ARCHIE SATTERFIELD

Chapter 5
THE BIG STRIKE





The 1890s may have been a time of gaiety in some parts of the world, but not for many in the United States. The crash of 1893 precipitated the worst economic depression the country had experienced to that time, and the panic bore all the earmarks of a permanent disaster.
Like most of the depressions that century, it was caused by an overexpansion of the railroads, wild speculation by enthusiastic businessmen, and an uneasiness on the part of European businessmen that caused them to sell American bonds, which in turn drained gold from the U.S. treasury. By 1894 thousands of businesses had failed and four million men were looking for work. The panic was directly responsible for the success of the Populist Party, which almost pushed William Jennings Bryan into the White House in 1896 and again in 1900.
It was a desperate time, and American citizens had even fewer federal and state social welfare programs to fall back onto than during the Great Depression of the 1930s. One of the most desperate reactions was Gen. Jacob S. Coxey's Industrial Army, formed in 1894 to march on Washington, D.C., and demand that Congress give relief to starving workers. Soon "Coxey's Army" was marching eastward across the nation, stealing railroad equipment, even whole trains, on its way.
One contingent was formed in the Seattle-Tacoma area and a regular army detachment was sent to head them off at Spokane The group of sixty-odd Coxeyites was unable to get a whole train to themselves, so at the town of Cle Elum they commandeered car and coasted the downgrade toward Ellensburg. They were given the right of way, but the tracks leveled off at the Columbia River and one presumes they came to a halt and were caught there.
Another group stole a train near Spokane, and the railroad simply tore up a section of track ahead of them, causing a wreck. But for the most part, there was little excitement in the Northwest during those lean years. The vast majority of people more concerned with getting the next meal than solving the problems of the nation. Fortunately, there was enough wild food available on Puget Sound and in the lakes and rivers and forests and the towns to keep most people from starving. Seattle was so small--fewer than 50,000 people--that bear and deer could still be killed between Elliott Bay and Lake Washington, there were enough clams and bottom fish in the Sound, plus migrating salmon in the Duwamish River, for all.
Among the factors that set the stage for the overwhelming response to the Klondike gold rush was the general mood, the mental state, of the whole nation at that particular time. The American Dream had turned into a nightmare for many immigrants. The promise of free land in the West had become a prison with the horizon its walls. People who had first fled Europe, then filth and corruption of the East Coast cities, found only hard with no prospect of the milk and honey they had thought the new land offered. The refugees from the industrial society of York, Boston, Pittsburgh and Cleveland found that clean air and water alone are not enough. The railroads had effectively put an end to the westering mystique; once the west became accessible its attraction and mystery were gone.
Evidence indicates there was a general paranoia sweeping the n. There were probably as many senseless killings then as Insanity and mental breakdown was rampant. Thousands afflicted with what came to be known as cabin fever, but d of being trapped in a small cabin by winter, they were trapped by geography and poverty. Some social historians have called the 1890s a period of psychic crisis for the country, and those who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s will understand something of the mood of the 1890s, even though there seemed to be more hope in the 1930s that things would eventually brighten.
There is another similarity between the two periods: Both were ended dramatically, almost overnight, by a single event. Just as the outbreak of World War II ended the Great Depression, the Klondike gold rush ended the depression of the 1890s. The Klondike gold rush began on Saturday, July 17, 1897, and before a week passed, newspapers were announcing the depression was over and money was circulating again.
Gold rushes were as much a part of American life as the problem of leisure time is today. There had been gold rushes to Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona, then the big one of 1849 to California, followed by smaller stampedes to Oregon, Idaho, Washington and British Columbia. There had been a small one or two into Southeastern Alaska, but the big one continued to elude prospectors in the north.
For two decades or more a trickle of prospectors had worked the streams that feed the Yukon River. Some worked up from the estuary on the northwestern coast of Alaska. Others intercepted the river by heading over the Chilkoot Pass route. They found enough gold to keep them coming back season after season, or to build rough cabins at Circle or Fortymile and winter over.
There was also enough gold found in the early years of the 1880s to bring traders in with small steamboats to make a single trip up the river from the coast at St. Michael each summer. A few traders lived among the prospectors and obtained most of their provisions through Seattle merchants, who often owned the paddlewheelers and coastal vessels that called on other Alaskan ports en route to St. Michael.
By the late 1890s, there were perhaps a thousand prospectors, wives, traders and hangers-on along the Yukon River, most of whom were living around Circle, or around Fortymile where the best strike yet had been made. The majority of these prospectors were from the Seattle area, or at least it had been their last address before heading for Alaska. There was also a sampling of Californians and Canadians, a missionary or two and a small detachment of Mounties sent up by the Canadian government to keep the peace, even though nobody was sure then whether Fortymile was in Alaska or Canada. Civilization was creeping into the wilderness almost as though in preparation for the gold rush that fate had in store.
Old-timers from the period delighted in telling how they lived before the gold rush, of how they used a team of tame moose to pull a plow, and when the moose proved unsatisfactory, they hired local Indians to pull it. They had their own system of justice, which appeared to work reasonably well, and when it came to food, shelter and firewood, they were scrupulously honest. Cabins had no locks, and gold nuggets left lying around the claim sites or pokes left inside the cabins were as safe as if they were locked in a Wells Fargo vault. Thieves had no place to go.
When the big strike was finally made in August 1896, the towns of Circle and Fortymile and the little creeks where prospectors worked were vacated. Everyone streamed into what became Dawson City to file claims on the streams that fed the Klondike River a few miles up from its confluence with the Yukon. All that autumn and winter they worked, sinking shafts through the permafrost down to bedrock where the gold was. They built cabins, and chopped firewood to heat them and to thaw out shafts in the permafrost to get at the gold. They worked all that winter until the spring thaw carried away the river ice and the two or three paddlewheelers could make their annual 2,000-mile run upriver from St. Michael. Only then would the outside world hear of the strike.
Unfortunately, it has never been recorded what the skippers of the paddlewheelers thought that June of 1897. But when they arrived, the miners were waiting with their sacks, cans and boxes of gold, still wearing their patched and torn clothing, some suffering from scurvy. What a magnificent shock it must have been to those captains.
At St. Michael the now-wealthy miners transferred to two coastal steamers, the Excelsior, bound for San Francisco, and the Portland, for Seattle. Aboard the Excelsior were at least four men and women from Seattle, one of whom was T. S. Lippy, former manager of the Seattle YMCA. He told a reporter in San Francisco that he wound up on that ship, and in the wrong city, because he couldn't get a berth on the Portland.
He and his wife brought out at least $50,000, but nevertheless it wasn’t a happy trip for them. They had taken a young son with them to the Klondike and he had died during the Yukon winter. Lippy and his wife spoke of the tragedy often; their new wealth had already extracted a heavy price.
The Excelsior landed in San Francisco on July 15, 1897, and the miners were treated as a curiosity by the city. They were followed by reporters wherever they went. As soon as they struggled down the gangplank with their booty, they surprised hack drivers by demanding that they be taken immediately to the Shelby smelting plant to have their gold assayed and bought. Only then did they go to the Palace Hotel, where they engaged the best suites, had long-overdue baths, bought new clothes and began celebrating.
“The professor [Lippy], since arriving here, has been the recipient of considerable attention, and is surprised at the large number of friends he seems to have in San Francisco," a reporter remarked wryly. "At the Palace Hotel, where the professor and wife are stopping, a continual stream of visitors poured in on them, till they were compelled to call a halt, and instructed the hotel clerk that they would see no more visitors, but to success fully do so, they leave the city tonight for Portland and will arrive in Seattle in a few days."
The story quoted Lippy as saying Seattle must act to get major benefits from the gold rush he was sure would come. The story ran in the first editions of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer with a page-one box telling readers to stand by for an extra edition under preparation with the latest news from the Klondike.
Perhaps San Franciscans were too blasé or they thought the miners were exaggerating the extent of the strike way up north near the Arctic Circle. Whatever the cause, the rush didn't materialize. Not yet. But soon it would. When the Post-Intelligencer received a dispatch from San Francisco telling about the Excelsior's cargo, the newspaper beat the competition by chartering a tug, the Sea Lion, and put one of its best reporters aboard to intercept the Portland as it cleared customs at Port Angeles. The reporter's name was Beriah Brown, and it seems unjust that Brown, whose work may be considered to have started that last great gold rush, received not even a byline on his extraordinarily influential piece of journalism. His story constituted the special edition of the Post-Intelligencer that July 17,1897. It began with these electrifying words:

ON BOARD STEAMSHIP PORTLAND.3 A.M. -At 3 o'clock this morning the steamship
Portland, from St. Michaels for Seattle, passed up Sound with more than a ton of solid gold on board. . .