Old-Timers Recall Hectic Klondyke Days

Hawera Star, Volume LIII, 4 November 1933, Page 14

Old-Timers Recall Hectic Klondyke Days

r jpHE Alaska and Yukon sourdoughs arc holding their convention this year in California, as a tribute to the Forty-Niners, pioneers of gold stampedes. Their reminiscences recall stirring deeds north of fifty-three (writes the Vancouver correspondent of the “Evening Post”). “With two friends, Happy .Tack and Bill the Horse, I set out from Circle City for the Yukon/’ says Ross Moulton, who lives in retirement in -this city. 'TJnck broke his false teeth. Well, sir, that same day, Bill the Horse shot a. bear. We skinned the bear, and Jack cemented its teeth into his plate with copper rivets. Then he helped eat bear meat with the bear’s own teeth.’’

They tell their individual experiences in the famous disaster that took 03 lives on the Cliilkoot Pass on April 3, .1898, in the midst of the first stampede. “The night, before, an Indian warned me not to pack over/’ says George Driver. “Ilis word was good enough for me, and it saved my life. 'Fourteen inches of snow fell in a few hours that night, and the top of the snow froze. We heard the avalanche and went up there, and

■ heard the people groaning under the snow, and started digging them out. i [don’t remember how many got out, but the fellow who was digging the hardest. was the husband of the woman caught in that snow slide, and she’d left him, several months before, bacK in Illinois.’’ I Elwood Brown—it was “Buster” Brown in those days—was born in Nome, “right on. a bed of gold, too,” ho said. “'The night I was born we had a blizzard. Dad got word to the famous Scotty Allen to t'etcli a doctor, and the winner of the first All-Alaska Dog Derby made the three-mile trip with his team in fifteen minutes. Right under the cabin' where I was born, they took out f,000,000 dollars in gold. My tad owned the cabin, but, no, he didn’t own the mine under it.”

The girls who catered to the entertainment of the miners that followed the Trail of Ninety-Eight contributed their share of the reminiscences. Klondike Kate, who was known as the Queen of the Yukon, and who went there fresh from a 1 Southern convent, said she earned 750 dollars one night, “as easy as falling off a log.” A

gentleman admirer bought 1500 dollars worth of champagne, and her share for entertaining him was half that amount The Nightingale of the Yukon, Beatrice Lome, gave her testimony: “I was working at Monte Carlo, in Dawson ! City. One of my friends pointed out ja miner who was giving nuggets to I the girls. X asked him for one. He turned up his nose. Hearing that he was a Scotsman, I went to the piano and sang, ‘Cornin’ Through the Rye.’ Well, that 'Scotsman started to weep, and presently walked over and dumped 500 dollars worth of nuggets in my lap, and asked me to marry him. Did 1 accept him? No! Tie wore squeaky boots and they got on my nerves!”

Business sessions of the convention were interspersed with the prevaricators’ luncheon and annual ball, at which the sourdoughs’ anthem was sung: “Their hopes and prayers are all with thee, Northern Land, O Northern Land.”

'The newly-elected president, in his acceptance speech, said: “This organisation shall continue to ibc a group of real sourdoughs, without money, religion, or polities.”