Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (16 page)

The gold was everywhere. The wages Berry paid totalled one hundred and fifty dollars a day, which he washed out himself each evening. When Mrs. Berry needed pocket-money, she merely walked to the dump and with a sharp stick smashed apart the frozen clods and pulled out the nuggets. One day she went down to call her husband for supper and, while she was waiting for him to come up the shaft, picked up fifty dollars’ worth of coarse gold.

Ethel Berry’s only female neighbour was Tom Lippy’s wife Salome, a sinewy little woman from Kinsman, Ohio, who lived with her husband in another tiny mud-roofed cabin, about a mile up the valley. Lippy, like Berry, was industrious, sober, level-headed – and lucky. A sudden and inspired hunch had brought him to the Yukon; a blind trade had given him his present claim.

He had started life as an iron-moulder in Pennsylvania, but his almost fanatical belief in physical culture had led him into the
YMCA
and thence west to Seattle as a physical-training instructor. As a volunteer fireman he had once held the title of world’s champion hose-coupler, and, like everybody else who came in over the trail, he was tough: solidly built, dark, good-looking, and clean-shaven, the prototype indeed of the Arrow Collar man. An injury to his knee had forced his retirement from the
YMCA
, and a strange intuition had sent him north in 1896 on borrowed money. Now he had one of the richest claims in the Klondike. Although this was the most memorable winter of Thomas Lippy’s life, it certainly was not the happiest, for the Klondike, which gave him his fortune, took the life of his adopted son, and not all the gold in Eldorado could have saved him.

5

Big Alex and Swiftwater Bill

The winter passed slowly, dreamlike in its unreality. It was hard, sometimes, to disentangle tangibility from fantasy. In their dark hovels the miners watched in fascination and disbelief as the small heaps of gold accumulated in jars and bottles on the window-sills. Fortune, chimerical, seemed to be making game of them; and yet the gold was palpably there. It supplied the only ornament on the naked walls, glittering in the flat light of the sunless noons or in the precious luminescence of hoarded candles. In such a setting do myths have their beginning. It was a time for fancies and illusions; it was a time for fables; it was a time for legend.

Now, subtly, two of the most durable legends of the Klondike began to take form. One was the Legend of Big Alex McDonald, the King of the Klondike; the other was the Legend of Swiftwater Bill Gates, the Knight of the Golden Omelet. Of all the human specimens placed on public exhibit by the great strike, none were destined for greater immortality than these two oddly dissimilar figures, the one a towering and sober Scot, the other a diminutive but flamboyant Yankee.

Both of these men acquired their fortunes because of the “lay” system which the lumbering and taciturn McDonald introduced into the Klondike. He had come to the north after fourteen years in the silver mines of Colorado and a stint at Juneau on the Panhandle. Although he had no money at all, he had developed a shrewd sense of values while working as a buyer of land for the Alaska Commercial Company, and by the time of the strike he had an abiding faith in the value of property that amounted to a religion.

While other men owned a single claim and worked it themselves, McDonald determined to own a great many and let others do the work. He began by acquiring half of
Thirty
Eldorado for a few groceries. He made no move to mine it, but instead let a section of it out on lease or “lay,” as it was called, to Charley Myers and Dick Butler, receiving from them a percentage of the take. In the next forty-five days the two lay men took out thirty-three thousand dollars. McDonald got half.

As fast as the lay men gave him his share, McDonald bought more property. His policy was to make a small downpayment and give a note for the balance, payable at the time of the spring clean-up. To raise enough money for these downpayments he borrowed funds at exorbitant interest rates, and in some cases he paid as much as ten per cent for a ten-day loan, which is a rate of 365 per cent per annum.

By late spring McDonald’s speculations were the talk of the camp. Clean-up time was approaching, and it was no longer possible to work in the drifts and shafts, which were filling with seepage. The miners were building flumes and log sluiceboxes and paying a higher price for the rough lumber than they would have paid for mahogany in New York. An air of expectancy hung over the camp. Not until the gold was washed out from the gravel of the winter dumps would anyone know exactly how much he was worth; until this process was completed it was mere guesswork.

Bets were laid as to whether Big Alex would be bankrupt or wealthy by summer. His creditors were demanding payment; his notes were falling due; and often enough he fulfilled his obligations at the last moment with gold still wet from the sluiceboxes. On one occasion Fate stepped in to save him from ruin. He owed forty thousand dollars to two brothers, and when the note fell due he still had not washed out enough gold to cover the debt. Then, at the eleventh hour, one of the brothers conveniently died. The ensuing litigation delayed all payments until McDonald was able to meet his obligations.

Before the summer of ’97 was out, McDonald had interests in twenty-eight claims and his holdings were reckoned in millions of dollars. “I’ve invested my whole fortune,” he remarked complacently, “I’ve run into debts of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars besides. But I can dig out a hundred and fifty thousand any time I need it.”

The King of the Klondike presented a deceptively simple face to the world, with his painful articulation and his great ham hands and his blank oval visage, which rarely betrayed any animation; but the deals he made were often staggering in their complexity. In June of 1897 he walked into the tent office of Ron Crawford, a former Seattle court clerk who was setting up in business to draw up legal papers for prospectors. McDonald deposited his huge frame upon the three-legged stool in front of Crawford’s rough spruce table and announced that he wished to borrow five thousand dollars. Crawford, who had just twenty-five cents to his name, asked him how much interest he was willing to pay.

“I don’t want to pay interest,” said McDonald in his slow way, rubbing his chin. “Interest is always working against you, and I can’t sleep at night when I think of that. But if you let me have the money, I’ll give you a lay of a hundred feet on
Six Below
Bonanza at fifty per cent. I’ll also give you thirty-five per cent of thirty-five feet of
Twenty-Seven
Eldorado and a mortgage on
Thirty
Eldorado as security.”

Considering the value of the three claims involved, this was an enormous sum to pay for the use of five thousand dollars. Crawford, stalling for time, promised to give McDonald an answer by morning. Then he rushed to a neighbouring saloon and raised five thousand dollars from the owner in return for a half-interest in the mortgage on
Thirty
. After the loan was made, Crawford sold part of his share of the section of
Twenty-Seven
for five thousand dollars to a Dawson barber. The barber worked it the following winter and took out forty thousand dollars.

McDonald’s example was widely copied, and claims were swiftly carved up like so many apple pies, to be mortgaged, leased, traded, loaned, and lost. Carmack, for instance, sold half of Tagish Charley’s claim for five thousand dollars. The purchaser made a five-hundred-dollar downpayment, and from a fourteen-foot tunnel took out eight thousand, from which he paid the balance. Ogilvie, who liked to work with figures, reckoned that on this basis the claim could be worth up to two and a half millions.

“My God,” cried the new owner aghast, “what will I do with all that money?”

“I wouldn’t worry,” Ogilvie told him. “It’s hardly possible your claim will average anything like that,” and he went on to reason that if the only wealth on the claim was on the one fourteen-foot strip, there would still be eighty-three thousand in the ground. “Which,” he added dryly, “is enough to kill you.”

It was this lay system that catapulted Swiftwater Bill Gates into the notoriety which he craved as fervently as McDonald craved property. Gates was one of a group of seven men who were finally persuaded to take a lay on
Thirteen
Eldorado, which, because of the jinx implied by its number, had been shunned by all. The new lay men sank seven shafts before they hit the pay-streak, but when they did they saw at once that it was incredibly rich. To keep the find a secret, they burned in the sides of the shaft and then let it be noised about that they were getting a paltry ten cents to the pan. The owner, J. B. Hollingshead, was delighted that April to part with the property for forty-five thousand dollars, a sum which the new owners were able to dig from his former claim in just six weeks.

Until the moment of this discovery there was little to distinguish William F. Gates from his fellows. He was an unimpressive five foot five in height, and his moon face was ornamented by a straggling black moustache that gave his features a comic cast. Nobody had ever taken him seriously, even when, to attract attention, he boasted of his former prowess as a boatman on the Coeur d’Alene River in the placer district of Idaho. They laughed and dubbed him Swiftwater Bill.

Like most of his companions, Swiftwater Bill Gates was nearly destitute. But all he needed to transform his personality was gold. One season he was a nondescript dishwater in Circle City, begging jobs from George Snow of the Opera House; the next he was a man in a Prince Albert coat, with a top hat, a white shirt with a diamond stickpin in his tie, and the only starched collar in Dawson. It was said that Swiftwater Bill was so proud of this unique collar that he took to his bed while it was being laundered, rather than be seen without it. He was a small man; all his life he had been inconspicuous. He did not intend to remain inconspicuous any longer, and in this resolve he triumphed.

He could not wait for his share of the gold to be hoisted up the shaft of
Thirteen
Eldorado. He borrowed money at ten per cent a month so that he could play pool at a hundred dollars a frame, or throw his poke on the faro table and cry: “The sky’s the limit! Raise ’er up as far as you want to go, boys, and if the roof’s in your way, why tear it off!”

William Haskell, an old prospector, watched Swiftwater lose five hundred dollars in a few minutes one evening in ’97.

“Things don’t seem to be coming my way tonight,” he said, rising casually from his seat. “Let’s let the house have a drink at my expense.”

The round cost him one hundred and twelve dollars. He threw his poke on the bar, lighted a dollar-fifty cigar, and strolled out.

Like Big Alex, he hired others to mine his property, but whereas Big Alex used all this time to acquire more gold, Swiftwater needed every waking moment to get rid of his. Like Big Alex, he paid his workers in land rather than in funds, and he paid them well. One of his helpers was a former milk-wagon driver from Seattle named Harry Winter, who worked one hundred days for Swiftwater and received in return a fifty-foot-square plot. From this ground he took five thousand dollars, and with that sum he bought from his former employer a second plot, thirty feet square. This, in turn, yielded eighty-five thousand, which meant that Swiftwater had, in effect, paid Winter eight hundred and fifty dollars a day for his labour.

Swiftwater Bill allowed no wine to touch his lips (though he occasionally bathed in it), but he indulged in other pleasures of the flesh. It was his habit to escort dance-hall girls in coveys to his claim and let them clamber down the shaft to pan out all the gold they wanted. They turned out to be as expert as seasoned miners.

Bill’s favourite was Gussie Lamore, a comely strumpet of nineteen who had come to Dawson from Circle City in the spring rush, and who shared top billing with him in an incident which has become the liveliest of the Klondike’s imperishable legends. Gussie, it developed, was inordinately fond of fresh eggs, possibly because they were as scarce as diamonds in the Dawson of 1897. One day, so the tale goes, Swiftwater Bill was seated in a restaurant when, to his surprise and chagrin, he saw Gussie enter on the arm of a well-known gambler. The pair ordered fried eggs, which were the most expensive item on the menu, and it was then that, in a fury of jealousy, Swiftwater achieved a certain immortality by buying up every egg in town in an attempt to frustrate Gussie’s cravings.

There are many versions of this tale. Arthur Walden, the dog-puncher, who claimed in his memoirs to have witnessed the incident, wrote that Swiftwater had the eggs fried one at a time and flipped them through the window of the café to a rabble of dogs outside, commenting to the gathering crowd on the cleverness of the animals in catching them. Other versions have it that he presented the entire trove of eggs to Gussie as a token of his true emotions; or that he fed them to other dance-hall girls in order to awaken Gussie’s jealousy. Belinda Mulroney, a famous Klondike innkeeper who arrived in Dawson early that spring, recollects that there was about half a case of eggs involved, and that these had been brought over the ice from the Pacific coast and were fast growing mellow. Mrs. Iola Beebe, one of Swiftwater’s several future mothers-in-law, wrote that there were two crates of eggs and that Swiftwater paid for them with a brace of coffee tins filled with gold. The details of the story have thus been obscured, for there was no writing-paper in Dawson at the time to set them down, and no scriveners either, since every would-be historian was too busy seeking a fortune to attend to such footnotes. Whatever the details, the fact remains that the incident brought Gussie to heel, at least temporarily. She offered to meet Swiftwater Bill in San Francisco that fall and marry him, failing to mention that she was already wed to one Emile Leglice and had been since 1894.

Swiftwater’s journey to San Francisco was ostensibly for business. He had gone into partnership with a shrewd entrepreneur named Jack Smith to establish the most famous of the Klondike’s palaces of pleasure, the Monte Carlo Dance Hall and Saloon. Smith was an old showman who had a variety troupe in Fortymile at the time of the strike. He had reached Bonanza with the first wave, staked a claim, sold it for one hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars, opened up a small saloon on the creeks, and turned a handy profit. The transaction convinced him that it was easier to dig gold out of miners’ pockets than out of the ground. He quickly saw the potentialities of Dawson’s Front Street, and in the spring established the Monte Carlo in a tent. He made only one error of judgement, but it was a whopper. He persuaded Swiftwater Bill to put up some of the funds for a permanent building, and then allowed him to go out to San Francisco to rustle up a cargo of furnishings, liquor, and dance-hall girls. Sending Swiftwater Outside to bring back girls was like sending a greedy child to a candy shop and hoping to get a full box back. But the awful realization of what he had done did not begin to dawn on Jack Smith until the following summer.