Adventures in Alaska

by Samuel Hall Young

"Mrs. Perrigo," I replied. "She has just built a new cabin. I helped her with it. Her husband is recovering from the fever."

Soon the good woman was in my tent, eager to serve. I was carried through a driving snow-storm to her cabin. It was a rude affair built of rough boards set upright and battened with narrow, half-inch strips. A single thickness of building-paper poorly supplemented the inch boards. But cold and uncomfortable as it was, it was the only available shelter. I had them bring my tent and make a storm-shed of it in front of the door. There, for more than two months, I was to lie helpless.

My friends told me afterwards of the consternation that my illness caused. I was chairman of all the general relief committees—those of the town council, the citizens, the mission, the Odd Fellows. That the leader should thus be laid aside seemed a greater calamity than was actually the case. For Mr. Wirt of the Congregational Church arrived with lumber to erect a hospital, and Raymond Robins, a young man of great earnestness and talent, who has since arisen to national prominence, came with him to help in Christian work.

The night after I was taken to the Perrigo cabin, there was a meeting of the Odd Fellows' Club. Billy Murtagh was present and made his first public speech. As my illness and the general situation was discussed he rose to his feet, the tears streaming down his face. He seemed unconscious of them—or, at least, unashamed.

"Fellers," he faltered, "I'm hard hit. This gets me where I live. Now I'll tell you this: you fellers can look after the other sick folks, and call on me when you need any money. But I want you to leave Father Young to me. I've adopted him. He's my father. All I've got is his. If there's anything in this camp he needs, he's goin' to have it."

Ah, that long, desperate fight for life! The stunning pain in my head, the high fever, the delirium, the nervous terror, the deadly weakness, the emaciation, the chills and nausea! I was badly handicapped in my fight. The two months of wearing work and strain which preceded my illness had exhausted me, body and mind—there was no vital reserve to draw upon.

I was in a little, cold shanty, twelve feet square, crowded and unhealthy. Two people besides myself must live in that tiny room—sleep there, cook there. The savage arctic winter raged against us, howling his vengeance upon our impudence in thus braving him, unprepared. He made every nail-head inside the house a knob of frost. When my blankets, damp with the steam of cooking, touched the wall, he clamped them so tight one must tear the fabric in pulling it free. He made my clothing, stowed under the cot, a solid lump of ice. He asphyxiated us with foul gases when the door was closed, and filled the room instantly with fine snow from the condensation of the moisture when it was opened. He charged constantly upon the thin shell of the house with his high October and November winds, shaking it wildly and threatening to bowl it over. He drove, in horizontal sheets, the fine, flour-like snow, shooting it through batten-crevice, door-crack and keyhole; and, finding myriad small apertures in the shake roof, sifted it down upon my face. He piled it in fantastic whirls around the house, selecting the side on which our one small window was, to bank it highest, so that he might shut out our light. He sent the red spirit in the thermometer tube down, down, down—ten below zero, twenty, thirty when it stormed, and forty, fifty, sixty below when it was still, and the black death-mist brooded over the icy wastes and men breathed ice-splinters instead of air.

The fuel supply for the Nome camp was very poor and scanty. Men were digging old, sodden logs of driftwood out of the snow, and hauling this sorry fire-wood twenty miles by hand. Coal was scarce and sold by the ton for $150.00, or by the bucket for ten cents a pound.

Having had experience with typhoid epidemics and other sicknesses in the Klondike Stampede, I had laid in a good supply of nice foods for the sick, such as malted milk, the best brands of condensed milk, tapioca, farina, and other delicacies; but all of these had been given away before my own illness, and there was a scarcity of such articles in the stores.