Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Scarlet Life of Dawson and the Roseate Dawn of Nome Personal Experiences and Observations of the Author
The life of the Yukon is an untold story, and an unsolved mystery, despite the fact that some of the brightest minds and most deserving writers of the day have passed this way, and have written of this strange life. Reports have gone out differing so widely as to condemn all. Invariably the new-comer finds so much that is unlike what he has read or expected as to cause him to decide, with the aid of man's natural prejudice in favor of his own opinions, that he only has seen aright. Each sees a different phase of it, or judges from a different standpoint
The life of Dawson and of Nome, from its origin and environment, is necessarily a unique development and peculiar to itself. It is different, in every detail, from other life. There are no commonplaces in this life; it is tragedy, comedy, farce and vice, varied by the fascinating and inspiring influence of single examples of a staunch fidelity and honor amid fearful temptations, or an exquisitely beautiful pathos in instances of undeserved, or unexpected, suffering and disappointment. An honest writer will, at the outset, designate his work as simply some impressions of the life of the Northland, admitting that much must be left untold, and yielding to various writers other impressions different from, but possible as true, as his own.
All who have witnessed the mighty contagion of greed which possessed men, sending thousands of them hither in the great gold stampede of '97 and '98 to a dearth of unstaked ground and to wide-open gambling houses and dance-halls, and to the long rows of red-curtained abodes of its demimonde, which here await to absorb both Cheechargo surplus and the golden fortune of the miners, will admit the fitness of this title, "The Scarlet Life."
Some good men and women are here whose lives are spent in saintly devotion, and noble work of charity; and most impressive of all, is the vast, silent colony up on the mountain-side, just above the sound of revelry and the dark passes of crime.
Yet it is true that no good man or woman can breathe this tainted atmosphere and be again quite what he was before. "The wages of sin is death," and even enough experience of this life to be called a knowledge of its sin, is a destroying influence.
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