Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (3 page)

In the face of this threat, the British government moved with commendable celerity. Within a few weeks, New Caledonia had become a crown colony under James Douglas, Governor of Vancouver Island, and a force of soldiers and lawmakers had been dispatched to the Fraser gold-fields. British justice arrived in the person of that be-whiskered giant, Matthew Baillie Begbie, who proceeded to enforce the law toughly but fairly for Canadian and American alike. Judge Begbie, who thought that democracy was akin to anarchy, established a territorial council whose authoritarianism came under bitter criticism, but he undoubtedly prevented bloodshed among both Indians and whites, saved British Columbia for Canada, and established a pattern that was clearly followed by the Canadian government in 1897 and 1898.

Begbie was to the Fraser and Cariboo gold rushes what Sam Steele was to the Klondike, and, indeed, there is a story told of him that is almost identical to one told of Steele during the great stampede.

“Prisoner,” Begbie told an American charged with assault, “I understand you come from the other side of the line. We will not put up with your bullying here. The fine is one hundred dollars.”

“That’s all right, Judge,” came the reply. “I’ve got that right here in my breeches pocket.”

“And six months’ hard labour. Perhaps you have that in your other pocket!”

The tale has become part of our authentic Canadian mythology, as any reader who compares it with the one on
this page
will realize.

The second clash between the American and British traditions led to the formation of the North West Mounted Police and the founding of a Canadian frontier mythology that contrasted dramatically with the American. In the late 1860’s, a veteran Indian fighter and lawman named John J. Healy (whom the reader will encounter throughout this book) moved up from Montana into what is now southern Alberta to build Fort Whoop-Up, the best known of the American “whiskey forts.” Healy and his fellows were intent on making their fortunes by selling a hideous concoction of raw whiskey, red pepper, Jamaica ginger, and hot water to the Indians in exchange for furs. Small wonder that the forts – Robbers’ Roost, Fort Stand-Off, Whiskey Gap, and others – were built of heavy logs and defended by cannon: under the influence of such a devil’s brew, the Indians were perfectly prepared to massacre the men who sold it to them. It was the natives, however, who suffered a massacre. Some thirty-six Assiniboines were cruelly butchered in the Cypress Hills by Yankee frontiersmen who clung to the tradition that the only good redskin was a dead one.

This was not the tradition of the Canadian frontier. Our handling of the Indians was both callous and unthinking, but our philosophy never included purposeful genocide. For one thing, the Indians were far too valuable to the paternalistic Hudson’s Bay Company to be slaughtered indiscriminately. The colonial government and its autonomous successors were equally paternalistic – towards whites as well as towards natives – and when news of the Cypress Hills affair reached Ottawa, the Mounted Police came into being with all the traditions of a colonial constabulary. When the Mounties reached the foothills of the Rockies, the whiskey traders fled. The old whiskey forts vanished to be replaced by neat barracks, scrubbed clean and whitewashed regularly. Discipline was such that, it was said, the constables often had to be carried onto the parade square feet first to avoid creasing their trousers before inspection. This was the legend of the Canadian west; the impeccable Mountie was a far cry from the rumpled town marshal.

From that moment on the prairies were safe from gunmen, vigilantes, whiskey traders, wolf hunters, wild Indians, thieves, and saloon-keepers. When the Canadian Pacific Railway was constructed, droves of American workmen poured across the border from the construction camps of the Northern Pacific. The police kept them in check. When several thousand of them rioted over lack of pay at Beavermouth on the Columbia in 1885, Inspector Sam Steele – the same Sam Steele who is a major figure in this book – rose from what appeared to be his deathbed and cowed them into submissiveness with nothing more than a loaded rifle and a copy of the Riot Act.

Oddly, it was Johnny Healy himself who brought the Mounted Police into the Canadian Yukon. He had been nurtured in an environment where the community made its own laws and he had flourished in it. But in Fortymile, he himself ran afoul of miners’-meeting justice and, remembering the very police who had driven him from the Canadian foothills, sent out a call for help. It was speedily answered.

The Mounties, then, were established in the Yukon well before the stampede burst upon the Klondike Valley, and so there was on hand a Canadian force for law and order to cope with the influx. It must be pointed out, in parenthesis, that there would have been no foreign problem at all if Canadians had not been so lenient about the pillaging of their own resources. Anybody could stake a claim in Canada and, after the payment of a small royalty, could take the gold out to a foreign land. The Americans were not so easy-going; only American citizens were allowed to mine for gold on United States soil or – as William Moore found out – to establish a townsite; Moore’s son Bernard had to become an American citizen before he could hold title to the plot that became part of Skagway. If the Klondike’s gold had been across the border, no Canadian could have mined it. As it was, much of the wealth taken from the famous creeks ended up in the United States.

The location of the border itself was a matter of dispute, and here the presence of the Canadian constabulary saved a portion of the Yukon for Canada. Because Charles Constantine was on hand at Fortymile to alert the Canadian government to the news of Carmack’s strike before the world was aware of it, Ottawa was able to rush a second detachment of police to the North before the gold rush began. Inspector Scarth and nineteen constables reached Fort Constantine on the Yukon on June 12, 1897. By October, another detachment with Major J. M. Walsh, the new commissioner of the Yukon, had reached the territory. This was augmented by further reinforcements during the winter of 1897–98.

Well before the main body of stampeders had launched itself at the passes in the spring of 1898, the police, armed with Winchester rifles and Maxim machine guns, were in possession of both the White Pass and Chilkoot summits and prepared to collect customs duties on all goods shipped across. This led to a tense situation with the American authorities, who believed that, under the terms of the 1867 treaty with Russia, Alaskan territory extended all the way back to Lake Bennett and continued for four miles beyond the lakehead. American argonauts, building boats along its shore and those of Lake Lindemann, were infuriated that they had to pay duty on construction materials while occupying soil they considered to be their own. A nasty border incident was clearly in the making. Judge John U. Smith, the United States commissioner at Skagway, took time off from feathering his own nest (he pocketed official fees and fines with wild abandon) and started to organize a company of volunteers to cross the mountains and establish the Stars and Stripes on Lake Bennett by force.

By this time Washington had dispatched four companies of infantry to Dyea and Skagway with instructions to “show the flag” and maintain order among the increasingly unruly civilian population. The officer in charge, Col. Thomas M. Anderson, sent a note to Inspector Steele demanding to know why the Canadians “found it necessary to exercise civil and military authority over American territory.” Steele forwarded the note to the new commissioner. Walsh, a one-time Mountie himself, refused to budge an inch. Indeed, he boldly seized the initiative by insisting that Canadian territory actually extended all the way to Skagway, though the Mounties had decided not to exert their authority over it. Anderson was convinced that the Canadians would not retreat. He forestalled the impetuous Smith, relayed his impressions to his superiors, and set in motion the long train of international arbitration that eventually resolved the dispute. Today the border runs along the summit of the passes, exactly where the Mounties had placed their machine guns.

The differing behaviour of the two military forces during the stampede – the American infantry companies and the Canadian Mounted Police – gives a further insight into Canadian and American attitudes towards law, order, freedom, and anarchy. The American style was to stand aside and let the civilians work out matters for themselves even at the risk of inefficiency, chaos, and bloodshed. The Canadian style was to interfere at every step of the way in the interests of order, harmony, and the protection of life and property.

During the entire stampede winter, with one brief exception, the United States military held themselves aloof from events in Skagway. The commissioner pocketed public funds; the deputy marshal worked hand in glove with gangsters; men were shot, robbed, and cheated; and the town was under the thrall of an engaging but unscrupulous confidence man who was even allowed to raise a personal army. Skagway was permitted to solve its own problems in the approved American frontier style. In the end, a vigilante committee was formed, the traditional shoot-out took place, and the dictator was violently removed from the scene. Only when the mob threatened to lynch one of the gang did the infantry step in to stop further bloodshed. But previous lynchings, hangings, and whippings had taken place on both American trails without interference from the authorities.

On the Canadian side of the passes, conditions were totally different. Here the soldiers were also policemen, appointed from above in the British colonial tradition. Their job was to maintain order, for it has seemed to be a Canadian quality to opt for order before freedom. The Canadians accepted the benevolent dictatorship of the Mounted Police as a later generation accepted the strictures of the War Measures Act in Quebec. Safety and security, order and harmony – these are qualities that Canadians prize more highly than their neighbours, in spite of all the talk of “law and order” south of the border. It is no accident that we have more per capita money safely invested in banks and insurance than any other civilized nation; the influence of the Loyalists and of the Scots (who control so many of our institutions, educational and financial) has made us a prudent race. “Welfare” is a word that has always smacked of authoritarianism to the American individualist; “security” was for years the object of propaganda attacks by American entrepreneurs. There was very little security in Skagway during the stampede winter, but on the Canadian side, packs loaded with nuggets could be left for a fortnight on the trail without being touched and boats could travel for five hundred miles through unknown waters and be reasonably sure of reaching their destinations because the Mounties, like stern fathers, were on hand to protect the boatmen from themselves. The Americans were often irked by this paternalism. At the Whitehorse Rapids, when Steele laid down the law and refused to allow them to take their own boats through, some of them protested aloud. The scene, which is almost Biblical in its intensity, could scarcely have occurred on the American side of the border, where every citizen considered he had the God-given right to drown himself if he wished.

This tension between the two North American styles was even more marked in that strangest of all international communities, Dawson City, where the Calvinist ethic collided with the American frontier tradition. The officials in Dawson were all Canadian; most of the entrepreneurs – the dance-hall owners, gamblers, and saloonkeepers – were American. An uneasy compromise was arrived at in which all sorts of illegal activities were allowed – but never on Sunday; in which prostitution was openly winked at – but risqué stage performances were strictly censored; in which public officials got away with accepting bribes – but men who chopped their own kindling on the Sabbath were hauled into police court and fined.

Some might call this Victorian hypocrisy, others Canadian common sense. Dawson, as Stroller White wrote, was “far from being a model for the Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavour but there was a gayety and lightheartedness about its sinning that was absent in Skagway. And while Dawson provided plenty of places and opportunities for the suckers to dispose of their money, the suckers were never steered, dragooned and bootjacketed into these places as they had been in Skagway.” For this, the Stroller, himself an American, credited the presence of the Mounted Police.

Dawson was also a gunless town, virtually devoid of violence. This is one of the several points of confusion about the Klondike that has bedevilled the American media. Writers of fact and of fiction and of motion picture and television scripts have never been able to get it into their heads that the right to carry a gun, of which Americans are so proud, has never been recognized on our side of the border. It is hard for Americans to realize that the Klondike strike took place on Canadian soil (letters still arrive, as they did in my day, addressed “Dawson City, Alaska”) and, when they do realize it, even harder for them to accept the fact that our customs and our traditions differ markedly from their own.

Shortly after
Klondike
was published in the United States, an American company purchased the television rights and proceeded to launch a series supposedly based on the incidents in the book. The original idea was to have an American frontier marshal play the central figure – until I explained to the production people that Canadians did not elect or even appoint frontier marshals. An alternative suggestion was mooted: the central character would be a “frontier marshal type,” elected by the miners of Dawson City to bring law and order to the Klondike. It became necessary then to explain that the Canadian government not only sent about forty Mounted Policemen to patrol the streets of Dawson but also prudently followed this up with a Yukon Field Force of more than two hundred soldiers. The television company finally decided to move the action out of Dawson and into Skagway, Alaska, where the myth of the American frontier could once again be acted out in all its familiar variations. The Canadian aspects of the tale were ignored but perhaps, in retrospect, that was for the best.