Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (31 page)

3

A
dollar a
waltz

Some of those who fled the Klondike did not reach Fort Yukon, and these were obliged to trudge back to Dawson along the unkempt surface of the frozen river. One such was Joaquin Miller, who less than three months before had left San Francisco so proudly and so optimistically. He and his party chopped their way through mountains of ice, flinging their supplies away to lighten their loads, and with the aid of Indians along the way reached the Klondike on December 5. The poet was in a sorry state. Both cheeks were frozen, his left ear was sloughed off, part of his big toe had to be removed, one finger was missing, and he was suffering the tortures of snow-blindness. He remained in Dawson for the rest of the winter, dependent on the charity of others, a curious gaunt figure in his reindeer parka, his grey beard, stained with food, flowing from his thin, ascetic face.

All that fall the exodus from Dawson continued. In mid-October one thousand men, women, and children were shivering in tents on the banks of the Klondike, but by December 1 some nine hundred had retraced their steps.

Scores attempted to return up the frozen river to the passes, rending their clothes, shredding their moccasins, and shattering their sleighs on the sharp blocks of ice that were sometimes heaped as high as twenty feet. As they stumbled on, they jettisoned their sleds, their food, their clothes, even their shoes, keeping only a single blanket apiece and a meagre amount of provisions, with no shelter but a campfire to keep them from death by freezing.

All of this time the temperature hung at fifty below zero, so cold that any man moving faster than a tortoise pace felt the chill air sear his lungs. On November 29 the temperature dipped again to sixty-seven below, so that the trees cracked like pistol shots with the freezing and expanding sap, and cooked beans turned hard as pebbles, and the touch of metal tore the skin from naked fingers.

Half a dozen died on this fearful journey and many were incapacitated, such as William Byrne, a seventeen-year-old from Chicago who was abandoned at Five Finger Rapids by his half-crazed uncle. The elder man had worked the youth to exhaustion at pistol point until one night Byrne was too tired to remove his soaking moccasins. He awoke next morning to find both feet frozen. A doctor amputated his legs at the knee while the uncle rushed on. Byrne eked out the winter in a shack by the river, more dead than alive. The following spring he managed to make his way Outside, whereupon he announced that he would return at once to the Klondike on artificial limbs to dig for gold.

Dawson, meanwhile, settled down to a second winter in which poverty, famine, and sickness were fortune’s bedfellows. In Bill McPhee’s Pioneer Saloon homeless men slept fitfully on benches and tables, but across the road, in Harry Ash’s Northern, there stood a row of old-fashioned mixing-glasses, each filled with a thousand dollars’ worth of dust. Down the street at the Yukon Hotel the buckskin sacks were stacked like cordwood – two hundred thousand dollars alone from the Eldorado claim of the Lucky Swede. Directly above this Croesus hoard, the guests were herded into double-decked bunks beneath bare rafters, to sleep in their work clothes, with only verminous blankets over them and a nail for a coat-hanger. A crack in the wall served as ventilation, a bit of candle stuck into the logs as light; a red-hot sheet-iron stove supplied an uneven heat.

Gold, which would buy so little, slipped easily from hand to hand at the gambling-tables. A man could lose eighteen thousand dollars in a day and a half without giving it a thought, as one man did that winter. A man could lose a thousand dollars in five minutes and cheerfully buy liquor and cigars for all, as another did. Or a man could throw his sack of dust on the high card, collect his winnings, and blow them all on two hundred glasses of whiskey, in the manner of Joe Brand, a dog-puncher.

What would gold buy in Dawson that winter? It would buy a meal of beans, stewed apples, bread, and coffee for five dollars in a restaurant before the restaurants closed. It would buy desiccated potatoes at a dollar a pound or rancid flour at three. It would buy a one-minute waltz with a girl in a silk dress at a dollar a waltz; and it would, under certain conditions, buy the girl in the silk dress too. It was in the Monte Carlo that winter that a twenty-two-year-old French-Canadian girl named Mable LaRose auctioned herself off to the highest bidder; she offered to live with him all winter as his wife and do his housekeeping – the money to be held by neutral parties and paid over when the bargain was completed. Up she stood on the bar, a wistful and diminutive figure with plaited auburn hair and was promptly purchased for five thousand dollars.

Within the smoke-filled, kerosene-lit interior of the M & M Saloon and Dancehall, Pete McDonald, the one-time “Prince of Puget Sound,” was raking in thirty-seven hundred dollars a day. He looked the perfect bartender, with his round head, his bulldog expression, his carefully oiled and parted hair, and his dark, curled moustache, but this man had already made and lost three fortunes in the timber camps of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Washington. When he reached Dawson in March, 1897, he had only ten dollars left, the residue of his enormous take from the Silver Dollar Saloon in Snohomish, Washington’s great boom town. He built his Dawson bar on borrowed money, and by midwinter he was in the chips again. Around and around his sawdust floor the silk-clad girls went whirling, so swiftly and so expertly that McDonald was able to crowd as many as one hundred and twenty-five dances into a single evening’s entertainment. For each dance his girls received an ivory chip worth twenty-five cents and McDonald got the remainder of the dollar fee. One man so badly wanted to dance that he bought seven hundred dollars’ worth of dance tickets in advance and danced like a dervish for a week while the violins scraped and the piano rattled out its tinny waltzes and polkas. Then, on Thanksgiving Night, with the temperature at fifty-eight below, a dance-hall girl threw a flaming lamp at a rival and most of Front Street went up in smoke. McDonald’s saloon burned to the ground; his loss was reckoned at a hundred thousand dollars; but he had a new building erected within a week (named the Phoenix because it rose from the ashes). He had no glassware left, for every whiskey glass in town had been cornered by speculators who were charging five to ten dollars each for the hoard, so he made his own drinking-cups of copper and tin, and thus the dance whirled on.

4

Only a coal miner’s daughter …

The fog of winter, thickened by the smoke that poured from the mine shafts, clung like a shroud to Bonanza and Eldorado, but the miners toiled doggedly on. The high dumps formed odd blurred shapes in the mist, and the men who worked upon them loomed out of the haze like ghosts. In midwinter, dusk fell at three p.m., and in the thickening twilight the mouth of each shaft glowed pinkly from the fires within. Down the valleys a weird sound came sighing, like a hundred rusty gates swinging in the wind; it was the cry of the windlasses creaking while miners deep within the earth struggled with the heavy buckets of paydirt. But it was the only sound, for the snow and the moss and the fog muffled the valleys until men themselves fell silent and worked on wordlessly in the numbing cold of their self-dug warrens. They worked like animals, creeping about on all fours among the ashes of their fires, scraping away at the immemorial muck, peering squint-eyed into the chiaroscuro of their deepening pits, seeking always the twinkling motes of gold.

At the junction of the two creeks, a new town, called Grand Forks, had sprung up: twenty cabins and a couple of hotels and saloons. And here a plain-faced young Irishwoman of rigid morals and canny disposition, Belinda Mulroney by name, was establishing herself as one of the legendary figures of the stampede.

She was a coal-miner’s daughter from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who had gone off to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago at the age of eighteen to open a restaurant and to make her fortune. She earned eight thousand dollars but lost it all in California. Undaunted, she shipped aboard the
City of Topeka
as a stewardess, where she quickly gained a reputation for her business acumen, her cool resource, and her sharp tongue. When a passenger asked her to black his boots, she retorted that if he so much as put them outside his door she would pour a pitcher of water on them. When, on her first voyage, a baby had to be delivered, she did the job herself, while the captain stood discreetly outside the cabin door and read the instructions from a medical text. He put her in charge of purchasing all ship’s supplies, and she bought everything from machinery to canary birds, charging him a stiff ten-per-cent commission and selling picture hats and satin dresses on the side to the squaws in the coastal towns.

By the spring of ’97, when the news of the Klondike reached the Alaskan Panhandle, Belinda had amassed five thousand dollars. She invested it all in cotton goods and hot-water bottles, floated down the river on a raft with two Indians, and on reaching Dawson flung her last fifty-cent piece contemptuously into the river, swearing that she would never again need such small change.

She sold her merchandise on Dawson’s Front Street at a profit of six hundred per cent, opened up a lunch counter, and hired a group of young men to build cabins for her, which she sold as fast as the roofs went on.

But she wanted to be nearer the mines. With the aid of a broken-down mule named Gerry, she began to haul lumber to the creeks; and here, as the town jeered at her, she built her road house. In vain her friends told her that Dawson was the place to open a hotel and saloon. By fall her hostelry was open and Belinda herself stood behind the bar, a stern and strangely incongruous figure in her white shirtwaist and long black skirt, dispensing eggs at a dollar apiece, and wine, cigars, and whiskey at the highest prices in the Klondike, always keeping her ears open to the mining gossip and shrewdly noting it all down for future action. Before the winter was out she had half a dozen valuable mining properties in her name.

The Eldorado kings flocked to her road house. Sam Stanley, the wild young son of William Stanley, the lame old Seattle bookseller, leaned on the counter with his partner, Charlie Worden, and laid plans to open a hotel in Dawson. Clarence Berry’s partner, Antone Stander, drank crazily, his eyes fixed on Violet Raymond, who was the personal property of Max Endleman, the grizzled proprietor of the near-by Gold Hill Hotel. Endleman had brought Violet and her sister in from the Juneau Opera House that spring, but Stander, with his Austrian good looks and his vast supplies of gold, soon won her away. He bought her every diamond in the area and gave her a necklace that reached almost to her knees. He gave her twenty thousand dollars in gold dust and a lard pail full of nuggets. He gave her a thousand dollars a month to keep her happy. In the end he married her, and she ruined him.

Arkansas Jim Hall and his French-Canadian partner, Picotte, rubbed shoulders at the bar with Dick Lowe, of the famous fraction. All three could now afford to indulge their fancies. Hall had fancied a woman and purchased her for twenty thousand dollars in gold dust. Picotte, who was married to a squaw, fancied a white wife. Off he went to Montreal, and back he came to Eldorado with a bride broadminded enough to help him buy clothes for his three half-breed children. Dick Lowe’s fraction had already yielded twenty-five thousand dollars, and he was spending it freely on wine and women, but the ex-mule-skinner seemed to get as much satisfaction out of practising with his long whip outside his cabin door, a rite that consumed a full hour of every day.

Skookum Jim and Tagish Charley clomped into Belinda’s in loud plaid shirts and gaudy ties, with scarlet bands on their black miners’ hats and heavy watch-chains with double rows of nuggets draped across their paunches. They were treated as white men now, allowed to consume alcohol, and so they bought drinks for the crowd while everybody sang the “George Carmack Song”:

George Carmack on Bonanza Creek went out to look for gold
,
I wonder why, I wonder why
.
Old-timers said it was no use, the water was too cold
.
I wonder why, I wonder why
.
They said that he might search that creek until the world did end
And not enough of gold he’d find a postage stamp to send
.
They said the willows on that creek the other way would bend
.
I wonder why, I wonder why…
.

But the most frequent visitor of all to Belinda’s road house did not drink at all, or sing. Whiskey could not intoxicate Big Alex McDonald: he was already drunk with the idea of land. By the winter’s end he had acquired interests in ten claims on Eldorado, seven on Bonanza, nineteen on Dominion, fifteen on Sulphur, eight on Hunker, three on Gold Bottom, one on Bear, two on Skookum Gulch, and several on the benchland above the fork. In short, he had claims on every one of the Klondike’s richest creeks. And he had land in Dawson, too.

None knew how much he was worth, least of all Big Alex himself. It was said that if he so much as stopped to look at a piece of property its value increased at once. He was involved in so many complicated business deals that every time he was introduced to a newcomer he would start the conversation by asking: “Are you a partner of mine?” Wherever he went, a swarm of gesticulating hangers-on followed him, plucking at his sleeve, waving papers, offering business propositions, asking for money. To each, McDonald replied with an immediate “No!” but this meant only that he wanted time to mull over the idea. As often as not he ended by accepting, for he had reached the point where he found it hard to resist any offer. Each man, that winter, seemed to require an outlet for his new-found wealth. For some it was supplied by women, for others by incessant dancing in Pete McDonald’s saloon, for many more by faro bank or blackjack. Alex McDonald’s outlet was business and property; they consumed his interests and satisfied his appetites, and in the end they ruined him too.