Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/137

Rh to grief so many a hopeful tenderfoot. Down the river, through Lake Lebarge and the "Five Fingers," one can journey under many different class tickets. There is the first-class ticket on the first-class boat, which means that you may have a stateroom if you are lucky, or the floor under a table if you are not, and there is the second-class ticket on the first-class boat, which means you may sleep above the boiler if cold-blooded, or on the bow of the boat if warm; then follow the first and second class tickets on the second-class boats, which cost as much as if they were first-class, but always inspire the sentiment, "If I'd only stayed to home with mother." The wise and independent traveler eschews both classes and masses and takes to the open boat, in many ways the most attractive mode of traveling. The river flows swiftly; the days are endless and the scenery beautiful and varied; hills and valleys, cliffs and flats, fly by as one takes the midstream to escape "them pretty little -," the mosquitoes, and 50 miles in a day's run before camp is pitched requires little effort. If in great haste to tread the streets of gold and collect the nuggets waiting, "watch and watch" will enable you to utilize the long Arctic days. At Gibbon you await the first steamer up the Tanana, for ascending by small boat means much hard poling and tracking on the bank, 15 miles being a big day's work. The light-draught steamer is crowded, and you are in luck if you find space for your blanket on a secluded spot of the deck. But all are gay and hopeful, and dreams of a farm in southern California, with an orange grove about the house, or a brown-stone front on Fifth avenue in the East put energy into the weary.

It is another matter to reach Fair- banks from the "outside" after the "freeze up." The shortest route is over the mail trail, by dog sled from Valdez, on Prince William Sound, a weary stretch of 400 miles of mountain and lowland, not to be undertaken by a "cheechaco" (Alaskan tenderfoot) unless he possesses not only the right stuff, but also a reserve fund to call on in time of need. Strange as it may seem, the closing in of winter opens up the country to the "sourdough," for dogs can pull where horses fail, and the prospector with his team and "grubstake" roams at will.

Level spruce-covered ridges rising to bare rounded domes, with horizon lines as straight as a rule, characterize the Tanana gold fields. Gently sloping valleys with hillsides at low angles are seen on every hand, and only a clear day reveals far to the south across the wide valley of the Tanana the snow-capped Alaskan range towering to the clouds and culminating to the southwest in Mt McKinley.

Fools, and many of them, rush into a new mining camp, but the presence of angels would be rather a disturbing element in the general scramble for good "pay." Moreover, their wings would become torn in the brush and their robes muddied by the heavy trails.

Fairbanks is a thriving town of some two thousand souls and growing. In fact, it grows as yon watch it, and it grows as you give up the watching and turn for a few moments of sleep. It has not yet, and it is to be hoped never will, bear the name of city, so often ill applied in the northern camps, where each collection of log cabins is dignified by that addition to the name of the first prospector who struck pay. The main street fronting Chena Slough already puts to shame many a town of ten times its age on the " outside."

On the main street alone there are as many as ten saloons, all in active business, to say nothing of the hospital, dwellings, sawmills, drug stores, and commercial companies' posts, where can be bought anything from a paper of pins to a folding bed or from a roll of