Actress Blanche Lamonte was a seductive nineteen-year-old when she arrived in Dawson from San Francisco in 1898. She had taken her stage name from the young victim of San Francisco's notorious belfry murderer,¹ and inadvertently had made lurid headlines of her own when Maude Roselle, another actress, ran to Blanche's room at the Monte Carlo for protection from her rejected lover, Harry Davis. Tiny Blanche stood by helplessly as Harry shot Maude dead, then committed suicide.²

Blanche was one of Dawson's most popular soubrettes. It was rumored that Bob Ensley offered her weight in gold if she would marry him, that the scales were set up in the M & N Saloon and the transaction completed.³ Klondike King Charlie Anderson was said to have made her a similar offer.⁴ But although Blanche "vamped" with the best of them, like Cad Wilson and Klondike Kate, and earned good money, she was far short of the fortune she had envisioned, and she'd had more than her fill of Dawson when word arrived of a new gold strike in Nome. "She gave her 'macs' the malamute laugh as the steamer pulled away from the dock on Saturday last," the Dawson Daily News reported.⁵

The discovery of gold on Cape Nome, Alaska, during the Indian summer of 1898 marked the beginning of America's last big placer gold stampede. Justifiably ballyhooed as a match for the great Klondike discoveries which were made by seasoned prospectors, Nome's gold was found by greenhorns who had been in the Far North less than a year.

Eric Lindblom, a forty-one-year-old Swedish tailor, had made his way to Alaska as a deckhand on a whaler, jumping ship at Grantley Harbor. Jafet Lindberg, a twenty-four-year-old Norwegian, had conned his ticket to Alaska by pretending to be an experienced reindeer herder. John Brynteson, a twenty-seven-year-old Swede and the only miner among them, had worked only iron and coal. Although they were headed for the Klondike, the three Scandinavians were so late in acquiring passage that all the land was taken, which is why they ended up 1,000 miles west of Yukon Territory in the bleak and barren lands of the American Arctic.⁶

Their discovery would yield $3.5 million in gold by 1900 and $80 million during the next two decades. It was a latecomers' gold rush, a rare opportunity for amateurs, and a second chance for pros who had failed in Dawson.⁷

On one of the first boats in was Tex Rickard, professional gambler and fight promoter who had lost everything in a Dawson faro game, including his immensely profitable Monte Carlo Saloon. In Nome he teamed with Pat Murphy, who already had opened the Northern Saloon. Tex went on to make a second fortune, which he later parlayed into a prime investment in New York City called Madison Square Gardens.

Tex Rickard's friend, "Klondike Mike" Mahoney, had made $120,000 off a Klondike claim and lost it trying to develop ground on Jack Wade Creek that proved worthless. Going on to Nome, Big Mike worked longshore, ran mail, and also beat the world's heavyweight champ, Tommy Burns. Later he would successfully invest his Nome profits in stampedes in Alaska's Interior, retiring as a millionaire to his native Canada.⁸

On arriving in Nome, Blanche Lamonte and her lover, C. B. Heath, alias the "Hobo Kid," invested in a gambling house and saloon called the Kid's Club.⁹ Blanche was so determined to make her fortune that when a no-good named Flory Wynkoop attempted to steal her poke, she trashed him severely enough to make newspaper headlines. She remained single and apparently did well in Nome.¹⁰

In 1899, 8,000 people left Dawson, some for the Outside but many more for Nome, giving Canada's Northwest Mounted Police reason to rejoice. For every beauty like Blanche Lamonte who headed over the border, so did at least a dozen hardened criminals. Thoughtfully, the Mounties forwarded an all-male list of "the worst criminals known on this continent" to U.S. Army personnel in the area. Blanche's Hobo Kid was, of course, among them: "C. B. Heath—alias Hobo Kid, general cook, clever poker player, will most likely be found living with a dance hall girl."¹¹

With such a strong criminal element, Nome's gold rush got off to a horrible start. Although American mining law clearly stated that mineral content had to be proved before ground could be staked, most Nome prospectors blithely ignored the requirement, claiming everything in sight in their own names or those of friends, relatives, and casual acquaintances.¹² Latecomers, frustrated by their greed and egged on by talk that the original discoverers were not American and therefore did not deserve title (although American mining law clearly allowed aliens to file), began staking lands already taken.

CROWDED STREETS
Thousands of fortune hunters crowded Nome’s muddy streets at the height of the gold rush in 1901. The relatively cheap and easy transportation from the States (when compared with the difficulties of getting to the Klondike) attracted great hordes of opportunists.
UAF #88-23105N.

Three weeks after navigation opened in June of 1 899, almost every potentially valuable claim in the Nome district had been jumped at least twice and some had half a dozen claimants.¹³

Meanwhile, almost nobody was making any money. Of an estimated 3,000 people in Nome in July 1899, 1,000 were destitute.¹⁴ Unrest and a lack of any civil government brought Nome under military law, gingerly enforced by the small detachment of American soldiers sent up from St. Michael. But what ultimately brought a truce, if not peace, to the camp was a discovery on the beach. A soldier from the barracks and an old Idaho prospector, too sick to leave the coast, found out that Nome's beach sands were rich with gold. Since tidelands were public property, anyone could work without the legal hassle of staking and recording.¹⁵ The subsequent stampede was billed as the "Poor Man's Gold Rush," and newcomers came north by the thousands to pan an average of twenty to one hundred dollars a day in gold dust.

Nome's census in June of 1900 counted 12,488, but by midsummer about 20,000 were in residence.¹⁶ The town, hastily established on an unsheltered shore, was the busiest seaport in the world without a harbor. Usually at least forty-five ships were anchored in the roadstead. Nome's post office employed twenty-three clerks who handled 546,000 letters between June and August; the "B" names alone took seventy boxes.¹⁷

"The beach from high-water mark was one solid rampart of piled goods; while longshoremen, earning from fifty to one hundred dollars each day, landed more and more freight every hour of the twenty-four," reported E. C. Trelawney-Ansell, by then a veteran stampeder.

"The front street was filled with a yelling, shouting, struggling, drunken, cursing throng, through which pushed teams and wagons, or the pack-trains, owned by Sam Heron, splashed their way through belly-high mud.

"Traders, gamblers, saloon-keepers and the women—dance hall girls, stage girls, and whores, black, white, or yellow—coined money. From the first, Nome differed from the Yukon camps,- it was easy of access and cost little to get there either in effort or money.

"Nome was different, it was a place where the creeks and the town itself filled with thousands of cheechacos who had never known the hardship of the trail and few if any other hardships. Worse still, the camp and surrounding country was filled with gamblers, cutthroats and murderers of the worst kind. . . . The other northern camps had all contained a very large percentage of old sourdoughs, men whose word once given was worth all they owned and was never broken, be the man a poor miner or a millionaire claim owner. The say-so of these men on a bet of any size from ten dollars to ten thousand was taken by one and all. This was not the case in Nome."¹⁸

"Nome was a city of many diverse elements thrown together, all with only one idea in common," observed John B. Wallace. "That was to get rich as soon as possible and go back Outside."¹⁹

With such high transient turnover, little camaraderie, and no American equivalent to Canada's Northwest Mounted Police, the crime rate was extraordinary. Trelawney-Ansell reported eighty murders by the end of 1900, a figure so high it appears ridiculous. But so was the official count of only five murders and four suicides!²⁰