Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/138

Rh io8 The National Geographic Magazine

wall paper to a polished oak dining table. He that imagines that luxury does not exist in our far northern camps would need settle but one small bill for furnishing to become entirely convinced of the luxury of all things, even a sack of flour.

Houses front the slough which would do credit to our eastern shores. Steam laundries vie with the force of muscle in producing the spotless white shirt bosom, and bootblacks at " two bits " a shine, ever ready, await you, that the mud of the trail may be cleaned from your boots before entering your carpeted cabin.

Justice is rendered daily in the court- house (used on Sundays as the church) , and if a man's claim be " jumped " he needs but bring suit, and then go seek another claim — ' ' broke. ' '

If you would know the creeks, don't go to them. Enter a saloon, and in five minutes, mid the melodious tones of "Mamie, come kiss you honey boy," screeched from the latest phonograph, and the jostling of the eager crowd about the gaming tables, endeavoring to lose in the shortest possible time their hard-won gold, you will hear more of the ' ' good pay ' ' and rich ' ' fractions ' ' than you could learn in a month at the bottom of a wet drift. "Sell it?" "No; not for $50,000;" and he wouldn't, either, though before the winter is over he' 11 probably work ' ' day shift ' ' on the end of a wooden windlass hoisting a ten-pan bucket 60 feet at 40 0 below zero.

The continuous buzz of the sawmills, turning out 50,000 feet of spruce lum- ber a day, would suggest a western logging camp. L,umber is as essential in mining as is water, and with the prices up to $200 a thousand the owner of a mill needs no gold mine to make his fortune.

Enter a restaurant, and anything from a cup of good coffee, well served, to a four-course dinner is yours. Broiled

caribou steak and mushrooms are in- viting, served with lettuce and green peas; but don't do it often, or you'll probably work your way out in the fall as a deck hand on a flat-bottom stern- wheeled steamboat bound south.

When you are able to drag yourself from the allurements of the metropolis and start for the creeks, take the ridge trail. Some one may tell you to follow the telephone line, as it is straight. It is straight enough — one of the few straight things in the country, in fact — and the walking is good when you get down to it, but it's a long ways down and you must need make special efforts to extract each separate foot. The ridge road is high and dry, through a stretch of spruce and birch timber, and, if you have dragged yourself through the mud and water of a creek trail, seems a boule- vard. The freight of all the creeks passes this route, and the lead horse of a pack train steps aside to let pass the two-ton four-mule freighter as it toils along, jolting over the old roots and stumps of the former wood. Ten miles beyond, in the bottom land at the junc- tion of Gilmore and Goldstream, this same freighter will sink axle deep in the mire, and probably leave half its load by the wayside for a second trip. Lit- tle wonder that freight rates are "two bits" a pound, or $500 a ton, a mere bagatelle when your claim carries fifty cents to the "pan," but ruinous when it averages only five.

A newly opened gold placer in an Alaskan camp is far from an inviting sight. Heavy freighting, accompanied with frequent rains, produces in the freshly thawed ground of the creek bot- toms a result not conducive to good walking, to say the least, and in a short while the foot trail has spread itself far up on the hillsides in a vain endeavor to find a dry and firm piece of moss upon which to settle. But it is on the creeks that the work begins. The glamor and fascination of the infant