When this sailor-miner had accumulated $20,000 worth of dust he concluded that civilization was good enough for him, and proceeded “to pull for the outside.”  From the Mackenzie he went up the Little Peel to its headwaters, found a pass through the mountains, nearly starved to death on his way across to the Porcupine Hills, and eventually came out on the Yukon River, where he learned for the first time of the Yukon gold hunters and their discoveries.  Yet for twenty years they had been working there, his next-door neighbours, virtually, in a land of such great spaces.  At Victoria, British Columbia, previous to his going east over the Canadian Pacific (the existence of which he had just learned), he pregnantly remarked that he had faith in the Mackenzie watershed, and that he was going back after he had taken in the World’s Fair and got a whiff or two of civilization.

Faith!  It may or may not remove mountains, but it has certainly made the Northland.  No Christian martyr ever possessed greater faith than did the pioneers of Alaska.  They never doubted the bleak and barren land.  Those who came remained, and more ever came.  They could not leave.  They “knew” the gold was there, and they persisted.  Somehow, the romance of the land and the quest entered into their blood, the spell of it gripped hold of them and would not let them go.  Man after man of them, after the most terrible privation and suffering, shook the muck of the country from his moccasins and departed for good.  But the following spring always found him drifting down the Yukon on the tail of the ice jams.

Jack McQuestion aptly vindicates the grip of the North.  After a residence of thirty years he insists that the climate is delightful, and declares that whenever he makes a trip to the States he is afflicted with home-sickness.  Needless to say, the North still has him and will keep tight hold of him until he dies.  In fact, for him to die elsewhere would be inartistic and insincere.  Of three of the “pioneer” pioneers, Jack McQuestion alone survives.  In 1871, from one to seven years before Holt went over Chilcoot, in the company of Al Mayo and Arthur Harper, McQuestion came into the Yukon from the North-west over the Hudson Bay Company route from the Mackenzie to Fort Yukon.  The names of these three men, as their lives, are bound up in the history of the country, and so long as there be histories and charts, that long will the Mayo and McQuestion rivers and the Harper and Ladue town site of Dawson be remembered.  As an agent of the Alaska Commercial Company, in 1873, McQuestion built Fort Reliance, six miles below the Klondike River.  In 1898 the writer met Jack McQuestion at Minook, on the Lower Yukon.  The old pioneer, though grizzled, was hale and hearty, and as optimistic as when he first journeyed into the land along the path of the Circle.  And no man more beloved is there in all the North.  There will be great sadness there when his soul goes questing on over the Last Divide—­ “farther north,” perhaps—­who can tell?