Down the Yukon

by Will Hobbs

  The newspaper called him by the name Brackett had prophetically bestowed on him. There was a story about Lucky Ethan cutting the ribbon for the opening of Irish Nellie’s boardinghouse in the block behind the Northern. I read it to Abraham one evening after work. Nellie had a new nickname—“the miner’s angel.”

  Ethan rarely came home anymore, whether due to his success or to Abraham’s disapproval it was hard to tell. I got to a part of the newspaper story that told of Ethan making appearances at all the dance halls along Front Street and the famous personalities he’d danced with, including Diamond Tooth Gertie, Caprice, Ping Pong, and Cad Wilson. It began to tell of a photograph that had been taken of Ethan and Cad Wilson, with Nuisance curled up on the redhead’s lap.

  “Stop,” Abraham said softly. “Don’t read me any more of that racy rubbage, Jason.” Abe sounded eighty years old.

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “The dance-hall girls may be colorful, but they’re respectable. The dancing is as proper as can be. Everyone at the mill says so.”

  Abraham raised an eyebrow. “As I understand it, they dance to collect tokens, which cost a dollar. They get to keep a quarter. Is this a respectable way to make a living? All the while, they’re encouraging the men to buy drinks. It’s a scheme by the ownership to sell liquor.”

  I hesitated. “I don’t suppose there’s anything wrong in all of that….”

  “No?” Abe sighed and looked back at me, holding his eyes on mine. Then he said, “Do you mean to say you’ve paid them to dance with you?”

  “I haven’t,” I said truthfully.

  “Why not, then, if there’s nothing wrong in it? Too shy, are you?”

  For a moment I hated Abraham’s self-righteousness. I had an idea it was part of what was keeping Ethan away. “That’s not it,” I insisted.

  “What is it, then?”

  “Because of Jamie, I suppose.”

  My oldest brother nodded his approval. “Good for you, then. I hope she does come back, Jason. It’s not so far off—the first boat up the river should arrive in early June.”

  “I know,” I said. In fact, I was counting the days.

  “But Jason, you have to allow that Jamie and her father have been on a tour all across the continent. They’ve been treated like royalty wherever they go…. Remember, she’s the Princess of Dawson.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “You’ve seen, on a smaller scale, what fame can do to a person.”

  “Jamie won’t get too big for her britches, Abraham.”

  Abe smiled at my choice of words. “You’ll find out soon if they still fit…if she comes back.”

  I stood up, turned my back on him. His last “if” had me boiling. “I’m going out,” I said without explanation.

  I wandered down to Front Street looking for Ethan. Tracking him down didn’t take long; everybody in town knew Ethan by now. I found him in Silent Sam Bonnifield’s Bank Saloon and Gambling House at the corner of Front and King, across from the Alaska Commercial Store. Ethan was watching Silent Sam gamble with a fellow whose face I couldn’t make out from where I stood. Raptly observing the master, Ethan didn’t notice me as I came in.

  Nuisance noticed, however, and wagged that bent tail at the sight of me. I was allowed to gradually weave my way through the crowd—people recognized me as Ethan’s brother—until I stood at Ethan’s shoulder, which I gave a pat. He looked back, saw me there, and gave me that golden smile of his. “Jason,” he whispered. Nothing had soured between the two of us, at least.

  The room was in a profound hush. My eyes went to the pot on the poker table and I understood why. There was an enormous amount of cash there.

  Silent Sam was also called Square Sam because he ran an honest game. The man across the table was Louis Golden, also called Goldie. It turned out that this was a weekly game. The two were the owners of rival establishments, which they would close on alternating weeks to match wits and luck.

  Bonnifield was in his early thirties, slender and handsome, as taciturn as a marble statue. His blue eyes lacked any hint of expression. Golden, on the other hand, didn’t seem to mind sharing his ups and downs with the onlookers.

  There was fifty thousand dollars in the pot when Goldie confidently raised Silent Sam by twenty-five thousand. The crowd gasped at the enormity of the stakes. They all knew what money was worth, and so did I. Back in Seattle, in the years after our father died, my brothers and I shared a three-room apartment that cost five dollars a month. Back then I worked at a cannery for ten cents an hour, ten hours a day. It was the going wage in the States, and if wages had improved in the several years since, it couldn’t have been by more than a couple cents.

  Silent Sam called Golden and raised him. There was now $150,000 in that pot.

  Goldie in turn called him and raised him. He had a smile playing at his lips.

  This time Bonnifield was content to call.

  With a triumphant flourish, Goldie laid down four queens.

  Silent Sam, with no expression whatsoever, laid down four kings. His long arm reached across the table and raked in a fortune.

  The next time I went looking for Ethan I found him at the Bodega Saloon. This time Ethan wasn’t looking on. He was gambling, though not with large amounts, and he was winning more than he was losing. To my surprise, Cornelius Donner came and went from the table, and the two of them seemed fast friends.

  In fact, I was astounded. To me the warmth in Donner’s voice sounded no more genuine than his costume. When Donner looked at me out of the corner of his penetrating eyes—he never addressed me—I saw nothing in them but the depths and darkness of a bottomless well.

  When I caught Ethan alone I alluded to his gambling money by kidding that he must have turned prospector and discovered a new gold creek. He told me that Donner was the owner of the saloon and had staked him.

  I wondered why Donner would give Ethan money. I guessed it was a way of trying to bribe Ethan into more boxing matches, even though Ethan had told everyone in town he’d never fight again.

  In the days to come, now that Ethan had a cash grubstake, he turned in earnest to playing the fool on fortune’s wheel. Roulette, poker, faro, three-card monte, he played them all, not only at the Bodega but all up and down Front Street, and at midnight he went dancing. One night Abe sent me to try to bring him home, but Lucky Ethan was winning. He assured me that he was “really living” for the first time in his life. “Tell Abraham…,” he declared, and then Ethan couldn’t come up with the words. He’d been drinking and he couldn’t think straight. “Why even bother?” he said finally.

  The rest of April there was alcohol on Ethan’s breath. He no longer checked in at the mill.

  “I’ve lost him,” Abe lamented.

  So had I.

  The trouble was, Ethan kept winning. Not all the time, but often enough for his nickname to seem deserved. Still, “lucky” isn’t the word I would have used to describe him.

  There were storm warnings wherever Ethan might have looked, but he wasn’t looking. All Dawson was talking about another gambler, a nattily dressed man who waltzed into the Northern, directly to the roulette wheel, and laid a thousand dollars on the red. The wheel stopped on black. He bet another thousand on the red, and lost again. Stolidly, he bet on the red a third time, laying another thousand on the felt. Again, it went to the house.

  Like a mule butting its bloodied head against its stall, the man bet seven more times on the red, and lost every time.

  Finally, showing no emotion, the man walked away. At the bar, he ordered a drink. The next day the newspaper reported that he said to the bartender, “I went broke.” With that, he walked into the street and shot himself in the head.

  Another man who’d lost everything stayed drunk and raved that a huge black python was after him.

  Ethan must have heard about these two, and others. He couldn’t quit.

  I questioned my long infatuation with the Golden City. A madness had infected the San Fr
ancisco of the North, and it had ahold of my brother.

  One night I heard he might be at the Opera House attending a vaudeville show, and I set out to find him. Amid a sea of men on the ground floor I tracked him by his hearty laugh to one of the private boxes above, where he was applauding lustily, gulping champagne, and peeling off bills for the waiter. Cornelius Donner was in the box, Henry Brackett too—all three were in tailcoats. They were surrounded by a bevy of dance-hall girls with heavy nugget chains around their waists.

  I caught Ethan as he was leaving the theater, pulled him away from his friends, and spoke my mind. In fact I poured my heart out. My brother was so drunk he could barely keep on his feet, but he listened, wide-eyed. At the last, I appealed to the memory of our father, who used to call drinking and gambling “the engines of calamity.”

  After a long silence, Ethan said, “Abraham sent you.”

  I shook my head. “No, Ethan, this is me.”

  He went his way, I went mine. I found out the next day that I’d been talking to the owner of a half-interest in a dance hall—the Monte Carlo, no less—and a third share of Forty Above, a fabulously rich claim on Eldorado Creek. Ethan had been winning big. Suddenly he was, if not one of the kings of the Klondike, one of its dukes or earls. Compared to his present station, part ownership of a sawmill was a penny-ante game.

  Dawson City-style, everything kept happening fast. Within days, the men at the mill were saying that Ethan’s luck had turned—he was on a losing streak. I worried that he’d be ruined. An old hand at the mill told me, “He can lose feathers and still fly. It depends on how many get pulled out.”

  Loss was in the air. From the Nugget, Abraham read to me of the passing of Joseph Ladue. The founder of Dawson City was the man who’d set us up in business and granted us 51-percent ownership of the sawmill. He died far from the Klondike, of tuberculosis, at his Adirondacks farm in New York State. After thirteen years of hardship in the North, he’d finally struck it rich by claiming forty acres of swamp where the Klondike meets the Yukon. A day or two after George Washington Carmack’s fabulous discovery, Ladue guessed right that a town would rise there.

  “Sic transit gloria,” Abraham commented. “Joseph Ladue was one of the most famous men in the country when he died. Worth five million dollars, they say, and now the worms are making supper of him.”

  “Don’t be so gloomy,” I said. I knew Abe was thinking more of Ethan than Joseph Ladue.

  “At least he was able to live a year or so after he returned triumphant. It says he married his long-suffering sweetheart.”

  FIVE

  Maybe it was Abraham saying “sweetheart” that set my heart on edge. I went to the Palace Grand to see Arizona Charlie Meadows. I had to find out if he’d heard anything from Jamie’s father regarding their return to Dawson City.

  When Jamie and her father left in July, Arizona Charlie had promised them their place in his show for the following summer. Jamie’s performances of her father’s Klondike poetry, with Homer scribbling in the background against the backdrop of a log cabin, had never failed to pack the house. Yet before ’98 was out, Meadows had invented a new act featuring Little Margie Newman, shamelessly billing her as the Princess of the Klondike.

  I’d been certain that Jamie and Homer’s loyal audiences at the Palace Grand would turn a cold shoulder to the new act, but I was dead wrong. In the place of Jamie performing her father’s authentic narratives of the rush, Meadows gave the audiences a nine-year-old singing songs so sentimental they were nauseating.

  To my dismay, the same townsmen and the same grizzled men from the creeks who’d showered Jamie with wildflowers not only bestowed the pretender with their affection, they tossed nuggets onto the stage until Little Margie was heel-deep in them while blowing her kisses. All this for a nine-year-old as authentic to the North as a flamingo.

  Jamie, on the other hand, had been born and raised in the North, in the bush no less. Until the age of twelve she lived at Fort Chipewyan, the Hudson Bay Company’s outpost way up on Lake Athabaska. Homer was a trader working with the Indians in those days.

  Arizona Charlie Meadows knew me on sight as Jamie’s friend. The famous marksman greeted me at his office door with a somber expression. I assumed it was because he was about to tell me what I already expected, that the Princess of the Klondike and the Princess of Dawson couldn’t perform on the same stage.

  “Sit down, sit down,” the man in buckskins said with a deep, reverberating voice like far-off thunder. He took off his wide-brimmed hat, bowed his silver head, and said, “I have tragic news.”

  My God, I thought, she’s dead.

  Numb, I sank into the gilded chair he offered. Arizona Charlie looked out the window onto the frozen Yukon. Without turning to speak, he said at last, “I learned only days ago—a dog team got through from Skagway with the mails—that the poet has passed away.”

  “The poet?” I repeated. For a moment I couldn’t think who in the world he was talking about.

  Then, of course, I knew. “You don’t mean Homer….”

  “I do indeed. His heart suddenly failed him. In Philadelphia, they say.”

  “What about Jamie?”

  The frontiersman’s eyes met mine. “I know nothing of her. I’m sorry. Nothing was mentioned of Jamie.”

  Arizona Charlie paused, then seated himself behind his desk. “Jamie is an extraordinary talent. I’m sure she’ll find work on the stage. Doubtless she’s already been flooded with offers. Don’t worry about her having plenty of friends and theater people to look out for her.”

  “But she’ll come back here,” I heard myself saying aloud.

  Arizona Charlie looked at me and shrugged. “All the way to the ends of the earth? I wouldn’t think so.”

  I went mute, stunned as if he’d hit me with a fish club. I felt sorry for myself, but a minute later, walking away, it hit me all over again and I came to my senses. I felt sorry for Jamie.

  At that very time, Ethan was in the midst of a colossal gambling binge. He’d lost his share in the Monte Carlo and was on his way to losing his piece of the claim on Eldorado Creek. My brother was a runaway train. He couldn’t stop whether he was winning or losing.

  Abraham knew all this was going on, but he couldn’t bear to hear about it. Anyway, he was busy trying to get Dawson City’s fire department back to work. Abe was the head of a citizen’s group fighting for higher wages for the firemen, who had been on strike since the first week of April. Dawson City was in jeopardy every single day they were on strike, as everyone in town, including the town council, knew full well. The department of a hundred men had been formed after the disastrous Thanksgiving fire only five months before.

  Half a million dollars in real estate had burned on Thanksgiving Day in a quick conflagration, and all that could be done to stop the blaze was to tear down businesses and cabins that were in its way. A fire in the spring of ’99 would be far more disastrous, Abraham pleaded to the council, but the council stood firm.

  The firemen retaliated by letting the fires under their boilers go out.

  Ethan’s last hand was dealt sometime during the evening of April 25. In all likelihood he hadn’t slept in several days. It was Silent Sam Bonnifield who cleaned him out, I learned the next morning from the men at the mill. Ever since Ethan had started gambling for high stakes, I’d stayed away. I didn’t have the stomach for it. A thousand times afterward, I wished I’d sought him out, given his addled brain a good swipe with a lead pipe, and dragged him home. I should’ve handcuffed him to his bed.

  After Ethan was cleaned out, he started on a drinking spree. When fire broke out the next night, April 26, on the second floor of the Bodega Saloon, Ethan had been unaccounted for since the wee hours of the morning; I’d been scouring the town all day trying to find him and bring him home. Abe and I figured that his madness would be spent now that he’d hit rock bottom.

  I was there on Front Street when flames erupted from the second floor of the Bodega. It was
bitter cold, around forty-five degrees below zero. Everyone on the street, including me, started yelling “Fire!” A moment later dozens of people burst from the saloon into the cold, including Cornelius Donner, for once without his Prince Albert coat. Donner hollered, “Fire! Fire! My saloon! For God’s sake, someone rouse the fire department!”

  Just that quick, the second stories of the adjoining buildings were ablaze, too. With the night sky glowing at my back like an aurora, I raced to our cabin on the hillside to alert Abe. As I burst inside, he’d just heard the alarm bells and had come to the window. By now there was a parade of flame along the tops of a good many of the false fronts of Front Street. “Oh my God,” Abe muttered. “Oh my God.” He was thinking fast. “They’ll need dry lumber,” he declared, and began to snatch up his clothes.

  “Dry lumber?” I repeated incredulously.

  “Hand me my boots—no time to explain!”

  We ran to the mill, hitched up the team, and raced a load of dry scrap as close to the fire as the terrified horses would allow. As Abe had foreseen, men were down on the ice on the river, trying to melt the spot the fire department had formerly counted on for their emergency water supply. Before the strike, the spot had always been kept open, but April 26 found it frozen several feet thick. Men with axes had raced to the river to chop it open, but men with axes were no match for the speed of the inferno overtaking the city.

  I struggled up the bank with a firehose for one of the pumps parked on Front Street. I was standing only ten yards from the British Bank of North America, which was all ablaze, and I barely felt the heat, so intense was the extreme cold.