A contemporaneous and remarkable shrinkage of a vast stretch of territory may be instanced in the Northland.  From its rise at Lake Linderman the Yukon runs twenty-five hundred miles to Bering Sea, traversing an almost unknown region, the remote recesses of which had never felt the moccasined foot of the pathfinder.  At occasional intervals men wallowed into its dismal fastnesses, or emerged gaunt and famine-worn.  But in the fall of 1896 a great gold strike was made—­greater than any since the days of California and Australia; yet, so rude were the means of communication, nearly a year elapsed before the news of it reached the eager ear of the world.  Passionate pilgrims disembarked their outfits at Dyea.  Over the terrible Chilcoot Pass the trail led to the lakes, thirty miles away.  Carriage was yet in its most primitive stage, the road builder and bridge builder unheard of.  With heavy packs upon their backs men plunged waist-deep into hideous quagmires, bridged mountain torrents by felling trees across them, toiled against the precipitous slopes of the ice-worn mountains, and crossed the dizzy faces of innumerable glaciers.  When, after incalculable toil they reached the lakes, they went into the woods, sawed pine trees into lumber by hand, and built it into boats.  In these, overloaded, unseaworthy, they battled down the long chain of lakes.  Within the memory of the writer there lingers the picture of a sheltered nook on the shores of Lake Le Barge, in which half a thousand gold seekers lay storm-bound.  Day after day they struggled against the seas in the teeth of a northerly gale, and night after night returned to their camps, repulsed but not disheartened.  At the rapids they ran their boats through, hit or miss, and after infinite toil and hardship, on the breast of a jarring ice flood, arrived at the Klondike.  From the beach at Dyea to the eddy below the Barracks at Dawson, they had paid for their temerity the tax of human life demanded by the elements.  A year later, so greatly had the country shrunk, the tourist, on disembarking from the ocean steamship, took his seat in a modern railway coach.  A few hours later, at Lake Bennet, he stepped aboard a commodious river steamer.  At the rapids he rode around on a tramway to take passage on another steamer below.  And in a few hours more he was in Dawson, without having once soiled the lustre of his civilized foot-gear.  Did he wish to communicate with the outside world, he strolled into the telegraph office.  A few short months before he would have written a letter and deemed himself favoured above mortals were it delivered within the year.