Rhymes of a Roughneck

by Frank J. Cotter

They shut off the sun for full half of the year,
Made each glacier a blizzard blown trap,
They strung out volcanoes half way to Japan
Each one with a hair trigger cap.
They planned for the coast line a system of storms
Each equipped with a ninety mile breath
And then spread o'er it all the fog that men call
The North Coast mantle of death.

Then knowing full well that man would not go
To a Land so forlorn to behold,
He salted the hillsides and some of the streams
With nuggets and traces of gold.
He tinted the hills with a green copper ledge
And covered the valleys with game,
All this for a lure, then the Devil felt sure
That the white man would fall for the same.

THE LAND

The lure of the little known places
Still calls, as it called to your sires;
The longing for wide open spaces,
The perfume of evening camp fires;
The hunting for treasure unfound yet
The knocking at fortune's own gate;
The doing of deeds for the joy that it breeds
Were all used by the Devil as bait.

The summers besprinkled with sunshine,
The hillsides a riot of bloom
With meadows a color shot grandeur
And valleys as still as a tomb.
With mountains of cloud-encased beauty
Or with stars shining down on it all
It's the trails we don't know that call us to go
And no wonder man heeded the call.

The winters, the trails all unbroken,
The far fields that beckon and call;
The song of the frost on the runners
And the Northern Lights high over all;
The trees in the bend of the river,
The streams that nobody has spanned;
The whisper of gold, the story half told,
All this by the Devil was planned.

When the trap of the Devil was ready
Widespread went the whisper of gold,
And the white men stampeded like cattle,
There never was tie that could hold.
The first mad rush to the Northland
When the scum from the four ends of earth
Came in with a rush, a scramble, a crush
Like scrap in a fusing pot hurled.

They came all untaught and not ready,
Spurred on in the mad rush for gold;
They died here unsung and uncared for
Of famine, and scurvy and cold.
They had the same laws as the wolf pack,
Stay up, for you die if you fail,
And the paths to the Northern placers
Are marked by their graves on the trail.

The towns that they started were plague spots
With brothels and dance halls aglare,
With cribs, faro banks and roulette wheels
And phonographs adding their blare.
All traps for the young and unwary,
All builded to help with his fall,
Never dealer was fair, never game on the square
For the Devil presided o'er all.

Nick fiendishly grinned when he saw his work
And he chuckled with devilish glee—
"When it comes to making an up-to-date hell
They've sure got to hand it to me.
For every ten souls that come in to this land
There's nine of them headed for hell
With never a fight, the percentage is right,
And my prep school is doing quite well."