SOUL-SEEKING AMONG GOLD-SEEKERS.
By S. Hall Young
BY REV. S. HALL YOUNG, D.D. In 1897, when the marvelous discoveries of gold became generally known, multitudes of men from all walks of life and from all parts of the globe hastened to the Klondike. The peculiarity of that crowd was that not one in ten had ever mined before. They were largely from the cities, plenty of lawyers and doctors and merchants and railroad men and clerks, as well as farmer boys. It is only thirty miles from Skagway to the navigable headquarters of the Yukon. But what a thirty miles! Granite mountains crushed into sharp fragments and heaped up, narrow gorges with precipitous faces of solid rock; glaciers hanging on mountain breasts; threatening avalanches, and above, sheer cliffs with glaciers at their base! Half that crowd turned back before they got across the Chilkut Pass. I landed the last of August, and, after two months of struggle, and by sacrificing more than half of my goods in order to get the other half across the mountain, I reached Dawson. It was on the 9th of October, 1897, in the midst of a jam of ice floating down on the Yukon for two hundred and fifty miles in zero weather, with a foot of snow on the ground, and in the midst of four or five thousand houseless and homeless men. What a camp that was! What confusion! What ignorance of conditions! Hardly any of those men knew where they would get their gold, or how, but they expected to get it. We could not buy a pound of any kind of provisions for less than a dollar a pound. Conditions were not very favorable to holding religious meetings, but the devil was at work and I could not be idle. I went to every gambling-hall, every saloon, every large building in Dawson, asking the privilege of preaching the Gospel there. I was refused everywhere, not because they were enemies, for many had been my friends years before at Fort Wrangel, but they said that they could not clear out the crowd or keep them quiet. At last I found an unfinished log house capable of holding about a hundred men, and I paid $850 in cash for it. Two men were touched by the first sermon in that building, and confessed Christ at our first prayer-meeting. They joined our church at its organization as charter members on confession of their faith. I will never forget that first Sunday. At night we had a still larger congregation than in the morning—men not able to find even standing room. I saw we were going to have great difficulty in lighting that building. Candles were a dollar apiece and very scarce; kerosene was $20 a gallon. I said to the men: “Now, you will have to help me out in this. Blow out the candle you would have used in your cabin to-night, and light it here.” In that way they lighted our building all that winter at a good deal of sacrifice to themselves. Under those circumstances we commenced our service, but after a winter of work our building burned down, with a loss of a thousand dollars, for which I was responsible. We organized on Easter Day, 1898, the first Presbyterian Church of Dawson, with fifty-nine charter members. To our great pride and joy, seven of those charter members were women, for good Christian women are very scarce in the Klondike. The first thing those good ladies did was to organize a Ladies’ Aid Society; they gave a supper to pay off the debt, charging the prevailing price, $3.50 a meal; when the rush came in we paid off the debt. We made that church self-supporting, and it has continued a strong self-supporting church ever since. We built a church at the cost of $3,000, paying for it; built a hospital at the cost of some $5,000. Then I turned over the mission to the Canadian Presbyterians, and started the Presbytery of the Yukon. I organized another mission at Council, and that has been in charge of a theological student. At Teller we opened a mission in charge of a good Presbyterian elder until we could get a minister to carry on the work. But you can not always measure the effect of preaching the Gospel in Alaska or elsewhere by church organizations or even by professions of Christianity. There is no people in the world that needs the safeguarding of precious lives from all manner of loose morals as in those camps. When the saloon is the only place to congregate, when there is no restraint of law or order, and no restraint of Christianity, men will drift with the tide. How often in our prayer-meeting have men said, with tears in their eyes: “If it was not for this church or this mission, I would be just drifting with the crowd.” The Gospel is the only thing that can correct the evils of society, and the only thing that can safeguard those precious lives. We do not need sympathy for physical hardships; there are trials much greater. All manner of vice marched with that company. I heard the miners say: “God does not exist here in the Klondike.” And by the oaths that sounded from lips unused to them before; by the vast moral loss that many men met with; by the sad fall of many a professing Christian into all sorts of vice—by those falls you gauge the moral stamina of a man. The saddest part is to see the wickedness of those who have been trained in ways of Christianity. We have many vices there—all the vices and lusts; but of all, I believe the most universal, deadly, dangerous, and soul-killing, is that mad lust of gold. I know nearly all the men who “struck it rich” at Bonanza and Eldorado and other rich creeks in the Klondike, and to nine out of ten of those men their gold-dust has brought nothing but trouble and misery, for they knew not how to get any real good out of it. I knew one young man who was brought up in a Christian home, and who came there a big, stalwart, lovable fellow. Three months later he sold a claim that he had staked for $25,000. In two weeks he had not a cent of it left; one wild spree, and it was all gone. A crowd of those gambling and confidence men flocked around him, and kept him giving and treating the town, and having, as he thought, “a big time.” The outcome of it was attempted suicide as he went back to work for wages on the claim that he had sold. One thing that impressed me was the futility of a mere secular education to safeguard a life from moral failure and ruin. I knew many college-bred men, some of them educated in Oxford and Cambridge, in England, or in Yale, Harvard, Princeton, who are now saloon-keepers, bar-keepers, superintendents of a faro table, or the mere hangers-on and stokers for saloons and gambling-halls. The worst savages I have ever known—the most filthy, hopeless, irreclaimable savages—were educated, college-bred men from Christian communities. But if the man is strong in character, and especially if he has that strength that is from above, he becomes tenfold stronger and more noble in the face of such temptations. No more lovable and admirable men exist anywhere than the men of those camps in the North. The hard rubbing that destroys clay, polishes the diamond. In the rough logging camps, and away up in dark little cabins up those creeks, I have met men ready to discuss any question. The brightest congregation I have ever ministered to, and the hungriest for the Gospel, was in Alaska. Some of those men came regularly every Sunday from fifteen to twenty miles to hear the sermon. Many of them had not heard a sermon in months, and thousands of men scattered in the wild camps of Alaska have not a chance all winter to hear the Gospel. One old-timer, whom I had known seventeen or eighteen years before at Fort Wrangel, said he had not been to church since he saw me last. He came merely for music, but presently he began to be touched; he began to study the Bible; he joined the Bible class; and at last the old “forty-niner” got up to give his testimony in the rough language and slang of the camp. He said: “You all know me. I’ve lived the life of the camps, and I had no thought of what was going to come hereafter. I’ve been in every camp on the Coast, from California to the Arctic, and I’ve had all sorts of luck; but, partners, this is the first time that I’ve ever struck it real rich.” I never knew the joy of service until I experienced the service of preaching the Gospel to those miners of the North.—Missionary Review.