The position occupied by Jacob Welse was certainly an anomalous one.
He was a giant trader in a country without commerce, a ripened product
of the nineteenth century flourishing in a society as primitive as that
of the Mediterranean vandals. A captain of industry and a splendid
monopolist, he dominated the most independent aggregate of men ever
drawn together from the ends of the earth. An economic missionary, a
commercial St. Paul, he preached the doctrines of expediency and force.
Believing in the natural rights of man, a child himself of democracy,
he bent all men to his absolutism. Government of Jacob Welse, for
Jacob Welse and the people, by Jacob Welse, was his unwritten gospel.
Single-handed he had carved out his dominion till he gripped the domain
of a dozen Roman provinces. At his ukase the population ebbed and
flowed over a hundred thousand miles of territory, and cities sprang up
or disappeared at his bidding.
Yet he was a common man. The air of the world first smote his lungs on
the open prairie by the River Platte, the blue sky over head, and
beneath, the green grass of the earth pressing against his tender
nakedness. On the horses his eyes first opened, still saddled and
gazing in mild wonder on the miracle; for his trapper father had but
turned aside from the trail that the wife might have quiet and the
birth be accomplished. An hour or so and the two, which were now
three, were in the saddle and overhauling their trapper comrades. The
party had not been delayed; no time lost. In the morning his mother
cooked the breakfast over the camp-fire, and capped it with a
fifty-mile ride into the next sun-down.
The trapper father had come of the sturdy Welsh stock which trickled
into early Ohio out of the jostling East, and the mother was a nomadic
daughter of the Irish emigrant settlers of Ontario. From both sides
came the Wanderlust of the blood, the fever to be moving, to be pushing
on to the edge of things. In the first year of his life, ere he had
learned the way of his legs, Jacob Welse had wandered a-horse through a
thousand miles of wilderness, and wintered in a hunting-lodge on the
head-waters of the Red River of the North. His first foot-gear was
moccasins, his first taffy the tallow from a moose. His first
generalizations were that the world was composed of great wastes and
white vastnesses, and populated with Indians and white hunters like his
father. A town was a cluster of deer-skin lodges; a trading-post a
seat of civilization; and a factor God Almighty Himself. Rivers and
lakes existed chiefly for man's use in travelling. Viewed in this
light, the mountains puzzled him; but he placed them away in his
classification of the Inexplicable and did not worry. Men died,
sometimes. But their meat was not good to eat, and their hides
worthless,--perhaps because they did not grow fur. Pelts were
valuable, and with a few bales a man might purchase the earth. Animals
were made for men to catch and skin. He did not know what men were
made for, unless, perhaps, for the factor.
As he grew older he modified these concepts, but the process was a
continual source of naive apprehension and wonderment. It was not
until he became a man and had wandered through half the cities of the
States that this expression of childish wonder passed out of his eyes
and left them wholly keen and alert. At his boy's first contact with
the cities, while he revised his synthesis of things, he also
generalized afresh. People who lived in cities were effeminate. They
did not carry the points of the compass in their heads, and they got
lost easily. That was why they elected to stay in the cities. Because
they might catch cold and because they were afraid of the dark, they
slept under shelter and locked their doors at night. The women were
soft and pretty, but they could not lift a snowshoe far in a day's
journey. Everybody talked too much. That was why they lied and were
unable to work greatly with their hands. Finally, there was a new
human force called "bluff." A man who made a bluff must be dead sure
of it, or else be prepared to back it up. Bluff was a very good
thing--when exercised with discretion.
Later, though living his life mainly in the woods and mountains, he
came to know that the cities were not all bad; that a man might live in
a city and still be a man. Accustomed to do battle with natural
forces, he was attracted by the commercial battle with social forces.
The masters of marts and exchanges dazzled but did not blind him, and
he studied them, and strove to grasp the secrets of their strength.
And further, in token that some good did come out of Nazareth, in the
full tide of manhood he took to himself a city-bred woman. But he
still yearned for the edge of things, and the leaven in his blood
worked till they went away, and above the Dyea Beach, on the rim of the
forest, built the big log trading-post. And here, in the mellow of
time, he got a proper focus on things and unified the phenomena of
society precisely as he had already unified the phenomena of nature.
There was naught in one which could not be expressed in terms of the
other. The same principles underlaid both; the same truths were
manifest of both. Competition was the secret of creation. Battle was
the law and the way of progress. The world was made for the strong,
and only the strong inherited it, and through it all there ran an
eternal equity. To be honest was to be strong. To sin was to weaken.
To bluff an honest man was to be dishonest. To bluff a bluffer was to
smite with the steel of justice. The primitive strength was in the
arm; the modern strength in the brain. Though it had shifted ground,
the struggle was the same old struggle. As of old time, men still
fought for the mastery of the earth and the delights thereof. But the
sword had given way to the ledger; the mail-clad baron to the
soft-garbed industrial lord, and the centre of imperial political power
to the seat of commercial exchanges. The modern will had destroyed the
ancient brute. The stubborn earth yielded only to force. Brain was
greater than body. The man with the brain could best conquer things
primitive.
He did not have much education as education goes. To the three R's his
mother taught him by camp-fire and candle-light, he had added a
somewhat miscellaneous book-knowledge; but he was not burdened with
what he had gathered. Yet he read the facts of life understandingly,
and the sobriety which comes of the soil was his, and the clear
earth-vision.
And so it came about that Jacob Welse crossed over the Chilcoot in an
early day, and disappeared into the vast unknown. A year later he
emerged at the Russian missions clustered about the mouth of the Yukon
on Bering Sea. He had journeyed down a river three thousand miles
long, he had seen things, and dreamed a great dream. But he held his
tongue and went to work, and one day the defiant whistle of a crazy
stern-wheel tub saluted the midnight sun on the dank river-stretch by
Fort o' Yukon. It was a magnificent adventure. How he achieved it
only Jacob Welse can tell; but with the impossible to begin with, plus
the impossible, he added steamer to steamer and heaped enterprise upon
enterprise. Along many a thousand miles of river and tributary he
built trading-posts and warehouses. He forced the white man's axe into
the hands of the aborigines, and in every village and between the
villages rose the cords of four-foot firewood for his boilers. On an
island in Bering Sea, where the river and the ocean meet, he
established a great distributing station, and on the North Pacific he
put big ocean steamships; while in his offices in Seattle and San
Francisco it took clerks by the score to keep the order and system of
his business.
Men drifted into the land. Hitherto famine had driven them out, but
Jacob Welse was there now, and his grub-stores; so they wintered in the
frost and groped in the frozen muck for gold. He encouraged them,
grub-staked them, carried them on the books of the company. His
steamers dragged them up the Koyokuk in the old days of Arctic City.
Wherever pay was struck he built a warehouse and a store. The town
followed. He explored; he speculated; he developed. Tireless,
indomitable, with the steel-glitter in his dark eyes, he was everywhere
at once, doing all things. In the opening up of a new river he was in
the van; and at the tail-end also, hurrying forward the grub. On the
Outside he fought trade-combinations; made alliances with the
corporations of the earth, and forced discriminating tariffs from the
great carriers. On the Inside he sold flour, and blankets, and
tobacco; built saw-mills, staked townsites, and sought properties in
copper, iron, and coal; and that the miners should be well-equipped,
ransacked the lands of the Arctic even as far as Siberia for
native-made snow-shoes, muclucs, and parkas.
He bore the country on his shoulders; saw to its needs; did its work.
Every ounce of its dust passed through his hands; every post-card and
letter of credit. He did its banking and exchange; carried and
distributed its mails. He frowned upon competition; frightened out
predatory capital; bluffed militant syndicates, and when they would
not, backed his bluff and broke them. And for all, yet found time and
place to remember his motherless girl, and to love her, and to fit her
for the position he had made.