Prisoners of the North (2 page)

Dawson City in those days was a unique community, a cosmopolitan village where everybody knew everybody else, full of adventurous spirits who had come from every corner of the globe to profit from the great stampede of 1898. In my boyhood, the gold rush was history, but they were still here, this handful of survivors from the gaudy days.

They did not talk much about adventures that would seem prodigious to us today; it was old stuff to them. They had clawed their way up the passes, hammered together anything that would float, defied the rivers and the rapids, and notched the logs for their own cabins when at last they reached their goal. They had made it! When others flagged, or failed, or fled, they had hung on, secure in themselves, and isolated from the outside world—prisoners of their environment but free from the cacophony, and the glare, and the breathless bustle of the settled world. They had had their fill of all that. I once asked George Fraser, an old-timer who lived on Dominion Creek forty miles from Dawson, why he hadn’t paid a visit to town in fifteen years. “Too many bright lights!” he told me. That says it all.

The North has its own sounds, but in my day when the temperature dropped and the roar of the river was stilled and the whine of the big gold dredges had ceased, the world of my youth was silent. Nothing seemed to move. Smoke rose from the chimneys in stately columns that did not waver. It was as if the entire community had been captured in a motion picture freeze frame. For many, I think, that was one of the attractions.

They came from everywhere, these old-timers we called sourdoughs. Men like Mr. Kawakami, a Dawson fixture who sold us fireworks and incense along with Japanese parasols and kimonos from his little shop on Third Avenue. A block away in her corner store, a distinguished, grey-haired Frenchwoman, Mme Émilie Tremblay, displayed the latest Paris fashions for the town’s socialites as well as for the town’s demimonde. No stranger just off the boat would have realized that in 1894, two years before gold was discovered on Bonanza and before Dawson existed, she and her husband had climbed the Chilkoot Pass and made their way into the empty Yukon.

One of her customers was the Chicago-born doyen of Dawson society, Martha Louise Black, who left her husband and climbed the Chilkoot pregnant, bore her baby in a one-room log cabin, and went on to become the second woman in Canada to win a seat in Parliament.

At St. Paul’s Pro-cathedral on the Dawson waterfront I would watch the morning procession each Sunday, often led by the bishop, Isaac O. Stringer, who had been obliged to boil and consume his sealskin boots to ward off starvation on the Rat River trail, thus providing Charlie Chaplin with a memorable scene for his film
The Gold Rush
. At the other end of the social scale was a rough-hewn Slav, Jan Welzl, who had come to Dawson from Prague by way of the Arctic, so he claimed, with the help of the Inuit. He spent his time trying to develop a perpetual motion machine in an abandoned warehouse while bemoaning the fact that he had sold the rights to his memoirs,
Thirty Years in the Golden North
, for one hundred dollars before it became a Book-of-the-Month Club best-seller.

I went to school with the second and third generations of these captive Northerners. One classmate, Chester Henderson, was the grandson of the famous Robert Henderson, officially acknowledged as the co-discoverer of the Klondike’s gold. Another was the son of Percy de Wolfe, known as the Iron Man of the North because of the hazards he encountered with his dog team on the mail run between Dawson and Eagle, Alaska. Helen Van Bibber, who beat me to stand first in our class, was the mixed-blood offspring of a marriage between a native Indian and a male descendant of Daniel Boone.

My father was one of these Northern hostages. He could have had a teaching job at Queen’s but he chose the Yukon, refusing to quit even when the so-called Stikine Trail became a heaving swamp. He opted for the Chilkoot, built a raft, and made his way to the goldfields, intending to stay for two years. He found no gold but stayed for forty, and his only regret, I think, was when the Depression forced him to leave.

I was thinking of people like Mme Tremblay, Martha Black, Chester Henderson, and Helen Van Bibber when in a book for would-be authors I made a facetious suggestion: get yourself born in an interesting environment. It was my great good fortune, thanks to my father, the sourdough, and my mother, the journalist’s daughter, that I was born in what was then the most interesting community in Canada. The North has been a rich literary source for me—far more valuable than the nuggets Chester’s grandfather dug out of his Klondike claim.

In this work I have again gone back to my Northern heritage. It is my fiftieth book, and I have discovered, somewhat to my astonishment, that no fewer than twenty-seven have included some reference to the North or the Klondike—sometimes no more than a few paragraphs, sometimes a chapter or more, and on several occasions an entire book.

Time and again my heritage has intruded into my literary output, occasionally without my realizing its presence. Like my father before me and like the five remarkable characters that follow, I, too, in my own way am a prisoner of the North.

CHAPTER 1
The King of the Klondike

Joseph Whiteside Boyle in his trademark uniform with its Klondike gold lapel badges, wearing the Order of Regina Maria and the Star of Romania
.

—ONE—

Joseph Whiteside Boyle was a force of nature, albeit a flawed one. In the early days of the twentieth century, he was famous, even notorious, on two continents. A man who craved action for its own sake, he had an uncanny instinct for finding where the action was. When the first news of the Klondike strike was making headlines in Seattle and San Francisco, Boyle was already in the vanguard of the ragtag army of gold seekers stampeding north. Old-time mining methods were not for him. Though he began with virtually nothing, he went on to build, under almost impossible conditions, the largest gold dredges in the world—monstrous floating machines that churned up the storied creek beds and helped revolutionize the placer mining industry in the Yukon. He made a fortune but squandered it all as a soldier of fortune in eastern Europe at the time of the Bolshevik revolution. Eulogized as the Saviour of Romania, he was named Duke of Jassy by her elegant queen, whose lover he was reputed to be.

Boyle was a loner all his life, an entrepreneur and an adventurer who had little time for intimacies. He kept his family—his two wives and his children—at a distance. One gets the impression that from time to time he considered them nuisances who got in the way of his ambitions. Boyle was a take-charge man, ever the leader, never a follower, contemptuous of generals, bureaucrats, and civil servants. He was beholden to no one; it was not in his makeup to settle for second place, an attitude that worked well enough in the Yukon, where he was totally in charge, but caused no end of problems to his superiors when he arrived in eastern Europe during the Great War.

The image that Joe Boyle projected to the world was one of bold confidence. With his square jaw, his heavy brows, and his strong Irish features, he looked the part. He was built like a boxer and in his younger days had been a good one. But there was a small boy quality to Boyle that clashed with his bluff exterior. In moments of high peril, as in courtship, he was impulsive to a fault. In his various adventures he seemed to be having the time of his life. “I like this sort of thing!” he exclaimed as he dashed about Odessa trying to bargain for the lives of a group of Romanian hostages. He was never happier than when he was at the centre of things, whether running a dredging company in the Klondike or influencing royalty in Romania. He disliked supervision and one can sympathize with the British and Canadian political and military authorities who tried to rein him in.

If Boyle had moments of introspection, he kept them to himself. Outwardly he gave no hint of any inner insecurity. Only Marie, the Romanian queen, knew his secrets and then not until the fading years of his life. He had long mastered the art of the public gesture, which made him famous in his own time. Journalists and biographers made much of him. Few of his fellow countrymen have had so much ink expended on them. Every generation of readers, it seems, has had its version of what Hollywood might call the Joe Boyle Story.

In 1938 his eldest daughter, Flora, devoted three long articles to him in
Maclean’s
(“Who Was Joe Boyle?”). The magazine, in turn, published a fourth made up of letters from those who had known and venerated the legendary Canadian. Since that time three substantial biographies have been published: Kim Beattie’s breathless
Brother, Here’s a Man!
in 1949, William Rodney’s scholarly
Joe Boyle: King of the Klondike
in 1974, and Leonard W. Taylor’s revealing
The Sourdough and the Queen
in 1983.

Moreover, Boyle played a role in the published memoirs and reminiscences of a dozen or more contemporaries who crossed his path, from the Klondike to the Caucasus. These ranged from Herbert Hoover, who knew him in his gold-mining days, to Ethel Greening Pantazzi, whose husband Boyle saved from execution by the revolutionary Battalion of Death in Odessa. Boyle is a leading figure in two books of memoirs by Captain George A. Hill, a British spy, who found him “a man whose equal I have never encountered before or since.” Every biography of Queen Marie of Romania, not to mention her own published memoirs, venerates Boyle, whom she called “one man in a million … a man it is a richness to know.” Yet in Canada he is largely forgotten.

Had he been born American it is probable that he would have been claimed by Hollywood and turned into a popular icon, like Davy Crockett. But Boyle came from Woodstock, Ontario, and was a Canadian through and through. He named his mining enterprise the Canadian Klondyke Company, making it clear it was not an Alaskan venture, and when he built his enormous gold dredges he named them Canadian Number One, Canadian Number Two, Canadian Number Three, and Canadian Number Four. He made it a point to fly the Red Ensign from their masts—a sly dig at his American rivals.

Boyle, then, was a Canadian first and foremost and a
Northern
Canadian with all that that connoted: a man secure within himself and outwardly unflappable, having confronted and conquered the worst that nature had in store for him. Robert Service was his favourite poet, and he often transfixed his listeners, who included members of the Romanian royal family, by quoting aloud from the Yukon bard and telling stories of early days in the North. But he rarely talked about himself. His modesty, it was said, would have shamed a shrinking violet.

His career unfolded like a series of movies, but Joe Boyle, the Canadian puritan who neither smoked nor touched strong drink—who in fact chaired temperance rallies in rough-and-tumble Dawson City at the turn of the century—did not fit the Hollywood mould. In the early 1950s Hollywood did attempt a motion picture based on Kim Beattie’s exclamatory biography, but his family put a stop to that, as they knew he would have. It was too, well,
American
, loaded with invented scenes and dialogue that didn’t jibe with the Boyle character. There is no Joe Boyle story on film. Canada had no substantial movie industry and no television, either, for three decades after his death in 1923. Other countries had applauded him, but his own country had ignored him. The Russians decorated him with the Order of St. Anne and the Order of St. Vladimir; France awarded him the Croix de Guerre. Britain gave him the Distinguished Service Order, while Romania went all out with three decorations: Crown, Grand Cross, and Star. But Canada turned her back on him. The army tried to take away his uniform and his rank; the bureaucrats tried to order him back home, but Boyle went his own way. It was not until the early 1980s that a popular campaign was finally mounted, thanks to Leonard Taylor, to move his body from Hampton Hill in Middlesex, England, to Woodstock, underlining the truth that this is not a land that indulges enthusiastically in hero worship except for hockey players.

From the acres of print devoted to his character and career, Boyle emerges as a romantic who found it difficult to sit still for long. This restlessness, a by-product, perhaps, of his Celtic blood (half Irish, half Scottish), is the key to his character. Some of it may have come from his father, a breeder of fine horses whose calling made it necessary to leave home in season and follow the racing schedule wherever it took him. Boyle’s childhood seems to have been serene enough. He came from a middle-class family of four siblings, and there is no suggestion that his upbringing in the quiet ambience of Woodstock was anything but happy. There were signs of that serenity in his later years when on occasion he found himself at risk. He feared no man but held no grudges. He got along with his opponents, both legal and financial, and they got along with him.

And yet there are cracks in the Boyle legend. He was certainly not a family man. In 1884, at the age of seventeen, just out of Woodstock College, he visited his two elder brothers in New York City. Their relationship cannot have been close. One day the brothers returned to their quarters on lower Broadway to find a scribbled note on the table: “I’ve gone to sea. Don’t worry about me. Joe.” That was all: no explanation, no fond farewells, no hint of his plans or even the name of the ship, nothing. He was gone for the best part of three years, and in all that time they had no word of him—not a whisper, not a note, not a clipping, not a telegram, not even a message for his mother, “a sweet little woman from Dumfries, Scotland,” in Flora Boyle’s words. Toward the end of his absence they believed he had been lost at sea.