ence of thirty years he insists that the climate is delightful, and
declares that whenever he makes a trip to the States he is afflicted with
home-sickness. Needless to say, the North still has him and will keep
tight hold of him until he dies. In fact, for him to die elsewhere would
be inartistic and insincere. Of three of the "pioneer" pioneers, Jack
McQuestion alone survives. In 1871, from one to seven years before Holt
went over Chilcoot, in the company of Al Mayo and Arthur Harper,
McQuestion came into the Yukon from the North-west over the Hudson Bay
Company route from the Mackenzie to Fort Yukon. The names of these three
men, as their lives, are bound up in the history of the country, and so
long as there be histories and charts, that long will the Mayo and
McQuestion rivers and the Harper and Ladue town site of Dawson be
remembered. As an agent of the Alaska Commercial Company, in 1873,
McQuestion built Fort Reliance, six miles below the Klondike River. In
1898 the writer met Jack McQuestion at Minook, on the Lower Yukon. The
old pioneer, though grizzled, was hale and hearty, and as optimistic as
when he first journeyed into the land along the path of the Circle. And
no man more beloved is there in all the North. There will be great
sadness there when his soul goes questing on over the Last
Divide--"farther north," perhaps--who can tell?

Frank Dinsmore is a fair sample of the men who made the Yukon country. A
Yankee, born, in Auburn, Maine, the _Wanderlust_ early laid him by the
heels, and at sixteen he was heading west on the trail that led "farther
north." He prospected in the Black Hills, Montana, and in the Coeur
d'Alene, then heard a whisper of the North, and went up to Juneau on the
Alaskan Panhandle. But the North still whispered, and more insistently,
and he could not rest till he went over Chilcoot, and down into the
mysterious Silent Land. This was in 1882, and he went down the chain of
lakes, down the Yukon, up the Pelly, and tried his luck on the bars of
McMillan River. In the fall, a perambulating skeleton, he came back over
the Pass in a blizzard, with a rag of shirt, tattered overalls, and a
handful of raw flour.

But he was unafraid. That winter he worked for a grubstake in Juneau,
and the next spring found the heels of his moccasins turned towards salt
water and his face toward Chilcoot. This was repeated the next spring,
and the following spring, and the spring after that, unt