THE WHITE WORLD 



winter were it not for the fact of the floating ice cakes 

 gorging at Bering Sea and jamming and backing up 

 from the mouth to the head waters. 



In 1897, the river stopped at Dawson, November 7, at 

 Fort Selkirk, November 17, and at the Little Salmon, 

 November 28. The jam backed up stream at the rate of 

 about twenty miles a day, and to form it, cakes of ice 

 eighteen inches thick were piled on top of each other, ris- 

 ing in places in hummocks ten or a dozen feet in height, 

 like the paleocrystic ice of the polar sea. Not only was 

 the surface terribly rough as a whole, but the detail of the 

 ice masses also presented a collection of points and ex- 

 crescences that bruised and blistered men's feet and made 

 extra wrappings a necessity. 



The snow was marvelously light and fine and dry, and 

 back in the woods it never crusted, but rested as softly as 

 sifted wood ashes. Still, out on the river it was packed 

 by the wind till it would support the weight of a fox or a 

 dog, but not that of a man or a sled. In midwinter, when 

 the rush of travel had passed, breaking trail was terribly 

 fatiguing work. There are two poles of greatest cold, one 

 in Siberia and the other in the northern part of the North 

 American Continent, and on the Yukon, as early as No- 

 vember, the temperature reached a lower point than any 

 experienced by Nansen in his three years on the polar ice. 



All is changed in the Yukon, and there is comparative 

 comfort along the ice trail at present. The stern necessi- 

 ties and perils are gone, but the pioneer spirit still marches 

 on, and the scene has only been transformed to the Koyu- 

 kuk and the Kuskokwim and a host of unmapped streams 

 lacing the Arctic waste. 



Here the fruit farmer from Puget Sound and the Arizona 

 miner, the Cambridge college man and the Texas ranger, 

 shoulder to shoulder, or back to back, with Viking spirit, 

 are waging the same lusty struggle. It is the love of ad- 

 venture, old as humanity, that influences these men, and 

 this, after all, rather than the greed for riches, which has 

 been given the prominence, is the significant feature of the 

 Klondike. 



332 



