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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79395 ***
+
+
+
+
+                  [Illustration: The Chilkoot Pass.]
+
+
+
+
+                            IN THE KLONDYKE
+
+                        INCLUDING AN ACCOUNT OF
+
+                     A WINTER’S JOURNEY TO DAWSON
+
+                                  BY
+
+                           FREDERICK PALMER
+
+                             _ILLUSTRATED_
+
+                        CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
+                             NEW YORK 1899
+
+
+
+
+                          COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY
+                        CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
+
+
+                            TROW DIRECTORY
+                   PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
+                               NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  I. THE START FROM DYEA
+
+  Choosing Comrades--Jack Beltz and his Dogs--Fritz Gamble--From
+  Sheep Camp to the Summit--Packing over the Chilkoot Pass--The
+  Halt at Lake Linderman--A Night in a Sleeping Bag--Coasting
+  down the Frozen Yukon--Half Way to Dawson      _Page 1_
+
+  II. ON THE TRAIL
+
+  Personalities--The Forebears of Jack and Fritz--Good Camp Manners--Dog
+  Individuality--Dude--The Team of Huskies--Wayfarers
+  at Five Fingers--Fort Selkirk and Pelly--The Thanksgiving
+  Turkey that Did Not Get to Dawson--A Diet of Flapjacks--Suburbs
+  of the Klondyke Capital--The Passing of the Trail      _Page 36_
+
+  III. DAWSON
+
+  Social Aspects of Dawson--Cornering the Tinned Food Market--Cheechawkos
+  and Old-Timers in the Early Days      _Page 61_
+
+  IV. THE FIRST DISCOVERIES
+
+  The Beginning of Mining in Alaska--Forty Mile Creek--Canadian
+  and American Deposits--The Largest Log-Cabin Town in the
+  World--Life of the First Adventurers--The Superfluity of
+  Six-Shooters--Leaving the Latch-Strings Out--The Way of the
+  Transgressors--Indian Charley and his Nugget      _Page 66_
+
+  V. MINERS AND MINING
+
+  Reaping the Gold Harvest--Thawing and Sluicing--Miners and their
+  Theories--The Dome--Expensive Timber--Empty Pockets but
+  Dollars in the Dumps--The First Millionnaires--Color in the Pan--Once
+  a Prospector Always a Prospector--Figuring Fortunes--Capitalists
+  in Demand--The Forty Happy Kings on Eldorado      _Page 85_
+
+  VI. SOME KLONDYKE TYPES
+
+  The Fool and his Lucky Friends--More Theorizers--Joe Staley and
+  Billy Deddering--French Gulch Bench--Good Fortune that
+  was Deserved--Neighbors and Twins--No Cure for the Gold
+  Fever      _Page 111_
+
+  VII. GETTING ACQUAINTED
+
+  Mr. and Mrs. “Meenach” and their Menage--The Juvenile Mining
+  Company, Limited--Voss--The Arch-Deacon--A Sour-Dough
+  Stiff--A Dalmatian and a Turk--Siawash George and his Steam-Engine--Miss
+  Mulrooney at The Forks--The Price of a “Square”
+  with Trimmings      _Page 126_
+
+  VIII. ARCTIC TRAITS
+
+  Daily Life in Dawson--Renting a Cabin--Circumventing the Huskies--Joey
+  Boureau and his Restaurant--The Faro Dealer’s Wife and
+  her Bakery--The Laundryman and his Claim--Jack Beltz’s
+  Schemes--A Pair of Dreamers      _Page 153_
+
+  IX. PILGRIMS’ TRAILS AND TRIALS
+
+  Itineraries--Alleged Unimportance of Experience--The Case of Father
+  Stanley--Press Agents and Primers of Wealth--The Secretary of
+  the Seattle Chamber of Commerce his own Convert--Pardners
+  and Promoters--Outfits--Home Comforts for an Arctic
+  Climate--Heterogeneous Boat Loads--The Nancy G--Tragedies of the
+  Passes      _Page 163_
+
+  X. PROFITS AND LOSSES
+
+  Newspapers as Profit-Winners--Hearing about Dewey--A Drop in
+  Eggs--Market Items--Lemons against Scurvy--The Mercury at
+  110 Degrees--An Averted Moving Day--Industrious Scavengers--The
+  Klondyke Itself--Aspects of Summer--Bandanna Hats and
+  Pink Lemonade--A Restaurant Trust--The Grasshoppers and
+  the Ants--Disillusions      _Page 181_
+
+  XI. GOVERNMENT
+
+  The Canadian Policy in the Yukon Province--Taxes and Fees--The
+  Gold Commissioner’s Office--Conflicts between Territorial and
+  Dominion Governments--Timber Grants--The Value of the
+  Mounted Police--The Newly Rich at Dawson--The Order of
+  the Yukon Pioneers--Mrs. Constantine      _Page 200_
+
+  XII. DOWN THE YUKON AND HOME
+
+  Good-By to Dawson--The Extinction of the Unfit--Steamboating to
+  St. Michaels--Mosquitoes and Sandbars--Pilgrims by the All-Water
+  Route--Behring Sea--Civilization Once More      _Page 212_
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  The Chilkoot Pass                                       _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                                  FACING
+                                                                   PAGE
+
+  “Packing” Timber                                                     8
+
+  Pilgrims Resting on the Chilkoot                                     8
+
+  A Halt                                                              14
+
+  Guiding the Team                                                    18
+
+  Borrowing a Hint from Ice-Boats--Just Above White Horse Rapids      22
+
+  Over the Bench Ice of Thirty Mile River                             26
+
+  Crossing a Brook                                                    32
+
+  In Camp--The Dogs’ Porridge                                         40
+
+  The First Boats                                                     54
+
+  A Typical Pilgrims’ Boat                                            66
+
+  Yukon Indians                                                       78
+
+  On the Creeks                                                       88
+
+  A Flume on Bonanza Creek                                           102
+
+  Cleaning Up                                                        108
+
+  Shovelling a Clean-Up into a Gold Pan                              108
+
+  The Discoverers of French Gulch Bench at Work                      124
+
+  Pardners and Twins for Forty Years                                 124
+
+  Miss Mulrooney of The Forks                                        142
+
+  Jack Beltz                                                         156
+
+  “The Huskies”                                                      156
+
+  On the Pass                                                        164
+
+  Caches of Pilgrims’ Outfits at the Summit                          172
+
+  Bargaining for a Newly Arrived Boat-Load, Dawson                   182
+
+  In the Camps of the Cheechawkos                                    188
+
+  A Yukon Steamer                                                    198
+
+  The Main Street of Dawson                                          208
+
+  A Dawson Good-By                                                   214
+
+
+
+
+IN THE KLONDYKE
+
+I
+
+THE START FROM DYEA
+
+ CHOOSING COMRADES--JACK BELTZ AND HIS DOGS--FRITZ GAMBLE--FROM SHEEP
+ CAMP TO THE SUMMIT--PACKING OVER THE CHILKOOT PASS--THE HALT AT
+ LAKE LINDERMAN--A NIGHT IN A SLEEPING BAG--COASTING DOWN THE FROZEN
+ YUKON--HALF WAY TO DAWSON.
+
+
+Originally, I had intended to accompany our Government expedition for
+the relief of the miners of the Klondyke, which was in part mobilized
+at Dyea when I arrived there late in February. As it never went any
+farther, for the good reason that Dawson had been rescued from famine
+by the migration of a portion of its population, I was left to my own
+resources. Wholesome fatigue and clean camps on the snow were better
+than the hospitality of a mushroom town built of rough boards and
+tar-paper; a little adventure was better than watching for two months
+the thousands of pilgrims of fortune in the desperate and monotonous
+labor of putting their outfits over the passes; and I determined,
+rather than to wait with them for the opening of navigation, to
+undertake with dogs and sleds of my own the untried journey of six
+hundred miles over the ice-fields of the Lewes lakes and the ice-packs
+of the Yukon River which the Government expedition had contemplated.
+
+Whoever was to go with me must be companionable, industrious, and
+loyal, lest in pitching a tent in a storm, when limbs ached from the
+strain of the day’s tramp, an unruly temper might lead to the crisis of
+blows or separation. In turn, I must work as hard as he; for we could
+not afford to carry food for a stomach that nourished idle hands.
+
+Precisely the right kind of comrade, equipped with experience, I had
+hoped would be forthcoming from among the men who had violated the
+traditions of the early communities of gold-seekers in regard to winter
+travel. Some members of this hardy little army were almost daily
+arriving in Dyea. But their dogs were worn out, and they themselves
+were inclined to laugh at my suggestion, more particularly at my money.
+Having pointed out the greater difficulties of ingress than of egress,
+they asked, with a touch of sarcasm, if I thought that they had made
+the journey out from Dawson for the purpose of immediately retracing
+their steps.
+
+Meanwhile, adventurous spirits but lately arrived from Seattle or San
+Francisco came to offer their services with all the self-confidence
+characteristic of a floating population. The references of some
+were belied by their demeanor, and the demeanor of others by their
+references. All were further belied by their dogs--Newfoundlands,
+setters, and what not--which had received a few days’ training for
+market purposes in Seattle. In consequence, I was almost despairing,
+when I was accosted by a powerfully built, blond-haired, blue-eyed
+fellow who impressed his personality upon me at once.
+
+“I hear you’re lookin’ for a dog-puncher,” he said, awkwardly. “My
+name’s Jack Beltz. I’ve been a cowboy, and done a good many other
+things in the West, and now I’m up against it with the crowd in Alaska.
+I think I could do what you want”--and then with sudden fervor, “but
+come around and look at the dogs! If the dogs are no good, you don’t
+want me, that’s sure.”
+
+“Any further references?”
+
+“Well,” after a moment’s thought, “there’s Bangs, up at the Miner’s
+Rest. He knowed me when I was on a ranch in Nebrasky. Dunno what he’ll
+say. You can ask him, though. Anyhow, I’d be obliged if you’d see the
+dogs ’fore you make a decision.”
+
+He waited outside the Miner’s Rest while I spoke with Bangs.
+
+“Jack Beltz!” exclaimed Bangs. “Well, Jack Beltz’s a fool when it comes
+to hosses and dawgs. He thinks they can talk. But Jack Beltz’ll stick
+to a thing that’s hard--he don’t like things that ain’t--till he comes
+out of it or goes down with it, and all the mules in the army couldn’t
+make him mad.”
+
+Then I followed Jack to a woodpile in the outskirts of the town,
+where five fat and sleek huskies awoke at his approach, and at his
+command lined up like so many soldiers, wagging their bushy tails over
+their backs and watching his every movement with their sharp eyes.
+From their mothers, who were native Indian dogs, they had inherited
+their affection for man, however poor the specimen, and from their
+fathers, who were full-blooded wolves of the forest, their strength and
+endurance.
+
+In an hour after I had met him I had engaged Jack Beltz on the strength
+of the fat on his dogs’ ribs, of his blue eyes, and of Bangs’s candid
+recommendation. Placing my theoretical knowledge of the needs of an
+arctic climate against his experience as a frontiersman, we quickly
+made out a list of the supplies which were to be packed on our sleds,
+minimizing everything in weight and bulk as far as we dared, but being
+very careful to consider that while we might go hungry the dogs must
+not. In all, we took eleven hundred pounds, four hundred of food and
+bedding for ourselves and seven hundred of food for the dogs.
+
+Chance made the choice of a third member of the party, whose assistance
+was necessary, as happy as the choice of its second. This big fellow,
+over six feet in height, was Frederick Gamble, known to his friends as
+Fritz, who had given up a career as an artist and had already spent one
+unprofitable season with a pick and a pack in the Cassiar district. No
+pilgrim accustomed to good living ever accepted a diet of bacon and
+beans with better philosophy.
+
+It was already the 18th of March. If, as the old-timers said, the Yukon
+became impassable by the 20th of April, we had little time to spare.
+There was much in our surroundings on the day of our departure to lend
+credence to their opinion. The sun, at midday, which turned the blue
+of the little glaciers over our heads into a red, united with the wind
+blowing from the ocean to thaw the snow on the mountain sides. In the
+many places where the winter trail had been worn down to the sand of
+the flats which the Dyea River overflows in the freshets of spring,
+the pilgrims had to turn off to the still intact but spongy ice of the
+winding little stream of the autumn and winter to find a better track
+for their sleds.
+
+Canyon City, where the comparatively level stretch of eight miles of
+the flats is at an end and the real ascent of eight miles to the summit
+of the Pass begins, had grown into a little village with three saloons
+since I had last visited it, only two weeks before. Here the river is a
+thundering cataract in spring, dashing through a narrow gorge of rocks
+which rise to a height of from twenty to a hundred feet. The sled road
+of trodden snow with a basis of ice had become so mushy that the men
+who panted forward, dragging their sleds and asking with their eyes,
+if not with their tongues, for a hand to help them out of ruts, were
+wondering whether they would not be forced to take to the summer trail
+running over the wall of the canyon on the morrow.
+
+Beyond the canyon was a community of thousands of tents, Sheeps Camp,
+a halfway station in the work of transportation from Dyea to the
+Summit if not in the number of miles. It had doubled if not trebled in
+population since I had last seen it, which meant that the bulk of the
+pilgrims had their outfits this far on their journey. I slept here, the
+guest of some friends who had an excellent bed of fir boughs. Before I
+was up I knew that the day on the Summit was fair by the tramping of
+the packers and the howls of the dogs in the main path, or street, of
+the “town.” At this time, most of the days on the Summit were fair,
+and it behooved the pilgrims to make the most of them. In midwinter
+it often happened that intense cold and a fierce storm of fine snow,
+resembling a blizzard in the Dakotas, made the Summit impassable.
+
+The series of steep ascents leading from Sheep Camp to the base of the
+final, long, and much steeper ascent, called as a whole by the pilgrims
+the Summit, was a struggling line of men and dogs, drawing sleds, and
+of horses with packs. Oaths and howls were so numerous that no one oath
+or howl came to the ear distinctly. You heard only noise, as you hear
+an uproar of individual shouts at a national convention. In the early
+days the pioneers had given to the little plateau at the base of the
+final ascent the name of the Scales, because at this point they were
+wont to balance their packs and readjust them for the last grim effort.
+Beyond this neither horse nor mule could carry nor dog could draw a
+load. The more supple animal man took his place.
+
+If you would see the Pass, of which so much was written when so little
+was known of the Klondyke itself, you have only to imagine a broad
+incline at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees, seven hundred feet
+in height, running between two snowy peaks at its summit, with men in
+the foreground bending under the weight of heavy packs, and gradually
+growing smaller as they ascend, until, finally, they seem like ants
+dangerously near toppling over with their loads, though, to your relief
+and amazement, crawling off the white blanket into the sky.
+
+[Illustration: Pilgrims Resting on the Chilkoot.]
+
+[Illustration: “Packing” Timber.]
+
+In the hard, well-packed snow, steps had been cut, making it a case of
+walking up-stairs rather than of climbing. At intervals, more welcome
+than the chairs on the landings of an apartment house which has no
+elevator, seats had been cut. Men stepping out of the slow-moving line
+found rest in these. It was not “game” to groan, but purple faces and
+lungs gasping for more power for bodies quivering with excess of strain
+told of misery that was felt if not expressed. When a man did break
+down he collapsed utterly, and sometimes he wept.
+
+Fifty pounds was the usual weight of a pack for all who did not take
+pride in exhibiting their brute strength. These, and the professional
+packers who bore the outfits of pilgrims who could afford this luxury,
+often labored under a hundred pounds or more. The hero of the day was
+an Indian. He took up a barrel weighing three hundred and fifty pounds.
+A Swede who crawled up on his hands and knees with three six-by-four
+timbers strapped on his back shared honors with him, however. The
+descent to the Scales was delightfully simple. You sat down and
+tobogganed, using your heels as a brake, without any unpleasant
+results if you had well-riveted overalls.
+
+On the crest were piled hundreds of pilgrims’ outfits, separated one
+from another by narrow paths, making the whole seem like a city in
+miniature. Buried under the seventy feet of snow which had fallen
+during the winter were two other such cities, which their owners hoped
+to recover in the summer. Beyond floated a large British flag over
+the little block-house where the British Northwest Mounted Police had
+established themselves to collect customs and to see that no one not
+having a special permit entered Canadian territory with less than a
+year’s supply of food.
+
+Jack labored for two hours in bringing up the dogs with the empty
+sleds, while our goods came on the backs of the ants, who charged three
+cents a pound for the service. Aside from the five huskies hitched to
+a large basket-sled, we had two St. Bernards, “Patsy” and “Tim,” who
+were born in the country, and duly christened and acclimatized there.
+With “Patsy” and “Tim,” and my hand on the “gee-pole” by which the sled
+was guided, I went under fire for the first time in descending the
+inland side of the pass. Man and sled were put _hors de combat_ again
+and again, while the dogs, who managed to keep erect, looked back on
+me with professional disgust. I wanted to blame my misfortunes to my
+moccasins, but Jack wore moccasins as well and maintained his footing
+easily. Fortunately for the novice there are three small lakes--at the
+time they were three fields of snow--in the nine miles from the Summit
+to Linderman, and he could take advantage of the respite when he was
+trotting across these to think out, in the hard-and-fast civilized
+manner, how to avoid his frequent loss of equilibrium.
+
+We spent the night “at home” with Jack in his own camp on the shore
+of Lake Linderman. Jack and his “pardner” Cliff had been among the
+pilgrims who had attempted to reach Dawson in the same summer that the
+news of the great “strike” was received by the outside world. The ice
+formed in the lakes and rivers before they could build their boats,
+and there had been nothing to do but to wait eight months until the
+ice was gone. Once he had bought a team of dogs, however, Jack became
+enamoured of making the journey now at last before him. On the other
+hand nothing apparently had disturbed the patience of Cliff, who was a
+broad-shouldered giant, over six feet in height. The pair had first met
+in Seattle, formed an alliance “for dust or bust,” as Cliff said, and
+had thought more of each other “every minute ever since.” Cliff was to
+stay at Linderman now, but their alliance was resumed later in Dawson,
+when Jack, Fritz, and I dissolved partnership.
+
+While we were putting our outfits straight and Jack was writing a
+letter--from his sighs I concluded that it was to his best girl--Cliff
+cooked flapjacks and fried bacon, sang snatches of what had been the
+latest popular songs when he left Colorado, and talked to his favorite
+dog, a Great Dane, who was as scarred as a veteran.
+
+“Think you’re going to be slighted, don’t you, Maje?” he rambled
+on. “Froze off your ears already, ain’t you? ’Tain’t no country for
+short-haired dogs, is it? Don’t want to lose your tail, too. No, sir.
+You’re going to sleep in the tent same’s ever, and if they don’t like
+it I’ll tell you ‘sickum,’ and they won’t be with us long.”
+
+Major curled up at Cliff’s feet as usual that night. Inasmuch as he had
+a snow-bath whenever he was caught in a storm, he was more agreeable
+than many human beings whose bodies had not touched water for months.
+
+In a day we had passed over the only portion of our journey on land,
+and we were henceforth, as Jack put it gayly, to proceed downhill with
+the current of the river at the rate of eight inches to the mile,
+which is fast enough as currents go, but rather poor coasting. The
+course of the Yukon through the heart of Alaska is in a semicircle,
+with one end at the coast and the other end as near to the coast as
+the head-waters of a stream can be, unless it flows on the level. Once
+he has reached the lakes, the prospector may float for 2,600 miles to
+Bering Sea, and but for this one of the two friendly deeds of nature in
+Alaska--the other is abundant firewood--it is questionable if the gold
+in the Klondyke would have been discovered in our generation. De Soto’s
+exploring party would have had a similar advantage if the Mississippi
+had risen within thirty-two miles of Cape Hatteras, and they would have
+needed it if the valley of the Mississippi had been like the valley of
+the Yukon.
+
+In harnessing our dogs at dawn, as we looked out across Lake Linderman
+from Jack’s camp, the only color in sight in the vast expanse of
+white was the needle-like fir-trees, cropping through the snow on the
+mountain-sides, and the outlines of a few pilgrims in advance of the
+main body, already astir, dragging their sleds on to Lake Bennett,
+where, with whipsaws, hammers, nails, oakum, and pitch, was to be built
+out of the forests the unique and variegated flotilla which was to
+line the river-banks in front of Dawson in May and June. Jack snapped
+the long lash of his whip, shook the “gee-pole” to free the runners,
+cried “Mush!”--a Saxon contraction of the “_Marchons!_” brought into
+the country along with many other words by the French Canadians--and
+seven gallant four-footed comrades and three figures in parkees looking
+like hooded night-shirts began in earnest their journey over the trail
+hardened by the pilgrims’ footsteps. By the wayside we passed caches
+of waterproof bags, one of them at either end of a pilgrim’s route of
+daily toil in moving his outfit forward by relays, his own ambition
+making him undergo longer hours and greater strain than he, a free
+citizen (U. S. A.), would have endured for any other master.
+
+[Illustration: A Halt.]
+
+Linderman is only four miles long, and we were soon on Bennett,
+where the afternoon brought, in sharp contrast to the keen atmosphere
+of the morning, a blowing storm of moist snow which wet us to the skin.
+When Jack halted the dogs for our first and our worst camp, whose only
+consolation was a water-hole that had been made by some pilgrim, they
+set up a howl of knowing delight.
+
+With the snow up to my waist I cut firewood out of the abundance
+of dead timber, and then cut green spruce-boughs, which, when laid
+tufts upward on the snow that was packed down as a floor for our
+seven-by-seven tent, made a soft bed. Then I went for a pail of water
+and brought in my sleeping-bag, and my work was done. The air had
+cleared suddenly, and the weather had turned so cold that my parkee
+had frozen as stiff as a board. I pulled it off, substituted dry
+moccasins and socks for my wet ones, left the rest of my clothes to be
+dried by the warmth of my body, and then, huddling myself up with my
+sleeping-bag as a seat, I watched my comrades finishing their allotted
+tasks.
+
+Fritz, who had been chosen cook, was sitting with one leg on either
+side of the little sheet-iron stove, smoking a cigarette and making
+flapjacks. Outside, by the light of the crackling blaze, I could see
+Jack stirring something in a pan over a roaring fire with a big ladle
+that he had whittled out of a sapling. Weirdly presiding over this
+operation, their bodies in shadow and their wolf-noses thrust forward
+with epicurean relish, were the huskies. Jack fed them only once a day,
+but then all that they could eat of tallow, bacon, cornmeal, and rice,
+thoroughly boiled in the form of a porridge. When he took the pan off
+the fire he put it, safely covered, in the snow to cool, while the dogs
+mounted guard over it, glaring at one another; and then he came to sit
+on his own bed, and together we ate by the light of a candle hanging
+by a piece of wire from the top of the tent. As I had my granite-ware
+plate filled with beans the second time and took my fourth flapjack--a
+flapjack an inch thick and seven inches in diameter--a twinkle came
+into Jack’s eyes.
+
+“I like to see a man in earnest,” he said.
+
+Then he relighted his pipe and went back to his dogs. Having filled a
+two-quart tin pan for each of them, with the ardor of a child he heaped
+more timber on the dying fire, and, turning his back to the cheerful
+glow, began a technical conversation on the state of the trail with
+sleek old Dude, the leader of the team.
+
+Later, when he returned to the tent, the dogs were so many balls of
+fur, their noses snuggled under their bushy tails. If two feet of snow
+had fallen during the night it would not have disturbed the serenity of
+their slumbers, and in the morning at the call to harness they would
+have dug their way out and shaken themselves ready for duty. Jack
+explained, as he pulled off his moccasins, that they had eaten only
+half their usual rations. Having been treated to beefsteak in Dyea by
+their generous owner, they rather resented marching fare; but they
+would come down to it as soon as they felt the pangs of hunger, he
+added.
+
+“Are you tired?” I asked him.
+
+“Me? No,” he drawled.
+
+He filled up the stove--he must always have a fire of some kind
+going--and, leaning back on his robe, his hands behind his head,
+he looked up at the top of the tent dreamily. He was still in this
+attitude when I crawled into my sleeping-bag and quickly fell asleep.
+The sleeping-bag did well enough for that night, but I soon repented
+of it. With no opportunity for airing it properly, it soon collected
+moisture and became as uncomfortable as a coating of ice. After I had
+been kept awake for a night by the colder weather that followed the
+storm, I ripped it open and used the furs as a robe, which, with the
+assistance of a heavy blanket, kept me as warm as toast, though, when I
+awoke, there was a glacial path through the space I had left open for
+breathing. The wonder to me was that Jack did not freeze his nose--it
+was a large nose--for he always slept with his head completely outside
+of his coverings, his beard becoming as white with ice as that of
+Father Christmas.
+
+“Blister me if I want to smother!” was his explanation.
+
+The first one to awake in the morning crawled half-way out of his
+robe, and, dexterously leaning over, put the coffee-pot on the stove
+and made the fire out of the kindlings which were always ready. To
+dress was to put on your footwear, which had been drying--if it had
+not been burning--before the stove. Then the robes and blankets were
+rolled up and strapped to serve as seats for breakfast, and you stepped
+outside into the invigorating air and did what you might in the way of
+cleanliness. For my part, I washed my hands in the snow, using soap
+liberally, with astonishingly efficacious results. After breakfast we
+had to pack all the things that we had unpacked the night before back
+on the sleds and lash them.
+
+[Illustration: Guiding the Team.]
+
+On the Lewes lakes, and the streams which join them in a chain, one
+day was quite like another, with the exception of a single event of
+importance to ourselves. At daybreak we were on the level trail, now
+trotting and then walking, until our stomachs cried a halt. On three
+occasions we had luncheon in the tents of pilgrims who, not having been
+able to bring their supplies over the pass in the rush of the previous
+autumn before winter was at hand, were making for the foot of Lake Le
+Barge to take advantage of the three weeks by which the clearing of
+the ice in the river precedes the clearing of the ice in the lakes.
+While his partner was dragging his sled, one of our hosts was suffering
+in his tent the torture of snow-blindness as the penalty of having
+gone for a day without glasses. Another host, an old Dane from San
+Francisco, had no companion, not even a dog.
+
+“Sometime I do get mad,” he said, “when the sled pull so hard, and I
+say, ‘Yohn, you are a big fool to start for Klondyke when you are
+sixty-nine.’ But we do not like to gif up. Nefer do we get so old we
+tank it too late to make a fortune. If a man know as he would drop dead
+on top of the Pass, I tank a man go on to see the t’ing out. I make a
+fortune t’ree time, and efery time I haf many pad lucks--yes, very many
+pad lucks. Sometime I get lonely, and then I say, ‘Yohn, there is your
+wife, there is your shildren; it is Sunday dinner, and you are home
+with a pile of gold.’”
+
+How we relished the one rapidly diminishing ham that we had brought
+with us for our first luncheons, followed by the perfect relaxation
+which comes with good digestion and physical fatigue, glorified by
+a pipe, before we arose and turned our steps toward the brown line
+of sled-track which stretched out over the expanse of white until
+growing darkness made it dim, and Jack began to look out for the first
+favorable place for a camp!
+
+At this time it was reported that a great “strike” of $2.50 to the
+pan had been made on Walsh Creek, a tributary of the Yukon near Big
+Salmon. The rumor afterwards turned out to be an exaggeration--only
+thirty cents a pan being the amount actually found, which had grown as
+it travelled up the lakes. Many of the pilgrims, among them ourselves,
+who already had their year’s supply of food over the Pass, and some
+who had not but were able to elude the police, leaving their caches in
+charge of friends, put a tent, half a side of bacon, a few quarts of
+flour, and a few quarts of beans on a sled behind a lean house-dog, and
+hastened toward Walsh Creek without regard to fatigue or exposure. A
+sallow and swarthy Quixote who had not made even this provision for his
+stomach and none for his back except a small blanket, called upon us
+one morning when we were at breakfast. Before he asked for something to
+eat he introduced himself as a Cuban who had been a cook in New York,
+but had concluded to be a cook no more now that fortunes were to be had
+for a little hard travelling.
+
+“You see, gents,” he further explained, assuming a serene air of
+fellowship, “I’ve been walking at night so’s to get past the police
+stations. They won’t let a feller by when he ain’t got any grub. If I
+carried grub I’d be too late for the strike, mebbe.”
+
+“But you’ll observe, I’m thinkin’,” Jack suggested, “that hotels are
+few and far between in this region.”
+
+“Oh, I’ll manage to get on somehow. There’s a lot of luck in this world
+if you dodge about so it’ll hit you. I didn’t know where I’d get my
+breakfast, but I’ve got it, that’s sure.”
+
+He wished us much happiness, put his blanket on his back, and walked
+on as unconcernedly as if he had a whole baggage train at his heels.
+But this was not until he had suggested with the aplomb of the Bowery
+that we would do well to take him on as a “pardner.” What became of
+him I do not know. Possibly his body lies among a pile of driftwood on
+some sandbar in the river. On the other hand, I should not be surprised
+to see him one day on Broadway, a huge diamond in his shirt bosom and
+a blond lady on his arm, or to read an account of him in a newspaper
+under the head of “From Cook to Millionaire.”
+
+[Illustration: Borrowing a Hint from Ice-Boats--Just Above White Horse
+Rapids.]
+
+The Walsh Creek digression caused two weeks’ delay at a time when
+we felt the need of every day to complete our journey, and I accept
+the awkward responsibility for it. At White Horse Canyon we were
+offered the hospitality of a large cabin with a kitchen in one end and
+bunk-room in the other, occupied by some workmen engaged in building
+a tramway around the rapids. Jack suggested that we stop here for a
+day because the dogs needed rest, he said, but really on my account, I
+think. I had contracted a bad cough, and my legs ached like two great
+teeth. In the afternoon I lay down on the cook’s bunk, and toward
+evening Fritz started down the trail to a distant camp to find a doctor
+who had turned pilgrim of fortune. Meanwhile Jake, the cook, dosed me
+with tea made of sage that he had gathered on the mountain-side.
+
+“Your pulse is up to a hundred and ten,” the doctor said; “but all that
+you’ve got is a plain, old-fashioned case of measles. You must have
+caught them in Dyea, and you’ve greatly exaggerated them by physical
+strain.”
+
+My comrades put up a tent in another cabin which still wanted doors
+and windows, thus ensuring a soft light for the protection of my eyes,
+which the doctor feared might be affected. They nailed some saplings
+together for a bedstead, and were so ingenious in many ways, so kind in
+keeping the temperature the same night and day, and in attending to my
+wants generally, that I felt like a king in his private hospital. Jake
+came in every day to make sure that I was taking the doses of sage-tea
+that he sent in morning, noon, and night; while the big workmen came
+in to hint that I must not let Jake have his own way too much. And I
+lay on my back and thought of two things--strawberries and pineapples.
+I would have given all my wealth for either--but not a five-cent piece
+for a pear.
+
+My convalescence was not so dull as I sat on a bench in the kitchen,
+learning, under Jake’s tutelage, how to cook oatmeal properly, how to
+bake bread and to make good pies out of dried apples, and listening
+to him expound his ideas of the world. He was a great cynic. If you
+believed in one thing, he was sure to believe in another. One of his
+favorite remarks with which he baited me was that “everybody is out
+for the stuff; there ain’t no honor nowadays; and you don’t catch me
+missin’ no dollars.” His boarders excused him by saying, “Any cook
+that’s been in a minin’-camp or a lumber-camp is always a blisterin’
+crank.” On the morning of my departure I held out a bill to Jake in
+partial remuneration for what he had done for me. He stirred the
+contents of his pot this way and that, viciously, without replying. I
+protested, and then he growled:
+
+“Gwan! What d’ye take me for?”
+
+As I waved him a good-by he called out:
+
+“Young feller, you’re all right, but you won’t argue.”
+
+In two days we were at the foot of Lake Le Barge, and on the second
+of these we had travelled thirty-five miles, which made the dogs very
+unfit for service on the day following.
+
+So all of another two days’ hard work was required to go from the
+foot of Le Barge to the junction of the Hootalinqua over a portion of
+the Yukon known from its length as Thirty Mile River, and certainly
+worthy of some distinction on account of other characteristics. Many
+more boats of the pilgrims’ flotilla were wrecked in the spring on its
+hidden rocks than in the White Horse Rapids, which, I may add, have
+received undue celebrity. If an average temperature of thirty degrees
+below zero continues for several weeks, the current may freeze over,
+but rarely is there more than bench ice along the shores; and this,
+owing to the increasingly moderate weather and the falling water, was
+fast breaking away in huge cakes, which fell into the stream with a
+splash. Over that which remained, slippery, sometimes sloping toward
+the river at a considerable angle, and often only a foot or two in
+breadth, we must make our way. When there was no footing below the
+sled, we attached one end of a rope to it, wrapped the other end around
+our waists, and if one of us slipped and fell in the soft snow of the
+steep hill-side above, luckily the others maintained their hold and
+were able to prevent both sleds and dogs from going into the river and
+putting an end to our little expedition there and then.
+
+There was only one accident, and that not alarming. Fritz thought that
+he did not need our help to bring the St. Bernards over a place that
+the big sled had safely crossed with Jack’s back and mine against it
+and with the heavy steel prongs strapped to the heels of our boots
+dug into the ice. We heard a cry of “Hurry up! This is cold!” and
+looked around to see Fritz standing in a shallow eddy up to his waist,
+his parkee blown up about his head like a veritable balloon, while
+he braced himself against the sled. “I had to jump in to save our
+bedding,” he said. We hurried on the faster so that he might keep his
+blood in circulation, and he merely took the trouble to change his
+socks when we made a camp on a fairly comfortable ice-cake, after
+having assured ourselves that it would not float away with us during
+the night.
+
+[Illustration: Over the Bench Ice of Thirty-Mile River.]
+
+Near the Hootalinqua the current slackens, and we crossed where the
+stream was completely frozen over. Above us was a great jam of cakes
+that had floated down, some of which rumbled under our feet, came out
+in an open place below, and then went on to form another jam. A few
+minutes later there was a boom and our bridge moved downstream with
+the noise of a medley of bass drums. At noon on this day the sun had
+made the trail so soft that we sank into it up to our knees. We halted
+a little later, determined to start at one o’clock in the morning and
+take advantage of the crust frozen during the night; and we had what
+seemed at the time the good fortune to put up in a cabin which had
+been abandoned by the mounted police. Having had an early dinner, we
+were thinking of bed at six o’clock when two ragged men, their faces
+blackened by cooking over camp-fires, came in. They sat down, and when
+they had eaten with the heartiness of famished beings some things that
+we had left on the table, one of them, whom his companion called “the
+Doctor,” became explanatory:
+
+“You mustn’t mind our appetites,” he said. “We’ve just come from
+Dawson. My pardner there, Yukon Bill, hain’t been out of the country
+for eight years. Go easy there, Bill! Your manners are bad.”
+
+“Shut up!” roared Bill, looking as wild as a hungry lynx.
+
+“Oh, he ain’t as crazy as Jim,” continued the Doctor. “Jim was a sight
+uglier ’n Bill, an’ you can see what Bill is. He took his share of the
+bacon on his back an’ started out for himself this mornin’.”
+
+“No packin’ fer me! We kept the dogs, you bet, by----,” put in Bill
+through a mouthful.
+
+Jim arrived three hours later. Without paying any attention to the
+presence of other persons, he dropped his pack as if it were of lead,
+fell down on the bench, pushed back his unkempt hair, and looked
+vacantly at the stove.
+
+“Hello, Jim, you loon!” the Doctor called out. “As long’s we’ve said
+quits, I ain’t goin’ to be mean. Have one of our flapjacks!”
+
+“Eat yer own dirt,” replied Jim. “I kin cook, an’ I’ve got just as much
+right in this cabin as you have.” And Jim put a skillet with a piece
+of dirty bacon in it on the stove.
+
+“Don’t push my pan off there, you eight-footed elephant!” cried the
+Doctor.
+
+Jim lifted his skillet and turned on the Doctor. Then he set the
+skillet down again with the action of one who is too tired for further
+effort, and fell back onto his seat.
+
+“You Siawash sons of the devil,” he said between his teeth, “if I ever
+git my strength on the outside I’ll lick both on ye till ye bawl like
+a calf.” And brushing back his hair again he added, in a protesting
+voice, after a moment’s pause: “I kin do it, too!”
+
+“Bully old Jim!” observed the Doctor.
+
+It was plain enough that the minds of all three of our visitors,
+especially Jim, had been affected by the hardships that they had
+endured on their long tramp, with only snow, trees, dogs, and their own
+quarrels for companionship. Most of these grim travellers whom we met
+coming out from Dawson--now and then one was limping from scurvy--had
+neither tent nor stove, quite inadequate robes, no dishes except
+skillets and cups, and no food except bacon, flour, and beans, and not
+always beans. Earlier in the winter they put up a barrier of boughs
+against the wind, and slept between two great fires, kept up by the
+member of the party whose night it was to watch.
+
+At eleven o’clock the Doctor stopped talking, and we slept for half an
+hour, only to be awakened by the arrival of another equally worn-out
+party, and almost the last one from Dawson that we met. By the time we
+were fairly asleep again these tired beings set the cabin on fire, and
+Jack, in his good-natured way, put the flames out for them.
+
+At daylight I was awakened by Fritz, who was grumbling to himself about
+the audacity and the stomachs that some people must have. I arose
+to see him looking into two empty pails which he had left full of
+apple-sauce and beans.
+
+“I was hungry as a dog in the night,” the Doctor explained, a little
+later, “and I couldn’t help it.”
+
+Fritz replied by looking daggers at him. Then the Doctor offered a pair
+of snow-shoes to Fritz as an olive branch.
+
+“If I thought that what you’ve eaten would make you downright sick, I’d
+take ’em,” said Fritz.
+
+“’Twon’t,” replied the Doctor, in all honesty. “Nothin’ makes me sick.”
+And he gave the snow-shoes to Jack, whose eyes were twinkling in
+appreciation of the conversation.
+
+As we started out, five or six hours later than we had planned, we
+resolved to eschew cabins hereafter. We had not done a half-day’s work
+when a heavy wet snow set in, and the condition of the dogs compelled
+us to rest.
+
+“Wear ’em out,” said Jack, “and it’s all up, anyway. We’ll boil some
+beans and lay up some sleep ahead against a freeze.”
+
+Accordingly, dogs and men slept for thirteen hours.
+
+So slight was the freeze at night that the sun, now rising at four
+o’clock, soon thawed the crust. The Big Salmon was already open, its
+current destroying the trail and leaving a field of slush with many
+places too deep for passage for a distance of five or six miles, which
+was as wearing on the dogs as a full day’s journey under ordinary
+circumstances. We only hoped that the Big Salmon was alone in its
+enmity to our plans, for once the ice is out of the tributaries, the
+ice in the Yukon cannot last long. It seemed to be imperative that,
+in order to take full advantage of the slight crust which formed, we
+should travel nights. We made this experiment once, starting out at 10
+P.M., and once was quite enough.
+
+The thawing snow had fallen away from the path, which was hardened by
+travel from Dawson and therefore the better resisted the sun’s rays;
+but when frozen it was as slippery as ice. In so far as you were able
+to keep the sled from slewing on this razor’s back, that much you aided
+the dogs. At intervals you walked outside the trail, plunging with
+every step through the crust down to the slush underneath, while, with
+body bent and arm extended with all the rigidity at your command, you
+endeavored to hold the lurching “gee-pole” steady. Early in the evening
+the great darkness seemed the more dense to visions strained by the
+sun beating on the expanse of snow by day. With their eyes bloodshot
+and almost closed with snow-blindness, the St. Bernards continually
+stumbled and fell as they leaped from one side of the trail to the
+other, blindly and vainly seeking a better footing. When we rested we
+dug holes in the crust, and throwing ourselves prostrate, drank our
+fill. At first, I tried to use a telescope drinking-cup, but soon I
+regarded it as tawdry, inefficient, and unworthy of the occasion, and
+followed the more robust custom of Jack, who enjoyed to the full the
+pleasure of having made a convert. For one who had left White Horse
+with a bad cough on the heels of the measles, such indulgence would
+seem to be the height of indiscretion. But the cough was completely
+gone, no room having been left for it in the development of every
+muscle of my body by the handling of the “gee-pole.”
+
+[Illustration: Crossing a Brook.]
+
+At these times we would pay our respects with some bitterness to
+the man who had made this strange and lonely trail, though in
+better moments we were willing to admit that he was a pioneer and
+a pathfinder. As soon as the ice would bear him, when the wind had
+drifted the snow here and there and lifted the slush ice up to be
+frozen into rifts, with his dogs and sleds he set his face toward
+the coast, winding in and out between these rifts, back and forth
+across the stream and along its banks, wherever he could find the best
+footing; and all who came afterward followed in his footsteps. He was
+making a path for himself and not for us, and it was to his interest,
+if not to ours, to have it as crooked as the track of a snake, and on
+the most crooked of rivers at that.
+
+With the falling of the water as the winter advanced, the ice was
+rent with cracks. It fell away from the shores, leaving cakes on end
+and fissures. You must toil up one side of a pyramid to slide down
+the other; you held your sled up literally at an angle of forty-five
+degrees, and sometimes you dropped up to your hips into the fissures,
+for the thin covering of snow often made them invisible even in the
+daytime. Yet to step away from the trail was like stepping off a bad
+corduroy road into a swamp.
+
+In the darkness the trained eye of the master had to trust to the
+halt and whine of the brave little Dude when we came to a place where
+the surface water was deep or the ice had given away entirely. While
+the master went ahead with a pole to make soundings, Fritz seized the
+opportunity to roll a cigarette and to say in a drawl, as he sat on his
+sled, resting:
+
+“If I were in town I would call a cab.”
+
+Jack had discarded his boots with sharp pegs--the three of us had worn
+boots since it became warmer--to put on moccasins. These were soon
+wet and quickly froze, giving him a sole of ice with which to walk on
+ice. In utter exhaustion, once the big fellow threw himself upon his
+“gee-pole” and gasped out something about not caring whether he went
+any farther or not. Then he added:
+
+“Well, we’ll outlast this trail, anyway. I guess I’ll light my pipe.”
+
+Confessedly, I was rather glad of the incident. It is good to see
+giants nod when you have nodded yourself. Only on the previous day,
+over a mile of sidling trail, leaning on my sled to keep it from
+upsetting, and righting it when it did upset, I had momentarily, I am
+ashamed to say, turned cynic and protester.
+
+An hour before dawn a scimeter of light shot across the heavens,
+followed by broadswords, fans, daggers, waves, and streaks of light,
+dancing sometimes in playful panic and again moving in a sweep of
+dignity. With the aurora borealis as our candle, we passed around
+Freeman’s Point, built a fire for luncheon in a cove, and enjoyed
+keenly the fact that we were half way to Dawson.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+ON THE TRAIL
+
+ PERSONALITIES--THE FORBEARS OF JACK AND FRITZ--GOOD CAMP MANNERS--DOG
+ INDIVIDUALITY--DUDE--THE TEAM OF HUSKIES--WAYFARERS AT FIVE
+ FINGERS--FORT SELKIRK AND PELLY--THE THANKSGIVING TURKEY THAT DID
+ NOT GET TO DAWSON--A DIET OF FLAPJACKS--SUBURBS OF THE KLONDYKE
+ CAPITAL--THE PASSING OF THE TRAIL.
+
+
+As we moved on slowly at dawn to make a few more miles before camping,
+we saw the penalty of this savage run, which human stubbornness had
+insisted upon making, in the blood left on the trail by the wounded
+feet of our dogs. Jack at once covered them with the moccasins which he
+had brought for the purpose. It was plain enough that the continuance
+of night marches was unfeasible if we desired our brave steeds to
+hold out as far as Dawson. While the sled slid easier at night, the
+excrescences of ice were as sharp as lances, and though the mushy
+trail of mid-day made the sled harder to pull, it was like a cushion
+for a wounded foot. We compromised upon a portion of both evils by
+determining to start at dawn and travel as fast and as long as we
+could, practically. This gave only seven or eight hours on the road as
+against the twelve or more that we had originally planned, and in order
+to make the most of them we made the sacrifice for the dogs’ sake of
+drinking ice-water for our luncheon instead of taking the time to boil
+chocolate. Fritz preferring to handle the “gee-pole,” and I preferring
+to assist in keeping the equilibrium of the big sled by holding the
+handles at the rear, each settled down to this as his definite labor.
+
+We now had more time for our camps; more time for our pipes of
+relaxation as we sat on our beds around Jack’s bonfires after the dogs
+were fed and dinner was eaten. On one of these nights we were talking
+of ambitions.
+
+“As a boy, I wanted to drive a street-car,” said Fritz. “When I grew
+older they still called me Freddy, and I made pictures for a living.
+That is enough to ruin any man; and, foreseeing this, I concluded that
+I’d live on flapjacks and go unwashed, and be called ‘pardner,’ or
+Pete, or Bill, or make baking-powder dough, or anything, till I found
+a good placer mine. Then I’m going around the world, smoking the best
+brand of Turkish cigarettes, and looking at other people’s pictures.”
+
+Jack had run away from home at the age of thirteen to the land of the
+Indians that had been revealed to him in a dime novel secreted in a
+haymow, and had earned his own living ever since. Meagre as was his
+early education, he had picked up a surprising amount of information
+from reading and from association. His eye was that of a scout; his
+knowledge of birds and animals that of a naturalist; his love of
+flowers that of a sentimentalist. He had varied his life as a cowboy by
+many other occupations. At one time he had been a private coachman in
+Omaha, just to see how it would seem.
+
+“I was gettin’ pretty sick of the job,” he explained, “when the old
+lady I drove about leaned over to me one day, confidentially. ‘I’m
+goin’ to get you a fine livery to wear,’ she said. Then I realized how
+low I had fallen, and that evening I was a free man again.”
+
+He was longer on the Government survey than in any other employment,
+rising until he filled a position of considerable responsibility.
+Possibly it was then that he learned the ethics of camp-life; more
+likely they were innate. He adhered to his own soap, his own towel, and
+his own bedding, and was more observant of the small niceties of life
+than are most of the men who wear the high collars that he despised. In
+all of his seventeen years of wandering his greatest source of sorrow
+was that he had never made enough money, according to his ideas, to
+return home, though his pay had been as high as a hundred and fifty
+dollars a month. He must have a few thousands, and treat the little
+Pennsylvania village that was his birthplace to such extravagance as
+it had never seen before. If he made a “stake” in the Klondyke, he
+had planned to drive right up to the old folks’ door with his team of
+huskies and a little red cart, distributing candy to the children as
+the procession moved forward.
+
+The dogs, which at first seemed to me to be only so many domesticated
+wolves of like dispositions, had now assumed strong individualities.
+Dude, the leader, was worthy of the name given to him, on account of
+his sleek coat of thick gray fur, by the frontiersman who had instilled
+into him the wisdom of the trail and soldierly spirit and obedience.
+He was the sergeant-major among Yukon dogs, far from being a pup in
+years and far from having lost his vigor. When called to harness in the
+morning he would stretch his body, arch his neck, throw his handsome
+tail over his back, deliver himself of a peculiar little wolfish whine,
+and trot straight to his place. Though your old sergeant-major may feel
+a little stiff when he gets out of bed, he isn’t stiff when he has his
+tunic on, especially if there are any recruits about. From the moment
+that Jack called “Mush!” until he called “Halt!” Dude pulled steadily.
+All the others shirked at times and needed the crack of the whip to
+remind them of their duty, but the traces between Dude and the dog
+behind him were always taut. He had the natural dignity requisite to
+his position. The other dogs attempted no familiarities with him, such
+as eating out of his dish or trying to bowl him over in sport. After an
+unusually hard day’s work, before lying down to rest, he would gambol a
+little with them as a relaxation from the steady strain in harness, but
+not in a manner of equality.
+
+[Illustration: In Camp--The Dogs’ Porridge.]
+
+During their conversations while the master was stirring the porridge
+he asked the sergeant-major what he thought of the prospects of
+reaching Dawson before the ice went out of the river, Dude replied,
+on the authority of Jack’s translation:
+
+“Don’t ask me! I can make it all right. But we ain’t certain of
+anything as long as we have those house-dogs on the hind sled.”
+
+Next to Dude was Fox, a nondescript, who remained in good flesh up to
+the last. He waddled and puffed in trying to keep up when Dude trotted.
+Fritz said that Fox reminded him of a fat school-girl, her cheeks
+daubed with molasses candy, and two braids down her back.
+
+Behind Fox was Jack, a pup, a mischief-maker, a rascal, and an actor.
+All husky dogs are thieves. Some will take a pot off a stove by its
+handle and hide it safely out of sight in the snow while they wait for
+its contents to cool to their taste. Jack promised to become the most
+accomplished of the clan. His wolf’s nose always told him where our
+bacon was stored and his wolf’s eyes told him when his opportunity had
+arrived. Once he had the meat out of his own basin of porridge eaten,
+he looked up to see which dog had any left and got it before the other
+dog realized what was up. He would scent an Indian camp even before
+Dude, sometimes at a distance of two miles. In the traces he forgot to
+pull while he looked at the ravens flying overhead or listened for
+noises in the forest. Then the whip descended upon him and he would
+seem very crestfallen for a moment, only to be at his old tricks and
+to have his tail in the air in the next. The more he was punished for
+dereliction during the day, the greater was his affection for his
+master in camp. On the warmer nights when Jack slept outside of the hut
+for the sake of elbow room, he would put himself on guard at the head
+of the master’s bed of boughs and allow no other dog except Dude to
+come near.
+
+Dude was partial to him. He regarded Jack as a wayward but clever pup
+who was sowing his wild oats, and he knew, as an old sergeant-major,
+that this would make the best kind of a dog in the end. Often the
+master took hold of the ne’er-do-well’s ears and shook him, saying:
+
+“I guess I like you best, after all, Jack. That’s the way of the world.
+You’re a rascal, but you’re clever.”
+
+Next in line was Tommy, Jack’s brother. Jack enjoyed getting Tommy into
+scrapes and then leaving him to get out of them the best he could.
+Tommy was forever sneaking about the tent, and he was so impolitic
+in his choice of his moment of action that he was usually caught
+red-handed and cuffed. Though he never succeeded in stealing half as
+much as Jack, he came in for a great deal more enmity from Fritz than
+all the rest of the team. Jack used to approach Fritz gayly as Fritz
+sat with a leg on either side of our little stove, turn his coyote’s
+head to one side, cock up his ears, and assure Fritz of his friendship
+for a good cook and his contempt for all such curs as Tommy. He might
+go and come many times in this way before Fritz’s back was turned.
+When it was, however, he seized his spoil and trotted away in the
+businesslike manner of a dog who is doing an errand for his master. At
+a safe distance, he neatly dodged all missiles and smiled mockingly
+back at the cook. When Tommy was licked in the traces he howled for
+half an hour and his tail did not ascend for the remainder of the
+day. None of the other dogs would make friends with so sour a fellow.
+Perhaps he was only oversensitive and introspective, and I do him
+wrong. I fear, however, that he will be sent to the penitentiary at
+Forty Mile for a long term one of these days.
+
+Shorty, the end dog (wheel horse) of the husky team, was born in
+Spitzbergen, where dogs are so white that when they are on a
+background of snow you know of their presence only by the black spots
+for their eyes and a bigger black spot for their noses. An equality in
+breadth and length gave Shorty his name. Like some fat old gentlemen
+whom we meet at the club, he was the more comical because he was
+unconsciously so. He didn’t believe in being a martyr, and he always
+carried his head so that one of his eyes was on Jack. When the master
+was about to touch up Jack and Tommy, Shorty would begin suddenly to
+pull very hard. His legs were so short and his body was so chunky that
+if the team turned a sharp corner around a cake of ice he would often
+roll over like a ball of fur; or, in trying to keep up he would slip
+and fall down a fissure, hanging suspended by his collar while he
+looked around at Jack, saying:
+
+“Oh, I know I’m the snapper of the whip! What next?”
+
+He blinked so oddly, there was such an expression of disgust in the
+very way in which he lolled his tongue out, that you laughed at him as
+you would at the old gentleman who finds another club member in his
+favorite chair and reading his favorite paper.
+
+Tim, the larger of the two St. Bernards, was a sober, phlegmatic dog
+of noble mien, who was funny only when he ate so much porridge after a
+hard day’s work that he groaned with pain.
+
+“You needn’t look at me so reproachfully, Tim,” Jack would say, “I know
+I’m to blame. But I’d feel just as mean if I didn’t feed you all you
+wanted.”
+
+The St. Bernard is too high-spirited for the work of a draught animal.
+At first Patsy seemed the better dog of the two. But Patsy wore himself
+out by fidgeting, and then it was his turn to soldier while Tim did his
+work. Toward the last they were in such bad shape that we dared to put
+only fifty pounds on their sled.
+
+In the neighborhood of Five Fingers we met a dozen stranded pilgrims
+whose desperate efforts to reach Dawson in the previous autumn had been
+put to naught by the summary approach of the arctic winter when they
+were within a few days of their destination. They had built cabins on
+the banks of the river, wherever their boats had been inextricably
+caught in a jam of ice, and settled down to the prospect of playing
+checkers and fighting off scurvy for eight months, until summer came.
+Of those who were unsuccessful in the battle, the most afflicted was an
+old forty-niner who accepted with better grace than any of the others
+a diet of spruce tea and rice, which he hoped would undo the work of
+too much bacon. A few prospect holes had been sunk without any reward
+except “colors,” because, as they explained, they were, in keeping with
+their general ill luck, just outside of the gold belt. For selfish
+as well as sentimental reasons we were glad that these unfortunate
+fellows were not more numerous. We had always to tell them some of the
+news, and then to leave their hospitality rather offended despite our
+explanations that we could not afford to tarry with them for a day’s
+rest when the trail was good.
+
+At one of the cabins a boy of seventeen years hobbled out to the
+bank to greet us. He and his uncle had left Dawson for the coast
+in December, drawing their own sleds. Hardship had so affected his
+uncle’s mind, as the story was told to me, that to escape from the
+country had become a brutal and selfish mania with him. He forced his
+nephew, even at the point of the revolver, it was said, to do all the
+work of making and breaking camp. The boy was so tired one night
+that he crawled under his blankets without changing his moccasins,
+which had become wet by the slush snow about the fire. He awoke in the
+morning with his feet frozen. When they were overtaken on the trail
+by a man with a dog team, the next afternoon, the boy, goaded on by
+his uncle, was plodding along on legs which were frozen stiff up to
+his knees, experiencing, he said, much inconvenience but no pain.
+The fellow-traveller gave him a ride behind the dogs to the nearest
+cabin, where, later, a doctor on his way to the coast found amputation
+necessary to save the boy’s life. As for the uncle, he delayed only a
+few hours, and hastened on his journey more energetically than ever.
+
+A little hunting had been done by the stranded pilgrims, but with no
+success. We had hoped to obtain some venison from the Indians, but
+though we passed many of their deserted camps between the Hootalinqua
+and the Pelly, we came to only one that was occupied. Here two families
+were sitting around a small fire with their backs protected on all
+sides from the wind by a wall of brush about waist high. We secured a
+few pounds of extremely tough steak in exchange for some corn-meal. A
+small boy who looked quite like a young Jap knew a few English words
+and had the gift of making comprehensible gestures. He explained that
+he had heard his father’s gun go “boom!” far off on the mountain-side,
+a few hours before. No chaffing could shake his confidence in his
+father, whose name was Chook, as a great hunter. One boom, he told us
+by signs, and the moose or caribou always tumbled over into the snow.
+The temptation to wait and see if Chook would return with fresh moose
+or caribou meat was great, but we resisted it. When, however, we were
+at the other end of the semicircle formed by the curve of the river
+beyond the camp, a cry from the bank showed us Chook, who had hastened
+through the woods by a trail known to himself, bearing a fine caribou
+steak and a piece of liver. With him, besides the little boy we had
+seen, was an elder brother who had been out to learn the way in which
+Daddy crept up quietly until he was within a few steps of his prey.
+Chook wanted sugar in exchange, but we had none to spare. Finally his
+obduracy was overcome and he accepted corn-meal. Long after we had
+passed on, he stood watching us, and presumably he was grinning over
+his bargain. We enjoyed part of the steak; Jack, the pup, stole the
+rest with such finesse that we forgave him.
+
+When we had passed one point which we recognized as a name on the
+map, we looked forward from day to day, as we lessened the distance,
+until we should arrive at another. In camp we compared our opinions
+of how many miles we had made that day, and soon our estimates became
+surprisingly accurate. After leaving Five Fingers, all our thoughts
+were bent on reaching Fort Selkirk, where the Pelly, a great river of
+itself, joins the Yukon. The trail for this distance was better than
+for the fifty miles that had preceded it and the colder weather made
+sledging better. Moreover, our new plan of shorter hours and harder
+work was succeeding admirably.
+
+Long before placer mining was thought of in Alaska or in the British
+Northwest Territory, representatives of the fur companies were
+stationed at Fort Selkirk. The present post is across the river from
+the upper ramparts of the Yukon’s bank, whose towering walls of rock
+resemble the walls of old-time forts, even to the embrasures. In a
+break in the ramparts is the mouth of the Pelly, which is to the Yukon
+what the Missouri is to the Mississippi.
+
+Mr. Pettit, the trader at Selkirk, had only Indians for companions. The
+aspect of this little man’s loneliness was heightened by his slight
+form and his pallor, so out of place in a country where bare existence
+is supposed to demand so much vigor. In summer he busied himself with
+a little garden, which was an absorbing occupation because upon its
+success there possibly depended immunity from the dreaded scurvy. In
+winter he sat by his stove smoking when he was not sleeping. Watching
+the Indians go through the ritual of the Russian Church in their
+original manner, or dance around a dying fellow to keep off the evil
+spirit of death, were diversions which must by this time have lost
+their novelty for him. He had had nothing to sell for more than a year.
+This was a great disappointment to his customers who were short of
+those great requirements of aboriginal happiness, tobacco, sugar, and
+gay-colored clothes.
+
+While we were at Pelly, the Indians became excited over the arrival of
+news that one of the tribe, Ulick, had shot ten caribou and two moose,
+“one sleep”--or more than a day’s travel--down the river. We made
+careful calculations as to how much tobacco we could spare, and kept
+a sharp lookout for Ulick, whom we met with his family dragging some
+of the moose back to camp. For forty-five cents’ worth of tobacco we
+secured thirty pounds of steak for ourselves and the dogs. To offers of
+as high as a dollar a pound for more, he merely made the reply:
+
+“Got heap money! Want ‘baccy!’”
+
+Your husky dog is no vegetarian. Once we realized how much additional
+pulling-power our team could get out of a little fresh meat we denied
+ourselves for them.
+
+The height and the character of the mountains towering over our heads
+told us that we were coming into the region of the Rockies. Every turn
+of the river brought into view a panorama of low wooded islands made
+in later times by a change of current; of islands that were Cyclopean
+masses thrown up by chaos, and the nesting-places of eagles; of
+mountains on either shore, whose strata seemed to have been kneaded and
+stirred when soft as dough, and afterward, upon solidifying, to have
+been rent by convulsions of the earth’s crust.
+
+But one was too busy with the handles of the sled fully to enjoy
+scenery. You only knew that the vista seemed to be frowning upon
+the impudence of you and your sled and dogs breaking in upon great
+solitudes. Thankfully, the weather was more in our favor and the trail
+was harder, as it had been between the Big Salmon and Pelly, and not
+so sliding. At times it was as smooth as a skating-rink for a few
+hundred yards where it was protected from the sun by the shadow of the
+mountains and the forests; again, there was glare ice, where we might
+ride for a little distance, jesting merrily about private equipages and
+driving-parks; and, again, we drove flocks of wild ducks away from open
+places, making us regret that we had only revolvers with us. Far over
+our heads against the background of the blue sky we saw great flocks
+of wild swans and wild geese moving northward in stately procession,
+reminding us that summer was near at hand. At 2 A.M. the thermometer
+was at from 10 to 20 degrees below zero; at noon, 80 degrees above, and
+the crust of dawn had become like porridge. I had one ear blistered by
+the frost and the other by the sun in the same day.
+
+But we little minded these extremes; for the trail continued to be
+good, until one morning we arrived at the cluster of cabins called
+Stewart City, at the mouth of the Stewart River, where we rested for a
+day. Of the inmates of the cabins we bought enough rice to piece out
+the rations of our dogs.
+
+A mile out of Stewart we met Anders, of Bay City, Michigan, who was
+drawing his own sled as he swung along in great strides in the company
+of an elderly man who had one dog. An idea for making a fortune had
+occurred to him and to carry it out he had started for Dyea at once,
+regardless of the season of the year. He was “going outside” to bring
+in the stock for a poultry farm which he proposed to establish on an
+island near Dawson.
+
+“Fresh eggs will bring ten dollars a dozen any time,” he said, “and a
+spring chicken as much. I ain’t going to let anybody get ahead of me,
+you bet. I’ve got a side of bacon and a sack of flour. I’ll sleep by
+day and go without a blanket. I’ll make it to Five Fingers with my sled
+and then I’ll take what’s left of my grub on my back and skin along the
+shore till I get to the lakes, where I can get some more grub off the
+boats that are coming in, snake a canoe somewhere, and paddle up to
+Linderman.”
+
+I saw him in Dawson two weeks after the pilgrims’ flotilla began to
+arrive. The ice in the river had broken before he reached Five Fingers.
+He had climbed over mountains and beaten his way through underbrush
+until he sprained his ankle. Then he crawled to a ledge of rock
+overlooking the stream and waited until a pilgrim in a passing boat saw
+the red bandanna which he waved as a signal of distress.
+
+“And I guess Dawson won’t have turkey for Thanksgiving this year,” he
+added. “You remember the old feller that was with me? We got separated.
+He couldn’t keep up with my gait. Well, our boat passed his dog running
+up and down the shore howling, but we couldn’t find a sign of him. I
+guess he was drowned.”
+
+It took us six days to make the remaining seventy-five miles to
+Dawson, though now our outfit, including bedding and kit-bags, did not
+weigh more than two hundred pounds. The weather at night had suddenly
+moderated, as if the arctic winter, after a spasmodic resistance, had
+given way entirely to the tropical summer. Henceforth, it was needless
+to put up our tent, and we slept and cooked entirely in the open,
+drying our wet footwear by the heat of the sun in the late afternoon.
+
+[Illustration: The First Boats.]
+
+Starting at 2 A.M. with the first light, we plodded straight ahead
+through the snow up to our knees, until the dogs gave out. We followed
+the trail where we could; followed it until it led us to the flowing
+river, and then we made a detour around the open place. The snow-shoes
+which we had brought thus far without having once put them on, now
+became invaluable in making a path by slow and arduous tramping, as
+monotonous as the beating of time, but a little more tiring, I assure
+you. Without the relief of the color of the dogs or of the man in front
+of you upon which to rest your eyes, little red spots would dance in
+the glare on the snow even through heavy green glasses. Often the rest
+of the party had to wait while Jack, who never tired, went on ahead
+to see if, in case we should go around this or that island, we should
+be obliged to retrace our steps. Again, in little side channels where
+the water was deep only in a freshet, we hitched all the dogs to one
+sled at a time and they dragged it over the sandy bottom and up on the
+other side, where we were likely to strike out on an old Indian trail
+bare of snow, and to have to lift the sleds from side to side to avoid
+saplings.
+
+It was our boast that only once had we unpacked the sleds except to
+make camp. This was at Five Fingers, where we had to carry our baggage
+piece by piece up an ascent of forty feet. Even there we had sent the
+dogs up with the small sled on bare ground. But now we could lift the
+sleds and contents; or if the bank or ledge of rocks which we wished
+to gain was very precipitate, we could slide them up on skids. Dude,
+the old leader, would crawl up by himself without a whine, like a true
+soldier. Jack threw the other huskies up bodily, and the clumsy St.
+Bernards were pushed and pulled and coaxed up.
+
+Just when we had to undergo the greatest physical labor, and the
+greatest strain from climate, our food-supply, so astonishing had
+been our appetites, had dwindled to flour and bad bacon, and we had
+remaining only a pipe of tobacco apiece, which was religiously saved
+for our last camp. We missed most keenly our chocolate, of which we had
+eaten half a pound apiece a day. With a slab of it for luncheon, and
+only two flapjacks and a slice of bacon, we were not hungry again for
+five or six hours. Consume all the flapjacks and bacon that we could
+without suffering from that excess of quantity which is the foe of
+exercise, in three or four hours our stomachs would be calling for more.
+
+On the afternoon of the fourth day out from Stewart, when the dogs
+pulled up after one of the rushes they were never too tired to make on
+scenting a camp, we looked up to see some figures standing on a pile of
+logs which they were cutting for a raft of timber for a Dawson saw-mill.
+
+“How are ye?” they called. “Goin’ to town?”
+
+We had reached the suburbs!
+
+“Well,” replied Jack, “we’ve been thinkin’ some of it. How far is it?”
+
+“’Bout twenty miles. But you won’t make it. The ice is likely to go out
+any minute.”
+
+On the day following we passed still another camp of rafters, who said
+that the river was open in front of Dawson. They advised us to make
+camp and accompany them when navigation opened.
+
+“We’ll be old inhabitants by that time,” said Jack.
+
+Every creek flowing into the river was a torrent, eating up the ice
+and flooding its surface. We could see that the river was rising, which
+was a sure sign that its days were few. However, we were confident of
+reaching our destination on the morrow, though we had to desert our
+sleds, put some flapjacks and slices of bacon in our pockets, and climb
+over the mountain which hid “town” from view.
+
+Our last camp was on a wooded island where some prospector had built a
+brush-house. Jack’s bonfire, especially large in honor of the occasion,
+extended to this house, and we thought it rather good fun that we had
+to save our bedding from the flames. But our jubilation was not unmixed
+with sadness. We should not make another journey together, and we had
+been good comrades, always venting our anger, when it insisted upon
+expression, upon our sleds, and never blaming one another.
+
+Our hair and beards were long and unkempt; our trousers were the color
+of mahogany; but we felt strong enough to go up the side of a mountain
+on the run, and we had been so near to nature that we could truly claim
+her for next-door neighbor.
+
+In the future, the numerous police stations built in the summer (1898)
+will furnish food for travellers and their dogs. Already, therefore,
+our journey in the manner that we made it is a thing of the past, and,
+accordingly, one feels as he looks back on it a little of the pride of
+the pioneer.
+
+“We can sleep as long as we want, to-morrow,” said Fritz, pulling his
+robe over him, “and we won’t care whether it is going to freeze at
+night or not.”
+
+“And we won’t have wet feet,” Jack added. “I guess it’s been twenty
+days since they wasn’t sopping ’fore we’d been out two hours, and that
+slush does feel rather clammy when the sun’s blisterin’ overhead.”
+
+Ten miles in ten hours was the record of our last day’s travel, over
+the worst trail we had encountered. At dusk we rounded an island, and
+to our right, on a small flat across the river (which here had been
+opened by the current of the Klondyke), we saw the cluster of cabins
+which was the pilgrim’s Mecca. There was glare ice, however, above the
+Klondyke across to the little suburb of Dawson, Klondyke City. For the
+first time in many days we rode on our sleds, finishing our journey in
+triumph.
+
+“Don’t you know that it’s too late to travel on the river?” asked the
+foremost man of the little crowd that came out to meet us.
+
+“Yes,” replied Jack, “and we’ve just made up our minds to quit.”
+
+Four days later, as if it had broken away all along the shores at
+the same moment, the ice moved on toward the sea like a great white
+procession, halted now and then by a jam, but not for long.
+
+“It’s a pleasure to see that trail go by,” was Jack’s comment, as he
+watched it from our cabin-door. “I only wish I might pay it back in its
+own kind by tripping it up a few times.”
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+DAWSON
+
+ SOCIAL ASPECTS OF DAWSON--CORNERING THE TINNED FOOD
+ MARKET--CHEECHAWKOS AND OLD-TIMERS IN THE EARLY DAYS.
+
+
+At this season of the year the inhabitants of Dawson were passing
+out of the chrysalis of fur caps into soiled, broad-brimmed hats
+resurrected from cabin-shelves; out of winter clothing generally into
+what remained of their last summer’s clothing. Along the thawing bog
+called the main street, littered and odorous from sanitary neglect,
+were two rows of saloons and gambling-halls, with mining-brokers’
+offices and the stores of shrewd speculators in food-supplies, who
+always had one can of condensed milk for $2.50, one can of butter
+for $5, and one pound of sugar for $1.50, and assured you that they
+were the last in the country. To look out across the flat toward the
+mountains was to see scattered cabins and piles of tin cans, which
+at once let one into the culinary secrets of an isolated community
+composed largely of men. At the restaurants, bacon and beans and coffee
+cost $2.50.
+
+For a time in the winter in fear of famine the well-to-do hoarded
+food as they hoard gold in a financial panic, and the restaurants
+were closed because supplies were not procurable at prices that made
+catering profitable. Then, a fifty-pound sack of flour sold for as high
+as $100; but at the approach of spring the little capitalists who had
+planned to sell their “corners” at great profit were glad enough to
+dispose of such surplus as they had beyond their own needs at a loss.
+To them the departure of hundreds of mouths which otherwise would have
+been fed out of Dawson’s granary was as great a disappointment as a
+report that Hungary’s wheat crop would greatly exceed expectations is
+to the bulls on the Chicago Exchange. All of the luxuries and many
+of the necessities of life were scarce; but, withal, there was quite
+enough of bacon, beans, and flour to have satisfied the appetites of
+the whole community for a month after supplies arrived. According to
+the philosophy of the old-timers, there is never any danger of a man’s
+starving as long as he will look ahead a little. So easy is it to
+sleep and so little does one eat when one is not working that he can
+live on a pound of food a day, if need be, and take the remainder of
+his nourishment in slumber. On the other hand, vigorous labor in winter
+demands at least three pounds a day, and it is upon this basis that
+estimates have always been made in the valley of the Yukon.
+
+With a tiny can of cocoa, which I pounced upon in a store as if it were
+an Elzevir in a junk-heap, and a few staples bought at extravagant
+prices, we were able to prepare a superior meal in the cabin that I
+had leased. But this was not until we had slept gloriously for sixteen
+hours. There remained the problem of a bath, which was serious, as
+the one bath-house in Dawson was closed for repairs. I solved it
+legitimately, if uncomfortably, in the wooden tub which was lent to me
+by a neighbor.
+
+The saloons had only a substitute for whiskey, of home manufacture. The
+dance-halls were not open. All the men whose dust and presence would
+make the camp lively were at the mines--or “up the creeks,” as the
+saying goes in Dawson--preparing for the “clean-up.”
+
+In winter and in summer the trail leads up the Klondyke to the mouth
+of Bonanza, three miles from Dawson, and thence up Bonanza to the
+working-claims, about three miles farther on. In the spring, when the
+currents are swollen, you must go over a high mountain by a path in
+the soft snow. If you have a pack, this is hard work. On the way I met
+a blue-faced old fellow--by his look if not by his limp he had the
+scurvy--who promptly put me in my proper social status.
+
+“Are ye a Cheechawko?” he asked.
+
+“I don’t know, I’m sure.”
+
+“Well, then, ye are, and the river must ’a’ broke. Any man’s a
+Cheechawko until he’s been in the country when the ice goes out. In
+the old days we could lick the Cheechawkos into shape; larn ’em to
+leave their latch-strings out fur a passin’ stranger when they was
+away from hum, and larn ’em to eat what they wanted and to use the
+best blanket in a cabin, but to lug nothin’ away. Fifty thousand of
+’em, they say--clerks and farmers and dudes. They’re too many fur us.
+Civilization’s here, and it’s a case of locking up yer dust after
+this. But, young man, ye can’t be an old-timer, never! Ye can’t be an
+old-timer, ’less ye’ve lived in the camps in the old days when a man
+was a man and his neighbor’s brother.”
+
+And without giving me time to reply to his little lecture, he hobbled
+on toward the hospital.
+
+Cheechawko is the Indian word for stranger, or, more literally,
+tenderfoot, which has come into general use in the Klondyke; and toward
+the Cheechawko, bringing in the more penurious ways of the outside
+world, along with ignorance of mining, the old-timer feels a genuine
+resentment. I was glad of the opportunity to see the veterans ere the
+recruits had arrived.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE FIRST DISCOVERIES
+
+ THE BEGINNING OF MINING IN ALASKA--FORTY MILE CREEK--CANADIAN AND
+ AMERICAN DEPOSITS--THE LARGEST LOG-CABIN TOWN IN THE WORLD--LIFE OF
+ THE FIRST ADVENTURERS--THE SUPERFLUITY OF SIX-SHOOTERS--LEAVING THE
+ LATCH-STRINGS OUT--THE WAY OF THE TRANSGRESSORS--INDIAN CHARLEY AND
+ HIS NUGGET.
+
+
+A little history of placer mining in the Yukon valley, at this turn of
+my narrative, will be of importance, I think, in making what follows
+more comprehensible. It was early in the eighties, if not before, that
+the first prospectors, armed with Indian tales, faith, and a “gold
+pan,” packed their supplies to the shores of the Lewes lakes over the
+passes which were the means of communication between the Indians of the
+coast and those of the interior. They followed the ice out of the lakes
+and down the river into a practically unexplored country, panning out
+of the gravel at the mouth of each tributary.
+
+[Illustration: A Typical Pilgrims’ Boat.]
+
+At first, these and the other brave spirits who were encouraged to
+follow their example arduously poled their boats back up-stream in
+September, with the result of their summer’s labor, to spend the winter
+in one of the towns of the quartz-mining region in southeastern Alaska
+or in the Pacific Coast States. Some had three or four hundred dollars;
+others, who had impatiently disregarded certain “pay” on the bars
+of the tributaries and had prospected in the hope of making a great
+“strike,” returned with little or nothing.
+
+Soon they began to take in enough supplies to last them through the
+winter, and to build cabins for their protection. A little settlement
+sprang up on the site of the “diggings” of Forty Mile Creek. All of
+the rich deposits thus far have been found not on the tributaries of
+the Yukon but on the tributaries of the tributaries. (The wealth of
+the far-famed Klondyke is not on the Klondyke River but on Eldorado
+and Bonanza, which flow into it.) So the next progressive step was a
+discovery which led to the working of the frozen ground in the valleys
+of the numerous little streams tributary to Forty Mile, by stripping
+off the dirt as fast as the very hot sun of the long days of the arctic
+summer thawed it. This process, however, was feasible only when the
+“pay-dirt” was near to the surface, and the season of activity was
+still restricted to four or five months of the year.
+
+As the prospectors moved on down the river, gradually widening the
+circle of their labors and their experience, deposits considerably
+richer than those of the tributaries of Forty Mile were found on
+the tributaries of Birch Creek in American territory. Here, for the
+first time, an innovation, which did not appeal to everybody, made
+it feasible to work twelve months in the year. An energetic man sank
+a shaft to bedrock with fires. Then he drifted out his “pay-dirt” in
+the same manner and piled it in dumps on the surface to be sluiced out
+in summer. By the autumn of 1896, when the great discovery of Bonanza
+Creek was made, Circle City was said to be the largest log-cabin town
+in the world, and from twenty-five hundred to three thousand white men
+dwelt in the Yukon valley.
+
+Experience in placer mining counted for little in a region where
+conditions were so different from those of the Pacific Coast States.
+There was no sprinkling of capitalists or mining engineers among
+those robust pilgrims of the early days. Many of the hardships which
+they endured are already a memory. They were cheered in their combat
+with nature by no such tales as lured on the Cheechawkos of 1897-98.
+The majority of them came from the frontiers of the United States;
+a smaller part, generally of French descent, from the frontiers of
+Canada. All were peculiarly the product of the Anglo-Saxon bent for
+overcoming obstacles. Not infrequently there were fugitives from
+justice, who, having the inclination and the energy to undergo great
+physical trials rather than serve a term in prison, and learning a
+lesson in manhood by bitter retrospection, have often become heroic
+pioneers. More numerous than the inhabitants of the old centres of
+civilization would suppose were those recluses who are ever seeking
+lonely refuges out of touch with the advance posts of organized society.
+
+There was no prospect, especially when no “big strikes” had been
+reported, to attract the idle and the dissolute who infest similar
+settlements in more hospitable countries. Relieved of the parasitic
+class and being interdependent in isolation from the outside world
+under the most rigorous conditions for eight months in the year, their
+inhabitants, despite the “pasts” of some of them, made Circle City and
+Forty Mile the most peaceable of mining camps. Captain Constantine,
+of the British Northwest Mounted Police, with a few men, had plenary
+powers at Forty Mile, while Circle City was nominally governed by a
+United States Commissioner and a United States Marshal.
+
+All the white women in both communities could be counted on the fingers
+of two hands. Mrs. Constantine, the wives of a few missionaries and
+of a few leading men, had come in on steamers up the river in summer
+to join their husbands. Half a dozen half-breed women, with more or
+less of the blood of Russian fur traders in their veins, composed the
+demimonde of either camp. Full-blooded squaws performed the household
+duties in some cabins for a civilized lord and master. But the “squaw
+man” was the exception. In no part of the world where isolated white
+men live among aborigines was the man who had a native mistress held in
+greater disrespect than here.
+
+As a rule, the miners did their own washing and mending. Their
+amusements were card-playing and checker-playing. The climate seemed
+to exercise a softening effect upon bellicose natures, and even
+intoxication seldom carried quarrels beyond a dispute of words. Whoever
+struck the first blow had the consensus of opinion of the camp against
+him.
+
+“We’ve got enough to do fighting Alaska,” was a saying which
+sententiously expressed the general feeling, “without fighting one
+another.”
+
+To the new-comer it was hinted that a six-shooter, which fiction makes
+the inseparable companion of all men in a new placer mining camp, was
+a superfluity that would keep him out of trouble only when he kept it
+at all times hanging on a peg in his cabin. Its weight alone was equal
+to two days’ rations in a country where the prospector had to dispense
+with his helpmeet, the mule or the burro, and carry his grub for a tour
+on his back. Therefore, arms were never carried unless there was a
+chance of meeting with game.
+
+The essence of the “free miners’ law” was being on the “squar’,” which,
+after all, is a rough equivalent of the brotherhood of man. Between
+the disputants as to the ownership of a claim the “miners’ meeting”
+decided which one was in the right. All offenders were brought before
+the bar of their fellows. A man accused of theft, after an examination
+of witnesses, was acquitted or convicted by the holding up of hands. If
+guilty, he was, according to the circumstances, either warned to leave
+the country for good--no slight penalty in midwinter with only the
+hospitality of Indians to depend upon--or else ostracism was postponed
+pending good behavior. “Miners’ meeting law” is unscientific and rarely
+commendable, but here it served its purpose well because its methods
+made it so seldom required.
+
+Under the force of self-interest a universal good-will prevailed.
+Whatever a miner had--perhaps the increment of a summer’s earnings
+which was to pay for another year’s supplies--he kept in tomato cans on
+the table of his cabin with impunity. When he went away from home on a
+journey to some other creek he left his latch-string out. On the very
+evening of his absence, while his cabin was occupied by another, he
+was, perhaps, sleeping in someone else’s without an invitation. By the
+unwritten law of the land he enjoyed whatever luxuries of food and rest
+the cabin afforded; but, likewise by the unwritten law of the land, he
+washed any dishes that he had used and put them and all other things
+that he had disturbed back where they belonged, folded the blankets on
+the bunk, cut firewood in place of that which he had burned, and laid
+kindlings by the stove ready to make warmth and cheer for the owner
+when he should return, cold and weary.
+
+Cheechawkos who came down the river in the spring in their rough boats
+at first, through ignorance, were often transgressors of the unwritten
+laws. But so few arrived at a time that the majority were soon able
+to convince them of the folly of courting trouble for themselves.
+Anyone with a bad record could not obtain favors or a loan when he
+needed it. After he had consumed the supplies which he had brought
+into the country with him, he must rely upon the transportation
+companies, established to meet the demand of the new settlements, whose
+river steamers connected with ocean-going vessels at the island of
+St. Michael in Norton Sound. When a man had been unfortunate in his
+summer’s work, a reputation for probity would secure from the companies
+a year’s outfit on a simple promise to pay. In treating generously
+the real prospector who sought new fields, they only had an eye to
+their own interests in the development of the country. Every canned and
+preserved delicacy was included in a year’s supplies, costing from $500
+to $600. Canned plum pudding was a treat for the holidays; and more
+than one miner ate _pâté de foie gras_ for the first time in Circle
+City or Forty Mile. These luxuries, however, were no substitutes for
+fresh fruits and fresh vegetables.
+
+The flat-bottomed river steamers continued on their course until
+the ice in the river led them to seek a slough or side channel for
+safety, all hands preparing to spend the winter housed up on board.
+Then no more Cheechawkos’ boats could arrive, and the camps were as
+completely separated from the outside world as a whaler caught in the
+ice of Bering Sea. To all men, including the recluses, a “pardner” was
+essential. For the recluses were recluses from civilization and not
+from fellow-men of their own tastes; and no one, except a few of the
+most perverse, undertook single-handed to put up a cabin or to live in
+it alone.
+
+The “town” was on the river bank at the most accessible point to the
+creeks whose wealth was responsible for its existence. Its cabins
+clustered around the commercial companies’ stores and the saloons. To
+one side was a camp of Indians and the mission station which ministered
+to their spiritual wants and, following the paths of diplomacy, to the
+spiritual wants of the miners--upon request. Fuel was brought from the
+hill-sides and food was taken to the cabins on the creeks by teams of
+husky dogs.
+
+When the winter settled down in serene triumph in December there was
+not even the falling of snow to disturb the calm atmosphere. The fine
+white particles under foot, which seemed as sharp as powdered glass to
+the touch, were precipitated invisibly, like frost. They glistened on
+the mountain-sides without a breath of air to stir them. In the few
+hours of gray light out of the twenty-four, men welcomed the sound of
+their own voices, or even the howl of their dogs, to break the silence
+which was the fit companion of the dry, biting cold. At night they
+forgave the still and merciless panorama of the day as they watched out
+of their cabin-windows the play of the Northern Lights, in which nature
+has furnished for the eyes a greater treat than is the breaking of
+surf for the ears.
+
+With the coming of spring, when the sun mounted so rapidly in the
+heavens, every man had his opinion and his reasons for it as to the
+exact date when the ice should go out of the Yukon. After this--the
+greatest event of the year--had taken place, all eyes kept a lookout
+up-stream for the first pine-colored boat that should dart around the
+bend with the rapidity of the current. The Cheechawko was surrounded
+by a little crowd which asked him about the result of the previous
+November’s elections, or if France and Germany had gone to war as
+indicated by an August paper which the community had been reading for
+eight months.
+
+As a rule, the early arrivals had been in the country before. They
+knew the channels and the currents of the river, and could resist
+the temptation of stopping to pan the gravel of the bars in search
+of colors, for the old-timers had long since concluded that the
+travel-worn particles of dust to be found at the mouths of all of the
+tributaries of the Yukon which are in the so-called gold belt, were
+vagrants and not the advance guard of a floating pilgrimage. They had
+poled weary miles in their long boats and carried packs for wearier
+ones without finding at the head-waters of the tributaries, which were
+named by them and still await accurate mapping by geographers, any
+original deposits. The shallow bedrock in the neighborhood of Forty
+Mile put the original deposits there within reach of the summer’s sun
+and the superficial investigation of the hurrying prospector, and
+opened the way to the discovery of richer original deposits at Circle
+City at a slightly greater depth of bedrock.
+
+So the miners had concluded that the next great strike, following the
+progress of development down the river, would be made below Circle
+City. On account of an Indian’s keen glance the contrary happened, and
+they retraced their footsteps to find fortunes at a depth of thirty
+feet under soil whose surface they had trod before. The sharp-eyed
+Indian was a brother-in-law of “Siawash George,” and “Siawash George”
+was an outcast, whose nickname was given to him by his fellow white
+men. The Siawashes are one of the lowest orders of the American
+Indians, and the old-timers, so largely men from the Pacific Coast,
+use Siawash both as a noun and as an adjective to signify contempt. One
+of the first white pilgrims to cross the passes, Cormac, was now the
+father of three or four half-breed children. He had planned that his
+marriage to a princess of the tribe would be the stepping-stone of his
+ambition to become chief of the Sticks. In the autumn of 1896 he and
+his family and retainers were encamped at the mouth of the Klondyke,
+gathering from the land and the water, according to aboriginal custom
+but with modern riffles and hooks, their winter supply of provender.
+
+[Illustration: Yukon Indians.]
+
+The Klondyke is one of the best rivers in the neighborhood for fish,
+much better than the Indian River, which flows into the Yukon between
+thirty and forty miles above it. At the summit of the water-shed
+between the Indian and the Klondyke is a great mountain, which, from
+its shape, the miners have named The Dome. In the snows of its sides
+six creeks have their origin, three flowing into either stream.
+The longest of these is sixteen miles. They wind through beds of
+black muck, ranging from fifty to two hundred and fifty yards in
+breadth, which lie between steep embankments. It is presumed that
+the embankments are the walls of an ancient river channel. They
+are indented only by the gulches cut by tributaries which once were
+mighty but now have dwindled to little torrents which flourish only
+with the first warmth of spring or after a heavy rain in summer. The
+great heat of June, July, and August drew out of the muck with a growth
+of tropical rapidity a rank grass upon which the moose fed in peace,
+fattening his sides, made lean by winter’s privations.
+
+Here “Injun Sharley,” as he called himself, came to look for moose,
+and here he found instead, as he was crossing the first tributary of
+the Klondyke at a point where its bending course had dug a niche out
+of the side-hill, a glistening nugget of gold. According to all of
+the preconceived ideas of the placer mining prospectors, no creeks in
+the region were so unpromising as these. Those few prospectors who
+had tramped up this valley, finding a few colors in the shoals made
+by washing the earth of the embankment, had passed them by with the
+ever-ready expression of the country:
+
+“Oh, well, you can find colors anywhere.”
+
+If the turn of the creek had not washed one stray nugget as well as
+stray colors out of a bench which no one found worth working two years
+after discovery, the moose might still be feeding undisturbed in the
+valleys of Eldorado and Bonanza creeks, which are now as expressive
+of man’s handiwork as the rear of a row of tenement houses, and
+certain unhappy newspaper correspondents would not have missed the
+Spanish-American War.
+
+There is no reason to believe that “Siawash George,” personally, had
+any great confidence in the “strike.” Rather--after having staked
+creek claims for himself and “Injun Sharley”--he thought it worth
+advertising, when advertising was so cheap because of the expert
+canoists and good pedestrians in his family. He was further assisted
+in spreading the news by Joe La Due, another “squaw man,” who has been
+erroneously called Father of the Klondyke, just as “Siawash George,”
+and not “Injun Sharley,” has been called its discoverer. La Due staked
+out a town-site on the flat which had been formed in the course of time
+by the alluvial deposits of the Klondyke at its mouth. He was fond of
+“booms,” and as a part of his plan of promoting his latest boom he
+offered lots for five dollars apiece to all who would stake claims on
+the new creeks. Neither he nor “Siawash George” had much to lose and
+they might gain a great deal if shafts were sunk to bedrock with fires
+after the plan that had lately come into vogue at Circle City.
+
+When an Indian arrived at Forty Mile and then at Circle City with a
+tale out of all proportion to the actual size of the nugget that “Injun
+Sharley” had found, the miners received it with that garlic cynicism
+which has its natural abiding-place in the unkempt beards of hardened
+frontiersmen. They had become so used to strikes with no foundation
+except an irresponsible imagination, as nominally to believe in nothing
+that a man said about any find he had made. So they told the Indian
+that he was a liar pure and simple, who had been primed by an ambitious
+brother-in-law. The Indian had been told to expect this reply and was
+not the least disturbed in mind by it. But no miner acts upon his
+convictions in such a matter. He usually hurries off to the reported
+scene of the find because, after all, “mebbe there might be somethin’
+in it.” But such were the reputations of Joe La Due and Cormac that
+many of the earlier pioneers refused to budge. Their superior wisdom
+was as unfortunate for them as absence from the settlements was for
+those at work on the creeks. The two or three hundred, lounging in the
+saloons and the stores or resting in their cabins, who made for the
+mouth of the Klondyke in the mood of men who are playing a joke on
+themselves, became rich.
+
+There were not enough claims on the discovery creek, Bonanza, for all
+of them, so the later arrivals, just for the sake of staking something,
+contemptuously staked a tributary of Bonanza, which they called in
+their phrase a “pup.” Then there was naught to do but to wait until a
+few of the more energetic fellows sunk holes on Bonanza. No one was
+more surprised at the result than “Siawash George.” Bedrock on Bonanza
+showed the richest placer dirt yet found in Alaska or the British
+Northwest Territory. Those who had been in time to stake claims on
+Bonanza settled down to work at once, incidentally extending their pity
+to the fellows on the “pup.” The claim-owners on Eldorado, where no
+shaft had been sunk, accepted the pity in good part and offered their
+claims at various prices, ranging from one hundred to five hundred
+dollars. Most of them were so lucky as to be unable to make a sale, and
+are now worth from five hundred thousand to a million dollars apiece.
+The “pup” is the richest placer mining creek in the world.
+
+Nine months after “Injun Sharley” had brought home a nugget instead of
+a moose, the outside world heard of the great discovery. Such pilgrims,
+attracted by the news, as succeeded in reaching Dawson in the autumn
+of 1897 found that all creeks rising on the slopes of The Dome and all
+other creeks at that time proven to be worth the working, had already
+been staked by the old-timers who had followed the advance guard from
+Circle City and Forty Mile. Feverish stampede followed on feverish
+stampede to new ground. That putting down four stakes in a creek-bed
+anywhere in the region was equal to drawing a fortune from a bank
+became the gospel of the hour, which received its authority from the
+original attitude toward the “pup” of the men who had staked Eldorado.
+A man needed only to come into a saloon with a pack on his back, and,
+being tired, appear silent and mysterious, to excite the suspicion that
+he had made a “strike.” “Only an affidavit” of having found “color” was
+necessary to have a discovery claim recorded, and a discovery always
+meant a stampede. Having received a hint from a friend, or overheard
+a whispered conversation in the street, a pilgrim would rush off for
+a distance of more than a day’s travel, without food or blankets,
+trusting to luck to feed him and keep him warm. Death was often the
+result.
+
+Having staked the remaining creeks in a radius of from thirty to
+sixty miles of Dawson, some of the new-comers rested in their cabins,
+eating their winter’s supply of food. Others found employment on
+the work-claims; and still others departed over the ice to escape
+starvation and to thrill their neighbors at home with the information
+that they owned claims. As the humor of the saloons went, there
+remained for the oncoming host of May and June an expanse of unexplored
+territory sufficient to keep a hundred times their number busy
+prospecting for a century, but no gold at all, unless they could find
+it for themselves.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+MINERS AND MINING
+
+ REAPING THE GOLD HARVEST--THAWING AND SLUICING--MINERS AND THEIR
+ THEORIES--THE DOME--EXPENSIVE TIMBER--EMPTY POCKETS BUT DOLLARS IN THE
+ DUMPS--THE FIRST MILLIONNAIRES--COLOR IN THE PAN--ONCE A PROSPECTOR
+ ALWAYS A PROSPECTOR--FIGURING FORTUNES--CAPITALISTS IN DEMAND--THE
+ FORTY HAPPY KINGS ON ELDORADO.
+
+
+It was just on the eve of harvest-time when I first visited the creeks.
+In a day or two the flow of water from the gulches where the snow lay
+thickest would make a head sufficient to wash the yellow grain out of
+the dumps. Along the four miles of Eldorado, or its full length, and
+the ten miles of working claims on Bonanza, lines of flumes and their
+dependent sluice-boxes--the lumber for which had been drawn on sleds
+from Dawson by husky dogs, or cut with whipsaws--formed a network
+around the string of cabins occupied by claim-owners and their workmen
+and around the piles of clayish-colored dirt, thawed out inch by inch
+during the short winter days, which contained virgin wealth amounting
+to ten million dollars. The hill-sides, once covered with timber, were
+bare of all except stumps and scarred by broad streaks from top to
+bottom, showing where logs for building the cabins and for feeding the
+fires in the drifts had been slid down.
+
+If you descended by the shafts beside the dumps to the drifts, you soon
+comprehended that reaping the harvest, once you have a claim, is not so
+easy as picking wild cranberries. It is dogged work to build fires day
+after day, running the risk of suffocation and permanent injury to the
+eyes by the smoke, and pulling up the dirt, bucketful after bucketful,
+by means of a windlass, with the thermometer forty below zero--and the
+prospect of cooking your own dinner. The rising steam from the thawing
+pay-dirt of the drifts, which fills the valley with mist, adds the
+discomfort of humidity to the biting cold. Though the man who turns the
+windlass may have to beat his hands and dance about to keep warm, he is
+never in positive danger as is his partner below, who, in returning to
+relight one of the series of nicely arranged piles of wood which have
+failed to ignite, is likely to be suffocated, or, barring such slips
+as this or any consequent accident, is sure to suffer continually from
+soreness and smarting of the eyes, if not to have them permanently
+injured by the smoke.
+
+In one spot of three or four square feet on Eldorado, the nuggets are
+so thick that you can pick them out by hand as a farmer’s boy picks
+potatoes out of a hill. In juxtaposition there may be as many more
+square feet which are not considered worth thawing and sluicing; and
+so the angles of the drifts seem like the path of a man of vacillating
+mind trying to make his way to the light in darkness. From two to three
+feet above the real bedrock is the false bedrock, a stratum of stone
+broken into angular fragments, apparently by some great force passing
+overhead. Between the two is the best paying-dirt, and occasionally
+here is found, perhaps with particles of gold sticking to it, the tusk
+of a mammoth who was the ruler in the valley before the days of the
+moose.
+
+In the angular fragments of the false bedrock the miners who are
+fond of making out the reason of things over their cabin-fires, with
+diversified reading in newspapers or even a dip in a text-book of
+geology at school as basic knowledge, find support for their favorite
+theory as to how the yellow particles came to their resting-place.
+Gold had never been found before in such incongruous surroundings.
+Therefore, they contend, it must have been borne from its point of
+precipitation by some force worthy of the situation and of Alaska,
+where nature has a gift for seemingly paradoxical performances done on
+a Brobdingnagian scale. What else but a glacier was equal to the feat?
+It had scattered wealth in its progress like some good Lady Bountiful,
+crushing with its great weight the false bedrock between whose
+fragments the dust had fallen by force of gravity to the true bedrock.
+
+Another, a smaller and perforce a more confident school of thought,
+holds that an ancient volcano “coughed” the dust out of the bowels of
+the earth.
+
+[Illustration: On the Creeks.]
+
+For my part, inasmuch as the geologists themselves have come to no
+certain conclusion, I hold that all the gold which has been found
+in the Klondyke and Indian River districts was smelted in a great
+pot in The Dome and has leaked out of its cracks. Then, as a fitting
+corollary, I desire that one day an old forty-niner, as sturdy and as
+fine as an old weather-beaten oak, shall discover the pot and find
+a leverage strong enough to lift the cover off it; whereupon, a good
+guardian, gently reserving enough of his millions to give him a certain
+annuity for life, he may spend the rest in ’Frisco after the manner
+of his own choosing as quickly as he can. But I am certain--such is
+the irony of fate--that, instead of him, the happy man will be an
+Oklahoma “boomer,” the father of several strapping daughters, who never
+panned a handful of dirt before he mortgaged his all in order to buy
+a Klondyker’s outfit. He will set his daughters up in the capitals of
+Europe, where they will marry continental noblemen, while the whole
+family will be miserable for life.
+
+In candor, I must say that with mine as with most theories there are
+facts which go to contradict it. The claims on the upper reaches of the
+creeks, which have their origin on the slopes of The Dome, are much
+richer than those on the lower reaches, where the dust is finer and
+more travel-worn as well as more scattering. But in the head-waters
+nothing has yet been found which is worth the working. So either all
+the gold leaked out some time before this force that carried it ceased
+to operate, or the mythical person who has charge of the pot mended
+the cracks, or, possibly--and this is my hope--the fortunes which have
+already been brought to light were only an overflow, the palpable
+result of the chemist in charge of the vessel having misjudged its
+capacity.
+
+By the fifteenth of May the drifts were filled or partly filled with
+seepage which had frozen below a depth of a few feet, where the
+temperature is never above freezing. Work in them was at an end by
+the first of May, when the surface earth had begun to thaw a little
+at midday. Then the plane, saw, and hammer took the place of the pick
+and shovel. If they had used rosewood at New York or London prices
+the miners could not have built their flumes and sluice-boxes out of
+more expensive material than that they had in the warping, knotty fir
+boards which were condescendingly sold at $250 a thousand by the three
+saw-mills in the country. Once the flumes were laid to the gulches and
+to the dams in the creek itself, the sluice-boxes were properly laid
+on the dumps which were to be washed first and the gates between the
+two were made tight, the community was ready to reap the reward of a
+winter’s toil as soon as the sun should thaw the drifts of snow on the
+mountain-sides sufficiently to make a sluice-head of water.
+
+There followed a brief period of inactivity like that between sowing
+and harvest for the farmer. Every man had his opinion of how much the
+output of all the creeks would be, and the estimates varied from six to
+fifteen millions. Within the big world of speculation there were the
+small worlds of the groups of cabins which clustered around that of the
+owner of each claim on Eldorado and Bonanza. For the laymen who had
+taken portions of claims to work on shares and for the claim-owners,
+especially those who had employed the workers on their claims at daily
+wages, it was an interval of some anxiety. They would soon know in what
+measure the estimates that they had made from specimens of pay-dirt
+panned out in buckets of water in their cabins during the winter would
+be verified. Men who had more than a hundred thousand dollars in their
+dumps possibly had not five dollars in cash in their possession.
+
+The members of no community had ever been submitted to a greater burden
+of usury. They bore it with rare good-nature. What else were they to
+do? they asked. They needed money for wages, for food for their men,
+and for lumber, and those in town who had money knew the value of it.
+The regular rate in the winter was ten per cent. a month, and some of
+the so-called millionnaires who had owned nothing except an outfit two
+years before were owing as much as $25,000 on from three to six months’
+time.
+
+A spirit of optimism and good cheer prevailed. A sun bath, lounging in
+a home-made chair on the stoop of a cabin (perhaps with a pair of moose
+horns forming an ornamental back), was a luxury better appreciated in
+the Klondyke than in a temperate clime. Sometimes a breeze, with a
+faint odor of fir-trees and of the many wild flowers which spring up in
+tropical luxuriance in the spring, came down the valley. Over the hills
+were young birches which yielded a delicious sap for the tapping. There
+was even gratitude to the tyrant windlass of the winter days in that it
+had supplied exercise, given an appetite, kept the blood circulating,
+and prevented the scurvy, which is to be dreaded only by the man who
+lounges in his cabin, does not wash himself, does not cook his food
+properly, and endeavors generally to imitate the bear. Nearly everyone
+could hope, if he did not expect, that his claim or his lay would turn
+out as well as he had estimated. At all events, he would have some
+spending money. He knew that the early boats from Lake Le Barge would
+bring in many luxuries just at the opportune moment when the “clean-up”
+was about finished and he might go to “town.” He smacked his lips in
+anticipation of the day when he would have all the eggs that he could
+eat, regardless of their cost.
+
+One day the sun suddenly beat down with great fierceness, which was
+unabated for several days. Then the water came gushing down the flumes
+in greater quantity than was needed, and the men picked up their picks
+and shovels again and began peeling off the dirt on the dumps and
+tossing it into the sluice-boxes. The warmth was prolonged through the
+night, so that the dirt continued to thaw as fast as they could strip
+it off, and on many claims--whose owners had foresight or were in luck,
+as one pleases to put it--there were two shifts working all the time
+except when, once or twice a day, the boxes were being “cleaned” of
+the accumulation of gold and the sand which sinks with it between the
+cleats. The snowdrifts were melting as if they were under a blowpipe.
+Even the tiny streams of the gulches become torrents, dams had to be
+opened, and some sluice-boxes floated away from their moorings. Only
+too soon was the loss of the wasted energy brought home. With the
+snow gone and rains and the seepage from the thawing surface the only
+source of water supply, the currents dwindled until many claims had
+not a single sluice-head. The claim-owners on the tributary Eldorado,
+with as much dirt to wash as the main stream Bonanza, particularly
+had cause to resent the prodigality of nature in expending all of its
+ammunition at once. Instead of having finished their washing in June as
+they had confidently expected, all through July they were measuring the
+head of water from hour to hour with the care of a physician feeling a
+patient’s pulse.
+
+When the “clean-up” of a day’s shovelling was made, you might feast
+your eyes on the consummation of the harvest. The water was shut off
+and the cleats in the boxes were lifted and rinsed, leaving a residue
+which glistened with yellow particles. Just a small stream was turned
+on by the man at the water-gates, who was probably making the most
+of his rest from shovelling by smoking a pipe of cut plug, and then
+turned off again, or on a little more or off a little less, while the
+most expert miner on the claim pushed the speckled sand-pile back and
+forth with a common brush-broom until all the foreign particles had
+floated off, except a sprinkling of the heavy black sand which is
+invariably the companion of placer gold.
+
+Three or four or five thousand dollars--perhaps ten or fifteen or
+twenty thousand if the “clean-up” be on Eldorado--which is three or
+four or five double handfuls, is put into a pan with an ordinary
+fire-shovel. The sight is bound to make your blood run faster and to
+color your reason with an epic enthusiasm. That little yellow pile, you
+know at a glance, will stand the test of chemicals. It must also accept
+the concrete responsibility for all the disappointments, sufferings,
+and deaths of the pilgrims on the trail and the worries of their
+friends and relatives at home. Once you have seen a “color” in the
+bottom of a pan with the black sand following it around like a faithful
+servant, you can never again be deceived by the glitter of any false
+gods. You would know it if you saw it between cobblestones on Broadway,
+or if it were no larger than a pin-head at the bottom of a trout-pool.
+
+It is small wonder that once a man is a prospector, in good faith,
+not a child of a wild stampede, he is always a prospector. There is
+an heroic aspect, the more charming in contrast to the complexity of
+civilization, in going from creek to creek which have no place on the
+maps of geographical societies, taking a pan of dirt here and a pan of
+dirt there, breathing fresh air, a zest given to your exercise by the
+hope of success.
+
+For the moment, the yellow pile makes you feel like seeking a claim of
+your own and harvesting its treasure for yourself. But when you look
+at the miry path along the base of the mountain by the creek-side, and
+think of following it with a pack on your back until it is no more, and
+a wilderness begins; of passing on over the mountains until you come
+to what you consider a likely place, and thawing through thirty feet
+of earth at a rate of a foot a day in the hap-hazard possibility of
+finding “pay-dirt,” you conclude that the poetry of the thing can be
+better appreciated by sitting on someone else’s dump.
+
+Besides, as one who did a little prospecting on his own account and is
+proud to say that he found a few “colors”--which is just what anyone
+else can do in the Klondyke region--I observed that the recent arrivals
+of Nestorian prospectors who took a delight in quoting to you from
+Emerson when their hands were reeking with clay and their gray locks
+were sticking through the crowns of old hats, do not like Alaska,
+though free to admit its material opportunities. They could not be
+weaned from the temperate climate and the skies of California, and were
+determined to return to their old stamping-grounds, where any honest
+prospector can get a grubstake from a speculative city man, and needs
+nothing more to make him happy and free.
+
+After a few days’ washing the hopes of most of the laymen were
+shattered; and so far as their peace of mind was concerned, the
+worst of it was that they had only their own lack of foresight to
+blame. They had learned that even in the Klondyke men do not make a
+practice of giving fortunes away to strangers--except to music-hall
+artistes--though, as in the centres of civilization, they often
+negotiated a bargain with an air of self-sacrifice which is an
+assumption of as much.
+
+Such was the attitude of many of the claim-owners below the discovery
+claim on Bonanza and of a few above who had prospected their claims
+well enough to have some idea of what was in them. They concluded to
+let out their ground to be worked on shares, two men to each section,
+which is called a lay. Many, especially those who had come in with
+the little pilgrimage that reached Dawson in the autumn of ’97, were
+enraptured over the chance of getting a portion of a claim on the
+original creek and not far from “discovery,” at that.
+
+The number of applications quite exceeded the number of lays to be
+let, and all through the winter the laymen on Bonanza were the envy
+of their fellows. The samples which they washed out in their cabins
+had the peculiarity of bringing promises up to original expectations,
+because the laymen had the weakness of selecting the samples from their
+best dirt. When the man who was in the drift came to one of those
+rare spots in the pay-streak of Lower Bonanza where he could see the
+tiny particles shining in the wall of earth like golden hoar-frost,
+he gleefully called out to his “pardner” at the windlass to take it
+into the cabin so they could see how much it ran to the bucket. In
+the evening the happy children, upon the result as a basis, quite
+overestimating the amount of dirt they had in their dumps, figured
+out small fortunes for themselves, spoke of the claim-owner as a good
+angel, hugged their knees fondly, as if they had materialized into
+dust, and saw brilliant pictures in their smoke rings.
+
+In their letters, detailing their success to the folks at home, they
+promised their wives new gowns and their daughters pianos. They were
+doing so well that they felt that they could afford holidays. They fell
+into the way of “knocking off” by mutual consent at noon on days when
+they had to bake bread. If it was a little colder than usual in the
+morning they succumbed to the temptation of making more figures and
+dreaming more dreams by the fire and postponing work until the morrow.
+“The gold’s in the ground; it’s ours. All we’ve got to do is to take it
+out, and we’ve got to stay here two or three winters, anyway,” was the
+argument with which they excused themselves. The size of their dumps
+beside those excavated by employees who worked by the hour was a silent
+commentary on the value of discipline.
+
+Mid-July found them in Dawson in a mood to afford at least one
+more dish of eggs, one more dinner at the restaurant before they
+settled down to the economical life which their necessities required.
+Occasionally they took out of their pockets, to amuse their friends,
+clippings from the home paper, in which they saw themselves made out
+millionnaires. They reread the letters from home which had come along
+with the clippings in the first mail down the river, and confronted
+deep perplexities. It was only human that they should wish that the
+wife had not gone so far as actually to order the piano and the gown.
+While they calculated how much they would need for their winter’s
+outfit and how much they could send home--if that fund did not all go
+for eggs before the problem was settled--they formulated the wording of
+their replies by which they should explain the situation.
+
+To the credit of the sex be it said that the wives of some of the
+unfortunate laymen knew their husbands’ weaknesses. One optimist, who
+had taken only $900 out of his claim instead of the $10,000 that he had
+anticipated, received this reply from home:
+
+“God bless you, Charlie, but we’ve made too many ten thousands without
+ever getting them for me to count my chickens before they’re hatched.
+I’m being as economical as I can, and telling the neighbors that I hope
+you’ll make a good year’s wages, but that it’s too early to tell yet
+for certain.”
+
+Most of the laymen, if they had worked steadily for eight hours a
+day--more are scarcely practicable on account of the long nights--would
+have had more than the equivalent of the prevailing rate of wages.
+Those who had felt themselves to be unfortunate in not getting lays and
+had sought employment, because they had someone to tell them to go to
+work in the morning, were in the mood of the school-boy who had studied
+during the term and passed his examination as opposed to the boy who
+had not. Their employers were better satisfied because their claims had
+been worked with more system and thoroughness than the others, and were
+more than glad to pay the interest, heavy as it was, on their borrowed
+capital.
+
+While the laymen were inclined to exaggerate the amount of their
+earnings in order to decrease the discrepancy between their winter
+boasts and their spring returns, the claim-owners themselves, who early
+in May were serene optimists and put the total output of the country
+at $15,000,000, by the end of May were dour pessimists, asserting
+their unbounded faith that the total output would not be more than
+$6,000,000. Early in May, you see, there was an impression that the
+Government royalty of ten per cent. on the gross product of all claims
+had been repealed. At the end of May, Major Walsh, the Commissioner
+of the Yukon District, arrived with the positive information that the
+royalty would be collected. Most of the claim-owners on Bonanza had
+suffered the same disillusion as their laymen; but most of them, if
+the Government had not decided that they would have to pay the royalty
+on the laymen’s gold as well as on their own, would have put on a bold
+front, especially as their claims were for sale.
+
+When claim-owners met on the trail, after comparing notes as to the
+number of eggs eaten at the first sitting, the invariable remark was:
+
+“I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything about your claim being sold!”
+
+For no one was certain whether he or some stranger owned the wealth of
+his dumps. Without any property under consideration by the capitalists
+of London or New York, you were a kind of social outcast. Claims
+that were under options were as common as mortgages formerly were on
+farms in Kansas.
+
+[Illustration: A Flume on Bonanza Creek.]
+
+The prospect of famine during the winter had been responsible for this.
+Some enterprising fellows, who were among the first to go out over the
+ice, made the best of their opportunity as connecting links between an
+isolated community and civilization.
+
+“Here you are,” they said to the claim-owners on Eldorado and Bonanza,
+“paying a dollar and a quarter and a dollar and a half an hour for
+labor and thawing the dirt out by inches, when capitalists, with
+cheaper labor and improved appliances, can take it out for half the
+money. Why, it’s a case of the old stage coach against the lightning
+express. If they can block a number of claims and work ’em together,
+they’ll gladly pay you on the spot more’n you can get out of your claim
+the way you’re working it, and make a good thing out of it too. The
+whole outside’s wild over the Klondyke. The capitalists are longing for
+the chance. All that’s got to be done is to lay it before ’em. You name
+your price and give me six months’ option and we’ll take ’em out and
+sell ’em. What we get for ’em’s our affair. We’ll make our commission
+out of the difference.”
+
+The enthusiasts believed what they said. They assured themselves and
+the claim-owners that none of the arguments which held good in other
+mining camps could apply in this instance. The Klondyke was a law unto
+itself in all matters of investment, they said. They put dust from each
+of the claims which they were to sell in a separate bag, and this they
+were to offer to the simple-minded financiers of London and New York
+as a guarantee of the correctness of their several representations.
+Each zealous miner being desirous that his claim should show up well on
+the list, some of the promoters obtained several thousand dollars in
+nuggets.
+
+Such examples of success were not without their effect upon those who
+went out over the ice at later periods. The field of all the claims
+on the creeks as yet demonstrated to be valuable having been worked,
+they turned their attention to those creeks which had been staked on
+unfounded rumors by stampedes, and possibly were worth no more than
+the beds of so many creeks in the valley of the Hudson River. They
+neglected none of the details. Because it looks better to the lay eye,
+they chose dust from Eldorado as examples of the product of these “wild
+oat prospectors.”
+
+The moral effect of the option craze was unfortunate in more respects
+than one. Men who owned claims on stampede creeks felt that they could
+afford to waste their winter in idleness in their cabins as long as
+they had property in the hands of New York capitalists. They could not
+escape the heresy that a claim in the Klondyke, no matter what its
+location, was regarded by the outside world as a valuable piece of
+property. It was especially hard for those who had not funds enough to
+buy their winter’s outfit, as they inquired along the river bank, day
+after day, as the boats came in, to learn finally that the promoters
+to whom they had intrusted their claims had arrived on the Pacific
+Coast just at the time when the Klondyke was forgotten and all public
+interest was centred in another subject, and, accordingly, had enlisted
+in the volunteer army.
+
+Those promoters with small ambitions fared the best. In London
+they sold a few of the cheaper claims, which, as a rule, were
+disappointments to the purchasers. But sometimes it is better to be
+trusting than to be wise. One young Englishman bought a claim on
+Sulphur for $2,000 which would not have sold for $500 in Dawson at the
+time. When he arrived to take possession of it in June, its value had
+risen so rapidly on account of the later development of the creek that
+he sold it for $20,000. The anxiety of the claim-owners on the new
+creeks, as Sulphur, Dominion, and Hunker--all having their head-waters
+on the slopes of The Dome--were called, lest the promoters had sold
+their claims, was as great as that of some of the claim-owners on
+Bonanza lest their claims had not been sold. Perhaps as many as thirty
+claims on the new creeks had been worked to any extent during the past
+winter, with such results as to increase their speculative value by
+five hundred per cent.
+
+The forty happy kings of the forty claims on Eldorado also preferred
+not to sell. That “pup” returned good for evil. It heaped satire upon
+the satirists who had given it its name as a joke, and continued to
+surpass all expectations. The optimism which over-estimated Bonanza
+under-estimated Eldorado. These forty kings, as they compared the
+output with their figures, concluded, with some pride, that all born
+mathematicians are inclined to be too conservative.
+
+You could see the dust glistening in the dumps of the “pup.” The water
+gurgling over the cleats in the sluice-boxes seemed to sing a merrier
+song than on Bonanza. Every shovelful which it bore chuckling over the
+cleats yielded up a dollar or more. It licked twice as much off rocks
+that had to be lifted out of the sluice-boxes by hand because its
+current was not strong enough to carry them on down to the waste pile.
+At intervals, nuggets of some size were unearthed by the spade and were
+tossed into a pan at one side. If you were a friend of the claim-owner
+he would beg you to take your pick of the lot as a souvenir of the day.
+But you would not get one worth more than ten or fifteen dollars, even
+if you were greedy enough to choose it for its size rather than for its
+beauty. The giants--one was found worth $600 and those worth from $50
+to $100 were not infrequent--had been spied in the drifts in the winter.
+
+A magnificent carelessness of details prevailed. A scientific miner who
+had seen fortunes made in California out of a cent a pan would have
+regarded the forty kings in the light of infants making a holiday with
+a tack hammer and a gold watch. They could afford to laugh back at him
+in return. There is some reason in their philosophy that one cannot
+afford to pay men a dollar and a quarter an hour to pick up stray
+pennies, and more in the philosophy that when you have a fortune you
+have enough.
+
+It was not yet in the old-timer’s nature, rapidly as his character was
+changing, to squeeze the last cent out of Mother Earth, in the manner
+of some hard taskmaster, when she had given to him such a bountiful
+harvest. A little line of dust, like a braid of gold lace, remaining on
+either side of the sluice-boxes after a day’s clean-up was dismissed
+with the remark that it would “come out in the wash” next time. If the
+workman who had the uncomfortable and unhealthy position--especially
+when the sun was directly overhead--of standing in the dump-box, took
+a few minutes’ rest, he shrugged his shoulders and said that any dust
+that was lost in the meantime could be a boon to the Chinamen who,
+coming humbly after the white man’s departure, would patiently take
+fortunes out of the white man’s tailings--unless the capitalist should
+make the valley resound with the toil of machinery manned by cheap
+labor, thus cheating poor John out of what he has come to regard as the
+right of his race in placer mining countries.
+
+[Illustration: Shovelling a Clean-Up into a Gold Pan.]
+
+[Illustration: Cleaning Up.]
+
+There was not one strong box for the safekeeping of the daily harvest
+of thousands on all of the creeks. The bags of dust were kept in the
+little cellars which the miners had excavated under their cabins for
+the preservation of their food. There was a joke which went the round
+of the firesides during the food-panic that it would be cheaper to
+fry the dust and save the hams. For the bags, made of roughly tanned
+moosehide, the Indians received prices in keeping with those of other
+things. They bore the owner’s name printed in ink, if ink could be
+obtained; their capacity was about $5,000 each, and they were not
+unlike, in their freshness as well as in their size, the dirty, worn,
+brown little bags which were carried in lieu of purses. Three or four
+of them were all that you cared to carry on your back. When you met
+men on the trail bending as under heavy packs of slight bulk, you knew
+their business. If there were many bags there might be an escort with
+a rifle and there might not. Most of the claim-owners thought nothing
+of sending several thousands by their employees, unaccompanied, to be
+deposited in one of the Commercial Companies’ stores; but once the
+“Cheechawkos” began to arrive, all sought locks for their cellar-doors.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+SOME KLONDYKE TYPES
+
+ THE FOOL AND HIS LUCKY FRIENDS--MORE THEORIZERS--JOE STALEY
+ AND BILLY DEDDERING--FRENCH GULCH BENCH--GOOD FORTUNE THAT WAS
+ DESERVED--NEIGHBORS AND TWINS--NO CURE FOR THE GOLD FEVER.
+
+
+It was the greater world of the Klondyke that was bounded by the creek
+claims. A smaller world was bounded by the hill-sides where there were
+many fresh mounds of earth, suggesting that the population might be
+digging their graves one by one. Graves of ambitions most of these
+mounds were, in all truth. A few, readily distinguished as far as you
+could see the two figures hovering over them, were the birthplaces of
+the fortune which the figures were exhuming with the orthodox rocker.
+
+The original nugget washed out of a bench and deposited where Indian
+Charlie’s gaze would light on it did not lead, even indirectly, to
+the discovery of the wealth of the benches. This honor belongs to a
+stalwart Swede, whose race in the Klondyke is the general butt of that
+fine wit of our own race which makes a mark of a foreigner’s broken
+English and his efforts to understand strange manners and a strange
+language. One day in the spring of 1897 he went up the slope above his
+cabin near the mouth of Eldorado and began to strip off the muck as
+fast as the sun thawed it. Directly his neighbors saw what he was doing
+they began to compose satirical remarks against the time when he should
+come down.
+
+“Why don’t you go looking for gold up a tree?” they asked him.
+
+“I tank gold no grow on trees,” he replied, in all candor.
+
+“Say, did you ever hear,” they continued, as they held their sides,
+“that the weight of gold makes it sink? I suppose you think the glacier
+walked up on the hills and left a few millions there. The millions
+didn’t roll down? Oh, no! That’s why we have to sink through thirty
+feet in the creek bed to pay dirt. Better try the trees! You might find
+a bear up the trees and bear meat would be worth three pennyweights a
+pound in town.”
+
+“If you don’t dig some hole you no find gold. By tam! I dig a hole if
+I vant to,” he replied, as he went into his cabin.
+
+“Well of all the fools,” they said, “it takes a Swede to beat the lot.”
+
+Men passing on the trails stopped to look up to the point where the
+“fool” was working, grew friendly in despising him, and carried the
+joke to the ends of the creeks and to Dawson, where it was elaborated
+over the bars.
+
+One evening the “fool” quietly called on all of his friends among his
+fellow Scandinavians, as well as upon certain Anglo-Saxons who had not
+made fun of his English. They followed him up the hill and drove stakes
+in the neighborhood of his prospect hole. The twinkle in his blue eye
+was not unkind, though suggestive, the next morning when he showed to
+the scoffers a handful of nuggets from a claim which was worth $50,000.
+But scoffers accept nothing on faith. They would not believe that he
+took the nugget out of the hill until they had panned some of his dirt
+themselves.
+
+“Well, of all the lucky fools,” they said, “it takes a Swede to beat
+the lot! Here’s millions been lyin’ within ten rods of us for a year
+and we never knowed it.”
+
+Those who had sharpened their wits at the discoverer’s expense now
+hastened to get a claim as near as possible to his, until a mile of
+Bonanza on both sides of the creek was taken up, from the point where
+the slopes meet the creek bed to their summit. Theories about the
+habits of the glacier were qualified by the experts. Thenceforth, it
+stood to reason that the breadth of no glacier of such importance would
+be limited to that of a creek. The scoffers soon found themselves
+saying that this had been their opinion all along, and eventually
+became so imaginative as to hint that they had advised the Swede to
+make the experiment.
+
+Poetic justice attended the immediate outcome of the stampede. The
+pioneer and the parasite got their fit rewards. There was less than
+an acre of good pay dirt on Skookum Bench, as it was called, and this
+mostly fell to the discoverer and his friends. Here and there in the
+neighborhood good day’s wages could be made with a rocker, and nothing
+more. Enthusiasm over bench claims languished.
+
+“It was just like a Swede to strike the only rich bench in the whole
+country the first time that he put his pick in the ground,” said the
+scoffers. In their pessimistic philosophy, which exults over deserted
+prospect holes, the latest strike is always bound to be the last. They
+are the very ones who were the greatest optimists when they left home
+to try their luck in the North against the advice of their friends.
+This weakness is likely to grow on Klondykers who become too fond of
+a sedentary life, unless their supply of bacon runs out and forces
+action, or they awaken to a sense of their growing degradation when
+they eat fresh eggs in Dawson and then see the world in bright colors
+again. But long after the cynics are dead, strikes will be made in
+Alaska by the class of real prospectors who cheerily face all hardships
+and get out of them good digestions for anything from flapjacks to
+moose gristle or even boiled willow roots.
+
+Joe Staley and Billy Deddering, who discovered French Gulch Bench,
+the richest of all the benches, the spring following the discovery of
+Skookum Bench, were of the order of real prospectors. They had served
+their apprenticeship in various parts of the Rockies, which are the
+playground of free men from end to end.
+
+Fond as I am of the California prospector, I am unwilling to accept the
+verdict of his squint whenever he brings it to bear on a portion of
+the earth’s surface, though Billy Deddering, I admit, as he understands
+relative values, has reason to believe in his. But, in one sense, I
+rejoice with him in his faith, inasmuch as the scoffers, who want to
+make out that all success in the Klondyke comes from luck, and that
+they have failed because they never had any, spun the yarn that a log
+which he was shooting down the hill for a cabin knocked a nugget out of
+the ground and thus became the godfather of his fortune.
+
+Some two miles above the mouth of Eldorado, French Gulch splits the
+embankment which forms the western wall of the valley of Eldorado.
+Billy’s squint, when he brought it to bear on the rounded corner of the
+embankment on the lower side of the gulch in something of the manner of
+an old-fashioned marine covering a sail with his telescope, told him
+that this was exactly the place where gold ought to be found, even if
+it was not. The first hole that he sunk yielded only colors. A clerk
+from London or the Eastern seaboard of the United States might have
+gone back down the hill with his pick and shovel in a fit of blues and
+never come up again. Billy was not in the least discouraged. He merely
+readjusted his squint, and concluded:
+
+“If ’tain’t here it must be farther up.”
+
+So it was. In the next hole he took $187 out of his first pan on
+bedrock. Joe was with him at the time, but at the request of Joe I give
+all the credit for the discovery to Billy.
+
+“It was Billy’s idea entirely,” Joe said. “He spotted the ground first.”
+
+“What did you do,” I asked Billy, “when you struck it after all your
+years of buffeting about from one camp to another?”
+
+“Well,” he replied, “I looked around to see if anybody had seen us.”
+
+“Nobody did see us, so far as we could make out,” Joe put in, “but they
+must have noticed that we went down the hill as light as if we was
+walkin’ on feathers, though we was tryin’ to look very solemn, like we
+was at a funeral. When somebody asked us if we had found anything I
+reckon we kind o’ started, though we was careful to say, ‘Jest a few
+colors.’ But durned if the crowd wasn’t up there ’fore the few friends
+we had among our neighbors had fairly got their stakes in the ground.”
+
+“And you, Joe? What did you think of that night before you turned in?”
+
+“Old’s I am, and long’s I’ve been knockin’ about the world, I’ve never
+been married, and naturally I thought what a surprise it would be to
+mother, when she got a letter sayin’ that her oldest boy was comin’
+back to ’hio with a pile to pay off the mortgage and spend the rest of
+his days on the old homestead.”
+
+“And you, Billy?”
+
+“I wished I was in ’Frisco with that hundred and eighty-seven.”
+
+Many times I climbed the hill to have a talk with Joe and Billy.
+They were a relief from the loungers and speculators in the hotel
+at the Forks, who seemed to think that the business of a newspaper
+correspondent was to expound the possibility of the schemes for
+enlisting capital which they were promoting. It was a pleasure to look
+into the good faces of Joe and Billy, and to shake their hands, caked
+with clay. I sat on a stone and smoked my pipe, while Joe carried
+buckets of dirt to Billy, who looked up with a smile on his round
+German face, which was spattered with drops of mud that had splashed
+out of the rocker when he shook it, or when he ladled water on to the
+dirt with a dipper made out of a butter-can. Joe said that he didn’t
+mind if the fact that he had struck it was published in the _Sydney_
+(Ohio) _Journal_, but beyond that I knew he had no axes to grind, and
+my highest ambition for the moment was that they should think me a
+good fellow, while their greatest fear was that I was starving because
+I would not go up to the tent and have a cup of coffee and a “bite to
+eat” in the middle of the afternoon.
+
+The sun was accommodating enough to thaw the dirt as fast as Billy
+could rock it, and Joe could bring it a little faster than either the
+sun could thaw it or Billy could rock it. This allowed Joe intervals
+in which to rest, to entertain me, and to relight his pipe. I used to
+offer my pouch to him, telling him that he would get more smoke if he
+used tobacco.
+
+“Couldn’t think of it. There’s nothin’ so sweet as the heel,” he would
+say. “It gives me a puff, and that’s all I want.”
+
+It was not surprising that he wondered why the supplies of tobacco
+which other men had brought in with their outfits were long ago
+exhausted, while he had plenty left. He protested, notwithstanding
+Billy’s denials, that he filled his pipe every morning--at least,
+almost every morning.
+
+The experience of seeking with his own hands wealth direct from the
+hands of Mother Nature had chiselled out the lines of his face in
+distinct, unqualified characteristics, without any of the doubtful
+gingerbread work which we find on faces in civilization. It was like
+the weather-beaten image on some old church, careless of the storms
+which make a new image streaked and mean. He and his “pardner” were
+“rocking out” five hundred dollars a day; he was no man’s servant and
+no man’s master, and more of a king than kings. I have gathered nuggets
+on his claim as easily as I have picked up white pebbles on the beach
+in boyhood.
+
+The great difficulty is in developing such a wonderful squint as
+Billy Deddering’s and in finding the exact spot where such nests of
+nuggets are located. If ever there was a poor man’s claim it is the
+bench claim. All you need to work it are a rocker, which costs fifteen
+dollars, and your pick and shovel. A blind ditch whose frozen walls are
+as tight as a porcelain bath-tub will catch the seepage from the pay
+dirt, which is thawed by the sun as it is gradually exposed. So you
+have all the water that you need, without too much. If the bedrock be
+at some depth, you can work in winter as well as in summer. A year at
+the most will suffice to take out your fortune; and you have no worry
+over borrowed money, flumes, sluices, or dams.
+
+If Billy had not already staked his bench claim rights for the Bonanza
+Creek region, he and Joe would not have had to be content with a single
+claim, and one of them would have got the claim just above discovered,
+which was even richer, two men taking as high as a thousand dollars a
+day out of it. Here was dirt richer than any on Eldorado itself, twenty
+of whose forty working claims, probably containing thirty million
+dollars, stretched out in a panorama before you when you looked either
+up or down the creek. If one could have had a claim on the bench of the
+size of the creek claims, instead of one only a hundred feet square, he
+would have been more than a millionaire; and by hiring labor he could
+have left the country in three months after the discovery with his
+money in his pocket.
+
+Sad to say, there was not room for all on French Gulch Bench any more
+than on Eldorado. The whole extent of the pay dirt was not more than
+two or three acres. It was just as large as the dip in the hill-side,
+which, according to the theory of Billy, caught and held the gold when
+it was travelling, while all that passed over the rim went on down to
+the creek bed below, leaving only an occasional color in its track.
+But I disagree with Billy. I think that all is accounted for by the
+giant keeper of the pot in The Dome having thrown out a handful of the
+overflow across the hills. This makes the presence of wash-gravel,
+which is absent, unnecessary, and reconciles itself to the presence of
+nuggets in rotten mica shist, which is the most inexcusable of all the
+paradoxes in Alaska, the old prospectors say.
+
+Aside from Billy and Joe, I came to know some of their fortunate
+neighbors. Dan Saunders probably had the best claim of all. He was at
+the hotel at the Forks one day, and in his cups when a man offered
+in the bar-room to sell a claim on French Gulch Bench for a hundred
+dollars. The Forks is the Stock Exchange of the creeks, and at that
+moment, on account of some rumor, the opinion ruled that the bench had
+been salted. The claim-owner believed it. Dan said he would give fifty
+down and the first fifty out of the claim, and the offer was accepted.
+The morning after, when Dan’s wit was not so brilliant, but his
+reasoning faculties had improved, he went up to look at his elephant.
+He came down a week later and tried to spend the two or three thousand
+dollars he had taken out in the meantime. He could dispose of only part
+of it, and returned to his claim in despair, somewhat disgusted with
+city life.
+
+Burke, who owned the claim next to Saunders, was a type of the runaway
+boys from the East who have turned up in the Klondyke after having
+served an apprenticeship in the West. This one reaped among the harvest
+of his wild oats the largest nugget that was taken out of French Gulch
+Bench. It was the shape of an oblong pancake, without any quartz in it,
+and worth $210. When I met him in Dawson one morning, he was gleeful
+over the joke he had played on the old folks at home. For the first
+time in five years he had written to them. They had as good reasons to
+suppose that he was dead as that he was in the Klondyke.
+
+“Won’t their eyes pop and won’t they have something to tell the
+neighbors when they find out that their worthless Tom is comin’ home
+with fifty thousand cold!”
+
+That same day I dined with Joe Staley at the foremost restaurant in
+town. When we had eaten fresh eggs and other luxuries which had just
+been brought in from the “outside,” as he pushed his plate away from
+him he shook his head dubiously:
+
+“I dunno as I’ll be so happy as I thought, when I settle down among
+the cows and chickens,” he mused. “This grub don’t taste the way I
+thought ’twould. Darned if I don’t like the beans and bacon that I have
+up at the claim better, and I’ll be glad to be back carryin’ dirt to
+the rocker for Billy to-morrow. They say once the gold fever’s in a
+fellow’s bones it sticks like the rheumatiz, and I believe it. I reckon
+it’s the only thing I’ll be satisfied with in this life. But I won’t
+prospect in this godless region. I’ll go back to Californy.”
+
+On my way to see Joe and Billy I often stopped for a chat with Ned and
+Fred Beck, who were sinking a shaft to bedrock at the base of French
+Gulch Bench hill. These twin brothers had been “pardners” for forty
+years. They had the vigor which comes from living among the Rockies.
+Their faces, framed in white beards, were fresh and smiling. The
+archaic furnace which they had constructed for sharpening their
+tools, if not their age and personal resemblance, would have attracted
+attention.
+
+[Illustration: The Discoverers of French Gulch Bench at Work.]
+
+[Illustration: Pardners and Twins for Forty Years.]
+
+“Have you never quarrelled?” I asked.
+
+“Oh, yes, lots of times,” said Fred, “and agreed on quits lots of
+times, too. After Ned’s had a drink or two he always gets cranky and
+wants to start out for himself.”
+
+“Not much crankier’n you do,” Ned put in.
+
+“That’s right,” Fred assented. “But when we’re sober we make it up
+again and are ashamed of ourselves. We may be twins, but we’re just
+fitted for each other.”
+
+“That’s right, too,” Fred assented.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+GETTING ACQUAINTED
+
+ MR. AND MRS. “MEENACH” AND THEIR MENAGE--THE JUVENILE MINING COMPANY,
+ LIMITED--VOSS--THE ARCH-DEACON--A SOUR-DOUGH STIFF--A DALMATIAN AND
+ A TURK--SIAWASH GEORGE AND HIS STEAM-ENGINE--MISS MULROONEY AT THE
+ FORKS--THE PRICE OF A “SQUARE” WITH TRIMMINGS.
+
+
+One day, if the quartz claims which have been staked should fulfil the
+hopes of their owners, the Klondyke will become a place of managers and
+workmen, of stamp mills and chemical processes. To-day, there is very
+little to say about the working of the mines, which is as simple as
+building a fire, digging a well and doing the week’s wash, but much to
+say about my friends and acquaintances there, who came from the ends
+of the earth and represented most of its employments. Without knowing
+individuals, the pilgrimage of the Cheechawkos would have meant no
+more to me than a motley procession seen from a balcony. Those leading
+citizens and well-known characters whom I met, under the guidance of
+Captain Hansen in a round of the town on the evening after my arrival,
+are worthy of a chapter by themselves. If I had taken advantage of all
+the letters of introduction to claim-owners that they gave me I think
+that I should have been three weeks in travelling the length of Bonanza.
+
+In return for hospitality that did not stand upon formality but laid
+its hand on my shoulder and insisted, I could offer nothing except the
+news from the “outside,” the bad news that there was no escape from the
+royalty. I registered a vow that if I were to make the journey over
+the ice again I would find room among my supplies for one more article
+of luxury, or else forego the privilege of introductions. I saw in my
+dreams the smiles with which my hosts would have greeted the offer of a
+good cigar, until I had the conscience of a highway robber.
+
+“Don’t forget to call on Meenach!” said Captain Hansen. “He’s the
+luckiest man in the country without exception. He doesn’t have to
+darn his own socks and cook his own bacon and beans and you’ll know
+him because he’s sleek and fat and clean-shaven. I walk up the creek
+when I can get the time just for the privilege of poking my head in
+at Meenach’s door. To a poor devil of a Klondyker it’s a peep into
+paradise.”
+
+It was not enough that the fortunate Meenach should have his wife; he
+had also his little boy of six and his two little girls, one of four
+and the other of two years, with him. After he wrote to Mrs. Meenach
+that he had killed his lion, she came on to him; and she brought with
+her such thing as sheets, tablecloths, and pillows, and a regulation
+cooking-stove. He never dared to compute just how much the stove had
+cost him, preferring not to have his enjoyment of the luxury allayed.
+The mere expense of bringing it up from Dawson would have bought two or
+three good ones at home.
+
+To the miners the most wonderful feature of the Meenach cabin was the
+carpet on the floor. Some of them wanted to take off their boots before
+entering, and one suggested that if he were younger he would walk in on
+his hands.
+
+“If you don’t mind,” he added, “I’ll sit with my back to the sheets on
+the bed. It’s too much at a time. I want to drift into this easy like.”
+
+“Folks who live in castles may be bothered by having too many rooms to
+care for,” said Mrs. Meenach, “but not I, in my cabin. I could put the
+children to bed with one hand, stir something on the stove with the
+other, and set the table with the third, if I had it. It’s no trouble
+to go to the market in the morning. All our fresh vegetables are in
+tin cans in the cache just outside the door. Oh, yes, there is much
+to be thankful for if I look at it in the right light. We kept our
+condensed cream, our canned asparagus and our canned peas all winter
+without being frozen. Then, please heaven, something green grows in
+this country. I have a little cranberry sauce from the poor cranberries
+on the hill-side, and I agree with the children that it is ‘gooder’n’
+anything I ever tasted. If I could get a fresh cabbage I think I should
+eat it all without waiting to put salt on it. Now I live from day to
+day on the hopes of the eggs which are expected in on the first boats.”
+
+Thus she chatted while she warmed the tinned roast mutton in the
+frying-pan, boiled the evaporated potatoes and the tinned sweet corn.
+
+“I’m not going to say that dinner, such as it is, is ready,” she said,
+“because, in the Klondyke, that is quite superfluous.”
+
+It is good when you have eaten beans for a month off a tin plate
+balanced upon your knee, to look upon a clean table-cloth again, to
+sit by the window of a cabin in blissful certainty that your journey
+is at an end, and have a good and gentle woman pour you a cup of tea.
+I remember the meal as a banquet, not a dinner. After it was over, the
+lord and master and I smoked our pipes until the little ones’ heads
+began to nod, when I went into the cabin of one of his laymen to roll
+up in my blanket.
+
+The children had reason to think that they were the only children in
+the world and to be as proud as princes. But Mrs. Meenach’s fears lest
+they should be spoiled by the adulation of the miners were equally vain
+with her fears about their health. The extent of their illnesses was a
+day’s indisposition on the part of the baby. Swathed in furs and scarfs
+until only their noses were visible and their limbs were as stiff as
+a doll baby’s, they might go out to play with their sleds for a few
+moments at a time. Listening to the cries of the dog-drivers and the
+howls of their steeds, which had turned their mother’s nerves on edge,
+had been as good as the kuh-chuk-chuk-chuk of a railroad locomotive
+to them. The miners, with frost-encrusted beards, were so many Father
+Christmases who rarely forgot to bring a present of a nugget when they
+came.
+
+With the coming of spring, an old Californian took the baby in his arms
+while the brother and sister followed at his heels up the hill-side to
+his bench claim. He showed them to a log, where they sat very gravely
+while he unfolded to them a mighty scheme. In return for three kisses
+apiece, one to be delivered when the bargain was struck and two when
+the goods were delivered, he agreed to build for them a small rocker,
+so that they could start a Mining Company (Limited) on their own
+account.
+
+Their dividends were large until one of the laymen found out that they
+were using the best portions of his dumps. Then the total income fell
+to a dollar a day, which the boy explained was due to laxness on the
+part of the president--his elder sister--and gross negligence on the
+part of the assistant manager--the baby--who insisted upon turning the
+gold pan bottom side up at critical moments. Their father played the
+part of the unskilled laborer, and sometimes when he was ordered to
+work he said, “In a minute!” an excuse which had to be accepted. The
+time came when the old Californian could no longer keep his joke to
+himself.
+
+“Meenach, seems to me I ’member tellin’ the youngsters that you’d carry
+water for ’em to work the rocker with,” he chuckled.
+
+It was by a diversion from my programme that I spent the next night
+with Voss. His name was not on my list, and I had never heard of it
+until I drifted into his cabin. I was attracted by his speech, which
+sounded a little unnatural in a community where expressions are
+intended to convey a meaning and not to subserve the rules of grammar.
+Despite his education, Voss was an old-timer among old-timers, greeting
+them all by their first names. The most ferocious of them, out of whose
+mouths an oath rolled with the ease and deliberation of their tobacco
+smoke, regarded him as a personal friend.
+
+“He looks stuck up, but he ain’t stuck up,” they said. “He’s clean all
+the way down and all the way through and game as a grizzly bear, and we
+know. We’ve followed him on the trail.”
+
+The sincere fellowship which he felt for them in return belongs to
+that philosophy which makes of the young men of old but impoverished
+families, good and cheerful prospectors, ranchers, and cowboys. Not
+in fancy--which misled so many poor souls among the Cheechawkos--but
+in fact, they prefer the independent life of a mining camp to working
+for a salary in a city; prefer washing their own dishes and rising
+at 3 A.M., and harnessing the dogs to start on the trail to going to
+an office every morning and leaving it every afternoon at a certain
+hour. By all the manners that stamp the man, Voss was a child of
+civilization, and such a child as was equal to carrying out his
+determination not to return to it until he was master in his own right
+of the little luxuries that keep the taste of ashes out of the mouth.
+Often he spoke of these, then ran his hands into the pockets of his
+overalls, took a pull at his pipe, and looked at his dumps with an
+anticipation as keen as that of some naval captain of Drake’s day in
+sight of the chalk cliffs of England, after years in foreign countries
+on rations of hard biscuit.
+
+“But even before I carry out my plans of travel,” he said, “I shall buy
+a ranch, where I shall have a home with no other habitations in sight;
+where I shall have a good saddle-horse waiting for me, whenever I shall
+grow tired of town. Once you have become accustomed to the silence of
+the plains, the mountains, and the trail, mere country houses will not
+satisfy you--something gets into the blood.”
+
+“You all catch it, I see,” I interrupted. “Joe Staley says it’s like
+rheumatiz’ and it gets not into the blood but into the bones.”
+
+“Yes, bones--blood and bones, both!” was the reply.
+
+He had four retainers, who lived in his cabin: the boy, the Archdeacon,
+Jim, and Grouse, the fox-terrier. The boy was sixteen or seventeen. He
+had gone to the Klondyke, against his parents’ wishes, to find himself
+nonplussed by the necessity of a food supply for the winter months.
+Voss put him on his feet. The Archdeacon was of the Established Church
+and a graduate of Oxford. He did not seem to be, but he must have been,
+older than the boy, for he was gray and the father of three children.
+Shortly after he was ordained archdeacon the something had “got into”
+his blood and bones, and he vacillated between the church and travel
+until his meanderings brought the promise of a brilliant career to the
+guardianship of a flock of Indians, halfway around the world. He baked
+the best bread that I ate in the Klondyke. Though he accepted praise on
+that score as quietly as he did everything else, I could see that it
+pleased him--better, perhaps, than the praise of a bishop. In getting
+breakfast, which he had taken upon himself as one of his tasks, his
+slippered feet moved about so softly that you were not awakened until
+his voice called you at the right moment.
+
+“It is good to see many kinds of men and to do many things,” he
+volunteered, as he lifted a flapjack from the skillet to my plate.
+“When all the world was going to the Klondyke, I had to join the
+throng. I got a lay on Bonanza and put some men to work on it. But,
+unfortunately, I had no food for myself. Mr. Voss”--the Archdeacon
+never omitted the Mister--“asked me to come and live with him through
+the winter. What a pity it is that there isn’t such a good fellow as
+Mr. Voss to take care of every unfortunate fellow like me!”
+
+Jim, in the language of the Klondyke, was a “sour-dough stiff,” and
+he was certainly an unhappy man. A “sour-dough stiff” will, under no
+circumstances, eat baking-powder bread. This eccentricity, developed
+in the later years of a prospector’s life, generates others which are
+its natural companions. He thinks that baking powder in the smallest
+quantity is poisonous, and, therefore, is as finicky and miserable
+as any other man who becomes a victim of dyspepsia through forever
+thinking of some means to avoid it.
+
+In addressing his employer Jim uttered the word “Voss” in a harsh
+voice, as if calling attention to its nudity and implying that he would
+not subvert his rights as a free man by using “Mister,” though he were
+to hang for it. He was the first to rise in the morning and he always
+prepared his own breakfast.
+
+“Some folks don’t like my cookin’, an’ I don’t like some folks’
+cookin’, either,” he explained.
+
+On some occasions, when he felt a little lazy, he would condescend to
+eat at the table with the others, but with an expression of martyrdom
+on his thin, old face. Voss told me that Jim would probably confide to
+me at the first opportunity how grossly the claim was mismanaged, and
+so he did. Voss forgave his eccentricities partly because they amused
+him and his friends, and partly because Jim was an expert in saving
+fine gold from floating down to the waste pile.
+
+Jim’s contempt for the Alaskan miner’s knowledge of sluicing was
+pleasant to hear unless you had to hear it often. He had a miniature
+sluice for treating the residue which contains the lighter particles.
+It were better to step on the hem of your wife’s skirt on the way to
+the theatre than to lay your hands on this fine gold machine, as he
+called it. Whether or not it was worth the time that Jim had spent in
+building it, was a grave question with Voss.
+
+In making the “clean-up” Jim was the general in charge of the field.
+The best-natured men on the claim were selected to assist him, and
+even their patience sometimes gave out. Voss himself, accompanied by
+the fox-terrier, who was general superintendent of the claim, winter
+and summer, used to take up his station at the water gate. He did not
+always interpret Jim’s orders satisfactorily, and I overheard this
+grumbling complaint:
+
+“A man can’t play with a dog an’ pay ’tention to business at the same
+time.”
+
+Everybody about the claim except Jim was the slave of the fox-terrier’s
+moods. In New York or London you could have bought Grouse for five
+dollars. Voss was offered $200 for him by another claim owner, but
+would as soon have parted with his claim. I knew of only one other
+terrier in the Klondyke. He was a companion, deserving the affix of
+bull, of a doggy-looking man who walked up and down the river front of
+Dawson. He was usually limping on three legs, but not infrequently on
+two. He seemed to realize his position as the sole representative of
+civilized dogdom among thousands of savages, and he no more thought of
+surrender than a Roman prefect. The boast of his master that he could
+whip any two or three of the huskies was well founded. Even when he was
+attacked by a dozen he gave more wounds than he received, retreating
+with the dignity of one who belongs to a ruling race.
+
+Provincial as Voss’s claim was in its isolation from the world, its
+surroundings were cosmopolitan enough. Among his employees, aside from
+Germans, Swedes, and French-Canadians, were a Dalmatian and a Turk. The
+Turk was a good workman. When he had made his “stake” he was going to
+buy a fig orchard in southern California.
+
+On the day that I visited the discovery claim of Siawash George,
+which is only a short distance beyond Voss’s, several Cheechawkos were
+panning some gravel at the very point where Indian Charlie had found
+the famous nugget. They did not wash out a single color, and passed
+on in disgust to do more prospecting on ground whose stakes--for the
+most part fallen down--had been driven so long ago that the weather had
+washed off the writing on their four hewn sides. Siawash George had
+expended several thousand dollars in buying and bringing an old boiler
+and engine up to his claim from Forty Mile. Owing to a fatal defect in
+its pumping gear it would not supply half a sluice-head of water or do
+the work of a small dam; but the noise of its puffing and his ability
+to hire an engineer to superintend it at $15 a day greatly amused a
+mind which had become aboriginal from family associations.
+
+Money playing an important part in the politics of Alaska as well as in
+other countries, poor George had acquired a fortune only to find that
+it was two-edged and might be an obstacle, as well as instrumental, in
+the fulfilment of his royal ambition. On a fatal day he had brought
+from Dawson to his wife some little brown things in a box which was
+lettered in gilt. She had found them so superior to plain brown sugar
+that they had opened a new world to her. She gave over her rights to
+a throne to dream of the day when she should take passage on a Yukon
+steamer to the land where shops were filled with chocolate bonbons.
+
+Joe Powers was a near neighbor of Siawash George. As both had squaw
+wives there was a bond of union between them, and they visited back and
+forth a great deal. Joe could not read or write, I was told, but his
+good fellowship shone out of his ever-grinning face.
+
+“Some of the boys I knowed down in Circle and Forty Mile that’s struck
+it big,” he told me in confidence, “is going into s’ciety when they get
+on the outside. But I ain’t. How I would look in s’ciety, wouldn’t I?
+The rest of the boys are about on the same pattern, too, I guess, only
+they can’t see it when they look into a pool of water. I’m thankful
+I know them dodgers on the outside are too clever for me. I’ll buy a
+fruit farm in Californy. Nobody can beat me out o’ that.”
+
+However dangerous a little learning may be to some of the old-timers,
+one does not envy them their dust, spend it how they will. It is
+fitting that they who bore the brunt of the robust business of
+pioneering should occupy the cabins of the masters on the Eldorado and
+the Bonanza claims. Graduates of colleges and universities, who work
+for them with pick and shovel for a dollar an hour, arrived on the
+scene after the great strikes, and must take the consequences.
+
+It is scarcely half a mile from Siawash George’s to the cluster of
+cabins at the mouth of Eldorado; and Eldorado flows into Bonanza about
+midway of its working claims, making of The Forks, as the confluence
+of the two streams is called, the hub of a wheel with three spokes.
+When Miss Mulrooney came up to The Forks in the autumn of 1897 she
+appreciated the mathematical advantage of the situation at once, and
+acted upon her perception with such decision that the news of her
+wonderful undertaking went up and down the creeks that very day.
+
+“Boys,” said the heralds to the scoffers, “there’s a new woman up to
+The Forks with a bit of an Irish brogue and the tongue of a lawyer,
+that’s goin’ to show us old moss-backs how to get rich. Hanged if she
+ain’t got so much money to lose that she’s goin’ to build a two-story
+hotel bigger’n any in Dawson right up here on the creeks.”
+
+“Strange things was to be expected from the Cheechawkos once the news
+of a strike got into the newspapers all over the States,” said the
+scoffers; while the saloon-keepers, being specialists on the subject,
+apprehended with professional disdain that Miss Mulrooney might as well
+start a hotel at the head of the Stewart or at the North Pole.
+
+The next instalment of news related that Miss Mulrooney was up on the
+hill-side superintending the labors of the one lone mule surviving of
+those brought down the river on rafts in the summer, which she had
+hired for $20 a day to drag logs to the site of her building. That
+class of women who are too common in the Klondyke are not given to this
+sort of thing; and, moreover, they wear bloomers, while Miss Mulrooney
+wore long skirts. A new woman deserved punishment for such folly, but
+a good woman who wore long skirts was entitled to the friendly advice
+which one of the leading claim-owners undertook to supply.
+
+[Illustration: Miss Mulrooney of The Forks.]
+
+“I’ve been in the country some time,” he told Miss Mulrooney, “and
+I don’t mind telling you for your own interest that Dawson’s the
+place, not The Forks, for a hotel.”
+
+“Now, that’s kind of you,” assented Miss Mulrooney. “And may I ask if
+you would like something to drink?”
+
+“Er-r-r, well,” stuttered the Committee of One, as he tried to get his
+bearings, “well, I admit I sometimes do, like the most of the boys--but
+I didn’t know as you’d be mentionin’ that.”
+
+“Oh, I’m not, and I’m not likely to,” with a toss of her head, “when
+I know there’s no chance of your accepting. Of course, if you or any
+of the other boys was hungry or thirsty you wouldn’t think of buying a
+drink or a meal up here. You’d walk sixteen miles to Dawson and back
+for it, wouldn’t you? And the boys going over the divide to Dominion
+or Sulphur when they break the journey at The Forks would hang up in a
+tree over night before they’d sleep in a hotel, wouldn’t they, now?”
+
+A light burst upon the Committee of One.
+
+“You’ll pass, Miss Mulrooney, you’ll pass,” he said. “You kin take care
+o’ yourself all right. With that head of yours, you’ll own the Klondyke
+by the time you’ve been in the country as long as I have.”
+
+And the word that Miss Mulrooney was all right was passed along the
+line. Every man on the creeks looked forward to the date of the opening
+of her hotel. A democratic community could not confer titles, but it
+might call her Miss Mulrooney of the Forks, and thus she will be known
+for all time among Klondykers.
+
+Meanwhile, she expected that every day would be the lone mule’s last.
+There was neither hay nor oats in the country. As the story was told
+to me, he held body and soul together on birch bark and willow sprouts
+until the final log was dragged to the foundations, and then promptly
+expired.
+
+“He had nothing to live on,” as Miss Mulrooney expressed it, “and
+nothing to live for, and I’m thinkin’ the poor fellow was so slow
+because he just knew that his interest in the enterprise was all that
+kept him up; and, like the rest of us, he wanted to postpone the last
+hour as long as he could.”
+
+The third night after the hotel was opened the Committee of One,
+himself, had to sleep on the floor because the bunks were all taken.
+Nothing could have served Miss Mulrooney better than the food-panic
+of midwinter. She had bought a full supply before everyone began to
+hoard whatever beans or flour or whiskey he could get. All but two of
+the restaurants in Dawson had to close their doors. The two exceptions
+on fête days gave butter and apple sauce along with bacon, beans, and
+coffee. Their owners grew to regard Miss Mulrooney as their animate
+consciences whose voice was that of every miner who ate a meal in
+Dawson when he was down from the creeks.
+
+“I don’t mind paying double,” said the Committee of One, to a Dawson
+waiter, “s’long’s I get suthin to eat. Just bring that dinner over
+again. Then I’ll have only half a square meal for $5, not to mention
+that no fixin’s go with it. Miss Mulrooney charges $3.50 for a square,
+but she gives you canned beef, canned mutton, and ham, and fixin’s, and
+keeps askin’ you if you won’t have more and you keep acceptin’ till you
+have to send for a drink ’fore you’re strong enough to get up from the
+table. Jumpin’ John Rogers! How you fellers must suffer when you pass
+out a bean and a rind and think of what a woman is doin’ up there to
+The Forks!”
+
+If you want to reach a man’s heart through his stomach in a
+scurvy-stricken country, feed him, if it is the best you have, with
+sauce made of dried apples. Miss Mulrooney kept a great bowlful
+of this on her table. The transient ate of its contents with the
+ravenousness of the thirsty traveller drinking from a spring of cold
+water. No sooner was it emptied--I know by actual observation of a
+quart of apple-sauce having been eaten by two persons--than it was
+filled again by the cook, rapid if rough in his movements, who picked
+it up and put it down as if it were a red-hot ingot.
+
+The ground floor of the hotel was divided into the bar-room and
+the dining-room. Cards were permitted, but no gaming-tables were
+maintained. Upstairs was a tier of bunks running along the wall, with a
+passageway between them. The blankets seemed cleaner than elsewhere--no
+hotel had sheets--and the bunks had curtains. Either a nice sense of
+individuality or sheer fatigue restrained the guests from removing
+their socks, and I have known miners who were over-tired by a long
+tramp not to remove their boots. They had enough respect for Miss
+Mulrooney to hang the soles of them over the edge of the bunk, however,
+though, if in their dreams they should participate in a stampede to
+some new creek, their good intentions were sadly belied. The sole
+occupant of a lower bunk, which was supposed to accommodate two in case
+of necessity, might be awakened at any hour by a nudge, and:
+
+“Pardner, sorry to trouble you, but I guess you’ll have to move over a
+bit to make room for me.”
+
+In winter the curse of a Klondyke cabin, banked with snow, chinked with
+moss and dirt to the last crack and knothole, is lack of ventilation.
+In summer, when there is no night and no two men quite agree on their
+hours of sleep or hours for travelling, it was as good as reading a
+local newspaper to try to sleep at Miss Mulrooney’s. The widening
+cracks between boards of fir (put into the floors and partitions while
+yet green) never permitted the slightest details of conversation
+over the card-table or over the bar to be inaudible, except during
+unavoidable and scarcely welcome intervals when you heard the tramping
+and scuffling of heavy boots. I could discern the direction the
+traveller was going upon entering the dining-room door; whether he was
+coming up stairs to bed, or was going to call out to the cook for a
+“squar” or “half a dozen eggs.”
+
+Andrew, a quiet, soft-voiced, obliging young man, who wore a white
+shirt and was solicitous about keeping his tie straight, had charge of
+the bar. According to all the traditions of new placer mining camps he
+was as much out of place as the average bartender would be in a chair
+of moral philosophy. He was so essentially lacking in combativeness
+that no one ever thought of picking a quarrel with him. Luck and
+whiskey, however, despite the Northwest Mounted Police, will generate
+in miners a surplus energy which they are inclined to expend upon
+furniture if not upon one another. Miss Mulrooney did not depend for
+purposes of pacification upon a huge St. Bernard who was always at her
+side when he was not drawing her upon her sled up and down the creeks
+in winter, but rather upon her blarney. She knew when, where, and just
+how much to apply.
+
+“I always appeal to their best instincts,” she said. “It’s easy to lead
+and hard to drive. That’s what you men don’t understand. You try to
+drive.”
+
+I saw her theory put to the test of practice. A giant who was so well
+on in his cups that he could scarcely walk, concluded, only half an
+hour after he had finished one, that he wanted another meal. When it
+was placed before him he seemed to think that the cook was trying to
+hurt his feelings by making him eat twice, and with an oath he threw
+a dish of stew on the floor. Miss Mulrooney happened to be passing
+through the room at the time. She stepped over to him and told him in
+her pleasantest tone that accidents would happen.
+
+“Accident?” he asked, dazedly.
+
+“Of course,” she said. “I know you’re too much of a gentleman to do
+such a thing purposely.”
+
+“Coursh! Coursh it was!” he kept repeating, as he dropped down on to
+his knees and tried to scrape the stew up into a little pile, despite
+her protests.
+
+Then out of the maze of his crippled memory another horror presented
+itself suddenly and prompted him to arise.
+
+“Miss Mulrooney,” he asked, his face very red, “did you hear me swear?”
+
+“A little one--a slip,” she replied.
+
+He told her that it was only a real lady who would put so liberal
+a construction on what he called a breach of “ettykit.” Fearful,
+nevertheless, that she might secretly think ill of him, he followed
+her about the hotel with apologies and dripping hands while he kept
+repeating how a poor devil might be a little weak, so rarely did a good
+bench claim fall to a poor devil’s lot, until the inner workings of his
+conscience culminated in a full confession that the plate had not been
+broken by accident but intentionally. She forgave him even this, and
+then he went up-stairs and to sleep.
+
+“What I want to do is to make money, you may be sure,” Miss Mulrooney
+would say if you persuaded her to tell you her story. “I was born in
+Scranton, Pennsylvania. I had to earn my own living before I was out
+of short skirts, and I kept on doing a little better from one thing
+to another, till I was stewardess of a steamer on the Pacific Coast.
+There’s nothing like being a stewardess to develop your wits when
+you’re just a bit too independent for the job and you have to give the
+passengers as good as they send when they’re sassy. I remember an old
+Englishman who expected me to black his boots. I told him I wouldn’t,
+and I told him if he put ’em outside his door again I’d be thinkin’ he
+was wantin’ ice-water and turn a pitcherful into ’em. He went to the
+captain. The captain was a Scotchman and he didn’t believe in puttin’
+on airs; and when the captain sent for me and I went to the captain’s
+room I found the old gentleman there. Before we came out I had him
+laughin’, and I’d never blacked his boots, either. But runnin’ errands
+doesn’t suit me. I started for the Klondyke as soon as I heard of it,
+and like the rest I’m going back either rich or broke.”
+
+The last time I saw Miss Mulrooney she was in Dawson searching for a
+good location for a hotel which was to have sheets and be positively
+palatial. Three weeks later, so I am told, it was completed.
+Once her first venture succeeded, she had begun to speculate in
+mining properties. Her position at The Forks gave her exceptional
+opportunities for inside information, and she was a “pardner” of a
+dozen leading citizens in as many enterprises.
+
+“If you ever go to Chicago or New York,” I suggested to her, “the
+women’s clubs will be making a heroine of you as an example of what
+their sex can do.”
+
+“Not if I know it,” she replied. “They won’t, I’m thinkin’, if they
+hear I sold whiskey. Besides, there’s nothin’ new about me. I’m
+old-fashioned.”
+
+Without abusing a much-abused word, I think that Miss Mulrooney may
+be called a remarkable woman, more particularly as her own opinion of
+herself is quite the contrary.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+ARCTIC TRAITS
+
+ DAILY LIFE IN DAWSON--RENTING A CABIN--CIRCUMVENTING THE HUSKIES--JOEY
+ BOUREAU AND HIS RESTAURANT--THE FARO DEALER’S WIFE AND HER BAKERY--THE
+ LAUNDRYMAN AND HIS CLAIM--JACK BELTZ’S SCHEMES--A PAIR OF DREAMERS.
+
+
+It depends upon the season of the year whether the town-site of Dawson
+is liquid, mushy, or as flinty as frozen ground can be. At one time
+in the summer of 1898 most of it was under water. Two weeks later,
+the Yukon having fallen some sixteen feet, this same town-site was
+at a respectable height above the level of the stream. The smaller
+sandbar on the opposite side of the mouth of the Klondyke, which, out
+of respect to the cabins which cover an area of six or seven acres,
+has been called Klondyke City, is without the surface layer of muck
+which held sewage as in a sponge under the noses of the residents of
+Dawson. The good nature of the fellow, known as “Dud,” who keeps the
+sole saloon and hotel at Klondyke City, was as largely responsible for
+our choice of abode as the healthfulness of the location. Empty cabins
+were scarce. “Dud” said he had one to rent. When I asked him the price,
+I offended him.
+
+“You walk right in and stay till I tell you to get out,” he said. “But
+if you go shakin’ your dust in my face I won’t let you have it at all.”
+
+So we stood our sleds up beside the door, set up our little Yukon
+stove, threw our blankets on the floor, and were at home. The comfort
+of my daily existence I felt to be great compared with a bunk in a
+bunk-house for $2.50 a night, or a room with cloth partitions over a
+bar for $10 a night.
+
+Fritz, who liked movement and life, went over to town to live in
+the cabin of a friend, leaving Jack and me to do our own cooking or
+to eat at the restaurant when we were of idle mind. The dogs also
+patronized the restaurant without standing on ceremony. “Jack” carried
+off almost the last ham in the camp, having lifted it from a nail
+with the unostentatiousness of an expert thief. The proprietors of
+the restaurant would not listen to reimbursement. They explained that
+anybody who had been in the country for six years and let a husky dog
+get the better of him deserved to be mulcted. It is out of deference to
+the husky dog that the miner builds little caches, set on poles, for
+storing food, which make the town look like a Bornese village, whose
+inhabitants have deserted their old homes to live in cabins.
+
+The proprietors of the restaurant, in my opinion, were well worth
+knowing. Joey Boureau--undeniably French-Canadian, but forever
+repeating that he was a citizen of the United States--was almost as
+dark as a Moor, with the torso of a Turkish wrestler. He yielded
+neither to excess nor fatigue, blustered at times, never cared
+for to-morrow, and was possessed of a ready wit. His blague had a
+counterpart in the blarney of his partner, Tim, undeniably Irish
+American and proud of it. This pair had been inseparable for the many
+years that they had sought gold with the pick and in all the ways of
+camp life. Upon the scales at the end of the oilcloth-covered dining
+table they weighed out $2.50 worth of dust out of your bag whenever you
+ate off their board. Whichever one happened to be in did the cooking,
+and if both were in, one told stories to amuse the guests and acted as
+cashier.
+
+But both were seldom there. One was usually at “Dud’s” faro table. The
+other, when he grew tired of working brought his “pardner” home on his
+arm, installed him in the kitchen, and immediately went out to enjoy a
+little recreation on his own account. As he took with him whatever dust
+there was in the tomato-can, which served as their cash-box, we heard
+frequent excuses for the absence of moose steak on the table because of
+lack of funds to purchase it. Just as their business was beginning to
+prosper they sold it for a song to a Cheechawko whom they met on the
+river-front. A week in town sufficed to spend the song, and then they
+put packs on their backs and started over the hills, whistling as they
+went.
+
+In one of the neighboring cabins the wife of a faro dealer had set
+up a bakery. We paid her fifty cents apiece for pies and fifty cents
+for loaves of bread, and had to order them beforehand to make sure of
+getting them.
+
+Our laundryman had staked a claim in which he placed great hopes; but
+his invariable charge remained seventy-five cents a garment. He related
+with a realism almost tragic the details of the processes by which he
+had arrived at the original color of the khaki trousers that I had
+worn on the trail. Jack Beltz, for his part, secured the loan of
+an old tub and a washboard, and after a day’s labor surveyed bandanna
+handkerchiefs and what not hung out on the line with the mien of a
+conqueror.
+
+[Illustration: Jack Beltz.]
+
+[Illustration: “The Huskies.”]
+
+Economy, however, was always a matter of necessity with him. On the
+first night of his return from town he said, with some pride, that he
+still had most of the dust which he had received in conclusion of our
+contract. The next night before going to bed he built a fire in the
+stove out of the driftwood which he snaked out of the river for fuel,
+and sat for a long time in a reverie.
+
+“Well, I’ll have to earn some more,” he said, finally, to himself, and
+dropped upon his blankets.
+
+In the morning, followed by his troop of dogs, who had regained their
+spirits and their flesh, because he had fed them so bountifully, he
+went up on the mountain side, where he picked a great bouquet of the
+wild flowers which spring up in such profusion in summer. He never told
+me of his losses, and I tried to avoid the appearance of suspecting the
+truth, at the same time that I took practical measures to obviate an
+effort to dispose of his robe for cash and to hypothecate his year’s
+outfit, which was to be brought down the river by his “pardner,” Cliff.
+
+Meanwhile, he revolved in his mind many schemes for making money. The
+price of moose steak, $1.50 a pound, suggested to him that a fortune
+might be made in moose hunting. Learning that Dawson had no bowling
+alley, he so far arranged to start one as to find that balls and pins
+could not be obtained nearer than Seattle. This scheme was succeeded
+by the more alluring prospect of taking dogs, which are valueless in
+summer, as they are valuable in winter, to an island in the river to
+feed for so much a month. Always before his dream had taken definite
+form he dismissed it by saying he was no city man. He recalled his
+experience in keeping the restaurant in a British Columbia mining town,
+and he reverted to a proposition that was to the liking of his love of
+robust vagabondage:
+
+“I’ll get a pardner and take the dogs and go up to the head-waters of
+the Porcupine and cross over to the Mackenzie. It would be a rattling
+trip!”
+
+As if in excuse of his venture he would add that he was certain to find
+gold in that region.
+
+One day another dreamer, Kidd, came to join us. He was a protégé of
+Jack, who had found him trying to put his outfit over the Pass. There
+must have been such giants as Kidd, with such straight noses, curling
+black hair and curling black beard, in the phalanxes that confounded
+the Persians. But this type of the freshness and strength of country
+life was quite modern. He slouched into the cabin with his hands in
+his pockets, and included in the drawl with which he greeted us a
+Missourian “Doggone it!” Like many other unfortunate fellows, Kidd had
+been obliged to spend the whole winter in the neighborhood of the Pass.
+Jack and his partner had made him a tent-mate in their camp on the
+banks of Linderman, during the dreary period of waiting. Going on to
+Le Barge after our departure from Linderman, he had arrived in Dawson
+before Cliff.
+
+“That boy comes from a good family,” said Jack; “and I’ll bet they’re
+proud as anybody that ever had a grand-dad who owned a lot of niggers
+and went stone broke after the war. He don’t say nothin’ about it, but
+it sticks out all over him. He didn’t know how to hitch a pack on a
+mule’s back when I first met him. But though he was green, he wasn’t
+fresh; and when tenderfeet are that way they’ll learn and you like to
+learn ’em. When they ain’t, you like nothin’ better than to give ’em
+the worst bronch’ on the ranch and leave ’em to find out things for
+themselves.”
+
+It was not until after considerable urging that Kidd would consent to
+share our cabin. His character was in sharp contrast to that of another
+young stranger who entered and threw his blankets on the floor for
+the night without any formalities. In the morning, picking up certain
+articles of my kit which were lying beside my bed, he said:
+
+“You’re goin’ out on the first steamer. Don’t suppose you want these,
+do you? I’ll take ’em along. They’ll come in handy next winter.”
+
+“He’ll get on,” quoth Jack, “but I’m ding-donged if he’ll get on with
+my help.”
+
+Jack now included Kidd in his schemes, which became more and more
+attenuated. Kidd would walk back and forth for some time as if in deep
+thought, and finally drawl:
+
+“Gee-mo-nee! We must do something, Jack!”
+
+And Jack, as he looked out upon the rapidly flowing river, would agree,
+and relight his pipe. Kidd admitted that he was homesick, “doggoned
+homesick.” He had a right to be, for he left home with a thousand
+dollars and his mother’s blessing, instead of finishing his education
+and studying for the country bar.
+
+“Gee-mo-nee!” he exclaimed. “I was green, wasn’t I, Jack? I thought
+you’d just pick the gold up once you got here. But doggoned if I’ll go
+back broke. I’ll have as much as I had when I left or stay forever.
+I’ve got three hundred of that thousand and I’ll make seven hundred and
+my fare out some way this winter.”
+
+One day the dreamers found employment on the log booms for the new
+saw-mill that was to be built on the island in the Klondyke between
+Dawson and Klondyke City. Jack was as much at home on a rolling log
+as on the back of a broncho. Poor Kidd fell into the water often,
+but showed great persistence until the rise in the river made work
+impossible and left them idle again. So Jack sat by the cabin door
+keeping a lookout for Cliff, the third giant of the trio, who arrived
+one day, with a broad grin.
+
+“Gosh!” he exclaimed, as he grasped Jack’s hand. “I was washed out of
+the boat when we came through Five Finger Rapids, and blamed if I
+wasn’t washed in again! How’s that for luck?”
+
+There was something of the New England Yankee in him, though he had
+been born in Colorado.
+
+“I’ll bet you’ve give your money all away, ain’t you, Jack?” was his
+next remark. “You wouldn’t be Jack if you hadn’t.”
+
+“Weeks ago,” was the reply.
+
+They secured a contract with one of the saw-mills to cut rafts of logs
+sixty miles up the river. Here was a chance for Jack to swing an axe,
+to build bonfires, and to do what he called an honest man’s work. With
+his dogs around him on the day of his departure I said a regretful
+good-by to the vagabond.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+PILGRIMS’ TRAILS AND TRIALS
+
+ ITINERARIES--ALLEGED UNIMPORTANCE OF EXPERIENCE--THE CASE OF
+ FATHER STANLEY--PRESS AGENTS AND PRIMERS OF WEALTH--THE SECRETARY
+ OF THE SEATTLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE HIS OWN CONVERT--PARDNERS AND
+ PROMOTERS--OUTFITS--HOME COMFORTS FOR AN ARCTIC CLIMATE--HETEROGENEOUS
+ BOAT LOADS--THE NANCY G--TRAGEDIES OF THE PASSES.
+
+
+Next to taking part in some event chronicled on the bulletin boards
+your average pilgrim of fortune best enjoyed being near them. Least
+of all he liked waiting in latitude 64 degrees for a month or more
+for news of progress of the only war yet waged by his country in his
+generation. When he left home the Klondyke was the ruling general topic
+of the hour in the newspapers. When he reached his destination he was
+quite forgotten, and public interest was entirely absorbed in the
+invasion of Cuba.
+
+Viewed in one light, there was good reason for the pique which he
+naturally felt toward Shafter’s army. He might see many wars, for
+instance, before he saw the like of this Dawson pilgrimage again.
+Thirty-five thousand generals, each one his own quartermaster,
+packing a thousand pounds of food apiece over a rugged coast range of
+mountains, building a flotilla with axe and whipsaw out of the primeval
+forest, and travelling six hundred miles into a country having an
+arctic climate in winter and a tropical climate in summer and yielding
+no food except a little game, presented a spectacle more romantic, if
+not so exciting, as the massing of an army corps under one general, its
+extension into a battle line, and the capture of the enemy’s outposts.
+
+[Illustration: On the Pass.]
+
+The old prospector from California, British Columbia, Australia, or
+South Africa formed only a small percentage of those who entered, with
+the enthusiasm of children, a world of effort quite new to them. The
+village loafer and the ne’er-do-well son of the banker became partners
+on the trail. Mechanics who had mortgaged homes bought with savings
+from their wages to buy an outfit, rubbed elbows with broken-down
+speculators and business men who hoped to recover all that they had
+lost by finding a placer mine. The farmer, the clerk, the artisan,
+and the city or the provincial day laborer of the Eastern States,
+Eastern Canada, and England, were as confident of success as their
+associates who had learned in the severe school of the plains, the
+veldt, or the bush how to preserve life and health in a new country.
+If they had not swung a lariat or a pioneer’s axe, they had at least
+beaten someone in walking or rowing or had gone longer without eating
+than any of their immediate friends.
+
+Of the eighty thousand who left their homes for the Klondyke in the
+winter of 1897-98 and the spring of 1898, some thirty-five thousand
+arrived at Dawson. The battle was not always to the strong. More
+important than physical strength were determination and cheerfulness.
+Those who failed were as peculiarly Anglo-Saxon as those who succeeded;
+for they had the restlessness which impels one to seek obstacles but
+does not necessarily provide the force to overcome them. Most of those
+who had endeavored to reach Dawson in the autumn of 1897 were stranded
+on one side or the other of the passes, where they had to wait through
+a dreary winter until the ice which had arrested their progress should
+go out of the river. But only a small proportion of the whole number
+of pilgrims made this attempt. The great majority planned to transport
+their outfits over the passes in the early months of 1898 and build
+their boats on Lakes Linderman and Bennett in the interval between good
+travelling in a snow-bound country and the opening of navigation.
+
+All pilgrims, whatsoever their itineraries, were grist for the mills of
+the towns of the Pacific Coast States and of British Columbia, bringing
+welcome relief from a period of commercial depression. Enterprising
+merchants, chambers of commerce, and steamship companies scattered
+broadcast throughout the United States (whence came seventy per cent.
+of the pilgrimage, ninety per cent. of it being Anglo-Saxon) pamphlets,
+well written for the purpose, telling “How to Get to the Klondyke.”
+
+The career of “Father” Stanley, of Seattle, was used as a stock
+illustration of the unimportance of experience to the prospector. This
+lame old bookseller, having the enthusiasm of the fanatic in place of
+real strength, had gone to the Klondyke in the spring of 1896. For a
+time he worked on the bars of Stewart, taking out $10 a day. If he
+had not been deformed he would have packed more food over the Pass.
+Fortunately, his supply ran out in September, and on his way down
+stream to Forty Mile, where he hoped to get more, he happened to arrive
+at the mouth of the Klondyke just as the first miners from Forty Mile
+were hurrying to the scene of Indian Charlie’s “strike.” As he could
+not walk as fast as the others, they got all the claims on Bonanza, and
+he had the good luck to get one of the best claims on Eldorado.
+
+A year later, returning on the treasure ship that brought the news of
+the great strike, when he entered his house with a small portion of
+his fortune--a hundred thousand dollars in cash--his good wife, as the
+story goes, was at the washboard, where she had spent a deal of her
+time during her husband’s absence, earning a living for a large family.
+Her customers coming to make inquiries about their clothes were told to
+take whatever was in the tub which they could identify as their own. As
+for herself, she was boarding at the hotel, sending such of her apparel
+as she had not thrown away to the laundry, and, moreover, was too busy
+with the dressmaker to attend to any trifling details which might have
+concerned her past life.
+
+“In the frozen fastnesses of the far North fortunes nestle in nuggets
+of glittering gold for all”--but the press agents were too well
+versed in human nature to say that these fortunes were to be had for
+a pleasure trip. They mentioned hardships which put up a price of
+success, thus making the nuggets more attractive, and, in a sense,
+supporting the assertion of their existence. Anyone who would overcome
+the hardships might have a competency for the trouble of thawing it out
+of the frozen ground. No pilgrim felt himself to be less courageous
+and vigorous than “Father” Stanley; and the wives of all pilgrims were
+equally certain that, under similar circumstances, they could conduct
+themselves with quite as much dignity as Mrs. Stanley.
+
+As became a primer to wealth, the pamphlets told just how much it
+would cost to reach Dawson with the all-necessary year’s outfit, going
+to the trouble, in a spirit of solicitude and rectitude, of setting
+down opposite each article of food and each utensil, whether spade
+or gold-pan, or oakum or pitch, or nails for boat-building, its cost
+in dollars and cents, and adding up a fascinatingly small total from
+a very tall column of figures. With a receipted bill for this, and
+having paid his fare to Dyea or Skaguay, where he would disembark on
+the mainland of Alaska and begin the transportation of his outfit over
+the passes, the pilgrim, although he was supposed to have expended only
+$300, needed no more money to take him to his mine.
+
+It was not to the credit of the calculations of the pamphlets, and
+not testimony, in all if it was in some instances, to the success
+of the numerous gambling establishments that sprang up at the point
+of mobilization of the army of fortune-seekers, that the Seattle
+post-office did an overwhelming business in money-orders in December,
+1897, and January and February, 1898. The authors of the pamphlets
+were not called to account for their errors. Rather, they received the
+thanks of their employers. Once he was on the coast, it stood to reason
+that while he was yet sleeping between sheets and eating meals cooked
+by someone other than himself the pilgrim would not retreat because
+he needed a few more dollars which were obtainable from friends or
+relatives at home.
+
+Seattle’s success beyond all other towns in attracting trade was due to
+a university graduate and an author of works on art. Having to give up
+journalism in the East and seek health in the West, after some severe
+tests of versatility of earning a living, he became Secretary of the
+Seattle Chamber of Commerce. Such were the results of his knowledge of
+the peculiarities of the Easterner, the Westerner, the Canadian, and
+the Englishman, which he incorporated in separate pamphlets, that his
+employers continued to raise his salary from week to week until the
+war broke out and he relieved them of the embarrassing consequences
+of their transports of generosity by resigning and starting for the
+Klondyke himself (regardless of his doctor’s advice) as a convert of
+his own arguments.
+
+The camp-followers of the host of individual quartermasters which
+Seattle equipped and embarked, besides the gambler and the pickpocket,
+included many men of elastic consciences and elastic schemes, who had
+no capital but were ambitious to become capitalists. Those promising
+large dividends on properties yet to be purchased or staked were
+common; those proposing such grand things as running snow and ice
+locomotives over the hummocks of the Yukon in winter were in some
+measure distinguished. In the corridors of the crowded hotels you
+overheard the consultations of “pardners” as well as the harangues of
+promoters.
+
+Sacks of flour, bacon, and beans, the chief constituents of the Yukon
+outfit, were piled on the sidewalks. In the windows of the stores were
+samples of various improved edibles and home comforts for an arctic
+climate. Fakirs on the curbs proclaimed the merits of patent sleds,
+portable boats, and devices for thawing frozen ground. In selecting his
+outfit, the pilgrim experienced the same emotion as the young wife who
+furnishes a flat. When he had settled on the kind of sled, the kind of
+stove, and the kind of tent that he was going to take, he faced the
+important question of buying dogs or of drawing his own supplies from
+Dyea or Skaguay to the lakes. If he had money enough he usually fell
+a victim to the speculators, who sold the house dogs that they had
+shipped into Seattle, after a few days’ training in harness, for fifty
+dollars apiece.
+
+The last article of his outfit bought, he waited for his steamer to
+sail, while his hotel bill grew apace. Liberal navigation laws, at
+all times carelessly enforced, in these piping times of prosperity
+became a dead letter. Every available sailing and steam craft in the
+Pacific marine, which is comparatively small and is largely recruited
+from the Atlantic seaboard, was called into service by the demands of
+the pilgrimage. Fortunes were made in two or three trips of vessels,
+which had been condemned as unseaworthy years before. To get all the
+passengers they could carry they had only to offer transportation for
+a pilgrim and a ton of supplies at a little less exorbitant price than
+any of their rivals.
+
+Inexperienced pilots steered many vessels on to rocks in the tortuous
+and narrow channels between the barren and mountainous islands of
+the Alexander Archipelago which skirt the coast of British Columbia
+and the adjoining territory of southeastern Alaska. Pilgrims not
+yet embarked were too anxious about their own departure to think of
+the miseries of those who had suffered from exposure and lost their
+outfits, if not their lives. Rarely did the best steamers leave within
+less than a week of their appointed sailing time. In loading them
+there was little discrimination or even classification. Quarters of
+beef for the restaurants of Dyea and Skaguay, dogs in crates and in
+leash, mules and bales of hay, were put on the decks after the hold
+was filled. Considering the experiences of a volunteer army with a
+single quartermaster, better things were scarcely to be expected of a
+volunteer army composed entirely of quartermasters. The chaos had the
+sole attraction of not bearing the stamp of officialdom.
+
+[Illustration: Caches of Pilgrims’ Outfits at the Summit.]
+
+As an example of what a pilgrim might suffer, there was the case of
+the Nancy G. When I left Seattle on February 15th, on the Nancy G.’s
+mast still fluttered the torn ends of a cloth sign with fast-fading red
+letters: “This fine schooner in the tow of a powerful ocean tug, will
+positively sail for Dyea on January 25th.” Every day the passengers
+went down to the pier to see if their outfits were still on board and
+to see how repairs were getting on. A man with a hammer in one hand and
+some oakum in the other came out of the hold.
+
+“You needn’t cuss me,” he said. “A schooner that’s been resurrected
+after five years in the graveyard, ain’t what she was when she was new,
+and you oughter know it. Every minute I lose caulkin’ up the old girl’s
+corn out of your own crops.”
+
+Afterward they went to see the owner, who received their complaints
+with an air of disdain, refused to return the amount that they had
+paid in fares for the good reason that he had their signatures to a
+contract for January 25th or thereabouts, and warned them in their own
+interests that “thereabouts” was a very elastic word.
+
+“And I’ll tell you something else,” he said. “If you talk to me in this
+way much more, I’ll have you up for riot. If you want to lose a gold
+mine and go to jail, that’s your business and not mine.”
+
+The owner was a small man--a small man who had spent his life in the
+new towns of the West. The passengers were mostly hulking Swedes from
+the lumber camps of Minnesota and Wisconsin. They longed to lay their
+strong hands on him for just a moment. But it was hard to lose a gold
+mine, and they hadn’t enough money to pay for passage on another
+steamer. So they slouched out of the owner’s presence more in sorrow
+than in anger. I heard afterward that the Nancy G. finally started on
+February 20th. Fate was so kind to her passengers that she did not sink
+until the return journey. They were more fortunate than two hundred of
+their fellows, who saw their outfits burned on the vessel which had
+reached Skaguay just in time to have disembarked them in safety.
+
+To meet the demands of the migration to the interior, Dyea and Skaguay
+had sprung up as quickly as a house of cards. When Indian Charlie found
+his nugget there was no building at Skaguay and only a trading-store
+at Dyea for bartering with the Indians and furnishing any supplies
+to an old-time prospector which he had neglected to buy at Juneau.
+The two towns are situated at the heads of either of two arms of the
+Lynn Canal, which nature has cut through the rock as man cut that of
+Corinth, upon sandy deposits at the mouths of the Dyea and Skaguay
+Rivers, and separated by a distance of a mile in a straight line over a
+mountain spur or of three miles around the point of the spur by water.
+This spur, rising into high peaks as it reaches the summit of the main
+range, is a barrier separating the two rivers and the two passes.
+
+Dyea is the gateway to Chilcoot Pass, which leads to Lake Linderman,
+and Skaguay is the gateway to the White Pass, which leads to Lake
+Bennett. They were not, as it appeared to the superficial observer,
+trying to excel each other in wickedness, but in the amount of
+business that they could do. Anyone who had been a resident of either
+town a single day considered it his duty to warn you as a friend
+against the rival town and the rival pass. In a week he had become an
+old citizen. The small proportion who were on hand for the rush of the
+late summer and autumn of 1897 were as proud as Lord Mayors. Then,
+thousands of pack-horses, earning as high as $50 apiece a day, died
+from the exertions to which they were forced by their owners. In the
+winter their bones sticking up through the snow were snags to catch
+the sleds of the pilgrims. Instead of a series of steps, the packers
+on Chilcoot had to walk around bowlders, slipping on the fragments
+of crumbling rock, and possibly, after all their exertion, reaching
+Linderman and building their boats only to have them blocked by ice
+half way to Dawson, where they were effectually stranded with their
+outfits.
+
+Perhaps every fifth or sixth house in the main streets was not a
+gambling hall or a dance hall. With these and a large idle population
+it is easy to understand how men who had a few dollars in cash when
+they arrived were obliged to sell their outfits and return home. The
+enforcement of law was in the hands of a United States commissioner
+and three or four deputy marshals. The commissioner was a gentle
+optimist who spent most of his working-hours in an office with a window
+looking out on the river and the mountain side, where he might see no
+wrong-doing. “Soapy” Smith, gambler, by self-appointment, was Mayor
+of Skaguay and General-in-chief of the Army of Disorder, composed
+of characters from San Francisco and Seattle, who had no money left
+after their fare to Alaska was paid and were looking for something
+to turn up. When an atrocious murder was committed by one of his
+followers, “Soapy” told a body of protesting citizens that they would
+better mind their own business. As his army outnumbered theirs and was
+better armed, they accepted his advice. The United States sent out
+two companies of infantry, with instructions from the authorities at
+Washington that they should not interfere with the affairs of the two
+towns unless there was a riot. The Commissioner, seeming to regard
+their presence as an intrusion on his rights, never asked for their
+assistance. No murders or highway robberies were committed within sight
+of his little window. In time, however, “Soapy” Smith met the death
+that he deserved at the hands of one of his followers, and through the
+efforts of the merchants and the better element the towns became more
+orderly.
+
+Not every pilgrim who returned home was the victim of gamblers and
+other parasites. For two or three days he might stop at one of the
+hotels until he selected the parcels of his outfit from the piles
+which had been thrown indiscriminately on the shore by common carriers
+in haste to have done with their contracts. Then, with his tent, his
+stove, and a cook-book, which was the gift of a baking-powder company,
+his journey began in earnest. The novelty of making his first flapjacks
+wore off by the time he had washed his dishes the second or third
+time. It was not long before he came to the conclusion that the fellow
+whom he had chosen to share all of his sorrows and joys was lazy. He
+blamed his own disinclination to rise in the morning and all his little
+failures upon him, as some men do upon their wives. Whenever he had a
+chance he solaced his wounded spirits by telling a stranger that he
+had put up with doing all of the work of his party about as long as he
+could.
+
+Partnerships formed so gayly in Seattle by men who thought that being
+a partner was being a playfellow, could not be expected to last
+long at pulling sleds through the slush and going to bed in a robe
+or a sleeping-bag which was cheap and inefficient, with a supper of
+sandwiches made of sticky flapjacks and cold bacon. As he grew more
+angry with his partner he grew fonder of his dog. Jim might beat his
+poor Newfoundland, who was too nervous to pull even if he had ever been
+taught how; he might put up with a poor dinner; but if Tom, who was
+cooking, kicked the Newfoundland for stealing the bacon off the plate
+or sticking his nose in the butter, it was the last straw. He demanded
+a division of goods on the spot. But quarrels seldom resulted in blows,
+because they occurred when the men were too tired to do more than join
+in a contest of forcible language.
+
+It was the man who leaves the door ajar at home who went to bed without
+washing his dishes. The Easterner now learned that, while he might know
+things that the Westerner did not, the Westerner knew better than he
+how to take care of himself. The Westerner always cooked a warm supper,
+and dried his footwear before going to work in the morning; while the
+self-neglect of the Easterner made hundreds of doctors at Dyea and
+Skaguay the busiest in the world. Spinal meningitis was often the
+penalty of sitting down to rest when dripping with perspiration without
+throwing a coat over the shoulders.
+
+Even after their goods were on the summit of the Pass and the worst
+of their labors were over, many pilgrims gave up the battle. One by
+one they were thinned out until only thirty-five thousand were ready
+with their boats when the ice broke in Bennett. This far I had shared
+their experiences and then had gone on ahead. Mine was the privilege
+of having been a Cheechawko and at the same time standing on the river
+bank as an old-timer or among old-timers, to watch the arrival of the
+pilgrimage in its unpainted, unique flotilla.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+PROFITS AND LOSSES
+
+ NEWSPAPERS AS PROFIT-WINNERS--HEARING ABOUT DEWEY--A DROP IN
+ EGGS--MARKET ITEMS--LEMONS AGAINST SCURVY--THE MERCURY AT 110
+ DEGREES--AN AVERTED MOVING DAY--INDUSTRIOUS SCAVENGERS--THE KLONDYKE
+ ITSELF--ASPECTS OF SUMMER--BANDANNA HATS AND PINK LEMONADE--A
+ RESTAURANT TRUST--THE GRASSHOPPERS AND THE ANTS--DISILLUSIONS.
+
+
+It was only to be expected that the first boat of the season to shoot
+around the bend above Dawson and raise a shout which would bring all
+the population to the shore would be manned by a resident of Seattle
+with the name of his beloved town painted on a huge streamer flying
+from the mast. Enterprising citizens of the far West such as he owned
+the stores at Dyea and Skaguay, the pack-mules on the trail, the
+restaurant tents which had sprung up in Sheep Camp, and then, following
+the pilgrimage on to Linderman and Bennett, generally made money out
+of the Klondyke without having to use a spade, because of their
+knowledge of the life and necessities of new communities. This proud
+Seattleite with the boat had two hundred dozen of nominally “fresh”
+eggs to sell, for which he received $3,600 within less than an hour
+after he had landed. Those of the crowd who could afford it hurried off
+to the restaurant for a “squar’” composed entirely of “ham and”. The
+others, having to bide their time until luxuries were cheaper, found
+compensation in the items of news which were passed from tongue to
+tongue--for it had not occurred to the Seattleite to bring a newspaper
+with him.
+
+“Thought there was more money in eggs,” was his aggravating
+explanation. “’Sposed you fellers wanted to eat, not read.”
+
+[Illustration: Bargaining for a Newly Arrived Boat-Load, Dawson.]
+
+As he had heard it, within a week after the declaration of war with
+Spain, the cruiser New York, Captain Evans in command, had reduced
+the fortifications of Havana in three hours. The second Cheechawko to
+arrive assured us that this was quite untrue, and that two of Admiral
+Sampson’s squadron had been sunk and the Spaniards were winning on
+every hand. The crowd refused to believe anything of the kind, and the
+second Cheechawko received only $14 a dozen for his eggs.
+
+With the next boat came a single newspaper, soiled with bacon grease.
+A curbstone speculator bought it for $15, stuffed it instantly into his
+inside coat pocket, and a few minutes later was posting signs to the
+effect that all might hear the news of Admiral Dewey’s victory read
+by paying a dollar a piece that evening. His entertainment would have
+netted him twice as much as it did if more than three hundred and fifty
+people could have been packed in the hall in which it was held. Some
+of the wealthy men considered this proceeding an outrage on personal
+liberty and made it a point to buy between them any single copy of a
+paper later than any others that had arrived and have it read at once
+in the streets.
+
+Never did contrast better illustrate the comparative reliability of
+even the most unreliable of modern newspapers. All winter the camp had
+not had so much as a small hand printing-press, and news was carried
+solely by word of mouth. Most miners have the weakness of exaggeration.
+With some it is unconscious. Others enjoy testing a hearer’s credulity.
+Twice, up the creeks, I heard that the Continent had declared war
+against England and the United States; in the second instance, the
+detail of an Anglo-American naval victory off the coast of Bohemia
+perhaps was supplied. Such rumors were the natural fruit of the desire
+of Americans and Englishmen to pay compliments to one another at a
+juncture when the Anglo-Saxon alliance of the Klondyke was quite ready,
+without any assistance from London or Washington, to stand in arms
+against the whole world.
+
+Within a week some thirty boats all bringing merchandise had arrived.
+In momentary anxiety of being lodged on a sandbar, without stopping
+to make camps, their crews bending to the oars night and day, they
+had raced with one another to the goal of high prices. Too many had
+placed their speculative trust in eggs. After all, there were only four
+hundred working claims, and the stomachs of each of their owners, and
+of the chief gamblers and business men, were little if any larger than
+that of the average human being. Eggs fell in five days from $18 to $4
+a dozen and finally to $3.
+
+A stock of fine millinery and ladies’ apparel, sold to the women of
+the town, gave to one fellow a profit of $5,000. The first condensed
+milk to arrive brought $1 a can; the first butter, $2.50 a pound; the
+first ham, $1.25 a pound, and the first sugar, $1.50 a pound. Lemons
+were more in demand in a scurvy-ridden country than oranges and bananas
+and sold for double their price, which was seventy-five cents apiece.
+But the happiest of all the newcomers was the one who had the only
+boat-load of boots for a community which was miserable in moccasins in
+warm weather. He received $15 a pair for fifteen hundred pairs which
+had cost him $1.75 a pair in Montreal. A five-cent bottle of ink cost
+$1; a fifteen-cent golf cap, $2.50; a pen-holder, fifty cents--the
+smallest amount of dust that anyone cared to weigh out; socks $2 a
+pair; a broad-brimmed summer hat, $20 to $40; a small whisk broom,
+$2.50; a ready-made suit of clothes, from $50 to $200; canned roast
+beef, $2.50 a can; canned oysters, a great luxury, $5 for a pound or
+pint can, and cigars, fifty cents to $1 apiece.
+
+Against the profits which such prices represented the speculator had
+to set the original cost of the articles, the expense of transporting
+them to Dyea or Skaguay and over the one hundred and seventy-five miles
+to the foot of Lake Le Barge, his own fare on a steamer out of the
+country, and the loss of from three to six months’ time.
+
+During the lull between the arrivals of the few speculators from Le
+Barge and the main body of the pilgrims from Linderman and Bennett,
+it seemed at one time not unlikely that Dawson might be carried down
+the river and a new town established on some sandbar. But there was
+not enough snow left on the mountain sides to allow the tropical sun,
+shining eighteen hours out of the twenty-four and raising the mercury
+to 110 degrees, to accomplish its apparent purpose. Never had the
+old-timers known it to be so warm so early in May, and never had they
+known the river to be so high. They held that the Lord was displeased
+with the prospective defilement of the country by an army of “clerks,
+farmers, and dudes.” The Indians knew better. White man might be very
+cunning in making a boat go up stream by burning wood in an iron box,
+but Indian could tell him some things besides how to kill moose. Old
+Indian could count off on his fingers some twenty years ago when the
+canoeing was good on the whole town-site of Dawson. That was why Indian
+never lived in Dawson but at Klondyke City.
+
+Day by day we saw the water approaching a few inches nearer to our
+door-sill. It began to fall just as we were thinking of putting up
+our tent on the mountain side. Only the roofs of some cabins in Dawson
+were above the level of the stream. The suspension bridge between
+Dawson and Klondyke City, whose woven wire cables were earning two or
+three hundred fifty-cent tolls a day for their owners, was carried away
+along with a great pile of débris that it had collected. You paid fifty
+cents for being ferried from one island to another in the main street.
+Along the bank, standing in their boats, pike poles in hand, were those
+easy-going ones of the inhabitants who raised husky dogs for sale, did
+a little freighting in the winter, and took naturally to odd jobs--and
+I might say to squaw wives--now, in the heyday of importance, as they
+rowed out in the strong current and brought in a tree which had been
+uprooted by the flood. If the tree was suitable only for firewood it
+was probably worth a quarter of an ounce, or four dollars; if large
+enough for sawing, half an ounce. The average Klondyker’s dislike for
+such work being quite as strong as that of the average man at home for
+scavenging, the easy-going had a free field and earned enough in a few
+days to buy winter outfits for themselves and their families. A few
+had even better luck. They caught portions of rafts--in two instances
+whole rafts--which had slipped their moorings up the river, and
+steering the sum of two or three months’ labor of men probably unknown
+to them up to the bank, let the owners of the saw-mill have it at a
+bargain.
+
+A source of amusement if not of income was a ditch in one of the back
+streets, hidden under three or four inches of water. As you stepped
+into it up to your thighs you heard a roar of laughter from several men
+sitting on a prominence near by.
+
+“If you don’t tell your friends, pardner,” said one of them, “there’s
+room up here for another, and you can enjoy yourself watchin’ the
+others tumble in.”
+
+With all the snow gone and no rainfall, the Yukon fell as rapidly as
+it had risen. The thawing and crumbling soft earth of the embankments
+of the upper reaches made it muddier than the Missouri at its worst.
+For drinking water one had either to resort to the rivulets on the
+hill-side, amber-colored from the moss, or go to the Klondyke, which,
+once sluicing was nearly finished, became so clear that the bottom
+was visible at a depth of ten or twelve feet, while the eddies and
+rapids of its current as seen from the mountain tops, left a dark,
+comet-like streak, stretching from its mouth for a distance of two or
+three miles on the café-au-lait surface of the mother stream.
+
+[Illustration: In the Camps of the Cheechawkos.]
+
+By the fifteenth of June the river-bank was lined with the boats of
+the pilgrims, two or three deep. A city of canvas, with the old cabins
+and buildings as its heart, extended until the neighboring heights
+were dotted with tents. Knowledge of boat-building had turned out to
+be a misfortune, if anything, for the scows moved just as fast with
+the current and proved quite as easy to manage, I was told, as smaller
+craft pointed at both ends. The bow of each vessel bore the number
+which had been put on by the Mounted Police when they examined outfits
+for a second time for custom purposes at Le Barge or Tagish. Beside it
+was the name of the pilgrim’s home town, of his sweetheart, his wife,
+or his daughter, put on with coal if he had no paint. From the mast
+fluttered a red bandanna, a towel, or possibly some absurdly elaborate
+flag which had been made in the idle hour between the completion of the
+boat and his embarkation. If there were three in a boat, which is the
+best working number for a Klondyke party, one was in the bow on the
+watchout for sandbars, the second was at the oars, and the third in the
+stern with a sweep. Navigation had its perils, too. The river as well
+as the Pass had claimed its victims. You heard on every hand tales of
+wrecks in White Horse Rapids and in Thirty Mile River, whose hidden
+rocks had proven even more dangerous than the White Horse Rapids. Many
+a scow with merchandise which had cost its owner his last cent was
+split in two, and those on board were thankful to find themselves on
+shore alive.
+
+In their camps, the pilgrims found the mosquitoes of summer worse than
+the cold of winter. Fevers and headaches upon their arrival in Dawson
+were the consequences of exposure under the sun. It was even the fate
+of a few to be taken at once to the big log hospital on the hill-side
+which already had more patients than it could accommodate; and of a
+part of these to be buried in the little cemetery beyond the hospital,
+which gives to relatives of the deceased the sombre satisfaction of
+knowing that its inmates, lying at a depth where the earth never thaws,
+are preserved for all time--unless the town-site itself one day is
+marked by hydraulics.
+
+Between the pilgrims when I met them in Seattle and when I met them
+again in Dawson there was all the difference of volunteers in new
+uniforms going forth to war and the dust-stained men who return. Their
+tents, so white and new in Dyea, had patches where holes had been
+burned by sparks or by carelessly hung candles. Their canvas bags of
+provender were the color of the Yukon. Their cheap sheet-iron stoves
+were so badly warped that the oven had ceased to bake well. Their
+beards were unkempt, their faces tanned. The knees of their trousers
+proved again how helpless a man is when alone with a needle. Many
+were still wearing caps. A few had made substitutes for summer hats
+out of wire, straw, fir twigs, and a bandanna. If the Seattle and the
+Vancouver merchants could have seen the outfits which they had sold
+after three or four months’ usage, they themselves might have wondered
+at the skill of the manufacturers in making little seem a great deal by
+the use of varnish.
+
+Very wisely the Canadian Government had provided that every pilgrim
+entering Canadian territory must have eleven hundred pounds, or a
+year’s supply of food. Flour was the cheapest thing to bring an outfit
+that lacked two or three hundred pounds up to the requirements. Almost
+without exception the pilgrims had failed to realize the importance
+of luxuries in contributing a healthful and sustaining diet in the
+North. Flour sold on July 1st, after the commercial companies began
+to receive supplies, for $6 a sack, but white sugar sold for fifty
+cents a pound. Everybody had enough of staples, but many had eaten all
+their sugar--the larger part of their dried fruits, soup preparations,
+and canned delicacies and smoked or chewed all of their tobacco. It
+was easy to promise themselves on the trail that if they indulged
+themselves in “something good” after a hard day’s work they could buy
+more of the same article in Dawson. For they were certain that a great
+many of their comrades intended to sell their outfits and leave the
+country at once--so many of their comrades did. But they, too, had
+eaten all their butter and evaporated eggs and kept any tobacco they
+had lest they should run out of it on the way home.
+
+Pilgrims who had goods to sell hastened to find a niche for a booth on
+the busy main street, where you could buy peanuts and pink lemonade, or
+the substantials of eating; patent leather shoes, yellow-backed novels,
+and cheap jewelry, or the substantials of wearing apparel. The six
+restaurants formed a trust and kept the price of a meal up to $2.50.
+In furnishing them with meat, the men who had used oxen for drawing
+their outfits up to the Scales and again to draw them over the lakes,
+now had reason to laugh back at the friends who had scoffed at them for
+thinking that any animal except a dog or a mule was useful in Alaska.
+An ox sold for $700 or $800 and was butchered at once before it had a
+chance to eat any more hay--which was worth $100 a ton--while the rich
+men stood by to see that they got the tenderloin. Besides beefsteak,
+we had moose-steak. One moose, who had possibly come back to his old
+pastures out of curiosity, was shot with a revolver only a mile out of
+town. His slayer, who met him ambling along the white man’s trail as if
+he were on a stampede to some new creek, sold his carcass for $500.
+
+Carpenters got employment at $15 a day on some one of the new dance
+halls, saloons, and stores which were being built as fast as green
+lumber for their construction could be obtained. Pilgrims without
+any trade, if they were wise, immediately secured logs and built a
+cabin, which served them at once as a temporary home, a storehouse
+for their supplies, and assured them warmth and shelter when winter
+should come. But the grasshoppers were far more numerous than the
+ants. The debilitating climate of summer, joined with the indecision
+of whether to leave the country or to remain, of whether to go down
+the river to the American side or up the river to Stewart if they
+did remain, supplied the majority with a good excuse for idleness.
+Some did not even put up tents on the shore, but kept house in their
+boats which they had moored to the bank. They sat on logs discussing
+their experiences in shooting the rapids, and they kept watch of the
+new arrivals for the purpose of guying anyone who had started before
+themselves but had arrived later.
+
+There was something pitiful as well as ridiculous in the disappointment
+of the pilgrim who had believed everything that he read in the
+press-agents’ pamphlets, to find that a rich claim was not to be had
+for working it. When he put his new gold-pan and a pack on his back
+and went up the trail to the creeks, where possibly he found a few
+colors in a rivulet, the old-timers laughed at him and asked him if
+he liked prospecting well enough to pan ground that was staked two
+years ago. If he carried a revolver they begged him, please not to
+shoot them. Wearily, and with all his visions dispelled, he returned
+to Dawson. His tent was no protection from the sun of midday. At night
+the light made it difficult for him to sleep. As he fried his fat bacon
+he could not help thinking that it was just strawberry time on the
+“outside.”
+
+Few pilgrims had any money and those who had were inclined to spend
+it on the luxuries which their palates craved. They walked up and
+down the main street like the crowd at a country fair; looked on at
+the drinking and gambling of the successful miners and marvelled at
+the amount of dust that passed over the saloon-keeper’s scales; and
+slouched in and out of the stores of the two commercial companies to
+see the bulletin board, which had the list of names of men for whom
+letters had been received. If they might not visit the new variety
+theatre, with gambling hall and bar attached, where actresses from
+’Frisco and Seattle sang the songs of a local poet containing spirited
+references to the rich claim-owners--who, in return for the compliment,
+opened champagne at $30 a bottle between the “turns,”--they could at
+least enjoy the sights of the river bank. In the absence of so great
+an event as the arrival of a scow with mules or the latest papers
+on board, some “pardners” were either quarrelling or dividing their
+outfits preparatory to selling them. With the first steamer from down
+the river came the news from Circle City, which meant a great deal to
+the old-timers. The Cheechawkos could not understand it, but, as became
+a crowd which gets only a glimpse into the inside world, they made the
+most of the peeps and simulated intense interest.
+
+One day a midget of a steamer, the first to shoot White Horse
+Rapids--her parts had been packed over the Pass and put together on
+Bennett--ran in between two scows and tied up so quietly that not more
+than three or four hundred men saw it. Their pride was no greater than
+the disappointment of the multitude, who refused to forgive the captain
+until they learned that his whistle was out of gear.
+
+Next to knowing them personally, the Cheechawkos enjoyed having the
+leading citizens and the foremost gamblers pointed out to them. They
+knew the story of how the Eldorado kings had made their fortunes, and
+how Jack Smith had once bet $7,000 on the turn of a card. Now and then
+they caught a glimpse of the tall, raw-boned Scotchman who was the
+richest man in the country. Two years before he had been a day laborer
+at Circle City. When the value of Eldorado claims was an uncertain
+quantity he bought one of the best for $800. He spent all the first
+year’s output in buying undeveloped properties, and then bought still
+others upon his promise to pay, which the miners accepted without any
+written word. The clean-up had vindicated his judgment. Now the fact
+that he had stopped on a trail to look at a claim was supposed to
+increase its speculative value.
+
+And speculation still continued in both mining property and real
+estate. A French-Canadian who had paid $5 for a front lot just after
+the town-site was staked still held out persistently for $20,000, with
+slight prospect of getting it. The “bottom” was out of the “boom,”
+as every man who supported himself by gambling or speculation well
+knew. No new strikes were made except on a few benches. None could be
+made on the creeks at a season of the year when the seepage from the
+thawing earth would fill a prospect-hole as fast as it was dug. Autumn
+and winter have ever been the time for prospecting in the Klondyke,
+and summer the time for cabin building or for taking provisions to
+the heads of some of the tributaries in poling-boats preparatory to
+prospecting.
+
+Roughly but surely the lesson was forced home to the pilgrim that a
+fortune cannot be made in the Klondyke in a hurry. If he would have a
+claim he must find it. Even after he has found it, he must spend two
+or three years, unless he sells it, taking out its treasure. If it
+were not for the humiliation of facing their friends from whom they
+had parted with merry good-bys, nine out of every ten of the pilgrims
+would have returned home at once. Thirty per cent. of them did, as it
+was. Two-thirds would have gone if many had not loitered on in their
+tents until it was too late to go except over the ice. The tenth man
+developed those characteristics of patience and nonchalance in dealing
+with obstacles which the veteran prospector possesses by experience and
+by nature. For such as lacked this spirit and remained in the country
+there was the prospect of loitering in their cabins until their
+supplies were eaten, in the hope of getting a good claim on a stampede,
+or of going to work for wages.
+
+[Illustration: A Yukon Steamer.]
+
+In all, the pilgrims must have spent $30,000,000, or $40,000,000, on
+outfits and transportation. (The output of gold in the Klondyke for the
+year was $11,000,000.) But they have paved the way with their failures
+for the development of a vast expanse of country whose abounding wealth
+is unquestioned. The hardships of a journey to Dawson are of the past.
+An aërial tramway, without groans or perspiration, does the work of
+the packers at one-fifth of the expense on Chilcoot, and a railroad
+carries passengers as well as freight over the whole Pass. Steamers ply
+on both the upper and lower branches of the river connecting at White
+Horse Rapids with others plying on the lakes. Hereafter, the mines of
+the Klondyke will be an established institution, like the mines of
+California, and the prospectors who go there, better fitted for their
+tasks.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+GOVERNMENT
+
+ THE CANADIAN POLICY IN THE YUKON PROVINCE--TAXES AND FEES--THE GOLD
+ COMMISSIONER’S OFFICE--CONFLICTS BETWEEN TERRITORIAL AND DOMINION
+ GOVERNMENTS--TIMBER GRANTS--THE VALUE OF THE MOUNTED POLICE--THE NEWLY
+ RICH AT DAWSON--THE ORDER OF THE YUKON PIONEERS--MRS. CONSTANTINE.
+
+
+In its policy the Dominion Government, which took matters out of
+the hands of the Territorial Government after the Klondyke “boom”
+began, has apparently been largely influenced by the predominance
+of aliens in the Klondyke. At least three-fourths of the 2,000 men
+in and around Dawson in the winter of 1897-98 and of the 35,000
+pilgrims of the spring of 1898, were citizens of the United States.
+Naturally, the members of the Canadian Parliament regarded with dismay
+the prospect that the new-found wealth of a portion of their domain
+hitherto considered valueless was going to American mints, and that
+their constituents would be paying the expenses of administration,
+which, owing to the isolation of the region to be governed, must be
+comparatively expensive, for the benefit of another country.
+
+Accordingly, the placer regions of the Yukon Valley lying in British
+territory were created a special province called the Yukon District,
+under the jurisdiction of the Dominion Parliament. A Commissioner,
+with the powers of a dictator, was appointed for the District, the
+Judge of the district alone being responsible to Ottawa and not subject
+to the Commissioner’s orders. The other civil officials were a Gold
+Commissioner, who had charge of the recording of claims, a Crown
+Attorney, and two Mining Inspectors for collecting the royalties.
+The opportunities of the officials for their own aggrandizement were
+exceptional by reason of the system of taxation devised. On the output
+of all claims a royalty of ten per cent. was collected. Every pilgrim
+had to take out a mining license at a cost of $10. For having a claim
+recorded a fee of $15 was charged. Every alternate claim on all new
+discoveries was reserved to the Crown, thus depriving the community of
+half the reward of enterprise. These restrictions drove a great many
+experienced American prospectors to the other side of the boundary
+line and at the same time served the inexperienced as an excuse for
+returning home.
+
+Major J. M. Walsh, who was chosen Commissioner, did not go to Dawson
+in the autumn of 1897. His corps of civil officials preceded him while
+he remained behind in camp on the Lewes Lakes, with a considerable
+force of police, in order to escort to Dawson the United States Relief
+Expedition.
+
+Among the foremost charges of maladministration made against the civil
+officials was the one in connection with the water front, data of which
+were given to me by several leading men. The Canadian law provides
+that the main street of a new town shall be at all points a certain
+distance from the bank of the river. In order not to have a crooked
+main street, the men who staked the town-site of Dawson agreed to
+follow this measurement, from the greatest indentation of the bank, in
+a straight line. Those who bought lots on the main street supposed that
+they were securing river frontage, which is invaluable. The spring of
+1898 however, saw a long row of buildings whose back-doors were toward
+the river and which faced the original row. The officials had let
+the water-front to an individual for a nominal sum in the name of the
+Government. The sub-lessees said, with a shrug of their shoulders, that
+they did not care to say to whom they paid their heavy rents, and that
+they were satisfied as long as they were left undisturbed.
+
+Captain Constantine, who had been transferred from the charge of
+the police at Forty Mile to the same position at Dawson, was an old
+fashioned executive. His departure in the summer of 1898 was agreeable
+to him as well as to the other officials, because he was alone among
+uncongenial company. He understood the miners; and they knew that,
+though gruff, he was honest and incorruptible. Even the lawless ones
+admitted this much; for in no community is simple integrity enforced
+by a strong will better appreciated than in a mining-camp. Had he
+been retained as administrator of the whole district, with the power
+to choose his own assistants, Dawson would have been a phenomenally
+well-governed settlement from the start, and the development of the
+great wealth of the region would have been less retarded. Instead
+of men who had spent their lives among pioneers, the Dominion
+Government sent, as the reward for party service, men whose experience
+was limited to local politics at home. With hundreds of experts to
+choose from in British Columbia, an ex-captain of a whaler and an
+ex-livery-stable-keeper were made inspectors to collect the royalty of
+10 per cent. on an output of eleven millions of gold.
+
+Considering the expense of recording a claim, the owners of claims
+and the prospectors had at least the right to expect from the Gold
+Commissioner’s Office reasonable attention to duty. To have posted in
+a public place a detailed map of the district, with all claims and the
+names of their owners recorded, would have required little labor and
+no expense; but it would have ruined the business of the clerks in
+furnishing information. Considering the number of policemen with idle
+hands, mail received in the summer might have been sorted with dispatch
+and distributed at different windows under different heads. But a delay
+of two or three days, and the prospect of waiting in line for several
+hours before one could even ask if there was a letter for him, were
+strong incentives, to miners who wished to hurry back to their claims,
+to put a few dollars into an itching palm, and in return to receive
+immediate attention at the side-door of the Post-Office.
+
+Unfortunately the arrival of Major Walsh in Dawson in the spring was
+not productive of the reforms which an oppressed population had hoped
+for. The acts of the officials, except that of a representative of the
+Northwest Territory in placing a tax of $2,000 each on saloons and
+gambling-halls, seemed to meet with the favor of the Commissioner.
+He maintained that the Territorial Government was infringing on the
+special powers granted to him by the Dominion Government; and he issued
+an order that anyone who chose might sell liquor without any form of
+license.
+
+The buildings on the water-front stood in the way of even a primitive
+system of sewerage. Simple sanitary rules were not promulgated, much
+less enforced. Absolutely no precautions were taken against the
+epidemic of fever, which was responsible for so many deaths. Private
+beneficence built the two hospitals, and it now maintains them and
+carries on all charitable undertakings. Whatever has been done in the
+way of improvements has been paid for by public subscriptions. The full
+measure of the Government’s public spirit was the construction of the
+barracks and stockade for the Police on the Government Reserve. Had
+some of the money collected from the claim-owners and the prospectors
+been expended on constructing trails and on a system of sanitation,
+there would have been less ground for complaint. Doing nothing itself,
+the Government often took the position of the dog in the manger. The
+exorbitant price demanded for a charter forced capitalists to give up
+the plan of building a railroad from Dawson to the mines, which would
+have been invaluable in cheapening the cost of mining. After paying
+for timber privileges in their licenses, the pilgrims found, to their
+dismay, that the Government, or the officials, had given enormous
+timber grants in the neighborhood of Dawson to individuals, thus
+putting an artificial value on logs for firewood and building purposes.
+
+Very properly the loudest complaints arose from Englishmen,
+Australians, and South Africans. If the new laws were directed against
+Americans, they injured Canadians and other British subjects equally
+as much, if not more. From the first, London regarded the Klondyke as
+a great field for exploration, and most of the capital represented
+there last spring was British. The royalty of 10 per cent. and the
+failure to use the money so collected in constructing trails have been,
+however, more injurious to capitalistic enterprise, which is largely
+British, than to individual enterprise, which is largely American. A
+poor man who takes from $5,000 to $50,000 out of a bench-claim with his
+own hands will not be deterred from his labors by the royalty. But 10
+per cent. on the gross output makes a majority of company propositions
+impracticable. Often it will wipe out a goodly profit, and put a
+balance on the wrong side of the ledger. As soon as it was known that
+the Dominion Government would not heed the appeals for the abolition of
+the royalty, the reaction from the “boom” was complete. The appointment
+of Mr. Ogilvie, the new Commissioner, who has a reputation for probity,
+was as welcome to the aliens as to the other residents. He at once set
+about the work of making reforms.
+
+Too much cannot be said in praise of the personnel of the Northwest
+Mounted Police--mounted only in name, for they have not a single horse
+in the Klondyke--which is largely drawn from the ranks of the young
+Englishmen who enjoy “roughing it.” In preserving order they are
+good-natured but severe. Malefactors are punished with the commendable
+promptness of British justice; and no murderer in Dawson can snap his
+fingers in the face of the law as one did at Skaguay. At Skaguay there
+was no order; at Dawson too much civil government.
+
+For the first winter, being populated entirely by men from the old
+camps, Dawson was, of course, largely a sociological counterpart
+of Forty Mile and Circle City, except that the excitement and the
+feverish optimism, which increased as the new discoveries continued
+to surpass expectations, had hitherto been unknown in the valley.
+The contamination of the old customs began with the arrival of the
+fifteen hundred madly hastening pilgrims who succeeded in reaching
+Dawson before navigation was closed in the autumn of 1897. It was
+complete with the arrival of the great pilgrimage with its element
+of toughs, gamblers, and other parasites. The time had passed when
+every man nodded to whomsoever he met. Dawson had become a settlement
+not of neighbors, but, like Mecca, of strangers. The old-timers were
+developing those human weaknesses which are brought out in sharp relief
+by the sometimes doubtful blessing of great and unexpected success.
+Practical communism was easier for a man when he and his comrade were
+equally poor than after chance had made him the owner of a plot of
+creek bed worth from $500,000 to $1,000,000, while his comrade, who had
+been too late in the stampede to stake a claim on Eldorado, was among
+his employees.
+
+[Illustration: The Main Street of Dawson.]
+
+There sprang up as a consequence an aristocratic social circle called
+the Eldorado Kings, suffering, in a measure, from the affliction of
+the _nouveaux riches_ of old communities who live miserably under the
+suspicion that whoever approaches them has an axe to grind. Yet they
+did not forget their duties to their less fortunate fellows. They
+gave bountifully to the churches, to the hospitals, and for the care
+of those poor Cheechawkos who lay ill in their tents. Upon a special
+occasion, the Order of the Yukon Pioneers--perhaps the death of a
+comrade or perhaps a church sociable, where you bought ice-cream made
+from condensed milk for $2.50 a plate--appeared together wearing broad
+blue ribands. Foremost among them was Jack McQuestion. He was keeping a
+trading post when the first prospectors entered the Yukon Valley. The
+old miners came to him to settle disputes, and the poorest of them
+asked him for the loan of an ounce of dust.
+
+On the day before the departure of our steamer for the outside, attired
+in their best clothes and wearing their ribands, the old-timers
+presented to Captain Constantine an address of appreciation and a
+peck of nuggets. Then Jack McQuestion went over to the barracks and
+asked that Mrs. Constantine should share with her husband the central
+position in a photographic group of all the pioneers. She consented.
+
+The Captain’s wife had been her husband’s companion during his service
+on the Yukon. When she was quite ill one winter and had to remain
+in her cabin from one short day’s end to another--with long, dark,
+monotonous nights between them--the kindnesses shown to her were not
+limited to the devotion of her stalwart husband or the attention of
+ruddy-faced privates, whose Cockney accent told how far they were
+from the motherland of commonplaces and restraints. The miners who
+came to the door to inquire how she was getting on, devised means
+of entertaining her over their pipes and cabin fires, and then were
+sometimes too bashful to put them into execution. For one thing they
+learned by heart the contents of some old humorous journals in camp.
+Though she had been the first person to receive the journals when they
+had been brought down the river the preceding summer, she did not say
+so, and listened with gentle patience to their jokes being retold again
+and again.
+
+“Mrs. Constantine,” said one old-timer, as he bade her good-by, “we
+ain’t much on manners, but we do know a lady when we see one.”
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+DOWN THE YUKON AND HOME.
+
+ GOOD-BY TO DAWSON--THE EXTINCTION OF THE UNFIT--STEAMBOATING TO
+ ST. MICHAELS--MOSQUITOES AND SANDBARS--PILGRIMS BY THE ALL-WATER
+ ROUTE--BEHRING SEA--CIVILIZATION ONCE MORE.
+
+
+Despite the diet, the isolation, and the inhospitable nature of the
+country, many of the old-timers who had now realized the material
+ambition which had brought them to Alaska and were going home, saw
+the great crowd which gathered on the river bank to bid our steamer a
+pleasant voyage, disappear in the distance with a feeling of regret
+amounting to more than a momentary pang. From two to ten years had
+passed since many of them had seen a paved street.
+
+“You’ll wish you’re back,” and, “You won’t feel natcheral,” their
+departing friends called out to them.
+
+Out of deference to civilization everyone had bought certain of its
+habiliments. New red ties stood out on the background of black
+sweaters, and crumpled overalls drooped over patent leather shoes. Some
+had taken whatever they could find to fit them, regardless of cost
+and incongruity. Others had halted half way in making out a wardrobe
+because they feared that they might not be getting the right styles
+or because they got indignant at the prices charged by the Dawson
+speculators compared with those on the outside.
+
+The dying woman who was the mother of the first white baby born in
+Dawson, the sallow men who had limped down from the hospital just
+before the steamer sailed, and the Cheechawkos who had sold their
+outfits for just enough to pay for passage to Seattle, where they
+would have to telegraph home for railway fare--these had no regrets.
+We buried the woman half way down the river, two of the men before
+we reached St. Michaels, and a third at sea when only two days from
+Seattle.
+
+With good accommodations, the journey of eighteen hundred miles
+from Dawson to St. Michaels would have been a pleasure trip. It
+was far from that with us, owing to the Spanish-American war and
+certain other reasons. The commercial company which charged us $300
+for transportation had two steamers at Dawson. It held them there
+long enough to give us the questionable satisfaction of seeing the
+steamer of the rival company, which had been delayed in coming up
+the river from its winter quarters, arrive and cut prices before our
+steamer, having room for seventy-five passengers, and one hundred and
+seventy-five on board, started on ahead of her sister steamer. We were
+to act as a reconnoitering force or a buffer, or whatever you choose,
+for the sister steamer, which had a dozen lonely, armed passengers and
+$2,500,000 in dust on board, with a view to saving her treasure from a
+Spanish privateer if one were waiting for us at the mouth of the river,
+as rumor from the outside said. Therefore, one hundred passengers had
+to sleep on the floor of the dining-room or on the lower deck among the
+Indians and the piles of firewood.
+
+[Illustration: A Dawson Good-by.]
+
+Except when we ate, and when the steamer poked its bow into the sand
+in front of some piles of fire-wood on the bank, we could be fairly
+comfortable lounging on the decks. For the eleven days which the
+journey occupied, we had one tablecloth for three sittings at each
+meal. As the miners had a general disregard for the utility of
+dishes for holding things, the cloth did not preserve its original
+color, even in spots, for more than two days. Our food was bad rice,
+bad bacon and bread, and old canned roast beef, which, however, did
+not count, as we could not eat it. If the company had only allowed
+us to use our fingers instead of forks and knives which men who were
+“working their fare” out as waiters washed indifferently, I should have
+been much happier. By July, moreover, the little mosquitoes were out.
+They, and not the big ones which come early in the season, understand
+flying straight to the mark with rigid lance. They bit the Indians as
+well as the white men, but to no purpose so far as making them hurry
+in bringing on the wood. As soon as the steamer was in midstream, the
+buzzing mists, which could be resisted only by the finest netting drawn
+over the head, disappeared.
+
+Our principal stops in the eighteen hundred miles were at Forty Mile
+and Circle City, where the deserted cabins were being once more
+occupied and there was a chance that the old claims, which were good
+for their day, would be worked again, and of a recrudescence of the
+boom; and at Minook, where important discoveries had been made in the
+past winter. But we stopped also at every little Indian village--to
+please the Indians, one presumed--where the inhabitants came out to
+meet us in their light canoes and wanted to sell furs and trinkets. At
+many of these villages there were mission houses. We had on board a
+Russian priest, who had come up on the steamer from Anvik and was now
+returning. He was bold enough to say that he thought he needed this
+little recreation after having been two years alone among the Indians.
+
+We had left behind the great mountains below Dawson, we had seen the
+midnight sun across the vast stretches of flats below Circle City, and
+were just congratulating ourselves that our Indian pilot had led us
+through the last of the many shallow channels in the flats, when we
+ran on a sandbar. Our mate and his Indian crew labored for twenty-four
+hours before we were off. The next day a hog chain broke and our
+engines were helpless. For the rest of the distance to St. Michaels we
+were towed by the steamer which carried the treasure and had the misery
+of seeing the fellows who had started two days after us and paid less
+fare pass us on the steamer of the rival company.
+
+At St. Michaels we met three or four thousand pilgrims who were
+going into the Klondyke by the all-water route. They had bought
+transportation for themselves and outfits of new companies which had
+attempted to tow flotillas of river steamers built in Seattle to St.
+Michaels. Almost invariably the river steamers had been lost at sea
+between Seattle and Unalaska, and those who depended upon them for
+transportation to Dawson were only better off than others who had
+attempted the journey on decrepit sailing vessels that had gone to
+the bottom. It was a little unkind of our passengers, while we waited
+for transfer to an ocean steamer, to enjoy setting before them in the
+bluntest phrase an exaggerated account of the desperate condition of
+all the newcomers in Dawson.
+
+Behring Sea was placid as a lake when we crossed it. After two days
+for coaling at Unalaska and after five days on the Pacific, we entered
+Puget Sound on the morning of July 19th. Everyone on board was thinking
+of the steaks and the fruit that he would eat that evening for dinner.
+The old-timers, who had heretofore resented the steward’s requests that
+they should not expectorate on the decks, were a little ill at ease
+at the prospect of the social restraint of civilization. Civilization
+offers many advantages over Dawson or Circle City for spending a
+fortune, to be sure, but such of the old-timers as were destined to
+become poor again--and the majority were, I think--would no doubt
+return to the pick and the pan as a wanderer returns home.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+_BOOKS ON OUR NEW POSSESSIONS_
+
+
+COMMERCIAL CUBA
+
+A Book for Business Men
+
+By WILLIAM J. CLARK
+
+With 8 maps, 7 plans of cities, and 40 full-page illustrations, and a
+Commercial Directory of Cuba. Large 8vo, $4.00
+
+“A thoroughly good and useful book. We should not know where to
+find within another pair of covers so much and so carefully sifted
+information bearing on this subject. Mr. Clark’s painstaking account of
+the railway and telegraph systems; of highways and harbors; of rivers
+and water supplies, and lighthouses; of sugar and tobacco growing; and
+his detailed description of each province and of every city of any
+size, together with a ‘business directory’ for the whole island, make
+his book one of great value for reference as well as for practical
+guidance. In the present situation of Cuban affairs it should command
+a wide sale. Its accuracy is certainly of a high order.”--New York
+_Evening Post_.
+
+
+YESTERDAYS IN THE PHILIPPINES
+
+By JOSEPH EARLE STEVENS
+
+With 32 full-page illustrations from photographs by the author.
+_Seventh thousand._ 12mo, $1.50
+
+“With the observant and indulgent eye of an old traveller, Mr. Stevens
+has seen everything in the islands worth seeing, and has described what
+he has seen in a most interesting manner.... All is set forth by the
+narrator in a breezy, chatty way that would be entertaining under any
+circumstances.”
+
+  --Philadelphia _Evening Telegraph_.
+
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, NEW YORK
+
+
+_THE WAR ON SEA AND LAND_
+
+
+THE CUBAN AND PORTO RICAN CAMPAIGNS
+
+By RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
+
+With 117 illustrations from photographs and with 4 maps. _Twentieth
+thousand._ 12mo, $1.50
+
+“Never has a war been reported as this has been, and never has a
+history been written like this, by one who saw it all--while the blood
+was hot and the memory vivid.”--New York _World_.
+
+“This is much the most vivid and readable of all the books on the
+war that have appeared so far, and it is full of life and color and
+incidents that show the sort of stuff of which our soldiers were made.
+The book is written with a keenness, a vivacity, a skill and a power
+to thrill and to leave an impression which mark a decided advance over
+anything that even Mr. Davis has written heretofore.”--Boston _Herald_.
+
+
+OUR NAVY IN THE WAR WITH SPAIN
+
+By JOHN R. SPEARS
+
+_Author of “The History of Our Navy”_
+
+With 125 illustrations from photographs and with charts and diagrams.
+12mo, $2.00
+
+“Mr. Spears has plainly put his best efforts into that mighty combat,
+the sea-Gettysburg of the war, the death-grapple of Cervera’s ships
+and Sampson’s. His story of the action of July 3d is superb. It is
+the most lucid and comprehensive description which has yet been laid
+before the American people, and it is made all the more valuable by the
+official chart of the ships’ courses which accompanies it. As a whole,
+Mr. Spears’s book is not only true to technical details, but it is a
+spirited and admirable piece of literary workmanship. It is one of the
+few volumes out of the many hurriedly issued in the wake of the war
+which will endure the test of time and stand as a faithful, competent
+picture to future generations.”--Boston _Journal_.
+
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+  Transcriber's Notes:
+
+  Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
+
+  Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
+
+  Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79395 ***