Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  Side arms were forbidden in Dawson. No man could carry a revolver on the streets without a licence, and few licences were issued. There is the story of the one-time Western badman from Dodge City who was ejected from a saloon by a Mountie constable for talking too loudly. He left like a lamb. The Mountie discovered that he was carrying a gun and asked him to hand it over. “No man yet has taken a gun away from me,” the badman snarled in the best tradition. “Well, I’m taking it,” the policeman said mildly, and did so without a murmur from his opponent.

  As one resident wrote, “You can call the toughest gambler in town anything you wish, or slap him on the wrist and all he can do is sue you for slander or have you arrested for assault. But he will do nothing for himself. If you get into trouble call a policeman.… The old American stall of self-defense just doesn’t go.”

  If there had been a Dan McGrew in Dawson, and a Malemute Saloon, as Service’s fictional verse suggests, there could never have been a shooting because a Mountie would have been on the spot to confiscate the guns before the duel began. So many revolvers were confiscated in Dawson in 1898 that they were auctioned off by the police for as little as a dollar and purchased as souvenirs to keep on the mantelpiece. The chief crimes that season included such heinous offences as non-payment of wages, dog-stealing, operating unsanitary premises, fraud, unlawfully practising medicine, disturbing the peace, deserting employment, and that vicious crime “using vile language.” Most of the six hundred and fifty arrests made in the Yukon in 1898 were for misdemeanours of that order. One hundred and fifty were for more serious offences, but of these, more than half were concerned with prostitution. No other community on such a remote frontier could boast a similar record.

  By fall, Sam Steele was in command not only of Dawson but also of all of the Yukon and British Columbia. Constantine relinquished his post on June 24 and proceeded Outside to a new assignment. When he left town the old-timers presented him with a silver plate containing two thousand dollars’ worth of selected nuggets. This was all the gold he took from the Klondike, but he left with the lasting respect of the community.

  To newcomers and old-timers alike, the police often seemed superhuman. There was something miraculous about the ability of Inspector W. H. Scarth, Constantine’s deputy in charge of the Dawson barracks, to work cheerfully in below-zero weather without ever wearing gloves or mitts – and without ever seeming to freeze a finger. Scarth had been the hero of a disconcerting mishap on the steamer that brought him north in 1897, and all of Dawson knew the story. A rope against which the policeman was leaning gave way, and, toppling head-first into the hold of the City of Topeka, he landed upside-down in a barrel. In spite of this, he emerged smiling, his forage cap still in place and his ever-present monocle screwed as firmly as ever into his eye-socket.

  When Steele arrived on the heels of the main rush, his reputation had come ahead of him, and he proceeded to rule Dawson with the firm hand he had displayed on mountains, lakes, and river. Fines were stiff, sentences suffer. For all crimes Steele imposed one of two main punishments. A culprit was either given a “blue ticket” to leave town, or he was sentenced to hard labour on the government woodpile. The blue ticket was considered a serious penalty by gamblers and saloon-keepers, since it meant they could no longer ply a lucrative trade on Front Street. The woodpile kept more than fifty prisoners busy at all times, for the police and government offices alone used enough fuel to make a pile two miles long and four feet square, and all of it had to be sawed into stove lengths by prisoners who worked from morning until night, winter and summer. In July, for instance, a man convicted of cheating at cards was sentenced to three months on the woodpile; in October a man who had been given a blue ticket and had not left town fast enough was sentenced to six months. It was back-breaking work; nobody wanted it.

  One American gambler, so the story goes, who came up before Steele was contemptuous when the policeman fined him fifty dollars.

  “Fifty dollars – is that all? I’ve got that in my vest pocket,” he said.

  Whereupon the superintendent added: “… and sixty days on the woodpile. Have you got that in your vest pocket?”

  Steele allowed the saloons and the gambling-halls, the dance pavilions and the prostitutes’ cribs on Paradise Alley behind Front Street to run wide open; but he would not countenance disorderly conduct, obscenity, or cheating. Shortly after his arrival he called a meeting of saloon-keepers and told them that if he received any complaints of unfair gambling he would close them up. As a result, disgruntled players were always paid off without argument, ejected promptly from the premises, and not allowed to return.

  He did not interfere with the liquor traffic – one hundred and twenty thousand gallons were imported into Dawson during the ’98 season – but he would not allow spirits to be sold to minors, nor would he countenance the employment of children in the saloons. If a man made a remark that he judged to be either obscene or disloyal during a theatrical performance, the theatre was fined, and if such remarks continued, the theatre faced closure. When Freda Maloof, a Greek girl billed as “The Turkish Whirlwind Danseuse,” tried to repeat the hootchie-kootchie dance with which Little Egypt had startled the patrons of the Columbian Exposition, Steele had it stopped at once. There is evidence, however, that he used these corrective measures sparingly in order to keep matters from going too far. Years after the incident two old-timers, Bert Parker and a lawyer named De Journel, met on a Yukon riverboat and recalled old times. Parker described the belly dance that was too hot for Dawson. De Journel stared out into the river, his eyes glazing.

  “Do you remember it?” Parker prodded.

  “No,” said De Journel softly, “I don’t. But I certainly would have liked to see that dance. It must have been some dance if they wouldn’t let her do it in those days.” He paused for a moment, then turned to his companion: “I myself saw Captain Harper of the North West Mounted Police bet a hundred dollars that he could strip off naked, stand on his head on the stage of the Monte Carlo Theater, and eat a pound of raw beefsteak off the floor, and he won the bet.” De Journel resumed his inspection of the Yukon River and was silent again. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “it must have been some dance if they wouldn’t let her do it in Dawson!”

  Even more remarkable to the free-wheeling Americans who formed the majority of the population was the Dawson Sunday. On the Sabbath the town was dead. “On Sundays there is quiet,” one man wrote home, “and the old familiar strains of ancient hymns steal through the clear northern air.”

  Saloons and dance halls, theatres and business houses were shut tight one minute before midnight on Saturday. At two minutes before twelve the lookout at the faro table would take his watch from his pocket and call out: “The last turn, boys!” A rush would follow as the players placed one last bet. At the next table the roulette ball gave a final click; in the saloon the bartender was already stacking the chairs. Without a word the crowd silently moved out into the street, bidding the lone Mountie a quiet good-night. The lights, at Steele’s insistence, stayed burning so that the policeman on the beat could make sure the premises were empty until two a.m. on Monday, when they were allowed to reopen.

  There were many ingenious attempts to circumnavigate these blue laws. Some of the theatre-owners instituted what they called “sacred concerts,” at which a silver collection was taken. The pièce de résistance was a series of “living pictures” of various religious scenes, chosen with the eye of a De Mille for their voluptuous quality. The climax of these tableaux was reached on a certain Sabbath eve when the curtains parted to reveal Caprice, the dance-hall queen, plump and blonde, attired only in pink tights and slippers and clinging suggestively to an enormous cross.

  Another device, during the summer months, was the Sunday excursion. As the American border was less than fifty miles away, a boatload of holidayers could easily be transported beyond the reach of the Mounted Police to a Promised Land where wine flowed like water and joy reigned supreme. On o
ne memorable occasion some three hundred and sixty-eight people, largely gamblers, dance-hall girls, and theatrical men, clambered aboard the Bonanza King while another hundred embarked on the Tyrrell. One boat ran out of fuel and the other developed engine trouble, so that the two pleasure ships drifted helplessly downstream into the heart of Alaska until the liquor was consumed and the novelty of the occasion began to pall. Monday had come and gone meanwhile, but Dawson remained a dead town, the liveliest members of its population taken from it, and the theatres, dance halls, saloons, and gambling-houses closed for lack of staff.

  When the steamers finally limped back upstream and hove into sight, the town rushed en masse to the wharf to welcome the prodigals. One old-timer, years later, likened the scene to Lindbergh’s reception in New York. With the steamers’ whistles blowing wide open and every dog in town howling in chorus and several thousand people cheering, the girls in their rumpled dresses walked unsteadily down the gangplank and the community once more returned to normal.

  But the Sunday laws were never relaxed. No work of any kind was allowed on the Lord’s Day. One man was arrested for fishing on the Sabbath, another for sawing his own wood, and in August, 1898, the Nugget noted that two men were each fined two dollars and three dollars costs simply for examining their fishing-nets on a Sunday. One Lord’s Day event had a touch of high comedy to it: a race was arranged between two famous dog-teams and was organized for a Sunday so that the sporting fraternity could attend. The scene along the Klondike valley road was a gaudy one: in the glittering spring sunlight scores of dance-hall girls and actresses, their hair piled high in the pompadour style of the day, and dressed in their finest beribboned silks with enormous leg-of-mutton sleeves, lined the course arm in arm with saloon-keepers and gamblers in hard hats, stiff collars, and diamond studs. Cheers rang out as the two teams came bolting down the hard-packed road – and then raced neck and neck into the arms of the waiting police, who arrested all and sundry on a charge of desecrating the Sabbath.

  5

  Graft and the Nugget

  The honesty and finesse of the Mounted Police stood out sharply against a background of governmental ineptitude and petty graft. On the one hand there is a picture of four Mountie constables, each earning one dollar and twenty-five cents a day, escorting five tons of gold ingots safely out of the country. On the other, there are the scenes in the mining recorder’s office where bribery, inefficiency, and small corruptions were the order of the day. Here, changes on recorded claims could be made by running a pen through a name and date, or by scratching or erasing names, or – even more brazenly – by cutting them out and pasting in fresh slips of paper with new signatures. Here palms often had to be crossed before records could be inspected, and crowds waiting to record or transfer a piece of ground might wait in line for as long as three days unless they were admitted through what was known as “the five-dollar door” at the side, where speedy service was secured by a bribe.

  Women were given the right of way into the recorder’s office, an apparent chivalry that led to many instances of collusion, especially through the agency of prostitutes or dance-hall girls. Many a man who staked a claim would arrive at the office only to be told that the ground was closed by government order, and then to discover that it had been given, later, to friends or accomplices of the recorder.

  In the winter of 1898–99 the government refused to record any further fractional claims, reserving these for the Crown, but, nevertheless, favoured individuals and clerks in the offices seemed able to stake these fractions. Sometimes when a man successfully staked a claim he was informed that he could not officially record it until he had it surveyed for a fee of one hundred dollars. While the survey was in progress he might find that others, with obvious knowledge, had jumped the claim and recorded it themselves. As Lord Minto, the Governor General of Canada, who visited the Klondike after the turn of the century, wrote, “It has been said with some truth that to settle the boundaries and titles of a good claim requires two or three surveys and as many lawsuits.”

  The natural discontent with the government arising from these outrages was magnified by the fact that the great majority of Klondikers were U.S. citizens living reluctantly under the British flag. Here was a unique situation: Dawson, one of Canada’s largest cities, was four-fifths American. The foreigners’ feelings were reflected in the editorial pages of the Klondike Nugget, an American-owned newspaper devoted to the interests of the U.S. section of the population. The Nugget’s editorials and news stories were scathing, and for more than a year the paper regularly attacked Canadian officialdom. It did not spare its own highly placed fellow citizens when the situation warranted, however, and in one celebrated instance incurred a libel suit from the U.S. consul himself.

  The action sprang from a news report in the Nugget’s uninhibited pages which detailed the actions of the consul, a plump and fun-loving official named James McCook, at the hour of 3.30 on a certain April morning. McCook, the Nugget informed its readers, had entered Pete McDonald’s Phoenix dance hall with Diamond-Tooth Gertie, one of the reigning dance-hall queens, on his arm. He was bursting with patriotic fervour and announced that he would buy drinks for any true American. A large number of girls immediately identified themselves as true Americans and stepped up to the bar, but one prospector refused the offer, saying that he was a true Canadian. McCook roared that he would rectify the error and make the man an American, whereupon a brief and inconclusive fracas occurred. The consul turned from this interruption to the pleasanter task of distributing all his wealth. He dispensed money and nuggets to the girls at the bar, gave one of them his heavy gold watch, and then, in a burst of enthusiasm, turned his pockets inside out, crying: “Take the whole works!” Several scuffles followed, in which the consul was seen rolling about on the floor. He recovered himself, produced a small Stars and Stripes, pinned it to the seat of his pants, placed his hands on the bar, and, leaning over, requested Pete McDonald to give him a good square kick.

  When McCook read this account of his actions in the Nugget, he sued the paper for five thousand dollars and Gene Allen and his brother George, the proprietors, for twenty thousand. The newsmen lined up such a phalanx of witnesses that the case was dismissed and the consul shortly afterward relieved of his post.

  A more scurrilous paper than the Nugget was the short-lived Gleaner. Bert Parker, who sold it on the streets, described it as “one of the hottest sheets that was ever published in Canada, and I don’t except the Calgary Eye-Opener” The paper was published twice a week, and, more in the interests of circulation than public spirit, roasted the government unmercifully. “They blamed the government for everything, not excepting the weather,” Parker recalled. The Gleaner was finally closed down because of obscenity and its publisher given a blue ticket to leave town. But the hatred of Canadian policy did not die away. In one extreme case a lady physician named Luella Day, from New York City, became so incensed at the government that she actually came to believe that the local officials were trying to poison her under direct orders from Clifford Sifton, the Canadian Minister of the Interior. She held to this conviction to her dying day, wrote and published a book repeating the charge, and found an audience for it.

  A good deal of the discontent sprang less from public graft than from public mismanagement. The gold office was staffed by men who had little experience of a stampede and who could not handle the enormous demands made upon them. Pandemonium reigned in the government offices, which in the summer of ’98 were snowed under by one hundred thousand official documents. There was not a duplicate copy of any of these, for paper had been so short that some records had to be kept on pieces of wood. The government staff lived in dread of a fire, which would have produced utter chaos, as every record of every mining transaction would have been irretrievably lost. All that season the queues of people trying to record claims, or purchase miner’s licences, or simply get information, stretched for blocks. Thomas Fawcett, the gold commissioner, was followed by
a swarm of petitioners whenever he appeared on the streets. So great was the press of the crowd about him that at twelve noon sharp he would burst from his office and head for his boarding-house for lunch at a dead run, his petitioners in hot pursuit. Fawcett was one of the chief targets of the Nugget, which eventually helped to secure his removal; but there is no evidence that he was dishonest – only harassed. Some of his staff, however, were certainly culpable.

  Scenes similar to those in front of the gold office took place at the post office. No one had foreseen the blizzard of mail that would descend upon the Klondike; no one had made arrangements to handle it. All the previous winter, deliveries had been sporadic and uncertain. In December, 1897, Captain Ray, the U.S. infantry officer at Fort Yukon, had accidentally found a second-class-mail sack lying in the snow and on opening it had discovered, to his astonishment and frustration, several hundred letters that should have been delivered to Dawson. It transpired that one hundred such sacks, all intended for the Klondike, had by an error been put ashore at Fort Yukon, on U.S. soil.

  All winter long, United States citizens in Dawson had been fuming over a piece of bureaucracy that did not take into account the enormous distances in the northwest. All letters mailed from the U.S. and addressed to Dawson were placed in the Circle City sack at Juneau on the coast. They were then brought through Dawson and on to Circle before being returned for distribution. This involved a delay of two or three months, and as a result some men did not hear from their families for months or even years. One man, awaiting a letter at the Dawson post office and not receiving it, sobbed out that he had been eighteen months in the country without word from home. Letters were subjected to so much handling that some were stripped of their envelopes by the time they reached their destination. In the fall of 1897, before a proper post office was established, three boxes of mail were placed at the A.C. store, the N.A.T. store, and Jimmy Kerry’s saloon, all filled with coverless letters, many entirely unidentifiable. One, dated June 1894, opened with the words “My darling boy” and closed with “Your anxious but everloving mother.” Letter after letter of this kind was read and pawed over by hundreds of men trying to find their own mail.