ALASKA: Sourdough Social

Men make most countries, oldtime Alaskans are wont to remark, but the Klondike made men. Last week some 500 men & women the Klondike made gathered in the Multnomah Hotel in Portland.

Ore., for the tenth annual International Sourdough Reunion. Swapping tall stories, but doing little whooping in the Multnomah bar (see cut), which, like other Oregon taprooms, serves no hard liquor, were such diverse sourdoughs as Alaska’s Episcopal Bishop Peter Trimble Rowe, Henry Macaulay, first mayor of Dawson, Editor Frank J. Cotter of Seattle’s Alaska Weekly, scores of old Yukon prospectors, storekeepers, mail clerks.

Biggest sourdough storyteller was the Reunion’s retiring president, Michael Ambrose Mahoney of Ottawa, Ont., who flew to Portland in a checkered jacket. Big Mike Mahoney, who is supposed to have retired with $250,000 in his poke, spends most of his time at luncheons and banquets reciting Poet Robert W. Service’s doleful ballads Dangerous Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee. According to Mr. Mahoney, he was present, along with Poet Service, when a crazed engineer named Madden burst into the Dominion saloon at Dawson and shot Gambler McGrew for running away with his wife. What Poet Service did not mention, said Mr. Mahoney last week, was that the “lady called Lou” was also shot. She recovered, he said, and was two years ago reported living quietly in Prince Rupert, B. C.

When Portland papers printed this old Mahoney story last week, a local reporter named George R. Stearns ungraciously produced a letter which he said Mr. Service had written to him in 1928 in answer to a question: “I have no doubt that the Malamute Saloon was entirely imaginary. At this distant date, however, I have little recollection of the circumstances in which my notorious ballad was perpetrated, and my only regret is that I have been unable to live it down.” An old bonanza operator named “Skiff” Mitchell had the last word. Sniffed he: “I knew Sam McGee, the fellow who was cremated in that other poem, before he was cremated. Mahoney knew him afterward.”