Gold Diggers_Striking It Rich in the Klondike

by Charlotte Gray

  In the memoirs of Klondikers, there are so many references to “the Old Priest” that it comes as a shock to realize that Father Judge was only forty-eight—by today’s standards an age still considered the prime of life. Yet he had lived through nine winters in Alaska and the Yukon, and each of those bitter seasons had carved new lines on his face. One evening in October, the Jesuit settled down at the table in his little room in St. Mary’s Hospital to write to his family. Behind him was a washstand, a small bookcase full of religious books, and a rough recliner on which were two neatly folded blue blankets. All Father Judge’s worldly possessions were hidden away in a wooden drawer under his bed. He still had no interest in looking after himself: he continued to give away his own clothes to anyone in need, and he often forgot to eat dinner. Yet although the priest was as gaunt as ever, he was more serene now that he shared his work with the Oblate priests and the nursing sisters. Today, he was in an upbeat, count-your-blessings frame of mind. “The doctors all agree that we are having unusually good success in the hospital,” he wrote to his brother. “We have five or six hundred at Mass every Sunday . . . I have a telephone in my office, not only for the town but also to the creeks. They are preparing to give us electric light.” With a benefactor like Big Alex McDonald, Father Judge was enjoying an unfamiliar sense of security. His latest project, for which he had not asked the approval of the Reverend Father J. B. René, was a chapel for the hospital. He was once again enjoying the challenge of being architect, contractor, and interior designer for the building. This fall, the river froze in mid-October. Father Judge always enjoyed winter, when the entire landscape was shrouded in snow. “This part of the world,” he liked to tell parishioners, “is so beautiful in its mantle of purity.” He was happy to see the incidence of typhoid and dysentery plummet alongside the temperature, but concerned by the number of people still living in tents. Over a game of chess, he confided to Dr. Jim, “Soon the trees will be cracking like guns in the frosty woods. But these children will not take care of themselves . . . [They] eat half raw, soggy pork, heavy beans, and leaden soda biscuits. Then they will either go back to bed again, or loaf away a night gambling and drinking in some saloon or dance hall. These are the men who get scurvy . . . They are not bad little boys, but lazy little boys . . . So I have to spank them and put them to bed at St. Mary’s—I and the good Sisters and our thirty-four helpers.”

  As arctic winds cut through Dawson like a scalpel through flesh, he continued about his daily business in the most threadbare garments. Some of his friends decided he deserved more, and ordered a warm, well-made suit for him that would “better become the dignity of his calling.” All Judge’s Jesuit training rose up in revulsion at such indulgence; he refused to see the tailor sent to take his measurements. His friends shrugged and told the tailor to do the best he could. On a cold December evening, Father Judge returned to his room at St. Mary’s to discover the suit, plus a long sealskin coat, cap, and gloves, laid out on his bed and a handful of men eager for thanks. “Father Judge was much moved by their thoughtfulness,” his brother later recorded, “but he told them that he could not accept the gift, that being a Jesuit priest he could own nothing.” He was finally persuaded to accept the outfit because most of the donors were Protestants, who didn’t see why God’s work should involve frostbite.

  The sealskin coat was yet another sign of Father Judge’s starring role in Dawson City’s self-image as a community that could pull itself together. Tackling the predicament of St. Mary’s Hospital was another. Since the hospital was still mired in debt, the Jesuit’s friends decided to organize a minstrel entertainment as a fundraiser. Minstrel shows, in which white actors put black boot polish on their faces and strummed banjos, were all the rage Outside, and Dawson merrymakers jumped on the trend. The nightly rental for one of the town’s false-fronted halls was usually between $300 and $400, but Joseph Cooper, owner of the Tivoli Theatre, offered his place at no cost. Tickets were sold at five dollars each for Sunday, December 25, when men on the creeks would come into town for Christmas. (The prohibition on Sunday entertainment did not apply to such a worthy event.) Organizers then asked for volunteers to appear on stage. By now, as reported in the local papers, an appetite for “respectable” theatrical performances had developed in Dawson, and despite the Fairview proprietor’s severe reputation, Belinda Mulrooney was in demand. She had appeared in a play called Three Hats, performed in Pioneers Hall in mid-October, and a month later she performed in a masquerade ball to benefit the newly formed Dawson Fire Department. (She teamed up with another woman to play a husband and wife: the Klondike Nugget strengthened the widespread suspicion that this tough businesswoman was a lesbian when it reported that “Miss Mulrooney made a dapper little husband, in regulation broadcloth and silk hat.”) Now, she agreed to appear as one of twenty Dawson women in blackface on behalf of St. Mary’s Hospital.

  On Christmas Eve, the day before the show, a large crowd sat in Father Judge’s church, waiting to celebrate midnight Mass on the Yukon. The Oblate priests, sensing the town’s mood, had agreed that the Jesuit would conduct the service. Outside, it was thirty-five degrees below freezing, and even with the stove blazing and so many warm bodies, the chill didn’t leave the air as a small reed organ played, supplemented by several violins. Then the choir began singing “Adeste Fideles,” and Father Judge appeared at the back of the nave. An observer called Charlie Higgins would later recall, “Something seemed to illuminate his countenance as he advanced towards the altar and moved to the Gospel side.” The priest read the Gospel, preached a sermon on God’s benevolence, then “drew a vivid picture of the loved ones of his hearers in their widely-scattered homes, where the vacant chair was their one anxiety that day.” It was a stab to the hearts of most participants, whose brutal labors on the creeks were often accompanied by desperate longing for distant parents, wives, and children. They stared at the skeletal figure in holy garments, as he raised his arms to the heavens and blessed them. “Strong men wept,” remembered Higgins.

  After the high holiness of Christmas Mass, the priest was reluctant to attend the minstrel show, particularly as it was on a Sunday. He was finally persuaded and luckily, as Charlie Higgins recalled, “the show was clean”: neither the song lyrics nor the performers’ outfits would cause anybody to blush. At the end, Father Judge himself appeared briefly on stage in his new suit to thank everybody for their generosity. The show raised $2,000 for the hospital. It was the only time anybody saw the priest wearing his new clothes.

  A few days after his Christmas triumph, Father Judge celebrated Mass in his new hospital chapel. But a week later, he started coughing, and soon he was too feeble to stand. A tremor of apprehension ran through the community; in the past, no matter how frail he had seemed, the Jesuit had always officiated when required. Father Judge’s telephone never stopped ringing and the most unexpected well-wishers turned up to check on his health. The manager of one of the trading companies, who had never set foot in the Catholic church, sent up a case of champagne. “The town seemed as if some calamity were about to fall on it,” remembered Charlie Higgins. But each day, the sick man’s condition deteriorated. He had pneumonia, and lay on his rough bed, wrapped in blankets, shivering and struggling for breath, but still greeting fellow priests, friends, doctors, nurses, and the Sisters of St. Ann. Hān men and women, whom he had always treated with respect, tiptoed in to see him. George “Skiff” Mitchell, who had first met Father Judge in Forty Mile and who had since then made a fortune on Bonanza Creek, knelt by his bedside and wept. The priest opened his eyes and asked, “George, why are you crying?” Skiff whispered, “We can’t afford to lose friends like you.” Father Judge managed a smile. “George, you have got what you came for. I, too, have been working for a reward. Would you keep me from it?”

  Those closest to him were in denial that they might lose their leader. Surely such a saint was immortal? One of the nursing sisters assured him, “Father, you are not going to die; we shall pray hard,
and you will not die.” He gave her a weak smile: “You may do what you please, but I am going to die.” He was right. After receiving Last Rites from the Oblate priest Father Desmarais, Father Judge passed away on the afternoon of Monday, January 16, 1899.

  Father Judge’s death triggered an explosion of mourning. The headline in the Klondike Nugget read: “Rev. Father Judge is Dead. He Yields Up His Life Surrounded By Many of His Friends. His Splendid Work in Dawson. His Ruling Motive. A Good Man’s Work. A Living Faith.” Elaborate plans were made for his funeral, and it was decided that the priest should be buried not in the Catholic cemetery up the hill but in St. Mary’s Church itself, on the Gospel side of the altar. In the January cold, it took two and a half days to dig the grave in the frozen, packed-earth floor of the church, but there was no shortage of volunteers.

  Early on the morning of January 21, in the stygian gloom of the Yukon winter, groups of mourners started walking toward the north end of Dawson to attend the funeral. All businesses were closed for the day. Sam Steele jotted in his diary, “Father Judge buried,” and although he himself was too busy to attend the service, he noted, “gave leave to the men to go.” The church overflowed with people several hours before the service was due to start. Dark fabric draped the sanctuary’s wooden supports and walls, and dozens of wax tapers threw a flickering, smoky light. In the middle of the aisle stood the priest’s open coffin; the congregation was mesmerized by the corpse’s peaceful expression. One of the nursing sisters remarked that he looked as though he had “fallen into quiet, restful repose.” Father Gendreau performed the requiem Mass, assisted by his two Oblate colleagues, Father Desmarais and Father Corbeil, and spoke about the Jesuit’s extraordinary service in the North. Then, as the choir sang “Nearer My God to Thee,” the congregation filed up the aisle, past the coffin. Finally, the coffin was lowered into the grave.

  The death of the gentle Jesuit marked the end of an era in the Yukon. He had traveled north to minister to the Indians, whom he loved wholeheartedly. He had come to the Klondike valley before it became a blackened, treeless landscape of mineshafts, and had seen Dawson City when it was nothing more than a handful of grubby tents. He had saved individual souls and lives, and inspired collective efforts to build a hospital and a church. His ear was always open and his door was never closed. As the Klondike Nugget put it the day after his funeral, “There is scarcely a man in the entire community who, at sometime or other, has not come into personal contact with the work of that noble priest.”

  The priest had been such a familiar figure on Dawson streets, as he peered shortsightedly through his wire-rimmed glasses at passersby and held their outstretched hands between his shabby mittens, that even men who had never bothered to acknowledge him now felt his loss. “Now that this work of love was finished,” wrote his brother, Charles, in the biography he published eight years later, “men realized how beautiful, how sweet, his charity had been.” In 1899, there were several other “sky pilots” (as church men were called by the miners) in Dawson, but they competed for congregations and none had Judge’s quiet grace. “There is no one here,” suggested the Klondike Nugget, “who can take up the Father’s good work with the disinterestedness and unselfishness of Father Judge, or can, in less than a decade, win such individual trust as all felt for this physically feeble, yet charitably strong man.” No other representative of the Church had the moral authority of the dead Jesuit. Now it was up to the legal authority of Superintendent Sam Steele of the Mounties to provide Dawson City with a moral compass and some semblance of civilization.

  CHAPTER 18

  A Cleansing Fire, February-April 1899

  RESIDENTS OF DAWSON CITY could set their watches by Superintendent Sam Steele as he did his inspection rounds. Beginning in the frozen darkness of the early morning, he checked the North-West Mounted Police station on Front Street, then the cells in the Mountie prison, and then the Mounties’ own hospital, before settling into his barracks office. Sam was in his element, and hard work and ambition made up for his lack of either imagination or humor. He kept record books up to date, filed long reports, and carefully noted in his official NWMP daybook any initiatives taken.

  Sam’s control of Dawson was tantamount to martial law, and he didn’t care if he rode roughshod over the rights of non-Canadians. A handful of disgruntled Americans grumbled to James McCook, the plump and jolly U.S. consul, that they were being persecuted on account of their nationality. When McCook stormed into Sam’s office, the policeman listened skeptically to the consul’s rant, then coolly announced that these were “petty complaints” and that at least 200 Americans in the area ought to be in jail. “Blatant American fool!” Sam commented to Marie, privately confirming American protests. Most Dawson residents, he was confident, appreciated his regime. When he tramped along the frozen Klondike on crisp, twilit winter afternoons, looking like a big brown bear in his raccoon coat, cabin dwellers along the riverbank shouted greetings. On the rare occasions when he stepped into the Monte Carlo or the Dominion, a respectful hush spread rapidly through the smoky bar while any malefactors melted quietly into the background.

  The police chief could not entirely eliminate Dawson’s more sinful side, and the Klondike Nugget continued to record it in vivid detail. In early February 1899, a twenty-eight-year-old Welsh wrestler named Dave Evans shot his mistress, a forty-five-year-old dance hall girl called Libby White, because of her “promiscuous tendencies,” then turned the gun on himself. A few days later, nineteen poker players were arrested in a Sunday police raid on “the Green Cloth Resorts”: each was fined fifty dollars plus costs in police court the following day. Mlle Hermine Depauvv, described primly by the Nugget as “a typical representative of the tenderloin society,” accused a French miner called Emil Rodenbach of stealing from her the sum of $10,700, which she had accumulated during her “thrifty and festive career.” Over the course of the winter, the Nugget reported the suicides or attempted suicides of at least six prostitutes, including nineteen-year-old Kitty Stroup from Oregon, who ate strychnine four days before Christmas after her boyfriend, a bartender at the Pioneer saloon, dumped her for another woman. And there was a dismal catalogue of thefts, drunkenness, unpaid debts, assaults, and—most poignant—dead babies discovered hidden under rocks or in garbage heaps. But Steele’s rules were having an effect. Dawson was no Skagway.

  The town’s opinion leaders were eager to curry favor with Steele. They had little success. Sam was not particularly gregarious, so didn’t enjoy the camaraderie of the saloons, and he knew the advantages of keeping his distance. Unable to inveigle Sam into the Fairview while he was doing his daily rounds, Belinda Mulrooney invited him to a select little dinner. Again, he declined. “She is sharp,” he wrote to Marie, and what’s more, “mixed up with certain officials in the way of money-making. I am not going to make myself cheap.” He barely greeted her when they passed in the street. The Klondike Nugget ran numerous articles praising the police force because editor Gene Allen wanted to interview the man in charge. Sam refused. He regarded the Nugget as “a rag of a newspaper,” he told Marie, because it made “unjust attacks on the council and others of the officials most of whom are pretty good men.”

  The honor of the force came first in Sam’s book. He was determined to project the right image, so he insisted on lots of spit ’n’ polish and formality in the officers’ mess. Sam admired his colleague Commissioner Ogilvie, who told colorful stories about the early days in the North. Ogilvie humanized the stark, dark, log barracks where both he and Steele lived: his rooms often resounded with the roar of male laughter, as senior personnel joined him for cigars and a singsong around his graphaphone. But Ogilvie’s easy manners, and the way he would talk to “any Tom, Dick and Harry” who dropped into the commissioner’s office, appalled Steele. “Ogilvie is too simple in his habits,” he confided to his wife, and the commissioner’s official dinners were shabby affairs, prepared by “a poor cook” and served with “a hasty lot of drinks. This has a bad ef
fect.” At NWMP mess dinners, nobody could smoke until after the toast to the Queen, and the plates were changed between courses. “Thank goodness we hold up our end and act as particularly as if in Ottawa or London.”

  Sam Steele did allow himself a limited social life, with the two bank managers, a couple of Scottish businessmen, and Mr. and Mrs. Davis, the collector of customs and his wife. Sam was also prepared to talk to Faith Fenton, the Toronto journalist who had arrived in Dawson the same month as he, and who in a column in the Toronto Globe had contradicted Flora Shaw. Fenton was quite besotted with the red-coated Mounties, and Sam found her respectful attention flattering, although he reassured his wife that although “Faith Fenton and I are quite friendly . . . you need not fear a flirtation for she is the plainest [woman] I have met for some time.” Faith was smart and demure; more important, she provided Sam with a pipeline to an influential Liberal newspaper.

  Perhaps that was why, the previous November, Superintendent Steele had done Miss Fenton a big favor. One of the first stories she sent her newspaper from Dawson was about the four Tlingit prisoners whom Flora Shaw had met on the trail in July. Since then, three of the men had been sentenced to be hanged. Faith knew this was the kind of raw northern drama that Toronto readers would love, but the dogsled carrying mail left for Whitehorse before the hanging was scheduled. So she “prewrote” the story and gave it to the carrier. Then the hanging was postponed, to the exasperation of Sam Steele, who was eager to make an example of the murderers. While he was venting his irritation to his junior officers, a frantic Faith arrived in his office, begging for help. Steele promptly dispatched one of the Mounties’ crack dog teams on a fifty-mile chase along the slushy banks of the Yukon River to retrieve Faith’s premature report. The “distressed damsel,” as Sam Steele called her, saved face.