rtably weather a degree of cold which, in lower latitudes,
would immediately transform him to an icicle. The snow had averaged on
the level places about five feet in depth, but was very deep where it
had drifted and been banked by the wind, making it a common thing to
have to dig one's self out, or for a party to lend assistance in
bringing to the light, if any there was, snow-buried men and women. The
shortest day had given three and a half hours of dusky light; the
coldest had forced the thermometer down to 60 deg. below zero, where
kerosene had frozen. Horses had to be killed on account of the absence
of fodder; and, after having been left out a short time to freeze, one
would chop them up with an ax for dog-food, the chips flying as if they
were timber. Frequent salutations on the trail were such as, "Say, old
man, your nose is frozen," which might bring forth the rejoinder, "So is
yours"; whereupon both would rub snow upon the senseless point, and
proceed onward. It was the continual wind, sometimes impossible to
withstand, which worked the greatest hardship and fiendishly got upon
the nerves. Old Tom Welch, whom I well remembered, and his partner,
while trying to prospect in the snow, had been frozen to death; and
there had been some talk of lynching the individual who had undertaken
to supply them with provisions, upon whose failure to do so the two
unfortunates had essayed to return to Council in a storm which had cost
them their lives. Some others had met a like unnecessary fate. The
natives and oldest white inhabitants unanimously agreed that it had been
the most severe winter known; and it was an attested fact that many
creeks in that region remained throughout the following summer hopeless
ice and presented to the expectant miner a frozen face.

The freighters came in at midnight the day of my arrival; and by the
noon following my twenty-odd pieces of freight and baggage, intact, were
properly stored and distributed in and about our abode--a very great
satisfaction indeed. Those fellows earned their three cents a pound all
right. A little later in the season two very small and very light-draft
stern-wheelers, referred to as "coal-oil Johnnies," plied intermittently
between White Mountain and Council, as the condition of the streams
allowed; but the usual and best-adapted means of transportation were
long, shallow scows which a horse pulled up-stream freighted, and rode
down upon empty.

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