Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (14 page)

“What in hell do you think you’ve sent up, the Bank of England?” Scouse is supposed to have called down the shaft.

“What’s up – have we struck it?” came the faint reply.

“Come up and have a look; it will do your blooming eyes good.”

The two joined the third brother in the cabin, first sprinkling sand over the two pans of paydirt to disguise the find. They asked him to pan the gold out, and when he saw the result he thought he had gone mad. In the two pans were more than four hundred dollars.

These first three claims, Rhodes’s, Berry’s, and Scouse’s, proved that the Klondike was one of the world’s richest mining areas – not rich in total quantity, as it turned out, but certainly rich in the wealth of some of the individual claims. Until this time, ten-cent pans had been considered rich. Before the season was out, some men would be getting as much as eight hundred dollars from a single pan of selected paydirt.

Berry and Stander were able to pay their workmen with gold dug out on the spot. They bought the two adjoining claims,
Four
and
Five
, from the original stakers of Eldorado, J. J. Clements and Frank Keller, and eventually split this block of claims in half, Stander taking the lower half and Berry the upper. Berry alone took one hundred and forty thousand dollars from his winter dump the following spring.

Now the Klondike was a frenzy of excitement as every claim-owner began to burrow into the frozen earth. Glowing in the long nights with a hundred miners’ fires, the valleys looked like the inferno itself. Those who had scoffed at Rhodes and Berry could now peer down their shafts and literally see the nuggets glittering in the candle’s rays.

But some sceptics had staked claims and then left the area without bothering to record. Under the new mining law, these were due to fall open again in sixty days, and a wild scramble ensued for ground that had once been shrugged off as moose pasture. The most memorable of such contests took place early in November on Upper Bonanza and provided an incident in one of Jack London’s Klondike novels.

It was a garish scene, for more than a dozen prospectors had decided to re-stake the same claim, and these milled about the site waiting for the midnight hour when the ground would fall open. So tense was the situation that Constantine stationed police on the claim to prevent trouble. Then, as the deadline approached, the farcical nature of the situation was perceived by all, and, one by one, the contestants dropped out until only two die-hards were left, a Scotsman and a Swede. Having prepared their stakes in advance, these two moved stubbornly to a starting-line, where, on the stroke of midnight, a policeman called time and the race began. With feverish intensity the two men hammered in their stakes and dashed off down Bonanza neck and neck.

Out onto the frozen Yukon the rivals sped behind fast dog-teams, each realizing that the recorder’s office at the Fortymile police post closed at four p.m. and did not reopen until nine the next morning. Over the humpy ice they slid and tumbled, passing and repassing one another until, weary hours later the blurred outlines of the log town loomed out of the cold fog. At this moment, with the goal in view, the Scotsman’s dogs began to flag, and he leaped from his sled, determined to finish on foot, the Swede instantly following suit. The two reached the barrack gate in a dead heat, but, being unfamiliar with the post, the Swede raced for the largest building, which was the officers’ quarters, while the Scot, knowing the layout, let him pass, made a sharp turn to the right, and just managed to reach the door of the recording office. Unable to cross the six-inch threshold, he fell prone upon it, crying with his remaining breath:
“Sixty Above
on Bonanza!” An instant later the Swede toppled across him, gasping out the same magic phrase. When Constantine was recruited to play Solomon, he advised the pair to divide the ground, which in the end they did. It was one of the small ironies of the Klondike that the claim turned out to be entirely worthless.

2

The death of Circle City

All this time Circle City, two hundred and twenty miles downstream, had remained in ignorance of the Klondike strike. An occasional rumour drifted into town with the thickening ice – and was disbelieved. Sam Bartlett, for instance, floated in one day before freeze-up on a raft of logs, but all he told his friends was that Ladue was trying to hoax the country so that he might profit from his new townsite.

Into Oscar Ashby’s smoky saloon, ten days before Christmas, came J. M. Wilson, of the Alaska Commercial Company, and Thomas O’Brien, an independent trader. They brought gold from Eldorado and a bundle of mail. Ashby read one of the letters to a group of seventy-five men who crowded into the bar to hear it, but their reaction was one of scepticism.

“ ‘This is one of the richest strikes in the world,’ “ Ashby read. “ It is a world-beater. I can’t tell how much gold we are getting to the pan. I never saw or heard the like of such a thing in my life. I myself saw one hundred and fifty dollars panned out of one pan of dirt and I think they are getting as high as a thousand.…’ ”

The crowd had heard this kind of talk before in other letters from other distant creeks, and they laughed uproariously, ordered drinks all round, and then forgot about it.

But two old-time sourdoughs, Harry Spencer and Frank Densmore, received a second letter from their partner, Bill McPhee, the Fortymile saloon-keeper who had grubstaked Berry; and Densmore, who was nobody’s fool, fitted up a dog-team and decided to see what was what. He was a respected man who had been fourteen years in the country and had tramped across most of Alaska. Indeed, long before Mount McKinley, the highest peak on the continent, received its name, it was known as Densmore’s Mountain because this two-hundred-pound pioneer was the first white man to see it at close range. Therefore, when Densmore sent back word that the Klondike was really as reported, every man knew that something extraordinary had happened.

By this time, more news had arrived. In January, Arthur Treadwell Walden, a well-known dog-driver, walked into Harry Ash’s saloon, threw a bundle of letters on the bar, and asked for a cup of hot beef tea (for dog-drivers did not dare drink whiskey in the winter). Ash paid no attention to the request, but began to riffle feverishly through the mail. He looked the part of the bartender of the nineties, with his round, florid face, his curly moustache, and his slick, centre-parted haircut, but he was as much prospector as saloonkeeper. He had been a stampeder in the Black Hills country of South Dakota, and he had sensed for some time that something unusual was afoot upriver. Finally he found the letter he was looking for, tore it open, and devoured it. It confirmed what he had suspected.

“Boys, help yourself to the whole shooting match,” he shouted, leaping over the bar. “I’m off to the Klondike.”

An orgy followed. Men smashed the necks off bottles and drained them while others rushed about Circle trying to buy dogs at any price. The normal value of a sled-dog was between twenty-five and fifty dollars, but the price leaped immediately to two hundred and fifty, and then to fifteen hundred. Cabins once valued at five hundred dollars were now worthless, for Circle’s gay days were ended. Only Jack McQuesten stayed behind to minister to the handful of miners who continued to work the Birch Creek claims.

All that winter and all that spring the residents of Circle straggled up the frozen Yukon in twos and threes, the affluent racing behind dog-teams over the hummocks of ice, the poor dragging their sleds by hand. All of Alaska, it seemed, was moving towards the Klondike.

The lives of many of these trudging figures were to be changed by the events of the year. One in particular was heading for the traditional fame and fortune. He was a former Texas marshal, just twenty-six years old, with knit brows and a pencil-thin moustache, who had come to Alaska the previous year. His name was George Lewis Rickard, but his friends called him Tex. It took him and his partner twenty days to pull a sled-load of provisions up the river that February, but when they reached the Klondike they were able to buy a half-interest in
Three Below
Bonanza. They sold it almost at once for twenty thousand dollars and bought an interest in
Four Below
, which they sold for thirty thousand dollars. It was the start of the career that led Tex Rickard to Madison Square Gardens in New York as the greatest fight-promoter of his day.

In the procession up the river that spring were two middle-aged women – a Mrs. Adams, who was a dressmaker and would shortly be making thirty dollars a day with her needle, and a Mrs. Wills, a laundress of apparently inexhautible energy. Mrs. Wills had gone north in 1895 to try to support her invalid husband, vowing she would not return until she had made her fortune. On reaching Dawson she staked a claim and then turned cook to finance her mining project. She bought a stove, baked bread, and sold it for a dollar a loaf until she had cleared the two hundred and fifty dollars she needed to purchase a single box of starch. With this she was able to set up a laundry and pay for the labour of her mine. This determined and enterprising little creature fought off every attempt to jump her claim, held it against all comers, and, when it began to pay off, refused with disdain an offer of a quarter of a million dollars.

Of the seventy-score men and women who made that long trek up to Dawson from Circle City, there was one who had no interest in gold, no desire for material wealth. This was a Jesuit missionary named William Judge, a one-time apprentice in a Baltimore planing mill, who for the last dozen years had been a servant of the Lord in Alaska. His fellow travellers eyed him curiously – an emaciated man with a skull-like face, high cheek-bones, and huge cavernous eyes, accentuated by small gold-rimmed spectacles. He was ill-nourished, for he had loaded his sled with medicine and drugs rather than food; and he trudged along in harness with his single dog in order to preserve the animal’s strength. The new camp, he knew, would soon be facing plague, and he was determined to build a hospital with all possible dispatch. They called him “the Saint of Dawson;” death was already written across his face.

All spring, until the ice broke, the ill-assorted procession made its way up the river. In the end McQuesten himself joined it, for there was nothing left for him at Circle. He was too late to stake the rich ground, but he managed to secure a small-paying claim that netted him about ten thousand dollars. It was the largest sum of money he had ever known.

3

The birth of
Dawson

The new arrivals found a tent town stretched along the margin of the Yukon near the Klondike’s mouth. By January there were only four houses in Dawson besides Ladue’s, but the tents, like dirty white sails, were scattered in ragged order between the trees on the frozen swampland. It was not an ideal townsite; but it was close to the source of gold.

No one in the outside world yet knew of the existence of the burgeoning camp or of the gold that nourished it. In Fortymile, William Ogilvie, the Canadian government surveyor, was searching about for some means to apprise his government of the situation. Scarcely anyone was attempting the tortuous journey up the river to the Chilkoot Pass, but Captain William Moore, a remarkably tough septuagenarian, offered to take a brief message. Moore was a steamboat man who had been in almost every gold rush from Peru to the Cassiars and who now made his home on Skagway Bay, at the foot of the Coast Mountains. At the age of seventy-three, when most men were over the hill of life, the white-bearded old pioneer was going strong. He had accepted a contract to bring the Canadian mail across the mountains and into the interior of the Yukon, and when his U.S. counterpart failed to deliver, Moore took on his job too. That fall of 1896 he had already been down the river to Circle City and was now heading back again like a man on a Sunday jaunt when he picked up Ogilvie’s message. Moore put all other mushers to shame; three young men, strong and vigorous, had all started from Fortymile the previous week in an attempt to make a record trip to the coastal Panhandle. When the aged mail-carrier overhauled the trio, they were exhausted and starving. Moore popped them onto his dog-sled and whisked them out to Juneau without further mishap. As far as Ogilvie was concerned, the trip, though memorable, was a waste of time. His preliminary report of the Klondike went on to Ottawa, where nobody paid any attention to it.

On January 21, Ogilvie tried again, sending a note by another dog-driver and reporting that the new camp gave promise of being the greatest yet in the Northwest Territories and one that might startle the world. This intelligence did not reach Ottawa until the early spring, when it methodically moved through civil-service channels and was eventually published in an austere little pamphlet which caused not a ripple of interest.

No further news left the Yukon until mid-June, when the conscientious Ogilvie, squatting on the riverbank, scribbled a short report to the Minister of the Interior, estimating the season’s output at two and a half million dollars. He gave the note to two men in a canoe who were travelling fast, but by the time the report was digested in Ottawa, others had carried the story to the world in more dramatic circumstances.

If no news was leaking out, neither was any seeping in. The last arrivals in January brought in some two-month-old newspapers which a friend in Seattle had sent to Dick Butler and Charley Myers. Prospectors from all over the valley crowded into their cabin on Eldorado to read the three-month-old news: Queen Victoria was ill, and so was Pope Leo XIII; war was imminent between England and Russia; and a fight was being promoted between James J. Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons. There was no further news until May, and so the whole camp devoured the papers again and again, advertisements and all, dropping nuggets into a contribution box until Butler and Myers had four hundred dollars for their Seattle crony.

As the town of Dawson slowly took shape around Ladue’s sawmill and saloon, a subtle change began to work among those prospectors who for years had had nothing to call their own except a bill at Jack McQuesten’s store. Accepted standards of wealth vanished. There was a desperate shortage of almost everything that a man needed, from nails to women. But there was no shortage of gold. Those who had struck it rich could claw the legal tender from the dumps with their bare hands; and thus, to many, gold became the cheapest commodity in the world.