Alaska by James A. Michener

  He started valiantly, maintaining a pace that astonished Klope, but as Sarqaq pointed out: 'S'pose me alone? No help? Me walk all same.'

  Drawing upon the inherited strength that had brought his ancestors across the Bering Sea and then enabled them to survive in the world's most inclement surroundings, Sarqaq maintained his pace for about an hour, but when they were safely back on the Yukon, he relaxed his terrifying determination and fainted.

  Halting the dogs, Klope struggled to get him onto the top of the sled, tied him there, shouted to the dogs 'Hi!' and off they went.

  They spent the two final nights on the river, cold and frightened as to what might happen to Sarqaq's leg, but next morning they had traveled only a short distance when they caught sight of Dawson, that turbulent city where thousands of men pinched themselves in between mountain and river. Klope stopped the dogs, leaned forward on the handles of the sled, and bowed his head from exhaustion. He had completed one of the world's most demanding trips: nearly four hundred miles by train to Seattle, three thousand miles by sea to St. Michael, seventy miles along the Bering Sea to the Yukon, nearly fourteen hundred miles up that stubborn river to Dawson. He had earned the right to find his place in that city and try his luck on its gold fields.

  WHEN THEY BURST INTO DAWSON, WITH DESPERATE MEN firing off guns to welcome them, Klope acted vigorously: he sold the cargo of food, including the moose meat, for a small fortune; he persuaded Sarqaq to give him Breed, which the Eskimo did because he knew that this misbegotten dog, so useless in the traces, had saved his life; and he rushed out to the Klondike, to learn that every inch of both the Bonanza and Eldorado shorelines had long since been staked. When laughing men, secure on their own claims, told him that there might be free sites about four miles away, where there was no gold, he stormed back into town prepared to fight anyone bare-knuckle for a claim.

  Men who had been on the fields for a couple of years had learned to stay clear of newcomers who were semiwild with disappointment like Klope, and since this particular specimen had that big Eskimo dog that bared its teeth, they gave him extra room.

  It was probable, the more experienced men thought, that this one would wind up with a bullet through his chest before long.

  They did not know that John Klope was quite a different type of person; he did not propose to die in some blazing shoot-out in a Yukon alley. He was angry not at the men who had filed on all the promising sites, but at himself for having arrived so late. He did not stop to reflect that from the time he had heard of the Klondike, on 20 July 1897, to this sixteenth of December in the same year, he had wasted scarcely a day. The layover in Seattle had been minimal; the stop in St. Michael needed to rebuild the Jos. Parker had been inescapable; while the stay at Fort Yukon had been necessary for him to complete arrangements with Sarqaq. Even so, he cursed his luck.

  Now his problem was: Where do I find a place to sleep? and there was no easy solution, for most of the town was housed in tents whose temperatures at night could drop to minus-forty. Rarely had so many men lived in such misery, and he could find no one to take him in, even though he had saved lives by bringing in the cargo of food.

  The main thoroughfare of Dawsonthe entire place had been empty swampland only a year and a half before was a gaudy stretch called Front Street, with saloons galore, a theater, a dentist, a photographer and forty other kinds of establishments for the separation of miners from their gold. No spot along Front Street was hospitable to Klope and his dog, but there was another street parallel to Front, nothing more than a line of dives, called Paradise Alley, and here in ramshackle cribs lived the women who had come to service the miners.

  Some had climbed the Chilkoot Pass, others had been brought up the Yukon on the Jos Parker by their pimps, and some came as actresses, seamstresses or would-be cooks. Failing to find the employment they had hoped for, they wound up on Paradise Alley in whatever kind of pitiful housing they or their pimps could find.

  In one of the more commodious cribs lived a large, noisy, blowzy Belgian woman in her early thirties. She was one of eleven professional prostitutes who had been conscripted as a gang in the port of Antwerp, brought across the ocean and across the United States to work the gold fields. They had been imported, the locals claimed, by an enterprising German businessman who knew what a gold rush needed, and they were some of the best workmen, to use an odd term, in the Klondike.

  The lead woman in the biggest crib was known widely and favorably as the Belgian Mare, and when Klope complained openly about being unable to file a claim or find a place to sleep, an American in a bar told him: 'I spent four nights at the Belgian Mare's. She rents an extra bed.'

  So down Paradise Alley, Klope picked his way to the Mare's crib, and she did have an extra bed and she was in the habit of renting it out. Of course, there were only flimsy walls separating the rooms, so that anyone renting the bedroom almost had to participate in the Mare's lively and repeated profession, but Klope, always a loner, was able to blot out the reality of the Mare's occupation.

  He was, however, grateful to her for her generosity, and especially for her good will, because although she spoke no English, she did go out of her way to make him comfortable, as she did with all men. It was when he took her out to breakfast one morning sourdough flapjacks and moose meat patties that he met the man whose claim he would ultimately inherit. He was Sam Craddick, a disgruntled miner from California, one whose father had struck it moderately rich in the Gold Rush of 1849, the real one they spelled in capital letters. Craddick had expected to find lodes of gold similar to those in California, and the idea of washing tons of sand to find flecks of placer gold disgusted him.

  'Have you a claim?' Klope asked, and the man said: 'When I reached here last summer, all the good sites were taken. I met the Mare same way you did.'

  'So you staked no claim?'

  'Hell yes, I staked one. But not down on the streams where the gold is. High up on a hill overlooking Eldorado.'

  'Why would you stake up there?'

  And while the Mare wolfed her flapjacks, for she was a prodigious eater, Craddick used the slab-sided breakfast table on two trestles to explain mining theory to Klope:

  'Today, yes, you find gold along the streams down here. And that's where you'll always find it, time out of mind, if it ain't in a lode like in California.'

  'You think the mother lode lies under the hills?'

  'I do not. I don't think there's a mother lode in the whole of Canada, or Alaska either.'

  'Then why did you claim, on a hill?'

  The miner said: 'Today's gold, yes, it's found down here in the running stream you see. But yesterday's gold, and maybe the bigger lot where was the stream that captured it?'

  'You mean, there could've been another river?'

  'That's what the experts say.'

  'But wouldn't it be lower? Not higher?'

  'Ten years ago it would be lower. But let's say a million years ago? Who in hell knows where it could've been?'

  Klope asked: 'You mean it could've been much higher than today's river?'

  'You ever see pictures of the Grand Canyon?'

  'Everybody has.'

  'Remember how that little river cut that deep canyon? Maybe it was something like that.' Craddick stared at Klope, then asked abruptly: 'You want to buy my claim?

  The whole damned thing?'

  'Why would you sell?'

  'Because I'm fed up. This is hell country compared to California.'

  Klope thought: He's saying just what that fellow from California said. Maybe the Klondike is too tough for these men. Out loud he asked: 'How big a claim?'

  Craddick, aware that he had on his line a buyer on whom he might unload his mine, said honestly: 'Standard size. Five hundred yards parallel to the stream. Usual distance east and west.'

  Klope interrupted the Belgian woman eating her pancakes: 'Is he a good fellow, yes?'

  The woman laughed, embraced Craddick, and cried: 'Damn good man.' She called for other m
en in the tent restaurant to testify, and when with the help of hand signals she explained the question, the men confirmed her opinion: 'He is honest and he does hold a legitimate claim on the hills above Eldorado.'

  But when the Mare started out to defend the reputation of a man whom she knew to be reliable, it was difficult to stop her, and now she left the restaurant, stood in the middle of the frozen street, and with her right fingers to her lips uttered a piercing whistle. From a store midway down the street a young man in the red and blue uniform of the North West Mounted Police appeared. When he saw, as he suspected he would, the robust figure of the Belgian Mare, he walked sedately down to see what was the matter this time.

  He was a fine-looking officer, twenty-eight years old, clean-shaven, and with the frank, open manner that betrayed his origin in some small Canadian town far to the east. He was Sergeant Will Kirby, taller than the average member of his distinguished force but no heavier. Since his job had required him to learn French, he conversed easily with the Belgian woman, who told him that the American Klope was demanding references from Craddick, whom she knew to be a trustworthy man.

  When Kirby called the men out from the saloon, for he had been taught by his superiors to avoid both saloons and brothels, he recognized the miner at once: 'Sam Craddick is a good man. I've known him more than a year.'

  Klope asked: 'If he was here a year ago, why didn't he get one of the good claims?' and Kirby said: 'Even then it was too late.'

  In no way did the officer suspect Craddick of trying to pull an illegal trick, for he was a decent man, but Kirby did think it best if he knew what was going on: 'Is he trying to sell you a claim?'

  'Yes.'

  'Where is this claim?' he asked Craddick, and when the latter said: 'On the hill at Eldorado,' Kirby said with guarded enthusiasm: 'That's a serious site. Good things have been happening around there.'

  He did not want to know how much the seller was asking, but when the figure, fifty dollars, slipped out, he whistled and told Klope: 'If you don't take it, I will.'

  With that, he saluted the Mare and moved on.

  Klope had the money and a burning desire to own a gold mine of any sort, so he said that he would buy, cash in hand, if the miner would show him the claim and sign a transfer of sale at the Canadian government's office.

  Eager to dispose of what had been nothing but an irritation, the miner said: 'You know, you're getting a cabin, not finished altogether. That goes with the sale.'

  'Let's go see it. Now.'

  So Klope paid for the Mare's breakfast, untied Breed, and set out with the miner to walk the thirteen miles to Eldorado, and when they reached there, Klope found that everything the man had said was true. He had a claim. It was atop a hill. He had started to dig deep into the frozen earth. And he had already built about three-fourths of a one-room cabin. It was, the man said, the best damn buy on the Yukon: 'I don't think there's a flake of gold down there, but it's a real claim in a real gold field.'

  It was now late in the afternoon of the twenty-second, and neither man wished to take that long hike back to Dawson, so the miner suggested: 'Why don't we stay here?' and they made rude beds in the half-finished cabin. As the man was about to go to sleep, he suddenly cried: 'Damn near forgot!' and when Klope inquired, he explained:

  'You got to start your mix at night if you want flapjacks in the morning,' and when he left his bed to rummage among his stacked goods for some flour, Klope asked: 'Do you put some sourdough starter in the flour?' and the man replied: 'No other way.'

  Now Klope rose to make a hesitant proposal: 'I brought some sourdough all the way from Fort Yukon, and I was wondering if it was still any good.'

  'Try it someday and see.'

  'Could we try it now?'

  Craddick studied this, then gave a judicious answer: 'Mine's run out. I borried some from Ned down the line. I know this is good. If we just try yours and it ain't, we got ourselves no breakfast.'

  Klope considered this, then made his own proposal: 'Why don't we try both?' and the miner said: 'Now, that makes sense.'

  In the morning he was up before Klope, whom he awakened with good news: 'Pardner, you got yourself some real live sourdough!' and he explained how a substantial pinch of old dough rich in proliferating spores of yeast, when mixed in with ordinary flour, a little sugar and water and allowed to ferment overnight in a protected place, would generate the finest cooking yeast in the world and produce a new dough that produced delicious flapjacks.

  'Looks to me like your dough did three times as good a job as Ned's,' and when Klope studied the two pans of rising dough, he agreed.

  The first pancakes made from his leaven were, he proclaimed forcefully, the best he had ever tried: chewy, tasty, excellent when flooded with the almost frozen syrup from a big can. 'They'd be even better with butter,' the miner said, but even he had to admit that just as they were, they were pretty good.

  'You got yourself a good strain,' he said. 'It'll work well up here as you dig your shaft.'

  After breakfast he instructed Klope in the intricacies of this type of mining: 'What we do, every man on this hill, is light a fire every night, from September when the ground freezes hard to May when it begins to thaw. The fire softens the ground, maybe eight inches. Come morning, you dig out that eight inches and pile it over here.

  Next night and every night, you build yourself another fire. Next morning and every morning, you dig out the eight inches of thawed earth till you have yourself a shaft thirty feet deep.'

  'What do you do with the earth?' Klope asked, and Craddick pointed to a score of earthen piles, frozen solid: 'Come summer, you sluice all that earth and maybe you find gold.'

  The miner shouted down the hill to a man working on a lower level: 'Can we see your dump?' and the man shouted back: 'Come ahead, but hold that dog.'

  So Klope, Craddick and Breed climbed down to the lower level, halfway to the rich creek below, and studied the large pile of frozen muck. The owner said: 'Cain't tell as how there's much color in there, but Charlie, three claims down, says he believes he'll sluice forty, fifty thousand dollars outen his pile of mud.'

  'How does he protect it when he's down below working?' Klope asked, and both miners laughed: 'There's millions lying around these diggings this wintry day. And it better stay right where it is, because if any man touches a thimbleful of my frozen muck, there's fifty men will shoot him dead.'

  On their way up the hill they passed a grizzled man in his sixties who had a larger-than-average pile of frozen earth beside his cabin. 'Louie,' Craddick said, 'I hear you found real gold,' and the man said: 'Hasty assay said maybe twenty thousand dollars.'

  'Could I see what real gold looks like?' Klope asked, and the old man kicked at his pile until he broke loose a frozen fragment, and when he and the California man looked at it their faces broke into glorious smiles, for they were seeing a rich deposit.

  But when Klope looked he saw nothing and his face showed his disappointment.

  'Sonny,' the man said, 'it don't come in minted gold pieces like the bank has. It's them teeny-weeny flecks. My god, this is a rich deposit!' And now when Klope moved the chunk of earth in the sunlight, he saw the flecks, golden and pure and extremely small. So this is what he had come to find, these minute particles of magic?

  Back at his own mine, Craddick took Klope down the square opening he had so laboriously cut through the frozen soil, and for the first time in his life Klope heard the word permafrost:

  'Our curse and our blessing. We have to work like hell to dig it loose. But it's so permanent, here forever, that we don't have to timber our hole the way my pappy did in California. We dig a hole, it remains same size till doomsday or an earthquake.

  And when you do reach bedrock ...'

  'What's that?'

  'Where the ancient river collected its gold ... if there ever was a river, or gold.' He sighed over lost dreams, and added: 'When you reach bedrock, you just build more fires and melt sideways rather than down, and
the permafrost holds everything together ... even the roof of your cave.'

  They were about seven feet down when the miner said this, and when Klope looked up he asked: 'How do I get my thawed earth up to the pile?' and from bitter memory the man laughed sardonically: 'You load it in this bucket which I'm givin' you and you climb out of the shaft, takin' this rope with you, and you haul it up and dump it, and then you climb down with the bucket and do it all over again.' He stopped and chuckled: 'That is, unless you can teach that dog of yours to haul up the bucket and dump it.'

  'Is that how all those men ...?' and the miner nodded: 'That's how they all did it. The men like me who found nothin'. The lucky ones who took out half a million.'

  The two men walked back to Dawson, with Breed in tow, and next morning they appeared at the Canadian registry office, where they met Sergeant Kirby filing a report. 'I bought the claim,' Klope said, and Kirby replied: 'You won't regret it.' And minutes later Klope had in his possession the valuable paper which stated that a transfer had been made and that he now owned 'Eldorado Crest, Claim # 87 in Line, formerly in the legal possession of Sam Craddick of California, now belonging to John Klope of Moose Hide, Idaho, this 24th day of December 1897, $50.00 U.S.A.'

  As night fell and a group of sentimental miners toured the frozen streets singing Christmas carols, Klope felt that he knew the rock-bottom fact about gold mining on the Klondike: Luck. I was lucky to get here alive. I was lucky to meet Sarqaq before it was too late. I was lucky to find a helpful woman like the Mare. And I was damned lucky to buy as good a lease as I did. I know the chances of finding gold in that hole are a thousand-to-one against, but no wiseacre back in Idaho will ever be able to laugh at John Klope: 'That fool farmer! Went all the way to the Yukon and never found hisself a mine.'

  ON THE LAST DAY OF JULY 1897 A TALL ELDERLY GENTLEMAN, garbed in the uniform of a Confederate general, complete with a big Robert E.

  Lee kind of hat and a pair of cavalryman's boots, was lounging in the offices of Ross & Raglan, one of Seattle's principal shipping firms. Idly inspecting the hordes of would-be gold seekers from all parts of the globe who cluttered Schwabacher's Wharf, his inquisitive eye fastened upon a family obviously from somewhere to the east, and even more obviously ill at ease. 'They're running away from something.' he muttered to himself. 'They're nervous, but they do look decent.'