Chapter XII: Down the Yukon and Home (1)

Good-By to Dawson--The Extinction of the Unfit--Steamboating to
St. Michaels--Mosquitoes and Sandbars--Pilgrims by the All-Water
Route--Behring Sea--Civilization Once More _Page 212_

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The Chilkoot Pass _Frontispiece_

FACING
PAGE

“Packing” Timber 8

Pilgrims Resting on the Chilkoot 8

A Halt 14

Guiding the Team 18

Borrowing a Hint from Ice-Boats--Just Above White Horse Rapids 22

Over the Bench Ice of Thirty Mile River 26

Crossing a Brook 32

In Camp--The Dogs’ Porridge 40

The First Boats 54

A Typical Pilgrims’ Boat 66

Yukon Indians 78

On the Creeks 88

A Flume on Bonanza Creek 102

Cleaning Up 108

Shovelling a Clean-Up into a Gold Pan 108

The Discoverers of French Gulch Bench at Work 124

Pardners and Twins for Forty Years 124

Miss Mulrooney of The Forks 142

Jack Beltz 156

“The Huskies” 156

On the Pass 164

Caches of Pilgrims’ Outfits at the Summit 172

Bargaining for a Newly Arrived Boat-Load, Dawson 182

In the Camps of the Cheechawkos 188

A Yukon Steamer 198

The Main Street of Dawson 208

A Dawson Good-By 214

IN THE KLONDYKE

I

THE START FROM DYEA

CHOOSING COMRADES--JACK BELTZ AND HIS DOGS--FRITZ GAMBLE--FROM SHEEP CAMP TO THE SUMMIT--PACKING OVER THE CHILKOOT PASS--THE HALT AT LAKE LINDERMAN--A NIGHT IN A SLEEPING BAG--COASTING DOWN THE FROZEN YUKON--HALF WAY TO DAWSON.

Originally, I had intended to accompany our Government expedition for the relief of the miners of the Klondyke, which was in part mobilized at Dyea when I arrived there late in February. As it never went any farther, for the good reason that Dawson had been rescued from famine by the migration of a portion of its population, I was left to my own resources. Wholesome fatigue and clean camps on the snow were better than the hospitality of a mushroom town built of rough boards and tar-paper; a little adventure was better than watching for two months the thousands of pilgrims of fortune in the desperate and monotonous labor of putting their outfits over the passes; and I determined, rather than to wait with them for the opening of navigation, to undertake with dogs and sleds of my own the untried journey of six hundred miles over the ice-fields of the Lewes lakes and the ice-packs of the Yukon River which the Government expedition had contemplated.

Whoever was to go with me must be companionable, industrious, and loyal, lest in pitching a tent in a storm, when limbs ached from the strain of the day’s tramp, an unruly temper might lead to the crisis of blows or separation. In turn, I must work as hard as he; for we could not afford to carry food for a stomach that nourished idle hands.

Precisely the right kind of comrade, equipped with experience, I had hoped would be forthcoming from among the men who had violated the traditions of the early communities of gold-seekers in regard to winter travel. Some members of this hardy little army were almost daily arriving in Dyea. But their dogs were worn out, and they themselves were inclined to laugh at my suggestion, more particularly at my money. Having pointed out the greater difficulties of ingress than of egress, they asked, with a touch of sarcasm, if I thought that they had made the journey out from Dawson for the purpose of immediately retracing their steps.

Meanwhile, adventurous spirits but lately arrived from Seattle or San Francisco came to offer their services with all the self-confidence characteristic of a floating population. The references of some were belied by their demeanor, and the demeanor of others by their references. All were further belied by their dogs--Newfoundlands, setters, and what not--which had received a few days’ training for market purposes in Seattle. In consequence, I was almost despairing, when I was accosted by a powerfully built, blond-haired, blue-eyed fellow who impressed his personality upon me at once.

“I hear you’re lookin’ for a dog-puncher,” he said, awkwardly. “My name’s Jack Beltz. I’ve been a cowboy, and done a good many other things in the West, and now I’m up against it with the crowd in Alaska. I think I could do what you want”--and then with sudden fervor, “but come around and look at the dogs! If the dogs are no good, you don’t want me, that’s sure.”

“Any further references?”

“Well,” after a moment’s thought, “there’s Bangs, up at the Miner’s Rest. He knowed me when I was on a ranch in Nebrasky. Dunno what he’ll say. You can ask him, though. Anyhow, I’d be obliged if you’d see the dogs ’fore you make a decision.”

He waited outside the Miner’s Rest while I spoke with Bangs.

“Jack Beltz!” exclaimed Bangs. “Well, Jack Beltz’s a fool when it comes to hosses and dawgs. He thinks they can talk. But Jack Beltz’ll stick to a thing that’s hard--he don’t like things that ain’t--till he comes out of it or goes down with it, and all the mules in the army couldn’t make him mad.”

Then I followed Jack to a woodpile in the outskirts of the town, where five fat and sleek huskies awoke at his approach, and at his command lined up like so many soldiers, wagging their bushy tails over their backs and watching his every movement with their sharp eyes. From their mothers, who were native Indian dogs, they had inherited their affection for man, however poor the specimen, and from their fathers, who were full-blooded wolves of the forest, their strength and endurance.

In an hour after I had met him I had engaged Jack Beltz on the strength of the fat on his dogs’ ribs, of his blue eyes, and of Bangs’s candid recommendation. Placing my theoretical knowledge of the needs of an arctic climate against his experience as a frontiersman, we quickly made out a list of the supplies which were to be packed on our sleds, minimizing everything in weight and bulk as far as we dared, but being very careful to consider that while we might go hungry the dogs must not. In all, we took eleven hundred pounds, four hundred of food and bedding for ourselves and seven hundred of food for the dogs.

Chance made the choice of a third member of the party, whose assistance was necessary, as happy as the choice of its second. This big fellow, over six feet in height, was Frederick Gamble, known to his friends as Fritz, who had given up a career as an artist and had already spent one unprofitable season with a pick and a pack in the Cassiar district. No pilgrim accustomed to good living ever accepted a diet of bacon and beans with better philosophy.

It was already the 18th of March. If, as the old-timers said, the Yukon became impassable by the 20th of April, we had little time to spare. There was much in our surroundings on the day of our departure to lend credence to their opinion. The sun, at midday, which turned the blue of the little glaciers over our heads into a red, united with the wind blowing from the ocean to thaw the snow on the mountain sides. In the many places where the winter trail had been worn down to the sand of the flats which the Dyea River overflows in the freshets of spring, the pilgrims had to turn off to the still intact but spongy ice of the winding little stream of the autumn and winter to find a better track for their sleds.

Canyon City, where the comparatively level stretch of eight miles of the flats is at an end and the real ascent of eight miles to the summit of the Pass begins, had grown into a little village with three saloons since I had last visited it, only two weeks before. Here the river is a thundering cataract in spring, dashing through a narrow gorge of rocks which rise to a height of from twenty to a hundred feet. The sled road of trodden snow with a basis of ice had become so mushy that the men who panted forward, dragging their sleds and asking with their eyes, if not with their tongues, for a hand to help them out of ruts, were wondering whether they would not be forced to take to the summer trail running over the wall of the canyon on the morrow.

Beyond the canyon was a community of thousands of tents, Sheeps Camp, a halfway station in the work of transportation from Dyea to the Summit if not in the number of miles. It had doubled if not trebled in population since I had last seen it, which meant that the bulk of the pilgrims had their outfits this far on their journey. I slept here, the guest of some friends who had an excellent bed of fir boughs. Before I was up I knew that the day on the Summit was fair by the tramping of the packers and the howls of the dogs in the main path, or street, of the “town.” At this time, most of the days on the Summit were fair, and it behooved the pilgrims to make the most of them. In midwinter it often happened that intense cold and a fierce storm of fine snow, resembling a blizzard in the Dakotas, made the Summit impassable.

The series of steep ascents leading from Sheep Camp to the base of the final, long, and much steeper ascent, called as a whole by the pilgrims the Summit, was a struggling line of men and dogs, drawing sleds, and of horses with packs. Oaths and howls were so numerous that no one oath or howl came to the ear distinctly. You heard only noise, as you hear an uproar of individual shouts at a national convention. In the early days the pioneers had given to the little plateau at the base of the final ascent the name of the Scales, because at this point they were wont to balance their packs and readjust them for the last grim effort. Beyond this neither horse nor mule could carry nor dog could draw a load. The more supple animal man took his place.

If you would see the Pass, of which so much was written when so little was known of the Klondyke itself, you have only to imagine a broad incline at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees, seven hundred feet in height, running between two snowy peaks at its summit, with men in the foreground bending under the weight of heavy packs, and gradually growing smaller as they ascend, until, finally, they seem like ants dangerously near toppling over with their loads, though, to your relief and amazement, crawling off the white blanket into the sky.

In the hard, well-packed snow, steps had been cut, making it a case of walking up-stairs rather than of climbing. At intervals, more welcome than the chairs on the landings of an apartment house which has no elevator, seats had been cut. Men stepping out of the slow-moving line found rest in these. It was not “game” to groan, but purple faces and lungs gasping for more power for bodies quivering with excess of strain told of misery that was felt if not expressed. When a man did break down he collapsed utterly, and sometimes he wept.

Fifty pounds was the usual weight of a pack for all who did not take pride in exhibiting their brute strength. These, and the professional packers who bore the outfits of pilgrims who could afford this luxury, often labored under a hundred pounds or more. The hero of the day was an Indian. He took up a barrel weighing three hundred and fifty pounds. A Swede who crawled up on his hands and knees with three six-by-four timbers strapped on his back shared honors with him, however. The descent to the Scales was delightfully simple. You sat down and tobogganed, using your heels as a brake, without any unpleasant results if you had well-riveted overalls.

On the crest were piled hundreds of pilgrims’ outfits, separated one from another by narrow paths, making the whole seem like a city in miniature. Buried under the seventy feet of snow which had fallen during the winter were two other such cities, which their owners hoped to recover in the summer. Beyond floated a large British flag over the little block-house where the British Northwest Mounted Police had established themselves to collect customs and to see that no one not having a special permit entered Canadian territory with less than a year’s supply of food.

Jack labored for two hours in bringing up the dogs with the empty sleds, while our goods came on the backs of the ants, who charged three cents a pound for the service. Aside from the five huskies hitched to a large basket-sled, we had two St. Bernards, “Patsy” and “Tim,” who were born in the country, and duly christened and acclimatized there. With “Patsy” and “Tim,” and my hand on the “gee-pole” by which the sled was guided, I went under fire for the first time in descending the inland side of the pass. Man and sled were put _hors de combat_ again and again, while the dogs, who managed to keep erect, looked back on me with professional disgust. I wanted to blame my misfortunes to my moccasins, but Jack wore moccasins as well and maintained his footing easily. Fortunately for the novice there are three small lakes--at the time they were three fields of snow--in the nine miles from the Summit to Linderman, and he could take advantage of the respite when he was trotting across these to think out, in the hard-and-fast civilized manner, how to avoid his frequent loss of equilibrium.

We spent the night “at home” with Jack in his own camp on the shore of Lake Linderman. Jack and his “pardner” Cliff had been among the pilgrims who had attempted to reach Dawson in the same summer that the news of the great “strike” was received by the outside world. The ice formed in the lakes and rivers before they could build their boats, and there had been nothing to do but to wait eight months until the ice was gone. Once he had bought a team of dogs, however, Jack became enamoured of making the journey now at last before him. On the other hand nothing apparently had disturbed the patience of Cliff, who was a broad-shouldered giant, over six feet in height. The pair had first met in Seattle, formed an alliance “for dust or bust,” as Cliff said, and had thought more of each other “every minute ever since.” Cliff was to stay at Linderman now, but their alliance was resumed later in Dawson, when Jack, Fritz, and I dissolved partnership.

While we were putting our outfits straight and Jack was writing a letter--from his sighs I concluded that it was to his best girl--Cliff cooked flapjacks and fried bacon, sang snatches of what had been the latest popular songs when he left Colorado, and talked to his favorite dog, a Great Dane, who was as scarred as a veteran.

“Think you’re going to be slighted, don’t you, Maje?” he rambled on. “Froze off your ears already, ain’t you? ’Tain’t no country for short-haired dogs, is it? Don’t want to lose your tail, too. No, sir. You’re going to sleep in the tent same’s ever, and if they don’t like it I’ll tell you ‘sickum,’ and they won’t be with us long.”

Major curled up at Cliff’s feet as usual that night. Inasmuch as he had a snow-bath whenever he was caught in a storm, he was more agreeable than many human beings whose bodies had not touched water for months.

In a day we had passed over the only portion of our journey on land, and we were henceforth, as Jack put it gayly, to proceed downhill with the current of the river at the rate of eight inches to the mile, which is fast enough as currents go, but rather poor coasting. The course of the Yukon through the heart of Alaska is in a semicircle, with one end at the coast and the other end as near to the coast as the head-waters of a stream can be, unless it flows on the level. Once he has reached the lakes, the prospector may float for 2,600 miles to Bering Sea, and but for this one of the two friendly deeds of nature in Alaska--the other is abundant firewood--it is questionable if the gold in the Klondyke would have been discovered in our generation. De Soto’s exploring party would have had a similar advantage if the Mississippi had risen within thirty-two miles of Cape Hatteras, and they would have needed it if the valley of the Mississippi had been like the valley of the Yukon.

In harnessing our dogs at dawn, as we looked out across Lake Linderman from Jack’s camp, the only color in sight in the vast expanse of white was the needle-like fir-trees, cropping through the snow on the mountain-sides, and the outlines of a few pilgrims in advance of the main body, already astir, dragging their sleds on to Lake Bennett, where, with whipsaws, hammers, nails, oakum, and pitch, was to be built out of the forests the unique and variegated flotilla which was to line the river-banks in front of Dawson in May and June. Jack snapped the long lash of his whip, shook the “gee-pole” to free the runners, cried “Mush!”--a Saxon contraction of the “_Marchons!_” brought into the country along with many other words by the French Canadians--and seven gallant four-footed comrades and three figures in parkees looking like hooded night-shirts began in earnest their journey over the trail hardened by the pilgrims’ footsteps. By the wayside we passed caches of waterproof bags, one of them at either end of a pilgrim’s route of daily toil in moving his outfit forward by relays, his own ambition making him undergo longer hours and greater strain than he, a free citizen (U. S. A.), would have endured for any other master.

Linderman is only four miles long, and we were soon on Bennett, where the afternoon brought, in sharp contrast to the keen atmosphere of the morning, a blowing storm of moist snow which wet us to the skin. When Jack halted the dogs for our first and our worst camp, whose only consolation was a water-hole that had been made by some pilgrim, they set up a howl of knowing delight.

With the snow up to my waist I cut firewood out of the abundance of dead timber, and then cut green spruce-boughs, which, when laid tufts upward on the snow that was packed down as a floor for our seven-by-seven tent, made a soft bed. Then I went for a pail of water and brought in my sleeping-bag, and my work was done. The air had cleared suddenly, and the weather had turned so cold that my parkee had frozen as stiff as a board. I pulled it off, substituted dry moccasins and socks for my wet ones, left the rest of my clothes to be dried by the warmth of my body, and then, huddling myself up with my sleeping-bag as a seat, I watched my comrades finishing their allotted tasks.

Fritz, who had been chosen cook, was sitting with one leg on either side of the little sheet-iron stove, smoking a cigarette and making flapjacks. Outside, by the light of the crackling blaze, I could see Jack stirring something in a pan over a roaring fire with a big ladle that he had whittled out of a sapling. Weirdly presiding over this operation, their bodies in shadow and their wolf-noses thrust forward with epicurean relish, were the huskies. Jack fed them only once a day, but then all that they could eat of tallow, bacon, cornmeal, and rice, thoroughly boiled in the form of a porridge. When he took the pan off the fire he put it, safely covered, in the snow to cool, while the dogs mounted guard over it, glaring at one another; and then he came to sit on his own bed, and together we ate by the light of a candle hanging by a piece of wire from the top of the tent. As I had my granite-ware plate filled with beans the second time and took my fourth flapjack--a flapjack an inch thick and seven inches in diameter--a twinkle came into Jack’s eyes.

“I like to see a man in earnest,” he said.

Then he relighted his pipe and went back to his dogs. Having filled a two-quart tin pan for each of them, with the ardor of a child he heaped more timber on the dying fire, and, turning his back to the cheerful glow, began a technical conversation on the state of the trail with sleek old Dude, the leader of the team.

Later, when he returned to the tent, the dogs were so many balls of fur, their noses snuggled under their bushy tails. If two feet of snow had fallen during the night it would not have disturbed the serenity of their slumbers, and in the morning at the call to harness they would have dug their way out and shaken themselves ready for duty. Jack explained, as he pulled off his moccasins, that they had eaten only half their usual rations. Having been treated to beefsteak in Dyea by their generous owner, they rather resented marching fare; but they would come down to it as soon as they felt the pangs of hunger, he added.

“Are you tired?” I asked him.

“Me? No,” he drawled.

He filled up the stove--he must always have a fire of some kind going--and, leaning back on his robe, his hands behind his head, he looked up at the top of the tent dreamily. He was still in this attitude when I crawled into my sleeping-bag and quickly fell asleep. The sleeping-bag did well enough for that night, but I soon repented of it. With no opportunity for airing it properly, it soon collected moisture and became as uncomfortable as a coating of ice. After I had been kept awake for a night by the colder weather that followed the storm, I ripped it open and used the furs as a robe, which, with the assistance of a heavy blanket, kept me as warm as toast, though, when I awoke, there was a glacial path through the space I had left open for breathing. The wonder to me was that Jack did not freeze his nose--it was a large nose--for he always slept with his head completely outside of his coverings, his beard becoming as white with ice as that of Father Christmas.

“Blister me if I want to smother!” was his explanation.

The first one to awake in the morning crawled half-way out of his robe, and, dexterously leaning over, put the coffee-pot on the stove and made the fire out of the kindlings which were always ready. To dress was to put on your footwear, which had been drying--if it had not been burning--before the stove. Then the robes and blankets were rolled up and strapped to serve as seats for breakfast, and you stepped outside into the invigorating air and did what you might in the way of cleanliness. For my part, I washed my hands in the snow, using soap liberally, with astonishingly efficacious results. After breakfast we had to pack all the things that we had unpacked the night before back on the sleds and lash them.

On the Lewes lakes, and the streams which join them in a chain, one day was quite like another, with the exception of a single event of importance to ourselves. At daybreak we were on the level trail, now trotting and then walking, until our stomachs cried a halt. On three occasions we had luncheon in the tents of pilgrims who, not having been able to bring their supplies over the pass in the rush of the previous autumn before winter was at hand, were making for the foot of Lake Le Barge to take advantage of the three weeks by which the clearing of the ice in the river precedes the clearing of the ice in the lakes. While his partner was dragging his sled, one of our hosts was suffering in his tent the torture of snow-blindness as the penalty of having gone for a day without glasses. Another host, an old Dane from San Francisco, had no companion, not even a dog.

“Sometime I do get mad,” he said, “when the sled pull so hard, and I say, ‘Yohn, you are a big fool to start for Klondyke when you are sixty-nine.’ But we do not like to gif up. Nefer do we get so old we tank it too late to make a fortune. If a man know as he would drop dead on top of the Pass, I tank a man go on to see the t’ing out. I make a fortune t’ree time, and efery time I haf many pad lucks--yes, very many pad lucks. Sometime I get lonely, and then I say, ‘Yohn, there is your wife, there is your shildren; it is Sunday dinner, and you are home with a pile of gold.’”

How we relished the one rapidly diminishing ham that we had brought with us for our first luncheons, followed by the perfect relaxation which comes with good digestion and physical fatigue, glorified by a pipe, before we arose and turned our steps toward the brown line of sled-track which stretched out over the expanse of white until growing darkness made it dim, and Jack began to look out for the first favorable place for a camp!

At this time it was reported that a great “strike” of $2.50 to the pan had been made on Walsh Creek, a tributary of the Yukon near Big Salmon. The rumor afterwards turned out to be an exaggeration--only thirty cents a pan being the amount actually found, which had grown as it travelled up the lakes. Many of the pilgrims, among them ourselves, who already had their year’s supply of food over the Pass, and some who had not but were able to elude the police, leaving their caches in charge of friends, put a tent, half a side of bacon, a few quarts of flour, and a few quarts of beans on a sled behind a lean house-dog, and hastened toward Walsh Creek without regard to fatigue or exposure. A sallow and swarthy Quixote who had not made even this provision for his stomach and none for his back except a small blanket, called upon us one morning when we were at breakfast. Before he asked for something to eat he introduced himself as a Cuban who had been a cook in New York, but had concluded to be a cook no more now that fortunes were to be had for a little hard travelling.

“You see, gents,” he further explained, assuming a serene air of fellowship, “I’ve been walking at night so’s to get past the police stations. They won’t let a feller by when he ain’t got any grub. If I carried grub I’d be too late for the strike, mebbe.”

“But you’ll observe, I’m thinkin’,” Jack suggested, “that hotels are few and far between in this region.”

“Oh, I’ll manage to get on somehow. There’s a lot of luck in this world if you dodge about so it’ll hit you. I didn’t know where I’d get my breakfast, but I’ve got it, that’s sure.”

He wished us much happiness, put his blanket on his back, and walked on as unconcernedly as if he had a whole baggage train at his heels. But this was not until he had suggested with the aplomb of the Bowery that we would do well to take him on as a “pardner.” What became of him I do not know. Possibly his body lies among a pile of driftwood on some sandbar in the river. On the other hand, I should not be surprised to see him one day on Broadway, a huge diamond in his shirt bosom and a blond lady on his arm, or to read an account of him in a newspaper under the head of “From Cook to Millionaire.”

The Walsh Creek digression caused two weeks’ delay at a time when we felt the need of every day to complete our journey, and I accept the awkward responsibility for it. At White Horse Canyon we were offered the hospitality of a large cabin with a kitchen in one end and bunk-room in the other, occupied by some workmen engaged in building a tramway around the rapids. Jack suggested that we stop here for a day because the dogs needed rest, he said, but really on my account, I think. I had contracted a bad cough, and my legs ached like two great teeth. In the afternoon I lay down on the cook’s bunk, and toward evening Fritz started down the trail to a distant camp to find a doctor who had turned pilgrim of fortune. Meanwhile Jake, the cook, dosed me with tea made of sage that he had gathered on the mountain-side.

“Your pulse is up to a hundred and ten,” the doctor said; “but all that you’ve got is a plain, old-fashioned case of measles. You must have caught them in Dyea, and you’ve greatly exaggerated them by physical strain.”

My comrades put up a tent in another cabin which still wanted doors and windows, thus ensuring a soft light for the protection of my eyes, which the doctor feared might be affected. They nailed some saplings together for a bedstead, and were so ingenious in many ways, so kind in keeping the temperature the same night and day, and in attending to my wants generally, that I felt like a king in his private hospital. Jake came in every day to make sure that I was taking the doses of sage-tea that he sent in morning, noon, and night; while the big workmen came in to hint that I must not let Jake have his own way too much. And I lay on my back and thought of two things--strawberries and pineapples. I would have given all my wealth for either--but not a five-cent piece for a pear.

My convalescence was not so dull as I sat on a bench in the kitchen, learning, under Jake’s tutelage, how to cook oatmeal properly, how to bake bread and to make good pies out of dried apples, and listening to him expound his ideas of the world. He was a great cynic. If you believed in one thing, he was sure to believe in another. One of his favorite remarks with which he baited me was that “everybody is out for the stuff; there ain’t no honor nowadays; and you don’t catch me missin’ no dollars.” His boarders excused him by saying, “Any cook that’s been in a minin’-camp or a lumber-camp is always a blisterin’ crank.” On the morning of my departure I held out a bill to Jake in partial remuneration for what he had done for me. He stirred the contents of his pot this way and that, viciously, without replying. I protested, and then he growled:

“Gwan! What d’ye take me for?”

As I waved him a good-by he called out:

“Young feller, you’re all right, but you won’t argue.”

In two days we were at the foot of Lake Le Barge, and on the second of these we had travelled thirty-five miles, which made the dogs very unfit for service on the day following.

So all of another two days’ hard work was required to go from the foot of Le Barge to the junction of the Hootalinqua over a portion of the Yukon known from its length as Thirty Mile River, and certainly worthy of some distinction on account of other characteristics. Many more boats of the pilgrims’ flotilla were wrecked in the spring on its hidden rocks than in the White Horse Rapids, which, I may add, have received undue celebrity. If an average temperature of thirty degrees below zero continues for several weeks, the current may freeze over, but rarely is there more than bench ice along the shores; and this, owing to the increasingly moderate weather and the falling water, was fast breaking away in huge cakes, which fell into the stream with a splash. Over that which remained, slippery, sometimes sloping toward the river at a considerable angle, and often only a foot or two in breadth, we must make our way. When there was no footing below the sled, we attached one end of a rope to it, wrapped the other end around our waists, and if one of us slipped and fell in the soft snow of the steep hill-side above, luckily the others maintained their hold and were able to prevent both sleds and dogs from going into the river and putting an end to our little expedition there and then.

There was only one accident, and that not alarming. Fritz thought that he did not need our help to bring the St. Bernards over a place that the big sled had safely crossed with Jack’s back and mine against it and with the heavy steel prongs strapped to the heels of our boots dug into the ice. We heard a cry of “Hurry up! This is cold!” and looked around to see Fritz standing in a shallow eddy up to his waist, his parkee blown up about his head like a veritable balloon, while he braced himself against the sled. “I had to jump in to save our bedding,” he said. We hurried on the faster so that he might keep his blood in circulation, and he merely took the trouble to change his socks when we made a camp on a fairly comfortable ice-cake, after having assured ourselves that it would not float away with us during the night.

Near the Hootalinqua the current slackens, and we crossed where the stream was completely frozen over. Above us was a great jam of cakes that had floated down, some of which rumbled under our feet, came out in an open place below, and then went on to form another jam. A few minutes later there was a boom and our bridge moved downstream with the noise of a medley of bass drums. At noon on this day the sun had made the trail so soft that we sank into it up to our knees. We halted a little later, determined to start at one o’clock in the morning and take advantage of the crust frozen during the night; and we had what seemed at the time the good fortune to put up in a cabin which had been abandoned by the mounted police. Having had an early dinner, we were thinking of bed at six o’clock when two ragged men, their faces blackened by cooking over camp-fires, came in. They sat down, and when they had eaten with the heartiness of famished beings some things that we had left on the table, one of them, whom his companion called “the Doctor,” became explanatory:

“You mustn’t mind our appetites,” he said. “We’ve just come from Dawson. My pardner there, Yukon Bill, hain’t been out of the country for eight years. Go easy there, Bill! Your manners are bad.”

“Shut up!” roared Bill, looking as wild as a hungry lynx.

“Oh, he ain’t as crazy as Jim,” continued the Doctor. “Jim was a sight uglier ’n Bill, an’ you can see what Bill is. He took his share of the bacon on his back an’ started out for himself this mornin’.”

“No packin’ fer me! We kept the dogs, you bet, by----,” put in Bill through a mouthful.

Jim arrived three hours later. Without paying any attention to the presence of other persons, he dropped his pack as if it were of lead, fell down on the bench, pushed back his unkempt hair, and looked vacantly at the stove.

“Hello, Jim, you loon!” the Doctor called out. “As long’s we’ve said quits, I ain’t goin’ to be mean. Have one of our flapjacks!”

“Eat yer own dirt,” replied Jim. “I kin cook, an’ I’ve got just as much right in this cabin as you have.” And Jim put a skillet with a piece of dirty bacon in it on the stove.

“Don’t push my pan off there, you eight-footed elephant!” cried the Doctor.

Jim lifted his skillet and turned on the Doctor. Then he set the skillet down again with the action of one who is too tired for further effort, and fell back onto his seat.

“You Siawash sons of the devil,” he said between his teeth, “if I ever git my strength on the outside I’ll lick both on ye till ye bawl like a calf.” And brushing back his hair again he added, in a protesting voice, after a moment’s pause: “I kin do it, too!”

“Bully old Jim!” observed the Doctor.

It was plain enough that the minds of all three of our visitors, especially Jim, had been affected by the hardships that they had endured on their long tramp, with only snow, trees, dogs, and their own quarrels for companionship. Most of these grim travellers whom we met coming out from Dawson--now and then one was limping from scurvy--had neither tent nor stove, quite inadequate robes, no dishes except skillets and cups, and no food except bacon, flour, and beans, and not always beans. Earlier in the winter they put up a barrier of boughs against the wind, and slept between two great fires, kept up by the member of the party whose night it was to watch.

At eleven o’clock the Doctor stopped talking, and we slept for half an hour, only to be awakened by the arrival of another equally worn-out party, and almost the last one from Dawson that we met. By the time we were fairly asleep again these tired beings set the cabin on fire, and Jack, in his good-natured way, put the flames out for them.

At daylight I was awakened by Fritz, who was grumbling to himself about the audacity and the stomachs that some people must have. I arose to see him looking into two empty pails which he had left full of apple-sauce and beans.

“I was hungry as a dog in the night,” the Doctor explained, a little later, “and I couldn’t help it.”

Fritz replied by looking daggers at him. Then the Doctor offered a pair of snow-shoes to Fritz as an olive branch.

“If I thought that what you’ve eaten would make you downright sick, I’d take ’em,” said Fritz.

“’Twon’t,” replied the Doctor, in all honesty. “Nothin’ makes me sick.” And he gave the snow-shoes to Jack, whose eyes were twinkling in appreciation of the conversation.

As we started out, five or six hours later than we had planned, we resolved to eschew cabins hereafter. We had not done a half-day’s work when a heavy wet snow set in, and the condition of the dogs compelled us to rest.

“Wear ’em out,” said Jack, “and it’s all up, anyway. We’ll boil some beans and lay up some sleep ahead against a freeze.”

Accordingly, dogs and men slept for thirteen hours.

So slight was the freeze at night that the sun, now rising at four o’clock, soon thawed the crust. The Big Salmon was already open, its current destroying the trail and leaving a field of slush with many places too deep for passage for a distance of five or six miles, which was as wearing on the dogs as a full day’s journey under ordinary circumstances. We only hoped that the Big Salmon was alone in its enmity to our plans, for once the ice is out of the tributaries, the ice in the Yukon cannot last long. It seemed to be imperative that, in order to take full advantage of the slight crust which formed, we should travel nights. We made this experiment once, starting out at 10 P.M., and once was quite enough.

The thawing snow had fallen away from the path, which was hardened by travel from Dawson and therefore the better resisted the sun’s rays; but when frozen it was as slippery as ice. In so far as you were able to keep the sled from slewing on this razor’s back, that much you aided the dogs. At intervals you walked outside the trail, plunging with every step through the crust down to the slush underneath, while, with body bent and arm extended with all the rigidity at your command, you endeavored to hold the lurching “gee-pole” steady. Early in the evening the great darkness seemed the more dense to visions strained by the sun beating on the expanse of snow by day. With their eyes bloodshot and almost closed with snow-blindness, the St. Bernards continually stumbled and fell as they leaped from one side of the trail to the other, blindly and vainly seeking a better footing. When we rested we dug holes in the crust, and throwing ourselves prostrate, drank our fill. At first, I tried to use a telescope drinking-cup, but soon I regarded it as tawdry, inefficient, and unworthy of the occasion, and followed the more robust custom of Jack, who enjoyed to the full the pleasure of having made a convert. For one who had left White Horse with a bad cough on the heels of the measles, such indulgence would seem to be the height of indiscretion. But the cough was completely gone, no room having been left for it in the development of every muscle of my body by the handling of the “gee-pole.”

At these times we would pay our respects with some bitterness to the man who had made this strange and lonely trail, though in better moments we were willing to admit that he was a pioneer and a pathfinder. As soon as the ice would bear him, when the wind had drifted the snow here and there and lifted the slush ice up to be frozen into rifts, with his dogs and sleds he set his face toward the coast, winding in and out between these rifts, back and forth across the stream and along its banks, wherever he could find the best footing; and all who came afterward followed in his footsteps. He was making a path for himself and not for us, and it was to his interest, if not to ours, to have it as crooked as the track of a snake, and on the most crooked of rivers at that.

With the falling of the water as the winter advanced, the ice was rent with cracks. It fell away from the shores, leaving cakes on end and fissures. You must toil up one side of a pyramid to slide down the other; you held your sled up literally at an angle of forty-five degrees, and sometimes you dropped up to your hips into the fissures, for the thin covering of snow often made them invisible even in the daytime. Yet to step away from the trail was like stepping off a bad corduroy road into a swamp.

In the darkness the trained eye of the master had to trust to the halt and whine of the brave little Dude when we came to a place where the surface water was deep or the ice had given away entirely. While the master went ahead with a pole to make soundings, Fritz seized the opportunity to roll a cigarette and to say in a drawl, as he sat on his sled, resting:

“If I were in town I would call a cab.”

Jack had discarded his boots with sharp pegs--the three of us had worn boots since it became warmer--to put on moccasins. These were soon wet and quickly froze, giving him a sole of ice with which to walk on ice. In utter exhaustion, once the big fellow threw himself upon his “gee-pole” and gasped out something about not caring whether he went any farther or not. Then he added:

“Well, we’ll outlast this trail, anyway. I guess I’ll light my pipe.”

Confessedly, I was rather glad of the incident. It is good to see giants nod when you have nodded yourself. Only on the previous day, over a mile of sidling trail, leaning on my sled to keep it from upsetting, and righting it when it did upset, I had momentarily, I am ashamed to say, turned cynic and protester.

An hour before dawn a scimeter of light shot across the heavens, followed by broadswords, fans, daggers, waves, and streaks of light, dancing sometimes in playful panic and again moving in a sweep of dignity. With the aurora borealis as our candle, we passed around Freeman’s Point, built a fire for luncheon in a cove, and enjoyed keenly the fact that we were half way to Dawson.

II

ON THE TRAIL

PERSONALITIES--THE FORBEARS OF JACK AND FRITZ--GOOD CAMP MANNERS--DOG INDIVIDUALITY--DUDE--THE TEAM OF HUSKIES--WAYFARERS AT FIVE FINGERS--FORT SELKIRK AND PELLY--THE THANKSGIVING TURKEY THAT DID NOT GET TO DAWSON--A DIET OF FLAPJACKS--SUBURBS OF THE KLONDYKE CAPITAL--THE PASSING OF THE TRAIL.

As we moved on slowly at dawn to make a few more miles before camping, we saw the penalty of this savage run, which human stubbornness had insisted upon making, in the blood left on the trail by the wounded feet of our dogs. Jack at once covered them with the moccasins which he had brought for the purpose. It was plain enough that the continuance of night marches was unfeasible if we desired our brave steeds to hold out as far as Dawson. While the sled slid easier at night, the excrescences of ice were as sharp as lances, and though the mushy trail of mid-day made the sled harder to pull, it was like a cushion for a wounded foot. We compromised upon a portion of both evils by determining to start at dawn and travel as fast and as long as we could, practically. This gave only seven or eight hours on the road as against the twelve or more that we had originally planned, and in order to make the most of them we made the sacrifice for the dogs’ sake of drinking ice-water for our luncheon instead of taking the time to boil chocolate. Fritz preferring to handle the “gee-pole,” and I preferring to assist in keeping the equilibrium of the big sled by holding the handles at the rear, each settled down to this as his definite labor.

We now had more time for our camps; more time for our pipes of relaxation as we sat on our beds around Jack’s bonfires after the dogs were fed and dinner was eaten. On one of these nights we were talking of ambitions.

“As a boy, I wanted to drive a street-car,” said Fritz. “When I grew older they still called me Freddy, and I made pictures for a living. That is enough to ruin any man; and, foreseeing this, I concluded that I’d live on flapjacks and go unwashed, and be called ‘pardner,’ or Pete, or Bill, or make baking-powder dough, or anything, till I found a good placer mine. Then I’m going around the world, smoking the best brand of Turkish cigarettes, and looking at other people’s pictures.”

Jack had run away from home at the age of thirteen to the land of the Indians that had been revealed to him in a dime novel secreted in a haymow, and had earned his own living ever since. Meagre as was his early education, he had picked up a surprising amount of information from reading and from association. His eye was that of a scout; his knowledge of birds and animals that of a naturalist; his love of flowers that of a sentimentalist. He had varied his life as a cowboy by many other occupations. At one time he had been a private coachman in Omaha, just to see how it would seem.

“I was gettin’ pretty sick of the job,” he explained, “when the old lady I drove about leaned over to me one day, confidentially. ‘I’m goin’ to get you a fine livery to wear,’ she said. Then I realized how low I had fallen, and that evening I was a free man again.”

He was longer on the Government survey than in any other employment, rising until he filled a position of considerable responsibility. Possibly it was then that he learned the ethics of camp-life; more likely they were innate. He adhered to his own soap, his own towel, and his own bedding, and was more observant of the small niceties of life than are most of the men who wear the high collars that he despised. In all of his seventeen years of wandering his greatest source of sorrow was that he had never made enough money, according to his ideas, to return home, though his pay had been as high as a hundred and fifty dollars a month. He must have a few thousands, and treat the little Pennsylvania village that was his birthplace to such extravagance as it had never seen before. If he made a “stake” in the Klondyke, he had planned to drive right up to the old folks’ door with his team of huskies and a little red cart, distributing candy to the children as the procession moved forward.

The dogs, which at first seemed to me to be only so many domesticated wolves of like dispositions, had now assumed strong individualities. Dude, the leader, was worthy of the name given to him, on account of his sleek coat of thick gray fur, by the frontiersman who had instilled into him the wisdom of the trail and soldierly spirit and obedience. He was the sergeant-major among Yukon dogs, far from being a pup in years and far from having lost his vigor. When called to harness in the morning he would stretch his body, arch his neck, throw his handsome tail over his back, deliver himself of a peculiar little wolfish whine, and trot straight to his place. Though your old sergeant-major may feel a little stiff when he gets out of bed, he isn’t stiff when he has his tunic on, especially if there are any recruits about. From the moment that Jack called “Mush!” until he called “Halt!” Dude pulled steadily. All the others shirked at times and needed the crack of the whip to remind them of their duty, but the traces between Dude and the dog behind him were always taut. He had the natural dignity requisite to his position. The other dogs attempted no familiarities with him, such as eating out of his dish or trying to bowl him over in sport. After an unusually hard day’s work, before lying down to rest, he would gambol a little with them as a relaxation from the steady strain in harness, but not in a manner of equality.

During their conversations while the master was stirring the porridge he asked the sergeant-major what he thought of the prospects of reaching Dawson before the ice went out of the river, Dude replied, on the authority of Jack’s translation:

“Don’t ask me! I can make it all right. But we ain’t certain of anything as long as we have those house-dogs on the hind sled.”

Next to Dude was Fox, a nondescript, who remained in good flesh up to the last. He waddled and puffed in trying to keep up when Dude trotted. Fritz said that Fox reminded him of a fat school-girl, her cheeks daubed with molasses candy, and two braids down her back.

Behind Fox was Jack, a pup, a mischief-maker, a rascal, and an actor. All husky dogs are thieves. Some will take a pot off a stove by its handle and hide it safely out of sight in the snow while they wait for its contents to cool to their taste. Jack promised to become the most accomplished of the clan. His wolf’s nose always told him where our bacon was stored and his wolf’s eyes told him when his opportunity had arrived. Once he had the meat out of his own basin of porridge eaten, he looked up to see which dog had any left and got it before the other dog realized what was up. He would scent an Indian camp even before Dude, sometimes at a distance of two miles. In the traces he forgot to pull while he looked at the ravens flying overhead or listened for noises in the forest. Then the whip descended upon him and he would seem very crestfallen for a moment, only to be at his old tricks and to have his tail in the air in the next. The more he was punished for dereliction during the day, the greater was his affection for his master in camp. On the warmer nights when Jack slept outside of the hut for the sake of elbow room, he would put himself on guard at the head of the master’s bed of boughs and allow no other dog except Dude to come near.

Dude was partial to him. He regarded Jack as a wayward but clever pup who was sowing his wild oats, and he knew, as an old sergeant-major, that this would make the best kind of a dog in the end. Often the master took hold of the ne’er-do-well’s ears and shook him, saying: