Gold Diggers by Charlotte Gray

Author:Charlotte Gray [Gray, Charlotte]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2010-09-13T23:00:00+00:00

Dawson’s streets were paved not with gold but with mud as thick as gumbo.

“Below-the-girdle stuff” was music to Jack London’s ears. Jack embraced the low-lifes. He had known poverty and insecurity himself; he had watched women fight to survive in the slums and on the docks of San Francisco. Charmian London, who knew all too well her husband’s enjoyment of riotous parties and gregarious survivors, wrote after Jack’s death about his admiration for the “grit of women who . . . had entered the frozen territory.” He had spent his youth railing against the establishment, so he appreciated women who challenged convention—even if, in many cases, such women were at the mercy of their pimps. One performer who appeared in Dawson this spring was a colorful, tough character called Freda Maloof, who advertised herself as the “Turkish Whirlwind Danseuse.” Freda’s act consisted of a bump-and-grind belly dance with lots of wispy veils, bare flesh, and suggestive patter. It was based, she claimed, on a performance by an exotic dancer known as Little Egypt at the 1893 Columbian Exposition (the same exposition where Belinda Mulrooney had made her first fortune). A contemporary described Little Egypt as having “more moves in bed than water on a hot griddle, and her gyrations could make a grown man cry,” but Freda Malouf’s belly dance apparently outstripped Little Egypt’s. It was so shocking that even the Mounties, who usually turned a blind eye to outrageous acts, shut her down. Jack London loved Freda’s “muscle dance” and relished the dancer’s wicked appeal. High-spirited Freda would appear twice as “a certain Greek dancer who played with men as children did with bubbles” in Jack’s fiction, but in both stories she is a stereotypical “tart with a heart,” who shows greater decency than women of higher status.

As Bill Haskell had noticed, the Mounties paid more attention to gambling halls than dance halls because fights were more likely to break out among gamblers. Owners were instructed that no person under the influence of alcohol should play; players were warned that cheats would be fined or run out of town. This didn’t stop miners losing their hard-won fortunes on the turn of a card or a roll of the dice. A man who won might ring the bell over the bar as he announced, “Free drinks all round!” Men would come pouring through the saloon doors. In the saloons, miners fresh from a clean-up tossed nuggets into the cuspidors and laughed as down-and-outers fished them out of tobacco-flavored saliva.

Jack had no money to gamble, but like Bill Haskell before him, he enjoyed the theatricality of the faro tables and roulette wheels. And like Bill, he too enjoyed the sight one evening of cocky little Swiftwater Gates playing pool for $100 a game. Gates didn’t stand a chance. He was playing against a shark who, according to Edward Morgan, “was known up and down the Yukon as one who could charm a pool ball to do his will.” Gates lost game after game and was soon down several thousand dollars.

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