.-ii! EHORS^cPyBLK bOX 2703 C l/i/uiTCunnoc YUKON.____________ (loom SOURDOUGH GOLD The Log of a Yukon Adventure BOOKS BY MARY LEE DAVIS Uncle Sam's Attic, the Intimate Story of Alaska We Are Alaskans Alaska, the Great Bear’s Cub Sourdough Gold, the Log of a Yukon Adventure “The Yukon ran West, following the sun-path” SOURDOUGH GOLD The Log of a Yukon Adventure By MARY LEE DAVIS Author of " Uncle Sam’s Attic," " We Are Alaskans,” " Alaska, the Great Beat's Cub ” W ith Maps by thb A uthor and Illustrated by Photographs W. A. WILDE COMPANY PUBLISHERS BOSTON Copyrighted, 1933, By Mary Lee Davis A ll rights reserved Sourdough Gold Printed in the United States of America J7/-2! c . /. To HOWARD ATWOOD KELLY Surgeon Extraordinary— Trail breaker o) Rare Vision Master of Strong Sympathies, Energies, and Loyalties — A Learner always, though accounted with the Wisest— l dedicate this Book SOURDOUGH: One who has wintered in the North, beyond 54° 40'; one who has " seen the ice come and go.” That is a practical and dictionary-like definition, perhaps as good as any. But to describe the real meaning of Sour­ dough-is another and a more difficult matter. If you are not a Sourdough yourself, you find it hard to discover. If you are yourself a Sourdough, you find it hard to tell. The very essence of the word is personal experience—picturing a person who knows the North so well, is so at home there, that all he needs is just his crock of living sour-dough yeast in order to set up a happy housekeeping in any farthest comer of the land. Perhaps—just perhaps—this whole true story, which " Duns Scorns ’’ and I have together put together, is our best definition of the meaning of ” Sourdough.” M ary Lee Davis. 7 CONTENTS I. Klondike Jim the Futteguhr Fakir In Red and Black 17 O n e River Ran W est 24 Silver Flute and Faery Fjord . 32 T wice '49 Is '98 . 39 U p and H ik e! .... 46 A nybody’s G old . 55 r Beds of A laska Feathers . 64 Riding W hite H orses . 74 T he K night’s M ove . 86 •r II. The Dusts of Her Streets Were Gold A T he H ub of the K londike . 97 , V W h en M ercury Froze . 108 T he Saint o f Saint M ary's . 120 4 V is M edicatrix .... 131 s?*‘ï Square M eals and Social Rounds . 140 V ictoria— or My U ncle? . 153 1 A Line from " Iolanthe ” . 167 Scarlet Curtains . 183 III. River and I T he Craft of Buddha • . 203 Spitting, Eagle .... •• . 217 Foot in the Circle . •. 228 Rolling River .... 9 10 CONTENTS M nemosyne, H er G arden . 255 T he M irror of the W ilderness . 267 W ind U pon W ater . 288 D elta and O mega . 306 K ai-ya-no—P ee-o-vah . 317 " G et Your M a n ! ” . 327 End of a Y ukon Log . 342 ILLUSTRATIONS “The Yukon ran West, following the sun-path” Frontispiece OPPOSITE PAGE “Crystal glaciers dropping to the fingering Sea” . 36 “Majestic Lynn Canal.” Rough Sketch Map of the Trail. The Surrtmit of Chilkoot Pass, that spring of ’98 . 54 Sketch Map from Dyea to Dawson. “A little city of amateur boat builders at Lake Bennett” . .70 Waiting at the Lake Camp for the ice to move. “The motley fleet which followed the ice down the Lake.” “The quiet alternation of lake and river” . 76 — “Was soon to know swift change!” “A quarter mile of vertical rock wall.” 12 Illustrations “We crossed lovely Lake Lebarge by night” . 84 “Limy sandstone pocketed and patterned.” “ Black forests rose.” Five Finger Rapids. Dawson City, looking up-river to the mouth of the Klondike . .98 “The Dawson Waterworks” Dawson’s crowded streets, in ’98. “All the earth sitteth still and is at rest” . .110 “The Northern Lights dropped silver, jade and am^er curtains.” “I wish that you had known Father Judge” . 132 “Men with fortunes waiting on the next stroke of the pick.” The sun at midnight, from a mountain back of Dawson. “A landscape carved in Carrara.” Governor Ogilvie . 166 A Yukon graybeard rocking out his placer gold. “ Where is the boundary?” was the question. The concrete answer to an old dispute — the inter­ national line. Illustrations 13 “Now that my river flowed once more to sea, I, too, must follow” ...... 192 “As May days lengthened, I became impatient.” “The military post adjoining the town was called Fort Egbert” ...... 224 “The painted sky-land of our American Eagle.” “The older houses wore flower gardens on their tops.” “The day’s work done, a good westing made.” “Loggers had been cutting wood for hungry steam­ boat boilers” ...... 256 .“The slow rhythm of my sibilant River.” “Summer fish-camps of the River Indians never slept.” Young Rex Beach once lived in this Rampart cabin. A Yukon steamer and her barges at Fort Gibbon . 262 “The Tinneh canoe is slim, long and pointed.” “ A lone blockhouse — all that was left of the Russian redoubt” . 32$ Kai-ya-no, pee-o-vah! — Thanks and good-bye to “The land that measures each man at his worth.” AUTHOR’S NOTE Deep thanks are due to five friends of the North, for many photographs of old days and odd places here reproduced: Arthur H. Merritt of Boston, The Honorable James Wicker sham of Juneau, J . G. Blanchard of Skagway, F. G. Kim­ ball who called Saint Michael “ home” at the turn of the century, and Clarence L. Andrews of Sitka, Skagway, Eagle City and points still further North. I Klondike Jim the Futteguhr Fakir In Red and Black HEN I came North those several years ago, much of the veritable magic of Alaska lay, for me, not in the hidden, golden treasure underground but in that other richness found in sourdough tales. Although the whole of the wide-spread glamourous North is raw material of adventure, in no place and at no time had such venturing been so concentrated, perhaps within the memory of man, as on the Trail of ’98 into Canadian Klondike from the Alaskan seaports of Dyea and Skagway. O f winter nights, especially, I listened for long hours to countless tellings of that passage of the passes. No two, of all my weather-beaten, sourdough friends had met identical experiences, though all had crossed the border into the mys­ terious North, at similar times, by similar trails. If more than one old-timer should happen to be present, we usually were treated to rare argument; for no two could apparently agree on certain little inessential facts! The years between had mel­ lowed certain happenings, had sharpened others. The memory of man is eminently fallible— a jackdaw thing, snatching and retaining for its shaping nest only what glitters and attracts. Dark facts, drab facts, are lost and can not be recalled. My sourdough friends could tell me, after a lapse of more than thirty years, the color of a partner’s eye, the type of lace he used to latch his shoe-pacs, and just how many spoons of sugar or molasses he lavished on his coffee. But if I asked, " How much did beans cost, in that winter? How large the boat you built on Bennett? When did the ice break on Lebarge that 17 18 SOURDOUGH GOLD year? ” it angered them— for either they could not remember or disagreed in violent controversy! Never shall I forget one near-to-fist-fight argument, pre­ cipitated between two men both in their sixties, sane and sober pioneers whose word was better than a gilt-edged bond— and all about the simple matter of a cedar brush! One said, in telling of the steepness of Chilkoot’s heart-break climb, " I grabbed at a scrawny bunch of cedar growing from a rock, or the stone loosened from above would have been the death of me.” The other snorted. " You never crossed the Chilkoot, or else you’re a liar. There wasn’t a green twig or brush upon the whole bloody face of Chilkoot. ■ If you were a man of truth, Andrew, you’d know it, and not be telling the lady, for facts, a yarn spun clean out of your head! ” After at least an hour of bitter argument— hot and acid and all but homicidal, apparently!— we learned at last the tiny fact which cleared it all and sent them away into the night with linked arms, singing. Andrew had crossed the Chilkoot in ’96, before the great stampede when thousands blackened the pass with human, crawling figurines of men; whereas my good friend Scotty had come over Chilkoot in the spring of ’98, with the great rush and after any little twig or growing bush that might have clung there had long ago been torn from that cliff’s bald and worn and rocky face by grasping fingers of tired men. It was so simple a solution. Yet that was the night when I. first thought to myself— " If only some one of those thousands had kept a daily journal, and jotted down the things that one forgets so easily— then and there and freshly at the time— with all the force and impact of immediate experience, and beyond all later controversy.” • For the Trail— and Dawson City, the far ending of that trail— were one thing in the fall of ’96, another in the winter of ’96, the spring of ’97, and so on through each season.