Gold, Men and Dogs

“What influenced you most in life?” he asked. While I hesitated, he grinned, “Women?”

“No, sir. There was only one.”

But it wasn’t a hard question, after all, though I hated to admit the truth. “Gold comes first,” said I. “But not the love of it.” I think I meant gold in the way it affects most men’s lives; always an invisible finger guiding them this way and that as they hunt it, fear it, lust for it, yearn for it, suffer for its lack.

“Then men—”

“Naturally,” he said.

“And dogs.”

Gold Men and Dogs is the true adventures of one of Alaska's great people. Scotty Allan like a Jack London character was a larger-than-life sourdough and has the hair raising and head shaking stories to prove it.

Scotty Allan made his living since the age of six. Scottish by birth he emigrated from Scotland to the Territory of Dakota with a shipment of horses at nineteen; him weighing only one hundred pounds.

In ’eighty-nine, he started on the construction of railroads in the West, finishing up on the completion of the Great Northern when it reached the Pacific Coast.

On August 2, 1897, Allan took eighteen months’ leave of absence from the Great Northern and sailed from Seattle for Skagway, headed for Yukon Territory and joined the mad rush for Klondike gold.

From then until the World War, “north of ’sixty-three” was his home. Stacking twenty years of adventures around Nome and the Arctic.

In 1915 he was commissioned by the French Government to get dogs for them. He took four hundred and forty malamutes to France to haul ammunition for the Alpine Chasseurs in the Vosges Mountains.

Later, on returning to Alaska, Allan's fellow citizens sent him to Alaska Legislature.