THE GORDONS HIT THE TRAIL
With the spring break-up the men of the creeks abandoned their shafts
and turned their attention to sluicing their dumps. The Northland knows
no gradual merging of Winter into Spring. One day it is Winter, and the
next day it is Spring--unequivocally, and undeniably Spring. Here is no
half-hearted surrender of the Frost King after weeks of dawdling effort
to maintain his sway. For here he fights in his own fastness--fights
with unabated fury to maintain his iron grip on the frozen land--fights
to the last gasp with no sign of weakening. For only at the point of
utter annihilation does he yield up his sceptre to Spring.
Water from melting snows trickles down the sides of the mountains,
pours from the mouths of “dry washes,” and rushes in leaping torrents
over the surface of ice-locked creeks. The thick creek ice, loosened
by the torrent, lets go in places and allows the surface water to get
beneath it. Scattered cakes float down on the flood. More cakes, and
more, until the whole surface becomes a mass of grinding, whirling
cakes. Jams form at bends and upon the shallows, ice cakes up-end,
leap clear of the water to be forced higher and higher by the grinding,
battering impact of other cakes. Behind these jams the water rises,
bursting from the creek beds in a hundred places, overflooding
lowlands, cutting new channels, but rising always until at last the
high-flung mass of cakes can no longer withstand its weight, and with a
mighty roar the jam lets go, the whole mass of grinding, crashing cakes
rides the crest of the suddenly released flood to crash into the next
jam.
It was after the run-out of ice cakes that the work of sluicing
began. The men of the creeks worked that spring with an air of tense
expectancy. What would the “clean-up” show? Men knew that the strike
was rich, the test pans had showed that. But, how rich? All day
long, in rapidly lengthening days the sourdoughs toiled wet to their
middles in snow water to answer that question. For the “clean-up” is
the harvest of the gold diggers. And the clean-up that year was big.
Work on the frozen dumps had scarcely started before men knew that
the prediction that they were riding the richest strike yet made was
an established fact. Rumor piled upon rumor as the dust poured into
the camp. Dawson real estate increased in value by leaps and bounds.
McCarty, his safe full to overflowing, was forced to decline storage
room for the dust that poured in from the creeks.
Summer brought the first rush of the _chechakos_. Down the Yukon they
came in canoes, in boats of every shape, kind and description, on
rafts and on anything that by any possible act of manipulation could
be made to float. They swarmed the camp and spread out into the hills.
Stampedes were of daily occurrence. Every creek, and feeder, and pup
was staked from rim to rim--and still they came. Although wages were
high, few of that first onrush were content to work for wages. They
heard the stories of gold, gazed with blazing eyes upon coarse gold in
the scales, saw men shake raw gold from the mouths of sacks in payment
for drinks at the bar, and straightway they headed into the hills. It
was pitiful, but there was none to pity. The newcomers looked on and
did likewise, and the sourdoughs looked on, and grinned. Their fortunes
were assured, and they knew that in the fall laborers would be plenty.
As MacShane had predicted, however, not all of the sourdoughs sluiced
great wealth from their dumps. A few there were who struck it big,
counting their dust in hundreds of thousands, many counted in thousands
and tens of thousands, and many more found that their dumps had yielded
scarcely better than wages.
Among these latter was Old Man Gordon. The pay streak on his claim
turned out to be all in the grass roots, that is, the only gravel that
was really worth working lay close to the surface. His whole dump
averaged better than wages, but the lean gravel thrown from the deeper
half of the shaft showed that the pay streak would peter out long
before bed rock was reached.
By the time Gordon discovered this fact the _chechakos_ had already
staked the country for miles around, and although he located several
new claims, he failed to strike anything that showed.
For three years he stayed by his claim, getting what there was on the
surface by top stripping, and only now and then sinking a shaft in hope
of hitting a lucky spot on the lower level.
Then, he sold out for a few hundred dollars to a _chechako_ and
procuring a poling boat drifted northward down the great river. For
another year he sniped on the Birch Creek bars, and then hearing
whispers of a strike on the Koyukuk, he once more loaded his wife and
child into a poling boat and, dropping down the Yukon to the mouth of
the Koyukuk, spent an entire summer in ascending six hundred miles of
its course that lay between the Yukon and the newfound placers.
It was gruelling and laborious work, track lining and poling the
heavily loaded boat against the swift and treacherous current of the
Koyukuk. And it was work that all three shared equally. For Lou, a
lithe bodied, rather ungainly young miss of fifteen, who seemed somehow
to be mostly legs and arms, and the legs and arms all muscle, did a
man’s work every day. Nor was her mother far behind her in the matter
of handling a pole or paddle, or pulling on the track line. They were
in the land of the midnight sun, now, and the continuous daylight
was a source of never-ending wonder to the girl. Nor was the actual
visualizing of the phenomenon any the less wonderful because she could
demonstrate the text book explanation for it. For, despite the fact
that her life had been spent entirely in the remoter outlands, yet
she had suffered not one whit in any detail of her education. For her
mother had been an apt pupil of a famous old mission school on the
Mackenzie, and she took a great pride in passing the education she had
gained on to her little daughter.
They were a happy family--the Gordon’s. Simple and God-fearing in their
belief, and simple and contented in their manner of life. For them the
semi-nomadic life of the Northland was no hardship. It was merely the
accepted fact of a normal existence. When the luck of the early Dawson
days piled up a small surplus of dust, they accepted their good fortune
with unboastful equanimity, and later when the claim petered out, and
the high prices drained their little surplus, they accepted the reverse
of fortune with philosophic stoicism. As their daily lives were sternly
ordered by the vicissitudes of a stern land so was their religion a
stern and unflexible code of laws. The much thumbed Bible that Gordon
read daily was the dictated word of God, and as such was to be believed
literally, word for word. The code of law set down in the Gude Book
was the code of law subscribed and authorized by God. Any act not
in accordance with this code was therefore sanctioned and authorized
by the devil. Gordon feared God, and hated the devil. Yet, such was
the austere honesty engendered by this implicit belief in his austere
code, that had necessity compelled him to have had any dealing with the
devil, he would punctiliously have rendered the gentleman of darkness
his due, even to the uttermost farthing. For it was his pride, and
the pride of his wife, and the inborn pride of his daughter that they
owed no man. At least, this had been their pride up to the moment that
Camillo Bill told him that MacShane had salted the gold he had won at
cribbage into the gravel at the bottom of the shaft. From that moment
Gordon knew, and his wife knew, and in a vague sort of way, the little
Lou sensed, that no more could they say they owed no man.
Not that they considered themselves debtors to MacShane in the sum of
the thirty-seven hundred dollars which he had won, and had seen fit to
return. The dust was his to do with as he pleased, and the fact that he
had pleased to return it to its original owner created no obligation on
the part of that owner. No, it was no money debt--this debt that the
house of Gordon owed to Burr MacShane. It was a moral debt.
When Gordon had denounced MacShane, as he rose from the card table and
refused to continue the play, he had honestly believed that MacShane
was deliberately refusing him the chance to win back, “earn back,” as
Gordon would have it, the money he had risked in an honest endeavour
to show that same MacShane the error of his ways. When Camillo Bill’s
explanation of the sudden wealth he had found at the bottom of his
shaft, had convinced him of MacShane’s honesty in his refusal to
continue the game, and his subsequent generosity in the disposal of
the dust, even in the face of public denunciation and insult--from
that moment Gordon found himself obsessed by a sense of debt. He owed
MacShane an apology. And until he should meet MacShane and offer that
apology, he was MacShane’s debtor.
With the words of Camillo Bill ringing in his ears, Gordon had that
evening quitted the Golden North Saloon, and had gone straight to his
cabin, and had laid the whole matter before his wife and daughter, nor
had he spared himself in the telling. What one Gordon owed, all Gordons
owed, therefore his debt became their debt. From the cabin he had
returned to the Golden North and publicly had denounced himself even
more bitterly than he had, the previous evening denounced MacShane.
Thus, having made all amends within his power, with a clear conscience,
he bided the time when he should meet MacShane. Nor was he lacking in
diligence in his endeavor to locate him. No traveler from the North
crossed his path, but was asked the same question: “Have ye run acrost
Burr MacShane?” And, always the answer had been, “No.”
It was the same as he floated down the Yukon, and while he worked the
Birch Creek bars, always the same question, and always the same answer,
and it was the same upon the Koyukuk.
Small chance for inquiry though, they found upon the Koyukuk, two
prospectors at the mouth of Hog River, and another one further along,
were working the bars with indifferent success. One of these, the lone
prospector of the upper bar, an old man, had known MacShane years
before on the Kuskokwim, but had not run across him since. At Bergman
the Commercial Company’s agent had known him on the Lower Yukon. At
Moses’s Village, the largest native town on the river, several of the
Indians knew him, but could not, or would not, give any information as
to his present whereabouts. At Bettles, the head of shallow-draught
steamboat navigation the Gordons remained for three weeks, the women
resting while Gordon prospected several likely looking creeks. But
the creeks had all been prospected before, so the laborious up-river
journey was resumed, with the new camp of Coldfoot as their objective,
seventy-five miles to the northward.