Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  A group of the miners hailed a four-horse truck, hired it on the spot, hoisted their gold aboard it, and drove off towards the Selby Smelting Works on Montgomery Street, the crowd surging behind them. The U.S. mint was closed, because the Democratic director was in the process of being replaced by a Republican, but Selby’s was happy to buy the gold. The crowd squeezed into the building and watched goggle-eyed while the buckskin bags, the soiled canvas sacks, the glass fruit jars and jelly tumblers, covered with precious writing-paper and tied with twine, were ripped open on the counter and their yellow contents disgorged. The gold lay on the counter, in the words of an eyewitness, “like a pile of yellow shelled corn” while the poker-faced clerks weighed it, paid for it, and shovelled it with copper scoops into a great melting-pot.

  The story of this spectacle buzzed through the streets of San Francisco, and soon the news was afoot that something extraordinary was happening. For some time rumours had been sifting down the coast about a big strike made on an unpronounceable stream deep in the Yukon Valley. Ogilvie’s report had been published the previous month in the form of an austere and forbidding pamphlet titled Information Respecting the Yukon District, to which few paid attention. William Johns, the ex-newsman who had staked on Eldorado, sent a brief mention of the Klondike to a Chicago paper, which printed a few lines in March, but this attracted little notice. Jack Carr, a veteran Yukon dog-driver, left Dawson on June 5 and reached Juneau on July 11 wearing gold nuggets for buttons and bearing the news of the strike. Nobody believed him until they opened their mail. The Alaska Commercial Company in San Francisco also had word of the strike before the Excelsior’s arrival, and the word “Klondike” had started appearing in its advertisements early in July.

  These hints caused not a ripple until the Excelsior docked. But here at last was dramatic proof of a new Eldorado. Here was one grizzled creature, fresh off the boat with a thirty-pound sack of dust in his hand, ordering poached eggs nine at a time, tipping waitresses with nuggets, engaging a horse cab at twenty dollars a day, and exclaiming that he had pulled a hand sled fourteen hundred miles and now intended to ride in luxury for a fortnight.

  The Call and Chronicle spread the story of the Excelsior’s cargo prominently, but William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner literally and figuratively missed the boat and gave it only a few lines. The Call’s story was wired to James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald. Hearst’s New York Journal had no story, and the proprietor was furious. Hearst had invaded the big city only two years before and was locked in a journalistic war the like of which New York had not known before. He had lured away some of his rival’s top talent, including the famous comic-strip character, the Yellow Kid; and, as the heir to the famous Homestake mining fortune, he had both the funds and the understanding to exploit a stampede. He ordered all-out coverage of the story and dispatched two expeditions to the Klondike. With that imperial dictum, the Klondike fever began.

  In Seattle, excitement was mounting to a white heat, for Tom Lippy, who had lugged the largest personal fortune off the Excelsior, was a Seattle boy and the papers were full of his story. Lippy and his wife had a suite in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, where they were virtual prisoners, the halls outside jammed with people bombarding the doors. Now the word was out that a second treasure ship, far richer than the first, was due in Seattle at any moment. The Post-Intelligencer chartered a tug, loaded it with reporters, and sent it off to Cape Flattery to intercept the Portland as she entered the sound. The newsmen tumbled over the ship’s rails into the arms of the excited miners, who were eager to trade news of the Klondike for news of the Outside. The tug raced back to port, and, as a result, the first of the P-I’s three extras hit the Seattle streets at almost the same moment that the Portland docked: “GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! 68 rich men on the Steamer Portland; STACKS OF YELLOW METAL!” and the story, written by an ingenious reporter named Beriah Brown, coined the phrase that flashed round the world: “At 3 o’clock this morning the steamer Portland from St. Michael for Seattle, passed up the Sound with more than a ton of solid gold aboard.…”

  Brown had reckoned that the weight of the gold dust would sound more dramatic than its value. His instinct was right. By evening the phrase “a ton of gold” was being published by newspapers all around the world. The rival Seattle Times, with more restraint, gave the weight as half a ton, but for once the newspapers erred on the side of caution. When the results were totted up, it turned out that there were at least two tons of gold aboard the ship.

  As the Portland nosed into Schwabacher’s Dock at six a.m. on July 17, five thousand people poured down to the waterfront to greet her. “Show us the gold!” cried the watchers on the wharf as the vessel approached, and the miners on board obliged by hoisting their sacks. Seattle police and Wells-Fargo guards armed with rifles appeared to clear a way for the miners through the jam of humanity.

  Now the scene in San Francisco was repeated. Down the gangplank came the ragged, bearded men, lugging their sacks and their suitcases and their blankets full of gold, as the spectators shouted “Hurrah for the Klondike!” One man had one hundred thousand dollars in dust and nuggets tied up in a blanket and had to hire two others to help him drag it away. John Wilkinson, one of the ex-coal-miners from Fifteen Eldorado, had fifty thousand dollars in gold in his leather grip, and, although this was tied tightly with three straps, it was so heavy that the handle snapped off as he staggered along the dock. A miner named Nils Anderson dragged a heavy bag down the gangplank. He had two other sacks full of gold back in his stateroom. Two years before, he had borrowed three hundred dollars and left his family to gamble on fortune in the north. His wife, waiting on the dock, did not know he was rich until he told her that he had brought out one hundred and twelve thousand dollars.

  Staff Sergeant M. E. Hayne of the North West Mounted, who had staked on Bonanza, came down the gangplank and into the arms of Seattle newspapermen, “who clung to us like limpets.”

  “Let me at least have a thimbleful of Scotch whisky before I suffer the torment of an interview,” Hayne cried. Six men seized him and propelled him to a near-by saloon, and each flung a quarter on the bar to treat him.

  The reporters clustered around each prospector in turn as the police fought to hold back the crowds. “We’ve got millions,” Frank Phiscator told them. Dick McNulty, who had twenty thousand, announced that the Klondike placers were ten times as rich as any found in California. William Stanley, the old bookseller, said that “the Klondike is no doubt the best place to make money that there is in the world.” Stanley’s story was quickly circulated. His wife, in Anacortes, had been living on wild blueberries and taking in laundry to keep her family together. When the news reached her she dropped the wet clothes, told her customers to fish their own out of the tub, and moved with her husband into a downtown hotel, where she threw out her meagre wardrobe and called in a dressmaker to design raiment more appropriate for the wife of a Klondike prince.

  From this day on, few prospectors arriving from the north were to know any real peace. The Stanleys and the Berrys were trailed by such throngs in the streets that they had to flee to San Francisco, where an avalanche of letters snowed them under. “The Klondike is the richest goldfield in the world,” Berry told the reporters who laid siege to his hotel room. Four sacks of nuggets on the floor and a variety of jars and bottles on the table, all filled with gold, lent credence to his words. Jacob Wiseman tried to go home to Walla Walla, but the press of the curious was so insistent that he secretly left the town and lived under an assumed name in Tacoma. Mrs. Gage boarded the train for Chicago and locked herself in her drawing-room for the entire journey. Frank Phiscator headed for Chicago, too, flourishing a big red pocketbook in which reposed a certificate of deposit for one hundred and twenty thousand dollars; on arrival he checked in at the Great Northern Hotel, where he told the clerk, in ringing tones, that nothing was too good for him.

  One prospector, J. C. Miller of Los Angeles, was reduced to a state of nervous
prostration by the swarms of gold-crazy men who visited him. Another, William Hewitt, who came out with a five-gallon can filled with dust and nuggets, received more than a hundred callers a day for weeks, and letters from every state in the union. But Ladue perhaps had the most frantic time of all, for the papers quickly dubbed him Mayor of Dawson City, and he was pursued by such a throng of reporters, well-wishers, fortune-hunters, and cranks that he fled to the East. He stepped off the train in Chicago into the arms of another waiting mob, and even when he reached his farm at Plattsburgh in the Adirondacks there was no surcease. A bushel basket full of mail awaited him. The people crowded into the parlour and began to finger the nuggets that he poured onto a table. Ladue left them to it and went off into a barn to hide. Here he was cornered by Lincoln Steffens, the most persistent reporter of his day. “He was the weariest looking man I ever saw,” Steffens wrote in McClure’s. It was a prophetic remark, for Ladue’s days were numbered. His life reached its climax in a Cinderella ending, made to order for the press. At long last he married Anna Mason, his lifelong sweetheart, whose parents were now more than happy to welcome the most renowned figure in America into the family. Ladue’s name by this time was a household word. He was worth, on paper, five million dollars and was dubbed “the Barney Barnato of the Klondike;” his picture appeared in advertisements endorsing Dr. Green’s Nervura blood and nerve remedy; his name was listed as author of a book about the Klondike; and the financial pages were soon reporting that he had been named president and managing director of the Joseph Ladue Gold Mining and Development Company, whose directors included some of the biggest names in New York finance, headed by Chauncey Depew, president of the New York Central.

  Alas for Ladue, the thirteen winters spent along the Yukon had taken their toll. A few months after he came out of the north, his partner, the aging Arthur Harper, who had followed him down the coast on the next boat, died of tuberculosis. The following year Ladue also succumbed to the disease, at the height of the great stampede he helped bring about.

  4

  Klondicitis

  “Seattle,” a New York Herald reporter wrote, “has gone stark, staring mad on gold.”

  By nine thirty on the morning of the Portland’s arrival the city’s downtown streets were so jammed with people that some of the streetcars had to stop running, which was perhaps just as well since the streetcar-operators had already started to resign and head for the Klondike. Before the week was out the city had trouble keeping its transportation system in operation at all. This was the first of a series of mass resignations which became a feature of the early stages of the stampede. Only a few hours after the Portland docked, a Seattle barber suddenly stopped work, closed his shop, and bought a ticket for Alaska. All over the Pacific northwest similar incidents were taking place. Clerks quit by the dozen the same day; the Seattle Times lost most of its reporters; shipping men and policemen left their jobs. Within four days, twelve members of the Seattle force had resigned to go to the Klondike. Salesmen jumped counters, doctors deserted patients, preachers quit their congregations. The Mayor of Seattle, W. D. Wood, happened to be in San Francisco attending a convention when the news broke. He did not bother to return home, but wired his resignation. Before the month was out he had raised one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, bought himself an ocean steamer, the Humboldt, and formed the Seattle and Yukon Trading Company, whose subsequent history was a troubled one.

  The resignations kept coming. The ferry between Vancouver and Victoria had difficulty loading because most of the crew had left for the Klondike. Ships going north had trouble coming south again because so many seamen deserted. Whaling in the Canadian Arctic came to a standstill because the whalers left in a body for the gold-fields. Canneries along the Alaskan coast were forced to close for similar reasons. The price of riverboats tripled, and so many were shipped north for Yukon River service that fruit-picking ceased in the Sacramento Valley because of the absence of transportation. The rush threatened to close down the California gold mines. Within ten days the Oneida and Kennedy mines near Jackson lost most of their men.

  Everyone seemed fiercely determined to go. More than three quarters of the members of the graduating classes of San Francisco and Los Angeles medical schools announced that they would accelerate their studies in order to establish themselves as doctors in the Yukon Valley. In Chicago a group of gamblers, harried by a reform government, held a hurried meeting in a downtown saloon and within three hours boarded a train for Seattle, taking no luggage but a set of gold-scales and some heavy underwear. In Tacoma the streetcar employees organized a mass meeting and chose nine of their number to go to the Klondike to stake claims for the rest. On Bellingham Bay, in Washington State, Eric A. Hegg, a twenty-nine-year-old Swedish-born photographer, closed both of his thriving studios, bought all the chemicals and photographic plates he could afford, and took immediate passage north on a leaky stern-wheeler, the Skagit Chief. It was not gold that lured him but the prospect of photographing the greatest adventure story of the age.

  The stampede was swiftly given an air of respectability and authority by the numbers of leading citizens who took part in it. John McGraw, a former governor of Washington, a senatorial candidate, and one-time president of the First National Bank of Seattle, was aboard the Portland when she left on her return journey. Fellow passengers included Brigadier General M. E. Carr of the state militia, who had the most lucrative law practice in the state, and Captain A. J. Balliot, once Yale’s greatest oarsman and footballer, who also gave up a thriving law practice to seek his fortune in the gold-fields. E. J. “Lucky” Baldwin of San Francisco, a millionaire hotel man, miner, and landowner, who had been one of the argonauts in the ’49 rush, at the age of seventy-one announced that he would go to the Klondike to seek the mother lode itself. Winfield Scott Stratton, the eccentric millionaire from Cripple Creek, organized an expedition and bought two riverboats to prospect the Yukon River.

  The aristocrats of the underworld were equally alert to the possibilities of the stampede; already boom towns, disorganized and ripe for the plucking, were mushrooming up at the foot of the mountain passes.

  Shortly after the news broke, an ex-policeman named Willis Loomis encountered, on the streets of Seattle, Soapy Smith, one of the most famous bunko men on the continent.

  “I’m going to be the boss of Skagway,” Smith told him casually. “I know exactly how to do it, and if you come along I’ll make you chief of police.”

  Loomis had known Smith in the great silver camp of Leadville, Colorado, when he had sold cakes of shaving-soap for five dollars apiece to suckers who believed there was a twenty-dollar bill hidden under the wrapper. Since then Smith had risen in the world: he was the acknowledged master of the sure-thing game, the king of the confidence men, the emperor of the Denver underworld, and the ex-ruler of Creede, Colorado – a man with the reputation of buying and selling police chiefs as if they were so many cattle. Loomis retorted that a team of mules could not drag him to Alaska, and Smith went on alone, with historic results.

  Within ten days of the Portland’s arrival, fifteen hundred people had left Seattle and there were nine ships in harbour jammed to the gunwales and ready to sail. The town itself was demented. By August 1 every hotel was bursting with men, restaurants were overtaxed, and lodging-houses were roaring. In the area of the docks, the streets were choked with people and animals moving sluggishly between the ten-foot stacks of supplies. Through the crowd moved steerers hired to lure men to the various outfitting stores. Hundreds sat in the roadways, dressed in gaudy mackinaws, miners’ wide-brimmed hats, iron-cleated, high-top boots, and heavy wool socks – waiting for ships, playing at cards, and babbling about gold.

  Dogs, goats, sheep, oxen, mules, burros, Shetland ponies, and sway-backed cayuses, all designed for Klondike packing, blocked the streets, tied to hitching-posts and lumber piles. Every dog-owner in town learned to keep his pet securely tethered – otherwise he was stolen for the Klondike. Horses kept pouring
in from Montana, many of them bony, spavined, and worn out. They had been worth between three and five dollars the week before, but now they sold for twenty-five and more. Mules arrived from Colorado; reindeer with amputated horns were sold as beasts of burden; Washington elks were brought in by the carload priced at two hundred and fifty dollars apiece.

  The continent was Klondike-crazy. Transportation-company offices were in a state of siege. One railway company received twenty-five thousand queries about the Klondike in the first few weeks. In Chicago the N.A.T. Company was bombarded by one thousand people a day. In the first twenty-four hours after the news broke, two thousand New Yorkers tried to buy tickets for the Klondike. A day later a New York paper printed an advertisement asking applicants to invest any sum between five hundred and two thousand dollars in a Klondike expedition. Twelve hundred signed up at once. On August 1 the New York Herald’s financial page carried advertisements for eight huge mining and exploration corporations all formed within a few days to exploit the Klondike. Their total authorized capitalization came to more than twenty-five million dollars.