Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (20 page)

The stampede was swiftly given an air of respectability and authority by the numbers of leading citizens who took part in it. John McGraw, a former governor of Washington, a senatorial candidate, and one-time president of the First National Bank of Seattle, was aboard the
Portland
when she left on her return journey. Fellow passengers included Brigadier General M. E. Carr of the state militia, who had the most lucrative law practice in the state, and Captain A. J. Balliot, once Yale’s greatest oarsman and footballer, who also gave up a thriving law practice to seek his fortune in the gold-fields. E. J. “Lucky” Baldwin of San Francisco, a millionaire hotel man, miner, and landowner, who had been one of the argonauts in the ’49 rush, at the age of seventy-one announced that he would go to the Klondike to seek the mother lode itself. Winfield Scott Stratton, the eccentric millionaire from Cripple Creek, organized an expedition and bought two riverboats to prospect the Yukon River.

The aristocrats of the underworld were equally alert to the possibilities of the stampede; already boom towns, disorganized and ripe for the plucking, were mushrooming up at the foot of the mountain passes.

Shortly after the news broke, an ex-policeman named Willis Loomis encountered, on the streets of Seattle, Soapy Smith, one of the most famous bunko men on the continent.

“I’m going to be the boss of Skagway,” Smith told him casually. “I know exactly how to do it, and if you come along I’ll make you chief of police.”

Loomis had known Smith in the great silver camp of Leadville, Colorado, when he had sold cakes of shaving-soap for five dollars apiece to suckers who believed there was a twenty-dollar bill hidden under the wrapper. Since then Smith had risen in the world: he was the acknowledged master of the sure-thing game, the king of the confidence men, the emperor of the Denver underworld, and the ex-ruler of Creede, Colorado – a man with the reputation of buying and selling police chiefs as if they were so many cattle. Loomis retorted that a team of mules could not drag him to Alaska, and Smith went on alone, with historic results.

Within ten days of the
Portland’s
arrival, fifteen hundred people had left Seattle and there were nine ships in harbour jammed to the gunwales and ready to sail. The town itself was demented. By August 1 every hotel was bursting with men, restaurants were overtaxed, and lodging-houses were roaring. In the area of the docks, the streets were choked with people and animals moving sluggishly between the ten-foot stacks of supplies. Through the crowd moved steerers hired to lure men to the various outfitting stores. Hundreds sat in the roadways, dressed in gaudy mackinaws, miners’ wide-brimmed hats, iron-cleated, high-top boots, and heavy wool socks – waiting for ships, playing at cards, and babbling about gold.

Dogs, goats, sheep, oxen, mules, burros, Shetland ponies, and sway-backed cayuses, all designed for Klondike packing, blocked the streets, tied to hitching-posts and lumber piles. Every dog-owner in town learned to keep his pet securely tethered – otherwise he was stolen for the Klondike. Horses kept pouring in from Montana, many of them bony, spavined, and worn out. They had been worth between three and five dollars the week before, but now they sold for twenty-five and more. Mules arrived from Colorado; reindeer with amputated horns were sold as beasts of burden; Washington elks were brought in by the carload priced at two hundred and fifty dollars apiece.

The continent was Klondike-crazy. Transportation-company offices were in a state of siege. One railway company received twenty-five thousand queries about the Klondike in the first few weeks. In Chicago the N.A.T. Company was bombarded by one thousand people a day. In the first twenty-four hours after the news broke, two thousand New Yorkers tried to buy tickets for the Klondike. A day later a New York paper printed an advertisement asking applicants to invest any sum between five hundred and two thousand dollars in a Klondike expedition. Twelve hundred signed up at once. On August 1 the New York
Herald’s
financial page carried advertisements for eight huge mining and exploration corporations all formed within a few days to exploit the Klondike. Their total authorized capitalization came to more than twenty-five million dollars.

The news of the Klondike quickly released the northwest from the economic strait jacket in which it had been imprisoned. The gold coins that had lain so long in sugar bowls and strong-boxes and under floor boards were now suddenly flung into circulation. Money had been so scarce in the northwest that grocery bills habitually went unpaid, and yet within a week five-hundred-dollar grubstakes were plentiful. The feeling was epitomized by one Seattle man dying of lung trouble who nevertheless decided to make the arduous trek north and, as he boarded the
Portland
, announced that he would rather expire making a fortune than rot in poverty on the shores of Puget Sound.

“Prosperity is here,” cried the Seattle
P-I
just four days after the
Portland
docked. “So far as Seattle is concerned the depression is at an end. A period of prosperity, far greater than anything known in the past, is immediately at hand.…”

Three days later the financial barometers of the Bradstreet and R. G. Dun companies (then separate firms) endorsed this optimism. Bradstreet’s report declared that “the demand for supplies for shipment to the Clondyke gold region has made July the busiest instead of the dullest month in the commercial year in Seattle and has had an influence on sales of staples at Tacoma, Portland and San Francisco.”

In the first two weeks of the excitement, telegraph orders on the Puget Sound National Bank increased fivefold over any other period in the bank’s history. The sale of bank drafts tripled and express business doubled. In August the city’s total business had leaped by fifty per cent.

The midwest felt a similar upsurge. “I have never seen such a change pass over the faces and hopes of people in the last two months,” wrote Senator C. K. Davis of Minnesota, in October. “In the streets of … [Minneapolis] you will see three people and three teams where you saw one two months ago.”

Grocers doubled their help, supply stores ran day and night, woollen mills sold out of blankets and heavy clothing. Towns as far away as Winnipeg, Manitoba, were cleaned out of furs and robes in two weeks. Plants making evaporated food stepped up production: one Washington State plant operated night and day processing seven thousand pounds a week while workmen rushed through an addition to the factory. Everyone wanted evaporated food: evaporated eggs, evaporated onions, and even evaporated split-pea soup, which was sold in the form of a sausage, each one guaranteed to make twenty to thirty platefuls. The stampeders bought milk tablets, peanut meal, saccharine, desiccated olives, coffee lozenges, beef blocks, and pemmican. One entrepreneur claimed he could put enough food into an ordinary valise to last a man a year and give him a menu as varied as that of a good hotel. He sold these valises to the gullible for two hundred and fifty dollars, claiming they would be worth two thousand in the Klondike.

The newspapers were full of advice on suitable outfits for the Klondike, but many of the argonauts, as they were universally called, chose to ignore them and hold to their own ideas of what was proper for sub-Arctic travel. Tappan Adney, the correspondent for
Harper’s Illustrated
, came across one man in Victoria, B.C., whose outfit consisted of thirty-two pairs of moccasins, a case of pipes, a case of shoes, two Irish setters, a bull pup, and a lawn-tennis set. He was no trader, he told Adney, but simply a tourist going to the gold-fields for a good time. About the same time a forty-seven-year-old spinster, Miss Blanche King, sailed for St. Michael, taking along a maid, a cook, a horse, a parrot, three canaries, a piano, two Saint Bernard dogs, and a sealskin suit.

Almost anything was salable if it had the name “Klondike” attached to it. Optometrists sold Klondike glasses, rubber manufacturers hawked Klondike boots, drugstores peddled Klondike medicine chests, restaurants dispensed Klondike soup; everything from stoves to blankets suddenly bore the necromantic name. It had become a magic word, a synonym for sudden and glorious wealth, a universal panacea, a sort of voodoo incantation which, whispered, shouted, chanted, or sung, worked its own subtle witchery. The papers talked of “Klondicitis,” and the phrase was apt. A New York printer named William Miller, suffering from Klondicitis in the first week of the stampede, tried to raise five hundred dollars from his friends to make the trip north. When he failed to get enough money he lost his reason and the police had to be called to prevent mayhem.

Another curious example of Klondicitis turned up in the same week. A businessman named W. J. Arkell laid claim to the entire Klondike gold-fields, which he insisted were his by right of discovery. Arkell was secretary of the Sterling Remedy Company and proprietor of
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly
as well as the weekly humour magazine
Judge
. In 1890 he had organized the Frank Leslie expedition and sent it to Alaska by way of Haines Mission and the Chilkat Pass, which lies to the southeast of the Chilkoot. Arkell himself had not gone along, nor did the expedition’s members set foot in the Klondike watershed, but this did not deter him from laying claim to the entire gold-bearing region. This attack of Klondicitis spread to Arkell’s brother-in-law, who offered to buy up the interests of an officer of the expedition, one A. B. Shanz. He offered Shanz fifty thousand dollars for his share of Arkell’s non-existent claims. But Shanz, by this time, had Klondicitis, too, and he turned down the offer as being too niggardly. Nothing more was heard of Arkell’s suit.

The Klondike had another curious effect on people: they began seeing gold everywhere. A group of Italian labourers in New York City saw gold in some sand in which they were digging and began to talk to newspapermen of fortune. A visitor to Victoria saw gold in an outcropping in a gutter near that city’s post office and tried to stake a claim on the main street. Gold started to turn up in almost every state in the union. Trinity County, California, went wild over the alleged discovery of some old Spanish mines. A farm near Elizabethtown, Kentucky, was said to be lined with gold. A report from Marquette, Michigan, claimed that the town was sitting on top of a vein of gold forty feet wide. Promoters in Columbia, Missouri, professed to find gold in the beds of dry creeks. Gold mines that had long been worked out suddenly took on a new lease of life: Peru tried to revive the gold mines of the Incas; Deadwood announced the discovery of a new gold vein; the old Cariboo and Kootenay districts of British Columbia began to report new gold finds. Mexico claimed there was gold in the Yaqui country, Russia insisted there were fabulous mines just across from Alaska, and even China talked about new discoveries. Thousands subscribed to various promotion dodges, most of which were based on no firmer evidence than the deposits of iron pyrites which caused a brief flurry in Missouri.

The prevailing attitude towards gold, as expressed in the journalism and in the personal correspondence of the day, was an entirely sensual one. The phrase-makers hovered lovingly over their descriptions of the Klondike’s mineral wealth, caressing it with adjectives that emphasized its tactile qualities. They wrote, and talked, of “rich, yellow gold,” of “hard, solid gold,” of “shining gold,” as if the metal were to be coveted for its own sake, as a jewel or an ornament is coveted.

So infectious was the Klondike epidemic that the flimsiest rumour served to send hundreds dashing to the farthest corners of the northern hemisphere. Transportation companies were not above making capital of these tales, the most flagrant example being the fruitless chase to Kotzebue Sound, on the northwestern tip of the continent, just off Bering Strait. This abortive race was touched off by an old sea-dog in San Francisco who claimed to have dug fifteen thousand dollars out of the ground in two hours with a jack-knife. Several parties swallowed the fairy tale and paid forty dollars each to learn the exact spot in the Kotzebue area where the gold was hidden. The story spread, the price of the inside tip soared to six hundred dollars, and soon steamship companies were advertising “Nuggets as Big as Hickory Nuts” on Kotzebue’s cold shore. More than one thousand persons travelled over three thousand miles, each thinking his party, alone of all the others, knew the secret. And so they were trapped for one long winter above the Arctic Circle, a good five hundred miles, as the crow flies, from the Klondike, which they never saw.

Meanwhile the railway and steamship ads were crying “Ho! For the Klondike!” while the slogan “Klondike or bust!” was on everyone’s lips. It had become suddenly very fashionable to be a stampeder, and red-lettered lapel buttons with the phrase “Yes, I’m going this spring” enjoyed a brisk sale. J. E. Fraser, who went north from San Francisco with twenty men on a wild-goose chase to the Tanana River, later recalled the sentiment of the times:

“The man who had a family to support who could not go was looked on with a sort of pity … the man who didn’t care to leave his business or for other trivial reasons, was looked on with contempt as a man without ambition who did not know enough to take advantage of a good thing when placed in his reach; but the man who
could
go, and would go, and was going to the Klondike, the man who could not be stopped from going, by any means short of a wire cable anchored to a mountain, was a hero. He was looked up to; he was envied by everybody; he was pointed out in the streets.”

Anybody who wished to get free drinks in a Pacific coast saloon had only to dress in the approved costume of the stampeder – the colourful mackinaw, the high boots, and the thick cap. Such a one was automatically treated to the best in the house by his envious fellows.

Men who decried their friends as fools for leaving everything and rushing to the Klondike suddenly found themselves shuttering their shops and following suit, scarcely knowing why.

“Have I also gone daft with this fever, this lust for gold?” wrote Raymond Robins, a rising young San Francisco lawyer, to his sister Elizabeth, a London actress noted for her interpretation of Ibsen’s plays. “I leave this city for Ice-bound Alaska in a few days, and then across the snow-covered mountains and glaciers to rushing Clondyke, where the Yellow God has been sporting in the turbid waters and upon the gravelly shores.” Two years later almost to the day, he was to write her again from Dawson City: “My two years’ race with fortune is over and I have lost.… I am about one thousand dollars in debt and have no assets of any immediate value.…”