But the following spring always found him drifting down the
Yukon on the tail of the ice jams.
Jack McQuestion aptly vindicates the grip of the North. After a
residence of thirty years he insists that the climate is delightful,
and declares that whenever he makes a trip to the States he is
afflicted with home-sickness. Needless to say, the North still has
him and will keep tight hold of him until he dies. In fact, for him
to die elsewhere would be inartistic and insincere. Of three of the
"pioneer" pioneers, Jack McQuestion alone survives. In 1871, from
one to seven years before Holt went over Chilcoot, in the company of
Al Mayo and Arthur Harper, McQuestion came into the Yukon from the
North-west over the Hudson Bay Company route from the Mackenzie to
Fort Yukon. The names of these three men, as their lives, are bound
up in the history of the country, and so long as there be histories
and charts, that long will the Mayo and McQuestion rivers and the
Harper and Ladue town site of Dawson be remembered.
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