Klondike Mike

Alongside Michael Ambrose Mahoney, Paul Bunyan was a dim and legendary piker. Klondike Mike, the greatest of the mushers, the sourdough who struck it rich and kept his poke, is a living legend. Last week when Klondike Mike, at 74, announced in Ottawa that he was leaving Canada to settle in Los Angeles for his health, newspapers wrote dew-eyed editorials, hoped "his shade [would] be long in growing less."

When he hitched to Skagway at the start of the Klondike rush of '97, Mike was a strapping, redheaded six-footer from the backwoods of Quebec. He was handy with his fists and his feet, could kick off the bar in the hitch-and-kick* at eight feet. He put together a nondescript dog team, began mushing supplies for the sourdoughs. He blazed a 1,400 mile dog-team trail from Dawson to Nome. He toted a piano on his back up the 1,200 ft. of Chilkoot Pass. With a corpse as cargo, he mushed over the mountains, 400 miles from Fairbanks to Valdez, in 28 days.

The Old Days. Klondike Mike struck pay dirt at Alaska's Goldstream. He panned out $165,000 in three months, moved on to Iditarod. There he panned $10,000 a week. When he sold out ($250,000 would be a low estimate, says Mike) and headed back for Quebec, he was only 35, had not a worry in the world.

Idleness sat ill on Klondike Mike. Along with his Alaskan partner, George Rich, he started a trucking business in Ottawa, built it into one of the biggest in Canada. Then he took a major step. At 53, he learned to read and write.

That opened up a new world to Mike. For the first time he read the sourdough sagas of Jack London and Robert Service, and learned of a Klondike more glittering than his own. At first he carefully distinguished between his own achievements and the sourdough sagas, recited with a will The Cremation of Sam McGee and The Shooting of Dan McGrew.

The Good Old Days. In time, as his fame spread, he spoke to wide-eyed audiences from Nova Scotia to Los Angeles. As he became a showman, the Service sagas became Mike's own: he had actually witnessed the shooting of Dan. Last week, Klondike Mike, white-haired, but still straight as a pine, chatted about the good old days: "There aren't many oldtimers like me left any more . . . You know, I used to know old Dan McGrew. He was a big hulking fellow. He'd shoot a man at the drop of a hat. I remember the night he got it. Lou ["the lady known as"] wasn't expecting to get shot but she got over it. Last I heard she was running a rooming house up in Prince Rupert."

-A popular sport in the '903, played by making a standing high jump and lashing out with a high kick while in the air.

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