'It is.'
'Now let's go over each item carefully.'
In the late afternoon Snyder asked: 'What does this entry mean?' and she said: 'Judge Grant had me claim for seven hours of extra work which I didn't do, but when I was paid he kept the money.'
Snyder pushed the book away as if its odor offended him: 'Jesus Christ, if a man had his salary, you would not expect him to cheat on his secretary.'
But it was when he reached the Hoxey entries that he became really enraged: 'I'm an officer of the law and I take it very seriously, but I find myself wishing that I could lock these two in a room with that big Norwegian, that Siberian and that tough little Lapp. I'll bet they could handle this case in fifteen minutes and save the taxpayers a lot of money.'
And then, on his second morning with Missy's notebook, he came upon the Concannon case, and he was sickened: 'A woman loses her husband in a crazy accident that cannot be explained, and two skunks defraud her of her insurance.'
He could read no further. Storming from the hotel, he went to where Judge Grant and Hoxey were skulking and slapped handcuffs on them. 'Where are you taking us?' Judge Grant whined, and Snyder said: 'Protective custody. So these people here don't lynch you.' Two days later, when the Senator sailed south, these two were aboard. They had been in Nome less than four months, but in that time they had smeared across the face of blindfolded American justice one of her most disgraceful stains.
THE SAGA OF NOME GROUND TO A STUMBLING HALT. THE Golden Gate Hotel burned again and was rebuilt. The glacier of frozen urine filled the alleys once more in winter and melted into the sea in summer. The golden beaches continued to throw up gold for another year and then were exhausted, while the placer mines along Anvil Creek continued modestly for several decades.
But there had been stunning if brief glory. In one twelvemonth period alone, Nome produced $7,500,000 worth of gold, more than the price paid for all Alaska back in 1867. In all, more than $115,000,000 was taken out when gold was valued at $20 an ounce.
Claims Five, Six and Seven Above, once more controlled by their rightful owners, produced only modest fortunes because Marvin Hoxey had sequestered the best portion of the gold, and had hidden it so effectively that during his trial in San Francisco and his time in the penitentiary, the government was unable to find his two million in loot. He kept it all.
An outraged judge sentenced him to fifteen years, just punishment for a man who had defrauded so many of so much, but after three months President McKinley pardoned him on the grounds that his health was threatened by imprisonment, and besides, everyone knew he had been, in prior life, an exemplary citizen. He would function another thirty productive years as one of the most effective lobbyists in Washington, continuing to prevent any constructive legislation for Alaska's self-governance. Legislators listened to him, for he continued to boast: 'I know Alaska like the back of my hand and, to speak frankly, it's just not ready for self-government.'
Judge Grant's case had a surprising conclusion. As Harold Snyder had predicted, despite Missy's notebook, no specific charges could be proved against him, for with an almost animal cunning he had, during his frantic weeks in Nome, conducted his affairs so carefully and with such complete knowledge of what was happening, that he manipulated what evidence that did surface to condemn Hoxey while revealing himself as a forthright Iowa judge striving to do his best. Snyder, listening in court to the evidence, burst into laughter several times: 'All of us in Nome thought Judge Grant was the dummy.
Used as a cat's paw by clever Marvin Hoxey. No, Grant was the smart one. He maneuvered it so that he went free and Hoxey went to jail.' At the end of one court session in which Judge Grant's evidence absolved him and damaged his partner, Marvin came over to Snyder and said: 'I was Hoxey, he was foxy.'
Declared 'Not guilty' by a federal jury, Grant returned to Iowa, where, after a lapse of two years during which he mended his fences, he resumed his position on the bench before which his father had practiced, and there he was known favorably as 'the eminent jurist who brought a system of justice to Alaska.' Repeatedly, while he was on the bench or delivering orations locally or in Chicago, admiring people would comment:
'He looks like a judge,' proving that in many circumstances it is more important to look like something than to be something.
Tom Venn prospered, as such dedicated and well-trained young men so often do. He kept his assayer's scales clear of rust, and when the R&R store in Nome was closed because of the catastrophic drop in population 32,000 in 1900, counting drifters; 1,200 three years later, counting almost no working miner she was promoted to the big store in Juneau, the new capital of Alaska, where he tended to business as before, but also began looking carefully at all his younger female customers for a potential marriage partner.
The biggest change came in the lives of Missy Peckham and Matt Murphy. No, his wife in Ireland did not die so that he could remarry, and since they were Catholic, divorce was not possible, but one July afternoon after the Yukon thawed, a tall stoop-shouldered stranger arrived in Nome, taking a room not in the expensive Golden Gate but in one of the cheaper makeshift places, half wood, half canvas.
He registered, and threw his canvas duffel in a corner without unpacking. Then he started roaming the streets, and after a few inquiries, was directed to a miserable shack, where he knocked on the door and announced himself: 'I'm John Klope,' and Missy, showing no surprise, quietly said: 'Come in, John. Sit down. Can I get you coffee?'
He wanted to know what had happened to them, so Matt recalled his bicycle trip down the Yukon and he and Missy explained how they had fitted in with the famous gold rush: 'Got here too late, like always, for the good placers. Didn't even file a claim.
Missed the beaches too. That was a madhouse. We found jobs, and I'm sure we did better than most of the people on the beach.'
'What kind of job?'
'Missy worked for that corrupt judge, what a mess. I worked for Tom Venn when the store got big.'
'Tom Venn! Is he in town?'
'Juneau. Big promotion.'
'How is Tom? How'd he do?'
'I just said, big promotion.'
'He was a fine boy.' He sipped his coffee, then pointed to the mean quarters they shared. 'Things not going too well?'
'After the gold stopped,' Matt said. 'You know how it is.'
'How's it with you, John?' Missy asked, for he, too, looked as if he had fallen upon bad times.
'You know how we dug that damned hole?'
'I sure do,' Matt almost groaned. 'You ever strike anything down there?'
'Lots of rock, no colors.'
'I'm sorry,' Missy said. 'You gave it such an honest try, but your claim was up so high ... everybody knew the gold was down on the creek where the claims were already taken.'
The three oddly matched people, older now and sobered by their experiences, sat quietly cradling their cups, and after a while Klope said: That must have been a wild storm, the one that blew all the machines off the beach.'
It was.'
'We saw pictures. Looked pretty awful.'
'Dawson must be a ghost town these days,' Matt said.
'You wouldn't recognize it. Not one tent left.'
'Remember ours? The grease on the canvas? Those good sourdough flapjacks you taught us how to make?'
As they reminisced about the old days with affectionate nostalgia, Missy said: 'You remember the Belgian Mare? Her cribs here burned twice and were blown away once, and we were sorry for her till we found that she had sweet-talked miners into building them for her and she didn't lose a nickel. After each disaster she hiked her prices and made a fortune. One day she just left. Yep, John, she just up and left. Eight girls stranded on the beach without a nickel.'
'Where'd she go?'
'Belgium, to buy a farm near Antwerp.'
The day was wasting, and it was obvious to Missy that John Klope had something more important to talk about than the storm or the changing fortunes of the Mare. A startlin
g thought exploded in her mind: My God, he's come here to ask me to marry him! And she began to draw back, because in Matt Murphy she had met a man of almost ideal temperament. He was kind, he was witty, he could smell out rascals and identify good people, and she loved sharing life with him, even if he could never seem to find a steady job. But since there was always need for her secretarial skills, she was more than willing to share her income with Matt.
Klope coughed, edged about in his chair, and diddled with his fingers. Finally he said: 'Haven't you heard?'
'About what?'
'About me?' When they shook their heads, he said with embarrassment: 'I always told you there had to be gold down there.'
'But you never found it. You said so.'
'Not in the hole the three of us worked. But when I got down to solid rock and threw out my laterals ...'
'You did that while I was still helping,' Matt said.
'Yep, and I found nothing. But I got so mad with all that work, and I was so sure about the ancient river I talked about that I dug me another hole, way down. Didn't you hear?'
'What happened, John?'
'Sarqaq kept with me. Maybe we'd find something. Back down to bedrock, me thawing, him raising the muck, and this time when I sent out my laterals ..."
He stopped and looked at his two good friends: 'First pan from the big crevice, nine hundred dollars ... in nuggets ... not flakes.'
Yes, before that one lucky lateral was exhausted, John Klope, assisted by the lame Eskimo Sarqaq, took out three hundred and twenty thousand dollars of some of the purest gold produced along the Klondike. His persistence had led him to the deposits laid down by a river that had flowed two hundred thousand years ago.
After Missy and Matt fell silent, emotionally exhausted from exploring all aspects of this tremendous stroke of good fortune, Klope was ready to make the awkward speech which had drawn him from Dawson to Nome on his way back to his farm at Moose Hide, Idaho: 'You two and Tom Venn were as much a part of that strike as I was. You kept me goin' in the bad days. Sarqaq, too. All the time I dug out that rich lateral and sent up that muck crawlin' with gold, I thought of you folks.'
His voice broke: 'You know, a man can't work underground for two years else'n someone believes in him. Here.' He thrust into Missy's hand an envelope, and when she opened it two drafts fell out, one to her, one to Matt, drawn upon a Canadian bank. Each check was for twenty thousand dollars. 'I'll mail Tom's to him in Juneau,' Klope said.
And he did one thing more. As he was about to leave the shack he took from his worn backpack a parcel, which he placed on the rude table: 'If you ever open another restaurant, you'll need this.' And when Missy removed the wrapper, she realized that Klope was placing in her care one of his prized possessions: the sourdough starter whose recorded history was now nearly a century old.
TWO DAYS LATER KLOPE WAS ABOARD A SHIP TO Seattle, and as he left he epitomized all the lonely men who had come to Alaska in search of gold. He was one of the few whose dreams had come true, but only at terrible cost.
He had braved the Yukon Flats in a blizzard; he had fought his way up the frozen Yukon past Eagle; he had slaved in the shafts atop Eldorado; he had lost Missy, the woman he loved, and Matt Murphy, a partner he had trusted. But he did get his gold.
And it changed him not at all. He did not walk any straighten He did not suddenly read good books. He made no firm friends to replace the ones he had left behind, and his life had been altered neither negatively nor positively. As an honorable man, he had given twenty thousand dollars to each of the four to whom he knew he was indebted Missy, Matt, Tom Venn, Sarqaqbut when he returned to Idaho he would do no spectacular thing with what was left. He would not form a bank for assistance to farmers, nor endow chairs at any of the Idaho colleges, nor start a library, nor finance a hospital. He had left Idaho in those first heady days of July 1897, lived through times of cataclysmic changes, and now he was returning home in the sputtering aftermath the simple inarticulate man he was when he had come to the arctic. There were thousands like him.
Missy Peckham had developed in the Klondike and Nome into a woman of towering strength, beautiful in her integrity, and Tom Venn had grown from a callow youth into an amazingly mature man, but they had achieved this through hardship and failure, not success, and the lessons they acquired would last them through life. John Klope, like so many others, would bring home only gold, which would slowly slip through his fingers, until in old age he would ask: 'Where did it go? What did it accomplish?'
The rigs along Bonanza and Eldorado were closed down. The shacks that had protected miners along the Mackenzie during the arctic winters were slowly falling apart, and the marvelous golden beaches of Nome were once again mere sand. When new storms howled in from the Bering Sea they found no tents to destroy, for all was now as it had been before.
No more will be said about gold in this chronicle. Exciting small finds would continue to be made near the new town of Fairbanks, and one of the most rewarding of all operations would be the deep quartz mine across from Juneau, but there would never be another Klondike, another Nome. Through some miracle never to be fully understood, at those favored points gold had somehow risen to the surface and been eroded away, abraded by sand and wind and ice to be deposited arbitrarily in one place and not another.
The metal that drove men mad behaved as crazily as did the men, and in those frenzied years at the close of the century, turned the world's attention to Alaska, but its effect on the area was no more lasting than it had been upon John Klope.
There were, however, three men whose lives were changed by the miraculous gold of Nome. Lars Skjellerup became an American citizen, and one morning, while at the beach watching the arrival of passengers from a ship anchored in the roadstead, he spotted on the near end of the lighter bringing them ashore a wonderfully vivacious young woman, and he was so captivated by her smile, her look of eagerness and her general demeanor, that when sailors manning the lighter shouted to Eskimo porters: 'Come!
Take the people ashore!' he ran quickly into the surf, offered himself to her, and shivered with a new excitement as she was lifted onto his back.
Step by careful step he carried her to the beach, his mind in a whirl, and after she was some fifteen yards inland she said quietly: 'Don't you think you could put me down now?'
Introducing himself somewhat awkwardly, he learned that Miss Armstrong had come from Virginia to teach school in Nome. In the days that followed he haunted the schoolhouse, and when everybody including Miss Armstrong was aware that he was smitten with her, he made the most extraordinary proposal: 'I'm taking the job as Presbyterian missionary at Barrow. Would you honor me to come along?' And in this way a young woman who had fled Virginia for the romance of Alaska found herself a missionary's wife in farthest Barrow, where her husband spent most of his time teaching Eskimos how to handle the reindeer replenishment stock he and his wife had driven north.
Mikkel Sana deposited his money in a Juneau bank and returned to Lapland for a bride, but could convince none of those cautious Lapp beauties that he was really a very rich man. He finally persuaded the third daughter of a man who owned three hundred reindeer to take a chance, and what a surprise she encountered when she accompanied Sana to Juneau and found that the bank account really did exist. After she learned English, which she did in six months, she became the town librarian.
In Arkikov's life, a wife did not feature, at least not at first. Having been abused because he was not an American citizen, and having lost Seven Above, he was determined to repair this deficiency, and as soon as his claim was returned after Hoxey's arrest, he started naturalization procedures. Of course, since Alaska still had no regular form of civil government, this proved so difficult that twice he almost gave up, but his partner Skjellerup persuaded him to continue, and after Lars became the missionary in Barrow, the letters he sent to Seattle in support of Arkikov's petition were so persuasive that citizenship was granted.
When a revenue cutter
officer who came to Nome explained that in America, as opposed to Siberia, it was customary for a man to have first and last names, Arkikov asked:
'Me get what name?' and the man said: 'Well, some people like the name of their occupation.'
'My what?'
'Your job. If you were a baker in the old country, you'd take the name Baker. A goldsmith becomes Goldsmith. What were you in the old country?'
'What country?'
'Siberia.'
'Me herd reindeer.'
Since it was widely known that this fellow Arkikov now had some sixty thousand dollars in the bank, he had to be treated with respect, and the officer coughed: 'We don't hand out many names like Arkikov Reindeer herder. How about keeping Arkikov as your last name and putting two American names in front?'
'Maybe. What names?'
'Two pairs are very popular. George Washington Arkikov...'
'Who is he?'
'Father of this country. Fine general.'
'Me like general.'
'The other pair is just as good. Abraham Lincoln Arkikov.'
'What he did?'
'He freed the slaves.'
'What you mean slaves?' And when the man explained what Lincoln had done, Arkikov had never seen an American black the choice was made: 'In Siberia got slaves. Me like Lincoln.'
So he became A. L. Arkikov, Nome, Alaska, and in time he took an Eskimo wife, and their three children attended the University of Washington in Seattle, for their father was a rich man.
X - SALMON
East of Juneau, Taku Inlet, a splendid body of water which in Scandinavia would be called a fjord, wound and twisted its way far inland, passing bleak headlands at one time, low hills covered with trees at another. On all sides mountains with snow-covered peaks rose in the background, some soaring to more than seven and eight thousand feet.
A notable feature of Taku was the family of powerful glaciers that pushed their snouts right to the water's edge, where from time to time they calved off huge icebergs which came thundering into the cold waters with echoes reverberating among the hills and mountains. It was a wild, lonely, majestic body of narrow water, and it drained a vast area reaching into Canada almost to the lakes which the Chilkoot miners traversed in 1897 and '98. To travel upstream in the Taku was to probe into the heart of the continent, with the visible glaciers edging down from much more extensive fields inland, where the ice cover had existed for thousands upon thousands of years.