CHAPTER XX MAN OF THE FAR NORTH History, local in character, unrecorded for the most part, but epic in virile intensity, makes with startling rapidity where men answer the call of raw gold. And it is history, not delicately graven by master hands of diplomacy; but rough hewn and slashed broad by self-centered men who let the chips fall where they may. The past is forgotten. The future is yet to come. But, there is gold in the gravel today! Raw gold! Yellow gold! Coarse gold! And dust! With no thought of future men will starve for it, will freeze for it, and for the chance to gouge it from the earth will undergo all hardship and privation known and unknown. With their eyes fixed on the golden sands of California, men gave no heed to the rich and fertile loam lands of the middle west as the wheels of their wagons rutted, and their feet trampled that golden storehouse of the future. For there is gold in the gravel _today_! The grazing lands of Australia, with their golden future in cattle and sheep were worn bare by the trails of the stampeders. There is gold in the gravel _today_! And the forest lands and the tillable lands of Oregon, and Washington, and British Columbia were passed with hardly a glance by the nondescript army that surged Northward to answer the call of gold. Timber and grain are of the future--but there is gold in the gravel _today_! And never did history make more rapidly than when that horde of _chechakos_ swarmed over the Chilcoot and poured into the valley of the Yukon. Good men, and bad men, poor men, and rich--clean-lived, clean-muscled farmer boys aglow with the ruddy health of the outdoors, rubbing elbows with the pasty-skinned degenerates of the city’s slums--all dumped together into a land of ice, and of snow, and of rugged mountains! Into a land that by no possibility of development could be made to supply the one tenth part of their sustenance! Rough hewn is the history of the Yukon. Its makers drowned in its waters, froze on its hillsides, and starved on its creeks; or miserably back-trailed to the place they came from! They paid with their lives for their ignorance; or crept cravenly back in defeat. Those were the incompetents. But, a few of the fit survived. Supermen, who lived on and thrived where human life was the only cheap thing in the whole lean land--beat the North, and gutted her creeks of their riches! So history made fast on the Yukon. Camps sprang up in a day, flourished for a month--and were forgotten. The hero of today supersedes the hero of yesterday, and tomorrow will be unremembered. The heroes were the men who found gold. Camps grew into towns, and towns into cities, and banks superseded the safes of the saloon keepers and the traders as repositories for the miner’s gold.