d shot the Yukon in
flatboats. They reached Circle City on the very day when some Siwash
Indians came into the settlement with the report that there had been a
rich gold strike farther up the river, on a certain Klondike Creek.
Two days later Tiny and her friends, and nearly everyone else in Circle
City, started for the Klondike fields on the last steamer that went
up the Yukon before it froze for the winter. That boatload of people
founded Dawson City. Within a few weeks there were fifteen hundred
homeless men in camp. Tiny and the carpenter's wife began to cook for
them, in a tent. The miners gave her a building lot, and the carpenter
put up a log hotel for her. There she sometimes fed a hundred and fifty
men a day. Miners came in on snowshoes from their placer claims twenty
miles away to buy fresh bread from her, and paid for it in gold.

That winter Tiny kept in her hotel a Swede whose legs had been frozen
one night in a storm when he was trying to find his way back to his
cabin. The poor fellow thought it great good fortune to be cared for by
a woman, and a woman who spoke his own tongue. When he was told that
his feet must be amputated, he said he hoped he would not get well; what
could a working-man do in this hard world without feet? He did, in fact,
die from the operation, but not before he had deeded Tiny Soderball his
claim on Hunker Creek. Tiny sold her hotel, invested half her money in
Dawson building lots, and with the rest she developed her claim. She
went off into the wilds and lived on the claim. She bought other claims
from discouraged miners, traded or sold them on percentages.

After nearly ten years in the Klondike, Tiny returned, with a
considerable fortune, to live in San Francisco. I met her in Salt Lake
City in 1908. She was a thin, hard-faced woman, very well-dressed, very
reserved in manner. Curiously enough, she reminded me of Mrs. Gardener,
for whom she had worked in Black Hawk so long ago. She told me about
some of the desperate chances she had taken in the gold country, but the
thrill of them was quite gone. She said frankly that nothing interested
her much now but making money. The only two human beings of whom she
spoke with any feeling were the Swede, Johnson, who had given her his
claim, and Lena Lingard. She had persuaded Lena to come to San Francisco
and go into business there.

'Lincoln was never any place for her,' Tiny remarked. 'In a town of that
size Lena would always be gos