on the lid of a paper box—Lodging. I entered the rough building and found a cheery Irish woman named M'Grath. There was no furniture in the house except two or three cheap chairs and a home-made board table.
"Shure, ye can," she answered in reply to my question about spending the night there. "Ye'll spread yer robe an' blankets on the flure, an' it'll only cost ye a dollar an' four bits. Ye'll plaze pay in advance."
I took stock of the contents of my pocketbook. There was just five dollars and a quarter left of the thousand dollars with which I had started from home on the first of May. It was now the first of September, and no more money was due me until the next spring. My food and tent were on the steamboat and would not be likely to come ashore for many days. It was Sunday evening, and a whole week must elapse before I could take up a collection.
I paid my landlady and she put my blankets by her stove to dry. I paid another dollar and a half for a supper of beans and flap-jacks—the first food I had tasted for three days. I slept soundly that night on the floor, without a care or anxiety. The next morning I paid another dollar and a half for breakfast, and could not resist the temptation of purchasing a Seattle paper (only three weeks old—what a luxury!). I had just twenty-five cents left—and I was a stranger in this strange corner of the earth!
I could not help laughing at my predicament as I entered the Alaska Exploration Company's store. A bearded man standing by the stove bade me "good-morning."
"You seem to be pleased about something," he said. "Have you struck it rich?"
"Well, yes!" I replied; "a rich joke on me," and I told him of the fix I was in.
"What? You are Dr. Young?" he exclaimed, shaking me heartily by the hand. "Why, I'm a Presbyterian elder from San Francisco."
The man's name was Fickus, a carpenter, who had come to Nome to build the store and warehouses of one of the big companies. He had held the first religious meetings in the new camp and had found quite a circle of Christian people.
He offered to lend me money, but I refused to take it. "No," I said, "let us wait and see what happens."
Something happened very quickly. While we were talking a young man entered the store and came up to me.
"I understand that you are a minister," he said.
"Yes," I replied. "What can I do for you?"
"You can marry me to the best woman in Alaska."
"Is she here?" I asked, with a triumphant smile at Fickus.
"Oh, yes; she came on the last boat from Seattle."
"When do you wish the ceremony to take place?" I inquired.
"Right now," he replied. "You can't tie the knot too quickly to suit me."
I followed the eager young man, married him to a nice-looking girl who was waiting in a near-by cabin, received a wedding-fee of twenty dollars, and returned to my newly-found friend with the assurance that my wants were supplied until my outfit would come ashore.
This was my introduction to the second great gold camp of the Northwest—the raw, crazy, confused stampede of Nome.
II
THE ANVIL
The first two great gold camps of the Northwest were very different, although largely composed of the same material. In physical features they were most unlike. The Klondike was in the great, beautiful, mountainous, forested Interior; Nome was on the bleak, treeless, low, exposed coast of Bering Sea. To reach the Klondike you steamed from Seattle through twelve hundred miles of the wonderful "Inside Passage," broke through the chain of snowy mountains by the Chilcoot Pass, and, in your rough rowboat, shot down the six hundred miles of the untamed and untameable Yukon. Or else you sailed twenty-three hundred miles over the heaving Pacific and the choppy Bering Sea to St. Michael, and then steamed laboriously against the stiff current of the same Father Yukon eighteen hundred miles up to Dawson. To reach Nome you simply steamed the twenty-three hundred miles of Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea; or, if you were up the Yukon, came down it to St. Michael and across Norton Sound a hundred and fifty miles to Nome.
Though on the same parallel of north latitude, the climates of the two camps are very unlike. In the Klondike you have the light, dry, hot air of summer; the light, dry, cold air of winter. There are long periods when the sky is cloudless. In the summer of unbroken day the land drowses, bathed in warm sunshine and humming with insect life, no breath of air shaking the aspens; in the winter of almost unbroken but luminous night, the Spirit of the North broods like James Whitcomb Riley's Lugubrious Whing-whang,
"Crouching low by the winding creeks,
And holding his breath for weeks and weeks."
There are no wind-storms in the Klondike, and a blanket of fine, dry snow covers the land in unvarying depth of only a foot or two.
On Seward Peninsula, the Spirit of Winter breathes hard, and hurls his snow-laden blasts with fearful velocity over the icy wastes. The snow falls to great depth, and never lies still in one place. It drifts, and will cover your house completely under in one night, and pack so hard that the Eskimo can drive his reindeer team over your roof in the morning. The air becomes so full of the flying particles that you cannot see the lead-dog of your team. Men have lost their way in the streets of Nome and wandered out on the tundra to their death. There is considerable sunshine in the summer, and some comparatively still days, but there is much rain, and mossy swamps are everywhere.
The men at Nome in the fall of '99 included many who had been at Dawson in '97, but conditions were very different. The Klondike Stampede was composed of tenderfeet, not one in twenty of whom had ever mined for anything before—men of the city and village and workshop and farm, new to wilderness life, unused to roughing it. Those who reached Nome in '99 were mostly victims of hard luck. Many were Klondikers who had spent two winters rushing wildly from creek to creek on fake reports, possessing themselves of a multitude of worthless claims, eating up the outfits they had brought in with them, and then working for wages in mines of the lucky ones to buy a passage to the new diggings. Many had come down the Yukon in their own rowboats.
But the Klondike Stampede was the cause of other smaller but more fruitless stampedes. These were started by steamboat companies, or by trading companies, and often by "wildcat" mining companies, and were generally cruel hoaxes. Scores of small steamboats, hastily built for the purpose, went up the Yukon to the Koyakuk and other tributaries in the summer of '98. Other scores of power-schooners and small sailing vessels sailed through Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean and through Kotzebue Sound to the Kobuk and Sewalik Rivers. Almost without exception these eager gold-seekers of '98 found only disappointment, endured the savage winter as best they could, and, out of money and food, were making their way back to the States, when news of the marvelous "beach diggings" at Nome met them and they flocked thither in hopes of at least making back their "grub-stake."
As these vessels approached the new camp, the most prominent landmark which met their eyes was a lone rock in the shape of an anvil, which crowned the summit of the highest of the hills near the coast. At the base of this hill rich gold diggings were found in a creek. The town which sprung up was first called Anvil City; but the Government postal authorities, looking at the map, found Cape Nome in the vicinity, and the post-office was named after the Cape.
Anvil Rock. Overlooking Nome
For the name "Nome" two explanations are given. It is said that the American and Canadian surveyors who were laying out the projected Western Union Telegraph Line across the American and Asiatic Continents, failed to find a name for this cape and wrote it down "No name," which was afterwards shortened to Nome. The more