Alaska (100 page)

It didn't matter, for the lonely miners had come to see women, and many onlookers who constituted most of the paying audience did no dancing themselves. They watched, for they were the kinds of men to whom prostitutes would be unthinkable and actual participation in the dance improbable, or, in extreme cases, absolutely out of the question. They were men desperately wanting to see again what women looked like, and they were content to pay for the privilege.

At about eleven the fiddlers would stop, silence would fill the hall, and one by one the native women would depart, each one receiving a dollar for that night's performance.

On most nights no man would have spoken to any woman, or laughed with her, or touched even her arm, and it was customary, when the dance ended, for the women to be escorted home by their men, who had been waiting outside and who now preempted the dollar for family needs.

That was the famous Eskimo Dance, that curious symbol of man's loneliness and hunger for human association, and it came into being almost of necessity, because the men had persisted in coming into the arctic without their women.

At Nome the dance had a peculiarity which occasioned some difficulty for Missy Peckham, for she was an attractive little white woman with whom the miners wanted to dance in the American mode, and they urged her to attend. It was 606

flattering to have young men and some not so young lined up for every dance, but it also had its drawbacks, because during the course of any evening Missy would receive three or four invitations to move into the quarters of this miner or that, so she had constantly to explain that her man Murphy would be arriving from Dawson at any moment.

This caused merriment among her suitors: 'How's he gonna come down the Yukon? Swim?'

They pointed out that Murphy, if he really existed, which they doubted, 'couldn't no way get here before the June thaw, no boats runnin' so why waste the winter?'

She insisted that he would be arriving anytime now: 'He survived the Mackenzie River in Canada, and that's a lot tougher than the Yukon,' and like Penelope resisting the suitors who pestered her, Missy never deviated from her conviction that one of these days her Ulysses, through one device or another, would soon be joining her in Nome. But how he would accomplish this she did not know, and if someone had whispered to her what Matt's plan was, she would have thought the scheme plain crazy.

WHEN THE Jos. PARKER,

LAST SHIP OUT OF DAWSON for Nome, departed with Missy Peckham aboard, it left Matt Murphy stranded ashore, with several unappealing options as to how he might overtake his lady and join her in exploiting the town where 'gold nuggets the size of pigeon eggs can be picked up on the beach.' He could wait nine months till the Yukon thawed in the spring and catch the first boat down, but by then all the good spots would be taken. Or he could associate himself with some party of men trying to hike down, but as a fiercely independent Irishman, he did not trust group adventures. But doing it alone would necessitate the purchase of a dog team, a sled and enough meat to keep the dogs fit for two months as they tackled the thousand-mile run.

Rejecting all these choices, he settled upon one so bizarre that only a mad Irishman down on his luck could have dared it. Since the Yukon River would soon be frozen almost solid all the way to the Bering Sea, why not use it as a highway and to hell with waiting for it to thaw so that boats could navigate it? The idea was a sound one, but what to use for transportation if walking was out and no money was available for gear?

There was in Dawson a grubby store run by a shopkeeper from San Francisco who had found no gold. He dealt in everything, a kind of minimal hockshop with a worn set of

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scales for weighing gold dust and, inside his door, hung on pegs on the wall which kept it off

the ground, an almost new two-wheel bicycle made by Wm. Read & Sons of Boston. It was the top of their line and had sold in Seattle in 1899 for $105, which included a kit for mending tires, a clever tool for replacing broken spokes and twelve spare wire spokes.

Matt, entering the shop one day to pawn his last possessions for money to keep him alive during the Klondike winter, chanced to see this bicycle, and right then it came to him: 'A man could ride a contraption like that right down to Nome.' Only a man who had conquered the great Mackenzie River would entertain so daring a scheme for the Yukon.

'What would he use for roads?' the shopkeeper asked, and he was astounded when Matt said: 'The Yukon. Frozen all the way,' and the pawnbroker said: 'The Yukon don't go to Nome,' and Matt replied: 'But Norton Sound does, and it freezes solid too.'

Finally, after pawning his belongings, Matt asked: 'How much?' and the dealer said: 'That's a special bicycle,' and he showed Matt a paper which had come with it and which described the machine as 'Our New Mail Special model used widely by members of the Postal Service. $85.'

'Save it for me,' Matt said without hesitation, but the dealer said: 'It's a hundred and forty-five dollars,' and Matt said: 'It says here, plain as day, eighty-five,'

and the pawnbroker said: 'That was Boston. This is Dawson.'

During the next weeks Matt, captivated by the concept of bicycling to Nome, returned often to the shop to check whether the bicycle had been sold, and he was always relieved to see that it had not. However, two impediments stood in his way. He lacked the money to buy the bicycle, and even had he been able to do so, the machine would have been of little use to him, for he had never sat astride one and had almost no idea of how it worked.

When the great river froze, forming a highway, as he had said, 'right down to Nome,'

he became almost monomaniacal, badgering everyone in Dawson who had a spare dime to give him work. As October, November and December passed he painfully accumulated funds toward the purchase of the bicycle, and on 2 January 1900 he marched into the pawnshop and made a deposit of eighty dollars on the purchase. This done, he begged the owner to let him practice riding the contraption, and when the miners of Dawson saw him trying to pedal along their snow-covered roads, they said: 'We better lock him up to save his life,' and when they learned that he proposed making it all the way to Nome, they seriously considered keeping him in jail until his madness abated.

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But by the middle of February he made his last payment, and with skill painfully acquired, rode out to the middle of the river, where, with the temperature at minus-forty, he waved goodbye to the doubting watchers. At this late point he was struck with an idea that was going to make the long trip a kind of triumph: abruptly he turned and returned to shore, ignoring the jeers: 'One taste of that cold, he don't want it! He's brighter'n we thought!'

He had come back to acquire copies of four newspapers then circulating along the Klondike with the latest political news from the United States: Dawson Daily News, Dawson

Nugget, and the two with flaming red headlines, San Francisco Examiner and Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

With these stowed in his gear, he returned to the middle of the river and set forth.

Once his wheels adjusted to the extreme cold, they functioned perfectly, and to the amazement of the onlookers, he quickly disappeared from sight. Like his machine, Matt was undaunted by the cold, which was surprising because he was not dressed as one might have expected no heavy furs, no goggles, no immense sealskin cap with wolverine edging, no fur-lined mukluks. He wore pretty much what he would have worn on a cold, rainy day in Ireland: heavy boots, gamekeeper leggings, stout fur mittens, three woolen jackets, a scarf about his neck, an ingenious cap made of wool and fur with three big flaps, one for each ear, one to be pulled down to protect the eyes. As he pedaled out of Dawson, old-timers predicted: 'Absolutely impossible he can get to Nome. Hell, he won't even get to Eagle,' which was a mere ninety-five miles downriver.

Matt covered sixty-three miles that day, sixty-nine the next, and long before even he expected it, he pulled into Fort Yukon, and here his newspapers proved themselves, for the occupants of the rude hotel were so excited by the arrival of news from home that they stayed up all night reading the papers aloud while Matt slept, and in the morning the hotel manager would accept no money from him. Wherever he stopped along the river, and there was a surprising number of solitary cabins sheds dedicated to mail drops and camps from which woodsmen went out to cut logs in preparation for the summer steamer she and his bicycle were received with disbelief and his newspapers with joy. And even though this was midwinter, since the Yukon followed a course south of the Arctic Circle, there was a grayish light for five or six hours each day when the temperature rose to a comfortable minus-twenty.

Matt's New Mail Special performed even better than its 609

builders in Boston had predicted, and at the halfway mark he'd had no trouble with his tires except that they froze solid at anything below minus-forty, and only one loosened spoke. During the first days his personal gear, strapped to his back, did cause chafing, but he soon solved that problem by adjusting his pack, and during his long, solitary ride down the Yukon he often amused himself by bellowing old Irish songs. The only thing that held him up was an occasional bout of snow blindness, which he cured with a day's rest in some dark cabin.

He kept going at more than sixty miles a day, and once when he felt he had to make up lost time after an enforced halt because of the blindness, he did seventy-eight.

That night he shared a cabin with a toothless old-timer, who asked: 'You claim you come all the way from Dawson? How do I know that?' so Matt produced his newspapers with their dates of publication showing, and the old man said: 'So you think that git-up'll work on this 'ere river?'

'You don't have to carry food for dogs, or spend an hour cooking it at the end of the day,' to which the old man, recalling the hardships he had suffered with his dogs, replied: 'Yep, that would be an advantage.'

Rider and bike were in such excellent condition that when they reached Kaltag, the village which Father Fyodor Afanasi had served as missionary and in which he had married his Athapascan wife, Matt was emotionally prepared to face the difficult choice laid before him: 'You can continue down the Yukon, more than four hundred miles to the Bering Sea, or you can leave the river for a sixty-mile hike across the mountains to Unalakleet.”

'How do I get my bicycle across?'

'You carry it.'

Matt chose the mountains, and after finding an Indian to lug his gear, he dismantled his bicycle as best he could, lashed it to his back, and climbed the eastern slopes, then scrambled down to the welcome sight of Unalakleet perched on the edge of Norton Sound, which was, as he had anticipated, beautifully frozen all the way to Nome.

Glad to be riding again, he set out blithely on the final dash, a hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies, and on 29 March 1900 at about four in the afternoon he pedaled his way down Front Street in Nome. He was a man who had accomplished one of the remarkable travel adventures of the dying century: Dawson to Nome, solo, depth of winter, thirty-six days.

After turning his bicycle over to admiring bystanders and delivering his four newspapers to the editor of the local 610

paper, he hurried to meet Missy Peckham, who embraced him ardently and informed him: 'All the good mining sites are taken, but I'm sure you can get a job somewhere. I did.'

DURING THE LAST WEEK IN FEBRUARY, WHILE MATT Murphy and his bicycle were still on the Yukon, the testing time came for men and women living in northern Alaska. Existence was brutal. All through February wind howled in from the Bering Sea, and although little snow fell, it was so whipped about that a ground blizzard obscured buildings just half a block away. Now came the feared whiteout, when earth and horizon and sky blended into one gauzelike whole and trappers went blind if they lacked eye shields.

What made this time more difficult were the huge blocks of ice that forced their way upward through the layers of ice already covering the Bering Sea, for they loomed ominously, casting weird shadows when either the midnight moon or the wan noontime sun shone upon them.

'I'll be glad when February goes,' Tom Venn said as he watched the sea from his store, but a knowing woman customer warned: 'March is the bad month. Watch out for March.'

She did not, during that visit, explain this strange statement, and when March did arrive, it brought such fine weather that Tom felt a surge of spring, and he was most pleased when the days began to lengthen and the sea started to look as if would soon relax its icy grip enough to allow ships to arrive. Four days later, when the weather was still perfect, the woman returned: 'These are the dangerous days. Husbands start to beat their wives, and men sharing one hut as mining partners begin to quarrel and suddenly shoot each other.'

Shortly thereafter, news of two such scandalous affairs reached Tom, and when he asked why they had happened just as winter was relaxing its hold, the same woman customer explained: 'That's the reason! In dark January and February, you know you have to remain strong. But in March and April, we have more daylight than dark. Everything seems to be brighter. But the fact is, we face three more long months of winter.

March, April, May. The sun shines but the sea remains frozen. We feel life moving but the damned sea stays blocked, and we begin to shout at our friends: ”When will this thing ever end?”Watch out for March!' And Tom found that he was reacting exactly as she had described: he felt winter should be over; ships ought to be coming in with new stores; and there stood the frozen sea, 611

its great hummocks immobile in the ice as if winter would never end.

In his seventeen years he had never experienced a worse month than May when it was spring throughout the world, even in the arctic. Yet still the sea remained locked in the grip of winter. And then, as May ended, the Bering Sea began to break up into monstrous icebergs as big as cathedrals, and despite the fact that navigation was now at its most perilous, for one of these mighty bergs could crush any ordinary vessel, men began to speculate on how soon ships could begin to arrive.