Having Wonderful Time

YUKON VOYAGE--Walter R. Curtin-- Caxton Printers ($3.50).

One fine October morning 40 years ago, the steamer Yukoner, bound upriver for Dawson with passengers and supplies, tied up for the winter in a small tributary of the Yukon, 1,400 miles from Dawson. The weather was getting cold, one of the Yukoners boilers had blown up, and she was in danger of being crushed in the ice if she remained in the river. For the captain, crew, passengers and the general manager of the company operating the Yukoner, her failure to reach Dawson was a catastrophe; in those gold-rush days a Yukon River steamer paid for itself in one trip and made a profit of $41,000 to boot.

With nothing else to do, they began to fight. The purser said the captain was trying to wreck the boat. A steward fought the cook because "we had canned pears too often." The captain said the chief engineer had stolen 20 barrels of white lead. The captain's wife refused to come to dinner. The captain chased a passenger from the pantry because she was helping the assistant cook dry the dishes. A passenger announced she would pay $500 to have the captain beaten up. The assistant cook discovered she was pregnant and headed upriver by dog team. The chief engineer left for the Nome gold fields, and on Christmas, after gifts had been exchanged, the mate blacked a steward's eye, whereupon another steward stabbed the one whose eye was blacked. The captain tried to choke the mate; the crew refused to work; the general manager fired the captain and, when the Yukoner finally reached Dawson next summer, the crew-learned that the gold rush had shifted to Nome (2,000 miles behind them), that the company had gone bankrupt. They were all jailed for piracy.

Witnessing these doings with quiet satisfaction was the general manager's son, Walter Curtin, who kept a diary. "As I look back on the most enjoyable vacation I ever had," he observes, "it was worth all it cost to have such a wonderful year of silence." Last week, Mr. Curtin, now an Oakland, Calif, businessman, published his diary in a 299-page book which made good reading for its picture of gold-rush days, but which sounded like something by Ring Lardner in its grave, adolescent comments on the turbulent life aboard the Yukoner. Fights and uproar left young Walter unmoved. "When I came to Alaska," he wrote in his diary, between a discussion of the price of liquor and a quotation from Longfellow, "I made a resolution that I would never take a drink of liquor or ever admit . . . that everything was not all right."

Walter was the only person aboard the Yukoner who wholeheartedly enjoyed his trip. When the crew got out of jail in Dawson (the piracy case was allowed to die because of international complications), all members immediately went on a drunk, spent their year's wages. Because of complications arising from the bankruptcy, Walter was not paid. He did not mind:

"The fun I had while earning it was worth it." The only thing that bothered him, when he read back over his diary, was that there was so much writing about troubles and squabbles in it. "I started out," he reflected, "with the idea that I would not mention any troubles at all, but that is about all the news there is."

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