Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (8 page)

He ran afoul of his fellows shortly after his arrival. Although he was successful in bringing down prices in Alaska and the Yukon, Healy was never popular with the Fortymilers, for he was a crusty man who insisted on sending out bills promptly at the end of the month, a presumption to those accustomed to Jack McQuesten’s unlimited credit. When his hired girl haled him before the miners’ court, his enemies were waiting for him.

The case was an odd one. The girl, whom Healy and his wife had brought in from the Outside as a servant, insisted on staying out late at night and sometimes, indeed, all night. Healy forbade her to go out again to one of the squaw dances being held in the main town. When she disobeyed him and tried to get back into the house, he locked her out. This autocratic attitude in a settlement where freedom of individual action was almost a religion enraged the miners. They decided in favour of the girl and demanded that the trader pay her a year’s wages and her full fare back home.

Healy paid under protest, but prepared to deliver a counter-blow. He wrote to his old frontier friend from the Whoop-Up days, Superintendent Samuel B. Steele of the North West Mounted Police, and asked for the protection of the Canadian constabulary.

At almost the same time Bishop Bompas was sending a similar letter to the authorities at Ottawa. The miners, he said, “were teaching the Indians to make whisky with demoralizing effect both to the whites and Indians and with much danger in the use of firearms.” The reference was to a shooting affray over a poker hand: Jim Washburn, known as the meanest man in town, had slashed a card-player across the belly and received a bullet through the hips in return.

These submissions to Ottawa ended Fortymile’s free-and-easy existence. In 1894 Inspector Charles Constantine of the North West Mounted Police arrived – thickset, gruff, and incorruptible, the first Mountie to enter the Canadian northland. The following year a detachment of twenty joined him. They had scarcely established their barracks before a meeting was held to take away a claim from a man charged with defaulting on wages. Constantine reversed the verdict and abolished the miners’ meetings forever. He had been eight years in the police force, was known for his ability in a rough-and-tumble fight, and never spared himself. He called himself “chief magistrate, commander-in-chief and home and foreign secretary” of the town, and he took his duties so seriously that he had three tables in his cabin, each with a different kind of work on it; he moved continually from one to another, and this brief change of scene was the only respite he permitted himself. His iron hand was quickly felt in various small ways in the community: one of his first acts was to stop the dance-hall girls from wearing bloomers. Another was to collect the excise duty on all locally made hootchinoo. With these edicts, some of the freer spirits decided that the time had come to move again. Once more civilization had caught up to them.

4

The land of the
Golden Rule

Was it coincidence that in the same year when the first force of constabulary was embarking for the Yukon, an even more unconventional town was springing up farther downstream, to the northwest, on Alaskan soil? Probably. But for anyone chafing under new restraints, Circle City was a welcome haven.

Circle was McQuesten’s town. For years he and Harper had been grubstaking men to seek out the legendary “Preacher’s Creek,” on which a missionary had once seen gold by the spoonful. Two Russian half-breeds outfitted and encouraged by McQuesten finally found it in 1893 on the headwaters of Birch Creek, near the Arctic Circle. Within a year the region was producing an annual four hundred thousand dollars.

McQuesten built his new town in the dreariest section of the Yukon Valley, one hundred and seventy miles downstream from Fortymile, at the point where the river spills over the Yukon Flats. Here the hills suddenly lose their grandeur and seem to sicken and die until they decline into monotonous wastes of sand, while the main stream, broad as a lake and sluggish as a slough, describes its huge arc across the Arctic Circle for one hundred and eighty miles. There is no scenery here in the grand sense; only hundreds of islets and grey sand-bars on which ducks and snow geese and plover nest by the million.

The town was as drab as its surroundings, a hodge-podge of moss-chinked cabins scattered without plan along the curve of the riverbank and stitched together by a network of short streets which were little more than rivers of mud in the springtime. The mines were some eighty miles back from the river, for Birch Creek ran parallel to the Yukon before joining it at the end of its arc. The trail between Circle City and the mines led across a no-man’s land of swamp and muskeg and stunted spruce, empty of game but swarming during the summer with mosquitoes so thick that they blotted out the sun, suffocated pack horses by stopping their nostrils, and drove some men insane.

In this lugubrious settlement McQuesten was king. Above his two-storey trading post – the most imposing log structure in town – there rose a flagpole whose cross-arm was handily located in case a hanging should be required. Each year when the squaws, by custom, tossed every white man in a moose-skin blanket, McQuesten was honoured by being tossed first. It was traditional to let him escape, then bring him to bay in a mock battle. He invariably landed lightly on his feet, no matter how high he was tossed, and only at the last ceremony, in 1896, having grown old and bulky, toppled onto his back, whereupon the fat Indian women clustered about him, murmuring and patting him as a sign of sympathy.

By 1893 the trader’s former partners had scattered: Mayo was farther down the river at the mouth of Minook Creek, in the region where Ed Schieffelin had once poked about for gold; Harper and his partner, Joseph Ladue, had poled their way up the river, deep into Canadian territory. McQuesten staked everything he had on Circle. His credit was so liberal that by 1894 the miners owed him one hundred thousand dollars.

William Ogilvie, the Canadian government surveyor who established the boundary line between Alaska and Canada, once witnessed McQuesten’s credit system in operation. A miner came into the store from the creeks and asked McQuesten how much he owed.

“Seven hundred,” said the trader.

“Hell, Jack, I’ve only got five hundred. How’m I going to pay seven hundred with five?”

“Oh, that’s all right. Give us your five hundred and we’ll credit you and let the rest stand till next clean-up.”

“But, Jack, I want more stuff. How’m I going to get it?”

“We’ll let you have it, same as we did before.”

“But, damn it, Jack, I haven’t had a spree yet.”

“Well, go and have your little spree; come back with what’s left and we’ll credit you with it and go on as before.”

The miner had his spree; it took everything he had. McQuesten without a word gave him a five-hundred-dollar outfit and carried a debt of twelve hundred dollars against him on the books.

Such sprees were the high points of Circle’s social life. There was something almost ceremonial about them. A man on a spree moved from saloon to saloon, swinging a club as a weapon, threatening the bartenders, pouring the liquor himself, treating the house to cigars and hootch, then driving everybody ahead of him to the next saloon, where the performance was repeated. When a spree reached its height, the miners would line up on two sides of the saloon and throw cordwood at each other from the pile that stood beside the stove. Then someone would jump onto the water barrel to make a speech, upset it, and finally roll the stove itself, often red hot, around the floor. When the spree was over, the man who began it would hand his poke of gold dust to the saloon-keeper and ask him to take the damages out of it. A spree could last for several days, and one such bill for damages came to twenty-nine hundred dollars.

For Circle was subject only to the law of the miners’ meeting. In its first year it had no jail, no court house, no lawyers, and no sheriff, yet there was neither lock nor key in the community. It had no post office and no mail service, and a letter might take from two months to a year to reach its destination, arriving crumpled and odorous, impregnated with tar and bacon. It had no taxes and no banks except the saloons, where men kept their money; and the smallest coin in use was a silver dollar. It had no priest, doctor, church, or school, but it had the squaw men with Oxford degrees who could recite Greek poetry when they were drunk. It had no thermometers to measure the chilling cold, save for the bottles of quicksilver, whiskey, kerosene, and Perry Davis Painkiller which Jack McQuesten set outside his store and which froze in ascending order.

It was a community divorced from the customs of civilized society. A man might easily rise and eat breakfast at ten in the evening, since the summers were perpetually light and the winters perpetually dark. On cold days, when even the Painkiller froze in the bottles, it became a ghostly and silent settlement, the smoke rising in vertical pillars to form an encompassing shroud that seemed to deaden all sound save for the incessant howling of the ubiquitous sled dogs – the wolf-like huskies and the heavy-shouldered malemutes. These ravenous but indispensable creatures dominated the town. They were always hungry, and they gobbled everything in sight – leather gloves and harnesses, gun straps and snowshoes, pots of paste, miners’ boots and brushes, and even powdered resin, which was devoured as swiftly as it was sprinkled on the dance-hall floors. One man watched a dog eat a dish-rag whole for the sake of the grease in it; another stood helpless while a dog rushed into a tent and swallowed a lighted candle, flame and all. To prevent the dogs from eating their precious cakes of soap, the Indians hung them from the branches of trees. Circle’s skyline was marked by the silhouettes of log caches built on stilts to keep supplies away from the dogs, whose teeth could tear open a can of salmon as easily as if it were a paper package. There were those, indeed, who swore the dogs could tell a tin of marmalade from one of bully beef by a glance at the label.

Men crowded into Circle City ostensibly to look for gold, but they also came because they were the kind who wished to be left alone. Where else could a man attempt to cut his throat in plain view without anyone interfering? But here one did just that; his name was Johnson, and he made a bad job of it because he was drunk. The onlookers, seeing that he was obviously failing in his plan, patched him up and then told him courteously that he might try again if he wished. (He rejected the idea, grew a villainous black beard to hide his scars, and revelled ever after in the nickname of Cut-throat Johnson.)

Only when a man’s freedom of action encroached upon that of his neighbour did the miners’ meeting take hold. When a saloon-keeper seduced a half-breed girl, a meeting decreed that he must either marry her or spend a year in jail, even though there was no jail in town. The miners were quite prepared to build one on the spot, but were spared this labour by the accused, who chose a shotgun wedding.

Theft was a more heinous crime, and when one man stole from a cache his comrades sentenced him to hang. This was commuted to banishment when no one could be found to stretch the rope. The culprit was ordered to live by himself twelve miles out of town until the annual steamboat arrived. The miners gravely took up a collection, bought him a tent, stove, and provisions, bade him good-bye, and never saw or spoke to him again.

The U.S. government obviously considered these meetings lawful, for the verdict of one of them was sent to Washington and confirmed. This was a murder case involving a bartender named Jim Chronister and the same Jim Washburn whose shooting affray in Fortymile had so disturbed Bishop Bompas. After killing Washburn in self-defence, Chronister offered himself on trial to a miners’ meeting and was acquitted in just twenty minutes.

It was out of these meetings that the Miners’ Association, and later the Yukon Order of Pioneers, was formed, a fraternal organization whose emblem was the Golden Rule and whose motto was “Do unto others as you would be done by.” It sounds like a curiously saccharine slogan for a group of hard-bitten prospectors, but it was born of experience by men who had learned, over many years, the necessity of dependence upon one another. Each member pledged himself to help every other member should the need arise and always to spread the news of a fresh gold-discovery far and wide.

In the end, Circle City, more than four thousand miles by water from civilization, was not immune to the inevitable corrosion of mining-camp civilization. By 1896 it had a music hall, two theatres, eight dance halls, and twenty-eight saloons. It was known as “the Paris of Alaska,” where money was so free that day-labourers were paid five times as much as they were “Outside,” as the Alaskans called the rest of the civilized world.

In the big new double-decker Grand Opera House, George Snow, half miner, half entrepreneur, who had once starred with Edwin Booth in California, produced Shakespearean plays and vaudeville turns. Snow’s children appeared on the stage and picked up nuggets thrown to them by miners hungry for entertainment. One troupe of vaudevilleans, sealed in for the winter with only a limited repertoire, was forced to enact the same routines nightly for seven months until the audience howled as loudly as the malemutes who bayed to the cold moon.

Circle City grew richer. Into the bars roared the miners, flinging down handfuls of nuggets for drinks and dancing out the change at a dollar a dance. They danced with their hats on, clumping about the floors in their high-top boots; and they danced from midnight until dawn while the violins scraped and the sled dogs howled on.

Circle City grew bigger. A thick porridge of chips and sawdust from newly erected buildings mixed with the mud of the rutted streets. By 1896 it had twelve hundred citizens. John Healy’s N.A.T. Company opened up a store in opposition to Jack McQuesten of the A.C. Company. The Episcopal Church bought land for a hospital. The Chicago
Daily Record
sent a foreign correspondent into the settlement, which now boasted that it was “the largest log town in the world.”