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.
[Illustration: ALASKAN WOMEN AND CHILDREN.]
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.
[Illustration: ALASKAN INDIANS AND HOUSE.]
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.