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Updated: May 25, 2025
I'd back him against Old Nick himself for snow-bucking and ice-travel. He brought in the government dispatches in 1895, and he did it after two couriers were frozen on Chilkoot and the third drowned in the open water of Thirty Mile." Smoke had travelled in a leisurely fashion up to Mono Creek, fearing to tire his dogs before the big race.
They refused to carry to the lake for less than $20 per hundred pounds, and as they had learned that the expedition was an English one, the second chief of the Chilkoot Indians recalled some memories of an old quarrel which the tribe had with the English many years ago, in which an uncle of his was killed, and he thought we should pay for the loss of his uncle by being charged an exorbitant price for our packing, of which he had the sole control.
Father had gone to the Klondyke a year before at the age of sixty-four, climbing Chilkoot Pass in the primitive way and "running" Miles Canyon and White Horse Rapids in a small boat which came near being swamped in the passage.
He snored in a low and confidential tone at first, but gradually the sound increased in volume and rose in pitch. Linton listened to it with a thrill, and he assured himself that he had never heard music of such soul-satisfying sweetness as issued from the nostrils of his new partner. To the early Klondikers, Chilkoot Pass was a personality, a Presence at once sinister, cruel, and forbidding.
"He never will see the other side of Chilkoot Pass." "I doubt whether he will ever see this side." Thus the boys speculated, sometimes amused and sometimes saddened by what they saw.
Always gold that first, and then ice, snow, endless nights, desolate barrens, and craggy mountains frowning everlastingly upon a blasted land in which men fought against odds and only the fittest survived. It was gold that had been Alaska's doom. When people thought of it, they visioned nothing beyond the old stampede days, the Chilkoot, White Horse, Dawson, and Circle City.
Lately he had been conscious that the North was working a change in him, but the precise extent of that change, even the direction it was taking, had not been altogether clear; now, however, he thought he understood. He had been quite right, that first hour in Dyea, when he told himself that Life lay just ahead of him just over the Chilkoot. Such, indeed, had proved to be the case.
Twenty, thirty, fifty thousand, perhaps. About half of them turn back when they see the Chilkoot." "And the rest will wish they had. It's a hard country; not one in a hundred will prosper." They picked their way down the drunken descent to the Scales, then breasted the sluggish human current to Sheep Camp.
But it did not take him long to recover his land legs and appetite. His first interview with the Chilkoot packers straightened him up and stiffened his backbone. Forty cents a pound they demanded for the twenty-eight-mile portage, and while he caught his breath and swallowed, the price went up to forty-three.
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