out of the chrysalis of fur caps into soiled, broad-brimmed hats
resurrected from cabin-shelves; out of winter clothing generally into
what remained of their last summer’s clothing. Along the thawing bog
called the main street, littered and odorous from sanitary neglect,
were two rows of saloons and gambling-halls, with mining-brokers’
offices and the stores of shrewd speculators in food-supplies, who
always had one can of condensed milk for $2.50, one can of butter
for $5, and one pound of sugar for $1.50, and assured you that they
were the last in the country. To look out across the flat toward the
mountains was to see scattered cabins and piles of tin cans, which
at once let one into the culinary secrets of an isolated community
composed largely of men. At the restaurants, bacon and beans and coffee
cost $2.50.
For a time in the winter in fear of famine the well-to-do hoarded
food as they hoard gold in a financial panic, and the restaurants
were closed because supplies were not procurable at prices that made
catering profitable. Then, a fifty-pound sack of flour sold for as high
as $100; but at the approach of spring the little capitalists who had
planned to sell their “corners” at great profit were glad enough to
dispose of such surplus as they had beyond their own needs at a loss.
To them the departure of hundreds of mouths which otherwise would have
been fed out of Dawson’s granary was as great a disappointment as a
report that Hungary’s wheat crop would greatly exceed expectations is
to the bulls on the Chicago Exchange. All of the luxuries and many
of the necessities of life were scarce; but, withal, there was quite
enough of bacon, beans, and flour to have satisfied the appetites of
the whole community for a month after supplies arrived. According to
the philosophy of the old-timers, there is never any danger of a man’s
starving as long as he will look ahead a little. So easy is it to
sleep and so little does one eat when one is not working that he can
live on a pound of food a day, if need be, and take the remainder of
his nourishment in slumber. On the other hand, vigorous labor in winter
demands at least three pounds a day, and it is upon this basis that
estimates have always been made in the valley of the Yukon.
With a tiny can of cocoa, which I pounced upon in a store as if it were
an Elzevir in a junk-heap, and a few staples bought at extravagant
prices, we were able to prepare a superior meal in the cabin that I
had leased. But this was not until we had slept gloriously for sixteen
hours. There remained the problem of a bath, which was serious, as
the one bath-house in Dawson was closed for repairs. I solved it
legitimately, if uncomfortably, in the wooden tub which was lent to me
by a neighbor.
The saloons had only a substitute for whiskey, of home manufacture. The
dance-halls were not open. All the men whose dust and presence would
make the camp lively were at the mines--or “up the creeks,” as the
saying goes in Dawson--preparing for the “clean-up.”
In winter and in summer the trail leads up the Klondyke to the mouth
of Bonanza, three miles from Dawson, and thence up Bonanza to the
working-claims, about three miles farther on. In the spring, when the
currents are swollen, you must go over a high mountain by a path in
the soft snow. If you have a pack, this is hard work. On the way I met
a blue-faced old fellow--by his look if not by his limp he had the
scurvy--who promptly put me in my proper social status.
“Are ye a Cheechawko?” he asked.
“I don’t know, I’m sure.”
“Well, then, ye are, and the river must ’a’ broke. Any man’s a
Cheechawko until he’s been in the country when the ice goes out. In
the old days we could lick the Cheechawkos into shape; larn ’em to
leave their latch-strings out fur a passin’ stranger when they was
away from hum, and larn ’em to eat what they wanted and to use the
best blanket in a cabin, but to lug nothin’ away. Fifty thousand of
’em, they say--clerks and farmers and dudes. They’re too many fur us.
Civilization’s here, and it’s a case of locking up yer dust after
this. But, young man, ye can’t be an old-timer, never! Ye can’t be an
old-timer, ’less ye’ve lived in the camps in the old days when a man
was a man and his neighbor’s brother.”
And without giving me time to reply to his little lecture, he hobbled
on toward the hospital.
Cheechawko is the Indian word for stranger, or, more literally,
tenderfoot, which has come into general use in the Klondyke; and toward
the Cheechawko, bringing in the more penurious ways of the outside
world, along with ignorance of mining, the old-timer feels a genuine
resentment. I was glad of the opportunity to see the veterans ere the
recruits had arrived.
IV
THE FIRST DISCOVERIES
THE BEGINNING OF MINING IN ALASKA--FORTY MILE CREEK--CANADIAN AND
AMERICAN DEPOSITS--THE LARGEST LOG-CABIN TOWN IN THE WORLD--LIFE OF
THE FIRST ADVENTURERS--THE SUPERFLUITY OF SIX-SHOOTERS--LEAVING THE
LATCH-STRINGS OUT--THE WAY OF THE TRANSGRESSORS--INDIAN CHARLEY AND
HIS NUGGET.
A little history of placer mining in the Yukon valley, at this turn of
my narrative, will be of importance, I think, in making what follows
more comprehensible. It was early in the eighties, if not before, that
the first prospectors, armed with Indian tales, faith, and a “gold
pan,” packed their supplies to the shores of the Lewes lakes over the
passes which were the means of communication between the Indians of the
coast and those of the interior. They followed the ice out of the lakes
and down the river into a practically unexplored country, panning out
of the gravel at the mouth of each tributary.
[Illustration: A Typical Pilgrims’ Boat.]
At first, these and the other brave spirits who were encouraged to
follow their example arduously poled their boats back up-stream in
September, with the result of their summer’s labor, to spend the winter
in one of the towns of the quartz-mining region in southeastern Alaska
or in the Pacific Coast States. Some had three or four hundred dollars;
others, who had impatiently disregarded certain “pay” on the bars
of the tributaries and had prospected in the hope of making a great
“strike,” returned with little or nothing.
Soon they began to take in enough supplies to last them through the
winter, and to build cabins for their protection. A little settlement
sprang up on the site of the “diggings” of Forty Mile Creek. All of
the rich deposits thus far have been found not on the tributaries of
the Yukon but on the tributaries of the tributaries. (The wealth of
the far-famed Klondyke is not on the Klondyke River but on Eldorado
and Bonanza, which flow into it.) So the next progressive step was a
discovery which led to the working of the frozen ground in the valleys
of the numerous little streams tributary to Forty Mile, by stripping
off the dirt as fast as the very hot sun of the long days of the arctic
summer thawed it. This process, however, was feasible only when the
“pay-dirt” was near to the surface, and the season of activity was
still restricted to four or five months of the year.
As the prospectors moved on down the river, gradually widening the
circle of their labors and their experience, deposits considerably
richer than those of the tributaries of Forty Mile were found on
the tributaries of Birch Creek in American territory. Here, for the
first time, an innovation, which did not appeal to everybody, made
it feasible to work twelve months in the year. An energetic man sank
a shaft to bedrock with fires. Then he drifted out his “pay-dirt” in
the same manner and piled it in dumps on the surface to be sluiced out
in summer. By the autumn of 1896, when the great discovery of Bonanza
Creek was made, Circle City was said to be the largest log-cabin town
in the world, and from twenty-five hundred to three thousand white men
dwelt in the Yukon valley.
Experience in placer mining counted for little in a region where
conditions were so different from those of the Pacific Coast States.
There was no sprinkling of capitalists or mining engineers among
those robust pilgrims of the early days. Many of the hardships which
they endured are already a memory. They were cheered in their combat
with nature by no such tales as lured on the Cheechawkos of 1897-98.
The majority of them came from the frontiers of the United States;
a smaller part, generally of French descent, from the frontiers of
Canada. All were peculiarly the product of the Anglo-Saxon bent for
overcoming obstacles. Not infrequently there were fugitives from
justice, who, having the inclination and the energy to undergo great
physical trials rather than serve a term in prison, and learning a
lesson in manhood by bitter retrospection, have often become heroic
pioneers. More numerous than the inhabitants of the old centres of
civilization would suppose were those recluses who are ever seeking
lonely refuges out of touch with the advance posts of organized society.
There was no prospect, especially when no “big strikes” had been
reported, to attract the idle and the dissolute who infest similar
settlements in more hospitable countries. Relieved of the parasitic
class and being interdependent in isolation from the outside world
under the most rigorous conditions for eight months in the year, their
inhabitants, despite the “pasts” of some of them, made Circle City and
Forty Mile the most peaceable of mining camps. Captain Constantine,
of the British Northwest Mounted Police, with a few men, had plenary
powers at Forty Mile, while Circle City was nominally governed by a
United States Commissioner and a United States Marshal.
All the white women in both communities could be counted on the fingers
of two hands. Mrs. Constantine, the wives of a few missionaries and
of a few leading men, had come in on steamers up the river in summer
to join their husbands. Half a dozen half-breed women, with more or
less of the blood of Russian fur traders in their veins, composed the
demimonde of either camp. Full-blooded squaws performed the household
duties in some cabins for a civilized lord and master. But the “squaw
man” was the exception. In no part of the world where isolated white
men live among aborigines was the man who had a native mistress held in
greater disrespect than here.
As a rule, the miners did their own washing and mending. Their
amusements were card-playing and checker-playing. The climate seemed
to exercise a softening effect upon bellicose natures, and even
intoxication seldom carried quarrels beyond a dispute of words. Whoever
struck the first blow had the consensus of opinion of the camp against
him.
“We’ve got enough to do fighting Alaska,” was a saying which
sententiously expressed the general feeling, “without fighting one
another.”
To the new-comer it was hinted that a six-shooter, which fiction makes
the inseparable companion of all men in a new placer mining camp, was
a superfluity that would keep him out of trouble only when he kept it
at all times hanging on a peg in his cabin. Its weight alone was equal
to two days’ rations in a country where the prospector had to dispense
with his helpmeet, the mule or the burro, and carry his grub for a tour
on his back. Therefore, arms were never carried unless there was a
chance of meeting with game.
The essence of the “free miners’ law” was being on the “squar’,” which,
after all, is a rough equivalent of the brotherhood of man. Between
the disputants as to the ownership of a claim the “miners’ meeting”
decided which one was in the right. All offenders were brought before
the bar of their fellows. A man accused of theft, after an examination
of witnesses, was acquitted or convicted by the holding up of hands. If
guilty, he was, according to the circumstances, either warned to leave
the country for good--no slight penalty in midwinter with only the
hospitality of Indians to depend upon--or else ostracism was postponed
pending good behavior. “Miners’ meeting law” is unscientific and rarely
commendable, but here it served its purpose well because its methods
made it so seldom required.
Under the force of self-interest a universal good-will prevailed.
Whatever a miner had--perhaps the increment of a summer’s earnings
which was to pay for another year’s supplies--he kept in tomato cans on
the table of his cabin with impunity. When he went away from home on a
journey to some other creek he left his latch-string out. On the very
evening of his absence, while his cabin was occupied by another, he
was, perhaps, sleeping in someone else’s without an invitation. By the
unwritten law of the land he enjoyed whatever luxuries of food and rest
the cabin afforded; but, likewise by the unwritten law of the land, he
washed any dishes that he had used and put them and all other things
that he had disturbed back where they belonged, folded the blankets on
the bunk, cut firewood in place of that which he had burned, and laid
kindlings by the stove ready to make warmth and cheer for the owner
when he should return, cold and weary.
Cheechawkos who came down the river in the spring in their rough boats
at first, through ignorance, were often transgressors of the unwritten
laws. But so few arrived at a time that the majority were soon able
to convince them of the folly of courting trouble for themselves.
Anyone with a bad record could not obtain favors or a loan when he
needed it. After he had consumed the supplies which he had brought
into the country with him, he must rely upon the transportation
companies, established to meet the demand of the new settlements, whose
river steamers connected with ocean-going vessels at the island of
St. Michael in Norton Sound. When a man had been unfortunate in his
summer’s work, a reputation for probity would secure from the companies
a year’s outfit on a simple promise to pay. In treating generously
the real prospector who sought new fields, they only had an eye to
their own interests in the development of the country. Every canned and
preserved delicacy was included in a year’s supplies, costing from $500
to $600. Canned plum pudding was a treat for the holidays; and more
than one miner ate _pâté de foie gras_ for the first time in Circle
City or Forty Mile. These luxuries, however, were no substitutes for
fresh fruits and fresh vegetables.
The flat-bottomed river steamers continued on their course until
the ice in the river led them to seek a slough or side channel for
safety, all hands preparing to spend the winter housed up on board.
Then no more Cheechawkos’ boats could arrive, and the camps were as
completely separated from the outside world as a whaler caught in the
ice of Bering Sea. To all men, including the recluses, a “pardner” was
essential. For the recluses were recluses from civilization and not
from fellow-men of their own tastes; and no one, except a few of the
most perverse, undertook single-handed to put up a cabin or to live in
it alone.
The “town” was on the river bank at the most accessible point to the
creeks whose wealth was responsible for its existence. Its cabins
clustered around the commercial companies’ stores and the saloons. To
one side was a camp of Indians and the mission station which ministered
to their spiritual wants and, following the paths of diplomacy, to the
spiritual wants of the miners--upon request. Fuel was brought from the
hill-sides and food was taken to the cabins on the creeks by teams of
husky dogs.
When the winter settled down in serene triumph in December there was
not even the falling of snow to disturb the calm atmosphere. The fine
white particles under foot, which seemed as sharp as powdered glass to
the touch, were precipitated invisibly, like frost. They glistened on
the mountain-sides without a breath of air to stir them. In the few
hours of gray light out of the twenty-four, men welcomed the sound of
their own voices, or even the howl of their dogs, to break the silence
which was the fit companion of the dry, biting cold. At night they
forgave the still and merciless panorama of the day as they watched out
of their cabin-windows the play of the Northern Lights, in which nature
has furnished for the eyes a greater treat than is the breaking of
surf for the ears.
With the coming of spring, when the sun mounted so rapidly in the
heavens, every man had his opinion and his reasons for it as to the
exact date when the ice should go out of the Yukon. After this--the
greatest event of the year--had taken place, all eyes kept a lookout
up-stream for the first pine-colored boat that should dart around the
bend with the rapidity of the current. The Cheechawko was surrounded
by a little crowd which asked him about the result of the previous
November’s elections, or if France and Germany had gone to war as
indicated by an August paper which the community had been reading for
eight months.
As a rule, the early arrivals had been in the country before. They
knew the channels and the currents of the river, and could resist
the temptation of stopping to pan the gravel of the bars in search
of colors, for the old-timers had long since concluded that the
travel-worn particles of dust to be found at the mouths of all of the
tributaries of the Yukon which are in the so-called gold belt, were
vagrants and not the advance guard of a floating pilgrimage. They had
poled weary miles in their long boats and carried packs for wearier
ones without finding at the head-waters of the tributaries, which were
named by them and still await accurate mapping by geographers, any
original deposits. The shallow bedrock in the neighborhood of Forty
Mile put the original deposits there within reach of the summer’s sun
and the superficial investigation of the hurrying prospector, and
opened the way to the discovery of richer original deposits at Circle
City at a slightly greater depth of bedrock.
So the miners had concluded that the next great strike, following the
progress of development down the river, would be made below Circle
City. On account of an Indian’s keen glance the contrary happened, and
they retraced their footsteps to find fortunes at a depth of thirty
feet under soil whose surface they had trod before. The sharp-eyed
Indian was a brother-in-law of “Siawash George,” and “Siawash George”
was an outcast, whose nickname was given to him by his fellow white
men. The Siawashes are one of the lowest orders of the American
Indians, and the old-timers, so largely men from the Pacific Coast,
use Siawash both as a noun and as an adjective to signify contempt. One
of the first white pilgrims to cross the passes, Cormac, was now the
father of three or four half-breed children. He had planned that his
marriage to a princess of the tribe would be the stepping-stone of his
ambition to become chief of the Sticks. In the autumn of 1896 he and
his family and retainers were encamped at the mouth of the Klondyke,
gathering from the land and the water, according to aboriginal custom
but with modern riffles and hooks, their winter supply of provender.
[Illustration: Yukon Indians.]
The Klondyke is one of the best rivers in the neighborhood for fish,
much better than the Indian River, which flows into the Yukon between
thirty and forty miles above it. At the summit of the water-shed
between the Indian and the Klondyke is a great mountain, which, from
its shape, the miners have named The Dome. In the snows of its sides
six creeks have their origin, three flowing into either stream.
The longest of these is sixteen miles. They wind through beds of
black muck, ranging from fifty to two hundred and fifty yards in
breadth, which lie between steep embankments. It is presumed that
the embankments are the walls of an ancient river channel. They
are indented only by the gulches cut by tributaries which once were
mighty but now have dwindled to little torrents which flourish only
with the first warmth of spring or after a heavy rain in summer. The
great heat of June, July, and August drew out of the muck with a growth
of tropical rapidity a rank grass upon which the moose fed in peace,
fattening his sides, made lean by winter’s privations.
Here “Injun Sharley,” as he called himself, came to look for moose,
and here he found instead, as he was crossing the first tributary of
the Klondyke at a point where its bending course had dug a niche out
of the side-hill, a glistening nugget of gold. According to all of
the preconceived ideas of the placer mining prospectors, no creeks in
the region were so unpromising as these. Those few prospectors who
had tramped up this valley, finding a few colors in the shoals made
by washing the earth of the embankment, had passed them by with the
ever-ready expression of the country:
“Oh, well, you can find colors anywhere.”
If the turn of the creek had not washed one stray nugget as well as
stray colors out of a bench which no one found worth working two years
after discovery, the moose might still be feeding undisturbed in the
valleys of Eldorado and Bonanza creeks, which are now as expressive
of man’s handiwork as the rear of a row of tenement houses, and
certain unhappy newspaper correspondents would not have missed the
Spanish-American War.
There is no reason to believe that “Siawash George,” personally, had
any great confidence in the “strike.” Rather--after having staked
creek claims for himself and “Injun Sharley”--he thought it worth
advertising, when advertising was so cheap because of the expert
canoists and good pedestrians in his family. He was further assisted
in spreading the news by Joe La Due, another “squaw man,” who has been
erroneously called Father of the Klondyke, just as “Siawash George,”
and not “Injun Sharley,” has been called its discoverer. La Due staked
out a town-site on the flat which had been formed in the course of time
by the alluvial deposits of the Klondyke at its mouth. He was fond of
“booms,” and as a part of his plan of promoting his latest boom he
offered lots for five dollars apiece to all who would stake claims on
the new creeks. Neither he nor “Siawash George” had much to lose and
they might gain a great deal if shafts were sunk to bedrock with fires
after the plan that had lately come into vogue at Circle City.
When an Indian arrived at Forty Mile and then at Circle City with a
tale out of all proportion to the actual size of the nugget that “Injun
Sharley” had found, the miners received it with that garlic cynicism
which has its natural abiding-place in the unkempt beards of hardened
frontiersmen. They had become so used to strikes with no foundation
except an irresponsible imagination, as nominally to believe in nothing
that a man said about any find he had made. So they told the Indian
that he was a liar pure and simple, who had been primed by an ambitious
brother-in-law. The Indian had been told to expect this reply and was
not the least disturbed in mind by it. But no miner acts upon his
convictions in such a matter. He usually hurries off to the reported
scene of the find because, after all, “mebbe there might be somethin’
in it.” But such were the reputations of Joe La Due and Cormac that
many of the earlier pioneers refused to budge. Their superior wisdom
was as unfortunate for them as absence from the settlements was for
those at work on the creeks. The two or three hundred, lounging in the
saloons and the stores or resting in their cabins, who made for the
mouth of the Klondyke in the mood of men who are playing a joke on
themselves, became rich.
There were not enough claims on the discovery creek, Bonanza, for all
of them, so the later arrivals, just for the sake of staking something,
contemptuously staked a tributary of Bonanza, which they called in
their phrase a “pup.” Then there was naught to do but to wait until a
few of the more energetic fellows sunk holes on Bonanza. No one was
more surprised at the result than “Siawash George.” Bedrock on Bonanza
showed the richest placer dirt yet found in Alaska or the British
Northwest Territory. Those who had been in time to stake claims on
Bonanza settled down to work at once, incidentally extending their pity
to the fellows on the “pup.” The claim-owners on Eldorado, where no
shaft had been sunk, accepted the pity in good part and offered their
claims at various prices, ranging from one hundred to five hundred
dollars. Most of them were so lucky as to be unable to make a sale, and
are now worth from five hundred thousand to a million dollars apiece.
The “pup” is the richest placer mining creek in the world.