Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  PROLOGUE

  On July 14, 1897, the steamship Excelsior docked in San Francisco, California. It brought with it the first news that gold had been discovered in the Klondike region of the Canadian Yukon. Unremarkable men who once had only modest means now swaggered down the gangplank with gold dust and nuggets enough to set themselves up in business and live—some comfortably, a few fabulously. The news rocked the country to its foundations, not least because it gave hope to America’s teeming ranks of the poor.

  The United States was still wallowing in the malaise of the Panic of 1893 and its subsequent depression. The economic excesses of what Mark Twain had called the Gilded Age, the high-water mark of unrestrained capitalism and gaudy wealth for the tiny class of industrialist robber barons, now cruelly tormented the lower class. Jobs were scarce and miserably paid; the standard wage for backbreaking labor was ten cents an hour. Shirkers and troublemakers, and especially anyone who even looked like he might be a unionizer or a socialist, were fired in a heartbeat and replaced from the long line of the unemployed who were desperate to have that dime an hour.

  Typical of them—in fact, archetypical of them—was a disaffected young intellectual of twenty-one who drifted about the dockside bars of Oakland, California. He was the illegitimate son of an unbalanced, free-loving spiritualist mother, who had been steadied somewhat by marriage to a kindly but partially disabled Civil War veteran. The boy was sensitive and unusually gifted, and he came to adore books, but in his existence there was little time to read.

  From his earliest memory, life had been little more than a series of chores. As soon as he left primary school he had been set to work in a cannery, stuffing pickles into jars for the ubiquitous ten cents an hour. At fifteen he realized he could make vastly more money as a thief. He borrowed the funds to buy a small sloop, taught himself to sail, and became an oyster pirate, raiding San Francisco Bay’s guarded tidal farms that were the monopoly of the Southern Pacific Railroad. He bought rounds of drinks for the waterfront toughs who became his friends, hiding from them his love of books and learning. Wary of prison or the violent death that other pirates met, he soon switched sides and made a small living for a while as a deputy for the California Fish Patrol.

  Still poor, seventeen, and suffocating, he signed aboard a sealing schooner hoping that his share of the profits would rescue his family from their poverty. He was at sea for seven months, pulling his boat, slaughtering seals, and fending off the bullying and indecent advances of older sailors. Alone on his watch he had steered the ship through a roaring typhoon and returned home a man. But the little money he made was soon gone.

  The economy had crashed during his absence, and he was lucky to find a job loading bobbins in a jute mill—for ten cents an hour. Knowing his love of books and gift of expression, his mother urged him to enter a literary contest sponsored by a local newspaper. Sacrificing precious hours of sleep, he wrote of the typhoon off the coast of Japan, and won the first prize of $25—a month’s wages. It set him on a flurry of writing other articles, but no one would buy them.

  He had read Horatio Alger stories as a boy, and still needed to believe that he could rise as a result of his honest labor. He took a job shoveling coal in the powerhouse of an electric railway company. The manager promised that he could advance in the business if he started at the bottom. The pay was $30 a month: ten hours a day, seven days a week—only they habitually gave him at least twelve hours’ worth of coal to shovel. His actual pay was even less than a dime an hour. His whole body would seize up with cramps, and he sprained his wrists, forcing him to wear heavy leather splints to do the job. Advancement never came, and another employee eventually confessed that in shoveling coal he was the replacement of two men, who had been paid forty dollars a month—each.

  He quit in a rage and became a hobo, riding the rails and experiencing the penniless subculture of vagrancy. To his surprise he met brilliantly read men among the tramps, men who introduced him to the egalitarian doctrines of socialism and gave him a cause to live for. Their disdain for capitalism and its minions who enforced order and conformity became brutally vivid in Buffalo, New York, where he was unjustly imprisoned for a month after being denied access to a lawyer.

  He worked his way back home and returned to high school. He was years older than the other students. Some of his classmates mocked him for earning his keep as the school janitor, but others were mesmerized by the stories he wrote of his wide-roaming life, no fewer than eight of which were published in the school’s literary journal. Looking ahead to college, he entered a prep school but was soon dismissed. The headmaster determined that he could not afford to have their wealthy students outshone by this working-class ruffian.

  Stung but defiant, he studied on his own, and passed the three-day entrance exam to the University of California at Berkeley. He borrowed the tuition from a kindly barkeeper, but family poverty forced him to withdraw after a single semester. The institution was not sorry to see him go, for his effectiveness as an editorialist and street-corner socialist was raising consternation among students and faculty alike. He returned to his labors, for ten cents an hour, ironing shirts in the steam laundry—exquisite irony—of a prep school.

  When the Excelsior docked with news of gold in the Yukon, the young malcontent knew he had to go. That there would be adventure was certain. There was also the possibility of wealth, perhaps great wealth. He approached his stepsister to lend him the money for a “grubstake.” He was uncertain whether she would support him, until he discovered that her much older husband had also determined to go seek a fortune.

  Only eleven days after the Excelsior had tied up, the pair boarded a coastal steamer dangerously overloaded with hundreds of other hopeful Klondikers, and headed north. They changed ships in Seattle and engaged an Indian canoe in Juneau to paddle them the last hundred miles to the prospectors’ beachhead at Dyea.

  He was greeted with chaos. Three thousand would-be prospectors, nearly all of them cheechakoes, the derisive local term for a tenderfoot, were all trying to get themselves organized to hike into the gold fields. It was nearly a three-week haul just to reach the first large resting camp, after which the elevation increased more and more steeply. London had brought a half-ton of supplies, all of which he had to carry in on his back, lugging seventy-five to one hundred pounds in each one-mile stage before trekking back for another load.

  Many of his ill-prepared competitors had stupidly brought horses to do their hauling. This was a country with no forage. Overloaded and whipped, the horses soon dropped dead or fell into ravines. All his life he had adored horses, and now he saw to his horror how Dead Horse Gulch got its name.

  The last obstacle was the worst. Chilkoot Pass presented him with a trek of three-quarters of a mile, upward at a 45-degree angle, after which the Canadian authorities at the border were satisfied that he could maintain himself and motioned him on. From there, he and his partners reached Lake Lindemann, the headwaters of the Yukon, where they built boats to float down to the gold region.

  “Float,” he discovered, did not begin to describe the terrors that followed. The lakes were connected by rivers fraught with gargantuan rapids. They saw others’ boats dashed on rocks, or swallowed by gaping whirlpools. Men drowned before their eyes. Miraculously they made it through to Lake Bennett and Lake Tagish, and his sailing experience on San Francisco Bay got them through to Marsh Lake, which poured out into the gruesome rapids of 50-Mile River. As other outfits came to grief, and death, on chutes called the Ridge and the Horse’s Mane, he got them through to Lake Laberge, and there winter overtook them.

  Twice they were defeated by icy headwinds while trying to cross the lake before it froze. The third time they sailed by night, exiting the lake into 30-Mile River just in time to see the sheet of ice form behind them. Outfits less hardy would have to spend the winter where they were.

  Almost at their destination, only eighty miles from the freezing boomtown of Dawson, they were met by discouraged w
ould-be prospectors on their way back. The good claims had already been staked, they said, and there was barely enough food in town to get through the winter—a bad omen for them and the thousands of others who had come north to get rich. He and his partners appropriated an abandoned line shack and set up housekeeping, having decided they might as well hunker down for the advancing Arctic winter where they were, and conditions were deteriorating steadily.

  Some days after, he set off alone up a nearby creek to do some exploratory panning, sheltering himself in a log dugout. The gold he found amounted to no more than a fingertip of flakes. Already he was showing the early signs of “Klondike Plague”: scurvy. His gums bled, and his skin was slack and pallid. A passing doctor told him he would die without medical care. He could not go back the way he came; if he lived until the ice broke he would somehow have to sail down the entire length of the Yukon to civilization.

  In this frozen crucible he reached a personal epiphany. He would never advance in life as a laborer. When he could no longer shovel coal he would be tossed aside like any other used-up, disabled worker. He had just turned twenty-two; if he lived through this winter, he vowed to himself, he would become a writer. If people were ignorant, he would educate them. If society was unjust, he would preach justice. He had shown a talent for writing; if he made it back home, he would train himself to write professionally, no matter what it took.

  Cold, sick, lonely and miserable, the young man whose penmanship had never developed beyond what he could manage in grammar school scrawled some highly prophetic graffiti onto the log next to his bunk:

  JACK LONDON MINER AUTHOR JAN 27, 1898

  1

  THE WORK BEAST

  Readers of the San Francisco Chronicle snapped open the June 4, 1875, edition and were confronted by a lurid tale of domestic abuse and wifely desperation. The story was melodramatic, the writing turgid and breathless. A DISCARDED WIFE, shrilled the headline, WHY MRS. CHANEY TWICE ATTEMPTED SUICIDE.1

  The husband-villain was “Professor” William Chaney, an astrologer, which was a respectable calling in the wide-open San Francisco of the 1870s. He was known in the Bay Area for his well-attended lectures and his forceful and nimble debating skills. The aggrieved spouse was Flora Wellman, not actually his wife although she called herself Flora Chaney. She was a spiritualist who supported herself by conducting séances and—being from a cultured family—piano lessons. Both principals were of a dubious social rank, belonging to a community of widely vilified nonconformists. “Husband and wife have been known for a year past as the center of a little band of extreme Spiritualists,” clucked the reporter, “most of whom professed, if they did not practice, the offensive free-love doctrines. . . . It is hard to see what attracted her toward this man, to whom she was united after a short acquaintance. The union seems to have been the result of a mania like, and yet unlike, that which drew Desdemona toward the sooty Moor.” She became pregnant and he, according to the newspaper, demanded that she obtain an abortion. Torn between devotion and degradation, Flora twice tried to take her own life.

  William Chaney and Flora Wellman were both social rebels, but they had followed vastly different paths to this violent intersection of their lives. Chaney was fifty-four at the time their domestic strife became public scandal; Flora was thirty-one. Chaney was from Maine, born into harsh poverty in a log cabin on a farm near Chesterville, raw country twenty miles northwest of Augusta, in 1821. He was nine when his father was killed in an accident, and he was sent out to labor on nearby farms, seven of them in seven years; he loathed the work and was sometimes beaten for his sour attitude. In contrast, Flora was born into luxury in 1843 in Massillon, Ohio, a few miles west of Canton in the eastern part of the state. She had tutors and her family indulged her whims, but she was wild and willful; after her mother’s death, from the age of four she terrorized her stepmother. Despite lessons in music and elocution and social graces, she remained spoiled and rebellious—traits that only worsened after she was ravaged by a fever thought to have been typhus. The disease arrested her growth at perhaps only four and a half feet tall, caused much of her hair to fall out, ruined her eyesight, and left her brittle, prone to hysterical rages that bordered on madness.

  Before they met, both Chaney and Flora survived years in personal wilderness. Sick of farm labor, Chaney worked in a sawmill and tried to become a carpenter, always resentful of having to perform manual labor when he would have preferred a more learned life. At sixteen he determined to take his revenge on a cruel world by becoming a pirate, and spent two years on a fishing boat to learn seamanship. Late in 1839 he enlisted in the Navy, but after he found himself assigned to the dock-bound receiving ship Columbus, he deserted and as a wanted man began drifting toward New Orleans, once the haunt of the last great Gulf buccaneer, Jean Lafitte. When Chaney took sick and could not earn his passage on the flatboat he had signed aboard, the captain put him ashore, but Chaney at twenty was treated so kindly by local farmers that his faith in humanity was, briefly, restored.

  Despite her family’s repeated attempts to humor and pacify her, Flora became increasingly alienated. Like Chaney she was sixteen when she left home, living with one and then another of her three married sisters before deserting her family entirely. Where she roamed and how she supported herself for the next decade remained her own secret, but at some point she turned, as did so many turbulent spirits, to the West. By 1873, at age thirty, she was boarding in the Seattle home of Henry and Sarah Yesler. He was one of Seattle’s most prominent citizens, entrepreneur of the first steam-powered sawmill on Puget Sound; probably Flora’s family had known him when he was a sawyer for a time in her hometown.

  At some point in her wanderings, Flora had become enamored of spiritualism, an occult fad that swept America in the mid-nineteenth century and centered on the belief that the dead could be contacted through entranced mediums. First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln publicized the practice and even convinced her husband to attend séances in the White House.

  Massillon itself had been rocked by a famous case when Flora was eight. Abby Warner, an eighteen-year-old illiterate who was believed to have been mildly retarded, was presented to the public as a medium capable of receiving messages from as many as three spirits at once. Naysayers were put to flight when Abby was taken to Christmas Eve services at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church, and the proceedings were reduced to confusion by loud knockings emanating from Abby’s pew, although she herself was perfectly still. The authorities brought her to trial for disrupting a church service nevertheless, but she was acquitted for want of any witnesses able to swear that they had seen her causing the commotion. In Ohio more generally, the sisters Tennie and Victoria Claflin were drawing almost as much attention. To Flora, who already knew how to make herself the center of attention, the events were both spell-binding and instructive. Then, too, one of the most celebrated spiritualists of the day, Achsa Sprague, attributed her surviving a siege of rheumatic fever to the intercession of spirits, and Achsa’s experience, so similar to Flora’s own, may have given her the idea to become a practitioner. She found willing hosts in the Yeslers, who were devotees of spiritualism.

  The Yeslers were unconventional in other ways as well. While they did not advocate free love, they certainly held liberal views; Henry Yesler acknowledged a daughter he had fathered with an Indian woman before his wife joined him from Ohio, and Sarah was known to have had at least one lesbian lover. Yesler also believed in astrology, and during the time that Flora was living with them he frequently welcomed into his home a man who had become a leader in this field, William Chaney.

  After his riverbank rescue, Chaney had realized his dream of becoming better educated, but he remained a disagreeable rebel. As a teacher he alienated other teachers by spurning established science and philosophy. He read for the law in Wheeling, Virginia, but alienated other attorneys with his certainty that a legal system based on precedent was humbug. Eventually his contrariness cost him his law practice, and he was reduce
d to working in a match factory. Chaney’s life took the cerebral turn that he craved in 1866, when by chance he fell in with Dr. Luke Broughton, a British astrologer who settled in the United States; he had practiced in Philadelphia until that town passed an ordinance against fortune-telling, then he removed to a studio at 814 Broadway in New York, where he made a convert, heart and soul, of Chaney.2 Chaney became virtually one of the Broughton household, and their partnership proved lucrative, to the extent that they drew first an unfavorable press, then the determination of Broughton’s landlord to evict them despite two years remaining on his lease. Months of harassment ended with Chaney being jailed, for want of bail, for twenty-eight weeks on unsubstantiated charges.

  Once he was released, Chaney determined to search out a more open-minded community. He had married and was widowed, married again and was divorced, and despite the stars being aligned against the union he married a third time, to a woman he had met while incarcerated. Within a month of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad he entrained for the West, telling his wife that the trip was purely exploratory and he would return soon.

  Chaney worked and resided across much of the West. By turns, he was a lawyer and a surveyor—and always an evangelizing astrologer—in Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and California. He rewrote and published a British astrological tract as a kind of American manifesto of the art, and he lectured successfully in the San Francisco area before settling in Salem, Oregon, in 1871, frequently visiting Seattle. His third wife was left to languish and fume in New York as he took advantage of the West’s more open-minded attitude toward astrology—open-mindedness, of course, that stopped short of public acknowledgment. “I enjoyed the friendship, ‘in private,’” he recalled, “of U.S. Senators, Congress-men, Governors, Judges of the Supreme and lower courts, etc., but they were timid about recognizing me in public, except to salute me pleasantly.” He believed to his core that his abilities had helped many of them to their high stations, “but they dare not reward me openly, although in private they were my best and truest friends.”3 It was surely in this connection that Chaney gained the friendship of Seattle’s Henry Yesler, although had it been generally known that Yesler was consorting with and even consulting an astrologer, he likely would not have been elected mayor of Seattle, as he was in 1874.