Achen L. League, later known as Archie, was a versatile entertainer who worked in  vaudeville, theatre, and radio. He started his career as a popular vaudeville actor on the West Coast, from Seattle to San Francisco. In 1896, he sailed from Seattle to Skagway for  the Klondike Gold Rush, seeking adventure and fortune. He came back to Tennessee with no gold, but with many stories to tell. He realized that vaudeville was dying out, so he switched to radio, where his deep voice and creative characters captivated the listeners. He worked for WMC and WREC in Memphis, creating roles such as “Happy Pappy Hawkins” and reading bedtime stories to the children. He also played Santa Claus during the Christmas season, hiding inside a giant fiberglass figure and talking to the kids through a window.

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Archie had two marriages and four children. His first wife was Itasca Snow Magner, whom he married in Missouri. They had two sons: Archie W. League, born in 1907, who became the first air traffic controller; and Glenn League. His second wife was Viola Drury, with whom he had two more children: Daniel, born in 1921; and Flora, my mother, born in 1923.

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Archie’s life and adventures in the Klondike and Yukon were featured in a full-page article by the Memphis Commercial Appeal on Sunday, Jan 30th, 1938. You can read the transcript of the article below or see the original newspaper page. click here.
 

"It Was GOLD They Were After"

 

 

By Robert Talley

 

Links to Contents:

​​

• Archie Sailed for Alaska From Seattle in 1896
   

• The Miners Used Their Gold Dust for Money
   

• “Soapy” Smith’s Last Bluff Was Called
   

• Archie managed an Opera House At Dawson City
   

• The story of “Swiftwater Bill’s” Revenge that cost "Gussie" Her Eggs
   

• Tex Rickard Didn’t Forget a Friend
   

• Eskimos tricked into believing Monkeys Were Dead Ancestors
   

• One By One, the Sled Dogs Dropped in Their Tracks
   

• References

 

 

     Memphis Veteran of Klondike Rush of 1898 Tells of Stirring Days When He Ran Dance Hall at Dawson City and Tended Bar for Tex Rickard in Wild and Woolly Nome.

 

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;

The kid that handles the music box was hitting a jag-time tune;

Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan Mcgrew,

And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou…

Then I ducked my head and the lights went out and two guns blazed in the dark,

And a woman screamed, and the lights went up, and two men lay stiff and stark.

Pitched on his head and pumped full of lead was Dangerous Dan McGrew,

While the man from the creeks lay clutched to the breast of the lady that’s known as Lou

 

        --from “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” by Robert W. Service

 

     Archie League didn’t witness the killing of Dan McGrew, of course since that classic shooting scrape of the Klondike’s Gold Rush days was a figment of Robert W. Service’s stirring imagination. But he did hear the shot that killed “Soapy” Smith at Skagway, he managed an “opry house” and a dance hall at Dawson City and he tended bar for Tex Rickard at Nome

 

      Maybe you think you don’t know Mr. League, a kindly faced old fellow who lives at 1034 East Mclemore in Memphis Tennesee, and whose life rolls back into 65 years of colorful adventure. But do you know him, because he’s probably been a visitor in your home many times, and doubtless a welcome one. Remember “Happy Pappy” Hawkins, that gentle old philosopher of Radio Station WMC who played request numbers for folks who wrote in and offered friendly words of comfort and cheer? Well, Archie League and “Happy Pappy” Hawkins are one, although he’s doing another radio skit now.

 

      Mr. League is an actor. He’s been at it now ever since he went broke in the Alaskan Gold Rush in the 1890s and his fine baritone voice landed him a job in Max Engleman’s “opry house” at Juneau, with a dance hall, saloon and gambling joint attached. For years he was a trooper on the vaudeville circuits, playing “rube” and “tramp” roles. When vaudeville finally succumbed to the movies, he turned to the radio. He’s still there.

 

 

Sailed for Alaska From Seattle in 1896

 

       The story of Archie League’s eight years in the Klondike and the Yukon reads like a chapter from Jack London or Rex Beach and perhaps it should, for he knew both of them and bought for dramatization in his theater at Dawson City one of the first stories Rex Beach ever sold. It was “A Trip to Bedrock,” a two-act sketch that literally wowed the big bearded men from the creeks as they sat in the barn-like theater under the flickering light of oil lamps suspended from the ceiling by ropes.

 

 

         Mr. League was 23 and had been roaming around the world ever since he left his boyhood home at Winchester, Tenn., when the gold fever his him at Seattle in August 1896. The big gold rush hadn’t started then as the sensational strikes on the Yukon were yet to come, but a lot of the yellow metal was being thawed out of the snow-capped mountains. So he hopped the S.S. Alki, a steamer loaded with Irish potatoes and went to Juneau, the gateway to the gold country.

 

 

         Juneau was a boom town that was built on pilings at the edge of the bay where the towering mountains, wearing their crowns of snow that were older than history, ended their march to the sea. From 4000 to 5000 persons lived in its frame shacks and tents and it’s saloons, gambling joints and dance halls far outnumbered its other places of business. It was a wild, reckless place and money flowed as free as water as the grizzled sourdoughs came in from the creeks to spend their “pokes” (small moosehide pouches filled with gold dust) for liquor and adventure.

 

 

         It wasn’t long before the young League, who had done some amateur theatrical work in Seattle, got a job in Max Engleman’s opera house. IT was a huge frame theater built over the bay, in the rear of Max’s saloon and gambling joint. After the three-hour show, the chairs would be cleared away, the dance hall girls would appear and the place would be converted into a dance emporium.

 

         “I can see those dance hall girls now,” Mr. Lane mused the other day as his memory traveled back through the years. “They had hour-glass figures with wasp-like waists in the fashion of the day, wore long dresses that swept the floor and were well padded with old-fashioned bustles, and they had ‘rats’ in their hair. During the show they mingled with the miners, persuading the men to buy drinks on which they received a commission. When the dance began, they charged the men 50 cents a dance, on which their commission was 25 cents. It wasn’t difficult – especially if a drunken miner was generous with his dust -for a girl to make $300 or $400 in a night.”

 

         These dance hall girls said Mr. League, were recruited from San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle and brought to Alaska by the shipload. Many of them quit their jobs in Pacific Coast canneries and mills, lured by the promise of wealth.

 

 

Miners Used Their Gold Dust for Money

 

       The Miners threw their pokes at the bartender who would weigh out the amount of each treat on the apothecary scales that every saloon owned - $18 for an ounce of the precious dust, 10 cents for a grain. They were so careless that a barkeep might take double the quantity and not be detected. In fact, many of them did. A drunken miner might have $1000 in his bag and spend it all in one roaring night.

 

       The show that preceded the dance consisted of an olio of vaudeville acts, followed by a dramatic sketch. The olio offered such favorites as buck and wing dancers, German comedians in baggy pants and green vests and blackface comedians who sang such popular songs of that era as

 

Won’t you come home, Bill Baily?

Won’t you come home?

I’ll do the cooking, darling; I’ll pay the rent…

 

         The rough men from the creeks got their fun in the olio, and then they got their tears in the dramatic sketch that followed. Sob stuff was in demand; such three-act plays as “Brother Against, Brother,” “Only a Widows’s Child,” etc. Many a bearded brute wept at the unhappy plight of a defenseless orphan or a helpless old mother as the orchestra, sans collars and ties, softly trilled “Hearts and Flowers” or some other heart-tingling intermezzo.

 

         In 1897 came the fabulous Klondike strike and League with thousands of new prospectors eager for the riches that lay in Alaska’s golden sands, trekked inland to Skagway which lay beyond the snow-heaped White Pass, “the worst trail this side of hell.” Either you carried all your worldly belongings on your back as you struggled through the wind-swept crevice that furrowed the towering mountains or you paid somebody to carry them at the rate of $2 a pound.

 

         Skagway was a wild, boom town, it’s muddy streets and noisy saloons filled with men in rough mining clothes. They represented every race on the face of the earth and every type of human being imaginable – from grocery clerks to undertakers. In a thousand ways they differed but all were drawn together by one common bond, the lure of gold.

 

         “Money was no object,” said Mr. League. “Everybody had money and plenty of it. Nobody asked the price of anything; they just said ‘Gimme’ and paid whatever was demanded. Ham and eggs were $3 an order, you paid $5 for a meal that you could buy for 50 cents back in the States, whiskey was $1 a drink and beer $1 a bottle.

 

          At Skagway, young League went to work as an actor at Jake Rice’s opera house, which was very much the same as Max Engleman’s establishment back in Juneau. There was a saloon and gambling joint in front; in the rear was the big barn-like theater which, after the performance, was converted into a dance hall. In a short time, the young League was managing the “opera house” and producing it’s plays and vaudeville.

 

        The “uncrowned king” of Skagway in those days was “Soapy” Smith, a short, chunky man with a full crop of whiskers who ran one of the numerous saloons and headed the toughest gang of cutthroats south of the Arctic Circle. They preyed upon drunken miners, collected tribute from the dance hall girls, robbed men of their gold dust and kicked them into the snow.

 

        “Soapy” Smith’s real name was Jefferson Randolph Smith. He was the black sheep of a respectable Georgia family who had been lured to Alaska by the prospect of riches and a college graduate. He had got the nickname “Soapy” while peddling soap at county fairs. From a satchel hung around his neck directly under his marble-sized diamond stickpin, “Soapy” would purvey small bars of soap. From time to time he would reach into the bag, pick up a $10 bill and announce that, as a matter of advertising, he intended to give the bill to someone in the crowd. Then he would pretend to hide the $10 bill in one of the soap wrappers, jumble up the bars and start selling to the yokels. But always it was one of “Soapy’s” confederates who got the $10 bill, which they kept on using until they finally wore it out and had to replace it with a new one.

            

     The Klondike never knew another character quite like “Soapy” Smith who was far to clever to engage in any rough stuff himself. With a gracious bow, he would present a poke containing $100 in gold dust to the parson of Skagway’s Union Church on Sunday morning and then that night one of his gang would crawl under the parson’s tent and get it back. When the Spanish-American War came along in 1898 he wrote President Mckinley for permission to open a recruiting station and the President, unaware of “Soapy’s” character, sent him a letter of authorization. With a fake army doctor, he set up a recruiting office in the back of his saloon; when applicants were stripped for physical examination a confederate secretly went through their pockets.

 

 

“Soapy” Smith’s Last Bluff Was Called

 

            “Things finally reached such a stage that the decent citizenry of Skagway rose up in arms to put an end to “Soapy” and his gang and formed the famous ‘Committee of 101,’ said Mr. League. “’Soapy’ responded to the challenge by renaming his saloon and gambling house ‘The 303.’”

 

              “One day early in July 1898, the Citizen’ Committee held a meeting at the end of the long pier, to be safe from ‘Soapy’s’ spies. They posted a civil engineer named Frank H. Reid at the land end of the wharf, to keep intruders away. Frank Reid was a mild-looking little man, but he had plenty of guts."

 

              “’Soapy’ was drunk in his saloon that day. He heard about the meeting, picked up his rifle and announced that he was going                        down to break it up. Some of his gang tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen,”

              Gun in hand, “Soapy” staggered up to Reid at the land end of the wharf.

              “Get out of my way; I’m going in there,” commanded ‘Soapy.’”

              “You’re not,” said Reid, in a quiet voice.

              “'Who in the hell’s gonna stop me?' demanded ‘Soapy.”

              “I am,” said Reid.

 

              “Soapy” Smith raised his rifle to fire, but Frank Reid was equally quick on the draw. Both men fired at the same instant. Reid’s bullet grazed “Soapy” Smith’s left wrist, followed his upraised arm and lodged in his heart. He died, almost instantly. “Soapy’s” lone bullet struck Reid in a vital spot. He lingered for two weeks and when he died the appreciative citizens of Skagway erected a monument in his memory.

 

 

Managed Opera House At Dawson City

 

       “I heard the shot that killed ‘Soapy’ Smith, and 15 minutes later I saw his body in the Palace Undertaking Parlors,” said Mr. League. “He had evidently been killed when he had the gun to his shoulder, as the seared place on his wrist was there to show for it.”

With “Soapy” dead, citizen’s posses quickly rounded up his gang and jailed them on the upper floor of an old frame building. There were threats of a wholesale lynching but cooler heads prevailed and the outlaws were “deported” from Alaska on the next ship leaving for the States.

 

        About a month after “Soapy” Smith was killed the citizens of Skagway awoke one morning to find a huge skull, built of rock and painted white, on the mountainside above the town. It was labeled “Soapy Smith’s Skull.” Nobody knew how it got there; no one knows until yet.

 

         In 1899 the big strike at Dawson City was on and League went there. Transportation was difficult to obtain at any price, so he and three companions sailed 640 miles down the Yukon River in a 30-foot boat they had built themselves and put together with wooden pins. The trio left Skagway early in October and arrived at Dawson City on Nov. 11, just a few days before the Winter freeze set in.

         Dawson City was about like Skagway, but there was more law and order in this British town, as it was patrolled by the Royal Northwest Mounted Police in their scarlet coats, and also by the Yukon Field Force, consisting of regular British soldiers. No strong-armed professional bouncers were needed in the dance halls and saloons, for these men did their duty.

 

         At Dawson City, League managed the “opry house,” which had the usual saloon and dance hall in connection. One of the waiters who peddled drinks among the miner-patrons was a young Greek named Alexander Pantages, who later became a theatrical millionaire and who built what is now the Warner Theater in Memphis. A girl buck and wing dancer in League’s show, with whom Alexander Pantages formed an attachment, taught him the first thing he ever knew about the show business.

 

 

“Swiftwater Bill’s” Revenge Cost Gussie Her Eggs

 

       “Men were thawing gold out of the mountains and money there was plenty,” said Mr. League. “One night a drunken miner occupying a box called on of the girl performers to a spot directly under him, opened his poke and poured gold dust on her head; It was a $50 shampoo. A miner named Hauser fell in love with a dance hall girl and offered the girl her weight in gold to marry him. She weighed 135 pounds avoirdupois or 2100 ounces troy. At $18 an ounce, his wife cost him around $38,000. But he paid it.”

 

         Another Dawson City character of those turbulent days was “Swiftwater Bill” Gates, an intimate friend of Jack London, who was then living there.

 

       “’Swiftwater Bill’ had a girl named Gussie Lamour, who had a strong fondness for eggs and he bought her plenty of them even though eggs cost $1 apiece,” said Mr. League. “One night ‘Swiftwater Bill’ got drunk and he and Gussie had an awful row. He determined he would get revenge on Gussie by depriving her of eggs for her breakfast. So he bought up every egg in Dawson City, taking over the stocks of all the restaurants and even that of the Alaska Commission Company, a wholesale house. You can imagine what his revenge must have cost him.

 

         The ice in the Yukon broke up earlier than usual in the Spring of 1900, and May of that year found League and three companions heading down the river toward the Arctic Circle in League’s 30-foot sailing boat. They sailed down the stream for days, between lazy mountains and the velvet valleys in the first flush of Spring, until they came to Circle City.

 

 

Tex Rickard Didn’t Forget a Friend

 

        At Circle City, League met a hungry man who was broke and grub-staked him. That man was later to become known to the world as Tex Rickard, perhaps the most famous prizefight promoter of all time.

 

        “Tex Rickard wasn’t a prospector; he was a gambler, but he was as fair and square as a die,” Mr. League said. “He’d run into a streak of hard luck with the cards and lost his bankroll.”

 

         From Circle City, League and his companions sailed on down the Yukon to St. Michael, a mining camp at the river’s mouth – 2400 miles from Dawson City. The journey took 45 days, the trio subsisting on bacon and beans and coffee and on chance supplies purchased at Indian trading posts along the way.

 

         At St. Michael they began staking claims on Norton Sound, into which the Yukon emptied, and on the Norton River that lay farther to the North. They busied themselves there for several months until a storm wrecked their boat on Rocky Point, near a mining village known as Bluff City, and then they took a tug to Nome, which was only 100 miles away. All of them were broke.

 

          “At Nome”, said Mr. League, “I found Tex Rickard running a gambling house, known as ‘The North Pole.’ He welcomed me with open arms and gave me a job as a bartender in his place. Tex was a gambler, but a fairer and squarer man never lived. There was nothing crooked around his place; you got a run for your money and if you were lucky, you won."

 

League soon became manager of Nome's Monte Carlo Theater, much like the other "opry houses" he had encountered, and in this capacity, he met Rex Beach. The latter, a budding young author, was working a claim on Anvil Creek and writing stories for Everybody's Magazine. It was then that Rex Beach wrote for League the play "A Trip to Bedrock" which the latter dramatized in his theater.

League shared a cabin with a happy-go-lucky young prospector named Louie Lane who, of all things, had brought a couple of monkeys to Alaska as pets. They kept the little animals warm by keeping a roaring fire in the pot-bellied stove.

 

"These monkeys were a subject of intense curiosity to the Eskimos who came from as far North as Kotzebue Sound on the Arctic Circle to see them," said Mr. League. "They had never seen any animals like them before and they simply couldn't figure them out.

"One of the most curious was an older Eskimo named 'Happy Jack,' who hung around nome, etching your picture on a cribbage board with a sharp walrus tusk and coloring it with red dye that he obtained by boiling soap wrappers. That Eskimo was a real artist; I've got one of his cribbage boards now with my picture on it.

 

 

Monkeys Were Their Dead Ancestors

 

     "Just for fun, I told 'Happy Jack' that the monkeys were re-incarnated Eskimos--that when an Eskimo died he went to the warm, sunny land down South and turned into a monkey. He believed it, and he used to bring other Eskimos to our cabin to see their departed ancestors. The monkeys would chatter and I would pretend to translate the message they were giving; then 'Happy Jack' would translate this into Eskimo for the other Eskimos gathered in the cabin. Often they would ask questions about their ancestors, how they were faring in the warm sunny land far to the South, etc. I would cause the monkeys to chatter and then answer them."

 

One By One, Dogs Dropped in Their Tracks

 

     His most memorable experience in Alaska?.....Gray-haired Mr. League wrinkled his brow, as if searching through his memories of nearly 40 years ago, when I asked the question.

 

     "I guess," he replied thoughtfully, "It was the time that 'Cigar,' a gigantic Husky with a wolf strain in his blood and the docility of a child, whose deeds in real life rivaled the fictional exploits of Buck, the canine hero of Jack London's 'Call of the Wild'."

Louie Lane, driving seven dogs to his sled, was far back in the gold country one day when an Artic blizzard closed in. Sleet that lashed like sharp-edged razor blades began pelting down, lashed by a howling gale that knifed both man and dog to the marrow. The trail vanished behind them as the snowdrifts deepened.

 

Suddenly, the frightened dogs wheeled and overturned the sled, breaking Lane's left leg and dumping his provisions into the snow. Painfully he succeeded in righting the sled, crawled aboard it, turned the dogs around and gave the command: "Mush!" Back toward Nome the dogs started, the fierce Arctic storm screaming in their ears.

 

One by one, the dogs dropped in their tracks and died as they strained at the harness and struggled through the snow and blinding sleet. Each time Lane crawled painfully from the sled and cut loose the dead dog's harness. Finally, all the dogs were dead except 'Cigar' ---and that was the last that Lane remembered for then he lapsed into unconsciousness.

 

Sometime later--- nobody ever knew just how long it was --- "Cigar" came staggering into Nome, straining his mighty muscles against his moosehide harness as he dragged the sled containing his unconscious master. He struggled to the door of Lane's cabin and there he dropped in his tracks.

 

Friendly hands soon carried both man and dog inside the cabin, where a big fire was roaring in the stove. Hours passed before Lane regained consciousness.

 

     "When Lane came to," said Mr. League, "the first thing he did was to ask about 'Cigar' and call the big dog to his bedside. We were all standing around; we saw 'Cigar' get up from his place near the stove and start slowly toward his master's bed. But en route to the bed, the big dog first stumbled into a chair and then he stumbled against a table leg.

 

"And thus we found out," said Mr. League, "that 'Cigar' was blind. Either the stinging sleet had injured his eyeballs or else the terrific exertion of pulling the heavy sled alone through the storm had snapped something inside of him."

 

For days, the big blind dog was the hero of Nome. Everybody wanted to see him, everybody wanted to pat his shaggy head. And then one-day 'Cigar' wandered with unseeing eyes into a stable where a mule kicked him in the head and killed him.

"It nearly broke Louie Lane's heart," said Mr. League, "but I guess, after all, it was a merciful act,"

League remained in Nome until 1904 and then he sailed for home, after eight years in the North.

 

References

 

Memphis Commercial Appeal, January 30, 1938

1. "Archie League - Historical records and family trees - MyHeritage". www.myheritage.com. Retrieved 2018-01-11. 

2. "Archie League - Historical records and family trees - MyHeritage". www.myheritage.com. Retrieved 2018-01-11. 

3. "Archie League". Wikipedia. 2017-12-17. 

4. "WMC (AM)". Wikipedia. 2017-11-14. 

5. "WREC". Wikipedia. 2018-01-09. 

6. "The Commercial Appeal - Memphis Breaking News and Sports". The Commercial Appeal. Retrieved 2018-01-11. 

7. "Archie League - Historical records and family trees - MyHeritage". www.myheritage.com. Retrieved 2018-01-11. 

8. "Archie League - Historical records and family trees - MyHeritage". www.myheritage.com. Retrieved 2018-01-12. 

9. "The Commercial Appeal - Memphis Breaking News and Sports". The Commercial Appeal. Retrieved 2018-01-10.