Democratic Sentinel, Volume 22, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 April 1898 — LIFE IN DAWSON CITY. [ARTICLE]

LIFE IN DAWSON CITY.

The Real El Dorado to Be Found in the Far North. “The River Trip to the Klondike” is the title of an article in the Century written by John Sidney Webb. The author says: On the morning of August 17, at about four o’clock, broad daylight, we came up to that collection of forty large log cabins and five hundred tents, sprawled at the foot of Moose-skin Mountain, named Dawson City. Helter-skelter, in a marsh, Ilea this collection of odds and ends of houses and habitations, the warehouses of the two companies cheek by jowl with cabins and tents; a row of barrooms called Front street; the side streets deep in mud; the river-bank a mass of miners’ boats, Indian canoes, and logs; the screeching of the sa'wmill; the dismal, tuneless scraping of the violin of the danchalls, still wide open; the dogs everywhere, fighting and snarling; the men either “whooping it up” of working with the greatest rapidity to unload the precious freight we had brought—all of this rustling and hustling made the scene more like the outside of a circus-tent, including the smell of the sawdust, than anything else in the world. Dawson City seems like a joke. Eighteen hundred and fifty miles from St. Michael Island—this is where they have gold, millions of gold, and nothing better than a muddy swamp to live in; gold-dust and nuggets in profusion, and yet the negroes in the cabins of a Southern plantation live better than the richest man in the country. Our arrival at Dawson was at a very critical time. We had brought with us nearly four hundred tons of provisions, and this fact served to allay the anxious fears of many who were becoming panic-stricken at the idea that there would be a scarcity of food during the winter. No news had come to us by way of the ocean of later date than June 10, but newspapers had been received over the summit at Dawson of date as late as July 26; and so the report that crowds were swarming into the gold-fields had reached them, but was news to us. The town was thoroughly scared, and was overrun with men who had come down from the diggings, often twenty and twenty-five miles, to make sure of their outfits for the winter; and so determined were they to procure them that they sat themselves down calmly in line, like men waiting to bny seats at a firstnight performance, determined to wait until the goods were put’up and set aside in tjpir names. An outfit. a miner means everything that he uses during the winter, and this, being reduced to its lowest terms, means bacon and beans. There are other things, of course, in, tins and in gunny-sacks—flour, sugar, salt, pickles, dried fruit, desiccated potatoes —to suit the taste; but the work is done, and the gold is found and cleaned up, and miles and miles of the wilderness conquered, and cold weather and wintry winds withstood, on bacon and beans. It is the easiest food to pack, the quickest to prepare, and the most lasting and sustaining. The miner usually reckons on getting his outfit in November, because he can carry on a sledge, after the snow has set in, four times as much as he can pack on his back, and if he is foi-tunate enough to have dogs he can draw much more.