Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (27 page)

“A man found time amid the hurry and bustle of the mushroom city to become infatuated with a woman. The icy fogs that stole down from the mountains could not chill his heart of fire. He suffered until the flames stole up and touched his brain – made it glow with a dizzying light – and he looked on the taunting woman with a murderer’s eyes and strove to kill the scornful spirit he could not break.…”

The prose fitted the personality of the town, whose emerging character was distilled in the sign of Keelar, “The Money King,” a pawnbroker whose shop was jammed with hundreds of trinkets and valuables sacrificed by desperate men:

Keelar the Money King has
Barrels of Money Buys and Sells Everything
Loans Money, sells by Auction.
Is a Public Benefactor.

Such money-lenders were among the town’s elite, together with the packers who were making swift fortunes with their horses and mules. One of them, Charlie O’Brien, a Nova Scotian, was seen to walk on board a steamer one day with fifteen thousand dollars in Canadian bills stuffed into his pockets. He was off to the bank at Victoria, more than a thousand miles away, to make a deposit. Another, Joe Brooks, kept the side pockets of his heavy sweater filled with goldpieces so that, on entering Clancy’s bar, he could pour them onto the counter in a stream and shout: “Everybody drink!” Brooks, a Vancouver drayman, was a tough, thick-set extrovert who arrived at Skagway on one of the first boats in July, pushed his string of seventeen mules into the water, and swam ashore with them. Soon his team had grown to three hundred and thirty-five, and he was garnering as much as five thousand dollars a day. He became a familiar sight on Skagway’s muddy streets, dashing up and down Broadway on horseback at breakneck speed with his two small boys, one clutched under each arm.

Even women entered the lucrative packing trade. The best known was Mrs. Harriet Pullen, a widow with a brood of little boys, who arrived in the fall with seven dollars in her pocket and parlayed it into a comfortable fortune. She drove a four-horse freighting outfit up the pass by day, and by night made apple pies in dishes hammered out of old tin cans. She stayed in Skagway all of her life and became in the end its most distinguished citizen.

All that winter the carnival roared on until Skagway took on the trappings of a great freak show. A Negro performer straight from Huber’s Museum in New York lived comfortably from the fees paid him by men who watched while he stuffed an extraordinary number of china eggs into his mouth. A trained bear named Alexis danced down the streets accompanied by his bearded Russian master. An Italian arrived with hundreds of toy balloons and sold them all at high prices. A strange creature known as Peter the Apostle came up from the San Joaquin Valley to render aid to the wayfarers on the trail. On the edge of town William Moore’s granddaughter drove about in a cart pulled by a yearling moose, and the old sea captain himself, building a new home with a ship’s pilothouse on top, wandered restlessly about the streets, a gaunt and strangely disturbing figure in his thick yellow overcoat.

It was, in the words of Elmer J. “Stroller” White, who was employed at the time by the Skagway
News
, “a free, unfettered and impulsive populace.” Ordinary social conventions were not taken as seriously as they were in the outside world. “It was not unusual,” White recalled, “for an avowed and sworn celibate to arise in the morning firm and steadfast in his principles, and before repose again overtook him anything might have happened, including marriage.”

The Stroller, as he called himself, once entered a Skagway saloon to find the bartender standing drinks in celebration of his marriage the previous evening.

“What was the name of your bride?” White asked, sensing a news item.

The bartender scratched his head, thought for several moments, polished the bar furiously, and thought again. Finally he turned to White: “Here. You tend bar and I’ll run over and ask her. I heard it but I forgot what it was. You’ll find rye and Scotch on ice under the bar.”

Saloons sprang up on every corner, in spite of Alaska’s rigid laws which prohibited the importation, manufacture, or sale of spirituous liquors. The respect for this paper statute was indicated in the statistics for 1897, which showed that there were five breweries and one hundred and forty-two bars in the territory – all doing a roaring business. All liquor arriving in Skagway was billed through to Canada in bond, but by the time the barrels reached the border a good deal of whiskey had been mysteriously replaced with water. Few people, apparently, took much heed of the gigantic red lettering painted on a cliff a thousand feet above the town exhorting the populace to DRINK ROCKY MOUNTAIN TEA.

The Blaze of Glory, the Hungry Pup, the Mangy Dog, the Red Onion, the Home of Hooch, and the Palace of Delight – these and other saloons and gambling-houses provided Skagway with the core of its non-transient population: the managers, bartenders, dealers, faro lookouts, dance callers, case keepers, bouncers, blackjack boosters, and saloon swampers. Among these night people, caste was almost as rigid as it was along the Ganges. Faro dealers were at the top of the social scale. Dance callers (“corral your heifer for the next turn”) were considerably farther down. Bartenders had their own caste system depending on the social level of their particular saloon. Blackjack boosters were considered the lowest of the low.

The boosters, whose task it was to inveigle newcomers into a game, were almost invariably known as “Kid.” Stroller White estimated that there were between five hundred and seven hundred and fifty citizens in Skagway, that first winter, who would respond to the cry of “Hey, Kid!” Of these, some two hundred worked the twenty-five blackjack games in double shifts. They included the Granulated Kid, the Down-and-Out Kid, the Chills and Fever Kid, the Ping Pong Kid, the Skylight Kid, the Nanny Goat Kid, the Burn-’em-up Kid, and the No Shirt Kid. Their nicknames were acquired through a quirk of character or physique or as the result of an incident from the past, often long-forgotten. The Sealskin Kid was named by the passengers on the ship that brought him to Skagway because he sported an expensive sealskin coat. The Wake-up Kid was so called because he could sleep through almost anything and was therefore subject to constant appeals to open his eyes. It was said of the Evaporated Kid, when he was caught in the dressing room of Little Egypt during that dancer’s performance in Clancy’s Music Hall, that he had entered through the keyhole. And J. H. P. Smythe, an Australian, quickly acquired the title of the “Hot Cake Kid” because that was all he appeared to live on. He worked for the notorious Soapy Smith on a percentage basis but was actually paid off in the form of a chit on the Pack Train Restaurant, signed each week by the confidence man and bearing the simple notation: “Give him all the hot cakes he wants.”

In the dance halls that adjoined the saloons, painted women held court in caricatures of Paris fashions, with names like Sweet Marie, Babe Wallace, the Virgin, Mollie Fewclothes, Sitting Maud, Ethel the Moose, and Diamond Lil Davenport. The man who took a box in a concert hall almost had to beat off women with a stick, for they rushed the boxes in relays, forcing the luckless occupants to treat them to champagne. One packer, under these conditions, paid out seven hundred and fifty dollars one night for a box of cigars and another three thousand for wine.

And all the while the pianos tinkled out a tinny melody – tinkled all night long and into the dawn. In Jimmy Ryan’s Nugget Saloon the piano never ceased, save for those moments when the player, English Harry Marston, sodden with drink, toppled senseless from the bench.

Above the rattle of the dance-hall bands a more discordant sound was heard: the staccato notes of gunfire in the streets. For Skagway existed in a state of incredible anarchy. Half the population was composed of transients, unswerving in their single-minded resolution to reach the gold-fields. The remainder were opportunists whose sole object was the making of money. Few had time to occupy themselves with civic affairs, and so the community drifted, like a rudderless ship, towards its own Scylla and Charybdis.

Alexander Macdonald, a worldly Englishman who passed through Skagway late in the fall of 1897, described the character of the town in a few pungent sentences:

“I have stumbled upon a few tough corners of the globe during my wanderings beyond the outposts of civilization, but I think the most outrageously lawless quarter I ever struck was Skagway.… It seemed as if the scum of the earth had hastened here to fleece and rob, or … to murder.… There was no law whatsoever; might was right, the dead shot only was immune to danger.”

In the unimpassioned words of Superintendent Samuel B. Steele of the
NWMP,
Skagway was “little better than a hell on earth.” Steele, who was the last man to give way to overstatement, described in his memoirs the nights he spent in the town, when the crash of bands in the dance halls and “the cracked voices of the singers” were mingled with shouts of murder, cries for help, and the crackle of gunshot. “Skagway,” Steele wrote, “was about the roughest place in the world.”

It must have irked this case-hardened policeman, whose character had been forged in the hot flame of prairie revolt, that, as a Canadian, he was powerless to interfere. One Sunday morning he and a fellow officer were aroused from their slumbers on the floor of a Skagway cabin by a pistol fight; bullets ripped through the walls of the building, but the affair was so commonplace that the two men did not bother to rise from their beds.

Captain Henry Toke Munn, an Arctic adventurer, passed through Skagway about the same time, and his experiences were similar to Steele’s. “For the six nights I slept in Skagway there was shooting on the streets every night,” he reported. “At least one man was killed that I know of and probably others. The shack I slept in had a bullet through it over my head.”

A contemporary account of a typical shooting, which occurred in the Klondike saloon in the spring of 1898, gives an insight into social conditions in Skagway during the stampede year. A man named Brannon got into a fight with another man and attempted to bend him back over the bar. In the ensuing struggle, involving four or five saloon habitués, the belligerent Brannon was shot to death. Although there were more than a dozen eyewitnesses to the murder, everyone in the barroom seemed to have been stricken with a sudden case of blindness. In the preliminary hearing that followed, the bartender, who was within two feet of the corpse, denied all knowledge of the incident, and when the judge asked him what he was doing at the time, he replied with some disdain: “I was drawing two beers.” A gambler, when called on to testify, was equally unobservant. When asked the same question he told the court: “I was busy grabbing seven dollars and a quarter from the blackjack table.” Thirteen witnesses followed and all denied that the accused, one Keifer, had done the shooting. The judge obviously placed little value on their testimony for he bound Keifer over for trial in spite of the lack of evidence.

Proper machinery for law-enforcement being non-existent, the vacuum thus created was shortly filled in another manner. Slowly and very quietly, almost without realizing it, the community became aware of a man named Jefferson Randolph Smith, the same Soapy Smith who had announced in Seattle that he would be the boss of Skagway. By midwinter he had made good his boast. Over its citizens and transients he held the power of life and death. Before he was through, he had his own army – drilled, disciplined, and armed – his own spy system, and his own secret police. He cowed the militia and bought out the civil law. Merchants, businessmen, and journalists were in his pocket, and his sway extended along both the Dyea and Skagway trails to the very summit of the passes, where the North West Mounted Police installed Maxim guns to keep him at bay.

Any well-heeled stampeder landing in Skagway that winter found it impossible to escape the attentions of Smith’s organization. From the moment he stepped aboard ship at Victoria or Seattle until the day he finally crossed the international border at the summit of the pass, he was under almost constant surveillance. Smith’s men ranged far and wide, many of them mingling with the crowd on the docks of the Pacific coast ports, travelling on the steamers plying north, pretending to be bona fide stampeders, and befriending likely-looking prospects. They were at the gangways, in the streets, behind the counters, along the trails, and even in the church pews. They were, in fact, everywhere.

They were all consummate actors, and each had a role which he played to the hilt. The “Reverend” Charles Bowers pretended to be a pious and God-fearing Christian, lending a helping hand to newcomers, advising tenderfeet on where to get supplies, and counselling the unwary against evil companions. Indeed, a good opening for any member of the organization was to warn newcomers to stay clear of the Soapy Smith gang. Billie Saportas, a newspaperman in Smith’s pay, interviewed all travellers on their arrival and discovered in this way how much money they had. “Slim Jim” Foster, an engaging curly-haired youth, was stationed at the docks, where he cheerfully helped stampeders carry their baggage uptown. Van B. Triplett, known as “Old Man Tripp,” an aging creature of great cunning, worked the trails, posing as a returning stampeder full of information about the Klondike. Like so many others in the Smith entourage, he was a man who exuded benevolence from every pore. With his long white hair and patriarchal mien, he might have been a Biblical prophet, but this saintly exterior masked a heart of granite. One of the strong points of Smith’s rule of Skagway was that nobody was quite sure who belonged to his gang, because so many, like Tripp, looked so innocent. In their bowler hats, wing collars, diamond stickpins, and polished high button boots, they posed as business leaders, public-spirited citizens, and churchmen. The ordinary man feared to raise his voice against Smith in public or private for fear he might be addressing one of Smith’s own men without knowing it. When the Right Reverend Peter Trimble Rowe, the pioneer bishop of Alaska, was robbed by one of the gang, the miscreant, on learning his victim’s identity, handed back the pouch of gold.