41 Lure O Gold 1904

The Lure o 9
Gold
in other Arctic mining camps, was adhered to in this
oddest of all gold-diggings
could anybody, like myself, who really
in the world. And how
wanted and
needed sleep, find it in such a wild, noisy, bustling
place as this Nome ?
Nome! What a leaping inspiration the name had
been to me !
What a loadstone it had been to the thou
sands who were now crowding
its crooked streets ! What
a golden hope! What a lure! My thoughts
over the tundra and up the yellow Yukon to the Klon
ran far
dike from which my father and I had come in the early
summer. In the Klondike we had felt the frustration,
the depression and the bitterness of the late comers
the men who were in at the tail of the stampede. Not
but that my father was seasoned to defeat, though he
had never been soured by it.
He was an old Californian
miner and had seen many a fair prospect melt away.
Of late years he had been making a modest living as a
mining secretary in the office of a San Francisco com
pany.
When the Klondike rush set in he had felt the
old gold fever stirring
in his blood, but he hesitated for
months about going. Finally the impulse became too
strong for him to resist any longer, and he declared that
he would go to the gold fields and take me with him.