* * * * * *
On our return to Missoula we found the town aflame with a report that a steamer had just landed at Seattle, bringing from Alaska nearly three million dollars in gold-dust, and that the miners who owned the treasure had said, "We dug it from the valley of the Yukon, at a point called the Klondike. A thousand miles from anywhere. The Yukon is four thousand miles long, and flows north, so that the lower half freezes solid early in the fall, and to cross overland from Skagway—the way we came out—means weeks of travel. It is the greatest gold camp in the world but no one can go in now. Everybody must wait till next June."
It was well that this warning was plainly uttered, for the adventurous spirits of Montana instantly took fire. Nothing else was talked of by the men on the street and in the trains. Even my brother said, "I wish I could go."
"But you can't," I argued. "It is time you started for New York. Herne will drop you if you don't turn up for rehearsal in September."
Reluctantly agreeing to this, he turned his face toward the East whilst I kept on toward Seattle, to visit my classmate Burton Babcock, who was living in a village on Puget Sound.
The coast towns were humming with mining news and mining plans. The word "Klondike" blazed out on banners, on shop windows and on brick walls. Alert and thrifty merchants at once began to advertise Klondike shoes, Klondike coats, Klondike camp goods. Hundreds of Klondike exploring companies were being organized. In imagination each shop-keeper saw the gold seekers of the world in line of march, their faces set toward Seattle and the Sound. Every sign indicated a boom.
This swift leaping to grasp an opportunity was characteristically American, and I would have gladly taken part in the play, but alas! my Grant history was still unfinished, and I had already overstayed my vacation limit. I should have returned at once, but my friend Babcock was expecting me to visit him, and this I did.
Anacortes (once a port of vast pretentions), was, at this time, a boom-town in decay, and Burton whom I had not seen for ten years, seemed equally forlorn. After trying his hand at several professions, he had finally drifted to this place, and was living alone in a rude cabin, camping like a woodsman. Being without special training in any trade, he had fallen into competition with the lowest kind of unskilled labor.
Like my Uncle David, another unsuccessful explorer, he had grown old before his time, and for a few minutes I could detect in him nothing of the lithe youth I had known at school on the Iowa prairie twenty years before. Shaggy of beard, wrinkled and bent he seemed already an old man.
By severest toil in the mills and in the forest he had become the owner of two small houses on a ragged street—these and a timber claim on the Skagit River formed his entire fortune.