Part 7

We have just passed a little log cabin beneath great firs and amidst a cluster of golden aspen. Its door and solitary window are wide open. No one occupies it, or ever will. Wild things may live in it, but not man. Near the cabin, where the Yukon makes a great sweeping bend, and the swift water purls round into bubbling eddies, a narrow trail cut from the river bank leads up among the trees. The dweller in the cabin could see far up the great river; he could espy the raft or skiff or barge descending and mark its occupants; then he used to take his trusty rifle, step across to the opening in the trees at the point, and pick off his victims. Sometimes their bodies fell into the deep, cold, swift-running waters. The wolves and foxes picked their bones on the bars below. Sometimes he captured the body as well as the outfit, and sunk and buried them at leisure. The pictures of the three last men he murdered hang in the office of the chief of the Northwest Mounted Police, at Dawson, beside his own. It took three years to gather the complete chain of circumstantial evidence, but at last they hanged him, two years ago. In the beginning there were many other crimes quite as atrocious committed in this vast region of the unknown north, but soon the efficiency and systematic vigilance of the Northwest Mounted Police broke up forever the bandits and thugs who had crowded in here from all the earth, and Uncle Sam's dominion in particular. Many were hanged, many sent up for long terms, many run out. Life sentences were common for robbery. To-day the Yukon country is more free from crime than West Virginia, and Dawson more orderly than Charleston.

TENTH LETTER.

DOG LORE OF THE NORTH.

WHITE HORSE, Sunday, September 20, 1903.

We arrived about nine o'clock this morning. The voyage up the Yukon from Dawson has taken us since Wednesday at 2:30, when we cast off and stemmed the swift waters--twenty-four hours longer than going down. During the week of our stay at Dawson the days grew perceptibly shorter and the nights colder. There is no autumn in this land. Two weeks ago the foliage had just begun to turn; a week ago the aspens and birches were showing a golden yellow, but the willows and alders were yet green. Now every leaf is saffron and golden--gamboge--and red. In a week or more they will have mostly fallen. As yet the waters of the Yukon and affluent rivers show no ice. In three weeks they are expected to be frozen stiff, and so remain until the ice goes out next June. The seasons of this land are said to be "Winter and June, July and August." To me it seems inconceivable that the Arctic frosts should descend so precipitately. But on every hand there is evident preparation for the cold, the profound cold. Double windows and doors are being fastened on. Immense piles of sawed and cut firewood are being stored close at hand. Sleighs and especially sledges are being painted and put in order; the dogs which have run wild, and mostly foraged for themselves during the summer, are being discovered, captured and led off by strings and straps and wires about their necks. Men are buying new dogs, and the holiday of dogkind is evidently close at an end. Women are already wearing some of their furs. Ice half to a full inch forms every night, and yesterday we passed through our first snow storm, and all the mountains round about, and even the higher hills, are to-day glistening in mantles of new, fresh, soft-looking snow. The steamers of the White Pass and Yukon Railway Company will be laid up in three weeks now, they tell us, and already the sleighs and teams for the overland stage route are being gathered, the stage houses at twenty-four-mile intervals being set in order, and the "Government road" being prepared afresh for the transmission of mails and passengers.

We have just seen some of the magnificent Labrador dogs, with their keeper, passing along the street, owned by the Government post here--immense animals, as big as big calves, heifers, yearlings, I might say. They take the mails to outlying posts and even to Dawson when too cold for the horses--horses are not driven when the thermometer is more than 40 degrees below!

As I sat in the forward cabin the other night watching the motley crowd we were taking "out," two bright young fellows, who turned out to be "Government dog-drivers" going to the post here to report for winter duty, fell into animated discussion of their business, and told me much dog lore. The big, well-furred, long-legged "Labrador Huskies" are the most powerful as well as fiercest. A load of 150 pounds per dog is the usual burden, and seven to nine dogs attached each by a separate trace--the Labrador harness is used with them, so the dogs spread out fan-shaped from the sledge and do not interfere with each other. The great care of the driver is to maintain discipline, keep the dogs from shirking, from tangling up, and from attacking himself or each other. He carries a club and a seal-hide whip, and uses each unmercifully. If they think you afraid, the dogs will attack you instantly, and would easily kill you. And they incessantly attack each other, and the whole pack will always pounce on the under dog so as to surely be in at a killing, just for the fun of it, ripping up the unfortunate and lapping his blood eagerly, though they rarely eat him. And as these dogs are worth anywhere from $100 up, the driver has much ado to prevent the self-destruction of his team. And to club them till you stun them is the only way to stop their quarrels. Then, too, the dogs are clever and delight to spill the driver and gallop away from him, when he can rarely catch them until they draw up at the next post house, and it may be ten or twelve or thirty miles to that, unless it be that they get tangled among the trees or brush, when the driver will find them fast asleep, curled up in the snow, where each burrows out a cozy bed. The Malamutes, or native Indian dog, usually half wolf, are driven and harnessed differently--all in a line--and one before the other. They are shorter haired, faster, and infinitely meaner than the long-haired Huskie (of which sort the Labrador dogs are). Their delight is to get into a fight and become tangled, and the only way out is to club them into insensibility, and cut the leather harness, or they will cut the seal-hide thongs themselves at a single bite if they are quite sure your long plaited whip will not crack them before they can do it. These Malamutes are the usual dogs driven in this country, for few there are to afford or know how to handle the more powerful Labrador Huskie. And the Malamute is the king of all thieves. He will pull the leather boots off your feet while you sleep and eat them for a midnight supper; he delights to eat up his seal-hide harness; he has learned to open a wooden box and will devour canned food, opening any tin can made, with his sharp fangs, quicker than a steel can-opener. Canned tomatoes, fruit, vegetables, sardines, anything that man may put in, he will deftly take out. Even the tarpaulins and leather coverings of the goods he may be pulling, he will rip to pieces, and he will devour the load unless watched with incessant vigilance night and day. Yet, with all their wolfish greed and manners, these dogs perform astonishing feats of endurance, and never in all their lives receive a kindly word. "If you treat them kindly, they think you are afraid, and will at once attack you," the driver said; "the only way to govern them is through fear." Once a day only are they fed on raw fish, and while the Malamute prefers to pilfer and steal around the camp, the Huskie will go and fish for himself when off duty, if given the chance. Just like the bears and lynx of the salmon-running streams, he will stand along the shore and seize the fish that is shoved too far upon the shallows. Seventy miles a day is the rule with the Indians and their dog teams, and the white man does almost as much. Forty miles is it from here to Caribou Crossing, and the Northwest Mounted Police, with their Labrador teams, take the mails when the trains are snowbound and cover the distance in four to five hours. Great going this must be!

And then the conversation turned to the great cold of this far north land, when during the long nights the sun only shows for an hour or two above the horizon.

When the thermometer falls below fifty degrees (Fahr.), then are the horses put away, what few there may be, and the dogs transport the freight and mails along the Government road between White Horse and Dawson, as well as from Dawson to the mining camps to which the stage lines usually run. Indeed, throughout all of this north land, with the coming of the snow, the dogs are harnessed to the sledges and become the constant traveling companions of man.

All along the advance of winter was apparent. The green of a fortnight ago had turned into the universal golden yellow, and the fresh snow lay in more extended covering upon all the mountain summits and even far down their slopes. So it is in this far north, each day the snow creeps down and down until it has caught and covered all the valleys as well as hills.

At Caribou we met old Bishop Bompas and his good little wife, who, with a big cane, came all the way into the car to see us and say good-by. A charming couple who have given their lives doing a noble work.

Lake Bennett was like a mirror, and Lake Lindemann above it, too, seemed all the greener in contrast to the encroaching snows. We were at the White Pass Summit by 3 P. M., and then for an hour came down the 3,200 feet of four per cent. grade, the twenty miles to Skagway. The increase of snows on all the mountains seemed to bring out more saliently than ever the sharp, jagged granite rock masses. It even seemed to us that we were traversing a wilder, bolder, harsher land than when three weeks ago we entered it. And the views and vistas down into the warmer valleys we were plunging into were at times magnificent. Snow around and above us, increasing greenness of foliage below us, and beyond recurring glimpses of the Lynn fiord, with Skagway nestling at its head. In every affluent valley a glacier and a roaring torrent.

One of the newest and best boats in the trade, "The Dolphin," was awaiting us. Our stateroom was already wired for and secured. We took our last Alaska meal at the "Pack Train Restaurant," where we snacked sumptuously on roast beef, baked potatoes and coffee for seventy cents (in Dawson it would have been an easy $3.00), and walked down the mile-long pier to the boat. The tides are some twenty feet here, and the sandy bars of Skagway require long piers to permit the ships to land when the tides are out.

We cast off about 10 P. M., with the tide almost at its height, and only awoke to-day just as we were steaming out of Juneau. Now we are approaching the beautiful and dangerous Wrangel Narrows, and see everywhere above us the fresh snows of the fortnight's making.

WILD SEAS AMONG THE FJORDS.

WEDNESDAY, September 23rd.

It is the middle of the afternoon and we are just safely through the--to-day--tempestuous passage of "Dixon's Entrance," the thirty-three-mile break in the coast's protecting chain of islands and the outlet for Port Simpson to the open sea. Yesterday we passed through the dangerous twenty miles of the Wrangel Narrows just before dark, and only the swift swirls of the fighting tides endangered us; they fall and rise seventeen feet in a few hours, and the waters entering the tortuous channels from each end meet in eddying struggle somewhere near the upper end. The boats try and pass through just before the flood tide or a little after it, or else tie up and wait for the high water. If we had been an hour later, we should have had to lie by for fifteen hours, the captain said. As we turned in from Frederick Sound, between two low-lying islands all densely wooded with impenetrable forests of fir, the waters were running out against us almost in fury, but in a mile or two they were flowing with us just as swiftly.

To-day we saw a good many ducks, chiefly mallard and teal, and small divers, and my first cormorant, black, long-necked and circling near us with much swifter flight than the gull. In the narrows we started a great blue heron and one or two smaller bitterns.

From the narrows we passed into Sumner Strait, and then turning to the right and avoiding Wrangel Bay and Fort Wrangel, where we stopped going up, passed into the great Clarence Strait that leads up direct from the sea. A sound or fiord one hundred miles or more long, ten or fifteen miles wide.

The day had been clear, but, before passing through the narrows, clouds had gathered, and a sort of fierce Scotch mist had blown our rain-coats wet. On coming out into wider waters, the storm had become a gale. The wildest night we have had since twelve months ago in the tempest of the year upon the Gulf of Finland. To-day, until now, the waters have been too boisterous to write. All down Clarence Strait, until we turned into Revilla and Gigedo Channels--named for and by the Spanish discoverers--and across the thirty-three miles of Dixon's Entrance, we have shuttlecocked about at the mercy of the gale and in the teeth of the running sea. The guests at table have been few, but now we are snug behind Porcher Island and passing into the smooth waters of Greenville Channel, so I am able to write again. The Swedish captain says the storm is our equinoctial, and that may be, and now that the sun is out and the blue sky appearing, we shall soon forget the stress, although to-night, as we pass from Fitzhugh Sound into Queen Charlotte Sound, we shall have a taste of the Pacific swell again, and probably yet have some thick weather in the Gulf of Georgia. Considering the lateness of the season, we are, all in all, satisfied that we rightly gave up the St. Michaels trip, though it has sorely disappointed us not to have seen the entire two thousand miles of the mighty Yukon.

Already we notice the moderation of the temperature and the greater altitude of the sun, for we are quite one thousand miles south of Dawson, while the air has lost its quickening, exhilarating, tonic quality.

We are becoming right well acquainted with our sundry shipmates, particularly those who have "come out" from the Yukon with us. Among them we have found out another interesting man. Across the table from us on the steamer "White Horse" sat a shock-headed man of about thirty years, tall, very tall, but muscularly built, with a strong, square jaw and firm, blue eyes. A fellow to have his own way; a bad man in a mix-up. A flannel shirt, no collar, rough clothes. Possibly a gentleman, perhaps a boss tough. We find him a graduate of the University of Michigan. He has lived in Mexico, and now for five straight years has been "mushing it," and prospecting in the far north; has tramped almost to the Arctic Sea, into the water-shed of the Mackenzie, and bossed fifty to one hundred men at the Klondike and Dominion diggings. His camera has always been his companion, and for an hour yesterday he sat in our cabin and read to us from the MSS. some of the verse and poems with which his valise is stacked. Some of the things are charming and some will bring the tears. This far north land of gold and frost has as yet sent out no poet to depict its hopes, its perils, its wrecks. It may be that he is the man. His name is Luther F. Campbell, and you may watch for the name. And so we meet all sorts.

FRIDAY, September 25th.