The Conquest Of Alaska

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Title:     The Conquest Of Alaska
Author: Cy Warman [More Titles by Warman]

Immediately under the man with the money, who lived in London, there was the President in Chicago; then came the chief engineer in Seattle, the locating engineer in Skagway, the contractor in the grading camp, and Hugh Foy, the "boss" of the builders. Yet in spite of all this overhanging stratification, Foy was a big man. To be sure, none of these men had happened to get their positions by mere chance. They were men of character and fortitude, capable of great sacrifice.

Mr. Close, in London, knew that his partner, Mr. Graves, in Chicago, would be a good man at the head of so cold and hopeless an enterprise as a Klondike Railway; and Mr. Graves knew that Erastus Corning Hawkins, who had put through some of the biggest engineering schemes in the West, was the man to build the road. The latter selected, as locating engineer, John Hislop, the hero, one of the few survivors of that wild and daring expedition that undertook, some twenty years ago, to survey a route for a railroad whose trains were to traverse the Grand Canon of Colorado, where, save for the song of the cataract, there is only shade and silence and perpetual starlight. Heney, a wiry, compact, plucky Canadian contractor, made oral agreement with the chief engineer and, with Hugh Foy as his superintendent of construction, began to grade what they called the White Pass and Yukon Railway. Beginning where the bone-washing Skagway tells her troubles to the tide-waters at the elbow of that beautiful arm of the Pacific Ocean called Lynn Canal, they graded out through the scattered settlement where a city stands to-day, cut through a dense forest of spruce, and began to climb the hill.

When the news of ground-breaking had gone out to Seattle and Chicago, and thence to London, conservative capitalists, who had suspected Close Brothers and Company and all their associates in this wild scheme of temporary insanity, concluded that the sore affliction had come to stay. But the dauntless builders on the busy field where the grading camp was in action kept grubbing and grading, climbing and staking, blasting and building, undiscouraged and undismayed. Under the eaves of a dripping glacier, Hawkins, Hislop, and Heney crept; and, as they measured off the miles and fixed the grade by blue chalk-marks where stakes could not be driven, Foy followed with his army of blasters and builders. When the pathfinders came to a deep side canon, they tumbled down, clambered up on the opposite side, found their bearings, and began again. At one place the main wall was so steep that the engineer was compelled to climb to the top, let a man down by a rope, so that he could mark the face of the cliff for the blasters, and then haul him up again.

It was springtime when they began, and through the long days of that short summer the engineers explored and mapped and located; and ever, close behind them, they could hear the steady roar of Foy's fireworks as the skilled blasters burst big boulders or shattered the shoulders of great crags that blocked the trail of the iron horse. Ever and anon, when the climbers and builders peered down into the ragged canon, they saw a long line of pack-animals, bipeds and quadrupeds,--some hoofed and some horned, some bleeding, some blind,--stumbling and staggering, fainting and falling, the fittest fighting for the trail and gaining the summit, whence the clear, green waters of the mighty Yukon would carry them down to Dawson,--the Mecca of all these gold-mad men. As often as the road-makers glanced at the pack-trains, they saw hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of traffic going past or waiting transportation at Skagway, and each strained every nerve to complete the work while the sun shone.

By midsummer they began to appreciate the fact that this was to be a hard job. When the flowers faded on the southern slopes, they were not more than half-way up the hill. Each day the sun swung lower across the canals, all the to-morrows were shorter than the yesterdays, and there was not a man among them with a shade of sentiment, or a sense of the beautiful, but sighed when the flowers died. Yes, they had learned to love this maiden, Summer, that had tripped up from the south, smiled on them, sung for a season, sighed, smiled once more, and then danced down the Lynn again.

"I'll come back," she seemed to say, peeping over the shoulder of a glacier that stood at the stage entrance; "I'll come back, but ere I come again there'll be strange scenes and sounds on this rude stage so new to you. First, you will have a short season of melodrama by a melancholy chap called Autumn, gloriously garbed in green and gold, with splashes and dashes of lavender and lace, but sad, sweetly sad, and sighing always, for life is such a little while."

With a sadder smile, she kissed her rosy fingers and was gone,--gone with her gorgeous garments, her ferns and flowers, her low, soft sighs and sunny skies, and there was not a man that was a man but missed her when she was gone.

The autumn scene, though sombre and sad, was far from depressing, but they all felt the change. John Hislop seemed to feel it more than all the rest; for besides being deeply religious, he was deeply in love. His nearest and dearest friend, Heney--happy, hilarious Heney--knew, and he swore softly whenever a steamer landed without a message from Minneapolis,--the long-looked-for letter that would make Hislop better or worse. It came at length, and Hislop was happy. With his horse, his dog, and a sandwich,--but never a gun,--he would make long excursions down toward Lake Linderman, to Bennett, or over Atlin way. When the country became too rough for the horse, he would be left picketed near a stream with a faithful dog to look after him while the pathfinder climbed up among the eagles.

In the meantime Foy kept pounding away. Occasionally a soiled pedestrian would slide down the slope, tell a wild tale of rich strikes, and a hundred men would quit work and head for the highlands. Foy would storm and swear and coax by turns, but to no purpose; for they were like so many steers, and as easily stampeded. When the Atlin boom struck the camp, Foy lost five hundred men in as many minutes. Scores of graders dropped their tools and started off on a trot. The prospector who had told the fable had thrown his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the general direction. Nobody had thought to ask how far. Many forgot to let go; and Heney's picks and shovels, worth over a dollar apiece, went away with the stampeders. As the wild mob swept on, the tethered blasters cut the cables that guyed them to the hills, and each loped away with a piece of rope around one ankle.

Panting, they passed over the range, these gold-crazed Coxeys, without a bun or a blanket, a crust or a crumb, many without a cent or even a sweat-mark where a cent had slept in their soiled overalls.

When Foy had exhausted the English, Irish, and Alaskan languages in wishing the men luck in various degrees, he rounded up the remnant of his army and began again. In a day or two the stampeders began to limp back hungry and weary, and every one who brought a pick or a shovel was re-employed. But hundreds kept on toward Lake Bennett, and thence by water up Windy Arm to the Atlin country, and many of them have not yet returned to claim their time-checks.

The autumn waned. The happy wives of young engineers, who had been tented along the line during the summer, watched the wildflowers fade with a feeling of loneliness and deep longing for their stout-hearted, strong-limbed husbands, who were away up in the cloud-veiled hills; and they longed, too, for other loved ones in the lowlands of their childhood. Foy's blasters and builders buttoned their coats and buckled down to keep warm. Below, they could hear loud peals of profanity as the trailers, packers, and pilgrims pounded their dumb slaves over the trail. Above, the wind cried and moaned among the crags, constantly reminding them that winter was near at hand. The nights were longer than the days. The working day was cut from ten to eight hours, but the pay of the men had been raised from thirty to thirty-five cents an hour.

One day a black cloud curtained the canon, and the workmen looked up from their picks and drills to find that it was November and night. The whole theatre, stage and all, had grown suddenly dark; but they knew, by the strange, weird noise in the wings, that the great tragedy of winter was on. Hislop's horse and dog went down the trail. Hawkins and Hislop and Heney walked up and down among the men, as commanding officers show themselves on the eve of battle. Foy chaffed the laborers and gave them more rope; but no amount of levity could prevail against the universal feeling of dread that seemed to settle upon the whole army. This weird Alaska, so wild and grand, so cool and sweet and sunny in summer, so strangely sad in autumn,--this many-mooded, little known Alaska that seemed doomed ever to be misunderstood, either over-lauded or lied about,--what would she do to them? How cruel, how cold, how weird, how wickedly wild her winters must be! Most men are brave, and an army of brave men will breast great peril when God's lamp lights the field; but the stoutest heart dreads the darkness. These men were sore afraid, all of them; and yet no one was willing to be the first to fall out, so they stood their ground. They worked with a will born of desperation.

The wind moaned hoarsely. The temperature dropped to thirty-five degrees below zero, but the men, in sheltered places, kept pounding. Sometimes they would work all day cleaning the snow from the grade made the day before, and the next day it would probably be drifted full again. At times the task seemed hopeless; but Heney had promised to build to the summit of White Pass without a stop, and Foy had given Heney his hand across a table at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Skagway.

At times the wind blew so frightfully that the men had to hold hands; but they kept pegging away between blasts, and in a little while were ready to begin bridging the gulches and deep side-canons. One day--or one night, rather, for there were no days then--a camp cook, crazed by the cold and the endless night, wandered off to die. Hislop and Heney found him, but he refused to be comforted. He wanted to quit, but Heney said he could not be spared. He begged to be left alone to sleep in the warm, soft snow, but Heney brought him back to consciousness and to camp.

A premature blast blew a man into eternity. The wind moaned still more drearily. The snow drifted deeper and deeper, and one day they found that, for days and days, they had been blasting ice and snow when they thought they were drilling the rock. Heney and Foy faced each other in the dim light of a tent lamp that night. "Must we give up?" asked the contractor.

"No," said Foy, slowly, speaking in a whisper; "we'll build on snow, for it's hard and safe; and in the spring we'll ease it down and make a road-bed."

They did so. They built and bedded the cross-ties on the snow, ballasted with snow, and ran over that track until spring without an accident.

They were making mileage slowly, but the awful strain was telling on the men and on the bank account. The president of the company was almost constantly travelling between Washington and Ottawa, pausing now and again to reach over to London for another bag of gold, for they were melting it up there in the arctic night--literally burning it up, were these dynamiters of Foy's.

To conceive this great project, to put it into shape, present it in London, secure the funds and the necessary concessions from two governments, survey and build, and have a locomotive running in Alaska a year from the first whoop of the happy Klondiker, had been a mighty achievement; but it was what Heney would call "dead easy" compared with the work that confronted the President at this time. On July 20, 1897, the first pick was driven into the ground at White Pass; just a year later the pioneer locomotive was run over the road. More than once had the financial backers allowed their faith in the enterprise and in the future of the country beyond to slip away; but the President of the company had always succeeded in building it up again, for they had never lost faith in him, or in his ability to see things that were to most men invisible. In summer, when the weekly reports showed a mile or more or less of track laid, it was not so hard; but when days were spent in placing a single bent in a bridge, and weeks were consumed on a switch back in a pinched-out canon, it was hard to persuade sane men that business sense demanded that they pile on more fuel. But they did it; and, as the work went on, it became apparent to those interested in such undertakings that all the heroes of the White Pass were not in the hills.

In addition to the elements, ever at war with the builders, they had other worries that winter. Hawkins had a fire that burned all the company's offices and all his maps and notes and records of surveys. Foy had a strike, incited largely by jealous packers and freighters; and there was hand-to-hand fighting between the strikers and their abettors and the real builders, who sympathized with the company.

Brydone-Jack, a fine young fellow, who had been sent out as consulting engineer to look after the interests of the shareholders, clapped his hands to his forehead and fell, face down, in the snow. His comrades carried him to his tent. He had been silent, had suffered, perhaps for a day or two, but had said nothing. The next night he passed away. His wife was waiting at Vancouver until he could finish his work in Alaska and go home to her.

With sad and heavy hearts Hawkins and Hislop and Heney climbed back to where Foy and his men were keeping up the fight. Like so many big lightning-bugs they seemed, with their dim white lamps rattling around in the storm. It was nearly all night then. God and his sunlight seemed to have forsaken Alaska. Once every twenty-four hours a little ball of fire, red, round, and remote, swung across the canon, dimly lighted their lunch-tables, and then disappeared behind the great glacier that guards the gateway to the Klondike.

As the road neared the summit, Heney observed that Foy was growing nervous, and that he coughed a great deal. He watched the old fellow, and found that he was not eating well, and that he slept very little. Heney asked Foy to rest, but the latter shook his head. Hawkins and Hislop and Heney talked the matter over in Hislop's tent, called Foy in, and demanded that he go down and out. Foy was coughing constantly, but he choked it back long enough to tell the three men what he thought of them. He had worked hard and faithfully to complete the job, and now that only one level mile remained to be railed, would they send the old man down the hill? "I will not budge," said Foy, facing his friends; "an' when you gentlemen ar-re silibratin' th' vict'ry at the top o' the hill ahn Chuesday nixt, Hugh Foy'll be wood ye. Do you moind that, now?"

Foy steadied himself by a tent-pole and coughed violently. His eyes were glassy, and his face flushed with the purplish flush that fever gives.

"Enough of this!" said the chief engineer, trying to look severe. "Take this message, sign it, and send it at once."

Foy caught the bit of white clip and read:--

"CAPTAIN O'BRIEN,

SKAGWAY.

"Save a berth for me on the 'Rosalie.'"

They thought, as they watched him, that the old road-maker was about to crush the paper in his rough right hand; but suddenly his face brightened, he reached for a pencil, saying, "I'll do it," and when he had added "next trip" to the message, he signed it, folded it, and took it over to the operator.

So it happened that, when the last spike was driven at the summit, on February 20, 1899, the old foreman, who had driven the first, drove the last, and it was his last spike as well. Doctor Whiting guessed it was pneumonia.

When the road had been completed to Lake Bennett, the owners came over to see it; and when they saw what had been done, despite the prediction that Dawson was dead and that the Cape Nome boom would equal that of the Klondike, they authorized the construction of another hundred miles of road which would connect with the Yukon below the dreaded White Horse Rapids. Jack and Foy and Hislop are gone; and when John Hislop passed away, the West lost one of the most modest and unpretentious, yet one of the best and bravest, one of the purest minded men that ever saw the sun go down behind a snowy range.

[The end]
Cy Warman's short story: Conquest Of Alaska

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