made. Here were eligible winter
quarters; farther on we might have trouble in putting the boat in
safety; here also was a kindly and capable man willing to assist us.

It was our great good fortune to find this man at this spot. A steamboat
he had signalled as she entered the mouth of the Koyukuk had passed him
by unheeded, and he had been left to make his way six hundred miles up
to the diggings, with his winter's outfit in a poling boat. He had
accomplished more than half the task, and, warned by the approach of
winter, had stopped at this place a few days before we reached it, and
had begun the building of a little cabin; meaning to prospect the creek,
which had taken his eye as having a promising look. The cabin we helped
him finish was the twenty-first cabin he had built in Alaska, he
informed us.

There is something very impressive about the quiet, self-reliant,
unrecorded hardihood of the class of which this man was an excellent
type. We asked him why he had no partner, and he said he had had several
partners, but they all snored, and he would not live with a man that
snored. He had prospected and mined in many districts of Alaska during
nearly twenty years. Once he had sold a claim for a few hundred dollars
that had yielded many thousands to the purchaser, and that was as near
wealth as he had ever come. But he had always made a living, always had
enough money at the close of the summer to buy his winter's "outfit" and
try his luck somewhere else.

[Sidenote: THE PROSPECTOR]

Singly, or in pairs, men of this type have wandered all over this vast
country: preceding the government surveys, preceding the professional
explorer, settling down for a winter on some creek that caught their
fancy, building a cabin, thawing down a few holes to bed-rock, sometimes
taking out a little gold, more often finding nothing, going in the
summer to some old-established camp to work for wages, or finding
employment as deck-hand on a steamboat.

With an axe and an auger they have dotted their rough habitations all
over the country; with a pick and a shovel and a gold pan they have
tested the gravels of innumerable creeks. They know the drainage slopes
and the practicable mountain passes, the haunts of the moose and the
time and direction of the caribou's wanderings. The boats they have
built have pushed their noses to the heads of all navigable streams; the
sleds they have made have furrowed the remotest snows. In the arts of