CHAPTER IV.

THE FORTY MILE DIGGINGS.

Forty Mile Creek is the oldest mining camp in the Yukon country, and the first where coarse gold or "gulch diggings" was found. In the fall of 1886 a prospector by the name of Franklin discovered the precious metal near the mouth of what is now called Forty Mile Creek. This stream was put down on the old maps as the Shitando River, but miners are very independent in their nomenclature, and often adopt a new name if the old one does not suit them, preferring a simple term with an evident meaning to the more euphonious ones suggestive of Pullman cars. At the time of the discovery of gold there was a post of the Alaskan Commercial Company at the mouth of the stream, but the trader in charge, Jack McQuesten, was absent in San Francisco. As the supplies at the post were very low, and a rush of miners to the district was anticipated for the next summer, it was thought best to try to get word to the trader, and George Williams undertook to carry out a letter in midwinter.

Accompanied by an Indian, he succeeded in attaining the Chilkoot Pass, but was there frozen to death. The letter, however, was carried to the post at Dyea by the Indian, and the necessary supplies were sent, thus averting the threatened famine. From 1887 to 1893 the various gulches of Forty Mile Creek were the greatest gold producers of the Yukon country, but by 1893 the supplies of gold began to show exhaustion; and about this time a Russian half-breed, by the name of Pitka, discovered gold in the bars of Birch Creek, some two hundred miles further down the Yukon.

A large part of the population of the Forty Mile district rushed to the new diggings and built the mining camp to which they gave the name of Circle City, from its proximity to the Arctic Circle. The Forty Mile district is partly in British and partly in American territory, since the boundary line crosses the stream some distance above its mouth, while Birch Creek is entirely in American territory. The world-renowned Klondike, again, is within British boundaries. So the tide of mining population has ebbed back and forth in the Yukon country, each wave growing larger than the first, till it culminated in the third of the great world-rushes after gold, exciting, wild and romantic--the Klondike boom, a fit successor to the "forty-nine" days of California, and to the events which followed the discovery of gold in Australia.

At the time of our visit, in 1896, Forty Mile Post was distinctly on the decline. Yet it contained probably 500 or 600 inhabitants, not counting the Indians, of whom there were a considerable number. These Indians were called Charley Indians, from their chief Charley. There is a mission near here and the Indians have all been Christianized. It is told that the Tanana Indians, who had no mission, and who came here out of their wild fastnesses only once in a while to trade, did not embrace Christianity, which rather elated Charley's followers, as they considered that they now had decidedly the advantage; and they openly vaunted of it. In this country at certain times of the year, particularly in the fall, great herds of caribou pass, and then one can slaughter as many as he needs for the winter's supply of meat, without much hunting, for the animals select some trail and are not easily scared from it. One fall a herd marched up one of the busiest mining gulches of Birch Creek and the miners stood in their cabin doors and shot them.

So the Indians always watch as eagerly for the caribou, as they do for the salmon in the summer. But this particular fall it happened that the animals stayed away from the Charley Indians' hunting grounds, but passed through those of the Tananas in force. The heathen then came down to the trading post laden with meat, and the chief, who knew a little English, taunted Charley in it.

"Where moose, Charley?" he asked.

"No moose," said Charley.

"Woo!" said the Tanana chief, grinning in triumph. "What's the matter with your Jesus?"

The Indians at Forty Mile Post were mostly encamped in tents or were living in rude huts of timber plastered with mud; while the white men had built houses of logs, unsquared, with the chinks filled with mud and moss and the roof covered with similar material. Prices were high throughout: A lot of land in the middle of the town, say 100 by 150 feet, was worth $7,000 or $8,000; sugar was worth twenty-five cents a pound and ordinary labor ten dollars a day. All provisions were also very expensive, and the supply was often short. Many common articles, usually reckoned among what the foolish call the necessities of life, could not be obtained by us. I say foolish, because one can learn from pioneering and exploring, upon how little life can be supported and health and strength maintained, and how many of the supposed necessities are really luxuries.

The Alaskan Eskimo lives practically on fish alone throughout the year, without salt, without bread,--just fish--and grows fat and oily and of pungent odor. But white men can hardly become so simple in their diet without some danger of dying in the course of the experiment, like the famous cow that was trained to go without eating, but whose untimely death cut short her career in the first bloom of success.

The miners have always been dependent for supplies on steamers from San Francisco or Seattle, which have to make a trip of 4,000 miles or more; and, in the early days, if any accident occurred, there was no other source.

I have heard of a bishop of the Episcopal Church, a missionary in this country, who lived all winter upon moose meat, without salt; and an old miner told me of working all summer on flour alone. When the fall came he shot some caribou, and his description of his sensations on eating his first venison steak were touching. Hardly a winter has passed until very recently when the miners were not put on rations--so many pounds of bacon and so much flour to the man,--to bridge over the time until the steamer should arrive. The winter of 1889-90 is known to the old Yukon pioneer as the "starvation winter," for during the previous summer a succession of accidents prevented the river boat from reaching Forty Mile with provisions. The men were finally starved out and in October they all began attempting to make their way down the Yukon, towards St. Michaels, over a thousand miles away, where food was known to be stored, having been landed at this depot from ocean steamers. Nearly a hundred men left the post in small boats. Some travelled the whole distance to St. Michaels, others stopped and wintered by the way at the various miserable trading posts, or in the winter camps of the Indians themselves, wherever food could be found. It happened that this year the river did not freeze up so early as usual, which favored the flight, though the journey down the lower part of the river was made in running ice.

In connection with the shortness of provisions and supplies in these early years, a story is told of a worthless vagabond who used to hang around Forty Mile Post, and whose hoaxes, invented to make money, put the wooden nutmeg and the oak ham of Connecticut to shame. There was a dearth of candles one year at the post, and in midwinter, when, for a while, the sun hardly rises at all, that was no trifling privation. The weather was cold, as it always is at Forty Mile in the winter time. The trickster had some candle molds in his possession, but no grease; so he put the wicks into the molds, which he filled with water colored white with chalk or condensed milk. The water immediately froze solid, making a very close imitation of a candle. He manufactured a large number and then started around the post to peddle them. All bought eagerly--Indian squaws to sew by, miners, shop-keepers, everybody. One man bought a whole case and shoved them under his bed; when he came to pull them out again to use, he found nothing but the wicks in a pile, the ice having melted and the water having evaporated in the warm room. What punishment was meted out to this unique swindler I do not know, but I could not learn that he was ever severely dealt with.

The evening of our arrival in Forty Mile Post we were attracted by observing a row of miners, who were lined up in front of the saloon engaged in watching the door of a large log cabin opposite, rather dilapidated, with the windows broken in. On being questioned, they said there was going to be a dance, but when or how they did not seem to know: all seemed to take only a languid looker-on interest, speaking of the affair lightly and flippantly. Presently more men, however, joined the group and eyed the cabin expectantly. In spite of their disclaimers they evidently expected to take part, but where were the fair partners for the mazy waltz?

The evening wore on until ten o'clock, when in the dusk a stolid Indian woman, with a baby in the blanket on her back, came cautiously around the corner, and with the peculiar long slouchy step of her kind, made for the cabin door, looking neither to the right nor to the left. She had no fan, nor yet an opera cloak; she was not even décolleté; she wore large moccasins on her feet--number twelve, I think, according to the white man's system of measurement--and she had a bright colored handkerchief on her head. She was followed by a dozen others, one far behind the other, each silent and unconcerned, and each with a baby upon her back. They sidled into the log cabin and sat down on the benches, where they also deposited their babies in a row: the little red people lay there very still, with wide eyes shut or staring, but never crying--Indian babies know that is all foolishness and doesn't do any good. The mothers sat awhile looking at the ground in some one spot and then slowly lifted their heads to look at the miners who had slouched into the cabin after them--men fresh from the diggings, spoiling for excitement of any kind. Then a man with a dilapidated fiddle struck up a swinging, sawing melody, and in the intoxication of the moment some of the most reckless of the miners grabbed an Indian woman and began furiously swinging her around in a sort of waltz, while the others crowded around and looked on.

Little by little the dusk grew deeper, but candles were scarce and could not be afforded. The figures of the dancing couples grew more and more indistinct and their faces became lost to view, while the sawing of the fiddle grew more and more rapid, and the dancing more excited. There was no noise, however; scarcely a sound save the fiddle and the shuffling of the feet over the floor of rough hewn logs; for the Indian women were stolid as ever, and the miners could not speak the language of their partners. Even the lookers-on said nothing, so that these silent dancing figures in the dusk made an almost weird effect.

One by one, however, the women dropped out, tired, picked up their babies and slouched off home, and the men slipped over to the saloon to have a drink before going to their cabins. Surely this squaw-dance, as they call it, was one of the most peculiar balls ever seen. No sound of revelry by night, no lights, no flowers, no introductions, no conversations. Of all the Muses, Terpsichore the nimble-footed, alone was represented, for surely the nymph who presides over music would have disowned the fiddle.

All the diggings in the Forty Mile district were remote from the Post, and to reach them one had to ascend Forty Mile Creek, a rapid stream, for some distance. Pete left us here, and we three concluded to go it alone. Inasmuch as we were young and tender, we were overwhelmed with advice of such various and contradictory kinds that we were almost disheartened. Every one agreed that it would be impossible to take our boats up the river, that we should take an "up river" boat, (that is, a boat built long and narrow, with a wide overhang, so as to make as little friction with the water as possible, and to make upsetting difficult); but when we came to inquire we found there was no such boat to be had. We were advised to take half-a-dozen experienced polers, but such polers could not be found. Evidently we must either wait the larger part of the summer for our preparations _à la mode_, or go anyhow; and this latter we decided to do. We announced our intention at the table of the man whose hospitality we were enjoying. He stared.

"You'll find Forty Mile Creek a hard river to go up," he said, slowly. "Have you had much experience in ascending rivers?"

"Very little," we replied.

"Are you good polers?" asked another.

"Like the young lady who was asked whether she could play the piano," I answered, "we don't know--we never tried." Everybody roared; they had been wanting to laugh for some time, and here was their opportunity. Later a guide was offered to us, but we had got on our dignity and refused him; then he asked to be allowed to accompany us as a passenger, taking his own food, and helping with the boat, and we consented to this. He had a claim on the headwaters of Sixty Mile, to which he wished to go back, but could not make the journey up the river alone. A year afterwards this penniless fellow was one of the lucky men in the Klondike rush and came back to civilization with a reputed fortune of $100,000.

We could row only a short distance up the creek from the post, for after this the current became so swift that we could make no headway. We then tied a long line to the bow of the boat, and two of us, walking on the shore, pulled the line, while another stood in the bow and by constant shoving out into the stream, succeeded in overcoming the tendency for the pull of the line to make the boat run into the shore or into such shallow water that it would ground. We soon reached the canyon, supposed to be the most difficult place in the creek to pass; here the stream is very rapid and tumbles foaming over huge boulders which have partially choked it. We towed our boat up through this, however, without much difficulty, and on the second night camped at the boundary line.

Here a gaunt old character, Sam Patch by name, had his cabin. He was famous for his patriotism and his vegetables. His garden was on the steep side of a south-facing hill and was sheltered from the continual frosts which fall in the summer nights, so that it succeeded well. Foreign vegetables, as well as native plants, thrive luxuriantly in Alaska so long as they can be kept from being frost-bitten: for in the long sunshiny summer days they grow twice as fast and big as they do in more temperate climates. "Sam Patch's potato patch" was famous throughout the diggings, and the surest way to win Sam's heart was to go and inspect and admire it. Sam was always an enthusiastic American, and when the Canadian surveyors surveyed the meridian line which constituted the International boundary, they ran it right through his potato patch; but he stood by his American flag and refused to haul it down--quite unnecessarily, because no one asked him to do so.

The next day we reached the mouth of the little tributary called Moose Creek. From here a trail thirty miles in length leads over the low mountains to the headwaters of Sixty Mile Creek, where several of the richest gulches of the Forty Mile district were located. We beached our boat, therefore, put packs on our backs and started. At this time the days were hot and the mosquitoes vicious, and nearly every night was frosty; so we sweat and smarted all day, and shivered by night, for our blankets were hardly thick enough. We used to remark on rising in the morning that Alaska was a delightful country, with temperature to suit every taste; no matter if one liked hot weather or moderate or cold, if he would wait he would get it inside of twenty-four hours.

We were tired when we started over the trail, and the journey was not an easy one, for we carried blankets, food, cameras, and other small necessaries. We camped in a small swamp the first night, where the ground was so wet that we were obliged to curl up on the roots of trees, close to the trunks, to keep out of the water. The second day a forest fire blocked our journey, but we made our way through it, treading swiftly over the burning ground and through the thick smoke: then we emerged onto a bare rocky ridge, from which we could look down, on the right, over the network of little valleys which feed Forty Mile Creek, and on the other side over the tributaries of Sixty Mile Creek, clearly defined as if on a map. The ridge on which we travelled was cut up like the teeth of a saw, so that a large part of our time was spent in climbing up and down.

On the latter part of the second day we found no wood, and at night we could hardly prepare food enough to keep our stomachs from sickening. My feet had become raw at the start from hard boots, and every step was a torture; yet the boots could not be taken off, for the trail was covered with small sharp stones, and the packs on our backs pressed heavily downward. The third day we separated, each descending from the mountain ridge into one of the little gulches, in which we could see the white tents or the brown cabins of the miners, with smoke rising here and there. My way led me down a rocky ridge and then abruptly into the valley of Miller Creek. As I sat down and rested, surveying the little valley well dotted with shanties, two men came climbing up the trail and sat down to chat. They were going to the spot on Forty Mile Creek which we had just left--there was a keg of whisky "cached" there and they had been selected a committee of two by the miners to escort the aforesaid booze into camp. They were alternately doleful at the prospect of the sixty mile tramp and jubilant over the promised whisky, for, as they informed us, the camp had been "dry for some time."

Descending into the camp where the men were busily working, I stopped to watch them. Gaunt, muscular, sweating, they stood in their long boots in the wet gravel and shovelled it above their heads into "sluice boxes,"--a series of long wooden troughs in which a continuous current of water was running. The small material was carried out of the lower end of the sluices by the water. Here and there the big stones choked the current and a man with a long shovel was continuously occupied with cleaning the boxes of such accumulations. Everybody was working intensely. The season is short in Alaska and the claim-owner is generally a hustler; and men who are paid ten dollars a day for shovelling must jump to earn their money.

Strangers were rare on Miller Creek in those days, and everybody stopped a minute to look and answer my greetings politely, but there was no staring, and everybody went on with his work without asking any questions. Men are courteous in rough countries, where each one must travel on his merits and fight his own battles, and where social standing or previous condition of servitude count for nothing. I wandered slowly down from claim to claim. They were all working, one below the other, for this was the best part of one of the oldest and richest gulches of the Forty Mile district. One man asked me where I was going to sleep, and on my telling him that I had not thought of it, replied that there were some empty log cabins a little distance below. Further down a tall, dark, mournful man addressed me in broken English, with a Canadian French accent, and put the same question.

"I work on ze night shift to-night," he continued, "so I do not sleep in my bed. You like, you no fin' better, you is very welcome, sair, to sleep in my cabine, in my bed."

I accepted gratefully, for I was very tired; so the Frenchman conducted me to a cabin about six feet square and insisted upon cooking a little supper for me. He was working for day's wages, he answered to my rather blunt questions, but hoped that he would earn enough this summer and the next winter to buy an outfit and enough "grub" to go prospecting for himself, on the Tanana, which had not been explored and where he believed there must be gold; prospectors get very firmly convinced of such things with no real reason.

After supper he darkened the windows for me and went to work. I sought the comfort of a wooden bunk, covering myself with a dirty bed-quilt. It was very ancient and perhaps did not smell sweet, but what did I care? It was Heaven. The darkness was delicious. I had not known real darkness for so long throughout the summer--always sleeping out of doors in the light of the Alaskan night--that I had felt continually strained and uncomfortable for the lack of it, and this darkened cabin came to me like the sweetest of opiates.

When I awoke the Frenchman was preparing breakfast. I had slept some ten hours without moving. There was only one tin plate, one cup, and one knife and fork, and he insisted upon my eating with them, while he stood by and gravely superintended, urging more slapjacks upon me. I suddenly felt ashamed that I had told him neither my name nor business, for although I had questioned him freely, he had not manifested the slightest curiosity. So without being asked I volunteered some information about myself. He listened attentively and politely, but without any great interest. It was quite apparent that the most important thing to him was that I was a stranger. Soon after breakfast I thanked him warmly and went away--I knew enough of miners not to insult him by offering him money for his hospitality.

The night shift of shovellers had given way to the day shift, and work was going on as fiercely as ever. The bottoms of all these gulches are covered with roughly stratified shingle, most of which slides down from the steep hillsides of the creek. Among the rocks on the hillsides are many quartz veins, which carry "iron pyrite" or "fool's gold"; these often contain small specks of real gold. So when all the rubble gets together and is broken up in the bottom of the stream, where the water flows through it, the different materials in the rocks begin to separate one from another, more or less, according to the difference in their weights and the fineness of the fragments into which they are broken. Now gold is the heaviest of metals, and the result is, that through all this jostling and crowding it gradually works itself down to the bottom of the heap, and generally quite to the solid rock below. This has been found to be the case nearly everywhere. In process of time the gravel accumulations become quite thick; in Miller Creek, for example, they varied from three or four feet at the head of the valley, where I was, to fifty or sixty at the mouth. But all the upper gravels are barren and valueless. Where the gravels are not deep, they are simply shovelled off and out of the way, till the lower part, where the gold lies, is laid bare; this work generally takes a year, during which time there is no return for the labor.

Once the pay gravel--as it is called--is reached, a long wooden trough called a "sluice," is constructed, the current turned through it, and the gravel shovelled in. This work can only be carried on in the summer-time, when the water is not frozen, so that the warm months are the time for hustling, day and night shifts being employed, with as many men on each as can work conveniently together. In case the barren overlying gravel is very deep, the miners wait until it is frozen and then sink shafts to the pay dirt, which they take out by running tunnels and excavating chambers or "stopes" along the bed rock. In this work they do not use blasting, but build a small fire wherever they wish to penetrate, and as soon as the gravel thaws they shovel it up and convey it out, meanwhile pushing the fire ahead so that more may thaw out. In this way they accumulate the pay dirt in a heap on the surface, and as soon as warm weather comes they shovel it into the sluices as before.

At the time of my visit, the construction of the sluices was a work of considerable labor, for as there was no sawmill in the country, the boards from which they were made had to be sawed by hand out of felled trees.

In the last few of the trough-sections or sluice-boxes, slats are placed, sometimes transverse, sometimes lengthwise, sometimes oblique, sometimes crossed, forming a grating--all patterns have nearly the same effect, namely, to catch the gold and the other heavy minerals by means of vortexes which are created. Thus behind these slats or "riffles" the gold lodges, while the lighter and barren gravel is swept by the current of water out of the trough, and the heavy stones are thrust out by the shovel of the miner. Nearly the same process as that which in nature concentrates gold at the bottom of the gravels and on top of the bed-rock is adopted by man to cleanse the gold perfectly from the attendant valueless minerals.

Everybody was hospitable along the gulch. I had five different invitations to dinner,--hearty ones, too--and some were loath to be put off with the plea of previous engagement. They were all eager for news from the outside world, from which they had not heard since the fall before; keenly interested in political developments, at home and abroad. They were intelligent and better informed than the ordinary man, for in the long winter months there is little to do but to sleep and read. They develop also a surprising taste for solid literature; nearly everywhere Shakespeare seemed to be the favorite author, all nationalities and degrees of education uniting in the general liking. A gulch that had a full set of Shakespeare considered itself in for a rather cozy winter; and there were regular Shakespeare clubs, where each miner took a certain character to read. Books of science, and especially philosophy, were also widely sought. It has been my theory that in conditions like this, where there are not the thousand and one stimuli to fritter away the intellectual energy, the mental qualities become stronger and keener and the little that is done is done with surprising vigor and clearness.

Down the creek I found a Swede, working over the gravels on a claim that had already been washed once. He had turned off the water from the sluice-boxes and was scraping up the residue from among the riffles. Mostly black heavy magnetic iron particles with many sparkling yellow grains of gold, green hornblendes and ruby-colored garnets. He put all this into a gold pan, (a large shallow steel pan such as used in the first stages of prospecting), and proceeded to "pan out" the gold yet a little more. He immersed the vessel just below the surface of a pool of water, and by skillful twirlings caused the contents to be agitated, and while the heavier particles sank quickly to the bottom, he continuously worked off the lighter ones, allowing them to flow out over the edge of the pan. Yet he was very careful that no bit of gold should escape, and when he had carried this process as far as he could, he invited me into his cabin to see him continue the separation.

Here he spread the "dust" on the table and began blowing it with a small hand-bellows. The garnets, the hornblendes and the fragments of quartz, being lighter than the rest, soon rolled out to one side, leaving only the gold and the magnetic iron. Then with a hand magnet he drew the iron out from the gold, leaving the noble yellow metal nearly pure, in flakes and irregular grains. As the material he had separated still contained some gold, he put this aside to be treated with quicksilver. The quicksilver is poured into the dust, where it forms an amalgam with the gold: it is then strained off, and the amalgam is distilled--the quicksilver is vaporized, leaving the gold behind.

This man had his wife with him, a tired, lonely looking woman. I asked her if there were no more women on the creek. She said no; there was another woman over on Glacier Creek, and she wanted so much to see her sometimes, but she was not a good woman, so she could not go. She was lonely, she said; she had been here three years and had not seen a woman.

From some of the miners I obtained a pair of Indian moccasins, which I padded well with hay and cloth to make them easy for my chafing feet; then I slung my own heavy boots on top of my pack and the next morning bade the gulch good-bye, feeling strengthened from my rest. As I climbed out of the gulch I met the miners who had gone as a committee to escort the whisky, arriving with it, white and speckled with fatigue, speaking huskily, (but not from drinking), yet triumphant. The day was cool and when one is alone one is apt to travel hard; but the unwonted lightness of my feet and the freedom from pain encouraged me, so I set my Indian moccasins into a regular Indian trot, and by noon had covered the entire fifteen miles that constituted the first half of the journey. This brought me to a locality dignified by the name of the "Half-Way House," from a tent-fly of striped drilling left by some one, in which the miners were accustomed to pass the night in their journeys over the trail. Here I found Schrader, who had arrived late the night before and was preparing to make a start. We lighted a fire and made some tea, which with corned beef and crackers, made up our lunch. While we were eating, our old companion Pete, with two more miners, came in from the opposite direction to that from which we had come; he was on his way to visit his old claim on Miller Creek. Afterwards we got away, and kept up a steady Indian trot till we reached our camp on Forty Mile Creek at about six o'clock.

We found Goodrich already arrived and wrestling with the cooking, with which he was having tremendously hard luck. This travelling thirty miles in one day, carrying an average of thirty-five pounds, I considered something of an achievement; but the tiredness which came the next day showed that the energy meant for a long time had been drawn upon.

For four days after that we worked our way up Forty Mile Creek, making on an average seven or eight miles a day. Mosquitoes were abundant, and the weather showery. We used the same method of pulling and poling as before,--a laborious process and one calculated to ruin the most angelic disposition. The river was very low and consequently full of rapids and "riffles," as the miners call the shallow places over which the water splashes. On many of these riffles our boat stuck fast, and we dragged it over the rocks by sheer force, wading out and grasping it by the gunwale. Again, where there were many large boulders piled together in deep water, the boat would stick upon one, and we would be obliged to wade out again and pilot it through by hand, now standing dry upon a high boulder, and now floundering waist deep in the cold water at some awkward step--maybe losing temper and scolding our innocent companions for having shoved the boat too violently.

We generally worked till late, and began cooking our supper in the dusk--which was now beginning to come--over a camp-fire whose glare dazzled us so that when we tossed our flapjack into the air, preparatory to browning its raw upper side, we often lost sight of it in the gloom, and it sprawled upon the fire, or fell ignominiously over the edge of the frying-pan. Those were awful moments; no one dared to laugh at the cook then. We took turns at cooking, and patience was the watchword. The cook needed it and much more so, those on whom he practiced. One of our number produced a series of slapjacks once which rivalled my famous Chilkoot biscuit. They were leaden, flabby, wretched. We ate one apiece, and ate nothing else for a week, for, as the woodsmen say, it "stuck to our ribs" wonderfully.

"How much baking powder did you put in with the flour?" we asked the cook.

"How should I know?" he answered, indignantly. "What was right, of course."

"Did you measure it?" We persisted, for the slapjack was irritating us inside.

"Anybody," replied the cook, with crushing dignity, "who knows anything, knows how much baking powder to put in with flour without measuring it. I just used common sense." So we concluded that he had put in too much common sense and not enough baking powder.

Just above where the river divides into two nearly equal forks, the water grew so shallow that we could not drag our boat further, so we hauled it up and filled it with green boughs to prevent it from drying and cracking in the sun; then we built a "cache."

It may be best to explain the word "cache," so freely used in Alaska. The term came from the French Canadian voyageurs or trappers; it is pronounced "cash" and comes from the French _cacher_, to hide. So a cache is something hidden, and was applied by these woodsmen to hidden supplies and other articles of value, which could not be carried about, being secreted until the owners should come that way again. In Alaska, when anything was thus left, a high platform of poles was built, supported by the trunks of slender trees, and the goods were left on this platform, covered in some way against the ravages of wild animals. To this structure the name "cache" came to be applied; and later was extended to the storehouses wherein the natives kept their winter supplies of fish and smoked meat, for these houses have a somewhat similar structure, being built on top of upright poles like the old Swiss lake-dwellings.

The next morning we shouldered our pack-sacks, containing our blankets, a little food, and other necessities, and were again on the tramp, this time having no trail, however, but being obliged to keep on the side of the stream. Here, as below, the river flowed in one nearly continuous canyon, but on one side or the other flats had been built out on the side where the current was slackest, while on the opposite side was deep water quite up to the bold cliffs; and since the current sweeps from side to side, one encounters levels and gravel flats, and high rocks, on the same side. Many of the cliffs we scaled, crawling gingerly along the almost perpendicular side of the rock. The constant temptation in such climbing is to go higher, where it always looks easier, but when one gets up it seems impossible to return. However, we had no accidents, which, considering how awkward our packs made us, was lucky. At other times we waded the stream to avoid the cliffs.

At night we reached the mouth of Franklin Gulch, where active mining had been going on for some time. The miners were almost out of food, the boat which ordinarily brought provisions from Forty Mile Post having been unable to get up, on account of the low water. Yet they gave us freely what they could. We took possession of an empty log cabin, lighted a fire and toasted some trout which they gave us, and this with crackers and bacon made our meal; then we discovered some bunks with straw in them, which we agreed were gilt-edged, and proceeded to make use of them without delay. Only a few of the total number of miners were here, the rest having gone over the mountain to Chicken Creek, where the latest find of gold was reported. The men had not heard from "the outside" for some time. Even Forty Mile Post was a metropolis for them and they were glad to hear from it. They had few books and only a couple of newspapers three years old.

"Doesn't it get very dull here?" we asked of an old stager; "what do you do for amusement?"

"Do!" he echoed with grave humor, "Do! why, God bless you, we 'ave very genteel amusements. As for readin' an' litrachure an' all that, wy, dammit, wen the fust grub comes in the spring, we 'ave a meetin' an' we call all the boys together an' we app'int a chairman an' then some one reads from the directions on the bakin'-powder boxes."

I set out alone for Chicken Creek the next morning, following a line of blazed trees up over the mountain from Franklin Creek. I had been told that once up on the divide one could look right down into Chicken Creek, and I have no doubt that this is true, for on attaining the top of the hill a stretch of country twenty miles across was spread out before me as on a map, while directly below was a considerable branch of Forty Mile Creek, divided into many closely adjacent gulches. One of these must be Chicken Creek, but which? There were no tents and no smoke visible, much as the eye might strain through the field-glasses. Just here the trail gave out, the blazer having evidently grown tired of blazing. Thinking to obtain a better view into the valley, I set out along the hill which curved around it, tramping patiently along until nearly night over the sharp ridges, but without ever seeing any signs of life in the great desolate country below me. When the dark shadows were striking the valleys, I caught sight of what appeared to be a faint smoke in the heart of a black timbered gulch, and I made straightway down the mountain-side for it, hurrying for fear the fire should be extinguished before I could get close enough to it to find the place. I had no doubt that this came from the log cabin of some prospector, who would be only too glad to welcome a weary stranger with a warm supper and a blanket on the floor.

On getting down, away from the bare rocks on the mountain ridge, I found deep moss, tiresome to my wearied limbs, and further down great areas of "niggerheads"--the terror of travellers in the northern swamps. These niggerheads are tufts of vegetation which grow upwards by successive accumulations till they are knee high or even more. They are scattered thickly about, but each tuft is separated completely from all the rest, leaving hardly space to step between; if one attempts to walk on top of them he will slip off, so there is nothing to do but to walk on the ground, lifting the legs over the obstacles with great exertion. The tops of the tufts are covered with long grass, which droops down on all sides, whence the name niggerheads,--_têtes de femme_ or women's heads is the name given them by the French Canadian voyageurs.

Still lower the brush and vines became so thick that it was almost impossible to force the way through in places. At last I emerged upon a grey lifeless area which seemed to have been burned over. There were no trees or plants, but the bare blackened sticks of what had once been a young growth of spruce still stood upright, though some trunks had fallen and lay piled, obstacles to travelling. The whole looked peculiarly forlorn. A little further I came to the spot where I had seen the smoke. There was nothing but a stagnant pool covered so deep with green scum that one caught only an occasional glimpse of the black water beneath, and from this, unsavory mists were rising in the chill of the evening air. I had mistaken these vapors for smoke from my post miles up the mountain. My dream of a log cabin and a blanket went up likewise in smoke.

It was now eleven o'clock at night, and twilight; I had walked at least twenty miles through a rough country and could go no further. So I broke off the smaller dried trees and sticks and lighted a fire, then I ate some crackers and bacon that I had with me, but I did not dare to drink the water of the stagnant pool, which was all there was to be had. The night grew frosty, and I had no blankets; but I lay down close to the fire and caught fifteen-minute naps. Once I woke with the smell of burning cloth in my nostrils: in my sleep I had edged too close to the grateful warmth, and my coat and the notebook in my pocket, containing all my season's notes, had caught fire. I rolled over on them and crushed out the fire with my fingers, and after that I shivered away a little further from the fire. At about three o'clock it grew light enough to see the surrounding country, and I started out again for the first point I had reached on the ridge the morning before, thinking to get back to Franklin Gulch, for I was thoroughly exhausted. On reaching the ridge, however, I met a miner coming over the trail; he agreed to pilot me to the new prospects, so I turned back again.

There were fifteen or twenty men in the gulch which we finally reached, all living in tents in a very primitive way, and all very short of provisions, yet, hospitable to the last morsel, they freely offered the best they had. They were poor, too; everybody does not get rich in the gold diggings, even in Alaska. In fact, previous to the Klondike discovery, the largest net sum of money taken out by any one man was about $30,000, while hundreds could not pay for their provisions or get enough to buy a ticket out of the country. The Klondike, too, has been badly lied about. Not one man in twenty who goes there makes more than a bare living, and many have to "hustle" for that harder than they would at home. So the hospitality of the miners, such as I found it nearly everywhere on the Yukon, is not a mere act of courtesy which costs nothing, but the genuine unselfishness which cheerfully divides the last crust with a passing stranger.

Having been strengthened by two square meals, simple but sufficient, I started back for Franklin Gulch the same night. It began to rain in torrents on the way, and this, as usual, drove out the mosquitoes and made them unusually savage. They attacked me in such numbers that in spite of my gloves and veil I was nearly frantic. The best relief was to stride along at a good round pace, for this kept most of the pests at my back, and gave me a vent for my wrought-up nerves; and at the same time I had the satisfaction of knowing I was "getting there." The thong of my moccasin became undone, but I did not dare to stop to tie it, but kept plunging along, shuffling it with me. I reached our cabin at the mouth of Franklin Gulch, and the sight of the bunk with straw in it, and the familiar grey blanket, was sweet to me.

Next day we bade the miners at the creek's mouth good-bye, with promises to hurry up the provision-boat if possible, and made our way to where we had left our boat and cache. The next morning we launched the Skookum again, and began our journey back. Going down was quicker work than coming up, not so laborious, and far more exciting. Owing to the lowness of the water, the stream was one succession of small rapids, which were full of boulders; and to steer the boat, careering like a race horse, among these, was a pretty piece of work. One pulled the oars to give headway, another steered, and the third stood in the bow, pole in hand, to fend us off from such rocks as we were in danger of striking. We soon found that the safest part of such a rapid is where the waves are roughest, for here the water, rebounding from the shallow shore on either side, meets in a narrow channel, where it tosses and foams, yet here is the only place where there is no danger of striking.

The second day out we ran twenty-five or thirty of these rapids. In running through one we pulled aside to avoid a large boulder sticking up in midstream, and then saw in front of us another boulder just at the surface, which we had not before noticed. It was too late, however, and the boat stuck fast in a second, and began to turn over from the force of the water behind. With one accord we all leaped out of the boat, expecting to find foothold somewhere among the boulders, and hold the boat or shove her off so that she should not capsize; but none of us touched bottom, though we sank to our necks, still grasping the gunwale of the boat. Our being out, however, made the boat so much lighter that she immediately slipped over the rock and went gloriously down the rapid, broadside, we hanging on. As soon as we could we clambered in, each grasped a paddle or oars or pole, and by great good luck we had no further accident.

Some distance further down we again sighted white water ahead, where the stream ran hard against a perpendicular cliff. Some miners were "rocking" gravel for gold in the bars just above; and we yelled to them to know if we could run the rapids.

"Yes," came the answer, "if you're a d----d good man!"

"All right--thanks!" we cried, and sailed serenely through. This was known by the cheerful name of Dead Man's Riffle. Owing to the strong wind blowing, the mosquitoes were not very annoying these few days; the sun was warm and bright, and the hillsides were covered thickly with a carmine flower which gave them a general brilliant appearance. These things, with the exhilaration of running rapids, made a sort of vacation--an outing, a picnic, as it were--in contrast to our previous hard work. When we got to the Miller Creek trail we took on a couple of miners who wanted to get out of the country, but had no boat in which to go down to Forty Mile Post. They had worked for some time and had barely succeeded in making enough to buy food, and now, a little homesick and discouraged, they had made up their minds to try to get out and back to "God's country" as they called it--Colorado. With their help we let our boat down through the "Cañon" safely, and the next day,--the 29th of July,--arrived at Forty Mile Post.

At the Post we found that plenty was reigning, for the first steamboat had arrived, bringing a lot of sorely-needed provisions. The trader in charge gave us a fine lunch of eggs, moosemeat, canned asparagus, and other delicacies, and then we took possession of a deserted log cabin. On ransacking around we found a Yukon lamp, consisting of a twisted bit of cotton stuck into a pint bottle of seal oil, and when it began to grow dusk we lighted it and sat down at the table and wrote home to our friends; for the steamer had gone further up the river and would return in a few days, so that letters sent down by her would probably be ahead of us in getting home--eight thousand miles! We had laid in a new stock of provisions. Flour, I remember was $8.00 for 100 pounds, and we managed to get a few of the last eggs which the steamer had brought, at $1.00 a dozen.

The Skookum had suffered considerably in our Forty Mile trip, and we spent a large part of the next day in patching her, plugging her seams with oakum and sealing them with hot pitch. One of our number, who was cooking for the boat-menders, suddenly appeared on the scene, chasing a pack of yelping dogs with our long camp-axe. He had gone to the woodpile for a moment, leaving the door ajar. At this moment a grey dog whose tail had been cut off somehow, was looking around the log house opposite--he had been on guard and watching our door for the last twenty-four hours. He uttered a low yelp which brought a dozen others together from all quarters, all lean, strong and sneaking; and they slipped into our door. When the cook turned from the woodpile a minute later he was just in time to aim a billet at the last one as he emerged from the cabin with our cheese in his mouth. They fled swiftly and were not to be caught: and an examination showed that they had, in their silent and well organized raid, cleaned our larder thoroughly, having eaten the delicacies on the spot and carried off nearly all the rest.

The Indian dog is a study, for he is much unlike his civilized brother. He rarely barks, never at strangers, and takes no notice of a white man who arrives in the village,--even though the village may never have seen such a thing, and the children scream, the women flee, and the men are troubled and silent--but he howls nights. A dog wakes up in the middle of the night, yawns, looks at the stars, and listens. There is not a sound. "How dull and stupid it is here in Ouklavigamute," he thinks; "not nearly as lively as it was in Mumtreghloghmembramute. There we had fights nearly every night, sometimes twice. If I only knew a dog I was sure I could lick--anyhow, here goes for a good long howl. I'll show them that there is a dog in town with spirit enough to make a noise, anyhow." With that he tunes up--do, re, mi, tra-la-la, dulce, crescendo, grand Wagnerian smash. The other dogs wake up and one nudges the other and says, "Oh, my, what a lark! Isn't it fun! Let's yell too--whoop, roo, riaow!" And just as men get excited at a football game, or an election, or when the fire-alarm rings, these dogs yell and grow red in the face. Then the inhabitants wake up and get out after the dogs, who run and yelp; and after a while each cur crawls into a hiding-place and goes to sleep. In the morning they wake up and wriggle their tails. "What enthusiasm there was last night--but--er--I didn't quite catch on to the idea--of course I yelled to help the other fellows--it's such fun being enthusiastic, you know."

This happens every night. The Indian dog makes it a point to stand around like a bump on a log and look stupid; when he has fooled you to that extent he will surprise you some day by a daring theft, for he is clever as a man and quick as an express train.