Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (12 page)

4

The kings of
Eldorado

By the end of August all of Bonanza Creek had been staked, and new prospectors, arriving daily, were fanning out across the Klondike watershed looking for more ground. None realized it, but the richest treasure of all still lay undiscovered.

Down Bonanza, in search of unstaked ground, trudged a young Austrian immigrant named Antone Stander. For nine years, ever since he had landed in New York City from his home province of Unterkrien, Stander had been seeking his fortune in the remote corners of the continent, working as a cowboy, as a sheep-herder, as a farmer, as a coal-miner, and now as a prospector. When he arrived in the New World, unable to speak a word of English, he had just one dollar and seventy-five cents to his name, and after mastering the language and walking over most of North America on foot he was no richer. All his funds had been spent on the trip north in the spring of 1896. Now, on this last day of August, he was embarking on a final gamble.

He was a handsome man, just twenty-nine years old, with dark, curly hair and sensitive, romantic-looking features. As he reached the south fork of Bonanza Creek, a few hundred feet above Carmack’s claim, he stopped to examine it curiously. Later Stander would look back upon this as the climactic moment of his life, for after this day nothing was ever again the same for him. The narrow wooded ravine, with a trickle of water snaking along its bottom, still had no name. The prospectors referred to it in Yukon parlance as “Bonanza’s pup.” It was soon to be known as Eldorado.

Stander arrived at the fork with four companions, all of whom had already staked on Bonanza. They had little faith in their property, but on an impulse they walked up the pup in a group and sank their pans into the sand. Like Stander, each had reached the end of the line financially. One, Jay Whipple, was an old prospector who had come down from the Sixtymile country. Another, Frank Keller, had been a railway brakeman in California. A third, J. J. Clements of New York, had almost starved to death the previous winter. The fourth, Frank Phiscator, a Michigan farm boy, had worked his way west, carrying the mail on horseback in order to earn enough money to come north. Now they stared into the first pan and, to their astonishment, saw that there was more than six dollars’ worth of gold in the bottom. They had no way of knowing it, but this was the richest creek in the world. Each of the claims staked that day eventually produced one million dollars or more.

As Stander and his companions drove in their stakes, others up and down Bonanza began to sense by some curious kind of telepathy, that something tantalizing was in the wind. Louis Emkins, a lean-faced and rangy prospector from Illinois, was toiling up Bonanza when he saw will-o’-the-wisp campfires flickering among the bushes of the unexplored creek. It was enough to send the blood pulsing through his veins. He and his three companions quickened their pace and burst upon Stander and the others, who tried to discourage the newcomers, saying that the prospects were small and only on the surface. Already the old code of the Pioneers was being thrown into discard.

Two of the men turned back at once, a fortune slipping from their grasp, but Emkins and his partner George Demars stayed on.
Seven
had already been staked illegally for a friend in Fortymile, but Emkins, a resolute figure with a forbidding black moustache, would have none of it. He tore up the stakes and substituted his own and by that single action made himself wealthy. Within a year he was able to sell out for more than one hundred thousand dollars.

William Johns, a black-bearded and rawboned ex-newspaper reporter from Chicago, was at the mouth of Eldorado when Emkins’s two discouraged comrades emerged talking disconsolately of “skim diggings” on a moose flat. Some sixth sense told Johns to prospect the pup anyway. He had a strange feeling that something important was afoot, and this sensation increased when he met Emkins and Demars, who were elaborately casual about their prospects, and then Frank Keller, Stander’s companion, who was curiously evasive about what he had found.

When Johns and his three Norwegian companions headed up the new creek the following day, one of them pointed dramatically to the water:

“Someone’s working; the water’s muddy!”

The four men crept upstream, alert and silent – “like hunters who have scented game,” as Johns put it. Suddenly they surprised Stander crouching over a panful of gold with three of his companions crowding about him. They looked “like a cat caught in a cream pitcher,” and Johns and his friends needed no further encouragement to stake. One of the Norwegians who had read a great deal named the new creek Eldorado, more or less as a joke, but, as it turned out, the title was entirely appropriate.

To the newcomers, however, this narrow cleft in the wooded hills was just another valley with good surface prospects. These really meant very little, for gold lying in the gravels on the creek’s edge did not necessarily mean that the valley was rich. Before that could be determined, someone would have to go through the arduous labour of burning one or more shafts down at least fifteen feet to bedrock, searching for the “pay-streak” (which might not exist), hauling the muck up by windlass to the surface, and washing it down to find out how much gold there really was. This back-breaking labour could easily occupy two months. Even then it was pure guesswork to estimate a claim’s true worth. Until the spring thaw came and the rushing creek provided enough head of water to wash thoroughly the gravels drawn up the shaft all winter, no one could really say exactly how rich Eldorado was – if, indeed, it was rich at all.

Most of the men who staked claims on the new creek in that first week had already done their share of prospecting. They had sunk shafts and shovelled gravel on creek after creek in the Yukon watershed without success. To them this little pup looked exactly like any other in the territory. If anything, it looked scrawnier and less attractive. To most men, then, Eldorado was as much of a gamble as the Irish sweepstakes. Some, such as Stander, determined to take the gamble and hold their ground and work it to see whether it really did contain gold. Others decided to sell out at once for what they could get. Still others bravely set out to take the risk and then got cold feet and sold before the prize was attained.

Nobody then knew, of course, that this was the richest placer creek in the world, that almost every claim from
One
to
Forty
was worth at least half a million, that some were worth three times that amount, and that a quarter of a century later dredges would still be taking gold from the worked-over gravels.

But in that first winter enormous untapped fortunes changed hands as easily as packages of cigarettes, and poor men became rich and then poor again without realizing it. Jay Whipple, for instance, sold claim
One
almost immediately, for a trifle. The purchaser, a lumberman from Eureka, California, named Skiff Mitchell, lived for half a century on the proceeds.

Frank Phiscator, on
Two
, saw fortune slipping from his grasp on two occasions, but in each instance retrieved it. He had scarcely hammered his stakes into the ground when F. W. “Papa” Cobb, known as one of Harvard’s best quarterbacks, tried to seize it from him. Cobb insisted that Phiscator already had a claim on Bonanza, therefore could not legally stake a second one on Eldorado. This was true, but Constantine of the Mounted Police, who always tempered justice with common sense, decided that Cobb was too greedy since he could easily have staked close to Phiscator without causing a fuss. Thus did a fortune elude Cobb. Yet Phiscator thought so little of his claim that he sold half of it for eight hundred dollars, only to buy it back later in the year for fifteen thousand.

Charles Lamb, who had been dismissed from his job as a Los Angeles streetcar conductor and had come north as the result of a swindle, hung on to claim
Eight
. Two years later he and his partner sold it for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

George Demars sold half of
Nine
for eight hundred dollars. Within three years it was valued at a million.

William Johns, the newspaperman, immediately sold half his claim,
Twelve
, for five hundred dollars and considered himself lucky to unload it. Three months later he sold the other half for twenty-five hundred. The claim was one of the richest on the creek.

On September 5, a few days after Eldorado was discovered, the Alaska Commercial Company’s steamer
Alice
arrived at the Klondike loaded with men from Fortymile, and the rest of the creek was quickly staked.

A group of Scotsmen from the British Columbia coal-mining town of Nanaimo staked
Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen
, and
Seventeen
. Rather than keep all their eggs in one basket, they abandoned
Sixteen
and
Seventeen
in order to retain staking rights on another creek. The other creek turned out poorly, but
Sixteen
was the most incredible claim of all Eldorado. It was re-staked by a muscular, God-fearing young man named Thomas Lippy, who had been a
YMCA
physical instructor in Seattle and had thrown up everything the previous spring because a hunch told him to head north. Lippy had already staked higher up on Eldorado, but, because his wife was with him and wanted to live in a cabin, he decided to move down the creek where the timber was better. It was a providential move. There was little gold in the upper reaches of Eldorado, but
Sixteen
produced $1,530,000 for Lippy.

Two of the Nanaimo boys next door to Lippy got cold feet when their shaft reached the eighteen-foot level. They were unsure of finding gold and were happy to sell out their interests to Bill Scouse and his two brothers for fifty thousand dollars each. A third man hung on. His share of the clean-up that spring came to fifty thousand, and there were hundreds of thousands left in the ground.

On the other side of Lippy’s claim was
Seventeen
, also rejected by the Nanaimo group. It was staked by French Joe Cazalais, who sold it almost immediately for six hundred dollars to Arkansas Jim Hall, a veteran of ten years in the Yukon, and to his partner, a French-Canadian squaw man, N. E. Picotte. The pay-streak on this claim was the widest in the country, extending five hundred feet from rim to rim, and when Picotte and Hall discovered how rich it was, they gave French Joe seventy-five feet of it as a consolation prize.

So the roulette wheel spun around on Eldorado. Al Thayer and Winfield Oler had staked out
Twenty-Nine
and, believing it worthless, returned to Fortymile, looking for a sucker on whom to unload it. They found their quarry in Jimmy Kerry’s saloon in the person of Charley Anderson, a thirty-seven-year-old Swede with a pinched face, who had been mining for several years out of Fortymile. Anderson was so doubtful of the Klondike that he had delayed his trip to the new field until all the ground was gone. Now he was drinking heavily, and Oler, a small and slender man from Baltimore, saw his chance. Anderson woke up the next morning to find he had bought an untried claim for eight hundred dollars. He went to the police post to ask Constantine to retrieve his money for him, but the policeman pointed out that his signature was on the title. Anderson glumly headed for Eldorado. He had no way of knowing yet that a million dollars’ worth of gold lay in the bed-rock under his claim and that for the rest of his life he would bear the tag of “the Lucky Swede.” As for Oler, he became the butt of so many jokes that he fled the country in disgust.

Next door to Charley Anderson, on
Thirty
, the groundwork for the most staggering fortune of all was being laid. The claim had been staked by Russian John Zarnowsky, who thought so little of it that he let half of it go for a sack of flour and a side of bacon. The purchaser was an elephantine Nova Scotian known as “Big Alex” McDonald, who until this moment had known neither weal nor leisure. But the pay-streak on
Thirty
was forty feet wide, and a man could, and did, pan five thousand dollars from it in a single day. With this purchase McDonald began his lightning ascent from unlettered daylabourer to Dawson aristocrat. Any ordinary creature would have been content with this single piece of ground which was rich enough to maintain a platoon for a lifetime, but McDonald was not ordinary. This fortuitous acquisition unleashed within him some hitherto inactive demon, which drove him on for the remainder of his days with an intensity of purpose in sharp contrast to his ponderous appearance. Because of his size and his awkward movements McDonald was known as the Big Moose from Antigonish. He spoke slowly and painfully, rubbing his blue jowls in perplexity, his great brow almost hidden by a shock of sable hair, his heavy lips concealed by a moustache of vaudevillean proportions. The effect was primeval, but Big Alex in spite of his Neanderthal appearance, was one of the shrewdest men in the North. While others sold, he bought – and he continued to buy as long as there was breath in his body. Within a year he was famous, hailed on three continents as “the King of the Klondike,” sought out by Pope, prince, and promoter.