The British journalist Flora Shaw never again had the chance to show the stamina and verve she demonstrated in the Klondike. Once back in London in the fall of 1898, she resumed her post as colonial editor for the Times. The British government paid to print and circulate a pamphlet that reproduced her articles on the Boer War—articles that asserted Britain’s sovereignty in South Africa and argued for the extension of the British Empire. But in 1900, Flora resigned from the newspaper for health reasons. Two years later, she married Sir Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, a high-ranking colonial administrator in the mold of Flora’s other hero, Cecil Rhodes.
Flora’s husband subsequently became Baron Lugard, governor of Hong Kong (1907-1912) and governor general of Nigeria (1912-1919). The Lugards were of one mind about the importance of Empire and the significance of their contribution to it. In 1904, Flora wrote to her husband, “To have helped to rouse the British public to a sense of Imperial responsibility and an appeal of Imperial greatness, to have had a good share in saving Australia from Bankruptcy, to have prevented the Dutch from taking South Africa, to have kept the French within bounds in West Africa, to have directed a flow of capital and immigration to Canada, to have got the Pacific cable joining Canada and Australia made, are all matters that I am proud and glad to have had my part in.”
As Lady Lugard, Flora traveled extensively, raised money for the University of Hong Kong, and worked on behalf of Belgian refugees in World War I. A vehement opponent of women’s suffrage, she became a Dame of the British Empire in 1916, and died in England in 1929.
Flora Shaw’s biographers, Dorothy O. Helly and Helen Callaway, who wrote the entry for Dame Flora Louise Lugard in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, have argued that Flora’s significance has been underrated. She was, they suggest, “a very important figure in the history of British imperialism, but a figure who because she was a woman, [has] been ignored by male historians of empire, and because she was an imperialist, [has] not yet been deemed worthy of recovering by feminist historians.” Even within their own lifetimes, both Lugards saw the tides of history turn against them and the imperial project for which they had worked so hard. In January 1920, Leonard Woolf published Empire and Commerce in Africa: A Study in Economic Imperialism. One of the villains of his story was Sir Frederick Lugard. “Psychologically,” wrote Woolf, “there is no difference between Captain Lugard and the people in past centuries who burnt and tortured men and women from the highest of religious motives.”
Superintendent Samuel Benfield Steele, who had commanded the red-coated Mounties in Dawson, benefited enormously from his months in the North. Despite the ignominy of his recall, his misfortunes were blamed entirely on his political bosses, and his own career quickly picked up. Within months of leaving Dawson, he had also left the North-West Mounted Police. The Canadian financier Donald Smith, recently ennobled as Lord Strathcona, offered him the command of a British army unit to be recruited in Canada and to fight in the Boer War. In charge of Lord Strathcona’s Horse on the veldt, Steele enhanced his reputation as an authoritarian commander. Years later, one of his subordinates recalled how Steele ordered a dozen men suffering from hemorrhoids to gallop flat out for five miles on the grounds that this would burst them and make them bleed.
Sam stayed less than a year with Lord Strathcona’s regiment. He was then offered a divisional command in the new South African Constabulary. The Steele family spent five years in South Africa while Sam drew on his Dawson experience for this policing job. He won the confidence of the Boer farmers by ensuring that his police officers provided practical services to them, acting as game wardens, veterinarians, census takers, and license issuers.
Sam returned to Canada in 1907, took a role in the Canadian militia, and began to write his memoirs. But old soldiers never die, and when World War I broke out in August 1914, he was eager for a military command. Although he was sixty-three and widely considered too old for a front-line position, he managed to wangle an administrative post as commanding officer of a Canadian training camp in southeastern England and the titular position of command of all Canadian troops in England. With a chestful of medals, he was knighted in January 1918. A year later, just after his seventieth birthday, he died in England during the flu epidemic. A group of his friends had a death mask made, with the intention of commissioning a statue. But the statue never materialized; by the 1920s, a spit ’n’ polish soldier like Steele had become a dinosaur. In the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Professor Rod Macleod suggests that Steele “was like one of those organisms so perfectly adapted to their environment that a change in external conditions results in extinction. The Great War had so changed Canada and the world that in 1919 Steele’s exploits no longer seemed significant.”
Sam Steele was buried in St. John’s Anglican Cathedral cemetery in Winnipeg. Vain till the last, he had managed to lop three years off his age. Although he was probably born in 1848, the splendid gravestone gives his dates as 1852 to 1919. His most important legacy is, without doubt, the heroic reputation he established for the Canadian Mounties in the West.
Father Judge, the selfless Jesuit priest, also lives on in public memory, although only within the Yukon. There he is still recalled as the Saint of Dawson. He is one of the few Gold Rush veterans whose Dawson grave is marked by a stone memorial close to the river rather than a simple wooden cross on the hillside. Two years after his death, his faithful congregation took up a collection for a monument to the priest and commissioned a gravestone to be floated down the Yukon. It arrived, according to the Yukon Catholic newspaper, in November 1903, and was erected beside the altar of his beloved church. Carved on the white marble in Latin were the words “Here lies the body of Father Wm. H. Judge, S. J., a man full of charity, who, with the co-operation of all, here first erected a house for the sick and a temple for God; and who, being mourned by all, died piously in the Lord, the 16th of January, 1899.”
Father Judge’s hospital and church burned down a few years later, and a new St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church was built several blocks to the south of the original buildings. Although the Jesuit’s memory is celebrated in the church, where pictures of his hospital hang, his gravestone sits neglected today in a grassy pocket of land beyond Dawson’s ferry terminal.
POSTSCRIPT
The Spell of the Yukon
I SPENT APRIL, MAY, AND JUNE of 2008 in Dawson City. Today, it feels like a shabby film set—a pale version of the raucous, rough-and-tumble boomtown of the 1890s. Yet over a century later, it still exerts a mysterious charm.
The Yukon River surges relentlessly past the waterfront, powerful in its chilly immensity, on its 1,400-mile journey to the Bering Sea. Under the midnight sun, the surrounding hills seem saturated with light—pulsing in the thin, dry air. Despite modern communications, the town’s remoteness remains overwhelming. There are no fast food chains—no Kentucky Fried Chicken, Starbucks, or Tim Hortons to reassure outsiders that even within a few hours drive of the Arctic Circle, they are not too far from urban props. The roads remain unpaved. In the Bonanza Market I saw stubble-chinned prospectors, in from the creeks, purchasing enough groceries to feed themselves for several weeks.
There are more subtle echoes of the past, too, in the culture of the place. Dawson City remains the end of the road, and many of its residents were happy to tell me that they had “escaped” to the North from jobs, marriages, and lives that didn’t work out. I learned not to ask “What do you do?” As Father Judge discovered, you still ask “What is your story?” The town’s year-round population continues to be numerically unbalanced: according to a local filmmaker, permanent residents consist of 1,500 people and 3,000 dogs. Men outnumber women, but as a burlesque dancer told me, “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.” While I was in the North, talk of smoking bans and seat belt laws elicited subversive guffaws. The heirs of Swiftwater Bill still partied prodigiously, especially in the dark winter months. (The only saloon open year round is the Pit, which has two rooms. One,
the Armpit, is open during the day, the other, the Snakepit, opens at night.)
Like many a small town, Dawson is the kind of large-hearted community that organizes benefits for residents in trouble, just as it once organized benefits for Father Judge. On the notice board at Bombay Peggy’s, the bar where (like Jack London in the Monte Carlo) I heard the best stories, there were regular announcements of fundraisers for people down on their luck. Dawson shares with other small, resource-based towns studded across northern Canada a hostility to the south and a sense of its own uniqueness. But Dawson is truly unique because of the legacy of the Gold Rush. Some of the original buildings continue to give mute testimony to past glory. The most poignant are wooden structures, like St. Andrew’s Church, which have tilted at crazy angles as the permafrost under them has melted and subsided at different rates. Doors bulge, lopsided roofs slide, walls collapse inward, and there isn’t a single straight lintel.
The physical legacy of the Gold Rush had all but dissolved by the 1960s. Then, spurred by the success of Berton’s Klondike and renewed interest in northern resources and sovereignty, the Canadian government decided to revive Dawson, with its colorful past, for the future. Historians researched the town’s heritage and its unique buildings. Many of the latter were restored and began to attract summer coach-loads of tourists, brought in by Holland America Lines. The Palace Grand Theatre reopened for summer touring productions. Today, for four months a year, the cancan dancers in Diamond Tooth Gertie’s saloon are as energetic and exuberant as their predecessors—those famous sisters Jacqueline and Rosalinde, a.k.a. Vaseline and Glycerine. Meanwhile, the territorial administration building, which lost its raison d’être when the territorial capital was moved to Whitehorse in 1953, reopened as a museum in 1962.
At the same time, the rights of the local First Nation were finally recognized. The Klondike valley had once belonged to the Hān people, who had been brutally ejected from their ancestral lands and robbed of its mineral treasures. Confined to the small reserve known as Moosehide Village, three miles downstream from Dawson, Hān elders spent most of the twentieth century watching southerners plunder their hunting grounds, ship their children off to residential schools, and destroy their way of life. By the end of the century, such actions had come to be regarded not as the consequences of spreading “civilization” but as unethical and cruel violations of human rights. Land claims have been settled with most of the Yukon’s First Nations, and compensation paid for the traumas of recent history. Since the early 1990s, the Hān people from the Klondike region have called themselves the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, and today they constitute about one-third of Dawson’s residents. One of the few modern buildings in town is their Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre, based on traditional Hān construction, where tourists can learn a very different story from that presented in Diamond Tooth Gertie’s saloon.
Today, 50,000 visitors a year flock to Dawson City during its brief tourist season. They visit the Palace Grand Theatre, the commissioner’s residence, the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre, and the Discovery Claim, where Carmack found his first nugget. In the gift shops, they purchase the works of Jack London, Robert Service, and Pierre Berton. The three writers’ ghosts live on in the little town, each with a cabin that is on every tourist’s itinerary. The Jack London cabin is a reconstruction of the one on the Stewart River on which he is supposed to have carved “Jack London, Miner Author” during the bitter winter of 1897. The Dawson version contains half the logs from which the original Stewart River cabin was built; the other half were shipped to Oakland, California, where another Jack London cabin sits on the waterfront. The Robert Service cabin is the actual building where the poet lived between 1908 and 1912. Both are just along Eighth Avenue from Berton House, where Pierre Berton was raised between 1920 and 1930.
Thanks to Berton family generosity, Berton House is now a writers’ retreat, where I spent my Dawson sojourn and asked a question: Behind the fictions and the mythology, what was the Gold Rush really like for its participants? London, Service, and Berton caught the communal frenzy that drove people to risk their lives for yellow metal. They relished the mock heroics and madness of the crowds. But history is the sum total of individual lives. I was interested in the experience of a few characters in this large historical drama. I wanted to jigsaw together real stories to illuminate, over a century later, life in Dawson City as the town grew from 300 to 300,000 in less than two years.
One of the first things that caught my eye in Dawson, painted on the side of a building opposite Klondike Kate’s restaurant, was the first verse of Service’s “Spell of the Yukon”:I wanted the gold, and I sought it;
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy, I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it—
Came out with a fortune last fall,—
Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn’t all.
So few stampeders in the 1890s found gold, and yet like a modern wilderness adventure the Klondike provided for many—including my six subjects—a personal epiphany.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
FOR THE MOST PART, I have kept the price of goods and services and the yield of the gold mines in 1890s values throughout this book. How much are these sums worth today? This question is almost impossible to answer in any meaningful way by a single estimate, because the value of labor and various commodities has changed in different ways. Moreover, monetary units have fluctuated in relation to one another: £1 was worth $5 in the 1890s but hovers around $1.40 today.
Gold is the easiest commodity for which to make comparisons over time. When a Klondike miner presented an ounce of gold dust to a bank in 1898, depending on its purity he would receive between $16 and $18. The official price was $18.96. Today, the value of an ounce of gold dust is well over $1,100. So a rough calculation to update the value of Klondike gold is to multiply 1898 values by sixty. Thus Bill Haskell’s $25,000 purse would be worth around $1.5 million today. And the total payout from the Klondike gold fields between 1896 and 1909, which was estimated at $120 million at the time, now would be worth over $7 billion.
As far as other items are concerned, a rule of thumb is to base calculations on the gradual increase in the consumer price index over the intervening years. The CPI allows us to compare the cost—then and now—of things most of us buy, such as food, housing, transportation, and so on. Changes in the CPI suggest that since $100 in 1896 was worth a little over $2,600 in today’s money, one should multiply 1896 amounts by twenty-six. Using that multiplier, the $1,500 Bill Haskell and Joe Meeker spent to outfit themselves for the Klondike is the equivalent of about $39,000 in today’s terms. I have taken the conversion factor of twenty-six from the helpful and reliable website www.measuringworth.com. The site computes how much an American dollar or a British pound from a specified year is worth in current terms.
The CPI is not always a good guide to the relative value of other items, such as laborers’ wages, for which meaningful comparisons are more complex. What can be said, however, is that the shortage of labor in the North meant Klondike wages in 1898 ran as high as five times the average daily wage in the United States. So even stampeders who did not find their own pot of gold could, if they spent a winter on a claim and left Dawson without blowing their take, return home feeling rich. No wonder gold dust was tossed around in Dawson saloons with such abandon. Nuggets must have felt like Monopoly money to people earning more in a day than they could earn Outside in a week.
Another figure that Klondike stampeders loved to quote is the number of degrees below zero registered on a thermometer. In 1898, thermometers used the Fahrenheit scale, on which the freezing point is 32 degrees. In general, I have preferred to use the phrase “degrees below freezing” to clarify temperatures, but I am also aware that the quoted figures are often rough guesses. Prospectors in the North developed their own sturdy system to measure
degrees of cold. Homemade trail thermometers consisted of small pill bottles fitted into holes in a block of wood. According to an old-timer known as Sourdough Ray, the first bottle contained mercury, which froze at 40 degrees below water’s freezing point; the next held kerosene, which froze at 50 below; the third had Jamaica ginger, which froze at 55 below; next Perry Davis’ Pain Killer (containing opiates and alcohol), which solidified at 72 degrees below; and the last, St. Jacob’s Oil (another patented painkiller containing ether, alcohol, and turpentine), was one he never saw frozen at all.
Images reproduced throughout the text have not been altered or manipulated in any way beyond standard cropping and resizing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DAWSON : My most heartfelt thanks go to Elsa Franklin and the Writers Trust of Canada for selecting me to become writer-in-residence at Berton House Writers’ Retreat, Dawson City, in 2008. The Trust’s James Davies organized everything for me, including transport for my dog, Jake, which was beyond the call of duty. My three months in Dawson were invaluable as I got to know the landscape and the town, and explored the rich resources of the Parks Canada offices, the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Heritage Centre, and the Dawson City Museum. Particular thanks to Laura Mann in the Museum, Miriam Haveman in the Dawson Library, Dawne Mitchell at Jack London’s cabin, and Leslie Piercy from Parks Canada. I was fortunate in being able to draw on the expertise of two local historians: John Gould and Dick North. Tara Christie explained modern mining practices to me. David Fraser, Karen MacKay, Valerie Salez and Jesse Mitchell, Dan and Betty Davidson, Rachel Wiegers, Anne Rust D’Eye, Eldo Enns, Karen Dubois, and Dan and Laurie Sokolowski were generous with time and friendship. The highlight of my Dawson sojourn was the trip down the Yukon River, for which I can never thank Gordon MacRae and Maureen Abbott enough. Particular thanks to Lulu Keating, the brilliant filmmaker who made so much happen.
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