saloon and dance-hall were
ablaze with light and loud with the raucity of phonographs and the
stamping of feet. Everything was "wide open," and there was not even the
thinnest veneer of respectability. Drinking and gambling and dancing go
on all night long. Drunken men reel out upon the snow; painted faces
leer over muslin curtains as one passes by. Without any government,
without any pretence of municipal organisation, there is no co-operation
for public enterprise. There are no streets, there are no sidewalks
save such as a man may choose to lay in front of his own premises, and
the simplest sanitary precautions are entirely neglected. Nothing but
the cold climate of the north prevents epidemic disease from sweeping
through these places. They rise in a few days wherever gold is found in
quantities, they flourish as the production increases, decline with its
decline, and are left gaunt, dark, and abandoned so soon as the diggings
are exhausted.

The next day we were on the Chatanika River, to which Cleary Creek is
tributary, and were immediately confronted with one of the main troubles
and difficulties of winter travel in this and, as may be supposed, in
any arctic or subarctic country--overflow water.

[Sidenote: OVERFLOW WATER AND ICE]

In the lesser rivers, where deep pools alternate with swift shallows,
the stream freezes solid to the bottom upon the shoals and riffles.
Since the subterranean fountains that supply the river do not cease to
discharge their waters in the winter, however cold it may be, there
comes presently an increasing pressure under the ice above such a
barrier. The pent-up water is strong enough to heave the ice into mounds
and at last to break forth, spreading itself far along the frozen
surface of the river. At times it may be seen gushing out like an
artesian well, rising three or four feet above the surface of the ice,
until the pressure is relieved. Sometimes for many miles at a stretch
the whole river will be covered with a succession of such overflows,
from two or three inches deep to eight or ten, or even twelve; some just
bursting forth, some partially frozen, some resolved into solid "glare"
ice. Thus the surface of the river is continually renewed the whole
winter through, and a section of the ice crust in the spring would show
a series of laminations; here ice upon ice, there ice upon
half-incorporated snow, that mark the successive inundations.

This explanation has been given at