Sam loved the excitement of the race, and made claims for Mountie sled dogs that smack more of police pride than canine character: “The dogs were the well-known Labrador breed, very fierce, and they had the remarkable reputation of having at one time killed and devoured their driver.” By the end of the winter, in horrendous weather conditions, NWMP mail carriers had logged 64,012 miles—the equivalent of about two and a half times round the world. (This was the kind of statistic that Sam loved to collect; he was probably the first member of the force to insist that mileage records for horses be kept. Such punctiliousness would have been unthinkable for similar forces such as the Texas Rangers.) Sam also reorganized the sorting of the mail in Dawson: under his watch, 1,600 mailboxes were constructed at the Front Street post office. However, both the post office itself and the wall of mailboxes were completely inadequate to service a community that numbered well over 30,000 when the miners on the creeks were included.
Sam had a personal interest in getting the mail running on time. He was desperate to hear from his wife. When the Steeles parted in January 1898, they had assumed that Marie would remain for only a few months at the Mountie barracks in Fort Macleod, Alberta, where her husband had previously been posted. Sam planned to bring his family to the NWMP post at the head of Bennett Lake as soon as he had built a decent house and settled in. At first, Marie was happy with the plans, and they regularly exchanged affectionate notes. “My own darling Sam,” Marie wrote in August, “Your dear letters of the 15th, 26th, 28th and 30th all came to me on Friday afternoon and needless for me to say what a very warm welcome they received.” But with three young children and Sam’s transfer to Dawson, Marie’s enthusiasm for northern challenges shrank. Instead, she joined her mother in Montreal, and started to dread a winter without her devoted husband. Once the Yukon River froze, mail would be infrequent. “When I think the time is fast approaching when you can write back [only] twice a month,” Marie wrote, “I feel as if my heart would break!”
For months, Marie Steele failed to reply to her husband’s letters. Sam became increasingly agitated.
In Dawson, Sam kept scribbling, but after mid-November no letters from Marie arrived. At first, his plaintive missives described how his heart ached to see her. “Oh my dear how I long for the sight of your dear kind face and of the dear little ones but I will not have that pleasure I fear for a long time now . . . It may be possible that I shall God willing be able to go on leave one year from now.” As winter stretched on, Sam grew increasingly anxious for a letter from Marie. “I am longing to hear from you my own dearest pet my own darling wife,” he wrote in early February. “I have no letter of a later date than September last yet I have written you at least once a week.” Sam’s reports to the NWMP comptroller in Montreal reached their destination, so he knew Marie was receiving his letters. “It is bad enough to be separated but separated without letters is worse.”
By mid-February, Sam was getting tetchy: “My dearest wife . . . I shall indeed be glad when I begin to get letters from you. I have not had one since the first you wrote after the time you arrived in Montreal. I know there are none in the Yukon anywhere; all is cleared up from Skagway to here, and no excuse for any delay . . . You should write me weekly my darling if you have any regard for me left.” By late February, he was pleading: “My dearest, I got another mail yesterday but no letter from you although every particle of mail has been sent through up to the 24th of January. I hope I shall soon get a letter from you my dearest wife for I am heartbroken on account of not having got one from you. I had such a happy life with you and our dear little ones that I naturally have my thoughts turned towards you all.” Sam’s outward demeanor remained as brusque as ever, and he was even tougher on any junior officers who did not make the mail run in record time. But privately, an aching loneliness afflicted him as he tramped along the frozen Klondike. His men learned to fear the arrival of sacks of mail. Their commander would sift frantically through letters addressed to him, then storm wordlessly out of the mailroom.
Finally, in early March, a twelve-page letter from Marie arrived. She had plenty of excuses for not writing: the move to Montreal, ill health, and her struggle to find accommodation, nurses, and a cook had exhausted her. But her letter was a litany of grievances about lack of help from her husband’s colleagues, her own relatives, and her household staff. When she and Sam were under the same roof, he probably either dealt with the problems or let the chatter flow over him. Now that they were apart, Marie poured out her complaints on paper. Subsequent letters captured the aggrieved tones of a woman who knew that her husband, for all his fine words, would always put profession before family. “It seems so long since I wrote and since I heard from you that your letters are like a ray of sunshine shed on my life from time to time,” Marie wrote on February 13. “I am delighted to hear you are so comfortable but fear you may feel less inclined than ever to return to the little wifie and birdies who so anxiously await your return.”
Sam’s letters spelled out his love for his family in Montreal. He urged Marie to “write often even if the letters are not long.”
Sam Steele was overjoyed to hear that Marie and the children were safe and his marriage solid. He assured Marie that everything was fine, urged her to buy a new gown, and sent a list of new clothes he required.
From now on, his wife’s letters infused renewed vigor into his daily routine. He brushed aside her hints of loneliness and did not pick up on her sense of being hard done by. “I am so sorry that you miss me my dear,” he explained to Marie. “There is so much to do here and it affects my reputation so much that I must stay for a considerable time.” Marie Steele was right about her husband’s aspirations. Sam harbored the hope of one day becoming commissioner of the force to which he had dedicated much of his life. Success in the Yukon would improve his chances immeasurably.
All in all, Superintendent Steele thrived in those first few months in Dawson. He reassured Marie that he was far too busy to fall off the wagon. “Liquor has not passed my lips since I have been in the Yukon nor will it do so. I have no desire for it.” As his fiftieth birthday approached, he took particular pride in his increased fitness. He had always been a vain man, who loved standing ramrod straight in his uniform for studio photographs—sometimes, he even added a little padding on his torso to achieve an extra-manly chest—but over the years some of the Mountie muscle had turned to fat. Now, his letters home included include regular updates on his weight. He had been 232 pounds when he arrived in Dawson; the following July he announced that he weighed 214 pounds, had not had a drink for thirteen months or a smoke for six months, and was “as active as a cat.” The only problem was that his red coat was now too tight on the shoulders and too loose at the waist—please could Marie send an urgent note to the tailor, ordering a new uniform. There was also the matter of a pair of pistols he had ordered from Hicks and Sons in London. Where were they? And could she find out what had happened to the ribbon for the North West Canada Medal that he had been awarded a few years earlier but had never received?
Just after seven in the evening of April 26, 1899, a thin red flame like a serpent’s tongue shot out of a bedroom above the Bodega saloon at 223 Front Street. Soon the Tivoli Theatre, on the north side of the Bodega, and the Northern restaurant to the south, were in flames. Panic swept through Dawson City. It was nearly a year since Father Judge’s church had been destroyed by fire, and there had also been a devastating conflagration the previous fall. On that occasion, a dance hall girl called Belle Mitchell had left a candle burning in her bedroom at the Green Tree Inn, and as a result, reported the Klondike Nugget in October 1898, forty buildings were completely razed, $500,000 worth of property was destroyed, and “a number of men lost eyebrows and mustachios from the burning heat.”
Now another, much more powerful inferno threatened. But citizens hoped that this time they were prepared. A year earlier, a fire engine had been purchased in the States for $18,000 and hauled over the mountains. It had
sat in its crate for months because the government refused to pay for it, but the October fire encouraged Dawson business leaders, including Belinda Mulrooney, to take some responsibility. A fund was established to pay for it, a fire chief and stoker were appointed, a volunteer fire department was created, and a hundred men were recruited as firefighters. In April, when the cry of “Fire!” arose, the “gallant fire boys” (as the Nugget named them) dragged the engine a half mile down to the riverbank, where it could pump water from the Yukon River.
It was an unusually chilly night, yet the firemen sweated as they unraveled the hoses, then directed the nozzles at the flames while they tugged them toward the burning buildings. They waited for five minutes for water to spurt out . . . then another five minutes . . . But their colleagues were still hacking their way through ten feet of ice to the flowing water of the Yukon River, and the fire chief could not light the boiler because it was too cold. For an agonizing thirty minutes, the steam pump failed to operate and the only source of water was a bucket brigade. The fire raged out of control. Fanned by a stiff breeze, the flames on Front Street consumed seven stores, three saloons, a hotel, three restaurants, and the large Northwest Trading Company warehouse. At the same time, the fire ripped along the waterfront, destroying a laundry, two more restaurants, and nine more stores, including the Pioneer barber shop and Anderson Brothers’ sign and paint shop. Spreading in every direction, it made short work of Dawson landmarks such as the Opera House, the Bank of British North America, the Ottawa Hotel, and numerous bawdy houses.
At last, the frenzied efforts of the men at the fire engine sent water through the frozen hose from beginning to end. A great cheer went up through the fog and smoke as a small stream of water trickled from the nozzle. But the air temperature was forty-five degrees below zero and the line of hose was 400 feet long, lying exposed on river ice. The steam engine was not strong enough to keep the water flowing. The water in the hose turned into solid ice, ripping its length as if with a giant razor blade.
As darkness fell, frantic figures passed buckets of water or dashed around trying to save possessions. Ramshackle wooden buildings began to smolder and collapse, and barrels of liquor were thrown into the street, where the liquid gelled instantly into mini-glaciers. Rescued furnishings, clothes, and goods were piled into the streets, blocking firefighting efforts. People clambered over buildings, vainly trying to protect them by draping wet blankets on roofs and walls. Screams reverberated as scantily dressed hookers and dance hall girls fled into the streets. Belinda Mulrooney was torn between helping friends and ensuring the Fairview Hotel was saved. She ran up First Avenue to Bill McPhee’s Pioneer saloon before it was consumed, to get the bags of gold dust out of his safe. “For heaven’s sake, Bill,” she yelled at her old rival, “Help us with the gold, to get it down to the Fairview.” But Bill had other priorities: the enormous moose antlers that he had brought from Forty Mile and nailed above his bar on opening day, two years earlier. “To hell with the gold dust,” he replied. “Save my moose horns.” Belinda never forgot how he “looked up at them as wistful as could be. They spread right across the bar and were the pride of his life.” The proprietor of the Fairview had no such sentimental attachment to animal relics. She ignored him and turned to the dance hall girls.
More than fifty women “were running in every direction crazy in their light pink silk underclothes—some in bare feet, some in slippers, with not enough clothes on to wad a shotgun.” Many had frozen feet; all had lost everything they owned. Belinda shooed them down to the Fairview Hotel, which was a couple of blocks south of the inferno. There was a large coffeemaker in the hotel kitchen, “and I dumped into it a lot of rum or brandy for the men fighting fire and had a cup poured for each girl. I took a cup myself and it nearly knocked me silly. After the boys tasted the coffee they all wanted to save the Fairview . . . The place had caught fire a couple of times on the roof. After the coffee the men stood around all night and threw buckets of muck at the hotel where it didn’t need it. We had to ask them to stop.” Meanwhile, Belinda organized mattresses and bedding for the wretched women, and instructed them to sleep on and under the tables in the Fairview’s dining room.
Sam Steele raced from the police encampment to the town center as soon as the alarm was sounded, and quickly took in the disaster—the ferocity of the flames, the absence of water, the public hysteria. There was only one way to kill the fire: to destroy the buildings in its path so they could not fuel the flames and spread them farther. “I personally directed the removal of buildings,” he noted in his daybook. His officers organized teams of volunteers to tear down some buildings and dynamite others. When the dynamite charges exploded, the noise was intense. The ground shuddered, the ice on the river creaked, onlookers screamed, log walls and tin roofs cartwheeled through the smoke. Fragments were scattered far out on the frozen Yukon. Sam noticed several of Dawson’s undesirables guzzling rescued whiskey and looting burning buildings instead of joining the bucket brigade. He issued orders to arrest men who avoided bucket duty and to close the hotels at midnight “because there was a sign of drunkenness going on all the time and there might have been a riot.”
In the early hours of the morning, the fire was contained. A somber sight met Sam Steele’s eyes as he patrolled the streets at dawn. The business section of town was a smoking ruin. One hundred and eleven buildings had burned down, and fifteen more had been torn down. Goods and furnishings rescued from the flames still stood in untidy piles in the middle of streets, destroyed by smoke and mud. There were also piles of ice, which had been cut and transported from the river only weeks earlier by several hotels and restaurants for summer use. The wooden buildings in which they had been stored had gone, but the ice remained intact. Belinda Mulrooney’s hotel—one of the few commercial buildings left standing—wore a glistening, coffee-colored sheath of frozen mud.
Men coated in soot crouched in the wreckage of saloons, cabins, and stores, panning for gold dust in the cinders. David Doig, the flamboyant manager of the Bank of British North America, was standing white faced in the empty crater where his bank once was. The previous night, as the fire roared toward the corner of Second Avenue and Queen Street, he had promised $1,000 to anybody who could save the building. Nobody snapped up the offer. As flames engulfed the bank, its steel “fire-proof vault” had exploded in the searing heat and the contents had spewed out—nuggets, gold dust, gold watches, chains, rings, bracelets, diamond brooches. Golden sovereigns had been flung twenty feet away, like confetti. Much of the wealth scooped from Bonanza paydirt or bestowed on dance hall girls was now fused into one ugly block of blackened gold. But the three steel safes within the vault were intact. When they were opened, paper money worth hundreds of thousands of dollars was found unharmed. Doig wearily set up a temporary bank headquarters on the second story of the Fairview Hotel, above the impromptu dormitory of hookers.
Before the ashes were cool, the price of lumber had doubled and rebuilding had begun. Belinda was running a soup kitchen. “We served meals in the Fairview from a long table in front of the kitchen stove. People just took food up in their hands . . . The hotel was crowded . . . In my office and my room, all you could see was bare feet sticking out. The place was lined with mattresses.” At the same time, Gene Allen was furiously putting together a special edition of the Klondike Nugget. “DAWSON IS ONCE AGAIN IN ASHES,” read the headline, “Queen Of The Yukon Is Once More Attacked By Her Old Enemy! The City’s Loss Will Be Fully A Million Dollars!” In the next few weeks, it became evident that even the Nugget, with its penchant for hyperbole, had underestimated the losses. Dawson had suffered at least $2 million of damage.
The Bank of British North America’s “fire-proof vault” (right) exploded in the April 1899 fire. Scavengers were soon busy in the mud and wreckage.
But Sam Steele was the man in charge. He ordered the men who had been arrested and jailed during the fire to appear in police court, then fined several for drunkenness and two for not assi
sting the fire brigade. He enforced an order from Commissioner Ogilvie that no new structures be built on the waterfront. He moved the dance hall girls down to the barracks from the Fairview Hotel, before they could resume business in Belinda’s bedrooms. Then he authorized an inquest into the cause of the fire.
A jury led by Captain Harper of the NWMP questioned the porter at the Bodega saloon. The porter accused Helen Holden, the dance hall girl who lived on the Bodega’s second floor, of leaving a candle burning in her bedroom. Miss Holden angrily denied such a charge, and counter-charged that the fire had begun in the Bodega stockroom. The jury was not sympathetic. Reported the Nugget, “One of the jurors seemed to entertain the belief pretty firmly that the fire started in Miss Holden’s apartments for he asked her if she smoked cigarettes. A titter went through the audience as she replied rather vehemently that she did not, and it was repeated when Captain Harper asked if she curled her hair. Miss Holden, however, didn’t see anything in the question to laugh at, and she answered very seriously that she did not—that her hair did not require curling, thanks to Mother Nature.”
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