rough and dirty streets; rude, narrow board walks or none at all; dog-teams hauling all manner of loads on small carts, and donkeys or "burros" bowing beneath great loads of supplies starting out on the trail for the gold mines.

"Don't do that!" shouted a man to me one day, as I attempted to "snap-shot" his pack train of twenty horses and mules as they passed us. Two of the animals had grown tired and attempted to lie down, thus causing the flour sacks with which they were loaded to burst open and the flour to fly in clouds around them. "Don't do that," he entreated, "for we are having too much trouble!"

Some of the drivers were lashing the mules to make them rise, and this spread a panic through most of the train, so that one horse, evidently new to the business and not of a serious turn of mind, ran swiftly away, kicking up his heels in the dust behind him. There were also hams and sides of bacon dangling in greasy yellow covers over the backs of the pack animals, along with "grub" boxes and bags of canned goods of every description. Pick axes, shovels, gold pans and Yukon stoves with bundles of stove pipe tied together with ropes, rolls of blankets, bedding, rubber boots, canvas tents, ad infinitum.

There was one method used by "packers," as the drivers of these pack trains were called, which worked well in some instances. If the animals of his train were all sober and given to honestly doing their work, then the halter or rope around the neck of a mule could be tied to the tail of the one preceding him, and so on again until they were all really hitched together tandem. But woe unto the poor brute who was followed by a balky fellow or a shirk! The consequences were, at times, under certain circumstances, almost too serious to be recounted in this story, at least this can be said of the emphatic language used by the packers in such predicament.

One warm, bright day soon after my arrival in Dawson, and when order had been brought out of chaos in the scow—our home—I went to call upon an old friend, formerly of Seattle. Carrie N. was three or four years younger than myself, had been a nurse for a time after the death of her husband, but grew tired of that work, and decided in the winter of 1897 and 1898 to go into the Klondyke. A party of forty men and women going to Dawson was made up in Seattle, and she joined them. For weeks they were busily engaged in making their preparations. Living near me, as she did at the time, I was often with Carrie N. and was much interested in her movements and accompanied her to the Alaska steamer the day she sailed. It was the little ship "Alki" upon which she went away, and it was crowded with passengers and loaded heavily with freight for the trip to Dyea, as Skagway and the dreaded White Pass had been voted out of the plans of the Seattle party of forty.