Klondike

by Pierre Berton

  The town shuddered with earthquake reverberations as the dynamite did its work in the face of the advancing flames. The firemen, unable to pump water, worked ahead of the explosion, soaking blankets in mud puddles to try to save the Fairview Hotel, which stood on the edge of the conflagration. In its adjoining stables were hogsheads of rum which Belinda Mulroney used to keep her horses warm and working during the chill winter days; she poured it by the dipperful down the grateful gullets of the fire-fighters.

  At last the groaning multitude saw that further effort was useless. Half freezing, half roasting, they stood like lost souls on the edge of the Pit, their faces glowing redly in the reflected light of the vagrant flames. Before their eyes, Front Street, with all its memories, was being consigned to the inferno.

  Bill McPhee’s Pioneer Saloon, one of Dawson’s oldest log buildings, crumbled to ashes and was gone in a shower of sparks, the piles of gold and sacks of mail stacked behind the bar buried beneath the charred timbers.

  “Gather up the money, the town is going to go!” Belinda Mulroney had called out as McPhee made a final dash into his building.

  But this was not what he was after.

  “To hell with the money!” he shouted. “I want to save my moose-head,” and back he staggered with the prized trophy. It meant far more to him than fleeting gold, for it had hung above the bar since opening day – that day which seemed so long ago, when Dawson was young, and the cheechakos were in the minority, and his old, good friends Spencer and Densmore were alive, and the men from Circle City crowded around the glowing stove and made the Pioneer Saloon their home. Could it have been only two years past?

  Harry Ash’s Northern Saloon, whose sawdust floor had glittered with gold dust, went the way of the Pioneer; and across the street the Aurora was blown to bits to make a firebreak – the Aurora that had once been Jimmy Kerry’s at the dawn of Dawson’s brief history. And now the Tivoli was crumbling, the Tivoli once called the Combination, where John Mulligan had produced Stillwater Willie and Cad Wilson had danced and sung; and the Opera House, with its famous gallery of private boxes, where Edgar Mizner had gambled his career away; and the Dominion Saloon and Gambling House, where the stakes were so high that eight Mounties had sometimes to be posted to keep order.

  Walter Washburn, a faro-dealer who had invested ten thousand dollars in the Opera House, watched with quiet resignation as it was devoured by the flames. “Well,” he said, “that’s the way I made it, and that’s the way it’s gone; so what the hell!”

  As if to underline this statement, the vault within the tottering Bank of British North America burst wide open in the fierce heat and the contents spewed out into the debris – gold dust and nuggets scooped from the bowels of Bonanza by moiling men, heavy gold watches from the vests of gamblers and saloon-keepers left here for safekeeping, jewelled stickpins and bracelets and dance-hall girls’ diamonds bought with favours and with wine and with music and now fused inseparably into the molten mass that oozed from the shattered strongbox to mingle with the steaming clay.

  One hundred and seventeen buildings were destroyed that night, their loss totalling more than one million dollars. In the cold light of the ensuing day, the weary townspeople crept from their homes to view the havoc. The fire had died away, leaving a smoking ruin where the business section had been. On the north edge of this black scar was the Monte Carlo, scorched but still standing: on the south the Fairview Hotel, a grotesque sight completely sheathed in frozen mud. In its lobby, scores of exhausted and homeless men and women were sleeping in two-hour shifts. The river marked the western boundary of the fire, the littered swamp the eastern. In the heart of the city was an enormous gap, from the ashes of which a large number of shapeless sawdust-covered piles arose at scattered intervals. They revealed themselves as immense blocks of ice which had been cut from the river for summertime use and covered with sawdust as insulation. Of all things, they alone had survived the fearful heat.

  At once the town began to rebuild. Less than twelve hours after his saloon was destroyed, Tom Chisholm had erected a big tent labelled “Aurora” and was doing business again. Although nails sold for twenty-five cents each, the familiar ring of saw and hammer was quickly heard on Front Street.

  But the town that rose from the ashes – a newer and sturdier metropolis – was not the same town; it would never be the same again. To walk down Front Street, Senator Jerry Lynch remarked, “was like walking for a block or two in the Strand.” Sewers were installed, the roads macadamized, and new sidewalks built. The shops were full of fancy goods displayed behind plate-glass windows. Schools were going up. Scores of handsome women sauntered up and down in fashions imported directly from Paris. And when the river broke, more and more steamboats lined the riverbank – as many as eleven at a time; already the trip from St. Michael had been cut from twenty-one to sixteen days.

  Dawson was no longer a camp of tents and log cabins: dressed lumber and plate glass were replacing bark and canvas. The dog had had his day; horses now moved easily through the dry streets, drawing huge dray wagons. Houses had parlours, parlours had pianos, pianos stood on carpeted floors. Men began to wear white shirts, polish their boots, shave their beards, and trim their moustaches.

  Although prices had been high that winter, with onions selling for a dollar and a half apiece and milk at four dollars a quart; although paper had been so short that the Nugget appeared for a month on butchers’ wrapping-stock, yet Dawson was no longer the isolated community it had once been. In March one man actually bicycled without mishap all the way to Skagway in a mere eight days. Already there was talk of a tunnel under the Chilkoot Pass, and a company was floated to drill one, but the scheme was abandoned because the White Pass Railway was swiftly becoming a reality. Thirty-five thousand men were at work on the grade between Skagway and the Whitehorse Rapids, carving the right of way out of solid rock and blowing hundred-and-twenty-foot cliffs bodily away. Before the year was out, men would be riding in style where two seasons before horses had perished by the thousands. As for Skagway, it had become a respectable and law-abiding town of sixteen hundred people, with electric lights and a water supply.

  And now the old-timers, who had witnessed the rise and fall of Fortymile, and who had seen Circle City turn from a frontier town of logs to a sophisticated community, began to get an uneasy sensation in their spines. It was as if the whole cycle of their experience was being repeated. This feeling was communicated to the cheechakos, who, by virtue of their year in the Klondike, were already thinking of themselves as sourdoughs. Some had spent the winter in hastily built cabins in distant valleys, sinking shafts on barren claims far from the golden axis of Bonanza and Eldorado; some had found work, as labourers in the gold-fields (the glut of men had driven wages down from fifteen dollars a day to a mere hundred dollars a month), or as clerks in stores, or as bartenders or dockworkers; some had done nothing but sit in their cabins slowly consuming their thousand pounds of food, wondering what to do. Now a sense of anticlimax spread among all of them. Thousands walked the wooden sidewalks seeking work, but there was less and less work to be had, and a stale taste began to grow in the mouths of those same men who, a year before, had tumbled pell-mell from the boats with shouts of triumph and anticipation.

  The Nugget reported that in the Outside world the word “Klondike,” which had once inspired visions of fortune, had become an epithet of contempt and derision. The newest expression of disgust was the phrase: “Ah – go to the Klondike!” In Seattle, gold-pans had been converted to dishpans and were selling at bargain rates, while costly hand axes, once destined for the gold-fields, were going at a fraction of their value. On July 1, five thousand dollars’ worth of Klondike groceries, hardware, and clothing were thrown on the market at cost. The proud fleet of ships assembled for the Alaskan trade rode at anchor in San Francisco harbour, empty and neglected.

  All through the spring vague rumours of something exciting on Norton Sound near the mouth of the Yukon River had been
filtering into Dawson. It was the same kind of news that had once emptied Fortymile and Circle City. At first the news was sketchy, as it always was, and men refused to believe it, as they always did. But, sceptical or not, they began to trickle out of town and down the river in twos and threes, and then in dozens, and then in scores, searching not so much for new adventure or new wealth, perhaps, as simply for the love of the search.

  One of the first boats to leave Dawson was the W. K. Merwyn, that same creaky little craft that had brought the Eliza Anderson’s party on her eventful trip up the river to the Klondike. The steamboat seemed fated to embark on the most harrowing journeys, and this was no exception. She was so crowded that Walter Russell Curtin, one of her two hundred passengers, wrote that they “had to stand like straphangers in a streetcar.” The food supply was swiftly reduced to peanuts and cornmeal, and the passengers were forced to gather goose eggs along the shore to keep body and soul together. The following year the Merwyn sank in an ocean storm not far from the Yukon’s mouth. Her timbers were washed ashore and, fittingly enough, burned by some of her ex-passengers who were by this time short of firewood.

  By midsummer 1899 the news from the beaches of Alaska was confirmed. On the sands of Nome, just across the Bering Strait from Siberia, a fortune in fine gold dust had been discovered – a fortune that had been lying hidden all the time at the far end of the golden river on whose cold breast so many men had floated in a search for treasure.

  The news roared across Alaska and across the Yukon Territory like a forest fire: a tent city was springing up on the beach at Nome … men were making fortunes and losing them just as quickly … buildings were going up, saloons opening, money changing hands … the beach was staked for thirteen miles … rocker and sluicebox were again in motion.… The experts were already predicting that Nome’s beaches and near-by creeks would produce two million dollars in the first year alone – more than the Klondike had at the same point in its history.

  The story was beginning again, like a continuous film show at a movie house. In Dawson, log cabins could be had for the taking as steamboat after steamboat, jammed from steerage to upper deck, puffed out of town en route to Nome. The saloon trade fell off; real estate dropped; dance halls lost their custom. Arizona Charlie Meadows announced that he would float his Palace Grand in one piece down the river to the new strike. Jacqueline, the dance-hall girl, complained that her week’s percentage would hardly pay her laundry bill. In a single week in August eight thousand people left Dawson forever. The same week a few haggard and wild-eyed men with matted locks and shredded garments straggled in from the Rat River divide. These were the last of that eager contingent which had set off from Edmonton twenty-four months before to seek their fortune; there would be no more.

  And so just three years, almost to the day, after Robert Henderson encountered George Carmack here on the swampland at the Klondike’s mouth, the great stampede ended as quickly as it had begun.

  Chapter Thirteen

  1

  Finale

  2

  The legacy of the gold rush

  3

  River of ghosts

  1

  Finale

  I shall borrow from Epicurus: “The acquisition of riches has been for many men, not an end, but a change, of troubles” I do not wonder. For the fault is not in the wealth, but in the mind itself. That which had made poverty a burden to us, has made riches also a burden. Just as it matters little whether you lay a sick man on a wooden or on a golden bed, for whithersoever he be moved he will carry his malady with him; so one need not care whether the diseased mind is bestowed upon riches or upon poverty. His malady goes with the man. – Seneca ad Lucilium Epistulæ Morales XVII.

  The statistics regarding the Klondike stampede are diminishing ones. One hundred thousand persons, it is estimated, actually set out on the trail; some thirty or forty thousand reached Dawson. Only about one half of this number bothered to look for gold, and of these only four thousand found any. Of the four thousand, a few hundred found gold in quantities large enough to call themselves rich. And out of these fortunate men only the merest handful managed to keep their wealth.

  The kings of Eldorado toppled from their thrones one by one. Antone Stander drank part of his fortune away; his wife deserted him and took the rest, including the Stander Hotel, which he had built in Seattle with profits from his claim. One cannot entirely blame her, for when Stander was drinking he was subject to crazy fits of jealousy; on one occasion he tried to cut her to pieces with a knife. Stander headed north again, seeking another Klondike, working his passage aboard ship by peeling potatoes in the galley, but got no farther than the Panhandle. He died in the Pioneers’ Home at Sitka. His wife, who lived until 1944, left an estate worth fifty thousand dollars.

  Win Oler died in the Pioneers’ Home, too, plagued to the last by the knowledge that he had sold a million-dollar claim to the Lucky Swede for eight hundred. But Charley Anderson, the Lucky Swede, fared no better. His dance-hall-girl wife divorced him; the San Francisco earthquake laid waste to his wealth, since he had invested heavily in real estate. He remained, in spite of these setbacks, an incurable optimist, so convinced he would strike it rich again that he vowed never to shave off his little pointed beard until he recouped his fortunes. He was still wearing it in 1939 when he died, pushing a wheelbarrow in a sawmill near Sapperton, British Columbia, for three dollars and twenty-five cents a day. It had always annoyed him when people referred to him as a millionaire. “I never had a million dollars,” the Lucky Swede used to say. “The most I ever had was nine hundred thousand.”

  Dick Lowe, the owner of the famous fraction on Bonanza, managed to get rid of more than half a million dollars. Part of it was stolen from his claim because he was too drunk to take notice of what was happening. Part of it was flung on the bars of saloons at Dawson and Grand Forks – as much as ten thousand at a time. He warned his friends against marrying a dance-hall girl, but in the end he married one himself. By the turn of the century Lowe was on the way down. He tried to recoup his fortunes in other gold rushes, without success. There is a pathetic picture of him pawning an eight-hundred-dollar monogrammed gold watch in Victoria, British Columbia. There is another of him peddling water by the bucket in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1905. He died in San Francisco in 1907.

  Others, with equally good prospects, met variations of the same fate. Sam Stanley of Eldorado married a dance-hall girl in Pete McDonald’s saloon and died in poor circumstances. Nigger Jim Daugherty was broke by 1902; he became a railroad worker and died poor in Fairbanks in 1924, divorced by Lottie Oatley who lived on in San Francisco until the early 1960’s. Pat Galvin quit the Klondike in 1899, bankrupt – and died shortly afterward of cholera in the South Seas. Frank Phiscator killed himself in a San Francisco hotel. Oliver Millet, the discoverer of Cheechako Hill, died well-to-do, but his mind wandered in his later years. Nathan Kresge of Gold Hill sank all his funds in an abortive mine in Oregon and died while on relief in Seattle.

  Even Tom Lippy, the God-fearing YMCA man who did not drink, whore, or gamble, ended his days bankrupt, though he took almost two million dollars from his Eldorado claim. After he sold out in 1903, Lippy and his wife made a trip around the world and built the proudest home in Seattle. The windows were of stained glass, the woodwork of intricately carved oak and mahogany. There were fifteen rooms, including an immense ballroom. Murals decorated the ceilings; a priceless collection of Oriental rugs covered the floor and hung from the walls like tapestries.

  Some of Lippy’s obscure relatives began to move to Seattle, and he took them all in and got them jobs. His philanthropies extended beyond this: he made extensive donations to the Methodist Church and the YMCA, gave twenty-five thousand dollars to the Anti-Saloon League, donated the land on which the Seattle General Hospital was built, and started the drive for Seattle’s first swimming-pool.

  Once, two Seattle reporters, on a stunt, dressed in old clothes, pretending to be down and out, and applied
at the homes of the wealthy for a handout. They were turned away at every mansion but Lippy’s. He gave them turkey sandwiches and coffee and sat down and ate with them.

  He became a respected Seattle citizen. He was hospital president, YMCA president, Port Commissioner, and senior golf champion of the Pacific northwest, but he was no businessman. He sank almost half a million dollars in a mattress-and-upholstery company, a brick company, a trust-and-savings bank, and the Lippy Building. All went bankrupt, and Lippy was ruined. When he died in 1931, at the age of seventy-one, he had nothing to leave his wife. Fortunately for her, a chance clause inserted in the hospital land agreement by a cautious lawyer provided her with fifty dollars a month. She lived on this until she died in 1938. The Lippy home was eventually turned over to the followers of Father Divine.

  Big Alex McDonald was ruined by the very thing that had made him wealthy – an obsession with property. For several years he continued, as a man of property, to be the leading light in Dawson, in spite of his awkwardness and lack of social presence. It was Big Alex the townspeople chose to preside at the farewell celebration when Sam Steele left the Yukon in 1899. As a special concession, the steamboat on which the policeman was leaving was brought up the river to the front of the barracks, and here Big Alex, who had been carefully rehearsed and drilled for several days, was supposed to make a graceful farewell speech and present Steele with a poke of gold. At the last moment the King of the Klondike lumbered forward sheepishly and thrust the poke into Steele’s hand. The farewell speech went as follows: