Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (4 page)

Kleinburg, Ontario
March, 1972

Cast of Major Characters

Along the River Settlements: 1896

LeRoy N. “Jack” McQuesten
, free trader working with the Alaska Commercial Company. Ran the Circle City post.

Arthur Harper
, McQuesten’s partner. Ran the Fortymile post.

Joseph Ladue
, Harper’s partner. Ran the Ogilvie post.

Al Mayo
, in partnership with McQuesten, Harper, and Ladue. Ran the Rampart post.

John Jerome Healy
, manager of Fort Cudahy, post of the North American Transportation and Trading Company (N.A.T. Company) at Fortymile Creek.

Bishop William Bompas
, Church of England missionary at Fortymile.

Father William Judge
, Roman Catholic missionary at Circle City. Later opened St. Mary’s Hospital at Dawson. “The Saint of Dawson.”

William Ogilvie
, Canadian government land surveyor.

Inspector Charles Constantine
, in charge of first detachment of North West Mounted Police to enter the Yukon. In command at Fort Constantine (Fortymile).

Robert Henderson
, Canadian prospector. Explored Indian River, co-discoverer of Klondike gold.

George Carmack
. He and Indian relatives (Skookum Jim and Tagish Charley) worked for Ogilvie packing over Chilkoot Pass. Co-discoverer of Klondike gold.

At Dawson City

OFFICIALS

J. M. Walsh
, ex-Mounted Policeman, Commissioner of the Yukon, 1897–98; replaced by William Ogilvie.

Samuel B. Steele
, Mounted Police superintendent in charge of the force in the Yukon.

Thomas Fawcett
, gold commissioner.

PROSPECTORS

Charley Anderson
, “the Lucky Swede,” owner of
Twenty-Nine
Eldorado.

Clarence Berry
, Fresno fruit farmer, owner with Antone Stander of
Four, Five
, and
Six
Eldorado and
Forty Above
Bonanza.

Pat Galvin
, former Helena, Montana, town marshal. Purchaser with Alex McDonald and George Byrne of
Forty
and
Forty-One
Eldorado. Founded North British American Trading and Transportation Company.

William F. “Swiftwater Bill” Gates
, part owner of
Thirteen
Eldorado and co-owner of Monte Carlo dance hall.

Thomas Lippy
, Seattle
YMCA
worker, owner of
Sixteen
Eldorado.

Dick Lowe
, mule-skinner. Staked “Dick Lowe Fraction,” richest piece of ground in history.

Alexander “Big Alex” McDonald
, “the King of the Klondike,” bought half of
Thirty
Eldorado for a song and acquired dozens of mining properties.

Louis Rhodes
, staked
Twenty-One Above
Bonanza. First man to reach bed-rock.

SALOON-KEEPERS

Harry Ash
, Circle City bartender. Opened the Northern Saloon, first saloon in Dawson.

Silent Sam Bonnifield
, legendary gambler. Opened the Bank Saloon.

Tom Chisholm
, a Nova Scotian, proprietor of three successive saloons all known as the Aurora.

James “Nigger Jim” Daugherty
, wealthy claim owner. Built the Pavilion dance hall. Married Lottie Oatley.

Pete McDonald
, “the Prince of Puget Sound,” wealthy claim owner, proprietor of the Phoenix.

Bill McPhee
, old-time Fortymile saloon-keeper, proprietor of the Pioneer with Harry Spencer and Frank Densmore. Grubstaked Clarence Berry.

Charles “Arizona Charlie” Meadows
, western scout, sharpshooter, and showman. Built the Palace Grand.

Belinda Mulroney
, coal-miner’s daughter from Scranton, Pa. Opened the Magnet at Grand Forks and the Fairview in Dawson. Married the “Comte” de Carbonneau.

Jack Smith
, co-owner with Swiftwater Bill Gates of the Monte Carlo.

At Skagway

George Brackett
, former mayor of Minneapolis; built wagon road over the White Pass.

Captain William Moore
, former Fraser River steamboat man; laid out Skagway townsite.

Frank Reid
, surveyor and school-teacher; helped lay out Skagway and shot Soapy Smith.

Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith
, confidence man from Creede, Denver, and Leadville. Operated Jeff Smith’s Oyster Parlor.

On the Trails

Captain W. R. Abercrombie
, Second U.S. Infantry, stationed at Valdez, Alaska.

Tappan Adney
, correspondent for
Harper’s Illustrated Weekly
.

Gene Allen
, itinerant newspaperman who founded the
Klondike Nugget
in Dawson.

Jack Dalton
, frontiersman. Opened the Dalton Trail over which cattle could be brought from Haines Mission to Dawson City.

E. A. Hegg
, Swedish-born photographer from Bellingham Bay, Washington, who photographed the stampede.

Norman Lee
, Chilcoten rancher; drove a herd of cattle north along the Ashcroft Trail.

Addison Mizner
, adventurer; laid out part of Dawson City and was later key architect of the Florida real estate boom of the 1920’s.

Wilson Mizner
, wit and
bon vivant
, later founder of the Hollywood Brown Derby restaurant. Brother of Addison and of Edgar Mizner, manager of Dawson’s Alaska Commercial outlet.

Inspector J. D. Moodie
,
NWMP
officer assigned to open a trail from Edmonton to the Yukon via the Peace River country.

Captain Patrick Henry Ray
, Eighth U.S. Infantry, sent north to investigate possible relief of starvation along Yukon.

Stroller White
, itinerant newspaperman who worked for the Skagway
News
, Bennett
Sun
, and
Klondike Nugget
.

W. D. Wood
, former mayor of Seattle. Led expedition up Yukon River to Klondike.

The Golden Highway

It was the river that fashioned the land, and the river that ground down the gold
.

Long before natives or white men saw it, the river was there, flowing for two thousand miles from mountain to seacoast, working its slow sculpture on valley and hillside, nibbling away at the flat tableland heaved up by the earth’s inner turmoils before the dawn of history
.

The main stream had a thousand tentacles, and these reached back to the very spine of the continent, honing down the mountainsides into gullies and clefts – boulder grating on boulder, gravel grinding against gravel, sand scouring sand, until the river was glutted with silt and the whole Alaska-Yukon peninsula was pitted and grooved by the action of running water
.

No mass could withstand this ceaseless abrasion, which lasted for more than five million years. The rocks and metals that had boiled up through fissures in the earth’s crust succumbed to it and were shaved and chiselled away. Quartz and feldspar, granite and limestone were reduced to muds and clays to be borne off with the current towards the sea, and even the veins of gold that streaked the mountain cores were sandpapered into dust and flour
.

But the gold did not reach the sea, for its specific gravity is nineteen times that of water. The finest gold was carried lightly on the crest of the mountain torrents until it reached the more leisurely river, where it sank and was caught in the sand-bars at the mouths of the tributary streams. The coarser gold moved for lesser distances: as soon as the pace of the current began to slacken, it was trapped in the crevices of bed-rock where nothing could dislodge it. There it remained over the eons, concealed by a deepening blanket of muck, while the centuries rolled on and more gold was ground to dust, while the watercourses shifted and new gorges formed in the flat bottoms of old valleys, while the water gnawed deeper and deeper, and the pathways left by ancient streams turned the hillsides into graceful terraces
.

Thus the gold lay scattered for the full length of the great Yukon River, on the hills and in the sand-bars, in steep ravines and broad valleys, in subterranean channels of white gravel and glistening beds of black sand, in clefts thirty feet beneath the mosses and on outcrop-pings poking from the grasses high up on the benchland
.

There was gold on a dozen tributary rivers and a hundred creeks which would remain nameless and unexplored until the gold was found; taken together, they drained three hundred and thirty thousand miles, stretching from British Columbia to the Bering Sea. There was gold on Atlin Lake at the very head of the Yukon River, and there was gold more than two thousand miles to the northwest in the glittering sands of the beach on Norton Sound into which the same river empties. There was gold on the Pelly and the Big Salmon and the Stewart, majestic watercourses that spill down from the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada to the east, and there was gold on the great Tanana, which rises in the Alaska Range on the southwest. There was gold in between these points at Minook and at Birch Creek and on the frothing Fortymile
.

Yet, compared with a wretched little salmon stream and its handful of scrawny creeks, these noble rivers meant little. For in the Klondike Valley gold lay more thickly than on any other creek, river, pup, or sand-bar in the whole of the Yukon watershed – so thickly, indeed, that a single shovelful of paydirt could yield eight hundred dollars’ worth of dust and nuggets. But white men sought gold along the Yukon for a generation before they found it
.

Chapter One

1
The pilgrims

2
“Gold – all same like this!”

3
The hermits of Fortymile

4
The land of the Golden Rule

1

The pilgrims

We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
  
Always a little further: it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow
,
  
Across that angry or that glimmering sea
.

White on a throne or guarded in a cave
  
There lives a prophet who can understand
Why men were born: but surely we are brave
  
Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand
.

– James Elroy Flecker:
Hassan

The Russians were the first on the river, in 1834, but they cared not a hoot for gold; no more than the natives who had given the river its name of Yukon, meaning “The Greatest.” Even before the river was discovered, whispers of gold in Russian America had reached the ears of Alexander Baranov, the rum-swilling Lord of Alaska, who ruled the peninsula from the island bastion of Sitka. But Baranov, garnering a fortune in furs for his Czarist masters against an incongruous background of fine books, costly paintings, and brilliantly plumaged officers and women, was not anxious for a gold rush. When one of the Russians babbled drunkenly of gold, so legend has it, the Lord of Alaska ordered him shot.

The Hudson’s Bay Company traders heard tales of gold, too, when they invaded the Yukon Valley at mid-century, but paid them no heed, for furs to them were richer treasure. They built Fort Yukon at the mouth of the Porcupine, where the great river makes its majestic curve across the Arctic Circle, and they built Fort Selkirk some six hundred miles upstream at the point where it is joined by the sombre Pelly, and they did not know that both forts were on the same watercourse. Nor did they know, at the time, that their Union Jack, flying over Fort Yukon, was deep in foreign territory; the land was remote, the boundaries hazy, and the geography uncertain.

But they knew of the gold and did nothing. Robert Campbell, one of the company’s most industrious explorers, found traces of it at Fort Selkirk, but the discovery intrigued him not at all. And sixteen years later another clerk, stationed at Fort Yukon, wrote laconically of gold in a letter home to Toronto: “On one small river not far from here the Rev. McDonald saw so much gold that he could have gathered it with a spoon.” But Archdeacon McDonald was intent only on translating prayerbooks for the Crooked-Eye Indians, and as for the Hudson’s Bay clerk, he had “often wished to go but can never find the time.”