[Illustration: REV. HUDSON STUCK, ARCHDEACON OF THE YUKON, PREACHING WITH INDIAN AND ESKIMO INTERPRETERS] [Illustration: INTERIOR OF GREEK CATHOLIC CHURCH IN ST. MICHAEL BUILT IN 1837] [Illustration: FINE OLD NATIONAL HOUSE WITH TOTEM POLES NEAR WRANGELL] I have already said that the true story of the Klondike stampede has never been written and perhaps never will be. A great deal was put out under the guise of literature, but it was mere journalistic stuff. It will not endure and should not. Jack London was in Klondike. And he was a born story-teller. He should have written something quite worth while of those stirring days with all the wealth of material which lay about him. But the best he did was _The Call of the Wild_ and in it he indulged his love for the romantic to such an extent that you find yourself wondering whether dogs are real dogs and his men real men until in the end you conclude that they are not! His white men are like characters on the stage. And if there are any Indians in Alaska such as he portrayed I have never encountered them. They are absurdly untrue to life. Furthermore, the brutal side of life seems to have had undue attraction for London. It is true that it did exist. But it was not the whole of life in Alaska, by any means, and one sickens of it after continuous reading about it. Rex Beach's stories, _The Spoilers_ and _The Silver Horde_ (by far his best, in my judgment), are good and typical of the life of the period. Yet one can not read them without a feeling that they, too, leave much to be desired. The wit, the pathos, the comedies, the tragedies, the sordidness, the heroism of those days! Whose pen could delineate the characters of those who wrought them or adequately describe the country as it was,--and is! It would take the combined genius of a Poe, a Kipling and a Bret Harte to do justice to the subject. Richard Harding Davis was preparing to go to Klondike. Had he carried out his intention it might have been different. But one morning he picked up the morning paper and read therein that the _Maine_ had been blown up in Havana harbor. He changed his mind! I am convinced that the best tales of the land have never been put on paper. These are the stories related at the road-houses, or in the rooms of the Arctic Brotherhood or some similar gathering-place by those who took part in them. And they usually come out quite by accident. The participant thinks there is nothing wonderful about them. Some grizzled miner,--Service calls them "the silent men who _do_ things,"--will suddenly begin talking, and sometimes the story he tells will beat any that has ever yet found its way into print. Why has no one ever written a steamboat story? Or a tale of the Arctic Brotherhood? There are material and local color galore for such.