CHAPTER V
The position occupied by Jacob Welse was certainly an anomalous one.He was a giant trader in a country without commerce, a ripened productof the nineteenth century flourishing in a society as primitive as thatof the Mediterranean vandals. A captain of industry and a splendidmonopolist, he dominated the most independent aggregate of men everdrawn together from the ends of the earth. An economic missionary, acommercial St. Paul, he preached the doctrines of expediency and force.Believing in the natural rights of man, a child himself of democracy,he bent all men to his absolutism. Government of Jacob Welse, forJacob Welse and the people, by Jacob Welse, was his unwritten gospel.Single-handed he had carved out his dominion till he gripped the domainof a dozen Roman provinces. At his ukase the population ebbed andflowed over a hundred thousand miles of territory, and cities sprang upor disappeared at his bidding.
Yet he was a common man. The air of the world first smote his lungs onthe open prairie by the River Platte, the blue sky over head, andbeneath, the green grass of the earth pressing against his tendernakedness. On the horses his eyes first opened, still saddled andgazing in mild wonder on the miracle; for his trapper father had butturned aside from the trail that the wife might have quiet and thebirth be accomplished. An hour or so and the two, which were nowthree, were in the saddle and overhauling their trapper comrades. Theparty had not been delayed; no time lost. In the morning his mothercooked the breakfast over the camp-fire, and capped it with afifty-mile ride into the next sun-down.
The trapper father had come of the sturdy Welsh stock which trickledinto early Ohio out of the jostling East, and the mother was a nomadicdaughter of the Irish emigrant settlers of Ontario. From both sidescame the Wanderlust of the blood, the fever to be moving, to be pushingon to the edge of things. In the first year of his life, ere he hadlearned the way of his legs, Jacob Welse had wandered a-horse through athousand miles of wilderness, and wintered in a hunting-lodge on thehead-waters of the Red River of the North. His first foot-gear wasmoccasins, his first taffy the tallow from a moose. His firstgeneralizations were that the world was composed of great wastes andwhite vastnesses, and populated with Indians and white hunters like hisfather. A town was a cluster of deer-skin lodges; a trading-post aseat of civilization; and a factor God Almighty Himself. Rivers andlakes existed chiefly for man's use in travelling. Viewed in thislight, the mountains puzzled him; but he placed them away in hisclassification of the Inexplicable and did not worry. Men died,sometimes. But their meat was not good to eat, and their hidesworthless,--perhaps because they did not grow fur. Pelts werevaluable, and with a few bales a man might purchase the earth. Animalswere made for men to catch and skin. He did not know what men weremade for, unless, perhaps, for the factor.
As he grew older he modified these concepts, but the process was acontinual source of naive apprehension and wonderment. It was notuntil he became a man and had wandered through half the cities of theStates that this expression of childish wonder passed out of his eyesand left them wholly keen and alert. At his boy's first contact withthe cities, while he revised his synthesis of things, he alsogeneralized afresh. People who lived in cities were effeminate. Theydid not carry the points of the compass in their heads, and they gotlost easily. That was why they elected to stay in the cities. Becausethey might catch cold and because they were afraid of the dark, theyslept under shelter and locked their doors at night. The women weresoft and pretty, but they could not lift a snowshoe far in a day'sjourney. Everybody talked too much. That was why they lied and wereunable to work greatly with their hands. Finally, there was a newhuman force called "bluff." A man who made a bluff must be dead sureof it, or else be prepared to back it up. Bluff was a very goodthing--when exercised with discretion.
Later, though living his life mainly in the woods and mountains, hecame to know that the cities were not all bad; that a man might live ina city and still be a man. Accustomed to do battle with naturalforces, he was attracted by the commercial battle with social forces.The masters of marts and exchanges dazzled but did not blind him, andhe studied them, and strove to grasp the secrets of their strength.And further, in token that some good did come out of Nazareth, in thefull tide of manhood he took to himself a city-bred woman. But hestill yearned for the edge of things, and the leaven in his bloodworked till they went away, and above the Dyea Beach, on the rim of theforest, built the big log trading-post. And here, in the mellow oftime, he got a proper focus on things and unified the phenomena ofsociety precisely as he had already unified the phenomena of nature.There was naught in one which could not be expressed in terms of theother. The same principles underlaid both; the same truths weremanifest of both. Competition was the secret of creation. Battle wasthe law and the way of progress. The world was made for the strong,and only the strong inherited it, and through it all there ran aneternal equity. To be honest was to be strong. To sin was to weaken.To bluff an honest man was to be dishonest. To bluff a bluffer was tosmite with the steel of justice. The primitive strength was in thearm; the modern strength in the brain. Though it had shifted ground,the struggle was the same old struggle. As of old time, men stillfought for the mastery of the earth and the delights thereof. But thesword had given way to the ledger; the mail-clad baron to thesoft-garbed industrial lord, and the centre of imperial political powerto the seat of commercial exchanges. The modern will had destroyed theancient brute. The stubborn earth yielded only to force. Brain wasgreater than body. The man with the brain could best conquer thingsprimitive.
He did not have much education as education goes. To the three R's hismother taught him by camp-fire and candle-light, he had added asomewhat miscellaneous book-knowledge; but he was not burdened withwhat he had gathered. Yet he read the facts of life understandingly,and the sobriety which comes of the soil was his, and the clearearth-vision.
And so it came about that Jacob Welse crossed over the Chilcoot in anearly day, and disappeared into the vast unknown. A year later heemerged at the Russian missions clustered about the mouth of the Yukonon Bering Sea. He had journeyed down a river three thousand mileslong, he had seen things, and dreamed a great dream. But he held histongue and went to work, and one day the defiant whistle of a crazystern-wheel tub saluted the midnight sun on the dank river-stretch byFort o' Yukon. It was a magnificent adventure. How he achieved itonly Jacob Welse can tell; but with the impossible to begin with, plusthe impossible, he added steamer to steamer and heaped enterprise uponenterprise. Along many a thousand miles of river and tributary hebuilt trading-posts and warehouses. He forced the white man's axe intothe hands of the aborigines, and in every village and between thevillages rose the cords of four-foot firewood for his boilers. On anisland in Bering Sea, where the river and the ocean meet, heestablished a great distributing station, and on the North Pacific heput big ocean steamships; while in his offices in Seattle and SanFrancisco it took clerks by the score to keep the order and system ofhis business.
Men drifted into the land. Hitherto famine had driven them out, butJacob Welse was there now, and his grub-stores; so they wintered in thefrost and groped in the frozen muck for gold. He encouraged them,grub-staked them, carried them on the books of the company. Hissteamers dragged them up the Koyokuk in the old days of Arctic City.Wherever pay was struck he built a warehouse and a store. The townfollowed. He explored; he speculated; he developed. Tireless,indomitable, with the steel-glitter in his dark eyes, he was everywhereat once, doing all things. In the opening up of a new river he was inthe van; and at the tail-end also, hurrying forward the grub. On theOutside he fought trade-combinations; made alliances with thecorporations of the earth, and forced discriminating tariffs from thegreat carriers. On the Inside he sold flour, and blankets, andtobacco; built saw-mills, staked townsites, and sought properties incopper, iron, and coal; and that the miners should be well-equipped,ransacked the lands of the Arctic even as far as Siberia fornative-made snow-shoes, muclucs, and parkas.
; He bore the country on his shoulders; saw to its needs; did its work.Every ounce of its dust passed through his hands; every post-card andletter of credit. He did its banking and exchange; carried anddistributed its mails. He frowned upon competition; frightened outpredatory capital; bluffed militant syndicates, and when they wouldnot, backed his bluff and broke them. And for all, yet found time andplace to remember his motherless girl, and to love her, and to fit herfor the position he had made.