Into Alaska - Alaska and Points North: Tips and Tales from the Road - page 104

Samme Gallaher talks a lot about them in her book , how she and her sister would wait
anxiously for the river to freeze over so they could mush a dog sled over the ice to the road-
house.
Basil Austen talks about them too in his book, Diary of a Ninety-Eighter. He was a young
man, mid-twenties, when he came north to seek his fortune in 1898. He and his partners
were adventurers, young,strong and healthy.Fortunately forus,he was a gifted diarist with
a keen, self-deprecating wit and deft hand at description. He provides a vivid first-hand ac-
count of landing in the tent city of Valdez - mud to his knees. He talks about getting outfit-
ted at tremendous cost, a ton of goods per man, then humping this up and over the Chilkoot
Pass on home made, self-propelled sleds.
He goes on to describe the two winters he spent in the bush, surviving by improvising and
heading for the roadhouse when the isolation became too intense. In so many ways, for
these healthy young men the gold rush was a great lark, the adventure of a lifetime. Not so
for the men who were there on the backs of family who had combined their life savings to
stake them. For them, it was a desperate quest for a payoff that would rescue them all. Or
not.
The roadhouses still seem to figure largely in the social life of the area. The dining room at
Copper Center was full of locals when we went in for fresh biscuits and jam with our cof-