by Jack Tunney
A year later, he met Pete Lally. And from that moment his true apprenticeship started. Pete taught him the science of fighting. He learned there were more ways to win a fight than just overpowering an opponent. He got tougher. And he fought smarter.
Jean’s wandering did not end. Travelling was part of a fighter’s life. But Jean stuck with Pete and with fighting longer than he’d done anything else. Their partnership was not forged on paper, but with words and a handshake. The two men lived by a mutual give and take that benefitted both.
Eventually Pete left fisticuffs to Jean and focused on setting up matches, gathering purses, and nurturing wagers among the sporting crowd that floated about the country – like prospectors, always looking for the next big strike.
But during the past three years, both Pete and Jean had begun to tire of the fight game, of its rootlessness and the lack of future both saw for themselves. They parted – not with rancor, but with a shared understanding that each needed change. Finding that change might have been easier to accomplish separately.
But the two stayed in touch through the network of rambling gamblers and community of sporting men. That was how Pete had reached out to Jean, how Billy Basham had gotten the information to the fighter for their meeting in San Francisco.
And now Jean found himself aboard a steamer for the all-water route to the gold fields. “Cheaper this way than going through Seattle,” Pete had cajoled. “I booked a tentative passage for us on half a dozen boats. I wasn’t sure when you’d arrive, so each day you didn’t show up, I’d sell the tickets to some other eager fellows. There were plenty willing to take me up, I’ll tell you sure.”
At the Carlton, Pete had wagged his finger at Jean over the table cloth and the remains of their meal. “And we don’t have to buy our equipment. My pal Barlowe stowed his gear and it’s just waiting for us. Just the cost of provisions, and we’re ready to pick up the nuggets in buckets.”
Jean and Pete had come aboard the Excelsior together, but Pete, probably sensing Jean’s remaining irritation and insecurity about the venture, had drifted into the crowd of men packed onto the deck.
Jean studied the faces around him. Desperate, haunted gazes were all he saw. These men, like him, were looking for some sort of escape. Or seeking a dream come true. The past decade had been filled with bank failures and financial crashes across the breadth of the country. Men lost more often than they gained. Tales of picking up gold like eggs in a hen house were fanciful dreams many men would laugh at, but when they were done laughing, they would notice the taste of cinders on their tongues, and they would give in to the chase for a will o’ the wisp.
My face, Jean wondered. Do I look so haunted? So desperate?
They were gaunt and gray, their skin like that of dead men. In some, their eyes had all the liveliness of lumps of coal. In others, hellfire seemed to burn.
One or two noticed Jean’s gaze, and returned his look with a challenging glare. Jean turned away. These men were all kindling and tinder for an ugly fire that could ignite at any time during this trip. Jean didn’t care to supply the first spark.
ROUND 5
The fire of too many desperate men shoved together erupted the second day aboard the Excelsior.
Although the journey across the rainbow to the pot of gold was underway, desperation fed the passengers’ impatience. Many had sold what little they had left to make this last-ditch effort to pry their respect out of the ground. Whatever sweet success they dreamed they might find after reaching shore was still, at this point in their trip, seasoned with the bitter steps that had brought them to this undertaking.
Jean stood with the rail at his back. He watched the crowd of men sway with the Excelsior’s movements through the water. The mutterings and grumblings that drifted through the passengers might have been distant thunder echoing from the ragged gray clouds overhead. But Jean detected a storm closer than any that might have been pushing through the sky.
“Irritable bunch,” he said. “Even after a morning’s coffee and corn dodgers.”
Pete Lally, standing at his side, grunted. “Tetchy.” He turned and spat over the side. “Like Texas longhorns on the prod.”
Jean looked at his friend. A smile lit his eyes, the first smile he’d offered since their dinner at the Hotel Carlton. “You know about cows?”
“Humph. I know enough to stay away from ‘em.”
A voice raised over the general murmur of the men and the sounds of the water and the ship. “Shuddup! How do we even know there’s anything left to find? They’ve been working claims two years now. We’re the car behind the caboose!”
“Shuddup yerself! You’re a danged blowhard.”
A third voice rang out: “Leave it, both of yez!”
The second voice came back, “Pull your boot out of the stew pot, Carmichael! You’ve got more teeth than sense, and yer pie hole ain’t got but two or three pegs in there as it is!”
Those were the last coherent words from the grumbling swarm before a gargling roar burst from someone’s throat, acting like a signal that made fists start swinging across nearly the entire deck. Anyone trying to push out of the melee was pulled and struck and stomped just like the rest of the brawlers.
Jean was trapped against the rail. He reached out and snatched a man by his coat collar before the fellow toppled over the side into the waves. He glanced at Pete, who was jabbing his knuckles into the face of anyone who got too near.
Men were yelling, roaring. If unleashed frustration and rage could swamp the ship, they’d all be swimming soon. Jean saw crewmen trying to break through the edges of the mob, brandishing clubs, but their efforts were having little effect. Jean looked into the face of the man whose collar he still clutched. The man’s eyes were glazed, unconscious. Jean lifted the dead weight of the stranger’s body above the crowd, raised him the height of his two muscled arms, then swung, and tossed the figure down into the heaving mass so twenty men collided and collapsed on the deck in a tangle.
A stunned moment that stopped the crowd followed the remarkable clash, as though the roaring mob had lost its air. Eyes glared in Jean’s direction.
“Stop it! Stop it now!” he bellowed.
The expressions he saw reflected the ugliest parts of these men’s souls. Jean now had become the focus of their combined rage.
He heard Pete mutter, “Uh oh.”
Jean set his feet, readying himself for a surge of fighting-mad men.
Pete said, “Oh, hell.” Then, “Okay, c’mon.”
The crowd lunged toward the two partners. Jean and Pete each took two steps away from the rail, then stood back-to-back. They had fought in tandem before, but never with a surging ocean on one side and mob on the other.
The first man advanced, fingers hooked into claws. Jean snapped out a fist, dropping the man to the deck with a bleeding nose. The second attacker came at Jean with a haymaker, and Jean ducked before driving his right fist upward into the man’s diaphragm. The man fell back, unable to breathe, tangling the legs of those behind him as he collapsed atop the bleeding man.
Pete hadn’t fought in the ring for years, but he was still spry and his arms were knotted with muscle. He swatted away grasping hands and jabbed his fist into one man’s throat, knocked two teeth from the mouth of another, and thumped a third’s rib cage twice before the man fell to his knees.
Jean had knocked down two more by the time he heard Pete yell out, “Two!”
Jean rattled a snarling man’s skull with his fist, then grabbed his arm while Pete latched onto another bellowing fellow’s wrist. The two partners swung, their foes’ skulls cracked together, and two more limp figures joined the heap on the deck.
Jean and Pete returned in a snap to their stances, hands up, ready for more.
BOOM!
All faces turned toward the pilot house. On its roof stood the captain. He held a pump-action shotgun, which he had just discharged into the air.
“That’s enough,” he said. His voice was a weary sort of g
rowl, and though it carried no tremor of excitement, the vigor of his threat was obvious. “You paid your way, but I’ll not have you lubbers wrecking my ship.” His gaze burned from his heavy-lidded eyes, framed by deep wrinkles. “You don’t care to stay aboard, you’re welcome to swim.” He slammed the forestock down the magazine tube and back in a sudden action, and a spent shell flew from his gun. “If you can.”
He glared long seconds more. Then he turned and stalked away.
The passengers remained quiet. Slowly they turned back toward their social eddies like water carefully released from a dammed pool. The injured were helped to their feet. The murmur of voices returned after a few minutes. The silence that had seemed to mute even the noise of the engines and the rush of the water sweeping the sides of the ship was gone.
Pete leaned against Jean so he could speak softly. “Think you made any friends?”
Jean didn’t answer at first. His knees trembled as adrenalin drained from his limbs. He listened to the voices. He saw the injured being helped to their feet. He saw one man clap another on the back with good humor. He heard a guffaw.
He rubbed his knuckles, first one hand, and then the other. “Maybe they blew off enough steam,” he said finally.
“Maybe,” Pete answered. “Maybe we’ll take turns sleeping at night.”
***
The passengers kept their violence in check the rest of the trip. Some thanks were due to the patrolling crew members who kept their armaments in view, ready for use. Jean thought perhaps all but the toughest nuts had decided to save their energies for the work required once they made landfall. Yet he still saw a few red gazes turned his way more than once each day.
The morning light was thin when the Excelsior dropped anchor in the Bering Sea off the Seward Peninsula. One of the crew hollered, “Welcome to Nome!” They still hadn’t touched land. Jean peered over the rail and judged it to be at least a mile or more away. A heavy surf separated the ship from the narrow shelf of black sand that marked the edge of the continent.
Pete Lally stood by his side. Jean turned to him. “Now what?”
“Too shallow for a port,” Pete answered. “The barges will come for us.”
Jean scowled at the ragged waves running along the beach. “You know a lot,” he said. “Sure you’ve not been here before?”
Pete snorted. “Nope. Read up all I could find. Asked Tim Barlowe a lot of questions.”
The scows arrived alongside the Excelsior. The craft hardly looked seaworthy in Jean’s eyes. They appeared unwieldy, like bulky blocks of wood that might flip their cargo into the water on first encountering one of the waves rising toward Nome’s beach.
Once aboard and underway, Jean realized his experience on the Excelsior was luxurious compared to his trip on the scow. It wallowed so through the waves Jean wondered if the thing had been originally built for some land-based purpose, rather than for herding humans and freight across the water. Swims like a pig, he thought. He turned to share his complaint, but saw Pete’s face was bright with anticipation, so he kept the words in his mouth.
The impatience and press of the passengers to get ashore meant their possessions were left aboard the Excelsior until everyone was first put on the beach. But the scows put no one ashore. Everyone had to wade through the waist-high surf from their conveyance before walking on land.
Six hours after the steamship’s anchor had dropped into the depths, Jean stepped onto the dark sands of Nome.
“Water’s cold,” he said.
Pete shivered a moment before a belly-shaking laugh burst forth. “This ain’t San Francisco or Texas, boyo! This is gold country.”
The scene on the beach was one some men might have described as bedlam. But Jean’s career as an itinerant boxer meant he had seen boomtowns before. Men and women thronged the beach in the midst of a seeming chaos – swirling sand in pans, operating rockers, shouting, elbowing away anyone who might step too close to their workings.
Pete had explained how the tide made staking claims on the flats impossible. By some sort of informal agreement among these gold-maddened crowds, a person was allowed to work an area within the reach of a shovel without interference from others.
Jean surveyed the scene to see if any shovels were being swung at heads.
The participants in the fury of stealing gold from the ground displayed every sort of wardrobe. There were men in mackinaws, in bib overalls and no shirts covering their union suits, and women in dresses and bonnets, women wearing men’s trousers. And hats! Bowlers, broken-down Stetsons, floppy fedoras, homburgs, blocky woolen caps with ear flaps. And everyone wore knee-high boots. If they wore trousers, the leggings were tucked into the boots. Even then, mud was sometimes splashed to the wearers’ waists.
Pete laughed again as he took in the sights. He clapped Jean on the shoulder. “We’re not in this madness. Our claim is on Anvil Creek. Come on.”
They trudged up the beach. Jean’s legs were now not yet adjusted to not having a heaving deck underneath, so he staggered a bit. As they left the beach, their way twisted and turned through the confusion of canvas tents set up on nearly every inch of the soggy turf running down to the sands from the town proper. No planning, no order, no organization lay behind this tent city. Its chaos, Jean realized, reflected the activity on the beach. Boomtown, he thought. In a gold rush, no one cares about where he lives, just about his diggings.
He almost stepped on a tipped-over thunder mug and asked, “How does anyone find his own tent?”
Pete guffawed before answering. “Maybe they look for the one that smells like home.”
ROUND 6
If a town might be said to have a cornerstone, Nome’s was anchored at the Snake River where it dumped its waters into Norton Sound. The city fanned outward from that point. Its business activities primarily lined Front Street, which paralleled the shoreline running southeast toward Norton Bay.
There was a profusion of frame buildings here, but many still were cheek-by-jowl with canvas-sided structures. Then Jean noticed a sound missing from the raucous music that marked other boomtowns. He heard plenty of hammering, but no burring whine of a sawmill. He realized then the closest thing to a tree he’d seen here was a scrubby bush. No trees, no sawmills.
Any lumber he saw here in Nome had been shipped from somewhere else. That explained why even a small structure like the one he was passing, The Kentucky Lodging House, had a front of lapped wooden boards, but the other sides and roof of the building were corrugated metal sheets.
Across the street, The Kentucky’s competitor – The Seattle Lodging House – was a large tent whose only wooden adornment was a short two-board fence across the width of the canvas wall facing the street.
This main thoroughfare was a muddy mess, and Jean was splattered to his waist before he and Pete had passed four businesses. Front Street was thronged with wagons and even a few loaded carts pulled by teams of dogs. The rolling wheels threw clots of mud on anything and anyone who happened to be near.
They came to a more established section of the business district. The first gold was found in the area on Anvil Creek in late ’98, and only frame buildings now lined the street. Signboards announcing every sort of trade were nailed to every available wall. Boardwalks fronted each business. The newly arrived partners no longer had to walk through the slop, but they still had to watch for any flying mud bombs thrown by passing wagons.
Here were collected the ticket offices for the various steamships that served Nome and its miners: one sign read S.S. Tacoma; another, S.S. Centennial; still another, among others, S.S. Warwick.
The larger buildings all appeared to Jean to house saloons and gaming emporiums. It made sense. Some of the earliest places established in a gold rush town would be in the business of separating men and women from their freshly unearthed wealth.
Pete nudged him and pointed. “The attorneys’ signs are smaller and hung under the big business signs. Honestly proclaims their parasite nature.” He grinned
widely before laughing. “Come on, we’ll claim our gear, then celebrate with a drink.”
“Where are we going?”
“A saloon, The Northern. Tim left his gear with the proprietor. We’ll take ownership, then we’ll be near-well prepared to pull gold out of the devil’s own hands.”
“How will they know us from Adam?”
“Tim and I drew up the papers. He signed everything over to us. I have ‘em here.”
Jean followed, taking in the sights all the while.
“Here we are,” Pete said, and he led the way through a double door.
The rough-and-tumble, just-hammered-and-hung-up looks of outside weren’t in evidence inside The Northern. The bar was handsome as any Jean had seen in Chicago. It gleamed under the light from polished brass oil lamps suspended from the pressed-tin ceiling. Ornately patterned paper covered the walls. A massive painting of a voluptuous nude woman was the focus of the back bar.
Gaming tables were arranged over most of the floor. The far end of the large room was taken up with a small stage. At one end was visible a balustrade for a stairway leading to the second floor.
Several men were at the games, some seated and playing cards, and a few were standing at the bar. Pete approached this latter group and leaned against the rail like the others did. Jean joined him.
The bartender came over. He was a stout, healthy-looking man, about thirty years old. He wore a crisp white shirt with black studs in the cuffs, a stiff collar with a black tie, and a starched white bib apron. His walrus mustache hid his mouth as he spoke: “Welcome to The Northern, boys.”
“Gentlemen,” Pete greeted the tender and the customers at the bar. “I’m looking for Charley Gary.”
“Charley’s not working the bar today,” the tender said. “My name is George Nelson. Can I help you?”
Pete nodded. “When will Charley be in?”
“He’ll be back tomorrow.”
“All right,” Pete sighed. “Do you know Tim Barlowe?”