Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (60 page)

The town was crowded with men who made their names and their fortunes after leaving the Klondike: Augustus Mack, from Brooklyn, the inventor of the Mack automobile and the Mack truck; Sid Grauman, whose name was later immortalized on Hollywood’s famous Chinese Theatre, where movie stars left footprints in the wet cement; Tex Rickard, who became the manager of Madison Square Garden; Jack Marchbank, the one-legged gambler who was to run the great Tanforan race track in San Francisco; Key Pittman, who became a controversial and ebullient senator from Nevada and chairman of the U.S. Foreign Relations Committee; Alexander Pantages, the little Greek immigrant who laid the foundations for his chain of motion-picture theatres in Dawson; and, of course, the Mizner brothers, about whose exploits three books and countless magazine articles were to be written.

But to another group, whose careers were ending, Dawson City was the last stop. Joseph Juneau ran a restaurant in Dawson; his discovery of gold on the Alaska Panhandle had enshrined his name on the territory’s new capital city, but he himself was without funds. Buck Choquette was in Dawson, too: he had made and lost a fortune in the early days of the Cariboo gold rush. Buckskin Frank Leslie, a famous gunman from Arizona, joined the gold rush and faded into obscurity, as did Calamity Jane, the camp-follower from Deadwood, a pale reminder of the era of Wild Bill Hickok. Irish Nellie Cashman, “the miners’ angel,” ran a boarding house in the Klondike, just as she once had on Tough Nut Street in Tombstone, where she sheltered the homeless and relieved the afflicted.

For such people there was nowhere else in the world to go but Dawson. All their lives had been spent on the frontier, on the plains of the American West or in the untamed little towns of legend and story with names like Deadwood and Tucson and Cheyenne — or in some other out-of-the-way corner of the world. But the West was no longer wild, and the frontier had moved away three thousand miles. And so they walked the streets of the golden city, many still clinging to their fringed gauntlets and their hide vests and their broad-brimmed hats. Here, in this familiar garb, they felt at home.

Tom Horey, a half-breed famous as one of three scouts who had captured Louis Riel, the leader of the Saskatchewan Rebellion, was in town; because of his exploits, the Mounties let him get roaring drunk without arresting him. F. R. Burnham, a noted African scout and one of two survivors of an expedition which had been massacred in Matabeleland in 1893, arrived at the height of the stampede. He later returned to the Dark Continent and became a Boer War hero. Captain Jack Crawford, the “poet-scout” of the West, turned up, with his white goatee, buckskin shirt, long silken hair, and scout’s hat. He had fought the Indians in the border wars, hobnobbed with Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok, and served a stint as U.S. marshal. Now from a hovel dubbed The Wigwam he sold everything from hay to ice cream, and doubled as a popular entertainer because of his ability to compose a poem about anything or anybody on the spot.

Jack Dalton, another frontiersman and a veteran of the Yukon and Alaska, was a respected figure in Dawson. He had constructed his own personal trail into the country, from Pyramid Harbor on the Lynn Canal to Fort Selkirk on the Upper Yukon River, charging two hundred and fifty dollars toll to anybody who wanted to use it. Other men had tried to establish toll roads and toll bridges on the various trails of ’98, but Dalton was the only man who made a toll stick. One party announced they would drive a herd of beef cattle over this trail without payment. As they were about to set out, Dalton appeared with rifle and six-gun and told the leaders he would shoot the first man or beast who set foot on it. Then, as the party floundered through the bushes and scrub timber alongside the trail, Dalton kept guard in splendid isolation on the right of way for three hundred miles to show he meant business. He was a tough man to tangle with – short, thick-set, and uncompromising. He beat one man to a pulp for trying to establish a saloon on his property, and he shot another dead (and was acquitted) for trying to turn the Indians against him. His trail turned out to be a boon to Dawson. In the summer of 1898 two thousand beef cattle successfully traversed it.

One towering figure on the streets seemed to have stepped straight out of a wild-west show. This was Arizona Charlie Meadows, the old Indian-fighter and rodeo king whose portable saloon had been swept away in the Chilkoot flood. He suffered a series of mishaps, including a devastating boat wreck on Tagish Lake, but within four months of his arrival in town he had made a small fortune. He conceived the idea of producing a souvenir newspaper which would glorify the Klondike kings, and swiftly raised fifty thousand dollars for it. Charlie rightly regarded Front Street as better mining property than any to be found on the Klondike watershed, and by the winter of 1898–99 was hard at work planning the Palace Grand dance hall and theatre, which, he promised, would be the most lavish establishment of its kind in the North.

Dawson in its climactic year remained a town of nicknames. Half the community, it seemed, went under such pseudonyms as Limejuice Lil, Spanish Dolores, Deep-Hole Johnson, Billy the Horse, Cassiar Jim, and Two-Step Louie. There were Spare-rib Jimmy Mackinson, so thin that his landlady was said to have refused him sheets for fear he might tear them with his bones; and Waterfront Brown, the debt-collector, who haunted the riverbank in order to capture fleeing defaulters; and Phantom Archibald, who spent twenty-five thousand dollars in gold on a colossal binge and thought himself pursued by a long black python; and Doc Stearnes, the “Gambler Ghost,” a wisp of a surgeon turned faro-player; and Hamgrease Jimmy, the dance-hall caller; and last, as well as least, that curious little creature known as the Evaporated Kid because he was so small that he “looked like a bottle with hips.”

At first glance, this mélange of humanity seemed to be an odd and insoluble mixture of nationalities, races, and pursuits, yet it was really remarkably cohesive. Although the men and women who reached the Klondike came from every corner of the globe, and although their backgrounds were entirely dissimilar, they had one thing in common: they were there. Others, with weaker wills and weaker constitutions, had given up the struggle and retreated, but each of these disparate citizens had succeeded in what he had set out to do. They were like war veterans who, having served their time in action, now found themselves bound together in a camaraderie born of fortitude. They were all part of a proud élite who, in spite of every vicissitude, had managed to reach their goal.

3

The false fronts of Front Street

Although Dawson covered several square miles, spilled across two rivers, and was squeezed up the sides of the surrounding hills, its pulse beat swiftest in those three or four short blocks of Front Street where the saloons, dance halls, and gaming-houses were crowded together. This was the most unstable as well as the liveliest section of the town. The buildings here were continually burning down and being rebuilt, changing ownership and managership, being lost and won in gambling-games, and sometimes changing both name and locale, so that the street was seldom the same from one month to the next. And yet, in another sense, it never changed, for any man who walked inside one building might be said to have walked inside them all. The outer façade of the street was a deceptive one. The carved scrollwork, the ornate bay windows and balconies with their intricately wrought balustrades, the elaborate cornices and pillars presented a rococo elegance which was as false as the square fronts which hid the dingy, gabled log building behind. Hollywood films have presented the Klondike dance halls with Parisian splendour, but the real edifices were cheaper and shabbier than their dreamworld counterparts. So were the girls who danced within them, especially in the early days. Like the furniture and the trimmings, they had to be brought in over the mountains, and thus they were plain, sturdy, serviceable, and without embellishment. Most of them ran to weight; only the huskiest, after all, were able to withstand the rigours of the journey.

The interiors of the dance halls were of a piece – and a description of the Monte Carlo serves for them all. It was a hastily erected two-story building with large plate-glass windows, on which its name was inscribed, facing the street. Upon entering it, the newcomer found himself in a small, rather dark room dominated by a sheet-iron stove, with a long polished bar to his left, behind which the bartenders in starched shirts and aprons, with white waistcoats and diamond stickpins, stood reflected in the long mirrors at their backs.

Beyond the saloon was a smaller room, where faro, poker, dice, and roulette were played continually, day and night, and behind this room was the theatre, consisting of a ground floor (with movable benches), a balcony (three rows and six boxes), and a small curtained stage. The remainder of the establishment’s upper storey was given over to about a dozen bedrooms, which could be rented by the night or by the week for any purpose, even including slumber.

This layout differed only in detail up and down the street. One dance hall sported elaborate murals (“Midnight on the Yukon”); another was lighted by acetylene lamps instead of the usual oil. (Electricity did not come until later in the season.) But each contained the same divisions of gallery, boxes, and common dance floor.

A sign on the balcony of the Opera House reminded customers that “gentlemen in private boxes are expected to order refreshments,” and these instructions were rarely ignored, for it was a mark of affluence for a man to be seen in an upper box, encircled by a bevy of soubrettes, drinking champagne at sixty dollars a quart. The men of the Klondike craved such outward signs of success more than they craved the actual champagne or the favours of the women; their presence in the balcony surrounded them with a kind of aura which proclaimed to all who watched that they had won a hand in the hard game of life. The private box in the Dawson dance hall thus became a sort of symbol; suspended above the turbulent and sweaty masses on the floor below, a miner flush with gold could feel that he had indeed risen in the world. In a single night in the Monte Carlo one such celebrant had seventeen hundred dollars’ worth of champagne brought to his box.

To some, the dance hall itself became the supreme emblem of achievement and nothing would do but that they own one outright. Many a Klondike king invested his gold in a palace of pleasure, although not always with crowning success. Charlie Kimball, who built the Pavilion with one hundred thousand dollars which he received for his mining property, took in twelve thousand on opening night in June, 1898. He was so delighted by this new way of mining gold that he began to celebrate. The bender lasted three months, and during this period Kimball made – and spent – three hundred thousand dollars. When he eventually sobered up he had lost his dance hall and was penniless. But for one brief whirl he had been Somebody.

In the larger establishments the bar, gaming-room, dance hall, and stage entertainment were operated as separate concessions. The bar ran twenty-four hours a day, except Sundays, and so did the gambling. The dance hall came alive about eight in the evening and ran until six or seven the following morning, but actual dancing did not really begin until after midnight, being preceded by lengthy entertainments: a drama first, and then a series of vaudeville turns on the tiny stage.

The most versatile of the entrepreneurs was John Mulligan, who with his wife, Carrie, had been staging vaudeville and burlesque in the various Pacific coast towns before coming north. Mulligan wrote the entire show himself, a series of bawdy and satirical commentaries on the times made up from suggestions he received from gamblers, miners, dance-hall girls, and bartenders. His best-remembered drama was
The Adventures of Stillwater Willie, a
satire on the exploits of Swiftwater Bill which Mulligan produced first in the Combination – or Tivoli, as it was renamed – and later repeated by popular request in the Monte Carlo. With a fine sense of casting, Mulligan starred Nellie Lamore, the youngest of the three Lamore sisters in the play. Swiftwater Bill would occupy the finest box in the theatre and applaud the caricature cheerfully – while the audience laughed. Swiftwater did not mind the laughter: he was being noticed, and that was what mattered. Nellie, thus emboldened, appeared at a masquerade ball in October, 1898, wearing a Prince Albert coat, a silk hat, and a placard inscribed: “Stillwater Willie, the Mayor of Lousetown.” She won first prize.

Gussie Lamore was back in town, her reputation enhanced by the legend of the eggs, and she, too, was a popular favourite. From the stage of the Monte Carlo she would sing directly to Swiftwater in his box:

Give me a pen, I’ll make my will
,
I’ll will it all to Swiftwater Bill
.
I loved him once and I always will
,
For he was certainly good to me
.

All eyes would turn upward to the little man with the Prince Albert coat, the diamond stickpin, and the comical moustache, applauding furiously; and the cheechakos in the pit would nudge each other and remember, years later, that they had once seen the legendary Swiftwater.

Another occasional stage entertainer was Wilson Mizner. He had a clear tenor voice, much in demand for the charity affairs and church socials at which, with a fine sense of impartiality, he also entertained. According to Mizner’s biographer, Alva Johnston, one of these dance-hall appearances saved Mizner from a jail term. His girl friend was Nellie Lamore, who was also known as Nellie the Pig, perhaps because of her attractive retroussé nose, or possibly because once, in a heated moment, she bit off the ear of a bartender who she felt had insulted her. Nellie was making a handsome profit by selling tiny pieces of chocolate at a dollar a morsel, and Mizner, no doubt spurred on by the example of Swiftwater Bill and the eggs, decided to lay an enormous amount of chocolate at her feet. He held up a restaurant which sold the delicacy, but discovered to his chagrin that, although gold was to be had by reaching for it, the more valuable candy was kept locked in a safe. To confuse the issue he took the cash register with him, tossed it aside, ripped off his mask, ran to a saloon where he was known to entertain, and appeared, somewhat breathless but otherwise in good voice, singing “Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt,” thus establishing an iron-clad alibi.