Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (21 page)

Robert Medill, a young and impoverished school-teacher from La Salle, Illinois, who rushed north in August, wrote to his wife from Seattle decrying the “calamity howlers” in his home state who looked upon the Klondike rush as a will-o’-the-wisp. “Was surprised to see how the Klondike fever has struck different parts of the country,” Medill wrote, in his curious shorthand style. “The Illinois people are quite bad – I mean this. You meet a calamity howler at La Salle quite bad. At Chicago he lets loose a little. From Chicago to Washington he is fearful, disgusting. At Seattle he is dead and
all
is
Klondyke
. What a relief!” Medill confidently expected to reach the gold-fields in fifteen days; it took him seventy-one – “an awful trip,” as he later described it. A year later, still impoverished but much wiser, he was home again.

It was impossible on the Pacific coast to pick up a newspaper and not find the word Klondike, in its various spellings, on almost every page. The advertising columns bristled with references to it.

“I was a physical wreck three years ago and cured by Dr. Sanden’s Electric Belt,” one testimonial read. “I am now fifty-two years old, but I am going to the Klondike and expect to hold my own with younger men.”

Hundreds of personal stories were compressed into a few lines in the classified columns: “Anyone with $150 can secure legitimate paying business – apply Clondyke, P-I” … 
“Wanted
by two experienced miners: stake for the Klondike” … 
“Wanted
$700 to go to the Yukon. Will give value and personal property and if successful will give $1000 additional. Will accept grubstake. Address Success” … “Restaurant and cafe for sale, including valuable lease, beautiful colonial mansion, grand piazza, shady lawns … address Klondike, 708 Columbus Avenue, New York.”

Tin Pan Alley, meanwhile, was busy hammering out a saccharine balled entitled “He’s Sleeping in a Klondike Vale Tonight,” and the various periodicals were printing odes to the stampede.
Review of Reviews
published this poetic exhortation:

All you miners wide awake!
Go to the Klondike, make your stake;
Get out your pick, your pan, your pack
,
Go to the Klondike, don’t come back
Ho for the Klondike, Ho!

The London
Daily Chronicle
published its Cockney counterpart:

Klondike! Klondike!
Libel yer luggidge “Klondike”!
Theers no chawnce in the street ter-dye
Theers no luck darn Shoreditch wye
Pack yer traps and be orf I sye
,
An’ orf an’ awye ter Klondike!

And in New York, Huber’s Fourteenth Street Museum, searching about for a new act to headline its bill of Scottish acrobats, tumblers, black-faced comedians, and the new picture-projecting machine called the Cineograph, came up with a surefire attraction:

Great Big Bill – EVERYTHING NEW!
FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE KLONDIKE BRIDES
15 brave young ladies with courage enough to
go to the Klondike to become miners’ brides.
15 wonderful freaks

In most of the civilized world, indeed, the Klondike had become the chief topic of the day, at lunch counters, in trams, aboard elevated trains and streetcars. In the midwest, farmers deserted their haying to drive into town to hear the latest item from the gold-fields. “Technical mining phrases,” one contemporary reporter wrote, “have become the cant of the day.”

In those first wild weeks there were few who had any real idea exactly where the enchanted land was to be found. The Memphis
Commercial-Appeal
, for instance, told its readers that the Klondike lay near Chicago. One gold-seeker arrived in Seattle and asked the station master which train he should board for Skagway. In London an enthusiast called upon Harry de Windt, an Alaskan explorer, and wanted to know if he could ride a bicycle over the Chilkoot Pass.

By the late fall of ’97, however, a Niagara of books, maps, pamphlets, brochures, advertisements, and newspaper reports had poured from the presses. Many were filled with misinformation of every kind, but they did serve to let the average man know roughly where the Klondike was. William Haskell arrived from Circle City and was astonished to discover that “little schoolboys and girls knew the topography of the Yukon and the Klondike better than they knew the States.” He tested one Los Angeles ten-year-old by asking him to give the length of the California coastline. The boy did not know the answer, but was able at once to quote correctly the exact length of the Yukon River.

Few men there were who remained unaffected by the excitement of the Klondike, save for the hermits, the recluses, and the occasional hobo, winding his wastrel way down the dusty roads of the nation. One such there was in California who remained entirely untouched by the spreading delirium. He had been successively a potato-digger, a gardener in a rural bordello, a dishwasher, a sandwich man, a sandhog, and an orange-picker. At this point in his speckled career he was a bum, picking up food in gutters, accepting handouts from soup kitchens, begging at back doors for bread, and strumming on his guitar to verses of a sort that he composed and sang himself. As the stampeders raced north he moved indolently south towards Mexico, scarcely aware of the frenzy that surrounded him.

His name was Robert W. Service.

5

Warnings all
unheeded

In the fevered chorus chanting anthems to the Klondike, a few reedlike voices could be heard faintly counselling caution. On July 28 the white-bearded Louis Sloss, one of the founders of the Alaska Commercial Company, said flatly: “I regard it as a crime for any transportation company to encourage men to go to the Yukon this fall.… The Seattle people who are booming the steamship lines may be sincere, but a heavy responsibility will rest on their shoulders should starvation and crime prevail in Dawson City next winter.… It is a crime to encourage this rush, which can only lead to disaster for three quarters of the new arrivals.” This statement, coming from the head of a pioneer company which stood to gain immeasurably from the stampede, could be counted as an honest and reliable appraisal of the situation. Few heeded it, perhaps preferring the advice of the colourful Joaquin Miller, published the same day. The grey-bearded “Poet of the Sierra,” a veteran of earlier Rocky Mountain stampedes, was already en route to the Klondike as one of Mr. Hearst’s quintet of journalists. He announced that there was “no possible chance of famine” and that “the dangers and hardships and cost of getting through have been greatly exaggerated.” Miller, who was almost sixty years old, boasted that he was travelling light, with very little in the way of provisions or equipment – a fact that was to cause him great distress before the year was out.

There were further warnings. The Travellers’ Insurance Company announced it would refuse insurance to any stampeder. An Ottawa paper published, in the form of a “Miner’s Catechism,” a series of questions that every would-be prospector should ask himself before setting out for the Klondike:

“Have I a capital of at least five hundred dollars? Am I subject to any organism or chronic disease, especially rheumatism? Am I physically sound in every way and able to walk thirty miles a day with a fifty pound pack on my back? Am I willing to put up with rough fare, sleep anywhere and anyhow, do my own cooking and washing, mend my own clothes? Can I leave home perfectly free, leaving no one dependent on me in any manner for support? Can I do entirely without spirituous liquors? Can I work like a galley slave for months, if need be, on poor fare and sometimes not enough of that, and still keep up a cheerful and brave spirit? Am I pretty handy with tools and not subject to lazy fits? Can I swim and handle boats and canoes; put up with extremes of heat and cold, and bear incessant tortures from countless swarms of mosquitoes, gnats and sand flies?”

Only a fraction of the tens of thousands who streamed across the passes in the months that followed could say
yes
to these questions. Most of them were sedentary workers, clerks and salesmen and office help, but once they caught the fever they were not to be deterred by mere words, especially when many newspaper writers, egged on by local chambers of commerce, were painting the journey to the gold-fields in the most vivid and enthusiastic terms.

Ambrose Bierce was a rare exception, one of the handful of journalists who took a jaundiced view of the stampede. “The California gold hunter did good by accident and crowed to find it fame,” he wrote in the San Francisco
Examiner
. “But the blue-nosed mosquito-slapper of Greater Dawson, what is he for? Is he going to lay broad and deep the foundations of Empire [for Great Britain]? Will he bear the banner of progress into that paleocrystic waste? Will he clear the way for even a dog sled civilization and a reindeer religion? Nothing will come of him. He is a word in the wind, a brother to the fog. At the scene of his activity no memory of him will remain. The gravel that he thawed and sifted will freeze again. In the shanty that he builded, the she-wolf will rear her poddy litter, and from its eaves the moose will crop the esculent icicle unafraid. The snows will close over his trail and all be as before.”

By August 10 the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, C. N. Bliss, felt it necessary to issue a state paper warning against anyone attempting to get to the Klondike that season. Clifford Sifton, the Canadian Minister of the Interior, had already published a similar plea, but both warnings fell on deaf ears. The
Excelsior
landed in San Francisco with a second cargo of gold, and this time the newspapers did not underestimate the quantity. There was only about half a million dollars on board, but the press reports made it two and a half millions, exciting such enthusiasm that the publicity-shy William Ogilvie, who was a passenger, had to disguise himself as a crew member to escape the reporters. There was further excitement when it was learned that a U.S. government revenue cutter was escorting the
Portland
down the coast on her second trip to protect her from Chinese pirates said to be lying in wait to capture the two million dollars reported aboard her.

Such tales lent impetus to the rush which was gathering speed, snowball-fashion. When the government warning was issued, three thousand people were already hived in the erupting tent towns of Dyea and Skagway, at the foot of the passes, together with two thousand tons of baggage. Thousands of horses were already struggling, dying, and rotting on the trails. Before the warning was a fortnight old, twenty-one more steamers as well as three sailing-vessels and two scows, all jammed with men and animals and freight, had put out from Pacific coast ports, steaming towards the Lynn Canal. In one single week in mid-August, twenty-eight hundred people left Seattle for the Klondike. By September 1 nine thousand people and thirty-six thousand tons of freight had left the port.

Although few would believe it, there was by this time no chance of any traveller reaching the diggings before the following summer. This fact was conveniently glossed over by the merchants of the various coastal ports who were bidding for the Klondike outfitting trade. Every city was a madhouse. The streets of Victoria bustled with strange men – Scots, Irish, French, German, Australian, American – garbed in outlandish costumes and dragging oxen and horses through roadways piled high with sacks of provisions, knockdown boats, fur robes, and Klondike knickknackery. In Seattle the streets were crowded all night long. Unable to get lodgings, the stampeders slept in stables and washed at fire hydrants. All the coastal ports – San Francisco, Tacoma, Portland, Seattle, and Victoria – were locked in an intense struggle for the lion’s share of the booty, each city screaming that it was the only possible outfitting port for the Klondike. The Canadians cried that every would-be miner ought to buy his goods in Canada since the Klondike was on British soil and a stiff duty would be levied on American outfits crossing the line. Victoria merchants went so far as to dispatch agents to Seattle to spread this news among the stampeders who were pouring off the trains. The Americans shouted just as loudly that every miner would have to cross the isthmus of the Alaska Panhandle, where he must pay duty on Canadian goods or else pay U.S. guards a fee to accompany bonded supplies to the Canadian line.

Up and down the coast the arguments reverberated. Seattle papers published bitter editorials attacking the claims of Tacoma and San Francisco, and the rival cities retorted in kind. One San Francisco merchant displayed in his window a poster showing two stampeders. One was depicted tired and beaten at the foot of the Chilkoot, complaining: “I outfitted in Seattle.” The other was shown fresh as a daisy atop the pass, crowing triumphantly: “I bought
my
goods in San Francisco.”

But it was Seattle in the end that seized the bulk of the gold-rush trade with a campaign planned as carefully as any military exercise. Within a week of the
Portland’s
arrival the Chamber of Commerce had organized a committee to boost Seattle as the only possible outfitting port. The city’s subsequent paid advertising in the nation’s press exceeded that of its competitors fivefold, but it was the superiority of Seattle’s free advertising that won the day.

This was largely due to the secretary of the advertising committee, a veteran newspaperman of subtle ingenuity named Erastus Brainerd, a Harvard graduate who had once been an art-gallery curator. The term “public-relations man” had yet to be coined, but Brainerd was a worthy forerunner of the
PR
breed. In publicizing Seattle he left nothing to chance. He inserted advertisements in small-town newspapers until he calculated he had a total circulation for them of almost ten million. He saw that the Klondike edition of the Seattle
P-1
was sent to seventy thousand U.S. postmasters, six thousand libraries, and four thousand mayors; then, for good measure, he distributed fifteen thousand to the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroads for prospective stampeders heading for the west coast. Brainerd was a student of psychology, and one of his most successful schemes was to persuade Seattleites of recent origin to send letters back to their home towns, to friends and local editors, exhorting their former neighbours to go to the Klondike via Seattle. Brainerd made it easy to send such letters, for he wrote them himself, leaving blanks for names and signatures, supplied the postage, and even dropped them in the mailbox. Another scheme involved the sending of Klondike views, with Seattle’s compliments, as Christmas gifts to the crowned heads of Europe. This worked out satisfactorily in all cases but one: the German Kaiser refused to open his package for fear that it might contain dynamite.