Kitabı oku: «In to the Yukon», sayfa 5
To-night I ventured out to try again the restaurant of our first adventure. Sitting at a little table, I was soon joined by three bright-looking men – one a “barrister,” one a mining engineer, one a reporter. Result (1), an interview; (2), a pass to the fair; (3), my dinner paid for, a 50-cent Havana cigar thrust upon me, and (4) myself carried off to the said fair by two of its directors, and again shown its fine display of fruits and grains and flowers and all its special attractions by the management itself. In fact, the Dawsonite can not do too much for the stranger sojourning in his midst.
Mercury 26 to 28 degrees every morning.
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.Our hostess takes good care of her guests. Very many young men working for the larger commercial companies board here, all, who are allowed, come for transient meals. And those who are homesick and down in spirit come just for the sake of neighborship to the tall, well-gowned woman whose invariable tact and sympathy, and often motherly tenderness, has given new heart to many a lonely “chechaqua” (tenderfoot), so far away from home!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 takes good care of her guests. Very many young men working for the larger commercial companies board here, all, who are allowed, come for transient meals. And those who are homesick and down in spirit come just for the sake of neighborship to the tall, well-gowned woman whose invariable tact and sympathy, and often motherly tenderness, has given new heart to many a lonely “chechaqua” (tenderfoot), so far away from home!
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.
