Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (65 page)

There were other bankruptcies equally catastrophic. Pat Galvin, the free-spending Irishman who had sunk the profits from his Bonanza claim into a transportation company, was teetering on the edge of ruin by the spring of 1899, as were so many of the successful Klondike claim-owners who had ventured into the business world. Galvin’s first steamboat, the
Mary Ellen Galvin
, which he had designed to be the finest vessel on the river, was a complete failure; although she had four decks and was advertised as “mosquito proof,” she drew too much water to cross the Yukon flats and had to be abandoned. His second boat, Captain Irving’s
Yukoner
, lay stranded in the ice fourteen hundred miles downstream, a mutiny brewing aboard her. Galvin had planned to have one of his boats in Dawson in time to steam upriver and pick up a load of cattle he had ordered brought in over the Dalton Trail at heavy expense. But with no transportation available the animals had to be slaughtered and the meat went bad, and his plans for a Yukon packing business melted away.

An even heavier millstone around Galvin’s neck was his financial manager, James Beatty, whose silken moustache, iron-grey hair, courtly manner, and English polo-playing background had earned him the nickname of “Lord Jim.” Lord Jim was even more indulgent than Galvin. Not only did he import the finest china and bed linen for Galvin’s proposed chain of Yukon River hotels, but also he imported the best-looking girls to be had in San Francisco for himself. He did this out of frustration: he had been sending fifteen-dollar breakfasts to the bedroom of a Dawson soubrette for weeks on end as a gesture of his affection. The price was steep even in Klondike currency – the voracious young lady seemed to be eating enough for two. Lord Jim investigated and learned that this was only too true: his intended was in the habit of sharing both breakfast and bed with a faro-dealer. There was nothing to do but replace her with an import, and this was one of the reasons why the company’s auditors found forty thousand dollars unaccounted for in Lord Jim’s books. Lord Jim was arrested and charged with embezzlement, but Galvin had him released on bail and paid his way across the border. Once on Alaskan soil, Lord Jim promptly forged a cheque and lit out for South Africa with a troop of detectives behind him in what was billed as the longest manhunt on record. Galvin by now had lost everything, but he was not a man to whimper. When he learned of Lord Jim’s defection, he merely shrugged.

“He was a good fellow,” he observed.

8

Money to burn

More than one visitor to Dawson during the stampede remarked that the wealthier miners seemed to have money to burn. In this observation there was literal truth. Although there are no recorded instances of men lighting cigars with fifty-dollar bills, there are dozens of examples of others who put tens of thousands into a frame hotel, saloon, or dance hall and then watched it reduced to ashes.

Dawson’s two worst fires occurred in its gaudiest year. The winter of ’98–99 began and ended with conflagrations that destroyed, in each case, the most expensive section of the town.

The first fire took place almost exactly one year after the Thanksgiving fire of 1897 and, by coincidence, was started by the same dance-hall girl. Half a million dollars’ worth of real estate went up in smoke because Belle Mitchell set off for Lousetown leaving a candle burning in a block of wood. Three Eldorado fortunes were badly dented by the inferno that followed. Arkansas Jim Hall saw his Greentree Hotel burned to the ground. Charlie Worden saw his Worden Hotel follow. Big Alex McDonald watched his post-office building, which he rented to the government for a substantial sum, vanish in the flames. The fire roared up and down the street and back towards the hills, leaping from cabin to cabin and crib to crib along Paradise Alley, while two thousand men chopped up neighbouring structures to stop it from spreading.

In front of John Healy’s N.A.T. store the town’s newly purchased fire-fighting equipment lay in a state of disassembly; it could not be used because it had not been paid for. Building after building, in which scores of men had flung pound after pound of gold dust, toppled and crumbled because the community as a whole would not raise twelve thousand dollars for reels and hoses. Men had bet more on a single card at the faro tables.

The following day a finance company hurriedly signed a note, and a fire-fighting company of one hundred men went into operation. Dawson breathed more easily with this safeguard, but its sense of reassurance was premature. In April, when the newly trained firemen asked for better wages, the town council demurred. The firemen struck, and the fires in their boilers died. And then, at this crucial moment, late on the night of April 26, 1899, a tongue of flame shot from the bedroom of a dance-hall girl on the second floor of the Bodega Saloon. Within minutes a holocaust far worse than the town had yet known began.

Scores dashed to the river in the glare of the flames and tried to break through the ice to reach the water supply. With the boilers cold, fires had to be set to melt the frozen surface so water could be pumped to the scene. In the meantime, half of Front Street was ablaze. The temperature stood at forty-five below – so cold that the heat had little effect even on those standing close to the spreading flames. Many discovered that their fur coats were scorched and charred, and yet they felt nothing. There was no breath of wind, and the tongues of flame leaped vertically into the air like flashes of lightning, causing clouds of steam to condense into an icy fog which soon encompassed most of the city. Within this white envelope the ghostly and frantic figures of the fire-fighters dashed about ineffectually against the background of the crackling fire. As the dance halls and saloons began to char and totter, hogsheads of liquor were overturned, and whiskey ran into the streets, where it instantly froze solid in the biting cold. Behind dance-hall row, Paradise Alley was aflame again, and the prostitutes poured, naked and screaming, from their smoking cribs into the arms of the fire-fighters, who ripped off their own coats to bundle up the terrified women.

The men on the river had meanwhile burned their way to the water supply; the pumps were started, and the hoses, long in disuse, slowly filled. But as the water was ice-cold and unwarmed by boiler heat, it froze solidly long before reaching the nozzles. Then there came a ripping, rending sound as the expanding ice tore open the hoses, followed by a moan of despair as the crowd realized the town was doomed.

“What’s to be done?” cried Tim Chisholm, as the flames darted towards his Aurora Saloon.

Captain Cortlandt Starnes of the North West Mounted Police, plump and red-faced, his mustachios stiff with his frosted breath, supplied the answer: “Blow up the buildings in front of the fire!”

A dog-team went racing to the A.C. warehouse for fifty pounds of Giant blasting-powder so that Starnes and his police could demolish the Aurora and Alex McDonald’s new building to leave a blank space in front of the moving wall of flame.

By this time the fire was occupying the energies of the entire town. Thousands struggled in and out of the condemned buildings carrying articles saved from the blaze until the marsh behind the business section was littered with chattels. Many were offering ten dollars an hour for help, and any two-horse team and driver could command one hundred dollars an hour. David Doig, the fastidious manager of the Bank of British North America, pledged one thousand dollars to anyone who could save the building, but the offer was made in vain.

The town shuddered with earthquake reverberations as the dynamite did its work in the face of the advancing flames. The firemen, unable to pump water, worked ahead of the explosion, soaking blankets in mud puddles to try to save the Fairview Hotel, which stood on the edge of the conflagration. In its adjoining stables were hogsheads of rum which Belinda Mulroney used to keep her horses warm and working during the chill winter days; she poured it by the dipperful down the grateful gullets of the fire-fighters.

At last the groaning multitude saw that further effort was useless. Half freezing, half roasting, they stood like lost souls on the edge of the Pit, their faces glowing redly in the reflected light of the vagrant flames. Before their eyes, Front Street, with all its memories, was being consigned to the inferno.

Bill McPhee’s Pioneer Saloon, one of Dawson’s oldest log buildings, crumbled to ashes and was gone in a shower of sparks, the piles of gold and sacks of mail stacked behind the bar buried beneath the charred timbers.

“Gather up the money, the town is going to go!” Belinda Mulroney had called out as McPhee made a final dash into his building.

But this was not what he was after.

“To hell with the money!” he shouted. “I want to save my moose-head,” and back he staggered with the prized trophy. It meant far more to him than fleeting gold, for it had hung above the bar since opening day – that day which seemed so long ago, when Dawson was young, and the cheechakos were in the minority, and his old, good friends Spencer and Densmore were alive, and the men from Circle City crowded around the glowing stove and made the Pioneer Saloon their home. Could it have been only two years past?

Harry Ash’s Northern Saloon, whose sawdust floor had glittered with gold dust, went the way of the Pioneer; and across the street the Aurora was blown to bits to make a firebreak – the Aurora that had once been Jimmy Kerry’s at the dawn of Dawson’s brief history. And now the Tivoli was crumbling, the Tivoli once called the Combination, where John Mulligan had produced
Stillwater Willie
and Cad Wilson had danced and sung; and the Opera House, with its famous gallery of private boxes, where Edgar Mizner had gambled his career away; and the Dominion Saloon and Gambling House, where the stakes were so high that eight Mounties had sometimes to be posted to keep order.

Walter Washburn, a faro-dealer who had invested ten thousand dollars in the Opera House, watched with quiet resignation as it was devoured by the flames. “Well,” he said, “that’s the way I made it, and that’s the way it’s gone; so what the hell!”

As if to underline this statement, the vault within the tottering Bank of British North America burst wide open in the fierce heat and the contents spewed out into the debris – gold dust and nuggets scooped from the bowels of Bonanza by moiling men, heavy gold watches from the vests of gamblers and saloon-keepers left here for safekeeping, jewelled stickpins and bracelets and dance-hall girls’ diamonds bought with favours and with wine and with music and now fused inseparably into the molten mass that oozed from the shattered strongbox to mingle with the steaming clay.

One hundred and seventeen buildings were destroyed that night, their loss totalling more than one million dollars. In the cold light of the ensuing day, the weary townspeople crept from their homes to view the havoc. The fire had died away, leaving a smoking ruin where the business section had been. On the north edge of this black scar was the Monte Carlo, scorched but still standing: on the south the Fairview Hotel, a grotesque sight completely sheathed in frozen mud. In its lobby, scores of exhausted and homeless men and women were sleeping in two-hour shifts. The river marked the western boundary of the fire, the littered swamp the eastern. In the heart of the city was an enormous gap, from the ashes of which a large number of shapeless sawdust-covered piles arose at scattered intervals. They revealed themselves as immense blocks of ice which had been cut from the river for summertime use and covered with sawdust as insulation. Of all things, they alone had survived the fearful heat.

At once the town began to rebuild. Less than twelve hours after his saloon was destroyed, Tom Chisholm had erected a big tent labelled “Aurora” and was doing business again. Although nails sold for twenty-five cents each, the familiar ring of saw and hammer was quickly heard on Front Street.

But the town that rose from the ashes – a newer and sturdier metropolis – was not the same town; it would never be the same again. To walk down Front Street, Senator Jerry Lynch remarked, “was like walking for a block or two in the Strand.” Sewers were installed, the roads macadamized, and new sidewalks built. The shops were full of fancy goods displayed behind plate-glass windows. Schools were going up. Scores of handsome women sauntered up and down in fashions imported directly from Paris. And when the river broke, more and more steamboats lined the riverbank – as many as eleven at a time; already the trip from St. Michael had been cut from twenty-one to sixteen days.

Dawson was no longer a camp of tents and log cabins: dressed lumber and plate glass were replacing bark and canvas. The dog had had his day; horses now moved easily through the dry streets, drawing huge dray wagons. Houses had parlours, parlours had pianos, pianos stood on carpeted floors. Men began to wear white shirts, polish their boots, shave their beards, and trim their moustaches.

Although prices had been high that winter, with onions selling for a dollar and a half apiece and milk at four dollars a quart; although paper had been so short that the
Nugget
appeared for a month on butchers’ wrapping-stock, yet Dawson was no longer the isolated community it had once been. In March one man actually bicycled without mishap all the way to Skagway in a mere eight days. Already there was talk of a tunnel under the Chilkoot Pass, and a company was floated to drill one, but the scheme was abandoned because the White Pass Railway was swiftly becoming a reality. Thirty-five thousand men were at work on the grade between Skagway and the Whitehorse Rapids, carving the right of way out of solid rock and blowing hundred-and-twenty-foot cliffs bodily away. Before the year was out, men would be riding in style where two seasons before horses had perished by the thousands. As for Skagway, it had become a respectable and law-abiding town of sixteen hundred people, with electric lights and a water supply.

And now the old-timers, who had witnessed the rise and fall of Fortymile, and who had seen Circle City turn from a frontier town of logs to a sophisticated community, began to get an uneasy sensation in their spines. It was as if the whole cycle of their experience was being repeated. This feeling was communicated to the cheechakos, who, by virtue of their year in the Klondike, were already thinking of themselves as sourdoughs. Some had spent the winter in hastily built cabins in distant valleys, sinking shafts on barren claims far from the golden axis of Bonanza and Eldorado; some had found work, as labourers in the gold-fields (the glut of men had driven wages down from fifteen dollars a day to a mere hundred dollars a month), or as clerks in stores, or as bartenders or dockworkers; some had done nothing but sit in their cabins slowly consuming their thousand pounds of food, wondering what to do. Now a sense of anticlimax spread among all of them. Thousands walked the wooden sidewalks seeking work, but there was less and less work to be had, and a stale taste began to grow in the mouths of those same men who, a year before, had tumbled pell-mell from the boats with shouts of triumph and anticipation.