The winters, the trails all unbroken,
  The far fields that beckon and call;
The song of the frost on the runners
  And the Northern Lights high over all;
The trees in the bend of the river,
  The streams that nobody has spanned;
The whisper of gold, the story half told,
  All this by the Devil was planned.

When the trap of the Devil was ready
  Widespread went the whisper of gold,
And the white men stampeded like cattle,
  There never was tie that could hold. 
The first mad rush to the Northland
  When the scum from the four ends of earth
Came in with a rush, a scramble, a crush
  Like scrap in a fusing pot hurled.

They came all untaught and not ready,
  Spurred on in the mad rush for gold;
They died here unsung and uncared for
  Of famine, and scurvy and cold. 
They had the same laws as the wolf pack,
  Stay up, for you die if you fail,
And the paths to the Northern placers
  Are marked by their graves on the trail.

The towns that they started were plague spots
  With brothels and dance halls aglare,
With cribs, faro banks and roulette wheels
  And phonographs adding their blare. 
All traps for the young and unwary,
  All builded to help with his fall,
Never dealer was fair, never game on the square
  For the Devil presided o’er all.

Nick fiendishly grinned when he saw his work
  And he chuckled with devilish glee—­
“When it comes to making an up-to-date hell
  They’ve sure got to hand it to me. 
For every ten souls that come in to this land
  There’s nine of them headed for hell
With never a fight, the percentage is right,
  And my prep school is doing quite well.”

* * * * *

Thus for a time he ruled this land
  Where few might venture forth,
For never a man-made law held good
  From Dixon’s Entrance north. 
He held this land in his claw tipped grip,
  And he took his pay in souls,
Theirs was the blame, for they played his game,
  And they paid for it on hell’s coals.

But the Devil lost when the law came in,
  Or the men who made the laws,
The gambling hall and the dance hall went
  And the Devil was forced to pause. 
For the life in the land develops men,
  Men of an alien breed,
A new made lot, that couldn’t be bought,
  And strangers to graft or greed.

They loosed the land from the Devil’s grip,
  They pierced the hills with their trails,
They flagged the rocks at the harbor’s mouth,
  They paved the way for the rails. 
They builded a school where the dance hall stood
  And they brought in their children and wives;
They gave their all to the new land’s call
  And some of them gave their lives.

Now the pimp and the brothel have passed away
  And the gambling hall is a dream;
A railroad train now follows the trail
  Where we followed a nine-dog team. 
A thousand stamps now sing their song
  Where we panned on the gold shot ledge,
And a picture show now marks the line
  That once was the frontier’s edge.