Lady at the O.K. Corral (19 page)

By the end of August, some two thousand people were working on the Nome beaches.

Speculation ran wild. Was this a great find? Or a terrible and dangerous waste of time and resources? The rest of the United States heard the siren song of the golden beaches that summer and tuned out the warnings. “Truth about Cape Nome: Gold is there but All Claims are Staked” reported the
San Francisco Chronicle
, writing from “Anvil City” in July 1899. While there was plenty of gold, the writer went on to admonish the would-be prospector that “there is no chance for newcomers. By the time they could reach here from Seattle or San Francisco and get back into the country . . . it would be winter, and wintering here is almost impossible. Nobody intends to stay during the winter months if he can get out. The coast is fearfully stormy and the cold is intense.” The reporter noted that slogging through the surf was dangerous and expensive, that wages were low, that there were no horses, no wood. His advice: stay away.

No one listened. That “placer gold,” twinkling so tantalizingly on the earth's surface, would surely remain plentiful. It seemed that everyone in America longed to see this “poor man's paradise,” where the streets were covered with mud two feet deep, but the beach was laced with treasure—and it was public property. Some effort was made to impose a tax on the beach miners, but that idea was quickly abandoned. In the absence of clear legal precedent, the miners themselves devised a solution. Meeting in Tex Rickard's saloon, the miners thrashed out a crude measure of “foot possession” to mark their spot on the beach, i.e., they could mine as much ground as a shovel could reach in a circle from the edge of the hole in which they worked.

IT TOOK A
little more than one day to get from St. Michael to Nome on the creaky, overcrowded
Saidie.
From a distance, Josephine saw a shoreline shrouded by an unusual thick mist that hugged the ground like swirling snow, despite the warm weather. As the boat came closer, the fluttering waves of mist materialized into white tents staked along the fifteen miles of Nome's shore. As she drew closer, she saw people and equipment beyond the tents, but no harbor or docks extending into the water.

Nome seemed relatively accessible—at least until Josephine and Wyatt tried to get ashore. Entering Nome required a three-step maneuver that was a harbinger of the unexpected difficulties of daily life in this most unusual place. As the
Saidie
pitched from side to side, Wyatt climbed down a rope ladder and then jumped into a small boat that was pulled up alongside, and waited for Josephine, who descended a few minutes later. Rowers struggled to hold the boat steady and then navigated to shore as the tide pulled in the opposite direction. Finally, Josephine heard the welcome sound of sand grinding beneath the boat. But they were still some thirty feet from shore. As the boat bobbed up and down in the breakers, men in rubber boots waded out to them. Wyatt surged ahead through the shallow water, while Josephine and other women climbed aboard the sturdy backs of men who carried them individually to shore. The Bering Sea was now behind her, and Nome beckoned ahead, two blocks wide and five miles long.

On Front Street, the main thoroughfare, she found it nearly impossible to walk without stumbling two feet deep in mud. There were no suitable hotels yet, but Josephine found one of the few wooden shacks on “the spit” a few minutes away from the main street, slightly better than a tent.

Nome was treeless, and also sleepless. The air seemed to vibrate with the constant clamor of saws and hammers. Some two hundred wooden buildings were under construction, all built from wood imported on the boats that now arrived constantly. Josephine saw no stores, just a foul-smelling fur depot, and the warehouse of the Alaska Commercial Company. There was little in the way of municipal services: basic sanitation was almost nonexistent; sewage emptied into the river that was the only source of drinking water. Along the waterfront, tickets for public toilets were sold at ten cents each, or three for twenty-five cents; the latrines were built on pilings, which were flushed by the tide. Typhoid, bloody dysentery, and pneumonia were common. When an epidemic of smallpox broke out, a hospital was constructed in haste, with an isolation area for infected patients.

Nome was struggling to become a habitable city as the population swelled to 5,000. That summer, $1 million would be taken from the beach. Everything was being done for the first time, including burying the dead. A cemetery was hastily designated on the outer rim of the tundra, just west of the city limits. A visiting soldier described the macabre process of carving out one of the first graves: When the men finished their arduous preparation, they went to town to collect the body, only to discover upon their return that they had been “jumped.” Another corpse occupied the grave, now filled in and marked by a headstone.

In spite of the general ugliness and discomfort, Josephine reveled in the excitement of Nome and without hesitation agreed that they should not return to St. Michael. Nome was bigger in every way than St. Michael, and would likely be even more profitable. For Josephine, Nome was all about the “thrill of a new gold camp,” and the “adventure of the thing.” At last, she would be at the center of the action.

Wyatt formed a partnership with his friend Charlie Hoxsie and built a new saloon called the Dexter. Miners needed to drink, to gamble, and to enjoy the company of women: that is how Wyatt knew how to make money, “mining the miners,” as he said to his brothers. Every minute of that summer was devoted to getting the saloon up and running. This would be Nome's first two-story building and its biggest structure to date, named after John Dexter, whose trading post had been the central gathering point for the pioneers of the Nome gold rush, in the earliest days of the Three Lucky Swedes. Wyatt and Hoxsie purchased “a bar-room license to engage in the sale of intoxicating liquors at retail.” Aided by Wyatt's celebrity, almost as potent in the northern frontier as it had been in the American territories, the Dexter was an immediate success and enjoyed what the newspapers called “a liberal patronage” during the years of Wyatt's management, in friendly competition with Tex Rickard's Northern Saloon as the most popular spot in Nome.

Josephine was torn between her vague disapproval of Wyatt's saloon keeping and her frank appreciation for its “lavish financial returns.” In St. Michael, she had comforted herself with the dubious distinction between selling alcohol and encouraging its consumption. In Nome, she could have no such illusions. She rationalized anew: the Dexter, this “better class” saloon, served an “important civic purpose” as the local clubhouse, the town hall, and the forum, where men could arrange political campaigns, transact business, and enjoy social contacts. Into the doors of the Dexter walked any important resident or guest, from writers like Rex Beach and Jack London to mining engineer and future president Herbert Hoover to future prizefighter Jack Dempsey. Wilson Mizner was there too, often entertaining a crowd at Considine's Hall, singing a lusty version of “Ben Bolt.” “We met and hung out in saloons,” Wyatt later observed with a smile. “There weren't any YMCAs.”

The Earps were getting rich, but the Dexter's popularity did nothing for Josephine. In fact, Nome would later pass an ordinance forbidding the presence of women in saloons. She could have entertained herself in other ways: women were working their own claims, and had seized the right to vote in the city's elections for its first mayor, city council, and chief of police. However, Josephine was never interested in politics. What passed for high society in Nome was already closed to her. As the wife of Nome's most famous saloonkeeper, she was invisible, caught once again in an unpleasantly familiar netherworld.

Nome matured with an intensity born of nearly twenty-four-hour days and the superheated atmosphere of gold. However, in the more sober corners of the community, winter was a subject of growing concern. Nome was getting a little chillier each day. Most people were still living in tents and shacks, facing a severe shortage of fuel, food, and medical supplies. Newspaper editorials warned residents to prepare for the winter—or leave: “This is the time when those who intend to winter in Nome should begin skirmishing around for eight months' supplies. . . . Nome cannot afford to be burdened with indigents this winter, and any one who does not see clearly whence his or her support is to come from had best get out before it is too late. We can hardly imagine a more uncongenial place to be broke in than Nome for the eight months commencing early in November.”

As the temperature plunged, panic hit those who had not yet struck it rich. For every successful prospector, there were at least three who had failed. Some 1,000 miners were broke and homeless in Nome, where everything cost up to five times as much as it did back home. Some vowed to stay, but most of them took advantage of government subsidies to board a steamer back to the States.

Charlie Hoxsie advised Josephine and Wyatt to leave their investments, including the Dexter, in his hands for the winter. Josephine was wary of the increasingly strong winds and driving rains that foreshadowed the approach of the great ice pack marching down from the north, a “wall of ice shimmering like diamonds,” as high as sixty feet, and advancing as rapidly as three miles an hour. Still more horrifying to her imagination was the fearful sound of the ice pack bearing down on Nome, a head-filling groan that Charlie and other veterans recollected with a shudder. “You can't hear yourself think,” Charlie warned, as the icebergs crashed against each other, creating a maddening din that ended suddenly in an ominous moment when the sea froze and empty silence settled over the landscape.

Despite Charlie's dramatic predictions, Josephine wanted to remain in Nome, hoping perhaps for a reprise of their idyllic winter in Rampart, but Wyatt overruled her. He had been unsuccessful in finding a suitable home for them, “no nice warm log houses” as they had in Rampart. Between his concern and the fears on everyone's face, Josephine capitulated. They decided to spend the winter in Seattle and San Francisco, where they would outfit the Dexter more grandly and return to Nome as soon as the Bering Sea became navigable.

They were almost too late to board the
Cleveland
, the last boat to leave Nome. Wyatt bribed two men to relinquish their small stateroom, just big enough for the two of them and a collection of furs and fine Irish woolen shawls, robes, and blankets purchased by Josephine. The trip was a nightmare. First came the discovery that their bodies and clothing, plus everything in their stateroom, were crawling with lice. Her beautiful furs and woolens were thrown overboard. Then they encountered a storm so terrible that Josephine begged to get off the boat, though they were in the middle of the Bering Sea. As they itched unmercifully, the boat rolled and pitched amid mountain-high waves beneath a “black howling sky.” When they finally reached Seattle, nine days late and already given up for lost, they had only the clothes on their backs and a few things that they hoped would survive fumigation, such as Josephine's treasured lynx cape. Still, they fared better than the passengers of another boat that left at the same time; the
Hera
took twenty-eight days to make the week-long trip, during which “two men died from starvation and others were half crazed from want of food and water . . . the majority of the men were so weak that they could not carry their gold dust ashore without assistance.”

Despite the horrors of their voyage, the passengers of the
Hera
were united in “declaring Nome to be the greatest camp on earth.” Many of them were already planning to return in the spring.

AS JOSEPHINE STEPPED
onto dry land, grateful beyond words to be off the boat, she encountered a city that had a single-minded focus. Seattle was Nome-crazy. The newly formed “Cape Nome Information and Supply Bureau” bombarded pedestrians with ads promoting Nome underwear, Nome tents, Nome medicine, even special hats like the Reed's Blizzard Defier Face Protector, which promised that “whether your nose is long or short, wide or narrow, inclined to be roman or retroussé . . . the wearer can see, hear, breathe, talk, smoke, swear, chew, or expectorate just as well with it on as off.”

One winter in Rampart had been enough to convince Josephine's neighbor Erasmus Brainerd, now back in Seattle, that Alaska was the new frontier. Seattle had missed one gold rush, Brainerd argued, and might never have another one. The city was losing ground to Tacoma and Portland—and all three cities were in the giant shadow of San Francisco. The national picture was still worse, a sickening combination of unemployment, business failures, and bank closures.

Alaska was a gift of the new millennium. Seattle successfully petitioned the federal government to establish an assay office where miners could have their gold tested and valued, cutting out the longer trip to San Francisco. The city's traditional businesses also prospered, as it became a primary source of lumber for the treeless north. Construction business boomed as profits were invested in the urban infrastructure.

The Alaska gold rush, especially the explosive summers of 1899 and 1900, changed the history of Seattle. Brainerd and his colleagues launched a national media campaign to promote Seattle as the gateway to the fabled riches of the Alaskan goldfields. It worked: the city drew the majority of Nome gold seekers to its stores and wharves. The amount of money passing through its banks tripled. In three years, Seattle's population increased by about 30 percent.

Josephine and Wyatt split the winter months between Seattle and San Francisco. The local newspapers took note of their return: the
San Francisco Examiner
reported that Wyatt was “making money perhaps faster than he ever made it before” and predicted that “if business runs with him next summer as it did after his arrival in the camp, he will be able to retire with all the money he desires.” Readers of Seattle's newspapers read about Wyatt as the “celebrated sheriff from Arizona” and a “quiet sort of individual, good natured, does not talk much,” though some reporters condemned him as “a bad man” and eagerly reprised the Sharkey-Fitzsimmons debacle as evidence of his corruption. Back in Tombstone, the
Epitaph
noted that their most famous former resident was back from Nome and would soon be opening a combination club and saloon.