Prisoners of the North (3 page)

This callousness toward his blood relations—for that is what it was—was a blemish on Boyle’s character that would manifest itself time and again during his career. With one exception he didn’t seem to care greatly for those who were closest to him. Outwardly, he was always the life of the party—gregarious, hearty, an accomplished storyteller, so affable that even his critics and business rivals warmed to him and basked in his persona. Yet he was very much his own man with his own goals, to the exclusion of those who might have been near and dear to him. It is ironic that when at last he reached out for true love and companionship they were to prove unattainable.

He had haunted the Manhattan waterfront, tramping the docks and watching the three-masters come into port to unload or take on cargo, when adventure beckoned. With the impetuousness that was to mark his later years, the teenaged youth, hungry for action, climbed aboard the barque
Wallace
and was hired as a deckhand. He left as a callow youngster; when he returned, equally suddenly and unexpectedly, he was clearly mature beyond his twenty years. Where had he gone? What had he done? What had happened?

There are hints, but only hints. Boyle was not one to boast. At the end of his life at the Middlesex home of his oldest friend, Edward Bredenberg, he did indulge in a few moments of nostalgia: “We would sit back and dream of sailor days in the Pacific Islands and he would chaff me about the dusky-eyed belles.” Bredenberg, an old Klondiker and a former sailor before the mast, wrote to the Romanian queen recalling how “we would sit and spin yarns of our younger days, or our fights on some of the hard Yankee ships.” Apart from Bredenberg, she was the only one whom Boyle allowed to pierce that bluff exterior.

In one of his many letters to Marie there is a glimpse of an earlier Boyle, a lonely and romantic teenager, thrust into a hard, foreign world of adventure—a world of his own choosing, but one fraught with pitfalls. He was by far the youngest hand on the
Wallace
, and he was, in a sense, a kind of teacher’s pet, hired on a whim by the ship’s captain who had noticed him lazing about on the dock, taken an interest in him, and offered to sign him on. Those first days as a green deckhand took away much of the romance; but Boyle endured, and the memory of the early days endured, too. He wrote: “I have just been out looking at the stars who have so many times been my companions and comforters—as a boy sailor at sea on a ship on which every man was against me and was more alone than if I had been the only soul on her—I used to lie on my back on the hatch at night and pick out a bright star, which used to seem to send me a message and wink and get brighter and let me know that he would be there the next night.”

How had he spent those three years aboard the
Wallace
and later the cargo steamer
Susan
, which brought him back to New York? The two brief glimpses we have of him through family tradition may be apocryphal, yet they ring true because they forecast events of his later career. When a fellow seaman tripped on the deck and tumbled into the water, Boyle was the first over the side to rescue his shipmate. That was the first time, but not the last, when he would risk his life to save another through quick thinking. Again, en route to the Indian Ocean the frail barque was crippled in a series of raging storms, and the exhausted crew working the pumps were about to give up the struggle when Boyle, the take-charge youth, rallied them, forced them back to work, and took command of the life-saving operation until the barque limped into port.

At twenty, having risen to ship’s quartermaster, he turned up unannounced in New York. There he was reunited with his older brother Dave who introduced him to a fellow boarder, a lively and attractive divorcee, Mildred Josephine Raynor, whom Dave himself hoped to marry. Heedless of his brother’s anguish, Joe plunged into a whirlwind courtship that swept Mildred off her feet. In just three days they were married. Dave Boyle, a shy, unassuming man, was deeply affected by the collapse of what had been a secret romance. Many years later Flora Boyle wrote, “No one will ever know how badly he was hurt. He never married and all through her tumultuous lifetime, he remained Mildred’s closest, most faithful friend.”

Joe Boyle certainly was not. He and Mildred were incompatible almost from the beginning. He was a skilled boxer and, like his father, a lover of horses. His natural homes now were the racetrack and the boxing ring; his cronies were bookmakers and pugilists. She had social pretensions. When their daughter Macushla died at the age of six months from scarlet fever, Boyle began to drink heavily. One night he and a playboy companion were arrested for being drunk and disorderly and also for trying to steal a cab and threatening the driver. A bookmaking friend eventually bailed them out, but the incident changed Boyle.

Mildred Raynor. She married young Joe Boyle after a whirlwind three-day courtship. She was nicknamed “Minky” because she loved costly furs
.

“It’s obvious I can’t drink like a gentleman,” he told his companion as they waited in jail, “and since I can’t hold my liquor I shall never drink again.”

“You’ll get so virtuous you’ll be giving up smoking next,” his cellmate retorted. But in that moment Boyle had made up his mind.

“A good idea,” he told his companion and handed him his expensive cigar holder. “Keep it,” he said. “I’ll have no further use for it.” For the rest of his life he was a non-smoker as well as an active temperance advocate.

Mildred might have been a frivolous spendthrift (her detractors called her “Minky” because of her love for costly furs), but she went through six pregnancies for him (two of which were miscarriages) in the nine years of their marriage. Boyle, now engaged in a lucrative feed and grain shipping business in New York, had little time for her. He was far too busy trying to get backing for a grandiose scheme to establish a national chain of grain elevators. His plans collapsed and so did his marriage.

In the divorce that followed, the couple divided custody of their surviving children. Mildred’s son Bill by her earlier marriage went with her along with the youngest of Boyle’s progeny, Susan and another daughter yet unborn to be named Charlotte. The two older children, Flora and Joe, Jr., went with Boyle. Boyle’s relationship with the younger girls, who remained with Mildred, was virtually non-existent after the divorce. It was as if he had erased them from his memory. With Flora and Joe it could best be described as distant. He shrugged them off and saw them sporadically during his various ventures, but it was never an intimate relationship. He had other concerns, other ambitions, and he put these first.

Flora Boyle remembered the first of many partings after the divorce when Boyle brought his two children home to their grandparents in Woodstock. “We were taken to the railroad station where, after kissing us goodbye and telling us he would be back soon, father stepped on a train and was whisked away into the darkness. We must have made a forlorn picture, Joe and I, standing on that old station platform, waving our little handkerchiefs to our handsome young father, who was just thirty. Fortunately, we were too young to realize that he was off on another great adventure, without the faintest idea when we would meet again. I think we were too stunned to cry, our poor little minds could not grasp the situation entirely.… We were living in a new strange world and our greatest feeling was one of awe and loneliness.”

Joe Boyle in 1900 with his daughter Flora, who worshipped him from afar
.

Boyle was off on an exhibition tour with Frank Slavin, the “Sydney Cornstalk,” who had ambitions to become a heavyweight-boxing champion. When the pair reached Victoria and heard whispers of a great gold strike in the Yukon, they lost no time in heading north, first to Juneau, Alaska, and then on to Skagway. By mid-July 1897, when the news of the great find burst upon the world, they had already reached the foot of the White Pass. A pack trail of sorts had just been opened to the summit. Boyle and Slavin hooked up to a party of fifteen men and a pack train of twenty-five horses, but the going was so tough that half the company turned back. The others elected Boyle captain to go on past the summit to blaze a trail through thirty miles of wilderness for the party to follow. At Bennett Lake, the headwaters of the Yukon, a growing number of tenderfeet were already sawing lumber for boats to take them downriver to Dawson. Here Boyle’s foresight paid off. In the tons of goods he had packed over the trail was a twenty-four-foot collapsible boat he had purchased to take Slavin and himself through the headwater lakes and onto the great river, all the way to the city of gold.

Down the hissing Yukon they floated, propelled by a stiff current, drifting through a land of lonely prospectors panning for wages in the sandbars at the mouths of nameless creeks. This was the Cordilleran spine of the Americas, and everywhere, it seemed, were flickers of gold for those patient enough to seek it. Within that backbone of mountains, running north from the land of the Incas, lay the impressions of ancient watercourses plundered successively for their treasure by the Spanish conquistadors, the forty-niners, and the pioneers of the Cariboo. Now the line of hidden fortunes had veered off to the northwest.

This was a turning point in Boyle’s career. He had started north on a hunch—to make a few dollars holding boxing exhibitions with Slavin. By the time they reached Juneau, he had caught a whiff of the gold fever that was raging along the Alaska Panhandle. He had no inkling then of what the future held, but as they drifted closer and closer to Dawson, the Yukon interior captured him. He could not imagine that he would spend nearly the next two decades, the most significant period of his life, tied to this unlikely corner of the North. That, one might say, was his destiny. He could not escape it.

The Yukon shaped Boyle. He was no longer the slender, callow youth who had gone off to sea on a whim. A big man, barrel-chested, he always thought big. The scale of the land with its mighty-mouthed valleys, its enormous rivers, and its endless, mist-shrouded vistas, fitted his personal style. In Dawson, soaking up the details of gold mining in the Yukon, Boyle and Slavin came to the conclusion that the present system was inefficient and wasteful. Surely there must be a better way of getting the treasure from the bedrock. Placer gold is known as Poor Man’s Gold because one lone prospector can wrest it from the ground with little more than a spade and a sluice box. That wasn’t good enough for Boyle and his partner. They would need a government concession to give them hydraulic and timber rights over a big chunk of the Klondike watershed.

All around them that fall of 1897 the carnival roared on. Men who had been paupers the year before were so fabulously rich they could fling their profits on the gaming tables and become paupers again. Others were buying champagne at thirty dollars a split for the dance-hall beauties who plied their trade in the upper boxes. None of this had any effect on the teetotalling puritan whose only ambition was to build a mining empire. He wanted to control a great swath of the goldfields instead of a single claim.

Leaving Slavin to work out the legal details, Boyle made his way to Eldorado, the richest of the gold creeks, to give himself a beginner’s course in placer mining. Some were already planning to use small dredges, but Boyle was contemplating monstrous machines, the largest anywhere, to mine the Klondike’s hoard more efficiently. While individual prospectors were utilizing wooden sluice boxes on separate claims, Boyle was negotiating for an eight-mile stretch of the Klondike Valley. He intended, in fact, to introduce the Industrial Revolution to this godforsaken corner of the globe, incurring the wrath of the latter-day Luddites who scrabbled and mucked with spade and mattock in the gravels of the gold creeks.

He chose to find work on Claim No. 13, which so many had avoided because of its unlucky number but turned out to be the richest claim of all. Here he encountered one of the several larger-than-life characters who people the Boyle saga, each worthy of a Hollywood movie of his own. This was Swiftwater Bill Gates, one of the most successful of the Klondike prospectors, with a moon face and a scraggly moustache, so eager to squander his sudden fortune that he offered to bet one hundred dollars on the turn of a card in Dawson’s Monte Carlo saloon and dance hall, and to buy up every scarce egg in town, each at the price of a day’s pay, allegedly to lay at the feet of Gussie Lamore, the toast of dance-hall row.