ections, a maze of little
valleys threading in and out amongst them.

[Sidenote: PLACE-NAMES]

The Bonanza Creek road-house was by far the best of any between the
Kuskokwim and the Iditarod, and showed what can be done for comfort,
even under adverse circumstances, by a couple who care and try. But how
the names of gold-bearing creeks, or creeks that are expected to be
gold-bearing are repeated again and again in every new camp! I once
counted up the following list of mining place-names in Alaska: Bonanza
Creeks, 10; Eldorados and Little Eldorados, 10; Nugget Creeks or
Gulches, 17; Gold Creeks, 12; Gold Runs, 7. Nor is it only in creeks
with auriferous deposit or expectation of auriferous deposit that this
reduplication occurs; there are Bear Creeks, 16; Boulder Creeks, 13;
Moose Creeks, 13; Willow Creeks, 17; Canyon Creeks, 12; Glacier Creeks,
14.

The imagination of the average prospector is not his most active
faculty, but even when his imagination is given play and he names a
place "Twilight," as he did the original settlement at this base of
supplies, the ineradicable prose of trade comes along the next summer
and changes it to "Iditarod City." There must have been some remarkable
personality strong enough to repress the "chamber of commerce" at
Tombstone, Arizona, or the place would have lost its distinctive name so
soon as it grew large enough to have mercantile establishments instead
of stores.

[Sidenote: IDITAROD CITY]

We went through "Discovery Otter" and into "Flat City," on Flat Creek,
the jealous rival of Iditarod City, and so over the hills to Iditarod
City, on the wings of a storm. The wind whirled the snow behind us and
drove the sled along almost on top of the dogs. In its bleak situation
and its exposure to the full force of the wind, Iditarod City reminds
one of Nome or Candle on the Seward Peninsula. The hills and flats that
surround it are in the main treeless, and the snow drifts and drives
over everything. Almost all the week that we spent in the town it was
smothered up in a howling wind-storm, so that it was quite a serious
undertaking to walk a block or two along the streets. Deep drifts were
piled up on all the corners and on the lee side of all buildings. We
reached Iditarod City on Monday, the 13th of March. Until the following
Friday morning was no cessation or moderation of the wind-storm; and
this, they told us, represented most of the weather since the 1st of
January.

Overgro