It was with the excitement of a veteran soldier going into a fresh battle that I teetered over the springy plank from the Rampart shore to the deck of the Yukon River steamboat. My year's outfit of "grub and duds," as the miners would put it, was aboard. I grasped the hand of Dr. Koonce, with whom I had just floated in an open boat down the Yukon twelve hundred miles. A fine fellow-"Kooncie" We had been camping, and fishing, and packing, and boating together since the first of May, 1899, and it was now the middle of August. He was to stay at the new mining town of Rampart, build a church there and learn the joyous life of a pioneer missionary.