<SPAN name="chap0111"></SPAN>
<h3> CHAPTER XI </h3>
<p>The hero of the Yukon in the younger days before the Carmack strike,
Burning Daylight now became the hero of the strike. The story of his
hunch and how he rode it was told up and down the land. Certainly he
had ridden it far and away beyond the boldest, for no five of the
luckiest held the value in claims that he held. And, furthermore, he
was still riding the hunch, and with no diminution of daring. The wise
ones shook their heads and prophesied that he would lose every ounce he
had won. He was speculating, they contended, as if the whole country
was made of gold, and no man could win who played a placer strike in
that fashion.</p>
<p>On the other hand, his holdings were reckoned as worth millions, and
there were men so sanguine that they held the man a fool who
coppered[6] any bet Daylight laid. Behind his magnificent
free-handedness and careless disregard for money were hard, practical
judgment, imagination and vision, and the daring of the big gambler.
He foresaw what with his own eyes he had never seen, and he played to
win much or lose all.</p>
<p>"There's too much gold here in Bonanza to be just a pocket," he argued.
"It's sure come from a mother-lode somewhere, and other creeks will
show up. You-all keep your eyes on Indian River. The creeks that drain
that side the Klondike watershed are just as likely to have gold as the
creeks that drain this side."</p>
<p>And he backed this opinion to the extent of grub-staking half a dozen
parties of prospectors across the big divide into the Indian River
region. Other men, themselves failing to stake on lucky creeks, he put
to work on his Bonanza claims. And he paid them well—sixteen dollars
a day for an eight-hour shift, and he ran three shifts. He had grub to
start them on, and when, on the last water, the Bella arrived loaded
with provisions, he traded a warehouse site to Jack Kearns for a supply
of grub that lasted all his men through the winter of 1896. And that
winter, when famine pinched, and flour sold for two dollars a pound, he
kept three shifts of men at work on all four of the Bonanza claims.
Other mine-owners paid fifteen dollars a day to their men; but he had
been the first to put men to work, and from the first he paid them a
full ounce a day. One result was that his were picked men, and they
more than earned their higher pay.</p>
<p>One of his wildest plays took place in the early winter after the
freeze-up. Hundreds of stampeders, after staking on other creeks than
Bonanza, had gone on disgruntled down river to Forty Mile and Circle
City. Daylight mortgaged one of his Bonanza dumps with the Alaska
Commercial Company, and tucked a letter of credit into his pouch. Then
he harnessed his dogs and went down on the ice at a pace that only he
could travel. One Indian down, another Indian back, and four teams of
dogs was his record. And at Forty Mile and Circle City he bought
claims by the score. Many of these were to prove utterly worthless, but
some few of them were to show up more astoundingly than any on Bonanza.
He bought right and left, paying as low as fifty dollars and as high as
five thousand. This highest one he bought in the Tivoli Saloon. It
was an upper claim on Eldorado, and when he agreed to the price, Jacob
Wilkins, an old-timer just returned from a look at the moose-pasture,
got up and left the room, saying:—</p>
<p>"Daylight, I've known you seven year, and you've always seemed sensible
till now. And now you're just letting them rob you right and left.
That's what it is—robbery. Five thousand for a claim on that damned
moose-pasture is bunco. I just can't stay in the room and see you
buncoed that way."</p>
<p>"I tell you-all," Daylight answered, "Wilkins, Carmack's strike's so
big that we-all can't see it all. It's a lottery. Every claim I buy
is a ticket. And there's sure going to be some capital prizes."</p>
<p>Jacob Wilkins, standing in the open door, sniffed incredulously.</p>
<p>"Now supposing, Wilkins," Daylight went on, "supposing you-all knew it
was going to rain soup. What'd you-all do? Buy spoons, of course.
Well, I'm sure buying spoons. She's going to rain soup up there on the
Klondike, and them that has forks won't be catching none of it."</p>
<p>But Wilkins here slammed the door behind him, and Daylight broke off to
finish the purchase of the claim.</p>
<p>Back in Dawson, though he remained true to his word and never touched
hand to pick and shovel, he worked as hard as ever in his life. He had
a thousand irons in the fire, and they kept him busy. Representation
work was expensive, and he was compelled to travel often over the
various creeks in order to decide which claims should lapse and which
should be retained. A quartz miner himself in his early youth, before
coming to Alaska, he dreamed of finding the mother-lode. A placer camp
he knew was ephemeral, while a quartz camp abided, and he kept a score
of men in the quest for months. The mother-lode was never found, and,
years afterward, he estimated that the search for it had cost him fifty
thousand dollars.</p>
<p>But he was playing big. Heavy as were his expenses, he won more
heavily. He took lays, bought half shares, shared with the men he
grub-staked, and made personal locations. Day and night his dogs were
ready, and he owned the fastest teams; so that when a stampede to a new
discovery was on, it was Burning Daylight to the fore through the
longest, coldest nights till he blazed his stakes next to Discovery.
In one way or another (to say nothing of the many worthless creeks) he
came into possession of properties on the good creeks, such as Sulphur,
Dominion, Excelsis, Siwash, Cristo, Alhambra, and Doolittle. The
thousands he poured out flowed back in tens of thousands. Forty Mile
men told the story of his two tons of flour, and made calculations of
what it had returned him that ranged from half a million to a million.
One thing was known beyond all doubt, namely, that the half share in
the first Eldorado claim, bought by him for a half sack of flour, was
worth five hundred thousand. On the other hand, it was told that when
Freda, the dancer, arrived from over the passes in a Peterborough canoe
in the midst of a drive of mush-ice on the Yukon, and when she offered
a thousand dollars for ten sacks and could find no sellers, he sent the
flour to her as a present without ever seeing her. In the same way ten
sacks were sent to the lone Catholic priest who was starting the first
hospital.</p>
<p>His generosity was lavish. Others called it insane. At a time when,
riding his hunch, he was getting half a million for half a sack of
flour, it was nothing less than insanity to give twenty whole sacks to
a dancing-girl and a priest. But it was his way. Money was only a
marker. It was the game that counted with him. The possession of
millions made little change in him, except that he played the game more
passionately. Temperate as he had always been, save on rare occasions,
now that he had the wherewithal for unlimited drinks and had daily
access to them, he drank even less. The most radical change lay in
that, except when on trail, he no longer did his own cooking. A
broken-down miner lived in his log cabin with him and now cooked for
him. But it was the same food: bacon, beans, flour, prunes, dried
fruits, and rice. He still dressed as formerly: overalls, German socks,
moccasins, flannel shirt, fur cap, and blanket coat. He did not take
up with cigars, which cost, the cheapest, from half a dollar to a
dollar each. The same Bull Durham and brown-paper cigarette,
hand-rolled, contented him. It was true that he kept more dogs, and
paid enormous prices for them. They were not a luxury, but a matter of
business. He needed speed in his travelling and stampeding. And by
the same token, he hired a cook. He was too busy to cook for himself,
that was all. It was poor business, playing for millions, to spend
time building fires and boiling water.</p>
<p>Dawson grew rapidly that winter of 1896. Money poured in on Daylight
from the sale of town lots. He promptly invested it where it would
gather more. In fact, he played the dangerous game of pyramiding, and
no more perilous pyramiding than in a placer camp could be imagined.
But he played with his eyes wide open.</p>
<p>"You-all just wait till the news of this strike reaches the Outside,"
he told his old-timer cronies in the Moosehorn Saloon. "The news won't
get out till next spring. Then there's going to be three rushes. A
summer rush of men coming in light; a fall rush of men with outfits;
and a spring rush, the next year after that, of fifty thousand.
You-all won't be able to see the landscape for chechaquos. Well,
there's the summer and fall rush of 1897 to commence with. What are
you-all going to do about it?"</p>
<p>"What are you going to do about it?" a friend demanded.</p>
<p>"Nothing," he answered. "I've sure already done it. I've got a dozen
gangs strung out up the Yukon getting out logs. You-all'll see their
rafts coming down after the river breaks. Cabins! They sure will be
worth what a man can pay for them next fall. Lumber! It will sure go to
top-notch. I've got two sawmills freighting in over the passes.
They'll come down as soon as the lakes open up. And if you-all are
thinking of needing lumber, I'll make you-all contracts right
now—three hundred dollars a thousand, undressed."</p>
<p>Corner lots in desirable locations sold that winter for from ten to
thirty thousand dollars. Daylight sent word out over the trails and
passes for the newcomers to bring down log-rafts, and, as a result, the
summer of 1897 saw his sawmills working day and night, on three shifts,
and still he had logs left over with which to build cabins. These
cabins, land included, sold at from one to several thousand dollars.
Two-story log buildings, in the business part of town, brought him from
forty to fifty thousand dollars apiece. These fresh accretions of
capital were immediately invested in other ventures. He turned gold
over and over, until everything that he touched seemed to turn to gold.</p>
<p>But that first wild winter of Carmack's strike taught Daylight many
things. Despite the prodigality of his nature, he had poise. He
watched the lavish waste of the mushroom millionaires, and failed quite
to understand it. According to his nature and outlook, it was all very
well to toss an ante away in a night's frolic. That was what he had
done the night of the poker-game in Circle City when he lost fifty
thousand—all that he possessed. But he had looked on that fifty
thousand as a mere ante. When it came to millions, it was different.
Such a fortune was a stake, and was not to be sown on bar-room floors,
literally sown, flung broadcast out of the moosehide sacks by drunken
millionaires who had lost all sense of proportion. There was McMann,
who ran up a single bar-room bill of thirty-eight thousand dollars; and
Jimmie the Rough, who spent one hundred thousand a month for four
months in riotous living, and then fell down drunk in the snow one
March night and was frozen to death; and Swiftwater Bill, who, after
spending three valuable claims in an extravagance of debauchery,
borrowed three thousand dollars with which to leave the country, and
who, out of this sum, because the lady-love that had jilted him liked
eggs, cornered the one hundred and ten dozen eggs on the Dawson market,
paying twenty-four dollars a dozen for them and promptly feeding them
to the wolf-dogs.</p>
<p>Champagne sold at from forty to fifty dollars a quart, and canned
oyster stew at fifteen dollars. Daylight indulged in no such luxuries.
He did not mind treating a bar-room of men to whiskey at fifty cents a
drink, but there was somewhere in his own extravagant nature a sense of
fitness and arithmetic that revolted against paying fifteen dollars for
the contents of an oyster can. On the other hand, he possibly spent
more money in relieving hard-luck cases than did the wildest of the new
millionaires on insane debauchery. Father Judge, of the hospital,
could have told of far more important donations than that first ten
sacks of flour. And old-timers who came to Daylight invariably went
away relieved according to their need. But fifty dollars for a quart of
fizzy champagne! That was appalling.</p>
<p>And yet he still, on occasion, made one of his old-time hell-roaring
nights. But he did so for different reasons. First, it was expected of
him because it had been his way in the old days. And second, he could
afford it. But he no longer cared quite so much for that form of
diversion. He had developed, in a new way, the taste for power. It
had become a lust with him. By far the wealthiest miner in Alaska, he
wanted to be still wealthier. It was a big game he was playing in, and
he liked it better than any other game. In a way, the part he played
was creative. He was doing something. And at no time, striking
another chord of his nature, could he take the joy in a million-dollar
Eldorado dump that was at all equivalent to the joy he took in watching
his two sawmills working and the big down river log-rafts swinging into
the bank in the big eddy just above Moosehide Mountain. Gold, even on
the scales, was, after all, an abstraction. It represented things and
the power to do. But the sawmills were the things themselves, concrete
and tangible, and they were things that were a means to the doing of
more things. They were dreams come true, hard and indubitable
realizations of fairy gossamers.</p>
<p>With the summer rush from the Outside came special correspondents for
the big newspapers and magazines, and one and all, using unlimited
space, they wrote Daylight up; so that, so far as the world was
concerned, Daylight loomed the largest figure in Alaska. Of course,
after several months, the world became interested in the Spanish War,
and forgot all about him; but in the Klondike itself Daylight still
remained the most prominent figure. Passing along the streets of
Dawson, all heads turned to follow him, and in the saloons chechaquos
watched him awesomely, scarcely taking their eyes from him as long as
he remained in their range of vision. Not alone was he the richest man
in the country, but he was Burning Daylight, the pioneer, the man who,
almost in the midst of antiquity of that young land, had crossed the
Chilcoot and drifted down the Yukon to meet those elder giants, Al Mayo
and Jack McQuestion. He was the Burning Daylight of scores of wild
adventures, the man who carried word to the ice-bound whaling fleet
across the tundra wilderness to the Arctic Sea, who raced the mail from
Circle to Salt Water and back again in sixty days, who saved the whole
Tanana tribe from perishing in the winter of '91—in short, the man who
smote the chechaquos' imaginations more violently than any other dozen
men rolled into one.</p>
<p>He had the fatal facility for self-advertisement. Things he did, no
matter how adventitious or spontaneous, struck the popular imagination
as remarkable. And the latest thing he had done was always on men's
lips, whether it was being first in the heartbreaking stampede to
Danish Creek, in killing the record baldface grizzly over on Sulphur
Creek, or in winning the single-paddle canoe race on the Queen's
Birthday, after being forced to participate at the last moment by the
failure of the sourdough representative to appear. Thus, one night in
the Moosehorn, he locked horns with Jack Kearns in the long-promised
return game of poker. The sky and eight o'clock in the morning were
made the limits, and at the close of the game Daylight's winnings were
two hundred and thirty thousand dollars. To Jack Kearns, already a
several-times millionaire, this loss was not vital. But the whole
community was thrilled by the size of the stakes, and each one of the
dozen correspondents in the field sent out a sensational article.</p>
<br/>
<P CLASS="footnote">
[6] To copper: a term in faro, meaning to play a card to lose.</p>
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