Dawson itself was about to become front-page news, for with the coming of summer its isolation from the world was at an end. The camp waited impatiently for the arrival of the first steamboat in June. The Klondike’s nouveaux riches were ready to return to a civilization that some had rejected ten years before. There were more than eighty, each possessed of a fortune that ran from twenty-five thousand to half a million dollars. Some were determined to leave the North forever and had already sold their claims, content to live modestly but securely for the rest of their lives. Others were intent on a brief but gaudy celebration in the big cities of the Pacific coast before returning to the Klondike for more treasure. All felt the desperate need to escape from the dark confines of their cabins and tents and from the smoky depths of their mine shafts, just as they had once felt a similar need to escape the smoky, populous cities.
Then early in June a shrill whistle was heard out in the river and the Alaska Commercial Company’s tiny stern-wheeler Alice rounded the Moosehide bluff and puffed into the shore. The entire town poured down to greet her. She was loaded with equal quantities of liquor and food, and the whole community went on a spree, as every saloon served free drinks across the counter. A couple of days later John J. Healy’s boat, Portus B. Weare, arrived, and the performance was repeated. When the two boats left for the trip downstream they carried with them the men who would bring the first news of the great strike out to the unsuspecting world.
Chapter Four
1
The treasure ships
2
Rich man, poor man
3
A ton of gold
4
Klondicitis
5
Warnings all unheeded
6
Balloons, boatsleds, and bicycles
7
Fearful passage
1
The treasure ships
Down the hissing Yukon puffed the Portus B. Weare on her seventeen-hundred-mile voyage to the sea, white wood smoke erupting from her twin black stacks. Two days ahead of her chugged the A.C. Company’s ungainly little Alice, a tiny smudge on the leaden expanse of the river. The brief sub-Arctic spring had yielded to summer, and the hills along the river were ablaze with crimson drifts of fireweed, accented by the blues of lupins and the yellows of arnicas and daisies. The air was heady with the pungent incense of balm of Gilead. Robins warbled among the birches, woodpeckers drummed against the spruce bark, moosebirds and chicken hawks wheeled and hovered in the sky. But, save for the occasional Indian or stray woodcutter, the two awkward little riverboats represented the only human movement along most of the Yukon, for the river country had long since been sucked dry of men by the news of the strike. In three months all this would change again, for the Alice and the We are were heading for civilization each loaded with a single cargo: gold.
There was gold in suitcases and leather grips, gold in boxes and packing-cases, gold in belts and pokes of caribou hide, gold in jam jars, medicine bottles, and tomato cans, and gold in blankets held by straps and cord, so heavy it took two men to hoist each one aboard. Stacked on the decks (its weight made it safe from theft) and in the purser’s office and in the dark, uncomfortable, verminous cabins, there was a total of three tons in the form of dust and nuggets. On the three-storied Weare the decks had to be shored up with wooden props, so heavy was the treasure, and there would have been more but for the lavishness of the farewell ceremonies. One Dawson saloon took in four hundred ounces of gold on the day the Weare left.
Most of the eighty-odd passengers aboard the two vessels had been paupers only a few months before. Some had not seen civilization for years, and none had heard from their families since the previous summer. Now each was worth a fortune. One, imprisoned in the Yukon for two years and reduced to a diet of half-raw salmon, had been planning suicide a few days before the Klondike strike, and now here he was, heading for civilization with thirty-five thousand dollars. Another had left Seattle the previous spring, impoverished and desperate, and was now worth more than one hundred thousand. Joe Ladue, gaunt and drawn after thirteen winters in the north, had become the owner of Dawson City, soon to be the hottest piece of real estate on the continent; he had more than enough money to marry the sweetheart whose family had spurned him for so long. Tom Lippy, the YMCA physical instructor, and Clarence Berry, the Fresno fruit farmer, were both coming out, each secure in the knowledge that he was worth at least a million.
The decks were crowded with Eldorado and Bonanza kings with a variety of backgrounds: a former dry-goods merchant, a former blacksmith, a former laundryman, a former Mounted Policeman, a former busboy. They hailed from every part of the globe: from Norway, Nanaimo, and Nova Scotia; from Stockholm, Sydney, and Seneca Falls. They had two things in common: all had been poor, all were now rich.
Not all were prospectors by choice or background. Many had gone north seeking gold through sheer desperation and had found it through a combination of stubbornness and good luck. J. O. Hestwood, a diminutive, pale-eyed man with a determined chin, leaned across the deck rail of the Alice and watched the blue scroll of the low Alaskan hills unwind slowly past. He had been a preacher, teacher, lecturer, and artist, and he had not held a steady job since 1893, when he painted murals at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. But on Bonanza Creek he had been getting sixteen dollars to the pan.
William Stanley, on board the creaking Weare, looked less like a prospector than any of his fellows, though he had made and lost three fortunes on previous Rocky Mountain stampedes. He was a Seattle bookseller, grey-haired and lame, and fifteen months earlier he and his wife and seven children had been impoverished. As a last resort Stanley had decided to go to the Yukon and look for gold. He and one son, Sam, headed north on borrowed money. On board ship they fell in with two brothers, Gage and Charlie Worden, from Sackets Harbor, New York. All four decided to pool their resources. Stanley limped over the Chilkoot Pass with the other three, and together they floated downriver. Pickings were slim on the bars of the Stewart, and the quartet was at the end of its tether and ready to give up when an old Indian drifted by in a canoe to say that a white man had found much gold on the Klondike. Now the old man was going home with one hundred and twelve thousand dollars while his partners stayed behind to work a million-dollar claim on Eldorado.
In spite of their riches, the passengers aboard the Weare and the Alice had yet to taste the sweet fruits of success. They had been living all winter in leaky cabins of green wood on an unvarying diet of beans and hardtack. No wonder, then, that when a crate of onions was discovered aboard the Weare there was a near-riot to devour them. To anyone else the wretched little port of St. Michael on the Bering Sea, with its melancholy mud flats, its grey warehouses, its rusty Russian cannon, and its stink of rotting fish, might have seemed to be the end of the earth. But to the prospectors it was Utopia. As each vessel in turn puffed out of the labyrinth of the Yukon delta and headed up the sombre coastline to the volcanic island on which the port was perched, a wave of excitement rippled among the passengers. For there was food at St. Michael, and an orgy followed each landing. It was fruit and vegetables the miners wanted, and they devoured tins of pineapple, apricots, and cherries, swilled cider at a dollar a bottle, and gnawed away on raw turnips.
Anchored in the shallow sea off the mud flats lay two grimy ocean-going vessels, the N.A.T. Company’s Portland and the A.C.’s Excelsior, one destined for Seattle, the other for San Francisco. As the Portland was to leave first, the majority boarded her. The trip was tedious, the ship rolled horribly, and most of the passengers took to their beds. One grew so ill that he had to be forcibly restrained from flinging himself overboard. Others, more hardy, drank champagne for most of the voyage or sat out on deck contemplating the future. Clarence Berry and his wife were like two excited children. They talked of the farm that he intended to buy, where he had once worked as a hired hand for starvation wages, and of the diamond wedding ring which she would now be able to
afford – poverty had forced them to omit it from the ceremony before they set out on an Alaskan honeymoon. Mrs. Berry, in the rough, mannish costume of a prospector’s wife, weather-beaten by the Yukon elements, presented a sharp contrast to her fellow passenger Mrs. Eli Gage, the fashionably attired daughter-in-law of the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. Mrs. Gage’s husband was one of the directors of the N.A.T. Company, and she was a prominent member of Chicago society. But Ethel Berry could have bought her, lock, stock, and bustle, with the gold from Five Eldorado.
The Portland’s journey took almost a month, and the passengers celebrated Independence Day aboard her. Under her previous name, Haitian Republic, she had been known as a hoodoo ship, but she was shortly to become the most famous vessel in America. She steamed into Seattle early on the morning of July 17 to the cheers of five thousand people crammed onto Schwabacher’s Dock to greet her. For the Excelsior had beaten her, arriving in San Francisco two days earlier, and the word “Klondike” was already on the lips of the nation.
2
Rich man, poor man
The Klondike stampede did not start slowly and build up to a climax, as did so many earlier gold rushes. It started instantly with the arrival of the Excelsior and Portland, reached a fever pitch at once, and remained at fever pitch until the following spring, when, with the coming of the Spanish-American War, the fever died almost as swiftly as it arose. If war had not come, the rush might have continued unabated for at least another half-year, but, even so, the stampede remains unique. It was the last and most frenzied of the great international gold rushes. Other stampedes involved more gold and more men, but there had been nothing like the Klondike before, there has been nothing like it since, and there can never be anything like it again.
The treasure ships from Alaska reached the Pacific coast at the peak of that era known nostalgically as the Gay Nineties. The gaiety is remembered, the misery that accompanied it largely forgotten. It was the era of Buffalo Bill, Mark Twain, Carry Nation, Little Egypt, Lillian Russell, Richard Harding Davis, and the Floradora Sextette. The Gibson Girl stared haughtily from the pages of the ten-cent magazines; the Yellow Kid leered gap-toothed from the penny press. Fitzsimmons had just knocked out Corbett, and William Jennings Bryan was on the rise. The world was riding tandem bicycles, singing “Daisy Bell,” and reciting Gelett Burgess’s mad jingle about a purple cow. It was an era whose various symbols are still remembered as emblems of “the good old days”: the leg-o’-mutton sleeve, the cigar-store Indian, the stereopticon, and the moustache cup.
It was also an era in which the rich grew richer and the poor poorer, when the “haves” had almost everything and the “have-nots” almost nothing, when melodramas starring wicked landlords and destitute widows were believable and understandable slices of life, when the word “mortgage” had connotations of terror, when banks foreclosed and men quite literally died of hunger in the street. Next to the headlines in the penny press about the foibles of the wealthy (“RICH GIRL’S SUICIDE A MYSTERY – MONEY HER BANE?”) were other headlines about the torments of the poor (“PRIDE MADE HER STARVE IN SILENCE”). If it was the era of Vanderbilt and Rockefeller, of the private yacht and the brownstone mansion, it was also the era of Samuel Gompers and Henry George, of the sweatshop and the tenement house. It was an age of millionaires, but it was also an age of hoboes. In short, it was an era occupied with money or preoccupied with the lack of it. It was an age, in the words of its historian Mark Sullivan, when “moneymaking was the most prized career.” No wonder the continent went insane when two ships loaded with gold steamed in from out of the Arctic mists.
For “gold” was the magic word of the nineties. The scarcity of it had conspired to bring the continent to its knees, economically. In 1896, when George Carmack was drying salmon at the Klondike’s mouth, the organ voice of William Jennings Bryan resounded across the land crying out that “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” The production of gold had not kept pace with the soaring population; in some years, indeed, it dropped, and this drop was accentuated by demands from European countries that had adopted a gold standard. As gold dollars grew scarcer they grew more expensive until at one point a gold dollar was worth almost twice as much as a paper dollar. People began to hoard gold, in socks and sugar bowls and under floor boards and in personal safes, so that by the year 1892 there were only one hundred and ninety millions in gold coin and certificates left in the U.S. Treasury out of a total of seven hundred and thirty millions. This drop in the circulation of gold was one of the reasons for the creeping depression that gripped the United States in the thirty years prior to the Klondike strike. It was a depression that favoured the money-lenders and bankers and wreaked hardship on the debtor classes, for those who had borrowed money when it was cheap found that they must repay it when it was expensive. Panic came in 1893 as a result of foreign fears that the government could not maintain payments in gold, and the slump that followed was the blackest the continent had known. Canada suffered just as badly.
It struck the Pacific northwest with particular viciousness, for this was a new land settled by men who had followed Horace Greeley’s advice after the California gold rush to go west, and many of those who had done so were now trying to push back the frontier on borrowed funds. Some were reduced to digging clams from the beaches of Puget Sound to keep alive. Indeed, the people of western Washington State were so dependent on clams that, in the words of Frank Cushman, a Tacoma congressman, “their stomachs rose and fell with the tide.” For years they had been waiting for a miracle to deliver them. It came, like an electric shock, when the Portland docked in Seattle with a ton of gold aboard.
This was perhaps the chief reason for the intensity of the stampede that followed, a stampede out of all proportion to the amount of gold that actually existed on the Klondike watershed. The century had already experienced three other great international rushes, to California, Australia, and South Africa – fields far richer than the Klondike. But, in the phrase of the British Columbia Yearbook for 1897, they “did not move the world as the Klondike moved it.”
Conditions were almost exactly right for the lunacy that ensued. The world was at peace, and the Klondike had no rivals for public attention for more than six months; another year and the Spanish-American and later the Boer wars would have interfered. Because of the high purchasing power of the dollar, goods and outfits were cheap. Rail and water transportation had reached a state of efficiency which made it possible to move large masses of people swiftly and inexpensively; the Klondike, in fact, started a railway rate war that saw the fare from Chicago to the Pacific coast drop to ten dollars. The Yukon was just far enough away to be romantic and just close enough to be accessible. Rich men could, in theory at least, travel all the way by boat without lifting a finger, while poor men could speedily reach the passes and travel by foot and home-made boat on a fast current to the gold-fields. Moreover, the Pacific-coast ports, hungering for trade, were prepared to use every weapon to promote themselves as outfitting ports for the stampede. Their greatest talking-point was the apparent wealth of the new fields. The area might not be extensive, but some of the claims were proving to be the richest in history.
There was something magical about the era, too. The Victorian Age was drawing to its close, and Englishmen, raised on a diet of adventure in far-off lands, were ripe for a fling. In North America, gullibility and optimism marched side by side and men were ready to believe that anything was possible. The novels of Jules Verne and the mechanical marvels of the Columbian Exposition had given the continent a heady feeling. Thrill-seekers rotated about in Ferris wheels; balloonists dared to mount into the clouds; thousands bought and believed in the Indian herb remedies sold by travelling medicine shows or in the gold bricks dispensed by itinerant confidence men. In some ways the Klondike was itself a giant gold-brick scheme in which an entire continent revelled.
Finally, the era of sensational journalism was in full swing. Outcault’s Kid had given the
name “yellow” to the popular press. Richard Harding Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune had just been published. Bennett, Dana, Pulitzer, and Hearst were the giants of journalism. Human interest was the order of the day, and the scenes in San Francisco and Seattle in mid-July 1897 were made to order for any newspaperman.
3
A ton of gold
The Excelsior did not look like a treasure ship. She was short and stubby with a lone black smokestack and two masts. Her superstructure was smudged and grimy and stained with rust marks. Her appearance fitted that of her passengers, who still wore their tattered working-clothes, caked with the mud of Bonanza and Eldorado. Under their broad-brimmed miners’ hats their lined faces were burned almost black by the Klondike sun, and their chins grizzled with unshaven whiskers. They were gaunt and they were weary, but their eyes burned with a peculiar fire. To the crowd on the dock they looked exactly like miners out of a picture-book.
Down the gangplank they came, Lippy, Hestwood, Joe Ladue, Louis Rhodes, and the others, staggering under their loads of gold. The knot of curious people on the dock at San Francisco parted to let them through. Tom Lippy’s square shoulders could be seen on the gangway, his wiry little wife beside him, her face tanned the colour of shoe-leather. Together they grappled with a bulging suitcase. It weighed more than two hundred pounds, and the awed spectators realized it was full of gold. Lippy’s neighbours on Eldorado, including some of those who had discovered the creek, accompanied him to the dock. Frank Keller with thirty-five thousand dollars and Jim Clements with fifty thousand hoisted their gold down the gangway. Fred Price, who had been a laundryman in Seattle before going north, was relatively “poor” with only fifteen thousand dollars in gold. But even fifteen thousand was a considerable fortune in 1897, when a four-room apartment could be rented for a dollar and a quarter a week, an all-wool serge suit could be purchased for four dollars, a square meal cost twenty-five cents, a quart of whiskey went for forty cents, coffee was thirteen cents a pound, a smoked tongue was worth twelve cents, and two baskets of fresh tomatoes could be bought for a nickel.
Klondike Page 13