b: "Surely there is a vein for
the silver and a place for the gold where they fine it" (refine it). But
that "gold is where you find it" is about the only law touching
auriferous deposits that holds universally good.

Three long parallel streets of one and two story wooden buildings, with
cross streets connecting them, made up the town. Because the country is
poorly timbered, the usual log construction had yielded in the main to
framed buildings, and great quantities of lumber had been brought the
previous summer from Fairbanks, and even from Nome and the outside, to
supplement the low-grade output of two local mills. But the price of
building materials had been very high, and the average dwelling was very
small and incommodious. People accustomed to the comparative luxury of
the older camps had suffered a good deal from the lack of all domestic
conveniences in this new will-o'-the-wisp of an eldorado.

So there the town stretched away, lumber and paper,--the usual
tinder-box Alaskan construction--stores slap up against one another,
with no alleyways between; in the busiest part of it and along the
water-front even an adequate provision of side streets grudged;
furnace-heated and kiln-dried and gasoline-lit; waiting for the careless
match and the fanning wind and the five minutes' start that should send
it all up in smoke. A week after we left it came; as it came to Dawson,
as it came to Nome, as it came to Fairbanks, without teaching any lesson
or leaving any precautionary regulations on the statute book to save
men from their own competitive greed. Two or three weeks after the fire,
however, it was all rebuilt, and a plunging local bank held mortgages on
most of the structures for the cost of the new material--and holds them
yet.

[Sidenote: THOUSANDS WITHOUT CHURCH]

With at least a thousand people resident in the town, not to mention the
thousands more out upon the creeks and at Flat City and "Discovery[G]
Otter," there was no minister of religion of any sort in the whole
region, nor had public Divine service been conducted since the occasion
of the _Pelican's_ visit the previous summer. Yet there were many in the
place who sorely missed the opportunities of worship. Twice on Sunday
the largest dancing hall in the town was crowded at service; at night it
could have been filled a second time with those unable to get in.

Places like this present very difficult problems to those desirous of
providing for their re