ught him by camp-fire and candle-light, he had added a
somewhat miscellaneous book-knowledge; but he was not burdened with
what he had gathered. Yet he read the facts of life understandingly,
and the sobriety which comes of the soil was his, and the clear
earth-vision.

And so it came about that Jacob Welse crossed over the Chilcoot in an
early day, and disappeared into the vast unknown. A year later he
emerged at the Russian missions clustered about the mouth of the Yukon
on Bering Sea. He had journeyed down a river three thousand miles
long, he had seen things, and dreamed a great dream. But he held his
tongue and went to work, and one day the defiant whistle of a crazy
stern-wheel tub saluted the midnight sun on the dank river-stretch by
Fort o' Yukon. It was a magnificent adventure. How he achieved it
only Jacob Welse can tell; but with the impossible to begin with, plus
the impossible, he added steamer to steamer and heaped enterprise upon
enterprise. Along many a thousand miles of river and tributary he
built trading-posts and warehouses. He forced the white man's axe into
the hands of the aborigines, and in every village and between the
villages rose the cords of four-foot firewood for his boilers. On an
island in Bering Sea, where the river and the ocean meet, he
established a great distributing station, and on the North Pacific he
put big ocean steamships; while in his offices in Seattle and San
Francisco it took clerks by the score to keep the order and system of
his business.

Men drifted into the land. Hitherto famine had driven them out, but
Jacob Welse was there now, and his grub-stores; so they wintered in the
frost and groped in the frozen muck for gold. He encouraged them,
grub-staked them, carried them on the books of the company. His
steamers dragged them up the Koyokuk in the old days of Arctic City.
Wherever pay was struck he built a warehouse and a store. The town
followed. He explored; he speculated; he developed. Tireless,
indomitable, with the steel-glitter in his dark eyes, he was everywhere
at once, doing all things. In the opening up of a new river he was in
the van; and at the tail-end also, hurrying forward the grub. On the
Outside he fought trade-combinations; made alliances with the
corporations of the earth, and forced discriminating tariffs from the
great carriers. On the Inside he sold flour, and blankets, and
tobacco; built saw-mills, staked townsites, and sought p