Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (61 page)

Mizner fancied himself as a singer and as a piano-player during his year in Dawson. The most famous pianist in town was the Rag Time Kid at the Dominion Saloon, said to be the model for Service’s subsequent Jag Time Kid in the famous poem about Dan McGrew. The Kid’s mother was a Chicago music teacher, and it was his boast that he could play anything that was requested. Mizner, who came from a good family, was sceptical of the Kid’s musical knowledge and rashly bet that he could play something the Kid could not copy. The Kid accepted, whereupon Mizner sat down and played “The Holy City.” “Move over,” said the Kid contemptuously, and before Mizner had finished the final notes he was rendering the grand old song in ragtime.

The incidental entertainments in the dance halls were usually supplemented by more serious dramas. Most of the plays of the day, from
East Lynne
to
Camille
, found their way to the Dawson stages, although a certain amount of invention was sometimes necessary in the properties department. In
Pygmalion and Galatea
, for instance, a Dawson stock company, vainly searching around for a faun, had to make do with a stuffed and mounted malemute. In
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
the bloodhounds were represented by a single howling male-mute puppy drawn across the stage by invisible wires, while newspapers were used to simulate ice floes. The critics, however, praised the realistic performance of the actress who portrayed Eliza; it was obvious that she had really seen people making their way across floating ice.

The
pièce de résistance
at Arizona Charlie’s Palace Grand was a full-blown production of
Camille
. The ambitiousness of the production suited the theatre. To build the Palace, Charlie Meadows had bought and wrecked two steamboats, and to open it he had held a banquet for forty persons and laid a hundred-dollar banknote upon each plate. The stage production, alas, was not entirely successful, owing to a monumental piece of miscasting. The restless audience swiftly noted a distinct lack of ardour between Armand Duval and his consumptive lady. It appeared that George Hillier, the actor playing Duval, was the divorced husband of Babette Pyne, the dance-hall girl playing Camille. Babette hated him so much that she could not bear to speak with him in the wings, and at the end of each performance was in a state of nervous prostration from being forced to make love to him on the stage. This was only one of several flaws in the
Camille
production. The girls on stage also worked as box hustlers during the dancing that followed, as well as during the intermissions, and this double duty brought its own impasses. One night Babette Pyne, in her role as Camille, called over and over again for Prudence, her neighbour, but no Prudence appeared, and the action came to a dead stop. In the end, after repeated entreaties, the actress, Nellie Lewis, her hair tousled and her face flushed, poked her head from between the curtains of a wine box in the gallery and in a high-pitched and nearly incoherent voice called out: “Madame Prudence isn’t here! Call all you like, but Madame Prudence ain’t a-comin’ tonight. Don’t you think she’s a-comin’.” And although she was carried from the box by force, neither cajolery nor threats would force her to go onstage.

When such entertainments failed, Arizona Charlie could always rely on his shooting skill to pack the Palace Grand. Dressed in his familiar fringed buckskin, with his black locks hanging to his shoulders, the old scout presented a commanding figure. From his position at the far end of the stage he would shoot glass balls from between the thumb and forefinger of his pretty blonde wife. One night he missed and nicked her thumb, and from then on the shooting exhibitions ceased.

Crude as they were, the stage shows in the Dawson theatres brought enthusiastic crowds to Front Street six nights a week, for the town was starved for entertainment, indeed, the whole community was indulging in a gigantic year-long binge: those who had struck it rich were celebrating their good fortune, and the remainder were celebrating anyway after the long months on the trail.

Young Monte Snow and his sister once picked up one hundred and forty-two dollars thrown at them as they danced and sang on the stage, while little Margie Newman, “The Princess of the Klondike,” sometimes stood heel-deep in nuggets after she rendered a sentimental song. The sight of this nine-year-old girl and the sound of her piping voice brought tears to the eyes of men far from their wives and families. They showered her with gold, and one even wrote a poem to her:

God Bless you, Little Margie, for you made us better men
God Bless you, Little Margie, for you take us home again
.

When at last she left town, Frank Conrad of
Eleven
Eldorado tore off his solid-gold watch and nugget chain and tossed them to her as she stood on the steamer’s deck. She smiled, and he pulled out a fifty-dollar bill, wrapped it around a silver dollar, and threw that. She smiled again, and he produced a hundred-dollar bill, wrapped it around another silver dollar, and threw that too.

A different form of entertainment consisted of prize fights, which also took place on the dance-hall stages. Although the main object of all the stage shows was to pack the house with customers in order to keep the bar going, the fight-promoters were able to get as much as twenty-five dollars a seat for the better matches. Frank Slavin of Australia, the Empire’s heavyweight champion, known as the Sydney Cornstalk because of his tall, agile figure and long, loose arms, figured prominently in the most memorable of Dawson’s matches. Although Slavin was past his fighting prime and embittered by his failure to meet either John L. Sullivan or Jim Corbett for the heavyweight championship of the world, he was still more than a match for most of the men put up against him. He fought one Australian named Perkins for fourteen rounds and gave him such a beating that Perkins died eighteen months later from internal injuries. One night a rowdy named Biff Hoffman knocked Slavin to the floor in the Monte Carlo saloon when both men were drunk. The fighter took his measure and said: “You can knock me about when I’m drunk, but I’ll show you what I can do in the ring when I’m sober.” Wilson Mizner, who was weighing gold in the Monte Carlo at the time, heard these words and saw the incident as a heaven-sent opportunity for a grudge match. The fight was profitable but disappointing. Slavin did not even bother to don the regulation trunks, but climbed into the ring immaculate in white turtle neck sweater and white flannel trousers. He swung a right, knocked Hoffman cold, and collected one thousand dollars from Mizner. Another fight between Slavin and a wrestler named Frank Gotch (who later became world’s champion) was less decisive. Gotch was faring badly until he clamped a half-nelson on Slavin and threw him out of the ring. Each fighter insisted loudly and threateningly that he was the winner until the terrified referee called “No contest.”

Although the promoters tried to bill every fight as a grudge match, most were mere exhibitions between men who knew each other well. Slavin had come into Dawson in the company of Joe Boyle, his Canadian sparring-partner, with whom he had barnstormed around America. Boyle later became one of the great figures of the Klondike, securing an enormous concession on the main river, building the largest dredges in the world, and ending his years as “the Uncrowned King of Rumania,” where he was popularly believed to be the lover of Queen Marie; but in 1898 he did duty as a bouncer in the Monte Carlo. Tex Rickard, who went from penury to fortune and back to bankruptcy again in Dawson, gained some early experience in fight-promoting by matching the two friends against each other and making the crowd believe they were enemies. He billed Boyle as a man who had defied Soapy Smith in Skagway, and he referred to Slavin as “the Sydney Slasher.” He talked both men into acting infuriated whenever they saw each other, and, to whip up interest in the match, placed Slavin in a prominent position in a Front Street saloon where the crowd could see him. Rickard was disgusted to discover one day that Slavin’s chief drinking-companion, in full view of the entire town, was Paddy Flynn, who was also billed as the referee, Rickard hustled Flynn out of town until the night of the fight and then extracted twenty-five dollars from every customer, including those who crowded in for standing room only. Boyle, when he grew wealthy from his mining concessions, did not forget his old sparring-partner. He put Slavin on his payroll in an imaginary job at a good salary. As for Rickard, he headed off to Rampart and thence on to Nome, Alaska, without a cent to his name. Within a year he had one hundred thousand dollars.

4

Queens of dance-hall row

Dawson’s entertainments, although they brought thousands into the dance halls, were only a means to an end, and that end was to extract as much gold as possible from the audience when the entertainment was done. When the curtain finally fell about one a.m. the girls descended from the stage to mingle with the customers, whereupon the real business of the evening began. The floor was cleared and the orchestra, usually consisting of piano, violin, trombone, and cornet, struck up, while a caller or “spieler,” standing on the stage, cried out to the high-booted crowd to “take your partners for that long, dreamy, juicy waltz.” The miners paid their dollar for a dance ticket, grasped a girl, and tried to complete a single lap around the floor before the orchestra stopped, somewhat after the fashion of musical chairs. Like so much else in the Klondike, the long, dreamy, juicy waltz was not quite as advertised; it had lasted less than a minute, and the spieler was already shouting: “Belly up to the bar, you Rocky Mountain sportsmen!” The girls seized their partners, propelled them to the bar or to a curtained box, and ordered whatever the traffic would bear. For every dollar spent, each girl received a circular disk representing her percentage of the profits, and this she secreted in her stocking to cash the following day until her legs were lumpy with ivory vouchers. All night long the dances roared on – waltzes, polkas, schottisches, square dances, and lancers – while the horns blew and the violins sawed away and the callers kept the crowd in an unremitting state of excitement. All night long the wealth of the creeks was transferred bit by bit to the nugget belts and pouches of the dance-hall girls. As Diamond-Tooth Gertie remarked, not without a certain compassion, “The poor ginks have just gotta spend it, they’re that scared they’ll die before they have it all out of the ground.”

To more than one man who struck it rich, dancing seemed more important than the gold they had struggled so hard to find. Casey Moran, an itinerant newspaperman who owned a claim on Sulphur Creek, was one of these. One night in the Monte Carlo, Humboldt Gates called him off the floor in order to offer him twenty thousand dollars for his property. Moran quickly accepted the offer, which was a generous one, but he demurred when Gates insisted on sealing the bargain then and there with a down payment of two thousand dollars, weighed out in gold dust by the head cashier. Moran declared that no man could dance properly with ten pounds of gold in his pockets. He rejected the offer and the dance went on.

Moran was, of course, an eccentric. He later startled the town by scooping the press of the world with a news story about the discovery of Noah’s Ark on the top of a mountain in the Koyukuk country of Alaska. Yet he was no more eccentric than many of his fellow prospectors, especially the wealthier ones, who preferred immediate pleasure to long-term profit.

There was one man that winter who actually danced his fortune away – a short, thick-set Irishman, with a pointed moustache named Roddy Conners. Such was his mania for dancing that he sold his claim on Bonanza Creek for fifty thousand dollars and spent the entire amount capering to the tunes of the Front Street bands. He began to dance the moment the orchestra started to play and he continued to dance until it stopped, and he never missed a dance. When he was too weary to dance any longer in time to the music, he paid his dollar anyway, put his arm around the girl’s waist, and walked her around the hall. No one woman had the stamina to keep up with him, but two sisters, working in shifts, succeeded in cleaning him out. Their show names were Jacqueline and Rosalinde, but they were popularly known as Vaseline and Glycerine. Vaseline would fasten upon the exhausted Conners, steer him to the bar and force a drink down his throat, then hand him over to Glycerine to take out to the dance floor again. Conners spent between five hundred and two thousand dollars a night and ended his years in a home for indigents.

Most of the dance-hall girls disguised their true identity, dancing under such nicknames as Sweet Marie, Ping Pong, or Caprice, or under pseudonyms like that of Blanche Lamonte, a seductive nineteen-year-old from the Barbary Coast who took her name from that of the young victim in San Francisco’s notorious belfry murder. Most of them had some distinguishing mark about them. Daisy D’Avara wore a belt of seventeen twenty-dollar goldpieces, a Christmas present from a wealthy miner. Gertie Lovejoy had a diamond fastened between her two front teeth and, despite the amour inherent in her original name, was known in Dawson as Diamond-Tooth Gertie. Flossie de Atley was always referred to as “the Girl with the Baby Stare” and was a favourite subject of the
Nugget’s
cartoonist, who delighted in showing her with a finger in her mouth and her Mona Lisa eyes staring innocently into space, though she was anything but innocent. “It was generally conceded by those in the know that Flossie could take a man to the cleaners a little bit faster and a good deal more completely than any other girl in town,” one Klondiker recalled, and added: “That’s saying a whole lot, for there were some very capable girls in the art of trimming a sucker.” Flossie’s story was always the same: she had a sick brother in a sanatarium Outside and she was trying to scrape up enough money to leave the country and care for him. And in the end she did leave, with enough for a dozen sick brothers.