1897

 

Teddy Roosevelt writes, “A rich nation which is slothful, timid or unwieldy is an easy prey for any people which still retains those most valuable of all qualities, the soldierly virtues.”

 

At the time, hundreds of thousands of Cubans were dying under Spanish control. Richard Harding Davis, a correspondent who visited the island, came back convinced the U.S. had to stop the slaughter. 

Protests were not enough, he wrote. “Why should we not go a step farther and a step higher, and interfere in the name of humanity?”

 

Just a few short years before, at Wounded Knee, the U.S. had finally stopped killing Native Americans.

The role of wife and mother was the norm.

* 

July: A young man named Jack London has just quit his job in a laundry, when the steamship Portland docks in Seattle and the Excelsior in San Francisco. Miners from the Klondike are returning with three tons of gold from the Yukon. 

    London is soon infected with “Klondictis,” as gold fever was then called. He’s broke; but his 60-year-old brother-in-law, James “Cap” Shepard is also infected. Shepard mortgages his wife’s house to pay for a trip. During the late 90s, a hundred thousand prospectors attempted the journey north, across a harsh land. Only thirty thousand made it, with 65 dying in an avalanche one day, and typhoid striking many others down. Countless others gave up and turned around. 

    As for London, 

He grew up poor in a broken home, and at age 15, he joined a gang of prison-hardened oyster pirates who risked their lives in small boats at night, trying to outwit the armed guards who watched over the oyster beds in San Francisco Bay. Jack soon became an expert sailor, and an accomplished drinker and brawler in the waterfront saloons. At 17, he sailed across the Pacific and up to the Bering Sea on a seal-hunting ship. He also worked 16-hour days in a Dickensian canning factory in Oakland, hoboed from coast to coast on freight trains, learned to beg and steal, spent 30 days for vagrancy in a vicious New York jail, and became a confirmed socialist—all by the age of 19. 

 

    One of the first obstacles London and Shepard had to overcome was to climb up and over the Alaskan Coastal Mountains. Jack was a voracious reader, and packed books by Milton and Darwin. 

    They sailed away to Alaska on a ship packed with gold-seekers and partnered with three of them: “Big Jim” Goodman, an experienced miner and hunter; Ira Sloper, a gritty carpenter and adventurer who weighed barely 100 pounds; and a red-whiskered court reporter, Fred C. Thompson, who kept a terse, deadpan diary of the trip. Disembarking at Juneau, they hired Tlingit canoes and paddled up a 100-mile fjord to Dyea, where the infamous Chilkoot Trail began. 

    To reach the Klondike, they first needed to get themselves and all their supplies over the Alaskan coastal range, on a trail too steep for horses or pack mules. They sent 3,000 pounds of supplies to the summit with Tlingit packers, at 22 cents per pound, and carried the rest on their backs. Several sources state that Jack hauled about a ton, which was average. A strong man who could backpack 100 pounds had to make 20 round trips, walking a total of 40 miles, in order to move that burden one mile. 

      The going was rough and muddy, with patches of quagmire. They had to cross and recross a raging river on felled trees. “They are very hard to walk on, with water rushing underneath and one hundred pounds on your back,” Thompson noted in his diary. Men who fell were usually drowned by the weight of their packs; they were buried in shallow graves beside the trail. Nine miles out from Dyea, Cap Shepard was in so much pain from his rheumatism that he said goodbye to the other men and turned back down the trail.

The Chilkoot Trail.

* 

August 21: London and his comrades camp at the foot of the pass: 

The others pressed on through heavy rain and deepening mud. They picked up an elderly gold-seeker named Martin Tarwater, who offered to cook for them. … On August 21, with blistered feet and raw shoulders, they reached Sheep Camp, which Thompson described as “a very tough hole.” More than 1,000 stampeders crowded together in a muddy tent city. It was the last piece of level ground before the dreaded ascent to Chilkoot Pass.

 

    They would soon join others, crawling up and over the pass, as London later wrote, “like a column of ants.”     

    Some of the prospectors looked at the challenge ahead, dumped their supplies, and turned back in defeat. Others make the attempt, but strength and stamina fail and they must make it back to the States as best they can. London and his friends made it up and over but had to backpack their supplies 16 miles. At one point they had to build a boat, with masts and a sail, rigged by London. In brutal winds and blizzard conditions they saw two other craft capsize and drown everyone aboard.

 

    The days of decent weather were dwindling, and the travelers limited themselves to five hours of sleep per night.

 

* 

September 25: By this time, they had reached a tributary of the Yukon River and would have to “shoot the rapids” in Box Canyon to save time. Most prospectors refused to even attempt the passage, but a portage would take four days. London and his friends “voted to run the rapids.” 

    The 27-foot boat was heavily laden with supplies. There were hundreds of spectators on the canyon walls, predicting disaster. Jack steered with a sweep-oar as they careened through the white water, and the others paddled frantically to avoid getting dashed against the rocks. The current was so swift that they ran the mile-long canyon in two minutes, with no damage done except one snapped paddle.

 

* 

October 9: Still eight miles from Dawson City, London and his companions find several abandoned cabins and decide to settle down for the winter. 

Big Jim saw promising color in his gold pan. Jack staked out 500 feet on the left fork of Henderson Creek and boated downriver to file his mining claim in Dawson City.

 

    Founded the previous year, Dawson now had more than a dozen saloons with dance halls and gambling, a street of prostitutes called Paradise Alley and some 5,000 inhabitants living in cabins, tents and shanties. There was a food shortage, no sanitation, and the filthy streets were full of unemployed men and sled dogs. 

 

    London spent the next six weeks in town, all the while gathering material for the writing he planned to do. 

Partly to keep warm, he spent a lot of time in bars, and was often seen in conversation with the “sourdoughs,” or seasoned miners. These characters thought 40 below zero was good weather for hunting and dog-sledding, and they scorned the newcomers as cheechakos, or “tenderfeet,” who were liable to start whining after three days with no food. There was so much material for a budding novelist in those gaudy saloons, where men told tales of death outwitted and bonanza gold strikes, silk-clad women charged a dollar for a dance, $25,000 was sometimes wagered on a hand of poker, and everyone paid with gold dust or nuggets. 

 

    Jack also “befriended two brothers, Louis and Marshall Bond, who let him camp next to their cabin in Dawson.” He was especially impressed with their dog “a magnificent, 140-pound Saint Bernard-Scotch collie mix. The dog’s name was Jack, and he was the model for Buck, the canine hero of The Call of the Wild.” 

Marshall Bond was struck by Jack London’s unusual rapport with dogs. Rather than talk affectionately to them, and pet them, “He always spoke and acted toward the dog as if he recognized his noble qualities, but took them as a matter of course,” Bond wrote in his memoir. “He had an appreciative and instant eye for fine traits and honored them in a dog as he would in a man.”  

 

    Today, the saloon in the Dawson Hotel features a highly unusual cocktail, as Richard Grant writes: “The Sourtoe – a severed, mummified human toe dropped into the liquor of your choice. The legend is that the drink dates back to the 1920s, and originally involved an amputated frostbitten toe.” 

    The rules are no chewing or swallowing – as if! – and you were required to touch the toe with your tongue.

 

* 

December: 

at the coldest, darkest time of year, Jack left Dawson and snowshoed 80 miles up the frozen Yukon River, sleeping under blankets next to a fire. Weather records, and Jack’s recollections, indicate temperatures close to 70 below zero. Reaching the Stewart River, he joined his three partners in one of the log cabins they had found. It was 10 by 12, and even when the metal stove was red hot, meat would stay frozen on a shelf eight feet away. 

    They lived on sourdough bread, beans and bacon, supplemented by game meat, and they chopped water out of the river with an ax. Thawing the ground with fires, they dug for gold but found very little. They played a lot of cards, and visited back and forth with men in other cabins. Jack’s company was valued because he was an excellent conversationalist and storyteller, with a cheerful, generous personality. 

 

    Grant continues: 

    There’s no exaggerating how primitive the cabin is, or how cramped and smelly it must have been with four men living in it. They slept on spruce boughs and animal hides. The floor was ice and snow. When they ran out of candles, they burned bacon grease in a homemade lamp, and Jack smoked incessantly. They all got scurvy, or “Arctic leprosy,” from the lack of fresh vegetables and exercise. The disease killed many prospectors in the Klondike, and put an end to Jack’s brief career as a miner.

1898

  __________

 

“The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent.”   

 

Charles Eliot Norton in True Patriotism.

__________

March 28: By a 6-2 majority, in the case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the U.S. Supreme Court upholds the citizenship of a Chinese American born in the United States.

 

    Mr. Wong had been born in California in 1873 but visited China in 1890 and then returned to this country without difficulty. In 1894, he again visited China, but on his return in August 1895, he was denied reentry to the United States under provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882.

 

    The wording of the Fourteenth Amendment had seemed clear but was now in dispute: “All person born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

 

    As for the words “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” the majority had no doubt what those words were meant to entail. They excluded only Native Americans outside of U.S. control, and special cases, like diplomats representing foreign nations, but stationed in this country.

 

    Justice Horace Gray, writing for the majority, noted that if some new standard were to deny a Chinese American citizenship by virtue of birth here, then, for example, children born here to white immigrants would also lose their citizenship, going all the way back to 1789.

 

    Judge Gray explained: 

the Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory [emphasis added], in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens, with the exceptions or qualifications (as old as the rule itself) of children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory, and with the single additional exception of children of members of the Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes. The Amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born, within the territory of the United States, of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States. Every citizen or subject of another country, while domiciled here, is within the allegiance and the protection, and consequently subject to the jurisdiction, of the United States.

  

    In other words, Wong Kim Ark was as much an American as any racist member of Congress who helped pass the Chinese Exclusion Acts.

 

*

“The great American principles of liberty, equality and humanity.” 

April 25: The United States declares war on Spain. Teddy Roosevelt begins recruiting for his regiment. Soon to be known as the “Rough Riders,” all kinds of colorful recruits are attracted. They include the mayor of Prescott, Arizona, the grandson of Grant’s secretary of state, and the two top-ranked tennis players in the country. Five percent of the men in the regiment, the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, are from Harvard.

 

    Roughly 16,000 Americans fought in Cuba, but Roosevelt’s unit gained widespread fame. The “Rough Rider” hat sold well; Stephen Crane chronicled the regiment’s exploits, as did a dozen other writers. The Philadelphia Inquirer lauded them: “Whether Fifth Avenue millionaires or Western cowboys, they fought together and died together in Cuba for the great American principles of liberty, equality and humanity.”

 

     The Rough Riders landed in Cuba on June 22; by August, Spain was suing for peace.

 

    Roosevelt credits African American soldiers who helped take San Juan Hill in his book on the war; the newspapers of the nation said little about them at the time.

 

The attack on San Juan Hill.

 

*

 

“The tyranny of the most cruel of modern nations.”

 

    McLaughlin (56/529-530) describes the motivation for American intervention in Cuba, after the Spanish crush a rebellion: 

    Moreover, the people of the United States were shocked by the methods used in suppression of the rebellion, which were cruel in the extreme, entailing untold misery not so much upon the soldiers in arms as on the women, children, and other non-combatants. A large portion of the whole island was laid waste, its commerce destroyed, while tens of thousands of its citizens died of want and starvation.

 

    This is ironic given the fight at Wounded Knee earlier in the decade and our fighting against the Filipinos to follow. 

    Charles Morris in The Great Republic also lays out the motivation for war against Spain, involving: “the wresting of the Philippines, Porto Rico, and the Ladrones from the tyranny of the most cruel of modern nations, and the addition of Hawaii to our domain.” “The Greater United States, at one bound, assumes its place in the van of nations, and becomes the foremost agent in civilizing and Christianizing the world.”

 

    The Publishers Introduction has this to say: 

    With a fervent trust in a guiding Providence, and an abiding confidence in our ability, we enter upon the new and grander career, as in obedience to the divine behest that the Latin race must decrease and the Anglo-Saxon increase, and that the latter, in a human sense, must be the regenerator of all who are groping in the night of ignorance and barbarism.

 

    Morris adds in his Author’s Introduction: 

    It may be fairly said, then, that the founders of our nation came from the cream of the populations of Europe, born of sturdy Teutonic stock, and comprising thrift, energy, endurance, love of liberty, and freedom of thought to a degree never equaled in the makers of any other nation upon the earth. They were of solid oak in mind and frame, and the edifice they built had for its foundations the natural rights of man, and for its superstructure that spirit of liberty which has ever since throbbed warmly in the American heart.

 

    He admits that the Native Americans had been driven back, step by step, but claimed: “Yet the Indians are probably as numerous to-day as they were originally, and are certainly better off in their present peaceful and partly civilized condition than they were in their former savage and warlike state.”

 

    Oddly enough, elsewhere he condemns the Spanish for their behavior in settling America: “Spain sent her armed expeditions thither, and in time they overran the sections [of land] named, their footprints marked everywhere by fire and blood.” 

A way of life was destroyed.

*

 

JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY, “The Hoosier Poet,” is busy writing all kinds of sentimental poems. 

    Not sure when he published “The Boy Patriot,” but it’s clear Riley never thought much about the high costs of war. The fact that it appeared in the anthology, The Book of Joyous Children (1902) may tell us something:

I want to be a Soldier! –

A Soldier! –

A Soldier! –

I want to be a Soldier, with a sabre in my hand
Or a little carbine rifle, or a musket on my shoulder,
Or just a snare-drum, snarling in the middle of the band;

I want to hear, high overhead, The Old Flag flap her wings

While all the Army, following, in chorus cheers and sings;

I want to hear the tramp and jar

Of patriots a million,
As gayly dancing off to war

As dancing a cotillion.

I want to be a Soldier! –

A Soldier! –

A Soldier! –

I want to be a Soldier, with a sabre in my hand

Or a little carbine rifle, or a musket on my shoulder,
Or just a snare-drum, snarling in the middle of the band.

I want to see the battle! –

The battle! –

The battle! –

I want to see the battle, and be in it to the end; –    
I want to hear the cannon clear their throats and catch the prattle
Of all the pretty compliments the enemy can send! –
And then I know my wits will go, – and where I should’nt be –

Well, there’s the spot, in any fight, that you may search for me.

So, when our foes have had their fill,
Though I’m among the dying,
To see The Old Flag flying still,
I’ll laugh to leave her flying!

I want to be a Soldier! –

A Soldier! –

A Soldier! –

I want to be a Soldier, with a sabre in my hand

Or a little carbine rifle, or a musket on my shoulder,

Or just a snare-drum, snarling in the middle of the band.

* 

In a humorous piece by Riley, “Hik-Tee-Dik,” the reader meets two “loud and hilarious” boys. At school, Billy and Buddy are always causing a commotion. When they enter class, shouting their war cry, “Hik-tee-dik,” they’d “ bang the school-door till the plastering fell.” 

Three days in a row, they pretend to “clinch,” and in wrestling with each other, knock over the teacher’s desk. 

Finally, they get beat: 

For the teacher, she righted her desk – raised the lid

And folded and packed away each little kid –

Closed the incident so – yes, and locked it, she did –

Hik-tee-dik! Billy and Buddy!

The teacher has her way.

*

 

Spring: Suffering from scurvy, Jack London and his comrades disassemble the cabin where they have spent the winter – searching for gold – finding little. They build a raft and float down the Yukon River to Dawson City. There they sell the logs for $600. London manages to secure a few potatoes and a lemon, which helps with his illness. On the day he and his friends leave Dawson, headed back to San Francisco, London begins keeping a diary.

 

    At one point, he describes being attacked by “thousands of millions” of mosquitoes that were only too happy to bite “through overalls and heavy underwear.”

 

   Gold fever had reached a peak by that next summer. The population of Dawson City exploded to 40,000. A prospector named Swede Anderson “dug out a million dollars in gold from a claim everyone said was worthless.”

 

    A year later, the rush was over, and the population of Dawson City dropped by three-fourths.

 

   Back home in San Francisco, London started writing, often spending eighteen hours a day at his craft. At first, everything he submitted for publication was rejected. A short story finally sold for five dollars – not much – and by the time it was published Jack had to borrow a dime to buy the magazine in which it appeared. Finally, he sold “An Odyssey of the North” to the Atlantic for $120.

 

    His career as an author was now secure. He sold the rights to his masterpiece, The Call of the Wild, for only $2,000; but from that point forward, he started making $10,000 per month, for his work, and for speaking engagements. Grant calls him “one of the first writers to live in the headlines, and he spent money like a movie star.” He died of liver disease at age forty, in 1916, however

*

 

July: Belinda Mulrooney, 26, one of the first “stampeders,” as the Klondike gold-rushers were known, opens the glamorous Fair View Hotel in Dawson City, Alaska.

 

    How had an Irish immigrant, and a woman on her own, ended up so far north? Despite her youth, Mulrooney had repeatedly shown a nose for a good investment. She bought a lot near the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, and built on it, then sold it at a profit, and bought a nearby restaurant, serving hungry fairgoers. She sold out and headed for San Francisco in 1895, investing wisely once more. A fire at an uninsured property left her without funds. So, when gold was discovered in Alaska, she started fresh. 

    This time she found success in merchant ventures, bootlegging whiskey and other coveted supplies aboard the steamship City of Topeka between Seattle and southern Alaska – then reselling goods at frontier prices. She opened a store in Juneau and was scanning the landscape for opportunity when a prospector strolled into town, showing off some of the gold nuggets he’d found in what seemed like a promising strike in the Klondike. Instantly, Mulrooney began outfitting for an expedition that would change her life, and the frozen frontier, forever. 

    Getting to the Klondike gold fields in 1897 required astonishing mettle. The majority of stampeders … came via a brutal overland trek, each explorer hauling gear by sled over the icy, 3,550-foot Chilkoot Pass. Mulrooney’s supplies required 30 such trips. Then came the two-week journey down the turbulent Yukon River to Dawson, for which travelers had to build their own boats. 

 

    Mulrooney made it to Dawson, but by that time, she was down to her last coin. As she often told the story later, she decided to toss it in a river, announcing to nearby miners, “I’ll start clean.”

 

    With a sharp eye for a sale, Mulrooney sold hot water bottles to miners who spent nights in frigid tents. She understood that the men (there were few women in Dawson City) were desperate for a good meal – opened a restaurant – and did a booming trade, serving home-style fare. She made a 600% profit on her first shipment of goods and kept going.

 

    Mulrooney’s eye for creative re-use proved key in an undeveloped environment where materials were scarce. “I started buying up all the boats and rafts that were arriving, hired a crew of young fellows who had nothing to do, and had them build cabins,” she said of her first Yukon real estate venture, which she embarked on shortly after arriving. Those cabins were soon selling for as much as $4,000 apiece, or more than $150,000 today.  

    Mulrooney also had a canny instinct for location. During that first Yukon spring, she scouted ground on which to open her first hotel and chose the junction of the two busiest gold-mining creeks, 16 miles outside of Dawson. The Grand Forks quickly became the miners’ primary gathering place and soon doubled as an official collection office for royalties demanded by the Canadian government. At night Mulrooney put the floor sweepings through a sluice, gleaning an extra $100 or so in gold dust daily. Perfectly positioned for intelligence-gathering, she invested accordingly and by the end of 1897 owned five gold claims—plus almost 20 percent of one of the region’s wealthiest mining companies.  

    Ever the expansionist, Mulrooney set out to build the finest hotel in Dawson City, one modeled on the elegant hotels she’d seen in Chicago and San Francisco. Calling it the Fair View, Mulrooney was meticulous in choosing the lace curtains, plush carpets, brass bedsteads and other finery that would make her new hotel the envy of the region’s other hoteliers, who housed most guests in rough dormitories. When explorer Mary E. Hitchcock arrived in Dawson in June 1898, she was deeply impressed and detailed her reaction in her 1899 memoir, Two Women in the Klondike: “The menu, beginning with ‘oyster cocktails,’ caused us to open our eyes wide with astonishment, after all that the papers have told us of the starvation about Dawson.” 

    The Fair View was the first property in town to have electricity. When miners bet Mulrooney $5,000 that she couldn’t keep the three-story building warm, she bought an old steamboat boiler, attaching a sawmill to provide the fuel. Mulrooney modernized the town in other ways, too, helping bring Dawson its first telephone and telegraph, housing the switchboard in the Fair View, and forming the Hygeia Water Supply Company to provide safe drinking water. It was less than two years since she arrived in Dawson, and already she was one of its foremost citizens.

 

    She even started a bank and can be seen in one photo from this era, examining an 88-ounce gold nugget.

 

    Unfortunately, she was less fortunate in love, falling for a sham European nobleman, Count Charles Eugene Charbonneau, who had been a barber from Montreal. They married in Dawson City, on October 1, 1900, and the “Count” soon wrecked his wife’s finances. She ditched the fake, and later divorced him, profited again from her businesses, and finally moved south to Yakima, Washington, where she built an impressive stone castle.

*

 

 “The old order – the rule of the white people.”

 

November 10: Race riots in Wilmington, N.C., end with the black community in ruins. Josephus Daniels, editor of The News and Record, the state’s most influential newspaper, fueled outrage in stories about sex and race and power. As a book review in The New York Times points out, when trouble exploded, 

   Successful black men were targeted for banishment from the city, while black workers left all their possessions behind as they rushed to the swamps for safety. Over 60 people died. No one seemed to care. The governor of North Carolina cowered in the face of the violent rebellion, worried about his own life. President William McKinley turned a blind eye to the bloodshed. 

 

    An avowed white supremacist took over as mayor. In the wake of the violence, leading newspapers explained, “We must hope that by far the greater part of Negroes in this city are anxious for the restoration of order and quiet and ‘the old order’ — the rule of the white people.”  

    The men who led the overthrow of city government went on to successful political careers. Daniels was a cabinet member under President Woodrow Wilson. Furnifold Simmons served 30 years as a United States senator.  The grandson of Alex Manly, who wrote about the riots, says simply, “If there’s a hell, I hope they’re burning in it, all of them.”