Books: Nugget Crazy

THE KLONDIKE FEVER (457 pp.)—Pierre Berfon—Knopf ($5.75).

Writers about the gold rush, one of history’s maddest mass movements, have been almost as numerous as prospectors in the Klondike. But perhaps no one has told the story with the same fullness and readable authority as Canadian Journalist Pierre Berton in The Klondike Fever. Author Berton’s credentials are convincing. His father staked a claim on Quigley Gulch in 1898, and while it produced only gravel, he stayed on and lived in fabled Dawson City for 40 years. Author Berton himself lived there until he was twelve, admits that it still “haunts my dreams and my memories.”

He has reassembled all the familiar and unfamiliar characters of the Bonanza and El Dorado days, missing no nugget of color and adventure. A squaw man named George Washington (“Siwash George”) Carmack staked the first big claim on Aug. 17, 1896, a day still celebrated in Yukon territory. There it was, “lying thick between the flaky slabs of rock like cheese in a sandwich.” Charley Anderson bought a claim when drunk for $800, tried to get his money back when sober and could not. Out of it came $1,000,000 and his lifelong nickname, the Lucky Swede. Soon the world outside could talk or dream of little except the Klondike. Preachers, policemen, doctors quit their callings and headed for the bitter North. The mayor of Seattle, in San Francisco for a convention, “did not bother to return home, but wired his resignation.” From New York came 500 women, mostly widows, by steamer around the Horn. After a fearsome journey, they reached Seattle broke, their hopes of marrying sourdough millionaires shattered.

Of all who started out, only 100,000 reached Dawson. Only 4.000 became wealthy. But while the rush was on, life in the Far North was fabulous. Miners thought nothing of $10.000 barroom sprees. One man collected the sawdust from a saloon floor and panned $278 from it in two hours. Dance-hall girls charged the miners $1 for one minute of dancing. and two miners actually had valets in their log huts. Fine dog teams, says Author Berton, were the Cadillacs of the time. “Nigger Jim” had one that was worth $2,500, and his sled had a built-in bar from which he treated his pals.

Author Berton’s book is jammed with the tragic stories of tenderfeet who tried to reach the golden creeks by boat, over the dread mountain passes and even over a sure-death glacier route. Even those who found great wealth often lost it, to gamblers, business crooks, the girls, or over the bars. Carmack died respectably, leaving his second wife, a former brothel-keeper, a fortune. But Lucky Swede Anderson, divorced by his dance-hall girl, died pushing a wheelbarrow in a sawmill for $3.25 a day. Lucky always denied that he ever had a million: “The most I ever had was nine hundred thousand.”