The Packer and the Klondike Angel
Jack Newman and Mollie Walsh
“I’m a better man, a better citizen, for having known Mollie Walsh. She influenced me always for the good. Her spirit fingers still reach across the years and play on the slackened strings of my old heart, and my heart still sings. Mollie! My hearts still sings but in such sad undertone that none but God and I can hear.”
Jack Newman – 1930
Mollie Walsh raced out of her house on Pike Street, in Seattle, crying. A look of panic filled her face. It was October 27, 1902. It was raining. Mollie was petrified and sick with the flu. She glanced over her shoulder just in time to see her husband, Michael Bartlett, burst through the front door and come after her. He swore at her and shouted for her to stop, but she only ran faster. Mike Bartlett pulled a revolver out of his pocket, took aim, and fired two shots. Both bullets hit Mollie in the back. She fell face first into the mud, reeled up once, and then died. She was thirty years old.
Not long after, Jack Newman, a handsome man with a square jaw and lively chestnut hair, sat at the bar at Clancy’s Saloon in Skagway, Alaska. A few tears fell into his beer. With his big fist he wiped the other tears he couldn’t hold back off his face and mustache. In his hand he held a dog-eared photograph of Mollie Walsh and a copy of her obituary he had found in the Klondike Nugget newspaper. “To have known such a great and exalted love,” Jack mumbled to himself,” and have it flee from your grasp.” Jack took his drink over to the window to watch a heavy snow blanket the soggy streets and remember his great and exalted love.
Mollie Walsh was lured to Alaska in 1897. Gold had just been discovered in the Klondike, and like other “stampeders,” Mollie embarked on a journey for fortune and glory. She was a diminutive and gracious woman of twenty-six with long, dark hair and a dusting of freckles across her nose. She arrived in Skagway in October and worked as a cook and waitress in one of the town’s nineteen restaurants. She saved her money and eventually opened her own “tent road house” near the tiny mining town of Log Cabin.
To learn more about Mollie Walsh, her relationship with Jack Newman, and her tragic demise at the hand of her husband, read Love Untamed: Romances of the Old West.
