It was from this town that thousands of prospectors and adventurers started in 1897 and 1898 in the rush to the Klondike, and Swiftwater told them many stories of the terrible winter trip over the White Pass in those years in which hundreds of men lost their lives and thousands of horses were killed.
With Colonel Snow they made one or two trips into the surrounding country, visiting the nearby Chilkat and Chilkoot villages, during two days that Swiftwater had gone over to White Horse in Yukon territory, at the other end of the White Pass and Yukon Railroad, a distance of 112 miles, to make arrangements for boats and Indian guides and boatmen to carry their machinery into the wilderness. The boys were greatly interested in this first near view of Alaskan Indian life in the two villages which they visited, and in comparing the natives with the Indians with whom they had been associated in their trip to the Canadian Rockies. The Alaskan Indians were shorter in build, more squatty in figure and broader faced than the Crees and the other Southern red men. Jack, who had been poking about into the various corners of the first village, which were composed of huts and sod houses, came back with a look very like disgust in his face.
“I say, Don,” he exclaimed, “for goodness sake don’t do anything to get adopted into this tribe,” referring to an episode of their journey in search of the lost mine, when Don had for obvious bravery been made a fullfledged Indian.
“Sure, I’ll na do anything to deserve it; it would be naething to be proud of. They do not look much like our friends in Canada.”
“There are two points in which I find they are identical,” said Jack.
“What are those?” asked Rand, “color and clothes?”
“No,” replied Jack, “dirt and dogs. The dirt must have been here when the Indian came onto this continent, but I’ve wondered whether the Indian found the dog when he came here or the dog found the Indian. They seem to have been inseparable ever since.”
“D-d-do you s’pose they have dog days up here so near the pole?” asked Pepper.
“Begorra, it looks to me as if all days might be dog days around here,” suggested Gerald, who was surrounded at that moment by at least a dozen of the hundred animals in the village.
“You would be surprised to know,” said Colonel Snow, “that the dog is really the most important animal, except perhaps the reindeer in our Northern possessions. Little of this country would have been explored or settled except for his good services. There was a time when as much as two thousand dollars has been paid for a good dog up here.”