Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  Bonnifield made it a habit never to turn down a bet. When Al Mitchell of Missoula, Montana, tackled him on one occasion and challenged him to a game, Bonnifield sat down immediately. Mitchell tried to unnerve him with a huge raise. Without the flicker of an eyelash Bonnifield casually turned around and asked the porter to stoke the fire. Then he turned back and called the bet. He was a past master at this form of gamesmanship, and when they got up, two and a half hours later, Mitchell had lost fifty-seven hundred dollars, which was all he had. Bonnifield tossed him a twenty-dollar goldpiece for breakfast and left the room without a word.

  He not only played everybody, but he also played as long as anybody else was playing. One memorable game began at seven one evening and went on steadily until seven the following night. The players were Bonnifield, the Montana Kid, and Harry Woolrich; their meals were brought to the table, and they ate without dropping a hand.

  Woolrich, who was from Montana, reached Dawson in November, 1898, after having achieved the distinction of winning and losing fifty thousand dollars in a game in Butte. Once he started playing, he often played for days, taking his meals at the table, a quiet, sallow man of about fifty-five, smoking a perpetual cigar, his expression never changing. Rubbernecks and kibitzers would stand five or six deep behind him, but this did not perturb him. Often enough he was playing with other men’s money. More timid plungers, believing that Woolrich had a magic touch with cards, would stake him; thus, if he lost, he lost nothing, while if he won, he took half the profit. As a result, he was able to take big chances with no risk to himself.

  Woolrich ended up in Dawson running the gambling concession at the Monte Carlo. One night he cleaned up sixty thousand dollars and determined to renounce gambling forever and leave the Klondike to settle down. Ticket in hand, he boarded a departing steamer to the cheers of a large crowd of well-wishers who came down to the docks to see him off. Alas for Harry Woolrich, the boat was delayed. Back he went to the gaming-tables and with a magnificent gesture pulled a half-dollar from his pocket, flung it on the counter, and cried: “Here’s my farewell to gambling, boys; I’m through!” He lost the half-dollar and so matched it with another half. He lost again. Twenty-four hours later he was still in the same spot, the boat long since gone. When his money ran out, he pulled out the steamer ticket and flung it on the table. And he lost that, too.

  The Monte Carlo was forever changing hands over games of chance. One evening Kid Kelly sauntered into the gaming-room and initiated a casual game with Ed Holden, the owner. It looked innocent enough, for each man was playing with one yellow chip at a time. Only a few of the spectators realized that each chip was worth an enormous sum and that every bet was the limit. The two men laughed and joshed each other as they played, and then, just as casually, Holden rose from his chair and walked out while Kelly took his place at the faro table as the new proprietor. This change in ownership wreaked havoc in the Monte Carlo dance hall. John Mulligan, who ran the stage show, had once refused to hire Kelly’s girl, Caprice, as an actress. Kelly installed the plump blonde as stage-manager, and her first act was to fire Mulligan. He and Holden left town shortly afterward.

  All during the winter of ’98–99, gambling provided the town with its chief amusement. When a big game was under way, hundreds and sometimes thousands would pour down to Front Street to watch the excitement; it was good entertainment, and it was free. More than that, it a player had a streak of luck, others could make minor fortunes by laying bets on the same cards. On the memorable evening when One-Eyed Riley contracted a winning streak, hundreds followed at his heels as he moved up and down the street from table to table and saloon to saloon. Riley was a night watchman for a navigation company and was known as a faro-bank fiend who spent all his wages on the game. His lunch hour was at midnight because of his job, but, rather than eat, he would go straight to the tables and play everything he had. He always lost; he was always broke.

  And then one night in Bonnifield’s Riley started to win. Soon he was playing the limit. He forgot about his job and stayed at the tables until, by morning, his winnings were in the thousands. He left Bonnifield’s to get something to eat and then began to move from saloon to saloon with the crowds following him. Wherever he went he asked: “What are you going to set as the limit?” and whatever the limit was, Riley played it and won, and moved on. His last stop was the Monte Carlo. It was well into morning now, but Riley’s luck still held. Dealer after dealer was thrown in against him to try to buck his winning streak, without success. A mystic aura seemed to surround him, and scores profited by following his bets with money of their own. In a last-ditch attempt to stop him, the management recruited a card wizard named Shepherd to deal to him, and Riley finally called it a day. By now he had piled up twenty-eight thousand dollars, and he was determined to quit the Klondike as quickly as possible before he lost it all again. So great was his haste that he did not even bother to collect his wages, but, as it was midwinter, paid a dog-driver one thousand dollars to rush him out over the winter trail.

  In Skagway somebody inveigled him into a dice game. Riley, flushed with success, lost his fortune in three straight passes.

  6

  The last stampede

  Far from the carnival of Front Street, in his makeshift hospital under the hill at the north end of Dawson, Father William Judge, the frail and cadaverous priest, quietly toiled away. All the previous summer, the steaming undrained swamp on which the town was built, rank with undisposed sewage, had spread typhoid, malaria, and dysentery among the unwitting stampeders. These, together with the scurvy cases, jammed every available cot in the hospital, filling the very hallways and crowding Father Judge himself out of his own spartan bedroom.

  The overworked priest had one quality in common with all the others who descended upon the Klondike: he was a believer in miracles. For him, if not always for others, the miracles seemed to come true. It was his practice, for instance, never to turn a patient away, but one afternoon he accepted twenty more than he had bedding for. Then the miracle came: at nightfall three bales of blankets arrived mysteriously on an unidentified sleigh and were dumped at the door. Again, early in the fall, he had so many patients pouring into the hospital that he was forced to put some of them in the upper rooms which were not yet finished, for the roof of his hospital had not been completed. As if in answer to his prayers, the storms relented and there was clear weather for three weeks until the last board was in place. During the winter he found that he could not hire workmen to dig a grave in the frozen ground of the cemetery for one of his dead patients, and so struggled himself with pick and shovel until he was about to give up in despair. Suddenly, out of the gloom, two husky miners appeared; they told him they had heard that they were wanted at the hospital and proceeded at once to complete the grave and to cover the coffin.

  In a sense, Judge was the conscience of Dawson. Men watched him at his work and felt a little better that they belonged to the human race; it was as if his own example cleansed them of their sins. His little office, which contained nothing more than a board lounge, two blue blankets, and a rough wooden drawer in which his worldly possessions were kept, had long since been given over to the sick. The priest, when he slept at all, curled up in the hallways, or in a corner by the stairs, or in any cranny he could find. When his nurses pleaded with him to take more rest, he replied only that when his work was finished he would have plenty of time for sleep. It was his habit to rise at five a.m. to hear Mass, to eat a spare breakfast – frequently sharing his food with another – and to work until eleven at night. He always insisted that he be awakened if any patient asked to see him, and all through the dark hours he could be seen moving quietly, like a guardian shade, through the wards.

  He rarely smiled, and yet his face was forever radiant, beaming with what one man called “an indescribable delight.” Despite his frailty, he moved with catlike speed; he did not walk upstairs, but always ran.

  It would have horrified him to know that his hospital
was a hotbed of graft and chicanery; that many of the male nurses were little better than thugs who waited, like ghouls, for a man to expire; that they borrowed money from the dying, knowing they would not need to pay it back, or sent the invalids’ watches to be repaired, hoping to claim them for themselves if the owners died. It was customary to prescribe stimulants for a patient recovering from typhoid – a bottle of brandy or whiskey – but the attendants drank most of this liquor, pouring out drinks for their charges and then pretending that the hour had not arrived for the dose.

  All that fall the priest remained on the town’s conscience, and in December of ’98 the feeling grew that something tangible should be done for him. In spite of some heavy donations from Big Alex McDonald and Pat Galvin, the hospital was still in debt, and so the people of Dawson proposed to pay it off as a Christmas present. A benefit show was planned, and, although December 25 was the best-paying night of the year, Joe Cooper offered his Tivoli theatre free for the affair.

  As Judge’s only outer garment in all his months in Dawson had been a tattered black cassock, patched and worn, it was decided that he must have a new suit of clothes for Christmas. A tailor was dispatched to get the priest’s measure, but Judge politely refused. The tailor was told to make the suit anyway, together with a sealskin coat, cap, and gloves (for Judge dressed lightly, with shocking disregard for the severity of the Yukon winter). A presentation was made a few days before the show; but Judge, although moved, explained that as a Jesuit he could neither own chattels nor accept gifts. The presentation committee urged the clothing upon him, pointing out that most of the donors were Protestants, and in the end the priest relented. He was reluctant to attend the minstrel show in his honour, but was prevailed upon to do so. When George Noble, the interlocutor, rose to make a little speech, referring to him as “the grand old man of Dawson,” the audience went wild. Judge was taken up on the stage, much against his wishes, and the cheering continued for five minutes. But this was the only time he appeared in his new clothes; the following day he was seen again in his threadbare robes.

  His time was running out, and the whole town knew it. Although he was but forty-five years old, he looked closer to seventy. Overwork had lowered his resistance, and two weeks after Christmas the word sped across the community that he was ill with pneumonia and would probably not recover. A pall settled over Dawson. As if to accentuate the mood, the temperature dropped to fifty below, and the snow turned dry as sand, squeaking eerily beneath men’s feet, while the smoke from the buildings pillared vertically into the still air to hang across the river valley in a pale shroud. The whole community, it seemed, was slowing to a dead stop. It was so cold that horses could not be worked, and after a few days there was scarcely any life in the streets. Moving slowly, like ungainly animals, to protect their lungs, and bundled in furs to the very ears, men made brief forays into the cold and then retreated again into the steaming interiors. Windows frosted solid, while cabins even a few yards distant were blurred by the fog that encompassed the community. In the hospital on the hill the death watch began.

  Then, suddenly, tantalizing rumours began to seep through the saloons, and a bizarre charade, half comic, half tragic, broke the spell and shook the town from its lethargy. Gold, it was whispered, had been discovered on an unknown creek down the river.… Nobody knew exactly where the gold was, but Nigger Jim Daugherty had the secret.… He was planning an expedition in the dead of night to stake out a fortune. Like a hive prodded by a stick, the community began to buzz as hundreds laid in stocks of provisions, mended the harness on their dog-teams, and did repair work on their sleds.

  No one was quite sure how the Nigger Jim Stampede originated. Some there were who swore that a mysterious prospector had sold Jim a map for a thousand dollars and produced a poke of gold dust as evidence of his good faith. Others claimed that Jim had started the stampede on a wager, to prove that nobody could keep a secret in Dawson. Whatever its beginnings, the stampede itself was the most frenzied that the town had seen since the rush to Dominion Creek.

  Nigger Jim was a member of the Klondike aristocracy, a blond giant of a man who had quit his job as logger on the Pacific coast to go north to Circle City in 1894. His claim on Upper Bonanza netted him three hundred and sixty thousand dollars, enough to purchase two dance halls for the singing Oatley Sisters, one of whom he was eventually to marry. He was called Nigger Jim, not because of his colour, but because of his soft Missouri accent and because he liked to sing spirituals and accompany himself on the banjo. He was seldom seen without a cigar in his mouth, or a sombrero on his head, or a heavy diamond ring on his finger, or a glittering stickpin in his tie. Like Curly Munro, he wore no coat, but his fine silk shirts and vests were specially tailored for him in London. He preferred to drink champagne, and to impress Lottie Oatley he would stand at the bar until dawn treating every comer to the best vintages. In Skagway the previous spring he drank up all the champagne in town, then chartered a steamer to go to Juneau, one hundred miles down the coast, for a new supply. His generosity was a byword. Two months before the stampede he had been robbed of twenty thousand dollars. A friend captured the thief, and as a reward Jim bought him a saloon. The free lunch at the bar in his own New Pavilion was so Lucullan that one man is said to have lived for a year in Dawson without eating elsewhere. Stroller White recalled that “for two years after he opened the New Pavilion, Nigger Jim could neither spend nor give away the money as fast as it came his way, although he did the best he could along both lines.”

  At eleven p.m. on January 10, Jim stood in the Aurora Saloon with some of the Klondike élite to whom he had disclosed his secret: Charley Anderson, the Lucky Swede; Skiff Mitchell of One Eldorado; Sam Stanley, Billy Chappell, and Ramps Peterson. Outside, all along Front Street, newly harnessed dog-teams lay waiting in the snow, while ghostly figures glided about town passing the word that the moment had almost come. Jim swallowed his eighth whiskey-and-soda and walked out of the door with his friends, and the rush was on. By two that morning there were fifty sleds dashing down the frozen river in the wake of the leaders, and behind these, plodding on foot, came stragglers, one or two of them with queer devices for carrying their outfits. Among these could be discerned the tall muffled figure of Arizona Charlie, leading a loaded ox.

  Here was an odd pantomime; it was as if this small knot of men. forcing their way along the whitened river in the dark of the cold night, were bent on acting out for themselves, once again, the full drama of ’98. For the Nigger Jim Stampede, with its wild rumours, its sudden frenzy, its optimism and despair, its trials and its yearnings and its ultimate irony, was a scale model of the Klondike gold rush itself.

  The temperature dropped to sixty below, and the journey became a horror for all but the anointed few who had had the foresight to prepare for it. Nigger Jim and his friends slept soundly each night; they had brought tents and Yukon stoves and thick fur robes. The rest cowered in the lee of their sleds, which were arranged in a huge circle, around the central camp so that Jim, in the words of one, “was enclosed like a Roman general.”

  Back in Dawson, in the hospital under the hill, Father Judge clung precariously to life.

  By the second day the stampeders had left the main river to follow a tributary stream into the hills, wallowing in snow so deep that sleds and dogs had to be cast aside. Here some gave up the struggle and turned back in frustration, fatigue, and disgust, while others, like hounds on a scent, only grew more eager. On they floundered, up a miniature Chilkoot, the snow falling upon them as fast as their snowshoes packed it down, a vicious gale blowing into their frostbitten faces, their beards and moustaches stiff as boards.

  On the far side of a razor ridge, in a valley of phantom white, Jim reached his goal and hammered in his stakes. The others followed suit; and then began the weary, anticlimactic trek back to Dawson some hundred miles away. By the time the town was reached, all were in a state of depression.

  Some of these men bore the scars of the Nigger J
im Stampede all their lives. Several were maimed hideously, and one man lost both his feet. Few, if any, returned to the lonely valley to examine the ground that had been staked at such a cost. The word went around that it was quite worthless, and this was accepted as truth, just as the original tales had been.

  On their return, the stampeders learned that Judge was sinking lower day by day. Hundreds of inquiries poured in asking how he was, while gifts arrived daily, including one case of champagne worth thirty dollars a pint.

  Skiff Mitchell, just back from the stampede, made his way to Judge’s bedside. He was an old friend of the priest, although Protestant, and when he saw the wasted figure on the couch the tears rolled down his cheeks.

  “Why are you crying?” Judge asked him. “We have been old friends almost since I came into the country.”

  “We can’t afford to lose old friends like you,” Mitchell replied.

  “You’ve got what you came for,” the priest reminded him. “I too have been working for a reward. Would you keep me from it?”

  He seemed anxious to die. When the nuns in the hospital said they would pray hard for him to stay alive, he answered quite cheerfully: “You may do what you please, but I am going to die.”

  The end came on January 16, and Dawson went into deep mourning. “If the whole town had slipped down into the river, it would not have been more of a shock,” someone wrote later. Shops and dance halls closed their doors, and even the houses were draped in black.

  It took two and half days to hack the dead priest’s grave out of the hard-frozen soil, but there was no dearth of men for the task, and when the body was taken to its rest the grieving population followed. Nothing would do but that the casket cost one thousand dollars and be made of the finest material. It was a gesture in keeping with the general ostentation of the community, though the shrivelled figure within would have shuddered at the thought.