THE GRAYLING 25 



the house cut apart and spread until the room was large enough for 

 the carpet. How Tagish Charley became one of the generous rich, 

 beloved of all men, and how Siwash George deserted the woman who 

 made his fortune for a San Francisco actress, all this, with the 

 spectacular career of Swiftwater Bill, are known to every one in touch 

 with the gossip of the smart set of Caribou Crossing, Seattle, and San 

 Francisco. 



When Ogilvie told all this in Juneau, the whole town re- 

 sponded. Juneau itself lay on the very frontier of adventure, and 

 here was something newer and greater and only two thousand miles 

 or so beyond. 



So the gamblers and gold seekers, the clerks and lawyers resigned 

 their positions, threw up their jobs, in some way or another made their 

 way to the head of navigation, Dyea or Skagway, and then struck the 

 White Pass Trail. The Bright Eyes Opera Company broke its en- 

 gagement at Juneau and men and women started over the mountains 

 to Bonanza Creek. And after them came a most wonderful migration 

 — one of those movements which, if anything could, lend " to the 

 sober twilight of the present, the color of romance." 



All the way southward, the word went from Juneau. Cigarette 

 young men, who had never done a man's day's work-in their lives, 

 crowded the smoking rooms in the Pullman cars, and pampered dogs 

 — St. Bernard, Great Dane, Mastiff, brought up in luxury, and bought 

 or stolen to do the work of a husky or Siberian wolf dog — rode in the 

 baggage cars. Along with the rest came young women and old women, 

 dainty Mercedes, silly, pretty and whimsical, demanding the impos- 

 sible, elderly graduates of cheap boarding houses with iron hand and 

 iron jaw, capable of making some sort of a way anywhere. All were 

 loaded down with clothing and provisions needed for an Arctic 

 winter. Most knew nothing of hardships, nothing of dogs, nothing 

 of trails over glacial mountains and through endless chains of rock- 

 bound lakes, each hidden in its - cleft of rocks. They knew nothing of 

 boats or rafts, or the breaking up of the ice, nothing of gold or men 

 or Alaska. And the dogs were just as ignorant, and had not even 

 seen a map of Alaska, and did not know beforehand that they were 

 going there. 



From Skagway- — a wild bedlam of incongruous elements, with its 

 hero mayor, chief of the Vigilantes — the trail goes up the boisterous 

 river, through the fir woods, past the mouth of glaciers, into a great 

 amphitheater like that at the foot of the Spltigen Pass, then in long 

 zigzags and windings past reckless splashing waterfalls and unbridged 

 chasms to the foot of the moss-covered White Pass. Then up the pass 

 to its gusty Summit Lake and the long ravine-like chain of lakes at 

 the head of the Yukon which may keep one guessing for miles as to the 

 way past or around them. 



