Nome matured with an intensity born of nearly twenty-four-hour days and the superheated atmosphere of gold. However, in the more sober corners of the community, winter was a subject of growing concern. Nome was getting a little chillier each day. Most people were still living in tents and shacks, facing a severe shortage of fuel, food, and medical supplies. Newspaper editorials warned residents to prepare for the winter—or leave: “This is the time when those who intend to winter in Nome should begin skirmishing around for eight months’ supplies. . . . Nome cannot afford to be burdened with indigents this winter, and any one who does not see clearly whence his or her support is to come from had best get out before it is too late. We can hardly imagine a more uncongenial place to be broke in than Nome for the eight months commencing early in November.”
As the temperature plunged, panic hit those who had not yet struck it rich. For every successful prospector, there were at least three who had failed. Some 1,000 miners were broke and homeless in Nome, where everything cost up to five times as much as it did back home. Some vowed to stay, but most of them took advantage of government subsidies to board a steamer back to the States.
Charlie Hoxsie advised Josephine and Wyatt to leave their investments, including the Dexter, in his hands for the winter. Josephine was wary of the increasingly strong winds and driving rains that foreshadowed the approach of the great ice pack marching down from the north, a “wall of ice shimmering like diamonds,” as high as sixty feet, and advancing as rapidly as three miles an hour. Still more horrifying to her imagination was the fearful sound of the ice pack bearing down on Nome, a head-filling groan that Charlie and other veterans recollected with a shudder. “You can’t hear yourself think,” Charlie warned, as the icebergs crashed against each other, creating a maddening din that ended suddenly in an ominous moment when the sea froze and empty silence settled over the landscape.
Despite Charlie’s dramatic predictions, Josephine wanted to remain in Nome, hoping perhaps for a reprise of their idyllic winter in Rampart, but Wyatt overruled her. He had been unsuccessful in finding a suitable home for them, “no nice warm log houses” as they had in Rampart. Between his concern and the fears on everyone’s face, Josephine capitulated. They decided to spend the winter in Seattle and San Francisco, where they would outfit the Dexter more grandly and return to Nome as soon as the Bering Sea became navigable.
They were almost too late to board the Cleveland, the last boat to leave Nome. Wyatt bribed two men to relinquish their small stateroom, just big enough for the two of them and a collection of furs and fine Irish woolen shawls, robes, and blankets purchased by Josephine. The trip was a nightmare. First came the discovery that their bodies and clothing, plus everything in their stateroom, were crawling with lice. Her beautiful furs and woolens were thrown overboard. Then they encountered a storm so terrible that Josephine begged to get off the boat, though they were in the middle of the Bering Sea. As they itched unmercifully, the boat rolled and pitched amid mountain-high waves beneath a “black howling sky.” When they finally reached Seattle, nine days late and already given up for lost, they had only the clothes on their backs and a few things that they hoped would survive fumigation, such as Josephine’s treasured lynx cape. Still, they fared better than the passengers of another boat that left at the same time; the Hera took twenty-eight days to make the week-long trip, during which “two men died from starvation and others were half crazed from want of food and water . . . the majority of the men were so weak that they could not carry their gold dust ashore without assistance.”
Despite the horrors of their voyage, the passengers of the Hera were united in “declaring Nome to be the greatest camp on earth.” Many of them were already planning to return in the spring.
AS JOSEPHINE STEPPED onto dry land, grateful beyond words to be off the boat, she encountered a city that had a single-minded focus. Seattle was Nome-crazy. The newly formed “Cape Nome Information and Supply Bureau” bombarded pedestrians with ads promoting Nome underwear, Nome tents, Nome medicine, even special hats like the Reed’s Blizzard Defier Face Protector, which promised that “whether your nose is long or short, wide or narrow, inclined to be roman or retroussé . . . the wearer can see, hear, breathe, talk, smoke, swear, chew, or expectorate just as well with it on as off.”
One winter in Rampart had been enough to convince Josephine’s neighbor Erasmus Brainerd, now back in Seattle, that Alaska was the new frontier. Seattle had missed one gold rush, Brainerd argued, and might never have another one. The city was losing ground to Tacoma and Portland—and all three cities were in the giant shadow of San Francisco. The national picture was still worse, a sickening combination of unemployment, business failures, and bank closures.
Alaska was a gift of the new millennium. Seattle successfully petitioned the federal government to establish an assay office where miners could have their gold tested and valued, cutting out the longer trip to San Francisco. The city’s traditional businesses also prospered, as it became a primary source of lumber for the treeless north. Construction business boomed as profits were invested in the urban infrastructure.
The Alaska gold rush, especially the explosive summers of 1899 and 1900, changed the history of Seattle. Brainerd and his colleagues launched a national media campaign to promote Seattle as the gateway to the fabled riches of the Alaskan goldfields. It worked: the city drew the majority of Nome gold seekers to its stores and wharves. The amount of money passing through its banks tripled. In three years, Seattle’s population increased by about 30 percent.
Josephine and Wyatt split the winter months between Seattle and San Francisco. The local newspapers took note of their return: the San Francisco Examiner reported that Wyatt was “making money perhaps faster than he ever made it before” and predicted that “if business runs with him next summer as it did after his arrival in the camp, he will be able to retire with all the money he desires.” Readers of Seattle’s newspapers read about Wyatt as the “celebrated sheriff from Arizona” and a “quiet sort of individual, good natured, does not talk much,” though some reporters condemned him as “a bad man” and eagerly reprised the Sharkey-Fitzsimmons debacle as evidence of his corruption. Back in Tombstone, the Epitaph noted that their most famous former resident was back from Nome and would soon be opening a combination club and saloon.
Hoping to trade again on his celebrity, Wyatt opened a new gambling and prizefighting club in Seattle’s Tenderloin district, but after a flurry of publicity and eager crowds, he ran into a brick wall of uncooperative police and politicians. Seattle was not Nome, and stirred up by prohibition enthusiasts and competitive saloonkeepers, the city was increasingly hostile to Wyatt. The state of Washington initiated legal proceedings against him for gambling and selling alcohol, and the club’s furnishings were confiscated and torched. The city’s temperance craze passed quickly, however, and soon everyone was back in business—except Wyatt. He and Josephine spent the rest of that winter buying glamorous furnishings for the Dexter—expensive thick carpets, mirrors, carved sideboards, and draperies.
Back in Nome, the winter passed slowly. The city’s residents had only the sketchiest of information about what was going on in the rest of the world. Newspapers could ask but not answer the question, “Is the Philippine war still on or has it at last been settled?”
The people of Nome seized any opportunity for winter celebration. “First child of Pure Caucasian Blood Born in Nome” announced the Nome Nugget on January 6, congratulating Mrs. Ginivin on the birth of the city’s first white child, a ten-pound boy who happened to be born on New Year’s Day. (Unfortunately, Mr. Ginivin was still on the “outside,” having left in the fall.) Other entertainment came from visitors such as Rex Beach, who performed in a minstrel show in which “he was the chief burnt-cork artist, furnishing the audience with more merriment than ordinarily falls to the lot of the Nome citizen during his period of winter hibernation.” Nome residents loved to bet on anything, from the date the ice broke up to th
e outcome of elections and dog races. They even liked to bet on betting—as they did when they ran a contest to decide the most popular faro dealer in town.
With regular business in suspended animation, Josephine’s friends initiated civic projects during the long winter freeze. For Christmas Day, Tex Rickard fed the poor with seven hundred turkey dinners, establishing an annual tradition during the years that he lived in Nome. Beloved for his charitable ways, Rickard was asked to serve as Nome’s first mayor. Charles Hoxsie was similarly philanthropic and was considered “one of the best known and most popular men in Nome . . . an enterprising citizen, a whole souled and altogether good fellow.”
By March, Nome residents began to talk feverishly about rejoining the outside world. A few hardy souls arrived from other parts of Alaska by dog teams, skates, even bicycles, but the waterways were still blocked by ice. The Nome Nugget offered a $10 prize to the person who guessed the day and hour of the arrival of the first steamer. Estimates of some 100,000 new residents filled the newspapers. At least some of these new arrivals were anticipated with fear: the Northwest Mounted Police warned the local officials that “the most criminals ever known on this continent” were headed to Nome from all over Alaska. The attorney general’s special agent predicted that the summer would bring Nome “the worst aggregation of criminals and unprincipled men and women that were ever drawn together in this country.”
While all of Nome was eagerly looking out to sea for the first boats, with anticipation and some anxiety, a much bigger mass of people was gathering at Seattle, like an army preparing for an assault. One of the most inaccessible places in the world during the frozen months, Nome was now advertised as an exotic summer destination, suitable for tourists as well as treasure seekers, with gambling to while away the hours on board the comfortable steamers. The trip cost about $75, which included 1,000 pounds of freight for the entrepreneurs on board. The San Francisco Chronicle predicted excitedly that Nome would soon be “A Modern City,” with electric lights, power, streets, railways, and telephone lines. Business owners invested in steamers to connect Portland and Cape Nome. But as Josephine was soon to be reminded, nature was not easily tamed. The Bering Sea was still clogged with unmapped blockades of frozen water. Boats were often forced hundreds of miles out of their way in search of an open channel, and could be tossed around like toys by the unpredictable movement of the ice. The so-called holiday cruise could take as little as a week or as long as two months.
Huge crowds filled the Seattle waterfront to see the first travelers depart in May 1900. On May 20 alone, four ships left Seattle, filled to capacity with as many as seven hundred people and loaded with thousands of tons of mining machinery and general merchandise. Other boats carried dismantled theaters, gambling halls, saloons, hotels, and restaurants—everything needed to construct an “instant civilization.”
Josephine and Wyatt left from Seattle on the Alliance, with the luxurious accessories for the Dexter in the hold. By now, the rest of the world knew what they knew: that Nome was destined to become “the greatest mining camp city the world has ever known.”
The time passed pleasantly enough during the early days of the trip. Josephine entertained herself with gambling, losing enough to annoy Wyatt. The Bering Sea became impassable just when they reached the port of Unalaska. The harbor town was crowded with people headed for Nome; among them, Josephine discovered many friends from her previous trips to Alaska. The biggest surprise came when Josephine heard a familiar voice calling “Aunt Josie!” There was her niece Alice with her husband Isidore, on their way from Oakland to Nome, where they had hoped to surprise Josephine and Wyatt. Isidore was bringing samples of clothing to sell in Alaska. An attentive and affectionate aunt, Josephine made plans for their time together in Nome.
They were soon back on board the Alliance, but not out of danger. As the ship skirted a menacing cluster of icebergs, Josephine noticed an alarming sound as the engines strained to negotiate lethal ice floes clustering around them like large, threatening animals. She awoke one morning to an eerie stillness. The engines had stopped completely. In place of the gray water of the Bering Sea was an impenetrable ice field as far as she could see, “a glistening white sheet, with spires and towers, hummocks and peaks.” The ship was clutched by the ice for another full week, as rations dwindled and tempers frayed. Finally distant boats began to stir, and the Alliance penetrated an open lane.
She was again within sight of the Nome coastline, close enough to take stock of dramatic changes. Everything was on a far bigger, noisier scale: where there had been a few boats in the water, there were now scores of ships lying off the shore, plus some wrecked hulks left over from winter storms. Instead of the little dories that had pulled alongside her boat last year, a motley flotilla of barges, tugboats, rafts, and rowboats hustled back and forth, loading and emptying enormous loads of cargo. Hundreds of cattle were being pushed into the water and herded to shore in a watery roundup. An army of Paul Bunyans plunged into the water to offer broad backs to Josephine and the other women climbing down ladders. Wyatt stayed behind to supervise the transfer of their precious cargo, while Josephine clung to the human ferry that deposited her on the beach. The air was filled with riotous sounds as each new boat blasted a shrill whistle to announce its arrival and every ship in the harbor answered in return, the passengers cheering and applauding, many having been stuck on ice for weeks.
For one brief summer, Nome became one of the busiest and oddest seaports in the world, where the last mile of freight delivery cost almost as much as it did to traverse the two thousand miles from Seattle.
Once on dry land, Josephine faced a scene of unimaginable chaos. The beach was barely visible beneath thousands of tents that almost touched each other, leaving the narrowest of passageways between them. Small mountains of worldly goods broke the line of tents, each pile challenging its owner to carry it away faster than a thief or a storm. Hundreds of dogs raced furiously about. Baggage and freight were piled high on the beach for a distance of several miles: a jumble of pianos, coal, narrow-gauge railway tracks, lumber, tents, stacks of hay, bar fixtures, washtubs, roulette wheels, stoves, liquor, sewing machines, and mining apparatus. Despite the density of people and belongings, wagons lumbered along the beach, hawking baked goods, clothing, and mining supplies. Men with go-carts were hauling loads; others were carrying trunks on stretchers or on their backs. Water was delivered from a wagon bearing a large water tank, five gallons for twenty-five cents. Crazy gold-panning contraptions were in constant motion.
For years after arriving in Nome, people looked for worldly possessions that were lost on their first day. Sometimes personal baggage was unloaded from the boats immediately; sometimes it was kept on board and sent later. Nor did businesses awaiting deliveries fare any better than hapless individuals. One grocer was expecting $10,000 worth of canned goods when an unexpected dunk in the Bering Sea washed off all the labels; it was sold as “mystery food” for ten cents a can.
Most people arrived without a plan other than a fierce determination to grow rich on Nome’s golden sands. “Imagine a heterogeneous mob of 23,000 people landed on a beach,” said one visiting engineer from London, “huddled together on a strip of beach 60 feet wide . . . without any sanitary arrangements; sleeping on almost frozen ground at night, broiling in a hot sun by day; and you have Nome as it was.” The first night was a particularly miserable rite of passage. Lucky newcomers who had the foresight to bring tents scrambled to find places to pitch them. Those without tents waited uncomfortably for the ships to unload their possessions, sleeping on the sand in the twenty-four-hour daylight with no shelter and relief from the crowds and the constant clang of construction.
Josephine was dazed, but Wyatt never took his eyes off their belongings until everything was stacked safely onshore. Steamship companies claimed that their responsibility for delivery ended when the goods left the ship, and Wyatt had invested too much money to be careless about the expensive furnishings he
had purchased for the Dexter.
Josephine was used to life in a boomtown, but Nome’s northern latitude generated an intensity beyond anything she had experienced. There were thirty days of ceaseless activity that summer, with as many people on the streets in the middle of the night as there were at lunchtime. Stately business blocks sprang up out of nowhere, and rich and costly interiors were installed and ready for customers in a few hours. There were fancy hotels, beer gardens, about a hundred saloons and gambling houses, and several newspapers. An empty lot one day would be reclaimed from the tundra and filled with a three-story structure the next day, its storerooms filled with bright new goods. Within weeks, Nome grew to a city of over 20,000.
Front Street was still unpaved and filled with people rushing about, elbowing each other for room. The dense black mud was so deep that when a wagon approached, everyone ran for the closest doorway to avoid being splattered. Many of the buildings were identified by wooden signs with a single word, SALOON, and had a dance hall in the rear. It was not unusual for someone walking along the street to be pushed by the crowd into a saloon, and it was often easier to get in than out.
Public health conditions had only slightly improved from Josephine’s first summer. Several ships in the harbor flew the yellow flag of smallpox quarantine that kept all passengers on board. Public water closets were no match for the demand of the wildly growing population. Garbage was collected weekly; in winter, refuse was carried on the ice to the three-mile limit, where the summer currents carried it to the Bering Straits and then out to the Arctic Ocean. The sanitation business was so profitable that the garbage collector’s daughter was reported to be the best-dressed girl in Nome’s first school, outfitted with a beautiful ermine coat shipped from New York.
Lady at the O.K. Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp Page 13