We were seized with fatigue and a terrible hunger. "You haven't a sandwich about your clothes, have you?" I asked of some prospectors whom I overtook resting in the lee of a cliff. Here the stream becomes so rough and rapid that the natives can work their canoes no further, and so the place has been somewhat pompously named on some maps the "Head of Navigation," by which most people infer that a gunboat may steam up this far.
"No, by ——, pardner," was the answer, "if we had, we'd a' eaten it ourselves before now."
Crossing the stream for the last time, on the trunk of a fallen tree, which swayed alarmingly, the trail led up steeply among the bare rocks of the hillside. All the pedestrian groups had separated into singles by this time, every one going his "ain gait" according to his own ideas and strength, and in no mood for conversation. I overtook a young Irishman, who had started out with a pack of about seventy-five pounds; he was resting, and quite downcast with fatigue and hunger.
Just where we stopped some one had left a load of canned corn and tomatoes. We eyed them hungrily, and gravely discussed our rights to helping ourselves. We did not know the owners and could not find them—certainly they were none of those that had come with us. We could not take them and leave money, for although the natives respected "caches" of provisions, we could not expect them to do the same with money. "Again," said the Irishman, "the feller what lift them here may be dipinding on every blissed can of swate corn for some little schayme of his, while we have plenty grub of our own, if we can on'y get our flippers on it."
At this period, all through Alaska, provisions and other property was regarded with utmost respect. Old miners and prospectors have told me that they have left provisions exposed in a "cache" for a year, and on returning after having been hundreds of miles away, have found them untouched, although nearly starving natives had passed them almost daily all winter. In the mining camps the same custom prevailed. Locks were unknown on the doors. When a white man arrived at the hut of an absent prospector, he helped himself, taking enough provisions from the "cache" to keep him out of want, till he could make the next stage of his journey, and wrote on paper or on the wooden door, "I have taken twenty pounds of flour, ten pounds of bacon, five pounds of beans, and a little tea," signed his name, and departed. It was not a bill, but an acknowledgment; and to have left without making the acknowledgment constituted a theft, in the eyes of the miner population. This condition of primitive honesty did not last, however. Later, with the Klondike boom, came the ordinary light-fingeredness of civilization, and a state of affairs unique and instructive passed away.
We arrived finally at the end of the horse-trail, a spot named Sheep Camp by an early party of prospectors who killed some mountain sheep here. Steep, rocky and snowy mountains overhang the valley, with a vast glacier not far up; and here, since our visit, have occurred a number of fatal disasters, from snowslides and landslides. Pete had arrived before us: he had set up a Yukon camp stove of sheet iron, had kindled fire therein and was engaged in the preparation of slapjacks and fried bacon, a sight that affected us so that we had to go and sit back to, and out of reach of the smell, till Pete yelled out in vile Chinook "Muk-a-muk altay! Bean on the table!" There were no beans and no table, of course, but that was Pete's facetious way of putting it.
Further than Sheep Camp the horse-trail was quite too rocky and steep for the animals; so we tried to engage Indians to take our freight for the remaining part of the distance across the Pass. Up to the time of our arrival, the regular price for packing from Dyea to Lake Lindeman had been eleven cents a pound. For the transportation by horses over the first half of the distance—thirteen miles—we had paid five cents a pound, and we had expected to pay the Indians six cents for the remainder of the trip. In the first place, however, it was difficult to gather the Indians together, for they were off in bands in different parts of the neighboring country, on expeditions of their own; and when they arrived in Sheep Camp, with a bluster and a racket, they were so set up by the number of men that were waiting for their help that they took it into their heads to be in no hurry about working. Finally they sent a spokesman who, with an insolence rather natural than assumed for the occasion, demanded nine cents per pound instead of six, for packing to Lake Lindeman. It was a genuine strike—the revolt of organized labor against helpless capital.
Being in a hurry to get ahead and fulfill our mission, we should doubtless have yielded; but there were many parties camped here besides ourselves—namely, all those who had been our fellow-sufferers on board the Scrambler—and a general consultation being held among the gold-hunters, it was decided that the proposed increase of pay for labor would prove ruinous to their business. A committee representing these gentlemen waited on us and begged us not to yield to the strikers, in the carelessness of our hearts and our plethoric pocket-books, but to consider that in doing so they—the prospectors—must follow suit, the precedent being once established; whereas they were poor men, and could not afford the extra price. To this view of the case we agreed, considering ourselves as a part of the Sheep Camp community, rather than as an individual party; and the English traveller (who was likewise suspected of being overburdened with funds, and therefore likely to be careless with them) was also waited upon and persuaded to resist the demands. So everybody camped and waited, and was obstinate, for several days: not only the white men, but the Siwash.
By way of digression it may be mentioned that the word Siwash is indiscriminately applied by the white men to all the Alaskan natives, to whatever race—and there are many—they belong. The word therefore has no definite meaning, but corresponds roughly to the popular name of "nigger" for all very dark-skinned races, or "Dago" for Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, and a host of other black-haired, olive-skinned nations. The name has been said to be a corruption of the French word "sauvage,"—savage,—and this seems very likely.
Like the corresponding epithets cited, the word Siwash has a certain familiar, facetious, and contemptuous value, and this may have been the idea which prompted its use just now, when speaking of the natives as strikers and opponents. At any rate, they took the situation in a careless, matter-of-fact way; cooked, ate, slept, borrowed our kettles, begged our tea and stole our sugar with utmost cheerfulness, and were apparently contented and happy. We white men likewise tried to conceal our restlessness, and chatted in each others' tents, admired the scenery, or went rambling up the steep mountain-sides in search of experiences, exercise, and rocks. Some of us clambered over the huge boulders, each as big as a New England cottage, which had been brought here by glacial action, then up over the steep cliffs, wrenched and crumbling from the crushing of the same mighty force, supporting ourselves,—when the rocks gave way beneath our feet and went rattling down the cliff,—by the tough saplings that had taken root in the crevices, and grew out horizontally, or even inclined downwards, bent by continuous snowslides. So we reached the base of the glacier, where a sheer wall of clear blue ice rose to a height which we estimated at three or four hundred feet, back of which stretched a great uneven white ice field, as far as the eye could see, clear up till the view was lost in the mists of the upper mountains; an ice field seamed with great yawning crevasses, where the blue of the ice gleamed as streaks on the dead white.