Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (66 page)

The
Nugget
reported that in the Outside world the word “Klondike,” which had once inspired visions of fortune, had become an epithet of contempt and derision. The newest expression of disgust was the phrase: “Ah – go to the Klondike!” In Seattle, gold-pans had been converted to dishpans and were selling at bargain rates, while costly hand axes, once destined for the gold-fields, were going at a fraction of their value. On July 1, five thousand dollars’ worth of Klondike groceries, hardware, and clothing were thrown on the market at cost. The proud fleet of ships assembled for the Alaskan trade rode at anchor in San Francisco harbour, empty and neglected.

All through the spring vague rumours of something exciting on Norton Sound near the mouth of the Yukon River had been filtering into Dawson. It was the same kind of news that had once emptied Fortymile and Circle City. At first the news was sketchy, as it always was, and men refused to believe it, as they always did. But, sceptical or not, they began to trickle out of town and down the river in twos and threes, and then in dozens, and then in scores, searching not so much for new adventure or new wealth, perhaps, as simply for the love of the search.

One of the first boats to leave Dawson was the
W. K. Merwyn
, that same creaky little craft that had brought the
Eliza Anderson’s
party on her eventful trip up the river to the Klondike. The steamboat seemed fated to embark on the most harrowing journeys, and this was no exception. She was so crowded that Walter Russell Curtin, one of her two hundred passengers, wrote that they “had to stand like straphangers in a streetcar.” The food supply was swiftly reduced to peanuts and cornmeal, and the passengers were forced to gather goose eggs along the shore to keep body and soul together. The following year the
Merwyn
sank in an ocean storm not far from the Yukon’s mouth. Her timbers were washed ashore and, fittingly enough, burned by some of her ex-passengers who were by this time short of firewood.

By midsummer 1899 the news from the beaches of Alaska was confirmed. On the sands of Nome, just across the Bering Strait from Siberia, a fortune in fine gold dust had been discovered – a fortune that had been lying hidden all the time at the far end of the golden river on whose cold breast so many men had floated in a search for treasure.

The news roared across Alaska and across the Yukon Territory like a forest fire: a tent city was springing up on the beach at Nome … men were making fortunes and losing them just as quickly … buildings were going up, saloons opening, money changing hands … the beach was staked for thirteen miles … rocker and sluicebox were again in motion.… The experts were already predicting that Nome’s beaches and near-by creeks would produce two million dollars in the first year alone – more than the Klondike had at the same point in its history.

The story was beginning again, like a continuous film show at a movie house. In Dawson, log cabins could be had for the taking as steamboat after steamboat, jammed from steerage to upper deck, puffed out of town en route to Nome. The saloon trade fell off; real estate dropped; dance halls lost their custom. Arizona Charlie Meadows announced that he would float his Palace Grand in one piece down the river to the new strike. Jacqueline, the dance-hall girl, complained that her week’s percentage would hardly pay her laundry bill. In a single week in August eight thousand people left Dawson forever. The same week a few haggard and wild-eyed men with matted locks and shredded garments straggled in from the Rat River divide. These were the last of that eager contingent which had set off from Edmonton twenty-four months before to seek their fortune; there would be no more.

And so just three years, almost to the day, after Robert Henderson encountered George Carmack here on the swampland at the Klondike’s mouth, the great stampede ended as quickly as it had begun.

Chapter Thirteen

1
Finale

2
The legacy of the gold rush

3
River of ghosts

1

Finale

I shall borrow from Epicurus: “The acquisition of riches has been for many men, not an end, but a change, of troubles” I do not wonder. For the fault is not in the wealth, but in the mind itself. That which had made poverty a burden to us, has made riches also a burden. Just as it matters little whether you lay a sick man on a wooden or on a golden bed, for whithersoever he be moved he will carry his malady with him; so one need not care whether the diseased mind is bestowed upon riches or upon poverty. His malady goes with the man. – Seneca ad Lucilium
Epistulæ Morales
XVII
.

The statistics regarding the Klondike stampede are diminishing ones. One hundred thousand persons, it is estimated, actually set out on the trail; some thirty or forty thousand reached Dawson. Only about one half of this number bothered to look for gold, and of these only four thousand found any. Of the four thousand, a few hundred found gold in quantities large enough to call themselves rich. And out of these fortunate men only the merest handful managed to keep their wealth.

The kings of Eldorado toppled from their thrones one by one. Antone Stander drank part of his fortune away; his wife deserted him and took the rest, including the Stander Hotel, which he had built in Seattle with profits from his claim. One cannot entirely blame her, for when Stander was drinking he was subject to crazy fits of jealousy; on one occasion he tried to cut her to pieces with a knife. Stander headed north again, seeking another Klondike, working his passage aboard ship by peeling potatoes in the galley, but got no farther than the Panhandle. He died in the Pioneers’ Home at Sitka. His wife, who lived until 1944, left an estate worth fifty thousand dollars.

Win Oler died in the Pioneers’ Home, too, plagued to the last by the knowledge that he had sold a million-dollar claim to the Lucky Swede for eight hundred. But Charley Anderson, the Lucky Swede, fared no better. His dance-hall-girl wife divorced him; the San Francisco earthquake laid waste to his wealth, since he had invested heavily in real estate. He remained, in spite of these setbacks, an incurable optimist, so convinced he would strike it rich again that he vowed never to shave off his little pointed beard until he recouped his fortunes. He was still wearing it in 1939 when he died, pushing a wheelbarrow in a sawmill near Sapperton, British Columbia, for three dollars and twenty-five cents a day. It had always annoyed him when people referred to him as a millionaire. “I never had a million dollars,” the Lucky Swede used to say. “The most I ever had was nine hundred thousand.”

Dick Lowe, the owner of the famous fraction on Bonanza, managed to get rid of more than half a million dollars. Part of it was stolen from his claim because he was too drunk to take notice of what was happening. Part of it was flung on the bars of saloons at Dawson and Grand Forks – as much as ten thousand at a time. He warned his friends against marrying a dance-hall girl, but in the end he married one himself. By the turn of the century Lowe was on the way down. He tried to recoup his fortunes in other gold rushes, without success. There is a pathetic picture of him pawning an eight-hundred-dollar monogrammed gold watch in Victoria, British Columbia. There is another of him peddling water by the bucket in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1905. He died in San Francisco in 1907.

Others, with equally good prospects, met variations of the same fate. Sam Stanley of Eldorado married a dance-hall girl in Pete McDonald’s saloon and died in poor circumstances. Nigger Jim Daugherty was broke by 1902; he became a railroad worker and died poor in Fairbanks in 1924, divorced by Lottie Oatley who lived on in San Francisco until the early 1960’s. Pat Galvin quit the Klondike in 1899, bankrupt – and died shortly afterward of cholera in the South Seas. Frank Phiscator killed himself in a San Francisco hotel. Oliver Millet, the discoverer of Cheechako Hill, died well-to-do, but his mind wandered in his later years. Nathan Kresge of Gold Hill sank all his funds in an abortive mine in Oregon and died while on relief in Seattle.

Even Tom Lippy, the God-fearing
YMCA
man who did not drink, whore, or gamble, ended his days bankrupt, though he took almost two million dollars from his Eldorado claim. After he sold out in 1903, Lippy and his wife made a trip around the world and built the proudest home in Seattle. The windows were of stained glass, the woodwork of intricately carved oak and mahogany. There were fifteen rooms, including an immense ballroom. Murals decorated the ceilings; a priceless collection of Oriental rugs covered the floor and hung from the walls like tapestries.

Some of Lippy’s obscure relatives began to move to Seattle, and he took them all in and got them jobs. His philanthropies extended beyond this: he made extensive donations to the Methodist Church and the
YMCA
, gave twenty-five thousand dollars to the Anti-Saloon League, donated the land on which the Seattle General Hospital was built, and started the drive for Seattle’s first swimming-pool.

Once, two Seattle reporters, on a stunt, dressed in old clothes, pretending to be down and out, and applied at the homes of the wealthy for a handout. They were turned away at every mansion but Lippy’s. He gave them turkey sandwiches and coffee and sat down and ate with them.

He became a respected Seattle citizen. He was hospital president,
YMCA
president, Port Commissioner, and senior golf champion of the Pacific northwest, but he was no businessman. He sank almost half a million dollars in a mattress-and-upholstery company, a brick company, a trust-and-savings bank, and the Lippy Building. All went bankrupt, and Lippy was ruined. When he died in 1931, at the age of seventy-one, he had nothing to leave his wife. Fortunately for her, a chance clause inserted in the hospital land agreement by a cautious lawyer provided her with fifty dollars a month. She lived on this until she died in 1938. The Lippy home was eventually turned over to the followers of Father Divine.

Big Alex McDonald was ruined by the very thing that had made him wealthy – an obsession with property. For several years he continued, as a man of property, to be the leading light in Dawson, in spite of his awkwardness and lack of social presence. It was Big Alex the townspeople chose to preside at the farewell celebration when Sam Steele left the Yukon in 1899. As a special concession, the steamboat on which the policeman was leaving was brought up the river to the front of the barracks, and here Big Alex, who had been carefully rehearsed and drilled for several days, was supposed to make a graceful farewell speech and present Steele with a poke of gold. At the last moment the King of the Klondike lumbered forward sheepishly and thrust the poke into Steele’s hand. The farewell speech went as follows:

“Here, Sam – here y’are. Poke for you. Good-by.”

In spite of this lamentable performance, Big Alex was chosen again to make a presentation to Lady Minto, the wife of the Governor General of Canada, when the viceregal party visited Dawson in 1900. This time the gift was a golden bucket, filled to the brim with curiously shaped nuggets, with a miniature golden windlass above it. Again Big Alex was carefully primed and rehearsed in a speech written especially for the occasion, but when the awful moment came, the King of the Klondike simply reached out his great ham hands towards Her Ladyship and said:

“Here. Tak’ it. It’s trash.”

To McDonald, gold was always trash. He continued to use it to buy more land. When his claims on Bonanza and Eldorado were worked out he bought up new ones on more distant creeks. He had twenty claims on Henderson Creek alone, in the Stewart River country; none was worth a plugged nickel. In his last years he lived by himself in a little cabin on Clearwater Creek, still prospecting for gold, his fortunes long since diminished. One day a prospector happened upon his cabin and found McDonald’s huge form lying prone in front of his chopping-block. He had died of a heart attack while splitting firewood. Because Belinda Mulroney had once persuaded him to take out a life-insurance policy, his widow was able to live on in some comfort.

It is pleasant, in the light of all this, to report that the two most industrious men on Bonanza and Eldorado enjoyed continued success and fortune for the rest of their lives. Louis Rhodes and Clarence Berry, who sank the first two shafts to bedrock in the Klondike while their fellows twiddled their thumbs, did not dissipate their riches, but, on the contrary, added to them.

Berry took a million and a half dollars from his claims on Eldorado. Then he and his brothers moved on to Fairbanks, where they struck it rich a second time on Esther Creek. They returned to California, secured oil property near Bakersfield, and made another enormous fortune. At various times they owned both the Los Angeles and the San Francisco baseball clubs.

Berry never forgot his original benefactor, Bill McPhee, the saloon-keeper. In 1906 McPhee’s saloon at Fairbanks was destroyed by fire and the ageing barkeeper lost everything but the clothes he wore. Berry wired him from San Francisco to draw on him for all the money necessary to get back into business again. In his declining years McPhee lived on a pension from Berry, who died of appendicitis in San Francisco in 1930, worth several millions.

Louis Rhodes invested his Klondike fortune in mining property in Mexico and lost everything. Without a moment’s hesitation he turned prospector again and headed for Alaska. With all the industry that he had shown in the early Bonanza days he began to explore the newly staked country near Fairbanks. He found gold-bearing quartz on a tiny outcropping of unstaked land and parlayed it into a mine which yielded him a profit of three hundred thousand dollars. He retired to California’s Valley of the Moon and lived out the rest of his days in comfort.

As might be expected, the liveliest Klondike sequel is provided by Swiftwater Bill Gates. When Swiftwater reached Nome he repeated his Eldorado success in a mild way by taking a lay on a claim on Dexter Creek. He made four thousand dollars, but lost it just as quickly gambling. Broke again and back in civilization, still as irrepressible as he was irresponsible, Swiftwater left his young wife and ran off with a comely seventeen-year-old named Kitty Brandon. The affair was climaxed by the usual wild chase from city to city with an angry mother in hot pursuit, until finally in the town of Chehalis, Washington, Swiftwater collared a preacher and made an honest woman of the schoolgirl. The marriage was complicated by the facts that
(a)
Swiftwater was still married to Bera Beebe, and
(b)
Kitty Brandon was Swiftwater’s stepniece.