the claim-owners that none of the arguments which held good in other
mining camps could apply in this instance. The Klondyke was a law unto
itself in all matters of investment, they said. They put dust from each
of the claims which they were to sell in a separate bag, and this they
were to offer to the simple-minded financiers of London and New York
as a guarantee of the correctness of their several representations.
Each zealous miner being desirous that his claim should show up well on
the list, some of the promoters obtained several thousand dollars in
nuggets.
Such examples of success were not without their effect upon those who
went out over the ice at later periods. The field of all the claims
on the creeks as yet demonstrated to be valuable having been worked,
they turned their attention to those creeks which had been staked on
unfounded rumors by stampedes, and possibly were worth no more than
the beds of so many creeks in the valley of the Hudson River. They
neglected none of the details. Because it looks better to the lay eye,
they chose dust from Eldorado as examples of the product of these “wild
oat prospectors.”
The moral effect of the option craze was unfortunate in more respects
than one. Men who owned claims on stampede creeks felt that they could
afford to waste their winter in idleness in their cabins as long as
they had property in the hands of New York capitalists. They could not
escape the heresy that a claim in the Klondyke, no matter what its
location, was regarded by the outside world as a valuable piece of
property. It was especially hard for those who had not funds enough to
buy their winter’s outfit, as they inquired along the river bank, day
after day, as the boats came in, to learn finally that the promoters
to whom they had intrusted their claims had arrived on the Pacific
Coast just at the time when the Klondyke was forgotten and all public
interest was centred in another subject, and, accordingly, had enlisted
in the volunteer army.
Those promoters with small ambitions fared the best. In London
they sold a few of the cheaper claims, which, as a rule, were
disappointments to the purchasers. But sometimes it is better to be
trusting than to be wise. One young Englishman bought a claim on
Sulphur for $2,000 which would not have sold for $500 in Dawson at the
time. When he arrived to take possession of it in June, its value had
risen so rapidly on account of the later development of the creek that
he sold it for $20,000. The anxiety of the claim-owners on the new
creeks, as Sulphur, Dominion, and Hunker--all having their head-waters
on the slopes of The Dome--were called, lest the promoters had sold
their claims, was as great as that of some of the claim-owners on
Bonanza lest their claims had not been sold. Perhaps as many as thirty
claims on the new creeks had been worked to any extent during the past
winter, with such results as to increase their speculative value by
five hundred per cent.
The forty happy kings of the forty claims on Eldorado also preferred
not to sell. That “pup” returned good for evil. It heaped satire upon
the satirists who had given it its name as a joke, and continued to
surpass all expectations. The optimism which over-estimated Bonanza
under-estimated Eldorado. These forty kings, as they compared the
output with their figures, concluded, with some pride, that all born
mathematicians are inclined to be too conservative.
You could see the dust glistening in the dumps of the “pup.” The water
gurgling over the cleats in the sluice-boxes seemed to sing a merrier
song than on Bonanza. Every shovelful which it bore chuckling over the
cleats yielded up a dollar or more. It licked twice as much off rocks
that had to be lifted out of the sluice-boxes by hand because its
current was not strong enough to carry them on down to the waste pile.
At intervals, nuggets of some size were unearthed by the spade and were
tossed into a pan at one side. If you were a friend of the claim-owner
he would beg you to take your pick of the lot as a souvenir of the day.
But you would not get one worth more than ten or fifteen dollars, even
if you were greedy enough to choose it for its size rather than for its
beauty. The giants--one was found worth $600 and those worth from $50
to $100 were not infrequent--had been spied in the drifts in the winter.
A magnificent carelessness of details prevailed. A scientific miner who
had seen fortunes made in California out of a cent a pan would have
regarded the forty kings in the light of infants making a holiday with
a tack hammer and a gold watch. They could afford to laugh back at him
in return. There is some reason in their philosophy that one cannot
afford to pay men a dollar and a quarter an hour to pick up stray
pennies, and more in the philosophy that when you have a fortune you
have enough.
It was not yet in the old-timer’s nature, rapidly as his character was
changing, to squeeze the last cent out of Mother Earth, in the manner
of some hard taskmaster, when she had given to him such a bountiful
harvest. A little line of dust, like a braid of gold lace, remaining on
either side of the sluice-boxes after a day’s clean-up was dismissed
with the remark that it would “come out in the wash” next time. If the
workman who had the uncomfortable and unhealthy position--especially
when the sun was directly overhead--of standing in the dump-box, took
a few minutes’ rest, he shrugged his shoulders and said that any dust
that was lost in the meantime could be a boon to the Chinamen who,
coming humbly after the white man’s departure, would patiently take
fortunes out of the white man’s tailings--unless the capitalist should
make the valley resound with the toil of machinery manned by cheap
labor, thus cheating poor John out of what he has come to regard as the
right of his race in placer mining countries.
[Illustration: Shovelling a Clean-Up into a Gold Pan.]
[Illustration: Cleaning Up.]
There was not one strong box for the safekeeping of the daily harvest
of thousands on all of the creeks. The bags of dust were kept in the
little cellars which the miners had excavated under their cabins for
the preservation of their food. There was a joke which went the round
of the firesides during the food-panic that it would be cheaper to
fry the dust and save the hams. For the bags, made of roughly tanned
moosehide, the Indians received prices in keeping with those of other
things. They bore the owner’s name printed in ink, if ink could be
obtained; their capacity was about $5,000 each, and they were not
unlike, in their freshness as well as in their size, the dirty, worn,
brown little bags which were carried in lieu of purses. Three or four
of them were all that you cared to carry on your back. When you met
men on the trail bending as under heavy packs of slight bulk, you knew
their business. If there were many bags there might be an escort with
a rifle and there might not. Most of the claim-owners thought nothing
of sending several thousands by their employees, unaccompanied, to be
deposited in one of the Commercial Companies’ stores; but once the
“Cheechawkos” began to arrive, all sought locks for their cellar-doors.
VI
SOME KLONDYKE TYPES
THE FOOL AND HIS LUCKY FRIENDS--MORE THEORIZERS--JOE STALEY
AND BILLY DEDDERING--FRENCH GULCH BENCH--GOOD FORTUNE THAT WAS
DESERVED--NEIGHBORS AND TWINS--NO CURE FOR THE GOLD FEVER.
It was the greater world of the Klondyke that was bounded by the creek
claims. A smaller world was bounded by the hill-sides where there were
many fresh mounds of earth, suggesting that the population might be
digging their graves one by one. Graves of ambitions most of these
mounds were, in all truth. A few, readily distinguished as far as you
could see the two figures hovering over them, were the birthplaces of
the fortune which the figures were exhuming with the orthodox rocker.
The original nugget washed out of a bench and deposited where Indian
Charlie’s gaze would light on it did not lead, even indirectly, to
the discovery of the wealth of the benches. This honor belongs to a
stalwart Swede, whose race in the Klondyke is the general butt of that
fine wit of our own race which makes a mark of a foreigner’s broken
English and his efforts to understand strange manners and a strange
language. One day in the spring of 1897 he went up the slope above his
cabin near the mouth of Eldorado and began to strip off the muck as
fast as the sun thawed it. Directly his neighbors saw what he was doing
they began to compose satirical remarks against the time when he should
come down.
“Why don’t you go looking for gold up a tree?” they asked him.
“I tank gold no grow on trees,” he replied, in all candor.
“Say, did you ever hear,” they continued, as they held their sides,
“that the weight of gold makes it sink? I suppose you think the glacier
walked up on the hills and left a few millions there. The millions
didn’t roll down? Oh, no! That’s why we have to sink through thirty
feet in the creek bed to pay dirt. Better try the trees! You might find
a bear up the trees and bear meat would be worth three pennyweights a
pound in town.”
“If you don’t dig some hole you no find gold. By tam! I dig a hole if
I vant to,” he replied, as he went into his cabin.
“Well of all the fools,” they said, “it takes a Swede to beat the lot.”
Men passing on the trails stopped to look up to the point where the
“fool” was working, grew friendly in despising him, and carried the
joke to the ends of the creeks and to Dawson, where it was elaborated
over the bars.
One evening the “fool” quietly called on all of his friends among his
fellow Scandinavians, as well as upon certain Anglo-Saxons who had not
made fun of his English. They followed him up the hill and drove stakes
in the neighborhood of his prospect hole. The twinkle in his blue eye
was not unkind, though suggestive, the next morning when he showed to
the scoffers a handful of nuggets from a claim which was worth $50,000.
But scoffers accept nothing on faith. They would not believe that he
took the nugget out of the hill until they had panned some of his dirt
themselves.
“Well, of all the lucky fools,” they said, “it takes a Swede to beat
the lot! Here’s millions been lyin’ within ten rods of us for a year
and we never knowed it.”
Those who had sharpened their wits at the discoverer’s expense now
hastened to get a claim as near as possible to his, until a mile of
Bonanza on both sides of the creek was taken up, from the point where
the slopes meet the creek bed to their summit. Theories about the
habits of the glacier were qualified by the experts. Thenceforth, it
stood to reason that the breadth of no glacier of such importance would
be limited to that of a creek. The scoffers soon found themselves
saying that this had been their opinion all along, and eventually
became so imaginative as to hint that they had advised the Swede to
make the experiment.
Poetic justice attended the immediate outcome of the stampede. The
pioneer and the parasite got their fit rewards. There was less than
an acre of good pay dirt on Skookum Bench, as it was called, and this
mostly fell to the discoverer and his friends. Here and there in the
neighborhood good day’s wages could be made with a rocker, and nothing
more. Enthusiasm over bench claims languished.
“It was just like a Swede to strike the only rich bench in the whole
country the first time that he put his pick in the ground,” said the
scoffers. In their pessimistic philosophy, which exults over deserted
prospect holes, the latest strike is always bound to be the last. They
are the very ones who were the greatest optimists when they left home
to try their luck in the North against the advice of their friends.
This weakness is likely to grow on Klondykers who become too fond of
a sedentary life, unless their supply of bacon runs out and forces
action, or they awaken to a sense of their growing degradation when
they eat fresh eggs in Dawson and then see the world in bright colors
again. But long after the cynics are dead, strikes will be made in
Alaska by the class of real prospectors who cheerily face all hardships
and get out of them good digestions for anything from flapjacks to
moose gristle or even boiled willow roots.
Joe Staley and Billy Deddering, who discovered French Gulch Bench,
the richest of all the benches, the spring following the discovery of
Skookum Bench, were of the order of real prospectors. They had served
their apprenticeship in various parts of the Rockies, which are the
playground of free men from end to end.
Fond as I am of the California prospector, I am unwilling to accept the
verdict of his squint whenever he brings it to bear on a portion of
the earth’s surface, though Billy Deddering, I admit, as he understands
relative values, has reason to believe in his. But, in one sense, I
rejoice with him in his faith, inasmuch as the scoffers, who want to
make out that all success in the Klondyke comes from luck, and that
they have failed because they never had any, spun the yarn that a log
which he was shooting down the hill for a cabin knocked a nugget out of
the ground and thus became the godfather of his fortune.
Some two miles above the mouth of Eldorado, French Gulch splits the
embankment which forms the western wall of the valley of Eldorado.
Billy’s squint, when he brought it to bear on the rounded corner of the
embankment on the lower side of the gulch in something of the manner of
an old-fashioned marine covering a sail with his telescope, told him
that this was exactly the place where gold ought to be found, even if
it was not. The first hole that he sunk yielded only colors. A clerk
from London or the Eastern seaboard of the United States might have
gone back down the hill with his pick and shovel in a fit of blues and
never come up again. Billy was not in the least discouraged. He merely
readjusted his squint, and concluded:
“If ’tain’t here it must be farther up.”
So it was. In the next hole he took $187 out of his first pan on
bedrock. Joe was with him at the time, but at the request of Joe I give
all the credit for the discovery to Billy.
“It was Billy’s idea entirely,” Joe said. “He spotted the ground first.”
“What did you do,” I asked Billy, “when you struck it after all your
years of buffeting about from one camp to another?”
“Well,” he replied, “I looked around to see if anybody had seen us.”
“Nobody did see us, so far as we could make out,” Joe put in, “but they
must have noticed that we went down the hill as light as if we was
walkin’ on feathers, though we was tryin’ to look very solemn, like we
was at a funeral. When somebody asked us if we had found anything I
reckon we kind o’ started, though we was careful to say, ‘Jest a few
colors.’ But durned if the crowd wasn’t up there ’fore the few friends
we had among our neighbors had fairly got their stakes in the ground.”
“And you, Joe? What did you think of that night before you turned in?”
“Old’s I am, and long’s I’ve been knockin’ about the world, I’ve never
been married, and naturally I thought what a surprise it would be to
mother, when she got a letter sayin’ that her oldest boy was comin’
back to ’hio with a pile to pay off the mortgage and spend the rest of
his days on the old homestead.”
“And you, Billy?”
“I wished I was in ’Frisco with that hundred and eighty-seven.”
Many times I climbed the hill to have a talk with Joe and Billy.
They were a relief from the loungers and speculators in the hotel
at the Forks, who seemed to think that the business of a newspaper
correspondent was to expound the possibility of the schemes for
enlisting capital which they were promoting. It was a pleasure to look
into the good faces of Joe and Billy, and to shake their hands, caked
with clay. I sat on a stone and smoked my pipe, while Joe carried
buckets of dirt to Billy, who looked up with a smile on his round
German face, which was spattered with drops of mud that had splashed
out of the rocker when he shook it, or when he ladled water on to the
dirt with a dipper made out of a butter-can. Joe said that he didn’t
mind if the fact that he had struck it was published in the _Sydney_
(Ohio) _Journal_, but beyond that I knew he had no axes to grind, and
my highest ambition for the moment was that they should think me a
good fellow, while their greatest fear was that I was starving because
I would not go up to the tent and have a cup of coffee and a “bite to
eat” in the middle of the afternoon.
The sun was accommodating enough to thaw the dirt as fast as Billy
could rock it, and Joe could bring it a little faster than either the
sun could thaw it or Billy could rock it. This allowed Joe intervals
in which to rest, to entertain me, and to relight his pipe. I used to
offer my pouch to him, telling him that he would get more smoke if he
used tobacco.
“Couldn’t think of it. There’s nothin’ so sweet as the heel,” he would
say. “It gives me a puff, and that’s all I want.”
It was not surprising that he wondered why the supplies of tobacco
which other men had brought in with their outfits were long ago
exhausted, while he had plenty left. He protested, notwithstanding
Billy’s denials, that he filled his pipe every morning--at least,
almost every morning.
The experience of seeking with his own hands wealth direct from the
hands of Mother Nature had chiselled out the lines of his face in
distinct, unqualified characteristics, without any of the doubtful
gingerbread work which we find on faces in civilization. It was like
the weather-beaten image on some old church, careless of the storms
which make a new image streaked and mean. He and his “pardner” were
“rocking out” five hundred dollars a day; he was no man’s servant and
no man’s master, and more of a king than kings. I have gathered nuggets
on his claim as easily as I have picked up white pebbles on the beach
in boyhood.
The great difficulty is in developing such a wonderful squint as
Billy Deddering’s and in finding the exact spot where such nests of
nuggets are located. If ever there was a poor man’s claim it is the
bench claim. All you need to work it are a rocker, which costs fifteen
dollars, and your pick and shovel. A blind ditch whose frozen walls are
as tight as a porcelain bath-tub will catch the seepage from the pay
dirt, which is thawed by the sun as it is gradually exposed. So you
have all the water that you need, without too much. If the bedrock be
at some depth, you can work in winter as well as in summer. A year at
the most will suffice to take out your fortune; and you have no worry
over borrowed money, flumes, sluices, or dams.
If Billy had not already staked his bench claim rights for the Bonanza
Creek region, he and Joe would not have had to be content with a single
claim, and one of them would have got the claim just above discovered,
which was even richer, two men taking as high as a thousand dollars a
day out of it. Here was dirt richer than any on Eldorado itself, twenty
of whose forty working claims, probably containing thirty million
dollars, stretched out in a panorama before you when you looked either
up or down the creek. If one could have had a claim on the bench of the
size of the creek claims, instead of one only a hundred feet square, he
would have been more than a millionaire; and by hiring labor he could
have left the country in three months after the discovery with his
money in his pocket.
Sad to say, there was not room for all on French Gulch Bench any more
than on Eldorado. The whole extent of the pay dirt was not more than
two or three acres. It was just as large as the dip in the hill-side,
which, according to the theory of Billy, caught and held the gold when
it was travelling, while all that passed over the rim went on down to
the creek bed below, leaving only an occasional color in its track.
But I disagree with Billy. I think that all is accounted for by the
giant keeper of the pot in The Dome having thrown out a handful of the
overflow across the hills. This makes the presence of wash-gravel,
which is absent, unnecessary, and reconciles itself to the presence of
nuggets in rotten mica shist, which is the most inexcusable of all the
paradoxes in Alaska, the old prospectors say.
Aside from Billy and Joe, I came to know some of their fortunate
neighbors. Dan Saunders probably had the best claim of all. He was at
the hotel at the Forks one day, and in his cups when a man offered
in the bar-room to sell a claim on French Gulch Bench for a hundred
dollars. The Forks is the Stock Exchange of the creeks, and at that
moment, on account of some rumor, the opinion ruled that the bench had
been salted. The claim-owner believed it. Dan said he would give fifty
down and the first fifty out of the claim, and the offer was accepted.
The morning after, when Dan’s wit was not so brilliant, but his
reasoning faculties had improved, he went up to look at his elephant.
He came down a week later and tried to spend the two or three thousand
dollars he had taken out in the meantime. He could dispose of only part
of it, and returned to his claim in despair, somewhat disgusted with
city life.
Burke, who owned the claim next to Saunders, was a type of the runaway
boys from the East who have turned up in the Klondyke after having
served an apprenticeship in the West. This one reaped among the harvest
of his wild oats the largest nugget that was taken out of French Gulch
Bench. It was the shape of an oblong pancake, without any quartz in it,
and worth $210. When I met him in Dawson one morning, he was gleeful
over the joke he had played on the old folks at home. For the first
time in five years he had written to them. They had as good reasons to
suppose that he was dead as that he was in the Klondyke.
“Won’t their eyes pop and won’t they have something to tell the
neighbors when they find out that their worthless Tom is comin’ home
with fifty thousand cold!”
That same day I dined with Joe Staley at the foremost restaurant in
town. When we had eaten fresh eggs and other luxuries which had just
been brought in from the “outside,” as he pushed his plate away from
him he shook his head dubiously:
“I dunno as I’ll be so happy as I thought, when I settle down among
the cows and chickens,” he mused. “This grub don’t taste the way I
thought ’twould. Darned if I don’t like the beans and bacon that I have
up at the claim better, and I’ll be glad to be back carryin’ dirt to
the rocker for Billy to-morrow. They say once the gold fever’s in a
fellow’s bones it sticks like the rheumatiz, and I believe it. I reckon
it’s the only thing I’ll be satisfied with in this life. But I won’t
prospect in this godless region. I’ll go back to Californy.”
On my way to see Joe and Billy I often stopped for a chat with Ned and
Fred Beck, who were sinking a shaft to bedrock at the base of French
Gulch Bench hill. These twin brothers had been “pardners” for forty
years. They had the vigor which comes from living among the Rockies.
Their faces, framed in white beards, were fresh and smiling. The
archaic furnace which they had constructed for sharpening their
tools, if not their age and personal resemblance, would have attracted
attention.
[Illustration: The Discoverers of French Gulch Bench at Work.]
[Illustration: Pardners and Twins for Forty Years.]
“Have you never quarrelled?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, lots of times,” said Fred, “and agreed on quits lots of
times, too. After Ned’s had a drink or two he always gets cranky and
wants to start out for himself.”
“Not much crankier’n you do,” Ned put in.
“That’s right,” Fred assented. “But when we’re sober we make it up
again and are ashamed of ourselves. We may be twins, but we’re just
fitted for each other.”
“That’s right, too,” Fred assented.
VII
GETTING ACQUAINTED
MR. AND MRS. “MEENACH” AND THEIR MENAGE--THE JUVENILE MINING COMPANY,
LIMITED--VOSS--THE ARCH-DEACON--A SOUR-DOUGH STIFF--A DALMATIAN AND
A TURK--SIAWASH GEORGE AND HIS STEAM-ENGINE--MISS MULROONEY AT THE
FORKS--THE PRICE OF A “SQUARE” WITH TRIMMINGS.