hopes of their owners, the Klondyke will become a place of managers and
workmen, of stamp mills and chemical processes. To-day, there is very
little to say about the working of the mines, which is as simple as
building a fire, digging a well and doing the week’s wash, but much to
say about my friends and acquaintances there, who came from the ends
of the earth and represented most of its employments. Without knowing
individuals, the pilgrimage of the Cheechawkos would have meant no
more to me than a motley procession seen from a balcony. Those leading
citizens and well-known characters whom I met, under the guidance of
Captain Hansen in a round of the town on the evening after my arrival,
are worthy of a chapter by themselves. If I had taken advantage of all
the letters of introduction to claim-owners that they gave me I think
that I should have been three weeks in travelling the length of Bonanza.
In return for hospitality that did not stand upon formality but laid
its hand on my shoulder and insisted, I could offer nothing except the
news from the “outside,” the bad news that there was no escape from the
royalty. I registered a vow that if I were to make the journey over
the ice again I would find room among my supplies for one more article
of luxury, or else forego the privilege of introductions. I saw in my
dreams the smiles with which my hosts would have greeted the offer of a
good cigar, until I had the conscience of a highway robber.
“Don’t forget to call on Meenach!” said Captain Hansen. “He’s the
luckiest man in the country without exception. He doesn’t have to
darn his own socks and cook his own bacon and beans and you’ll know
him because he’s sleek and fat and clean-shaven. I walk up the creek
when I can get the time just for the privilege of poking my head in
at Meenach’s door. To a poor devil of a Klondyker it’s a peep into
paradise.”
It was not enough that the fortunate Meenach should have his wife; he
had also his little boy of six and his two little girls, one of four
and the other of two years, with him. After he wrote to Mrs. Meenach
that he had killed his lion, she came on to him; and she brought with
her such thing as sheets, tablecloths, and pillows, and a regulation
cooking-stove. He never dared to compute just how much the stove had
cost him, preferring not to have his enjoyment of the luxury allayed.
The mere expense of bringing it up from Dawson would have bought two or
three good ones at home.
To the miners the most wonderful feature of the Meenach cabin was the
carpet on the floor. Some of them wanted to take off their boots before
entering, and one suggested that if he were younger he would walk in on
his hands.
“If you don’t mind,” he added, “I’ll sit with my back to the sheets on
the bed. It’s too much at a time. I want to drift into this easy like.”
“Folks who live in castles may be bothered by having too many rooms to
care for,” said Mrs. Meenach, “but not I, in my cabin. I could put the
children to bed with one hand, stir something on the stove with the
other, and set the table with the third, if I had it. It’s no trouble
to go to the market in the morning. All our fresh vegetables are in
tin cans in the cache just outside the door. Oh, yes, there is much
to be thankful for if I look at it in the right light. We kept our
condensed cream, our canned asparagus and our canned peas all winter
without being frozen. Then, please heaven, something green grows in
this country. I have a little cranberry sauce from the poor cranberries
on the hill-side, and I agree with the children that it is ‘gooder’n’
anything I ever tasted. If I could get a fresh cabbage I think I should
eat it all without waiting to put salt on it. Now I live from day to
day on the hopes of the eggs which are expected in on the first boats.”
Thus she chatted while she warmed the tinned roast mutton in the
frying-pan, boiled the evaporated potatoes and the tinned sweet corn.
“I’m not going to say that dinner, such as it is, is ready,” she said,
“because, in the Klondyke, that is quite superfluous.”
It is good when you have eaten beans for a month off a tin plate
balanced upon your knee, to look upon a clean table-cloth again, to
sit by the window of a cabin in blissful certainty that your journey
is at an end, and have a good and gentle woman pour you a cup of tea.
I remember the meal as a banquet, not a dinner. After it was over, the
lord and master and I smoked our pipes until the little ones’ heads
began to nod, when I went into the cabin of one of his laymen to roll
up in my blanket.
The children had reason to think that they were the only children in
the world and to be as proud as princes. But Mrs. Meenach’s fears lest
they should be spoiled by the adulation of the miners were equally vain
with her fears about their health. The extent of their illnesses was a
day’s indisposition on the part of the baby. Swathed in furs and scarfs
until only their noses were visible and their limbs were as stiff as
a doll baby’s, they might go out to play with their sleds for a few
moments at a time. Listening to the cries of the dog-drivers and the
howls of their steeds, which had turned their mother’s nerves on edge,
had been as good as the kuh-chuk-chuk-chuk of a railroad locomotive
to them. The miners, with frost-encrusted beards, were so many Father
Christmases who rarely forgot to bring a present of a nugget when they
came.
With the coming of spring, an old Californian took the baby in his arms
while the brother and sister followed at his heels up the hill-side to
his bench claim. He showed them to a log, where they sat very gravely
while he unfolded to them a mighty scheme. In return for three kisses
apiece, one to be delivered when the bargain was struck and two when
the goods were delivered, he agreed to build for them a small rocker,
so that they could start a Mining Company (Limited) on their own
account.
Their dividends were large until one of the laymen found out that they
were using the best portions of his dumps. Then the total income fell
to a dollar a day, which the boy explained was due to laxness on the
part of the president--his elder sister--and gross negligence on the
part of the assistant manager--the baby--who insisted upon turning the
gold pan bottom side up at critical moments. Their father played the
part of the unskilled laborer, and sometimes when he was ordered to
work he said, “In a minute!” an excuse which had to be accepted. The
time came when the old Californian could no longer keep his joke to
himself.
“Meenach, seems to me I ’member tellin’ the youngsters that you’d carry
water for ’em to work the rocker with,” he chuckled.
It was by a diversion from my programme that I spent the next night
with Voss. His name was not on my list, and I had never heard of it
until I drifted into his cabin. I was attracted by his speech, which
sounded a little unnatural in a community where expressions are
intended to convey a meaning and not to subserve the rules of grammar.
Despite his education, Voss was an old-timer among old-timers, greeting
them all by their first names. The most ferocious of them, out of whose
mouths an oath rolled with the ease and deliberation of their tobacco
smoke, regarded him as a personal friend.
“He looks stuck up, but he ain’t stuck up,” they said. “He’s clean all
the way down and all the way through and game as a grizzly bear, and we
know. We’ve followed him on the trail.”
The sincere fellowship which he felt for them in return belongs to
that philosophy which makes of the young men of old but impoverished
families, good and cheerful prospectors, ranchers, and cowboys. Not
in fancy--which misled so many poor souls among the Cheechawkos--but
in fact, they prefer the independent life of a mining camp to working
for a salary in a city; prefer washing their own dishes and rising
at 3 A.M., and harnessing the dogs to start on the trail to going to
an office every morning and leaving it every afternoon at a certain
hour. By all the manners that stamp the man, Voss was a child of
civilization, and such a child as was equal to carrying out his
determination not to return to it until he was master in his own right
of the little luxuries that keep the taste of ashes out of the mouth.
Often he spoke of these, then ran his hands into the pockets of his
overalls, took a pull at his pipe, and looked at his dumps with an
anticipation as keen as that of some naval captain of Drake’s day in
sight of the chalk cliffs of England, after years in foreign countries
on rations of hard biscuit.
“But even before I carry out my plans of travel,” he said, “I shall buy
a ranch, where I shall have a home with no other habitations in sight;
where I shall have a good saddle-horse waiting for me, whenever I shall
grow tired of town. Once you have become accustomed to the silence of
the plains, the mountains, and the trail, mere country houses will not
satisfy you--something gets into the blood.”
“You all catch it, I see,” I interrupted. “Joe Staley says it’s like
rheumatiz’ and it gets not into the blood but into the bones.”
“Yes, bones--blood and bones, both!” was the reply.
He had four retainers, who lived in his cabin: the boy, the Archdeacon,
Jim, and Grouse, the fox-terrier. The boy was sixteen or seventeen. He
had gone to the Klondyke, against his parents’ wishes, to find himself
nonplussed by the necessity of a food supply for the winter months.
Voss put him on his feet. The Archdeacon was of the Established Church
and a graduate of Oxford. He did not seem to be, but he must have been,
older than the boy, for he was gray and the father of three children.
Shortly after he was ordained archdeacon the something had “got into”
his blood and bones, and he vacillated between the church and travel
until his meanderings brought the promise of a brilliant career to the
guardianship of a flock of Indians, halfway around the world. He baked
the best bread that I ate in the Klondyke. Though he accepted praise on
that score as quietly as he did everything else, I could see that it
pleased him--better, perhaps, than the praise of a bishop. In getting
breakfast, which he had taken upon himself as one of his tasks, his
slippered feet moved about so softly that you were not awakened until
his voice called you at the right moment.
“It is good to see many kinds of men and to do many things,” he
volunteered, as he lifted a flapjack from the skillet to my plate.
“When all the world was going to the Klondyke, I had to join the
throng. I got a lay on Bonanza and put some men to work on it. But,
unfortunately, I had no food for myself. Mr. Voss”--the Archdeacon
never omitted the Mister--“asked me to come and live with him through
the winter. What a pity it is that there isn’t such a good fellow as
Mr. Voss to take care of every unfortunate fellow like me!”
Jim, in the language of the Klondyke, was a “sour-dough stiff,” and
he was certainly an unhappy man. A “sour-dough stiff” will, under no
circumstances, eat baking-powder bread. This eccentricity, developed
in the later years of a prospector’s life, generates others which are
its natural companions. He thinks that baking powder in the smallest
quantity is poisonous, and, therefore, is as finicky and miserable
as any other man who becomes a victim of dyspepsia through forever
thinking of some means to avoid it.
In addressing his employer Jim uttered the word “Voss” in a harsh
voice, as if calling attention to its nudity and implying that he would
not subvert his rights as a free man by using “Mister,” though he were
to hang for it. He was the first to rise in the morning and he always
prepared his own breakfast.
“Some folks don’t like my cookin’, an’ I don’t like some folks’
cookin’, either,” he explained.
On some occasions, when he felt a little lazy, he would condescend to
eat at the table with the others, but with an expression of martyrdom
on his thin, old face. Voss told me that Jim would probably confide to
me at the first opportunity how grossly the claim was mismanaged, and
so he did. Voss forgave his eccentricities partly because they amused
him and his friends, and partly because Jim was an expert in saving
fine gold from floating down to the waste pile.
Jim’s contempt for the Alaskan miner’s knowledge of sluicing was
pleasant to hear unless you had to hear it often. He had a miniature
sluice for treating the residue which contains the lighter particles.
It were better to step on the hem of your wife’s skirt on the way to
the theatre than to lay your hands on this fine gold machine, as he
called it. Whether or not it was worth the time that Jim had spent in
building it, was a grave question with Voss.
In making the “clean-up” Jim was the general in charge of the field.
The best-natured men on the claim were selected to assist him, and
even their patience sometimes gave out. Voss himself, accompanied by
the fox-terrier, who was general superintendent of the claim, winter
and summer, used to take up his station at the water gate. He did not
always interpret Jim’s orders satisfactorily, and I overheard this
grumbling complaint:
“A man can’t play with a dog an’ pay ’tention to business at the same
time.”
Everybody about the claim except Jim was the slave of the fox-terrier’s
moods. In New York or London you could have bought Grouse for five
dollars. Voss was offered $200 for him by another claim owner, but
would as soon have parted with his claim. I knew of only one other
terrier in the Klondyke. He was a companion, deserving the affix of
bull, of a doggy-looking man who walked up and down the river front of
Dawson. He was usually limping on three legs, but not infrequently on
two. He seemed to realize his position as the sole representative of
civilized dogdom among thousands of savages, and he no more thought of
surrender than a Roman prefect. The boast of his master that he could
whip any two or three of the huskies was well founded. Even when he was
attacked by a dozen he gave more wounds than he received, retreating
with the dignity of one who belongs to a ruling race.
Provincial as Voss’s claim was in its isolation from the world, its
surroundings were cosmopolitan enough. Among his employees, aside from
Germans, Swedes, and French-Canadians, were a Dalmatian and a Turk. The
Turk was a good workman. When he had made his “stake” he was going to
buy a fig orchard in southern California.
On the day that I visited the discovery claim of Siawash George,
which is only a short distance beyond Voss’s, several Cheechawkos were
panning some gravel at the very point where Indian Charlie had found
the famous nugget. They did not wash out a single color, and passed
on in disgust to do more prospecting on ground whose stakes--for the
most part fallen down--had been driven so long ago that the weather had
washed off the writing on their four hewn sides. Siawash George had
expended several thousand dollars in buying and bringing an old boiler
and engine up to his claim from Forty Mile. Owing to a fatal defect in
its pumping gear it would not supply half a sluice-head of water or do
the work of a small dam; but the noise of its puffing and his ability
to hire an engineer to superintend it at $15 a day greatly amused a
mind which had become aboriginal from family associations.
Money playing an important part in the politics of Alaska as well as in
other countries, poor George had acquired a fortune only to find that
it was two-edged and might be an obstacle, as well as instrumental, in
the fulfilment of his royal ambition. On a fatal day he had brought
from Dawson to his wife some little brown things in a box which was
lettered in gilt. She had found them so superior to plain brown sugar
that they had opened a new world to her. She gave over her rights to
a throne to dream of the day when she should take passage on a Yukon
steamer to the land where shops were filled with chocolate bonbons.
Joe Powers was a near neighbor of Siawash George. As both had squaw
wives there was a bond of union between them, and they visited back and
forth a great deal. Joe could not read or write, I was told, but his
good fellowship shone out of his ever-grinning face.
“Some of the boys I knowed down in Circle and Forty Mile that’s struck
it big,” he told me in confidence, “is going into s’ciety when they get
on the outside. But I ain’t. How I would look in s’ciety, wouldn’t I?
The rest of the boys are about on the same pattern, too, I guess, only
they can’t see it when they look into a pool of water. I’m thankful
I know them dodgers on the outside are too clever for me. I’ll buy a
fruit farm in Californy. Nobody can beat me out o’ that.”
However dangerous a little learning may be to some of the old-timers,
one does not envy them their dust, spend it how they will. It is
fitting that they who bore the brunt of the robust business of
pioneering should occupy the cabins of the masters on the Eldorado and
the Bonanza claims. Graduates of colleges and universities, who work
for them with pick and shovel for a dollar an hour, arrived on the
scene after the great strikes, and must take the consequences.
It is scarcely half a mile from Siawash George’s to the cluster of
cabins at the mouth of Eldorado; and Eldorado flows into Bonanza about
midway of its working claims, making of The Forks, as the confluence
of the two streams is called, the hub of a wheel with three spokes.
When Miss Mulrooney came up to The Forks in the autumn of 1897 she
appreciated the mathematical advantage of the situation at once, and
acted upon her perception with such decision that the news of her
wonderful undertaking went up and down the creeks that very day.
“Boys,” said the heralds to the scoffers, “there’s a new woman up to
The Forks with a bit of an Irish brogue and the tongue of a lawyer,
that’s goin’ to show us old moss-backs how to get rich. Hanged if she
ain’t got so much money to lose that she’s goin’ to build a two-story
hotel bigger’n any in Dawson right up here on the creeks.”
“Strange things was to be expected from the Cheechawkos once the news
of a strike got into the newspapers all over the States,” said the
scoffers; while the saloon-keepers, being specialists on the subject,
apprehended with professional disdain that Miss Mulrooney might as well
start a hotel at the head of the Stewart or at the North Pole.
The next instalment of news related that Miss Mulrooney was up on the
hill-side superintending the labors of the one lone mule surviving of
those brought down the river on rafts in the summer, which she had
hired for $20 a day to drag logs to the site of her building. That
class of women who are too common in the Klondyke are not given to this
sort of thing; and, moreover, they wear bloomers, while Miss Mulrooney
wore long skirts. A new woman deserved punishment for such folly, but
a good woman who wore long skirts was entitled to the friendly advice
which one of the leading claim-owners undertook to supply.
[Illustration: Miss Mulrooney of The Forks.]
“I’ve been in the country some time,” he told Miss Mulrooney, “and
I don’t mind telling you for your own interest that Dawson’s the
place, not The Forks, for a hotel.”
“Now, that’s kind of you,” assented Miss Mulrooney. “And may I ask if
you would like something to drink?”
“Er-r-r, well,” stuttered the Committee of One, as he tried to get his
bearings, “well, I admit I sometimes do, like the most of the boys--but
I didn’t know as you’d be mentionin’ that.”
“Oh, I’m not, and I’m not likely to,” with a toss of her head, “when
I know there’s no chance of your accepting. Of course, if you or any
of the other boys was hungry or thirsty you wouldn’t think of buying a
drink or a meal up here. You’d walk sixteen miles to Dawson and back
for it, wouldn’t you? And the boys going over the divide to Dominion
or Sulphur when they break the journey at The Forks would hang up in a
tree over night before they’d sleep in a hotel, wouldn’t they, now?”
A light burst upon the Committee of One.
“You’ll pass, Miss Mulrooney, you’ll pass,” he said. “You kin take care
o’ yourself all right. With that head of yours, you’ll own the Klondyke
by the time you’ve been in the country as long as I have.”
And the word that Miss Mulrooney was all right was passed along the
line. Every man on the creeks looked forward to the date of the opening
of her hotel. A democratic community could not confer titles, but it
might call her Miss Mulrooney of the Forks, and thus she will be known
for all time among Klondykers.
Meanwhile, she expected that every day would be the lone mule’s last.
There was neither hay nor oats in the country. As the story was told
to me, he held body and soul together on birch bark and willow sprouts
until the final log was dragged to the foundations, and then promptly
expired.
“He had nothing to live on,” as Miss Mulrooney expressed it, “and
nothing to live for, and I’m thinkin’ the poor fellow was so slow
because he just knew that his interest in the enterprise was all that
kept him up; and, like the rest of us, he wanted to postpone the last
hour as long as he could.”
The third night after the hotel was opened the Committee of One,
himself, had to sleep on the floor because the bunks were all taken.
Nothing could have served Miss Mulrooney better than the food-panic
of midwinter. She had bought a full supply before everyone began to
hoard whatever beans or flour or whiskey he could get. All but two of
the restaurants in Dawson had to close their doors. The two exceptions
on fête days gave butter and apple sauce along with bacon, beans, and
coffee. Their owners grew to regard Miss Mulrooney as their animate
consciences whose voice was that of every miner who ate a meal in
Dawson when he was down from the creeks.
“I don’t mind paying double,” said the Committee of One, to a Dawson
waiter, “s’long’s I get suthin to eat. Just bring that dinner over
again. Then I’ll have only half a square meal for $5, not to mention
that no fixin’s go with it. Miss Mulrooney charges $3.50 for a square,
but she gives you canned beef, canned mutton, and ham, and fixin’s, and
keeps askin’ you if you won’t have more and you keep acceptin’ till you
have to send for a drink ’fore you’re strong enough to get up from the
table. Jumpin’ John Rogers! How you fellers must suffer when you pass
out a bean and a rind and think of what a woman is doin’ up there to
The Forks!”
If you want to reach a man’s heart through his stomach in a
scurvy-stricken country, feed him, if it is the best you have, with
sauce made of dried apples. Miss Mulrooney kept a great bowlful
of this on her table. The transient ate of its contents with the
ravenousness of the thirsty traveller drinking from a spring of cold
water. No sooner was it emptied--I know by actual observation of a
quart of apple-sauce having been eaten by two persons--than it was
filled again by the cook, rapid if rough in his movements, who picked
it up and put it down as if it were a red-hot ingot.
The ground floor of the hotel was divided into the bar-room and
the dining-room. Cards were permitted, but no gaming-tables were
maintained. Upstairs was a tier of bunks running along the wall, with a
passageway between them. The blankets seemed cleaner than elsewhere--no
hotel had sheets--and the bunks had curtains. Either a nice sense of
individuality or sheer fatigue restrained the guests from removing
their socks, and I have known miners who were over-tired by a long
tramp not to remove their boots. They had enough respect for Miss
Mulrooney to hang the soles of them over the edge of the bunk, however,
though, if in their dreams they should participate in a stampede to
some new creek, their good intentions were sadly belied. The sole
occupant of a lower bunk, which was supposed to accommodate two in case
of necessity, might be awakened at any hour by a nudge, and:
“Pardner, sorry to trouble you, but I guess you’ll have to move over a
bit to make room for me.”
In winter the curse of a Klondyke cabin, banked with snow, chinked with
moss and dirt to the last crack and knothole, is lack of ventilation.
In summer, when there is no night and no two men quite agree on their
hours of sleep or hours for travelling, it was as good as reading a
local newspaper to try to sleep at Miss Mulrooney’s. The widening
cracks between boards of fir (put into the floors and partitions while
yet green) never permitted the slightest details of conversation
over the card-table or over the bar to be inaudible, except during
unavoidable and scarcely welcome intervals when you heard the tramping
and scuffling of heavy boots. I could discern the direction the
traveller was going upon entering the dining-room door; whether he was
coming up stairs to bed, or was going to call out to the cook for a
“squar” or “half a dozen eggs.”