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Updated: May 16, 2025
We have anticipated in the last paragraph in order to illustrate how the Mounted Police guided the wild stampede. But let us get back and find Superintendent Perry on the ground just as the rush was starting for the passes. He made a swift trip and placed detachments of police on the Chilcoot and White Passes, putting those reliable officers Inspectors Belcher and Strickland in command.
Not alone was he the richest man in the country, but he was Burning Daylight, the pioneer, the man who, almost in the midst of antiquity of that young land, had crossed the Chilcoot and drifted down the Yukon to meet those elder giants, Al Mayo and Jack McQuestion.
I fancied I could see the snow dust of Chilcoot yet powdering his shoulders. And then he strewed the table with the nuggets, stuffed ptarmigans, bead work and seal pelts of the returned Klondiker, and began to prate to us of his millions. "Bank drafts for two millions," was his summing up, "and a thousand a day piling up from my claims. And now I want some beef stew and canned peaches.
We took the dogs along, all except Spot. We figured we'd been feeding him long enough. He'd cost us more time and trouble and money and grub than we'd got by selling him on the Chilcoot especially grub. So Steve and I tied him down in the cabin and pulled our freight. We camped that night at the mouth of Indian River, and Steve and I were pretty facetious over having shaken him.
Daylight won across Chilcoot that same day, dropping down five hundred feet in the darkness and the flurrying snow to Crater Lake, where he camped. It was a 'cold' camp, far above the timber-line, and he had not burdened his sled with firewood. That night three feet of snow covered them, and in the black morning, when they dug themselves out, the Indian tried to desert.
A few, however, of these foaming, roaring streams the Alsek, Chilcat, Chilcoot, Taku, Stickeen, and perhaps others head beyond the range with some of the southwest branches of the Mackenzie and Yukon.
"It's a thousand miles, I'm sayin' an' most of the trail unbroke, but I bet any chechaquo anything he wants that Daylight makes Dyea in thirty days." "That's an average of over thirty-three miles a day," Doc Watson warned, "and I've travelled some myself. A blizzard on Chilcoot would tie him up for a week."
But when Perry put Belcher on the Chilcoot and Strickland on the White Pass to hoist the British flag and collect customs levies, intimation was given that the great gold country was on the Canadian side of the line and that all who wished to pass that way must contribute to the Dominion exchequer and thus swell the revenue of Canada. Weather conditions were nothing less than awful.
A spasm of anger wrought on his face for a flashing instant, but in the next his good-humor was back again. "I know you-all are only pokin' fun asking such a question," he said, with a smile. "Of course I ain't going out." "Take the oath again, Daylight," the same voice cried. "I sure will. I first come over Chilcoot in '83.
In the same year Inspector Robert Belcher, C.M.G., who had won that decoration in the Boer War, retired after thirty-four years' strenuous service. It was Belcher and Strickland who had first flown the flag and established custom-houses amid the snow and blizzards and tremendous cold of those deadly summits of the White and the Chilcoot passes in the days of the gold rush.
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