Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (52 page)

They had brought with them what a fellow traveller described as “the strangest agglomeration of cargo that ever women and wit devised.” It included two Great Danes, an ice-cream freezer, a parrot and several canaries, two cages full of live pigeons, a gramophone, a hundred-pound Criterion music box, a coal-oil stove, a zither, a portable bowling-alley, a primitive motion-picture projector, a mandolin, several air mattresses and hammocks, and box after box of rare foods:
pâté
and truffles, stuffed olives and oysters. This vast cargo was transported some five thousand miles by water to the accompaniment of the tart tongue and hot temper of Mrs. Hitchcock, the buxom matron who was in charge of the expedition and who complained incessantly about the freight charges on the steamboat that brought them from St. Michael. She had not been used to this when crossing the Atlantic.

The most singular item was an enormous marquee tent which covered twenty-eight hundred square feet and was the largest ever brought into the Yukon Territory. There was no space for it in the main town, so the ladies had it raised on the bank on the far side of the Yukon River, where it dominated the landscape. It was so cavernous that they soon found it expedient to pitch another, smaller tent in one corner in order to keep warm at night.

Soon this extraordinary couple was to be seen walking the duck-boards of Dawson in their tailored suits, their starched collars, their boater hats, and their silk ties. Occasionally they affected a more picturesque garb – large sombreros, blue serge knickers, rubber boots, striped jersey sweaters, and heavy cartridge belts to which were strapped impossibly big revolvers.

In their gargantuan marquee the two ladies held court. They searched about the town for the right people and quickly sensed that the leader of Dawson’s four hundred was Big Alex McDonald. He became guest of honour at intimate little dinners within the great tent. The menu included anchovies, mock-turtle soup, roast moose, escalloped tomatoes, asparagus salad with French dressing, peach ice cream, chocolate cake, and French drip coffee. Indeed, the bounty of the ladies’ board made the Regina Café seem like a one-arm joint. Both women were large of girth and, having heard tales of the Klondike’s starvation winter, had no intention of going hungry. Their memoirs, while somewhat vague on the specifics of the gold rush, are enlivened with detailed accounts of what they consumed daily, down to the last crisp potato ball.

Here on this frozen strip of riverbank they observed the niceties of Philadelphia and Washington. One English physician who had known Miss Van Buren’s father in Yokohama expressed a desire to call, but sent his card saying that he would be unable to do since he could not procure a starched shirt. She graciously accepted his excuse, waived all formality, and received him anyway in his serge suit.

The Salvation Army, meanwhile, had dispatched a troupe to Dawson, and these bonneted servants of the Lord, covetously eyeing the marquee, summoned up courage to ask the ladies if they might use it for their Sunday service. The ladies were happy to oblige. The following Sabbath, as the voices were raised in prayer, it was noticed that the pigeons had escaped from their cages and were fluttering above the heads of the uneasy congregation. One of them finally perched on the music box, which mechanically responded with “Nearer My God to Thee” and the entire assemblage rose and repeated the grand old hymn, which they had already sung.

Mrs. Hitchcock and Miss Van Buren stayed out the summer and then booked passage upriver on the tiny little steamer
Flora
. They were shocked by the primitive stateroom to which they were assigned. There was only a one-foot space to turn around in between the double bunks and the wall and it was quite impracticable to undress save for the removal of an overcoat or so. Nor were there any washing facilities except for a bucket with a rope attached to it which one had to lower over the side and into the muddy river. As the boat departed the two outraged women could be heard complaining shrilly about these arrangements. It was not at all what they had been used to, really.

4

Remember the
ïabbath …

Dawson has occasionally been depicted in song and story as a lawless and gun-happy town. Indeed, a U.S. marshal, Frank M. Canton, sent up to Circle City by his government at a late date to keep the peace, described Dawson in his memoirs as a “wild, picturesque, lawless mining camp. The like had never been known, never would be seen again. It was a picture of blood and glittering gold-dust, starvation and death.… If a man could not get the woman he wanted, the man who did get her had to fight for her life.”

Canton knew lawlessness when he saw it, for he was a former western sheriff, a one-time range detective, and one of the leading figures in the Johnson County War of 1892, when Wyoming cattlemen mounted an army against the encroaching homesteaders. But his assessment of Dawson is sheer fiction – the embellishment, no doubt, of his ghost writer, Edward Everett Dale. The truth is that, thanks to the presence of the Mounted Police, not a single murder took place in Dawson City in 1898, and very little major theft. It was possible to leave one’s cabin or tent wide open, go off on a six-week trip, and return to find all possessions intact. James Dalziel, a New Zealander, used to go away for a month at a time and leave his cabin unlocked with his best suit hanging on the wall for all to see. In the vest pocket was a solid-gold watch in a solid-gold case with a massive gold chain whose every link was stamped
18k
. It was never touched.

The nearest thing to mayhem occurred when Coatless Curly Munro had a quarrel with his wife. Both reached for revolvers which they kept under their pillows, then took one look at each other and fled the premises by different doors. (Coatless Curly was a man who believed in such melodramatic gestures. It was his habit never to wear an outer jacket, but to go about in vest and shirt-sleeves even in the coldest weather. It was generally conceded, however, that he wore three suits of heavy underwear beneath his outer clothing.)

Side arms were forbidden in Dawson. No man could carry a revolver on the streets without a licence, and few licences were issued. There is the story of the one-time Western badman from Dodge City who was ejected from a saloon by a Mountie constable for talking too loudly. He left like a lamb. The Mountie discovered that he was carrying a gun and asked him to hand it over. “No man yet has taken a gun away from me,” the badman snarled in the best tradition. “Well, I’m taking it,” the policeman said mildly, and did so without a murmur from his opponent.

As one resident wrote, “You can call the toughest gambler in town anything you wish, or slap him on the wrist and all he can do is sue you for slander or have you arrested for assault. But he will do nothing for himself. If you get into trouble call a policeman.… The old American stall of self-defense just doesn’t go.”

If there had been a Dan McGrew in Dawson, and a Malemute Saloon, as Service’s fictional verse suggests, there could never have been a shooting because a Mountie would have been on the spot to confiscate the guns before the duel began. So many revolvers were confiscated in Dawson in 1898 that they were auctioned off by the police for as little as a dollar and purchased as souvenirs to keep on the mantelpiece. The chief crimes that season included such heinous offences as non-payment of wages, dog-stealing, operating unsanitary premises, fraud, unlawfully practising medicine, disturbing the peace, deserting employment, and that vicious crime “using vile language.” Most of the six hundred and fifty arrests made in the Yukon in 1898 were for misdemeanours of that order. One hundred and fifty were for more serious offences, but of these, more than half were concerned with prostitution. No other community on such a remote frontier could boast a similar record.

By fall, Sam Steele was in command not only of Dawson but also of all of the Yukon and British Columbia. Constantine relinquished his post on June 24 and proceeded Outside to a new assignment. When he left town the old-timers presented him with a silver plate containing two thousand dollars’ worth of selected nuggets. This was all the gold he took from the Klondike, but he left with the lasting respect of the community.

To newcomers and old-timers alike, the police often seemed superhuman. There was something miraculous about the ability of Inspector W. H. Scarth, Constantine’s deputy in charge of the Dawson barracks, to work cheerfully in below-zero weather without ever wearing gloves or mitts – and without ever seeming to freeze a finger. Scarth had been the hero of a disconcerting mishap on the steamer that brought him north in 1897, and all of Dawson knew the story. A rope against which the policeman was leaning gave way, and, toppling head-first into the hold of the
City of Topeka
, he landed upside-down in a barrel. In spite of this, he emerged smiling, his forage cap still in place and his ever-present monocle screwed as firmly as ever into his eye-socket.

When Steele arrived on the heels of the main rush, his reputation had come ahead of him, and he proceeded to rule Dawson with the firm hand he had displayed on mountains, lakes, and river. Fines were stiff, sentences suffer. For all crimes Steele imposed one of two main punishments. A culprit was either given a “blue ticket” to leave town, or he was sentenced to hard labour on the government woodpile. The blue ticket was considered a serious penalty by gamblers and saloon-keepers, since it meant they could no longer ply a lucrative trade on Front Street. The woodpile kept more than fifty prisoners busy at all times, for the police and government offices alone used enough fuel to make a pile two miles long and four feet square, and all of it had to be sawed into stove lengths by prisoners who worked from morning until night, winter and summer. In July, for instance, a man convicted of cheating at cards was sentenced to three months on the woodpile; in October a man who had been given a blue ticket and had not left town fast enough was sentenced to six months. It was back-breaking work; nobody wanted it.

One American gambler, so the story goes, who came up before Steele was contemptuous when the policeman fined him fifty dollars.

“Fifty dollars – is that all? I’ve got that in my vest pocket,” he said.

Whereupon the superintendent added: “…    and sixty days on the woodpile. Have you got that in your vest pocket?”

Steele allowed the saloons and the gambling-halls, the dance pavilions and the prostitutes’ cribs on Paradise Alley behind Front Street to run wide open; but he would not countenance disorderly conduct, obscenity, or cheating. Shortly after his arrival he called a meeting of saloon-keepers and told them that if he received any complaints of unfair gambling he would close them up. As a result, disgruntled players were always paid off without argument, ejected promptly from the premises, and not allowed to return.

He did not interfere with the liquor traffic – one hundred and twenty thousand gallons were imported into Dawson during the ’98 season – but he would not allow spirits to be sold to minors, nor would he countenance the employment of children in the saloons. If a man made a remark that he judged to be either obscene or disloyal during a theatrical performance, the theatre was fined, and if such remarks continued, the theatre faced closure. When Freda Maloof, a Greek girl billed as “The Turkish Whirlwind Danseuse,” tried to repeat the hootchie-kootchie dance with which Little Egypt had startled the patrons of the Columbian Exposition, Steele had it stopped at once. There is evidence, however, that he used these corrective measures sparingly in order to keep matters from going too far. Years after the incident two old-timers, Bert Parker and a lawyer named De Journel, met on a Yukon riverboat and recalled old times. Parker described the belly dance that was too hot for Dawson. De Journel stared out into the river, his eyes glazing.

“Do you remember it?” Parker prodded.

“No,” said De Journel softly, “I don’t. But I certainly would have liked to see that dance. It must have been some dance if they wouldn’t let her do it in those days.” He paused for a moment, then turned to his companion: “I myself saw Captain Harper of the North West Mounted Police bet a hundred dollars that he could strip off naked, stand on his head on the stage of the Monte Carlo Theater, and eat a pound of raw beefsteak off the floor, and he won the bet.” De Journel resumed his inspection of the Yukon River and was silent again. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “it must have been some dance if they wouldn’t let her do it in Dawson!”

Even more remarkable to the free-wheeling Americans who formed the majority of the population was the Dawson Sunday. On the Sabbath the town was dead. “On Sundays there is quiet,” one man wrote home, “and the old familiar strains of ancient hymns steal through the clear northern air.”

Saloons and dance halls, theatres and business houses were shut tight one minute before midnight on Saturday. At two minutes before twelve the lookout at the faro table would take his watch from his pocket and call out: “The last turn, boys!” A rush would follow as the players placed one last bet. At the next table the roulette ball gave a final click; in the saloon the bartender was already stacking the chairs. Without a word the crowd silently moved out into the street, bidding the lone Mountie a quiet good-night. The lights, at Steele’s insistence, stayed burning so that the policeman on the beat could make sure the premises were empty until two a.m. on Monday, when they were allowed to reopen.

There were many ingenious attempts to circumnavigate these blue laws. Some of the theatre-owners instituted what they called “sacred concerts,” at which a silver collection was taken. The
pièce de résistance
was a series of “living pictures” of various religious scenes, chosen with the eye of a De Mille for their voluptuous quality. The climax of these tableaux was reached on a certain Sabbath eve when the curtains parted to reveal Caprice, the dance-hall queen, plump and blonde, attired only in pink tights and slippers and clinging suggestively to an enormous cross.