As one nears the western coast the cities become few and far between. Anchorage, on Cook Inlet, Iditarod and Nome are the most important. The interesting story of Nome is well known. Prospectors were working the streams for gold when suddenly the yellow dust was found in huge quantities in the sand along the beach! The first settlement was called Anvil City and was the usual mushroom affair. Nowhere else in Alaska was the struggle of the gold-seekers to be compared with those of Nome. Its exposed position on Norton Sound made it subject to the violent coast storms. The conditions were unsanitary, the food and fuel supply a subject of great anxiety, the water supply scanty and the climate cruel. In the face of all these discouragements, however, the hardy pioneers fought and conquered. Nome is now a city of some three thousand, the commercial, judicial and educational center of Seward Peninsula. It is a fine, courageous little city, compactly built, with modern improvements and prosperous business houses. A railroad eighty-five miles long runs to Shelton, but Nome and the adjacent regions are reached direct only between June and October, the open season of Bering Sea. I always learn with regret of any tourist who takes a trip up the "Inside" passage and returns by the same route. What can he possibly know of Alaska? The broad expanse of country which sweeps away to the north and the west, guarded by the mountains, watered by one of the mightiest rivers in the world,--of this he knows nothing, for it is a country which can not be described. It must be seen to be appreciated. It is this part of Alaska that is Nature's gigantic workshop with a job in it for any man who asks! Here new cities are yet to be born, new business enterprises to be established, new farms to be tilled. Here any man who chooses may have that most prized of all possessions,--a home of his own! There is room for all! CHAPTER XV THE NATIVE RACES In speaking of the native races of Alaska it is not my purpose to enter into the subject except in so far as it belongs to a book of this character. As was said of the mines, the real student of such subjects will find (in the journals devoted to ethnology) what definite information he seeks. Strangely enough, however, a diligent search has revealed that there is not to be found in any library a book or in any magazine an article dealing with that most unusual custom which prevails among the Eskimos,--the trial marriage. Whether this custom exists among any other natives of the world I do not know. But I think not.