But his turbulent life continued. In 1900, on his first trip after regaining his command, he escaped a most serious court-martial pertaining to his abuse of a woman passenger only when his protectors had him declared temporarily insane, and in 1903, at the conclusion of his final command, he was again reprimanded for 'unofficerlike and indecent language in the presence of his officers and crew.' Unrepentant, he moved ashore, and died a year later.
IN SITKA THE GOVERNMENT'S CASE AGAINST SHELDON Jackson rehashed old charges against him, but with new and more effective citizens making them. As the population of Alaska grew, the numbers of miners, businessmen and saloonkeepers increased proportionately, and these groups had always been violently anti-Jackson, but since their speakers were now more literate, they painted him in dark and dictatorial colors: 'He wants to tell everyone how to behave, but he himself is an unchristian, ungodly tyrant.'
He had also acquired a new body of enemies, the members of the Russian Orthodox Church, who felt that if the little missionary wanted to declare war against their church and their language, which he obviously did, they would take up arms against him.
Most telling was a voice not heard before, and therefore extra persuasive: 'If Reverend Jackson spends six months a year attending to personal business in Washington, and six months cruising with his drunken crony on the Bear, how much time per year has he left to mind his duties in Alaska?'
At the conclusion of this round of testimony, things looked gloomy for Jackson, but the investigator was no fool, and before issuing his conclusions he sought a secret meeting with Carl Caldwell, now a full-fledged judge in the Alaskan court, who confided:
'Everything his enemies say about Jackson is true. But his enemies say the same thing about me, and if you set up your office here, they'd lodge the same charges against you. Nobody can be neutral where Jackson is concerned. He often irritates me, and I'm sure he'd irritate you. But you must have deduced from the character of his enemies that he's one of the best forces in Alaska. He represents the future.'
Paralleling the court-martial in San Francisco, the government man in Sitka began by conceding that the charges against Jackson had been brought in good faith, and he said so; there were many reasons why men of serious mind could dislike this obstreperous little man, but like Mike Healy, he was necessary for the well-being of his society.
So the verdict had to be: 'All charges dropped with prejudice,' which meant, as Caldwell explained: 'They can't be revived again.'
But of course that applied only to Alaska, because when Jackson returned to Washington, members of his own church conspired against him, bringing charges of misapplication of funds, disobedience to orders and arrogance in the conduct of his missionary efforts. But his defenders pointed out that while others sat in offices pondering the niceties of formal administration, he had been on the firing line, sleeves rolled up and winning souls to God. His loyal women, seeking to remind the public of his astonishing accomplishments, published a small pamphlet summarizing his work:
In unflagging dedication to God's work from Colorado to Arizona to Montana to Alaska, with yearly returns to Washington to instruct Congress, he traveled more than a million miles using every known form of transportation, including his own feet. He organized from scratch more than seventy congregations, for whom he personally built more than forty church buildings. He often gave four or five speeches in one day for a total that ran into many thousands, and church organizations launched by him collected for missionary and other religious work a proved total of $20,364,475, for in the work of the Lord he was tireless. We shall not soon again see his like.
But perhaps the most revealing portrait of this contentious little man, who continued all his days to make friends and enemies in equal proportion, can be found in his battle with the Post Office Department, of which he was a paid official. It was his belief that since the Great Land was now American, its villages should carry respectable American names, and since he had the right to choose the names, he saw no reason why they should not honor the Presbyterians who had helped civilize the new territory.
Accordingly, he dumped fine old Eskimo and Tlingit names and replaced them with ones like Young, Hill, Rankin, Gould, Willard and especially Norcross and Voorhees, good Presbyterians all, the last two being relatives of his whom he wished to honor. One of his most interesting switches was getting rid of Chilkoot, attached to a beautiful village west of Skagway; for it he substituted Haines, the name of the chairwoman of the Presbyterian Women's Committee, who had never seen Alaska but who had contributed generously to Jackson's support. His principal change, however, was to drop the historic old Tlingit name of Howkan in favor of his own, Jackson.
This caused a furor, for the residents did not want to lose their historic designation.
Jackson, however, was adamant, and pestered Washington to ignore local complaints and retain the new name, which honored him. But when the Democrats assumed national leadership under Grover Cleveland, the Post Office Department restored the name but spelled it Howcan, at which Jackson, with a burst of spleen which proved he had no shame or sense of the ridiculous, deluged Washington with requests that Howcan be changed back to its proper name, Jackson.
He accomplished nothing, but when the Republicans rewon the presidency, he sent a sharp letter to John Wanamaker, the new and Presbyterian postmaster general:
With the Republicans again in power we expect to receive just consideration...
. During Cleveland's administration the Democrats had it changed back to Howkan, out of opposition to myself. With our Republican victory, it became Jackson again.
Now I hear there is a local movement to make it Howkan once more. Please notify the clerk in charge of these proposals that you wish it left Jackson, and greatly oblige.
But his foes prevailed, and changed the name back to a misspelled Howcan.
THE TWO AMERICAN GIANTS IN ALASKA, MICHAEL Healy and Sheldon Jackson, were in some ways reminiscent of the two earlier giants Vitus Bering and Aleksandr Baranov. In each instance the first of the pair was an imposing sea captain who exerted his will and his command over the northern oceans, while the second member was insignificant or even comic in appearance but gargantuan in determination to forge ahead despite opposition. Each of the pairs left an indelible imprint on Alaska, especially the second and less imposing members, but the greater similarity seems to be that each of these four explorers and dreamers was a badly flawed man. They were not resplendent conquerors like Alexander the Great or continent builders like Charlemagne. They were ordinary men who drank too much or were foolishly vain or who started things they did not finish or who were objects of ridicule to their colleagues. All four were subjected to official harassment or legal investigations or the censure of court-martial, and each ended his life in a kind of disgrace.
Alaska did not produce supermen, but in its formative periods it was served by men of character and determination, and it is a fortunate land which knows such public servants.
VIII – GOLD
The cataclysmic incidents which produced the scenic grandeurs of Alaska began at least a hundred and twenty million years ago, but the events which gave rise to the most dramatic development in Alaskan history started much earlier.
About eighteen billion years ago, insofar as science can determine from signals left behind, an explosion of indescribable magnitude took place, and what had previously been a void became occupied by gigantic clouds of cosmic dust. Different men with different insights or mind-sets have described this beginning of the beginning in different ways, but regardless of its cause, the event seems to have set our universe spinning; all that happened thereafter stemmed from its complexity and overpowering force.
We cannot reasonably guess what happened to the major portion of the dust thus set in movement, but about nine billion years ago a minor portion staggering in size though only a fraction began to coalesce into what would ultimately become the galaxy of which we are a part. In this galaxy some two
hundred billion stars would form, the one we see rising each morning as our sun being one of the smaller. We must not take too much pride in our galaxy, wonderful as it is, because it is merely one of more than a billion; quite often the others are greater in dimension and larger in their starry populations.
About six billion years ago an immense agglomeration of cosmic dust within our galaxy began assuming the shape of a huge swirl much like the ones we will see in the heavens this night if we have a good telescope, for all the processes here mentioned are still being repeated in other parts of the universe. Out of this swirling mass of cosmic particles a star began to evolve and with it the nine or ten accompanying planets which together would make up our solar system. Our sun, therefore, is probably about six billion years old, with some of the planets slightly younger.
Now our figures become more precise. About four and a half billion years ago cosmic dust somehow related to what was happening in the sun began to agglomerate into what would ultimately become our earth. For the first billion years of its existence the earth seems to have been a turbulent cauldron in which violent physical and chemical alterations were taking place.
Composed at first mainly of hydrogen and helium, the interior of the earth accumulated such heat and pressure that nuclear reactions occurred, and out of them began to take form the more than one hundred distinct elements upon which the earth would be constructed. Iron, one of the principal elements, being heavier than most, concentrated in the central core, where in a part molten, part solid form it would exert the unifying force which held the earth together, determine much of its movement, establish the magnetic poles, and lend stability to the whole. Mixed with generous amounts of nickel, this central core of iron helped in manifold ways to keep the earth functioning.
At the center, in a heat inconceivable, under pressures never known on the surface and driven by nuclear reactions, the semiliquid components of the earth were sorted out, forming all the basic elements which would later comprise the earth as we know it. Essential substances as diverse as lead, sulfur, nitrogen and arsenic emerged, each with its peculiar atomic weight, each with its preassigned and unique position among its neighbors.
One of these elements, Number 79 in line with an atomic weight of 196.9, which made it conspicuously heavy, was a bright metal with an alluring appearance and a curious set of propensities. Gold, far from copious in its distribution throughout the mass of the earth, had a specific gravity nineteen times that of water, so that if any one of the major oceans had been comprised of gold rather than water, its sheer weight could have collapsed the system.
A major characteristic of gold was its reluctance to react with other elements, staying stubbornly to itself. In this respect it differed strikingly from the element carbon, which formed relationships with almost any substance with which it came into contact. Carbon formed more than four hundred thousand different compounds, gold almost none. Also, carbon metamorphosed itself into an almost endless chain of useful or valuable products: petroleum, carbon black, anthracite, graphite and limestone. A notable characteristic of carbon was its capacity to restructure itself late in the life of earth, when altered conditions produced altered forms. Thus diamonds, one of the spectacular manifestations of carbon, did not come into being until relatively late, when a unique combination of elementary material, heat and pressure transformed carbon into something quite dazzling.
Gold, on the contrary, began as gold, and remained gold, despite the hammering of heat, and atomic reactions, and the ever-present invitation of other metals to join them in exotic new combinations. Gold tended to associate with the heavier elements related to iron, but it also showed a slight affinity for sulfur. It combined occasionally with the exotic mineral tellurium, but refused to do so with oxygen, the way so many other minerals did. There would be no gold oxide. Gold did not rust.
Because of its insularity, gold was known as a noble metal, an adjective applied also to those rare gases which refused to combine with other gases. The word did not refer to lineage, or attractive appearance, or value; a metal or a gas was noble if it stood by itself, had great persistence and a reluctance to deform itself in union with another element. According to such definitions, gold was certainly a noble metal.
It seems to have moved upward from its originating cauldron by following fissures in rocky formations, depositing itself here and there in arbitrary and diverse patterns.
At times, like any other liquid under pressure, it found some convenient crevice and spread laterally, coming to rest at various levels, never in great concentrations like lead or sulfur, but in areas so widely scattered that no logical reason could explain their placement.
When man succeeded in exploring most of the surface of the earth, he would find deposits of gold in places as varied as Australia, California, South Africa and on the banks of a trivial snowbound stream on the Canada-Alaska border, close to the Arctic Circle.
Gold could be found in two dramatically different circumstances. Like other metallic elements, copper and lead for example, it might rest well below the surface of the earth in concentrations laid down millions of years earlier. This gold would be mined, as metals have been mined for some four thousand years, and there would be no great difference between the mining of gold and the mining of the other metals. A deep shaft would be sunk; walls would be shored up by timbers; and at promising levels laterals would be sent out to explore veins.
What would be found in such a below-the-surface gold mine? Not concentrations of the noble metal, waiting to be dug out and brought to the surface. What was common was a quartz rock containing flecks of gold so minute that the unpracticed eye could scarcely recognize them. A find of tremendous value would be a hunk of quartz whose cross section showed traces of gold no larger than pinpoints not pinheads and so widely dispersed that the uninstructed would have to look twice to see them.
Such rock, broken loose from its underground hiding places and brought to the surface, would be crushed and sluiced with water, and now the weight of gold became important, for invariably it would sink to the bottom, where it would be trapped in riffles while the apparently heavier but lighter quartz rock was carried off by the water.
To mine gold in this way required courage to delve into the earth, dynamite to break the quartz loose, and a constant flow of water to sluice the crushed mixture.
The second way of finding gold was the more exciting. Through millions of years as the upper crust of the earth shifted and rose and fell, veins of rock containing minute traces of gold were exposed to the elements, allowing abrasion to take place.
Freezing winters fractured the quartz; incessantly dripping water broke down the rock; gravel at the bottom of swift-moving streams acted like sandpaper on wood; and volcanic displacement brought to the surface new deposits to be abraded.
As the suddenly released flecks of gold found their freedom, their fate was determined by their weight. They moved for a while with the motion of whatever stream was carrying them, then irresistibly they fell to the bottom, and as they came to rest, certain hydrodynamic forces dictated where they would accumulate. If a stream was tumbling headlong down an incline, they would seem to be almost internally driven to seek some quiet nook in which to escape the turbulence. If a quiet creek was meandering over fairly level land, its cargo of gold would fall into some outer curve where the relative speed of the water slowed. But all the flecks came to rest somewhere.
The finding of this surface gold was known as placer mining the word rhymed with gasser and the mark of the placer miner was a man with a beard holding a tin basin beside a creek, panning a load of gravel to see if it showed colors, flecks of gold, then building a crude sluice of some kind «to bring lots of water to wash away lots and lots of gravel. To find gold locked in quartz, a man had to dig deep into the earth; to find placer gold in its easier locations, one sometimes had to dig only two feet and lift up not tons of rocks but only a covering of gravel or sand.
Through centurie
s of gold seeking, men had devised a dozen rules of thumb to guide them in locating where placer gold was hiding, and men who had been on the various gold fields became uncanny in their ability to-find the noble mineral. If you brought onto a new field a gang of men practiced in the fields of Australia, California and South Africa, they would find the gold, while amateurs from Idaho, London and Chicago would not.
Three practical rules seemed to prevail. The first knowledgeable men on a new field preempted the good spots; those who arrived late found little or nothing. However, the second rule kept the hopes of the general public alive; just often enough some lucky prospector who knew nothing about gold stumbled upon colors, scouted about, and by sheer chance staked himself a bonanza. This did not happen often, but it did happen.
The third rule was not widely understood, but it accounted for some of the great finds. In seeking placer gold, one followed stream beds, because moving water was the only possible agency by which placers could be deposited. But since the gold had been laid down over millions of years, and since a stream could wander notoriously during even one man's brief lifetime, what the prospector should investigate was not necessarily the little stream as it existed today but the mighty one that might have existed a thousand years ago, or a hundred thousand, or even a million. Perhaps, along the Yukon River and its tributaries in 1896, the place to look for gold was not along the banks of the Klondike, that magical stream with the magical name, but on ridges hundreds of feet high where some river of significance had laid down its gold three hundred thousand years earlier.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1896 A BROKEN-DOWN AMERICAN prospector with an unfavorable reputation because of his propensity for lying, George Washington Carmack, happened to strike up an acquaintance with a dour, proper Scotsman born in Canada. Robert Henderson could have laid claim to the title gentleman had he preferred, for he favored strict personal behavior and austere business rectitude. Had he no weaknesses? He was an inveterate snob.