Bankruptcy -- Fiction; Gold mines and mining -- Alaska -- Fiction; Oakland (Calif.) -- Fiction; Western stories; Women pioneers -- Fiction
Corner lots in desirable locations sold that winter for from ten to
thirty thousand dollars. Daylight sent word out over the trails and
passes for the newcomers to bring down log-rafts, and, as a result, the
summer of 1897 saw his sawmills working day and night, on three shifts,
and still he had logs left over with which to build cabins. These
cabins, land included, sold at from one to several thousand dollars.
Two-story log buildings, in the business part of town, brought him from
forty to fifty thousand dollars apiece. These fresh accretions of
capital were immediately invested in other ventures. He turned gold
over and over, until everything that he touched seemed to turn to gold.
But that first wild winter of Carmack's strike taught Daylight many
things. Despite the prodigality of his nature, he had poise. He
watched the lavish waste of the mushroom millionaires, and failed quite
to understand it. According to his nature and outlook, it was all very
well to toss an ante away in a night's frolic. That was what he had
done the night of the poker-game in Circle City when he lost fifty
thousand--all that he possessed. But he had looked on that fifty
thousand as a mere ante. When it came to millions, it was different.
Such a fortune was a stake, and was not to be sown on bar-room floors,
literally sown, flung broadcast out of the moosehide sacks by drunken
millionaires who had lost all sense of proportion. There was McMann,
who ran up a single bar-room bill of thirty-eight thousand dollars; and
Jimmie the Rough, who spent one hundred thousand a month for four
months in riotous living, and then fell down drunk in the snow one
March night and was frozen to death; and Swiftwater Bill, who, after
spending three valuable claims in an extravagance of debauchery,
borrowed three thousand dollars with which to leave the country, and
who, out of this sum, because the lady-love that had jilted him liked
eggs, cornered the one hundred and ten dozen eggs on the Dawson market,
paying twenty-four dollars a dozen for them and promptly feeding them
to the wolf-dogs.
Champagne sold at from forty to fifty dollars a quart, and canned
oyster stew at fifteen dollars. Daylight indulged in no such luxuries.
He did not mind treating a bar-room of men to whiskey at fifty cents a
drink, but there was somewhere in his own extravagant nature a sense of
fitness and arithmetic that revolted against paying fifteen dollars for
the contents of an oyster can. On the other hand, he possibly spent
more money in relieving hard-luck cases than did the wildest of the new
millionaires on insane debauchery. Father Judge, of the hospital,
could have told of far more important donations than that first ten
sacks of flour. And old-timers who came to Daylight invariably went
away relieved according to their need. But fifty dollars for a quart of
fizzy champagne! That was appalling.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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