"Oh, yes, very different. I guess their only resemblance is that they are both good only when they are dead."
"You're pretty hard on them," was the remark of the good-natured John.
"Perhaps I am. You see, a tough outfit has been trading up here for years from down the coast; and before that the Russians were here—and they didn't put in most of their time building churches. They found a dollar's worth of hootch would get more from the savages than a dollar's worth of anything else; so they used whisky. The savage, when you find him without the cussedness taught by the white man, makes a pretty good citizen. He may be lazy, but he is honest; and perhaps his laziness is only due to the fact that he has always had a klootch[2] to do chores around, and has never been trained to the white man's ways of working; but let any fellow try following an Indian on snow-shoes for a couple of days, and his ideas soon change. He is not much good with a pick and shovel for sure; but he is A1 on the trail. Another thing about the Indian is that when one has grub they all have grub. This is the way of the Stick Indians inside, and you can cache your grub in their country or leave the things lying around, and they won't touch them."
[2] Squaw.
During the rest of the day John and his mates were in the company of Hugh Spencer, listening to his tales of Yukon life: the glories of the summer there, and the great cold of the winter, with the resources of the miners to keep from despair. He told them the traditions of the camps, and how the discoveries of '49 in California had been followed by others in Oregon, British Columbia, the Fort Steele district (Wild Horse Creek), Kettle River, Caribou, and, finally, in the Yukon.
"It wasn't a miner who was the first finder of gold in the Yukon; it was a missionary. But the missionary did not follow up this discovery, which makes a difference. However, I'll tell you the story, and it will let you see a little of Siwash nature in the telling of it.
"The Rev. Robert Macdonald, Doctor of Divinity and Archdeacon of MacKenzie River, was the first white man to find gold in the Yukon. Say! I ain't got much use for missionaries as a general proposition, but Archdeacon Macdonald is as white a man as ever lived, though he is east of the Rocky Mountains now. I guess the reason I don't like missionaries is that you can never do anything with the Siwashes, once a missionary gets hold of them.
"Well, the Archdeacon—he wasn't Archdeacon then though—drifted down the Porcupine, and took up his residence with the Hudson Bay Company people at Fort Yukon in the year 1862, which was a few years before I was born. You see the Hudson Bay people established themselves at Fort Yukon in 1847. In 1842 Mr. J. Bell, in charge of the Hudson Bay Post on the Peel River, which runs into the MacKenzie, from beyond the divide from the head waters of the Porcupine, crossed over and went down the Porcupine a way. In 1846 he followed it to its mouth, and saw the Yukon. In the following year Mr. A. H. Murray built Fort Yukon, and set up business. Well, it was here that the Archdeacon started to tell the savages of the Great Spirit—and they were mighty interested.
"The savages had some sort of a tradition that a certain canyon, which opened into the Yukon a short distance up stream from the Fort, was the home of bad spirits; they could hear them groaning, and they asked the missionary to 'put them wise.'[3] So when a bunch[4] arrived, one day in July 1863, he trotted the whole outfit off to the canyon.
[3] Inform them.