(Five years ago the following article was published in The Roundup magazine. When I looked at it again, I thought it might interest readers today in this newspaper.)
The auctioneer cried, “Sold, $20!” With a rap of his gavel I owned The Spoilers, a book written in 1905 by Rex Beach. A thinly disguised novel about the North Dakotan Alexander McKenzie. The Spoilers moved into bestseller status the following year. Why was Beach compelled to think the story surrounding this man during the Alaskan Gold Rush was worthy of his attention?
In the beginning, the real-life McKenzie had worked as a bullwhacker and a railroad laborer working westward. Landing at Bismarck, the end of the track for several years, he joined a Hell on Wheels community “crowded with Indian fighting soldiers, ‘bad men’ from down river and railroad gangs from the east.” His doorway into a political career opened in December 1874 after the county sheriff, along with a deputy U.S. marshal, fell through the ice on the Missouri River and drowned.
To replace the sheriff, the county commissioners turned to the physically imposing McKenzie to quell unbridled crime in what The Bismarck Tribune called the “Wickedist City in the West.” After his appointment, he was elected to the post six more times.
McKenzie made friends and alliances during his lawman tenure, including Clement Lounsberry, publisher of the Tribune. Lounsberry blessed McKenzie’s work in 1877 saying, “Few criminals escape detection when McKenzie gets on their track.” Working with and on behalf of the Northern Pacific Railroad gave him a powerful platform. Prior to statehood in 1889, he deceitfully engineered the removal of Dakota Territory’s capital from Yankton to Bismarck because the railroad planned to go through Bismarck.
If the old maxim is true that absolute power corrupts absolutely, then he can be fairly judged corrupt. Of the state’s first eight governors, only one was not handpicked by the growing McKenzie machine.
The stage in North Dakota wasn’t big enough for the Boss and his imaginative character. The Alaskan Gold Rush drew him like a magnet northward. Not inclined to dirty his hands digging for gold, he took the tack of calling on his connections in Washington, D.C. to appoint his handpicked choice of Arthur H. Noyes as a district judge. Timid and pliable, Noyes could be easily convinced to back McKenzie’s scheming.
They focused wolfish attention on rich lodes developed by Norwegian and Swedish miners after the question arose: Should non-citizens have rights to ownership? Noyes placed them into receivership until “legal” claim could be decided. Of course, the receiver happened to be McKenzie, who banned the rightful owners from setting foot on their claims, then hired workers to mine the gold and hide it.
Enter Rex Beach. Like thousands of others, he had also sought riches in the gold fields at Nome. He failed at prospecting but succeeded in spinning gold when he wrote The Spoilers. Beach recreated McKenzie as a character with a similar-sounding name - Alexander McNamara - while remaining fairly close to the actual storyline. The story caught the attention of the reading public, becoming a best-selling novel in 1906 and attracting filmmakers in a big way. Hollywood filmed it in 1914, 1923, 1930, 1942, and 1955.
It would be difficult to compare the movies one to the other, but the 1942 version starred Marlene Dietrich, Randolph Scott, John Wayne, Harry Carey - and even poet Robert W. Service, who played himself in a bit part.
Scott, who usually played Western heroes, acts the part of the antagonist McNamara. Wayne, the good guy, rises in opposition to McNamara and consorts with dance hall girl Dietrich. The movie features arguably one of the best fight scenes ever filmed, lasting more than six minutes before the knockout punch lands. Thirty stuntmen took 10 days to choreograph the saloon’s destruction.
James Michener’s novel Alaska includes the McKenzie story in Chapter Nine, The Golden Beaches of Nome.” Furthermore, after viewing the 1960 movie North to Alaska several times, I’ve concluded there’s a good chance the screenwriters also took inspiration from McKenzie’s misdeeds.
A dependable telegraph system in Alaska was not completed until 1903, rendering communications with the outside world subject to the coming and going of seagoing crafts. That fact meant meant the aggrieved miners had a long wait between the time they could lodge their complaints with an honest judge in California and the final resolution, which did come in their favor. In the interval, complaints filed with Noyes went unheeded and the gold heist continued. The miners could only sit and watch them dig.
Finally, justice arrived when the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco heard the case and determined McKenzie and his friends had refused to return the gold to its owners after being told to do so. It further ordered two deputy marshals to Nome to arrest him and bring him to the court in San Francisco. Found guilty, he began serving a one year sentence.
It paid McKenzie to have friends in high places, men like President William McKinley and railroad magnate James J. Hill. After only a few weeks of confinement,McKenzie began to feign declining health. Friends started applying pressure on McKinley to release McKenzie because his health started to suffer. The president said he had “never before been subjected to such tremendous pressure from influential men as he had been to pardon McKenzie.” McKinley relented and after three months McKenzie walked free. One observer witnessed him “sprinting” to catch the next train out of Oakland.
McKinley appointed a new judge, James Wickersham, to clean up the affair and return property to rightful owners. After studying the matter, Wickersham wrote that McKenzie’s “notorious criminal activities as head of the most flagrant prostitution of American courts known in our history, and his other offenses were all forgiven by the President’s pardon. He returned to North Dakota, where his health quickly recovered its normal condition, and continued in his activities as a leading citizen.”
The era of McKenzie’s influence in the state ended , however, with a strong grassroots progressive movement that turned him and his cronies out of power. He found the energy and the money to build in 1910 one monument to his memory, the McKenzie Hotel in Bismarck, now called the Patterson Hotel.
As much as he had become an offensive man in some quarters, he maintained a loyal following until his death. He received the only state funeral given a non-office holder in history. One further shock came when his will was read. It came to light that he had two separate families, each unknown to the other. Buried in Bismarck’s St. Mary’s Cemetery, his place of rest can easily be found at the largest monument in the cemetery. It casts a long shadow over his grave at sundown.
Rex Beach
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