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We were rejoiced to see signs of native prosperity and advance, and we left Unalaklík with high hope for its future. Here also was real rest and refreshment at a road-house. Road-houses in Alaska are as various in quality as inns are "outside." Our previous night's halt was at one of the worst; this was one of the best.
We pulled out into the snow that the mules might pass, and the soldiers said no word, for they knew just how we felt, until the last soldier leading the last mule was going by, and he turned round and said: "And her name was Maud!" It was in the height of Opper's popularity, his "comic supplements" the chief dependence of the road-houses for wall-paper.
Whenever she went to lie down, which was frequently, he played poker and drank highballs. He tried in his sincerest way to amuse her. He took her to theaters, restaurants, road-houses. He arranged a three days' hunting-trip, with a darky cook. He hired motor-boats and motor-cars and told her every "here's a new one," that he heard.
The messenger had tried to dissuade him; he had reminded him there were no road-houses, and that the traces left by my party must have been wiped out by the winter snows. But Weatherbee argued that the new route would shorten the distance to open tide-water hundreds of miles; that his nearest neighbors were in that direction, fifty miles to the south; and they would let him have dogs.
One wishes that some of the old-time travellers who used to wax so eloquently indignant over the inns in the Pyrenees could make a winter journey in the interior of Alaska. One thing pleased me at these road-houses.
Road-houses along the way provided relays of fresh horses. Freight went in by bull-team, but pack-horses and mules were still used to carry miners' provisions to the camps in the hills which lay off the main road. It was while the road was still building that an enterprising packer brought twenty-one camels on the trail. They were not a success and caused countless stampedes.
At last they came to a region which was neither country nor city, where the road-houses were still in evidence, where the glass roofs of greenhouses caught the burning rays of the sun, where yards filled with marble blocks and half-finished tombstones appeared, and then they turned into the gates of Winterbourne.
On Sunday the populace generally did one of two things: either it sallied out in small groups into the surrounding country on picnics or celebrations at some of the numerous road-houses; or it swarmed out the plank toll-road to the Mission. To the newcomer the latter must have been much the more interesting.
He told Spaulding to take a taxi and come to the house. Nothing had occurred meanwhile to cause him anxiety. He had taken Hélène out to the Cliff House to dinner the night before, and afterward to see the road-houses, whose dancing is so painfully proper early in the evening.
The post-office, the commissioner's office, and the saloon, the stores and road-houses, migrated to the new spot, and Coldfoot was abandoned. Now the chief producing creek is the Hammond River, still farther up the Koyukuk, and if its placer deposits prove as rich as they promise it is likely that a town will spring up at the mouth of the Hammond which will supersede Wiseman.
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