Gold Diggers

by Charlotte Gray

  But Flora Shaw had done her best. She was anxious to leave Canada, visit friends in Boston, and then catch the White Star Line’s S.S. Cymric from New York for the nine-day voyage to Liverpool. She would return to England almost exactly five months after she had left on her fact-finding mission.

  Was Flora right? Were Our Special Correspondent’s conclusions about the sleaze in Dawson City justified?

  There was undeniably official graft in Dawson City, as the local papers loved to point out. The most serious offender was Frederick Coates Wade, the crown prosecutor and land commissioner, who continued to act as both crown agent for land sales and solicitor for Big Alex McDonald and Roderick Morrison, two of the biggest landowners in Dawson. Wade was the most corrupt senior official, but junior clerks in various government offices also had ample opportunities to supplement their pay with a few extra dollars or a well-stuffed gold poke from a grateful client. In the mining recorder’s office, where claims were recorded, checked, and transferred, a surreptitiously purchased scratch of the pen might wipe out a man’s claim or insert a prior claim on a newly registered statement. A sharp speculator could hire a dance hall girl or a prostitute to wheedle her way into the office on his behalf, and then register a claim that some poor sucker farther back in the line had laboriously staked for himself. And a savvy miner could learn from friends in the mining recorder’s office if any prospectors had staked claims on new creeks because they had found “color.” A quiet word in the right ear could result in friends and colleagues staking a nearby claim before news of the next big strike triggered the inevitable stampede out of Dawson’s saloons.

  Similarly, much of what Flora had said about the post office was true. Mail delivery in Dawson was a shambles, since mail bags arrived not in a steady stream each week but on only a handful of occasions during the year, in a vast and unpredictable avalanche. There had been no mail at all from October 12, 1897, until the end of the following February. Then a dog sled had brought in 5,700 letters in a single batch, and as there were no mail deliveries or boxes, every hopeful recipient turned up at the post office in the hopes of a letter from Outside. There was soon an auction for places near the front of the line-up outside the two-story log house on Front Street, conducted by quick-witted entrepreneurs who had anticipated demand. Anyone else might have to stand in line for as much as four days. Mailing a letter out of Dawson in 1898 was even more difficult. The supply of Canadian stamps was so inadequate that the police, who took over the handling of mail in October 1897, slapped a limit on them of two per customer per transaction.

  Why had the government allowed such chaos to explode? Because the top-hatted legislators in Ottawa could not believe that a gold rush in the country’s most remote and inaccessible corner could possibly last. Their sole goal was to get as much in royalties as possible out of the region, in a “clean up and clear out” campaign. Only now were they beginning to think that the gold might last for several years, making it worth investing in Dawson’s future.

  Flora Shaw had arrived in Dawson City at the very moment when Ottawa’s policy looked most shortsighted. The Gold Rush was at its peak in the summer of 1898 as thousands poured over the White and Chilkoot passes. (The Mounties had already counted 27,000 before Flora crossed, she told Lulu.) Hundreds more arrived from St. Michael or by one of the three other land routes—the Stikine River route, the Dalton Trail, and the all-Canadian overland route from Edmonton—that were even tougher than the two mountain pass trails. The population of Dawson was somewhere between 18,000 and 30,000, and several thousand more people were encamped on the creeks, though it is hard to arrive at accurate figures with so much coming and going. These numbers completely overwhelmed the cramped townsite and its hopelessly inadequate infrastructure. Moreover, the number of claims to be registered had rocketed. In June 1897, there were 800 claims on record in Dawson; by January 1898, there were 5,000; and that number had jumped to 17,000 by September 1898.

  But change was on its way. Four weeks after Flora Shaw left Dawson, two men arrived to clean up the rowdy, overcrowded town. Both were familiar faces. The first was the incorruptible William Ogilvie, who as Flora had already noted had succeeded James Walsh, a Sifton crony, as commissioner of the Yukon. Earlier in the year, the Laurier government in Ottawa had passed the Yukon Act, changing the district’s status from a distant corner of the vast North-West Territories administered from Regina to a separate territory controlled directly by Ottawa, 4,000 miles away, with Dawson City as its capital. Ogilvie was now authorized to establish an executive council, plus the kind of administrative structures Dawson needed desperately: a board of health, a fire department, a sanitation department. Ogilvie would supervise the grading of streets and the construction (at last!) of drainage ditches to deal with Dawson’s appalling flood problems.

  The second new arrival was Superintendent Samuel Benfield Steele, who took over from Inspector Charles Constantine in Dawson when he was given command of the 250 North-West Mounted Police in the Yukon and British Columbia. Sam Steele would become a Klondike hero, with a nickname—the Lion of the North—straight out of a juvenile comic book.

  Born in Ontario, Sam Steele was a tall, heavily built man who came from a long line of defenders of the Union Jack, and by 1897 he was already a legend. His British-born forebears had cropped up at all the great battles of the previous century, including Waterloo and Trafalgar. As a broad-shouldered twenty-four-year-old, Sam had been the third man to be sworn into the newly formed Mounties in 1873, as a sergeant major. The new Canadian force was more than a police force but less than a militia, and its distinctive uniform reflected its purpose. It combined the red jacket of a traditional British regiment with the breeches and boots of a frontier ranger. The navy serge pants had a distinctive yellow stripe down the outside, and northern lawbreakers always referred to the police as “Yellow Legs.” So far, in the force’s short history, there hadn’t been a Mountie triumph in which Sam Steele hadn’t featured. He had been on the Long March west in 1874, helped to negotiate with Sitting Bull after the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1877, supervised construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway across the prairies in the early 1880s, maintained peace on the prairies as immigrants swarmed in, and pursued Big Bear during the 1885 Rebellion in Saskatchewan. (Because he had been under the army’s command in 1885, he was often called “Colonel” Steele. Although this was a courtesy title, it was used interchangeably with “Superintendent.”) His reputation had spread across the continent. In 1890, he married Marie Elizabeth de Lotbinière Harwood, daughter of an influential Quebec landowner who sat in the Canadian Parliament as a Conservative MP. When the newlyweds went to New York City on their honeymoon, the New York Fire Department greeted Steele of the Mounties with a parade of sixty engines.

  Sam’s men respected him because there was nobody who worked harder than their boss, and they feared him because he was a bit of a bully. “Gruff and bluff, and absolutely fearless of everybody,” as a colleague put it, Sam was up at dawn and hard at it until nearly midnight. His official diary captures his unbending military demeanor. In British Columbia’s Kootenay Ferry, where he was stationed at the time, he jotted a terse note on January 11, 1888: “Annual flogging administered to whores, adulterers, drunkards and gamblers.” But under the red serge and bullying manner was a devoted family man who wrote long, affectionate letters to his wife, Marie, almost every day when they were apart. His writing was often illegible, and he rarely bothered with punctuation, but the letters resonated with his dependence on Marie as the emotional center of his life. In photos, Marie Steele appears thin lipped and prim—hardly a figure to attract such passion. Nevertheless, Sam adored her and his lengthy epistles home always included pages of sentimental endearments. “My darling Marie,” he wrote in bold cursive in a typical letter from Bennett Lake, at the headwaters of the Yukon River, in May 1898, “How I long to clasp you in my arms, my own love, how I miss you. You are in my mind day after day.” Photos of Marie and their three small
children, Gertrude, Flora, and their only son, Harwood, rarely left Sam’s breast pocket.

  Sam Steele, North-West Mounted Police hero, wrote almost daily to his wife, Marie Elizabeth de Lotbinière Harwood Steele. Under his brass buttons, braid, and love of ceremony was a devoted family man.

  The public side of Sam Steele, along with his walrus mustache and fierce blue eyes, was already familiar to many Dawson residents because he had spent the previous winter in charge of the Canadian police posts from the summits of the White Pass and Chilkoot Pass to Dawson. In theory he had been subordinate to Ogilvie’s predecessor as commissioner of the Yukon Territory, James Walsh. In practice, Colonel Sam Steele had run the whole show on the trail to Dawson. Part military dictator, part sheepdog, he chivvied the army of stampeders along the route and made sure that none of Soapy Smith’s villains from Skagway strayed onto his territory. The Mounties had hauled a couple of Maxim machine guns to the top of the passes and set them up there, pointed at American soil, to show they meant business. Sam made up rules and regulations as necessary. First, he insisted that every homemade boat, scow, canoe, and raft had to have a serial number painted on the bow, and the occupants had to register their vessels, their own names, and their next of kin before they set off to face the river’s foaming rapids. The boats were checked through each police post (over which Union Jack flags fluttered) as they went downriver. If one disappeared, Steele’s Mounties went after it. Next, he ordered that every person who entered the Yukon must carry one year’s supply of provisions. Those orders were blatantly illegal (as Steele admitted himself) but thanks to his unilateral pronouncements and muscular authority, dozens of tragedies were averted. He had done everything he could to ensure Flora Shaw’s safety and comfort as she traveled into the Yukon over the White Pass and left via the Chilkoot Pass. No wonder Flora was so enthusiastic in her letter to Lulu about “the nice comfortable police.”

  Sam already knew that Dawson was, as he wrote to Marie, “orderly—but apart from that simply a hell upon earth, gamblers, thieves and the worst kind of womankind.” On her journey out of the Yukon, Flora Shaw confirmed his fears when she told him that “she does not envy me my task and that she could not have believed that such things could exist under the British flag. That is pretty blunt talk.” Sam was no saint: he lurched into drinking binges when he was bored, much to his wife’s consternation. But he was no libertine either, and he was disgusted to hear what was going on along Dawson’s Second Avenue. In a letter from Bennett Lake, he confided to his wife that “a coloured woman . . . went through to the south with $25,000 that she saved, and a dance hall girl had eight thousand. It is a tough place indeed.” He did not share Flora’s sympathy with the miners’ fury about the 10 percent royalty. “What on earth right have a few thousand foreigners to take out of the country what there is in it? . . . Perhaps ten percent is too much, but judging from the fact that all are willing to come out with sacks of gold—more money than they could earn in forty years or one hundred—they are not so much oppressed by the royalty.”

  Steele had been angling for command of all the North-West Mounted Police in the Yukon for months, and in July he heard that when Ogilvie replaced Walsh, he would be given officially the title “superintendent” and the position he had filled informally since January. Two months later, stampeders at Bennett Lake watched Superintendent Steele board a boat for the journey down the Yukon River, in the company of William Ogilvie. Alongside supplies that the two men would need to set up their offices in Dawson were an iron bedstead with wire springs for Sam (“I want to be comfortable when I am in barracks”) and a newfangled “graphaphone” (an early record player) for Ogilvie. As the party steamed north, Steele selected twenty sites for additional police posts along the river. Each would house five officers and two dog teams.

  Back in Ottawa, Clifford Sifton was trying to improve the Yukon’s hopeless mail service. In September, a dozen new employees for the post office arrived in Dawson. But mail service remained erratic. As one of those new employees, a keen young Ottawa man called Benjamin Craig, noted in his diary, they sent the first mail after the freeze-up to the Outside on November 15, but “they went through the ice and the mail was lost.” The same month, Thomas Fawcett, the gold commissioner, left his post. (“Goodbye Fawcett!” gloated the headline on the Klondike Nugget.)

  Most of Dawson’s citizens were happy with the improvements, but they were unwilling to give Flora Shaw much of the credit. Her articles in the Times had done damage to the town’s growing sense of itself as a little atoll of civility in an icy wilderness. As the population of Dawson had mushroomed, so had the self-importance of its more distinguished citizens. The new professional class, and particularly the wives of the professionals, had not appreciated the way that Flora treated them when she was in Dawson, and now they took umbrage at Flora’s negative portrait of their community as a crude boomtown. They wanted Dawson City’s reputation to rest on its wealth and sophistication rather than its wide-open gambling tables and corrupt officials. How dare this imperi-ous Englishwoman, with her fancy accent and beekeeper’s outfit, flit in and out of their bustling town thanks to the support of Canada’s police, railroad, government, and largest commercial enterprise, and then pass judgment? Their resentment was best expressed by the Toronto journalist Alice Freeman or, as she was better known to readers of her articles, Faith Fenton. Faith, a former schoolteacher in her early forties, had been encouraged to visit Dawson by William Ogilvie. She was at a stage in her life when she was hungry for change (she had just lost her job as a magazine editor) and worried about her future. Ogilvie, a jovial raconteur always happy to exaggerate the Yukon’s potential, assured her that Dawson was now thoroughly respectable and brimming with marriageable men. The prospect was irresistible. Faith arranged to send regular articles about the booming mining town back to the Toronto Globe, and headed north. She arrived in Dawson in August 1898, a week after Flora Shaw had left, and was quickly captivated by the exuberant atmosphere of the town. She became the darling of Dawson’s officer class.

  Red jackets, shiny leather boots, and a military demeanor made the Mounties both feared and popular in Dawson City.

  Faith Fenton reflected the pique of her newfound friends in the North when she took a swipe at Flora in a column in the Globe in January 1899. “There are difficulties of administration,” Fenton wrote, “that even Miss Shaw, with all her ability, could not possibly comprehend within the limits of her two or three weeks’ stay in the territory.”

  But Faith Fenton and her fellow residents didn’t need to worry. That same January, Flora gave her address on the Klondike gold fields to members of the Royal Colonial Institute in the Whitehall Rooms of London’s Hotel Metropole, a substantial brick building close to Trafalgar Square. A striking figure in her tightly corseted black gown, Flora was introduced by Lord Strathcona, High Commissioner for Canada, who had done much to facilitate her travels. Standing next to a large map of western Canada, she spoke for nearly two hours. After repeating much of what she had written in the Times, she mentioned recent improvements in Dawson City’s administration, for which she and the Times were happy to take credit. Next, she suggested that the appetite in Dawson for hookers and hooch would abate as soon as more women arrived. Men wasted time and money in Dawson’s saloons because they all yearned for a home life. “In noting the contrast between the splendid qualities exercised in the effort to acquire gold and the utter folly displayed in the spending of it, it was impossible to avoid the reflection that in the expansion of the Empire, as in other movements, man wins the battle but woman holds the field.”

  Flora Shaw predicted that if British capital and British enterprise were prepared to invest in the Empire, the communication difficulties would be eased and “there will be no more difficulty in going to the Klondike than in going to the Rhine.” She ended her talk on a note that must have thrilled all those institutions and organizations that had hosted her visit to Canada’s Northwest the previous year. �
�I went a skeptic,” she announced. “I returned convinced that though much that is temporary there is bad, the permanent conditions are very good.” She might have added that, officially, gold to the value of $10 million had been taken out of the Yukon in 1898, at least half as much again would leave in 1899, and that those estimates were reckoned to understate real production by at least 25 percent. And only a month after Flora’s London talk, on February 18, 1899, the twenty-one-mile, narrow gauge White Pass and Yukon Railway reached the summit of White Pass. By the end of July, it had completed the entire 110-mile overland section—Skagway to Whitehorse—of the Gold Rush route. Over 35,000 men had worked on the project, and the mountainsides were so steep that workers had been suspended by ropes to prevent them falling off while cutting the grade. Thirty-five men had died during construction. The final cost of the project was over $12.5 million—but it was British capital that had financed the most northerly passenger train on the American continent, and the railroad was soon channeling revenues back to Close Brothers, the London merchant bank that had financed it.