As of old time, men still
fought for the mastery of the earth and the delights thereof. But the
sword had given way to the ledger; the mail-clad baron to the
soft-garbed industrial lord, and the centre of imperial political power
to the seat of commercial exchanges. The modern will had destroyed the
ancient brute. The stubborn earth yielded only to force. Brain was
greater than body. The man with the brain could best conquer things
primitive.
He did not have much education as education goes. To the three R's his
mother taught him by camp-fire and candle-light, he had added a
somewhat miscellaneous book-knowledge; but he was not burdened with
what he had gathered. Yet he read the facts of life understandingly,
and the sobriety which comes of the soil was his, and the clear
earth-vision.
And so it came about that Jacob Welse crossed over the Chilcoot in an
early day, and disappeared into the vast unknown. A year later he
emerged at the Russian missions clustered about the mouth of the Yukon
on Bering Sea. He had journeyed down a river three thousand miles
long, he had seen things, and dreamed a great dream. But he held his
tongue and went to work, and one day the defiant whistle of a crazy
stern-wheel tub saluted the midnight sun on the dank river-stretch by
Fort o' Yukon. It was a magnificent adventure. How he achieved it
only Jacob Welse can tell; but with the impossible to begin with, plus
the impossible, he added steamer to steamer and heaped enterprise upon
enterprise.
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