Joseph Whiteside Boyle in his trademark uniform with its Klondike gold lapel badges, wearing the Order of Regina Maria and the Star of Romania.
Joseph Whiteside Boyle was a force of nature, albeit a flawed one. In the early days of the twentieth century, he was famous, even notorious, on two continents. A man who craved action for its own sake, he had an uncanny instinct for finding where the action was. When the first news of the Klondike strike was making headlines in Seattle and San Francisco, Boyle was already in the vanguard of the ragtag army of gold seekers stampeding north. Old-time mining methods were not for him. Though he began with virtually nothing, he went on to build, under almost impossible conditions, the largest gold dredges in the world—monstrous floating machines that churned up the storied creek beds and helped revolutionize the placer mining industry in the Yukon. He made a fortune but squandered it all as a soldier of fortune in eastern Europe at the time of the Bolshevik revolution. Eulogized as the Saviour of Romania, he was named Duke of Jassy by her elegant queen, whose lover he was reputed to be.
Boyle was a loner all his life, an entrepreneur and an adventurer who had little time for intimacies. He kept his family—his two wives and his children—at a distance. One gets the impression that from time to time he considered them nuisances who got in the way of his ambitions. Boyle was a take-charge man, ever the leader, never a follower, contemptuous of generals, bureaucrats, and civil servants. He was beholden to no one; it was not in his makeup to settle for second place, an attitude that worked well enough in the Yukon, where he was totally in charge, but caused no end of problems to his superiors when he arrived in eastern Europe during the Great War.
The image that Joe Boyle projected to the world was one of bold confidence. With his square jaw, his heavy brows, and his strong Irish features, he looked the part. He was built like a boxer and in his younger days had been a good one. But there was a small boy quality to Boyle that clashed with his bluff exterior. In moments of high peril, as in courtship, he was impulsive to a fault. In his various adventures he seemed to be having the time of his life. “I like this sort of thing!” he exclaimed as he dashed about Odessa trying to bargain for the lives of a group of Romanian hostages. He was never happier than when he was at the centre of things, whether running a dredging company in the Klondike or influencing royalty in Romania. He disliked supervision and one can sympathize with the British and Canadian political and military authorities who tried to rein him in.
If Boyle had moments of introspection, he kept them to himself. Outwardly he gave no hint of any inner insecurity. Only Marie, the Romanian queen, knew his secrets and then not until the fading years of his life. He had long mastered the art of the public gesture, which made him famous in his own time. Journalists and biographers made much of him. Few of his fellow countrymen have had so much ink expended on them. Every generation of readers, it seems, has had its version of what Hollywood might call the Joe Boyle Story.
In 1938 his eldest daughter, Flora, devoted three long articles to him in Maclean’s (“Who Was Joe Boyle?”). The magazine, in turn, published a fourth made up of letters from those who had known and venerated the legendary Canadian. Since that time three substantial biographies have been published: Kim Beattie’s breathless Brother, Here’s a Man! in 1949, William Rodney’s scholarly Joe Boyle: King of the Klondike in 1974, and Leonard W. Taylor’s revealing The Sourdough and the Queen in 1983.
Moreover, Boyle played a role in the published memoirs and reminiscences of a dozen or more contemporaries who crossed his path, from the Klondike to the Caucasus. These ranged from Herbert Hoover, who knew him in his gold-mining days, to Ethel Greening Pantazzi, whose husband Boyle saved from execution by the revolutionary Battalion of Death in Odessa. Boyle is a leading figure in two books of memoirs by Captain George A. Hill, a British spy, who found him “a man whose equal I have never encountered before or since.” Every biography of Queen Marie of Romania, not to mention her own published memoirs, venerates Boyle, whom she called “one man in a million … a man it is a richness to know.” Yet in Canada he is largely forgotten.
Had he been born American it is probable that he would have been claimed by Hollywood and turned into a popular icon, like Davy Crockett. But Boyle came from Woodstock, Ontario, and was a Canadian through and through. He named his mining enterprise the Canadian Klondyke Company, making it clear it was not an Alaskan venture, and when he built his enormous gold dredges he named them Canadian Number One, Canadian Number Two, Canadian Number Three, and Canadian Number Four. He made it a point to fly the Red Ensign from their masts—a sly dig at his American rivals.
Boyle, then, was a Canadian first and foremost and a Northern Canadian with all that that connoted: a man secure within himself and outwardly unflappable, having confronted and conquered the worst that nature had in store for him. Robert Service was his favourite poet, and he often transfixed his listeners, who included members of the Romanian royal family, by quoting aloud from the Yukon bard and telling stories of early days in the North. But he rarely talked about himself. His modesty, it was said, would have shamed a shrinking violet.
His career unfolded like a series of movies, but Joe Boyle, the Canadian puritan who neither smoked nor touched strong drink—who in fact chaired temperance rallies in rough-and-tumble Dawson City at the turn of the century—did not fit the Hollywood mould. In the early 1950s Hollywood did attempt a motion picture based on Kim Beattie’s exclamatory biography, but his family put a stop to that, as they knew he would have. It was too, well, American, loaded with invented scenes and dialogue that didn’t jibe with the Boyle character. There is no Joe Boyle story on film. Canada had no substantial movie industry and no television, either, for three decades after his death in 1923. Other countries had applauded him, but his own country had ignored him. The Russians decorated him with the Order of St. Anne and the Order of St. Vladimir; France awarded him the Croix de Guerre. Britain gave him the Distinguished Service Order, while Romania went all out with three decorations: Crown, Grand Cross, and Star. But Canada turned her back on him. The army tried to take away his uniform and his rank; the bureaucrats tried to order him back home, but Boyle went his own way. It was not until the early 1980s that a popular campaign was finally mounted, thanks to Leonard Taylor, to move his body from Hampton Hill in Middlesex, England, to Woodstock, underlining the truth that this is not a land that indulges enthusiastically in hero worship except for hockey players.
From the acres of print devoted to his character and career, Boyle emerges as a romantic who found it difficult to sit still for long. This restlessness, a by-product, perhaps, of his Celtic blood (half Irish, half Scottish), is the key to his character. Some of it may have come from his father, a breeder of fine horses whose calling made it necessary to leave home in season and follow the racing schedule wherever it took him. Boyle’s childhood seems to have been serene enough. He came from a middle-class family of four siblings, and there is no suggestion that his upbringing in the quiet ambience of Woodstock was anything but happy. There were signs of that serenity in his later years when on occasion he found himself at risk. He feared no man but held no grudges. He got along with his opponents, both legal and financial, and they got along with him.
And yet there are cracks in the Boyle legend. He was certainly not a family man. In 1884, at the age of seventeen, just out of Woodstock College, he visited his two elder brothers in New York City. Their relationship cannot have been close. One day the brothers returned to their quarters on lower Broadway to find a scribbled note on the table: “I’ve gone to sea. Don’t worry about me. Joe.” That was all: no explanation, no fond farewells, no hint of his plans or even the name of the ship, nothing. He was gone for the best part of three years, and in all that time they had no word of him—not a whisper, not a note, not a clipping, not a telegram, not even a message for his mother, “a sweet little woman from Dumfries, Scotland,” in Flora Boyle’s words. Toward the end of his absence they believed he had been lost at sea.
This callousness toward his blood relations—for that is what it was—was a blemish on Boyle’s character that would manifest itself time and again during his career. With one exception he didn’t seem to care greatly for those who were closest to him. Outwardly, he was always the life of the party—gregarious, hearty, an accomplished storyteller, so affable that even his critics and business rivals warmed to him and basked in his persona. Yet he was very much his own man with his own goals, to the exclusion of those who might have been near and dear to him. It is ironic that when at last he reached out for true love and companionship they were to prove unattainable.
He had haunted the Manhattan waterfront, tramping the docks and watching the three-masters come into port to unload or take on cargo, when adventure beckoned. With the impetuousness that was to mark his later years, the teenaged youth, hungry for action, climbed aboard the barque Wallace and was hired as a deckhand. He left as a callow youngster; when he returned, equally suddenly and unexpectedly, he was clearly mature beyond his twenty years. Where had he gone? What had he done? What had happened?
There are hints, but only hints. Boyle was not one to boast. At the end of his life at the Middlesex home of his oldest friend, Edward Bredenberg, he did indulge in a few moments of nostalgia: “We would sit back and dream of sailor days in the Pacific Islands and he would chaff me about the dusky-eyed belles.” Bredenberg, an old Klondiker and a former sailor before the mast, wrote to the Romanian queen recalling how “we would sit and spin yarns of our younger days, or our fights on some of the hard Yankee ships.” Apart from Bredenberg, she was the only one whom Boyle allowed to pierce that bluff exterior.
In one of his many letters to Marie there is a glimpse of an earlier Boyle, a lonely and romantic teenager, thrust into a hard, foreign world of adventure—a world of his own choosing, but one fraught with pitfalls. He was by far the youngest hand on the Wallace, and he was, in a sense, a kind of teacher’s pet, hired on a whim by the ship’s captain who had noticed him lazing about on the dock, taken an interest in him, and offered to sign him on. Those first days as a green deckhand took away much of the romance; but Boyle endured, and the memory of the early days endured, too. He wrote: “I have just been out looking at the stars who have so many times been my companions and comforters—as a boy sailor at sea on a ship on which every man was against me and was more alone than if I had been the only soul on her—I used to lie on my back on the hatch at night and pick out a bright star, which used to seem to send me a message and wink and get brighter and let me know that he would be there the next night.”
How had he spent those three years aboard the Wallace and later the cargo steamer Susan, which brought him back to New York? The two brief glimpses we have of him through family tradition may be apocryphal, yet they ring true because they forecast events of his later career. When a fellow seaman tripped on the deck and tumbled into the water, Boyle was the first over the side to rescue his shipmate. That was the first time, but not the last, when he would risk his life to save another through quick thinking. Again, en route to the Indian Ocean the frail barque was crippled in a series of raging storms, and the exhausted crew working the pumps were about to give up the struggle when Boyle, the take-charge youth, rallied them, forced them back to work, and took command of the life-saving operation until the barque limped into port.
At twenty, having risen to ship’s quartermaster, he turned up unannounced in New York. There he was reunited with his older brother Dave who introduced him to a fellow boarder, a lively and attractive divorcee, Mildred Josephine Raynor, whom Dave himself hoped to marry. Heedless of his brother’s anguish, Joe plunged into a whirlwind courtship that swept Mildred off her feet. In just three days they were married. Dave Boyle, a shy, unassuming man, was deeply affected by the collapse of what had been a secret romance. Many years later Flora Boyle wrote, “No one will ever know how badly he was hurt. He never married and all through her tumultuous lifetime, he remained Mildred’s closest, most faithful friend.”
Joe Boyle certainly was not. He and Mildred were incompatible almost from the beginning. He was a skilled boxer and, like his father, a lover of horses. His natural homes now were the racetrack and the boxing ring; his cronies were bookmakers and pugilists. She had social pretensions. When their daughter Macushla died at the age of six months from scarlet fever, Boyle began to drink heavily. One night he and a playboy companion were arrested for being drunk and disorderly and also for trying to steal a cab and threatening the driver. A bookmaking friend eventually bailed them out, but the incident changed Boyle.
Mildred Raynor. She married young Joe Boyle after a whirlwind three-day courtship. She was nicknamed “Minky” because she loved costly furs.
“It’s obvious I can’t drink like a gentleman,” he told his companion as they waited in jail, “and since I can’t hold my liquor I shall never drink again.”
“You’ll get so virtuous you’ll be giving up smoking next,” his cellmate retorted. But in that moment Boyle had made up his mind.
“A good idea,” he told his companion and handed him his expensive cigar holder. “Keep it,” he said. “I’ll have no further use for it.” For the rest of his life he was a non-smoker as well as an active temperance advocate.
Mildred might have been a frivolous spendthrift (her detractors called her “Minky” because of her love for costly furs), but she went through six pregnancies for him (two of which were miscarriages) in the nine years of their marriage. Boyle, now engaged in a lucrative feed and grain shipping business in New York, had little time for her. He was far too busy trying to get backing for a grandiose scheme to establish a national chain of grain elevators. His plans collapsed and so did his marriage.
In the divorce that followed, the couple divided custody of their surviving children. Mildred’s son Bill by her earlier marriage went with her along with the youngest of Boyle’s progeny, Susan and another daughter yet unborn to be named Charlotte. The two older children, Flora and Joe, Jr., went with Boyle. Boyle’s relationship with the younger girls, who remained with Mildred, was virtually non-existent after the divorce. It was as if he had erased them from his memory. With Flora and Joe it could best be described as distant. He shrugged them off and saw them sporadically during his various ventures, but it was never an intimate relationship. He had other concerns, other ambitions, and he put these first.
Flora Boyle remembered the first of many partings after the divorce when Boyle brought his two children home to their grandparents in Woodstock. “We were taken to the railroad station where, after kissing us goodbye and telling us he would be back soon, father stepped on a train and was whisked away into the darkness. We must have made a forlorn picture, Joe and I, standing on that old station platform, waving our little handkerchiefs to our handsome young father, who was just thirty. Fortunately, we were too young to realize that he was off on another great adventure, without the faintest idea when we would meet again. I think we were too stunned to cry, our poor little minds could not grasp the situation entirely.… We were living in a new strange world and our greatest feeling was one of awe and loneliness.”
Joe Boyle in 1900 with his daughter Flora, who worshipped him from afar.
Boyle was off on an exhibition tour with Frank Slavin, the “Sydney Cornstalk,” who had ambitions to become a heavyweight-boxing champion. When the pair reached Victoria and heard whispers of a great gold strike in the Yukon, they lost no time in heading north, first to Juneau, Alaska, and then on to Skagway. By mid-July 1897, when the news of the great find burst upon the world, they had already reached the foot of the White Pass. A pack trail of sorts had just been opened to the summit. Boyle and Slavin hooked up to a party of fifteen men and a pack train of twenty-five horses, but the going was so tough that half the company turned back. The others elected Boyle captain to go on past the summit to blaze a trail through thirty miles of wilderness for the party to follow. At Bennett Lake, the headwaters of the Yukon, a growing number of tenderfeet were already sawing lumber for boats to take them downriver to Dawson. Here Boyle’s foresight paid off. In the tons of goods he had packed over the trail was a twenty-four-foot collapsible boat he had purchased to take Slavin and himself through the headwater lakes and onto the great river, all the way to the city of gold.
Down the hissing Yukon they floated, propelled by a stiff current, drifting through a land of lonely prospectors panning for wages in the sandbars at the mouths of nameless creeks. This was the Cordilleran spine of the Americas, and everywhere, it seemed, were flickers of gold for those patient enough to seek it. Within that backbone of mountains, running north from the land of the Incas, lay the impressions of ancient watercourses plundered successively for their treasure by the Spanish conquistadors, the forty-niners, and the pioneers of the Cariboo. Now the line of hidden fortunes had veered off to the northwest.
This was a turning point in Boyle’s career. He had started north on a hunch—to make a few dollars holding boxing exhibitions with Slavin. By the time they reached Juneau, he had caught a whiff of the gold fever that was raging along the Alaska Panhandle. He had no inkling then of what the future held, but as they drifted closer and closer to Dawson, the Yukon interior captured him. He could not imagine that he would spend nearly the next two decades, the most significant period of his life, tied to this unlikely corner of the North. That, one might say, was his destiny. He could not escape it.
The Yukon shaped Boyle. He was no longer the slender, callow youth who had gone off to sea on a whim. A big man, barrel-chested, he always thought big. The scale of the land with its mighty-mouthed valleys, its enormous rivers, and its endless, mist-shrouded vistas, fitted his personal style. In Dawson, soaking up the details of gold mining in the Yukon, Boyle and Slavin came to the conclusion that the present system was inefficient and wasteful. Surely there must be a better way of getting the treasure from the bedrock. Placer gold is known as Poor Man’s Gold because one lone prospector can wrest it from the ground with little more than a spade and a sluice box. That wasn’t good enough for Boyle and his partner. They would need a government concession to give them hydraulic and timber rights over a big chunk of the Klondike watershed.
All around them that fall of 1897 the carnival roared on. Men who had been paupers the year before were so fabulously rich they could fling their profits on the gaming tables and become paupers again. Others were buying champagne at thirty dollars a split for the dance-hall beauties who plied their trade in the upper boxes. None of this had any effect on the teetotalling puritan whose only ambition was to build a mining empire. He wanted to control a great swath of the goldfields instead of a single claim.
Leaving Slavin to work out the legal details, Boyle made his way to Eldorado, the richest of the gold creeks, to give himself a beginner’s course in placer mining. Some were already planning to use small dredges, but Boyle was contemplating monstrous machines, the largest anywhere, to mine the Klondike’s hoard more efficiently. While individual prospectors were utilizing wooden sluice boxes on separate claims, Boyle was negotiating for an eight-mile stretch of the Klondike Valley. He intended, in fact, to introduce the Industrial Revolution to this godforsaken corner of the globe, incurring the wrath of the latter-day Luddites who scrabbled and mucked with spade and mattock in the gravels of the gold creeks.
He chose to find work on Claim No. 13, which so many had avoided because of its unlucky number but turned out to be the richest claim of all. Here he encountered one of the several larger-than-life characters who people the Boyle saga, each worthy of a Hollywood movie of his own. This was Swiftwater Bill Gates, one of the most successful of the Klondike prospectors, with a moon face and a scraggly moustache, so eager to squander his sudden fortune that he offered to bet one hundred dollars on the turn of a card in Dawson’s Monte Carlo saloon and dance hall, and to buy up every scarce egg in town, each at the price of a day’s pay, allegedly to lay at the feet of Gussie Lamore, the toast of dance-hall row.
In Swiftwater, who owned a piece of No. 13 and who went on to lose more than one fortune, Boyle had a willing instructor. Each in his own way was a man of vision, but Boyle differed from the prospector. Gates, who owned the only starched shirt collar in town and went to bed rather than be seen without it, was a man who loved to watch himself lampooned on the stage of the Monte Carlo by Gussie Lamore’s sister Nellie and revelled in his new sobriquet, the Knight of the Golden Omelette. Boyle had neither the time nor the inclination for that kind of frolic. He thought in terms of gigantic nozzles ripping up the overburden from the verdant valleys, and of enormous floating machines clawing their way to bedrock.
One characteristic of the Boyle style was the speed with which he made up his mind and moved, often under appalling conditions. He threw himself into each new venture with all the enthusiasm of a small boy playing his first game of Parcheesi. Life to Boyle was a game. For him, it was always the race that counted, not the gold and certainly not the prestige. As a born leader, he needed to be first off the mark, ahead of the pack—determined to win.
He could not idle away the Yukon winter. He needed a hydraulic and timber concession eight miles long, from rim to rim of the Klondike Valley, before someone else could beat him to it. For that he had to go to Ottawa, so he signed the necessary documents and left Slavin to work out the application to the Gold Commissioner while he headed for the Outside before freeze-up. Less than two months after he landed in Dawson he was ready to make his move.
While thousands of men and women were struggling to reach the city of gold in the face of impossible natural obstacles, here was Boyle headed the other way. To live in Dawson in that first gold-rush winter was akin to living on the moon. For most there was no escape. Only the hardiest, the hungriest, or the craziest dared attempt the daunting journey to the Outside. But Boyle and Swiftwater Bill Gates were planning to do just that. As they set off in Boyle’s collapsible boat, clinging to the eddies along the Yukon riverbank and inching their flimsy craft forward against a current that could reach seven miles an hour, winter was already setting in and pack ice was forming all about them. When Boyle’s eccentric partner (who insisted on wearing a colourful four-in-hand tie beneath his furs) broke through the thin crust at one point, Boyle dragged him, soaking wet, to safety. The craft was just as vulnerable: the collapsible boat kept collapsing and had to be repaired three times before the pair abandoned it at Carmacks Post, 250 miles upriver from Dawson. There they came upon a huddle of men and horses about to give up and return to the Klondike, and it was then that Boyle’s qualities of leadership were tested. At his suggestion, the group agreed to pool their resources and travel together under his command. They called him Captain, a title that certainly fitted.
They set off for Haines Mission on the coast, following a trail blazed through the mountains by Jack Dalton, an earlier pioneer. In good weather this was a four-day trip; at −25 degrees Fahrenheit it took them twenty-nine days. The horses gave up and had to be shot. Some humans also succumbed and were prepared to die on the spot, but Boyle would have none of that. In the words of one of his biographers, “he drove them like a chain gang,” alternately making promises, cajoling, and insulting them as he spurred them on. They staggered into Haines on November 23 and managed to pick up a ship to Seattle. There, Boyle was presented with a gold watch by his followers who swore that without his leadership no one would have reached the coast alive.
Joe Boyle and the eccentric Swiftwater Bill Gates (in dress shirt and four-in-hand tie) on their way to the Outside in the autumn of 1897 while the rush was still on.
It had soon become obvious to Boyle that the day of the individual placer miner was over. The thousands who rushed to the Klondike talked in terms of “digging for gold” as if the ground was knee-deep in nuggets. To their dismay, they were faced with a back-breaking procedure. Seeking out the hidden paystreak by thawing the ground with fire or steam and then drilling a shaft to bedrock was always a gamble. You might drill half a dozen shafts yet miss the serpentine paystreak, and even if you found the line of the old stream bed, it could turn out to be barren of gold. Those who did not give up and who were lucky enough to come upon the elusive evidence of a prehistoric watercourse then had the tedious task of hauling up the pay dirt, bucket by bucket, and sluicing it free of its treasure. Only about 25 percent of the available gold was recovered by this procedure.
Boyle was convinced that in order to separate the gold from the bedrock the leafy valleys would have to be torn apart, ripped up by huge nozzles. The gold would then be dug up by electrically powered dredges floating on ponds of their own creation, biting into the bedrock with an endless line of moving buckets and washing the gold free in monstrous revolving sieves.
The principle was not new; small gold dredges had operated well before Boyle devised his plan, but there was a difference. Boyle proposed to build huge dredges and to haul the necessary machinery—tons and tons of it—up the White Pass trail, over the mountains, down the fast-flowing Yukon to Dawson, and out by gravel road to the gold creeks—all in the shortest possible time.
The details would have daunted a lesser man. The entire dredge system would run on electricity, which meant building a hydroelectric power plant, digging vast ditches, and using the water of the north fork of the Klondike River to achieve his ends. And all this in a land when the first snow fell early in October and the country stayed frozen until April.
Speed was essential. Swiftwater Bill was off to San Francisco’s Baldwin Hotel, where he tipped bellboys with gold dust to page him by name and continued to woo not only Gussie Lamore, who it developed was already married, but also her two sisters, Nellie and Grace. Joe Boyle headed for Ottawa.
In the capital while waiting for Parliament to sit, he encountered the diminutive Englishman who would become his rival in the Klondike. This was Arthur Christian Newton Treadgold, a direct descendant of Sir Isaac Newton, the renowned scientist. Himself an Oxford graduate and teacher, he was for the moment correspondent for the Mining Journal and the Manchester Guardian. That wasn’t much more than a cover. Treadgold had ideas as big as Boyle’s about controlling the Klondike goldfields. But Treadgold was wary of dredges. He thought instead of using giant scrapers and land-going digging machines, none of which ever worked.
This odd pair, around whose personalities so much of the Klondike’s mining history revolves, were opposites in every way. Treadgold was short and stubby with a shaggy blond moustache and a face that was all teeth when he smiled, in contrast to the robust former boxer. Treadgold was conceited, secretive, and cunning, quite prepared to flirt with the truth if it suited his purposes, an incompetent manager, possessed of an uncontrollable temper and an inability to take advice—character flaws that would eventually doom him. Boyle, on the other hand, was a big man in every way, open-minded and open-hearted, who scorned personal publicity but could be a terrier when facing setbacks to his personal plans for corralling the Klondike gold. It was significant that Treadgold to his employees and friends was always “Mr. Treadgold.” Boyle to all and sundry was simply “Joe.”
Both men had one quality in common: they were adept at raising funds for their ventures. Each had the ability to charm financiers with deep pockets. There was a certain magic in the word Klondike that conjured up visions of unlimited profits. It did not seem to occur to normally hard-headed investors that the Klondike’s main resource was a diminishing one. Gold was not grain. Two of the richest families in America—the Guggenheims and the Rothschilds—were included in dredging enterprises after the turn of the century, ventures that included both Boyle and Treadgold, each of whom was prepared, it seemed, to sell his soul in order to gain control of the Klondike’s resources.
In Ottawa Boyle pressed his case for a hydraulic lease on Clifford Sifton, Wilfrid Laurier’s Minister of the Interior. In June 1898 he got part of what he wanted: an undertaking in writing reserving eight miles of the Klondike Valley, rim to rim, exclusively for hydraulic operations. In November 1900 the government issued a lease in his favour. This was the famous Boyle Concession, which effectively barred all individual prospecting in the area and caused so much controversy in the Yukon. Boyle clung to it through a series of lawsuits and counter-suits that would have dampened the ardour of a less persistent man. His daughter Flora has testified to the passion with which he flung himself into each new legal battle. “Lawsuit,” she wrote, “was his middle name.” He loved a fight. Each time he was sued he immediately countersued. Before he achieved his aim he had lawyers in Dawson City, Vancouver, London, New York, and Detroit.
To describe his reputation in Dawson during the early days as controversial would be an understatement. Meetings were held, petitions forwarded to Ottawa, and local politicians pressured in a series of attempts to cancel the Boyle Concession. The timber rights to that chunk of the Klondike Valley were as valuable as the ground that lay beneath. Because lumber was needed for sluice boxes and cabins on the creeks, Dawson was enjoying a building boom that saw the price of logs soar from $18 a cord in December 1898 to $48 a cord the following summer. Boyle saw this coming. He and Slavin (who later left the partnership) established a sawmill near the mouth of the Klondike River that turned out more than a million feet of dressed lumber in 1899. Much of the timber came from his own property, an asset so valuable that it is said he was forced to drive poachers off at rifle point.
Meanwhile, in New York City, Treadgold sweet-talked Daniel Guggenheim into a major investment to buy up as many claims as possible in the heart of the gold country in order to consolidate water and mineral rights on the richest creeks—Hunker, Bonanza, and Eldorado. By the summer of 1901, he too had wheedled a hydraulic concession out of Ottawa, one that was arranged to free him from any of the work commitments prescribed by mining law, thus tying up the gold country for six years. It was, in the heated words of the Klondike Nugget, “a malignant and unpardonable outrage … the blackest act of infamy that ever blotted the history of the country.” After a storm of protest the government cancelled the Treadgold hydraulic concession. Boyle went on to form the Canadian Klondyke Company with backing from the Rothschild interests in Detroit; Treadgold would shortly become resident director of the rival Yukon Gold Corporation, a Guggenheim enterprise.
Joe Boyle (back row, right) at the Bear Creek office of his Canadian Klondyke Mining Company in the heart of the gold country.
When I was a small boy in Dawson the name Treadgold seemed to pop up in every conversation around our dinner table. Boyle was gone by then, but Treadgold was very much alive, the central figure in a tangle of court actions that occupied him for most of his days. He left the Guggenheims, formed his own mining company, and had his eye on the Boyle interests, hoping to consolidate all corporate mining into one big enterprise. He failed, went broke, and left the Klondike, apparently forever, only to return in the mid-twenties after Boyle’s death to pursue his dream. Even then “Klondike” had a touch of magic for investors, and Treadgold, with his smooth tongue and a name that hinted at riches underfoot, was able to form the Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation out of borrowed money and the remnants of earlier ventures. (I worked for it in the late thirties as a young mucker.) In the end Treadgold was eased out and lost everything. But in 1951, when he died at the age of eighty-seven, several of the original Boyle dredges were still churning up the pay dirt in the golden valleys of the Klondike.
Boyle spent almost two decades of his adult life in the Yukon. He liked to claim that he had arrived in Dawson with only nineteen dollars in his pocket. In his pocket, no doubt, but in the bank? In New York he had operated a lucrative feed and grain business, and though he was clearly hard-pressed for money—he depended on boxing exhibitions for his living after his New York stay—it stretches the imagination to suggest he was penniless. Clearly he was not without resources. It cost money to travel to Ottawa, and it cost more to live at the Russell House, the most luxurious hotel in the capital. Boyle certainly put whatever money he had to good use, as William Rodney has noted. He owned among other things several valuable pieces of Dawson real estate, a 20-foot-long wharf, a warehouse 100 feet long, a lumber dock, a half interest in a hydraulic grant, and 16 placer claims. His sawmill was certainly profitable, though Boyle and Slavin would have needed some sort of nest egg to launch it. But ten years after he arrived he would be a millionaire—self-made and proud of it, as his casual reference to the nineteen dollars suggests.
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.
The industrial revolution in the gold country sparked by Boyle had changed the face of the Klondike, and there was no environmentalist movement to protest or prevent it. The low, rolling hills had long since been denuded in the growing hunger for lumber. The broad and verdant valleys were reduced to black scars by the big nozzles that tore at the topsoil and overburden to send the muck and silt coursing down to the big river. As the years rolled by, the dredges themselves, gouging out their own ponds, would reshape the rivers and creeks, leaving their own dung behind in the huge tailings piles of washed gravel that would choke the goldfields for more than forty miles.
Boyle’s monstrous dredge Canadian Number Four floating on its own pond and dipping into the bedrock for gold. The stacker is dumping gravel tailings at the stern.
The irony is that, with the gold gone, the rape of the Klondike has become an asset. The tailings are now a tourist attraction; when some were bulldozed flat for a new housing development there was an outcry from those who saw them as part of the country’s history. Driving past this moonscape, goggle-eyed tourists are treated to another spectacle from the old days: Canadian Number Four, raised from the silt of the creek by the army, restored by Parks Canada, and officially designated an historic site, towers over its visitors on Bonanza Creek as a reminder of a romantic era and its Klondike King. There is no other monument to Joe Boyle in the land of gold.
But the king was growing restless. He had achieved everything he set out to do in the Yukon. His four great dredges were breaking all previous records; he had become a leading figure in Dawson, admired now as a local booster and praised for his philanthropy. On September 3, 1914, shortly after war was declared in Europe, he plunged into the fray in his characteristic Boyle fashion, offering to raise at his own expense a fifty-man machine-gun battery made up entirely of Yukoners. He also provided morning jobs for the new recruits in his company so that they could drill every afternoon. There were precedents for such grand gestures: the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry and the Lord Strathcona Horse had similar histories.
Speed was essential if Boyle was to get his men Outside before the ice made river traffic impossible. But even as they prepared to leave, Boyle had to acknowledge clouds gathering on his horizon. Hostilities had scarcely begun in Europe when Canadian Number Two, working the Klondike River, sank in some twenty feet of water. That meant the dredge would be out of operation for the best part of a year, eating up the profits as several score men tried to salvage the boat. As a result, gold production was cut by 20 percent or more. The dredge was raised at last the following July and placed on piles for inspection. Alas, it toppled from its makeshift perch, killing one man and injuring three others. Worse, three months later, on October 29, 1915, Boyle’s big steam generating and heating plant at Bear Creek, which serviced Dawson, burned to the ground.
War was another factor Boyle had not envisaged when building his big dredges. Operating costs had risen by $20,000 since 1913 while gold production values had fallen by the same amount. Dredging has some of the uncertainties of a Las Vegas roulette wheel. As the early stampeders had discovered, some claims were fabulously rich, others worthless. By this time Boyle’s dredges were working poorer ground—so poor that wages had to be postponed until better prospects showed up.
Until this point Boyle’s active life had been crowned with a series of successes, and he had reason to feel content. But now his career had begun to unravel, or so it must have seemed to him. In his pride he could not have foreseen that one of his mammoth machines might fail or a world war force up his costs and bring down his profits.
October 10, 1914, was a bittersweet benchmark in Boyle’s peripatetic career. That was the day when the recruits for his machine-gun battery would leave the Yukon for active service. And that was the very day on which Canadian Number Two sank in the Klondike. Boyle worked all day at Bear Creek to help save it. That evening he hurried to Dawson to bid his detachment farewell. In its spirited account of the unit’s departure, the Dawson News noted a silent man who stood at the edge of the barge with bared head as the steamer plowed past the shouting crowd and “watched the ship and her brave boys until she was out of hailing distance.” It was Boyle, who seemed “transfixed, gazing until only the dancing lights were visible on the water.” Then he quietly turned from his place and marched up the street with the crowd.
Boyle, ever the man of action, desperately wanted to be where the action was—not in Dawson, declining into a ghost town, but with his brave boys, far from the growing frustrations (financial, mechanical, and legal) that would continue to bedevil him. His brave boys, however, were not in Europe but languishing in Vancouver’s Hastings Park, transformed into a military camp, “a forlorn outfit,” in the words of Leonard Taylor, “with no spiritual home, condemned to hours of square bashing and route marching, dulling to the soul of Yukon individualists.”
Boyle put on the pressure, went over the heads of the army, and straight to the Minister of Militia, the choleric Sam Hughes. Finally he got his way: the unit was posted overseas in the summer of 1915. In England, Boyle’s frustrations increased when he attempted to have a Canadian put in charge of the battery and was told peremptorily that the machine-gun section was under the control of Imperial authorities. In the end the battery was broken up and its identity destroyed, shattering Boyle’s hopes for a close-knit band of Northern brothers, side by side, attacking the hated Hun.
The zest was going out of Boyle’s life. His ardour was dampened by the news that his old rival George Black, the Tory lawyer who had opposed him in his court battles, had been given leave to organize a Yukon infantry company to fight in France. Not only that, but Black was studying for a commission to lead his men in action. This must have galled Boyle, who was itching to get into service but at the age of forty-nine was not eligible. Black was forty-three.
In the Yukon, Boyle would remain a controversial (if engaging) figure long after his death. Andrew Baird, a friend of my family and a regular guest at our dinner table during my Dawson days, wrote in his memoirs that the story of Boyle’s activities in the Klondike was more like a fairy tale than a factual record. “He wrecked his company with ill-conceived policies and left it in a hopeless muddle,” he wrote. Baird of course was not unbiased, being associated with A. C. N. Treadgold and the rival Yukon Gold Corporation.
When Flora Boyle told her Maclean’s readers that her father “could not endure to be bound,” one suspects that she was referring to more than his unfortunate marriage. Boyle was tied to his faltering company and confined to the far-off Yukon at a time when others were flocking to their king’s aid in the poppy-dotted fields of Flanders.
It was too much. The man who had solved his daughter’s problems with her stepmother by pushing her off to distant climes now chose another form of escape. Like a small boy who picks up his marbles sobbing “I don’t want to play any more,” Joe Boyle slipped quietly out of town in mid-July 1916, leaving the Klondike behind forever.
The Boyle contingent of Yukon machine-gunners at their barracks in Dawson City.
This was a surprising decision and, given Boyle’s long history of success in the Klondike, a remarkable one. He was not a man to let sudden setbacks deter him. Or was he? There is an adolescent quality to Boyle’s unexpected flight from reality, for that is what it was. Certainly, wartime conditions had made his business affairs more difficult. It was hard to get the supplies, the equipment, and the men he needed to keep the company alive. Dawson was slowly dwindling, and so was the supply of gold. But surely this was not the time to abandon the mining empire that had been his pride. What was needed was a firm hand on the tiller. For Boyle at this juncture to turn the whole enterprise over to his son Joe was akin to a dereliction of duty. If the senior Boyle had stayed on the job, could he have saved his ailing business? The answer is that fifty years later, after others reorganized and consolidated the company, the great Boyle dredges were still working the famous creeks and still producing gold.
For Boyle, the fun had gone out of the mining business. The real “fun” lay elsewhere, in the battlefields of France. Boyle wanted to escape the burdens of the Klondike. He wanted to be known as Klondike Boyle, and for the rest of his life he was, but he wanted the glamour without the responsibilities. The outside world, of course, from Ottawa to Odessa, did not know that in the Klondike he was a failure.
Now, in the twenty-first century, it is hard for us to comprehend the mindset of the Great War generation, when the soldiers and the generals, too, were idolized as lily-white heroes and a man out of uniform, even a middle-aged man, was seen as a slacker. The propaganda that sold the war as Great Adventure was designed to recruit young men—the flower of the nation—and send them willingly, even joyously, into the trenches of Flanders: to make them feel themselves noble crusaders for their country doing battle with the Antichrist. No one in Boyle’s generation would ever censure him for abandoning his business enterprise in order to save civilization.
When Boyle left Canada for London, he took a piece of the Yukon with him. That was a purposeful decision. He could run away from all the frustrations and unexpected financial problems that had been visited upon him, but he could not escape the aura of the golden North that attended him—nor did he want to. In London, his circle of acquaintances, carefully cultivated during his earlier trips, grew wider. “Klondike” had become a word in the language that connoted glamour, adventure, heroism, and sudden wealth. Now he was Klondike Boyle, a title worth more, in some circles, than a knighthood because it was unique. At the level in which he moved he was not seen as a lone prospector who had stumbled upon a paystreak; he was the King of the Klondike. It was for Boyle a kind of brand name providing a conversational gambit that gave him easier access to military, business, and social circles that might otherwise have been closed to him. He had left the North but the North had not left him. In that sense, he would always be its captive.
Now Boyle’s contribution to the war effort in the form of a machine-gun battery, costly as it was, began to pay off. On September 16, 1916, he was gazetted an honorary lieutenant colonel in the Canadian militia. It gave him a title and a touch of authority. But it also burdened him with a reputation. He spent the rest of his life subconsciously living up to it—the bold sourdough and entrepreneur who feared nothing and dared everything. Fortunately, he had the stamina, the will, and the zest to press forward against all odds.
He did his best to wipe out the intimacies of his past. Save for one letter, Elma Louise never heard from him again although she made repeated attempts to seek him out. Nor was his son, Joe, who took over active management of the company, able to reach him once he had plunged into new adventures. Again it was out of sight, out of mind, which helps explain the indifference that young Joe, burdened now by the responsibilities his father had saddled him with, exhibited in Boyle’s last days.
The rank had no military significance. The army doled out many honorary commissions to prominent citizens who had helped the war effort. Boyle was little more than a civilian in costume, but he made much of it. He lost little time in switching to a well-tailored uniform of officer’s serge complete with Sam Browne belt. Now he was “Colonel Boyle” also, and he revelled in the title, which was to become useful to him in eastern Europe. Few would realize that he was not a regular officer. He was never seen in mufti but made a point of wearing his uniform at all times, complete with the word yukon in large black letters stitched on his shoulder straps. He went further: on each lapel, a Canadian maple leaf gleamed with unaccustomed brilliance. These caused considerable comment because they needed no polishing, being fashioned of genuine Klondike gold—a regimental quiff for a man without a regiment.
It is tempting to think of Joe Boyle in cinematic terms. We can almost see the word finis on the screen as he boards the steamboat and fades into the distance. He has dispensed with his own past and we can only wait for the movie sequel: king of the klondike Part 2, subtitled The Saviour of Romania, which, unlike most sequels, manages to surpass the original.
In London, the man of action wanted, once again, to be where the action was—if not in the front lines, at least serving his country as part of the war effort. Boyle’s own pride was involved. How could he, a powerful man of forty-nine, be cast aside like a used topcoat? Other men of his age were being shamed as slackers by aggressive young women who taunted them with white feathers. Boyle’s uniform protected him from that, but there is little doubt he himself felt he was not pulling his weight. He lobbied intensely, using his social connections (Herbert Hoover was one), to try to get into the fight. That didn’t happen until the United States entered the war and the Russian czar, Nicholas II, abdicated. The American Society of Engineers was formed that spring to help support wartime Washington, and Boyle knew the honorary chairman, who had shown an interest in his dredging operations. One connection led to another, and on June 17, 1917, Boyle, who spoke no word of Russian, went off to Russia on the recommendation of another American friend, Walter Hines Page, U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, ostensibly to help reorganize the Russian railway system. He knew very little about railways, but he certainly knew a good deal about organization, and that turned out to be exactly what was needed.
When Boyle arrived in Petrograd (St. Petersburg, then capital of Russia) in July 1917, eastern Europe was in chaos. The provisional Lvov–Kerensky government, which had replaced the old czarist regime, was clinging to power, shored up by the Allies who needed to keep Russia active in the war in the face of Bolshevik insurgents. Boyle made contact with the Russian military authorities who accepted his services, though with some hesitation, while the British War Office was trying not very successfully to find out what he was doing and under what authority.
Boyle soon moved southwest to Romania to try to assess the stalemate caused by the tangle in the Russian and Romanian transportation systems. Romania had declared war on the German-led Central Powers in August 1916, but her railways were in such a state of disorder—half-finished in some cases, ending abruptly in others—that it was impossible to ensure a steady stream of supplies to the troops of either country.
Boyle got the system working by making use of Lake Yalpukh (now in Ukraine). This was a long finger of water running north from the Danube River near its delta. He saw that one end of an existing rail line could be extended to the southern tip of the lake where ships could be used to replace the gap in the rails. The link to the railhead at the northern shore thus formed unravelled the transportation snarl.
Here the new movie begins, with a montage of overlapping shots showing Boyle in action in the no man’s land of the post-revolutionary Eastern Front. There is a fictional quality to these tales of Boyle’s adventures in eastern Europe—the kind of stories that English schoolboys thrived on through the pages of the Boy’s Own Paper. They come to us not through Boyle, who tended to shrug off his own exploits, but from a reputable eyewitness, Captain G. A. “Podge” Hill, the British intelligence officer who was from time to time Boyle’s comrade-in-arms. Indeed, Hill himself later confessed that he had played down Boyle’s role in some dauntless deeds in his memoirs to build up his own part in them. If Boyle’s new adventures seem to have the earmarks of a Saturday matinee movie serial—and they do—they are not the less impressive because they are true.
The southeastern sector of Europe at this point was in turmoil. Romania had been torn in half by the advance of the Central Powers. The provincial town of Jassy (Iasi) had replaced Bucharest as its temporary capital. The Russian army was disintegrating and the provisional government was tottering.
Boyle was in the thick of it, as Hill’s memoirs, Go Spy the Land, make clear. He records one incident where Boyle prevented a near riot in the provincial town of Mogilev on the Dnieper (now in Belarus). Feeling was running high at the presence of the Allied Military Missions to Russia, which were doing their best to counter German-Austrian propaganda among members of the newly formed Soldiers’, Sailors’, and Peasants’ Council. A meeting of the council was agitating to have the missions expelled or their members murdered. In the midst of this hullabaloo, Boyle strode onto the stage of the assembly and started to speak, with Hill translating. There was a movement to rush the stage, but Boyle’s voice, “clear and musical,” to quote Hill, held the audience. In a short speech, full of references to Russian history, Boyle reminded his listeners that Russians had never surrendered. “You are men, not sheep!” he told them. “I order you to act as men!” Thunderous applause followed as one young Russian leaped on the stage and cried, “Down with the Germans!” That ended the anti-Allies uproar.
A stranger who didn’t speak a word of the language walking onto the platform and subduing an angry mob! It strains credulity. But Hill was there, on the stage with Boyle, translating his words sentence by sentence as he uttered them. As so often in the Boyle story, fact again outdid fiction.
At the request of the Romanian government through its consul general in Moscow, Boyle undertook a special mission. Some twenty tons of paper, including diplomatic documents and all the currency that the beleaguered Romanians had had printed on Moscow presses, were in peril. Because the Russians were impressed by Boyle’s work on organizing the Romanian railway system, he and Hill were able to secure a private carriage and the rolling stock they needed to pack four cars with the Romanian papers. They hooked these up to an overcrowded southbound train and set off for the harassed country nearly a thousand miles to the southwest. The journey was fraught with danger, for the route lay directly through territory over which the Bolsheviks and the Russians were contesting.
Boyle and Hill were running the gauntlet through a land in ferment. When undisciplined Bolsheviks tried to uncouple the cars at a small railway station, Boyle crept out under cover of darkness and knocked the leader cold. On the way to Kiev, the train stopped dead for lack of fuel, and Boyle organized a human chain of passengers to bring back logs from a nearby clearing in the forest. With some men up to their armpits in the soft snow, the logs were passed back to the stranded locomotive until the tender was piled high. The engineer finally got up steam and they reached Kiev, where they were able to attach their cars to another train.
At Zhmerinka, forty miles from the then Romanian border, a Bolshevik officer stopped the train, shunted the rescuers’ cars onto a siding, and trained a gun battery on the station to prevent any escape. Boyle’s response was to throw a party and an impromptu concert for the Bolshevik soldiers to show his lack of concern and to conceal his next scheme. Fortunately, in the yard an engine stood in constant readiness for shunting purposes. Hill and Boyle boarded it and forced the engineer and stoker at gunpoint to pick up the cars carrying the Romanian treasures. After Boyle cut both the telephone and the telegraph wires, the train with the pair aboard set off at top speed. Twenty minutes later they reached a level crossing barred by a gate. When the engineer refused to crash through, they kneed him to the floor. Seizing the throttle, Hill opened it to full speed and “the good old shunting engine carried everything before it in its stride.” When they finally reached Jassy, they were met by an escort of 250 Romanian railway gendarmes and a body of Romanian army cavalry to secure the country’s vital papers. It was Christmas Eve, 1917—a bright moment in an otherwise dark year.
Boyle was in Petrograd when the Kerensky government fell and the Bolsheviks took over. Six days of street fighting prevented any trains from leaving the capital, and Moscow was starving. The untried Bolshevik regime was forced by circumstances to release the former minister of war, General Alexei Manikovskii, from prison with orders to feed the army. Manikovskii sent for Boyle, who had just been made chairman of the All-Russia Food Board, and asked him to go to Moscow to untie the railways knot and get supplies moving.
Boyle’s methods were unorthodox, but they worked. By pitching entire trains over embankments and pushing empty cars into the fields, he eliminated the bottleneck in three days, and the Russian armies on the Eastern Front were saved from starvation.
Both Russia and Romania had signed armistices with the Central Powers that December, and the Germans were moving in to occupy the country. Boyle now turned his attention to averting a war between the Russian Bolsheviks and Romanian forces. After weeks of hard negotiations with the Germans at the very gates of the capital, Boyle, shuttling by light plane between Jassy and Odessa (and once nearly brought down by a Romanian anti-aircraft battery), finally got his way. An agreement between the Russians and Romanians brought an end to hostilities in late February 1918 and was followed in May by a peace treaty between Romania and the Central Powers signed at Bucharest.
In effect, Boyle was acting as an unofficial and unaccredited agent, as William Rodney has noted and as Hill well knew. Boyle had contacts among high-ranking Soviet officials as well as some senior Allied representatives; moreover, he could move freely about the country, unlike the Allied ambassadors and ministers who were cooped up in Petrograd and cut off from what was going on in Russia because their governments had not yet recognized the new regime.
Early in January 1918, for example, an important and dangerous plan was worked out by the commander of the French mission to Romania in which Boyle would use the authority he had been given by the Bolsheviks “to drift locomotives from the North to South Russia and create as much disorder and confusion in the Railways Systems in the North as possible”: in short, an act of sabotage. In that same period the Romanian prime minister, Ion Brătianu, asked Boyle to go to Petrograd on his behalf on a delicate mission to assure Leon Trotsky, then Bolshevik commissar for foreign affairs, that the Jassy government wanted to avoid friction between Romania and the new Soviet regime.
Motion pictures, like stage plays, tend to be divided into three acts. The first act of The Saviour of Romania was now complete. Since every good movie requires a love interest, the second begins in March 1918, when Boyle meets Marie, the alluring Queen of Romania.
She was Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, tall, elegant, spirited, intelligent, and still beautiful at forty-three—everything, in short, that a queen should be. It was she who had stiffened the spine of her Hohenzollern husband, the weak and vacillating King Ferdinand, persuading him to put his natural inclinations aside and join the Allies in their war against the Germans and the Central Powers.
She was a romantic in the grand sense. At the moment of her greatest despair, the arrival of a bold and unconventional Yukoner gave her courage. At their first brief meeting on March 2, she had only the vaguest idea of who he was, but he was certainly impressive. “A very curious, fascinating sort of man, who is frightened of nothing, and who, by his extraordinary force of will, gets through everywhere. The real type English adventurer books are written around.”
The second meeting lasted two hours, with the Queen at her lowest ebb. The Allied missions were vacating Jassy, fearing the German advance would cut them off, and the Queen stayed up to make her farewells. It was a black night, the rain pouring down as if to accentuate her anguish. Then, into the reception hall, uniform dripping from the deluge, walked Joe Boyle. “Have you come to see me?” she asked as he advanced to meet her. “No, Ma’am,” Boyle replied, “I have come to help you.”
Queen Marie of Romania, Boyle’s friend, confidante, and reputed mistress who enjoyed striking poses like this for the camera. She was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
Marie’s fervent recollections of those midnight hours vibrate with the kind of passion one associates with cheap nineteenth-century novels or early twentieth-century movies. “I tried to let myself be steeled by the man’s relentless energy, tried to absorb some of the quiet force which emanates from him. I poured out my heart to him in those hours.… I do not know all that I told him, the memory is a blur, but I made a clean breast of all my grief and when he left me and I said that everyone was forsaking me, he answered very quietly, ‘But I don’t,’ and the grip of his hand was as strong as iron.”
Boyle left almost immediately for Odessa to implement the peace treaty with Russia that the Romanian cabinet had finally signed. Before he went, Marie reminded him that more than two dozen of her country’s most notable citizens—ex-ministers, politicians, industrialists, members of the aristocracy—were being held hostage in Odessa by the Bolsheviks, awaiting a prisoner exchange for Russians held in Romania. The situation was precarious. The prisoners were locked up in Turma, a heavily guarded prison fortress. Around them, something close to civil war was breaking out between leaders of the inexperienced Bolshevik regime and so-called White Russians. Under the new treaty, which Boyle himself had pressed for, the hostages were to be dispatched by rail from Odessa to Jassy while the four hundred Russians hived in Romania would get safe transport back to their own country. It was not to work out that way.
Now another remarkable woman enters the picture—a doughty Canadian, Madame Ethel Greening Pantazzi, whose husband, a high-ranking Romanian naval officer, was one of the hostages. A friendly source within the prison had bad news for her. The Bolsheviks in charge, she told Boyle, had decamped with all the prisoners’ money, valuables, and personal papers, leaving them guarded by the much-feared pro-Bolshevik Battalion of Death. Instead of being taken to the railway station for the journey home, they were being pushed onto the waterfront where the steamship Imperator Trajan waited to take them away, perhaps to their deaths.
Odessa was in a state of chaos. With Madame Pantazzi as his interpreter, Boyle hurried here and there vainly seeking a Romanian official who might be empowered to assist in an exchange of prisoners that he himself had negotiated. “I’ve been up in the Yukon and know how to deal with men like these,” he told her. “They have never gotten the best of me yet!”
Boyle was in his element at such moments. At the dockside they found that active preparations were being made to spirit the hostages away. As they rushed off again in search of aid, Boyle turned to her with a smile. “Quite a day for a lady!” he remarked. “I like this sort of thing—do you?” And Madame Pantazzi had to admit to herself that “in spite of the anguish tearing at my heart about B. [her husband], I was surprised to find I rather did.”
Unable to find help, they returned to the dockside. Here a series of tussles took place, with some hostages who were forced onto the ship trying to shoulder their way back down the gangplank and into the crowd while others were being driven back by guards. Members of the death battalion were firing indiscriminately into the throng, and Boyle realized that the safest place for the prisoners was aboard the ship. Pinned down momentarily by the press of people, he spotted Madame Pantazzi and shouted, “I can’t stand this. I’m going with them!” To which she replied, “Go! Or they are all dead men!” (The dialogue may seem overheated, but the story of this venture, as recorded in Madame Pantazzi’s book Romania in Light and Shadow, was confirmed subsequently by the hostages themselves.)
Unarmed and with only the uniform he stood in, Boyle forced his way up the steep gangplank to reach members of the death battalion who were beating an old man. He seized two of the tormentors, banged their heads together, and threw them back on the dock. The ship finally pushed off with a thousand Bolsheviks on board and all the hostages lined up on deck to be counted by the meticulous Boyle, who found that nine were missing or dead.
Where were they headed? Clearly not to Romania. After three days poking about the Black Sea and being turned away at several ports, the Imperator Trajan with its hungry and dispirited human cargo, was finally allowed to dock at Theodosia. The Battalion of Death refused to give up its prisoners—an alarming state of affairs, especially when Boyle received a whispered warning from a sympathizer aboard the ship. The prisoners, he said, were to be marched to an ammunitions shed and “accidentally” blown up.
Boyle and the high-class Romanian hostages he rescued from the death battalion.
Boyle moved quickly. Borrowing money from the British consul in town, he bribed the captain of a small freighter, the Chernomor, to take the group to Romania. He had already engaged twenty Chinese soldiers from the Bolshevik International Brigade ostensibly to guard the hostages but actually to keep an eye on the unreliable members of the death battalion. At the last moment as the freighter made ready to sail off, the Chinese escorted their charges on board, catching the death battalion watchmen aboard the Trajan off guard. When two rushed over to find out what was happening, Boyle suggested they board the freighter and he would explain. When they did so, he locked the pair in a cabin and the Chernomor steamed away.
It took days of negotiation at the Black Sea ports of Sebastapol and Sulina, marked by threats, bribery, and bluff on Boyle’s part, to get his charges back to Jassy. There he found himself a national figure, cheered by thousands and decorated with the country’s finest honour for what Marie, in her diary, called “a prodigious feat of unselfish energy.” Suddenly the man from the Yukon was the Saviour of Romania, providing that country with a hero when it most needed one.
None of this was lost on the British army hierarchy or the bureaucrats and politicians in Canada who had struggled to put a damper on Boyle’s activities and vainly tried to keep him under close control. The elusive Boyle was hard to pin down. Every time the War Office tried to reach him, he had slipped away on a new adventure. The British ambassador in Petrograd considered Boyle a meddling freelancer with no military authority and at the end of December 1917 had wired his Foreign Office urging that he be recalled. The British in turn put pressure on Canada, and as a result the Duke of Devonshire, as governor general, issued an order unique in Canadian military history requiring him to come home. But where was Boyle? Somewhere in eastern Europe where the British couldn’t reach him. By the time he reappeared in Jassy to a tumultuous welcome, the authorities were forced to backtrack. The British ambassador in Jassy was told to retain Boyle “so long as his services were considered useful.”
This was the climax of Boyle’s career. He had helped negotiate the Russian–Romanian peace treaty, had risked his life to save some of the country’s notable citizens, and had brought back the nation’s archives and currency. The Bolshevik leaders of Russia held him in greater esteem than did the Canadians. As Bruce Lockhart, the unofficial British agent in Moscow, reported to the Foreign Office in April, “Trotsky has frequently asked about him and would be glad to make use of his services.”
To the snobbish military establishment he was nothing more than a civilian and a nuisance. He continued to wear his uniform long after hostilities had ceased, a stubborn insistence that galled one highly placed Canadian staff officer who described him as “a bluffing adventurer … who should not receive official encouragement.” Every effort was made to force him out of this trademark costume, but he had an answer to that. He had switched to civilian clothes just once, he said, but that act had nettled George V, who admired him, often inviting him to breakfast at Buckingham Palace. The King told him that as his sovereign he was ordering him to get back into the uniform that he had earned by his work for the Allied cause. At least that is the story Boyle told, and no one had the temerity to check it with the crusty monarch.
Boyle went on wearing the uniform for two more years in spite of further attempts to stop him. When much of Romania was under German occupation he had made a point of going everywhere in khaki. “Tell him to take off that uniform or I shall have him shot,” Mackensen, the commanding German field marshal, told the Romanian war minister. Boyle’s response was forthright. “Tell him that no German living will compel me to take off my uniform. I carry a single action Colt, and I am a man of my word. I promise to drill holes in the first German be he general or private who lays violent hands on me.” They left him alone from that moment.
Why this insistence on wearing the uniform? Other field officers sometimes wore mufti on informal or private occasions. Not Boyle. For him, the pleated serge with the lapel buttons of gleaming Klondike gold and the yukon shoulder flashes identified him not just as a Canadian but as a special kind of Canadian—a Northerner from the most glamorous corner of the Dominion, known the world over. It made him unique. No other officer bore that form of identification. It gave him status, and in eastern Europe it gave him authority.
There was more to it than that. Here, in the company of strangers, these magical symbols, combined with his field officer’s crown and pip, served to give reassurance to a man whose financial edifice was tottering. They reminded him, as they reminded others, that on the face of it he was Colonel Boyle, King of the Klondike—commander of men, mining magnate, soldier of fortune, confidant of a queen. He wore his uniform like a second skin and he had no intention of peeling it off.
There is little doubt that in the final months of 1918 the Saviour of Romania had fallen deeply in love with its queen. He saw her periodically as he moved in and out of Jassy. They managed to spend hours together after rides through the countryside. He told her about the Yukon, which she had long confused with Alaska, and the great gold dredges of the Klondike (but not about the wife he had left behind with whom he did not bother to correspond—a later revelation that shook Marie). He spoke of returning to the North and read to her from the works of Service, long passages of which he knew by heart. One of the Queen’s biographers has called her “the Last Romantic.” That she admired him and felt sustained by him there is no doubt. But was their relationship physical?
Boyle’s two leading biographers differ. Certainly there were whispers about “Colonel Lawrence of Romania,” as the catty court ladies dubbed him behind his back. The Romanian court was a hotbed of sexual intrigue, the by-product of a network of arranged marriages consummated in the interests of the state. Affairs, both grand and fleeting, were common and expected. The Queen herself enjoyed a long-standing relationship with Prince Barbu Stirbey, a courtier with a lengthy pedigree, but she did not distribute her favours widely, if at all. In Boyle she discovered “an unexpected touch of early Victorian Puritanism that added much to his quaintness.”
It is possible, as William Rodney has suggested, that in his relations with Marie, Boyle saw himself as a white knight, too chivalrous to sully this, the most important relationship of his life, with mere carnal appetite. Leonard Taylor, who had access to a newly discovered cache of Boyle papers after Rodney’s book was published, disagrees. “That they became lovers seems certain,” he wrote, pointing out that “both were full-blooded passionate individuals who made their own rules.… They were living at a pace only those who have survived a war can understand. When you may be dead tomorrow there is every reason to live today.”
Given the situation, it is hard to dispute Taylor’s assessment. Though the sentimental and elegant queen might have seemed unapproachable to a Romanian courtier, Boyle was not a man to let such class restraints deter him. To her, the Yukoner appeared the epitome of rugged masculinity. To him, she was almost the direct opposite of his previous partners—a highly intelligent woman of the world who before her death would publish no fewer than sixteen books and innumerable articles in magazines ranging from Ladies Home Journal to the Paris Review. The fact that they came from totally different worlds only increased their mutual attraction.
Queen Marie (left) in peasant costume with Joe Boyle and Princess Ileana.
In June 1918, the two were thrown together by an unexpected circumstance. Boyle, who hadn’t had a real holiday since he left Great Britain, was felled by a near fatal stroke that left him partially paralyzed. For a fortnight his life hung in the balance. Marie was devastated. “I felt my heart die within me,” she wrote; “Boyle, my great strong invincible friend.”
He had been stricken in Kishinev (now Chisinău, the capital of Moldova), but as soon as he could move she had him installed in a small cottage on the grounds of the summer palace in the Romanian hill country. There he fought back against his condition, exercising his stricken arm and leg and smoothing out the paralyzed side of his face in front of mirrors—a minor spectacle made to order for Act Three of The Saviour of Romania. Finally he managed to shave himself with an old-fashioned razor and it was clear that he was recovering. Marie had breakfast with him daily and took him on drives in the country. Her ten-year-old daughter, Ileanna, became his constant companion, and Boyle delighted the little princess by reciting for her Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” At last the King of the Klondike had found a warm and fulfilling family.
Marie had never met a man like Boyle. He did not fit the palace stereotype. To the stuffy salons of the Romanian court he brought a whiff of the clean, northern Canadian air. There, he was “Klondike Boyle,” a soubriquet bestowed in admiration but one that also stamped him as an alien, albeit a glamorous one.
For all of his career he had been beholden to no one, but now, day by day, he was becoming a slave to a new kind of passion. Marie had only to crook her finger and he stood ready to do her bidding. Back in Canada his demure little wife tried vainly to get an answer to her official inquiries about him. In the Yukon, Joe Boyle, Jr., was trying to reach his father to discuss his concerns about the state of the Canadian Klondyke Company. From the maelstrom of eastern Europe there was no response. His company was now in receivership, yet Boyle appeared indifferent to the collapse of his empire. Though he yearned for the Klondike, as Marie’s writing makes clear, he didn’t try to launch a rescue attempt.
Why? Was it that he had done what he set out to do and moved on? To quote his favourite poet: “It wasn’t the gold that I wanted, so much as just finding the gold.” But these excuses for his inaction are not very plausible. Something else was holding him back, keeping him tied to the exotic kingdom, and that something, surely, was Marie. He could not bear to slip away with scarcely a goodbye, as he had slipped away from Elma Louise, still waiting for him wistfully on the other side. The great dredges had been his toys, but now he had put away childish things and flung himself into a romance that some might consider adolescent but that turned out to be the first abiding love affair of his life.
As he recovered from his devastating illness, new challenges presented themselves, all revolving around the needs and desires of his royal confidante. In the late fall of 1918 he masterminded a successful campaign to spirit the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia, the Queen’s cousin, out of Odessa. In Paris in December he persuaded his old Klondike acquaintance Herbert Hoover of the Allied Food Council to dispatch three shipments of food to starving Romania. Next, in London he negotiated a twenty-five-million-dollar loan for that beleaguered country, lobbied (unsuccessfully) for a massive Allied intervention in Russia, and arranged for young Prince Nicholas, Marie’s son, to attend Eton.
In the midst of this whirlwind of activity he was “knocked clean out” by an attack of influenza that weakened him further. The Saviour of Romania was also, thanks to Marie, now the Duke of Jassy. That did not deter the War Office, which was back with annoying questions about his right to wear the King’s uniform. Boyle continued to resist all attempts to put him into mufti. Grudgingly, the War Office agreed to allow him to continue the masquerade until September 1920, a deadline later extended to the following January.
Joe Boyle recovering from his near fatal illness, Kishinev, Bessarabia, 1918.
By this time, political opposition to Boyle in Romanian court circles was building. His attempts, at Marie’s behest, to separate Crown Prince Carol from his commoner mistress were seen as an intrusion into internal affairs that was much resented. The government had changed, and there was continuing uneasiness about the supposed influence of an outsider on the royal family. The intrigue began to tell upon the Queen herself. “They one and all torture me about faithful old Boyle and my unshakeable belief in him,” she wrote. Yet the crisis only deepened their affection for each other. “You and I are man and woman and we have come together at a late period of our lives and come together in a way but few could understand,” he wrote to Marie. In the end, however, it became obvious that Boyle was no longer welcome at court, and it fell to Marie herself to break the news as gently as she could.
In later years, Marie briefly drew aside the veil of circumspection that had masked her own inner passion for the soldier of fortune whom she had admitted into her personal life. She had been, she said, “torn between two loyalties and two affections.” (She did not name anyone, but she may well have meant Prince Stirbey or even her husband.) “It was unbearable to me to hurt anyone and yet I was hurting them and myself even more.” Boyle was devastated by this unexpected blow. In the correspondence that followed, it is possible to discern another side of Boyle, one that he had concealed perhaps even from himself. He had always been the loner, the leader who faced every setback with aplomb. Women had been secondary in his career. Now, in middle age, he found himself consumed by the kind of ardour usually associated with lovesick youths. From the moment of their first meeting he was the rock to which Marie clung, the haven to which she retreated. Now the tables were turned, but there was no way in which he could reach out to her. In one remarkable and revealing letter that has all the resonance of a wail in the night, he laid himself bare. “I do not think in my whole manhood I actually knew what fear was until … you told me I must go.” The bold adventurer was now the prisoner of a hopeless passion. “I found myself paralyzed with fear, preventing myself from screaming … by cramming my hand in my mouth and nearly biting my fingers off.”
Boyle’s life had been marked by a series of stunning successes. Now, at last, he had a family on which he doted; the young crown prince and his siblings called him Uncle Joe. He had found a woman who could easily have been his life’s companion—a contrast to his dizzy first wife and her uninspiring successor. He was in love with Marie, and on more than one occasion she demonstrated her affection and respect. But the ultimate consummation of that unlikely affair was denied them by circumstances over which they had no control. Indeed, much of the fire in his heart may have been fuelled by the lure of the unattainable. For the first time in his life, Boyle, the take-charge man, found himself powerless to act.
Boyle’s career at this critical time was winding down, but he refused to admit it. Settling down … taking it easy … resting on his laurels—such senior-citizen goals were foreign to his makeup. He had one last service to perform for his queen. He had finally managed to separate the future king, Carol, from the arms of his unsuitable morganatic wife, Zizi Lambrino, and nudge him in the direction of an acceptable (if unlovable) princess, Helene of Greece.
He needed a new adventure, a new career goal, and he found it in the petroleum-rich Caucasus between the Black and Caspian seas. In May 1921, Royal Dutch/Shell, the international oil conglomerate, made him its representative in dealing with the Soviets, and he was off again for Constantinople (Istanbul), pausing for a bittersweet two-week idyll in the Romanian countryside with Marie. His treatment at the hands of the Romanian court had left him depressed. “In spite of his mighty spirit and energy he does mind being so unfairly attacked,” Marie noted as he reluctantly took his leave. He felt the Canadian cold shoulder no less keenly. He had undertaken his several adventures on behalf of the Romanians and the western Allies at his own expense, and all he had received from the military (apart from the grudging gift of a DSO) was a long haggle about his right to wear his uniform.
By the end of August, Boyle was back in London, outwardly the man of action but inwardly at odds with himself. Only Marie understood the extent of his despair. “I am gone,” he wrote to her in a melodramatic letter at the end of October. “Do not let me be a shadow on your life—you never owed me anything—always you gave and I am grateful and love you—remember only that.” He had written her many letters but tore them up because they were “just lonesome wails,” and Boyle was not a man to wail. She was, he told her, the “one human being that fills every spare moment of his mind” and one who also haunted his sleep. “There are nights when I am so completely worn out that I am almost dazed and the only way I can settle it is to conclude with ‘I love her and I don’t know anything more nor do I want to.’ ”
The following spring, having set up a network of trusted followers in the Caucasus, he was off again to Constantinople and then across the Black Sea to Batum to meet Podge Hill, who was again his associate. Hill was disturbed by Boyle’s appearance. This was a sick man, “aged almost beyond recognition,” whose clothes hung in folds over what had been a robust body. The pair set off for the Georgian capital of Tiflis (modern Tbilisi) on an inspection tour, but not for long. An international economic conference was slated for Genoa, and Boyle was determined to attend it.
The train journey to Tiflis had exhausted him. Hill noticed that he was increasingly short of breath and looked worn out. Nonetheless, he insisted on heading back on a dangerous and jolting journey through the mountains on a dilapidated train that at one point plunged headlong into a gorge. Its brakes had been tampered with by dissident anti-Bolshevik saboteurs, and the crash that followed killed the crew and many passengers. The Boyle party escaped, but Boyle’s condition worsened. His breathing was laboured and his legs were swollen so alarmingly that he had to walk with two canes. The subsequent voyage to Constantinople aboard a pitching vessel battered by a Black Sea squall only increased his suffering. Taken on a stretcher to his hotel, he was told by the examining physician that if he tried to continue on to Genoa he would be risking his life. But risk it he did by way of the Orient Express, eager to make an oil deal with the Russians who were attending the conference. When not confined to his bed in Genoa he moved about by wheelchair.
Back in London in May, having lost sixty pounds, Boyle was examined by one of the city’s leading heart specialists who told him to put his affairs in order and abstain from worry and from any thought of travel, under which conditions he might live for two or three more years. Go straight to a nursing home, the doctor told him—don’t even bother to go back to the hotel.
Boyle followed instructions but proved a difficult patient, holding board meetings with Shell officials and his own staff in his bedroom, to the consternation of the nurse who was now attending him. In June he stubbornly insisted on going to an international conference at The Hague, hoping to continue to negotiate with the Russians on behalf of Shell in its increasing rivalry with Standard Oil. The conference accomplished nothing, and when Shell, in effect, abandoned him, Boyle, ever litigious, turned to the courts for compensation, an action that was settled quietly by the company with Joe Boyle, Jr., after his father’s death.
Ill or not, he could not resist embarking on one more piece of derring-do. In September, when he found out that one of his associates, Charles Solly, was locked up in a Tiflis prison, he set off again for the Black Sea, shooting off telegrams of protest en route. There he learned that Solly had been released as a result of diplomatic pressure and also, perhaps, because of Boyle’s stream of protests. He made his way from Constantinople back to London by way of Greece, where he visited with Marie’s eldest daughter, now queen of that country, albeit temporarily (she fled to Romania in mid-December). But his pride kept him from Romania. He did not want Marie to see the shadow of the big man she had known and loved. They had corresponded regularly, but now, in one last letter, he rejected her invitation to come to her. “I want you to remember me as the man I was,” he wrote back. “I am no more Joe Boyle.”
He spent his last days in the spring of 1923 at the home of his old Klondike friend Ted Bredenberg in Hampton Hill, Middlesex, reminiscing about the old Yukon days, rereading Service’s verse, and, in Marie’s words, “longing to get back to his mountains, his river rapids, his great forests and silent snows.” He did not speak of his illness and fought it to the end, as his last words make clear. The date was April 14, 1923. He had spent a peaceful but sleepless night and now he seemed ready for action. “I want to get up,” he said, and struggled to raise himself, only to fall back upon the pillow. At the age of fifty-six, the King of the Klondike was dead.
Though he did not die intestate as some writers have suggested, most of his great fortune had been dissipated as a result of his many philanthropies, the expense of his failing dredging company, and his costly and varied exploits in Europe. Marie learned the full details of his passing in a letter from his former Russian interpreter, a trusted employee, Dimitri Tzegintzov, who planned Boyle’s funeral service. She responded in an emotional and affecting twelve-page letter in which she described the special understanding between the two as “something deep, real, strong, I may say holy, based upon a perfect belief, faith, and respect.” Fate, she wrote, had brought them together. “We had clasped hands at the hour of deepest distress and humiliation and nothing could part us in understanding. No one knew his heart better than I. Women played but little part in his life and he had a wealth of love unspent … when he had his stroke I was the haven in which he anchored for awhile.”
When she visited his grave at Hampton Hill—and she returned to visit it almost yearly on her visits to England—she was not impressed. She immediately arranged for a more appropriate memorial in the shape of an ancient six-foot stone slab to be placed atop the grave, engraved with the insignia of the Order of Maria Regina together with Boyle’s name and relevant dates. There was something more. At the foot of the slab appeared a line from “The Spell of the Yukon” that she had often heard from his own lips and that would serve as his special epitaph:
Man with the heart of a Viking and the simple faith of a child.