through the Dakotas, Idaho, and eastern Oregon, and on into the mountains of British
Columbia. In camp and on trail, Edith Nelson was always with him, sharing his luck, his
hardship, and his toil. The short step of the house-reared woman she exchanged for the long
stride of the mountaineer. She learned to look upon danger clear- eyed and with
understanding, losing forever that panic fear which is bred of ignorance and which afflicts
the city-reared, making them as silly as silly horses, so that they await fate in frozen horror
instead of grappling with it, or stampede in blind self- destroying terror which clutters the
way with their crushed carcasses.
Edith Nelson met the unexpected at every turn of the trail, and she trained her vision so that
she saw in the landscape, not the obvious, but the concealed. She, who had never cooked in
her life, learned to make bread without the mediation of hops, yeast, or baking-powder, and
to bake bread, top and bottom, in a frying-pan before an open fire. And when the last cup of
flour was gone and the last rind of bacon, she was able to rise to the occasion, and of
moccasins and the softer-tanned bits of leather in the outfit to make a grub-stake substitute
that somehow held a man's soul in his body and enabled him to stagger on. She learned to
pack a horse as well as a man, - a task to break the heart and the pride of any city-dweller,
and she knew how to throw the hitch best suited for any particular kind of pack. Also, she
could build a fire of wet wood in a downpour of rain and not lose her temper. In short, in all
its guises she mastered the unexpected. But the Great Unexpected was yet to come into her
life and put its test upon her.
The gold-seeking tide was flooding northward into Alaska, and it was inevitable that Hans
Nelson and his wife should he caught up by the stream and swept toward the Klondike. The
fall of 1897 found them at Dyea, but without the money to carry an outfit across Chilcoot
Pass and float it down to Dawson. So Hans Nelson worked at his trade that winter and
helped rear the mushroom outfitting- town of Skaguay.
He was on the edge of things, and throughout the winter he heard all Alaska calling to him.
Latuya Bay called loudest, so that the summer of 1898 found him and his wife threading the
mazes of the broken coast-line in seventy-foot Siwash canoes. With them were Indians, also
three other men. The Indians landed them and their supplies in a lonely bight of land a
hundred miles or so beyond Latuya Bay, and returned to Skaguay; but the three other men
remained, for they were members of the organized party. Each had put an equal share of
capital into the outfitting, and the profits were to he divided equally. In that Edith Nelson
undertook to cook for the outfit, a man's share was to be her portion.
First, spruce trees were cut down and a three-room cabin constructed. To keep this cabin
was Edith Nelson's task. The task of the men was to search for gold, which they did; and to
find gold, which they likewise did. It was not a startling find, merely a low-pay placer
where long hours of severe toil earned each man between fifteen and twenty dollars a day.
The brief Alaskan summer protracted itself beyond its usual length, and they took
advantage of the opportunity, delaying their return to Skaguay to the last moment. And then
it was too late. Arrangements had been made to accompany the several dozen local Indians
on their fall trading trip down the coast. The Siwashes had waited on the white people until
the eleventh hour, and then departed. There was no course left the party but to wait for
chance transportation. In the meantime the claim was cleaned up and firewood stocked in.
The Indian summer had dreamed on and on, and then, suddenly, with the sharpness of