Monday, December ninth.
It blows worse than ever, and it is colder. All day the blue sky has been hidden in clouds of vapor and flying spray. The bay seethes and smokes and huge breakers race across it. It is truly bitter weather. Olson to-night ventured the prophecy that this was about the culmination of winter—but I know Olson by now. I cut another tree this morning to release the one of yesterday and both fell with a magnificent crash. Then we went to work with the cross-cut saw and stocked our day’s wood.
Olson called this afternoon and related his recollection of the early days of Nome.
“A certain man,” he began, “deserted from a whaler that stopped for water on the north coast of Alaska. He’d been shanghaied in San Francisco and was a tailor by trade. He made his way down the coast with the occasional help of the esquimaux. At last he came to Nome. The men were gone from the native village but a woman took him in. She was named English Mary. Now she had heard of the gold finds on the Yukon and she asked the man if he was a miner. He answered, ‘Yes.’ ‘You come with me,’ she said, and led him to a certain creek and showed him the shining nuggets lying thick upon the bottom. But the tailor really knew nothing about gold and let it lie. He continued down the coast and was at last carried to St. Michael. There he met a missionary and a young fellow who had come to Alaska with a party of prospectors. With those two he returned in a boat to Nome. You’ll hear different stories, to be sure, of how they got there but this is the right one, for I’ve seen the boat they came in lying there off the beach. Well, they came and saw the gold but none of them could say for certain what it was. So one of them went off to get a man from the party of prospectors with whom the young fellow had come to Alaska. At last they got him there and he proved that it was sure enough gold. They staked their claims and began to work them. But word of gold travels fast and already others began to come. The miner of that first party drew up mining laws for the country and these were enforced. I was up on the Yukon when I heard of the first find at Nome. I went down and arrived there in the fall, a little more than a year after the strike. By that time there was quite a number there.
“Some man had drawn up a plan of a town and was selling lots. I bought one on the northwest corner of the block. It was on the tundra. (Tundra is vegetation covered ice, soggy to a foot’s depth.) There was a tent on my lot and some wood, so I bought those too. But shortly after when I came home one day from prospecting I found that both the tent and the wood had been stolen. I bought lumber for the frame of a new tent. It cost me thirty dollars; that is, fifty cents a foot. By that time all kinds of people were pouring into Nome. They were taking out gold on the creek, those that had claims, at the rate of $5000 in a couple of hours. It was so heavy in the sand you couldn’t handle a pan-full.
“Someone cut into my tent and cleaned me out—but I had nothing much besides a jack-knife. I borrowed ten dollars and went to work at a dollar an hour. A couple of rascals had come there, a judge and a lawyer; and they began to get busy swindling everybody out of their titles to claims. It was said openly that if you saw anyone’s claim ‘jump it,’ and the lawyers would make more money for you than you could get out in gold. There was no use in a man without money trying to hold a claim. And the crowd that was there! Gamblers, sharps, actors,—men and women of every kind—and they did act so foolish!—all out of their heads over the gold. The brothels were running wide open and robberies occurred in the town by daylight. Every man slept with his gun beside him and if he shot it was to kill. The robbers chloroformed men as they slept in their tents.
“There were thousands of people then and you could look out on the beach and see them swarming like flies. Everything was overturned for gold,—the entire beach for ten miles both ways from Nome was shoveled off into the sea. They dug under the Indian village till the houses fell in, and even under the graveyard.”
WOMAN
And so Olson’s story continues. A story of his life would really be—as an old pioneer in Seward told me—a history of Alaska. Because Olson has never succeeded he has been everywhere and tried everything. I have not done him justice in my abridgment of his Nome story. His recollections are so intimate. He remembers the words spoken in every situation and never, no matter how much an adventure centers in himself, does he depart in what he tells of himself from his character as I know him.
I would not have devoted all of the time I have to this day’s entry if I had not a good day’s work to my credit including the conception of a new picture so vivid that the doing of it will be mere copying. It is the “North Wind.” Surely after the past four days I may tell with authority of that wild Prince from the North.