Chapter XII: Down the Yukon and Home (2)

“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.

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.

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.

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.