Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (62 page)

The Grizzly Bear, a gargantuan woman who weighed one hundred and seventy pounds, had an eye missing: it had been torn from her head, so it was whispered, in a fight with another dance-hall girl. The most printable explanation for the Oregon Mare’s nickname was that she whistled and squealed like a horse when she was dancing, but it was said that she had other equine talents as well. She was one of the best-known girls in town – a big, handsome woman who made men get off the sidewalk when she walked by. Seldom short of funds, she would, when in an expansive mood, stand up at the bar and cry: “Here, boys – there’s my poke. Have a drink with me, all of you.” Jeremiah Lynch, an ex-senator from California, saw her spend one thousand dollars in a single hour at roulette. Like so many others, she wore a heavy nugget chain, the gift of an admirer, and was reputed to have hidden away fifty thousand dollars with which she helped pay off the mortgage on her mother’s ranch near Sacramento.

The Oatley Sisters were, in the words of one newspaper correspondent, “the queens of the gold-fields.” The Dyea
Trail’s
Dawson correspondent reported in the summer of 1898 that “their capacity for drink, if nothing else, should attract a good patronage out of mere curiosity to see two girls who are put to bed drunk every night and who yet retain the bloom of youth, bright eyes, good voice and lively heels. They are the wonders of their kind.”

The most successful and celebrated of all the Dawson dance-hall queens was a diminutive redhead with large brown eyes named Cad Wilson, who was brought to Dawson at the highest salary ever paid to an entertainer on the Pacific coast. She was no beauty and she could not sing very well, nor did she have a good figure, but her personality was such that men vied with each other to throw nuggets and gold watches and pieces of jewellery onto the stage when she appeared. She would run about, laughing her famous laugh, picking up the baubles, and holding her dress out, apron-like, to display her legs. The audience stood on the benches in the Tivoli and the Orpheum when she sang and danced, and cheered for encore after encore.

She made no secret of the fact that she was in town to separate miners from their pokes. Eddie Dolan, the stage-manager at the Tivoli, used to introduce Cad when she first appeared on the stage. Dolan would pretend that he had seen a letter from the actress’s mother telling her “to be sure and be a good girl and pick nice clean friends.” Then he would turn to the audience, wave Cad on with a flourish, and cry: “I leave it to you, fellers, if she don’t pick ’em clean!”

Soon Cad was sporting the largest and most famous nugget belt in the Klondike. It was presented to her one Fourth of July by a group of Eldorado claim-owners who had been arguing for months as to who had found the biggest nugget. Each man put his choicest nugget into Cad’s belt, which was so large that it went around her waist one and a half times, and made such a glittering display that a Klondike jewellery store asked and received permission to exhibit it in the window.

Cad Wilson’s theme song, “Such a Nice Girl, Too,” became a byword in Dawson. One man was so enamoured of her that he paid a waiter to fill a bathtub full of wine, purchased at twenty dollars a bottle, for her to bathe in. She did not so much as allow him the privilege of scrubbing her back or watching her splash about in the tub, and there was a good deal of speculation as to whether she took the bath at all. Bert Parker wrote that he was sure of one thing: “The wine would be salvaged, re-bottled and go into circulation again.”

All of these women were a cut above the common prostitutes who inhabited Paradise Alley and who were later moved to a section of swampland well back from the business section and known as “Hell’s Half Acre.” The girls in the dance halls enjoyed freedom to come and go as they pleased and to pick and choose among the men who lavished attention upon them, but the prostitutes were white slaves in the proper sense of the word. Paradise Alley ran conveniently behind dance-hall row, and here, from a double line of identical frame shacks, each with a single window facing the two board sidewalks that ran down the narrow street, the girls plied their trade. There were at least seventy of these “cribs,” with a girl’s name painted on every door.

In the early days these women had been spread all about town, identified by a red lampshade or a special colour of curtains or a certain shape of cap. In the spring and summer of 1898 they lived in open tents all along the street like “a small-town annual fair for breeding animals,” as one reporter put it. The most notorious of all, Big Sal, pitched her own tent in the middle of a roadway with her name painted on the front in large letters. But Sam Steele made them move to one section of the town, and from then on they were barred from the streets until four in the afternoon. They lived a wretched life, for most of them were in bondage for their passage money to the pimps who had brought them to the Klondike.

It is doubtful if the girls who laughed and sang so easily in the dance halls were really much happier. Most of them were involved in tempestuous love affairs, not with the miners who coveted them so much, but with the gamblers and saloon-keepers and dance-hall operators. In the winter of 1898–99 the
Nugget
periodically reported the suicides or attempted suicides of half a dozen of them: of Stella Hill, a nineteen-year-old from Oregon who swallowed strychnine four days before Christmas when she learned that her boy friend, the bartender at the Pioneer, had taken up with another woman; of Libby White, whose lover, a one-time Welsh miner, shot her to death in the Monte Carlo in a fit of jealousy and then took his own life; of Helen Holden, who tried to kill herself with chloroform because she was insanely jealous of a saloon proprietor.

The most pathetic tale of all was the tragedy of Myrtle Brocee, one of two sisters who danced and sang at the Tivoli. She shot herself to death in a room over Sam Bonnifield’s gambling-house in a fit of despondency. The coroner’s inquest into her death was marked by an odd gallantry: half a dozen men took the stand to testify that they had been sleeping with Miss Brocee, but each blandly swore under oath that, though he had shared her bed, she remained virtuous to the end. She had been living with Harry Woolrich, one of the most famous of the Klondike gamblers, and it was, indeed, in his room that she took her life, but Woolrich testified with a straight face that his bed companion was a virgin. The remarkable instance of mass chivalry on the part of the leaders of the demi-monde inspired the entire community, and when Myrtle Brocee, her honour preserved, went to her rest, it was in a coffin with silver-plated handles and a silken interior of blue and white, and with half of Dawson weeping quietly at the graveside.

5

Fortune’s wheels

In the gaming-rooms, which ran twenty-four hours a day, the gold never stopped circulating.

The entire stampede, from the first moment when Carmack met Henderson, had been an enormous and continual gamble, and when the rush reached its height men were ready to make any kind of wager for any kind of reason. Two old-timers bet ten thousand dollars on the accuracy with which they could spit at a crack in the wall. Swiftwater Bill and John J. Healy lost five thousand dollars between them in a single side bet on a stud-poker game in which they were merely kibitzers. Thomas Wiedemann stood in the gaming-room of the Northern one night in the fall of ’98 and watched a neatly dressed man with clean-cut features thoughtfully saunter over to the roulette wheel and lay a thousand-dollar bill on the red. The black came up. He laid a second on the red, and again the black came up, and so he laid a third and lost again. Ten times he laid a thousand dollars down upon the green baize table, and ten times he lost. He showed no emotion, but strolled over to the bar and nonchalantly asked for a drink. “I went broke,” he told the bartender, and with that gulped his whiskey, turned about, thrust a single fleeting glance at the wheel, walked into the street, and shot himself.

Edgar Mizner, on the other hand, lost his job as manager of the Alaska Commercial Company in Dawson through similar circumstances. Mizner invited a group of his fellow merchants to have a drink with him in the saloon of the Opera House. The bill came to four dollars, and Mizner remarked with a chuckle that he would get it back on the roulette wheel. He lost on the first spin, and so, with his friends laughing beside him, took a second whirl and lost again. He began to double his bets in order to recoup, but still could not win. Soon he was plunging, and as the word went across town that he was playing for enormous stakes, a large and generally unfriendly crowd gathered to watch him bet; he had remained an unpopular man. By dawn he was down fifteen thousand dollars. In desperation he made four long-shot bets at one thousand dollars each – and lost each one. It was the end for Edgar Mizner.

Scores were destroyed for almost identical reasons. Silent Sam Bonnifield, a famous gambling-house operator in Dawson, used to say that the house made its money because, once a man had won what he set out to get – a dinner, perhaps, or a round of drinks – he quit and went home; but if he lost, he played on to the bitter end. It was true of the operators themselves as well as their customers. Often enough when the faro-dealer and his lookout had finished their stint behind the tables they would take their pay from the pot, sit right down, and lose it.

Because it was fast and offered the players the closest thing to an even break, faro remained the most popular game of chance. In principle it was somewhat similar to roulette: every card from ace to king was painted on the faro table, and the players laid their money on these painted squares. A metal box containing a deck of cards was attached to the table, and the dealer slipped off the top card, exposing the one beneath. If the card that a player was betting on came up first, he lost; if it came up second, he won; if neither, he bet again. Above the dealer was a rack with thirty or forty compartments which held the players’ pokes. Into the rack with each poke went a slip of paper charging the owner for the chips he bought. At the end of the play, chips were balanced against slips and the poke was diminished or increased depending on whether the player had lost or won.

Each gambler had his own set methods of playing. For instance, the Oregon Jew, a meticulously dressed man who wore spats and carried a gold-headed cane, would walk into one or another of the houses every afternoon about four and buy a stack of chips and sit down to try his luck. If he lost, he quit. If he started to win, he played long enough to find out how lucky he was. If he felt he was really lucky, he would begin to bet the limit. But he rarely played in the evening unless luck was coming his way, for he was a family man who cloaked his identity, as so many others did, behind a nickname.

The best-known gambler in Dawson was Sam Bonnifield, known as “Silent Sam” because of his taciturn nature and sometimes as “Square Sam” because he always ran an honest game. His Bank Saloon and Gambling House at the corner of Front and King, across from the Alaska Commercial store, was the most celebrated establishment of its kind in the Klondike. He was a handsome man in his early thirties, tall and slender, with eyes of a peculiar unfading blue, who never cracked a smile or uttered a word as he pulled in bets of five hundred dollars at the roulette or faro tables. He came originally from West Virginia but had worked through Kansas and Montana and California before coming north through Juneau and Circle City. Tex Rickard’s biographer, Charles Samuels, credits Bonnifield with having given the fight-promoter his start in life as a gambler by equipping him with an entire outfit and a shack to operate in at Circle City. Rickard lost the layout in two weeks, but for the rest of his life “gambled as though Sam Bonnifield were looking over his shoulder.”

Rickard once watched Bonnifield lose seventy-two thousand dollars in a poker game – and his gambling-establishment into the bargain. At the eleventh hour a crony arrived and loaned the gambler enough to keep going on, and within six hours Bonnifield had won it all back again and cleaned out the customer.

Bonnifield came north with another bold and persistent gambler named Louis Golden, better known in the North as Goldie. The two ran rival establishments in Juneau, Circle City, and Dawson, but it was their practice to close up once a week and play at the other’s table until one of them went broke. Goldie made sixty thousand dollars in 1897 and lost it all the following year – twenty-five thousand of it in a single night.

He and Bonnifield took part in the biggest poker game ever recorded in the Klondike. There was fifty thousand dollars in the pot when Goldie raised it by twenty-five thousand. Bonnifield called him and raised again, bringing the pot to one hundred and fifty thousand. Goldie triumphantly laid down four queens. Bonnifield, without a word or a change of expression, turned his hand over to show four kings and raked in a fortune.

Bonnifield made it a habit never to turn down a bet. When Al Mitchell of Missoula, Montana, tackled him on one occasion and challenged him to a game, Bonnifield sat down immediately. Mitchell tried to unnerve him with a huge raise. Without the flicker of an eyelash Bonnifield casually turned around and asked the porter to stoke the fire. Then he turned back and called the bet. He was a past master at this form of gamesmanship, and when they got up, two and a half hours later, Mitchell had lost fifty-seven hundred dollars, which was all he had. Bonnifield tossed him a twenty-dollar goldpiece for breakfast and left the room without a word.

He not only played everybody, but he also played as long as anybody else was playing. One memorable game began at seven one evening and went on steadily until seven the following night. The players were Bonnifield, the Montana Kid, and Harry Woolrich; their meals were brought to the table, and they ate without dropping a hand.

Woolrich, who was from Montana, reached Dawson in November, 1898, after having achieved the distinction of winning and losing fifty thousand dollars in a game in Butte. Once he started playing, he often played for days, taking his meals at the table, a quiet, sallow man of about fifty-five, smoking a perpetual cigar, his expression never changing. Rubbernecks and kibitzers would stand five or six deep behind him, but this did not perturb him. Often enough he was playing with other men’s money. More timid plungers, believing that Woolrich had a magic touch with cards, would stake him; thus, if he lost, he lost nothing, while if he won, he took half the profit. As a result, he was able to take big chances with no risk to himself.