The gold rush created what seems to me one of the most unique places in history. It was a place that was synonymous with riches, yet of the 100,000 that set out for it only a few hundred really made it big; the nature of the adventure, a hunt into the wilderness in a mad search for gold, brought out some of the strangest, most interesting misfits and weirdos you'd find; towns would spring up and die so quickly simply on word of mouth you can make a strong argument for just calling the people nomadic; and lastly, there's the strange paradox of so much money flowing through it and darn near everyone living in squalor. It makes for some great stories.
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| Sam Steele. HBO's Dudley Do-Right. |
To start, one has to understand the geography. Think about the show
Ice Road Truckers for a moment. The whole concept is how difficult it is to bring supplies to these isolated arctic cities because of how treacherous the roads are and how brutal the weather is. Now picture how it it would be
without roads or heated vehicles. What's isolated now was mostly uncharted territory, maps were sketchy and the people that promised they knew how to get there were sketchier still. The main way to the show was through the Chilkoot Pass, a forbidding mountain range with brutal winds, tons of snow and the appearance of a wall of ice. If you were poor, as most were that travelled north, you would have to lug as many of your possessions as you could up the mountain, drop them off, go back down, and repeat the process until you had everything. At the top, they would have to carry on a great deal further. The natives made a pretty decent business in charging travelers $1 a pound to carry up their gear. Impromptu businesses sprang up from the necessity of packing heavy, where merchants along the trail would sell basic items that one might not have accounted for or simply offering their services in carrying goods. Eventually, the need grew so large that a tram system was installed to carry goods from the bottom to the top - all for a fee, of course.
Once you're there, it's no easy pickings either. Since that was the manner of getting supplies to the towns, food was exceedingly scarce. Eggs were sold at the hefty price of a dollar each (after searching up inflation rates, that comes to just shy of $30 an egg today, slightly more than organic food markets). For perspective, a suit could be purchased for about $4 at the time. Of course, money was flowing in so quickly there that many could afford the high prices without a second thought, but those that hadn't found the right patch of ground yet were often left to starve. Famine was rampant, and would stay that way in the American cities. The Canadian ones, however, changed mostly due to the indomitable will of the appropriately named Sam Steele, a RCMP officer who would turn back those that did not have enough supplies to survive the trip - a requirement of a year of rations in order to be allowed to pass.
Steele was also instrumental in stopping crime, one of a set of major issues in the isolated northern cities. Because of him and the rest of the mounties, the Canadian cities were much safer and law abiding than the more wild American ones (as expected). In the beginning, before the law arrived, much of everything was done by committees set up to settle disputes, mostly arranged by members of the community choosing their most reliable. This was a necessity as the Klondike tended to attract those that were destitute, last-chancers that were often of ill-repute. They also had absolutely hysterical names to coincide with their past deeds, like Jimmy the Pirate, Salt Water Jack, and Pete the Pig (was the lattermost just a fat dude?). In essence, it was a town full of those eccentrics that by their very presence were established as crazy enough to travel up there in the first place. You know they've all got to have a screw loose already. And boy, things can go south if you don't have someone to police them.
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Soapy's beard was thick enough that the gold dust
lost in it could pay ten men's wages for a month. |
In Skagaway, an American city in the southern point of Alaska that connects to the uppermost parts of B.C. and the southernmost parts of the Yukon, there was no Sam Steele. Instead, there was a legendary head of a team of cheats and grifters that went by "Soapy" Smith. Masquerading as a friendly go-to man of the town, he had a seemingly limitless arsenal of misfits and weirdos that would cheat the newcomers to the town out of their money before they even started. His schemes ranged from straight up robbery to rigged games of chance, and with a carefully planned system that didn't link any of the lower-level members of his operation to him he managed to appear to be an upstanding citizen. With no true police force to hold him back, his outfit grew and grew, pulling in beautifully named miscreants like Yank Fewclothes and Kid Jimmy Fresh. Even Soapy wasn't immune to the dangers of Skagaway, however, and the town eventually banded up together, called him out on his misdeeds, and shot him dead in the streets while his gang members were eventually rounded up.
Of course, people wouldn't brave these dangers if there wasn't something at the end of the tunnel. The pull of money and gold was so strong because there was, after all, a tremendous wealth of it buried beneath them waiting to be taken. In the early years, prior to the ships coming back full of gold to alert the public, a man would find a lot and stake his claim. Limited to a certain amount of territory they were free to mine on that land as much as they wished. Claims were largely luck based, and were a gamble in and of itself. For example, one man sold his claim thinking it was near worthless for $800. While that sounds like no small amount of money, which at the time it certainly was not, it was later valued at a million. At El Dorado, one of the many gold rush towns based on a stream connected to Bonanza, each claim could yield a million or more. Disputes over inches could be worth hundreds, and it wasn't until an incorruptible official that lived off a small government salary (who could so easily have made millions himself had he felt the need) measured the properties down to the inch. A ten foot gap was often worth ten to twenty thousand dollars.
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"I'll trade an ounce of my old-timey gold dust for some of
those old-timey cans of beans!"
"Sir, you don't have to call them that." |
Once the gold was mined, the newly rich would find they would run into a problem. It's a similar one to the elementary student who believes his
Pokemon collection is worth thousands; if you have something that's worth a lot but no one's willing to buy it, it isn't worth anything at all. Gold was so plentiful one could make a living simply by sweeping the sawdust and dirt from the miners in bars at the end of a night as enough of the dust would have fallen off them. But where could you spend it? When or where in history could you find millionaires living in such wretched conditions? Money can't buy what isn't there. That's probably why so many of them spent darn near everything they had on liquor, women or gambling, three exceptionally prominent vices in gold rush territory.
In the end, it was only a few that managed to bring their riches back. After three years the rush was over, save for a few hangers-on. The Klondike leaves behind a legacy of incredible riches, terrible tragedy and the stories of a vast number of weirdos that climbed the Chilkoot Pass.
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The information for this blog came from Pierre Berton's Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899. Well worth a read.
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