Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields: A Multicultural Adventure

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Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields: A Multicultural Adventure

Steven C. Levi

Praeger

      

       A Multicultural Adventure

 . 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levi, Steven C. Boom and bust in the Alaska goldfields : a multicultural adventure / Steven C. Levi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-313-34544-9 (alk. paper) 1. Alaska—Gold discoveries. 2. Frontier and pioneer life—Alaska. 3. Gold miners—Alaska—History. 4. Adventure and adventurers—Alaska—History. I. Title. F909.L43 2008 979.8’03—dc22 2007028640 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2008 by Steven C. Levi All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2007028640 ISBN-13: 978-0-313-34544-9 First published in 2008 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10

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For my wife who never REALLY believed this would EVER get published!

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Preface

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Chapter One: The Madness Begins

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Chapter Two: Juneau

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Chapter Three: The Rush North

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Chapter Four: Booze and Bootlegging

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Chapter Five: Skagway and Dyea

49

Chapter Six: The Valdez Stampede

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Chapter Seven: The Kotzebue Rush

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Chapter Eight: Nome

89

Chapter Nine: Women and Minorities

111

Chapter Ten: The Natives and the Argonauts

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Chapter Eleven: The Fairbanks Boom

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Chapter Twelve: Law and Order

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Chapter Thirteen: The Fourth Estate

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Chapter Fourteen: The End

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Appendix

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Contents

Notes Bibliography Index

201 225 235 Photo essay follows page 88.

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The Alaska Gold Rush is the chronicle of humans digging in the muck for the future. It is the tale of drunkards and heroes, paupers and magnates, gamblers and godfearing missionaries—and sometimes all the same person. It was the drama of all that we hope and fear played out by men and women drawn north by the most irresistible of forces: GOLD. —Warren Sitka, Alaskan humorist

Far to the north of the 48 contiguous states is a land shrouded with the miasma of adventure. It is a land of glaciers the size of some states and fish the size of some cities. Its history is steeped in intrigue, scoundrels abound, and things that could never occur anywhere else on earth happened here. It has everything one has come to expect of an exotic port—and more. This land is Alaska. Even though Alaska’s history is brimming with fascinating incidents, colorful characters, eccentric events, and strange twists of fate, not that many historians have been able to get the message across. This is understandable because most historians are not writers and most writers are not historians. The problem is compounded by the fact that, over the decades, history teachers at all levels of the American educational system have achieved the impossible: they have managed to make history b-o-r-i-n-g. The reality is that history is the most interesting and relevant of all academic subjects. It is the drama of real people solving real problems with solutions that could be stripped out of any age and used today. It is also entertaining, humorous, sad, twisted and, at the same, informative and offers creative solutions to modern problems. A small part of the fascinating field of history is offered here. This book is not intended to be an overview of the Alaska Gold Rush, roughly from the late 1870s–1944. Rather, it is meant to provide a myriad of glimpses into the lives of people and events of the age. This is a book of popular history rather than

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another tome of Western Americana. If you find it interesting, don’t thank the writer; credit the 100,000 men and women who rushed north in search of the precious yellow metal a century ago. No historian can complete a book without assistance and, in that respect, this manuscript is no different than any other book of history. The author’s job was made infinitely easier by the four-person staff of the National Archives, Alaska Region: Thomas E. Wiltsey, R. Bruce Parham, Diana Kodiak, and Sally Dunn. Diane Brenner and Myna Jacobs at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art as well as Bruce Merrell and Dan Fleming at the Z. J. Loussac Library in Anchorage were also indispensable. Other assistance came from Mike Burwell, Cecile Richter, Carrie Keene, India Spartz at the Alaska State Library, and the staff at the Alaska State Archives over the years including Larry Hibpshman, Pattee Larsen, Karen Matter, and Dean Dawson. Also to be thanked are Kathy Hunter, Sylvie Savage, George Guthridge, George Harper, Jean Oldham, Melanie Roller, Bonnie Jack, Archbishop Hurley, Brother Charles P. McBride, C. S. C., Margaret Gardiner, Assistant Archivist, Sister of Providence, Seattle as well as Heinz Noonan, Danny Daniels, David Powers, and the hundreds of librarians and archivists across the country that answered my letters.

One

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In the beginning there was the gold. But that wasn’t a story until a white man found it and told a friend not to tell anyone else. Then the whole world knew and then there was a story. —Warren Sitka, Alaskan humorist

ALASKA. Even today, the word sets the imagination of the world ablaze. It is the Land of the Midnight Sun, where Eskimos eat blubber and polar bears prowl wind-swept sheets of the polar ice pack. Here glaciers calve into ice-floe choked sounds where walrus bellow and orca cruise the depths in search of king salmon and seal pups while overhead the Aurora Borealis dances from horizon to horizon across the winter sky. But it is more than that; it is the land of the Alaska Gold Rush, where nuggets the size of goose eggs littered the ground, where men froze to death in search of the elusive yellow metal, and dancehall girls lured overnight millionaires into marriage. Honky-tonk pianos punctuated the howl of the north wind in communities that were half tent and half ramshackle collections of driftwood, whalebone, and packing cases. It was a time of whiskey and gold and long, lonely trails behind a dogsled. It was, in a word, ALASKA. In truth, the Alaska Gold Rush was all of that. It was a riotous time with saints and scoundrels living side by side. In the cities, rugged men and women walked on planks set across streets so deep with spring mud that horses could be swallowed whole. On the tundra, life was a living hell with mosquitoes, gnats, white socks, and biting flies that descended on warm-blooded creatures in clouds. On the flipside of the seasons the temperature could drop to 50 or 60 degrees below zero, cold enough to freeze a can of motor oil so solid that it could be cut in half with a saw. With the wind blasting at 100 miles an hour, the chill factor could go well below 100 degrees below zero,

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Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

cold enough to freeze a person to death in a matter of minutes if he could not find proper shelter. In whiteout conditions, visibility could be cut to a foot in a matter of seconds. Then there was the gold, unending rivers of it from dust to nuggets so heavy a man could not lift one alone. It could be panned out of the sand on a beach, dug out of the ground, plucked from quartz veins deep in mining tunnels, or found just lying around in a stream bed. There was enough to build an empire. Juneau alone took five times more gold out of the Treadwell and Alaska–Juneau mines than the United States paid for all of Alaska—and that was twenty years before the booms in Nome and Fairbanks or the hundreds of other strikes that stretched from the Arctic Ocean to the Inside Passage. Besides the gold there was the adventure of it. Afterall, this was Alaska, the land where anything was possible. The gold seekers were called Argonauts, taken from the mythical crew of Jason and his quest for the golden fleece. The name stuck. Not a lot of Argonauts became wealthy, but every man, woman, or child that was touched by the spell of the northland was changed forever. Each Argonaut took a bit of the north home with them to Des Moines, Paris, Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Tokyo, Seattle, San Francisco, and a thousand other cities and towns. Around the world, Alaska became the symbol of adventure, where dreams could come true and wealth was within the reach of the common man. To this day, travelers from the four corners of the earth flood to Alaska believing that as they walk the streets of Juneau, Nome, or Fairbanks, they may very well hear the ghostly honky-tonk of the saloon pianos echoing across a century drawing them back to the wild and woolly days when the very word “Alaska” set the imagination of the world ablaze! Writing a comprehensive book on the Alaska Gold Rush would be like trying to gather every great painting in the world in a single gallery. It cannot be done. While other gold rushes are short in longevity and compact in area, the Alaska Gold Rush defies this classification. It began in the 1870s and lasted until the Second World War—April 8, 1944, when the Alaska Juneau Mine closed permanently.1 Further, during those seven decades, strikes and boomtowns erupted into existence across an area one fifth the size of the contiguous United States—called the “Lower 48” by Alaskans—and faded just as fast. The historical task is made even more difficult by a contradictory combination of circumstances. On one hand, there is a significant lack of primary material that has survived. Though there are diaries, letters, and local newspapers, for the most part they are scattered in location and sketchy in details. The Argonauts took their letters and diaries home to Denver and Atlanta and New York where their progeny placed them in local libraries. Just finding the diaries and letters is a lifetime task in itself. The traditional historical record is just as sketchy. Not that many newspapers of the era still exist. Worse, the few newspapers for extinct boomtowns that can still be found allude to tales of the locals, which are lost forever. Incomplete court cases detail legal battles for which there is no resolution because the documentation is missing and many scoundrels are only known by a few allusions in a variety of sources. Some personal memorabilia fill in a few of the gaps but, for the most part, the historian is left to recreate the saga of the Alaska Gold Rush with a jigsaw collection of documentary pieces, none of which fit perfectly.

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On the other hand, the sheer number of newspapers which covered the Alaska Gold Rush is staggering. Presses from around the world had their own special correspondent, usually an Argonaut from the area who wrote occasional columns or letters home. Even though many of these newspapers are on microfilm, it is still impossible for any historian to read them all, even if he could speak every language on earth. Then there is the ongoing confusion regarding the Klondike Strike in the Yukon Territory of Canada and the Alaska Gold Rush. Many people believe that the Klondike Strike is a part of the Alaska Gold Rush. Tending to confuse matters even more, the rush to the Klondike began in the Alaskan communities of Dyea and Skagway or a steamship trip up the Yukon River through Alaska to Dawson. In the sense that men and women rushed north for gold, the strikes are similar. But that is the only similarity. The Klondike Strike was centered in Dawson and lasted less than two years. Then the rush was on to Nome and later, Fairbanks. The Klondike was popularized by Jack London and Robert Service, whose names have become household words. The Alaska Gold Rush was best illustrated by Rex Beach, a writer who was more famous in his day for screenplays than novels and short stories. While many Americans have seen his movies, most would be hard pressed to name even one of his thirty-odd novels. For the sake of simplicity, it could be said that the Alaska Gold Rush had three major strikes—Juneau, Nome, and Fairbanks—and hundreds of minor rushes ranging from hundreds of men flooding up river systems to a handful of sourdoughs standing kneedeep in ice-cold streams sloshing water around their pans. Millions in gold were taken out of boomtowns that no longer exist or have turned into rustic communities whose residents number less than a hundred. The boom days of Iditarod, Flat, Candle, Ophir, Arctic City, Melozi, Galena, Ruby, Eagle, and Circle have passed. For some, all that is left is a single newspaper on microfilm; for others, only an indication on the map of Alaska that here, once, was a vibrant community. History is replete with ironies and there are few great events which do not owe their success to flukes, quirks, or accidents. The Alaska Gold Rush is no different in this respect. In fact, Juneau, Nome, and Fairbanks all owe their discovery to three twists of fate. For Juneau it was in 1880 that the “inveterate drunkard” Richard T. Harris and the illiterate Joe Juneau were contracted to look for gold under the watchful eye of Chief Kowee of the Auk Indians. But the two white men were not dedicated to the task at hand. On their first trip into the area, the unlikely partners took a boat to the present site of Juneau, quickly traded their food and supplies for booze and spent the next three weeks on a binge. When they returned to Sitka and told their employer, George Pilz, that there was no gold to be found, Chief Kowee, who had secretly followed the two drunks back to Sitka in his own boat, emphatically told Pilz that his two men hadn’t so much as gotten off the beach much less sampled the creek where Kowee knew there was gold. (Kowee was interested in the whiskey and blankets George Pilz had promised any Natives who could lead him to gold and therefore had a stake in the discovery.) Juneau and Harris were sent back under notice that if they didn’t look precisely where Chief Kowee instructed them, they would not be paid. When they went back

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Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

the second time, the two sots discovered what turned out to be the richest gold find in Alaskan history and started an industry that lasted until 1944. Two decades later came Elbridge Truman Barnette, known as E. T. Barnette, an entrepreneur and con man. Barnette convinced a gullible steamboat captain that his ship could easily ascend the Tanana River without striking bottom. However, when it became apparent that Barnette did not know what he was talking about, the steamboat captain evicted the protesting Barnette along with 135 tons of his supplies onto the nearest shore—which happened to be on the Chena Slough. As Barnette’s supplies were being off loaded, a sourdough by the name of Felix Pedro suddenly appeared on the bank. He had made—and subsequently lost—a major find in the area and was wondering if Barnette would have any food to sell since he, Pedro, did not want to walk the 360 miles round trip to Circle for supplies. Then and there was established Barnette’s cache, later to become known as Fairbanks. The discovery of gold in what became known as Nome had an origin just as convoluted as the other strikes. Perhaps the man most responsible for the Nome Strike was an Englishman who never even made it to the northland and died six years before the Alaska Gold Rush set the world ablaze. Further, it was the failure of this Englishman that brought about the Nome Strike, not his success. The Englishman in question was Cyrus Field. In his formative years, Field was driven by his dream of seeing a transatlantic cable for telegraphic communication link Europe with America. Further, he envisioned a cable system where messages would speed along wires strung across around the world on land and laid on the bottom of the seas. A successful merchant, he retired at 33 to fulfill his fantasy and formed the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company. After three failed expeditions, he was able to lay a working cable between England and Ireland in 1858. (It failed soon afterwards.) Then, in 1866, after the American Civil War, he successfully laid the first transatlantic cable. Even as Field was laying his submarine cable, his competitors were licking their financial chops. While the undersea cable was certainly an admirable idea, it was a very expensive proposition. A more economic idea was a landline linking the towns and cities of world. Whether Field succeeded or failed, there was still going to be a need for a spider web of telegraphic wires on land to link the world. Realizing that a less expensive means of running a telegraph cable from North America to Europe would be across Siberia, Western Union raised money to link North America with Asia under the narrow stretch of icy water that separated the two continents. Part of the expedition to lay the cable was a 22-year old Civil War veteran by the name of Daniel B. Libby. On September 16, 1866, Libby and a Western Union construction crew of about 40 men landed at Port Clarence, about 100 miles north of Nome, and spent the next ten months stretching wire along 23 miles of the Seward Peninsula. Then came a tortuous winter. The expedition had not packed properly and in April, months before the mantle of ice broke on the Bering Sea, the small party ran out of food. Facing imminent starvation, Libby stopped work on the telegraph and sent his men out, individually and in different directions, to forage for food. “It was with great difficulty that they got enough to eat,” Libby said of his men and it was no small blessing when the supply ship arrived on June 28, 1867. But there was bad

The Madness Begins

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news aboard. Cyrus Field had succeeded in laying the cable and Western Union was abandoning its trans-Siberian project. On July 2, 1867, the Libby party, less the two men who had been interred “beneath the frozen sod,” departed. But the winter on the Seward Peninsula had not been without some promise. Libby and another man working for Western Union, Baron Otto Von Bendeleben, had seen “unmistakable evidence” of gold. For the next 30 years, Libby talked of going back and searching for the elusive yellow metal. Then, in 1897, when the story of the Klondike Strike captured the imagination of the world, Libby set about organizing an expedition north. He had no trouble finding partners and investors and on August 18, 1897, Libby and three partners left San Francisco for Port Clarence—with enough supplies “to last the four-man party for several years.” Libby clearly was not going to face starvation again. By July of 1898, the men had struck it rich.2 With the success of the Libby party there was an undistinguished rush which led to the formation of miner’s district and community of Council City. It was on his way to this remote outpost of civilization that one of the so-called Three Lucky Swedes made the discovery that established Nome. Eric Lindblom, a Swedish tailor, jumped ship on his way to Kotzebue and hid out with a family of Eskimos until his shipmates gave up the search for him. Hitching a ride with his hosts to Council City, Lindblom made the first discovery on the future site of Nome when the Eskimos stopped at the mouth of the Snake River to fish. Lindblom returned to the spot in August of 1898 with two partners, Jafet Lindeberg and John Brynteson, and made the strike that made history. Though the Alaska Gold Rush lasted longer, it was the Klondike Strike that first captured the attention of the world. Word of the gold in the north came to the lower states like a thunderclap from a clear sky. In June of 1897, two gold ships were headed south from St. Michael with the news of the fabulous strike in the north. The Excelsior was headed for San Francisco and the Portland for Seattle. The Portland arrived first but news of the gold ship had already reached Seattle. So intense was the interest that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer chartered a tug to interview the miners before the Portland even docked. By the time the ship tied up at Schwabacher’s Dock at 6 a.m. on July 17, 5,000 people who had read any of the three special editions of the Post-Intelligencer were waiting to see the millionaires and the ship that was coming into harbor with “a ton of gold.” (In actuality, it was closer to two tons.) “Show us the gold!” the crowd cried as men came struggling down the gangplank weighed down under hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gold. Many of the miners obliged. For the next week, anyone with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer could read of the rags-to-riches stories of the Klondike miners. Synchronicity also increased the drawing power of the north. America had been drained of its vitality by years of poverty, depression, and a lack of national direction. But the gold in the north changed all of that. Overnight the world was contagious with Klondike Fever. The river banks were lined with gold stones where “nuggets are reported as big as potatoes.”3 All you had to do was reach down and pick them up. A man could become a millionaire overnight. Within two weeks, more than l,500 prospectors had left Seattle for the Klondike and there were nine more ships in the harbor ready to sail. The greatest gold rush in world history was on! But this was the Klondike Strike, not the Alaska Gold Rush and the man who made the Klondike Strike history was Erastus Brainerd, a member of the Seattle Chamber

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of Commerce with an eye to advertising and publicity. He was the man responsible for the hyperbole which was to make the Klondike the byword for gold in the Northland. He had good reason for his actions. As far as Brainerd and the Seattle Chamber of Commerce were concerned, the Klondike Strike was an opportunity to be mined from behind a sales counter. The merchants of Seattle were quick to realize they could capitalize on their proximity to Klondike and mounted a sophisticated publicity campaign which would have been the envy of any city a century later. San Francisco and Portland, equally as far from the gold fields for Americans coming across country, simply could not compete with the innovation and enthusiasm Seattle put into the contest to attract Argonaut dollars. As a result, Seattle boomed and became known as the gateway to the Klondike and the Klondike became the catch phrase for any gold strike north of Seattle. But it was the Alaska Gold Rush that was to last. Dawson’s heyday was less than two years in length. By comparison, Juneau’s golden days lasted seventy years while Nome and Fairbanks still have active gold extraction industries one hundred years after the initial discoveries. Alaska has also captured the market on imagination. To this day the mystique of the Alaska Gold Rush draws a million tourists a year, 300,000 of them up the Inside Passage alone. What makes the Alaska Gold Rush so difficult for many in the Lower 48 to grasp intellectually is that it took place over so large an area. The distance from Juneau to Nome is over 1,000 miles by air and considerably farther—and longer—by dogsled. Seattle is 1,500 air miles south of Anchorage. Dawson, the heart of the Klondike strike, required 3,000 miles of steamship travel because the Argonauts had to go north up the Inside Passage and then cut across the North Pacific to Unalaska and then traverse the Bering Sea to St. Michael near the mouth of the Yukon River where they would change ships for their last 1,600 miles up the Yukon River to Dawson. While Dawson may be within 300 miles of Fairbanks, it is still is 400 miles from Nome— and that’s by air. By Yukon River, it’s closer to 2,000 miles. Further, to fully understand Alaska, presently as well as during the Alaska Gold Rush, it is necessary to comprehend the two undefeatable obstacles of the northland: distance and tundra. In the Lower 48 today, a trip of 100 miles can be viewed as a little less than two hours by car. The average American climbs into an automobile and then pulls onto a freeway. At 70 miles per hour the driver can leisurely eat up the 100 miles of blacktop in about an hour and a half. Along the way there are gas stations with restrooms, restaurants offering food ranging from fried chicken to caviar, more than a dozen movie theaters, a handful of hospitals and medical clinics along with dozens of parks, schools, and playgrounds. Even today, in Alaska 100 miles can be like stepping back in time. First, even though Alaska is one-fifth the size of the Lower 48, a century after the gold rush it still only has 15,000 miles of road. By comparison, there are fewer miles of road in the entire state of Alaska than in a medium-sized city in the Lower 48. Ninety percent of Alaska is unreachable by a road that connects with the Alaska Highway and the Lower 48. This landmass is called the “Bush” and more than one-third of the population of Alaska still live in this remote areas. For the people who live in the Bush, covering the

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100 miles is more expensive and covers substantially different terrain. As an example, for an Alaskan, going from Anchorage, the largest city in the state, to Lime Village, a community of 48, it means jumping into a bush plane and flying 100 miles due west. Along the way, the Alaskan will fly over the rugged Alaska Range where the only sign of human beings are the crumpled wrecks of the airplanes which did not make it through treacherous Merrill Pass. Landing in Lime Village, the traveler will discover a community that has running water but only a few flush toilets and no restaurants or theaters. There are no doctors or hospitals here either. There is a school and a store but no hotel so unless the visitor knows someone in the village, he or she may be spending the night at the airstrip or on the floor of the school gym. For the residents of Lime Village, everything from toothpicks to prescription drugs has to come in by barge or airplane. The barge is efficient when it comes to moving cargo in tons, but Lime Village does not buy that many supplies by the ton. When the once-a-year barge does come to the village, the vessel can only arrive during the 120 days a year that the Bering Sea and the rivers are ice-free. Within that 120 day window, the cargo must take a circuitous route to arrive at Lime Village. Coming north from Seattle, the cargo slips through the Aleutian Island chain 800 miles southwest of Anchorage before proceeding 350 miles north through the Bering Sea. Then it winds its way up 150 miles of the Kuskokwim and Stony rivers. Simply in terms of logistics and economics, this means that the barge can only come in once a year. The rest of year, the only way into and out of Lime Village is by airplane. Then there is the tundra. Once again, the same person driving the 100 miles in the Lower 48 would probably pass through a few smaller towns or even a city or two. These communities grew up where they did because there was an economic reason for them to sink their roots at these particular locations. Then, from these humble roots, the small communities grew to the mighty oaks they are today. These towns could have been built anywhere in the area; it just happened that someone chose the one particular spot where the city was established. In Alaska, the reverse is true. Communities could not be established anywhere someone had a inkling to build a cabin. Alaskans have never had the option of being able to sink their roots wherever they chose. Though Alaska is staggering in geographic size, virtually of the land is either mountain or tundra. The Lower 48 equivalent of tundra is swamp. You can’t walk on it or drive through it. Those who try find themselves slowly sinking into the ooze. Complicating life on the tundra are the mosquitoes, gnats, and biting flies that appear in clouds. Wild game is limited as well. Unlike the Indians of the forests of the Lower 48, Alaska Natives have never been able to walk into the wilderness and kill what they needed to eat. Wild game is seasonal. The Natives had to wait for the salmon to run and the berries to ripen. Caribou could only be hunted when the herd migrated through the area, which happened once a year. Other than an occasional moose that happened to stumble through the settlement, the food supply was limited. As a result, Native communities were small because the amount of game available was limited and the solid ground on which to build the community was restricted. When the Russians came to Alaska, they quickly discovered what the Natives already knew: it was not possible to build large communities in Alaska. Then the Russians did exactly what the Native had done before them. They scattered their numbers to those

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locations which could support a small community and constructed their towns on these few dry acres. Taking a look at the map of Alaska, it is easy to see that those communities are still few and far between. During the Alaska Gold Rush, the prospectors faced the twin problems of distance and tundra much the same way the Natives did. They traveled slowly and circuitously, lived in small communities, cursed the mosquitoes and biting flies, and used dog sleds during the winter because that was the fastest way to travel. Thus the Alaska Gold Rush is the story of small, far-flung communities sitting on dry islands in a sea of tundra too wet to cross six months out of the year. These communities lasted as long as the mineral resource and, when the gold ran out, so did the luck of the boomtowns. Sometimes the town was just a collection of cabins near a water source. Other times it lived long enough to have a mayor, newspaper, post office and hospital. But in the end, almost all of them disappeared, their hulking remains falling to ruin and scattering into the ground cover. Further, for a full understanding of the Alaska Gold Rush, it is important to keep in mind two important features which distinguish it from other similar events in other eras. First, the age of the gold seekers, the Argonauts, was older. While the average miner who rushed to the California gold fields was in his twenties, in Alaska he was in his thirties. This did not necessarily make the Alaska Gold Rush a more mature strike, but it did mean that the average man or woman came north with a decade more life skills. This transformed the Alaska Gold Rush from one of a mad rush for gold to a premeditated attempt to take advantage of the rush in an entrepreneurial sense. In Nome, for instance, one-third of the men not engaged in mining were merchants or clerks and one-fifth were cooks, waiters or bartenders. Another 15 percent were listed as professionals.4 Further, the social make-up of Alaska’s population varied from community to community. Juneau was a well-established city by 1900 with an ingrained social and political network. On the other hand, Nome and Skagway had populations of destitute Argonauts which could have reached as high as one-third of the population. These individuals were marooned in Alaska as there was no inexpensive way out. So they stayed and many, through lack of other options, became part of the criminal element. Other communities didn’t survive long enough to have a social network. A last point to be mentioned with regard to the Alaska Gold Rush is the difference between a “stampede” and a “rush.” Though both words are often used interchangeably there are very different. A “rush,” as in the Alaska Gold Rush means an unorganized movement of prospectors into an area. A “stampede” indicates some form of organization. A rush is a mob on the move while a stampede is an organized movement. The Valdez Stampede was organized. A miner’s council was elected, law and order established, trials were held, and the population moving across the glacier respected the property of others because that was the law. On the other hand there was the Kotzebue Rush. Here there was no law and order. It was every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. No property was safe and gun play was not uncommon. There was no miner’s council and thus no law and order. It was anarchy in its purest form. Overall, the history of Alaska is the story of both rushes and stampedes. Alaska, as historians note, was discovered four times. First came furs and then there were the fish.

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Gold followed and finally, in the second half of the twentieth century, came the oil. Each of these discoveries touched off an era of rushes and stampedes. Combined they have made the history Alaska one of boom-to-bust and then to boom again. Today, as the oil industry continues to downsize the Alaskan economy, Alaskans are already looking forward to the next boom and anticipating history to repeat itself with another era of both rushes and stampedes.

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

Joe Juneau was always getting fascinated by some new squaw, and between hooch and squaws he never had a cent to get away (from Sitka) on.1 —George Pilz

The story of the discovery of gold in what is now Juneau, like so many other stories of Alaska, is the mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. Here was the saga of a most unlikely melange of individuals. There was a German-educated metallurgist who had spent a year in a San Francisco jail awaiting trail for forgery, two drunks who would trade food for liquor, and a Native willing to paddle 200 miles in some of the most treacherous waters of North America for 100 blankets. Together these individuals precipitated a tale so astounding that if a Hollywood writer had dared to present the facts in unadorned fashion, no producer would have touched the project. The metallurgist was George E. Pilz. Born the fourth of six children of a forester of modest means in Saxony, his father’s death forced him to become a choirboy at the Royal Saxon Cathedral in Dresden. The cathedral paid for his education in Freiberg and eventually he graduated with an engineering and metallurgical degree. Contracted to come to the United States, he invented a water jacket furnace which he did not patent and the idea was subsequently stolen from him by the Pacific Iron Works of San Francisco. Later he worked in the Comstock Lode in Nevada and, while in New Mexico, exposed the “Arnold” Diamond Swindle. Then he moved to Ventura, California, where he “opened up the first flowing oil” in the area only to have the United States government declare his claim to be “government property.” After that, he headed north in 1876, for the Black Hills of South Dakota. [Author’s note: These claims were all made by Pilz in his memoirs. None of these incidents can be corroborated with any existing historical documentation.]

12

Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

The next winter, convalescing from an attack of inflammatory rheumatism in San Francisco, Pilz was recognized by a man with whom he had worked in Placer County, Nicholas Haley. Haley had been working with Pilz but disappeared after leaving to celebrate a payday in Sacramento several years earlier. Haley, Pilz learned, had ended up broke in Sacramento and had enlisted in the army. Sent to Alaska, Haley was subsequently discharged in Sitka where he had discovered some gold. Allegedly he had the nuggets to prove it. The gold interested Pilz and he tried to get more information on Alaska. There were no books on Alaska in the local libraries so he sought information from United States government sources. He was finally able to find “A Report of the U.S. Commissioner on the Resource of Alaska” wherein he found a paragraph on Sitka which proclaimed it “a barren desolate country, where there was not vegetation for a bird to build his nest.” Pilz confronted Haley with this paragraph and “accused him of lying to me,” whereupon Haley took him to meet other members of the company that had just mustered out in Sitka. After being convinced that there was gold in Sitka, Pilz bought into Haley’s claim and went north in 1878. For the next three years, Pilz prospected throughout Southeast Alaska, primarily by passing the word among the Tlingits that he would pay “a hundred pair of Hudson Bay Co.’s blankets and employment of the tribe” if they would assist him in finding gold. On a man-per-man basis, this was $1 per day plus “a ration of three hard tack and a cup of seal oil.”2 It was tempting offer and Natives from all over Southeast Alaska came to Sitka with stones they believed to be gold. In 1880, Kowee, Chief of the Auks, came to Pilz with “some fairly high grade quartz ore,” that looked promising. Pilz decided to take a chance on Kowee’s sample but, as fate would have it, all of his experienced prospectors were in the field. The only man left in Sitka he could use was Joe Juneau who, at that moment, was “fascinated with a squaw” and probably would not have gone alone. Thus, he would need a partner and the only other person available was a poor choice at best, Richard T. Harris, “whom [Pilz] had discharged all ready a number of times, as a inveterate drunkard.” Juneau, one-quarter Indian, was “no scholar & did not know how to read or write” and Harris was a man of questionable virtue. Harris had been a clerk for Anaconda but alcohol and “some crookedness” had forced to leave. Stampeding north to the Cassiar he lived by “sponging off from others” until he was forced to leave. [The Cassiar Strike was in 1860, 30 years before the Klondike.] Drifting into Wrangell, Harris had encountered Juneau and later Pilz. Juneau could have been prospecting in the area as early as 1874. Pilz hired Juneau and Harris along with “2 more siwashes” to investigate Kowee’s claim. Then Pilz left for San Francisco. When Pilz returned a month later, he found Juneau and Harris in Sitka anxiously awaiting his arrival for their money. They had some gold which they swore they got two miles from the beach but claimed “they could not get over the steep mountain” to where Kowee had said the gold was located. Further, according to Juneau and Harris, when they had returned to where they had left Pilz’s boat and supplies, “the tide had taken the boat and carried it away & most all their outfit stored in it.” To make it back to Sitka, they had had to borrow a canoe from Kowee. Unbeknownst to Juneau and Harris, Chief Kowee had followed the two men back to Sitka and had quite a different story to tell. As the truth was related by Kowee,

Juneau

13

Juneau and Harris had only gone as far as the Auk’s fishing camp where they had traded “all their stuff & grub for hooch & been on a steady drunk for 3 weeks, & while drunk the boat got away, but nothing in it.” Kowee had a stake in this strike: 100 blankets. Unless Juneau and Harris actually looked where he had said the gold existed, the Chief would be out the blankets—so he turned informant. Pilz was furious and sent Juneau and Harris back with Kowee with strict instructions not to return unless they went exactly where Kowee had found the gold—or they would not be paid. Why did Pilz send out such derelicts again if they had cheated him once? Apparently he had no one else to send. Pilz left on another expedition and when he returned he was informed that Juneau and Harris were back in Sitka. But it was not because the two sots had told him they had returned. Rather, his two employees had slipped into Sitka and were packing to flee south to Victoria, clearly planning on selling Pilz’s equipment for the tickets. Their plans had only been altered when some of Pilz’s friends became suspicious, particularly since Juneau and Harris would have been running out on their summer’s pay. Considering the two men’s history, this was hardly characteristic of the pair. Wading out to their boat the night before they left Sitka, Pilz’s friends discovered “highoo Goldstone” on board. Juneau and Harris were immediately seized and their weapons confiscated. The next morning, the two men were marched before Pilz at gunpoint. When Pilz saw the “highoo Goldstone” he knew what he was looking at—as, apparently, had Juneau and Harris. It was a high-grade ore, rich enough to spark a rush. Pilz immediately headed south and, on December 2, “put up notice of locating a townsite.” The town was named “Auk” and Harris was the first Recorder—though why Pilz would trust Harris in such a sensitive position is now known. Harris, once again showing his true colors, tried to cheat Pilz yet again, and was caught again. Pistol in hand, Pilz confronted Harris and his new partner, N. A. Fuller, with the evidence. Fuller was ordered to sign over his claims to Pilz or be killed. Fuller signed. Pilz marched the two men down to the customhouse where he had the soldiers stationed there witness the transaction. Accusing Harris of “the worst kind of fraud & crookedness [Pilz demanded] a cancellation vote to put him out of office.” Harris was subsequently removed. But Pilz problems were not over. Once the news of the Juneau strike leaked, hundreds of men from the Cassiar region in Canada descended on the community of “Auk” and declared that it was actually in Canada whereupon they formed a new mining district under British Columbia law. It took several years for the United States government to clarify Auk’s status—and its nationality. Once the United States government established legal possession of the area, the history of Juneau became one of mining companies swallowing each other. Because the gold in Juneau was secreted in the mountains, it could only be extracted through hard rock mining. In other words, the gold was in veins which had to be followed with tunnels. While there was a tremendous amount of gold in the mountains, it took a substantial output of dollars to mine the metal. As a result, mining in Juneau was done by large corporations which hired mine workers, called “muckers,” by the hundreds to tunnel into the mountains following the gold vein. Other Alaskan mining communities such as Nome and Fairbanks had placer gold. This meant that the precious metal was in the form of small nuggets or dust that was

14

Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

scattered in the ground. Generally speaking, gold in veins in the mountains is exposed to the elements by earthquakes or erosion. Over the eons it falls out of the vein and is rolled to smaller and smaller nuggets in the streams and rivers. Eventually the rolling process turns the nuggets to dust. Hard rock miners look for gold in veins in mountains. Placer miners search for the precious metal along streambeds that are new, old, or ancient. Hard rock miners bore into mountains with tunnels; placer miners dig into the earth to find ancient stream beds. Placer mining could be accomplished by a single person or a large company, but hard rock mining required a well-financed corporation. Juneau’s history is tied to its hard rock mines, the two largest being the AlaskaJuneau and the Treadwell. The Alaska-Juneau, A-J, still haunts the city, the great arches of its tunnel entrances visible at the southern end of town. Miles of mining tunnels are still walkable, some of them running along the hillside and a danger to curious children and stupid pets. The Treadwell on Douglas Island still has standing structures which can be visited. The Treadwell Glory hole is still visible but collapsed and flooded. But mining in Juneau effectively ended in 1944. The story of how the city came to be named is just as convoluted as that of Nome. Originally it was called Auk for the Indians who lived there but after the discovery of gold it was changed to Pilztown. George Pilz objected so it was changed to Rockwell for United States Navy Commander Charles Henry Rockwell who had been sent to the area with a detachment to men to preserve peace in the area. After some violence, the name of the town was changed to Harrisburg for Richard T. Harris until he left for the East Coast with $20,000. Then it was named Juneau in spite of the fact that Joe Juneau was “drunk all the time” and was spending his money on “a good time in Victoria or S. F.” [Author’s note: The bulk of the quotes from this chapter come from Pilz’s Reminiscences. However, it should be noted, they should not be taken at face value. The work has glaring embellishments which place the credibility of the entire manuscript in doubt. For instance, Pilz wrote of his friendship with Mark Twain in Virginia City at the time when Twain was working for the Virginia City Chronicle and how he, Pilz, had escorted the noted writer to Alaska. In fact, Twain had left Virginia City four years before the Chronicle was founded and never went to Alaska. Twain left the West for the last time in 1868. According to Pilz, he was in New Mexico in 1872 exposing the “Arnold Diamond Swindle”—which he claimed happened in 1876. Pilz also neglected to mention the fact that he spent a year in jail in San Francisco on a charge of forgery that never made it to court. As far as Harris being a disreputable, untrustworthy individual, Pilz does not mention that he had given Harris a complete power of attorney to rent or sell any of his properties while Pilz was in jail in San Francisco. These discrepancies alone place the accuracy of his REMINISCENCES in doubt.3] Joe Juneau left Juneau in 1894 and went to the Yukon looking for gold. He was in Circle in 1895 where he made a modest strike the next year. Then he spent the next winter in San Francisco and returned to Juneau in the spring before he left in the rush for the Klondike. He died near Dawson in 1899 where he had been running a restaurant. Because he had acquired such an unsavory reputation in the city named after him, “not one of the old-timers” in Juneau would donate money to retrieve his body and bury him in Juneau. It took quite a few years for enough money to be raised to

Juneau

15

bring his body home, apparently most of it by people who had not known him personally. His body was returned in 1903.4 Today he and Harris lie buried on opposite sides of the walkway through the city’s cemetery. Over the six decades they operated, the Juneau mines produced $158 million in gold ($2.3 billion in 1990 dollars5) and today Juneau lives comfortably on that legacy. It is a sedate, cultured community with a population of about 30,000. The gold industry has long since abandoned the area and another has taken its place. Now, instead of plucking nuggets from the veins in Mt. Juneau, the residents of Alaska’s capitol city extract money from the wallets of tourists. The city has become very adept at this art and sees $130 million dollars a year arrive courtesy of the cruise liners. By comparison, when adjusted to 1990 dollars, the gold industry only provided an average of $36 million a year.

Three

  

When asked which was the best route to the gold fields, an old miner in Seattle replied “They are all HELL!”1

In essence, the history of the Alaska Gold Rush begins with the Klondike Rush. It was Klondike gold that set the world ablaze with fantasies of wealth but it was Alaska that reaped the benefits. Today, the entire population of the Yukon Territory is well under 30,000 while Alaska’s is over half a million and rising. While the original strike that made the Klondike a household term was made in midsummer of 1896, it took almost a year before news leaked to the United States. Then, in July, 1897, it reached the lower 45 states in a most dramatic fashion: almost two tons of gold arrived in Seattle on the Portland and a bonafide rush was ignited. Seattle streets teemed with would-be millionaires seeking passage north on the first available vessel. Across the United States, thousands of men, and more than a few women, left their jobs without so much as a day’s notice. They just grabbed a suitcase and headed for Seattle, the gateways to the Klondike. From the four corners of the earth, the Argonauts converged on Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Vancouver with a single thought in mind: passage north. All that mattered was getting to the gold fields as rapidly as possible. Each day’s delay was a fortune lost, a day in which some one else might find your Eldorado. The good claims went to those who got to the Klondike first while the latecomers were still sitting on a dock waiting for their ships to be loaded. But getting to the Klondike was a bit more difficult than just getting to a port on the Pacific coast and catching a ship north. The fastest—and most expensive—way to the Klondike was by steamship from Seattle across the North Pacific to Unalaska and then over the choppy Bering Sea to St. Michael. From there the passengers would

18

Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

change from an ocean-going vessel to a river steamship and plow their way against the current up the 1,600 miles of the Yukon River to Dawson. But not everyone could afford passage for this 3,000 mile trip. The most popular route was by steamship from Seattle or Portland to the twin cities at the top of the Lynn Canal in Alaska, Dyea (pronounced Die-eee or Die–ee-uh) and Skagway. From here the Argonauts would crest the Chilkoot or White passes into Canada’s Yukon Territory and then move on foot up the watershed to Dawson. This route was cheaper in terms of sea fare but far more challenging to the human spirit, not to mention legs. But it was cheaper. While steamship to Dawson cost over a thousands dollars (over $21,000 in 1990 dollars) the trip to Skagway was less than $200 ($4,200 in 1990 dollars). Those with even less money used whatever means they could afford. Some came by foot while other tried bicycles or even canoes. Professor Carl E. Myers had a more ingenious way of getting to the gold fields. In 1898 he claimed he was going to make the passage north from San Francisco to Dawson by balloon. The basket would be specially made with skids and though it only weighed 15 pounds, would support about 700 pounds. Three men could thus be carried in the balloon along with “one common trunk for the transportation.” Myers suggested he could make the trip from Dyea to Dawson in “three hours.”2 However, he did not say where he would transport the required 1,000 pounds of food per person that was required by Canadian law to survive in the gold field for a year once the men had arrived. Myers was not alone in the development of outlandish methods of getting to the gold fields. On April 8, 1899, the Seattle Times ran a story of a woman who was intent on reaching Skagway in a catboat. She intended to buy the fragile craft in Seattle and find another woman to row with her. The boat would carry 100 pounds of provisions. Upon arrival in Skagway, she and her corower would sell the boat and proceed on to Dawson on foot. The woman’s name, ironically, was “Carrie R. Hope.”3 Other means of transportation were just as unusual. One of them, called an “Alaskan What-Is-It” was illustrated in the Seattle Times in April of 1898. Appearing as a cross between a “flying machine and a brick-clay mixer,” it was 40 feet in length with a steering wheel in the bow and a paddle wheel astern. It was a “corker,” the Seattle Times reported, and “worth the price of a photograph.”4 Also considered for travel to or in Alaska were reindeer, camels, and even 10,000 Mexican burros.5 As soon as it became apparent that there was going to be a gold rush—and it didn’t take much of a sense of history to realize that—there was a sudden boom in entrepreneurial activities in Seattle. It started with scalpers buying every steamship ticket available before the price of passage went up. These unscrupulous vendors, known as “peanut speculators,”6 bought blocks of tickets on steamships headed north and then sold them piecemeal at the highest possible price. In one case, a man bought 300 tickets for the City of Seattle while the ship only had accommodations for 600.7 Another scam involved store clerks buying tickets on ships and using them as an incentive to get customers to buy goods at their establishment. Other times clerks in steamship offices gave advance notice of rate increases so the speculators could buy at the lower price.8 Then there were the “steerers,” people of dubious reputation whose job it was to hustle passengers for gold rush ships. They would prowl the streets looking for likely marks to be sold overpriced tickets on unsafe vessels. They usually didn’t have to prowl

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19

very far. The men who stood in line to get on the boats were often 2,000 individuals long. Even boats from China joined the trade. One of the largest loads, according to one Argonaut, Florence Hartshorn, was being carried by the Ning Chow. Getting a ticket was only a portion of the logistics. Every Argonaut needed supplies and Seattle merchants were more than willing to sell the hard goods and food every conscientious Argonaut needed. Establishments claiming to be stores opened on street corners, vacant lots, in derelict structures, and out of overcoat pockets. On every street, from curbside hawker to bonafide merchant, every manner of invention, foodstuff, supply, or bit of gold searching paraphernalia was sold. Whether it was a portable house, “crystallized eggs,” electric heating belts, or evaporated foods, these establishments had the item or could get it. Not everything that was sold was legitimate. The Dietz party bought what they thought were crystallized eggs—a gold rush version of today’s dehydrated eggs—but when the substance was used on the trail, a bait-andswitch trick had left them with yellow corn meal rather than eggs. As Dietz remarked with personal venom, “almost as much money was left in Seattle by the gold seekers as was ever recovered [in 1898 and 1899].”9 But still they came and Seattle was packed from midtown to the docks. Men were sardined six to a room with a tin basin for washing and a stool for furniture. Teams of dogs were tied in the hallways and every square foot not set aside for sleeping was stacked to the ceiling with bags, sacks, boxes, crates, backpack, and every manner of prospecting gear. Other gear included such unlikely items as boats, grindstones, and at least one piano. (The piano, like the boats, was transported in pieces.) Thievery even in hotel rooms was so common the companies of men would have to leave one of their numbers to guard their supplies while the others surveyed the town or sought passage on a steamer. Since the most advantageous method of mining was in concert with partners, the Argonauts formed companies, called “syndicates.” This was primarily because it took a lot of food and supplies to reach the gold fields let alone search for the precious metal. As there was no railway in the early days of the Alaska Gold Rush, almost all of the supplies had to be moved by manpower. In terms of raw numbers, each man needed approximately three-quarters of a ton of food and supplies. A man on his own would be hard pressed to both move and watch his supplies on the trail. That required more than one pair of eyes, and four to eight were exponentially better, thus there were realistic reasons to be part of a syndicate, even if you didn’t know your partners well. While many of the Argonauts left home in groups, freelancing was not uncommon and the formation of syndicates was frequent. But not all syndicates were reputable. Advertisements for hundreds appeared across the country and most of them were scams. These included companies that required advance payments by mail or offered lottery tickets for free transportation as an incentive along with a wide variety of free options for joining one syndicate over that of an another. In January of 1898, an investigative Boston Citizen made a list composed of 300 of these schemes and after extensive examination of them declared that “295 of them were found to be frauds.”10 The situation in Seattle was not much better. As many Argonauts quickly discovered, Seattle was more of a Peter Bruegel painting than a city. In addition to the seedy travel agents, unscrupulous merchants, fly-by-night entrepreneurs, untrustworthy ships,

20

Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

and larcenous hotel clerks, the city was often fog-locked, wet, and cold. “I have had the opportunity of seeing Seattle at its best,” wrote one Argonaut, “and it has every appearance of being just what it is—a dirty, dingy, hilly, nasty, foggy, ill-kept, Godforsaken little country town.”11 Prior to coming to Seattle, Dietz “thought that nothing could surprise a New Yorker.” He was in error. Seattle and its swindles did.12 Dietz was a florid in his description of the city and its scams, It was a gigantic chaos of crime and the city government was an institution [that] protected evil. Every kind of illicit business flourished. License trod all law under foot in its grasping and never-satisfied greed. Every possible form of deception was practiced with the full consent of the city government, apparently. Thousands of gold seekers spent their money for worthless [gear] and they never knew they had been deceived until too late; soon their frozen corpses told the story of man’s inhumanity to man and its awful price.13

Another Argonaut, Alfred McMichael, summed up the attitude of many men about the boomers, “Seemingly all men are liars in this town of Seattle.”14 Pure greed was driving the gold rush juggernaut. It was town gone made with Klondikitis and, as Dietz wrote, it was “more wicked than Sodom; the devil reigned supreme.”15 While the Seattle Chamber of Commerce may have been pleased with the influx of business, many mariners were quite concerned with the impact the unscrupulous transportation companies were having on their industry. Ships that should be have been allowed to rot gracefully to splinters were being pressed into service in waters that were among the world’s most treacherous. Captains of dubious ability were commanding crews of questionable competence in ships so decrepit that the first storm could reduce them to timbers. The ethical mariners became even more concerned when editorials in East Coast papers, the home ports of their competitors, began stating the obvious. In February of 1898, the Providence Rhode Island Journal touched a sensitive nerve when it stated that “in the rush to gold fields any old thing, so long as it would float, is sent forth.” In a bureaucratic fury, Erastus Brainerd, the publicity chieftain of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, wrote to the supervising inspector of the Steamboat Inspection Service in Washington, D.C., demanding to know what the Service was going to be doing in Puget Sound. The response to his letter was that there were inspectors on payroll in Seattle and they would be doing their job. To emphasize what kind of job that was, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran both letters, one after the other, at the bottom of a lengthy piece on the Clara Nevada, one of the first ships to go to the bottom in 1898.16 Thus it is not surprising that many parties never made it beyond Seattle. Fleeced, exhausted, broke or as far from home as they cared to go, thousands turned back. Of the 100,000 who initially left for the Klondike, it is estimated that only about 35,000 would ever make it to Dawson. Seattle was the first hurdle the Argonauts had to leap and, for perhaps as many as 65,000, that was as far as they got.17 But that still left a lot of people who wanted to go north, a slug of so many passengers that there was the threat of a coal famine in San Francisco. Every company that could draw ships from the Atlantic to the Pacific did so. The rush would not last forever and a wise business made certain that it should took as large a slice of the market pie as possible.

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21

The influx of ships leaving Seattle also forced the United States Steamboat Inspection Service to take on new tasks. But it was clearly beyond the agency’s powers to do much with their statutory abilities. There were only two members of the Board of Inspectors, Captain Bryant and C. C. Cherry. With a bit of bravado and absolutely no idea how much traffic the Klondike and Yukon trips would eventually bring, in January of 1898, Captain Bryant made the statement that “the [Board of the Steamboat Inspection Service] will make it an unvarying rule to require the owners or managers of steamers sailing to the north to comply strictly with the letter of the law as to accommodations and space for passengers. There will be no overcrowding.”18 Little did he know what the future held in store for him. That statement was made on January 22, 1898. The next month, 37 ships left for Alaska while 13 headed for other ports.19 In March, 53 ships left Seattle of which only three were not headed for Alaska.20 Still the flotilla of gold rush vessels that was gathering grew by leaps and bounds. Argonauts wanted to go north—a high demand. The number of ships was limited—a low supply. Thus, by the natural mechanism of supply and demand, the shipping industry seemed destined to make money—lots of money. In the mad rush to provide transportation, every ship on the Pacific Coast that could be found, regardless of its seaworthiness, was launched into the trade. Rotting derelicts were yanked off beaches or unearthed from maritime graveyards. Refitted, they became members of a doom-haunted flotilla. Sailing vessels, blockade runners, private yachts, and decrepit steamers of every description and variety were swiftly refurbished, repainted, and rechristened to be offered to the gold-dazzled public. Many of these vessels could hardly be called safe much less seaworthy even when upgraded. But that didn’t matter to the owners as these vessels were to be loaded for profit, not safety. The rush would not last long; all it had to be was long enough to make a fortune. Every safety margin was erased. Holds were crammed dangerously full. Hallways were lined with swaying, unsteady crates; hatches were left open since they were crammed with boxes, bags, and timber. Deck cargo was piled as high as ropes could reach. Uneven loading often caused ships to list dangerously. Time was of the essence and sometimes the steamships left so fast that they left passengers standing on the dock. John J. Miller was loading horses when he suddenly realized that his transportation north was pulling out. There were two tons of his gear, four horses, and a partner on board, and Miller was forced to take a long run and jump and “landed sprawling on deck.”21 The stampede for dollars was so great that even the Seattle papers recognized the rush for mammon in their own city. “The worst place on the Coast to find these floating coffins is San Francisco,” the Seattle Times lambasted its maritime competitor and then added, “Portland is another sinkhole . . . and Seattle is not very far behind either one of them.” Ships that were 50 or 60 years old were being passed off as “new” and every manner of deception was used to convince Argonauts that these rotting hulks were seaworthy. One of the scams the Seattle Times exposed was how ingenious scoundrels put false floors in ship holds. The rotten ribs in the ships bilge were covered with thin sheets of wood. The wood was covered with a layer of tarpaper and then earth was sprinkled on top. When a suspicious Argonaut wanted to the check the sea-worthiness of the hold, he was told that the earth was “ballast.” If the man became curious, he was given a shovel and told to dig to the hull of the ship—which was the false flooring

22

Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

six inches down. But that wood was new thus assuring the Argonaut that this vessel was seaworthy.22 One of the many ships that never should have been allowed on the open ocean was the Guardian, which had been “laying at the wharves at ‘Frisco for years.” It was refitted and sent to Seattle where she took on 350 passengers and tons of cargo. Some of the passengers reported that the ship was so rotten “you could pick her sealing out with your fingers.” The ship made it as far as Kotzebue and then was abandoned.23 Basil Austin reported that when he boarded the Lizzie, the ship smelled of freshly cut timber. Later he came to the sad realization that initially “the odor of deceased codfish was well disguised by the more pungent smell of freshly-sawn lumber.”24 As the ship headed north, the scent of fresh lumber was replaced by the stench of the fish which filled the ship with a smell that was “certainly robust if difficult to analyze.”25 Many of the passengers realized the danger they were in, even if the captain or crew refused to do so. In February of 1898, 23 passengers from the Kingston deserted the ship in Seattle and demanded their money back or transportation north on a safe ship. The captain had left Port Townsend in a storm despite orders to remain until the weather had moderated. The boat was in danger of sinking because it “leaked like a sieve,” the forward deck had not been properly caulked and the bow was too dangerously low because of overloading. The Kingston only made 14 miles before seas swept the main deck and put out the galley fires. A big section of the vessel’s port side, forward had been torn off, including a part of her rail. Many of the passengers were deathly sick and those who were able had fastened life preservers around them. Tables and furniture were sent in every direction about the cabins and dining rooms and in the latter a lamp exploded, adding the horror of fire to the possibilities.26

Life onboard these vessels was hardly palatial. Beds were often constructed of canvas on frames, three high and two feet apart. The men were fed 50 at a time at a long table in the hold. On the trip north, many passengers slept in “Pullmans,” as in the Pullmans of railroad fame, or “sleepers” as they were called. These were nothing more than bunk beds. Often these bunks were beds in name only. For instance, the upper berth could have been the top of a table while the “lower” was on the floor. The “bull pen” meant steerage, a term which led more than one passenger to believe they were to sleep with the animals.27 More often than not, humans were treated as just a form of troublesome cargo. If staterooms were full, passengers had to find sleeping quarters between crates, in the engine room, or wherever else a human body could wriggle. The Canadian steamer Amur overbooked its passengers by a factor of five. Ten people were assigned to rooms normally holding three. Passengers had to seize any open bed if they wanted to sleep. To eat, the Argonauts had to snatch food from trays as it passed them in the hallway on its way to the dining room, a salon that would only accommodate 27 people at a time.28 Second class quarters were likened to “a veritable beehive [where] the atmosphere resembled that of a dungeon in Afghanistan.”29 Fred Kimball, postmaster of St. Michael during the rush, reported seeing the Homer at the Dutch Harbor dock “loaded with freight so that not a ray of daylight could get into a stateroom.” Had the ship gone down, “her passengers would have stood no more a show than rats in a trap.”30 Another Argonaut recalled that beds, “nothing but board shelves” had numbers in blue

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chalk above them that corresponded to ticket numbers. The beds was so small the Argonaut had a hard time turning around. His first class ticket bedded him next to the mules, “and the second class next to the horses.” He was also required to furnish his own blankets and eating utensils.31 The food on board was revolting, often the cheapest substances that could be bought. Henry F. Woods recounted how the dinning room on his vessel, the Amur, were so cramped that only 12 people could eat any one time. As the average time for a meal was about 20 minutes, it took seven hours to fed all 500 people on board.32 Wood solved his problem of getting fed by contracting with a Madam on board to provide him with meal for a dollar a day.33 Robert J. Farnsworth recalled that his crackers “had bugs and maggots in them, and the oatmeal had large white worms, when cooked they swelled up and I can remember picking them out and lining them up along side my plate.”34 B. E. Axe reported of his food onboard that “it would be hard to say which would carry off the prize at a test of strength, the beef or the butter which we had.” Axe reported eating in “hog fashion.” He waited patiently for “one hour when [he] was kindly served with an empty plate which was followed some thirty minutes later by a generous slice of bread—with finger marks on it.” Dinner was “pitched at us in an eat dog or starve sort of way.”35 Another Argonaut , John J. Miller and his fellow passengers ate on a table that was “a long row of planks on deck.” Miller had a hard time getting food so he came to dinner an hour early. Choosing a prime seat, he was pleased when the cooks brought out a large cauldron of soup. They set the soup right down in front of him and in an instant there was a swarm of men beside me and on top of me reaching for soup. I did not get any soup inside of me, but got plenty outside and on top of me before I got away from that mess.36

At least one passenger didn’t complain about the food. When a cheechako, a newcomer or tenderfoot, on the Rosalie complained about the food he was quickly admonished by a sourdough, an old timer, “If this fellow can’t stand half-cooked grub now, what the devil will he do when he gets into the mountains, where they eat things raw?”37 Sometimes the food was so bad that the passengers revolted. On the Valencia, F. W. A. Poppe was elected by the crew to confront the captain over the quality of food. Poppe told the captain that unless the food got better the passengers would “take over the ships galley and do their own cooking.” The Captain, who did not take to be being told what was going to happen on his ship, told Poppe that if the passengers made the attempt, “there would be some dead bodies lying around on the deck.” The captain then armed his crew and order the crew to “hook up hoses to the hot water pipes as a precaution.” Then he challenged the passengers to do their best. Before violence could occur the captain agreed to serve better food—which he did. But in doing so “he caused a shortage before the end of the journey” to Valdez.38 Potable water was also a problem. “Yakima Pete” Norby recalled that on his trip north, the ship on which he was traveling, the George E. Starr, ran out of water. To replenish the water supply, the Starr had to stop at a waterfall from where the 75 passengers could form a bucket brigade back to the ship.39 In addition to the overloading, bad food, lack of drinking water, and poor bunk areas, there was also the quality of passengers. Governor John G. Brady was well aware

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Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

of the scum coming north. In a letter to the Secretary of the Interior, his superior in Washington, D.C., the governor lamented that the ships headed north were “carrying great lists of passengers, many of whom are gamblers, thugs, and lewd women from the worst quarters of the cities of the coast.”40 Argonauts noted the social distinctions as well but were in less of a position to be squeamish. Fred T. Merritt, writing of his trip north, “it beats all what people one meets on a trip like this. Decent fine women sitting beside the lowest sports, fine men beside gamblers and pimps, ignorance beside education, vulgarity beside refinement, . . . bent on getting money one way or another.” Not all the passengers were sane either. Merritt reported that one passenger had gone crazy on board and had to be locked up for his own safety.41 Petitions filled out by passengers and given to a government official at a port were not unusual but only marginally effective. All in all, once passengers were on board, they were at the mercy of the hard-bitten captains and crews. One surviving petition concerns the overselling of first class cabin space on the steamer Protection. The ship was licensed for 16 first class passengers but the company had sold that space to 27 persons. There is no evidence that the United States government officials in St. Michael in August of 1898 did anything other than accept the petition. The only proof that it did even that is that the document is still in existence.42 Upon occasion the conditions on board were so bad that government officials did step in. In July of 1898, the Kinney was so crowded with Argonauts that when it took an additional 100 Lapplands in Port Townsend, health officials refused to let the ship sail. “The health officials came aboard and saved us,” reported James Hunter Shotwell. But the health officials did allow 40–50 men, women, and children aboard, all of whom passed the voyage, Shotwell wrote to his wife, “stowed in a room not any larger than your dining room and parlor.” Shotwell’s room wasn’t much better. He and 17 other passengers were “stowed like sardines in a room not as large as your kitchen,” he wrote to his wife. The smell of the ship was so overpowering, he wrote, “I fear I will never get the smell of the Lapps and our dining place out of my nostrals [sic]” The Lapps added to the general disgust of the other passengers by lassooing goonie birds (probably sea gulls) and eating them.43 Adding to the turmoil, part of the cargo was animal. On some ships, horses, dogs, and cattle were taken onboard first and human passengers were squeezed into the remaining space. Often this was not much. The epitome of overloading was the Al-Ki which left Seattle on July 19, 1898. The ship carried 110 human passengers, 900 sheep, 65 cattle, 30 horses, and still managed to load 350 tons of supplies.44 Another dilapidated wreck, the Colorado, left Seattle with 350 horses, 150 cattle, and 100 dogs. Once aboard these animals had to be fed and watered daily, a chore that fell to their owners. The combined smell of animals, flatulence, manure, and feed in these Augean stables added to the mephitis onboard. Dead animals were not uncommon and extracting their cadavers was a chore worthy of Hercules. For both man and beast, the trip north was difficult. B. E. Axe reported going through a storm in Queen Charlotte Sound which was very rough. I was desperately seasick, as were most of the other passengers. I was sick constantly from 7 A.M. till 3 P.M. and this is as near to the tortures of hell as I ever expect to get. Some of the horses also suffered terribly and it was pitiful to see how they were lurched backwards and forwards and to see the helpless look upon their faces.

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My attack of seasickness also gave me a terrible attack of dysentery and this coupled with the other soon brought me into a state of utter collapse. Toward night I took a quarter of a grain of morphine and knew no more until morning.45

Securing animals and cargo was frequently done without much care, even on the larger ships. When the Queen went aground in Wrangell Narrows, the ship tilted to 40 degrees. Falling baggage crushed a number of horses and injured many more.46 A passenger on the Islander, Bert Whyte, wrote to his wife that the steamer was so packed it had a “100 ton overload” including “about 600 dogs and 8 oxen and 50 to 75 horses,” besides the “420 to 450 passengers and crew.” Whyte estimated that was about 150 passengers too many but the steamer company didn’t seem to “care, this is a skin game all through.” Another passenger described his voyage north as “a floating bedlam, Pandemonium let loose, the Black Hole of Calcutta in an Arctic setting.”47 While these passengers certainly had a difficult time, their case was not the worst. In July of 1898, 30 passengers boarded the Elsie which was being captained by L. M. Larsen, a man who quickly proved to be “utterly incompetent.” The vessel fought its way through a number of gales and “mistake followed mistake in navigation” until it went up on a sandy beach in the middle of the night. The next morning the passengers discovered how lucky they had been. Had they been one hundred yards to the fore or aft of their course, they would have struck rocks several miles from shore. But their luck didn’t seem to be holding. As the Elsie began breaking up there was a mad scramble to get their gear ashore. Captain Larsen assured them that they were near Dutch Harbor, though “near” in this case meant 800 miles distant, and thus so infuriated the passengers that more than a few of the younger men “talked hanging” to him whereupon he “immediately proceeded to disappear.” For 41 days the passengers huddled in their tents on the beach waiting for a passing steamer to spot them. Finally, one morning they awoke to find a steamer anchored nearby and making preparations to come ashore. Ironically, the steamer Herman was coming ashore because it was believed that the survivors of the Elsie were actually those of a sister ship, the Herman.48 Navigation, at times, seemed a lost art. Dr. Louis Seitz, bound for Valdez, reported “we were 14 days on the Pacific, some of which time we were entirely lost. Neither pilot, captain, or (?) anyone on board knowing where Valdes was, and we finally were compelled to take in tow a small sailing coaster to show us the way to Valdes.” There were 95 passengers on board, Seitz reported, “not one of whom was not sick.” He was so seasick, he noted, “I wished I could die to get relief.” Seitz, who went north on the Albion, reported that the ship “tossed about like an egg shell” and on two occasions the ship went up on the rocks. “The first time it looked like an accident,” he reported, “because the night was very dark, although the sea was quiet.” But two night later, “in a perfectly smooth sea,” they hit a rock “which made the ship quiver from stem to stern.” On deck they discovered the ship was “high and dry upon a rock with rocks showing all around us.” It looked to many of the passengers as if this had been a deliberate attempt to wreck the ship and the pilot “came near to being lynched.” The pilot and lookout, Seitz suspected, had been asleep.49 As 1898 progressed, the maritime horror stories grew in both number and intensity. In February of 1898, the Alice Blanchard docked in Seattle on her way to Alaska from San Francisco. It was soon learned that an “obliging inspector” in her city of origin had raised her passenger limit. Originally approved for 39, she was carrying 151,

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Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

nine short of her new legal limit. When she was permitted to leave Seattle, “her unfortunate passengers set up a wail that was loud and long” but did little to “touch the hearts of the local inspectors.” In the same month, the same ship headed north again, this time with 169 passengers, 50 dogs and some “unsuspecting burros.” F. M. White from San Francisco told the Seattle Times that sleeping quarters consisted of hammocks “between the upper deck and the hold” in a room where the air was so foul “I am afraid we [would] all be sick if we have to stand it much longer.”50 The captain apparently didn’t know his business and went aground forcing men to pull the ship off the shore—where she lost her keel. Then the ship was struck by an iceberg. Everyone panicked because they thought the ship was sinking. Once into the Lynn Canal, the vessel was so overloaded and the wind so strong that the ship had to hide in a cove for a number of hours. When she emerged, the wind proved so powerful they had to run back south before they could find a safe harbor.51 One Argonaut on board another trip of the Alice Blanchard, C. P. Cahoon, recalled that the ship had staterooms for 36 and 204 men ended up as passengers—at $70 apiece. Additionally, the deck was crowded with horses and dogs. Woods remembered them as a menagerie of “great Danes, English Mastiffs, collies, sheep dogs, Saint Bernards, Newfoundlands, wolf-hounds,” and mongrel breeds.52 Though the law required 100 cubic feet of space for every passenger on the main deck and 120 cubic feet for those decks below, the Argonauts were packed so tight that “hammocks which take the place of staterooms are hung in rows, one above the other, and very close together.”53 Another ship, the Humboldt, was equally as packed. Inspectors stated that the passengers were so crammed aboard that they were sleeping on the cabin floors, on “the dining room table and under it.” Some were sleeping on beds made of life preservers. Seasickness had been common and “garbage and offal were on the floor and the whole place was so overcrowded as to be totally unfit for human habitation.” Yet, the Humboldt’s license permitted her to carry this number of passengers and the ship was passed out of Seattle. This, the Seattle Times, clearly stated was a clear indication of the “avarice and greed of a few transportation sharks.”54 Seasickness seemed to have been common, brought on as much by the food and living conditions. Robert Dey reported that his initiation to sea travel aboard the Alaska out of San Francisco was anything but pleasant. Six men had to sleep “crowded in a hole about 6 ⫻ 10 feet.” These sleeping areas, called “cells” by the passengers, “extended the whole length of the upper deck” and were on the same deck as the galley where “the stench of the victuals etc. in process of cooking filled the rooms and made things almost unbearable.” The next morning, after the Alaska was towed out of San Francisco Bay, the sea became so choppy that one by one the passengers “leaned over the rail and up came the liver and onions they had for supper and breakfast.” Supposedly, “almost everybody on board was sick, even the captain.” One particular fellow had it worse than others and was so sick that he wanted to die. “My God,” he said. “If you’ll just lay me down I’ll die.” Dey and the other passengers lay the unfortunate man on the deck timbers “but he couldn’t die.”55 Frances Fitz, a passenger on the Tacoma, claimed that the seasickness on her trip north on the Tacoma was caused by something other than natural conditions. The cooks, overworked because of the extra passengers, “doped the food with soap” so that the passengers would be so sick

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they could not eat. This reduced the workload for the cooks and “conserved on their supplies” which they then “sold for enormous prices in Nome.”56 Were these tales of overcrowding, bad food, and poor passengers conditions isolated instances? Actually, they were not. The maritime traffic, particularly for the shorter run to the Alaskan ports of Dyea and Skagway, was so treacherous that it was a wonder that any ships arrived at all. In Dyea, customs officers reported “nearly every vessel arriving here carr[ied] twice the passengers the law allow[ed] it to carry and many of them are condemned craft that have been fitted up for this trade.”57 Conditions didn’t improve with the passage of time either. By May of 1898, more than a dozen ships were already gone to the bottom of the Inside Passage.58 Conditions continued to be intolerable and by the end of the year so many gold rush ships had gone down to Davy Jones’ Locker that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was recording maritime disasters as fillers rather than front-page features. Then there was the weather. For many Americans, particularly the 300,000 each summer who take a cruise up the Inside Passage, it is hard to explain just how treacherous the weather can be during the winter. During the summer, the waters are calm and storms are more of an annoyance than a danger. Whales, majestic scenery, and quaint fishing villages charm visitors while the average temperature is mild enough to allow jogging on the open top decks of the pleasure ships.59 But during the winter, the Inside Passage is exceedingly treacherous. Funneled by the channel islands, ferocious Pacific winds blast through the straits and barrel up the narrows with nothing to impede their progress. Known as takus, these winds can easily roll a poorly loaded ship. The moisture-laden winds can coat a ship with ice in a few hours. Snow can fall so heavily that white-out conditions can occur in a matter of minutes and fog can hover so low that the rugged shoals of the channels cannot be seen until a luckless ship runs aground. Ships could be just as luckless when they were afloat. Archie Templeton wrote to his wife and children that his ship “should have landed in five days” but the overloaded ship and the bad weather had stopped the ship in its wake. Over the previous three days and nights, “the boat did not gain a mile.” On the fourth day, the weather go so bad that the “16 horses and six oxen on deck [were] shot and thrown overboard, and then followed a night that made strong men fear for their safety.”60 As an example of the kind of damage the weather can do, take the case of the Dietz party on the Blakely. The vessel was chartered to take the syndicate to Yakutat and rather than cut across the Gulf of Alaska but the sloop proceeded north hugging the coastline. But if the captain had hoped to avoid blizzard conditions, he made a bad choice. Days after escaping from a rainstorm, the Blakely encountered a blizzard which cut visibility to three feet. The wet, sticky snow built up on the rigging and rope until its weight became unbearable and down it all came onto the passengers and crew and deck below. The ship was coated in a jacket of ice several inches thick which made it imperative that they land as soon as possible. When the front passed, the Blakely was faced with a far more formidable obstacle: icebergs or, as Dietz reported, “white island of ice with ranges of ghostly mountains rising up out of the sea.”61 The bergs were large enough to flip the Blakely had she drawn too close as one of the ice behemoths was rolling in the brine. Passengers could be a danger too. Many were not the least concerned with overloading. They wanted to go north immediately. This was a gold rush and every hour

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Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

spent on a Seattle dock meant that someone else was getting the good claims. Speed was of the essence even if that speed put the ship at danger. In August of 1897, as an example, there was a full scale passenger riot when the Humboldt attempted to leave with the passengers but not their supplies. Threats of “gun play, mutiny and violence” kept the ship from sailing.62 The cargo was finally overloaded. Even unarmed, passengers could be violent. In September of 1899, Captain O’Brien of the Hunter arrived in Seattle making “unusually quick time.” The passengers, angry over the quality of the food and had “talked of hanging the master to yardarm of the vessel.”63 The leader of the almost-mutiny was R. M. Shannon of Tacoma who was incensed that he could not have “fresh meat every meal.” Even after the Captain explained that having fresh meat daily was an impossibility, Shannon persisted in his mutinous ways, reported the Captain, “and tried to get the passengers to lynch me, so they could get their money back.” Captain O’Brien then told Shannon that before he swung from any yard arm, he would kill Shannon first. That ended any talk of mutiny. (Later, Captain O’Brien attributed Shannon’s bellicose attitude to the fact that Shannon was “a Populist.”)64 Stowaways were particularly a plague. With so much at stake, those without the finances often tried to make the trip for free. Unfortunately for the shipping companies, once the stowaways were on board it was almost impossible to spot them. The ships were so overloaded that the stowaways could walk the decks with impunity and eat with the rest of the passengers. The only problem was where to sleep but, with so many cubbyholes it was not hard to find a place to secrete themselves for the night. Then there was the question of what to do with them if captured. Even if stowaways were apprehended, captains rarely risked upsetting paying passengers by stopping and dropping off the freeloaders. When one captain actually did, he found that the law was unsympathetic to his plight. The captain of the Laurada who “coolly dumped [two destitute stowaways] ashore at Bella Bella” in British Columbia in March of 1899 found himself fined $800 plus costs. If he had refused to pay, the vessel would have been subject to seizure.65 Stowaways were also resented by the authorities of the cities where they disembarked. While the number cited may be high, the Skagway News lamented that on its last trip, the Islander brought in 40 such undesirables and the Queen, another 60. “It is small wonder,” the paper raged, “that petit larceny is increasing, sneak thieving is becoming common and hold-ups are frequent,” for these stowaways must “‘live by their wits’ and work is not a prime necessity to their existence.”66 Skagway merchants were, of course, interested in Argonauts who came with cash in their pockets, not holes. Then there were the crews. Or what passed for “crews.” When hundreds of seasoned sailors abandoned deck timbers for the gold fields, their places were often filled by men whose maritime experience was limited to rowboats on calm country lakes. If that. Unscrupulous men claimed years of sea experience to get a free ride north. Farmers, bartenders, cardsharps, and derelicts signed on as seaman, many of them so unfamiliar with the ocean they were unsure what their job title entailed. When manpower became tight, men were shanghaied. Fighting was not uncommon and drunkenness a hazard to the safety of the ship. Some of the so-called crew was so unused to the sea that they went overboard in calm weather. Archie Templeton reported that “two stewards fell overboard at Seattle and were killed,” presumably while the ship was not yet out to sea. That same ship also sailed with “no pilot.”67

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With such a poor quality of deckhand, it was not unusual to have pilfering onboard. Robert Dey reported a crew member on the Alaska was caught trying to sell a passenger gloves that the crew member had stolen from the same passenger—not a particularly smart move. The captain immediately ordered a search of the crew’s quarters and found “a great many stolen articles” in the possession of two of the crew. One man claimed to have a confederate but refused to name him. “Well, you’ll tell before I get through with you,” said the captain and “immediately put him in irons with the arms over the knees and a stick thrust through. He also took a belaying pin and tied it in his mouth for a gag.” The other man, who admitted to stealing two gallons of whiskey, was put in irons. The crew member with the gag was left on the cold deck for three hours before he gave the name of his partner in crime. It didn’t take long for the captain to learn that this accusation was false. The seaman who had been caught stealing was then left in irons for the remainder of the voyage “on six sea biscuits and all the water he wanted per day” primarily, Dey surmised, because the captain feared that the crew member would “set the ship afire.”68 The ongoing need for sailors, regardless of their knowledge of the sea or, rather, in spite of the fact they had no knowledge whatsoever of the ways of the ocean, continued well after the initial rush of enthusiasm in 1898. As late as 1905 captains were still hiring men who “didn’t know a marlin pike from a lanyard.” At least so stated seven men who abandoned their ship, the Tharsher, in Port Clarence. After several months of being treated “little better than slaves” they escaped ashore under a hail of gunfire from the ship. Two of the men, 18 and 22, had been recruited for work on the ship when they become drunk in a sailor’s boarding house in San Francisco and “awoke the next morning with parched tongues and aching heads [and were] away beyond the Golden Gate.”69 Officers were not much better. Crew members were pummeled, brutalized, and punished unmercifully. Men were beaten to the point where they were permanently crippled and few captains were punished for their crimes. The captain of the schooner Lyman D. Foster, for example, was the subject of a libel suit that “read much like a page from a mildly colored dime novel.” The captain was accused of “inveigh[ing]” three seaman onto his ship and then “shanghai[ng]” them. Other captains were outand-out cowards. When the schooner Elsie was about to wreck on Chichagof Island, the captain rushed out on deck without hat or shoes “wild with fear. He knelt down on the icy deck and with tears streaming down his face cried out ‘God Help Us!’”70 The incompetence of the captain and crew often lead to near catastrophic events. Take the case of the Blakely, a square-rigged brigantine. The ship had been rotting on the beach in Tacoma for two years before it was snatched by four Klondike exploration syndicates. The years on the beach had done the vessel permanent damage and even when it had been refitted it was in such poor shape that the captain “refuse[ed] to take charge until he had consumed the [ship’s] entire supply of whiskey.”71 The captain should probably have saved some of that whiskey for the voyage as he would have had good reason to drink. On the way to the Valdez the Blakely ran into a heavy gale that hit the ship with such force that waves washing over the prow of the vessel loosened the moorings of housing for 60 men “and on which were piled tons of cargo.” Horse stalls were broken and the animals were sent tumbling back and forth on deck. “Flour, grain and other stuff was floating in three feet of water” below decks and it for a while it seemed that the Blakely was going to the bottom of the sea. The storm continued

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Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

for several days forcing the passengers to “keep warm through exercise” and fast until the cooking fires could be restarted.72 Luck was with the vessel and the storm ended before the ship sank. But she was without power until a tow line was tossed from the Kodat which hauled her into Valdez.73 Apparently the captain didn’t take his experience to heart because an Argonaut who took passage on the same ship later, Dietz, reported that the Blakely, “rolled and dipped and rode the waves in a bewildering manner” and there were few who were not seasick. The captain, it should be mentioned, was not one of those stricken with mal de mere, possibly because he had brought a collection of whiskey on board and “kept to his cabin and did not appear until he had consumed all the booze.”74 But officers and crew member were desperately needed, regardless of their inexperience. In March of 1898, 42 steamers and 22 sailing vessels and barges were made available for the Seattle to Dyea and Skagway run. The round trip took about 15 days and the carrying capacity of those ships was 12,472 passengers and 53,570 tons of cargo. This meant that there could have been as many as 20,000 passengers heading north that month. Considering that the ships were overloaded and overbooked, the actual number may have been substantially higher.75 Each of those vessels needed a crew and with so much money to be made, captains could not be choosy about who they hired. Arrival in Skagway or Dyea didn’t end the lurking misery and bad luck. The trip north was not only fraught with the dangers of sea and storm, piracy was also a concern. So was salvage. The problem was making the distinction. To illustrate, as Alaskan humorist Warren Sitka succinctly summed up, “the difference between salvage and piracy is how fast the ship is sinking.” In March of 1898, the Canada, loaded with “lumber and merchandise,” was abandoned by her officers and subsequently claimed as a derelict by the captain and crew of the Coleman. The Canada had gone aground near Skagway but then gone adrift when the tide rose. The Coleman discovered the Canada adrift and hauled her ashore. Captain Piper of the Coleman left three men aboard to guard her and immediately sailed to Juneau to file papers legalizing his salvage claim. But when he returned to his prize “with much the same feeling of pride and gratification [as that of a] Klondiker [as he] superintends his spring cleanup” he discovered that there were ten armed men on his prize. In a wild gun battle, his three men had been unable to hold the Canada from its former captain and crew who now re-held possession of their former ship. When Piper tried to pull alongside the Canada, his rope was severed. The former captain of the Canada then stepped to rail and yelled, “I’ll shoot the first man who steps aboard.” Then he discharged his weapon at the Coleman. Rather than fighting a pitched battle for the vessel, Piper sailed across the harbor into Dyea where he charged the captain and crew of the Canada with “piracy on the high seas and attempted manslaughter.” The papers were served and the Canada was then turned over to the Coleman.76 The same week, in Skagway Harbor, the loaded passenger vessel Whitelaw suddenly burst into flames. It was later determined that the fire had been burning for two days, probably the remnants of a previous fire that had not been totally snuffed out. By the time the fire was discovered a second time, it was far too advanced to be extinguished. Though it was clear that the vessel was going to be gutted hulk, Captain Lockyer fought the flames with his pumps and refused to let those passengers left

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onboard leave the ship. There was a fierce gale blowing at the time which would have made the scramble to lifeboats hazardous so the passengers just stood on deck and watched as the flames slowly consumed the Whitelaw and their belongings. Finally the decks gave way and towers of flames leapt for the sky. When Captain Lockyer still resisted allowing the passengers into lifeboats, he was “surrounded by a desperate, panic-stricken mob of furious men.” Finally the captain gave the order to abandon ship. By this time the flames had lighted the shore for miles. But just as the burning vessel allowed the passengers to see their way into the lifeboats, it also illuminated the tragedy for the “free-booters, thugs and thieves of all kinds in small boats, even as the passengers and crew scrambled down the sides of the vessel for their very lives.” The pirates looted whatever property they could seize, including the cargo that had been tossed into the surf by the luckless passengers. Some passengers pulled knives and guns and battled the pirates for their property even as the flames were consuming what was left of their food and supplies. Cargo that made it ashore was stacked in piles but, as soon as the passengers left their cache to gather more of their belongings, that which had been piled on shore was brazenly stolen. Only after there was nothing left to steal was the ship finally abandoned by both passengers and free-booters.77 The maritime rush resulted in four different routes being chosen to the gold fields of Dawson, two of which seem ludicrous today. By far the best known was by vessel from Seattle to the twin Alaska boomtowns of Dyea and Skagway. Here the Argonauts disembarked and made their way up and over the infamous Chilkoot Pass ice stairway if they disembark in Dyea, or the longer but less steep White Pass outside of Skagway. Once these passes had been crested and the Argonauts were inside Canada, they could follow the river and lake systems northward to Dawson, the heart of the Klondike gold fields. The two routes which seem ludicrous today are by vessel to Valdez, across the Valdez Glacier to the Copper River watershed and then north to Dawson. (This was known as the “All American Route” in spite of the fact that an Argonaut would have to cross into Canada to get to Dawson.) The other journey was across the Malaspina Glacier and then on to Dawson. Both of these routes proved deadly as the Argonauts of the Valdez Stampede and the Dietz party quickly discovered. The fourth was known as the “Rich Man’s Route.” Though it was the longest of the four in terms of miles and the most expensive in terms of cost, it was the shortest in terms of time. Passengers would board ocean-going steam vessels in Seattle or Portland which would make their way directly across the North Pacific to Unalaska in the Aleutian Islands. From there the steamships would head across the southern portion of the Bering Sea to St. Michael. Here the passengers would transfer from the oceangoing steamers to the flat-bottomed river steamships for the 1,600 mile trip up the Yukon River to Dawson. While the route was advertised as ten days on the ocean and then 1,600 miles up the Yukon, very few if any ships made that kind of record time. Some ships took as long as a month just to reach St. Michael—with the passengers helping with the loading of fuel along the way. Depending on the weather, it would not be unusual for a ship to be at sea for a month before arriving at the mouth of the Yukon River. But the long time at sea was more than an inconvenience. It could become a matter of life and death. The North Pacific can host ice bergs and the Bering Sea will become

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Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

ice-choked while the Yukon River will freeze from shore to shore. Thus there was only a brief window of opportunity during which time the vessels could make it all the way to Dawson before the Yukon River or the Bering Sea froze. The first winter, 1897, when mariners were still learning just how brief that window of opportunity was, traffic up the Yukon became so slow and late that 2,700 passengers were frozen in waiting for the spring thaw. By the next spring, most of those who had been weathered in for the winter wanted to go home. Of the original 1,800 passengers who left Seattle in the first rush for Dawson in the fall of 1897, only 43 ever actually arrived there.78 However, these marooned passengers were luckier than they knew. The first winter of Klondikitis, 1897, provided disastrous. There were far too many Argonauts for the food supply and Dawson faced starvation. By August, as the ice was closing in there was no question that the winter of 1898 was going to be another one of famine. So many Argonauts had gone up the Yukon River, as compared with how little food, that by the middle of August, General Merriam at St. Michael was not allowing any Argonauts without at least a year’s supply of food to disembark. This left quite a few men stranded in St. Michael, many of them with not enough food to make it through the winter. The situation was worsened when 160 destitute miners from Dawson made the trip down the Yukon River in small boats. With no money to buy passage home, they were forced to squat on the beach and were only kept alive that winter by the kindness of the Eskimo who fed them “salmon, walrus meat and whale blubber.”79 “What the whites will do when the [Eskimo] withdraw their support is another question I could not answer,” Captain P. C. Rickmere of the Conahaugh told the PostIntelligence. He had good reason to pose the question as there were reports of more men coming down river from Dawson.80 However, this tale of men starving in St. Michael may be another of the many myths of the Alaska Gold Rush. Two months after the Seattle Times announced that there was a food shortage and starvation was imminent, the paper reversed itself by running a story that there was enough food in the possession of the military that “needy Americans [will not be] compelled to go hungry” that winter. According to the Times story, “the soldiers have grub piled up at St. Michael higher than a house, and the troops at Rampart City and Eagle City are equally well provided for.” With regard to the civilian population, “the soldier’s mess tent will be a free lunch counter for many an unfortunate American before the ice breaks.”81 St. Michael was an unusual military outpost. First, it was well out of the ordinary for its prodigious size. Established in October of 1897, it included all lands within 100 miles of the outpost. This was done to give the fort uncontested control of the mouth of the Yukon River. While this was an admirable consideration, the decision had been made at a time when no one in Washington, D.C., considered St. Michael to be anything more than the most far-flung of America’s frontier military posts. With the discovery of gold in the Klondike, the Kotzebue Rush, and the Nome boom in 1899, St. Michael suddenly became a bustling hub of maritime traffic moving up and down the Yukon River and across the Bering Sea. By mid-1898, St. Michael had so many people milling about its two streets that troops had to be sent because of the serious menace to life and property. Then, when the Klondike boom went bust in 1900, St. Michael saw a reverse flood of miners, fortune hunters and derelicts coming down the Yukon River on their way to Nome or back to the United States.

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So many people were flooding into St. Michael in 1898 that the United States military realized that it would not be long before it would have major administrative problems. Not only were there staggering numbers of people passing through the community, there were an amazing number of businesses that were petitioning to use military land as a “base of supply.” By March of 1898—and before the ice on the Bering Sea broke—about forty individuals and companies had filed for permission “to erect warehouses, hotels, dwellings, wharves, [and] docks.” Clearly, the secretary of war wrote to the secretary of the interior, “St. Michael is to become a point of considerable commercial importance” and the time was rapidly approaching when a civilian government would have to take the place of the military in St. Michael. “Regarding this question,” the secretary of war made it clear, the military “will restore the status of the [military reservation] lands whenever the course to be pursued shall have been determined.”82 In other words, the military wanted no part of what was clearly to become a boomtown with all of the cataclysmic social and legal difficulties that accompanied such growth. But the hustle and bustle of the gold rush boom didn’t product that many new structures in St. Michael. When the Argonauts arrived in St. Michael in 1898, all they found was a town of little more than a dozen buildings. In addition to several trading posts and two company hotels, there was a Catholic church, a Russian Orthodox church, and a few rows of houses connected by a board walk. The Indian cemetery was in town, the bodies of the deceased in rough timber boxes above ground many of which had spilled their contents out onto the earth. “Several skulls had fallen out and were lying about,” reported Walter Curtin when he passed through St. Michael on his way up the Yukon in 1898. “I saw some of the skulls picked up and carried off by American souvenir hunters.”83 But making it as far as St. Michael didn’t guarantee an Argonaut that he or she would make it all the way to Dawson. Though many passengers bought tickets all the way to Dawson, it was only after they had arrived in St. Michael to transfer to river steamers, did they discover that it was going to cost them another $250 to go up river. Many other passengers had spent every dime they had to get this far and thus could not go on. If this were the case, then they didn’t have the cash to buy a ticket home either so they were stuck in St. Michaels. Then there was the requirement that everyone going into Canada had to bring 1,000 pounds of food. With the flood of humanity into the Yukon Territory, Canadian officials did not want to have hundreds of starving Argonauts wandering the countryside looting cabins for food. But many of the passengers were unaware of the requirement and arrived in St. Michaels with a meager amount of supplies. These Argonauts as well were marooned in St. Michael. Making matter worse, the bureaucratic maneuvering became convoluted. As an added twist, passengers were not allowed off any ship unless the steamer on which they were traveling guaranteed to take them back on board if they could not find passage up the river. The steamships couldn’t afford to pay for their passengers’ fare up the river and were not inclined to transport the destitute Argonauts back to the Pacific Northwest at no charge. While some of the steamers in the St. Michael harbor could guarantee to take back their passengers who could not find transpiration up the Yukon River, in July of 1898, five could not. So those five steamships sat in the harbor, fully

34

Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

loaded with passengers, unable to progress forward, unable to release their passengers and return to Seattle, and unable to afford to feed the passengers which were stuck on board. Two of the steamers, Progresso and National City, had been sitting in the harbor for five weeks by July and had completely exhausted their food supply. The two companies which controlled the up-river service showed very little interest in resolving this bureaucratic standoff. Bluntly they stated that it was not in their interest to take passengers. “The fact is we don’t care for passenger traffic on the Yukon,” stated M. J. Bissell of the North American Transportation and Trading Company. The company had seven thousands tons of freight at St. Michael and every “passenger we take lessens the amount of space” that could be used for cargo. So the steamers loaded with passengers sat in St. Michael harbor with “everybody abusing everybody else and no one was doing anything to help the matter.”84 Perhaps one of the greatest myths of the origins of the Alaska Gold Rush was that the maritime rush made money hand over first. This may have been true for a few unscrupulous companies but it was not for very long. While there may have been a momentary shortage of vessels and a oversupply of passengers which did lead to profit-taking, it did not take long for those economic circumstances to reverse themselves. Rather, the ongoing intense competition for passengers along with the dynamics of economics actually drove prices down. Ticket costs in late 1898 went so low that the 11 major shipping companies running ships out of Seattle and British Columbia lost about $1 million in 1898 ($25 million in 1995 dollars). This loss was so great that the shipping lines “entered into an agreement which puts the rates at a living point.” Rates were set for point-to-point travel as well as cargo and livestock transport.85 Shipping wasn’t the only business negatively affected. There had been so many loses that marine insurance companies were losing too much to be profitable. Passing along the bad news, insurance rates jumped by 50 percent and many companies pulled out of the market altogether.86 By May of 1899, a profound change reshaped to the shipping industry. It finally became clear to the insurance underwriters that they were losing too much money and it was time to press for a change in policy. They demanded thorough testing of all captains, pilots, and masters. “The thing of a ship turning turtle crossing a bar because the pilot didn’t know enough to follow a plain channel or a ship turning turtle because master and mates knew nothing about the relation of ballast, the ship, gravitation and the tides in conjunction” was to be a thing of the past. Blaming maritime companies as much as crews, a letter from a “prominent marine insurance company” noted that “if ship owners [had] to bear the loss of ship and cargo because of the employment of incompetent men, instead of falling back on the insurance companies, they [would] speedily see to it that their vessels are properly manned.”87 The unrestrained, greedy, unprincipled rush to riches was over. The forces of regulation and civilization were also being felt in the North. By the spring of 1899, Canadian authorities were restricting traffic on all navigable waters in Canada to “British bottoms carrying none but British officers.”88 On the same day, it also announced that no liquor would be allowed into the Yukon Territory.89 The winds of change had arrived.

Four

  

As a matter of fact, sourdoughs seldom moaned about the quality of a drink. They didn’t seem to care much what they put down. What they complained about was the size of the drink.1

“In Alaska,” humorist Warren Sitka once noted, “the only thing that sells faster than whiskey is bootleg whiskey.” There is, unfortunately, more truth to that statement than many would wish to admit. In fact, throughout history, regardless of the country, when it comes to liquor, the bottom line has always been the bottom line. With liquor, legal or illegal, that bottom line has always been jet black. Liquor is a very profitable business and when the booze is illegal, it is even more profitable. However, the right to sell, transport, purchase, and consume liquor has always been in doubt, particularly in Alaska. Even today, a century after the gold rush, many Alaskan communities seesaw between “wet” and “dry” with occasional periods of “damp.” There is good reason for this ambivalence on the part of communities. Alcoholism is endemic, particularly in Native populations, and all Alaskans pay for the disease with high rates of fetal alcohol syndrome, drunk driving fatalities, property damage, court time, law enforcement effort, and rehabilitation costs. But no one is sure if the problem is more pronounced when the city is wet, dry, or damp. Prior to the Alaska Gold Rush, alcoholic beverages were illegal except for medical, mechanical, or scientific purposes. At least that’s what the law said. But the law did not and could not stop the flood of liquor north. While the United States government officials searched for contraband elixirs—or at least went through the motions of searching—barrels of the elixir slipped through their fingers as a bottle of beer here and a case of wine there was confiscated. In reality, the traffic in illicit liquor could not be stopped. It was too profitable, the loopholes too many, and the forces of enforcement were so weak as to be laughable

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Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

In reality, liquor had been a problem in Alaska ever since the days of the Russian American Company. Russian vodka made it into the Native population with great frequency and drunk Cossacks were not unusual. When the United States bought Alaska from the Czar, the problems got worse, even with the Revenue Cutter Service at sea and the United States Custom Service on land searching for alcohol. But the bureaucrats were fighting as losing battle. As John Keatly, Alaska District Judge, noted in 1892, “a coastguard of 5,000 men loyally attempting to do their whole duty could make it little better than it is now.”2 If the search for alcohol was useless, the prosecution of those captured with bootlegged product was hilarious, even before the Alaska Gold Rush brought more than 100,000 prospectors north. In December of 1896, two years before the boom, Sheldon Jackson’s publication, The North Star, lamented that while the importation of intoxicating liquor was illegal, “Sitka has six or seven regular saloons in full blast while Juneau has many times that number.” Whites were not the only ones affected by drink. The July, 1897 issue of The Eskimo Bulletin, “The Only Yearly in the World,” ran a front page story on the distilling industry among the Eskimo in the Prince of Wales region. Elders claimed that the previous winter had been the worst in memory for “drunkenness, disorder, and bloodshed.” Liquor had been distilled in just about every home in the village and the result had been drunken brawls which “prevented many from taking advantage of favorable conditions of the ice and wind for seal and bear hunting.” Drunks were constantly loitering in the streets of the village and, on two occasions, staggered into Sunday School classes. It didn’t take long for Alaskans to realize just how weak their liquor laws were. In August of 1898, the Fort Wrangell News noted “regardless of the fact that the powers at Washington, D.C., have been informed of the unpopularity of the Alaska liquor law and the lack of power to enforce it, the jolly farce goes bravely on.”3 Liquor was illegal but it was available everywhere, even to the extent that law enforcement officials actively participated in the sale of the very substance they were supposed to be prohibiting. Since the lion’s share of whiskey came in by ship, getting it ashore was a logistic difficulty for the bootlegger. But it wasn’t much of a problem. With public officials and law enforcement personnel turning a blind eye, the intoxicating liquid made it ashore with no difficulty at all. Sometimes getting the liquor on land was a simple as tossing it overboard and allowing it to float into the arms of waiting smugglers.4 But even this was not really necessary. A goodly portion of the product was just walked ashore, literally. Smugglers would strap liquor bottles around themselves, put on an overcoat and walk into town. The price was fixed so there was no haggling over the price. A merchant wanted the whiskey or he didn’t. Once the quantity was agreed upon, the smuggler would make trips to and from the buyer until “a wholesale business has been carried ashore.”5 Though the Natives had their own alcoholic beverage, they took an immediate liking to the white man’s product—though the reverse was not universally true. The Alaska Native alcoholic beverage was collectively known as “Hoochenoo,” or more simply “hooch,” the term taken from the name of the village of Hoochenoo just outside of Juneau where this legendary spirit was first brewed. Whites had a hard time

Booze and Bootlegging

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consuming the Natives’ liquor. “Almost kills on sight,” was the description of one observer. “Certain death to a healthy dog at 100 yards” was the assessment of another.6 In reality, the white man’s whiskey was not much better. Each vintage had its own colloquial name describing its effect. Beside Redeye and Red Dynamite, there was Skull Bender, Block and Tackle and Joy Juice, the last being so strong that after consuming three drinks the beverage one could be induced to “save his drowning Mother-in-law.” There was also Brave Maker which would “make a humming bird spit in a rattlesnake’s eye” and Forty-Rod. In 1914, testifying before Congress, Judge James Wickersham described Forty-Rod as having the ability to make “a man climb a telegraph pole backwards, run up the side of a house [and] spit in the face of a Kodiak bear.”7 Some of the saloons sold their own concoction, often whiskey watered with additives. Jed Jordan who owned the Ophir Saloon in Nome cut his whiskey with water and seasoned it with tobacco juice and Tabasco sauce. Sometimes, when I felt creative, I would add some boiled brown sugar or coffee to give it a little color, or red pepper to improve the body. I didn’t get too many complaints, and indeed often heard a sourdough state that a person could get as fair a pour at the Ophir as any in Alaska. As a matter of fact, sourdoughs seldom moaned about the quality of a drink. They didn’t seem to care much what they put down. What they complained about was the size of the drink.8

There was reason to complain. Fred Lockley, a mailman in Nome, reported that “the quality of much of the Nome liquor was enough to make an ardent prohibitionist of a confirmed drunkard.”9 Some of the liquor was lethal. In a letter to the Secretary of the Treasury, Captain Fengar of the Revenue Cutter Rush reported arriving at Klawock near Ketchikan to investigate the case of three Indians who had shared nine bottles of “Wizard Oil” between them. All three had died agonizing deaths symptomatic of opium poisoning. When the “Wizard Oil” was examined, it was discovered that each bottle contained “1/2 oz. opium & 13 oz. wood alcohol, among other things.” Each man had thus consumed 1 1/2 ounces of opium and 39 ounces of wood alcohol—“enough to kill a number of people.”10 In many cases, it was suicide to drink the locally produced hooch—quite literally. In August of 1905, five suicides were reported in the Diomede Islands because the Natives were “experts in making [a] bad brand of hooch.” The Natives “go crazy when they drink it,” reported William Jones who had wintered in the Diomedes, and they developed a “suicide mania.” But it was cheap. Jones reported that the elixir could be produced for about $.40 a gallon.11 By comparison, in other parts of Alaska, $.25 a shot was not unusual. (In 1990 dollars, $.40 is $8.50 and $.25 is $5.25.) It wasn’t just the Natives who had a hard time controlling their drinking and it wasn’t just the alcohol that was the problem. It was what happened when too much was consumed. In February of 1899, William Matheson drank three glasses of hooch and tried to walk 100 yards to his brother’s cabin. A small slough lay between and Matheson fell into some open water—and then fell asleep with his hands and feet wet. When he finally awoke, he rushed to his brother’s cabin where they tried to restore circulation to his frozen limbs. But it is was too no avail, reported the Seattle

38

Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

Post-Intelligencer, for the man had to have both his hands and feet amputated. However, it should be pointed out that the paper did not mention how it was possible to have an open pool of water in a small slough when the outside temperature was “20 below.”12 Liquor was everywhere, even in the most remote regions. On the overland expedition to feed the whalers trapped in the ice in 1897, Lt. E. T. Bertholf of the Revenue Cutter Bear reported visiting several villages between Cape Thompson and Point Hope where he found six stills and “ten gallons of mash nearly fermented,” all of which he destroyed. Some of the Eskimo villagers were very pleased with his action and revealed the hiding place of nine more stills “which had been concealed in all sorts of snow banks, where it would have been almost impossible to discover them.” Bertholf felt that the liquor—made from a “mixture of flour, water and sugar or molasses”—had been introduced at Point Hope to a chief Ah-tung-owra who subsequently taught others until “there was not a single village on the coast from Point Hope south that did not have one or more stilling apparatus going whenever the [N]atives could procure the necessary flour and molasses.” Interestingly, Bertholf also discovered a way to stop alcoholism in the villages. While at Point Hope he did some experimenting. He created two mashes and in one he added a teaspoon of seal oil. “After allowing the mixtures to remain in a warm place for several days,” he reported, “I found the [mash] having the seal oil in it had not fermented at all.” This led him to the conclusion that mixing a little seal oil in the molasses that was sold to the Eskimo would make it unusable as an alcohol base. “Whether or not [the white traders in Point Hope] will do so,” Bertholf concluded diplomatically, “is hard to say.”13 [Author’s note: In June of 1994, Brown Forman Beverage Company—the distillers of Jack Daniel’s—was contacted regarding this passage. Dr. John E. Bujake, Vice President of Research and Development, noted that a brew of this nature would likely be “rather harsh.” Bujake also speculated that the seal oil had coated the yeast molecules and thus inactivated them. This then prevented the “conversion of sugar to alcohol from taking place.”14] American Indians have historically had a hard time with alcohol and Alaskan aboriginals—Eskimo, Aleut, Athabaskan, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian—were no different. Booze, hooch, whiskey or the wide variety of names under which the inebriant was labeled affected the Natives greatly. Records of drunk Natives proliferate the historical record and most references are not complimentary. Many Natives were described as somnambulant or stupefied by the alcohol and the elixir is frequently mentioned as a means for men, many of them white, taking sexual advantage of women, most of them Native. Sometimes the whiskey was sold by unscrupulous whites, other times it was manufactured and sold locally by Natives. An Eskimo who had served on a whaling ship might return with more just his pay. In Golovin, in 1896, a party of Prince of Wales and Port Clarence Natives were returned home after two years at sea. As soon as they were off loaded, they began distilling spirits and soon a “reign of terror” spread to surrounding settlements. Drunkenness pervaded the area and in some communities, individuals drank themselves to death. It was reported that “heads of families would trade their last fox skin, deer skin, or boots for a bottle of this crude alcohol.”15

Booze and Bootlegging

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Thereafter it did not take long for the technology of distillery to be made available to Natives in the scattered villages. In July of 1898, the Revenue Cutter Service reported destroying 20 stills in Native villages in the Arctic. There was good reason to destroy the stills as “whole villages had been depopulated” by craving for the alcohol with Eskimos “rendered incapable of procuring the necessary food supplies for the winter.”16 When it came to the Argonauts, those who did not import it, manufactured it. Even though Jed Jordan kept his saloon in Nome well supplied with imported liquor, he was not averse to making some of his own. He rented a remote cabin and set up a small still that ran 24 hours a day. (He kept the inquisitive away with a sign that read “KEEP OFF—MAD DOG!”) The still was composed of a five-gallon oil can, an old gun barrel, and a barrel filled with snow and ice water. When heated, the combination of molasses, sugar, and flour in the oil can fermented and the alcohol ran down the gun barrel. The mixture tasted something like rum, Jordan claimed, “providing you were not too familiar with rum,” and ran about 120 proof. This elixir he bottled and sold as “Aurora Borealis.” When he allowed the alcohol to drip through reindeer moss, it “produced something that no one earth had ever tasted” and he named it “Midnight Sun.” Jordan bottled the two brews and had labels printed at the Nome News. Though his label claimed that the “Midnight Sun” had been imported from Norristown, Pennsylvania, in Nome it was referred to as “Jed’s Champagne.”17 Even if the authorities had wanted to keep liquor out of Alaska, there would have been no way to do it. So they didn’t try very hard. Large seizures were infrequent and extensive searches rare. Even fine tooth comb searches revealed little. In September of 1898, for instance, the Farallon aroused suspicion when it “made a quiet sneak” out of Seattle. Customs officials in Port Townsend were wired and the Farallon was subjected to an intensive search for contraband cargo. All night long four customs agent searched the ship, from stem to stern. Ton upon ton of cargo was moved until the customs agents got to the bottom of the hold. There they were rewarded for their efforts by discovering “seven cases of whiskey” which were confiscated and thus could not supply the “gigantic Alaskan whiskey ring.”18 However, one might wonder how much of a dent the confiscation of seven cases of whiskey was going to make in the Alaskan liquor traffic. Clearly the United States Customs Service was at a severe disadvantage. Inspections of holds of incoming ships failed to reveal much because the liquid was often labeled as other foodstuffs such as sugar, Florida water, or “stewed tomatoes.” Tomatoes because a catch phrase for whiskey in Alaska, particularly because whisky was transported under that name and partially from the note of a missionary that Governor John Kinkhead, 1884–1885, had his own stock of “stewed tomatoes” which tasted “exactly like Scotch whiskey and produced the same effect.”19 Every means possible was used to import this contraband. When the steamer Al-Ki was searched in October of 1897 because inspectors were being forced to crack down on the illegal trade, whiskey, brandy, and wine were discovered in containers marked “sugar,” “coffee,” “oatmeal,” “clerical goods,” and “kerosene.” In at least one case, the whiskey came north in an empty coffin.20 Two decades later, at the end of the Gold Rush era, smuggling was done in much the same manner. In Anchorage, three men were indicted for smuggling whiskey and beer in crates “falsely marked on the outside cover as cheese and machinery and various kinds of canned vegetables and fruits.”21

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Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

The price of whiskey varied. In 1898, reasonable whiskey that was worth 75 cents a quart in San Francisco could be sold for $4 in St. Michael and “ten dollars a bottle as it pass[ed] the mouth of [the Yukon River.]”22 The further up river one went, the more valuable the whiskey became. Whiskey was not cheap when it was imported. The cost of whiskey in Nome in 1900 was $1 for a two ounce shot ($20 in 1990 dollars) good Scotch went for $1.25. Jordan’s homemade brew sold for $.75 a shot—but it only cost $.60 a gallon to make even after adding in all of the “handouts to the authorities”—a clear profit of $95.40 a gallon.23 Wine in Tex Rickard’s Northern Saloon in Nome went for $20 a bottle ($425 in 1990 dollars) with the women keeping $7.50 for themselves ($160 in 1990 dollars).24 The quality of distillate was not the question; quantity was. For many Argonauts, taste was not the critical element in the beverage. deputy collector and chief inspector of customs at Eagle, A. J. Cody, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that hooch was “a very good substitute for whiskey: it will intoxicate, and that is what they want in [Alaska].”25 Cody knew quite well what he was talking about. In the early part of 1898 in St. Michael, Cody and a fellow customs official set up a tent allegedly selling liquor they had seized as contraband from the steamships they had been inspecting (see details below). Even after there had been a seizure, prosecution was hindered by the very profitable nature of the crime. With saloons in Dawson making as much as $15,000 a day ($315,000 in 1990 dollars), the incentive was to keep the pipeline full. This, in turn, affected the enforcement of the liquor laws. Bribery of government officials was not only common, it was expected. Even if the liquor was seized, it rarely made it to court. The disappearance of evidence was not uncommon. Sometimes water was substituted for the elixir before the evidence made it to court. Other times both liquor and bottles simply vanished. In one case, a cask of confiscated whiskey was left on a dock for the night. When the barrels were moved the next morning, it was discovered that they were empty. Enterprising thieves had drilled up through the timbers of the dock and drained the barrels dry. In another case, a jury was called to pass judgment on a bootlegger. After circulating the bottles of the contraband among jury members, it was found that the liquor had disappeared and thus the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.26 Other times it was clearly a case of government thievery. M. D. K. Weimer noted in his memoirs that the U.S. customs officer in Circle was “paid a nice little sum not to see [whiskey] land” and one smuggler who failed to pay an Officer had 96 gallons seized from him, the liquor then being “retailed over the bar.”27 Other United States officials were clearly in the pocket of the bootleggers and more than a few of the customs inspectors were always looking for a cut. In 1901, the deputy collector of customs in Juneau was a man by the name of Tenney. On one occasion, after Tenney had examined a shipment of legal Canadian liquor, he refused to sign the landing certificate. As the conversation was reported to the Revenue Cutter Service, Tenney was asked by one of two men from the steamer what could be done to “induce” him to sign the manifest. “What do you do with the machinery when it will not run?” One man said he didn’t know because he wasn’t a machinist. The other man got the message and suggested that one “oils it.” Tenney “replied in the affirmative” and

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was offered “as a lubricant a box of cigars.” Tenney refused the cigars and “exhibited a number of full boxes.” The men did not give Tenney the boxes and Tenney did not sign the landing certificate.28 Other employees of the United States government didn’t have any trouble at all landing “intoxicating liquors.” Unfortunately they were doing it for themselves. On November 1, 1897, four men “did unlawfully, corruptly, and wickedly conspire, combine confederate and agree together” to unlawfully land liquor. One of the four men was the acting deputy United States collector of the customs of the Port of Juneau, C. S. Hannum. Another of the four, Thomas Marquam, was the inspector of customs at Juneau. For their willingness to allow the “whiskey, beer, etc.,” to land, the four men allegedly received $.75 per gallon.29 Two and a half months later, on January 18, 1898, Joseph Floyd, acting deputy United States collector of customs at Dyea, and two customs inspectors— L. C. Hartman and Thomas S. Luke—were charged by the grand jury with turning over confiscated liquor to “diverse persons, to the Grand Jury unknown.”30 (The men later resigned rather than go to trial.31) Liquor was such a valuable commodity that it was for sale as fast as emporia could be established. The Seattle Times reported that, in October of 1898, two barrels of “fiery rye” arrived in Valdez labeled “glass.” Thereafter, “it was taken to one of the government storerooms and soon a full fledged saloon was born. Whiskey was sold by the glass from under government tarpaulin while government hay was left to rot on the beach without covering.” Humorously, a moral balance to the whiskey was achieved, noted the Times, because at the same time the whiskey was being sold, the Christian Endeavor Society was building a “neat little meeting place” on the edge of the Valdez Glacier.32 In Circle, Deputy Custom Collector Charles Smith complained that he could not find honest men to employ because “ninety nine men out of one hundred that could be employed in this section are in sympathy with the whiskey element and the smuggling fraternity.”33 At the other end of the Territory, M. J. Cochran, an attorney in Wrangell, wrote to the secretary of the interior that the attempt to enforce the liquor laws in Alaska was “a lamentable failure, a fiasco in fact, consisting of nothing more than idle threats, bombast and braggadocio.” Further, there had only been two days when the “saloons and breweries” had not been operating “in full blast under the very eyes of the Collector.”34 A decade and a half later, things had not changed much. In March of 1914, Governor Strong sent a letter to the officer in charge of the U.S. Signal Corps in Seattle quoting a complaint the governor had received from Ruby: I cannot close without informing you that the Signal Corps men at the stations Melozi, Lowden and Koyukuk are utterly unreliable and untrustworthy. The movements and business of officials of the Government are ‘tipped off’ to whiskey peddlers and their friends greatly to the detriment of the service for the suppression of the liquor traffic among the Indians. Most of them are drinking men and are furnished whiskey by the peddlers, who are given their assistance in return. It is hard to get positive evidence of this fact, but I can give you several instances of its truth and the marshall and some of the river traders can do the same.35

But these were minor infractions compared to what was going on elsewhere in Alaska. In St. Michael, three customs inspectors—Cody, Hoxie, and Dunn—went so

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Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

far as to set up a tent “in which they conducted a saloon and gambling” on the beach “half way between” two companies that could sell liquor legally, “the Alaska Commercial Company’s Building and the North American Trading & Transportation Company.” Further, when liquor was seized by the inspectors and placed in a government warehouse, “it was stolen out about as fast as it was put in.”36 When Custom Inspector Hatch was questioned as to the existence of the tent in which his inferiors were openly selling liquor and making a profit by operating a gambling enterprise, Hatch denied it vehemently. However, six months later, as Special Treasury Agent John Shartzer reported, the tent was located in such a central location that “Mr. Hatch must have seen it every day.” (Military authorities finally closed the tent in August of 1898 as a “nuisance.”37) [Author’s Note: The Hoxie referred to in the preceding paragraph was a long-time associate of Wyatt Earp in Arizona.] Drinking on the steamers by both passengers and crew was common as well—even though everyone knew it was strictly illegal. Technically, liquor on its way through Alaska to Canada could not be consumed in Alaska or on Alaskan waterways but this nicety of the law was widely ignored. The illegality of taking the liquor ashore for sale or consumption was generally ignored as well. On his first trip up the Yukon River, Captain John Irving of the Yukoner had taken 300 “theatrical people, dancehall girls, musicians, and gamblers” who “had a wild time” as they cruised to Dawson. Often when they landed, the band would be playing and the girls dancing on deck. Onshore residents including wood choppers would be invited on board to join in the reveries.38 Because there were so few individuals enforcing the law, the Yukon River and its tributaries was, quite literally, as wet as the river.39 With the dawn of the Alaska and Klondike Gold rushes, both American and Canadian officials tried to crack down on the trade. But their efforts were in vain. The Post-Intelligencer ran a story in January extensively quoting the deputy collector and chief inspector of the customs, A. J. Cody, who was responsible for making sure that no liquor was off-loaded in Alaska. Though Cody gave no specific numbers as to the gallons of whisky on the Yukon, he did make it clear that alcohol was rarely in short supply. “All manner of schemes to land these liquors at American ports on the way up the Yukon were tried,” he said. “Another thing we had to look after was the illegal manufacture of liquor known as hoochinoo or hooch mills. I guess I broke up a mill at every town on the river.”40 But it was impossible to stop the traffic in illegal liquor. As the number of Argonauts grew, so did the smuggling of alcohol. Occasionally the United States government did make an arrest. In November of 1898, the United States Attorney in Seattle did prosecute the Laurada for carrying illegal alcohol. It was alleged that the Laurada had 103 cases of whiskey and nine cases of wine along with thirty kegs of beer on one trip and two barrels of beer and 127 cases of whiskey on a second occasion. The liquor had been seized in Unalaska.41 But this was nothing compared to the traffic of liquor going in. John F. Stacey reported watching officials seize and unload boxes of liquor from the Laurador in Seattle. Then, before the ship sailed, “the very same boxes of liquor were loaded on again . . . [by] . . . the very same three officers who had previously ordered them off.” This officers came aboard the Laurador “looking very important and again inspected the cargo, and this time declared everything all right.” The ship’s clearance papers were

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quickly signed, Stacey recalled with irony, for the inspector’s eyes “seemed to have been blinded since the last inspection.”42 These same boxes of liquor were once again seized in St. Michael. When everything onboard the Laurador was taken off, officials seized the contraband. But, as soon as the rest of the cargo was loaded onto the river steamer which would wind its way up the Yukon River to Dawson, the liquor was put back onboard. The officer in charge claimed that he was doing so under “Governor’s orders.” Stacey questioned that excuse as the governor lived a thousand miles away and even if he had given the order it was still “illegal transportation of liquor.”43 (Ironically, the Laurador was a old blockade runner from Cuba.) In July of the next year, the City of Topeka had two tons of whiskey seized that had been listed as “clothing.” The authorities seized the whiskey, “but who shipped it was unknown.”44 Not surprisingly, liquor was available everywhere. Even the men struggling to stay alive on the Valdez stampede were tempted. Luther W. Guiteau reported having “an angel from heaven” drop into his camp. One night a man stuck his head in Guiteau’s tent on the Valdez Glacier and roared, “Do you want a life-saver?” Then he proceeded to sell Canadian Club whiskey for $5 a bottle ($100 in 1990 dollars). Though the sale of liquor was strictly illegal, the man—“half-Indian” and therefore another violation of the law—had bought 100 bottles from a purser in the harbor and was selling them out of his dogsled. Guiteau bought his last one. As a macabre aside, while the Argonauts were starving to death as they inched their food and supplies forward a mile at a time on the Valdez Glacier, the whiskey salesman went anywhere he wanted with a burst a speed. Though it had taken Guiteau and his party five weeks to reach the far side of the Chugach Range, the whiskey salesman bragged that his dogs would have him back in Valdez in “an hour and a half.” He had illegally sold 100 bottles of whiskey between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. and would be back in Valdez by 9:30 p.m. with $500 in his pocket ($10,000 in 1990 dollars). That was more than most of the men on the Valdez Glacier would ever see from their sojourn in Alaska.45 How much liquor was getting in? Governor Brady was not shy in estimating the numbers of barrels of whisky that made it into Alaska. He guessed that in 1898 the custom service confiscated 2,500 gallons of whiskey leading him to conclude that 60,000 gallons had slipped through the cracks. “None of this foreign liquor,” noted the governor, “has at any time brought to the United States any revenue.”46 Superintendent Samuel B. Steele of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who did not interfere with the liquor trade on his side of the border because it was legal, estimated that 120,000 gallons of liquor made it into Dawson during 1898 alone.47 Both American and Canadian authorities were too late to affect the quantity of alcoholic elixirs in the Yukon in 1898. In December, there was so much whiskey in Dawson that the price actually dropped by 50 percent. Earlier in the winter a gallon of whiskey had gone for an ounce of gold. By the end of December the price had dropped to $8, a “fair figure,” it was reported. (By comparison, whiskey sold for $2 to $2.50 a bottle in Port Townsend.) Individual shots were going for $.25, about half the price they were at the end of the summer. Further, while both American and Canadian officials worked themselves to the bone to stop the illegal trade, the use of the elixir was so widespread in Dawson that the Post-Intelligencer included the following

Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

44

sentence in a story, “Colonel Lynch is reported to have recently bought 8,000 gallons at $8 while ‘Black’ Sullivan offered to deliver 1,000 gallons at $7.50.”48 How effective was the United States Custom Service in stopping the flow of liquor into Alaska? In December of 1898, a list of seizures was condensed from custom service records covering the previous 16 months, the heyday of both the Klondike and Alaska rushes. Being quite liberal in determining volume, by the custom services’ own count, it seized approximately 6,200 gallons of illegal liquor in the entire district of Alaska.49 Comparing the eight pages of seizures by Customs with the 15 pages of liquor permits issued, more than 23,000 gallons of legal liquor were allowed into Alaska. Some of the permit holders certainly raise eyebrows. Jennie Sullivan, who held a permit license, was allowed to bring in 25 gallons of Claret for “medicinal” purposes. Robert Duncan, the general superintendent of the Treadwell Mine in Juneau was allowed to bring in a supply of medicinals which included 3 dozen bottles of Port, 3 dozen bottles of Sherry, 5 gallons of whiskey, 5 gallons of brandy, 6 dozen bottles of beer and 2 cases of Champagne in November of 1897. He must have been making his purchases for an injury-prone group of miners for he brought in 10 more gallons of alcohol on June 27 of the next year and, on July 6, he received another permit for six cases of whiskey and a barrel of beer—all for medical purposes. Erastus Brainard, the public relations genius who turned Seattle from a sleepy Pacific Northwest seaport into the gateway to the Klondike and Alaska, also had need of medicinal alcohol: 50 gallons of whiskey, 50 gallons of Port, 100 gallons of beer, and three cases of generic liquors. Edward de Groff of Sitka, who was “licensed to sell on prescriptions by the Governor” placed 17 orders during the sixteen month survey and ordered, for medicinal purposes: 10 gallons of port wine 20 gallons of Jamaican rum 5 gallons of sherry 1,510 gallons of beer 500 gallons of claret 202 gallons of whiskey 20 gallons of alcohol 12 cases of gin 2 case of champagne 4 cases of brandy 6 cases of ale 2 case of port 1 case of Maderia 5 cases of sherry 5 cases of claret

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2 cases of Vermouth 10 gallons of alcohol 2 cases of wine 1 case of sautern 1 case Hock

But de Groff was not the largest purveyor of medicinal alcohol. On May 14, 1898, the Alaska Commercial Company acquired seven permits for 1,000 gallons of whiskey each for medical, mechanical and scientific purposes in Circle, Fort Yukon, Rampart, and St. Michael. Another large license holder was C. H. Hamilton who acquired five permits to import medicinal alcohol to Rampart, Fort Get There (St. Michael), Weare, Hamilton Landing, and Circle. Each of the five permits was for 500 gallons of whiskey, 1,200 gallons of beer, and 15 cases of wines.50 While few gallons were seized, even fewer made it to Seattle where the confiscated property was supposed to be sold at auction. In March of 1899, the quarterly sale of confiscated liquor consisted of “72 gallons of liquor in tins, 20 half-dozen cases of whiskey, 5 kegs of the same, 17 separate bottles of the best Scotch, 3 cases of cordials, 3 kegs of wine, 2 kegs of brandy, 20 dozen bottles of beer, demijohns of whiskey and pure alcohol.”51 Compared to the figures above, it is clear that only a fraction of the confiscated alcohol ever made it back to Seattle for sale. What happened to the rest is a matter of speculation. On the sea, the United States Revenue Cutter Service records are full of letters from captains outlining the incidence of alcoholism, the search for distilleries, and the tragedy caused by the drunks. Shooting, beatings, robberies, and other anti-social actions were directly linked with alcoholism. But a certain amount of alcohol was legal, 500 gallons on each whaling ship as “sea stores” and though the Revenue Cutter Service knew some of it was being sold to the Natives, it was difficult to prove. Some of the liquor was sold in Siberia where the legal arm of the American government could not extend.52 No one was fooled by the attempts of the Revenue Cutter Service and the custom service to stem the flow of alcohol into Alaska. There was simply no way to keep the liquor out. Worse, the temptation for customs agents to make a profit on the side was too great and many succumbed. Everyone knew it was a losing proposition. In June of 1898, as an example, the businesses of Skagway sent a petition to the Secretary of the Treasury stating that the prohibition law “was a farce and directly productive of crime and official corruption.” Though intoxicating liquids were illegal, the petition noted, enough illegal liquor was being landed in Skagway to “supply as many as fifty hotel and saloons.” There was a tremendous tax loss here, the merchants pointed out, and the door to corruption was open.53 Further, it was a white man’s boondoggle, as Nome bar owner Jed Jordan pointed out. As long as the authorities were given “the proper encouragement,” no one was closed down—except the Natives who tried to horn in on the trade. The authorities closed them down quickly.54 Whether the custom service wished to recognize the fact or not, it was clear that Alaska was being deluged with hard-drinking men and women, an estimated 50,000 of them by the middle of 1898. With so much money to be made in the sale of alcoholic

46

Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

beverages, legitimate businesses went to great lengths to take advantage of the market without having to stoop to smuggling. In May of 1898, the Alaska Commercial Company wrote to the collector of the customs in Sitka, stating that with so many miners in Alaska, it was an “absolute necessity for men working in the mines, exposed as they are to the wet and cold of that climate, to have a small amount of liquor in case of sudden chills.” Then the Alaska Commercial Company then asked to be allowed to transport 12,000 gallons of alcoholic beverages into Alaska.55 (They were eventually allowed 7,000 gallons.) Humorously, there was a grain of truth to that statement, though not in the manner in which Alaska Commercial Company expressed it. When there was an epidemic of typhoid in Nome, the only source of clean water was in the mixed drinks. Some wags pointed out the logic in this action as there was probably more water than whiskey in the drinks sold.56 Perhaps the best summation of the problem was made by Revenue Agent John W. Linck in a letter to the supervising special agent in Washington, D.C. It was impossible to control the smuggling of liquor into Alaska, he admitted in September of 1898, because the legal requirements were so loosely enforced as to be laughable. As an example, he referred to one permit for “50 barrels of whiskey, 120 barrels of beer and 75 cases of wine” which had been imported for medicinal purposes. This clearly implies, he wrote, that “the efficiency and medicinal properties of liquor are made effective only by frequently bathing in a properly proportioned mixture of whiskey, wine and beer.”57 But interdiction was a last ditch stand by officials and even that was a wasted effort. On July 1, 1899, it became legal to sell whiskey in Alaska. What had been contraband then became a legitimate product and liquor “by the ton” came into Alaska, even with the distributors paying a license fee of $3,000.58 The legalization of liquor ended the profit-making by ships that plied the Yukon. It was now profitable to be legal. But it meant paperwork to keep the license current and, of course, the inevitable prohibition of the sale of liquor to Indians. But as far as the United States Custom Service and the Revenue Cutter Service were concerned, their job had not changed at all. Liquor may have been legal to import, but its effect on the population—and particularly the Native population—was unchanged. Clearly, the weakest link in the chain of government mail in Alaska was the United States Custom Service. Designed as a filter to keep unsavory characters, products and activities out of Alaska, it turned out to be a poorly-run, graft-ridden, bureaucracy that was just as hamstrung by unrealistic federal statutes and regulations as it was by its own incompetent inspectors. In September of 1899, Special Agent John Linck reported that Inspector Ivey had been absent from his post at Sitka for “nearly two months.” Proceeding up the Yukon, Linck arrived at Fort Yukon where custom duties were performed by William Millmore. Millmore was a “professional smuggler” who owned Millmore Hotel in Sitka that was being run by his wife. Upon investigation, Linck learned that Millmore was supplementing his income as a government servant by “supplying the saloons [in Sitka] with liquor” which was sent in trunks to his hotel. When Linck had some of the alleged trunks seized and discovered them to be full of liquor, “Millmore disclaimed any knowledge of their content.” Of course, Linck noted, Inspector Ivey could not have known of the subterfuge because his “being so seldom at Sitka.”

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Not to minimize Ivey’s lack of attending to his duties, there were extenuating circumstances, primarily self-preservation. In a letter to the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in April of 1898, Ivey pointed out that he had “made thousands of enemies in closing saloons and breweries.” The newspapers in Juneau, Wrangell, and Skaguay were “roasting” him and “I am threatened with murder almost every hour in the day and night.” Even if he made an arrest, Ivey wrote, the commissioners before whom he was to make his case are “standing in with the criminal element.” In Wrangell, for instance, when he brought a case against a saloonkeeper for selling whiskey, “even the deputy district attorney rose and made a speech for the defendant.” Two of the witness were attacked and Ivey had to place them in the custom house for safekeeping. If the assistant secretary of the treasury thought it was an easy job being a custom inspector in Alaska, “you might be here for a few days and go with me to see how pleasant it is to be threatened with murder and blackmail.”59 Ivey’s contention may have been true. The same month he wrote the letter, Ivey ordered the “principal hotels and saloons” in Wrangell raided. Through June, by Ivey’s estimate, the custom service had confiscated 60 tons of “high priced liquor.”60 Where this liquor went is not supported by any historical documentation. There were internal problems with the custom service as well. Special agents made unsubstantiated charges against collectors—and each other—and then hewed their own credibility by committing questionable acts of judgment. In December of 1900, for instance, Special Agent Shartzer reported that another special agent, Joseph F. Evans, had ordered the custom station at Circle closed. All the books were ordered sent to Eagle where a new deputy collector was to reside. The deputy collector of Circle at that time, Charles Smith, was reported to be an “honest, intelligent officer” who did his job well. Amazingly, “during the first season up there he did not even have a copy of the customs law, a sheet of paper, pen or ink, and yet he brought out some five thousand dollars.”61 Only after he had closed up his shop was Smith told he was not going to be the deputy collector. That position was to be held by Lewis Baker.62 Baker, a resident of Nome when appointed, was described as “a drunkard and a gambler.” He started his employment with the custom service by leaving Nome “drunk and arrived drunk at Eagle” and his conduct on the boat was a “disgrace.” Evans clearly knew he was appointing a “worthless character” as it had been pointed out to him by the deputy collector of Nome. But Evans had an ulterior motive: Baker was a relative. Evans was not a paragon of virtue either. In Eagle, he had made himself a nuisance by using government rooms for “immoral purposes” and was once seen in the company of another inspector “with two sisters of ill-repute” in that government-funded room. He was also seen embracing a number of prostitutes at a public gathering. After he arrived, Lewis Baker earned just as nefarious a reputation. Baker wrote a $500 check when “he did not have a dollar in the bank” and neglected to turn over $832.90 in custom’s fees collected while, at the same time, was writing the Sitka office for “salary and expenses.” Alas for Special Agent Shartzer, he did not fully understand the nature of the federal bureaucracy. While Evans and Baker were certainly disreputable characters, they had friends in high places. Shartzer apparently did not for his “services were discontinued”

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and his “office abolished” even before he sent a report on Baker and Evans to the Secretary of the Treasury.63 The pressure on the United States Customs to improve the quality of its performance became so great that Ivey offered to resign in the Spring of 1900. When a replacement could not be found, his resignation was not accepted.64 The Fort Wrangell News gave him a accolades in June of 1898, and made an assessment that was probably still true two years later. “We do not believe that Ivey himself has been dishonest,” the paper proclaimed, “but he has some men under him who have made him lots of trouble.” Further, as Ivy does not have the power to choose his own subordinates, he was stuck with the dregs of political appointment who do not see a difference between “dirty work in office and dirty work in politics.”65 It was a long, valiant struggle against booze and it was a vain attempt. A decade after liquor became legal, the governor of Alaska, Wilford B. Hoggatt, had the audacity to say that he had actually turned the corner on prohibition. Gloating over a momentary condition in July of 1908, Hoggatt, wrote to the president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, that “the last dancehall and gambling house in Alaska has been closed.” Further, the “gamblers and dancehall men have given up,” the governor stated with certainty, “and [Alaska] will now have cleaner and better towns.” He would be hard pressed to make the same claim a year later when the Tanana Leader reported that the number of Fairbanks saloons were increasing.66 Today his statement is ludicrous.

Five

  

Doctor’s [sic] would not thrive well [in Skagway] for there are but 4 [burials] in the cemetery and I have not heard of anyone being sick.1

Skagway and Dyea. Even today they conjure up images of wild northern towns where drunks swaggered down plank sidewalks and dancehall girls beckoned from saloons packed with sourdoughs loaded for bear. In 1898, they were the wildest twin cities on earth, more violent than any Wild West community, with more gunplay than any Hollywood western, with more lewd women per square block than San Francisco at the height of the California Gold Rush. Here were the gates of hell, wide open and beckoning in the gamblers, pimps, con men, prostitutes, thieves, burglars, cardsharps, dandies, drunks, and derelicts. These were cities gone mad with the excess of greed and wild with no law to restrain them. Here was madness made king and anarchy reigning supreme. Even though the Klondike was a Canadian strike in the Yukon Territory, access to the gold fields was through a thin sliver of Alaskan territory and the twin cities claimed the lion’s share of the traffic into the Yukon. Situated on the northern end of the Lynn Canal at the top of the Inside Passage, they offered two different routes to the gold fields. (To one old timer, the choice between them didn’t make much of a difference. “One’s hell,” the old sourdough said; “the other’s damnation.”2) Most photogenic was Dyea for it was from this rough-and-tumble settlement that the trail led to the famed ice staircase at Chilkoot Pass that has captured the imagination of the world. But getting to either of the passes was not just a matter of a causal stroll from dockside. It was a logistic nightmare. With each arriving ship, hundreds of tons of cargo had to be off loaded. First, there was a mad scramble of Argonauts on board of the vessels to make certain that all of their cargo onboard was sent ashore. Dyea had

50

Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

a harbor that was perfect for surf fishing but impractical for ships. It had a long sloping beach, with acreage for storing cargo once it got ashore but there were no docks and, until they were constructed, lighterage was done by small boats when the tide was up. If the cargo could float, it was just tossed overboard and then sorted on the beach. Lumber was unloaded in the same manner as were bales of hay. Sometimes horses were plopped off the side of the steamships and left to swim ashore on their own.3 This last practice created as many problems as it solved. While it was an easy way of getting horses ashore, many of the Argonauts were not cowboys and had a hard time distinguishing their horses in the herd that came out of the waters and “many more were claimed than arrived.” Further, because most of the Argonauts had no experience with horses, they didn’t know how to corral the animals, put on bridles, lash packs, or many of the other basic requirements to use a horse. The horses also had to have shoes nailed onto their hooves, a job which cost about $3 per hoof ($65 in 1990 dollars) and there were men familiar with horses that would load the animals for another $3 per pack. But even this was not enough if the Argonaut didn’t know how to handle the animal. Often, as soon as the beasts were loaded, “before the owner [was able to] catch up with the animal, it had run through the brush, rubbing and bucking and kicking and finally tearing the pack to shreds.”4 When the tide went out, horses dragging wagons would wallow through the shallow water up to the sides of the ships. Since passengers were responsible for unloading their own gear, each syndicate had to bargain with crews of the small boats or the teamsters for the best price to get their goods ashore. Teamsters charged $20 an hour if the tide was on its way out. But once the tide changed, so did the price. As the tide was rising, the charge was $50 an hour.5 Once the cargo was ashore, there was Pandemonium to pile all of one’s goods in the proper pile and not have any boxes or bags mixed with another syndicate’s supplies—and all above the high water mark. If the Argonauts thought that the only shysters they would meet on their way to the gold fields were in Seattle, they were sadly mistaken. The scams to part the men from the money they had left in their pocket began before the supplies left the ships. Thievery was common and relatively easy considering how many tons of cargo were being off loaded. When the steamship crews weren’t purloining luggage, the scavengers on the beach were. Kirke E. Johnson noted of Skagway, Supplies and the like cost very little more here than at home and I think it is the best place to outfit as those that bring their stuff with them are only getting about half of it and can get no satisfaction from the Steamship people, they are all robbers, and let me say that any one who is expecting to come up here should be for steerage, for if they can stand that and get here alive they can stand anything they will get afterward except the walking in Youkon [sic] shoes.6

Half of the men headed north arrived with about 1,500 pounds of supplies apiece, 1,000 of that food. The Canadians had made it very clear that they would not allow any Argonaut into the Yukon Territory without a year’s supply of food. Justifiably fearful of starving men pillaging Indian villages and raiding white settlements for food, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police established outposts at the tops of both the Chilkoot and White passes where they meticulously weighed the food of each man entering the Yukon Territory. If a man could not prove that he had at least 1,000 pounds

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of food by weight, he wasn’t allowed out of Alaska. In terms of tonnage, this meant that a small syndicate of four men was responsible for six tons of supplies, almost all of it in units no heavier than 100 pounds so it could be easily moved. With so many Argonauts arriving so fast, Dyea appeared more as an anthill than a city. Prior to January of 1898, it was best described as “an Indian village of 250, a white town of four.”7 Overnight the influx of Argonauts turned this sleepy hamlet into a boomtown with an open-air warehouse with goods piled ten feet high everywhere along the waterfront that there was a spare foot above the high tide mark. The tent city blossomed into a rough hewn city constructed of whatever timber could be cut, salvaged, or stolen. No one stayed very long but at one time the city numbered about 3,000—or 10,000 if one were to believe some of the Argonauts. There were not a lot of permanent residents as most of the men were just passing through. For the Argonauts, Dyea was merely an Alaskan toehold before they stepped into the Yukon Territory. For most of the men, the journey from Dyea to Dawson would be on foot, continuous trips of 50–75 pounds per man. Moving forward was strictly a job for the fit. A man would load up, walk a few miles, and deposit his load. Then he would return for another load. This process would continue ad nauseam until the entire 1,500 pounds, his portion of the syndicate’s supplies, had been moved forward a few miles. Then the process would start again. In terms of miles, each man had to pack 59 miles to move all his food and supplies forward a single mile. If it was during the summer, the packers had to contend with deep mud on the trail and the clouds of mosquitoes and biting flies that swarmed them. During winter, blizzards could bury their cache of supplies in a matter of an hour. Time was lost on bad weather, avalanches, and blockage on the trail, weighing food at the Canadian border, seas of mud and only traveling as fast as the slowest member of the syndicate. Initially the local Chilkat Indians could be hired to carry the cargo over the summit to the shore of Lake Linderman, a distance of 27 miles. For this service they charged $.12 a pound in early 1898. But by the immutable law of supply and demand, by the end of that first rush season, the price had risen to $.38 a pound. The Chilkat men carried packs of 250 pounds while their woman and children carried a “white man’s burden,” a mere 75 pounds.8 This means of transportation changed when a large rope tramway went into operation over the Chilkoot Pass on January 1, 1899. It ran for nine miles and handled 100 tons of cargo per day. That dropped the price dropped to 6 cents a pound so that almost any Argonaut could afford the charge.9 Jack London, as he claimed, could have carried a load equivalent to a Chilkat Indian but the average white man could not. In fact, 75 pounds might have been what the strongest white man was carrying and was by no means the average. In his memoirs, Sam Dunham admitted to carrying a load of only 47 pounds.10 Others sources indicated that 50 pounds was average with a few loads over 75 pounds.11 Those men who could not afford to pay the Chilkats carried their own cargo and became, in the parlance of the day, A.P.A., “Alaska Pack Animals.”12 The trail to the Chilkoot Pass from Dyea had five miles of good road and then, as one sourdough noted, “Hell begins.”13 During the summer the trail was nothing more than a rut of knee-deep mud closed in on both side by impenetrable vegetation.

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Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldfields

In winter, it was either slush or slick ice, often with a wind that added a chill factor to the hardships of the trail. Where streams crossed the trail, men just waded across. They maneuvered their sleds, pack mules, and dog sleds around boulders, over uprooted tress, and through the rubble of mud slides and, during the winter, avalanches. Fourteen miles from Dyea was the community of Sheep Ranch, actually nothing more than an assembly of tents around two log structures. Sheep Camp, in the winter of 1898, was described as an eerie city. Deep snow lay on all sides of the few wood structures and tents made up the rest of the city. At night, the tent city became “grotesque by candlelight with her moving figures reflected in its glow of light.” The men usually had a large tent covering their supplies and a smaller tent beneath the overflowing tarp. As long as a stove was burning inside—and there was an adequate supply of air flow to flush the carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide—the small tents were warm. This area of warmth was necessary because Sheep Camp was often snowbound for days. (These elaborate tents-within-tents were known as “dover tents.”)14 Beyond Sheep Camp the trail rose 1,000 feet in 2 miles. The timberline was at 1,900 feet and snow covered the ground until July. Then it was another 3.5 miles to the “Scales,” so-named because of a generation of tramways which had been located here. Once at the Scales, there were three routes over the top. In the center was the famed Chilkoot Pass which photos depict as an ice staircase. To the right was the Peterson Trail used primarily by dog teams and Argonauts with horses or other livestock. On the left was a trail that was so steep that it was rarely used, and probably the site of the alleged incident in James Michener’s book Alaska where a fictional party of Argonauts used their combined body weight along with a rope and tackle setup to pull their supplies to the crest of the pass. From here, the shortest way to the pass was directly up the 1,000 foot slope. Over the years a number of tramway entrepreneurs tried to capture the cargo market up the past but none of them had much success. The first tram had been built in 1894 and was ten sleds long. It operated on a pulley system with a long rope and cargo was pulled up the slope at the rate of $.50 a sled and off loaded. Then the sleds would be filled with snow and gravity would draw them to the valley floor. Later, in the fall of 1897, Archie Burns constructed a tramway called a “whim” which used horses to pull the sleds to the top of the incline. By the end of the year, Burns was using a small gasoline engine. Since he was charging by weight, $.01.5 per pound, it is most likely that “The Scales” was named for the location of his enterprise. Both of these operations proved woefully inadequate for the flood of Argonauts who arrived the next year. That traffic called for a larger tramway which was finally open for operation on January 1, 1899. But until then, virtually every pound of food and supplies had to be carried over the pass by manpower alone. The men stood in line, shoulder-to-shoulder, for hours waiting for their chance to ascend the narrow staircase. Loaded with everything from needle-and-thread to pieces of a boat, the men ascended the 30 degree ice walkway, step by step by step, going the speed of the slowest man ahead of them. There are quite a few myths which cling to the staircase. One of them is that there were so many men moving up the stairs that if one stepped out of line he might have to wait for hours to rejoin the rush. This is not true. The staircase had been constructed by entrepreneurs who saw the value in charging each man who used their facility.

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Since every syndicate was moving at the rate of 50 pounds per man per trip, every man would have to make multiple trips which, in turn, meant multiple fees to use the staircase. The men that built and maintained the staircase had every incentive to make sure the men didn’t get “cold feet” and go home. (The men who stepped off the staircase were known as “cold footers” and from thus comes the expression, “to get cold feet.”15) So they made the staircase as functional—therefore profitable—as possible. A rope handrail ran to the top of the rise and spaced every twenty steps was a large bench area where the Argonauts could step out of line for a rest.16 Those wily entrepreneurs were so successful that there is even a report of a peg-leg man making it over the Chilkoot.17 While the going up was difficult, coming down for the next load was a breeze. Getting to the bottom was simply a matter of sliding down what was called the “Grease Trail,” a pathway shoulder-deep that had been worn smooth by men sliding to the bottom of the pass “on a gee pole, a spade, or a bit of canvas.”18 Since the Grease Trail was so narrow, Argonauts had to time the men ahead of them. If someone got hung up in the trail it might mean a dangerous pile-up in the snow channel.19 It was here at the Chilkoot Pass that the most famous Alaskan term came into being: cheechako. The word is a combination of the Chinook words chee which means to “be late” and chako, to “to come.” Another, later and probably false explanation of the origin of the word came, allegedly, when an early group of Argonauts came over the pass, one of the Chilkat Indians asked a tenderfoot from where he had come. “Chicago,” replied the tenderfoot and the Indian pronounced it “cheechako.” From that moment forward, cheechako—often pronounced chee-chalk-er—meant a newcomer or tenderfoot. Once a cheechako had been in the north for a winter, from “freeze-up to break-up,” he became a sourdough. The origin of sourdough is a bit more obscure and it is generally believed that the name came from the sourdough mix that many of the old timers took with them as they traveled on their never-ending hunt for gold. Other definitions of a sourdough are more earthy and of recent vintage.20 But not all was tedium on the Chilkoot Pass. There was some romance as well. Frank Bardy and Marie Isharoywere were married as the wedding procession started at the Scales and proceeded up the famous ice staircase, lead by accordion music courtesy of Paul Ward of Virginia City, Montana. The groom went first followed by ushers, the bride, bride’s father, other wedding dignitaries—followed by men wearing 100 pound packs no doubt hoping that the procession would progress a bit faster. On top of the pass vows were exchanged with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police furnishing the “table, pen, ink and paper” to make the ceremony legal in the eyes of both nations. As prayers were about to be said, hundreds of men stopped plodding and “resting their heavy packs on the snow, this gathering of gold seekers from all parts of the earth stood with uncovered heads and reverently watched the minister of God, join in holy wedlock the handsome Montana miner and the beautiful Polish girl.”21 When the ceremony was over, the tramp up the ice staircase continued again. There were many strange sights at the scales not the least of which was Alexis, a muzzled bear that was the dancing pet of a Siberian. When erect, the bear stood taller than the Russian, and would dance on command. The pair was in Skagway for awhile, the bear dancing whenever a crowd would gather. History’s last mention of the duo was at the Scales, the bear “playing the part of a beast of burden” as it ascended the

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ice staircase.22 Other beasts of burden were not so fortunate. In most cases, the animals were treated very poorly. Many of the Argonauts had placed their faith in horses, oxen, or dogs and tales of the cruelty was universal. The animals were overloaded, beaten, forced to suffer inhumane indignities, and often abandoned when feed became too expensive. The abuse that the animals suffered at human hands was enough to make the blood of even the mildest of men boil. Henry F. Woods, described a team of oxen that an Argonaut was using as drayage to Dawson and then planned to sell when he arrived at the gold fields. However, the oxen proved to be useless on the deeply rutted trail and stood stock still. “Not all the oaths in the driver’s repertory—and he was a versatile swearer—could budge them,” he recalled. The fact that oxen had been underfed didn’t help either. In an effort to move his beasts of burden, the cruel Argonaut had at last resorted to building a fire under the exhausted animals and proceeded to prod the oxen with burning brands. Even the words of other Argonauts could not deter this man from his actions.23 Horses weren’t treated any better. Longevity for a horse was about six weeks, but it was not a pleasant time period. Generally the horses were worked unmercifully and died quickly or were left to forage for themselves when their owners ran out of fodder. Then they usually died of starvation often near the trail where their carcasses were quickly covered with a “black shroud” of blowfiies.24 The casualty rate among horses was so high that bears became bold. Yakima Pete, who went over the White Pass in 1897, recalled that after one of his horses died in camp during the night, “a bear came along and took possession of it.”25 A universal assessment of the treatment of horses was that at best it was unthinking and cruel. “They were simply racks of bones, scarcely any flesh upon their ribs or bodies,” was the comment made by Emma Kelly who was so tortured by the suffering of one particular animal that she “shot the animal in the head.” The owner became quite angry and threatened to hit strike her but 22 men jumped to her defense.26 In 1899, so many dead horses littered the trail near Skagway that there was a genuine fear that an epidemic would be unleashed on the community—not to mention the stench that already pervaded the city streets. About 60 carcasses littered the river leading out of town and there was serious debate as to who was going to handle situation. The concern centered over whether to burn the cadavers or bury them. While burning would be cheaper, some felt that “disease germs would fly to all parts of the town on wings of smoke.” Burying the animals would require 60 horse-size graves which the city could not afford to fund.27 No decision was reached so the cadavers remained where they lay until they rotted. During the winter months, there was an added factor of danger: avalanches. While ice and snow made travel easier because more cargo could be transported on a sled than a back, it also increased the danger of avalanches. Florence Hartshorn reported an avalanche in which a woman was trapped. Four Natives came into Sheep Ranch and said they had lost a woman in a slide. The fact that a woman was involved moved the men to the slide area in “double quick time.” The men dug for a long time and were about to quit when the Natives revealed that there was a baby involved in the disaster as well. The men then redoubled their efforts. When they found the woman she was dead but, in her last moments, she had “dug a small hole in the snow large enough for her child. She lay upon the child to protect it with the warmth of her body.”28

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The most disastrous avalanche occurred in April of 1898. The weather had been mercurial for weeks and while there had been some foolhardy men trying the ice staircase even they did not try to crest the pass on April 2. Blasting up the canyon past Sheep Ranch a blizzard left six feet of wet snow in less than 24 hours. Rather than dropping as traditional snowflakes wafting in the air like millions of down feathers, the snow fell straight, like rain. When it struck the snow-covered earth, it bounced. Flake froze upon flake as a thick, wet blanket of snow rose, layer upon layer. Higher and higher the unstable snow rose until it stood as tall as a man. Then Mother Nature played a cruel joke on the Argonauts locked in their tents of canvas and boards. She parted the clouds and blew them away. For the first time in weeks the Argonauts could see the stars. Good cheer flooded the men who had been trapped in their tents were warmed to the prospect that they would soon be up and over the pass. If the weather held, they would be able to crest the pass the next day, April 3, 1898. But none of the Chilkat Indians would test the pass. They knew what a heavy blanket of snow on top of powder meant. The steep slope of the pass was top heavy with snow and, if the temperature warmed, the wet snow would lose its grip on the mountainside. But nothing could stop some men in their quest for Eldorado. By the midmorning there were several dozen men moving up the ice staircase, step by step. As they crested the pass, others took heart that the time had come to pack out. Then scores of men defied the odds and moved up the pass. They did not have to wait long for their fate to be sealed. At around noon, with men standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the ice staircase, there was a sharp report like that of a pistol. Instantaneously the entire face of the Chilkoot Pass started slipping downhill. But that only lasted for seconds. The sheet of snow quickly broke into snow boulders and thundered toward the Scales where men were frantically trying to outrun the 30 foot wall of snow rushing down on them. As Henry A. Collins wrote to his wife, the avalanche “hit the jackasses about one third of the way up the pass.”29 The men on the ice staircase never had a chance. One moment they were standing on an ice step with 50 pound packs on their backs and the next they were being bounced about on the surface of the avalanche like a cork on an angry sea. Then they went under, deep, into the bowels of the snow, rolling and being buffeted by snow boulders that rolled them like rag dolls. When the rumbling stopped, those beneath the surface was frozen in place. Then came the grim work. Inch by inch the search for the survivors began. Some of the buried men and women could be heard calling for help, yelling until their voices went hoarse. Those who were rescued told of lying twisted in snow frozen as hard as cement as they listened to search parties above them talking back and forth. Some heard relatives regretting their loss. Others heard search parties come, and go, leaving them locked in the grip of the snow, perhaps never to be found alive. Some were lucky. On seeing the avalanche approaching, one man on the staircase had the good sense to tell everyone to hang onto the rope handrail so they could all be discovered together. Another man raised his hand so he would be easier to find. But it was all a matter of chance. Some of the men were buried as deep as 30 feet and many of them could hear the digging but could not call out.30 Comically, as the men were frantically digging for survivors, they came across an ox that was contentedly chewing

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its cud in a snow cave created by its own body heat.31 One corpse was found “frozen stiff in the position of running.”32 One of the men who was trapped by the avalanche noted, I thought of my friends, home, every act of life. I was held tight as in a plaster cast. Near me people were groaning, praying. Then I became unconscious. When I awoke I was on the floor of the power house alive but black and blue and bruised. They tell me I was buried three hours.33

More than 80 corpses were pulled from the debris of the avalanche after which they were stripped of their money and valuables. As there was no time, or ground, in which to bury them properly, the accumulating bodies were simply dumped into a hollow and hurriedly covered with snow. This speed of burial was discovered to be a mistake the next spring when the hollow became a small lake “full of rotting corpses.”34 All manner of material on its way to Dawson made it over the Chilkoot Pass. Pianos and organs, boat ribs, grindstones, pots, pans, canoes, blankets, picks, live turkeys, and sacks of flour made it up the pass by tram or on the backs of men—and sometimes boys or women. Frances Hartshorn reported that United States Marshal Irwin took in “eighty-four turkeys on foot”—though it is not clear to whose feet she was referring—and that 600 chickens went in by pack train. Little did the chicken packer know how well his product would be received. He expected to sell the chickens for a dollar and a half a pound; he eventually received $20 apiece for the chickens. The 84 turkeys went for $2,000. Two men, “Hulscher and Al Eckelmann,” transported 120 pigs of 100 pounds apiece in sacks, “squeal and all.” All but one of the pigs made it to Dawson, one of them eventually being traded for a claim “for which $4,000 was realized a few days later.” An enterprising goose salesman was concerned that the feet of the fowl were too tender to survive being driven up the Chilkoot and to Dawson to he “put shoes on them by driving them through soft pitch and then through sand thus giving them a pair of hard shoes.”35 But Dyea’s flame was fleeting. With the completion of construction of the White Pass and Yukon Railway out of Skagway in June of 1899, Dyea died within a matter of days. The era of the Chilkoot Pass were over. The United States Custom Service in Washington reduced staff in Dyea to a single staff person that month though a year later, Deputy Collector A. J. Walker was still there, drawing $3 a day in a town where nothing remained but “empty cabins, hungry ravens, silence and desolation.”36 Typical of the speed of the federal government in those days, it took a year to transfer Walker.37 Skagway, however, was far from a ghost town. Like Dyea, Skagway had started as a fly speck of civilization. But there was a difference. At Skagway there was an entrepreneur, a man with a vision. That man was Captain William “Billy” Moore. Moore was something of an eccentric. He had made and lost a handful of fortunes as a maritime captain, packer, prospector, and general goods merchandiser. He had packed into the Yukon Territory in 1887 as part of a survey party for William Ogilive, the Canadian Surveyor, but the trail had proved so rugged that he searched for a lower pass to vault over the mountains. He found it outside of what was to become Skagway and it was named the White Pass, named after Thomas White, the Canadian Minister of the Interior at the time. The White

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Pass was 600 feet lower in altitude than the Chilkoot Pass but, more important, its incline was gentle enough to allow pack animals. While men over the Chilkoot had to be A.P.A., over the White Pass they could use horses, mules, dog sleds, and even sheep teams to haul their 1,500 pounds apiece of goods. Moore envisioned a great city where he staked his claim. Sooner or later, he reasoned, the mineral riches of the Yukon Territory would draw men and companies from around the world. Access to the Yukon would have to be cross over the White Pass. If he could lock up the property rights early, he would be the owner of the most exclusive real estate on the West Coast, if not the world. He started early and was able to interest an English investor in the Skagway scheme, C. H. Wilkinson, who advanced him $1,800 ($40,000 in 1990 dollars) along with a few horses, cows and 6,000 board feet of lumber for an interest in Skagway properties. Moore then claimed 160 acres of land which he had surveyed by Charles Garside, deputy United States surveyor from Juneau, and began to erect the city of Skagway. In addition to his cabin and a sawmill, Moore also built a wharf and a few small bridges along the trail. He was also able to arrange for a Royal Mail contract, the Canadian equivalent of the United States Postal route, in 1896 even though he was 74 years old at the time. All in all it was not a bad pipe dream for a septuagenarian. Little did he know how bittersweet his legacy would be. Moore’s dream of fame and fortune ended before it began. On July 29, 1897, the first shipload of Argonauts hit the beaches at Skagway and rather than jump-starting his dreams of a booming city at the foot of the White Pass, it finished them. The entrepreneurial-spirited Argonauts who recognized that there was more gold to be made in selling than mining, simply jumped Moore’s claim and set up the city of Skagway. Ignoring Moore’s claims of ownership, the thieves established 3,600 lots measuring 50 feet by 100 feet. The lots were quickly sold. Some of the Argonauts built cabins on the plot and left for the strikes only to return months later to find that the cabin had been re-sold, perhaps several times. Others never left and built business on the stolen property. But whatever the use of the property after it was subdivided, to Billy Moore it was all nothing more than out and out theft. (Interestingly, the man who laid out the plat was Frank H. Reid. Reid would die the next year in the famous shootout with Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith.) While Dyea was famous for the Chilkoot Pass; Skagway was renown for its lawlessness. But it took a while for Skagway to catch fire. As late as October of 1897, it was described as a “deserted village.” By February of 1898, as the trickle of Argonauts showed every sign of increasing in intensity, the Territory of Alaska’s Governor James G. Brady, sent a desperate wire to the Department of the Interior underlining the decline of law and order in Skagway. In reality, there was no law and order. The United States deputy marshal had just been shot “in discharge of his duties” and shiploads of “gamblers, thugs and lewd women from the worst quarters” of America were streaming in to Skagway. Brady then requested that the Secretary of the Interior press Congress to allow naval and military officials to act upon the request of civilian authority as that was the governor’s only option. Brady also wanted the power to use the military as a police unit. Further, “the U.S. Marshal should have a patrol vessel at his command” which would be outfitted for eight or ten deputies and heavy firepower.38 This would certainly impress the lawless element of Skagway.

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The governor had good reason to be concerned as there was quite a lawless element to impress. By February of 1898, so many men with no money had arrived in Skagway that half the town was destitute. The white men, numbering about 1,500, were so desperate for work that when it was reported that a gang of Natives was being brought in on the Al-Ki to unload the ship and thus “take bread out of the white men’s mouths,” the unemployed men crowded the docks waiting to “kill the white-livered captain and burn the ship.” The Natives on the Al-Ki had been hired in Juneau to unload the ship, an arrangement made months before because of the lack of readily available white men willing to work at that time. But that labor situation had changed radically by February of 1898 as half the population of Skagway was “out of work, out of cash, and out of the actual necessities of life.” When the Al-Ki arrived, a melee erupted on the dock with Natives and crew members fighting for their lives. They “fought valiantly” and the riot was only stopped when Deputy United States Marshal McGinnis restored order.39 Unlike other Alaskan towns, Skagway didn’t just boom into existence; it erupted. Buildings went up as fast as one man could jump Billy Moore’s homestead and his partner steal lumber. Any structure that could break the wind and keep out the rain was called a building. A restaurant was any room that had a stove and floor space for tables and chairs. A hotel was any roof that held beneath it rooms, bunk beds, or both. A saloon was anything that had a bar. “A new dance hall has opened up next door to where I am writing and there is a continual cry by the floor manager,” wrote C. W. Watts. “At least every other house is a saloon or dance house and ever other house is a restaurant. Between them is either a doctor’s office or a store.” Watts also confirmed Skagway’s notorious reputation for murder. “Doctor’s would not thrive well,” he wrote, “for there are but 4 [burials] in the cemetery and I have not heard of anyone being sick.”40 B. E. Axe reported in February 1898 that the “death rate is 2 per day. Last Monday night four murders, including the town marshal, occurred. People are arriving at a rate of 1,000 per day. There were four hold-ups last night.”41 Were these Argonauts exaggerating the already seedy reputation of Skagway? Was there really a murder a day? Unfortunately there are no records to confirm this statistic but at least one contemporary document does insinuate that Skagway may very well have been the most dangerous city in North America. It was so dangerous that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were often forced to defend themselves against mobs.42 In 1899, the Commander of the North West Mounted Police for the Yukon Territory—his name illegible on the letter he sent to the U.S. Consul in Dawson— spent six weeks in Skagway. In that letter he confirmed that during his time in Skagway, “there was an average of one man killed a day.” Sadly, he wrote to the Consul, “there is not on this continent that has [Skagway’s] size such an assembly of crooks and villains from all parts of the world and yet there is law and order, protection to life and property to an extent hitherto unknown in mining camps.”43 It is true that there was law and order in Skagway in 1899, primarily because of a contingent of black troops which patrolled the streets. But for the first half of 1898, it was the domain of Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith, the king of Skagway. Soapy ran Skagway the way Al Capone controlled Chicago. If it was illegal and there was a dime in it, Soapy had a percentage of that dime. Robbery, cardsharking, rolling drunks, selling booze, gambling, phony collection rackets, protection, and every other form of deception was used to part the Argonaut from the money in his pocket.

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Soapy was originally from Denver where he had earned his name with a scam involving bars of soap. Gathering a crowd on a sidewalk, Soapy would show them a wash basin full of wrapped bars of soap. Then he would take one of the bars, open it up, and appear to insert a $50 bill ($250 in 1990 dollars). He would rewrap the soap bar and drop in back into the basin. Then he would shake the basin and sell the bars of soap that might have cost him $.05 a bar for $1. No one objected to the price because everyone believed he or she could get $50 for a $1 gamble, pretty good odds in any horse race. Of course, no one ever seemed to find the bar of soap with the $50. But then again, that was Soapy’s game. In Skagway, Soapy Smith ran a much larger operation. Those whom he and his gang could not roll they robbed. Those they could not rob they hoodwinked. Soapy Smith and his gang ruled Skagway, despoiling Argonauts with impunity. Indeed, to this day some of his scams are legendary. One of his better known schemes was “Soapy Smith’s Cuban Army.” Following the news of America’s entry in the Spanish American War, Soapy established a recruiting office to muster a company of men who would be sent to Cuba to fight for the United States. The call went out and 150 patriotic men joined “Soapy’s Skagway Guards.” But it didn’t take long the recruits to learn just how nefarious Soapy’s scheme was. One at a time the men were ordered to strip for their physical. As they were having their eyes checked, one of Soapy’s henchman went through their clothing taking everything of value.44 He also set up a “Telegraph Office” and charged $5 per message—which never went anywhere. Often the telegraph sender was charged another $5 when he supposedly received a reply from his message. Soapy also established an “Information Office” which culled the ranks of the Argonauts for chickens to be plucked. When the avalanche of April 3, 1898, took the lives of more than 80 Argonauts, Soapy set up a morgue tent and as the bodies came through, his men stripped them of everything of value. Another time, a young minister asked Soapy for a donation to help build a log tabernacle. Soapy gave the clergyman $1,000. Using Soapy’s donation as leverage, the minister was able to raise $36,000 in a single day ($160,000 in 1990 dollars) which Soapy’s men promptly stole. Wilson Mizner, a storyteller with a dubious reputation himself, told this story for years and usually finished with the statement, “Thirty-six for one is pretty good odds.”45 But Soapy apparently tried this trick once too often. When the Reverend Peter T. Rowe came to Skagway, Soapy’s men went through the saloons and collected money for the construction of his hospital. Though they collected quite a few dollars, none of the money made it to Rowe’s hands. When no one was willing to face Soapy, the Reverend did himself. He cornered Soapy and demanded the money. “I don’t know how much there was,” replied Soapy benevolently, “but it’s all gone now.” Not to be out-maneuvered Reverend Rowe replied, “Let’s say there was $500. I’ll be satisfied with that.” Soapy paid.46 It didn’t take long for the stories of the skinnings in Skagway to reach Seattle and both city papers began carrying stories of the depredations carried out by Soapy and his gang. This didn’t please the outlaw much and, being a literate man, he responded in kind. When an article appeared discussing how his scams were disrupting business in Skagway, Soapy sent a letter which was printed in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as a news story. He acknowledged he had a “saloon and gambling business” in Skagway but

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did not think he was entitled to the “roast” he had been given by the Post-Intelligencer. After all, what he was doing was legal, he asserted, and “under strict police surveillance.”47 In a certain sense Soapy’s last statement was true. There was strict police surveillance of his gambling and saloon business—except that Soapy owned the police. Surprisingly Soapy wrote quite a few letters. In one of them he corrected a Seattle Times story by stating he had “no gang” and had “not been ordered out of Skagway, or any other place.”48 But this did not stop the bad publicity. In April, the Seattle Times reported that “‘Skin Games’ [were] thicker than fleas on a dog” and the lawless element in Skagway had so taken control of the city that “all you [had] to do was listen to hear pistol shots after nightfall.”49 This infuriated Soapy and when more stories of the same ilk appeared, he became even more incensed. Finally he sued the Seattle Times for $25,000 because of an article entitled “Conspired to Murder” in which it was alleged that Soapy and a henchman by the name of Taylor—who also sued the Seattle Times—along with two other men were overheard discussing how they were going to divide the loot taken from a black women they had just murdered. The conversation was allegedly overheard by Mrs. Mattie Silk who lived in the adjoining room. Silk also heard the men discussing how they were going to have to kill her, Silk, so she wisely left Skagway. While the Seattle Times noted editorially that $25,000 from the suit would certainly “brighten [Soapy] up,” the fact of the matter was that “before any Court will give [Soapy] damages for a smirched reputation, he will have to prove that he had a reputation that was capable of being smirched that much.”50 While it is certainly true that Soapy Smith was a disreputable individual, it is also important to note that the newspapers of that era were not the most reputable of sources. Their job was to sell newspapers and more than one editor was unwilling to let the facts get in the way of a good news story. Quite a few of the stories in the Seattle papers were bogus. Even the Seattle Post-Intelligencer noted that “three-fourths of the stories about Soapy have been fiction.”51 In the case of Mattie Silk, for instance, the Seattle Times didn’t bother to mention that she had been a long-time Madame of a high priced call girl ring in Dawson and had been known as the Queen of the Underworld in Denver. She had followed Soapy to Skagway and ran her business there until, allegedly, Soapy and his gang got out of hand and murder became as common as a morning constitutional. But this is not to say that Soapy didn’t earn his reputation of dishonesty honestly. He had earned it the old fashion way, one outrage at a time. What kept Soapy in power was the fact that most people in Skagway were on their way through to the Klondike and had no interest in what was happening in the city. But as more and more merchants and other businessmen and businesswomen settled in for the long term, there as a concern that Skagway’s well-earned reputation for no law and disorder was driving away business. If Skagway was to become a permanent settlement, investors had to feel comfortable that their money is safe. Home buyers had to know that their property would not be jumped. Businesses did not want to worry that they would have pay for protection from the same people who would burglarize them if they didn’t pay the protection money. Men—and quite a few women—were looking at Skagway seriously as a place to live permanently, but as long as Soapy and his gang ran the city, there would be no law and order and thus no stability. Until something dramatic happened, the city fathers had to contend with the underworld running the economy of the city.

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Soapy’s end was coming quickly. On July 7, 1898, a miner on his way home from the Klondike by the name of John Douglas Stewart came to town with his poke of $2,700 ($60,000 in 1990 dollars). How he lost it is a matter of dispute. The most reliable story is that he met two strangers in a saloon who recommended a hotel to him. He checked his poke into the hotel safe and when he went to retrieve the money the next morning he was told by the clerk that “no one here has ever seen you before.”52 Stewart’s case was made worse when he could not identify the man who had taken his poke. When he went Deputy United States Marshal Taylor, who happened to be a friend of Soapy’s, Stewart was told there was nothing that the law could do. Stewart, understandably upset, went to the commissioner in Dyea, C. A. Schelbrede, and demanded action. Schelbrede, no friend of Soapy’s, came into Skagway and advised Soapy to his face to give back the money. Soapy allegedly said something about Stewart losing it a fair poker game and assumed that would be the end of the matter. Little did he know how wrong he was. The Stewart case had made such a ruckus that the vigilantes, a dormant group at that time, decided that this was an opportune moment for them to reassemble. Soapy’s claim that Stewart had lost the money drinking or gambling and, in either case, the gold no longer belonged to Stewart enraged the Committee of One Hundred and One, as the vigilantes referred to themselves. This, they decided collectively, was the moment to bring the reign of Soapy Smith to an end. When Schelbrede gave Soapy until 4 p.m. that day, July 8, 1898, for the return of the money and, assuming that he would not, the vigilantes called for a meeting. After a number of places proved inadequate for the assembly, it was eventually held at the end of the so-named Juneau dock. When Soapy heard about the meeting, he was concerned that he was being tried and convicted in absentia. Then he did the worst three things he could do. First, he got roaring drunk. Second, he got belligerent. Third, he got his Winchester after which he announced that “By God, trouble is what I’m looking for.”53 In a brazen move Soapy, armed with his Winchester, walked 50 yards out onto the dock to confront his accusers. He never made it to the meeting. Guarding the way were Frank Reid, Captain J. M. Tanner, Jesse Murphy, and John Landers, all armed and expecting trouble. “Now all you people chase yourselves home to bed,” Soapy yelled to the vigilante meeting 80 yards beyond the four men who blocked his path. Soapy, his gun now at the ready, jabbed it at Reid. Reid grabbed the rifle barrel with his left hand and pushed it aside while, at the same time, drawing his own pistol with his right. Soapy’s gun went off, the slug passing through Reid’s groin. By this time Reid has his pistol out and he fired four times, the first shot being a misfire. Soapy was killed instantly.54 There has always been speculation that Soapy had actually been killed in an ambush. This was prognosticated by the allegation that some of the slugs in Soapy’s body did not match Frank Reid’s weapon. This has never been proven but eyewitnesses discount the possibility. Bobby Sheldon, a witness to the confrontation, stated that were no other shots than those by Reid and Smith. It was a quiet evening and Sheldon claimed that if there had been any additional shots, he would have heard them.55 Further, Dr. F. B. Whiting who did the autopsies on both Smith and Reid made no mention of any unexplained bullet holes in either man in his book Grit, Grief and Gold. There was only one source that disputed the facts as just presented. Matthew Sundeen of Skagway claimed that Reid had been armed with “an ancient” weapon,

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a “Smith & Wesson six-shooter,” and that Reid had fired at Smith three times but the gun only clicked. Smith fired on Reid and sent him to his knees where he, Reid, kept on shooting. But the gun only clicked. Finally a carpenter by the name of Murphy grabbed Smith from behind and the two men fought for control of Smith’s rifle. Murphy won but the gun, according to Sundeen, was jammed. Murphy cleared the jam and shot Smith dead. The reason Reid was given credit for the kill, Sundeen claimed, “while Reid was dying in the hospital he kept asking, ‘Did I get him?’ To make him feel better they told him he shot Smith through the heart.” This is a good story except that the first time it was revealed was in June of 1941, four decades after the encounter. Sundeen, the paper declared, “[was] a little vague about his own experiences in Skagway and vicinity all these years.” He called himself a “tinsmith and politician” (his words), “but always tells you next he knows nothing about either” (the words of the reporter for the Ketchikan paper that reported the story which was subsequently published in the Anchorage Daily Times on June 6, 1941). The sudden appearance of Murphy is unexplained as well. If Reid were advancing on Smith it is reasonable to assume that anyone “behind” Smith would have been his ally. Further, no account of the encounter between Reid and Smith mentions anything about misfires of a “six-shooter” or Smith’s rifle becoming jammed. With regard to a carpenter named Murphy, the records for 1898 are sketchy at best. Masses of humanity were moving into and out of the city on a daily basis—and Murphy is a common name. The most credible records that exist for this time period is the 1900 Census. For the record, there were eight men named Murphy in Skagway at the time of the Census. Their listed occupations were teamster, laborer, fireman, deckhand, roadmaster and, interestingly, an accountant whose last address was Elkton, South Dakota. Thus, at best, the claims of Sundeen are highly suspect. Doubts or not, Reid was credited with bringing the reign of Soapy Smith to an end. When he died 12 days after the shooting, he was given the largest funeral in Skagway’s history, and one of the largest tombstones. Soapy was buried not far from Reid, but outside the cemetery confines so he would not “desecrate the hallowed ground.”56 The determination of the inquest was never in doubt as Commissioner Schelbrede took care of the matter.57 At least one person was sorry to see Soapy shot. That was 18 year old Bobby Sheldon. Sheldon was selling newspapers at the time and remembered that Soapy always gave him a dollar for the paper. “The regular price was two bits,” recalled Sheldon years later. “As you can imagine, I was very sorry when the vigilantes shot Soapy.”58 Leaderless, Soapy’s cohorts tried to flee but found that the geographic isolation that had helped them corral luckless men to be robbed proved their undoing. They couldn’t run to Canada because the authorities had blocked entrance. It was impossible to take a steamship south to Juneau because the docks were being watched. This left them little option but to surrender. Though there was talk of a necktie party, none of Soapy’s men saw the gallows that day. Rounded up, they were sent to Sitka for trial. Five received sentences that ranged from one to ten years and others were transported back to the United States to stand trial for offenses they had committed there. Though he never knew it, what really killed Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith was the White Pass & Yukon Railroad. With so many Argonauts moving through Skagway, it was clear that a road was needed. While a road would take money to build, it

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would also generate a handsome return because the Argonauts had no choice but to use the facility. George A. Brackett, former Mayor of Minneapolis and an engineer, decided to take the gamble and build such a toll road. Initially he was able to raise $300,000 for the venture ($13 million in 1990 dollars) and work started in November of 1897. But it was plagued with problems from the start. The project was continually broke, speculators blocked the road claiming mineral rights under the route, and bridges that were planned for the river crossings failed. Even before the road was completed, Brackett began charging a toll at the rate of 2 cents a pound for freight, $1 for each horse, mule, or oxen, 25 cents for each sheep or dog and $10 for each wagon. For a while he was collecting a modest $1,500 per day but this was no where near what he and the investors had anticipated. But even this income was fleeting. As the flood of humanity increased in size it also grew in animosity. Soon the Argonauts had torn down the toll gates and were using the road and bridges free of charge. Thus ended Brackett’s road and the $185,000 ($900,000 in 1990 dollars) he had dropped into the project. But even as Brackett’s road was being designed, other men had grander designs. In a chance meeting in a Skagway saloon in late 1898, Michael J. Heney, also known as “Big Mike” and the “Irish Prince,” and a group of British investors made plans to build a railroad from tidewater in Skagway to Whitehorse. Heney, who had played a significant role in the construction of the Pacific Canadian Railway, had been eyeing the terrain out of Skagway with the thought of building a railway. While the British investors had the same idea, they didn’t believe such a feat of construction was possible. Heney did. But there was one thing the British investors were sure of. Heney, famous for his statement, “Give me enough dynamite and snoose and I’ll build a road to Hell!” was probably the only man who could do the job. Thus was born the White Pass and Yukon Railroad. The project bought the right of way from Brackett for a modest $50,000 ($220,000 in 1990 dollars) and work started in May of 1898. The completion of the White Pass and Yukon Railroad on July 29, 1900, changed the face of the northland forever. Before the railroad, the only way into the gold country was on foot. It took a special breed of person to be willing to submit himself to the rigors of the trail, the mosquitoes in the summer and ice fog in the winter, moving forward at the rate of two or three miles a week, and then facing the terrors of white water travel in frail, overloaded, undependable, hand-made boats. It had been a culling process with the weak quitting and selling their goods along the trail or simply abandoning the cargo where it sat. Signs reading “OUTFIT FOR SALE CHEAP” could be seen all the way up the White Pass trail in those days.59 After July 29, 1900, it was possible for a Argonaut to load his 1,500 pound load onto a train and ride all the way to Whitehorse in a single day. Dyea died that day and Skagway saw a new birth. But it wasn’t to last long. The news of a new strike in Nome on the coast of the Bering Sea was already drawing men out of the Dawson and Whitehorse by the boatload. By the end of 1900, the White Pass and Yukon Railroad would be nothing more than a metal ribbon connecting two towns shrinking in population as fast as they had grown the previous year.

Six

  

Anyone caught with goods in his possession which do not belong to him will be hung by the neck until dead —Valdez Miner’s Committee

Like many other strikes of the era, the Valdez Stampede could well be described as the triumph of greed over good sense. But it was much more than that; it was the saga of grocery store clerks and school teachers who came north with gunny sacks to fill with gold nuggets the size of goose eggs. They came because they could afford the price of a ticket. If they were lucky, they left with their lives. But the Valdez stampede was different from other strikes because here Mother Nature conspired with an added enemy. The supposed gold was in the Copper River watershed over the mountains from Valdez, and the only way over that fearsome range was across the breast of the Valdez Glacier, 50 miles of blue hell. Only then could the Argonauts descend the far side of the mountains into the supposedly gold-rich Copper River. Alternatively, if the stampeders so chose, they could continue up the Copper River watershed and then travel overland to the Klondike, though this geographic possibility is hard to fathom today.1 Initially the Argonauts headed north in the summer of 1898 had a problem of logistics. For many, it was too late to head for the Klondike. All of the good claims had been snatched up and the snow pack needed for hauling 1,500 pounds of supplies per man was melting. Heading to Kotzebue Country was a possibility but that required money for passage because the Argonauts would have to breach the Aleutian Island chain, cross the Bering Sea and then circumnavigate the Seward Peninsula into the Chukchi Sea before finally entering Kotzebue Sound—where there would still be 300 miles of the Kobuk River before the gold fields were reached. Further, the Kotzebue

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rush required a well-heeled syndicate, an organization that was too expensive for many Argonauts to form or join. A more reasonable possibility for the Argonaut of modest means was the Copper River country. After all, the gold nuggets were just as big here as anywhere else and just lying around waiting to be picked up. Or at least the newspapers told it that way. The Victoria, B.C., Daily Colonist reported that men were making as much as $2.10 per pan ($50 in 1990 dollars) on the glacier and a $.60 pan was “nothing at all uncommon.”2 (It was not explained how one could find gold on a glacier.) But the Valdez strike would take a Herculean effort which limited its appeal. Though Valdez was only six days sail from Seattle, food and supplies would have to be dragged up the Valdez Glacier to the 5,000 foot level and then taken down the far side of the Chugach Range through an interlocking series of rivers and lakes to the Copper River. This was not a task for the faint of heart. It would take a strong back and more than a little courage for every element of nature would be working against the men. Before it was declared a bust, more than 3,000 stampeders would learn just how cruel Mother Nature could be. The most important consideration was timing. Prospectors had to be on the Valdez Glacier while the ground was still frozen and, on the far side of the Chugach Range, to be on the shore of the lakes or waterways before break-up. Leaving too late in the year meant that by the time the Argonauts made it over onto the eastern slope of the mountains, the frozen ground would have thawed to muskeg and the tons of supplies would have to moved 50 pounds at a time or let sit until the next freeze-up. Leaving the oceanside of the glacier too early would mean sitting on the far side of the mountain range waiting for the ice to breaks on the rivers and lakes. So, in the fall of 1898, 3,000 men and a handful of women flooded into Valdez to take advantage of the snow cover. But from the very start the Valdez strike proved treacherous. Though Valdez was called a “port,” there was actually not much on the waterfront in 1898. Supplies had to be lightered ashore when the tide was high or after the mud left exposed by the outgoing tide had been frozen. As it turned out, 1898 was one of the coldest years on record for Valdez. Many of the stampeders reported thick ice on the harbor, strange as the harbor has an average tide of 8 feet with a high tide of up 18 feet. Charles A. Margeson, who came north on the Moonlight, reported the ice was “about eighteen inches thick, and covered with three feet of snow.” Fortunately for the stampeders, the ice proved to be thick enough to support the hundreds of tons of cargo that were dragged across it even though the ice “settle[d] so that eight inches of water had overflowed the surface” which made the off loading treacherous and very cold. By the third day, Margeson reported that the shore ice had broken free and disintegrated into ice cakes.3 (According to long-time Valdez resident John Kelsey, president of the Kelsey Dock Company in Valdez, the harbor of Valdez had only been frozen twice in his lifetime. Once was during the Second World War. The time previous to that had been in 1925 when the ice had been thick enough for people to skate across the harbor.4) This climatological feature may have been added to the impending disaster. If Valdez had experienced a normal winter, ice and snow would not have been on the ground until late November when the average temperatures dropped below freezing. The early winter of 1898 made the trail to the foot of the glacier snow-covered so that

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it was easy to drag the supplies by sled. Had there been no snow on the ground, the exertion of moving 1,500 pounds per person across rock, gravel, and muskeg might have discouraged more than a few stampeders before they even arrived at the foot of the Valdez Glacier. As in the Klondike Strike, each man needed 1,000 pounds of food to survive the rigors of a year in the gold country.5 On top of that had to be added his own clothing and gear as well as whatever mining equipment he shared with the other members of his small company. Some syndicates dragged boats—often in pieces—up the glacier so they would have a means of transportation down the Klutina watershed into the Copper River on the far side of the mountains. Others carried small saw mills broken into their basic parts to cut trees for rafts, sluices, and cabins. Using timber they had brought with them or that which they could scrounge, the men made sleds and began the cresting of the glacier, one step at a time. Moving along the glacier was done in a series of smaller loads. Sleds were loaded with around 200 pounds and moved several miles at a time. Back and forth the men would go, 200 pounds at a time, until all the food and gear for the syndicate had been moved forward. Then the process would start again. It was not easy work, as George Hazelet learned when he began moving his supplies over the glacier. He made “an ass of [himself ] in earnest,” he wrote, and after pulling two 200-pound sleds a day every day all week long, he recorded, “you soon have long ears.”6 There was also a problem with finding a trail. As Dr. Louis Seitz noted in a letter home in 1898, of the 2,500 men in the stampede “not one knows a thing about either the trail, or the country beyond.” He readily admitted that he and his syndicate didn’t “really know with any degree of certainty just where we are, and not all where we are going or how we are to get” to the gold fields. Even worse, he was “perfectly satisfied that the [land beyond the glacier] has never been surveyed, excepting in the mind of the men who surveyed it for the government or are credited with having done so,” because, so far, “we have found it entirely different from anything our maps give us.” As far as following a trail over the glacier, Seitz noted that the stampeders were “like a lot of chicks. Wherever the one in the lead goes, the whole band follows.”7 Where the going was steep, a steel spike, called a “dead man,” would be driven into the ice and a pulley system attached. Experience revealed that 300 feet of 3/4 inch rope proved to be the most efficient length. One end of the rope would be attached to a loaded sled which would then be pulled up the incline inch-by-inch courtesy of human muscle. One man would usually pull the sled courtesy of the pulley on the dead man while the others would push the sled. But the men had to be careful and keep the pulley oiled and cooled otherwise it would snap. Then the men behind the sled would find themselves unable to push the sled uphill and have no way to get out its way if it slid backwards.8 A few of the stampeders had horses and some others had “Mexican Canary Birds” (burros).9 Hazelet wished he had one and remarked that a horse in Seattle sold for $10 ($200 in 1990 dollars) while on the Glacier, it would go for as much as $400 ($8,000 in 1990 dollars).10 But he was correct in surmising that the horses would die quickly. They had to work hard all day and then “stand out all night [and] get very cold.” The horses also had to eat and that meant more weight that had to be moved along the ice. [Author’s note: Though there is at least one photo of strings of horse teams being used

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on the Valdez Glacier—and at least one bicycle—few diaries mention horses in any great number.11] Kapplemann also described men selling ice skates for “$300 to $400 each.”12 [This author could find no other reference to skates on the Valdez Glacier.] The animals did not last long on the glacier. The burros’ feet proved to be too small to spread over the ice. As a result they cut into the surface of the glacier and were abandoned early in the trek. Often the packs were taken off the animals and they were left where they stood, exhausted and helpless on the ice. Most of them died but at least a few of the burros made it over the crest of the glacier and into the Klutina River where they were used for packing on solid ground, a surface better fitted for their hooves.13 Dogs were another matter altogether. Treatment of these animals was abominable. Hazelet estimated that of the several hundred dogs he had seen on the Excelsior on his trip north, fewer than 25 made it onto the glacier. “Some men are so brutal,” he wrote, “whipping their dogs when the poor things [were] doing all and more than they are able to, some will even ask you to give their dog a kick as you pass him.”14 One stampeder, Basil Austin, reported on a team of three dogs whose owners were “always lashing and yelling at them” as they progressed up the glacier. The dogs pulled as best they could but when their strength gave out from malnutrition and exhaustion, they were shot. Though Austin was sorry for the dogs, he felt they “were better off than to be further subjected to such damnable treatment.”15 Kappleman noted that generally the dogs were tied to a post stuck in the ice “and if they don’t dig a hole for themselves they have to stay out in the wind and snow.” It was survival of the fittest and many dogs proved themselves to be unfit. Howling dogs were nothing uncommon and Kappleman reported one dog which had been “out in the entire storm and has been howling and crying all day and night. It is really pitiful to see them but what can you do? If you say anything to the owners they tell you to mind your own business and not having any extra food for them you can’t do a thing.”16 While many of the incidents above are normal for any gold rush, what made the Valdez Stampede unique was that it was, quite literally, a civilization on the move. With men inching forward load by load, there were tons of food and supplies left unattended. This opened the door to pilfering and petty theft. Well aware that such transgressions would take place, the Argonauts in Valdez quickly formed a “Law and Order Committee” which decreed that any man who was found guilty of petty larceny, would “have his goods confiscated, and he was to be driven from the country.” If the theft were more than $100, the penalty was death. (A complete copy of the so-called “Copper River Code” can be found in the Appendix.) Apparently the threat of harsh treatment worked. Margeson reported that If a man found anything on the trail which had been lost by another, he would place it upon a stick, stuck in the snow, beside the trail; or if a man found among his goods a sack or box which belong to another, he would put up notices in two or three conspicuous places, to the effect that a box or sack bearing such a mark had been found among his stuff, and invite the owner to call and get his property.17

But then again, petty theft was still present. When George Miller took inventory of his syndicate’s supplies on the glacier he found that “some _______ _______ ha[d] swiped two sacks of our hard-hauled flour, and three cans of baking powder, which cuts us very short on both.”18

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Other stampeders reported seeing a body that had been “left to dangle in the wind for days as a reminder of the penalty for stealing another man’s supplies.”19 Clarence J. Messer, a newspaperman for the Boston Transcript reported a sign reading “ANYONE CAUGHT WITH GOODS IN HIS POSSESSION WHICH DO NOT BELONG TO HIM WILL BE HUNG BY THE NECK UNTIL DEAD” which was signed by the “Miner’s Committee.” Messer personally learned how effective that sign was. As he was hauling his supplies over the glacier, “my fine rifle slipped its bonds and fell into the snow, unknowingly,” he reported. “In ten hours my gun passed through five outfits of men trying to find the rightful owner. Then I found it beside my cache where it had been placed by someone who had received it in the same manner.”20 Not everyone was so honest. Shad Reid’s diary recorded his thoughts when he discovered that a sack of flour and 50 pounds of bacon had been stolen. “May the man who [stole] it never be prosperous,” he wrote.21 In reality, the body left to dangle in the wind was probably that of a murderer, Doc Tanner, and was the first act of vigilante justice—or miner’s council justice, depending on the definition of either—in Alaska during the Gold Rush.22 Tanner had joined with the Hogg party of six Canadians as they were traversing the United States on their way to Seattle and continued as their partner as they progressed up the glacier. A confrontation erupted when it became clear that Tanner was not pulling his load. He was “teetering along with a light load while other dragged more according to their capacity.” The situation reached a breaking point when the Canadian party met in a tent without Tanner to discuss his case. Tanner, listening outside the canvas conference room, heard the party decide to give him his share of the outfit and cut him loose. Drunk, Tanner stepped into the tent and began firing and instantly killed two members of the party, N. A. Call and W. A. Lee.23 That was on January 1, 1898, and did not augur for a good year. There were no police or courts so the miners, collectively, meted out justice. Tanner was immediately seized, found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. Margeson, who appears to have been an eyewitness, reported that as the miner’s committee was seeking a tree to hang Tanner, the murderer seemed the least excited of any man in the company, and talked about the horrible crime as if it were a matter of no importance, and jokingly disputed with the men as to which limb of the tree he was to hang from.24

Tanner even “offered to tie the knot around his [own] neck.”25 Perhaps to spread the responsibility, 37 men pulled on the rope and did, in the words of one of the participants, “the best job we can.”26 Tanner’s last words, repeated by a member of the jury, were reported to be “Gentlemen, you’re hangin’ the best man with a six-shooter that ever came to Alaska or any other country. I want only one shot to a man.” Two years later, those who had taken part in the lynching “received official notification from Washington that they were exonerated from all blame.”27 After this incident, Margeson claimed that the town of Valdez bore the name “Hang-town.”28 From an historical perspective, it was this sense of law and order that distinguished Valdez as a stampede, not a rush. Messer reported two incidents where crimes were investigated by the collective stampeders. On April 7, 1898, “a crier went through our camp shouting ‘Indignation meeting tonight at top of second bench to take action on

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thieves, at 7:30.’”29 Nothing came of that trial. But a month later, on May 10, a “negligence committee” tried a man by the name of Wolff who had been found with stolen goods. Wolff said he had bought the goods so the negligence committee gave him time to find the man. If he could not find the man, he would have to leave the glacier or suffer 50 lashes on his bare back. Messer had little sympathy for the defendant, “I am sorry for Wolff who seems deficient in intellect and in my opinion is the tool of others, but when we have to leave goods all along the trail as we do here, law must be upheld.”30 History has always treated gold rushes as if there was more than a touch of madness in the prospectors. By modern standards, perhaps there was. But a stampede was not a mob of unkempt men plunging into the wilderness after yellow metal. There was quite a bit of civilization in this stampede and though the men were scattered along the glacier, they were, in essence, a city in movement. Thousands of men were trudging the same trail, working side-by-side as they slogged forward. Sometimes the camp sites looked more like tent cities than miners’ shelters. This led to camaraderie, even though the men were destined to compete against one another for the gold when they arrived on the banks of the Copper River. “Miner’s hospitality” meant sharing what you had if it was needed. There were also liquor salesmen who used dog sleds to speed their supplies to the customers.31 Newspapers were sold on the glacier for $.75 apiece.32 Postmen also came down the trails with letters about every ten days—as long as you were willing to pay the $1 per letter charge to have it delivered from Valdez.33 Though they must have been rare, elaborate funerals were also held along the trail. Margeson reported the death of a stampeder who had been a Mason. The corpse was wrapped in his blankets, and placed on a hand sled, which was drawn by six Masons, four other walking behind, holding to a line attached to the sled to hold it back as they descended the glacier. Next came about sixty Masons in line, and then several hundred miners, who, to show their respect for their dead companion, had quit work to attend the funeral.34 Other men were not so lucky. Those that died were often rolled into shallow graves wrapped in their blankets.35 But beyond the limited community activity, the primary chore of the Argonauts was to move forward, a 200 pound sled at a time, an average of 1,500 pounds per man up the face of the Valdez Glacier. Tempers were often short and syndicates breaking apart were not uncommon. A partnership or syndicate would air its grievances, split its supplies, and then the new groups of partners would move, some on their own and others joining with other companies which, in turn, might split themselves. In one particular case, Whiskey Taylor was judged not to be pulling his weight. Taylor would only pack a “boy’s load” of 125 to 150 pounds while his partners were lugging up to 250 pounds when conditions permitted. Nineteen miles out of Valdez one of the partners “cut the rope on Taylor and that ended the Whiskey Taylor outfit.”36 For men who felt as though they had been cheated when the syndicate disbanded, miner’s meetings were called. Verdicts were usually brought back in about ten minutes and usually resulted in equal division of all property.37 Ironically, the trip itself was not that far in miles, about 50 miles as the raven flies, but moving 1,500 pounds apiece, it would take the Argonauts between 90 and

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200 days.38 Day by day the men dragged their supplies forward over the bone-chilling ice. In addition to slick spots there were “wide cracks and crevasses which [were] perhaps hundreds of feet deep” Hazelet reported, and boulders “weighing thousands of tons” scattered all across the face of the glacier, “waiting for the sun to melt the ice and snow and allow them to tumble down to the sea.”39 Occasionally men slid in the chasms, never to be seen again. One man, Otto Thews of Primrose, Iowa, slipped into a 1,000 foot deep crevice and was only saved from falling to his death when his pack jammed in the ice. There he hung, between Heaven and earth, until his partners could extract him from his ticklish predicament.40 Sliding became a way of life. No matter how well a sled was packed and balanced, it was not easy to control on the ice. When there was a modest layer of snow on the trail the men were able to control the slide of the sleds, but on glare ice—particularly after a rain storm—there was always the problem of losing control. Once a sled started to pick up speed, it could hit other men, possibly injuring or even killing them. The weather was yet another unpredictable feature of the stampede. Many of the diaries reported storms so fierce that the men were buried in their tents under feet of snow. (Though this may sound like a myth, in fact, it is not. As a modern example, in the winter of 1990, Valdez set a record with 158 inches of snow. On January 16, 1990, the city got 47 1/2 inches in just a few hours. The snow was so compacted by its own weight that it had to be removed from the roofs of houses with chain saws.) When it rained, the water came in torrents and would sweep into the tents, drenching their clothes and blankets inside.41 In at least one sense the rain was a blessing. Dehydration on the glacier was a common problem and if the men could not collect the runoff, they would not have to burn valuable wood to melt snow for drinking water. Oddly, of all of the hardships mentioned in diaries, cold was rarely mentioned except in relation to the wind and storms; then again, as George Miller of Riverside, California, noted, the “terrible wind” blows “about eight days out of the week and Sunday, too.” Perhaps the failure to mention the cold was because the men were exerting themselves so greatly that they welcomed the coolness of the air on the glacier’s surface. When the cold was mentioned, it was usually in regard to the Argonauts’ whiskers and mustaches freezing.42 Other than storms, the times when cold was mentioned most frequently in diaries was at night and usually in connecting with lack of wood on the glacier. But this should not diminish the power of the storms. Often the wind was so strong a man could not stand against it. So the men would burrow into the snow, forming caves in the snow with the heat of their own bodies. Poppe reported a three day storm in which he was “compelled to burrow a cavern in the snow and remain there for three days and nights, not daring to sleep.” While he was luckier than others in that he did not freeze, “his hands were somewhat froze, resulting in the blacking of the fingernails.” He was lucky since the temperature was estimated at “40 to 60 degrees below zero most of the time.”43 As wood was scarce some of the men had to walk 18 miles to find combustible material and then they often had to fight their way through snow drifts eight feet deep to find even dry branches and kindling. If they cut a tree, the wood had to be dug out of the deep snow. As a consequence, it was no wonder that the Argonauts burned wood as sparingly as possible.44 But every Argonauts needed firewood to stay alive, particularly if a storm swept down on him. If someone ran out of firewood, he might

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burn anything to keep from freezing in his tent. In one case, some Argonauts were so desperate for warmth they were forced to burn their tent poles to keep from being frozen.45 On the other hand, the sun was a constant menace. It blasted down the ice corridor and reflected into the men’s faces. Some of the Argonauts even referred to these conditions as “an oven. Most of the mushers’ faces resembled unpeeled red onions— red and scruffy with dead skin.” Then there was snow blindness, blisters, and even the bleaching effect of the sun. One man by the name of Foster started the trek in Valdez with “iron gray hair” and ended the voyage with hair “white as snow.” The blasting of snow and ice particles cut the men’s eyes and it was quickly learned that the best protection was not snow goggles but a “blue or even red handkerchief tucked under the cap or hat and hanging loose over the face.”46 Another menace was the deterioration of the foot gear. The hard work, combined with low temperatures along with the ice and snow of the trail, chewed boots to shreds. Thus it did not take long for the Argonauts to switch from boots to the far more serviceable moccasins. “I forgot to tell you what an awful time we are having with footwear,” George Miller wrote in the Riverside Daily Enterprise. “The whole camp has moccasins, but all the bear skin in this part of the country has been worn off the bottoms of these moccasins, and that is about the only thing that is any good.”47 But all of these difficulties of the Valdez Glacier were dwarfed by the benches. Unfortunately, the trek of men and supplies up the glacier was not done along trails that ran smoothly to the crest of the Chugach Range. Rather, they ran upward gently until they came to benches, steep walls of ice that had to be traversed in a zig-zag fashion and then crested. The first bench was 150 feet in height. Half a mile further on was the second bench, 200 feet in height. The third bench was a heart-stopper. Kappleman referred to it as a “corker” and even Messer admitted “a touch of cold feet” when he saw that the pathway led “along a narrow hogback, or ice shelf, with frightful ravines on either side” which, the day he had to make the crossing, was swept with “pitiless icy blasts and blinding storm of sleet.”48 The treacherous climb was nearly a mile and broken into three steep areas “with a creek between each turn.”49 When Messer finally crested the bench, he was amazed to see the accumulated mass of freight that had made it that far, 200,000 pounds of cargo including “provisions, boats, ammunition, guns, clothing [and] a portable sawmill.”50 But the benches did offer the Argonauts the opportunity to join with other syndicates to work as a team. Rather than each man hauling 100 pounds to the top of the ice ridge, the men would organize in teams. “With from 12 to 15 men on the rope,” Kappleman noted, “we could haul from 4 to 6 hundred pounds at a lick.”51 The boats were an interesting twist to the Valdez Strike. All of the stampeders knew that once they had crested the mountains and dropped into the Copper River they were going to need some means of transportation down the watershed. While many preferred to make boats once they got into the forest on the far side of the glacier, others dragged their boats with them. One party had dismantled a large steel boat and was moving the craft in sections. Apparently the steel sections made such a rumbling noise on the ice that it “could be heard for a mile or two while at a standstill or on the move.” Another party had “boats of the bateau pattern” or “double ender river drivers

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double bowed” boats. One Argonaut, Doc. Ottawa, even hauled a steam launch over the summit. He was clearly successful as he later used the steam launch on Klutina Lake.52 Of all the hardships mentioned in the diaries, few writers missed mention of the benches. Travel was slow, tedious, and dangerous. In some places, all that lay between men and a long drop to oblivion was their own luck. Those rich enough to use ropes and pulleys could move their supplies up the incline 200 pounds at a time. Less wellheeled Argonauts had to pack their goods, 15 pounds at a time because the slope was so steep.53 Calculating 1,500 pounds moved at 15 pounds a trip, it is easy to see why men became haggard by the benches. But the stampede took its toll. As the Argonauts progressed further and further up the glacier, more and more abandoned the trek. Many died along the way, others were killed by accidents, exhaustion, gunfire, stupid mistakes, or an unstable step. Others froze, were buried in snow slides, or committed suicide rather than go on. Deaths on the glacier were frequent, some of them gruesome. Sometimes the deaths weren’t discovered for weeks, particularly after storms. One corpse that evaded discovery was described as “literally eaten up by ravens, the flesh of the face, eyes, tongue and every exposed place had been eaten away.” The body was identified through the contents of the man’s pockets. All that was missing was a money belt which had supposedly contained “a considerable sum of money” though there is no historical evidence to confirm this statement.54 Other men were buried in slides and never found.55 All along the way, men were quitting by the hundreds, many of them trying to sell their supplies for whatever they could get—and usually abandoning their supplies where they sat. When these miners returned to Valdez they were described as “living scarecrows,” men with full beards and matted, unkempt hair and faces that were burned red from the perpetual sun, and as thin as fence rails from the drudgery of inching tons of supplies across the glacier. These may have been the lucky ones. For those Argonauts still on the glacier, going down the far side of the glacier was more treacherous than the ascent. Proceeding up the slope, the men could see where they were stepping. Going down, a man could often not see clearly where his foot would be placed. With one false step he could find himself hurtling down the slope with a 200 pound sled close on his heels. At the lower altitudes, in the gap between where the glacier ended and the water of the river system was deep enough to allow boating, the men had to pack their supplies over rocks and gravel, 75 pounds at a time rather than the 200 in the sleds. At these lower elevations, mosquitoes exploded off the muskeg in clouds so thick “they often obscured the sun.”56 Scurvy struck and travel slowed to a crawl. For those who were fortunate enough to have made it over the glacier, there was still treachery ahead in the form of the Klutina Lake and the river system beyond. But the remaining Argonauts were not daunted. As soon as they arrived on the shore of the lake they began to whipsaw logs into boats. Leaky, badly caulked, poorly constructed, and unstable, they went onto the lake and then down the watershed, a task that proved as dangerous as hauling the sleds downhill. Once into the river system many of them shot around the “rock-strewn, spray-swept white hell” of the Klutina Rapids. Guiteau, writing in the Alaska Sportsman, December, 1940, said that he was with the first group of white men to ever shoot the rapids. They allegedly made the 25 miles in

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three hours and ten minutes. “Even the Copper River Indians, who saw us land and helped us ashore, refused to believe that we had actually shot the rapids.”57 Messer, possibly weeks behind the Guiteau syndicate, claims that while running the river he “often” passed “a pair of human legs hanging from a snag.”58 There were other difficulties as well. One man was chased into the water by a bear.59 Other men tried to load their gear on boats and then walk them through the rapids with ropes from the shore. That was fine until the men came to the aptly-named Hell’s Gate and Devil’s Elbow, which were impassable on land. By water it destroyed seven out of every ten outfits that attempted to survive its frothing waters.60 The loss of food, supplies, and equipment was devastating for the men who had inched it forward for three or four months only to see it swallowed by the Klutina River in an instant. The only upside was that so many boats were capsizing that scavengers could find boxes and bags on the bank of the river for miles. At least on bag of white flour, known as “starvation flour,” made it 100 miles down river before it was retrieved.61 Some men, like Messer, found themselves trapped. They went down river until the waterway became too turbulent to be safe so they could not go forward. Refusing to quit, his syndicate decided to prospect where they were. Others tried to go on with a wide variety of luck, most of it bad. For those who had crested the Chugach Range and made it into the Copper River watershed, there was the ultimate dose of bad news: there was very little gold. Those who came early and staked what they thought were the good claims had spent valuable time with little to show for their efforts. Those who came later got the news as they descended into the watershed. Worse, so many men had carried so many supplies this far that they were worthless. Now, with no gold, there was no reason to stay. But no one could push their food and supplies over the glacier again. At first it was possible to sell the goods that had been so painstakingly dragged over the crest of the mountains. But as more and more men abandoned the quest, the supply of goods for sale went up in volume and there was a corresponding decline in value. A man might have 1,500 pounds of supplies but if he could not sell them, the only value they had was that he could eat his own food. But after his food was exhausted, what could he do? The game in the area had been depleted with so many hunters and the salmon season was short, even if he arrived at an opportune moment. The trek had been a bust and by the hundreds, the Argonauts stumbled back into Valdez. Disaster was so apparent to outsiders that by March, 1898, newspapers across the United States were reporting of the “Copper River Fraud.” Letters from correspondents alerted would-be Argonauts to stay away from the Valdez country. “This insane rush to Copper River should be discouraged,” wrote E. F. O’Neal in a letter that was published in the Los Angeles Times. But men were still landing in Valdez, intent on crossing the glacier, “many of them flat broke.” Only one in eight men had enough money to pay for their passage back to the United States. Worst of all, “if there is any metal in the [Copper River] it will be years, perhaps, before it is found.” O’Neal was correct in his assessment of disaster. Now the specter of starvation haunted the men. They had no money and only the clothes on their backs. They swarmed into Valdez, a community that had no room for its own residents let alone destitute Argonauts who were arriving by the score each day. Food and supplies were

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available from Seattle within a matter of days—but the town couldn’t afford to pay for it and the danger of starving mobs of rampaging grew as more and more of the destitute stumbled into town. Bands of hungry men wandered the muddy streets, an invitation to disaster. As often happens in moments of great need, an individual rises to the occasion. At this juncture of history, such a man was United States Army Captain William Randolph Abercrombie. He had been assigned to explore the Copper River basin and arrived in Valdez just as the full scale of the disaster were becoming known. Abercrombie was alerted to the scale of the disaster when Quartermaster’s Agent Charles Brown told him of the situation on the glacier and how many destitute men were deluging Valdez. “My God, Captain, it has been clear Hell! I tell you, the early days of Montana [were nothing compared to] what I have gone through this winter.” Once ashore, Abercrombie visited the destitute miners and saw the horror for himself. He had been in Valdez the previous year and many of the people I had met and known the year before were so changed in their appearance, with their long hair hanging down their shoulders and beards covering their entire face, that I do not think I recognized one of the them. They were crowded together, from 15 to 20 in log cabins 12 by 15, and in the center of which was a stove. On the floor of the cabin at night they would spread their blankets and lie down, packed like sardines in a box. Facilities for bathing there were none. Most of them were more or less afflicted with scurvy, while not a few of them had frost-bitten hands, faces, and feet. Their footwear in some cases consisted of the tops of rubber boots that had been cut off by Brown and manufactured into shoes. Around their feet they had wound strips of gunny sacks, which were used in place of socks. Across the cabin, from side to side, were suspended ropes on which were hung various articles of apparel that had become wet in wallowing through the deep snow and had been hung up at night to dry. The odor emanating from those articles of clothing, the sore feet of those who were frozen and the saliva and breath of these afflicted with scurvy, gave forth a stench that was simply poisonous, as well as sickening, to a man in good health, and sure death to one in ill health.62

Taking full authority during the disaster, Abercrombie ordered dog teams sent over the glacier to bring back sick men and set the destitute miners to work on roads to earn enough money to pay for their passage out.63 (The United States Treasury Department claimed lack of funds stopped it from assisting the destitute miners.64 The problem was then bumped to the War Department under which Abercrombie performed admirably.) The men were paid a dollar a day plus board and were only kept on payroll for 32 days, just long enough to enable them to pay for a ticket to Seattle “and to leave them $5.00 surplus for their immediate wants upon landing.”65 The steamers took the destitute at 50 percent off the regular fare.66 (Some of this roadwork became what is today the Richardson Highway.67) By August of 1899, the Revenue Cutter Service reported that the number of destitute had dropped to “five or six.”68 Fortunately, the life-saving services of the government extended to the Natives of the Copper River as well. Because of the influx of miners in the watershed, nearly all the game had been slaughtered or driven out of the region. This left the Natives destitute, 60 of them in such a perilous state that they needed “rations and clothing” to survive. The response of the Judge Advocates General’s Office of the War Department

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in Washington, D.C. was that there was “no authority of statute for furnishing clothing and rations in such cases.” However as there was no “statutory prohibition” against such assistance either, “the contemplated relief may be given.”69 In other words, Abercrombie could extend assistance to the Natives. But the Valdez Strike was not all bad news. There was a silver lining though it took an economist to see it. As in all stampedes, the big winners were the supply salespeople and the transportation companies. Tickets to Valdez were a hot selling item, even as the news of the strike being a fake were being publicized. Even then the “gang of scheming swindlers and ticket sharks” tried to hush up the bad news so they could continue the sale of tickets north. One of the stampeders, David Fikes, who returned to Los Angeles broke spoke bitterly to the Times of the swindle. But the next day he retracted his story. When asked why, he replied that a ticket agent who made a living by selling passage to Alaska had offered him $200 to conceal the truth because “it would injure his business.” When asked if this was ethical, Fikes replied, “Well, $200 will come in handy and [other Argonauts] would find out the truth anyway.”70 Thus ended the saga of the Valdez Strike. Its golden lure hooked more than 3,000 men to challenge the icy slopes of the Valdez Glacier, the Chugach Range, Klutina Lake, and the rivers beyond. In the end, Mother Nature triumphed for there was no gold. Today, all that is left of the men and women who trekked the icy wasteland are diaries, yellowing photographs, and the ghosts that wail when the wind blows across the crevices where their bones remain, frozen solid in a keep with their sleds and dreams.

Seven

  

. . . about $3 worth of gold dust.1 —The estimate by Cy Mulkey of Napa, California—both a ‘49er and a ‘98er—on the amount of gold that actually came out of the Kotzebue Rush.

“The history of every gold rush,” Alaskan humorist Warren Sitka notes with sarcasm, “is written by the people who came home with gold.” This is decidedly true. The very symbol of the gold rush is not the down-and-out failure home without a penny in his pocket but the man or woman who beats the odds and comes home a millionaire. Rather than work a lifetime and retire with a measly pension, the epitome of the Argonaut is someone who placed his life at extreme risk for a single shot at fame and fortune—and scores! While there were many rushes throughout the era of the Alaska Gold Rush, perhaps the least known and most disastrous was that into Kotzebue Country. It began in the summer of 1898 when a flotilla of steamers and schooners with 3,000 men and women headed up the Kobuk River, the water source that feeds Kotzebue Sound. They spent the summer and fall digging for gold. Then, when it was too late to take a ship out, they discovered just what winter in the Arctic meant. The Kotzebue rush did not start out auspiciously. In fact, the very events which generated the rush seemed to augur doom. The first reference in an Alaskan paper to gold on the Kobuk River in Kotzebue Country appeared in the Sitka Alaskan on November 20, 1897. Vene C. Gambell, the Presbyterian missionary and teacher on St. Lawrence Island, reported that “great quantities of gold” were being found on Kotzebue Sound. Gambell was certainly in a position to know. He had lived on St. Lawrence island in the Bering Sea since 1894 and was knowledgeable about the

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happenings in the far north, particularly through the network of missionaries of many denominations which were scattered throughout the region. Gambell stated that Natives “and others” were talking up the strike and those conversations were being corroborated by officers of the Revenue Cutter Bear. Who the “others” were was not made clear and, considering that in 1898 there was dearth of whites living anywhere in the Arctic, one might wonder what “others” were there to be talking about gold in the first place—and if there was gold, why would they be announcing their discoveries? Of course none of these questions were seriously posed by any of the Argonauts who saw Kotzebue Country as their Eldorado. However, Gambell might be not be the only man to be given the credit for the Kotzebue disaster.2 According to Eugene McElwaine in his self-published book The Truth About Alaska, a “marine circular” from a supposedly “responsible transportation company in San Francisco,” made the announcement of the Kotzebue Strike and claimed that “The United States government officials are staking [N]atives to work placer diggings” and that there were “absolutely no obstacles to the immediate working of mines.”3 But Gambell’s announcement was after the fact when it came to Seattle. By October of 1897, the West Coast was electrified with word of the Kotzebue Strike. “Richer Field Than Klondike,” the San Francisco Call announced on October 29. Supposedly some “Indians” had come to Captain B. Coogan of the steam whaler Thrasher with some yellow stone and wanted to know if these stones “were the same kind of stuff as the miners were looking for the Yukon.” The gold was about “the size of guncaps and worn smooth,” Coogan reported, which had been scooped “from the river bottom with their paddles.” The Eskimo—Coogan apparently did not know that Eskimo live along the coast while Athabaskan Indians live in the Alaskan Interior—had also reportedly led a white man by the name of Jackson to the Eldorado who they then killed when he refused to pay their wages. Of course, if Jackson had been killed, this should have caused some to doubt as to how word of the Eldorado would have leaked to other white men. [Credit for the Kotzebue Country has also been attributed to a whaler by the name of Cooper—perhaps the same man. Cooper had deserted his whaling vessel in Kotzebue Sound and made his way up the Kobuk River to Ambler where he found 21 nuggets. Cooper, a Mason, showed the nuggets and a map to some other Masons in Seattle and this led to the formation of a Moonlight syndicate. Cooper never made it back to the Kobuk River. He was alleged to have drowned off Valdez on his way north.4] There was no indication in any the newspaper as to precisely why the Kotzebue field should have been any richer than the Klondike.5 However, this did not stop the rumors from spreading and within three weeks, “hundreds of men” had decided to go to Kotzebue Country. The Northern Light was reported to be headed north as were the barks Alaska and Thrasher, the latter announcing it intended to have Natives on deck to “scan for gold.” It was even announced that a company had been formed to “dredge the streams which empty in [Kotzebue] Sound.”6 Across the United States, the cry of the Kotzebue Country was synonymous with wealth. In March of 1898, the Fall River News (Massachusetts) reported that the first “authentic report” from Kotzebue Sound had been published in the San Francisco Call. The source was a letter which had taken four months to make it from the Kobuk

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in which the author, John Ross, claimed to have taken out “$40,000 in ten days.” There was so much gold in Kotzebue Country, Ross claimed, that it was “richer than any gold fields yet discovered in Alaska or the Northwest Territory.” Gold was so plentiful that an Eskimo bought Ross’ last plug of tobacco for a 20 ounce nugget ($7,500 in 1990 dollars). It was news articles such as this that fanned the flames of greed. As a result of the publicity, the rush to the Kotzebue Country intensified. In Fall River alone, the number of boats preparing to go to the Kobuk in March of 1898 jumped from one to at least eight.7 The hubbub of the Kotzebue Strike found receptive ears in Seattle as well. In Valdez, an army of men was crossing the glacier single column like ants, the stampede being aided rather than hindered by winter. With so many men already on the ground, anyone following in their footsteps would find all of the good claims taken. Thus latecomers chose Kotzebue Country as the logical alternative. Some of the ships were even doing double duty. The Moonlight, for instance, shipped men and supplies to Valdez and later to Kotzebue. History, which wallows in ironies, would leave the Moonlight as possibly the only ship to participate in two of the most disastrous floods of humanity of the Alaska Gold Rush—Valdez and Kotzebue.8 The first two ships to leave for Kotzebue Country were the Moonlight and the Jane Gray. The Jane Gray was the faster of the two and her crew expected to be in Unalaska well ahead of the Moonlight.9 At 5 p.m. on May 19, 1898, the tug Queen pulled the two schooners out of Seattle harbor and into the straits. Though the two schooners raised their sails immediately, they “spent the day bobbing around” which made their passengers, primarily land lubbers, queasy. When the wind finally did give the vessels some speed, nearly everyone began to “feed the fish.” Such was the start of the Kotzebue Rush.10 It took the Moonlight 21 days to reach Unalaska, a near speed record in those days. There the ship encountered a large number of schooners and sloops on their way to Kotzebue Sound. The ice had not yet broken on the Bering Sea so the flotilla was marooned in Unalaska. The Revenue Cutter Bear was also in harbor as was the Eliza Anderson. The passengers spent two days in Dutch Harbor and one passenger and diarist, M. A. Harnett, paid “$.50!” for a meal, twice the going price in Seattle. But for that extravagant price, Harnett recalled, he and his syndicate members could “sit at a table and take our time to eat, and be assured that we would get our food to our mouth without it being blown off the spoon.”11 Around Dutch Harbor, Harnett and the other passengers were known as the “Moonlight Dudes.”12 It wasn’t until June 17 that the Moonlight knew that the Jane Gray had gone down.13 One of the great tragedies of the early days of the Kotzebue rush, it was widely speculated that the Jane Gray was vastly overloaded and therefore unbalanced. This, it was speculated, had led to her demise.14 As soon as the ice broke on the Bering Sea, the rush for Kotzebue Country was on. One at a time the vessels broke away from Unalaska and headed out across the treacherous Bering Sea. The fastest boat on the water was the Moonlight and she made good time. Not only was she the first ship to arrive in Kotzebue Sound, but because of her shallow draft she was also the first ship to enter the Kobuk River. Gradually working her way up the watershed she went as far as she could before she ran aground on July 4, 1898, about three miles from shore. Then the ship started to sink. But it sank so

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slowly that passengers and crew were able to get themselves and their supplies ashore without mishap. Not to be denied their fortunes, the men proceeded to take the derelict Moonlight apart timber by timber and make rafts to float the final 20 miles to their destination.15 In actuality, this story of the Moonlight going aground and being cannibalized for timber was not true. It was a fabrication published by the Seattle Times. In reality, the vessel had been caught in a storm and was being driven ashore when, 30 feet from the rock that lines the shore, her anchor took hold and she was able to ride out the storm without incident. Later, when the Moonlight returned to Seattle, the captain told the Seattle Times that the story of the ship going aground was “started maliciously and if he ever [found] the man [who gave the paper the story] there will be a fight.”16 Now the Kotzebue Country rush was in full swing. In September of 1898, three months after the first men had stepped ashore, the Seattle Times interviewed Captain Stenlance of the barkentine Leslie D. after he had returned from the north. Stenlance was “enthusiastic” about Kotzebue Country and in five paragraphs beat the drum for the beauty of the countryside and how it was, in the warm months at least, a “‘fount of perpetual youth’ that Ponce de Leon once imagined but never found.”17 But then again, Captain Stenlance made his money on transportation and it would hardly be in his interest to downplay Kotzebue Country. Within a short period of time it appeared that Stenlance’s had not been kind enough in his assessment of Kotzebue Country. Two weeks later the Seattle Times announced a strike 300 miles up the Kobuk on the Buckland River. “There will be no returning crowds of disgusted miners,” the Times announced prematurely of the 1,500 miners who were then dotting the beaches of Kotzebue Sound. The gold was drawing them inland “like a magnet.” Here was a strike was so large, contended the paper, that crews had deserted five or six schooners and the captains were making their boats ready for spending the winter iced in. One crew, that of the M. M. Morrill, had even abandoned their ship even as their captain, Louis Bernhardt was “sick almost unto death.”18 One source put the rush at 1,238—16 of them women, one single. Of these, only one in four would survive.19 By mid-summer of 1898, the usually desolate country was crawling with prospectors. While standing watch one night Hartnett reported the beach “lined with camps” with river steamers and launches that “seem [to be] prepared to handle considerable freight.”20 Shallow draft steamers were plying the river dragging smaller boats behind them and rowboat were moving cargo down the river. But not all boats were successful in negotiating the turbulent waters of the Kobuk River. Hartnett reported finding some wreckage “marked R. T. Young” and salvaged a box. One box proved to be particularly valuable. “It was all canned goods including butter, cream coffee and spices,” he wrote in his diary. “As we had no butter we immediately resolved that should we meet Mr. Young he should have his goods back with the exception of a few cans of butter which we purloined for our own use. Had a veteran of the Valdez stampede been present, he would probably have told Hartnett and the other passengers the fate of anyone there who was caught with someone else’s property. If the property amounted to more than $100, the penalty was death. But unlike Valdez, the Kotzebue Country rush was not civilization on the move. In Valdez, there was law and order maintained all the way from Valdez to the Copper

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River basin. Trials were called and punishment exacted. But the Kotzebue Country rush was every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. Pilfering and robbery were widespread. Several nights after Hartnett found the abandoned food, he had a shoot-out when “two men tried to rob our cache” and “we had a shooting scrap.” One of Hartnett’s comrades took a bullet “through his hat” but that was the extent of the damage. But no one was fooling around. The cache was their life and one of Hartnett’s comrade, Graham, “emptied his rifle at [the thieves] as they went.” Apparently shooting a man in the back was perfectly acceptable under these conditions.21 Many of the syndicates, like Harnett’s, planned to spend more than a year in the area and put down roots quickly. They had come prepared. Better yet, they had come by water so every ounce of their supplies only had to be carried from ship to shore. Thus they could afford luxuries, unlike the Argonauts in Valdez. Cy Mulkey of Napa, California, who was both a ‘49er and a ‘98er, later remarked that “the people who went to the Kotzebue country were the best equipped of any lot of gold seekers I ever saw. They had two years supply of everything, much of which was given away to the [N]atives.”22 This testament is confirmed by Freida Goodwin, an Eskimo in Kotzebue who remembered the coming of the miners in 1898 and recalled that they “put up lots of tents” to the east of what is now the city of Kotzebue. Eskimo children came over to the tents and Goodwin remembered being given crackers, a food she had never eaten. “The kids smelled [the crackers]. They didn’t think they smelled very good. Some of the kids tried to eat them, but they didn’t like them. I smelled the cracker, and I didn’t like it.” So she took the crackers down to the shore and dumped them into the water. Goodwin also benefited from the rush in other ways. Sometime later, after a severe storm which caused the death of several prospectors and the capsizing of their crafts, her father found a 100 pound sack of flour that had drifted ashore. Her family dried the flour and made gravy. “Boy! That was a good,” she recalled. “My mama, after the flour was gone, didn’t wash the sack. She just shook the flour off. The sack had big letters on it. She made me a calico parka from the sack. Boy! You ought to have seen how proud I was. Ha! Ha! I felt like I was the queen of the whole world when I got that flour sack calico!!” (Author’s note: She probably meant a kuspuk rather than a parka.)23 Hartnett and his partners lived in tents at first, fighting the mosquitoes and biting flies. “The mosquitoes would not let us have a moment’s rest,” he wrote. “The way they do torture one is indescribable.” The mosquitoes got into everything. “This evening we had hot biscuits and butter and enjoyed it immensely only the mosquitoes would persist in getting in the butter as to make a meat sandwich.”24 As for the flies, back from his first walk inland, Hartnett wrote that “my face is swollen as if I had the mumps.”25 After three months they moved into a cabin they had constructed from the limited, nearby timber. It was, Harnett wrote, “an agreeable change”26 But there was not a lot of gold found. That was because there was very little of it to be found. While there might have been a handful of prospectors who were making a few dollars a day, no one was finding the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gold nuggets the size of cue balls they had been led to believe would just be lying on the river bank. But they were finding something of value—though it would not make any difference for a century. One of the byproducts of their search was the discovery

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of great seams of coal. “One vein after another crop[ped] out from the coast all along the river as far as we went,” reported George Trabert, but there was “not a solitary sign of gold in that section.”27 It did not take long for some prospectors to realize they had been snookered. In July of 1898, at the height of the madness, Mulkey, writing from Port Clarence in a letter that found its way to the San Francisco Call, advised other ‘98ers to “leave this country alone until there is something more definite known of it.” Mulkey had done some prospecting, and invested the claims made of the rich finds. According to local missionaries, the gold which started the find was actually from the Yukon River and the only authentic gold that had come out of the area was “about $3 worth of gold dust.” This was hardly enough to get excited about. Kotzebue, he added in his letter, was a miserable place to be as the “climate is cold and very disagreeable. A great portion of the country is covered with snow and the rain pours down constantly.”28 Shotwell also commented on the rain—and gold. “What a senseless rush,” he wrote to his wife. “Hardly a color in the country,” and “all reports of rich strikes [and] great finds are lies.”29 Others were more optimistic. Frank L. Noonan, who had arrived in July, noted that the black sand they had seen in the Kobuk River was “encouraging and a good indication of gold.” But no one had picked up one nugget of gold as yet and by August the newspapers were becoming cautious. The San Francisco Call headlined the article quoting Noonan with “Hints of Gold.”30 Within a month it was obvious that the strike was a bust. By September of 1898, as the ice began closing in, and after a season of digging for gold, “of the 1,200 seekers not one has struck enough gold to pay for his daily flapjacks and salt pork,” reported Lt. John G. Berry aboard the Revenue Cutter Bear. “The Kotzebue Sound boom has been stuck in the mud of the [Kobuk] River.” This was a true statement in more ways than one. The rough waters of Hotham Inlet which fed the Kobuk River proved to be too treacherous for many of the landlubbers. Boats were overturned frequently and prospectors were losing all their supplies, much of the cargo their food to last the winter. Upstream the current was so swift that steam barges had to be used to pull the smaller boats.31 With winter closing in, it now became a matter of survival for many to get out of the Kobuk River watershed. Many syndicates were under supplied with food while others had foolishly given much food away or lost it in accidents on the river. The Revenue Cutter Service was transporting some shipwrecked Argonauts out but this was piecemeal compared to those who were left. But many of the Argonauts had no idea what lay in store for them if they tried to spend the winter with less than an adequate amount of food. They had yet to learn the meaning of freeze-up in the Arctic. At least for the Fall River parties, the Kotzebue Country turned out to be a bust early, and it may very well have saved their lives. By November of 1898, some of the men had decided to abandon the quest. “We prospected three hundred miles up the Kobuk but found nothing,” the correspondent for the Fall River News wrote, and they were not the only ones. A “mass exodus” was occurring. Other news was not encouraging. Of the 12 men who started the journey from Massachusetts, five had drowned.32 By September it became clear to a great many of the miners that there was trouble brewing. Now, instead of referring to the Kotzebue Country as the strike of the future,

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the San Francisco Call was insinuating that disaster was awaiting those who remained. “No Starvation at Kotzebue,” the Call announced in a headline on September 14, 1897, but the sub-heads were chilling: “Vessels Waiting to Bring Gold Hunters Back” “ALL WHO WANT CAN RETURN” “Only Charge Will be For Meals While on Board” It was apparent to anyone reading the newspaper who was not infected with the gold bug that things were going awry in Kotzebue Country. Clearly the captains of some of the ships knew what was in store for the men. Four of the ships, Alaska, Northern Lights, Jane I. Falkenberg and the Catherine Sudden offered to bring back all the miners who wanted to go home at no charge. “If their venture prove[s] a fizzle,” one of the captains said, “we will bring them back free. All it will cost them will be the price of their meals, and it will not cost them that if they have provisions with them.” While more than a handful went out, about 1,500 people chose to brave the winter. Then the ice closed in. Now Kotzebue Country was ice-locked solid for six months. For some like Harnett, food was in ample supply. But many of the miners had been poorly prepared for an Arctic winter. They did not know, or appreciate what the Alaskan term “freeze-up” really meant. In any case, they were up the Kobuk River when temperatures dropped into the 30 degrees below zero range for weeks at a time and there was a mantle of ice covering the ocean for 1,000 miles. Game was limited under normal conditions and, with so many miners foraging for food, the winter of 1898–99 could not be called “normal” under any definition of the term. As winter progressed, the unprepared miners began running out of food. Faced with starvation they had a choice: reduce their food intake to stretch out their food until break-up or run for their lives. The choice was equally dangerous. To reduce their diet could mean a slow death by starvation. To stay meant scurvy—even if the food would last until breakup. Then there would be have to be enough firewood to ward off the cold. And, as it later turned out, there was cannibalism. “Hunger also stalked among us,” wrote a miner who had allegedly been reduced to cannibalism, and you have not even a faint idea what it means among a gang of hopeless men, desperate in the extreme. A dozen of my party died in thirty days, and we began to cast lots for healthy human flesh. There are [at the time the letter was sent] only four of us alive, but all too weak to travel.33

To flee to the nearest settlement meant risking life and limb in temperatures with a chill factor that approached 100 degrees below zero and storms which could bury a man and a dog team in very short order. It was only eighty miles to Council City and the yet-to-boom community of Nome, the most logical places to go—if the miners knew in exactly which direction it lay. But any miscalculation, not matter how small, meant death. Just being a few degrees off over the miles, they could miss the town. Since land and water looked the same at that time of year, an Argonaut could easily bypass his goal and end up out on the frozen surface of the Bering Sea headed toward Siberia and never know he had missed Council City or Nome. Then there was the very real possibility that Council City and Nome might be short on food as well and

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thus the survivors may have found that they had jumped from an empty ice box to vacant cold storage locker. Many chose to run. When they did, they scattered in all directions. Some followed the Kobuk River to its source hoping to crest the mountains and descend into the Koyukuk River watershed and then to run along the frozen surface of the Yukon River to St. Michael. Others headed to Council City, Nome, and Golovin by land. No one knows how many died along the way or how many missed the scattered boomtown communities on the shore of the Bering Sea and disappeared onto the vastness of the frozen surface of the Bering Sea, never to be seen again. The horror stories piled one upon another until none stood out as exemplary. Some headed for the Golovin Bay eating their dogs along the way. There were other reports of men arriving with little more than blankets wrapped around them and suffering from scurvy. Frank A. Holbrook was part of a group of 17 men who started on the 80 mile trek to Nome and ran out of food en route. For 21 days he and his syndicate battled the elements and each day the food supply dwindled until there was none left. Then they started on the dogs. One by one they butchered the animals for food, “a nauseating diet,” Holbrook reported, which was made even more repelling “because of the lack of salt and pepper.”34 Another party ate 16 dogs on their way into Nome.35 Speaking of their experiences to the Nome News in 1901, four men—Lafe Hamilton, C. J. Clark, F. Gurney, and John T. Bell—told a harrowing tale of 1,000 miles by dogsled through “inhospitable and uninviting country” where “grub was scarce and the blizzards frequent” as the “musher’s dogs froze and starved to death.” However, these testimonials should be taken with a grain of salt. By 1901, the disaster of Kotzebue Country was well known and a story coming out two years later was suspect. Further, if the men had indeed traveled 1,000 miles by dogsled they could have reached the yetto-be-established-city of Anchorage and come half-way back besides.36 Perhaps it is appropriate that the Nome News entitled this particular article, “How Men Will Lie.” For those who were able to make it all the way to Nome, the situation was only slightly better. Scurvy, lack of food, and the cold had taken their toll.37 Nome was a city that had arrived by steamship and fully expected to be able to buy food and drink all winter long. Unfortunately when the ice closed in Nome’s population exceeded its food supply and the cost of food was quite high. Further south, in St. Michael, starvation was setting in as well. A food crisis precipitated when destitute miners from Dawson who had made the trip down the Yukon River in small boats made it before the river froze from bank to bank. They squatted on the beach and were only kept alive by the kindness of the Eskimo.38 The summer brought little relief. When the ice finally broke in June, the human disaster built upon its ruins. Those who had survived the winter tried to extricate themselves from Kotzebue country as rapidly as possible. To effect their escape they constructed flimsy boats with which to travel down the Kobuk River and out into the Chukchi Sea. From there, hugging the coast, they expected to bounce along the coast to Nome where they could take a steamer back to the United States. As soon as the rivers were flowing, a flotilla of “all manner of small craft” and rafts, many of them badly built, followed the ice cakes down the Kobuk River and into Kotzebue Sound.39 Many of them never made it down the river let alone out onto Kotzebue Sound. No one knows how many more of these hardy souls perished in the Chukchi Sea or went

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aground on the treacherous shores of the Seward Peninsula. All that is known is that a modest contingent of them did reach Nome and there many of them sat until the Revenue Cutter Service took them south as destitute passengers. But still there were those who were too weak to travel and word was slow in reaching the United States as to who was still alive. As late as July of 1899, information was still trickling back. “Captain Bens’ Party Did Not Perish” was the headlines of a July article in the Seattle Times. Captain Bens had not perished in Kotzebue Sound, or so reported the Garrone when it docked in Seattle. Other ships reported similar incidents. The Roanoke, arriving in Seattle from Nome, reported that some of the Kotzebue miners had struck out for Nome. Horror stories flooded into Seattle well into the next summer. In July of 1899, the Seattle Times ran a story of the Bens party. A dozen men and Mrs. Bens left Kotzebue for the Koyukuk, up over a mountain crest. One at a time, they succumbed to death. Finally there was only Mr. and Mrs. Bens, he in a pitiable state. They went into a convenient cabin where they remained for “five or six long weeks” until Mr. Bens died. Mrs. Bens was then discovered by a group of miners who made arrangements to transport her to St. Michael.40 When the Revenue Cutter Bear finally entered the Bering Straits area, Captain Jarvis was flooded with stories of the “terrible suffering and conditions” of the “more than one thousand” who had come into the area. As the captain of the Bear later noted, The rush of people to Kotzebue Sound was a sad, deplorable affair. Misled by false information and advertisements, twelve hundred people, many totally unfitted to stand the hard conditions and climate, rushed to the country during the [ice free months] of 1898.41 Scurvy had broken out among them in the spring and many deaths were reported from it, and, though as many as could, had left in the numerous small vessels that wintered there, some three hundred more people were said to be camped on Hotham Inlet in a distressed condition.

According to the list compiled by the Revenue Cutter Service, 48 deaths were listed by name. Of these, scurvy took the most (16), followed by drowning (10), and black leg (8). Other causes of death included overwork, heart failure, dropsy, spinal meningitis, suicide, “missing,” “killed,” and “frozen.” Of statistical interest, only three of the 48 dead were not from the United States—“South America,” Italy, and England—and none of those who were still alive were foreigners. On July 30, 1899, writing from St. Michael, Jarvis listed the names of those who had died as well as those that had been saved.42 The fate of the others was not recorded but it is presumed that they were eventually evacuated by the Revenue Cutter Service. The Bear took aboard 83 of the sickest from the beach leaving more than 200. He assured those on the beach that he would make a return run to pick them up as well. Further along Kotzebue Sound, many of these at Howthan Inlet had provisioned themselves properly before leaving the United States so starvation was not a problem.43 At that time it was estimated that there were three hundred people camped there and an additional 230 marooned at Mission Beach. The encampment at Mission Beach elected five of their number to “visit the first government vessel reaching this Beach and explain to the commanding officer the condition of the people here.”44 This was

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the first instance of any organized effort on behalf of the Kotzebue Argonauts to form any kind of a cohesive body for the establishment of order. As in the Valdez stampede, government red tape stalled the rescue attempt. Most of the surviving Argonauts were penniless but still had provisions. This meant they were not destitute by the definition of the United States government. So the survivors sat on the beach with provision that were worthless because no one could buy them and, until they had no provisions they were not destitute. To make matters worse, under the pretext of being humanitarian, the Nome Mining and Development Company staked the land beneath the survivors of the rush and then gave the marooned population the opportunity to earn its own ticket home. But it came at a cost: $.50 a day. The scheme didn’t last long as the miners refused to pay.45 Besides that, there was no gold. With specific regard to what had originally set the world ablaze for Kotzebue Country, an examination of the historical records reveals some interesting tidbits. The first reference to the Kotzebue gold came from the Reverend Vene C. Gambell who claimed the tales of the gold had been confirmed by some Natives and at least one officer on the Revenue Cutter Bear. That officer may very well have been Second Lt. E. P. Bertholf. But Bertholf did not say there was gold in the Kotzebue area. What he did say appears in his report of the overland expedition to bring reindeer to the whalers trapped in the ice at Point Barrow The Noatuk [N]atives have plenty of stories to tell me of gold to be found in the small streams tributary to their river, but upon questioning them closely I invariably found that it was someone else that had seen the gold and they were simply telling me what they had heard.46

Giving the story even less credence, Bertholf noted that among the tales he had heard I also heard two stories of an old man living on the Kowak River who had been chased many years ago by a “caligabuk,” which is the Eskimo name for a mammoth.47 [Author’s note: Why the Eskimo would have a word for mammoth is not known.]

Bertholf concluded that very little credibility should be attached to Eskimo’s stories because they are “very apt to tell you what they think you would like to hear.”48 From there, the glowing embers of greed were fanned by unscrupulous maritime transport company who saw a way to make a quick dollar. Fliers were circulated and news stories fed to the papers. McElwaine was probably right when he stated that whoever had printed the circulars on the so-called wealth of Kotzebue was guilty of “criminal representations, made for the purpose of obtaining money under false pretense,” specifically, transportation fees north. There was one final note of irony of the Kotzebue Rush. The man who may very well have generated the entire fantasy was Vene C. Gambell, the Presbyterian missionary and teacher on St. Lawrence Island who never lived to see the disaster he wrought. He was, in a twist of irony, one of the first victims of his own lunacy. He and his wife went to the bottom of the sea in the Jane Gray in June of 1898. According to eyewitnesses, Gambell went on deck when the call to abandon ship was given. He “took a survey” and apparently came to the conclusion that he, his wife, and child could not survive the “strong and high surf.” Worse, they might make it into

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the sea and suffer greater “torture than the fate that lay in their pathway.” One survivor heard Gambell in his cabin tell his wife “We are all lost, there is no chance for us.” When Gambell and his wife refused to come on deck with their child, the captain sent a crew member down after the baby. But time was too short. The crew member and the Gambells went down with the ship.49 Today, the largest city on St. Lawrence is named Gambell in memory of the couple. The wreck of Jane Gray generated a law suit in which survivors sued for their lost luggage. James E. Blackwell and Silas Livengood, in particular, sued the owners of the vessel claiming that the ship was “unseaworthy and rotten” and thus the sinking was “not an accident.”50 In spite of the fact that the ship was greatly overloaded, the company refused to pay, an act which caused the Seattle Times to rail against the “contemptible spirit of greed and avarice” shown by the company in their treatment of the survivors. Most of the survivors were destitute, having lost all they owned in the tragedy, and many were “still wearing the water-stained clothing” in which they had escaped the sinking ship. After quite a bit of haggling—and no money—survivors were told that if anyone of them wished to show up at the company office, a company representative “would help [the survivor] get a job or give him the money to get out of town.” When some survivors did go to the company office, they were told You fellows have talked about [the Jane Gray] and said she was a rotten old hulk and if you were down on the wharf now in your overalls and wet clothes, I would let you lie there. The owners of [the] Corona said we were fools to do anything for you and I am sorry we did.

The company had little to feel sorry about for they did little and, as the record shows, they did nothing less than treat the survivors as “dogs.” Fortunately, the Seattle Times noted, the survivors sought the assistance of “competent attorneys.”51 In July of 1899, the court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs.52 Was there ever any gold in Kotzebue Country? In June of 1899, Albert C. Thees claimed that not one cent of gold had been taken out of the entire area.53 A month later, C. H. Packard, formerly the editor of the Snohomish Eye, reported that the entire output of gold for the entire Kotzebue Sound country “can be safely estimated at less than $1” and the amount for 1900 “will not exceed this.” Further, it had been widely reported—and apparently Packard believed it—that $10,000 worth of gold dust had been purchased by the officers of the steamship Grace Dollar “to be used in booming the Kotzebue Sound country and making business for [their] boat the next year.” If this was truly the case, reported Packard, “should they come up here again next season with another invoice of bunkoed ‘suckers,’ a large majority of their last year’s victims will be Kotzebue to entertain them with a warm Arctic soiree.”54 The fact that there was no gold of any significant amount coming out of Kotzebue Country was confirmed six months later when two prospectors arrived in Nome from Kotzebue by dog sled and reported there had been no new strikes that season.55 But there were some the next year. In 1901, the Nome News reported that there had been a minor strike where pans were running $7 with an occasional $125 nugget. But as far as the Kotzebue Rush was concerned, a year after the madness, “from all the region, not one cent of gold has been taken out” declared the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in July of 1899.56

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But the tales of undiscovered wealth in Kotzebue Country persisted for years. Parties constantly tried to find gold where heretofore none had been located. One such exception was begun by George Trabert, “a smooth talker and honest looking whaler” who claimed that there had been a “fabulously rich strike” 40 miles up the Kobuk. He was able to convince a party of five men to grubstake him. They arrived in September and settled in for a winter of prospecting and all they found was coal. When Trabert was confronted with his lie, the man admitted he had manufactured his story to help him get back to Point Hope where he could “resume his occupation of whaling.” When the party returned to Nome, almost all of them had some member of their body frozen. In the same winter, four men left Nome for Kotzebue Country on December 10, 1900, with a “dead sure tip.” While they expected to return with “sled loads of gold,” instead they came back victims of frostbite and lucky to be alive. They had traveled hundreds of miles in country where the “grub was scarce and blizzards frequent; the mushers’ dogs starved and froze to death.”57 Even as these stories were being told in the streets of Nome, there was yet another hue and cry for Kotzebue Country generated by Captain Coughan, one of the boosters of the precipitous rush in 1898. Coughan claimed to have found gold and had grubstaked a group of men who subsequently spent the 1901 season 200 miles up the Kobuk River. “We have had an experience I do not care to duplicate next year,” reported former Captain Hanson of the John Riley when he returned. “There is not five cents to be found in whole bunch of us,” reported Hanson. “The wild stories which have been circulated in Nome relative to rich diggings found by Captain Coughan and his party are branded as absolutely false.” Coughan was apparently generating enthusiasm for another trip up the Kobuk the next season.58 Later, in January of 1903, a strike of “considerable magnitude” was announced 300 miles from the mouth of the Kobuk. “Hundreds of people have migrated from Candle City to the scene of the latest Eldorado,” announced the Council City News, “but as yet no authentic information as to the extent of richness of the find” had been made public.59 A final note to the entire affair was that few considered the Eskimo victims of the rush. In fact, they suffered as much as the non-Natives and did not have the option of leaving the country. They did give assistance to the starving miners but received little credit for their charity. In a passing note, the Nome Pioneer Press reported that one of the reasons that many whites survived the terrible winter of 1898 in Kotzebue Country was the assistance of the Eskimo, although these people were “universally known for their filth and squalor.”60 But this assistance had not been without a cost. By July of the next year, 1899, it was reported that Eskimo were “dying like sheep” in Kotzebue Country and, if such conditions continued, “it will be a question of only a generation or two when they will perish utterly.”61

Horse Creek Mary with two unidentified men. (Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, Crary-Henderson Collection, b-62-1a-138).

Real Alaska Gold Rush Gamblers. They are dressed well so these men are probably the dealers, the only ones to make money on games of chance in those days. (Courtesy of the Cordova Historical Society, Bob Sabourin Collection, 86-35-3).

This photograph was turned into a popular postcard titled “A Malamute Chorus.” (Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, General File).

Many Natives lived in what are called barabaras. This one obviously benefited from material brought up from the lower states. As there are no mountain sheep in the Arctic, this Native must have bartered for the horn he has in his hand. (Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, B70-28-168).

These young girls were probably the first Eskimos to see white men—and were certainly the first Eskimos the whites had seen. This picture is one of the few from the Kotzebue Rush. (Courtesy of the Alaska State Library, Frank C. Nichols Collection, PCA 256-86).

The boxes on the backs of the mules are full of turkeys on their way to dinner, so to speak. (Courtesy of University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW 8291).

The troops that guarded the Chilkoot and White Pass trails from the Alaskan side were black. Here they stand in review in 1899 in downtown Skagway during a July 4th parade. Note the interesting bicycle in the lower right. (Courtesy of the Alaska State Library, Paul Sinicic Collection, PCA 75-144).

Because of the sudden storms and blasting snow on the Valdez Glacier, care had to be taken to stack all supplies together so they did not disappear into a snow bank. Here is a typical pile of supplies. This pile is called a “cache,” pronounced “cash,” and is one of the few Alaska Gold Rush terms to make it into the American vocabulary. Another such term, interestingly, is “hooch.” (Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, Messer Collection).

This is the aftermath of the disastrous Chilkoot Slide. The bodies retrieved from this site were taken to tents outside of Skagway where Soapy Smith’s men ‘relieved’ the corpses of every item of value. (Stereograph in the possession of the author).

Nome has not forests so all heat had to come from driftwood—which was extinguished quickly—or coal that was shipped in. This is a stockpile of coal for the winter of 1902, 10,000 tons. (Courtesy of University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Nowell Collection, 5928).

Front Street in Nome was as busy as any street in New York or San Francisco during the heyday of the Alaska Gold Rush. Note the Dexter Saloon, the establishment owned by Wyatt Earp. (Courtesy of the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum, Nome, Alaska, 1-13a).

George Hinton Henry’s press free at last. (Courtesy of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Geist Collection, 64-98-4995N).

A bevy of Nome beauties, the “Arctic Sisterhood Basketball Team,” during the 1908-09 Season. (Courtesy of University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Nowell Collection, 5758).

During the Alaska Gold Rush, teamsters actually drove horses. This photo was taken in Nome in 1907. (Courtesy of University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Nowell Collection, 5885).

Navigation was a treacherous business in the Inside Passage. Here the Princess May has gone aground on Sentinel Island in August of 1910. The ship is so heavy that it cannot simply rest on the exposed reef and wait for the next tide. So the crew erected the wood scaffolding to keep the hull free of the rocks. (Courtesy of the Alaska State Library, Winter and Pond Collection, 87-1692).

These are mail dogs. Note the mail sled beneath the bakery sign. (Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, B81-19.2).

Most men made it across the Valdez Glacier one step at a time. Here is a contingent of stampeders doing just that. (Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, Messer Collection).

Using sheep to pull sleds was not unusual. The sheep were not as strong as dogs but they could forage along the trail, even in deep snow. Dogs had to be fed by their owners which meant more food had to be transported. (Courtesy of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Wahte Collection, 64-34-19).

This was a popular photograph and is titled: A Klondykers “Home Sweet Home.” (Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, Urban Collection, b-64-185).

Alaska’s ghost ship, the Clara Nevada, sank in February of 1898 and ‘reappeared’ ten years later, almost to the day. It sank off Eldred Rock in the Lynn Canal, north of Juneau. (Courtesy of the Alaska State Library, Winter and Pond Collection, PCA 87-1594).

The Alaska Gold Rush had its share of bad men. This was George Wade who was arrested in Nome for pilfering gold from other people’s sluice boxes. He had already served two terms in prison for opium smuggling so he was sent to McNeil Island off the coast of the state of Washington, the maximum security prison for the Pacific Northwest. On July 4, 1905, Wade masterminded the largest escape from McNeil Island. Though the other seven men were quickly captured, Wade never was. This was his booking photo courtesy of the United States Bureau of Prisons.

An authentic Alaska Gold Rush dance hall. Note that the barmaids are not as elegant as those in Hollywood movies. Neither are the patrons. Arctic City was one of the few communities to have electricity. Note the bulb and wire over the moose head above the door. (Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum at the Rasmuson Center, Wyman Collection, 202).

Eight



I think that lawyers are thicker than anything else [here in Nome] except gamblers and sporting women.1 —lawyer Fred Merritt of Nome in 1900

There is an old Alaskan adage that there’s “no place like Nome.” In fact, it’s even on the City of Nome letterhead today. While today this has a completely different meaning than it had in 1899, to a certain extent it is still true. Nome is like no other place on earth. It never has been. It never could have been. It wasn’t a city that grew or a boomtown that bloomed from the tundra overnight. Nome erupted to maturity. One moment it was a deserted stretch of Alaskan coastline on the Norton Sound; the next it was so white with tents set peg-to-peg that the landscape appeared to be snow-covered. And it was one of the most desolate places on earth. Located 2,300 miles north of Seattle, the strike was located in treeless, flat country that saw fewer than 120 days a year of ice-free ocean for steamship travel—June 1 to October 1. In addition to its desolation and climatic conditions, it had a marine access that was rivaled by Dyea insofar as its inconvenience. The water was so shallow that ships could not approach closer than a mile from shore and everything had to be lightered in. During the winter there were months of unbroken, frigid weather accented by ferocious snow storms, whiteouts, and very short daylight hours around the winter solstice. During the summer it was a strip of beach sand immediately adjacent to an unending, low, flat swamp that teemed with every kind of biting, sucking, stinging, swarming insect. Travel across the tundra was circuitous where possible and unless there was a wind blowing, a man could be driven mad by the sheer number of insects descending upon him. It was also the least likely place to find gold. There were no nearby mountains from which gold veins could leach into the river systems and spread gold dust from

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headwater to mouth. So ancient was the land in geologic terms that the alluvium had been flattened to tundra and the rivers that did exist were slow and not suited for sluicing. Nome has a modest tide of up to two feet, substantially lower than that of Dyea, and during the winter, the ocean had an ice plate that stretches all the way to Siberia. During the winter the ground freezes solid to the permafrost making mining impossible for six months out of the year. Even when gold was discovered on the three beaches—one modern and two ancient—there was a great deal of debate as to where the gold had come from. If there was gold on the beach in Nome, surely there was gold on the beach in Siberia and, by logical extension, the floor of the Bering Sea must be teeming with flakes of gold being moved to and fro by the surge and underwater currents. Even the naming of the area was an enigma. It began half a century before the Alaska Gold Rush, when a mariner on either the Plover or Herald from the Sir John Franklin rescue mission identified the cape on which Nome is now located with the handwritten “? Name.” Back in London, a cartographer misread the scribbling as “C. Nome” or Cape Nome. Other sources contend that Nome was a corruption of the Yupik expression “ka-no-me” which translates as “I don’t know” or “I don’t understand.”2 In either case, the name “Nome” preceded the strike. With the initial flurry of activity caused by the Klondike Strike in the Yukon Territory and the Kotzebue Rush on the northern side of the Seward Peninsula, a sprinkling of mining communities dotted the coastline. One near the present site of Nome named itself “Nome City” while another group of Argonauts who established their domicile on the Snake River at the present site of Nome named their community Anvil City after an anvil-shaped rock which gave its name to nearby Anvil Mountain. But the name didn’t last long. As legend has it, the United States Post Office did not want to confuse Anvil on the Seward Peninsula with Anvik on the Lower Yukon so the designation “Nome” was given to mail headed in the direction of the Seward Peninsula. This concerned the founding fathers of Anvil City and, rather than risk having the United States Post Office and all its services moved to Nome City, they reluctantly renamed their community Nome. In the early days of the strike, all of the mines lay inland. Geologically speaking, the gold in Nome was on ancient beaches. Deposited there by eons of tidal action, as the ocean receded the gold was left high and dry. More eons passed and the ancient beach was slowly covered with blowing sand and earth, decomposing organic matter, and tundra. The job of the Argonauts was to dig into the ancient beach, extract the gold-bearing sands, and wash them in some kind of a sluicing operation. For a small company of Argonauts, this usually meant being lowered into a shaft and hauling the fill out by the bucket load. Since the ground was often frozen, a primitive steam cooker was built next to the mine. Water would be heated to steam and them piped into the mine where it would be used to thaw the frozen soil. Then chunks of the gold-bearing earth would be hauled out of the shaft and spread out on the ground for the sun to thaw. When the thawing process was completed, the earth would them be sluiced to separate the gold from the overburden. In the early days, the key to operating a mine was fuel. Without some manner of a steam injection system, the gold-bearing soils could not be freed from the permafrost. There was a limited amount of fuel naturally, primarily driftwood which was already being used for buildings and to keep the Argonauts warm. Thus burnable material

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had to be shipped in as cargo. The most economic fuel source at that time was coal and it was barged into Nome by the ton. Shipped in gunny sacks, sometimes the piles of coal appeared as mountains. The very nature of how the gold had been strewn in the stratigraphy dictated how mining was to take place. Smaller operations were marginally profitable while the larger operations showed healthy returns. The larger operations hired day labor which meant that many of the Argonauts who started as partners in small syndicates and companies ended up as common laborers. But even with the best claims taken, there was still room for the enterprising Argonaut and there were plenty of those. As a result, the tundra was dotted with claims miles from the beach inland. In some places, the land was so wet that dredges could be floated and over the years they, quite literally, ate their way up the small streams until the gold ran out or the water became to shallow to allow the behemoth to move forward. There they sat and still do sit to this very day. But even with mining operations as far as the eye could see, there was still the matter of who owned what acreage. The establishment of a mining district did nothing to resolve many of the disputes. Claim jumping was frequent and sometimes ended in gunfire. The situation was just as unsettled in the city of Nome. When the early Argonauts had first landed, they had set up their tents where they chose. Lots within the new community were staked willy-nilly until some manner of organization was established. Reminiscent of the Great Oklahoma Land Rush of 10 years earlier, a pistol shot on April 4, 1899, signaled a lot rush with Argonauts dashing around the current site of Nome to stake their own piece of property. Then the lot owners had two equally arduous tasks: scrounging for driftwood to build ramshackle structures and keeping lot jumpers from snatching away their hard-won prize. Now that the question of who owned which lot in Nome was settled, there was still the question of who owned what in the hinterlands that was to be resolved. Right at the top of that list was how to deal with mining claims held by foreigners—and specifically the claims of the “Three Lucky Swedes.” Many American miners believed that any claim owned by a foreigner were invalid and could be restaked. Furthermore, many of the claims held by the Three Lucky Swedes had been filed in the names of people who were not there. While this was a perfectly legal mechanism to claim mineral land, the fact that allegedly non-Americans had filed the claims gave the uproar a strain of jingoism. That question came to a head on July 10, 1899. While there has been great debate as to who made the original strike that established the city of Nome, there is no debate as to who profited first. The first three were Jafet Lindeberg, Eric Lindblom, and John Brynteson, known thereafter as the “Three Lucky Swedes” in spite of the fact that one of them, Lindeberg, was Norwegian. Cheechakos all, they staked the Snake River and some surrounding areas and found promising color. Then they were fortunate in two respects. First, they didn’t find enough gold in their first season to set off a rush. Second, while they did not know enough about mining law to protect themselves and their claims, they did have the good sense to find someone who did. That was Gabe W. Price, an agent for Charles D. Lane, a mining millionaire. Price, along with the Three Lucky Swedes, returned to the Snake River and legitimized the claims on paper.3 The Three Lucky Swedes were lucky he did because within a year their claims were so valuable that there was an all-out attempt to strip the trio of their legitimate properties.

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By July of 1899, there was widespread animosity toward the Three Lucky Swedes primarily because they held the richest claims and it was widely believed that the men didn’t have the right to file a claim because they were not American citizens.4 (Brynteson and Lindblom were naturalized American citizens. Lindeberg had made a declaration to become an American citizen before the commissioner of St. Michael. This was later proved invalid as a commissioner didn’t have the power to grant citizenship. Lindeberg then re-delcared his intent to become a citizen before an appropriate court.5 But even if all three had not been American citizens, Alaskan law—which was actually the Oregon law transplanted north—explicitly gave aliens the right to stake claims.) Since the Three Lucky Swedes had all of the good claims and many of the others had none—including a contingent of destitute Argonauts from the failed Kotzebue Rush—there seemed to be an inequity which would only be rectified by claim jumping: legal, quasi-legal, or otherwise. To this end, a mass meeting of Argonauts was held on July 10th in Tex Rickard’s Northern Saloon attended by 500 men. Mr. Willoughby Clarke was elected chairman, “apparently by previous arrangement,” and then the first order of business was to declare the original mining district and all registered holdings therein as illegal as “most of the country had been located by fraud [and] that there had been collusion between the locators and officials.” The meeting did not last long. Lt. Spaulding with the troops in Nome, had specific orders to maintain order and this meeting smacked of exactly the opposite. Acting quickly, he stated loudly to the gathering that unless the move to revoke all claims was dropped “he would order the hall cleared and the meeting broken up.” This announcement was met with a “howl of rage and derision” as many of the men in the meeting were clearly intending to restake claims that were already being worked by owners who had filed under the articles of the original mining district. When the catcalls died, Spaulding stood up to the mob and stated that until a court of law declared the original mining district absolved, he was bound to support it. This pleased the gathered men not a bit and when it became clear that calm could not be restored, Spaulding loudly ordered “all peaceable citizens to leave the hall” immediately and then ordered his men to clear the saloon with bayonets if necessary. When the irate Argonauts tried to gather outside the saloon, Spaulding suspected trouble and ordered his men to disperse that crowd as well. Custom Inspector Hatcher, a dispassionate observer, felt that Spaulding’s prompt action had nipped the legalized claim jumping in the bud and averted serious trouble. “Furthermore,” Hatcher noted in a subsequent deposition, “I believe that had the meeting been allowed to proceed, the title of every honest man would have been put in jeopardy by the Chairman elected.”6 Was Spaulding acting in good faith with his orders? Less than a month earlier Spaulding had signed a special order presented to him by his superior at St. Michael, Captain Walker. With specific regard to claim jumping, Spaulding’s written orders stated that arrests were to be made “only in flagrant cases when public necessity seems to demand such measures.” Further, “Lieut. Spaulding will use his good offices in every way in the interests of law and order and in the promotion of the business interests of the community.”7 But there was more to this meeting than just some rambunctious miners. It was later learned that the men at the meeting had been intent on passing the resolution

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and then lighting a bonfire in town. This “was to be the signal to the men in the hills to rush into the creeks and attempt to locate claims,” specifically and primarily the richest ones. As Rex Beach put it, the American miners were intent on jumping “every claim whose location bore a name ending in ‘son,’ ‘berg’ or had three consonants in a row.”8 Many of the Argonauts were, naturally, upset by the turn of events. After all, the only thing worse than losing a claim is losing a claim that has proven itself. For whatever personal reason the claim jumpers had, many did not view the breakup of the meeting as being consistent with the maintenance of law and order. J. H. Nolan was later quoted in the Seattle Times that the resolution introduced “was very mild” and alleged that the “spirit of the law governing the location of mining claims had been violated.” He disputed the Army’s contention that the resolution had been “revolutionary in character.” Nolan was also quoted as stating that the United States Commissioner and the military commander were in league with “the big transportation companies to deprive the prospectors in the district of their just rights.”9 Others coming down from Nome were equally as distraught. The Seattle Times ran the comments of two more Argonauts who complained of the “treacherous way in which claims have been taken up illegally and held in the interests of people and corporations who have never been in the country and probably ever expect to be.”10 A month later, Isaac Burlingame stated that the breakup of the meeting was an “outrageous affair” and was appalled at seeing “how [the Nome area] had been ruthlessly and illegally gobbled by aliens.”11 The failure of the mass meeting to obliterate the impact of the mining district did not end the claim jumping by any means. So many disputes were headed to court that lawyers were, quite literally, a dime a dozen. By the end of 1899, there were 16 lawyers in Nome; two years later there were close to 130. Court dockets filled even though there was not yet a court. Pencil claims, those held for person or persons not present, were common and the resulting imbroglio over which titles were free and clear and which were in doubt resulted in a rat’s nest of legalities and technicalities which eventually led to the greatest legal crisis in the history of Alaska, and possibly the West Coast. With the blessing of a century of hindsight it is easy to say the conventional historical weasel, that “all things worked out in the end.” In fact, the situation in Nome was extremely tense, somewhat akin to the kinetic atmosphere that exists in a boxing ring as the two combatants strip off their bathrobes. Nome was on the brink of an allout rebellion against what authorities figures there were. On one side were up to a thousand irate, destitute Argonauts with very little to lose while, on the other, was, at most, a dozen armed military men. Had the situation erupted again, this time in violence, there would have been no way for the military to have maintained order. Further, there might not have been enough military force in all of Alaska at the time to have squelched any form of rebellion in Nome. With so many destitute Argonauts in such a confined area, there was no telling what could have happened. Five score years later the mass meeting appears as nothing more than a tempest in a teapot. But to many of the Argonauts in Nome, desperate, well past their last penny with no hope of lasting through another winter and no money for a ticket to the United States, snatching a rich claim was a gamble of survival even though it

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was well beyond the pale of the law. Thwarted in their first attempt, what was to keep them from trying again, particularly as their already desperate conditions would have become nothing but more grave with the passage of time? But before any further violence could occur, fate played a trump card in favor of law and order. It is generally conceded that John Hummel, an Argonaut from Idaho, and a second man, a soldier from St. Michael, should be credited with the discovery that the beaches of Nome were strewn with gold. Also, as legend would have it—and it quite possibly may be true—that the discovery was made the same day or the day after the mass meeting in which Lt. Spaulding moved the mob out of the Northern Saloon with bayonets. According to Tex Rickard, and thus the story is suspect, Hummel made the discovery while bathing in the Norton Sound to alleviate his scurvy. On the same day the soldier had picked up some gold flakes from off the beach and taken them into the Northern Saloon to be weighed. Rickard asked him where he had found the color and the solider replied he had picked up the flakes on the beach just outside of Rickard’s saloon. Two days later Rickard “lost his bartenders, his roulette stick men, and faro dealers.” Within a matter of a week, the Nome strike extended 25 miles down the shore of the Norton Sound—but only 200 feet deep, right to the edge of the tundra.12 Overnight, anyone with a frying pan or shovel could make between $20 and $100 a day ($425 to $2,100 in 1990 dollars). That ended the discontent brewing in the city.13 With the discovery of gold on Nome’s beach, the strike changed from one of large mining operations squeezing out smaller ones to a poor man’s paradise. Some of the claims on the beach were as small as 16 square feet; but they were yielding a thousand dollars a square foot or, as stampeder Robert Easton estimated, “$256,000 from a piece of ground no larger than your living room floor.”14 When it came to beach property, “you owned the land you were standing on,” wrote Georg af Forselles in his memoirs of Nome, “but you lost your right to it the minute you left.”15 After every tide the beach miners had to scramble for the shore line never knowing if they were going after virgin territory or re-digging someone else’s dry hole from the previous day. All manner of equipment and inventions were used. While most of the miners worked with traditional pans, sluices, and rockers, there were some bizarre contraptions as well. Several companies experimented with a “caisson,” or shallow water rig. At least one of them was 16 feet long and four feet wide and high. At low tide, the caisson was rolled 120 feet into the surf where it pumped up sand from the bottom of the Norton Sound and ran it through a sluice system. That operation was netting “15 to 50 cents a shovelful” ($3 to $10 in 1990 dollars).16 And it was profitable. It was estimated that Nome’s first year produced $4 million in gold, half of it taken off the beaches. “Numerous” miners had reaped between $10,000 and $20,000, “scores” made between $3,000 and $8,000 while “hundreds” made between $1,500 and $2,000.17 When gold was discovered on the beaches, men were making between $20 and $100 per day—and spending $40 a day of it in the saloons and gambling houses. About $1 million was taken out the first month by some 2,000 men.18 But there were problems. First, the waters off the coast of Nome could hardly be called clean. All manner of flotsam and jetsam, raw sewage, dead dogs, corrupting horse cadavers, broken boards too small to build with or burn, glass, deteriorating straw,

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and burlap littered the beach at low tide. When the tide came in, often it rose to within inches of some of the tent pegs of the Argonauts who had camped on the sand. If the Argonauts were newcomers and didn’t know how to judge the tides, they found their lodgings awash. If they were not home when the tide came in, their belongings joined the rest of the trash littering the Nome surf. Then there were the claim jumpers, even on the public domain. Milroy reported making $500 a day between himself and his brother but they were constantly in a state of war protecting their beach property or their tent and property in town. They would leave their beach property only to return and find “strangers operating our goldrocker, insisting that they had bought and paid for it.” Then, returning to their tent in town, “we would find our tent and belongings thrown off our lot and occupied by others.”19 But that was penny ante compared to the larger companies. In August of 1899, the Nome Mining and Development Company claimed it owned the beach and when the Argonauts who were on the alleged claim refused to leave, 380 of them were arrested.20 But they were not detained long. The United States Revenue Cutter Bear happened to be in port and, after a short investigation, ordered the men released. As stated by the captain of the Bear, “The United States owns the shore line from sixty feet above high tide line to three miles out to sea, and I am in control. No man can get title to this and none can prevent another from working the beach.”21 While this decision was welcomed by the beach miners, it was moot. The United States Army and the Revenue Cutter Service together didn’t have enough men to arrest all the miners, couldn’t afford to pay to feed them even if there had been a jail in which to detain them and may not have had the jurisdiction to settle the dispute anyway. (The Nome Mining and Development Company tried the same thing on the beach of Kotzebue where there were no troops. This was a failure as well. There was no gold on the beach in Kotzebue and the destitute miners refused to pay the $.50 per day fee.)22 It was the discovery of the gold on the beaches that turned Nome from a city of destitute Argonauts into a boomtown. There was gold on the beaches and it was just a matter of picking it up. The simplicity with which the gold could be taken immediately generated a double rush, one down the Yukon River from Dawson and the other by steamship from the Pacific Northwest. Every ship in Dawson that could be loaded with passengers was rushing to Nome.23 By the fall of 1899, Nome wasn’t a town; it was a landing zone. Argonauts were coming into the city so fast there was no place to house them. Carl Lomen, later to be one of the most respected men in the area, recalled that the “confusion was appalling. Machinery, hay and grain, hardware, provisions, liquor, tents, pianos, mirrors, bar fixtures, household furniture were all stored in the open. Stovepipes were everywhere, all breathing out a slow black smoke that settled in a dark fog over everything, biting at a man’s throat and making his nose run.”24 Cargo from incoming ships was lost overboard and washed up on shore where it was snatched by whomever happened to be nearby. In town, “claims to town lots were jumped. The cabins that had been erected were hauled away at night by horses brought by gangs of men, some of the owners still in the cabins, and before they could get back to their location another structure would be occupying the ground.”25 When Kutz arrived in Nome he recalled that the horizon was white with tents with “the dark silhouettes of buildings [which could be seen] among the tents which spread back for miles on the tundra in great white blobs.”26

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In the history of gold rushes, Nome was an anomaly. Access to the gold bearing sands was simply a matter of buying a steamship ticket. It did not require any particular stamina to reach the gold fields. While the Argonauts on their way to the Klondike over the Chilkoot Trail were moving ahead at the rate of 50 pounds at a time, in Nome it was simply a matter of being lightered ashore. This led to an entirely different breed of Argonaut. Anyone from a lounge lizard to a bank president could be a miner. All it took was finding a vacant space on the beach after the tide came in. No one owned any property so there was no expense to get into the mining business. All it took was a willingness to put with hardships. Count G. Des Garets of Paris, alleged to have been from “one of the oldest and noblest families of France,” described Nome as a “picture of desolation. The beach was swept by terrific storms, and I had to wait for days before landing. Then I tried to reach the beach in a small boat, but the boat was overturned on the shore, and billows rolled over it and me.” Once ashore, the Count didn’t find life much better. “The food was nauseating, the cold was horrible and the rudest accommodations only existed.” But there was a great compensation, he noted, “but then the gold was everywhere.” 27 By September of 1899, the Revenue Cutter Service estimated there were between 2,000 and 3,000 residents of Nome with another 1,000 expected to be there from Dawson. About 2,000 were expected to leave Nome before the ice came in but Nome would still have to accommodate about 2,500 people all winter long “with very limited building accommodations and a great lack of fuel.”28 Food supplies were estimated at 1,700 tons for the next six months. The Revenue Cutter Service did its part to alleviate part of the problem. They illegally seized a number of known malcontents, most of them with criminal records in the lower states, and gave them a “blue ticket.” (In Alaskanese, a “blue ticket” is a one-way ticket out of town on the first available means of transportation in any direction. Blue tickets were being regularly issued as late as 1905.)29 Contrary to the legend that Nome was a wild and dangerous town, it was a remarkably safe place to live. Officially, between September of 1899 and October of 1900, only 62 deaths were reported. Only five people had been killed as compared to 29 who had died of pneumonia and seven who had drowned.30 Even the crime rate, so to speak, was remarkably low. In 1900, only 77 indictments were tried in Nome, only one was for murder. Larceny led the list with 37 cases with assault well behind, 14.31 But this does not mean that the court in Nome was inactive. In a certain sense it was too proactive. This was particularly true when it came to the press. In June of 1904, Nome offered a legal soap opera that kept the population on the edge of its collective seat. It was the legal equivalent of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. The mad imbroglio began on June 1 when the Nome Nugget, allegedly “did wrongfully and unlawfully, willfully and maliciously publish and cause to be published” the following statement regarding a local businessman, Maurice Peltz: Licensing Crime The licensing of the Totem Theater is due soon and without doubt the owners of this low groggery will apply to the district court for renewal of their Federal license. It is well that the court should understand that it in granting this license it gives a permit for the continuance in business of a most disreputable house employing and frequented by men and women of the vilest character. Following in the murky wake of the Totem will be the Big Four, formerly the Monte Carlo.

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What has been said of the Totem with all truth and sincerity can be applied to the Big Four with the additional information to the court that Morris [sic] Peltz its ostensible owner and manager is a man of exceeding bad character. Time and again he has been ordered out of communities on account of his misdeeds. He will run an establishment where the saloon and theater business will be an avocation while robbery by means of skin games a vocation. It is possible he may apply for his license under the name of a dummy, knowing full well that his known character may jeopardize this success.32

To say that Peltz was outraged would have been an understatement. The ink in the newspaper was barely dry when Peltz filed a libel suit against Sol S. Warren and S. H. Stevens, the proprietors of the Gold Digger. Pelz, listed as a “well known businessman” in the same paper that had libeled him, lodged the complaint—along with a civil suit in the amount of $50,000. The district attorney arrested both Warren and Stevens on Thursday morning, the day after the paper came out, and the men posted bond in the amount of $400 to be released until a hearing that was scheduled the same day. The hearing was pushed to the next day, Friday, at which time the lawyers for Warren and Stevens asked for “40 or 60 days, as considerable documentary evidence of much importance would have to be sent for.” The Commissioner allowed a continuance until the next Tuesday, June 7. The Nome Nugget’s June 8 edition gave a blow-by-blow description of the subsequent trial. When called to testify, Warren, who appeared as the first witness, stated that while he was one of the proprietors of the paper and his name had appeared over the offending editorial column this had been the first time his name had so appeared and had been printed without his knowledge. This testimony was followed by a discussion of an apparent “crusade against dance halls and variety shows [which had been and was being] instituted to prevent the roaming about the streets of women of the class frequenting dance halls.” Crusade or not, the fact of the matter was that the employment of women in saloons was the hot topic of the day. In the June 4 Nome Nugget the newspaper reported that “an order has been issued by federal authorities to the effect that women will not hereafter [be] allowed in saloons for the purpose of ‘rustling’ or selling drinks on a percentage plan.” This article, which was not connected to the Warren or Stevens libel case, indicated that the action had been taken “pursuant to the recommendations of the late grand jury” and was being “rigidly enforced.” Interestingly, the filler immediately below the article on the employment of women as rustlers was “Drinks two for 25c, the same as formerly 25c each, Board of Trade.” In spite of the fact that Stevens and Warren had requested “40 to 60 days” to prepare their defense, Commissioner Reed refused to provide them any time at all. Trial was set and held on June 7. Peltz made an appearance and after stating he was a “cigar salesman” denied he had been “run out of several towns.” Various witnesses for Peltz appeared including a comedian who stated he had been instructed to “produce nothing of a vulgar or obscene character upon the stage” and a bouncer who had been ordered “to keep characters of bad repute, such as pickpockets and thieves, away from the place.” The defense argued that the allegedly libelous matter was “justified by the testimony” presented.

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Apparently the commissioner had no doubt as to the guilt of Stevens. The June 8 Nome Nugget lead with the Stevens case under the headline “Stevens Is Guilty” even though the last section of the article indicated that the commissioner had made no decision. Commissioner Reed stated that “there was no doubt in his mind as to the libelous nature of the article,” but he may have misspoken. Though he may have found Stevens guilty and fined him $300 plus court costs, the case was re-tried in January of 1905. The jury found for Stevens and overturned the commissioners verdict. As far as the judge was concerned, Stevens was the only guilty party. A week later, on June 11, Reed concluded that Warren had been the “victim of deceit.” Oddly, while Reed conceded that the article published had been libelous and even though Warren was a co-owner of the paper and had proofread the edition in which the article had appeared, he held that Warren was not guilty. It should also be stated that the man who allegedly deceived Warren was an employee of the paper at the time, Paul D’Hierry. D’Hierry was not unknown to the legal community of Nome. The month before the libel trial, he had been convicted of threatening to kill one Alfred Smith. This would hardly be worthy in a footnote in a book on the history of the Alaska Gold Rush except for the fact that the trial transcripts still exist. In them, D’Hierry stated under oath he was an attorney. This convolutes the libel case against Warren substantially. If D’Hierry was a lawyer and was the individual who proofed the paper before publication, why wasn’t he charged along with Warren and Stevens?33 Though Warren disappears from the pages of Nome’s history, Stevens does not. [See additional sections on Stevens in the chapters on Nome and the The Fourth Estate.] The episode in 1904 was not his last encounter with Nome’s legal establishment. In September of 1906 he was again charged with libel, this time by impugning the character of George B. Grigsby. Grigsby, a well-known Nome attorney, had also been the acting district attorney who had prosecuted Stevens in the Peltz case. The libelous story printed in the Nome Nugget was as follows Attorney Grigsby Leaves for Outside* George B. Grigsby, the Assistant United States District Attorney, left on one of the last departing vessels for the outside [sic], giving no reason for his sudden departure, and revealing from all but his very closest friends that he had any intention of deserting the shore of Bering sea, and the fat job that he occupied for some time past. It is hinted around the town that George has lately gotten himself into financial difficulties through over-speculation in mining and his intimate acquaintances predict that he will send his resignation from Seattle. They base this prediction on the fact that he was very insistent in impressing upon them the fact that he intended to return.34

No verdict was rendered in this case. The legal battles, however, were only a sideshow when it came to the real problems facing nomeites. With so many Argonauts and so few supplies and services, prices were “jumping stiff legged,” right along with the population boom.35 Prices in Nome

* In Alaskan parlance, “Outside” was usually “The Lower States,” “America,” or “The United States.” The term is still used widely in Alaska but today the equitable term is “The Lower 48.”

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were astronomical compared to Seattle. Meals in Nome were from $1.50 to $2.50 ($40 to $80 in 1990 dollars) depending on the quality. A bed in a tent was $1.50. Drinks were $.50 for beer. Some items, such a copper plate which was used in the gold rockers, was going for its weight in gold. If copper couldn’t be bought, other metals were substituted. One miner used 64 silver dollars to plate his rocker. Miners working for larger mining companies were making $10 a day plus board while the highest paid laborers were carpenters who were making $1.50 an hour—plus board.36 In 1899, the successful miner in Nome was making from “two to fifty dollars per day,” ($50 to $1,000 in 1990 dollars.) By comparison, in Seattle in July of 1899, a man’s suit was $4.25 while women’s sold from $6.95 to $19.95. Potatoes sold for $.06 a pound. A good meal could be had for $.25 and a bottle of whiskey for $.40. The weather was not an ally of the Argonauts either. When it rained, “the rain pelted down, drenching everything and turning the flat, level-lying stretch of land that lay back towards the hills into a slippery, muddy quagmire.” This didn’t help with city planning. The fact that Argonauts set their tents wherever they chose left Nome with narrow winding trails about and around patches of tents rather than wide sweeping boulevards. “Streets began to be laid out parallel with the water front. As traffic passed over them the mud became bottomless. Horses mired and lay helpless until they were pulled out with block and tackle.”37 When Jordan arrived he noted that the streets were a “heavy black slush” and “everyone waded along in gum boots.”38 At times the mud was so deep a pedestrian would be “uncertain whether he would arrive at his destination or suddenly find himself in China.”39 When the mud got too deep, timbers were placed across the street so men could pass over the rivers of goo. But this led to other problems. At his first service in St. Mary’s Church, Reverend Rowe reported that as he was preaching at the pulpit, entrepreneurs stole his board walkway across the sea of mud.40 With the streets sometimes knee-deep in mud, walking was particularly hazardous for women. In September of 1900, Kutz watched as a woman had to be pried from her boots which had become encased in the muddy streets. “Some men went to her assistance,” Kutz reported, “and they had to take hold of the top of her rubber boots, and pull first one then the other up till she finally landed on solid ground.”41 Storms were frequent and did more than endanger lives on the flimsy vessels at sea; they also destroyed boats in harbors. In one storm in August of 1899, for instance, there was an estimated $500,000 worth of damage ($13 million in 1990 dollars) in St. Michael. “The whole beach of the island is strewn with wreckage,” reported Captain P. H. Mason of the Jeanie to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Thirty ships were wrecked of which maybe five could be saved. “I saw $20,000 steamers offered for $2,000” he remarked, “and other wrecks tendered for $100.” Nome did not escape the onslaught either. On September 13, a storm caught everyone by surprise. Fred A. Baker, a miner from Washington, was asleep in a tent when the storm hit. Ye Gods, we had a [rough] night of it. We had to climb the bluff about midnight when the sea came over the sea wall and knocked our tent down. We had to fish our stuff out of the water and the rain pouring down and spray flying over our heads and it dark, the wind a howling the sea roaring its water rather hideous our losses amount to our boat all smash a total wreck.42

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Losses from the storm were staggering. For miles, the beaches were littered with the wreckage of barges, sloops, schooners, and other small marine craft along with sections of buildings, lumber, merchandise, tents, and anything else that could be moved by the powerful wind. Damage was estimated at $250,000 ($1.1 million in 1990 dollars).43 After the storm, all manner of cargo came ashore and was seized by men onshore as salvage. One item of cargo that came ashore was a hog which ran from the mob of men searching for salvage. The hog dodged in and out of the crowd until he “ran between the legs of a stout man, who was forced to sit down upon the animal, and was given a free ride up the beach.” The humorous scene of a man riding in hog urged one man to comment that the rider was like every man in Nome: “on the hog.”44 Then there was the winter. While there was an exodus of Argonauts out of Nome before the ice came in, there were a substantial number of people who could not make it out. Among these were the survivors of the Kotzebue Rush who would now be forced to spend a second winter in Alaska, a harrowing experience they no doubt told to anyone who would listen. How many did listen is matter of conjecture. But as soon as the Bering Sea froze in October, the message was delivered with an iron fist. During that winter wood was so scarce that it was feared many people would freeze before winter was through. For miles above and below Nome the beaches had been stripped of driftwood. Sadly, the Nome News reported, “the grossest indifference and neglect have been exercised” in this matter as many people had not only collected enough wood to survive the winter but were stockpiling it to be used on their claims the next year. Driftwood skyrocketed in value with some entrepreneurs charging $25 a cord ($600 in 1990 dollars).45 Because of the shortage of fuel and thus its high value, many miners had to guard their stockpile with rifles.46 Theft of coal or wood was viewed as a serious crime by the authorities. In November of 1899, J. McGlade was caught stealing a sack of coal from the stockpile of the Nome City Attorney, Key Pittman. McGlade even had the audacity to use a wheelbarrow he found on the premises. Justice was swift and severe for that very night McGlade was sentenced to a year working on the city’s woodpile.47 Coal, which went for $8 a ton in Seattle ($170 in 1990 dollars), sold for $100 in Nome ($2,100 in 1990 dollars).48 While hundreds, if not thousands, of destitute Argonauts struggled to stay alive that winter, there was a growing problem more deadly than Arctic storms, drunks with guns, and corrupt city government combined: disease. With so many people living in such confined quarters with so few toilet facilities, the danger of a widespread outbreak of every variety of feces-born disease was only abated by the subzero temperatures of winter. There were as many as 20,000 individuals camped out on the beach in a city that was no more than five blocks deep and twenty miles long and the privies were few and far between. While there had been some attempt to sequester the sewage, in many cases it was not sufficient. This was particularly true behind the “prominent saloons.” Argonauts drinking themselves to capacity would step out the back door of the saloons and relieve themselves to the point that by March of 1900, there were “glaciers of urine” three feet deep.49 Dysentery was so common that one physician reported “one would see blood in every public convenience.”50 By June the situation reached a critical stage. Then the military took command. The chief surgeon for the United States Army, General Randall, issued a circular and ordered “a thorough clearing up of all grounds and the destruction of all filth and

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refuse either by burning or casting into the sea; all rubbish and garbage to be to deposited in suitable [receptacles] for daily removal and destruction.” Privies and “cesspits” were to be coated with quicklime and earth and then closed. Thereafter, all toilets would be the “dry earth system” which would be emptied daily. At least six large “closets” were to be constructed with drains so that sewage could drain out to sea far enough away from the city that it did not wash up on the beaches of the city.51 Use of latrines was required by city statute under penalty of a fine and toilet tickets were issued for $.10 a piece—three for $.25. To move the sewage out to sea, several large drainage ditches were constructed to drain the effluent.52 Drinking water was also a vital consideration. The Snake River was so polluted that it became a health hazard and wells worked adequately during the winter when they were “mere surface affairs.” But, as the ice began to melt in the spring of 1900, they became “little better than cesspools.”53 Truly potable water, which had to be wagoned in for miles, was sold at a premium rate of “16 for 1,” ounces of water to gold. At 128 ounces to a gallon, fresh water thus cost 8 ounces of gold, or, in 1990 dollars, $2,800.54 The price was a bit more modest if you carried your own and were prepared to face the risk of disease. Kutz reported paying $.25 to fill a 5 gallon coal oil can with water from Dry Creek at the outskirts of Nome.55 (It is presume that the water was boiled before consumed.) When the ice of the Bering Sea broke in June of 1900, once again, Nome was inundated with Argonauts. The Revenue Cutter Rush reported 6,000 people in Dutch Harbor waiting for the ice to break so they could flood into Nome. Dutch Harbor itself was a riotous boomtown “owing to the presence of so many passengers of rough character.” Prisoners were kept in irons on ships because there was no jail in Unalaska and armed guards had to be assigned to patrol the coal wharf because so “many of the passengers when in a drunken condition [were interfering] with the cars used in coaling.” W. H. Cushing, the captain of the Rush, then ordered all bars “ashore and afloat” closed and banned the sell of liquor.56 Nome was not much better. Fred Merritt, who arrived in June of 1900, was amazed at how fast the town was growing. “I wish you could see this place and the way it grows,” Merritt wrote to his wife. “On June 15th this year this street was tundra, today it is lined both sides with buildings and tents. [The building where I have my office] was built in ten days and [then] rented to [ten girls?] who had moved in and paid an aggregate of $1100 a month” ($2,700 in 1990 dollars). Merritt’s office was 5 by 6 and he was paying $40 a month for the space ($1,000 in 1990 dollars).57 And still the building continued. Merritt walked up the beach for miles and saw nothing but men and freight. Some of the men were trying to sell out and go home. Merritt finished his letter to his wife by stating, “I may go up the beach in a few days and help start a new town.”58 There was a second general rush for Nome from Dawson in September of 1900. But there too late for the good claims. According to I. W. McPherson, inland from Nome there were claims for “miles and miles” and the beach had been staked for 25 miles above and below Nome.59 In the mines back of Nome, the old problems of transportation and tundra and tundra again reared their ugly heads. Once off the beach there was the problem of moving supplies into the mining areas. This problem could be solved by a railroad. In spite of the obstacles, a group of English businessmen

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with some American investors established the “Norton Bay and Yukon Railway Transportation Company” to construct the “most northerly railroad in the world” from the shores of Norton Sound to the banks of the Yukon River, a run of 75 miles. The route was surveyed in the summer of 1898 and work was expected to begin soon with “4,000 Italians from San Francisco.” Supposedly the locomotives would be run on electricity rather than steam because of the “enormous water power for the generation of electricity.”60 The line was never built, most likely because there was no economic reason for its existence. It would be just as expensive to ship goods up the Yukon River and then transport them by rail to Norton Sound as it would be to ship them directly to Nome. Further, both the Norton Sound and Yukon River froze during the winter which precluded cargo traffic and, to a certain extent, reasons for passengers to travel from one end of the line to the other. If the mining frontier was chaotic on the beach, life in the city was like being lost at a circus. Nome was particularly known for its lawlessness. Alfred H. Brooks felt compelled to wear a pistol while in Nome. Cases of blatant theft were numerous and well-publicized. In November of 1900, two washerwomen who were working to supply medicine for their dying brother were robbed of two and a half tons of coal on a Sunday night. Tracks indicated that the bags had been moved by dogsled. Neighbors were indignant over the theft and, as the Nome Chronicle noted, “had the thieves been caught red-handed, there would have been a sudden decimation of the criminal population.”61 On the same day, three masked men robbed the owner of the Boss Bakery for $340 and thieves stripped the cabin of Miss Ross on Third Street of everything but the “paper on the wall.” Miss Ross was visiting friends between 10 p.m. and midnight and when she returned, she found that the miscreants had taken her “stove, several chairs and a table, all of her personal effects including a trunk full of clothes of a bed.” Tales of perdition went on and on, including thieves who stole a red-hot stove and spirited it away on a dog sled, probably the first time such a crime had been commiteed.62 The Nome Chamber of Commerce, the first organized body in the city, made it clear that they would not tolerate any bloodshed. “We will hang the first man who unnecessarily spills human blood,” they reportedly stated, “even if we have to go to Council City to get the tree to hang him on.”63 Thieves were quite bold and innovative. In September of 1900, H. M Goodrich was robbed after he had been slipped a drink with chloral hydrate.64 In November, L. Daglow returned home late and was reading a novel when he passed out. When he recovered his senses he discovered himself in his bed and robbed with the smell of chloroform pervading the room. The thieves had poured some of the liquid through his key hole and when he had passed out, they had boldly walked in and robbed him of $1,300.65Another method used to rob these sleeping men was to “tie a rag saturated with chloroform to a stick and dangle it into a tent on top of a sleeper’s nose.” When the sleeper “went by-by,” he was then mercilessly robbed.66 In November of 1899, while J. C. Muther was having supper in his apartment over his store, a gang of thieves broke into his store and stole his safe. The large lockbox was later found on a creek bed where the thieves had blown it open. Total take for the crime was $150 (about $4,000 in 1990 dollars).67 It appears that this technique worked so well that it was tried again, at least once, in September of the next year when the thieves got away with $1,290.68 Another Argonaut reported that

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his wallet had been stolen right out the back pocket of his pants, “the thief [had] cut it out just as smooth as anything you ever saw.”69 Other types of criminal activity were much more serious. In July of 1900, Nome was an extremely dangerous place to be. “We sleep with our revolvers right where we can lay our hands on them,” reported Kutz, “and always have them handy.”70 Robbery and mayhem were everyday, and every night, occurrences and well into 1901 “gun plays [were] as common as fist fights in a country school yard.”71 Other robberies weren’t nearly so elaborate. The next month James Norton was two miles out of Nome on his way to Teller when he was stopped by two men who stole his “dogteam, sled and load of grub.” Norton, drunk at the time, reported that the men also stole his revolver and knife. Then, placing the muzzle of a pistol to his head, they ordered him to “mush back to Nome” while they took his dogs and supplies north.72 Nome also tried to crack down on the “lewd women who frequent saloons” and “people of dissolute character” by ordering the district attorney to “take such immediate steps as he shall deem expedient and proper.”73 The prostitutes in Nome were segregated into “The Stockade,” a square block in the center of the city. Most lived in cribs large enough for a bed and washstand and loitered outside their door awaiting customers.74 It is doubtful much happened because it would have been too expensive for the city of Nome to have paid for blue tickets for all of these individuals. The enthusiasm with which Nome went after its lewd woman was exemplified by a raid that had occurred the previous month. The chief deputy United States marshal and one other man raided the tenderloin on Wednesday, August 22, 1900, and “descended on the woman occupying houses of ill-fame situated back of the saloons on Front Street.” Though it made the front page of the Nome Chronicle the next day, a careful reading of the article revealed that the raid appeared more as a shakedown than attempt to rid the city of prostitutes. (Even the paper called it a “queer raid” in the headline.) Mercer simply went from door to door and notified each prostitute she must “pungle up ten dollars or go to court.” The door-to-door dragnet only snared four woman, one of them black. Two of them were fined without being taken into custody and one woman, Camille Bountaine, was fined a total of $18 because she had been arrested “after midnight.” An indication of how paltry this fine could be illustrated by the fact that the newspaper carrying the story sold for $.25.75 The ladies of leisure lived in a section of town known as the stockade which was “almost the exact center of town.” Surrounded by high walls, the prostitutes where thus segregated from the rest of the population. While some of the structures were nothing but cribs, other houses were palatial. Many of the prostitutes had sweethearts among the miners in the city and some were even wealthy from grubstaking men who had struck it big. One of these prostitutes, Japanese Mary, made so much on her grubstake that she held a huge party in a roadhouse that was the talk of Nome for years.76 As an indication of how prostitution was tolerated—and protected—in Nome, by 1907 there was a vociferous hue and cry to rid the city of the stockade. There were complaints that parents didn’t want their children to be negatively influenced by prostitution and certain people didn’t want to meet the prostitutes on the street under any conditions. While this may have been as much as an economic move to make use of the valuable land where the district was located, nevertheless, the stockade was

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ordered torn down. No mention was made by the local judge of where the harlots were to go, simply that the stockade would be torn down. As fast as the old buildings were being torn down, a new section of town was being built—funded by the Chief of Police who was also the mayor’s brother-in-law. The editor of the Nome Gold Digger, S. H. Stevens, also known as Big Mitt, immediately published the story, which the mayor denied. But the mayor swore to get even and the entire town waited for the confrontation. All of Nome was waiting for the confrontation as both men were well over six feet tall, the mayor being “rawboned and sparely built.” Big Mitt was also physically fit “except for his paunch which presented much the same effect as a good sized watermelon reposing in the interior of a boa constrictor.” But “The Battle of the Century” turned out to be a flop. When the men met shortly thereafter at the Barrel House, the fisticuffs were short and the men fell to “fighting like a couple of old ladies, clawing and gouging.” But the fight did result in the new homes not going to the prostitutes who were left to find housing where they could, which defeated the ascribed purpose for getting rid of the stockade in the first place.77 [See additional information on Stevens in the chapter The Fourth Estate.] Tales of cardsharps in Nome are just as far from the truth as the sultry Marlene Dietrich was from the saloon girls of the gold rush. Card sharps, also known as Greeks— pronounced “Grecks”—had a hard time because cards brought up from the lower states were not trusted. Decks were used over and over and a “shiny new deck was as noticeable as a toothache,” Jordan reported. Cards were greasy, stained with whiskey or tobacco, and had so many cuts, nicks, and dents imbedded in the playing cards that it was very difficult to cheat. Sometimes cards were missing. This didn’t stop the hustlers from cheating, but it did slow them down.78 Some of the games favored by the hustlers included Whiskey Poker, Wild Widow, Spit in the Ocean, and Deuces Wild.79 Saloons were another popular way of separating an Argonaut from his poke. One of the more famous saloon owners was Wyatt Earp. Earp had gained a few pounds in the 20 years since his legendary shootout at the OK Corral and probably wasn’t moving as fast as he had been in his youth. He ran the Dexter Saloon and entered the historical record twice in the summer of 1900, once when he was arrested for entering a sidewalk brawl with a marshal and later when he and another man, N. Marcus, assaulted a military policeman who was arresting someone in the Dexter Saloon. Perhaps the best known saloon owner was Tex Rickard. Rickard, a gambler and promoter, had arrived in Nome broke but with a reputation that quickly turned his Northern Saloon into a popular hangout. The Northern, which could be described as nothing more than a large tent with a wood floor, was made famous by Rickard’s reputation for honesty. Even the cynical Wilson Mizner was impressed with Rickard’s honesty, You can’t write off the fact that there were many desperate and vicious men in Nome [in the winter of 1900]. Yet, in those surrounding Rickard was a man who could be trusted under all conditions. His back bar was always piled with miners’ pokes. No one place parked so many pokes filled with gold, but Rickard’s place never was raided though the others were held up right along. Gold on Rickard’s back bar was like gold in the bank. In fact, Rickard was Nome’s banker.80

But the liquor industry was not without its difficulties. Setting prices was apparently a problem because there was always someone trying to undercut his competitors.

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To resolve this matter, many of the saloons in Nome established the “Liquor Dealers Protective Association of Nome” in February of 1900. In addition to naming the new president, George Murphy, the Nome News revealed the true mission of the Association: “an attempt will be made to induce the two-bit houses to raise their prices to four-bits.”81 It was a fine attempt at collusion but it didn’t work. The two-bit houses refused to raise their prices and that ended any hopes of a city-wide, four-bit drink.82 In odd reversal of the Old West, wood was in high demand while horses were not. Wood was extremely valuable, whether it was used as a combustible or turned into furniture. Even small boxes were treasured because they could be used as tables or chairs. Beachcombing for wood was a popular endeavor. On the other hand, horses were close to useless. Feed was far too expensive and during the winter, the cost of fresh water was exorbitant, so the animals were left to wander the streets. There was an attempt to slaughter the animals for dog food but dogs showed a reluctance to eat the meat and that finished the business. Thereafter the horses were left to wander until they died of hunger or thirst, which created a sanitation problem whether the animals died in the spring, winter, summer, or fall. Cadavers in the street, glaciers of urine in the alleys, crime running rampant and limited amounts of drinking water are problems that are usually solved by a city government and the first movement in that direction came in August of 1899 when Alaska District Judge Charles Johnson visited Nome and urged the Argonauts collectively to organize what was known as a “consent government.” Since Congress had passed no law allowing for the formation of a municipal government, it was up to a miner’s council to enforce the generally accepted principles of civic order. Basically stated in different terms, someone had to be responsible for organizing the rabble such that basic sanitation rules were enforced, taxes had to be assessed to pay for public toilets and piping systems, juror roles needed to be established, and other municipal functions had to be carried out whether the gathered Argonauts liked it or not. To this end an election was held on September 12, 1899. More than 1,400 votes were cast, many individuals voting more than once since “voters were not registered and repeating was easy” and women were given the opportunity to vote as well, a rarity in Alaska and the United States as well. Thomas D. Cashel was elected Mayor with a City Council that included Tex Rickard.83 (As an interesting aside, while women were not allowed on juries in other parts of Alaska, the list of available jurors for Nome, printed in the August 13, 1900, Nome Chronicle, lists at least two: Roxy Reber and Laurie Lauritizen.) The organization of the city didn’t come any too soon. The spring of 1900 showed a marked increase in population. By July 1, more than 50 ships had off loaded their passengers and the population of Nome jumped to around 20,000 only 2,000 of whom had had been there the previous winter.84 But achieving civic order didn’t mean that the city was organized. It wasn’t. It was still basically a free-for-all both in the mining fields and the city streets. Every type of scam was being pulled by every manner of individual from the mayor to the derelict in the street. It didn’t take long for corruption to lurch into public view. In May of 1900 Mayor Cashel was indicted for embezzlement of rent moneys he was collecting. At the same time, affidavits attesting to his unfitness were being gathered for impeachment proceedings. One of those affidavits had been signed by D. R. B. Glenn, a well-known surveyor, who swore that Mayor Cashel had demanded a “cut in” the

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city survey. Cashel didn’t take this last charge sitting down. Glenn was eating in the Creamery Restaurant on May 12 when he was approached by Cashel who demanded to know if Glenn had filed an affidavit. Glenn said he had and “Cashel led out with his right, landing on Glenn’s mouth and tumbling him off his chair.” The fight was quickly broken up with the mayor stating unequivocally that there had not been no foundation to the alleged charge.85 However, later than afternoon the mayor was arrested for embezzlement. An offer was made for the mayor to resign in which cases all charges would be dropped. The mayor refused the offer. The embezzlement charges were the latest in a long string of abuses which put the mayor in “open hostility” with the chief of police, judge, ex-city attorney and ex-treasurer. “Thus matters stand,” the Nome News noted, “in the municipal family.”86 For obvious reasons, lawyers were in great demand. As of October of 1899, the Nome News reported that with a new strike, within ten days “500 powers of attorney” had been made out for the new district. Fed Merritt, a lawyer, said of Nome in 1900, “I think that lawyers are thicker than anything else except gamblers and sporting women.”87 There was very little law and not much order. There was a city government, but it was illegal. Lots in town had been claimed but no one was sure that a bonafide court might not overturn the staking. Out of town there had already been one brazen attempt to overturn the mining district. Symptomatic of the amorphous state of the law, claim jumping reached such proportions that it had changed from being a matter of in situ robbery to one of blackmail. In 1899, claim jumping had been to take possession of someone else’s claim. By the spring of 1900, the art form had grown to the point that men were hinting at the illegality of someone’s claim lines or ownership to squeeze monetary concessions. For many claims, it was cheaper to pay off the blackmailer than see the case tied up in court for years. Nome was ripe for plucking. It had a venal city government, lack of a court system, and millions of dollars in transportable booty coming from claims which had been established in a mining district whose legality was in doubt. Add to that the fact that there were thousands of men and women who were more than willing to perjure themselves, Nome was, in essence, begging to be fleeced. It wasn’t just the Argonauts who realized how vulnerable they were, it was organized bands of villains as well. Hungry eyes from the highest quarter of America fell on Nome. In chaos there is profit and none understood this better than one of the most powerful political bosses in the United States in 1899, Alexander McKenzie. The Republican National Committeeman from North Dakota, he had controlled politics in his states and virtually selected every United States senator from that state for more than two decades. A steadfast friend of big business, he lobbied in both territorial and state legislatures for the railroads, insurance companies, banks, and large corporations. The possibility of reaping great personal rewards in Nome came to McKenzie’s attention when he was approached by Oliver P. Hubbard of the Nome law firm of Hubbard, Beeman, and Hume, the firm who was representing the collection of Argonauts who were intent on jumping all claims filed by the Three Lucky Swedes. To do this legally would take congressional action and that was where Hubbard needed McKenzie’s help. The Alaska Civil Code was under consideration in Congress at the time and Hubbard urged McKenzie to use his influence to alter the wording to deny aliens the right to file claims.

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McKenzie agreed to help; but at a price. He then organized the Alaska Gold Mining Company, capitalized it to the tune of $15 million, and had the corporation swallow the law firm of Hubbard, Beehamn, and Hume. He was now president; Hubbard Secretary. Shares of the company also presumably went to senators Thomas H. Carter of Montana and Henry C. Hansbrough of North Dakota. At first the two senators tried to adjust the language of the Alaska Civil Code to exclude aliens but this was nipped in the bud on the Senate floor. Passage of this language would have immediately overturned the Nome Mining District and opened the entire area to restaking, an action that many senators must have considered when they rejected the amendment to exclude aliens. But McKenzie was not to be denied his booty. If he could not succeed through congressional channels, there were other ways to profit from the chaos. Swinging his considerable political bat in Washington, he was able to get a fellow North Dakotan appointed to the judgeship of Nome: Arthur H. Noyes. On July 19, 1900, McKenzie and Noyes arrived in Nome. Noyes stayed onboard while McKenzie surveyed the wealth that was to be his. Four days later, when Noyes finally came ashore, McKenzie had identified the richest mines and was set to pounce. Now came the audacious part. As he controlled Judge Noyes, McKenzie had himself declared as the receiver for all claims in dispute. Traditionally, a receiver is a disinterested third party. For instance, suppose that a man dies leaving $10 million to his heirs but doesn’t specifically state who should get what. As a result, his six children, fourteen grandchildren, wife, three ex-wives, and two adopted foster children begin to squabble over who gets what. A receiver would be appointed by the court to negotiate an equitable settlement. The receiver would be paid by the court thus have no financial incentive to tip his judgment in favor of one heir over another. McKenzie’s case was different because not only did he have himself appointed as the receiver, his company profited by the receivership as did Judge Noyes. The moment the claims fell into his hands, McKenzie rushed to hire workers who worked the claims and sequestered the extracted gold in McKenzie’s safe. In retrospect, it was McKenzie’s speed that was both his greatest asset and downfall. The law-abiding citizens of Nome were so pleased to see that a bonafide judge was at last coming to sit in Nome that they were initially blind to the machinations of McKenzie. Further, as McKenzie worked quickly to secure the rich claims, his actions took the miner owners by surprise. They had not expected to be evicted from their own claims and didn’t put up much of a struggle at first. Then, when it became obvious what McKenzie was doing, they reacted. Once again, it was McKenzie’s speed that proved his undoing. Had he moved with more deliberation and less speed, he may have bamboozled enough of the lawyers long enough to let the ice mantle of the Bering Sea cut them off from any judicial appeal. Perhaps with greed getting the better of him, McKenzie worked quickly and as soon as some of the honest lawyers realized what he was doing, they sent a representative south to appeal to the Circuit Court in San Francisco. There Judge William Morrow ruled that McKenzie had “grossly abused the judgment and discretion vested in him by law.”88 In the meantime, McKenzie was kept under constant surveillance by the miners whose claim titles he had usurped. He had nearly $750,000 in raw gold ($16 million

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in 1990 dollars) and there was great fear that he would slip out of town with the booty. Late September and early October, 1900, marked days of anticipation. With one eye the Argonauts kept track of McKenzie and his ill-gotten gains which, in the eyes of the Nome court, had been legally acquired. With the other eye they watched the Bering Sea for word from San Francisco as to their appeal. Would word come north before the Bering Sea froze over? Would McKenzie figure some way to slip out of town with his plunder? What could happen if McKenzie got a legal court order to remover the gold? Just before the Bering Sea froze over, the Argonauts got their answer. On October 15, two weeks after the traditional last day of ice-free travel, the Oregon landed with two deputy marshals from San Francisco. The night McKenzie was arrested was wild and tumultuous. At first McKenzie declared that the warrant for his arrest was forged. Then negotiations began with William “Hell Fire Bill from Gold Hill” Metson acting as the go-between. Four times Metson, under armed escort, met with McKenzie bringing the demands that he release all of the gold he had collected under his receivership and surrender to federal authorities. McKenzie refused, and once tried to pull a gun on Metson. But Metson, armed, was ready. We both went after our guns. I instantly figured that as I had a small caliber I would have to shoot him through the head to stol [sic] him. Just as I was about to pull the trigger the soldier go[t] me. McKenzie was left handed and had just gotten his gun out of his pocket when they grabbed him.89

Then McKenzie tried to bribe Metson with a million dollars—according to Metson—which may not have been true as McKenzie didn’t have a million dollars in toto. Across town, the federal authorities were trying to get to the gold McKenzie had sequestered in a bank. When the bank presidents refused to open to vault, the troops were assigned to open the vault with hammers and chisels. Only then was the gold returned to its rightful owners. That was the end of McKenzie in Alaska. Under arrest, he was marched down the street with Argonauts hissing and booing as he walked. There are two primary sources for that night, one of the insists that Judge Noyes was almost lynched and that McKenzie had to run to keep ahead of a mob intent on stretching his neck. He escaped when troops held the mob back thus allowing him to enter the bank where the heavy door were locked behind him. Another source says that it was a seething calm that night and that with McKenzie under guard by the United States Army—as well as having a reputation for being a quick draw and dead eye shot—“none dared attack him.”90 But McKenzie’s arrest only solved half the problem. Noyes still sat on the bench. He remained in Nome throughout the winter mostly drinking and making decisions that alienated what few friends he had left. When the end came in August of 1901, there was no question that Noyes lacked any viable support in Nome. At a mass meeting more than 150 miners openly signed their name on a petition for his removal and “53 out of [the] 65 lawyers in Nome” did the same. Claiming Noyes was “weak and vacillating, dilatory, arbitrary, and absolutely incompetent,” the judge relented. At 10:30 a.m. on August 12th, to a courtroom packed for a trial, Noyes announced he was adjourning court and leaving Alaska. But he was busy until the last minute.

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Up until he departed on the Roanoke at 7:30 p.m., he “arbitrarily ex parte issued numerous unlawful, unwarranted and outrageous orders and injunctions which were not served until the next day.”91 Judge Noyes, who had an annual salary of $5,000, was alleged to have left Nome with at least $30,000.92 But he didn’t live long to spend it. He was removed from the bench in 1902 and died a little more than a year later. Alexander McKenzie did a bit better. He was held in the Alameda County Jail until February of 1901 when President McKinley pardoned him because of bad health. His bad health, however, did not keep him from sprinting to catch a train upon his release and did not seem to slow him down when he returned to his political control of North Dakota for the next two decades. At the very least, judicial restraint returned to Nome on October 16, 1901, when James Wickersham held court as the temporary replacement for Noyes. Wickersham immediately announced that “no member of the bar shall in my private office, or any other place, except in the courtroom or in the presence of opposing council, speak to me at any time upon any matter connected with litigation.”93 Then he went to work. Before the ice broke the next spring he had tried 56 jury cases, 140 equity matters without a jury and dismissed any additional 226 cases. Law and order had at last arrived in Nome. But wealth was not to be had by all. Hundreds of stampeders had come north ill prepared for mining or the winter conditions which living on the shores of the Norton Sound will bring. While summers brought foraging opportunities, winter was a time of desperation. As a result, every destitute Argonaut that could stowaway on a southbound steamer did so. But not that many could slip aboard without being caught. But it got to the point that so many destitute men were trying to get on vessels that they created a dangerous situation. In November of 1901, a mob of desperate men numbering in the hundreds attacked the crew of the Queen, the last ship to leave that season. It was an orchestrated assault. Many of the destitute approached the Queen in small vessels. When members of the crew asked for tickets, the men charged aboard and disappeared among the passengers. As the crew searched for the destitute, some of the men threw lines overboard so more men could scramble aboard. Some of the crew was armed with marlin spikes to keep anyone from boarding who did not have a ticket while the rest of the crew searched for the stowaways. When a stowaway was found, fist fights often broke out. But the crew, captain, or both must have been compassionate for of the 100 stowaways who were estimated to have made it on board, “only six were finally caught.”94 If there was any question as to the impact of the declining population of Nome, in March of 1908, the Nome Pioneer Press reported that “the tundra for miles up and down the coast is black with camps.”95 Some of the same problems remained as well for as late as 1909, destitute people by the hundreds were being shipped south.96 Miners being stuck in Nome with no money was a problem that lasted well into the twentieth century. In September of 1909, a revenue cutter was ordered to Nome to pick up destitute miners who had worked for the Alaska Development Company. The company had gone out of business leaving the miners in Nome with no money for food or transportation out of Alaska.97 Though the heady days of Nome lasted through 1901, interest in the gold never died. It was a thriving gold community well after other boomtowns faded to obscurity.

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There was renewed flurry of interest in the spring of 1903 when J. C. Brown, an Argonaut from Iowa, discovered the Third Beach. Nome’s first beach bordered the ocean. The Second Beach was the older beach above the high tide mark where gold had accumulated eons ago. As climatic and geologic conditions changed, the ocean had receded leaving the second beach high and dry. But in 1903, Brown found a far more ancient beach which also contained gold bearing soil. The beach extended in a sweeping arc about 20 miles back of Nome. Brown had the good sense to hid the first few pokes of gold under the kindling in his wood box fully anticipating that claim jumpers would try to snatch his claim from him. The pokes would be his retirement just in case his court cases went awry. He was correct about the claim jumpers, but he beat off all court challenges and retired a multi-millionaire. Nome also had a Fourth Beach that was on Anvil Mountain and a submarine beach, neither of which proved to be particularly rich with deposits.98 Today, Nome is still reaping the benefits of its heady days at the turn of the century. Tourist flock to the city for a last taste of the wild and woolly North. During the summer, many intrepid modern day Argonauts try their luck on the beaches looking for the gold their predecessors could not find. For the flightseer, the fingerprints of the gold rush are still there. Forty-four dredges are still visible on the tundra and the so-called “Last Train to Nome” is still sitting on its tracks 32 miles east of Nome where it was abandoned in 1907. There is an ultimate irony in the history of Nome. Eric Lindblom, the original lucky Swede, never intended to go north. A tailor by trade, he was looking for a job in San Francisco but there were no jobs to be had. Friend after friend commiserated with the unemployed tailor and each offered him a drink. Inebriated, Lindblom saw a sign which read “Sailors wanted” which he misread as “Tailors wanted.” He immediately signed papers and by the time he sobered up, he was on his way to the Arctic on a whaling ship.99 The rest belongs to the history of Nome. But it is significant to note that the origin of Nome, like its life, began with a drunk.

Nine

  

In the vernacular of the late twentieth century, the Alaska Gold Rush was truly an equal opportunity strike. It wasn’t so much that everyone was welcome, rather, it was that no one was dissuaded from participating. While there were certainly many documented instances of racism, most of these incidents had economic roots rather than racial ones. Anyone was welcome in the rushes and stampedes regardless of race, color, creed, sex, religion, previous condition of servitude, country of origin, or even if you had been the subject of a three-state man/woman/person hunt. There was no restriction on who could rush for the yellow metal, Alaska filled with humans of every hue of the racial and religious rainbow. Black, yellow and white, men and women, Jew and Christian, all flooded north. Not all of them came for gold. Some worked on slime lines in the fish canneries while others ran gambling casinos, brothels, or hired out for day labor. They were mine workers, commissioners, postmasters, mule skinners, cooks, thieves, and lawyers. Boomtowns were a mix of humanity where the only separation was by income: the destitute lived in tents at the outskirts of town while the rich lived in more sumptuous structures in town. In some towns, those “sumptuous structures” were just as often made of rough-cut lumber which made them a little warmer during the winter. But in those days, that was sumptuous living. In the bush, nature made certain that everyone suffered equally. Mosquitoes clouded the miners and made no distinction between rich and poor and the gold nuggets were where you found them. Streams did not alter their course for white men over black and falling trees would crush Jew, Christian, or Muslim alike. Bullets didn’t check for racial purity and dysentery struck without checking Dunn & Bradstreet ratings. The Alaska Gold Rush was as diverse a melting pot as one could have without the civilizing influence of women. It was not an American strike alone either. There were substantial numbers of foreigners, many of whom had been hired at barely livable wages to work in the mines,

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canneries, or for menial tasks the whites would not perform. They came in large numbers, were treated more like cattle than human beings and worked with a minimum of health and safety inspections. Other foreigners left their indelible mark on Alaska, including George Pilz, a German, who hired Joe Juneau and Richard T. Harris to look for gold in what is now the Juneau area; Felix Pedro, the Italian immigrant, whose strike established Fairbanks; the “Three Lucky Swedes” who made the strike at Nome; and Territorial Governor J. F. A. Strong who was forced to resign because he had lied about being an American citizen. He was actually a Canadian. While it is certainly true that women were not represented equally with men in terms of numbers, there were, nevertheless, women everywhere. Estimating the movement north at about 100,000, roughly 10 percent of those were non-Native women. They came north and worked as miners, prostitutes, cooks, actresses, roadhouse owners, doctors, and every other profession necessary to keep a boomtown alive. In many cases, women were doing as good a job as men—even if they were single. In 1901, Secretary of the Interior Ethan A. Hitchcock requested information on one woman, May Fleming, “an English lady” who had gone to Cape Nome. After inquires were made, Governor John G. Brady was able to respond that the woman in question was conducting a “lodging house” in a large tent in Nome. With regard to concerns as to her safety, Brady told the Secretary those that knew her spoke “well of her business ability and [say] that no body need fear of her inability to get along in the world, that she is quite capable of taking care of herself at Cape Nome or elsewhere.”1 Other women also set the standard for operating as equal to the men when it came to making their own way in the world. In spite of the fact that there was an entire city of men without jobs, Frances Fitz successfully negotiated for her own wages from a position of weakness to become the stenographer for the law firm of Hubbard, Beeman, and Hume.2 She got the job and her spunk allowed her to work on some of the most explosive cases in Nome at the time, specifically the attempts to declare the claims of the Lucky Swedes null and void. Working directly under Alexander McKenzie, her memoirs titled Lady Sourdough offer one of the few views of the inside workings of the McKenzie office. Mrs. C. D. Lane of Nome was credited with the first person to erect a stamp mill on the Seward Peninsula. Lane and her son Tom owned the Big Hurrah Mine that was extracting pay dirt that was 300 feet down. But it was rich, as high as $1,200 per ton.3 Lulu Thompson and Lois Adams, both veterans of the Chilkoot Pass, arrived in Eagle in July of 1899 and opened a pie shop in a tent. Later the two women, known as “the pie girls,” built a roadhouse in Eagle. One of their favorite recipes was made of wild sheep meat. Thompson later became postmaster of Eagle and Adams the local school teacher.4 The first physician in Fairbanks was a woman, Dr. Fugard.5 Beverly B. Dobss was a photographer for the Nome Gold Digger.6 Bessie Couture, a black cook, opened a restaurant in Skagway called the “Black and White Restaurant” and in Nome, a secretary who had come north without a typewriter tried her hand at doughnut making and her fare became so popular that “she had been unable to fill the orders they had come so fast.”7 Though hardly a scientific survey, the list of postmasters and post offices from 1897 to 1910 includes 23 communities which had women as postmaster. While some of these communities were small, such as Deering, Loring, and Fort Yukon, others were substantial, including Valdez, Seward, Sitka, Kenai, Ketchikan, Douglas, and Unalaska.

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Some did not last long. Nellie Frost at Sunrise on the shores of Cook Inlet lasted minus five days. According to the official record she was appointed on May 16, 1899, and her appointment was rescinded about a month later, on June 19. Her successor, Henry A. Smith, had been appointed five days before she had been appointed, on May 9, 1899. Others had longevity. Lizzie J. Woods of Fort Yukon held her post for 15 years and Louise Kane in Hoonah set a record of sorts with 39 years on the job. She was appointed in January of 1903 and retired in April of 1942. Women maintained the post office in Sitka for 11 years and in Valdez for 7 years. Excluding Louise Kane from Hoonah and her skewing accomplishment, there were 28 female postmasters who spent an average of about four years on the job. In days when jobs were hard to find for men, this is an accomplishment in itself.8 Then there was Belinda A. Carbonneau who established the Dome City Bank and ran it from 1906 to 1908—though there were many who doubted the integrity of the institution including James Wickersham. But clearly Mrs. Carbonneau understood the ways of the world. Two months after Wickersham began his inquiry into the bank, he dropped it. According to his diary, he wrote “I am now employed by the Dome City Bank, $1,000 as a yearly retainer, and the usual prices for all the work I do besides.”9 Women also joined with men on the toughest stampedes. On the Valdez Glacier, for instance, Kappleman reported that there were “quite a few women on the trail” but then went on to disparage them but most of them seem to be a nuisance, some help right along, but when it comes to hauling wood 18 miles for the sake of having a fire all night, it comes pretty hard on her man. Of course she has the meals ready when he gets in, but he can do it as well as she. There is one running around here in man’s clothes.10

There were also women rugged enough to make it up the Chilkoot. Martha Munger Purdy recalled the last hundred feet of the pass as a “sheer wall of rock!” Unsure of her footing, she was aided upwards by her party. Unfortunately her foot slipped into a crevice and the sharp edge of a rock sliced through her boot. As she sat down to weep, man after man passed her asked “Can I help? Can I help?” Her brother, George, however, was unimpressed with her womanly ways. “For God’s sake,” he snapped, “buck up and be a man!”11 Stroller White, a newspaper writer and editor in Skagway, Dawson, and later Douglas, hired a woman only known as Barbara in the spring of 1898 to sell papers. Described as a tiny, gray-haired, blue-eyed, 76 year-old widow from Butte, she had come to Skagway because she had always wanted to “make [her] own way” among strangers. According to White she was doing exactly that. She kept her expenses low by sleeping in a piano box she purchased for two dollars, if, White noted, “she ever slept” for she was nimble in the trade of selling papers. By the end of 1898 she had saved $1,350. Barbara spent the winter in Butte and wrote asking White for her job back the next spring and requested that her piano box home be kept vacant for her. Though she never returned, the piano box remained empty waiting for her for several years before it was finally destroyed.12

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Many of the diaries and letters speak of women in the sense that there were many of them and that they were not unusual, at least in the early days of the rush. In fact, many of the early photos of the rush reveal quite a few women, many of them in family settings. Prostitutes were featured in some photos—and women listed as “entertainers” could lead one to assume that their occupation was something other than thespian. Photos of families trudging the trail were not uncommon. Mention in some diaries was passing, often more concerned with the lady-like qualities lacking in some of the women rather than the lack of woman. One Argonaut, for instance, commented with disgust on a woman with a four-year-old child in the stampede and four others who were “dressed like men” while helping their husbands.13 For the most part, the women were treated well primarily because there were so few of them. But this did not mean that they were always treated in a gentle manner. Boomtowns were rough and swindlers were just as quick to cheat women as they were men. Wives worked side-by-side with their husbands at the sluice or, if their husbands were well off, established the social network of the community. Alaska was not a place for the faint of heart. Some women were truly born for gold rush conditions. Kenneth Kutz reported the presence of Stampede Kate in Nome as “very muscular and stout,” in her fifties and even in the chill of October (1900) she wore “short knee skirts” and “leather leggings.” But she was not what one would normally describe as gentile. She was “the most independent person you ever saw, she swears like a trooper and people as a rule hate[d] to talk to her.”14 But once out of the boomtowns, women were so few that each was treated as a jewel. Basil Austin reported a woman stopping at a roadhouse for the night where she became the “center of attention” and was “admired almost like some rare exhibit.”15 She had no trouble with her privacy. At the roadhouse she solved the problem of sleeping among so many men by pinning a blanket across her bunk and this made her bed “no worse than a sleeping car.”16 Because women were such a precious commodity, acts such as wife beating were not looked upon as comical in Alaska. It was a transgression that could end in a blue ticket. In November of 1899, John Givian was sent out of Nome on the Alpha for that very reason.17 Six years later the crime was still considered reprehensible but the blue ticket had been replaced with a fine. Young Stevens was convicted of beating his wife—even though “the better half of the Stevens family was pretty handy with her fists.” Stevens was find $10 and court costs.18 On the flip side of the coin, if a woman got upset, she could horsewhip a man with impunity. When Mrs. Carbonneau horsewhipped a man who had accused her sister of embezzlement she was quoted in a Seattle paper as saying I needed no help. Twenty friends of ours, all sourdoughs of Alaska, begged to take the work off my hands; but it was a family affair. The man had besmirched the name of my sister, and I tended to it to the best of my ability. I horsewhipped him until he cried like a baby.19

Actually, Mrs. Carbonneau did not get away scott free. As James Wickersham’s diary indicated, she was fined $150.

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Even the clergy was not immune from attack when it came to women. When a clergyman struck a matron in Kodiak, a Valdez paper asked, “Is it not time for our officers [of the law] to teach this man that in America all women are respected, and that a man who would strike a woman is not fit to be called a citizen of the United States, or of any other country, unless it should be Russia?”20 While it is generally believed that women were few and far between, there were more than one might otherwise have suspected. Kenneth Kutz, whose Nome diary was printed as a book in 1991, was surprised at the number of “very nice ladies” there were in Nome in November of 1900 and remarked that he “had no idea there were so many.”21 Indeed, photographs of early Nome show a surprising number of women, at all levels of society. Balls were held and women were in abundance. Women worked on the beach, in stores, and as entrepreneurs. In balance, it should also be noted that Kutz commented on the number of disreputable women in Nome, many of whom were “gambling and mixing up with the men” and, in some cases, even owning the saloon in which gambling was taking place.22 Particularly since the ratio of men to women was so high, ten-to-one not being an unreasonable count, the dearth made women a highly prized commodity. So much in fact, that when they arrived it signaled a change. In July of 1898, with each steamer bringing more and more women north, the Skagway News announced that this must truly be the “dawning of the day of the boiled shirt” as the “refining influence of the feminine society generally” set in.23 In July of 1903, the Fairbanks Gazette cheered the arrival of “several ladies, the wives and relatives of some of our best known citizens,” because “wives, mothers and sisters are foremost among strong influences for good, that a new town can possibly acquire.”24 Women were so few that advertising for them was not unusual. In December of 1898, five miners from Chilcat placed personal ads in the Seattle Times for wives. J. C. Brown listed his assets as “two mining claims” and advertised for a woman that was “nice,” had an “amiable disposition and good character.” W. E. Sommersett, who claimed to be “good looking,” wanted an older woman, preferably a widow, with experience. J. A. MacDonald also wanted a woman of means while R. W. Davis wanted a woman no older than 25 because be was interested in “results.” The last man, A. Standbridge, wanted young, pretty widow and he too was interested in “results.”25 History does not record if these gentlemen were successful in their pursuits. In his 1904 Annual Report, Governor Brady called for an “influx of good New England girls” to help populate Alaska. The New York Mail picked up the story and, in January of 1905, ran an editorial commending the governor and stated that “whatever his motive, and we do not see why he should not get them.” Further, the Mail reported, perhaps tongue in cheek, that there were “thousands of anxious and aimless supernumerary females throughout New England” and Massachusetts was “particularly rich” in “precious unprized maidens.” Perhaps, stated the New York Mail, the governor-elect of Massachusetts should “gather up a cargo of girls for Governor Brady’s territory and send them along.”26 As late as 1905 in Fairbanks, even the rumor of a woman coming to town was enough to draw men to the train station.27 Life was no easier for the women than the men. Mrs. A. Regina Burr recalled how she was in a boat that swamped on the Little Tokio River, now the Tok River. On

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May 22, 1899, afloat on the ice-choked stream dodging “snags and islands,” the current suddenly threw her boat against a floating piece of the once-frozen river. The side of the boat took water and swamped. But it did not sink. Down river it drifted for hours with a raging torrent on each side of us and [we] did not know how we could be rescued when Providence sen[t] a monster piece of ice down as first we thought to smash the boat but it stopped the water from pouring in the boat so she swung to [the] side of drift and righted. After bailing her we found she was all right. Five other boats were swamped and goods of every description floated down stream. We finally succeeded in landing our boat with the help of others but found we had lost every pound of provisions and only saved ourselves and the clothes we wore.28

After a very chilly night in the open air, in wet clothes, she and her party began picking up whatever of their goods they could find along the shore. They found their tent but it was in such a shredded condition that it was unusable. They spent a second night in the open air and, “to add to our comfort a heavy rain set in.” With no choice but to continue, the party salvaged what supplies they could, repaired their boat and set off again.29 One of the saddest stories of a gold rush woman was that of Dr. Edith Chambers. Both a dentist and writer, she came north with the rush in 1900 and spent a year in Dawson. From there she planned to go down the Fortymile River to the Goodpaster and from there to the Tanana. However, after she passed onto the American side of the border, she disappeared. Three years later, her diary, some clothing, and camping gear was found along with some letters to her relatives. The man who made the discovery sent the diary and letters to Dr. Chambers’ brother, Professor Frank Hewitt, who launched a search for his sister’s remains in 1904. According to her diary, Dr. Chambers had been forced to abandon the raft she had made when she reached the Goodpaster River. She also abandoned her pack animals at this point. Caching as much as she could she proceeded down river by foot carrying nothing more than a backpack. But the journey was more strenuous than she expected and she quickly consumed what food she had. She realized she would have to return to her cache to survive so she retraced her steps to the where she had left her raft. But when she arrived she discovered that bears had discovered her cache and eaten all her food. Too weak to continue in any direction, she sat near her destroyed cache hoping that a traveling prospector would pass her way. But it was late September and winter was on its way. For the next twenty days all she ate was four small birds. Her last diary entry was on October 9, 1901. But up until the end her writing was rational and coherent, indicating that she understood fully what was to become of her. It was not until five years later that her brother finally came to the site of her demise. By that time all that was left were a handful of bones, articles of decayed clothing, some odds and ends, and fishhooks.30 Then there was Fannie Quigley. Here was a woman who could out-drink, outshoot, and out-cuss any man in Alaska. She weighed all of 100 pounds, including the flask of “Kantishna champagne” she usually carried in her boot, and was widely considered as close to Alaskan folkhero as there was. Quigley was born in the bohemian village of Wahoo, Nebraska, and didn’t even learn to speak English until she was in her teens. Farming did set with her so when Klondike fever swept the nation,

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she came north. She couldn’t mine and didn’t want to be a dancehall girl so she settled into the vocation of cooking, hiking after the men, and putting up her tent with a “Meals For Sale” sign. She quickly acquired the nickname, “Fannie the Hike.” Her last strike was in Kantishna in 1904, south of Mt. McKinley, where she met and married another Alaska folk hero, Joe Quigley. Joe had been in the north for a decade before the strike in Dawson and was one of the few people to rush south to the Klondike. Joe and Fannie were a real Mutt-and-Jeff combination. Joe stood six feet tall while Fannie might have made five feet. But height didn’t mean anything in this relationship. Whether it was hunting for game, working their Red Top Mine, or mushing supplies into Kantishna, Fannie was the equal of Joe. Because the Quigley cabin was at the foot of Mt. McKinley, the pair were known worldwide. Over the years they hosted the outdoor set of the rich and famous who came to study Mt. McKinley and the game there. Scientists, nobility, and big game hunters, as well as grubstakers, park rangers, and geologists all came through Kantishna. The Quigley cabin was open to them all. Though Fannie had only learned to speak English in her teens, she was regarded as a great conversationalist—even though she swore frequently. Fannie’s importance to Alaska and the United States was her steadfast support of the pristine wilderness and wild animals in the area. She advocated and supported making Mt. McKinley into a preserve of some sort to stop the depredation of the game in the area. She was successful and today it is called Denali National Park.31 But there were women of another stripe as well and, from the moment they stepped aboard the steamships that were to carry them north, they stood out like black sheep in a flock of white. Even from the beginning of the strike, the “good” women kept their distance from the prostitutes. Mont Hawthorne, who headed north on the George W. Elder, noted that the wives kept their husbands away from the dance hall crowd, particularly on deck. “What got to me,” noted Hawthorne, “was the way them married women acted when the dance hall girls came to their end of the boat. They’d just gather their husbands up by the arm, and they’d move down to the other end of the boat, and they’d walk real straight.”32 But still they came in large numbers. One woman, writing in August of 1898 to her mother, noted that on her steamship alone there were 50 prostitutes aboard. “They are around all over the place,” noted the letter writer, “first playing & singing in the saloon, then drinking & promenading about.”33 Better known today, largely due to the Hollywood portrayal of most women of the Alaska Gold Rush, were the less than gentile variety. Each community had its collection of harlots and courtesans, and many of them made the court docket or newspaper. In Nome, Anna Woods made both. On August 30, 1900, the Nome News clearly had a hard time deciding whether to treat Woods with delicacy because she was female in a boomtown or the harsh treatment due a criminal. So, in a compromise, it did both. Referring to her first as a woman who “sported”—an interesting choice of verb—“Titan hair and a freckled face” and had the “physical proportions of an [A]mazon,” the News then proceeded to discuss her depravity Her manners are coarse, and she is so inured to the commission of crime that she could not refrain from laughing when the story of her depravity and dishonesty was recited to the court by the victim of her felonious practices.

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Her crime was to entice a drunken man to enter her room “and subsequently, while he slept, she pilfered his pockets of $80.” Then she “ejected him from the premises.”34 Women of the sporting set varied in talent, looks and skill, but their reason de vivre was the same. There was money to be made in Alaska and it could be made a lot easier with whiskey, sex, and gambling than with a sluice or pan. In the larger communities, the women would hustle men in the crowd. Their job was to get men to buy drinks, for themselves, and the women. Women would allow themselves to be bought as dance partners, and other services could be negotiated as well, often in the same buildings. In the larger saloons they would “rush the box.” While there was music was playing and people were dancing there was a lull in the action. The instant the band stopped playing, the girls would rush off the dance floor into the seating area where the spectators and inveigled, conned, persuaded, or convinced the men buy them champagne—at $20 a pint—or other drinks. If a man appeared reluctant, a truculent waiter appeared who persuaded him to shell out. Many a man was cleaned out before he even hit the trail north. One man, Joe Brooks, a pack train contractor for Royal Canadian Mounted Police was billed $4,700 for an evening. Of that, $750 was for a box of cigars.35 In smaller towns, the dancehall girls would simply steal whatever money they could. Joseph Crad reported watching a gigantic Swede trade dances with two girls in the Eldorado Saloon in Nome. The Swede was “paying for booze from a bag of dust as large as his two great fists.” After some persuasion, the two women got the Swede to sit out a dance at the far end of the dance hall where there was a rear door. One sat on his lap, kissing him, the other got behind him and knocked him out with a slung [sic] shot, the pair then hauled him out through the back door, pinched his poke, and left him lying in the mud.36

Crad estimated that one of the girls was 19, the other about 22. Not all of the women who came north and worked in dance halls were trollops. Many of them were competent singers and exquisite entertainers and considered stints in gold rush communities as part of the road life. Many of the good ones could draw a crowd and were making $150 a week ($3,200 in 1990 dollars). Some of these women were Anna Kane, the Nightingale of the North, Nellie LaMarr, Minnie La Tour, Blanche LaMonte, and Jesse La Vore.37 But prostitution was where the money was. While the women were not particularly good-looking, as their names attest, they were still woman and that was a rare commodity. In some of the more sophisticated houses, women had their own rooms where they could entertain. In Dawson, a high class prostitute could make as much as $50 a night ($1,000 in 1990 dollars). (Common laborers, by comparison, only made about $10 a day.) At the cheaper end of the industry, women did their business in what were called cribs, cubicles just big enough for a bed and wash basin. Often the only privacy was a sheet or blanket that was tossed over a rope that hid the crib from the rest of the room. In smaller communities for years, the sign that a peripatetic prostitute was in the area was a sheet over a rope in the back of a cabin she had rented for business purposes. Prostitution was not only immensely profitable business but it was dangerous as well. So many young miners were being rolled and robbed by the prostitutes and their

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pimps in Fairbanks that Archdeacon Hudson Stuck established “The Line,” a section of town where brothels were allowed to do business. This was not because Stuck had any compassion for the prostitutes, rather he was concerned about the muggings of the young miners.38 While the law had an off-again-on-again relationship with the houses and their owners, in most cases the brothels were left alone. It was a truly naive individual who did not know what was going on in the buildings but the general feeling was that as long as there were no difficulties, the constabulary should turn a blind eye to the peccadilloes. Occasionally there was a raid but, generally speaking, throughout the gold rush era, historical documentation of arrests and prosecutions for running a bawdy house or working therein are few and far between. But some prostitutes did not understand the delicate balancing act they were required to perform. In September of 1908, Sadie Silverstein was arrested four times in the period of about a week. First it was for the loss of $200 by C. L. Boldoc, a miner who had visited Sadie and a friend in her cabin. The two women claimed Boldoc was drunk at the time, which the miner denied. There was not enough evidence to convict but Silverstein was ordered out of town. (She had been charged with a similar offense the previous winter.) Silverstein didn’t leave the vicinity and a few days later she was arrested for the use of “obscene and profane” language and fined $25. Thereafter she was arrested for running a bawdy house—and was then arrested again, for the fourth time in about a week—on another charge of running a bawdy house. She was jailed and infuriated the jailer by yelling all night long.39 In Fairbanks, at about the same time, another woman was arrested “three times in one week” in spite of the fact that the community deemed her “one of the quietest and least indecent of her class in Fairbanks.” Arrested at 8:30 in the evening of September 6, 1908, until 7:30 the next morning, she was held in a cold cell without a chair or cot. She was not allowed a “wrap” or to go to the toilet. In spite of the fact that she had “not committed a crime,” she was still fined $10 and told by the Chief of Police that she could not “continue business” in Fairbanks.40 Considering that both women were arrested in the same short time frame, it could be supposed that there was a dedicated effort by law enforcement at that time to rid their respective cities of the ladies of the night. It could also be inferred that 1908 was a bumper year for cleaning up the morality of Alaskan communities. In June of that year, United States Marshal Shoup—under the Direction of District Judge Royal A. Gunnison in Juneau—sent notices to all holders of liquor license that such would not be renewed if it could be proven that any one of them had “a dance floor or any place in which women or girls are employed or permitted to act in any capacity in connection with the sale or distribution of liquor.”41 Apparently this was the beginning of a push to end the “White Slave Traffic” in Alaska. In 1909, the Chief of the Immigration Service in Alaska, Kazis Krauczunas was ordered to clean up the matter in Alaska under the assumption that the prostitutes were primarily aliens and could be deported. From the point of view of immigration, that would solve two problems at the same time. Krauczunas began a campaign of subterfuge in which he distributed free drinks and expensive cigars ($.25 apiece—$5.25 in 1990 dollars) for information on prostitutes. It was an expensive campaign as records indicate he distributed over 700 cigars in Fairbanks in one month

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alone. But his success was minimal, primarily because the police and residents of Fairbanks were unwilling to cooperate. With regard to the police, much it might have had to do with money. The estimated 150 prostitutes were paying $12.50 apiece per month for “a so-called fine” for a total of $1,875 per month ($40,000 a month in 1990 dollars) which was lathered on a police department of three, one of whom was known to be intimate with one of the prostitutes. Of the other two, one had been a well known gambler and bartender in Dawson and the other was cohabitating at the time. When asked to assist Krauczunas, the three policemen who oversaw law and order for a town of no more than 4,000 could not identify a single pimp by name. By 1910, the extracting of money from prostitutes in Nome was an established practice. No less a witness than the Reverend Hudson Stuck reported that the Fairbanks city attorney met every incoming boat and asked every woman coming ashore, “Are you a lady or a whore? If you are a lady, pass on, if you are a whore, seventeen dollars and a half.” With regard to the general population, the prostitutes were known by name, first and last, and “even the children knew the prostitutes’ names and reputations.” When Krauczunas tired to crack down on the procuring, he was able to arrest four while the rest fled town. He made several arrests of prostitutes on the grounds that there were aliens and did little more than to generate a rush of marriages so the prostitutes could stay active in Fairbanks. As the prostitutes were willing to pay cash to be married, there was no shortage of suitors. Krauczunas even reported that women he had arrested “were daily having callers desiring to see them and secure money for marrying them.” One of the suitors even had the audacity to tell Krauczunas that since he was going to get $5,000 for marrying one of the women in custody, “he was not particular with which one” of the jailed prostitutes he was paired within the holy bonds of matrimony. Even the United States government seemed to be conspiring against him. As Krauczunas had to staff in touch with the Washington office of the Immigration Service, he had to use the service of the United States Army Signal Corps. But because of bribery or other inducements, the Signal Corps apparently leaked like a sieve when it came to critical information such as who was going to be arrested when. On one occasion Krauczunas even heard the contents of one of his supposedly confidential messages being part of the general talk within a matter of hours after he received it. Because of logistics, the expense of deporting the women, lack of support of the community of Fairbanks and its law enforcement officials, the attempt to rid Fairbanks of its white slavery traffic was a dismal failure to everyone but the United States Bureau of Immigration which commended Krauczunas for his efforts. While there is no historical documentation of the extent of Krauczunas’ efforts, all that is known for a fact is that he was able to send nine women to Seattle for a deportation hearing.42 By the end of the decade, with more and more women in Alaska, the mystique of feminine gentility was wearing thin. Ten years earlier, a socially reprehensible act of a woman would have been ignored. That was no longer the case now. In August of 1909, Mrs. James McCloskey of Juneau was indicted for an assault on Mrs. Hilma Gustafson for “pulling the hair from the left side of [Mrs. Gustafson’s] head and then and there pounding and beating the said Ms. Hilma Gustafson on the right side of the head.”43 In Fairbanks, Annie Rose and Nellie May were convicted of having “engaged in a hair-pulling altercation” in July of 1906 and were fined “$50 of fun each.”44

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Fights among prostitutes were also printed in the newspaper. Two harlots apparently engaged in a rough and tumble battle in which Gabriel, the French woman, walloped the living daylights out of Irene Wallace to the extent that a doctor had to be called to look after the “Wallace woman’s” wounds. An hour later, the French woman went looking for her victim to “finish her” when the law stepped in. Though the Wallace woman had fled Fairbanks for her own safety, Gabriel was still brought to court. There she “graphically described . . . how she delivered the blows which did such terrible execution upon her opponent’s face.” As she had some experience with prize fighting, Gabriel proudly “punched holes in the air to show how different blows could be delivered with force.” She was fined $50 and left “the Victor, as well as the terror, of the row.”45 Blacks also played a significant role in the Alaska Gold Rush. In fact, Alaskan history is replete with incidents which involved blacks, and not all of them are minor incidents. Blacks were not just in Alaska but, in some cases, played pivotal roles in the development of the northland. For instance, the troops who patrolled the streets of Skagway during the wild and woolly days of the Klondike Rush were black as was “Hell Roaring Mike” Healy of the United States Revenue Cutter Service who patrolled Alaskan for 25 years, from the early 1880s until his last trip in 1900. There was a high percentage of black whalers and, judging from the photographs available, blacks worked as equal partners on claims across the land. Perhaps even more significant, blacks were even in the smaller, well-established communities. With the exception of their race, many appeared to be treated as equals, particularly before the law. In Fort Wrangell in August of 1898, for instance, a presumably white man by the name of Tim Callagan attempted to enter the home of a black couple, Benjamin Starkie and Minnie Jones—“the home of these parties [being one that] would hardly pass muster if chastity were to be considered.” Callagan, drunk at the time, shouted that he wanted to enter the home and Ms. Jones barred his entrance. The drunk, “with all his good looks and persuasive powers” tried in vain to talk his way into the house and finally broke through the door whereupon Benjamin Starkie took an ax and “let fly at [Callagan’s] face, which landed square, and also laid [Callagan] our for repairs.” The case attracted so much attention in Wrangell that the “room and corridor” of the court were full. The case was resolved with no charges made against anyone. “[Callagan] is a good fellow,” the Fort Wrangell News reported, “and drink got him into this trouble which we trust will be a lesson to him and a warning in the future that a man’s home is his castle and none may enter therein when forbidden, regardless of what the reputation of the house may be.” What is interesting to note is that cohabitation was against the law and there were cases of the crime being prosecuted vigorously in other communities at this time. The fact that Starkie and Jones were living “just back of Judge Sunmacher’s office” is a clear indication that the matrimonial state of the two was known and tolerated, a sure sign that in the small community of Fort Wrangell, black couples living in sin were treated with the same blind eye of the law as whites.46 Tracing blacks in Alaska history is difficult because so few references are made with regard to race. In most gold rush documents, the race of an individual is rarely mentioned. Sometimes the term “nigger” is used in a name, such as Nigger Jim, but this does not necessarily mean that this individual was black. Nigger Jim, the example in

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the sentence above, was an “Irishman with a frosty beard.” While Nigger Jim could have been black, it is unlikely. In this particular case, Nigger Jim earned his name because of his Missouri accent and his affinity for playing the banjo and singing spirituals. One of the few historical references to him mentions that he hired a bummer to boost Teller, about 60 miles north of Nome. The bummer did his work well and started a mild rush. When it was discovered that the Teller strike was a fake, the bummer was found dead alongside the trail in ten feet of snow. A coroner reported that the man had died of exposure but the man who found the body, Wild Jim O’Hare, reported that the neck had been broken.47 Nigger Jim should not be confused with Nigger Bill, the latter being black. Bill was an entrepreneur who supervised a team of builders who constructed a roadhouse “thirty-five miles north of Casey’s Cache” in 1904. Wickersham stopped at Nigger Bill’s on March 3, 1905 and reported it was a sturdy, warm log building. 48 In most cases, blacks are referred to as “colored,” “black,” “Negro,” “negress,” and sometimes “darky.” “Dusky” was usually used when referring to a Native. Occasionally there is a reference to a black in the historical record but in most cases it is only in passing, probably because the individual’s racial content had nothing to do with the matter at hand. But this does not mean that blacks were absent. On the contrary, they were everywhere. On whaling ships there were apparently enough blacks to warrant mention in a petition to keep them—and white crew members—from taking advantage of the Eskimo women. Blacks are mentioned as prostitutes, miners, actors, lodging house owners, felons, and common laborers. There is also reference to at least one black boxer in Golovin—and he won his bout.49 One of the few specific references to a black is L. T. Watson who came north to the Saxman area, just south of Ketchikan, in 1890. There he became a close friend of the Tlingit chief, Krshakes. So honored was Watson that he sat on the local Tlingit council and, when gold was discovered on the “hunting grounds” of Krshakes, the mining claims were filed under Watson’s name. (There was not a lot of gold there, only “coarse shot gold.”)50 Other blacks earned their place in Alaskan history because of their novelty. One man, whose name has been lost in the swirling sands of time, had a mouth was so large that it seemed to spread from ear to ear. He had previously been exhibited at Huber’s Museum in New York for this physical peculiarity and in Skagway he would often “simultaneously stuff three billiard balls” into his mouth. He also had a cane with a head about the size of a young cantaloupe which he would frequently pop into his mouth as well. Able to put his physical malformity to good use, it was rumored that he earned enough money to retire comfortably.51 Many other blacks acquired their fortune honestly. In March of 1908, Mrs. G. B. Verden, “a negress,” returned to her home in Des Moines “fashionably clad with jewels and gold nuggets galore”—and “mining interests near Gold Run worth a cool million.” Mrs. Verden had not made her money as a dancehall girl. Rather, she had gone north to Gold Run where she had run a hotel and wisely invested her profits.52 Black women, like all women in this era, were treated well. There is reference to a black woman from South Carolina by the name of May who threw her lover out of the home he had built and stated that if he ever did return, she would slit his throat. Thereafter she brought suit against him for $2,200 ($50,000 in 1990 dollars) for

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“boarding his dogs and for bodily services.” A jury, drinking heavily, returned a verdict indicating that the amount was excessive and then fined May for court costs— including the whiskey consumed.53 But there was still more than a trace of racism. M. D. K. Weimer, in his selfpublished book, noted that the three “colored people” had left Circle because it had become “too hot for them,” and followed it with his rendition of “Say, Darkey, Have You Heard the Massa,” with Dem white folks way up dere in Alaska Dey’s havin a fearful time. While we here niggars in de open do’ cabin is snoozin in de wahm sunshine. 65 be’low zero, on de creek day all de mission. An’ “Hooch” is all the de fruit they grow Di’s darkey’d die widout watermillion And de Eagle city chicken is a crow.54

Being black could also change how the community viewed you. In Fairbanks, a “colored man” by the name of Walter Preston was held in jail for five and a half months awaiting his trial for stealing a dog. When he appeared before the judge, Preston protested his innocence and “while technically guilty” he claimed to be “partly justified in what he did.” The judge dropped the charge from grand larceny to petit larceny and then sentenced Preston to another 10 days.55 Probably the best known black during the Alaska Gold Rush was “Hell Roaring Mike” Healy. Born the son of an Irish slave owner and a mulatto woman in 1839, Healy along with his brothers and sisters were raised as white and sent to north to Quaker and Catholic schools for their education. The young Healy was rambunctious and was constantly running away from school. Finally, at 15, he ran away to sea. He worked his way up to an officer on a merchant vessel and after the Civil War he joined the Revenue Cutter Service, the forerunner of the United States Coast Guard. He operated out of Alaskan waters until 1896 when his heavy drinking and alleged brutality to his crewman forced him into an early retirement. Four years later, he made a final voyage to Alaska, a voyage during which he displayed behavior that was so erratic that his command was taken from him by junior officer. The junior officer was not charged with mutiny but Healy was declared “indisposed” and he was removed from active duty. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer was not so kind and used no euphemisms. In its July 14, 1900 edition it declared in headlines that Healy was “insane” and had become “a raving maniac.” The first line of the article stated that Healy was “hopelessly insane and a danger to himself and with those with whom he comes in contact.” However, because of his connections he was able to regain his original position on the captain’s list in 1901 making him the seventh highest captain in the Revenue Cutter Service. He retired in 1903 and died in obscurity in San Francisco shortly thereafter. Being suspended for four years, 1896–1900, Healy missed the heyday of the Alaska Gold Rush. But he was not without influence in the north. He was better known than the president of the United States in the Arctic and one of the reasons was his compassion for the Eskimo. Over the years he noticed that the Siberian Eskimo seemed to be doing better than the Alaskan Eskimo. He attributed this success to the fact that the

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Siberians domesticated reindeer while the Alaskan Eskimo were primarily hunters and gatherers. Since the tundra of both areas was similar, Healy believed that domesticated reindeer could be raised in Alaska. This would give the Alaskan Eskimo a means of survival as civilization was rushing north by the boatload. Joining with Reverend Sheldon Jackson, the two were able to finagle money out of philanthropists and the United States Congress to transport several hundred reindeer from Siberia to Alaska. A handful of Siberian Natives came along to teach the Alaskan Eskimo how to care for the animals but, after protracted bouts of homesickness, the Siberians were replaced with Lapps. Though the Alaskan Eskimo did not adapt well to the life of reindeer ranchers, by 1904 Sheldon Jackson could claim that there were 8,000 reindeer in domesticated herds. Today, reindeer ranching is an occupation which can only be performed by Natives. Though the herds are still small when compared to beef, reindeer meat is a unique Alaskan product that can be bought across the nation and around the world. The historical record is also replete with references to Orientals. While there were some who worked as miners, in most cases they worked in the fishing business, usually on a slime line or as hourly labor in a cannery. Treatment of the Asian was mixed in the sense that on a one-to-one basis, they were treated as equals but as a group they were treated abominably. This was probably for two reasons. First, the Oriental would take jobs that no white man wanted—such as working in a fish cannery—and secondly, they took jobs that white men might have wanted when times were hard. But treatment was schizophrenic. In June of 1902, word was passed in Whitehorse that “five” Chinese were on the train from Skagway. There was “a great deal of indignation expressed over their arrival.” When the Orientals arrived they were greeted by a “committee of citizens” who told them “they were not wanted in Yukon Territory and they had better make arrangements to return from when they came.” They were placed on the Skagway-bound train an hour later and that took care of the Chinese problem in Whitehorse—but the committee of citizens had to come up with the $200 transportation fee.56 On the other hand, during a race riot in 1886 in Juneau when 80 Chinese were rounded up in the Treadwell area and shipped out with a warning never to return, China Joe—also known as Joe the Baker and in the census as Hi Ching—was spared deportation when men who had known him in other strikes refused to let him be deported.57 China Joe had grubstaked so many men that he was respected to the point that the men of Juneau were willing to lay down their lives for him. When the anti-Chinese mob showed up at China Joe’s home, they found a rope around the premises. As they approached the hemp, a man from Juneau told the mob the rope “represent[ed] the deadline. The man you want is in his house. If you still want him you can have him—if you can get him.” This terse statement was followed by a sound that “men of the West had long since learned to respect—the particular click of cocking rifles” whose sound identified them to be in great number and numerous strategic locations. This show of force cooled the ardor of the anti-Chinese mob and they left Juneau.58 Two decades later, in September of 1902, the Juneau Daily Record announced that plans had been made to import up to 2,000 workers for the construction of the Valdez, Copper River & Yukon Railroad because railroad officials and the contractor were

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“satisfied that it [would] not be possible to obtain enough white men to complete the force.” While there was a demand for labor on the coast, it was feared that hiring white men “would be stampeded by reports of gold strikes, and it would be necessary continually to send out for more.”59 The Valdez News was more explicit when it clearly stated that “it is very likely an effort will be made to procure Japanese labor.”60 The same day the editor did a column entitled “Jap Labor” which basically stated it was understandable why Japanese laborers might be used: there was a shortage of men willing to do low income work. A few thousand men willing to work at these wages could possibly be found in Alaska, the editor wrote, but gave no indication as to where those few thousand could be found, particularly considering that the population of Valdez at that time was about 300. But it appears that A. W. Rochford, the editor of the Valdez News, was the only once concerned about the possibility of 2,000 almond-eyed, low income, railway builders swarming into Valdez. Other than the news story and editorial, there was no further mention of the Japanese in the next dozen issues of the paper. Even in the summary of the meetings of the Valdez Chamber of Commerce, a perennial hot-bed of pro-local business boosting, no mention was made of the yellow hordes about to descend and take white jobs. In fact, judging by the paper it appears that the only one concerned about “Jap Labor” was the editor of the newspaper. Journalism was free and easy in this era, and editorializing in news stories was not only frequent, it was expected. In a story under the banner of “Chinese Murderer,” the Juneau Record-Miner, reported the arrival of a “Chinaman” who had been brought up from Ketchikan on a charge of murder. “The Chinaman got into a discussion with a brother celestial as to who could clean the most fish,” the article read, “and having been outdone in the contest proceeded to carve the fins off the victor.” Held under suicide watch in Juneau, the paper suggested that the legal establishment should “give him a whole bunch of shoe strings and let him shouffle [sic] off—the quicker the better.”61 It is interesting that the law and order establishment was sincere in their attempt to keep its prisoner alive even though the prevailing attitude was to let the man commit suicide. Sometimes the Japanese were subjected to indignities which the law would not have considered if the individuals had been Occidental. Several years earlier, in December of 1904, 20 Japanese were brought into Valdez for the murder of their boss in Karluk. The authorities were sure that one of the 20 had done the deed but no individual came forward to confess. So all 20 were jailed. Finally one of the 20, Yoshida, admitted the killing. The authorities still wanted to hold the other 19 to see if they could be “induced to tell what they knew about the affair” but there was an epidemic of measles at the jail which precluded them from doing so.62 But then again, when it came to taking into account their unique culture, in July of 1906, the authorities allowed the Japanese in jail in Valdez to cremate one of their dead.63 There were also other Japanese of note, though not necessarily honor. One was James Wada who lived in Icy Cape. Wada had endeared himself to the Natives there and they named him “king,” at least according to the Tanana Weekly. To his credit, he convinced the Natives to hold out on trade goods because the whalers were not paying enough. In fact, he convinced the Natives that they could earn many times more by selling their wares in Tanana. The whalers, enraged that Wada had robbed them of

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their rightful “loot and pillage” told the Natives that Wada was a “false profit and a bad man generally.” But the Natives believed in Wada and sent him to Tanana with sleds of ivory carving and furs to the city where “guileless cheechakoos . . . poured their money out like water from a mountain stream.” Wada was correct in his estimation that dollars were “as plentiful as salmon at the mouth of the river in summer” and he was able to sell the Natives’ wares at a high profit. Alas, the Japanese entrepreneur “fell to the temptation offered in the places where the clerk hands out a bottle and a glass.” When he awoke from a drunken slumber, he was broke. Rather than the face the wrath of the Natives of Icy Cape, he tried to slip out of town. The white man’s law, however, was faster and Wada was hauled before a grand jury. As there was no evidence of larceny, he was released and welcomed back to Icy Cape for the Natives believed that Wada had fallen prey to the white man’s liquor, a fact they apparently knew too well. In January of 1907, Wada returned to Icy Cape.64 [Author’s note: At least one historian feels that James Wada is the same as Jujiro Wada of Fairbanks notoriety.65 There was also a James Wada, possibly the same man, who was arrested for having stolen $225 from a Native whom he was escorting to Nome in 1906.66] Historically Wada has always stood in the shadow of E. T. Barnette or worse, the two men have been considered peas in a pod. In actual fact, Wada was an adventurer in his own right. In 1907 and 1908, for instance, Wada traveled by dog team from the head of the Chandalar River in the Alaskan Interior north to the Arctic Ocean and then along its coast to the McKenzie River in Canada. He traveled down the McKenzie to the Rat River and then over a divide into the Porqupine River. The trip took him more than a year and among his many adventures was becoming so snow-blind he could not see well enough to hunt. Because he could not fed them, his dogs became lean and weak. The resourceful man that he was, Wada allowed the dogs to chew on his seal oil-soaked trousers which gave them enough strength to finish the journey—though he “nearly dressed in his underclothes.” Well into the second decade of the twentieth century, Wada was exploring and developing routes to gold fields he felt had promise. He was not shy about booming his claims. He once convinced the Seward Chamber of Commerce to pay his expenses to open a dogsled trail from Seward to Iditarod, a trail that would make Seward the supply capital of Alaska.67 In 1913 he even traveled to New York to see if he could sell his claims to the Guggenheims. As late as 1923 he was still on the trail weaving telling thrilling stories to newsmen.68 Another Japanese of note was Frank Yasuda who established the village of Beaver when he moved his family from the shore of the Arctic Ocean to the Interior. Yasuda, at his request, had been left by the Bear in Barrow as a weather observer. He married an Eskimo woman and was living happily when he was bitten by the gold bug. In a prospecting trip from which only heroes return, he was able to locate gold near the headwaters of the Chandalar River hundreds of miles south of Barrow where he remained for several years. Then, two events occurred simultaneously that were to change the map of Alaska. First, the whaling era came to an end. For the myriad of Eskimos who depended on whaling, this was the end of life as they knew it. Second, Yasuda sold his claims and got out of the mining business. He did not want to leave the banks of the Chandalar River yet, at the same time, he was homesick for his Eskimo friends. He resolved these twin problems by convincing 20 Eskimo families

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to move with him and establish the village of Beaver, an Eskimo enclave in an Athabaskan region. The journey started in 1912 and took two years to complete. Yasuda ran the trading post in Beaver for decades, his only extended stay out of the area being when he spent the Second World War in an internment camp. He died in 1958.69 Sometimes the Japanese earned the bad press they received. Of great concern to Alaskans was what the Japanese were doing to the seal population. In the fall of 1901, so many animals had been killed on St. Paul and St. George islands that the seals had sought a new home. A Japanese schooner found a new rookery on Bouldyr Island and the crew proceeded to slaughter almost the entire population. When they left, 2,500 carcasses minus their pelts littered the beach. The United States Revenue Cutter Manning mounted a search for the poachers but all it found was a rowboat with three Japanese. Though there were sure that these Japanese had been involved in the poaching, primarily because they all had guns, there was no basis to charge the men with poaching. The three Japanese were sent to Seattle so they could be deported to Yokohama.70 The Japanese also had a reputation for pillaging Native villages. When they came upon villages in the Aleutians, looting was frequent. In one, the vandals, presumed to be Japanese because a cigarette holder “such as are used by the Japanese” had been found in the destruction, had “broken open houses, chest and truck and taken men and women’s clothing, watches, jewelry, etc.”71 But not all of the press about the Japanese was negative. In March of 1904, a Japanese cook, Maritara Yanagimachi, known in Valdez as “George, the cook on the Perry,” received a wire from his mother to return home and “help lick the Russians.” Yanagimachi returned to Japan reluctantly even though he was not required to do so because “he would disgraced forever when he returned to his native land if he did not respond to the call.” Perhaps prophetically, the newspaper article concluded, “This unflattering patriotism on the part of the Japanese is what will make their nation one of the hardest in the world to whip.”72

Ten

    

As with the Indians in the United States, in Alaska when the white man started shouldering his way in the Eskimo was out, and to hell with him.1 —Jed Jordan, owner of the Ophir Saloon in Nome

By far, the largest minority group during the Gold Rush was the Alaska Native. Alaska had—and still has—four separate Native cultures only one of which is “Indian.” In Southeast Alaska, the Alaska Natives are a combination of Tlingit, Haida, and/or Tsimshian who are closely related to the Native peoples of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest. Then there are the Eskimo who live along the coastline from Arctic Ocean to as far south as Yakutat on the North Pacific—with the exception of the Aleutian Islands which is occupied by the Aleuts. Alaska’s only Indians are Athabaskan. These people live in the Alaskan Interior, from Bethel to the Canadian border, and are closely related, at least linguistically, to the Navajo and Apache of the American Southwest. This, anthropologists speculate, is because of the migration patterns of early man. After the ocean side of the Pacific Ocean had been populated, early humans moved inland and then north. Each of the four cultures came in contact with the predominantly white prospectors and the meeting was not always pleasant, at least for the Native. Alcoholism, disease, destitution, and starvation were often the result. On the other hand, the meetings were usually more lucrative for the non-Natives. Basically stated, as Jordan crudely stated of the general attitude of the miners of the Eskimos in Nome, “as with the Indians in the United States, in Alaska when the white man started shouldering his way in the Eskimo was out, and to hell with him.”2 With the sudden influx of the Argonauts, the Natives faced a number of critical challenges: shortage of food, alcoholism and lack of natural immunity to the white

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man’s diseases. Each took a devastating toll on the Native population. With regard to food, one of the myths of Alaska is that game animals are everywhere and all one has to do to survive is grab rifle and some shells and a mile away is more food that one can eat in a year. This is not true. Game in Alaska is quite limited because the food supply for wildlife is limited. Further, for many of the traditional food sources—notably caribou and salmon—the game is seasonal. Killing a moose was possible but moose don’t stumble through Native encampments with any great frequency. The direct impact of the whites on the Natives was substantial in all parts of Alaska. The indirect effects were staggering as well. Many Argonauts expected to live off the land, or at least supplement their bland food with fresh meat. This proved to be difficult and reduced the game supply substantially. Whites were also quite adept at wasting food. Shooting from the passing ships was a favorite pastime. Whale, seal, and walrus all became targets of opportunity. If an animal was killed, rarely was its body retrieved. Harnett, for instance, tells of passengers on the Moonlight shooting into a school of porpoises and letting the bodies float away because they could not get any of them into the boat.3 Walrus lying on the ice floes were “pitilessly bombarded by the passengers on the vessels slowly working their way north.”4 However, while it would be easy to say that this depravation made a substantial dent in the indigenous walrus population, it may have not have been that devastating. First, not many of the passengers were good shots. Second, they were firing at a distance. Third, it took quite a large, well-placed slug to kill a large walrus. Captain F. E. Kleinschmidt, who later became a big game hunter and author of big game stories, noted that he was able to kill a walrus with a .30–.40 slug to the brain at 200 yards. But that was after the animal had already survived “five .30–.30, three .45–.70, four .38–.55, six .44, and one .30–.40, nineteen balls—and at that distance it was hardly possible to miss such a large object—to say nothing of how many he received before getting on the floe.”5 In the interior, the slaughter was another matter. Hunters could get close to their game so their kill ratio went up substantially. So many animals were being killed that in the opinion of one big game hunter, Dal de Weese, “the doom of the big game in Alaska is just now being rapidly worked out by the Indians and white prospectors.” Weese spent four months in Alaska on behalf of the National Museum and reported that game was disappearing at an alarming rate. “Since the Indians found a market for furs by trading them for almost nothing to the white miner or trapper, a ruthless slaughter has been going on.” So extensive was this slaughter in 1898 that Weese was able to see a decline in animals from his previous trip in Alaska. Game had been shot and left to rot because it was too difficult to get and “deer will soon be exterminated.”6 For the Native cultures of the Tlingit/Haida/Tsimshian as well as the Aleut and Eskimo, this slaughter was a net loss to their food supply. Wanton waste was entertainment to the predominantly white prospector but to the Natives, it was a destruction of their food supply. Little wonder that when a shaman tried to rouse the Eskimo to a war against the whites in 1903, one of his arguments was that every time the white man drives a stake into the ground, it kills a thousand fish.7 Further, while there had usually been enough food for small bands of Natives, with the incursion of the whites, that food source dwindled quickly. As a result, reports of Natives reduced to eating grass or starving were not uncommon—and were probably true.8

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Reports of Natives starving started early during the gold rush, as early as April of 1898, three months before the Portland and the Excelsior brought the news of the gold to a breathless world.9 Thereafter destitution among Natives was an ongoing saga. While there is no way to make a comparison with pre-gold rush days, with the influx of miners into Alaska, limited natural food supply, there was corresponding less and less food and more and more individuals began to compete. The primary difference was that the whites had more money to buy foodstuffs than Natives. When hard times came, Natives starved in numbers large enough to stagger the imagination of whites—so much so that reports of starving Natives became commonplace in the papers, even when the numbers ran into the hundreds. Starvation, it should be added, was not just a problem for Natives. For the miners, the newspapers were filled with stories of men who had starved to death in the wilderness. The threat of starvation by the whites was in the thousands as many of the miners had come north unprepared for the rigors of the north. Because of shortages, in some places the price of food had risen to its weight in gold.10 Time did not ameliorate this problem either. Starvation was just a ship away, even after a decade. In 1907, the Nome Pioneer Press reported the wreck of some supply ships in Kotzebue Sound which meant that the Kivalina mission would be entirely without food for the winter. While not a word was mentioned about the Natives, “the white population [was] liable to be entirely destitute before the winter is half gone.”11 The next year, it was reported that food was so scarce in the Teller area that bodies of Eskimos who had died from starvation were so numerous they had been left “lying on the beach waiting for a storm to wash them into the sea.” The winter had been so severe and food so scarce, the A.T. & T. wire continued, that dogs were feeding off the corpses to stay alive.12 Four years later, the plight of the Eskimo in Kotzebue Country had not improved. In March of 1903, it was reported that the rate of starvation among Eskimos had reached such epic proportions that the medicine man in Shungnak—the site of the latest rush—was “inciting the Eskimos to murder the white prospectors.” The Eskimo were absolutely destitute and the medicine man was attributing their plight to the presence of the miners. The Council City News reported that the Eskimo had “never been on particularly friendly terms with the whites, and more than one murder had been committed in this locality within the past few years.”13 In retrospect, this last statement is only partially true. In direct contradiction to the Council City News, the Eskimo had been famously friendly with the white miners not only in Kotzebue Country but in other areas of Alaska as well. With rare exception, Alaskan Natives had been exceptionally outgoing and supportive of the non-Native invasion in spite of the fact that many of these men took outrageous liberties including rape, murder, theft, vandalism, and kidnapping.14 When compared to the Sioux or Apache it could be said that the Alaska Native was a pacifist. While there were cases of Eskimos murdering whites, they were very few in number and were dwarfed by the white-on-white violence. Destitution of the Natives did not stop with the high water mark of the Alaska Gold Rush. Well into the next decade, starvation was a major problem. So was the question of what to do about it. In November of 1906, General Ainsworth, “Secretary of the Military” in Washington, D.C., went to great lengths regarding the problems of Native starving in the Copper River area. The solution for the matter was suggested

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by Captain Helmick, the commanding officer at Fort Liscum. Helmick was “not in favor of extending aid to the destitute natives” via the military because such assistance would “encourage the natives to idleness and that they [would] make no effort to provide for themselves as long as they can depend on the government to supply them with the necessaries of life.” While this solution may have a grain of truth, Helmick’s suggested solution had an historical backlog of failure: he suggested that an Indian agent be placed in charge of the Copper River Natives.15 Even as late as 1908, the condition of the Natives had not been improved by the Alaska Gold Rush. Assistant Surgeon for the Public Health Service Robert Olesen visited the Aleut village in Akutan in July of 1908 and reported on the deplorable condition of the Natives. At that time the village consisted of a “well kept church, three frame houses and about fifteen barabaras.” While the homes were comfortable, the barabaras were “littered with straw, rags, nets and drying fish,” were “poorly lighted and [the room was] only ventilated through the chinks and crannies in the roof and the seldom opened door.” The beach outside was “lined with the decaying remains of birds and fish [and] the paths between the hovels strewn with fish entrails and no proper disposal of human excreta [had been] attempted.” Five of the 13 women in the village were pregnant and none of them was “properly clothed.” Several people were suffering from “intestinal derangement” and eye trouble seemed to be a common problem as well. One child was starving to death, “fish being the only available article of diet.” Worse, these Natives were “so unskilled in the art of cookery that gifts of flour and unprepared edibles are entirely misplaced.”16 Then there were the diseases of the white man. The Natives of Alaska, like the Indians of North America, proved to be susceptible to diseases brought in by the Argonauts. In December of 1900, a surgeon for the Revenue Cutter Service in Seattle wrote to Captain Tuttle of the Bear, that an epidemic of measles had caused “very great mortality among the [N]atives.” The disease, the surgeon surmised, had come from “the Asiatic side” of the Pacific. It may have entered Alaska, the surgeon speculated, when the Revenue Cutter Bear had rescued a contingent of men from the disabled bark Alaska in June. The men onboard had apparently come in contact with the disease and though none of the white crew caught the disease, all of the Natives did. From there the disease spread northward from Nome where the men from the Alaska had disembarked. In some place, the subsequent death rate that rose to one-third. So many Natives were dying on the Seward Peninsula in July of 1900, that Fred Kimball, postmaster of St. Michaels, noted that the Natives were “dying like poisoned rats and it looks now as if there [will] be hardly any left along the coast by October.”17 As far as the spread of measles was concerned, the Surgeon was mistaken as to how far the disease had spread. In August it was reported in the lower Yukon watershed—at least that was what the Revenue Cutter Service had been told. But by the time the Revenue Cutter Nunivak had made it 400 miles up the Yukon, it was “evident that the sickness and destitution among the [N]atives … had extended rapidly and was so far-spread that its limits could hardly be defined.” Worse yet, the plague had come at a time of famine so that the Native population, weakened by hunger, was doubly struck. The devastation was staggering. In terms of sheer numbers, from the mouth of the Yukon to Fort Gibbon at Tanana, the number of destitute individuals were estimated at 2,450 of which 90 percent were victims of

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measles. “Whole villages would be prostrated, with hardly a single person left well enough to attend to the wants of the sick and helpless,” the Nunivak reported. In places, the living were not strong enough to bury the dead very deep so “dogs had dug them up, and parts of the bodies were found lying around the village mangled and gnawed.” The only bright cheering section of the report was the reference to “[C]hristian men and women attached to all church missions” for whom “no work has been too hard, no sacrifice too great, no office too menial or repulsive to deter them from [their] performance.”18 In one fish camp, You enter a tent and you see a man and his wife and three or four children and some infants lying on a mat, all half naked, coughing up bile with blood, moaning, vomiting, passing blood with stools and urine, with purulent eruptions from the eyes and nose, covered with oily an dirty rags, all helpless, all wet and damp day and night.

It was so hard to bury so many dead that mass graves were dug or sometimes tents were just collapsed over the corpses.19 But the disease devastated the Natives. In 1900 a plague, variously attributed to small pox, measles, cholera, influenza, or the grippe, ran up the Yukon as far as the boats could carry it. At Holy Mission on the Yukon, Father Lucchesi discovered the severity of the epidemic so deadly that he “devoted all of his time toward saving [the Native victim’s] souls” since so little could be done to save their lives.20 There had been and would be a number of small pox, typhoid fever, and plague scares both in Nome and the Interior. Six months before the surgeon wrote his letter to Captain Tuttle there had been a dual epidemic of small pox and typhoid fever causing a rush to get out of Nome. The Garonne happened to be in port and 250 people “hastened to take passage to Seattle.”21 There had been quite a scare the previous month, June of 1900, when the Oregon landed its passengers secretly at night in spite of the fact that the Captain was aware “that there was small pox on board.” This, however, was according to the Nome Daily News and is not backed up by documentation from the Revenue Cutter Service or the Custom Service.22 But even without the documentation it is clear that the authorities took the possibility of a small pox epidemic seriously. A quarantine was established that lasted almost a month and even mail on its way into Nome was “fumigated” as some letters of that era are stamped.23 The Revenue Cutter Service also offered free vaccination services.24 While small pox was a deadly disease, in spite of the concern, it did very little damage. Though there were some cases, they seemed to isolated. M. Clark, who was in Nome at the time during the boom, reported a single case of small pox in Nome, though it is second hand. According to the man who told Clark of the case, “a man with the small pox is lying [on the sidewalk], his teeth chattering with a congestive chill. He face is all broke out, and blue with the cold. His blankets are under his head, but everybody is afraid to go near him.”25 Kutz, who was in Nome at the time (October, 1900), reported that in spite of the fact that an article in a New York newspaper detailing the sanitary horror of Nome, there was “no epidemic of either small pox or typhoid.”26 There was also some minor scares. A case of small pox was reported outside of Nome on the trail to Teller in December of 1900. It was determined to be small pox

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by an attending physician and a red flag was placed outside the roadhouse.27 Another case of small pox was stopped in Juneau in May of 1901 and a small pox scare was avoided in Valdez in March of 1902 when the Excelsior discovered one of its passengers had “a well defined case of small pox.” No one was allowed to leave or enter the ship and no cargo was off loaded. It immediately sailed for the quarantine station at Port Townsend.28 A similar case occurred in May of 1901 when a case of small pox was discovered on the steamer Senator. The ship was sent back to Port Townsend but the disease had made already it ashore. The Acting Assistant Surgeon of Alaska contacted Governor Brady in May of 1901 regarding a small pox epidemic in Hoonah and Killisnoo where he had used all his “points,” presumably needles. He also reported a case in Douglas, just across the narrow Gastineau Channel from Juneau.29 The actual number of cases reported for small pox were fewer than two dozen, three of them on ships and these people were quarantined on Egg Island. The 18 cases in Nome were isolated in a “pesthouse” a mile and a half from town. Later, in 1902, the disease broke out in Southeast Alaska leaving quite a few Natives sick resulting in about two dozen deaths.30 With a bit of black humor, it might also be mentioned that in June of 1900, a month before the quarantine of Nome, the commander of the Revenue Cutter Rush threatened to place two doctors and a woman on the Roanoke in chains because they had started a rumor of small pox epidemic. Their motivation had been one of profit as they “were well supplied with vaccine points [and created] the scare to enable them to vaccinate the passengers at an advanced rate.”31 One aspect of the Alaska Gold Rush that was in common with the California Gold Rush was the passivity of the Native peoples. For the most part, the Natives watched the non-Native rush in and showed little aggression. Even when Natives were being starved, cheated, and beaten, organized resistance was unknown. In spite of this face, the mentality of many whites was that if you “scratch an Native you will find a bloodthirsty headhunter.” In July of 1901, for example, there was a “rumor” of the Chilkat Indians “being on the warpath.” A nervous population called for troops to be sent to the Haines area. However, upon investigation by Judge Schelhbrede, it was found that the incident which generated the hysteria was “heap cry and little hair” and “that the presence of troops there was entirely unnecessary.” Further, as the Alaska Record-Miner noted editorially on the front page, it was a sad commentary that whenever “an Indian shows the least indication outside of that meek submissive spirit demanded of him by the high tones of civilization, he is immediately charged with being on the warpath and dispatches are at once sent for soldiers to put down the uprising.”32 In spite of the staggering influx of non-Natives, very few cases of violence by Natives on whites. Such cases were, in fact, few and far between and the best known were often based on hearsay. In June or July of 1898, for instance, the steamer Jessie was swamped on the Kuskaniwill River near the mouth of the Kuskokwim River. The sinking of the Jessie was one of the great unsolved maritime mysteries of the Alaska Gold Rush. The vessel was on its way up to the gold fields with 18 passengers and was towing two barges, the Minerva and a second whose name has been lost in the swirling sands of time. The ships were never seen again and at the time it was assumed that they had been swamped in a storm and drowned. Later there were rumors that some of the passengers had survived the swamping and had made it to shore where they had been massacred by the local Natives. A trader

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in the area, Reuben Marsten, reported having seen Natives fighting over objects that clearly had come from the Jessie. The Alaska Commercial Company office in Bethel made inquiries as did the Revenue Cutter Corwin but neither party received a satisfactory answer. Supposedly, according to a letter written by a “hunter and trader on Nunivak Island,” his wife was at a feast when the whites from the Jessie were set upon by the Indians and killed. The Indians, according to the letter, had assisted the whites in escaping the sinking craft. The whites paid for that service but, after a night of wild drinking and “general debauch” in which the Indians fought over the possessions, they returned and demanded more from the whites. Their demands were so extravagant that the whites would not have had enough to last the winter. When the whites countered with a more reasonable offer, the Indians “decided to kill all the whites which was done the next night when they were all asleep.” The bodies were they transported out to sea by canoe and tossed overboard.33 It took almost a year before local authorities made any effort to unravel the mystery. In June of 1899, United States Marshal J. M. Shoup stated that “without a doubt” the passengers had been murdered and he would “bring the murderous Indians to justice if he ha[d] to ask for United States troops and chase the redskins through the Alaskan mountains all winter.” As there had only been one known survivor of the massacre, a Native who had swum ashore—“and Alaskan Indians are not swimmers,” Shoup noted—he suspected that the killing was over liquor. There was a large amount of whiskey on the Jessie and Shoup suspected that Indians were offered some and became troublesome. “Desire for more whiskey and the other possessions of the prospectors led to the wholesale murder.” The incident only came to the attention of authorities when some local Indians were spotted sporting watches and neckties.34 No definitive resolution of the matter was every presented and this investigation, like the others, proved for naught. But this was not the end of the story. When the original charges had been made against the local Natives, two whites had risen to their defense: the manager of the Alaska Commercial Company store in Bethel and a local guide, L. L. Bales. In the fall of 1901, Bales had conducted an extensive investigation into the alleged affair. He was able to locate the deckhouse of the steamship which had washed up on shore and was being used as a residence by some Natives. These Natives directed him to three bodies “in a fair state of preservation” because they had “washed ashore on the tundra, and becoming frozen, had remained in that state” for three years. Bales reported no evidence of death by any other means but drowning or hypothermia.35 There were very few authenticated cases of Natives killing whites and nothing on the scale of what could have been called an “Indian uprising.” Usually it was a case of an individual Native killing a specific white man for a identifiable transgression. One such case was reported in the Kotzebue area in May of 1900. G. F. Everton reported the killing of two white men by Prince of Wales Natives. Allegedly, the Natives had also killed the prospectors’ dogs, an odd act which places the entire episode in doubt. Everton got the story from three men he met on the trail to Nome who “were looking for ammunition to in order to return and kill the Natives who were implicated in the killing of the prospectors.”36 Whites who had killed Natives were sometimes arrested and tried. In June of 1899, Harry Kirschbaum of Wrangell was the first white man to be arrested and convicted

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for killing a Native. He was sentenced to McNeil Island. Even then the charge was manslaughter. But Kirshbaum was still sentenced to McNeil Island.37 Treating the Natives as second-class citizens was universal. In August of 1899, nine white men went to a Native village near Port Tongass which had the “appearance of being deserted” and proceeded to steal a 50 foot totem pole. Apprehended, they agreed to pay the Natives $500 and the case was dropped. This was probably fortunate for the Natives as the United States Attorney filed paperwork stating that “chances of conviction were small.”38 Stories which made Natives the butt of the joke were common. Some of the stories may have been apocryphal but may have had a grain of truth. In the fall of 1904, a boatload of miners left Dawson with barely enough food for the trip to Fairbanks. The Captain was broke as well. Since the boat couldn’t navigate the river system without an Indian pilot, one was hired for $10 a day plus board. But there was only $10 available on the whole ship and after the Indian had been paid for the first day, everyone was flat broke. “How do you keep paying someone $10 when they have all your money?” the miners wondered, desperate to reach Fairbanks. So they hit upon a novel plan. Each night they played poker and suckered the Indian into the game wherein he lost his $10. They repaid him the next day and subsequently stole the $10 back from him in the next night’s poker game. All the way into Fairbanks the Indian gambled himself broke each night until the boat arrived from where the Indian had to “walk back to the Yukon [Territory], with nothing for his trip but some good experience.”39 In Cordova, Gna Hanson, “an illustrious copper colored inhabitant of the Indian ranchero,” had become “loaded up on rotgut” and “created a rumpus” in a residential district. He was arrested and fined $50—which he paid.40 The descriptions of the Natives lent credence to the concept that they were subhuman. Writing of the smell of the Eskimo in particular were widespread. It was noted by de Windt that “the Eskimo woman ages rapidly, but when young is not repellent, and sometimes even good-looking.”41 Others found them a health hazard as they were “peculiarly susceptible” to disease, one reason being that they were lived “as Indians generally do—in filth, surrounded by dirt and dead dogs.” To stop the spread of disease, particularly when they lived near white populations, it was suggested that the Natives be made to “clean up, clean up themselves, clean their houses, clean their surroundings and move their habitations to a less contiguous locality” than “right on the borders of our town.”42 Held in just about as low regard were the siwashes, white men who married Native women. Miscegenation was looked upon as both a cultural and biological aberration. Judge Bernard Rodey recorded surprise at the “astonishing number of what appear to be clear-cut, clean-blooded white men in Alaska, who after being there a few years, hitch up and marry squaws.” There must be something about loneliness, Rodey concluded, “that tends to make men degenerate” and marry Native women, “some of whom are very homely.”43 Friends of the Natives as a race were not held in high regard either. Alongside Healy, the Reverend Sheldon Jackson was the most well known advocate of Alaska’s Natives. A Presbyterian minister, Jackson labored from the mid-1870s until his death in 1909 to make certain that the Alaska Native did not perish from the face of

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the earth. He worked with Healy to bring reindeer from Siberia so the Natives could learn to ranch and, when more reindeer were needed, he arranged for a herd to be brought from Scandinavia. Jackson traveled more than a million miles in his lifetime, no mean feat in a day when the fastest way to move was a train at 50 miles an hour, much of it between Washington, D.C. and Alaska. He was an indefatigable in his efforts to raise money for the Alaska Native from both private sources and a reluctant United States Congress. As the General Agent for Education he shaped the future of Alaska for both the Native and non-Native. But he was not a well-liked man. One complaint was that he was more interested in educating Natives than whites. “He may be a friend to the untutored and unlettered savages,” the Skagway News reported in 1898, “but he is too much of a barnacle to be of any use the whites.” In fact, the paper reported, Jackson had been associating with the Natives so long that “he carries a side of salmon with him when he goes east with which to rub the faces of his female relatives before he kisses them in order that the kiss will taste natural.”44 While Jackson’s reputation as an ally of the Alaskan Native, judging by his actions, particularly with regard to the importation of the reindeer, a great deal of doubt has been left as to his motives. For instance, the exact purpose of his quest to bring domesticated herds to Alaska is still being pondered. Only after the reindeer had been in Alaska for four years—and under pressure from Eskimos and W. T. Lopp of the American Missionary Association who was also the government agent in charge of reindeer herds—did Jackson finally start turning over some of the herds to Eskimos. Even then, the reindeer were given as a loan, payable over a five year period. These terms didn’t last long either. In the case of Sinrock Mary and her husband, Jackson tried to shorten the time payable to three years and eventually persuaded the pair to let him take their remaining reindeer to Barrow, allegedly to save a fleet of ice-bound whalers from starvation. When the errand of mercy discovered that the whalers were not out of food, 180 of the animals were slaughtered anyway and the balance of 425 reindeer were given to the Presbyterian Mission in Barrow and the Episcopalian Mission in Point Hope. Sinrock Mary and her husband did not receive their original reindeer back until almost two years after they had originally been lent.45 Tension between Natives and non-Natives was acute in many areas, and not always the fault of the non-Natives. It did not take long for the some Natives to learn to become entrepreneurs of the blackest stripe. In July of 1901 in Yakutat, for instance, Natives blatantly stole fishing boats and nets from white fisherman and threatened violence if the fishing companies did not buy fish from the Natives exclusively—at ten times the market rate. Since there was no way for the whites could protect themselves, they did the only thing they could do: complain to the governor. F. A. Frederick of the F. A. Frederick, Co. in Seattle complained to Governor Brady that his company was “perfectly willing to employ [I]ndians and pay them for what their work is worth, but we are not willing to be dictated to by the [I]ndians and consider it very important that there should be some representative officer there to hold these [I]ndians down.”46 The Revenue Cutter Service investigated the complaint and in August reported to the Secretary of the Treasury that six Natives had been tried and convicted by the local commissioner, Edward de Groff for the crimes of “fighting, threatening the white fishermen, and general disorder” but that the crimes had been committed while the

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Natives were under the influence of alcohol purchased illegal from ships which passed through the area. One Native was convicted of “distilling and selling Native beer” and a white man was sentenced for selling liquor to Indians—as well as cohabitation. The five whites who were openly cohabiting and had done so openly for years, were suddenly in a rush to secure the marital bond and “were married before complaints arrived.”47 But Natives could work and often did. In Susitna, the Indian chief ran one store in competition with Alaska Commercial.48 One of the areas where they could work in direct competition was in the roadhouse business. Bernard S. Rodey, United States Attorney in Nome, made a “road trip” in 1912 from Nome to Cordova, Valdez and Seward and remarked that many of the Natives had set up roadhouse to take advantage of the traffic on the trail. Rodey reported that the roadhouses were so numerous in some areas that he just mushed on past. Some the establishments were not cheap, up to $6 for supper, bed and breakfast ($160 in 1990 dollars). He also recorded that one roadhouse owned by an Native had a sign which read “White man roadhouse plenty far away, you stop here four bits.”49 The Natives were quick to learn the tricks of doing business. In December of 1897, Governor Brady informed “Indian Schwatka” in Haines Mission that he, the governor, had no “authority to give you the monopoly of guiding over the pass.”50 Not all Natives were honorable. In March of 1900, the Alaska Record Miner reported on a scam by Chief Johnson of the Auks. Johnson had “worked the Indians around Juneau to a high pitch” by telling them that Governor Brady was trying to get the president of the United States to establish a reservation near Sitka where all the Indians would be incarcerated. A “high fence” would be built around all of the Natives and “that if any tried to escape or committed any nuisance, the Indian would be shot down by the government soldiers.” Johnson was trying to raise $1,000 for a trip back to Washington, D.C., an amount Johnson had stated he paid for his last round trip to nation’s capital. There was also a fund-raiser for another local Indian, Fred Moore, who was to use the money to “go to the following tribes and stir them up in the same manner: Kake, Stikeen, Hydas, Metlakatla, Auk, Chilkat, Taku, Hoonahs, and, in fact all tribes, including the interior Indian.” Chief Johnson’s scam, or so alleged the Alaska Record Miner, including promising younger Indians “propositions and other emoluments” to urge the elders to pay the money to Johnson quickly and “without ceremony.” This was apparently more than the locals could stand and the fund-raised meeting “narrowly escaped [turning into] a serious riot.”51 Even with such disreputable individuals in their midst, the Alaska Natives were not without defenders. The missionaries of various denomination gave of their time, energy and credibility. This might have been enough in the days before the gold rush, but not when tens of thousands of prospectors—many of them with unsavory characters -- were pouring into Alaska. Also a credit to preserving the rights of the Natives was the United States government and its various departments. At the very least, the many representatives of the United States were well aware of their responsibility when it came to caring for the Natives. And, while there may have been more than one reprehensible character in the service of the United States, the governor’s correspondence show that many government service providers were willing to stand up

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against powerful businesses on behalf of the Natives. In June of 1898, for instance— at the height of the rush over the Chilkoot Pass—the commanding officer of the infantry in Dyea wrote to the commissioner of the Land Office stating that three businesses had moved the local Natives off their land “in order that a required survey be made.” As soon as the Natives moved off the acreage, the companies moved onto the land. When the Natives tried to relocate back on their own lands, they were “warned off the ground.” When they protested, the companies—Alaska Packers Association, Hugh Murray [Supplies (?)] and the Dalton Pony Express Company— claimed “prior possession and said the Indians must go to the courts for redress.” Though there is no record of the resolution of this matter, it is significant that it was the United States Army that was standing up for the rights of the Natives.52 The Eskimos were not without their friends either. In an open letter from a miner in Nome in January of 1904—reprinted in the Skagway Alaska Daily Guide—the sourdough noted that the Eskimo had been a friend to “us mushers in the days when people didn’t wear boiled shirts in the Seward Peninsula.” In the old days, the sourdough recalled, “when we crowded into their igloos on the trails the Eskimo always gave us the glad hand and acted like they was pleased to see us.” Further, while civilization had finally overtaken the Nome area, the Eskimo was not bettered “except to teach them the use of hooch and other kinds of sin.”53 This friendship was not fleeting either. Petitions and legislation to guarantee rights to Natives were introduced throughout the gold rush era. In November of 1905, for instance, M. A. Richards, commissioner of the General Land Office in the Department of the Interior recommended to the Secretary of the Interior that a bill be introduced in the United States Congress which extended the Alaskan Natives “the rights enjoyed by citizens of the United States under the public and mineral land laws applicable to that District, and to protect such Natives in their possessory rights.”54 A bill to “extend to the Natives of Alaska the rights, privileges and benefits conferred by the public land laws upon citizens of the United States, and for other purposes” was introduced in April of 1908 and the bill died in committee.55 In May of the next year, 1906, the Council City News ran a one page editorial decrying the “neglect of the government” and the “ignorance of the average missionaries” and how these two factors had led to the “pitiable condition of the Natives.” “Common humanity and decency” demanded that something be done because the Natives were being abused by each other and from “unprincipled men who find pleasure in debauching.” Further, the Council City News lamented the squalor of Native homes which naturally led to medical problems. All totaled, the treatment of the Natives was earmarked with “ignorance, filth, disease and immorality.”56 It wasn’t just government officials who were concerned about the plight of the indigenous peoples. Herman Carpenter joined a relief party from Circle for some Indians who were starving on the Tanana River, a trip of 200 miles. The Indians had cached caribou for the winter but arrived to find that wolves had devoured all of it. On the verge of starvation, two of the strongest Indians were sent to Circle for help. One died on the way. When the whites arrived with food, four of the remaining Indians had died. Those that were left had “eaten their dogs, most of their fur clothing, and the rawhide lacing from their snowshoes, and for a long distance they had dug through the snow to procure roots to eat.” Carpenter was appalled at their condition.

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“Never have I seen people in such a condition,” he commented in his book Three Years in Alaska, “and I hope I never may again. They were merely living skeletons.”57 While the Natives may have been primeval, they were not ignorant. Though they may have been abused, they did not have any difficulty in understanding that their rights were being violated. They did not have the same rights as non-Natives with regard to mining and homesteading specifically and their non-coverage was extended to other areas as well whether or not it was legal. If the historical record is any guide, Native leadership fought for their rights early. In November of 1904, a group of Natives and whites in Jackson—Howkan in Southeast Alaska—calling themselves the South East Alaska Christian Endeavor Convention sent the president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, a petition to give the Native equal rights under the law. When Alaska was bought from the Russians, the petition declared, the Natives “were regarded as uncivilized and were to remain under such rules and regulations as Congress should from time to time prescribe.” Congress, unfortunately, “has done scarcely anything to determine our legal statues,” the Natives contended, “and it is now difficult for us to know what our legal rights are.” Actually, this was not a true statement. Both de jure and de facto, the Natives had only those rights which local whites allowed them. Denying Natives alcohol might have been the law but the letter of the law was rarely enforced, as the number of trials for selling liquor to Natives indicates. Ownership of firearms was limited, the right to homestead was restricted, and land title to Indian lands was in doubt. Even lands of cultural or religious value were plundered in the name of eminent domain. At the forefront of civilizing the Natives, in the positive sense of the term, were the missionaries. Well before the turn of the century a wide variety of churches viewed Alaska as fertile grounds for conversion. The Russian Orthodox Church came first, in September of 1794, a byproduct of the Russian incursion into Alaska. A century later, the list of churches sending missions included the Quakers, Catholics, Methodists, Congregationalists, and Lutherans, all of them looking upon Alaska as virgin soil for spreading the gospel. This is, however, not to insinuate that there was anything disreputable about the intentions of the missionaries. To the contrary, with rare exception these individuals gave of themselves without restraint and many of them gave the ultimate sacrifice, they own lives. They established schools and hospitals, rectories, and congregations, as well as hospices and a moral yardstick for the communities in which they lived. More important, they left an indelible mark on pages of Alaskan history. Here, indeed, were people who made a difference and their influence is still being felt today. The moral lessons they brought to Alaska are just as valid today as they were a century ago. As an example, the Samms, Quaker Missionaries in Kotzebue, had the Natives sign an affidavit for membership in the church. That Affidavit was as follows: Having accepted Jesus Christ as my divine Savior and Lord, I earnestly desire to be connected with this church in fellowship and service. I therefore request membership with Friends Mission Kotzebue Alaska. Should the request be granted I promise to do as the Lord Jesus Christ would have me do. I will not lie; I will not steal; I will not gamble; I will not drink, give nor make whiskey, nor allow anyone to make it in my house; I will pray to Jesus every day; as a married man or woman, I will have but one husband or wife while he or she lives, as an unmarried man or woman I will have a pure life; and as a

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member of Friends Mission will attend all the regular Sabbath services and midweek prayer meetings unless hindered therefrom by circumstances which I cannot control.58

The Samms also formed a “Children’s Temperance Class” in Kotzebue to meet every Friday after school. These children also signed a pledge as follows: I promise that I will not use tobacco nor intoxicating liquor in any form nor use bad language.59

The missionaries were also painfully aware of the neglect from which the Alaska Native suffered and some of their solutions were so novel that they are still being used today. In January of 1905, Reverend C. E. Ryberg spoke in Valdez on the incredible suffering of the Eskimo. “Shamefully neglected by our government and boastful civilization, the last chapter in their history is rapidly being written in the cruel characters of neglect, want, disease, and crime.” Ryeberg’s solution was to give each community a “steam or gasoline schooner” so the Eskimo could go whaling and walrus hunting. They could eat the game and sell the ivory from “$20,000 to $50,000 a year.” Conceivable the government could take 10 percent of that amount to repay the cost of the schooners and supervision. This would change the Natives from being destitute to “wealth producing.”60 (Today, many Alaskan lending institutions and some State of Alaska agencies have specific programs to provide low interest loans to Natives for boats to be used for commercial fishing and hunting.) Compassion for the Native, particularly among Alaskans, was an ongoing concern. Year after year this concern was voiced in the form of petitions, letters to the Department of the Interior and newspaper editorials. The Natives were educated as to their rights and often recognized that they were residents without citizenship. Suggestions for the welfare of the Natives varied from the granting of Natives full rights of citizenship to establishing a reservation system. While it would be fair to say that the United States government in Washington, D.C., cared little for the welfare of the Natives, it would be erroneous to state that Alaskans of every ethnic hue did not understand the Natives’ dilemma. It wasn’t just in sickness and bad health that whites were concerned about. In 1906, almost thirty white residents of Copper Center, a substantial portion of that community’s white population, sent a petition to the Valdez News stating that the condition of the local Natives was so desperate that unless something was done quickly, these Natives “would become extinct in the not distant future.” The petition was reprinted on the front page of the newspaper. (The complete petition is included in the Appendix.)61 While the Natives were not always treated fairly, the white community was not completely blasé as to their travails. In 1906, two men who beat up an old Indian woman in the Rampart area were sentenced to 6 months in jail by the United States Commissioner.62 In April 1901, the Alaska Forum lambasted the “degrading spectacle of a drunken squaw, on her hands and knees, being kicked all over the sidewalk.”63 The Council City News and other papers dedicated pages to protesting the treatment of Natives. Even when there was trouble, some of the papers went out of their way to treat the Natives with equanimity. In March of 1903 when the Kobuk Eskimos were being incited to “slaughter the white miners,” the Council City News, in a front page story, noted that the Eskimo “driven to desperation by hunger and privation” were “preparing to protect themselves against invasion of the white man.”64

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The Natives had good reason to resent in the Argonauts. In addition to taking game which kept the indigenous peoples alive and bringing unknown plagues into Alaska, they also kidnapped young women for sexual pleasure and sold liquor illegally. In a front page story, the Nome News also lamented that whites were taking so much driftwood that the Eskimo was left to “shiver and starve.”65 Then and now in the Arctic, all of the wood on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, Chukchi Sea and northern Bering Sea was driftwood. When the whites collected the wood, Natives suffered. The rapacity of white men for selling the wood was so great that they would “strip the ground bare” and even take logs from abandoned barabaras.66 [Barabaras, or Eskimo sod homes, are only “abandoned” during certain seasons of the year. The Eskimo might winter in a barber and then move to a fish camp for the summer and fall.] Looting was common as well. One of the best known instances by people who should have know better was the Harriman Expedition of 1898 which fell on a deserted village and went from hut to hut stealing what they wanted. Two totem poles were forcibly removed and loaded on board. The Expedition even went so far as to have photos taken of the booty. One man found two Chilkoot blankets placed over a grave in the Native cemetery and took one that was “in fair preservation.” John Muir, the noted naturalist, was appalled at the “reckless greed” of his colleagues, many of them noted scholars and scientists. Muir called the theft of these artifacts as nothing short of “robbery” and “sacrilege.”67 In another case, ca. 1910, Chief Good-la-tah, as the trustee for the Copper River Indian Tribe, filed a complaint against the Copper River & Northwestern Railway Company, the CR & NW known colloquially as the “Can’t Run and Never Will.” In late May and early June, construction workers for the CR & NW constructed a railroad grade over some acreage which had been used as a Indian burial ground “for so long that the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.” Further, the construction workers “overturned” eight graves, one of them being the grave of a chief. The bones were dumped haphazardly and left “exposed to public gaze and to defilement and sequestration by animals.” The tribe asked for $10,000. The CR & NW filed a one-page Demurrer which was upheld by court. . . . and the case was dismissed.68 Not much changed quickly. Four years later the old cemetery of Juneau was dug up and “skeletons of Indians were dug up and scattered promiscuously” in the process of building new housing.69 The missionaries and the Natives were well aware of the duplicity of their condition and the impending disaster if their status was not changed. As the Natives noted, “we are held accountable to the law. If we start a store we must pay license, if accused of crime we are arraigned, if guilty we are sentenced under the specifications of the law and pay fines and suffer imprisonment.” But, in the eyes of the United States government, they had no rights. “White men are coming, in increasing numbers, building canneries and assuming ownership of all the salmon streams and locating mining clams. If we attempt the same we are told we have no rights.” On particular petition in 1905 asked for one simple action, “In short, we ask that we may be declared citizens of the United States.” Of note, the petition was also signed by then governor of Alaska, James G. Brady—who had been appointed by President Roosevelt. The petition was routed to the Secretary of the Interior, William Loeb, Jr., in February of 1905, and there it died.70

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But the ongoing problems between Native and white was not just a regional Alaskan problem. In Nome in 1905, a body no less influential than the Grand Jury made sweeping recommendations regarding the Eskimo which included the establishment of a relief fund for “sick and indigent Natives,” government hospital services, adequate housing in the villages, prosecution of “unlawful cohabitation with Native women,” and “industrial training” in all Eskimo schools. However, there was more than an bit of enlightened self interest in the Grand Jury’s recommendations. It did not want any of the “small, comfortable cabins” for Natives to be constructed in Nome and no mention was made of the cohabitation restriction with regard to non-Native women. Further, the hospital was not only a necessity from the “standpoint of charity” but also with regard to the “consideration for the health of the white population.” But giving credit where credit is due, the Grand Jury also requested that the District Court should “request” that local businessmen “not give the [N]atives any articles of food or clothing or in any way encourage them to become beggars and vagrants.”71 (The complete text of the recommendation is in the Appendix.) By far, the saddest chapter of the Natives in Alaska was their treatment by the whalers up through the era of the Alaska Gold Rush. Whalers had been active in Alaskan waters since the California Gold Rush. Each season as many as 250 whaling vessels made it through the Aleutian Island chain in the Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean. While their primary target were the behemoths of the sea, they were not adverse to the taking of walrus for its tusks and oil. So effective were the whalers at taking walrus that they harvested about 200,000 of the marine mammals between 1860 and 1880. The whalers, by far, had the greatest impact on Alaska’s indigenous people who lived along the coastline. Not only were the whalers in Alaska longer than the Argonauts, they were competing directly with the Natives for the same food resource. The difference was that the whalers were far more efficient at the harvest than the Natives. They were also far more wasteful and the impact of their callous treatment of the resource resulted in famine for the Natives—along with disease and impact of liquor that was introduced by the whalers. Three decades before the first Argonaut arrived, it was reported by the first census taker, Ivan Petroff, that the Natives of St. Lawrence Island were being decimated by famine and disease. More than 400 had died, a substantial portion of their population. Those left alive, Petroff reported, were making a living off the whaling vessels and “this situation has been a curse to them; for as long as the rum lasts they do nothing but drink and fight among themselves.”72 When it came to the whaling ships, Eskimos were treated very badly, often as slaves. The men were hired as guides and then whether they got paid or not depended on the captain. Whether the Eskimo was paid by the month or lay, i.e., a percentage of the catch, he could be—and often was—cheated. Worse, the captain legally had to transport the Eskimo back to his village of origination. However, more than once an unfortunate Eskimo was simply evicted from the whaler at the end of the season, stranded on the forbidding coastline of the Arctic Ocean coastline hundreds of miles from his family and village often without money to buy food. Even if he was dropped off in his village, he might not have made enough money to buy food for the winter. Just as bad, since he had been working on the whaling ship during the traditional hunting and gathering season, he could not harvest enough game fast enough to supplement his meager salary. This did more than affect just

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the individual. His family would be destitute as well, often while he was away. Often while he was away with the white crews, his family would be in their village begging for food. If he did not return, when winter came his family would starve. The alternative was just as unsavory. If the Eskimo’s family went aboard the whaling ship, the women and female children were often “debauched”—sometimes for pay, sometimes not. Seizing women and keeping them onboard for up to two years was not unusual.73 The debauching reached such a point that in 1904, it was estimated that in some areas, such as between Port Clarence and Kotzebue, “for every young woman of marriageable age, there are at least ten young unmarried men.”74 Sometimes the young women were sold just as if they were chattel property. In August of 1905, Captain Hamlet of the Revenue Cutter Bear reported that an Eskimo couple told him and some law enforcement personnel that they had “sold” their foster daughter for “eight bags of flour and some trade-goods.”75 While the Native women were supposedly on board with their husbands, these were just convenient excuses. Some of the Native men, Hamlet of the Revenue Cutter Thetis reported, had become so “debased form the moral looseness they see about every day on board the Whaling ships that they actually put up the USE of their wives as an article of trade to other men.” Sometimes the women were traded from ship to ship during the cruises and ended as “Nomads and Wanderers.” Changing and abandoning women was so common that children of these liaisons “could be seen on the Siberian and American shore in nearly every village,” Hamlet reported.76 However, with as many as 300 whaling ships a year, it was hard to keep track of what was happening on each vessel.77 In January of 1908, Indian Agent Hallady reported that two young girls had been sold as slaves during a potlatch at Alert Bay. The girls, both under 14 years of age, “were openly sold by their male friends to other Indians for wives.” One woman went for $1,000 cash while the other went for 1,400 blankets. Another girl, by the name of Rebecca, had already been sold three times and was the mother of five children, all of whom had died in infancy.78 As the Revenue Cutter Service noted sadly, part of the problem rested with the Eskimo women. While many of them undoubtedly knew the consequences of accepting employment or passage on a ship, “the average Eskimo woman takes pride in being the mother of a child born of a white father.”79 This made prosecution of the white men doubly difficult because many of the women chose to place themselves in the very dangerous situation from which the Revenue Cutter Service was trying to extract them. However, it should be pointed out that in the 1890s the need for manpower or, rather, Eskimo knowledge, was so great that a good crewman could get up to $250 a year in supplies. Often this was for no more than six to eight weeks of work. So, while it is easy to say that the Eskimo were often cheated, some come out of the arrangement well.80 But this does not excuse the depredations. While many of the whalers spent their winters in warmer waters, some crew members preferred to live with Native women in Alaska. This was not just crew members either, but officers as well. These men were referred to as “squaw men” and the women as “coonies.”81 Other whalers had different tastes. Captain E. W. Newth of the whaler Jeanette was known as the “kindergarten captain” because he preferred his on-board Native mistresses between the ages of

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11 and 15 and often carried as many as five aboard at a time, renting them from their parents for trade goods and alcohol.82 One of his more colorful escapades was reported in the September 13, 1905, Chena Times even though the incident took place in the Diomede Islands. Newth’s crew “in a state of beastly intoxication” tried to seize two girls, ages 9 and 13, from their parents as the family was on board. The family was barely able to make it away from the men. What made this incident memorable was that it was reported to the authorities who made, at best, a cursory examination of the incident. When asked of the results of the investigation, U.S. Attorney Hoyt “shrugged his shoulders and said ‘If there is anything done about it I do not care to discuss it at this time.’” While it was no secret what was happening to the Native women on the whaling vessels, getting convictions was difficult. First, most of the acts were not reported. Second, many of those that were reported proved difficult to prosecute. According to the “passenger act in the navigation Laws,” carnal intercourse with a female passenger was a crime. But even if there was a clear violation, it meant arresting the captain of the whaling ship—and witnesses—and transporting them to Nome for trial. This was expensive and futile for, in many cases, whaling captains could claim that the Eskimo women were not “legally passengers.” To forestall this legal maneuver, the Revenue Cutter Service was forced to deal with the matter as a misdemeanor and fine the ship. The Revenue Cutter Service was well aware of the deplorable treatment of Native woman on whaling vessels. Extensive reports were submitted to the Service outlining the problem. In September of 1906, Captain C. C. Hamlet sent the Department of the Interior of special report on the Arctic with recommendations. Hamlett wrote candidly of the conditions in which Native women were taken on board ships for immoral purposes. Captains and mates were living openly with women to whom they were not married—sometimes cohabitating with two or three Native women— and many young Native women were traded and bartered as if they were property. Hamlet’s first recommendation was that single Native women not be allowed on board the vessel and that a fine of $300 be assessed to be paid one-third by the guilty party, one-third by the Captain and one-third by the owners of the vessel. Further, deck watch should be kept to make certain that Native women who came aboard to “Trade of Visit, [would be prevented] from entering any Deck-House, holds or Officers’ or Men’s quarters.”83 The fines were hardly nuisance payments. On August 31, 1906, the whaler Herman was boarded and searched. The Captain was fined $200 for unlawful cohabitation while the First Mate was fined $100 for fornication. The Second Mate and Fourth Mate were fined $75 and $50 respectively for the same charge.84 ($200 in 1906 was about $4,000 in 1990.) Over the years the fines became heavier. In 1907, for instance, a captain was fined $2,500 for a similar offense.85 In other cases, the Revenue Cutter Service gave the men a choice of marrying the woman, being fined or imprisonment. Given this choice, many couples were married. But not all. At least one man disappeared on an out-going steamer without definitively having been married.86 Oddly, for many of the reformers, marriage was not looked upon as a resolution to the problem of cohabitation and fornication as the “mixed marriages contract relations often prove to be merely temporary, being brought to an end by the desertion of the woman by her white or Negro husband.”87

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This lasted until 1906, when the fines stiffened. When the whalers were notified by the Thetis that a new law was probably in effect, Captain Hamlet found himself protecting the right of the Native women to stay on board. When the whalers in Point Barrow heard of the ruling, they immediately evicted all the women on board. The Revenue Cutter Service would not allow that as it would have caused “severe physical hardship” on the women, several of whom had small children. The whalers were then given written permission for the transport of Native females and then ordered to carry the women to their homes. Other women were returned to their village by the Thetis.88 The depredations were not only on whaling vessels. In January of 1903, Nathan V. Harlan, the United States attorney in Valdez wrote to the attorney general of the United States of the “cruel and brutal” treatment of Indians in the vicinity. White men had been living with Native women, some of them “young girls not more than 11 to 15 years old.” Once pregnant, many of these girls were abandoned. These white men “demoralize the Indians, make prostitutes of the women and drunkards of the men,” the letter concluded.89 The Argonauts of the Interior did not treat the Natives any better than the whalers treated the Eskimo. In 1903, the United States attorney in Valdez wrote to the U.S. Attorney General in Washington, D.C., of the depravations. White men were living with Indians “not more than 11 to 15 years old” only “while convenient” and then “leave them first to destitution and to shift for themselves.”90 Jordan noted that even younger girls were not uncommon. “More than once I have seen three or four native girls lounging stark naked in a room or in the bunk of a whaler,” he noted of conditions in Nome, “some of them no more than ten years old.”91 If there was an unsung hero in the era of the Alaska Gold Rush, the medal of honor would surely go to the Revenue Cutter Service. For decades they plied the waters of Alaska protecting the rights of Alaska’s Natives and enforcing the laws and maritime regulations of the United States. The simple fact that Alaska has a Native population today is proof that the Revenue Cutter Service was diligent in its job in spite of the monstrous adversities it had to face.

Eleven

  

Rottenest judicial farce the Noth has ever witnessed. —Assessment of E. T. Barnette’s trial by the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner1

There is an old Alaskan expression that Fairbanks isn’t at the end of the earth—but you can see it from there. In a state of unique communities, even today Fairbanks is a standout. While Juneau is known as a sophisticated cosmopolitan area even though it only has a population of 30,000 and even Anchorage residents admit that urban sprawl means they live in “Los Anchorage,” Fairbanks has retained much its gold rush character and temperament. Fairbanks is also a city that probably should never have been. It was founded by mistake, named for profit, bankrupt by design, prospered because another community became too greedy, and survives because it is a transportation hub supplying communities the rest of Alaska doesn’t even know exist. If credit is to go to any single person for the establishment of Fairbanks, it should go to an Italian immigrant by the name of Felix Pedroni—Americanized to Felix Pedro. The youngest of six children of an Italian coal miner, Pedroni came to the United States in 1881 when he was 23 years old and drifted across the country. He ended up in Alaska in the mid-1890s, tired of working hard for other people. He made a spectacular find in about 1898 and promptly forgot where it was. Three years later he was still looking for it. In August of 1901, Pedro and his partner of the moment, Tom Gilmore, were running low on food after spending a summer searching for Pedro’s lost mine. They were considering walking back to Circle, a trip of 165 miles, for more food when they saw what appeared to be a forest fire in the distance. The two men picked their way up to the top of a hill, now called Pedro Dome, and saw that the smoke was coming from a steamer. Luck seemed to be with them. If they could flag down the steamer they

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might be able to buy food and thus save themselves the 380 round-trip trek into Circle. It took them a day and a half to reach the banks of the Chena River and there, to their delight, they saw that the riverboat was being unloaded. The destiny of Fairbanks was now set. Rudely being tossed off the steamer Lavelle Young was E. T. Barnette, embezzler and con man. Barnette had been convinced by Alaska’s Buffalo Bill, John Jerome Healy, that a railroad was going to be built that would link Valdez with Dawson. Any railway would have to cross a number of rivers, one of them being the Tanana River which was approximately equidistant between the two cities. This Tanana crossing— to be named Tanacross—would be an excellent location for a general goods store. Barnette had hired the Lavelle Young to get him to Tanacross where he expected to the first entrepreneur and largest landholder by the time the railroad arrived. Barnette, who was used to taking risks, had good reason to be optimistic that he could make money off the railroad proposal. He had been in Alaska for four years, having come with the first rush in 1898, and had made money in the most unlikely of locations. Marooned in Circle he had been able to make a hefty profit on the foods he was carrying north when a famine threatened the area. He had managed some mines in the area for the North American Trading and Transportation Company before deciding that he wanted a larger slice of the economic pie. If he could get to Tanacross before the railroad got there, he would make millions. But getting to Tanacross was a logistics nightmare. Sinking $20,000 in goods and supplies and an additional $10,000 into a steamboat—a total of $630,000 in 1990 dollars—he prepared to head up the Yukon River. He only got as far as St. Michael when his luck took a turn for the worse. His steamboat, the Arctic Boy, hit a snag and had her bottom torn out. This left Barnette and his entourage with $20,000 worth of goods and no way to make it up the river. Fate had not abandoned him, however, as the Lavelle Young was in port at the time. But the owners of the Lavelle Young thought he was crazy. They couldn’t believe Barnette wanted to go that far up the river with his 135 tons of goods—not to mention the fact that he was planning on shipping another 500 tons to the same location the next year. Then there was the problem of ballast and draw. Though he claimed that the Lavelle Young had a shallower draft with 50 tons onboard, Captain Charles Adams was doubtful that even his steamship with a draft of three feet could make into the area where Barnette wanted to go. But with the proper inducement, Barnette was able to convince Adams to try. Further, it was agreed that if the Lavelle Young could not make it beyond Chena Slough, “Barnette would get off with his goods wherever that happened to be.” On August 26, 1901, that happened to be at the present site of Fairbanks. Though it probably appeared to both Pedro and Adams that Barnette was down on his luck, hundreds of miles from his intended destination, Barnette looked at his predicament as just another stumbling block on his way to making millions. He planned on staying in this area through the winter and then heading out in the spring to Tanacross, still hopeful of getting there before the railroad arrived. Apparently his entourage felt the same way for many of them stayed on the bank with Barnette. Among them were Shorty Robins and a man who dubbed himself “Soapy Smith the Second,”

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an elderly Canadian frontiersman named Jim Eagle, Ben Atwater, who once claimed to be the strongest man in the world, and a Japanese cook named Jujiro Wada. Christening the clearing where his log cabin was being constructed as Chenoa City, Barnette set about to make the best of a bad situation. Barnette only spent part of the first winter in Chenoa City. He apparently tried to start a boom to generate business for his store but that failed. Other than that, he traded for furs from some local Indians and prospectors and took them to lower states where he and wife, Isabelle, spent the winter. The next spring he and his wife returned with a new steamship, the Isabelle, with a very shallow draft which he sent in pieces to St. Michael. It was there that he met and conversed with United States Judge James Wickersham of the Third District and changed the map of Alaska. At that time Wickersham’s court was in Eagle, a community that was diminishing in population. Wickersham had a judicial district that was about 300,000 square miles in size, larger than the state of Texas, and he wanted to move his court to a different community. But he had a problem. Other communities wanted an exorbitant price for land and money was in short supply with the federal government. Barnette offered Wickersham a free lot on which to establish his court, which was no particular problem for Barnette as it would cost him nothing to make the offer. But then again, there wasn’t much of a town around his store either. In fact, his Chenoa City had so few people that it was referred to as “Barnette’s cache.” Wickersham then suggested that Barnette rename his city Fairbanks, in honor of Senator Charles Warren Fairbanks from Indiana, the man who had made Wickersham’s appointment to judge possible. Barnette, not one to pass up a chit when it cost him nothing, agreed. Both men probably left the meeting assuming that they had not agreed to anything. Wickersham couldn’t move his court to a fly speck of civilization even if the land was free and Barnette’s renaming of a few cabins in honor of a senator who would never come to Alaska was an empty gesture at best. History had a little surprise for both of them. In April of 1902, while Barnette was Outside, his mercantile was being operated by his brother-in-law, Frank Cleary. Cleary has been given clear and specific instructions not to give any goods or supplies to anyone wanting credit—and particularly prospectors like Felix Pedro who was broke. But when Pedro came to the cache he was able to talk Cleary into giving him a season of supplies against $100. Cleary took the money and put the rest on account. While Cleary was undoubtedly wondering what he was going to tell Barnette when he returned, Pedro made a dazzling discovery less than 12 miles from the store. At first he tried to keep it a secret but it leaked and there was a general rush into the area. By the time Barnette returned on September 8, he was a man at the bottom of a well. The rivers have been exceptionally low that summer and he had been unable to even get as far as his own cache. Clearly moving upriver to Tanacross was out of the question this season. But the moment he arrived home, the first news he heard was of Pedro’s strike. The crew of the Isabelle immediately quit their jobs and began staking the nearby creeks. Barnette was not slow in taking advantage of this flash of fortune and staked for himself, his wife, and a half dozen relatives in Ohio whose power of attorney he had fortuitously acquired earlier. Two days later a miner’s meeting was held in Felix Pedro’s tent. A new mining district was voted into existence with Barnette as

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its recorder. When Barnette suggested the name of the community to be formed be called Fairbanks, no one objected. Thus was Fairbanks named. But it was still not a city. Basically, Fairbanks was nothing more than a few cabins and a seat of a mining district, the latter simply a political designation. But Barnette was not above a little chicanery. A gold rush into the area would give the population base a budge so he sent his cook, Jujira Wada, to Dawson to spin the tale of the gold of Felix Pedro to draw people to Fairbanks. Spin one he did for Wada was no fool. He did such an admirable job that he was able to get front page coverage for this new strike, possibly as big as the Klondike. The story made the front page of the Yukon Sun on January 17, 1903, and as many as 1,000 men hit the trail for Fairbanks.2 Considering it was the middle of winter with the mercury at 74 below in some places, this rush was a dangerous undertaking at best.3 Some of the entrepreneurs in Dawson were concerned enough about the alleged strike in the Tanana Valley to do some investigating on their own. A strike that close to Dawson could put them out of business. If there really was a strike, it might be in their best interest to set up subsidiary businesses in Fairbanks. But before they made the investment, they needed to know if there really was a strike in the vicinity of Barnette’s cache. Pooling their resources, they sent a respected mining operation, James “Coatless” Monroe—also known as Curley—to investigate the claims made by Fairbanks. Coatless had earned his sobriquet by never wearing a parka or gloves no matter how cold it got. Apparently he did it for show and once out of sight of Dawson he would don parka and gloves. In town, he usually wore three suits of underwear to maintain his reputation. Coatless made it to Fairbanks and on his return in March, 1903, he reported that the only money in circulation was that from the rushers’ pockets. While there might be a strike in the Tanana Valley someday, that day was not in 1903. But Coatless wasn’t saying anything the locals didn’t know. Rather than making living conditions better, the discovery of gold had them worse. They couldn’t mine during the winter and there wasn’t a job to be had. A local by the name of Ford was quoted in the Alaska Forum as stating that the only thing that had any value, he said, was town lots and they were depreciating because speculators were holding them for the boom. In terms of gold, “$20 will cover the entire output” in Fairbanks that winter and that “is the poorest excuse for a foundation to base a stampede on I ever saw.”4 It didn’t take long for the rushers to realize they had been bamboozled. When they got to the Tanana area they found no gold, primarily because it was winter and mining was difficult to perform. The lack of a boom, understandably, led to ill will particularly as Barnette’s was the only store in the area and his prices were sky-high—a tactic which had driven Barnette from Circle several years earlier.5 Particularly galling was his requirement that every man buying a bag of flour for $12 ($250 in 1990 dollars) also had to buy three cases of canned goods, which some men claimed were spoiled. Tensions were running high. The rush had happened in the dead of winter which meant that men put their lives on the line to make it to Tanana. Once in the fabled valley, all they found was snow, unemployment, high prices, and too many men competing for what jobs were there. At first the anger of the newcomers focused on the man who had lured them west, Jujira.

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The miners held a meeting to decide what to do. No one appeared interested in eating horse or dog, as one miner recalled, and Barnette’s prices were too high for many of the men to eat bread. Since talking about their problems was not resolving the matter, a mob was formed and Wada was grabbed and dragged before the council. Wada, terrified that he would be lynched, didn’t give the mob satisfaction so they went looking for Barnette with a “nicely noosed rope.” They found him exactly where they expected him to be, at his store. But he was accompanied with a dozen men carrying high-powered rifles. There was a brief verbal confrontation and a compromise was reached. For Barnette’s part, he cut the price of flour in half and not require the acquisition of case of canned goods to accompany the flour.6 Shortly thereafter, Barnette headed out for the winter. But on his way Outside, Barnette met again briefly with Judge Wickersham in Circle. Wickersham, intent on moving his court out of Eagle, had decided to settle in either the now-named Fairbanks or Chena, a community a handful of miles up the Chena River. Both were about the same size, 500 residents apiece at that time, both having profited from gold bug fever. Wickersham planned on visiting both communities and making a decision then. He visited Fairbanks first and must have been disenchanted when he saw that Barnette’s largest log cabin looked like a “disreputable pig sty” and described the rest of the visible community as a half-dozen log structures and a few tents.7 Then he visited Chena. A dozen city fathers took him on a tour of the city which included a dozen completed building and more than 100 under construction. But Chena wanted the United States government to buy the land for the courthouse. Barnette, in his infinite wisdom not only instructed his brother-in-law, Frank Cleary, to give Wickersham the southeast corner of his own trading post as a jail—and possibly a court— but deeded Wickersham personally a 49-foot lot on one of the choicest real estate in Fairbanks. Given this choice, Wickersham chose Fairbanks as the seat of his judicial district. Fairbanks was a rollicking town, the kind that no Hollywood producer need invent for the screen. No less a character than Swiftwater Bill Gates, who certainly knew saloons, said of Fairbanks that it was “only one sidewalk. If you fall off one side, you fall into the mud. If you fall off the other, you fall into a saloon.” Saloons had no locks on their doors because they never closed and, when compared to rough and tumble mining boomtowns of Nevada, California, and Colorado—and the wild cowboy towns of the Southwest, Fairbanks was a standout because of its roughness. This observation came from no less an informed source that the Reverend Hudson Stuck who began his career in those wild and wooly towns of the American frontier. Fairbanks, Hudson wrote to a friend, “is really a rough place [with] vice and dissipation of all sorts rampant.” It was a wide open town “ablaze with light and loud with the raucity of the phonograph and the stamping of feet” with drunken men and painted ladies with little semblance of respectablity.8 In many ways it was Dawson reborn. About 80 percent of the city in the early days had come from the Yukon Territory and many of the Argonauts knew each other from the other side of border—as friends, competitors, and as debtors. One man, upon arriving in Fairbanks, was shocked at what he saw. “My first impression,” he noted, “was that I had alighted by some way in Dawson, for in looking around me I saw the

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same signs hanging from the buildings, the same old horses and dogs on the streets, and the same old boys and girls in the saloons, doing the same old thing for a living that they had been doing ever since they first struck the trail in ‘97.”9 Though its beginnings were somewhat rocky, Fairbanks proved to be a survivor. And it was the big strike. While Dawson and Nome each peaked after little more than two years, the Fairbanks-Tanana boom went on through the First World War. In 1906 alone, Tanana produced $9.1 million and that was a $3 million increase over the previous year. By comparison, all of Alaska only produced $14.6 million. That was the largest year in Alaska history up to that date. Prior to 1904, in no single year did Alaska’s total top that of Tanana.10 From 1903 to 1905, gold production in Fairbanks went from $40,000 to $600,000 to $6,000,000.11 By the end of the gold rush era, Fairbanks had almost doubled the production of Nome and outstripped even Juneau with its two decade head start. But, in terms of raw numbers, it did not equal the output of the Klondike. In 1900 alone, Dawson produced about $20 million in gold. But that was in a year when the unofficial census was about 20,000. Within a handful of years the production had dropped to $4 million and, a decade later, a littler over $1 million. But before Fairbanks truly became a city, it had two more critical challenges to weather. The first was the expanding economic growth of Chena, the community 7 miles down river. With the relocation of the United States District Court in Fairbanks, it appeared that nothing could stop that city’s growth. Grow it did, by leaps and bounds. While Chena only had 23 residents in 1903, Fairbanks had close to 1,200 with more than 500 structures including a spectrum of business establishments from tin shops to cigar stores. But Chena was not dead yet. In the fall of 1903, three men from Dawson visited Chena on the sly and examined the surrounding area for the purpose of building a railway into the mining operations in the Tanana Valley. At that time the big money was in deep drift mines, but this extraction method required heavy, expensive machinery. The machinery had to be moved and a railway seemed the most economic means available. As a side benefit, the Tanana Valley’s population was large enough to warrant a railway. The three speculators—Martin Harrais, Frank Smith, and John Joslin—envisioned a system that would supply what they hoped would be a burgeoning mining industry in the area. As a result of their examination, they decided that Chena was the natural terminus for the railway. It had a port that was deep enough to support barge and steamship traffic, which Fairbanks did not have. Worse for Fairbanks, the proposed railway would miss Fairbanks by about five miles, a distance which had killed other towns in America. It was not until steamships began pulling up at the Chena dock and unloading did the resident of Fairbanks realize that great events were afoot and they were not involved. When they became informed that history was about to pass them by, it even seemed as though a celestial deity was conspiring against Fairbanks in favor of Chena. Chena was a strong contender for the terminus because the water was deep enough to land steamships. In the spring of 1904, the water in the Chena River was so low that very few ships could get upriver as far as Fairbanks. For two months the citizens of Fairbanks had to run a “mosquito fleet” of shallow draft boats to move supplies into Fairbanks. Even E. T. Barnette himself was working day and night to

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move cargo. The residents of Chena, labeled with the derogatory name of “Chenese,” were quick to point out the obvious shortcoming of having Fairbanks as a railroad terminus. Eventually the river did rise a bit and cargo could get into Fairbanks. But its fate as a railhead was still an open question. Hoping to resolve that issue once and for all, the Fairbanks City Council subscribed $12,000 to divert the Tanana River directly into the Chena River and thus raise the water level. While this project started with a bang, it ended with a whimper and the water level in the Chena remained shallow. Just as it looked as though every effort of Fairbanks was bearing sour fruit, the President of the newly-formed Tanana Mines Railway Company, Falcon Joslin, arrived for a look at his ongoing project. As no official designation of the route had been made, no one could say for sure that Fairbanks would be left off the rail system. It was only after Falcon Joslin arrived did the real focus of the railway became apparent. Falcon Joslin apparently saw something his three underlings had not; that while it was certainly true that Chena had a superior river port, Fairbanks still had a substantial population base. That meant that if he built his railway to bypass Fairbanks, someone else might very well come to Fairbanks and build a competing line. Fairbanks clearly had the population base to support such an enterprise. Being the clever businessman that he was, he realized that if he ran a spur line to Fairbanks, he would get Fairbanks cargo traffic and still have his deep water river port. So, under the guise of compromising to keep competition out, he announced that Fairbanks and Chena would be linked with a rail line and that the rail line to the mines would be midway between the two cities. That ended the rivalry between the two cities. (Chena was about the same size as Fairbanks in 1904. Three years later its population had dropped to 450. Chena’s population had fallen so far by 1916 that its vacant buildings were being dismantled for lumber.) Fairbanks survived a disastrous fire in 1906 that almost wiped out the entire city but nothing in its early days equaled the final challenge to the survival of Fairbanks during the gold rush era. That was E. T. Barnette himself. After originating the community in 1903, he had become the city’s first mayor—with a sleight of hand maneuver in the City Council—and proceeded to dominate every political, social and economic aspect of Fairbanks. He was one of the largest landowners and one of its richest citizens. He sold out his mercantile interests to Northern Commercial Company in 1904 and sank $25,000 into a bank, the Washington-Alaska Bank. It proved to be a very profitable venture until January of 1911 when Barnette fled town with an estimated $500,000 ($10.5 million in 1990 dollars)—very little of it his money. He was eventually arrested in Los Angeles and brought back to trial in Valdez. With the best legal assistance money could buy, he was eventually found guilty of only one charge: a misdemeanor, of filing a false bank report with intent to deceive or defraud. The judge fined him $1,000. Barnette paid the fine and left Alaska. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner called the trial the “rottenest judicial farce the North has ever witnessed” And, for years, used the term “barnette” as the verb “to rob.” There has long been debate as to how much money Barnette might have stolen. It was clear to his 1,400 depositors that Barnette had absconded with their money— $101,000 of it in raw gold which was seized in Cordova as it was being shipped out of Alaska—that the number was substantially high enough for Barnette to live

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comfortably for many years to come. He did. As late as 1920 Barnette still owned his palatial estate in Mexico, though there were rumors of bandits partaking of his wealth there.12 All that is known for certain is that Barnette lived in the abyss of obscurity. When he died accidentally of a fall in his home in Los Angeles on May 22, 1933, his death was not even covered by the Alaskan papers.13 Interestingly, Barnette’s original home in Fairbanks was seized by creditors after the collapse of the Washington-Alaska Bank. It went through a series of owners until it was bought by Hulda Ford in the summer of 1926. Ford was well-known around Fairbanks because she lived like a derelict, the equivalent of a bag lady in that era. But she was owned almost half a million dollars in real estate. She was an astute businesswoman because she still owned the house when she died of malnutrition at the age of 83 in 1957. The house was torn down a year and a half later, replaced by a Christian Science Church and Reading Room.14

Twelve

  

Disorder and disturbance, originating in the presence of barrooms, has been the prevailing feature at Unalaska for the past two weeks. The liquor-dealers . . . , realizing the weakness of the authorities at this place, are ignoring all reasonable regulations subscribed and sworn to in their application for license, and liquor is being freely dispensed to intoxicated persons, and large amounts is finding its way to the [N]atives.1 —James G. Blaine, Deputy United States Marshal in August of 1900

If there is any aspect of the Alaska Gold Rush that deserves careful and deliberate scrutiny, it is the development of law and order. This is not only because Alaska’s saga is different from than that of other parts of the United States, but because its evolutionary stages were so clearly pronounced. Even more visible is the different rate of speed taken by various communities to reach a state of stabilization. Humorously stated, law and order in Alaska was like the Caucus-race in Alice in Wonderland, a contest in which all the participants would run in the same circle, each at his own chosen speed and starting point with all contestants being declared winners. While the benefits of law and order are not always recognized by those who live in an organized city, frontier communities had no difficulty at all understanding what they lacked. Hollywood movies have historically simplified the quest for cityhood as something akin to a quest for family values. High on that list is a city where the streets are safe and the women secure, the children have a school, and the family has a church, a newspaper can be printed and drunk drovers cannot ride into town on Saturday night and shoot out the windows in the general store. By these standards, no American city is safer today that it was a century ago. But the key to a full comprehension of the benefits of law and order is the realization that stability breeds investment and enterprise while discouraging bullies in both

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the street and marketplace. For a community to stabilize, there has to be a communal feeling that its existence is going to be long enough to warrant putting up a building. The construction of a building will take time, money, effort and, in many cases, neighborly assistance. It is unlikely that someone would build a cabin if he thought that the boom would only last four months. On the flip side, if there is a feeling of permanence, individuals will make the investment of time, money, and effort to build from Main Street to Pill Hill. Generally, the process of achieving law and order involves a number of critical steps. First there is a state of anarchy in the positive sense of the word. A large contingent of people settle in an area with no law and order. Each person is responsible for his own actions and neighborly pressures fine tune behavior. While anarchy is an adequate form of government while all people are reasonable, all people are not reasonable and bullies have a tendency to run amuck. Thus every community arrives at a point in which it must make the collective effort to organize. But there must be a critical mass to make such an organization effective and that mass must be significant enough to overcome the forces precipitating chaos. In the case of most communities, the so-called bad guys are few and disorganized. In this Alaska was different. In the biggest communities, the thieves were organized. The biggest thieves organized the communities. Skagway was unusual as the underworld was organized and it took a gargantuan effort to organize the vigilantes. If history is any guide, had Soapy Smith not been a stumbling drunk on the night he was killed, the history of the Klondike could have turned over very different than it did. Smith had a gang of scores of armed men—possibly as many as 100—who lived in a city where murder was so common that no one was allowed to die of old age. Add to that the fact that as much as one half of the city was destitute, a sober, calculating Soapy Smith may very well have been able to kill or drive off most of the vigilantes. At the very least he could have set fire to the dock leaving his enemies stranded one hundred yards off shore and easy rifle targets when the sun came up. While there have been a claim by at least once scholar that “vigilantes were absent in the Alaskan experience,” this is not true.2 Even if one discounted a miner’s council as a vigilante group, extra-legal activity was frequent. The term “extra legal,” however is nebulous because if there is no established law and order in the vicinity then there is really no extra legal activity. As an example, in July of 1899, a runaway whaler by the name of Edward E. Gordon staked a claim that had “formerly belonged to a miner named Curtis.” It was the two words “formerly belonged” that got Gordon into trouble for apparently Curtis was still working the claim. As the men could not work out a resolution to their problem, a miner’s meeting was called. As Gordon was telling his side of the story, Curtis called him a “damned liar” and drew his gun. Gordon knocked the gun away and a body of miner’s restrained Curtis. The Council found for Curtis and told Gordon to leave the district. Gordon, just about lynched, clearly viewed leaving the area was best for his health.3 Sometimes communities react to transgressions quickly. In the case of the Valdez stampede there was no question but that the body of men moving across the glacier were going to have law and order and it was made very clear with a hanging early in the course of events. This stampede was not one with which to trifle. On the other hand, there are no historical documents which indicate that there was any effort to

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form any kind of a miners’ council or other organization of civil order during the Kotzebue Rush. Side-by-side the two historical events are strikingly different. During the Valdez stampede, none of the Argonauts worried about their goods being stolen while they were packing. In the Kotzebue Rush, no goods were secure, gun play was common, and freelance criminals were stealing ships and cargo with little fear of being caught or punished. Doing nothing leaves the community in a state of anarchy, this time in the negative sense of the word. Bullies dominate the lives of citizens, illegal activities create havoc with social order, progress of any kind is stalled. An excellent example of this state of affairs occurred in Kenai in July, 1902. Reverend Sebastian Dabovich reported to the Revenue Cutter Service that “heinous crimes of long standing” were being ignored by authorities. Bootleggers were selling liquor such that a dozen Natives were “usually stupefied from Saturday till Monday” and one “notorious villain,” Hans Stiverson, had killed an 18 year old boy for “protect[ing] his [N]ative foster mother from being assaulted by Stiverson.” After Stiverson had done away with the lad, he “drugged with powerful drink two women in the hut.” Clearly, the Reverend wrote, “justice is overlooked and the lives of quiet people in danger.”4 Further, without community support, an authority figure is still helpless. In August of 1900, Deputy United States Marshal James G. Blaine informed the United States Marshal that chaos existed in Alaska even with in his presence. “Disorder and disturbance, originating in the presence of barrooms, has been the prevailing feature at Unalaska for the past two weeks,” he reported. “The liquor-dealers . . . , realizing the weakness of the authorities at this place, are ignoring all reasonable regulations subscribed and sworn to in their application for license, and liquor is being freely dispensed to intoxicated persons, and large amounts is finding its way to the [N]atives.”5 If the illegal activity was organized, there is very little anyone could do. While claim jumping was common in this era, when organized it was impossible to stop. At Hollis City, on Prince of Wales Island, a resident complained that a band of bandits were about to come in and build a saloon on his property. In April of 1901, these “Lot Jumper Bandits” told M. V. Loy, the owner of some property, that they were going to “erect a building for [a] saloon and dance house directly in front of [his] building.” When Loy protested, the bandits said they “would bring sufficient force to forcibly take possession of any part of my [property] that they chose to regardless of what my rights were” and “when they came with their lumber and force that I might avoid [disaster] by paying them a sufficient sum of money to be fixed by them.” Loy fenced in his property in anticipation of the return of the bandits and contacted the Governor’s office for assistance.6 Local acts of terror and theft such as these continued over and over in hundreds of communities where law and order had not taken root. To do nothing was to invite the underbelly of society to run unchecked. If there is no threat of retribution for acts contrary to common sense there is no incentive to be civil. Logic dictates that committing an illegal act carries with it an unpleasurable consequence. If the unpleasurable activity continues unabated, the consequences necessarily become more severe. Had Soapy Smith maintained his criminality at a level that was tolerable to the landed residents of Skagway, he would have been able to continue his nefarious deeds longer than he did. But, by the same token, his days were numbered because civilization in

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many guises—the White Pass and Yukon Railroad, the United States Army, a growing population of Argonauts who stayed, businesses sinking their roots in the muck of anarchy, the establishment of federal court districts—was creeping in around him. Sooner rather than later, the critical mass of factors would have swept Soapy from power regardless of how carefully he sugar-coated his acts of depredation. Historically speaking, the ultimate price of a failure to embrace law is a complete breakdown of order. People resolve their differences as they see fit and violence becomes a daily fact of life. On the Solomon River near Nome in August of 1901, for a small example, a corpse was found “so decomposed as to be beyond recognition.” The pockets of the deceased were searched but all that was found were some nails and a pipe. There was no paper to indicate who the man might have been. But there was no doubt as to the cause of death: “In the back of the man’s head were a couple of gunshot wounds.” Because there was nothing that could be done, the body was simply reburied.7 Events such as this would happen everywhere if a critical mass of concerned citizens was not reached. In Alaska it was usually the formation of a miner’s council which was responsible for the implementation and execution of the will of the majority of citizenry through their representation on the council. In a gold rush community, there was too much at stake to be lukewarm on support for law and order. There was a large, destitute, transient population and robbery was widespread. To protect themselves and their property, miner’s justice was also the rule of the day. Often it was harsh. In February of 1898, for instance, two Argonauts on the trail to the Chilkoot Pass were caught with stolen goods. They had the misfortune to be in possession of the purloined goods at Sheep Camp when they were discovered. The two men, a Dane by the name of Hansen and his Irish partner, Wellington, were immediately seized by the community and detained. While the miners were discussing the fate of the two thieves, Wellington asked to step outside the tent for a moment. Once outside he somehow gained possession of a revolver and “blew his brains out.” Hansen wasn’t much luckier. He was sentenced to 50 lashes on his bare back with a half-inch rope. Fifteen lashes later, when it was determined that 50 lashes would kill him, he was released and forced to walk the 13 miles to Dyea with a sign about his neck on his chest reading “I AM A THIEF.” On his back was a sign reading “PASS ME ALONG.” In Dyea he was turned over to the United States Commissioner. When the commissioner demanded that the men who had meted out the justice turn themselves in, the miner’s meetings sent him the following message: “Come and get us.”8 (Most sources indicate that the whipping was stopped because Hansen could not stand the pain. According to the February 18, 1898, Skaguay News, this was not the case. Hansen did not utter a single word during the punishment. Though “froth oozed from his mouth,” the newspaper reported, “his face wore the same look of unconcern which had marked it as he was bound to the post to receive his punishment.” The whipping was not stopped by Hansen’s condition, rather the miners stopped it because the man doing the whipping “had become nearly frantic in inflicting punishment, the sight of the blood apparently exciting all his brutal passions.”) Miner’s councils also handled civil matters. Partnerships, syndicates, and business enterprises were always in the process of dividing and reforming on the trail, in the communities and on the streams. If there was a dispute, a miner’s council was called.

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Usually the goods were divided equally, sometimes with the two partners quarreling as the goods were being separated.9 Sometimes the goods were dispersed for other reasons. On September 22, 1898, there was a miner’s meeting on Tyoonck Beach near present day Anchorage over the conduct of “Major Matson, who had made it a rule to swindle every one he could on the Beach.” A judge, clerk and sheriff were elected and the meeting found Matson “guilty of swindling one Silas Benton to the amount of $100” and Matson was ordered to pay the bill or have his provisions levied.10 The epitome of the Miner’s Council is described in Henry de Windt’s book Through the Gold-Fields of Alaska to the Bering Straits. A European aristocrat, de Windt reported that in Circle crime was rare even though there were no police and no government. “The place is ruled by miner’s law,” he reported, “represented by a society called the ‘Yukon Pioneers.’ Everything from a mining dispute to a broken head, is settled by tribunal. There is no appeal, the law being carried out if necessary by physical force, and, strange to say, this rough and ready mode of administering justice has so far been found satisfactory.”11 Notices such as the one below reinforced the image of the nobility of the miner’s council, NOTICE TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN At a general meeting of miners held in Circle City it was the unanimous Verdict that all thieving and stealing shall be punished by WHIPPING AT THE POST AND BANISHMENT FROM THE COUNTRY, the severity of the whipping and the guilt of the accused to be determined by Jury. SO ALL THIEVES BEWARE12

But this is far from an exact picture of what the miner’s councils did do. They could be capricious. In Skagway in 1897, before the days of Soapy Smith, a mass meeting of miners was called on August 9, 1897 and a council of 30 were approved by the general vote. Their council’s first case was that of a teamster by the name of Joe Cleveland who had transported the body of Dwight Fowler, a drowned Argonaut , “half a mile” back to his party and then demanded $10. So incensed were the Argonauts for this lack of compassion on the part of Cleveland that “he had a narrow escape from being lynched.” In the end, Cleveland was told to leave the area immediately “or suffer the consequences.”13 There were real reasons for the miner’s to be concerned about law and order. For those who had been in Alaska prior to the gold rush, it appeared that every vice known to mankind had been transported north with the Argonauts. In the old days, no one bothered another’s cache, stole food from an unattended cabin, burned firewood and did not replace it or stole someone else’s property. This was particularly dangerous during the winter where food and firewood were the only things standing between a man and death. By 1898, as First Lt. J. C. Cantwell noted, Ten years ago the contents of a cache or unoccupied cabin were inviolate, while to-day petty robberies of their contents are of common occurrence. Not only are thefts of food committed, but in many cases coming under our observation depredations on property had been committed apparently with no other objective in view than the gratify the desires of some moral pervert.14

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Sometimes the myth of the miner’s council outran the reality. Gold rush author and former Rampart resident Rex Beach stated that any man caught stealing would be publicly flogged and set adrift in the Yukon on a log where “the mosquitoes would slaughter him.” If it was winter time, the miscreant was to be sent out onto the ice barefoot. But this is a gross exaggeration of the truth for, in the very next paragraph, Beach tells of a black who was caught stealing a ham and spent eight months on the woodpile and this crime, according to Beach in his memoirs, was the first case of stealing in two years.15 (This might not be true. According to another source the man was going to be whipped but local soldiers stopped the action. Stating that the black was to go to trial in the Sitka in the spring, the soldiers kept him as their servant all winter and then let him go in the spring.16) But the communities were not heartless either. In 1904, after George Michel of Eagle was found guilty of horse stealing and sentenced to two years in jail, he was pardoned because of bad health and “for fear that he was unjustly convicted.”17 Sometimes the law was twisted for humanitarian purposes. In 1903 in Teller, the city boasted five “prisoners.” These men, however, was not violators of the law but destitute mushers who had frozen “different members of their body.” To received government medical assistance, these men “were remanded to jail on charges of vagrancy.”18 When a woman was involved, whether she was non-Native or Native, it changed the color of the matter. In Circle, when it was learned that someone was building a cabin on town property—and had been so informed—the mood was in favor of fining that person, giving him a blue ticket or setting him afloat in the river. When it was learned that the individual in question was “Kitty Brown,” the mood abruptly changed and it was decided that as there was plenty of public land, Kitty Brown should be left alone. That was the end of the matter.19 In Rampart, Beach recalled an incident where the miner’s council was called upon to hear the divorce proceeding between a white man and his Native wife. She was filing for divorce because of his “loud and persistent snoring.” The husband, who had married her by “book, bell and candle” at a river mission, didn’t want the divorce because she was a “good pie maker.” He offered to sleep with a German sock in his mouth if she would withdraw the divorce request. She refused, saying she never really much cared for him and was content to keep their sewing machine instead of him.20 In another case, reported by James Wickersham, a dance hall fiddler promised to marry a woman and then reneged leaving her with $1,000 worth of bills “resulting from her surrender in reliance upon his promise and his subsequent repudiation of it.” She appealed to the miner’s council. The trial was short and simple and resulted in the following verdict: Resolved, that the defendant pay the plaintiff’s hospital bill $500.00, and pay the plaintiff $500.00, and marry her as he promised to do, and that he have until 5 o’clock this afternoon to obey this order; and, Resolved further, that this meeting do now adjourn until 5 o’clock.

At 5 o’clock, Wickersham reported, the fiddler was married to the plaintiff.21 Basically, the administration of justice in Alaska during the gold rush was handled by four different entities. On the sea, the Revenue Cutter Service handled justice and the administrative paperwork that went along with doing business on the waters of

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the United States such as ship certificates, rights of captains and their crew as well as passengers, whaling and sealing quotas, smuggling, and the rights of Natives. It also provided the transportation for what was known as the “floating court.” Because the communities were so scattered, it was not possible to have a court in each village. To alleviate the problem, a court was established on a Revenue Cutter ship. The vessel would travel from port to port with a contingent a judge and other legal official on board and court would be held when the ship docked. The floating court, a unique Alaskan institution, made it possible for crimes to be tried locally rather than having the accused, accuser and witnesses travel thousands of miles to a regular court. On land, the entire jurisprudence system was overseen by four districts with judges in Juneau, Nome, Fairbanks, and Valdez. Beneath the judges were commissioners, appointed officials who operated much like magistrates today. They were given authority to perform a wide range of functions but were still inferior to the court system. The fourth layer of justice were the miner’s councils. These councils were quasi-official in the sense that as long as the justice they meted out was reasonable, a commissioner or judge would not interfere. These councils usually operated in isolated areas where it was not reasonable for a commissioner to visit every time there was a matter to be settled. Many of the commissioners were peripatetic but they still had a large area to administer. The only locally elected officials were the mining district recorders but this was an administrative post established to keep claim records in order and recorders had no other jurisdiction. When it came to the actual law enforcement figures, it appeared that the federal legal establishment was sending a mixed message. The first Deputy United States Marshal in the Interior was Frank Canton, appointed because his predecessor was lured from his job by gold fever before he ever arrived in Alaska. Canton,22 who had a reputation as a cold blooded killer while working as a peace officer in Oklahoma and Wyoming, had also been a criminal in Texas under the name of Joe Horner.23 Canton had killed at least one man, Bill Dunn, in the line of duty in Pawnee, Oklahoma in November of 1894. Dunn, a criminal, rode into town to kill Canton and, in a classic good guy versus bad guy confrontation, hid in the doorway of a butchershop until Canton came out of a restaurant where he had been serving subpoenas. Canton walked up the plank sidewalk, his hands in the pockets because it was a brisk day. But he was armed with a Colt .45. Dunn stepped out into the open and said “Frank Canton, God damn you, I’ve got it in for you.” Canton saw “murder in [Dunn’s] eyes” and Dunn’s hand on his gun. Canton was fast. He snatched his Colt from a clip on his waistband and fired at the outlaw point blank range. The slug struck Dunn in the forehead before he had a chance to fire and he went down heavily still “working the trigger finger of his right hand.” A grand jury declared this to be a case of “plainly justifiable homicide.”24 [The saga of Frank Canton in Alaska was short and painful. Constantly short of cash because the government was slow to pay, he had to pay many of his expenses out of his own pocket. These expenses were necessary because he could find no one in Circle that was willing to feed prisoners at the rate of $3 a day and the federal wage for being a jail guard was so low there were no takers. Even when Canton was paid, the money was inadequate for his upkeep. “It has been a hardship on me to discharge the duties of the office as I have no funds at my command,” Canton wrote to his superior, “and have been compelled to borrow money to meet expenses.”25

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Canton never did receive any compensation from his superior. Then he was dismissed. The year before he had come to Alaska he had been accused of submitting fraudulent expense claims while he had been in Oklahoma. The wheels of justice move slowly but they did move and Canton was left in Alaska and broke. He had to borrow from a friend to pay for a steamship ticket to Seattle.] It is also important to note that there was a significant difference between the law and the understanding thereof in Alaska as opposed to the Wild West. One example would be access to actual law books. In the West, statute books were few and far between. That was the good news. The bad news was that the laws as written were “loosely drawn, worded in illogical fashion, and inadequately printed” and, considering that many westerners could not read English, did not have a wide readership.26 On the other hand, the Argonauts of ’98 were older, more educated and law books were accessible. Further, each community had a miner’s council and many had commissioners. When it came to punishment, the early communities did not have much choice in their options. There were few jails and unless the crime was particularly heinous, the only options were flogging, time on the woodpile or the blue ticket. Jail was considered so bad that often just the threat of it was enough to cause a criminal to leave town. On November 26, 1910, W. R. Merriesfield was found guilty of vagrancy in Hot Springs. He was fined $200 and sentenced to 25 days in jail. According to the Yukon Valley News, his jail time was rescinded on Merriesfield’s promise “to take to the woods.” In August of 1910, “Malamute Joe” Carrol was awaiting trial for carrying a concealed weapon when he was informed that it had been “agreed not to press charges on condition he would migrate.” He did so in a small boat at which time he stated he expected to see “salt water before the freeze up.”27 This brief explanation of the judicial system makes Alaska’s seems relatively simple. In reality it was not because of the rat’s nest of administrative red tape. Though the governor was appointed by the president, he was under the authority of the Department of the Interior. The Revenue Cutter Service, which administrated United States law on the high seas, was under the Department of the Treasury. The customs officials were under the Department of Commerce. The United States marshals took their orders from the Department of Justice and the judges were in an entirely different branch of government. Added to this melange was the United States Army and United States Navy, the commissioners, missionaries such as Sheldon Jackson who were often government officials using private foundation money and United States dollars for private enterprise activities, and the Department of State when it came to relations with Japanese sealers and the kidnapping of Siberian women for the whaling ships. Thus it is easy to see that the lines of authority were anything but clearly delineated. Even with the arrival of the commissioners and judges, jails were primitive. In Circle, jail time was not 24 hours a day. A sign over the hoosegow read “NOTICE: All Prisoners Must Report by Nine O’Clock PM or They Will Be Locked Out for the Night.”28 With temperatures dropping to 50 degrees below zero at night, being locked out might be a death sentence. During the summer in the early days of Eagle, the jail was a tent of mosquito netting. Seargent Woodfill of the U.S. Army at Fort Egbert in Eagle reported that the local miners’ committee would “take a prisoner’s clothes away from him and push him in one of those tents. Just one look at the hordes of mosquitoes eyeing him hungrily from outside the net was enough to stop any prisoner from thinking about attempting to escape.”29

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In Nome, the miscreants whose transgressions were not severe enough to send them to McNeil Island were left in the local jails. There they did a variety of menial tasks during their time in jail. In 1899, J. McGlade stole one bag of coal and was sentenced to a year in jail during which time he would serve on the city’s woodpile. While this sentence may seem a bit stiff, it should be noted that the man from whom he stole the coal was the Nome City Attorney.30 There wasn’t a lot of sympathy for transgressors in Nome because the laws were few and the punishment of those transgression clear. A complete list of illegal activity was posted in front of the city and “in other locations” so that ignorance of the law would not be considered an excuse.31 Jail time wasn’t hard when compared to the Yuma Territorial Prison, but it was serious in the sense that prisoners spent their time on the Alaskan equivalent of the rock pile. In this case, it was chopping wood instead of chipping stones. In Nome, these men were put to work cutting the city’s lumber supply for the winter.32 In other gold rush communities where there was no wood to chop, felons were put to work doing menials tasks. In many cases there wasn’t much need of the traditional bars because the wilds of Alaska provided all the restraint that was needed. In addition to distance there was also the winter. Allen Crane of Circle found out the hard way in 1909 when he broke out of jail and headed for freedom. Two days later he was back with two frozen feet. Clearly, the Fairbanks Daily News reported, “the invisible bars of chilling cold that lay upon the land [were] a more effective barrier than manmade prison walls.”33 Nevertheless, the threat of chopping wood was potent. In August of 1906, Spence Koonce was fined $20 for being drunk in public—a condition he claimed was necessary to relieve a toothache. Koonce claimed he didn’t have $20, “but after hearing the [Chief of Police] say they had a lot of wood to saw,” Koonce asked for 15 minutes to see if he could raise the $20. The judge granted the stay and after hitting up everyone in the courtroom “who looked like a live one, he made a run down to Front street and succeeded in finding an ‘angel’ who assisted with the loan.”34 Traditionally, one assumes that the era of the miner’s council would come to an end with the arrival of police forces and court. In Alaska this was not the case. Miner’s councils thrived throughout the gold rush era even after the courts had been established. This was for a variety of reasons. Possibly most important, the law on the local level was handled by a commissioner, the judicial equivalent of a magistrate in the Lower 48. Generally speaking, the commissioner had the power to marry and bury, fine and threaten, and resolve local matters. Matters which involved murder were handled by the district judge who was usually far away and very busy. Thus commissioners were, in their own neck of the woods, despots. Many of them exercised their powers poorly. Some of their antics were humorous. In the late 1890s, a corpse was discovered at Rainbow alongside Turnagain Arm. When the body was searched it was found to have $15 and a revolver. The local Commissioner fined the body $15 for having a concealed weapon.35 Other decisions were not humorous at all. In October of 1905, two female visitors in Circle were arrested for giving liquor to the Indians. At their trial they were represented by the “Desiccated Kid.” The women were given three months and fined $100 for their crime but the Desiccated Kid drew three months for “butting in.” A saloonkeeper paid the women’s fines and the judge allowed them to leave Circle. But the Desiccated Kid had to spend the whole three months in jail—courtesy of “Commissioner Vote’s kangaroo court.”36

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The commissioner system was flawed because there were too few commissioners for the area they had to oversee, all were political appointees and many were less than competent, products of a patronage system in which Alaska was the dumping ground. Further, unless the commissioner had the force of personality and support of the community with the backing of the miner’s council, he was simply a figurehead. His position was made exceeding difficult when called upon to resolve civil matters which involved large companies, particularly with regard to fraud and claim jumping in its various forms. If the commissioner couldn’t or wouldn’t handle the matter quickly, the miners would. The commissioner could not be everywhere all the time and when he was not present, what happened was judged by the standards of the people present, not statute. High on the list of enemies of the Argonauts were the men holding powers of attorney called “blanketers” and their claims “pencil claims.” These men would file claims for individuals not in the area or, for that matter, even alive. But as long as the paperwork was correct, the claims could be legally filed. Anger over the pencil claims was widespread and violence was a frequent companion to that anger. In November of 1899, enraged miners in Cape York decided to take matters into their own hands. Accusing the elected recorder of the district, W. H. Lopp, of allowing the good claims to be “gobbled up by men holding powers of attorney,” the miners elected O. E. Rechmeyer to “supersede” Lopp. Presumably this meant to supplant Lopp. Shortly after the election, “the books and papers [of the recording office] were first taken from the [Recording Office], saturated with coal oil and then set on fire. Then the Recording Office was burned.”37 This incident was unconfirmed, as the Nome News stated in the article, but even if untrue, the story underscored the temper of Argonauts when it came to pencil claims. In other parts of Alaska, the reaction to pencil claims and blanketeers was much deadlier. In the Fairbanks area in February of 1909, the Fairbanks Daily News, with unusual journalistic caution, reported that there had been “talk of hemp for blanketeers” and a “near-lynching.” The names of the “alleged victim” and “some of the members of the entertainment committee” were known, the newspaper admitted, but refused to list any names. According to the paper the “claim-hog” was visited by a small group of miners who came “without an invitation.” There was no time to discuss the matter as “no time was wasted with preliminary overtures” and the blanketed “came to thorough realization of his status quo [when he] discovered that a hempen looplet had been dropped over his head and that it was ever growing tighter about his throat.” Thereafter, the paper reported, A spokesman briefly charged him with dog-in-the-manger tactics in his locations, and wound up with the declaration that if he did not agree to take down a big bunch of his own location notices and yield the ground to others there was every prospect that the stout-looking length of [M]anila attached to his neck would become a plumb line and he the plumb. The story ends there, but it is fair to draw the conclusions that the reply was entirely satisfactory, as the accredited victim is still alive and new locators are happily working parts of his reservation.38

This is not the only instance where the threat of hanging was used as a method of enforcing justice, or what was perceived as justice. In September of 1907 in Valdez,

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for instance, eight men seized an individual with whose reputation for “honesty, truth and veracity [was] bad.” The miscreant in this case, J. E. Kenny, ran Kenny’s Roadhouse on the Susitna River. According to depositions, C. Edward Cone had spent the night at Kenny’s Roadhouse and upon leaving realized that he was missing a poke of $2,500 ($53,000 in 1990 dollars). He returned to the Roadhouse where Kenny denied that he had the poke. As the nearest United States Marshal was in Seward, 250 miles away, Cone gathered a collection of eight men and returned to the Roadhouse where they “did then and there hang and suspend above the ground by said rope” the struggling Kenny. Kenny was not hanged and the historical record is mute as to whether Cone ever received his $2,500 poke back. Kenny did file charges against the eight men but the case was eventually dropped because many of the witnesses and perpetrators—including Cone—were not longer in the area when the case was being considered for trail.39 But reprehensible as they were, threats of violence did work, as the Juneau Alaska Record-Miner reported that promiscuous [sic] [claim] jumping has aroused miners in other districts to act for themselves, with the results that meetings have been held and local rules and regulations adopted these lead pencil, fly-up-the-creek miners that their presence is not desirable. These actions are having a [sanitary] effect, as claim jumping has greatly decreased in these areas.40

Under the best of conditions, a commissioner’s job was difficult. He had to resolve marital issues, civil matters, resolve business disputes, handle drunks, fine companies, check, and verify documents along with a wide variety of other legal and bookkeeping tasks, often without a staff or even a typewriter. Dealing with the Natives required a special concept of reality. Joseph Herman Romig, M.D., also found that it was hard to be both a Christian and lawgiver. In the early 1900s he was approached by a man with two wives who wanted to be married. Everyone knew Dr. Romig’s stand on bigamy so, as a Native acolyte asked, “what’ja goin’ to do about it?” Romig, a missionary with his feet firmly grounded in reality, pointed to the younger woman. “You must marry this one. She’s the mother of your children. But,” continued the doctor, pointing to the older woman, “you must promise to take care of this old first wife so long as she lives.” Since the older woman was, in Romig’s words, “pathetic,” Romig commiserated with the Native and assured him that “she’ll not live long—just a little short while.”41 Commissioners were not the best representatives of the law but, considering the time and place, they were the best that could be expected. In the Nushagak area, Dr. Romig wrote of one commissioner who had a hard time holding his liquor. The man complained to Romig that he had transacted business but forgotten what it was he had done. “Weren’t there any witnesses?” asked the doctor. The commissioner said there were and immediately dashed off to find them. When he returned he reported that in his inebriated stated he had married a couple and held an inquest over the death of a man who had become drunk and burned to death in his own cabin. “Record the marriage,” Romig advised, “and find the name of the deceased and record his death as ‘Accidental Burning.’”

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Like many early residents of Alaska, this particular commissioner had a hard time with alcohol. He and the United States marshal used the jail as a brewery and frequently partook of their own stock. One night the two men got into an argument while greased and the marshal threatened to lock up the commissioner. “Ja think I’m gonna give ya a commitment fur myshelf?” yelled the commissioner and a brawl ensued. As the marshal was the larger man, the commissioner took the worst of the drubbing. When he had had enough, he escaped with injuries to his bald pate and sought the protection of the night watchman at the cannery. After the commissioner had sobered up, he went hunting for the marshal. When the two friends were re-united, they “spent the rest of the afternoon consuming all the home product that was left.”42 Sometimes the Commissioner “looked the other way” when justice was carried out of which they approved. As a United States Commissioner, Dr. Romig reported that a medicine man by the name of Makaguk had two wives, one of which he beat unmercifully. He was warned to stop but refused. The next time his wife showed up beaten, two men from the community beat Makaguk with a coil of rope. The Indian was furious and he loaded his rifle to go looking for the men who had beaten him. Dr. Romig’s response to the incident was to warn Makaguk, “you kill somebody and you’ll be killed.”43 As Commissioner, Romig was a representative of the law who took his position seriously. In a case of disturbing the peace, the defendant had the temerity to say to Romig, “Can’t get no justice in this here court.” “If you don’t like the judgment, appeal it,” advised Romig. The man’s attitude didn’t change and when it came time for his case, Romig fined him $50 for disturbing the peace “and a $1,500 bond to keep the peace.” The man spent the next summer in jail because he could not raise the bond and had to make a trip to Seattle to get released from the bond. But he had learned his lesson. “You fellas better treat that Romig fella with respect,” he told his buddies when he returned.44 Sometimes Romig meted out justice in unusual ways. In a fight between a black and a “Hindu,” he fined the black $77. But, since the Hindu was a notorious troublemaker, he patched up the man and charged the cannery $77 which the company promptly took out of the Hindu’s pay.45 There were also problems when the commissioners exceeded their authority. Romig told of one in which a commissioner had fined a Chinaman $1,000 for assault. The commissioner forwarded the $1,000 to the district judge and got a letter back stating that the case should have been tried in the District Court. “The assault was made with a deadly weapon, so send Chinaman and witnesses to this court.” But by the time the commissioner got the message, the Chinaman was out of the country as were the witnesses because the canning season was over. Now the commissioner had $1,000 in his hand, no accused, no witnesses, and no jurisdiction. Romig suggested that the commissioner examine the case from a different angle. Since the Chinaman settled and the court refused the money and the canning company had no claim to the money, what other recourse was there but to keep the cash. What the commissioner did is not a matter of record.46 Once thriving communities were established, the concept of law and order broadened. To fully explain this concept, it will be necessary to take a non-Alaskan example.

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In large, older cities in the Lower 48, there is a distinct difference between the social, business, and political segments of society. While political leaders do meet and gladhand the social and business elite, the legislators are seldom part of either of those worlds. Socialites, by the same token, host political functions but they are not politicos and business people will fund social and political events but are not members of the jet set. Thus there are three distinct socio-economic groups in existence, each with their own hierarchy, standards, and newspaper section. In the larger, established communities in Alaska, the political, social, and business leaders of the community were all the same people. The business leaders were the social movers-and-shakers and filled the political offices. What this social elite did was the business of the city. Most of these people were well-connected with the commissioners who had to be well connected to have gotten their appointment in the first place. It was a small group but a tight one as well. They invested together, drank together, intermarried their children, and intermixed their fortunes. On the downside, what these men and women did to preserve the integrity of their collective businesses was also the business of the community no matter how disreputable that might have been. When E. T. Barnette left his bank to wither on the vine, the community suffered from the neglect. No one is sure that E. T. Barnette suffered the loss of so much as a dime of his own money in the debacle. As the concept of law and order broadens in the communities, legal officials often find themselves hamstrung by leading citizens. As an example, a merchant might be strongly in favor of prosecuting robbers but care little who was selling liquor to the Natives. A mine operator would be greatly concerned about the change in land status but not give a whit for the rights of the partners in a disputed business. A gay dog might become very agitated over the changing legality of alcoholic beverages but not be very concerned over someone who had been arrested for stealing dog teams. Each segment of society has its own pet concern. In the days of the miner’s council, the concept of law was simple and direct. With the establishment of order, the concept of law became nebulous and partisan. Then there were the public servants and not all of them were respected. Sometimes the troops were no help at all. In January of 1899, the acting secretary for the governor wrote to the secretary of war requesting that the troops in Wrangell be removed because the soldiers were “intoxicated daily” and were furnishing liquor to the Indians.47 Not all lawmen were men who stood as standards in the community. Deputy United States Marshal C. W. Bruce was found guilty of the use of excessive force in making arrests in Juneau in May of 1902. In one case, he struck a man over the head with a pair of handcuffs and, in another, he shot and wounded a suspect. In both cases, the suspect was the same man.48 In June of 1902, United States Marshal Frank H. Richards and Joseph D. Jourdan, a prominent saloonkeeper, politician and member of the city council, were adjudged guilty of contempt. Both men had been arrested the previous month for fixing a jury which found Joseph H. Wright not guilty of embezzling post office funds.49 A year later, former Police Chief Jolley was indicted for having shot and killed a police officer who had been formerly under his command.50 In fact, 1903 seemed to be such a bumper crop for indictments that when public officials of Council City met on the streets of Nome they would say, “What have you been indicted for?” In May, the Nome Grand Jury issued indictments against

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Commissioner Harry C. Gordon for “compounding a felony,” Deputy Marshal W. D. Simmons for assault with a deadly weapon, Federal Guard Charles Ramsdell on assault with a deadly weapon, and Council City Representative W. R. “Chop House Bill” Hart on assault with a deadly weapon.51 Jolley and most of the men from Council were found not guilty or had their cases dropped. United States Marshal Richards was eventually removed from office in November of 1904 by no less a person that President Theodore Roosevelt, most likely because he had been suspected of being involved in judicial scandals.52 Even the governor of Alaska was not beyond reproach. In April of 1905, Governor Brady was asked to resign because President Roosevelt would not allow him to act as governor while, at the same time, boosting a mining company.53 (Brady’s association with mining promoter H. D. Reynolds was worse than an bad idea. It broke him. Two years later he returned to Stika virtually penniless.) Judges were treated with the same disrespect as lawyers. After the judicial debacle in Nome, the general feeling was that law was not a static entity, its pillars shifting with each federal appointment. Lawyers, who were universally disliked, were treated with contempt even though they were the instrument of change in removing Noyes from his judgeship and thus returned a semblance of law and order to Nome. In short, the law was looked upon as a capricious beast while the miner’s council were considered the best possible alternative because, at the very least, they were made up of residents who could not be fooled by legal hairsplitting. It was in this turbulent world that Alaska’s best known frontier judge, James Wickersham, was to make his mark. He came to Alaska with plenty of experience in the slippery world of legalities. He had served as a probate judge in Washington, city attorney for Tacoma, and even spent a term in the legislature. Appointed judge in the Third Judicial District, Eagle, in 1900 he later moved his court to Fairbanks where he became intimately involved with E. T. Barnette, a friendship which did not do his reputation much good after 1911. In retrospect, James Wickersham would have been a standout judicial and political figure in any state. In Alaska he became stellar. As a judge he served in served in three judicial districts in Alaska: Fairbanks, Nome, and Valdez. He is the father of the University of Alaska system and the Alaska Railroad. Additionally, he is the first person to attempt to climb Mt. McKinley and the first man to develop what is now known as an environmental impact statement. His record of achievements include the introduction of a statehood act in Congress when he was a delegate, a Native land claims settlement, and the beginning of the accumulation of judicial opinions from Alaskan judges. Prior to the coming of James Wickersham, the state of the Alaska legal system was in shambles. Though Alaska had been purchased from the Russians in 1867, it was initially ignored by the United States government. It wasn’t until 1884 that Alaska received its first non-military governor and became a “civil and judicial district.” However, as there was no territorial legislature and would not be until 1913, Alaska was simply given its laws, in this case, by transplanting the Oregon statutes to the northland. While this was good enough for Alaskans in what has come to be known as the “Era of Flagrant Neglect,” when gold was discovered, Washington, D.C., took a whole different look at Alaska. Two new judicial districts were added in 1900 and a third nine years later.

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But even with the growing of a cohesive judicial system, Alaska was still a roughand-tumble neighborhood. There were so many lawbreakers that the court system could not handle justice even if there were enough law enforcers to cull for the serious offenders. Some judges were crooked, others incompetent. The commissioner system was an effective stop-gap measure but it had serious flaws. Miner’s councils were effective in establishing order but could not be counted upon to dispense justice with a even hand. Even the basics of establishing a territory-wide consistency were missing. There were no compendiums of decisions to which judges could refer and they were left to apply legal principles in the same manner Abraham Lincoln made political decisions. Lincoln admitted he didn’t have any consistent political philosophy but made decisions based on what seemed right at the time. It didn’t take long for the word to get around the Interior that there was a new judge in Alaska and he would be headquartered in Eagle. Even the Natives knew. Wickersham’s first case came even before he had time to unpacked. As soon as Chief Charley of the Tena Indians heard that Wickersham was setting up court in Eagle, he and a band of a dozen “fighting men” paddled 100 miles against the current to see the Judge. Not long on ceremony, he went right to the judge’s home. Upon entering he demanded to know if Wickersham was the “big chief here?” Wickersham assured him he was and Chief Charley said, “All right, you big chief, I tell you. Eagle Jack steal my dog at Nation river. He got my dog at Eagle village, one mile. You big chief you get my dog; bring him me. If you not get my dog I get my dog. Maybe some Indian get hurt. Maybe you get my dog?”54 Wickersham sent a deputy to retrieve the dog. This was probably Wickersham’s easiest case. In a career that was studded with spectacular victories and heart-breaking defeats, during the gold rush era he was best known for cleaning up the judicial mess in Nome left by Judge Alfred H. Noyes. He shocked the Nome lawyers by packing his schedule. He started promptly at nine in the morning and often went late into the night. Further, he cracked down severely on misuse of power. R. N. Stevens, who was both the commissioner of Nome and a municipal judge, had taken in more than $9,000 ($40,000 on 1990 dollars) in fees and fines but could not account for a dime of the money. Wickersham removed him. Marshal Frank Richards, who had run his office in Nome as though it was his own kingdom, was ordered to redo his expense report properly and take out the hundreds of false items he had put in to fill his pocket. One item was particularly flagrant. Richards claimed he was living at the Golden Gate Hotel where he was paying $15 a day. Wickersham was staying at the same hotel and only paying $7 a day.55 Probably the most important service Wickersham performed for Alaska during the gold rush was restoring the credibility of the American legal system. Prior to his arrival, law and order was a function that was usually handled by a miner’s council. The nuts-and-bolts of civil administration were later handled by the commissioners but these were largely matters which were of peripheral interest to the general community, issues such as marriages, disputes between business partners, overseeing hunting regulations, and trying minor cases. With the steady hand of James Wickersham on the judicial ship of state, Alaskans became confident that judges such as Alfred H. Noyes were aberrations of the judicial system, not symbols of it. If there was any standout organization which made certain that the laws of the United States were being observed, it was the Revenue Cutter Service. In the eyes of

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the Revenue Cutter Service, the laws of the United States applied to all and the progressive skippers of the cutters made certain that the laws of the United States were observed even though Alaska may have been a long way from Washington, D.C. While the saga of the Bear and how it protected Native rights is legendary, the key to assessing the effectiveness of the Revenue Cutter Service is in judging how it handled allegations against captains. Capturing and transporting whaling crew members who had committed a crime was easy. Arresting captains and transporting them for trials was another matter altogether. First, it involved finding the whaler on the open sea, removing the captain from his ship, dealing with the interference created by the large, usually New England firm that owned the ship and could afford to spend money on the captains defense, and transporting the suspect to court. Nineteen Hundred and Seven was a banner year for dealing with captains. Two of them, Captain H. H. Bodfish of the Bailess and Captain E. W. Neuth of the Jeanette were indicted in Seattle in November of that year for, respectively, kicking a sailor to death and criminal assault on an Eskimo girl. Bodfish had been charged with murder by his crew when he docked in Nome the previous spring, a dangerous move for any crew to make. Rather than face charges in Nome, Bodfish fled into the Arctic. He was apprehended later that summer by the Revenue Cutter Thetis. When captured, Bodfish swore the dead sailor had succumbed to “natural causes.” But there were ten witnesses who were willing to testify that he had indeed kicked and beat the man to death. Neuth’s crime was of a different stripe. Neuth had a reputation for shore-hopping the Bering Sea where he plied Natives with liquor “until they were [in] such [a] state of debauchery that he was able to abduct the young women and girls, taking them aboard his ship and keeping them for immoral purposes.”56 Considering the number of whaling captains who were committing the same acts as Neuth, it is hard to understand why Neuth should have been singled out for his transgression. In fact, in the Fairbanks Times article that announced that Neuth was coming to Nome under arrest, the newspaper noted that the Revenue Cutter Thetis had just returned from Barrow where its crew had checked each of the whaling vessels wintering in and fined “many of the captains and mates for keeping squaws for immoral purposes.” Captain Hamlet of the Thetis didn’t think very much of the charges against Neuth and Bodfish. He “seemed to enjoy their company very much,” reported the Nome Gold Digger, “and were often laughing and chatting together.” The prisoners were even treated to unusual amenities on board, such as having their shoes shined by the Japanese stewards. When the Thetis arrived in Nome, Hamlet assembled all his men on deck and warned them that the Nome newspaper men were “a bad lot” and would not allow “any man to receive justice or a fair trial.” Therefore, Hamlet forbade all men “to give one word of information in regard to anything that had happened on the Revenue Cutter.” One member of the crew that the Captain did not trust to keep his mouth shut was not allowed off the vessel when it docked in Nome.57 There may have been good reason to treat Bodfish with respect. He was being arrested in regard to the death of a seaman under his command. The man in question was Edward LeGear, a black from Columbia. Addicted to opium, when he smoked through his supply—which became exhausted ten days out of Dutch Harbor—LeGear exhibited “symptoms of craziness” and, according to the testimony of the first mate, “tried to set fire to the ship.” LeGear was placed in irons where he died. Even his best friend,

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boatsteerer A. Roderiques, stated under oath that LeGear was not mistreated. As to the cause of his death, “I think he got crazy and died when he had no more opium.”58 The alleged crime of Neuth was a bit more severe. He had been accused of tying a man into the rigging and leaving him dangling until he was unconscious and nearly dead.59 But Neuth and Bodfish were not the only whaling captains to be arrested that year. There was also the announcement of the intention of authorities to make another arrest. Captain Kedinkenberg of the Olga, the Valdez News reported, had been accused of cold-blooded murder. Supposedly the ship’s engineer had been asleep in his bed when the captain “came in and shot him.” The Olga was wintering at Point Barrow but authorities planned to travel overland to take him into custody and transport him to jail cell in Nome until the ice broke and he could be shipped south on a steamship. Failing this, the Revenue Cutter Service would seek him out in 1907. (The next day, November 28, the Valdez News revealed that it had made two mistakes in the story on Kedinkenberg. First, the captain’s name was actually “Klinkenberg” and his crime was not the killing of one man but four. Accurately spelled, it is Klengenberg and his first name—as it appears in his autobiography—is Christian.) In an era of brutality, Klengenberg was a standout. Not only was he accused of shooting to death the Olga’s engineer, Jackson D. Paul—whom he was also accused of poisoning—he had also set two men adrift on an ice cake and marooned the ship’s steward, George Johnson, on the coast of Siberia. In all fairness to with regard to the death of Jackson Paul, it should be pointed out that Paul had previously pulled a gun on the captain. The next time the captain came into the cabin, he came armed. When Paul refused to carry out an order, the captain said “Well, if you won’t pick up the wood you are a dead man” and shot him. Paul reached for his rifle and the captain fired twice more. According to the captain, Jackson had made a grab for the captain’s rifle and it was at that point the rifle was discharged. In a sworn statement, an 18-year-old seaman on board the Olga claimed that the captain had ordered strychnine mixed into the drinking water of another crew member. “Put this in Jackson’s water,” the captain allegedly told the cook, “I think half of it will be enough as that is enough to kill a bear.” The cook allegedly put the poison in the water and Jackson drank it.60 The two men he set adrift had allegedly been witnesses to the alleged murder of the engineer. If this was the case, then why he did not set the other witness adrift is not clear. Three decades later, in his autobiography, Klengenberg did not deny that he had shot Jackson. As far as the two men who were allegedly marooned, he acknowledged that the men, Walter and Hermann, were part of a budding mutiny. However, Klengenberg claims, the men did not return on the ice pack. After the men had gone missing, Klengenberg claimed he and an Eskimo guide went searching them. They followed their sled tracks across the ice. “The sled tracks led us right to the water’s edge,” Klengenberg claimed, “—open water!” But even Klengenberg acknowledged that the loss of the two men had a silver lining. With Jackson, Herman and Walter out of the way, “there were no others to make factions among the men.”61 That effectively ended the threat of a mutiny. But it didn’t finish the matter as far as the law was concerned. Word of the missing men reached the ears of the Revenue Cutter Service and an investigation was launched.

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Klengenberg had a reputation of “enterprise, energy, and fearlessness,” reported the legendary Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, “but he was also known to be unscrupulous, ruthless and two faced.” In this particular case, it may very well have been his ruthlessness that turned the tied in Klengenberg’s favor. After testimony had been recorded and Klengenberg was initially cleared, he left Hershel Island. This precipitated a change in quite a bit of the testimony which was witnessed by Stefansson who took some of the testimony. Klengenberg knew that he was going to be questioned regarding the four deaths and shortly before the Olga arrived at Hershel Island he assembled the entire crew on deck. With Hershel Island in sight, Klengenberg told the crew, “Boys, you know the penalty for killing five or six men is no worse than for killing four.”62 But even the changing of the testimony was in vain. In the end, the evidence was considered weak and Klengenberg was found not guilty on all charges and released.63 [Klengenberg got the last word on his place in history: his autobiography was published in 1932, a year after his death. Melodramatically he painted himself in the best possible light and claims that Jackson fired at him twice before he shot him in the stomach. He summed up his trial in San Francisco in three sentences.64] With specific regard to stopping the kidnapping of Native women by whaling ships, the Revenue Cutter Service made an impact. The mere presence of a Revenue Cutter was enough to make even notorious sea captains toe the legal line. In 1907, when Captain Moog of the Olga—the replacement for Klengenberg who was then on trial in San Francisco—wanted to take his common law wife and children to Barrow, he went to Captain Anderson of the Thetis to make sure he wasn’t going to be arrested for transporting a woman and children. The captain told him to get married. When Moog left without confirming that he had indeed gotten married, Anderson was preparing to give chase when he was informed by an eye witness that Moog had been married by the Prebyterian missionary at Point Barrow and his children had been baptized at the same time. Anderson then made it clear verbally to the whalers and in writing to the Secretary of the Treasury that he “would impose jail sentences in all cases, which might be brought before me for trial, where the charge was unlawful cohabitation, and that the officers of the whaling ships might as well understand my position.” He also made it clear that the cohabitation with Native women also meant Siberian women. The law, he informed the whalers, applied to the officers and crews of vessels of the United States wherever they might be.” Anderson’s threat must have been taken seriously because there was only one case of illegal carnal knowledge regarding a whaler as of October of 1907—though Anderson admitted it was “exceedingly difficult to get the [N]atives to talk on the subject” because “the average Eskimo woman takes pride in being the mother of a child born of a white father.”65 Another duty of the Revenue Cutter Service was to forestall the hunting of the fur seal, particularly from Japanese poachers. This was hazardous work primarily because much of it took place in remote areas such as the Pribilof and Aleutians islands with armed adversaries. These islands had to be patrolled in August and September. When ships were spotted within the three-mile limit, they were stopped and boarded. If they had sealing permits, they were allowed to proceed. If not, they were ordered out of United States waters.

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Occasionally sealers would slip onto the islands at night using small rowboats from the mother ship. They would slaughter the seals and then hope to be back out of American waters by the time the sun came up. If they were not out of American waters, they would be easily spotted by the crews of the Revenue Cutter. If a man was captured during such a raid—and many were—there were taken to trial before a nearby United States Commissioner or to Sitka. In May of 1909, for instance, 30 Japanese were captured at once.66 In some cases, pitched battles between the Revenue Cutter Service and the sealers erupted. On July 16, 1906, a fierce battle began when Japanese sealers from at least three mother ships had slipped ashore in five boats under the cover of fog and gunfire could be heard distinctly from the shore. When they were finally repulsed, five of the poachers were or had been killed and 12 captured. But they had done their damage nevertheless. Nearly 200 female seals had been killed, most of them were pregnant or nursing females. The nursing young were thus left to starve.67 The Japanese were taken to trial at Valdez. Just as frustrating to the Revenue Cutter Service was the inability to get convictions. The 30 Japanese who were arrested in May of 1909, were taken to Juneau for a trial. There, after 9 1/2 hours of deliberation by the jury, the Japanese were found not guilty in September. Released, there were insinuations of law suits against the United States government for monetary compensation to the Japanese for time lost while incarcerated.68 When it came to the duties of the Revenue Cutter Service, “law and order” carried a vast array of responsibilities. Ranging from transporting destitute miners to aiding those distressed by volcanic eruptions, the Revenue Cutter Service was at the front. One of its more unusual duties during the winter of 1897 occurred when a fleet of whaling ships became lodged in the ice of the Arctic Ocean off coast from Barrow. The Revenue Cutter Service then ordered Captain Tuttle of the Bear to proceed to a northern port where he would gather 600 reindeer to be driven overland to the whalers trapped in Barrow. This would entail a trip of 90 days by foot across some of the roughest, coldest terrain in North America. But the Revenue Cutter Service fulfilled the mission.69 Perhaps the greatest question to be answered was just how wild was Alaska during the gold rush. While there are few historical records for many communities, those that do exist indicate that it wasn’t all that wild—with the possible exception of Skagway. Some of the records which do still exist include Circle. A glimpse at the commissioner records for its heyday indicate that it was not that rambunctious. Between December of 1897 and 1898, for instance, there were 21 cases. Of these there was only one murder, nine cases of assault and two cases of selling liquor to Indians. Choosing a calmer community, St. Michael—between October of 1897 and April of 1899—had no murder cases but four for assault and three arrests for larceny.70 Nome, which should have been a beehive of illegal activity, was surprisingly calm in its heyday from 1899 to 1900. According to the Nome Police Records, there were only 30 bonds for arrest. Five were drunks and nine were gambling charges. Fines from drunkenness ranged from $20 to $50. Fighting cost $25 and larceny $200. Half of the bonds were forfeited; seven cases were dismissed or discharged. Only six deaths were reported in that time period. In the same report, there were 66 prisoners being held. Of these, only one was close to a murder charge, “assault to kill,” while the rest

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ranged from robbery (19) to such interesting transgressions as “larceny of coal,” “contempt of court,” and “larceny of [a] dog.”71 There are more than 60 coroner’s reports for the Nome area between 1897 and 1903 but as the State of Alaska refuses to make these records public there is no way to accurately assess how many individuals met their end through foul play as opposed to hypothermia, bad whiskey, dysentery, or accident. But there were enough deaths so that John F. Collins, “undertaker and embalmer,” could make enough money to erect his own building.72 As to the possible exception of Skagway, there is only one source for the inference that there was a reference to Skagway having a murder a day. That was the commander of the North West Mounted Police for the Yukon Territory who had spent six weeks in Skagway. While he is an impeccable source, other contemporary sources don’t the paint the city so black. While others agreed that there was substantial crime in that community, there was a way to avoid it. Kirke E. Johnson noted of Skagway, I didn’t find Skagway what the papers picture it. In fact in regard to law and order it isn’t any worse than Chicago or Denver. But a man had to keep off the trail at night and avoid gambling houses. Anyway it is as safe here and things are as quiet as they are in any western city.73

[Author’s note: The Skagway Cemetery has 137 grave sites. Assuming that every unnamed grave—and every corpse identified but cause of death was not—was someone who had been killed in the wild and wooly days of Skagway between February 1 and July 8, 1898, the total is a modest 25. Thus, during the 158 days in question, murders occurred at the rate of one every six days. In terms of sheer numbers, more than three times as many people were killed in a single avalanche on the Chilkoot Pass. While a murder a week is still a high mortality, it is a far cry from a murder a day. By comparison, for all of 1898, Dawson only had nine deaths that were reported in the funeral index.]74 As far as Fairbanks being a wild city, not that many men carried guns. By 1906, three years after the community was found, only one man in 500 walked the streets armed.75 While tracing the evolution of law and order in Gold Rush Alaska by following the documentary trail clearly shows the maturing of civil government, what it does not show is the economic underpinnings of the era. In fact, though rarely stated, initially the stability was brought about not by force of arms and courts but by economic cycles. From the very beginning, the development of Alaska has been the story of the growth of business. Just as the Russians viewed Alaska as a milk cow so did the American business community after the land mass fell into their collective clutches. And American businesses were just as quick to take advantage of Alaska’s unique resources as were the Russians. Companies grew in size and strength, devouring their competitors either through competition or merger until, by the turn of the century, Alaska was dominated by six giants, each of whom staked out a unique resource to exploit. The Alaska Packers’ Association dominated the fishing and canning industry while the North American Commercial Company concentrated on seal harvest and the Pacific Steamer Whaling Company dominated the whaling frontier. The Treadwell Mining Company lead the mining industry and thus dominated Southeast Alaska while the Interior saw two companies splitting the economic pie: the North American Trading Company and the Alaska Commercial Company, the A.C.C.

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By 1900, A.C.C. had a half dozen ships on Alaska waterways and another four on the ocean. For better or worse, the firm controlled Interior Alaska. With federal dollars slow in coming, often being months late, it was the A.C.C. that filled the fiscal gap. A government official once remarked to Wickersham that in Alaska, instead of “In God We Trust,” coins should read “In the A.C.C. We Trust” because the company had been so forthcoming with cash to tide over businesses and individuals. The A.C.C. was the lender of first and last resort. Even Judge Wickersham was financed by the company and so stated in his memoirs. The A.C.C. also acted as a money exchange. Since much of the actual currency in the Interior was Canadian this made any monetary transactions technically impossible. Added to that was the fact that the Canadian money was discounted. Once again, the A.C.C. company stood equal to the task and converted Canadian dollars for American currency so the business of building Alaska’s interior could continue.76 The company also acted as bank, storage for valuables and mineral exchange office that would convert an Argonaut ‘s gold dust to cash.76 While many tales of the development of Alaska revolve around individuals who “struck it rich,” the true story of Alaska’s development is rooted in business investment. Skagway was established as a business venture. So was Fairbanks. Juneau and Douglas were hard rock mining towns. Many of the smaller boomtowns were also established as the result of grubstakes, small amounts of money given to prospectors for a percentage of the take—if there was a take to split. With the establishment of communities, other businesses rushed to provide the goods and services needed by the hard working, hard drinking Argonauts. One of the first enterprises to stampede to Fairbanks from Dawson, for instance, was George Butler who came down the Yukon with 50 tons of whiskey. For some reason, Canadian officials had refused to renew his liquor license and thus the entrepreneur was open to other challenges. Fairbanks held the logical demand to satisfy his supply, an assessment that turned out to be correct as well as lucrative.77 Even though Alaska was different, businesses were quick to adapt to the unique conditions of the northland. Banking methods, as an example, would “give a modern banker nightmares.” Though Alaska was basically a cash economy, it was run on a handshake. A mine would call into the bank and say they had $15,000 in gold at the mine and the bank would then put that figure on their books. The company would pay its bills based on that figure and collect the actual gold when the precious metal was brought to town, possibly six months later when the ice broke.78 Here it is important to note that businesses in Alaska—both at the turn of the last century as well as the twenty-first —fall roughly into two categories: those that intend to be part of northland and those that were only established for momentary, monetary gain. A handshake contract is good between people who have longevity in Alaska and when each expects the other to be a long-term resident. But not all businesses are honorable. These enterprises, like the Russians before them, are interested solely in the rape-and-run school of economics. As an example, a group of “English capitalists” had bought the Moore Wharf in Skagway and then neglected to pay license taxes— for years. Though the City of Skagway served the manager of the Moore Wharf Company with indictments year after year, the company refused to pay. Rather, they joined a law suit that made it to the United States Supreme Court on the constitutionality of license taxes on wharves.79 By the time the case came to court, Skagway was a ghost of

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what it had been in 1898 and the case was moot. The Guggenheim corporation, officially the Alaska Syndicate but called the “googies” by the locals, dominated Alaska’s economic landscape for decades yet there is no evidence that the family ever gave so much as a dime to any Alaskan institution. And when it comes to the crowning jewel of the family’s philanthropy, the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, not a word is mentioned in its literature about the fact that the very foundation of the building was funded by Alaskan resources. Madison Square Gardens, established by Tex Rickard who ran the Northern Saloon in Nome, also gives no credit to the Alaska Gold Rush for its fiscal roots. These giant companies had a gargantuan stake in law and order because stability of community meant that their investments were secure. Anarchy and civil turbulence were not good business conditions. Law and order was thus in their business interest. Further, as Alaska edged from a wild and wooly frontier toward territorial status, these same companies had to make certain that their unique interests were maintained. The ground on which their canneries, whaling stations, coaling facilities, docks, and warehouses stood had to remain in their custody regardless of the form of government. Transportation corridors had to be guaranteed and mineral rights had to be protected. To these ends the trusts did exactly what politics dictated. They underwrote law and order even to the extent of floating loans to men like James Wickersham, a practice that is illegal today. They maintained an army of lobbyists in Washington, D.C., to make certain that any laws affecting Alaska took their company’s unique relationship into account. Inevitably the legislative history of Alaska became a chronicle of what big business would allow. To a certain extent that is still true today. With more than 80 percent of the State’s revenue coming from a single source, petroleum, what the oil industry does affects the Alaskan economy forcefully and immediately. Comparing the gold rush era with that of the oil rush, not much as changed with regard to who really controls the destiny of the 49th state.

Thirteen

  

reeking with sour grapes and venom1 —editor Wingate’s response to editor Callahan’s comments

No collection of people is truly a community until it has the amenities of civilization, chief of them being an operating newspaper. Single sheet, tabloid, or daily, the press is the heartbeat of the town. Nothing is news until it’s in the press; then it’s history. The Alaska Gold Rush spawned hundreds of newspapers, many of which lasted only a few issues. Many did not even last that long. They appeared like a lonely crusader on a milk-white stallion armed to do battle with the forces of evil usually represented by corrupt businesses, sniveling government officials, petty bureaucrats and, when no other target was available, other newspapers and their editors. In the end, less than a handful remain. Some of the papers were oddities worthy of footnotes. The Aurora Borealis which was published in St. Michaels in 1897 and 1898, for instance, sold for a dollar a copy—or ten papers for a porterhouse steak. In lieu of payment in cash or beef steak, the editor would also accept “seal oil, gold dust, blubber, fur, ivory and fish.”2 William Jennings Bryan was undoubtedly pleased with the July, 1897 issue of The Eskimo Bulletin, “the Only Yearly in the World” when it declared him newly-elected president of the United States. But they were used were used to settle arguments. Old Maiden, a man in Circle about 1900, always packed 40–50 pounds of newspaper with him regardless of how rough the country was. When asked why he carried the papers, Old Maiden replied, “they’re handy to refer to when you get into an argument.”3 The editor of the Eagle River Tribune, whose name has been lost to eternity, wrote in the only surviving issue that he sincerely thanked his friends for their support of the editor as “he was certainly shot, and is still certainly loaded but goes about with his load just the same.”4

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But many of the papers were on the cutting edge of the industry, even by today’s standards. The Hot Springs Echo, for instance, “The Peoples Paper,” was priced at “Two Bits a Throw.” To its credit, though small, its front page carried news from across the country and around the world. On the front page of the April 20, 1910 edition were 20 stories which included: the tale of a millionaire in St. Louis whose “sub-conscious self ” married a woman “while his self was unaware of the ceremony,” a report of the sentencing of “an inhuman monster” by the name of Arthur Zimmermann of Brooklyn who had married 21 woman and impregnated 11 of them, statehood bills for Arizona and New Mexico, the inscribing of Edgar Allan Poe’s name in Hall of Fame of New York University, an increase in the amount of A.T. & T. stock, an announcement that American author Josephine Preston Peabody had received a prize offered by the governors of the Shakespeare Memorial Theater and her play which would be presented the next year, the stopping of a marathon dance in San Francisco after 15 hours and six minutes because any further “exertion on the part of the dancers might have fatal results,” and a clip on United States Representative Jamieson of Iowa who announced that he would not be a candidate for re-election because he was “disgusted and discouraged with many things about the capital.”

It is important to note that newspapers were probably far more influential in the Alaska Gold Rush than in any other part of the country. Unlike the rest of the nation, Alaskans did not have the option of being able to speak frequently with neighbors from the next town. In Alaska, there were no “next towns” in the vernacular sense. As a result, news items from each community were often reprinted in other papers so that anyone reading a paper would get a snippet of news from Nome, Juneau, Valdez, Kodiak, or Fairbanks. Just as important, news organizations produced leaders. Three of Alaska’s appointed governors were newspapermen—Alfred P. Swineford, John F. A. Strong, and John Troy—and several others had newspaper experience outside of Alaska. But running a newspaper in Alaska was like to trying to drink tea on a subway. Many of Alaska’s early papers were the product of small machines that had to be carried on a man’s back and set up in a tent. Using a cabin, even temporarily, was an improvement. Sometimes the sheets were typewritten or run through hand-fed printers much like a medieval printing press. Perhaps the most expensive newspaper in the history of Alaska was hand-typed by James Wickersham. To finance his Mt. McKinley expedition, Wickersham typed the May 9, 1903, edition of the Fairbanks Miner and sold the copies—all seven of them—for $5 apiece ($125 in 1990 dollars). It was eight pages in length on every blank sheet of legal size paper that was available in Fairbanks the day it was written. The tabloid also had ads, 36 of them at a cost of $5 each. To raise even more money, four of the papers were read to crowds in saloons who paid a dollar apiece for the privilege.5 (A complete copy of this newspaper can be found in Wickersham’s Old Yukon Tales-Trails-and Trials.) Alaskans read the newspaper to know what was going on in their community and what to expect next week. The press told of what was happening in the world, the lower states and in their own back yard. But to an Argonaut, a newspapers were more

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than a publicity organ, it was a primary means of entertainment, a theater of the mind. They read the newspapers to be intrigued as much as informed. They also liked to be humored. Often they were, such as in the following news story which appeared in the Council City News, BATTLE WITH SALMON BELLIES Politician vs. Lawyer Two Well-Known Nomeites Indulge in Disgusting Proceedings on Board the Nome City It is learned by letter received from a passenger on the outgoing Nome City that R. S. Ryan a well known Nome politician, and W. S. Blackett, an attorney from the same place, caused a riot on the vessel. It appears that the belligerent pair had drunk rather freely of champagne, and with the desire to exchange confidences which that beverage imparts they sat down and began to relate to each other their past and future histories. In the course of conversation Blackett made a disparaging assertion about the Irish members of Parliament and the lie was passed. “Choose your weapons,” said Ryan in his most grandiloquent manner. “All right,” replied Blackett and suiting the action to the word reached into a barrel of pickled salmon bellies and using one for a club, dealt Ryan a squashy blow on the cheek bone. Ryan closed with his antagonist and, securing a half-nelson hold with one hand, proceeded to grind it into Blackett’s face, giving him the flavor of an Eskimo who had neglected his morning ablutions for some time past. Then he grabbed Blackett and crammed him into the barrel, and was proceeding to roll it overboard when Captain Mason appeared and stopped the battle. Ryan now thinks that he has vindicated the honor and dignity of the Irish politicians and Blackett’s friends say that the odor hanging around him reminds them of a squaw man.6

The newspaper also reflected the mood and temperament of the times. What was considered newsworthy was printed. A century later a news story might seem a bit odd but, at the time, there was a good reason for piece. For instance, take the subject of dogs. At the turn of the century in Alaska, dogs were so important that the death of a good one was news. Human obituaries were a dime a dozen. This was clearly shown in the May 2, 1901, issue of the Alaska Forum in which the following two obituaries were run, one on top of the other, just as they are reproduced here. A FAMOUS DOG GONE “Spot,” one of the most famous dogs along the river, was shot last Saturday. He had developed all the symptoms of the rabies and his owner, J. B. Wingate, decided that the danger of his living might entail on the public would not compensate for any attempts to cure him. He was formerly the property of Bill Elwell and was one of a team famous for its capacity for pulling heavy loads to the Circle diggings, long before the Klondike strike. He was about nine years old and a magnificent animal, standing fully thirty inches high and weighing about 125 pounds. He was from Hershel Island and had a strong strain of the smooth-coat St. Bernard. GEORGE DUNNE DIES AT ANDREOFSKY Geo. Dunne, the collection of customs at St. Michael in ‘98, died at Andreofsky of pneumonia last week.

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The newspapers had to offer a wide fare of reading products, from the sophisticated to the mundane. Then again, they, like their contemporaries today, had to sell papers. Deaths were a mainstay in the newspaper, as important as business developments, new strikes, social events, and the occasional humorous aside. Tabloid sensationalism is not a late twentieth century product and newspaper editors quickly discovered that when it came to selling paper, grisly did the deed. Some of the more notable stories included details that would have shivered the spine of Edgar Allan Poe, When the snow had been cleared away there lay before the men the almost completely devoured body of the Greek. The skull was stripped entirely of flesh, it being as bare as twenty years exposure to the elements could have made it. Every article of the breast and stomach had been eaten by the starving malamutes, only the back and parts of the legs, arms and bones remaining. The head was completely severed from the body.7

Personal animosities were also part of the press business and editors were prone to be attacked, verbally and otherwise, for the words that appeared in their press. The smaller the community, the more likely the encounter to be spirited. In July of 1903, for instance, S. H. Stevens, editor of the Nome Gold Digger, published the allegation that attorney Albert Fink had attempted to “influence” Judge Moore with $1,000. Fink was incensed and told Stevens so—physically—and the two men had to be separated by police and bystanders. Later in the day the two men met again and another brawl ensued, this time being joined by a saloonkeeper, Joe Jourdan. During the fisticuffs, Jourdan, who had a wooden arm made of hardwood, struck Stevens over the head with the arm and inflicted a “nasty scalp wound.” All three were arrested.8 Sometimes the articles were difficult to interpret unless, of course, one happened to be a party in the event. Take, for instance, the following article which appeared in the February 3, 1900, Nome News. In the somewhat celebrated case of Midgley vs. LeClair {sp?} for the possession of a dog, on Wednesday Judge Rawson refused to issue another execution on the ground that Midgley had stopped himself by claiming the dog in the suit, which proved to be not the real dog, with the knowledge that the first dog in question was not his. The real dog therefore went to the third contestant, A. McEwing.

Apocryphal stories about cheechakoos filled many newspapers of this era. Some of them included: Two cheechakos from Nebraska who had never heard of high and low tide landed in Ketchikan at low tide. They decided to take a walk up to look at a cannery even though it was raining. While they were visiting the cannery, the tide came in. Walking back to the city, one cheechako commented to his comrade, “I say, Bill, don’t let stay in a ding-gasted country where it rains so hard that the river rises 14 feet in an hour; let’s go.” And they took the first boat south.9

Sometimes the newspapers themselves reported stories that were so absurd only a cheechako could have invented them. One, reported in the Valdez News on March 12, 1904, reported that the Douglas News had published an article on how mosquitoes can kill grizzly bears. “The mosquito attacks the eye, which is the weakest point, and the bear in attempting to kill the mosquito with his paw, scratches his own eyes out

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and become blind.”10 A spokesperson for the State of Alaska, Department of Fish and Game, when contacted, stated that the story was absurd, the proof being that “there are not a whole lot of blind grizzly bears [in Alaska].” The Alaskan press establishment was not immune from editorial battles between newspapers. Small or large, the battles were epic for the communities in the sense that everyone knew the individuals throwing the mud. In Rampart on the Yukon River there were ongoing disputes between James B. Wingate and his former partner, W. R. Edwards. The two men had published the Alaska Forum together but the partnership dissolved with Wingate remaining with the paper and Edwards establishing the Rampart Miner. The Alaska Forum had raised eyebrows, to say the very least, and on at least one occasion bumps as well. In November of 1900, the editor (presumably Wingate) was “attacked on the street and hit over the head with a revolver” for “daring to publish the news.”11 Since there were few printing presses in the Territory at that time, Wingate’s Alaska Forum used the machine owned by the Episcopal Church while Edwards was forced to buy a new press from the United States. Both were weeklies and did well enough to remain open—until the land office which served as the headquarters for the Rampart Miner was closed in August of 1902. That ended the Rampart Miner. This left the Alaska Forum as the only paper in the area until July of 1904 when Wingate went on the attack against the Episcopal Church labeling one of the churchmen as a “relentless missionary.” This might be considered on the par of biting the hand which feeds you as Reverend J. E. Huhn, in the charge of Episcopal mission, ordered his press returned. That finished the Forum and the press was subsequently leased to S. E. Heeter and Sam J. Callahan who established the Yukon Valley News. Wingate filed a writ with the United States Commissioner and the ownership of the press seesawed back and forth until Heeter and Callahan won control forcing Wingate to buy a new press from the United States. Two months later, when he finally started reprinting, Wingate editorialized against the “dirty work perpetrated this summer by an itinerant dentist and an ex-Dawson blackjack booster, assisted by Rev. J. E. Huhn.” Editorial mud was slung back and forth at irregular intervals but it was not until April of 1906 when animosities went from simmer to boil. Callahan opened with a salvo on April 25, in which he declared that Wingate was “the organizer of evil forces, and at him the assaults [of the Yukon Valley News] will be directed. He may win the fight, but if he does, his stock of mud will be so exhausted, that men and women of the community will be sure of a long respite.” Three days later, Wingate responded in print, stating that Callahan’s comments were “reeking with sour grapes and venom,” and the sordid, malicious and unscrupulous crew who use [the Yukon Valley News] to throw their filth—stockholders in the enterprise—take refuge behind the back of the maimed and crippled “manager” who sticks the type and bears the brunt of outraged public sentiment.12

The editorial Donnybrook only ended in August of 1906 when the Alaska Forum’s press was moved down river to Tanana. The Yukon Valley News only lasted another six months. In 1907, the Episcopal Church reclaimed the press and leased it to a former Rampart resident and then the United States Commissioner John Bathhurst who

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moved the press to Tanana. That ended the publishing struggle in Rampart, but opened up a whole new era of editorial invective in Tanana.13 No chapter on newspapers in Alaska would be complete without a section on the most-sued member of the press, George Hinton Henry. Henry published/edited six papers in four cities between 1907 and 1915. These included the Yukon Press, Tanana Citizen, Hot Springs Echo, Tanana News, Free Press (Fairbanks) and Socialist Press in Fairbanks. He was responsible for a great number of papers in a great number of towns, all of them going broke.14 Further, he probably holds the record for the number of times an editor has been sued for slander, though the true number is unknown as most of the records for that time period have been lost. While some of the historical documentation still exists, the bulk of the information on his sordid career appears in the various papers not published by him during this era. Reading some of his words, it is easy to see why he was so disliked by the minions of the establishment. Reeking with invectives, Henry wrote of a “kangaroo court” in Gibbon where a local bully tried to force a trial his way. In Cleary, two men staked some land that had lain without improvements for five years and was thus legally open. The man who claimed the property, Vautier, “a leech” with an “evil smelling reputation” who was also a “past master in chicanery” took the two to court on charges of trespass. Then he attempted to intimidate the jury by having his gang chase away any spectators and stood where he could overhear the jury’s deliberations. After ten hours, the jury returned a verdict of guilty—but fined the men the minimum, $5 apiece. The defendants stated that they were not guilty and wished to appeal their verdict at which time, reported Henry, the community was witness to the disgusting spectacle of this judge figuratively speaking groveling before these defendants entreating them to reconsider their determination to appeal.15

It didn’t take long for the battle between Henry and the establishment to begin in Tanana. The Northern Light in Fairbanks reported a physical confrontation between the editor of the Tanana Citizen, Henry and the judge outside a church in February of 1907.16 The judge, Henry Bathurst, was also the “commissioner, ex-officio justice of the peace, probate judge, recorder and coroner.”17 By April of 1907, the animosity between Henry and the minions of law and order broke out in open warfare. On April 27, Henry was hit with five libel indictments. Indictment 231 discussed the case of man named Kelly who was being held on $2,500 bail ($65,000 in 1990 dollars) for attempted rape of a Native woman. Kelly was turned over to the Deputy Marshal and “shortly afterwards were electrified to wake up to the fact that Kelly h[a]d escaped.” For whatever reason, the guards had been given the night off the night Kelly escaped—which gave Kelly a 19 hour head start. “We want protection that protects,” editorialized Henry. “If our officials are too simple and farmer to hold the desperate criminals when they get them, it is high time there was a change.” Henry further suggested that there was a unholy alliance between the Marshal and Commissioner. It would be very hard to convince many people, Henry published, that the arguments between the men was “not a fight over spoils.”18 Indictment 232 was based on an editorial Henry had published insinuating that United States Commissioner Bathhurst was a “failure” and “one of these men who can

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do everything but succeed in nothing; one who is so lost to all sense of decency as to boast of the time when a justly infuriated husband went gunning for him for passing himself off as one who was authorized to perform the ceremony of marriage, and performed the same, and actually allowed the couple to live together till they found out the vile deception which had been practiced on them.”19 Indictment 233 was for a letter to the editor which Henry published on March 6, 1907. Written by Charles Wilson, it related to Wilson’s arrest in Tanana. Brought before Commissioner Bathurst, wrote Wilson, “I was nicely releived [sic] of $112.75.” When he protested, Bathurst ordered him to “shut up.” Bathurst wasn’t ready for the case and would have to postpone the hearing for 24 hours. When Wilson protested, Bathurst told him “I will put you on bread and water 10 days if you don’t ‘shut up;’ I am the U.S. Commissioner and I have a perfect right to do as I think best or please.” Still no charges were preferred. The next day the case was postponed again. Four days later Wilson got his hearing, but he was allowed to be present. “Now is that justice or is it a kangaroo[?]” Wilson apparently broke jail. “I would have stayed and stood trail for any thing they might bring against me, if I thought that I could have got a particle of justice.”20 (See Indictment 235 below.) Indictment 234 was for reprinting another letter to the editor, this one by Harry Milles, who stated he had been railroaded to a 9 month sentence “without cause or any evidence whatsoever.” Further, wrote Milles, “the reason for my incarceration is not evidence, but the crime of being poor which to all Englishmen is sufficient proof of guilt.”21 (Bathurst was English.) Indictment 235 was for another letter to the editor regarding Bathurst’s attempt to recapture Charles Wilson, (see Indictment 233 above.) Bathurst arrived in Mouse Point with Wilson’s dog team—which was actually not owned by Wilson but a Mrs. Wallace— and rounded up “all the Indians putting handcuffs on some of them causing them to lose all knowledge of english [sic] they possessed.” He apparently took a shot an Indian that was crossing the River and “frightened the [I]ndian children pretty well out of their senses.” Since they could not get any information out of the Indians, they proceeded to Mrs. Wallace’s home where they arrived after dark. He tried to pass himself as a tired woodcutter just off the trail to which Mrs. Wallace replied “Yes, Judge, did you come all the way from Tanana on foot? What have you done with my dogs?” How did you know I was the Judge, asked Bathurst to which Mrs. Wallace replied, “by your abrupt way of entering a house.” The altercation continued with Bathurst threatening to arrest Mrs. Wallace for aiding Charles Wilson’s escape but he gave her a choice. He would rather that she left the area “entirely as I have a telegram in my pocket from President Roosevelt telling me what to do with you and others.” Mrs. Wallace replied that while she had a good deal of respect for the President, she found it hard to believe that the President “would notice such an obscure and inferior judge as you.” Bathurst left in a huff and apparently tried to get an Indian woman to give false testimony against Mrs. Wallace but the Indian replied “we no tell lie on white woman.” This was not the end of the story as Mrs. Wallace then went to Bathurst and demanded the return of her money—which had been taken from Charles Wilson—and her dogs, to which the judge replied “I am the law and I will hold and use that money and property as I see fit.” The conversation got nasty with the judge threatening to send the Marshal after her. Mrs. Wallace said she would go to Tanana to which the judge replied “I will give you a preliminary hearing and bind you over to the district court under $5,000.” Bathurst, “must be an expert falsifier” the letter noted because Bathurst had claimed to have turned all of the money over to government officials and only had $30 which he “needed for his expenses.” Charlie Wilson signed the letter.22

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Henry was found not guilty on all charges in June of 1907. But he was not out of trouble for long. At the same time, May of 1907, he was also charged with criminal libel of a missionary by the name of Mrs. Hoare “and a woman who was mixed up in the case somehow.” Henry was taken in chains to Fairbanks for trial and spent more than a month in jail before he was acquitted of the charge.23 (No file exists for the Hoare trial.) James Wickersham, in Old Yukon Tales—Trails—and Trials, wrote of another trial for which no records exist where Henry was charged by Bathurst for contempt of court, tried by Bathurst, convicted by Bathurst and sentenced to 90 days in jail. Not to be outdone, Henry got a “tramp printer” to continue to publish the paper and criticize Bathurst while he, Henry, was still in jail. Bathurst then issued a warrant for the arrest of the press and had it installed in the cell next to Henry. When Henry was released, the press was not. Henry left town and eventually the press was tossed onto a garbage heap where Wickersham found it in 1923. He saved the press and sent it the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Today that press is in Central at the community’s museum.24 (There is no record of this trial.) Following court records beyond the era of the Alaska Gold Rush, it appears that Henry had a difficult time staying out of trouble. In February of 1911 he was indicted for attempting to coerce Benjamin Drury, the clerk and agent for the Northern Commercial Company, to give false testimony regarding a sale of intoxicating liquors to Alice Taylor at Tofty. Taylor was under arrest for selling liquor without a license when Henry allegedly made the suggestion. There is no record of the outcome of this indictment.25 Though the file no longer exists, according to the Fairbanks Daily News Miner, Henry was convicted of a libel against Mrs. H. C. Quiner on May 5, 1911. Quiner is listed in the story as the wife of the deputy for Hot Springs. It appears that Henry had libeled Mrs. Quiner indirectly by making libelous statements about her husband.26 (Three months earlier, Henry had been indicted for “endeavoring to procure and incite a witness to commit the crime of perjury.” The case “fell down” on lack of evidence, reported the Fairbanks Daily News.27) On July 5, 1913, a warrant of arrest was issued for Henry for libel by United States Commissioner and Judge of the District Court J. E. Coffer upon the complaint of Edith M. Coffer—his wife. Henry was arrested, posted $500 bail and that is end of the case file.28 According to the Fairbanks Alaska Citizen, Henry tried to solve his legal problems by relocating. If that was his intent, it failed. Commissioner Dehn in Tanana had the case moved from his jurisdiction.29 Four years later Henry was hit with another libel suit, this time for obtaining perjured statements from a witness in a case of selling intoxicating liquors to Indians.30 He began 1916 with a libel suit filed by one George Herrington because Henry—in the Free Press—had quoted Herrington’s daughter in connection with an alleged rape. Henry was found not guilty, probably because the rapist, Alferd Sutton, plead guilty and the case thus never went to court. Alas, the trial might have been quite interesting as the Alaska Citizen stated that Laurie Herrington “had figured prominently in several of the rape trials in district court.” Tantalizing though this tidbit is, no other documentation continues the story.31 In December of 1916, Henry had a new newspaper, The Free Press in which he stated that N. R. King was stealing his newspapers. “If N. R. King or any of his kind

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wants a Free Press to take home but is too cheap to buy one, we will give him one.” The charge stuck and Henry went through four different trials before he was finally sentenced to five months in jail on March 5, 1917.32 This may not include a charge of criminal libel which he survived in February of 1917.33 But his reputation was marred, this time by members of the Fourth Estate. In an editorial titled “Rottenness Personified,” the editorial stated that Henry was the living personification of the rottenest conglomeration of filthy material that it would seem possible to stuff around the framework of a human being, normal or abnormal.

While the editorial went on to suggest that Henry should be cleaned with a “liberal application of a plentiful amount of tar heated to the right temperature and applied by hands willing and able,” no such incident appeared in the Fairbanks paper.34 This was not the end of his troubles. According to the Iditarod Pioneer, Henry was charged with criminal libel for publishing an article which classed all members of the district attorney’s office as pro-Germans and particularly cited Chief of Police Wiseman as being pro-German and the brother of a man killed by a mob in Kansas City recently as a pro-German.

Henry claimed that his trial had been based on a “purely patriotic motive.” True or not, he was still sentenced to a year in jail.35 Henry eventually became disenchanted with Alaska and left the Territory in April of 1919.36 The history of the fourth estate was no less tempestuous in Fairbanks. That city’s first paper came in the winter of 1903 when George M. Hill hiked into the area from Dawson with a small printing press. He ran the Weekly Fairbanks News for about a year and then sold out to R. J. McChesney. McChesney had been unable to buy the paper on his own and needed additional investors. He found two in Dawson who, in an odd twist of fate, had just forced the Yukon Sun out of business. This had released one of the most talented newsmen in the north, William Fentress Thompson— usually known as W. F. or “Wrong Font” Thompson—who would soon change the course of journalism in Alaska.37 Two years later, E. T. Barnette replaced McChesney as owner of the paper. Barnette put $40,000 in the operation, “none of which in the original, did he ever again see” commented W. F. Thompson who went into direct competition with Barnette and J. Harmon Caskey.38 But that didn’t last long. Thompson’s paper could not show a profit and was soon bought out by Barnette. Barnette retained Thompson and the two went after Caskey and the other papers which were sprouting like weeds in a vacant lot. Then disaster struck. Barnette’s bank went under and Thompson was forced to leave town. But he only went as far as Chena, eight miles away, where he edited the Tanana Miner. He was not completely out of Fairbanks, however, as he had his paper printed at his old place of business, the Fairbanks News. Two years later he was back, this time with the financial backing to buy out the Fairbanks News. He absorbed his old paper and named the new publication the Fairbanks Daily News Miner, a name and paper that continues to this day. However, Thompson had been the editor of so many Alaskan newspapers— Fairbanks News, Tanana Tribune, Tanana Miner, Chena Miner, Ridgetop Miner, Daily

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Alaskan Citizen, Weekly Alaskan Citizen and finally the Fairbanks Daily News Miner— that he was quoted as saying that his was a “newspaper graveyard” in which he lived “cluttered up with the remains of the papers” which had once been published in Fairbanks.39 “Our whole name,” he once said, “which we do not use in ordinary business for lack of time is: The Fairbanks News, Tanana Tribune, Tanana Miner, Chena Miner, Ridgeway Miner, Daily Alaska Citizen, Weekly Alaska Citizen, Tanana Tribune, Fairbanks News Miner.”40 He was correct. Better yet, as Thompson knew, his paper would be a survivor, one of the few to outlive the Alaska Gold Rush. The Alaskan Interior wasn’t the only place where the Fourth Estate was fighting tooth-and-nail. In 1909, Juneau had a bumper crop of editorial conflict. On April 9, 1909, A. R. O’Brien of the Alaska Daily Record published rude statements about one Charles A. Hopp, the editor of the Douglas Island News. Hopp, the newspaper printed tongue in cheek—excuse the mixed metaphor—“Hopped around the recent political fight over in Douglas” until he saw which side was going to be “successful and then came out strongly for the winners.” Hopp was compared to a “star harlot” in the “tenderloin [of ] the newspaperdom in Alaska” who believed that by attacking the “Western Federation of Miners” that he would “get [a] job printing at Treadwell.”41 Hopp responded on April 14, 1909, when he published that “Gloomy Gus O’Brien” of the Alaska Daily Record, took time from “tearing down everything that is good, decent and holy in the city of Juneau to hurl a handful of his filth at the editor of this paper.” Insinuating that O’Brien had “either escaped from a penitentiary or a lunatic asylum,” Hopp further suggested that in the few months since O’Brien had come to town, “he has done nothing but vomit forth the most villainous rot ever read in this part of the North.” A man without friends, O’Brien’s “very name has [gotten to be] a curse” on the streets of Juneau. But the script strayed over the line and Hopp was indicted for libel. Hopp and O’Brien were not the only editors in trouble. The same grand jury also indicted L. S. Keller, editor of The Daily Alaskan in Skagway. Three months earlier, Keller had published a attack on Judge Lyons in Juneau that ended with an indictment for libel. The Daily Alaskan editorialized that the confirmation of Lyons as a judge was the “severest blow that could have been struck at public confidence in the administration of justice in Alaska” because Lyon was in the pocket of “Big Business” and would serve as their “servant on the bench.”42 Hopefully, the editor mused, the judge would “rise superior to the influences that have elevated him to his present position.” All three editors were indicted by the grand jury of August 18th. Three days later, the remaining two editors in the area, Edward C. Russell of the Daily Alaska Dispatch and W. C. Ullrich of the Juneau Daily Transcript took the Grand Jury to task. On August 21, Russell had published an editorial attacking the credibility of the court clerk and jury commissioner: There would be a nice condition of affairs with Judge Lyons on the bench, Big Clem [Summers] jury commissioner and all around fixer Clerk Shattuck paying political debts with court printing and furnishing wet nurses for the gang and Brother Louie Shackleford floor leader. What a nice deal this would be.43

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Not to be left out, the next day Ullrich summed up the feelings of the Judge Lyon his crew succinctly under the heading “THE ‘RULE OR RUIN’ GANG”: Robert A. Kinzie, Gov. Wilford B. Hoggatt, Clem M. Summers, Louis P. Shackleford, Thomas Lyons, Henry A. Shattuck, charter members. John Boyce, honorary member. Gloomy Gus O’Brien, valet and editor o[f ] rule or ruin organ. Principal place of business, Juneau, Alaska. Principal object, GRAFT.44

Two days later, Ullrich ran yet another libelous editorial for which he was indicted.45 Thus all five editors were indicted by the Grand Jury. That was a known fact. What happened next is a matter of conjecture. On August 21, C. M. Summers, smarting from the attacks in the papers, was in the company of A. R. Russell when the two men happened to run into Edward C. Russell in the Frieman Brothers Cigar Store in Juneau. The confrontation resulted in Summers and Russell “knowingly, willfully and unlawfully” assaulting Russell, wounding him in the eye. Then O’Brien proceeded to wipe the cigar store floor with Russell’s body—the actual indictment language being that O’Brien did “knowingly, willfully and unlawfully grapple with, hang on and drag said Edward C. Russell on and along the floor of [the] room.”46 Two other men, C. F. Cheek and Henry Shattuck, who had also been attacked editorially by Russell were also present as was special policeman W. J. Harris, also known as “Six Shooter Sam.” Harris attempted to take custody of O’Brien but Cheek and Shattuck, stopped him by standing between the policeman and the man under arrest. When Harris reached for his billyclub, Shattuck took it from him. Harris then arrested all three men.47 Since the men were so well known in Juneau—Summers was the president of the First National Bank of Juneau and the “jury commissioner” while Shattuck was the court clerk—the case was moved to Ketchikan. The case against Summers was dropped but O’Brien was fined $230. Ullrich’s paper went under the same month and libel charges against Hopp and O’Brien were dropped.48 “Newspaper life in Juneau is not all a bed of roses,” the Juneau Daily Transcript editorialized on September 8, 1909, What with First National Bank presidents doing Jack Johnson stunts, every editor roasting the other and carrying pocket cannon, life preservers, brass knucks and a dark lantern, while grand jury indictments grow on every bush and husky United States deputy marshals armed with bench warrants lurk behind every telephone pole waiting for stray members of the press, it is getting to be a toss-up whether the editors eat dinner at home or are guests at the Hotel de Sutherland, [jail, courtesy of the United States Attorney Sutherland.]49

Finishing on a humorous note, one of Alaska’s most notable journalist was Elmer E. “Stroller” White. Born in Ohio in 1859, Stroller was a science teacher and newspaper employee before he became a journalist in the Puget Sound area. Then the Klondike Strike drew him north. For the next six years he worked as an employee of the Skagway News, Bennet News, Klondike Nugget (Dawson), Dawson Daily News, Dawson Free-Press, and was the editor/publisher of the Whitehorse Star. As a newspaper reporter in Dawson, White had a column entitled “Strolling Through the Yukon”

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and the name “Stroller” stuck. He became famous for his focus on the underside of gold rush society, the trollops, drunks, gamblers, and other low lifes. As he was fond of saying, he liked to write about the Sam brothers—Flot and Jet.50 After the gold rush had subsided, he was the editor/publisher of the Douglas Island News which he moved to Juneau and renamed Stroller’s Weekly, a paper which survived from 1916 to 1930. He later became the Chief of the Territorial Bureau of Publicity and served in the Territorial House of Representatives in 1919–21 as the speaker. A 5,000 foot mountain on the northwest side of Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau was named in his honor after his death in 1930. Of humorous note, White’s journalistic saga of the “chirping of ice worms” predates Robert Service’s poem of the ice worm cocktail.51

Fourteen

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According to Hoyle, [these early Argonauts] ought to be rich, but so far, I have not met a single early Dawson man in this part of the country who has a cent.1 —Walter R. Curtin after meeting a number of the men who had gone to Dawson

Just as the Alaska Gold Rush had no distinct beginning, thus it does not have a precise end. In most history books the gold rush to confined to the boom years of 1898— 1901 but these are simply dates of convenience for publishers. It allows text authors to encapsulate great events into precise time frames so they can be used on true/false, multiple choice tests. In fact, the roots of the Alaska Gold Rush extend back to the 1850s with the Libby Expedition. If the flower itself bloomed at the turn of the twentieth century, the plant itself did not die until April 8, 1944 when the Alaska-Juneau Mine closed. This date too could be in error. Half a century later, in January of 1994, Howard Hayes, an 83-year-old miner, was going through the legal moves to mine the tailings of the old A. J. He figured that the mine itself took $1 billion dollars in gold out of the mountain with at least 20 percent of that being lost in the tailings. If those numbers are correct, there is as much as $200 million still left in piles of dirt and stone on the outskirts of Juneau. That’s quite an incentive to mine.2 Further north, on March 24, 1995, the Anchorage Daily News ran a front page story headlined, “The Gold Rush Is On.” As the result of an aerial survey by the State of Alaska, Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys, one of the “largest claimstaking rush in Fairbanks history” was set off. The rush, headed by “some of the largest mining companies in North America” involved 80 square miles of wilderness, some of it as close as 38 miles to Fairbanks. In 1994, Alaska produced 200,000 ounces of gold worth about $73 million.

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There is no question but that 1898 was the boom year for going north. In a “Special Klondike Edition” on July 17, 1898, the Post-Intelligencer listed name after name of individual and ship and the amount with which they returned. The term “millions” was used time and again and the steamers bearing the Klondikers to Seattle were called “treasure ships.” Adding up the nuggets and dust brought to Seattle during July alone, the Post-Intelligencer estimated the city had seen $7,296,000 pass through its port. (This is about $162 million in 1990 dollars.) A year later, in July of 1899, the paper ran a story quoting William Ogilive, the “Canadian Government’s Yukon Commissioner” who said that the gold coming out of the Klondike topped $100 million in 1898, a pronouncement that did little to stem the tide of Klondikers headed north.3 To keep these numbers in perspective, in Seattle in 1898, potatoes were selling at $.55 a hundred, cheese for $.10 a pound. Hams were going for $.09 a pound, bacon for $.11 and prunes for $.03. Children’s gloves cost $.50. A dining room table ran $3.75 and parlor sets of three chairs, now called “top quality antiques,” went for $24.50 a set. If you wanted to make your own clothes, Scotch gingham went for $.25 a yard and pure silk at $.75. Things were a bit more expensive in Dawson, however. There, a candle cost $1. Flour went for $100 a sack and oysters for $25 a pound. Tobacco cost $7.50 a pound and cigarettes, $.50 a pack. Fresh mutton went for $1.50 a pound, beef at $1, and moose up to $1.75. The next summer, oranges, and lemons went for $1.50 each and watermelons for $25. Dogs sold for up to $400, depending on the quality of the animal and, as Adney noted, a copy of Shakespeare went for “$50.”4 But stories of the cornucopia of gold emptying into Seattle coffers said nothing of the thousands of luckless Argonauts who returned penniless. By March of 1898, the Review of Reviews estimated that Argonauts spent over $60 million in supplies and tickets of which Seattle was credited with receiving $16 million. But by the end of the year, the total Klondike output was estimated at only $10 million.5 Walter R. Curtin got his first clue as to how much gold there was in Klondike when he was frozen aboard the Yukoner on the Yukon River in the winter of 1898—99. After meeting a number of the men who had gone to Dawson, Curtin noted “According to Hoyle, [these early Argonauts] ought to be rich, but so far, I have not met a single early Dawson man in this part of the country who has a cent.”6 There are some historian who feel that the Spanish-American War snuffed the life form the Alaska Gold Rush. While it may be true that it pushed tales of Alaska’s gold to a back page, it did not do so for very long. The Spanish-American War only lasted some three months. But the Alaska Gold Rush never did resume the front pages of America’s newspapers. Contrary to popular belief, the Alaska Gold Rush did not start with a bang and end with a whimper. Also contrary to popular belief, the tide of humanity which had headed north so eagerly in 1898 did not reverse itself in 1901. Quite a few people stayed. In fact, in the decade following the Alaska Gold Rush, the population went up slightly, from 63,592 to 64,356. Much of this growth, however, was not gold related. Large copper mines were moving into the northland. Coal deposits were being exploited in the Prince William Sound area and canning became a big business, replacing whaling as the leading maritime industry in Alaskan waters. Never again would Alaska be left in the sleepy backwaters of America.

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But the impact of gold was still being felt at the end of the first decade. As late as November of 1907 it was reported that ship wrecks had doomed the Kivalina Mission was “without food for the winter, and the white population is liable to be entirely destitute before the winter is half-gone.” Point Hope was also without food and custom’s officials in Nome were “at a loss to know what to do.”7 This problem was exacerbated by a storm which had closed down the West Coast from “Alaska to South America.”8 And there were traditional rushes to the very end of the first decade of the twentieth century. The epitome of the later rushes occurred in late November of 1907. From Valdez and Fairbanks there was a rush into the Susitna watershed. “The day of ease for the many dogs that have recently been littering the warm corners about town” was over, reported the press. The price of dogs had gone up, a sure sign a rush was underway, “when some forty Fairbankers suddenly decided that they had business in the Susitna and each proceeded to quietly gather up an outfit in the hopes of leaving town before anyone else could get away.”9 Not a lot of Argonauts ever became wealthy. Of the 100,000 Argonauts, only a few hundred ever came home with enough gold to call themselves wealthy. But they all came home changed by the grandeur of Alaska. From San Francisco to Paris to Moscow, the returning Argonauts talked of the walrus and grizzly, the Eskimo, and bellying up to the bar with Wyatt Earp. Madison Square Gardens had its roots in the Alaska Gold Rush as do Boca Raton and the Guggenheim Art Gallery. An entire century after the madness swept the world, the works of Jack London, Robert Service, and Rex Beach can still be found in bookstores. Hollywood continues to reach into the Alaska Gold Rush for the stories that will make the hair of your arm stand on end. And north the tourists come, by the millions, to the land made famous by the gold. In terms of perspective, the total gold output for all of Alaska from 1880 to 1906 was about $100 million ($2.1 billion in 1990 dollars). In 1995 alone, Alaska saw an economic impact of $1.7 billion from the tourism business alone. Is the Alaska Gold Rush over? Well, it’s all a matter of perspective.



CONSTITUTION OF THE CAMP OF VALDEZ Whereas the citizens of the United States on their way into the Copper River country, Alaska, realizing that we have no protection under the law of the land, deem it necessary to enact a code of laws to govern our conduct during our journey to and our stay in Alaska: Therefore be it resolved: 1. That any person guilty of murder shall be punished as a jury of twelve men may decide; 2. That any person guilty of assault, assault and battery, aggravated assault, or assault with intent to kill, shall be punished as a jury of twelve men may decide. 3. That any person stealing any property whatever shall be tried by a jury of twelve men and, upon conviction, shall be sentenced to restore the property stolen and to pay the injured party all damages sustained directly or indirectly in consequence of the theft. In case the guilty party shall not restore or make good all damages aforesaid, the injured party make take sufficient property of the defendant to satisfy all damages, and dispose of it in any way he deem fit and proper. The defendant shall also be banished forever from the country, and failing to leave immediately upon notice, shall receive not less than ten or more than 50 lashes: and failing to leave within ten days after such punishment, he shall abide by the consequence of his temerity. Should the value of the property stolen exceed $100 in money, punishment shall be the same as in the case of murder. 4. Any person charged with crimes as described above shall be tried by a jury of twelve men in the district, and in all trials shall be entitled to three peremptory challenges. Before a person shall be adjudged guilty not less then ten of the jury shall be agreed upon his guilt. The officers elected to enforce these laws shall consist of a judge, a sheriff and a clerk of the court.

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[Author’s note: C. A. King was the “unanimous choice for judge.” Dalbert Stevens was the sheriff and Frank P. Reid was chosen district clerk. All men assumed office on February 9, 1898.]1

DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR Indian School Service Office of Superintendent U.S. Indian Training School, Chairman, Oregon. Dec 30,1898 To whom it may concern: The bearer of this letter is Chief Johnson of the Taku Tribe near Juneau Alaska. He was elected by the Chiefs of several Alaskan Tribes to go to Washington in the interests of the Alaska Indians, and has stopped off at this school where he could use some of the Alaska pupils who talk his language, in interpreting in English the object of his mission, and the great needs of his people. I have written down the words as spoken by him through a reliable interpreter for your information and consideration. Very respectfully, Tless Potter Superintendent *** Gentlemen: I have come a long way from my home in Alaska to see you and tell you of the condition of my people. I was sent here by the Chiefs of the principal tribes to represent them, and have brought with me a petition signed by them. We find our country Alaska over run by white men who have crowded or driven the Indians from their fishing grounds, hunting grounds, and the places where their fathers and grand fathers have lived and been buried. Russia came and took possession of our land without consulting the natives of Alaska, the real owners of the country, and later on sold it to the United States. The Indians never knew anything about this sale until years afterwards, altho’ it was our land and country which was sold. We have never tried to make any trouble over it, and this is the first time we have ever brought the matter to the Washington Government to consider, altho’ Russia stole our country and sold it to [the U.S.]. We do not ask anything unreasonable of the U.S. government. We do not ask to be paid for the lands, which were ours by rights. We do not ask that the whites be prevented from coming to Alaska. We do ask and pray that the good white people who have true and kind and just hearts will listen to our words and assist us in protecting us by good laws, and requiring the same to be enforced. There [are four] principal things which the Indians desire the help of the government viz: 1st. That the fishing and hunting grounds of their Fathers be reserved for them and their children, and that the whites who have driven them of off the same be ordered by the government to leave them. The Indians chief method of support is by fishing and hunting and that is the only way the most of them can live, as only a small number are educated sufficiently to go out in the towns of the land and compete with the whites. 2nd. The Indians of Alaska pray that the U.S. government will set apart certain reservations for them and their children where they and their children can each have a home allotted

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to them, the same privileges as Indians of the United States enjoy. We ask this in return for all of Alaska, which has passed into the hands of the whites, without a murmur from us. We have given up a great deal and now only ask the great and good Father at Washington to give us back a little of the land, in return for the much we gave him, and protect us from the encroachments of greedy white men who would drive us into the Sea in order to advance their own interests. 3rd. Many of the Alaska Indians are poor and destitute, and have to beg from their friends in order to live. We ask the government to help the old and destitute, and to establish Industrial Boarding schools among the Indians of Alaska so as to fit them for citizenship and self support. We need schools and education as much as the Indians of the U.S. We are now apart of the United States, and we want to learn how to live like the good white men and adopt their laws and customs. There are hundreds of Indian boys and girls in Alaska who never saw a school. Only a few are able to attend the mission schools, and the one small government school at Sitka, and the most of the children must grow up in ignorance, superstition, and poverty. We ask that the United States will help the Alaska Indians just as it helps the South Dakota Indians, and those of other parts of the country. We have never gone on the war-path or given the government any trouble, and we feel we can appeal justly for help and protection as we belong to Washington just as much as any other Indians living in the States. 4th. We ask that laws will be made and enforced which will compel the Indians of Alaska to give up their heathenism and superstitious customs among themselves as we want to live like white people and be governed by white men’s laws. One evil custom (as well as many others) I desire to speak about. That is in the case of death, of a husband or wife, the parents of the one dead seizes all the property, as the immediate surviving members of the family, including the children are left destitute and beggars. This is a very unjust custom and works hardship and misery among the Indians. There are many other evil and superstitious customs still in existence among our people, and we the Chiefs want the white man’s law to help us stop them. Therefore I have come to Washington to speak and to lay our case before the Congressmen of the government, to implore their aid in giving the Alaska Indians homes and schools, and protecting them by law from the encroachment of avaricious white men. Signed,

Chief Johnson [His + Mark]

Interpreter Joshua Johnson John Dennis Witness to the above Tless. Potter Supr. Salem Indian (?)

McGINLEY VS. CLEARY (Alaska Reports, Vol. 2, Wickersham, 1903–5) Third Division, Fairbanks, August 8, 1904 On the 29th day of last November the plaintiff was, and for some time previous thereto had been, one of the proprietors of that certain two-story log-cabin described in the pleadings as the “Fairbanks Hotel,” situated upon Lot 1 Front Street, in the town of Fairbanks, Alaska. The opening scene discovers him drunk, but engaged on his regular night shift as barkeeper in dispensing whiskey by leave of this court on a Territorial license to those of his customers who had not been able, through undesire or the benumbing influence of the liquor, to retire to their cabins.

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The defendant was his present customer. After a social evening session, the evidence is that at about 3 o’clock in the morning of the 30th, they were mutually enjoying the hardships of Alaska by pouring into their respective interiors unnumbered four-bit drinks, recklessly expending undue pokes, and blowing into the next spring cleanup. While thus employed, between sticking tabs on the nail and catching their breath for the next glass, they began to tempt the fickle goddess of fortune by shaking the plaintiff’s dicebox. The defendant testifies that he had a $5 bill, that he laid it on the bar, and that it constituted the visible means of support to the game and transfer of property which followed. That defendant had a $5 bill so late in the evening may excite remark among his acquaintances. Whether plaintiff and defendant then formed a mental design to gamble around the storm center of this bill is one of the matters in dispute in this case about which they do not agree. The proprietor is plaintively positive on his part that at the moment his brains were so benumbed by the fumes or the force of his own whiskey that he was actually non comps mentis; that his mental facilities were so paralyzed thereby that they utterly failed to register or record impressions. His customer, on the other hand, stoutly swears that the vigor and strength of his constitution enabled him to retain his memory, and he informed the court from the witness stand that while both were gazing on the bill, the proprietor produced his near-by dicebox, and they began to shake for its temporary ownership. Neither the memory which failed nor that which labored in spite of its load enabled either the proprietor or the customer to recall that any other money or its equivalent came upon the board. The usual custom of $500 millionaires grown from wild-cat bonanzas was followed, and as aces and sixes alternated or blurringly trooped athwart their vision, the silent upthrust of the index finger served to mark the balance of trade. They were not alone. Tupper Thompson slept bibulously behind the oil tank stove. Whether his mental receiver was likewise so hardened by inebriation as to be incapable of catching impressions will never be certainly known to the court. He testified to a lingering remembrance of drinks which he enjoyed at this time upon the invitation of some one, and is authority for the statement that when he came to, the proprietor was so drunk that he hung limply and vine-like to the bar, though he played dice with the defendant, and later signed a bill of sale of the premises in dispute, which Tupper witnessed. Tupper also testified that the defendant was drunk but according to his standard of intoxication, he was not so entirely paralyzed as the proprietor, since he could stand without holding to the bar. Not to be outdone either in memory or expert testimony, the defendant admitted that Tupper was present, that his resting place was behind the oil tank stove, where, defendant testifies, he remained on the puncheon floor in slumberous repose during the gaming festivities with the dicebox, and until called to drink and sign a bill of sale, both of which he did according to his own testimony. One O’Neil also saw the parties, plaintiff and defendant, about this hour in the saloon, with defendant’s arm around plaintiff’s neck in maudlin embrace. After the dice-shaking has ceased, and the finger-tip bookkeeping had been reduced to round numbers, the defendant testifies that the plaintiff was found to be indebted to him in the sum of $1,800.00. Whether these dice, which belonged to the bar and seem to have been in frequent use by the proprietor, were in the habit of playing such pranks on the house, may well be doubted; nor is it shown that they, too, were loaded. It is just possible that mistakes may have occurred pending lapses of memory by which, in the absence of a lookout, the usual numbers thrown for the house were counted for the defendant, and this without any fault of the dice. However, this may be, the defendant swears that he won the score, and passed up the tabs for payment. According to the defendant’s testimony, the proprietor was also playing a confidence game, whereupon, in the absence of money, the defendant suggested that he make his a bill of sale of the premises. Two were written by the defendant. The second was signed by plaintiff and

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witnessed by Tupper, and for a short time the defendant became a tenant in common with an unnamed person and an equitable owner of an interest in the saloon. The plaintiff testifies that during all this time, and until the final act of signing the deed in controversy, he was drunk, and suffering from a total loss of memory and intelligence. The evidence in support of intelligence is vague and unsatisfactory, and the court is unable to base any satisfactory conclusion upon it. Above the mist of inebriety, which befogged the mental landscape of the principals in this case at that time rise a few jagged peaks of fact which must guide the court nothwithstanding their temporary intellectual eclipse. After the dice-throwing had ceased, the score calculated, and the bills of sale written and the last one conveying a half interest in the premises, signed by the plaintiff, he accompanied the defendant to the cabin of Commissioner Cowles, about a block away, on the banks of the frozen Chena, and requested that official to affix his official acknowledgement to the document. Owing to their hilarious condition and the early hour at which they so rudely broke the judicial slumbers, the commissioner refused to do business with them, and thrust them from his chamber. He does not testify as to the status of their respective memories at that time, but he does say that their bodies were excessively drunk; that of the defendant being, according to the judicial eye, the most wobbly. He testifies that the plaintiff was able to and did assist the defendant away from his office without any official acknowledgement being made to the bill of sale. The evidence then discloses that, in the light of the early morning, both principals retired to their bunks to rest; witness Sullivan going so far as to swear that the plaintiff’s boots were removed before he got into bed. The question of consideration is deemed to be an important one in this case. Defendant asserts that it consisted of the $1,800.00 won at the proprietor’s own game of dice, but Tupper Thompson relapses into sobriety long enough to declare that the real consideration promised on the part of the defendant was to give a half interest in his Cleary Creek placer mines for the half interest in the saloon; that the defendant said the plaintiff could go out and run the mines while he remained in the saloon and sold hootch to the Sour-doughs, or words to that effect. Tupper’s evidence lacks some of the earmarks; it is quite evident that he had a rock in his sluice box. The plaintiff, on the other hand, would not deny the gambling consideration; he forgot; it is much safer to forget, and it stands a better cross examination. The evidence discloses that about 3 or 4 o’clock p.m. on the evening of the 30th, the defendant went to the apartment of the proprietor, and renewed his demand for payment or a transfer of the property in consideration of the gambling debt. After a meal and a shave they again appeared, about 5 o’clock, before the commissioner; this time at this public office in the justice’s court. Here there was much halting and whispering. The bill of sale written by Cleary was presented to the proprietor, who refused to acknowledge it before the commissioner. The commissioner was then requested by Cleary to draw another document to carry out the purpose of their visit there. The reason given for refusing to acknowledge the document then before the commissioner was that it conveyed a half interest, whereas, the plaintiff refused them to convey more than a quarter interest. The commissioner wrote the document now contained in the record, the plaintiff signed it; it was witnessed, acknowledged, filed for record, and recorded in the books of deeds, according to law. The deed signed by McGinley purports to convey “an undivided one-four (1/4) interest in the Fairbanks Hotel, situated on Lot No. one (1), Front Street, in the town of Fairbanks.” The consideration mentioned is one dollar, but, in accordance with the finger-tip custom, it was not paid; the real consideration was the $1,800.00 so miraculously won by the defendant the previous night by shaking the box. Plaintiff soon after brought this suit to set aside the conveyance upon the ground of fraud (1) because he was so drunk at the time he signed the deed as to be unable to comprehend the nature of the contract, and (2) for want of consideration.

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It is currently believed that the Lord cares for and protects idiots and drunken men. A court of equity is supposed to have equal and concurrent jurisdiction, and this case seems to be brought under both branches. Before touching upon the law of the case, however, it is proper to decide the questions of fact upon which these principles must rest, and they will be considered in the order in which counsel for plaintiff has prevented them. Was McGinley so drunk when he signed the deed in controversy that he was not in his right mind, or capable of transacting any business, or entering into any contract? He was engaged, under the aegis of the law and seal of this court, in selling whiskey to the miners of the Tanana for four-bits a drink, and more regularly in taking his own medicine and playing dice with customers for a consideration. Who shall guide the court in determining how drunk he was at 3 o’clock in the morning, when the transaction opened? Tupper or the defendant? How much credence must the court give to the testimony of one drunken man who testifies that another was also drunk? Is the court bound by the admission of the plaintiff that he was so paralized [sic] by his own whiskey that he cannot remember the events of nearly 24 hours in which he seemed to have generally followed his usual calling? Upon what fact in this evidence can the court plant the scales of justice that they may not stagger? Probably the most satisfactory determination of the matter may be made by coming at once to that point of time where the deed in question was prepared, signed and acknowledged. did the plaintiff exhibit intelligence at that time? He refused to acknowledge a deed which conveyed a half interest, and caused his creditor to procure one to be made by the officer which conveyed only a quarter interest; he protected his property to that extent. Upon presentation of the deed prepared by the officer, he refused to sign it until the words, “and other valuable consideration” were stricken out; thus leaving the deed to rest on a stated consideration of “one dollar.” Upon procuring the paper to read as he desired, he signed it in a public office, before several persons, and acknowledged it to be his act and deed. Defendant says that the deed was given to pay a gambling debt lost by the plaintiff at his own game, and his counsel argues that for this reason equity will not examine into the consideration and grant relief, but will leave both parties to the rules of their game, and not intermingle these with the rules of law. He argues that they stand in pari delicto, and that, being engaged in a violation of the law, equity ought not to assist the proprietor of the game to recover his bank roll. It may be incidentally mentioned here, as it has been suggested to the court, that the phrase pari delicto does not mean a “delectable pair,” and its use is not intended to reflect upon or characterize plaintiff and defendant. There are cases where courts will assist in the recovery of money or property lost at gambling, but this is not one of them. The plaintiff was the proprietor of the saloon and the operator of the dice game in which he lost his property. He now asks a court of equity to assist him in recovering it, and this raises the question, may a gambler who runs a game and loses the bank roll come into a court of equity and recover it? He conducted the game in violation of law, conveyed his promise to pay the winner’s score, and now demands that the court assist him to regain it. Equity will not become a gambler’s insurance company, to stand by while the gamester secures the winnings of the drunken, unsuspecting, or weak minded in violation of the law, ready to stretch forth its arm to recapture his looses when another as un[s]crupulous or more lucky than he wins his money or property. Now will the court in this case aid the defendant. The cause will be dismissed; each party to pay the costs incurred by him and judgement accordingly.

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IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT OF THE SECOND DIVISION OF THE DISTRICT OF ALASKA IN THE MATTER OF THE FINAL REPORT OF THE GRAND JURY, April, 1905 TERM: ESQUIMAUX We recommend that the United States Government take immediate steps for the relief of the Esquimaux and to that end suggest the following: 1. A relief fund for the relief of the sick and indigent [N]atives, to purchse medicines and the necessaries of life; 2. Government hosptial for [N]atives is an absolute necessity from the standpoint of charity as well as the consideration for the health of the white population. 3. Some measures should be secured to prohibit [N]ative families from living in Nome, and the government should build small comfortable cabins at the larger villages and such places as the Quartz Creek Colony, and offer each [N]ative family a little home as an inducement to move away from this camp and other undesirable localities, where they cannot obtain liquors and become demoralized. 4. An Alaskan law which absolutely prohibits individuals form taking Esquimaux to the states for any purpose whatsoever, excepting in the case of taking such [N]ative boys and girls out as may be trained for education or missionary work among their own people. 5. Making the giving or selling of liquor to [N]atives a felony. 6. Vigorous prosectution of unlawful cohabitation with [N]ative women. 7. Requesting the business men of Nome to not give the [N]atives any articles of food or clothing or in any way encourage them to become beggars and vagrants. 8. Introduction of industrial training in all the Esquimaux schools even if it be only in a very moderate degree.2

COPPER CENTER, ALASKA, MAY 8, 1906 We the undersigned declare, from personal observation, that the condition of the Copper River Indians is most pitiable. Fully 25 percent of them have died in the past two weeks, and those that are left are emaciated and unable to work or hunt. They have not been able to care for their sick or bury their dead. Without immediate special assistance the mortality among them will be greater. Their condition has been brought about by the lack of food and clothing. Since the rabbits perished during the extreme cold weather they have been short of food. They have no footwear but moccasins or old cast off shoes and when the snow began to melt[,] their feet were wet and cold. They have made a special effort to hunt and work when work can be obtained. They have taken heavy colds and because of lack of nourishment and clothing the colds have resulted in grippe and pneumonia. It is our conviction that unless some new policy is adopted by the government to aid these Indians they will become extinct in the not distant future. John McCrary Frances McCrary Oscar Expert

Ralph McCrary Nelson McCrary Walter T. Neal

Appendix

200 Otto H. Strappe F. S. Coleman Fred Sherman Mrs C. S. Horsfall Charles W. Rodeen G. E. Simpson G. Asplmel Henry C. Hempe H. R. Clevenger G. B. Rorere W. T. Soule

Lydia S. Neal J. W. Neal J. M. Jule R. Blix Mrs. G. E. Simpson G. Parker Smith Victor Olson Henry Buck Paul Hansel Charles G. Horsfall J. V. Donahue3

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CHAPTER ONE 1. DeArmond, Founding of Juneau, page vii. 2. Cole, Nome, pages 11–14. 3. Robertson, Frank C. and Beth Kay Harris. Soapy Smith, King of the Con Men. Hastings House, 1961, pages 30, 31, 35 and 36. The Seattle paper that made the comment about gold being smuggled onboard the Portland to avoid the freight charge was not mentioned by name. 4. James H. Ducker did a statistical survey of the men and women who rushed north for the Alaska Historical Commission. His analysis can be found in “Gold Rushers North,” Pacific Historical Quarterly, July, 1994.

CHAPTER TWO 1. DeArmond, Juneau, page 45 2. DeArmond, Juneau, page 41. 3. Mark Twain Papers, UCB, to Levi, April 27, 1993; White, Marjorie, “‘Great Diamond Hoax’ Century Ago, Had Role in History of New Mexico,” Sundial, August 8, 1966; Christiansen, Paige W. The Story of Mining in New Mexico, New Mexico Bureau of Mines & Mineral Resources, Socorro, 1974. 4. George Pilz Diary, page 48, UAF. 5. Stone, page 7. His figures are $158 million. The figure was adjusted by assuming gold to be an average of $26.50 per ounce and, in 1990, gold to be $380 per ounce.

CHAPTER THREE 1. Hartshorn, Chapter I, page 5. 2. “To the Klondike by Balloon,” Seattle Times, February 7, 1898.

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3. “This Girl Is Brave,” Seattle Times, April 8, 1899. 4. “Alaskan What-Is-It?” Seattle Times, April 13, 1898. 5. “Burros for Alaska,” Seattle Times, October 4, 1897. There is no evidence that the burros ever arrived or, for that matter, that the camels did either. But reindeer were used extensively for meat and milk throughout Alaska. For a while they were also considered as beast of burden for mail delivery. Alaska’s first Postmaster, John Clum, examined herds of the animals in Haines for exactly that purpose in 1898, (see references to Clum’s diary). There were quite a few more bicycles in Alaska than would have been expected. One source is “Out on a Bike,” Skagway Daily Alaskan, December 14, 1899. “Klondike’s Reindeer Mail,” Los Angeles Seattle Times, March 20, 1898. Also, “Balloon is Completed,” Post-Intelligencer, February 17, 1898; “Reindeer to Carry Mail,” March 30, 1898; “Making Ready for Alaska,” March 15, 1898; “To the Klondike by Canoe,” March 18, 1898; “Camels for Icy Alaska,” February 24, 1898; “Wheels on Ice,” edited by Terrence Cole, monograph by Alaska Northwest Publishing Company, 1985; “Making Ready for Alaska,” March 15, 1898; “Fatal to Reindeer,” March 28, 1898; “The Famous Tin Boat and her Scandinavian Owners,” November 5, 1898; “Want to Fly to Klondike, January 22, 1898; “Reindeer for the Camps,” August 24, 1897; “The Aerial Voyager,” (with freehand drawings), August 18, 1897. (All sources are from the Post-Intelligencer.) 6. “Some Very Shrewd Deals,” Seattle Times, January 21, 1898. 7. “Some Very Shrewd Deals,” Seattle Times, January 21, 1898. 8. “Some Very Shrewd Deals,” Seattle Times, January 21, 1898. 9. Dietz, pages 22–3. 10. “The East has 295 Fakes,” Seattle Times, January 29, 1898. 11. Letter in the Minneapolis Times, March 10, 1898. 12. Dietz, page 20. 13. Dietz, page 19. 14. McMichael, page 11. 15. Berton, page 128. 16. “From Inspector Dument,” Post-Intelligencer, February 16, 1898. 17. Statistics of this kind are speculative at best. Pierre Berton in Klondike Fever, page 417, estimated the stampeders to the Klondike alone at 100,000. There is no reason to dispute this figure. Estimates for the Alaska Gold Rush are meaningless as that rush lasted for sixty-four years, from the discovery of gold in what is now Juneau to the closing of the Alaska-Juneau Mine in 1944. Estimates of about 50,000 for the “peak years” of 1898 through 1902 are plausible. 18. “Guarding Against Wrecks,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 22, 1898. 19. “Heavy Alaska Business,” Seattle Times, March 2, 1898. 20. “Heavy Alaska Business,” Seattle Times, March 2, 1898. 21. Miller, page 2. 22. “More Floating Coffins,” Seattle Times, April 14, 1898. 23. Remick, page 49. The actual place where the ship was abandoned is listed as “Coabue.” No such location exists in Alaska. Other sources have the Guardian in Kotzebue. 24. Austin, page 5. 25. Austin, page 12. 26. “Want Their Money Back,” Seattle Times, February 21, 1898. 27. Jordan, page 25. 28. Berton, page 138. 29. Berton, page 140. 30. Actual quote is from William H. Wilson’s “To Make a Stake,” Alaska Journal, Winter, 1983, page 109. 31. Miller, pages 2 and 3.

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32. Woods, pages 28–8. 33. Woods, page 29. 34. Farnsworth, page 4. 35. Axe, January 29 and January 31, 1898. 36. Miller, page 3. 37. Wells, page 14. 38. Popp papers, page 5. 39. Norby, page 4. 40. Brady to Secretary of the Interior, February 3, 1898, DOI, NA. 41. Merritt, June 8, 1900. When Merritt wrote of the man who went crazy, he reported that the man “flammed in his hat [sic]” and thought it was gold nuggets. 42. Petition of August 22, 1898, in the possession of the Federal Archives in Anchorage. 43. James Hunter Shotwell to Margharete Ross Shotwell, July 12, 1898. 44. Berton, page 138. 45. Axe, January 30, 1898. 46. “The Queen Strikes a Bar,” Skagway News, February 11, 1898. 47. Berton, page 138. 48. “Schooner Elsie’s Crew,” Seattle Times, July 17, 1898. 49. Seitz letter. 50. “The Alice Blanchard,” Seattle Times, February 21, 1898. 51. Cahoon, page 1. 52. Woods, page 32. 53. “The Alice Blanchard,” Seattle Times, February 21, 1898. 54. “Heavy Alaska Business,” Seattle Times, March 2, 1898. 55. Dey, page 1. 56. Fitz, page 21. 57. McCurdy, page 18. 58. Lautauret, page 23. 59. As a footnote to history, the Inside Passage was also known as “Grease Alley” because it was the transportation corridor for ships bringing hooligan (Alaskan smelt) to Seattle and Portland. The term “grease” was used because the hooligan had a high content of oil. In fact, the content is so high that a fish could be used as a candle if a wick were inserted in its throat. The fish, of course, had to be dead. 60. Archie Templeton, March 14, 1898, Templeton Papers, University of Alaska Anchorage Archives. 61. Dietz, pages 42–45 and 49. 62. “But She Did Not Sail,” Post-Intelligencer, August 18, 1897. 63. “Wanted to Hang Captain,” Post-Intelligencer, September 3, 1899. 64. “Wanted to Hang the Captain,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 3, 1899; “Captain of the Hunter Says the Passengers Threatened to Lynch Him,” Seattle Times, September 2, 1899. 65. “Put Stowaways Ashore,” Post-Intelligencer, March 14, 1899. 66. “Stowaways on Steamers,” Skagway News, February 4, 1898. 67. Archie Templeton, March 14, 1898, Templeton Papers, University of Alaska Anchorage Archives. 68. Dey, pages 6 and 7. 69. “The Life Strenuous,” Nome Nugget, July 26, 1905. 70. “Say They Were Kidnapped,” Post-Intelligencer, September 20, 1899; “Prayed on the Icy Deck,” July 5, 1899; “Terrible Tale of the Sea,” February 21, 1899. 71. Berton, page 141. 72. Dietz, pages 34–7.

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Notes

73. “The Brigantine Blakeley,” Seattle Times, April 16, 1898. 74. Dietz, page 29. 75. “There Is Room for All,” Post-Intelligencer, February 11, 1898. 76. “Charged with Piracy,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 12, 1898. 77. “Burning of the Whitelaw,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 12, 1898. According to the article, the battle with knives and guns went on “all through the night” and “far into the afternoon.” Considering the ferocity of the fires, it is unlikely that the fighting continued that long. 78. Friesen, page 35. 79. “Stranded at St. Michael,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, August 11, 1898. 80. “Stranded at St. Michael,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, August 11, 1898. 81. “Troops Will Not Starve,” Seattle Times, October 18, 1898. 82. Secretary of War to Secretary of the Interior, March 4, 1898, Department of Interior Papers, NA-AR. 83. Curtin, pages 34–5. 84. “Two Sides to a Story,” Seattle Times, July 29, 1898. 85. “Alaskan Rates Go Up,” Seattle Times, March 10, 1899. 86. “Rates Are Advanced,” Victoria Daily Colonist, March 29, 1898. 87. “Captains, Pilots, Mates,” Post-Intelligencer, May 3, 1899. 88. “American Vessels Barred,” Post-Intelligencer, March 14, 1899. 89. “Liquor Barred from Yukon,” Post-Intelligencer, March 14, 1899.

CHAPTER FOUR 1. Jordan, 35. 2. Hinkley, Brady, page 197. 3. “The Jolly Farce,” Fort Wrangel News, August 3, 1898. 4. John Tenney to Collector of Customs, October 3, 1898, Customs. 5. “It May Cause Trouble,” Seattle Times, November 17, 1898. 6. Anderson, page 57. 7. Anderson, page 60. 8. Jordan, page 35. 9. Cole, Nome, page 67. 10. Fengar to Secretary of the Treasury, December 31, 1903, RCS, NA-AR. 11. “Natives of Diomede Island,” Nome Gold Digger, August 5, 1905. 12. “Los Angeles Man Loses Hands and Feet in Alaska,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February, 17, 1899. 13. Overland Expedition, page 21. 14. John E. Bujake to Steven C. Levi, June 17, 1994, Levi Papers in the possession of the University of Alaska Anchorage Archives. Bujake also noted “It indeed was a clever idea to have the traders add the seal oil to the molasses to prevent the Eskimos from making moonshine.” 15. Lopp to Hamlet, December 20, 1904, RCS, NA-AR. 16. Besthoff to Tuttle, July 15, 1898, RCS, NA-AR. 17. Jordan, pages 88–89. 18. “Alaskan Whiskey Seized,” Seattle Times, September 8, 1898. 19. Anderson, pages 120 and 231. 20. McCurdy, page 18 and “A Fiery Corpse in a Coffin,” Seattle Times, March 24, 1899. Jordan sent his liquor north listed as “clerical goods,” page 16. 21. Anchorage Criminal File #585, Box 33, NA-AR.

Notes

205

22. Curtin, page 89. 23. Jordan, pages 88–89. 24. Rickart, Mrs., page 119. 25. “Moonshiners of Alaska,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 13, 1899. 26. Anderson, page 31 and 231; Hunt, NORTH, page 21. 27. Weimer, page 157. 28. Shantze to Secretary of the Treasury, January 26, 1901, RCS, NA-AR. 29. United States vs. W. E. Crews, C. S. Hannum, Thomas Marquam and Alonzo Cleaver, RG 21, Sitka Criminal File 999, NA-AR. 30. United States vs. Jospeh Floyd, L. C. Harman and Thomas S. Luke, RG 21, Sitka Criminal File #998, NAN-AR. 31. “Custom Officials Out,” Seattle Times, January 12, 1898. 32. “Whiskey and Religion,” Seattle Times, November 8, 1898. 33. Smith to Ivey, March 15, 1898, Custom Service Records, NA-AR. 34. Cochran to Secretary of the Treasury, June 25, 1898, Custom Agent Files, NA-AR. 35. Strong to Lenoir, March 7, 1914, Governor’s Papers. 36. White Pass and Yukon Route to Shartzer, March 30, 1900, Revenue Agent Files, NA-AR. 37. Shartzer to Secretary of the Treasury, November 17, 1900, Revenue Agent File, NA-AR. 38. Curtin, page 32. 39. Gastineaux Printing Company to Secretary of the Treasury, May 9, 1898, Custom Service Records, NA-AR. 40. “Moonshiners of Alaska,” Post Intelligencer, January, 13, 1899. 41. “Wants to Libel Steamer Laurada,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, November 29, 1898. 42. Stacey, pages 13, 14 and 18. 43. Stacey, page 28. 44. “Big Whiskey Seizure,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 10, 1899. 45. Guiteau, Luther W., “Golden Eggs,” Alaska Sportsman, November, 1940, pages 32–33. 46. “Governor Brady’s Report,” Post-Intelligencer, December 2, 1898. 47. Berton, page 321. Other sources can be found in footnote 297 in Nichols. 48. “Whiskey is Very Cheap,” Post-Intelligencer, December 26, 1898; “Governor Brady’s Report,” Post-Intelligencer, December 2, 1898. 49. “List of Seizures Made by the Collector of Customs for the District of Alaska From August 5, 1897, to November 9, 1898,” and “Liquor Permits Issued,” Records of the United States Customs Service, Record Group 36, Alaska File of the Special Agents Division of the Department of the Treasury, M802, NA-AR. 50. Slayton to Secretary of the Treasury, November 14, 1904, RCS, NA-AR. 51. “List of Seizures Made by the Collector of Customs for the District of Alaska From August 5, 1897, to November 9, 1898,” and “Liquor Permits Issued,” Records of the United States Customs Service, Record Group 36, Alaska File of the Special Agents Division of the Department of the Treasury, M802, NA-AR. 52. “List of Seizures Made by the Collector of Customs for the District of Alaska From August 5, 1897, to November 9, 1898,” and “Liquor Permits Issued,” Records of the United States Customs Service, Record Group 36, Alaska File of the Special Agents Division of the Department of the Treasury, M802, NA-AR. 53. “Seized Whiskey Sold,” Seattle Times, March 3, 1899. 54. Slayton to Secretary of the Treasury, November 14, 1904, RCS, NA-AR. 55. Skagway merchants to Secretary of the Treasury, June 8, 1898, Customs Agent Record Group, NA-AR. 56. Jordan, page 89.

206

Notes

57. Alaska Commercial Company to Collector of Customs, Sitka, May 13, 1898, Custom Agents Records, NA-AR. 58. Jordan, pages 134–5. 59. Linck to Chance, September 1, 1898, Custom Agent Files, NA-AR. 60. “Tons of Liquor Going North,” Post-Intelligencer, July 13, 1899. 61. Ivey to Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, April 21, 1898, Custom Agent Records. 62. “Old Wrangel Wakes Up,” Seattle Times, April 18, 1898; “News of Wrangel,” Seattle Times, June 12, 1898. 63. Shartzer to Secretary of the Treasury, December 11, 1900, Revenue Agent Files. 64. “Resignation Withdrawn,” Juneau Record-Miner, May 26, 1900. 65. “Collector Ivey Under Fire,” Fort Wrangel News, June 8, 1898. 66. Hoggatt to Roosevelt, Governors’ Papers, July 8, 1908, and “Fairbanks Saloons Increase in Number,” Tanana Leader, July 1, 1909.

CHAPTER FIVE 1. Watts, January 20, 1898. 2. McKeown, page 101. 3. Morgan, page 34. 4. Chase, Sourdough, pages 36–7. 5. Murray-Morgan, page 37. 6. Johnson, March 17, 1898. 7. Morgan, page 35. 8. Morgan, page 38. 9. “Getting Ready to Run Chilkoot Trams,” Seattle Times, December 28, 1898 and Hartshorn, page 24. 10. Dunham, page 13. 11. Wharton, page 45. 12. Weimer, page 41. 13. Morgan, page 40. 14. Hartshorn, Dyea, page 6. 15. Henry W. Clark, 104. 16. Hartshore, Chapter I, page 8. 17. Hartshorn, Dyea, page 2. 18. Hartshorn, page 24. 19. Hartshorn, Dyea, page 2. 20. There is a Chinook Jargon dictionary at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. The “Chicago” term can be found in Robert O. Bowen’s An Alaskan Dictionary, 1960 and Russell Tabbert’s Dictionary of Alaskan English, 1991. 21. Weimer, pages 41–43. 22. Collier, page 251. 23. Woods, page 55. 24. Becker, KLONDIKE, pages 40 and 43. 25. Norby, page 7. 26. Kelly, pages 80–81. 27. “Fear an Epidemic,” Seattle Times, June 6, 1899. 28. Hartshorn, Dyea, page 6. 29. Collins, Henry A. to Mattie Collins, April 16, 1898.

Notes

207

30. Hartshorn, Dyea, page 7. 31. Davis, page 52. 32. Davis, page 52. 33. Becker, Klondike, page 18. 34. Davis, pages 52–53. 35. Hartshorn, Book 3, pages 1–2; Dyea, page 3. 36. Evans to Secretary of the Treasury, May 5, 1900, Revenue Agent File, NA-AR. 37. Special Agent Evans to Secretary of the Interior, May 5, 1900, Revenue Agent Records. 38. Brady to Secretary of the Interior, February 3, 1898, Department of the Interior Papers, NA-AR. 39. “Plot to Burn the Al-Ki,” Seattle Times, February 2, 1898. 40. Watts, January 20, 1898. 41. Axe, February 3, 1898. 42. Northwest Mounted Police letter, April 14, 1899, in the U.S. Consul for Dawson Papers, NA-AR. 43. Correspondence to Colonel McCook, April 14, 1899, Dispatches of the U.S. Consul in Dawson. 44. “Smith’s Skagway Guards,” Seattle Times, April 2, 1898. 45. Johnston, MIZNER, pages 86–87. This may be true. James Wickersham tells a similar story in Old Yukon, Tales—Trails—and Trials. 46. Jenkins, pages 95 and 96. 47. “Letter from ‘Soapy’ Smith,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 18, 1898. 48. “Hon. Jeff. R. Smith, Esq.,” Seattle Times, March 30, 1898. 49. “Smith’s Skagway Guards,” Seattle Times, April 2, 1898. 50. “Soapy Smith is Angry,” Seattle Times, July 4, 1898. 51. Robertson and Harris, page 205. 52. Clifford, Skagway, page 20. 53. Minter, page 212. 54. Minter, pages 212–213. 55. Clifford, SKAGWAY, page 24. 56. Clifford, SKAGWAY, pages 22–24. 57. Collier, page 284 and Martinsen, page 31. Sehlbrede had been a long-time friend of Frank Reid. 58. Clifford, page 72. 59. Woods, page 54.

CHAPTER SIX 1. Though this may seem far-fetched today, in 1898 it was viewed as realistic possibility. Alfred G. McMichael wrote a letter in March 1898 outlining his plans to enter Alaska at the Copper River because “the climate is milder in that country and game is plentiful.” There was even some gold there, McMichael reported, “but nothing to compare with the Klondike.” McMichael’s letters have been combined into Klondike Letters. There was also a short news article on an expedition that made it from Valdez to Circle City, “Keep up your Spirits,” Seattle Times, September 1, 1898. 2. “The Copper River Code,” Victoria, B.C., Daily Colonist, March 29, 1898. 3. Margeson, pages 54–6. 4. Conversation with Calls, February 7, 1993.

208

Notes

5. Since these stampeders were not crossing into Canada, there was no requirement that each person have a year’s supply of food. As a result, many stampeders did not. Horace Willis, writing for the Los Angeles Times, reported that some stampeders had “scarcely enough provisions to last three months, and not a dollar in their pockets.” [“The Valdez Pass,” Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1898.] 6. Hazelet, page 32. 7. Seitz letter. 8. Copper River Joe, page 11. 9. Copper River Joe, page 9. 10. Hazelet, page 41. 11. Naske and Rowinski, Fairbanks, page 22. 12. Kapplemann, April 28, 1898. 13. Coppper River Joe, page 9. 14. Hazelet, page 42. 15. Austin, page 43. 16. Kappleman, April 28, 1898. 17. Margeson, pages 63–4. 18. “George Miller Writes From the Copper River District,” Riverside Daily Enterprise, March 15, 1898. 19. “Story of Hanging in 1882 as Told by Old Records,” Daily Alaska Dispatch, December 9, 1917; Guiteau, November, 1940, page 11. However, the Daily Alaska Dispatch lists the two cases of summary justice in Valdez as murderers while Guiteau clearly states that the man was hung for robbing a cache. 20. Messer’s work is in the form of a slide show. This quote came from slides 23, 24 and 25. 21. Reid, April 18. 22. This is a guess for the Seattle Times, September 17, 1898, “First and Only Lynching” ran a story of a lynching in Skagway of a Russian Finn, name unknown. He was hung on September 3 “near the summit of White Pass” and “about 15 miles from salt water” which could have been in Canada, not the United States. The victim was alleged to have admitted coming to Skagway to steal but was probably mentally deficient. He was reported to have lived in a “little hole back from the trail among the rocks” with a “piece of tent cloth” for a door “eating what food he could steal.” He had stolen some money and was caught by a detective by the name of W. T. Sauls. “Five enraged miners” lynched him. The vertical file at the Alaska Historical library also lists a number of hangings including a white man by the name of Boyd in Wrangell in 1877 and two Indians in Juneau in 1882, both of these cases being determined by miner’s courts but there is no indication if either of these was a case of vigilante justice. 23. Copper River Joe, pages 7–8. Although Tanner was supposed to be traveling with Canadians, the men he shot were from Minnesota (Call) and Massachusetts (Lee). “Murder at Valdes Bay,” Dyea Trail, February 25, 1898. 24. Margeson, pages 62–3. 25. “Alaskan Law,” Los Angeles Times, February 3, 1898. 26. “First Hanging at Valdez as Related by Noted Old Timer,” All Alaska Weekly, May 16, 1947. 27. “A Hanging Party,” Alaska Northern Lights, January, 1966, in the possession of the Alaska State Library, Juneau. The name of the juror who reported the story was Winfield Scott Amy. Author has no idea as to who in Washington would “exonerate” a vigilante. Also of note, Copper River Joe reported that when Tanner was asked if he had anything to say in his own defense, he noted “Boys, I am going to get what is coming to me.” (Copper River Joe, page 8.)

Notes

209

28. Margeson, pages 62–3. There is two other references to this hanging, both of which generally agree with Margeson. This may be found in Austin, pages 54–5, and Copper River Joe, pages 7–8. 28. Messer, April 7th. 29. Messer, May 11 and May 12. There was also a mention of a former streetcar employee who was found guilty of pilfering. He was banished from the glacier and a committee of stampeders even went so far as to make certain he boarded a ship heading south. (Copper River Joe, page 13). 30. Guiteau, “Golden Eggs,” page 33. 31. Copper River Joe, page 22. 32. Messer, April 22 and Copper River Joe, pages 22–3. 33. Margeson, pages 70–1. 34. Austin, page 29. 35. Copper River Joe, page 10 and 12. Author’s note: the actual quote had the words “Taylor” and “Whiskey” reversed. This was assumed to be a typo. 36. Copper River Joe, page 23. 37. April 6th. 38. Hazelet, page 32. 39. “His Body Devoured by Ravens Near Valdes,” Seattle Times, September 6, 1899. 40. Hazelet, page 37. 41. “George Miller Writes From the Copper River District,” Riverside Daily Enterprise, March 15, 1898. 42. Poppe, page 7. 43. Kappleman, April 28, 1898; “George Miller Writes From the Copper River District,” Riverside Daily Enterprise, March 15, 1898. 44. Messer, May 1. 45. Copper River Joe, page 14. 46. “George Miller Writes From the Copper River District,” Riverside Daily Enterprise, March 15, 1898. 47. “Under the Devil’s Blanket,” True West, March-April, 1975, page 33; Kappleman, April 28, 1898. 48. Messer, April 8th. 49. “Under the Devil’s Blanket,” True West, March-April, 1975, page 33. 50. Kappleman, April 28, 1898. 51. Copper River Joe, page 16. 52. Messer, slide 27. That may be a typographic error as 15 pounds is quite light. More likely it was “50 pounds.” 53. “His Body Devoured by Ravens Near Valdes,” Seattle Times, September 6, 1899. 54. Austin, page 45. 55. Charles C. Wentzler, “On Alaskan Trails,” Riverside (California) Press Enterprise, October 8, 1898. 56. “Guiteau, Luther W., “Down the Klutina,” Alaska Sportsman, December, 1940, page 16. 57. Messer, slide 75. 58. Guiteau, December, page 17. 59. Guiteau, “Down the Klutina,” page 17. 60. Copper River Joe, page 39. 61. “Copper River Fraud,” Los Angeles Times, March 13, 1898. 62. Abercrombie, 758. 63. Guiteau, January, 1941, page 27.

210

Notes

64. Secretary of Treasury to Secretary of War, August 22, 1898, Custom Agent Files, NA-AR. 65. Author’s note: At least one other source listed the amount at $50, “From the Valdez,” Seattle Times, August 3, 1899. 66. Kilgore to Secretary of the Treasury, August 26, 1899, RCS, NA-AR; “In from Valdes,” Seattle Times, September 29, 1899. 67. Guiteau, January, 1941, page 27. 68. Kilgore to Secretary of the Treasury, August 2, 1899, RCS. 69. G. W. Lieber, Judge-Advocate General to Secretary of War, August 5, 1899, Department of Interior, NA-AR. 70. “Copper River Fake,” and “Copper River a Fake,” Los Angeles Times, February 23, 1898.

CHAPTER SEVEN 1. “No Gold at Kotzebue Sound,” San Francisco Call, August 17, 1898. 2. There was even speculation that a convict by the name of Stevens, allegedly, met an old whaler while in prison and the two created a crude map of Kotzebue Country indicating where the gold was located. The whaler died and Stevens took on another partner who, conveniently, was released soon thereafter. This new partner was able to effect Stevens a pardon and the two of them outfitted a ship and headed for Kotzebue. The news leaked and thus was the rush to the Kobuk started. Stevens never completed the quest. As he was going ashore in Nome, he fell out of the boat and drowned. This story was revealed at the reunion of the Rag, Tag and Bobtail Bridgade gathering of “tatterdermalians” who had rushed to Kotzebue. Seattle Post Intelligencer, May 20, 1916 and Seattle Times, May 20, 1916. There was a George Stevens in prison at the State Penitentiary at Walla Walla in 1894 who was pardoned on March 20, 1898 but there is no evidence that anyone by that name drowned in Nome. 3. McElwaine, page 83. 4. “The Rush of 1898,” Nome Nugget, March 7, 1903. 5. “Richer Fields than Klondike,” SanFrancisco Call, October 29, 1897. 6. “Gold Fever Spreading,” San Francisco Call, November 13, 1897. 7. News articles in the Frank C. Nichols Collection, Alaska State Library, Juneau. 8. More on the background of the Moonlight can be found in “The Rush of 1898,” Nome Nugget, March 7, 1903. Included in this article are allegations that the Kotzebue Strike was started by a man named Cooper who had deserted from a whaler and found gold near Ambler. Cooper, a Mason, showed the nuggets to some Masons in Seattle and that started the rush north to Kotzebue Country. Cooper was drowned in the waters off Valdez before he could return to Kotzebue Country. There is also a chance that the Moonlight was involved in the disastrous Koyukuk Strike as well as it is listed as one of the ships on that river in Old Gold Rush to Alaska Diaries of 1898–1900, page 136H. 9. Harnett, page 5. 10. Harnett, page 1. However, other sources have the Moonlight being towed by the Coleman. 11. Harnett, page 7. 12. Harnett, page 8. 13. Harnett, page 8. 14. “Her Awful Deck Load,” Seattle Times, June 6, 1898. 15. “The Moonlight a Wreck,” Seattle Times, August 3, 1898. 16. “Moonlight is in Port,” Seattle Times, November 7, 1898.

Notes

211

17. “Kotzebue Is All Right,” Seattle Times, September 5, 1898. 18. “Gold Found on Kotzebue,” Seattle Times, September 19, 1898. 19. McElwaine, page 85. 20. Hartnett, page 16. 21. Hartnett, 16. 22. Hartnett, page 17. 23. “Yukoners Are Rushing to Cape Nome,” Seattle Times, September 26, 1899. 24. Goodwin interview. 25. Hartnett, page 16. 26. Hartnett, page 15. 27. Hartnett, page 27. 28. “How Men Will Lie,” Nome News, April 8, 1901. 29. “No Gold at Kotzebue Sound,” San Francisco Call, August 17, 1898. 30. Shotwell, November 9, 1898. 31. “Hints of Gold in Kotzebue,” San Francisco Call, August 19, 1898. 32. “Twelve Hundred Gold Seekers are Stranded at Kotzebue Sound,” San Francisco Call, September 13, 1898. 33. Articles from the Frank C. Nichols Collection, Alaska State Library, Juneau. 34. “Wild Story of Kotzebue,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 2, 1899. This story should be taken with a grain of salt, excuse the pun. The letter also alleges that a few days before the letter was sent the writer had discovered a “large nest of nuggets peering out of the frozen ground in his tent but [had] turned from the gold in disgust.” This stretches the credibility of the author of the letter. 35. “Dog Meat as Diet,” Nome News, December 2, 1899. 36. “Captain Bens’ Party Did Not Perish,” Seattle Times, July 19, 1899. 37. “How Men Will Lie,” Nome News, April 8, 1901. 38. “Terrors Exist in Nome,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 15, 1899. 39. “Stranded at St. Michael,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, August 11, 1898. 40. Bear to Secretary of the Treasury, July 30, 1899, Revenue Cutter Service, NA-AR. 41. “Bens Party Perished,” Seattle Times, July 25, 1899. 42. Bear to Secretary of the Treasury, July 30, 1899, Revenue Cutter Service Records, NA-AR. 43. A list of the sick, destitute and dead can be found in Jarvis to Secretary of the Treasury, July 30, 1899, RCS. 44. Jarvis to the Department of Treasury, July 30, 1899, RCS, NA-AR. 45. Author’s note: It is not known if these 230 people are part of the 300 mentioned previously in the paragraph. Donald Orth lists no location as “Mission Beach” but the presence of name of Robert Samms indicates that the location of the beach was near the present site of Kotzebue. This list of names, many of them illegible, came from the petition dated July 11, 1899, in the Records of the Revenue Cutter Service, NA-AR. 46. “The Whole Cheese,” Nome News, May 19, 1900. 47. Overland Expedition, page 25. 48. Overland Expedition, page 26. 49. Overland Expedition, page 26. 50. “A Missionary Drowned,” New York Times, June 18, 1898. 51. “Was She Seaworthy,” Seattle Times, March 4, 1899. 52. “Jane Gray Survivors,” Seattle Times, June 6, 1898. 53. “Jane Gray Case,” Seattle Times, July 19, 1899. 54. “From the Ku Buck,” Seattle Times, June 29, 1899. 55. “Kotzebue Sound,” Seattle Times, July 6, 1899.

212

Notes

56. “From Kotzebue Sound,” Nome News, December 16, 1899. 57. “Dying Like Sheep,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 1, 1899. 58. “How Men Will Lie,” Nome News, April 8, 1901. 59. “Return of the John Riley,” Teller News, July 25, 1901. This author is unable to state categorically that captains Coogan, Cougan and Cogan are the same man with different spellings by the newspapers and diarists. Interestingly, Captain B. Cogan was the Captain from which Erik Lindblom escaped and subsequently discovered gold on the Snake River in what became Nome. According to at least one source (NOME AND SEWARD PENINSULA, page 210), Lindblom jumped ship because he had heard from whalers that there was no gold in Kotzebue. 60. “Two Eskimos Freeze to Death,” Council City News, February 24, 1903. 61. “Dying Like Sheep,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 1, 1899.

CHAPTER EIGHT 1. Fred T. Merritt to his wife, July 4, 1900. 2. “Origin of the Word Nome,” Nome Nugget, September 17, 1901, and Cole, Nome, page 29. 3. Traditionally it took six men to establish a mining district. In addition to the Three Lucky Swedes and Price, the sextet included Dr. Kittilsen and a Lap reindeer herder named J. S. Tornanses. Cole, Nome, page 23. 4. A charge was later made in the United States Senate that immediately after the discovery of gold, Laps from the Eaton Reindeer Station had rushed in to take the best claims. An examination of the records of the Reindeer Station revealed that while gold was discovered in September of 1898, most of the Lapps did not leave until Spring of the next year. By name and date of departure, this list can be found in the appendix of Waldemar Lillo’s Dissertation, page 343. 5. Helms and Mangusso, page 11. 6. Deposition of E. T. Hatch, Collector of a the Customs, July 14, 1899, Department of the Interior Records, NA-AR. 7. Special Order #35 (?) signed by Lt. Oliver L. Spaulding, Jr., June 18, 1899, DOI. As an interesting aside, Spaulding’s orders also authorized him “five gallons of lime juice” to be given to “destitute civilians suffering from scurvy.” 8. Ravitz, page 12. 9. “Details of the Cape Nome Trouble Ventilated,” Seattle Times, August 2, 1899. 10. “Additional Charges Made Against Nome Troops,” Seattle Times, August 18, 1899. 11. “Additional Charges Made Against Nome Troops,” Seattle Times, August 18, 1898. 12. Samuels, pages 70–1. 13. Kutz, page 16. 14. Easton, page 81. 15. Forselles, page 55. 16. “The Ocean at Cape Nome Covers Much Gold,” Seattle Times, September 15, 1899. 17. “At Least $4,000,000,” Nome News, October 9, 1899. 18. Jordan, page 44. 19. Milroy, page 7. 20. “The Whole Cheese,” Nome News, May 19, 1900. 21. “Yukoners Are Rushing to Cape Nome,” Seattle Times, September 26, 1899. 22. Kutz, page 16, and “The Whole Cheese,” Nome News, May 19, 1900. 23. “Rushing to Nome,” Seattle Times, October 9, 1899. 24. Hinkley, Brady, page 193.

Notes

213

25. Hinkley, Brady, page 193. 26. Kutz, page 11. 27. Campbell, CAPE NOME, page 29. 28. Jarvis to Secretary of the Treasury, September 8, 1899; Herrnig to Secretary of the Treasury, October 25, 1899, RCS, NA-AR. 29. Brooks, page 385. This author could find no reference to any such action on the part of the Revenue Cutter Service in the Revenue Cutter Service files in the National Archives. With regard to blue tickets being used as late as 1905, please see “Rounding Up Non-Producers,” Fairbanks Evening News, September 23, 1905. It is interesting to note that the authorities in Fairbanks that freeze-up were unable to get everyone on their list. Some of those slated for removal apparently discovered that their names were on the list and went “to Kantishna and other nearby districts, expecting to return later in the winter, if they feel so inclined, hoping the officers will have forgotten them meantime.” 30. “An Official List of Nome’s Dead,” Nome Weekly News, October 6, 1900. 31. “A Year’s Crimes,” Nome Nugget, September 13, 1901. 32. Nome Criminal Case 334, National Archives. 33. Nome Criminal Case 499. 34. Nome Criminal Case 399. 35. “Yukoners Are Rushing to Cape Nome,” Seattle Times, September 26, 1899. 36. “A New Gold Field,” Seattle Times, October 18, 1899. 37. Hinkley, Brady, page 193. 38. Jordan, page 34. 39. Cole, NOME, page 38. 40. Jenkins, page 173. 41. Kutz, page 56. 42. Fred A. Baker Collection, Alaska State Library, Juneau, Diary, 276–277. 43. Colson to Secretary of the Treasury, December 24, 1900, RCS, NA-AR. 44. Carpenter, THREE YEARS, page 95. 45. Herrnig to Secretary of the Treasury, October 25, 1899, RCS, NA-AR. 46. “The Fuel Supply,” Nome News, January 20, 1900. 47. “He Got 365 Days,” Nome News, November 11, 1899. 48. Fitz, page 30. 49. “Mayor Finds Fault,” Nome News, March 3, 1900. 50. Cole, NOME, page 38. 51. “To Cleanse The Town,” Nome News, June 30, 1900. 52. French, NUGGETS, page 37. Kutz, page 11, lists the same price. 53. “As To Sanitation,” Nome News, March 3, 1900. 54. A photograph of the water wagon and the sign “16 for 1” can be found in Becker’s Here Comes the Polly, page 117. 55. Kutz, page 11. 56. Cushing to Secretary of the Treasury, June 12, 1900, RCS, NA-AR. 57. Fred T. Merritt to his wife, July 4, 1900. 58. Fred T. Merritt to his wife, July 4, 1900. 59. “Yukoners Are Rushing to Cape Nome,” Seattle Times, September 26, 1899. 60. “Most Northerly Railway,” Seattle Times, September 23, 1898. 61. “Robbed a Dying Man,” Nome Chronicle, November 14, 1900. 62. Nome Chronicle, November 14, 1900 and Hunt, NORTH, pages 118–119. 63. Hunt, Justice, page 85. 64. “Knock Out Drop Was Employed,” Nome Chronicle, September 29, 1900. 65. “Chloroformed and Robbed of $1,300,” Nome Chronicle, November 17, 1900.

Notes

214

66. Jordan, pages 41–2. 67. “Stole Muther’s Safe,” November 1, 1899, Nome Gold Digger. 68. “Burglars Make a Big Winning,” Nome Chronicle, September 25, 1900. 69. Kutz, page 44. 70. Kutz, page 38. 71. “Nome a Winter Camp,” Alaska Record-Miner, June 28, 1901. 72. “Daring Robbery on the Teller Trail,” Nome Chronicle, December 1, 1900. 73. “BAD People Must GIT,” Nome Chronicle, September 3, 1900. 74. Jordan, page 217. 75. “Queer Raid on the Tenderloin,” Nome Chronicle, August 23, 1900. 76. Wallace, John A. “We Settled Disputes with Fists,” Alaska Sportsman, November, 1939. 77. Wallace, John B. “The People of Nome Were Scandalized,” Alaska Sportsman, December, 1939. 78. Jordan, pages 188–189. 79. Jordan, page 190. 80. Samuels, page 70. 81. “Liquor Dealers Organize,” Nome News, February 3, 1900. 82. “Liquor Men’s Meeting,” Nome News, February 10, 1900. 83. Cole, Nome, page 41. 84. Brooks, page 389. 85. “Row in the Family,” Nome News, May 19, 1900. 86. “Row in the Family,” Nome News, May 19, 1900. 87. Fred T. Merritt to his wife, July 4, 1900. 88. Hunt, Justice, page 112. 89. Metson to Lillo, September 29, 1932, in the Appendix to Lillo’s Dissertation, page 336. Some historians state that “Wild Billy” Metson might have come out worse than McKenzie in any gunplay. This is not true. Metson had brought his names “Hell Fire Bill from Gold Hill” and “Two Gun Billy” from the gold fields of the Lower 48. He carried two guns, one from each of two former associates, “Pinoche” Kelly and Pat Reedy, “both of who had been fast on the draw on several occasions.” (“Hell Fire Bill from Gold Hill,” Pony Express, July, 1945.) 90. Fitz, pages 40–41 and Sutherland, page 9. 91. “Judge Noyes Leaves Nome,” Teller News, August 22, 1901. Interestingly, the Teller News printed a list of the Nome lawyers who had not signed the petition of removal. 92. Wickersham’s diary, May 3, 1924, reproduced in Atwood, WICKERSHAM, pages 83–4, indicate Noyes departed Nome with at least $30,000 in gold. 93. Hunt, Justice, page 124. 94. “Many Stowaways,” November 30, 1901, Valdez News. 95. “Black with Mining Camps,” Nome Pioneer Press, March 28, 1908.452. 96. Jarvis to Secretary of the Treasury, October 15, 1909, RCS, NA-AR. 97. “Destitute Miners Coming on Cutter,” Alaska Daily Record, September 24, 1909. 98. Kutz, pages 55–58. 99. Reed, page 43.

CHAPTER NINE 1. 2. 3. 4.

Brady to Secretary of the Interior, February 15, 1901, Governors’ Papers. Fitz, page 34. “Woman Leads—As Usual,” Midnight Sun, 1903. Yukon River in Alaska’s History, pages 169–70.

Notes

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5. Atwood, WICKERSHAM, page 103. 6. Wallace, John B. “The People of Nome were Scandalized,” Alaska Sportsman, December, 1939. 7. “Doughnuts Make a Woman Rich,” San Francisco Examiner, October 22, 1900. 8. Ricks, page 62 for Nellie Frost. Only names that were easily identifiable as women were used. The communities for which women could be found included Kenai, Fairbanks (?), Douglas, Deering, Deadwood, Coldfoot, Circle, Eagle, Sunrise, Petersburg, Quinhagak, Seward, Unalaska, Valdez, Wodesky, Loring, Fort Liscum, Fort Yukon, Hollis, Hoonah, Sitka, Ketchikan, and Miller. 9. DeArmond, Robert, “Fortunes Misfortunes,” Fairbanks Daily News Miner, March 11, 1990. 10. Kappleman, April 28, 1898. 11. Black, pages 28–9. 12. White, pages 19–24. 13. Lokke, page 52. 14. Kutz, page 58. 15. Austin, page 165. 16. Austin, page 165. 17. “Deported on the Alpha,” November 1, 1899, Nome Gold Digger. Sara Fitz, in her book Lady Sourdough (page 31) claims that she was attacked by a hormone-crazed doctor in a tent in Nome. She broke free of his clutches and her male friends chased the man down to the beach where they threw him into a small boat and sent him off to board a steamer threatening to “kill him the instant he again set foot in Alaska.” This is not included in the vigilante section because this appears to be an act of revenge rather than an organized act of miner’s justice. 18. “Young Stevens Will Do Time,” Alaska Forum, May 6, 1905. 19. Fairbanks Daily Times, January 11, 31, and February 1, 1911. 20. “Western News,” Alaska Prospector, February 18, 1904. 21. Kutz, page 65. 22. Kutz, page 56. 23. “More Wives Arrive,” Skagway News, July 10, 1898. 24. Fairbanks Gazette, July 17, 1903. 25. “Alaskans Want Wives,” Seattle Times, December 12, 1898. 26. The editorial was reprinted in the Alaska Daily Guide, January 8, 1905. 27. “Mules on Track Caused Report,” All Alaska Weekly, August 24, 1905. 28. Burr, page 26, May 22, 1899. 29. Burr, page 26, May 23 to 30, 1899. 30. “Alaskan Tragedy,” November 8, 1906, Valdez News. 31. For more on Fannie Quigley, see Steven C. Levi’s Alaskcattalo Tales, A Treasury of Alaskan Humor. 32. McKeown, page 98. 33. Daughter to Emily Slaughter, August 18, 1898, in the possession of Mina Jacobs. 34. “She Robbed a Drunkard,” Nome News, August 30, 1900. 35. Clifford, page 46. 36. Crad, page 37. 37. Clifford, page 46. 38. “Yukon River in Alaska’s History,” page 150. 39. “Why She Was Arrested Three Times in a Week,” Tanana Tribune, September 4, 1908. 40. “Is Arrested Three Times in One Week,” Fairbanks Times, September 8, 1908. 41. “Dance Halls Seem to be Doomed,” Fairbanks Times, July 1, 1908. 42. Dean, page 73.

Notes

216

43. Naske, Claus M., “Red Lights of Fairbanks,” Alaska Journal, Spring, 1984, pages 27–32. This article includes the verbatim report by Krauczunas. 44. United States vs. Mr. James McCloskey, Juneau Criminal File #666, Box 22, RG 21, NA-AR. 45. “Fifty Dollars for Fun,” Fairbanks Daily Times, July 17, 1906. 46. “Wallace Woman Feared for Her Life,” Fairbanks Evening News, July 18, 1905. 47. “A Lively Law Suit,” Fort Wrangel News, August 10, 1898. 48. Jordan, pages 73–4. There was a Nigger Jim Daugherty in Dawson who sparked a stampede in January. Many of the participants of that stampede bore the maiming of frostbite for the rest of their lives. (Berton, KLONDIKE, pages 395–398.) The author assumes that Jordan mixed up his Klondike history with that of Nome. 49. Phillips, ROADHOUSES, p. 57. 50. Hines, pages 92–95. 51. “Chief Krshakes’ Preserve,” Seattle Times, December 1, 1897. 52. Collier, page 250. 53. “Negress Returns from Alaska with a Million,” Nome Pioneer Press, March 7, 1908. 54. Wharton, pages 169–171; this story comes from Wickersham and concludes with the drunks fooling May into believing that the judge in the case was trying to steal her stovepipe. In a rage, May attacked the judge in his bed, cursing at him for not only ruling against her in court but trying to steal her stovepipe, a valuable commodity in Circle. Wickersham lists this as an example of practical jokes in the northland. There is also a short clip on May in “Women Were Everywhere,” Columbia, Spring 1994. 55. Weimer, page 156. 56. “Preston Sentenced to Serve Ten Days,” Fairbanks Times, August 21, 1906. 57. “No Chinese Wanted,” Semi-Weekly Star (Whitehorse), June 28, 1902. 58. Dearmond, Juneau, page 146. 59. Beattie, Ed, “China Joe,” Alaska Sportsman, September, 1949. 60. “Japs for Valdez,” Juneau Daily Record, September 2, 1902. 61. “Looks Like Business,” Valdez News, September 6, 1902. 62. “Chinese Murderer,” Juneau Record-Miner, August 18, 1902. 63. “Japs Confess,” Valdez News, December 31, 1904. 64. “Japanese Burn the Body of the Dead,” Tanana Tribune, July 22, 1906. 65. “Wada, the Jap, Is on Deck,” Tanana Weekly Miner, January 11, 1907. 66. Cole, Barnette, page 42. A good summary of Wada’s accomplishments can be found in Hunt’s NORTH OF ‘53, pages 164–65. As a footnote to a footnote, according to Johnny Wallace, a Nome old-timer, Wada once won a sled dog race in Nome. The race was memorable because a harlot bet $5,000 on Wada, a long shot because he was only given five to one odds. Wada won and the harlot left Nome with her stash. 67. “Japanese Musher Arrested at Candle,” Nome Gold Digger, December 19, 1906. 68. “Rich Strike in Alaska,” New York Times, January 19, 1903. 69. Barry, pages 153–4. 70. Reed, Irving McKinney, “Frank Yasuda,” Alaska Sportsman, June, 1963. 71. “Seal Poachers,” October 5, 1901, Valdez News. 72. Munger to Secretary of the Treasury, November 15, 1907, RCS, NA-AR. 73. Valdez News, March 12, 1904.

CHAPTER TEN 1. Jordan, page 38. 2. Jordan, page 38.

Notes

217

3. Harnett, page 2. 4. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury to Collector of Customs, Sitka, January 11, 1909, Collector of the Customs Papers, NA-AR. 5. Kleinschmidt, page 575. 6. “Alaskan Game Doomed,” Seattle Times, November 8, 1898. 7. “Trouble with Kobuk Eskimos,” Council City News, March 7, 1903. 8. Captain Charles P. Elliot to the Department of the Interior, Indian Affairs, September 22, 1899, Department of Interior Papers, NA-AR. 9. “Alaskan Reports,” Seattle Times, April 6, 1898. 10. “Starvation,” Seattle Times, February 17, 1899. 11. “Point Hope without Food,” Nome Pioneer Press, November 2, 1907. 12. “Natives Starved to Death,” Nome Pioneer Press, June 11, 1908. 13. “Trouble with Kobuk Eskimo,” Council City News, March 7, 1903. 14. The largest number of Natives convicted for murder was six. They were accused of killing a Skagway grocer and his wife on October 24, 1899. The murders were kept as a secret until one of the Indians converted to Christianity at a Salvation Army revival in Skagway and confessed to the crime. (Gold Rush Cemetery, 1996.) 15. “Report Copper River Natives,” Valdez News, November 27, 1906. 16. “Olesen to Daniels,” July 21, 1908, RCS. 17. Wilson, page 110. 18. Cantwell to Secretary of the Treasury, September 17, 1900. RCS, NA-AR. 19. Fortuine, page 223. 20. Savage, page 91. 21. Evans to Secretary of the Treasury, July 6, 1900, Revenue Agent File, NA-AR. 22. “Brought Plague Here,” Nome Daily News, June 29, 1900, in Kutz, page 33. Kutz also reported another quarantine in June of 1902 when the Senator arrived with two cases of small pox; page 145. 23. Kutz, page 33. 24. Jordan, page 135. 25. Clark, page 35. 26. Kutz, page 57. 27. “Smallpox on the Trail,” Nome Chronicle, December 12, 1900. 28. Acting Assistant Surgeon to Governor J. G. Brady, May 6, 1901, Governors’ Papers; Godall to Collector of Customs, Sitka, March 1, 1902, Customs Records, NA-AR. 29. Leonhoddy (?) to Governor Brady, May 6, 1901, Governor’s Papers, NA-AR. 30. Fortune, pages 239–40. 31. Cushing to the Secretary of the Treasury, June 12, 1900, RCS, NA-AR. 32. “False Alarm,” Alaska Record-Miner, July 19, 1901. 33. “Killed by Indians,” Vancouver Province, November 23, 1898. 34. “He is an Avenger,” Seattle Times, June 20, 1899. 35. “Wrecked,” Daily Alaskan, October 25, 1901. 36. “Two Men Killed,” Nome News, May 5, 1900. 37. June 24, 1899, Stikeen River Journal. 38. Sitka Criminal File #1348, Box 21, NA-AR. 39. (Fairbanks) Alaska Citizen, September 21, 1914. 40. “In the Skookum House,” Cordova Alaskan, October 6, 1906. 41. de Windt, page 181. 42. “Smallpox Scare,” Juneau Record-Miner, May 10, 1901. 43. Rodey, page 7. 44. “Schools and Teachers,” Skaguay News, December 9, 1898.

218

Notes

45. The most readable source is Dorothy Jean Ray, “Sinrock Mary,” Pacific Historical Quarterly, July, 1984. 46. Frederick to Brady, July 25, 1901, Governors’ Papers. 47. Kilgore to Secretary of the Treasury, August 27, 1901, RCS. 48. Barry, Mary J., page 65. 49. Rodey, page 9. 50. Brady to Schwatka, December 24, 1897, Governor’s Papers. 51. “Chief Johnson at his Old Tricks Again,” Alaska Record Miner, March 17, 1900. 52. Captain R. T. Yeatman to Commissioner of the Land Office, June 30, 1898, Department of Interior Papers, NA-AR. 53. “Claims Eskimos as Friends,” Alaska Daily Guide, January 4, 1904. 54. Richards to Secretary of the Interior, Department of the Interior Papers, National Archives, November 25, 1905. 55. “The Government, the Missionary and the Eskimo,” Council City News, May 19, 1906. 56. Carpenter, Three Years, pages 32–3. 57. Samms Diary, sometime after May 13, 1899. Re-finding material in the diaries is difficult. This pledge fills an entire page and is headed “Church Record” and below that “Application for Membership.” 58. Samms Diary, October 13, 1899. 59. “The Esquimo,” Valdez News, January 21, 1905. 60. “Natives Suffering,” Valdez News, May 26, 1906. 61. “Case of Assault and Battery,” Yukon Press, March 24, 1906. 62. “Gradually Getting Worse,” Alaska Forum, April 18, 1901. 63. “Trouble with Kobuk Eskimos,” Council City News, March 7, 1903. 64. “Natives Complain,” Nome News, February 3, 1900. 65. “Natives Complain,” Nome News, February 3, 1900. 66. Goetzmann, LOOKING, pages 161–168. 67. Valdez Criminal File #490, Box 28, NA-AR. 68. Davidson to Governor Strong, May 6, 1914, Governor’s Papers. 69. South East Alaska Christian Endeavor Convention to President Theodore Roosevelt, November 6–9, 1904, in the possession of the United States Department of the Interior Papers, National Archives. 70. IN THE MATTER OF THE FINAL REPORT OF THE GRAND JURY, APRIL, 1905 TERM to the United States District Court of the Second Division of the District of Alaska in the possession of the United States Department of the Interior papers, National Archives. 71. Naske and Slotnik, page 186. 72. Slayton to Secretary of the Treasury, November 14, 1904. 73. Lopp to Hamlet, December 20, 1904, RCS, NA-AR. 74. Hamlet to Secretary of the Treasury, August 23, 1905, RCS, NA-AR. 75. Hamlet to the Secretary of the Treasury, November 26, 1906, RCS, NA-AR. 76. Andersen, page 30. 77. “Indians Sell Girls,” Nome Pioneer Press, January 2, 1908. 78. Hamlet to Secretary of the Treasury, October 3, 1907, RCS, NA-AR. 79. Bockstoce, page 242. 80. Bockstoce, pages 276–7. 81. Bockstoce, page 277, Other items on Newth can be found in “Victims of Sea Captains,” Fairbanks Evening News, August 15, 1905 and “Debauching the Natives,” Fairbanks Evening News, August 25, 1905.

Notes

219

82. Hamlet to Secretary of the Interior, September 26, 1906, RCS, NA-AR. 83. Hamlet to Secretary of the Treasury, September 11, 1906, RCS, NA-AR. 84. “Whaler Plead Guilty,” Alaska Prospector, January 17, 1907. Incidentally, the whaler was also sentenced to “one day in prison.” 85. Henderson to Secretary of the Treasury, September 24, 1907, RCS, NA-AR. 86. This line comes from Section III of the petitions to the President of the United States, a copy of which is in the Appendix. 87. Hamlet to Secretary of the Treasury, November 26, 1906, RCS, NA-AR. 88. Nathan V. Harlan, United States Attorney’s Office to the Attorney General of the United States, January 31, 1903, RCS, NA-AR. 89. Harlan to U.S. Attorney, January 31, 1903, RCS, NA-AR. 90. Jordan, page 181. 91. Cole, Barnette, page 137.

CHAPTER ELEVEN 1. Wharton, pages 232–233. 2. Cole, Barnette, pages 45–54. 3. “Chenoa, No Gold,” Alaska Forum, February 28, 1903. 4. Robe, page 100. 5. Cole, BARNETTE, page 54. 6.` Cole, BARNETTE, page 58. 7. Jordan, page 66. 8. Dean, Breaking Trail, pages 72–3. 9. Cole, Barnette, pages 82–3. 10. “Gold Output of Alaska,” December 22, 1906, Fairbanks News. 11. Cole, Barnette, page 81. 12. “Barnettes Are Divorced,” Los Angeles Times, January 22, 1920. 13. “Fifty Years Ago in May, Barnette Met his Fate,” and “The Trail of Barnette Leads South of the Border,” Fairbanks News-Miner, July 16, 1983. 14. Cole, Ghosts, page 9.

CHAPTER TWELVE 1. Blaine to Shoup, August 18, 1900, Crosby. 2. Kynell, page 47. 3. “New from Cape Nome District,” Seattle Times, July 14, 1899. There was also a mass meeting held in Juneau in November of 1896 where Founding Father R. G. Goldstein was forced to attend where the matter of lynching was discussed with regard to Goldstein refusal to turn over a legal document to the township. He turned over the document which was never returned to him. (Nichols, footnote on page 170.) 4. Dabovich to Brady, July 29, 1902, RCS, NA-AR. 5. Blaine to Shoup, August 18, 1900, Crosby. 6. W. V. Loy to Department of the Interior. This involves a letters back and forth between Loy and the Secretary of Alaska between December 20, 1900 and May 10, 1901, Governors’ Papers. There is no indication as to the resolution of the matter. 7. “News of the Northwest,” August 31, 1901, Valdez News. 8. Lokke, pages 44–5. The story of the beating can be found in “Whipping a Thief,” Skagway News, February 18, 1898.

220

Notes

9. Lokke, page 46. 10. Herning, September 22, 1898. 11. de Windt, page 163. 12. Wharton, page 172. 13. Wells, pages 25 and 26. 14. Cantwell, page 183. 15. Beach, pages 47–8. 16. Stacey, page 38. 17. “District News,” Valdez News, December 31, 1904. 18. “Two Eskimos Frozen to Death,” Council City News, January 24, 1899. 19. Wharton, page 171. 20. Beach, page 47. 21. Gruening, READER, page 148. 22. Canton was notorious enough to be listed as one of the six most notable “Bad Guys” in advertisements for the Time/Life book illustrated book THE GUNFIGHTERS. Others in that select group included Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Bat Masterson, John Wesley Hardin and Wyatt Earp. 23. Hunt, Distant Justice, page 70. 24. Shirley, pages 372–373. As an interesting footnote to a footnote, Dunn’s body was buried by his family in the local cemetery the next Saturday, which clearly enraged the citizenry. This was expressed forcefully when, the next morning, a pile of fresh hog entrails were placed on the fresh grave. 25. Hunt, Justice, page 79. 26. Jordan, Frontier Law and Order, page 161. 27. “The Better Way,” Tanana Leader, August 18, 1910. The actual assault charge was “threatening to make a widow out of an old tillicum of his.” 28. Wharton, page 160. 29. Scott, page 98. 30. “He Got 365 Days,” Nome News, November 11, 1899. 31. Schrader, page 46. 32. Nome News, August 31, 1904. 33. “Cold Stronger than Prison Bars,” Fairbanks Daily News, January, 14, 1909. 34. “Police Court Proceedings Took Humorous Turn,” Fairbanks Daily Times, August 21, 1906. 35. Barry, page 83. 36. “Gets Three Months’ Sentence for ‘Butting In’ at Circle,” Alaska Forum, October 7, 1905. 37. “The Match Applied,” Nome News, November 11, 1899. This story was unconfirmed by the paper at the time of publication and was so stated in the article. 38. “Talk of Hemp for Blanketers,” Fairbanks Daily News, February 25, 1909. 39. United States vs. L. D. Ellexson, Same E. Wagner, A. R. Young, W. McManus, Frank Dunn, Charles Harper, Frank Churchill, and C. Edwin Cone, Anchorage Criminal Case File 124, NA-AR. 40. “Nome a Winter Camp,” Juneau Record-Miner, June 28, 1901. 41. Anderson, page 239. 42. Anderson, pages 267–269. 43. Anderson, page 275. 44. Anderson, pages 274–275. 45. Anderson, page 276.

Notes

221

46. Anderson, ROMIG, page 269. 47. Acting Secretary to Secretary of War, January 10, 1899, Secretary of the Interior, NA-AR. 48. “C. W. Bruce,” Juneau Record Miner, May 16, 1902. 49. “Joseph Jourdan,” Juneau Record Miner, June 27, 1902. 50. “Jolley is Sent to Jail,” Council City News, May 26, 1903. 51. “Incitements by the Wholesale,” Council City News, May 23, 1903. 52. “Richards Removed,” Council City News, November 26, 1904. 53. “Governor Brady Asked to Resign,” Alaska Forum, April 15, 1905. 54. Wickersham, Tales, pages 42–44. 55. Atwood, Wickersham, pages 91–3. 56. “Captains Indicted,” November 20, 1907, Valdez News. 57. “Wicked News Men of Nome,” December 3, 1906, Fairbanks Times. 58. Testimony quotes are from the Board of Investigation conducted by Captain O. C. Hamlet of the Revenue Cutter Service on July 30, 1906, before Bodfish was taken to Nome. The signed documents are in the Revenue Cutter Service Collection, National Archives. 59. McCurdy, page 129. 60. Statement of Alfred Carlson, Department of Justice File, Marcy 20, 1907, in the Revenue Cutter Service Papers, National Archives. 61. Klengenberg, pages 211–215, 217, and 225. 62. Stefansson, pages 73–4. 63. McCurdy, page 129. 64. Klengenberg, pages 210–215. He also claims his crew hired an Eskimo by the name of Kolmak to kill him. Klengenberg saved himself by “stari[ing] at [Kolmak] without a sound, but boring deep into him through his squinty eyes.” page 221. 65. Anderson to Revenue Cutter Service, October 5, 1907. 66. Bunell to Secretary of the Treasury, May 14, 1909, RCS, NA-AR. 67. Simms to Secretary of Commerce and Labor, August 8, 1906, RCS, NA-AR. 68. “Jury Out Nine Hours Declare Not Guilty,” Alaska Daily Record, September 24, 1909. 69. “600 Reindeer,” Seattle Times, November 16, 1897. 70. Commissioners Records for Circle and St. Michael, Alaska State Archives. 71. Nome Police Records, Alaska State Library. 72. “At Least $4,000,000,” Nome News, October 9, 1899. 73. Johnson, March 17, 1898. 74. Dawson Funeral Index, UAF. 75. Heller, page 229. 76. Wickersham, TRAILS, pages 38–9. 77. Kitchener, page 15. 78. Hunt, page 139. 79. Fitz, page 63.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN 1. Alaska Forum, April 25, 1906. 2. Davis and Atwood, pages 13–14. 3. Berton, pages 18–19. 4. Eagle City Tribune, October 8, 1898, in the possession of the State of Alaska, Historical Library in Juneau.

222

Notes

5. Atwood, Wickersham, page 106. 6. “Battle With Salmon Bellies,” February 21, 1903, Council City News. 7. “Sight is a Ghastly One,” Nome Pioneer Press, April 2, 1908. This was actually a follow-up to “Two Men Meet Death—Are Eaten by Dogs” which appeared in the same newspaper on March 31. In that article, in the interest of historical accuracy, it was stated that the bodies of both men had been found “lying in snow, frozen stiff” though “two-thirds of the flesh [was eaten] from both [men].” 8. “Attorney Fink Causes Trouble,” Council City News, July 25, 1903. 9. “News of the Northwest,” Valdez News, July 12, 1902. 10. “District News,” Valdez News, March 12, 1904. 11. “Next!” Alaska Forum, November 1, 1900. 12. Alaska Forum, April 25, 1906. 13. The entire section on the Rampart era of journalism came be found in Dora Elizabeth McLean’s MA thesis, “Early Newspapers on the Upper Yukon Watershed: 1894–1907,” University of Alaska, Fairbanks. 14. Yukon Press, Weekly for 6 months in 1907 in Tanana Tanana Citizen, 9 months Hot Springs Echo, 1908–1913 Tanana News, July to October, 1913 Free Press, (Fairbanks), two months Socialist Press, June, 1914–1915. 15. “Gibbon has Kangaroo Court,” Hot Springs Echo, May 8, 1909. [Author’s note: The article insinuates that the trial took place in Cleary but the title of the news story seems to indicate that trial was in Gibbon. However, the author could find no community by the name of Gibbon but the judicial unit in the area was the “Fort Gibbon Precinct.”] 16. “Editor Fights Judge,” Northern Light, March 2, 1907. 17. Wickersham, Old Yukon, page 153. 18. United States vs. Hinton, Fairbanks Criminal File 231, NA-AR. 19. United States vs. Hinton, Fairbanks Criminal File 232, NA-AR. 20. United States vs. Hinton, Fairbanks Criminal File 233, NA-AR. 21. United States vs. Hinton, Fairbanks Criminal File 234, NA-AR. 22. United States vs. Hinton, Fairbanks Criminal File 235, NA-AR. 23. Seward Weekly Gateway, May 25, 1907 and June 29, 1907. The Yukon Valley News ran headlines of the trail and acquittal. 24. Wickersham, Old Yukon, pages 153–4. 25. United States vs. George Hinton Henry, RG 21,Fairbanks Criminal File #459, NA-AR. 26. “G. H. Henry Found Guilty,” Fairbank Daily News Miner, May 6, 1911. 27. No case file for this can be found. The reference to the case was in “G. H. Henry Found Guilty,” Fairbanks Daily News Miner, May 6, 1911. 28. United States vs. George Hinton Henry, RG 21, Fairbanks Criminal File #592, NA-AR. 29. “Editor Henry in the Toils,” Alaska Citizen, October 13, 1913. 30. United States vs. Hinton, Fairbanks Criminal File #459, NA-AR. 31. “Editor Henry is Not Guilty,” “Alferd Sutton Pleads Guilty on One Charge,” and “Judge Bunnell imposes First Rape Sentence,” Alaska Citizen, April 10, 1916; “Editor Arrested on Libel Charge,” Alaska Citizen, April 3, 1916. 32. United States vs. Henry, Fairbanks Criminal File #735, NA-AR; “Henry is Given Five Months in Federal Bastile,” Fairbanks News-Miner, May 5, 1917. 33. “Henry Found Not Guilty,” Alaska Citizen, February 12, 1917.

Notes

223

34. “Rottenness Personified,” Alaska Citizen, January 22, 1917. 35. June 29, 1918. 36. There have been hints that George Hinton Henry went to Berkshire, England but this author could not corroborate that rumor. An interesting footnote to Henry, and reported in the Fairbanks Daily News on September 11, 1916, was that his brother, Frank Henry, was brutally killed at the hands of Mexican outlaws who subsequently sacked his home. The body was sent back to England. There is no listing of a George Hinton Henry in either the 1920 or the 1930 U.S. Census. 37. There is no evidence that W. F. Thompson ever referred to himself or any other printer as “Wrong Font.” The term comes from the fact that “WF” is a proofreader’s indication that a font is in error. Other names by which he was known include “Forepaugh,” “Wandering Foot,” “The Old Man,” “The Ancient One,” “Dude,” and “Old Goat,” Solka, page 67. 38. Solka, page 11. 39. Cole, GHOSTS, pages 36 and 37. 40. Davis and Atwood, page 15. 41. United States vs. A. R. O’Brien, Juneau Criminal File #647, Box 21, RG 21, NA-AR. Of passing interest, Hopp was the editor of the Fort Wrangel News that covered the Bachelor’s Club. 42. United States vs. L. S. Keller, Juneau Criminal File #649, Box 21, RG 21, NA-AR. 43. United States vs. Edward C. Russell, Juneau Criminal File #644B, Box 21, RG 21, NA-AR. 44. United States vs. W. C. Ullrich, Juneau Criminal File #645, Box 21, RG 21, NA-AR. 45. United States vs. W. C. Ullrich, Juneau Criminal File #646, NA-AR. 46. United States vs. A. R. O’Brien and C. M. Summers, Juneau Criminal File $641. 47. United States vs. C. F. Cheek, C. M. Summers and Henry Shattuck, Juneau Criminal File #643, NA-AR. 48. United States vs. A. R. O’Brien, Juneau Criminal File #647, NA-AR; United States vs. Charles A. Hopp, Juneau Criminal File #648, NA-AR; “O’Brien Fine Will Amount to $230.00,” Alaska Daily Record, October 28, 1909; “Ketchikan Jury is Out but Ten Minutes,” Alaska Daily Record, October 25, 1909; “Transcript Forced to Suspend This Morning,” Alaska Daily Record, September 10, 1909; 49. Juneau Daily Transcript, September 8, 1909. 50. Clifford, page 451. 51. Who’s Who in Alaskan Politics, page 105; Klondike Newsman.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN 1. Curtin, page 133. 2. “Mining Case Decision Could Affect 1,400 Claims,” Alaska Journal Of Commerce, January 17, 1994, page 3. 3. “Klondike’s Grand Total,” Post-Intelligencer, July 14, 1899. 4. Adney, page 467. 5. Berton, Fever, page 127; “Seattle got the Bulk of Alaska Trade,” Post-Intelligencer, December 21, 1898. 6. Curtin, page 133. 7. “Point Hope Without Food,” Nome Pioneer Press, November 2, 1907. 8. “Storms Will Rage on Coast,” Nome Pioneer Press, November 2, 1907. 9. “Susitna Stampede,” Nome Pioneer Press, December 28, 1907.

224

Notes

APPENDIX 1. “The Copper River Code,” Victoria B C., Daily Colonist, March 29, 1898. 2. Nome Grand Jury to the United States District Court of the Second Division, in the papers of the Department of the Interior, April, 1905, National Archives. 3. “Natives Suffering,” Valdez News, May 26, 1906.



PRIMARY SOURCES Alaska Packers Association Records, microfiche, in the possession of the Z. J. Loussac Library. Alaska Trial Courts Criminal Files, RG 21, National Archives—Alaska Region. Alig, Joyce L. Old Gold Rush to Alaska Diaries of 1898–1900. Messinger Press, Ohio, 2001. Axe, B. E. Papers in the possession of the University of Washington. Barrett, W. T., M. D. Papers in the possession of the Sisters of St. Ann Archives,Victoria, B.C. Bufvers, John. Diary in the possession of the Z. J. Loussac Library, Anchorage, Alaska. Burr, A. Regina. Diary in the possession of the Anchorage Musem of History and Art. Captain J. D. Winchester’s Experiences on a Voyage from Lynn, Massachusets to San Francisco, Cal. And to the Alaskan Gold Fields. Newcoomb & Gauss Printers, 1900. Cavanaugh, Albert B. Papers in the possession of the University of Washington. Chilton, Robert S. Personal papers in the possession of Duke University. Circle, Bylaws of the Miners of Alaska State Library. Circle, Commissioners Records. Alaska State Library. Clum, John P. Papers in the possession of the University of Arizona. Coghill, William A. “An Account of Some of the Alaskan Experience of W. A. Coghill as told to William Coghill Jr.” in the possession of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Collins, Henry A. Papers in the possesion of the Huntington Library. Cravez, Pam. Seizing the Frontier, Alaskas Territorial Lawyers, 1984, unpublished in the possession of the Z. J. Loussac Library in Anchorage. Crosby, Hartley. Collection of seven letters in the possession of the Alaska State Library. Dawson Funeral Index in the possession of the Rasmuson Library, UAF. Dey, Robert L. Diary in the possession of Dartmouth College. Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon or Indian Trade Language of the North Pacific Coast. Victoria B.C., 1899, in the possession of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art.

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Farnsworth, Robert J. Personal narrative in the possession of the Archives, University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Glenn, Edwin F. Papers in the possession of the Archives, University of Alaska, Anchorage. Goodwin, Freida. Oral history of her life in the possession of Richard Miller of Anchorage. Governors’ Papers of Alaska. The originals are in Washington D. C. at the National Archives but a microfilm copy of the dcouments are available at the National Archives—Alaska Region. Hadley, Martha. The Alaskan Diary of an Alaskan Pioneer Missionary. Self-published, 1969. Harris, Richard T. Papers in the possession of the University of Alaska Anchorage. Hartnett, Maurice. Diary of M.A. Hartnett on trip to Kotzebue Sound, Alaska, 1898, photocopy in the possession of the Univeristy of Washington. Hartshorn, Florence. Papers in the possession of the University of Washington. Hekrdle, Kevin D. “Dangerous Passage: Gold Rush Shipwrecks of 1898,” Alaska Historical Cmmission Studies in History, No. 194, June, 1986. This monograph was found in the Z. J. Loussac Library in Anchorage Alaska. Herdman, James. My First Stampede. Columbia Publishing Company, Long Beach, WA., nd. Herning, Orville George. Diaries in the possession of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. Hubbard, II, Charles Goodyear. Papers in the possession of the University of Alaska, Anchorage. Jackson, Sheldon. Papers in the possession of the Sheldon Jackson Library, Sitka. Jacobs, Myna. Personal papers. Jenks, Issac. Papers in the possession of the Huntington Library. Johnson, Kirke E. Letters in the possession of the Oregon Historical Society. Kappleman, Frank. Letter to his family in the possession of the Z. J. Loussac Library, Anchorage, Alaska. Lillo, Waldemar Engvald. “The Alaska Gold Mining Company and the Cape Nome Conspiracy,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of North Dakota, 1935. Mackey, Billy E. “Iditarod: Portrait of an Alaskan Gold Community,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Northern Arizona University. Martin, George D. “Reminiscence About a 250 Mile Trek in Alaska,” in the possession of the Kansas State Historical Society. Marx, Walter J. “History of Teller,” ND in the possession of the Lois Morey Papers, University of Alaska, Anchorage. Merritt, Fred T. Papers in the possession of the University of Washington. Milroy, Robert Houston. Papers in the possession of the University of Washington. Morey, Lois. Papers in the possession of the University of Alaska, Anchorage. Nome Police Records, Alaska State Library. Norby, “Yakima” Pete. Interview in the possession of the Yakima Valley Historical Society. Norris, Frank. “Gawking at the Midnight Sun,” Alaska Historical Commission Project No. 170, June, 1985. Orth, Donald J. Dictionary of Alaska Place Names. USGS, Department of the Interior, Professional Paper 567, 1967. Perkins, William T. Papers in the possession of the University of Washington. Phillips, Walter T. Roadhouses of the Richardson Highway. Funded by a grant from the Alaska Historical Commission, 1984. Poppe Family Reminiscents. Document in the possession of the Univeristy of Alaska Anchorage Archives. Pugh, Arthur. Diary in the possession of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Ray, Captain P. H. “Relief of the Destitute in Gold Fields,” 56th Congress, 1st Session, Senate Report No. 1023.

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Record of Prisoners Received, U.S. Penitentiary, McNeil Island, RG 129, National Archives— Pacific Northwest Region. Reick, Addie. Diary in the possession of the Western Historical Manuscript Collection, Columbia, Missouri. Reid, Shad. Diary, copy in the possession of the Alaska State Library, Juneau. Remich, J. E. Dingo, Dumpyned and Mike Keene. Self-published and undated, in the possession of the Z. J. Loussac Library in Anchorage, Alaska. Report of the Cruise of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Bear and the Overland Espedition for the Relief of the Whalers in the Arctic Ocean. United States Government Printing Office, 1899. Robe, Cecil Francis. “The Penetrtion of an Alaskan Frontier, The Tanana Valley and Fairbanks,” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1943. Robertson, Frank C. and Beth Kay Harris. Soapy Smith, King of Con Men. Hastings House, 1961. Rock Island log book in the possession of the Huntington Museum. Rodey, Bernard. “A random, unrevised account of a midwinter ‘Mush’ or overland trip from Nome to Cordova, Valdez and Seward, Alaska with his philosophical, economic and political views regarding the great territory, and his journal of the trip, by B. S. Rodey, U.S. District Attorney at Nome” in Claus M. Naske’s A History of the Alaska Federal District Court System, 1884-1959, and the Creation of the State Supreme Court System prepared pursuant to RSA 410059 between the Alaska Court System and the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Alaska, in July of 1985 in the possession of the Law Library at the Alaska State Court in Anchorage. St. Michael, Commissioner Records. Alaska State Archives. Samms Diaries. Location of the original Quaker diaries is not known. Poor photocopies of these Quaker diaries were found in the archives at Whittier College in Southern California. Seitz, Dr. Louis Seitz. Letter in the possession of the Margaret I King Library, University of Kentucky. Shotwell, Margharete Ross. Personal Papers in the possession of the Univerity of Washington. Smith, Kathleen Loop. “A Pioneer Family in Alaska, Ellen Loop’s Letters” unpublished collection in the possession of the University of Alaska, Anchorage. Spencer, Arthur C., III. Papers in the possession of the University of Washington. Sutherland, Dan. Papers in the possession of UAF. Templeton, Archie. Papers in the possession of the University of Alaska Anchorage. United States Government. Admiralty Register, United States District Court in the possession of the State of Alaska Archives, Juneau. ———. Annual List of Merchant Vessels of the United States. ———. Bankruptcy Case Files of the US District Court for the District and Territory of Alaska, Second Divison (Nome), 1901–52. ———. Census of 1900 in the possession of the Z. J. Loussac Library. ———. Census of 1910 in the possession of the Z. J. Loussac Library. ———. Civil Case Files of the U.S. District Court for the District and Territory of Alaska, Second Division (Nome) 1908–1955. ———. Criminal Case Files of the US District Court for the District and Territory of Alaska, Second Division (Nome). ———. Custom Service, original documentation from St. Michael, 1898–1905, in the possession of the Z. J. Loussac Library in Anchorage. ———. Dispatches of the U.S. Consuls in Dawson City in the possession of the National Archives—Alaska Region. ———. Index by District to U.S. Coast Guard Reports of Assistance, in the possession of the National Archives—Alaska Region.

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United States Government. Records of Alaska Customhouses in the possession of the National Archives—Alaska Region. ———. Records of the United States Department of the Interior in the possession of the National Archives—Alaska Region. ———. Records of Entries and Liquidations, Eagle, in the possession of the National Archives—Alaska Region. ———. Revenue Cutter Service, Alaska File, in the possession of the National Archives— Alaska Region. ———. Report Upon the Customs District, Public Service, and Resources of Alaska Territory by William Gouverneur Morris, 18799. in the possession of the Z. J. Loussac Library. ———. U.S. Coast Guard Casualty and Wreck Reports in the possession of the National Archives—Alaska Region. Wade, George. Documents regarding his criminal record are in the possession of the United States Bureau of Prisons. Watts, C. W. Papers in the possession of the Huntington Library. Whyte, Bert. Papers in the possession of the University of Washington. Wickersham, James. Papers in the possession of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and the Huntington Library. Author’s note: There is a free-floating collection of Wickersham letters and files on microfilm. The originals may be in Washington, D.C. Wonderlin, Fred N. Diary in the possession of the State Historical Society of Kansas.

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Bowen, Robert. O. An Alaskan Dictionary. Nooshnik Press, Spenard, Alaska, 1965. Brooks, Alfred Hulse. Blazing Alaska’s Trails. University of Alaska, 1953. Brown, William E. A History of the Denali-Mount McKinley Region, Alaska. National Park Service, 1991. Buranelli, Vincent. Gold: An Illustrated History. Hammond, Inc., Maplewood, New Jersey, 1979. Burke, John. Rougue’s Progress. G. P. Putnam’s, 1975. Burnham, John B. The Rim of Mystery. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1929. Burroughs, Polly. The Great Ice Ship Bear. Van Nordstrand Reinhold Company, 1970. Calasanctius, Sister Mary Joseph. The Voice of Alaska. Sisters of St. Anne, Lachine, Quebec, 1947. Campbell, J. L. Cape Nome, Alaska, The Poor Man’s Diggings. Self-published, 1900. Cantwell, J. C. Report of the Operations of the U.S. Revenue Steamer Nunivak. Government Printing Office, 1902. Carlson, Leland H. An Alaskan Gold Mine. Northwestern University Press, 1951. Carpenter, Frank G. Alaska, Our Northern Wonderland. Doubleday, & Company, New York, 1925. Carpenter, Herman. Three Years in Alakska. Howard Company, 1901. Cashen, William R. A Breif History of Fairbanks. Self-published, 1971. Chase, Will H. The Sourdough Pot. Burton Publishing, Kansas City, 1943. Choate, Glenda J. Skagway Alaska, Gold Rush Cemetery. Lynn Canal Publishing, 1996. Church in Alaska’s Past. State of Alaska, Office of History and Archaelogy Miscellaneous Publication 23, 1979. Clark, Henry W. Buck Choquette, Stampeder. Self-published, 1960. ———. History of Alaska. Books for Libraries Press, New York, 1972. Clifford, Howard. Rails North. Superior Publishing, 1981. ———. The Skagway Story. Alaska Northwest Publishing Company, 1975. Cohen, Stan. Gold Rush Gateway. Pictoral Histories, Missoula, 1986. Cole, Terrance. E. T. Barnette. Alaska Northwest Publishing Company, 1981. ———. Ghosts of the Gold Rush. Tanana-Yukon Historical Society, 1977. ———. Nome, “City of the Golden Beaches,” Alaska Geographic, 1984. Collier, William Ross, and Edwin Victor Westrate. The Reign of Soapy Smith. Sun Dial, New York, 1937. Colp, Harry D. The Strangest Story Ever Told. Exposition Press, 1953. Cordova to Kennecott, Alaska. Cordova Historical Society, 1988. Couch, Jim. “The Wizard of Eagle,” Alaska Sportsman, February, 1957. Crad, Joseph. White Hell of the North. Sampson Low, Marston & Company, London, 1900. Crane, Water R. Gold and Silver. John Wiley & Sons, 1908. Curtin, Walter R. Yukon Voyage. Caxton Printers, Idaho, 1938. Curtis, Edward S. “The Rush to the Klondike Over the Mountain Passes,” The Century Magazine, March 1898. Davis, Mary Lee. Sourdough Gold. W. A. Wilde Co., Boston, 1933. Davis, Phyllis, and Evangeline Atwood. A Guide to Alaskan Newspapers. Gastineau Channel Centennial Association and Alaska Division of State Libraries and Museums, 1976. Davis, Trevor M. Looking Back on Juneau, The First Hundred Years. Self-published, 1979. Dean, David M. Breaking Trail: Hudson Stock of Texas and Alaska. Ohio University Press, 1988. DeArmond, Robert N. “Fortunes Misfortunes,” Fairbanks Daily News Miner, March 11, 1990. ———. The Founding of Juneau. Gastineau Channel Centennial Association, 1967. ———. A Sitka Chronology. Sitka Historical Society, 1993.

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Nichols, Jeanette Paddock. Alaska, A History of Its Administration, Exploitation and Industrial Development During the First Half Century Under the Rule of the United States. Arthur H. Clark Co., 1924. Nome and Seward Peninsula, History, Description, Biographies and Stories. E. S. Harrison, Seattle, 1905. O’Connor, Harvey. The Guggenheims. Covici Friede, 1937. O’Connor, Richard. High Jinks on the Kondike. Bobbs-Merrill, 1954. Orth, Donald I. Dictionary of Alaska Place Names. United States Department of the Interior, 1967. Ostrogorsky, Michael. “Women Were Everywhere,” Columbia, Spring, 1994. Phillips, James W. Alaska—Yukon Place Names. University of Washington,1973. Pitcher, James S. Sourdough Jim Pitcher. Alaska Northwest Publishing Company, 1985. Pointer, Larry. In Search of Butch Cassidy. University of Oklahoma Press, 1977. Proceedings of the Conference on Alaska History. “Frontier Alaska.” AMU Press, 1968. Ravitz, Abe C. Rex Beach. Western Writers Series No. 113, Boise State University, 1994. Ray, Dorothy Jean. “Sinrock Mary,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly, July, 1984. Reed, Irving McKenny. Boyhood in the Nome Gold Camp. University of Alaska, 1969. ———. “Frank Yasuda,” Alaska Sportsman, June, 1963. Remmington, C. H. (“Copper River Joe”). A Golden Cross (?) On Trails From the Valdez Glacier. White-Thompson, Los Angeles, 1939. Rickard, T. A. Through the Yukon and Alaska. Mining and Scientific Press, 1909. Rickard, Tex. Everything Happened to Him. Rich & Cowan, 1937. Ricks, Melvin B. Alaska’s Postmasters and Post Offices. Tongass Publishing, 1965. Robbins, Elizabeth. Raymond and I. Macmillan, 1956. Robertson, Frank C., and Beth Kay Harris. Soapy Smith, King of the Frontier Con Men. Hastings House, New York, 1962. Samuels, Charles. The Magnificent Rube, Lie and the Gaudy Times of Tex Richard. McGraw-Hill, 1957. Satterfield, Archie. Chilkoot Pass. Alaska Northwest Publishing, 1973.Klondike Park. Fulcrum Publishing, Golden, Colorado, 1993. Savage, A. H. Dogsled Apostles. Sheed & Ward, New York. 1942. Schrader, Frank C. and Alfred H. Brooks. Cape Nome Gold Regiion, Alaska. United States Government Printing Office, 1900. Scott, Elva. Historic Eagle and Its People. Eagle City, 1993. Shiels, Archibald. Seward’s Icebox. Union Printing, 1933. Shirley, Glen. West of Hell’s Fringe. University of Oklahoma Press, 1978. Smith, Michael E. Alaska’s Roadhouses. State of Alaska, Office of History and Archaeology, 1974. Solka, Jr., Paul. Adventures in Alaska Journalism Since 1903. Commercial Printing, Fairbanks, 1980. Solstice, Sarah. “A Woman in Alaska,” Alaska-Yukon Magazine, March 1907. Stacey, John F. To Alaska for Gold. Ye Galleon Press, 1973. Stefansson, Vilhjalmur. Discovery. McGraw-Hill, 1964. Steffa, Don. “Tales of Noted Frontier Characters, III, ‘Soapy Smith,’ Bad Man and Bluffer,” The Pacific Monthly, October, 1908. Stewart, Robert. Sam Steele. Doubleday Canada, 1979. Stone, David and Brenda. Hard Rock Gold. Juneau Centennial Committee, 1980. Stuck, Hudson. Alaskan Missions of the Episcopal Church. Domestice and Foreign Missionary Society, 1920. ———. Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914.

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Sutherland, Dan. “Gold Rush Pioneer and Politician,” Alaska History, Spring, 1995. Tabbert, Russell. Dictionary of Alaskan English. Denali Press, Juneau, Alaska, 1991. Thomas, Jr., Lowell. The Trail of ‘98. Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New Yorik, 1962, Tornfelt, Evert E., and Michael Burwell. Shipwrecks of the Alaskan Shelf and Shore. United States Department of the Interior, OCS Report MMS 92-0002. Tower, Elizabeth A. Big Mike Henry. Self-published, 1988. ———. Reading, Religion, Reindeer. Self-published, 1988. Ulibarri, George. S. Documenting Alaskan History. University of Alaska Press, 1982. Walden, Arthur Treadwell. Dob—Puncher on the Yukon.Houghton Mifflin, 931. Wallace, John B. Four articles on his experiences in Nome which appeared in the Alaska Sportsman in August, October, November, and December of 1939. Washburn, Bradford. A Tourist Guide to Mount McKinley. Alaska Northwest Publishing, 1971. Webb, John Sidney. “The River Trip to the Klondike,” The Century Magazine, March 1898. Weimer, M. D. K. Klondyke. Self-published, 1903. Wells, E. Hazard. Magnificent Misery. Doubleday, 1984. Wendt, Ron. Gold, Ghost Towns & Grizzlies. Self-published, 1994. Wharton, David. The Alaska Gold Rush. Indiana University Press, 1972. White, E. J. “Stroller.” Tales of a Klondike Newsman. Mitchell, 1969. Whiting, M. D. F. B. Grit, Greif, and Gold. Peacock Publishing, 1933. Wickersham, James. Old Yukon Tales—Trails—and Trials, Washington Law Book, 1938. Wiedemann, Thomas. Cheechako into Sourdough. Binford & Mort, 1942. Willey, George Franklyn. “Lady Luck and the Cold Deck,” Alaska Sportsman, October, 1954. Wilson, William. “To Make A Stake,” Alaska Journal, Winter, 1983. Wilson, William H. “Alaska’s Past; Alaska’s Future,” Alaska Review, Spring/Summer, 1970. de Windt, Harry. Through the Gold-Fields of Alaska to Bearing Straits. Chatto & Windus, London, 1899. Woods, Henry F. God’s Loeaded Dice. Caxton Publishers, 1948. Woodstock Letters, A Historical Journal of Jesuit Missionar and Educational Activities. Academic Editions, 1987. World Almanac of Books and Facts, 1995. Wyman, J. N. Journey to the Koyukuk. Pictorial Histories, 1988. Young, S. Hall. Adventures in Alaska. Fleming H. Revell, 1919. Yukon River in Alaska’s History. Papers Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Alaska Historical Society, October 7–9, 1993.

NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES 49th Star Alaska Capital (Juneau) Alaska Citizen (Fairbanks) Alaska Daily Guide Alaska Forum Alaska History Alaska Journal Alaska Magazine Alaska Prospector Alaska Sportsman Alaska Traveler’sGuide Alaska Truth

Alaska Weekly Alaska-Yukon Magazine Alaskan World (Fairbanks) All Alaska Review Bennett Sun Bertillion Eye Bijougram Boston Alaskan Chena Times Chitina Leader Cordova Daily Alaskan Council City News

234 Daily Industrial Worker Daily Prospector Bulletin Diamond Drill Dyea Press Dyea Trail Eagle City Tribune Eskimo Bulletin Fairbanks Daily New Miner Fairbanks Daily Times Fairbanks Evening Alaskan Fairbanks Evening News Fairbanks Facts Fairbanks Free Press Fairbanks Gazette Fairbanks Leaders Fairbanks Weekly News Fort Wrangell News Free Press Hot Springs Echo Hot Springs Post Iditarod Nugget Iditarod Pioneer Innoko Miner Interloper Juneau Alaskan Juneau Journal Midnight Sun Midnight Sun (Seattle) Miner’s Union Bulletin Musher Nenana News

Bibliography Nome Chronicle Nome Gold Digger Nome Industrial Worker Nome News Nome Pioneer Press Northern Light (Fairbanks) Northern Light (Unalakleet) Pathfinder Pony Express (San Francisco) Rampart Miner Riverside Daily Enterprise (Riverside, California) Seattle Post-Intelligencer Seattle Times Seward Daily Gateway Sitka Cablegram Skaguay Budget Skagway News Tanana Daily Star Tanana Leader Tanana Miner Tanana Tribune Tanana Valley Socialist Teller News Truth Valdez Daily News Valdez News Vancouver Province (British Columbia) Yukon Press Yukon Valley News



Abercrombie, William Randolph: assistance to Natives, 76; building Richardson Highway, 76; destitute Argonauts, 75 A.C.C., 174–75; as money exchanger, 175 Adams, Lois, 112 af. Forselles, Georg, 94 Ainsworth, General, 131 Alaska Gold Mining Company, 107. See also McKenzie, Alexander Alaska Highway, 6 Alaska-Juneau Mine, 2, 14; closure, 190 “Alaskan What-Is-It?,” 18 Alice Blanchard, 25–26 Al-Ki, 24, 39, 58 All-American Route, 31 Alpha, 114, Footnote 17 in Chapter 9 Amur, 22, 23 Anderson, Captain, 172 Anvil City, 30. See also Nome Anvil Mountain, 110 A.P.A. (Alaska Pack Animal), 51 Arctic Boy, 148 Arctic City, 3 “Arnold” Diamond Swindle, 11, 14. See also Pilz, George Asplmel, G., 200

Atwater, Ben, 149 Auk (city). See also Juneau, naming of Auk Indians, 3, 12. See also Kowee, Chief Austin, Basil, 22, 68, 114 Axe, B. E., 23, 24, 58 Baker, Fred A., 99 Baker, Lewis, 47, 48 Bales, L. L., 135 Balloon, 18 Barabara, 142 Bardy, Frank, 53 Barnette, Elbridge Truman “E.T.,” 4, 126, 147, 167; death, 154; Isabelle, 149; John Jerome Healy, 148; journalistis enterprise, 185; Lavalle Young, 148; Mayor of Fairbanks, 153; price gouging, 151; Tanacross, 148; Trial, 153; Washington-Alaska Bank, 153; Wickersham, 149, 151, 168 Barnette, Isabelle, 149 “Barnette’s Cache,” 149 Bathhurst, John, 181–82 Beach, Rex, 3, 93, 160, 191 Bear, 78, 79, 126, 170, 173; diseased Natives, 132; Kotzebue Rush, 82–86; Natives and alcohol, 38; Nome, 95; Slavery, 134

236 Bell, John T., 84 Ben’s Party, 85 Bering Sea, 4, 6, 7, 17, 31–33, 63, 65, 77, 79, 83, 84, 90, 98, 100, 107–8, 142, 143, 170 Bernhardt, Louis, 80 Berry, Lt. John G., 82 Bertholf, Lt. E. T., 86; alcohol, 38 Bissell, M. J., 34 Black troops, 58 Blackett, W. S., 179 Blackwell, James E., 87 Blaine, James G., 155, 157 Blakely, 27, 29, 30 Blix, R., 200 Block and Tackle (alcoholic beverage), 37 “blue ticket,” 96, 103, 114, 116, 162 Boldoc, C. L., 119 Boyce, John, 187 Brackett, George A.: “Brackett’s Road,” 63 Brady, Governor James G., 23, 43, 57, 112, 137, 138, 142, 168; Advertises for single women for Alaskan men, 115; Small pox epidemic, 134 Brave Maker, 37 Brown, Charles, 75 Brown Forman Beverage Company, 38 Brown, J. C., 115 Brown, Kitty, 160 Bruce, C. W., 167 Bryant, Captain, 21 Brynteson, John. See also “Three Lucky Swedes” Buck, Henry, 200 Bujake, Dr. John E., 38 Burns, Archie, 52 Burr, A. Regina, 115 Burros, 18, 67–68 Cahoon, C. P., 26 Call, N. A., 69 Callagan, Tim, 121 Callahan, Sam J., 177, 181 Camels, 18 Canada, 30 Candle, 3, 88 Cannibalism, 83 Canton, Frank, 161 Cantwell, Lt. J. C., 159

Index Carbonneau, Belinda A., 113–14 Carpenter, Herman, 139 Carrol, “Malamute Joe,” 162 Carter, Senator Thomas H. (Montana), 107 Cashel, Mayor Thomas D., 105–6 Caskey, J. Harmon, 185 Cassiar Strike, 12–13 Catherine Sudden, 83 Chambers, Dr. Edith, 116 Cheechako, 23, 53 Cheek, C. F., 187 Chena, 151–53, 185–86 Chena Slough, 4, 148 “Chenese,” 152 Chenoa City, 149 Cherry, C. C., 21 Chilkoot Pass, 18, 31, 49–56, 96, 112, 139, 158, 174 China Joe (Hi Ching), 124 Circle, 3–4, 14, 40, 41, 45, 47, 123, 139, 147–48, 150–51, 159–63, 173, 177 City of Seattle, 18 Clark, C. J., 84 Clark, M., 133 Cleary, Frank, 149, 151 Clevenger, H. R., 200 Cochran, M J., 41 Cody, A. J., 40, 42 Coleman, 30 Coleman, F. S., 200 Collins, Henry A., 55 Colorado, 24 Committee of One Hundred and One, 61 Comstock Lode, 11 Conahaugh, 32 Cone, C. Edward, 165 Coogan, Captain B., 78 “coonies,” 144 Copper River, 31, 65–66, 67, 70, 72, 74–75, 124, 131, 141–42 Copper River & Northwestern Railway Company (CR & NW), 142 Copper River Code, 68, 193, 199 Coughan, Captain, 87, 88 Council City, 83–84, 88, 102, 131, 139, 141, 167–68, 179 Couture, Bessie, 112 Crad, Joseph, 118 Crane, Allen, 163 crystallized eggs, 19

Index Curtin, Walter R., 189–90 Cushing, W. H., 101 D’Hierry, Paul D., 98 Daglow, L., 102 Dalton Pony Express Company, 139 Davis, R. W., 115 Dawson, 3, 6, 14, 18, 20, 31–33, 40, 42–43, 51, 54, 56, 58, 60, 63, 84, 116–18, 120, 148, 150–52, 174–75, 185, 187, 189–90 “dead man,” 67 Dehn, Commissioner, 184 Dennis, John, 195 des Garets, Count G., 96 de Groff, Edward, 137 de Weese, Dal, 130 Dey, Robert, 26, 29 Dietrich, Marlene, 104 Dietz, Arthur, 19–20, 17, 30–31 Diomedes, 37 Donahue, J. V., 200 Douglas, 14, 112, 114, 134, 175, 180, 186, 188 Duncan, Robert, 44 Dunn, 41 Dunn, Bill, 161 Dunne, George, 179 Dutch Harbor, 22, 25, 79, 101, 170 Dyea, 3, 18, 27, 30, 31, 41, 49–63, 89, 90, 158 Eagle, 3, 32, 40, 47, 112, 123, 149, 151, 160, 162, 168–69, 177 Eagle, Jim; “The Strongest Man in the World,” 149 Earp, Wyatt, 42, 191 Easton, Robert, 94 Eckelmann, Al, 56 Edwards, W. R., 181 electric heating belts, 19 Eliza Anderson, 79 Elsie, 29, 225 evaporated food, 19 Excelsior, 5, 68 Expert, Oscar, 199 Fairbanks, 2–4, 6, 13, 48, 112, 115, 119–21, 123, 126, 136, 147–54, 161, 163–64, 168, 170, 174–75, 178, 182, 184–86, 189, 191 Fairbanks, Charles Warren, 149

Farallon, 39 Field, Cyrus, 4–5 Fikes, David, 76 Fink, Albert, 180 Fitz, Frances, 112 Fleming, May, 112 Floyd, Joseph, 41 Ford, Hulda, 154 Forty-Rod, 37 Franklin, Sir John, 90 Frederick, F. A., 137 Frieman Brothers Cigar Store, 187 Frost, Nellie, 113 Fugard, Dr., 112 Fuller, N. A., 13 Gabriel, 121 Gambell, Vene C, 77–78, 85–87 Garrone, 85 Garside, Charles, 57 Gates, William “Swiftwater Bill,” 151 George E. Starr, 23 George W. Elder, 117 Givian, John, 114 Glenn, D. R. B., 105 gold and mining, types of, 13–14 Good-la-tah, Chief, 142 Goodwin, Freida, 81 “googies,” 176 Gordon, Edward E., 156 Grace Dollar, 87 Grease Trail, 53 Grigsby, George B., 98 Guardian, 22 Gugenheims, 176 Guiteau, Luther W., 43, 73, 74 Gunnison, Royal A., 119 Gurney, F., 84 Gustafson, Mrs. Hilma, 120 Haley, Nicholas, 12 Hallady, Indian Agent, 144 Hamilton, C. H., 45 Hamilton, Lafe, 84 Hamlet, C. C., 144–45 Hannum, C. S., 41 Hansbrough, Henry C., 107 Hansel, Paul, 200 Hansen, 158 Hanson, Captain, 87

237

238 Hanson, Gna, 136 Harlan, Nathan V., 146 Harrais, Martin, 152 Harriman Expediton of 1898, 142 Harris, Richard T., 3, 12–15 Harris, W. J. “Six Shooter Sam,” 187 Hart, W. R. “Chop House Bill,” 168 Hartnett, M. A., 80–81 Hartshorn, Florence, 19, 54, 56 Hatch, Customs Inspector E. T., 42 Hatcher, Customs Inspector, 92 Hawthorne, Mont, 117 Hayes, Howard, 189 Hazelet, George, 67–68, 71 Healy, “Hell Roaring” Mike, 121, 123 Healy, John Jerome: Alaska’s “Buffalo Bill” and E. T. Barnette, 148 Heeter, Sam E., 181 Hempe, Henry C., 200 Henry, George Hinton, 182–85 Herald, 90 Herman, 145 Herrington, George, 184 Herrington, Laurie, 184 Hewitt, Professor Frank, 116 “Highoo Goldstone,” 13. See also Juneau, Joe, Harris, Frank T. Hill, George M., 185 Hitchcock, Ethan A., 112 Hoare, Mrs., 184 Hoggatt, Wilford B., 48 Holbrook, Frank A., 84 Homer, 22 Hooch, 36–40 Hoochenoo, 36 Hope, Carrie R., 18 Hopp, Charles A., 186 Horner, Joe, 161. See also Canton, Frank Horsfall, Mrs. C. S., 200 Hoxie, Charles, 41–42 Hubbard, Beeman and Hume, 106 Hubbard, Oliver P., 106 Huhn, Reverend J. E., 181 Hulscher, 56 Humboldt, 26, 28 Hummel, John, 94 Hunter, 28 Iditarod, 3, 126 Inside Passage, 2, 6, 27, 49

Index Irving, John, 42 Isabelle, 149 Isharoywere, Marie, 53 Islander, 25, 28 Ivey, Jacob, 46–48 Jackson, Sheldon, 36, 124, 136, 162 Jane Gray, 79, 86–87 Jane I. Falkenberg, 83 Jarvis, Captain, 85 Jeanette, 144, 170 Jessie, 134–35 “Joe the Baker.” See China Joe John Riley, 87 Johnson, Chief, 138, 194 Johnson, Joshua, 195 Johnson, Kirke E., 174 Jolley, Police Chief, 167–68 Jones, Minnie, 121 Jordan, Jed, 37, 39, 45, 129 Joslin, Falcon, 153 Joslin, John, 152 Jourdan, Joseph D., 167, 180 Joy Juice, 37 Jule, J. M., 200 Juneau, naming of, 13 Juneau, Joe, 11, 12–15 Kane, Anna, 118 Kane, Louise, 112 Kapplemann, 68, 72, 113 Keatly, John, 36 Keller, L. S., 186 Kelly, 182 Kelly, Emma, 54 Kelsey Dock Company, 66 Kelsey, John, 66 Kenny, J. E., 165 Kimball, Fred, 132 “kindergarten captain,” 144 King, C. A., 194 King, N. R., 184–85 Kingston, 22 Kinney, 24 Kinzie, Robert A., 187 Kirschbaum, Harry, 135–36 Kleinschmidt, F. E., 130 Klinkenberg, 171–72 “Klondikitis,” 20 Klutina Lake, 67–68, 73–74, 76

Index Koonce, Spence, 163 Kowee, Chief, 3, 12–13 Koy ukuk River, 41, 84, 85 Krauczunas, Kazis, 119 Kutz, Kenneth, 95, 99, 101, 103, 115, 133, 144 La Tour, Minnie, 118 La Vore, Jessie, 118 LaMarr, Nellie, 118 LaMonte, Blanche, 118 Landers, John, 61 Lane, Mrs. C. D., 112 Larsen, Captain L. M., 25 Laurador, 28, 42–43 Lavelle Young, 148 Lee, W. A., 69 LeGear, Edward, 170–71 Leslie D., 80 Libby, Daniel B., 4–5 Lime Village, 7 Linck, John W., 46 Lindblom, Eric. See “Three Lucky Swedes” Lindeberg, Jafet. See “Three Lucky Swedes” Liquor Dealers Protective Association of Nome, 105, 155–57 Livengood, Silas, 87 Lizzie, 22 Lockley, Fred, 37 Loeb, Jr., William, 142 London, Jack, 3, 51, 191 Lopp, W. T., 137 Lower 48, 98 Loy, M. V., 157 Lucchesi, Father, 133 Lyman D. Foster, 29 Lynn Canal, 18, 26, 49 Madison Square Gardens, 176, 191 Margeson, Charles A., 66–70 Marquam, Thomas, 41 Matheson, William, 37–38 Matson, Major, 159 May, Nellie, 120 McChesney, R. J., 185 McCloskey, Mrs. James, 120 McCrary, Frances, 199 McCrary, John, 199 McCrary, Nelson, 199

239

McCrary, Ralph, 199 McGinley vs. Cleary, 195 McGlade, J., 100 McKenzie, Alexander, 106–9 Merritt, Fred T., 24, 101 Merriam, General, 32 Merriesfield, W. R., 162 Messer, Clarence J., 69–74 Metson, William “Wild Billy,” 108 “Mexican Canary Birds,” 67 Michener, James, 52 Midgley vs. LeClair, 180 Miller, George, 68, 71, 72 Millmore, William, 46 Milroy, Robert Houston, 95 Miners’ Council, 195 Minerva, 134 Monroe, James “Coatless,” 150 Moog, Captain, 172 Moonlight, 66, 78–80, 130 Moore, Captain William “Billy,” 56–58 Moore, Judge, 180 Morrill, M. M., 80 “mosquito fleet,” 152 Muir, John, 142 Mulkey, Cy, 77, 81 Murphy, 62 Murphy, Jesse, 61 Murray, Hugh, 139 Muther, J. C., 102 Myers, Professor Carl E., 18 National City, 34 Neal, J. W., 200 Neal, Lydia S., 200 Neal, Walter T., 199 Neuth, E. W., 170–71 New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company, 4 Nigger Bill, 122 Nigger Jim, 121–22 Ning Chow, 19 Nolan, J. H., 93 Nome, 2, 3–5, 27, 32, 37, 39, 40, 45–47, 63, 83–110, 112, 114, 115, 118, 120, 122, 126, 129, 132–35, 138, 139, 143, 145, 146, 152, 158, 161, 163, 167–69, 171, 173, 174, 176, 178, 179, 191, 199 Nome City, 179

240

Index

Nome Mining and Development Company, 95 Noonan, Frank L., 81 Norby, “Yakima Pete,” 23 North American Trading and Transportation Company, 148 Northern Commercial Company, 153, 184 Northern Lights, 83 Norton Bay and Yukon Railway Transportation Company, 102 Noyes, Arthur H., 106–9 Nunivak, 132, 133, 135 O’Brien, A. R., 186 O’Brien, Captain, 28 Ogilive, William, 190 O’Hare, Wild Jim, 122 Olesen, Robert, 132 Olga, 171–72 Olson, Victor, 200 O’Neal, E. F., 74 Oregon, 108 Ottawa, Doc, 73 “Outside,” 98 Pacific Iron Works, 11 Packard, C. H., 87 Paul, Jackson D., 171 Pedro, Felix. See Barnette, E. T.; Cleary, Frank Peltz, Maurice, 96–97 Perry, 127 Pigs, 56 Pilz, George, 3, 11–15 Pilztown, 14 Piper, Captain, 30 Plover, 90 Poppe, F. W. A., 23 Port Clarence, 4–5, 8, 82, 144 Portland, 5, 17 Potter, Tless, 194 Preston, Walter, 123 Progresso, 34 Protection, 24 Purdy, Martha Munger, 113 Queen, 79, 109 Quigley, Fannie, 116–17

Quigley, Joe, 117 Quiner, Mrs. H. C., 184 R. T. Young, 80 Ramsdell, Charles, 168 Randall, General, 100 Rechmeyer, O. E., 164 Red Dynamite, 37 Redeye, 37 Reed, Commissioner, 97, 98 Reid, Frank P., 60–61 Reid, Shad, 69 Reindeer, 18, 86, 137, 173 Revenue Cutter Service, 36, 39, 40, 45, 46, 75, 82, 85, 95, 96, 121, 123, 132, 133, 137, 144, 145, 146, 157, 160, 162, 169, 170–73 “Rich Man’s Route,” 31 Richards, Frank H., 167 Richardson Highway, 75 Rickard, Tex, 40, 92, 94, 104, 176 Rickmere, Captain P. C., 32 Roanoke, 85 Robins, Shorty: “Soapy Smith the Second,” 148 Rochford, A. W., 125 Rockwell, Henry, 14 Rodeen, Charles W., 200 Roderiques, A., 171 Rodey, Bernard S., 136, 138 Romig, M. D., Joseph Herman, 165–66 Roosevelt, Theodore, 48, 140, 142, 168, 183 Rorere, G. B., 200 Rosalie, 23 Rose, Annie, 120 Ross, John, 79 Rowe, Reverend Peter T., 59 Rush, 37 rush vs. stampede, 8 Russell, Edward C., 186–87 Russian American Company, 36 Ryan, R. S., 179 Ryberg, Reverend C. E., 141 St. Michael, 5, 6, 17, 22, 24, 31–34, 40, 41, 43, 45, 84, 85, 92, 94, 99, 132, 148, 149, 173, 177 Sam brothers, Flot and Jet, 188 Samms family, 140–41

Index Sampson, Mrs. G. E., 200 Scales, 52 Schelhbrede, Judge, 134 Seitz, Dr. Louis, 25, 67 Senator, 134 Service, Robert, 3, 188, 191 Shackleford, Louis, 186–87 Shannon, R. M., 28 Shartzer, John, 42, 47 Shattuck, Henry A., 186–87 Sheep Camp, 52 Sheldon, Bobby, 61, 62 Sherman, Fred, 200 Shotwell, James Hunter, 24, 82 Shoup, J. M., 119, 135 Silk, Mattie, 60 Silverstein, Sadie, 119 Simpson, Mrs. G. E., 200 Sinrock Mary, 137 Sitka, Warren, ix, 9, 30, 35, 77 Skull Bender, 37 Smith, Alfred, 98 Smith, Charles, 41, 47 Smith, Frank, 152 Smith, G. Parker, 200 Smith, Henry A., 113 Smith, Jefferson Randolf “Soapy,” 57–62 Snake River, 5 Soapy Smith the Second, 148 Soapy Smith’s Cuban Army, 59 Soapy’s Skagway Guards, 59 Sommersett, W. E., 115 Soule, W. T., 200 Spaulding, Lt., 92 “Spot,” 177 “squaw men,” 144 Stacey, John F., 42–43 stampede versus rush, 8 Standbridge, A., 115 Starkie, Benjamin, 121 Steele, Samuel B., 43 Stefansson, Vilhjalmur, 172 Stenlance, Captain, 80 Stevens, Dalbert, 194 Stevens, R. N., 169 Stevens, S. H., 97, 104, 180 Stevens, Young, 114 Stewart, John Douglas, 61 Stiverson, Hans, 157

241

Strappe, Otto H., 200 Strong, Governor J. F. A., 41, 112 Stuck, Hudson, 119–20, 151 Sullivan, Jennie, 44 Summers, C. M., 187 Sundeen, Matthew, 61–62 Sunmacher, Judge, 121 Syndicates, 19 Tacoma, 26 Taku, 27 Tanana Mines Railway Company, 153 Tanner, Doc, 69 Tanner, J. M., 61 Templeton, Archie, 17–18 Tenney, 40–41 Thompson, Lulu, 112 Thompson, William Fentress: “W.F.” or “Wrong Font,” 185–86 “Three Lucky Swedes,” 5, 91–92 Trabert, George, 82, 88 Treadwell Mine, 2, 14 124, 174, 186 Turkeys, 56 Tuttle, Captain, 132 Twain, Mark, 14 Ullrich, W. C., 186 Valdez Stampede, 65–76 Valencia, 23 Verden, G. B., 122 Wada, James, 125–26 Wada, Jujiro, 149, 150 Walker, Captain, 92 Wallace, Irene, 121 Washington-Alaska Bank. See E. T. Barnette Watson, L. T., 122 Watts, C. W., 58 Weimer, M. D. K., 123 Wellington, 158 Western Union, 4–5 Whim, 52 Whiskey Taylor, 70 White, Elmer E. “Stroller,” 187–88 White, F. M., 26 White Pass, 18, 31, 50, 54, 56, 57, 62, 63 White Pass & Yukon Railroad, 63

242 Whitelaw, 30–31 Whiting, Dr. F. B., 61 Whyte, Bert, 25 Wickersham, Judge James: E. T. Barnette, 149, 151, 168; Frank Cleary, 151 Wilkinson, C. H., 57 Wilson, Charles, 183 Wingate, James B., 177, 179, 181 Wiseman, Chief of Police, 185 Wizard Oil, 37

Index Wolff, 70 Woods, Henry F., 23, 54 Woods, Lizzie J., 113 Wrangell Narrows, 25 Wright, Joseph H., 167 Yanagimachi, Maritara, 127 Yasuda, Frank, 127 Yoshida, 125 Yukoner, 42

ABOUT THE AUTHOR STEVEN C. LEVI is the author of Making It: Personal Survival in the Corporate World (1990), Travel Smart Alaska (1998), and Use History Like a Tool (2003).