“MES ENFANTS” MALAMUTE PUPS.
A KLONDIKE CABIN.
To-night I ventured out to try again the restaurant of our first adventure. Sitting at a little table, I was soon joined by three bright-looking men—one a “barrister,” one a mining engineer, one a reporter. Result (1), an interview; (2), a pass to the fair; (3), my dinner paid for, a 50-cent Havana cigar thrust upon me, and (4) myself carried off to the said fair by two of its directors, and again shown its fine display of fruits and grains and flowers and all its special attractions by the management itself. In fact, the Dawsonite can not do too much for the stranger sojourning in his midst.
Mercury 26 to 28 degrees every morning.
Before arriving in Dawson a big, rugged, government official had said to me, “Go to the hotel —— and give my love to Mrs. ——. She has a red head and a rich heart. She has cheered more stricken men than any woman in the Yukon. She mushed through with her husband with the first ‘sourdoughs’ over the ice passes in ’97. She was a streak of sunshine amidst the perils and heartaches of that terrible human treck. She runs the only hotel worth going to in Dawson. You will be lucky to get into it. Give her our love, the love of all of us. Tell her you’re our friends, and maybe she will take you in.” So we were curious about this woman who had dared so much, who had done so much, who was yet mistress of the hearts of the rough, strong men of the Yukon. We went to her hotel. We asked to see her. We were shown into a cosy, well-furnished parlor. We might just as well have been in a home in Kanawha or New York. We heard some orders given in a firm, low-pitched voice, a quick step, Mrs. —— was before us. An agreeable presence, dignity, reserve, force. Tall, very tall, but so well poised and proportioned you didn’t notice it. A head broad browed and finely set on neck and shoulders. Yes, the hair was red, Venetian red with a glimmer of sunshine in it. I delivered the message straight. She received it coolly. “The house was full, but she would have place for us before night. A party would leave on the 4 P. M. stage for Dominion Creek. We should have his room. Dinner would be served at seven.” The chamber was given us in due time. Plainly furnished, but comfortable. The hotel is an immense log house, chinked with moss and plaster, and paper lined, and all the partitions between the rooms are also paper. But we are learning to talk in low voices, and, between a little French and German and Danish, H. and I manage to keep our secrets to ourselves, although of the private affairs of all the other guests we shall soon be apprised.
The dining-room is large, the whole width of the house, in the center a huge furnace stove from which radiate many large, hot pipes, where in the long winter night-time is kept up a furious fire, and a cord of wood is burned each day—and wood at $25 to $50 per cord! The guests sit at many little tables. The linen is spotless. The china good English ware. The fare is delicious. The cook is paid $300 per month, the maids $125, with board thrown in. Delicate bacon from Chicago. Fresh eggs from Iowa. Chickens from Oregon—no live chickens in Dawson. The first mushers brought in a few, but the hawks and owls, the foxes and minks and other varments devoured many of them, and the surviving ones, after waiting around a week or two for the sun to set, went cackling crazy for lack of sleep, and died of shattered nerves. Caribou steak and tenderloin of moose we have at every meal. And to-day wild duck and currant jelly. The ducks abound along the river, the currants grow wild all over the mountain slopes. And such celery and lettuce and radishes and cabbage! Potatoes, big and mealy, and turnips, and carrots, delicate and crisp, all grown in the local gardens round about. Cabbage here sells at a dollar a head and lettuce at almost as much. But you never ate the like. White and hard as celery, so quickly do they grow in the nightless days! Nowhere in all the world can you live so well as in Dawson, live if only you have the “stuff.” Live if you can pay. We follow the habit of the land and pay up in full after each meal. It is dangerous to trust the stranger for his board. It is well for us we hold fast to this custom, else we might not be able to leave the town—a regulation of the government of the city—no man may leave with bills unpaid. So long as he owes even a single dollar, he must remain! And the N. W. M. P. watch the boats, the river and the mountain passes and enforce this law.
Our hostess takes good care of her guests. Very many young men working for the larger commercial companies board here, all, who are allowed, come for transient meals. And those who are homesick and down in spirit come just for the sake of neighborship to the tall, well-gowned woman whose invariable tact and sympathy, and often motherly tenderness, has given new heart to many a lonely “chechaqua” (tenderfoot), so far away from home!
In this dining-room, too, one sees a type not so often now met in our own great country, but inherent to English methods. The permanent Chief Clerk. The man whose career is to be forever a book-keeper or a clerk, whose highest ambition is to be a book-keeper or a clerk just all his life, and who will be trusted with the highest subordinate positions, but will never be made a partner, however much he may merit it. London is filled with such. The offices of the great British Commercial companies are full of such the world round. Men who know their business and attend to it faithfully, and whose lives are a round of precise routine. Such men sit at tables all about us. In London every morning the Times or Daily Telegraph is laid at their plates. Here the Yukon Sun or Dawson Times is laid before them just the same, and they gravely read the news of the world, while they sip their tea and munch their cold toast, just as though they were “at home.” And they walk in and out with the same stoop-shouldered shuffle gait one sees along the Strand or Bishopsgate Street within, or Mansionhouse Square.