Before arriving in Dawson a big, rugged, government official had said to me, “Go to the hotel —— and give my love to Mrs. ——. She has a red head and a rich heart. She has cheered more stricken men than any woman in the Yukon. She mushed through with her husband with the first ‘sourdoughs’ over the ice passes in ’97. She was a streak of sunshine amidst the perils and heartaches of that terrible human treck. She runs the only hotel worth going to in Dawson. You will be lucky to get into it. Give her our love, the love of all of us. Tell her you’re our friends, and maybe she will take you in.” So we were curious about this woman who had dared so much, who had done so much, who was yet mistress of the hearts of the rough, strong men of the Yukon. We went to her hotel. We asked to see her. We were shown into a cosy, well-furnished parlor. We might just as well have been in a home in Kanawha or New York. We heard some orders given in a firm, low-pitched voice, a quick step, Mrs. —— was before us. An agreeable presence, dignity, reserve, force. Tall, very tall, but so well poised and proportioned you didn’t notice it. A head broad browed and finely set on neck and shoulders. Yes, the hair was red, Venetian red with a glimmer of sunshine in it. I delivered the message straight. She received it coolly. “The house was full, but she would have place for us before night. A party would leave on the 4 P. M. stage for Dominion Creek. We should have his room. Dinner would be served at seven.” The chamber was given us in due time. Plainly furnished, but comfortable. The hotel is an immense log house, chinked with moss and plaster, and paper lined, and all the partitions between the rooms are also paper. But we are learning to talk in low voices, and, between a little French and German and Danish, H. and I manage to keep our secrets to ourselves, although of the private affairs of all the other guests we shall soon be apprised.

The dining-room is large, the whole width of the house, in the center a huge furnace stove from which radiate many large, hot pipes, where in the long winter night-time is kept up a furious fire, and a cord of wood is burned each day—and wood at $25 to $50 per cord! The guests sit at many little tables. The linen is spotless. The china good English ware. The fare is delicious. The cook is paid $300 per month, the maids $125, with board thrown in. Delicate bacon from Chicago. Fresh eggs from Iowa. Chickens from Oregon—no live chickens in Dawson. The first mushers brought in a few, but the hawks and owls, the foxes and minks and other varments devoured many of them, and the surviving ones, after waiting around a week or two for the sun to set, went cackling crazy for lack of sleep, and died of shattered nerves. Caribou steak and tenderloin of moose we have at every meal. And to-day wild duck and currant jelly. The ducks abound along the river, the currants grow wild all over the mountain slopes. And such celery and lettuce and radishes and cabbage! Potatoes, big and mealy, and turnips, and carrots, delicate and crisp, all grown in the local gardens round about. Cabbage here sells at a dollar a head and lettuce at almost as much. But you never ate the like. White and hard as celery, so quickly do they grow in the nightless days! Nowhere in all the world can you live so well as in Dawson, live if only you have the “stuff.” Live if you can pay. We follow the habit of the land and pay up in full after each meal. It is dangerous to trust the stranger for his board. It is well for us we hold fast to this custom, else we might not be able to leave the town—a regulation of the government of the city—no man may leave with bills unpaid. So long as he owes even a single dollar, he must remain! And the N. W. M. P. watch the boats, the river and the mountain passes and enforce this law.

In this dining-room, too, one sees a type not so often now met in our own great country, but inherent to English methods. The permanent Chief Clerk. The man whose career is to be forever a book-keeper or a clerk, whose highest ambition is to be a book-keeper or a clerk just all his life, and who will be trusted with the highest subordinate positions, but will never be made a partner, however much he may merit it. London is filled with such. The offices of the great British Commercial companies are full of such the world round. Men who know their business and attend to it faithfully, and whose lives are a round of precise routine. Such men sit at tables all about us. In London every morning the Times or Daily Telegraph is laid at their plates. Here the Yukon Sun or Dawson Times is laid before them just the same, and they gravely read the news of the world, while they sip their tea and munch their cold toast, just as though they were “at home.” And they walk in and out with the same stoop-shouldered shuffle gait one sees along the Strand or Bishopsgate Street within, or Mansionhouse Square.

Our hostess greets each guest as he enters, and walks about among them and says a cheery word to every one. One, on her left, has just now been reading to her from a letter which tells of his mother in England, and, I surmise, hints of a waiting sweetheart; and another, an Australian, who is just going away on a prospecting trip far up the Stuart River, is telling her what to write home for him in case he shall never come back.

The two other chief objects of interest in this dining-room, besides Mrs. ——, are—her small boy of six, who is being greatly praised this morning by all the company—he has just licked the big boy across the street, who for a week or two has tried to bully him, on account of which feat his mother is immensely proud—and a wonderful grey and white cat that sits up and begs just like a prairie dog or a gopher. When a kitten, pussy must have gone out and played with some of the millions of gophers that inhabit every hillside, and learned from them how to properly sit up. She visits each guest every morning and sits up and folds her paws across her breast and mews so plaintively that no hand can forbear giving her a tidbit.

“We were among the first. We came up from San Francisco in a waterlogged schooner through the wash of ice and winter gales to Dyea, and then mushed over Chilkoot Pass on snowshoes with the dogs. I shouldered my pack like the men. And John—John would have backed out or died of weariness, if I hadn’t told him that if he quit, I should come on in just all the same. Yes! I carried my gun—I didn’t have to use it but once or twice. Yes! We’ve done very well in Dawson, very well in the Klondike, very well!” And a big diamond glinted as though to reenforce the remark. She spoke rapidly, though easily, in crisp, curt sentences, and you felt she had indeed “mushed” in, that frightful winter, over those perilous snow and ice passes, just sure enough! As I looked into her wide-open, brown eyes, I felt that I beheld there that spirit which I have everywhere noted in the keen faces of the men and women of the Yukon, the yet living spirit of the great West, of the West of half a century ago; of Virginia and New England two hundred years ago; the spirit which drove Drake and Frobisher and Captain Cook and their daring mariners out from the little islands of our motherland to possess and dominate the earth’s mysterious and unchartered seas; the spirit which still makes the name American stand for energy and power and accomplishment in all the world; the spirit, shall I say, which gives the future of the earth to the yet virile Anglo-Saxon race.

NINTH LETTER.
MEN OF THE KLONDIKE.

Yukon Territory, Canada, September 18, 1903.

We lingered in Dawson a week waiting for the steamers “Sarah” or “Louise” or “Cudahy” to come up from the lower river, and though always “coming,” they never came. Meantime the days had begun to visibly shorten, the frosts left thicker rime on roof and road each morning. “Three weeks till the freeze-up,” men said, and we concluded that so late was now the season that we had best not chance a winter on a sand-bar in the wide and shallow lower Yukon, and a nasty time with fogs and floe ice in Behring Sea. So on Wednesday, the 16th, we again took the fine steamer “White Horse,” and are now two days up the river on our way. We will reach White Horse Sunday morning, stay there till Monday morning, when we will take the little railway to Skagway, then the ocean coaster to Seattle and the land of dimes and nickels. We regret not having been able to go down to St. Michael and Nome, and to see the whole great Yukon. My heart was quite set on it, and the expense was about the same as the route we now take, but to do so we should have had to take too great risks at this late season.

While lingering in Dawson we were able to see more of the interests of the community. One day we called on a quite notable figure, a, or rather the, Dr. Grant of St. Andrews Hospital, M. D., and of St. Andrews great church, D. D.! A Canadian Scotchman of, say, thirty-five years, who, although a man of independent fortune, chose the wild life of the border just from the very joy of buffet and conquest. He “mushed” it in 1897 over the Chilkoot Pass. He built little churches and hospitals all in one, and became the helper of thousands whom the perils and stresses of the great trek quite overcame. So now he is a power in Dawson. A large and perfectly equipped hospital, his creation, has been endowed by the government; a fine, modern church holding six hundred; a pretty manse and big mission school buildings of logs. All these standing in a green turfed enclosure of two or three acres. The church cost $60,000. He preaches Sundays to a packed house. He is chief surgeon of the hospital during the rest of the time. He gives away his salary, and the men of these mining camps, who know a real man when they see him, can’t respond too liberally to the call of the preacher-surgeon who generally saves their bodies and sometimes their souls. I found him a most interesting man—a naturalist, a scientific man, a man of the world and who independently expounds a Presbyterian cult rather of the Lyman Abbott type. He showed us all through the hospitals; many surgical accident cases; very few fevers or sickness. The church, too, we inspected; all fittings within modern and up to date; a fine organ, the freight on which alone was $5,000, 40 per cent. of its cost; a furnace that warmed the building even at 80 below zero, and a congregation of 400 to 500 people, better dressed (the night we attended) than would be a similar number in New York. There are no old clothes among the well-to-do; gold buys the latest styles and disdains the cost. There are few old clothes among the poor, for the poor are very few. So as I looked upon the congregation before Dr. Grant, I might as well have been in New York but for a pew full of red coats of “N. W. M. P.” (North West Mounted Police).

The succeeding day Dr. Grant called upon us, and escorted us through the military establishment that polices and also governs the Yukon territory as well as the whole Canadian Northwest. Barracks for 250 men, storerooms, armory, horse barn, dog kennel—150 dogs—jail, mad-house and courtrooms. The executive and judicial departments all under one hand and even the civil rule as well. Everywhere evidence of the cold and protection against it. A whole room full of splendid fur coats, parquets, with great fur hoods. Such garments as even an Esquimaux would rejoice in.

Later, we attended the fine public school, where are over 250 children in attendance; all equipment the latest and up to date; kindergarten department and grades to the top, the teachers carefully picked from eastern Canada. The positions are much sought for by reason of unusually high salaries paid. The new principal had just come from Toronto. He told us that these were the brightest, most alert children he had ever taught. Keen faces, good chins, inheriting the aggressive initiative of the parents who had dared to come so far. In the kindergarten a little colored boy sat among his white mates. In Canada, like Mexico, there is no color line.

It now takes us four days to creep up the river against the strong current and through the many shallows to White Horse. On the boat there are all sorts. I have met a number of quaint figures. One a French Canadian trapper, on his way to a winter camp on McMillan Creek of the Pelly River. He will have three or more cabins along a route where he will set his traps. About two hundred he keeps a-going, and sees as many of them as he can each day. Mink and marten and otter and beaver, as well as wolves and foxes, lynx and bears. For meat he prefers caribou to moose. For many years he trapped for the “H. B. C.” (Hudson Bay Company) over east of the Rockies. But they paid him almost nothing and there were no other buyers. Now he sells to Dawson merchants and gets $6.00 for a marten skin “all through”—the whole lot. The fur merchant in Victoria asked $30.00 for just such, and said we might buy them as low as $10.00 in the Yukon country, so he had heard. Another man to-day has sat on the wood-pile with me and told me of the great North—a man with a well-shaped face, who used language of the educated sort, yet dressed in the roughest canvas, and who is raising hay here along the Yukon which he “sells at three cents a pound in Dawson, or one cent a pound in the stack,” wild, native hay at that. And he had “mushed” and “voyaged” all through the far north. He had set out from Edmonton, he and his “pardner,” and driven to “Athabasca landing” in their farm wagon, three or four hundred miles over the “Government road;” had passed through the beautiful, wide, gently sloping valley of the Peace River, and through the well-timbered regions north of the Peace. At Athabasca landing they had sold the wagon and built a stout flatboat, and in this had floated down some three hundred miles to Athabasca Lake, Indian pilots having taken them through the more dangerous rapids. The Athabasca River enters the lake among swamps and low, willowy spits of land, where grows wild hay and ducks abound, and the “Great Slave” River flows out of it into the body of water of that name. These two rivers enter and depart near together, and the voyager escapes the dangers of a journey on the great and shallow Athabasca, where the surf is most dangerous. Three or four hundred miles of a yet greater river, with many rapids through which you are guided by Indian pilots, who live near the dangerous waters, carry you into the Great Slave Lake, the largest body of fresh water in Canada. Steamboats of the Hudson Bay Company run upon it and ply upon the inflowing rivers, and even go up and down the McKenzie to Herschell Island at its mouth, and where the “N. W. M. P.” have a post, chiefly to protect the natives from the whalers who gather there to trade and smuggle in dutiable goods. The McKenzie is greater than the Yukon, is wider and much deeper and carries a much greater volume of water. Great Slave Lake, while shallow and flat toward the eastern end, is deep and bounded by great cliffs and rocks on the west. Storms rage upon it, and at all times the voyagers count it dangerous water. Both it and Athabasca are full of fish, so, too, the adjacent rivers and the McKenzie. Floating down the McKenzie, passing the mouth of the Nelson River, they came at last to the Liard, and up this they canoed to within half a mile of the waters of the Pelly, down which they floated to the Yukon. The French trapper had also “come in” by this route. “Two seasons it takes,” he said, “an easy trip,” and you can winter quite comfortably in the mountains. East of the mountains there is much big game, “plenta big game;” musk ox are there, and moose and caribou. But the Indians and wolves kill too many of them. The Indians catch the caribou on the ice and kill them for their tongues. “Smoked caribou tongue mighta nice.” They leave the carcasses where they fall, and then come the foxes for the feast. “Thousands of fox, red fox, silver fox, black fox, white fox. Mr. Fox he eat caribou, he forget Indian—Indian set the trap and fox he caught. The wolf, too, he creep up upon the caribou, even upon the moose when he alone, when he lying down; the wolf he bites the hamstring. He kill many moose. That a grand country for to trap, but the Hudson Bay Company it pay nothing for the fur. A sack of flour I see them give one Indian for a black fox. Now since Hudson Bay lose his exclusive right, no man trade with him or sell him fur except he must for food.”

We have just passed a little log cabin beneath great firs and amidst a cluster of golden aspen. Its door and solitary window are wide open. No one occupies it, or ever will. Wild things may live in it, but not man. Near the cabin, where the Yukon makes a great sweeping bend, and the swift water purls round into bubbling eddies, a narrow trail cut from the river bank leads up among the trees. The dweller in the cabin could see far up the great river; he could espy the raft or skiff or barge descending and mark its occupants; then he used to take his trusty rifle, step across to the opening in the trees at the point, and pick off his victims. Sometimes their bodies fell into the deep, cold, swift-running waters. The wolves and foxes picked their bones on the bars below. Sometimes he captured the body as well as the outfit, and sunk and buried them at leisure. The pictures of the three last men he murdered hang in the office of the chief of the Northwest Mounted Police, at Dawson, beside his own. It took three years to gather the complete chain of circumstantial evidence, but at last they hanged him, two years ago. In the beginning there were many other crimes quite as atrocious committed in this vast region of the unknown north, but soon the efficiency and systematic vigilance of the Northwest Mounted Police broke up forever the bandits and thugs who had crowded in here from all the earth, and Uncle Sam’s dominion in particular. Many were hanged, many sent up for long terms, many run out. Life sentences were common for robbery. To-day the Yukon country is more free from crime than West Virginia, and Dawson more orderly than Charleston.

TENTH LETTER.
DOG LORE OF THE NORTH.

White Horse, Sunday, September 20, 1903.

We arrived about nine o’clock this morning. The voyage up the Yukon from Dawson has taken us since Wednesday at 2:30, when we cast off and stemmed the swift waters—twenty-four hours longer than going down. During the week of our stay at Dawson the days grew perceptibly shorter and the nights colder. There is no autumn in this land. Two weeks ago the foliage had just begun to turn; a week ago the aspens and birches were showing a golden yellow, but the willows and alders were yet green. Now every leaf is saffron and golden—gamboge—and red. In a week or more they will have mostly fallen. As yet the waters of the Yukon and affluent rivers show no ice. In three weeks they are expected to be frozen stiff, and so remain until the ice goes out next June. The seasons of this land are said to be “Winter and June, July and August.” To me it seems inconceivable that the Arctic frosts should descend so precipitately. But on every hand there is evident preparation for the cold, the profound cold. Double windows and doors are being fastened on. Immense piles of sawed and cut firewood are being stored close at hand. Sleighs and especially sledges are being painted and put in order; the dogs which have run wild, and mostly foraged for themselves during the summer, are being discovered, captured and led off by strings and straps and wires about their necks. Men are buying new dogs, and the holiday of dogkind is evidently close at an end. Women are already wearing some of their furs. Ice half to a full inch forms every night, and yesterday we passed through our first snow storm, and all the mountains round about, and even the higher hills, are to-day glistening in mantles of new, fresh, soft-looking snow. The steamers of the White Pass and Yukon Railway Company will be laid up in three weeks now, they tell us, and already the sleighs and teams for the overland stage route are being gathered, the stage houses at twenty-four-mile intervals being set in order, and the “Government road” being prepared afresh for the transmission of mails and passengers.

As I sat in the forward cabin the other night watching the motley crowd we were taking “out,” two bright young fellows, who turned out to be “Government dog-drivers” going to the post here to report for winter duty, fell into animated discussion of their business, and told me much dog lore. The big, well-furred, long-legged “Labrador Huskies” are the most powerful as well as fiercest. A load of 150 pounds per dog is the usual burden, and seven to nine dogs attached each by a separate trace—the Labrador harness is used with them, so the dogs spread out fan-shaped from the sledge and do not interfere with each other. The great care of the driver is to maintain discipline, keep the dogs from shirking, from tangling up, and from attacking himself or each other. He carries a club and a seal-hide whip, and uses each unmercifully. If they think you afraid, the dogs will attack you instantly, and would easily kill you. And they incessantly attack each other, and the whole pack will always pounce on the under dog so as to surely be in at a killing, just for the fun of it, ripping up the unfortunate and lapping his blood eagerly, though they rarely eat him. And as these dogs are worth anywhere from $100 up, the driver has much ado to prevent the self-destruction of his team. And to club them till you stun them is the only way to stop their quarrels. Then, too, the dogs are clever and delight to spill the driver and gallop away from him, when he can rarely catch them until they draw up at the next post house, and it may be ten or twelve or thirty miles to that, unless it be that they get tangled among the trees or brush, when the driver will find them fast asleep, curled up in the snow, where each burrows out a cozy bed. The Malamutes, or native Indian dog, usually half wolf, are driven and harnessed differently—all in a line—and one before the other. They are shorter haired, faster, and infinitely meaner than the long-haired Huskie (of which sort the Labrador dogs are). Their delight is to get into a fight and become tangled, and the only way out is to club them into insensibility, and cut the leather harness, or they will cut the seal-hide thongs themselves at a single bite if they are quite sure your long plaited whip will not crack them before they can do it. These Malamutes are the usual dogs driven in this country, for few there are to afford or know how to handle the more powerful Labrador Huskie. And the Malamute is the king of all thieves. He will pull the leather boots off your feet while you sleep and eat them for a midnight supper; he delights to eat up his seal-hide harness; he has learned to open a wooden box and will devour canned food, opening any tin can made, with his sharp fangs, quicker than a steel can-opener. Canned tomatoes, fruit, vegetables, sardines, anything that man may put in, he will deftly take out. Even the tarpaulins and leather coverings of the goods he may be pulling, he will rip to pieces, and he will devour the load unless watched with incessant vigilance night and day. Yet, with all their wolfish greed and manners, these dogs perform astonishing feats of endurance, and never in all their lives receive a kindly word. “If you treat them kindly, they think you are afraid, and will at once attack you,” the driver said; “the only way to govern them is through fear.” Once a day only are they fed on raw fish, and while the Malamute prefers to pilfer and steal around the camp, the Huskie will go and fish for himself when off duty, if given the chance. Just like the bears and lynx of the salmon-running streams, he will stand along the shore and seize the fish that is shoved too far upon the shallows. Seventy miles a day is the rule with the Indians and their dog teams, and the white man does almost as much. Forty miles is it from here to Caribou Crossing, and the Northwest Mounted Police, with their Labrador teams, take the mails when the trains are snowbound and cover the distance in four to five hours. Great going this must be!

And then the conversation turned to the great cold of this far north land, when during the long nights the sun only shows for an hour or two above the horizon.

When the thermometer falls below fifty degrees (Fahr.), then are the horses put away, what few there may be, and the dogs transport the freight and mails along the Government road between White Horse and Dawson, as well as from Dawson to the mining camps to which the stage lines usually run. Indeed, throughout all of this north land, with the coming of the snow, the dogs are harnessed to the sledges and become the constant traveling companions of man.

The air is dry in all this great interior basin of the continent, and, consequently, the great cold is not so keenly felt as in the damper airs nearer to the sea. The dogs can travel in all weathers which man can stand, and even when it becomes so cold that men dare not move. The lowest Government record of the thermometer yet obtained at Dawson City is eighty-three degrees below zero. These great falls of temperature only occasionally occur, but when the thermometer comes down to minus sixty degrees, then men stay fast indoors, and only venture out as the necessity demands; then the usually clear atmosphere becomes filled with a misty fog, often so thick that it is difficult to see a hundred yards away.

When traveling with a dog team, or, indeed, when “mushing” upon snow-shoes across streams and forests, men go rather lightly clad, discarding furs, and ordinarily wearing only thick clothes, with the long canvas parquet as protection against the wind rather than against the temperature; then motion becomes a necessity, and to tarry means to freeze. The danger of the traveler going by himself is that the frost may affect his eyesight, freezing the eyelids together, perhaps dazing his sight, unless snow-glasses are worn. And the ice forms in the nostrils so rapidly, as well as about the mouth, and upon the mustache and beard, that it is a constant effort to keep the face free from accumulating ice. In small parties, however, men travel long distances, watching each other as well as themselves to insure escape from the ravages of the frost. When the journey is long and the toil has become severe, the Arctic drowsiness is another of the enemies which must be prevented from overcoming the traveler, and the methods are often cruel which friends must exercise in order to prevent their companions from falling asleep.

During this long period of Arctic winter and Arctic night, there seems to be no great cessation in the struggle for gold; the diggings in the Klondike and remoter regions retain their companies of men toiling to find the gold. The frozen gravels are blasted out and piled up to be thawed the next summer by the heat of the sun and washed with the flowing waters.

While the Arctic night prevails for twenty-two or twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, yet so brilliant are the stars and so refulgent are the heavens with the lightening of the aurora borealis, that men work and travel and carry on the usual occupations, little hindered by the absence of the sun. Sometimes, in the very coldest days, is beheld the curious phenomenon of several suns appearing above the horizon, and these are called the “sun dogs,” the sun itself being seemingly surrounded by lesser ones. I was fortunate enough to obtain a fine photograph taken on one of these days, which I am able to send you.

The freezing of the Yukon comes on very suddenly, the great river often becoming solid in a night. The curious thing of these northern lakes and rivers is, that the ice forms first upon the bottom, and, rising, fills the water with floating masses and ice particles, which then become congealed almost immediately.

Early in last October our steamer “White Horse,” on which we are now traveling, became permanently frozen in when within one hundred miles of Dawson City, the apparently clear river freezing so quickly that the boat became fast for the winter, and the passengers were compelled to “mush” their way, as best they might, across the yet snowless country, a terrible and trying experience in the gathering cold.

You may be in a row-boat or a canoe upon ice-free waters, and, as you paddle, you may notice bubbles and particles of ice coming to the surface. Great, then, is the danger. The bottom has begun to freeze. You may be frozen in before you reach the shore in ice yet too thin to walk upon or permit escape.

For the greater part of the winter season the frozen streams become the natural highways of the traveler, and the dog teams usually prefer the snow-covered ice rather than attempt to go over the rougher surface of the land.

Another curious thing, friends tell me, affects them in this winter night-time, and that is the disposition of men to hibernate. Fifteen and sixteen hours of sleep are commonly required, while in the nightless summer-time three and four and five hours satisfy all the demands nature seems to make—thus the long sleeps of winter compensate for the lack of rest taken during the summer-time.

And yet these hardy men of the north tell me that they enjoy the winter, and that they perform their toils with deliberation and ease, and take full advantage of the long sleeping periods.

The Yukon freezes up about the 10th of October, the snow shortly follows, and there is no melting of the ice until early June. This year the ice went out from the river at Dawson upon June 10th; thus, there are seven to eight months of snow and ice-bound winter in this Arctic land.

ELEVENTH LETTER.
HOW THE GOVERNMENT SEARCHES FOR GOLD.

Steamer Dolphin, September 22, 1903.

We left White Horse by the little narrow-gauge railway, White Pass & Yukon Railway, at 9:30—two passenger cars, one smoker, mail and express and baggage hung on behind a dozen freight cars. Our steamer brought up about one hundred passengers from Dawson and down-river points, and together with what got on board at White Horse, the train was packed. Many red-coated Northwest Mounted Police also boarded the train, and just as it pulled out, a strapping big, strong-chinned, muscular woman came in the rear door and sat down. She was elegantly gowned, dark, heavy serge, white shirt waist, embroidered cloth jacket, and much gold jewelry, high plumed hat. Presently a big man called out that all the men must go forward into the next car, and the big woman announced that she would proceed to examine all the ladies for gold dust. The paternal government of the Yukon Territory exacts a tax of 2½ per cent. of all gold found, and examines all persons going out of the territory, and confiscates all dust found on the person. Women are said to be the most inveterate smugglers, and the big woman goes through them most unmercifully. She bade the lady next her to stand up and then proceeded to feel her from stockings to chemise top, and did the same by the others. Those who wore corsets had a tough time, and some had to undo their hair. As the first victim stood up and was unbuttoned and felt over, she was greeted with an audible smile by the other ladies, but silence fell as the next victim was taken in hand. Meanwhile, during this pleasant diversion, a big red-coat stood with his back to each door, and the men were being similarly though not so ruthlessly gone through in the other cars. This trip no dust was found, I believe, but last week one woman was relieved of $1,800 sewed into the margin of her skirts and tucked deep into the recesses of her bosom. Stockings and bosom are the two chief feminine caches for gold, and when a culprit is thus discovered and relieved, many are the protestations and unavailing the clamors raised. During the past year I am told that the examiners have seized in these searches some $60,000 in dust, so I presume the happy custom will for some time continue. Detectives are kept in Dawson, travel on the boats, and so watch and scrutinize every traveler that by the time the final round-up and search takes place, the probable smugglers are all pretty well spotted. As each is examined, his or her name is checked off in a little book.

All along the advance of winter was apparent. The green of a fortnight ago had turned into the universal golden yellow, and the fresh snow lay in more extended covering upon all the mountain summits and even far down their slopes. So it is in this far north, each day the snow creeps down and down until it has caught and covered all the valleys as well as hills.

At Caribou we met old Bishop Bompas and his good little wife, who, with a big cane, came all the way into the car to see us and say good-by. A charming couple who have given their lives doing a noble work.

Lake Bennett was like a mirror, and Lake Lindemann above it, too, seemed all the greener in contrast to the encroaching snows. We were at the White Pass Summit by 3 P. M., and then for an hour came down the 3,200 feet of four per cent. grade, the twenty miles to Skagway. The increase of snows on all the mountains seemed to bring out more saliently than ever the sharp, jagged granite rock masses. It even seemed to us that we were traversing a wilder, bolder, harsher land than when three weeks ago we entered it. And the views and vistas down into the warmer valleys we were plunging into were at times magnificent. Snow around and above us, increasing greenness of foliage below us, and beyond recurring glimpses of the Lynn fiord, with Skagway nestling at its head. In every affluent valley a glacier and a roaring torrent.

One of the newest and best boats in the trade, “The Dolphin,” was awaiting us. Our stateroom was already wired for and secured. We took our last Alaska meal at the “Pack Train Restaurant,” where we snacked sumptuously on roast beef, baked potatoes and coffee for seventy cents (in Dawson it would have been an easy $3.00), and walked down the mile-long pier to the boat. The tides are some twenty feet here, and the sandy bars of Skagway require long piers to permit the ships to land when the tides are out.

We cast off about 10 P. M., with the tide almost at its height, and only awoke to-day just as we were steaming out of Juneau. Now we are approaching the beautiful and dangerous Wrangel Narrows, and see everywhere above us the fresh snows of the fortnight’s making.

WILD SEAS AMONG THE FJORDS.

Wednesday, September 23rd.

It is the middle of the afternoon and we are just safely through the—to-day—tempestuous passage of “Dixon’s Entrance,” the thirty-three-mile break in the coast’s protecting chain of islands and the outlet for Port Simpson to the open sea. Yesterday we passed through the dangerous twenty miles of the Wrangel Narrows just before dark, and only the swift swirls of the fighting tides endangered us; they fall and rise seventeen feet in a few hours, and the waters entering the tortuous channels from each end meet in eddying struggle somewhere near the upper end. The boats try and pass through just before the flood tide or a little after it, or else tie up and wait for the high water. If we had been an hour later, we should have had to lie by for fifteen hours, the captain said. As we turned in from Frederick Sound, between two low-lying islands all densely wooded with impenetrable forests of fir, the waters were running out against us almost in fury, but in a mile or two they were flowing with us just as swiftly.

To-day we saw a good many ducks, chiefly mallard and teal, and small divers, and my first cormorant, black, long-necked and circling near us with much swifter flight than the gull. In the narrows we started a great blue heron and one or two smaller bitterns.

From the narrows we passed into Sumner Strait, and then turning to the right and avoiding Wrangel Bay and Fort Wrangel, where we stopped going up, passed into the great Clarence Strait that leads up direct from the sea. A sound or fiord one hundred miles or more long, ten or fifteen miles wide.

The day had been clear, but, before passing through the narrows, clouds had gathered, and a sort of fierce Scotch mist had blown our rain-coats wet. On coming out into wider waters, the storm had become a gale. The wildest night we have had since twelve months ago in the tempest of the year upon the Gulf of Finland. To-day, until now, the waters have been too boisterous to write. All down Clarence Strait, until we turned into Revilla and Gigedo Channels—named for and by the Spanish discoverers—and across the thirty-three miles of Dixon’s Entrance, we have shuttlecocked about at the mercy of the gale and in the teeth of the running sea. The guests at table have been few, but now we are snug behind Porcher Island and passing into the smooth waters of Greenville Channel, so I am able to write again. The Swedish captain says the storm is our equinoctial, and that may be, and now that the sun is out and the blue sky appearing, we shall soon forget the stress, although to-night, as we pass from Fitzhugh Sound into Queen Charlotte Sound, we shall have a taste of the Pacific swell again, and probably yet have some thick weather in the Gulf of Georgia. Considering the lateness of the season, we are, all in all, satisfied that we rightly gave up the St. Michaels trip, though it has sorely disappointed us not to have seen the entire two thousand miles of the mighty Yukon.

Already we notice the moderation of the temperature and the greater altitude of the sun, for we are quite one thousand miles south of Dawson, while the air has lost its quickening, exhilarating, tonic quality.

We are becoming right well acquainted with our sundry shipmates, particularly those who have “come out” from the Yukon with us. Among them we have found out another interesting man. Across the table from us on the steamer “White Horse” sat a shock-headed man of about thirty years, tall, very tall, but muscularly built, with a strong, square jaw and firm, blue eyes. A fellow to have his own way; a bad man in a mix-up. A flannel shirt, no collar, rough clothes. Possibly a gentleman, perhaps a boss tough. We find him a graduate of the University of Michigan. He has lived in Mexico, and now for five straight years has been “mushing it,” and prospecting in the far north; has tramped almost to the Arctic Sea, into the water-shed of the Mackenzie, and bossed fifty to one hundred men at the Klondike and Dominion diggings. His camera has always been his companion, and for an hour yesterday he sat in our cabin and read to us from the MSS. some of the verse and poems with which his valise is stacked. Some of the things are charming and some will bring the tears. This far north land of gold and frost has as yet sent out no poet to depict its hopes, its perils, its wrecks. It may be that he is the man. His name is Luther F. Campbell, and you may watch for the name. And so we meet all sorts.

Friday, September 25th.

Yesterday was a “nasty” day, as was the day before. Early, 2 or 3 A. M., we passed through the ugly waters of Millbank Sound, where the sweeping surge of the foam-capped Pacific smashes full force against the rock-bound coast. We were tossed about greatly in our little 400-ton boat, until at last, passing a projecting headland, we were instantly in dead quiet water and behind islands once more. About 10 A. M. we came again into the angry Pacific, and for fifty miles—four hours—were tossed upon the heavy sea, Queen Charlotte Sound. The equinoctial gales have had a wild time on the Pacific, and the gigantic swell of that ocean buffeted our little boat about like a toy. But she is a fine “sea boat,” and sat trim as a duck, rolling but little, nor taking much water. Toward middle afternoon we were in quiet waters again, and by nightfall at the dangerous Seymour Narrows, where Vancouver Island leans up against the continent, or has cracked off from it, and a very narrow channel separates the two. Here the tides—twelve feet—rise, rush and eddy, meet and whirl, and only at flood stage do boats try to pass through.

In 1875, a U. S. man-of-war tried to pass through when the tides were low, and, caught in the swirling maelstrom, sank in one hundred fathoms of water. In 1883, a coastwise steamer ventured at improper moment to make the passage, was caught in the mad currents, and was engulfed with nearly all on board; half a dozen men alone were saved. Hence the captains are now very careful in making the passage, and so we lay at anchor—or lay to—from seven to twelve, midnight, waiting for the tide.

To-day we are spinning down the Gulf of Georgia and Puget Sound, the wind direct astern, and have already left Vancouver and Victoria to the north. The sun is clear and soft, not hard and brilliant as in Dawson. Whales are blowing at play about the ship, gulls skimming the air in multitudes. All our company are over their seasickness and now mostly on deck. We are repacking our bags and the steamer trunk, taking off heavy winter flannels and outer wear, and preparing to land at Seattle clad again in semi-summer clothes.

TWELFTH LETTER.
SEATTLE, THE FUTURE MISTRESS OF THE TRADE AND COMMERCE OF THE NORTH.

The Portland Hotel,
Portland, Oregon, October 3, 1903. }

Just one week ago to-day the steamer “Dolphin” landed us safely at the pier at Seattle. The sail on Puget Sound, a body of deep water open for one hundred miles to the ocean, was delightful. We passed many vessels, one a great four-masted barque nearing its port after six or eight months’ voyage round the Horn from Liverpool.

Seattle lies upon a semi-circle of steep hills, curving round the deep waters of the Sound like a new moon. An ideal site for a city and for a mighty seaport, which some day it will be. Many big ships by the extensive piers and warehouses. The largest ships may come right alongside the wharves, even those drawing forty feet. The tracks of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific Railways bring the cars along the ship’s side, and there load and unload. All this we noted as our boat warped in to her berth. A great crowd awaited us. Many of our passengers were coming home from the far north after two and three years’ absence. Friends and families were there to greet them; hotel runners and boarding-house hawkers; citizens, too, of the half world who live by pillage of their fellowmen were there, and police and plain clothes men of the detective service were there, all alike ready to greet the returning Klondiker with his greater or lesser poke of gold. It was exciting to look down upon them and watch their own excitement and emotion as they espied the home-comers upon the decks. We, as well, had all sorts of people among our passengers. Mostly the fortunate gold-finders who had made enough from the diggings to “come out” for the winter, and some, even to stay “out” for good. A young couple stood near me; they were on their wedding trip; they would spend the winter in balmy Los Angeles and then return to the far north in the spring. An old man stood leaning on the rail. Deep lines marked his face, on which was yet stamped contentment. He had been “in” to see his son who had struck it rich on Dominion Creek, who had already put “a hundred thousand in the bank,” he said. He had with him a magnificent great, black Malamute, “leader of my boy’s team and who once saved him from death. The dog cost us a hundred dollars. I am taking him to Victoria. I couldn’t let him go. His life shall be easy now,” the old man added. Just then I noted a tall man in quiet gray down on the dock looking intently at two men who stood by one another a little to my left. They seemed to feel his glance, spoke together and moved uneasily away. They were a pair of “bad eggs” who had been warned out of the Yukon by the Mounted Police, and who were evidently expected in Seattle. One, who wore a green vest and nugget chain, played the gentleman. The other, who worked with him, did the heavy work and had an ugly record. He was roughly dressed and wore a blue flannel shirt and a cap. A bull neck, face covered with dense-growing, close-cropped red beard, shifty gray eyes. He had been suspected of several murders and many hold-ups. Detectives frequently travel on these boats, keeping watch upon the “bad men” who are sent out of the north. We probably had a few on board. In the captain’s cabin, close to our own, were piled up more than half a million dollars in gold bars; the passengers, most of them, carried dust. But the pair, and any pals they may have had along, had kept very quiet. They were spotted at the start. They knew it. Now they were spotted again, and this, too, they discerned.

Seattle is the first homing port for all that army of thugs and scalawags who seek a new land like the far north, and who, when there discovered, are summarily hurried back again. It is said to be the “nearest hell” of any city on the coast. The hungry horde of vampire parasites would make a fat living from the pillage of the returned goldseeker if it were not for the vigilance of the police. A strong effort is now being made by the authorities of Seattle to stamp out this criminal class and drive it from the city.

Our impression, as we crowded our way through the pressing throngs upon the pier and pushed on up into the city, was that we were in another Chicago. Tall buildings, wide streets, fine shops, great motion of the crowds upon the streets, many electric tram-cars running at brief intervals, and all crowded.

On our trip up the Yukon we had made the pleasant acquaintance of a Mr. S—— and a Mr. M—— of Columbus, O. Keen and agreeable men who had been spending a month in Dawson puncturing a gold swindle into which an effort had been made to lead them and their friends by unscrupulous alleged bonanza kings. They had cleverly nipped the attempt in the bud, and were now returning, well satisfied with their achievements. We had become fast comrades and resolved to keep together yet another few days. We found our way to the Grand Rainier Hotel, one of Seattle’s best, and now kept by the old host of the Gibson House in Cincinnati.

Our favorable impressions of Seattle were confirmed that night when our friends introduced us to the chief glory of Puget Sound, the monstrous and delicious crab, a crab as big as a dinner plate and more delicate than the most luscious lobster you ever ate. They boil him, cool him, crack him and serve him with mayonnaise dressing. You eat him, and continue to eat him as long as Providence gives you power, and when you have cracked the last shell and sucked the last claw, and finally desist, you contentedly comprehend that your palate has reflected to your brain all the gustatory sensations of a Delmonico banquet, with a Sousa band concert thrown in.

Saturday, after we had spent the morning in seeing the shops and wandering along the fine streets of the choicer residence section of the city, we all took the tourist electric car, which, at 2 P. M., sets out and tours the town with a guide who, through a megaphone, explains the sights.

Seattle now claims one hundred and twenty to one hundred and thirty thousand inhabitants, and probably has almost that number. A distinctly new city, yet growing marvelously, and already possessing many great buildings of which a much larger town might well boast.

Toward evening, at 4:30 P. M., we took the through electric flyer, and sped across a country of many truck gardens and apple orchards, some thirty-five miles to Tacoma, that distance farther up the Sound, and once the rival of Seattle. A city more spread out and less well built, the creation of the promoters of the Northern Pacific Railway Co., in the palmy days of Henry Villard. Tacoma, too, possesses superb docking facilities and a good two miles of huge warehouses and monstrous wharves, where, also, great ships are constantly loaded and unloaded for the Orient, South Africa and all the world, but whence few or no ships depart for the Northern Continent of Alaska. Tacoma seemed less alive and alert than Seattle, fewer people on the streets, smaller shops and business blocks, and the people moving more leisurely along the thoroughfares. In Seattle the houses mostly fresh painted; in Tacoma the houses looking dingy and as though not painted now for many a month. Seattle is noted for the public spirit of its citizens; they work and pull together for the common weal, but Tacoma is so dominated by the railway influence which created it, that the people are lacking in the vigor of the rival town.

As our electric train came to a standstill, W—— rode up on his bicycle, and he was surely glad to see us. Messrs. S—— and M—— had come over with us for the ride, and we all five set right off to find our dinner. “Cracked Crabs” was again the word, and W—— added, “Puget Sound oysters broiled on toast.” A delicate little oyster about the size of one’s finger nail, and most savory. When our party left the table, we were as contented a group as ever had dined.

We lodged with W——, and were delightfully cared for—a large, sunny room overlooking such a garden of roses and green turf as I never before have seen. Roses as big as peonies and grass as green and thick as the velvet turf of the Oxford “quads.” Our host gave us each morning a dainty breakfast, and then we foraged for ourselves during the day.

In the morning of Sunday we attended the Congregational Church, and in the afternoon rode on the electric car to the park, a few miles—two or three—out of the city, along the shores of one of the fine bays that indent the Sound. Not so fine a park as Vancouver’s, but one that some day will probably rank among the more beautiful ones of our American cities.

On Monday we wandered about the town, visited its museum, saw the fine public buildings, and spent several hours in going over and through the most extensive sawmill plant on the coast—“in the world,” they say. The big business originally instituted by one of the early pioneers, is now managed by his four sons, all graduates of Yale. We met the elder of them in blue overalls and slouch hat, all mill dust. A keen, intelligent face. He works with his men and keeps the details of the business well in hand. How different, I thought, from the English manner of doing things. These men are rich, millionaires; college bred, they work with their men. In England they tell you that no man who would give his son a business career would think of sending him to college. Oxford or Cambridge would there unfit him for business life. He would come out merely a “gentleman,” which there means a man who does nothing, who earns no bread, but who lives forever a parasite on the toil of others.

In these great mills the monstrous fir and pine logs of Washington are sawed up, cut, planed, and loaded directly into ships for all the markets of the earth—Europe, South Africa, Australia, China, South America and New York, wherever these splendid woods are in demand. The forests of Washington and British Columbia are said to possess the finest timber in the world, and all the world seems to be now seeking to have of it.

Many fishing-boats were in the harbor and along the water-side, and many of the big sixty-foot canoes, dug out of a single immense log, paddled by Indians, were passing up and down the bay. Throughout the States of Washington and Oregon the Indians are the chief reliance of the hop growers for the picking of their crops, and every summer’s-end the various tribes along the coast gather to the work. They come from everywhere—from Vancouver’s Island, from British Columbia and even from Alaska. They voyage down the coast in their immense sea canoes, stop at the ports, or ascend the rivers, pushing as far as water will carry them. They bring the children and the old folks with them, they buy or hire horses, and they push hundreds of miles inland to the hop fields, where a merry holiday is made of the gathering of the hops. They were now returning, and many were passing through Tacoma. They were here outfitting, and spending their newly earned wages in buying all those useful and useless things an Indian wants—gay shawls and big ear-rings for the squaws, gaudy blankets, knives and guns for the bucks; even toys for the papooses. On the side the women were also selling baskets made in their seasons of leisure. In the shelter of the long pier one afternoon we came upon a group of several family canoes preparing for the long voyage to the north. A number of pale-face women were bargaining for baskets; one had just bought a toy canoe from an anxious mother, and I was fortunate in buying another. Near by a man was carefully cutting out the figures of a Totem pole. They were evidently from Alaska. Alaska and a thousand miles or more of sea lay between them and home. They looked like a group of Japanese and spoke in gutteral throat tones. The Indians we lately met at Yakima were wholly different, being redskins of the interior, not the light yellow of the coast. When in Caribou Crossing, old Bishop Bompas, who has spent more than forty years among the Indians of the north, told me that in his view the coast Indians had originally come over from North Asia and were allied to the Mongolian races, while he believed that the red-tinged, eagle-nosed Indian of the interior was of Malay origin and of a race altogether distinct. Be this as it may, the coast Indian, according to our preconceived ideas, is no Indian at all, but rather a bastard Jap. He fishes and hunts and works, and his labor is an important factor in solving the agricultural problems of the Pacific Coast. The enormous and profitable hop crops could not be gathered without him.

We had hoped while in Tacoma to have had the chance of visiting some of the primeval forest regions of the State, where the largest trees are yet in undisturbed growth, but the opportunity of taking advantage of a railway excursion to Yakima, there to see the State Fair, was too good to be lost, and we accordingly made that journey instead. Mr. S—— had joined us in Tacoma, so we four bought excursion tickets, and climbed into one of eleven packed passenger coaches of a Northern Pacific special, and made the trip. Eight hours of it, due east and southeast, across the snow-capped Cascade Mountains and down into the dry, arid Yakima River basin to the city—big village—of North Yakima. An arid valley, but yet green as an Irish hedge, a curious sight. The hills all round sere and brown, tufted and patched with dry buffalo grass and sage brush; the flat bottom lands mostly an emerald green; all this by irrigation, the first real irrigation I had yet seen. The river is robbed of its abundant waters, which are carried by innumerable ditches, and then again divided and sub-divided, until the whole level expanse of wide valley is soaked and drenched and converted into a smiling garden. Here and there a piece of land, unwatered, stretched brown and arid between the green.

North Yakima, named from the Indian tribe that still dwells hard by upon its reservation, is a thriving little place, the greenest lawns of the most velvety turf, roses and flowers abounding where the water comes. Trees shading its streets, which are bounded on each side by flowing gutters, and the driest, dustiest, vacant lots on earth. The fair is the annual State show of horses, cattle, sheep and fruits, and these we were glad to see. All fine, very fine, and such apples as I never before set eyes on. Thousands of boxes of Washington apples are now shipped to Chicago, and even to New York, so superior is their size and flavor.

Returning, we had an instance of the insolence of these great land grant fed railway corporations. While the Northern Pacific had advertised an excursion to Yakima and hauled eleven carloads of men, women and children to the fair, it yet made no extra provision to take them back, so that when next day several hundred were at the station in order to board the train for home, only a few dozen could get in, and the very many saw with dismay the train pull away without them! We had got into a sleeper on the rear, fortunately, and thus escaped another twelve hours in the overcrowded little town.

Yesterday we boarded the night express for Portland. The country between this city and Tacoma is said to be rough and unsettled, and not fit for even lumbering or present cultivation, so we did not regret the travel at night. On the other hand, we saw much fine forest in crossing the Cascade Mountains, although the finest timber in the State is, I am told, over in that northwestern peninsula on the slopes of the Olympia Mountains, between Puget Sound and the Pacific. There the trees grow big, very big, and thence come the more gigantic of the logs, fifty and one hundred feet long and ten to twenty-five feet in diameter at the butt.