I followed the eager young man, married him to a nice-looking girl who was waiting in a near-by cabin, received a wedding-fee of twenty dollars, and returned to my newlyfound friend with the assurance that my wants were supplied until my outfit would come ashore.

This was my introduction to the second great gold camp of the Northwest-the raw, crazy, confused stampede of Nome.

T

II

THE ANVIL

HE first two great gold camps of the Northwest were very different,

although largely composed of the same material. In physical features they were most unlike. The Klondike was in the great, beautiful, mountainous, forested Interior; Nome was on the bleak, treeless, low, exposed coast of Bering Sea. To reach the Klondike you steamed from Seattle through twelve hundred miles of the wonderful "Inside Passage," broke through the chain of snowy mountains by the Chilcoot Pass, and, in your rough rowboat, shot down the six hundred miles of the untamed and untameable Yukon. Or else you sailed twentythree hundred miles over the heaving Pacific and the choppy Bering Sea to St. Michael, and then steamed laboriously against the stiff current of the same Father Yukon eighteen hundred miles up to Dawson. To reach Nome you simply steamed the twenty

three hundred miles of Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea; or, if you were up the Yukon, came down it to St. Michael and across Norton Sound a hundred and fifty miles to Nome.

Though on the same parallel of north latitude, the climates of the two camps are very unlike. In the Klondike you have the light, dry, hot air of summer; the light, dry, cold air of winter. There are long periods when the sky is cloudless. In the summer of unbroken day the land drowses, bathed in warm sunshine and humming with insect life, no breath of air shaking the aspens; in the winter of almost unbroken but luminous night, the Spirit of the North broods like James Whitcomb Riley's Lugubrious Whing-whang,

"Crouching low by the winding creeks,

And holding his breath for weeks and weeks."

There are no wind-storms in the Klondike, and a blanket of fine, dry snow covers the land in unvarying depth of only a foot or two.

On Seward Peninsula, the Spirit of Winter breathes hard, and hurls his snow-laden blasts with fearful velocity over the icy

wastes. The snow falls to great depth, and never lies still in one place. It drifts, and will cover your house completely under in one night, and pack so hard that the Eskimo can drive his reindeer team over your roof in the morning. The air becomes so full of the flying particles that you cannot see the lead-dog of your team. Men have lost their way in the streets of Nome and wandered out on the tundra to their death. There is considerable sunshine in the summer, and some comparatively still days, but there is much rain, and mossy swamps are everywhere.

The men at Nome in the fall of '99 included many who had been at Dawson in '97, but conditions were very different. The Klondike Stampede was composed of tenderfeet, not one in twenty of whom had ever mined for anything before-men of the city and village and workshop and farm, new to wilderness life, unused to roughing it. Those who reached Nome in '99 were mostly victims of hard luck. Many were Klondikers who had spent two winters rushing wildly from creek to creek on fake reports, possessing themselves of a multitude of worthless claims, eating up the outfits

they had brought in with them, and then working for wages in mines of the lucky ones to buy a passage to the new diggings. Many had come down the Yukon in their own rowboats.

But the Klondike Stampede was the cause of other smaller but more fruitless stampedes. These were started by steamboat companies, or by trading companies, and often by wildcat" mining companies, and were generally cruel hoaxes. Scores of small steamboats, hastily built for the purpose, went up the Yukon to the Koyakuk and other tributaries in the summer of '98. Other scores of power-schooners and small sailing vessels sailed through Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean and through Kotzebue Sound to the Kobuk and Sewalik Rivers. Almost without exception these eager goldseekers of '98 found only disappointment, endured the savage winter as best they could, and, out of money and food, were making their way back to the States, when news of the marvelous "beach diggings' at Nome met them and they flocked thither in hopes of at least making back their grub-stake."

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As these vessels approached the new