Along many a thousand miles of river and tributary he
built trading-posts and warehouses. He forced the white man's axe into
the hands of the aborigines, and in every village and between the
villages rose the cords of four-foot firewood for his boilers. On an
island in Bering Sea, where the river and the ocean meet, he
established a great distributing station, and on the North Pacific he
put big ocean steamships; while in his offices in Seattle and San
Francisco it took clerks by the score to keep the order and system of
his business.
Men drifted into the land. Hitherto famine had driven them out, but
Jacob Welse was there now, and his grub-stores; so they wintered in the
frost and groped in the frozen muck for gold. He encouraged them,
grub-staked them, carried them on the books of the company. His
steamers dragged them up the Koyokuk in the old days of Arctic City.
Wherever pay was struck he built a warehouse and a store. The town
followed. He explored; he speculated; he developed. Tireless,
indomitable, with the steel-glitter in his dark eyes, he was everywhere
at once, doing all things. In the opening up of a new river he was in
the van; and at the tail-end also, hurrying forward the grub. On the
Outside he fought trade-combinations; made alliances with the
corporations of the earth, and forced discriminating tariffs from the
great carriers.
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