Maybe it was Abraham saying “sweetheart” that set my heart on edge. I went to the Palace Grand to see Arizona Charlie Meadows. I had to find out if he’d heard anything from Jamie’s father regarding their return to Dawson City.
When Jamie and her father left in July, Arizona Charlie had promised them their place in his show for the following summer. Jamie’s performances of her father’s Klondike poetry, with Homer scribbling in the background against the backdrop of a log cabin, had never failed to pack the house. Yet before ’98 was out, Meadows had invented a new act featuring Little Margie Newman, shamelessly billing her as the Princess of the Klondike.
I’d been certain that Jamie and Homer’s loyal audiences at the Palace Grand would turn a cold shoulder to the new act, but I was dead wrong. In the place of Jamie performing her father’s authentic narratives of the rush, Meadows gave the audiences a nine-year-old singing songs so sentimental they were nauseating.
To my dismay, the same townsmen and the same grizzled men from the creeks who’d showered Jamie with wildflowers not only bestowed the pretender with their affection, they tossed nuggets onto the stage until Little Margie was heel-deep in them while blowing her kisses. All this for a nine-year-old as authentic to the North as a flamingo.
Jamie, on the other hand, had been born and raised in the North, in the bush no less. Until the age of twelve she lived at Fort Chipewyan, the Hudson Bay Company’s outpost way up on Lake Athabaska. Homer was a trader working with the Indians in those days.
Arizona Charlie Meadows knew me on sight as Jamie’s friend. The famous marksman greeted me at his office door with a somber expression. I assumed it was because he was about to tell me what I already expected, that the Princess of the Klondike and the Princess of Dawson couldn’t perform on the same stage.
“Sit down, sit down,” the man in buckskins said with a deep, reverberating voice like far-off thunder. He took off his wide-brimmed hat, bowed his silver head, and said, “I have tragic news.”
My God, I thought, she’s dead.
Numb, I sank into the gilded chair he offered. Arizona Charlie looked out the window onto the frozen Yukon. Without turning to speak, he said at last, “I learned only days ago—a dog team got through from Skagway with the mails—that the poet has passed away.”
“The poet?” I repeated. For a moment I couldn’t think who in the world he was talking about.
Then, of course, I knew. “You don’t mean Homer….”
“I do indeed. His heart suddenly failed him. In Philadelphia, they say.”
“What about Jamie?”
The frontiersman’s eyes met mine. “I know nothing of her. I’m sorry. Nothing was mentioned of Jamie.”
Arizona Charlie paused, then seated himself behind his desk. “Jamie is an extraordinary talent. I’m sure she’ll find work on the stage. Doubtless she’s already been flooded with offers. Don’t worry about her having plenty of friends and theater people to look out for her.”
“But she’ll come back here,” I heard myself saying aloud.
Arizona Charlie looked at me and shrugged. “All the way to the ends of the earth? I wouldn’t think so.”
I went mute, stunned as if he’d hit me with a fish club. I felt sorry for myself, but a minute later, walking away, it hit me all over again and I came to my senses. I felt sorry for Jamie.
At that very time, Ethan was in the midst of a colossal gambling binge. He’d lost his share in the Monte Carlo and was on his way to losing his piece of the claim on Eldorado Creek. My brother was a runaway train. He couldn’t stop whether he was winning or losing.
Abraham knew all this was going on, but he couldn’t bear to hear about it. Anyway, he was busy trying to get Dawson City’s fire department back to work. Abe was the head of a citizen’s group fighting for higher wages for the firemen, who had been on strike since the first week of April. Dawson City was in jeopardy every single day they were on strike, as everyone in town, including the town council, knew full well. The department of a hundred men had been formed after the disastrous Thanksgiving fire only five months before.
Half a million dollars in real estate had burned on Thanksgiving Day in a quick conflagration, and all that could be done to stop the blaze was to tear down businesses and cabins that were in its way. A fire in the spring of ’99 would be far more disastrous, Abraham pleaded to the council, but the council stood firm.
The firemen retaliated by letting the fires under their boilers go out.
Ethan’s last hand was dealt sometime during the evening of April 25. In all likelihood he hadn’t slept in several days. It was Silent Sam Bonnifield who cleaned him out, I learned the next morning from the men at the mill. Ever since Ethan had started gambling for high stakes, I’d stayed away. I didn’t have the stomach for it. A thousand times afterward, I wished I’d sought him out, given his addled brain a good swipe with a lead pipe, and dragged him home. I should’ve handcuffed him to his bed.
After Ethan was cleaned out, he started on a drinking spree. When fire broke out the next night, April 26, on the second floor of the Bodega Saloon, Ethan had been unaccounted for since the wee hours of the morning; I’d been scouring the town all day trying to find him and bring him home. Abe and I figured that his madness would be spent now that he’d hit rock bottom.
I was there on Front Street when flames erupted from the second floor of the Bodega. It was bitter cold, around forty-five degrees below zero. Everyone on the street, including me, started yelling “Fire!” A moment later dozens of people burst from the saloon into the cold, including Cornelius Donner, for once without his Prince Albert coat. Donner hollered, “Fire! Fire! My saloon! For God’s sake, someone rouse the fire department!”
Just that quick, the second stories of the adjoining buildings were ablaze, too. With the night sky glowing at my back like an aurora, I raced to our cabin on the hillside to alert Abe. As I burst inside, he’d just heard the alarm bells and had come to the window. By now there was a parade of flame along the tops of a good many of the false fronts of Front Street. “Oh my God,” Abe muttered. “Oh my God.” He was thinking fast. “They’ll need dry lumber,” he declared, and began to snatch up his clothes.
“Dry lumber?” I repeated incredulously.
“Hand me my boots—no time to explain!”
We ran to the mill, hitched up the team, and raced a load of dry scrap as close to the fire as the terrified horses would allow. As Abe had foreseen, men were down on the ice on the river, trying to melt the spot the fire department had formerly counted on for their emergency water supply. Before the strike, the spot had always been kept open, but April 26 found it frozen several feet thick. Men with axes had raced to the river to chop it open, but men with axes were no match for the speed of the inferno overtaking the city.
I struggled up the bank with a firehose for one of the pumps parked on Front Street. I was standing only ten yards from the British Bank of North America, which was all ablaze, and I barely felt the heat, so intense was the extreme cold.
Abe and the men at the river burned their way to running water. The pumps were started at last. But as the hoses slowly filled with ice-cold water, they froze solid before the water even reached the nozzles. Normally, boiler-fired warm water opened the hoses. I ran along the line trying to straighten the kinks, wildly hoping it would help. Before long came the sickening sound of the hoses ripping as the water inside expanded and burst the casings.
I turned, straightened my aching back, and watched the tinder-dry frame structures of Front Street go up in tall sheets of flame that crackled like lightning as the heat met the superchilled air. The collision of temperatures created an ice fog that settled ominously over the city as the fire raged out of control. Hundreds were racing this way and that, many with axes in hand. Abraham had disappeared.
I fell to helping the firemen who were trying to save Belinda Mulrooney’s famous Fairview Hotel. Fast as we could, we soaked blankets in the puddles that were forming in front of the nearest burning building. Without a note of panic, the young Irishwoman called for hammers and nails and directed us to nail up the blankets to the front of her hotel and the side facing the onrushing fire.
The inferno was about to reach the Pioneer Saloon just down the street. A man was surveying the shower of sparks between him and the front door and appeared to be on the verge of going inside.
“Gather up the money, McPhee,” called Belinda Mulrooney. “The whole town’s going to go!”
“Forget the money!” he shouted back, and ran inside. He appeared half a minute later staggering under an immense, antlered moosehead. “My good luck charm!”
It was chaos. The Dominion was up in flames, the Opera House, the Northern, Jamie’s Palace Grand…. Inside the tottering Bank of British North America, the vault burst open. Its heavy iron door was glowing red as the guts of a forge.
“What’s to be done?” cried a man in front of the Aurora.
“Blow up the buildings in front of the fire!” commanded Captain Starnes of the Mounted Police. “Yours included!”
The Mountie dispatched a dog team to the Alaska Commercial Company warehouse for fifty pounds of blasting powder. I turned to work alongside thousands who’d showed up to help carry items of value from the buildings in harm’s way out to the marsh behind the business district.
At one point I heard something yelled about Irish Nellie’s boardinghouse, about it burning. I took off at full sprint.
The windows were all spouting flames when I got there; the back of the building was engulfed. Nellie and her terrified residents, many of whom were feeble or crippled, watched in disbelief from the street. When Nellie saw me she screamed, “Your brothers!”
“Where?” I yelled.
With a grimace, she pointed into the building. “Ethan—then Abe—brought everyone out. We heard Mrs. Jeffries’s cries inside. Ethan went in after her, Abraham went after Ethan. Neither has come out!”
It might be only minutes, I knew, before the building collapsed. I scanned the onlookers gathered around and spotted one with an ax. I seized it and ran for the front door as Nellie screamed at me not to. A locomotive couldn’t have dragged me away. On my hands and knees, I crawled in under the smoke billowing out the door. “Ethan!” I hollered at the top of my lungs. “Abraham!”
No reply, only groaning from upstairs.
Coughing, trying to hold my breath, I crawled up the stairs with the ax and bellied onto the oven-hot landing. I saw no one, nothing but smoke. At the end of a straight run, the hallway branched in two directions. Suddenly Nuisance appeared from the hallway on the right. The dog recognized me and started barking, then disappeared where he’d come from. I followed to the fork in the hall and turned right, keeping low.
There they were, barely visible through the smoke. Ethan was pinned by a blackened timber, and so was a woman he’d shielded with his bulk. Abe was trying to pry the timber off Ethan with an ax.
“Jason, get out of here!” Abe ordered.
I kept bellying toward him.
This time he screamed, “You’re going to get yourself killed!”
How could I turn and flee? I kept going.
Together, with both our axes, Abraham and I were able to pry the timber off and drag Ethan and the woman clear. “His leg’s broke!” Abe yelled.
Ethan’s face was a mask of pain. The woman had passed out.
Ethan started to rise on his good leg. “Stay down!” Abe ordered.
I dragged the woman on her back, by her collar, down the hallway; behind me came Abe, dragging Ethan.
The heat was overpowering and I couldn’t breathe any longer. I thought I was about to black out. I grabbed up the woman, rose, and made my way down the stairs, the fury of the fire all around me.
In the street I laid the woman down and raced back inside. Halfway up the stairs I met them staggering down in the smoke. Leaning on Abe, Ethan was hopping down one step at a time, but neither one could breathe.
I took hold of Ethan on his other side. We lifted him and carried him into the street, where Nuisance, on three legs, was barking furiously.
A minute later the building was a skeletal tower of flame. It shortly tottered and collapsed. We were burned, but not too badly. The Hawthorn brothers were torn up, but we were alive.