Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  Gene Allen, the gimlet-eyed newspaper editor, arrived in town over the ice, stubbornly determined to produce his paper ahead of his rivals. Having no printing-press, he launched it as a bulletin. The Klondike Nugget appeared on May 27, typed on a machine borrowed from the correspondent of The New York Times. Thus, though the Midnight Sun was to be the first to get its printing-press into operation, Allen was always able to say that he had launched the first newspaper in the Klondike. Not far away, in a log shack with a canvas roof, E. A. Hegg opened a studio and continued his remarkable photographic record of the stampede.

  The day after the Nugget was published, most of Dawson’s business section found itself under five feet of water, with the cabins near the river already afloat and the townspeople fleeing into the hills. It was impossible to move about except by boat, and passengers were being rowed along Front Street at fifty cents a head, the main point of attraction being the Nugget’s bulletin board, now in the centre of a muddy, swirling channel. The town, however, did not float away. The water subsided on June 5, leaving behind an ocean of mud so deep that horses could not move in the main street.

  A calm of expectancy hung over the community as Dawson waited for the human flood to engulf it. A day passed; two days, and no sign yet of the great flotilla from Lake Bennett.

  Then, suddenly, on June 8, the river came alive with boats. They poured in day and night like a parade, without a break, the men tumbling from them as soon as they touched shore and spraying out into the mud-filled streets. Soon there was no space along the shoreline, and newer arrivals had to tie their boats to other boats and leap from craft to craft to reach the bank, until the boats were six deep for nearly two miles, and Dawson’s waterfront resembled a Cantonese seaport.

  On the same day that the first wave of small boats struck Dawson, the first steamboat arrived from the opposite direction. She had been spotted from the hilltops, a flyspeck on the grey water. Across the town, at four in the morning, rang the long-awaited cry: “Steeeeam-boat!” and thousands, roused from their beds, raced to the waterfront in the early sunshine to greet the vessel. Bets were laid as to whether she would turn out to be the Bella or the Weare, the last boats out of town the previous fall. To the surprise of all, she was the diminutive May West.

  By the time the little boat puffed into the bank, there were five thousand men and women crowded together to welcome her with cheers and rifle-fire.

  “Has she whiskey aboard?” came the cry. She had indeed: sixteen barrels. It went on sale at once in the bars at a dollar a drink.

  Five days later the first steamboat to navigate the upper Yukon chugged in: the tiny little Bellingham, scarcely big enough to bear the title, only eight feet wide and thirty-five feet long, packed piecemeal over the mountains. Captain Goddard’s larger steamer was ten days behind her. His trip was so successful, establishing as it did a steamboat link between the gold-fields and the Pacific coast, that the merchants of Skagway tendered him a civic banquet on his return and carried him through the streets on their shoulders.

  Meanwhile, a late edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer had been brought in, and a struggle ensued for its ownership. The two local papers bid for it, but a miner from Hunker Creek secured it for fifty dollars. He paid “Judge” John F. Miller, a lawyer who later became mayor of Seattle and a U.S. congressman, to read it aloud in the Pioneers’ Hall. A crowd followed Miller down the street as he tantalized them with snatches from the headlines. To hear the news of Dewey’s victory at Manila and the annihilation of the Spanish fleet, hundreds cheerfully paid a dollar each; the affair was so profitable that it was repeated the following day.

  And still the boats kept coming. H. L. Miller floated into town with his cow on June 29 and achieved his ambition to be the first man to sell fresh milk in the Klondike at thirty dollars a gallon. Forever afterward he bore the nickname of “Cow” Miller. Tom Chisholm, the expansive and florid owner of the Aurora Saloon, managed to get some of the milk to sell over his bar at five dollars a mugful, just five times the price of whiskey.

  Day after day for more than a month the international parade of boats continued. They brought hay and horses, goats and cattle, kittens and mastiffs, roosters and oxen. They brought sundowners, shantymen, sodbusters and shellbacks, buckaroos and bluenoses, vaqueros and maquereaus, creoles and métis, Gaels, Kanakas, Afrikaners, and Suvanese. They brought wife-beaters, lady-killers, cuckolded husbands, disbarred lawyers, dance-hall beauties, escaped convicts, remittance men, card-sharps, Hausfraus, Salvation Army lasses, ex-buffalo-hunters, scullions, surgeons, ecclesiastics, gun-fighters, sob sisters, soldiers of fortune, and Oxford dons. They brought men seeking gold and men seeking adventure and men seeking power. But more than anything they brought men seeking escape – escape from a nagging wife, or an overpowering mother-in-law, or a bill-collector, or a deflowered virgin, or, perhaps, simple escape from the drabness of the un-gay nineties.

  Each man, whoever he was, brought along his tent, long since worn ragged by the elements, and these sprouted everywhere, crowding along the black muck of the waterfront, overflowing across the swamp, spilling into Lousetown on the south side of the Klondike or onto the shoreline opposite Dawson on the west side of the Yukon. They blossomed out on the slopes and hilltops and benches that overlooked the town, and they straggled by the hundreds along the trails that led to the gold creeks. From the top of the Midnight Dome, Dawson that spring seemed to be a field of billowing white, like a vast orchard in bloom.

  Half a dozen canvas cities – Bennett, Lindemann, Sheep Camp, Dyea, Tagish, and Teslin – had simply been packed up and transferred to Dawson, and the same feverish scenes which had marked each one were here re-enacted on a grander scale. Sawmills screeched incessantly; hammers and saws pounded and rasped through the bright night; planks, rough timber, ladders, and sawhorses encumbered the thoroughfares; mountains of logs and piles of freshly sawed lumber grew everywhere. Dawson was a city of sawdust and stumps and the skeletons of fast-rising buildings, its main street a river of mud through which horses, whipped on by clamouring men, floundered and kicked. In between these threshing beasts moved a sluggish stream of humanity. They trudged up to their calves in the slime, or they negotiated the duck-boards that were thrown across the black morass, or they shambled in a steady flow along the high boardwalk that was mounted on one side of the street.

  This wretched, swampy land was prohibitively expensive. Building-lots were fetching as much as forty thousand dollars. The cheapest single room on the far edge of town rented for a hundred a month, while log cabins in good locations were bringing up to four hundred. Along the waterfront, the government was leasing property for twelve dollars per front foot per month. Signor Gandolfo, the Italian merchant, managed to secure for his fruit stand a slender space just five feet square for which he was happy to pay a monthly one hundred and twenty dollars. A four-room apartment in New York City could have been leased for two years for exactly the same amount, but then the value of money in the two cities was hardly comparable. In New York two baskets of tomatoes could be had for a nickel. At Gandolfo’s they sold for five dollars a pound.

  Dawson’s character and shape changed from day to day. Tents, cabins, and men were being shifted constantly, and, as there were no street addresses, it was difficult for new arrivals to find their friends. Those who had spent months in each other’s company lost track of one another. Most had been known on the trail by their first names or by their nicknames; now, dumped from their boats, they were lost in the swirling crowd that moved restlessly back and forth along Front Street. Dwelling-places, in lieu of addresses, acquired nicknames of their own, such as “the cabin with the screen door,” or “the big tent with two stovepipes,” or “the slabhouse facing the river.” The only way to find an acquaintance was to post a notice on the bulletin board at the A.C. store.

  NOTICE

  Lost

  June 24, 1898 about 11 at night a gold sack containing all a poor woman had: between Old Man Buck
(Choquette) cabin and small board House selling Lemonade upon bank on the Troandike River any person finding same will confer a very great favor a poor woman who is sick and must go out. she made Her Dust by washing and mending a Liberal reward will be paid by Enquiring at Ferry Beer Saloon at Lousetown Bridge.

  An Oxford don, Arthur Christian Newton Treadgold, who had dropped his classical career to join the stampede, described for the Manchester Guardian the scene on Front Street in July: “The main street is nearly always crowded with men trying to find one another for … it is a hard matter to find a man in Dawson and much time is wasted thereby. When you find your man the two of you sit on the edge of the sidewalk (raised a foot above the road for cleanliness) and talk. This is a picturesque sight, for men are of all nations in all kinds of quaint garments, standing or sitting in business on the main street.”

  Some men died and their friends did not hear the news for weeks. Others suffering from typhoid and scurvy were spirited off to hospital and given up by their comrades, who could not find them. If a man so much as moved his tent he was often lost to his friends. There is one ghoulish tale of a new arrival who spent weeks searching for a missing partner until one day he was asked to act as pallbearer at the funeral of a typhoid victim. He accepted and shouldered his burden, but before the last rites were read he looked casually at the corpse in its pine box. To his horror, he found himself gazing down upon the dead face of the friend he sought.

  2

  Carnival summer

  By July 1, Dawson City had two banks, two newspapers, five churches, and a telephone service. The Yukon Telegraph Company strung its first wire and shouted its first “hello” from the Dominion Hotel to its main office in Lousetown; its best-known stockholder was Big Alex McDonald. The two papers were locked in a circulation duel, each with its own cartoonist, its own press, arid its own engraving-plant. The copies were snapped up quickly at fifty cents, and the newsboys who peddled them could expect in addition substantial tips from the Eldorado kings, hungry for news and willing to pay for it. Charley Anderson, the Lucky Swede, gave one boy fifty-nine dollars in gold for a single paper.

  Others made small fortunes importing papers from the Outside. An enterprising Polish gambler named Harry Pinkert arranged to have the San Francisco papers send to the Klondike surplus copies of their Sunday editions which he agreed to distribute as free advertising. He made a killing selling these at fifty cents each. So great was the hunger for Outside news that the bundles were tossed from the upper decks of the steamboats before they docked, and the newsboys were able to sell as many as four hundred by the time the boats were tied up.

  In addition to Father Judge’s Roman Catholic church, four other faiths were establishing themselves in Dawson: the Church of England, the Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church, and the Salvation Army. Hall Young, one of Alaska’s best-known Protestant ministers, had arrived in 1897 and opened a Presbyterian church in a cabin rented from a saloon-keeper, using blocks of wood and rough planks for pews, a miner’s copper blower as a collection plate, and a whiskey bottle for a candelabrum. He was replaced the following summer by a Canadian, Dr. Andrew S. Grant, a surgeon who had studied under Osler and then taken to the cloth. Young’s makeshift church had burned to the ground, and Grant held services in the Pioneers’ Hall until the building was submerged in the spring floods. Nothing daunted, the minister gathered up his flock and marched them to St. Paul’s Anglican Church, walking in through the doors just as the congregation commenced to sing the second stanza of a grand old hymn:

  See the mighty host advancing,

  Satan leading on.

  But temples to Mammon were rising as swiftly as those to God. The Bank of British North America won its race with the Bank of Commerce and opened for business in a tent with an unplaned board for a counter and an old open trunk as a safe. Here, in careless piles, lay thousands of dollars in currency to be traded for gold dust at sixteen dollars an ounce. David Doig, the manager, a shrewd Scot, lived in appropriate style. He enjoyed whiskey, cigars, and women, dined on pâté, oysters, and caviar, wore a soft slouch hat and grey flannels in the English style, smoked a small wooden pipe with a white horn mouthpiece, played the harmonium, made a habit of drinking a pint of champagne for breakfast, and brought a general air of sophistication to the community.

  The Canadian Bank of Commerce was not far behind. Its foresight in bringing an assay plant over the pass enabled it to buy gold dust the moment it opened and to make outward shipments ahead of its rival. Within two weeks it sent three quarters of a million dollars out aboard the Weare.

  The bank immediately issued one million dollars’ worth of the paper money brought in over the trail, with the words “DAWSON” or “YUKON“ surprinted on each bill in heavy type, a precautionary measure taken in case the entire issue should be lost en route to the Klondike. Miners discounted their gold in order to obtain the less awkward bank-notes, and before long paper currency from almost every country was circulating in Dawson, including Confederate notes and bills on the Ezra Meeker Bank, which had gone out of business a quarter-century before. Everything from gold dust to scraps of paper was used as legal tender, and the Bank of Commerce on one occasion cleared a three-dollar cheque made from a six-inch square of spruce plank with a nail driven through it for the convenience of the filing clerk.

  In spite of the new notes, the great medium of exchange continued to be gold dust, and because of its uncertain quality a continual tug-of-war was maintained between merchant and customer. Most men used the so-called “commercial dust,” heavily laced with black sand, to pay their bills. As the bank valued this commercial dust at only eleven dollars an ounce, a customer using it to buy groceries or whiskey could reckon that he was saving five dollars an ounce, since the normal price of clean Klondike gold ran around sixteen dollars – and the tradesmen tacitly accepted all dust at this price. This profit was increased by some who judiciously salted their pokes with fine brass filings. On the other hand, the bartenders and commercial businessmen weighed the dust carelessly, so that a poke worth one hundred dollars was usually empty after seventy dollars’ worth of purchases were made. Thus, as was often the case in the Klondike, the gain was largely ephemeral.

  The Bank of Commerce occupied a small building that had once been used for storing fish, and it kept its money in two big wooden chests. One of its first customers was a plump and heavily rouged dance-hall girl who walked up to an astonished clerk with the words: “Have you got my tights and slippers? I’m Caprice.” The manager was hastily summoned, as the only official equipped to deal with such an unorthodox request. Caprice repeated the query, adding that “Joe Brooks told me he’d send them here.” After a hasty search, the bank discovered that ever since Skagway it had been carrying with its bank-notes a parcel containing Caprice’s brief but effective costume.

  Another early customer was Big Alex McDonald, and the bank’s official history describes his first verbal statement of his business affairs as “a classic.” It took the combined staff several hours to extract all the necessary information from the slow-spoken King of the Klondike. Each time he was about to sign a deposition listing his assets he would drop the pen, rub his chin, and exclaim that he had just remembered another claim he owned. The list, when it was at last completed, showed fifty mining properties. McDonald at once borrowed an enormous sum from the bank to buy another, and before the summer was over had recovered the purchase price, paid off the loan, and realized an equal amount in gold dust as profit.

  By this time Dawson was crawling with men. In one month it had become the largest Canadian city west of Winnipeg – and Winnipeg itself was not much larger. In size of population, Dawson was only slightly smaller than the Pacific-northwest cities of Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland, and it dwarfed both Vancouver and Victoria. A rough census by the Mounted Police in midsummer put its population at about eighteen thousand, with another five thousand or more working and prospecting on the creeks. But with men continually arrivin
g and leaving, changing their addresses, moving into the hills and back into town, pouring off the steamboats and back aboard again, it was really impossible to estimate the true population at any given moment. The police calculated that more than twenty-eight thousand men had passed the Tagish post, but that five thousand of these had stopped to prospect on the tributaries of the Yukon before reaching Dawson in 1898. Another five thousand or more, however, arrived from various other points, largely via St. Michael, on board one of the sixty steamboats that made the trip up the river that summer. The Klondike Nugget reckoned that sixty thousand persons would reach the gold-fields before freeze-up, which would have made Dawson the largest city north of San Francisco and west of Toronto. This was probably an exaggeration, but undoubtedly well over half that number did touch at the Klondike for a few hours or a few days or a few months to form part of the jostling throng that plodded up and down, “curious, listless, dazed, dragging its slow lagging step along the main street.”

  The strange lassitude of the crowd tramping slowly back and forth through the mud was one of the singular features of Dawson in the summer of 1898. It was as if the vitality that had carried these men across the passes and down the rivers, shouting, singing, bickering, and slaving, had been sapped after ten months of struggle. For the best part of a year each had had his eyes fixed squarely upon a goal and had put everything into attaining that goal: but now that the goal was reached, all seemed to lose their bearings, and eddied about in an aimless fashion like a rushing stream that has suddenly been blocked. Some took out miners’ licences and went through the motions of searching for gold. Paul T. Mizony, a seventeen-year-old from San Diego, wrote that “hundreds … expected all they would have to do was to pick the nuggets above the ground and some even thought they grew on bushes.” But there were large numbers who spent only a few days in Dawson and did not even bother to visit the hypnotic creeks that had tugged at them all winter long. They turned their faces home again, their adventure over; and by August the Nugget reported that a third of them had departed. It was as if they had, without quite knowing it, completed the job they set out to do and had come to understand that it was not the gold they were seeking after all.