Prisoners of the North

by Berton, Pierre

  Speed was essential. Swiftwater Bill was off to San Francisco’s Baldwin Hotel, where he tipped bellboys with gold dust to page him by name and continued to woo not only Gussie Lamore, who it developed was already married, but also her two sisters, Nellie and Grace. Joe Boyle headed for Ottawa.

  In the capital while waiting for Parliament to sit, he encountered the diminutive Englishman who would become his rival in the Klondike. This was Arthur Christian Newton Treadgold, a direct descendant of Sir Isaac Newton, the renowned scientist. Himself an Oxford graduate and teacher, he was for the moment correspondent for the Mining Journal and the Manchester Guardian. That wasn’t much more than a cover. Treadgold had ideas as big as Boyle’s about controlling the Klondike goldfields. But Treadgold was wary of dredges. He thought instead of using giant scrapers and land-going digging machines, none of which ever worked.

  This odd pair, around whose personalities so much of the Klondike’s mining history revolves, were opposites in every way. Treadgold was short and stubby with a shaggy blond moustache and a face that was all teeth when he smiled, in contrast to the robust former boxer. Treadgold was conceited, secretive, and cunning, quite prepared to flirt with the truth if it suited his purposes, an incompetent manager, possessed of an uncontrollable temper and an inability to take advice—character flaws that would eventually doom him. Boyle, on the other hand, was a big man in every way, open-minded and open-hearted, who scorned personal publicity but could be a terrier when facing setbacks to his personal plans for corralling the Klondike gold. It was significant that Treadgold to his employees and friends was always “Mr. Treadgold.” Boyle to all and sundry was simply “Joe.”

  Both men had one quality in common: they were adept at raising funds for their ventures. Each had the ability to charm financiers with deep pockets. There was a certain magic in the word Klondike that conjured up visions of unlimited profits. It did not seem to occur to normally hard-headed investors that the Klondike’s main resource was a diminishing one. Gold was not grain. Two of the richest families in America—the Guggenheims and the Rothschilds—were included in dredging enterprises after the turn of the century, ventures that included both Boyle and Treadgold, each of whom was prepared, it seemed, to sell his soul in order to gain control of the Klondike’s resources.

  In Ottawa Boyle pressed his case for a hydraulic lease on Clifford Sifton, Wilfrid Laurier’s Minister of the Interior. In June 1898 he got part of what he wanted: an undertaking in writing reserving eight miles of the Klondike Valley, rim to rim, exclusively for hydraulic operations. In November 1900 the government issued a lease in his favour. This was the famous Boyle Concession, which effectively barred all individual prospecting in the area and caused so much controversy in the Yukon. Boyle clung to it through a series of lawsuits and counter-suits that would have dampened the ardour of a less persistent man. His daughter Flora has testified to the passion with which he flung himself into each new legal battle. “Lawsuit,” she wrote, “was his middle name.” He loved a fight. Each time he was sued he immediately countersued. Before he achieved his aim he had lawyers in Dawson City, Vancouver, London, New York, and Detroit.

  To describe his reputation in Dawson during the early days as controversial would be an understatement. Meetings were held, petitions forwarded to Ottawa, and local politicians pressured in a series of attempts to cancel the Boyle Concession. The timber rights to that chunk of the Klondike Valley were as valuable as the ground that lay beneath. Because lumber was needed for sluice boxes and cabins on the creeks, Dawson was enjoying a building boom that saw the price of logs soar from $18 a cord in December 1898 to $48 a cord the following summer. Boyle saw this coming. He and Slavin (who later left the partnership) established a sawmill near the mouth of the Klondike River that turned out more than a million feet of dressed lumber in 1899. Much of the timber came from his own property, an asset so valuable that it is said he was forced to drive poachers off at rifle point.

  Meanwhile, in New York City, Treadgold sweet-talked Daniel Guggenheim into a major investment to buy up as many claims as possible in the heart of the gold country in order to consolidate water and mineral rights on the richest creeks—Hunker, Bonanza, and Eldorado. By the summer of 1901, he too had wheedled a hydraulic concession out of Ottawa, one that was arranged to free him from any of the work commitments prescribed by mining law, thus tying up the gold country for six years. It was, in the heated words of the Klondike Nugget, “a malignant and unpardonable outrage … the blackest act of infamy that ever blotted the history of the country.” After a storm of protest the government cancelled the Treadgold hydraulic concession. Boyle went on to form the Canadian Klondyke Company with backing from the Rothschild interests in Detroit; Treadgold would shortly become resident director of the rival Yukon Gold Corporation, a Guggenheim enterprise.

  Joe Boyle (back row, right) at the Bear Creek office of his Canadian Klondyke Mining Company in the heart of the gold country.

  When I was a small boy in Dawson the name Treadgold seemed to pop up in every conversation around our dinner table. Boyle was gone by then, but Treadgold was very much alive, the central figure in a tangle of court actions that occupied him for most of his days. He left the Guggenheims, formed his own mining company, and had his eye on the Boyle interests, hoping to consolidate all corporate mining into one big enterprise. He failed, went broke, and left the Klondike, apparently forever, only to return in the mid-twenties after Boyle’s death to pursue his dream. Even then “Klondike” had a touch of magic for investors, and Treadgold, with his smooth tongue and a name that hinted at riches underfoot, was able to form the Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation out of borrowed money and the remnants of earlier ventures. (I worked for it in the late thirties as a young mucker.) In the end Treadgold was eased out and lost everything. But in 1951, when he died at the age of eighty-seven, several of the original Boyle dredges were still churning up the pay dirt in the golden valleys of the Klondike.

  —TWO—

  Boyle spent almost two decades of his adult life in the Yukon. He liked to claim that he had arrived in Dawson with only nineteen dollars in his pocket. In his pocket, no doubt, but in the bank? In New York he had operated a lucrative feed and grain business, and though he was clearly hard-pressed for money—he depended on boxing exhibitions for his living after his New York stay—it stretches the imagination to suggest he was penniless. Clearly he was not without resources. It cost money to travel to Ottawa, and it cost more to live at the Russell House, the most luxurious hotel in the capital. Boyle certainly put whatever money he had to good use, as William Rodney has noted. He owned among other things several valuable pieces of Dawson real estate, a 20-foot-long wharf, a warehouse 100 feet long, a lumber dock, a half interest in a hydraulic grant, and 16 placer claims. His sawmill was certainly profitable, though Boyle and Slavin would have needed some sort of nest egg to launch it. But ten years after he arrived he would be a millionaire—self-made and proud of it, as his casual reference to the nineteen dollars suggests.

  Boyle was out of Dawson sometimes for months, even years, but it is clear that he thought of himself first and foremost as a Klondiker. From the beginning he was a leading figure in Dawson City. There is no sign that he had political ambitions. He was too much of a maverick to follow any party line, nor was he the sort who could stand to be pinned down by a pre-arranged political program. The only active role that would have suited his personality was that of leader; his ego would not have settled for less.

  In Dawson during the stampede summer of ‘98, anarchy reigned. The harried local government—a federal responsibility—could not cope with the myriad problems thrust upon it by the influx of thousands of men. Nothing worked. There were no street addresses. The town had been under water as a result of a sudden flood when the ice breakup dammed the Yukon. The whole of Front Street—dance-hall row—was an impassible swamp. The steamboats couldn’t unload cargo and the horse-drawn wagons couldn’t move in the mire. Then Boyle took
over. He organized every teamster in town and built a slab road all the way from the docks to the Mounted Police barracks. Under his goading the job was done in one day.

  Boyle made a point of buying his company supplies locally rather than from the Outside, as his rivals did, no doubt as a sop to his local critics but also because he was a community booster. He fought for a special tax to underwrite St. Mary’s Hospital, and he arranged regularly for a steamboat to take all the school children on a picnic upriver (and even splashed about himself, with his trousers rolled up and a toddler on his shoulders). His glee on such occasions was infectious, his energy boundless, and his generosity prodigal.

  He built a special church in Moosehide, the native village downriver from Dawson, with the stipulation that it must be open to worshippers of all faiths. On one occasion when he spotted the pregnant wife of a Yukon Gold Corporation executive staggering down a hill not far from his headquarters at Bear Creek (a tributary of the Klondike), he dashed to her aid and delivered her of a strapping baby on the spot.

  His community spirit came easily as part of his natural ebullience. Some, no doubt, was purposeful and political. He needed the support of the community for his mining ventures, and he also needed the support of the press, which alternately praised him and damned him. His great political rival was George Black, the loyal Conservative who would later become Speaker of the House of Commons. In spite of their differences the two men liked and admired each other. Boyle had need of Black. He had gained his mining concession with the help of Clifford Sifton, the most prominent Liberal west of Ottawa, who dealt out political favours like sweetmeats. But when the government changed in 1911 after Boyle had launched the first of his big dredges, Dawson became a Conservative town, and Boyle was shrewd enough to cultivate a Tory ally. He became one of the founders of the Dawson Amateur Athletic Association and chairman of its gymnasium and sports committee. That led to a new enterprise when he became manager of the Dawson Nuggets, a local hockey team that had the temerity to challenge the Ottawa Silver Seven, holders of the Stanley Cup in 1904.

  Boyle was already Outside when the Nuggets reached Ottawa, more than a little the worse for wear. They had set out for Whitehorse in mid-December, some on foot, others on bicycles. The bicycles didn’t make it, but the team did in just nine days, hoping to catch the SS Amur out of Skagway for Vancouver. That would allow them four days’ rest, according to Boyle’s schedule, before they played the first game in a series.

  A howling blizzard shut down the White Pass railway for three days after which they managed to struggle aboard the Romano for Seattle. Seven days aboard the tossing craft confined most to their beds. The trip back north to Vancouver and the transcontinental journey to the capital left them exhausted. They had been twenty-four days on the road without a chance to practise. The first game was scheduled for January 13, two days after their arrival, and Boyle was unable to secure a postponement. Not surprisingly, they lost that contest 9–2.

  This dispiriting result did not in the least rattle Boyle. Indeed, his regular reports to the Dawson News reached new heights of optimism. “It was a great game,” he wrote, noting that one of his charges had broken his stick over an Ottawa player, knocking him unconscious for ten minutes (retaliation for a cross-check), and drawn a fifteen-minute penalty. “We have a good chance to win the cup,” Boyle enthused. “The beating is no disgrace.”

  When the Nuggets lost the second game by a devastating 23–2 (a Stanley Cup record that still stands), Boyle’s exuberence continued. “Nevertheless it was a good game,” he reported, admitting that his team “was broken up and in no condition to play.” To give his players some rest he cancelled the coming exhibition games and sent the team on a tour of eastern Canada where, reinvigorated, they won six of eleven games, drawing enthusiastic crowds at every community.

  The idea of a hockey team travelling four thousand miles from a godforsaken subarctic village to challenge the Stanley Cup champions caught the public’s imagination. Six thousand people watched the final contest, played in Montreal. To George Kennedy, one of the Dawson forwards, “it was the roughest match ever played in Montreal” and “the most sensational ever witnessed here.” It did not matter that the Nuggets were defeated by Ottawa (at a more acceptable 4–2); Boyle’s Klondikers were heroes wherever they went, touring as far as Pittsburgh and Brandon and winning almost as many games as they lost. Then they set off individually for the Yukon leaving Boyle to grapple with problems, legal and financial, involving his concession.

  “Straitlaced” is not an adjective that springs readily to mind when describing a man who spent three years at sea, who mingled with the fight crowd in New York, and who propelled himself into the gaudy whirlwind of a gold-rush town. Yet there are elements of self-restraint in Boyle’s otherwise unorthodox personality. The abstemious, nonsmoking temperance crusader did not ogle dance-hall girls from a box in the Monte Carlo or the Palace Grand as his erstwhile companion Swiftwater Bill did. Women played a minor role in Boyle’s Klondike career.

  Was he ever in love during these early days? Capable of infatuation, certainly, as his sudden courtship in New York makes clear, but too impetuous for the good of that unfortunate marriage. “Few people ever thoroughly understood my father,” his daughter Flora was to write. “And it was unfortunate that my mother was not one of them.” Flora’s comments suggested the marriage was placid enough—too placid for Boyle. “There was no adventure, no fight, no difficulties to be vanquished. He became restless and unhappy. He was tired of this smooth, ordered existence, of bricks and mortar, smug houses and smug people.” In his daughter’s view, Boyle should never have married for “he could not endure to be bound.”

  During this period in the Klondike, Boyle’s children in Woodstock had little contact with their father save during the brief visits he made during his business trips to the Outside. They heard stories about him and wrote to him regularly, but it was not until years later that they heard the details of his operations. “We were lonely for him,” Flora remembered, “and he was lonely for us, too. By this time we were old enough to be with him.… He sent for us, and we went west thrilled, excited and eager.”

  In Flora Boyle’s memoirs there is a good deal of admiration for her father, but one does not get much sense of affection. She hero-worshipped him, that is certain. But how could they have been close? As for Joe Boyle, Jr., observers noted a certain coolness between father and son. Boyle’s nurse, Dorothy Wilkie, who spent some time with him during the last year of his life, told his biographer William Rodney that Colonel Boyle was “not on friendly terms with his son.” His long-time Klondike friend Teddy Bredenberg recorded an indifference between the two. Young Joe rarely came to see his father during his last illness. Their estrangement sprang mainly from Boyle’s own neglect; engrossed in his own affairs, he rarely bothered to write to his family.

  Three years after his first marriage broke up, a mysterious woman briefly entered Boyle’s life. Rodney (whose biography of Boyle is the most authoritative) discovered in the Personal Mentions column of the Dawson News of July 19, 1899, an item reporting that “Mrs. Joseph Boyle has arrived from the Outside.” Nothing more. Who was this unknown creature? Wife? Almost certainly not. Mistress or paramour would be a better guess. But who was she? That there was another woman in Boyle’s life about this time is only hinted at by his daughter. It is an abiding mystery, rendered more baffling because, after that one brief notice, the elusive “Mrs. Boyle” vanishes from the record.

  In 1907, a second, legitimate Mrs. Boyle entered the picture. Again the marriage was sudden enough to cause a shock to his family. She was a hotel manicurist, Elma Louise Humphries, whom Boyle had met in Detroit during his long and ultimately successful legal struggle with Sigmund Rothschild and other company directors who were attempting to take over his hydraulic concession.

  Flora, now living in the Yukon, describes her stepmother as “a nice quiet little person who could have been happily wedded to a good sub
stantial business or professional man”—but not to Boyle. He brought his new wife to Dawson and settled her in a little house at nearby Bear Creek, the centre of his mining activities. It is clear that Flora was uncomfortable with Elma Louise as her father’s wife. He was so different from the glamorous parent she had admired from afar. “It was not in this big, hot-blooded adventurous man to settle down quietly with a wife and family,” she wrote. The relationship between daughter and wife was clearly strained, but Boyle was too immersed in his mining ventures to make any real attempt to bring the two together. He solved the impasse in typical fashion by getting his daughter out of the way—shipping her off on a round-the-world cruise with a family friend: out of sight, out of mind.

  With his life organized to his satisfaction, Boyle could pursue his dream. The Guggenheims, operating as the Yukon Gold Corporation, had several smaller dredges on properties that Treadgold had assembled and consolidated before he sold out his shares and quit. Boyle’s company already had one large machine in operation, but the three new monsters he was planning would be twice its size and built on Canadian soil by a Canadian company in a corner of the North that many Americans and Englishmen confused with Alaska.

  Boyle had reason to be optimistic. Canadian Number One, gouging out the pay dirt at Bear Creek, had cost $200,000 to construct and had paid for itself in just sixty days. Now Boyle determined to build much bigger boats. His company was responsible for the superstructure; the Marion Steam Shovel Company of Ohio would design and build the machinery. Boyle signed the Marion contract in January 1910 and, with a work crew of one hundred, had Canadian Number Two operating before freeze-up in December, a remarkable feat considering the problems involved. His rivals were scoffing at the prospect of these gigantic new machines, but they proved highly efficient. Though the construction costs were doubled, their seventy-one manganese steel buckets, each weighing more than two tons, could process in one day three times as much gravel as their smaller counterparts.