The tables were provided with good food, all ready to be eaten. There were ham sandwiches made of lean ham. It was not edged with fat and embittered with mustard; it must have been baked, too, because no boiled ham could be so sweet. There were big brown lima beans, also baked, not boiled, and dill-pickles—no insipid pin-moneys, but good, sour, delicious dills! There were salads, home-made bread, "salt-rising" bread and butter, cakes and cookies and fruit—and huckleberry pie. Blueberries, they are called in Alaska, but they are our own mountain huckleberries.
No twelve-course luncheon, with a different wine for each course, could impress itself upon my memory as did that lunch-counter meal. We ate as children eat; with their pure, animal enjoyment and satisfaction. For fifteen minutes we had not a desire in the world save to gratify our appetites with plain, wholesome food. There was no crowding, no selfishness and rudeness,—as there had been in that wild scene on the excursion-boat, where the struggle had been for place rather than for food,—but a polite consideration for one another. And outside the sun shone, the blue waves sparkled and rippled along the shore, and their music came in through the open windows.
Here, in 1897, was a city of tents. Several thousand men and women camped here, waiting for the completion of boats and rafts to convey themselves and their outfits down the lakes and the river to the golden land of their dreams.
Standing between cars, clinging to a rattling brake, I made the acquaintance of Cyanide Bill, and he told me about it.
"Tents!" said he. "Did you say tents? Hunh! Why, lady, tents was as thick here in '97 and '98 as seeds on a strawberry. They was so thick it took a man an hour to find his own. Hunh! You tripped up every other step on a tent-peg. I guess nobody knows anything about tents unless he was mushin' around Lake Bennett in the summer of '97. From five to ten thousand men and women was camped here off an' on. Fresh ones by the hundred come strugglin', sweatin', dyin', in over the trail every day, and every day hundreds got their rafts finished, bundled their things and theirselves on to 'em, and went tearin' and yellin' down the lake, gloatin' over the poor tired-out wretches that just got in. Often as not they come sneakin' back afoot without any raft and without any outfit and worked their way back to the states to get another. Them that went slow, went sure, and got in ahead of the rushers.
"I wisht you could of seen the tent town!—young fellows right out of college flauntin' around as if they knew somethin'; old men, stooped and gray-headed; gamblers, tin horns, cut-throats, and thieves; honest women, workin' their way in with their husbands or sons, their noses bent to the earth, with heavy packs on their backs, like men; and gay, painted dance-hall girls, sailin' past 'em on horseback and dressed to kill and livin' on the fat of the land. I bet more good women went to the bad on this here layout than you could shake a stick at. It seemed to get on to their nerves to struggle along, week after week, packin' like animals, sufferin' like dogs, et up by mosquitoes and gnats, pushed and crowded out by men—and then to see them gay girls go singin' by, livin' on luxuries, men fallin' all over theirselves to wait on 'em, champagne to drink—it sure did get on to their nerves!
Copyright by F. H. Nowell, Seattle
Council City and Solomon River Railroad—A Characteristic Landscape of Seward Peninsula
"You see, somehow, up here, in them days, things didn't seem the way they do down below. Nature kind of gets in her work ahead of custom up here. Wrong don't look so terrible different from right to a woman a thousand miles from civilization. When she sees women all around her walkin' on flowers, and her own feet blistered and bleedin' on stones and thorns, she's pretty apt to ask herself whether bein' good and workin' like a horse pays. And up here on the trail in '97 the minute a woman begun to ask herself that question, it was all up with her. The end was in plain sight, like the nose on a man's face. The dance hall on in Dawson answered the question practical.