Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (28 page)

“Why do you give this back?” Rowe asked in astonishment.

“Hell, Bishop,” replied the thief, “I’m a member of your congregation.”

Smith, in fact, almost succeeded in getting one of his henchmen elected to the Board of Stewards of the Union Church. The church, which had been erected by public subscription, was the inspiration of the Rev. Robert McCahon Dickey, whose character was later appropriated by Ralph Connor as the model for the Preacher in his best-selling novel,
The Sky Pilot
. Dickey, a Presbyterian, was chairing the meeting when nominations for each of the seven denominations represented were called. Immediately a man leaped to his feet and nominated “the Bishop.” Dickey thought at first that he meant Bishop Rowe, but it developed that the nominee was someone else entirely.

“He’s a very holy man, so we call him the Bishop,” the nominator explained to the crowd. “He wouldn’t rob no poor widow.”

“What about the rich ones?” came a
sotto voce
query from the rear.

Dickey (as he later confided to his diary) then recognized the nominee as the man “who guided dead brokes from the beach to the church.” He asked quietly what his denomination might be.

“He’s a
episcopalian –
in fact he’s a church
warner
like what his Holiness spoke about this morning,” the Bishop’s backer replied.

“And how long has he been a church
warner?”
Dickey asked.

“All his life – he was always holy!”

“Shut up, you damned fool!” whispered a fierce voice, which all present recognized as belonging to Soapy Smith.

Dickey got around the problem by suggesting that Bishop Rowe examine the nominee on his knowledge of the Episcopalian service. When Rowe suggested he recite the Apostles’ Creed, the con man responded with the Gettysburg Address, which he claimed to have memorized from the Bible. He was rejected at once, but such was Smith’s wrath at the blunder that plans had to be made to smuggle him out of Skagway under cover of darkness. Dickey described him, at this point, as “the most abject and terrified man I ever saw.…”

The town was soon dotted with bogus business premises erected by Smith, or by the men under his protection, for the purpose of fleecing the Klondikers. There were a Merchants’ Exchange, a Telegraph Office, a Cut Rate Ticket Office, a Reliable Packers, and an Information Bureau – all complete shams – to which the suckers were steered. Each of these establishments was plausibly furnished and fitted out to give an air of solidity and respectability, and peopled with “clerks” and “customers” who had memorized their lines like veteran thespians.

Slim Jim Foster had a disarming quality that made strangers warm to him. “Why not go over to the Reliable Packers?” he would suggest as he seized a stranger’s bags and helped lug them uptown. “They’re an honest outfit who’ll get your gear over the pass without overcharging. I can vouch for them.”

Foster would steer the sucker into the fake packing establishment, where another member of the gang, posing as proprietor, would conduct negotiations in a crisp, business-like fashion. When the matter was finally arranged, the negotiator would ask for a small deposit “just to prove the business won’t be given elsewhere.” This was the key moment in the confidence game as practised by Smith’s organization: to make the mark produce his wallet. Once a billfold was brought out into the open in one of Smith’s establishments, its owner could kiss it good-bye. The scene that followed was carefully planned : a member of the gang, attired as a ruffian, would leap up and snatch the pocketbook; another would rise at once and cry out in anger that he could not stand idly by and see an honest man robbed in broad daylight. Others would rise, crying out slogans about honesty and deploring crime, jostling and rushing about to create a scene of confusion. In the spurious scuffle the victim himself would often be knocked flat while the man with the wallet escaped. All involved would pretend to be outraged by the event until the sucker departed dazed, baffled, and penniless.

Other stampeders would be met on the street by men pretending to be naïve cheechakos. The “cheechako” would strike up a conversation about the prospects of getting over the pass, leading up to the fact that new maps, complete information, and weather forecasts could be obtained at the Information Bureau. “Let’s go along together and see what we can find out,” he would say, linking arms with his quarry, and so the two new-found friends would head for another Smith establishment.

At the Information Bureau a man was posted to find out all he could about the newcomer: the size of his outfit, the amount of his ready cash, his friends, his background, his immediate plans.

At this point the luckless innocent was either steered to one of Smith’s crooked gambling-games or, if he balked, the details were filed so that others in the gang could shear him when he took to the trail.

Smith’s Telegraph Office was a particularly ingenious establishment, and its operation underlined the ignorance and gullibility of many stampeders. There was, of course, no telegraph line to Skagway in 1898, but Smith guaranteed to send a wire anywhere in the world for five dollars. Scores paid their money and sent messages to their families before leaving for the passes, and Smith always saw that they got an answer within two or three hours. It invariably came collect.

On one occasion the gang had pamphlets printed warning against poison water on the White Pass trail. Smith’s men steered newcomers to the Merchants’ Exchange, where maps of the poisonous springs were supposedly available. In this false-fronted shack, in dim candlelight, men fresh off the boats were speedily relieved of their money.

Often Smith’s operatives were the very ones who organized the landing committees which handled the freight. Thus did they worm themselves into the confidence of hundreds who, swindled out of their money and possessions, found themselves caught in Skagway, unable to move forward or back. At this point, on occasion, a kindly philanthropist with a dark, pointed beard and probing grey eyes appeared and advanced them, in the name of Christian charity, just enough cash to take them home again. And so they returned the way they had come without raising any awkward fuss, comforted that the Devil did not rule supreme in Alaska, their hearts warm towards their benefactor, whose name, of course, was Jefferson Randolph Smith.

5

The human serpent

When the mud froze hard as granite, and the rivers turned to ice, and the snow swept down from the mountains so thickly that a man could scarcely see his neighbour, the Dead Horse Trail reopened and thousands once more took up the struggle to cross the White Pass.

But this time the Mounted Police at the border were enforcing a new regulation. No one could enter the Yukon Territory of Canada without a year’s supply of food, roughly eleven hundred and fifty pounds. Together with tents, cooking-utensils, and tools, this made about a ton of goods in all – lime juice and lard, black tea and chocolate, salt, candles, rubber boots and mincemeat, dried potatoes and sauerkraut, string beans and cornmeal, cakes of toilet soap and baking-powder, coal oil and lamp chimneys, rope, saws, files, mukluks, overshoes – in short, everything needed to keep going for a year in a northern climate without outside aid.

All of these goods had to be packed on the backs of animals or of men, or dragged on sleds and parcelled up into manageable loads. The average man carried about sixty-five pounds, moved it about five miles, cached it, and returned for another load, continuing this laborious process until the entire ton of supplies was shuttled across the pass. Thus, a man who depended on his own back for transportation might have to make up to thirty round trips to move his outfit, and his total mileage before he reached Lake Bennett could exceed twenty-five hundred miles. Most contrived to pull sleds with larger loads, but even these found they were covering more than one thousand miles, which explains why even a hard-working man took ninety days to move through the White Pass.

All along the trail, often buried in twelve or more feet of snow, lay the packs and equipment of those who were backtracking in this onerous manner. After days and days of painfully slow forward movement, men were ready to fling themselves down by the side of the trail and sob their hearts out in frustration. Others spent their passions on their animals. One who finally completed the journey across the pass uncoiled like a steel spring, and in his rage beat his dogs so unmercifully that they could go no farther. Beginning with the lead dog, he pushed the animals one by one into a waterhole under the ice and only then, coming to his senses and realizing the enormity of his conduct, collapsed in the snow in tears. Henry Toke Munn watched one man deal with a pair of oxen that were so exhausted they could not continue on. He built a fire under them and then began to poke at them with burning brands, but they still could not move the load and so were slowly roasted alive before his eyes. Those who passed such scenes rarely paid them heed, for all were too much occupied with their own misfortunes to mind anybody else’s business on the Dead Horse Trail. A dead man sat beside the right of way for hours with a hole in his back staring glassily out at the passers-by, who trudged on past with scarcely a second glance.

As the winter wore on and the snow continued to fall, the trail changed its physical shape, literally rising above the surrounding countryside. The soft snow on either side was blown off down the valley by the screaming gusts, but the trail itself was kept so hard-packed by the trampling of thousands that no wind could budge it. And when more snow fell, it too was packed down, hard as cement, until in certain places the pathway was ten feet high. Bert Parker, a teen-ager from Ontario who crossed the pass that winter and who set down his memories of it years later when he was dying of cancer, likened the trail to a huge pipeline, six to eight feet in diameter, and the men who moved along it to a chain gang. The wind-blown snow on either side was so loose that if a man toppled off the trail he had difficulty clambering back up again.

“If a man forgets for a moment what he is doing, his sled is liable to get off the trail and upset in the snow,” Parker wrote. “The minute this happens the man behind him steps up and takes his place and he stays there till the whole cavalcade passes by. Sometimes you would think that a man had gone crazy when his sled had upset off the trail. They would throw their caps in the snow, shake their fists, throw their heads back and ask Jesus Christ to come down there on the trail so that they could tell Him what they thought of Him for playing a trick like that on them.”

The solid line was so closely packed with men that it could take four or five hours to pass a given point without a gap appearing. From Porcupine Hill to the summit the movement was unceasing, for there was no level place to sit down. Here each man’s individuality seemed to be smothered in the impersonal and all-encompassing human serpent that wound slowly through the mountains. On it moved, with its thousand identical vertebrae, each figure bent forward in its jack-knife attitude of strain, each face purple with the stress of hauling a heavy sled, a rope over every shoulder, a gee-pole for steering purposes gripped in every right hand.

Down the mountain corridor a bitter north wind whistled incessantly. The ranges that guard the coastal strip block off an immense ocean of frigid air which is thirty degrees colder than the sea-tempered air of the coast – and the pass that winter was like a waterfall over which this air tumbled. On the far side of the divide, as if to match the temperament of the men who managed to cross, all was tranquillity. To arrive in the interior, beyond the mountains, was like passing onto the calm body of a lake after breasting a turbulent stream.

The summit of the pass was a symphony of white, although few of the stampeders who reached it had time or inclination for the aesthetics of mountain scenery. Here the sun glittered on the dazzling peaks, and the flanks of the mountains, blue-white in the shadows, merged with the feathery white fog that rose from the sea coast. In the intense cold, men walked in an aura of vapour compounded of the lazy white steam that rose from the campfires and the white jets that burst from the snouts of the animals and the nostrils of the struggling climbers.

Through this eerie world moved the shadowy, frost-encrusted forms of the stampeders, men of every kind and description, made brothers for this brief moment by the common travail of the trail: a man with a string of reindeer pulling a sled, for instance; a group of Scots in furs and tam-o’-shanters led by a bagpiper; a woman with bread dough strapped to her back so that it rose with the heat of her body – every kind of human animal, each struggling forward with a single purpose.

A steamboat man and his wife moved two entire stern-wheel vessels in bits and pieces across the mountains that winter. He was A. J. Goddard, a wiry engine-designer from Iowa, and he was determined to get the first cargo down the river that spring.

A photographer was in the crowd as well. E. A. Hegg, who had closed his two studios on Bellingham Bay, had arrived with a darkroom fastened to a sled drawn by a herd of long-haired goats. He was obliged to heat his developer to keep it from freezing, to filter his water through charcoal, to coat his wet plates with a mixture improvised from herbs and egg albumen, and to work his bulky camera in forty-below weather; but the pictures he made of that strange mountain migration were so effective that when some of them went on exhibit in New York, crowds fought to get a glimpse of them and police had to be called to restore order.

There was a boxing champion among the climbers, too. His name was Jim Carroll, and his fighter’s physique was not equal to the journey. But when he dropped exhausted on the trail and called out to his young wife that he was turning back, she put her hands on her hips and turned on him savagely: “All right, Jim, we’ll split the outfit right here on the trail. I’m going on to Dawson.” The threat spurred him forward, and the following summer found him giving boxing lessons in Dawson while she opened a road house that earned three hundred dollars a day.