Lady at the O.K. Corral (20 page)

Hoping to trade again on his celebrity, Wyatt opened a new gambling and prizefighting club in Seattle's Tenderloin district, but after a flurry of publicity and eager crowds, he ran into a brick wall of uncooperative police and politicians. Seattle was not Nome, and stirred up by prohibition enthusiasts and competitive saloonkeepers, the city was increasingly hostile to Wyatt. The state of Washington initiated legal proceedings against him for gambling and selling alcohol, and the club's furnishings were confiscated and torched. The city's temperance craze passed quickly, however, and soon everyone was back in business—except Wyatt. He and Josephine spent the rest of that winter buying glamorous furnishings for the Dexter—expensive thick carpets, mirrors, carved sideboards, and draperies.

Back in Nome, the winter passed slowly. The city's residents had only the sketchiest of information about what was going on in the rest of the world. Newspapers could ask but not answer the question, “Is the Philippine war still on or has it at last been settled?”

The people of Nome seized any opportunity for winter celebration. “First child of Pure Caucasian Blood Born in Nome” announced the
Nome Nugget
on January 6, congratulating Mrs. Ginivin on the birth of the city's first white child, a ten-pound boy who happened to be born on New Year's Day. (Unfortunately, Mr. Ginivin was still on the “outside,” having left in the fall.) Other entertainment came from visitors such as Rex Beach, who performed in a minstrel show in which “he was the chief burnt-cork artist, furnishing the audience with more merriment than ordinarily falls to the lot of the Nome citizen during his period of winter hibernation.” Nome residents loved to bet on anything, from the date the ice broke up to the outcome of elections and dog races. They even liked to bet on betting—as they did when they ran a contest to decide the most popular faro dealer in town.

With regular business in suspended animation, Josephine's friends initiated civic projects during the long winter freeze. For Christmas Day, Tex Rickard fed the poor with seven hundred turkey dinners, establishing an annual tradition during the years that he lived in Nome. Beloved for his charitable ways, Rickard was asked to serve as Nome's first mayor. Charles Hoxsie was similarly philanthropic and was considered “one of the best known and most popular men in Nome . . . an enterprising citizen, a whole souled and altogether good fellow.”

By March, Nome residents began to talk feverishly about rejoining the outside world. A few hardy souls arrived from other parts of Alaska by dog teams, skates, even bicycles, but the waterways were still blocked by ice. The
Nome Nugget
offered a $10 prize to the person who guessed the day and hour of the arrival of the first steamer. Estimates of some 100,000 new residents filled the newspapers. At least some of these new arrivals were anticipated with fear: the Northwest Mounted Police warned the local officials that “the most criminals ever known on this continent” were headed to Nome from all over Alaska. The attorney general's special agent predicted that the summer would bring Nome “the worst aggregation of criminals and unprincipled men and women that were ever drawn together in this country.”

While all of Nome was eagerly looking out to sea for the first boats, with anticipation and some anxiety, a much bigger mass of people was gathering at Seattle, like an army preparing for an assault. One of the most inaccessible places in the world during the frozen months, Nome was now advertised as an exotic summer destination, suitable for tourists as well as treasure seekers, with gambling to while away the hours on board the comfortable steamers. The trip cost about $75, which included 1,000 pounds of freight for the entrepreneurs on board. The
San Francisco Chronicle
predicted excitedly that Nome would soon be “A Modern City,” with electric lights, power, streets, railways, and telephone lines. Business owners invested in steamers to connect Portland and Cape Nome. But as Josephine was soon to be reminded, nature was not easily tamed. The Bering Sea was still clogged with unmapped blockades of frozen water. Boats were often forced hundreds of miles out of their way in search of an open channel, and could be tossed around like toys by the unpredictable movement of the ice. The so-called holiday cruise could take as little as a week or as long as two months.

Huge crowds filled the Seattle waterfront to see the first travelers depart in May 1900. On May 20 alone, four ships left Seattle, filled to capacity with as many as seven hundred people and loaded with thousands of tons of mining machinery and general merchandise. Other boats carried dismantled theaters, gambling halls, saloons, hotels, and restaurants—everything needed to construct an “instant civilization.”

Josephine and Wyatt left from Seattle on the
Alliance
, with the luxurious accessories for the Dexter in the hold. By now, the rest of the world knew what they knew: that Nome was destined to become “the greatest mining camp city the world has ever known.”

The time passed pleasantly enough during the early days of the trip. Josephine entertained herself with gambling, losing enough to annoy Wyatt. The Bering Sea became impassable just when they reached the port of Unalaska. The harbor town was crowded with people headed for Nome; among them, Josephine discovered many friends from her previous trips to Alaska. The biggest surprise came when Josephine heard a familiar voice calling “Aunt Josie!” There was her niece Alice with her husband Isidore, on their way from Oakland to Nome, where they had hoped to surprise Josephine and Wyatt. Isidore was bringing samples of clothing to sell in Alaska. An attentive and affectionate aunt, Josephine made plans for their time together in Nome.

They were soon back on board the
Alliance
, but not out of danger. As the ship skirted a menacing cluster of icebergs, Josephine noticed an alarming sound as the engines strained to negotiate lethal ice floes clustering around them like large, threatening animals. She awoke one morning to an eerie stillness. The engines had stopped completely. In place of the gray water of the Bering Sea was an impenetrable ice field as far as she could see, “a glistening white sheet, with spires and towers, hummocks and peaks.” The ship was clutched by the ice for another full week, as rations dwindled and tempers frayed. Finally distant boats began to stir, and the
Alliance
penetrated an open lane.

She was again within sight of the Nome coastline, close enough to take stock of dramatic changes. Everything was on a far bigger, noisier scale: where there had been a few boats in the water, there were now scores of ships lying off the shore, plus some wrecked hulks left over from winter storms. Instead of the little dories that had pulled alongside her boat last year, a motley flotilla of barges, tugboats, rafts, and rowboats hustled back and forth, loading and emptying enormous loads of cargo. Hundreds of cattle were being pushed into the water and herded to shore in a watery roundup. An army of Paul Bunyans plunged into the water to offer broad backs to Josephine and the other women climbing down ladders. Wyatt stayed behind to supervise the transfer of their precious cargo, while Josephine clung to the human ferry that deposited her on the beach. The air was filled with riotous sounds as each new boat blasted a shrill whistle to announce its arrival and every ship in the harbor answered in return, the passengers cheering and applauding, many having been stuck on ice for weeks.

For one brief summer, Nome became one of the busiest and oddest seaports in the world, where the last mile of freight delivery cost almost as much as it did to traverse the two thousand miles from Seattle.

Once on dry land, Josephine faced a scene of unimaginable chaos. The beach was barely visible beneath thousands of tents that almost touched each other, leaving the narrowest of passageways between them. Small mountains of worldly goods broke the line of tents, each pile challenging its owner to carry it away faster than a thief or a storm. Hundreds of dogs raced furiously about. Baggage and freight were piled high on the beach for a distance of several miles: a jumble of pianos, coal, narrow-gauge railway tracks, lumber, tents, stacks of hay, bar fixtures, washtubs, roulette wheels, stoves, liquor, sewing machines, and mining apparatus. Despite the density of people and belongings, wagons lumbered along the beach, hawking baked goods, clothing, and mining supplies. Men with go-carts were hauling loads; others were carrying trunks on stretchers or on their backs. Water was delivered from a wagon bearing a large water tank, five gallons for twenty-five cents. Crazy gold-panning contraptions were in constant motion.

For years after arriving in Nome, people looked for worldly possessions that were lost on their first day. Sometimes personal baggage was unloaded from the boats immediately; sometimes it was kept on board and sent later. Nor did businesses awaiting deliveries fare any better than hapless individuals. One grocer was expecting $10,000 worth of canned goods when an unexpected dunk in the Bering Sea washed off all the labels; it was sold as “mystery food” for ten cents a can.

Most people arrived without a plan other than a fierce determination to grow rich on Nome's golden sands. “Imagine a heterogeneous mob of 23,000 people landed on a beach,” said one visiting engineer from London, “huddled together on a strip of beach 60 feet wide . . . without any sanitary arrangements; sleeping on almost frozen ground at night, broiling in a hot sun by day; and you have Nome as it was.” The first night was a particularly miserable rite of passage. Lucky newcomers who had the foresight to bring tents scrambled to find places to pitch them. Those without tents waited uncomfortably for the ships to unload their possessions, sleeping on the sand in the twenty-four-hour daylight with no shelter and relief from the crowds and the constant clang of construction.

Josephine was dazed, but Wyatt never took his eyes off their belongings until everything was stacked safely onshore. Steamship companies claimed that their responsibility for delivery ended when the goods left the ship, and Wyatt had invested too much money to be careless about the expensive furnishings he had purchased for the Dexter.

Josephine was used to life in a boomtown, but Nome's northern latitude generated an intensity beyond anything she had experienced. There were thirty days of ceaseless activity that summer, with as many people on the streets in the middle of the night as there were at lunchtime. Stately business blocks sprang up out of nowhere, and rich and costly interiors were installed and ready for customers in a few hours. There were fancy hotels, beer gardens, about a hundred saloons and gambling houses, and several newspapers. An empty lot one day would be reclaimed from the tundra and filled with a three-story structure the next day, its storerooms filled with bright new goods. Within weeks, Nome grew to a city of over 20,000.

Front Street was still unpaved and filled with people rushing about, elbowing each other for room. The dense black mud was so deep that when a wagon approached, everyone ran for the closest doorway to avoid being splattered. Many of the buildings were identified by wooden signs with a single word,
SALOON
, and had a dance hall in the rear. It was not unusual for someone walking along the street to be pushed by the crowd into a saloon, and it was often easier to get in than out.

Public health conditions had only slightly improved from Josephine's first summer. Several ships in the harbor flew the yellow flag of smallpox quarantine that kept all passengers on board. Public water closets were no match for the demand of the wildly growing population. Garbage was collected weekly; in winter, refuse was carried on the ice to the three-mile limit, where the summer currents carried it to the Bering Straits and then out to the Arctic Ocean. The sanitation business was so profitable that the garbage collector's daughter was reported to be the best-dressed girl in Nome's first school, outfitted with a beautiful ermine coat shipped from New York.

But the beach at Nome, once “thick with gold,” had reverted to prosaic sand. One year after the momentous discovery, the pans in the hands of feverish amateurs were yielding flecks, not nuggets, which were hardly worth the effort to retrieve. Unemployment was growing, and emotions ran high, veering between disappointment and hope. “This is a hot town and going to be hotter,” wrote one prospector trying to sustain his optimism. “Hundreds of men sitting around not knowing what to do and hundreds more coming in every day. Labor is a dollar an hour, but one has got to be a husky or strong man to get a job.” In one night, he reported, three men committed suicide and two men shot each other on the street.

As Josephine had observed in Tombstone, business boomed even after mining opportunities peaked. So did crime: Nome was approaching the point where predators outnumbered prospectors. The same newspapers that wrote breathlessly about Nome in 1899 were now warning about a “reign of terror” that would leave Nome with little or no gold being taken out, overrun by gamblers and disreputable characters from other parts of Alaska and all over the United States. Guns were commonplace, martial law was imposed, and Nome's highest-ranking military official wrote to Washington that there was “no effective civil organization for protection of life and property.” The owner of the Alaska Commercial Company visited Nome several times that summer, but the company's internal memos warned that the city was “filled with the riffraff of the country, law and order were disregarded and honest men could scarcely make a living.” One specialty crime involved cutting a hole in a tent and pumping in a powerful dose of chloroform before robbing the sleeping occupants.

Despite forbidding headlines back in the States—“Murders Frequent and Gold Very Scarce
”
—
people kept coming.

“The major business in Nome in 1900 was not mining, but gambling and the saloon trade,” reported the
Seattle Intelligencer
. “Downtown Nome was lined with nearly 100 saloons and gambling houses, with an occasional restaurant sandwiched in between.” The Dexter was at the top of the list. In its second year of operation, the Dexter consolidated its position as Nome's preeminent saloon for liquor and gambling, aided by Wyatt's celebrity and his winter shopping expedition, which created a first-class saloon fit for any city in the United States. He and Hoxsie renewed their alcohol license, which required them to swear that the Dexter was more than four hundred feet distant from any schoolhouse or place of religious worship. In the Nome of 1900, that was not hard to do.