In to the Yukon. Edwards William Seymour
the open season. There is no night up here for these four months, and men work all the twenty-four hours in eight-hour shifts; thus, really, more work is done than one would at first imagine. The life of the ideally successful gold digger is to toil with unflagging vigor for the four or five months of daylight and open weather, then “come out” and blow it in leisurely luxury in some comfortable city. But not all are so able to make their summer pile. They may not strike rich pay dirt, but may find it lean, or even barren, and such must just live on through ice and snow and mighty frost, hoping for more luck another year. Many are the tales of hardship and suffering and dire wreck one hears. The little graveyard out along the Pine Creek pike has many graves in it. One man died a natural death, they say, but all the rest went to their graves stark mad from disappointment, poverty and privation. Every train passing out over the White Pass Railway carries its complement of the hopelessly insane, gone mad in the hunt for gold.
In this little town or “camp,” as it is called, are very many too poor to get away, too broken in health and spirits to more than barely exist. A delicate woman, once the wife of the mayor of an Illinois city, does our washing; her husband, a maimed and frozen cripple, sits penniless and helpless while she earns a pittance at the tub. Our landlady lets rooms to lodgers, her husband’s body lying beneath the deep waters of Teslin Lake.
A Cambridge Senior wrangler passed us yesterday on the road driving two dogs hitched to a little wagon, peddling cabbages and fish. A few strike gold, and, making their piles, depart, but the many toil hopelessly on, working for a wage, or frozen or crippled, weary in spirit and out of heart, sink into penury, or die mad.
After our dinner in the tent I joined another party, some of those interested in the building of the dredge, and drove with them twenty miles up into the interior to Otter Creek, where three of them have just started an operation, sluicing for gold. We passed many cabins and small tents, where live the men who are working claims and washing for gold. Some were quite shut down for lack of water, others were eagerly at work. At one point a Mr. S – and I left the wagon and struck six miles across a great grassy mountain. We must have ascended 2,000 feet or more. An easy ascent over a vast expanse of moss and tufted grass; no trees, no bushes, no hardy herbs, nothing but grass and moss. Only on the south and west was the horizon bounded by jagged peaks and summits of snow-topped mountains. Glacial action has everywhere worn down the surface into rounded rolling domes and slopes, and for hundreds of miles the land is one wide moorland of grass and moss.
Here are many flocks of wild sheep and mountain goats, and here moose and caribou are said to abound. During the day, about the noon hour, a giant bull moose had stalked deliberately through the midst of the camp, neither quickening his pace, nor fearing man. So engrossed were the men in their search for gold, that none dropped pick or shovel to molest him.
On these higher slopes are multitudes of ptarmigan, – the birds breeding close to the permanent snow line, remaining high up during the summer heats, and gradually descending to the valleys as the fresh falling autumnal snows little by little push them down.
In Atlin, the other day, a young Swedish engineer, a graduate of Upsala, showed me a fine pair of ibex horns from one which he had shot high up on the mountains beyond the lake. The animal, though not uncommon, is difficult to get, inhabiting the most inaccessible summits and rarely descending to even the levels where the mountain sheep and goats find pasture.
A superb and seemingly boundless pasture land where great herds of cattle ought also to be feeding, and would be, except for the terror of the winter’s cold. Perhaps the reindeer will some day here find a congenial home.
We sat by fires after nightfall, and when day came icicles a foot long hung all along the drip of the flume, and in the afternoon snow fell, covering every rounded summit with its white mantle.
Returning, I walked another ten miles down the winding valley of Otter Creek. A stretch of open, grassy moorland, where in the winter-time the moose and caribou gather in numbers seeking shelter from the winds, and finding the dried grass through the scraped-off snow.
To-day H – , Sutton and I have driven for hours along the valley of Spruce Creek, visiting another industrious gold-washing section. We picnicked for lunch in an abandoned miner’s camp, and H – saw her first real washing for gold. We took the picture of one old man, a Mr. Alfred Sutton, in whose cabin we had sought shelter from a passing rain squall. He had hoped to return to England for the winter – he left there many years ago – but the gold had not come in as rich as he had hoped, so he must delay his going for one more year. Poor old fellow, his beard was long and white, so, too, his uncombed hair. He had not yet made his yellow pile, but was as hopeful as a boy of twenty. I promised to send him a copy of the photograph and he thanked me joyfully, saying, “And I shall send it to my family at home” – in England.
We are here two days longer, when we move on to Dawson and I mail these lines to you.
This is our last day in Atlin. The morning was cold like late November in Virginia, the air keen and frosty. Ice has formed in the pools, though the aspen and scrub willow and a sort of stunted alder are only turned yellow in spots and patches. The mountain-tops are now all whitened with the delicate early snows, extending like blankets of hoar-frost out beyond the margins of the snow fields that never melt.
We dine sumptuously, and all through the gold fields it is the same. The one thing men will and must have is food, good food and no stint. The most expensive canned goods, the costliest preserves, the most high-priced fresh fruits, oranges, bananas, pears and grapes, the finest beef steaks and meats, the most ample variety of vegetables. Such an average as New York gives only in her best hotels, is what the gold digger demands, will have, and freely spends his nuggets to obtain. We are astonished at such lavish eating. At the diggings where men work for wages, $4.50 and $5.00 per day, board is always included and demanded, and only this high-priced, costly food is accepted. The cooks are connoisseurs. Their wages run from $125.00 to $150.00 per month and free board. At the camp high amidst the desolate moorlands of Otter Creek, the men eat beef steaks, thick, juicy, rare, California fresh fruit and lemon meringue pie; with lemons $1.00 per dozen and eggs ten cents apiece! Dundee marmalade is eaten by the ton; the costliest canned cream is swallowed by the gallon – the one permitted, recognized and established extravagance of the gold fields is the sumptuous eating of every man who finds the gold.
This afternoon Sutton and ourselves with a few friends are going down to see the great glacier at the south end of Lake Atlin.
SIXTH LETTER
THE GREAT LLEWELLYN OR TAKU GLACIER
We have just come in on the steamboat from Atlin, and are waiting for the train which will take us to White Horse this afternoon, where we will take a river boat to Dawson.
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