The position occupied by Jacob Welse was certainly an anomalous¹ one. He was a giant trader in a country without commerce, a ripened² product of the nineteenth century flourishing in a society as primitive³ as that of the Mediterranean⁵ vandals. A captain of industry and a splendid monopolist, he dominated the most independent aggregate⁶ of men ever drawn⁷ together from the ends of the earth. An economic missionary⁸, a commercial St. Paul, he preached the doctrines⁹ of expediency¹⁰ and force. Believing in the natural rights of man, a child himself of democracy, he bent¹¹ all men to his absolutism. Government of Jacob Welse, for Jacob Welse and the people, by Jacob Welse, was his unwritten gospel. Single-handed he had carved out his dominion¹² till he gripped the domain¹³ of a dozen Roman provinces. At his ukase the population ebbed¹⁴ and flowed over a hundred thousand miles of territory, and cities sprang up or disappeared at his bidding.  
Yet he was a common man. The air of the world first smote¹⁵ his lungs on the open prairie by the River Platte, the blue sky over head, and beneath, the green grass of the earth pressing against his tender nakedness. On the horses his eyes first opened, still saddled and gazing in mild wonder on the miracle; for his trapper father had but turned aside from the trail that the wife might have quiet and the birth be accomplished¹⁶. An hour or so and the two, which were now three, were in the saddle and overhauling¹⁷ their trapper comrades. The party had not been delayed; no time lost. In the morning his mother cooked the breakfast over the camp-fire, and capped it with a fifty-mile ride into the next sun-down.
 
The trapper father had come of the sturdy Welsh stock which trickled¹⁸ into early Ohio out of the jostling East, and the mother was a nomadic¹⁹ daughter of the Irish emigrant²⁰ settlers of Ontario. From both sides came the Wanderlust of the blood, the fever to be moving, to be pushing on to the edge of things. In the first year of his life, ere he had learned the way of his legs, Jacob Welse had wandered a-horse through a thousand miles of wilderness²¹, and wintered in a hunting-lodge on the head-waters of the Red River of the North. His first foot-gear was moccasins, his first taffy the tallow from a moose. His first generalizations²² were that the world was composed of great wastes and white vastnesses, and populated with Indians and white hunters like his father. A town was a cluster of deer-skin lodges²³; a trading-post a seat of civilization; and a factor God Almighty²⁴ Himself. Rivers and lakes existed chiefly for man's use in travelling. Viewed in this light, the mountains puzzled him; but he placed them away in his classification of the Inexplicable²⁵ and did not worry. Men died, sometimes. But their meat was not good to eat, and their hides worthless,—perhaps because they did not grow fur. Pelts²⁶ were valuable, and with a few bales a man might purchase the earth. Animals were made for men to catch and skin. He did not know what men were made for, unless, perhaps, for the factor.
 
As he grew older he modified these concepts, but the process was a continual source of naive²⁷ apprehension²⁸ and wonderment. It was not until he became a man and had wandered through half the cities of the States that this expression of childish wonder passed out of his eyes and left them wholly keen and alert. At his boy's first contact with the cities, while he revised his synthesis of things, he also generalized afresh. People who lived in cities were effeminate. They did not carry the points of the compass in their heads, and they got lost easily. That was why they elected to stay in the cities. Because they might catch cold and because they were afraid of the dark, they slept under shelter and locked their doors at night. The women were soft and pretty, but they could not lift a snowshoe far in a day's journey. Everybody talked too much. That was why they lied and were unable to work greatly with their hands. Finally, there was a new human force called "bluff²⁹." A man who made a bluff must be dead sure of it, or else be prepared to back it up. Bluff was a very good thing—when exercised with discretion³⁰.
 
Later, though living his life mainly in the woods and mountains, he came to know that the cities were not all bad; that a man might live in a city and still be a man. Accustomed to do battle with natural forces, he was attracted by the commercial battle with social forces. The masters of marts and exchanges dazzled but did not blind him, and he studied them, and strove to grasp the secrets of their strength. And further, in token that some good did come out of Nazareth, in the full tide of manhood he took to himself a city-bred woman. But he still yearned³¹ for the edge of things, and the leaven³² in his blood worked till they went away, and above the Dyea Beach, on the rim⁴ of the forest, built the big log trading-post. And here, in the mellow³³ of time, he got a proper focus on things and unified³⁴ the phenomena³⁵ of society precisely³⁶ as he had already unified the phenomena of nature. There was naught³⁷ in one which could not be expressed in terms of the other. The same principles underlaid both; the same truths were manifest of both. Competition was the secret of creation. Battle was the law and the way of progress. The world was made for the strong, and only the strong inherited it, and through it all there ran an eternal equity³⁸. To be honest was to be strong. To sin was to weaken. To bluff an honest man was to be dishonest. To bluff a bluffer³⁹ was to smite⁴⁰ with the steel of justice. The primitive strength was in the arm; the modern strength in the brain. Though it had shifted ground, the struggle was the same old struggle. As of old time, men still fought for the mastery of the earth and the delights thereof. But the sword had given way to the ledger⁴¹; the mail-clad baron⁴² to the soft-garbed industrial lord, and the centre of imperial political power to the seat of commercial exchanges. The modern will had destroyed the ancient brute⁴³. The stubborn earth yielded only to force. Brain was greater than body. The man with the brain could best conquer things primitive.
 
He did not have much education as education goes. To the three R's his mother taught him by camp-fire and candle-light, he had added a somewhat miscellaneous book-knowledge; but he was not burdened with what he had gathered. Yet he read the facts of life understandingly, and the sobriety which comes of the soil was his, and the clear earth-vision.
 
And so it came about that Jacob Welse crossed over the Chilcoot in an early day, and disappeared into the vast unknown. A year later he emerged at the Russian missions clustered about the mouth of the Yukon on Bering Sea. He had journeyed down a river three thousand miles long, he had seen things, and dreamed a great dream. But he held his tongue and went to work, and one day the defiant⁴⁴ whistle of a crazy stern-wheel tub saluted⁴⁵ the midnight sun on the dank river-stretch by Fort o' Yukon. It was a magnificent adventure. How he achieved it only Jacob Welse can tell; but with the impossible to begin with, plus the impossible, he added steamer to steamer and heaped enterprise upon enterprise. Along many a thousand miles of river and tributary⁴⁶ he built trading-posts and warehouses⁴⁷. He forced the white man's axe⁴⁹ into the hands of the aborigines, and in every village and between the villages rose the cords of four-foot firewood for his boilers⁵⁰. On an island in Bering Sea, where the river and the ocean meet, he established a great distributing station, and on the North Pacific he put big ocean steamships⁵¹; while in his offices in Seattle and San Francisco it took clerks by the score to keep the order and system of his business.
 
Men drifted into the land. Hitherto famine had driven them out, but Jacob Welse was there now, and his grub-stores; so they wintered in the frost and groped in the frozen muck for gold. He encouraged them, grub-staked them, carried them on the books of the company. His steamers dragged them up the Koyokuk in the old days of Arctic City. Wherever pay was struck he built a warehouse⁴⁸ and a store. The town followed. He explored; he speculated; he developed. Tireless, indomitable, with the steel-glitter in his dark eyes, he was everywhere at once, doing all things. In the opening up of a new river he was in the van; and at the tail-end also, hurrying forward the grub. On the Outside he fought trade-combinations; made alliances with the corporations of the earth, and forced discriminating⁵² tariffs⁵³ from the great carriers. On the Inside he sold flour, and blankets, and tobacco; built saw-mills, staked townsites, and sought properties in copper⁵⁴, iron, and coal; and that the miners should be well-equipped, ransacked⁵⁵ the lands of the Arctic even as far as Siberia for native-made snow-shoes, muclucs, and parkas.
 
He bore the country on his shoulders; saw to its needs; did its work. Every ounce of its dust passed through his hands; every post-card and letter of credit. He did its banking⁵⁶ and exchange; carried and distributed its mails. He frowned upon competition; frightened out predatory capital; bluffed⁵⁷ militant⁵⁸ syndicates, and when they would not, backed his bluff and broke them. And for all, yet found time and place to remember his motherless girl, and to love her, and to fit her for the position he had made.