Just turned thirty years old, he was chiefest among all the sourdoughs of the mighty North. And he knew the North as no other man ever knew it. Cabin boy on a whaler, he deserted at the age of fourteen at St. Michaels, and for several years he knocked about the Russian settlements and the Eskimo villages of the lower Yukon, gradually widening his circle of adventure until in the eighties, and early nineties, men who thought they were exploring virgin territory were continually crossing his trail. Indians who had seen no other white man knew him by name, and little, isolated tribes there were who years afterward still called all white men Burrmacshane, believing it to be the name of the whole white race. He was the first white man to explore the Kuskokwim, and the first to traverse the mighty waste eastward from Kotsebue Sound up the Kobuk and down the Koyukuk to the Yukon. Always he played a lone hand, and among the sourdoughs he was regarded as a super man. No boasting of adventure where men foregathered but what some adventure of Burr MacShane out-topped them all. Yet, of these adventures MacShane, himself, never talked. For no adventure could there be in the North of which MacShane had not tasted the fullness. He had fought starvation, strong cold, blizzard, thin ice, rotten ice, fire, famine, water, and disease, and always he had won. By the very force and indomitable nerve of him he had won, and by the strength of his iron-hard frame. Every camp in the gold country had at some time or other boasted his habitat, but none had boasted for long. The wild, restless spirit of him forever goaded him on. The long trail beckoned, and he would hit the long trail. The strong cold descending upon a camp would drive men to the shelter of their fires, and MacShane, defying the strong cold, would throw his outfit together and mush a thousand miles. Men whispered that every safe in Alaska and in the Canadian Yukon held some of MacShane’s gold. But not for his gold was he held in regard, for no man ever thought of MacShane as rich. His deeds outshadowed his gold--in a land where gold is God.