After the laundry my sister and her husband grubstaked me into the Klondike.It was the first gold rush into that region,the early fall rush of 1897.I was twenty-one years old,and in splendid physical condition.I remember,at the end of the twenty-eight-mile portage across Chilcoot from Dyea Beach to Lake Linderman,Iwas packing up with the Indians and out-packing many an Indian.
The last pack into Linderman was three miles.I back-tripped it four times a day,and on each forward trip carried one hundred and fifty pounds.This means that over the worst trails I daily travelled twenty-four miles,twelve of which were under a burden of one hundred and fifty pounds.
Yes,I had let career go hang,and was on the adventure-path again in quest of fortune.And of course,on the adventure-path,I met John Barleycorn.Here were the chesty men again,rovers and adventurers,and while they didn't mind a grub famine,whisky they could not do without.Whisky went over the trail,while the flour lay cached and untouched by the trail-side.
As good fortune would have it,the three men in my party were not drinkers.Therefore I didn't drink save on rare occasions and disgracefully when with other men.In my personal medicine chest was a quart of whisky.I never drew the cork till six months afterward,in a lonely camp,where,without anaesthetics,a doctor was compelled to operate on a man.The doctor and the patient emptied my bottle between them and then proceeded to the operation.
Back in California a year later,recovering from scurvy,I found that my father was dead and that I was the head and the sole bread-winner of a household.When I state that I had passed coal on a steamship from Behring Sea to British Columbia,and travelled in the steerage from there to San Francisco,it will be understood that I brought nothing back from the Klondike but my scurvy.
Times were hard.Work of any sort was difficult to get.And work of any sort was what I had to take,for I was still an unskilled labourer.I had no thought of career.That was over and done with.I had to find food for two mouths beside my own and keep a roof over our heads--yes,and buy a winter suit,my one suit being decidedly summery.I had to get some sort of work immediately.
After that,when I had caught my breath,I might think about my future.
Unskilled labour is the first to feel the slackness of hard times,and I had no trades save those of sailor and laundryman.With my new responsibilities I didn't dare go to sea,and I failed to find a job at laundrying.I failed to find a job at anything.I had my name down in five employment bureaux.I advertised in three newspapers.I sought out the few friends I knew who might be able to get me work;but they were either uninterested or unable to find anything for me.
The situation was desperate.I pawned my watch,my bicycle,and a mackintosh of which my father had been very proud and which he had left to me.It was and is my sole legacy in this world.It had cost fifteen dollars,and the pawnbroker let me have two dollars on it.And--oh,yes--a water-front comrade of earlier years drifted along one day with a dress suit wrapped in newspapers.He could give no adequate explanation of how he had come to possess it,nor did I press for an explanation.I wanted the suit myself.
No;not to wear.I traded him a lot of rubbish which,being unpawnable,was useless to me.He peddled the rubbish for several dollars,while I pledged the dress-suit with my pawnbroker for five dollars.And for all I know the pawnbroker still has the suit.I had never intended to redeem it.
