272 BIG GAME SHOOTING IN ALASKA chap. 



of their post. Therefore, as the attorney remarked, it was 

 not much use claiming damages from a Deputy-Marshal, as 

 one could not get blood from a stone. But since, as he said, 

 quaintly checking off the points of the present case, the Head 

 Marshal was going round making libellous statements con- 

 cerning me, his advice to me was " not to go shooting at a 

 squirrel when I had a chance at an elephant," but to have 

 a go at the Head Marshal himself. Had it not been for the 

 fact that this would have entailed losing the Bertha, and a 

 probably protracted stay at Valdez, I should have taken his 

 advice, but finally decided, as a salve to my injured feelings, to 

 take all the papers and documents to Washington, and there 

 lay them before the Minister of Justice and other officials, 

 trusting that they would make things lively for these over- 

 zealous Marshals in Alaska. This I did, and at Washington 

 received the sympathy and interest of the officials in my case, 

 and from letters since received, I have reason to believe that 

 certain men in Alaska found that in this case they had, as I 

 said before, " cut off a bigger lump than they could chew." 



The chief topics of interest for the day in Valdez appeared 

 to be the shooting of a man on the previous evening in a 

 saloon, and the arrival of some prospectors from the Sushitna 

 River, where they had made a wonderful strike of gold in a 

 gravel creek, some of the lucky finders getting out as much 

 as Sioo per man in the day. We saw a lot of fine samples 

 of the gold, and numbers of the inhabitants of Valdez were 

 even then talking of, and preparing for, a wild rush over the 

 trails into the Sushitna country in the coming spring. The 

 long -talked -of railway from Valdez into the Tanana and 

 Yukon districts had not yet been commenced, although 

 rumour stated, when we were last there in the spring, that 

 a lot of work would be done on it during that summer. If 



