shirt and was solicitous about keeping his tie straight, had charge of
the bar. According to all the traditions of new placer mining camps he
was as much out of place as the average bartender would be in a chair
of moral philosophy. He was so essentially lacking in combativeness
that no one ever thought of picking a quarrel with him. Luck and
whiskey, however, despite the Northwest Mounted Police, will generate
in miners a surplus energy which they are inclined to expend upon
furniture if not upon one another. Miss Mulrooney did not depend for
purposes of pacification upon a huge St. Bernard who was always at her
side when he was not drawing her upon her sled up and down the creeks
in winter, but rather upon her blarney. She knew when, where, and just
how much to apply.
“I always appeal to their best instincts,” she said. “It’s easy to lead
and hard to drive. That’s what you men don’t understand. You try to
drive.”
I saw her theory put to the test of practice. A giant who was so well
on in his cups that he could scarcely walk, concluded, only half an
hour after he had finished one, that he wanted another meal. When it
was placed before him he seemed to think that the cook was trying to
hurt his feelings by making him eat twice, and with an oath he threw
a dish of stew on the floor. Miss Mulrooney happened to be passing
through the room at the time. She stepped over to him and told him in
her pleasantest tone that accidents would happen.
“Accident?” he asked, dazedly.
“Of course,” she said. “I know you’re too much of a gentleman to do
such a thing purposely.”
“Coursh! Coursh it was!” he kept repeating, as he dropped down on to
his knees and tried to scrape the stew up into a little pile, despite
her protests.
Then out of the maze of his crippled memory another horror presented
itself suddenly and prompted him to arise.
“Miss Mulrooney,” he asked, his face very red, “did you hear me swear?”
“A little one--a slip,” she replied.
He told her that it was only a real lady who would put so liberal
a construction on what he called a breach of “ettykit.” Fearful,
nevertheless, that she might secretly think ill of him, he followed
her about the hotel with apologies and dripping hands while he kept
repeating how a poor devil might be a little weak, so rarely did a good
bench claim fall to a poor devil’s lot, until the inner workings of his
conscience culminated in a full confession that the plate had not been
broken by accident but intentionally. She forgave him even this, and
then he went up-stairs and to sleep.
“What I want to do is to make money, you may be sure,” Miss Mulrooney
would say if you persuaded her to tell you her story. “I was born in
Scranton, Pennsylvania. I had to earn my own living before I was out
of short skirts, and I kept on doing a little better from one thing
to another, till I was stewardess of a steamer on the Pacific Coast.
There’s nothing like being a stewardess to develop your wits when
you’re just a bit too independent for the job and you have to give the
passengers as good as they send when they’re sassy. I remember an old
Englishman who expected me to black his boots. I told him I wouldn’t,
and I told him if he put ’em outside his door again I’d be thinkin’ he
was wantin’ ice-water and turn a pitcherful into ’em. He went to the
captain. The captain was a Scotchman and he didn’t believe in puttin’
on airs; and when the captain sent for me and I went to the captain’s
room I found the old gentleman there. Before we came out I had him
laughin’, and I’d never blacked his boots, either. But runnin’ errands
doesn’t suit me. I started for the Klondyke as soon as I heard of it,
and like the rest I’m going back either rich or broke.”
The last time I saw Miss Mulrooney she was in Dawson searching for a
good location for a hotel which was to have sheets and be positively
palatial. Three weeks later, so I am told, it was completed.
Once her first venture succeeded, she had begun to speculate in
mining properties. Her position at The Forks gave her exceptional
opportunities for inside information, and she was a “pardner” of a
dozen leading citizens in as many enterprises.
“If you ever go to Chicago or New York,” I suggested to her, “the
women’s clubs will be making a heroine of you as an example of what
their sex can do.”
“Not if I know it,” she replied. “They won’t, I’m thinkin’, if they
hear I sold whiskey. Besides, there’s nothin’ new about me. I’m
old-fashioned.”
Without abusing a much-abused word, I think that Miss Mulrooney may
be called a remarkable woman, more particularly as her own opinion of
herself is quite the contrary.
VIII
ARCTIC TRAITS
DAILY LIFE IN DAWSON--RENTING A CABIN--CIRCUMVENTING THE HUSKIES--JOEY
BOUREAU AND HIS RESTAURANT--THE FARO DEALER’S WIFE AND HER BAKERY--THE
LAUNDRYMAN AND HIS CLAIM--JACK BELTZ’S SCHEMES--A PAIR OF DREAMERS.
It depends upon the season of the year whether the town-site of Dawson
is liquid, mushy, or as flinty as frozen ground can be. At one time
in the summer of 1898 most of it was under water. Two weeks later,
the Yukon having fallen some sixteen feet, this same town-site was
at a respectable height above the level of the stream. The smaller
sandbar on the opposite side of the mouth of the Klondyke, which, out
of respect to the cabins which cover an area of six or seven acres,
has been called Klondyke City, is without the surface layer of muck
which held sewage as in a sponge under the noses of the residents of
Dawson. The good nature of the fellow, known as “Dud,” who keeps the
sole saloon and hotel at Klondyke City, was as largely responsible for
our choice of abode as the healthfulness of the location. Empty cabins
were scarce. “Dud” said he had one to rent. When I asked him the price,
I offended him.
“You walk right in and stay till I tell you to get out,” he said. “But
if you go shakin’ your dust in my face I won’t let you have it at all.”
So we stood our sleds up beside the door, set up our little Yukon
stove, threw our blankets on the floor, and were at home. The comfort
of my daily existence I felt to be great compared with a bunk in a
bunk-house for $2.50 a night, or a room with cloth partitions over a
bar for $10 a night.
Fritz, who liked movement and life, went over to town to live in
the cabin of a friend, leaving Jack and me to do our own cooking or
to eat at the restaurant when we were of idle mind. The dogs also
patronized the restaurant without standing on ceremony. “Jack” carried
off almost the last ham in the camp, having lifted it from a nail
with the unostentatiousness of an expert thief. The proprietors of
the restaurant would not listen to reimbursement. They explained that
anybody who had been in the country for six years and let a husky dog
get the better of him deserved to be mulcted. It is out of deference to
the husky dog that the miner builds little caches, set on poles, for
storing food, which make the town look like a Bornese village, whose
inhabitants have deserted their old homes to live in cabins.
The proprietors of the restaurant, in my opinion, were well worth
knowing. Joey Boureau--undeniably French-Canadian, but forever
repeating that he was a citizen of the United States--was almost as
dark as a Moor, with the torso of a Turkish wrestler. He yielded
neither to excess nor fatigue, blustered at times, never cared
for to-morrow, and was possessed of a ready wit. His blague had a
counterpart in the blarney of his partner, Tim, undeniably Irish
American and proud of it. This pair had been inseparable for the many
years that they had sought gold with the pick and in all the ways of
camp life. Upon the scales at the end of the oilcloth-covered dining
table they weighed out $2.50 worth of dust out of your bag whenever you
ate off their board. Whichever one happened to be in did the cooking,
and if both were in, one told stories to amuse the guests and acted as
cashier.
But both were seldom there. One was usually at “Dud’s” faro table. The
other, when he grew tired of working brought his “pardner” home on his
arm, installed him in the kitchen, and immediately went out to enjoy a
little recreation on his own account. As he took with him whatever dust
there was in the tomato-can, which served as their cash-box, we heard
frequent excuses for the absence of moose steak on the table because of
lack of funds to purchase it. Just as their business was beginning to
prosper they sold it for a song to a Cheechawko whom they met on the
river-front. A week in town sufficed to spend the song, and then they
put packs on their backs and started over the hills, whistling as they
went.
In one of the neighboring cabins the wife of a faro dealer had set
up a bakery. We paid her fifty cents apiece for pies and fifty cents
for loaves of bread, and had to order them beforehand to make sure of
getting them.
Our laundryman had staked a claim in which he placed great hopes; but
his invariable charge remained seventy-five cents a garment. He related
with a realism almost tragic the details of the processes by which he
had arrived at the original color of the khaki trousers that I had
worn on the trail. Jack Beltz, for his part, secured the loan of
an old tub and a washboard, and after a day’s labor surveyed bandanna
handkerchiefs and what not hung out on the line with the mien of a
conqueror.
[Illustration: Jack Beltz.]
[Illustration: “The Huskies.”]
Economy, however, was always a matter of necessity with him. On the
first night of his return from town he said, with some pride, that he
still had most of the dust which he had received in conclusion of our
contract. The next night before going to bed he built a fire in the
stove out of the driftwood which he snaked out of the river for fuel,
and sat for a long time in a reverie.
“Well, I’ll have to earn some more,” he said, finally, to himself, and
dropped upon his blankets.
In the morning, followed by his troop of dogs, who had regained their
spirits and their flesh, because he had fed them so bountifully, he
went up on the mountain side, where he picked a great bouquet of the
wild flowers which spring up in such profusion in summer. He never told
me of his losses, and I tried to avoid the appearance of suspecting the
truth, at the same time that I took practical measures to obviate an
effort to dispose of his robe for cash and to hypothecate his year’s
outfit, which was to be brought down the river by his “pardner,” Cliff.
Meanwhile, he revolved in his mind many schemes for making money. The
price of moose steak, $1.50 a pound, suggested to him that a fortune
might be made in moose hunting. Learning that Dawson had no bowling
alley, he so far arranged to start one as to find that balls and pins
could not be obtained nearer than Seattle. This scheme was succeeded
by the more alluring prospect of taking dogs, which are valueless in
summer, as they are valuable in winter, to an island in the river to
feed for so much a month. Always before his dream had taken definite
form he dismissed it by saying he was no city man. He recalled his
experience in keeping the restaurant in a British Columbia mining town,
and he reverted to a proposition that was to the liking of his love of
robust vagabondage:
“I’ll get a pardner and take the dogs and go up to the head-waters of
the Porcupine and cross over to the Mackenzie. It would be a rattling
trip!”
As if in excuse of his venture he would add that he was certain to find
gold in that region.
One day another dreamer, Kidd, came to join us. He was a protégé of
Jack, who had found him trying to put his outfit over the Pass. There
must have been such giants as Kidd, with such straight noses, curling
black hair and curling black beard, in the phalanxes that confounded
the Persians. But this type of the freshness and strength of country
life was quite modern. He slouched into the cabin with his hands in
his pockets, and included in the drawl with which he greeted us a
Missourian “Doggone it!” Like many other unfortunate fellows, Kidd had
been obliged to spend the whole winter in the neighborhood of the Pass.
Jack and his partner had made him a tent-mate in their camp on the
banks of Linderman, during the dreary period of waiting. Going on to
Le Barge after our departure from Linderman, he had arrived in Dawson
before Cliff.
“That boy comes from a good family,” said Jack; “and I’ll bet they’re
proud as anybody that ever had a grand-dad who owned a lot of niggers
and went stone broke after the war. He don’t say nothin’ about it, but
it sticks out all over him. He didn’t know how to hitch a pack on a
mule’s back when I first met him. But though he was green, he wasn’t
fresh; and when tenderfeet are that way they’ll learn and you like to
learn ’em. When they ain’t, you like nothin’ better than to give ’em
the worst bronch’ on the ranch and leave ’em to find out things for
themselves.”
It was not until after considerable urging that Kidd would consent to
share our cabin. His character was in sharp contrast to that of another
young stranger who entered and threw his blankets on the floor for
the night without any formalities. In the morning, picking up certain
articles of my kit which were lying beside my bed, he said:
“You’re goin’ out on the first steamer. Don’t suppose you want these,
do you? I’ll take ’em along. They’ll come in handy next winter.”
“He’ll get on,” quoth Jack, “but I’m ding-donged if he’ll get on with
my help.”
Jack now included Kidd in his schemes, which became more and more
attenuated. Kidd would walk back and forth for some time as if in deep
thought, and finally drawl:
“Gee-mo-nee! We must do something, Jack!”
And Jack, as he looked out upon the rapidly flowing river, would agree,
and relight his pipe. Kidd admitted that he was homesick, “doggoned
homesick.” He had a right to be, for he left home with a thousand
dollars and his mother’s blessing, instead of finishing his education
and studying for the country bar.
“Gee-mo-nee!” he exclaimed. “I was green, wasn’t I, Jack? I thought
you’d just pick the gold up once you got here. But doggoned if I’ll go
back broke. I’ll have as much as I had when I left or stay forever.
I’ve got three hundred of that thousand and I’ll make seven hundred and
my fare out some way this winter.”
One day the dreamers found employment on the log booms for the new
saw-mill that was to be built on the island in the Klondyke between
Dawson and Klondyke City. Jack was as much at home on a rolling log
as on the back of a broncho. Poor Kidd fell into the water often,
but showed great persistence until the rise in the river made work
impossible and left them idle again. So Jack sat by the cabin door
keeping a lookout for Cliff, the third giant of the trio, who arrived
one day, with a broad grin.
“Gosh!” he exclaimed, as he grasped Jack’s hand. “I was washed out of
the boat when we came through Five Finger Rapids, and blamed if I
wasn’t washed in again! How’s that for luck?”
There was something of the New England Yankee in him, though he had
been born in Colorado.
“I’ll bet you’ve give your money all away, ain’t you, Jack?” was his
next remark. “You wouldn’t be Jack if you hadn’t.”
“Weeks ago,” was the reply.
They secured a contract with one of the saw-mills to cut rafts of logs
sixty miles up the river. Here was a chance for Jack to swing an axe,
to build bonfires, and to do what he called an honest man’s work. With
his dogs around him on the day of his departure I said a regretful
good-by to the vagabond.
IX
PILGRIMS’ TRAILS AND TRIALS
ITINERARIES--ALLEGED UNIMPORTANCE OF EXPERIENCE--THE CASE OF
FATHER STANLEY--PRESS AGENTS AND PRIMERS OF WEALTH--THE SECRETARY
OF THE SEATTLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE HIS OWN CONVERT--PARDNERS AND
PROMOTERS--OUTFITS--HOME COMFORTS FOR AN ARCTIC CLIMATE--HETEROGENEOUS
BOAT LOADS--THE NANCY G--TRAGEDIES OF THE PASSES.
Next to taking part in some event chronicled on the bulletin boards
your average pilgrim of fortune best enjoyed being near them. Least
of all he liked waiting in latitude 64 degrees for a month or more
for news of progress of the only war yet waged by his country in his
generation. When he left home the Klondyke was the ruling general topic
of the hour in the newspapers. When he reached his destination he was
quite forgotten, and public interest was entirely absorbed in the
invasion of Cuba.
Viewed in one light, there was good reason for the pique which he
naturally felt toward Shafter’s army. He might see many wars, for
instance, before he saw the like of this Dawson pilgrimage again.
Thirty-five thousand generals, each one his own quartermaster,
packing a thousand pounds of food apiece over a rugged coast range of
mountains, building a flotilla with axe and whipsaw out of the primeval
forest, and travelling six hundred miles into a country having an
arctic climate in winter and a tropical climate in summer and yielding
no food except a little game, presented a spectacle more romantic, if
not so exciting, as the massing of an army corps under one general, its
extension into a battle line, and the capture of the enemy’s outposts.
[Illustration: On the Pass.]
The old prospector from California, British Columbia, Australia, or
South Africa formed only a small percentage of those who entered, with
the enthusiasm of children, a world of effort quite new to them. The
village loafer and the ne’er-do-well son of the banker became partners
on the trail. Mechanics who had mortgaged homes bought with savings
from their wages to buy an outfit, rubbed elbows with broken-down
speculators and business men who hoped to recover all that they had
lost by finding a placer mine. The farmer, the clerk, the artisan,
and the city or the provincial day laborer of the Eastern States,
Eastern Canada, and England, were as confident of success as their
associates who had learned in the severe school of the plains, the
veldt, or the bush how to preserve life and health in a new country.
If they had not swung a lariat or a pioneer’s axe, they had at least
beaten someone in walking or rowing or had gone longer without eating
than any of their immediate friends.
Of the eighty thousand who left their homes for the Klondyke in the
winter of 1897-98 and the spring of 1898, some thirty-five thousand
arrived at Dawson. The battle was not always to the strong. More
important than physical strength were determination and cheerfulness.
Those who failed were as peculiarly Anglo-Saxon as those who succeeded;
for they had the restlessness which impels one to seek obstacles but
does not necessarily provide the force to overcome them. Most of those
who had endeavored to reach Dawson in the autumn of 1897 were stranded
on one side or the other of the passes, where they had to wait through
a dreary winter until the ice which had arrested their progress should
go out of the river. But only a small proportion of the whole number
of pilgrims made this attempt. The great majority planned to transport
their outfits over the passes in the early months of 1898 and build
their boats on Lakes Linderman and Bennett in the interval between good
travelling in a snow-bound country and the opening of navigation.
All pilgrims, whatsoever their itineraries, were grist for the mills of
the towns of the Pacific Coast States and of British Columbia, bringing
welcome relief from a period of commercial depression. Enterprising
merchants, chambers of commerce, and steamship companies scattered
broadcast throughout the United States (whence came seventy per cent.
of the pilgrimage, ninety per cent. of it being Anglo-Saxon) pamphlets,
well written for the purpose, telling “How to Get to the Klondyke.”
The career of “Father” Stanley, of Seattle, was used as a stock
illustration of the unimportance of experience to the prospector. This
lame old bookseller, having the enthusiasm of the fanatic in place of
real strength, had gone to the Klondyke in the spring of 1896. For a
time he worked on the bars of Stewart, taking out $10 a day. If he
had not been deformed he would have packed more food over the Pass.
Fortunately, his supply ran out in September, and on his way down
stream to Forty Mile, where he hoped to get more, he happened to arrive
at the mouth of the Klondyke just as the first miners from Forty Mile
were hurrying to the scene of Indian Charlie’s “strike.” As he could
not walk as fast as the others, they got all the claims on Bonanza, and
he had the good luck to get one of the best claims on Eldorado.
A year later, returning on the treasure ship that brought the news of
the great strike, when he entered his house with a small portion of
his fortune--a hundred thousand dollars in cash--his good wife, as the
story goes, was at the washboard, where she had spent a deal of her
time during her husband’s absence, earning a living for a large family.
Her customers coming to make inquiries about their clothes were told to
take whatever was in the tub which they could identify as their own. As
for herself, she was boarding at the hotel, sending such of her apparel
as she had not thrown away to the laundry, and, moreover, was too busy
with the dressmaker to attend to any trifling details which might have
concerned her past life.
“In the frozen fastnesses of the far North fortunes nestle in nuggets
of glittering gold for all”--but the press agents were too well
versed in human nature to say that these fortunes were to be had for
a pleasure trip. They mentioned hardships which put up a price of
success, thus making the nuggets more attractive, and, in a sense,
supporting the assertion of their existence. Anyone who would overcome
the hardships might have a competency for the trouble of thawing it out
of the frozen ground. No pilgrim felt himself to be less courageous
and vigorous than “Father” Stanley; and the wives of all pilgrims were
equally certain that, under similar circumstances, they could conduct
themselves with quite as much dignity as Mrs. Stanley.
As became a primer to wealth, the pamphlets told just how much it
would cost to reach Dawson with the all-necessary year’s outfit, going
to the trouble, in a spirit of solicitude and rectitude, of setting
down opposite each article of food and each utensil, whether spade
or gold-pan, or oakum or pitch, or nails for boat-building, its cost
in dollars and cents, and adding up a fascinatingly small total from
a very tall column of figures. With a receipted bill for this, and
having paid his fare to Dyea or Skaguay, where he would disembark on
the mainland of Alaska and begin the transportation of his outfit over
the passes, the pilgrim, although he was supposed to have expended only
$300, needed no more money to take him to his mine.
It was not to the credit of the calculations of the pamphlets, and
not testimony, in all if it was in some instances, to the success
of the numerous gambling establishments that sprang up at the point
of mobilization of the army of fortune-seekers, that the Seattle
post-office did an overwhelming business in money-orders in December,
1897, and January and February, 1898. The authors of the pamphlets
were not called to account for their errors. Rather, they received the
thanks of their employers. Once he was on the coast, it stood to reason
that while he was yet sleeping between sheets and eating meals cooked
by someone other than himself the pilgrim would not retreat because
he needed a few more dollars which were obtainable from friends or
relatives at home.
Seattle’s success beyond all other towns in attracting trade was due to
a university graduate and an author of works on art. Having to give up
journalism in the East and seek health in the West, after some severe
tests of versatility of earning a living, he became Secretary of the
Seattle Chamber of Commerce. Such were the results of his knowledge of
the peculiarities of the Easterner, the Westerner, the Canadian, and
the Englishman, which he incorporated in separate pamphlets, that his
employers continued to raise his salary from week to week until the
war broke out and he relieved them of the embarrassing consequences
of their transports of generosity by resigning and starting for the
Klondyke himself (regardless of his doctor’s advice) as a convert of
his own arguments.
The camp-followers of the host of individual quartermasters which
Seattle equipped and embarked, besides the gambler and the pickpocket,
included many men of elastic consciences and elastic schemes, who had
no capital but were ambitious to become capitalists. Those promising
large dividends on properties yet to be purchased or staked were
common; those proposing such grand things as running snow and ice
locomotives over the hummocks of the Yukon in winter were in some
measure distinguished. In the corridors of the crowded hotels you
overheard the consultations of “pardners” as well as the harangues of
promoters.