The San Francisco call., 1898-03-18
BY SAM w. WALL.

BY SAM w. WALL.
 DAWSON, Feb. IA (by special carrier to Dyea and by steamship Queen to Seattle, March 17-Since my last dis patch have made journey with dogs to Fort Yukon, and there secured the full story of the miserable army of the unprovisioned that struggled to reach Dawson City, only to be ordered by their own needs to move on.
 Writing from Dawson when this day was far in the future, said the winter promised for the great disorganized multitude that climbed the pass above Dyea an experience of suffering such as threatened to overmatch that of the French in their retreat from Moscow. have seen the fulfllment of that threat.
 In the long stretch of frozen rivers between here and Fort Yukon, I have seen the wrecks of the boats in which that section of the north bound army floated down stream. I have seen the trail for miles strewn with it's forsaken and ruined property, and have seen and camped with attachments of that army as it comes back from Fort Yu- kon, struggling against the bitter cold and driving snow and frightful winds, through a temperature registering from 30 to 50 degrees below zero, each man pulling his sled loaded with the food he had secured. literally freezing that they might not starve.
 By their campf1res along the bleak river, I have heard them tell, careless by comparison, of the terrible experf- ha1y ofo tain night in October while they floated down the river, and there came to them that peculiar sound of ice in mo- tion."
 The ice was tanning, the river rose behind it, their boats were caught and crushed and thrown under. Cries for help were answered by other cries for help. We know this from those who made the landing. I have secured the names of many of them. If some went down in the darkness and the flood, we do not know it and can never know.
 The story of that struggle, that night with the water and the ice, the effort to reach the land over the broken and un- certain surface, the waiting by some for days until they became sufficiently fixed to bear their weight of the slow struggle of over sixty miles through the bewildering maze of islands known as the Yukon flats, often losing their way and turning back on their own trail, and the treacherous ice and snow giving way under them, compelling them to abandon their little supplies of food and even their clothes, some of them without matches or ax with which to make fires, and with no more than a blanket for covering, the mer- cury registering 10 degrees below zero; this is the experience in slightly vary ing detail and degree of five hundred men.
 I give the matter of fact relation of the experience by individuals most of them tired and worn at the time of the telling, incapable of any play of imag- ination, but the listener in the incident of the ice jam, for instance, could still feel the darkness of the night, the black water underneath the boat, the moving masses of ice, on every side, land nowhere to be seen, and in the ear, that peculiar sound of ice in mo- tion."
 The sudden rise or check of the wa ter, the rush and crush of ice about the boat and then the crash of contact. There were over 100 men in that crush of the night of the 18th of October in the vicinity of what came to be known as Camp Ray or Jam City," and 400 others entered the jam before or within a few days after Later this crowd was assembled at Fort Yukon, cold, miserable, destitute They were cared for as well as the equipment of the place admitted.
 They had lost and suffered much. They had been advised to go there and were assured that they could get food without money if they had none. Some of them had been engaged at Dawson to make the round trip on a. boat that got no further than Circle City, going down.
 These felt they had a definite griev- ance. There were among them a num- Der of idle and i'll disposed men who thought they saw an opportunity to get something for nothing. All of them demanded outfits that they might get away and do the things that they came to do. They were offered the opportunity to chop wood at s5 a cord and were required to accept it as a condition of their being given food in quantity. Some turbulent spirits arose against the acceptance and an organized move was made to capture the caches of the trading companies. It was directed first against that of the Alaska Commercial Company, not because that company was the spe-