Klondike Friday – An Armada

It’s well known that the route to the Klondike in 1897-98 was nothing if not difficult. The photographs of a line of men and sometimes women climbing steadily up the Chilkoot trail, carrying a portion of their one ton of goods on their backs, is iconic. So iconic it’s featured on Alaska licence plates. (I’ve always thought it a bit ironic that the Alaska licence plate proudly features people LEAVING Alaska).

But lesser known perhaps is what those would-be prospectors faced once they reached the summit. Could they take a rest and congratulate themselves on making it? Was it smooth sailing the rest of the way? A gentle stroll down the mountainside followed by a leisurely cruise?

Not exactly.

Because once they reached the summit, and were inspected by the Mounties posted there and allowed to go forward, there was, of course, nothing until they got to Dawson City. Eight Hundred kilometres of nothing.
The only way to get to Dawson from here was by water, up the Yukon River. As there wasn’t exactly a port at the lakes, they had to build their own boats – and then navigate a river full of rapids through the wilderness.

And build boats they did, out of green wood they hacked out of the wilderness forest themselves. And not a canoe, but something that would transport all of their party and everyone’s ton of goods. While they waited the winter out on the shores of Lake Bennett for the river ice to break up. One day ice clogged the waterway, the next day it did not. And the armada set off. Just imagine a wilderness river, barely disturbed by so much as a paddle in all the years of its existence. Suddenly tens, then hundreds, of craft arrive. Canoes and rowboats, scows and barges, rafts that were living trees a few days before. Billowing with sails made out of the sides of tents or tarpaulins.

As this was Canada, and not the ‘wild west’ the Mounties kept an eye on the proceedings, they inspected the boats for some minimal degree of seaworthiness, and those they feared not capable of operating their craft were ordered to learn water skills first. At various points where the rapids were strong the police ordered women and children out of the boats to walk around.



Many boats and many possessions and even some lives were lost on the river. Imagine carrying all that stuff up the Chilkoot trail and over the summit only to watch it sink to the bottom of the mighty river.

GOLD WEB, the fourth book in the Klondike Gold Rush series, is now available for pre-order for both paper and ebook versions.  Click for Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, Kobo, Chapters.ca or remember your favourite independent bookstore.

Klondike Friday: Mud

I sometime thought that in later years, if I should be so lucky, the thing I would remember most about Dawson, in this summer of 1898, was the mud. The town had been built with no thought for anything other than access to the gold fields. Inconveniences such as being located on a floodplain, on the flats beside one river and at the mouth of another, right at the spot where the rivers would jam during spring break-up, were inconsequential in light of the town’s desperate need to be at the road to the Creeks where lumps of gold waited to be found.
-Fiona MacGillivray, Gold Fever (Dundurn Press).

Mud.

And a lot of it. Dawson City was built where the Klondike River flows into the Yukon River. A good location for a town, near a waterway, close to the gold fields. But it was also a floodplain. When the ice broke up on the river in May of 1898, the newly arrived townsfolk discovered just what a poor choice of site it was. There are pictures of the Mounties crossing from one building in Fort Herchmer to another in a canoe (sorry can’t find such a picture today, I’ll keep an eye out for it ).

Every tree for miles around had been hacked down for lumber, firewood, and to make room for houses. All that water had nothing stopping it.

The streets were, literally seas of mud. The mud could be as high as a horse’s knees. Duckboards were laid across the streets so people could get across. And mud, as we all know, breeds insects and disease. Never mind what it must have been like trying to keep the floors clean!









GOLD WEB the fourth book in the series, will be released on December 28th.  It is now available for pre-order from all your usual sources including Amazon.ca, Amazon.com Chapters.ca And don't forget your favourite independent bookstore.  (Pre-orders apply to paperback only. E-books will be available on publication date)

Klondike Friday: Sex and Sin in the Klondike

Dawson City in 1897-98 Yukon might have been a freewheeling town, full of open prostitution, legalized gambling, and saloons that stayed open twenty four hours a day, but somethings remained completely traditional
In the Yukon as in the rest of Europe and North America at the time, there was a very strict social strata, particularly as it affected women.
Married women occupied the top rung of respectability. Some of that respectability varied of course according to the status of their husband. Then came the few businesswomen. Whether wealthy business owners such as Belinda Mulrooney or a dressmaker or the proprietor of a hat shop. Nurses and teachers would have fallen into this category.



Then we hit what was known as the demimonde. And the majority of gold rush women who made their living ‘mining the miners’. The top of those ranks were the headliners in the dancehalls. These women could make a lot of money, but it was an expensive occupation – they provided their own stage costumes and were expected to change them often. The next tier was the chorus dancers. Not headliners but still stage performers. The rung below – percentage girls. These were the women who moved in after the stage show was over to dance with the men for the legendary dollar a dance. One dollar got some lonely sourdough or cheechako a one minute turn around the dance hall and then he could expect his lady to drag him off to the bar to buy a drink – included in the dance price. They got 25 cents out of every dollar dance. Most of these women simply wore their street clothes to work. They would have worked hard too – from midnight to six or eight am six days a week, dancing constantly.

Let’s keep going down. The few independent prostitutes, some of whom ran their business under the guise of a cigar store and the employees of the better class brothels. Below them, the cheaper brothels, and then at the very bottom, the women who worked out of the cribs on Paradise Alley. Many of these poor women didn’t earn much, if anything, at all. First they had to pay for their transportation to the Klondike, then the rent on their cribs, and pay off pimps.



Information on social strata found in Gamblers and Dreamers by Charlene Porsild.

Klondike Friday: Women in the Klondike

With the publication of Gold Web, the fourth book in the Klondike Gold Rush series only two months away, I’m mentally back in the Klondike.

Today, I’m going to recommend some books that I used as research for the history of the time. The definitive book on the subject is Pierre Berton’s Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush. A highly readable popular-history book, it’s well worth starting your historical investigation with. One thing about Berton though, is that he does gloss over women’s participation. (Hardly the first historical record to do so). It’s estimated that about one-sixth of the people who went to the Klondike were women. And not just prostitutes and dance hall owners either. But businesswomen, shopkeepers, nurses, nuns, newspaper reporters, wives and mothers. They carried their babies up the Chilkoot trail or lugged pregnant bellies and tried to make homes out of the wilderness and created successful (or not-so-successful) businesses. They supported themselves, or they supported their families.

Charlotte Gray’s book: Gold Diggers: Striking it Rich in the Klondike, examines, among others, Belinda Mulrooney, prominent businesswoman.

I’d recommend Also Gamblers and Dreamers: Women, Men, and Community in the Klondike. by Charlene Porsild

And Goodtime Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush by Lael Morgan for a peek into the demimonde.

And now, a word from our sponsor: Pre-orders are important to build interest in a book (and usually at a reduced price) Gold Web is available for Pre-Order at a reduced price.

From Amazon.ca, From Amazon.com, From Chapters/Indigo. Also your favourite independent bookstore.

Klondike Friday: Not on the Lord’s Day

Today is Good Friday. I'm planning to go to a fabulous little shop in Bloomfield called Diva which -stocks fancy hats and fascinators. I'm in need of a new 19th century-style hat for my upcoming promotional appearances for Gold Mountain.

Which got me thinking about changing attitudes to religious days.

As I’ve discussed here before, the Klondike Gold Rush was notable for the presence of the police. The NWMP was in the territory before all those mad prospectors and their hangers-on began flooding across the border. Thus what the newcomers found was not a wild west town, but a place where the police were firmly in control and some laws strictly enforced.

The Mounties turned a semi-blind eye to offenses such as prostitution and gambling recognizing that banning those things outright would simply lead to driving them underground. Somethings they didn’t bend on, however. Such serious crimes as the use of vile language or working on Sunday – the Lord’s Day.

Swearing in public could get you tossed in jail and any form of work on Sunday could see one facing the long arm of the law. It has been recorded that people could be, and were, arrested for such offences as chopping wood for their own stove on a Sunday.

Times certainly have changed, haven't they!


Get it early: Gold Mountain has appeared on KOBO in advance of publication date. So, if you have a KOBO e-reader, now’s your chance: click here. Gold Digger and Gold Fever have been on KOBO for a while. I am expecting (hoping!)they will be available in all electronic formats soon.

All she wants is a quiet life: Fiona MacGillivray guests at Killer Characters

Fiona MacGillivray, owner of the Savoy Saloon and Dance Hall in Dawson City, 1898, guests today at the fun blog Killer Characters. Head on over to see what she has to say about her adventures and about being a character in a book. http://www.killercharacters.com/

Klondike Friday: Law and Order (Sometimes)

In Gold Mountain, the third in the Klondike Gold Rush Series, due out next April from Dundrun Press, there are some flashbacks to when Fiona and Angus first arrived in Skagway, Alaska in August of 1897. Fiona’s on the run from the law in Toronto. She has no intention of going on the difficult trip to Dawson, and thinks it might be a nice idea to set up a theatre in Skagway, something for the entertainment of all the eager prospectors sure to follow.

Then she has an encounter with the legendary outlaw Randolph Jefferson Smith, and decides it expedient to take her prospects across the border into Canada and then to Dawson City.

Smith (aka Soapy) is a real historical character and I did a fair amount to research into him for his small part in this book. There was pretty much nothing in Skagway before July of 1897, when news of the gold strike hit the cities of the south and tens of thousands of people headed north. Skagway, and nearby Dyea, were the jumping-off points for the interior. Passengers travelled by ship from Seattle, San Francisco, Vancouver or Victoria and disembarked at Skagway or Dyea to head overland into Canada.

The aforementioned Mr. Smith, who got his nickname from a confidence game involving a bar of soap, was one of the first on the scene. Seeing an opportunity, he quickly took over the town, and ruled Skagway for the next year.

What little there was in the way of law and order, looked the other way. (The Marshall was in Smith’s pocket.)

Smith was killed in July of 1898 in a shootout on the Skagway waterfront. His killer died of his own wounds a few days later. The picture of Smith on the horse was taken was he was the Grand Marshall of the July 4th parade, but a few days before his death.



Meanwhile, at the top of the Chilkoot Trail, at the Canadian border, the North-West Mounted Police kept a Maxim Machine Gun with the express purpose of keeping Soapy and his gang out of Canada.

Many an American was not impressed to arrive in Canada and find that there were rules and the law was enforced. For example, the NWMP inspected all boats leaving Lake Bennett for sea-worthiness, and insisted that women and children get out and walk around the rapids. In town they kept an eye on the gambling halls and cribs, enforced Sunday closing, and banned firearms from town and the Creeks.

And created a very Canadian version of the not-so-wild west.



The picture to the right is of Sir Sam Steele, who in typical Canadian fashion, gets far less recognition than he deserves.

Klondike Friday: A Day Off

I'm taking a day off today. Yup, a holiday. Normally, when I'm at home I write every day until about noon or one-ish. Yesterday I realzied that summer is ending, I have a fridge full of blueberries, a counter-top covered in tomatoes, and almost nothing made for the freezer. I have books to read and a swimming pool to enjoy while I still can. So I'll take a day off.

But wait - the last-minuite edits for Gold Mountain are due today. I can do those quickly. And it's Klondike Friday!

Sunday was the Lord's Day in the Yukon. Everything was shut down, the bars, the dancehalls, the shops. People could be (and were) fined for chopping wood for their own stoves on a Sunday. So consider this my version of Sunday, and that's the end of Klondike Friday for this week!

One more thing - the release date of Gold Mountain has been moved up to April.

Klondike Friday: Gotta Spend it.

When I sent the manuscript for the first book in the Klondike Gold Rush series, Gold Digger, into my editor she returned it questioning every instance in which I’d specified the amount of money flowing.

Yup, I said, they really did spend money in those quantities.

Very few people made much money in the rush: of all those tens of thousands of people who set off for the Klondike, almost all of them were too late. By the time they heard the news, headed to Seattle or San Francisco or Vancouver, bought the required one ton of possessions, got on a boat to Skagway or Dyea, carried all their things over the passes and into Canada, made a boat and braved the rapids on the Yukon River, and finally arrived in Dawson… all the claims were taken.

There were a few exceptions of prospectors who got lucky, but generally speaking the only ones who truly stuck it rich were already in the area when the initial strike was made.

Aside, that is, from those who mined the miners – the bartenders and dance hall girls and far-sighted shopkeepers.

Yet for those who did strike it rich it was a time of almost unimaginable indulgence. Any luxury available in the South – champagne, oysters, pâté, silk dresses, ostrich plume hats, not to mention real luxuries like fresh eggs! could be had for the right price.




Men dropped ten thousand dollars in a night at the gambling tables (in 1898 dollars!), threw nuggets at the feet of their favourite dance hall performer, bought drinks for all and sundry. A dancer known as Diamond Tooth Gertie (incidentally, you can visit Diamond Tooth Gertie’s in Dawson today) reportedly said, “The poor ginks have just gotta spent it, they’re that scared they’ll die before they have it all out of the ground.”

Klondike Fridays: A newspaper story run amok.

The Promised Land. Not.

In her book Gold Diggers (a non-fiction account of the Klondike Gold Rush) Charlotte Gray points out that the rush was largely a journalistic or media event.

That there was gold in the Yukon was not exactly a big secret. People had been mining there and finding gold for more than twenty years. So what happened in 1897 that set off a world wide rush that saw tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of people from all parts of the world packing up all their worldly belongings and rushing into the wilderness?

Media.



There was a severe depression going on in the United States. When word arrived that a ship was heading to Seattle, carrying gold and now-rich gold miners, the newspapers, particularly the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Seattle Times, saw the opportunity to pump up the business prospects of Seattle. And they played it up for all it was worth. They made the arrival of the Portland in July 16, 1897 into a media event of unprecedented proportions. Other papers, of course, picked it up, and the news spread to a highly receptive audience like wildfire.

The amount of gold in that first shipment wasn’t really all that impressive. The papers reported it in weight – which did sound pretty good – rather than value – nothing too special.

Once the story had legs, as they say in the newspaper biz, everyone else was jumping on the bandwagon. Outfitting shops sprouted overnight, stores put ads in newspapers and hung signs and banners, books and maps were printed by the boatload, and everyone with a boat rushed to the docks to provide transportation. That the books and maps were likely to be laughably inaccurate, and the goods one supposedly needed wouldn’t do much other than take money from a wanna-be prospector’s pocket, was of no relevance. People needed to believe and other people were happy to take advantage of that need.

Unfortunately for the tens of thousands who made it to the Klondike, the reality was a lot different. There wasn't gold lying on the ground waiting to be swept up, and the profitable mines were already owned by those who’d been in the area when the strike happened.

The only real money to be made was in the shops or the saloons and dance halls.

Enter Fiona MacGillivray.