Читать книгу The Looting Of Alaska - Rex Beach - Страница 3

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*This is the first of a series of articles, which will run through five or six numbers. The author was on the ground during the occurrences of which he writes, a fact which gives peculiar force to the narrative.—The Editor.

ALASKA is the galley slave of the Union. Her chains were forged by some very vile politics. She has been ruined, rifled, and degraded by such practices as have seldom blackened the pages of American corruption.

To accomplish her debauch, our judiciary has been capitalized, and American courts of law exploited as a commercial investment. She writhes to-day under the same conditions at which our forefathers rebelled in King George’s time, being our only possession—State, territorial, or foreign—to suffer taxation without representation.

She has been licensed directly from Washington as a mistress for the politically unclean, has presented the unique spectacle of her court officials in jail yet drawing salaries through the bars, of high government servants retained in office long after conviction in their own court of heinous offenses, of others defiled yet protected in their defilement, and she will show for years the print of the boldest political steal ever consummated in this country. Such an unbroken catalogue of disreputable officeholders has been saddled upon her that she now feels, when a man accepts a position in her government, he is, by virtue of his acceptance, a blackleg.

What are we to think of the conspiracy of 1900 wherein a coterie of exalted political pets stole the resources of a realm as large as Great Britain, France, and Germany, set up their marionettes in control, and took the richest gold mines since ’49?

We haven’t heard about it! Of course not. When the scandal came out, it was smothered and the public kept in ignorance. Criminals were pardoned, records expunged, thieves exalted to new honors. Your Alaskan remembers it, though—remembers when he was bound, gagged, and gone through by the basest officials that ever disgraced an appointment. He remembers how at headquarters the wheels of justice were mysteriously clogged, and how, when judgment of a feeble kind overtook the gang, they squirmed out of punishment. When he sees these men higher in office and more powerful now than then, with Russian fatalism he shrugs his shoulders and says:

“God is far off, and it’s a long way to Washington.”

The tale is worth the telling if for no other reason than to show what abuses are possible under our much-touted systems where we are supposedly equal in the eye of God and the law. What was done here to Americans close at home can be done more easily to those distant foreigners we are coming to rule, and to whom our doctrines are as darkness.

The outsider who knows Alaska not as a glacier-riven barren but as the greatest mineral possession we have, with centuries of undeveloped resource before it, will be interested in the story of its shame. It is a recital of intrigue and pillage originating in the fertile brains of statesmen beneath the shadow of Washington Monument, stretching out to the westward and ending among the gold-bottomed placers of Nome. There is in it the contrast of the extra old and the ultra new, the foyer and the frontier, the white vest and the blue shirt. It has a backing of long toms and gold pans, writs and riots.

In order properly to understand what led to and aroused the lusts of the titled conspirators, it is necessary to go back through the early romance of a great gold strike and sketch the history of its development; to show how, out of a forbidding and unknown land peopled by Lap deer-drivers and shanghaied sailors, was wrought a wonderful country; how these aliens and a wandering crew of penniless adventurers solved the mystery of a rock-girt coast and gave to the world such tidings that in a night there sprang up a city of twenty thousand, with hotels, theaters, brass bands, and tables d’hôte; how a sick man dug into the beach sands where he lay and found such treasure that his fellow-argonauts swarmed out of the hills, tore down their houses, ripped up their streets, and burrowed under the city of their making; how, when they had done this, a crew of political pirates made them walk the plank.

In 1865-66, before the Atlantic cable was completed and when Alaska was but a blank space upon the map, the Western Union Telegraph Company conceived the notion of establishing overland telegraphic communication with Europe, and sent expeditions to Siberia and Alaska to determine the feasibility of two transcontinental lines connected at Bering Strait by a short cable.

These labors were interrupted by news of the perfect success of the Atlantic cable, and both expeditions were recalled. In 1897, when the Klondike discovery electrified the world, a member of this forgotten expedition—one Libby—remembered that he had found gold in Alaska while surveying near Bering Strait thirty years before, and although this spot was many hundreds of miles west of Dawson City, he determined to return on a hunt for the stream. He took with him three others—Mordaunt, Melsing, and Blake, of whom only the last was a miner.

Libby and his friends landed about eighty miles east of the present Nome district, or a full two thousand miles from Dawson, being the first prospectors to invade the great Seward gold fields. At this point was a crippled trader and squaw man by the name of Dexter, as strong hearted a pioneer as ever blazed a trail; also two Swedes, one a missionary named Hultberg, the other a schoolteacher, Anderson.

Some distance west, close under Bering Straits, is the harbor of Port Clarence where in summer the whaling fleets used to refit, ship their catch, and make ready to disappear again into the Arctics. When the Yukon steamers brought down the first gold-burdened Klondikers, their marvelous stories fired these whalers, as they had fired Libby, the surveyor, and, although distant two thousand miles from the Klondike mines, all, from master to galley boy, were for deserting on the spot. Many did, among whom was a Swedish tailor by the name of Lindbloom, who, while drunk in ‘Frisco, had been shanghaied and carried north as a deck hand.

In addition to Libby’s party and the whalers, there were also near here certain Laplanders imported from the old country and employed by the United States Government. The presence of a number of them is explained as follows:

During the first days of the Klondike, 1897, the cry of famine horrified the country and a certain missionary convinced our Government that American miners were famishing in Dawson. He conceived the scheme of driving a herd of reindeer into the Yukon valley for succor, these being the only beasts which could live and find forage on the journey. Accordingly, a herd was imported from Lapland and with it were brought native herders. At great expense the outfit was rushed across the continent, but not until its arrival at the Pacific coast was it learned that the starving Yukoners had enough to eat and indigestion besides.

This is a tender spot in official circles, and although the reindeer is a melancholy creature, wanting in humor as befits a beast reared in darkness, yet his dewlap shakes and quivers to this day at sight of a missionary.

It became necessary to put these deer somewhere, and, as others had been introduced into Alaska to benefit the Eskimos, these were sent there also, and the herder went along.

From such strange quarters did Destiny draw the men she had chosen, and by token of her paradoxical whims it was not the palsied trader whose years had been spent in hardship, the observant surveyor whose quick eye had seen the Sign, the hard-handed miner, nor any of their kind to whom the goddess bared her treasures—but to the runaway tailor with a thirst, the missionary consecrated to an unselfish life, and the Lapland deer herder.

During the summer of ’98, Blake, the American miner, and Hultberg, the preacher, together with two Laps, went prospecting along the coast of Bering Sea out toward the straits. A storm arose, driving their sailboat into a strange river. This is the town site of Nome. It was a desolate outlook. A bleak, open shore, pounded by surf and backed by sodden miles of tundra, rising to low rolling hills barren of all but the ever-present moss, with here and there gnarled willows groveling in the creek bottoms. It was nearing fall and the nights were chill, hinting of the long winter close at hand. Although the summers are hot at this latitude, reaching a temperature of 110° F. in the sun, they are short—barely four months long. In June it is daylight always, the sun dipping shallowly below the southern sea for a brief hour, its heat during the rest of the day causing vegetation to grow riotously. Perpetual daylight is quickly succeeded by lengthening nights of inky blackness, however, and when September comes the frosts are back again, the creeks are clogging, and the prospector lays aside his pan and shovel.

Taking their tools they went back to the hills, testing the gravel of the stream beds. The first creek wound past a mountain upon whose crest a great rock was balanced in the shape of an anvil, but Blake, the “experienced,” noted how the willows grew, the quarter of the wind, and other things as essential, then stated that no gold was here and they should go on. Hultberg wished to stay, so, the others refusing to listen, he quit them and went back to his station, eighty miles. Taking Lindbloom, the ex-tailor, and a Norwegian deer herder, Linderberg—names to conjure with in the North now—these three returned to the creek with the anvil rock above it.

It seems strange that this man of God who had never seen a placer mine should choose this spot so stubbornly, and it is said in explanation that while digging with the first party, he found such prospects that he modestly refrained from divulging them, preferring to share his discovery with his own countrymen. No one knows this, of course, except Hultberg. At any rate, the three hurried back with two Indian boys as helpers, and although not one in the party knew a placer from a potato patch, not only did they discover every rich part of Anvil Creek, but every rich stream in that whole vicinity.

Staking out some claims, they went back to the Mission at Golovin Bay, and made known their doings to a few friends—among others, Anderson, the school-teacher. As none of the crowd knew much about Uncle Sam’s mining laws, they felt it incumbent to take in with them the wisest man in the village—so chose Dr. Kittleson, a Government employee—also a man named Price. These they swore to secrecy, and the party returned to the new creek for the third time, and amended their locations to conform to the laws, organized a mining district, and elected from among their number a recorder with whom to file their notices.

The process of acquiring Government mineral land is simple. Every man may stake one claim of twenty acres on each creek, and to do so he marks the boundaries of his land with stakes, blazed trees, or monuments so that the next comer may observe his priority and not encroach. Upon one of these monuments he posts his location notice describing the ground he claims. A copy he files with the nearest mining recorder, who places it on record. If the district is new, isolated, or without courts, the miners elect some one to act as recorder. These steps were taken by the discoverers.

When the little party of American miners heard of this strike, they swore that they had been dealt to from the bottom of the deck and were entitled to a share of the riches, because Blake had been with Hultberg when he found gold. This hugely amused the lucky ones, who reminded them that Blake, from his wide experience, had refused to stay, while the simple-minded missionary had returned and made his discovery. Seeing that this would not work, the honest prospectors recalled a provision of the law to the effect that none but citizens of the United States, or foreigners who have declared their intention to become such, are permitted to hold mining claims. The Swedes were not naturalized. This opened a loophole through which an American might squirm, so they jumped such claims as they figured could be held.

To jump a mining claim is even a simpler process than to stake one. The jumper posts notices on the monuments, stating that he has relocated the premises, then files a copy of his relocation notice with the recorder. He either takes possession and forces the original staker to bring suit and oust him, or brings suit himself to eject the other. In those days, before law came into the land, such matters were argued before miners’ meetings and a popular vote was taken on the merits of each case. Here was a question of citizenship, a complicated and purely technical one, so these jumpers lay back awaiting the arrival of courts and taking no immediate action.

Meanwhile, as winter settled, the news spread in those mysterious ways of desolate lands, and men materialized out of the uninhabited hills as the armed warriors leaped from the earth when Jason sowed the dragon’s teeth.

The Laps were first on the ground, for they used the Government reindeer, while the miners, scattered up and down the coast for many miles, dragged their sleds by muscle, sweat, and profanity. Men stampeded from Saint Michaels, the nearest trading post, slipping away under cover of darkness, and racing madly to outstrip their friends. The news fled up along the reaches of the silent Yukon to the other camps, to Circle City, to Forty Mile, to Dawson, and bearded men loaded their sleds in the night time, tightened their snowshoe thongs, and began the long race down the winding river. The price of dog teams trebled in a day, men sold their holdings to join the rush, and there was talk of nothing but the new strike away out near Bering Strait.

The adventuresome ones came wearily in from all sides during the winter, gaunt, ragged, and travel worn, arriving to find the land from sea beach to sky line plastered with unpronounceable names of Laplanders, Finlanders, and Swedes, written in hieroglyphic. These late comers swore that no skin-clad barbarians should euchre them out of their birthrights and proceeded to jump every claim whose location notice bore a name ending in “son,” “berg,” or had three consonants in a row.

One Government employee stationed at Saint Michaels used Uncle Sam’s reindeer on a sledge trip to Nome and staked a claim which he sold for seventy-five thousand dollars the next summer, after taking out some twenty thousand dollars.

Now, when the alienship question arose, it created consternation among the discoverers, but few of whom had declared their intention to become citizens. Although none of them dreamed what riches the future held for them, yet they were panic-stricken at thought of losing their rights to whatever it might be.

Linderberg, the deer driver, was of these. At Saint Michaels, near by, was a court official with powers approximating those of a justice of the peace, and before him the new-born millionaire made declaration of his intention to become a citizen of the United States. He was followed by all the others. Everything being grist that came to this commissioner’s mill, he hatched out American citizens like an incubator, although by law he had no more power to do so than he had to appoint a minister to the Court of Saint James. Be it said that he had ambition to break into this good thing in a capacity more active than that of the oil stove in the machine, and it came. He secured a one-quarter interest in two claims, which made him rich.

With the spring of 1899 came a horde of strangers. These were the less adventurous ones, who had not risked the long winter trip by dog team. The first spring steamers, loaded to the gunwales, brought them down the Yukon, while the rickety fleet of stern-wheel, side-wheel, gasoline, and steam craft, which had been knocked together overnight for the Klondike rush two years before, brought back the crowds they had taken into the Canadian fields. The news of the Nome strike had reached the States, and some few came up by ocean steamer from Seattle and San Francisco, but not many. It was too new as yet. Some Swedes had rocked out a few thousand dollars in the late fall—that was all. There was nothing definite. Not so with Alaskans. They knew what those scanty yellow ounces meant and they came by steamer, by skiff, by skin boat and kyak. No man walks here in the summer—the distances are too magnificent. A city grew between dawns, a city of gleaming white canvas which hardened to frame and zinc as the weeks passed. Although the land was as barren of timber, the beach was piled high with driftwood, and as the days grew long and the nights warm, life was pleasant.

Gamblers and women were close upon the heels of the first comers, as is ever the case. Saloons and dance halls appeared. Music and the rattle of dice sounded through canvas walls. The workers swarmed over the hills, and although the signs of gold were everywhere, there was no vacant ground left. The Swedes had taken it all. Now began the trouble which led to the great conspiracy at Washington.

The Swedes had hustled onto their mines early in the spring, ahead of the jumpers, and found the richness so startling that they lost their heads, played roulette with stacks of double eagles, and ran to such excesses that the cupidity of the newcomers was inflamed.

So many claims had been jumped, and the rich claims had been jumped so repeatedly, that the tangle was frightful. As there was no law in the land to straighten it out nor hold the greedy ones in check, the newcomers got together, deciding to sponge off the whole slate, start over again, and grab a piece in the scramble. A miners’ meeting was called for July 8th, and although the original discoverers were in possession of their mines, knowing nothing of the plan, it was arranged to introduce a resolution to overthrow the laws of the entire district, and make void all existing locations. Accomplices of the ringleaders stationed themselves on the distant mountain crests above the rich creeks, to watch for signal fires. When these were lighted, in sign that the motion had carried, they were to swarm down upon the placers and throw off the Swedes.

An army lieutenant named Spaulding, with a few soldiers from the new military post at Saint Michaels, had been sent to preserve order. One might wonder how enlisted men drawing thirteen dollars a month could be held under authority where common labor brought ten dollars a day and where rumor had painted the hills yellow with gold, but not one deserted or forgot his obligation. A splendid example.

This miners’ meeting was held in a saloon, the largest building in the camp, and comprised as desperate and disappointed a crew of adventurers as may well be pictured: strong, rough men who felt that they were the law of this land and that there was no other, that in their might lay the right to do as they chose. They had grown to rely on themselves and to despise restraint, true products of the frontier, many of them, and dangerous to balk.

When the resolution to abrogate the existing titles of the district was offered, Lieutenant Spaulding marched his three men through the crowd and up to the chairman’s platform. The soldiers wore side arms and had fixed bayonets.

“Gentlemen, withdraw that resolution!” he cried.

“What for?” they shouted. “We make our own laws. What do we care for you and your soldiers!”

They argued and some one yelled:

“Don’t let him bluff you.” The proposers refused to do as he directed. At that he opened his watch and said:

“I will give you two minutes to withdraw that motion. Then I’ll clear the hall.”

At the end of the time he prodded the mob forth with his three bayonets and all that afternoon broke up the angry groups as they gathered.

Bonfires did not burn that night.

At this meeting was present a lawyer by the name of Hubbard, a man who had been private secretary to Attorney-General Miller under President Harrison’s administration. He was of some ability and had considerable familiarity with the methods of the Department of Justice and officialdom in general. As the summer advanced, the property owners became alarmed at the amount of litigation threatening, so employed him as counsel, in which way he learned many of their secrets and the marvelous richness of their holdings.

With him originated the germ of the Great Steal. Now appears the intellectual man in place of the horny-handed miner. Following the latter’s failure comes the graft of the high-class politician, Italian in its ingenuity, American in its daring.

A judge was hurried from Nome to Sitka, two thousand miles away, in time to hear a few cases founded on the citizenship proposition. He laid down the law against jumpers, for although the statutes state that none but citizens or those having declared their intention to become such, before proper officials designated, can hold title to mining claims, yet it has been firmly established by courts of different States and by the Supreme Court of the United States that the question of alien ownership cannot be raised against the claimant by any one except the United States Government. In other words, paradoxical as it may seem, no mere citizen can raise the issue, this being a prerogative of the Government. This meant that the Swedes and the Laps would hold their mines, but Hubbard snapped his fingers! He knew a trick or two. If the United States laws, as applied to Alaska, could be changed on this one point, ownership would revert to the jumpers! He knew that Congress intended drafting a civil code for Alaska. He had friends in Washington. Therefore he acquired jumpers’ titles in any way he could. He formed a partnership with two other lawyers of like caliber to himself—Beaman and Hume—in whose hands many of the plaintiffs had placed their suits for prosecution, thus securing contingent interests in the titles which Judge Johnson had just declared null and void. When he had done this, Hubbard went to Washington.

It has been necessary to go back thus far to get an understanding of the conditions which made possible the crime. Here were many marvelous mines held by men not only ignorant of our laws, but wanting in education, their claims smothered under a confusion of lawsuits. Here was a Congress about to draught a code for Alaska, ignorant of the country, the conditions, and the wealth involved. Here was a lawyer who knew.

His work was made easier by the fact that Philippine matters took much time just then, and, in straining their eyes to the Orient, our legislators looked clear past Alaska—all but a few who had meanwhile met O. P. Hubbard.

New characters now enter—United States senators, judges, and that twentieth-century product—the political boss. Not the common municipal vote getter, the manipulator of primaries, but the man of riches, respectability, and standing, who plays the game for gold, not glory. Such a man is the “Senator Maker” of the Dakotas, Alexander McKenzie. Inasmuch as he fills a prominent part in this story—is to-day the political czar of the Northwest, as well as the most heartily hated man who ever crossed the fifty-third degree of latitude—he is worthy of note.

He is a giant in build, and, although of no great education, has the shrewd, well-balanced common sense of the Scotch-Irish. A pioneer of the Dakotas, he has played an important part in their development, is a friend of President Roosevelt, as he was of McKinley, Mark Hanna, and others in high places. In the early days he worked on the grade of the Northern Pacific Railway and later became receiver of a part of the road he had helped to build. He is a natural politician and has been for years the lobbyist for the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern railways, while, aided by their influence, he boasts the ability to deliver whatever is needed in his country from United States senators down. He has the indispensable power of binding men to him with bonds unbreakable—has been a banker, is a man of means, stands high in Bismarck socially, holds in his hands the politics of North Dakota, and, although honors are his for the asking, prefers to play with the men who crave them.

He is in many ways the most remarkable man of the Northwest, and it is problematical whether he would have succeeded better in his career had he been equipped with an education, or whether his combination of natural genius and acumen was not precisely adapted to his environment. He is generous, and big in the wider sense of the word. He never turns down a comrade in trouble, is a firm friend, and an implacable enemy. While sheriff and deputy marshal he earned the title of a good officer. He was without fear and always got his man—traits which make for popularity in any land.

“You can’t get enough money together in one spot to bribe him,” his friends assure you loyally. “He’s absolutely honest.” They are ready to back this claim by wager of battle.

“How is he in politics?” you ask.

“Oh, he’s honest there, too—but—he can think of more ways to gain his end than anybody you ever saw.”

To-day he is in fact the Republican Party of North Dakota. There is no one in his class up there. Nor does this prestige apply to his own State alone—he is the biggest “hidden” politician in the whole Northwest, meaning by the adjective that he seeks no honors for himself. He is a member of the Republican National Committee, also of the Republican Advisory and Republican Executive committees, smaller bodies which really do the work and mold our political destinies.

Such a person as this Scotch-Irishman was eminently fitted to take in hand the Alaskan matter, and when Hubbard presented it to him, he grasped its possibilities. Together they went to Washington, D. C., along with one Robert Chipps, a man from Nome who had jumped the mine of Linderberg, the deer herder. They incorporated the Alaska Gold Mining Company, capitalized at fifteen millions of dollars under the laws of Arizona, forty-nine per cent of the stock being set aside to pay for jumpers’ titles, while the remaining fifty-one per cent was to be distributed among McKenzie’s moneyed and political friends to secure their financial and legislative backing. Chipps was paid seven hundred and fifty dollars in cash and three hundred thousand dollars in stock for his supposed title to one claim, while Hubbard made a similar deal for his holdings.

McKenzie introduced both Alaskans to his political friends—among others Senator H. C. Hansborough of North Dakota and Senator Carter of Montana, whereupon these lawmakers became most aggressively active in Alaskan legislation.

It appears, in the light of later developments, that the scheme, as worked out, was to seize and operate the rich Nome mines for the Alaska Gold Mining Company, bring back the bullion obtained in this way, place it on exhibition in New York City and elsewhere, then sell the fifteen million dollars of capital stock. This could be done by showing a vast profit for the first season’s work and ownership of the marvelous property. The originators of the scheme purposed obtaining title to the mines either by act of Congress or by decisions of their own courts to be established in Alaska. In case the real owners contested their action, there would be a long delay pending settlement in the higher courts and meanwhile they could take the profits of the first season’s work, sell their stock, then step out, leaving the public to bear the fight.

To do this it was of course essential to control the Alaskan courts absolutely, so they cast about for a facile judge who would pledge himself to do their bidding. This man was obtained in Arthur H. Noyes, of Minneapolis. With laws of their own draughting, administered by courts of their own making, Alec McKenzie and his astute friends did not see where they could lose.

Having traced the history of those events which incited the cupidity of the conspirators, having shown the conditions which made possible their plans, and having mapped their method of accomplishing it, I propose next to show how they undertook, through the Congress of the United States, to legislate into their own hands the riches they coveted. To me it seems as daring a thing as was ever conceived.

I shall show how they failed in this by a “fluke,” yet how they stole the treasure anyhow, regardless of authority, law, or precedent; and how it is possible in this enlightened day for a band of determined and unscrupulous men, with political backing, to rape a whole country—not a country of ignorant blacks under martial law, but a land peopled by independent, progressive Americans. It is of interest to learn how, sheltered by influence and the law, one may steal the wealth of a Solomon and escape punishment.

An American traveling in Russia in 1832 was asked upon what America prided herself. He said, “Upon the purity of our women and our judiciary.” As to the latter, O tempora! O mores!

The ability of our politicians to do in times of peace what was done here is a menace to our national integrity, and the story should form an interesting commentary on the methods employed in at least one branch of our public affairs.