Within a few
weeks there were fifteen hundred homeless men in camp. Tiny and the
carpenter's wife began to cook for them, in a tent. The miners gave her a
lot, and the carpenter put up a log hotel for her. There she sometimes fed
a hundred and fifty men a day. Miners came in on snowshoes from their
placer claims twenty miles away to buy fresh bread from her, and paid for
it in gold.
That winter Tiny kept in her hotel a Swede whose legs had been frozen one
night in a storm when he was trying to find his way back to his cabin. The
poor fellow thought it great good fortune to be cared for by a woman, and
a woman who spoke his own tongue. When he was told that his feet must be
amputated, he said he hoped he would not get well; what could a
working-man do in this hard world without feet? He did, in fact, die from
the operation, but not before he had deeded Tiny Soderball his claim on
Hunker Creek. Tiny sold her hotel, invested half her money in Dawson
building lots, and with the rest she developed her claim. She went off
into the wilds and lived on it. She bought other claims from discouraged
miners, traded or sold them on percentages.
After nearly ten years in the Klondike, Tiny returned, with a considerable
fortune, to live in San Francisco. I met her in Salt Lake City in 1908.
She was a thin, hard-faced woman, very well-dressed, very reserved in
manner.
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