Songs of a Sourdough

This is the law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain: “Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane. Strong for the red rage of battle; sane, for I harry them sore; Send me men girt for the combat, men who are grit to the core; Swift as the panther in triumph, fierce as the bear in defeat, Sired of a bulldog parent, steeled in the furnace heat. Send me the best of your breeding, lend me your chosen ones; Them will I take to my bosom, them will I call my sons; Them will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with my meat; But the others⁠—the misfits, the failures⁠—I trample under my feet. Dissolute, damned, and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain, Ye would send me the spawn of your gutters⁠—Go! take back your spawn again.

This is the song of the parson’s son, as he squats in his shack alone, On the wild, weird nights when the Northern Lights shoot up from the frozen zone, And it’s sixty below, and couched in the snow the hungry huskies moan.

“I’m one of the Arctic brotherhood, I’m an old-time pioneer. I came with the first⁠—O God! how I’ve cursed this Yukon⁠—but still I’m here. I’ve sweated athirst in its summer heat, I’ve frozen and starved in its cold; I’ve followed my dreams by its thousand streams, I’ve toiled and moiled for its gold.

“Look at my eyes⁠—been snow-blind twice; look where my foot’s half gone; And that gruesome scar on my left cheek where the frost-fiend bit to the bone. Each one a brand of this devil’s land, where I’ve played and I’ve lost the game, A broken wreck with a craze for hooch, and never a cent to my name.

“This mining is only a gamble, the worst is as good as the best; I was in with the bunch and I might have come out right on top with the rest; With Cormack, Ladue and Macdonald⁠—O God! but it’s hell to think Of the thousands and thousands I’ve squandered on cards and women and drink.

“In the early days we were just a few, and we hunted and fished around, Nor dreamt by our lonely campfires of the wealth that lay under the ground.

Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there’s nothing else to gaze on, Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore, Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon, Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar? Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream streaking through it, Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost? Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God’s sake go and do it; Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.

Have you wandered in the wilderness, the sagebrush desolation, The bunch-grass levels where the cattle graze? Have you whistled bits of ragtime at the end of all creation, And learned to know the desert’s little ways? Have you camped upon the foothills, have you galloped o’er the ranges, Have you roamed the arid sun-lands through and through? Have you chummed up with the mesa? Do you know its moods and changes? Then listen to the wild⁠—it’s calling you.

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon; The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune; Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew, And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.

When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare, There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty and loaded for bear. He looked like a man with a foot in the grave, and scarcely the strength of a louse, Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house. There was none could place the stranger’s face, though we searched ourselves for a clue; But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.

There’s men that somehow just grip your eyes, and hold them hard like a spell; And such was he, and he looked to me like a man who had lived in hell; With a face most hair, and the dreary stare of a dog whose day is done, As he watered the green stuff in his glass, and the drops fell one by one. Then I got to figgering who he was, and wondering what he’d do, And I turned my head⁠—and there watching him was the lady that’s known as Lou.

There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold; The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, But the queerest they ever did see Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee.

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows. Why he left his home in the South to roam round the Pole God only knows. He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell; Though he’d often say in his homely way that he’d “sooner live in hell.”

On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail. Talk of your cold! through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail. If our eyes we’d close, then the lashes froze, till sometimes we couldn’t see; It wasn’t much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.

And that very night as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow, And the dogs were fed, and the stars o’erhead were dancing heel and toe, He turned to me, and, “Cap,” says he, “I’ll cash in this trip, I guess; And if I do, I’m asking that you won’t refuse my last request.”