Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (7 page)

They were all individuals, as their nicknames (far commoner than formal names) indicated: Salt Water Jack, Big Dick, Squaw Cameron, Jimmy the Pirate, Buckskin Miller, Pete the Pig. Eccentricities of character were the rule rather than the exception. There was one, known as the Old Maiden, who carried fifty pounds of ancient newspapers about with him wherever he went, for, he said, “they’re handy to refer to when you get into an argument.” There was another called Cannibal Ike because of his habit of hacking off great slabs of moose meat with his knife and stuffing them into his mouth raw. One cabin had walls as thin as matchwood because its owner kept chopping away at the logs to feed his fire; he said he did it to let in the light. Another contained three partners and a tame moose which was treated as a house pet. Out in the river lay Liar’s Island, where a group of exiles whiled away the long winters telling tales of great ingenuity and implausibility.

Fortymile, in short, was a community of hermits whose one common bond was their mutual isolation.

“I feel so long dead and buried that I cannot think a short visit home, as if from the grave, would be of much use,” wrote William Bompas, a Church of England bishop who found himself in Fortymile. A Cambridge graduate who could read his Bible in Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac, he was the fourth son of that same London advocate on whom Dickens had modelled his “Serjeant Buzfuz” in
Pickwick Papers
. His predecessor had been driven to literal madness by the practical jokes of the miners, but Bompas was far too tough for that – a giant of a man with a high dome, a hawk nose, piercing eyes, and the flowing beard of a Moses. He baked his own bread, eschewed all dainties, drank his sugarless coffee from an iron cup, ate from a tin plate with a knife his only utensil, slept in the corner of a boat or a hole in the snow or on the floor of a log hut, and allowed himself no holidays. His only furniture was a box which he used for a seat; he had torn down shelves, cupboard, and table to make a coffin for a dead Indian because lumber was so scarce. And he thought nothing of making a present of his trousers to a pantless native and mushing home in his red flannels.

For almost half a century he lived in isolation, and he was resigned to it. When his wife joined him at Fortymile in 1892, they had not seen each other for five years. She was the daughter of a fashionable London doctor, and had been brought up in Italy. On those dark winter afternoons when she was not on the trail with her husband, she sat quietly in the mission hall with its cotton-drill walls, reading her Dante in the original or – if the keys were not frozen stiff – playing her little harmonium.

This ecclesiastical existence was no more primitive than that of the miners at Fortymile. Each man lived with his partner in a murky, airless cabin whose windowpanes were made from untanned deer-hide, white cotton canvas, or a row of empty pickle jars chinked with moss. Cutlery was fashioned from pieces of tin, furniture constructed from the stumps of trees. Four men often lived year in and year out in a space about eighteen feet square. Above the red-hot sheet-iron stove there always hung a tin full of fermented dough, used in place of yeast to make bread, biscuits, and flapjacks rise. This was the origin of the name “sourdough” which was applied to the pioneers of the Yukon to distinguish them from the tenderfeet or
cheechakos
, as the Indians called them.

Men moved from their fetid cabins by night into murky, constricted mine shafts by day. Mining in the sub-Arctic is unique because the permanently frozen ground must be thawed before the bed-rock can be reached; it is this bed-rock, ten, twenty, and even fifty feet below the surface, that contains the gold. At first the miners let the sun do the work. This was a long, laborious process: a few inches of thawed earth were scraped away each day, and an entire summer might pass by before the goal was attained. Soon, however, wood fires replaced the sun. The gold-seekers lit them by night, removed the ashes and the thawed earth in the morning, then lit a new fire, burning their way slowly down to form a shaft whose sides remained frozen as hard as granite. This method allowed miners to work all winter, choking and wheezing in their smoky dungeons far below the snow-covered surface of the ground as they tunnelled this way and that seeking the “pay streak” which marked an erstwhile creek channel. The paydirt thus obtained was hoisted up the shaft and piled in a mound, known as a “dump.” In the spring, when the ice broke on the creeks and water gushed down the hillsides, the miners built long spillways or sluiceboxes to counterfeit the ancient action of nature. The gravel was shovelled into these boxes and, as the water rushed through, was swept away. But the heavier gold was caught in the crossbars and in the matting on the bottom, as it had once been caught in the crevices of the streambeds. Every two or three days the water was diverted from the sluicebox as each miner panned the residue at the bottom in what came to be known as a “clean-up.” The various stages in this process had been arrived at by trial and error over the years, since the days of ’49 in California; in the Yukon Valley they reached their greatest refinement.

The entertainments that lightened this monotony were scanty and primitive. One of the main amusements, apart from the saloons, was a folk-rite known as the “squaw dance.” Josiah Edward Spurr, a U.S. government geologist who visited Fortymile in the nineties, has left a description of one of these affairs:

“We were attracted by a row of miners who were lined up in front of the saloon engaged in watching the door of a very large log cabin opposite, rather dilapidated with the windows broken in.… They said there was going to be a dance, but when or how they did not seem to know.…

“The evening wore on until ten o’clock, when in the dusk a stolid Indian woman with a baby in the blanket on her back, came cautiously around the corner, and with the peculiar long slouchy step of her kind, made for the cabin door, looking neither to the right nor to the left.… She was followed by a dozen others, one far behind another, each silent and unconcerned, and each with a baby upon her back. They sidled into the log cabin and sat down on the benches, where they also deposited their babies in a row: the little red people lay there very still, with wide eyes shut or staring, but never crying.…

“The mothers sat awhile looking at the ground on some one spot, then slowly lifted their heads to look at the miners who had slouched into the cabin after them – men fresh from the diggings, spoiling for excitement of any kind. Then a man with a dilapidated fiddle struck up a swinging, sawing melody and in the intoxication of the moment some of the most reckless of the miners grabbed an Indian woman and began furiously swinging her around in a sort of waltz while the others crowded and looked on.

“Little by little the dusk grew deeper, but candles were scarce and could not be afforded. The figures of the dancing couples grew more and more indistinct and their faces became lost to view, while the sawing of the fiddle grew more and more rapid, and the dancing more excited. There was no noise, however; scarcely a sound save the fiddle and the shuffling of the feet over the floor of rough hewn logs; for the Indian women were as stolid as ever and the miners could not speak the language of their partners. Even the lookers on said nothing, so that these silent dancing figures in the dusk made an almost weird effect.

“One by one, however, the women dropped out, tired, picked up their babies and slouched off home, and the men slipped over to the saloon to have a drink before going to their cabins. Surely this squaw-dance, as they call it, was one of the most peculiar balls ever seen.…”

This aboriginal background appeared all the more bizarre behind the thin varnish of civilization that began to spread over the community as the years passed. There were saloons that contained Chippendale chairs; and stores that, when they sold anything, dispensed such delicacies as
pâté de foie gras
and tinned plum pudding. There were Shakespeare clubs formed to give play-readings, and a library whose shelves contained books on science and philosophy. There was a dressmaker with the latest Paris fashions, and an opera house with a troupe of San Francisco dance-hall girls, and even a cigar factory, all housed in log buildings strewn helter-skelter along the mudbank above the Yukon and surrounded by intervening marshland littered with stumps, wood shavings, and tin cans.

The social life of the camp revolved around ten saloons, which at steamboat time served whiskey at fifty cents a drink (heavily watered to make it last) and the rest of the year peddled hootchinoo, a vile concoction compounded of molasses, sugar, and dried fruit, fermented with sourdough, flavoured with anything handy, distilled in an empty coal-oil can, and served hot at fifty cents a drink. It was sometimes referred to as Forty-Rod Whiskey because it was supposed to kill a man at that distance. By the peculiar etiquette of the mining camp, a man who bought a drink bought for everyone in sight, though such a round might cost a hundred dollars, while a teetotaller who refused a drink offered a deadly insult – unless he accepted a fifty-cent cigar in its place. Hootch, like everything else, was paid for in gold dust, and the prospector who flung his poke upon the bar always performed the elaborate gesture of turning his back while the amount was weighed out, since to watch this ritual was to impugn the honesty of the bartender.

Fortymile thrived on such unwritten laws, its residents enjoying a curious mixture of communism and anarchy. It had no mayor or council, no judges or lawyers, no police or jail or written code. Yet it was a cohesive community. No man went hungry, though many were destitute. Credit at Harper and McQuesten’s store was unlimited. If a man had no money, he could still get an outfit without payment. There were few “bad men” in Fortymile; on the contrary, it was a community that hewed surprisingly closely to the Christian ethic. Men shared their good fortune with their comrades, and it was part of the code that he who struck a new creek spread the news to one and all. Each man’s cabin was open to any passer-by; such a traveller could enter, eat his fill, sleep in the absent owner’s bed, and go on his way, as long as he cleaned up and left a supply of fresh kindling. This was more than mere courtesy in a land where a freezing man’s life might depend on the speed with which he could light a fire.

Although Fortymile itself was within the Canadian border, it was really an American town, getting its supplies from the United States without customs payments and sending out mail with U.S. stamps. A number of the mines were on Alaskan soil, and the social characteristics of the district were those of the American Rocky Mountain camps. It was from these parent communities that the legalistic device of the miners’ meeting was borrowed.

Canadian and U.S. mining camps grew up with varying legal customs which, to a considerable extent, point up the very real difference between the Canadian and the U.S. character. The American, freed by his own will of what he considered colonial bondage, has always insisted on running his own affairs from the ground up – especially on the frontier. The Canadian, who never knew the blood bath of revolution, has more often preferred to have law and order imposed from above rather than have it spring from the grass roots.

In the three British Columbia gold rushes, constabulary and courts of justice enforced a single set of laws in the British colonial tradition. Mining law was the same everywhere, and the gold commissioner in charge had such absolute power that the lawlessness so familiar to American mining history was unknown in the B.C. camps.

But in the Rocky Mountain camps of the United States, and later in Alaska, each community had its own customs and its own rules made on the spot. The American prospector, with his long tradition of free frontier life, smarted under any restriction imposed from above. Authority was vested in the miners themselves, who held town meetings in the New England manner to redress wrongs or dispense justice. Like the mining process, this institution had its origin in California.

These twin concepts, the one stressing order and often caution, the other freedom and sometimes licence, were to meet head-on during the great international stampede to the Klondike. On Alaskan territory, during the hectic days of 1897–98, there was no organized machinery of government, to speak of; rule was by local committee, sometimes wise, sometimes capricious, always summary. On the Canadian side there was, if anything, too much government, as the graft in Dawson City was to demonstrate; but there were also, at every bend in the river, the uniformed and strangely comforting figures of the Mounted Police.

The American miners’ meeting, which operated in the Canadian town of Fortymile, had the power of life and death over the members of the community. It could hang a man, give him a divorce, imprison, banish, or lash him, and in Alaska all these functions were performed in the late eighties and nineties. (The Fortymilers hanged at least two Indians for murder.) Any prospector could call a meeting simply by posting a notice. An elected chairman performed the function of judge, while the entire meeting acted as jury. Both sides could produce witnesses and state their cases, and anybody who wished could ask a question or make a speech. The verdict was decided by a show of hands. Seldom has the democratic process operated at such a grass-roots level.

When the first saloons began to appear in Fortymile, they served as headquarters for the miners’ meetings, and it was perhaps as a result of this that the meetings began to degenerate. On several occasions when a man called a meeting to seek redress, he found himself fined twenty dollars by the miners for daring to call one at all, and the sum was spent immediately on drinks. In 1893 the moment came when a man rebelled at the authority of a miners’ meeting.

The rebel was as typical a Fortymiler as it was possible to find, a man who for all his life had been seeking out the wild places of the northwest. His name was John Jerome Healy, and he was as tough as hardtack. With his cowlick and his Buffalo Bill goatee and his ramrod figure, he looked the part of the traditional frontiersman. He had been hunter, trapper, soldier, prospector, whiskey-trader, editor, guide, Indian scout, and sheriff. He had run away from home at the age of twelve to joint a band of renegades who made an abortive attempt to seize part of Mexico and establish a Pacific republic. He had been in Salt Lake City in 1857 at the time of the Mormon wars, and he counted himself a crony of Sitting Bull. He had built the most famous of the whiskey forts on Canadian territory, ruled it like a feudal baron, and dubbed it “Whoop-Up,” thereby giving a name to the great block of untamed Indian country that straddled the Montana-Canadian border. When the wild wolf-hunters of the prairie formed an armed band known as the Spitzee Cavalry, attacked Fort Whoop-Up, and tried to bargain with him, Healy broke up the confab with a lighted cigar held over a keg of gunpowder – a threat that sent them packing. As the hanging sheriff of Chouteau County, Montana, he pursued rustlers and Indians with a zeal that left some students of the period wondering where crime-control left off and lawlessness began. Then, with the frontier tamed by his own efforts, the restless and aging Healy headed north to virgin country, still hungering for the adventure that had driven him all his life. He followed gold to Juneau on the Alaska Panhandle as he had once followed it through Montana, Idaho, and Athabasca. He pushed on to Dyea Inlet at the foot of the Chilkoot, where he built the trading post into which the dying Tom Williams brought news of the Fortymile strike. Healy quickly saw that there was more than one way to get gold out of the Yukon. Off he went to Chicago and convinced an old Missouri crony, Portus B. Weare, a respected mid-western businessman, that there was profit in the Alaska trade. With the help of the Cudahy meat-packing fortune, these two set up the North American Trading and Transportation Company to break the monopoly of the entrenched Alaska Commercial Company. They laid plans to establish a series of posts along the river, built a fleet of steamboats, and launched a price war on the Yukon. In his post at Fort Cudahy, across the Fortymile River from the main town, the bearded Healy with his fierce Irish face was no man to accept quietly the ruling of a miners’ meeting. He had always been a law unto himself, and he did not relish the prospect of knuckling under to the eccentrics of a Yukon mining camp.