Our hostess greets each guest as he enters, and walks about among them and says a cheery word to every one. One, on her left, has just now been reading to her from a letter which tells of his mother in England, and, I surmise, hints of a waiting sweetheart; and another, an Australian, who is just going away on a prospecting trip far up the Stuart River, is telling her what to write home for him in case he shall never come back.
The two other chief objects of interest in this dining-room, besides Mrs. ——, are—her small boy of six, who is being greatly praised this morning by all the company—he has just licked the big boy across the street, who for a week or two has tried to bully him, on account of which feat his mother is immensely proud—and a wonderful grey and white cat that sits up and begs just like a prairie dog or a gopher. When a kitten, pussy must have gone out and played with some of the millions of gophers that inhabit every hillside, and learned from them how to properly sit up. She visits each guest every morning and sits up and folds her paws across her breast and mews so plaintively that no hand can forbear giving her a tidbit.
“We were among the first. We came up from San Francisco in a waterlogged schooner through the wash of ice and winter gales to Dyea, and then mushed over Chilkoot Pass on snowshoes with the dogs. I shouldered my pack like the men. And John—John would have backed out or died of weariness, if I hadn’t told him that if he quit, I should come on in just all the same. Yes! I carried my gun—I didn’t have to use it but once or twice. Yes! We’ve done very well in Dawson, very well in the Klondike, very well!” And a big diamond glinted as though to reenforce the remark. She spoke rapidly, though easily, in crisp, curt sentences, and you felt she had indeed “mushed” in, that frightful winter, over those perilous snow and ice passes, just sure enough! As I looked into her wide-open, brown eyes, I felt that I beheld there that spirit which I have everywhere noted in the keen faces of the men and women of the Yukon, the yet living spirit of the great West, of the West of half a century ago; of Virginia and New England two hundred years ago; the spirit which drove Drake and Frobisher and Captain Cook and their daring mariners out from the little islands of our motherland to possess and dominate the earth’s mysterious and unchartered seas; the spirit which still makes the name American stand for energy and power and accomplishment in all the world; the spirit, shall I say, which gives the future of the earth to the yet virile Anglo-Saxon race.
NINTH LETTER.
MEN OF THE KLONDIKE.
Yukon Territory, Canada, September 18, 1903.
We lingered in Dawson a week waiting for the steamers “Sarah” or “Louise” or “Cudahy” to come up from the lower river, and though always “coming,” they never came. Meantime the days had begun to visibly shorten, the frosts left thicker rime on roof and road each morning. “Three weeks till the freeze-up,” men said, and we concluded that so late was now the season that we had best not chance a winter on a sand-bar in the wide and shallow lower Yukon, and a nasty time with fogs and floe ice in Behring Sea. So on Wednesday, the 16th, we again took the fine steamer “White Horse,” and are now two days up the river on our way. We will reach White Horse Sunday morning, stay there till Monday morning, when we will take the little railway to Skagway, then the ocean coaster to Seattle and the land of dimes and nickels. We regret not having been able to go down to St. Michael and Nome, and to see the whole great Yukon. My heart was quite set on it, and the expense was about the same as the route we now take, but to do so we should have had to take too great risks at this late season.
While lingering in Dawson we were able to see more of the interests of the community. One day we called on a quite notable figure, a, or rather the, Dr. Grant of St. Andrews Hospital, M. D., and of St. Andrews great church, D. D.! A Canadian Scotchman of, say, thirty-five years, who, although a man of independent fortune, chose the wild life of the border just from the very joy of buffet and conquest. He “mushed” it in 1897 over the Chilkoot Pass. He built little churches and hospitals all in one, and became the helper of thousands whom the perils and stresses of the great trek quite overcame. So now he is a power in Dawson. A large and perfectly equipped hospital, his creation, has been endowed by the government; a fine, modern church holding six hundred; a pretty manse and big mission school buildings of logs. All these standing in a green turfed enclosure of two or three acres. The church cost $60,000. He preaches Sundays to a packed house. He is chief surgeon of the hospital during the rest of the time. He gives away his salary, and the men of these mining camps, who know a real man when they see him, can’t respond too liberally to the call of the preacher-surgeon who generally saves their bodies and sometimes their souls. I found him a most interesting man—a naturalist, a scientific man, a man of the world and who independently expounds a Presbyterian cult rather of the Lyman Abbott type. He showed us all through the hospitals; many surgical accident cases; very few fevers or sickness. The church, too, we inspected; all fittings within modern and up to date; a fine organ, the freight on which alone was $5,000, 40 per cent. of its cost; a furnace that warmed the building even at 80 below zero, and a congregation of 400 to 500 people, better dressed (the night we attended) than would be a similar number in New York. There are no old clothes among the well-to-do; gold buys the latest styles and disdains the cost. There are few old clothes among the poor, for the poor are very few. So as I looked upon the congregation before Dr. Grant, I might as well have been in New York but for a pew full of red coats of “N. W. M. P.” (North West Mounted Police).
The succeeding day Dr. Grant called upon us, and escorted us through the military establishment that polices and also governs the Yukon territory as well as the whole Canadian Northwest. Barracks for 250 men, storerooms, armory, horse barn, dog kennel—150 dogs—jail, mad-house and courtrooms. The executive and judicial departments all under one hand and even the civil rule as well. Everywhere evidence of the cold and protection against it. A whole room full of splendid fur coats, parquets, with great fur hoods. Such garments as even an Esquimaux would rejoice in.