North

With the spring break-up the men of the creeks abandoned their shafts and turned their attention to sluicing their dumps. The Northland knows no gradual merging of Winter into Spring. One day it is Winter, and the next day it is Spring—unequivocally, and undeniably Spring. Here is no half-hearted surrender of the Frost King after weeks of dawdling effort to maintain his sway. For here he fights in his own fastness—fights with unabated fury to maintain his iron grip on the frozen land—fights to the last gasp with no sign of weakening. For only at the point of utter annihilation does he yield up his sceptre to Spring.

Water from melting snows trickles down the sides of the mountains, pours from the mouths of “dry washes,” and rushes in leaping torrents over the surface of ice-locked creeks. The thick creek ice, loosened by the torrent, lets go in places and allows the surface water to get beneath it. Scattered cakes float down on the flood. More cakes, and more, until the whole surface becomes a mass of grinding, whirling cakes. Jams form at bends and upon the shallows, ice cakes up-end, leap clear of the water to be forced higher and higher by the grinding, battering impact of other cakes. Behind these jams the water rises, bursting from the creek beds in a hundred places, overflooding lowlands, cutting new channels, but rising always until at last the high-flung mass of cakes can no longer withstand its weight, and with a mighty roar the jam lets go, the whole mass of grinding, crashing cakes rides the crest of the suddenly released flood to crash into the next jam.

It was after the run-out of ice cakes that the work of sluicing began. The men of the creeks worked that spring with an air of tense expectancy. What would the “clean-up” show? Men knew that the strike was rich, the test pans had showed that. But, how rich? All day long, in rapidly lengthening days the sourdoughs toiled wet to their middles in snow water to answer that question. For the “clean-up” is the harvest of the gold diggers. And the clean-up that year was big. Work on the frozen dumps had scarcely started before men knew that the prediction that they were riding the richest strike yet made was an established fact. Rumor piled upon rumor as the dust poured into the camp. Dawson real estate increased in value by leaps and bounds. McCarty, his safe full to overflowing, was forced to decline storage room for the dust that poured in from the creeks.

Summer brought the first rush of the chechakos. Down the Yukon they came in canoes, in boats of every shape, kind and description, on rafts and on anything that by any possible act of manipulation could be made to float. They swarmed the camp and spread out into the hills. Stampedes were of daily occurrence. Every creek, and feeder, and pup was staked from rim to rim—and still they came. Although wages were high, few of that first onrush were content to work for wages. They heard the stories of gold, gazed with blazing eyes upon coarse gold in the scales, saw men shake raw gold from the mouths of sacks in payment for drinks at the bar, and straightway they headed into the hills. It was pitiful, but there was none to pity. The newcomers looked on and did likewise, and the sourdoughs looked on, and grinned. Their fortunes were assured, and they knew that in the fall laborers would be plenty.

As MacShane had predicted, however, not all of the sourdoughs sluiced great wealth from their dumps. A few there were who struck it big, counting their dust in hundreds of thousands, many counted in thousands and tens of thousands, and many more found that their dumps had yielded scarcely better than wages.

Among these latter was Old Man Gordon. The pay streak on his claim turned out to be all in the grass roots, that is, the only gravel that was really worth working lay close to the surface. His whole dump averaged better than wages, but the lean gravel thrown from the deeper half of the shaft showed that the pay streak would peter out long before bed rock was reached.

By the time Gordon discovered this fact the chechakos had already staked the country for miles around, and although he located several new claims, he failed to strike anything that showed.

For three years he stayed by his claim, getting what there was on the surface by top stripping, and only now and then sinking a shaft in hope of hitting a lucky spot on the lower level.

Then, he sold out for a few hundred dollars to a chechako and procuring a poling boat drifted northward down the great river. For another year he sniped on the Birch Creek bars, and then hearing whispers of a strike on the Koyukuk, he once more loaded his wife and child into a poling boat and, dropping down the Yukon to the mouth of the Koyukuk, spent an entire summer in ascending six hundred miles of its course that lay between the Yukon and the newfound placers.

It was gruelling and laborious work, track lining and poling the heavily loaded boat against the swift and treacherous current of the Koyukuk. And it was work that all three shared equally. For Lou, a lithe bodied, rather ungainly young miss of fifteen, who seemed somehow to be mostly legs and arms, and the legs and arms all muscle, did a man’s work every day. Nor was her mother far behind her in the matter of handling a pole or paddle, or pulling on the track line. They were in the land of the midnight sun, now, and the continuous daylight was a source of never-ending wonder to the girl. Nor was the actual visualizing of the phenomenon any the less wonderful because she could demonstrate the text book explanation for it. For, despite the fact that her life had been spent entirely in the remoter outlands, yet she had suffered not one whit in any detail of her education. For her mother had been an apt pupil of a famous old mission school on the Mackenzie, and she took a great pride in passing the education she had gained on to her little daughter.

They were a happy family—the Gordon’s. Simple and God-fearing in their belief, and simple and contented in their manner of life. For them the semi-nomadic life of the Northland was no hardship. It was merely the accepted fact of a normal existence. When the luck of the early Dawson days piled up a small surplus of dust, they accepted their good fortune with unboastful equanimity, and later when the claim petered out, and the high prices drained their little surplus, they accepted the reverse of fortune with philosophic stoicism. As their daily lives were sternly ordered by the vicissitudes of a stern land so was their religion a stern and unflexible code of laws. The much thumbed Bible that Gordon read daily was the dictated word of God, and as such was to be believed literally, word for word. The code of law set down in the Gude Book was the code of law subscribed and authorized by God. Any act not in accordance with this code was therefore sanctioned and authorized by the devil. Gordon feared God, and hated the devil. Yet, such was the austere honesty engendered by this implicit belief in his austere code, that had necessity compelled him to have had any dealing with the devil, he would punctiliously have rendered the gentleman of darkness his due, even to the uttermost farthing. For it was his pride, and the pride of his wife, and the inborn pride of his daughter that they owed no man. At least, this had been their pride up to the moment that Camillo Bill told him that MacShane had salted the gold he had won at cribbage into the gravel at the bottom of the shaft. From that moment Gordon knew, and his wife knew, and in a vague sort of way, the little Lou sensed, that no more could they say they owed no man.

Not that they considered themselves debtors to MacShane in the sum of the thirty-seven hundred dollars which he had won, and had seen fit to return. The dust was his to do with as he pleased, and the fact that he had pleased to return it to its original owner created no obligation on the part of that owner. No, it was no money debt—this debt that the house of Gordon owed to Burr MacShane. It was a moral debt.

When Gordon had denounced MacShane, as he rose from the card table and refused to continue the play, he had honestly believed that MacShane was deliberately refusing him the chance to win back, “earn back,” as Gordon would have it, the money he had risked in an honest endeavour to show that same MacShane the error of his ways. When Camillo Bill’s explanation of the sudden wealth he had found at the bottom of his shaft, had convinced him of MacShane’s honesty in his refusal to continue the game, and his subsequent generosity in the disposal of the dust, even in the face of public denunciation and insult—from that moment Gordon found himself obsessed by a sense of debt. He owed MacShane an apology. And until he should meet MacShane and offer that apology, he was MacShane’s debtor.

With the words of Camillo Bill ringing in his ears, Gordon had that evening quitted the Golden North Saloon, and had gone straight to his cabin, and had laid the whole matter before his wife and daughter, nor had he spared himself in the telling. What one Gordon owed, all Gordons owed, therefore his debt became their debt. From the cabin he had returned to the Golden North and publicly had denounced himself even more bitterly than he had, the previous evening denounced MacShane. Thus, having made all amends within his power, with a clear conscience, he bided the time when he should meet MacShane. Nor was he lacking in diligence in his endeavor to locate him. No traveler from the North crossed his path, but was asked the same question: “Have ye run acrost Burr MacShane?” And, always the answer had been, “No.”

It was the same as he floated down the Yukon, and while he worked the Birch Creek bars, always the same question, and always the same answer, and it was the same upon the Koyukuk.

Small chance for inquiry though, they found upon the Koyukuk, two prospectors at the mouth of Hog River, and another one further along, were working the bars with indifferent success. One of these, the lone prospector of the upper bar, an old man, had known MacShane years before on the Kuskokwim, but had not run across him since. At Bergman the Commercial Company’s agent had known him on the Lower Yukon. At Moses’s Village, the largest native town on the river, several of the Indians knew him, but could not, or would not, give any information as to his present whereabouts. At Bettles, the head of shallow-draught steamboat navigation the Gordons remained for three weeks, the women resting while Gordon prospected several likely looking creeks. But the creeks had all been prospected before, so the laborious up-river journey was resumed, with the new camp of Coldfoot as their objective, seventy-five miles to the northward.