Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (17 page)

6

City of gold

Dawson grew slowly all that winter, as the news spread through Alaska and sifted as far south as Juneau on the Panhandle. By April 1897 there were about fifteen hundred people in the community and the camp had became a carbon copy of Fortymile and Circle City, its customs and traditions as yet untarnished by any large influx of strangers.

All winter long a thin trickle of men – one thousand or more – had been scaling the Chilkoot and hammering boats together along the shores of Lake Bennett on the headwaters of the Yukon. Now they waited on the frozen lake for the spring thaw. Their destination was Circle City; if they had heard of the Klondike at all, it was only in the vaguest terms.

At noon on May 14 the rotten ice in front of Dawson snapped with a mighty rumble and the whole mass began to crack and heave and move slowly off towards the sea. For two days a solid flow of ice cakes, some of them the size of houses, drifted past the town, until by May 16 the ice had thinned to the point where boats could navigate the river. The first small vessels to arrive belonged to men who had wintered somewhere along the river, but the main body of boats was only a few days behind.

The newcomers, sweeping around a bend in the river, came unexpectedly upon two tent cities scattered raggedly along both sides of the Klondike at the point where it joined the Yukon. The first city on the south bank of the Klondike was known officially as Klondike City, but rejoiced in the more common title of “Lousetown,” for it was the site of the old Indian salmon camp. On the far side, on the swamp beneath the scarred mountain, was Dawson City proper. The two saloon-keepers in Lousetown had erected a large sign – “Danger Below: Keep to the Right” – to mislead the newcomers and prevent them going on to Dawson, where Joe Ladue was planning to sell them the last of his whiskey. Within twenty-four hours some two hundred boats had landed at Lousetown with the first news from the Outside: “The Pope’s alive, the Queen’s well, there’s no war, and Bob Fitzsimmons knocked hell out of Jim Corbett!” Then William Ogilvie conceived the impish idea of tying down the steam whistle on Ladue’s sawmill, and as its piercing shrieks echoed through the Klondike hills the makeshift fleet left Lousetown and moved down to Dawson, which swiftly became the hub of the gold-fields. Soon boats of every size and shape were pouring in day and night.

Harry Ash, the big, florid bartender from Circle City, was one of the first to benefit from the influx. His Northern Saloon was little more than a plank floor with a tent covering, but the very sawdust on the floor glittered with fine gold. On May 23, Monte Snow, a teen-age boy from Circle whose father had arrived with a theatrical troupe, walked into the saloon and was greeted by Ash, who pointed to the sawdust-covered space in front of the bar.

“Take that sawdust, go down to Joe Ladue’s and get two more sacks. Pan it out, and I’ll give you what you get.”

Snow did not think this worth while, but when Ash offered him twenty-five dollars for all the gold he could pan from the sawdust he changed his mind. In two hours he took out two hundred and seventy-eight dollars in fine dust which had sifted out of miners’ pokes slapped onto the bar above. All business was transacted in gold. Bank-notes, indeed, were so scarce that when the occasional twenty-dollar bill turned up it could be sold for twenty-five dollars.

By June, Ash was taking in three thousand dollars a day. On the night that he opened his saloon in a permanent log building he took in thirty thousand, perhaps because he had the only piano in Dawson. The previous fall he had written to an old friend in Juneau, Billy Huson, to bring a piano in to Circle City, and all that winter Huson and his wife had been lugging the instrument over the Chilkoot in bits and pieces, the sounding-board carefully wrapped in wool yarn for protection. It was a tiny upright, made in Hong Kong for the steamer trade, and within a month every dance-hall girl in town had scratched her name on its surface with hatpins. As for the wool yarn, Mrs. Huson knitted it into sweaters which sold for a handsome profit. Within three months of the opening Ash was able to leave town with one hundred thousand dollars.

Before summer’s end there were ten saloons in Dawson, none taking in less than three hundred dollars a night. Some were only tents, like the Blue Elephant and the White Elephant, so named because of the colour of the canvas. Others were substantial log structures like Jimmy Kerry’s moved down from Fortymile, or Bill McPhee’s new Pioneer with its stuffed moose-heads. In front of one saloon there hung a great ship’s bell which rang every time a Klondike king laid down his poke, as a signal for everyone to crowd in for a free drink. Bartenders were paid twenty dollars a day and soon learned to underweigh gold dust, so that a customer could expect to lose a dollar and a half for every ten he laid out.

Once the gold was taken, wet and glistening, from the sluicebox, it seemed to shift from poke to poke as if carried by the winds. Money ceased to have value. Dance-hall girls were paid a hundred dollars a night; town lots were selling for as high as twelve thousand. The Alaska Commercial Company was planning a warehouse that could have been put up for four thousand dollars in any midwestern town but which cost ninety-three thousand to erect in Dawson. Log cabins sold for as much as two hundred dollars per square foot of floor space. Bacon and tea cost seven to eight times their Outside values.

The more enterprising of the new arrivals quickly realized that there were easier ways to garner Klondike gold than to mine it, and that there were business opportunities everywhere for a man of imagination. In six months a Pennsylvania cigar salesman turned his small stock into a hundred-thousand-dollar fortune. He sold his ten-cent cigars for a dollar and a half apiece and used the profits to make downpayments on a dozen city lots. In less than twenty days he had turned over the lots for a net profit of twenty thousand. He reinvested this money in a number of ingenious ventures – hiring Indians, for instance, to peddle fresh water at twenty-five cents a pail, and women to bake bread at a dollar a loaf – so that by fall he was ready to ship two hundred pounds of gold to the coast. In this fashion he grew rich without ever setting foot on a mining claim.

By summer, with the population nearing thirty-five hundred, with the ring of hammer and axe heard all over town, with buildings sprouting up in helter-skelter fashion and the muddy roadways encrusted with chips and sawdust and blocked by newly planed logs, Dawson had lost its original character. The old rules and customs which had made the Alaska-Yukon camps cohesive communities no longer applied. The Golden Rule of the Yukon Order of Pioneers was honoured only in the breach, and the old sourdoughs no longer felt free to leave their cabin doors ajar for all who passed by. Constantine, coming up from Fortymile, looked over the newcomers with contempt and wrote to his superiors that some of them “appeared to be the sweepings of the slums and the result of a general jail delivery.” He was closer to the mark than perhaps he knew, for that eddying multitude concealed at least one murderer and, pressing close behind in that same throng, his Nemesis, an indefatigable private detective who had travelled twenty-five thousand miles searching for his man and who now found himself, somewhat to his own amazement, in the midst of a gold rush.

The murderer’s name was Frank Novak. His pursuer was Detective C. C. Perrin, an athletic and square-jawed employee of Thiel’s Detective Service in Chicago. The chase had been on since February, when Novak, having gambled away his firm’s funds on the Chicago grain market, had killed and cremated a farmer in Iowa in the naïve belief that his insurance company would confuse the victim with himself and pay off Novak’s family. A coroner’s jury easily identified the corpse, and the relentless Perrin was put on the murderer’s trail. The chase had zigzagged back and forth across the continent, from Iowa to Maryland, back to Iowa and on to Nebraska, then finally to Vancouver, British Columbia, and north up the Pacific coast to Alaska. When Perrin found that his quarry was heading for Canadian territory, he had to entrain for Ottawa to get extradition papers and then speed back to the coast, five weeks behind his victim. The detective reached Alaska in June, searching for his man in the faces of the crowd that climbed the Chilkoot. At one time pursuer and pursued were only a few miles from each other, respectively building boats on Lake Lindemann and Lake Bennett. Indeed, both started off on the same morning, and at one point Perrin actually passed Novak’s scow without knowing it.

In Dawson, while others scrambled for fortune, hunter and hunted moved warily through the throng, oblivious of their strange surroundings. At this point both could have made themselves wealthy, for they had arrived unwittingly in the gold-fields before the Outside world yet knew of the strike. But neither had any interest in gold. From tent to tent the dogged Perrin moved, staring fixedly at face after face without recognition. Then he came upon one tent that excited his suspicions. He noticed that only two of its three occupants moved about by day, while the third emerged stealthily after midnight for a quiet stroll about the unfrequented parts of the camp with his miner’s hat low over his eyes. Perrin settled down to a long vigil, seeking to make out the features concealed behind a matted beard. In the end he identified his quarry and, with Constantine’s co-operation, made the arrest. He had been six months on the trail and history was being made all around him, but he was a man with a single purpose. Once his job was done, he left town with his handcuffed prisoner without another glance at the bizarre community that gold was building on the banks of the Yukon.

Dawson itself was about to become front-page news, for with the coming of summer its isolation from the world was at an end. The camp waited impatiently for the arrival of the first steamboat in June. The Klondike’s
nouveaux riches
were ready to return to a civilization that some had rejected ten years before. There were more than eighty, each possessed of a fortune that ran from twenty-five thousand to half a million dollars. Some were determined to leave the North forever and had already sold their claims, content to live modestly but securely for the rest of their lives. Others were intent on a brief but gaudy celebration in the big cities of the Pacific coast before returning to the Klondike for more treasure. All felt the desperate need to escape from the dark confines of their cabins and tents and from the smoky depths of their mine shafts, just as they had once felt a similar need to escape the smoky, populous cities.

Then early in June a shrill whistle was heard out in the river and the Alaska Commercial Company’s tiny stern-wheeler
Alice
rounded the Moosehide bluff and puffed into the shore. The entire town poured down to greet her. She was loaded with equal quantities of liquor and food, and the whole community went on a spree, as every saloon served free drinks across the counter. A couple of days later John J. Healy’s boat,
Portus B. Weare
, arrived, and the performance was repeated. When the two boats left for the trip downstream they carried with them the men who would bring the first news of the great strike out to the unsuspecting world.

Chapter Four

1
The treasure ships

2
Rich man, poor man

3
A ton of gold

4
Klondicitis

5
Warnings all unheeded

6
Balloons, boatsleds, and bicycles

7
Fearful passage

1

The treasure ships

Down the hissing Yukon puffed the
Portus B. Weare
on her seventeen-hundred-mile voyage to the sea, white wood smoke erupting from her twin black stacks. Two days ahead of her chugged the A.C. Company’s ungainly little
Alice
, a tiny smudge on the leaden expanse of the river. The brief sub-Arctic spring had yielded to summer, and the hills along the river were ablaze with crimson drifts of fireweed, accented by the blues of lupins and the yellows of arnicas and daisies. The air was heady with the pungent incense of balm of Gilead. Robins warbled among the birches, woodpeckers drummed against the spruce bark, moosebirds and chicken hawks wheeled and hovered in the sky. But, save for the occasional Indian or stray woodcutter, the two awkward little riverboats represented the only human movement along most of the Yukon, for the river country had long since been sucked dry of men by the news of the strike. In three months all this would change again, for the
Alice
and the
We are
were heading for civilization each loaded with a single cargo: gold.

There was gold in suitcases and leather grips, gold in boxes and packing-cases, gold in belts and pokes of caribou hide, gold in jam jars, medicine bottles, and tomato cans, and gold in blankets held by straps and cord, so heavy it took two men to hoist each one aboard. Stacked on the decks (its weight made it safe from theft) and in the purser’s office and in the dark, uncomfortable, verminous cabins, there was a total of three tons in the form of dust and nuggets. On the three-storied
Weare
the decks had to be shored up with wooden props, so heavy was the treasure, and there would have been more but for the lavishness of the farewell ceremonies. One Dawson saloon took in four hundred ounces of gold on the day the
Weare
left.

Most of the eighty-odd passengers aboard the two vessels had been paupers only a few months before. Some had not seen civilization for years, and none had heard from their families since the previous summer. Now each was worth a fortune. One, imprisoned in the Yukon for two years and reduced to a diet of half-raw salmon, had been planning suicide a few days before the Klondike strike, and now here he was, heading for civilization with thirty-five thousand dollars. Another had left Seattle the previous spring, impoverished and desperate, and was now worth more than one hundred thousand. Joe Ladue, gaunt and drawn after thirteen winters in the north, had become the owner of Dawson City, soon to be the hottest piece of real estate on the continent; he had more than enough money to marry the sweetheart whose family had spurned him for so long. Tom Lippy, the
YMCA
physical instructor, and Clarence Berry, the Fresno fruit farmer, were both coming out, each secure in the knowledge that he was worth at least a million.