Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [162]
She and the boys had never intended to be prospectors. But almost everyone else had. Yet as soon as they tied up their boats, and they were six deep along the shore now, these people just hung around in town, not even taking a trip out to the creeks where gold had been found. It was as if getting here was enough.
Beth could understand weariness, for the majority of these people had spent a whole year getting here and they’d been challenged in every conceivable way. Most had burned all their bridges, walked out on jobs, homes, sometimes wives and children, and blown all their money. They’d risked their health, sanity and in some cases their lives. But surely a couple of days’ rest would revive them? Why were they now trying to sell their kit to buy a ticket home on a steamer? How could that lust for gold suddenly vanish? Or was it that the gold had never been the real aim, only to have the biggest adventure of all time?
It was said that there were approximately 18,000 people now in Dawson, and another 5,000 out prospecting on the surrounding creeks, making it almost as big a population as Seattle. With no more room for tents or cabins, people were now going across the river to a place generally known as Louse Town.
Down on the shore a huge market place had sprung up. Dogs, horses, sledges, and bags of flour, patched shirts, worn-out axes, long winter underwear, mackinaws and high-sided boots were all for sale. People picked over them endlessly, and to the disappointment of the sellers who wanted to go home, their stuff was mostly rejected.
But each steamer spilled out many more hundreds of people: dancing girls, actresses and whores, bank clerks, doctors, even ministers. There were whole families, elegant ladies with feathered hats, their husbands with wing collars and tail coats, and small children. They too had mostly only come to take a look, for they surely weren’t intending to pan for gold.
It was a mad, wild place, a city of runaways, some from the law, or from nagging wives or brutal husbands, debt, dull jobs or city slums. The morality and social status of the Outside meant nothing here. Men took up with dance-hall girls, a woman could drink in the saloons without a man beside her, even the whores were treated with respect. You could be anything you wanted here; where you came from didn’t matter. Those who’d struck lucky helped those who had nothing. It was almost as if people shed their old skin the moment they stepped off the boat, and grew another more comfortable one.
Yet for now it suited Beth. For as long as she could play her fiddle, she could forget all she had lost and that she had no real place to call home.
The deep sadness at the core of her seemed to give her music a new dimension and she’d found she was using it to twist her audience’s emotions. If one of her tunes reminded them of an old lover, their mother, their children, they put more money in the hat. She didn’t feel this was exploiting anyone; after all, the money she earned was passed on to the woman who baked bread, the boy who sold eggs, and the couple from Idaho who ran a diner. It would also take her home one day to see Molly.
Late in the afternoon of 3 July, Beth was down on Front Street watching as Jack and a couple of his hired men built the facade of their saloon. The speed with which Jack had gone to work on it was astounding. Within a week he had the skeleton of the saloon up; by the end of the second the roof was on and he was laying the floorboards on the first floor. The long hours of daylight and the number of men needing paid work helped. Now the building was close to completion, with three rooms upstairs, a large room for the saloon downstairs and a kitchen and storerooms out the back.
‘It’s looking good, Jack,’ Beth called to him. ‘But you aren’t going