"The horses died like mosquitoes in
the first frost, and from Skaguay to the Bennett they rotted
in heaps. They died at the Rocks, they were poisoned at the Summit,
and they starved at the Lakes; they fell off the trail, what
there was of it, or they went through it; in the river they drowned
under their loads, or were smashed to pieces against the boulders;
they snapped their legs in the crevices and broke their backs
falling backwards with their packs; in the sloughs they sank
from sight or smothered in the slime, and they were disemboweled
in the bogs where the corduroy logs turned end up in the mud;
men shot them, worked them to death, and when they were gone,
went back to the beach and bought more. Some did not bother to
shoot them,–stripping the saddles off and the shoes and
leaving them where they fell. Their hearts turned to stone–those
which did not break–and they became beasts, the men on the
Dead Horse Trail."
