as his name, and already the mists of antiquity have wrapped about the
time of his passage. 1872, 1874, and 1878 are the dates variously
given--a confusion which time will never clear.

Holt penetrated as far as the Hootalinqua, and on his return to the coast
reported coarse gold. The next recorded adventurer is one Edward Bean,
who in 1880 headed a party of twenty-five miners from Sitka into the
uncharted land. And in the same year, other parties (now forgotten, for
who remembers or ever hears the wanderings of the gold hunters?) crossed
the Pass, built boats out of the standing timber, and drifted down the
Yukon and farther north.

And then, for a quarter of a century, the unknown and unsung heroes
grappled with the frost, and groped for the gold they were sure lay
somewhere among the shadows of the Pole. In the struggle with the
terrifying and pitiless natural forces, they returned to the primitive,
garmenting themselves in the skins of wild beasts, and covering their
feet with the walrus _mucluc_ and the moosehide moccasin. They forgot
the world and its ways, as the world had forgotten them; killed their
meat as they found it; feasted in plenty and starved in famine, and
searched unceasingly for the yellow lure. They crisscrossed the land in
every direction, threaded countless unmapped rivers in precarious
birch-bark canoes, and with snowshoes and dogs broke trail through
thousands of miles of silent white, where man had never been. They
struggled on, under the aurora borealis or the midnight sun, through
temperatures that ranged from one hundred degrees above zero to eighty
degrees below, living, in the grim humour of the land, on "rabbit tracks
and salmon bellies."

To-day, a man may wander away from the trail for a hundred days, and just
as he is congratulating himself that at last he is treading virgin soil,
he will come upon some ancient and dilapidated cabin, and forget his
disappointment in wonder at the man who reared the logs. Still, if one
wanders from the trail far enough and deviously enough, he may chance
upon a few thousand square miles which he may have all to himself. On
the other hand, no matter how far and how deviously he may wander, the
possibility always remains that he may stumble, not alone upon a deserted
cabin, but upon an occupied one.

As an instance of this, and of the vastness of the land, no better case
need be cited than that of Harry Maxwell. An able seaman, hailing from