Flora Shaw’s brief sojourn in the Yukon and her exploration of the gold-bearing creeks helped to secure the future for Dawson City. She had justified the Klondike gold mines as an attractive investment because the huge dredges that large corporations could take north would collect gold from the gravel piles discarded by the individual gumboot-and-gold-pan prospectors. A. N. C. Treadgold, an English mining promoter who had already spent a summer in the Yukon, would find some well-heeled British backers. The battle between businessmen for control of great swaths of the creeks had begun in January 1898, when Ottawa permitted large mining concessions, but now it would be in full swing. And as a Montreal Herald reporter wrote in an 1898 column that would be reprinted in the New York Times, “It may be said of Miss Shaw without exaggeration that she has not been by any means the least of the forces working for the unification of the empire . . . [She] is certainly one of the remarkable women of the age.”
PART 4 : ORDERAND EXODUS
CHAPTER 17
“Strong men wept,” October 1898-January 1899
IN THE FALL OF 1898, two years after Carmack’s strike, Dawson was still like no other place in the world. It had outgrown its roots as a frontier mining camp, but it was no collar-and-tie, kid-glove city. The town boasted four churches, two hospitals (the Presbyterians had just completed their Good Samaritan Hospital), two banks, three newspapers, several theaters, and twenty-two saloons. Yet it lacked amenities enjoyed by every self-respecting North American town in the late nineteenth century: sewers, street lighting, horse-drawn tramcars, railway links to neighboring cities, and a solidly built town hall. Even the basic necessities of civic life were missing—an elected city council, schools, paved roads, or a fire service. There was no telegraph or telephone to the Outside.
It was a town of paradoxes. Some of its residents dined on oysters and caviar, while others scraped by on stale bread, lard, and tea. You could buy a penny postcard but it would cost you a dollar to mail, and if the dogsled carrying the mail broke through the ice, it would never arrive. A dinner of tough roast beef and soggy apple pie that cost fifteen cents in Seattle would set you back $2.50 in Dawson. Mink capes, diamond rings, champagne, and chamois leather underskirts were stocked by Front Street stores, but there were no shopping bags to take them home in. In fact, there was no paper to wrap anything. A physician from Baltimore known to all and sundry as Dr. Jim was shocked when, after buying a thick moose steak, he watched the butcher spear it on a sharpened stick, then politely hand him “this meaty lollipop.” Dr. Jim walked home “carrying my frozen steak at the far end of that stick, valiantly warding off scores and battalions of hungry dogs with the other arm—and with both feet!”
No wonder that as daylight had begun to vanish, tourists hurried away. After eight weeks of roughing it in the North, in late September Mrs. Hitchcock and Miss van Buren sold their tent and movie projector, spent a night at the Fairview Hotel, then scrambled onto one of the last boats steaming downriver. Several hundred disappointed stampeders left too, unable to face the ordeal of working on somebody else’s claim during a cruel winter. Those who intended to stay made their preparations for eight months of icy isolation—stocking up with provisions, chinking cabins and, if they were men, finding their razors. Many miners let their beards grow as bushy as they liked during the summer, and even suave city types sported luxuriant mustaches and sideburns, partly as protection against mosquitoes. In the words of the Klondike Nugget, “The approach of winter marks the period when the Yukon crop of whiskers is harvested . . . The knowing resident of this arctic clime sheds the hairy facial ornaments as soon as winter’s chilling frosts begin to convert his mustache and beard into a combination of frost and icicles.”
The coming winter would not be as harsh as last year’s season of starvation—but it wouldn’t be as much fun, either. The town’s population was now so large that strangers outnumbered old-timers on the streets. Racial and class discrimination was shattering the camaraderie among those who previously had clung together for survival. The small Jewish community found itself sidelined by British immigrants: “I eat with the Japs,” a lonely New Yorker called Solomon Schuldenfrei wrote to his wife, Rebecca. The “bad women” whom poor Mrs. Wichter had noticed in July were impossible to ignore. You could no longer leave your cabin unlocked or your food cache unguarded: crime filled the columns of the Nugget, the Midnight Sun, and the new Klondyke Miner and Yukon Advertiser. Gold pokes went missing, drunks were rolled outside the bars, inebriated miners enraged neighbors by firing off illegal firearms at night. The line of prostitutes’ hutches, bearing signs proclaiming names like “Saratoga,” “The Lucky Cigar Store,” and “Bon Ton,” stretched for three blocks along Second Avenue. There would often be line-ups for the most popular (and cheapest) girls: as one customer emerged, buttoning his fly, the next one would be ready with his two dollars. Some of the women continued to exude the businesslike cheerfulness of long-time northerners like Esther Duffie, but most had been brought in by pimps and madams in the spring and looked faded and exhausted in daylight.
Was this high-spirited circus on the brink of becoming a thieves’ kitchen? Would a Soapy Smith emerge to become (as Flora Shaw had put it) the local Robespierre and turn Dawson into another Skagway?
Not if Superintendent Steele had anything to do with it. Sam Steele arrived in Dawson determined to burnish his reputation there, so from the start he exaggerated the wickedness he discovered while publicizing his own achievements. Soon after Steele and Ogilvie arrived in Dawson in September 1898, Sam reported to Marie that “we have our hands full . . . There will be a general clean-up . . . The state of affairs is bad and could not possibly be worse but those who have the task of restoring credit to our country will spare none who have displaced it.” One of his first actions was to tighten up the discipline of his own troops. On his arrival in Dawson, Sam was appalled to discover Mounties gambling, falling asleep on guard duty, accepting bribes, and consorting with sleazy dealers and “loose” women. He confided to a friend that if he had had any say in selecting men for service in the Yukon, he would have called for volunteers and then taken only those who declined. “Tried Corporal for being drunk,” a typical entry in his official NWMP diary for September reads. “Fined thirty days pay and reduced to ranks.” At the same time, he also improved his men’s living conditions by building a hospital, latrines, offices, and a quartermaster’s stores, and ordering adequate supplies for the coming winter.
In the cribs of Paradise Alley behind Front Street, “soiled doves” plied their trade openly.
The police were heavily outnumbered: only thirteen Mounties were assigned to the rip-roaring boomtown itself, plus a further thirty to patrol the fourteen creeks that had been identified as gold bearing. How could so few Mounties be expected to keep the peace among so many toughs, let alone develop the community relations on which the force prided itself? Sam reckoned at least a hundred police officers were required for the job, and asked for a fresh contingent of Mounties. He was not happy to learn that the government was sending to Dawson from Fort Selkirk, 150 miles upstream, fifty members of the Yukon Field Force, which had none of the training and esprit de corps of the NWMP. When the fresh-faced military contingent arrived, according to Belinda Mulrooney, “the miners thought they were awfully pretty [in their] nice little red jackets and a fried egg on their heads for a cap . . . but they didn’t know what they were there for.” One old-timer said to her, “Gee, they look awful cute. They’d make nice ladies’ men if only we had the ladies.” But the militia contingent, and Sam’s smartened-up Mounties, had their effect. A veteran prospector, known as Nigger Jim on account of his southern drawl rather than his skin color, stared at the two light fieldpieces that accompanied the force and the military swagger of the marching soldiers. Then he sighed, and remarked to a Bank of Commerce employee, “I guess this place is getting too damned civilized for me. I’d better be moving on again to the frontier.”
Next, Sam Steele got tough wit
h what he described in his memoirs, Forty Years in Canada: Reminiscences of the Great North-West, as the “loose characters who had come into the country to prey upon the respectable but, as a rule, simple and unsuspicious miners.” At least half of Dawson’s 16,000 winter residents, in Sam’s private opinion, had at some time in their lives been on the wrong side of the law, so he proceeded to rule with an iron fist in a chainmail glove. “Many of them have committed murders, ‘held up’ trains, stage coaches, and committed burglary and theft in the United States.” He built thirty-four new jail cells—part of an ambitious construction program that saw sixty-three new buildings at the force’s twenty Yukon posts and outposts in the fall of 1898. He tightened an already existing rule that saloons, dance halls, theaters, and business houses must be closed one minute before midnight on Saturday and were not allowed to reopen until two in the morning on Monday. From now on, the only music to be heard on Dawson’s streets on Sunday was from the Salvation Army band: there were no more lubricious “sacred concerts,” at which the likes of Caprice, in the pink tights she had rescued from the Bank of Commerce, would cling like a modern pole dancer to a large wooden cross in a Sunday tableau vivant. And on his own authority, Steele raised the fines imposed by the police court on anybody convicted of public drunkenness, cardsharping, possession of a firearm, assault, breach of the Sunday curfew, or brawling.
Concerned about the rising incidence of syphilis in the town, Sam ordered a round-up of “loose women.” His forces arrested 150 women (there were as many as 400 prostitutes working the streets that summer), and fined each of them fifty dollars and costs. Each prostitute was ordered to undergo a monthly medical inspection. (The hookers loved Steele’s rules; they were released as soon as they had been fined and inspected, so resumed business on the assumption that the certificates of good health, for which they paid five dollars, were licenses to operate.) Sam also announced that all saloons, dance halls, and roadhouses where liquor was served would have to buy licenses. A hotel owner was charged $2,000 for a license to operate and a saloonkeeper $2,500—prices that “would make a Montreal hotel keeper stare,” admitted Sam. The NWMP rapidly collected more than $90,000 from fines and licenses, “a large and useful fund,” in Sam’s words, “every cent of which was devoted to the patients in the fever-crowded hospitals.”
Sam quickly realized that his job was not just to enforce the law; he also had to change the culture of Dawson. “The villainy, wickedness, robbery and corruption that took place last spring are simply beyond belief,” Sam told Marie. He had been hearing all about Walsh’s regime in Dawson, when “Her Majesty’s representative and staff [were frequently seen] in a dance hall box with common prostitutes on their knees and spending easily.” But those were the bad old days. In Steele’s Dawson, corruption would not be tolerated, and no wicked act would go unpunished. “I know lots of the hucksters . . . will hate the NWMPolice and probably try to eject us, but it will never succeed. We have right on our side and our motto, ‘Maintiens le droit,’ will prevail,” Sam insisted.
Prisoners were put to work collecting refuse, washing dishes, and shoveling snow—saving the NWMP hundreds of dollars in wages. One of Sam Steele’s most effective tactics was his embrace of the woodpile. The quantities of firewood burned in the stoves of hotels, saloons, cabins, and tents through the Yukon winters were huge, but nowhere was more fuel consumed than in the government offices, the newly expanded jail, and the Mounties’ barracks, which had also been enlarged to house the militia. According to Steele their stoves used “nearly 1000 cords, equal to a pile of fuel almost 8,000 feet long, 4 feet high and 4 feet wide.” The timber was cut on distant hills, floated down the Yukon, and delivered to the barracks by lumber companies, but it then had to be sawn into stove lengths. This was the prisoners’ job: wrongdoers were given the choice of leaving town or working on the woodpile. “They hated the ‘wood pile,’ if possible, more than they hated their escorts,” he would chortle. The woodpile kept fifty or more Dawson delinquents busy every day, even when the temperature sank forty degrees below the freezing point. Sam Steele put his toughest NCO in charge of the operation. Corporal Tweedy was “a terror to all evildoers and, no matter how they boasted of what they ‘would do to him,’ one glance of his keen eyes or a grip of his well-skilled hand was sufficient.” (One imaginative convict, according to Steele’s biographer, Robert Stewart, “got his revenge by spending three months sawing every log he handled exactly half an inch too long for the stoves.”)
Belinda Mulrooney liked the way that Superintendent Steele took command of Dawson. As she wrote of the Mounties, “They themselves were part of the country and capable of taking care of trouble. But no trouble ever came up . . . Colonel Steele had a splendid bunch of men.” Whenever she saw Steele’s imposing figure, brass buttons twinkling and leather boots gleaming, striding along Front Street, she pressed him to enjoy a quick drink in the Fairview Hotel. Sam studiously avoided her. Belinda did not like being snubbed, but she decided to ignore his behavior. With her husky voice, abrupt manner, and air of authority, she was now such a local celebrity that it was hard to believe she was still only twenty-six. Most of her customers called her “Mom” and referred to her as “the Queen of the Klondike.” Her hotel had become the hub of Dawson activities, which meant she knew everything that was going on. “There wasn’t any better blood in any man’s country than that around the Fairview Hotel.” The two bank managers were fixtures of the Fairview bar. Any entertainers hired to perform at the new Opera House always began their run with a show in the hotel saloon. The Yukon Order of Pioneers held all their special celebrations in the dining room; Belinda’s chefs were good at inventing dishes like Arctic Trout à la Klondike River, Cheechako Potato Salad à la Yukon Bank, and Ptarmigan on Toast au Dome. And having the telephone switchboard next to her office was a master stroke: there wasn’t a deal going down that she didn’t know about. (The arrangement had its drawbacks: “Every joker who owned a phone liked to play with it. They would get me up in the middle of the night . . . I got rid of them. I charged them ten dollars after the first minute.”)
Belinda was particularly amused by the British remittance men who stuck around after the rest of the summer tourists had fled. “Of course those Englishmen after they landed wouldn’t look at the mines, the country was too beastly for them, no-one to wait on them, no flunkeys, no body servants, people they could order around. Those Johnnies hung around Dawson [and] took to the dance halls like ducks to water.” The Englishmen had one unconventional talent. “It was the wonder of the miners and all western people how they could get full as lords with an eyeglass [monocle] in one eye, drape themselves around a woman and dance. Those foolish miners would hang around for hours watching for the eyeglass to fall out. They would try everything in their own eyes, little round pieces of tin or glass, [but] if they would walk out or move it would drop.”
These were good times for Belinda: there were so many ways of making a buck. She still owned her original roadhouse up at Grand Forks, and she was active on her various claims on the creeks. When she first arrived in the Yukon she had cultivated a prim, matronly image. But it was a sham, and now she was an established multimillionaire, a coarser, more hard-boiled Belinda emerged. One of those Englishmen she scorned, Neville Armstrong, would never forget the sight of the “short, dark, angular, masculine [woman who] could swear like a trooper,” standing by a mineshaft in a calf-length skirt and knee boots, issuing orders. Another of her employees was shocked by her language. “When one of the men came out of the bushes, she asked him where he had been and what he had been doing. He replied, ‘A man has to relieve himself once in a while.’ Her response was ‘You have been there long enough to jerk off. Get your pay and get out of here.’”
Sam Steele used his immaculate military attire to set a standard. He studiously avoided Belinda Mulrooney, whom he considered a corrupting influence in town.
The growth of Dawson offered Belinda new commercial opportunities. Typhoid wa
s the big killer after scurvy in Dawson, and dysentery was endemic, thanks to a water supply contaminated by raw sewage. So Belinda put together the Yukon Hygeia Water Supply Company, which offered boiled and filtered water, and in December 1898 issued stock valued at $8,000. She brusquely circumvented anti-American feeling by starting this venture with two Canadian partners. Within a few months, she had knocked out her competitors in the clean water business and established a monopoly for her company. “How much was I making?” she asked herself in her memoirs, then refused to answer her own question because she knew she would sound like a fool “to tell how much [I] made—and then lost.”
In the north end of town, these were good months for Father Judge, too, despite the typhoid epidemic. Sam Steele’s arrival was particularly welcome to the Jesuit. He was happy that the Sunday closing of casinos was now strictly enforced, and he was even happier because St. Mary’s Hospital was a direct beneficiary of the new regime. The Klondike Nugget, no friend of Canadian authorities, noted, “We are very pleased to have occasion to chronicle the fact that the government has come forward with a donation of $3000 [to St. Mary’s] . . . By reason of excessive charitable work, the hospital had got behind in its books not much short of $30,000.”
In the memoirs of Klondikers, there are so many references to “the Old Priest” that it comes as a shock to realize that Father Judge was only forty-eight—by today’s standards an age still considered the prime of life. Yet he had lived through nine winters in Alaska and the Yukon, and each of those bitter seasons had carved new lines on his face. One evening in October, the Jesuit settled down at the table in his little room in St. Mary’s Hospital to write to his family. Behind him was a washstand, a small bookcase full of religious books, and a rough recliner on which were two neatly folded blue blankets. All Father Judge’s worldly possessions were hidden away in a wooden drawer under his bed. He still had no interest in looking after himself: he continued to give away his own clothes to anyone in need, and he often forgot to eat dinner. Yet although the priest was as gaunt as ever, he was more serene now that he shared his work with the Oblate priests and the nursing sisters. Today, he was in an upbeat, count-your-blessings frame of mind. “The doctors all agree that we are having unusually good success in the hospital,” he wrote to his brother. “We have five or six hundred at Mass every Sunday . . . I have a telephone in my office, not only for the town but also to the creeks. They are preparing to give us electric light.” With a benefactor like Big Alex McDonald, Father Judge was enjoying an unfamiliar sense of security. His latest project, for which he had not asked the approval of the Reverend Father J. B. René, was a chapel for the hospital. He was once again enjoying the challenge of being architect, contractor, and interior designer for the building. This fall, the river froze in mid-October. Father Judge always enjoyed winter, when the entire landscape was shrouded in snow. “This part of the world,” he liked to tell parishioners, “is so beautiful in its mantle of purity.” He was happy to see the incidence of typhoid and dysentery plummet alongside the temperature, but concerned by the number of people still living in tents. Over a game of chess, he confided to Dr. Jim, “Soon the trees will be cracking like guns in the frosty woods. But these children will not take care of themselves . . . [They] eat half raw, soggy pork, heavy beans, and leaden soda biscuits. Then they will either go back to bed again, or loaf away a night gambling and drinking in some saloon or dance hall. These are the men who get scurvy . . . They are not bad little boys, but lazy little boys . . . So I have to spank them and put them to bed at St. Mary’s—I and the good Sisters and our thirty-four helpers.”
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