img The Great Gold Rush  /  Chapter 4 THE BEGINNING OF YUKON | 9.76%
Download App
Reading History

Chapter 4 THE BEGINNING OF YUKON

Word Count: 1739    |    Released on: 06/12/2017

e towns of Skagway and Dyea, the respective ports of the White and the Chilkoot Passes. For ten hundred miles the steamers plying along this route run behind the great

sages to the sea, or by glacier-ridden valleys from the mainland, whose mighty burdens shimmer in the sunlight as they yield in torrents tributes to th

rock uplifting to the clammy mantle of low-lying clouds. Here and there Indian villages were passed and Indian grav

g the excitement of the Cassiar twenty years back," remarked Hugh Spencer to Berwick and Br

de with the disembarked passengers. The sales made were mostly of moccasins in beads, and bark canoes adorned with porcupine quills of brightest colours

h?" he i

r two

you si

rig

like them for the trail: look how big the thumbs are." So Hug

and we'll have some cold weather yet before we get over the summit. But you have to beat the beggars down, as they always ask twice as much as

sh[1] Indians?"

on of the Fr

like it. The real Siwash lives farther south,

ns from any I have seen o

eir only resemblance is that they ar

them," was the remark o

d him without the cussedness taught by the white man, makes a pretty good citizen. He may be lazy, but he is honest; and perhaps his laziness is only due to the fact that he has always had a klootch[2] to do chores around, and has never been trained to the white man's ways of working; but let any fellow try following an Indian on snow-shoes for a c

Sq

e great cold of the winter, with the resources of the miners to keep from despair. He told them the traditions of the camps, and how the discoveries of '49 in C

the missionary did not follow up this discovery, which makes a difference. However, I'll

got much use for missionaries as a general proposition, but Archdeacon Macdonald is as white a man as ever lived, though he is east of the Rocky M

ished themselves at Fort Yukon in 1847. In 1842 Mr. J. Bell, in charge of the Hudson Bay Post on the Peel River, which runs into the MacKenzie, from beyond the divide from the head waters of the Porcupine, crossed over and went down the Porcupine a way.

tream from the Fort, was the home of bad spirits; they could hear them groaning, and they asked the missionary to

nform

unch-

d by the wind or nothing, but, as the Siwashes said t

king to a piece of mica, of which there's lots in the Klondike country-mica schist the scientists call it. So this was the first fi

six-year-old kid; and if a medicine man comes among them it

ate pleasantly passed the hours listening to the c

ing amongst those of the company who were seated near the companion-way. Several were seen to ris

thing that could happen-outside of fire-would be to run ashore or hit an iceberg. We are hardly far enough north for the icebergs yet-besides, if we had hit one, or

king excitedly, with others returning from the upper deck where the life-boat

You stand by and let the officers and sailors run things-and they will fill the boats with women and their own friends-and look out for thems

ough carelessness; and, running up through the saloon to the boats, had started the excitement. Such triv

mp mills pounding out the wealth of the mighty Treadwell quartz deposits on Douglas Island; to the right was t

journey would end on the morrow. The passengers were

Download App
icon APP STORE
icon GOOGLE PLAY