i28 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



REMINISCENCES OF YUKON EXPLORATION, 1865-1868 



BY WILLIAM HEALEY DALL 



Smithsonian Institution. 



OF the human flood which poured over the Chilkoot crest and inun- 

 dated the drainage hasin of the Yukon in the last years of the 

 nineteenth century, Elizabeth Robins, Joaquin Miller and Jack London 

 have given lurid pictures. The thirst for gold drew miners from every 

 western camp, gamblers from every slum, dreamers from three conti- 

 nents, and human parasites from the whole round world. Ignorant of 

 the climatic conditions, unprepared for the vicissitudes of life in the 

 north, often burdened with preposterous machinery, unsuitable equip- 

 ment and impossible loads — this motley horde invaded the Yukon terri- 

 tory in quest of fortune. With thousands exhaustion, exposure, disap- 

 pointment, fear and panic dealt harshly in the end. 



The interplay of human passions among those stripped thus of every 

 conventionality offered an unrivaled opportunity to the observer. 

 Greed, fear, suspicion, cruelty and selfishness revealed themselves, on 

 occasion, as vividly as did the contrasted courage, kindliness, self-denial 

 and heroic endurance of the nobler souls. On the just and the unjust, 

 the strong and the weak, the coward and the courageous, indiscrimi- 

 nately, played the natural forces. The soft, white, clogging snow, the 

 stinging cold, the searching wind, the claims of appetite — none might 

 forego. 



What with the fight for mere existence, the struggle for a paying 

 location, the fitful gleaming of hope, fear, realization and disappoint- 

 ment, few in all that seething multitude may have had eyes for the 

 beauty, the solemnity, the poetry of that wild north land. For most 

 of them memory would picture the weary monotony of the trail, the 

 buffeting of wind and snow, the penetrating rigor of the cold. These 

 things so bit into their experience that all other impressions would 

 seem trivial. Upon these factors fiction and romance would lean for 

 local color, until, in the course of years, they would become to the 

 average man essentially typical of the Yukon country. Under these 

 conditions it seems possibly worth while, for one of the few who visited 

 the Yukon region in its virgin prime, to put on record some of the 

 impressions which it left upon his memory. 



Like most great waterways, the Yukon itself has carved its kingdom 

 out from the rude husk of mother earth. Before man was, its waters 



