Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (51 page)

Irving handled his steamer as if she were a spirited mare and he an accomplished rider. Nothing appeared to give him greater pleasure than a charge through the waters at some object. On the return trip from Dawson he nosed his boat out of the delta and into the Bering Sea, where he spotted the ocean steamer
Danube
, the ship which was to pick up his passengers and cargo. Irving promptly charged the
Danube
, but miscalculated his speed by a fraction with lamentable results. Unabashed, he puffed on to St. Michael, where, to keep his hand in, he charged the dock, almost reducing it to matchwood. This was the climax of his voyage. He quickly unloaded the
Yukoner
, for forty-five thousand dollars, to Pat Galvin, the man who bougnt steamboats the way others buy a suit of clothes.

Galvin was a one-time town marshal from Helena, Montana, who had run a hardware and tinsmith shop at Circle before the Klondike strike. Enriched by his Bonanza claim, he sought, like so many of his fellows, to form a corporation and become a financial titan – not so much for wealth as for fame. His new firm bore the proud title of “North British American Trading and Transportation Company, Pat Galvin president.” Galvin insisted that his name, and his alone, stand above the doors of all the trading posts and appear on all merchandise and canned goods which he proposed to import into the Yukon and sell at various points along the river.

Galvin’s reputation for free-handed spending had preceded him, and the crew of the
Yukoner
awaited their new employer with pleasure and anticipation. It was said that he was good for two thousand dollars a night in Dawson, and on entering a bar it was his custom to treat everybody in the house.

“Come on, boys,” Galvin would shout, “open up the best you have, the drinks are on me!” and, in case he might have overlooked anybody in the street, he would send the bartender outside to drag in any passers-by. He was a commanding figure, dressed entirely in black, slender and wiry, with eyes that gleamed from a pale Irish face. A crowd usually followed him, for his generosity was legend; on a whim, on occasion, he distributed as much as a thousand dollars’ worth of nuggets at a time.

He did not disappoint the
Yukoner’s
crew. As soon as he bought the steamer he lined them all up on deck and gave each man a twenty-dollar goldpiece. This was all the cash he had, but he set out blithely upriver towards Dawson without further funds to purchase fuel or hire hands. The boat had steamed only a few miles when the boiler exploded, almost wrecking a large crate of plate glass which Galvin had planned to install, at exorbitant expense, in the show windows of his establishment in Dawson. Long before the journey was completed, the ship froze in, and did not reach Dawson until 1899. By this time matters had deteriorated to the point where she became the scene of the only mutiny on the Yukon River, but Galvin himself had long since departed for Dawson by dog-team. At the peak of the stampede he was offered seven million dollars for his holding. He turned it down. In another year he was bankrupt.

Other Eldorado kings were following Galvin’s example and becoming, if only briefly, shipping magnates. Big Alex McDonald bought the
W. K. Merwyn
, the same stern-wheeler which had been part of the
Eliza Anderson’s
strange entourage. He also acquired the
W. S. Stratton
, named for the eccentric Black Hills mining millionaire who had had ambitions to invest some of his rapidly diminishing wealth in the Klondike. Nels Peterson, who had grown rich from one of the early bench claims, formed the “Flyer” line with two spanking new steamboats, the
Eldorado
and the
Bonanza King
. The original name of the
Eldorado
was
Philip B. Low
, but she sank so many times that the wags were referring to her as the
“Fill Up Below”
and so the name was changed. Peterson offered a free ticket from Dawson to Seattle to the first person to spot either boat when the two arrived on their maiden voyage from St. Michael in the fall of ’98. Hundreds who had no other way of quitting the country climbed the Midnight Dome above the town, straining for a sight of steamboat smoke. One ingenious pair won handily by arranging a system of wig-wag signals from the mountaintop to the main street. Dozens risked breaking their necks in a pell-mell race down the hillsides when the
Bonanza King
at last appeared, only to find they had been outwitted. But Peterson’s showmanship was better than his financial acumen: he sank ninety thousand dollars in the two ships, which in the end helped to ruin him.

By the end of August, fifty-six steamboats had dumped seventy-four hundred tons of freight – everything from fancy porcelain chamber pots to flagons of Napoleon brandy – on the new docks. Dawson’s isolation was at an end; it was no longer a beans-and-bacon town. Indeed, as early as July 1 the imported San Francisco chef who presided at the Regina Café had produced the following Dominion Day menu:

Consommé à la jardinière
Rock Point oysters
Piccalilli
Lobster Newburg
Chicken salad en mayonnaise
Broiled moose chops aux champignons
Cold tongue
Roast beef
Boiled ham
Bengal Club chutney
Saratoga chips
Cakes and jellies
Pears and peaches
Cheese
Coffee

The Regina Hotel, which was under construction all summer and fall, was slated, in the words of the
Klondike Nugget
, to “more than rival more pretentious caravanserais in much more metropolitan cities,” for its floors were covered with Brussels carpets and its woodwork with gold-leaf trimming, and it rose four stories, the tallest building in Dawson.

Its chief rival was the equally elegant Fairview, which Belinda Mulroney was constructing on Front Street. She intended it to be the finest and best-appointed hostelry in town: it was to have twenty-two steam-heated rooms, a side entrance for ladies, electric lights (with power supplied by a yacht anchored in the river), and Turkish baths. The tables were spread with linen, sterling silver, and bone china. In the lobby an orchestra played chamber music. And the bar was staffed by young American doctors and dentists who, unable to get a licence to practise on British soil, quickly learned to mix drinks instead of medicines.

Although it opened in July, more than a year was required to put the finishing touches on the Fairview. All of its furnishings – from cut-glass chandeliers to brass bedsteads – were packed in over the White Pass, and the efficient Belinda, who left very little to others, went personally to Skagway to supervise the operation. She arrived in the nick of time: Joe Brooks, the packer, had moved her outfit only two miles up the trail and then dumped it when he received a better offer to transport a cargo of whiskey for Bill McPhee. In a black rage, Belinda headed for the Skagway wharves and recruited a gang of destitute men. She incited them to fight among themselves until they found out who was the toughest, and he was elected foreman. This done, she accompanied the gang up the trail to take over from Brooks. Her men beat up Brooks’s foreman, imprisoned him in a tent, set a guard on it, dumped McPhee’s whiskey onto the side of the trail, loaded Belinda’s hotel equipment on Brooks’s mules, and started over the pass with Belinda herself, mounted on Brooks’s own pinto pony, triumphantly riding at their head. In this manner Belinda convoyed the entire shipment safely over the mountains and down the Yukon on fifteen scows, and the Fairview stood complete, a sumptuous hostelry with only one real flaw: the interior walls were made of canvas over which wallpaper had been pasted, so that the slightest whisper anywhere in the building could be heard by every guest.

The Fairview made money. In its first twenty-four hours of operation the bar took in six thousand dollars. The dining-room was equally lucrative. Thomas Cunningham, purser of the
Yukoner
, once invited Belinda to have breakfast with him at the hotel. She accepted demurely, and the bill, when it was totted up, came to sixty dollars. This staggered Cunningham a little.

“Think of a woman ordering champagne for breakfast!” he exclaimed later. “It is not done.”

Over the trails and up the river the cargo poured into Dawson. Jack Smith paced the riverbank that June, impatiently awaiting the ten-foot mirrors, the velvet carpets, the oil paintings, and the ten thousand dollars’ worth of fixtures which his partner, Swiftwater Bill Gates, was supposed to be bringing into town along with a bevy of dance-hall beauties. He had cause for concern: disquieting rumours of Swiftwater Bill’s exploits in San Francisco had already reached his ears.

When Swiftwater arrived in San Francisco he rented a suite of rooms in the Baldwin Hotel, and in the Klondike manner began distributing gold dust to one and all. He tipped the bellboys to walk about the lobby and point him out to other hotel guests as “The King of the Klondike,” and when the newspaper notices showed signs of diminishing he paid an itinerant journalist one hundred dollars to publish a lurid account of his own drowning. In his new Prince Albert coat, with diamond cuff-links and diamond stickpin, he presented a glittering façade to the world, but his diminutive five-and-a-half-foot figure and his scraggly moustache subtracted from the dignity borrowed from his clothes. Gussie Lamore had preceded him to the coast with a promise of marriage, as a result of the famous incident with the eggs, but in San Francisco she refused to go through with the bargain, possibly because she was already married and had a three-year-old child. Swiftwater, undismayed, married her sister Grace, bought her a fifteen-thousand-dollar house in Oakland, and, while it was being renovated to suit her tastes, installed her in the bridal chamber of the Baldwin. Alas for Swiftwater Bill, the honeymoon was short-lived. After three weeks Grace threw him over, and he emerged from their new home carrying seven thousand dollars’ worth of wedding presents wrapped in a blanket. It was, however, almost impossible to discourage him. A few days later he was earnestly wooing the youngest Lamore sister, Nellie.

Swiftwater by this time was running perilously short of funds and had as yet made no purchases for the Monte Carlo. This did not worry him particularly, since – while lacking many qualities, including horse sense – he was never wanting in the ability to dig up finances at short notice. He was a born prospector who for all of his long life was always able to spot a likely piece of ground – and, when no ground was available, to spot a likely-looking sucker. In the course of time his eye fell on a Dr. Wolf who had twenty thousand dollars to invest. Swiftwater talked so swiftly and glibly that he was able to pre-empt all of it. In return he gave the gullible Wolf a ninety-day note promising to pay the astonishing interest rate of one hundred per cent.

Wolf’s imagination was so fired by Swiftwater’s tale of fortunes to be gleaned from Klondike stampeders that he decided to become a stampeder himself, forgetting perhaps that Swiftwater had already gleaned his fortune. The two laid plans to organize a trading and transportation company and set off at once for Seattle, where the doctor plunged into the business end of the matter while Swiftwater paraded up and down the streets with the girls whom he had hired for the Monte Carlo. He lived sumptuously at the Rainier-Grand, one of the city’s leading hotels, ordering gallon upon gallon of champagne, not to drink (for he was a teetotaller) but to bathe in. He splashed about in the effervescent tub for the benefit of the press, announcing that a bath was a rare thing in the Yukon. When he took his leave, the bill for damages alone came to fifteen hundred dollars.

None of these shenanigans was calculated to soothe the rapidly fraying nerves of Dr. Wolf. Slowly it began to dawn upon him that his new partner was not the solid businessman he had thought. By the time the expedition arrived at Lake Bennett, he was thoroughly alarmed and, abandoning Swiftwater to his own sybaritic devices, sped on ahead by dog-sled, travelling light in order to reach Dawson and investigate his partner’s background before the main rush. The enthusiastic accounts he received of Swiftwater’s escapades glowed with local colour but only served to confirm the doctor’s worst fears. He was waiting impatiently on the riverbank beside Jack Smith when Swiftwater arrived at last in a Peterborough canoe with two scow-loads of girls and whiskey in its wake. Swiftwater himself sat in the prow of the canoe, a silk topper cocked on his head, his Prince Albert coat draped across his shoulders, his arms extended in welcome to the crowd that stood on the banks to greet him. Directly behind him a girl was perched on a case of whiskey, and on the scows other girls waved prettily and shouted saucy greetings to the onlookers. Swiftwater stepped ashore in triumph and into the arms of his enraged partner.

“You’ve got just exactly three hours to pay back the twenty thousand,” Wolf told him. “To hell with the interest!”

“I’ll have it,” Swiftwater gasped.

“Get started!” Wolf rapped back.

Swiftwater raised the money, and Wolf took the next boat Outside, declaring he had had all he wanted of the Klondike. Jack Smith lost no time in attaching twelve thousand dollars of Swiftwater’s mining profit at the bank and Swiftwater’s share of the dance hall to boot. With scarcely an instant’s hesitation, Swiftwater plunged into a new scheme. He announced the formation of the British North American Trading and Exploration Company and left directly for London to raise the capital for it. He was not a man whose spirits were easily dampened.

All these proceedings were watched curiously and with a certain genteel detachment by two wealthy ladies who appeared briefly upon the scene in July. These were the first two bona fide tourists to reach Dawson, and with their advent the community might be said to have arrived. One was Mrs. Mary E. Hitchcock, the widow of a U.S. admiral; her companion was Miss Edith Van Buren, the niece of the former U.S. President. It was the habit of this pair to visit various watering-places and points of interest each summer, and this particular summer, rather than Paris, Bath, or Shanghai, they had chosen Dawson City, for it seemed the most interesting place to go. Of all the thousands who poured into the Klondike that season it is probable that these two were the only ones who came merely as sightseers.