Chapter XII: Down the Yukon and Home (4)

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.”