Frank Dinsmore is a fair sample of the men who made the Yukon country.  A Yankee, born, in Auburn, Maine, the Wanderlust early laid him by the heels, and at sixteen he was heading west on the trail that led “farther north.”  He prospected in the Black Hills, Montana, and in the Coeur d’Alene, then heard a whisper of the North, and went up to Juneau on the Alaskan Panhandle.  But the North still whispered, and more insistently, and he could not rest till he went over Chilcoot, and down into the mysterious Silent Land.  This was in 1882, and he went down the chain of lakes, down the Yukon, up the Pelly, and tried his luck on the bars of McMillan River.  In the fall, a perambulating skeleton, he came back over the Pass in a blizzard, with a rag of shirt, tattered overalls, and a handful of raw flour.

But he was unafraid.  That winter he worked for a grubstake in Juneau, and the next spring found the heels of his moccasins turned towards salt water and his face toward Chilcoot.  This was repeated the next spring, and the following spring, and the spring after that, until, in 1885, he went over the Pass for good.  There was to be no return for him until he found the gold he sought.

The years came and went, but he remained true to his resolve.  For eleven long years, with snow-shoe and canoe, pickaxe and gold-pan, he wrote out his life on the face of the land.  Upper Yukon, Middle Yukon, Lower Yukon—­he prospected faithfully and well.  His bed was anywhere.  Winter or summer he carried neither tent nor stove, and his six-pound sleeping-robe of Arctic hare was the warmest covering he was ever known to possess.  Rabbit tracks and salmon bellies were his diet with a vengeance, for he depended largely on his rifle and fishing-tackle.  His endurance equalled his courage.  On a wager he lifted thirteen fifty-pound sacks of flour and walked off with them.  Winding up a seven-hundred-mile trip on the ice with a forty-mile run, he came into camp at six o’clock in the evening and found a “squaw dance” under way.  He should have been exhausted.  Anyway, his muclucs were frozen stiff.  But he kicked them off and danced all night in stocking-feet.

At the last fortune came to him.  The quest was ended, and he gathered up his gold and pulled for the outside.  And his own end was as fitting as that of his quest.  Illness came upon him down in San Francisco, and his splendid life ebbed slowly out as he sat in his big easy-chair, in the Commercial Hotel, the “Yukoner’s home.”  The doctors came, discussed, consulted, the while he matured more plans of Northland adventure; for the North still gripped him and would not let him go.  He grew weaker day by day, but each day he said, “To-morrow I’ll be all right.”  Other old-timers, “out on furlough,”, came to see him.  They wiped their eyes and swore under their breaths, then entered and talked largely and jovially about going in with him over the trail when spring came.  But there in the big easy-chair it was that his Long Trail ended, and the life passed out of him still fixed on “farther north.”