This is the story of Chicken Billy and his ten-thousand-dollar potato patch. It is about a young American who became the poultry king of the Klondike, and then turned to farming with such success that he has had a field of potatoes that brought in ten thousand dollars in one year.

Chicken Billy is a representative type of the farmers of the Far North. I first met him yesterday afternoon when he called at my hotel here in Dawson. A rough-looking man of less than medium height, his face is bronzed by the hot summer sun of the Arctic and his hands are horny from handling the plough. He had brought some of his crops of hot-house vegetables into Dawson for sale, and he wore his working clothes—a flannel shirt open at the neck, blue jeans somewhat the worse for wear, and a pair of rough boots that reached to his knees.

Billy was born in Philadelphia and went to school there. He was still under twenty when he passed the examinations for appointment to the navy. He was so excited over his success that when he came into the hands of the surgeons to be tested as to his physical fitness his heart was throbbing at the rate of a hundred-odd beats to the minute, and the result was that the doctors said he had heart disease and pronounced him unfit for service.

Billy then worked at odd jobs, without great success, until one day he read in a newspaper about the gold strike in the Klondike. The article was headed “Gold at the Grass Roots,” and Billy tells me he decided to dig into the grass and take out a fortune. He had only seventeen dollars at the time, but with that he got to St. Paul and thence worked his way up to Skagway. He walked in over the Dyea trail and fought for his own with the miners of Dawson. He got some gold from his various ventures, but made no big strikes, and finally gave up mining to raise chickens. For this purpose he bought an island in the Yukon not far from the mouth of the Klondike, and built a henhouse of logs with glass windows facing the south.

For a while Billy prospered. His eggs sold for fifty cents each, and his fat chickens brought in forty or fifty dollars a dozen. He built up his flock until he had nine hundred chickens, and his fresh-laid eggs became so well known that he acquired the nickname of Chicken Billy. When he thought he was on the sure road to success, competition arose. The other poultry raisers cut prices, and chickens dropped to a dollar apiece. Billy began to lose money and so looked about for other kinds of farming. He is now raising only fancy chickens, and is devoting his energy to hogs and potatoes, with occasional crops of turnips and oats.

My visit to Billy’s farm was one of the most interesting trips I have had in the Yukon. We started up the river from Dawson in a gasoline boat about three feet wide and forty feet long. The boat had a big paddle wheel at the end attached to the engine by a long iron shaft. We had gone only two miles when this shaft broke and we had to row ourselves to the nearest island. Leaving the beach, we made our way through the potato rows from one farm to another. The first farm we visited was owned by a Swede. He had eleven acres under cultivation, half in potatoes, and half in oats. The oats are grown for hay, and some of it stood in shocks as high as my head, while that not yet cut reached halfway to my waist.

The owner told me that this oats hay often sells for sixty dollars a ton. When I asked what he expected to get for his potato crop, he fixed the price at ninety dollars a ton, saying that it might go as high as one hundred dollars. He told me of one crop from three acres that had yielded him thirty-seven hundred dollars. That was when the Guggenheim syndicate began to dredge out the gold of the Klondike. They were employing large numbers of men, and potatoes were scarce. Since then he has raised nothing but potatoes and oats. The next farm we visited produced potatoes and carrots. The woman in charge told me that the carrots paid as well as the potatoes. She said that she and her husband enjoyed their summer home on the Yukon. They live in Dawson in winter.

Leaving this farm, we found ourselves at the end of the island with the next one about a half mile upstream. This was Billy’s island, and a loud shout brought his helper after us in a canoe. Upon landing we first took a look at the hot-house, where cucumbers and tomatoes are raised for the markets of Dawson. This is one of the most interesting features of farming in the Far North. There are more than twenty-five big hothouses in Dawson itself, and they are all doing well, although Billy says his farm makes more profit than any two of the others.

Billy’s hot-house is about thirty feet wide and fifty feet long. It consists of a great pit walled with logs to the surface of the ground and above that a framework entirely covered with glass. The house is kept warm by wood fires, the ever-present gasoline tank having been made into a stove for the purpose. The plants are set out in beds upon low tables, which are connected with a network of wires. The vines of the cucumbers and tomatoes are trained on the wires. They climb up the walls and hang down from the roof. Many of the cucumbers are over ten inches in length and the largest tomatoes are bigger than the head of a baby.

Leaving the hot-house we took a look at the hogs. During the summer they are kept in enclosures out in the open and in the winter they live in the log henneries, which have been turned into pig pens. The buildings are warmed with good stoves, and the fires are kept up day and night. In the winter the pigs are fed upon potatoes and grain. Their food is cooked and served hot morning and evening. Every bit of manure is saved, Billy says, for the soil of the Yukon needs fertilizing, and this by-product is worth almost four times as much as in the United States.

I went with Billy from pen to pen to examine the stock. It is said that a man may be known by the way animals act in his presence; that if they like him he is to be trusted, if not, he is a man to be watched. If this is true, Chicken Billy should sprout angel’s wings. His hogs seemed to love him. He talked to them as though they were human, and they lay down and rolled over like pet dogs. One of his biggest boars did tricks. The babies of the hog pens were of all ages, from little red piggies as big as a kitten to lusty black Berkshires the size of a fox terrier.

Chicken Billy started in the hog business with fourteen pigs—Duroc-Jerseys, Berkshires, and Yorkshires—most of which had taken prizes at the agricultural fair at Vancouver. He bought them for sixty dollars apiece, and shipped them into the Klondike for breeding purposes.

Leaving the pigs, we went to the farmhouse, a log cabin of two rooms besides a kitchen. The earth was banked up around the outside to keep out the winter cold, and inside were great stoves. For dinner we had eggs fresh from the hens, fried with ham that fairly melted in our mouths. There were mealy potatoes as good as any that ever came out of Ireland, although they had been harvested more than a year before. The bread was made by Billy’s hired man, and there were more cucumbers than we could possibly eat.

After dinner we took a skiff and rowed from the island over to Billy’s potato farm on the mainland. This farm was on the banks of the Yukon, and the crop was raised within a stone’s throw of the river in a seventeen-acre field a half mile long. I have seen many farms, but none better cultivated and more free from weeds than this potato patch. The rows were perfectly straight and the vines reached to my knees. Billy told me he hoped to get six or seven tons to the acre, or more than three thousand bushels in all. At one hundred dollars a ton the gross receipts would be something like ten thousand dollars.

In the centre of the patch is a log cabin with a great cellar where the potatoes are stored until shipped to market. This is so well built and so insulated with air spaces that the potatoes do not freeze, even in the severest weather.

There is no doubt that potatoes can be raised in most parts of Alaska and the Yukon. When Luther Burbank was in Dawson he said that these regions may some day be among the chief potato lands of the world and that by selective breeding a potato can be developed that will mature here to perfection. Even now the country is raising nearly all that it needs, and the potato imports are decreasing. This year the crop is especially good, and the potatoes are equal in quality to any brought in from outside.

Plants live upon sunshine, and as the Yukon Territory has about one third more sunlight than the United States in the same period of summer, Nature puts on its seven-league boots and makes things grow during our nights. Growth begins in April, when the crocuses come up through the snow. Gardens are planted by the middle of May, and by the latter part of June there are vegetables to eat. The chief summer month is July, although the frosts do not come until the middle of September. After that follows Indian summer, when the hills are ablaze with gold.

The country about Dawson is virgin land covered with trees, which are usually stunted except in the river bottoms. There are meadows in the south and the southwest, and also great areas that can be used for grazing. Doctor Dawson, the man who first surveyed the territory, says that there are thirty-eight million acres that can be utilized either for crops or for grazing. He compares the Yukon with some of the inland provinces of Russia where oats, rye, barley, flax, and hemp are raised successfully.

Most of the farming is in small patches. There are gardens about the miners’ cabins where potatoes and turnips, green peas and beets, and carrots and celery are raised. Last year one man grew forty tons of turnips upon a single acre, and from another acre the same man raised five hundred and sixty-one bushels of potatoes. Another farmer brought in to Dawson a cauliflower measuring ten inches in diameter, a turnip weighing fourteen pounds, and six heads of cabbage that tipped the scales at one hundred and thirty pounds.

Already a number of homesteads have been taken up in the territory, and there are little farms here and there on the banks of the Yukon and on the islands with which it is dotted. The soil is a sandy loam made up of silt brought down by the river. The land is so thickly covered with bushes and trees that it costs one hundred dollars and upward an acre to clear it. Farm wages are high, although the demand for labour is limited, and the market for potatoes and other vegetables is confined to the small population in the mines and in Dawson. If the farms are increased by many new homesteaders there may be a glut in the market and the prices will fall.