Prisoners of the North Read Online Free Page A

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