CHAPTER II.

OVER THE CHILKOOT PASS.

At this time there was only one building at Dyea--a log house used as a store for trading with the natives, and known by the name of Healy's Post. (Two years afterwards, on returning to the place, I found a mushroom, sawed-board town of several thousand people; but that was after the Klondike boom.) We pitched our tents near the shore that night, spreading our blankets on the ground.

In the morning all were bustling around, following out their separate plans for getting over the Pass as soon as possible. Of the different notches in the mountain wall by which one may cross the coast range and arrive at the head waters of the Yukon, the Chilkoot, which is reached from Dyea, was at that time the only one practicable. It was known that Jack Dalton, a pioneer trader of the country, was wont to go over the Chilkat Pass, a little further south, while Schwatka, Hayes, and Russell, in an expedition of which few people ever heard, had crossed by the way of the Taku River and the Taku Pass to the Hootalinqua or Teslin River, which is one of the important streams that unite to make up the upper Yukon. But the White Pass, which afterwards became the most popular, and which lies just east of the Chilkoot, was at that time entirely unused, being a rough long trail that required clearing to make it serviceable.

The Chilkoot, though the highest and steepest of the passes, was yet the shortest and the most free from obstructions; it had been, before the advent of the white adventurer in Alaska, the avenue of travel for the handful of half-starved interior natives who were wont to come down occasionally to the coast, for the purpose of trading. The coast Indians are, as they always have been, a more numerous, more prosperous, stronger and more quarrelsome class, for the sea yielded them, directly and indirectly, a varied and bountiful subsistence. The particular tribe who occupied the Dyea region,--the Chilkoots--were accustomed to stand guard over the Pass and to exact tribute from all the interior natives who came in; and when the first white men appeared, the natives tried in the same way to hinder them from crossing and so destroying their monopoly of petty traffic. For a short time this really prevented individuals and small parties from exploring, but in 1878 a party of nineteen prospectors, under the leadership of Edmund Bean, was organized, and to overcome the hostility of the Chilkoots, a sort of military "demonstration" was arranged by the officers in charge at Sitka. The little gunboat stationed there proceeded to Dyea, and, anchoring, fired a few blank shots from her heaviest (or loudest) guns; afterwards the officer in charge went on shore, and made a sort of unwritten treaty or agreement with the thoroughly frightened natives, by which the prospectors, and all others who came after, were allowed to proceed unmolested.

The fame of that "war-canoe" spread from Indian to Indian throughout the length and breadth of the vast territory of Alaska. One can hear it from the natives in many places a thousand miles from where the incident occurred, and each time the story is so changed and disguised, that it might be taken for a myth by an enthusiastic mythologist, and carefully preserved, with all its vagaries, and very likely proved to be an allegory of the seasons, or the travels of the sun, moon, and stars. In proportion as the story reached more and more remote regions, the statements of the proportions of the canoe became more and more exaggerated, and the thunder of the guns more terrible, and the number of warriors on board increased faster than Jacob's flock. The gunboat was the butt for many good-natured jokes from navy officers, on account of her small dimensions and frail construction. Yet the natives a little way into the interior will tell you of the wonderful snow-white war-canoe, half a mile long, armed with guns a hundred yards or so in length; and by the time one gets in the neighborhood of the Arctic Circle, he will hear of the "great ship" (the native will perhaps point to some mountain eight or ten miles away) "as long as from here to the mountain"; how she vomited out smoke, fire and ashes like a volcano, and at the same time exploded her guns and killed many people, and how she ran forwards and backwards, with the wind or against it, at a terrific speed,--a formidable monster, truly!

At the time of our trip (in 1896) the immigration into the Yukon gold country had gone on, in a small way, for some years; several mining districts were well developed, and the natives had settled down into the habit of helping the white man, for a substantial remuneration. These natives were all camped or housed close to the shore. They were odd and interesting at first sight. The men were of fair size, strong, stolid, and sullen-looking; clothed in cheap civilized garb in this summer season,--it was in the early part of June--in overalls and jumpers, with now and then a woollen Guernsey jacket, and with straw hats on their heads. The women were neither beautiful nor attractive. Many of them had covered their faces with a mixture of soot and grease, which stuck well. Other women had their chins tattooed in stripes with the indelible ink of the cuttlefish--sometimes one, sometimes three, sometimes five or six stripes. This custom I found afterwards among the women of many tribes and peoples in different parts of Alaska, and it seems, in some regions at least, to be a mark of aristocracy, indicating the wealth of the parents at the time the girl-child was born. All the natives were living in tents or rude wooden huts, in the most primitive fashion, cooking by a smouldering fire outside, and sleeping packed close together, wrapped in skins and dirty blankets.

It had been the custom of the miners to engage these natives to carry their outfits for them, from Dyea, and some of the men who had come with us, immediately hired packers for the whole trip to Lake Lindeman, paying them, I think, eleven cents a pound for everything carried. The storekeeper, however, had been constructing a foot trail for about half the distance and had bought a few pack-horses, and we engaged these to transport our outfit as far as possible, trusting to Indians for the rest. We had brought with us from Juneau, on a last sudden idea, a lot of lumber with which to build our boat when we should get to Lake Lindeman, and here the transportation of this lumber became a great problem. To pack it on the horses was an impossibility, and the Indians refused absolutely to take the boards unless they were cut in two, which would destroy much of their value, and even if this were done, demanded an enormous price for the carrying; therefore it was concluded to leave them behind, and trust to good luck in the future.

In one way or another, everybody was furnished with some kind of transportation, and the whole visible population of Dyea, permanent or transient, began moving up the valley. Some of the natives put their loads in wooden dugout canoes, which they paddled, or pushed with poles, six or seven miles up the small stream which goes by the name of the Dyea River; others took their packs on their backs, and led the way along the trail. Not stronger, perhaps, than white men, the Chilkoots showed themselves remarkably patient and enduring, carrying heavy loads rapidly long distances without resting. Not only the men, but the women and children, made pack-animals of themselves. I remember a slight boy of thirteen or so, who could not have weighed over eighty pounds, carrying a load of one hundred. The dog belonging to the same family, a medium-sized animal, waddled along with a load of about forty pounds; he seemed to be imbued with the same spirit as the rest, and although the load nearly dragged him to the ground, he was patient and persevering.

The trail was a tiresome one, being mostly through loose sand and gravel alongside the stream: several times we had to wade across. As we went up, the valley became narrower, and we had views of the glacier above us, which reached long slender fingers down the little valleys from the great ice-mass on the mountain. It was evident that the glacier had once filled the entire valley. As soon as we were up a little we were obliged to clamber over the piled-up boulders in the strips of moraine which the ice had left; in places the rows were so regular that they had the appearance of stone walls.

We were seized with fatigue and a terrible hunger. "You haven't a sandwich about your clothes, have you?" I asked of some prospectors whom I overtook resting in the lee of a cliff. Here the stream becomes so rough and rapid that the natives can work their canoes no further, and so the place has been somewhat pompously named on some maps the "Head of Navigation," by which most people infer that a gunboat may steam up this far.

"No, by ----, pardner," was the answer, "if we had, we'd a' eaten it ourselves before now."

Crossing the stream for the last time, on the trunk of a fallen tree, which swayed alarmingly, the trail led up steeply among the bare rocks of the hillside. All the pedestrian groups had separated into singles by this time, every one going his "ain gait" according to his own ideas and strength, and in no mood for conversation. I overtook a young Irishman, who had started out with a pack of about seventy-five pounds; he was resting, and quite downcast with fatigue and hunger.

Just where we stopped some one had left a load of canned corn and tomatoes. We eyed them hungrily, and gravely discussed our rights to helping ourselves. We did not know the owners and could not find them--certainly they were none of those that had come with us. We could not take them and leave money, for although the natives respected "caches" of provisions, we could not expect them to do the same with money. "Again," said the Irishman, "the feller what lift them here may be dipinding on every blissed can of swate corn for some little schayme of his, while we have plenty grub of our own, if we can on'y get our flippers on it."

At this period, all through Alaska, provisions and other property was regarded with utmost respect. Old miners and prospectors have told me that they have left provisions exposed in a "cache" for a year, and on returning after having been hundreds of miles away, have found them untouched, although nearly starving natives had passed them almost daily all winter. In the mining camps the same custom prevailed. Locks were unknown on the doors. When a white man arrived at the hut of an absent prospector, he helped himself, taking enough provisions from the "cache" to keep him out of want, till he could make the next stage of his journey, and wrote on paper or on the wooden door, "I have taken twenty pounds of flour, ten pounds of bacon, five pounds of beans, and a little tea," signed his name, and departed. It was not a bill, but an acknowledgment; and to have left without making the acknowledgment constituted a theft, in the eyes of the miner population. This condition of primitive honesty did not last, however. Later, with the Klondike boom, came the ordinary light-fingeredness of civilization, and a state of affairs unique and instructive passed away.

We arrived finally at the end of the horse-trail, a spot named Sheep Camp by an early party of prospectors who killed some mountain sheep here. Steep, rocky and snowy mountains overhang the valley, with a vast glacier not far up; and here, since our visit, have occurred a number of fatal disasters, from snowslides and landslides. Pete had arrived before us: he had set up a Yukon camp stove of sheet iron, had kindled fire therein and was engaged in the preparation of slapjacks and fried bacon, a sight that affected us so that we had to go and sit back to, and out of reach of the smell, till Pete yelled out in vile Chinook "Muk-a-muk altay! Bean on the table!" There were no beans and no table, of course, but that was Pete's facetious way of putting it.

Further than Sheep Camp the horse-trail was quite too rocky and steep for the animals; so we tried to engage Indians to take our freight for the remaining part of the distance across the Pass. Up to the time of our arrival, the regular price for packing from Dyea to Lake Lindeman had been eleven cents a pound. For the transportation by horses over the first half of the distance--thirteen miles--we had paid five cents a pound, and we had expected to pay the Indians six cents for the remainder of the trip. In the first place, however, it was difficult to gather the Indians together, for they were off in bands in different parts of the neighboring country, on expeditions of their own; and when they arrived in Sheep Camp, with a bluster and a racket, they were so set up by the number of men that were waiting for their help that they took it into their heads to be in no hurry about working. Finally they sent a spokesman who, with an insolence rather natural than assumed for the occasion, demanded nine cents per pound instead of six, for packing to Lake Lindeman. It was a genuine strike--the revolt of organized labor against helpless capital.

Being in a hurry to get ahead and fulfill our mission, we should doubtless have yielded; but there were many parties camped here besides ourselves--namely, all those who had been our fellow-sufferers on board the Scrambler--and a general consultation being held among the gold-hunters, it was decided that the proposed increase of pay for labor would prove ruinous to their business. A committee representing these gentlemen waited on us and begged us not to yield to the strikers, in the carelessness of our hearts and our plethoric pocket-books, but to consider that in doing so they--the prospectors--must follow suit, the precedent being once established; whereas they were poor men, and could not afford the extra price. To this view of the case we agreed, considering ourselves as a part of the Sheep Camp community, rather than as an individual party; and the English traveller (who was likewise suspected of being overburdened with funds, and therefore likely to be careless with them) was also waited upon and persuaded to resist the demands. So everybody camped and waited, and was obstinate, for several days: not only the white men, but the Siwash.

By way of digression it may be mentioned that the word Siwash is indiscriminately applied by the white men to all the Alaskan natives, to whatever race--and there are many--they belong. The word therefore has no definite meaning, but corresponds roughly to the popular name of "nigger" for all very dark-skinned races, or "Dago" for Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, and a host of other black-haired, olive-skinned nations. The name has been said to be a corruption of the French word "sauvage,"--savage,--and this seems very likely.

Like the corresponding epithets cited, the word Siwash has a certain familiar, facetious, and contemptuous value, and this may have been the idea which prompted its use just now, when speaking of the natives as strikers and opponents. At any rate, they took the situation in a careless, matter-of-fact way; cooked, ate, slept, borrowed our kettles, begged our tea and stole our sugar with utmost cheerfulness, and were apparently contented and happy. We white men likewise tried to conceal our restlessness, and chatted in each others' tents, admired the scenery, or went rambling up the steep mountain-sides in search of experiences, exercise, and rocks. Some of us clambered over the huge boulders, each as big as a New England cottage, which had been brought here by glacial action, then up over the steep cliffs, wrenched and crumbling from the crushing of the same mighty force, supporting ourselves,--when the rocks gave way beneath our feet and went rattling down the cliff,--by the tough saplings that had taken root in the crevices, and grew out horizontally, or even inclined downwards, bent by continuous snowslides. So we reached the base of the glacier, where a sheer wall of clear blue ice rose to a height which we estimated at three or four hundred feet, back of which stretched a great uneven white ice field, as far as the eye could see, clear up till the view was lost in the mists of the upper mountains; an ice field seamed with great yawning crevasses, where the blue of the ice gleamed as streaks on the dead white.

One morning we heard a yell from the Siwash, and soon they came running over the little knoll which separated our camp from theirs, and began grabbing the articles that belonged to some of the miners. We were at a loss to know the meaning of what seemed at first to be a very unceremonious proceeding, but when we saw the miners, with many shamefaced glances at us, help the natives in the distribution of the material, we realized that these men had forsaken us and their resolutions; so greedy were they to reach the land of gold that they had gone to the natives and agreed to pay them the demanded rates on condition that they should have all the packers themselves, leaving none to us. We let these men and their natives go in peace, without even a reproach: less than a week afterwards we had the deep satisfaction of passing them on the trail, and even in lending them a hand in a series of little difficulties for which, in their haste, they had come unprepared. The veteran miner in Alaska is a splendid, open-hearted, generous fellow; the newcomer, or "chicharko," is a thing to be avoided.

After this we had to wait till the natives had got back from carrying the miners' supplies, and then we agreed, with what grace we could, to pay the price that the others had. The Indians were quite a horde, capable of carrying in one trip all the supplies belonging to our party and that of the English traveller. Since they were paid by the pound they vied in taking enormous loads; the largest carried was 161 pounds, but all the men's packs ranged from 125 to 150 pounds. Women and half-grown boys carried packs of 100 pounds. It was a "Stick" or interior Indian, named at the mission _Tom_, but originally possessed of a fearful and unpronounceable name, who carried the largest load. He was barely tolerated and was somewhat badgered by the Chilkoots, hence he fled much to the society of the whites, and would squat near for hours, always smiling horribly when looked at; he claimed to be a chief among his own wretched people, and spent all his spare time in blackening his face, reserving rings around the eyes which he smeared with red ochre--having done which, he grinned ghastly approval of himself!

Pete started over the Pass in advance of the party, to procure for us if possible a boat at Lake Lindeman.

"Dis is dirt time I gross Pass," said Pete. "Virst dime I dake leedle pack--den I vos blayed out; nex' dime I dake leedle roll of clo'es--den I vos blayed out too, py chimney: dis dime I dake notting--den I vill be blayed out too!"

The natives, after much shouting and confusion and wrangling, made up their packs about noon, and started out, we following; just before getting to snow-line they stopped in a place where a chaotic mass of boulders form a trifling shelter, grateful to wild beasts or wild men like these. Here they deposited their loads, and with exasperating indifference composed themselves to sleep. We tried to persuade them to go on, but to no avail, and we discovered afterwards, as often happened to us in our dealing with the natives, that they were right. It was June, and yet the snow lay deep on all the upper parts of the Pass; and in the long, warm days it became soft and mushy, making travel very difficult, especially with heavy packs. As soon as the sun went down behind the hills, however, the air became cool, and a hard crust formed, so that walking was much better.

We left the natives and followed a trail which led among the boulders and then higher up the mountain, where many moccasined feet had left a deep path through the icy snow. We tramped onward, sometimes on hard ice, sometimes through soft snow, strung out in Indian file, saying nothing, saving our breath for our lungs; at times the crust rang hollow to our tread, and beneath us we could hear torrents raging. It was about eight o'clock at night when we started, and the sun in the narrow valley had already gone down behind the high glaciers on the mountain-tops, even at this latitude and in the month of June; so the long northern twilight which is Alaska's substitute for night in the summer months soon began to settle down upon us. At the same time the moisture from the snow which all day long had been lying in the sun, began cooling into mists, changeful and of different thicknesses; and in the dim light gave to everything a weird and unnatural aspect.

Even our fellow-travellers were distorted and magnified, now lengthwise, now sidewise, so that those above us were powerful-limbed giants, striding up the hill, while those behind us were flattened and broadened, and seemed straddling along as grotesquely as spiders. When we drew near and looked at each other we were inclined to laugh, but there was something in the pale-blue, ghastly color of the faces that made us stop, half-frightened. At twelve o'clock it was so dark that we could hardly follow the trail; then we saw a fire gleaming like a will-o'-the-wisp somewhere above us, and clambering up the steep rock which stuck out of the snow and overhung the trail, we saw a couple of figures crouching over a tiny blaze of twigs and smoking roots. It was a native and his "klutchman" or squaw; he turned out to be deaf-and-dumb, but made signs to us,--as we squatted ourselves around the fire,--that the night was dark, the trail dangerous, and that it would be better to wait till it grew a little lighter. So we kept ourselves warm for a half-hour or more by our exertions in tearing up roots for a fire: the fire itself being nothing more than a smoky, flary pile of wet fagots, hardly enough to warm our numbed fingers by. Then a dim figure came toiling up to us. It was one of our packers, and he explained in broken, profane, and obscene English, of which he was very proud, (the foundation of his knowledge had been laid in the mission, and the trimmings, which were profuse and with the same idea many times repeated, like an art pattern, had been picked up from straggling whites) that the trail was good now. So we very gladly took up our march again.

Two of us soon got ahead of the guide and all the rest of our party, following the beaten track in the snow; after a while the ascent became very steep, as the last sheer declivity of the Pass was reached, and we began to suspect that we had strayed from the right path, for although here was a track, we could find no footprints on it, but only grooves as if from things which had slid down. Yet we decided not to go back, for we did not know how far we had strayed from the path, and the climbing was not so easy that we were anxious to do it twice. So we kept on upward, and the ascent soon became so steep that we were obliged to stop and kick footholds in the crust at every step.

It was twilight again, but still foggy, and we could see neither up nor down, only what appeared to be a vast chasm beneath us, wherein great indistinct shapes were slowly shifting--an impression infinitely more grand and appalling than the reality. At any rate, it made us very careful in every step, for we had no mind that a misplaced foot should send us sliding down the grooves we were following. At last we gained the top, found here again the trail we had lost, and waited for the rest. Around us, sticking out of the snow, were rocks, which appeared distorted and moving. It was the mists which moved past them, giving a deceptive effect. My companion suddenly exclaimed, "There's a bear!" On looking, my imagination gave the shape the same semblance, but on going towards it, it resolved itself very reluctantly into a rock, as if ashamed of its failure to "bluff." Most grown-up people, as well as children, I fancy, are more or less afraid of the dark--where the uncertain evidence of the eyes can be shaped by the imagination into unnatural things. Goethe must once have felt something like what Faust expressed when he stood at night in one of the rugged Hartz districts:

"Seh' die Baüme hinter Baüme, Wie sie schnell vorüber rücken, Und die Klippen, die sich bücken, Und die langen Felsennasen, Wie sie schnarchen, wie sie blasen."

Presently the rest of the party came up from quite a different direction and with them a whole troop of packers. The main trail, from which we had strayed, was much longer, but not so steep; while the one we had followed was simply the mark of the articles which the packers were accustomed to send down from the summit to save carrying, while they themselves took the more circuitous route.

On the interior side of the summit is a small lake with steep sides, which the miners have named Crater Lake, fancying from the shape that it had been formed by volcanic action; it has no such origin however, but occupies what is known as a glacial cirque or amphitheatre--a deep hollow carved out of the dioritic mountain mass by the powerful wearing action of a valley glacier. This lake was still frozen and we crossed on the ice, then followed down the valley of the stream which flowed from it and led into another small lake. There are several of these small bodies of water and connecting streams before one reaches Lake Lindeman, which is several miles long, and is the uppermost water of the Yukon which is navigable for boats. Our path was devious, following the packers, but always along this valley. We crossed and recrossed the streams over frail and reverberant arches, half ice, half snow, which, already broken away in places, showed foaming torrents beneath. As we descended in elevation, the ice on the little lakes became more and more rotten and the snow changed to slush, through which we waded knee deep for miles, sometimes putting a foot through the ice into the water beneath.

We were all very tired by this time and were separated from one another by long distances, each silent, and travelling on his nerve. The Indian packers, too, in spite of their long experience, were tired and out of temper; but the most pitiful sight of all was to see the women, especially the old ones, bending under crushing loads, dragging themselves by sheer effort at every step, groaning and stopping occasionally, but again driven forward by the men to whom they belonged. One could not interfere; it was a family matter; and as among white people, the woman would have resented the interference as much as the man.

Finally we came to a lake where the water was almost entirely open and were obliged to skirt along its rocky shores to where we found a brawling and rocky stream entering it, cutting us off. After a moment of vain glancing up and down in search of a ford, we took to the water bravely, floundering among the boulders on the stream's bottom, and supporting ourselves somewhat with sticks. Afterwards we found a trail which led away from the lake high over the rocky hillside, where the rocks had been smoothed and laid bare by ancient glaciers, now vanished. Here we found the remnants of a camp, left by some one who had recently gone before us; we inspected the corned beef cans lying about rather hungrily, thinking that something might have been left over. Our only lunch since leaving Sheep Camp had been a small piece of chocolate and a biscuit. The biscuit possessed certain almost miraculous qualities, to which I ascribe our success in completing the trip and in arriving first among the travellers at Lake Lindeman. I myself was the concocter of this biscuit, but it was done in a moment of inspiration, and since I have forgotten certain mystic details, it probably could never be gotten together again. It was the first and last time that I have made biscuit in my life, and I did it simply for the purpose of instruction to the others, who were shockingly ignorant of such practical matters.

We had brought a reflector with us for baking,--a metal arrangement which is set up in front of a camp-fire, and, from polished metallic surfaces, reflects the heat up and down, on to a pan of biscuit or bread, which is slid into the middle. These utensils as used in the Lake Superior region, that home of good wood-craft, are made of sheet iron, tinned; but thinking to get a lighter article, I had one constructed out of aluminum. This first and last trial with our aluminum reflector at Sheep Camp showed us that one of the peculiar properties of this metal is that it reflects heat but very little, but transmits it, almost as readily as glass does light. So when I had arrived at the first stage of my demonstration and had the reflector braced up in front of the fire, I found that the dough remained obstinately dough, while the heat passed through the reflector and radiated itself around about Sheep Camp. Still I persisted, and after several hours of stewing in front of the fire, most of the water was evaporated from the dough, leaving a compact rubbery grey BISCUIT, as I termed it. I offered it for lunch and I ate one myself; no one else did, but I was rewarded by feeling a fullness all through the tramp, while the others were empty and famished. I also was sure that it gave me enormous strength and endurance; while some of the rest were unkind enough to suggest that the same high courage which led me up to the biscuit's mouth, figuratively speaking, kept me plugging away on the Lake Lindeman trail.

We reached Lake Lindeman at about nine o'clock in the morning, and found Pete and Cooper already there. It was raining drearily and they had made themselves a shelter of poles and boughs under which they were lying contentedly enough, waiting until the packers should bring the tents. In a very short time after we had arrived all the natives were at hand, and setting down their packs demanded money. They could not be induced to accept bills, because they could not tell the denomination of them, and would as soon take a soap advertisement as a hundred-dollar note; they dislike gold, because they get so small a quantity of it in comparison with silver.

Like the Indians of the United States, the Alaskans formerly used wampum largely as a medium of exchange--small, straight, horn-shaped, rather rare shells, which were strung on thongs--but when the trading companies began shipping porcelain wampum into the country the natives soon learned the trick and stopped the use of it. I have in my possession specimens of this porcelain wampum, which I got from the agent of one of the large trading companies on the Yukon. Silver is now the favorite currency, whether or not on the basis of sound political economy; and each particular section has often a preference for some special coin, such as a quarter, ("two bits," as it is called in the language of the west coast) a half-dollar or a dollar. Where the natives have had to deal only with quarters, you cannot buy anything for half-dollars, except for nearly double the price you would pay in quarters; while dimes, however large the quantity, would probably be refused entirely.

The Chilkoots, however, on account of their residence on the coast and consequent contact with the whites, had become more liberal in their views as regarded denomination of silver, but drew the line at bimetalism, and had no faith whatsoever in the United States as the fulfiller of promises to redeem greenbacks in silver coin. So there was some trouble in paying them satisfactorily; and after they were paid they came back, begging for a little flour, a little tea, etc., and keeping up the process with unwearied ardor till the supply was definitely shut off. The toughness of these people is well shown by the fact that when they had rested an hour and had cooked themselves a little food and drunk a little tea, they departed over the trail again for Sheep Camp, although they had made the same journey as the white men, who were all exhausted, and had, in addition, carried loads of as high as 160 pounds over the whole of the rough trail of thirteen miles. When affairs were settled we pitched our tents, rolled into our blankets, and for the next twenty hours slept.