Alaska (113 page)

Now the second corpse was undressed and carefully fitted into the barrel, also in an upright sitting position, facing the first man and adjusting to him.

'What in hell are they doing?' Mr. Ross asked, and Tom explained: 'Our contract requires us to ship any dead Chinese back to China for burial in what they call ”the sacred soil of the Celestial Kingdom.”'

'In a barrel?'

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'Look!' And as they stared in disbelief, Ah Ting and his helpers packed every cranny in the barrel with rock salt, filling it so to the brim that no sign of the dead men remained visible. Even their nostrils were crammed with salt. And when the heavy lid was nailed tight, the coffin barrel was ready for shipment back to China, where the two slain men would attain whatever immortality this tradition ensured.

BACK IN THE MANAGER'S QUARTERS, MR. Ross WAS STILL agitated by what he had seen: 'A man murdered while I was holding him. His assailant stabbed half a dozen times.

The man supposed to be in charge being held captive. And everything settled by packing the victims in a barrel and salting them down.' The more he reflected on this extraordinary behavior, the more distressed he became: 'We can't have Chinese in our cannery. You've got to get rid of them, Tom.”

'Nobody can run a cannery without them,' Venn said, and he reviewed briefly the disastrous experiences of operators who had tried to handle the great crush of salmon with other kinds of workmen: 'Indians refuse to work fifteen hours a day. White men are worse.

You've seen that our Filipinos cause more trouble than the Chinese and do half the work. Mr. Ross, we're stuck with them, and I don't want today's incident to sour you, especially not in our first year.'

'What irritates me no, it's worse than irritation, it's downright fear is the way you and I are at the mercy of that Ah Ting. I think he let those men neutralize him.

He didn't want to face those knife-wielding wild men.'

'But when he was freed, Mr. Ross, he did get the men back to work. I couldn't have done it.'

'I will not have a cannery of mine at the mercy of a Chinese scoundrel. We must do something.' And as he began to study his Chinese employees, what he saw caused further dismay: 'In the whole lot, only three speak any English. They're a tight clan living by their own rules, with their own food, their own customs. And for some reason I can't pinpoint, that Ah Ting unnerves me.' / 'I've sometimes felt the same way, Mr.

Ross.'

'What is there about him?'

'He knows he's indispensable. He knows this cannery couldn't handle a single salmon without him. And I think he's clever.'

'About what?'

'I'm sure he knew that serious trouble had become inescapable. He suspected there might be knifings and he wanted to be held prisoner while it took its course.'

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'I want him off our property.' When Tom made no reply, Ross continued: 'It infuriates me to see him grinning at me, knowing that he's in command, not me.'

Tom, aware that there was no chance of dispensing with Ah Ting, neither this year nor next, ignored Ross's unhappiness, and three days later the two men stood together as a crane hoisted the burial barrel off the wharf and onto the deck of an R&R ship loading salmon to ship to a wholesaler in Boston. No Chinese workman bothered to bid the dual coffin farewell as it headed back to China, but as Tom started for his office he caught a glimpse of Ah Ting in the shadows. The wiry fellow was smiling, and Tom entertained a momentary suspicion that Ah Ting was not at all unhappy to have at least one of the men in that barrel disappearing from Totem Cannery.

But preoccupation with the Chinese was abruptly terminated when Mr. Ross learned that the fishermen on whom his cannery relied for its salmon were protesting their meager pay and refusing to take their small boats out unless that scale was increased.

The fishermen did not engage in a formal strike; that would be against their principles of freedom and individual responsibility, for as one sailor said: 'Strikes are for factory people in Chicago and Pittsburgh. All we demand is fair pay for what we catch.'

And when Mr. Ross told Tom Venn that additional pay was impossible, and Tom told the fishermen, boats stopped heading up Taku Inlet, and for two desperately long weeks Totem Cannery saw no salmon.

The Chinese workers in the carpentry shop kept building shipping boxes, but the larger number engaged in heading, gutting and cleaning the catch had nothing to do, and in their idleness they started having trouble with the Filipinos, who were also idle.

The huge establishment at the mouth of the Pleiades River became such an uneasy place that Tom warned his boss: 'If we don't get some salmon in here right quick, there's going to be real trouble.'

It was then that young Tom Venn came to appreciate the difficulties of management, for he watched at close hand as Malcolm Ross, a determined and wealthy man of fifty-two who commanded hundreds of men and almost a score of ships, stood helpless before a gang of Chinese and a rabble of fishermen in small boats. He could not command his Chinese to behave if they had no work to do, nor could he halt their wages, and he had to continue feeding them, for they were prisoners at his cannery and could not move elsewhere if they wanted to.

And he was equally ineffective with the fishermen. Fiercely stubborn, they said: 'We can live off our savings or what we 690

get peddling fish to housewives in Juneau. Mr. Ross of Seattle can go to hell.' Ross, unwilling to grant demands which he felt to be excessive, was powerless to make them fish and incapable of getting his salmon from any other source. Caught in this vise formed by Chinese in one jaw, illiterate white and Indian fishermen in the other, he felt himself so miserably squeezed that he spent one whole week fuming and contriving ways to put himself in a secure position which no Chinese, no fisherman could ever attack: 'We must make ourselves self-sufficient, Tom. We must never be forced to sweat out a season like this.'

He did not confide to Tom what he was devising, but during the closing days of the second painful week, when the cannery was losing great sums each day, he walked back and forth along the banks of Taku Inlet as if studying its fish laden waters, and then through the cavernous buildings whose tables and ovens and canning sheds were silent. Only the hammering of the Chinese carpenters as they built boxes that might never be filled broke the solemn quietness, and out of these days of intense study, Malcolm Ross of Seattle constructed his vision and launched his plan to attain it.

'What we shall do before next year,' he told Tom almost bitterly, 'is surprise these scoundrels. Ross & Raglan will never again be held up by Chinese coolies and hard-drinking fishermen.'

'What do you have in mind?'

'To get rid of that grinning Ah Ting. To teach those insolent fishermen a lesson.'

'How?'

Ross swung into vigorous action: 'Tell the fishermen we'll accept their demands if they double their catch. Tell Ah Ting his sheds must run sixteen hours a day. Send a telegram to get our two biggest boats up here. In the remaining weeks of this season we're going to pack the way Alaska has never seen before.'

The fishermen, gloating over the way they had defeated the big man from Seattle, accepted the challenge he issued, and assured of the raise they sought, fished arduously to earn the bonus he promised. And as soon as the handsome loads of sockeye salmon arrived at the cannery dock, Ah Ting's Chinese crew accepted the extra rations Mr.

Ross authorized and then worked sixteen productive hours each day, seven days a week.

The gutting tables were never free of fish. The great cooking ovens, made in Germany, received one batch of cans after another. Chinese tinsmiths worked in three shifts to build the great volume of cans required, while skilled men under Ah 691

Ting's direction soldered the lids, and the packing crew stowed them in boxes, forty-eight to a box, and sent them down the slide to the waiting ships.

When the cannery was running at maximum speed, with all parts meshing as Mr. Ross had visualized a year ago, he saw it as an American miracle, an almost flawless operation which provided one of the world's most nutritious foods to eager buyers throughout the world at a price no other form of food could match. Taking one of the cans from the machine which pasted on the bright-red Totem label, he hefted it, tossed it to Tom Venn, and cried: 'A pound of matchless salmon. Sixteen cents in stores across America. And next year it's all to be under our control, Tom. No more Chinese. No more men in tiny boats commanding us what to do.'

In his euphoria he uttered a phrase which would dominate his actions for the remainder of his life: 'It's the job of Seattle businessmen to organize Alaska. And I promise you I'm going to show the way.'

'What am I to do?' Tom asked, and he said: 'Pay the bills. See that our last ship takes away the Chinese. Close the place down, and after the first of the year, catch one of our ships at Juneau and work with me in Seattle. Because next year we are going to astonish the world.' With that, he boarded an R&R ship at the Totem dock, waved farewell to the cannery whose first campaign was coming to an end, and watched approvingly as the ship's captain threaded his way toward the Walrus, out into the channel, and on to his offices in Seattle.

ON 5 JANUARY 1904 TOM VENN TURNED THE Management of R&R affairs in Juneau over to his assistant and took passage on one of his firm's smaller vessels headed for Seattle, thus fulfilling a desire which had gnawed at him since the day in March 1898 when he and Missy had left that enticing city for the Klondike gold fields. He was so excited about seeing Seattle again that he barely slept the first night out, and when the ship finally entered the quiet waters of Puget Sound he was perched on the railing hoping for a sight of Mount Rainier. When that majestic snow-clad peak appeared, he cried to no one in particular: 'Look at that mountain!' Later, when a woman passenger asked: 'What's that huge mountain?' he said proudly: 'Mount Rainier. It guards Seattle,'

and the woman told him: 'Looks as if an artist painted it,' and he nodded.

It was an emotional homecoming for Tom, and as the familiar sights of the city rose from the water, he entertained bold thoughts: If in the next few years I show a profit on the

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salmon cannery, Mr. Ross will be almost obligated to promote me to the Seattle headquarters permanently. That'll be the day! Whispering to himself, he said: 'I'll use the money John Klope gave me to buy a home on one of those hills and watch as our ships sail home from Alaska.' As the words formed he could visualize the Alacrity,

that small white R&R ship on which Missy had worked and on which he, Missy and his father had traveled to great adventure on the Yukon.

How far away those days of high daring seemed, and as he thought of them he resolved to perform as creditably at the cannery as Missy had done in Dawson and Nome: You'll be proud of me, Missy. One of these days you'll be proud of me.

His excitement grew as he left the ship, carrying nothing, and hurried along the dock where he had once sold newspapers. Searching for the familiar sign of the R&R

dockside offices, he found that the old building had been replaced by a fine modern one, and when he burst through its doors, three older men inside recognized him: 'It's Tom Venn. Loaded with Nome gold.' After enthusiastic greetings they told him: 'You're to leave your bags aboard ship. We'll send them along.'

'Where am I to stay?'

'Mr. Ross left orders for you to go to the main office immediately. He'll give you instructions.'

It was ten in the morning when Tom arrived at the building on Cherry Street, its oak door bearing the neatly carved blazon ROSS & RAGLAN, and as on that first visit nearly seven years ago, he felt a pulse of excitement on entering the waiting room leading to Mr. Ross's office. The same austere lady, Ella Sommers, her hair now streaked with white, guarded the portals, and the same air of busy importance dominated the place, for this was the nerve center from which controlling ganglia spread out to all sections of northwestern America and Alaska.

'I'm Tom Venn, from Juneau. The men at the dock told me that Mr. Ross wanted to see me.'

'Indeed he does,”Miss Sommers said. 'You're to go right in,' and she nodded toward the door through which she allowed only a few to pass.

As soon as Tom entered the room he felt once more the spell of the powerful man who sat behind the big blond-oak desk. As before, the red-haired man fitted exactly the setting from which he operated, but this time the office was filled with three smaller tables, on which rested a bewildering array of small wooden models whose interlocking parts moved when Mr. Ross or one of the two men working in the room operated them.

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'Tom, these men are from the university. They know salmon. Gentlemen, this is our Mr. Venn from the Totem Cannery, where your machines will be installed, if you ever get them to work.' And with these peremptory words the informal session began.

Moving to the largest of the three tables, Mr. Ross explained: 'This is Taku Inlet, and this feeder, shown by the blue paper, is our Pleiades River. Our cannery, obviously, is on this point. Professor Starling, show us how it's going to work.'

As the first words were spoken, Tom accommodated himself to the diagram; he was in the middle of Taku Inlet, and when the professor said: 'Now you must imagine yourself a sockeye swimming upstream to spawn on a warm July day,' Tom became a salmon, and from that moment on, he understood viscerally what Starling said.

'This is Taku Inlet as we know it now. The returning salmon, heading for either our Lake Pleiades over here, or to one of the hundred similar lakes upstream in Alaska or over the border in Canada, swim past this point, where your fishermen catch a fair proportion and bring them to the cannery over here.'

'The system worked pretty well last summer,' Tom said. 'And we're enlarging the cannery starting March first.'

'It was a respectable catch you canned,' the second professor said, a Dr. Whitman, 'but it could have been four times that size.'