Gold Diggers Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PREFACE

  PART 1 : COLOR AND CHAOS

  CHAPTER 1 - Arctic Secrets, June 1896

  CHAPTER 2 - Bill Haskell’s Dreams of Gold, 1889-1896

  CHAPTER 3 - Mob Justice and Wild Dogs, June-September 1896

  Chapter 4 - “Five dollars to the pan!” October 1896-April 1897

  CHAPTER 5 - Sourdough Success, April-May 1897

  PART 2 : MINING THE MINERS

  CHAPTER 6 - Father Judge’s Flock, May-June 1897

  CHAPTER 7 - Belinda Mulrooney Stakes Her Claim, June 1897

  CHAPTER 8 - Jack London Catches Klondicitis, July-October 1897

  CHAPTER 9 - Starvation Rations, October-December 1897

  CHAPTER 10 - The Pioneers’ Show, January-March 1898

  PART 3 : MONEY TALKS

  CHAPTER 11 - Gumboot Diplomacy, April-August 1898

  CHAPTER 12 - Jack’s Escape from the Yukon, June 1898

  CHAPTER 13 - Rags and Riches, May-June 1898

  CHAPTER 14 - Flora Shaw, “From Paris to Siberia,” July 1898

  CHAPTER 15 - “Queer, rough men,”August 1898

  CHAPTER 16 - Scandal and Steele, September-October 1898

  PART 4 : ORDERAND EXODUS

  CHAPTER 17 - “Strong men wept,” October 1898-January 1899

  CHAPTER 18 - A Cleansing Fire, February-April 1899

  CHAPTER 19 - Stampede to Nome, Summer 1899

  CHAPTER 20 - Mythmakers

  AFTERLIVES

  POSTSCRIPT

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Acknowledgements

  SOURCES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  For friends in Dawson, then and now

  PREFACE

  IN 2008, THREE FRIENDS and I rafted down a section of the wide, silty Yukon River in the endless sunlight of four long June days. The scenery was breathtaking—no visible human habitations, distant snow-capped mountains under a vast sky, a black bear at the water’s edge, and two moose standing motionless in a swamp. Massive log pile-ups littered the riverbanks like timeless sculptures. I heard the croak of ravens, the hiss of river sediment against the rubber raft, the howling wolves. I watched a branch bob along in the water, then realized it was a fifty-foot spruce tree, wrenched from the bank by a current strong enough to carve out new channels and treacherous gravel bars. My fingers went numb when I dipped them into the icy water.

  I faced none of the risks and few of the discomforts confronted by those who had made the same journey in the 1890s, during the Klondike Gold Rush. We had life jackets, a Global Positioning System, down sleeping bags, Therm-a-Rests, bug repellent, a four-burner gas cooker, and all the other gear designed for extreme adventurers today. Even though I felt a lifetime away from my family south of the sixtieth parallel, I could return home within a few hours by plane.

  Nevertheless, I felt the menace—the sense that we were trespassers on the immense silence. In four days of travel, we saw only three other boats, two of them with Hān men at the tiller. If, with all the protective paraphernalia that we had stowed, I felt overwhelmed by the savage beauty of the surroundings, how much more intense must it have been for those intrepid adventurers at the peak of the Gold Rush? If one of them drowned, it would take months for the news to reach his family back home. If he was alone when he toppled into the water, his name would be forgotten and his fate unknown.

  Yet 110 years ago, stampeders streamed north in their tens of thousands in one of the great quests of the nineteenth century. Primarily from the United States but also from Canada, Britain, Australia, Sweden, France, Japan, Italy, and dozens of other countries, they undertook a brutal journey toward the Arctic. They were gamblers and dreamers: the Gold Rush was the chance to reinvent themselves—to escape the claustrophobia of cramped lives, and to share the adrenaline rush of mother lode fantasies and frontier adventure. In an earlier era, similar urges had impelled Europeans to set sail across uncharted oceans. In a later era, the same appetite for speculation persuaded investors to embrace the promise of dot-com stocks.

  Different motives impelled me north. My river trip was the culmination of a three-month sojourn in the Yukon. I had hankered to spend time in the immense and almost impenetrable North American wilderness that stretches from the sixtieth parallel to the North Pole, and which freezes into an icy solitude for more than half the year. Moreover, I have three sons, who love to pit themselves against white water, steep mountains, and jagged rock faces. They revel in perilous adventures that fill me with terror of the unknown. They return from such trips exhilarated by their own stamina and courage, humbled by the power of raw nature, and at peace with themselves. I sought a glimpse of their elation.

  Most of all, I wanted to see the Yukon with my own eyes. By now I had read dozens of books by survivors of the collective get-rich-quick madness of the 1890s. When I caught sight of the Moosehide Slide, above the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers, I knew the surge of relief and excitement recorded by so many of the men and women who stampeded into the Far North toward the Klondike gold fields. Like me, most of those people had no idea what the terrain was like, no backwoods skills, and only the haziest notion of how to pan for gold.

  I was particularly curious about a handful of obsessive, reckless individuals within that torrent of humanity that flowed north. I had heard their voices in memoirs, handwritten letters, or stories. Now I wanted to see and feel for myself what they had seen and felt, to help me understand why they faced such hazards. Why did they hurl themselves so far beyond the horizon’s rim?

  This is the true story, taken from their own words, of six people whose paths crossed during the Gold Rush drama. Had they not made that journey, they would never have met. Woven together, their accounts show how a community develops and how history is built from the ground up. Individual stories have a psychological depth too often missing from the grand narratives of the past, where crowds are faceless and personal motives irrelevant. My six Klondikers were the selfless Jesuit Father William Judge; Belinda Mulrooney, the feisty and ruthless entrepreneur; Jack London, a tough youngster desperate to make his mark on the world; the imperious and imperial Flora Shaw, special correspondent for the Times of London; Superintendent Sam Steele of the Mounties, the barrel-chested lion of the North; and the engaging prospector Bill Haskell. Each of them sought and found riches—although not always the yellow metal itself. Bill Haskell was the first of the six to make that arduous journey. If it weren’t for men like Bill, with his incredible tenacity and hunger for adventure, the Klondike Gold Rush might never have happened.

  PART 1 : COLOR AND CHAOS

  CHAPTER 1

  Arctic Secrets, June 1896

  THE WIDE RIVER SWEPT the little boat along in its silty current. All the two men had to do was steer clear of hazards—shifting gravel bars, uprooted trees, ice cakes. A thick branch jutting out from the bank could easily catch and swamp their homemade craft. But Bill Haskell couldn’t resist glancing up from time to time.

  “Mile after mile of wildest grandeur glided by like a continuous panorama,” he recalled later. It was early June now, and the days were long. Light lingered in the northern sky until after midnight. Sheer cliffs glowed yellow in the midday sunshine or deep purple in the evening shadow. Hillsides were covered in dark spruce forests or slender white birches. Snow still capped the distant mountains.

  But Bill and his partner, Joe Meeker, hadn’t seen a human habitation for days, and they were intimidated by the landscape’s vastness. The beauty was suffused with menace. The hiss of the river’s sediment scraping along the side of the boat, and the harsh croaks of ravens, emphasized the eerie silence
rather than broke it. Occasionally, a great bull moose would appear at the water’s edge and stare at them. When they pulled their craft onto the bank, they found fresh bear scat and the bleached bones of animals torn to pieces by wolves. At night, wolf howls prickled the hair on the back of Bill’s neck. When a sudden shower fell, the raindrops were hard, cold pellets of moisture, a stinging reminder that summer here was brief.

  The Yukon River Baslin and Its Promise of Gold

  The two men exchanged hardly a word as their clumsy boat swirled erratically in the channel. Bill, a husky, blond farmboy from Vermont, let out the occasional exclamation at the sight of a golden eagle wheeling overhead or a brilliant patch of purple fireweed. Joe, a wiry Irishman from South Carolina, was not much of a talker at the best of times; he stared ahead, gripping an oar. The two Americans were tired, and too sick of each other’s company for much conversation. It had taken them three months to get here—a journey that had included avalanches, blizzards, an almost vertical climb, fierce rapids and treacherous whirlpools, and faces so swollen by insect bites that they could barely open their eyes. Now they were far, far from any civilization they would recognize. There were no cities, farms, railroads, or telegraph lines for hundreds of miles. They had almost reached the Arctic Circle.

  Bill and Joe were traveling along the Yukon River, the waterway that meanders for 2,000 miles through conifers, tundra, and ice in the Far North. From the Yukon’s headwaters, only 50 miles from the Pacific coast, the river flows toward the North Pole until it is about 120 miles from the Arctic Ocean, then curves southwest to flow for another 1,200 miles through impenetrable forests and black swamps. The mosquitoes are terrible, the landscape sometimes dramatic and at other points dreary and monotonous. Finally, after slicing an immense arc through the middle of Alaska, the river trickles through the many fingers of a wide, shallow delta before reaching the salt water of the Bering Sea in the topmost corner of North America’s west coast. Covered in a layer of ice several feet thick for seven or eight months of the year, the powerful Yukon waterway is today still only half explored.

  Why were Bill Haskell and Joe Meeker floating through this wilderness, their knuckles taut with fear? What hunger drove them to travel so far, and face such dangers?

  Gold had enticed the two men north. In the 1890s, gold was as important as oil is today: it made the world turn. Gold was crucial for governments because every country’s currency depended on its gold holdings, and money and credit for economic expansion rested on increasing gold supplies. And like oil today, in the second half of the nineteenth century supplies of gold seemed to be dwindling, putting a squeeze on the world’s economies. Banks were failing, breadlines lengthening.

  Gold was also the basis for individual fortunes, because a prospector who struck a mother lode would never have to work again in his life. An ounce of pure gold dust (enough to fill a teaspoon) was and is worth a lot of money—nearly twenty dollars in 1896 and more than $1,000 today. Miners like Bill and Joe had been drifting into the Yukon basin for nearly twenty years, drawn by rumors of gold dust in the river’s gravel bars and nuggets in its tributaries. They arrived with their shovels, gold pans, and picks, eager to make their fortunes. There were other lures, too—the chance to conquer unknown territories, live on the frontier, escape the rules and regulations of more ordered societies. Wild-eyed and leather-skinned, muscular and pugnacious, they clung to their dreams like warriors on a crusade. By 1896, there were perhaps a thousand such adventurers in the Northwest, alongside the uncounted indigenous people, including the Tutchone, Tlingit, Inuit, Hān, and Tagish, who had made this inhospitable region their home for generations.

  Gold bound Bill and Joe together. If their partnership was successful in striking gold, it would let them vault out of poverty, hunger, hopelessness and into a gleaming future. Joe clung to this vision with tight-lipped fury, refusing to speculate how he would use his wealth until he actually felt the heavy yellow dust trickle through his fingers. Easygoing Bill loved to fantasize how he would spend his precious nuggets—on a rich man’s toys like one of the new horseless carriages, or on travel to distant cities like Paris that otherwise he could never hope to see. But how long would it take to find the stuff?

  Each morning on the long journey, Joe would unfold a rough map of the Yukon River to gauge their progress. Narrowing his eyes, he looked for landmarks in the vast landscape. Bill, impatient to get started, would pile their meager possessions into the boat and slap the mosquitoes away from his puffy, sunburned face. They had already ticked off Windy Lake, Marsh Lake, the terrifying White Horse Rapids, Lake Laberge, the mouths of the Pelly, White, and Stewart rivers, and Fort Selkirk, an abandoned Hudson’s Bay Company trading post. “We stopped upon the banks but little, for the mosquitoes make camp life an excruciating experience,” Bill recorded. A couple of weeks after they had launched their clumsy craft, they saw a big white scar, left by a rock slide, on a hillside ahead of them. From their map, the men learned that this was nicknamed the Moosehide Slide because it looked like the hide of a moose stretched out to dry. Below the slide, a river gushed clear as gin into the soupy brown Yukon. The river was known as Tr’ondëk, or “Thron’diuk” as Bill spelled it. On each bank of the Tr’ondëk lay a narrow apron of flat ground, squeezed between the two rivers and a steep hillside. There was a small Indian settlement on the Tr’ondëk’s left bank, but otherwise the mudflats were covered in alder shoots cropped to waist height by moose during the winter. Bill’s trigger finger itched as he surveyed this prime hunting ground.

  The Tr’ondëk was one of the favorite fishing rivers of the Hān people. Its name meant “hammer stones” because for generations Hān had hammered stakes across the mouth of the river, then slung fish traps between them to catch salmon as they swam upstream to their spawning grounds. Their leader, Chief Isaac, came with his family each spring to camp on the stream’s south bank and harvest the salmon run. From the river, Bill saw a huddle of people by huts built in the characteristic Hān style—low-slung birch constructions, roofed with canvas anchored by more birch saplings. A tall, dark man stared at them as their boat floated past. Was this the Hān chief who was well known to prospectors muscling into his territory? Chief Isaac had learned English from the newcomers, and had even allowed an American missionary to convert him to Christianity.

  If Bill and Joe had steered their boat to the riverbank and stopped to speak to the Hān families, they could have saved themselves so much trouble. But they were impatient, and had no time for people they had been raised to disparage. So what if these strangers had for generation after generation fished and hunted all over this hostile landscape, learned the migration patterns of caribou and medicinal properties of vegetation, and knew how to survive the cruel winters? So what if they were canny traders who had dominated the commerce in fox, bear, and lynx furs with the Hudson’s Bay Company for years? Even Bill’s hunger for human companionship wouldn’t persuade him to mix with the Hān. When one of the fishermen shouted at them in his own tongue, Bill hooted with derisive laughter because the Hān language sounded to his untrained ear as though the speaker was “doing his best to strangle himself with it.” He and Joe allowed the river to sweep them past the settlement.

  So Bill Haskell never discovered that the people who lived here knew this river was special—that soft yellow stones glittered in the Tr’ondëk gravel. He never heard how Hān children competed to find the largest of these magic pebbles. Gold had no value for the Indians, and Bill saw no value in talking to people who understood this magnificent and mysterious land.

  Besides, Bill and Joe were in a hurry: the Yukon’s dangers and loneliness had unnerved them. Bill was hungry for the company of men like himself—the tough, grizzled, backslapping prospectors in the mining camps downriver, who shared his lust for gold and contempt for anyone who didn’t speak English properly. Joe wanted to take stock of their dwindling provisions and cash. Bill would reflect a couple of years later that “but for the fact that we
were now anxious to arrive at the center of the gold diggings we might have stopped a day to see what we could bag in this moose pasture.” So the two men floated past the Tr’ondëk—which the world would come to know as the Klondike—“in blissful ignorance of what lay under the tundra of its creeks.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Bill Haskell’s Dreams of Gold, 1889-1896

  BILL HASKELL RECORDED his Klondike adventure in a memoir entitled Two Years in the Klondike and Alaskan Gold-Fields, published only two years after he first saw the Yukon River. He began his tale in an unassuming tone: “This is the plain story of one who began life in a little township of Vermont about thirty-two years ago, and who, several times during the past two years, has been dangerously near losing it in a search for gold along the glacier-bound coasts of Alaska, in the frozen regions of the Yukon, and in the rich gulches of the Klondike.”

  But it was not a plain story. Bill was caught up in two extraordinary phenomena that reverberated throughout nineteenth-century America. The first was the surge of settlers who moved westward across the continent, pushing the American frontier all the way to the Pacific. The second was the obsession with gold, as a route out of cramped lives and into a fantasy of untold wealth. Bill’s subtitle was A Thrilling Narrative . . . and it was thrilling. He was born on a hardscrabble New England farm and grew up entirely ignorant of either geography or geology. Although his parents, at considerable financial sacrifice to themselves, sent him off to a good school, he showed little promise. All he knew was that he wanted something from life beyond unremitting toil on rocky fields. Yet there was more to Bill than adolescent frustration: he had imagination, and an unquenchable appetite for books about quests and exploration. His account of his months in the North has the drama and color of the bestsellers he most likely read—W. L. Stevenson, for example, on the South Seas, or Bret Harte’s short stories about the California Gold Rush.