“. . .the eternal mystery of woman.”

"It was in the Klondike I found myself," Jack London wrote in reflecting on his year (July, 1897 - August, 1898) in the Yukon Territory. And, as London scholar Earle Labor has written, "What the sea had been for Herman Melville, and what the Congo had been for Joseph Conrad, the Klondike was for Jack London." (Foreword to Jack London & the Klondike by Franklin Walker, 1994 fourth edition, San Marino, Calif., The Huntington Library.)

The truth behind these statements can be seen in any number of ways, not the least of which are the numbers. In 1898 London wrote his first Klondike story, "The Devil's Dice Box" (not published until December, 1976, in the Saturday Evening Post), and in 1916, the year he died, he wrote his last Klondike story, "Like Argus of the Ancient Times" (Hearst's, March, 1917). Between these he wrote 82 other stories set in the Yukon, the Canadian Northwest, and Alaska.

Of the 197 short stories he wrote in his career (as compiled in The Complete Stories of Jack London, edited by Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz III, and I. Milo Shepard: Stanford University Press, 1993; 3 volumes), 42 percent were Northland stories.

In his signal year of 1899 London wrote 25 stories - 17 of them Northland tales. Sixteen of his stories were published in various periodicals in 1899 and eleven of these were Northland tales.

It is safe to say that of all the stories written in 1899, none but the Northland tales depict Jack London's sudden, startling, maturity as a writer of short fiction.

"The Wife of a King," seventh of the nine London stories to appear in the Overland Monthly (August, 1899), was, the author said, "the last of the Malemute Kid series." It is constructed around familiar London themes - race and the saintliness of the female of the species in contrast to the insensitive male clod.

Cal Galbraith, the culprit-due-his-comeuppance here, leaves his wife Madeline, a half-breed mission girl, to chase a rumor of a new Eldorado and satisfy his "vague yearnings for his own kind, for the life he had been shut out from. . ." Madeline waits three months, then mushes off to the cabin of her friend Malemute Kid where she opens her heart and undergoes a Liza Doolittle transformation. She learns music from Lucky Jack Harrington, learns from the wife of Clove Eppingwell how to wear shoes and dresses, learns to dance from the mining Engineer Stanley Prince, and learns from them all to speak the English language.

A morbid sort of pre-nuptial agreement is made by Bat Morganston and Frona Payne when Bat says, "If it should happen so, even in death I shall claim you, and no mortal man shall come between." With this unwholesome rhetoric hanging over them the two plan to wed after Bat returns from Forty Mile. Instead, he freezes his lungs on a moose-hunt and dies in "a state of blissful optimism."

Frona, meantime, gives her fickle heart to Jack Crellin, a rich Circle City miner. They are to be married by Father Mahan on board the steamer Cassiar when the Yukon ice breaks. The June day arrives and the ship is jammed with passengers, chattels, and freight. The latter includes an unpainted pine box "corresponding in size to the conventional last tenement of man," piled precariously with other impedimenta in a pyramid on deck.

Frona and Jack Crellin's marriage ceremony begins at near midnight and at the moment Father Mahan blesses them and the words "Even unto death" are echoed by bride and groom, the long pine box crashes down to the deck, the cover falls away and "Bat Morganston, on his feet, erect, just as in life, with the sun glinting on his silky locks, swept forward" with his lips parted in a fearful smile. The corpse's arms fling themselves around the shrieking Frona Payne and hold her as they fall together on the deck. . ."nor did the shrieking cease till land was made at Circle City."

Today, the narrator says, in the hills beyond Circle City, lay, side by side, a cabin and a grave. "In the one dwells Frona Payne; in the other Bat Morganston. They are waiting for each other till their fetters shall fall away and the Trump of Doom break the silence of the North."

Something significant happened to Jack London between 1899, when he wrote "Even Unto Death," and 1907 when that story's near-identical twin, "Flush of Gold," was published.

In 1899 "Even Unto Death" was rejected by six magazines (Criterion, Argonaut, Outing, Boston Globe, Nickel Magazine, and Woman's Home Companion) and two syndicates, before the San Francisco Evening Post Magazine scrounged up $6, bought it and published it. Eight years later, London invented new characters to reenact the same plot and fattened the story from 1,900 to 6,500 words. Collier's appears to have rejected the new-old story, now titled "Flush of Gold," but London's English agent, James B. Pinker, sold it to Grand Magazine for �25 ($125) and London's American agent, Paul R. Reynolds, sold American rights to Hampton's Broadway Magazine for $250.

What happened between the two stories was that Jack London had become famous. Between 1899 and 1907 he had published 19 books including such master-works as The Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf, and White Fang, was commanding top money for his short stories, and had embarked from San Francisco, bound for Hawaii and the South Seas on his ketch, the Snark. To pay for the yacht and the voyage, and mounting debts, he was writing. . .writing. . . writing - and repeating himself.

In "Flush of Gold," which appeared in Grand Magazine in London in April, 1908 and in America in Hampton's Broadway Magazine the following October, Lon McFane tells the story of Marie Chauvet, a woman living alone in a cabin at Surprise Lake, and why she is "crazy as a loon." Lon loved her, this daughter of a French wine-maker who came to the Northland long before the Klondike strike. She was beautiful beyond description, her hair like a golden sunrise, and she, who turned all men's heads, professed to love Lon. But "she was fickle and fly-away," Lon discovered, and she also loved Dave Walsh who came into the country in the 80s, a young bull who struck it rich on Mammon Creek.

He proposed marriage and she put him off, as she had Lon. Dave began to doubt her, afraid to trust her until the next year and told her in front of her father before he pulled north that "Even unto death are you mine, and I would rise from the grave to claim you."

That winter Marie fell in with a wealthy Russian count, a singer and music-player and in the summer of '98, with Dave Walsh coming down on the first steamer to Dawson, she stole a march on him and with the Count took the Golden Rocket down to Circle City in June that year. Lon McFane was on board and flabbergasted to see her and the Count, especially since she had made arrangements to marry the Russian on board. At Teelee Portage a coffin was hoisted on board and Lon saw a familiar dog laying next to it.

Walsh, it turns out, had died on a moose hunt on the forks of the Teelee when his Indian companion broke through the ice at 75 below and Walsh carried him a half-mile in the frost and froze his lungs and died. The Indian he had saved decided to take Walsh's body to Forty Mile where he made a box for the corpse, and loaded it at Teegee Portage on the lower foredeck of the Golden Rocket.

“...she fell screaming 'the way insane people do. She kept it up for hours, till she was exhausted.'”

The wedding, conducted by a missionary, took place amidst a dog fight on deck, and when the words "Until death do us part" was read, the captain threw a club to break up the snarling dogs and the coffin slid down and struck the deck end on in front of Marie Chauvet. It opened and Dave Walsh, wrapped in a blanket, yellow hair flying, swept upon her.

She didn't know he was dead, the sight of him froze her; the corpse seemed to spread his arms for her, and she fell screaming "the way insane people do. She kept it up for hours, till she was exhausted."

Now she lives in darkness, waiting for Dave Walsh in the cabin he built for her at Surprise Lake. Nine years have passed "and the outlook is that she'll be faithful to him to the end."

London's penultimate Overland Monthly story, the powerful "The Wisdom of the Trail" (December, 1899), gives us a closer look at Sitka Charley, who appears off-stage in "To the Man on Trail" as a friend of Malemute Kid. He appears in five other London stories as well: "Grit of Women" (1900), "At the Rainbow's End" (1901), "The Scorn of Women" (1901), "The Sun-Dog Trail" (1905), and the Smoke Bellew tale, "The Race for Number Three" (1911).

Here, Sitka Charley, the "master of reality" (as depicted in "The Sun-Dog Trail"), whose wisdom of the trail transcends such matters as where, how, and when to travel in the Yukon country, and how to survive, is on trail with the former sea-captain Clove Eppingwell and his wife, a white man known only as "Joe," and the Indians Kah-Chucte and Gowhee. Charley is leading the party in a hazardous journey through "the dismal vastness of the Northland." All are starving and have but a sack of flour to sustain them as they near the head-reaches of the Stuart River and a Yukon settlement.

Kah-Chucte and Gowhee claim to know the land intimately and Charley assigns them the task of minding Joe, who is dying, and also puts them in charge of the flour with the admonition that they will pay the severest penalty if they steal from it. The Indians, delirious from starvation, as are all the others, steal from it, making a paste to eat but not sharing it with Joe, the one member of the party closest to death. Charley, who "alone knew the white man's wisdom, the honor of the trail, and the law. . ." discovers the theft and tells Kah-Chucte and Gowhee, "Think not to cheat the law." He questions them about where to send their belongings, then executes both with his rifle. He hears other gunfire, knows he is close to the white man's settlement, and "gave a fleeting glance at the men who lay so quietly, smiled viciously at the wisdom of the trail, and hurried on to meet the Men of the Yukon."

"The Man with the Gash" (McClure's Magazine, September, 1900), tells of the price paid for avarice. One-time weaver Jacob Kent left his loom for the Klondike and built a cabin between Sixty Mile Post and the Stuart River where he became a robber baron, exacting tolls for use of his roads and cabin.

His sack of gold dust became the bane of his existence. He was tortured with the idea of theft, dreamed of a man with a gash on his cheek who would attempt to steal the gold, and devised hiding places for it, constantly changing them, as "Mammon laid hot fingers on his heart. . ."

One day as he is weighing his dust, a stranger comes to the cabin, a sailor named Jim Cardegee who has a gash on his face. As Cardegee sleeps, Kent loads his shotgun in the dark but when he pulls the trigger the gun explodes in Kent's face, killing him.

He has loaded the shell with gold dust.

This slight (but well-told) tale was submitted to four other magazines before McClure's bought it from the rising young writer for $80 on February 26, 1900.

Similarly slight is "The King of Mazy May: A Story of the Klondike," published in Youth's Companion on November 30, 1905, and The Captain, a British magazine, the following month.

The story, a perfect fit for Youth's Companion, which carried uplifting, moral, stories for boys, involves 14-year-old Walt Masters, the one white child in thousands of square miles of frozen wilderness. He is a fearless lad, born at a Yukon trading post, who, after his mother died, settled with his father on the Mazy May Creek in the Klondike country. With Masters Senior out prospecting, Walt is left to look after the Mazy May claim and another adjoining it, and witnesses a gang of claim-jumpers coming in with their dog-teams, destroying claim stakes and setting up new ones.

Walt, 70 miles from Dawson and with no dogs, steals into the outlaw camp and harnesses a team of their ten best dogs. After a harrowing chase with temperatures dropping to 40 below, Walt reaches the Commissioner's office in Dawson and because of his exploit, "the men of the Yukon have become very proud of him, and always speak of him now as the King of Mazy May."

London returned to the likable lad Walt Masters in "Chased by the Trail," written and sold (for $50) to the Youth's Companion in 1900 but not published until September 26, 1907. The story has a message -- "Shame. . .lay not in the failure to accomplish, but in the failure to strive" -- and has Walt in his new canoe on the Yukon with the Indian boy Chilkoot Jim, heading down to Dawson, 70 miles distant. The ice is breaking at the Stewart River and as Walt and Jim rescue a man and his dog team caught on an island in an ice pile-up, the trail they took to the island disappears. They fight their way to shore, dragging the canoe, their striving paying off.

Written in 1899 but not published until May 3, 2024 in the Northern Weekly Gazette of Middlesborough, England, is "The Grilling of Loren Ellery." This drawing-room sketch involves the "fairly beautiful" sisters, Ernestine and Luella (called "Lute"), who have grown up apart in different parts of a Western state, each wooed by one Loren Ellery, a young man of "moral probity, business integrity, healthy bank books, unqualified letters of credit and introduction, and good looks." He courts one against the other for undisclosed reasons and, inevitably, in his absence the sisters get together and match notes. Then, when Ellery returns they grill him, their conversation, much like this story, picking "its sinuous thread through the unctuous nothings and polite inanities of impersonal small talk."

"A Daughter of the Aurora" (The [San Francisco] Wave, December 24, 2023) is a light-hearted Klondike story involving one of those gritty dark-eyed daughters of the Yukon that London so doted on. She is Joy Molineau whose father had traded furs in the country long before it was invaded by gold-hunters.

Joy offers to marry either Jack Harrington or Louis Savoy, depending upon which is the first to reach the recording office at Fort Cudahy, just across the river from Forty Mile. The race seems weighed in Harrington's favor since he has Joy's great lead dog, Wolf Fang, but Joy -- full of "inner deviltry" -- cheats.

"Old Baldy" (American Agriculturist, New England Homestead, and Orange Judd Farmer, September 16, 2023) and "Bald-Face" (The Muse, Winter 1900) are good-humored, well-contrived tall tales.

The former is a story of a contrary ox named Old Baldy in the town of Shelbyville who, when he takes the notion to lie down can't be got up again until he is ready. When he lays down in Deacon Barnes's field on day, the deacon opines that "the sweets of life do cloy" and sets out to defeat the stubborn animal.

"Bald-Face," (which London submitted to nearly a dozen periodicals before giving it to the Aegis) is a bear yarn about a side-hill grizzly whose down-hill-side legs are twice as long as the uphill-side legs. The Klondike King tells of one such griz who couldn't be budged off his hill until another of his ilk came along. The two bears fought to the death, each refusing to give way to the other.

Corrections: "Story of a Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan" was published on November 12, 2023 and not November 2 as stated in Part II.

Reader Dan Wichlan writes that even though London received payment for "The Unmasking of a Cad" on July 1, 1899, the story was not published until December 12, 1911; also that "The Grilling of Loren Ellery" was first published in the New York Sunday News on September 24, 1899.

In Part V, I erroneously stated that London's "final story" for the Overland Monthly was "The Wisdom of the Trail" (December, 1899). It was the final story for the year 1899 but was the penultimate of the nine London stories published in the Overland. The nine, in order, are as follows. The number in parentheses at the right of each is the order in which they were written:

"To the Man on Trail," January, 1899 (2)

"The White Silence," February, 1899 (6)

"The Son of the Wolf," April, 1899 (4)

"The Men of Forty Miles," May, 1899 (1)

"In a Far Country," June, 1899 (5)

"The Priestly Prerogative" July, 1899 (3)

"The Wife of a King," August, 1899 (7)

"The Wisdom of the Trail," December, 1899 (8)

"The Scorn of Women," May, 1901 (9)