A Splendid Savage by Steve Kemper

Author:Steve Kemper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Burnham and the Blicks were among the first of thousands to arrive that June. The town was so starved for news that when Burnham gave the gold commissioner an old copy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, he read it out loud to a crowd, even the ads. Some of the arriving cheechakos knew the town was ravenous for outside goods and would pay almost anything for eggs, fruit, and other luxuries. “In the brief space of a few days,” wrote reporter Tappan Adley in his lively firsthand account, The Klondike Stampede (1900), “there seemed to be nothing that could not be purchased in Dawson, from fresh grapes to an opera-glass, from a safety-pin to an ice-cream freezer.”

Dawson also had been preparing for the rush of stampeders. “At Dawson buildings of every description sprang up like mushrooms in a night, from the black, reeking bog,” wrote Adley. “Many of them were substantial logs and lumber, but the greater part, both large and small, were mere coverings, intended to last only through the summer.”

Of the 100,000 stampeders who had started for the Yukon after the news broke in July 1897, about 30,000 raced into Dawson the following summer. Most were shocked by what they found. In a place saturated with gold but lacking almost everything else, prices were stratospheric. Newcomers hoping to open a store or business faced costs of between $10,000 and $20,000 for a lot in town. That lot probably faced an unpaved street turned into knee-deep muck by the spring thaw. Dawson was built on a bog and didn’t have sewers, so the lowest parts of town flooded in spring, leaving behind the waste of thousands of people and more thousands of sled dogs. This effluent often ended up in the creeks and rivers, which led that summer to epidemics of dysentery and typhoid. Men rubbed clay on their faces to reduce torments from clouds of mosquitoes and biting flies. The mosquitoes caused malaria, though people didn’t yet understand the connection.

Burnham had seen it all before. The place was another boomtown—half-built, half-crazy, electric with dreams, hazardous with sharks. On the main streets, saloons, dance halls, and gambling houses stood shoulder to shoulder. Some were simple tents, with a bar of rough boards and whiskey to match. A few finer establishments had wooden walls and charged admission, fifty cents or a dollar, which entitled the customer to one drink or one cigar.

Burnham knew one of Dawson’s most striking entrepreneurs, Belinda Mulrooney. She had arrived in 1897 and quickly opened a restaurant, then a roadhouse in the gold fields. In the summer of 1898 she opened the town’s swankiest hotel, the Fairview, offering thirty rooms with carpeting, wallpaper, lace curtains, and electricity.

Mulrooney aside, many of Dawson’s women earned their money in the usual boomtown professions, from entertainers to high-priced courtesans to crib hookers. Some of their pungent names survive: Spanish Dolores, Limejuice Lil, Diamond-Tooth Gertie. Somewhere in between were the hostesses and dance hall tootsies, who made about $120 a week, with bonuses for persuading customers to buy champagne at $60 a bottle.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.