"They were great times," they say, looking at one another.
"They could only come once. They were times of blood and gold; of dance and song; of glitter and show—and starvation and death. We worked all day and danced or gambled all night. Our only passions were for women and gold. If we couldn't get the women we wanted, the men that did get 'em fought their way to 'em, inch by inch; if we couldn't dig the gold out of the earth, we got it in some other way.
"All the best buildings were occupied by saloons. Every saloon had a dance-hall in the back of it; not that the girls had to keep to their quarters, either—they had the run of the whole shebang. Every saloon had its gambling rooms, too—unless the tables and games were right out in the open. I tell you, it was tough. You can't begin to understand the situation unless you'd been here. There wasn't a hotel nor a corner where a man could go in and get warm except in a saloon—and with the thermometer fooling in the neighborhood of fifty below, he didn't stand around outside with his hands in his pockets, not to any great extent. Most likely his pockets was naturally froze shut, anyhow, and the only way he could get 'em thawed out was to go into a saloon. That thawed 'em quick enough. It not only thawed 'em out; it most gen'rally thawed 'em wide open.
"I tell you, the worst element in a mining-camp is women. They follow a man and console him when he's down on his luck; they follow him through thick and thin; and they get such a hold on him that, when he wants to get back to decent ways and decent women, he just naturally can't do it. Young fellows don't realize it. They don't see it being done; they see it after it is done and can't be undone.
"As soon as the mounted police took holt of Dawson, with Inspector Constantine at the head, there was a sure change. Still, even the mounted-police doctrine does have some drawbacks. I noticed they couldn't make the post-office clerks turn out letters unless you slipped two-three dollars into their outstretched hands. I noticed that."
To-day Dawson is a pretty, clean-streeted town built of log and frame buildings. In the hottest summer the earth never thaws deeper than eighteen inches, and no foundation can be obtained for brick buildings. For the same reason plastering is not advisable, the uneven freezing and thawing proving ruinous to both brick and plaster.
The first objects to greet the visitor's eyes are the large buildings of the great commercial and transportation companies of the North, along the bank of the river. Passing through these one finds one's self upon a busy, but unconventional, thoroughfare. Dawson is built solidly to the hill, extending about a mile along the water-front; and the most attractive part of the town is the village of picturesque log cabins climbing over the lower slopes of the hill. They are not large, but they are all built with the roof extending over a wide front porch. The entire roof of each cabin is covered several inches deep with earth, and at the time of our visit—the first week of August—these roofs were grown with brilliant green grasses and flowers to a height of from twelve to eighteen inches. They were literally covered with the bloom of a dozen or more varieties of wild flowers. Every window had its flaming window-box; every garden, its gay beds; and there were even boxes set on square fence posts and running the entire length of fences themselves, from which vines drooped and trailed and flowers blew. Standing at the river and looking toward the hill, the whole town seemed a mass of bloom sloping up to the green, which, in turn, sloped on up to the blue.
We had heard so much about the exorbitant prices of the Klondike, that we were simply speechless when a very jolly, sandy-haired Scotch gentleman offered to take our two steamer trunks, three heavy suit cases, and two shawl-straps to the hotel which we had blindly chosen, for the sum of two dollars. We had expected to pay five; and when he first asked two and a half, we stood as still as though turned to stone—and all for joy. He, however, evidently mistaking our silence, doubtless felt the prick of the stern conscience of his ancestors, for he hastily added:—
"Well, seeing you're ladies, we'll call it an even two."
We agreed to the price coldly, pretending to consider it an outrage.