Adventures in Alaska
By
S. HALL YOUNG, D.D.
_Alaska Days with John Muir._ Illustrated, 12mo, cloth....
"Do you remember Stickeen, the canine hero of John Muir's dog story?
Here is a book by the man who owned Stickeen and was Muir's companion
on the adventurous trip among the Alaskan glaciers. This is not only
a breezy outdoor book, full of the wild beauties of the Alaskan
wilderness, it is also a living portrait of John Muir in the great
moments of his career."--_New York Times._
"I can see only one fault with the book, it is far too short. I should
love to read such a book as big as the dictionary. Thank you very
much!"--_Gene Stratton-Porter._
"One need not be an admirer of John Muir to be thoroughly entertained
by the lively pages. The Muir of this book is the familiar vibrant
personality. This little book, the record of these trips, is written
in a style animated and vivid without being journalistic--a style not
unlike that of the lover of glaciers himself."--_The Nation._
Adventures in Alaska
By
S. HALL YOUNG
_Author of "Alaska Days with John Muir,"
"The Klondike Clan"_
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration]
NEW YORK CHICAGO
Fleming H. Revell Company
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
Copyright, 1919, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street
[Illustration: Stalking Walrus in an Oomiak
Dr. Young's figure is to the left. This is the time he got his ivory
for the gavels]
Foreword
The author puts forth this little book of actual adventures in
the great new land of Alaska with the hope that it will afford
healthy-minded young people a true idea of some phases of human and
animal life there. These stories are picked out of an experience of
forty years and selected with a view to both unity and variety.
The first three chapters are an attempt to draw in bold outline some
dramatic episodes of the author's experience in the second of the
three great gold stampedes of the Northwest. All these struggles
for gold have in them richly dramatic elements. Life in such camps
pulses strongly with all human ambitions, affections and passions. The
missionary, if he is really to commend himself to the men who rush into
the wilderness for gold, and do them good, must, first of all, prove
himself a _man_, ready and able to do and suffer everything that falls
to the lot of the gold seekers. He must live their life and play the
game with them. He must cheerfully put up with the privations they
endure, must take the lead in their healthy sports, must alleviate
their sufferings, and, keeping himself free from the deadly gold-lust,
must show that he has in himself and can give to his fellow pioneers
something better than gold. His heart must be, for himself and those
about him, a living fountain of joy and peace.
As in his earlier work, "The Klondike Clan," the author endeavored to
draw a true picture not only of the life and conditions of the first
Northwestern gold-rush, but also of the minister's aims and field of
duty; so in this short sketch of the second Stampede his aim has been,
above all things, _truth_. Every incident is actual history, and even
the names are real. The dog story is also conscientiously true history,
and belongs to one of the minor gold stampedes.
The second section of the book--the three bear stories and the walrus
story--are also bits of history. Every pioneer missionary in Alaska
should be an ardent hunter. The author's life has often depended upon
his gun and fishing tackle. For ten years in Southeastern Alaska he
and his family had no beef or pork or mutton, but the game--animals,
birds and fish--more than made up for the lack of these.
In Interior Alaska the same conditions prevail. The wild animals
furnish not only the food of the people, both natives and whites,
but also their winter clothing. Life would be unbearable there in
"sixty-below weather" were the inhabitants unable to procure the
warm coats provided by kindly Mother Nature for the use both of her
four-footed and her human children.
The Eskimo faces the hardest conditions of almost any native race in
his battle for life; and yet he is, perhaps, the most comfortable of
any. He gets his living from the Arctic seas, the seal and walrus being
his main dependence. From the great walrus he gets meat, clam chowder,
light and fuel; its skin makes his foot-wear, the walls and roof of
his house, and his boats; its ivory furnishes his tools and implements
of the chase. When the author and his friends brought the great supply
of walrus meat to the Eskimo village of East Cape they insured the
life and comfort of its inhabitants for the winter. All this is an
essential part of a missionary's beneficent work. Good service for God
and humanity is not inconsistent with the joy of the chase.
As the author confidently expects that many of his young readers will
find their permanent homes in "The great big, broad land 'way up
yonder," he hopes this book may prove, in some degree, an introduction
to the enjoyments and achievements of the life there.
S. H. Y.
_New York._
Contents
I. THE NOME STAMPEDE 13
II. THE ANVIL 33
III. BUNCH-GRASS BILL 49
IV. MY DOGS 76
V. LOUIE PAUL AND THE HOOTZ 100
VI. OLD SNOOK AND THE COW 112
VII. NINA AND THE BEARS 131
VIII. THE ABSURD WALRUS 153
Illustrations
STALKING WALRUS IN AN OOMIAK _Frontispiece_
_Facing page_
NOME, ALASKA, SUMMER OF 1900 28
ANVIL ROCK, OVERLOOKING NOME 36
THE ODORIFEROUS BUT INTERESTING ESKIMO 48
DR. YOUNG AND HIS DOG TEAM 80
FORT WRANGELL, ALASKA, ON ETOLIN HARBOR 100
NATIVE HOUSES, SHOWING TOTEM POLES 118
FIVE KODIAK BEARS 148
I
THE NOME STAMPEDE
It was with the excitement of a veteran soldier going into a fresh
battle that I teetered over the springy plank from the Rampart shore to
the deck of the Yukon River steamboat. My year's outfit of "grub and
duds," as the miners would put it, was aboard. I grasped the hand of
Dr. Koonce, with whom I had just floated in an open boat down the Yukon
twelve hundred miles. A fine fellow--"Kooncie"! We had been camping,
and fishing, and packing, and boating together since the first of May,
1899, and it was now the middle of August. He was to stay at the new
mining town of Rampart, build a church there and learn the joyous life
of a pioneer missionary.
What a queer mix-up of men on the crowded decks of the steamboat! Wild
rumors of a ridiculous sort had reached the ears of gold hunters clear
up the two thousand miles of the swift and crooked Yukon to Dawson.
Gold! Not snugly reposing in the frozen gravel of deep gulches and
canyons cut through the high hills--where respectable and orthodox gold
ought to be; but gold on the wind-swept, stormy, treeless, exposed
coast of Seward Peninsula--the tongue that impudent young Alaska sticks
out at old Asia. Gold, like yellow corn-meal, in the beach-sands of
Bering Sea, where nobody could lawfully stake a claim, but where
anybody could go with shovel, pan and rocker and gather it up. Nuggets
a-plenty and coarse gold--enticing shallow diggings--in the bed of
Anvil Creek and other creeks and runlets in the hills, and the flat
tundra about Nome.
The reports of the new "strike," often wild and exaggerated, came
as a life-saver to weary and discouraged thousands of Klondikers,
who had packed their outfits over the terrible thirty miles of the
Chilcoot Pass in the fall of '97 or the spring of '98, sawed the
lumber themselves in the "armstrong sawmill," sailed their clumsy
boats through the lakes, shot the rapids of the Upper Yukon, spent the
summer of '98 and the winter that followed surging here and there on
"wildcat" stampedes or putting down "dry" holes on unprofitable lays,
and were now eagerly snatching at this new straw, hoping to "strike it"
on the Nome beach. From Dawson, Forty Mile, Eagle, Circle, Fort Yukon;
from wood camps and prospectors' tents along the Yukon, and now from
Rampart, these bearded, battered, sun-blistered men came rushing aboard
the steamboat.
I had engaged a state-room before the steamboat arrived, but when it
came a placard of the company owning the boat menaced us in the office:
"_All reservations cancelled. Boat overcrowded. No passengers to be
taken at Rampart_."
Of course there was a mighty howl from the Rampart men, nearly half of
whom had packed up to go on the boat. I hurried to the purser, whom I
knew, and showed my pass from the manager of the company.
"Can't help it, Doctor," he said in a loud tone, for the benefit of the
bystanders. "The boat's past her limit now, and we're liable for big
damages if anything happens. We can't take _anybody_."
Presently he slyly pulled my arm, and I followed him to an inner office
of the store. "Get your goods aboard," he directed. "You can spread
your blankets on the floor of my office."
While I was checking off my outfit and seeing it on board, I noticed
a lot of the Rampart men, with hand-trucks gathered from the various
stores, taking their own outfits aboard, ignoring the shipping clerk
and dumping their goods wherever they found a place to put them. The
officers and deck-hands were protesting and swearing, but the men went
right along loading their outfits.
Presently the captain pulled the whistle rope and ordered the plank
drawn in and the cable cast off from the "dead man." Instantly three
men marched to the cable's end, seized the man who was to cast it off
and held him. Then fully fifty men with their packs on their backs
filed down the plank. The first mate tried to stop them. He even made a
move to draw his pistol; but the foremost man--a big six-footer--threw
his arms around him and carried him back against the stairway and held
him until the men with their packs were all aboard. It was all done
quietly, and with the utmost good humor. The men grinned up at the
swearing, red-faced captain on the upper deck, and one shouted, "We'll
give you a poke of dust, Cap., when we get to Nome."
When all were aboard, somebody on the bank cast off the cable, the
swift current caught the boat, the wheel backed, and we swung around
and headed down the Yukon, bound for the new strike.
Whiskers were very much in evidence in that closely packed mob of men
that stood around on all the decks, stepping on each other's feet,
perching on stairways, boxes, pole-bunks--anywhere for a resting place.
To go from one part of the boat to another was a difficult proposition.
The most evident trait of the crowd was its good nature. The
deck-hands, among whom I recognized a lawyer friend from Dawson and
a former customs collector from Juneau, were gold-seekers like all
the rest; and it was, "Hello, Shorty!" "Ah, there, Dutch!" "Where
you goin', Jim?" between them and the newcomers. A rollicking,
happy-go-lucky crowd, all joyful at being on the way to the new
diggings. Even the officers of the boat began to smile, secretly
pleased that they had a record-breaking and most profitable load
aboard, and were free from blame for overloading, because they could
not help it.
As for me, I was well content, even to be hustled and jostled and
elbow-punched by this horde of scraggly-bearded men of the northwestern
wilderness. This was my parish, my home; and these were my comrades, my
chums, my brothers. I was just as sunburned and weather-beaten as they
were, and felt the same tingling of nerves, the same leap of the blood
at the call of fresh adventure.
I was dressed in the same sort of rough woolen mackinaw clothes and
soft flannel underwear as the men around me. I had left my clerical
suit and white shirts and collars behind, for three reasons: First,
for the sake of economy. These strong, loose garments did not cost a
third as much as broadcloth, and would wear twice as well. Besides,
it would cost a dollar and a half to have a white shirt laundered in
Interior Alaska (which, at that time, was twice the original cost of
the shirt), and twenty-five cents to do up a collar, the cost price of
which "outside" was three for a quarter. I could wash my flannel shirts
myself. Second, for comfort's sake. The soft wool of these garments
was so much warmer and more pliable than a "Prince Albert" suit; and
a starched collar would sear one's neck like fire, when it was "sixty
below." My chief reason, however, was that I wished to create no
artificial barriers between my parishioners and myself. I wished to
stand on the same social level. I desired these men to feel that I was
one of them, and could camp and "rustle," carry a pack, live on rabbits
and rough it generally as deftly and cheerfully as they--live the same
outdoor life and endure the same so-called "hardships."
The view-point of these "sour-doughs" was shown in a funny way at our
first landing place after leaving Rampart, which was the little town
of Tanana. When the boat tied up, the whistle gave three sharp hoots,
showing that the stay would be very short. As soon as the plank was
ashore a man ran up it, and when he reached the deck he called loudly:
"Is there a preacher aboard? Is there a preacher aboard?"
A grizzled old miner, who did not know me, pointed to the only man on
the steamboat who wore a Prince Albert coat and white shirt and collar,
and drawled: "Wa-al, that there feller, he's either a preacher or a
gambler; I don't know which."
The "dressed-up" man proved to be a gambler. I made myself known to the
anxious man from the village, followed him ashore and married him to a
woman who was waiting in the company's office.
That was one voyage of mingled discomfort and pleasure. Discomforts and
hardships are as you make them and take them. There were a few of that
company who grumbled and swore at being crowded, at being obliged to
stand up all day, to lie on the floor or on the piles of cord-wood at
night, besides being compelled to fairly fight for their meals or to
get their food from their own kits. But the majority of these men had
been camping and roughing it for two years. Many of them had packed
heavy loads over the Chilcoot Pass in the great Klondike Stampede, had
made their own boats and navigated hundreds of miles of unknown and
dangerous rivers, had encountered and overcome thousands of untried
experiences. To all of them these little discomforts were trifles to be
dismissed with a smile or joke, and they had contempt for any man who
fussed or complained.
One of the cheeriest of the crowd aboard the steamboat was a newsboy
twelve or thirteen years old. His name was Joe: I never knew his
surname. He had had a very wonderful time. The year before--the summer
of 1898--he was selling papers in Seattle. He heard of the high prices
paid for newspapers and magazines at the camps of the Northwest.
He bought three or four hundred copies of the Seattle P. I. (_Post
Intelligencer_) and _Times_. He paid two and a half and three cents
apiece for them, the selling price at Seattle being five cents. Then he
got five or six hundred back numbers of these papers, from a day to a
week old, for nothing. He also got, mostly by gift from those who had
read them, three or four hundred of the cheaper magazines, some new,
some a month or two old. For his whole stock he paid scarcely fifteen
dollars.
Joe smuggled himself and his papers aboard a steamboat bound for
Skagway, and worked his passage as cabin boy, waiter and general
roustabout. At Juneau and Skagway he sold about one-fourth of his
papers and magazines--the papers for twenty-five cents each and the
ten-cent magazines for fifty cents. He could have sold out, but
hearing that he could get double these prices at Dawson and down the
Yukon, held on to his stock.
He formed a partnership with an old "sour-dough" miner, who helped him
get his papers over the Chilcoot Pass and down the Yukon to Dawson.
At the great Klondike camp he quickly sold out his papers at a dollar
each, and the magazines at a dollar and a half to two and a half.
Joe spent the winter of 1898-9 at Dawson, selling the two papers
published in that city and running a general news stand, in which he
sold the reading matter he had sold before but gathered up again from
the buyers. Sometimes he sold the same magazine four or five times.
When the Nome Stampede began, Joe got into the good graces of the
manager of the steamboat company and got free passage down the Yukon.
He shared my wolf-robe on the floor of the purser's room, and we became
great chums. The boy was so bright and quick, and at the same time so
polite and accommodating, that he made friends everywhere. He was a
Sunday-school boy, and distributed my little red hymn-books when I
held service in the social hall of the steamboat on Sunday, and his
clear soprano sounded sweetly above the bass notes of the men.
"Joe," I asked him one day, "how much money have you made during the
last year and a half?"
"Well," he replied, "I sent two thousand dollars out home from Dawson
before I started down here, and with what I am making on this trip and
what I hope to make at Nome, I think I'll have five thousand dollars
clear when I land at Seattle the last of October."
"That's a dangerous amount of money for a small boy to have," I warned
him. "Have you lost any of it?"
Joe grinned. "No, I dassen't. Some card sharps tried to get me to
gamble at Dawson. They said I could double my money. But my partner
[the old miner] said he'd lick me half to death if I ever went near the
green tables. I didn't want to, anyhow. Everybody helps me take care of
my money."
"What are you going to do with it?"
"Why, give it all to mother, of course. She'll use it for me and my
sister. I'm going to school as soon as I get home. Mother works in a
store, but I guess this money'll give her a rest. She needs it."
A word more about little Joe before I leave him. He made good at Nome
in September, and sailed for Seattle the last of October. The last I
heard of him, four or five years later, he was making his way through
the University of Washington, and still managing newspaper routes in
Seattle. His is a case of exceptional good fortune; and yet I know of a
number of boys who have made remarkable sums selling papers in Alaska.
It is a boy's land of opportunity as well as a man's.
Our voyage to St. Michael was a tedious one--down the long stretches
of the Lower Yukon, worming through the sand-bars and muddy shallows
of the interminable delta, waiting through weary hours for tide and
wind to be just right before venturing out on Bering Sea. Hurrying at
last under full steam through the choppy sea, with the waves washing
the lower deck and producing panic, uproar and swearing among the men
packed upon it--we came to the harbor of St. Michael on the wind-swept,
treeless, mossy shore of Norton Sound.
I was still to work my way through a tangle of delays and adventures
before I could reach my goal--the great new camp at Nome, one hundred
and thirty miles from St. Michael.
I had first to get my outfit together on the wharf, counting the boxes
and war bags, pursuing the missing ones to other outfits and proving
my claim to them. In the confusion this was a hard job, but I only
lost two or three of my boxes. I piled my goods in a corner of the big
warehouse of the North American Trading and Transportation Co., and set
up my tent on the beach, for I was near the end of my money, and could
not pay the high prices charged at the hotels. I got into my camp kit
and did my own cooking, protecting my food as best I could against the
thievish Eskimo dogs.
Then began a search, which lasted a week, for means of getting to Nome.
The gold-hunters were putting off every day in whale boats, Eskimo
_oomiaks_, and small sloops and schooners; but these craft were too
small and uncertain for me to risk passage in them. My caution proved
wise, for five or six of these small boats, after setting out, were
never heard of again.
While I was waiting, the U. S. Revenue Cutter, _Bear_, came into the
harbor, and aboard her was Sheldon Jackson, Superintendent of Education
for Alaska, the noted pioneer missionary. He was just returning from
a tour of the native schools and reindeer stations. (He was the man
who had introduced the reindeer into Alaska from Siberia to supply the
wants of the Eskimo.)
"Hurry on to Nome," he counseled me. "You were never needed more in all
your life."
At length there limped into the harbor a little tub-like side-wheel
steamboat, belonging to the Alaska Exploration Company, whose wharf was
a mile and a half distant up the harbor. There was no way of getting my
goods across the swampy tundra of St. Michael Island to the wharf. On
the beach I found an abandoned old rowboat with open seams. I procured
pieces of boards, some oakum and pitch, and set to work to repair the
old boat. The steamboat was to sail for Nome the next forenoon. I
worked all night. I made a pair of clumsy oars out of boards. Then I
carried my goods to the leaky boat and rowed them to the dock. It took
three trips to transfer my outfit, and while I was rowing back and
forth somebody carried off my most valuable war-bag, containing most of
my foot-wear and underclothes--one hundred dollars' worth.
I was a tired man when I stumbled down the steep stairs into the dark
and stuffy hold of the little steamboat; and much more tired when,
after two and a half days of seasickness, bobbing up and down in the
choppy seas like a man on a bucking broncho, I pulled up the stairs
again and let myself down the rope-ladder into the dory which was to
take the passengers ashore at Nome.
"You can only take what you can carry on your back," announced the
captain. "There's a storm coming up and I've got to hurry to the lee of
Sledge Island, twenty miles away. You'll get your outfits when I come
back. Lucky we're not all down in Davy Jones's locker."
I strapped my pack-sack, containing my wolf-robe and a pair of
blankets, on my back, glad to get ashore on any terms. The dory
wallowed heavily in the waves, the strong wind driving it towards the
sandy beach. Boats have to anchor from one to two miles offshore at
Nome. When we reached the beach, a big wave lifted the dory and swung
it sideways. The keel struck the sand, and she turned over, dumping us
all out, the comber overwhelming us and rolling us over and over like
barrels. Drenched and battered, we crawled to land.
A heavy rain was falling as I staggered up the beach with my
water-soaked blankets on my back, looking for a lodging-house. The
beach was lined with tents, placed without regard to order or the
convenience of anybody except the owner of each tent. A few straggling
board-shacks were stuck here and there on the swampy tundra. Two or
three large, low store buildings represented the various pioneer
trading companies. The one street, which ran parallel to the beach, was
full of mud. The buildings most in evidence were saloons, generally
with dance-hall attachments. The absence of trees, the leaden, weeping
sky, the mud, the swampy tundra, the want of all light and beauty, made
this reception the dreariest of all my experiences in the new mining
camps.
But I long ago learned that nothing is so bad but that it might be
worse. I had not at that time seen Edmund Vance Cook's sturdy lines,
but the spirit of them was in my heart:
"Did you tackle the trouble that came your way
With a resolute heart and cheerful,
Or hide your face from the light of day
With a craven heart and fearful?
Oh, a trouble's a ton or a trouble's an ounce,
Or a trouble is what you make it;
And it isn't the fact that you're hurt that counts,
But only, how did you take it!"
[Illustration: Nome, Alaska, Summer of 1900
A city of tents, twenty miles long]
I soon found a sign written in charcoal on the lid of a paper
box--_Lodging_. I entered the rough building and found a cheery Irish
woman named M'Grath. There was no furniture in the house except two or
three cheap chairs and a home-made board table.
"Shure, ye can," she answered in reply to my question about spending
the night there. "Ye'll spread yer robe an' blankets on the flure, an'
it'll only cost ye a dollar an' four bits. Ye'll plaze pay in advance."
I took stock of the contents of my pocketbook. There was just five
dollars and a quarter left of the thousand dollars with which I
had started from home on the first of May. It was now the first of
September, and no more money was due me until the next spring. My food
and tent were on the steamboat and would not be likely to come ashore
for many days. It was Sunday evening, and a whole week must elapse
before I could take up a collection.
I paid my landlady and she put my blankets by her stove to dry. I paid
another dollar and a half for a supper of beans and flap-jacks--the
first food I had tasted for three days. I slept soundly that night on
the floor, without a care or anxiety. The next morning I paid another
dollar and a half for breakfast, and could not resist the temptation of
purchasing a Seattle paper (only three weeks old--what a luxury!). I
had just twenty-five cents left--and I was a stranger in this strange
corner of the earth!
I could not help laughing at my predicament as I entered the Alaska
Exploration Company's store. A bearded man standing by the stove bade
me "good-morning."
"You seem to be pleased about something," he said. "Have you struck it
rich?"
"Well, yes!" I replied; "a rich joke on me," and I told him of the fix
I was in.
"What? You are Dr. Young?" he exclaimed, shaking me heartily by the
hand. "Why, I'm a Presbyterian elder from San Francisco."
The man's name was Fickus, a carpenter, who had come to Nome to build
the store and warehouses of one of the big companies. He had held the
first religious meetings in the new camp and had found quite a circle
of Christian people.
He offered to lend me money, but I refused to take it. "No," I said,
"let us wait and see what happens."
Something happened very quickly. While we were talking a young man
entered the store and came up to me.
"I understand that you are a minister," he said.
"Yes," I replied. "What can I do for you?"
"You can marry me to the best woman in Alaska."
"Is she here?" I asked, with a triumphant smile at Fickus.
"Oh, yes; she came on the last boat from Seattle."
"When do you wish the ceremony to take place?" I inquired.
"Right now," he replied. "You can't tie the knot too quickly to suit
me."
I followed the eager young man, married him to a nice-looking girl
who was waiting in a near-by cabin, received a wedding-fee of twenty
dollars, and returned to my newly-found friend with the assurance that
my wants were supplied until my outfit would come ashore.
This was my introduction to the second great gold camp of the
Northwest--the raw, crazy, confused stampede of Nome.
II
THE ANVIL
The first two great gold camps of the Northwest were very different,
although largely composed of the same material. In physical features
they were most unlike. The Klondike was in the great, beautiful,
mountainous, forested Interior; Nome was on the bleak, treeless, low,
exposed coast of Bering Sea. To reach the Klondike you steamed from
Seattle through twelve hundred miles of the wonderful "Inside Passage,"
broke through the chain of snowy mountains by the Chilcoot Pass, and,
in your rough rowboat, shot down the six hundred miles of the untamed
and untameable Yukon. Or else you sailed twenty-three hundred miles
over the heaving Pacific and the choppy Bering Sea to St. Michael, and
then steamed laboriously against the stiff current of the same Father
Yukon eighteen hundred miles _up_ to Dawson. To reach Nome you simply
steamed the twenty-three hundred miles of Pacific Ocean and Bering
Sea; or, if you were up the Yukon, came down it to St. Michael and
across Norton Sound a hundred and fifty miles to Nome.
Though on the same parallel of north latitude, the climates of the two
camps are very unlike. In the Klondike you have the light, dry, _hot_
air of summer; the light, dry, _cold_ air of winter. There are long
periods when the sky is cloudless. In the summer of unbroken day the
land drowses, bathed in warm sunshine and humming with insect life,
no breath of air shaking the aspens; in the winter of almost unbroken
but luminous night, the Spirit of the North broods like James Whitcomb
Riley's Lugubrious Whing-whang,
"Crouching low by the winding creeks,
And holding his breath for weeks and weeks."
There are no wind-storms in the Klondike, and a blanket of fine, dry
snow covers the land in unvarying depth of only a foot or two.
On Seward Peninsula, the Spirit of Winter breathes hard, and hurls his
snow-laden blasts with fearful velocity over the icy wastes. The snow
falls to great depth, and never lies still in one place. It drifts,
and will cover your house completely under in one night, and pack so
hard that the Eskimo can drive his reindeer team over your roof in
the morning. The air becomes so full of the flying particles that you
cannot see the lead-dog of your team. Men have lost their way in the
streets of Nome and wandered out on the tundra to their death. There is
considerable sunshine in the summer, and some comparatively still days,
but there is much rain, and mossy swamps are everywhere.
The men at Nome in the fall of '99 included many who had been at Dawson
in '97, but conditions were very different. The Klondike Stampede was
composed of tenderfeet, not one in twenty of whom had ever mined for
anything before--men of the city and village and workshop and farm,
new to wilderness life, unused to roughing it. Those who reached Nome
in '99 were mostly victims of hard luck. Many were Klondikers who had
spent two winters rushing wildly from creek to creek on fake reports,
possessing themselves of a multitude of worthless claims, eating up the
outfits they had brought in with them, and then working for wages in
mines of the lucky ones to buy a passage to the new diggings. Many had
come down the Yukon in their own rowboats.
But the Klondike Stampede was the cause of other smaller but more
fruitless stampedes. These were started by steamboat companies, or by
trading companies, and often by "wildcat" mining companies, and were
generally cruel hoaxes. Scores of small steamboats, hastily built for
the purpose, went up the Yukon to the Koyakuk and other tributaries
in the summer of '98. Other scores of power-schooners and small
sailing vessels sailed through Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean and
through Kotzebue Sound to the Kobuk and Sewalik Rivers. Almost without
exception these eager gold-seekers of '98 found only disappointment,
endured the savage winter as best they could, and, out of money and
food, were making their way back to the States, when news of the
marvelous "beach diggings" at Nome met them and they flocked thither in
hopes of at least making back their "grub-stake."
As these vessels approached the new camp, the most prominent landmark
which met their eyes was a lone rock in the shape of an anvil, which
crowned the summit of the highest of the hills near the coast. At the
base of this hill rich gold diggings were found in a creek. The town
which sprung up was first called Anvil City; but the Government postal
authorities, looking at the map, found Cape Nome in the vicinity, and
the post-office was named after the Cape.
[Illustration: Anvil Rock. Overlooking Nome]
For the name "Nome" two explanations are given. It is said that the
American and Canadian surveyors who were laying out the projected
Western Union Telegraph Line across the American and Asiatic
Continents, failed to find a name for this cape and wrote it down
"No name," which was afterwards shortened to Nome. The more probable
explanation is that the surveyors asked an Eskimo the name of the cape.
Now the Eskimo negative is "No-me," and the man not understanding, or
not knowing its name said "No-me." This was written down and put on the
map as the name.
But I like Anvil, and spoke and voted for that name at the first town
meeting, held soon after I landed at the new camp. For the camp has
been a place of hard knocks from the first. Rugged men have come there
to meet severe conditions and have been hammered and broken by the
blows of adversity. Others have been shaped and moulded by fiery trial
and "the bludgeonings of chance." When I see that stone anvil I think
of Tennyson's inspired lines:
"For life is not an idle ore,
But iron, dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And battered with the shocks of doom,
To shape and use."
I was battered as hard as any one on this anvil of the Northwest; but
to-day I feel nothing but gratitude for the severe experience.
I had to wait until Saturday before the little steamer on which I came
from St. Michael returned from the shelter of Sledge Island and put my
goods ashore. In the meantime I had obtained permission to spread my
blankets on the floor of the Alaska Exploration Company's store. During
that first week we had constant storms. Five or six vessels were driven
ashore and broken up by the violence of the waves.
But I was getting my congregation together, and so was happy. A goodly
proportion of Christian men and women are always found in these gold
camps, and they are very willing workers. Before Sunday came I had
found an old acquaintance, Minor Bruce, whom I had known fifteen years
before when he was a trader in Southeastern Alaska. He offered me
the use of the loft over his fur store. Mr. Fickus, the man from San
Francisco, to whom I have made reference in a former chapter, fixed up
some seats. I got my organ carried up the ladder and found singers.
"Judge" McNulty, a lawyer friend who was handy with crayons, made fancy
posters out of some pasteboard boxes I had got from the store.
The floor of Bruce's store was cluttered with Eskimo mucklucks, bales
of hair-seal skins, and other unsavory articles; and an old Eskimo
woman, who had her lower lip and chin tattooed downwards in streaks
after the fashion of these people, sat among the skins, chewing walrus
hides and shaping them into soles for mucklucks, while the congregation
was gathering. One usher received the people at the store door, steered
them carefully between the bales and skins, and headed them to another
who helped them up the steep stairway, while a third seated them. We
had a good congregation and a rousing meeting. Our choir was one of the
best I ever heard. Our organist and leader was Dr. Humphrey, a dentist,
who had been director of a large chorus and choir; Mr. Beebe, our chief
baritone, had sung in the choir of St. Paul's Episcopal Church of
Oakland, Cal.; and there were other professionals. I give these details
as a typical beginning in a frontier camp. There is always fine talent
of all sorts in a new gold town.
Let me give right here two or three instances of the bread of kindness
"cast upon the waters" and "found after many days." Nowhere is this
Bible saying oftener realized than in the friendly wilderness.
One of the first men I met at Nome was an old Colorado miner, whom I
had known at Dawson. I had done him some kindness at the Klondike camp
during the illness and after the death of his nephew. When he found me
at Nome he greeted me warmly. "You're just the man I've been looking
for. I know you don't do any mining, but I'm going to do some for you.
I expect to go 'outside' in a few days. You come out on the tundra
with me to-morrow, and I'll stake some ground for you; then I'll take
your papers out with me and try to sell the claims."
I went with him and he marked off three claims for me, which he had
already selected. The next spring, when my long illness had plunged me
deeply into debt and I was wondering how I could pay my obligations, my
old friend returned with a thousand dollars, from the sale of one of my
claims. I paid my doctor's bills and the other debts, and rejoiced. It
was as money thrown down to me from heaven, in my time of dire need.
At Dawson, in the summer of '98, I helped an old G. A. R. man from
Missouri. He had been sick with the scurvy and was drowned out by the
spring freshets and driven to the roof of his cabin, where I found him
helpless and half-devoured by mosquitoes. I raised money for his need
and sent him out home by one of the first steamboats down the Yukon.
Before he left he pressed upon me the only gift he could offer--a fine
Parker shotgun. I took this gun with me when I went to stake my claims
and bagged a lot of ptarmigan; and a number of times afterwards I shot
others of these delicious wild chickens with it. And when I was taken
ill and my money all spent, I was able to sell the gun for a goodly sum.
One more link in this chain of kindness: When my goods came ashore and
I was able to set up my tent, I found two men, one a Norwegian, the
other a Michigander, both of whom had just arrived, without a shelter.
I took them into my tent. They helped me to move my goods, made me a
cot and fixed up tables, box-chairs and shelves for me. The Norwegian
was a very fine cook and baked my "shickens" for me most deliciously. I
kept the men in my tent until they could build a cabin. When I became
ill they would come to see me, bringing ptarmigan broth and other
delicacies; and when I was convalescing and ravenous the Norwegian came
again and again to my cabin, bringing "shickens for Mr. Zhung," and
roasted them for me, serving them with his famous nut-butter gravy. In
the language of the Northwest, "I didn't do a thing to those chickens."
Of all places in the world, I think Alaska is most fruitful in return
for little acts of kindness.
Men such as I have just described were pure metal, and the heavy blows
they received on the anvil only made their characters more beautiful
and efficient.
It was in the metal of the men themselves--what this hard life would do
for them. Some it made--some it ruined. Among the "Lucky Swedes," who
leaped in a few months from poverty to wealth by the discovery of gold
in Anvil Creek, three form a typical illustration.
One was a missionary to the Eskimos, on a small salary. At first his
gold gave him much perplexity and trouble while he was being shaped
to fit new conditions; but he rose finely to the occasion, gave a
large part of his wealth to his church board for building missions and
schools among the natives, and pursued his Christian way, honored and
beloved, to broader paths of greater usefulness.
A second Swede was also a missionary, teaching the little Eskimos on
a salary of six hundred dollars a year. His gold completely turned
his head. He fell an easy prey to designing men and women. He became
dissipated and broken in body and character. He tried to keep for his
own use the gold taken from the claim he had staked in the name of his
Mission. His Board sued him for their rights. Long litigation, in which
he figured as dishonest, selfish and grasping, followed, his church
getting only a small part of its dues. The last I heard of him he was
a mere wreck of a man, disgraced, despised and shunned by his former
friends. The anvil battering, the trial by fire, the hard blows, proved
him base metal.
The third man was a Swedish sailor and longshoreman, ignorant and
low, living a hand-to-mouth, sordid life, with no prospects of honor
or wealth. His gold at first plunged him into a wild orgy of gambling
and dissipation. He took the typhoid fever and was taken "outside."
Everybody prophesied that he would simply "go the pace" to complete
destruction.
But there was true steel in his composition. His moral fiber stiffened.
He began to think and study. He broke away from his drunken associates.
He sought the companionship of the cultured. A good woman married
and educated him. He has become one of Alaska's wealthiest and most
influential citizens, and his charities abound. The stern anvil shaped
him to world-usefulness. It is all in the _man_!
Here at Nome I first made the acquaintance of that strange race in
which I afterwards became so much interested--the Eskimo. At first they
were a source of considerable annoyance. I always felt like laughing
aloud when the queer, fat, dish-faced, pudgy folk came in sight. As
we had to depend upon driftwood for our fuel, they would come several
times a day, bringing huge basketfuls of the soggy sticks for sale at
fifty cents a basket.
They soon learned that I was a missionary, and then they would come
rolling along, forty or fifty of them at a time, and "bunch up" in
front of my tent. If I were cooking dinner they were sure to gather in
full force, and would lift up the flap of my tent, grinning at me and
eyeing every mouthful I ate. I did not know enough of their language
even to tell them to go away. Their rank native odors were overpowering
in the hot tent. You could detect the presence of one of those fellows
half a mile away if the wind were blowing from him to you. The combined
smells of a company of natives, not one of whom had ever taken a bath
in his or her life, and who lived upon ancient fish and "ripe" seal
blubber--well, I'll stop right here!
One evening at a social in our warehouse-church we played the
"limerick" game, which was then a popular craze. We would take a word
and each one would write a verse on it. One of the words was Esquimaux.
A number of the "limericks" were published in the _Nome Nugget_. With
a man's usual egotism I can only remember my own, which I saw at
intervals for several years in Eastern periodicals:
"Oh, look at this queer Esquimaux!
His nose is too pudgy to blaux.
His odors are awful;
To tell them unlawful.
The thought of them fills me with waux."
One day I was getting dinner in my tent and the usual company of
natives watching the performance, when there came along a couple of
men who had just landed and who, evidently, had never seen an Eskimo
before. I overheard their conversation.
"Say, Jim," said one, "just look there. Did you ever see the like?" (A
pause.) "Say, do you think them things has souls?"
"We-e-ll," drawled Jim, "I reckon they must have. They're human bein's.
But I'll tell you this: If they do, they've all got to go to heaven,
sure; for the devil'd never have them around."
Now let me tell you a sequel: Two years afterwards I was a Commissioner
from the newly organized Presbytery of Yukon to the General
Assembly, which met at Philadelphia. My fellow Commissioner from the
Presbytery--the elder who sat by my side--was Peter Koonooya, an
Eskimo elder from Ukeavik Church, Point Barrow. Ten years earlier,
Dr. Sheldon Jackson, then Superintendent of Education for Alaska,
had visited that northernmost point of the Continent and had started
a school and mission. Peter Koonooya was one of the fruits. He was
a native of extraordinary intelligence, a man of property, owning a
fleet of whaling _oomiaks_. He could read, write and talk English, was
a constant student of the Bible, and was considered by the Presbytery
of sufficient intelligence and piety to represent us in the supreme
Council of the Church.
I am quite certain that Peter always voted exactly right on all
questions which were up before that Assembly; because he watched me
very closely and voted as I did.
I was able, then, and in after years, to do these gentle, good-natured
natives some good, and other Christian teachers have done much more for
them. So it comes about that the condition of the Alaska Eskimo, under
the influence of the various Christian missions and schools among them,
as compared with that of their brothers and sisters of the same race
across Bering Strait in Asia, for whom nothing in a Christian way has
been done, is as day to night. They are pliable metal, and the Anvil of
the Northwest is shaping them into vessels and implements of usefulness
and honor.
[Illustration: The Odoriferous but Interesting Eskimo
Two of Dr. Young's Parishioners]
III
BUNCH-GRASS BILL
Although I had often met him on the streets of Dawson in '98, I had
not come into hand-shaking contact with Bunch-grass Bill until my
first week at Nome. Of all the social orders whose members gathered
together in clubs for humane work during the epidemic of typhoid fever,
the first to organize, besides being the strongest and most active,
was the Odd Fellows' Club. It was already organized when I arrived
and, as I belonged to the order, I was present at the second meeting.
The young lawyer who was president of the Club, taking me around the
little circle of earnest men, brought me to a black-haired, black-eyed,
sturdily-built and singularly handsome young Irishman by the name of
Billy Murtagh.
"Billy owns and runs the 'Beach Saloon,' and goes by the name of
Bunch-grass Bill," introduced our president. "I don't know how he got
into the Odd Fellows, under rules which bar saloon-keepers and bad men.
But he's in, and we'll not turn him out of the Club, at least so long
as this distress continues."
Bill made no reply to this rather uncomplimentary introduction, but
shook hands with Irish heartiness and looked at me with level gaze.
"I've seen you in my saloon at Dawson," he said.
The others laughed, and the president chided, "You oughtn't to give a
preacher away like that, Bill."
Taking a closer look at the young man, a scene at Dawson a year earlier
flashed upon me. I was collecting money to pay the passage on the
steamboat bound down the Yukon of some poor fellows who were broken and
sick, and who must go "outside" or die. I made the round of the saloons
and gambling halls, and going into one of these places was curtly
refused by one of the partners. The other, who was this young man, came
up and quietly said to the cashier, "Weigh him out two ounces ($32.00)."
"Oh, I remember you now, and your two ounces," I said to Bill; and to
the others, "I can vouch for his knowing the Second Degree of the
order, at least."
I was made chairman of the Relief Committee of the Club, and found
work a-plenty cut out for me. Although the members of the Club did not
look with indifference upon any case of distress, yet its prime object
was to look up and help the sick Odd Fellows. I prepared a bulletin
and tacked it up in the stores and saloons, directing that any cases
of distress among the members of the order should be reported to the
Committee. As the typhoid epidemic increased in virulence, the Club
found its hands full.
A day or two after this first meeting, I was passing Bill's saloon when
he called me in.
"I've just heard of a sick man," he reported, "and I think he's an Odd
Fellow." Then, after a pause, he added, "But if he isn't that doesn't
make a ---- bit of difference."
He led the way along the beach for half a mile or more, to an isolated
tent, where we found the typhoid case. Billy stayed until he made sure
that the man was well cared for in the charge of friends and a good
physician. Then he took me aside and slipped a twenty-dollar gold
piece into my hand. "Use that for him," he directed.
The next day I had to raise a hundred and fifty dollars to send an old
miner who was poor and crippled "outside." I marched at once to the
"Beach Saloon." "Billy," I said, "this old-timer has blown in all his
dust for booze; and it's up to you who have got it from him to take
care of him now."
"That's right," he promptly answered. "There's ten saloons; what would
be my share?"
"An ounce," I replied, passing him the paper.
He weighed out the gold dust. "Wait a while before going on. I'll pass
the word down the line," he said.
Half an hour afterwards I stopped again at his door. "They're all
ready," reported Bill. "If any of them guys don't come across, just
tell me."
They all "came across," and thereafter, until I left Nome, all the
saloon-keepers met every demand I made upon them without question.
When a man had been impoverished or made sick through drink I went to
the saloons, _only_, for his relief. In other cases I made a general
canvass. When collecting money for church purposes I went to everybody,
_except_ the saloon-keepers and their following.
The day before my second meeting with the Odd Fellows' Club--a rainy,
blustering day--I came to Bunch-grass Bill with a greater demand.
"It is you I want this time, Billy, not just your money," I said.
"There is a sick Odd Fellow in a tent almost a mile from here. He is
alone and lying in a puddle of water. Get your gum-boots and find three
or four other stout men and come with me."
Bill agreed at once, found a man to tend his bar, secured a squad of
strong and willing men, a stretcher from the army post and a good
physician and went with me on the errand of mercy. He worked all day
in the mud and rain. He carried the sick man to the warehouse which
we had turned into a temporary hospital, visited all the stores in an
attempt to find mattresses, and, failing in that, bought eight large
reindeer skins and piled them on the floor for a bed, bought underwear,
dry blankets and other comforts for the sick man, and laid in a supply
of delicacies for the use of the hospital. In all, he spent over fifty
dollars and a whole day of strenuous work upon the case.