The neck to the Klondyke as it appeared in April, 1898, during the height of the stampede.
From "The Romance of Modern Mining," by A. Williams.
Copyright, 1898, by S. A. Hegg.
Pass in the Sierra Nevadas of California.
"Thirty thousand an' more, so folks said. Two thousand o' them, though, died in tryin'. An' they had Injun an' half-breed porters to tote their dunnage, too! The trail was marked for them. In the last years o' the big rush, there was an aerial tramway to take up the stuff. It wasn't like that in my day. We tackled it on our own.
"When we reached the top, the trouble wasn't over neither. 'Tother side was rough an' dangerous, all loose rock an' mighty little snow. We loaded the sleighs an' let 'em down by jerks, all three men hangin' on to the drag-ropes. But we made the bottom, safe, an' started off again. No trail, no map, no nothin'! We jest pushed on, blind, three white men in a country o' hostile Injuns huntin' for a river which we didn't even know where it was.
"Followin' a small creek an' pannin' now an' agin—though not findin' any color—we came at last to Crater Lake an' then on to Lindeman, an' final, to Lake Bennett. Here, we'd heard before leavin', the Yukon River begun, an' we started to go round the lake, so's to strike the bank o' the river.
"It couldn't be done. Muskeg an' thick forest run clear down to the shore o' the lake, an' a b'ar couldn't ha' pushed his way through. Small creeks shot out every which way. Sleighs were worse'n useless.