Down the Yukon

by Will Hobbs

“What’s your number?”

  “We’ll have one of these lawyers draw up the papers—legal as can be, with witnesses and all. I’ll give you three thousand dollars for the mill, which is the amount you loaned to my brother Ethan. We’ll be fair and square.”

  “Three thousand dollars,” he raged. “Who’ll pay me more? It’s worth far more! I have a saloon in Dawson as well!”

  “The New Bodega,” I said. I lowered my voice and said to Swink, “Should I tell everybody in Nome, loud and clear, that your partner died in the fire? Should I tell them that the arson you’re accused of is the Great Fire?”

  “Don’t,” the detective told me. “They’ll lynch him dead.”

  The crowd had fallen to a hush, wondering what was being said. At last a wag shouted, “Give him three dollars, Hawthorn, not three thousand!”

  Swink had as much room to negotiate as a mouse in a trap. A short while later, at the jail, he deeded over his entire interest in the mill for the sum of three thousand dollars, and not a dime more, to Abraham, Ethan, and Jason Hawthorn.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  During our stay in Nome, Jamie and I took rooms at the Golden Gate Hotel, Nome’s finest. Once we’d bathed, slept out our exhaustion, and filled our stomachs, we strolled down the street shopping for clothes.

  Same as Dawson, Nome had its personalities. Right away we heard that Wyatt Earp was in town, the famous marshall from the Wild West days in Dodge City, Kansas, and Tombstone, Arizona. In addition to owning a saloon, Earp was, of all things, a boxing promoter. Earp had already learned that the former heavyweight champion of the British Empire was in Nome and had signed him for a fight.

  Jamie and I walked Nome’s sprawling tent city and gazed like tourists at the sluice and rocker works and all the pits along the beach. Wherever the beach hadn’t been dug, it was the staging ground for industry. Lumber was stacked high. So were mounds of coal, barrels of kerosene—everything that an instant city on the windswept, treeless tundra required. From the huge oceangoing steamers anchored offshore, freight lighters were arriving by the hour. Some were stacked with supplies, others crowded with hundreds of stampeders. Before the lighters even touched the beach, some people leapt into the shallows and took off sprinting, claim stakes in hand.

  They were going to have to sprint a long, long way. We’d learned that the beach was already staked ten miles north and ten miles south, and so were the banks of the river as well as all the local creeks. And some of Nome’s placers were proving out extremely rich. Indications were that Nome’s first year would surpass even the Klondike’s.

  Everywhere we went, we were asked if we were going to stake a claim.

  Jamie, in a bright new dress and scrubbed so clean she shined, would answer, “We’re heading back to Dawson soon as possible. We’re anxious to see Jason’s brothers.”

  And so we were, but we had to wait out a storm that lashed Cape Nome for three days. It washed away the diggings all along the beach and destroyed a fortune in goods that couldn’t be pulled from the waves in time. The shallow-drawing Yukon sternwheelers, able to moor in the mouth of the river, were spared.

  As soon as the weather cleared, we boarded the Eldorado, which would take us across the sound and all the way up the Yukon to Dawson City.

  After a pleasant few hours at Unalakleet, where we were able to present Father Karloff with a check on the Bank of Cape Nome for the amount of $6,700, the Eldorado steamed south to the old Russian port of St. Michael. The following day we entered the northernmost channel of the Yukon. I was able to see those five hundred miles of the lower river I’d missed due to our portage. Jamie and I were both at the rail when Kaltag’s few cabins appeared on the left bank. There was the greenish Kaltag River, where we’d paddled in among the salmon.

  Though we never laid eyes on him, George Swink was on the Eldorado, too. John Tobin had him cuffed in a private room and never let him out among the passengers. I had no doubt he would be brought to justice.

  Our return to Dawson City was a thoroughly joyous one. Jamie and I had quite a story to tell, and my brothers provided a most appreciative audience. As I described the last moments of the race, and the role Burnt Paw had played, that mongrel I’d named Nuisance proved a rapt listener. His ears were perked high, and his blue eye was staring at me as if to make sure I got it right.

  When I came to the part about Burnt Paw tripping Jamie, his ears went down to half-mast. As I told of the pivotal moment when he tripped Donner, Ethan slapped himself on the leg so hard I was afraid he’d broken it all over again.

  Abe, in his wry way, said to Ethan, “I seem to remember you calling him Underdog, or some such, before he was Burnt Paw.”

  “Yes, sir—watch your step—he’s back in town!”

  The first order of business, to my mind, was for the three of us to visit the mill and to have our name restored in large letters at the entrance. Before the day was out, we’d accomplished it.

  While we were nailing the sign up at the mill, Jamie was paying a visit to Arizona Charlie Meadows. He did indeed want to buy her play, The Adventures of Big Olaf McDoughnut. She told him that she had a new character and a new scene to add, and he paid her five hundred dollars on the spot, with all terms as they’d agreed before.

  The play made its debut three weeks later at the Palace Grand, with Klondikers by the hundreds roaring their approval. Jamie and the Hawthorn brothers were watching from seats in the third row. From his private box, Big Alex McDonald clapped and cheered and whistled every time his fictional counterpart entered a scene.

  As I knew they would, Jamie’s prospector jokes had the house roaring with laughter. But that wasn’t the best part. The most popular scene in the play was all the more effective because so many in the audience knew it to be true. When Big Olaf McDoughnut invited the boy who’d lost his leg at the knee, Charlie Maguire, to reach into that glass bowl of nuggets and help himself, the young actor hesitated, then took very few nuggets, exactly as I remembered my friend Charlie doing in real life.

  “No, no!” Big Olaf insisted. “I mean fill both trouser pockets full as you can get ’em, then your shirt pockets, too. Gold means nothing to me, lad. Nothing!”

  At that, everyone in the theater rose, turned around, and applauded Big Alex McDonald, who saluted them modestly. I only wished Charlie could have been there to see it.

  When the curtain came down on the play, the house erupted with deafening cheers for Jamie’s celebration of the Klondike. When the curtain came up on the actors, and they were showered with flowers and nuggets, Arizona Charlie took the stage in buckskins, as always. The silver-haired frontiersman acknowledged the renewed applause, then motioned to Jamie several times—urgently—for her to come up and join him on the stage.

  I could see what Arizona Charlie aimed to do—reduce the entire house to tears. He wanted Jamie beside him as he told of the passing of the poet of the Klondike, and how the author of the play they had just enjoyed was none other than the poet’s daughter, the same girl many of them had known as the Princess of Dawson.

  The man in buckskins beckoned to Jamie once more, but he had met his match. Firmly, she shook her head. The consummate showman, Arizona Charlie recovered before the audience even knew what had transpired. In a dramatic voice, he announced, “A hand for the playwright, Jamie Dunavant!” and pointed her way.

  Jamie stood to acknowledge the cheers, gave the audience a wave and a golden smile, then sat down. “Whew!” she said, taking my hand. “I’d rather paddle the Norton Sound!”

  Jamie’s play kept the Palace Grand alive. By the end of the summer, some of the theaters and dance halls were closing. In one midsummer week alone, eight thousand people had left Dawson.

  Some of the mills closed down, but not ours. We even kept it running through the winter.

  Jamie lived in Melinda Mulrooney’s Fairview Hotel, where she and her father had lived.

  We saw each other every day. We were engaged to be married.

  Jamie and I ma
rried several days after the ice broke on the Yukon. The day was June 1, 1900. I’d recently turned eighteen and Jamie seventeen. It was time. We were ready for the adventure.

  A couple weeks later we embarked with Burnt Paw once again down the Yukon, this time in a handsome, river-worthy, twenty-five-foot skiff. We had a year’s outfit on board with all the provisions and tools for getting started in the bush.

  It was with a heart full of pride and love that I waved good-bye to my brothers that day in Dawson City. In the future, we’d come back to see them, or they’d come to find us, but it wouldn’t be often. I suppose this was the way it was meant to be, with the two of them sticking together and me heading off over the northern horizon.

  Dawson had a future, but on a far lesser scale than it had imagined itself, and much more civilized.

  With Dawson so well connected to the Outside, it wasn’t the place for Jamie and me. Our hearts were in the wilderness.

  At the village of Koyukuk, just a mile up from the Yukon, we traded our skiff for seven husky pups, dog harnesses, a basket sled, and enough baled salmon to feed a team through the winter.

  After a week a little sternwheeler arrived, and we started up the river of our dreams. The Koyukuk ran so clear we could see every stone on the bottom. At every village we asked after Johan and Ingrid Swenson. Everyone remembered them. Everyone kept pointing upriver.

  We entered a country with vast stands of birch and aspen and tall spruce. Along the banks we saw moose, caribou, wolves, grizzly and black bear. The skies were teeming with birds. Hundreds of miles upriver we crossed the Arctic Circle. Mountains on both sides rising three thousand feet kept us from seeing the sun for several hours around midnight, not that we cared. We could climb one of these mountains any time we pleased for a view of the midnight sun.

  We found our friends. The Swedes were surprised to see us—and pleased. Johan and Ingrid had settled at the mouth of the John River, only a few miles up the Koyukuk from a man named Gordon Bettles, who’d opened a store at the upstream limit of steamboat navigation. A new village named Bettles was taking shape around the store.

  We settled at the mouth of the Wild River, next stream up from Johan and Ingrid and their children. They helped us pole our outfit up there in a boat they’d made from whipsawed lumber, and they helped us build our log cabin.

  When winter came, we were ready.

  There was a little gold in the creeks, and I meant to try my hand at it, but it wasn’t gold that we or our friends were after. It was the independent life. Even without gold, the fishing, hunting, berrying, and gardening would pull us through.

  Jamie and I were of one mind. Every day, summer and winter, would bring labor, but it would be meaningful labor in the midst of incomparable beauty and never lacking for adventure. We meant to raise our children in this place.

  The first one came in October of 1901.

  We named him Homer.

  Our twins we named Rebeccah and Elizabeth, after our mothers, who died young.

  Abraham and Ethan made five. To our good fortune, each one of our children survived, all of them healthy as weeds.

  All the while Jamie was writing plays for the stage in Dawson and for Alaska’s new gold mecca, Fairbanks.

  Burnt Paw had a lot of years left in him. Summers he was always with me, up and down the river; when winter came, Jamie would outfit him with a knitted coat, and he never failed to come along.

  A day rarely passed without a small war breaking out among our sled dogs, but for whatever reason they never laid a tooth on Burnt Paw. Maybe it was because he rode in the sled instead of pulling it; maybe it was because he lived in the cabin with us instead of out in the snow with them.

  As time went by, Burnt Paw wasn’t the leaper he once had been, nor the traveler. To his last days he favored that front right paw, and even little Ethan knew why. Burnt Paw’s history was the stuff of legend. The children’s pet was a sort of mythic hero, thanks to the bedtime stories their mother had fabricated over the years from his exploits in the mists of the previous century. When Jamie and I appeared in this saga it was infrequently, and as minor characters.

  In his last few years, when Burnt Paw preferred to lie close to the stove and dream, the children thought we were lucky to still have the old fellow underfoot.

  And so did I.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In “The Spell of the Yukon,” Robert W. Service wrote, “There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons/And I want to go back—and I will.”

  That’s exactly how I felt when I finished writing Jason’s Gold, the story of Jason Hawthorn’s eleven-month journey from New York City to Dawson City in 1897–98. My heart was still in the Northland; I had to go back and find out what came next for Jason. The result is Down the Yukon.

  At the end of the first book Jamie had promised she’d come back, and there was so much left to explore—not only Jason and Jamie’s relationship but the Yukon River itself. Together, the two of them might float clear across Alaska. The historical context, I realized, would be the 1899 rush to Cape Nome, where gold had been discovered in the beaches of the Bering Sea.

  News of the discovery at Nome had an electrifying effect on Dawson City. As many as eight thousand disappointed Klondikers left Dawson in a single week in the summer of ’99. Many of those were going to give it one last try in Nome, and the Yukon was their highway for most of the route.

  In addition to those bound for salt water, there were numbers of Klondikers who traveled down the Yukon and then up virtually every one of its tributaries, searching Alaska for a new bonanza or simply a place to live in the wilderness. Some of these settled far up the Koyukuk River, even north of the Arctic Circle.

  I’ve had a longtime fascination with the Koyukuk that came from reading books by two acclaimed conservationists, Margaret Murie and Robert Marshall, who knew the river intimately. Mardy Murie’s book is Two in the Far North (Alaska Northwest Books, 1997 reprint) and Bob Marshall’s is Arctic Village (University of Alaska Press, 1993 reprint).

  In the early 1930s, Bob Marshall spent over a year in the settlement of Wiseman, upstream of Bettles. Some of its old-timers were Klondikers who’d left Dawson City in the summer of 1899. Marshall described Wiseman’s small community of many races as “the happiest civilization of which I have knowledge.” Wishing great happiness for Jason and Jamie, I had them settle on the upper Koyukuk.

  As in Jason’s Gold, I strove to describe the geography and landscapes of Down the Yukon as accurately as possible. In regard to the plausibility of Yukon River sternwheelers managing the crossing of Norton Sound, I was amazed to read accounts of them moored in the mouth of the river at Nome, and then to find 1899 photographs depicting exactly that.

  The idea of the attempt to float a hotel down the Yukon came from Arizona Charlie Meadows’s announcement in real life that he would float his Palace Grand Theater in one piece from Dawson City to Nome. He abandoned the idea. Destroyed in the April fire of ’99, the Palace Grand reopened in July, and remains standing today under another name.

  Henry Brackett, the Sydney Mauler, is a fictional counterpart of an actual Australian boxer named Frank Slavin (“Sydney Cornstalk”) who fought a number of matches in Dawson City and was a former heavyweight champion of the British Empire. The subplot involving George Swink, a.k.a. Cornelius Donner, was inspired by a true-life twenty-five-thousand-mile detective saga involving arson and murder that began in Iowa and ended in Dawson City. The actual criminal’s name was Frank Novak, and the detective was C. C. Perrin.

  Dawson’s Thanksgiving fire of ’98 and the April 26 fire of ’99 took place largely as described in the novel, though arson was not suspected in either event.

  The names in Down the Yukon of Dawson’s dance halls, theaters, gambling houses, saloons, banks, and hotels are the actual ones. I have portrayed or referred to many of Dawson’s colorful historical characters in their actual context. These include Arizona Charlie Meadows, Irish Nellie Cashman, Little Margie Newma
n, Belinda Mulrooney, Calamity Jane, Joe Boyle, Big Alex McDonald, Swiftwater Bill Gates, Joseph Ladue, Buckskin Frank Leslie, George Washington Carmack, Dick Lowe, Jack Dalton, Captain Starnes, Waterfront Brown, Silent Sam Bonnifield, Louis Golden, One-Eyed Riley, Hamgrease Jimmy, the Evaporated Kid, and others. Incidentally, Wyatt Earp of Dodge City fame indeed surfaced in Nome as a saloon owner and boxing promoter.

  Jason and Jamie, as well as Jason’s brothers, Abe and Ethan, are entirely fictional. Burnt Paw’s name is drawn from that of a village on the Porcupine River.

  The North American Trading and Transportation Company and the Alaska Commercial Company are the names of the actual companies that supplied Dawson City and Nome. The idea of the former’s breakup lottery was inspired by the annual lottery on the exact time of breakup on the Tanana River, which I recalled from my childhood in Alaska. The Great Race from Dawson City to Nome, sponsored by the Alaska Commercial Company, is fictional. The ancient portage trail between Kaltag on the Yukon River and Unalakleet on the Bering Sea is real. In modern times it is a section of the Iditarod dogsled race, which ends in Nome.

  Once again I am indebted to Pierre Berton’s superb history Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896–1899 (Penguin, 1990 reprint). I would also point interested readers to William Haskell’s period narrative, Two Years in the Klondike and Alaskan Gold-Fields 1896–1898 (University of Alaska Press, 1997 reprint); Women of the Klondike, by Frances Backhouse (Whitecap Books, 1995); The Miners, by Robert Wallace, with photographs (Time/Life Books, 1976); The Alaskans, by Keith Wheeler, with photographs (Time/Life Books, 1977); Reading the River: A Voyage Down the Yukon, by John Hildebrand (Houghton Mifflin, 1988); and The Klondike Gold Rush—Photographs from 1896–99 (Wolf Creek Books, 1997).

  As was the case with Jason’s Gold, I was writing Down the Yukon exactly one hundred years after its events took place. My wife, Jean, and I hope to revisit Dawson City one of these years, and I have my heart set on seeing the Koyukuk River north of the Arctic Circle. I’d like to visit the setting that moved Bob Marshall to write these words: “It is impossible ever to evaluate just how much beauty adds to what is worthwhile in existence.”