part of which represented fortunes thrown away. Scattered about and along the shore, looking for an opportunity to steal, were as tough a looking lot of rascals as one could meet. Upon walking into the center of the town one was greeted by a sight which beggars description. Certainly it was a case of "whited sepulcher." The whiteness viewed from afar disappeared. The main street was lined with hastily-erected two-story frame buildings, with here and there a tent—a series of saloons, gambling-places, and dance-halls, restaurants, steamship agencies, various kinds of stores, and lawyers' "offices." It was filled with a mass of promiscuous humanity. Loads of stuff drawn by horses and dog-teams were being carted through the narrow, crowded ways, and the cry of encouragement to the dogs of "Mush on" (dog French for Marchons) was heard frequently. Miners with heavy packs on their backs were starting out for the claims on the creeks and into the unknown interior, but the "bar-room" miner was far more in evidence.

It was not the typical mining camp where the population for the greater part is composed of hardy, honest people who have undergone privation to reach their destination, and thereby represent, in a measure, the survival of the fittest; for this was a great impossible hybrid sort of city, accessible by steamer direct from San Francisco and Seattle, where the riffraff and criminals of the country were dumped, remote from the restraints of law and order. I heard old-timers who had visited all the principal mining camps in recent years remark that this Nome was the "toughest proposition" they had ever encountered, and I must admit that it would be difficult to picture anything tougher. However, it was soon realized that the matter to be reckoned with was that of sanitary conditions, or rather the lack of them. The general "toughness" of things and the inconveniences of getting settled had been in the main foreseen and discounted, but the rather alarming outbreak of smallpox in the camp, and the reported filling up of the "pest-house," made matters somewhat more involved and complicated. There had been a warning in Seattle that certain vessels were bringing up persons infected with the disease, and two of the suspected ships were then being held in quarantine by the vigilant government representative, Lieutenant Jarvis, but the disease had, nevertheless, secured a foothold in the camp. Undoubtedly, however, the matter was grossly exaggerated, and there were probably more deaths from pneumonia than from any other disease. The smallpox scare, nevertheless, gave the doctors a good opening, for vaccination was strictly in order. Considering in retrospect the site of the place, the total absence of any sewerage, and the great motley crowd there herded together, Nome proved to be a remarkably healthy camp—a fact due, in the main, to the prompt measures for sanitation taken by General Randall immediately upon his arrival, and the introduction into the town, later in the season, of good water conveyed by pipes from the streams beyond. During the preceding year typhoid had been very prevalent and deaths numerous. A repetition was thus happily avoided, though, during the first days the prospects seemed indeed dismal, and the old-timers (always spoken of as "sour doughs" in Alaska) predicted that, after the rains should set in, the people were going to die like flies; and, without the least exaggeration, it certainly looked that way. I believe, nevertheless, that if the story could be told, it would be learned that more lives have been lost in that country through drowning than in any other way. Hundreds of gold-hunters, in small and unseaworthy boats, as soon as they could do so, left Nome to prospect the remoter coast and possible creeks, many of whom perished in the sudden and fierce storms which occur in the Bering Sea, and wives and mothers wondered why no letters came from Alaska.

We were four or five days collecting our seventeen packages of freight, and with V—— took turns day and night waiting for the uncertain lighters to come ashore with their mixed loads of machinery and miscellaneous supplies. I believe that between us we saw and examined every parcel which came from the hold of the Lane. C—— was ill aboard ship, and we looked after his freight as well. Some days it was too rough to discharge any, or a tug could not be secured or had broken down. It was good luck finally to get it all, for many were left high and dry with nothing, their vessels having returned for a second trip with cargo not wholly discharged. During these nights—or what should have been nights—we were fortunate to have extended to us the hospitality of the floor of the storehouse of the Wild Goose Mining and Trading Company, and I can very distinctly recall the stretched-out, blanketed figures lying about, the coughing of a sick Eskimo family in the attic above, and the yelling of the fellow across the way exhorting people in the ever-restless street to enter the dance-hall and see the "most beautiful women in the world."

Until our tents and provisions could be collected, it was necessary to live, so to speak, "on the town," but restaurant competition was already so keen that one could get a really excellent and clean meal for a dollar and a half or a dollar. I drank no water at all, unless it had been boiled, and then took it with tea. It is possible thus to accustom one's self; but I distinctly remember being on one occasion so thirsty as to give fifty cents for a glass of ginger-ale, and poor at that. Despite our special vigilance in watching our freight as it accumulated on the shore, in an unguarded moment, when our backs were turned, one of the numerous thugs stole V——'s valise, containing many essentials and keepsakes of the miner which could not be replaced. The calm, manly manner in which he bore his great loss, for which my brother and I felt partly responsible, was an excellent example for us when, on the morrow, we similarly had stolen from us the sack which contained our invaluable sleeping-robes, made from army blankets, things which we missed all summer, and the lack of which made us mentally sore. Of course, among such an assortment of persons, there were a number of murders, suicides, and indulgences in "gun-play," and it was not precisely the proper thing in the small hours to stroll carelessly about the place.

Early in the spring of 1900 a "strike" had been made at Topkok, a small stretch of beach some thirty miles east of Nome, near the mouth of a dry creek called Daniel's. Four men with primitive contrivances had taken out at least forty thousand dollars' worth of gold-dust in thirty days, when the secret leaked out, and a stampede to that quarter ensued. Small vessels of all kinds, charging from fifteen to twenty-five dollars a passenger and a good deal for freight, were making the trip, crowded, between Nome and the new diggings. It was generally conceded that all the ground along the creeks back of Nome, and the tundra, had been staked and restaked for many miles; in fact, nearly all the surrounding country had been gobbled up, on speculation mainly, after the rich discoveries on Anvil and other creeks. There had been a rush to Port Clarence, forty miles north and west, but it was common belief that no gold had been discovered there, and that it was a mere real-estate boom and a fake excitement. Cape York, thirty miles beyond Port Clarence, which had been reported rich the preceding fall, and where it was believed there would be a considerable