re those not so profoundly interested in the war or
whose arrangements had been completed before the actual outbreak of
cannon-shot, and would not be turned aside. An immense army still
pushed on to the north. This I joined on the 20th day of April,
leaving my home in Wisconsin, bound for the overland trail and
bearing a joyous heart. I believed that I was about to see and take
part in a most picturesque and impressive movement across the
wilderness. I believed it to be the last great march of the kind
which could ever come in America, so rapidly were the wild places
being settled up. I wished, therefore, to take part in this tramp of
the goldseekers, to be one of them, and record their deeds. I wished
to return to the wilderness also, to forget books and theories of art
and social problems, and come again face to face with the great free
spaces of woods and skies and streams. I was not a goldseeker, but a
nature hunter, and I was eager to enter this, the wildest region yet
remaining in Northern America. I willingly and with joy took the long
way round, the hard way through.

THE COW-BOY

Of rough rude stock this saddle sprite
Is grosser grown with savage things.
Inured to storms, his fierce delight
Is lawless as the beasts he swings
His swift rope over.--Libidinous, obscene,
Careless of dust and dirt, serene,
He faces snows in calm disdain,
Or makes his bed down in the rain.

CHAPTER II

OUTFITTING

We went to sleep while the train was rushing past the lonely
settler's shacks on the Minnesota Prairies. When we woke we found
ourselves far out upon the great plains of Canada. The morning was
cold and rainy, and there were long lines of snow in the swales of
the limitless sod, which was silent, dun, and still, with a majesty
of arrested motion like a polar ocean. It was like Dakota as I saw it
in 1881. When it was a treeless desolate expanse, swept by owls and
hawks, cut by feet of wild cattle, unmarred and unadorned of man. The
clouds ragged, forbidding, and gloomy swept southward as if with a
duty to perform. No green thing appeared, all was gray and sombre,
and the horizon lines were hid in the cold white mist. Spring was
just coming on.

Our car, which was a tourist sleeper, was filled with goldseekers,
some of them bound for the Stikeen River, some for Skagway. While a
few like myself had set out for Teslin Lake by way of "The Prairie
Route." There were wo