Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (53 page)

Another device, during the summer months, was the Sunday excursion. As the American border was less than fifty miles away, a boatload of holidayers could easily be transported beyond the reach of the Mounted Police to a Promised Land where wine flowed like water and joy reigned supreme. On one memorable occasion some three hundred and sixty-eight people, largely gamblers, dance-hall girls, and theatrical men, clambered aboard the
Bonanza King
while another hundred embarked on the
Tyrrell
. One boat ran out of fuel and the other developed engine trouble, so that the two pleasure ships drifted helplessly downstream into the heart of Alaska until the liquor was consumed and the novelty of the occasion began to pall. Monday had come and gone meanwhile, but Dawson remained a dead town, the liveliest members of its population taken from it, and the theatres, dance halls, saloons, and gambling-houses closed for lack of staff.

When the steamers finally limped back upstream and hove into sight, the town rushed
en masse
to the wharf to welcome the prodigals. One old-timer, years later, likened the scene to Lindbergh’s reception in New York. With the steamers’ whistles blowing wide open and every dog in town howling in chorus and several thousand people cheering, the girls in their rumpled dresses walked unsteadily down the gangplank and the community once more returned to normal.

But the Sunday laws were never relaxed. No work of any kind was allowed on the Lord’s Day. One man was arrested for fishing on the Sabbath, another for sawing his own wood, and in August, 1898, the
Nugget
noted that two men were each fined two dollars and three dollars costs simply for examining their fishing-nets on a Sunday. One Lord’s Day event had a touch of high comedy to it: a race was arranged between two famous dog-teams and was organized for a Sunday so that the sporting fraternity could attend. The scene along the Klondike valley road was a gaudy one: in the glittering spring sunlight scores of dance-hall girls and actresses, their hair piled high in the pompadour style of the day, and dressed in their finest beribboned silks with enormous leg-of-mutton sleeves, lined the course arm in arm with saloon-keepers and gamblers in hard hats, stiff collars, and diamond studs. Cheers rang out as the two teams came bolting down the hard-packed road – and then raced neck and neck into the arms of the waiting police, who arrested all and sundry on a charge of desecrating the Sabbath.

5

Graft and
the
Nugget

The honesty and finesse of the Mounted Police stood out sharply against a background of governmental ineptitude and petty graft. On the one hand there is a picture of four Mountie constables, each earning one dollar and twenty-five cents a day, escorting five tons of gold ingots safely out of the country. On the other, there are the scenes in the mining recorder’s office where bribery, inefficiency, and small corruptions were the order of the day. Here, changes on recorded claims could be made by running a pen through a name and date, or by scratching or erasing names, or – even more brazenly – by cutting them out and pasting in fresh slips of paper with new signatures. Here palms often had to be crossed before records could be inspected, and crowds waiting to record or transfer a piece of ground might wait in line for as long as three days unless they were admitted through what was known as “the five-dollar door” at the side, where speedy service was secured by a bribe.

Women were given the right of way into the recorder’s office, an apparent chivalry that led to many instances of collusion, especially through the agency of prostitutes or dance-hall girls. Many a man who staked a claim would arrive at the office only to be told that the ground was closed by government order, and then to discover that it had been given, later, to friends or accomplices of the recorder.

In the winter of 1898–99 the government refused to record any further fractional claims, reserving these for the Crown, but, nevertheless, favoured individuals and clerks in the offices seemed able to stake these fractions. Sometimes when a man successfully staked a claim he was informed that he could not officially record it until he had it surveyed for a fee of one hundred dollars. While the survey was in progress he might find that others, with obvious knowledge, had jumped the claim and recorded it themselves. As Lord Minto, the Governor General of Canada, who visited the Klondike after the turn of the century, wrote, “It has been said with some truth that to settle the boundaries and titles of a good claim requires two or three surveys and as many lawsuits.”

The natural discontent with the government arising from these outrages was magnified by the fact that the great majority of Klondikers were U.S. citizens living reluctantly under the British flag. Here was a unique situation: Dawson, one of Canada’s largest cities, was four-fifths American. The foreigners’ feelings were reflected in the editorial pages of the
Klondike Nugget
, an American-owned newspaper devoted to the interests of the U.S. section of the population. The
Nugget’s
editorials and news stories were scathing, and for more than a year the paper regularly attacked Canadian officialdom. It did not spare its own highly placed fellow citizens when the situation warranted, however, and in one celebrated instance incurred a libel suit from the U.S. consul himself.

The action sprang from a news report in the
Nugget’s
uninhibited pages which detailed the actions of the consul, a plump and fun-loving official named James McCook, at the hour of 3.30 on a certain April morning. McCook, the
Nugget
informed its readers, had entered Pete McDonald’s Phoenix dance hall with Diamond-Tooth Gertie, one of the reigning dance-hall queens, on his arm. He was bursting with patriotic fervour and announced that he would buy drinks for any true American. A large number of girls immediately identified themselves as true Americans and stepped up to the bar, but one prospector refused the offer, saying that
he
was a true Canadian. McCook roared that he would rectify the error and make the man an American, whereupon a brief and inconclusive fracas occurred. The consul turned from this interruption to the pleasanter task of distributing all his wealth. He dispensed money and nuggets to the girls at the bar, gave one of them his heavy gold watch, and then, in a burst of enthusiasm, turned his pockets inside out, crying: “Take the whole works!” Several scuffles followed, in which the consul was seen rolling about on the floor. He recovered himself, produced a small Stars and Stripes, pinned it to the seat of his pants, placed his hands on the bar, and, leaning over, requested Pete McDonald to give him a good square kick.

When McCook read this account of his actions in the
Nugget
, he sued the paper for five thousand dollars and Gene Allen and his brother George, the proprietors, for twenty thousand. The newsmen lined up such a phalanx of witnesses that the case was dismissed and the consul shortly afterward relieved of his post.

A more scurrilous paper than the
Nugget
was the short-lived
Gleaner
. Bert Parker, who sold it on the streets, described it as “one of the hottest sheets that was ever published in Canada, and I don’t except the Calgary
Eye-Opener”
The paper was published twice a week, and, more in the interests of circulation than public spirit, roasted the government unmercifully. “They blamed the government for everything, not excepting the weather,” Parker recalled. The
Gleaner
was finally closed down because of obscenity and its publisher given a blue ticket to leave town. But the hatred of Canadian policy did not die away. In one extreme case a lady physician named Luella Day, from New York City, became so incensed at the government that she actually came to believe that the local officials were trying to poison her under direct orders from Clifford Sifton, the Canadian Minister of the Interior. She held to this conviction to her dying day, wrote and published a book repeating the charge, and found an audience for it.

A good deal of the discontent sprang less from public graft than from public mismanagement. The gold office was staffed by men who had little experience of a stampede and who could not handle the enormous demands made upon them. Pandemonium reigned in the government offices, which in the summer of ’98 were snowed under by one hundred thousand official documents. There was not a duplicate copy of any of these, for paper had been so short that some records had to be kept on pieces of wood. The government staff lived in dread of a fire, which would have produced utter chaos, as every record of every mining transaction would have been irretrievably lost. All that season the queues of people trying to record claims, or purchase miner’s licences, or simply get information, stretched for blocks. Thomas Fawcett, the gold commissioner, was followed by a swarm of petitioners whenever he appeared on the streets. So great was the press of the crowd about him that at twelve noon sharp he would burst from his office and head for his boarding-house for lunch at a dead run, his petitioners in hot pursuit. Fawcett was one of the chief targets of the
Nugget
, which eventually helped to secure his removal; but there is no evidence that he was dishonest – only harassed. Some of his staff, however, were certainly culpable.

Scenes similar to those in front of the gold office took place at the post office. No one had foreseen the blizzard of mail that would descend upon the Klondike; no one had made arrangements to handle it. All the previous winter, deliveries had been sporadic and uncertain. In December, 1897, Captain Ray, the U.S. infantry officer at Fort Yukon, had accidentally found a second-class-mail sack lying in the snow and on opening it had discovered, to his astonishment and frustration, several hundred letters that should have been delivered to Dawson. It transpired that one hundred such sacks, all intended for the Klondike, had by an error been put ashore at Fort Yukon, on U.S. soil.

All winter long, United States citizens in Dawson had been fuming over a piece of bureaucracy that did not take into account the enormous distances in the northwest. All letters mailed from the U.S. and addressed to Dawson were placed in the Circle City sack at Juneau on the coast. They were then brought through Dawson and on to Circle before being returned for distribution. This involved a delay of two or three months, and as a result some men did not hear from their families for months or even years. One man, awaiting a letter at the Dawson post office and not receiving it, sobbed out that he had been eighteen months in the country without word from home. Letters were subjected to so much handling that some were stripped of their envelopes by the time they reached their destination. In the fall of 1897, before a proper post office was established, three boxes of mail were placed at the A.C. store, the N.A.T. store, and Jimmy Kerry’s saloon, all filled with coverless letters, many entirely unidentifiable. One, dated June 1894, opened with the words “My darling boy” and closed with “Your anxious but everloving mother.” Letter after letter of this kind was read and pawed over by hundreds of men trying to find their own mail.

The hard-pressed Mounted Police, who had become jacks of every trade in the Yukon, took over the handling of mail in October, 1897, and were still in charge when the main rush reached Dawson. It was a task for which they were neither trained nor prepared. William Ogilvie reported to the Minister of the Interior that the Dawson post office entailed as much work as that of a city of one hundred and fifty thousand because there was no delivery. One arriving steamboat brought fifty-seven hundred letters in a single batch. Every resident had to collect his own mail. Some waited vainly in line three days, until the price for a place in the queue rose to five dollars. Women made wages holding places for wealthy prospectors who could not afford the time to wait for their letters. The supply of stamps was so inadequate that the police were forced to dole them out two to a customer. No matter what the denomination, the price was always twenty-five cents because there was no small change in the community.

Against this background the cauldron of Dawson boiled and steamed. There was even talk of revolution, but none dared to flout the iron rule of Sam Steele. The
Nugget
continued to rail at the government, while the two other papers, the
Midnight Sun
and the
Miner
, took the opposite side. Canadian mining regulations were considered harsh by the Americans, who tended to forget that on the other side of the border no foreigner could stake or own a claim at all. Because most of the Klondike claims were held by foreigners who were intent on taking the gold out of the country, the government imposed a royalty of ten per cent on everything that was mined. This almost unheard-of regulation, which came into force on September 11, 1897, stuck in the craw of Canadians and Americans alike, especially as it was increased to twenty per cent if the output of any mine exceeded five hundred dollars a week. As a result, every kind of deception was used to falsify the amounts being mined, so that today no true record exists of the real value of gold taken from the Klondike, and all figures showing output during the peak years can be considered low. Major Nevill Armstrong, who operated rich claims on Bonanza Creek and on Cheechako Hill, wrote: “I do not believe more than one-tenth part of the correct tax was ever recovered from individual miners.”

The royalty underwent many changes. On June 1, 1898, Commissioner Walsh reduced it to a straight ten per cent on output, with an annual exemption of five thousand dollars. This still did not satisfy the miners, who held bitter meetings of protest and dispatched delegations to Ottawa. The
Nugget
called Fawcett and Walsh grafters, and when the former was finally relieved of his post in November it ran a sardonic headline: “Goodbye Fawcett!” The harried gold commissioner must have been happy to depart. Thrust into the maelstrom of the Klondike from a quiet sinecure in a British Columbia backwater, he had never been equal to the task. He much preferred the quiet of a Dawson Sunday, when he led the choir of the Presbyterian church and forgot the hurly-burly of the weekday.