Gold-fever is a disease without diagnosis or doctor—­infectious, contagious, and hereditary; if its germ once stirs in a man’s blood, till the day of his death he is not immune from an attack.  The discovery of gold-dust in Dawson sent swarming through the waterways of sub-Arctic Canada a heterogeneous horde,—­gamblers of a hundred hells, old-time miners from quiet firesides, beardless boys from their books, human parasites of two continents, and dreamers from the Seven Seas.

Coastwise they sought the North by steamers from ’Frisco, Seattle, and Vancouver Island, and of the numbers of these the shipping offices have some records.  But of that vast army who from the east and from the south travelled inland waterways towards the golden goal no tabulation has ever been made.  Singly they went, in groups, and by partnerships of two and three.  There was no route marked out by which they were to reach the glittering streams of which they dreamed; the general direction of north and west was all that guided them.  Athabasca Landing was the portal through which they passed, and by every northward stream they travelled,—­down the Athabasca toward the Mackenzie and up the Athabasca to the Peace, leaving stranded men and stranded boats on every shore.  By raft and dug-out, scow and canoe, men essayed to travel rapid waterways who had never handled craft before, and the Indians still point out to you near Grand Rapids on the Athabasca the site of the Mounted Police Station where Sergeant Anderson rescued a dozen tenderfoots from drowning.

To the Indians of this vast country the unwonted inundation of the whites was a revelation.  Before this, their knowledge of Europeans had been limited to men of the Hudson’s Bay posts and the few black-robed Fathers of the missions.  The priests had told the Indians that in the outside world French was the accepted language of the white man and that only the degraded and debased spoke English.  Most of the Northern Indians who speak English will tell you that they got their first lessons from the Klondike miners.

And what of the men who followed the gleam?  Some reached Dawson.  These were few.  Those who gained fortunes, were fewer still.  In the old books of the H.B.  Co. a favourite phrase of the Factor is “a band of Indians cast up from the east,” “the Express from the North cast up at a late hour last night.”  On the way to Dawson, and filtering backward from that point, hundreds of gold-miners are “cast up” on every interior shore.  Acting as attaches to Hudson’s Bay posts, engaging as free traders, manipulating missionary boats for Protestant and Roman Catholic seekers for souls, trapping off their own bat, and, in one instance at least, marrying the missionary, they were constantly passing us.  Round the home hearths wives wonder about them, and the old bent mother still prays for her absent son.  A silence like this once entered upon is hard to break, and the wanderer in the silence wraps tighter about