I wanted the gold and I sought it,I scrabbled and mucked like a slave,was it famine or scurvy?I fought it;I hurled my youth into a grave.I wanted the gold and I got it; came out with a fortune last fall.
yet somehow life's not what I thought it, and somehow the gold isn't all; no.
There's the land,have you seen it? It's the cussidest land I know,
from the big dizzy mountains that screen it to the deep death like valleys below.
Some say God was tired when he made it, some say it's a fine land to shun;maybe,
but there are some who would trade it for no land on Earth, and I'm one.
You come to get rich, that's a good reason. You feel like an excile at first, you hate it like Hell for a season and then you're worse than the worst.
It grips you like some kind of sinning, it twists you from foe to a friend.
It seems it's been since the Beginning, it seems it will be till the end.
I've stood in some mighty mouthed hollow thats plum full of hush to the brim.
I've watched the big husky sun wallow in crimson and gold and grow dim.
Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming and the stars tumbled out neck and crop; and I thought I surely was dreaming with the peace of the World piled on top.
The summer, no sweeter was ever, the sunshining woods all a thrill, the grailing aleap in the river, the bighorn asleep on the hill.
The strong life that never knows harness, the wilds where the caribou call,the freshness, the freedom,the farness.Oh God how I'm stuck on it all!
The winter, the brightness that blinds you,the white land locked tight as a drum; the cold fear that follows and finds you, the silence that bludgions you dumb.
The snows that are older than history, the woods where the wierd shadows slant,the stillness, the moonlight, the mystery.I've bade them goodbye, but I can't.
There's a land where the mountains are nameless and the rivers all run God knows where.
There are lives that are airing and aimless and deaths that just hang by a hair.
There are hardships that nobody reckons,there are valleys unpeopled and still.
There's a land, oh how it beckons and beckons.And I want to go back and I will.They're making my money diminish; I'm sick of the taste of champagne
Thank God when I'm skinned to a finish ,I'll pike to the Yukon again.I'll fight; and you bet it's no sham fight, it's Hell but I've been there before and it's better than this by a great sight.
So me for the Yukon once more. There's gold and it's haunting and taunting.
It's luring me on as a goal.
Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting so much as just finding the gold.
It's the great big broad land way up yonder,it's the forests that silence has leased,it's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,it's the stillness that fills me with peace.