Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (59 page)

This quieted the crowd momentarily. By now the town hall was overflowing with captured men, and Tanner decided to move some of the key prisoners, including both Tripp and Slim Jim, to the second floor of Burkhard’s hardware store across the street. He did this so swiftly and boldly that there was no interference from the people in the jammed thoroughfare, who quietly gave way and let him pass.

Tripp, who was one of the toughest nuts in the gang, showed no emotion at all, but Slim Jim Foster was terrified by the mob, and the devilish Tripp amused himself by baiting him and adding to his fright.

Finally Foster could stand it no longer. Tripp got him into such a panic that he flung himself through an upper-storey window, bounced on a shed roof, and landed in French Alley. Someone at the back of the building took a shot at him, but missed. The noise brought the main body of the crowd around from the street at a dead run. The leaders had ropes in their hands and were intent on stringing him up.

“For the sake of my poor widowed mother, boys!” Foster cried in terror, as one man slipped the noose round his neck.

Two of Tanner’s men tore it off again, and a seesaw battle for the panic-stricken con man ensued in which the rope was several times tightened around the outlaw’s neck and several times removed. By now, however, the soldiers from Dyea had arrived. Down the street they moved on the double, with fixed bayonets, the crowd scattering before them. Martial law was proclaimed, and Foster was hustled back to prison, where he collapsed from fright.

That night Stewart’s poke of gold – about five hundred dollars of it missing – was found in Soapy Smith’s trunk. The following morning the captured members of his gang were shipped out of town. Eleven of the gang, including Marshal Taylor, Tripp, Foster, George Wilder, and Bowers, were sent to Sitka to face the Alaskan Grand Jury, charged with a variety of offences ranging from extortion and grand larceny to the possession of firearms. They received prison sentences ranging from one to ten years. Nine more, including Saportas and the editor of the
Daily Alaskan
, were bundled aboard the
Tartar
bound for Seattle. A large crowd on the dock watched them ascend the gangplank, one by one, and admit grudgingly to the commissioner that they were leaving “of their own free will.” The police met them at Seattle and arrested several on various charges that had been pending against them.

Both the Baptist and the Methodist ministers refused to bury Soapy Smith, so Sinclair, the Presbyterian, did it alone, taking along a vigilante as protection. In the dreary morgue he preached a brief sermon, using as a text “The way of the transgressor is hard,” while the con man’s former mistress and sole mourner stood framed in the doorway. Then, with John Clancy, the executor of Smith’s estate, Sinclair took the body out to the little cemetery along the White Pass trail, where, to the monotonous roar of the mountain streams and the occasional rattle of a passing freight wagon, it was committed. The worldly assets of the ex-dictator amounted to no more than five hundred dollars cash. He had squandered the rest or given it away.

Reid was operated on at five a.m. on Tuesday.

“If that bullet hasn’t punctured my insides and if blood-poisoning doesn’t set in and if you damned doctors don’t butcher me, I’ll have some chance for life yet,” he remarked as, coolly smoking a cigar, he watched the surgical table being prepared.

But his wound was mortal. He lingered on for a few days and then died, and his funeral was the largest in Skagway’s history. A handsome monument was erected over his grave a few feet from Smith’s final resting-place. In the years that followed, thousands of tourists beat a path to the little graveyard under the hill to view these twin symbols of Skagway’s shame and Skagway’s honour.

But it was to Smith’s tomb that the curious turned. In death he continued to exert a strange fascination. An unknown admirer sent fifty dollars annually to Mrs. Harriet Pullen for the upkeep of his grave. Some of the money had to be spent for wire mesh to protect the gravestone from souvenir-hunters who chipped away at it.

No such precautions were needed for Frank Reid’s marble slab. It is almost seventy-five years since it was erected, but it stands today, like his memory, half forgotten but unblemished. On its face is a simple inscription: “He gave his life for the honor of Skagway.”

*This account, taken largely from the special edition of the Skagway
News
of July 8, 1898, agrees with that of several witnesses who were in Skagway at the time including the Rev. J. A. Sinclair, whose papers contain a personal account of Stewart’s troubles. A somewhat different version of the affair was published in the
Alaska Sportsman
of March, 1958, by Stewart’s daughter, Hazel Stewart Clark, who wrote that two of Smith’s gang persuaded her father to put his poke of gold in the vault of a local hotel for safekeeping. When Stewart went to the hotel the following day to get his poke, he was told that nothing of his was in the vault and that no one at the hotel had ever seen him before. I find it difficult to believe that Stewart would not have asked for a receipt for a poke of gold worth close to three thousand dollars. In addition, the eyewitness accounts set down at the time describe an incident more in keeping with the gang’s known method of operation.

Chapter Twelve

1
Gold, restless gold

2
The San Francisco of the North

3
The false fronts of Front Street

4
Queens of dance-hall row

5
Fortune’s wheels

6
The last stampede

7
Tales of conspicuous wealth

8
Money to burn

1

Gold, restless gold

In Dawson the gold was changing hands.

On the creeks, men by the thousands tore at frozen ground, in a frenzy to reach the pay-streak, and then, in another kind of frenzy, rushed into town to squander the results.

The winding, wooded valleys through which Carmack and Henderson had made their way were unrecognizable by the spring of 1899. The hills, once thick with timber, were denuded even of moss, their flanks gouged into a cliff-land by the swift human erosion. Their tops looked like extinct volcanoes, stained as they were with newly washed gravel which ran down the sides in streaks as white as lava. On the rims of the hills cabins sprouted in clusters, and along the benchland more cabins ran in ragged tiers, each tier separated from the next by a bleak rubble of rock and clay.

The valley floors, which had once been choked by a jungle undergrowth of matted foliage, were stripped clean of verdure, except for the occasional dying spruce rising gauntly from the stark landscape; and the little streams, dammed, cribbed, diverted and bridged, ran naked through a desert of bleached gravel.

From the hills above, the creeks presented scenes of utter disorder. Cabins, sheds, tents, caches, and privies lay scattered in every direction as if a superhuman hand had tossed them casually into the valleys. Logs were piled so thickly that from a distance they resembled stacks of straw. Roadways, trails, narrow-gauge rail lines, trestles, flumes, ditches, and the long skeletal fingers of sluiceboxes criss-crossed the terrain between the conical mountains of gravel and dirt. All the impedimenta of the placer process – rockers and boilers, steam engines and pumps, hoses and winches – littered the landscape.

As spring crept onward and the snows melted, the valleys began to ooze with mud and men. The miners emerged from their smoky shafts like insects seeking the sun, until there were thousands of them at work, trundling wheelbarrows, hammering away at trestles, ripping into hillsides, standing in long lines at the sluiceboxes to shovel tirelessly from dawn until dusk, or winding away at the creaking winches as if they were turning fortune’s wheel.

Thus the gravels yielded up the gold, and the gold slipped from hand to hand, as though it were red-hot. It poured into Dawson in an endless, shining stream, in greasy pokes of moose-hide or in hundred-pound sacks strapped to the backs of plodding mules. It was sprayed onto the bars of the Front Street saloons, shovelled into the slender purses of the dance-hall girls, or flung carelessly on the gaming-tables.

The very air glittered with it. Some of the bartenders developed long fingernails so that when they weighed out a pokeful of dust a little of it was left behind; they panned their own fingernails at night and enjoyed a neat profit. Every gold-scale rested on a thick velvet cloth into which the gold filtered while the bands played and the kings of Eldorado danced the night away. At dawn the velvet cloths themselves were panned, and they in turn yielded up their treasure. The waiters kept their hands damp with beer or wine so that some of the gold stuck to their fingers and was transferred to secret pockets in chamois vests. These, too, were panned nightly, as though they were part of the dump from Paradise Hill.

The gold moved swiftly from pocket to pocket and poke to poke, as if carried by the wind. Some of it rested momentarily in the safe of Silent Sam Bonnifield, the gambling king, and some of it found its way into the flashing nugget belt of Cad Wilson, the dance-hall queen. Some of it was carried from crib to crib along the length of Paradise Alley, where fat Belgian girls in shapeless outer garments leaned from doorways and plied their trade for the profit of the sleek little pimps or
maques
who had brought them across the Chilkoot Pass or up the river like so much freight. Some of it, eventually, reached the bank, where it was melted into bricks or bars and transported Outside to start its whirl again. Some of it was lost for years or forever in the muck of Front Street or in the dusty corners of the frame saloons. The Kansas City Kid, who slept in the sawdust under the crap tables at the Monte Carlo, was actually permeated with gold dust – or at least his clothes were. Once, when he took ill and was sent to the hospital, the laundry that handled his washing returned $39.75 to him, that being the amount that had collected in the bottom of the tub when his clothes were washed.

So much gold was caught in the sawdust of the Monte Carlo’s floor that two children who panned the area beneath the front bar made twenty dollars a day from it. Forty years later, when some of the old dance halls were torn down in Dawson, thousands of dollars’ worth of this fine gold was recovered. Indeed, the town’s streets could be said to be paved with gold, for during the depression of the thirties dozens of destitute men made wages by panning the ground beneath the wooden sidewalks. In the early forties, when the Bank of Commerce was being repaired, two carpenters secured the panning rights and realized fifteen hundred dollars from the foundations. About the same time the proprietor of the Orpheum Theatre decided to have his floor repaired, and in the half-day available to him while the planks were torn up he was able to pan one thousand dollars’ worth of gold that had been hidden there for almost half a century.

The Klondike ran on gold, and so did its people. Because of it, they faced typhoid, malaria, frostbite, and scurvy. And, though they often treated it as offhandedly as if it were so much sand, they were always ready to look for more. The slightest whisper of a new find could send hundreds stampeding up and down the river or across the hills in the bitterest weather. In the end, this constant quest was the undoing of Dawson City, as it had been the undoing of Fortymile and Circle before it.

2

The
San Francisco of the North

Dawson existed as a metropolis exactly twelve months: from July, 1898, to July, 1899. Before this period it had been nothing more than an overgrown frontier community of shacks and tents. Afterward it subsided slowly but inevitably into a ghost town. But for one glorious twelvemonth it was the “San Francisco of the North,” enjoying almost every amenity available to civilized cities the world over.

Although it lay in the shadow of the Arctic Circle, more than four thousand miles from civilization, and although it was the only settlement of any size in a wilderness area that occupied hundreds of thousands of square miles, Dawson was livelier, richer, and better equipped than many larger Canadian and American communities. It had a telephone service, running water, steam heat, and electricity. It had dozens of hotels, many of them better appointed than those on the Pacific coast. It had motion-picture theatres operating at a time when the projected motion-picture was just three years old. It had restaurants where string orchestras played the
Largo
from
Cavalleria Rusticana
for men in tailcoats who ate
pâté de foie gras
and drank vintage wines. It had fashions from Paris. It had dramatic societies, church choirs, glee clubs, and vaudeville companies. It had three hospitals, seventy physicians, and uncounted platoons of lawyers. Above all, it had people.

None of its citizens were ordinary, for almost every one of them knew how to build his own boat or his own cabin out of green lumber, how to handle a dog-team on a narrow trail, how to treat scurvy with spruce-bark tea, how to carry a pack on a tumpline, and how to navigate fast water. Some had more individual accomplishments: there were gamblers ready to bet fifty thousand dollars on the turn of a card, and dance-hall girls willing to be purchased for their weight in gold.

They came from all over the world and from every background and creed. Arthur Treadgold, a direct descendant of Sir Isaac Newton, was in the gold rush; so were the nephew of H. Rider Haggard, the novelist, and the nephew of Jay Gould, the Wall Street financier, and the son of William Lever, the soap king. Frank Slavin, the heavyweight champion of the British Empire, was part of the throng that surged into Dawson, and so was W. J. “Sailor Bill” Partridge, who had become so rich from Queensland gold that he never wore the same suit twice, even though he changed clothes several times a day. There were scores of newspaper correspondents in Dawson, many of them women – ranging all the way from Nelly Bly, the New York world-girdler, to Flora Shaw, the aristocratic colonial expert of
The Times
of London, who crossed the White Pass dressed as a perfect English gentlewoman, her skirts of ladylike length, her hair neatly coiled, and her neckpiece carefully fastened.