Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (49 page)

This wretched, swampy land was prohibitively expensive. Building-lots were fetching as much as forty thousand dollars. The cheapest single room on the far edge of town rented for a hundred a month, while log cabins in good locations were bringing up to four hundred. Along the waterfront, the government was leasing property for twelve dollars per front foot per month. Signor Gandolfo, the Italian merchant, managed to secure for his fruit stand a slender space just five feet square for which he was happy to pay a monthly one hundred and twenty dollars. A four-room apartment in New York City could have been leased for two years for exactly the same amount, but then the value of money in the two cities was hardly comparable. In New York two baskets of tomatoes could be had for a nickel. At Gandolfo’s they sold for five dollars a pound.

Dawson’s character and shape changed from day to day. Tents, cabins, and men were being shifted constantly, and, as there were no street addresses, it was difficult for new arrivals to find their friends. Those who had spent months in each other’s company lost track of one another. Most had been known on the trail by their first names or by their nicknames; now, dumped from their boats, they were lost in the swirling crowd that moved restlessly back and forth along Front Street. Dwelling-places, in lieu of addresses, acquired nicknames of their own, such as “the cabin with the screen door,” or “the big tent with two stovepipes,” or “the slabhouse facing the river.” The only way to find an acquaintance was to post a notice on the bulletin board at the A.C. store.

NOTICE
Lost

June 24, 1898 about 11 at night a gold sack containing all a poor woman had: between Old Man Buck (Choquette) cabin and small board House selling Lemonade upon bank on the Troandike River any person finding same will confer a very great favor a poor woman who is sick and must go out. she made Her Dust by washing and mending a Liberal reward will be paid by Enquiring at Ferry Beer Saloon at Lousetown Bridge.

An Oxford don, Arthur Christian Newton Treadgold, who had dropped his classical career to join the stampede, described for the
Manchester Guardian
the scene on Front Street in July: “The main street is nearly always crowded with men trying to find one another for … it is a hard matter to find a man in Dawson and much time is wasted thereby. When you find your man the two of you sit on the edge of the sidewalk (raised a foot above the road for cleanliness) and talk. This is a picturesque sight, for men are of all nations in all kinds of quaint garments, standing or sitting in business on the main street.”

Some men died and their friends did not hear the news for weeks. Others suffering from typhoid and scurvy were spirited off to hospital and given up by their comrades, who could not find them. If a man so much as moved his tent he was often lost to his friends. There is one ghoulish tale of a new arrival who spent weeks searching for a missing partner until one day he was asked to act as pallbearer at the funeral of a typhoid victim. He accepted and shouldered his burden, but before the last rites were read he looked casually at the corpse in its pine box. To his horror, he found himself gazing down upon the dead face of the friend he sought.

2

Carnival summer

By July 1, Dawson City had two banks, two newspapers, five churches, and a telephone service. The Yukon Telegraph Company strung its first wire and shouted its first “hello” from the Dominion Hotel to its main office in Lousetown; its best-known stockholder was Big Alex McDonald. The two papers were locked in a circulation duel, each with its own cartoonist, its own press, arid its own engraving-plant. The copies were snapped up quickly at fifty cents, and the newsboys who peddled them could expect in addition substantial tips from the Eldorado kings, hungry for news and willing to pay for it. Charley Anderson, the Lucky Swede, gave one boy fifty-nine dollars in gold for a single paper.

Others made small fortunes importing papers from the Outside. An enterprising Polish gambler named Harry Pinkert arranged to have the San Francisco papers send to the Klondike surplus copies of their Sunday editions which he agreed to distribute as free advertising. He made a killing selling these at fifty cents each. So great was the hunger for Outside news that the bundles were tossed from the upper decks of the steamboats before they docked, and the newsboys were able to sell as many as four hundred by the time the boats were tied up.

In addition to Father Judge’s Roman Catholic church, four other faiths were establishing themselves in Dawson: the Church of England, the Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church, and the Salvation Army. Hall Young, one of Alaska’s best-known Protestant ministers, had arrived in 1897 and opened a Presbyterian church in a cabin rented from a saloon-keeper, using blocks of wood and rough planks for pews, a miner’s copper blower as a collection plate, and a whiskey bottle for a candelabrum. He was replaced the following summer by a Canadian, Dr. Andrew S. Grant, a surgeon who had studied under Osler and then taken to the cloth. Young’s makeshift church had burned to the ground, and Grant held services in the Pioneers’ Hall until the building was submerged in the spring floods. Nothing daunted, the minister gathered up his flock and marched them to St. Paul’s Anglican Church, walking in through the doors just as the congregation commenced to sing the second stanza of a grand old hymn:

See the mighty host advancing
,
Satan leading on
.

But temples to Mammon were rising as swiftly as those to God. The Bank of British North America won its race with the Bank of Commerce and opened for business in a tent with an unplaned board for a counter and an old open trunk as a safe. Here, in careless piles, lay thousands of dollars in currency to be traded for gold dust at sixteen dollars an ounce. David Doig, the manager, a shrewd Scot, lived in appropriate style. He enjoyed whiskey, cigars, and women, dined on
pâté
, oysters, and caviar, wore a soft slouch hat and grey flannels in the English style, smoked a small wooden pipe with a white horn mouthpiece, played the harmonium, made a habit of drinking a pint of champagne for breakfast, and brought a general air of sophistication to the community.

The Canadian Bank of Commerce was not far behind. Its foresight in bringing an assay plant over the pass enabled it to buy gold dust the moment it opened and to make outward shipments ahead of its rival. Within two weeks it sent three quarters of a million dollars out aboard the
Weare
.

The bank immediately issued one million dollars’ worth of the paper money brought in over the trail, with the words “
DAWSON
” or
“YUKON
“ surprinted on each bill in heavy type, a precautionary measure taken in case the entire issue should be lost en route to the Klondike. Miners discounted their gold in order to obtain the less awkward bank-notes, and before long paper currency from almost every country was circulating in Dawson, including Confederate notes and bills on the Ezra Meeker Bank, which had gone out of business a quarter-century before. Everything from gold dust to scraps of paper was used as legal tender, and the Bank of Commerce on one occasion cleared a three-dollar cheque made from a six-inch square of spruce plank with a nail driven through it for the convenience of the filing clerk.

In spite of the new notes, the great medium of exchange continued to be gold dust, and because of its uncertain quality a continual tug-of-war was maintained between merchant and customer. Most men used the so-called “commercial dust,” heavily laced with black sand, to pay their bills. As the bank valued this commercial dust at only eleven dollars an ounce, a customer using it to buy groceries or whiskey could reckon that he was saving five dollars an ounce, since the normal price of clean Klondike gold ran around sixteen dollars – and the tradesmen tacitly accepted all dust at this price. This profit was increased by some who judiciously salted their pokes with fine brass filings. On the other hand, the bartenders and commercial businessmen weighed the dust carelessly, so that a poke worth one hundred dollars was usually empty after seventy dollars’ worth of purchases were made. Thus, as was often the case in the Klondike, the gain was largely ephemeral.

The Bank of Commerce occupied a small building that had once been used for storing fish, and it kept its money in two big wooden chests. One of its first customers was a plump and heavily rouged dance-hall girl who walked up to an astonished clerk with the words: “Have you got my tights and slippers? I’m Caprice.” The manager was hastily summoned, as the only official equipped to deal with such an unorthodox request. Caprice repeated the query, adding that “Joe Brooks told me he’d send them here.” After a hasty search, the bank discovered that ever since Skagway it had been carrying with its bank-notes a parcel containing Caprice’s brief but effective costume.

Another early customer was Big Alex McDonald, and the bank’s official history describes his first verbal statement of his business affairs as “a classic.” It took the combined staff several hours to extract all the necessary information from the slow-spoken King of the Klondike. Each time he was about to sign a deposition listing his assets he would drop the pen, rub his chin, and exclaim that he had just remembered another claim he owned. The list, when it was at last completed, showed fifty mining properties. McDonald at once borrowed an enormous sum from the bank to buy another, and before the summer was over had recovered the purchase price, paid off the loan, and realized an equal amount in gold dust as profit.

By this time Dawson was crawling with men. In one month it had become the largest Canadian city west of Winnipeg – and Winnipeg itself was not much larger. In size of population, Dawson was only slightly smaller than the Pacific-northwest cities of Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland, and it dwarfed both Vancouver and Victoria. A rough census by the Mounted Police in midsummer put its population at about eighteen thousand, with another five thousand or more working and prospecting on the creeks. But with men continually arriving and leaving, changing their addresses, moving into the hills and back into town, pouring off the steamboats and back aboard again, it was really impossible to estimate the true population at any given moment. The police calculated that more than twenty-eight thousand men had passed the Tagish post, but that five thousand of these had stopped to prospect on the tributaries of the Yukon before reaching Dawson in 1898. Another five thousand or more, however, arrived from various other points, largely via St. Michael, on board one of the sixty steamboats that made the trip up the river that summer. The
Klondike Nugget
reckoned that sixty thousand persons would reach the gold-fields before freeze-up, which would have made Dawson the largest city north of San Francisco and west of Toronto. This was probably an exaggeration, but undoubtedly well over half that number did touch at the Klondike for a few hours or a few days or a few months to form part of the jostling throng that plodded up and down, “curious, listless, dazed, dragging its slow lagging step along the main street.”

The strange lassitude of the crowd tramping slowly back and forth through the mud was one of the singular features of Dawson in the summer of 1898. It was as if the vitality that had carried these men across the passes and down the rivers, shouting, singing, bickering, and slaving, had been sapped after ten months of struggle. For the best part of a year each had had his eyes fixed squarely upon a goal and had put everything into attaining that goal: but now that the goal was reached, all seemed to lose their bearings, and eddied about in an aimless fashion like a rushing stream that has suddenly been blocked. Some took out miners’ licences and went through the motions of searching for gold. Paul T. Mizony, a seventeen-year-old from San Diego, wrote that “hundreds … expected all they would have to do was to pick the nuggets above the ground and some even thought they grew on bushes.” But there were large numbers who spent only a few days in Dawson and did not even bother to visit the hypnotic creeks that had tugged at them all winter long. They turned their faces home again, their adventure over; and by August the
Nugget
reported that a third of them had departed. It was as if they had, without quite knowing it, completed the job they set out to do and had come to understand that it was not the gold they were seeking after all.

All of them realized at last that none had won the great race to the Klondike; the best ground had long been staked out by men who were on the spot before the name became a byword. Yet none had lost either. There was a strange satisfaction in the simple fact that they had made it. Suddenly they uncoiled, like springs that have been wound too tightly, and hundreds began to seek out, sheepishly, the former friends with whom they had quarrelled in the tense months on the trail, until the sweet laughter of reunion rippled across the canvas city.

All summer long, thousands of aimless men shuffled up and down Front Street, still dressed in the faded mackinaws, patched trousers, and high-laced boots of the trail. Their faces, like their clothes, seemed to be the colour of dust, seasoned in the crucible of the mountains; they wore their fur hats, many of them, as a kind of badge, with their snow-glasses still perched above them, and many retained their unkempt beards as if in memory of the winter of their travail.

They were like a crowd on a holiday, sightseers at the carnival of the Klondike. They jostled each other and they pointed as the Eldorado kings went by – at the Berrys and the Stanleys, at Big Alex, the Lucky Swede, Dick Lowe, and Antone Stander. These men, who a few years before had been cheechakos themselves, were now the star attractions of the Front Street midway as they played to the grandstand from their boxes in the Combination dance hall, where each door was marked with the name of a famous creek and where every pint of champagne was worth two ounces of gold.