New Bedford, Massachusetts, his ship, the brig _Fannie E. Lee_, was
pinched in the Arctic ice. Passing from whaleship to whaleship, he
eventually turned up at Point Barrow in the summer of 1880. He was
_north_ of the Northland, and from this point of vantage he determined to
pull south of the interior in search of gold. Across the mountains from
Fort Macpherson, and a couple of hundred miles eastward from the
Mackenzie, he built a cabin and established his headquarters. And here,
for nineteen continuous years, he hunted his living and prospected. He
ranged from the never opening ice to the north as far south as the Great
Slave Lake. Here he met Warburton Pike, the author and explorer--an
incident he now looks back upon as chief among the few incidents of his
solitary life.

When this sailor-miner had accumulated $20,000 worth of dust he concluded
that civilization was good enough for him, and proceeded "to pull for the
outside." From the Mackenzie he went up the Little Peel to its
headwaters, found a pass through the mountains, nearly starved to death
on his way across to the Porcupine Hills, and eventually came out on the
Yukon River, where he learned for the first time of the Yukon gold
hunters and their discoveries. Yet for twenty years they had been
working there, his next-door neighbours, virtually, in a land of such
great spaces. At Victoria, British Columbia, previous to his going east
over the Canadian Pacific (the existence of which he had just learned),
he pregnantly remarked that he had faith in the Mackenzie watershed, and
that he was going back after he had taken in the World's Fair and got a
whiff or two of civilization.

Faith! It may or may not remove mountains, but it has certainly made the
Northland. No Christian martyr ever possessed greater faith than did the
pioneers of Alaska. They never doubted the bleak and barren land. Those
who came remained, and more ever came. They could not leave. They
"knew" the gold was there, and they persisted. Somehow, the romance of
the land and the quest entered into their blood, the spell of it gripped
hold of them and would not let them go. Man after man of them, after the
most terrible privation and suffering, shook the muck of the country from
his moccasins and departed for good. But the following spring always
found him drifting down the Yukon on the tail of the ice jams.

Jack McQuestion aptly vindicates the grip of the North. After a
resid