Prisoners of the North (5 page)

Boyle was out of Dawson sometimes for months, even years, but it is clear that he thought of himself first and foremost as a Klondiker. From the beginning he was a leading figure in Dawson City. There is no sign that he had political ambitions. He was too much of a maverick to follow any party line, nor was he the sort who could stand to be pinned down by a pre-arranged political program. The only active role that would have suited his personality was that of leader; his ego would not have settled for less.

In Dawson during the stampede summer of ‘98, anarchy reigned. The harried local government—a federal responsibility—could not cope with the myriad problems thrust upon it by the influx of thousands of men. Nothing worked. There were no street addresses. The town had been under water as a result of a sudden flood when the ice breakup dammed the Yukon. The whole of Front Street—dance-hall row—was an impassible swamp. The steamboats couldn’t unload cargo and the horse-drawn wagons couldn’t move in the mire. Then Boyle took over. He organized every teamster in town and built a slab road all the way from the docks to the Mounted Police barracks. Under his goading the job was done in one day.

Boyle made a point of buying his company supplies locally rather than from the Outside, as his rivals did, no doubt as a sop to his local critics but also because he was a community booster. He fought for a special tax to underwrite St. Mary’s Hospital, and he arranged regularly for a steamboat to take all the school children on a picnic upriver (and even splashed about himself, with his trousers rolled up and a toddler on his shoulders). His glee on such occasions was infectious, his energy boundless, and his generosity prodigal.

He built a special church in Moosehide, the native village downriver from Dawson, with the stipulation that it must be open to worshippers of all faiths. On one occasion when he spotted the pregnant wife of a Yukon Gold Corporation executive staggering down a hill not far from his headquarters at Bear Creek (a tributary of the Klondike), he dashed to her aid and delivered her of a strapping baby on the spot.

His community spirit came easily as part of his natural ebullience. Some, no doubt, was purposeful and political. He needed the support of the community for his mining ventures, and he also needed the support of the press, which alternately praised him and damned him. His great political rival was George Black, the loyal Conservative who would later become Speaker of the House of Commons. In spite of their differences the two men liked and admired each other. Boyle had need of Black. He had gained his mining concession with the help of Clifford Sifton, the most prominent Liberal west of Ottawa, who dealt out political favours like sweetmeats. But when the government changed in 1911 after Boyle had launched the first of his big dredges, Dawson became a Conservative town, and Boyle was shrewd enough to cultivate a Tory ally. He became one of the founders of the Dawson Amateur Athletic Association and chairman of its gymnasium and sports committee. That led to a new enterprise when he became manager of the Dawson Nuggets, a local hockey team that had the temerity to challenge the Ottawa Silver Seven, holders of the Stanley Cup in 1904.

Boyle was already Outside when the Nuggets reached Ottawa, more than a little the worse for wear. They had set out for Whitehorse in mid-December, some on foot, others on bicycles. The bicycles didn’t make it, but the team did in just nine days, hoping to catch the
SS
Amur
out of Skagway for Vancouver. That would allow them four days’ rest, according to Boyle’s schedule, before they played the first game in a series.

A howling blizzard shut down the White Pass railway for three days after which they managed to struggle aboard the
Romano
for Seattle. Seven days aboard the tossing craft confined most to their beds. The trip back north to Vancouver and the transcontinental journey to the capital left them exhausted. They had been twenty-four days on the road without a chance to practise. The first game was scheduled for January 13, two days after their arrival, and Boyle was unable to secure a postponement. Not surprisingly, they lost that contest 9–2.

This dispiriting result did not in the least rattle Boyle. Indeed, his regular reports to the
Dawson News
reached new heights of optimism. “It was a great game,” he wrote, noting that one of his charges had broken his stick over an Ottawa player, knocking him unconscious for ten minutes (retaliation for a cross-check), and drawn a fifteen-minute penalty. “We have a good chance to win the cup,” Boyle enthused. “The beating is no disgrace.”

When the Nuggets lost the second game by a devastating 23–2 (a Stanley Cup record that still stands), Boyle’s exuberence continued. “Nevertheless it was a good game,” he reported, admitting that his team “was broken up and in no condition to play.” To give his players some rest he cancelled the coming exhibition games and sent the team on a tour of eastern Canada where, reinvigorated, they won six of eleven games, drawing enthusiastic crowds at every community.

The idea of a hockey team travelling four thousand miles from a godforsaken subarctic village to challenge the Stanley Cup champions caught the public’s imagination. Six thousand people watched the final contest, played in Montreal. To George Kennedy, one of the Dawson forwards, “it was the roughest match ever played in Montreal” and “the most sensational ever witnessed here.” It did not matter that the Nuggets were defeated by Ottawa (at a more acceptable 4–2); Boyle’s Klondikers were heroes wherever they went, touring as far as Pittsburgh and Brandon and winning almost as many games as they lost. Then they set off individually for the Yukon leaving Boyle to grapple with problems, legal and financial, involving his concession.

“Straitlaced” is not an adjective that springs readily to mind when describing a man who spent three years at sea, who mingled with the fight crowd in New York, and who propelled himself into the gaudy whirlwind of a gold-rush town. Yet there are elements of self-restraint in Boyle’s otherwise unorthodox personality. The abstemious, nonsmoking temperance crusader did not ogle dance-hall girls from a box in the Monte Carlo or the Palace Grand as his erstwhile companion Swiftwater Bill did. Women played a minor role in Boyle’s Klondike career.

Was he ever in love during these early days? Capable of infatuation, certainly, as his sudden courtship in New York makes clear, but too impetuous for the good of that unfortunate marriage. “Few people ever thoroughly understood my father,” his daughter Flora was to write. “And it was unfortunate that my mother was not one of them.” Flora’s comments suggested the marriage was placid enough—too placid for Boyle. “There was no adventure, no fight, no difficulties to be vanquished. He became restless and unhappy. He was tired of this smooth, ordered existence, of bricks and mortar, smug houses and smug people.” In his daughter’s view, Boyle should never have married for “he could not endure to be bound.”

During this period in the Klondike, Boyle’s children in Woodstock had little contact with their father save during the brief visits he made during his business trips to the Outside. They heard stories about him and wrote to him regularly, but it was not until years later that they heard the details of his operations. “We were lonely for him,” Flora remembered, “and he was lonely for us, too. By this time we were old enough to be with him.… He sent for us, and we went west thrilled, excited and eager.”

In Flora Boyle’s memoirs there is a good deal of admiration for her father, but one does not get much sense of affection. She hero-worshipped him, that is certain. But how could they have been close? As for Joe Boyle, Jr., observers noted a certain coolness between father and son. Boyle’s nurse, Dorothy Wilkie, who spent some time with him during the last year of his life, told his biographer William Rodney that Colonel Boyle was “not on friendly terms with his son.” His long-time Klondike friend Teddy Bredenberg recorded an indifference between the two. Young Joe rarely came to see his father during his last illness. Their estrangement sprang mainly from Boyle’s own neglect; engrossed in his own affairs, he rarely bothered to write to his family.

Three years after his first marriage broke up, a mysterious woman briefly entered Boyle’s life. Rodney (whose biography of Boyle is the most authoritative) discovered in the Personal Mentions column of the
Dawson News
of July 19, 1899, an item reporting that “Mrs. Joseph Boyle has arrived from the Outside.” Nothing more. Who was this unknown creature? Wife? Almost certainly not. Mistress or paramour would be a better guess. But who was she? That there was another woman in Boyle’s life about this time is only hinted at by his daughter. It is an abiding mystery, rendered more baffling because, after that one brief notice, the elusive “Mrs. Boyle” vanishes from the record.

In 1907, a second, legitimate Mrs. Boyle entered the picture. Again the marriage was sudden enough to cause a shock to his family. She was a hotel manicurist, Elma Louise Humphries, whom Boyle had met in Detroit during his long and ultimately successful legal struggle with Sigmund Rothschild and other company directors who were attempting to take over his hydraulic concession.

Flora, now living in the Yukon, describes her stepmother as “a nice quiet little person who could have been happily wedded to a good substantial business or professional man”—but not to Boyle. He brought his new wife to Dawson and settled her in a little house at nearby Bear Creek, the centre of his mining activities. It is clear that Flora was uncomfortable with Elma Louise as her father’s wife. He was so different from the glamorous parent she had admired from afar. “It was not in this big, hot-blooded adventurous man to settle down quietly with a wife and family,” she wrote. The relationship between daughter and wife was clearly strained, but Boyle was too immersed in his mining ventures to make any real attempt to bring the two together. He solved the impasse in typical fashion by getting his daughter out of the way—shipping her off on a round-the-world cruise with a family friend: out of sight, out of mind.

With his life organized to his satisfaction, Boyle could pursue his dream. The Guggenheims, operating as the Yukon Gold Corporation, had several smaller dredges on properties that Treadgold had assembled and consolidated before he sold out his shares and quit. Boyle’s company already had one large machine in operation, but the three new monsters he was planning would be twice its size and built on Canadian soil by a Canadian company in a corner of the North that many Americans and Englishmen confused with Alaska.

Boyle had reason to be optimistic. Canadian Number One, gouging out the pay dirt at Bear Creek, had cost $200,000 to construct and had paid for itself in just sixty days. Now Boyle determined to build much bigger boats. His company was responsible for the superstructure; the Marion Steam Shovel Company of Ohio would design and build the machinery. Boyle signed the Marion contract in January 1910 and, with a work crew of one hundred, had Canadian Number Two operating before freeze-up in December, a remarkable feat considering the problems involved. His rivals were scoffing at the prospect of these gigantic new machines, but they proved highly efficient. Though the construction costs were doubled, their seventy-one manganese steel buckets, each weighing more than two tons, could process in one day three times as much gravel as their smaller counterparts.

The statistics recorded in the Dawson press were enough to send shivers down the spines of the individual pick-and-shovel placer miners. Boyle was importing 1,700 tons of steel parts over the White Pass and down the river by barge at a freight cost of $110,000. Twenty-four horses were needed to drag the two 27-ton steel “spuds,” or anchors, each 65 feet long, on which the great dredge would pivot. The bucket lines, which could dig as deep as 45 feet, moved up a 97-foot digging ladder to dump the contents into a 63-ton inclined revolving screen that separated the pay dirt and hurled the dross gravel into another inclined travelling belt.

This “stacker,” as it was called, disgorged its contents to become part of the mountainous gravel tailings that the dredge left in its wake and that would soon choke the Klondike River valley and its tributary gold creeks. The screaming sound of the dredge at work—its cables whining and groaning as it pivoted from side to side—could be heard for miles. Each time it lurched forward as the spud was hauled up, this sound, together with the guttural growling of the bucket line and the clamour of the inner drum, resonated through the hills. It is part of my boyhood memories, this eerie sound, wafting down the valley twenty-four hours a day, ten months a year. As a child I thought it was some kind of strange animal lurking just behind the hills, and I feared it. But to Boyle it was welcome music.

Although dredges cannot work in permafrost, Boyle was both lucky and prescient. The Guggenheims were thawing their ground with steam under pressure, an expensive process. Boyle merely diverted the main channel of the Klondike River and let the water flow over the ground where the dredge would operate. It wasn’t until 1918 that new research established that cold water thaws more effectively than steam, but Boyle had divined that ten years earlier and made an enormous saving.

To provide power for his dredges, Boyle built a hydroelectric power plant at the north fork of the Klondike some seven miles upriver from his concession. To divert water for the plant he dug a conversion canal six miles long and twenty-eight feet wide, a remarkable piece of wilderness engineering that also had its quota of scoffers. He knew that to be profitable his big dredges would have to operate for much of the winter. But how could that be achieved if his great canal froze over? Boyle installed electric heaters at intervals along the route. With these and other techniques he was able to extend the working season by more than a month.

By 1912, Boyle was King of the Klondike, a title originally bestowed upon Alex McDonald, “the Big Moose from Antigonish,” who dealt in gold claims as if they were playing cards but died broke, chopping his own wood on Cleary Creek. Boyle not only ran Dawson’s telephone company, electric system, and running water but also owned the town’s laundry and was supplying power to his rivals. He ordered two more big dredges with Marion equipment, Canadian Number Three and Number Four. The mammoth floating machines, working day in and day out, lasted until mid-century. Canadian Number Four was still in working order when the successor to Boyle’s company shut it down in 1961.