In my personal medicine chest was a quart of whisky.

I never drew the cork till six months afterward, in a lonely camp, where, without anaesthetics, a doctor was compelled to operate on a man.

The doctor and the patient emptied my bottle between them and then proceeded to the operation.
Back in California a year later, recovering from scurvy, I found that my father was dead and that I was the head and the sole bread-winner of a household.

When I state that I had passed coal on a steamship from Behring Sea to British Columbia, and travelled in the steerage from there to San Francisco, it will be understood that I brought nothing back from the Klondike but my scurvy.
Times were hard.

Work of any sort was difficult to get.