Alaska Part 54

Standing between cars, clinging to a rattling brake, I made the acquaintance of Cyanide Bill, and he told me about it.

"Tents!" said he. "Did you say tents? Hunh! Why, lady, tents was as thick here in '97 and '98 as seeds on a strawberry. They was so thick it took a man an hour to find his own. Hunh! You tripped up every other step on a tent-peg. I guess n.o.body knows anything about tents unless he was mushin' around Lake Bennett in the summer of '97. From five to ten thousand men and women was camped here off an' on. Fresh ones by the hundred come strugglin', sweatin', dyin', in over the trail every day, and every day hundreds got their rafts finished, bundled their things and theirselves on to 'em, and went tearin' and yellin' down the lake, gloatin' over the poor tired-out wretches that just got in. Often as not they come sneakin' back afoot without any raft and without any outfit and worked their way back to the states to get another. Them that went slow, went sure, and got in ahead of the rushers.

"I wisht you could of seen the tent town!--young fellows right out of college flauntin' around as if they knew somethin'; old men, stooped and gray-headed; gamblers, tin horns, cut-throats, and thieves; honest women, workin' their way in with their husbands or sons, their noses bent to the earth, with heavy packs on their backs, like men; and gay, painted dance-hall girls, sailin' past 'em on horseback and dressed to kill and livin' on the fat of the land. I bet more good women went to the bad on this here layout than you could shake a stick at. It seemed to get on to their nerves to struggle along, week after week, packin'

like animals, sufferin' like dogs, et up by mosquitoes and gnats, pushed and crowded out by men--and then to see them gay girls go singin' by, livin' on luxuries, men fallin' all over theirselves to wait on 'em, champagne to drink--it sure did get on to their nerves!

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright by F. H. Nowell, Seattle

COUNCIL CITY AND SOLOMON RIVER RAILROAD--A CHARACTERISTIC LANDSCAPE OF SEWARD PENINSULA]

"You see, somehow, up here, in them days, things didn't seem the way they do down below. Nature kind of gets in her work ahead of custom up here. Wrong don't look so terrible different from right to a woman a thousand miles from civilization. When she sees women all around her walkin' on flowers, and her own feet blistered and bleedin' on stones and thorns, she's pretty apt to ask herself whether bein' good and workin' like a horse pays. And up here on the trail in '97 the minute a woman begun to ask herself that question, it was all up with her. The end was in plain sight, like the nose on a man's face. The dance hall on in Dawson answered the question practical.

"Of course, lots of 'em went in straight and stayed straight; and they're the ones that made Dawson and saved Dawson. You get a handful of good women located in a minin'-camp and you can build up a town, and you can't do it before, mounted police or no mounted police."

I had heard these hard truths of the Trail of Heartbreak before; but having been worded more vaguely, they had not impressed me as they did now, spoken with the plain, honest directness of the old trail days.

"If you want straight facts about '97," the collector had said to me, "I'll introduce you to Cyanide Bill, out there. He was all through here time and again. He will tell you everything you want to know. But be careful what you ask him; he'll answer anything--and he doesn't talk parlor."

"The hardships such women went through," continued Cyanide Bill, "the insults and humiliations they faced and lived down, ought to of set 'em on a pe-_des_-tal when all was said and done and decency had the upper hand. The time come when the other'ns got their come-upin's; when they found out whether it paid to live straight.

"The world'll never see such a rush for gold again," went on Cyanide Bill, after a pause. "I tell you it takes a lot to make any impress on me, I've been toughenin' up in this country so many years; but when I arrives and sees the orgy goin' on along this trail, my heart up and stood still a spell. The strong ones was all a-trompin' the weak ones down. The weak ones went down and out, and the strong ones never looked behind. Men just went crazy. Men that had always been kind-hearted went plumb locoed and 'u'd trample down their best friend, to get ahead of him. They got just like brutes and didn't know their own selves. It's no wonder the best women give up. Did you ever hear the story of Lady Belle?"

I remembered Lady Belle, probably because of the name, but I had never heard the details of her tragic story, and I frankly confessed that I would like to hear them--"parlor" language or "trail," it mattered not.

"Well,"--he half closed his eyes and stared down the blue lake,--"she come along this trail the first of July, the prettiest woman you ever laid eyes on. Her husband was with her. He seemed to be kind to her at first, but the horrors of the trail worked on him, and he went kind of locoed. He took to abusin' her and blamin' her for everything. She worked like a dog and he treated her about like one; but she never lost her beauty nor her sweetness. She had the sweetest smile I ever saw on any human bein's face; and she was the only one that thought about others.

"'Don't crowd!' she used to cry, with that smile of her'n. 'We're all havin' a hard time together.'

"Well, they lost their outfit in White Horse Rapids; her husband cursed her and said it wouldn't of happened if she hadn't been h.e.l.l-bent to come along; he took to drinkin' and up and left her there at the rapids.

He went back to the states, sayin' he didn't ever want to see her again.

"She was left there without an ounce of grub or a cent of money.

Yakataga Pete had been workin' along the trail with a big outfit, and had gone on in ahead. He'd fell in love with her before he knew she was married. He went on up into the cricks, and when he come down to Dawson six months later, she was in a dance hall. Dawson was wild about her.

They called her Lady Belle because she was always such a lady.

"Yakataga went straight to her and asked her to marry him. She burst out into the most terrible cryin' you ever hear. 'As if I could ever marry anybody!' she cries out; and that's all the answer he ever got. We found out she had a little blind sister down in the states. She had to send money to keep her in a blind school. She danced and acted cheerful; but her face was as white as chalk, and her big dark eyes looked like a fawn's eyes when you've shot it and not quite killed it, so's it can't get away from you, nor die, nor anything; but she was always just as sweet as ever.

"Two months after that she--she--killed herself. Yakataga was up in the cricks. He come down and buried her."

It was told, the simple and tragic tale of Lady Belle, and presently Cyanide Bill went away and left me.

The breeze grew cooler; it crested the waves with silver. Pearly clouds floated slowly overhead and were reflected in the depths below.

The mountains surrounding Lake Bennett are of an unusual color. It is a soft old-rose in the distance. The color is not caused by light and shade; nor by the sun; nor by flowers. It is the color of the mountains themselves. They are said to be almost solid mountains of iron, which gives them their name of "Iron-Crowned," I believe; but to me they will always be the Rose-colored Mountains. They soften and enrich the sparkling, almost dazzling, blue atmosphere, and give the horizon a look of sunset even at midday. The color reminded me of the dull old-rose of Columbia Glacier.

Lake Bennett dashes its foam-crested blue waves along the pebbly beaches and stone terraces for a distance of twenty-seven miles. At its widest it is not more than two miles, and it narrows in places to less than half a mile. It winds and curves like a river.

The railway runs along the eastern sh.o.r.e of the lake, and mountains slope abruptly from the opposite sh.o.r.e to a height of five thousand feet. The scenery is never monotonous. It charms constantly, and the air keeps the traveller as fresh and sparkling in spirit as champagne.

For many miles a solid road-bed, four or five feet above the water, is hewn out of the base of the mountains; the terrace from the railway to the water is a solid blaze of bloom; white sails, blown full, drift up and down the blue water avenue; cloud-fragments move silently over the nearer rose-colored mountains; while in the distance, in every direction that the eye may turn, the enchanted traveller is saluted by some lonely and beautiful peak of snow. It is an exquisitely lovely lake.

We had pa.s.sed Lake Lindeman--named by Lieutenant Schwatka for Dr.

Lindeman of the Breman Geographical Society--before reaching Bennett.

Lake Lindeman is a clear and lovely lake seven miles long, half a mile wide, and of a good depth for any navigation required here. A mountain stream pours tumultuously into it, adding to its picturesque beauty.

Sea birds haunt these lakes, drift on to the Yukon, and follow the voyager until they meet their silvery fellows coming up from Behring Sea.

Between Lakes Lindeman and Bennett the river connecting link is only three quarters of a mile long, about thirty yards wide, and only two or three feet deep. It is filled with shoals, rapids, cascades, boulders, and bars; and navigation is rendered so difficult and so dangerous that in the old "raft" days outfits were usually portaged to Lake Bennett.

During the rush to the Klondike a saw-mill was established at the head of Lake Bennett, and lumber for boat building was sold for one hundred dollars a thousand feet.

The air in these lake valleys on a warm day is indescribably soft and balmy. It is scented with pine, balm, cottonwood, and flowers. The lower slopes are covered with fireweed, larkspur, dandelions, monk's-hood, purple asters, marguerites, wild roses, dwarf goldenrod, and many other varieties of wild flowers. The fireweed is of special beauty. Its blooms are larger and of a richer red than along the coast. Blooms covering acres of hillside seem to float like a rosy mist suspended in the atmosphere. The gra.s.ses are also very beautiful, some having the rich, changeable tints of a humming-bird.

The short stream a couple of hundred yards in width connecting Lake Bennett with the next lake--a very small, but pretty one which Schwatka named Nares--was called by the natives "the place where the caribou cross," and now bears the name of Caribou Crossing. At certain seasons the caribou were supposed to cross this part of the river in vast herds on their way to different feeding-grounds, the current being very shallow at this point.

There is a small settlement here now, and boats were waiting to carry pa.s.sengers to the Atlin mining district. The caribou have now found less populous territories in which to range. In the winter of 1907-1908 they ranged in droves of many thousands--some reports said hundreds of thousands--through the hills and valleys of the Stewart, Klondike, and Sixty-Mile rivers, in the Upper Yukon country.

Miners killed them by the hundreds, dressed them, and stored them in the shafts and tunnels of their mines, down in the eternally frozen caverns of the earth--thus supplying themselves with the most delicious meat for a year. The trek of caribou from the Tanana River valley to the head of White River consumed more than ninety days in pa.s.sing the head of the Forty-Mile valley--at least a thousand a day pa.s.sing during that period.

They covered from one to five miles in width, and trod the snow down as solidly as it is trodden in a city street. A great wolf-pack clung to the flank of the herd. The wolves easily cut out the weak or tired-out caribou and devoured them.

Caribou Crossing is a lonely and desolate cl.u.s.ter of tents and cabins huddling in the sand on the water's edge. Considerable business is transacted here, and many pa.s.sengers transfer here in summer to Atlin.

In winter they leave the train at Log-Cabin, which we pa.s.sed during the forenoon, and make the journey overland in sleighs.

The voyage from Caribou Crossing to Atlin is by way of a chain of blue lakes, pearled by snow mountains. It is a popular round-trip tourist trip, which may be taken with but little extra expense from Skaguay.

Tagish Lake, as it was named by Dr. Dawson,--the distinguished British explorer and chief director of the natural history and geological survey of the Dominion of Canada,--was also known as Bove Lake. Ten miles from its head it is joined by Taku Arm--Tahk-o Lake, it was called by Schwatka.

The sh.o.r.es of Tagish Lake are terraced beautifully to the water, the terraces rising evenly one above another. They were probably formed by the regular movement of ice in other ages, when the waters in these valleys were deeper and wider. There are some striking points of limestone in this vicinity, their pearl-white shoulders gleaming brilliantly in the sunshine, with sparkling blue waves dashing against them.

Marsh Lake, and another with a name so distasteful that I will not write it, are further links in the brilliant sapphire water chain by which the courageous voyagers of the Heartbreak days used to drift hopefully, yet fearfully, down to the Klondike. The bed of a lake which was unintentionally drained completely dry by the builders of the railroad is pa.s.sed just before reaching Grand Canyon.

The train pauses at the canyon and again at White Horse Rapids, to give pa.s.sengers a glimpse of these famed and dreaded places of navigation of a decade ago.

At six o'clock in the evening of the day we left Skaguay we reached White Horse.

CHAPTER XLII

This is a new, clean, wooden town, the first of any importance in Yukon Territory. It has about fifteen hundred inhabitants, is the terminus of the railroad, and is growing rapidly. The town is on the banks of Lewes River, or, as they call it here, the Yukon.

There is an air of tidiness, order, and thrift about this town which is never found in a frontier town in "the states." There are no old newspapers huddled into gutters, nor blowing up and down the street. Men do not stand on corners with their hands in their pockets, or whittling out toothpicks, and waiting for a railroad to be built or a mine to be discovered. They walk the streets with the manner of men who have work to do and who feel that life is worth while, even on the outposts of civilization.