THE STIKINE RIVER IN 1898 13 



of dollars went to the bottom of the Stikine through breaking 

 ice, overturned canoes, flooded camps, and caches. There were 

 at least four dogs to each inhabitant of Glenora — splendid, shaggy 

 animals that sported in the swift, cold river and breasted its six- 

 mile current in pursuit of sticks in sheer excess of strength and 

 spirits. Nearly all of them had been over the Teslin trail, each 

 one carrying a fifty-pound sack of flour on his back or dragging 

 a three-hundred-pound sled-load over ice and snow, worn to 

 skin and bones by such long-continued exertions and hardships 

 on scant food. These dogs were then living in plenty at Glenora, 

 and were evidently well cared for by kind owners, to judge from 

 the way they capered and jumped and barked around certain 

 men who lounged along the one river bank road ; but the tales 

 one hears of the inhuman cruelties to animals inflicted along 

 all the Klondike trails would put a stain upon any gold that is 

 ever brought out of the district. " It was a trail of blood from 

 Stikine City to Glenora, and I never want to see such sickening 

 sights again," one rough frontiersman summed it up. Ignorance, 

 greed, and callousness were evenly combined in this inhuman 

 work. Every kind of a dog was bought or stolen in the States 

 and brought up in midwinter on the open steamer decks, where 

 the half-fed creatures were crowded together in sleet, snow, rain, 

 and bitter winds without shelter or drink. Tied in strings to 

 the fences, they were left to howl the nights out at Ft Wrangell, 

 and were in poor condition to pull the cruel loads when driven 

 off over ice and snow to be beaten, clubbed, and kicked as long 

 as they could stand in harness, All animals were treated as 

 cruelly — horses and oxen brought to Ft Wrangell without food or 

 drink on the way, and left as uncared for on the river steamers, 

 until certain humane captains took the matter in hand, broke 

 into the bales of fodder that the owners were saving for use on 

 the trail, and under threats made those owners give water to the 

 animals crying with thirst as the river ran beside them. The 

 owner of a flock of goats tied them to the Ft Wrangell wharf 

 stringers at low tide and returned to find them all drowned by 

 the usual eighteen-foot rise of water, the crowds of wharf loafers 

 having enjoyed the spectacle as their idea of a joke on the poor 

 distracted goat herder, who had put his every dollar into this 

 Klondike venture. 



There was no movement of pack-trains out over or in from 

 the trail for the two days the Ogilvie waited at Glenora, and a 

 few incoming packers reported that the corduroying of the bogs 



