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"So we slew, without haste, and craftily. On the Chilkoot and in the Delta we slew, from the passes to the sea, wherever the white men camped or broke their trails. It be true, they died, but it was without worth. Ever did they come over the mountains, ever did they grow and grow, while we, being old, became less and less. I remember, by the Caribou Crossing, the camp of a white man.
"Look out you don' broke your back," warned the other. "Dis Chilkoot she's bad bizness. She's keel a lot of dese sof' fellers. Dey get seeck in de back. You hear 'bout it?" "Spinal meningitis. It's partly from exposure." "Dat's him! Don' never carry too moch; don' be in soch hurry." Phillips laughed at this caution. "Why, we have to hurry," said he.
It was in this loosening of sentimental ties, in the breach of friendships and the birth of bitter enmities, where lay the deepest tragedy of the Chilkoot and the Chilkat trails. Under ordinary, normal circumstances men of opposite temperaments may live with each other in harmony and die in mutual accord, but circumstances here were extraordinary, abnormal.
So bitter did the factions wax, and so high did they bid, that dogs brought stiffer prices than ever before in the annals of the country. And, as it chanced, this scramble for dogs turned the public eye still more searchingly upon Joy Molineau. Not only was she the cause of it all, but she possessed the finest sled-dog from Chilkoot to Bering Sea. As wheel or leader, Wolf Fang had no equal.
Men were being frozen in the blizzard which swept Chilkoot, and Rasmunsen frosted his toes ere he was aware. He found a chance to go passenger with his freight in a boat just shoving off through the rubble, but two hundred hard cash, was required, and he had no money.
Details of this proclamation the most arbitrary of any, hitherto had just arrived from the International Boundary, and had caused a halt, an eddy, in the stream of gold-seekers which flowed inland toward the Chilkoot Pass.
One of my failures is when I see a mountain to wish to know how the land lays on the other side, naturally given to adventure I had indulged, and it grew very rapidly upon me, till it got beyond my controll, so I was delighted to discover new fields. After proper preparations we set out for White horse. After a few days we arrived at the Chilkoot Pass.
Two flour-sacks upon a man's back was a rare sight on the roof of the Chilkoot.
A ton of provisions would cost at least five hundred dollars and the expense of transporting it across summer swamps and tundras, then up and over that mysterious and forbidding Chilkoot of which he had heard so much, would bring the total capital required up to impossible proportions. The prospect was indeed dismaying.
In the spring of 1898 I made my first trip over the Chilkoot Pass, went down the Yukon river to Dawson in a flatboat, and ran the famous White Horse Rapids with my load of vegetables for the Klondike miners. One may read most graphic descriptions of Chilkoot Pass; but the difficulties met by those earlier fortune-seekers who tried it were worse than the wildest fancy can picture.
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