorded within sixty days of staking. In vain Henderson protested that when he had staked his ground the law had allowed a claim on each creek, with no deadline for recording. The mining recorder did not know him. Henderson swallowed hard and recorded only the Hunker Creek claim.

“I only want my just dues and nothing more, but those discoveries rightly belong to me and I will contest them as a Canadian as long as I live,” he said with force and bitterness. And so began the long controversy over which man was the rightful discoverer of the Klondike. It rages still, and almost always along national lines: the English and Canadians say that Henderson should have the credit; the Americans stand by Carmack.

Henderson’s troubles were not over. Indeed, it might be said that they never ended. All through the following winter he lay ill from the old injury to his leg. He was unable to work his claim, but he refused to be disheartened, and the following year, when his injury healed, he was off again. A less restless man might have gone to work on the Hunker claim, which was obviously a good one, but it was typical of Henderson that he ignored it in order to continue the search for new gold-fields. He trudged the length of Too Much Gold Creek, which contained no gold at all, and then, still supremely optimistic, headed for the Stewart River country. Here, too, he searched in vain, though he left his name behind on one of the Stewart’s smaller tributaries. At last he decided to return to his wife and children in Colorado, whom he had not seen for four years. He boarded a steamboat for St. Michael, anxious to be away, and here, for the fifth time, ill-luck descended upon him. The steamer was frozen in at Circle City, and Henderson, trapped in the country which had brought him nothing but misfortune, fell sick again. In order to pay his medical bills he was forced to sell his claim on Hunker Creek. He received three thousand dollars for it, and that represented the total amount that he took from the Klondike district. Yet each of the claims that he had staked and tried to record was worth a great deal. The Hunker claim eventually paid a royalty on four hundred and fifty thousand dollars, after which it was sold for another two hundred thousand. For decades it continued to be a valuable property, but Henderson got none of it.

He reached St. Michael ultimately, the following spring, and boarded a steamer for Seattle. He had eleven hundred dollars left in Klondike gold, but his troubles were still not over. The years spent in the country of the open cabin door had not equipped him for civilization’s wiles. Before he reached Seattle all his gold had been stolen. Disgusted and disconsolate, he tore an emblem from his lapel and handed it to Tappan Adney, the correspondent for
Harper’s Illustrated Weekly
.

“Here, you keep this,” he cried. “I will lose it, too. I am not fit to live among civilized men.”

Adney examined the little badge curiously. It was the familiar insignia of the Yukon Order of Pioneers, with its golden rule and its motto: “Do unto others as you would be done by.”

*Although there is no contemporary record of his presence, a small boy, Patsy Henderson, is said to have been present. Years later, in Whitehorse, his account of the incident was recorded on tape.

Chapter Three

1
Clarence Berry strikes it rich

2
The death of Circle City

3
The birth of Dawson

4
A friend in need

5
Big Alex and Swiftwater Bill

6
City of gold

1

Clarence Berry strikes it rich

The story of the Klondike is remarkable for the fact that in an extraordinary number of cases the industrious and sober prospector profited little from the gold-fields, while the ne’er-do-wells and profligates often amassed great, if temporary, wealth. It was perhaps coincidental that Horatio Alger, Jr., should die when the great stampede reached its climax, but it is certainly true that many Klondike success stories made mincemeat out of his accepted formula. It seemed almost axiomatic that the Harpers and the Hendersons should seek but never find, while the Swiftwater Bills and the Diamond-Tooth Gerties retained the golden touch. There was, however, one shining exception. The tale of Clarence Berry and his gold is unique in the annals of the stampede.

Berry, a one-time fruit farmer from Fresno, California, not only made millions as a result of the strike, but he also died at a ripe age with his millions intact. His history is marked by none of those anecdotes of personal eccentricity that enliven so many Klondike legends. He was sober, honest, hard-working, ambitious, and home-loving, and he stayed that way. Of all the original locaters on Bonanza and Eldorado, there is scarcely one other to whom those statements apply.

Berry owed his fortune to an encounter in Bill McPhee’s saloon with Antone Stander, the Austrian who had staked on Eldorado. The handsome Stander was back in Fortymile, without funds, without food, and, to his pain and bewilderment, without credit at the Alaska Commercial Company’s store. It had been refused him by the company’s newly appointed agent in charge of the entire Yukon Valley, a merchant of aristocratic tendencies whom the company’s own history describes as arrogant and dictatorial. His name was Edgar Mizner, and his two brothers, Addison the architect and Wilson the
bon vivant
, wit, and playwright, were to become engaging if eccentric figures in the folklore of twentieth-century America. Edgar lacked their charm. He did not believe in McQuesten’s system of unlimited credit and was heartily disliked by the miners, who called him “the Pope” and dispatched letters of protest about him to the company’s office. When Stander arrived back in Fortymile he discovered he would need a guarantor before the A.C. store would advance him provisions. He was desperately seeking a friend when Berry, who had been tending bar in McPhee’s saloon, volunteered to help him. The grateful Stander traded Berry half of his Eldorado property for half of a claim that Berry had staked on Upper Bonanza. With this simple gesture Berry laid the foundations for one of the largest personal fortunes to come out of the Klondike.

Berry had gone north in 1894 as a last resort, a victim of the depression of the nineties, purchasing his outfit and passage with money borrowed at exorbitant interest. A giant of a man with the biceps of a blacksmith and the shoulders of a wrestler, his magnificent strength sustained him when his fellows faltered. Of a party of forty that crossed the Chilkoot, only Berry and two others reached Fortymile. All the rest turned back, discouraged, after a storm destroyed their outfits. But Berry would not give up; he pushed ahead relentlessly with little more than the clothes on his back. A year later he trekked out to California, married his childhood sweetheart, a sturdy waitress from Selma named Ethel Bush, again started off for Alaska, his bride strapped to a sleigh which Berry dragged over the mountains and down the river to Fortymile. He found no gold, so he went to work tending bar for Bill McPhee and in this way was on the spot when Carmack entered with his shellful of nuggets. With a grubstake provided by the open-handed McPhee, Berry left at once for Bonanza, where he staked
Forty Above
, and it was this claim that he now divided with Stander in the shrewd belief that Eldorado was a much richer creek.

That fall, while Ladue’s sawmill was turning out rough lumber for the first of Dawson’s buildings, while Carmack was treating his friends to drinks at fifty dollars a round, while old-timers continued to jeer and newcomers scouted the valleys for new ground, the industrious Berry and one or two others set about the slow work of burning shafts through the permafrost to bed-rock to find out just how much gold there was in the Klondike Valley.

On
Twenty-One Above
Bonanza, Louis Rhodes was also reluctantly grubbing his way down through the frozen muck. He felt a bit of a fool, for his neighbours were laughing at him, but when he tried to sell out for two hundred and fifty dollars there were no takers, and so he kept working. On October 3, at a depth of fifteen feet, he reached bed-rock.

The results were electrifying. In the soft rock he could spy, by guttering candlelight, broad seams of clay and gravel streaked with gold. This was the pay-streak; he had hit the old creek channel squarely on his first try. It was so rich that he was able to hire workmen on the spot and to pay them nightly by scooping up a few panfuls of dirt from the bottom of the shaft.

Heartened by this news, Berry kept working until early in November he too reached bed-rock. From a single pan of paydirt he weighed out fifty-seven dollars in gold and knew at once that his days of penury were over. He and Stander began to hire men to help them haul the dirt up by windlass and pile it on the great “dump” which, when the spring thaw came, would be shovelled into sluiceboxes so that the gold could be washed free of the clay and gravel.

Shortly after Berry reached bed-rock on
Six
Eldorado, the three Scotsmen on
Fifteen
made an even more spectacular strike. The actors in this drama were Bill Scouse and his two brothers, who had worked in coal mines from Pennsylvania to Nanaimo. Bill Scouse was on the windlass and his brother Jack down in the shaft hoisting up heavy buckets of gravel, sand, and clay. Suddenly one bucket appeared whose contents were quite different from the others. Nuggets stuck out from the gravel like raisins in a pudding, and fine gold glistened everywhere.