Flora sent a similar letter to Moberly Bell, but she included a comment from Monroe that she hadn’t told Lulu. “Now I am an old Klondyker,” her fellow passenger had said, “and you take my advice! Never draw out your revolver till you need it and when you draw it out shoot quick!!” Flora confessed that she had never fired a gun. Monroe shrugged. “Well, when you get in the woods I guess you’ll have to practice some.” Flora confided to her boss: “A reflection on the state of the woods in which other equally inexpert persons may be ‘practising some’ does not tend to reassure me.”
The Britannic docked in New York and Flora Shaw took the train to Montreal. As soon as she reached Canada, she was welcomed as though she were the personal ambassador of Queen Victoria herself. Senior members of the four most important institutions in the country—the federal government in Ottawa, the North-West Mounted Police, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the Canadian Pacific Railway—did everything in their power to ensure that the Thunderer’s representative crossed the continent in record time. Although Canada had achieved Dominion status in 1867, it still had a distinctly colonial mindset. Most Canadians spoke of the “Mother Country” and celebrated Queen Victoria’s birthday with feverish enthusiasm. On her previous visit to Canada, in 1893, Flora had been as unimpressed by Canadians as she had been by Americans. She described them to Lulu as infused with “ineffectual and sentimental loyalty” to the Empire, satisfied with “imperfect achievement,” and lacking “the democratic self-reliance of Australia and the executive High Toryism of South Africa.” This did not “promise well for the making of a new country,” Flora suggested to Lulu, adding that Canada’s “general laxity and . . . semi-good-natured incapacity” to tackle economic problems was a recipe for government corruption. Five years later, she carried this preconception westward with her as she was ushered across the continent. Nevertheless, she appreciated the royal treatment, particularly the offer from the Canadian Pacific Railway to telegraph her dispatches to the Times. “All goes admirably,” Flora wrote to Bell in early July 1898. “I travel like an Indian rubber ball, only the better for it the further I bound.”
As soon as Flora arrived at the west coast, she went straight to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s store in Vancouver. The lower floors of this establishment were filled with household gadgets, gastronomic delicacies, and the latest fashions for ladies and gentlemen. Ignoring such distractions, Flora took the elevator to the top floor—a journey that a contemporary described as “a trip from Paris to Siberia”—where busy clerks sold, packed, and shifted enormous piles of goods while anxious stampeders jostled for their turn. Flora was shown to the front of the queue, and the store manager himself helped her locate everything on her list, including the tent, stove, sleeping bag, beekeeper’s outfit, and mosquito netting. Then he arranged for it to be loaded onto the little steamer on which she would head north.
Ahead of Flora lay the voyage up the Inland Passage of Canada’s west coast to Skagway, the jumping-off point for the route over the St. Elias mountain range via the White Pass. From the deck of the coastal steamer, Flora gazed out at the unfamiliar northern panoramas, then wrote a huffy little note to Lulu: “If only there were colours it would be lovely but the weather is permanently grey and the whole scene in half-ghostly, dove-coloured tones, grey sea, grey sky, grey hills, dark at the base, which is generally crowded to the water edge and white on the snow-capped tops.”
On July 12, 1898, twenty-one days after she had left London, Flora disembarked from the steamer at the American port of Skagway, three miles south of Dyea at the head of the Lynn Canal, and got her first taste of Gold Rush culture. This settlement had barely existed until July 1897, when the first stampeders had opted to land here, instead of Dyea, so they could attempt the White Pass. Since then, it had swelled to a muddy town of 5,000, filled with shacks, tents, gambling houses, and makeshift saloons with names like the Mangy Dog, the Nugget, the Home of Hooch, and the Blaze of Glory. On first glance, an observer might assume little difference between Skagway and Dawson City, a few hundred miles north. But Skagway was lawless and, in the words of Sam Steele of the Mounties, chief law enforcement officer on the Canadian side of the northern border, “about the roughest place in the world . . . little better than a hell on earth, [where] the hard, cracked voices of the [dance hall] singers wailed amidst the shouts of murder, cries for help, and the sharp staccato crack of gunfire.” Exhausted, penniless men begged in the filthy streets, or earned enough for a meal by digging graves in the overcrowded cemetery for victims of an outbreak of spinal meningitis.
Until four days before Flora’s arrival, Skagway had been under the control of a ruthless thug called Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith. There was no hospital or civic government, only a deputy U.S. marshal who supplemented his income by befriending Soapy Smith and sharing in his loot. When pressed to establish a police force, the marshal had responded, “Other cities are over-governed, but Americans, when left to their own resources, are disposed to do the right thing.” Soapy had proved him wrong: Smith’s gang of thieves, scoundrels, con men, and shills had dominated this miserable settlement, where murder was commonplace and justice unknown. Saloons, bars, brothels, gaming halls, and hotels all paid protection money to Soapy because if they didn’t, their businesses would suffer. Unwary prospectors were steered into crooked card games, sold non-existent goods, or fleeced of their savings. Soapy had even established a bogus Skagway Telegraph Office. Despite the fact that there was no telegraph line to Skagway, newly arrived stampeders were persuaded to send a reassuring message home, for the price of five dollars. Soapy’s telegraph operator ensured that an answer would arrive within a few hours. It always came collect.
Smith’s crime spree in Skagway had come to an abrupt end on July 7. A returning Klondike miner had been foolish enough to get into a game of three-card monte with three of Soapy’s henchmen. They persuaded him to stake his sack of gold dust, worth $2,800, which he promptly lost. When he protested that the game was fixed, they grabbed the sack and ran. A local committee of vigilantes, who had been trying to drive Soapy Smith out of Skagway for months, demanded that the gold be returned. Soapy just sneered at them. The following night, in a shoot-out on the waterfront, both Smith and a guard named Frank Reid were fatally wounded.
A couple of days later, the steamer’s captain carefully escorted Flora off the ship. As soon as they were on dry land, Flora heard about the whole affair. Blood stained the wharf; Smith’s sidekicks were crowded into the log jail (“as full as it could hold of wickedness”); the towns-folk exuded overwhelming relief that they were rid of such a crook. The Wild West tenor of the tale amused the Londoner, and in a light-hearted letter to Lulu, she bestowed an aura of revolutionary grandeur on the criminal by referring to him as a “Robespierre of the name of Soapy Smith” responsible for a “reign of terror.” Once her own luggage had been unloaded, she watched the vigilantes march some of Smith’s associates, including the U.S. marshal, onto the boat under an escort of rifles. “The interest of watching these irregular proceedings delayed me for some hours, and I did not get away with my pack train until seven in the evening.”
Nevertheless, the story of Soapy Smith’s crimes was more evidence, in Flora’s view, of the inferiority of American society. She was appalled by the “American principles” of vigilante justice on which the town seemed to be run. In Canadian territory a few days later, Flora watched the Mounties deal with the four Tlingit whose story had attracted the vindictive headlines of the Klondike Nugget. The men were on their way to trial in Dawson. At one stage, Flora found herself eating dinner in the Mounties’ tent alongside two officers, the four suspects, and a man they had tried to kill. Flora behaved as graciously as if she was joining her friend the Duchess of Sutherland for dinner. Her fellow diners, she noticed, were even more gracious. At one point, one of the suspects could not reach the dish because he was in handcuffs. The man they had attacked, whose arm was still in a sling, pushed the dish toward him, saying, �
�Want some more beans, boy?” Suffused with pride in standards of British justice, Flora wrote to Lulu, “When murders are committed on our side of the border we don’t require the citizens to rise in raucous indignation to avenge them. We simply give notice to the police. The offenders are promptly arrested and sent down securely ironed to Dawson where they will be well and truly hanged.”
Despite the fact that she was at least twenty years older than most of the other travelers and corseted in ladylike skirts and a tight-waisted jacket, Flora Shaw hardly broke into a sweat as she tackled the forty-five-mile uphill switchback of the White Trail. The long days and the July sun meant less mud and more warmth than stampeders in previous months had known, although “it was not an altogether pleasant experience because of the number of horses that have been killed by the steepness of the way and whose bodies no vultures are here to remove.” The smell at the notorious Dead Horse Gulch, she told Lulu, “is not to be described.” But this was a passing phase; during the three-day hike to the summit she reported, “the scenery was magnificent and, but for the dead horses, the journey would have been delightful.” Perhaps it was so easy to keep chin up and cheerful because she had to make the journey only once, she was not carrying her own baggage, and she had powerful protectors. The Mounties were so obliging. While she sat on a log, boiling her kettle for a cup of afternoon tea, “the nice comfortable police are putting up my tent.” This allowed her to scribble another note to Lulu, in which she described how the climate reminded her of an English summer and the scenery of the Scottish Highlands.
In the sprawling tent city at the head of Bennett Lake, Flora Shaw did not blend in with the crowd, and certainly had no interest in doing so. One young woman, Martha Munger Purdy, stared in surprise at this lady who was so “different from the usual type coming into the country. She was wearing a smart-looking rain cape and a tweed hat, and as she turned, I noted that she was not so pretty as clever-looking.” Martha was from an affluent, well-connected Chicago family and had the self-assurance to make her way over to where Flora was watching men building boats, and introduce herself. Flora explained that she had been sent to the Klondike by the London Times and was exasperated by the length of the journey. To both their satisfaction, the two women found they had a mutual acquaintance, “which proves,” Martha would later write, “that the world is really small.” But there was no time for stampede small talk. The nice, comfortable police had found a stern-wheeler to take their VIP through the chain of lakes to Whitehorse, and a second steamer on which she could complete her journey to Dawson.
Flora’s only complaint about steamer travel was the diet of bad fish and stewed tea. She maintained her standards despite the black bilge water swirling round her feet, the lack of passenger cabins, and the smell of oil, freight, and sweat. “I have borrowed a galvanized iron pail and a tin basin from the cook and can just manage to shut myself in so as to secure privacy for a wash.” She did find that being “over the boiler the heat is almost unbearable. The woodwork is hot to the touch and one’s clothes smell of roasting.”
The water level of the Yukon River was gradually falling and the White Horse Rapids were not as fearsome as in earlier months, but Flora’s sangfroid was tested when the stern-wheeler repeatedly got stuck on sandbanks. She spent a day in the pilot box, talking to the crew as they steered the vessel round various hazards. She even began to unbend. “The good humour and kindliness of all these rough people is remarkable. The captain tells me that they pride themselves out West upon their great Western hearts and so far as I am concerned I find everyone ready to be kind and helpful . . . It is rather touching to me to find nearly all the men frankly lonesome for their wives and children.”
On July 23, 1898, the Times’s colonial editor arrived at her destination. It was only thirty-one days since she left London, and despite her shipboard friend Mr. Monroe’s claim that she couldn’t possibly reach Dawson from Montreal in less than thirty days, she had done it in fewer than twenty. She had no intention of slowing her pace. She wanted to get the measure of the gold fields on which Bill Haskell and Jack London had pinned their hopes, and the community that Father Judge and Belinda Mulrooney were nudging toward civility.
CHAPTER 15
“Queer, rough men,”August 1898
WHEN FLORA SHAW ARRIVED in Dawson City, a reception committee of prominent citizens, including the senior police officer, was waiting for her on the crowded wharf—not because she was a woman but because she was from the Times. A Times report on the Klondike would inevitably have a big impact in London and Ottawa, and would influence British investors. It was important that she get the “right” impression.
The Dawson authorities hustled their distinguished visitor through the crowd of loafers and layabouts hanging around the wharf, giving her no time to see the ramshackle, false-fronted buildings on Front Street, Belinda’s Fairview Hotel among them, or to hear the cries of croupiers escaping from saloons. The Bennett Lake-Dawson steamship company had arranged for her tent to be pitched alongside the log cabin of its Dawson agent, above Eighth Avenue on a steep hill covered in silver birches and alders. Here, close to a source of clean water, log cabins and tents were scattered through the woods overlooking Father Judge’s hospital. The company had also found a handyman, called James Short, to look after her, making Flora one of the few people in town other than proprietors of hotels and brothels who employed a domestic servant. Given that Short charged Flora four dollars a day at a time when the average wage in Dawson was ten dollars, he was probably subsidized by the authorities.
If so, the strategy worked. The day after her arrival, she settled herself outside her tent to write to Lulu. “I had a long sleep last night and this morning a bath and clean clothes and feel much refreshed.” She had expected Short to be “the equivalent of an English charwoman” but was pleased to discover that he was more like “a knight errant . . . He knows apparently everything there is to know about American woodcraft and brings all the resources of his knowledge to bear upon my comfort.” Short provided fresh brushwood on which Flora could spread her sleeping bag, new spruce boughs for the floor of the tent, and hot water for her daily wash. Flora had an upper-class Englishwoman’s culinary limitations, and cooed with delight when, after her wash, Short settled her at a crude table and served the most appetizing meal she had seen for days. “Hot cakes of infinite varieties appear at breakfast, buttered toast, porridge, sort of omelette dishes made with crystallized [dried] eggs, bacon cooked in batter, bacon in sandwiches of hot rice cakes, bacon curried, bacon with a thick white gravy.” Pies, curries, hashes, and stews were conjured up out of the only two kinds of meat available, bacon and tinned corned beef. Short also produced “a wonderful series of sweet dishes from evaporated fruits and prunes and farinaceous stuffs.”
Although Flora was no cook, she was an energetic hiker and gardener. Her first morning, she walked up the hill behind her tent to take in the magnificent view of the Yukon River, snaking silently between hills now clad in emerald-green alder and plum dark spruce. Only the snow-capped mountains in the distance hinted at the frozen bleakness of the same landscape in winter. As she retraced the steps to her tent, she picked a bouquet of lupines, Jacob’s ladder, and purple fireweed, then arranged the wildflowers in an empty condensed milk tin in the middle of the table. She was fascinated by the way her neighbors’ vegetable gardens flourished during the brief growing season, thanks to the never-ending sunshine. In late July, a full month after the summer solstice, light lingered in the sky until well after midnight. Lettuce, peas, and beans flourished on the sod roofs of cabins. “I could not resist the temptation to sow mustard and cress and radishes around my tent.”
Behind the wooden buildings of Dawson’s commercial district, a sea of canvas stretched over the hillsides.
Flora’s positive impressions were also reflected in the first paragraphs of the “Letter from Canada” that would appear in the Times on Monday, September 19, 1898, under the byline “From Our Sp
ecial Correspondent.” Her description of the Gold Rush town was very different from the “dreary, desolate Dawson” that Jack London had left only five weeks earlier, when he disappeared down the Yukon River. Dawson City, according to the Times, seemed well on the way to becoming yet another little colonial town, far from the center of power but proclaiming its allegiance with a bravely fluttering Union Jack. Flora had seen such towns all through Africa and Australia; now she envisaged Dawson developing into a subarctic version of Rhodesia’s Salisbury or Tasmania’s Hobart.
“Dawson City has stretched itself across a little cove of river-wash which forms a hundred acres or so of the flat land in the sweep of a bend made by the Yukon just after it has received the waters of the [Klondike River]. The main street of Dawson follows the river bank. Behind it tents are thickly studded on the flat, and as the town stretches up the encircling hills log cabins, in some cases tastefully constructed with little balconies, verandahs and projecting porches, stand in rows among the uncleared copse. In the south-eastern suburb of the town, which mounts high over the hill dividing the course of the Yukon and commands a view of both rivers, a broad road has been cut through the spruce wood. Here cabins built of white peeled logs succeed each other on either side in little clearings of about half an acre, and form in their setting of aromatic scented wood an original and charming suggestion of a boulevard which only needs the advent of women and the house life which they will bring with them to the town to realize its possibilities.” Nobody had talked about aromatic-scented wood, balconies, and verandas before, or suggested that Dawson had suburbs.
Privately, Flora was much more critical. She wrote to Lulu, “Few people permit themselves the extravagance of a servant but do everything for themselves washing included. The natural result follows that everything on occasion is left undone, and the universal dirt is one of the worst features of the situation.” Swirls of brown dust rose from the dried mud streets and lodged in every crease of skin and fabric; Flora’s skin itched in the dry, grimy air. The town itself, she told her sister, “is hideous.” Streets that only two months earlier had been quagmires were now rock hard, with ankle-twisting crevasses. “All the refuse of the town of tents flung out of doors, no order of a sanitary kind pursued and the so-called main street along which wooden warehouses and hotels are rapidly closing up in a continuous row is a mere lane of mudholes and dust heaps where you feel you are breathing poison all the time you walk. I only go down on business and am always glad to get back to the hillside.”
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