Mushing with dogs in Alaska is the worst and the best mode of traveling in all the world--the most joyful and the most exasperating--according to the angle from which you look at it.
Once I was preaching a series of sermons on the Ten Commandments to the miners at Council, a town on Seward Peninsula eighty-five miles east of Nome. I had come to the Third Commandment; and I bore down pretty hard upon the useless and foolish habit of profane swearing.
When I was going home from the meeting, a group of young men stood on the corner waiting for me.
"Come over here, Doctor," called one of the men. "I have a bet with Jim, and I want you to decide it."
I crossed over to the jolly group. "What is your bet?" I asked.
"Why," he replied, "I've bet Jim five dollars that you have never mushed a dog-team."
"Well, you've lost," I answered. "I have driven dogs many times--and never found it necessary to swear at them, either."
Before I go on with my story, perhaps I would better explain that word "mush," as it is used in the Northwest. The word is never used in Alaska as you use it in the East, to denote porridge, or some sort of cereal. There we say "oatmeal" or "corn-meal," or simply "cereal."
In Alaska the word has but one use. It is a corruption of the French _marchez, marche_, which the Canadian _coureurs du bois_, or travelers of the woods, shout at their dogs when urging them along the trail. From _marche_ to "mush" is easy. So now, throughout the great Northwest, Canadian or Alaskan, when a man is traveling he is "on a mush." When he is speaking to his dogs, either to drive them out of the house or to urge them along the trail, he shouts "mush!" If he be a good traveler, he is a "great musher." Of all the pet names they used to give me up there, the one of which I was proudest was "The Mushing Parson."
They tell a story, which has the ear-marks of truth, which illustrates this universal use of the word "mush" in the Northwest.
Two miners, who for years had been in the mining camps of Alaska, at last came "outside" to Seattle. In the morning they went to a restaurant for breakfast and took seats at a table. A rather cross-looking waitress came to take their order. "Mush?" she asked. The miners looked at one another in surprise and alarm. The woman waited a while, and when they did not answer she supposed they were deaf and had not heard her question. "Mush?" she screamed. The two men arose and fled. When they got safely to the sidewalk, one said to the other, "Now, what the Sam Hill did she fire us for?"