Since I have come to western Canada I have acquired a contempt for Aladdin. At every step here I am meeting common, everyday men who are enslaving genii a million times mightier than those of the Arabian Nights. They rub their magic lamps and mechanical wonders spring up almost in a night. They give an order and change the course of a river. They lift a hand and valleys are turned upside down. Of all these conquerors of Nature in the Klondike none has come up to Joseph W. Boyle, the famous dredge king, who was once the most striking figure in this land of gold.
Joe Boyle started at the bottom and won great wealth and a dominant position. In manner and thought he was as plain as a pipe stem. A giant of a man, over six feet in his stockings, he was straight and well formed. He had a big head, a broad, high forehead, and eyes like blue steel. Yet he was a good companion and hail-fellow-well-met with those he liked. He was a friend to his employees and addressed them by their first names. They referred to him always as “Joe Boyle” or “J. W. B.,” but they understood that he was the boss and that everything must be done just as he said.
Boyle began his fight with life as a boy and kept it up until he died after the World War. His father, who was a farmer living at Woodstock, in eastern Canada, had planned that Joe should become a lawyer or a preacher and with that end in mind had sent him to college. This was too tame for “J. W. B.” He left school and shipped before the mast as a sailor. Once, in going from the Island of St. Helena around the Cape of Good Hope, his ship sprang a leak. Boyle took charge of the crew at the pumps and kept them at work for four thousand miles until they sailed into Bombay. When he had risen to the position of quartermaster of a British vessel he gave up the sea and came home.
A little later he struck out for the West, where he became trainer and manager for Frank Slavin, the bare-knuckle champion prize fighter. The two staked their all on Slavin’s success in a big fight, which was lost. They had exactly fifty cents between them when they decided to go up to the new gold mines of the Yukon. They “mushed” it from Dyea over the mountains, and got to the Klondike shortly after gold was discovered. For a time they worked together, and then Boyle engaged in placer mining with Swift-Water Bill Gates.
At one time he and five or six companions ran out of supplies. They had started for the “outside” through Chilkoot Pass, where a blizzard caught them. Swift-Water was overcome, and Boyle carried him back into camp on his shoulders. After that the party came to a stream that only Boyle had the strength to cross. He took over the others one at a time and they went on their way. When at last they reached San Francisco they were given a big banquet and on the menu cards was printed the story of what Boyle had done.
At this time Boyle was not doing as well as he had hoped at his mining. He looked over the ground of the Klondike Valley and conceived the idea that there was a fortune to be made in the earth the miners had left. Boyle stood on a little hill above the Klondike River, and determined to lease all the land within sight. This was when the mining in the creeks was at its height and the valley was so lean it was thought worthless.
Joe Boyle also staked a timber claim ten miles in length and extending through and beyond the area of his mining claim. Everyone laughed at his mining proposition, but he had to fight for his timber. As soon as news of his application got out his competitors at Dawson saw the authorities and had them require him to stake out the whole ten miles of his claim. This stipulation was made at three o’clock on the afternoon before the last day in which the title could be perfected. Boyle started on foot that afternoon and tramped all night, wading through swamps, blazing trees, and driving stakes to define limits. The work was exhausting, but he kept on until he thought he had marked out not less than fifteen miles. He got back to Dawson at nine o’clock the next morning, only to find a number of men ready to jump his claim if it had not been staked. When the area was measured according to law, it was found that his stakes fell short only twenty feet of the ten miles allotted. Boyle put in saw-mills and made money out of his lumber and wood. He got from this same claim the timbers needed in his gold dredging.
His lumber profits gave Boyle the money he needed to approach capitalists about financing his mining concessions. He first formed an alliance with the Rothschilds, by which he was to have one third and they two thirds of the stock. The understanding was that they were to furnish the money, amounting to some millions, and that Boyle was to manage the property and superintend its development.
Then the Rothschilds tried to squeeze out “J. W. B.” They questioned his title and planned a reorganization. Boyle carried the matter to Ottawa; he fought them in the courts, where he got a judgment in his favour for more than six hundred thousand dollars. The Rothschilds then offered him a million dollars for his share of the stock. He refused and in return made them an offer of four hundred thousand dollars for the two thirds they held. At first they laughed, but they finally reconsidered and accepted his proposition. Boyle then formed another corporation, the Canadian Klondike Mining Company, by which name the property is known to this day.
This company owns leases from the government of Canada that give it the right to work the lower valley of the Klondike up to the crest of the mountains on both sides of the river. The greater part of its holdings lie in the wide bed between the hills through which runs the swift-flowing river. At a distance it looks like farm land and when the concessions were granted much of it was covered with gardens. It had been cleared of woods by the first miners, who, it was generally believed, had stripped the soil of its gold.
Joe Boyle thought otherwise. He reasoned, “If so much gold has come from the valley there must be quantities of gold dust and grains in the bed-rock underneath.” Working upon that supposition, he became a rich man by handling gold-bearing earth carrying values of only about twenty-six cents to the ton.
And this brings me to another of the wonders of engineering in the Far North. It is a device invented by Boyle for keeping the hydro-electric plant running throughout the winter, notwithstanding the fact that the temperature at times falls to seventy degrees below zero. That is so cold that if you should attempt to run a sprayer such as is used in an orchard the water would turn to ice before it fell to the ground. At such times some of the streams have seven feet of ice over them and many are solid. Nevertheless, Boyle turned a branch of the Klondike River into a ditch six miles long and dropped it down upon turbines with a fall which he said would generate electricity to the amount of ten thousand horse-power a day all the year through.
Joe Boyle knew that the waters of the Yukon and the Klondike flow under the ice all winter long and that there is an air space between the water and the ice overhead. He concluded that, on the principle of the double walls of an ice house or a thermos bottle, it was this dead air space that kept the running water from freezing. The only thing necessary was to make Nature furnish the thermos bottle. This Boyle did. He filled his ditch to the top and allowed a sheet of ice to freeze a foot or so thick upon it. He then lowered the level of the water two feet, leaving a running stream four feet deep, with an air space above. He next installed electric heaters underneath to help keep the water from freezing. In this way he made the water warm itself, for the stream thus kept moving generated the electricity for the heaters, each of which required current equal to one hundred horse-power.
I went out yesterday in an automobile to North Fork, thirty miles up the Klondike Valley, to see this electric plant. The ditch is thirty feet wide, about six feet in depth, and six miles long. The water drops down through great pipes, with a fall of two hundred and twenty feet on the turbines. I asked one of the men how Mr. Boyle got the idea of electrically heating the water and was told it came to him one morning at breakfast. The family had toast and eggs, and were browning the bread on the electric toaster. As he looked at it, Boyle thought that he might employ the same principle in keeping the water from freezing. His men made out of telephone wire a gigantic toaster somewhat like a woven-wire bed spring. This was properly insulated, dropped into the ditch, and connected with the electric plant.
In 1914 Boyle was forty-seven years old and in the prime of his vigour. Moreover, he had just won a million dollars in a suit against the Guggenheims and so had plenty of cash for any adventure. He organized a machine gun battery of fifty gunners, picked men of the Yukon, and offered them to the Allied armies. To his great distress, his battery was broken up and scattered through the forces. He went to London and from there was sent into Russia to help in keeping transportation open. On one occasion he reported to the chairman of the Soldiers’ Committee, who was inclined to be nasty.
“Were you sent here because you were the best man they could find on the Western Front?” he demanded of Boyle.
“Possibly so,” was the reply. “And now, you answer me this. Are you the best man on your committee?”
“I am,” answered the chairman, expanding his chest.
“Very well, I will meet you man to man,” said Boyle, as he unbuttoned his coat and doubled his fists. He had no more trouble with that chairman.
When Russia gave up, Colonel Boyle went over into Rumania, where he became a national hero. He undertook all sorts of dangerous and important missions. For instance, when the Bolsheviki were beginning to get the upper hand, he offered to go to Moscow to bring back the national treasure of Rumania, which had been sent there for safe keeping. He got into Moscow, loaded millions of dollars’ worth of bank notes and securities on a special train, and started back. On the way the engineer of the train deserted, leaving his boilers without water or fuel. Boyle and his helpers carried water in buckets from the nearest station and cut wood for the fire. Though he had never driven a locomotive before, Boyle climbed into the cab and got the train and its treasure across the border. Later he turned the Russian Black Sea fleet pro-Ally, arranged peace terms between Rumania and the Bolsheviki, and saved sixty Rumanian deputies from banishment to Sebastopol.
After the Armistice he was commissioned to superintend the distribution of the food and supplies bought for the country with the Canadian credit of twenty-five million dollars. Then he became interested, with the Royal Dutch Shell Transport Company, in oil concessions in Caucasia.
In the course of his many adventures in Rumania, Colonel Boyle flew so high and so fast in airplanes that he suffered a sort of paralytic stroke. During his illness he was attended for two months by Queen Marie and her daughter, who did everything they could to show their appreciation of his service to their country. He finally recovered, but when in England on his way back to Canada, he died of heart failure.