Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (18 page)

The decks were crowded with Eldorado and Bonanza kings with a variety of backgrounds: a former dry-goods merchant, a former blacksmith, a former laundryman, a former Mounted Policeman, a former busboy. They hailed from every part of the globe: from Norway, Nanaimo, and Nova Scotia; from Stockholm, Sydney, and Seneca Falls. They had two things in common: all had been poor, all were now rich.

Not all were prospectors by choice or background. Many had gone north seeking gold through sheer desperation and had found it through a combination of stubbornness and good luck. J. O. Hestwood, a diminutive, pale-eyed man with a determined chin, leaned across the deck rail of the
Alice
and watched the blue scroll of the low Alaskan hills unwind slowly past. He had been a preacher, teacher, lecturer, and artist, and he had not held a steady job since 1893, when he painted murals at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. But on Bonanza Creek he had been getting sixteen dollars to the pan.

William Stanley, on board the creaking
Weare
, looked less like a prospector than any of his fellows, though he had made and lost three fortunes on previous Rocky Mountain stampedes. He was a Seattle bookseller, grey-haired and lame, and fifteen months earlier he and his wife and seven children had been impoverished. As a last resort Stanley had decided to go to the Yukon and look for gold. He and one son, Sam, headed north on borrowed money. On board ship they fell in with two brothers, Gage and Charlie Worden, from Sackets Harbor, New York. All four decided to pool their resources. Stanley limped over the Chilkoot Pass with the other three, and together they floated downriver. Pickings were slim on the bars of the Stewart, and the quartet was at the end of its tether and ready to give up when an old Indian drifted by in a canoe to say that a white man had found much gold on the Klondike. Now the old man was going home with one hundred and twelve thousand dollars while his partners stayed behind to work a million-dollar claim on Eldorado.

In spite of their riches, the passengers aboard the
Weare
and the
Alice
had yet to taste the sweet fruits of success. They had been living all winter in leaky cabins of green wood on an unvarying diet of beans and hardtack. No wonder, then, that when a crate of onions was discovered aboard the
Weare
there was a near-riot to devour them. To anyone else the wretched little port of St. Michael on the Bering Sea, with its melancholy mud flats, its grey warehouses, its rusty Russian cannon, and its stink of rotting fish, might have seemed to be the end of the earth. But to the prospectors it was Utopia. As each vessel in turn puffed out of the labyrinth of the Yukon delta and headed up the sombre coastline to the volcanic island on which the port was perched, a wave of excitement rippled among the passengers. For there was food at St. Michael, and an orgy followed each landing. It was fruit and vegetables the miners wanted, and they devoured tins of pineapple, apricots, and cherries, swilled cider at a dollar a bottle, and gnawed away on raw turnips.

Anchored in the shallow sea off the mud flats lay two grimy ocean-going vessels, the N.A.T. Company’s
Portland
and the A.C.’s
Excelsior
, one destined for Seattle, the other for San Francisco. As the
Portland
was to leave first, the majority boarded her. The trip was tedious, the ship rolled horribly, and most of the passengers took to their beds. One grew so ill that he had to be forcibly restrained from flinging himself overboard. Others, more hardy, drank champagne for most of the voyage or sat out on deck contemplating the future. Clarence Berry and his wife were like two excited children. They talked of the farm that he intended to buy, where he had once worked as a hired hand for starvation wages, and of the diamond wedding ring which she would now be able to afford – poverty had forced them to omit it from the ceremony before they set out on an Alaskan honeymoon. Mrs. Berry, in the rough, mannish costume of a prospector’s wife, weather-beaten by the Yukon elements, presented a sharp contrast to her fellow passenger Mrs. Eli Gage, the fashionably attired daughter-in-law of the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. Mrs. Gage’s husband was one of the directors of the N.A.T. Company, and she was a prominent member of Chicago society. But Ethel Berry could have bought her, lock, stock, and bustle, with the gold from
Five
Eldorado.

The
Portland’s
journey took almost a month, and the passengers celebrated Independence Day aboard her. Under her previous name,
Haitian Republic
, she had been known as a hoodoo ship, but she was shortly to become the most famous vessel in America. She steamed into Seattle early on the morning of July 17 to the cheers of five thousand people crammed onto Schwabacher’s Dock to greet her. For the
Excelsior
had beaten her, arriving in San Francisco two days earlier, and the word “Klondike” was already on the lips of the nation.

2

Rich man, poor man

The Klondike stampede did not start slowly and build up to a climax, as did so many earlier gold rushes. It started instantly with the arrival of the
Excelsior
and
Portland
, reached a fever pitch at once, and remained at fever pitch until the following spring, when, with the coming of the Spanish-American War, the fever died almost as swiftly as it arose. If war had not come, the rush might have continued unabated for at least another half-year, but, even so, the stampede remains unique. It was the last and most frenzied of the great international gold rushes. Other stampedes involved more gold and more men, but there had been nothing like the Klondike before, there has been nothing like it since, and there can never be anything like it again.

The treasure ships from Alaska reached the Pacific coast at the peak of that era known nostalgically as the Gay Nineties. The gaiety is remembered, the misery that accompanied it largely forgotten. It was the era of Buffalo Bill, Mark Twain, Carry Nation, Little Egypt, Lillian Russell, Richard Harding Davis, and the
Floradora
Sextette. The Gibson Girl stared haughtily from the pages of the ten-cent magazines; the Yellow Kid leered gap-toothed from the penny press. Fitzsimmons had just knocked out Corbett, and William Jennings Bryan was on the rise. The world was riding tandem bicycles, singing “Daisy Bell,” and reciting Gelett Burgess’s mad jingle about a purple cow. It was an era whose various symbols are still remembered as emblems of “the good old days”: the leg-o’-mutton sleeve, the cigar-store Indian, the stereopticon, and the moustache cup.

It was also an era in which the rich grew richer and the poor poorer, when the “haves” had almost everything and the “have-nots” almost nothing, when melodramas starring wicked landlords and destitute widows were believable and understandable slices of life, when the word “mortgage” had connotations of terror, when banks foreclosed and men quite literally died of hunger in the street. Next to the headlines in the penny press about the foibles of the wealthy
(“RICH GIRL’S SUICIDE A MYSTERY – MONEY HER BANE
?”) were other headlines about the torments of the poor (“
PRIDE MADE HER STARVE IN SILENCE
”). If it was the era of Vanderbilt and Rockefeller, of the private yacht and the brownstone mansion, it was also the era of Samuel Gompers and Henry George, of the sweatshop and the tenement house. It was an age of millionaires, but it was also an age of hoboes. In short, it was an era occupied with money or preoccupied with the lack of it. It was an age, in the words of its historian Mark Sullivan, when “moneymaking was the most prized career.” No wonder the continent went insane when two ships loaded with gold steamed in from out of the Arctic mists.

For “gold” was the magic word of the nineties. The scarcity of it had conspired to bring the continent to its knees, economically. In 1896, when George Carmack was drying salmon at the Klondike’s mouth, the organ voice of William Jennings Bryan resounded across the land crying out that “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” The production of gold had not kept pace with the soaring population; in some years, indeed, it dropped, and this drop was accentuated by demands from European countries that had adopted a gold standard. As gold dollars grew scarcer they grew more expensive until at one point a gold dollar was worth almost twice as much as a paper dollar. People began to hoard gold, in socks and sugar bowls and under floor boards and in personal safes, so that by the year 1892 there were only one hundred and ninety millions in gold coin and certificates left in the U.S. Treasury out of a total of seven hundred and thirty millions. This drop in the circulation of gold was one of the reasons for the creeping depression that gripped the United States in the thirty years prior to the Klondike strike. It was a depression that favoured the money-lenders and bankers and wreaked hardship on the debtor classes, for those who had borrowed money when it was cheap found that they must repay it when it was expensive. Panic came in 1893 as a result of foreign fears that the government could not maintain payments in gold, and the slump that followed was the blackest the continent had known. Canada suffered just as badly.

It struck the Pacific northwest with particular viciousness, for this was a new land settled by men who had followed Horace Greeley’s advice after the California gold rush to go west, and many of those who had done so were now trying to push back the frontier on borrowed funds. Some were reduced to digging clams from the beaches of Puget Sound to keep alive. Indeed, the people of western Washington State were so dependent on clams that, in the words of Frank Cushman, a Tacoma congressman, “their stomachs rose and fell with the tide.” For years they had been waiting for a miracle to deliver them. It came, like an electric shock, when the
Portland
docked in Seattle with a ton of gold aboard.

This was perhaps the chief reason for the intensity of the stampede that followed, a stampede out of all proportion to the amount of gold that actually existed on the Klondike watershed. The century had already experienced three other great international rushes, to California, Australia, and South Africa – fields far richer than the Klondike. But, in the phrase of the
British Columbia Yearbook
for 1897, they “did not move the world as the Klondike moved it.”

Conditions were almost exactly right for the lunacy that ensued. The world was at peace, and the Klondike had no rivals for public attention for more than six months; another year and the Spanish-American and later the Boer wars would have interfered. Because of the high purchasing power of the dollar, goods and outfits were cheap. Rail and water transportation had reached a state of efficiency which made it possible to move large masses of people swiftly and inexpensively; the Klondike, in fact, started a railway rate war that saw the fare from Chicago to the Pacific coast drop to ten dollars. The Yukon was just far enough away to be romantic and just close enough to be accessible. Rich men could, in theory at least, travel all the way by boat without lifting a finger, while poor men could speedily reach the passes and travel by foot and home-made boat on a fast current to the gold-fields. Moreover, the Pacific-coast ports, hungering for trade, were prepared to use every weapon to promote themselves as outfitting ports for the stampede. Their greatest talking-point was the apparent wealth of the new fields. The area might not be extensive, but some of the claims were proving to be the richest in history.

There was something magical about the era, too. The Victorian Age was drawing to its close, and Englishmen, raised on a diet of adventure in far-off lands, were ripe for a fling. In North America, gullibility and optimism marched side by side and men were ready to believe that anything was possible. The novels of Jules Verne and the mechanical marvels of the Columbian Exposition had given the continent a heady feeling. Thrill-seekers rotated about in Ferris wheels; balloonists dared to mount into the clouds; thousands bought and believed in the Indian herb remedies sold by travelling medicine shows or in the gold bricks dispensed by itinerant confidence men. In some ways the Klondike was itself a giant gold-brick scheme in which an entire continent revelled.

Finally, the era of sensational journalism was in full swing. Outcault’s
Kid
had given the name “yellow” to the popular press. Richard Harding Davis’s
Soldiers of Fortune
had just been published. Bennett, Dana, Pulitzer, and Hearst were the giants of journalism. Human interest was the order of the day, and the scenes in San Francisco and Seattle in mid-July 1897 were made to order for any newspaperman.

3

A ton of gold

The
Excelsior
did not look like a treasure ship. She was short and stubby with a lone black smokestack and two masts. Her superstructure was smudged and grimy and stained with rust marks. Her appearance fitted that of her passengers, who still wore their tattered working-clothes, caked with the mud of Bonanza and Eldorado. Under their broad-brimmed miners’ hats their lined faces were burned almost black by the Klondike sun, and their chins grizzled with unshaven whiskers. They were gaunt and they were weary, but their eyes burned with a peculiar fire. To the crowd on the dock they looked exactly like miners out of a picture-book.

Down the gangplank they came, Lippy, Hestwood, Joe Ladue, Louis Rhodes, and the others, staggering under their loads of gold. The knot of curious people on the dock at San Francisco parted to let them through. Tom Lippy’s square shoulders could be seen on the gangway, his wiry little wife beside him, her face tanned the colour of shoe-leather. Together they grappled with a bulging suitcase. It weighed more than two hundred pounds, and the awed spectators realized it was full of gold. Lippy’s neighbours on Eldorado, including some of those who had discovered the creek, accompanied him to the dock. Frank Keller with thirty-five thousand dollars and Jim Clements with fifty thousand hoisted their gold down the gangway. Fred Price, who had been a laundryman in Seattle before going north, was relatively “poor” with only fifteen thousand dollars in gold. But even fifteen thousand was a considerable fortune in 1897, when a four-room apartment could be rented for a dollar and a quarter a week, an all-wool serge suit could be purchased for four dollars, a square meal cost twenty-five cents, a quart of whiskey went for forty cents, coffee was thirteen cents a pound, a smoked tongue was worth twelve cents, and two baskets of fresh tomatoes could be bought for a nickel.