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time machine as most people will ever experience.
Cleanliness and godliness.
We were ten miles upriver by the time the noise faded. One day out of Skagway, and the excitement on
deck was palpable.
The crowd of prospectors became more sociable, walking around discussing plans and comparing kits.
One fellow noticed that we had an overabundance of rifle ammunition, twelve bandoliers of sixty rounds
each, and he offered to buy a couple of them. Doc took a sample bandolier around the deck and wound
up selling half of them for ten times what he had paid, hiding his glee behind a serious expression. (They
hadn't been a totally honest purchase in the first place, coming from an army sergeant who had certainly
misappropriated them.)
Pretty soon, "horse trading" was the order of the day. Everyone knew how expensive things were
reported to be in Skagway, so they compared their own kit to the ones around them. "You don't got near
enough bacon," one would say; "how 'bout I trade you two tins and two dollars for that extra axe?"
We were approached by several entrepreneurs who noted that our kit was too small for four
people-evidence of how little communication there had been on deck. After it became common
knowledge that I was going back after Skagway, some of them diffidently asked if I might post a letter or
two. Skagway had a bad reputation for mail delivery. You could wait in line all day, only to have the
service window close in your face.
Two men had procured a guitar and fiddle in Juneau. The fiddler could carry a tune, but the guitarist had
never played before, and was attempting to learn from a booklet that came with the instrument. Before
long, there was a spirited bidding for the guitar, to be used as fuel-though the coalition that won the
auction, at twelve dollars, simply smashed it to pieces and threw it over the rail, to tumultuous applause.
Even the owner of the guitar laughed-and suddenly I realized that it must have been set up in advance!
Thesoi-disant musician was as loud and annoying as he could be, and his accomplice started the bidding,
to drop out when it got sufficiently high.
The water was very calm, and passage swift, and when the sun went down a party atmosphere prevailed,
the fiddler joined by a boy with a harmonica and some improvised drumming. Men danced with energy,
alone and together. Several asked me, but I had to demur out of ignorance. I would have gotten the rod
for dancing as a child, and the ballroom dancing I learned at Wellesley was a little too stately for these
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reels and jigs.
But then Doc shyly offered to waltz with me, and I had to say yes. The music was not % time, and he
danced like a stork, but it was good to be in his arms. We ignored the initial hooting and it dwindled
away.
I had a strange premonitory feeling: suppose I said yes, Doc, I will marry you, but only if you give this up
and come back to the States, to start up a normal life. Would Daniel and Chuck give up the
Yukon?-surely not. And I wanted Doc, with his steadiness and knowledge, to be there with my boy.
When I woke at dawn (chastely apart from Doc) we were maneuvering into the one space available at
Skagway's crowded wharf. We'd heard about the wharf and what a difference it made for new arrivals:
had we come a year earlier, the steamer would have anchored out in deep water, while our goods were
laboriously transferred by small boats to the mud at the high-tide mark. Horses and mules would have to
swim ashore. Women and children were carried over the last hundred yards of mud-if they had someone
willing to carry them.
In contrast, this wharf was a paragon of comfort and modernity-there were even electric lights, snapping
off as the dawn brightened.
I had envisioned a place that was mostly tents and mud, with a few hastily constructed saloons, but there
actually was a substantial town past the wharf, bigger than Fort Wrangell, even though most of the
buildings couldn't have been more than a year old. I caught the smell of fresh pine just as the
characteristic whine of a sawmill started up.
There were scores of people waiting on the dock, some with wagons for hire to transport your kit out to
the tent town. Doc told the boys to stay put while he went down to see whether that was a luxury we
could afford. I went along with him, both hesitant and curious.
Right at the bottom of the gangway was a little gray-haired lady with a stack of newspapers, the
SkagwayNews. I found a dime and bought one, and told her I was surprised and relieved to see a
woman at work here alone.
"Plenty of trouble for women here," she said with a twinkle in her eye, "especially for them as wants it."
She introduced herself as Barbara, from Butte, Montana. I later found out that she was a local
"character," saving her pennies while she lived inside a piano box that she'd bought for two dollars.
Most of the other women who came down to the ship were obviously women of easy, or no, virtue, but
they weren't offensive in their behavior. They just stood around trying to look attractive, which frankly
was a task beyond most of their powers.
Doc asked all of the men with wagons, and the cheapest one he could find was fifteen dollars. We had a
powwow about that, and decided it would be worth it if the driver would promise not to unload our
goods until we agreed on a proper site. He said that wouldn't be a problem; there were dozens of places
pretty close to town.
The deck was a madhouse of activity, mostly heavy lifting and cussing, so I let the men take care of both
aspects. I went down to the end of the dock and got them a pail of coffee, but otherwise just stayed out
of the way, reading the paper.
The storm we had weathered on the way into Juneau had been severe enough to make the news. We
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were lucky to have been inland; a river steamer like ours, theMable Lane, had sunk in the Bering Sea.
There was a story about the funeral for Frank Reid, the man who had killed Soapy Smith on the 8th of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]