How could you and your wife meet with the other company officials? Socially, I mean."On and on he went, repeating stories he had heard of the disastrous consequences which followed such marriages: 'And in our own experience, Tom, in our various stores, that is, we've seen only tragedy when we hired squaw men. It never works, because you can't mix oil and water.'
Tom bristled, and spoke with the same hard sense of integrity that had motivated his employer: 'In Dawson and Nome, I saw quite a few squaw men who led better lives than most of us. In fact, the whole Klondike field was discovered by a squaw man.'
'On a gold frontier there may be a place for such men, Tom, but we're talking about real society, which is what towns like Juneau will soon have. In real society, squaw men are at a terrible disadvantage.' He shook his head in sad recollection, then spoke with extra force: 'And another thing to think about, young man, their half-breed children are doomed from the start.'
'I think that settlements like Nome and Juneau will soon be filled with half-breed children,' Torn countered. 'They'll run those towns.'
'Don't you believe it.' And Ross was about to cite telling evidence about the total ineptitude of half-breeds he had known in the Northwest when loud shouting was heard from the main shed, and the white foreman bellowed: 'Help! The Chinks are running wild.'
Tom, who had for some time anticipated such an outbreak, leaped for the wooden causeway leading to the main shed, but Mr. Ross had reacted even more quickly, and as Tom ran toward the sound of rioting, he could see his boss plowing ahead like an enraged bear to join in the fray. As the two white men burst into the brawl, Tom thought:
God help the Chinks if Mr. Ross gets really mad.
Inside the cavernous building they met total chaos, with scores of Chinese roaring among the tables where that day's catch of salmon was being gutted, and although at first Tom thought that this was merely one more brawl in which two workmen had fallen into a fist fight over jealously guarded positions at the worktable, when he ran toward the center of the fighting he saw to his horror that the Chinese were attacking one another with their sharp gutting knives.
'Stop!' he bellowed, but his order had no effect. Mr. Ross, having been involved in riots before, waded into the midst of the fighting, laying about him vigorously and crying: 'Get back! Get back!' a command which had no more effect than Tom's.
'Ah Ting!' Tom called, hoping to locate the leader of the Chinese. 'Ah Ting! Stop this.'
He could not spot the tough little man, nor did he see any evidence that anyone was trying to halt the melee, but then Mr. Ross, infuriated by this frenzied interruption in the canning process, started to grab one Chinese or another, and at first he was unsuccessful.
'Tom! Give me a hand!' And as Venn ran to assist his boss, who had grabbed the pigtail of one of the more vigorous of the fighters, he shouted: 'I'm here!' But as he did so, he saw to his horror that Mr. Ross had pinioned the arms of the man he held, rendering him unable to defend himself, and in this exposed position the terrified Chinese could only watch impotently as a fellow worker lunged at him with a long fish knife, jabbing it once into the man's heart and then into his stomach, which he ripped apart with a powerful upward thrust.
As Mr. Ross held the captive in his arms he could feel life seeping out of the tense body, and when the wounded man went limp, both Ross and Tom watched helplessly while three of the dead man's friends leaped upon the assassin, stabbing him many times until he, too, fell dead.
'Ah Ting!' Tom began to shout aimlessly, but the man who had been assigned to prevent just such outbursts could still not be found. But now he was not needed, for the shock of the two slayings caught the Chinese off guard, and they backed away, awaiting the restoration of order. Mr. Ross, still clutching the body of the man whose death he had caused, looked about in bewilderment while Tom continued to call for Ah Ting.
And then Tom saw the aggressive leader. He was pinned against a wall, surrounded by three men, all taller than he, holding their knives against his throat and heart.
Some wild dislocation had swept through the cutting shed, something too big to be handled by ordinary procedures, and in its first moments these men, determined to see it to a conclusion, had isolated Ah Ting to prevent him from exercising his authority.
Two murders had resulted, and now when Tom ran up to the men, shouting: 'Let him go!' they obeyed.
'Big fight, boss,' Ah Ting gasped as he shook himself free. 'Could not stop.'
Mr. Ross lumbered up, his hands red with the blood of the man he had been holding.
'Were you in charge here?' he blustered, and Tom interceded: 'This is Ah Ting. Leader.
Good man. These three held him prisoner.'
Mr. Ross's first reaction was to shout 'You three are fired!' but before he could utter the words he realized how stupid they would sound, for there was no way of firing unsatisfactory Chinese working at a summer cannery. The men had come from Shanghai to America on a British boat. They had come from San Francisco to Seattle on an American train. And some Ross & Raglan recruiter had placed them aboard an R&R steamer, which had conveyed them to Taku Inlet, where they had been deposited directly from the ship to the cannery. Supposing that Mr. Ross, in his obstinacy, went ahead and fired the three men, where could they go? They were miles from any settled area, and if they did reach some town like Juneau or Sitka, they would be refused entrance, for Chinese were not allowed. They were supposed to arrive by ship in late spring, work all summer at some remote outpost, and leave by ship in early autumn, taking their few dollars with them and surviving in some large, impersonal city till the recruiters summoned them again for the next canning season.
So instead of firing the men responsible for neutralizing Ah Ting, Mr. Ross scowled at them and asked Tom: 'What can we do?' and Tom gave the only sensible answer: 'Only thing we can do, trust Ah Ting to get the men back to work.'
'Do we call the police? There are two men dead over there.'
'There are no police,' Tom said, and in this statement he described the extraordinary position in which the District of Alaska found itself. There were men in towns like Juneau who were called policemen, but they had no real authority, for there was still no properly organized system of government, and for such improvised officers to venture into an area like Taku Inlet was unthinkable. Each cannery ran its own system of self-protection, which included drastic measures for handling disturbances, including crimes at the plant. Therefore, the murder of the two Chinese workers became Tom Venn's responsibility, and Mr. Ross was most interested to see how the young man proceeded.
He was favorably impressed by the fearlessness with which Tom moved among the agitated workers, directing them back to their tasks and checking to ensure the maintenance of an orderly flow of salmon from the arriving fishing ships. But when the time came for Tom to discipline the men who were seen to have done the stabbing, Mr. Ross was appalled to see that Venn turned the matter over to Ah Ting, and Ross was further dismayed when he watched how the leader of the Chinese handled it. Ah Ting reprimanded the guilty men, did nothing to punish the others who had immobilized him in the fracas, and blandly told the men to pick up their gutting knives and get back to work.
But it was what he did afterward that affected Mr. Ross most profoundly, for Ah Ting directed two men to fetch one of the large barrels used for shipping salted fish to Europe, and when the barrel was in position he himself poured in a three-inch layer of coarse rock salt. Then he leaned deep into the barrel to spread the salt evenly over the bottom, after which he drew himself out, brushed off his hands, and directed his two helpers to bring the first of the slain men. When the corpse lay on the floor before him, Ah Ting helped his men strip away all bits of clothing and then hoist the dead body into the barrel, where it was propped into a sitting position.
Now the second corpse was undressed and carefully fitted into the barrel, also in an upright sitting position, facing the first man and adjusting to him.
'What in hell are they doi
ng?' Mr. Ross asked, and Tom explained: 'Our contract requires us to ship any dead Chinese back to China for burial in what they call "the sacred soil of the Celestial Kingdom."'
'In a barrel?'
'Look!' And as they stared in disbelief, Ah Ting and his helpers packed every cranny in the barrel with rock salt, filling it so to the brim that no sign of the dead men remained visible. Even their nostrils were crammed with salt. And when the heavy lid was nailed tight, the coffin barrel was ready for shipment back to China, where the two slain men would attain whatever immortality this tradition ensured.
BACK IN THE MANAGER'S QUARTERS, MR. ROSS WAS STILL agitated by what he had seen:
'A man murdered while I was holding him. His assailant stabbed half a dozen times.
The man supposed to be in charge being held captive. And everything settled by packing the victims in a barrel and salting them down.' The more he reflected on this extraordinary behavior, the more distressed he became: 'We can't have Chinese in our cannery. You've got to get rid of them, Tom."
'Nobody can run a cannery without them,' Venn said, and he reviewed briefly the disastrous experiences of operators who had tried to handle the great crush of salmon with other kinds of workmen: 'Indians refuse to work fifteen hours a day. White men are worse.
You've seen that our Filipinos cause more trouble than the Chinese and do half the work. Mr. Ross, we're stuck with them, and I don't want today's incident to sour you, especially not in our first year.'
'What irritates me no, it's worse than irritation, it's downright fear is the way you and I are at the mercy of that Ah Ting. I think he let those men neutralize him.
He didn't want to face those knife-wielding wild men.'
'But when he was freed, Mr. Ross, he did get the men back to work. I couldn't have done it.'
'I will not have a cannery of mine at the mercy of a Chinese scoundrel. We must do something.' And as he began to study his Chinese employees, what he saw caused further dismay: 'In the whole lot, only three speak any English. They're a tight clan living by their own rules, with their own food, their own customs. And for some reason I can't pinpoint, that Ah Ting unnerves me.
'I've sometimes felt the same way, Mr. Ross.'
'What is there about him?'
'He knows he's indispensable. He knows this cannery couldn't handle a single salmon without him. And I think he's clever.'
'About what?'
'I'm sure he knew that serious trouble had become inescapable. He suspected there might be knifings and he wanted to be held prisoner while it took its course.'
'I want him off our property.' When Tom made no reply, Ross continued: 'It infuriates me to see him grinning at me, knowing that he's in command, not me.'
Tom, aware that there was no chance of dispensing with Ah Ting, neither this year nor next, ignored Ross's unhappiness, and three days later the two men stood together as a crane hoisted the burial barrel off the wharf and onto the deck of an R&R ship loading salmon to ship to a wholesaler in Boston. No Chinese workman bothered to bid the dual coffin farewell as it headed back to China, but as Tom started for his office he caught a glimpse of Ah Ting in the shadows. The wiry fellow was smiling, and Tom entertained a momentary suspicion that Ah Ting was not at all unhappy to have at least one of the men in that barrel disappearing from Totem Cannery.
But preoccupation with the Chinese was abruptly terminated when Mr. Ross learned that the fishermen on whom his cannery relied for its salmon were protesting their meager pay and refusing to take their small boats out unless that scale was increased.
The fishermen did not engage in a formal strike; that would be against their principles of freedom and individual responsibility, for as one sailor said: 'Strikes are for factory people in Chicago and Pittsburgh. All we demand is fair pay for what we catch.'
And when Mr. Ross told Tom Venn that additional pay was impossible, and Tom told the fishermen, boats stopped heading up Taku Inlet, and for two desperately long weeks Totem Cannery saw no salmon.
The Chinese workers in the carpentry shop kept building shipping boxes, but the larger number engaged in heading, gutting and cleaning the catch had nothing to do, and in their idleness they started having trouble with the Filipinos, who were also idle.
The huge establishment at the mouth of the Pleiades River became such an uneasy place that Tom warned his boss: 'If we don't get some salmon in here right quick, there's going to be real trouble.'
It was then that young Tom Venn came to appreciate the difficulties of management, for he watched at close hand as Malcolm Ross, a determined and wealthy man of fifty-two who commanded hundreds of men and almost a score of ships, stood helpless before a gang of Chinese and a rabble of fishermen in small boats. He could not command his Chinese to behave if they had no work to do, nor could he halt their wages, and he had to continue feeding them, for they were prisoners at his cannery and could not move elsewhere if they wanted to.
And he was equally ineffective with the fishermen. Fiercely stubborn, they said:
'We can live off our savings or what we get peddling fish to housewives in Juneau. Mr. Ross of Seattle can go to hell.' Ross, unwilling to grant demands which he felt to be excessive, was powerless to make them fish and incapable of getting his salmon from any other source. Caught in this vise formed by Chinese in one jaw, illiterate white and Indian fishermen in the other, he felt himself so miserably squeezed that he spent one whole week fuming and contriving ways to put himself in a secure position which no Chinese, no fisherman could ever attack: 'We must make ourselves self-sufficient, Tom. We must never be forced to sweat out a season like this.'
He did not confide to Tom what he was devising, but during the closing days of the second painful week, when the cannery was losing great sums each day, he walked back and forth along the banks of Taku Inlet as if studying its fish laden waters, and then through the cavernous buildings whose tables and ovens and canning sheds were silent. Only the hammering of the Chinese carpenters as they built boxes that might never be filled broke the solemn quietness, and out of these days of intense study, Malcolm Ross of Seattle constructed his vision and launched his plan to attain it.
'What we shall do before next year,' he told Tom almost bitterly, 'is surprise these scoundrels. Ross & Raglan will never again be held up by Chinese coolies and hard-drinking fishermen.'
'What do you have in mind?'
'To get rid of that grinning Ah Ting. To teach those insolent fishermen a lesson.'
'How?'
Ross swung into vigorous action: 'Tell the fishermen we'll accept their demands if they double their catch. Tell Ah Ting his sheds must run sixteen hours a day. Send a telegram to get our two biggest boats up here. In the remaining weeks of this season we're going to pack the way Alaska has never seen before.'
The fishermen, gloating over the way they had defeated the big man from Seattle, accepted the challenge he issued, and assured of the raise they sought, fished arduously to earn the bonus he promised. And as soon as the handsome loads of sockeye salmon arrived at the cannery dock, Ah Ting's Chinese crew accepted the extra rations Mr.
Ross authorized and then worked sixteen productive hours each day, seven days a week.
The gutting tables were never free of fish. The great cooking ovens, made in Germany, received one batch of cans after another. Chinese tinsmiths worked in three shifts to build the great volume of cans required, while skilled men under Ah Ting's direction soldered the lids, and the packing crew stowed them in boxes, forty-eight to a box, and sent them down the slide to the waiting ships.
When the cannery was running at maximum speed, with all parts meshing as Mr. Ross had visualized a year ago, he saw it as an American miracle, an almost flawless operation which provided one of the world's most nutritious foods to eager buyers throughout the world at a price no other form of food could match. Taking one of the cans from the machine which pasted on the bright-red Totem label, he hefted it, tossed it to Tom Venn, and cried: 'A pound of
matchless salmon. Sixteen cents in stores across America. And next year it's all to be under our control, Tom. No more Chinese. No more men in tiny boats commanding us what to do.'
In his euphoria he uttered a phrase which would dominate his actions for the remainder of his life: 'It's the job of Seattle businessmen to organize Alaska. And I promise you I'm going to show the way.'
'What am I to do?' Tom asked, and he said: 'Pay the bills. See that our last ship takes away the Chinese. Close the place down, and after the first of the year, catch one of our ships at Juneau and work with me in Seattle. Because next year we are going to astonish the world.' With that, he boarded an R&R ship at the Totem dock, waved farewell to the cannery whose first campaign was coming to an end, and watched approvingly as the ship's captain threaded his way toward the Walrus, out into the channel, and on to his offices in Seattle.
ON 5 JANUARY 1904 TOM VENN TURNED THE Management of R&R affairs in Juneau over to his assistant and took passage on one of his firm's smaller vessels headed for Seattle, thus fulfilling a desire which had gnawed at him since the day in March 1898 when he and Missy had left that enticing city for the Klondike gold fields. He was so excited about seeing Seattle again that he barely slept the first night out, and when the ship finally entered the quiet waters of Puget Sound he was perched on the railing hoping for a sight of Mount Rainier. When that majestic snow-clad peak appeared, he cried to no one in particular: 'Look at that mountain!' Later, when a woman passenger asked: 'What's that huge mountain?' he said proudly: 'Mount Rainier. It guards Seattle,' and the woman told him: 'Looks as if an artist painted it,' and he nodded.
It was an emotional homecoming for Tom, and as the familiar sights of the city rose from the water, he entertained bold thoughts: If in the next few years I show a profit on the salmon cannery, Mr. Ross will be almost obligated to promote me to the Seattle headquarters permanently. That'll be the day! Whispering to himself, he said: 'I'll use the money John Klope gave me to buy a home on one of those hills and watch as our ships sail home from Alaska.' As the words formed he could visualize the Alacrity, that small white R&R ship on which Missy had worked and on which he, Missy and his father had traveled to great adventure on the Yukon.