The City of Canvas and Sawdust

A single egg cost one dollar in Dawson City in the summer of 1898. A man working a creek claim for wages earned fifteen dollars a day, if he could find work, and that was considered high pay — the best daily wage in the territory, reserved for the strongest men at the best claims. The egg and the wage stood at opposite ends of the same chain.

The egg had traveled from a farm somewhere in the south, by steamer to Skagway or Dyea, over the passes by pack train, down the lakes and rivers to the Klondike, and each portage, each transfer, each mile of water had added its cost to the shell. The wage had traveled with the man, from whatever life he had left behind, through the same passes, over the same water, and now it paid for the egg or it did not.

The arithmetic was simple. A man who ate two eggs for breakfast had spent more than an eighth of his day’s wage before he left the table. The town ran on this arithmetic, and the town understood it, and the town did not care.

The fleet that had broken loose from Lake Bennett in late April came down the Yukon in a long, ragged line, and by June the first boats reached the mouth of the Klondike. Some had wrecked in Miles Canyon. Others were lost in the Whitehorse Rapids. A few simply rotted at the riverbank, abandoned by owners who had run out of food or patience. The ones that survived nosed into the mud bank at Dawson and tied up, and the men climbed out and stood on ground that was not stable ground but mud and sawdust and the refuse of a thousand earlier arrivals.

Dawson had been a fishing camp. The confluence of the Klondike and the Yukon had been the heart of the homeland of the Hän-speaking people of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, whose fishing camp at Tr’ochëk sat at the meeting of the two rivers. They had used the land for hunting and gathering for generations beyond count.

By the winter of 1896, after the discovery on Bonanza Creek by George Carmack and Skookum Jim on August 16, the camp had become something else. The settlement, first called a “tent town” and then a “mud town site,” was named Dawson City after George Mercer Dawson, director of Canada’s Geographical Survey. It grew to hold perhaps five hundred people by that first winter, with plots of land selling for five hundred dollars each. By the spring of 1898, the Dawson area population, including the surrounding creeks and camps, had swollen past any reasonable estimate.

By summer it reached thirty to forty thousand, a figure no census could pin down because the population shifted daily with the arrival and departure of boats.

The Hän were moved. Forcibly relocated to a reserve downstream at Moosehide, they were pushed aside to make room for the stampeders and their claims, their lots, their stores. Many died in the relocation and after it, from disease, from exposure, from the disruption of a way of life that had sustained them in a land that was not forgiving to those who did not know it. The town that replaced their fishing camp was built of wood, heated with stoves, lit with candles and oil lamps.

Isolated and unsanitary, its unpaved streets were churned into thick mud, and in summer the settlement reeked of human effluent and was plagued by flies and mosquitoes. Epidemics came — typhoid, dysentery, meningitis — and the hospital at the top of the hill was too small and too late. The indigenous Hän suffered from the rush; they were forcibly moved into a reserve to make way for the Klondikers, and many died.

The town burned. It burned in the way all wooden towns built fast and built close burn, and it burned more than once. A fire in the autumn of 1897 took out a row of stores on Front Street. Another in 1898 took a block of cabins. The merchants rebuilt, and they rebuilt in wood, because wood was what they had, and the profits were too urgent to wait for stone or brick. The fire hose that the Mounted Police kept at the barracks reached the river but not much farther. The bucket brigades were volunteer and slow. The town was a fire waiting to happen, and it happened, and it was built again, and the building itself was a business, because lumber was scarce and the boats that had brought men to Dawson now came apart for their planks.

The waterfront told the story. Boats arrived daily through June and July, tying up at the mud bank or anchoring midstream, and the men who stepped off them needed everything. Food came first. Then lodging, tools, boots, socks, blankets, stoves, flour, bacon, beans, coffee, tobacco, whiskey — the list ran through the full inventory of survival and comfort. The demand was immediate. Merchants who had these things on their shelves set prices according to what the traffic would absorb, and the traffic would absorb a great deal, because the men had been told, all the way up the trail, that they would need these things, and now they were here, and the things were here, and the prices were what the prices were.

The prices were not arbitrary. They were the product of a causal chain that began at the wharves in Seattle and San Francisco and Victoria and ran through every portage, every transfer, every mile of water and trail to the mud bank at Dawson.

Goods came north by steamer to Skagway and Dyea. They came over the passes by pack train, a hundred pounds at a time, carried by horses or men or dogs, and each pound cost its fraction of transport. They came down the lakes and rivers in boats that leaked and wrecked and lost their cargo. At each stage, someone took a margin.

The customs records at the border captured some of this flow — the North-West Mounted Police logged goods as they entered Canadian territory, and the customs house at the summit of the Chilkoot and at the head of Lake Bennett kept tallies of what came through. But the records were incomplete, because much of what arrived in Dawson came by routes that bypassed the official checkpoints, or came in quantities too small to record, or came in the packs of men who intended to consume, not sell, and then sold anyway when the price was right.

The merchants understood the chain. They had bought goods in the south, paid for transport, paid duties, paid for storage, paid for the labor of moving things from boat to warehouse to shelf, and now they priced accordingly. The margin was high, but the risk was high too. A merchant who ordered eggs from Seattle had to account for the eggs that would rot on the trail, the eggs that would freeze, the eggs that would break, the eggs that would arrive in Dawson as nothing but a smell in a crate.

The egg that survived and reached the shelf in Dawson carried the cost of all the eggs that did not. The same was true of bacon, of flour, of whiskey, of every good that made the journey. The price in Dawson was the price of the journey, plus the merchant’s margin, plus the cost of failure along the way.

The engine was this: not the gold in the creeks but the demand in the streets. The stampeders had been required to carry a ton of goods — the North-West Mounted Police had enforced this at the passes, at the border, at every checkpoint along the way, and the regulation had been designed to prevent starvation, and it did prevent starvation, but it also created something else.

It created a population of men who arrived in Dawson with a year’s supply of food they did not need, because they were not going to stay a year, because they were going to go to the creeks and dig and either find gold or not, and if they did not find gold they were going to leave, and they could not carry a year’s supply of food back out with them. So they sold it. They sold it to the merchants, who bought it cheap and sold it dear, or they sold it to other stampeders who had arrived with less, or they traded it for lodging or drink or the company of women.

The ton of goods that had been required for entry became, at the destination, a commodity. The requirement that had been designed to keep men alive became a mechanism for separating them from their capital.

The business directories told the story. The Yukon Sun and the Dawson Daily News ran advertisements for hotels, saloons, restaurants, laundries, bathhouses, barber shops, cigar stores, jewelers, photographers, and assay offices. The Montgomery Brothers had a store on Front Street that sold dry goods and provisions. The Alaska Commercial Company had a warehouse at the riverbank. The North American Transportation and Trading Company had another. Harper and Ladue, the partners who had laid out the town site, held title to the most valuable lots and sold them at prices that would have been steep in San Francisco.

Land in Dawson was scarce now, and plots sold for up to ten thousand dollars each, with prime locations on Front Street commanding more. A lot on the corner of Front and King, thirty feet wide, sold for twenty thousand dollars in the summer of 1898, and the buyer put up a saloon on it within the week.

The saloons were the most visible institutions. They lined Front Street three and four deep, and they were open at all hours, and they were full. The men who came to them had money or they did not, and those who had it spent it, and those who did not watched.

Whiskey was expensive — a drink cost fifty cents or a dollar, depending on the establishment and the quality of the liquor, and much of the liquor was not whiskey at all but grain alcohol cut with river water and colored with caramel. It did not matter. The men bought it. They bought it because they were cold, or because they were tired, or because they had found gold and wanted to celebrate, or because they had not found gold and wanted to forget, or because they were lonely, or because the saloon was warm and the street was not.

The dance halls charged admission, and the women who danced with the miners charged by the dance, and the miners paid, because the alternative was to stand in the street in the mud and the mosquitoes and the smell.

Of the stampeders who reached Dawson during the gold rush — thirty thousand to forty thousand by the broadest count — only fifteen thousand to twenty thousand became prospectors. No more than four thousand of those struck any gold at all. A few hundred grew rich. By the time most arrived in the summer of 1898, the best claims on Bonanza and Eldorado and the other paying creeks had been staked and restaked and divided and sold and resold.

The ground that was left was ground that the men who had been there first had already determined was not worth working. The stampeders who arrived late — and most of them arrived late — found themselves standing on a mud bank with a ton of goods and no claim and no prospect of a claim and a winter coming. By July 1898, almost 10, 000 claims had been recorded by the authorities on the best creeks; a new prospector would have to look further afield.

The merchants did not need claims. They did not need to dig. Customers were everywhere, standing in the mud, holding their ton of goods, looking for a place to sleep and a meal to eat and a drink to steady themselves against what they had seen on the trail and what they were not seeing on the creeks. What the merchants sold ran the full range from necessity to indulgence. Lumber came from the boats the men had arrived on. Food they had carried over the passes came back to them at a markup. Rooms went for five dollars a night, ten, fifteen — in hotels that were tents with plank floors, in hotels that were shanties with canvas walls, in hotels that were solid enough but charged like they were palaces.

The paper trail thickened. The Mounted Police, under Sam Steele’s command, had established the customs posts and the checkpoint regime that governed entry into the Klondike. Now, at Dawson, the same administrative apparatus turned to the town. The police kept registers of businesses, of licenses, of deaths, of crimes, of the daily temperature and the state of the river. The claim records at the gold commissioner’s office logged every transfer, every sale, every dispute resolution on the creeks, and the disputes were many, because the claims were valuable and the boundaries were uncertain and the men who held them were stubborn and suspicious and armed.

The paperwork ran from the summit of the Chilkoot, where a constable had written a man’s name and the weight of his outfit in a ledger, to the gold commissioner’s office on Front Street, where another clerk wrote the same man’s name next to a claim number or next to nothing, if he had no claim, which most of them did not.

The women who came to Dawson made their own economy. Some came with husbands. Some came alone. The ones who came alone found work in the hotels and the restaurants and the dance halls, or they opened businesses of their own. Belinda Mulrooney arrived with a load of hot water bottles and silk underwear, both of which she sold at a profit that would have been impossible in any other market in the world. Martha Black came with her husband and stayed and became a businesswoman and eventually a member of Parliament.

The women who worked the dance halls earned more in a night than a laborer on the creeks earned in a week, and the women who owned the dance halls earned more than the miners who had struck it rich, because the miners came to them and spent what they had dug, and the women kept it and the miners went back to the creeks and dug more.

The town ran as a machine. It took men in at the riverfront and it took their money at the stores and the saloons and the hotels, and it gave them back to the creeks or it gave them back to the river, heading out, heading south, heading anywhere, because the town had taken what they had and given them nothing in return but the experience of having been there. The town consumed. That was its function. It consumed the goods that the men had carried over the passes, and it consumed the wages of the men who worked the claims, and it consumed the gold that the lucky ones had found, and it turned all of it into profit for the men and women who owned the stores and the saloons and the hotels and the lots on Front Street.

The richest men in the Klondike were not miners. They were merchants. They were the men who had arrived early, or who had arrived with goods instead of picks, or who had seen the shape of the economy before the economy existed. They understood that the gold in the creeks was finite and the demand in the streets was not, not as long as the boats kept coming, and the boats kept coming through the summer of 1898, every day, more boats, more men, more demand, more profit. The merchants did not need the creeks to pay. They needed the stampeders to keep arriving, and the stampeders kept arriving, because the newspapers in the south kept printing the stories of gold, and the stories kept selling papers, and the papers kept sending more men north, and the men kept coming, and the merchants kept selling, and the engine kept turning.

The engine was the stampede itself, redirected. The requirement that each man carry a ton of goods had created a market for those goods at the trailhead, and the same goods, having arrived at the destination, created another market there.

The ton of goods was the ton of gold. Not the gold that came out of the ground but the gold that went into the ground — into the stores, into the saloons, into the hotels, into the pockets of the men and women who had never lifted a shovel.

The North-West Mounted Police had enforced the requirement at the passes, and the requirement had done what it was designed to do: it kept men alive. But it also did something no one had designed. It created a self-sustaining commercial system that fed on the movement it was meant to protect. The paper trail that tracked the goods from the passes to the town to the creeks was the same paper trail that tracked the money from the stampeders to the merchants to the banks, and the money moved faster than the goods, and the money moved faster than the gold.

By July 1898, the streets of Dawson were a churn of mud and sawdust and men. The boats at the riverbank were three deep, and the men who had arrived on them were looking for work or looking for a claim or looking for a way out.

The merchants on Front Street were open and busy and profitable. The saloons were full. The dance halls were full.

The hotels were full, and the tents behind the hotels were full, and the tents behind those tents were full, and the mud was everywhere, and the mosquitoes were everywhere, and the price of an egg was still a dollar, and the price of a drink was still fifty cents, and the price of a night’s lodging was still more than a man could afford and less than a man would pay, because he had no choice, because he was there, because the trail was behind him and the creeks were ahead and the town was between, and the town took its cut.

The cut was everything. Goods carried over the passes came off the boats and went onto shelves, priced for the next arrival. Wages earned on the creeks came back to Front Street and paid for food and drink and shelter. Gold dug from the ground bought entertainment and comfort and the illusion that the trail had been worth walking. Dawson stood as a glittering, expensive trap, its commercial engine primed for the next wave of arrivals who had spent their capital just to get there.

The men who walked into it did not know it was a trap, because it glittered, and because it was expensive, and because they had been told, all the way up the trail, that the gold was at the end of the trail, and the town was at the end of the trail, so the town must be the gold, and it was, but not for them.

The boats kept coming. Around the bend above the town, the Yukon carried them forward — wide, steady, cold — and they nosed into the mud bank and tied up, and the men climbed out and stood where the Hän had stood, on ground that had been a fishing camp and was now a city of canvas and sawdust. The city took them in and took what they had and sent them on, to the creeks or to the river or to the saloon on the corner of Front and King where a drink cost fifty cents and the music played all night and the gold that someone else had dug paid for the whiskey that someone else had distilled and someone else had carried over the passes and someone else had sold at a margin that would have been impossible anywhere else on earth.

The town was the end of the trail. The town was the engine’s terminal. Everything that had been carried — the goods, the food, the tools, the hope — arrived here and was unloaded and sold, and the money moved from the pockets of the men who had carried it to the tills of the men who had waited for them, and the waiting was over, and the selling had begun.