There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee....
—Robert W. Service, The Cremation of Sam McGee, 1907
From the Los Angeles Review of Books, September 8:
MARK TWAIN KNEW a lot about throwing money away, starting with a failed try at silver mining in Nevada and culminating in a string of bad investments and unprofitable land deals. But he got revenge by making fun of rural con artists in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and shifty plutocrats in the novel he called The Gilded Age, co-written with Charles Dudley Warner in 1873.....MORE
Until recently, this era of flimflam often seemed like a distant Puck cartoon of capitalist egregiousness: titans roaming the continent in private railroad cars to the next field of plunder; the rise of the corrupt political boss, aptly caricatured with a moneybag for his head.
Thanks to the current administration, we can’t look as far down on squalid 19th-century politics as we once did. And so it is a particularly good subject for Paul Starobin’s new book, A Most Wicked Conspiracy: The Last Great Swindle of the Gilded Age, about the Alaskan gold craze of 1899–1900.
The breathtaking money-making scheme of the title stretched from Nome to Bismarck, from Manhattan to Washington, DC. Even President William McKinley had to get involved. But a writer has to keep his scorn in check at least until the messy conclusion, presenting the main actors in relief as they build their conspiracy, and trusting readers will judge for themselves in the end. “As disreputable as this all seemed,” writes Starobin, “the popular longing for immense quick wealth was a fervent conviction of the times.”
The mastermind of the scheme was Dakota political boss Alexander McKenzie, of whom The Seattle Times hyperbolized only slightly that “McKenzie is in North Dakota what Napoleon I was in France.” More specifically, Starobin explains, McKenzie was:
a maker of US senators, with connections to the Executive Mansion, as the White House was then called, and to the most powerful business moguls in the nation. […] Naturally, he planned to cut in his friends. This was, after all, the time in American life known as the Gilded Age, and the bosses operated like lords of the realm, dispensing and receiving favors as a matter of course. The question was, Who would stop him?
Who indeed, for the virus of gold was in the national bloodstream, and McKenzie usually got what he wanted when there was money to be made.
In September 1898, a Norwegian immigrant named Jafet Lindeberg found gold in the sand along a river near what became Cape Nome, Alaska. Miners swarmed to what they named Anvil Creek, and cooperation briefly followed as they staked out claims along the beachfront in an equitable division of potential spoils. But as Starobin explains, such times are usually too good to be true when gold is involved. Claim jumpers appeared, challenging the rights of the original Norwegian- and Swedish-born discoverers, but the petty thieves were soon outmatched by larger predators and more sophisticated stealing....
Previously:
August 2018
"Norway to Map Deep Sea Mineral Deposits"
....Meanwhile, at the other end of the Northern Sea Route, also via Maritime Executive:
Dredging for Gold in the Bering Sea
The snow has thawed enough for the gold dredging season to kick off, and dredgers in Nome, Alaska, are ready to be on the water in search of hidden treasures on the Bering Sea floor. With boats in the water and deckhands aboard, these gritty and independent men and women are ready to hit the season hard in hopes of finding their lucky cache.I still have trouble wrapping my head around the Nome gold rush.
However, before these pioneers can seek out their awaiting treasures on their unique vessels, they must first obtain an inspection from the U.S. Coast Guard. An approved Coast Guard vessel inspection is also required by the Department of Natural Resources in order for dredgers to obtain a seasonal permit to dredge in Nome. They are off to a later start than usual this year, which made for a bustling week of inspections that picked up steam as the week went on...MORE
Compared to the horrors of walking to the Dawson/Yukon/Klondike gold rush:
Where most of the 100,000 or so adventurers struck out completely and those that did find some 'color' suffered freezing in the winter and mosquitos in the summer along with backbreaking labor to vary the misery, the discovery of gold at Nome was a day at the beach.
From Wikipedia:
The Nome Gold Rush was a gold rush in Nome, Alaska, approximately 1899–1909.[1] It is separated from other gold rushes by the ease with which gold could be obtained. Much of the gold was lying in the beach sand of the landing place and could be recovered without any need for a claim....Although some who had come up the Dawson trail and failed ended up crossing Alaska along the Yukon river, other later arrivals took ships up from Seattle which deposited them at the beach.
Or you could explore other means of conveyance.
In 1900 a fellow named Max Hirschberg rode his bicycle 1,200 miles from Dawson to Nome.
(it's 800 miles straightline but there was no way to go in a straight line)
