Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (48 page)

Chapter Ten

1
“Cheechako!”

2
Carnival summer

3
Champagne for breakfast

4
Remember the Sabbath …

5
Graft and the
Nugget

1

“Cheechako!”

Dawson was waiting – for what it did not quite know.

From those few dog-drivers who had pierced the winter wall of isolation, the townspeople had heard tantalizing tales of an army of gold-seekers camped on the upper lakes. Everyone sensed that the stampede was reaching some sort of climax; none realized the dimensions of the human torrent.

The spring was unseasonably hot. The sun shone eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, and in the afternoons the temperature rose to one hundred and ten degrees. The snow vanished from the mountains at an alarming rate, and a dense sub-tropical growth sprang up along the hillsides. Through the leafy woods the sound of gurgling water came rippling. Frothing little streams bubbled where no streams had been visible before; small cataracts tumbled from the cliff tops; and far back in the mountains the tributary creeks broke their fetters and ran black between ragged lines of shore ice. On Bonanza and Eldorado, sweating men dammed the unleashed waters and guided them into flumes and sluiceboxes, and began to shovel the paydirt from the winter’s dump into the foaming current. As the water did its work and the dross gravel and mud was swept off down the valley, the greenish glitter of fine gold could be seen caught in the cross-riffles at the bottom of the long, slender boxes.

By May, nature was at work filling up the great Yukon River as if with a thousand pumps. Dark spots appeared on its still frozen surface. And then, on May 6, the great ice mass was gradually forced upward at the centre by hydraulic pressure until it resembled the crown of a road. The water drained off the middle of the slushy surface to the shorelines, where it flowed in channels above the ice. Now the Indians recalled that these flats had been flooded one spring twenty years before, and that they had paddled their canoes across the very spot where the new dance halls were being erected. Everyone saw by this time that Dawson had been built in the wrong place; yet how could it have been built elsewhere? After all, it was built where the gold was.

Constantine came up from Fortymile and walked the riverbank all night, watching the ice rising stealthily, his brow creased with worry. Just as Steele felt himself the protector of the stampeders, so Constantine, in an inexplicable way, felt himself the guardian of the gold camp. Already a wave of panic was sweeping over the community; a bad flood could sweep the city from its precarious position and send horses, tents, dogs, and men hurtling down the ice-choked river.

The water rose to within two feet of the top of the bank, so that Constantine could dip the toe of his polished boot into it. Then, on May 8 at four a.m., there came a crackling roar; the ice, weakened by the shore connection, was forced into motion at the centre by the current beneath. It split asunder, and slowly and smoothly the entire mass started on its long journey towards the Bering Sea. Faster and faster the ice seemed to move until jagged lines like glacial crevasses appeared in the surface. The swift current, catching the ice masses, whirled them about so that they ground into each other; and the black water boiled up from below, spurting in dark fountains between the heaving blocks.

The river was a hissing mass of ice. In the narrow curves the grime-encrusted cakes were squeezed out of the channel and flung high onto the shore. Scenes of natural carnage followed as the banks along Front Street were piled high with mounds of broken ice and snow, covered in muck and gravel, some of the individual pieces higher than a man. As the townspeople watched in horror and fascination, the river crept upward towards the bank.

There was no time for panic, for even as the water started to spill into the city the cry
“Cheechako!”
went ringing through the hills. The first boat had already arrived, amid the ice blocks still running in the river. With the water lapping at their boots, several hundreds trotted along the bank, following the craft for about a mile before it could be beached. There were five men with dogs and sleds aboard; but, as it turned out, they were from the Stewart River country a scant hundred miles away, and had no news at all. Disappointed, the crowd melted away.

A second cry went up. In between the ice cakes slid a green Peterborough canoe, and again the whole town rallied to the waterfront. The new arrivals were also old-timers, but they had actually been at Bennett earlier that winter. They had dragged their canoe on sleds down the frozen Yukon until the ice broke, then floated down with it, and now for the expectant throng on the riverbank they painted a verbal picture of thousands of men camped as close to Dawson as Lake Laberge, waiting for the ice to break and hoping to steal a march on the main body of stampeders.

A few more boats arrived, and then a lull followed. The ice had jammed at the mouth of the Pelly, stopping all movement.

All during the month of May, while the water rose slowly upon the town, boats in twos and threes slipped in from various wintering-points between Bennett and Dawson. But, as everybody knew, the main onrush was yet to come. Arriving from his camp on the upper Yukon, the new Commissioner of the Yukon, J. M. Walsh, told the excited town that the police at Tagish had already checked three thousand boats, and more were pouring through every hour.

A few hardy souls bent on winning the race to the Klondike had sledded their outfits down the river before the break-up. Few of these intended to stake claims; they brought eggs, which were worth as much as gold. A Seattle entrepreneur who reached Dawson City with two hundred dozen eggs disposed of them all in less than an hour for thirty-six hundred dollars. He had neglected to include a newspaper, which would have increased his profits, but he consented to give verbal news: war had been declared on Spain, he said, and the cruiser
New York
had reduced the fortifications of Havana to rubble within three hours. A second arrival, who also offered eggs, denied this story flatly: he insisted the Spaniards were winning the war. He, too, sold his eggs, but the price had already dropped to fourteen dollars a dozen. Within a week so many boats had tied up loaded with eggs that the price was reduced to three dollars. But when one man drifted in with an ancient newspaper soaked in bacon grease he was able to sell it for fifteen.

More boats trickled in. The man with the boots arrived and sold all fifteen hundred pairs at fifteen dollars a pair, which was twice what he paid for them in Montreal. The man with the load of tinned milk was paid a dollar a tin for it. Another made a clear profit of five thousand dollars on women’s hats and dresses. The man who had struggled over the Chilkoot with a crate of live chickens set them up in a box at the police barracks, and a crowd gathered to watch the first egg laid that year in Dawson. It sold for five dollars before the hen had finished cackling. The man who dragged a grindstone over the pass set to work sharpening miners’ picks for an ounce of gold per pick. The newsboy who lugged a pack of papers across the mountains was able to return home, his passage paid and two hundred and fifty dollars in his wallet. The man who brought in the scow-load of kittens confounded the scoffers by getting an ounce of gold per kitten from lonely miners craving the companionship of a pet. But Frank Cushing of Buffalo, who had planned to sell cheap mosquito lotion at ten dollars a bottle, arrived empty-handed. He had tested a sample on himself while floating down the Yukon; it had certainly discouraged the mosquitoes, but had raised such painful skin blisters that he had thrown the entire consignment of ten thousand bottles into the boiling river.

Gene Allen, the gimlet-eyed newspaper editor, arrived in town over the ice, stubbornly determined to produce his paper ahead of his rivals. Having no printing-press, he launched it as a bulletin. The
Klondike Nugget
appeared on May 27, typed on a machine borrowed from the correspondent of
The New York Times
. Thus, though the
Midnight Sun
was to be the first to get its printing-press into operation, Allen was always able to say that he had launched the first newspaper in the Klondike. Not far away, in a log shack with a canvas roof, E. A. Hegg opened a studio and continued his remarkable photographic record of the stampede.

The day after the
Nugget
was published, most of Dawson’s business section found itself under five feet of water, with the cabins near the river already afloat and the townspeople fleeing into the hills. It was impossible to move about except by boat, and passengers were being rowed along Front Street at fifty cents a head, the main point of attraction being the
Nugget’s
bulletin board, now in the centre of a muddy, swirling channel. The town, however, did not float away. The water subsided on June 5, leaving behind an ocean of mud so deep that horses could not move in the main street.

A calm of expectancy hung over the community as Dawson waited for the human flood to engulf it. A day passed; two days, and no sign yet of the great flotilla from Lake Bennett.

Then, suddenly, on June 8, the river came alive with boats. They poured in day and night like a parade, without a break, the men tumbling from them as soon as they touched shore and spraying out into the mud-filled streets. Soon there was no space along the shoreline, and newer arrivals had to tie their boats to other boats and leap from craft to craft to reach the bank, until the boats were six deep for nearly two miles, and Dawson’s waterfront resembled a Cantonese seaport.

On the same day that the first wave of small boats struck Dawson, the first steamboat arrived from the opposite direction. She had been spotted from the hilltops, a flyspeck on the grey water. Across the town, at four in the morning, rang the long-awaited cry: “Steeeeam-boat!” and thousands, roused from their beds, raced to the waterfront in the early sunshine to greet the vessel. Bets were laid as to whether she would turn out to be the
Bella
or the
Weare
, the last boats out of town the previous fall. To the surprise of all, she was the diminutive
May West
.

By the time the little boat puffed into the bank, there were five thousand men and women crowded together to welcome her with cheers and rifle-fire.

“Has she whiskey aboard?” came the cry. She had indeed: sixteen barrels. It went on sale at once in the bars at a dollar a drink.

Five days later the first steamboat to navigate the upper Yukon chugged in: the tiny little
Bellingham
, scarcely big enough to bear the title, only eight feet wide and thirty-five feet long, packed piecemeal over the mountains. Captain Goddard’s larger steamer was ten days behind her. His trip was so successful, establishing as it did a steamboat link between the gold-fields and the Pacific coast, that the merchants of Skagway tendered him a civic banquet on his return and carried him through the streets on their shoulders.

Meanwhile, a late edition of the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer
had been brought in, and a struggle ensued for its ownership. The two local papers bid for it, but a miner from Hunker Creek secured it for fifty dollars. He paid “Judge” John F. Miller, a lawyer who later became mayor of Seattle and a U.S. congressman, to read it aloud in the Pioneers’ Hall. A crowd followed Miller down the street as he tantalized them with snatches from the headlines. To hear the news of Dewey’s victory at Manila and the annihilation of the Spanish fleet, hundreds cheerfully paid a dollar each; the affair was so profitable that it was repeated the following day.

And still the boats kept coming. H. L. Miller floated into town with his cow on June 29 and achieved his ambition to be the first man to sell fresh milk in the Klondike at thirty dollars a gallon. Forever afterward he bore the nickname of “Cow” Miller. Tom Chisholm, the expansive and florid owner of the Aurora Saloon, managed to get some of the milk to sell over his bar at five dollars a mugful, just five times the price of whiskey.

Day after day for more than a month the international parade of boats continued. They brought hay and horses, goats and cattle, kittens and mastiffs, roosters and oxen. They brought sundowners, shantymen, sodbusters and shellbacks, buckaroos and bluenoses,
vaqueros
and
maquereaus
, creoles and métis, Gaels, Kanakas, Afrikaners, and Suvanese. They brought wife-beaters, lady-killers, cuckolded husbands, disbarred lawyers, dance-hall beauties, escaped convicts, remittance men, card-sharps,
Hausfraus
, Salvation Army lasses, ex-buffalo-hunters, scullions, surgeons, ecclesiastics, gun-fighters, sob sisters, soldiers of fortune, and Oxford dons. They brought men seeking gold and men seeking adventure and men seeking power. But more than anything they brought men seeking escape – escape from a nagging wife, or an overpowering mother-in-law, or a bill-collector, or a deflowered virgin, or, perhaps, simple escape from the drabness of the un-gay nineties.

Each man, whoever he was, brought along his tent, long since worn ragged by the elements, and these sprouted everywhere, crowding along the black muck of the waterfront, overflowing across the swamp, spilling into Lousetown on the south side of the Klondike or onto the shoreline opposite Dawson on the west side of the Yukon. They blossomed out on the slopes and hilltops and benches that overlooked the town, and they straggled by the hundreds along the trails that led to the gold creeks. From the top of the Midnight Dome, Dawson that spring seemed to be a field of billowing white, like a vast orchard in bloom.

Half a dozen canvas cities – Bennett, Lindemann, Sheep Camp, Dyea, Tagish, and Teslin – had simply been packed up and transferred to Dawson, and the same feverish scenes which had marked each one were here re-enacted on a grander scale. Sawmills screeched incessantly; hammers and saws pounded and rasped through the bright night; planks, rough timber, ladders, and sawhorses encumbered the thoroughfares; mountains of logs and piles of freshly sawed lumber grew everywhere. Dawson was a city of sawdust and stumps and the skeletons of fast-rising buildings, its main street a river of mud through which horses, whipped on by clamouring men, floundered and kicked. In between these threshing beasts moved a sluggish stream of humanity. They trudged up to their calves in the slime, or they negotiated the duck-boards that were thrown across the black morass, or they shambled in a steady flow along the high boardwalk that was mounted on one side of the street.