Gold Diggers

by Charlotte Gray

  On this day, Father Judge had taken as his text “Remember man, the end for which you were created.” He knew he had been created to save lives and souls in the Yukon, and nothing would deflect him from that goal. When typhoid broke out that month, he immediately began building a third story on St. Mary’s Hospital, notwithstanding Father René’s directive that there be no more construction. In order to pay for the extension, he sold a piece of church property—although it was the Oblates’, not his, to sell. When Father Gendreau, concerned about the church’s mounting debts, proposed that worshippers should pay rent for their pews, Father Judge was so appalled that the suggestion was abandoned. Everybody else in Dawson City was obsessed with accumulating wealth in their lifetime. Father Judge was interested only in spiritual gold. The mission’s money problems continued to swell, though as long as the Saint of Dawson was around, they were not allowed to seem important. But would such a frail man survive another arctic winter?

  CHAPTER 12

  Jack’s Escape from the Yukon, June 1898

  JACK LONDON WAS STILL only twenty-two, yet scurvy had drained his youthful vigor, destroyed his teeth, and left him as bent and slow as men three times his age. His stubbled cheeks were sunken: his skin was gray with ingrown dirt and malnutrition. He spent the first few days in Dawson close to St. Mary’s Hospital, where he chatted with fellow patients and watched Father Judge do his rounds. To his relief, the Jesuit’s potato peelings and sips of spruce beer slowed the progress of the disease. Spurts of Jack’s irrepressible energy began to bubble, and he was soon strong enough to earn fifteen dollars a day helping Doc Harvey rescue floating logs from the Yukon, then tow them behind a rowboat to a mill.

  With improved health came reawakened curiosity. More than twenty saloons lined Front Street these days. At night, the blue-eyed Californian was drawn to dance halls like the Monte Carlo and saloons like the M & M, to watch the latest crop of entertainers and croupiers. Six months of celibacy on Split-Up Island made Jack impatient for female company, the raunchier the better. “How good it was,” wrote Charmian London in her biography of her husband, “to see a woman’s face again.” The women reciprocated by making a fuss of the ailing but still charming young man. So what if his hands shook, his nose constantly bled, his breath stank and his teeth were so loose that he could barely chew meat? He listened. He made girls who dealt with male contempt every day feel valued. The women entertained him, as he sat slumped by the bar, surrounded by men he had met the previous November as well as new acquaintances. Edward Morgan, the miner who wrote God’s Loaded Dice, watched him “saturating himself with the spirit and lore of the Arctic as he caught it from his sourdough drinking companions.”

  Belinda Mulrooney often caught sight of the young man limping into a bar, on the hunt for drinking buddies. She had no idea he had literary ambitions as he never hung out with newspaper reporters. “London was not received there as one of the writers,” she recalled in her memoirs. “He was one of the wrecks of the saloons.” On Split-Up Island, Jack had gone for weeks without alcohol, but now he was back in a world he loved: a world of “big-chested, open-air men” where, as he put it in John Barleycorn, “drink was the badge of manhood.” The lonely claustrophobia of an ice-encrusted cabin was behind him. As a youngster on the Oakland wharves, he had learned the rituals of the drinking life—the need to buy a round for companions to prove you are one of them, the courtesy of buying a drink for the bartender, the drinking songs, the sentimentality of midnight drunks. But Belinda had no time for an almost penniless young drinker, and he had no interest in a woman who dressed like a schoolteacher. For each of them, there were far more attractive companions.

  Dawson City came into its own in the summer of 1898 as the wildest, noisiest, roughest frontier town, in the middle of the bleakest landscape on the American continent. A year earlier, Bill Haskell had been astonished to see the population reach 4,000 and saloons spring up along Front Street. By the end of May, the number on the cramped mudflat had swollen to 10,000 and continued its rapid rise. Jack London watched hundreds of people step onto the Dawson waterfront every day. Lots close to the river sold for $20,000 and the cheapest room rented for $100 a week, almost twenty times the price for a room Outside. Most newcomers couldn’t afford to stay in one of the newly built log hotels, which hid cramped rooms and primitive amenities behind false fronts and grandiose names like the Criterion, the Pavilion, the Montreal Hotel, the Pacific, the Pioneer, or Eldorado House. Instead, weary stampeders were forced to remain on their boats or pitch tents and build cabins on the other side of the Klondike River (the old Hān fishing camp, renamed Klondike City) or across the Yukon in a sprawling new settlement called West Dawson. Between shelters of every conceivable shape and size, from sketchy lean-tos to circus marquees and cavernous warehouses, there were heaps of supplies, piles of mining equipment and stoves, and great stacks of timber.

  The Yukon River had fallen to normal levels once the ice jams downriver had melted, so the floodwaters had receded from Dawson’s streets. But Front Street remained a muddy morass, and men, women, and dogs struggled to keep their footing on sidewalks of narrow planking so they didn’t plunge into the mire. The main thoroughfare was lined with restaurants, bars, brothels, gambling halls, stores, dance halls, and saloons. Belinda’s new three-story hotel, the Fairview, was being hammered together on the corner of Front and Princess. By Outside standards, prices were outrageous: a haircut that cost twenty-five cents in Chicago cost $1.50, while coffee and a waffle that cost a nickel in Seattle cost twenty-five cents in the North.

  Jack London quickly learned that Dawson’s demimonde had kept pace with the town’s growth in size and vivacity. He loved pleasure palaces like the famous Monte Carlo. This season brought a popular pair of dance hall sisters named Jacqueline and Rosalinde, better known as Vaseline and Glycerine. Despite the flood of boulevardiers and good-time girls, etiquette in the dance halls hadn’t improved since 1897. Men continued to wear rough mackinaws and rubber boots as they whirled the dance hall girls around. The girls, according to Edward Morgan, were an even rougher bunch than the previous year: “painted, coarse-featured, loud-voiced, brazen hussies.” The son of a wealthy New York businessman, Morgan never warmed to the assertive women of the North, who drank, fought, and laughed at his pretensions. “They were rouged within an inch of their lives,” he noted, “and many of them wore their hair short. Their skirts were abbreviated, their forms uncorsetted, their frocks close-fitting . . . Furthermore, they smoked cigarettes unashamedly and tossed off whisky neat with all the ease and sang-froid of a he-man sourdough, with a copper-lined stomach. Their badinage and persiflage, the wit and the wisecracks they exchanged with their male companions, were all below-the-girdle stuff.”

  Dawson’s streets were paved not with gold but with mud as thick as gumbo.

  “Below-the-girdle stuff” was music to Jack London’s ears. Jack embraced the low-lifes. He had known poverty and insecurity himself; he had watched women fight to survive in the slums and on the docks of San Francisco. Charmian London, who knew all too well her husband’s enjoyment of riotous parties and gregarious survivors, wrote after Jack’s death about his admiration for the “grit of women who . . . had entered the frozen territory.” He had spent his youth railing against the establishment, so he appreciated women who challenged convention—even if, in many cases, such women were at the mercy of their pimps. One performer who appeared in Dawson this spring was a colorful, tough character called Freda Maloof, who advertised herself as the “Turkish Whirlwind Danseuse.” Freda’s act consisted of a bump-and-grind belly dance with lots of wispy veils, bare flesh, and suggestive patter. It was based, she claimed, on a performance by an exotic dancer known as Little Egypt at the 1893 Columbian Exposition (the same exposition where Belinda Mulrooney had made her first fortune). A contemporary described Little Egypt as having “more moves in bed than water on a hot griddle, and her gyrations could make a grown man cry,” but Freda Malouf’s belly dance ap
parently outstripped Little Egypt’s. It was so shocking that even the Mounties, who usually turned a blind eye to outrageous acts, shut her down. Jack London loved Freda’s “muscle dance” and relished the dancer’s wicked appeal. High-spirited Freda would appear twice as “a certain Greek dancer who played with men as children did with bubbles” in Jack’s fiction, but in both stories she is a stereotypical “tart with a heart,” who shows greater decency than women of higher status.

  As Bill Haskell had noticed, the Mounties paid more attention to gambling halls than dance halls because fights were more likely to break out among gamblers. Owners were instructed that no person under the influence of alcohol should play; players were warned that cheats would be fined or run out of town. This didn’t stop miners losing their hard-won fortunes on the turn of a card or a roll of the dice. A man who won might ring the bell over the bar as he announced, “Free drinks all round!” Men would come pouring through the saloon doors. In the saloons, miners fresh from a clean-up tossed nuggets into the cuspidors and laughed as down-and-outers fished them out of tobacco-flavored saliva.

  Jack had no money to gamble, but like Bill Haskell before him, he enjoyed the theatricality of the faro tables and roulette wheels. And like Bill, he too enjoyed the sight one evening of cocky little Swiftwater Gates playing pool for $100 a game. Gates didn’t stand a chance. He was playing against a shark who, according to Edward Morgan, “was known up and down the Yukon as one who could charm a pool ball to do his will.” Gates lost game after game and was soon down several thousand dollars. But he didn’t blink: he was in the limelight and loving it.

  In the summer of 1898, dancers like “Snake Hips Lulu” gave Dawson City its reputation as “the town that never sleeps.”

  Throughout May, Jack London soaked up atmosphere. He picked up the tough, ironic humor of the big guys at the bar, who regarded whiners with disdain. He watched chained-up malamutes and huskies snarling at each other, idle now that spring had come. He heard tales of murder and thievery on distant Klondike creeks. He listened to Father Judge describe the night he spent on the trail, when he had to light a fire and fight off frostbite. At some point during these weeks, his literary ambitions revived and he began to make mental note of anecdotes that he could transform into vivid stories, with the excitement intensified, the terrors embellished.

  But there was still not enough vitamin C in Jack’s diet to eliminate scurvy, and in early June, Father Judge urged him to leave Dawson. The lower Yukon was ice free and navigable, the Jesuit argued, and Jack could float with almost no effort the 1,400 miles to St. Michael on the coast, where he would find the fresh vegetables his body craved.

  Father Judge’s advice was all Jack needed to hear. He had not struck gold, he was impatient to return to writing, and he felt cut off from life beyond the Klondike mud. Like most of the Americans in Dawson, he had been fired up when he heard that the United States had declared war on Spain a few months earlier in support of Cuban liberation. How was the war going? And what about Theo Durrant, the San Francisco medical student accused of two gruesome murders the previous year? Was he hanged? Who was the 1898 heavyweight boxing champion—Gentleman Jim Corbett, “Sailor” Tom Sharkey, or Bob Fitzsimmons, “the Freckled Wonder”? Jack wasn’t the only person hungry for news in a town that still had no newspaper of its own. One day he saw a man clad in a dirty red shirt and high rubber boots standing on a wagon and in loud, penetrating tones reading a front-page story about the Spanish- American war from a copy of the Seattle Times that was several weeks old. The throng cheered and cheered, while an American began singing the Union anthem from Civil War days: “Marching through Georgia.” The newspaper reader then announced that the rest of the paper would be read aloud in Pioneers Hall—admittance, one dollar. In fifteen minutes, the hall was crowded with about 500 men, who patiently stood for an hour while the enterprising owner read to them more war news, accounts of suicides, business announcements, and columns of small ads. The performance was so popular that there was an encore the following day. Jack would use this incident, like so many others, in his fiction. But it reinforced his determination to get out.

  Soon large paddle-steamers would arrive in Dawson, and then load up with passengers for the return journey to St. Michael. But Jack couldn’t wait that long, and he didn’t have the $150 needed for a deck passage to the river’s mouth. Besides, he had more than enough nautical skills to navigate a small sailboat in the current of a vast river. So two days after he had watched Father Judge’s church burn down, Jack set off in a “home-made, weak-kneed and leaky” little skiff along with two new friends called John Thorson and Charlie Taylor. He had no poke of gold, but he knew he had something more valuable for his literary ambitions—a gold mine of stories. And now, for the first time, he started scribbling notes each day.

  “We start at 4 p.m. for Outside,” reads the first entry in his diary. “Last words—sailor and miner friends—parting injunctions, ‘see so and so, & such a one’—love and business messages—frankly expressed envy of many who had decided to remain—Dawson slowly fading away. Pitched camp at 10 p.m.—no bunk in boat—slight rain . . . broad daylight all the time.”

  It was not a comfortable journey through the Yukon’s slushy, cold waters. For the first few days the skies were gray, then the weather turned unbearably hot. They couldn’t buy sugar, milk, or butter in the first few mining camps they passed. But Jack was enthused with purpose: his notes were the basis for an article he would complete as soon as he got home. His account of the voyage would appear in the Buffalo Express two years later, entitled “From Dawson to the Sea.” According to this article, Jack and his companions “had sworn to make of this a pleasure trip, in which all labor was to be performed by gravitation, and all profit reaped by ourselves. And what a profit it was to us who had been accustomed to pack great loads on our backs or drag all day at the sleds for a paltry 25 or 30 miles. We now hunted, played cards, smoked, ate and slept, sure of our six miles an hour, or our 144 a day.” Charlie Taylor was designated cook for the voyage, while Jack and John Thorson shared rotating watches. All three joined in a moose hunt on June 9. Sighting a moose at the water’s edge, the men sprang to arms in the hope of bagging some red meat. Since their arsenal consisted of an ax and an ancient blunderbuss loaded with birdshot, it was a vain hope. A gunshot succeeded only in scaring the moose back into the woods.

  Swarms of mosquitoes plagued the travelers. Jack’s diary is dotted with such entries as “mosquitoes thick,” “Mosquitos make a demonstration in force,” “Put up netting and fooled mosquitoes,” “John driven out of bed by mosquitos,” “Evening burned smudges” (smoky fires to drive the insects away), “Bite me through overalls and heavy underwear.” The men smeared their faces with clay for protection. In his diary, Jack began to enjoy shaping his experiences into stories: “One night badly bitten under netting—couldn’t vouch for it but John watched them & said they rushed the netting in a body, one gang holding up the edge while a second gang crawled under. Charlie swore that he has seen several of the largest ones pull the mesh apart & let a small one squeeze through. I have seen them with their proboscis bent and twisted after an assault on sheet iron stove.”

  Jack London and two friends made the 1,400-mile voyage down the Yukon in one of the leaky, single-masted skiffs built by many stampeders at Bennett Lake.

  Jack frequently took the evening watch. Drifting down the river at midnight in broad daylight, he listened to the song of robins, the drumming of partridge, the croak of ravens, the cries of loons, plovers, geese, and seagulls. He made notes of which incidents might be developed into articles for such publications as Outing magazine and Youth’s Companion. He rehearsed descriptions of the scenery (trees “stand stretching their bleached limbs heavenward, mute witnesses to the Ice God’s wrath”) and catalogued the birdlife (“killdeers, plover, ducks . . . martins, owls, hawks”).

  Most days, the men saw evidence of other humans. On the riverbanks were prospectors’ huts,
ghost towns like Forty Mile and Circle City, and as they traveled closer to the Bering Sea, abandoned Russian settlements. On the river were more vessels than the Yukon had ever seen before, all heading toward Dawson loaded with stampeders, building supplies, provisions and, in one case, six tons of whiskey. (“Hot time in Dawson as a consequence,” Jack predicted.) Some of the boats had set off for Dawson City the previous fall and been caught in the ice. About 1,800 stampeders had allowed themselves to be persuaded that this “all-water” route from Seattle to the Klondike via St. Michael was feasible, but only fifty had reached the gold fields before freeze-up in 1897. The rest had paid for their gullibility with a winter nightmare—iced in, starving and helpless, on the lower Yukon.

  Still, for hours on end the voyage seemed little more than a blur of swirling currents, piles of driftwood, and distant hills. For a rookie writer, itching to shape experience into adventure, there was little to note. The only excitement came when the men caught sight of Indian settlements on the riverbank. The Yukon flowed through the territories of Gwich’in, Tanana, and Koyukuk peoples, and Jack scribbled journal entries about “children playing, bucks skylarking, squaws giggling and flirting, dogs fighting etc . . . Banks lined with birch bark canoes, nets in evidence everywhere, everything ready for fish.” Salmon weighing as much as 110 pounds were being pulled in, then immediately gutted and hung over smoking fires.

  At a Tanana camp called Muklukyeto, the three men waded through sprawling babies and fighting dogs to the entrance of a large log structure where a celebration of the spring salmon run was being held. Jack later described in his Buffalo Express article how “the long, low room was literally packed with dancers. There was no light, no ventilation, save through the crowded doorway, and, in the semi-darkness, strapping bucks and wild-eyed squaws sweated, howled and reveled in a dance which defies description.” It was a scene made for an explorer hungry for exotica, and Jack relished the idea that he was one of the first non-Tanana people to see the spectacle. To his chagrin, he wasn’t. Through the smoke and heat, he caught sight of another intruder. In his journal, he recorded his irritation at seeing “the fair, bronzed skin & blonde mustache of the ubiquitous adventurous Anglo Saxon, always at home in any environment.” When he described the same incident in the Buffalo Express article, he admitted to “disappointment on discovering that even here, 1,000 miles beyond the uttermost bounds of civilization, the adventurous white man already had penetrated . . . A glance demonstrated how thoroughly at home he was.” Elsewhere, he noticed “traces of white blood among the papooses everywhere apparent.”