There was an enthusiastic reception at the Golden Gate Hotel, followed by a week's brilliant functions in his honor.
Three days later the Meteor came over from St. Michael, with a distinguished Congressman aboard. The weather was rough, even for Nome, and for three blessed days the Meteor rolled in the roadstead, and with every roll it went clear out of sight.
There were those at the hotel who differed politically from the Congressman aboard the little tug; and, like the people of Nome when the senatorial committee was landed under such distressful circumstances a few years ago, their faces did not put on mourning as they watched the Meteor roll.
CHAPTER L
Nome! Never in all the world has been, and never again will be, a town so wonderfully and so picturesquely built. Imagine a couple of miles of two and three story frame buildings set upon a low, ocean-drenched beach and, for the most part, painted white, with the back doors of one side of the main business street jutting out over the water; the town widening for a considerable distance back over the tundra; all things jumbled together—saloons, banks, dance-halls, millinery-shops, residences, churches, hotels, life-saving stations, government buildings, Eskimo camps, sacked coal piled a hundred feet high, steamship offices, hospitals, schools—presenting the appearance of having been flung up into the air and left wherever they chanced to fall; with streets zigzagging in every conceivable and inconceivable, way—following the beach, drifting away from it, and returning to it; one building stepping out proudly two feet ahead of its neighbor, another modestly retiring, another slipping in at right angles and leaving a V-shaped space; board sidewalks, narrow for a few steps, then wide, then narrow again, running straight, curving, jutting out sharply; in places, steps leading up from the street, in others the streets rising higher than the sidewalks; boards, laid upon the bare sand in the middle of the streets for planking, wearing out and wobbling noisily under travel; every second floor a residence or an apartment-house; crude signs everywhere, and tipsy telephone poles; the streets crowded with men at all hours of the day and night; and a blare of music bursting from every saloon. This is Nome at first sight; and it was with a sore and disappointed heart that I laid my head upon my pillow that night.
But Nome grows upon one; and by the end of a week it had drawn my heartstrings around it as no orderly, conventional town could do. From the very centre of the business section it is but twenty steps to the sea; and there, day and night, its surf pounds upon the beach, its musical thunder and fine mist drifting across the town.
Ten years ago there was nothing here save the golden sands, the sea that broke upon them, and the gray-green tundra slopes; there is not a tree for fifty miles or more. To-day there is a town of seven thousand people in summer, and of three or four thousand in winter—a town having most of the comforts and many of the luxuries to be obtained in cities of older civilization. Nome sprang into existence in the summer of 1899, and grew like Fairbanks and Dawson; but it is more wonderfully situated than, probably, any town in the world. For eight months of the year it is cut off from steamship service, and its front door-yard is a sea of solid ice stretching to the shores of Siberia, while its back yard is a gold-mine. There are many weeks when the sun rises but a little way, glimmers faintly for three or four hours, and fades behind the palisades of ice, leaving the people to darkness and unspeakable loneliness until it returns to its full brilliance in spring and opens the way for the return of the ships.
Nome is picturesque by day or by night and at any season. Its streets are constantly crowded with traffic and thronged by a cosmopolitan population. The Eskimo encampment is on the "sand-spit" at the northern end of the main street, where Snake River flows into the sea; and the men, women, and children may be seen at all hours loitering about the streets in reindeer parkas and mukluks. Especially in the evenings do they haunt the streets and the hotels, offering their beautifully carved ivories for sale.