Lady at the O.K. Corral (18 page)

The awakening of the Yukon River interrupted their idyll. The Yukon was once again a great lane of traffic. As each new boat came around the last bend in the river, the dogs began to bark and the townspeople gathered along the riverbank. Steamers arrived at all hours of the day and night, each one delivering old friends, mail, or new possibilities. On board one of the first steamers to reach Rampart was future playwright Wilson Mizner, a friend of Wyatt's who was apparently exercising his creativity by running various confidence schemes that victimized miners. Josephine did not fail to notice that Mizner was standing next to an attractive female passenger, true to his reputation as a ladies' man. He and Wyatt began shouting back and forth to each other even before the boat docked. Wilson joined the Earps in their cabin, dining heartily on steak and potatoes that he swiped from the ship's kitchen (“to keep you alive until another boat comes in”) and briefing them on his plans for his next stop: Nome.

Josephine had already noted the beginning of a mad migration to this northernmost outpost. People were scrambling for transportation to St. Michael, the best jumping-off point for the remote northern gold fields. Tex Rickard had already left. In fact, the Nome gold rush was kicked off in his saloon, a large circus tent in St. Michael. As Tex later told the story, a young prospector walked in and threw a heavy pouch (a “poke”) of gold on the table. The usual clamor of betting and arguing hushed. Asked who he was and where he came from, he gave his name as Jafet Lindeberg and said, “I come from Nome, and there you will find more of the same stuff.”

Rampart would soon become another ghost town, Josephine realized, as the previous year's exodus from Yuma played itself out again. Suddenly, an opportunity presented itself: Wyatt received an offer to run one of the Alaska Commercial Company's businesses at St. Michael, where they had stopped briefly the previous summer. It wasn't Nome, but they would be one step closer to the real action.

Josephine considered the prospect of leaving Rampart. She had enjoyed being part of an inclusive, intimate community that was fused together by the perilous winter conditions. That winter was among the happiest times of her life with Wyatt, and Rampart was the only place where they left behind close friends. So it was with mixed emotions that Josephine waved good-bye to Captain and Mrs. Mayo and their children as the riverboat steamed away, carrying the Earps and other passengers to St. Michael: “We left our little cabin by the brook, left our garden and our summer's ice. It was a sad time for both of us for we knew that there was no scenery besides ocean and tundra and barren mountains where we were going. We had learned to love the wilderness of the Yukon.” But the Earps had come to Alaska to make money, not friends.

JOSEPHINE COULD BE
softhearted and occasionally nostalgic. But if she had any regrets about leaving Rampart, or any other choices she made in her long life with Wyatt, she buried them deeply. The road ahead was all that mattered. The horizon was endless, always beckoning her forward. She turned her back on Rampart and focused on the next chapter.

Back on the Yukon River, Josephine felt herself to be an Alaskan veteran among a high-strung crowd of passengers who watched nervously as the boat made its way around each great bend of the river, much of it shallow and muddy. Recent storms had crushed thirty boats that year. They gasped as the expanse of the Bering Sea burst suddenly before them.

This was the crazy summer of 1898, when Klondike fever clustered around a single idea: Nome.

Wyatt's new boss, Mr. Ling, met them on the dock of St. Michael. He painted an alluring picture of the fortune to be made there, which consoled Josephine for the delay in getting to Nome. Ling directed them to a hotel owned by the Alaska Commercial Company. Josephine missed the company of their many friends and their snug little Rampart cabin but she sank gratefully back into comfort she hadn't experienced since leaving San Francisco.

St. Michael was a small, active outpost for the company, well situated for boats headed up to Nome or back “outside” to the United States. This year's crowds were larger and far more frantic than the ones Josephine had observed the last year, when she waited in St. Michael for the
Pingree
to be finished. The news about Nome had rippled throughout the entire Klondike region. Thousands of prospectors were so desperate to get to Nome that they pooled their last dollars to build small boats and row 1,800 miles across Norton Sound.

From her hotel window overlooking the port, Josephine watched the steamers and tiny rowboats crossing Norton Sound and the methodical loading and reloading of gold shipments sent down from Dawson to be shipped “outside.” The lineup of people and groceries that snaked along the waterfront were signs of the ringing cash register that guaranteed Wyatt's financial success, as were the rows of beer barrels rolling toward Wyatt's “canteen.” Wyatt kept 10 percent of a daily take of about $2,000. Beer was a dollar a bottle, and cigars sold for fifty cents each. The company owned his store as well as almost everything in St. Michael: the warehouses, post office, fur trading house, blacksmith shop, bathhouse, paint shop, powder house, most of the dwellings, the agents' dining room, the laundry, office building, and water tanks, and the most important and expensive structure in town: the wharf.

Despite the influx of cash, Josephine was dissatisfied. Surely Wyatt was destined for greater things than making a quick buck selling liquor. At least this retail business was a far cry from the hard-drinking, no-holds-barred consumption of Tombstone days. He was selling mostly beer, and no alcohol was actually consumed on his premises. With some prissy delicacy in her language, she noted “this custom [of no consumption on the company premises] also cut down the need for the services of an arbiter of such difficulties as used to rise in the saloons of Tombstone and Dodge City.” In other words, less booze, no brawls, no bouncer.

The weather was warm, but Josephine was immediately thrust back into the deep freeze of social isolation, so repellent after Rampart. Wyatt's world of saloons and gambling and shady ladies pushed her out again to the distant margins of a disapproving society. With no homemaking responsibilities or social engagements, she filled her time with visits and walks about town, sometimes in the company of a new friend, Sarah Vawter. Mrs. Vawter and her husband Cornelius were from prominent Montana families that had fallen on hard economic times. The two women strolled along the waterfront promenade together until Cornelius was named the new U.S. marshal and the Vawters joined the throngs bound for Nome, leaving Josephine alone again.

With a flood of exuberant letters, Tex Rickard urged Josephine and Wyatt to join him in Nome. His extravagant promises befit the man who would eventually become the greatest sports promoter of his era: deriding Wyatt's steady income at St. Michael as “chickenfeed,” Tex boasted that the really big money was in Nome. “Let everything go there in St. Michael,” he insisted. Tex was managing Nome's busiest saloon, the Northern, which was already crowded with roulette, poker, and faro tables. That, plus the lucrative sale of alcohol by girls who danced with the male guests, made the Northern highly profitable. Tex was not worried about competition. Come to Nome and open another saloon, he urged Wyatt.

They had just arrived, but Josephine felt the frustration of being “merely on the outskirts of adventure, selling refreshments to those who were hurrying to the center of it.” She was impatient to “get hold of a pan” herself. Although Tex's arguments were persuasive, she did try once more to be the practical one and encouraged Wyatt to weigh the advantages of a few more weeks of easy beer and cigar profits. Besides, everyone was trying to get to Nome, so they might not even get tickets, Josephine reasoned, half hoping, half fearing, that they would be lucky. She hedged with a suggestion that they take a short trip to Nome, just to look around—that is, if they could get a spot on a boat.

Her doubts were suddenly swept away by momentous news: gold had been found on the beaches of Nome, a barren coastline that became literally “a golden strand.” The fairy tale was swiftly validated by word of mouth that spread rapidly along St. Michael's waterfront.

“Better get ready,” Wyatt advised, after a quick scouting trip to the St. Michael dock. “We're leaving on the
Saidie
tonight.”

JOSEPHINE ARRIVED DURING
Nome's first summer as a boomtown, just a few weeks after the discoveries on the beach. Long suspected as a rich source of gold, Nome's extreme northern location, remote even by Alaskan standards, kept it off-limits. In this gray and barren landscape, there was not a tree between Josephine and the North Pole, nor another to the south for sixty miles. Until now, prospecting for gold had demanded hard labor and significant capital. Change would be radical and swift for the former fishing village and trading post. As Rex Beach noted in his 1905 novel about Nome,
The Spoilers
, “where a week before mild-eyed natives had dried their cod among the old bronze cannon, now a frenzied horde of gold-seekers paused in their rush to the new El Dorado.”

Nome's place in the modern history of gold prospecting traced back to engineer and Civil War veteran David Libby, who found signs of gold while he was stringing telegraph wires across Alaska. A few months later, nearly dead with hunger and sun exposure, he was only too happy to get back to the States—especially when the rescue team informed him that during his absence, the company had abandoned the project that nearly killed him. Some thirty years later, news of nearby Klondike strikes revived his interest. With a team of engineers, he returned to his original site and triumphantly located the first major gold strike on the Seward Peninsula. Libby's announcement attracted attention from Jafet Lindeberg and his companions, the “Three Lucky Swedes” who followed Libby with major strikes near a large mountain rock that resembled an anvil. The Swedes became celebrity millionaires overnight, and their symbol briefly identified the growing settlement as Anvil City.

According to local legend, Anvil City became “Nome” when Eskimos answered “Kn-no-me”—”I don't know”—when asked for the name of the region. An alternative explanation blamed a fifty-year-old spelling mistake. In 1850 a British naval officer on a ship off the coast of Alaska noted that his map lacked a name for the prominent point, and wrote “?Name” next to the spot. Later cartographers interpreted the question mark as a “C,” and thus christened the place as Cape Nome.

NEWS OF THE
first Nome strikes traveled with remarkable speed: within one month, three hundred additional claims were recorded. Hardy miners who had remained in Alaska during the winter of 1898–99 staked the first claims, but as soon as the Bering Sea was navigable, thousands of miners began to arrive, some from the States and others from other parts of the Yukon. By early spring, the first boats left Dawson, with some passengers standing the entire way. Rex Beach described the eager prospectors “like a locust cloud, thousands strong, settling on the edges of the Smoky Sea, waiting the going of the ice that barred them from their Golden Fleece, from Nome the new, where men found fortune in a night.”

What began as a mad scramble quickly became chaotic and dangerous. Although the mining laws held that citizenship was irrelevant, the Swedes' claims were hotly contested on the grounds that they were not Americans. Claim jumping and lawsuits were soon rampant. Ignoring the requirement to demonstrate the presence of minerals before filing for a specific location, “pencil and hatchet” miners posted hastily written notices and carved their marks haphazardly. Large tracts of land were held speculatively.

“Lawyers are thicker [in Nome] than anything else except gamblers and sporting women,” observed one resident. Litigation “has passed the stage of novelty,” warned a local reporter. “It has become a matter of routine monotony that is growing more and more abhorrent to the public with every succeeding 24 hours.” Powers of attorney were routinely abused, and the authorities responsible for affirming the legality of claims were accused of self-interest and double-dealing. A formal petition was sent to Washington with allegations of corruption and warnings that the mining districts were in danger of a major rebellion.

The situation grew more volatile as overcrowded boatloads of fortune hunters arrived each day, only to encounter inadequate housing and a lack of supplies. Most infuriating to the arriving miners was the discovery that “from sea-beach to sky-line the landscape was staked.” After weeks of legal wrangling and rising tensions, some of the disgruntled miners banded together and announced a meeting for July 10, 1899. Their plan was to overturn the Swedes' original claim and open up the region. Hundreds of men gathered in a meeting hall, with others stationed miles away, waiting to light a bonfire on Anvil Mountain that would signal open season again on mining claims.

With not enough food, not enough work, and not enough gold, Nome was on the verge of civil war. Violence that night was avoided only by quick action of the local military leadership, which dispersed the meeting at bayonet point. Soon the miners had much more to distract them.

WAS IT TWO
soldiers digging a well? Or was it an old Idaho prospector down on his luck who was sifting sand in desperation? Other fanciful geological theories about the discovery of gold on the Nome beach attributed the miracle to an atmospheric phenomenon in mid-July 1898 that caused gold to come in with the tide like driftwood; or the fable that “a golden lake” within the Bering Sea flooded the sand each day with a new coat of precious metal. Whatever the explanation, beach miners were soon gathering enough gold to earn twenty to eighty dollars per day with minimal effort. Ordinary prospecting required heavy equipment and backbreaking labor, so this discovery seemed like magic: to be able to walk to the edge of the shore, swirl water into a metal pan and discover gold! Anybody with a pie-shaped tin could pan for gold—and everybody did. Even women and children could be alchemists. Unemployment in Nome ceased immediately.