trading post at Dyea, outfitted, and went over Chilcoot Pass.
That was in '88--eight years before the Klondike strike, and
the Yukon was a howling wilderness. She was afraid of the
bucks, but she took two young squaws with her, crossed the
lakes, and went down the river and to all the early camps on
the Lower Yukon. She wandered several years over that country
and then on in to where I met her. Liked the looks of it, she
said, seeing, in her own words, 'a big bull caribou knee-deep
in purple iris on the valley-bottom.' She hooked up with the
Indians, doctored them, gained their confidence, and gradually
took them in charge. She had only left that country once, and
then, with a bunch of the young bucks, she went over Chilcoot,
cleaned up her gold-cache, and brought it back with her.

"'And here I be, stranger,' she concluded her yarn, 'and here's
the most precious thing I own.'

"She pulled out a little pouch of buckskin, worn on her neck
like a locket, and opened it. And inside, wrapped in oiled
silk, yellowed with age and worn and thumbed, was the original
scrap of newspaper containing the quotation from Thoreau.

"'And are you happy . . . satisfied?' I asked her. 'With a
quarter of a million you wouldn't have to work down in the
States. You must miss a lot.'

"'Not much,' she answered. 'I wouldn't swop places with any
woman down in the States. These are my people; this is where I
belong. But there are times--and in her eyes smoldered up that
hungry yearning I've mentioned--'there are times when I wish