Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (64 page)

Back in Dawson, in the hospital under the hill, Father Judge clung precariously to life.

By the second day the stampeders had left the main river to follow a tributary stream into the hills, wallowing in snow so deep that sleds and dogs had to be cast aside. Here some gave up the struggle and turned back in frustration, fatigue, and disgust, while others, like hounds on a scent, only grew more eager. On they floundered, up a miniature Chilkoot, the snow falling upon them as fast as their snowshoes packed it down, a vicious gale blowing into their frostbitten faces, their beards and moustaches stiff as boards.

On the far side of a razor ridge, in a valley of phantom white, Jim reached his goal and hammered in his stakes. The others followed suit; and then began the weary, anticlimactic trek back to Dawson some hundred miles away. By the time the town was reached, all were in a state of depression.

Some of these men bore the scars of the Nigger Jim Stampede all their lives. Several were maimed hideously, and one man lost both his feet. Few, if any, returned to the lonely valley to examine the ground that had been staked at such a cost. The word went around that it was quite worthless, and this was accepted as truth, just as the original tales had been.

On their return, the stampeders learned that Judge was sinking lower day by day. Hundreds of inquiries poured in asking how he was, while gifts arrived daily, including one case of champagne worth thirty dollars a pint.

Skiff Mitchell, just back from the stampede, made his way to Judge’s bedside. He was an old friend of the priest, although Protestant, and when he saw the wasted figure on the couch the tears rolled down his cheeks.

“Why are you crying?” Judge asked him. “We have been old friends almost since I came into the country.”

“We can’t afford to lose old friends like you,” Mitchell replied.

“You’ve got what you came for,” the priest reminded him. “I too have been working for a reward. Would you keep me from it?”

He seemed anxious to die. When the nuns in the hospital said they would pray hard for him to stay alive, he answered quite cheerfully: “You may do what you please, but I am going to die.”

The end came on January 16, and Dawson went into deep mourning. “If the whole town had slipped down into the river, it would not have been more of a shock,” someone wrote later. Shops and dance halls closed their doors, and even the houses were draped in black.

It took two and half days to hack the dead priest’s grave out of the hard-frozen soil, but there was no dearth of men for the task, and when the body was taken to its rest the grieving population followed. Nothing would do but that the casket cost one thousand dollars and be made of the finest material. It was a gesture in keeping with the general ostentation of the community, though the shrivelled figure within would have shuddered at the thought.

The following day the town returned to normal. At the Tivoli, where, less than a month before, Father Judge had received the homage of the camp, John Mulligan was winning applause with a topical new song:

Nigger Jim just wanted to know
If a fresh cheechako could outrun a sourdough
.

Jim himself sat in his box, with Lottie Oatley beside him, and laughed and applauded while the champagne ran as swiftly as the water in the sluiceboxes on Eldorado.

7

Tales of
conspicuous wealth

The mining élite had become a distinct social class. They occupied royal boxes in the dance halls, stood shoulder to shoulder at the bars in Grand Forks, the town at the junction of Bonanza and Eldorado, and drove their fashionable dog-teams down the hard-packed snow of the Klondike Valley.

Indeed, the dog-team had become the chief symbol of conspicuous wealth in the Klondike. It was the Cadillac of its time. The more affluent saloon-keepers, gamblers, and mine-owners all kept expensive teams with expensive harness. Coatless Curly Munro, for instance, lavished, in a single season, 4,320 pounds of bacon, fish, and flour, at one dollar a pound, on his embryo team of six husky puppies. Nigger Jim’s prize team of eight dogs was worth twenty-five hundred dollars, and his sled enjoyed the added refinement of a built-in bar. This was a specially made tin tank he kept filled with alcohol, which he poured out by the dipperful to mix with hot water and sugar so that he might treat his friends wherever he stopped.

If there was conspicuous wealth, there was also conspicuous waste. Dick Lowe, the ex-mule-skinner who had, on Ogilvie’s suggestion, staked the famous fractional claim on Bonanza, could be seen of a Sunday driving a spanking team of trotting-horses out along the Klondike Valley with a dance-hall girl on the seat beside him, or, of an evening, flinging a fortune on the bars at Grand Forks to treat the crowd. On Dominion Creek two neighbouring miners each installed a butler in his log cabin. On Eldorado, Clarence Berry, the ex-fruit farmer from Fresno, enjoyed a peculiar luxury. Berry, who had been the first on the creek to hit bedrock, now owned the only cow in the valley, a pure-bred Jersey who supplied fresh milk from her sawdust-padded stable and munched hay worth four hundred dollars a ton. His wife, who had come into the country strapped to a sled, now travelled in style, and when she complained that her stateroom on one of the steamboats was too small, the owner immediately hacked down some partitions so she might have the space she needed. In front of Berry’s cabin, along the Eldorado trail, stood a coal-oil can full of gold and a bottle of whiskey beside it. A sign between the two of them carried the blunt but inviting message: “Help Yourself.”

The old-timers were dying. Ladue was dead, and so was Harper. Bill McPhee, the giant barkeep from Fortymile who now ran the Pioneer Saloon, lost both of his partners, Harry Spencer and Frank Densmore – each of them veterans of some fifteen years in the North. Typhoid, pneumonia, and tuberculosis had taken their toll, but the real killer was the Yukon climate, which, over the years, had wasted the constitutions of these early prospectors. Now those who survived began to spend their fortunes as if they, too, had death at their heels.

George Carmack arrived in Seattle and announced that he was building a yacht to sail to the Paris Exposition, the South Seas, the Mediterranean, and the Orient. His Indian wife, Kate, who had never been away from her native Yukon, was ensconced with him in Seattle’s Butler Hotel – a situation which she found bewildering. To her the hallways and staircases were like a labyrinth, and in order to find her way back to the room she produced her little hatchet and blazed a trail, Indian style, on banister and doorway. With her brothers, Skookum Jim and Tagish Charley, she continued to make headlines. They loaded up with champagne and were arrested and fined for drunkenness. They caused a near-riot by throwing banknotes and gold nuggets from their hotel window until a scrambling crowd, fighting for the money, brought traffic to a stop. Meanwhile, Carmack himself was riding up and down the streets with an expensive cigar in his cheek and a sign emblazoned on his carriage identifying him as “George Carmack, Discoverer of Gold in the Klondike.”

Clarence Berry’s partner, the handsome Austrian Antone Stander, landed triumphantly at San Francisco with his new wife, Violet Raymond, the ex-dance-hall girl. He planned to take her on a honeymoon to China and he had one thousand pounds of gold, as pocket-money, in his stateroom, which was the finest on the
Humboldt
. Violet wanted to go ashore, but Stander feared to leave his treasure. “It would be hard to tell which [he] guards more jealously – his bride or his gold,” a reporter for the
Examiner
wrote. It was a hard choice; the only solution seemed to be to give the gold to Violet, and this Stander did, bit by bit, until it was all gone.

Charley Anderson, now known universally as the Lucky Swede because he had bought a million-dollar claim while drunk, was on his way to Europe accompanied by his wife, Edgar Mizner’s former inamorata Grace Drummond, the toast of the Monte Carlo. Grace had promised to cast off Mizner and marry the Lucky Swede if he would pay fifty thousand dollars into her bank account, and the Lucky Swede was delighted to do just that. Off the happy couple went, arm in arm, to Paris and London and New York and finally to San Francisco, on whose outskirts the Lucky Swede built a monument to his bride in the form of a turreted castle worth twenty thousand dollars.

Big Alex McDonald went to Paris, too, and thence to Rome, where he was granted an audience with the Pope and made a Knight of St. Gregory on the strength of his donation to Father Judge’s hospital. Then he was off to London, a huge and awkward figure in his formal clothing, with his immense ham hands fairly bursting from his gloves. He spent a good deal of his time riding up and down in elevators, which he referred to as “heists,” having never been in one until this time. Before he returned to Dawson, in April 1899, he married Margaret Chisholm, the twenty-year-old daughter of the superintendent of the Thames Water Police. The story went around that, on emerging from Alaska, Big Alex had seen his first pretty girl and asked her name; it had been Chisholm, and in his mind the word had been forever identified with desire.

There seemed no end to his wealth. In Dawson that spring his fifteen-mule pack train, laden with gold, was a familiar sight on the Klondike river road. On one of his claims a single man was able to shovel in twenty thousand dollars in a twelve-hour stretch. One payment made by McDonald to the Alaska Trading and Transportation Company amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand. He erected his own building, The McDonald, in Dawson and lived lavishly on its first floor. On his sideboard there rested a bowl containing forty-five pounds of large nuggets. When Alice Henderson, a newspaper correspondent, dropped in, McDonald waved airily at this treasure.

“Help yourself to some nuggets,” he said casually, with the attitude of a man proffering a box of chocolates. “Take some of the bigger ones.”

She hesitated, and McDonald made a gesture of impatience.

“Oh, they mean nothing to me,” he said. “Take as many as you please. There are lots more.”

His contempt for gold was quite genuine, for it was not nuggets McDonald desired. His mania for property was still unsatisfied. It was to him what champagne, dog-teams, and dancing-girls were to his fellow claim-owners. He could not stop buying, but roamed farther and farther from the Klondike, amassing more and more claims, turning down offers of millions for what he had, always accumulating land. As one newspaper wrote, his life “in point of riches promises to outrival that of the fabled Count of Monte Cristo.” But, as events turned out, the newspaper was wrong.

While McDonald was in Rome and London, Swiftwater Bill Gates, unabashed and unrepentant following his ill-fated venture with Jack Smith of the Monte Carlo, was cutting his own swath across North America and Europe. He and Joseph Whiteside Boyle, the sparring-partner of Frank Slavin, were off to London to raise money for a company which was to exploit the mining concession on Quartz Creek that Boyle had wangled from the Canadian government. How much of that money the company would ever see was problematical, since Swiftwater, now hailed in the press as “the Klondike Prince,” was publicly offering to bet seven thousand dollars on the turn of a card with anybody who cared to challenge him.

In Seattle, where he arrived en route back to Dawson, Swiftwater became embroiled in another of those astonishing marital adventures that marked his life. He was occupying an elegant suite in the Butler Hotel when Mrs. Iola Beebe, a Seattle widow, visited him. She had been to St. Michael the previous fall and was now trying to secure backing to open a hotel in Dawson. Swiftwater received her in his black Prince Albert coat, his patent-leather shoes, and his boiled shirt from whose centre a fourteen-carat diamond glittered. In the hallways outside, a shouting mob was trying to gain admittance, but the Klondike Prince had eyes only for Mrs. Beebe – or, more accurately, for her two daughters, Bera, aged fifteen, and Blanche, nineteen, both just out of convent school.

Swiftwater wasted no time. Mrs. Beebe’s back was scarcely turned before he had spirited both her daughters aboard the
Humboldt
, which was about to steam north. Their alarmed mother took up the scent, stormed aboard the ship, and discovered Swiftwater cowering under a lifeboat. She rescued the girls and took her leave, but her adventures were by no means over. Undeterred by this brush with a Klondike prince, she determined to go on to the north and seek her fortune. With her daughters she landed in Skagway some days later to find Swiftwater lying in wait, his ardour in no sense dampened. This time his blandishments were more successful. Mrs. Beebe awoke one morning to find that the fifteen-year-old Bera, a plump, pink-cheeked, and blue-eyed morsel, had decamped for Dawson with her Casanova. Before she could overtake the errant couple, they were man and wife. When the newlyweds reached Dawson, Swiftwater presented his bride with a characteristic gift: the town’s only melon, price forty dollars. Mrs. Beebe’s account of all this, which was privately printed some years later, leaves something to be desired. Her exasperation with Swiftwater is evident, and yet here and there a note of tenderness creeps into the narrative. No matter how badly Swiftwater behaved, Mrs. Beebe always forgave him, and the reader is left with the inescapable suspicion that Mrs. Beebe, like her two daughters, was enamoured of the little man in the Prince Albert coat. How else to explain her subsequent mollification? Far from financing Mrs. Beebe in the hotel business, Swiftwater Bill managed to extract from her all the money she owned, thirty-five thousand dollars, which he sank into his Quartz Creek mining venture. Swiftwater’s talent in raising money was always equalled by his ability to get rid of it. By the end of the year he was magnificently bankrupt and had run up bills that totalled one hundred thousand dollars. Off he went, down the river, with his child bride and his incurable optimism, leaving his wretched and now destitute mother-in-law to care for a four-week-old granddaughter.