Jack London and the Klondike Gold Rush by Peter Lourie

Author:Peter Lourie
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)

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While some began to feel the deep pangs of hunger, Jack walked around town observing all the many characters who had gathered in this boom city.

BIG ALEC McDONALD, KING OF THE KLONDIKE

ONE NOTABLE PERSONALITY Jack is certain to have met in town was Big Alec McDonald.

All the cheechakos drooled at the success story of Big Alec. A common statement about the Stampede is that of the forty thousand who reached Dawson, only a few hundred got rich. The luckiest of all might have been Alexander McDonald, a lumbering, almost clumsy man from Nova Scotia, Canada. Big Moose, as they called him, was a shrewd businessman. He’d climbed over the Chilkoot in 1896 and settled in Dawson. One of the claims he bought was Claim 30 on Eldorado Creek. He paid a Russian immigrant a sack of flour and a side of bacon for a claim that would soon yield more gold than almost any claim in the gold rush.

Big Alec rarely mined his claims himself, but rather leased them out to miners who were promised a split of whatever they discovered. He used the profits from claim 30 to buy other claims. By the end of 1897, he owned twenty-eight claims on many different creeks. In 1898 some said he was worth ten million dollars. He kept a suite at his own hotel—the McDonald Hotel. Visitors dipped their hands into a box of gold nuggets. He told them to grab just the big ones!

Marshall Bond wrote:

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