tores and hotels, the find of one man being shown
in a San Francisco shop window in the shape of one hundred
and thirty thousand dollars worth of gold.

The old gold-fever broke out again as an epidemic. Such a
stampede as took place had never before been seen. The
stream of picturesque humanity that poured through Seattle
and on to the golden north surpassed the palmy days of '49
when California opened its caves of Aladdin. Every steamer
that could be made use of was booked to its full capacity,
while many ardent gold-seekers were turned away. Every
passenger and every pound of cargo that could be taken on
these steamers was loaded and the hegira was almost
instantly in full blast.

As it proved, the new find was in Canadian territory, a few
miles east of the Alaskan boundary, but the flood of men
that set in was mainly American. Many threw up good
positions or mortgaged their homes for funds to join the mad
migration, oblivious in most cases of the fact that they
were setting out to encounter hardships and arctic extremes
of temperature for which their home life had utterly
unfitted them. Warnings were published that those who joined
the pioneer flood faced starvation or death by freezing or
hardship, but the tide was on and could not be turned, and
before the autumn had far advanced thousands had landed at
the mushroom settlements of Skagway and Dyea, laden with the
effects they had brought with them and proposing to fight
their way against nature's obstacles over the difficult
mountain passes and along the little less difficult lakes
and streams to the promised land of gold. A village of log
houses and tents, known as Dawson, had sprung up at the
mouth of the Klondike, and this was the mecca towards which
the great pilgrimage set.

The struggle inland of the first comers was a frightful one.
No roads or pack-trails existed over the rough and lofty
passes of the coast range of mountains, and it was killing
work to transport the many tons of equipments and
provisions over the nearly impassable Chilkoot and White
Passes. For those who came too late in the season it was
quite impassable, the trails and rivers were stopped by snow
and ice, and numbers had to endure a long and miserable
winter in the primitive coast settlements or straggle back
to civilization.

The terrors of that first year's battle with the unbroken
passes are indescribable. Thousands of dead pack-horses
marked the way. And the mountains onc