And so it was that upon the first day of September, the little band of Indians under the leadership of Snowdrift and Wananebish, loaded their goods into canoes and began the laborious ascent of Hare Indian River.
CHAPTER X
THE DINNER AT REEVES'
With the rush of the chechakos had come also the vanguard of big business—keen-eyed engineers and bespectacled metallurgists, accompanied by trusted agents of Wall Street, who upon advice of the engineers and the metallurgists paid out money right and left for options.
First over the pass in the spring came Reeves and Howson who struck into the hills and, passing up the rich "gold in the grass roots" claims, concentrated upon a creek of lesser promise. By the first of July, their findings upon this creek justified the report to their principals in the states that roused those officials of the newly organized Northern Dredge Company from their stupor of watchful waiting into a cauldron of volcanic activity.
Fowler, the little purchasing agent sat at his desk and for fourteen straight hours dictated telegrams, pausing only to refer to pages of neatly typed specifications, with the result that within twenty-four hours upon many railroads carloads of freight began to move toward a certain dock in Seattle at
which was moored a tramp steamer waiting to receive her cargo. A sawmill from the Washington forests, steel rails and a dinky engine from Pittsburg, great dredges from Ohio, tools, iron, cement from widely separated States and the crowning item of all, a Mississippi River steamboat jerked bodily from the water and dismantled ready to be put together in a matter of hours at the mouth of the Yukon.
Late in August that same steamboat, her decks and two barges piled high with freight, nosed into the bank at Dawson and threw out her mooring lines, while down her plank swarmed the Northern Company's skilled artisans—swarmed also into the waiting arms of her husband, Reba Reeves, wife of the Northern Dredge Company's chief engineer and general manager of operation. Reeves led his wife to the little painted house that he had bought and furnished, and turned his attention to the problem of transporting his heavy outfit to the creek of his selection.
For a month thereafter he was on the works night and day, snatching his sleep where he could, now and then at home, but more often upon the pile of blankets and robes that he had thrown into a corner of the little slab office on the bank of the creek. Early in October, upon one of his flying visits, his wife reminded him that he had promised to send a man down to bank the house for the winter.
"Don't see how I can spare a man right now, little girl," he answered, "I'm hiring every man I can find that will handle a pick or a shovel, or drive a nail, or carry a board. I've still got three miles of flume to put in, and half a mile of railroad grade to finish—and the snow will hit us any time now."