The man with the brain could best conquer things primitive.
He did not have much education as education goes.

To the three R's his mother taught him by camp-fire and candle-light, he had added a somewhat miscellaneous book-knowledge; but he was not burdened with what he had gathered.

Yet he read the facts of life understandingly, and the sobriety which comes of the soil was his, and the clear earth-vision.
And so it came about that Jacob Welse crossed over the Chilcoot in an early day, and disappeared into the vast unknown.

A year later he emerged at the Russian missions clustered about the mouth of the Yukon on Bering Sea.

He had journeyed down a river three thousand miles long, he had seen things, and dreamed a great dream.