Volume 2 - ElectricCanadian.com

182 HISTORY OF THE BANKferent meals in the unappetizing environment of the variouslocal restaurants. It may here be said that they went intothe Yukon under an arrangement whereby they were to behoused, clothed and fed at the bank's expense, but were to beEven laundrypaid then- eastern salaries for the time being.bills, doctors' bills and others of like nature were paid by thebank. In other words, they were to be kept, free of expenseto themselves, and to draw eastern pay until the followingsummer, when it was expected that the head office would beable to arrive at some equitable basis for their remuneration.Shortly after the assistant general manager made the firstinspection of the branch in the spring of 1899, the salaries ofallthe officers were revised, and each man received a specialbonus equivalent to his past year's salary; in addition, everyofficer, from the accountant down, was granted a specialannual allowance of $800. The salaries of the manager andassistant manager had been revised on a scale which renderedthe absence of this special allowance no injustice to them.It was also decided that the arrangements outlined above forthe keep of the staff should be continued It may be mentionedhere that until the mess was installed in the permanentbuilding the bank's bill for meals at restaurants for the staffof six was about $2,000 a month. In these circumstances,banking charges in the Yukon, from the point of view of theold and settled portions of Canada, were naturally high; butcompared with the general level of prices, to which allusionhas already been made, it is difficult to avoid the conclusionthat they were really on a more modest scale than anythingelse.The assistant manager, who was also chief assayer of thebranch, accompanied one of the later shipments of 1898 out ofthe Yukon to make a report on conditions to head office.After his departure the work of melting and assaying the golddust was indeed a heavy burden to the assistant in charge. Toshovel charcoal and to work in an atmosphere furiously hotand filled with the fumes of nitric acid, day after day without