ROMANCES OF THE KLONDIKE
Sit beside me on the top of King Solomon’s Dome and listen to some of
the romances of the Klondike, true stories surpassing the fiction of
the “Arabian Nights.” King Solomon’s Dome is the very centre of the
Klondike gold region. It is a mountain higher than the average peaks
of the Alleghanies, rising three thousand feet above Dawson, and I
have climbed to its top in an automobile. There at the west is Bonanza
Creek, where, twenty-five years ago, gold was first found, and running
into it is Eldorado Creek, where Swift-Water Bill Gates and Charlie
Anderson, the Lucky Swede, as well as scores of others, made their
fortunes.
The man who first discovered gold in the Klondike was George Carmack, a
New Englander who had come to Alaska from North Adams, Massachusetts.
He married an Indian and he had three Indians with him when he was
prospecting on the ground just below us. As the story goes, one of the
Indians who had gone to the creek for some water saw the gold shining
there in the sand. Taking up some dirt on the edge of the creek, the
men washed it, and within a half hour had recovered twenty dollars’
worth of gold. Carmack then laid out claims for himself and his three
companions, each of which brought a fortune that all too soon slipped
through its owner’s fingers. The news of the discovery spread like
wildfire over the North. It was telegraphed to all parts of the
world and by the next year men were rushing to the Klondike from every
direction. They staked both sides of the Bonanza. They set up claims
along Eldorado, Dominion, and Hunker creeks, and dug out gold all along
the valley of the Klondike River.
[Illustration: Although the earth contains only a few cents’ worth of
gold to the ton, the use of giant dredges to scoop up the gravel from
the beds of the Klondike and Yukon rivers enables the mining companies
to operate at a profit.]
[Illustration: With all the force of a shell from a big gun, a giant
stream of water is played against the hillside, washing the earth
into sluice boxes, where a layer of mercury catches even the most
infinitesimal particles of gold.]
Charlie Anderson’s claim was No. 29 Eldorado and it cost him six
hundred dollars. He had saved this money from his wages as a
pick-and-shovel miner at Forty Mile, and bought the mine one night when
he was too drunk to know what he was doing. When he awoke the next day
he wept bitter tears and asked the men who thought they had swindled
him to take back the claim and give him his money. They refused, and so
Anderson walked eighty miles to the Klondike and started work. He found
only a hole in the ground, but he thawed and dug eighteen feet deeper
and came upon a fortune. When he made the first strike the men who had
sold him the claim were near by and asked with a sneer what he had
found. He replied: “Ay tank Ay got some gold here,” and showed them his
pan. There were fourteen hundred dollars’ worth of gold nuggets in it,
and the claim eventually yielded between one and two million dollars.
But, like other Klondikers, Anderson ran through his money as fast
as it came. He was cheated by every one, and ended as a day labourer
somewhere in the States.
In coming down the Yukon to Dawson the captain of the steamer told me
many stories about Charlie Anderson, whom he had known well. Said he:
“Anderson had been doing railroad work in the States, but was
discharged, and that drove him to Alaska. When he struck it rich he
took out more than two hundred thousand dollars the first year, and
during the next four years his claim yielded him almost two million
dollars.”
“What did he do with the money?” I asked.
“He spent it as fast as he got it. He kept a gang of gamblers and dance
hall girls about him and gave away thousands. When he was at the height
of his fortune and had an income of a half million a year, he fell
in love and was married. He took his wife to San Francisco, where he
bought her a house and gave her all the money she could spend besides.
When he was about at the end of his fortune he told me she had cost him
a quarter of a million. He then pulled out of his pocket a garter with
a clasp set with a diamond as big as the end of your thumb, and said:
“‘And this is all I have to show for it. I am almost broke now, but I
will go back and find some more.’
“Anderson’s claim was then played out,” the captain continued. “He
tried to find others, but failed. In his first trips with me he
travelled in state, buying all the liquor and cigars that the ship had
and standing treat to the passengers. On his last trip he booked in
the steerage. He was dead broke. Shortly after we started I saw him,
dressed in rough clothes, sitting at the prow of the boat. I went up to
him and said:
“‘Well, Charlie, it is different with you from what it used to be.’
“He looked up and his eyes filled with tears.
“‘Yes,’ said he,’ I am travelling steerage, for I have not enough money
to pay first class.’
“I was so sorry for him that I put him in one of the first cabins and
took him home without charge.”
Swift-Water Bill Gates’ story was a good deal like Anderson’s. He was a
Portuguese, who got his nickname from his claim that he swam down the
rapids of the Yukon on his way to the gold fields. He began as a waiter
in an eating house. One day while serving two miners he heard one tell
the other of the gold discovery in the Klondike. He left their order
unfilled, got a dog team, and rushed to Dawson. He was in at the first
and picked out a number of claims, including that on Eldorado, which
made him a fortune. He was successful for years, but was so dissipated
that he ran through his millions, and when he left with the stampede
to Fairbanks, he had only fifty cents in his pockets. There he made a
second great strike, but he lost that fortune as well.
Swift-Water once cornered the egg market in Dawson, and all for the
love of a lady. He was a gallant suitor, and at this time he was
courting Miss Gussie Lamore, a popular and beautiful young woman who
had been nicknamed “The Little Klondike Nugget.” But the course of true
love did not run smooth, and for a time it seemed as though Bill’s cake
were all dough. Then he remembered that Gussie doted on eggs, and he
prepared to corner the supply. There were just eight thousand eggs in
the town, and they were selling at a dollar apiece. Bill slipped about
from store to store and bought every one of them. He then remarked that
if Gussie wanted more eggs she would have to eat out of his hand, or if
she stuck to his rival “she wouldn’t eat no eggs.” Gussie succumbed,
and so Cupid won by an egg.
In another claim on Eldorado a young Y. M. C. A. secretary struck it
rich. This man had started mining on Forty Mile Creek, but when gold
was discovered near Dawson he left his young wife there and came on
with the crowd. The first claim he selected was comparatively small
and had no timber upon it. As he needed logs to build a cabin, he
traded his claim for another farther down the creek where the valley
was wider and timber was plentiful. He built a cabin, sent for his
wife, and they started to work. When he had thawed the earth to some
distance below the surface he laboured down in the pit and his wife
wound the windlass that drew up the buckets of rocks. Time and again,
in despair, they talked of selling out and going back home. But they
held on until they came to bed-rock, where the gold was so rich that
their claim paid them about two million dollars. Unlike Anderson and
Gates, this man invested his money in real estate in Seattle.
All sorts of characters came to the Klondike in the early days. With
such types as the Lucky Swede, Swift-Water Bill, and Frank Slavin, the
prize fighter, came business and professional men from all parts of
the United States. Joaquin Miller came to mine gold and write poetry
and newspaper articles. Rex Beach was here, and so was Jack London.
Jack London was at one time a partner of Swift-Water Bill, and it is
said that the two owned a claim that eventually produced more than one
million dollars in gold. Jack London began the work on the property.
He made a fire and thawed the muck on the top of the gravel. He left
his tools in the soft mud over night. Before morning the thermometer
dropped to sixty degrees below zero, and when he again started to work
he found he would have to thaw out his tools, but that if he did so
their handles would be burned. He left in disgust, and Swift-Water Bill
got all the gold. Jack London’s wealth came from the literary material
he carried away as the result of his experiences. The same may be said
of Rex Beach, who has written so many good stories of Alaskan life, and
of Robert Service, whose shabby cabin still stands near the Dome.
[Illustration: To-day most of the Klondike gold is recovered by
machinery in large-scale workings, but now and then one sees a miner
washing the gravel by hand in a contrivance like this.]
[Illustration: Some of the miners, instead of moving on to new scenes
of action when the gold began to give out, have stayed on with their
families, working a few acres of land and occasionally panning out a
little gold.]
[Illustration: Much of the Yukon is unexplored, and bridges and ferries
are few, so the hunter and the prospector must ford the rushing streams
and make their own trails through the country.]
Indeed, many books might be made about the ups and downs of the
Klondike in the height of the gold fever. Men came here beggars and
went away millionaires, and millionaires lost fortunes and became
tramps. Gold was shipped out by the ton, and in the city of Dawson
it was spent by the pound. At the start, the town was what in slang
phrase is known as “wide open.” The scores of gambling houses,
saloons, and dance halls all made money. In one dance hall twelve
women were employed at $50 a week, besides the twenty-five per cent.
commission they received on the drinks and cigars sold through their
blandishments. One girl stated that her bar commission for the first
week amounted to $750. Another saloon had six beauties to dance at $150
a week, and in many of the halls the women were paid a dollar for a
dance of five minutes.
I have before me a copy of a bill of fare of one of the old
restaurants. A bowl of soup cost $1 and a bowl of mush and milk $1.25.
A dish of canned tomatoes cost $2, a slice of pie 75 cents, and a
sandwich with coffee, $1.25. Beans, coffee, and bread were $2, a plain
steak was $3.50, and a porterhouse was $5.
A leading restaurant, which had a seating capacity of thirty-two,
employed three cooks, one of whom received $100 a week, and the others
$1 an hour. The waitresses got $100 a month. The restaurant occupied a
tent twenty by forty feet, which rented for $900 a month. Carpenters
were drawing $15 a day, and common labourers $10. Skilled woodworkers
got $17 a day, and journeymen tailors $1.50 an hour. The ordinary
charge for a sack suit was $125. Barbers made from $15 to $40 a day,
each receiving sixty-five per cent. of the receipts of his chair. Four
barber shops were in operation, and their prices were $1 a shave, $1.50
for a hair cut, and $2.50 for a bath.
During that winter newspapers brought in over the trail sold for $2
apiece. A weekly newspaper was started, known as the Yukon _Midnight
Sun_, which cost $15 a year, and a little later the Klondike _Nugget_
was issued weekly at 50 cents a copy.
Banks were soon established and did a big business in buying gold dust
and putting their notes into circulation. The first eight days after it
opened its doors, the Canadian Bank of Commerce bought one and one half
million dollars’ worth of gold dust. Some years ago the old building
in which that bank had its offices was burned, and one of the clerks
asked permission to work over the ground as a gold claim. He wanted to
recover the waste from the assay offices and also the dust that had
fallen on the floor from time to time in the purchase of gold. His
request was granted and his idea proved worth thousands of dollars.