Prisoners of the North

by Berton, Pierre

  The statistics recorded in the Dawson press were enough to send shivers down the spines of the individual pick-and-shovel placer miners. Boyle was importing 1,700 tons of steel parts over the White Pass and down the river by barge at a freight cost of $110,000. Twenty-four horses were needed to drag the two 27-ton steel “spuds,” or anchors, each 65 feet long, on which the great dredge would pivot. The bucket lines, which could dig as deep as 45 feet, moved up a 97-foot digging ladder to dump the contents into a 63-ton inclined revolving screen that separated the pay dirt and hurled the dross gravel into another inclined travelling belt.

  This “stacker,” as it was called, disgorged its contents to become part of the mountainous gravel tailings that the dredge left in its wake and that would soon choke the Klondike River valley and its tributary gold creeks. The screaming sound of the dredge at work—its cables whining and groaning as it pivoted from side to side—could be heard for miles. Each time it lurched forward as the spud was hauled up, this sound, together with the guttural growling of the bucket line and the clamour of the inner drum, resonated through the hills. It is part of my boyhood memories, this eerie sound, wafting down the valley twenty-four hours a day, ten months a year. As a child I thought it was some kind of strange animal lurking just behind the hills, and I feared it. But to Boyle it was welcome music.

  Although dredges cannot work in permafrost, Boyle was both lucky and prescient. The Guggenheims were thawing their ground with steam under pressure, an expensive process. Boyle merely diverted the main channel of the Klondike River and let the water flow over the ground where the dredge would operate. It wasn’t until 1918 that new research established that cold water thaws more effectively than steam, but Boyle had divined that ten years earlier and made an enormous saving.

  To provide power for his dredges, Boyle built a hydroelectric power plant at the north fork of the Klondike some seven miles upriver from his concession. To divert water for the plant he dug a conversion canal six miles long and twenty-eight feet wide, a remarkable piece of wilderness engineering that also had its quota of scoffers. He knew that to be profitable his big dredges would have to operate for much of the winter. But how could that be achieved if his great canal froze over? Boyle installed electric heaters at intervals along the route. With these and other techniques he was able to extend the working season by more than a month.

  By 1912, Boyle was King of the Klondike, a title originally bestowed upon Alex McDonald, “the Big Moose from Antigonish,” who dealt in gold claims as if they were playing cards but died broke, chopping his own wood on Cleary Creek. Boyle not only ran Dawson’s telephone company, electric system, and running water but also owned the town’s laundry and was supplying power to his rivals. He ordered two more big dredges with Marion equipment, Canadian Number Three and Number Four. The mammoth floating machines, working day in and day out, lasted until mid-century. Canadian Number Four was still in working order when the successor to Boyle’s company shut it down in 1961.

  The industrial revolution in the gold country sparked by Boyle had changed the face of the Klondike, and there was no environmentalist movement to protest or prevent it. The low, rolling hills had long since been denuded in the growing hunger for lumber. The broad and verdant valleys were reduced to black scars by the big nozzles that tore at the topsoil and overburden to send the muck and silt coursing down to the big river. As the years rolled by, the dredges themselves, gouging out their own ponds, would reshape the rivers and creeks, leaving their own dung behind in the huge tailings piles of washed gravel that would choke the goldfields for more than forty miles.

  Boyle’s monstrous dredge Canadian Number Four floating on its own pond and dipping into the bedrock for gold. The stacker is dumping gravel tailings at the stern.

  The irony is that, with the gold gone, the rape of the Klondike has become an asset. The tailings are now a tourist attraction; when some were bulldozed flat for a new housing development there was an outcry from those who saw them as part of the country’s history. Driving past this moonscape, goggle-eyed tourists are treated to another spectacle from the old days: Canadian Number Four, raised from the silt of the creek by the army, restored by Parks Canada, and officially designated an historic site, towers over its visitors on Bonanza Creek as a reminder of a romantic era and its Klondike King. There is no other monument to Joe Boyle in the land of gold.

  But the king was growing restless. He had achieved everything he set out to do in the Yukon. His four great dredges were breaking all previous records; he had become a leading figure in Dawson, admired now as a local booster and praised for his philanthropy. On September 3, 1914, shortly after war was declared in Europe, he plunged into the fray in his characteristic Boyle fashion, offering to raise at his own expense a fifty-man machine-gun battery made up entirely of Yukoners. He also provided morning jobs for the new recruits in his company so that they could drill every afternoon. There were precedents for such grand gestures: the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry and the Lord Strathcona Horse had similar histories.

  Speed was essential if Boyle was to get his men Outside before the ice made river traffic impossible. But even as they prepared to leave, Boyle had to acknowledge clouds gathering on his horizon. Hostilities had scarcely begun in Europe when Canadian Number Two, working the Klondike River, sank in some twenty feet of water. That meant the dredge would be out of operation for the best part of a year, eating up the profits as several score men tried to salvage the boat. As a result, gold production was cut by 20 percent or more. The dredge was raised at last the following July and placed on piles for inspection. Alas, it toppled from its makeshift perch, killing one man and injuring three others. Worse, three months later, on October 29, 1915, Boyle’s big steam generating and heating plant at Bear Creek, which serviced Dawson, burned to the ground.

  War was another factor Boyle had not envisaged when building his big dredges. Operating costs had risen by $20,000 since 1913 while gold production values had fallen by the same amount. Dredging has some of the uncertainties of a Las Vegas roulette wheel. As the early stampeders had discovered, some claims were fabulously rich, others worthless. By this time Boyle’s dredges were working poorer ground—so poor that wages had to be postponed until better prospects showed up.

  Until this point Boyle’s active life had been crowned with a series of successes, and he had reason to feel content. But now his career had begun to unravel, or so it must have seemed to him. In his pride he could not have foreseen that one of his mammoth machines might fail or a world war force up his costs and bring down his profits.

  October 10, 1914, was a bittersweet benchmark in Boyle’s peripatetic career. That was the day when the recruits for his machine-gun battery would leave the Yukon for active service. And that was the very day on which Canadian Number Two sank in the Klondike. Boyle worked all day at Bear Creek to help save it. That evening he hurried to Dawson to bid his detachment farewell. In its spirited account of the unit’s departure, the Dawson News noted a silent man who stood at the edge of the barge with bared head as the steamer plowed past the shouting crowd and “watched the ship and her brave boys until she was out of hailing distance.” It was Boyle, who seemed “transfixed, gazing until only the dancing lights were visible on the water.” Then he quietly turned from his place and marched up the street with the crowd.

  Boyle, ever the man of action, desperately wanted to be where the action was—not in Dawson, declining into a ghost town, but with his brave boys, far from the growing frustrations (financial, mechanical, and legal) that would continue to bedevil him. His brave boys, however, were not in Europe but languishing in Vancouver’s Hastings Park, transformed into a military camp, “a forlorn outfit,” in the words of Leonard Taylor, “with no spiritual home, condemned to hours of square bashing and route marching, dulling to the soul of Yukon individualists.”

  Boyle put on the pressure, went over the heads of the army, and straight to the Minister of Militia, the chol
eric Sam Hughes. Finally he got his way: the unit was posted overseas in the summer of 1915. In England, Boyle’s frustrations increased when he attempted to have a Canadian put in charge of the battery and was told peremptorily that the machine-gun section was under the control of Imperial authorities. In the end the battery was broken up and its identity destroyed, shattering Boyle’s hopes for a close-knit band of Northern brothers, side by side, attacking the hated Hun.

  The zest was going out of Boyle’s life. His ardour was dampened by the news that his old rival George Black, the Tory lawyer who had opposed him in his court battles, had been given leave to organize a Yukon infantry company to fight in France. Not only that, but Black was studying for a commission to lead his men in action. This must have galled Boyle, who was itching to get into service but at the age of forty-nine was not eligible. Black was forty-three.

  In the Yukon, Boyle would remain a controversial (if engaging) figure long after his death. Andrew Baird, a friend of my family and a regular guest at our dinner table during my Dawson days, wrote in his memoirs that the story of Boyle’s activities in the Klondike was more like a fairy tale than a factual record. “He wrecked his company with ill-conceived policies and left it in a hopeless muddle,” he wrote. Baird of course was not unbiased, being associated with A. C. N. Treadgold and the rival Yukon Gold Corporation.

  When Flora Boyle told her Maclean’s readers that her father “could not endure to be bound,” one suspects that she was referring to more than his unfortunate marriage. Boyle was tied to his faltering company and confined to the far-off Yukon at a time when others were flocking to their king’s aid in the poppy-dotted fields of Flanders.

  It was too much. The man who had solved his daughter’s problems with her stepmother by pushing her off to distant climes now chose another form of escape. Like a small boy who picks up his marbles sobbing “I don’t want to play any more,” Joe Boyle slipped quietly out of town in mid-July 1916, leaving the Klondike behind forever.

  The Boyle contingent of Yukon machine-gunners at their barracks in Dawson City.

  This was a surprising decision and, given Boyle’s long history of success in the Klondike, a remarkable one. He was not a man to let sudden setbacks deter him. Or was he? There is an adolescent quality to Boyle’s unexpected flight from reality, for that is what it was. Certainly, wartime conditions had made his business affairs more difficult. It was hard to get the supplies, the equipment, and the men he needed to keep the company alive. Dawson was slowly dwindling, and so was the supply of gold. But surely this was not the time to abandon the mining empire that had been his pride. What was needed was a firm hand on the tiller. For Boyle at this juncture to turn the whole enterprise over to his son Joe was akin to a dereliction of duty. If the senior Boyle had stayed on the job, could he have saved his ailing business? The answer is that fifty years later, after others reorganized and consolidated the company, the great Boyle dredges were still working the famous creeks and still producing gold.

  For Boyle, the fun had gone out of the mining business. The real “fun” lay elsewhere, in the battlefields of France. Boyle wanted to escape the burdens of the Klondike. He wanted to be known as Klondike Boyle, and for the rest of his life he was, but he wanted the glamour without the responsibilities. The outside world, of course, from Ottawa to Odessa, did not know that in the Klondike he was a failure.

  Now, in the twenty-first century, it is hard for us to comprehend the mindset of the Great War generation, when the soldiers and the generals, too, were idolized as lily-white heroes and a man out of uniform, even a middle-aged man, was seen as a slacker. The propaganda that sold the war as Great Adventure was designed to recruit young men—the flower of the nation—and send them willingly, even joyously, into the trenches of Flanders: to make them feel themselves noble crusaders for their country doing battle with the Antichrist. No one in Boyle’s generation would ever censure him for abandoning his business enterprise in order to save civilization.

  When Boyle left Canada for London, he took a piece of the Yukon with him. That was a purposeful decision. He could run away from all the frustrations and unexpected financial problems that had been visited upon him, but he could not escape the aura of the golden North that attended him—nor did he want to. In London, his circle of acquaintances, carefully cultivated during his earlier trips, grew wider. “Klondike” had become a word in the language that connoted glamour, adventure, heroism, and sudden wealth. Now he was Klondike Boyle, a title worth more, in some circles, than a knighthood because it was unique. At the level in which he moved he was not seen as a lone prospector who had stumbled upon a paystreak; he was the King of the Klondike. It was for Boyle a kind of brand name providing a conversational gambit that gave him easier access to military, business, and social circles that might otherwise have been closed to him. He had left the North but the North had not left him. In that sense, he would always be its captive.

  Now Boyle’s contribution to the war effort in the form of a machine-gun battery, costly as it was, began to pay off. On September 16, 1916, he was gazetted an honorary lieutenant colonel in the Canadian militia. It gave him a title and a touch of authority. But it also burdened him with a reputation. He spent the rest of his life subconsciously living up to it—the bold sourdough and entrepreneur who feared nothing and dared everything. Fortunately, he had the stamina, the will, and the zest to press forward against all odds.

  He did his best to wipe out the intimacies of his past. Save for one letter, Elma Louise never heard from him again although she made repeated attempts to seek him out. Nor was his son, Joe, who took over active management of the company, able to reach him once he had plunged into new adventures. Again it was out of sight, out of mind, which helps explain the indifference that young Joe, burdened now by the responsibilities his father had saddled him with, exhibited in Boyle’s last days.

  The rank had no military significance. The army doled out many honorary commissions to prominent citizens who had helped the war effort. Boyle was little more than a civilian in costume, but he made much of it. He lost little time in switching to a well-tailored uniform of officer’s serge complete with Sam Browne belt. Now he was “Colonel Boyle” also, and he revelled in the title, which was to become useful to him in eastern Europe. Few would realize that he was not a regular officer. He was never seen in mufti but made a point of wearing his uniform at all times, complete with the word yukon in large black letters stitched on his shoulder straps. He went further: on each lapel, a Canadian maple leaf gleamed with unaccustomed brilliance. These caused considerable comment because they needed no polishing, being fashioned of genuine Klondike gold—a regimental quiff for a man without a regiment.

  It is tempting to think of Joe Boyle in cinematic terms. We can almost see the word finis on the screen as he boards the steamboat and fades into the distance. He has dispensed with his own past and we can only wait for the movie sequel: king of the klondike Part 2, subtitled The Saviour of Romania, which, unlike most sequels, manages to surpass the original.

  In London, the man of action wanted, once again, to be where the action was—if not in the front lines, at least serving his country as part of the war effort. Boyle’s own pride was involved. How could he, a powerful man of forty-nine, be cast aside like a used topcoat? Other men of his age were being shamed as slackers by aggressive young women who taunted them with white feathers. Boyle’s uniform protected him from that, but there is little doubt he himself felt he was not pulling his weight. He lobbied intensely, using his social connections (Herbert Hoover was one), to try to get into the fight. That didn’t happen until the United States entered the war and the Russian czar, Nicholas II, abdicated. The American Society of Engineers was formed that spring to help support wartime Washington, and Boyle knew the honorary chairman, who had shown an interest in his dredging operations. One connection led to another, and on June 17, 1917, Boyle, who spoke no word of Russian, went off to Russia on the recommendation of another Am
erican friend, Walter Hines Page, U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, ostensibly to help reorganize the Russian railway system. He knew very little about railways, but he certainly knew a good deal about organization, and that turned out to be exactly what was needed.

  —THREE—

  When Boyle arrived in Petrograd (St. Petersburg, then capital of Russia) in July 1917, eastern Europe was in chaos. The provisional Lvov–Kerensky government, which had replaced the old czarist regime, was clinging to power, shored up by the Allies who needed to keep Russia active in the war in the face of Bolshevik insurgents. Boyle made contact with the Russian military authorities who accepted his services, though with some hesitation, while the British War Office was trying not very successfully to find out what he was doing and under what authority.

  Boyle soon moved southwest to Romania to try to assess the stalemate caused by the tangle in the Russian and Romanian transportation systems. Romania had declared war on the German-led Central Powers in August 1916, but her railways were in such a state of disorder—half-finished in some cases, ending abruptly in others—that it was impossible to ensure a steady stream of supplies to the troops of either country.

  Boyle got the system working by making use of Lake Yalpukh (now in Ukraine). This was a long finger of water running north from the Danube River near its delta. He saw that one end of an existing rail line could be extended to the southern tip of the lake where ships could be used to replace the gap in the rails. The link to the railhead at the northern shore thus formed unravelled the transportation snarl.