After the laundry my sister and her husband grubstaked me into the
Klondike. It was the first gold rush into that region, the early fall
rush of 1897. I was twenty-one years old, and in splendid physical
condition. I remember, at the end of the twenty-eight-mile portage
across Chilcoot from Dyea Beach to Lake Linderman, I was packing up with
the Indians and out-packing many an Indian. The last pack into Linderman
was three miles. I back-tripped it four times a day, and on each forward
trip carried one hundred and fifty pounds. This means that over the
worst trails I daily travelled twenty-four miles, twelve of which were
under a burden of one hundred and fifty pounds.
Yes, I had let career go hang, and was on the adventure-path again in
quest of fortune. And of course, on the adventure-path, I met John
Barleycorn. Here were the chesty men again, rovers and adventurers, and
while they didn't mind a grub famine, whisky they could not do without.
Whisky went over the trail, while the flour lay cached and untouched by
the trail-side.
As good fortune would have it, the three men in my party were not
drinkers. Therefore I didn't drink save on rare occasions and
disgracefully when with other men. In my personal medicine chest was a
quart of whisky. I never drew the cork till six months afterward, in a
lonely camp, where, without anaesthetics, a doctor was compelled to
operate on a man. The doctor and the patient emptied my bottle between
them and then proceeded to the operation.
Back in California a year later, recovering from scurvy, I found that my
father was dead and that I was the head and the sole bread-winner of a
household. When I state that I had passed coal on a steamship from
Behring Sea to British Columbia, and travelled in the steerage from there
to San Francisco, it will be understood that I brought nothing back from
the Klondike but my scurvy.
Times were hard. Work of any sort was difficult to get. And work of any
sort was what I had to take, for I was still an unskilled labourer. I
had no thought of career. That was over and done with. I had to find
food for two mouths beside my own and keep a roof over our heads--yes,
and buy a winter suit, my one suit being decidedly summery. I had to get
some sort of work immediately. After that, when I had caught my breath,
I might think about my future.
Unskilled labour is the first to feel the slackness of hard times, and I
had no trades save those of sailor and laundryman. With my new
responsibilities I didn't dare go to sea, and I failed to find a job at
laundrying. I failed to find a job at anything. I had my name down in
five employment bureaux. I advertised in three newspapers. I sought out
the few friends I knew who might be able to get me work; but they were
either uninterested or unable to find anything for me.
The situation was desperate. I pawned my watch, my bicycle, and a
mackintosh of which my father had been very proud and which he had left
to me. It was and is my sole legacy in this world. It had cost fifteen
dollars, and the pawnbroker let me have two dollars on it. And--oh,
yes--a water-front comrade of earlier years drifted along one day with a
dress suit wrapped in newspapers. He could give no adequate explanation
of how he had come to possess it, nor did I press for an explanation. I
wanted the suit myself. No; not to wear. I traded him a lot of rubbish
which, being unpawnable, was useless to me. He peddled the rubbish for
several dollars, while I pledged the dress-suit with my pawnbroker for
five dollars. And for all I know the pawnbroker still has the suit. I
had never intended to redeem it.
But I couldn't get any work. Yet I was a bargain in the labour market.
I was twenty-two years old, weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds
stripped, every pound of which was excellent for toil; and the last
traces of my scurvy were vanishing before a treatment of potatoes chewed
raw. I tackled every opening for employment. I tried to become a studio
model, but there were too many fine-bodied young fellows out of jobs. I
answered advertisements of elderly invalids in need of companions. And I
almost became a sewing machine agent, on commission, without salary. But
poor people don't buy sewing machines in hard times, so I was forced to
forgo that employment.
Of course, it must be remembered that along with such frivolous
occupations I was trying to get work as wop, lumper, and roustabout. But
winter was coming on, and the surplus labour army was pouring into the
cities. Also I, who had romped along carelessly through the countries of
the world and the kingdom of the mind, was not a member of any union.
I sought odd jobs. I worked days, and half-days, at anything I could
get. I mowed lawns, trimmed hedges, took up carpets, beat them, and laid
them again. Further, I took the civil service examinations for mail
carrier and passed first. But alas! there was no vacancy, and I must
wait. And while I waited, and in between the odd jobs I managed to
procure, I started to earn ten dollars by writing a newspaper account of
a voyage I had made, in an open boat down the Yukon, of nineteen hundred
miles in nineteen days. I didn't know the first thing about the
newspaper game, but I was confident I'd get ten dollars for my article.
But I didn't. The first San Francisco newspaper to which I mailed it
never acknowledged receipt of the manuscript, but held on to it. The
longer it held on to it the more certain I was that the thing was
accepted.
And here is the funny thing. Some are born to fortune, and some have
fortune thrust upon them. But in my case I was clubbed into fortune, and
bitter necessity wielded the club. I had long since abandoned all
thought of writing as a career. My honest intention in writing that
article was to earn ten dollars. And that was the limit of my intention.
It would help to tide me along until I got steady employment. Had a
vacancy occurred in the post office at that time, I should have jumped at
it.
But the vacancy did not occur, nor did a steady job; and I employed the
time between odd jobs with writing a twenty-one-thousand-word serial for
the "Youth's Companion." I turned it out and typed it in seven days. I
fancy that was what was the matter with it, for it came back.
It took some time for it to go and come, and in the meantime I tried my
hand at short stories. I sold one to the "Overland Monthly" for five
dollars. The "Black Cat" gave me forty dollars for another. The
"Overland Monthly" offered me seven dollars and a half, pay on
publication, for all the stories I should deliver. I got my bicycle, my
watch, and my father's mackintosh out of pawn and rented a typewriter.
Also, I paid up the bills I owed to the several groceries that allowed me
a small credit. I recall the Portuguese groceryman who never permitted
my bill to go beyond four dollars. Hopkins, another grocer, could not be
budged beyond five dollars.
And just then came the call from the post office to go to work. It
placed me in a most trying predicament. The sixty-five dollars I could
earn regularly every month was a terrible temptation. I couldn't decide
what to do. And I'll never be able to forgive the postmaster of Oakland.
I answered the call, and I talked to him like a man. I frankly told him
the situation. It looked as if I might win out at writing. The chance
was good, but not certain. Now, if he would pass me by and select the
next man on the eligible list and give me a call at the next vacancy--
But he shut me off with: "Then you don't want the position?"
"But I do," I protested. "Don't you see, if you will pass me over this
time--"
"If you want it you will take it," he said coldly.
Happily for me, the cursed brutality of the man made me angry.
"Very well," I said. "I won't take it."