To-day I have staged again twenty miles on to the famous Hunker Creek, and then been driven further and home again by Mr. Orr, the owner of the stage line, behind a team of swift bays, over another fine government highway. I have looked at more machinery, steam shovels, hoist and labor-saving apparatus, and seen more millions already made and in the making. The present and potential wealth of this country almost stupifies one, and dollars fall into the insignificance of dimes. The traffic on these fine roads is also surprising. Substantial log “road houses,” or inns, every mile or so, and frequently at even shorter intervals, very many foot-farers traveling from place to place. Young men with strong, resolute faces; bicycle riders trundling a pack strapped to their handle-bars, and many six and eight span teams of big mules and big horses hauling immense loads—sometimes two great broad-tired wagons chained together in a train. Ten or twelve four and six horse stages leave Dawson every day, and as many come in, carrying passengers and mails to and from the many mining camps. In my stage to-day behind me sat two Mormons, a man and a woman, who had never met before, from Utah, and a woman from South Africa, the wife of an expatriated Boer; a Swede who was getting rich and a French Canadian. My host at dinner was from Montreal, a black-eyed, bulldog-jawed “habitan,” whose heart warmed to me when I told him that my great grandmother, too, was French from Quebec, and who thereupon walked me out to the barn to see his eleven Malamute pups, and afterward insisted that I take a free drink at his bar. I took a kodak of him with “mes enfants,” and promised to send him a copy of the same.
LOOKING UP THE KLONDIKE RIVER.
THE AUTHOR AT WHITE HORSE RAPIDS.
