I discovered later, was glad that 1,500 miles lay between him and New York City.
We pitched our tent by the shore and proceeded to investigate. Living cost little. It was sunny weather, it was spring. One company was already sinking a shaft and working a small crusher; there were shacks and shanties everywhere; the "city" was as peaceful as the inside of St. Paul's Cathedral; we saw no hairy men, but we saw mosquitoes. With the first warm nights these pests emerged for the season in their millions; they were very large and very hungry; they hung in the air like clouds of smoke; they welcomed us; as R.M. said, they had probably written the newspaper accounts that advertised the place. We had no netting. They stung the bears blind; they would have stung a baby to death, had there been any babies, except ourselves, to sting. The only gold we saw was a lump, valued at $5,000, lying beside a revolver on the counter of the Bank of Montreal's shack. The clerk allowed us to hold it for a second each. It was the only gold we touched.... We investigated, as mentioned; we wandered about; we fished and shot, we rubbed Indian stuff over our faces to keep the mosquitoes off; we enjoyed happy, careless, easy days, bathing in ice-cold water, basking in hot sunshine, resting, loafing, and spinning yarns with all and sundry round our camp-fires. After New York it was a paradise, and but for the mosquitoes, we could have dressed in fig leaves.
Except for the question of having enough money to get out again before the iron winter set in towards October, we might have spent the whole summer there. We decided to leave while it was still possible. To paddle a hundred and fifty miles against the stream was not attractive. We would do the trip on foot. Selling tent and canoe to the clerk in the bank, we set out across the Twenty-Six Mile Portage one day towards the end of June. A party of five men, also bound for Duluth, joined us, and one of them was--Morris.
Those happy, unproductive goldfields! That un-
