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Ebook has 442 lines and 37129 words, and 9 pages

"Why, give it all to mother, of course. She'll use it for me and my sister. I'm going to school as soon as I get home. Mother works in a store, but I guess this money'll give her a rest. She needs it."

A word more about little Joe before I leave him. He made good at Nome in September, and sailed for Seattle the last of October. The last I heard of him, four or five years later, he was making his way through the University of Washington, and still managing newspaper routes in Seattle. His is a case of exceptional good fortune; and yet I know of a number of boys who have made remarkable sums selling papers in Alaska. It is a boy's land of opportunity as well as a man's.

Our voyage to St. Michael was a tedious one--down the long stretches of the Lower Yukon, worming through the sand-bars and muddy shallows of the interminable delta, waiting through weary hours for tide and wind to be just right before venturing out on Bering Sea. Hurrying at last under full steam through the choppy sea, with the waves washing the lower deck and producing panic, uproar and swearing among the men packed upon it--we came to the harbor of St. Michael on the wind-swept, treeless, mossy shore of Norton Sound.

I was still to work my way through a tangle of delays and adventures before I could reach my goal--the great new camp at Nome, one hundred and thirty miles from St. Michael.

I had first to get my outfit together on the wharf, counting the boxes and war bags, pursuing the missing ones to other outfits and proving my claim to them. In the confusion this was a hard job, but I only lost two or three of my boxes. I piled my goods in a corner of the big warehouse of the North American Trading and Transportation Co., and set up my tent on the beach, for I was near the end of my money, and could not pay the high prices charged at the hotels. I got into my camp kit and did my own cooking, protecting my food as best I could against the thievish Eskimo dogs.

"Hurry on to Nome," he counseled me. "You were never needed more in all your life."

At length there limped into the harbor a little tub-like side-wheel steamboat, belonging to the Alaska Exploration Company, whose wharf was a mile and a half distant up the harbor. There was no way of getting my goods across the swampy tundra of St. Michael Island to the wharf. On the beach I found an abandoned old rowboat with open seams. I procured pieces of boards, some oakum and pitch, and set to work to repair the old boat. The steamboat was to sail for Nome the next forenoon. I worked all night. I made a pair of clumsy oars out of boards. Then I carried my goods to the leaky boat and rowed them to the dock. It took three trips to transfer my outfit, and while I was rowing back and forth somebody carried off my most valuable war-bag, containing most of my foot-wear and underclothes--one hundred dollars' worth.

I was a tired man when I stumbled down the steep stairs into the dark and stuffy hold of the little steamboat; and much more tired when, after two and a half days of seasickness, bobbing up and down in the choppy seas like a man on a bucking broncho, I pulled up the stairs again and let myself down the rope-ladder into the dory which was to take the passengers ashore at Nome.

"You can only take what you can carry on your back," announced the captain. "There's a storm coming up and I've got to hurry to the lee of Sledge Island, twenty miles away. You'll get your outfits when I come back. Lucky we're not all down in Davy Jones's locker."

I strapped my pack-sack, containing my wolf-robe and a pair of blankets, on my back, glad to get ashore on any terms. The dory wallowed heavily in the waves, the strong wind driving it towards the sandy beach. Boats have to anchor from one to two miles offshore at Nome. When we reached the beach, a big wave lifted the dory and swung it sideways. The keel struck the sand, and she turned over, dumping us all out, the comber overwhelming us and rolling us over and over like barrels. Drenched and battered, we crawled to land.

A heavy rain was falling as I staggered up the beach with my water-soaked blankets on my back, looking for a lodging-house. The beach was lined with tents, placed without regard to order or the convenience of anybody except the owner of each tent. A few straggling board-shacks were stuck here and there on the swampy tundra. Two or three large, low store buildings represented the various pioneer trading companies. The one street, which ran parallel to the beach, was full of mud. The buildings most in evidence were saloons, generally with dance-hall attachments. The absence of trees, the leaden, weeping sky, the mud, the swampy tundra, the want of all light and beauty, made this reception the dreariest of all my experiences in the new mining camps.

But I long ago learned that nothing is so bad but that it might be worse. I had not at that time seen Edmund Vance Cook's sturdy lines, but the spirit of them was in my heart:

"Did you tackle the trouble that came your way With a resolute heart and cheerful, Or hide your face from the light of day With a craven heart and fearful? Oh, a trouble's a ton or a trouble's an ounce, Or a trouble is what you make it; And it isn't the fact that you're hurt that counts, But only, how did you take it!"

"Shure, ye can," she answered in reply to my question about spending the night there. "Ye'll spread yer robe an' blankets on the flure, an' it'll only cost ye a dollar an' four bits. Ye'll plaze pay in advance."

I took stock of the contents of my pocketbook. There was just five dollars and a quarter left of the thousand dollars with which I had started from home on the first of May. It was now the first of September, and no more money was due me until the next spring. My food and tent were on the steamboat and would not be likely to come ashore for many days. It was Sunday evening, and a whole week must elapse before I could take up a collection.

I paid my landlady and she put my blankets by her stove to dry. I paid another dollar and a half for a supper of beans and flap-jacks--the first food I had tasted for three days. I slept soundly that night on the floor, without a care or anxiety. The next morning I paid another dollar and a half for breakfast, and could not resist the temptation of purchasing a Seattle paper . I had just twenty-five cents left--and I was a stranger in this strange corner of the earth!

I could not help laughing at my predicament as I entered the Alaska Exploration Company's store. A bearded man standing by the stove bade me "good-morning."

"You seem to be pleased about something," he said. "Have you struck it rich?"

"Well, yes!" I replied; "a rich joke on me," and I told him of the fix I was in.

"What? You are Dr. Young?" he exclaimed, shaking me heartily by the hand. "Why, I'm a Presbyterian elder from San Francisco."

The man's name was Fickus, a carpenter, who had come to Nome to build the store and warehouses of one of the big companies. He had held the first religious meetings in the new camp and had found quite a circle of Christian people.

He offered to lend me money, but I refused to take it. "No," I said, "let us wait and see what happens."

Something happened very quickly. While we were talking a young man entered the store and came up to me.

"I understand that you are a minister," he said.

"Yes," I replied. "What can I do for you?"

"You can marry me to the best woman in Alaska."

"Is she here?" I asked, with a triumphant smile at Fickus.

"Oh, yes; she came on the last boat from Seattle."

"When do you wish the ceremony to take place?" I inquired.

"Right now," he replied. "You can't tie the knot too quickly to suit me."

I followed the eager young man, married him to a nice-looking girl who was waiting in a near-by cabin, received a wedding-fee of twenty dollars, and returned to my newly-found friend with the assurance that my wants were supplied until my outfit would come ashore.

This was my introduction to the second great gold camp of the Northwest--the raw, crazy, confused stampede of Nome.

THE ANVIL

"Crouching low by the winding creeks, And holding his breath for weeks and weeks."

There are no wind-storms in the Klondike, and a blanket of fine, dry snow covers the land in unvarying depth of only a foot or two.

On Seward Peninsula, the Spirit of Winter breathes hard, and hurls his snow-laden blasts with fearful velocity over the icy wastes. The snow falls to great depth, and never lies still in one place. It drifts, and will cover your house completely under in one night, and pack so hard that the Eskimo can drive his reindeer team over your roof in the morning. The air becomes so full of the flying particles that you cannot see the lead-dog of your team. Men have lost their way in the streets of Nome and wandered out on the tundra to their death. There is considerable sunshine in the summer, and some comparatively still days, but there is much rain, and mossy swamps are everywhere.

The men at Nome in the fall of '99 included many who had been at Dawson in '97, but conditions were very different. The Klondike Stampede was composed of tenderfeet, not one in twenty of whom had ever mined for anything before--men of the city and village and workshop and farm, new to wilderness life, unused to roughing it. Those who reached Nome in '99 were mostly victims of hard luck. Many were Klondikers who had spent two winters rushing wildly from creek to creek on fake reports, possessing themselves of a multitude of worthless claims, eating up the outfits they had brought in with them, and then working for wages in mines of the lucky ones to buy a passage to the new diggings. Many had come down the Yukon in their own rowboats.

But the Klondike Stampede was the cause of other smaller but more fruitless stampedes. These were started by steamboat companies, or by trading companies, and often by "wildcat" mining companies, and were generally cruel hoaxes. Scores of small steamboats, hastily built for the purpose, went up the Yukon to the Koyakuk and other tributaries in the summer of '98. Other scores of power-schooners and small sailing vessels sailed through Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean and through Kotzebue Sound to the Kobuk and Sewalik Rivers. Almost without exception these eager gold-seekers of '98 found only disappointment, endured the savage winter as best they could, and, out of money and food, were making their way back to the States, when news of the marvelous "beach diggings" at Nome met them and they flocked thither in hopes of at least making back their "grub-stake."

As these vessels approached the new camp, the most prominent landmark which met their eyes was a lone rock in the shape of an anvil, which crowned the summit of the highest of the hills near the coast. At the base of this hill rich gold diggings were found in a creek. The town which sprung up was first called Anvil City; but the Government postal authorities, looking at the map, found Cape Nome in the vicinity, and the post-office was named after the Cape.

For the name "Nome" two explanations are given. It is said that the American and Canadian surveyors who were laying out the projected Western Union Telegraph Line across the American and Asiatic Continents, failed to find a name for this cape and wrote it down "No name," which was afterwards shortened to Nome. The more probable explanation is that the surveyors asked an Eskimo the name of the cape. Now the Eskimo negative is "No-me," and the man not understanding, or not knowing its name said "No-me." This was written down and put on the map as the name.

But I like Anvil, and spoke and voted for that name at the first town meeting, held soon after I landed at the new camp. For the camp has been a place of hard knocks from the first. Rugged men have come there to meet severe conditions and have been hammered and broken by the blows of adversity. Others have been shaped and moulded by fiery trial and "the bludgeonings of chance." When I see that stone anvil I think of Tennyson's inspired lines:

"For life is not an idle ore, But iron, dug from central gloom, And heated hot with burning fears, And dipt in baths of hissing tears, And battered with the shocks of doom, To shape and use."

I was battered as hard as any one on this anvil of the Northwest; but to-day I feel nothing but gratitude for the severe experience.

I had to wait until Saturday before the little steamer on which I came from St. Michael returned from the shelter of Sledge Island and put my goods ashore. In the meantime I had obtained permission to spread my blankets on the floor of the Alaska Exploration Company's store. During that first week we had constant storms. Five or six vessels were driven ashore and broken up by the violence of the waves.

But I was getting my congregation together, and so was happy. A goodly proportion of Christian men and women are always found in these gold camps, and they are very willing workers. Before Sunday came I had found an old acquaintance, Minor Bruce, whom I had known fifteen years before when he was a trader in Southeastern Alaska. He offered me the use of the loft over his fur store. Mr. Fickus, the man from San Francisco, to whom I have made reference in a former chapter, fixed up some seats. I got my organ carried up the ladder and found singers. "Judge" McNulty, a lawyer friend who was handy with crayons, made fancy posters out of some pasteboard boxes I had got from the store.

The floor of Bruce's store was cluttered with Eskimo mucklucks, bales of hair-seal skins, and other unsavory articles; and an old Eskimo woman, who had her lower lip and chin tattooed downwards in streaks after the fashion of these people, sat among the skins, chewing walrus hides and shaping them into soles for mucklucks, while the congregation was gathering. One usher received the people at the store door, steered them carefully between the bales and skins, and headed them to another who helped them up the steep stairway, while a third seated them. We had a good congregation and a rousing meeting. Our choir was one of the best I ever heard. Our organist and leader was Dr. Humphrey, a dentist, who had been director of a large chorus and choir; Mr. Beebe, our chief baritone, had sung in the choir of St. Paul's Episcopal Church of Oakland, Cal.; and there were other professionals. I give these details as a typical beginning in a frontier camp. There is always fine talent of all sorts in a new gold town.

Let me give right here two or three instances of the bread of kindness "cast upon the waters" and "found after many days." Nowhere is this Bible saying oftener realized than in the friendly wilderness.

One of the first men I met at Nome was an old Colorado miner, whom I had known at Dawson. I had done him some kindness at the Klondike camp during the illness and after the death of his nephew. When he found me at Nome he greeted me warmly. "You're just the man I've been looking for. I know you don't do any mining, but I'm going to do some for you. I expect to go 'outside' in a few days. You come out on the tundra with me to-morrow, and I'll stake some ground for you; then I'll take your papers out with me and try to sell the claims."

I went with him and he marked off three claims for me, which he had already selected. The next spring, when my long illness had plunged me deeply into debt and I was wondering how I could pay my obligations, my old friend returned with a thousand dollars, from the sale of one of my claims. I paid my doctor's bills and the other debts, and rejoiced. It was as money thrown down to me from heaven, in my time of dire need.

At Dawson, in the summer of '98, I helped an old G. A. R. man from Missouri. He had been sick with the scurvy and was drowned out by the spring freshets and driven to the roof of his cabin, where I found him helpless and half-devoured by mosquitoes. I raised money for his need and sent him out home by one of the first steamboats down the Yukon. Before he left he pressed upon me the only gift he could offer--a fine Parker shotgun. I took this gun with me when I went to stake my claims and bagged a lot of ptarmigan; and a number of times afterwards I shot others of these delicious wild chickens with it. And when I was taken ill and my money all spent, I was able to sell the gun for a goodly sum.

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