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+Project Gutenberg's Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled, by Hudson Stuck
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled
+       A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska
+
+Author: Hudson Stuck
+
+Release Date: October 12, 2007 [EBook #22965]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH A DOG SLED ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Lybarger, Brian Janes, Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net and
+the booksmiths at http://www.eBookForge.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH A DOG SLED
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+
+THE ASCENT OF DENALI (MT. McKINLEY).
+
+A narrative of the first complete ascent of THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN IN
+NORTH AMERICA and the most northerly high mountain in the world.
+
+Profusely illustrated. 8vo. $1.75 _net_
+
+        "Few climbers have had such good fortune on a
+        supreme occasion, but few have better deserved
+        it."
+
+        --_London Spectator._
+
+[Illustration: Handwritten: Hudson Stuck.]
+
+
+
+
+        TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH
+        A DOG SLED
+
+        A NARRATIVE OF WINTER TRAVEL IN INTERIOR ALASKA
+
+        BY
+
+        HUDSON STUCK, D.D., F.R.G.S.
+        ARCHDEACON OF THE YUKON
+        AUTHOR OF "THE ASCENT OF DENALI (MOUNT McKINLEY)"
+
+        ILLUSTRATED
+
+        SECOND EDITION
+
+        NEW YORK
+        CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+        1916
+
+
+
+
+        COPYRIGHT, 1914, 1916, BY
+        CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+
+
+
+        TO
+        GRAFTON BURKE, M.D.
+        AND
+        EDGAR WEBB LOOMIS, M.D.
+
+        PUPILS, COMRADES, COLLEAGUES,
+        COMPANIONS ON SOME OF THESE JOURNEYS,
+        ALWAYS DEAR FRIENDS,
+
+        AND TO
+
+        THE MOTHER OF THE THREE OF US
+
+        SEWANEE
+
+        THE COLLEGE ON THE MOUNTAIN-TOP
+        WHERE THE OLD IDEALS ARE STILL
+        UNFLINCHINGLY MAINTAINED
+
+        THIS VOLUME
+        IS
+        AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED
+        BY
+        THE AUTHOR
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+THIS volume deals with a series of journeys taken with a dog team over
+the winter trails in the interior of Alaska. The title might have
+claimed fourteen or fifteen thousand miles instead of ten, for the book
+was projected and the title adopted some years ago, and the journeys
+have continued. But ten thousand is a good round titular number, and is
+none the worse for being well within the mark.
+
+So far as mere distance is concerned, anyway, there is nothing
+noteworthy in this record. There are many men in Alaska who have done
+much more. A mail-carrier on one of the longer dog routes will cover
+four thousand miles in a winter, while the writer's average is less than
+two thousand. But his sled has gone far off the beaten track, across the
+arctic wilderness, into many remote corners; wherever, indeed, white men
+or natives were to be found in all the great interior.
+
+These journeys were connected primarily with the administration of the
+extensive work of the Episcopal Church in the interior of Alaska, under
+the bishop of the diocese; but that feature of them has been fully set
+forth from time to time in the church publications, and finds only
+incidental reference here.
+
+It is a great, wild country, little known save along accustomed routes
+of travel; a country with a beauty and a fascination all its own; mere
+arctic wilderness, indeed, and nine tenths of it probably destined
+always to remain such, yet full of interest and charm.
+
+Common opinion "outside" about Alaska seems to be veering from the view
+that it is a land of perpetual snow and ice to the other extreme of
+holding it to be a "world's treasure-house" of mineral wealth and
+agricultural possibility. The world's treasure is deposited in many
+houses, and Alaska has its share; its mineral wealth is very great, and
+"hidden doors of opulence" may open at any time, but its agricultural
+possibilities, in the ordinary sense in which the phrase is used, are
+confined to very small areas in proportion to the enormous whole, and in
+very limited degree.
+
+It is no new thing for those who would build railways to write in
+high-flown style about the regions they would penetrate, and, indeed, to
+speak of "millions of acres waiting for the plough" is not necessarily a
+misrepresentation; they are waiting. Nor is it altogether unnatural that
+professional agricultural experimenters at the stations established by
+the government should make the most of their experiments. When Dean
+Stanley spoke disdainfully of dogma, Lord Beaconsfield replied; "Ah! but
+you must always remember, no dogmas, no deans."
+
+Besides the physical attractions of this country, it has a gentle
+aboriginal population that arouses in many ways the respect and the
+sympathy of all kindly people; and it has some of the hardiest and most
+adventurous white men in the world. The reader will come into contact
+with both in these pages.
+
+So much for the book's scope; a word of its limitations. It is confined
+to the interior of Alaska; confined in the main to the great valley of
+the Yukon and its tributaries; being a record of sled journeys, it is
+confined to the winter.
+
+There is no man living who knows the whole of Alaska or who has any
+right to speak about the whole of Alaska. Bishop Rowe knows more about
+Alaska, in all probability, than any other living man, and there are
+large areas of the country in which he has never set foot. There is
+probably no man living, save Bishop Rowe, who has visited even the
+localities of all the missions of the Episcopal Church in Alaska. If one
+were to travel continuously for a whole year, using the most expeditious
+means at his command, and not wasting a day anywhere, it is doubtful
+whether, summer and winter, by sea and land, squeezing the last mile out
+of the seasons, travelling on the "last ice" and the "first water," he
+could even touch at all the mission stations. So, when a man from Nome
+speaks of Alaska he means his part of Alaska, the Seward Peninsula. When
+a man from Valdez or Cordova speaks of Alaska he means the Prince
+William Sound country. When a man from Juneau speaks of Alaska he means
+the southeastern coast. Alaska is not one country but many, with
+different climates, different resources, different problems, different
+populations, different interests; and what is true of one part of it is
+often grotesquely untrue of other parts. This is the reason why so many
+contradictory things have been written about the country. Not only do
+these various parts of Alaska differ radically from one another, but
+they are separated from one another by almost insuperable natural
+obstacles, so that they are in reality different countries.
+
+When Alaska is spoken of in this book the interior is meant, in which
+the writer has travelled almost continuously for the past eight years.
+The Seward Peninsula is the only other part of the country that the book
+touches. And as regards summer travel and the summer aspect of the
+country, there is material for another book should the reception of this
+one warrant its preparation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The problems of the civil government of the country will be found
+touched upon somewhat freely as they rise from time to time in the
+course of these journeys, and some faint hope is entertained that
+drawing attention to evils may hasten a remedy.
+
+Alaska is not now, and never has been, a lawless country in the old,
+Wild Western sense of unpunished homicides and crimes of violence. It
+has been, on the whole, singularly free from bloodshed--a record due in
+no small part to the fact that it is not the custom of the country to
+carry pistols, for which again there is climatic and geographic reason;
+due also in part to the very peaceable and even timid character of its
+native people.
+
+But as regards the stringent laws enacted by Congress for the protection
+of these native people, and especially in the essential particular of
+protecting them from the fatal effects of intoxicating liquor, the
+country is not law-abiding, for these laws are virtually a dead letter.
+
+Justices of the peace who must live wholly upon fees in regions where
+fees will not furnish a living, and United States deputy marshals
+appointed for political reasons, constitute a very feeble staff against
+law-breakers. When it is remembered that on the whole fifteen hundred
+miles of the American Yukon there are but six of these deputy marshals,
+and that these six men, with another five or six on the tributary
+rivers, form all the police of the country, it will be seen that
+Congress must do something more than pass stringent laws if those laws
+are to be of any effect.
+
+A body of stipendiary magistrates, a police force wholly removed from
+politics and modelled somewhat upon the Canadian Northwest Mounted
+Police--these are two of the great needs of the country if the liquor
+laws are to be enforced and the native people are to survive.
+
+That the danger of the extermination of the natives is a real one all
+vital statistics kept at Yukon River points in the last five years show,
+and that there are powerful influences in the country opposed to the
+execution of the liquor laws some recent trials at Fairbanks would leave
+no room for doubt if there had been any room before. Indeed, at this
+writing, when the pages of this book are closed and there remains no
+place save the preface where the matter can be referred to, an impudent
+attempt is on foot, with large commercial backing, to secure the
+removal of a zealous and fearless United States district attorney, who
+has been too active in prosecuting liquor-peddlers to suit the wholesale
+dealers in liquor.
+
+There are, of course, those who view with perfect equanimity the
+destruction of the natives that is now going on, and look forward with
+complacency to the time when the Alaskan Indian shall have ceased to
+exist. But to men of thought and feeling such cynicism is abhorrent, and
+the duty of the government towards its simple and kindly wards is clear.
+
+A measure of real protection must be given the native communities
+against the low-down whites who seek to intrude into them and build
+habitations for convenient resort upon occasions of drunkenness and
+debauchery, and some adequate machinery set up for suppressing the
+contemptible traffic in adulterated spirits they subsist largely upon.
+The licensed liquor-dealers do not themselves sell to Indians, but they
+notoriously sell to men who notoriously peddle to Indians, and the
+suppression of this illicit commerce would materially reduce the total
+sales of liquor.
+
+Some measure of protection, one thinks, must also be afforded against a
+predatory class of Indian traders, the back rooms of whose stores are
+often barrooms, gambling-dens, and houses of assignation, and
+headquarters and harbourage for the white degenerates--even if the
+government go the length of setting up co-operative Indian stores in the
+interior, as has been done in some places on the coast. This last is a
+matter in which the missions are helpless, for there is no wise
+combination of religion and trade.
+
+So this book goes forth with a plea in the front of it, which will find
+incidental support and expression throughout it, for the natives of
+interior Alaska, that they be not wantonly destroyed off the face of the
+earth.
+
+        HUDSON STUCK.
+
+        NEW YORK,
+        _March, 1914._
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
+
+
+IT is gratifying to know that a second edition of this book has been
+called for and it is interesting to write another preface; it even
+proved interesting to do what was set about most reluctantly--the
+reading of the book over again after entire avoidance of it for two
+years. It was necessary to do it, though one shrank from it, and it is
+interesting to know that after this comparatively long and complete
+detachment I find little to add and less to correct. Upon a complete
+rereading I am content to let the book stand, with two or three
+footnotes thrown in, and the correction of the one printer's error it
+contained from cover to cover--an error that a score of kind
+correspondents pointed out, for it was conspicuous in the title of a
+picture.
+
+The tendency to which attention is drawn in the original preface, the
+pendulum swing from the old notion that Alaska is a land of polar bears
+and icebergs to the new notion that it is a "world's treasure-house of
+mineral wealth and unbounded agricultural possibilities" is yet more
+marked than it was two years ago. The beginning of the building of the
+government railway has given new impetus to the "boosting" writers for
+magazines and newspapers. Quite recently it was stated in one such
+publication that we need not worry about the destruction of our
+forests, for had we not the inexhaustible timber resources of the
+interior of Alaska to draw upon?
+
+And in the North itself--though no one there would write about the
+timber resources of the interior--in certain shrill journals the man who
+does not confidently expect to see the Yukon Flats waving with golden
+grain and "the lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea" of the Koyukuk and
+the Chandalar is regarded as a traitor to his country and his God. But
+it must be remembered that there are a number of journalists in Alaska
+who know nothing of the country outside their respective towns, and that
+"boosting" grows shriller, as Eugene Field found red paint grow redder,
+"the further out West one goes." When they get a newspaper at Cape
+Prince of Wales what a clarion it will be!
+
+Truth, however, is not more wont than of old to be found in extremes,
+and the author of this book believes that those who desire a sober view
+of the country it deals with will find it herein. He claims no more than
+that he has had adequate opportunity of forming his opinions and that he
+has a right to their expression. It is now twelve years since he began
+almost constant travelling, winter and summer, in the interior of
+Alaska. He has described nothing that he has not seen; ventured no
+judgment that he has not well digested, and has nothing to retract or
+even modify; but he would repeat and emphasise a caution of the original
+preface. Alaska is not one country but many countries, and so widely do
+they differ from one another in almost every respect that no general
+statements about Alaska can be true. The present author's knowledge of
+the territory is confined in the main to the interior--to the valley of
+the Yukon and its tributary rivers, which make up one of the world's
+great waterways--and nothing of his writing applies, with his authority,
+to other parts.
+
+The matter of the preservation of the native peoples still presses, and
+is nearer to the author's heart than any other matter whatever. The
+United States Congress, which voted thirty-five millions of dollars for
+the government railroad, strikes out year by year the modest additional
+score or two of thousands that year by year the Bureau of Education asks
+for the establishment of hospital work amongst the Indians of the
+interior, and the preventable mortality continues to be very great.
+
+In the last two years, largely as the result of the untiring efforts of
+Bishop Rowe on behalf of the natives, two modern, well-equipped
+hospitals have been built, with money that he and his clergy have
+gathered, on the Yukon River, one at Fort Yukon and one at Tanana; and
+these are the only places of any kind, on nearly a thousand miles of the
+river, where sick or injured Indians may be received and cared for.
+
+Amongst men of thought and feeling there is noticeable revulsion from
+the supercilious attitude that used not to be uncommon toward the little
+peoples of the world. It begins to be recognised that it is quite
+possible that even the smallest of the little peoples may have some
+contribution to make to the welfare and progress of the human race. What
+is the Boy Scout movement that is sweeping the country, to the enormous
+benefit of the rising generation, but the incorporating into the nurture
+of our youth of the things that were the nurture of the Indian youth;
+that are a large part of the nurture of the Alaskan Indian youth to-day?
+And the camp-fire clubs and woodcraft associations and the whole trend
+to the life of the open recognise that the Indian had developed a
+technique of wilderness life deserving of preservation for its value to
+the white man. While as for the Esquimaux, the author never sees the
+extraordinary prevalence amongst them of the art of graphic delineation
+displayed in bold etchings of incidents of the chase upon their
+implements and weapons (though not upon the articles made by the dozen
+for the curio-venders at Nome and Saint Michael) without dreaming that
+some day an artist will come from out that singular and most interesting
+people who shall teach the world something new about art.
+
+Whatever the future may hold for the interior of Alaska, the author is
+convinced that its population will derive very largely from the present
+native stocks, and this alone would justify any efforts to prevent
+further inroads upon their health and vitality.
+
+        April, 1916.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                                 PAGE
+
+        PREFACE                                            vii
+
+     I. FAIRBANKS TO THE CHANDALAR THROUGH CIRCLE
+        CITY AND FORT YUKON                                  3
+
+    II. CHANDALAR VILLAGE TO BETTLES, COLDFOOT, AND
+        THE KOYUKUK                                         34
+
+   III. BETTLES TO THE PACIFIC--THE ALATNA, KOBUK
+        PORTAGE, KOBUK VILLAGE, KOTZEBUE SOUND              63
+
+    IV. THE SEWARD PENINSULA--CANDLE CREEK, COUNCIL,
+        AND NOME                                           102
+
+     V. NOME TO FAIRBANKS--NORTON SOUND--THE KALTAG
+        PORTAGE--NULATO--UP THE YUKON TO TANANA            125
+
+    VI. THE "FIRST ICE"--AN AUTUMN ADVENTURE ON THE
+        KOYUKUK                                            157
+
+   VII. THE KOYUKUK TO THE YUKON AND TO TANANA--CHRISTMAS
+        HOLIDAYS AT SAINT JOHN'S-IN-THE-WILDERNESS         188
+
+  VIII. UP THE YUKON TO RAMPART AND ACROSS COUNTRY
+        TO THE TANANA--ALASKAN AGRICULTURE--THE
+        GOOD DOG NANOOK--MISS FARTHING'S BOYS AT
+        NENANA--CHENA AND FAIRBANKS                        219
+
+    IX. TANANA CROSSING TO FORTYMILE AND DOWN THE
+        YUKON--A PATRIARCHAL CHIEF--SWARMING
+        CARIBOU--EAGLE AND FORT EGBERT--CIRCLE
+        CITY AND FORT YUKON                                251
+
+     X. FROM THE TANANA RIVER TO THE KUSKOKWIM--THENCE
+        TO THE IDITAROD MINING CAMP--THENCE
+        TO THE YUKON, AND UP THAT RIVER
+        TO FORT YUKON                                      294
+
+    XI. THE NATIVES OF ALASKA                              348
+
+   XII. PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE ARCTIC                          371
+
+  XIII. THE NORTHERN LIGHTS                                380
+
+   XIV. THE ALASKAN DOGS                                   392
+
+        INDEX                                              413
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  Hudson Stuck (_photogravure_)                        _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                          FACING PAGE
+
+  Sunrise on the Chandalar-Koyukuk portage                         36
+
+  Coldfoot on the Koyukuk                                          37
+
+  The upper Koyukuk                                                50
+
+  The barren shores of Kotzebue Sound                              51
+
+  Gold-mining at Nome                                             122
+
+  Pulling the _Pelican_ out with a "Spanish windlass"             123
+
+  The start over the "first ice"                                  164
+
+  "Rough going"                                                   165
+
+  Arthur and Doctor Burke                                         178
+
+  Saint John's-in-the-Wilderness, Allakaket, Koyukuk River        179
+
+  The double interpretation at the Allakaket                      186
+
+  The wind-swept Yukon within the ramparts                        187
+
+  A pleasant woodland trail                                       256
+
+  An Alaskan chief and his henchman                               257
+
+  The Tanana crossing                                             270
+
+  Good going on the Yukon                                         271
+
+  "A portage that comes so finely down to the Yukon that
+  there is pleasure in anticipating the view it affords"          290
+
+  Fort Yukon                                                      291
+
+  The rough breaking in of Doctor Loomis, camped on the mail
+  trail at 50° below zero, unable to reach a road-house for
+  the deep snow                                                   296
+
+  Esquimaux of the upper Kuskokwim                                297
+
+  "The 'summit' is high above timber-line and the trail
+  pursues a hogback ridge for a mile and a half at the summit
+  level"                                                          324
+
+  A street in Iditarod City                                       325
+
+  The end of the portage trail                                    334
+
+  Rough ice on the Yukon                                          335
+
+  A docile folk, eager for instruction                            350
+
+  The mission type                                                351
+
+  Wild and shy                                                    351
+
+  The native communicant                                          360
+
+  Raw material                                                    360
+
+  An Esquimau youth                                               361
+
+  A half-breed Indian                                             361
+
+  An aged couple                                                  366
+
+  Football at the Allakaket, exposure 1-1000 second, April,
+  after a new light snowfall                                      367
+
+  The sun dogs                                                    388
+
+  "Tan," of mixed breed                                           389
+
+  "Muk," a pure malamute                                          389
+
+  Map of the interior of Alaska showing journeys described
+  in this book                                     _At end of volume_
+
+
+
+
+TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH A DOG SLED
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S NOTE
+
+
+Three fundamental facts are to be borne constantly in mind by those who
+would form any intelligent conception of the Territory of Alaska.
+
+(1) Its area of approximately 590,000 square miles makes it two and a
+half times as large as the State of Texas.
+
+(2) But it is not, like Texas, one homogeneous body of land; it is not,
+in any geographical sense, one country at all. "Sweeping in a great arc
+over sixteen degrees of latitude and fifty-eight degrees of longitude,"
+it is no less than four, and some might say five, different countries,
+differing from one another in almost every way that one country can
+differ from another: in climate, in population, in resources, in
+requirements; and--
+
+(3) These different countries are not merely different from one another,
+they are _separated_ from one another by formidable natural barriers.
+
+
+
+
+TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH A DOG SLED
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+FAIRBANKS TO THE CHANDALAR THROUGH CIRCLE CITY AND FORT YUKON
+
+
+THE plan for the winter journey of 1905-6 (my second winter on the
+trail) was an ambitious one, for it contemplated a visit to Point Hope,
+on the shore of the Arctic Ocean between Kotzebue Sound and Point
+Barrow, and a return to Fairbanks. In the summer such a journey would be
+practicable only by water: down the Tanana to the Yukon, down the Yukon
+to its mouth, and then through the straits of Bering and along the
+Arctic coast; in the winter it is possible to make the journey across
+country. A desire to visit our most northerly and most inaccessible
+mission in Alaska and a desire to become acquainted with general
+conditions in the wide country north of the Yukon were equal factors in
+the planning of a journey which would carry me through three and a half
+degrees of latitude and no less than eighteen degrees of longitude.
+
+The course of winter travel in Alaska follows the frozen waterways so
+far as they lead in the general direction desired, leaves them to cross
+mountain ranges and divides at the most favourable points, and drops
+down into the streams again so soon as streams are available. The
+country is notably well watered and the waterways are the natural
+highways. The more frequented routes gradually cut out the serpentine
+bends of the rivers by land trails, but in the wilder parts of the
+country travel sticks to the ice.
+
+Our course, therefore, lay up the Chatanika River and one of its
+tributaries until the Tanana-Yukon watershed was reached; then through
+the mountains, crossing two steep summits to the Yukon slope, and down
+that slope by convenient streams to the Yukon River at Circle City.
+
+[Sidenote: THE GOLD TRAIN]
+
+We set out on the 27th of November with six dogs and a "basket" sled and
+about five hundred pounds' weight of load, including tent and stove,
+bedding, clothes for the winter, grub box and its equipment, and dog
+feed. The dogs were those that I had used the previous winter, with one
+exception. The leader had come home lame from the fish camp where he had
+been boarded during the summer, and, despite all attentions, the
+lameness had persisted; so he must be left behind, and there was much
+difficulty in securing another leader. A recent stampede to a new mining
+district had advanced the price of dogs and gathered up all the good
+ones, so it was necessary to hunt all over Fairbanks and pay a hundred
+dollars for a dog that proved very indifferent, after all. "Jimmy" was a
+handsome beast, the handsomest I ever owned and the costliest, but, as I
+learned later from one who knew his history, had "travelled on his
+looks all his life." He earned the name of "Jimmy the Fake."
+
+Midway to Cleary "City," on the chief gold-producing creek of the
+district, our first day's run, we encountered the gold train. For some
+time previous a lone highwayman had robbed solitary miners on their way
+to Fairbanks with gold-dust, and now a posse was organised that went the
+rounds of the creeks and gathered up the dust and bore it on mule-back
+to the bank, escorted by half a dozen armed and mounted men. Sawed-off
+shotguns were the favourite weapons, and one judged them deadly enough
+at short range. The heavy "pokes" galled the animals' backs, however
+they might be slung, and the little procession wound slowly along, a man
+ahead, a man behind, and four clustered round the treasure.
+
+These raw, temporary mining towns are much alike the world over, one
+supposes, though perhaps a little worse up here in the far north. It was
+late at night when we reached the place, but saloon and dance-hall were
+ablaze with light and loud with the raucity of phonographs and the
+stamping of feet. Everything was "wide open," and there was not even the
+thinnest veneer of respectability. Drinking and gambling and dancing go
+on all night long. Drunken men reel out upon the snow; painted faces
+leer over muslin curtains as one passes by. Without any government,
+without any pretence of municipal organisation, there is no co-operation
+for public enterprise. There are no streets, there are no sidewalks
+save such as a man may choose to lay in front of his own premises, and
+the simplest sanitary precautions are entirely neglected. Nothing but
+the cold climate of the north prevents epidemic disease from sweeping
+through these places. They rise in a few days wherever gold is found in
+quantities, they flourish as the production increases, decline with its
+decline, and are left gaunt, dark, and abandoned so soon as the diggings
+are exhausted.
+
+The next day we were on the Chatanika River, to which Cleary Creek is
+tributary, and were immediately confronted with one of the main troubles
+and difficulties of winter travel in this and, as may be supposed, in
+any arctic or subarctic country--overflow water.
+
+[Sidenote: OVERFLOW WATER AND ICE]
+
+In the lesser rivers, where deep pools alternate with swift shallows,
+the stream freezes solid to the bottom upon the shoals and riffles.
+Since the subterranean fountains that supply the river do not cease to
+discharge their waters in the winter, however cold it may be, there
+comes presently an increasing pressure under the ice above such a
+barrier. The pent-up water is strong enough to heave the ice into mounds
+and at last to break forth, spreading itself far along the frozen
+surface of the river. At times it may be seen gushing out like an
+artesian well, rising three or four feet above the surface of the ice,
+until the pressure is relieved. Sometimes for many miles at a stretch
+the whole river will be covered with a succession of such overflows,
+from two or three inches deep to eight or ten, or even twelve; some just
+bursting forth, some partially frozen, some resolved into solid "glare"
+ice. Thus the surface of the river is continually renewed the whole
+winter through, and a section of the ice crust in the spring would show
+a series of laminations; here ice upon ice, there ice upon
+half-incorporated snow, that mark the successive inundations.
+
+This explanation has been given at length because of the large part that
+the phenomenon plays in the difficulty and danger of winter travel, and
+because it seems hard to make those who are not familiar with it
+understand it. At first sight it would seem that after a week or ten
+days of fifty-below-zero weather, for instance, all water everywhere
+would be frozen into quiescence for the rest of the winter. Throw a
+bucket of water into the air, and it is frozen solid as soon as it
+reaches the ground. There would be no more trouble, one would think,
+with water. Yet some of the worst trouble the traveller has with
+overflow water is during very cold weather, and it is then, of course,
+that there is the greatest danger of frost-bite in getting one's feet
+wet. Water-proof footwear, therefore, becomes one of the "musher's"
+great concerns and difficulties. The best water-proof footwear is the
+Esquimau mukluk, not easily obtainable in the interior of Alaska, but
+the mukluk is an inconvenient footwear to put snow-shoes on. Rubber
+boots or shoes of any kind are most uncomfortable things to travel in.
+Nothing equals the moccasin on the trail, nothing is so good to
+snow-shoe in. The well-equipped traveller has moccasins for dry trails
+and mukluks for wet trails--and even then may sometimes get his feet
+wet. Nor are his own feet his only consideration; his dogs' feet are,
+collectively, as important as his own. When the dog comes out of water
+into snow again the snow collects and freezes between the toes, and if
+not removed will soon cause a sore and lameness. Then a dog moccasin
+must be put on and the foot continually nursed and doctored. When
+several dogs of a team are thus affected, it may be with several feet
+each, the labour and trouble of travel are greatly increased.
+
+So, whenever his dogs have been through water, the careful musher will
+stop and go all down the line, cleaning out the ice and snow from their
+feet with his fingers. Four interdigital spaces per foot make sixteen
+per dog, and with a team of six dogs that means ninety-six several
+operations with the bare hand (if it be done effectually) every time the
+team gets into an overflow. The dogs will do it for themselves if they
+are given time, tearing out the lumps of ice with their teeth; but,
+inasmuch as they usually feel conscientiously obliged to eat each lump
+as they pull it out, it takes much longer, and in a short daylight there
+is little time to spare if the day's march is to be made.
+
+[Sidenote: "OVERFLOW" ICE]
+
+We found overflow almost as soon as we reached the Chatanika River, and
+in one form or another we encountered it during all the two days and a
+half that we were pursuing the river's windings. At times it was covered
+with a sheet of new ice that would support the dogs but would not
+support the sled, so that the dogs were travelling on one level and the
+sled on another, and a man had to walk along in the water between the
+dogs and the sled for several hundred yards at a time, breaking down the
+overflow ice with his feet.
+
+At other times the thin sheets of overflow ice would sway and bend as
+the sled passed quickly over them in a way that gives to ice in such
+condition its Alaskan name of "rubber-ice," while for the fifteen or
+twenty miles of McManus Creek, the headwaters of the Chatanika, we had
+continuous stretches of fine glare ice with enough frost crystals upon
+it from condensing moisture to give a "tooth" to the dogs' feet, just as
+varnish on a photographic negative gives tooth to the retouching pencil.
+Perfectly smooth ice is a very difficult surface for dogs to pass over;
+glare ice slightly roughened by frost deposit makes splendid, fast
+going.
+
+Eighty-five miles or so from Fairbanks, and just about half-way to
+Circle, the watercourse is left and the first summit is the
+"Twelve-Mile," as it is called. We tried hard to take our load up at one
+trip, but found it impossible to do so, and had to unlash the sled and
+take half the load at a time, caching it on the top while we returned
+for the other half.
+
+It took us half a day to get our load to the top of the Twelve-Mile
+summit, a rise of about one thousand three hundred feet from the creek
+bed as the aneroid gave it. In the steeper pitches we had to take the
+axe and cut steps, so hard and smooth does the incessant wind at these
+heights beat the snow, and on our second trip to the top we were just in
+time to rescue a roll of bedding that had been blown from the cache and
+was about to descend a gully from which we could hardly have recovered
+it.
+
+This summit descended, we were in Birch Creek water, and had we followed
+the watercourse would have reached the Yukon; but we would have
+travelled hundreds of miles and would have come out below Fort Yukon,
+while we were bound for Circle City. So there was another and a yet more
+difficult summit to cross before we could descend the Yukon slope. We
+were able to hire a man and two dogs to help us over the Eagle summit,
+so that the necessity of relaying was avoided. One man ahead continually
+calling to the dogs, eight dogs steadily pulling, and two men behind
+steadily pushing, foot by foot, with many stoppages as one bench after
+another was surmounted, we got the load to the top at last, a rise of
+one thousand four hundred feet in less than three miles. A driving
+snow-storm cut off all view and would have left us at a loss which way
+to proceed but for the stakes that indicated it.
+
+The descent was as anxious and hazardous as the ascent had been
+laborious. The dogs were loosed and sent racing down the slope. With a
+rope rough-lock around the sled runners, one man took the gee pole and
+another the handle-bars and each spread-eagled himself through the loose
+deep snow to check the momentum of the sled, until sled and men turned
+aside and came to a stop in a drift to avoid a steep, smooth pitch. The
+sled extricated, it was poised on the edge of the pitch and turned loose
+on the hardened snow, hurtling down three or four hundred feet until it
+buried itself in another drift. The dogs were necessary to drag it from
+this drift, and one had to go down and bring them up. Then again they
+were loosed, and from bench to bench the process was repeated until the
+slope grew gentle enough to permit the regulation of the downward
+progress by the foot-brake.
+
+[Sidenote: "SUMMITS"]
+
+The Eagle summit is one of the most difficult summits in Alaska. The
+wind blows so fiercely that sometimes for days together its passage is
+almost impossible. No amount of trail making could be of much help, for
+the snow smothers up everything on the lee of the hill, and the end of
+every storm presents a new surface and an altered route. A "summit" in
+this Alaskan sense is, of course, a saddle between peaks, and in this
+case there is no easier pass and no way around. The only way to avoid
+the Eagle summit, without going out of the district altogether, would be
+to tunnel it.
+
+The summit passed, we found better trails and a more frequented country,
+for in this district are a number of creeks that draw supplies from
+Circle City, and that had been worked ten years or more.
+
+At the time of the Klondike stampede of 1896-97, Circle City was already
+established as a flourishing mining camp and boasted itself the largest
+log-cabin town in the world. Before the Klondike drew away its people as
+a stronger magnet draws iron filings from a lesser one, Circle had a
+population of about three thousand. Take a town of three thousand and
+reduce it to thirty or forty, and it is hard to resist the melancholy
+impression which entrance upon it in the dusk of the evening brings.
+There lay the great white Yukon in the middle distance; beyond it the
+Yukon Flats, snow-covered, desolate, stretched away enormously, hedged
+here at their beginning by grey, dim hills. Spread out in the foreground
+were the little, squat, huddling cabins that belonged to no one, with
+never a light in a window or smoke from a chimney, the untrodden snow
+drifted against door and porch. It would be hard to imagine a drearier
+prospect, and one had the feeling that it was a city of the dead rather
+than merely a dead city.
+
+The weather had grown steadily colder since we reached the Yukon slope,
+and for two days before reaching Circle the thermometer had stood
+between 40° and 50° below zero. It was all right for us to push on, the
+trail was good and nearly all down-hill, and there were road-houses
+every ten or twelve miles. Freighters, weather-bound, came to the doors
+as we passed by with our jangle of bells and would raise a somewhat
+chechaco pride in our breasts by remarking: "You don't seem to care what
+weather you travel in!" The evil of it was that the perfectly safe
+travelling between Eagle Creek and Circle emboldened us to push on from
+Circle under totally different conditions, when travelling at such low
+temperatures became highly dangerous and brought us into grave
+misadventure that might easily have been fatal catastrophe.
+
+Our original start was a week later than had been planned and we had
+made no time, but rather lost it, on this first division of the journey.
+If we were to reach Bettles on the Koyukuk River for Christmas, there
+was no more time to lose, and I was anxious to spend the next Sunday at
+Fort Yukon, three days' journey away. So we started for Fort Yukon on
+Thursday, the 7th of December, the day after we reached Circle.
+
+[Sidenote: THE YUKON FLATS]
+
+A certain arctic traveller has said that "adventures" always imply
+either incompetence or ignorance of local conditions, and there is some
+truth in the saying. Our misadventure was the result of a series of
+mistakes, no one of which would have been other than discreditable to
+men of more experience. Our course lay for seventy-five miles through
+the Yukon Flats, which begin at Circle and extend for two hundred and
+fifty miles of the river's course below that point. The Flats constitute
+the most difficult and dangerous part of the whole length of the Yukon
+River, summer or winter, and the section between Circle City and Fort
+Yukon is the most difficult and dangerous part of the Flats. Save for a
+"portage" or land trail of eighteen or twenty miles out of Circle, the
+trail is on the river itself, which is split up into many channels
+without salient landmarks. The current is so swift that many stretches
+run open water far into the winter, and blow-holes are numerous. There
+is little travel on the Flats in winter, and a snow-storm accompanied by
+wind may obliterate what trail there is in an hour. The vehicle used in
+the Flats is not a sled but a toboggan, and our first mistake was in not
+conforming to local usage in this respect. There is always a very good
+reason for local usage about snow vehicles. But a toboggan which had
+been ordered from a native at Fort Yukon would be waiting for us, and
+it seemed not worth while to go to the expense of buying another merely
+for three days' journey.
+
+The second mistake was in engaging a boy as guide instead of a man. He
+was an attractive youth of about fourteen who had done good service at
+the Circle City mission the previous winter, when our nurse-in-charge
+was contending single-handed against an epidemic of diphtheria. He was a
+pleasant boy, with some English, who wanted to go and professed
+knowledge of the route. The greatest mistake of all was starting out
+through that lonely waste with the thermometer at 52° below zero. The
+old-timers in Alaska have a saying that "travelling at 50° below is all
+right as long as it's all right." If there be a good trail, if there be
+convenient stopping-places, if nothing go wrong, one may travel without
+special risk and with no extraordinary discomfort at 50° below zero and
+a good deal lower. I have since that time made a short day's run at 62°
+below, and once travelled for two or three hours on a stretch at 65°
+below. But there is always more or less chance in travelling at low
+temperatures, because a very small thing may necessitate a stop, and a
+stop may turn into a serious thing. At such temperatures one must keep
+going. No amount of clothing that it is possible to wear on the trail
+will keep one warm while standing still. For dogs and men alike,
+constant brisk motion is necessary; for dogs as well as men--even though
+dogs will sleep outdoors in such cold without harm--for they cannot take
+as good care of themselves in the harness as they can when loose. A
+trace that needs mending, a broken buckle, a snow-shoe string that must
+be replaced, may chill one so that it is impossible to recover one's
+warmth again. The bare hand cannot be exposed for many seconds without
+beginning to freeze; it is dangerous to breathe the air into the lungs
+for any length of time without a muffler over the mouth.
+
+Our troubles began as soon as we started. The trail was a narrow,
+winding toboggan track of sixteen or seventeen inches, while our sled
+was twenty inches wide, so that one runner was always dragging in the
+loose snow, and that meant slow, heavy going.
+
+[Sidenote: SUNRISE AND SUNSET]
+
+The days were nearing the shortest of the year, when, in these
+latitudes, the sun does but show himself and withdraw again. But,
+especially in very cold weather, which is nearly always very clear
+weather, that brief appearance is preceded by a feast of rich, delicate
+colour. First a greenish glow on the southern horizon, brightening into
+lemon and then into clear primrose, invades the deep purple of the
+starry heavens. Then a beautiful circle of blush pink above a circle of
+pure amethyst gradually stretches all around the edge of the sky, slowly
+brightening while the stars fade out and the heavens change to blue. The
+dead white mirror of the snow takes every tint that the skies display
+with a faint but exquisite radiance. Then the sun's disk appears with a
+flood of yellow light but with no appreciable warmth, and for a little
+space his level rays shoot out and gild the tree tops and the distant
+hills. The snow springs to life. Dead white no longer, its dry,
+crystalline particles glitter in myriads of diamond facets with every
+colour of the prism. Then the sun is gone, and the lovely circle of rose
+pink over amethyst again stretches round the horizon, slowly fading
+until once more the pale primrose glows in the south against the purple
+sky with its silver stars. Thus sunrise and sunset form a continuous
+spectacle, with a purity of delicate yet splendid colour that only
+perfectly dry atmosphere permits. The primrose glow, the heralding
+circle, the ball of orange light, the valedictory circle, the primrose
+glow again, and a day has come and gone. Air can hold no moisture at all
+at these low temperatures, and the skies are cloudless.
+
+[Sidenote: AN ESCAPADE ON THE YUKON]
+
+Moreover, in the wilds at 50° below zero there is the most complete
+silence. All animal life is hidden away. Not a rabbit flits across the
+trail; in the absolutely still air not a twig moves. A rare raven passes
+overhead, and his cry, changed from a hoarse croak to a sweet liquid
+note, reverberates like the musical glasses. There is no more delightful
+sound in the wilderness than this occasional lapse into music of the
+raven. We wound through the scrub spruce and willow and over the
+niggerhead swamps, a faint tinkle of bells, a little cloud of steam; for
+in the great cold the moisture of the animals' breath hangs over their
+heads in the still air, and on looking back it stands awhile along the
+course at dogs' height until it is presently deposited on twigs and
+tussocks. We wound along, a faint tinkle of bells, a little cloud of
+steam, and in the midst of the cloud a tousle of shaggy black-and-white
+hair and red-and-white pompons--going out of the dead silence behind
+into the dead silence before. The dusk came, and still we plodded and
+pushed our weary way, swinging that heavy sled incessantly, by the gee
+pole in front and the handle-bars behind, in the vain effort to keep it
+on the trail. Two miles an hour was all that we were making. We had come
+but thirteen or fourteen miles out of twenty-four, and it was dark; and
+it grew colder.
+
+The dogs whined and stopped every few yards, worn out by wallowing in
+the snow and the labour of the collar. The long scarfs that wrapped our
+mouths and noses had been shifted and shifted, as one part after another
+became solid with ice from the breath, until over their whole length
+they were stiff as boards. After two more miles of it it was evident
+that we could not reach the mail cabin that night. Then I made my last
+and worst mistake. We should have stopped and camped then and there. We
+had tent and stove and everything requisite. But the native boy insisted
+that the cabin was "only little way," and any one who knows the misery
+of making camp in extremely cold weather, in the dark, will understand
+our reluctance to do so.
+
+I decided to make a cache of the greater part of our load--tent and
+stove and supplies generally--and to push on to the cabin with but the
+bedding and the grub box, returning for the stuff in the morning. And,
+since in the deepest depths of blundering there is a deeper still, by
+some one's carelessness, but certainly by my fault, the axe was left
+behind in the cache.
+
+With our reduced burden we made better progress, and in a short time
+reached the end of the portage and came out on the frozen river, just as
+the moon, a day or two past the full, rose above the opposite bank. One
+sees many strange distortions of sun and moon in this land, but never
+was a stranger seen than this. Her disk, shining through the dense air
+of the river bottom, was in shape an almost perfect octagon, regular as
+though it had been laid off with dividers and a ruler.
+
+We were soon in doubt about the trail. The mail-carrier had gone down
+only two or three times this winter and each time had taken a different
+route, as more and more of the river closed and gave him more and more
+direct passage. A number of Indians had been hunting, and their tracks
+added to the tangle of trails. Presently we entered a thick mist that
+even to inexperienced eyes spoke of open water or new ice yet moist. So
+heavy was the vapour that to the man at the handle-bars the man at the
+gee pole loomed ghostly, and the man ahead of the dogs could not be
+distinguished at all. We had gone so much farther than our native boy
+had declared we had to go that we began to fear that in the confusion of
+trails we had taken the wrong one and had passed the cabin. That is the
+tenderfoot's, or, as we say, the chechaco's, fear; it is the one thing
+that it may almost be said never happens. But the boy fell down
+completely and was frankly at a loss. All we could get out of him was:
+"May-be-so we catch cabin bymeby, may-be-so no." If we had passed the
+cabin it was twenty odd miles to the next; and it grew colder and the
+dogs were utterly weary again, prone upon the trail at every small
+excuse for a stop, only to be stirred by the whip, heavily wielded.
+Surely never men thrust themselves foolhardily into worse predicament!
+Then I made my last mistake. Dimly the bank loomed through the mist, and
+I said: "We can't go any farther; I think we've missed the trail and I'm
+going across to yon bank to see if there's a place to camp." I had not
+gone six steps from the trail when the ice gave way under my feet and I
+found myself in water to my hips.
+
+[Sidenote: AN ESCAPADE ON THE YUKON]
+
+Under Providence I owe it to the mukluks I wore, tied tight round my
+knees, that I did not lose my life, or at least my feet. The thermometer
+at Circle City stood at 60° below zero at dark that day, and down on the
+ice it is always about 5° colder than on the bank, because cold air is
+heavy air and sinks to the lowest level, and 65° below zero means 97°
+below freezing.
+
+My moose-hide breeches froze solid the moment I scrambled out, but not a
+drop of water got to my feet. If the water had reached my feet they
+would have frozen almost as quickly as the moose hide in that fearful
+cold. Thoroughly alarmed now, and realising our perilous situation, we
+did the only thing there was to do--we turned the dogs loose and
+abandoned the sled and went back along the trail we had followed as fast
+as we could. We knew that we could safely retrace our steps and that the
+trail would lead us to the bank after a while. We knew not where the
+trail would lead us in the other direction. As a matter of fact, it led
+to the mail cabin, two miles farther on, and the mail-carrier was at
+that time occupying it at the end of his day's run.
+
+The dogs stayed with the sled; dogs will usually stay with their sled;
+they seem to recognise their first allegiance to the load they haul,
+probably because they know their food forms part of it.
+
+Our cache reached, we made a fire, thawed out the iron-like armour of my
+leather breeches, and cutting a spare woollen scarf in two, wrapped the
+dry, warm pieces about my numbed thighs. Then we pushed on the eighteen
+miles or so to Circle, keeping a steady pace despite the drowsiness that
+oppressed us, and that oppressed me particularly owing to the chill of
+my ducking. About five in the morning we reached the town, and the
+clergyman, the Reverend C. E. Rice, turned out of his warm bed and I
+turned in, none the worse in body for the experience, but much humbled
+in spirit. My companion, Mr. E. J. Knapp, whose thoughtful care for me I
+always look back upon with gratitude, as well as upon Mr. Rice's
+kindness, froze his nose and a toe slightly, being somewhat neglectful
+of himself in his solicitude for me.
+
+We had been out about twenty hours in a temperature ranging from 52° to
+60° below zero, had walked about forty-four miles, labouring incessantly
+as well as walking, what time we were with the sled, with nothing to
+eat--it was too cold to stop for eating--and, in addition to this, one
+of us had been in water to the waist, yet none of us took any harm. It
+was a providential overruling of blundering foolhardiness for which we
+were deeply thankful.
+
+The next day a native with a fast team and an empty toboggan was sent
+down to take our load on to the cabin and bring the dogs back.
+Meanwhile, the mail-carrier had passed the spot, had seen the abandoned
+sled standing by recently broken ice, and had come on into town while we
+slept and none knew of our return, with the news that some one had been
+drowned. The mail for Fairbanks did but await the mail from Fort Yukon,
+and the town rumour, instantly identifying the abandoned sled, was
+carried across to Fairbanks, to my great distress and annoyance. The
+echoes of the distorted account of this misadventure which appeared in a
+Fairbanks newspaper still reverberate in "patent insides" of the
+provincial press of the United States.
+
+[Sidenote: FORT YUKON ]
+
+The next Monday we started again, this time with a toboggan and with a
+man instead of a boy for guide, and in three days of only moderate
+difficulty we reached Fort Yukon.
+
+Fort Yukon, though it holds no attraction for the ordinary visitor or
+the summer tourist on the river, is a place of much interest to those
+who know the history of Alaska. While it is purely a native village,
+with no white population save the traders and the usual sprinkling of
+men that hang around native villages, it is yet the oldest white man's
+post on the Yukon River, save the post established by the Russians at
+Nulato, five or six hundred miles lower down. The Hudson Bay Company
+established itself here in 1846, and that date serves as the year one
+in making calculations and determining ages to this day. It is a fixed
+point in time that every native knows of. Any old man can tell you
+whether he was born before or after that date, and, if before, can pick
+out some boy that is about the age he was when the event occurred. The
+massacre at Nulato in 1851 serves in a similar way for the lower river.
+
+After the Purchase, and the determination of the longitude of Fort Yukon
+by Mr. Raymond in 1869--who made the first steamboat journey up the
+Yukon on that errand--the Hudson Bay Company moved three times before
+they succeeded in getting east of the 141st meridian, and at the point
+reached on the third move, the New Rampart House on the Porcupine River,
+only a few hundred yards beyond the boundary-line, they remained until
+the gold excitement on the Yukon and the journeying of the natives to
+new posts on that river rendered trading unprofitable; then they
+withdrew to the Mackenzie. The oldest white men's graves in Alaska,
+again with the exception of Nulato, are those in the little Hudson Bay
+cemetery near Fort Yukon.
+
+[Sidenote: ARCHDEACON MACDONALD ]
+
+Fort Yukon is also the site of the oldest missionary station on the
+river, unless there were earlier visits of Russian priests to the lower
+river, of which there seems no record, for in 1862 there was a clergyman
+of the Church of England at this place. Archdeacon MacDonald was a
+remarkable man. Married to a native wife, he translated the whole Bible
+and the Book of Common Prayer into the native tongue, and his
+translations are in general use on the upper river to this day. He
+reduced the language to writing, extracted its grammar, taught the
+Indians to read and write their own tongue, and dignified it by the gift
+of the great literature of the sacred books. The language is, of course,
+a dying one--English is slowly superseding it--but it seems safe to say
+that for a generation or two yet to come it will be the basis of the
+common speech of the people and the language of worship. It is chiefly
+in matters of trading and handicrafts that English is taking its place,
+though here as elsewhere it stands to the discredit of the civilised
+race that blackguard English is the first English that is learned.
+
+There seems ground to question whether the substitution of a smattering
+of broken English for the flexibility and picturesque expressiveness of
+an indigenous tongue, thoroughly understood, carries with it any great
+intellectual gain, though to suggest such a doubt is treason to some
+minds. The time threatens when all the world will speak two or three
+great languages, when all little tongues will be extinct and all little
+peoples swallowed up, when all costume will be reduced to a dead level
+of blue jeans and shoddy and all strange customs abolished. The world
+will be a much less interesting world then; the spice and savour of the
+ends of the earth will be gone. Nor does it always appear unquestionable
+that the world will be the better or the happier. The advance of
+civilisation would be a great thing to work for if we were quite sure
+what we meant by it and what its goal is. To the ordinary government
+school-teacher in Alaska, with some notable exceptions, it seems to
+mean chiefly teaching the Indians to call themselves Mr. and Mrs. and
+teaching the women to wear millinery, with a contemptuous attitude
+toward the native language and all native customs. The less intelligent
+grade of missionary sometimes falls into the same easy rut. So letters
+pass through the post-offices addressed: "Mr. Pretty Henry," "Mrs.
+Monkey Bill," "Miss Sally Shortandirty"; so, occasionally, the grotesque
+spectacle may present itself, to the passengers on a steamer, of a
+native woman in a "Merry Widow" hat and a blood-stained parkee gutting
+salmon on the river bank.
+
+The nobler ideal, as it seems to some of us, is to labour for
+God-fearing, self-respecting Indians rather than imitation white men and
+white women. An Indian who is honest, healthy and kindly, skilled in
+hunting and trapping, versed in his native Bible and liturgy, even
+though he be entirely ignorant of English and have acquired no taste for
+canned fruit and know not when Columbus discovered America, may be very
+much of a man in that station of life in which it has pleased God to
+call him.
+
+Christmas and the Fourth of July are the Indian's great holidays, the
+one just after the best moose hunting and the other just before the
+salmon run. It may be supposed that there were always great feasts at
+the winter and summer solstices, though now he is sufficiently devout at
+the one and patriotic at the other. At these seasons, and for weeks
+before and after, Fort Yukon gathers a large number of Indians. It is
+the native metropolis of the country within a radius of a hundred
+miles, and what may be termed its permanent population of one hundred
+and fifty is doubled and sometimes trebled by contingents from the
+Chandalar, the Porcupine, and the Black Rivers, from that long river
+called Birch Creek, and all the intervening country. Many families of
+the "uncivilised," self-respecting kind, to which reference has been
+made, come in from outlying points, and the contrast between them and
+their more sophisticated kinfolk of the town is all in their favour.
+
+[Sidenote: JIMMY]
+
+Such a gathering had already taken place in preparation for the
+Christmas holidays when we reached Fort Yukon on the 15th of December.
+It would have been pleasant to spend Christmas with them, but we were
+due two hundred and fifty miles away, at Bettles, for that feast, if by
+any means we could get there. So we lingered but the two days necessary
+to equip ourselves. Jimmy had torn our bedding to pieces on the night of
+the mishap; it was lashed on the outside of the load, and he had
+scratched and clawed it to make a nest for himself until fur from the
+robe and feathers from the quilts were all over the trail. The other
+dogs, not so warmly coated as he, had been content to sleep in the snow.
+Jimmy's character was gradually revealing itself. A well-bred trail dog
+will not commit the canine sacrilege of invading the sled. That is a
+"Siwash" dog's trick. So there was fresh bedding to manufacture, as well
+as supplies for two hundred miles to get together.
+
+A mail once a month went at that time from Fort Yukon to the Koyukuk,
+and there was little other travel. The course lay fifty or sixty miles
+across country to the Chandalar River, about one hundred miles up that
+stream, and then across a divide to the South Fork of the Koyukuk, and
+across another to the Middle Fork, on which Coldfoot is situated. It is
+not possible to procure any supplies, save sometimes a little fish for
+dog food and that not certainly, between Fort Yukon and Coldfoot, so
+that provision for the whole journey must be taken.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CHANDALAR]
+
+A new Indian guide had been engaged as far as Coldfoot, and we set
+out--three men, two toboggans, and seven dogs; four on the larger
+vehicle and three on the smaller, one of the dogs brought by our guide.
+Three miles from Fort Yukon we crossed the Porcupine River and then
+plunged into the wilderness of lake and swamp and forest that stretches
+north of the Yukon. A portage trail, as such a track across country is
+called to distinguish it from a river trail, has the advantage of such
+protection from storm as its timbered stretches afford. For miles and
+miles the route passes through scrub spruce that has been burned over,
+with no prospect but a maze of charred poles against the snow, some
+upright, others at every angle of inclination. Then comes a lake, with
+difficulty in finding the trail on its wind-swept surface and sometimes
+much casting about to discover where it leaves the lake again, and then
+more small burned timber. Wherever the route is through woods, living or
+dead, it is blazed; when it strikes the open, one is often at a loss.
+After three or four days of such travel, sometimes reaching an old cabin
+for the night, sometimes pitching the tent, one is rejoiced at the
+sight of distant mountains and at the intimation they bring that the
+inexpressible dreariness of the Yukon Flats is nearly past; and
+presently the trail opens suddenly upon the broad Chandalar.
+
+The Hudson Bay voyageurs are responsible for many names in this part of
+Alaska, and Chandalar is a corruption of their "Gens de large." The
+various native tribes received appellations indicating habitats. A tribe
+that differed from most northern Indians, in having no permanent
+villages and in living altogether in encampments, was named "Gens de
+large," and the river which they frequented took their name.
+
+It is one of the second-rate tributaries of the Yukon, and in general
+its waters are swift and shallow, not navigable for light-draught
+steamboats for more than one hundred and fifty miles, save at flood, and
+not easily navigable at all. It is these swift shallow streams that are
+so formidable in winter on account of overflow water, and the Chandalar
+is one of the most dreaded.
+
+[Sidenote: DIPHTHERIA]
+
+Ten miles along the river's surface brought us to the Chandalar native
+village, a settlement of half a dozen cabins and twenty-five or thirty
+souls. The people came out to meet us, and said they were just about to
+bury a baby, and asked me to conduct the funeral. Because we had not
+done a day's march and were under compulsion to push on at our best
+speed, I did not unlash the sled but went just as I was up the hill with
+the sorrowful procession to the little graveyard. On the way down I
+asked as best I could of what sickness the baby had died, and I felt
+some uneasiness when the throat was pointed to as the seat of disease.
+When, presently, I was informed that two others were sick, and of the
+same complaint, my uneasiness became alarm. I went at once to see them,
+and the angry swollen throats patched with white membrane which I
+discovered left no room for doubt that we were in the presence of
+another outbreak of diphtheria. That disease had scourged the Yukon in
+the two preceding years. Twenty-three children died at Fort Yukon in the
+summer of 1904, half a dozen at Circle in the following winter, though
+that outbreak was grappled with from the first; and all along the river
+the loss of life was terrible.
+
+There was no question that we must give up all hope of reaching Bettles
+for Christmas and stay and do what we could for these people. So we made
+camp on the outskirts of the village, and I went to work swabbing out
+the throats with carbolic acid and preparing liquid food from our grub
+box. There was nothing to eat in the village but dried fish and a little
+dried moose, and these throats like red-hot iron could hardly swallow
+liquids. The two patients were a boy of sixteen and a grown woman. It
+was evident that unless we could isolate them the disease would probably
+pass through the whole village, and, indeed, others might have been
+infected already. It was likely that we were in for a siege of it, and
+our supply of condensed milk and extract of beef would soon be
+exhausted. Moreover, at Fort Yukon was the trained nurse who had coped
+with the epidemic there and at Circle, while we had virtually no
+experience with the disease at all. It was resolved to send back to Fort
+Yukon for supplies and for the nurse.
+
+The next morning Mr. Knapp and the native boy took the dogs and the sled
+and started back. With no load save a little grub and bedding, they
+could make the journey in two days, a day must be allowed for
+preparations, and, with the aid of another dog team, two days more would
+bring them back. Five days was the least they could be gone. It was
+asking a great deal of this lady to abandon her Christmas festival,
+preparations for which had long been making, and to come sixty-five
+miles through the frozen wilderness in a toboggan; but I felt sure she
+would drop everything and come.
+
+For those five days I was busied in close attention to the patients and
+in strenuous though not altogether availing efforts to maintain a
+quarantine of the cabin in which they lay. There was little more that I
+could do than swab out the throats and administer food every two hours.
+As the disease advanced it was increasingly painful to swallow and
+exceedingly difficult to induce the sufferers to make the attempt or to
+open their mouths for the swabbing. After two or three days the woman
+seemed to have passed the crisis of the disease and to be mending, but
+the boy, I thought, grew worse. One becomes attached to those to whom
+one ministers, and this poor, speechless boy, with his terrible throat
+and the agony in his big black eyes, appealed to me very strongly
+indeed. It was torture to move his head or to open his mouth, and I had
+to torture him continually.
+
+Every night I gathered the people for Divine service. Here was a little
+community far off in the wilds that had carefully conserved and handed
+on to their children the teaching they had received no less than thirty
+years before. The native Bibles and prayer-books and hymnals were
+brought out, bearing dates of publication in the seventies; one of their
+number acted as leader, and what he read was painfully followed in the
+well-thumbed books. They lifted their voices in a weird transformation
+of familiar tunes, with quavers and glides that had crept in through
+long, uncorrected use, and amongst the prayers said was one for "Our
+Sovereign lady Queen Victoria, and Albert Edward, Prince of Wales." I
+tried to explain that Queen Victoria was dead, that they were not living
+under British rule, and I took a pencil and struck out the prayers for
+the royal family from the books. But there was doubt in their minds and
+a reluctance to alter in any particular the liturgy that had been taught
+them, and it is quite likely that intercessions for a defunct sovereign
+of another land still arise from the Chandalar village. One cannot but
+feel a deep admiration for the pioneer missionaries of this
+region--Bishop Bompas, Archdeacon MacDonald, and the others--whose
+teaching was so thorough and so lasting, and who lived and laboured here
+long before any gold seeker had thought of Alaska, when the country was
+an Indian country exclusively, with none of the comforts and
+conveniences that can now be enjoyed. It was to a remote cabin on the
+East Fork of this river that Archdeacon MacDonald retired for a year to
+make part of his translation of the Bible, according to the Indian
+account.
+
+[Sidenote: THE SHORTEST DAY]
+
+At noon on the 21st of December, the shortest day, there is a note in my
+diary that I saw the sun's disk shining through the trees. Although
+fully half a degree of latitude north of the Arctic Circle, the
+refraction is sufficient to lift his whole sphere above the horizon. One
+speculates how much farther north it would be possible to see any part
+of the sun at noon on the shortest day; but north of here, throughout
+Alaska, is broken and mountainous country. We were on the northern edge
+of the great flat of the interior.
+
+The fifth day at the village was Christmas Eve. My boy was in a critical
+condition, very low and weak, with a temperature that stayed around 101°
+and 102°. As night approached I watched with the greatest anxiety for
+the party from Fort Yukon, and, just as the last lingering glow of the
+long twilight was fading from the south, there was a distant tinkle of
+bells on the trail, and faintly once and again a man's voice was raised
+in command and I knew that relief was at hand.
+
+The nurse had dropped everything and had come, as I felt sure she would.
+Gathering medicines and supplies and hiring a native dog team and
+driver, she had left immediately, and the round trip had been made in
+the shortest time it was possible to make it. It was a tremendous relief
+to see her step out of the rugs and robes of the toboggan and take
+charge of the situation in her quiet, competent way. A small, outlying
+cabin was selected for a hospital, the family that occupied it bundled
+out into a tent, and the two sick persons carefully moved into it, with
+whom and the mother of the sick boy the nurse took up her abode. Then
+there was the Christmas-tree in the chief's cabin, with little gifts for
+the children sent out from the mission at Fort Yukon some time before,
+and a dance afterward, for Christmas festivities must go on, whatever
+happens, at a native village. I took James's pocket-knife to him after
+the celebration was over, and I think he really tried to smile as he
+thanked me with his eyes.
+
+The next day after the services, although it was Christmas Day, we set
+to work on the disinfecting of the large cabin in which the sick had
+lain. Stringing bedclothes and wearing apparel on lines from wall to
+wall, and stuffing up every crack and cranny with cotton, we burned
+quantities of sulphur, that the nurse had brought with her, all day
+long.
+
+A recent article in a stray number of a professional journal picked up
+in the office of a medical missionary, devoted column after column to
+the uselessness of all known methods of disinfection. Sulphur,
+formaldehyde, carbolic acid, permanganate of potash, chloride of lime,
+bichloride of mercury--the author knew not which of these "fetiches" to
+be most sarcastic about. It may be that the net result of our copious
+fumigation was but the bleaching of the coloured garments hung up, but
+at least it did no harm. One sometimes wishes that these scientists who
+sit up so high in the seat of the scornful would condescend to a little
+plain instruction.
+
+The anti-diphtheritic serum is now kept in readiness at all our
+missions in Alaska, and the disease seems to have ceased its
+depredations; but it has taken terrible toll of the native people.
+
+[Sidenote: THE MISSIONARY NURSE]
+
+We wished to stay with the nurse until the sickness should be done, but
+she would not hear of it, and insisted upon the resumption of our
+journey. It did not seem right to go off and leave this lonely woman,
+sixty-five miles from the nearest white person, to cope with an outbreak
+of disease that might not yet have spent itself, although there had been
+no new case for a week. "You've done your work here, now leave me to do
+mine. You'll not get to Point Hope this winter if you stay much longer."
+
+"Aren't you afraid to stay all by yourself?" I asked, somewhat
+fatuously.
+
+"Afraid? Afraid of what? You surely don't mean afraid of the natives?"
+
+I did not know what I meant; it seemed not unnatural that a woman with
+such prospect before her should be a little timid, but she was resolute
+that we go, and we went.
+
+Not until the next summer did I learn the upshot--both patients
+recovered and there was no other case. Six years later, when these words
+are written, I have just baptized a son of the boy who lay so ill, who
+would have perished, I think, had we not reached the Chandalar village
+just in time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+CHANDALAR VILLAGE TO BETTLES, COLDFOOT, AND THE KOYUKUK
+
+
+AT five o'clock in the morning of the 27th of December, hours before any
+kind of daylight, while the faint "pit-pat" of all-night dancing still
+sounded from the chief's cabin, we dropped down the steep bank to the
+river surface and resumed our journey. Ahead was a man with a candle in
+a tin can, peering for the faint indications of the trail on the ice;
+the other two were at the handle-bars of the toboggans. It is strange
+that in this day of invention and improvement in artificial
+illumination, a candle in a tin can is still the most dependable light
+for the trail. A coal-oil lamp requires a glass which is easily broken,
+and the ordinary coal-oil that comes to Alaska freezes at about 40°
+below. In very cold weather a coal-oil lantern full of oil will go out
+completely from the freezing of its supply. All the various acetylene
+lamps are useless because water is required to generate the gas, and
+water may not be had without stopping and building a fire and melting
+ice or snow. The electric flash-lamp, useful enough round camp, goes out
+of operation altogether on the trail, because the "dry" cell that
+supplies its current is not a dry cell at all, but a moist cell, and
+when its moisture freezes is dead until it thaws out again. No extremity
+of cold will stop a candle from burning, and if it be properly sheltered
+by the tin can it will stand a great deal of wind. The "folding pocket
+lantern," which is nothing but a convenient tin can with mica sides, is
+the best equipment for travel, but an empty butter can or lard can is
+sometimes easier to come by.
+
+The Chandalar is wide-spread in these parts, with several channels, and
+the trail was hard to follow. One track we pursued led us up a bank and
+along a portage and presently stopped at a marten trap; and we had to
+cut across to the river and cast about hither and thither on its broad
+surface to find the mail trail.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CHANDALAR GAP]
+
+All the rivers that are confluent with the Yukon in the Flats enter that
+dreary region through gaps in the mountains that bound the broad plain.
+These gaps are noted for wind, and the Chandalar Gap, which had loomed
+before us since daybreak, is deservedly in especial bad repute. The most
+hateful thing in the Arctic regions is the wind. Cold one may protect
+one's self against, but there is no adequate protection against wind.
+The parkee without opening front or back, that pulls on over the head,
+is primarily a windbreak, and when a scarf is wrapped around mouth and
+nose, and the fur-edged hood of the parkee is pulled forward over cap
+and scarf, the traveller who must face the wind has done all he can to
+protect himself from it.
+
+[Illustration: SUNRISE ON THE CHANDALAR-KOYUKUK PORTAGE.]
+
+Unfortunately, in the confusion of striking the tent and packing in the
+dark, my scarf had been rolled up in the bedding, and, since the wind
+was not bad until we approached the Gap in the evening, I had not
+troubled about it. Now, as we drew nearer and nearer, the wind rose
+constantly. The thermometer was at 38° below zero, and wind at that
+temperature cuts like a knife. But to get my scarf meant stopping the
+whole procession and unlashing and unloading the sled, and the man who
+unlashed in that wind would almost certainly freeze his fingers. So I
+gave up the thought of it, turned my back to the wind while I tied my
+pocket handkerchief round mouth and nose, drew the strings of my parkee
+hood close, and then faced it again to worry through as best I could.
+The ice is always swept clear of snow in the Gap. The river narrows
+within its jaws, the ragged rocks rise up to the bluffs on either hand,
+and the blue-streaked ice stretches between. We all suffered a good
+deal. Against that cruel wind it was impossible to keep warm. The hands,
+though enclosed in woollen gloves, and they in blanket-lined moose-hide
+mitts, grew numb; the toes, within their protection of caribou sock with
+the hair on, strips of blanket wrapping, and mukluks stuffed with hay,
+tingled with warning of frost-bite; the whole body was chilled. We all
+froze our faces, I think, for the part of the face around and between
+the eyes cannot be covered. I froze my cheeks, my nose, and my Adam's
+apple, the last a most inconvenient thing to freeze.
+
+[Illustration: COLDFOOT ON THE KOYUKUK.]
+
+[Sidenote: A COLD LODGING]
+
+The cabin was just the other side of the Gap, and it was well that it
+was no farther, for we were weary with our thirty-mile run and
+dangerously cold with the exposure of the last hour. It was rather a
+large cabin as trail cabins go, with a rickety sheet-iron stove in the
+middle, burned full of holes, and it was hours before the fire began to
+make any impression on the obstinate, sullen cold of that hut. When we
+went to bed the frost still stood thick and heavy on the walls all over
+the room. A log building, properly constructed, is a warm building, but
+slowness in parting with heat means slowness in receiving heat, and a
+log cabin that has been unoccupied for a long time in very cold weather
+is hard to heat in one evening.
+
+When we started next morning the thermometer stood at 45° below zero,
+but we were out of the wind region and did not mind the cold. It is
+curious that a few miles on either side of that Gap the air will be
+still, while in the Gap itself a gale is blowing. Seven times I have
+passed through that Gap and only once without wind. The great Flats were
+now behind us, we had passed into the mountains, and for the remainder
+of our long journey we should scarce ever be out of sight of mountains
+again. Up the river, with its constant trouble of overflow, going around
+the open water whenever we could, plunging through it in our mukluks
+when it could not be avoided--with the care of the dogs' feet that the
+cold weather rendered more than ever necessary when they got wet, and
+the added nuisance of throwing the toboggans on their sides and beating
+the ice from them with the flat of the axe wherever water had been
+passed through--for two days we followed its windings, the thermometer
+between -45° and -50°, the mountains rising higher and the scenery
+growing more picturesque as we advanced. At the end of the second day
+from the Gap we were at the mouth of the West Fork of the Chandalar, and
+after passing up it for fifteen or sixteen miles we left that
+watercourse to cross the mountains to the South Fork of the Koyukuk
+River.
+
+Then began hard labour again. A toboggan is not a good vehicle for
+crossing summits. Its bottom is perfectly flat and smooth, polished like
+glass by the friction of the snow. If the trail be at all "sidling" (and
+mountain trails are almost always "sidling"), the toboggan swings off on
+the side of the inclination and must be kept on the trail by main force.
+The runners of a sled will grip the surface, if there be any
+inequalities at all, but a toboggan swings now this way and now that,
+like a great pendulum, dragging the near dogs with it. Again and again
+we had to hitch both teams to one toboggan to get up a sidling pitch
+while all hands kept the vehicle on the trail, and our progress was
+painful and slow. In soft snow on a level surface like the river bed or
+through the Flat country, generally, the toboggan is much the more
+convenient vehicle, for it rides over the snow instead of ploughing
+through it, but on hard snow anywhere or on grades the toboggan is a
+nuisance. Thus wallowing through the deep snow at the side of the
+toboggans to hold them in place we sweated and slaved our way mile after
+mile up the gradual ascent until we reached the spot, just under a
+shoulder of the summit, where there was dry spruce and green spruce for
+camping, the dry for fire and the green for couch, and there we halted
+for the night.
+
+[Sidenote: JOHN MUIR]
+
+Next morning we crossed the low pass and dropped down easily into the
+wide valley of the Koyukuk South Fork, with a fine prospect of mountains
+everywhere as far as the eye could see. I had stood and gazed upon those
+same mountains on my journey of the previous winter, my first winter in
+Alaska, and had seen a most remarkable sight. As we began the descent
+and a turn of the trail gave a new panorama of peaks I did not at first
+realise the nature of the peculiar phenomenon I was gazing at. Each peak
+had a fine, filmy, fan-shaped cloud stretching straight out from it into
+the sky, waving and shimmering as it stretched. The sun was not above
+the horizon, but his rays caught these sheer, lawn-like streamers and
+played upon them with a most delicate opalescent radiance. Then all at
+once came to my mind the recollection of a description in John Muir's
+_Mountains of California_ (surely the finest mountain book ever written)
+of the snow banners of the Sierra Nevada, and I knew that I was looking
+at a similar spectacle. It meant that a storm was raging on high,
+although so far we were sheltered from it. It meant that the dry,
+sand-like snow of the mountain flanks was driven up those flanks so
+fiercely before the wind that it was carried clean over them and beyond
+them out into the sky, and still had such pressure behind it that it
+continued its course and spread out horizontally, thinning and spreading
+for maybe a mile before it lost all coherence and visibility. As far as
+I could see mountain peaks I could see the snow banners, all pointing
+one way, all waving, all luminous and shimmering in the sun-rays. It was
+a very noble sight, and I gazed a long while entranced, not knowing how
+ominous it was. When we reached the valley and left the shelter of the
+gulch we struck the full force of that fearful gale, and for two days
+and nights of incessant blizzard we lay in a hole dug out of a sand-bank
+(for we had no tent that year), the trail lost, the grub box nearly
+empty, and no fire possible to cook anything with had the grub box been
+full.
+
+The valley before us--to resume the narrative--is a high, wind-swept
+region of niggerhead and swamp, the catch-basin of the South Fork of the
+Koyukuk River. The trail descends one of its southern draws, follows up
+the main valley awhile, crosses it, and leaves by one of its northern
+draws to pass over the mountains that separate its drainage from the
+main fork of the Koyukuk. The cold had given place to wind, and though
+the gale did not approach the fierceness of last year's storm, it gave
+great trouble in following the track. These high headwater basins are
+always windy; the timber is scrubby spruce with many open places, and in
+such open places the trail is soon obliterated altogether.
+
+When the light fails this casting about for blazes whenever a clump of
+spruce is reached becomes increasingly slow and difficult and at last
+becomes hopeless. The general direction determined, it might be thought
+that the traveller could ignore the tracks of previous passage and
+strike out for himself, but he knows that the trail, however rough, is
+at least practicable, whereas an independent course may soon lead to
+steep gullies or cut banks, or may entangle him in some thicket that he
+must resort to the axe to pass through. Moreover, even two or three
+passages through the snow in the winter will give some bottom to a
+trail; a bottom that, when the wind-swept areas are passed and the
+snow-shoes are resumed, both he and his dogs will be thankful for.
+
+[Sidenote: CAMP MAKING]
+
+So we made a camp as it darkened to night, not far from the spot where I
+had "siwashed" with an Indian companion the previous winter, the wind
+blowing half a gale at 20° below zero.
+
+Making camp under such circumstances is always a very disagreeable
+proceeding. It takes time and care to make a comfortable camp, and time
+and care in the wind and the cold involve suffering. Two suitable trees
+must be selected between which the tent is to be suspended by the
+ridge-rope, and the snow must all be scraped away by the snow-shoes, or,
+if it be too deep, beaten down. Then while one man unlashes and unpacks
+the sleds, another cuts green spruce and lays it all over the tent
+space, thicker and finer where the bed is to be. Then up goes the tent,
+its corner ropes and its side strings made fast to boughs, if there be
+such, or to stakes, or to logs laid parallel to the sides. Then the
+stovepipe is jointed and the stove set up on the edge of green billets
+properly shaped. Meanwhile the axe-man, the green boughs cut, has been
+felling and splitting a dry tree for stove wood, and the whole
+proceedings are rushed and hastened towards getting a fire in that
+stove. Sometimes it is a question whether we shall get a fire before we
+freeze our fingers or freeze our fingers before we get a fire. The fire
+once going, we are safe, for however much more work there is in the
+open, and there is always a good deal more, one can go to the tent to
+get warm. Enough stove wood must be cut, not only for night and morning,
+but for cooking the dog feed. The dog pot, filled with snow, into which
+the fish are cut up, is put upon the outdoor fire as soon as man-supper
+begins cooking in the tent. When it boils, the rice and tallow must be
+added, and when the rice has boiled twenty minutes the whole is set
+aside to cool. Meanwhile the two aluminum pots full of snow, replenished
+from time to time as it melts, are put upon the stove in the tent as the
+necessary preliminary to cooking. Sometimes ice, and more rarely water,
+may be had, and then supper is hastened. If we are camped on the river
+bank sometimes a steel-pointed rifle-bullet fired straight down into the
+ice will penetrate to the water below and allow a little jet to bubble
+up. Melting snow is a tedious business at best; but, since three times
+out of four when camping it must be done, the aluminum pots are a
+treasure. There is still work for every one as well as the cook. Snow
+must be banked all round the tent to keep out the wind. Little heaps of
+spruce boughs must be cut for the dogs' beds; it is all we can do for
+them whatever the weather, and they appreciate it highly. It may be that
+dog moccasins must be taken off and strung around the stove to dry, and
+before supper is ready the inside ridge-rope of the tent is heavy with
+all sorts of drying man-wear: socks, moccasins, scarfs, toques,
+mittens. One of the earliest habits a man learns on the trail is to hang
+up everything to dry as soon as he takes it off. Why should it be hung
+up to dry unless it has got wet? the writer was once asked, in detailing
+these operations. Because there is no other way to remove the ice with
+which everything becomes incrusted in very cold weather.
+
+[Sidenote: CAMP COOKING]
+
+As his snow melts the cook throws into the pot a few handfuls of
+evaporated potatoes, a handful of evaporated onions, and smaller
+quantities of evaporated "soup vegetables," and leaves them to soak and
+simmer and resume their original size and flavour. By and by he will cut
+up the moose meat or the rabbits or birds, or whatever game he may have,
+and throw it in, and in an hour or an hour and a half there will be a
+savoury stew that, with a pan of biscuits cooked in an aluminum
+reflector beside the stove and a big pot of tea, constitutes the
+principal meal of the day. Or if the day has been long and sleep seems
+more attractive even than grub, he will turn some frozen beans, already
+boiled, into a frying-pan with a big lump of butter, and when his meat
+is done supper is ready. Beans thus prepared eaten red hot with grated
+cheese are delicious to a hungry man. With the stove for a sideboard,
+food may always be eaten hot, and that is one advantage of camp fare.
+
+The men satisfied, the dogs remain, and while two of the party wash
+dishes and clean up, the third feeds the dogs. Their pot of food has
+been cooling for an hour or more. They will not eat it until it is cold
+and a mess of rice will hold heat a long time even in the coldest
+weather. When it is nearly cold it is dished out with a paddle into the
+individual pans and the dogs make short work of it. There are some who
+feed straight fish, and, if the fish be king salmon of the best quality,
+the dogs do well enough on it. But on any long run it is decidedly
+economical to cook for the dogs--not so much from the standpoint of
+direct cost as from that of weight and ease of hauling. An hundred
+pounds of fish plus an hundred pounds of rice plus fifty pounds of
+tallow will go a great deal farther than two hundred and fifty pounds of
+fish alone. There is little doubt, too, that in the long run the dogs do
+better on cooked food. It is easier of digestion and easier to apportion
+in uniform rations. Rice and fish make excellent food. The Japs took
+Port Arthur on rice and fish. The tallow answers a demand of the climate
+and is increased as the weather grows colder. Man and dog alike require
+quantities of fat food in this climate; it is astonishing how much bacon
+and butter one can eat. When the dogs have eaten, and each one has made
+the rounds of all the other pans to be sure nothing is left, they retire
+to their respective nests of spruce bough and curl themselves up with
+many turnings round and much rearranging of the litter. Feet and nose
+are neatly tucked in, the tail is adjusted carefully over all, the hair
+on the body stands straight up, and the dogs have gone to bed and do not
+like to be disturbed again.
+
+[Sidenote: DOG-HARNESS]
+
+Therein lies the cruelty of depriving them of their tails, which used
+to be the general custom in this country. The old tandem harness almost
+required it, as the breath of the dog behind condensed upon the tail of
+the dog in front until he was carrying around permanently a mass of ice
+that was a burden to him and rendered his tail useless for warmth. But
+the rig with a long mid rope, to which the dogs are attached by
+single-trees in such manner that they may at will be hitched abreast or
+one ahead of the other as the trail is wide or narrow, is superseding
+the tandem rig, and one sees more bushy tails amongst the dogs. The
+thick, long-haired tail of the dog in this country is indeed his
+blanket, and in cold weather the tailless dog is at a great
+disadvantage.
+
+It was said that all the dogs retired to the nests of spruce bough; it
+should have been all but one. It is Lingo's special charge to guard the
+sled and his special privilege to sleep on it. Turning around and
+curling up on the softest spot he can find of the unlashed and partly
+unloaded toboggan, he will not touch anything it contains nor permit any
+other dog to touch it.
+
+The northern skies are clouded the next morning, the first day of the
+new year, and there is a ruddy dawn that is glorious to behold. The
+white earth gives back a soft rose tint, as an organ pipe gives back a
+faint tone to the strong vibration of another pipe in pitch with it. We
+shall not see the sun himself any more for many weeks, but we see his
+light upon the flanks of the mountains for an hour or so around noon.
+The bold, shapely peaks of the South Fork of the Koyukuk turn their
+snows to pink fire as his rays slowly descend their sides, and the
+whole scene is exquisitely beautiful. What a wonderful thing colour is!
+When the skies are overcast this is a dead black-and-white country in
+winter, for spruce, the prevailing wood, is black in the mass at a
+little distance. Gaze where one will, there is naught but black and
+white. The eye becomes tired of the monotony and longs for some warmer
+tone. That is surely the reason why all those who live in the country
+cherish some gay article of attire, why the natives love brilliant
+handkerchiefs, why the white man also will choose a crimson scarf.
+Trudging at the handle-bars, I have found pleasure in the red pompons of
+the dogs' harness, in the gay beading of mitten and hind-sack. And that
+is why a lavish feast of colour such as this dawn stirs one's spirit
+with such keen delight. It gives life to a dead world.
+
+But the wind is still bitter and interferes sadly with one's enjoyment.
+All through the valley, up the creek by which we leave it, past the twin
+lakes on the low summit, the wind grows in force, and when we leave
+Slate Creek for the present and make a "portage" over a mountain
+shoulder to strike the creek again much lower down, the wind has risen
+to a gale that overturns the toboggans and makes the men fight for their
+footing. The actual physical labour of it is enormous, and there can be
+no rest; it is too bitterly cold in that blast to stop. For a mile or
+two we struggle and slave to beat our way around that mountain shoulder
+and then drop down to the creek again. The blessed relief it is to get
+out of the fury of that wind into the comparative shelter of the creek,
+to be done with the ceaseless toil of holding the heavy toboggans from
+hurtling down the hillside, to be able to keep one's feet without
+continually slipping and falling on the wind-hardened snow, no words can
+adequately convey. We are all frozen again a little; this man's nose is
+touched, that man's cheeks, and the other man's finger.
+
+[Sidenote: THE KOYUKUK GOLD CAMP]
+
+On the middle fork of the Koyukuk, at the mouth of Slate Creek, Coldfoot
+sits within a cirque of rugged mountain peaks, the most northerly postal
+town in the interior of Alaska, the most northerly gold-mining town in
+the world, as it claims. It sprang into existence in 1900 and flourished
+for a season or two with the usual accompaniments of such florification.
+In 1906 it was already much decayed, and is now dead. Ever since its
+start the Koyukuk camp has steadily produced gold and given occupation
+to miners numbering from one hundred and fifty to three hundred, but the
+scene of operations, and therefore the depot for supplies, has
+continually changed. In 1900 the chief producing creek was Myrtle, which
+is a tributary of Slate Creek, and the town at the mouth was in eligible
+situation, though much over-built from the first. Then the centre of
+interest shifted to Nolan Creek, fifteen miles farther up the river,
+which is a tributary of Wiseman Creek, and the town of Wiseman sprang up
+at the mouth of that creek. The post-office, the commissioner's office,
+and the saloon, the stores and road-houses, migrated to the new spot,
+and Coldfoot was abandoned. Now the chief producing creek is the Hammond
+River, still farther up the Koyukuk, and if its placer deposits prove
+as rich as they promise it is likely that a town will spring up at the
+mouth of the Hammond which will supersede Wiseman.
+
+There has never been found a continuous pay-streak in the Koyukuk camp.
+It is what is known as a "pocket" camp. Now and again a "spot" is found
+which enriches its discoverers, while on the claims above and below that
+spot the ground may be too poor to work at a profit; for ground must be
+rich to be worked at all in the Koyukuk. It is the most expensive camp
+in Alaska, perhaps in the world. This is due to its remoteness and
+difficulty of access. Far north of the Arctic Circle, the diggings are
+about seventy-five miles above the head of light-draught steamboat
+navigation, and more than six hundred miles above the confluence of the
+Koyukuk with the Yukon. Transshipped at Nulato to the shoal-water
+steamboats that make three or four trips a season up the Koyukuk,
+transshipped again at Bettles, the head of any steamboat navigation,
+freight must be hauled on horse scows the remaining seventy-five miles
+of the journey; and all that handling and hauling means high rates. The
+cost of living, the cost of machinery, the general cost of all mining
+operations is much higher than on the Yukon or on the other tributaries
+of that river. The very smallness of the camp is a factor in the high
+prices, for there is not trade enough to induce brisk competition with
+the reduction of rates that competition brings.
+
+[Sidenote: MINERS' GENEROSITY]
+
+Yet the smallness and the isolation of the camp have their
+compensations. There is more community life, more _esprit de corps_
+amongst the Koyukuk miners than will be found in any other camp in
+Alaska. Thrown upon their own resources for amusement, social gatherings
+are more common and are made more of, and hospitality is universal. Like
+all sparsely settled and frontier lands, Alaska is a very hospitable
+place in general, but the Koyukuk has earned the name of the most
+hospitable camp in Alaska. Since the numbers are small, and each man is
+well known to all the others, any sickness or suffering makes an
+immediate appeal and brings a generous response. Again and again the
+unfortunate victim of accident or disease has been sent outside for
+treatment, the considerable money required being quickly raised by
+public subscription. There is probably no other gold camp in the world
+where it is a common thing for the owner of a good claim to tell a
+neighbour who is "broke" to take a pan and go down to the drift and help
+himself.
+
+Until my visit of the previous year no minister of religion of any sort
+had penetrated to the Koyukuk, and, save for one journey thither by
+Bishop Rowe, my annual visits have been the only opportunities for
+public worship since. It will suffice for the visit now describing as
+well as for all the others to say that the reception was most cordial
+and the opportunity much appreciated. We went from creek to creek and
+gathered the men and the few women in whatever cabin was most
+convenient, and no clergyman could wish for more attentive or interested
+congregations.
+
+[Illustration: THE UPPER KOYUKUK.]
+
+Upon our return to Coldfoot from the creek visits the thermometer stood
+at 52° below zero, although it had been no lower than 38° below when we
+left the last creek, some fifteen miles away. As a general rule, the
+temperature on these mountain creeks, which are at some considerable
+elevation above the river into which they flow, will read from 10° to
+15° higher than on the river, and if one climbed to the top of the peaks
+around Coldfoot, the difference then would probably be 20° or 25°. At
+the summit road-house between Fairbanks and Cleary City in the Tanana
+country in cold weather the thermometer commonly reads 20° above the one
+place and 10° or 15° above the other.
+
+[Illustration: THE BARREN SHORES OF KOTZEBUE SOUND.]
+
+[Sidenote: LINGO]
+
+This interesting fact, which surprises a good many people, for we are
+used to think of elevated places as cold places, is due to the greater
+heaviness of cold air, which sinks to the lowest level it can reach; and
+the river bed is the lowest part of the country. It would be interesting
+to find out to what extent this rule holds good. The ridges and the
+hilltops are always the warmest places in cold weather; would this hold
+as regards mountain tops?--as regards high mountain tops? Probably it
+would hold in the sunshine, but the rapid radiation of heat in the
+rarefied atmosphere of mountain tops would swing the balance the other
+way after dark. There is no doubt, however, that the coldest place in
+cold weather in Alaska is the river surface, and it is on the river
+surface that most of our travelling is done. The night we returned to
+Coldfoot we put our toboggan up high on the roof of an outhouse to keep
+its skin sides from the teeth of some hungry native dogs, leaving some
+of the load that was not required within it, covered by the sled
+cloth. Later on I saw by the light of the moon Lingo's silhouetted
+figure sitting bolt upright on top of the sled, and he gave his short
+double bark as I drew near to make me notice that he was still doing his
+duty although under difficulties. The dog had climbed up a wood-pile and
+had jumped to the top of the outhouse and so to the sled. I thought of
+Kipling's _Men That Fought at Minden_:
+
+        "For fatigue it was their pride
+         And they would _not_ be denied
+         To clean the cook-house floor."
+
+Here at Coldfoot we came first into contact with that interesting tribe
+of wandering inland Esquimaux known as the Kobuks, from their occupation
+of the river of that name. The Koyukuk has its own Indian people, but
+these enterprising Kobuks have pushed their way farther and farther from
+salt water into what used to be exclusive Indian territory.
+Representatives of both races were at Coldfoot, and as we lay
+weather-bound for a couple of days, I was enabled to renew last year's
+acquaintance with them, though without a good interpreter not much
+progress was made. The delight of these people at the road-house
+phonograph, the first they had ever heard, was some compensation for the
+incessant snarl and scream of the instrument itself. It was very funny
+to see them sitting on the floor, roaring with laughter at one
+particularly silly spoken record of the "Uncle Josh at the World's Fair"
+order. Over and over again they would ask for that record, and it never
+ceased to convulse them with laughter. "He's been enjoyin' poor health
+lately, but this mornin' I heard him complain that he felt a little
+better"--how sick and tired we got of this and similar jokes drawled out
+a dozen times running! The natives did not understand a word of it; it
+was the human voice with its pronounced, unusual inflections that
+aroused their merriment. The phonograph is becoming a powerful agency
+for disseminating a knowledge of English amongst the natives throughout
+Alaska, and one wishes that it were put to better use than the
+reproduction of silly and often vulgar monologue and dialogue and trashy
+ragtime music. As an index of the taste of those who purchase records,
+the selection brought to this country points low.
+
+The third day the thermometer stood at -49° and we were free to leave
+without actually breaking the rule we had made after the escapade on the
+Yukon. Two other teams were going down the river, so we started with
+them on the sixty-five mile journey to Bettles. Twenty miles or so below
+Coldfoot the Koyukuk passes for several miles in a narrow channel
+between steep rock bluffs, with here and there great detached masses
+standing in the middle of the river. One has a grotesque resemblance to
+an aged bishop in his vestments and is known as the Bishop Rock; another
+a more remote likeness to an Indian woman, and this is known as the
+Squaw Rock. This part of the river, which is called the cañon of the
+Koyukuk, though it is not a true cañon, is very picturesque, and because
+of frequent overflow, offers glare ice and swift passage to the
+traveller when it does not embarrass him with running water. We were
+fortunate enough to pass it without getting our dogs' feet wet, and made
+the half-way road-house in a brilliant moon that rendered travelling at
+night pleasanter than during the day.
+
+[Sidenote: TRAVELLING AT "50 BELOW"]
+
+The next day we started again at near 50° below, but because there was a
+good trail and a road-house for noon, the travelling was rather pleasant
+than otherwise. If there be a warm house to break the day's march and
+eat in, where ice-incrusted scarfs and parkees and caps and mittens may
+be dried out, with a warm outhouse where the dogs may rest in comfort,
+travelling in such weather is not too risky or too severely trying. The
+continual condensation of the moisture from the breath upon everything
+about the head and face is a decided inconvenience, and when it
+condenses upon the eye-lashes, and the upper and the lower lashes freeze
+together, the ice must be removed or it is impossible to open the eyes.
+This requires the momentary application of the bare hand, and every time
+it goes back into the mitten it carries some moisture with it, so that
+after a while mittens are wet as well as head-gear; moreover, there is
+always a certain perspiration that condenses. One gets into the habit of
+turning the duffel lining of the moose-hide mitts inside out and hanging
+them up the moment one gets inside a cabin. Round every road-house stove
+there is a rack constructed for just that purpose.
+
+There is no more striking phenomenon of the arctic trail than the
+behaviour of smoke in cold weather. As one approaches a road-house, and
+to greater degree a village or a town, it is seen enveloped in mist,
+although there be no open water to account for it, and the prospect in
+every other direction be brilliantly clear. It is not mist at all; it is
+merely the smoke from the stovepipes. And the explanation is simple,
+although not all at once arrived at. Smoke rises because it is warmer
+than the air into which it is discharged; for that and no other reason.
+Now, when smoke is discharged into air at a temperature of 50° below
+zero, it is deprived of its heat immediately and falls to the ground by
+its greater specific gravity. The smoke may be observed just issuing
+from the pipe, or rising but a few feet, and then curling downward to be
+diffused amidst the air near the ground.
+
+It was to such a smoke-enveloped inn that we pulled up to warm and
+refresh ourselves and our team for the twenty miles that remained of the
+day's march. We had almost reached the limit of Koyukuk road-houses.
+Bettles being the head of navigation, and merchandise late in the season
+finding water too shallow for transport to the diggings, there is more
+or less freighting with dog teams and horses all the winter. This travel
+keeps open the road-houses on the route. From an "outside" point of view
+they may appear rough and the fare coarse. The night accommodation is a
+double row of bunks on each side of a long room with a great stove in
+the middle. Sometimes there is straw in the bunks, sometimes spruce
+boughs; in the better class even sometimes hay-stuffed mattresses. But
+to the weary traveller, who has battled with the storm or endured the
+intense cold for hours at a stretch, they are glad havens of refuge;
+they are often even life-saving stations.
+
+[Sidenote: METEOROLOGICAL]
+
+While we lay at the road-house the clear sky clouded and the thermometer
+rose. This is an unfailing sequence. Clear, bright weather is cold
+weather; cloudy weather is warm weather. The usual explanation, that the
+cloud acts as a blanket that checks the radiation of heat from the
+earth, is one of those explanations that do not explain. There is no
+heat to radiate. The cloud is a mass of moist air, which is warm air,
+introducing itself from some milder region. So the cloud brings the
+heat; and the lower layers of atmosphere extract it and thereby
+discharge the moisture. For an hour or two around noon the thermometer
+stood at -35° and there was a light fall of snow; then the skies cleared
+because they were discharged of all their moisture, and the thermometer
+went down to -50° again. It is a beautifully simple process and
+sometimes takes place two or three times a day. Every time the sky
+clouds, the thermometer rises; every time the sky clears, the
+thermometer falls. And because the barometer gives notice of changes in
+the density of the atmosphere, it is valuable in forecasting temperature
+in our winters. A steady rise in the barometer means a steady fall in
+the thermometer; a fall in the barometer in a time of great cold
+infallibly prophesies warmer weather; even such rapid changes as the one
+given above are anticipated. So well is this established, that during
+"50°-below spells" at Fairbanks, impatient, weather-bound travellers and
+freighters would busy the hospital telephone with inquiries about the
+barometer, the hospital having the only barometer in the country.
+
+After another long, cold run, on the night of Friday, the 12th of
+January, we reached Bettles, the place we had planned to spend Christmas
+at. We were unable to stir from Bettles for two solid weeks, for during
+the whole of that time the thermometer never rose above 50° below zero.
+
+The long wait at Bettles would have been excessively tedious had it not
+been for the kind hospitality of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Grimm, the
+Commercial Company's agent and his wife, and this is but one of many
+times that I have been under obligation to them for cordial welcome and
+entertainment, for needs anticipated, and every sort of assistance
+gladly rendered. We had been expected many days; the Christmas
+festivities with a gathering of natives of both races had come and gone;
+still they looked for us, for in this country one does not give a man up
+merely because he is a few weeks behind time, nor hold him to account
+for unpunctuality. The natives remained for the most part, and there was
+abundant opportunity of intercourse with them and some beginnings of
+instruction. As the days passed and all arrangements for our advance
+were made, we chafed more and more at the delay, for it was very plain
+that the prospect of visiting Point Hope grew less and less; but this is
+a great country for teaching patience and resignation.
+
+[Sidenote: PARASELENÆ]
+
+Some of the weather during that two weeks' wait was of quite exceptional
+severity. One night is fixed for ever in my memory. It is a very rare
+thing for the wind to blow in the "strong cold," but that night there
+was a wind at 58° below zero. And high up in the heavens was a sight I
+had never seen before. The moon, little past her full, had a great ring
+around her, faintly prismatic; and equidistant from her, where a line
+through her centre parallel with the horizon would cut the ring, were
+two other moons, distinct and clear. It was a strangely beautiful thing,
+this sight of three moons sailing aloft through the starry sky, as
+though the beholder had been suddenly translated to some planet that
+enjoys a plurality of satellites, but no living being could stand long
+at gaze in that wind and that cold. A perfect paraselene is, I am
+convinced, an extremely rare thing, much rarer than a perfect parhelion
+("moon-cats" my companion thought the phenomenon should be called,
+saving the canine simile for the sun), for in seven years' travel I have
+never seen another, and the references to it in literature are few.
+
+The next day at noon, the sun not visible above the distant mountains,
+there appeared in the sky a great shining cross of orange light, just
+over the sun's position, that held and shone for nigh an hour and only
+faded with the twilight. It is not surprising that these appearances
+should deeply impress the untutored mind and should be deemed
+significant and portentous; they must deeply impress any normal mind,
+they are so grand and so strange. The man who has trained his intellect
+until it is so stale, and starved his imagination until it is so
+shrivelled that he can gaze unmoved at such spectacles, that they are
+insignificant to him, has but reduced himself to the level of the dog
+upon whom also they make no impression--though even a dog will howl at a
+great aurora. Of course we know all about them; any schoolboy can pick
+up a primer of physical geography and explain the laws of refraction,
+and the ugly and most libellous diagram of circles and angles that shows
+just how these lustrous splendours happen; but the mystery beyond is not
+by one hair's breadth impaired nor their influence upon the spectator
+diminished. In Alaska perhaps more than any other country it is the
+heavens that declare the glory of God and the firmament that shows His
+handiwork, and the awestruck Indian who comes with timid inquiry of the
+import of such phenomena is rightfully and scientifically answered that
+the Great Father is setting a sign in the sky that He still rules, that
+His laws and commandments shall never lose their force, whether in the
+heavens above or on the earth beneath.
+
+[Sidenote: THE STRONG COLD]
+
+The "strong cold" itself is an awe-inspiring thing even to those who
+have been familiar with it all their lives; and a dweller in other
+climes, endowed with any imagination, may without much difficulty enter
+into the feelings of one who experiences it for the first time. It
+descends upon the earth in the brief twilight and long darkness of the
+dead of winter with an irresistible power and an inflexible menace.
+Fifty below, sixty below, even seventy below, the thermometer reads.
+Mercury is long since frozen solid and the alcohol grows sluggish. Land
+and water are alike iron; utter stillness and silence usually reign.
+Bare the hand, and in a few minutes the fingers will turn white and be
+frozen to the bone. Stand still, and despite all clothing, all woollens,
+all furs, the body will gradually become numb and death stalk upon the
+scene. The strong cold brings fear with it. All devices to exclude it,
+to conserve the vital heat seem feeble and futile to contend with its
+terrible power. It seems to hold all living things in a crushing
+relentless grasp, and to tighten and tighten the grip as the temperature
+falls.
+
+Yet the very power of it, and the dread that accompanies it, give a
+certain fearful and romantic joy to the conquest of it. A man who has
+endured it all day, who has endured it day after day, face to face with
+it in the open, feels himself somewhat the more man for the experience,
+feels himself entered the more fully into human possibilities and
+powers, feels an exultation that manhood is stronger even than the
+strong cold. But he is a fool if ever he grow to disdain the enemy. It
+waits, inexorable, for just such disdain, and has slain many at last who
+had long and often withstood it.
+
+On those rare occasions when there is any wind, any movement of the air
+at all, there enters another and a different feeling. Into the menace of
+a power, irresistible, inflexible, but yet insentient, there seems to
+enter a purposeful, vengeful evil. It pursues. The cold itself becomes
+merely a condition; the wind a deadly weapon which uses that condition
+to deprive its victim of all defence. The warmth which active exercise
+stores up, the buckler of the traveller, is borne away. His reserves
+are invaded, depleted, destroyed. And then the wind falls upon him with
+its sword. Of all of which we were to have instance here on the Koyukuk.
+
+[Sidenote: "FOUND FROZEN"]
+
+In the second week of our stay at Bettles, while Divine service was in
+progress in the store building, crowded with whites and natives, the
+door opened and, with an inrush of cold air that condensed the moisture
+at that end of the room into a cloud and shot along the floor like steam
+from an engine exhaust, there entered an Indian covered with rime, his
+whole head-gear one mass of white frost, his snow-shoes, just removed,
+under his arm, and a beaded moose-skin wallet over his shoulder. Every
+eye was at once turned to him as he beat the frost from his parkee hood
+and thrust it back, unwrapped fold after fold of the ice-crusted scarf
+from his face, and pulled off his mittens. Seeking out the agent, he
+moved over to him and whispered something in his ear. It was plain that
+the errand was of moment and the message disturbing, and as I had lost
+the attention of the congregation and the continuity of my own
+discourse, I drew things to a close as quickly as I decently could. That
+Indian had come seventy-five miles on snow-shoes in one run, without
+stopping at all save to eat two or three times, at a continuous
+temperature of 50° below zero or lower, to bring word that he had found
+a white man frozen to death on the trail; and on the Koyukuk that feat
+will always be counted to Albert the Pilot for righteousness. From the
+location and description of the dead man, there was no difficulty in
+identifying him. He was a wood-chopper under contract with the company
+to cut one hundred cords of steamboat wood against next summer's
+navigation at a spot about one hundred miles below Bettles. He had taken
+down with him on the "last water" enough grub for about three months,
+and was to return to Bettles for Christmas and for fresh supplies. After
+a day or two's rest the Indian was sent back with instructions to bring
+the body to a native village we should visit, to whipsaw lumber for a
+coffin and dig a grave, and we engaged to give the body Christian
+burial.
+
+Uneasy at the softening muscles and sinews of this long inaction, I took
+snow-shoes and a couple of Kobuks one day and made an ascent of the hill
+behind Bettles known as Lookout Mountain, because from its top the smoke
+of the eagerly expected first steamboat of the summer may be seen many
+miles down the river; being moved to that particular excursion by
+dispute among the weather-bound freighters as to the hill's height.
+
+The change of temperature as we climbed the hill was striking. On the
+first shoulder we were already out of the dense atmosphere of the valley
+and above the smoke gloom of the houses, and as we rose the air grew
+milder and milder, until at the top we emerged into the first sunshine
+of many weeks and were in an altogether different climate--balmy and
+grateful it was to us just come up from the strong cold. The aneroid
+showed the altitude about seven hundred feet above Bettles, and I
+regretted very much I had not brought the thermometer as well, for its
+reading would have been most interesting.
+
+The view from the top was brilliantly clear and far-reaching. The broad
+plain across the river was checkered black and white with alternating
+spruce thickets and lakes; beyond it and the mountains that bounded it
+lay the valley of the south fork which we had crossed fifty or sixty
+miles farther up on our journey hither. Right in front of us the middle
+fork made its big bend from southwest to south, and to the left, that
+is, to the north, the valley of the John River opened up its course
+through the sharp white peaks of the Endicott Mountains. It was in this
+direction that my eyes lingered longest. I knew that sixty or seventy
+miles up this river we could cross the low Anaktuvak Pass into the
+Anaktuvak River, which flows into the Colville, and that descending the
+Colville we could reach the shores of the Northern Ocean. It was a
+journey I had wished to make--and have wished ever since. There are many
+bands of Esquimaux on that coast, never visited save by those who make
+merchandise of them in one way or another. Please God, some day I should
+get there; meanwhile our present hopes lay west, though, indeed, these
+grew daily fainter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+BETTLES TO THE PACIFIC--THE ALATNA, KOBUK PORTAGE, KOBUK VILLAGE,
+KOTZEBUE SOUND
+
+
+ALL our preparations were long since made. Our Indian guide had been
+sent back to Fort Yukon from Coldfoot, and here we engaged a young
+Esquimau with his dog team and sled, to go across to Kotzebue Sound with
+us. There was also a young Dane who wished to go from the Koyukuk
+diggings to the diggings at Candle Creek on the Seward Peninsula, and
+him we were willing to feed in return for his assistance on the trail.
+The supplies had been carefully calculated for the journey, the
+toboggans were already loaded, and we waited but a break in the cold
+weather to start.
+
+Our course from Bettles would lead us sixty-five miles farther down the
+Koyukuk to the mouth of the Alatna. The visit to the native village and
+the burial of the poor fellow frozen to death would take us ten miles
+farther down than that, and we would return to the Alatna mouth. Then
+the way would lie for fifty miles or so up that stream, and then over a
+portage, across to the Kobuk River, which we should descend to its mouth
+in Kotzebue Sound; the whole distance being about five hundred miles
+through a very little travelled country. We learned indeed, that it had
+been travelled but once this winter, and that on the first snow. It was
+thought at Bettles that we might possibly procure some supplies at a
+newly established mission of the Society of Friends about half-way down
+the Kobuk River, but there was no certainty about it, and we must carry
+with us enough man-food to take us to salt water. Our supply of dog fish
+we might safely count upon replenishing from the natives on the Kobuk.
+Another thing that caused some thought was the supply of small money.
+There was no silver and no currency except large bills on the Koyukuk,
+and we should need money in small sums to buy fish with. So the agent
+weighed out a number of little packets of gold-dust carefully sealed up
+in stout writing-paper like medicine powders, some worth a dollar, some
+worth two dollars, the value written on the face, and we found them
+readily accepted by the natives and very convenient. Two years later I
+heard of some of those packets, unbroken, still current on the Kobuk.
+
+At last, on the 26th of January, we got away. The thermometer stood only
+a few degrees above -50° when we left, but the barometer had been
+falling slowly for a couple of days, and I was convinced the cold spell
+was over. With our three teams and four men we made quite a little
+expedition, but dogs and men were alike soft, and for the first two days
+the travel was laborious and slow; then came milder weather and better
+going.
+
+[Sidenote: THE KOYUKUK "TOWNS" OF '98]
+
+We passed the two ruined huts of Peavey, the roofs crushed by the
+superincumbent snow. In the summer of 1898 a part of the stream of gold
+seekers, headed for the Klondike by way of Saint Michael, was deflected
+to the Koyukuk River by reports of recent discoveries there. A great
+many little steamboat outfits made their way up this river late in the
+season, until their excessive draught in the falling water brought them
+to a stand. Where they stopped they wintered, building cabins and
+starting "towns." In one or two cases the "towns" were electrically lit
+from the steamboat's dynamo. The next summer they all left, all save
+those who were wrecked by the ice, and the "towns" were abandoned. But
+they had got upon the map through some enterprising representative of
+the land office, and they figure on some recent maps still. Peavey,
+Seaforth, Jimtown, Arctic City, Beaver City, Bergman, are all just names
+and nothing else, though at Bergman the Commercial Company had a plant
+for a while.
+
+We passed the mouth of the Alatna, where were two or three Indian
+cabins, and went on the remaining ten miles to Moses' Village, where the
+body of the man frozen to death had been brought. Moses' Village, named
+from the chief, was the largest native village on the Koyukuk River, and
+we were glad, despite our haste, that we had gone there. The repeated
+requests from all the Indians we met for a mission and school on the
+Koyukuk River and the neglected condition of the people had moved me the
+previous year to take up the matter. This was my first visit, however,
+so far down the river.
+
+We found the coffin unmade and the grave undug, and set men vigorously
+to work at both. The frozen body had been found fallen forward on hands
+and feet, and since to straighten it would be impossible without
+several days' thawing in a cabin, the coffin had to be of the size and
+shape of a packing-case; of course the ground for the grave had to be
+thawed down, for so are all graves dug in Alaska, and that is a slow
+business. A fire is kindled on the ground, and when it has burned out,
+as much ground as it has thawed is dug, and then another fire is
+kindled. We had our own gruesome task. The body should be examined to
+make legally sure that death came from natural causes. With difficulty
+the clothes were stripped from the poor marble corpse, my companion made
+the examination, and as a notary public I swore him to a report for the
+nearest United States commissioner. This would furnish legal proof of
+death were it ever required; otherwise, since there is no provision for
+the travelling expenses of coroners, and the nearest was one hundred and
+forty or one hundred and fifty miles away, there would have been no
+inquest and no such proof.
+
+[Sidenote: A WILDERNESS TRAGEDY]
+
+The man had delayed his return to Bettles too long. When his food was
+exhausted and he had to go, there came on that terrible cold spell. A
+little memorandum-book in his pocket told the pitiful story. Day by day
+he lingered hoping for a change, and day by day there was entry of the
+awful cold. He had no thermometer, but he knew the temperature was -50°
+or lower by the cracking noise that his breath made--the old-timer's
+test. At last the grub was all gone and he must go or starve. The final
+entry read: "All aboard to-morrow, hope to God I get there." The Indians
+estimated that he had been walking two days, and had "siwashed it" at
+night somewhere beside a fire in the open without bedding. Holes were
+burned in his breeches in two places, where, doubtless, he had got too
+near the fire. He had nothing whatever to eat with him save a piece of
+bacon gnawed to the rind. There were only two matches in his pocket, and
+they were mixed up with trash of birch-bark and tobacco, so it is likely
+he did not know he had them. He had lit all the fires he could light and
+eaten all the food he had to eat. Still he was plugging along towards
+the native village nine miles away. Then he lost the trail, probably in
+the dark, for it was faint and much drifted, and had taken off his
+snow-shoes to feel with his moccasined feet for the hardened snow that
+would indicate it. That was almost the end. He had gone across the river
+and back again, feeling for the trail, and then, with the deadly
+numbness already upon his brain, had wandered in a circle. The date of
+his starting in the memorandum-book and the distance travelled made it
+almost certain that, at some moment between the time when those three
+moons floated in the sky and the time when that cross glared on the
+horizon, he had fallen in the snow, never to rise again. Fifty-eight
+below zero and a wind blowing!
+
+One supposes that the actual death by freezing is painless, as it is
+certainly slow and gradual. The only instance of sudden gelation I ever
+heard of is in Longfellow's "Wreck of the Hesperus," where the skipper,
+having answered one question, upon being asked another,
+
+        "Answered never a word,
+         For a frozen corpse was he."
+
+But if the actual death be painless, the long conscious fight against it
+must be an agony; for a man of any experience must realise the peril he
+is in. The tingling in fingers and toes and then in knees and elbows is
+a warning he recognises only too well. He knows that, unless he can
+restore warmth by restoring the circulation, he is as good as frozen
+already. He increases his pace and beats his arms against his breast.
+But if his vitality be too much reduced by hunger and fatigue and cold
+to make more than a slight response to the stimulation, if the distance
+to warmth and shelter be too great for a spurt to carry him there, he is
+soon in worse case than before. Then the appalling prospect of perishing
+by the cold must rise nakedly before him. The enemy is in the breach,
+swarming over the ramparts, advancing to the heart of the fortress, not
+to be again repelled. He becomes aware that his hands and feet are
+already frozen, and presently there may be a momentary terrible
+recognition that his wits begin to wander. Frantically he stumbles on,
+thrashing his body with his arms, forcing his gait to the uttermost, a
+prey to the terror that hangs over him, until his growing horror and
+despair are mercifully swallowed up in the somnolent torpidity that
+overwhelms him. All of us who have travelled in cold weather know how
+uneasy and apprehensive a man becomes when the fingers grow obstinately
+cold and he realises that he is not succeeding in getting them warm
+again. It is the beginning of death by freezing.
+
+We buried the body on a bench of the bluff across the river from the
+native village, the natives all standing around reverently while the
+words of committal were said, and set up a cross marked with
+lead-pencil: "R. I. P.--Eric Ericson, found frozen, January, 1906." Two
+or three years later a friend sent me a small bronze tablet with the
+same legend, and that was affixed to the cross. There are many such
+lonely graves in Alaska, for scarce a winter passes that does not claim
+its victims in every section of the country. That same winter we heard
+of two men frozen on the Seward Peninsula, two on the Yukon, one on the
+Tanana, and one on the Valdez trail. This day I recorded a temperature
+of 10°, the first plus temperature in thirty-nine days, and that
+previous rise above zero was the first in twenty days.
+
+[Sidenote: NEGLECTED NATIVES]
+
+That night we gathered all the natives, and after long speech with poor
+interpretation I ventured to promise them a mission the next year. Some
+of them had been across to the Yukon years before and had visited the
+mission at Tanana. Some had been baptized there. Some had never seen a
+clergyman or missionary of any sort before, and had never heard the
+gospel preached. We were touched by one old blind woman who told of a
+visit to a mission on the Yukon, and how she learned to sing a hymn
+there. Her son interpreted: "She say every night she sing that hymn for
+speak to God." She was encouraged to sing it, and it turned out to be
+the alphabet set to a tune! After much pleading and with some
+hesitation, I baptized seventeen children, comforting myself with the
+assurance of the coming mission, which would undertake their Christian
+training and instruction.
+
+Back next day at the mouth of the Alatna, I was again impressed with the
+eligibility of that spot as a mission site. It was but ten miles above
+the present native village, and, with church and school established, the
+whole population would sooner or later move to it. This gives
+opportunity for regulating the building of cabins, and the advantage of
+a new, clean start. Moreover, the Alatna River is the highway between
+the Kobuk and the Koyukuk, and the Esquimaux coming over in increasing
+numbers, would be served by a mission at this place as well as the
+Indians. I foresaw two villages, perhaps, on the opposite sides of the
+river--one clustered about the church and the school, the other a little
+lower down--where these ancient hereditary enemies might live side by
+side in peace and harmony under the firm yet gentle influence of the
+church. So I staked a mission site, and set up notices claiming ground
+for that purpose, almost opposite the mouth of the Alatna, which, in the
+native tongue, is Allakaket or Allachaket.
+
+[Sidenote: THE INLAND ESQUIMAUX]
+
+There was some trail up the Alatna and we made fair headway on its
+surface, stopping two nights at Kobuk huts. We are out of the Indian
+country now, and shall see no more Indians until we are back on the
+Yukon. The mode of life, the habits, the character of the races are very
+different--the first Esquimau habitation we visited proclaiming it.
+These inland Esquimaux, though some of the younger ones have never seen
+salt water--our guide, Roxy, for one--are still essentially a salt-water
+people. Their huts, even in the midst of trees, are half-underground
+affairs, for they have not learned log-building; the windows are of
+seal gut, and seal oil is a staple article of their diet. Their clothing
+is also marine, their parkees of the hair-seal and their mukluks of the
+giant seal. Communications are always kept up with the coast, and the
+sea products required are brought across. The time for the movement of
+the Kobuks back and forth was not quite yet, though we hoped we should
+meet some parties and get the benefit of their trail. Just before we
+left the Alatna River we stopped at Roxy's fish cache and got some green
+fish, hewing them out of the frozen mass with the axe. The young man had
+fished here the previous summer, had cached the fish caught too late to
+dry in the sun, and they had remained where he left them for four or
+five months. Most of them had begun to decay before they froze, but that
+did not impair their value as dog food, though it rendered the cooking
+of them a disagreeable proceeding to white nostrils. This caching of
+food is a common thing amongst both natives and whites, and it is rarely
+that a cache is violated except under great stress of hunger, when
+violation is recognised as legitimate. Doughty, in his _Arabia Deserta_,
+mentions the same custom amongst the Arabs; Sven Hedin amongst the
+Tartars. Sparsely peopled waste countries have much the same customs all
+over the world. Even the outer garb in the Oriental deserts has much
+resemblance to our parkee; both burnoose and parkee are primarily
+windbreaks, and it makes little difference whether the wind be charged
+with snow or sand.
+
+At midday on the 3d of February we left the Alatna River and took our
+way across country for the Kobuk. We had now no trail at all save what
+had been made a couple of months before by the only other party that had
+crossed the portage this winter, and it was buried under fifteen or
+sixteen inches of snow. There was quite a grade to be climbed to reach
+the plateau over which our course lay, and the men, with rope over the
+shoulder, had to help the dogs hauling at the sled. Indeed, over a good
+deal of this portage, from time to time, the men had to do dog work, for
+the country is rolling, one ridge succeeding another, and the loose,
+deep snow made heavy and slow going. One man must go ahead breaking
+trail, and that was generally my task, though when the route grew
+doubtful and the indications too faint for white man's eye, Roxy took my
+place and I took his gee pole, and slipped his rope around my chest.
+
+Breaking trail would not be so laborious if one could wear the large
+snow-shoes that are used for hunting. But the hunting shoe, though it
+carries the man without fatigue, does not help the dogs. The small shoe
+known as the trail shoe, packs the snow beneath it, and by the time the
+trail breaker has gone forward, then back again, and then forward once
+more, the snow is usually packed hard enough to give the dogs some
+footing. Footing the dog must have or he cannot pull; a dog wallowing in
+snow to his belly cannot exert much traction on the vehicle behind him.
+The notion of snow-shoeing as a sport always seems strange to us on the
+trail, for to us it is a laborious necessity and no sport at all. The
+trail breaker thus goes over most of the ground thrice, and when he is
+anxious at the same time to get a fairly accurate estimate by the
+pedometer of the distance travelled, he must constantly remember to
+upend the instrument in his pocket when he retraces his steps, and
+restore it to its recording position when he attacks unbroken snow
+again. Also he must take himself unawares, so to speak, from time to
+time, and check the length of his stride with the tape measure and alter
+the step index as the varying surfaces passed over require.
+Conscientiously used, with due regard to its limitations, the pedometer
+will give a fair approximation of the length of a journey, but a man can
+no more tell how far he has gone by merely hanging a pedometer in his
+pocket than he can tell the height above sea-level of an inland mountain
+by merely carrying an aneroid barometer to the top.
+
+[Sidenote: THE SUNRISE AND THE MOUNTAINS]
+
+It was on this Alatna-Kobuk portage that we saw the most magnificent
+sunrise any of us could remember. It had been cloudy for some days with
+threat of snow which did not fall. We were camped in a little hollow
+between two ridges, and I had been busy packing up the stuff in the tent
+preparatory to the start, when I stepped out with a load of bedding in
+my arms, right into the midst of the spectacle. It was simple, as the
+greatest things are always simple, but so gorgeous and splendid that it
+was startling. The whole southeastern sky was filled with great luminous
+bands of alternate purple and crimson. At the horizon the bands were
+deeper in tone and as they rose they grew lighter, but they maintained
+an unmixed purity of contrasting colour throughout. I gazed at it until
+the tent was struck and the dogs hitched and it was time to start, and
+then I had to turn my back upon it, for our course lay due west, and I
+was breaking trail. But on the crest of the rising ground ahead there
+burst upon my delighted eyes a still more astonishing prospect. We were
+come to the first near view of the Kobuk mountains, and the reflected
+light of that gorgeous sunrise was caught by the flanks of a group of
+wild and lofty snow peaks, and they stood up incandescent, with a vivid
+colour that seemed to come through them as well as from them. To right
+and left, mountains out of the direct path of that light gave a soft
+dead mauve, but these favoured peaks, bathed from base to summit in
+clear crimson effulgence, glowed like molten metal. It was not the
+reflected light of the sun, but of the flaming sky, for even as I
+looked, a swift change came over them. They passed through the tones of
+red to lightest pink, not fading but brightening, and before my
+companions reached me the sun's rays sprang upon the mountains from the
+horizon, and they were golden.
+
+It seems almost foolish to the writer and may well seem tedious to the
+reader, to attempt in words the description of such scenes; yet so deep
+is the impression they produce, and so large the place they take in the
+memory, that to omit them would be to strike out much of the charm and
+zest of these arctic journeys. Again and again in the years that have
+passed, the recollection of that pomp of colour on the way to the Kobuk
+has come suddenly upon me, and always with a bounding of the spirit. I
+can shut my eyes now and see that incomparable sunrise; I can see again
+that vision of mountains filling half the sky with their unimaginable
+ardency, and I think that this world never presented nobler sight.
+Surely for its pageantry of burning, living colour, for purity and depth
+and intensity of tint, the Far North with its setting of snow surpasses
+all other regions of the earth.
+
+[Sidenote: TRAVELLING KOBUK LADS]
+
+That same day we met a couple of Kobuk youths on their way to the
+Koyukuk, and they gave us the greatest gift it was in the power of man
+to give us--a trail! There is no finer illustration of the mutual
+service of man to man than the meeting of parties going opposite ways
+across the unbroken snows. Each is at once conferring and receiving the
+greatest of favours, without loss to himself is heaping benefit on the
+other; is, it may be--has often been--saving the other, and being
+himself saved. No more hunting and peering for blazes, no more casting
+about hither and thither when open stretches are crossed; no more three
+times back and forth to beat the snow down--twenty miles a day instead
+of ten or twelve--the boys' trail meant all that to us. And our trail
+meant almost as much to them. So we were rejoiced to see them, sturdy
+youths of sixteen or seventeen, making the journey all by themselves. My
+heart goes out to these adventurous Kobuks, amiable, light-hearted,
+industrious; keen hunters, following the mountain-sheep far up where the
+Indian will not go; adepts in all the wilderness arts; heirs of the
+uncharted arctic wastes, and occupying their heritage. If I were not a
+white man I would far rather be one of these nomadic inland Esquimaux
+than any other native I know of.
+
+That same day we crossed two headwater forks of the Kokochatna, as the
+Kobuks call it, or the Hogatzitna as the Koyukuks call it, or the Hog
+River, as the white men call it, a tributary of the Koyukuk that comes
+in about one hundred and fifty miles below the Alatna. As we came down a
+steep descent to the little east fork, it showed so picturesque and
+attractive, with clumps of fine open timber on an island, that it
+remains in my mind one of the many places from the Grand Cañon of the
+Colorado almost to the Grand Cañon of the Noatak, where I should like to
+have a lodge in the vast wilderness.
+
+We had but crossed the west fork when we knew that we were close to the
+watershed between the Kobuk and the Koyukuk, between the streams that
+fall into Kotzebue Sound and those that fall by the Koyukuk and the
+Yukon Rivers into Bering Sea; and because it seemed a capital geographic
+feature, it was disappointing that it was so inconspicuous. Indeed, we
+were not sure which of two ridges was the actual divide. Beyond those
+ridges there was no question, for the ground sloped down to Lake
+Noyutak, a body of water some three and a half miles in length and of
+varying breadth that drains into the Kobuk. Here in a cabin we found
+three more young Kobuks, and spent the night, getting our first view of
+the Kobuk River next day, not from an eminence, as I had hoped, but only
+as we came down a bank through thick timber and opened suddenly upon it.
+By the pedometer I made the portage forty-six miles.
+
+[Sidenote: THE KOBUK RIVER]
+
+The upper Kobuk is a picturesque river, the timber being especially
+large and handsome for interior Alaska. We reached it just above the
+mouth of the Reed River, tributary from the north. The weather was
+warm--too warm for good travelling--the thermometer standing at 15­­­°,
+20°, and one day even 30° above zero all day long, so that we were all
+bareheaded and in our shirt-sleeves. From time to time, as the course of
+the river varied, we had distant views of the rocky mountains of the
+Endicott Range, or, as it might be written, the Endicott Range of the
+Rocky Mountains, for such, in fact, it is--the western and final
+extension of the great American cordillera. On the other side of those
+mountains was the Noatak River, flowing roughly parallel with the Kobuk,
+and discharging into the same arm of the sea.
+
+The division of the labour of camping amongst four gave us all some
+leisure at night, and I found time to read through again _The Cloister
+and the Hearth_ and _Westward Ho!_ with much pleasure, quite agreeing
+with Sir Walter Besant's judgment that the former is one of the best
+historical novels ever written. There are few more attractive roysterers
+in literature to me than Denys of Burgundy, with his "_Courage,
+camarades, le diable est mort!_" This matter of winter reading is a
+difficult one, because it is impossible to carry many books. My plan is
+to take two or three India-paper volumes of classics that have been read
+before, and renew my acquaintance with them. But reading by the light of
+one candle, though it sufficed our forefathers, is hard on our
+degenerate eyes.
+
+The days were much lengthened now, and the worst of the winter was
+done. There would still be cold and storm, but hardly again of the same
+intensity and duration. When the traveller gets well into February he
+feels that the back of the winter is broken, for nothing can take from
+him the advantage of the ever-lengthening days, the ever-climbing sun.
+
+On the afternoon of the third day on the Kobuk we reached a cabin
+occupied by two white men, the first we had seen since we left Bettles,
+and we were the first white men they had seen all the winter. They were
+waiting for the spring, having a prospecting trip in view; simply
+spending the winter eating up their grub. There was nothing whatever to
+read in the cabin, and they had been there since the freeze-up! They
+welcomed us, and we stayed overnight with them, and that night there was
+a total eclipse of the moon, of which we had a fine view. We had an
+almanac which gave the time of totality at Sitka, and we knew the
+approximate longitude of our position, so we were able to set our
+watches by it.
+
+The next two days are noted in my diary as two of the pleasantest days
+of the whole journey--two of the pleasantest days I ever spent anywhere,
+I think. A clear, cloudless sky, brilliant sunshine, white mountain
+peaks all about us, gave picture after picture, and the warm, balmy air
+made travelling a delight. There are few greater pleasures than that of
+penetrating into a new country, with continually changing views of
+beauty, under kindly conditions of weather and trail. In the yellow rays
+of the early sun, the spruce on the river bank looked like a screen of
+carved bronze, while the slender stems of birches in front of the
+spruce looked like an inlaying of old ivory upon the bronze, the whole
+set upon its pedestal of marble-like snow. The second day we took a
+portage of nine or ten miles across a barren flat and struck the river
+again just below a remarkable stretch of bank a mile or so in length,
+with never a tree or a bush or so much as the smallest shrub growing on
+it. Thick timber above suddenly ceased, thick timber below suddenly
+began again, and this bare bank reached back through open, barren flat
+to a low pass in the mountains. It was a bank of solid ice, so we were
+told later, and I remembered to have heard of ice bluffs on the Kobuk,
+and wished that the portage had struck the river above this spot instead
+of below it, that there might have been opportunity to examine it.
+
+[Sidenote: THE MISSION]
+
+[Sidenote: ENGLISH AND ESQUIMAU]
+
+A little farther down the river and we were at the new mission of the
+Society of Friends, where a cordial reception awaited us and, luxury of
+luxuries, a warm bath! Again and again the wash-tub was emptied and
+fresh water was heated until we all had wallowed to our heart's content.
+The rude log buildings of the mission had been begun the previous fall,
+and were not yet complete, but they were advanced enough for occupation,
+and the work of the mission went actively on. It was in charge of rather
+an extraordinary man. He gave us a sketch of his life, which was full of
+interest and matter for thought. For many years he was a police officer
+and jailer in the West. Then he sailed on a whaler and thus became
+acquainted with the Esquimaux. He was converted from a life of
+drunkenness and debauchery--though one fancied his character was not
+really ever so bad as he painted it--at a "Peniel" mission in a
+Californian town. He went in out of mere idle curiosity, just recovered
+from a spree, and was so wrought upon that when he came out he was a
+different creature, a new man, the old life with its appetite for
+vicious indulgence sloughed off and left behind him, and he now
+possessed with a burning desire to do some such active service for God
+as aforetime he had done for the devil. After three or four months of
+some sort of training in an institution maintained by the California
+Society of Friends--a body more like the Salvation Army, one judges,
+than the old Quakers--he volunteered for service at a branch which the
+old-established mission of the Society at the mouth of the Kobuk desired
+to plant two hundred miles or so up the river, and had come out and had
+plunged at once into his task. So here he was, some six or seven months
+installed, teacher, preacher, trader in a small way, and indefatigable
+worker in general. Pedagogical training or knowledge of "methods" he had
+none at all, but the root of the matter was in him, and surely never was
+such an insatiable school-teacher. Morning, noon, and night he was
+teaching. While he was cooking he was hearing lessons; while he was
+washing the dishes and cleaning the house he was correcting exercises in
+simple addition. In the schoolroom he was full of a genial enthusiasm
+that seemed to impart instruction by sheer dynamic force. "Boot," the
+lesson book said. There was no boot in the schoolroom, all were shod in
+mukluks. He dives into his dwelling-house attachment and comes back
+holding up a boot. "Boot," he says, and "boot" they all repeat.
+Presently the word "tooth" was introduced in the lesson. Withdrawing a
+loose artificial tooth of the "pivot" variety from his upper jaw, he
+holds it aloft and "tooth!" he cries out, and "toot!" they all cry, and
+he claps it back into his head again.
+
+We were present on Sunday at the services. There was hearty singing of
+"Pentecostal" hymns with catchy refrains, but we were compelled to
+notice again what we had noticed amongst the little bands of these
+people on the Koyukuk when we set them to singing, that the English was
+unintelligible; and since it conveyed no meaning to us could have had
+little for them. This is the inevitable result of ignoring the native
+tongue and adopting the easy expedient of teaching the singing of hymns
+and the recitation of formulas like the commandments in English. For a
+generation or two, at least, the English learned, save by children at a
+boarding-school, where nothing but English is spoken, is fragmentary and
+of doubtful import in all except the commonest matters of speech. And at
+such boarding-schools there is danger of the real misfortune and
+drawback of natives growing up to live their lives amongst natives,
+ignorant of the native tongue. There is no quick and easy way of
+stamping out a language, thank God; there is no quick and easy way of
+imparting instruction in a foreign language. By and by all the Alaskan
+natives will be more or less bilingual, but the intimate speech and the
+most clearly understood speech will still be the mother tongue. The
+singing done, there was preaching through an interpreter, and then each
+individual present "gave testimony," which consisted for the most part
+in the recitation of a text of Scripture. Then there were individual
+prayers by one and another of the congregation, and then some more
+singing. The only hymn I could find in the book that I knew was the fine
+old hymn, "How Firm a Foundation," and that was sung heartily to the
+"Adeste Fideles." They are naturally a musical race, picking up airs
+with great facility, and they thoroughly enjoy singing.
+
+[Sidenote: THE "DOUBLE STANDARD"]
+
+After the service the missionary confided some of his troubles to me. He
+had lately learned through his interpreter that the burden of most of
+the individual prayers was that the supplicator might "catch plenty
+skins" and be more successful in hunting than his fellows; and though he
+had done his best to impress upon them the superior importance of making
+request for spiritual benefit, he was afraid they had made no change.
+"Our people 'outside,'" he said, "don't understand these folk, and I'm
+not sure that I thoroughly understand them myself." "They're all
+'converted,'" he said; "they all claim to have experienced a change of
+heart, but some of them I know are not living like converted people, and
+sometimes I have my doubts about most of them." My sympathy went out to
+him in his loneliness and his earnestness and his disappointments. I
+pointed out that the emotional response to emotional preaching was
+comparatively easy to get from any primitive people, but that to change
+their whole lives, to uproot old customs of sensual indulgence, to
+engraft new ideas of virtue and chastity was a long, slow process
+anywhere in the world. It was chiefly in the matter of sexual morality
+that his doubts and difficulties lay, and I was able to assure him that
+his experience was but the common experience of all those who had
+laboured for the uplifting of savage people. Indeed, how should it be
+otherwise? Until quite lately there was almost promiscuous use of women.
+A man receiving a traveller in his dwelling overnight proffered his wife
+as a part of his hospitality; the temporary interchange of wives was
+common; young men and young women gratified themselves without rebuke;
+children were valuable however come by, and there was no special
+distinction between legitimate and illegitimate offspring. As one
+reflects on these conditions and then looks back upon conditions amongst
+white people, it would seem that all the civilised races have done is to
+set up a double standard of sexual morality as against the single
+standard of the savage. It can hardly be claimed that the average white
+man is continent, or even much more continent than the average Esquimau,
+but he has forced continence upon the greater part of his women,
+reserving a dishonoured remnant for his own irresponsible use. And there
+are signs that some of those who nowadays inveigh against the white
+man's double standard are in reality desirous of substituting, not the
+single standard of the Christian ideal, but the single standard of the
+savage. In the mining camps the prostitute has a sort of
+half-way-recognised social position, and in polite parlance is referred
+to as a "sporting lady"--surely the most horribly incongruous phrase
+ever coined; she often marries a miner who will tell you that she is as
+good as he is, and she is received afterwards by all but a few as a
+"respectable married woman."
+
+There had been some trouble of this sort at this mission. The great
+northern gold seekers' wave of '97 and '98 threw a numerous band of
+prospectors up the Kobuk as well as up the Koyukuk. The wave had receded
+and left on the Kobuk but one little pool behind it, a handful of men
+who found something better than "pay" on the Shungnak, a few miles away.
+And there was much criticism of the missionary's methods amongst them.
+Word of the arrival of strangers had brought some of them to Long Beach,
+and on Sunday night I had opportunity of addressing them, with a view to
+enlisting their sympathy, if possible. What if mistakes were made, what
+if some of the methods employed were open to question? Here was a man
+who beyond doubt was earnestly labouring in the best way he knew for the
+improvement of these natives. Such an effort demanded the co-operation
+of every right-feeling man.
+
+[Sidenote: PERSONAL CLEANLINESS]
+
+After all, however grand the physical scenery, the meteorological
+phenomena, may be, the people of any country are the most interesting
+thing in it, and we found these Esquimaux extraordinarily interesting.
+Dirty they certainly are; it is almost impossible for dwellers in the
+arctic regions to be clean in the winter, and the winter lasts so long
+that the habit of winter becomes the habit of the year. White and native
+alike accept a lower standard of personal cleanliness than is tolerated
+outside. I remember asking Bishop Rowe, before I came to Alaska: "What
+do you do about bathing when you travel in the winter?" To which he
+replied laconically: "Do without." It is even so; travellers on the
+Alaskan trails as well as natives belong to the "great unwashed." In the
+very cold weather the procuring of water in any quantity is a very
+difficult thing even for house dwellers. Every drop of it has to be
+carried from a water-hole cut far out on the ice, up a steep grade, and
+then quite a little distance back to the dwelling--for we do not build
+directly upon these eroding banks. The water-hole is continually
+freezing up and has to be continually hewed free of ice, and as the
+streams dwindle with the progress of winter, new holes must be cut
+farther and farther out. On the trail, where snow must usually be melted
+for water, it is obvious that bathing is out of the question; even the
+water for hands and face is sparingly doled by the cook, and two people
+will sometimes use the same water rather than resort to the painful
+though efficient expedient of washing with snow. If this be so despite
+aluminum pots and a full kit of camp vessels, it is much more so with
+the native, whose supply of pots and pans is very limited. I have seen a
+white man melt snow in a frying-pan, wash hands and face in it, throw it
+out, fry bacon and beans in it, then melt more snow and wash his cup and
+plate in it. There is, however, this to be said anent the disuse of the
+bath in this country, that in cold weather most men perspire very little
+indeed, and the perspiration that is exuded passes through to the outer
+garments and is immediately deposited upon them as frost; and there is
+this further to be said about dirt in general, that one blessed property
+of the cold is to kill all odours.
+
+One grows tolerant of dirt in this country; there is no denying it, and
+it is well that it is so; otherwise one would be in a chronic state of
+disgust with oneself and every one else. So the dirt of the native,
+unless specially prominent and offensive, is accepted as a matter of
+course and ignored. This obstacle overcome, the Esquimaux are an
+attractive and most interesting race, and compare to advantage with the
+Indians in almost every particular. They are a very industrious people.
+Go into an Esquimau's hut at almost any time when they are not sleeping,
+and you will find every individual occupied at some task. Here is a man
+working in wood or bone with the ingenious tools they have evolved; here
+are women working in skin or fur, and some of them are admirable
+needlewomen; here, perhaps, is another woman chewing mukluks--and many a
+white man who has kept his feet dry in overflow water is grateful to the
+teeth that do not disdain this most effective way of securing an
+intimate union between sole and upper. Even the children are busy: here
+is a boy whittling out bow and arrow--and they do great execution
+amongst rabbits and ptarmigan with these weapons that entail no cost of
+powder and shot; here is a girl beating out threads from sinew with a
+couple of flat stones. Some of us, troubled with unconscientious
+tailors, wish that a law could be passed requiring all buttons to be
+sewn on with sinew--they never come off.
+
+[Sidenote: A LIGHT-HEARTED FOLK]
+
+They are a very light-hearted people, easily amused, bubbling over with
+laughter and merriment, romping and skylarking with one another at every
+intermission of labour. One of my white travelling companions on this
+journey was in the habit of using a little piece of rabbit skin to
+protect his nose in cold or windy weather. The care of the nose is
+sometimes very troublesome indeed, it freezes more readily than any
+other portion of the body; and a little piece of rabbit skin, moistened
+and applied to the nose, will stay there and keep it warm and
+comfortable all day. But it does not exactly enhance one's personal
+attractions.
+
+We had stopped for camp and were all together for the first time in four
+or five hours, when Roxy noticed this rabbit-skin nose protector, upon
+which the breath had condensed all the afternoon until two long icicles
+depended from it, one on each side, reaching down below the mouth; and
+he fell straightway into a fit of laughter that grew uncontrollable; he
+rolled on the snow and roared. A little annoyed at this exhibition, I
+spoke sharply: "What's the matter with you, Roxy; what on earth are you
+cutting up like that for?" Checking himself for a moment, he pointed to
+my companion and said, "Alleesame _walrus_," and went off into another
+paroxysm of laughter, rolling about and roaring. At intervals all the
+evening he would break out again, and when we sat down to eat it
+overcame him once more and he rushed outside where he could give vent to
+his mirth with less offence.
+
+The boy was straightforward and conscientious. We were camped over
+Sunday once, and Roxy had noticed many marten tracks in the
+neighbourhood. He had brought a few traps along with him to set out as
+we went and pick up on his return, and he wanted to know if I thought he
+might set some that day, although it was the day of rest. Careful not to
+interfere in any way with the religious instruction any native has
+received from any source, I told him that was a matter for him to decide
+himself; that each man was responsible for his own conduct. The boy
+thought awhile--and he did not set his traps. Now that young man had
+never received any instruction at a mission; all his teaching had been
+from other Esquimaux. This same question of working on Sunday was the
+cause of some of the difficulty between the missionary at Long Beach and
+the miners at Shungnak. The sluicing or "cleaning-up" season is short,
+and mining operators generally consider that they cannot afford to lose
+an hour of it. The Kobuks employed by these miners quit their work on
+Sunday, and that brought the operations to a standstill. There was
+something to be said on the miners' side, but I rejoiced that the
+Esquimau boys showed such steadfastness to their teaching. "If you
+cannot use them six days in the week, if it has to be seven or none,
+then do as the miners on the Yukon side do, consider the country
+uninhabited, and make your arrangements as though there were no Kobuks."
+That was my advice, and this may be read in connection with Mr.
+Stefanson's caustic comments on the same rigidity of observance.
+
+We left Long Beach with a grateful feeling for the hospitality with
+which we had been received and with a substantial respect for the
+earnest missionary effort that was being put forth there. We were able
+to replenish our grub supply and also to exchange our two toboggans for
+one large sled, for we were out of the toboggan country again and they
+had already become a nuisance, slipping and sliding about on the trail.
+Our host was up early with a good breakfast for us, and speeded the
+parting guest, which on the trail is certainly an essential part of true
+hospitality, with all the honours; the natives lined up on the bank and
+the younger ones running along with us for a few hundred yards.
+
+[Sidenote: THE JADE MOUNTAINS]
+
+Soon after we left the mission we went up a series of terraces to a
+desolate, barren, wind-swept flat, the portage across which cut off a
+great bend of the river and saved us many miles of travel. To our right
+rose the Jade Mountains, whence the supply of this stone which used to
+be of importance for arrow-heads and other implements was obtained and
+carried far and wide. A light crust on the snow broke through at every
+step, though the snow was not deep enough and the ground too uneven to
+make snow-shoes useful; so we all had more or less sore feet that night
+when we regained the river and made our camp near the mouth of the
+Ambler, another tributary from the north.
+
+The next day was an exceedingly long, tedious day. The Kobuk River,
+which in its upper reaches is a very picturesque stream, began now to be
+as monotonous as the lower Yukon. It had grown to considerable size, and
+the bends to be great curves of many miles at a stretch, one of which,
+a decided bend to the north of the general westerly direction of the
+river, we were three full hours in passing down. It was while traversing
+this bend that we witnessed a singular mirage that lent to the day all
+the enlivenment it had. Before us for ten or twelve miles stretched the
+broad white expanse of the river bed, shimmering in the mellow sunlight,
+and far beyond, remote but clear, rose the sharp white peaks of the
+mountains that divide the almost parallel valleys of the Kobuk and the
+Noatak. As we travelled, these distant peaks began to take the most
+fantastic shapes. They flattened into a level table-land, and then they
+shot up into pinnacles and spires. Then they shrank together in the
+middle and spread out on top till they looked like great domed
+mushrooms. Then the broad convex tops separated themselves entirely from
+their stalk-like bases and hung detached in the sky with daylight
+underneath. And then these mushroom tops stretched out laterally and
+threw up peaks of their own until there were distinct duplicate ranges,
+one on the earth and one in the sky. It was fascinating to watch these
+whimsical vagaries of nature that went on for hours. A change in one's
+own position, from erect to stooping, caused the most convulsive
+contortions, and when once I lay down on the trail that I might view the
+scene through the lowest stratum of the agitated air, every peak shot up
+suddenly far into the sky like the outspreading of one's fingers, to
+subside as suddenly as I rose to my feet again. The psalmist's query
+came naturally to the mind, "Why hop ye so ye hills?" and our Kobuk boy
+Roxy, whose enjoyment of fine landscapes and strange sights was always
+a pleasure to witness, answered the unspoken question. "God make
+mountains dance because spring come," he said prettily enough.
+
+Then we crossed another portage and cut off ten miles of river by it,
+and when we reached the river again I wanted to stop, for it grew
+towards evening and here was good camping-ground. But we had lately met
+some travelling Kobuks and they had told Roxy of a cabin "just little
+way" farther on, and I yielded to the rest of the company, who would
+push on to it and thus avoid the necessity of making camp. That native
+"just little way" is worse than the Scotch "mile and a bittock"; indeed,
+the natives have poor notion of distance in general, and miles have as
+vague meaning to them as kilometres have to the average Anglo-Saxon.
+
+[Sidenote: A BELATED CAMP]
+
+On and on we pushed, mile after mile, and still no cabin. In the
+gathering dusk we would continually think we saw it; half-fallen trees
+or sloping branches simulating snow-covered gables. At last it grew
+quite dark, and when there was general agreement that we must seek the
+cabin no longer, but camp, there was no place to camp in. Either the
+bank was inaccessible or there was lack of dry timber. We went on thus,
+seeking rest and finding none, until seven-thirty, and then made camp by
+candle-light, in a poor place at that, having trudged thirty-five miles
+that day. A night-made camp is always an uncomfortable camp, and an
+uncomfortable camp means a miserable night, which to-morrow must pay
+for. We did not get to bed till nearly midnight, and it was
+nine-forty-five when we started out next morning, and we made only
+fifteen miles that day.
+
+The Kobuk valley continued to open out wider and wider and the mountains
+right and left to recede. The Jade Mountains were now dim and distant
+behind us, and new ranges were coming into view. The people on this
+lower river are very few. It was just about one hundred miles from Long
+Beach when we reached the next native village, a miserable collection of
+pole dwellings, half underground, with perhaps a score of inhabitants.
+Certainly the conditions of life deteriorated as we descended this
+river. The country seems to afford nothing but fish; we were amongst the
+ichthyophagi pure and simple. Roxy, bred and born on the upper Kobuk and
+never so far down before, is very scornful about it. "Me no likee this
+country," he says; "no caribou, no ptarmigan, no rabbits, no timber, no
+nothin'." The weather had grown raw and cold again, with a constant
+disagreeable wind that took all the fun out of travelling. We passed a
+place where a white man was pessimistically picking away at a vein of
+coal in the river bluff. "Yes, we been here all winter," he said,
+"working on the blamed ledge. I always knowed it was goin' to pinch out,
+and now it's begun to pinch. My partner's gone to Candle for more grub,
+but I told him it weren't no use. It's pinchin' out right now. I knowed
+it afore we started work, but the blamed fool wouldn't listen to me.
+'It'll pinch out,' I told him a dozen times; 'you mark my word it'll
+pinch out,' I told him, and now it's begun to pinch; and I hope he'll be
+satisfied." We were reminded of the many coal-mines from time to time
+located on the Yukon, in all or nearly all of which the vein has
+"pinched out." The deposits on the coast may be all the fancy of the
+magazine writer paints, and may hold the "incalculable wealth" that is
+attributed to them, but the coal on the interior rivers seems in scant
+measure and of inferior quality.
+
+The same night we reached the native village at the mouth of the
+Squirrel River, another northern tributary--the Kobuk receives most of
+its waters from the north--and we spent the night and the next day,
+which was Sunday, in one of the half-underground huts of the place, in
+company with twelve other people. Here we found Roxy's brother, dubbed
+"Napoleon" by some white man. They had not seen one another for years,
+yet all the greeting was a mutual grunt. The Kobuks are not
+demonstrative in their affections, but it would not be right to conclude
+the affection lacking. I have seen an old Esquimau woman taking part in
+a dance the night after her husband was buried, yet it would have been
+unjust to have concluded that she was callous and indifferent. It is
+very easy to misunderstand a strange people, and very hard to understand
+them thoroughly.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CANINE INTRUDER]
+
+The roof of the tent was dome-shaped and it was lit by a seal-gut
+skylight. In the morning while I was conducting Divine service and
+attempting most lamely by the mouth of a poor interpreter to convey some
+instruction, a dog fight outside adjourned to the roof and presently
+both combatants came tumbling through the gut window into the midst of
+the congregation. They were unceremoniously picked up and flung out of
+the door, a few stitches with a needleful of sinew repaired the window,
+and the proceedings were resumed. These gut windows have their
+convenience as well as their inconvenience. When the hut gets too warm
+and close even for Esquimaux, the seal gut is folded back and the outer
+air rushes in to the great refreshment of the occupants; when the hut is
+cool enough the gut is replaced. A skylight is far and away the best
+method of illuminating any single-story structure, and this membrane is
+remarkably translucent, while the snow that falls or frost that forms
+upon such a skylight is quickly removed by beating the hand upon the
+drum-like surface. All glass windows must be double glazed, or else in
+the very cold weather they are quickly covered with a thick deposit of
+frost from the condensation of the moisture inside the room, and then
+they admit much less light than gut does. One of its unpleasant features
+is the way the membrane snaps back and forth with a report like a pistol
+whenever the door is opened and shut, but on the whole it is a very good
+substitute for glass indeed.
+
+[Sidenote: SLEEPING CUSTOMS]
+
+These river Esquimaux vary greatly in physical appearance. While many of
+them are somewhat undersized and all have small feet and hands, some are
+well-developed specimens of manhood. "Riley Jim," the chief of this
+tribe, would be counted a tall, stalwart man anywhere. And while many
+have coarse, squat features, here and there is one who is decidedly
+attractive in appearance. A sweet smile which is often upon the face,
+and small, regular white teeth, greatly help to redeem any countenance.
+A youth of about eighteen at the Squirrel River would properly be called
+handsome, one thinks--though amongst native people one grows a little
+afraid of forgetting standards of comparison; and his wife--for he was
+already a husband--was a decidedly pretty girl. A word ought to be said
+which applies to all the Esquimaux we met. Although many people live in
+one hut and there is no possible privacy, yet we saw no immodesty of any
+sort. They sleep entirely nude--probably our own great-grandparents did
+the same, at least the people of Defoe and Smollet did, for nightshirts
+and pyjamas are very modern things. There is much to be said from an
+hygienic point of view in favour of that custom as against turning in
+"all standing" as the Indian generally does, or sleeping in the day
+underwear as most white men do. But although every one of a dozen people
+in cabin after cabin that we stayed at on the Kobuk River above and
+below this place, of both sexes and all ages, would thus strip
+completely and go to bed, there was never any exposure of the body at
+all. It may be, of course, that our presence imposed a greater care in
+this respect, but it did not so impress us; it seemed the normal thing.
+Another noticeable feature of the lives of all these people was their
+devoutness in the matter of thanks before and after meat. Some of them
+would not so much as give and receive a drink of cold water without a
+long responsive grace.
+
+As we went on down the river the country grew bleaker and drearier and
+the few scattered inhabitants were living more and more the life of the
+seacoast. The dwellings resembled igloos more than cabins, being
+completely covered with snow and approached by underground passages,
+with heavy flaps of untanned sealskin to close them. When we passed a
+fork of the river we knew that we were entering the delta of the Kobuk,
+and that another day would take us to the mission on Kotzebue Sound. It
+was a long, hard day, in which we made forty miles, but an interesting
+one. With a start at six, we were at the mouth by nine-thirty. The
+spruce which had for some time been dwarfing and dwindling gave place to
+willows, the willows shrank to shrubs, the shrubs changed to coarse
+grass thrusting yellow tassels through the snow. The river banks sank
+and flattened out and ceased, and we were on Hotham Inlet with the long
+coast-line of the peninsula that forms it stretching away north and
+south in the distance. Roxy's bewilderment was amusing. He stopped and
+gazed about him and said: "Kobuk River all pechuk!" ("Pechuk" means
+"played out.") "What's the matter, no more Kobuk River?" I think his
+mind had never really entertained the notion of the river ending, though
+of course he must often have heard of its mouth in the salt water. He
+was out of his country, his bearings all gone, a feeling of helpless
+insecurity taking the place of his usual confidence, and I think he said
+no more all that day.
+
+We had to traverse the ice of Hotham Inlet northward to its mouth,
+double the end of the peninsula, and then travel south along the coast
+to the mission at Kikitaruk, the peninsula being too rugged to cross.
+Three considerable rivers drain into Hotham Inlet, roughly parallel in
+their east and west courses, the Noatak, the Kobuk, and the Selawik, so
+that its waters must be commonly more fresh than salt, for its bounds
+are narrow and the extensive delta of its eastern shore would argue its
+depth slight. Ahead of us, as we travelled north making a bee-line for
+the end of the peninsula, all the afternoon, loomed the rocky promontory
+of Krusenstern, one of Kotzebue's capes, and far beyond, stretching up
+the dim coast-line, lay the way to Point Hope. It was with a sinking of
+the heart that I gazed upon it, for I knew already, though I had not
+announced a decision, that the road to Point Hope could not be my road
+that year. All day long the thermometer stood between -40° and -30°, and
+the constant light sea-breeze kept scarfs wrapped closely about mouths
+and noses, which always means disagreeable travel. When the company
+stopped at noon to eat a little frozen lunch, I was too chilly to cease
+my movement and pressed on. The day of that blessed comfort of the
+trail, the thermos flask, was not yet. By two-thirty we had reached Pipe
+Spit, which still further contracts the narrow entrance of the inlet,
+and turning west for a mile or two rounded the point and then turned
+south for ten miles along the coast. Just about dark we reached the
+mission and stood gazing out over the rough ice of Kotzebue Sound to the
+Arctic Ocean, having made the forty miles in ten and a half hours. We
+had come about one thousand miles from Fairbanks, all of it on foot and
+most of it on snow-shoes.
+
+[Sidenote: THE ARCTIC OCEAN]
+
+So here was my first sight of the Arctic Ocean. All day long I had
+anticipated it, and it stirred me,--a dim, grey expanse stretching vast
+and vague in the dusk of the evening. The old navigators whose stories I
+had read as a boy passed before me in their wonderful, bold sailing
+vessels, going in and out uncharted waters that steamships will not
+venture to-day--Kotzebue, Beechey, Collinson, McClure--pushing
+resolutely northward.
+
+Less happy had been my first sight of the Pacific Ocean, five years
+before. I had the ill luck to come upon it by way of that Western Coney
+Island, Santa Monica, and from the merry-go-rounds and cheap eating
+places Balboa and Magellan and Franky Drake fled away incontinent and
+would not be conjured back; though, indeed, the original discoverers
+would have had yet further occasion to gaze at one another "with a wild
+surmise" if they had seen shrieking companies "shooting the chutes." But
+here was vastness, here was desolation, here was silence; jagged ice
+masses in the foreground and boundless expanse beyond, solemn and
+mysterious. The Arctic Ocean was even as I had pictured it.
+
+The missionary in charge at Kikitaruk had been informed by letter of our
+projected journey during the previous summer and had long expected us.
+We were received with kindness and hospitality, and after supper began
+at once our acquaintance with his work, for there was a service that
+night which it was thought we should attend. I spoke for a few minutes
+through an excellent interpreter and then spent a couple of hours
+nodding over the stove, overcome with sleep, while there was much
+singing and "testimony."
+
+[Sidenote: TOTAL-ABSTINENCE ESQUIMAUX]
+
+The Californian Society of Friends, established here a number of years
+with branches at other points on Kotzebue Sound, has done an excellent
+work amongst the Esquimaux. If they had accomplished nothing else it
+would stand to the everlasting credit of the Society's missionaries that
+they have succeeded in imbuing the natives under their charge with a
+total aversion to all intoxicating liquor. We had come down from the
+remotest points to which the influence of these people has extended; we
+had met their natives five hundred miles away from their base of
+instruction, and everywhere we found the same thing. It was said by the
+white men on the Koyukuk that a Kobuk could not be induced to take a
+drink of whisky. It seemed to us a pity that the force of this most
+wholesome doctrine should be weakened by the unsuccessful attempt to
+include tobacco in the same rigorous prohibition. In several cabins
+where we stayed there was no sign of smoking until members of our party
+produced pipes, whereupon other pipes were furtively produced and the
+tobacco that was offered was eagerly accepted. From any rational point
+of view the putting of whisky and tobacco in the same category is surely
+a folly. There can be few more harmless indulgences to the native than
+his pipe, and no one knows the solace of the pipe until he has smoked it
+around the camp-fire in the arctic regions after a hard day's journey.
+
+The decision to turn my back on Point Hope was, I think, the most
+painful decision I ever made in my life; with all my heart I wanted to
+go on. It was only one hundred and sixty or one hundred and seventy
+miles away. The journey had been made in three or four days; but we
+were now come to a country where travel is impossible in bad weather and
+where bad weather prevails; and that journey might quite as likely take
+two weeks. I worked over the calendar in my diary, figuring how many
+days of travel still remained, allowing reasonable margins, and I could
+not see that I had much more than time to get back to Fairbanks before
+the break-up, which for sufficient reason I regarded as my first duty.
+The day of rest at Kikitaruk was Washington's birthday, the 22d of
+February. Eight weeks would bring us to the 19th April, by which time
+the trails would be already breaking up. Counting out Sundays, that left
+forty-eight days of travelling with something like twelve hundred miles
+yet to make without going to Point Hope--an average of about twenty-five
+miles a day. I knew that we had made no such average in the distance
+already covered, and though I knew also that travelling improved
+generally as the season advanced, I did not know how very much better
+going there is on the wind-hardened snows of the coast when travelling
+is possible at all. Again and again I have regretted that I did not take
+the chance and push on, but at the time I decided as I thought I ought
+to decide, and one has no real compunctions when that is the case.
+
+[Sidenote: THE RESOLUTION TO TURN SOUTH]
+
+So a first-hand knowledge of our own most interesting work among the
+Esquimaux was not for me on that occasion--and there has arisen no
+opportunity since. Mr. Knapp, who had planned to spend the rest of the
+winter at Point Hope, would get a guide and a team here and turn north
+after some days' rest, while I would turn south. Roxy was impatient to
+return to Bettles. "Me no likee this country," was all that could be got
+out of him. So I paid him his money and made him a present of the .22
+repeating rifle with which he had killed so many ptarmigan on the
+journey, outfitted him with clothes, grub, and ammunition, and let him
+go; saying good-bye with regret, for he was a good boy to us all the
+way.
+
+It was late on the night of our single day of rest when I got to bed,
+for there had been squaring up of accounts and much writing, and when I
+went to bed I did not sleep. Again and again I reviewed the decision I
+had come to and fought against it, though such is far from my common
+habit. Even as I write, years after, the bitter rebellious reluctance
+with which I turned south comes back to me. I wished the hospital at
+Fairbanks at the bottom of the deep blue sea. I protested I would go on
+and complete my journey, even though it involved "thawing out" at Tanana
+and getting to Fairbanks on a steamboat in the summer. I had a free
+hand, a kindly and complaisant bishop, and none would call me strictly
+to account. Then I realised that it was merely pride of purpose,
+self-willed resolution of accomplishing what had been essayed--in a
+word, personal gratification for which I was fighting, and with that
+realisation came surrender and sleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE SEWARD PENINSULA--CANDLE CREEK, COUNCIL, AND NOME
+
+
+ONE day's rest was not a great deal after the distance we had come--and
+that day fully occupied with business--but since Point Hope was
+abandoned some sort of schedule must be made for the Seward Peninsula,
+and where Sunday shall be spent is always an important factor in
+arranging these itineraries. There was just time to reach Candle for the
+next Sunday and it was decided to attempt it. Hans would accompany me as
+far as Candle, where he hoped to find work. It meant two days of
+forty-five miles each, for it is ninety miles from Kikitaruk to Candle,
+but they told us it could be done.
+
+So the reluctant adieus made, letters despatched, some mailed here at
+Kikitaruk, some to be carried back to Bettles and mailed there--these
+latter getting outside long before the former--we started at seven in
+the morning instead of six, as we had planned, on the journey down the
+shore of Kotzebue Sound. That hour's delay turned out to be a calamity
+for us.
+
+The trail was smooth along the beach until Cape Blossom was reached, and
+I had the first riding of the winter, Hans and I alternately running and
+jumping on the sled. There was a portage across the cape, and three or
+four miles below it was the wreck of the river steamer _Riley_, which
+used to make a voyage up the Kobuk with supplies for the miners at the
+Shungnak. The thermometer was at -38° when we started, and the same
+light but keen breeze was blowing that had annoyed us on the other side
+of the peninsula. What a barren, desolate region it is!--low rocks
+sinking away to the dead level of the snow-field on the one hand,
+nothing but the ice-field on the other.
+
+[Sidenote: A BAD NIGHT]
+
+[Sidenote: CAMPED IN THE OPEN]
+
+We were bound for an igloo forty-five miles from the mission, the only
+shelter between Kikitaruk on the peninsula and Kewalik on the mainland,
+and we had been warned that the igloo would be easy to miss if it grew
+dark as it would be almost indistinguishable from the snow-drifts of the
+shore. Some directions from a multitude of counsellors remembered in one
+sense by Hans and in another by me, added to our uncertainty as to just
+where the igloo lay. The wind increased in force as the evening advanced
+and the last time I looked at the thermometer it still registered -38°.
+The sun set over the sound with another of those curious distortions
+which had before proved ominous to us. It was flattened and swollen out
+like a pot-bellied Chinese lantern, with a neck to it and an irregular
+veining over its surface that completed the resemblance. The wind
+increased until the air was full of flying snow and it grew dark, and
+still there was no sign of the igloo. Only slowly and with much
+difficulty could the trail be followed, and that meant we were soon not
+moving fast enough to keep warm in the fierce wind. At last we lost the
+trail altogether, and sometimes we found ourselves out on the rough ice
+of the sound and sometimes wallowing in a fresh snow-drift on the shore.
+I became possessed with the fear that we had passed the igloo. I was
+positive that we were told at the mission that we should reach it
+_before_ the high bluffs were passed, and we had passed them a long way
+and had now but a shallow shelf to mark the coast-line. It is strange
+how long that delusion about passing his destination will pursue the
+Alaskan traveller. Presently the dogs dropped off a steep bank in the
+dark, and only by good fortune we were able to keep the heavy sled from
+falling upon them, for they were dead tired and lay where they dropped.
+With freezing fingers I unhitched the dogs while Hans held the sled, and
+we lowered it safely down. But it was plain that it was dangerous to
+proceed. We could not find the trail again and were growing alarmingly
+cold. We were "up against it," as they say here, "up against it good and
+strong." We had a tent but no means of putting it up, a stove but
+nothing to burn in it, a grub box full of food but no way to cook it. So
+the first night of coast travel was to show us the full rigour and
+inhospitality of the coast and to make us long for the interior again.
+Wood can almost always be found there within a few miles, if it be not
+immediately at hand, and no one properly appreciates the hospitality of
+a clump of spruce-trees until he has spent a night of storm lying out on
+this barren coast. We turned the dogs loose and threw them a fish
+apiece, unlashed the sled, and got out our bedding. I had been sleeping
+in robes, Hans in a shedding caribou-hide sleeping-bag that was my pet
+aversion. When he crawled out in the morning he was so covered with hair
+that he looked like a caribou, and the miserable hairs were always
+getting into the food. We fished them out of the coffee, pulled them out
+of the butter, and picked them out of the bread. But now in that
+sleeping-bag he had an enormous advantage. We lay side by side on the
+snow in the lee of the sled, and, tuck myself up with blanket and robe
+as I would, it was impossible to keep the swirling snow from coming in.
+I called the dogs to me and made them lie on my feet and up against my
+side, and so long as they lay still I could get a little warmth, but
+whenever they rose and left me I grew numb again. But Hans in his
+sleeping-bag was snoring. The bag is the only bedding on the coast.
+Added to the physical discomfort of that sleepless, shivery night was
+some mental uneasiness. There was no telling to what height the storm
+might rise, nor how long it might continue. Sometimes travellers
+overtaken in this way on the coast have to lie in their sleeping-bags
+for three days and nights before they can resume their journey. The only
+interest the night held was the thought that came to me that as nearly
+as I could tell we camped exactly on the Arctic Circle. The long night
+dragged its slow length to the dawn at last and the wind moderated a
+little at the same time, so with the first streak in the east I awoke
+Hans, we gathered our poor dogs together, rolled up the snow-incrusted
+bedding, and resumed our journey. Two miles farther on was the igloo!
+Our calls awoke some one and we were bidden to enter. Descending a
+ladder and crawling through a dark passage we came in to the grateful
+warmth and shelter. The chamber was crowded with sleeping Esquimaux and
+reeked with seal oil and fish, but Hans said it "looked good and smelled
+good to him," and so it did to me also. One has to lie out on that coast
+in a storm to appreciate the value of mere shelter. We went at once to
+cooking, for we had eaten nothing but a doughnut or two in twenty-four
+hours, and surely never meal was more relished than the reindeer steaks
+and the coffee we took amongst those still sleeping Esquimaux. I should
+have liked to spend the day and the next night there, for they were
+friendly and kindly, but the wind had moderated somewhat and there was
+still a chance to reach Candle for Sunday. With the offer of a sack of
+flour at Kewalik we induced a couple of Esquimaux to accompany us, for I
+knew we had to cross the mouth of a bay over the ice to reach the
+mainland and I wanted to take no more chances.
+
+Our company, again raised to four, started out about nine, and until the
+Choris Peninsula was reached the trail still skirted the shore. It is
+strange that Kotzebue, who named this peninsula of a peninsula for the
+artist who accompanied his expedition in 1816, should have left the main
+peninsula itself unnamed, and that the British expedition which named
+Cape Blossom ten years later should have failed to supply the omission.
+It still bears no name on the map. We portaged across the Choris
+Peninsula and at the end of the portage took a straight course across
+the mouth of Escholtz Bay (Escholtz was Kotzebue's surgeon) for Kewalik
+on the mainland, passing Chamisso Island, named for Kotzebue's poet
+friend. There is something very interesting to me in this voyage of
+Kotzebue's, and I have long wished to come across a full narrative of
+it. But the bitter wind that swept across that ice-sheet with the
+thermometer at -30° brought one's thoughts back to one's own condition.
+My hands I could not keep warm with the gear that had sufficed for 50°
+and 60° below in the interior, and I was very glad to procure from one
+of our native companions a pair of caribou mitts with the hair inside,
+an almost invulnerable gauntlet against cold. If that wind had been in
+our faces instead of on our sides I am sure we could not have travelled
+at all. At last we won across the ice and brought up at a comfortable
+road-house at Kewalik, about ten miles from Candle. Here we lay
+overnight, taking the opportunity of thawing out and drying the
+frost-crusted bedding, leaving the short run into town for the morning.
+
+[Sidenote: CANDLE CREEK]
+
+The diggings on Candle Creek yield to the Koyukuk diggings only as the
+most northerly gold mining in the world. Although the general methods
+are the same in all Alaskan camps, local circumstances introduce many
+differences. In all Alaskan camps the ground is frozen and must be
+thawed down. The timber of the interior renders wood the natural fuel
+for the production of the steam that thaws the ground, but the scarcity
+of wood on the Seward Peninsula substitutes coal. There is coal on the
+peninsula itself, but of very inferior quality, mixed with ice. One may
+see chunks of coal with veins of ice running through them thrown upon
+the fire. The wood of the interior is a great factor in its commercial
+and domestic economy, and its absence on the Seward Peninsula makes
+great change not only in the natural aspect of the country but in the
+whole aspect of its industrial and domestic life also. Wood-chopping for
+the stove and the mill, wood-sawing, wood-hauling employ no small
+percentage of all the white men in the interior--occupations which do
+not exist at all on the peninsula. But its encompassment by the sea, its
+peninsularity, is the dominating difference between the Seward Peninsula
+and the interior, and does indeed make a different country of it
+altogether. All prices are very much lower on the peninsula because
+ships can bring merchandise directly from the "outside." Thus amongst
+those who have money to spend there is a more lavish scale of living
+than in the interior towns, and luxuries may be enjoyed here that are
+out of the question there. Perhaps, conversely, it is true that life on
+the peninsula is somewhat harder for the poorer class. Whether a railway
+from salt water to the mid-Yukon would redress this great difference in
+the cost of everything may be doubted. Railways do not usually operate
+at less than water-rates. There will probably always be an advantage in
+the cost of living and mining in favour of the Seward Peninsula camps.
+
+There had been no public religious service of any sort in Candle, with
+its several hundreds of population, in three years, so there was special
+satisfaction in having reached the place for Sunday when many miners
+were in town from the creeks, and an overflowing congregation was
+readily assembled. And there was great pleasure in three days' rest at
+the hospitable home of a friend while the temperature remained below
+-40°, exacerbated by a wind that rendered travelling dangerous.
+Moreover, by waiting I had company on the way, and now that I was
+without native attendant or white companion, and disposed, if possible,
+to make the journey right across the peninsula to Council and then to
+Nome without engaging fresh assistance, I was doubly glad of the
+opportunity of travelling with two men bound for the same places and
+acquainted with the route.
+
+[Sidenote: THE SEWARD PENINSULA]
+
+Travelling, like so many other things, is very different on the Seward
+Peninsula. The constant winds beat down and harden the snow until it has
+a crust that will carry a man anywhere. There are only two means by
+which snow becomes crusted; one is this packing and solidifying by the
+wind, and the other is thawing and freezing again. There is much less
+wind in the interior than on the coast, and usually much less snowfall,
+and the greater part of the surface of the country is protected by
+trees; the climate, being continental instead of marine, is not subject
+to such great fluctuations of temperature. A thaw sufficiently
+pronounced or sufficiently prolonged to put a stout crust on the snow
+when freezing is resumed, is a very rare thing in the interior and a
+common thing on the coast. So a striking difference in travel at once
+manifests itself; in the interior all the snow is soft except on a
+beaten trail itself, while in the Seward Peninsula all the snow is alike
+hard. The musher is not confined to trails--he can go where he pleases;
+and his vehicle is under no necessity of conforming in width to a
+general usage of the country--it may be as wide as he pleases. Hence the
+hitching of dogs two and three abreast; hence the sleds of twenty-two,
+twenty-four, or twenty-six inches in width. My tandem rig aroused the
+curiosity of those who saw it. Hence many other differences also.
+Hitherto we had not dreamed of watering the dogs since snow fell; now I
+found their mouths bloody from their ineffectual attempts to dig up the
+hard snow with their teeth, and had to water them night and morning. It
+is not the custom on the Seward Peninsula to cook for the dogs, and dog
+mushers there argue the needlessness of that trouble. But the true
+reason is other and obvious. It is difficult for the traveller to get
+enough wood to cook for himself, let alone the dogs. On the Seward
+Peninsula skis are extensively used when there is soft snow; the
+prevalence of brush almost everywhere in the interior renders them of
+little use--and they are, therefore, little used, snow-shoes being
+universal.
+
+So, as in nearly all such matters everywhere, local peculiarities, local
+differences, local customs, usually arise from local conditions, and the
+wise man will commonly conform so soon as he discovers them. There is
+almost always a sufficient reason for them.
+
+[Sidenote: A "SIDLING" TRAIL]
+
+The journey from Candle to Council was a surprisingly swift one. We
+covered the one hundred and thirty miles in three days, far and away the
+best travelling of the winter so far, but the usual time, I found. The
+hard snow gives smooth passage though the interior of the peninsula is
+rugged and mountainous; two prominent elevations, the Ass's Ears,
+standing up as landmarks during the first day of the journey. The route
+crossed ridge after ridge with steep grades, and the handling of the
+heavy sled alone was too much for me. Again and again it was overturned,
+and it was all that I could do, and more than I ought to have done, to
+set it up again. The wind continued to blow with violence, and shelter
+from it there was none. One hillside struggle I shall always remember.
+The trail sloped with the hill and the wind was blowing directly down
+it. I could keep no footing on the marble snow and had fallen heavily
+again and again, in my frantic efforts to hold sled and dogs and all
+from sweeping down into a dark ravine that loomed below, when I
+bethought me of the "creepers" in the hind-sack, used on the rivers in
+passing over glare ice. With these irons strapped to my feet I was able
+to stand upright, but it was only by a hair's breadth once and again
+that I got my load safely across. When I was wallowing in a hot bath at
+Council two days later I found that my hip and thigh were black and blue
+where I had fallen, though at the time, in my anxiety to save the dogs
+and the sled, I had not noticed that I had bruised myself. So, judging
+great things by little, one understands how a soldier may be sorely
+wounded without knowing it in the heat and exaltation of battle.
+
+Then for a while there would be such travel as one sees in the
+children's picture-books, where the man sits in the sled and cracks his
+whip and is whisked along as gaily as you please--such travel as I had
+never had before; but there was no pleasure in it--the wind saw to
+that.
+
+On the second day we crossed "Death Valley," so called because two men
+were once found frozen in it; a bleak, barren expanse, five or six miles
+across, with a great gale blowing right down it, charged not only with
+particles of hard snow but with spicules of ice and grains of sand. Our
+course was south and the gale blew from the northwest, and the right
+side of one's body and the right arm were continually numb from the
+incessant beating of the wind. The parkee hood had to be drawn closely
+all the time, and the eyes were sore from trying to peer ahead through
+the fur edging of the hood. One grows to hate that wind with something
+like a personal animosity, so brutal, so malicious does it seem. An
+incautious turn of the head and the scarf that protected mouth and nose
+was snatched from me and borne far away in an instant, beyond thought of
+recovery. It seems to lie in wait, and one fancies a fresh shrill of
+glee in its note at every new discomfiture it can inflict. There is
+nothing far-fetched in the native superstition that puts a malignant
+spirit in the wind; it is the most natural feeling in the world. I said
+so that night in camp, and one of my companions mentioned something
+about "rude Boreas," and I laughed. The gentle myths of Greece do not
+fit this country. The Indian name means "the wind beast," and is
+appropriate.
+
+A savage, forbidding country, this whole interior of the Seward
+Peninsula, uninhabited and unfit for habitation; a country of naked rock
+and bare hillside and desolate, barren valley, without amenities of any
+kind and cursed with a perpetual icy blast.
+
+[Sidenote: DEATH VALLEY]
+
+The valley crossed and its ridge surmounted, a still more heart-breaking
+experience was in store. We descended the frozen bed of a creek from
+which the wind had swept every trace of snow so that the ice was
+polished as smooth as glass. The dogs could get no footing and were
+continually down on their bellies, moving their legs instinctively but
+helplessly, like the flippers of a turtle, while the wind carried dogs
+and sled where it pleased. The grade was considerable and in bends the
+creek spread out wide. Nothing but the creepers enabled a man to stand
+at all, and creepers and brake together could not hold the sled from
+careering sideways across the ice, dragging the dogs with it, until the
+runners struck some pebble or twig frozen in the ice and the sled would
+be violently overturned. Twice with freezing fingers I unlashed that
+sled lying on its side, and took out nearly all the load before I could
+succeed in getting it upright again, losing some of the lighter articles
+each time. The third time was the worst of all. The brake had been
+little more than a pivot on which sled and dogs were swung to leeward,
+but now the teeth had become so blunt that, though I stood upon it with
+all my weight, it would not hold at all nor check the sideways motion
+under the impulse of the wind. Right across the creek we went, dragging
+the dogs behind, jerking them hither and thither over the glassy
+surface. I saw the rocks towards which we were driving, but was
+powerless to avert the disaster, and hung on in some hope, I suppose, of
+being able to minimise it, till, with a crash that broke two of the
+uprights and threw me so hard that I skinned my elbow and hurt my head,
+we were once more overturned. Never since I reached manhood, I think,
+did I feel so much like sitting down and crying. It seemed hopeless to
+think about getting down that creek until the wind stopped, and one
+doubts if the wind ever does stop in that country. But there was no good
+sitting there like a shipwrecked mariner, nursing sores and misfortunes;
+presently one would begin to feel sorry for oneself--that last resort of
+incompetence. And the bitter wind is a great stimulus. It will not
+permit inaction. So I was up again, fumbling at the sled lashings as
+best I could with torpid fingers, when one of my companions, uneasy at
+my delay, very kindly made his way back, and with his assistance I was
+able to get the sled upright again without unloading and hold it
+somewhat better on its course until another bend or two brought us to
+the partial shelter of bluffs and, a little farther, to the cabin where
+we were to spend the night. I understood now why my companions had a
+sort of hinged knife-edge fastened to one runner of their sled. By the
+pressure of a foot the knife-edge engaged the ice and held the sled on
+its course. This is another Seward Peninsula device.
+
+[Sidenote: THE KINDLY SWEDE]
+
+I have it in my diary that "a Swede named Petersen was very kind to us
+at the cabin, cooking for us and giving us cooked dog feed." Blessed
+Swede named Petersen!--there are hundreds of them in Alaska--and I shall
+never forget that particular one's kindness--the only man I met in the
+Seward Peninsula who still persisted in cooking dog feed whenever he
+could. He had cooked up a mess of rice and fish enough to last his three
+or four dogs several days while he sojourned at this cabin, and he gave
+it all to us and would take nothing for it. His language was what
+Truthful James calls "frequent and painful and free." I ignored it for a
+while, loath to take exception to anything a man said who had been so
+kind. But at last I could stand it no longer--it took all the savour out
+of his hospitality--and I said: "I hope you won't mind my saying it, for
+I'd hate to give offence to a man who has been so good to strangers as
+you have, but I wish you'd cut out that cursing; it hurts my ears." He
+sat silent a moment looking straight at me, and I was not sure how he
+had taken it. Then he said: "Maybe you been kinder to me saying that,
+than I been to you. That's the first time I ever been call down for
+cursin'. I don't mean nothin' by it; it's just foolishness and I goin'
+try to cut it out."
+
+The dogs had done but ill on the dry fish, accustomed as they were to
+cooked food, and they ate ravenously of their supper. Only the previous
+night Lingo had betrayed his trust for the first and last time. Coming
+out of the cabin just before turning in, to take a last look round, I
+saw Lingo on top of the sled eating something, and I found that he had
+dug a slab of bacon out of the unlashed load and had eaten most of it. I
+knew he was hungry, missing the filling, satisfying mess he was used to,
+and I did not thrash him, I simply said, "Oh, Lingo!" and the dog got
+off the sled and slunk away, the very picture of conscious, shamefaced
+guilt. That was the only time he did such a thing in all the six years I
+drove him.
+
+Council was past its prime at the time of this visit, but just as we
+entered the town, at the end of the third day's run, it seemed in danger
+of going through all the stages of decadence with a rush to total
+destruction out of hand, for a fire had broken out in a laundry, and
+with the high wind still blowing it looked as though every building was
+doomed. Of two chemical engines possessed by the town one refused to
+work, but the vigour and promptness of the people in forming two lines
+down to the river, and passing buckets with the utmost rapidity, coped
+with the outbreak just in time to prevent its spreading beyond all
+control. Tired as we were, we all pitched in and passed buckets until
+parkees and mitts and mukluks were incrusted with ice from water that
+was spilled. Efficient protection is a matter of great difficulty and
+expense in Alaskan towns, and there is not one of them that has escaped
+being swept by fire. The buildings are almost necessarily all of wood,
+the cost of brick and stone construction being prohibitive. No one can
+guarantee ten years of life to a placer-mining town, and there would be
+no warrant for the expenditure of the sums required for fireproof
+building even were the capital available. But the rapidity with which
+they are rebuilt, where rebuilding is justified, is even more remarkable
+than the rapidity with which they are destroyed.
+
+A Saturday and Sunday were very welcome at Council, and the courtesy of
+the Presbyterian minister, who gave up his church and his congregations
+to me, Esquimaux in the morning and white at night, was much
+appreciated.
+
+[Sidenote: NORTON SOUND]
+
+In warmer weather, the thermometer no lower than -5° at the start, but
+with the same gale blowing that had blown ever since we left Candle,
+though it had shifted towards the northeast, we got away on Monday
+morning, bound for Nome, ninety miles away, hoping to reach the half-way
+house that night. Five or six hours' run over good trails, with no
+greater inconvenience than the acceleration of our pace by the wind on
+down grades, until the sled frequently overran the dogs with
+entanglements and spillings, brought us to the seacoast at Topkok, and a
+noble view opened up as we climbed the great bluff. There Norton Sound
+spread out before us, its ice largely cleared away and blown into Bering
+Sea by the strong wind that had prevailed for nearly a week, its waves
+sparkling and dashing into foam in the March sunshine; the distant
+cliffs and mountains of its other shore just visible in the clear air.
+It was an exhilarating sight--the first free water that I had seen since
+the summer, and it seemed rejoicing in its freedom, leaping up with glee
+to greet the mighty ally that had struck off its fetters.
+
+But from this point troubles began to grow. We dropped down presently to
+the shore and passed along the glare surface of lagoon after lagoon, the
+wind doing what it liked with the sled, for it was impossible to handle
+it at all. Sometimes we went along broadside on, sometimes the sled
+first and the dogs trailing behind, moving their silly, helpless paws
+from side to side as they were dragged over the ice on their bellies.
+When we had passed these lagoons the trail took the beach, running
+alongside and just to windward of a telephone-line, with rough shore
+ice to the left and bare rocks to the right. Again and again the already
+injured sled was smashed heavily against a telephone pole. I would see
+the impact coming and strive my utmost to avert it, but without a gee
+pole, and swinging the sled only by the handle-bars, it was more than I
+could do to hold the sled on its course against the beam wind that was
+forcing it towards the ice and the telephone poles; and a gee pole could
+not be used at the rate we had travelled ever since we left Candle. Mile
+after mile we went along in this way. I do not know how many poles I hit
+and how many I missed, but every pole on that stretch of coast was a
+fresh and separate anxiety and menace to me. I think I would have been
+perfectly willing to have abolished and wiped out the whole invention of
+the telephone so I could be rid of those hateful poles. What were
+telephone poles doing in the arctic regions anyway? Telephone poles
+belonged with electric cars and interurban trolley-lines, not with dog
+teams and sleds.
+
+Then it grew dark and the wind increased. I did not know it, but I was
+approaching that stretch of coast which is notorious as the windiest
+place in all Alaska, a place the topography of which makes it a natural
+funnel for the outlet of wind should any be blowing anywhere in the
+interior of the peninsula. My companions were far ahead, long since out
+of sight. I struggled along a little farther, and, just after a
+particularly bad collision and an overturning, I saw a light glimmering
+in the snow to my right. It was a little road-house, buried to the eaves
+and over the roof in snow-drift, with window tunnels and a door tunnel
+excavated in the snow. I was yet, I learned, five miles from Solomon's,
+my destination, but I hailed this haven as my refuge for the night and
+went no farther, more exhausted by the struggle of the last two or three
+hours than by many an all-day tramp on snow-shoes. It was a miserable,
+dirty little shack, but it was tight; it meant shelter from that
+pitiless wind. That night the thermometer stood at 7°, the first plus
+temperature in twenty-two days.
+
+By morning the gale had greatly diminished, and by the time I reached
+Solomon's and rejoined my companions it was calm, the first calm since
+we left the middle Kobuk. We had some rough ice to cross to avoid a long
+detour of the coast, and then we were back on the shore again and it
+began to snow. The snow was soon done and the sun shone, but the new
+coating of dazzling white gave such a glare that it was necessary to put
+on the snow glasses for the first time of the winter--and that is always
+a sign winter draws to a close.
+
+[Sidenote: DOGS AND REINDEER]
+
+On the approach to Nome we had our first encounter with reindeer, and at
+once my dog team became unmanageable. I had had some trouble that
+morning with a horse. A new dog I procured at Kikitaruk had never seen a
+horse before, and made frantic efforts to get at him, leaping at his
+haunches as we passed by. But when they saw the reindeer the whole team
+set off at a run, dragging the heavy sled as if it were nothing. The
+Esquimau driving the deer saw the approaching dogs and hastily drew his
+equipage off the trail farther inshore, standing between the deer and
+the dogs with a heavy whip. What the result would have been had the
+dogs reached the deer it is hard to say. I had kept my stand on the step
+behind the sled and managed to check its wild career with the brake and
+to throw it over and stop the approach before the carnivora reached
+their immemorial prey. Herein lies one of the difficulties of the
+domestication of reindeer in Alaska, a country where so far dogs have
+been the only domestic animals. Again, as we entered the outskirts of
+Nome the incident was repeated, and only the hasty driving of the
+reindeer into a barn prevented the dogs from seizing the deer that time.
+
+[Sidenote: NOME]
+
+Jimmy was long deposed from his ineffectual leadership and a little dog
+named Kewalik--the one I obtained at Kikitaruk--was at the head of the
+team. Kewalik had never seen so many houses before; hitherto almost
+every cabin he had reached on his journeys had been a resting-place, and
+he wanted to dive into every house we passed. At Candle and Council
+both, our stopping-place had been near the entrance to the little town.
+But now we had to pass up one long street after another and I had
+continually to drag him and the team he led first from a yard on this
+side of the road and then from one on the other. The dog was perfectly
+bewildered and out of his head by the number of people and the number of
+houses he saw. We were indeed a sorry, travel-worn, unkempt, uncivilised
+band, man and dogs, with an old, battered vehicle, and we felt our
+incongruity with the new environment as we entered the metropolis of the
+luxury and wealth of the North. Here we passed a jeweller's shop, the
+whole window aglow with the dull gleam of gold and ivory--the terrible
+nugget jewellery so much affected in these parts and the walrus ivory
+which is Alaska's other contribution of material for the ornamental
+arts. Here we passed a veritable department store, its ground-floor
+plate-glass window set as a drawing-room, with gilded, brocaded chairs,
+marquetry table, and ormolu clock, and I know not what costliness of rug
+and curtain. It was all so strange that it seemed unreal after that long
+passage of the savage wilds, that long habitation of huts and igloos and
+tents. Hitherto we had often been fortunate could we buy a little flour
+and bacon; here the choice comestibles of the earth were for sale. I
+looked askance at my greasy parkee as I passed shops where English
+broadcloth and Scotch tweeds were displayed; at my worn, clumsy mukluks
+when I saw patent-leather pumps. But Nome knows how to welcome the
+wanderer from the wilderness and to make him altogether at home. There
+could be no warmer hospitality than that with which I was received by
+the Reverend John White and his wife, than that which I had at many a
+home during my week's stay.
+
+Nothing in the world could have caused the building of a city where Nome
+is built except the thing that caused it: the finding of gold on the
+beach itself and in the creeks immediately behind it. It has no harbour
+or roadstead, no shelter or protection of any kind; it is in as bleak
+and exposed a position as a man would find if he should set out to hunt
+the earth over for ineligible sites.
+
+But Nome is also a fine instance of the way men in the North conquer
+local conditions and wring comfort out of bleakness and desolation by
+the clever adaptation of means to ends.
+
+The art of living comfortably in the North had to be learned, and it has
+been learned pretty thoroughly. People live at Nome as well as they do
+"outside." One may sit down to dinners as well cooked, as well
+furnished, as well served as any dinners anywhere. The good folk of Nome
+delight in spreading their dainty store before the unjaded appetite of
+the winter traveller, and it would be affectation to deny that there is
+keen relish of enjoyment in the long-unwonted gleam of wax candle or
+electrolier upon perfect appointment of glass, silver, and napery, in
+the unobtrusive but vigilant service of white-jacketed Chinaman or Jap.
+Nome has a great advantage over its only rival in the interior,
+Fairbanks, in the matter of freight rates. The same merchandise that is
+landed at the one place for ten or twelve dollars a ton within ten or
+twelve days of its leaving Seattle, costs fifty or sixty at the other,
+and takes a month or more to arrive. But this accessibility in the
+summer is exactly reversed in the winter. No practicable route has been
+discovered along the uninhabited shores of Bering Sea, and all the mail
+for Nome comes from Valdez to Fairbanks and then down the Yukon and
+round Norton Sound by dog team. In winter Fairbanks is within seven or
+eight days of open salt water; Nome a full month. After navigation
+closes in October, the first mail does not commonly reach the Seward
+Peninsula until January. So that, with all its comforts and luxuries,
+Nome is a very isolated place for eight months in the year.
+
+[Illustration: GOLD-MINING AT NOME.]
+
+[Illustration: PULLING THE "PELICAN" OUT WITH A "SPANISH WINDLASS."]
+
+[Sidenote: MINING AT NOME]
+
+We went out with the dog sled to the diggings a few miles behind the
+town, and a busy scene we found, enveloped in steam and smoke. Here an
+old beach line had been discovered and was yielding rich reward for the
+working. A long line of conical "dumps" marked its extension roughly
+parallel with the present shore, and the buckets that arose from the
+depths, travelled along a cable, and at just the right moment upset
+their contents, continually added to these heaps. All the winter
+"pay-dirt" is thus excavated and stored; in the summer when the streams
+run the gold is sluiced out. But that phrase "when the streams run"
+covers a world of difficulty and expense to the miner. In some places in
+this Seward Peninsula, ditches thirty and forty miles long have been
+constructed to insure the streams running when and where they are
+needed.
+
+There was quite a little to do in Nome. A new sled must be bought, and
+another dog, and, above all, some arrangement made about a travelling
+companion. I was not willing to hire a native who would have to return
+here, and I was resolved never again to travel alone. So I put an
+advertisement in the newspaper, desiring communication with some man who
+was intending a journey to Fairbanks immediately, and was fortunate to
+meet a sober, reliable man who undertook to accompany and assist me for
+the payment of his travelling expenses.
+
+The week wore rapidly away, and I began to be eager to depart, mindful
+of the eight hundred odd miles yet to be covered. Spring seemed already
+here and summer treading upon her heels, for the town was all slush and
+mud from a decided "soft snap," the thermometer standing well above
+freezing for days in succession.
+
+A visitor to this place is struck by the number of articles made from
+walrus ivory exposed for sale, chief amongst them being cribbage-boards.
+A walk down the streets would argue the whole population given over to
+the incessant playing of cribbage. The explanation is found in the
+difficulty of changing the direction of Esquimau activity once that
+direction is established. These clever artificers were started making
+cribbage-boards long ago and it seems impossible to stop them. Every
+summer they come in from their winter hunting with fresh supplies carved
+during the leisure of the long nights. The beautiful walrus tusk becomes
+almost an ugly thing when it is thus hacked flat and bored full of
+holes. The best pieces of Esquimau carving are not these things, made by
+the dozen, but the domestic implements made for their own use, and some
+of this work is very clever and tasteful indeed, adorned with fine bold
+etchings of the chase of walrus, seal, and polar bear.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+NOME TO FAIRBANKS--NORTON SOUND--THE KALTAG PORTAGE--NULATO--UP THE
+YUKON TO TANANA
+
+
+WE left Nome on the 13th of March, the night before being taken up by a
+banquet which the Commercial Club was kind enough to give me; indeed,
+the whole stay was marked by lavish kindness and hospitality, and I left
+with the feeling that Nome was one of the most generous and open-handed
+places I had ever visited.
+
+The soft weather continued and made sloppy travel. Our course lay all
+around Norton Sound to Unalaklík, and then over the portage to Kaltag on
+the Yukon; up the Yukon to the mouth of the Tanana, and then up that
+river to Fairbanks. The first day's run was the retracing of our steps
+to Solomon's, and that was done without difficulty save for a new
+trouble with the dogs. It appeared that we no longer had any leader. All
+the winter through my team had been behind another team, and that
+constant second place had turned our leaders into followers. We thought
+we had two leaders, but neither one was willing to proceed without some
+one or something ahead of him. On such good ice-going as this it was out
+of the question for one of us to run ahead of the team simply to please
+these leader-perverts, and the whip had to be wielded heavily on Jimmy's
+back ere he could be induced to fill his proper office--and then he did
+it ill, with constant exasperating stoppings and lookings-back. At
+Solomon's I met a man who had spent some years with Peary in his arctic
+explorations, and I sat up far into the night drawing interesting
+narratives out of him. So far as Topkok we were still retracing our
+steps, but once over the great bluff, which gave no view this time owing
+to the mist which accompanies this soft weather, we were on new ground,
+our course lying wholly along the beach.
+
+At Bluff was the most interesting, curious gold mining I have ever seen,
+the extraction of gold from the sand of Norton Sound, two hundred yards
+or more out from the beach. There it lies under ten or twelve feet of
+water with the ice on top. How shall it be reached? Why, by the exact
+converse of the usual Alaskan placer mining; by freezing down instead of
+thawing down. The ice is cut away from the beginning of a shaft, almost
+but not quite down to the water, leaving just a thin cake. The
+atmospheric cold, penetrating this cake, freezes the water below it, and
+presently the hole is chopped down a little farther, leaving always a
+thin cake above the water. A canvas chute is arranged over the shaft,
+with a head like a ship's ventilator that can be turned any way to catch
+the wind. Gradually the water is frozen down, and as it is frozen more
+and more ice is removed until the bottom is reached, surrounded and
+protected by a cylindrical shaft of ice; then the sand can be removed
+and the gold it contains washed out. They told us they were making good
+money and their ingenuity certainly deserved it.
+
+[Sidenote: ICE TRAVEL]
+
+We stopped that night at the native village of Chinnik, the people of
+which are looked after by a mission of the Swedish Evangelical Church on
+Golofnin Bay, which we should cross to-morrow. But the mission is off
+the trail, and we did not come to an acquaintance with the missionaries
+of this body until we reached Unalaklík. Next day, climbing and
+descending considerable grades in warm, misty weather, we reached
+Golofnin Bay, pursued it some distance, and left it by a very steep,
+long hill that was close to one thousand feet high, at the foot of which
+we were once more on the beach of the sound--and at the road-house for
+the night. From that place the trail no longer hugged the coast but
+struck out boldly across the ice for a distant headland, Moses' Point,
+where we lunched, and, that point reached, struck out again for Isaac's
+Point, most of the travelling during a long day in which we made
+forty-eight miles being four or five miles from land. The day was clear,
+and the shore-line of the other side of the sound, which grew nearer as
+we proceeded, was subject to strange distortions of mirage. The
+road-house that night nestled picturesquely against a great bluff, and
+right across the ice lay Texas Point, for which we should make a
+bee-line to-morrow. Sometimes the traveller must go all round Norton
+Bay, but at this time the ice was in good condition and our route cut
+across the mouth of the bay for twenty-two miles straight for the other
+side. It was like crossing from Dover to Calais on the ice. The passage
+made, the Alaskan mainland was reached once more, the Seward Peninsula
+left behind us, and our way lay across desolate, low-lying tundra
+strewn with driftwood and hollowed out here and there into little
+lagoons. Evidently the waves sweep clean across it in stormy weather
+when the sound is open; a salt marsh. In the midst of it reared a sort
+of lookout tripod of driftwood thirty or forty feet high, lashed and
+nailed together, with a precarious little platform on top and cleats
+nailed to one of the uprights for ascent. I essayed the view, but the
+rusty nails broke under my feet. We deemed it a hunting tower from which
+water-fowl might be spied in the spring. Sixteen miles of this
+melancholy waste brought us to the shore again, to a tiny Esquimau
+village and a tumble-down, half-buried shack of a road-house where we
+should spend the night, a little schooner lying beached in front of it.
+If its exterior were uninviting, the scene as we entered was sinister.
+By the light of a single candle--though it was not yet dark
+outside--amidst unwashed dishes and general grime, sat an evil-eyed
+Portuguese or Spaniard, in a red toque, playing poker with three
+skin-clad Esquimaux. So absorbed were they in the game that they had not
+heard us arrive nor seen us enter. With a brief, reluctant interval for
+the preparation of a poor supper, the card playing went on all the
+evening far into the night. My companion discovered that the chips were
+worth a dollar apiece and judged it to be "considerable of a game." At
+last I arose from my bunk and said that we were tired and had come there
+to sleep, and with an ill grace the playing was shortly abandoned and
+the natives went off. The arctic shores have their beach-combers as well
+as the South Sea Islands.
+
+[Sidenote: UNALAKL�K]
+
+The next day was Sunday, but I was anxious to spend my day of rest at
+Unalaklík and most indisposed to spend it here, so we got away with a
+very early start long before daylight. Six or seven miles of tundra and
+lagoon travel and the trail crossed abruptly a tongue of land and struck
+out over the salt-water ice for a cape fifteen miles away. The going was
+splendid. It was not glare ice, but ice upon which snow had melted and
+frozen again. It was so smooth that one dog could have drawn the sled,
+yet not so smooth as to deny good footing. We kept well out to sea,
+passing close to the mountainous mass of Besborough Island, plainly
+riven by some ancient convulsion from the sheer bluffs of the mainland.
+Our only trouble was in keeping the dogs well enough out, for, not being
+water-spaniels or other marine species, they had a hankering after the
+land and a continual tendency to edge in to shore.
+
+So from headland to headland we made rapid, easy traverse, thoroughly
+enjoying the ride, munching chocolate and raisins, speculating about the
+seasons when it had been possible to cross direct from Nome to Saint
+Michael on the ice, and exchanging stories we had heard of the disasters
+and hairbreadth escapes attending such overbold venture. Only this
+winter three men and a dog team were blown out into Bering Sea by a
+sudden storm, and lay for four days in their sleeping-bags drifting up
+and down on an ice cake, until at last they were blown back to the shore
+ice and made their escape. And there is a fine story of a white man
+rescued in half-frozen state by his Esquimau wife, and carried for miles
+on her back to safety.
+
+At last we turned a point and drew in to the shore, and, not seeing the
+little town till we were almost upon it, arrived at Unalaklík early in
+the afternoon. We had made the two hundred and forty miles, as it is
+called, from Nome, in six days. In the last twelve days of travel we had
+covered five hundred miles, an average of nearly forty-two miles per
+day, far and away the best travelling of the winter. The preceding five
+hundred miles had taken twenty-two days.
+
+We were in time to attend the Esquimau services at the mission both
+afternoon and night, and I found them very much the same as at
+Kikitaruk, with the exception that the singing was much more advanced
+and was very good indeed. There was an anthem of the Danks type sung by
+a choir--the parts well maintained throughout, the attacks good, the
+voices under excellent control--that it pleased and surprised me to
+hear, and there was a long discourse most patiently and, as I judged,
+faithfully interpreted by a bright-looking Esquimau boy. It is well for
+those who speak much through an interpreter to listen occasionally to
+similar discourse. Only so may its unavoidable tediousness be
+appreciated.
+
+[Sidenote: GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS]
+
+The school next day pleased me still more, and I was glad that I had a
+school-day at the place. I heard good reading and spelling, saw good
+writing, and listened with real enjoyment to the fresh young voices
+raised again and again in song. There was, however, something so
+curiously exotic that for a moment it seemed irresistibly funny, in "The
+Old Oaken Bucket," from lips that have difficulty with the vowel sounds
+of English; from children that never saw a well and never will see
+one;--and I was irreverent enough to have much the same feeling about "I
+love thy templed hills," etc., in that patriotic Plymouth Rock song
+which is so little adapted for universal American use that, in a gibe
+not without justice, it has been called "Smith's Country, 'tis of Thee."
+One wonders if they sing it in the Philippine schools; and, so far as
+these regions are concerned, one wishes that some teacher with a spark
+of genius would take Goldsmith's hint and write a simple song for
+Esquimau children that should
+
+        "Extol the treasures of their finny seas
+         And their long nights of revelry and ease";
+
+the splendour of summer's perpetual sunshine and the weird radiance of
+the Northern Lights; but prosody is not taught in your "Normal" school.
+The thing is a vain, artificial attempt to impose a whole body of ideas,
+notions, standards of comparison, metaphors, similes, and sentiments
+upon a race to which, in great measure, they must ever be foreign and
+unintelligible. Here were girls reading in a text-book of so-called
+physiology, and, as it happened, the lesson that day was on the evils of
+tight lacing! The reading of that book, I was informed, is imposed by
+special United States statute, and the teacher must make a separate
+report that so much of it has been duly gone through each month before
+the salary can be drawn. Yet none of those girls ever saw a corset or
+ever will. One is reminded of the dear old lady who used to visit the
+jails and distribute tracts on _The Evils of Keeping Bad Company_.
+
+But these incongruities aside, the school was a good school and well
+taught, the government appointing the teachers, as I learned, upon the
+nomination of the mission authorities; the only way that a government
+school can be successful at any mission station, for the two agencies
+must work together, as one's right hand works with one's left, to effect
+any satisfactory result. The hours spent in it were very enjoyable, and
+one wished one might have had opportunity for further acquaintance with
+some of the bright-faced, interesting children, both full-bloods and
+half-breeds.
+
+Unalaklík is a thriving Esquimau community, noted for its native
+schooner building and its successful seal hunters and fishermen. We were
+rejoiced to see signs of native prosperity and advance, and we left
+Unalaklík with high hope for its future.
+
+Here also was real rest and refreshment at a road-house. Road-houses in
+Alaska are as various in quality as inns are "outside." Our previous
+night's halt was at one of the worst; this was one of the best. The
+proprietor was a good cook and he did his best for us, with omelet and
+pastry, and young, tender reindeer. It has been said that road-house
+keeping in Alaska is like soliciting life insurance "outside," the last
+resort of incompetence. Certain it is that a thoroughly lazy and
+incompetent man may yet make a living keeping a road-house, for there is
+no rivalry save at the more important points, and travellers are
+commonly so glad to reach any shelter that they are not disposed to be
+censorious. None the less, when they find a man who takes a pride in his
+business and an interest in the comfort of his guests, they are highly
+appreciative.
+
+[Sidenote: THE KALTAG PORTAGE]
+
+We should have only an occasional road-house from now on, but expected
+to reach some inhabited cabin each night. Our good travelling was over
+though we did not know it. We knew that the hard snows of the Seward
+Peninsula and the bare ice of Norton Sound were behind us, but we kept
+telling ourselves that the travel of all the winter would surely have
+left a fine trail on the Yukon. We were now about sixty-five miles from
+Saint Michael, by the coast. But taking the ninety-mile portage from
+Unalaklík to Kaltag we should reach the Yukon River more than five
+hundred miles above Saint Michael, so much does that portage cut off.
+This is the route the military telegraph-line takes, and we should
+travel along close beside it much of the way until the Yukon was
+reached.
+
+The soft weather persisted, and we had even doubt about starting out in
+such a rapid thaw. A visit to the telegraph station informed us that the
+warm wave was spread all over interior Alaska and that there was general
+expectation of an early break-up. But if the snow on the portage were
+indeed rapidly going, that was all the more reason for getting across
+before it had altogether gone; so we pulled out in the warm, muggy
+weather, and even as we pulled out it began to rain!
+
+Up the little Unalaklík River, water over the ice everywhere, we went
+for a few miles and then took to the tundra. All the snow had gone
+except just the hard snow of the trail, a winding ribbon of white across
+the brown moss. The rain changed to sleet and back to rain again, and
+soon we were wet through and had much trouble in keeping that
+penetrating, persistent drizzle from wetting our load through the canvas
+cover. Though not an unique experience, it is rare to be wet with rain
+on the winter trail--rarer in the interior probably than on the coast.
+Once since on the Kuskokwim and once on the Fortymile it has happened to
+me in seven winters' travel. We pushed on for thirty miles, past several
+little native villages, until we came to Whaleback, a village part
+Esquimau and part Indian. These were the last Esquimaux we should see,
+and I was sorry, for I had grown to like very heartily and to respect
+very sincerely this kindly, gentle, industrious, good-humoured race.
+Surely they are a people any nation may be proud to have fringing its
+otherwise uninhabitable coasts, and should be eager to aid and conserve.
+There comes a feeling of impotent exasperation to me when I realise how
+many white men there are who speak of them continually with the utmost
+contempt and see them dwindle with entire complacency. The same thing is
+true in even more marked degree about the Indians of the interior: nine
+tenths of the land will never have other inhabitant, of that I am
+convinced, and the only question is, shall it be an inhabited wilderness
+or an uninhabited wilderness? Here, lodging with the natives, and, I
+make no doubt, living off them too, we found a queer, skulking white man
+whom I had met in several different sections of interior Alaska, known
+as "Snow-shoe Joe" or "The Frozen Hobo." The arctic regions one would
+esteem a poor place for the hobo, but this man manages to eke out an
+existence, if not to flourish, therein. Work he will not under any
+circumstances, but subsists on the hospitality of the whites until he
+has entirely worn it out and then removes to the natives, mushing from
+camp to camp and "bumming" his way as he goes. He was on his way to
+Saint Michael, he told me with perfect gravity, "to get work."
+
+[Sidenote: THE U. S. SIGNAL-CORPS]
+
+Before dark we had reached our destination for the night at the Old
+Woman Mountain, the divide between the waters of the Yukon and the
+waters of Norton Sound, and were kindly received and well treated at the
+telegraph station, the only resort on this portage for weary travellers.
+Here is surely a lonely post. For reasons connected with the maintenance
+of the wires and the keeping open of communications, it is necessary to
+have telegraph stations every forty or fifty miles, each with two or
+three men and a dog team, and shelter cabins about half-way between
+stations. A wind that blows a tree down in the narrow right-of-way cut
+through the forest--for we were come to forest again--or a heavy
+snowfall that loads branches until they fall across the wires, a post
+that comes up out of its hole as the thawing of spring heaves the ground
+around it, or the caving of the bank of a stream along which the line
+passes--any one of a dozen such happenings anywhere along its thousand
+miles of course, may put the entire inland telegraph system out of
+operation; and the young men in whose section the interruption
+occurs--they have a means of determining that--must get out at once,
+find the seat of the trouble and repair it. In all sorts of weather,
+unless the thermometer be below -40°, out they must go.
+
+It may be doubted if any other army in the world ever constructed and
+maintained a permanent telegraph line under such arduous conditions. It
+has been the army's one contribution to Alaska, the one justification
+for the enormous expense of maintaining army posts in the interior.
+Indeed it is often said by those who feel keenly the neglect of the
+territory by the general government that this telegraph system is the
+one contribution of the United States to Alaska. It is certainly a great
+public convenience and has assisted very materially in such development
+as the country has made. The men of the signal-corps deserve great
+credit for the faithful, dogged way in which they have carried out year
+after year their difficult and hazardous work, and often and often the
+weather-stressed traveller has been grateful for the hospitality which
+their cabins have afforded him.
+
+They have not been an unmixed blessing to the country; soldiers do not
+usually represent the highest morale of the nation, and though the
+signal-corps is in some respect a picked corps, yet the men are
+soldiers, with many of the soldier characteristics. Too often a remote
+telegraph station has been a little centre of drunkenness, gambling, and
+debauchery with a little circumference of native men and women, and
+while some of the officers of the corps have been willing and anxious to
+do all in their power to suppress this sort of thing in their scattered
+and difficult commands, others have been jealous only for the technical
+efficiency of their work.
+
+[Sidenote: MORE SNOW]
+
+There are many allowances to be made for young men taken from the
+society of their kind and thrust out hundreds of miles in the wilderness
+to sit down for a year or two at one of these isolated spots. They may
+see no women save those amongst a straggling band of Indians for the
+whole time of their exile; they may see no white man save a
+mail-carrier--and in many places not even a mail-carrier--for weeks
+together. Time sometimes hangs very heavily on their hands, for trees
+are not always blowing down, nor wires snapping through the tension of
+the cold, and at some stations there will not be a dozen telegraph
+messages sent the whole winter through. If a young man be at all
+ambitious of self-improvement, here is splendid opportunity of leisure,
+but a great many are not at all so disposed. Character, except the most
+firmly founded, is apt to deteriorate under such circumstances;
+standards of conduct to be lowered. And what is here written of the
+young men of the signal-corps may well apply in great measure to a large
+proportion of all the white men in the country.
+
+The "eighty-mile portage" we had heard of at Nome became ninety miles at
+Unalaklík, and added another five to itself here, so that although we
+had travelled forty-two miles that day we were told that there were yet
+fifty-three ahead before we reached the Yukon.
+
+So we decided not to attempt it in one day and to rest the next night at
+a "repair cabin" twenty-eight miles farther, making a somewhat late
+start in view of a short journey. It had been wiser to have started
+early. During our night at Old Woman Mountain some three inches of snow
+fell, and we found as we descended the Yukon slope that all the moisture
+that had fallen upon us as rain the previous day had fallen on this side
+as snow. The trail was filled full and buried, and so soft and mushy was
+it that although snow-shoes were badly needed they were impossible. The
+snow clung to them and came off the ground with them in heavy, clogging
+masses every time they were lifted. It clung to the sled, to the
+harness, to the dogs' feet, to everything that touched it; it gathered
+in ever-increasing snowballs on the long hair of the dogs. Travelling in
+warm weather in loose, new snow is most disagreeable work. We plugged
+along for twenty miles, and then in the dark in an open country with
+little patches of scattering spruce, had great trouble in finding the
+trail at all.
+
+At last we could find it no longer, and when there was no hope of
+reaching the cabin that night we made a camp. We had now no tent or
+stove with us, so a "Siwash camp" in the open was the best we could do,
+and a wet, miserable camp it was. By inexcusable carelessness on my
+part, candles had been altogether forgotten in the replenishing of the
+supplies, and a little piece an inch long which we found loose in the
+grub box was all that we possessed. Dogs and men alike exhausted with
+the long day's sweating struggle through the deep snow, sleep should
+have come soundly and soon. It did to the rest, but I lay awake the
+night through. The easy, riding travel of the preceding week had been a
+poor preparation for to-day's incessant toil, and I was too tired to
+sleep. In the morning our bedding was covered with a couple of inches
+of new snow. My companion got up at daylight and made a journey of
+investigation ahead, following the trail better, but not finding the
+cabin. We had thought ourselves within a mile or two of it, but
+evidently were farther away. However, when we had eaten a hasty
+breakfast and hitched up and had gone along the trail that had been
+broken that morning to its end, ten yards beyond the place where my
+companion had turned back, we came in sight of the cabin, and there we
+lay and rested and dried things out all day and spent the next night.
+During the day there came a team from Kaltag, and once again we enjoyed
+the delight of receiving, and at the same time conferring, the richest
+gift and greatest possible benefit to the traveller--a trail.
+
+[Sidenote: THE YUKON ONCE MORE]
+
+The next evening as it drew towards dark, after another day of soft,
+warm disagreeable travel, we reached the end of the portage, and the
+broad white Yukon stretched before us once more. Our hearts leaped up
+and I think the dogs' hearts leaped up also at the sight. I called to
+Nanook as we stopped on the bank, "Nanook, there's the good old Yukon
+again!" and he lifted his voice in that intelligent, significant bark
+that surely meant that he saw and understood. We had left the Yukon on
+the 15th of December at Fort Yukon; we reached it again on the 23d of
+March at Kaltag, more than six hundred miles lower down. We had two
+hundred and fifty miles of travel on its surface before us, and then
+close to another two hundred and fifty up the Tanana River to Fairbanks.
+But alas! for the fine Yukon trail we had promised ourselves! As we
+looked out across the broad river there was no narrow, dark line
+undulating over its surface, nor even a faint, continuous inequality to
+hint that trail had been, on snow "less hideously serene"; its perfect
+smoothness and whiteness were unscarred and unsullied. The trail was
+wiped out and swallowed up by the late snows and winds.
+
+[Sidenote: A LEARNED JESUIT]
+
+There is little interest in lingering over the long, laborious,
+monotonous grind up that river on show-shoes. When one has looked
+forward to pleasant, quick travel, the disappointment at slow, heavy
+plodding is the keener. The first little bit of trail we had was as we
+approached Nulato two days later on a Sunday morning, and it was made by
+the villagers from below going up to church at the Roman Catholic
+mission. We arrived in time for service, and enjoyed the natives' voices
+raised in the Latin chants as well as in hymns wisely put into the
+vernacular. It is historically a little curious to find Roman Catholic
+natives singing praises in their own tongue, and Protestant missions,
+like those on the Kobuk and Kotzebue Sound, using a language "not
+understanded of the people." The day was the Feast of the Annunciation
+as well as Sunday, and there was some special decorating of the church
+and perhaps some elaboration of the music. Here for the first and only
+time I listened to a white man so fluent and vigorous in the native
+tongue that he gave one the impression of eloquence. Father Jetté of the
+Society of Jesus is the most distinguished scholar in Alaska. He is the
+chief authority on the native language, and manners and customs, beliefs
+and traditions of the Middle Yukon, and has brought to the patient,
+enthusiastic labour of years the skill of the trained philologist. It
+is said by the Indians that he knows more of the Indian language than
+any one of them does, and this is not hard to believe when it is
+understood that he has systematically gleaned his knowledge from widely
+scattered segments of tribes, jotting down in his note-books old forms
+of speech lingering amongst isolated communities, and legends and
+folk-lore stories still remembered by the aged but not much repeated
+nowadays; always keen to add to his store or to verify or disprove some
+etymological conjecture that has occurred to his fertile mind. His work
+is recognised by the ethnological societies of Europe, and much of his
+collected material has been printed in their technical journals.
+
+A man of wide general culture, master of three or four modern, as well
+as the classic, languages, a mathematician, a writer of beautiful, clear
+English, although it is not his mother tongue, he carries it with the
+modesty, the broad-minded tolerance, the easy urbanity that always
+adorn, though they by no means always accompany, the profession of the
+scholar; and one is better able to understand after some years'
+acquaintance with such a man, after falling under the authority of his
+learning and the charm of his courtesy, the wonderful power which the
+society he belongs to has wielded in the world. If such devotion to the
+instruction of the ignorant as was described at the mission on the
+middle Kobuk be praiseworthy, by how much the more is one moved to
+admiration at the spectacle of this man, who might fill with credit any
+one of half a dozen professional chairs at the ordinary college, gladly
+consecrating his life to the teaching of an Indian school!
+
+Hearing an interest expressed in the massacre which took place at Nulato
+in 1851, Father Jetté offered to accompany us to the site of that
+occurrence, about a mile away. It stands out prominently in the history
+of a country that has been singularly free from bloodshed and outrage,
+and its date is the notable date of the middle river, as the
+establishment of the post at Fort Yukon by the Hudson Bay Company in
+1846 is the notable date of the upper river. They are fixed points in
+Indian chronology by which it is possible to approximate other dates and
+to reach an estimate of the ages of old people.
+
+[Sidenote: THE NULATO MASSACRE]
+
+Much has been written about the Nulato massacre, and the accounts vary
+in many particulars. The Russian post here was first established by
+Malakof in 1838. Burned during his absence by the Indians, it was
+re-established by Lieutenant Zagoskin of the Russian navy in 1842. The
+extortions and cruelties of his successor, Deerzhavin, complicated by a
+standing feud between two native tribes, and probably having the rival
+powers of certain medicine-men as the match to the mine, brought about
+the destruction of the place and the death of all its inhabitants, white
+and native, by a sudden treacherous attack of the Koyukuk Indians. It
+happened that Lieutenant Barnard of the British navy, detached from a
+war-ship lying at Saint Michael to journey up the river and make
+inquiries of the Koyukuk natives as to wandering white men, survivors of
+Sir John Franklin's expedition, who might have been seen or heard of by
+them, was staying at the post at the time and perished in the general
+massacre. His grave, with a headboard bearing a Latin inscription, is
+neatly kept up by the Jesuit priests at Nulato.
+
+In the last few years the river has been invading the bank upon which
+the old village stood, and as the earth caves in relics of the slaughter
+and burning come to light. Old copper kettles and samovars, buttons and
+glass beads, all sorts of metal vessels and implements have been sorted
+out from charred wood and ashes, together with numerous skulls and
+quantities of bones. One of the most interesting of these relics was a
+brass button from an official coat, with the Russian crowned
+double-headed eagle on the face, and on the back, upon examination with
+a lens, the word "Birmingham."
+
+Half the day serving for our day of rest this week, we were up and ready
+to start early the next morning, but so violent a wind was blowing from
+the southeast that we decided to remain, and the clatter of the
+corrugated iron roof and the whirling whiteness outside the windows made
+us glad to be in shelter. As the day advanced the wind increased to
+almost hurricane force, and the two-story house in which we lay began to
+rock in such a manner as to make the proprietor alarmed for his
+dwelling.
+
+There was an "independent" trading-post at this village which seemed to
+present an object-lesson in rapacity and greed. There was not an article
+of standard quality in the store; the clothing was the most rascally
+shoddy, the canned goods of the poorest brands; the whole stock the
+cheapest stuff that could possibly be bought at bargain prices
+"outside," yet the prices were higher even than those that prevail in
+Alaska for the best merchandise. Loud complaints are often made against
+the commercial corporation which does the great bulk of the business in
+interior Alaska, yet if the writer had to choose whether he would be in
+the hands of that company or in the hands of an "independent" trader, he
+would unhesitatingly cast in his lot with the company. The independent
+trader makes money, sometimes makes large money, and makes it fairly
+easily, but the calling seems to appeal mainly, if not wholly, to men of
+low character and no conscience. There are few things that would redound
+more to the benefit of the Indian than a great improvement in the
+character of the men with whom he is compelled to do business.
+
+The wind had subsided by the next morning and had been of benefit rather
+than injury to us, for it had blown the accumulated new snow off the old
+trail so that it was possible to perceive and follow it. But what was
+our surprise to find, with the recollection of that rattling roof and
+swaying building fresh in our minds, that ten miles away there had been
+no wind at all! The snow lay undisturbed on every twig and bough from
+which the gentlest breeze would have dislodged it. One never ceases to
+wonder at what, for want of a better word, must be called the
+_localness_ of much of the weather in Alaska--though, for that matter,
+in all probability it is characteristic of weather in all countries. The
+habit of continual outdoor travel gives scope as well as edge to one's
+observation of such things which a life in one place denies. That
+wind-storm had cut a clean swath across the Yukon valley. Yet it seems
+strange that so violent a disturbance could take place without affecting
+and, to some extent, agitating the atmosphere for many miles adjacent.
+
+[Sidenote: SNOW GLASSES]
+
+So, sometimes in snow-storm, sometimes in wind, always on snow-shoes and
+often hard put to it to find and follow the trail at all, we struggled
+on for two or three days more, sleeping one night at a wood-chopper's
+hut, another in a telegraph cabin crowded with foul-mouthed infantrymen
+sent out to repair the extensive damage of the recent storm and none too
+pleased at the detail, we plodded our weary way up that interminable
+river. At last we met the mail-man, that ever-welcome person on the
+Alaskan trail, and his track greatly lightened our labour. By his
+permission we broke into his padlocked cabin that night by the skilful
+application of an axe-edge to a link of the chain, and were more
+comfortable than we had been for some time. Past the mouth of the
+Koyukuk, past Grimcop, past Lowden, past Melozikaket to Kokrine's and
+Mouse Point, we plugged along, making twenty-two miles one day and
+thirty another and then dropping again to eighteen. The temperature
+dropped to zero, and a keen wind made it necessary to keep the nose
+continually covered. At this time of year the covering of the nose
+involves a fresh annoyance, for it deflects the breath upward, and the
+moisture of it continually condenses on the snow glasses, which means
+continual wiping. A stick of some sort of waxy compound to be rubbed
+upon the glass, bought in New York as a preventive of the deposit of
+moisture, proved entirely useless. In this respect the Esquimau snow
+goggle, which is simply a piece of wood hollowed out into a cup and
+illuminated by narrow slits, has advantage over any shape or kind of
+glass protection. A French metal device of the same order that is
+advertised in the dealer's catalogues was found to fail, perhaps owing
+to a wrong optical arrangement of the slits. It caused an eye-strain
+that brought on headache. But if that principle could be scientifically
+worked out and such a device perfected, it would be a boon to the
+traveller over sun-lit snow, for it would do away with glass altogether,
+with its two chief objections--its fragility and its opacity when
+covered with vapour.
+
+[Sidenote: SNOW-BLINDNESS]
+
+The indispensability of some eye protection when travelling in the late
+winter, and the serious consequences that follow its neglect, were once
+again demonstrated at Mouse Point. The road-house was crowded with
+"busted" stampeders coming out of the Nowikaket country. There had been
+a report of a rich "strike" on a creek of the Nowitna, late the previous
+fall, and a number of men from other camps--some from as far as
+Nome--had gone in there with "outfits" for the winter. The stampede had
+been a failure; no gold was found; there was much indignant assertion
+that no gold ever _had_ been found and that the reported "strike" was a
+"fake," though to what end or profit such a "fake" stampede should be
+caused, unless by some neighbouring trader, it is hard to understand;
+and here were the stampeders streaming out again, a ragged, unkempt,
+sorry-looking crowd in every variety of worn-out arctic toggery, many
+of them suffering from acute snow-blindness. It is surprising that even
+old-timers will go out in the hills for the whole winter without
+providing themselves with protection against the glare of the sun which
+they know will inevitably assail their eyes before the spring, yet so it
+is; and this lack of forethought is not confined to the matter of snow
+glasses: the first half dozen men we received in Saint Matthew's
+Hospital at Fairbanks suffering from severely frozen feet were all
+old-timers grown careless.
+
+Father Ragarou, another Jesuit priest of another type, reached the
+road-house from the opposite direction about the same time we did, and I
+was interested in watching his treatment of the inflamed eyes. Upon a
+disk of lead he folded a little piece of cotton cloth in the shape of a
+tent, and, setting fire to it, allowed it to burn out completely. Then
+with a wet camel's-hair brush he gathered up the slight yellow residuum
+of the combustion and painted it over the eyes, holding the lids open
+with thumb and finger and drawing the brush through and through. An
+incredulous spectator, noticing the sacred monogram neatly stamped upon
+the disk of lead, made some sneering remark to me about "Romish
+superstition," but remembering the Jesuit's bark, and recalling that I
+had in my writing-case at that moment a letter I had brought all the way
+from the Koyukuk addressed to this very priest, begging for a further
+supply of a pile ointment that had proved efficacious, I held my peace.
+Whether it be an oxide or a carbonate, or some salt that is formed by
+the combustion, I am not chemist enough to know, but I saw man after man
+relieved by this application. Even the scoffer was convinced there was
+merit in the treatment, though stoutly protesting that "them letters"
+had nothing to do with it; which nobody took the trouble to argue with
+him. My own custom--we are all of us doctors of a sort in this
+country--is to instil a few drops of a five-per-cent solution of
+cocaine, which gives immediate temporary relief, and then apply frequent
+washes of boric acid, bandaging up the eyes completely in bad cases by
+cloths kept wet with the solution. But I do not know that it brings
+better result than the lead treatment. Certainly it is a matter in which
+an ounce of any sort of prevention is better than a pound of any sort of
+cure. The affection is a serious one, being nothing more or less than
+acute ophthalmia; the pain is very severe, and repeated attacks are said
+to bring permanent weakness of the eyes. Smoked glasses or goggles,[A]
+veils of green or blue or black, even a crescent eye-shade cut out of a
+piece of birch-bark or cardboard and blackened on its under-side with
+charcoal, will prevent the hours and sometimes days of torture which
+this distemper entails.
+
+[Sidenote: HORSES AND MULES]
+
+For a few miles we had the trail of the stampeders, but when that
+crossed the river we put on our snow-shoes and settled to the steady
+grind once more. A day's mush brought us to "The Birches," and another
+to Gold Mountain. Between the two places there was a portage, and the
+trail thereon, protected by the timber, was good. We longed for the time
+when all trails in Alaska shall be taken off the rivers and cut in the
+protecting forest. But we had gone but a mile along this good trail
+when our hearts sank, for we saw ahead of us a procession of army mules
+packing supplies from Fort Gibbon to the telegraph repair parties. We
+pulled out into the snow that the mules might pass, and the soldiers
+said no word, for they knew just how we felt, until the last soldier
+leading the last mule was going by, and he turned round and said: "And
+her name was Maud!" It was in the height of Opper's popularity, his
+"comic supplements" the chief dependence of the road-houses for
+wall-paper. The reference was so apposite that we burst into laughter,
+but there was nothing funny about the devastation that had been wrought.
+That good trail was all gone--the bottom pounded out of it--and nothing
+was left but a ploughed lane punched full of sink-holes. We had no
+trouble following the trail on the river after this encounter, but it
+had been almost as easy going to have struck out for ourselves in the
+unbroken snow of the winter. It is hard to make outsiders understand how
+a man who loves all animals may come to hate horses and mules,
+particularly mules, in this country. Our travelling is above all a
+matter of surface. Distance counts and weather counts, but surface
+counts for more than either. See how fast we came across the Seward
+Peninsula in the most distressing weather imaginable! A well-used dog
+trail becomes so hard and smooth that it offers scarce any resistance to
+the passage of the sled, and for walking or running over in moccasins or
+mukluks is the most perfect surface imaginable. The more it is used the
+better it becomes. But put a horse on that trail and in one passage it
+is ruined. The iron-shod hoofs break through the crust at every step and
+throw up the broken pieces as they are withdrawn. With mules it is even
+worse; the holes they punch are deeper and sharper. Neither man nor dog
+can pass over it again in comfort. One slips and slides about at every
+step, the leg leaders and ankle sinews are strained, the soles of the
+feet, though hardened by a thousand miles in moccasins, become sore and
+inflamed, and at night there is a new sort of weariness that only a
+horse-ruined trail gives. As a rule, the dog trail is of so little
+service to the horse or mule that it were as cheap to break out a new
+one in the snow, and it is this knowledge that exasperates the dog
+musher. So there is not much love lost between the horse man and the dog
+man in Alaska.
+
+[Sidenote: ARMY POSTS AND NATIVES]
+
+At last, after a night at "Old Station," we came in sight of Tanana,
+where is Fort Gibbon, the one the name of the town and the post-office,
+the other the name of the military post and the telegraph office. The
+military authorities refuse to call their post "Fort Tanana" and the
+postal authorities refuse to allow the town post-office to be called
+"Fort Gibbon," so there they lie, cheek by jowl, two separate places
+with a fence between them--a source of endless confusion. A letter
+addressed to Fort Gibbon is likely to go astray and a telegram addressed
+to Tanana to be refused. Stretching along a mile and a half of river
+bank, and beginning to come into view ten miles before they are reached,
+the military and commercial structures gradually separate themselves.
+Here to the left are the ugly frame buildings--all painted
+yellow--barracks, canteen, officers' quarters, hospital, commissariat,
+and so on. Two clumsy water-towers give height without dignity--a
+quality denied to military architecture in Alaska. To the right the town
+begins, and an irregular row of one and two story buildings, stores,
+warehouses, drinking shops, straggle along the water-front.
+
+Unlike most towns in interior Alaska, Tanana does not depend upon an
+adjacent mining camp. It owes its existence first to its geographical
+position as the central point of interior Alaska, at the confluence of
+the Tanana and Yukon Rivers. Most of the freight and passenger traffic
+for Fairbanks and the upper river is transshipped at Tanana, and
+extensive stocks of merchandise are maintained there. The army post is
+the other important factor in the town's prosperity, and is especially
+accountable for the number of saloons. Not only the soldiers, but many
+civilian employees, are supported by the post, and when it is understood
+that three thousand cords of wood are burned annually in the military
+reservation, it will be seen that quite a number of men must find work
+as choppers and haulers for the wood contractors. Setting aside the
+maintenance of the telegraph service, which has already been referred
+to, it may be said without unfairness that the salient activities of the
+army in the interior of Alaska are the consumption of whisky and wood.
+There is no opportunity for military training--for more than six months
+in the year it is impossible to drill outdoors--and the officers
+complain of the retrogression of their men in all soldierly
+accomplishments during the two years' detail in Alaska. Whether the
+prosperity of the liquor dealer be in any real sense the prosperity of
+the country, and whether the rapid destruction of the forest be
+compensated for by the wages paid to its destroyers, may reasonably be
+doubted.
+
+Three miles away is a considerable native village where the mission of
+Our Saviour of the Episcopal Church is situated, with an attractive
+church building and a picturesque graveyard. The evil influence which
+the town and the army post have exerted upon the Indians finds its
+ultimate expression in the growth of the graveyard and the dwindling of
+the village.
+
+This point at the junction of the two rivers was an important place for
+the inhabitants of interior Alaska ages before the white man reached the
+country. Tribes from all the middle Yukon, from the lower Yukon, from
+the Tanana, from the upper Kuskokwim met here for trading and for
+general festivity. It is impossible nowadays to determine when first the
+white man's merchandise began to penetrate into this country, but it was
+long before the white man came himself. Such prized and portable
+articles as axes and knives passed from hand to hand and from tribe to
+tribe over many hundreds of miles. Captain Cook, in 1778, found
+implements of white man's make in the hands of the natives of the great
+inlet that was named for him after his death, and they pointed to the
+Far East as the direction whence they had come. He judged that they had
+been brought from the Hudson Bay factories clean across the continent.
+There are many Indians still living who remember when they saw the
+first white man, and some were well grown at the time, but diligent
+inquiry has failed to discover one who ever saw a stone axe used, though
+some old men have been found who declared that their fathers, when
+young, used that implement. Traces have been discovered of the
+importation of edge-tools from four directions--from the mouth of the
+Yukon; from the Lynn Canal, by way of the headwaters of the Yukon; from
+the Prince William Sound, by way of the headwaters of the Tanana; as
+well as from the Hudson Bay posts in the Canadian Northwest, by way of
+the Porcupine River.
+
+When the Russians established themselves at Nulato in 1842, and the
+Hudson Bay Company put a post at Fort Yukon in 1846, Nuchalawóya, as
+Tanana was called, became the scene of commercial rivalry, and it is
+said that by the meeting of the agents and voyageurs of the two
+companies at this point the identity of the Yukon and Quikpak Rivers was
+discovered.
+
+The stories that linger with the village ancients of the great numbers
+of Indians who used to inhabit the country are doubtless based upon
+recollections of the gathering at old Nuchalawóya, when furs were
+brought here from far and wide, when there was no other place of
+merchandise in mid-Alaska. Now almost every Indian village has a trader
+and a store. That the race has diminished, and in most places is still
+diminishing, is beyond question, but that it was ever very largely
+numerous the natural conditions of the country forbid us to believe.
+
+[Sidenote: WHISKY-PEDDLERS]
+
+During the Reverend Jules Prevost's time at Tanana--and he was in
+residence in the year of this journey--from careful vital statistics
+kept during two periods of five years each, the race seemed barely to be
+holding its own; but since that time there has been a considerable
+decline, coincident with the increase of drunkenness and debauchery at
+the village when Mr. Prevost's firm hand and watchful eye were
+withdrawn. The situation tends to grow worse, and while one does not
+give up hope, for that would mean to give up serious effort, the outlook
+for the Indians at this place seems unfavourable. Two hundred soldiers,
+six or eight liquor shops,--the number varies from year to year,--three
+miles off a native village of perhaps one hundred and fifty souls, and
+dotting those intervening miles cabins chiefly occupied by "bootleggers"
+and go-betweens--that is the Tanana situation in a nutshell. The men
+desire the native girls, and the liquor is largely a lure to get them.
+Tuberculosis and venereal disease are rife, and the two make a terribly
+fatal combination amongst Indians.
+
+It was good to enjoy Mr. and Mrs. Prevost's hospitality, and it was good
+to speak through such an admirable interpreter as Paul. Something more
+than intelligence and knowledge of the languages are required to make a
+good interpreter; there must be sympathy and the ability to take fire.
+With such an interpreter, leaping at the speaker's thoughts, carrying
+himself entirely into his changing moods, rising to vehemence with him
+and again dropping to gentleness, forgetting himself in his
+identification with his principal, there is real pleasure in speaking to
+the natives who hang upon his vicarious lips. On the other hand, one of
+the most intelligent mission interpreters in the country is also so
+phlegmatic in disposition, so lifeless and monotonous in his speech, and
+particularly so impassive of countenance, that he reminds one of
+Napoleon's saying about Talleyrand: that if some one kicked him behind
+while he was speaking to you his face would give no sign of it at all.
+
+[Sidenote: CHENA AND FAIRBANKS]
+
+It is not necessary to write much detail of the two-hundred-mile journey
+to Fairbanks up the Tanana River. The trail was then wholly on the
+river, but now it has been taken wholly off, as every Alaskan musher
+hopes some day will be done with all trails. The region about the mouth
+of the river and for some miles up is one of the windiest in the
+country, and there is always troublesome crossing of bare sand-bars and
+of ice over which sand has been blown. The journey hastens to its close;
+men and dogs alike realise it, and push on willingly over longer stages
+than they had before attempted.
+
+Two days from Tanana we were luxuriating in the natural hot springs near
+Baker Creek, wallowing in the crude wooden vat, when "Daddy Karstner"
+had shovelled enough snow in to make entering the water possible, and
+emerging ruddy as boiled lobsters. It was a beautiful and interesting
+spot then, with noble groves of birch and the finest grove of
+cottonwood-trees in Alaska--all cut down now--all ruined in a plunging
+and bounding and quite unsuccessful attempt to make a "Health Resort" of
+the place for the "smart set" of Fairbanks. It is a scurvy trick of
+Fortune when she gives large wealth to a man with no feeling for trees.
+We spent Sunday there and roamed over the curious domain, snow-free
+amidst all the surrounding snow, rank in vegetation amidst the
+yet-lingering winter death; and then we wallowed again.
+
+Tolovana, Nenana, and then one long run of fifty-four miles, the longest
+and last run of the winter, and--Chena and Fairbanks. But just before we
+reached Chena, as we passed the fish camp where the dogs had been
+boarded the previous summer, Nanook stopped the whole team, looked up at
+the bank and gave utterance to his pronounced five barks on the
+descending scale. None of the other dogs seemed to notice or recognise
+the place, but Nanook said as plainly as if he had uttered speech:
+"Well, well! there's where I spent last summer!"
+
+We reached Fairbanks on the 11th of April, in time for Good Friday and
+Easter, after an absence of four months and a half--with the accumulated
+mail of all that period awaiting me. The distance covered was about
+twenty-two hundred miles, three fourths of it on foot, more than half of
+it on snow-shoes. At Chena I had called up the hospital at Fairbanks on
+the telephone, and the exchange operator had immediately recognised my
+voice and bidden me welcome; but when I reached Fairbanks, a light beard
+that I had suffered to grow during the winter made me unrecognisable by
+those who knew me best. So effectually does a beard disguise a man and
+so surely may his voice identify him.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[A] This was written before the writer learned the superior protection
+afforded by _amber_ glass.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE "FIRST ICE"--AN AUTUMN ADVENTURE ON THE KOYUKUK
+
+
+IT is not attempted in this narrative to give separate account of all
+the journeys with which it deals. That would involve much repetition and
+tedious detail. Our long journey has been described from start to
+finish, taking the reader far north of the Yukon, then almost to the
+extreme west of Alaska, and then round by the Yukon to mid-Alaska again.
+It is proposed now to give sketches of such parts of other journeys as
+do not cover the same ground, and they will lie, with one exception,
+south of the Yukon. While visiting many of the same points every winter,
+it has been within the author's good fortune and contrivance to include
+each year some new stretch of country, sometimes searching out and
+visiting a new tribe of natives, and blazing the way for the
+establishment of permanent missionary work amongst them. To these
+initial journeys belongs a zest that no subsequent travels in the same
+region ever have; there is a keen interest in what every new turn of a
+trail shall bring, every new bend of a river; there is eagerness rising
+with one's rising steps to excitement for the view from a new mountain
+pass; above all, there is deep satisfaction coupled with a sense of
+solemn responsibility in being the first to reach some remote band of
+Indians and preach to them the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. There
+are few men nowadays on the North American continent to whom that
+privilege remains.
+
+A period of nearly three years elapses between the beginning of the
+journey that has already been described and the short sketch of a
+journey that follows. Many things had happened in those three years. It
+had been the happy duty of the writer to return to the Koyukuk late in
+the winter of 1906-7, empowered to build the promised mission for the
+hitherto neglected natives of that region. Pitching tent at a spot
+opposite the mouth of the Alatna, with the aid of a skilled carpenter
+and a couple of axemen brought from the mining district above, and the
+labour of the Indians, the little log church and the mission house were
+put up and prepared for the two ladies--a trained nurse and a
+teacher--who should arrive on the first steamboat. The steamboat that
+brought them in carried him out on its return trip, and the next year
+was spent in the States making known the needs of the work in Alaska and
+securing funds for its advancement.
+
+[Sidenote: DOCTOR GRAFTON BURKE]
+
+On my return I brought with me a young physician, Doctor Grafton Burke,
+as a medical missionary, and a half-breed Alaskan youth, Arthur, who had
+been at school in California, as attendant and interpreter. A
+thirty-two-foot gasoline launch designed for the Yukon and its
+tributaries was also brought and was launched at the head of Yukon
+navigation at Whitehouse. The voyages of the _Pelican_ on almost all the
+navigable waters of interior Alaska do not belong to a narrative
+concerned solely with winter travel, but her maiden voyage ended in an
+unexpected and rather extraordinary journey over the ice which is
+perhaps worth describing. After the voyage down the Yukon, and up and
+down the Tanana, it was purposed to take the boat up the Koyukuk to the
+new mission at the Allakaket, where dogs and gear had been left, and put
+her in winter quarters there. The delays that associate themselves not
+unnaturally with three novices and a four-cylinder gasoline engine, had
+brought the date for ascending the Koyukuk a little too late for safety,
+though still well within the ordinary season of open water. The
+possibility of an early winter closing the navigation of that stream
+before the _Pelican_ reached her destination had been entertained and
+provided against, though it seemed remote. Three dogs, needed anyway to
+replace superannuated members of the team, had been bargained for at
+Tanana and accommodations for them arranged, and a supply of dog fish
+stowed on the after deck of the launch. But when we went to pay the
+arranged price and receive the dogs, the vender's wife and children set
+up such a remonstrance and plaintive to-do that he went back on his
+bargain and we did not get the dogs. There was no time to hunt others,
+to linger was to invite the very mishap we sought to guard against, so
+we pulled out dogless, reached the mouth of the Koyukuk on the 17th of
+September and, having taken on board the supply of gasoline cached
+there, turned our bow up the river the next morning. For five days we
+pushed up the waters of that great, lonely river, and by that time we
+were some twenty-five miles above Hogatzakaket, three hundred and
+twenty-five miles from the mouth and one hundred and twenty-five miles
+from the mission, at the camp of a prospector who had recently poled up
+from the Yukon. We woke on board the launch the next morning to find ice
+formed all around us and ice running in the river. The thermometer had
+gone to zero in the night.
+
+[Sidenote: THE RUNNING ICE]
+
+A very brief attempt to make our way against the running ice showed the
+danger of doing so, for the thin cakes had knife-edges and cut the
+planking of the boat so that she began to leak. Then there came to me
+with some bitterness that I had earnestly desired a thin steel
+armour-plating at the water-line, but had allowed myself to be persuaded
+out of it by her builders. So again my forethought had been of no
+avail--though, of course, lightness of draught _was_ the first
+consideration. We put back to the camp and proceeded to flatten out and
+cut up all the empty cans and tinware we could find and nail it along
+the water-line of the boat, but the prospector persuaded us to wait a
+day or two. He had never seen a river close with the first little run of
+ice. He looked for a soft spell and open water yet. It was foolish to
+risk the boat against the ice. So we waited; and night after night the
+thermometer fell a little lower and a little lower, until presently a
+sheet of ice stretched across the whole river in the bend where we lay.
+We were frozen in. The remote possibility we had feared and sought to
+guard against had happened. Navigation had ceased on the Koyukuk at the
+earliest date anybody remembered, the 23d of September. Three days more
+had surely taken us to the mission where they had long expected us; now
+we should have to make our way on foot, without dogs, on the dangerous
+"first ice," as it is called, taking all sorts of chances, pulling a
+Yukon sled, with tent and stove, grub and bedding, "by the back of the
+face."
+
+But first there was the launch to pull out and make snug for the winter
+and safe against the spring break-up. A convenient little creek mouth
+with easy grade offered, which was one of the reasons I had not pushed
+on the few more miles we could have made. Here were eligible winter
+quarters; farther on we might have trouble in putting the boat in
+safety; here also was a kindly and capable man willing to assist us.
+
+It was our great good fortune to find this man at this spot. A steamboat
+he had signalled as she entered the mouth of the Koyukuk had passed him
+by unheeded, and he had been left to make his way six hundred miles up
+to the diggings, with his winter's outfit in a poling boat. He had
+accomplished more than half the task, and, warned by the approach of
+winter, had stopped at this place a few days before we reached it, and
+had begun the building of a little cabin; meaning to prospect the creek,
+which had taken his eye as having a promising look. The cabin we helped
+him finish was the twenty-first cabin he had built in Alaska, he
+informed us.
+
+There is something very impressive about the quiet, self-reliant,
+unrecorded hardihood of the class of which this man was an excellent
+type. We asked him why he had no partner, and he said he had had several
+partners, but they all snored, and he would not live with a man that
+snored. He had prospected and mined in many districts of Alaska during
+nearly twenty years. Once he had sold a claim for a few hundred dollars
+that had yielded many thousands to the purchaser, and that was as near
+wealth as he had ever come. But he had always made a living, always had
+enough money at the close of the summer to buy his winter's "outfit" and
+try his luck somewhere else.
+
+[Sidenote: THE PROSPECTOR]
+
+Singly, or in pairs, men of this type have wandered all over this vast
+country: preceding the government surveys, preceding the professional
+explorer, settling down for a winter on some creek that caught their
+fancy, building a cabin, thawing down a few holes to bed-rock, sometimes
+taking out a little gold, more often finding nothing, going in the
+summer to some old-established camp to work for wages, or finding
+employment as deck-hand on a steamboat.
+
+With an axe and an auger they have dotted their rough habitations all
+over the country; with a pick and a shovel and a gold pan they have
+tested the gravels of innumerable creeks. They know the drainage slopes
+and the practicable mountain passes, the haunts of the moose and the
+time and direction of the caribou's wanderings. The boats they have
+built have pushed their noses to the heads of all navigable streams; the
+sleds they have made have furrowed the remotest snows. In the arts of
+the wilderness they are the equal of the native inhabitant; in endurance
+and enterprise far his superior. The more one learns by experience and
+observation what life of this sort means, and realises the demands it
+makes upon a man's resourcefulness, upon his physique, upon his good
+spirits, upon his fortitude, the more one's admiration grows for the
+silent, strong men who have gone out all over this land and pitted
+themselves successfully against its savage wildness. Often in stress for
+the necessaries of life, there are yet no men as a class more
+free-handed and generous; trained to do everything for themselves, there
+are none more willing to help others.
+
+It is no small task to pull a four-ton boat out of the water with only
+such wilderness tackle as we could devise. We made ways of soft timbers,
+squaring and smoothing them; we cut down many trees for rollers; we dug
+and graded the beach. Then, having altogether unloaded her and built a
+high cache of poles and a platform for her stuff, and having chopped the
+ice from all around her, we rigged a Spanish windlass and wound that
+boat out of the water with the half-inch cable she carried, and up on
+the ways and well into the mouth of the little creek. Then we levelled
+her up and thoroughly braced her and put her canvas cover all over her,
+and she lay there until spring and took no harm at all.
+
+Arthur had meantime been making a sled of birch, intending to pull it
+himself while the doctor and I pulled a Yukon sled borrowed from our
+friend the prospector. By the 6th of October all our dispositions were
+made for departure, and the ice seemed strong enough to warrant trusting
+ourselves to it; but we waited another two days, the thermometer still
+reaching a minimum each night somewhere around zero. When we said
+good-bye to our friend Martin Nelson (sometimes one wonders if anywhere
+else in the world can be found men as kind and helpful to strangers) and
+started on our journey, it soon appeared that Arthur's sled was more
+hindrance than help. There was no material to iron the runners save
+strips of tin can, and these could not be beaten so smooth that they did
+not drag and cut on the ice. So the load was transferred to our sled and
+the little sled abandoned, and we took turns at the harness. This was
+the order of the journey: one man went ahead with an axe to test the
+ice; one man put the rope trace about his shoulders; one man pushed at
+the handle-bars which had been affixed to the sled. It was fortunate
+that amidst the equipment on the launch were two pairs of ice-creepers.
+Without them any sort of pulling and pushing on the glare ice would have
+been impossible.
+
+We soon found that the bend in which we had frozen was no sort of index
+of the general condition of the river. Much of it was still wide open,
+and every elbow between bends was piled high with rough ice from
+pressure jams. There was shore ice, however, even in the open bends,
+along which we were able to creep; and, though the ice-jams gave
+considerable trouble, yet we did very well the first day and camped at
+dark with eighteen or nineteen miles to our credit, in the presence of a
+great, red, smoky sunset and a glorious alpenglow on a distant snow
+mountain.
+
+The next day was full of risks and difficulties. We were to learn more
+about the varieties and vagaries of ice on that journey than many
+winters' travel on older ice would teach.
+
+[Illustration: THE START OVER THE "FIRST ICE."]
+
+[Illustration: "ROUGH GOING."]
+
+[Sidenote: THE START]
+
+At times, for a few hundred yards, the sled would glide with little
+effort over smooth, polished ice; then would come a long sand-bar, the
+side of which we had to hug close, and the ice upon it was what is
+called "shell-ice," through several layers of which we broke at every
+step. As the river fell, each night had left a thin sheet of ice
+underneath the preceding night's ice, and the foot crashed through the
+layers and the sled runners cut through them down to the gravel and sand
+at the bottom. Then would come another smooth stretch on which we made
+good time. But as we advanced up the river the current was swifter and
+swifter and the ice conditions grew steadily worse. Here was a steep-cut
+bank with just about eighteen or twenty inches of ice adhering to it and
+the black, rushing water beyond. We must either get our load along that
+shelf or unload the sled and pack everything over the face of a rocky
+bluff. Arthur passed over it first, testing gently with the axe, and
+found it none too strong. But the alternative was so toilsome that we
+resolved to take the chance. The doctor put the trace over his
+shoulders, Arthur took the handle-bars, while I climbed to a ledge of
+the rocks and, with a rope made of a pair of camel's-hair puttees
+unwound for the purpose and fastened to the sled, took all the weight I
+could and eased the sled over the worst place where the ice sloped to
+the water. If the ice had broken I might have held the sled from sinking
+until one of the others came to me, or I might not; the boys would
+probably have gone in too. It was a most risky spot and the sort of
+chance no one would think of taking under ordinary circumstances. As it
+was, the ice broke under Arthur's feet, and only by throwing his weight
+on the sled did he save himself a ducking. But we got the load safely
+across.
+
+A good run of perhaps a mile, and then we had to go back at least half a
+mile, for the ice played out altogether on our side of the river as we
+reached the Batzakaket, and there was open water in the middle. To reach
+the shore ice that was continuous on the other side, we had to "double"
+the open water. With such varying fortune the day passed, and we camped
+on the level ice of a little creek tributary to the right bank, having
+made perhaps another nineteen miles.
+
+When I awoke in the morning my heart sank at the tiny, creeping patter
+of fine snow on the silk tent. Snow was one thing I greatly dreaded, for
+there was not a pair of snow-shoes amongst us! A little snow would not
+do much harm, but if once snow began to fall we might have a foot or two
+before it ceased, and then we should be in bad case. It stopped before
+noon, but the half-inch that fell made the sled drag much heavier. The
+actual force to be exerted was not the most laborious feature of pulling
+that sled; it was the jerk, jerk, jerk on the shoulders. A dog's four
+legs give him much smoother traction than a man's two legs give, just as
+a four-cylinder engine will turn a propeller with much less vibration
+than a two-cylinder engine. Every step forward gave an impulse that
+spent itself before the next impulse was given, and the result was that
+the shoulders grew sore.
+
+We came that morning to the longest and roughest ice-jam we had so far
+encountered. It was as though a thousand bulls had been turned loose in
+a mammoth plate-glass warehouse. Jagged slabs of ice upended everywhere
+in the most riotous confusion, and it was impossible to pick any way
+amongst them, so a man had to go ahead and hew a path. It was while thus
+engaged that the doctor fell and injured his knee so severely on a sharp
+ice point that he hobbled in pain the rest of the trip. This was a very
+serious matter to us, for, though he insisted on still taking his trick
+at the traces, his effectiveness as a motive power was much diminished;
+and we had no sooner thus hewed and smashed our way through that jam
+than we had to hew and smash it across to the other side again in our
+search for passage.
+
+[Sidenote: "BY THE BACK OF THE FACE"]
+
+Then we came to a place where, in order to cut off a long sweeping curve
+of the river with open water and bad shore ice, we went through a dry
+slough and had to drag those iron runners over gravel and stones, where
+sometimes it was all the three of us could do to move the sled a few
+feet at a time. Yet all along the banks were willows, and if we had only
+known then what we know now we would have cut down and split some
+saplings and bound them over the iron, and so have saved three fourths
+of that labour.
+
+[Sidenote: BEAR MEAT AND BEANS]
+
+So the day's run was short, though the most exhausting yet, and we were
+all thoroughly tired out when we pitched the tent. I have note of a
+great supper of bear meat and beans, the meat the spoil of our friend
+the prospector's gun. It is one of the compensations of human nature
+that the satisfaction of appetite increases in pleasure in proportion to
+the bodily labour that is done. With food abundant and at choice, I do
+not like bear meat and will not eat beans. Yet my diary bears special
+note of the delicious meal they furnished on this occasion. Put any
+philosopher in the traces, or set him ahead of the dog team on
+show-shoes, breaking trail all day, and towards evening it is odds that
+his mind is not occupied with deep speculations about the infinite and
+the absolute, but rather with the question of what he will have for
+supper. Particularly should the grub be a little short, should fresh
+meat give out, or, above all, should sugar be "shy," it is astonishing
+how one's mind runs on eating and what elaborate imaginary repasts one
+partakes of. Yet of all food that a man ever eats there is none that is
+so relished and gives such clear gustatory pleasure as the plain, rough
+fare of the camp--provided it be well cooked. Greatly as we were in need
+of sleep, we got little, for the doctor's knee pained him all night and
+poor Arthur developed a raging toothache that did not yield until
+carbolic acid had been thrice applied.
+
+Soon after we started the next day, the river narrowed and swept round a
+series of mountain bluffs and we began to have the gloomiest
+expectations of trouble. It seemed certain that ice would fail us for
+passage, and we would have to pack our sled and its load by slow relays
+over the mountain. But to our delight we passed between the bluffs on
+good, firm, smooth ice, and it was not until we emerged on the flat
+beyond that our difficulty began. So it is again and again on the trail.
+Almost always it is the unexpected that happens; almost always it is
+something quite different from what our apprehensions have dwelt upon
+that arises to hinder and distress us. A tongue of level land that
+struck far out into the water, a cut mud bank with a current so swift
+that no ice at all had formed along it, interposed an obstacle that it
+took hours to circumvent. We had to leave the sled and cut a trail
+through the brush for half a mile along this peninsula in order to reach
+a stretch of the river where the ice was resumed, and the little snow
+that had fallen being quite insufficient to give the sled good passage,
+we had an exceedingly arduous job in getting it across.
+
+A mile or two of good going brought us in view of the smoke of a human
+habitation. What a blessed sight often and often this waving column of
+blue smoke in the distance is! Sometimes it means life itself to the
+Alaskan musher, and it always means warmth, shelter, food,
+companionship, assistance; all that one human being can bring to
+another. "The bright and the balmy effulgence of morn" never "breaks on
+the traveller faint and astray" with half the rejoicing that comes with
+the first sight of mere smoke. "I believe I see smoke," cried Arthur,
+with the quick vision of the native. "Where? Where?" we eagerly
+inquired, and the doctor left the handle-bars and limped forward to the
+boy ahead with the axe. "Away yonder on that bank," pointed Arthur. "I
+see it! I see it!" the doctor shouted; "we're coming to a house, we're
+coming to people!" The trip was a severe apprenticeship to Alaskan life
+for a man straight from the New York hospitals, although before the
+accident to his knee I had declared that if only they could be trained
+to live on dry fish I thought a team of young doctors would haul a sled
+very well. He was delighted at coming upon the first inhabited house we
+had seen since we helped Nelson to build his little cabin--and _that_
+was only the second inhabited house in three hundred miles.
+
+[Sidenote: BREAKING THROUGH]
+
+But, perhaps because we grew less cautious in our excitement, almost
+immediately after we had spied the smoke of the cabin we got into one of
+the worst messes of the whole trip. Arthur had pushed ahead and we had
+followed with a spurt, and almost at the same time all three of us
+became aware that we were on dangerous ice. Arthur cried, "The ice is
+breaking; go back!" just as we began to feel it swaying under our feet.
+I shouted to the doctor, "Go _on_ to the bank quick!" and pushed with
+all my might, and we managed to make a few yards more towards shallow
+water, over ice that bent and cracked at every step, before it gave way
+and let down the sled and the men into two feet of water. Arthur had run
+safely over the breaking ice and had gained the bank, and as I write, in
+my mind's eye I can see the doctor, who had been duly instructed in the
+elementary lessons of the trail, standing in the water and calling to
+Arthur: "Make a fire quick; make a fire. I'm all wet!"
+
+But it was not necessary to make a fire, for the thermometer was no
+lower than 10° or 15° above zero, and the chief trouble was not the
+wetting of our legs but the wetting of the contents of the sled. Along
+the bank was stronger ice, and we managed, though not without much
+difficulty, to get the sled upon it and to make our way to the Indian
+cabin.
+
+As soon as old "Atler" (I have never been quite sure of what white
+man's name that is a corruption) knew who we were, his hospitality,
+which had been ready enough at first sight, became most cordial and
+expansive. While we pulled off our wet clothing his wife hung it up to
+dry and had the kettle on and some tea making, and he and Arthur got out
+our wet bedding and festooned it about the cabin. Most fortunately the
+things that would have suffered most from water did not get wet. So
+there we lay all the afternoon, having made no more than six miles, and
+there we lay all the next day, which was Sunday.
+
+There was a sort of awful interest that centred upon one member of this
+family, a boy of seven or eight years. The previous spring he had killed
+his uncle by the accidental discharge of a .22 rifle, shooting him
+through the heart. The gun had been brought in loaded and cocked and had
+been set in a corner of the cabin, and the child, playing with it, had
+pulled the trigger. The carelessness of Indians with firearms is the
+frequent cause of terrible accidents like this. The child was still too
+young to realise what he had done, but one fancies that later it will
+throw a gloom on his life.
+
+To my great relief and satisfaction I was able to arrange here for a
+young Indian man to accompany us with his one dog. He was a native of
+those parts and knew every bend and turn of the river. We were, indeed,
+in great need of help. The doctor's knee grew worse rather than better,
+and Arthur was suffering the return of an old rheumatism in his leg. I
+was the only sound member of the party, and my shoulders were galled by
+the rope and my feet tender and sore from continual wearing of the
+crampons. We were now not quite half-way--some sixty miles lay behind us
+and sixty-five before--and we had been travelling four days.
+
+[Sidenote: "ONE-EYED WILLIAM"]
+
+Divine service being done on Sunday morning, the whole of it well
+interpreted by Arthur to the great satisfaction of the Indians, he and
+"One-Eyed William," our recruit, started out to survey to-morrow's
+route. In this reconnaissance William broke through some slush ice at
+the greatest depth of the river in seeking a safe place to cross, and,
+had Arthur not been with him, would almost certainly have drowned, for
+the current was very swift and the man, like most Indians, unable to
+swim a stroke;--though, indeed, swimming is of little avail for escape
+out of such predicament and is a poor dependence in these icy waters
+winter or summer. More beans boiled and a batch of biscuits baked
+against our departure, and evening prayer said and interpreted, we were
+ready for bed again.
+
+Our visit was a great delight to old Atler. An inflamed eye was much
+relieved by the doctor's ministrations, and the natural piety which he
+shares with most Indians was gratified at the opportunity of worship and
+instruction. A good old man, according to his lights, I take Atler to
+be, well known for benevolence of disposition and particularly priding
+himself on being a friend of the white man. He told us of one unworthy
+representative of that race he had helped a year ago. The man had come
+out of the Hogatzitna (Hog River) country, entirely out of food, himself
+and a couple of dogs nigh to starvation, and Atler had taken care of him
+for several days while he recuperated and had given him grub and dog
+fish enough to get him to Bettles, one hundred and thirty miles away,
+where he could purchase supplies. The old Indian had robbed his own
+family's little winter stock of "white-man's grub" that this stranger
+might be provided, and had never heard a word from him since, though he
+had promised to make return when he reached Bettles.
+
+Unfortunately Alaska's white population is sprinkled with men like this,
+men without heart and without conscience, and it is precisely such
+rascals who are loudest in their contemptuous talk of the Indians. It is
+such men who chop down the woodwork of cabins rather than be troubled to
+take the axe into the forest a few rods away, who depart in the morning
+without making kindling and shavings, careless how other travellers may
+fare so themselves be warm without labour; who make "easy money" in the
+summer-time by dropping down the Yukon with a boat-load of "rot-gut"
+whisky, leaving drunkenness and riot at every village they pass; who
+beget children of the native women and regard them no more than a dog
+does his pups, indifferent that their own flesh and blood go cold and
+hungry. They are the curse and disgrace of Alaska, and they often go
+long time insolent and unwhipped because our poor lame law is not nimble
+enough to overtake them; "to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness
+for ever," one's indignation is sometimes disposed to thunder savagely
+with Saint Jude; and indeed there needs a future punishment to redress
+the balance in this country.
+
+[Sidenote: FIDO]
+
+At break of day our reinforced company was off, Arthur and "One-Eyed
+William" going ahead to sound the ice and pick the way, the dog "Fido"
+(such a name for a Siwash dog!) and myself in the traces, the doctor at
+the handle-bars. The rest had benefited the doctor's knee, but walking
+was still painful and he needed the support of the handle-bars all day.
+What a great difference that one strong, willing little dog made! His
+steady pulling kept the sled in motion and relieved one's shoulders of
+the galling jerk of the rope at every step. The going was "not too bad,"
+as they say here, all day, though it carried one rather severe
+disappointment. William had told us of a portage he thought we could
+take that would cut off eight or nine miles of the river; but when we
+reached it the snow upon it proved insufficient to afford a passage, for
+it was a rough niggerhead flat, and we had to swing around the outer
+edges of the great curves the river makes, where alone was ice, with
+trouble and danger at every crossing.
+
+The decision as to whether we should halt or go forward, as to whether
+ice was safe or unsafe, as to whether we should cross the river or stay
+where we were--every decision that concerned the secure advance of the
+party--I put wholly upon William, and would not permit myself or any
+other to question his judgment or to argue it with him. There was no
+sense in half-measures; this young man knew the river as none of us did,
+knew ice as none of us did, and we must put ourselves entirely in his
+hands. The debate that had become usual at every doubtful course arose
+at the portage just referred to, but it was at once suppressed by the
+announcement that hereafter no one could have the floor but William, and
+that when he had spoken the matter was settled. Day by day I think we
+all came to a keener realisation of how very dangerous a journey we were
+making; it lay heavily on my mind that I had brought these two young
+men--whether by mishap or mismanagement--into real peril of their lives.
+Again and again I blamed myself for the delays that had deferred our
+start up the Koyukuk, again and again I wished that we had waited longer
+before leaving the _Pelican's_ winter quarters. I had even contemplated
+a week's stay at Atler's, to give the river a chance to get into better
+shape, but unless there came a very much sharper spell than we had had
+so far a week would not make much difference, and our grub began to run
+short and Atler was none too well supplied. So it seemed best to push
+on.
+
+The next day was full of toil and difficulty. There was no good ice to
+make fine time over that day. Starting in the grey dawn, for mile after
+mile we had to haul the sled over crumbly shell-ice that broke through
+to gravel; and when the shell-ice was done we came to a new bend where a
+rapid current washed a steep mud bank. There was just a little shelf of
+ice, but the brush overhung it so that the passage of the sled was not
+possible. William and Arthur started with the axes to clear away the
+brush, but it seemed to me foolish to do that unless the ledge held out
+and led somewhere, for the turn of the bank threw it out of sight. So
+they went forward cautiously along that ledge to the end--and an end
+they found, sure enough, so that had we followed the axemen with the
+sled we should have had to creep all the way back again. There was
+nothing for it but to cut another land trail on a bench that we could
+reach where the sled was stopped but that could not be reached at all
+farther on. A long and slow and laborious job it was, that took most of
+the morning, to cut that trail and then get the load over it to ice
+again.
+
+By noon we were opposite the Red Mountain, one of the well-known Koyukuk
+landmarks, and on the site of an old Indian fishing camp. William and
+Arthur had made a great fire when we came up, and we heated some beans
+and made some tea and ate lunch. A mile farther on was the cabin of a
+white man, and we paid him a brief visit and got a little tea from him,
+for ours was nearly gone. It did me good to hear him sing the praises of
+Deaconess Carter, the trained nurse at the mission. She had taken him
+in, crippled with rheumatism, and had cured him. Already the new mission
+was proving a boon to whites as well as natives. We made no more than
+four or five miles farther when, coming to spruce with no more in sight
+for a long distance, we pitched the tent, all very tired.
+
+That night the thermometer went to 5° below zero, the coldest weather of
+the season so far. As a consequence the next day we had a new and very
+disagreeable trouble. The cold weather, by increasing the amount of
+running ice in the still open stretches, had brought about a jam that
+had raised the level of the water and caused an overflow of the ice--a
+very common phenomenon of a closing river. We picked our way wet-foot
+much of the day, and towards evening came to a complete _impasse_ in the
+middle of the river, with open water in front and on one hand, and new
+thin ice on the other. So we had to turn round and go back again a long
+way, the mid-river being the only traversable place, until, when it
+seemed that we should have to go round another bend to reach a crossing,
+Arthur proposed that he and William, who wore mukluks, should carry the
+doctor and me, who wore moccasins across the overflow, and then rush the
+sled across; and this we did, wetting its contents somewhat, however. We
+camped immediately, for we had landed on impassable gravel.
+
+[Sidenote: THE RED MOUNTAIN]
+
+That night the thermometer went to 20° below zero, and we took good hope
+that the cold, which began to approach the real cold of winter, would
+put an end to overflow; but, on the contrary, it only aggravated the
+trouble. For the first mile or two there was nothing for it but to go
+through it, and at 20° below it is a miserable business to be wading in
+moccasins even for an hour. We had rearranged our load so that it stood
+up somewhat higher, but we could not avoid wetting the things on the
+bottom of the sled, and the ice formed about it very inconveniently.
+Moreover, the little dog, who had a great dislike to wetting his feet,
+began to give us a good deal of trouble, and at one time nothing but the
+admirable presence of mind and prompt action of William saved us from
+losing our whole load. We had reached a strip of new, dry ice formed the
+night before, with black, rushing water on the left, towards which the
+slippery surface sloped. Presently as we advanced we began to encounter
+a little overflow water, coming from the bank on the right, seeping up
+between the ice and the bank; and that dog, to avoid wetting his feet in
+the overflow, deliberately turned towards the open water and set the
+sled sliding in the same direction. Without the crampons, which we had
+not used for the past few days, it was impossible to hold the sled
+against the dog's traction, and in another moment we should have lost
+everything, for the dog paid no heed to our voices, when William with a
+blow of his axe cut the rope by which the dog pulled, and, grasping the
+sled and throwing himself full length on the ice, managed to stop it on
+the very brink of the water. It was a close shave, but once more we were
+safe; and the doctor, in the exuberance of his gratitude, said that
+night: "If William wants a glass eye I'll send to New York to get him
+one." But when William learned that the glass eye was a mere matter of
+looks and would in no wise improve his vision, he lost interest in it.
+Looks do not count for much amongst the Koyukuk Indians.
+
+[Illustration: ARTHUR AND DOCTOR BURKE.]
+
+[Illustration: SAINT JOHN'S-IN-THE-WILDERNESS, ALLAKAKET, KOYUKUK
+RIVER.]
+
+That night was a long way off yet, however; we had other risks to run,
+other labours. Here were two islands in the river, and the current,
+running like a mill-race and burdened with ice cakes, swept around the
+shore of one of them leaving the passage between them quite dry. There
+was no shore ice at all where the channel was, and it was so
+ugly-looking a reach that had there been any there I am sure we should
+not have ventured it. There was nothing for it but to drag the sled half
+a mile over the gravel, and we did it, the most heart-breaking labour
+of the whole trip. It took us exactly an hour to make that half mile.
+William did not know the trick of the split willows either, so we all
+four of us sweated for our ignorance. Shortly after, our guide pointed
+out the spot where poor Ericson's frozen body was found, two years and
+eight months before.
+
+[Sidenote: A NARROW ESCAPE]
+
+[Sidenote: RUBBER ICE]
+
+Near the Kornuchaket (or the mouth of Old Man Creek), where the Koyukuk
+receives a considerable tributary, we approached the most dangerous
+travelling we had had yet. The river here is swift and deep, and there
+are several islands set in it. Most of its surface was frozen, but the
+ice was very thin. William stopped the procession before we reached the
+bad stretch and went hastily over a part of it. Under his single weight
+we could see the ice-sheet undulating. It had been our rule that ice was
+not safe unless it took three blows of the axe to bring water, but this
+ice gave water at a blow. When William returned he made quite an
+harangue, which Arthur interpreted. He thought we could make it past the
+mouth of the creek, and if we could we should find good going to Moses'
+Village. But we must go just as fast as we could travel; we must not let
+the sled stop an instant. The ice would bend and crack; but he thought
+if we went quickly we could get across. So for nearly a quarter of a
+mile we rushed that sled over "rubber" ice that swayed and cracked and
+yielded under our feet and under the sled, until we reached the bank of
+one of the islands, and then again we launched her and ran with her to
+the shore. Once one of my feet broke through, and immediately the water
+welled up all around--with the steamboat channel underneath--but
+without pause we increased our speed and made the strong shore ice
+safely at last. No man will ever doubt the plasticity, the "viscosity"
+of ice, as it used to be styled in the old glacier controversies, who
+has passed over the "rubber" ice that forms under certain circumstances
+and at certain seasons on these rivers.
+
+We would never, I am sure, have attempted that ice had not William been
+with us. We would have struck a blow with the axe and declared it
+unsafe. Of course, it was unsafe; the whole journey was unsafe, but I am
+convinced that this thin, continuous sheet of ice, cushioned actually
+upon the surface of the water out of which it was growing, was really
+safer than much of the thicker but brittle, unsupported ice we had
+unhesitatingly come over. Chemists tell us that certain substances in
+the act of formation, which they call nascent substances, are
+extraordinarily active and potent, and it may be that ice in the same
+state has a special tenacity of texture which belongs to that state
+alone. I wish that I could have measured the thickness of that ice.
+Where my foot went through I know it was very thin, but its thickness I
+will not venture to guess. There was the distinct feeling that the water
+was bearing the ice up and when it was punctured the water welled up
+with pressure behind it.
+
+Beyond the Kornuchaket much more snow had fallen, and a few miles
+brought us to Moses' Village, called grandiosely "Arctic City," since a
+trader had established a store and a road-house there. At this spot a
+new overland mail trail from Tanana strikes the Koyukuk, and, although
+ten or twelve miles remained, we felt that our journey was done. My sled
+dogs were there, and, as I had not seen them for more than a year, that
+was a joyful reunion. Nanook's bark of welcome, which no one but I ever
+got with quite the same inflection, was as grateful to me as all the
+licking and slobbering of the others, for Nanook is a very independent
+beast, reserved in his demonstrations and not wearing his heart on his
+sleeve, so to speak. They were all glad to see me--Old Lingo and Nig,
+and even "Jimmy the Fake." Billy was dead. For fifteen or sixteen months
+they had been boarded here, and, since fish had been very scarce the
+preceding summer, their food had been chiefly bacon and rice and tallow,
+and there was a bill of close to four hundred dollars against us! Dogs
+are very expensive things in this expensive country. When used the
+winter through on the trail, and boarded the summer through at a fish
+camp, we estimate that it costs one hundred dollars per head per annum
+to feed a dog; so that the maintenance of a team of five dogs, which is
+the minimum practicable team, will cost five hundred dollars per annum
+for food alone.
+
+[Sidenote: SATURATED SNOW]
+
+When we had eaten a good supper and were reclining on spring cots in the
+bunk house, there was not one of us but confidently expected to be at
+the mission in the next forenoon. For a week past the natives had been
+going to and fro in three or four hours. The river was completely closed
+above here, and there was much more snow than we found below. So we
+hitched our own dogs to our own sled the next morning, when the doctor
+had visited a sick person or two, and started out on the last stretch
+of the journey. All went well until we had turned the long bend at the
+head of which the old, abandoned post of Bergman is situated, just on
+the Arctic Circle, but a mile or two beyond we were wallowing in
+saturated snow that stretched all across the river right up to the banks
+on either side. An overflow was in progress, the water running along the
+surface of the ice and soaking up the snow so that there was six inches
+of slush all over it. We struggled along awhile, though from the first
+it seemed hopeless, and then we gave it up and went back to the
+road-house. There would be no passing that stretch of river with the
+sled until the cold had dealt with the overflow. It is almost always the
+unexpected that happens. The next morning I put on a pair of
+snow-shoes--Doctor Burke's knee forbade him their use--and taking
+William with me, mushed up through the slush and the snow to the
+mission, leaving the others to come on with the team so soon as they
+found it practicable.
+
+A mile before we reached the mission was the new village built by the
+Esquimaux--"Kobuk town" they call it--and right in front of the village
+the Malamute Riffle, a noted difficulty of navigation, was still running
+wide open, though all the rest of the river was long closed. Near the
+riffle the Kobuks had a fish-trap, and some who were busy getting out
+fish saw and recognised me, and the whole population came swarming out
+for greetings. It was good to see these kindly, simple people again, to
+shake their hands and hear their "I glad I see you," which is the
+general native greeting where there is any English at all. Every one
+must shake hands; even the babies on their mothers' backs stretch out
+their little fingers eagerly, and if they be too small for that, the
+mother will take the little hand and hold it out. At the bend we take a
+portage and a quarter of a mile brings us to the Allakaket, to the
+familiar modest buildings of the mission, with its new Koyukuk village
+gradually clustering round it. The whole scene was growing into almost
+the exact realisation of my dream when first I camped on this spot two
+years and nine months before. There was a distinct thrill of pleasure at
+the sight of the church. Built entirely of logs with the bark on, there
+was nothing visible anywhere about it but spruce bark, save for the
+gleam of the gilded cross that surmounted the little belfry. The roof,
+its regular construction finished, was covered with small spruce poles
+with the bark on, nailed together at the apex, and where it projected
+well beyond the gables its under-side was covered with bark, as well as
+the cornice all round that finished it off. Even the window-frames and
+the door-panels were covered with bark. It was of the same tone because
+of the selfsame substance as the forest still growing around it, and it
+gave at the first glance the satisfied impression of fitness. It gave
+the feeling that it belonged where it was placed. It is ill praising
+one's own work, but I had been keen to see how it would strike me, fresh
+from the outside, after a year's absence, and I was very glad indeed
+that it pleased me again.
+
+[Sidenote: A STARVING WHITE MAN]
+
+I had no more than entered upon the warm welcome that waited at Saint
+John's-in-the-Wilderness, and was still wondering at the homelike
+cosiness which the mission house had assumed under the deft hands of
+the two ladies who occupied it, when there came an Indian with word of a
+white man he had found starving in the wilderness fifteen miles away.
+Another native with a dog team and a supply of immediate food was
+hastily despatched to bring the man in, and that night the poor
+emaciated fellow, looking like a man of sixty-five or seventy though he
+was really no more than forty, crawled out of the sled and tottered into
+the house. He had started out from Tanana two months before with two
+pack-horses to make his way across to the Koyukuk diggings, had lost his
+way and wandered aimlessly in that vast wilderness; one horse had been
+drowned, the other he had killed for meat. He had made a raft to come
+down the Kornutna (Old Man Creek) to the Koyukuk, knowing that there was
+a trading-post near its mouth, and had been frozen in and forced to
+abandon it. Since that time he had been living on a few spoonfuls of
+meal a day, with frozen berries, and once or twice a ptarmigan, and when
+Ned found him was at the last extremity and had given up, intending to
+die where he was.
+
+That man's hunger was tremendous, but Miss Carter, having knowledge and
+experience of such cases, was apprehensive that if any large quantity of
+food were taken at a time there would be serious danger to him. So for a
+day or two he ate frequently but sparingly. A little later, as he grew
+stronger, to such extremes did his hunger pinch him that he would watch
+till there was no one looking and would go into the kitchen and steal
+food that was preparing, even taking it out of the frying-pan on the
+stove. He would be hungry immediately after having a full meal. In ten
+days he was sufficiently recovered to resume his journey to the
+diggings, and when I saw him at Coldfoot two months later I did not
+recognise him, so greatly had he changed from the poor shrunken creature
+that crept into the mission. We all think we have been hungry time and
+again; if ever we have gone a few days on short rations we are quite
+sure of it; this man had sounded the height and depth and stretched the
+length and breadth of it, and none of the rest of us really know what
+hunger means. I tried to get him to talk about it, but he said he wanted
+to forget it. He said he was ashamed to think of some of the things he
+had done and of some of the terrible thoughts that had come to him, and
+I pressed him no more. I have always felt that, even in its last
+hideousness of cannibalism, only God Himself can judge starvation.
+
+[Sidenote: TWO INTERPRETERS]
+
+Here began my first experience of the difficulties of conducting a
+mission at the same place for two different races of natives speaking
+totally different languages. Although the Indian language spoken here is
+the same as at Tanana, and much of the liturgy, etc., had been put into
+that tongue by Mr. Prevost and was therefore available, yet it was found
+impracticable to have two sets of services whenever the church was used,
+for both races would always attend anyway. Since the mastery of the two
+tongues was out of the question, and there were no translations at all
+into the Esquimau, it became a question of teaching the Esquimaux to
+take part in an Indian service or dropping both vernaculars altogether
+and conducting the service in English. After much doubt and experiment
+the latter was resolved upon, and the whole service of prayer and praise
+is in English. When the lessons are read and the address delivered it is
+necessary to use two interpreters; the minister delivers his sentence in
+English, then the Koyukuk interpreter puts it in Indian, and when he is
+done the Esquimau interpreter puts it into that tongue.
+
+It is a very tedious business, this double interpretation and a
+twenty-minute sermon takes fully an hour to deliver, but there is no
+help for it. The singing is hearty and enthusiastic though the repertory
+is wisely very limited; and here, north of the Arctic Circle, is a
+vested choir of eight or ten Kobuk and Koyukuk boys who lead the singing
+and lead it very well.
+
+Already the influence of the mission and the school was very marked.
+Given the native off by himself like this, in the hands of those in whom
+he has learned to place entire confidence, remote from debasing
+agencies, and his improvement is evident and his survival assured.
+
+[Illustration: THE DOUBLE INTERPRETATION AT THE ALLAKAKET.]
+
+[Illustration: THE WIND-SWEPT YUKON WITHIN THE RAMPARTS.]
+
+In two days the doctor and Arthur and the team came up, and so was
+brought to a happy conclusion a perilous journey over the first ice. One
+is often glad to have had experiences that one would by no means repeat,
+and this is a case in point. We had learned a good deal about ice; we
+had taken liberties with ice that none of us had ever thought before
+could be taken with impunity; we had learned to trust ice and at the
+same time to distrust it and in some measure to discriminate about it.
+The "last ice" is bad, but the "first ice" is much worse, and all
+three of us were agreed that we wanted no more travelling over it and no
+more pulling of a sled "by the back of the face."
+
+Then followed a very happy, busy time of several weeks while the river
+ice was consolidating and the land trails establishing; happy with its
+manifold evidences of the rapid advance the natives were making under
+Miss Carter's able and beneficent sway, busy with the instruction of
+people eager to learn. It was busy and happy for Doctor Burke also; busy
+with the many ailments he relieved, happy with the beginnings of an
+attachment which two years later culminated in his marriage to Miss
+Carter's colleague at this mission.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE KOYUKUK TO THE YUKON AND TO TANANA--CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS AT SAINT
+JOHN'S-IN-THE-WILDERNESS
+
+
+LEAVING Fort Yukon on the 26th of November, 1909, and going again over
+almost the same route we followed during the first journey described in
+this volume, we reached the new mission at the Allakaket on the Koyukuk
+River on the 14th of December, after a period of almost continual cold.
+The climate of the interior of Alaska varies as much as any climate. The
+previous year, continuing the journey described in "The First Ice," I
+had passed over this same route in the opposite direction, between the
+same dates, with the thermometer well above zero the whole time. This
+trip the _mean_ of the minimum reading at night, the noon reading, and
+the reading at start and finish of each day's journey was -38 1/4°. Many
+days in that three weeks we travelled all day at 45° and 50° below zero,
+and we spent one night in camp at 49° below.
+
+It was the beginning of a severe winter, with much snow north of the
+Yukon and long periods of great cold.
+
+[Sidenote: BIRTH, BURIAL, AND DANCING]
+
+The two weeks or so spent at the mission of Saint
+John's-in-the-Wilderness was enjoyed as only a rest is enjoyed after
+making such a journey; as only Christmas is enjoyed at such a native
+mission. It is the time of the whole year for the people; they come in
+from near and far intent upon the festival in both of its aspects,
+religious and social, and they enter so heartily into all that is
+provided for them that one does not know which to admire most, their
+simple, earnest piety or the whole-hearted enthusiasm of their sports
+and pastimes. Right out of church they go to the frozen river, old men
+and maidens, young men and matrons, mothers with babies on their backs
+and their skirts tucked up, and they quickly line up and are kicking the
+football stuffed with moose hair and covered with moose hide in the
+native game that their forefathers played ages before "Rugby" was
+invented.[B] When the church-bell rings, back they all troop again, to
+take their places and listen patiently and reverently to the long,
+double-interpreted service, the babies still on their mothers' backs,
+sometimes asleep, sometimes waking up and crying, comforted by slinging
+them round and applying their lips to the fountain of nourishment and
+solace.
+
+On the nights when there is no church service there is feasting and
+dancing. The native dance is a very simple affair, entirely without any
+objectionable feature, and one cannot see any reason in the world for
+attempting to suppress it. A man and a woman get out in the middle of
+the floor and dance opposite one another without touching at all. The
+moccasined toes of an expert man in this dance move with surprising
+rapidity, the woman, with eyes downcast, the picture of demureness,
+sways slightly from side to side and moves on her toes in rhythm to the
+man's movement. Presently another man jumps up and the first man yields
+his place; then another woman comes forward and the first woman yields
+her place, and so the dance goes on.
+
+For a variety, of late years there is an occasional "white-man's dance,"
+of the quadrille or the waltz kind, but the natives much prefer their
+own dancing. Here at the Allakaket the presence of the Esquimaux adds
+picturesqueness and strangeness, and the Esquimau dance, which consists
+of a series of jerky attitudinisings, with every muscle tense, to a
+curious monotonous chant and the beating of a drum, is a never-failing
+source of amusement to the Indians.
+
+An old man's funeral in the morning away up on the high bluff
+overlooking the mission, a birth in the evening, a dance the same
+night--so goes the drama of life in this little, isolated native world.
+So soon as these people make up their minds that one of their number is
+sick unto death they make the coffin, for when trees must be felled and
+lumber whipsawed from them, it is well to be forehanded.
+
+[Sidenote: "BEFORE" AND "AFTER"]
+
+There is one old woman living up there yet whose coffin had been made
+three times. When it becomes evident that the unfavourable prognosis was
+mistaken the coffin is torn apart and made into shelves or some other
+article of household utility. It seems very cold-blooded, but it is easy
+to misjudge these people. The emotion of grief is real with them, I
+believe, but transient. They are matter-of-fact and entirely devoid of
+pretence, and when once a funeral has taken place and the service is
+all over they dismiss the gloomy event from their minds as soon as
+possible. The night of old Mesuk's death, however, there were fires
+lighted on all the trails and before most of the Esquimau cabins, the
+object of which was probably to frighten the spirit away from the
+dwellings of the living. We shall get the better of these superstitions
+by and by, but superstitions die hard, not only amongst Esquimaux.
+Moreover, practices like this linger as traditional practices long after
+their superstitious content is dissipated, and men of feeling do not
+wantonly lay hands on ancient traditional custom. I think that if I were
+an Esquimau and knew that from immemorial antiquity fires had been
+lighted on the trails and outside the doors upon the death of my
+ancestors, I should be tempted to kindle them myself upon an occasion,
+however firmly I held the Communion of Saints and the Safe Repose of the
+Blessed. And I am quite sure that if I were a Thlinket I should set up a
+totem-pole despite all the missionaries in the world. When one comes to
+think about it dispassionately, there is really nothing in Christianity
+averse to the kindling of corpse fires or the blazoning of native
+heraldry. When all the little superstitions and peculiar picturesque
+customs are abolished out of the world it will be a much less
+interesting world than it is to-day. If there were any evidence or
+reason to believe that morality and religion will be furthered by the
+brow-beating or cajoling of the little peoples into a close similitude
+of the white race in dress and manners and customs, all other
+considerations would, of course, be swallowed up in a glad welcome of
+such advance. But almost the exact opposite is true. The young Indian or
+Esquimau, who by much mixing with white men has been "wised up," as the
+expressive phrase goes here, is commonly one of the least useful, the
+least attractive, the least moral of his kind. We have many such on the
+Yukon--young men who work on the steamboats in the summer and do odd
+jobs and hang around the stores in winter, and will not condescend to
+fish any more or to hunt or trap unless driven by the pinch of hunger.
+Show me an Indian who affects the white man in garb, in speech, in
+general habits, and external characteristics, and it will be easy to
+show an Indian whose death would be little loss to his community or his
+race; while the native woman who aspires to dress herself like a white
+woman has very commonly the purpose of attracting the attention of the
+white men. I think the young Indian man I recall as the best dressed,
+most debonair, and most completely "civilised," was living in idleness
+upon the bounty of the white trader whom every one knew to be his wife's
+paramour, and was impudently careless of the general knowledge.
+
+Of all the photographs that illustrate missionary publications--and I
+have contributed enough villainous half-tones to warrant me in a
+criticism--the ones I dislike most are of the "Before and After" type.
+Here is a group of savages clad in skins, or furs, or feathers, or palm
+fibre, or some patient, skilful weave of native wool or grass; in each
+case clad congruously with their environment and out of the products it
+affords. Set against it is the same or a similar group clad out of the
+slop-shop, clad in hickory shirts and blue-jean trousers, clad so that,
+if faces could be changed as easily as clothing, they would pass for any
+commonplace group of whites anywhere. And, as if such change were in
+itself the symbol and guarantee of a change from all that is brutal and
+idolatrous to all that is gentle and Christian, there follows the
+triumphant "Before and After" inscription. All the fitness has gone, all
+the individuality, all the clever adaptation of indigenous material, all
+the artistic and human interest; and a self-conscious smirk of
+superiority radiates over made-by-the-million factory garments instead.
+Whenever I see such contrasting photographs there comes over me a
+shamed, perverse recollection of a pair of engravings by Hogarth,
+usually suppressed, which a London bookseller once pulled out of a
+portfolio in the back room of his shop and showed me. They bore the same
+title.
+
+I profess myself a friend of the native tongue because it is the native
+tongue--the easy, familiar, natural vehicle of expression; of the native
+dress because it is almost always comfortable and comely; of the native
+customs, whenever they are not unhealthy or demoralising, because they
+are the distinctive heritage of a people; and again, of tongue, dress,
+and customs alike, if you will, simply because they are dissimilar.
+
+[Sidenote: A BARREN UNIFORMITY]
+
+For it has always seemed a trumpery notion that uniformity in these
+things has any connection with the upbuilding of a people, has any
+ethical relation at all, and I have always wondered that so trumpery a
+notion should have so wide an influence. Moreover, is it not a little
+curious that, whereas the trend of biological evolution on its upward
+course, as Spencer assures us, is towards differentiation and
+dissimilarity, the trend of sociological evolution should be so marked
+towards this bald and barren uniformity? But these be deep matters.
+
+I have never been able to join in the reproach of superciliousness so
+often applied to the lines of that noblest of missionary hymns in which
+Bishop Heber asks, "Can we, whose souls are lighted with wisdom from on
+high, Can we, to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?" If that be
+superciliousness, it is an essential superciliousness of Christianity
+itself, for the question lies at the very core of our religion and will
+not cease to be asked so long as the world contains those who believe
+with all their hearts, and those who do not believe because they have
+not heard. I never listen to that hymn without emotion, it can still
+"shake me like a cry Of trumpets going by." But the question that seems
+to stir the souls of some missionaries and most school-teachers, "Can we
+deny to these unfortunate heathen our millinery, our 'Old Oaken Bucket,'
+our Mr. and our Mrs.," leaves me quite cold.
+
+Here was the weekly afternoon routine at this mission, only the mornings
+being devoted to books and classes: On Monday the children brought their
+soiled clothes of the week to the schoolroom and washed them; on Tuesday
+they were dried and ironed; on Wednesday they were mended; on Thursday a
+juvenile "society" did some sort of work for another mission; on Friday
+every child in the village had a hot bath. Now, let a routine of that
+sort be kept up, week after week, month after month, year after year,
+during the whole school life of a child, and it is bound to leave its
+mark; and there is no other way in which the same mark may be made.
+
+At the Allakaket is fine example of what, I think, is the best rule in
+the world for the inferior races--the absolute rule of a devoted,
+intelligent, capable gentlewoman. We are but now writing the indentures
+of their apprenticeship to self-government in the elective village
+councils we have set up; it is good for them to serve it under this
+loving and unquestioned despotism.
+
+[Sidenote: MATTERS METEOROLOGICAL]
+
+During all that Christmas season the temperature was subject to such
+violent fluctuations that a chart of them would look like the picture
+showing the comparative heights of mountains, that used to be presented
+under "The World in Hemispheres" in the school geographies. A minimum of
+52° below zero and a maximum of 10° below, was followed by a minimum of
+53° below and a maximum of 18° below, and that by a minimum of 56° below
+and a maximum of 14° below, while on Christmas Day itself we registered
+a minimum of 58° below zero and a maximum of 1° above, a range of 59° in
+less than twelve hours. At a time of the year when the sun has scarcely
+any effect upon the temperature such tremendous changes point to
+corresponding atmospheric disturbances, and each rise was caused by the
+irruption of clouds upon a clear sky and was followed by a fall of snow.
+
+It is a beautifully simple process. Driven into these regions by some
+compelling current of the upper atmosphere comes a mass of warm air
+laden with moisture--a cloud. As it comes in contact with the cold air
+of the region it parts with its heat, and the temperature of the lower
+air rises. Having parted with its heat, it can no longer contain its
+moisture; and, having parted with its moisture, it ceases to exist. The
+cold of the earth and of its immediate air envelope has seized upon that
+cloud and devoured it, and the cold resumes its sway. So have I opened
+the door of a crowded cabin, when an Indian dance or other gathering was
+in progress, at 50° or 60° below zero, and the cold, dry air meeting the
+hot, moist air has caused an immediate fall of snow on the threshold.
+
+After the abrupt rise in temperature on Christmas Day, the snow began to
+fall heavily, with a barometer continually falling until it reached
+27.98 inches, the lowest point recorded here (at an elevation of about
+500 feet above the sea) in two years and a half--and before the snow
+ceased three feet had fallen.
+
+Our winter itinerary called us to leave the Allakaket immediately after
+New Year's Day, and our route lay overland through a totally uninhabited
+country for nearly one hundred and fifty miles, to Tanana on the Yukon.
+We knew that it would not greatly interfere with our plans to lie
+another week at the Allakaket, and that would bring our departure after
+the monthly journey of the mail-carrier and would thus compel him to
+break trail for us through all that snow. That is the way the
+mail-carriers in Alaska are usually treated, but Arthur and I took some
+pride in keeping as closely as possible to the announced dates of
+visitation and in doing such share of trail breaking as fell to us.
+
+[Sidenote: TRAIL BREAKING]
+
+So on Monday, the 3d of January, 1910, we bade farewell to Deaconess
+Carter and her colleague and to the native charges they rule and care
+for so admirably, and set out on our journey with an additional boy from
+the mission to help us through the heavy snow of the Koyukuk valley. For
+ten or twelve miles the way lay down the river, and the going was slow
+and toilsome from the first, although there had been some passage from
+Moses' Village to the mission, and there was, therefore, some trail. Our
+start had been late--it is next to impossible to get an early start from
+a mission; there is always some native who must have audience at the
+last moment--and after the long repose we were so soft that the heavy
+trail had wearied us, and we decided to "call it a day" when in five and
+a half hours we came to the road-house, the last occupied habitation
+between the Allakaket and Tanana. Soon after we reached the village
+there came trooping down from the mission a number of the inhabitants
+gone up for Christmas, who, after weeping upon our necks, so to speak,
+at our departure, had left us to break out that drifted trail for their
+convenient return. So will Indians treat a white man almost always, but
+I had thought myself an exception and was vexed to find that so they had
+treated me.
+
+The next morning we entered the uninhabited wilderness with three feet
+of new snow on the trail and no passage over it since it had fallen. Our
+first trouble was finding the trail at all. The previous fall the Alaska
+Road Commission had appropriated a sum of money to stake this trail from
+Tanana to the Koyukuk River, for it passes over wind-swept, treeless
+wastes, where many men had lost their way. Starting out from Tanana, the
+men employed had done their work well until within ten miles of the
+Koyukuk River. There it was found that the labour and cost already
+expended had exhausted the appropriation, whereupon the proceedings were
+immediately stopped; not another stake was driven, and the whole party
+returned to Tanana and mushed two hundred and fifty miles up the Yukon
+to spend another little appropriation upon another trail. That is the
+unbusinesslike system in which the money available for such work in
+Alaska has been handled.
+
+The first trail breaker goes ahead with a long stick, which he thrusts
+continually down through the snow. The slightly harder surface over
+which sleds and dogs have passed reveals itself by offering more
+resistance to the penetration of the stick, and that is the only way the
+trail can be found. Even with three feet of new snow upon it, it is well
+worth while finding, or otherwise there is no bottom at all and way must
+be made through all the snow of the winter. But all Alaskan trails are
+serpentine, and it is very difficult to put the new trail right on top
+of the old one. Back and forth the second trail breaker goes between his
+leader and the sled, and at intervals the first man comes back and forth
+also. And with it all is no path packed solid enough for the dogs to
+draw the heavy sled without great difficulty. We should have had a
+toboggan, but toboggans are little used on the Koyukuk, and we had only
+our sled. In five hours we made five miles and were worn out. We decided
+to pitch our tent and go ahead and break trail for the morrow's
+journey. On the lakes interspersed amongst the brush we had to break an
+entirely new trail, for we could find no trace of the old one.
+
+If five miles in five hours be poor going, what is four miles in seven
+and a half hours? That is all we made the next day despite the
+snow-shoeing of the previous evening. The heavy sled was continually
+getting off the trail, however wide we show-shoed it. The two of us
+ahead went over every step of the distance four or five times, and
+sometimes all of us had to go back and forth again and again before the
+sled could be brought along at all. It was from 5° to 10° above zero all
+day, and at intervals snow fell heavily. We got at last to the middle of
+a little lake and were confronted by open water, the result of some warm
+spring, one supposes. Here we must stop until a laborious journey was
+made to the bank, trees were cut and carried, and the open place bridged
+so that the sled might be passed over it. Then again our painful
+progress was resumed until, as it grew dark, we reached the bank of the
+Kornutna, or Old Man Creek, and here we pitched tent again, and I went
+forward upon the bed of the stream to break out a part of to-morrow's
+path. That night two more inches of snow fell.
+
+[Sidenote: DOG DRIVING]
+
+For four miles the trail lies along the surface of this creek, and then
+takes up a steep gully and over a divide. That four miles was all we
+made the next day, back and forth, back and forth, wearily tramping it
+to and fro, dogs and men alike exhausted with the toil. The hatefulness
+of dog mushing usually appears under such circumstances; the whip is
+constantly plied, the senseless objurgations rise shriller and fuller.
+Once the sled is started, it must by any means be kept going, that as
+great a distance as possible may be covered before it stops again. The
+poor brutes, sinking almost to their bellies despite the snow-shoeing,
+have no purchase for the exercise of their strength and continually
+flounder and wallow. Our whip was lost and I was glad of it, for even as
+considerate a boy as Arthur is apt to lose patience and temper when,
+having started the sled with much labour by gee pole and rope about his
+chest, it goes but a few feet and comes to a halt again, or slips from
+the track and turns over in the deep snow. But it is at such times, too,
+that one appreciates at his full value such a noble puller as our wheel
+dog Nanook. He spares himself not at all; the one absorbing occupation
+of every nerve and muscle of his body is pulling. His trace is always
+taut, or, if he lose footing for a moment and the trace slacken, he is
+up and at it again that the sled lose not its momentum if he can help
+it. When the lead line is pulled back that the sled may be started by
+the jerk of the dogs' sudden traction, Nanook lunges forward at the
+command, "Mush!" and strains at the collar, mouth open and panting,
+tongue dropping moisture, as keen and eager to keep that sled moving as
+is the driver himself. All day he labours and struggles, snatching a
+mouthful of snow now and then to cool his overheated body, and he drops
+in his tracks when the final halt is made, utterly weary, yet always
+with the brave heart in him to give his bark, his five-note
+characteristic bark of gladness, that the day's work is done at last.
+It is senseless brutality to whip such a dog, and most of our dogs were
+of that mettle, though Nanook was the strongest and most faithful of the
+bunch. One's heart goes out to them with gratitude and love--old
+"Lingo," "Nig," "Snowball," "Wolf," and "Doc"--as one realises what
+loyal, cheerful service they give.
+
+[Sidenote: VIOLENT FLUCTUATIONS]
+
+Arthur was so unwell with a violent cold and cough, that had been
+growing worse for a couple of days, that I decided on two things: to
+leave him in the tent while I snow-shoed ahead the next day, and to send
+back the boy I had brought from the mission to secure a fresh supply of
+food; for the back trail was, of course, comparatively easy. Arthur's
+condition threatened pneumonia, to my notion, and I believe he was saved
+from an attack of that disease which is so often fatal in this country
+by long rubbing all over the neck and the chest with a remedy that was
+new then--a menthol balm. I have used it again and again since and I am
+now never without it. A second application made in the morning, I
+started out, show-shoeing up the long hill and then down into the flat,
+and so to the mail-carrier's little hut that is reached under good
+conditions of trail the first day from Moses' Village, and then back
+again to the tent. That day a tendon in my right leg behind the knee
+became increasingly troublesome, and in climbing the hill on the return
+was acutely painful. I recognised it as "mal-de-raquet," well known in
+the Northwest, where the snow is commonly much deeper than in Alaska,
+and I found relief in the application of the same analgesic menthol balm
+that I was rejoiced to find had wrought a great improvement in Arthur's
+condition.
+
+Meanwhile the warm weather of the past three or four days was over and
+another period of violent fluctuations of temperature similar to that
+around Christmastide was upon us. We went to bed with the thermometer at
+10° below zero and were wakened by the cold at two in the morning to
+find it at 40° below, so we had to keep a fire going the rest of the
+night; for as soon as the fire in the stove goes out a tent becomes just
+as cold as outdoors.
+
+We moved forward the next morning, but the trail we had broken was too
+narrow and had to be widened, which meant one snow-shoe in the deep snow
+all the time, a very fatiguing process that brought into painful play
+again the tendon strained with five days' heavy snow-shoeing.
+
+The temperature was around 40° below all day, and our progress was so
+slow that it was not easy to keep warm, and the dogs whined at the
+innumerable stops. Yesterday it had been 10° below, the day before 10°
+above, and now, to-day, 40° below. It is hard to dress for such
+changeable weather, especially hard to dress the feet. My own wear, all
+the winter through, is a pair of smoke-tanned, moose-hide breeches,
+tanned on the Yukon but tailored outside. They are a perfect windbreak,
+yet allow ventilation, and they are very warm; but those who perspire
+much on exertion cannot wear them. The amount of covering upon the feet
+must be varied, in some measure at least, as the temperature changes.
+The Esquimau fur boot, with fur on the inside of the sole and on the
+outside of the upper, is my favourite footwear, with more or less of
+sock inside it as the weather requires; but such sudden changes as we
+were experiencing always find one or leave one with too much or too
+little footwear. By one-thirty we had struggled to the top of the hill,
+and it was very evident that the cabin was out of the question that day;
+so, since to pass down into the flat was to pass out of eligible camping
+timber, we pitched tent on the brow of the hill.
+
+The cold business of making camp was done, all dispositions for the
+night complete, supper for men and dogs was cooked and ours eating, when
+we heard a noise in the distance that set our dogs barking and presently
+came the boy I had sent back, accompanied by an Indian and a fresh team
+loaded with such a bountiful supply of food, much of it cooked, that one
+felt it was worth while to get into distress to receive such generous
+and prompt succour. The ladies at the mission had sat up and cooked all
+night and had despatched the fastest team in the village the next
+morning to bring their provisions to us and to help us along. They had
+thought us at Tanana when we were not yet at the end of the first day's
+stage from Moses' Village. It would have been impossible for us to reach
+Tanana on the dog food and man food we started with.
+
+[Sidenote: SIXTY-FIVE BELOW ZERO]
+
+It was so cold and we were so crowded that I arose at three and made a
+fire and sat over it the rest of the night, and after breakfast,
+although it was Sunday, morning prayer being said, I started ahead again
+to break out the trail deeper and wider, leaving the teams with the
+distributed loads to follow. The thermometer stood at 38° below zero
+when I left camp, but as I began the descent it was evident that it grew
+colder, and at the bottom of the hill I was sure it was 20° colder at
+least. Reaching the cabin, I kindled a fire and started back to meet the
+teams. About a mile from the cabin I saw them, for, since the load was
+distributed in the two sleds progress was much better; but by this time
+it had grown so cold that the dogs were almost entirely obscured from
+view by the clouds of steam that encompassed them. We hurried as best we
+might and reached the cabin about eleven, and as soon as we were arrived
+I took out the thermometer and let it lie long enough to get the
+temperature of the air, and it read 65° below zero. There had been no
+atmospheric change at all; it was simply the most marked instance I ever
+knew of the influence of altitude upon temperature. We had descended
+perhaps three hundred feet, and in that distance had found a difference
+of 27° in temperature.
+
+The cabin was a wretched shack without door or window and full of holes,
+and in no part of it could one stand upright. We set ourselves to make
+things as comfortable as possible, however, rigging up the canvas sled
+cover for an outer door and a blanket for an inner door, and stopping up
+the worst of the holes with sacking. Then we went out and cut fresh
+spruce boughs to lie upon, and prospected around quite a while before we
+found dry wood nearly a quarter of a mile away. It was quite a business
+cutting that wood and packing the heavy sticks on one's shoulders,
+through the brush and up and down the banks of the little creek where
+it grew, on snow-shoes, at 65° below zero.
+
+Our Sabbath day's journey done, the hut safely reached and furnished
+with fuel, we did not linger long after supper, but, evening prayer
+said, went to bed as the most comfortable place in the still cold cabin,
+thankful not to be in a tent in such severe weather.
+
+The next day gave us fresh temperature fluctuations. At nine A. M. it
+clouded and rose to 35° below, by noon it had cleared again and the
+thermometer fell to 55° below, and at nine P. M. it stood once more at
+65° below. The milder weather of the morning sent all hands out breaking
+trail, save myself, for with all our stuff in a cabin without a door it
+was not wise to leave it altogether--a dog might break a chain and work
+havoc--so I stayed behind in the little dark hovel, a candle burning all
+day, and read some fifty pages of Boswell's _Life of Samuel Johnson_
+over again. Some such little India-paper classic it is my habit to carry
+each winter. Last year I reread Pepys's _Diary_ and the year before much
+of the _Decline and Fall_. Certain places are for ever associated in my
+mind with the rereading of certain old books. The Chandalar River is to
+me as much the scene of _Lorna Doone_, which I read for the sixth or
+seventh time on my first journey along it, as Exmoor itself; and _The
+Cloister and the Hearth_, that noble historical romance, belongs in my
+literary geography to the Alatna-Kobuk portage. So will Boswell always
+bring back to me this trip across country from the Koyukuk to the Yukon
+through the deep snow.
+
+The boys came back after dark, having broken some nine miles of trail
+and having suffered a good deal from the cold. I had supper cooked, and
+when that was done and the dogs fed we fell to reading the Gospels and
+Epistles for the Epiphany season, the boys reading aloud by turns. The
+all-day fire had warmed the little hut thoroughly, and despite the cold
+outside we were snug and comfortable within.
+
+[Sidenote: SEVENTY BELOW ZERO]
+
+That night the thermometer touched 70° below zero, within 2° of the
+greatest cold I have recorded in seven years' winter travel; a greater
+cold, I believe, than any arctic expedition has ever recorded, for it is
+in a continental climate like Siberia or interior Alaska, and not in the
+marine climate around the North Pole, that the thermometer falls lowest.
+
+Save for an hour or two getting wood, we all lay close next day, for the
+temperature at noon was no higher than 64° below. It is impossible to
+break trail at such temperature, or to travel as slowly as we were
+travelling. In the strong cold one must travel fast if one travel at
+all. Indeed, it is distinctly dangerous to be outdoors. As soon as one
+leaves the hut the cold smites one in the face like a mailed fist. The
+expiration of the breath makes a crackling sound, due, one judges, to
+the sudden congealing of the moisture that is expelled. From every
+cranny of the cabin a stream of smoke-like vapour pours into the air,
+giving the appearance that the house is on fire within. However warmly
+hands and feet may be clad, one cannot stand still for a minute without
+feeling the heat steadily oozing out and the cold creeping in.
+
+Notwithstanding the weather, that evening the mail came along, the
+white man who is the carrier, two tall, strong natives, and nine dogs.
+Only since descending to the flat had they suffered from the cold, for
+they found as great a difference as we did in the temperature; and they
+were grateful to us for the trail we had broken. The hut was
+uncomfortably crowded that night with seven people in it, but the
+thermometer stood at -56° and was rising, and gave us hope that we might
+move along to-morrow. Augmented as our party was into seven men, three
+sleds, and nineteen or twenty dogs, trail breaking would not be so
+arduous and progress would be much accelerated. There was good hope,
+moreover, that the heavy snow was confined to the Koyukuk valley and
+that when we passed out of it we should find better going.
+
+The morning found a temperature of 45° below, and we sallied forth,
+quite an expedition. Four, including myself, went ahead beating down the
+trail; one was at each gee pole, our team last, getting advantage of
+everything preceding. So far as the trail had been broken we made good
+time, covering the nine miles in about four hours. Another hour of
+somewhat slower progress took us to the top of a hill, and here the
+mail-carrier's two Indians had run ahead and built a great, roaring fire
+and arranged a wide, commodious couch of spruce boughs, and we cooked
+our lunch and took our ease for half an hour. The sky had clouded again
+and the temperature had risen to 28° below.
+
+[Sidenote: CLOSE QUARTERS]
+
+It is strange how some scenes of the trail linger in the memory, while
+others are completely forgotten. This noon halt I always remember as
+one of the pleasantest of all my journeyings. There was not a breath of
+wind, and the smoke rose straight into the air instead of volleying and
+eddying into one's face as camp-fires so often do on whichever side of
+them one sits. We were all weary with our five hours' trudge, and the
+rest was grateful; hungry, and the boiled ham they had sent from the
+mission was delicious. The warmth of the great fire and the cosiness of
+the thick, deep spruce boughs gave solid comfort, and the pipe after the
+meal was a luxurious enjoyment.
+
+From that on the going was heavier and our progress slower, but we kept
+at it till dark, and still far into the night, fortunate in having two
+Indians who knew every step of the way, until at last we reached the hut
+that marks the end of the second stage from the Koyukuk River, on the
+top of a birch hill. We had made nineteen and a half miles that day and
+had taken eleven hours to do it.
+
+If the noon rest be remembered as one of the pleasantest episodes of the
+trail, that night in the cabin on the hill I recall as one of the most
+miserable in my life. The hut was still smaller than the previous one,
+like it without door and window, and so low that one was bent double all
+the time. Walls and roof alike were covered with a thick coating of
+frost. The only wood discoverable in the dark was half-dry birch which
+would not burn in the stove but sent out volumes of smoke that blinded
+us. When the hut did begin to get a little warm, moisture from the roof
+dropped on everything. There we seven men huddled together, chilly and
+damp, choked and weary--a wretched band. There was no room for the
+necessary cooking operations; we had to cook and eat in relays; and how
+we slept, in what way seven men managed to pack themselves and stretch
+themselves in those narrow quarters, I cannot tell. However, we said our
+prayers and went to bed, snow falling heavily. The Indians were soon
+snoring, but sleep would not come to me, tired as I was, and I had not
+slept at all the previous night. So presently I took trional, X grs.,
+and dozed off till morning.
+
+Then we resolved to divide forces rather than subject ourselves to the
+miserable inconvenience of overcrowding these tiny huts, and at this
+stage of the journey it was possible to do so without losing a whole
+day, for there was a cabin for the noon rest. It was arranged that the
+mail-man should start first and make the full day's run if possible,
+while we should "call it a day" at the half-way hut.
+
+So Bob and his Indians sallied forth while yet my boys were reading
+their lessons to me, and when they were done we hitched up and followed.
+And as soon as we were down the hill and started along the bald flat, it
+was evident that we were out of the deep snowfall, for the present at
+any rate, and we plucked up spirit, for we were now to cross the wide,
+open, wind-swept uplands of the headwaters of the Melozitna and Tozitna,
+tributaries of the Yukon--the "Tozi" and "Melozi," as the white men call
+them--where snow never lies deep or long. We were out of the Koyukuk
+watershed now and in country drained by direct tributaries of the
+Yukon. The going was now incomparably the best we had had since we left
+the mission, the snow was light and we had the mail-carrier's trail;
+but, although the temperature had risen to 21° below, a keen wind put
+our parkee hoods up and our scarfs around our faces and made our 60°
+below clothing none too warm. In three hours we had reached the Melozi
+cabin, although that had included the climbing of a long, steep hill,
+and here we stayed for the rest of the day and night and shot some
+ptarmigan for supper, though we could easily have gone on and made the
+rest of the run.
+
+The next day I sent the auxiliary sled and team and driver back to the
+Allakaket, keeping the mission boy with me, however, to return with the
+mail-carrier, who was already late and must go back as soon as he
+reached Tanana. I parted with the Indian regretfully, for he had been
+most helpful and always good-natured and cheerful, and had really begun
+to learn a little at our travelling night-school.
+
+[Sidenote: THE STAKED TRAIL]
+
+[Sidenote: THE ARCTIC SKIES]
+
+A high wind was blowing, with the thermometer at 12° below, and the
+mail-man's trail was already drifted over and quite indistinguishable in
+the dark, and we began to appreciate the recent staking of this trail by
+the Road Commission. But for these stakes, set double, a hundred yards
+apart, so that they formed a lane, it would have been difficult if not
+impossible for us to travel on a day like this, for here was a stretch
+of sixteen or seventeen miles with never a tree and hardly the smallest
+bush. The wind blew stronger and stronger directly in our faces as we
+rose out of the Melozitna basin on the hill that is its watershed, and
+when the summit was reached and we turned and looked back there was
+nothing visible but a white, wind-swept waste. But ahead all the snow
+was most beautifully and delicately tinted from the reflection of the
+dawn on ragged shredded clouds that streamed across the southeastern
+sky. Where the sky was free of cloud it gave a wonderful clear green
+that was almost but not quite the colour of malachite. It was exactly
+the colour of the water the propeller of a steamship churns up where the
+Atlantic Ocean shallows to the rocky shore of the north coast of
+Ireland. The clouds themselves caught a deep dull red from the sunrise,
+which the snow gave back in blush pink. Such an exquisite colour harmony
+did the scene compose that the wind, lulling for a moment on the crest
+of the hill, seemed charmed into peace by it.
+
+The feast of colour brought a train of colour memories, one hard upon
+the heels of another, as we went down the hill; the Catbells, this
+golden with bracken, that purple with heather, and each doubled in the
+depths of Derwentwater; an October morning in the hardwood forests of
+the mountains of Tennessee, when for half an hour every gorgeous tint of
+red and yellow was lavishly flaunted--and then the whole pride and
+splendour of it wiped out at once by a wind that sprang up; the
+encircling and towering reds and pinks of a gigantic amphitheatre of
+rock in the Dolomites; a patch of flowers right against the snow in the
+high Rockies, so intensely blue that it seemed the whole vault of heaven
+could be tinctured with the pigment that one petal would distil. And,
+more inspiring than them all, there came the recollection of that
+wonderful sunrise and those blazing mountains of the Alatna-Kobuk
+portage. Every land has its glories, and the sky is everywhere a blank
+canvas for the display of splendid colour, but the tints of the arctic
+sky are of an infinite purity of individual tone that no other sky can
+show.
+
+As we descended the hill into the Tozitna basin the wind rose again, now
+charged with heavy, driving snow, while in the valley the underfoot snow
+grew deep, so that it was drawing to dusk when we reached the cabin on a
+fork of the Tozitna where Bob the mail-man had spent the previous night,
+and there we stayed.
+
+The next day is worthy of record for the sharp contrast it affords. All
+the night it had snowed heavily, and it snowed all the morning and into
+the afternoon. Some sixteen or seventeen inches of snow had fallen since
+Bob and his party passed, and again we had no trail at all.
+Moreover--strange plaint in January in Alaska!--the weather grew so warm
+that the snow continually balled up under the snow-shoes and clung to
+the sled and the dogs. At noon the thermometer stood at 17° above
+zero--and it was but four days ago that we recorded 70° below! It will
+be readily understood how such wide and sudden ranges of temperature add
+to the inconvenience and discomfort of mushing. Parkees, sweaters,
+shirts are shed one after the other, the fur cap becomes a nuisance, the
+mittens a burden, and still ploughing through the snow he is bathed in
+sweat who had forgotten what sweating felt like. The poor dogs suffer
+the most, for they have nothing they can shed and they can perspire only
+through the mouth. Their tongues drop water almost in a stream, they
+labour for their breath, and their eyes have a look that comes only with
+soft weather and a heavy trail. So constantly do they grab mouthfuls of
+snow that the operation becomes quite a check on our progress.
+
+By two o'clock it was growing dusk, and we had but reached the bank of
+the other fork of the Tozitna, not more than eight or nine miles from
+the cabin where we spent the night and yet thirteen or fourteen miles
+from the cabin we had hoped to reach. Beyond the banks of the stream was
+no more timber for a long distance; was such another stretch of open
+country as we had passed the previous day. So here was another
+disappointment, for camp must be made now lest there be no chance to
+make camp at all. But it was a good and comfortable camp, amidst the
+large spruce of the watercourse. Such disappointments are part of life
+on the trail; and supper done there was the more time for the boys.
+
+The open country was again wind-swept, and being wind-swept the snow was
+somewhat hardened, and we fought our way against a gale, covering the
+twelve and three quarter miles in ten hours, Sunday though it was. At
+that last stage on the road to Tanana came out a young man from the
+mission with a dog team and an Indian, anxious at our long delay, and
+Harry Strangman's name is written here with grateful recognition of this
+kindness and many others. We went joyfully into town on the morrow, the
+17th of January, having taken fifteen days to make a journey that is
+normally made in five.
+
+[Sidenote: THE MAIL-CARRIER]
+
+Half-way on that last day's mush we met the mail-man returning to the
+Koyukuk. So much had he been delayed that there was danger of a fine and
+all sorts of trouble, and the mail had been sent out to meet him at the
+noon cabin, together with a supply of grub for the return trip. But the
+caterer, whoever he was, forgot candles, and the mail-man would have had
+to make his way back to the Koyukuk without any means of artificial
+light, in the shortest days of the year, had we not been able to supply
+him with half a dozen candles that remained to us. It was a
+disappointment to George, the boy I had brought from the mission, that
+he must turn round and go back also. He had never "seen Tanana," which
+is quite a metropolis to him, and had looked forward to it keenly all
+the journey, but the boy braced up and took his disappointment manfully.
+A pitiful procession it was that passed us by and took our boy away; the
+poor, wearied dogs that had certainly earned the few days' rest they
+were so badly in need of left a trail of blood behind them that was
+sickening to see. Almost every one of them had sore, frozen feet; many
+of them were lame; and when we came to descend the long hill they had
+just climbed, right at its brow, where the stiffest pull had been, was a
+claw from a dog's foot frozen into bloody snow.
+
+So far as there is anything heroic about the Alaskan trail, the
+mail-carriers are the real heroes. They must start out in all weathers,
+at all temperatures; they have a certain specified time in which to make
+their trips and they must keep within that time or there is trouble. The
+bordering country of the Canadian Yukon has a more humane government
+than ours. There neither mail-carrier nor any one else, save in some
+life-or-death emergency, with licence from the Northwest Mounted Police,
+may take out horse or dogs to start a journey when the temperature is
+lower than 45° below zero; but I have seen a reluctant mail-carrier
+chased out at 60° below zero, on pain of losing his job, on the American
+side. Moreover, between the seasons, when travel on the rivers is
+positively dangerous to life, the mail must still be despatched and
+received, although so great is the known risk to the mail, as well as to
+the carrier, that no one will send any letter that he cares at all about
+reaching its destination until the trails are established or the
+steamboats run. But the virtually empty pouches must be transported from
+office to office through the running, or over the rotting ice, just the
+same, on pain of the high displeasure and penalty of a department
+without brains and without bowels. I have often wished since I came to
+Alaska that I could be postmaster-general for one week, and so I suppose
+has almost every other resident of the country.
+
+The week following my arrival at Tanana was a solid week of cold
+weather, the thermometer ranging around 50° and 60° below zero, and that
+means keeping pretty close to the house. Even the sentries at the army
+post are withdrawn and the protection of the garrison is confided to a
+man who watches the grounds from a glass-walled cupola above the
+headquarters building. Yet a week of confinement and inaction grows
+tiresome after life in the open.
+
+Sunday is always a busy day here. The mission and native village are
+three miles away from the town, and service must be held at both. The
+mission at Tanana is not a happy place to visit for one who has the
+welfare of the natives at heart. Despite faithful and devoted effort to
+check it, the demoralisation goes on apace and the outlook is dark.
+
+[Sidenote: SINGLE MEN IN BARRACKS]
+
+"Single men in barracks don't grow into plaster saints," we are told;
+sometimes they seem to grow into drunken, lustful devils without
+compassion for childhood, not to mention any feeling of magnanimity
+towards a feebler race. And when a girl who has been rough-handled, or
+who has been given drink until she is unable to resist the multiple
+outrage practised upon her, is told to pick out the malefactors from a
+company of soldiers, all clean-shaven, all dressed alike, all around the
+same age, she generally fails to identify altogether. So the offence
+goes unwhipped, and the officer is likely as not to address a reprimand
+to the complaining missionary for "preferring charges you are unable to
+substantiate." Yet an officer who had himself written such a letter told
+me once that all Indians looked alike to him. Even should the girl
+identify one or more men, they have usually half a dozen comrades ready
+to swear an alibi.
+
+Add to the trouble given by the soldiers the constant operation of the
+slinking bootleggers of the town, a score or more of whom are known to
+make money by this liquor peddling, and some of whom do nothing else for
+a living, yet whom it is next to impossible to convict, owing to the
+cumbrous machinery of the law and the attitude of juries, and it will be
+seen that the hands of those who are fighting for the native race are
+tied.
+
+What has been said about the military does not by any means apply to
+all, either officers or men. Some of the officers have been decent,
+God-fearing men, conscious of the evil and zealous to suppress it; some
+of the men, indeed in all probability most of the men, quite free from
+such offence; some commanding officers have kept such a well-disciplined
+post that offences of all kinds have been greatly reduced. But the
+commanding officer is changed every year, and the whole force is changed
+every two years, so that there is no continuity of policy at the post,
+and an administration that has grown familiar with conditions and that
+stands so far as it can for clean living and sobriety and decency and
+the protection of the native people, may be followed by one that is
+loftily ignorant of the situation, careless about offences against
+morality, and impatient of any complaint.
+
+Off by himself, separate from the demoralising influence of the low-down
+white, there is every hope and encouragement in the effort to elevate
+and educate the Indian; set down cheek by jowl with the riffraff of
+towns and barracks, his fate seems sealed.
+
+[Sidenote: DEATH-RATE AND BIRTH-RATE]
+
+Let these two mission stations, the Allakaket and Tanana, one hundred
+and fifty miles or so apart by the winter trail, represent the two
+conditions. In six years' time there has been manifest advance at the
+one and decay at the other. The birth-rate is greatly in excess of the
+death-rate at the Allakaket, the death-rate greatly in excess of the
+birth-rate at Tanana. In the year in which this journey was made there
+were thirty-four deaths and fourteen births at Tanana, and while the
+difference was an unusually large one, yet in the six years referred to
+there has not been one year in which the number of births exceeded the
+number of deaths. One does not have to be a prophet to foresee the
+inevitable result, if the process be not stopped.
+
+A tribute should be paid to the zeal, now of one, now of another army
+surgeon at Fort Gibbon in tending the native sick, three miles away,
+when we have been unable to procure a physician of our own for the
+place. The missionary nurse, for five years last past Miss Florence
+Langdon, has been greatly helped in her almost desperate efforts here by
+the willing co-operation of these medical officers of the army.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[B] See illustration, p. 374.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+UP THE YUKON TO RAMPART AND ACROSS COUNTRY TO THE TANANA--ALASKAN
+AGRICULTURE--THE GOOD DOG NANOOK--MISS FARTHING'S BOYS AT NENANA--CHENA
+AND FAIRBANKS
+
+
+OUR course from Tanana did not lie directly up the Tanana River, but up
+the Yukon to Rampart and then across country to the Hot Springs on the
+Tanana River. The seventy-five miles up the Yukon was through the Lower
+Ramparts, one of the most picturesque portions of this great river. The
+stream is confined in one deep channel by lofty mountains on both banks,
+and the scenery at times is very bold and wild. But its topography makes
+it the natural wind course of the country--a down-river wind in winter,
+an up-river wind in summer blows almost continually. It was no colder
+than 5° below zero when we started on the trip, but the wind made the
+travelling unpleasant. The second day it had increased to a gale, and
+every mile we travelled it grew stronger. We travelled three hours, and
+the last hour we made scarcely a mile. So thickly charged with flying
+snow was the wind and so dead ahead that despite parkee hoods it blinded
+us, and the dogs could hardly be forced to keep their heads towards it.
+Their faces were so coated with crusted snow that they looked curiously
+like the face of harlequin in the pantomime. It did become literally
+intolerable, and when Arthur said that he knew there was a cabin right
+across the river, we made our way thither and shortly found it and lay
+there the rest of the day, the gale blowing incessantly. This was
+disappointing, because it meant that I could not reach Rampart for the
+Sunday I had appointed.
+
+Next day the wind had ceased and the thermometer went down to 30° below
+zero. In places the ice was blown clear of snow; in other places it was
+heavily drifted. By midday we had reached the lonely telegraph station
+at "The Rapids," and were very kindly received by the signal-corps men
+in charge. They gave us to eat and to drink and would take no money.
+There is little travel on this part of the river nowadays, and the
+telegraph men are glad to see any one who may chance to pass by. We
+pushed on heavily again, and had to stop and cut a gee pole presently,
+for it was hard to handle the sled without it; but the gee pole always
+means laborious travel. The cold was welcome; it meant no wind; and we
+were glad to see the thermometer drop lower than 50° below zero that
+night at the old mail cabin. The mail goes no longer on the Yukon River
+from Fort Yukon to Tanana, and, barring this point, Rampart, towards
+which we were travelling, which is supplied across country from the Hot
+Springs, over the route we should traverse, no spot on that three
+hundred and fifty miles of river receives any mail at all. The
+population is small and scattered, it is true; on the same grounds
+Alaska might be denied any mail at all. There has been much resentment
+at this abandonment of the Yukon River by the post-office and several
+petitions for its restoration, but it has not been restored.
+
+[Sidenote: THE WIND-SWEPT YUKON]
+
+We travelled all the next day at 50° below zero, and it was one of the
+pleasantest days of the winter. There was not a breath of wind, the
+going steadily improved, and, best of all, for three hours we were
+travelling in the sunshine for the first time this winter. Only those
+who have been deprived of the sun can really understand how joyful and
+grateful his return is. There was no heat in his rays, this last day of
+January; the thermometer stood at 49° below at noon, and had risen but
+5° since our start in the morning; but the mere sight of him glowing in
+the south, where a great bend of the river gave him to us through a gap
+in the mountains, was cheerful and invigorating after two months in
+which we had seen no more than his gilding of the high snows. The sun
+gives life to the dead landscape, colour to the oppressive monotony of
+white and black, and man's heart leaps to the change as jubilantly as
+does the face of nature.
+
+[Sidenote: RAMPART AND ITS SALOON]
+
+Rampart City differs from Circle City, the other decayed mining town of
+the Yukon River, only in that the process is further advanced. Year by
+year there are a few less men on the creeks behind it, a few less
+residents in the town itself. Its long, straggling water-front consists
+in the main of empty buildings, the windows boarded up, the snow drifted
+high about the doors. One store now serves all ends of trade, one liquor
+shop serves all the desire for drink of the whites, and slops over
+through the agency of two or three dissolute squaw men and half-breeds
+to the natives up and down the river.[C]
+
+Rampart had one fat year, 1898, when many hundreds of gold seekers,
+approaching the Klondike by Saint Michael and the lower Yukon were
+attracted and halted by the gold discoveries on Big and Little Minook,
+and spent the winter here. The next spring news was brought of the rich
+discoveries on Anvil Creek, behind Cape Nome, and an exodus began which
+grew into a veritable stampede in 1900, when the gold discoveries in the
+beach itself were made. Rampart's large population faded away as surely
+and as quickly to Nome as Circle City's population did to the Klondike.
+The Indians are almost all gone from their village a mile above the
+town; they dwindled away with the dwindling prosperity, some to Tanana,
+some to other points down the river; and what used to be the worst small
+native community in the interior of Alaska has almost ceased to exist.
+Most of the little band of white folks still remaining were gathered
+together at night, and appreciated, I thought, their semiannual
+opportunity for Divine service.
+
+[Sidenote: "DEVELOPED"]
+
+There is no resisting the melancholy that hangs over a place like this.
+As one treads the crazy, treacherous board sidewalks, full of holes and
+rotten planks, now rising a step or two, now falling, and reads the
+dimmed and dirty signs that once flaunted their gold and colours,
+"Golden North," "Pioneer," "Reception," "The Senate" (why should every
+town in Alaska have a "Senate" saloon and not one a "House of
+Representatives"?), one conjures up the scenes of rude revelry these
+drinking places witnessed a few years ago. How high the hopes of sudden
+riches burned in the breasts of the men who went in and out of them,
+doomed to utter disappointment in the vast majority! What a rapscallion
+crew, male and female, followed this great mob of gold seekers, and grew
+richer as their victims grew poorer! What earned and borrowed and saved
+and begged and stolen moneys were frittered away and flung away that
+winter; what health and character were undermined! How the ribaldry and
+valiant, stupid blasphemy rang out in these tumbling-down shanties! Go
+out on the creeks and see the hills denuded of their timber, the
+stream-beds punched with innumerable holes, filled up or filling up, the
+cabins and sluice-boxes rotting into the moss, here and there a broken
+pick and shovel, here and there a rusting boiler, and take notice that
+this region has been "developed."
+
+When the debit and credit sides of the ledger are balanced, what remains
+to Alaska of all these thousands of men, of all the many hundreds of
+thousands of dollars they brought with them? Those creeks, stripped,
+gutted, and deserted; this town, waiting for a kindly fire with a
+favouring breeze to wipe out its useless emptiness; a few half-breed
+children at mission schools; a hardy native tribe, sophisticated,
+diseased, demoralised, and largely dead--that seems the net result.
+
+The portage trail from Rampart to the Tanana River goes up Minook Creek
+and follows the valley to its head, then crosses a summit and passes
+down through several small mining settlements to the Hot Springs. The
+trail saves traversing two sides of the triangle which it makes with the
+two rivers.
+
+The dogs' feet and legs had suffered so much from the deep snow and the
+heavy labour of the journey out of the Koyukuk and the rough ice of the
+Yukon that I was compelled to have not merely moccasins but moose-hide
+leggings made here, coming right up to the belly and tying over the
+back. All the hair was worn away from the back of the legs and the skin
+was in many places raw.
+
+We had thought to cover the twenty-five or thirty miles up the valley
+and over the summit to a road-house just beyond its foot, but rough
+drifted trails and a high wind held us back until it was dark before the
+ascent was reached, and we pitched our tent and reserved the climb for
+the morrow.
+
+It was a hard grind owing to the drifted snow and the wind that still
+disputed our passage, but the view from the summit, nearly eighteen
+hundred feet above last night's camp, was compensation enough, for it
+gave us the great mountain, Denali, or, as the map makers and some
+white men call it, Mount McKinley. Perhaps an hundred and fifty miles
+away, as the crow flies, it rose up and filled all the angle of vision
+to the southwest. It is not a peak, it is a region, a great soaring of
+the earth's crust, rising twenty thousand feet high; so enormous in its
+mass, in its snow-fields and glaciers, its buttresses, its flanking
+spurs, its far-flung terraces of foot-hills and approaches, that it
+completely dominates the view whenever it is seen at all. I have heard
+people say they thought they had seen Denali, as I have heard travellers
+say they thought they had seen Mount Everest from Darjiling; but no one
+ever thought he saw Denali if he saw it at all. There is no possible
+question about it, once the mountain has risen before the eyes; and
+although Mount Everest is but the highest of a number of great peaks,
+while Denali stands alone in unapproached predominance, yet I think the
+man who has really looked upon the loftiest mountain in the world could
+have no doubt about it ever after.
+
+How my heart burns within me whenever I get view of this great monarch
+of the North! There it stood, revealed from base to summit in all its
+stupendous size, all its glistening majesty. I would far rather climb
+that mountain than own the richest gold-mine in Alaska. Yet how its
+apparent nearness mocks one; what time and cost and labour are involved
+even in approaching its base with food and equipment for an attempt to
+reach its summit! How many schemes I have pondered and dreamed these
+seven years past for climbing it! Some day time and opportunity and
+resource may serve, please God, and I may have that one of my heart's
+desires; if not, still it is good to have seen it from many different
+coigns of vantage, from this side and from that; to have felt the awe of
+its vast swelling bulk, the superb dignity of its firm-seated,
+broad-based uplift to the skies with a whole continent for a pedestal;
+to have gazed eagerly and longingly at its serene, untrodden summit, far
+above the eagle's flight, above even the most daring airman's venture,
+and to have desired and hoped to reach it; to desire and hope to reach
+it still.[D]
+
+Plunging down the steep descent we went for four miles, and then after a
+hearty dinner at the road-house, essayed to make twenty-one miles more
+to the Hot Springs. But night fell again with a number of miles yet to
+come, the recent storm had furrowed the trail diagonally with hard
+windrows of snow that overturned the sled repeatedly and formed an
+hindrance that grew greater and greater, and again we made camp in the
+dark, short of our expected goal.
+
+Of late I had been carrying an hip ring, a rubber ring inflated by the
+breath that is the best substitute for a mattress. The ring had been
+left behind at Rampart, and so dependent does one grow on the little
+luxuries and ameliorations one permits oneself that these two nights in
+camp were almost sleepless for lack of it.
+
+[Sidenote: THE HOT SPRINGS]
+
+Three hours more brought us to the spacious hotel, with its forty empty
+rooms, that had been put up, out of all sense or keeping, in a wild,
+plunging attempt to "exploit" the Hot Springs and make a great "health
+resort" of the place. The hot water had been piped a quarter of a mile
+or so to spacious swimming-baths in the hotel; all sorts of expense had
+been lavished on the place; but it had been a failure from the first,
+and has since been closed and has fallen into dilapidation. The bottoms
+have dropped out of the cement baths, the paper hangs drooping from the
+damp walls, the unsubstantial foundations have yielded until the floors
+are heaved like the waves of the sea.[E] But at this time the hotel was
+still maintained and we stayed there, and its wide entrance-hall and
+lobby formed an excellent place to gather the inhabitants of the little
+town for Divine service--again the only opportunity in the year.
+
+What a curious phenomenon thermal springs constitute in these parts!
+Here is a series of patches of ground, free from snow, while all the
+country has been covered two or three feet deep these four months; green
+with vegetation, while all living things elsewhere are wrapped in winter
+sleep. Here is open, rushing water, throwing up clouds of steam that
+settles upon everything as dense hoar frost, while all other water is
+held in the adamantine fetters of the ice. Where does that constant
+unfailing stream of water at 110° Fahrenheit come from? Where does it
+get its heat? I know of half a dozen such thermal springs in
+Alaska,--one far away above the Arctic Circle between the upper courses
+of the Kobuk and the Noatak Rivers, that I have heard strange tales
+about from the Esquimaux and that I have always wanted to visit.
+
+Whenever I see this gush of hot water in the very midst of the ice and
+the snow, I am reminded of my surprise on the top of Mount Tacoma. We
+had climbed some eight thousand feet of snow and were shivering in a
+bitter wind on the summit, yet when the hand was thrust in a cleft of
+the rock it had to be withdrawn by reason of the heat. One knows about
+the internal fire of some portion of the earth's mass, of course, but
+such striking manifestations of it, such bold irruption of heat in the
+midst of the kingdom of the cold, must always bring a certain
+astonishment except to those who take everything as a matter of course.
+
+It is evident that this hot water, capable of distribution over a
+considerable area of land, makes an exceedingly favourable condition for
+subarctic agriculture, and a great deal of ground has been put under
+cultivation with large yield of potatoes and cabbage and other
+vegetables. But the limitations of Alaskan conditions have shorn all
+profit from the enterprise. There is no considerable market nearer than
+Fairbanks, almost two hundred miles away by the river. If the potatoes
+are allowed to remain in the ground until they are mature, there is the
+greatest danger of the whole crop freezing while on the way to market,
+and in any case the truck-farmers around Fairbanks find that their
+proximity to the consumer more than offsets the advantage of the Hot
+Springs.
+
+[Sidenote: ARCTIC AGRICULTURE]
+
+When the great initial difficulties of farming in Alaska are overcome,
+when the moss is removed and the ground, frozen solidly to bedrock, is
+broken and thawed, when its natural acidity is counteracted by the
+application of some alkali, and its reeking surface moisture is drained
+away; when after three or four years' cultivation it begins to make some
+adequate return of roots and greens, there remains the constant
+difficulty of a market. Around the mining settlements and during the
+uncertain life of the mining settlements, truck-farming pays very well,
+but it could easily be overdone so that prices would fall below the
+point of any profit at all. Transportation is expensive, and rates for a
+short haul on the rivers are high, out of all proportion to rates for
+the long haul from the outside, so that potatoes from the Pacific coast
+are brought in and sold in competition with the native-grown. And
+despite the protestations of the agricultural experimental stations, the
+outside or "chechaco" potato has the advantage of far better quality
+than that grown in Alaska. Tastes differ, and a man may speak only as he
+finds. For my part, I have eaten native potatoes raised in almost every
+section of interior Alaska, and have been glad to get them, but I have
+never eaten a native potato that compared favourably with any good
+"outside" potato. The native potato is commonly wet and waxy; I have
+never seen a native potato that would burst into a glistening mass of
+white flour, or that had the flavour of a really good potato.
+
+There has been much misconception about the interior of Alaska that
+obtains yet in some quarters, although there is no excuse for it now.
+Not only the interior of Alaska, but all land at or near sea-level in
+the arctic regions that is not under glacial ice-caps, is snow free and
+surface-thawed in the summer and has a luxuriant vegetation. The polar
+ox (Sverdrup's protest against the term "musk-ox" should surely prevail)
+ranges in great bands north of the 80th parallel and must secure
+abundant food; and when Peary determined the insularity of Greenland he
+found its most northerly point a mass of verdure and flowers.
+
+No doubt potatoes and turnips, lettuce and cabbage, could be raised
+anywhere in those regions; the intensity of the season compensates for
+its shortness; the sun is in the heavens twenty-four hours in the day,
+and all living things sprout and grow with amazing rankness and celerity
+under the strong compulsion of his continuous rays. Spring comes
+literally with a shout and a rush here in Alaska, and must cry even
+louder and stride even faster in the "ultimate climes of the pole." If
+the possibility of raising garden-truck and tubers constitutes a
+"farming country," then all the arctic regions not actually under
+glacial ice may be so classed.
+
+Any one who visits the Koyukuk may see monster turnips and cabbages
+raised at Coldfoot, near the 68th parallel; from Sir William Parry's
+description we may feel quite sure that vegetables of size and
+excellence might be raised at the head of Bushnan's Cove of Melville
+Island, on the 75th parallel; he called it "an arctic paradise"; Greely
+reported "grass twenty-four inches high and many butterflies" in the
+interior of Grinnell Land under the 82d parallel; and if gold were ever
+discovered on the north coast of Greenland one might quite expect to
+hear that some enterprising Swede was growing turnips and cabbages at
+Cape Morris Jessup above the 83d parallel, and getting a dollar a pound
+for them.
+
+In favourable seasons and in favourable spots of interior Alaska certain
+early varieties of Siberian oats and rye have been matured, and it
+stands to the credit of the Experiment Station at Rampart that a little
+wheat was once ripened there, though it took thirteen months from the
+sowing to the ripening. When the rest of the world fills up so that
+economic pressure demands the utilisation of all earth that will produce
+any sort of food, it may be that large tracts in Alaska will be put
+under the plough; but it is hard to believe that nine tenths of all this
+vast country will ever be other than wild waste land. At present the
+farming population is strictly an appendage of the mining population,
+and the mining population rather diminishes than increases.
+
+Your health resort that no one will resort to is a dull place at best
+and a poor dependence for merchandising, so that the little town of Hot
+Springs is fortunate in having some mining country around it to fall
+back upon for its trade. We lay an extra day there, waiting for the
+stage from Fairbanks to break trail for us through the heavy, drifted
+snow, having had enough of trail breaking for a while. At midnight the
+stage came, two days late, and its coming caused me as keen a sorrow and
+as great a loss as I have had since I came to Alaska.
+
+[Sidenote: NANOOK'S DEATH]
+
+We knew naught of it until the next morning, when, breakfast done and
+the sled lashed, we were ready to hitch the dogs and depart. They had
+been put in the horse stable for there was no dog house; the health
+resorter, actual or prospective, is not likely to be a dog man one
+supposes; but they were loose in the morning and came to the call, all
+but one--Nanook. Him we sought high and low, and at last Arthur found
+him, but in what pitiful case! He dragged himself slowly and painfully
+along, his poor bowels hanging down in the outer hide of his belly,
+fearfully injured internally, done for and killed already. It was not
+difficult to account for it. When the horses came in at midnight, one of
+them had kicked the dog and ruptured his whole abdomen.
+
+There was no use in inquiring whose fault it was. The dogs should have
+been chained; so much was our fault. But it was hard to resist some
+bitter recollection that before this "exploitation" of the springs, when
+there was a modest road-house instead of a mammoth hotel, there had been
+kennels for dogs instead of nothing but stables for horses.
+
+I doubt if all the veterinary surgeons in the world could have saved the
+dog, but there was none to try; and there was only one thing to do, hate
+it as we might. Arthur and I were grateful that neither of us had to do
+it, for the driver of the mail stage, who had some compunctions of
+conscience, I think, volunteered to save us the painful duty. "I know
+how you feel," he said slowly and kindly; "I've got a dog I think a heap
+of myself, but that dog ain't nothin' to me an' I'll do it for you."
+
+Nanook knew perfectly well that it was all over with him. Head and tail
+down, the picture of resigned dejection, he stood like a petrified dog.
+And when I put my face down to his and said "Good-bye," he licked me for
+the first time in his life. In the six years I had owned him and driven
+him I had never felt his tongue before, though I had always loved him
+best of the bunch. He was not the licking kind.
+
+We hitched up our diminished team and pulled out, for we had thirty
+miles to make in the short daylight and we had lost time already; and as
+we crossed the bridge over the steaming slough we saw the man going
+slowly down to the river with the dog, the chain in one hand, a gun in
+the other. My eyes filled with tears; I could not look at Arthur nor he
+at me as I passed forward to run ahead of the team, and I was glad when
+I realised that we had drawn out of ear-shot.
+
+All day as I trudged or trotted now on snow-shoes and now off, as the
+trail varied in badness, that dog was in my mind and his loss upon my
+heart, the feel of his tongue upon my cheek. It takes the close
+companionship between a man and his dogs in this country, travelling all
+the winter long, winter after winter, through the bitter cold and the
+storm and darkness, through the long, pleasant days of the warm sunshine
+of approaching spring, sharing labour and sharing ease, sharing
+privation and sharing plenty; it takes this close companionship to make
+a man appreciate a dog. As I reckoned it up, Nanook had fallen just
+short of pulling my sled ten thousand miles. If he had finished this
+season with me he would have done fully that, and I had intended to
+pension him after this winter, to provide that so long as he lived he
+should have his fish and rice every day. Some doubt I had had of old
+Lingo lasting through the winter, but none of Nanook, and they were the
+only survivors of my original team.
+
+[Sidenote: THE TALKING DOG]
+
+Nanook was in as good spirits as ever I knew him that last night, coming
+to me and plumping his huge fore paws down on my moccasins, challenging
+me to play the game of toe treading that he loved; and whenever he beat
+me at it he would seize my ankle in his jaws and make me hop around on
+one foot, to his great delight. He was my talking dog. He had more
+different tones in his bark than any other dog I ever knew. He never
+came to the collar in the morning, he never was released from it at
+night, without a cheery "bow-wow-wow." And we never stopped finally to
+make camp but he lifted up his voice. There was something curious about
+that. Only two nights before, when we had been unable to reach the
+health resort owing to wind-hardened drifts right across the trail that
+overturned the heavy sled again and again, swing the gee pole as one
+would, and had stopped several times in the growing dusk to inspect a
+spot that seemed to promise a camping place, Arthur had remarked that
+Nanook never spoke until the spot was reached on which we decided to
+pitch the tent. What faculty he had of recognising a good place, of
+seeing that both green spruce and dry spruce were there in sufficient
+quantity, I do not know--or whether he got his cue from the tones of our
+voice--but he never failed to give tongue when the stop was final and
+never opened his mouth when it was but tentative.
+
+I could almost tell the nature of any disturbance that arose from the
+tone of Nanook's bark. Was it some stray Indian dog prowling round the
+camp; was it the distant howling of wolves; was it the approach of some
+belated traveller--there was a distinct difference in the way he
+announced each. I well remember the new note that came into his
+passionate protest when he was chained to a stump at the reindeer camp,
+and the foolish creatures streamed all over the camping-ground that
+night. To have them right beside him and yet be unable to reach them, to
+have them brushing him with their antlers while he strained helplessly
+at the chain, was adding insult to injury. And he kept me awake over it
+all night and told me about it at intervals all next day.
+
+The coat that dog had was the heaviest and thickest I ever saw. On his
+back the long hair parted in the middle, and underneath the hair was fur
+and underneath the fur was wool. He was an outdoors dog strictly. It was
+only in the last year or two that he could be induced voluntarily to
+enter a house; he seemed, like Mowgli, to have a suspicion of houses.
+And if he did come in he had no respect for the house at all. When first
+I had him he would dig and scratch out of a dog-house on the coldest
+night, if he could, and lay himself down comfortably on the snow. Cold
+meant little to him. Fifty, sixty, seventy below zero, all night long at
+such temperatures he would sleep quite contentedly. The only difference
+I could see that these low temperatures made to him was an increasing
+dislike to be disturbed. When he had carefully tucked his nose between
+his paws and adjusted his tail over all, he had gone to bed, and to make
+him take his nose out of its nest and uncurl himself was like throwing
+the clothes off a sleeping man. He never dug a hole for himself in the
+snow. I never saw a dog do that yet. In my opinion that is one of the
+nature-faker's stories. A dog lies in snow just as he lies in sand, with
+the same preliminary turn-round-three-times that has been so much
+speculated about. We always make a bed for them, when it is very cold,
+by cutting and stripping a few spruce boughs, and they highly appreciate
+such a couch and will growl and fight if another dog try to take it.
+They need more food and particularly they need more fat when they lie
+out at extreme low temperatures, and we seek to increase that element in
+their rations by adding tallow or bacon or bear's-grease--or seal
+oil--or whatever oleaginous substance we can come by.
+
+[Sidenote: CANINE CHARACTER]
+
+He was a most independent dog was Nanook, a thoroughly bad dog, as one
+would say in some use of that term--a thief who had no shame in his
+thievery but rather gloried in it. If you left anything edible within
+his ingenious and comprehensive reach he regarded it as a challenge.
+There comes to me a ludicrous incident that concerned a companion of one
+winter journey. He had carefully prepared a lunch and had wrapped it
+neatly in paper, and he placed it for a moment on the sled while he
+turned to put his scarf about him. But in that moment Nanook saw it and
+it was gone. Through the snow, over the brush, in and out amongst the
+stumps the chase proceeded, until Nanook was finally caught and my
+companion recovered most of the paper, for the dog had wolfed the grub
+as he ran. He would stand and take any licking you offered and never
+utter a sound but give a bark of defiance when you were done, and he
+would bear you no ill will in the world and repeat his offence at the
+next opportunity. Yet so absurdly sensitive was he in other matters of
+his person that the simple operation of clipping the hair from between
+his toes, to prevent the "balling-up" of the snow, took two men to
+perform, one to sit on the dog and the other to ply the scissors, and
+was accompanied always with such howls and squeals as would make a
+hearer think we were flaying him alive.
+
+Nanook's acquaintance with horses began in Fairbanks the first season I
+owned him, before I had had the harness upon him, when he was rising two
+years old. The dogs and I were staying at the hospital we had just
+established--because in those days there was nowhere else to
+stay--waiting for the winter. One of the mining magnates of the infancy
+of the camp (broken and dead long since; Bret Harte's lines, "Busted
+himself in White Pine and blew out his brains down in 'Frisco," often
+occur to me as the sordid histories of to-day repeat those of fifty
+years ago) had imported a saddle-horse and, as the mild days of that
+charming autumn still deferred the snow, he used to ride out past the
+hospital for a canter.
+
+The dog had learned to lift the latch of the gate of the hospital yard
+with his nose and get out, and when I put a wedge above the latch for
+greater security he learned also to circumvent that precaution. And
+whenever the horse and his rider passed, Nanook would open the gate and
+lead the whole pack in a noisy pursuit that changed the canter to a run
+and brought us natural but mortifying remonstrance.
+
+The rider had just passed and the dogs had pursued as usual, and I had
+rushed out and recalled them with difficulty. Nanook I had by the
+collar. Dragging him into the yard, shutting the gate, and putting in
+the wedge, I picked up a stick and gave him a few sharp blows with it.
+Then flinging him off, I said: "Now, you stay in here; I'll give you a
+sound thrashing if you do that again!" I was just getting acquainted
+with him then. The moment I loosed his collar the dog went deliberately
+to the gate, stood on his hind legs while he pulled out the wedge with
+his teeth, lifted the latch with his nose and swung open the gate, and
+standing in the midst turned round and said to me: "Bow-_wow_-wow-wow-wow-_wow_!"
+It was so pointed that a passer-by, who had paused to see the
+proceedings and was leaning on the fence, said to me: "Well, you know
+where _you_ can go to. That's the doggonedest dog I ever seen!"
+
+[Sidenote: PARTNERS]
+
+It was a pleasure to come back to Nanook after any long absence--a
+pleasure I was used to look forward to. There was no special fawning or
+demonstration of affection; he was not that kind; that I might have from
+any of the others; but from none but Nanook the bark of welcome with my
+particular inflection in it that no one else ever got. "Well, well;
+here's the boss again; glad to see you back"; that was about all it
+said. For he was a most independent dog and took to himself an air of
+partnership rather than subjection. Any man can make friends with any
+dog if he will, there is no question about that, but it takes a long
+time and mutual trust and mutual forbearance and mutual appreciation to
+make a partnership. Not every dog is fit to be partner with a man; nor
+every man, I think, fit to be partner with a dog.
+
+Well, that long partnership was dissolved by the horse's hoof and I was
+sore for its dissolution. There was none left now that could remember
+the old days of the team save Lingo, and he grew crusty and somewhat
+crabbed. He was still the guardian of the sled, still the insatiable
+hand-shaker, but he grew more and more unsocial with his mates, and we
+heard his short, sharp, angry double bark at night more frequently than
+we used to. He reminded me of the complaining owl in Gray's "Elegy." He
+resented any dog even approaching the sled, resented the dogs moving
+about at all to disturb his "ancient solitary reign."
+
+His work was well-nigh done, and old Lingo had honestly earned his rest.
+With the end of this winter he would enter upon the easy old age that I
+had designed for both of them. Lingo had never failed me; never let his
+traces slack if he could keep them taut, never in his life had whip laid
+on his back to make him pull; a faithful old work dog for whom I had a
+hearty respect and regard. But he never found his way to my heart as
+Nanook did. I loved Nanook, and had lost something personal out of my
+life in losing him. There are other dogs that I am fond of--better dogs
+in some ways that either Nanook or Lingo, swifter certainly--but I think
+I shall never have two dogs again that have meant as much to me as these
+two. All the other dogs were of the last two years and thought they
+belonged to Arthur, who fed them and handled them most. But Nanook and
+Lingo had seen boys come and boys go, and they knew better.
+
+Six years is not very much of a man's life, but it is all a dog's life;
+all his effective working life. Nanook had given it all to me,
+willingly, gladly. He pulled so freely because he loved to pull. He
+delighted in the winter, in the snow and the cold; rejoiced to be on the
+trail, rejoiced to work. When we made ready to depart after a few days
+at a mission or in a town, Nanook was beside himself with joy. He would
+burst forth into song as he saw the preparations in hand, would run all
+up and down the gamut of his singular flexible voice, would tell as
+plainly to all around as though he spoke it in English and Indian and
+Esquimau that the inaction had irked him, that he was eager to be gone
+again.
+
+Well, he was dead; as fine a dog as ever lived; as faithful and
+intelligent a creature as any man ever had, not of human race, for
+servant, companion, and friend. And I thought the more of myself that he
+had put his tongue to my cheek when I said good-bye to him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: THE AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER]
+
+Here on the Tanana was one of the most interesting original characters
+of the many in the land: an old inhabitant of Alaska and of the
+Northwest who had followed many avocations and was now settled down on
+the river bank, with a steamboat wood-yard, a road-house for the
+entertainment of occasional travellers, and a little stock of trade
+goods chiefly for Indians of the vicinity. A round, fat, pursy man he
+was, past the middle life, with a twinkling eye and a bristling
+moustache, and a most amazing knack of picking up new words and using
+them incorrectly. He had fallen out with the great trading company of
+Alaska and did almost all his purchasing from a "mail-order house" in
+Chicago, the enormous quarto catalogue on the flimsiest thin paper
+issued by that establishment being his chief book of reference and his
+choice continual reading. He would declaim by the hour on the iniquitous
+prices that prevail in the interior and had the quotations of prices of
+every conceivable merchandise from his _vade mecum_ at his fingers'
+ends.
+
+But his chief passion of the past two or three years was photography, in
+the which he had made but little progress, despite considerable
+expenditures; and he had come to the conclusion about the time of our
+visit that what he needed was a fine lens, although, as a matter of
+fact, he had never learned to use his cheap one. He had recently become
+acquainted with sensitive film and had ordered a supply. By a
+transposition of letters, which the nature of the substance doubtless
+confirmed in his mind when it arrived, he always spoke of these
+convenient strips of celluloid as "flims," and was just now most
+eloquently indignant that, although he had broken utterly with the
+Northern Commercial Company and refused to trade with them at all, the
+supply of "flims" he had received from the mail-order house were
+labelled "N. C." "Them blamed monopolists has cornered the flims," he
+exclaimed, and was hardly persuaded that the letters signified
+"non-curling" and did not darkly hint at a conspiracy in restraint of
+trade.
+
+He produced and displayed a number of pieces of apparatus of a generally
+useless kind which he had ordered on the strength of their much
+advertising, and he observed sententiously, "We _armatures_ get badly
+imposed upon." Here were patent gimcrack printing devices, although he
+had scarce anything worth printing; all sorts of atrocious fancy borders
+with which he sought in vain to embellish out-of-focus under-exposures;
+orthochromatic filters and colour screens with which he was eliminating
+undesirable rays, although the chief thing his negatives lacked was
+light of any kind. His soiled and stained development trays were
+scattered about a large table amidst dirty cups and saucers and plates
+and dishes, while at the other end of the table, surmounting a pile of
+thumbed and greasy magazines and newspapers, lay the monstrous
+mail-order catalogue with pencilled indications of further apparatus to
+be purchased.
+
+But his zeal and enthusiasm and resolute riding of his hobby were very
+attractive. If he ever gets out of his head the notion that success
+depends upon apparatus he will doubtless become a photographer of sorts.
+Enthusiasm of any kind other than mining and "mushing" enthusiasm is so
+rare in this land that it is welcome even when it seems wasted. He had
+recently discovered the wax match in his catalogue, and as a parting
+gift he presented me with a box of "them there wax _vespers_ which beats
+the sulphur match all to thunder."
+
+[Sidenote: THE SULPHUR MATCH]
+
+But they do not. Nothing in this country can take the place of the
+old-fashioned sulphur match, long since banished from civilised
+communities, and the sulphur match is the only match a man upon the
+trail will employ. Manufactured from blocks of wood without complete
+severance, so that the ends of the matches are still held together at
+the bottom in one solid mass, it is easy to strip one off at need and
+strike it upon the block. A block of a hundred such matches will take up
+much less space than fifty of any other kind of match, and the blocks
+may be freely carried in any as they are commonly carried in every
+pocket without fear of accidental ignition. The only fire producer that
+it is worth while supplementing the sulphur match with is the even
+older-fashioned flint and steel, which to a man who smokes is a
+convenience in a wind. All the modern alcohol and gasoline pocket
+devices are extinguished by the lightest puff of wind, but the tinder,
+once ignited, burns the fiercer for the blast. With dry, shredded
+birch-bark I have made a fire upon occasion from the flint and steel.
+One resource may here be mentioned, since we are on the subject, which
+is always carried in the hind-sack of my sled against difficulty in fire
+making. It is a tin tobacco-box filled with strips of cotton cloth cut
+to the size of the box and the whole saturated with kerosene. One or two
+of these strips will help very greatly in kindling a fire when damp
+twigs or shavings are all that are at hand. A few camphor balls (the
+ordinary "moth balls") will serve equally well; and there may come a
+time, on any long journey, when the forethought that has provided such
+aid will be looked back upon with very great satisfaction.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The mail trail from Tanana to Fairbanks touches the Tanana River only at
+one point, a few miles beyond the Hot Springs; but, as we wished to
+visit Nenana, we had to leave the mail trail after two days more of
+uneventful travel and strike out to the river and over its surface for
+seventeen or eighteen miles.
+
+[Sidenote: A NOTABLE GENTLEWOMAN]
+
+Nenana is a native village situated on the left bank of the Tanana, a
+little above the confluence of the Nenana River with that stream, and we
+have established an important and flourishing school there which
+receives its forty pupils from many points on the Yukon and Tanana
+Rivers. None but thoroughly sound and healthy children of promise, full
+natives or half-breeds, are received at the school, and we seek to give
+both boys and girls opportunity for the cultivation of the native arts
+and for some of the white man's industrial training, in addition to the
+ordinary work of the schoolroom. The school was started and had the good
+fortune of its first four years' life under the care of a notable
+gentlewoman, Miss Annie Cragg Farthing, who was yet at its head at the
+time of this visit, but who died suddenly, a martyr to her devotion to
+the children, a year later; and a great Celtic cross in concrete,
+standing high on the bluff across the river, now marks the spot of her
+own selection--a spot that gives a fine view of Denali--where her body
+rests, and also the Alaskan mission's sense of the extraordinary value
+of her life.
+
+It would be easy to give striking instances of the potency and stretch
+of this remarkable woman's influence amongst the native people, an
+influence--strange as it may sound to those who deem any half-educated,
+under-bred white woman competent to take charge of an Indian school--due
+as much to her wide culture, her perfect dignity and self-possession,
+her high breeding, as to the love and consecrated enthusiasm of her
+character. It is no exaggeration to say that Miss Farthing's work has
+left a mark broad and deep upon the Indian race of this whole region
+that will never be wiped out.
+
+There is no greater pleasure than to spend a few days at this school; to
+foregather again with so many of the hopeful young scamps that one has
+oneself selected here and there and brought to the place; to mark the
+improvement in them, the taming and gentling, the drawing out of the
+sweet side of the nature that is commonly buried to the casual observer
+in the rudeness and shyness of savage childhood. To romp with them, to
+tell them tales and jingles, to get insensibly back into their familiar
+confidence again, to say the evening prayers with them, to join with
+their clear, fresh voices in the hymns and chants, is indeed to
+rejuvenate oneself. And to go away believing that real strength of
+character is developing, that real preparation is making for an Indian
+race that shall be a better Indian race and not an imitation white race,
+is the cure for the discouragement that must sometimes come to all those
+who are committed heart and soul to the cause of the Alaskan native.
+School-teachers, it would seem, ought never to grow old; they should
+suck in new youth continually from the young life around them; and
+children are far and away the most interesting things in the world, more
+interesting even than dogs and great mountains.
+
+[Sidenote: CHIVALROUS INDIAN YOUTH]
+
+All the boys in the school, I think, swarmed across the river with us
+when we started away early in the morning, and the elder ones ran with
+the sled along the portage, mile after mile, until I turned them back
+lest they be late for school.
+
+But when they were gone, still I saw them, saw them gathered round the
+grey-haired lady I had left, fawning upon her with their eyes, their
+hearts filled with as true chivalry as ever animated knight or champion
+of the olden time. Tall, upstanding fellows of sixteen or seventeen,
+clean-limbed and broad-shouldered, wild-run all their lives; hunters,
+with a tale of big game to the credit of some of them would make an
+English sportsman envious; unaccustomed to any restraint at all and
+prone to chafe at the slightest; unaccustomed to any respect for women,
+to any of the courtesies of life, I saw them fly at a word, at a look,
+to do her bidding, saw cap snatched from head if they encountered her
+about the buildings, saw them jump up and hold open the door if she
+moved to pass out of a room, saw the eager devotion that would have
+served her upon bended knee had they thought it would please her. It was
+wonderful, the only thing of quite its kind I had ever seen in my life.
+
+When early in the school's history an old medicine-man at Nenana had
+been roused to animosity by her refusal to countenance an offensive
+Indian custom touching the adolescent girls, and had defiantly announced
+his intention to make medicine against her, I can see her now, her staff
+in her hand, attended by two or three of her devoted youths, invading
+the midnight pavilion of the conjurer, in the very midst of his
+conjurations, tossing his paraphernalia outside, laying her staff
+smartly across the shoulders of the trembling shaman, and driving the
+gaping crew helter-skelter before her, their awe of the witchcraft
+overawed by her commanding presence. I make no apology that I thought of
+the scourge of small cords that was used on an occasion in the temple at
+Jerusalem, when I heard of it. It gave a shrewder blow to the lingering
+tyrannical superstition of the medicine-man than decades of preaching
+and reasoning would have done. No man living could have done the thing
+with like effect, nor any woman save one of her complete self-possession
+and natural authority. The younger villagers chuckle over the jest of it
+to this day, and the old witch-doctor himself was crouching at her feet
+and, as one may say, eating out of her hand, within the year.
+
+I saw these boys again, in my mind's eye, gone back to their homes here
+and there on the Yukon and the Tanana after their two or three years at
+this school, carrying with them some better ideal of human life than
+they could ever get from the elders of the tribe, from the little sordid
+village trader, from most of the whites they would be thrown with,
+keeping something of the vision of gentle womanhood, something of the
+"unbought grace of life," something of the keen sense of truth and
+honour, of the nobility of service, something deeper and stronger than
+mere words of the love of God, which they had learned of her whom they
+all revered; each one, however much overflowed again by the surrounding
+waters of mere animal living, tending a little shrine of sweeter and
+better things in his heart.
+
+[Sidenote: LONG-REMEMBERED TEACHING]
+
+Here, three years after the visit and the journey narrated, when these
+words are written with diaries and letters and memoranda around me, I am
+just come from a long native powwow, a meeting of all the Indians of a
+village for the annual election of a village council, important in the
+evolution of that self-government we covet for these people, but
+undeniably tedious. And, because at our missions we seek to associate
+with us every force that looks to the betterment of the natives, we had
+invited the new government teacher, a lady of long experience in Indian
+schools, to be present. She had sat patiently through the protracted
+meeting, and at its close, when she rose to go, a young Indian man
+jumped up and held her fur cloak for her and put it gently about her
+shoulders. When she had thanked him she asked with a smile: "Where did
+you learn to be so polite?" A gleam came into the fellow's eyes, then he
+dropped them and replied, "Miss Farthing taught me."
+
+Two days before, returning from a journey, I had spent the night at a
+road-house kept by a white man married to an Indian woman. There was
+excellent yeast bread on the table, and good bread is a rare thing in
+Alaska. "Where did you learn to make such good bread?" I inquired of the
+woman. There came the same light to her eyes and the same answer to her
+lips. Yet it was nine years ago, long before the school at Nenana was
+started, that this Indian boy and girl had been under Miss Farthing's
+teaching at Circle City.
+
+They tell us there is no longer much place or use for gentility in the
+world, for men and women nurtured and refined above the common level;
+tell us in particular that woman is only now emancipating herself from
+centuries of ineffectual nonage, only now entering upon her active
+career.
+
+Yet I am of opinion, from such opportunities to observe and compare as
+my constant travel has given me, that the quiet work of this gracious
+woman of the old school, with her dignity that nothing ever invaded and
+her poise that nothing ever disturbed, is perhaps the most powerful
+single influence that has come into the lives of the natives of interior
+Alaska.
+
+Two days brought us past the little native village and mission at Chena
+(which is pronounced Shen-a�), past the little white town of the same
+name, to Fairbanks, the chief town of interior Alaska. Chena is at the
+virtual head of the navigation of the Tanana River and is quite as near
+to the gold-producing creeks as Fairbanks, which latter place is not on
+the Tanana River at all but on a slough, impracticable for almost any
+craft at low water. For every topographical reason, from every
+consideration of natural advantage, Chena should have been the river
+port and town of these gold-fields. But Chena was so sure of her
+manifold natural advantages that she became unduly confident and
+grasping. When the traders at Fairbanks offered to remove to Chena at
+the beginning of the camp, if the traders at Chena would provide a site,
+the offer was scornfully rejected. "They would have to come, anyway, or
+go out of business." But they did not come; rather they put their backs
+up and fought. And because Fairbanks was enterprising and far-sighted,
+while Chena was avaricious and narrow, because Fairbanks offered free
+sites and Chena charged enormously for water-front, business went the
+ten miles up the often unnavigable slough and settled there, and by and
+by built a little railway that it might be independent of the uncertain
+boat service. The company came, the courts came, the hospital came, the
+churches came, and Chena woke up from its dreams of easy wealth to find
+itself and its manifold natural advantages passed by and ignored and the
+big town firmly established elsewhere.
+
+How well I remember the virulent little newspaper published at Chena in
+those days and the bitterness and vituperation it used to pour out week
+by week! One wishes a file of it had been preserved. Alaskan journalism
+has presented many amusing curiosities that no one has had leisure to
+collect, but nothing more amusing than the frenzy of impotent wrath
+Chena vented when it saw its cherished prospects and opportunities
+slipping out of its grasp for ever.
+
+        "If of all words on tongue or pen,
+         The saddest are 'it might have been,'
+         Full sad are those we often see,
+         It is, but it hadn't ought to be."
+
+It takes Bret Harte to strike the note for such rivalry and such
+disappointment.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[C] In December, 1912, a determined effort was made by the better
+element of the little handful of white people in this town to secure the
+withdrawal of the licence of this saloon. The justice of the peace, the
+government school-teacher, the postmaster, and others went up to
+Fairbanks (a week's journey over the trail) and opposed the granting of
+the licence in court. It was shown that the white men of the locality
+were so reduced in numbers that the business could not be carried on at
+a profit unless liquor was sold, directly or indirectly, to the Indians.
+But because by hook and by crook the names of a majority of one or two
+of all the white residents of the precinct were secured for a petition
+in favour of the licence (two or three were secured by telegraph at the
+last moment) the judge held that he had no option under the law but to
+grant the licence. So, on the one hand, it is a felony to sell liquor to
+Indians, and annually thousands of dollars are expended in trying to
+suppress such sale, while, on the other hand, a man is licenced to sell
+liquor when it is shown that he cannot make a living unless he sells to
+Indians; that is to say he is virtually granted a licence to sell to
+Indians. This note is not intended to reflect upon the judge who granted
+the licence, although all his predecessors have not put that
+construction upon the law, but upon a law open to that construction.
+
+[D] This was written some two years before the opportunity came. On the
+7th of June, 1913, the writer and three companions reached the summit of
+Denali. ("The Ascent of Denali," Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914.)
+
+[E] In 1913 it was finally destroyed by fire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+TANANA CROSSING TO FORTYMILE AND DOWN THE YUKON--A PATRIARCHAL
+CHIEF--SWARMING CARIBOU--EAGLE AND FORT EGBERT--CIRCLE CITY AND FORT
+YUKON
+
+
+FAIRBANKS was a different place in 1910 from the centre of feverish
+trade and feverish vice of 1904-5, when the stores were open all day and
+half the night and the dance-halls and gambling dens all night and half
+the day; when the Jews cornered all the salt and all the sugar in the
+camp and the gamblers all the silver and currency; when the curious
+notion prevailed that in some mysterious way general profligacy was good
+for business, and the Commercial Club held an indignation meeting upon a
+threat of closing down the public gaming and refusing liquor licences to
+the dance-halls, and voted unanimously in favour of an "open town"; when
+a diamond star was presented to the "chief of police" by the enforced
+contributions of the prostitutes; when the weekly gold-dust from the
+clean-ups on the creeks came picturesquely into town escorted by
+horsemen armed to the teeth. The outward and visible signs of the Wild
+West are gone; the dance-halls and gambling tables are a thing of the
+past; the creeks are all connected with Fairbanks by railway and
+telephone; an early closing movement has prevailed in the shops; and
+the local choral society is lamenting the customary dearth of tenors for
+its production of "The Messiah."
+
+Despite the steady decline in the gold output of late years, a drop of
+from twenty millions down to four or five, there is little visible decay
+in its trade, and despite stampedes to new diggings all over Alaska,
+there is no marked visible diminution in its population, though as a
+matter of fact both must have largely fallen off. The thing that more
+than any other has sustained the spirits and retained the presence of
+the business men is the expectation that seems to grow brighter and
+brighter, of the development of a quartz camp now that the placers are
+being exhausted. And in that hope lies the chance of Fairbanks to become
+the one permanent considerable town of interior Alaska. It is a
+substantial place, with good business houses and many comfortable homes
+electric-lit, steam-heated, well protected against fire--better than
+against flood--and, though it does not display the style and luxury of
+the palmy days of Nome, it has amenities enough to make disinterested
+visitors and passers-by wish that its hard-rock hopes may be realised.
+
+[Sidenote: FAIRBANKS]
+
+The little log church that is still, as a local artist put it, "the only
+thing in Fairbanks worth making a picture of," no longer stands open all
+day and all night as the town's library and reading-room, but has
+withdrawn into decorous Sabbath use in favour of the commodious public
+library built by a Philadelphia churchman; the hospital adjoining it,
+that for two or three years cared for all the sick of the camp, is
+supplemented by another and a larger across the slough; young
+birch-trees have been successfully planted all along the principal
+streets, and the front yards everywhere are ablaze with flowers the
+summer through. You may eat hot-house lettuce and radishes in March;
+hot-house strawberries (at about ten cents apiece) in July and August;
+while common outdoor garden-truck of all kinds is plentiful and good in
+its short season.
+
+We had another canine misfortune while we lay there. Doc, one of our
+leaders, got his chain twisted around his foot the night before we were
+to leave, and, in pulling to free it, stopped the circulation of the
+blood and the foot froze. It was as hard as wood and sounded like wood
+when it hit the sidewalks, from which the snow had been cleared, as the
+dog came limping along. An hour's soaking in cold water drew the frost
+out of the foot, and we swathed it in cotton saturated with carron oil,
+upon which it swelled so greatly that it was impossible to tell the
+extent of the injury or to determine whether or not the dog would ever
+be of use again. A kindly nurse at the hospital undertook his care, and
+we left him behind. One does not buy a dog so late in the season, with
+all the idle summer to feed him through, if any shift can be made to
+avoid it, and there was a Great Dane pup at the Salchaket, forty miles
+away, that I might pick up as I passed and perhaps make some use of for
+the remainder of the winter.
+
+That mission was the next stop on our journey, and we reached it over
+the level mail trail, the chief winter highway of Alaska, connecting
+Fairbanks with Valdez on the coast. Three times a week there is a horse
+stage with mail and passengers passing over this trail each way,
+together with much other travel. The Alaska Road Commission has lavished
+large sums of money upon it, and the four hundred miles or thereabout is
+made in a week.
+
+[Sidenote: THE SALCHAKET]
+
+A day and a half brought us to the Salchaket, one of a chain of missions
+along the Tanana River, established by the energy and zeal of the
+Reverend Charles Eugene Betticher, Jr., during his incumbency at
+Fairbanks, that have already brought a great change for the better in
+native conditions. Five years had elapsed since last I visited this
+tribe, a reconnoitring visit on one of the first steamboats that ever
+went up the Tanana River above Fairbanks, and it was a delight to see
+the new, clean village with the little gardens round the cabins, and to
+note the appreciative attitude which the Indians showed. So highly do
+they value the missionary nurse in charge that however far afield their
+hunting may lead them, one of their number is sent back every week to
+see that the mission does not lack wood and water and meat; a simple,
+docile, kindly people that one's heart warms to.
+
+This mission was our last outpost to the south. My farther journey had
+for its prime object the visiting of the natives of the upper Tanana as
+far as the Tanana Crossing, some two hundred and fifty miles beyond the
+Salchaket, the inquiring into their condition and into the desirability
+of establishing a post amongst them.
+
+[Sidenote: THE UPPER TANANA]
+
+The upper Tanana is probably one of the most difficult streams in the
+world to navigate that can by any stretch of the term be called
+navigable. The great Alaskan range begins to approach the Tanana River
+so soon as one gets above Fairbanks. Its prominent peaks, ten thousand
+to twelve thousand feet high, are continually in view from one angle to
+another as one pursues the river trail, and come constantly nearer and
+nearer. All the streams that are confluent with the Tanana on its left
+bank are glacial streams draining the high ice of these mountains. They
+come down laden thick with silt, at times foaming torrents, at times
+merely trickling watercourses that seam with numerous small runnels the
+wide deltas at their mouths. The tributaries of the right bank flow for
+the most part through heavily wooded country, and come out cleanly into
+the river. So the glacial waters form shoals and bars, and the woodland
+waters during freshets pile them high with driftwood. Such is the chief
+characteristic of the upper Tanana; a multiplicity of swift, narrow
+channels amidst bars laden with drift. It is subject to sudden rises of
+great violence; the attempt to stem a freshet on the upper Tanana is a
+hair-raising experience as the log of the _Pelican_ would show, but does
+not come within this narrative. Owing to the origin of much of its
+water, the Tanana is often in flood in dry, hot seasons, when other
+rivers run meagrely, as well as in times of rain. It cannot be stemmed
+in flood; its shoals deny passage in drouth; there must be just the
+right stage of water to permit its navigation, and that stage, "without
+o'erflowing, full," is not often found of duration to serve the voyage
+after the month of June.
+
+A river difficult to navigate in summer is usually a river difficult to
+travel upon in winter, and the upper Tanana is notoriously dangerous and
+treacherous. Scarce a winter or a summer that it does not claim victims.
+It is emphatically a "bad river." Therefore, as far as there is any
+travel to speak of, land trails parallel the river. Past Richardson
+where the next night is spent, a decayed mining and trading town that
+dates back to the stampedes of 1905-6 when it was thought the upper
+Tanana would prove rich in gold, past Tenderfoot Creek on which the
+discoveries were made, past the mouth of the Big Delta with the great
+bluff on the opposite shore and the rushing black water at its foot that
+never entirely closes all the winter, and on the other hand the wide
+barrens of the Big Delta itself giving the whole fine sweep of the
+Alaskan range, we came at length to McCarthy's, the last telegraph
+station on the river,--for the line strikes across country thence to
+Valdez following the government trail,--and there spent another night,
+and here we leave the government-made trail and take to the river
+surface and the wilderness.
+
+[Illustration: A PLEASANT WOODLAND TRAIL.]
+
+[Illustration: AN ALASKAN CHIEF AND HIS HENCHMAN.]
+
+Twelve miles through the woods along the left bank of the river brought
+us to the aptly named Clearwater Creek, a tributary that comes only from
+the foot-hills and carries no glacial water. This stream by reason of
+hot springs runs wide open all the winter and must be crossed by a
+ferry--a raft on a heavy wire. The man who owned the ferry and the house
+adjacent was gone from home, so we proceeded to cross as best we could.
+The raft was so small that first we took the dogs across then unloaded
+the sled and took part of the load, and returned for the remainder
+and the sled itself. Finally a canoe was loaded on the raft and, when it
+had been moored on the side we found it, Arthur paddled himself back. It
+was a strange scene, rafting and paddling a canoe in interior Alaska on
+the 2d of March, with the thermometer at -15°. Some eight miles farther
+along the portage trail we came to a little cabin about dusk, but
+disdaining its dirt and darkness we pitched our tent.
+
+Another eighteen miles the next day is noted in my diary for pleasant
+woodland travel and for the particular interest of the numerous animal
+tracks we passed. Here a moose had crossed the trail, ploughing through
+the snow like a great cart-horse; here for two or three miles a lynx had
+urgent business in the direction of the Healy River. A lynx will always
+follow a trail if there be one, and will pick out the best going on the
+ice or snow in the absence of trail. I once followed a lynx track from
+the head of the Dall River to its mouth, and, save for turning aside
+occasionally to investigate a clump of willows or brush, the lynx was an
+excellent guide. Here were rabbit tracks and every now and then the
+little sharp tracks of a squirrel. We stopped for lunch under a tall
+cottonwood-tree, and Arthur pointed out that the trunk, up to a high
+crotch, was all seamed by bear claws. He said that the black bear
+climbed the same tree season after season, and told me that, according
+to the Indians, this was chiefly done when first he came from his winter
+den,--for the purpose of getting his bearings, as the boy suggested with
+a chuckle. A fox, a marten, and a weasel had all passed across lately,
+and of course then came the exclamation that scarce fails from native
+lips when a fox track is seen: "I wonder if it were a black fox!" A
+black fox means sudden wealth beyond the dreams of avarice to an Indian,
+and any fox track may be the track of a black fox.
+
+The end of that portage brought us out on the Tanana River opposite the
+little trading-post at the mouth of the Healy--the last post of any kind
+we should see.
+
+[Sidenote: INDIAN TRADERS]
+
+The trader, by whom we were hospitably entertained, had heard of our
+projected occupation of the upper Tanana, and alert to his own
+interests, was anxious to know the plans for the establishment of a
+mission--plans which were yet all to make. He naturally favoured this
+spot, which it was already plain was quite out of the question, but
+professed his readiness to move to any place that we might decide upon,
+and his entire sympathy and co-operation.
+
+The question of the trader, which always arises upon the establishment
+of a new mission site, is an important and sometimes a vexatious one,
+for he wields an influence amongst the Indians second only to that of
+the mission itself, and may be either a great help or a great hindrance.
+There is a natural desire to secure a man of character for the new post,
+and at the same time a natural reluctance to disturb vested interests
+and arouse bitter enmity by diverting trade. The suggestion has often
+been made that the mission should itself undertake a store in the
+interest of the natives, but those with most experience in such matters
+will agree that it is the wisdom of the bishop that sets his face
+against mission trading. The two offices are so essentially dissimilar
+as to be almost incompatible with one another; either the person in
+charge is a missionary first and a trader afterwards, in which case the
+store suffers, or he is a trader first and a missionary afterwards, in
+which case he is not a missionary at all. A clean, sober, and honest
+trader, content to take his time about getting rich, is a blessing to an
+Indian community. There are some such, one thinks, but they are not
+numerous. The profits are large, though the turnover is but one a year;
+the capital required is small; it is a life with much leisure; but in
+the main it attracts only a certain class of men.
+
+A band of Indians to whom word of our visit had been sent had come down
+the river this far to meet us and escort us, but dog food was scarce and
+our arrival was delayed, and they had been compelled to return to their
+hunting camp whither we must follow them. We were now farther up the
+Tanana River than either of us had ever been before; the country had the
+fascination of a new country; every bend of the river held unknown
+possibilities, and the keenness and elation that only the penetration of
+a new country brings were upon the boy as well as upon myself.
+
+The river and the mountains were already drawn much closer together, and
+as we pursued our journey upon the one we had continual fine views of
+the other. The going was good--too good--for much of it was new ice and
+spoke of recent overflow, and all too soon we came upon the water. At
+the mouth of the Johnson River, one of the glacial streams, the whole
+river was overflowed, and we waded for a mile through water that
+deepened continually until there was risk of wetting our load. Then we
+were compelled to take to the woods and to cut a portage around the
+worst and deepest of it, and so passed beyond it to good ice and to an
+empty cabin where we spent the night, glad to be sheltered from an
+exceedingly bitter wind that had blown all day and had taken all the
+pleasure out of travel.
+
+[Sidenote: THE THERMOS BOTTLES]
+
+It is in such weather particularly that the thermos flasks prove such a
+boon to the musher. To stop and build a fire in the wind means to get
+chilled through. There is no pleasure in it at all, and I would rather
+push on until the day's journey is done. But the native boy must have
+his lunch, and will build a fire in any sort of weather and make a pot
+of tea. The thermos bottle, with its boiling-hot cocoa, gives one the
+stimulation and nourishment that are desired without stopping for more
+than a few moments. I have carried a pair of these bottles all day at
+60° below zero, and, when opened, snow had to be put into the cocoa
+before it was cool enough to drink. Of course it is perfectly
+simple--all the astonishing things are--but I never open one of those
+bottles in the cold weather and pour out its contents without marvelling
+at it.
+
+We left the river and struck inland towards the foot-hills of the
+Alaskan range, a long, rough journey over a trail that had been made by
+the band that came out to the Healy to meet us, and had been travelled
+no more than by their coming and going. The snow in this region had been
+as much lighter than usual as the snow in the Koyukuk had been heavier.
+Through the tangle of prostrate trunks of a burned-over forest and the
+dense underbrush that follows such a fire, with not enough snow to give
+smooth passage over the obstacles, we made our toilsome way, the labour
+of the dogs calling for the continual supplement of the men, one at the
+gee pole and one at the handle-bars. Some twenty miles, perhaps, a long
+day's continuous journey, we pushed laboriously into the hills and then
+pitched our tent; but in a few miles, next morning, we had struck the
+main Indian trail from the village near the Tanana Crossing, by which
+the hunting party had come, and what little was left of the journey went
+easily enough until we reached the considerable native encampment.
+
+The men were all gone after moose save one half-naked, blear-eyed old
+paralytic, a dreadful creature who shambled and hobbled up asking for
+tobacco. The women were expecting us, however, and took the encamping
+out of our hands entirely, setting up the tent, hauling stove wood and
+splitting it up, making our couch of spruce boughs, starting a fire, and
+bringing a plentiful present of moose and caribou meat for ourselves and
+our dogs. Nothing could have been kinder than our reception; the full
+hospitality of the wilderness was heaped upon us. It was not until dark
+that the men returned, and we had all the afternoon to get acquainted
+with the women and children. Already the chief difficulty we had to
+encounter presented itself. These people did not speak the language of
+the lower Tanana and middle Yukon--Arthur's language--at all. Their
+speech had much more affinity with the upper Yukon language, and it
+dawned upon me that they were not of the migration that had pushed up
+the Tanana River from the Yukon, as all the natives as far as the
+Salchaket certainly did, were not of that tribe or that movement at all,
+but had come across country by the Ketchumstock from the neighbourhood
+of Eagle--the route we should return to the Yukon by--and were of the
+Porcupine and Peel River stock. This was certainly a surprise; I had
+deemed all the Tanana River Indians of the same extraction and tongue,
+but the stretch of bad water from the Salchaket to the Tanana Crossing
+was evidently the boundary between two peoples.
+
+[Sidenote: CHIEF ISAAC]
+
+That night we met Chief Isaac and the principal men of his tribe. At
+first it seemed that such broken English as three or four of them had
+would be our only medium of intercourse, but later one was discovered
+who had visited the lower Tanana and the Yukon and who understood Arthur
+indifferently well, and by the double interpretation, halting and
+inefficient, but growing somewhat better as we proceeded, it was
+possible to enter into communication. These preliminaries arranged, the
+chief made a set speech of dignity and force. He thanked me for coming
+to them, and regretted he had not been able to wait longer at the Healy
+River to help us to his camp. When he was a boy he had been across to
+the Yukon and had seen Bishop Bompas, and had been taught and baptized
+by him, but he was an old man now and he had forgotten what he had
+learned. I was the first minister most of his people had ever seen. They
+heard that Indians in other places had mission and school, and they had
+felt sorry a long time that no one came to teach them; for they were
+very ignorant, little children who knew nothing, and when they heard a
+rumour that a mission and school would be brought to them their hearts
+were very glad. Wherever we should see fit to "make mission," there he
+and his people would go, and would help build for us and help us in
+every way; but he hoped it would be near Lake Mansfield and the
+Crossing, where most of them lived at present. Farther down the river
+was not so good for their hunting and fishing, but they would go
+wherever we said. That was the burden of the chief's speech.
+
+I took a liking to the old man at once. He was evidently a chief that
+was a chief. The chieftainship here was plainly not the effete and
+decaying institution it is in many places on the Yukon. He spoke for all
+his people without hesitation or question, and one felt that what he
+said was law amongst them.
+
+There followed for two days an almost continuous course of instruction
+in the elements of the Christian faith and Christian morals, all day
+long and far into the night, with no more interval than cooking and
+eating required. In the largest tent of the encampment, packed full of
+men and women, the children wedged in where they could get, myself
+seated on a pile of robes and skins, my interpreters at my side, my
+hearers squatted on the spruce boughs of the floor, the instruction went
+on. As it proceeded, the interpretation improved, though it was still
+difficult and clumsy, as speaking through two minds and two mouths must
+always be. Whenever I stopped there was urgent request to go on, until
+at last my voice was almost gone with incessant use. Over and over the
+same things I went; the cardinal facts of religion--the Incarnation, the
+Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension; the cardinal laws of
+morality--the prohibition of murder, adultery, theft, and falsehood;
+that something definite might be left behind that should not be lost in
+the vagueness of general recollection, and always with the insistence
+that this was God's world and not the devil's world, a world in which
+good should ultimately prevail in spite of all opposition.
+
+[Sidenote: SAVAGE, HEATHEN, PAGAN]
+
+It is at once a high privilege and a solemn responsibility to deal with
+souls to whom the appeal of the Christian religion had never before been
+made, as were most of my hearers. One cannot call them "heathen." One
+never thinks of these Alaskan natives as heathen. "Savage" and "heathen"
+and "pagan" all meant, of course, in their origin, just country people,
+and point to some old-time, tremendous superciliousness of the
+city-bred, long since disappeared, except, perhaps, from such places as
+Whitechapel and the Bowery. A savage is simply a forest dweller, a
+heathen a heath dweller, and for a large part of each year I come,
+etymologically, within the terms myself. But with its ordinary
+implication of ferocity and bloodthirstiness it is absurd to apply the
+word "savage" to the mild and gentle Alaskan Indian, and, with its
+ordinary implication of bowing down to wood and stone, it is misleading
+to apply the term "heathen" to those who never made any sort of graven
+image.
+
+Much has been written, and cleverly written, about the Alaskan Indian
+that is preposterously untrue. Arthur, my half-breed boy, had recently
+been reading a story by Jack London, dealing with the Indians in the
+vicinity of Tanana, where he was bred and born, and his indignation at
+the representation of his people in this story was amusing. The story
+was called _The Wit of Porportuk_, and it presented a native chief in
+almost baronial state, with slaves waiting upon him in a large
+banqueting hall and I know not what accumulated wealth of furs and gold.
+Such pictures are far more flagrantly untrue to any conditions that ever
+existed in Alaska than anything Fenimore Cooper wrote about the Five
+Nations. There were never any slaves in the interior; there was never
+any wealth amongst the Indians; there was never any state and
+circumstance of life. And the more one lives amongst them and knows
+them, the less one believes that they could ever have been a warlike
+people, despite their own traditions. Sporadic forays, fostered by their
+ignorant dread of one another or stirred up by rival medicine-men, there
+may have been between different tribes--and there certainly were between
+the Indians and the Esquimaux--with ambuscade and slaughter of isolated
+hunting parties that ventured too far beyond the confines of their own
+territory; and one such affair would furnish tradition for generations
+to dilate upon. I have myself found all the men of Nulato gone scouting,
+or hiding--I could not determine which--in the hills with their guns,
+upon a rumour that the "Huskies," or Esquimaux, were coming; I have
+known the Indians of the Yukon and the Tanana, and as far as the
+Koyukuk, excited and alarmed over the friendly visit of a handful of
+ragged natives from the Copper River to Nenana at Christmas time,
+although in either case it must certainly have been fifty years since
+there was any actual hostile incursion, and probably much longer.
+
+[Sidenote: A GENTLE, TIMID PEOPLE]
+
+They are a very timid people, and an exceedingly peaceable people. Years
+and years may be spent amongst them without knowledge of a single act of
+violence between Indian men; they do not quarrel and fight. Bold enough
+in the chase, willing to face dangers of ice and water and wild beast,
+they have a dread of anything like personal encounter, and will submit
+to a surprising amount of imposition and overbearing on the part of a
+white man without resorting to it. I knew a certain white man who
+claimed a whole river valley north of the Yukon as his, who warned off
+hunting parties of Indians who ventured upon it, and made them give up
+game killed in "his territory." They came to the mission and complained
+about it, but they never withstood the usurper. It ought to be added
+that it always appeared more as the making good of a practical joke than
+as a serious pretension, but the point is--the Indians submitted.
+
+So far as these natives of the interior are concerned they were never
+idolaters. I cannot find that they had any distinct notion of worship at
+all. Their religion had root in a certain frantic terror of the unknown,
+and found expression in ceaseless efforts to propitiate the malign
+spirits surrounding them on every side. Thus they were given over to the
+mastery of those amongst them who had the traditional art of such
+propitiation, and fell more or less completely under that cruellest and
+most venal of sways, the tyranny of the witch-doctor. It is impossible
+to doubt, and hard to exaggerate, the grinding and brutal exactions to
+which this rule led. Anything that a man possessed might be demanded and
+must be yielded, on pain of disease and death, even to the whole
+season's catch of fur or the deflowering of a young daughter. The utmost
+greed and lust that can disgrace humanity found its Indian expression in
+the lives of some of these medicine-men.
+
+Since every sort of tyranny has its vulnerable spot, since the despotism
+of Russia was tempered by assassination and of Japan by the effect of
+public suicide, so melioration of the tyranny of the medicine-man seems
+to have been found in rivalry amongst members of the craft itself.
+Oppressed beyond endurance by one practitioner, allegiance would be
+transferred to some new claimant of occult powers, and the breaking of
+the monopoly of magic would be followed by a temporary lightening of the
+burdens. Some of the most lurid of Alaskan legends deal with the
+thaumaturgic contests of rival medicine-men, and one judges that sleight
+of hand and even hypnotic suggestion were cultivated to a fine point.
+
+To such minds the Christian teaching comes with glad and one may say
+instantaneous acceptance. Their attitude is entirely childlike. They are
+anxious to be told more and more about it, to be told it over and over
+again. There is never the slightest sign of incredulity. It does not
+occur to them as possible that a man should be sent all this way to
+them, should hunt them up and seek them out to tell it to them, unless
+it were true. And one learns over again how universal is the appeal the
+Christian religion, and in particular the Life of Our Lord, makes to
+mankind. I have seen Indians and Esquimaux mixed, hearing for the first
+time the details of the Passion, stirred to as great indignation as was
+that barbarian chieftain who laid his hand on his sword and cried,
+"Would I and my men had been there!" or those Western cowboys, so the
+story runs, bred in illiteracy and irreligion, to whose children a
+school-teacher had given an account of the same great events, and who
+rode up to the schoolhouse the next day with guns and ropes, and asked:
+"Which way did them blamed Jews go?"
+
+The medicine-man lies low; may himself profess acceptance of the new
+teaching, may even really accept it (for it is very hard, indeed, to
+follow and judge all the mental processes of an Indian)--yes, though it
+expressly sweep all his devils away, out of the sick, out of the wind
+and storm, from off every grave mound, though it leave him no paltry
+net-tearing or trap-springing sprite to work upon with his conjurations;
+yet the old superstition dies hard, often crops up when one had thought
+it perished, and even sometimes maintains itself, sub rosa, side by side
+with definite, regular Christian worship.
+
+[Sidenote: THE OLD, OLD STORY]
+
+The arctic explorer Stefanson, a careful and acute observer who has had
+exceptional opportunities for observation of the intimate life of the
+Esquimaux, has written much lately of the grafting of Christianity upon
+native superstition and the existence of both together, as though it
+were some new thing or newly noticed by himself. Yet every one familiar
+with the history of Christianity knows that it has characterised the
+progress of religion in all ages. There was never a people yet that did
+not in great measure do this thing, nor is it reasonable to suppose that
+it could have been otherwise. It is impossible to make a _tabula rasa_
+of men's minds. It is impossible to uproot customs of immemorial
+antiquity without leaving some rootlets behind. And what is acquired
+joins itself insensibly to what is retained, and either the incongruity
+is hidden beneath a change of nomenclature or is not hidden at all. Our
+own social life is threaded through and through with customs and
+practices which go back to a superstitious origin. The matter is such a
+commonplace of history that it is bootless to labour it here.
+
+A scientist is only a "scientist." How that name tends continually to
+depreciate itself as the pursuit of physical science is divorced more
+and more completely from a knowledge of literature, from a knowledge of
+the humanities! And a scientist is a poor guide to an acquaintance with
+man, civilised or uncivilised. To come to the study of any race of man,
+even the most primitive, without some knowledge of all the long history
+of man, of all the long history of man's thought, man's methods, man's
+strivings, man's accomplishments, man's failures, is to come so ill
+equipped that no just conclusions are likely to be reached. Your
+exclusive "scientist"--and such are most of them to-day--may be
+competent to deal with circles and triangles, with wheels and levers
+with cells and glands, with germs and bacilli and micro-organisms
+generally, with magnetos and dynamos, with all the heavenly host if you
+like, but he has no equipment to deal with man! Somatic anthropology in
+particular tends to assume in some quarters such an overimportance that
+one falls back upon the recollection that the original head measurers
+were hatters and that all hatters are proverbially mad. The occupation
+would seem to carry the taint.
+
+It was with much pleasure that I was able to hold out hope to Chief
+Isaac of the mission and the school he desired so earnestly for his
+people. It must not be supposed that all of them were in the completely
+unevangelised state which has been dwelt upon, that to all of them the
+teaching of those two full days was novel; some of them, like the chief
+himself, had been across to the Yukon long ago and still bore some trace
+of the early labours of the Church of England missionaries to whom this
+region of Alaska that adjoins Canada is so much indebted. Others had
+once been to the Ketchumstock, upon the occasion of a visit from our
+missionary at Eagle, and had received instruction from him. But there
+were many present in that tent who had never seen any missionary, never
+had any teaching, to whom it was wholly new save as they might have
+picked up some inkling from those that had been more fortunate.
+
+[Illustration: THE TANANA CROSSING.]
+
+[Illustration: GOOD GOING ON THE YUKON.]
+
+[Sidenote: TRIBAL CONNECTIONS]
+
+When we left this encampment Isaac sent two of his young men to guide
+us, with a sled drawn by three or four small dogs, so gaily caparisoned
+with _tapis_ and ribbons, tinsel, and pompons, that they might have
+been circus dogs. Here again is evidence of this tribe's affinity
+with the upper Yukon natives, and so with those of the Mackenzie. I
+never saw the _tapis_, a broad, bright ornamented cloth that lies upon
+the dog's back under his harness, on the Middle Yukon. It is
+characteristic of the Peel River Indians who come across by the Rampart
+House and La Pierre House.
+
+A few hours' journey brought us to the Tanana River again, which we
+crossed, and took a portage on the other side that went up a long defile
+and then along a ridge and then down another long defile until at night
+we reached the native village at Lake Mansfield; a picturesque spot, for
+the lake is entirely surrounded by mountains except on the side which
+opens to the river. Here the Alaskan range and the Tanana River have
+approached so close that the water almost washes the base of the
+foot-hills, and the scenery is as fine and bold as any in Alaska. And
+here, at Lake Mansfield, if only there were navigable connection between
+the lake and the river into which it drains, would be an admirable place
+for a mission station.
+
+A couple of hours next day took us the seven remaining miles to the
+Tanana Crossing. Here, at that time, was a station of the military
+telegraph connecting Valdez on the coast with Fort Egbert (Eagle) on the
+Yukon, a line maintained, at enormous expense, purely for military
+purposes. It passed through an almost entirely uninhabited country in
+which perhaps scarcely a dozen messages would originate in a year. The
+telegraph-line and Fort Egbert itself are now abandoned. Strategic
+considerations constitute a vague and variable quantity.
+
+It was strange to find this little station with two or three men of the
+signal-corps away out here in the wilderness. Their post was supplied by
+mule pack-train from Fort Egbert, more than two hundred miles away, and
+they told me that only ten pounds out of every hundred that left Fort
+Egbert reached the Crossing, so self-limited is a pack-train through
+such country. We amused ourselves calculating just how much farther
+mules and men could go until they ate up _all_ they could carry.
+
+The Tanana Crossing is a central spot for the Indians of this region.
+Two days' journey up the river was the village of the Tetlin Indians.
+Two days' journey into the mountain range were the Mantasta Indians. Two
+days' journey across towards the Yukon were the Ketchumstock Indians.
+Most of them would congregate at this spot for certain parts of the
+year, should we plant a mission there, and despite the picturesque
+situation of Lake Mansfield, it looked as if the Crossing were the best
+point for building.
+
+[Sidenote: THE TANANA CROSSING]
+
+Our route lay northeast, across country to Fortymile on the Yukon, two
+hundred and fifty miles away, along the trail for the greater part of
+the distance by which the mule train reached the Tanana Crossing. The
+first five miles was all up-hill, a long, stiff, steady climb to the
+crest of the mountain that rises just behind the Crossing. We had to
+take it slowly, with frequent stops, so steep was the grade, and every
+now and then we got tantalising glimpses through the timber of the scene
+that spread wider and wider below us. Bend after bend of the Tanana
+River unfolded itself; the Alaskan range gave peak after peak; there
+lay Lake Mansfield, deep in its amphitheatre of hills, with the Indian
+village at its head.
+
+At last my impatience for the view that promised made me leave the boys
+(we still had Isaac's young men) and push on alone to the top. And it
+was indeed by far the noblest view of the winter, one of the grandest
+and most extensive panoramas I had ever seen in my life.
+
+Perhaps three miles away, as the crow flies, from the river, and
+seventeen hundred and fifty feet above it, as the aneroid gave it, we
+were already on the watershed, and everywhere in the direction we were
+travelling the wide-flung draws and gullies of the Fortymile River
+stretched out, so clear and beautiful a display of the beginnings of a
+great drainage system that my attention was arrested, notwithstanding my
+eagerness for the sight that awaited my turning around. But it was upon
+turning around and looking in the direction from which we had come that
+the grandeur and sublimity entered into the scene. There was, indeed, no
+one great dominating feature in this prospect as in the view of Denali
+from the Rampart portage, but the whole background, bounding the vision
+completely, was one vast wall of lofty white peaks, stretching without a
+break for a hundred miles. Enormous cloud masses rose and fell about
+this barrier, now unfolding to reveal dark chasms and glittering
+glaciers, now enshrouding them again. In the middle distance the Tanana
+River wound and twisted its firm white line amidst broken patches of
+snow and timber far away to either hand, and, where glacial affluents
+discharged into it, were finer, threadlike lines that marked the many
+mouths. The thick spruce mantling the slope in the foreground gave a
+sombre contrast to the fields of snow, and the yellow March sunshine was
+poured over all the wide landscape save where the great clouds contended
+with the great mountains.
+
+The boys had stopped to build a fire and brew some tea before leaving
+the timber, and I was glad of it, for it gave me the chance to gaze my
+fill upon the inspiring and fascinating scene in the pleasant warmth of
+the mountain top, with the thermometer at 30° in the shade and just 12°
+higher in the sunshine.
+
+[Sidenote: A NOBLE VIEW]
+
+How grateful I was for the clear bright day! What a disappointment it
+has been again and again to reach such an eminence and see--nothing! It
+was the most extensive view of the great Alaskan range I had ever
+secured--that long line of sharp peaks that stretches and broadens from
+the coast inland until it culminates in the highest point of the North
+American continent and then curves its way back to the coast again. Of
+course, what lay here within the vision was only a small part of one arm
+of the range; it stopped far short of Denali on the one hand and Mount
+Sanford on the other, though it included Mount Kimball and Mount Hayes;
+yet it was the most impressive sight of a mountain chain I had ever
+beheld. It was a sight to be glad and grateful for, to put high amongst
+one's joyful remembrances; and with this notable sight we bade farewell
+to the Tanana valley.
+
+Down the hill we went into Fortymile water and into a rolling country
+crossed by the military mule trail. If the morning had been glorious the
+evening was full of penance. Long before night our feet were sore from
+slipping and sliding into those wretched mule tracks. One cannot take
+one's eyes from the trail for a moment, every footstep must be watched,
+and even then one is continually stumbling.
+
+We were able, however, to rig our team with the double hitch that is so
+much more economical of power than the tandem hitch, whenever the width
+of the trail permits it. We now carry a convertible rig, so that on
+narrow trails or in deep snow we can string out the dogs one in front of
+the other, and when the trail is wide enough can hitch them side by
+side. "Seal," the Great Dane pup we got at the Salchaket, was a good and
+strong puller, but he had no coat and no sense. It is bad enough to have
+no coat in this country, but to have no coat and no sense is fatal--as
+he found. His feet were continually sore and he had to be specially
+provided for at night if it were at all cold--a dog utterly unsuited to
+Alaska.
+
+Thirty miles of such going as has been described is tiring in the
+extreme, and when we reached the Lone Cabin, behold! fifteen Indians
+camped about it, for whom, when supper was done, followed two hours of
+teaching and the baptism of six children. I would have liked to have
+stayed a day with them, but if we were to spend Palm Sunday at Fortymile
+and Easter at Eagle as had been promised, the time remaining did no more
+than serve; and there was a large band of Indians to visit at
+Ketchumstock.
+
+The next day took us into and across the Ketchumstock Flats, a wide
+basin surrounded by hills and drained by the Mosquito Fork of the
+Fortymile. The telegraph-line, supported on tripods against the summer
+yielding of the marshy soil, cuts straight across country. This basin
+and the hills around form one of the greatest caribou countries,
+perhaps, in the world. All day we had passed fragments of the long
+fences that were in use in times past by the Indians for driving the
+animals into convenient places for slaughter.
+
+The annual migration of the vast herd that roams the section of Alaska
+between the Yukon and the Tanana Rivers swarms over this Flat and
+through these hills, and we were told at the Ketchumstock telegraph
+station by the signal-corps men that they estimated that upward of one
+hundred thousand animals crossed the Mosquito Fork the previous October.
+
+[Sidenote: CARIBOU]
+
+The big game of Alaska is not yet seriously diminished, though there was
+need for the legal protection that has of late years been given. It is
+probable that more caribou and young moose are killed every year by
+wolves than by hunters. Only in the neighbourhood of a considerable
+settlement is there danger of reckless and wasteful slaughter, and some
+attention is paid by game wardens to the markets of such places. The
+mountain-sheep stands in greater danger of extermination than either
+caribou or moose. Its meat, the most delicious mutton in the world, as
+it has been pronounced by epicures, brings a higher price than other
+wild meat, and it is easy to destroy a band completely. The sheep on the
+mountains of the Alaskan range nearest to Fairbanks have, it is said,
+been very greatly diminished, and that need not be wondered at when one
+sees sled load after sled load, aggregating several tons of meat,
+brought in at one shipment. The law protecting the sheep probably needs
+tightening up.
+
+The big game is a great resource to all the people of the country, white
+and native. It is no small advantage to be able to take one's gun in the
+fall and go out in the valleys and kill a moose that will suffice for
+one man's meat almost the whole winter, or go into the hills and kill
+four or five caribou that will stock his larder equally well. The fresh,
+clean meat of the wilds has to most palates far finer flavour than any
+cold-storage meat that can be brought into the country; and, save at one
+or two centres of population and distribution, cold-storage meat is not
+available at all. Without its big game Alaska would be virtually
+uninhabitable. Therefore most white men are content that the necessary
+measures be taken to prevent the wasteful slaughter of the game; for the
+rights of the prospector and trapper and traveller, and the rights of
+the natives to kill at any time what is necessary for food, are
+explicitly reserved.
+
+[Sidenote: THE KETCHUMSTOCK]
+
+We reached the village and telegraph post of Ketchumstock for the night
+only to find all the natives gone hunting; but since they had gone in
+the direction of Chicken Creek, towards which we were travelling, we
+were able to catch up with them the next morning without going far out
+of our way. While we were pitching our tent near their encampment came
+two or three natives with dog teams, and as the dogs hesitated to pass
+our dogs, loose on the trail, a voluble string of curses in English fell
+from the Indian lips. Such is usually the first indication of contact
+with white men, and in this case it spoke of the proximity of the mining
+on Chicken Creek. To discover the women chewing tobacco was to add but
+another evidence of the sophistication of this tribe; a different people
+from Chief Isaac's tribe, different through many years' familiarity with
+the whites at these diggings. If the mission to be built at the Crossing
+tends to keep these Indians on the Tanana River and thus away from the
+demoralisation of the diggings, it will do them solid service.
+
+In some way foul and profane language falls even more offensively from
+Indians than from whites; for the same reason, perhaps, that it sounds
+more offensive and shocking from children than from adults. Sometimes
+the Indian does not in the least understand the meaning of the words he
+uses; they are the first English words he ever heard and he hears them
+over and over again.
+
+So here another day and a half was spent in instruction. There are some
+forty souls in this tribe and they have had teaching from time to time,
+though not in the last few years, at the mouths of missionaries from
+Yukon posts. Most of the adults had been baptized; I baptized sixteen
+children. One curious feature of my stay was the megaphonic
+recapitulation of the heads of the instruction, after each session, by
+an elderly Indian who stood out in the midst of the tents. What on earth
+this man, with his town-crier voice, was proclaiming at such length, we
+were at a loss to conjecture, and upon inquiry were informed: "Them
+women, not much sense; one time tell 'em, quick forget; two time tell
+'em, maybe little remember." So when we stopped for dinner and for
+supper and for bed, each time this brazen-lunged spieler stood forth and
+reiterated the main points of the discourse "for the _hareem_," as
+Doughty would say, whose account of the attitude of the Arabs to their
+women often reminds me of the Alaskan Indians. It was interesting, but I
+should have preferred to edit the recapitulation.
+
+When all was done for the day and we thought to go to bed came an Indian
+named "Bum-Eyed-Bob" (these white man's nicknames, however dreadful, are
+always accepted and used) for a long confabulation about the affairs of
+the tribe, and I gathered incidentally that gambling at the telegraph
+station had been the main diversion of the winter. It seems ungracious
+to insist so much upon the evil influence of the white men--we had been
+cordially received and entertained at that very place, and our money
+refused--but there is little doubt that the abandonment of the
+telegraph-line will be a good thing for these natives. Put two or three
+young men of no special intellectual resource or ambition down in a
+lonely spot like this, with no society at all save that of the natives
+and practically nothing to do, and there is a natural and almost
+inevitable trend to evil. To the exceptional man with the desire of
+promotion, with books, and all this leisure, it would be an admirable
+opportunity, but he would be quite an exceptional man who should rise
+altogether superior to the temptations to idleness and debauchery. One
+may have true and deep sympathy with these young men and yet be
+conscious of the harm they often bring about.
+
+Ten miles or so from the encampment brought us to Chicken Creek, and
+from that point we took the Fortymile River. The direct trail to Eagle
+with its exasperating mule tracks was now left, and our journey was on
+the ice. But so warm was the weather that 16th of March that we were
+wet-foot all day, and within the space of eight hours that we were
+travelling we had snow, sleet, rain, and sunshine. Leaving the main
+river, we turned up Walker Fork and, after a few miles, leaving that, we
+turned up Jack Wade Creek and pursued it far up towards its head ere we
+reached the road-house for the night.
+
+[Sidenote: THE FORTYMILE]
+
+We were now on historic ground, so far as gold mining in Alaska is
+concerned. The "Fortymilers" bear the same pioneer relation to gold
+mining in the North that the "Fortyniners" bear to gold mining in
+California. Ever since 1886 placers have been worked in this district,
+and it still yields gold, though the output and the number of men are
+alike much reduced. It is interesting to talk with some of the original
+locators of this camp, who may yet be found here and there in the
+country, and to learn of the conditions in those early days when a
+steamboat came up the Yukon once in a season bringing such supplies and
+mail as the men received for the year. It was here that the problem of
+working frozen ground was first confronted and solved; here that the
+first "miner's law" was promulgated, the first "miners' meeting" dealt
+out justice. Your "old-timer" anywhere is commonly _laudator temporis
+acti_, but there is good reason to believe that these early, and
+certainly most adventurous, gold-miners, some of whom forced a way into
+the country when there were no routes of travel, and subsisted on its
+resources while they explored and prospected it, were men of a higher
+stamp than many who have come in since. The extent to which that early
+prospecting was carried is not generally known, for these men, after the
+manner of their kind, left no record behind them. There are few creek
+beds that give any promise at all in the whole of this vast country that
+have not had some holes sunk in them. Even in districts so remote as the
+Koyukuk, signs of old prospecting are encountered. When a stampede took
+place to the Red Mountain or Indian River country of the middle Koyukuk
+in 1911-12, I was told that there was not a creek in the camp that did
+not show signs of having been prospected long before, although it had
+passed altogether out of knowledge that this particular region had ever
+been visited by prospectors.
+
+[Sidenote: "SNIPING ON THE BARS"]
+
+As the Fortymile is the oldest gold camp in the North, some of its trail
+making is of the best in Alaska. In particular the trail from the head
+of Jack Wade Creek down into Steel Creek reminded one of the Alpine
+roads in its bold, not to say daring, engineering. It drops from bench
+to bench in great sweeping curves always with a practicable grade, and
+must descend nigh a thousand feet in a couple of miles. At the mouth of
+Steel Creek we are on the Fortymile River again, having saved a day's
+journey by this traverse. And here, on the Fortymile, we passed several
+men "sniping on the bars," as the very first Alaskan gold-miners did on
+this same river, and probably on these same bars, twenty-five years ago.
+One hand moved the "rocker" to and fro and the other poured water into
+it with the "long Tom"; so was the gold washed out of the gravel taken
+from just below the ice. It was interesting to see this primitive method
+still in practice and to learn from the men that they were making
+"better than wages."
+
+The Fortymile is a very picturesque but most tortuous river. In one
+place, called appropriately "The Kink," I was able to clamber over a
+ridge of rocks and reach another bend of the river in six or seven
+minutes, and then had to wait twenty-five minutes for the dog team,
+going at a good clip, to come around to me. At length we reached the
+spot where a vista cut through the timber that clothes both banks,
+marked the 141st meridian, the international boundary, and passed out of
+Alaska into British territory. A few miles more brought us to Moose
+Creek, where a little Canadian custom-house is situated, and there we
+spent the night.
+
+The next day we reached the Yukon; passing gold dredges laid up for the
+winter and other signs of still-persisting mining activity, going
+through the narrow wild cañon of the Fortymile, and so to the little
+town at its mouth of the same name, where there is a mission of the
+Church of England and a post of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. I
+never come into contact with this admirable body of men without wishing
+that we had a similar body charged with the enforcement of the law in
+Alaska.
+
+Sunday was spent there officiating for the layman in charge of the
+mission and in interesting talk with the sergeant of police about the
+annual winter journey from Dawson to Fort McPherson on the McKenzie,
+from which he had just returned with a detail of men. The next winter he
+and his detail lost their way and starved and froze to death on the same
+journey.
+
+Here at one time was a flourishing Indian mission and school, and here
+Bishop Bompas, the true "Apostle of the North," lived for some time. The
+story of this man's forty-five years' single-eyed devotion to the
+Indians of the Yukon and McKenzie Rivers is one of the brave chapters of
+missionary history. But the Church of England "does not advertise."
+Writers about Alaska, even writers about Alaskan missions, carefully
+collect all the data of the early Russian missions on the coast, but
+ignore altogether the equally influential and lasting work done along
+five hundred miles of what is now the American Yukon by the missionary
+clergy of the English Church before and after the Purchase. Bishop
+Bompas identified himself so closely with the natives as to become
+almost one of them in the eyes of the white men, and many curious
+stories linger amongst the old-timers as to his habits and appearance.
+It is interesting to know that the bishop was a son of that Sergeant
+Bompas of the English bar from whom Dickens drew the character of
+Sergeant Buzfuz, counsel for the plaintiff in the famous suit of
+"Bardell v. Pickwick."
+
+But the natives have all left Fortymile, some to the large village of
+Moosehide just below Dawson, some to Eagle. The town, too, like all the
+upper Yukon towns, is much decayed; the custom-house, the police
+barracks, the company's store, the road-house, and the little mission
+embracing nearly all its activities and housing nearly all its
+population.
+
+There is always some feeling of satisfaction in reaching the broad
+highway of the Yukon again, even though rough ice make bad going and one
+of the most notorious, dirty road-houses in the North hold its menace
+over one all day and amply fulfil it at night. There is indeed so little
+travel on the river now that it does not pay any one to keep a
+road-house save as incidental to a steamboat wood camp and summer
+fishing station. Two short days' travel brought us across the
+international boundary again to Eagle in Alaska, where at that time Fort
+Egbert was garrisoned with two companies of soldiers.
+
+[Sidenote: EAGLE]
+
+Eagle and Fort Egbert together, for the one begins where the other ends,
+have perhaps the finest and most commanding situation of any settlement
+on the Yukon River. The mountains rise with dignity just across the
+water and break pleasingly into the valley of Eagle Creek, a few miles
+up-stream. To the rear of the town an inconsiderable flat does but give
+space and setting before the mountains rise again; while just below the
+military post stands the bold and lofty bluff called the Eagle Rock,
+with Mission Creek winding into the Yukon at its foot. Robert Louis
+Stevenson said that Edinburgh has the finest situation of any capital
+in Europe and pays for it by having the worst climate of any city in the
+world. It would not be just to paraphrase this description with regard
+to Eagle, for while it is unsurpassed on the Yukon for site, there are
+spots on that river where still more disagreeable weather prevails; yet
+it cannot be denied that the position of the place subjects it to
+exceedingly bitter winds, or that the valley of Eagle Creek, which gives
+pleasing variety to the prospect, acts also as a channel to convey the
+full force of the blast. Climate everywhere is a very local thing;
+topographical considerations often altogether outweigh geographical; and
+nowhere is this truer than in Alaska. Commanding sites are necessarily
+exposed sites, and he who would dwell in comfort must build in
+seclusion.
+
+A native village of eighty or ninety souls, with its church and school,
+lies three miles up-stream from the town, so that the relative positions
+of village, town, and military post exactly duplicate those at Tanana.
+It must at once be stated, however, that this situation has not led to
+anything like the demoralisation amongst the natives at Eagle that
+thrusts itself into notice at the other place. Whether it were the
+longer training in Christian morals that lay behind these people, or
+better hap in the matter of post commanders (certainly there was never
+such scandalous irregularity and indifference at Egbert as marked one
+administration at Gibbon), or the vigilance during a number of
+consecutive years of an especially active deputy marshal and the wisdom
+and concern through an even longer period of a commissioner much above
+the common stamp,[F] or all these causes combined, the natives at Eagle
+have not suffered from the proximity of soldiers and civilians in the
+same measure as the natives at Tanana. Drunkenness and debauchery there
+have been again and again, but they have been severely checked and
+restrained by both the civil and military authorities.
+
+It was pleasant during Holy Week and Easter to see so many of the
+enlisted men of the garrison taking part in the services in town;
+pleasant, especially, to see officers and men singing together in the
+choir, a tribute to the tact and zeal of the earnest layman in charge of
+this mission; and it was pleasant at the village to hear the native
+liturgy again and to see old men and women following the lessons in the
+native Bible.
+
+[Sidenote: FORT EGBERT ABANDONED]
+
+Fort Egbert is abandoned now, another addition to the melancholy of the
+Yukon; its extensive buildings, barracks, and officers' quarters,
+post-exchange and commissariat, hospital, sawmill, and artisans' shops,
+a spacious, complete gymnasium only recently built, are all vacant and
+deserted. In the yards lie three thousand cords of dry wood, a year's
+supply; cut on the hills, awaiting the expected annual contracts, lie as
+many more--six thousand cords of wood left to rot! Some of us perverse
+"conservationists," upon whom the unanimous Alaskan press delights to
+pour scorn, lament the trees more than the troops.
+
+One may write thus and yet have many pleasant personal associations
+with the post and those who have lived there. A large and varied
+military acquaintanceship is acquired by regular visits to these Alaskan
+forts, for the whole command changes every two years. If one stayed in
+the country long enough one would get to know the whole United States
+army, as regiment after regiment spent its brief term of "foreign
+service" in the North. Gazing upon the empty quarters, the occasion of
+my first visit came back vividly, when there was diphtheria amongst the
+natives at Circle and none to cope with it save the missionary nurse.
+The civil codes containing no provision for quarantine, the United
+States commissioner at Circle could not help, and the Indians grew
+restive and rebellious, and when Christmas came broke through the
+restrictions completely. Even some of the whites of the place defied her
+prohibition and attended native dances and encouraged the Indians in
+their self-willed folly.
+
+[Sidenote: SOME ARMY OFFICERS]
+
+So I went up the week's journey to Eagle and sought assistance from
+Major Plummer, the officer commanding the post, who, after telegraphing
+to Washington, promptly despatched a hospital steward and a couple of
+soldiers, and placed them entirely at the nurse's disposal. "I don't
+think we have any law for it," he said, "but we'll bluff it out." And
+bluff it out they did very effectively until the disease was stamped
+out, and then they thoroughly disinfected and whitewashed every cabin
+that had been occupied by the sick. I used to tell that nurse that, so
+far as I knew, she was the only woman who had ever had command of United
+States soldiers.
+
+Then there was Captain Langdon of the same regiment, the scholarly
+soldier, with the account of every great campaign in history at his
+fingers' ends. I recollect one evening, when we had been talking of the
+Peninsular War, I ventured to spring on him the ancient schoolboy
+conundrum: "What lines are those, the most famous ever made by an
+Englishman, yet that are never quoted?" "Lines?" said he, "lines?"
+though I don't think he had ever heard the jest. "They must be the Lines
+of Torres Vedras." How well I remember the musical box that used to
+arouse me at seven in the morning, however late we had sat talking the
+night before!
+
+And that young lieutenant, of wealthy New York people, just arrived from
+West Point, who was sent by another commandant to report upon the
+condition of the natives at the village and who came back and reported
+the whole population in utter destitution and recommended the issue of
+free rations to them all! As a matter of fact, during the administration
+of this commanding officer, some sixteen or eighteen persons were put
+upon the list for gratuitous grub, and it took a written protest to get
+them off. For no one who has the welfare of the natives at heart can
+tolerate the notion of making them paupers; these who have always fended
+abundantly for themselves, and can entirely do so yet. With free rations
+there would be no more hunting, no more trapping, no more fishing; and a
+hardy, self-supporting race would sink at once to sloth and beggary and
+forget all that made men of them. If it were designed to destroy the
+Indian at a blow, here is an easy way to do it. Yet there are some,
+obsessed with the craze about what is called education, regarding it as
+an end in itself and not as a means to any end, who recommend this
+pauperising because it would permit the execution of a compulsory
+school-attendance law. Or is it a personal delusion of mine that esteems
+an honest, industrious, self-supporting Indian who cannot read and write
+English above one who can read and write English--and can do nothing
+else--and so separates me from many who are working amongst the natives?
+
+These days at the end of March, when the sun shines more than twelve
+hours in the twenty-four, are too long for the ordinary winter day's
+twenty-five miles or so, and yet not quite long enough, even if man and
+dogs could stand it, to double the stage; so that there is much daylight
+leisure at road-houses. One grows anxious, after four months on the
+trail, to be done with it; to draw as quickly as may be to one's
+"thawing-out" place. One even becomes a little impatient of the
+continual dog talk and mining talk of the road-houses, to which one has
+listened all the winter. On the other hand, the travelling is very
+pleasant and the going usually very good, so that one may often ride on
+the sled for long stretches.
+
+By river and portage--one portage that comes so finely down to the Yukon
+from a bench that there is pleasure in anticipating the view it
+affords--in two days we reached the Nation road-house, just below the
+mouth of the Nation River, a name that has always puzzled me. Here all
+night long the wolves howling around the carcass of a horse kept our
+dogs awake, and the whimpering of the dogs kept us awake. The country
+beyond the Yukon to the northeast, the large area included between the
+Yukon and the Porcupine, into which the Nation River offers passage, is
+one of the wildest and least known portions of Alaska, abounding in game
+and beasts of prey.
+
+[Sidenote: THE GLARE OF THE SUN]
+
+At the Charley River we visited the native village and held service and
+instruction as well as inadequate interpretation permitted. Round Coal
+Creek and Woodchopper Creek the scenery becomes bold and attractive, but
+we found, as usual, that as we pushed farther and farther down the river
+the snow was deeper and the going not so good. The sun grows very bright
+upon the snow these days of late March and early April. Even through
+heavily tinted glasses it inflames the eyes more or less, and a couple
+of hours without protection would bring snow-blindness. Bright days at
+this season are the only days in all the year when the camera shutter
+may be used at its full speed. When the sun comes out after a flurry of
+new snow in April, the light is many times greater than in midsummer.
+
+[Illustration: "A PORTAGE THAT COMES SO FINELY DOWN TO THE YUKON THAT
+THERE IS PLEASURE IN ANTICIPATING THE VIEW IT AFFORDS."]
+
+[Illustration: FORT YUKON.]
+
+We reached Circle in a day and a half from Woodchopper Creek, in time to
+spend Sunday there. Circle had not changed much in the five years that
+had elapsed since the first visit to it mentioned in these pages. The
+slender trellis of the wireless telegraph had added a prominent feature
+to its river bank; a few more empty cabins had been torn down for
+fire-wood. Here it was necessary to shoot the Great Dane pup we got at
+the Salchaket. His feet were still very sore and he quite useless for
+the next winter, while Doc was returned to me from Fairbanks, not
+much the worse for his severe frost-bite. Indian after Indian begged for
+the dog, but I had more regard for him than to turn him over to the
+tender mercies of an Indian. There are exceptional Indians, but for my
+part I would rather be a dead dog than an ordinary Indian's dog--so he
+died.
+
+There remained the seventy-five or eighty miles through the Yukon Flats
+to Fort Yukon--always the most dangerous stretch of the river, and at
+this season, when the winter's trail was beginning to break up,
+particularly so. It would be entirely practicable to cut a land trail
+that should not touch the river at all, or not at more than one point,
+between Circle and Fort Yukon, and such a portage besides removing all
+the danger would save perhaps twenty miles. In many places it was
+necessary for one of us to go ahead with an axe, constantly sounding and
+testing the ice. Here and there we made a circuit around open water into
+which the ice that bore the trail had collapsed bodily--one of them a
+particularly ugly place, with black water twenty feet deep running at
+six or seven miles an hour. I never pass this stretch of river without a
+feeling of gratitude that I am safely over it once more.
+
+[Sidenote: CAPTAIN AMUNDSEN]
+
+As we left the Halfway Island we passed an Indian from Fort Yukon going
+up the river with dogs and toboggan, and I chuckled, as I returned his
+very polite salutation and shook hands with him, at the success of the
+way he had been dealt with the previous fall, for he had been a
+particularly churlish fellow with an insolent manner. Six or seven
+years before he had been taken by Captain Amundsen, of the _Gjoa_, as
+guide along this stretch of the river. It will be remembered that when
+that skilful and fortunate navigator had reached Herschell Island from
+the east, he left his ship in winter quarters and made a rapid journey
+with Esquimaux across country to Fort Yukon expecting to find a
+telegraph station there from which he could send word of his success.
+But to his disappointment he found it necessary to go two hundred and
+thirty miles farther up the river to Eagle, before he could despatch his
+message. So he left his Esquimaux at Fort Yukon and took this Indian as
+guide. And in his modest and most interesting book he mentions the man's
+surliness and says he was glad to get rid of him at Circle.
+
+Some new outbreak of insolence for which he had been flung out of a
+store decided that he must be dealt with, and I sent for him, for the
+chief, the native minister, and the interpreter. With these assessors
+beside me, and Captain Amundsen's book open on the table, I spoke to the
+man of his general conduct and reputation. I read the derogatory remark
+about him in the book "printed for all the world to read," and told him
+that of all the people, white and native, the captain had met on his
+journeys, only one was spoken of harshly and he was the one. It made a
+great impression on the man. The chief and the native minister followed
+it up with their harangues, and the net result was a thorough change in
+his whole attitude and demeanour. He told us he felt the shame of being
+held up to the world as rude and impudent and would try to amend. He has
+tried so successfully that he is now one of the politest and most
+courteous Indians in the village, for which, if this should ever chance
+to reach Captain Amundsen's eye, I trust he will accept our thanks.
+
+Fort Yukon, where the headquarters of the archdeaconry of the Yukon are
+now fixed, grows in native population and importance. A new and sightly
+church, a new schoolhouse, a new two-story mission house, a medical
+missionary and a nurse in residence, as well as a native clergyman, mark
+the Indian metropolis of this region and perhaps of all interior Alaska.
+Self-government is fostered amongst the people by a village council
+elected annually, that settles native troubles and disputes and takes
+charge of movements for the general good, and of the relief of native
+poverty. The resident physician has been appointed justice of the peace
+and there is effort to enforce the law of the land at a place where
+every man has been a law unto himself. But it is a very slow and
+difficult matter to enforce law in this country at all, and more
+particularly at these remote points; and the class of white men who are
+to be found around native villages, many of whom "fear not God neither
+regard man," pursue their debauchery and deviltry long time unwhipped.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[F] I take pleasure in naming Mr. U. G. Myers as the United States
+commissioner in question and Mr. Jack Robinson as the deputy United
+States marshal, and I mention their names the more readily because Mr.
+Myers, after his long and excellent service, has just been removed for
+political reasons. (May, 1916.)
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+FROM THE TANANA RIVER TO THE KUSKOKWIM--THENCE TO THE IDITAROD MINING
+CAMP--THENCE TO THE YUKON, AND UP THAT RIVER TO FORT YUKON
+
+
+THE discovery of gold on the Innoko in the winter of 1906-7, and the
+"strike" on the Iditarod, a tributary of the Innoko, some three years
+later, opened up a new region of Alaska. It is characteristic of a gold
+discovery in a new district that it sets men feverishly to work
+prospecting all the adjacent country, and sends them as far afield from
+it as the new base of supplies will allow them to stretch their tether.
+A glance at the map will show that the Innoko and Iditarod country lies
+between the two great rivers of Alaska, the Yukon and the Kuskokwim,
+much lower down the Yukon than any of the earlier gold discoveries; that
+is to say that while the Tanana gold fields lie off the Middle Yukon,
+the Circle fields off the upper Yukon, the Iditarod camp belongs to the
+lower river. The Innoko workings were not extensive nor very rich, but
+they furnished a base for prospecting from which the Iditarod was
+reached, and Flat Creek, in the latter district, promised to be
+wonderfully rich. Immediately upon the news of this strike reaching the
+other camps of the interior, preparations were made far and wide for
+migrating thither upon the opening of Yukon navigation, and the early
+summer of 1910 saw a wild stampede to the Iditarod. Saloon-keepers,
+store-keepers, traders of all kinds, and the rag-tag and bobtail that
+always flock to a new camp were on the move so soon as the ice went out.
+From Dawson, from the Fortymile, from Circle, from Fairbanks, from the
+Koyukuk, and as soon as Bering Sea permitted, from Nome, all sorts of
+craft bore all sorts of people to the new Eldorado, while the first
+through steamboats from the outside were crowded with people from the
+Pacific coast eager to share in the opportunity of wealth. The
+sensational magazines had been printing article after article about "The
+incalculable riches of Alaska," and here were people hoping to pick some
+of it up. Iditarod City sprang into life as the largest "city" of the
+interior; the centre of gravity of the population of the interior of
+Alaska was shifted a thousand miles in a month.
+
+Iditarod City furnished a new and large base of supplies. Amidst the
+heterogeneous mass of humanity that swarmed into the place, though by no
+means the largest element in it, were experienced prospectors from every
+other district in Alaska. Under the iniquitous law that then prevailed
+and has only recently been modified, by which there was no limit at all
+to the number of claims in a district which one man could stake for
+himself and others, every creek adjacent to Flat Creek, every creek for
+many miles in every direction, had long since been tied up by the men
+with lead-pencils and hatchets. So the newly arrived prospectors must
+spread out yet wider, and they were soon scattered over all the rugged
+hundred miles between Iditarod City and the Kuskokwim River. Here and
+there they found prospects; and here and there what promised to be
+"pay." They started a new town, Georgetown, on the Kuskokwim itself;
+another town sprang up on the Takotna, a tributary of the Kuskokwim; and
+the great Commercial Company of Alaska, ever alert for new developments,
+put a steamboat on the Kuskokwim and built trading-posts at both these
+points. Thus the Kuskokwim country, which for long had been one of the
+least-known portions of Alaska, was opened up almost at a stroke.
+
+[Sidenote: CAMP AT 50° BELOW]
+
+It was my purpose to visit Iditarod City during the winter of 1910-11,
+although, by reason of the distance to be travelled, a journey thither
+would involve the omission of the customary winter visit to upper Yukon
+points. When the northern trip to the Koyukuk was returned from at
+Tanana, a sad journey had to be made to Nenana to bury the body of Miss
+Farthing, and Doctor Loomis, missionary physician at Tanana, who
+accompanied me on this errand, had almost as rough a breaking-in to the
+Alaska trail as we came back to Tanana again as Doctor Burke had in our
+journey over the "first ice" of the Koyukuk two years before. Two feet
+of new snow lay on the trail, and the thermometer went down to 60° below
+zero. We were camped once on the mail trail, unable to reach a
+road-house, at 50° below zero.
+
+[Illustration: THE ROUGH BREAKING IN OF DOCTOR LOOMIS, CAMPED ON THE
+MAIL TRAIL AT 50° BELOW ZERO, UNABLE TO REACH A ROAD-HOUSE FOR THE DEEP
+SNOW.]
+
+[Illustration: ESQUIMAUX OF THE UPPER KUSKOKWIM.]
+
+[Sidenote: THE ROUTE TO THE IDITAROD]
+
+From Tanana the beaten track to the Iditarod lay one hundred and sixty
+miles down the Yukon to Lewis's Landing, and then across country by the
+Lewis Cut-Off one hundred miles to Dishkaket on the Innoko, and
+thence across country another hundred miles to Iditarod City. But I
+designed to penetrate to the Iditarod by another route. I had long
+desired to visit Lake Minchúmina and its little band of Indians, and to
+pass through the upper Kuskokwim country. So I had engaged a Minchúmina
+Indian as a guide, and laid my course up the Tanana River to the
+Coschaket, and then due south across country to Lake Minchúmina and the
+upper Kuskokwim.
+
+The Cosna is a small stream confluent with the Tanana, about thirty
+miles above the mouth of that river, and we had hoped to reach it by the
+river trail upon the same day we left the mission at Tanana, the 18th of
+February, 1911. But the trail was too heavy and the going too slow and
+the start too late. When we had reached Fish Creek, about half-way, it
+was already growing dark, and we were glad to stop in a native cabin,
+where was an old widow woman with a blind daughter. The daughter,
+unmarried, had a little baby, and I inquired through Walter who the
+father was and whether the girl had willingly received the man or if he
+had taken advantage of her blindness. She named an unmarried Indian,
+known to me, and declared that she had not been consenting. It seemed a
+paltry and contemptible trick to take advantage of a fatherless blind
+girl. I baptized the baby and resolved to make the man marry the girl.
+
+The next night we reached the Coschaket, which, following the Indian
+rule, means "mouth of the Cosna," and found that our guide, Minchúmina
+John, had already relayed a load of grub that Walter had previously
+brought here from Tanana, one day's march upon our journey. Our course
+from the Coschaket left the Tanana River and struck across country by an
+old Indian trail that had not been used that winter. Through scrubby
+spruce and over frozen lakes and swamps, crossing the Cosna several
+times--a narrow little river with high steep banks--the trail went,
+until it brought us to a hunting camp of the Indians, about eighteen
+miles from the Coschaket. Here our stuff was cached and here we spent
+the night, doctoring the sick amongst them as well as we could. My eyes
+had been sorely tried this day despite dark smoked glasses, for we were
+travelling almost due south, and the sun was now some hours in the sky
+and yet low enough to shine right in one's face. So Walter stopped at a
+birch-tree, stripped some of the bark, and made an eye-shade that was a
+great comfort and relief.
+
+From this place began the slow work of double-tripping. The unbroken
+snow was too deep to permit the hauling of our increased load over it
+without a preliminary breaking out of a trail on snow-shoes. So camp was
+left standing and Walter and John went ahead all day and returned late
+at night with eight or nine miles of trail broken, while I stayed in
+camp and had dog feed cooked and supper ready. The next day we advanced
+the camp so far as the trail was broken. A moose had used the trail for
+some distance, however, since the boys left it, and his great plunging
+hoofs had torn up the snow worse than a horse would have done.
+
+A driving wind and heavy snowfall had drifted the new trail in the night
+so badly, moreover, that we were not able to cover the full stretch
+that had been snow-shoed, but camped in the dusk after we had gone eight
+miles. Eight miles in two days was certainly very poor travel, and at
+this rate our supplies would never take us down to the forks of the
+Kuskokwim. Yet there was no other way in which we could proceed. The
+weather was exceedingly mild, too mild for comfort--the thermometer
+ranging from 20° to 25° above--and the dogs felt the unseasonable
+warmth. It took us all that week to make the watershed between the
+drainage of the Tanana and the drainage of the Kuskokwim, a point about
+half-way to Lake Minchúmina. One day trail was broken, the next day the
+loads went forward. Tie the dogs as securely as one would, it was not
+safe to go off and leave our supplies exposed to the ravages that a
+broken chain or a slipped collar might bring, so two went forward and I
+sat down in camp. The boys on their return usually brought with them a
+few brace of ptarmigan or grouse or spruce hen or, at the least, a
+rabbit or so.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CAMP-ROBBERS]
+
+The camp-robbers, to my mind the most interesting of Alaskan birds,
+became very friendly and tame on these vigils. They stay in the country
+all the winter, when most birds have migrated, like prosperous mine
+owners, to less rigorous climates; they turn up everywhere, in the most
+mysterious way, so soon as one begins to make any preparation for
+camping, and they are bold and fearless and take all sorts of chances.
+On this journey more than once they alighted on a moving sled and pecked
+at the dried fish that happened to be exposed. Yet they are so alert and
+so quick in their movements that it would be difficult to catch them
+were they actually under one's hand. One of them, during a long day in
+camp, grew so tame that it pecked crumbs off the toe of my moccasin, and
+in another day or two would, one feels sure, have eaten out of the hand.
+There is a curious belief, strongly intrenched in the Alaskan mind, that
+the nest of this most common bird has never been found, and that the
+Smithsonian Institution has a standing offer of a large sum of money for
+the discovery. They build in the spruce-trees, ten or twelve feet above
+the ground, a nest of rough twigs, and lay five very small eggs, grey
+spotted with black. This, at any rate, is the description that Walter
+gives me of a nest he discovered with the bird sitting upon it, and I
+have found the boy's accounts of such matters entirely trustworthy. It
+is curious, however, that the nest of a bird so common all over Alaska
+as the camp-robber should be so rarely found. At times they are very
+mischievous and destructive, and the man who builds a careless cache
+will often be heard denouncing them, but to my mind a bird who gives us
+his enlivening company throughout the dead of an Alaskan winter deserves
+what pickings he can get.
+
+[Sidenote: SOFT WEATHER]
+
+On Saturday, the 25th of February, after climbing a rather stiff hill,
+we passed temporarily out of Yukon into Kuskokwim waters, for the
+tributaries of these two great drainage systems interlock in these
+hills. At the foot of the hill we stopped for lunch, a roaring fire was
+soon built, and a great cube of beaten snow impaled upon a stake was set
+up before the fire to drip into a pan for tea water, while the boys
+roasted rabbits. In a few hours more we were on the banks of one of the
+tributaries of the East Fork (properly the North Fork) of the Kuskokwim.
+Here, in an unoccupied native cabin, we made our camp and lay over
+Sunday, and here began the most remarkable spell of weather I have known
+in the interior at this season of the year. The thermometer rose to 37°
+and then to 40°; the snow everywhere was thawing, and presently it began
+to rain steadily. It was the first time I had seen a decided thaw in
+February, let alone rain.
+
+Next day the rain turned to snow, but since the thermometer still stood
+around 40°, the snow melted as it fell, and we were wet through all day.
+The snow underfoot, however, was so much less and so much harder that we
+were able to proceed without preliminary trail breaking. But it was a
+most disagreeable day and the prelude to a more disagreeable night.
+Soft, wet snow clings to everything it touches. The dogs are soon
+carrying an additional burden; balls of snow form on all projecting
+tufts of hair; masses of snow must continually be beaten off the sled.
+Every time a snow-shoe is lifted from the ground it lifts a few pounds
+of snow with it. One's moccasins and socks are soon wet through, and the
+feet, encased in this sodden cold covering, grow numb and stay so. We
+crossed a considerable mountain pass in driving snow, and should never
+have found the way without John, for much of it was above timber, and
+when it took us through woods the blazes on the trees were so bleached
+with age as to be difficult of recognition. The Indians have used this
+trail for generations; but few white men have ever passed along it.
+
+Wet snow, wet spruce boughs, wet tent, wet wood, wet clothing make poor
+camping. Water-proof equipment is so rarely needed on the winter trail
+that one does not bother with it. But the climate of the Kuskokwim
+valley is evidently different from that of the rest of the interior, if,
+as John said, such weather is not remarkable in these parts at this
+season. A third day was of much the same description; thawing and
+heavily snowing all day, the thermometer between 36° and 40°. The labour
+of going ahead of the teams and breaking trail, on the snow-shoes,
+through slush, grew so great that I relinquished it to John and took the
+handle-bars of his sled. We were approaching Lake Minchúmina, but the
+hills that led us into Yukon waters once more and should have given us
+views of the lake and the great mountains beyond gave nothing. It is a
+keen disappointment to be utterly denied great views, the expectation of
+which has been a support through long distances and fatigues.
+
+At noon we built a fire with considerable difficulty, but once it was
+started we plied it with fuel till we had a noble, roaring bonfire, and
+we hung our wet socks and moccasins and parkees and caps and mitts
+around it and stayed there until they were dry, though the resumption of
+our journey in the continuous melting snow soon wet everything through
+again.
+
+[Sidenote: LAKE MINCHÚMINA]
+
+At length, late in the evening of the 28th of February, we descended a
+long ridge and came upon the northeastern shore of Lake Minchúmina, one
+of the most considerable lakes of interior Alaska. It stretched its
+broad expanse away into the misty distance, the farther shore quite
+invisible, the snow driving slowly over it, and it looked as though we
+had stumbled by mistake upon the shores of the Arctic Ocean. There was
+no sort of trail upon it and the snow-shoes sank through the melting
+snow of its surface into the water that lay upon the ice and brought up
+a load of slush at every step; yet the going would have been still worse
+without them. The recollection of the six miles we trudged across that
+lake is a dismal recollection of utter fatigue, of mechanical lifting
+and falling of encumbered feet with the recurring feeling that it would
+be impossible to lift them any more. All across that lake I ate snow,
+and that and the back-ache legacy of an old strain are my signs of
+approaching exhaustion. Four hours passed ere we heard the noise of dogs
+and saw the glimmer of a light through the darkness, and the hearts of
+men and beasts alike leaped to the expectation of rest and shelter. We
+had feared the village might be deserted and were rejoiced that the
+Indians were still there.
+
+Never was hospitality more grateful than that we had from the little
+remote band of natives at the Minchúmina village. They made a pot of tea
+and fried some flap-jacks for us, and that was our supper, though I
+think the boys ate some boiled moose meat from a pot on the stove. We
+had plenty of grub, but were too weary to cook it; we spread our bedding
+down on the floor amongst a dozen others and fell almost at once into a
+deep sleep. Almost at once; for the arrival of our eight dogs had made a
+commotion amongst the canine population of the place, that after
+repeated outbreaks of noisy animosity and defiance seemed to turn by
+common consent into a friendly and most protracted howling contest in
+which my malamute "Muk" plainly outdid all competitors. How much longer
+the noise would have kept up it is hard to say--dogs never seem too
+tired to howl--but when the limit of Indian patience was reached, an
+aged crone rolled out of the bed into which she had rolled "all
+standing," seized a staff and went outdoors to lay it impartially upon
+the backs of all the disturbers of the peace, domestic and foreign, with
+a screech that was as formidable as the blows. The rest was silence.
+
+The next morning a dozen alarm-clocks went off within a few minutes of
+each other. Every adult in that cabin owned a separate alarm-clock, and
+rose, one supposes, to the summons of no other timepiece. At any rate,
+the clocks went off at intervals, and the natives arose one by one and
+seemed hugely to enjoy the clatter. Let one purchase a new thing and
+every individual in the community must have one also.
+
+But what struck me instantly upon arising was the miraculous
+transformation that had taken place outdoors. The sun was shining
+brilliantly through a clear sky! I hastened to dress and, not waiting
+for breakfast, seized my camera and started out. The chinook was over;
+the sharp, welcome tang of frost was in the air; the snow was hard
+underfoot. Out upon the gleaming surface of the lake I went for nigh a
+mile, resolutely refusing to look behind. I knew what vision awaited me
+when I turned around, had, indeed, caught a slight glimpse as I left the
+cabin, and I wanted the smooth, open foreground of the lake that I
+might see it to the best advantage.
+
+[Sidenote: DENALI AND HIS WIFE]
+
+There is probably no other view of North America's greatest mountain
+group comparable to that from Lake Minchúmina. From almost every other
+coign of vantage in the interior I had seen it and found it more or less
+unsatisfying. Only from distant points like the Pedro Dome or the summit
+between Rampart and Glen Gulch does the whole mass and uplift of it come
+into view with dignity and impressiveness. At close range the peaks seem
+stunted and inconspicuous, their rounded, retreating slopes lacking
+strong lines and decided character. But from the lake the precipitous
+western face of Denali and Denali's Wife rise sheer, revealed by the
+level foreground of the snow from base to summit. It was, indeed, a
+glorious scene. There stood the master peak, seeming a stupendous
+vertical wall of rock rising twenty thousand feet to a splendid sharp
+crest perhaps some forty or fifty miles away; there, a little farther to
+the south, rose the companion mass, a smaller but still enormous
+elevation of equally savage inaccessibility; while between them, near
+the base, little sharp peaks stretched like a corridor of ruined arches
+from mass to mass. One was struck at once by the simple appropriateness
+of the native names for these mountains. The master peak is Denali--the
+great one; the lesser peak is Denali's Wife; and the little peaks
+between are the children. And my indignation kindled at the substitution
+of modern names for these ancient mountain names bestowed immemorially
+by the original inhabitants of the land! Is it too late to strike Mount
+McKinley and Mount Foraker from the map? The names were given fifteen or
+sixteen years ago only, by one who saw them no nearer than a hundred
+miles. Is it too late to restore the native names contemptuously
+displaced?
+
+The majesty of the scene grew upon me as I gazed, and presently hand
+went to camera that some record of it might be attempted. But alas for
+the limitations of photography! I knew, even as I made the exposures,
+first at one one-hundredth of a second and then at one-fiftieth, that
+there was little hope of securing a picture; the air was yet faintly
+hazy with thin vapour; the early sun made too acute an angle with the
+peaks; and the yellow lens screen was left in the hind-sack of the sled.
+It was even as I feared. When developed some months later, the film held
+absolutely no trace of the mighty mountains that had risen so proudly
+before it. I promised myself that at noon, when the sun had removed to a
+greater distance from the mountains and made a more favourable angle
+with them, I would return and try again; but by noon had come another
+sudden, violent change of the weather, and snow was falling once more.
+
+[Sidenote: THE MINCHÚMINA FOLK]
+
+So I got no picture, save the picture indelibly impressed upon my
+memory, of the noblest mountain scene I had ever gazed upon which made
+memorable this 1st of March; perhaps one of the noblest mountain scenes
+in the whole world, for one does not recall another so great uplift from
+so low a base. The marshy, flat country that stretches from Minchúmina
+to the mountains cannot be much more than one thousand feet above the
+sea. Those awful precipices dropping thousands of feet at a leap, those
+peaks rising serene and everlasting into the highest heaven, the
+overwhelming size and strength and solidity of their rocky bulk, all
+this sank into my heart, and there sprang up once again the passionate
+desire of exploring the bowels of them, of creeping along their glaciers
+and up their icy ridges, of penetrating their hidden chambers, inviolate
+since the foundation of the world, and maybe scaling their ultimate
+summits and looking down upon all the earth even as they look down!
+
+Men, however, and not mountains, made the immediate demand upon one's
+interest and attention, and I returned to breakfast and the duties of
+the day. The Minchúmina people are a very feeble folk, some sixteen all
+told at the time of our visit, greatly reduced by the epidemics of the
+last decade, living remote from all others on the verge of their race's
+habitat. They trade chiefly at Tanana, a hundred and thirty miles or so
+away, walking an annual trip thither with their furs, and owning a
+nominal allegiance to our mission at that place. It was the first time
+that any clergyman had ever visited them, and the whole of the day was
+spent with them, discovering what they knew and trying to teach them a
+little more. The people sat around on the floor and hung upon the lips
+of the interpreter. But what a barrier a difference of language is! An
+interpreter is like a mountain pass, a means of access but at the cost
+of time and labour. He does not remove the obstruction. The Minchúmina
+people occupy a fine country that could amply support ten times the
+Indian population that now inhabits it. We were, indeed, now entering a
+country that has been almost depopulated by successive epidemics of
+contagious diseases. The measles in 1900 slew most of them, and
+diphtheria in 1906 destroyed all the children and many of the adults
+that remained. The chief of this little band wore a hat proudly adorned
+with ribbons and plumes, and flew a flag before his dwelling with the
+initials of the North American Trading and Transportation Company on
+it--a defunct Alaskan corporation. We could not learn the origin
+thereof; the flag and the letters were plainly home-made. It was
+probably a mere imitation of a flag he had seen years ago at Tanana,
+copied without knowledge of the meaning of the letters, as the Esquimaux
+often copy into the decoration of their clothing and equipment the
+legends from canned foods.
+
+Lake Minchúmina drains by a fork of the Kantishna River into the Tanana
+and so into the Yukon. Just beyond the southwestern edge of the lake
+runs a deep gully for perhaps a mile that leads to another lake called
+Tsórmina, which drains into Minchúmina. And just beyond Tsórmina is a
+little height of land, on the other side of which lies Lake Sishwóymina,
+which drains into the Kuskokwim. So that little height of land is
+another watershed between Alaska's two great rivers. Lakes Tsórmina and
+Sishwóymina are not on any maps; indeed, this region has never been
+mapped save very crudely from the distant flanks of Denali upon one of
+Alfred Brook's early bold journeys into the interior of Alaska on
+behalf of the Geological Survey. Although the Russians had
+establishments on the lower Kuskokwim seventy-five years ago, and the
+river is the second largest in Alaska and easy of navigation, yet the
+white man had penetrated very little into this country until the Innoko
+and Iditarod "strikes" of 1908 and 1909 respectively.
+
+It was our plan to follow the main valley of the Kuskokwim until the
+confluence of the Takotna with that stream, just below the junction of
+the main North and South Forks of the Kuskokwim, and then strike
+northwestward across country to the Iditarod.
+
+The snow had passed and the sun was bright and the thermometer around
+zero all day when we left Minchúmina to pursue our journey. The welcome
+change in the weather had brought a still more welcome change in travel.
+The decided and continued thaw followed by sharp cold had put a crust on
+the snow that would hold up the dogs and the sled and a man on small
+trail snow-shoes anywhere. Trail making was no longer necessary, and in
+two days we made upward of fifty miles. So much difference does surface
+make.
+
+[Sidenote: TALIDA]
+
+Across the end of Lake Minchúmina, across Tsórmina and Sishwóymina and a
+number of lesser lakes we went, following a faint show-shoe trail
+towards a distant mountain group to the southwest, the Talida Mountains,
+at the foot of which lay the Talida village. On the other hand, to the
+east and southeast, we had tantalising glimpses through haze and cloud
+of the two great mountains, and presently of the lesser peaks of the
+whole Alaskan range, sweeping its proud curve to the coast. For a long
+way on the second day we travelled on the flat top of a narrow ridge
+that must surely have been a lateral moraine of a glacier, what time the
+ice poured down from the heights and stretched far over this
+valley--then through scattered timber, increasing in size and thickness
+and already displaying character that differed somewhat from the
+familiar forests of the Yukon. The show-shoe trail we were following was
+made by a messenger despatched by the Minchúmina people to invite the
+Talida people to a potlatch; for the caches were filled with moose meat
+beyond local consumption. Early on the second day we met him returning
+and learned that he had gone on to yet another village a day's journey
+farther, still on our route.
+
+The people were all gone hunting from the tiny native hamlet of Talida,
+but we entered a cabin and made ourselves at home. We had passed into
+the region where the Greek Church holds nominal sway, of which the icons
+with little candles before them on the walls gave token. No priest ever
+visits them, but a native at a village on the south fork where is a
+church holds some position analogous to that of a lay reader. The
+nearest priest is a half-breed, ill spoken of for irregularity of life,
+some two hundred miles farther down the river. The Greek Church is
+relaxing its hold in Alaska, perhaps inevitably, and suffers sadly since
+the removal of the bishop from Sitka from lack of supervision. Also we
+had passed out of Indian country into the land of the Esquimaux, for
+these people, far up towards the head of the river as they were, had
+yet come at some period from the mouth. We were out of Walter's language
+range now, and were glad that the bilingual John of the march country
+was with us to serve as interpreter.
+
+Standing proudly up against the wall in one corner of the cabin was a
+rather pathetic object to my eyes--an elaborate gilt-handled silk
+umbrella. There needed no one to tell its story; it spoke of a visit to
+the Yukon with furs to sell and the usual foolish purchase of gay and
+glittering trash--novel and quite useless. What easy prey these poor
+people are to the wiles of the trader! Said one of them to me recently,
+when I asked the purpose of an "annex" to his store with a huge
+billiard-table in it--at an exclusive native village--"It's to get their
+money; there's no use trying to fool you; if we can't get it one way
+we've got to get it another." This gorgeous silk umbrella was concrete
+expression of the same sentiment. It was bought outside, it was brought
+into the country, it was set on exhibition in the store, because some
+trader judged it likely to attract a native eye. No one, white or
+native, uses an umbrella in interior Alaska.
+
+We made twenty-five miles the next day through a wide, open country,
+well wooded in places with a park-like distribution of trees, unwonted
+in our travels and attractive. A new species of spruce threw thick
+branches right down to the ground and tapered up to a perfect cone; each
+tree apart from the others and surrounded by sward instead of
+underbrush. There was a dignity about these trees that the common Yukon
+spruce never attains. Rolling hills of small elevation stretched on
+either hand and game signs abounded. After eight hours of such travel
+we spoke of camping, but presently saw footprints in the snow and pushed
+on to the bank of a little river, the Chedolothna, where stood a cabin,
+a tent, and several high caches. Here, with two families that occupied
+the cabin, we stayed the night.
+
+[Sidenote: MEASLES AND DIPHTHERIA]
+
+Six people at this place, six at Talida, sixteen at Minchúmina, make up
+all the population of a region perhaps a hundred and fifty miles square.
+Yet it is a noble Indian country, one of the most favourable in all the
+interior, capable of supporting hundreds of people. Signs, indeed, of a
+much larger occupation of it were not wanting, and all accounts speak of
+the wholesale destruction of the natives by disease. We were told of a
+village a little farther up this stream where every living being, save
+one old man, died of diphtheria five years previously, while those who
+have heard the stories of the horrors of the epidemic of measles in
+1900, usually connected in some way with the stampede to Nome of that
+year when the disease seems to have entered the country, will understand
+how a region once thickly peopled, for Alaska, has become the most
+thinly peopled in all the territory.
+
+A half-breed trader, long resident at a point perhaps two hundred miles
+lower down the Kuskokwim, told me of coming back to a populous village
+after an absence of a few weeks, to find every person dead and the
+starving dogs tearing at the rotting corpses. It is terrible to think
+what the irruption of a new disease may mean to these primitive natives.
+Even a disease like measles, rarely fatal and not commonly regarded as
+serious amongst whites, takes to itself a strange and awful virulence
+when it invades this virgin blood. The people know no proper treatment;
+maddened by the itching rash that covers the body, they fling off all
+cover, rush outdoors naked, whatever the weather, and either roll in the
+snow or plunge into the stream; with the result that the disease
+"strikes in" and kills them. Such is the description that is given of
+its course along the lower Yukon and Kuskokwim. At many a Yukon village
+half the people died, despite the aid the few missionaries then on the
+river could afford; upon the Kuskokwim the havoc seems to have been
+still greater. Six years later, death again stalked through this region
+after having visited the Yukon, and this time seized his victims by the
+throat. In another chapter has been given some account of an outbreak of
+diphtheria on the Chandalar, following a more serious epidemic at Circle
+City and Fort Yukon. It was during that same winter the disease raged in
+this region, remote from any sort of medical or even intelligent lay
+aid, and swept off all the children that had been spared by the measles
+or had been born since that time. At our next stopping-place we saw the
+graves of nineteen children who died in one day!
+
+[Sidenote: THE INDIAN GUIDE]
+
+We learned that we were now within one day's travel of a road-house, at
+or near the junction of the forks of the Kuskokwim, and that a
+government trail had been surveyed and staked from the Iditarod to the
+Sushitna, passing close to the same point, and that during the present
+winter road-houses had sprung up along the western portion of it, so
+that we should not have to make camp again on the way to Iditarod City.
+All of which Minchúmina John had collected from the people in the
+cabin, and now presented to me as reason why he should be released from
+further service. I was loath to let him go until we were actually _at_
+the road-house described, but he wanted to go back to the lake for the
+potlatch then preparing, and said that two days' delay would bar him
+from the best of the festivities.
+
+So I settled with him, giving him fifty dollars of the sixty dollars
+covenanted to the Iditarod, and grub enough to take him back to the
+lake, and a rifle, for he was unprovided with firearms, and he went his
+way back, richly content, to the gorging of unlimited moose meat that
+awaited him, and the boy and I went ours. So far as merely his company
+was concerned I was not sorry to lose him. The old saying holds good
+upon the trail that "two is company and three is none." He interfered
+with my boy's lessons. Since he had scarce any English, and could not be
+ignored, the conversation was mainly in Indian. In a word he pulled the
+company down to a native level. And I was anxious that Walter's
+education should proceed.
+
+This boy had been with me for two years, winter and summer, and it was a
+great pleasure to witness his gracious development of body, mind, and
+character. Clean-limbed, smooth-skinned, slender, and supple, his Indian
+blood showing chiefly in a slight swarth of complexion and aquilinity of
+feature, he now approached his twentieth year and began to gain the
+strength of his manhood and to give promise of more than the average
+stature and physical power. With only one full year's schooling behind
+him, the year before he came to me, his active intelligence had made
+such quick use of it that there was good foundation to build upon; and
+our desultory lessons in camp--reading aloud, writing from dictation,
+geography and history in such snippets as circumstances permitted--were
+eagerly made the most of, and his mental horizon broadened continually.
+Until his sixteenth year he had lived amongst the Indians almost
+exclusively and had little English and could not read nor write. He was
+adept in all wilderness arts. An axe, a rifle, a flaying knife, a skin
+needle with its sinew thread--with all these he was at home; he could
+construct a sled or a pair of snow-shoes, going to the woods for his
+birch, drying it and steaming it and bending it; and could pitch camp
+with all the native comforts and amenities as quickly as anybody I ever
+saw. He spoke the naked truth, and was so gentle and unobtrusive in
+manner that he was a welcome guest at the table of any mission we
+visited. Miss Farthing at Nenana had laid her mark deep upon him in the
+one year he was with her.
+
+[Sidenote: THE HALF-BREED]
+
+Before he came to me I had another half-breed for two years, and before
+that there had been a series of full-blooded native boys. I found the
+half-breed greatly preferable. With full command of the native language,
+with such insight into the native mind as few white men ever attain, he
+combines the white man's quickness of apprehension and desire for
+knowledge; and the companionship had been pleasant and profitable. Both
+these boys had picked up quickly and efficiently, without the slightest
+previous experience, the running and the care of the four-cylinder
+gasoline engine of the mission launch, and took a great and intelligent
+interest in all machinery. As an interpreter the half-breed is far
+superior to most full-bloods; he takes one's purport immediately; his
+mind seems to leap with the speaker's mind, not only to follow
+faithfully but to anticipate. And the further his English progresses, so
+much the more excellent interpreter does he become.
+
+My heart goes out to the large and rapidly increasing number of these
+youths of mixed blood in Alaska. It is common to hear them spoken of
+slightingly and contemptuously. There is what my mind always regards as
+a damnable epigram current in the country to the effect that the
+half-breed inherits the vices of both races and the virtues of neither.
+The white man who utters this saying with a chuckle at his second-hand
+wit has generally not much virtue to transmit, were virtue heritable.
+But to thoughtful men nowadays this talk of the inheritance of virtues
+and vices is mere folly. The half-breed in Alaska, as elsewhere, is the
+product of his environment. Often without legitimate father--although in
+an Indian community, where nothing is secret, his parentage is usually
+well known--he is left for some native woman to support with the aid of
+her native husband. He is reared with the full-blooded offspring of the
+couple in the frankness that knows no reserve and the intimacy that
+knows no restraint, of Indian life. The full extent of that frankness
+and intimacy shocks even the loosest-living white man when he first
+becomes aware of it. Where religion and decency have not been
+faithfully inculcated there is no bound to it at all--it is complete.
+Presently, as his superior intellectual inheritance begins to manifest
+itself, as he grows up into consciousness that he is different from, and
+in many ways superior to, the Indians around him, he is naturally drawn
+to such white society as comes his way.
+
+[Sidenote: THE LOW-DOWN WHITE]
+
+In this book a good deal has been said, and, it may be thought by the
+reader, said with a good deal of asperity, about the whites who frequent
+Indian communities and come most into contact with the native people;
+yet the more the author sees of this class, the less is he disposed to
+modify any of the strictures he has put upon it. "The Low-Down White" is
+the subject of one of the most powerful and scathing of Robert Service's
+ballads, those most unequal productions with their mixture of strength
+and feebleness, of true and forced notes, the best of which should
+certainly live amongst the scant literature of the North. And, indeed,
+the spectacle of the man of the higher race, with all the age-long
+traditions and habits of civilisation behind him, descending below the
+level of the savage, corrupting and debauching the savage and making
+this corrupting and debauching the sole exercise of his more intelligent
+and cultivated mind, is one that has aroused the disgust and indignation
+of whites in all quarters of the world. Kipling and Conrad have drawn
+him in the East; Robert Louis Stevenson in the South Sea Islands; any
+army officer will draw him for you in the Philippines, which lack as yet
+their great delineator; Service has not overdrawn him on the Yukon.
+
+Now, it is to this man's society, for lack of other white society open
+to him, that the young half-breed who feels his father's blood stirring
+within him is drawn and is made welcome. He finds standards even lower,
+because more sophisticated, than the standards of the Indians
+themselves. He finds that honesty and morality are a sham, religion a
+laughing-stock. He finds the chastity of women and the honour of men
+sneeringly regarded as non-existent. He is taught to curse and swear, to
+talk lewdly, to drink and gamble. He is taught that drunkenness and
+sensuality are the only enjoyments worth looking forward to, and he soon
+becomes as vile as his preceptors. The back room of the Indian trader's
+store is often the scene of this tuition--barroom, assignation house,
+gambling hell in one. But let that same youth be taken early in hand by
+one who has a care for him and will be at some personal pains to train
+him cleanly and uprightly, and he is as amenable to the good influences
+as he would be to the bad if they were his sole environment. Conscious
+all the time of his equivocal position, shy and timid about asserting
+himself amongst whites, he is easy prey to the viciously as he is apt
+pupil to the virtuously disposed.
+
+What is said here of the male half-breeds applies _a fortiori_ to the
+female. Unless early taken in hand by the missionary, or put under the
+protection of some church boarding-school--and sometimes despite all
+such care and teaching--the lot of the half-breed girl is a sad one; and
+some of the lowest and vilest women of the land are of mixed blood.
+
+The half-breed is assuredly to be reckoned with in the future of Alaska.
+He is here to stay. He is here in increasing numbers. He is the natural
+leader of the Indian population. There seems little doubt that when he
+cares to assert his rights he is already an American citizen, although
+judicial decisions are uncertain and conflicting in this matter.
+
+The missions in the interior have recognised, though perhaps somewhat
+tardily, the importance of the half-breeds, and have picked them up here
+and there along the rivers and become responsible for their decent
+rearing. Some, assuredly, of the future leaders of the native people are
+now in training at the mission schools. Some, unfortunately, are in
+quite as assiduous training by the unscrupulous Indian trader and his
+coterie of low-down whites.
+
+The skies had threatened snow since we arose, and when our diminished
+expedition was well upon its way the snow began to fall. For thirty-six
+hours it fell without cessation. Three days of good travel had put us
+forward seventy-five or eighty miles; now once more we were "up against"
+deep snow and trail breaking. An old native whom we met on his way to
+the potlatch later in the day spread out his hands with a look of
+despair and cried: "Good trail all lose'm!" All day we pushed on against
+the driving storm, the flakes stinging our faces and striking painfully
+against our eyeballs, now following a narrow steep woodland trail, now
+awhile along a creek bed, now across open country with increasing
+difficulty in finding our way, until it grew dark while yet we were
+some miles from our destination, and we made camp; and all night long
+the heavy snow continued.
+
+So soon as we had struck our tent, crusted with ice, and had broken up
+our wet camp next morning there was trouble about finding the trail.
+Wide open spaces with never an indication of direction stretched before
+us. Again and again we cast about, the boy to the left, I to the right,
+to find some blaze or mark, but much of the course lay across open
+country that bore none. And then I sorely regretted having let John go
+back. Some miles before we came to a stop the previous evening, we
+passed a native encampment with naught but women and children in it--the
+men gone hunting. But we could not speak with them or get any
+information from them, for our Kuskokwim interpreter was gone. And now
+it seemed likely that we should lose our way in this wilderness. At last
+we were entirely at a loss, the boy returning on the one side and I on
+the other from wide detours, in which we had found no sign at all. The
+snow still fell heavily; there lay more than a foot of it upon the late
+crust; trail or sign of a trail, on the snow or above it, was not at
+all.
+
+[Sidenote: THE DOG GUIDES]
+
+Then occurred one of the most remarkable things I have known in all my
+journeyings. Straight ahead in the middle distance I spied two stray
+dogs making a direct course towards us; not wandering about, but
+evidently going somewhere. Now there are no such things as unattached
+dogs in Alaska; any dog entirely detached from human ownership and some
+sort of human maintenance would soon be a dead dog. The explanation,
+full of hope, sprang at once to the boy's mind. The dogs must belong to
+the native encampment some six miles back, and they had been to the
+road-house for what scraps they could pick up, and were returning. It
+was probably a daily excursion and they had doubtless followed their
+accustomed trail. So it turned out. All the way to that road-house,
+eight miles farther, we followed the trail left by those dogs, growing
+fainter and fainter indeed as the new snow fell upon it, but still
+discernible until we had almost reached the road-house. It led across
+open swampy wastes, and presently across two considerable lakes, over
+which we should never have been able to find our way, for the trail
+swung to one hand or the other and did not leave the lake in the same
+general direction by which it had reached it. Walter cut a bundle of
+boughs and staked the trail out as we pursued it, lest we should return
+this way, but from the moment we saw the dogs there was never any
+question about the trail; they kept it perfectly. We were four and a
+half hours making the eight miles or so to Nicoli's Village and the
+road-house, but we might have been days making it but for those dogs.
+And at the road-house we learned that the boy's theory of their
+movements was the right one. They came across the twelve or fourteen
+miles every day for such scraps as they could pick up.
+
+[Sidenote: THE WILDERNESS POET]
+
+So here was our first white man in sixteen days, an intelligent man of
+meagre education, with a great bent for versifying. A courteous approval
+of one set of verse brought upon us the accumulated output of years in
+the wilderness without much opportunity of audience, as one supposes,
+and most of the afternoon and evening was thus spent. Amidst the
+overwrought sentimentality and faulty scansion which marked most of the
+pieces was one simple little poem that struck a true note, said its
+little say, and quit--without a superfluous word. Its author set no
+store by it at all compared with his more pretentious and meretricious
+work; yet it was the one poem in the whole mass. It described the
+writing of a letter to his father; he had spent all he had in
+prospecting and working a small claim, and had just realised that a
+year's labour was gone for naught. His father would worry if he got no
+word at all, but there was no use telling the old man he was broke, so
+he just wrote that he was well, and that was all. The old man would come
+pretty near understanding anyway. In simple lines that scanned and
+rhymed naturally, that was what the three or four stanzas said. And it
+was so typical of many a man's situation in this country, gave so simply
+and well the reason why many men cease writing to their relatives at
+all, that it pleased me and seemed of value. That note came from the
+heart and from the life's experience.
+
+Nicoli's Village is a very small place with a mere handful of people,
+situated on the South Fork of the Kuskokwim some forty miles by river
+above the junction of the forks. Before the epidemics devastated it it
+had been a considerable native community. A Greek church, which the
+natives built entirely themselves, and which boasted a large painted
+icon of sorts, was the most important building in the place, and was
+served by the lay minister referred to before. Thus far the Kuskokwim
+is navigable for vessels of light draught, and a small stern-wheel
+steamboat lay wintering upon the bank.
+
+[Sidenote: ROAD-HOUSES]
+
+Our way now left the Kuskokwim and struck across country to a point just
+below the junction of the forks, and then across country again to a
+tributary of the right bank, the Takotna; with a general northerly
+direction. Road-houses there indeed were, in the crudity and discomfort
+of their first season, and other evidences of the proximity of the white
+man. Here were two men camped, hunting moose for the Iditarod market,
+more than a hundred and twenty-five miles away, and here, at the end of
+the second day, near the mouth of the Takotna, was the new post of the
+Commercial Company in the charge of an old acquaintance who welcomed us
+warmly and entertained us most hospitably. After camping and road-house
+experience of nearly three weeks, a comfortable bed and well-spread
+table, and the general unmistakable ménage of a home-making woman are
+very highly enjoyed. That night the whole population of the settlement,
+fourteen persons, gathered in the store for Divine service.
+
+Sixteen miles farther on was another settlement, the "Upper Takotna"
+Post, with a rival company established and some larger population. Here,
+also, we spent a night with old Fairbanks acquaintances. We were yet a
+hundred miles from Iditarod City, and the trail lay over a very rugged,
+hilly country, up one creek to its head, over a divide, and down
+another, in the way of the usual cross-country traverse.
+
+There had not been so much snowfall in this section, but the weather
+began to be very severe. The thermometer fell to -45° and -50° and -55°
+on three successive nights, and all day long rose not above -20°, with a
+keen wind. The cost of transporting supplies to the road-houses on this
+trail justified the high prices charged--one dollar and a half for a
+poor meal of rabbits and beans and bacon, or ptarmigan and beans and
+bacon, and one dollar for a lunch of coffee, bread and butter, and dried
+fruit. But no such exigency could be pleaded to excuse the dirt and
+discomfort and lack of the commonest provision of outhouse decency at
+most of these places--'twas mere shiftlessness. There is not often much
+middle ground in Alaskan road-houses; they are either very good in their
+way or very bad; either kept by professional victuallers who take pride
+in them or by idle incompetents who make an easy living out of the
+necessities of travellers. One wishes that some of the old-time
+travellers who used to wax so eloquently indignant over the inns in the
+Pyrenees could make a winter journey in the interior of Alaska.
+
+[Illustration: "THE 'SUMMIT' IS HIGH ABOVE TIMBER-LINE AND THE TRAIL
+PURSUES A HOGBACK RIDGE FOR A MILE AND A HALF AT THE SUMMIT LEVEL."]
+
+[Illustration: A STREET IN IDITAROD CITY.]
+
+One thing pleased me at these road-houses. The only reading-matter in
+any of them consisted of magazines bearing the rubber stamp of Saint
+Matthew's Reading-Room at Fairbanks, part of a five-hundred-pound cargo
+of magazines which the mission launch _Pelican_ brought to the Iditarod
+the previous summer; virtually the only reading-matter in the whole
+camp. It was pleasant to know that we had been able to avert the real
+calamity of a total absence of anything to read for a whole winter
+throughout this wide district. But, although they were brought to the
+Iditarod and distributed absolutely free, each of these magazines had
+cost the road-house keeper twenty-five cents for carriage over the trail
+from Iditarod City, and they had been read to death. Some of them were
+so black and greasy from continued handling that the print at the edges
+of the pages was almost unreadable.
+
+These creeks swarmed with ptarmigan, and it was well they did, for the
+new camp was ill supplied with food, and we found ourselves in a region
+of growing scarcity as we approached the Iditarod. The ptarmigan seem to
+have supplemented the meagre stocks in the Iditarod during this winter
+of 1910-11 as effectively as the rabbits did in the Fairbanks camp in
+the scarce winter of 1904-5. In place after place the whole creek
+valley, where it was open, was crisscrossed with ptarmigan tracks, and
+the birds rose in coveys, uttering their harsh, guttural cry at every
+turn of the trail.
+
+The summit between the head of Moose Creek and the head of Bonanza Creek
+is again a watershed between the waters of the Kuskokwim and the waters
+of the Yukon; for Moose Creek is tributary to the Takotna and Bonanza
+Creek is tributary to Otter Creek, which is tributary to the Iditarod
+River. The "summit" is high above timber-line, and when the trail has
+reached it it does not descend immediately but pursues a hogback ridge
+for a mile and a half at about the summit level. We passed over it in
+clear, bright weather without difficulty, but it would be a bad passage
+in wind or snow or fog. The rugged, broken country, with small, rounded
+domes of hills, stretched away in all directions, a maze of little
+valleys threading in and out amongst them.
+
+[Sidenote: PLACE-NAMES]
+
+The Bonanza Creek road-house was by far the best of any between the
+Kuskokwim and the Iditarod, and showed what can be done for comfort,
+even under adverse circumstances, by a couple who care and try. But how
+the names of gold-bearing creeks, or creeks that are expected to be
+gold-bearing are repeated again and again in every new camp! I once
+counted up the following list of mining place-names in Alaska: Bonanza
+Creeks, 10; Eldorados and Little Eldorados, 10; Nugget Creeks or
+Gulches, 17; Gold Creeks, 12; Gold Runs, 7. Nor is it only in creeks
+with auriferous deposit or expectation of auriferous deposit that this
+reduplication occurs; there are Bear Creeks, 16; Boulder Creeks, 13;
+Moose Creeks, 13; Willow Creeks, 17; Canyon Creeks, 12; Glacier Creeks,
+14.
+
+The imagination of the average prospector is not his most active
+faculty, but even when his imagination is given play and he names a
+place "Twilight," as he did the original settlement at this base of
+supplies, the ineradicable prose of trade comes along the next summer
+and changes it to "Iditarod City." There must have been some remarkable
+personality strong enough to repress the "chamber of commerce" at
+Tombstone, Arizona, or the place would have lost its distinctive name so
+soon as it grew large enough to have mercantile establishments instead
+of stores.
+
+[Sidenote: IDITAROD CITY]
+
+We went through "Discovery Otter" and into "Flat City," on Flat Creek,
+the jealous rival of Iditarod City, and so over the hills to Iditarod
+City, on the wings of a storm. The wind whirled the snow behind us and
+drove the sled along almost on top of the dogs. In its bleak situation
+and its exposure to the full force of the wind, Iditarod City reminds
+one of Nome or Candle on the Seward Peninsula. The hills and flats that
+surround it are in the main treeless, and the snow drifts and drives
+over everything. Almost all the week that we spent in the town it was
+smothered up in a howling wind-storm, so that it was quite a serious
+undertaking to walk a block or two along the streets. Deep drifts were
+piled up on all the corners and on the lee side of all buildings. We
+reached Iditarod City on Monday, the 13th of March. Until the following
+Friday morning was no cessation or moderation of the wind-storm; and
+this, they told us, represented most of the weather since the 1st of
+January.
+
+Overgrown and overdone in every way, the place presented all the
+features, sordid and otherwise, of a raw mining town. Prices had risen
+enormously on all manner of supplies, for everything that was not
+actually "short" was believed to be "cornered." Bacon was ninety cents a
+pound; butter one dollar and a half a pound; flour was twenty dollars a
+hundred pounds, and most things in like ratio. Some said the grub was
+not in the camp; others that the tradesmen had it cached away waiting
+for the still higher prices they believed would obtain before fresh
+supplies could arrive in July. There was a general feeling of
+disappointment and discouragement, enhanced by discomfort and actual
+suffering from the terrible stormy weather of the winter and the
+exorbitant and growing price of provisions. Many men without occupation
+were living on one meal a day. The saloons and the parasitical classes,
+male and female, seemed to flourish and to play their usual prominent
+part in the life of such places. The doings of notorious women whose
+sobriquets seemed household words, the lavish expenditures of certain
+men upon them, the presents of diamonds they received, with the amount
+paid for them, constituted a large part of the general talk.
+
+One is compelled to admire the vigour and enthusiastic enterprise,
+daunted by no difficulty, that is displayed in the wonderfully rapid
+upraising of a new mining-camp town. The building goes far ahead of the
+known wealth of the camp and commonly far ahead of the reasonable
+expectation. But the element of chance is so important a factor in
+placer mining that the whole thing partakes more of the nature of
+gambling than of a commercial venture. Any new camp may suddenly present
+the world with a new Klondike; with riches abundant and to spare for
+every one who is fortunate enough to be on the spot. Here was Flat Creek
+with a surprisingly rich deposit; why should there not be a dozen such
+amidst the multitudinous creeks of the district? How could any one know
+that it would be almost the only creek on which pay would be found at
+all? For there is no law about the distribution of gold deposits; there
+is not even a general rule that has not its notable exceptions. It is
+very generally believed by the old prospectors and miners that somewhere
+in the Bible may be found these words, "Silver occurs in veins, but gold
+is where you find it," which of course, is a mere misreading or faulty
+remembering of a verse in the Book of Job: "Surely there is a vein for
+the silver and a place for the gold where they fine it" (refine it). But
+that "gold is where you find it" is about the only law touching
+auriferous deposits that holds universally good.
+
+Three long parallel streets of one and two story wooden buildings, with
+cross streets connecting them, made up the town. Because the country is
+poorly timbered, the usual log construction had yielded in the main to
+framed buildings, and great quantities of lumber had been brought the
+previous summer from Fairbanks, and even from Nome and the outside, to
+supplement the low-grade output of two local mills. But the price of
+building materials had been very high, and the average dwelling was very
+small and incommodious. People accustomed to the comparative luxury of
+the older camps had suffered a good deal from the lack of all domestic
+conveniences in this new will-o'-the-wisp of an eldorado.
+
+So there the town stretched away, lumber and paper,--the usual
+tinder-box Alaskan construction--stores slap up against one another,
+with no alleyways between; in the busiest part of it and along the
+water-front even an adequate provision of side streets grudged;
+furnace-heated and kiln-dried and gasoline-lit; waiting for the careless
+match and the fanning wind and the five minutes' start that should send
+it all up in smoke. A week after we left it came; as it came to Dawson,
+as it came to Nome, as it came to Fairbanks, without teaching any lesson
+or leaving any precautionary regulations on the statute book to save
+men from their own competitive greed. Two or three weeks after the fire,
+however, it was all rebuilt, and a plunging local bank held mortgages on
+most of the structures for the cost of the new material--and holds them
+yet.
+
+[Sidenote: THOUSANDS WITHOUT CHURCH]
+
+With at least a thousand people resident in the town, not to mention the
+thousands more out upon the creeks and at Flat City and "Discovery[G]
+Otter," there was no minister of religion of any sort in the whole
+region, nor had public Divine service been conducted since the occasion
+of the _Pelican's_ visit the previous summer. Yet there were many in the
+place who sorely missed the opportunities of worship. Twice on Sunday
+the largest dancing hall in the town was crowded at service; at night it
+could have been filled a second time with those unable to get in.
+
+Places like this present very difficult problems to those desirous of
+providing for their religious need. To occupy them at all they should be
+occupied at once when yet eligible sites may be had for the staking; if
+they prosper, to come into them later means buying at a high price. Yet
+what seventh son of a seventh son shall have foresight enough to tell
+the fortunes of them? The North is strewn with "cities" of one winter.
+Nor is the selection of suitable men to minister to such communities a
+simple matter. Amidst the overthrow of all the usual criteria of
+conduct, the fading out of the usual dividing lines and the blending
+into one another of the usual divisions, it requires a tactful and
+prudent man "to keep the happy mean between too much stiffness in
+refusing and to much easiness in admitting" variations from conventional
+standards. His point of view, if he is to have any influence whatever,
+must not exclude the point of view of the great majority; he must accept
+the situation in order to have any chance of improving the situation.
+And yet in the fundamentals of character and conduct he must be
+unswerving. And if on any such fundamental the battle gauge is thrown
+down, he must take it up and fight the quarrel out at whatever cost.
+
+We left Iditarod City on Monday, the 20th of March, the dogs the fatter
+and fresher for their week's rest, resolved not to return by the
+Kuskokwim but to take the beaten trail out to the Yukon, and so all the
+way up that stream to Fort Yukon. The monthly mail had arrived a few
+days previously--a monthly mail was all that the thousands of men in
+this camp could secure--and had gone out again the very next morning,
+before people had time to answer their letters, before the registered
+mail had even been delivered. So our departure for the Yukon was eagerly
+seized upon and advertised as a means of despatching probably the last
+mail that would go outside over the ice. I was sworn in as special
+carrier, and a heavy sack of first-class mail added to our load as far
+as Tanana. The first stage of thirty miles led to Dikeman, a town at the
+headwaters of ordinary steamboat navigation of the Iditarod River, at
+which the Commercial Company had built a depot and extensive warehouse,
+since in the main abandoned. Two streets of cabins lined the bank, but
+forty or fifty souls comprised the population, and almost all of them
+gathered for Divine service that night.
+
+[Sidenote: THE "MOVING OF THE MEAT"]
+
+From Dikeman to Dishkaket, on the Innoko River, a distance of some
+seventy miles, our route lay over one of the dreariest and most dismal
+regions in all Alaska. It is one succession of lakes and swamps, with
+narrow, almost knife-edge, ridges between, fringed with stunted spruce.
+Far as the eye could reach to right and left the country was the same;
+it is safe to say broadly that all the land between the Iditarod and
+Innoko Rivers is of this character. We passed over it in mild weather,
+but it must be a terrible country to cross in storm or through deep
+snow. For ten miles at a stretch there was scarcely a place where a man
+might make a decent camp. At a midway road-house was gathered the
+greatest assemblage of dogs and loaded sleds I had ever seen together at
+one time, each team with an Indian driver; they must have covered a
+quarter or a third of a mile. It was a freight train engaged in
+transporting a whole boat-load of butcher's meat to Iditarod City, the
+cargo of a steamboat that had frozen in on the Yukon the previous
+October or early November. All the winter through efforts had been made
+to get this meat two hundred odd miles overland to its destination; but
+the weather had been so stormy and the snow so deep that near the end of
+March most of it was still on the way, and some yet far down the trail
+towards the Yukon waiting for another trip of the teams.
+
+Dishkaket was merely a native village on the Innoko River two or three
+years before; but since three new trails from the Yukon come together
+here--from Kaltag Nulato, and Lewis's Landing--and in the other
+directions two trails branch off here, to the Innoko diggings at Ophir
+and to the Iditarod, a store or two and a couple of road-houses had
+sprung up.
+
+From Dishkaket, after crossing the Innoko, we took the most northerly of
+the three trails to the Yukon, the Lewis Cut-Off, a trail of a hundred
+miles that strikes straight across country and reaches the Yukon eighty
+miles farther up that stream than the Nulato trail and a hundred and
+twenty miles farther up than the Kaltag trail. The Kaltag trail is the
+trail to Nome; the Nulato trail is the mail trail simply because it
+suits the contractors to throw business to Nulato. The Lewis Cut-Off is
+the direct route, the shortest by about a hundred miles, but it was cut
+by the private individual whose name it bears, and leads out to his
+store and road-house on the Yukon; so a rival road-house was built close
+by on the river and the prestige and advertisement of the "United States
+mail route" thrown to the trail that covers one hundred unnecessary
+miles--for no other reason than to deprive Lewis of the legitimate fruit
+of his enterprise.
+
+The character of the country changed so soon as the Innoko was crossed;
+the wide swamps gave place to a broken, light-timbered country of ridges
+and hollows, and the rough, laborious, horse-ruined trail across it made
+bad travelling. "Buckskin Bill," with his cayuses, was also engaged in
+"moving the meat." The measured miles, moreover, gave place to estimated
+miles, and the nominal twenty-five we made the first day was probably
+not much more than twenty.
+
+[Sidenote: MILLINERY]
+
+The first fifty miles of the country between the Innoko and the Yukon is
+much the same, and we were climbing and descending ridges for a couple
+of days. Then we crossed a high ridge and dropped out of Innoko waters
+into the valley of the Yukatna, a tributary of the Yukon, and passed
+down this valley for thirty or forty miles, and then across some more
+broken country to the Yukon. At one of the road-houses a woman was
+stopping, going in with three or four large sled loads of millinery and
+"ladies' furnishings." We were told that the merchandise had cost her
+twelve thousand dollars in Fairbanks, and that she expected to realise
+thirty thousand dollars by selling it to the "sporting" women of the
+Iditarod, now a whole winter debarred from "the latest imported French
+fashions." This woman was dressed in overalls, like a man, and the
+drivers of her teams, two white men and a native, cursed and swore and
+used filthy language to the dogs in her presence. It always angers me to
+hear an Indian curse; to hear one curse in the presence of a white woman
+was particularly disgusting and exasperating; but what could one expect
+when the white men put no slightest restraint upon themselves and the
+woman seemed utterly indifferent? I called the Indian aside and spoke
+very plainly to him, and he ceased his ribaldry; but the white men still
+poured it out as they struggled to hitch their many dogs. At last I
+could stand it no longer. "Madam," I said to the woman, "I don't know
+who you are, save that you are a white woman, and as a white woman,
+if I were you, I would make those blackguards treat me with more respect
+than to use such language before me." She flushed and made no reply. The
+men, who heard what I said, scowled and made no reply. Presently
+dispositions were done and the train moved off, but I did not hear any
+more foul language. This is set down here chiefly because it was the
+first and only time in all his travels in Alaska that the writer heard
+such language in such presence.
+
+[Illustration: THE END OF THE PORTAGE TRAIL.]
+
+[Illustration: ROUGH ICE ON THE YUKON.]
+
+Another road-house was kept by a man who had been cook upon a recent
+arctic expedition off the coast of Alaska, and he gave some interesting
+inside information about an enterprise the published narrative of which
+had always seemed unsatisfactory. It was just gossip from a drunken
+scamp, but it filled several gaps in the book.
+
+As we approached the Yukon we passed several meat caches where great
+quarters of beef sewn up in burlap were piled on the side of the trail.
+At one of these caches the camp-robbers had been at work industriously.
+They had stripped the burlap from parts of several quarters, exposing
+the fat, and had dug out and carried it away little by little until it
+was all gone. The hard-frozen lean probably defied their best efforts;
+at any rate, the fat offered less resistance. But where else in the
+world could men dump quarters of beef beside the road and go off and
+leave them for weeks with no more danger of depredation than the bills
+of birds can effect?
+
+A few miles from the river the rival road-house signs began to appear.
+"Patronise Lewis; he cut this trail at his own expense," pleaded one.
+"Why go five miles out of your way," sneered another. Lewis's
+road-house _is_ across the wide Yukon, and there was no point in
+crossing the river save one's determination to lend no countenance to
+the spitefulness of these mail runners. So across the river we went and
+were glad to be on the Yukon again. The next morning we encountered the
+same rival signs at the point where the trail from Lewis's joined the
+"mail trail."
+
+[Sidenote: "TREASURE ISLAND"]
+
+Most of our travelling was now upon the surface of the Yukon, and four
+hundred and fifty miles of it stretched ahead of us ere our winter's
+travel should end at Fort Yukon. Four hours brought us to the military
+telegraph station at Melozi, and we were able to send word ahead that we
+were safely out of the Kuskokwim wilderness. Then a portage was crossed
+and then the river pursued again until with about thirty miles to our
+credit we made camp. The days were lengthening out now, the weather
+growing mild, although a keen, cold, down-river breeze was rarely
+absent, and travel began to be pleasant and camping no hardship. We
+preferred camping, on several scores, when the day's work had not been
+too arduous, chief amongst them being that it gave more opportunity and
+privacy for Walter's schooling. He was reading _Treasure Island_ aloud,
+and I was getting as great pleasure from renewing as he from beginning
+an acquaintance with that prince of all pirate stories. Kokrines and
+Mouse Point one day, the next The Birches; we passed these well-known
+Yukon landmarks, camping, after a run of thirty-eight miles, some six
+miles beyond the last-named place, with a run of forty-four miles before
+us to Tanana. I judged it too much; but the trail was greatly improved
+and we decided to attempt it in one stage. A misreading of the watch, so
+that I roused myself and Walter at 3.30 A. M. instead of 5.15 A. M., and
+did not realise the mistake until the fire was made and it was not worth
+while returning to bed, gave us a fine start and we made good progress.
+Gold Mountain (so called, one supposes, because there is no gold there;
+there is no other reason), Grant Creek, "Old Station" were passed by,
+and at length Tanana loomed before us while yet ten miles away. In just
+eleven hours we ran the forty-four miles, making, with three additional
+miles out to the mission, forty-seven altogether, by far the longest
+journey of the winter. We reached Tanana on the 1st of April, just six
+weeks since we left.
+
+[Sidenote: AN UNTRAVELLED RIVER]
+
+We spent eight days at Tanana, including two Sundays, Passion Sunday and
+Palm Sunday, but I was under an old promise to spend Easter there also.
+Now, Easter, 1911, fell on the 16th of April, and for the
+three-hundred-mile journey to Fort Yukon a period of ten or twelve days
+at the least would be necessary, that might easily stretch to two weeks.
+Travelling on the Yukon ice so late in April as this would involve was
+not only fraught with great difficulty and discomfort, but also with
+actual danger, and I had to beg to be absolved of my promise. Some
+considerable preparation was on foot for the festival, and I was loath
+to leave, for Tanana was then without any resident minister, but it
+seemed foolish to take the chances that would have to be taken if we
+stayed.
+
+Five days of almost ceaseless snow-storm during our stay at Tanana did
+not give prospect of good travelling, and, indeed, when we pulled out
+from the mission on the Monday in Holy Week there was no sign of any
+trail. From Tanana up to Fort Yukon there is very little travel; since
+the whole of this long stretch of river was deprived of winter mail a
+year or two before, no through travel at all. Cabins may usually be
+found to camp in, but there are no road-houses. What travel still takes
+place is local.
+
+The journey divided itself into two roughly equal parts, a hundred and
+fifty miles through the Lower Ramparts, and a hundred and fifty miles
+through the Yukon Flats, almost all of it on the surface of the river.
+It was hoped to reach Stephen's Village, a native settlement just within
+the second half of the journey, for Easter.
+
+Snow does not lie long at rest upon the river within the Ramparts, and
+particularly within the narrow, cañon-like stretch of seventy-five miles
+from Tanana to Rampart City. Violent and almost ceaseless down-stream
+winds sweep the deep defile in the mountains through which the river
+winds its course. In places the ice is bare of snow; in places the snow
+is piled in huge, hardened drifts. So strong and so persistent is this
+wind that it is often possible to skate over an uninterrupted black
+surface of ice, polished like plate glass, for twenty miles on a
+down-river journey. To make way over such a surface up-stream, against
+such wind, is, however, almost impossible. The dogs get no footing and
+the wind carries the sled where it listeth. The journey so far as
+Rampart City has been described before; it will suffice now that it
+took three days of toilsome battling against wind and bad surface, with
+nights spent upon the floor of grimy cabins. So cold was the wind that
+it is noted in my diary with surprise, on the 12th of April, that I had
+worn fur cap, parkee, and muffler all day, as though it had been the
+dead of winter instead of three weeks past the vernal equinox.
+
+On Wednesday night there was Divine service at Rampart, and on Maundy
+Thursday, after four miles upon the river, we took the portage of eleven
+miles that cuts a chord to the arc of the greatest bend of the river
+within the Ramparts and so saves nine miles. Three miles more took us to
+the deserted cabin at the site of the abandoned coal-mine opposite the
+mouth of the Mike Hess River, here confluent with the Yukon, and in that
+cabin we spent the night, having had the high, bitter wind in our faces
+all day. We hated to leave the shelter of the wooded portage and face
+the blast of the last three miles.
+
+[Sidenote: WIND AND SNOW]
+
+We woke the next morning to a veritable gale of wind and snow, and lay
+in the cabin till noon, occupied with the exercises of the solemn
+anniversary. The wind having then abated somewhat and the snow ceased,
+we sallied forth, still hopeful of making Stephen's Village for Easter.
+But when we got down upon the river surface it became doubtful if we
+could proceed, and as we turned the first bend we encountered a fresh
+gale that did not fall short of a blizzard. The air was filled with
+flying snow that stung our faces and blinded us. The dogs' muzzles
+became incrusted with snow and their eyes filled with it so that it was
+hard to keep them facing it. I could not see the boy at all when he was
+a hundred feet ahead of the team. We struggled along for four miles,
+and, since it was then evident that we could not go much farther without
+useless risk, we turned to a spot on the bank where Walter knew another
+deserted cabin to stand; for he knows every foot of this section of the
+river and once spent a summer, camped at the coal-mine, fishing. The
+spot was reached, but the cabin was gone. The fish rack still stood
+there, but the cabin was burned down. There was nothing for it but to
+return to the coal-mine cabin; so, for the first and only time in all my
+journeyings, it was necessary to abandon a day's march that had been
+entered upon and go back whence we had come. We ran before the gale at
+great speed and were within the cabin again by 2.30 P. M. All the
+evening and all night the storm raged, and I was in two minds about
+running back to Rampart before it for Easter, since it was now out of
+the question to reach Stephen's Village. If the season had not been so
+far advanced this is what I should have done, but it would set us back
+three days more on the journey, and on reflection I was not willing to
+take that chance with the break-up so near.
+
+So on the morning of Easter Eve we sallied up-stream again, snow falling
+and driving heavily, and the wind still strong but with yesterday's keen
+edge blunted. By the time we had beaten around the long bend up which we
+had fought our way the day before, the snow had ceased, and by noon the
+wind had dropped and the sun was shining, and in a few moments of his
+unobscured strength all the loose snow on the sled was melted--a
+warning of the rapidity with which the general thaw would proceed once
+the skies were clear. That night saw us in the habitable though dirty,
+deserted cabin at Salt Creek (so called, one supposes, because the water
+of it is perfectly fresh) at which we had hoped to lodge the previous
+night.
+
+[Sidenote: ALASKAN "FORTS"]
+
+Buoyed by the hope of doing a double stage in a clear, windless day and
+thus reaching Stephen's Village for service at night, we made a very
+early start that beautiful Easter morning. But it was not to be. Such
+trail as there was ran high up on the bank ice--level, doubtless, when
+it was made much earlier in the season, but now at a slope towards the
+middle of the river through the falling of the water, and seamed with
+great cracks. Such a trail, called a "sidling" trail in the vernacular
+of mushing, is always difficult and laborious to travel, for the sled
+slips continually off it into the loose snow or the ice cracks, and
+often for long stretches at a time one man must hold up the nose of the
+sled while the other toils at the handle-bars. In one place, while thus
+holding the front of the sled on the trail, Walter slipped into an ugly
+ice crack concealed by drifted snow, and so wedged his foot that I had
+difficulty in extricating him. The last two bends of the river within
+the Ramparts seemed interminable and it was 6.30 P. M., with twelve
+hours' travel behind us, when we reached old Fort Hamlin, on the verge
+of the Yukon Flats. These "forts," it might be explained, if one chose
+to pursue the elucidation of Alaskan nomenclature in the same strain,
+are so called because they never had any defences and never needed any.
+As a matter of fact, in the early days, when the Hudson Bay Company
+made its first establishments on the upper river, there was supposed to
+be some need of fortification, and Fort Selkirk and Fort Yukon were
+stockaded. Fort Selkirk, indeed, was sacked and burned sixty years ago,
+but not by Yukon Indians. The Chilkats from the coast, indignant at the
+loss of their middle-man profits by the invasion of the interior,
+crossed the mountains, descended the river, and destroyed the post. It
+thus became customary to call a trading-post a "fort," and every little
+point where a store and a warehouse stood was so dignified. Hence Fort
+Reliance, Fort Hamlin, Fort Adams.
+
+For years Fort Hamlin had been quite deserted, but now smoke issued from
+the stovepipe and dogs gave tongue at our approach, and we found a white
+man with an Esquimau wife from Saint Michael and a half-breed child
+dwelling there and carrying a few goods for sale. With him we made our
+lodging, and with him and his family said our evening service of Easter,
+and so to bed, thoroughly tired.
+
+[Sidenote: TRAVELLING BY NIGHT]
+
+A mile beyond Fort Hamlin the Ramparts suddenly cease and the wide
+expanse of the Yukon Flats opens at once. Ten miles or so brought us to
+Stephen's Village, where we had been long expected and where a very busy
+day was spent. A number of Indians were gathered and there were children
+to baptize and couples to marry, as well as the lesson of the season to
+teach. It was a great disappointment that we had been unable to get here
+before, and matter of regret that, being here at such labour, only so
+short a time could be spent. But the closing season called to us
+loudly. A mild, warm day set all the banks running with melting snow and
+made the surface of the river mushy. There was really no time to lose,
+for the next seventy-five miles was to give us the most difficult and
+disagreeable travelling of the journey. Here, in the Flats, where is
+greatest need of travel direction on the whole river, was no trail at
+all beyond part of the first day's journey. Within the Ramparts the
+river is confined in one channel; however bad the travelling may be,
+there is no danger of losing the way; but in the Flats the river divides
+into many wide channels and these lead off into many more back sloughs,
+with low, timbered banks and no salient landmarks at all. Behind us were
+the bluffs of the Ramparts, already growing faint; afar off on the
+horizon, to the right, were the dim shapes of the Beaver Mountains. All
+the rest was level for a couple of hundred miles.
+
+A local trail to a neighbouring wood-chopper's took us some twelve
+miles, and then we were at a loss. The general direction we knew, and
+previous journeys both in winter and summer gave us some notion of the
+river bends to follow, but we wallowed and floundered until late at
+night before we reached the cabin we were bound for, the snow exceeding
+soft and wet for hours in the middle of the day.
+
+The time had plainly come to change our day travel into night travel,
+for freezing was resumed each night after the sun was set, and the
+surface grew hard again. So at this cabin we lay all the next day, with
+an interesting recluse of these parts who knows many passages of
+Shakespeare by heart, and who drew us a chart of our course to the next
+habitation, marking every bend to be followed and the place where the
+river must be crossed. But there is always difficulty in getting a new
+travel schedule under way, and we did not leave until five in the
+morning instead of at two as we had planned. This gave us insufficient
+time to make the day's march before the sun softened the snow, and
+moccasins grew wet, and snow-shoe strings began to stretch, and the
+webbing underfoot to yield and sag--and we had to content ourselves with
+half a stage. By nine P. M. we were off again and did pretty well until
+the night grew so dark that we could no longer distinguish our
+landmarks. Then we went to the bank and built a big fire and made a pot
+of tea and sat and dozed around it for a couple of hours or so until the
+brief darkness of Alaskan spring was overpast, and the dawn began to
+give light enough to see our way again.
+
+When our course lay on the open river, the snow had crust enough to hold
+us upon our snow-shoes; but when it took us through little sheltered
+sloughs, the crust was too thin and we broke through all the time, and
+that makes slow, painful travel. At last we came to a portage that cuts
+off a number of miles, but the snow slope by which the top of the bank
+should be reached had a southern exposure and was entirely melted and
+gone. The dogs had to be unhitched, the sled to be unloaded, the stuff
+packed in repeated journeys up the steep bank, and the sled hauled up
+with a rope. Then came the repacking and reloading and the rehitching;
+and when the portage was crossed the same thing had to be done to get
+down to the river bed again. Twice more on that day the process was gone
+through, and each time it took nigh an hour to get up the bank, so that
+it was around noon, and the snow miserably wet and mushy again, when we
+reached Beaver and went to bed at the only road-house between Fort Yukon
+and Tanana.
+
+"Beaver City" owes its existence to quartz prospects in the Chandalar,
+in which men of money and influence in the East were interested. The
+Alaska Road Commission had built a trail some years before from the
+Chandalar diggings out to the Yukon, striking the river at this point,
+and on the opposite side of the river another trail is projected and
+"swamped out" direct to Fairbanks. The opening up of this route was
+expected to bring much travel through Beaver, and a town site was staked
+and many cabins built. But "Chandalar quartz" remains an interesting
+prospect, and the Chandalar placers have not proved productive, and all
+but a few of the cabins at "Beaver City" are unoccupied. If "the
+Chandalar" should ever make good, "Beaver City" will be its river port.
+
+[Sidenote: LAST DAY]
+
+We left Beaver at eleven P. M. on Friday night, hoping in two long
+all-night runs to cover the eighty miles and reach Fort Yukon by Sunday
+morning. Here was the first trail since we left Stephen's Village and
+the first fairly good trail since we left Tanana, for there had been
+some recent travel between Fort Yukon and Beaver. Here for the first
+time we had no need of snow-shoes, and when they have been worn
+virtually all the winter through and nigh a couple of thousand miles
+travelled in them, walking is strange at first in the naked moccasin. It
+is a blessed relief, however, to be rid of even the lightest of trail
+snow-shoes. We stepped out gaily into a beautiful clear night, with a
+sharp tang of frost in the air, and even the dogs rejoiced in the
+knowledge that the end of the journey was at hand. All night long we
+made good time and kept it up without a stop until eight o'clock in the
+morning, when we reached an inhabited but just then unoccupied cabin and
+ate supper or breakfast as one chooses to call it and went to bed,
+having covered fully half the distance to Fort Yukon. About noon we were
+rudely awakened by one of the usual Alaskan accompaniments of
+approaching summer. The heat of the sun was melting the snow above us,
+and water came trickling through the dirt roof upon our bed. We moved to
+a dry part of the cabin and slept again until the evening, and at nine
+P. M. entered upon what we hoped would be our last run.
+
+But once more our plans to spend Sunday were frustrated. The trail led
+through dry sloughs from which the advancing thaw had removed the snow
+in great patches. Sometimes the sled had to be hauled over bare sand;
+sometimes wide detours had to be made to avoid such sand; sometimes
+pools of open water covered with only that night's ice lay across our
+path. By eight o'clock in the morning we estimated that we were not more
+than seven or eight miles from Fort Yukon. But already the snow grew
+soft and our feet wet, and the dogs were very weary with the eleven
+hours' mushing. It would take a long time and much toil to plough
+through slush, even that seven or eight miles. So I gave the word to
+stop, and we made an open-air camp on a sunny bank, and after breakfast
+we covered our heads in the blankets from the glare of the sun, and
+slept till five. Then we ate our last trail meal, and were washed up and
+packed up and hitched up an hour and more before the snow was frozen
+enough for travel. A couple of hours' run took us to Fort Yukon, and so
+ended the winter journey of 1910-11, on the 23d of April, having been
+started on the 17th of November. We were back none too soon. Every day
+we should have found travelling decidedly worse. In a few more days the
+river would have begun to open in places, and only the middle would be
+safe for travel, with streams of water against either bank and no way of
+getting ashore. Seventeen days later the ice was gone out and the Yukon
+flowing bank full.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[G] The "claim" on a creek on which gold is first found is called
+"Discovery"; the claims above are numbered one, two, three, etc.,
+"above" and the claims below, one, two, three, etc., "below."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE NATIVES OF ALASKA
+
+
+WHEN one contemplates the native people of the interior of Alaska in the
+mass, when, with the stories told by the old men and old women of the
+days before they saw the white man in mind, one reconstructs that
+primitive life, lacking any of the implements, the conveniences, the
+alleviations of civilisation, the chief feeling that arises is a feeling
+of admiration and respect.
+
+What a hardy people they must have been! How successfully for untold
+generations did they pit themselves against the rigour of this most
+inhospitable climate! With no tool but the stone-axe and the flint
+knife, with no weapon but the bow and arrow and spear, with no material
+for fish nets but root fibres, or for fish-hooks or needles but bone,
+and with no means of fire making save two dry sticks--one wonders at the
+skill and patient endurance that rendered subsistence possible at all.
+And there follows quickly upon such wonder a hot flush of indignation
+that, after so conquering their savage environment or accommodating
+themselves to it, that they not only held their own but increased
+throughout the land, they should be threatened with a wanton
+extermination now that the resources of civilisation are opened to them,
+now that tools and weapons and the knowledge of easier and more
+comfortable ways of life are available.
+
+The natives of the interior are of two races, the Indian and the
+Esquimau. The Indian inhabits the valley of the Yukon down to within
+three or four hundred miles of its mouth; the Esquimau occupies the
+lower reaches of the Yukon and the Kuskokwim and the whole of the rivers
+that drain into the Arctic Ocean west and north. These inland Esquimaux
+are of the same race as the coast Esquimaux and constitute an
+interesting people, of whom something has been said in the account of
+journeys through their country.
+
+[Sidenote: THE ATHABASCANS]
+
+The Indians of the interior are of one general stock, the Athabascan, as
+it is called, and of two main languages derived from a common root but
+differing as much perhaps as Spanish and Portuguese. The language of the
+upper Yukon (and by this term in these pages is meant the upper American
+Yukon) is almost identical with the language of the lower Mackenzie,
+from which region, doubtless, these people came, and with it have always
+maintained intercourse. The theory of the Asiatic origin of the natives
+of interior Alaska has always seemed fanciful and far-fetched to the
+writer. The same translations of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer
+serve for the lower Mackenzie and the upper Yukon and are in active use
+to-day through all that wide region, despite minor dialectical
+variations.
+
+Near the lower ramparts of the Yukon, at Stephen's Village, the language
+changes and the new tongue maintains itself, though with continually
+increasing dialectical differences, until the Indians overlap the
+Esquimaux, six hundred miles farther down.
+
+Fort Yukon is the most populous place on the river, and the last place
+on the river, where the upper language, or Takhud, is spoken. A stretch
+of one hundred and fifty miles separates it from the next native
+village, and the inhabitants of that village are not intelligible to the
+Fort Yukon Indians--an unintelligibility which seems to speak of long
+ages of little intercourse.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The history of the migrations of the Indians from the Athabascan or
+Mackenzie region is impossible to trace now. It is highly probable that
+the movement was by way of the Porcupine River. And it would seem that
+there must have been two distinct migrations: one that passed down the
+Yukon to the Tanana district and spread thence up the Tanana River and
+up the Koyukuk; and long after, as one supposes, a migration that
+peopled the upper Yukon. A portion of this last migration must have gone
+across country to the Ketchumstock and the upper Tanana, for the
+inhabitants of the upper Tanana do not speak the Tanana tongue, which is
+the tongue of the Middle Yukon but a variant of the tongue of the upper
+Yukon.
+
+[Illustration: A DOCILE FOLK, EAGER FOR INSTRUCTION.]
+
+[Illustration: THE MISSION TYPE.]
+
+[Illustration: WILD AND SHY.]
+
+How long ago these migrations took place there is not the slightest
+knowledge to base even a surmise upon. The natives themselves have no
+records nor even traditions, and the first point of contact between
+white men and the natives of the interior is within three quarters of a
+century ago. It may have been two or three families only which
+penetrated to this region or to that and settled there, and what
+pressure started them on their wanderings no one will ever know. Perhaps
+some venturesome hunter pursuing his game across the highlands that
+separate the Mackenzie from the Yukon was disabled and compelled to
+remain until the summer, and then discovered the salmon that made their
+way up the tributaries of the Porcupine. The Mackenzie has no salmon. Or
+a local tribal quarrel may have sent fugitives over the divide.
+
+When first the white man came to the upper Yukon, in 1846 and 1847, no
+one knew that it was the same river at the mouth of which the Russians
+had built Redoubt Saint Michael ten or twelve years before. The natives
+of the upper river knew nothing about the lower river. It is an easy
+matter to float down the Yukon for a thousand miles in a birch-bark
+canoe, but an exceedingly difficult matter to come up again. It was not
+until the voyageurs of the Hudson Bay Company, in their adventurous
+fur-trading expeditions, met at the mouth of the Tanana River the agents
+of the Russian Fur Company, come up from Nulato on the same quest, that
+the identity of the Yukon and Kwikpak Rivers was discovered; and that
+seems to have been well past the middle of the century. In the map of
+North America that the writer first used at school, the Yukon flowed
+north into the Arctic Ocean, parallel with the Mackenzie.
+
+[Sidenote: AN INOFFENSIVE PEOPLE]
+
+The Indians of the interior of Alaska are a gentle and kindly and
+tractable people. They have old traditions of bloody tribal warfare that
+have grown in ferocity, one supposes, with the lapse of time, for it is
+very difficult for one who knows them to believe that so mild a race
+could ever have been pugnacious or bloodthirsty. Whether it were that
+the exigencies of subsistence under arctic conditions demanded almost
+all their energies, or that a realisation of their constant dependence
+upon one another checked the play of passion, they differ most widely
+and, it seems certain, always differed most widely in character from the
+Indians of the American plains. A personal knowledge of the greater part
+of all the natives of interior Alaska, gained by living amongst them and
+travelling from village to village during seven or eight years,
+furnishes but a single instance of an Indian man guilty of any sort of
+violence against another Indian or against a white man--except under the
+influence of liquor.
+
+It is true that there are unquestioned murders that have been
+committed--murders of white men at that; but in the sixty years from the
+Nulato massacre of 1851, over the whole vast interior, these crimes can
+be counted on the fingers of one hand. They are not a revengeful people.
+They do not cherish the memory of injuries and await opportunities of
+repayment; that trait is foreign to their character. On the contrary,
+they are exceedingly placable and bear no malice. Moreover, they are
+very submissive, even to the point of being imposed upon. In fact, they
+are decidedly a timid people in the matter of personal encounter. In all
+these characteristics they differ from the North American Indian
+generally as he appears in history.
+
+They are capable of hard work, though apparently not of continuous hard
+work; they will cheerfully support great privation and fatigue; but
+when the immediate necessity is past they enjoy long periods of feasting
+and leisure. Having no property nor desire of property, save their
+clothes, their implements and weapons, and the rude furnishings of their
+cabins, there is no incentive to hard and continuous work.
+
+After all, where is the high and peculiar virtue that lies in the
+performance of continuous hard work? Why should any one labour
+incessantly? This is the question the Indian would ask, and one is not
+always sure that the mills of Massachusetts and the coal-mines of
+Pennsylvania return an entirely satisfactory answer. As regards thrift,
+the Indian knows little of it; but the average white man of the country
+does not know much more. There is little difference as regards thrift
+between wasting one's substance in a "potlatch," which is a feast for
+all comers, and wasting it in drunkenness, which is a feast for the
+liquor sellers, save that one is barbarous and the other civilised, as
+the terms go.
+
+It would seem that the general timidity of the native character is the
+reason for a very general untruthfulness, though there one must speak
+with qualification and exception. There are Indians whose word may be
+taken as unhesitatingly as the word of any white man, and there are
+white men in the country whose word carries no more assurance than the
+word of any Indian. The Indian is prone to evasion and quibbling rather
+than to downright lying, though there are many who are utterly
+unreliable and untrustworthy.
+
+[Sidenote: SEXUAL MORALITY]
+
+In the matter of sexual morality the Indian standards are very low,
+though certainly not any lower than the standards of the average white
+man in the country. One is forced to this constant comparison; the white
+man in the country is the only white man the Indian knows anything
+about. To the Indian a physical act is merely a physical act; all down
+his generations there has been no moral connotation therewith, and it is
+hard to change the point of view of ages when it affects personal
+indulgence so profoundly. The white man has been taught, down as many
+ages, perhaps, that these physical acts have moral connotation and are
+illicit when divorced therefrom, yet he is as careless and immoral in
+this country as the Indian is careless and _un_moral. And the white
+man's careless and immoral conduct is the chief obstacle which those who
+would engraft upon the Indian the moral consciousness must contend
+against.
+
+The Indian woman is not chaste because the Indian man does not demand
+chastity of her, does not set any special value upon her chastity as
+such. And the example of the chastity which the white man demands of his
+women, though he be not chaste himself, is an example with which the
+native of Alaska has not come much into contact. Too often, in the
+vicinity of mining camps, the white women who are most in evidence are
+of another class.
+
+[Sidenote: GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS]
+
+The Indian is commonly intelligent and teachable, and in most cases
+eager to learn and eager that his children may learn. Here it becomes
+necessary to deal with a difficult and somewhat contentious matter that
+one would rather let alone. The government has undertaken the education
+of the Indian, and has set up a bureau charged with the establishment
+and conduct of native schools.
+
+There are five such schools on the Yukon between Eagle and Tanana,
+including these two points, amongst Indians all of whom belong to the
+Episcopal Church, and five more between Tanana and Anvik, amongst
+natives divided in allegiance between the Episcopal and the Roman
+Catholic Churches. Below Anvik to the river's mouth the natives are
+divided between the Roman and the Greek Churches, and they are outside
+the scope of this book. On the tributaries of the Yukon the only native
+schools are conducted by the missions of the Episcopal Church, on the
+Koyukuk and Tanana Rivers, and have no connection with the government.
+
+When, somewhat late in the day, the government set its hand to the
+education of the natives, mission schools had been conducted for many
+years at the five stations of the Episcopal Church above Tanana and at
+the various mission stations below that point. The Bureau of Education
+professed its earnest purpose of working in harmony with the mission
+authorities, and upon this profession it secured deeds of gift for
+government school sites within the mission reservations from the Bishop
+of Alaska.
+
+It cannot be stated, upon a survey of the last five or six years, that
+this profession has been carried out. The administration of the Bureau
+of Education has shared too much the common fault of other departments
+of the government in a detached and lofty, not to say supercilious,
+attitude. Things are not necessarily right because a government bureau
+orders them, nor are government officials invested with superior wisdom
+merely by reason of their connection with Washington. It is just as
+important for a government school as for a mission school to be in
+harmony with its environment, to adapt itself to the needs of the people
+it designs to serve; and that harmony and adaptation may only be secured
+by a single-minded study of the situation and of the habits and
+character, the occupations and resources of the people.
+
+To keep a school in session when the population of a village is gone on
+its necessary occasions of hunting or trapping, and to have the annual
+recess when all the population is returned again, is folly, whoever
+orders it, in accord with what time-honoured routine soever, and this
+has not infrequently been done. Moreover, it is folly to fail to
+recognise that the apprenticeship of an Indian boy to the arts by which
+he must make a living, the arts of hunting and trapping, is more
+important than schooling, however important the latter may be, and that
+any talk--and there has been loud talk--of a compulsory education law
+which shall compel such boys to be in school at times when they should
+be off in the wilds with their parents, is worse than mere folly, and
+would, if carried out, be a fatal blunder. If such boys grow up
+incompetent to make a living out of the surrounding wilderness, whence
+shall their living come?
+
+The next step would be the issuing of rations, and that would mean the
+ultimate degradation and extinction of the natives. When the question is
+stated in its baldest terms, is the writer perverse and barbarous and
+uncivilised if he avow his belief that a race of hardy, peaceful,
+independent, self-supporting illiterates is of more value and worthy of
+more respect than a race of literate paupers? Be it remembered also that
+many of these "illiterates" can read the Bible in their own tongue and
+can make written communication with one another in the same--very
+scornful as the officials of the bureau have been about such attainment.
+One grows a little impatient sometimes when a high official at
+Washington writes in response to a request for permission to use a
+school building _after_ school hours, for a class of instruction in the
+native Bible, that the law requires that all instruction in the school
+be in the English language, and that it is against the policy of
+Congress to use public money for religious instruction! When the
+thermometer drops to 50° below zero and stays there for a couple of
+weeks, it is an expensive matter to heat a church for a Bible class
+three times a week--and the schoolhouse is already cosy and warm.
+
+But the question does not reduce itself to the bald terms referred to
+above; by proper advantage of times and seasons the Indian boy may have
+all the English education that will be of any service to him, and may
+yet serve his apprenticeship in the indispensable wilderness arts. And,
+given a kindly and competent teacher, there is no need of any sort of
+compulsion to bring Indian boys and girls to school when they are within
+reach of it.
+
+The Indian school problem is not an easy one in the sense that it can be
+solved by issuing rules and regulations at Washington, but it can be
+solved by sympathetic study and by the careful selection of intelligent,
+cultured teachers.
+
+After all, this last is the most important requisite. Too often it is
+assumed that any one can teach ignorant youth: and women with no culture
+at all, or with none beyond the bald "pedagogy" of a low-grade
+schoolroom, have been sent to Alaska. There have, indeed, been notable
+exceptions; there have been some very valuable and capable teachers, and
+with such there has never been friction at the missions, but glad
+co-operation.
+
+The situation shows signs of improvement; there are signs of withdrawal
+from its detached and supercilious attitude on the part of the bureau,
+signs which are very welcome to those connected with the missions. For
+the best interest of the native demands that the two agencies at work
+for his good work heartily and sympathetically together. The missions
+can do without the government--did do without it for many years, though
+glad of the government's aid in carrying the burden of the schools--but
+the government cannot do without the missions; and if the missions were
+forced to the re-establishment of their own schools, there would be
+empty benches in the schools of the government.
+
+[Sidenote: THE THREAT OF EXTINCTION]
+
+That the Indian race of interior Alaska is threatened with extinction,
+there is unhappily little room to doubt; and that the threat may be
+averted is the hope and labour of the missionaries amongst them. At most
+places where vital statistics are kept the death-rate exceeds the
+birth-rate, though it is sometimes very difficult to secure accurate
+statistics and to be sure that they always cover the same ground. The
+natives wander; within certain territorial limits they wander widely.
+Whenever a child is born it is certain that if it lives long enough it
+will be brought to a mission to be baptized, but a death often occurs at
+some isolated camp that is not reported till long after, and may escape
+registration altogether.
+
+Certain diseases that have played havoc in the past are not much feared
+now. For the last seven years supplies of the diphtheritic antitoxin
+have been kept at all the missions of the Episcopal Church, and in the
+summer of 1911, when there was an outbreak of smallpox at Porcupine
+River, almost every Indian of interior Alaska was vaccinated, mainly by
+the mission staffs. Diphtheria has been a dreadful scourge. The valley
+of the upper Kuskokwim was almost depopulated by it in 1906. A disease
+resembling measles took half the population of the lower Yukon villages
+in 1900. In the last few years there have been no serious epidemics; but
+epidemic disease does not constitute the chief danger that threatens the
+native.
+
+[Sidenote: DWELLING AND CLOTHING]
+
+That chief danger looms from two things: tuberculosis and whisky.
+Whether tuberculosis is a disease indigenous to these parts, or whether
+it was introduced with the white man, has been disputed and would be
+difficult of determination. Probably it was always present amongst the
+natives; the old ones declare that it was; but the changed conditions of
+their lives have certainly much aggravated it. They lived much more in
+the open when they had no tree-felling tool but a stone-axe and did not
+build cabins. The winter residence in those days was, it is true, a
+dark, half-underground hut covered with earth and poles, but the time of
+residence therein was much shorter; the skin tent sheltered them most of
+the year. Indeed, some tribes, such as the Chandalar, lived in their
+skin tents the year round. Now an ill-ventilated and very commonly
+overcrowded cabin shelters them most of the year. It is true that the
+cabins are constantly improving and the standard of living within them
+is constantly rising. The process is slow, despite all urgings and
+warnings, and overcrowding and lack of ventilation still prevail.
+
+[Illustration: THE NATIVE COMMUNICANT.]
+
+[Illustration: RAW MATERIAL.]
+
+Perhaps as great a cause of the spread of tuberculosis is the change in
+clothing. The original native was clad in skins, which are the warmest
+clothing in the world. Moose hide or caribou hide garments, tanned and
+smoked, are impervious to the wind, and a parkee of muskrat or squirrel,
+or, as was not uncommon in the old days, of marten, or one of caribou
+tanned with the hair on, with boots of this last material, give all the
+warmth that exposure to the coldest weather requires. Nowadays fur
+garments of any sort are not usual amongst the natives. There is a
+market, at an ever-growing price, for all the furs they can procure. A
+law has, indeed, gone recently into effect prohibiting the sale of
+beaver for a term of years, and already beaver coats and caps begin to
+appear again amongst the people. It would be an excellent, wise thing,
+worthy of a government that takes a fatherly interest in very childlike
+folks, to make this law permanent. If it were fit to prohibit the
+sale of beaver pelts for a term of years to protect the beaver, surely
+it would be proper to perpetuate the enactment to protect the Indian. It
+would mean warm clothing for man, woman, and child.
+
+[Illustration: AN ESQUIMAU YOUTH.]
+
+[Illustration: A HALF-BREED INDIAN.]
+
+[Sidenote: THE INDIAN TRADER]
+
+The Indian usually sells all his furs and then turns round and buys
+manufactured clothing from the trader at a fancy price. That clothing is
+almost always cotton and shoddy. Genuine woollens are not to be found in
+the Indian trader's stock at all, and in whatever guise it may
+masquerade, and by whatever alias it may pass, the native wear is
+cotton. Yet there is no country in the world where it is more
+imperative, for the preservation of health, that wool be worn.
+
+However much fur the Indian may catch and sell, he is always poor. He is
+paid in trade, not in cash; and when the merchant has bought the
+Indian's catch of fur he straightway spreads out before him an alluring
+display of goods specially manufactured for native trade. Here are
+brilliant cotton velvets and sateens and tinselled muslins and gay
+ribbons that take the eye of his women folk; here are trays of Brummagem
+knickknacks, brass watches, and rings set with coloured glass, gorgeous
+celluloid hair combs, mirrors with elaborate, gilded frames, and brass
+lamps with "hand-painted" shades and dangling lustres; here are German
+accordions and mouth-organs and all sorts of pocket-knives and
+alarm-clocks--the greatest collection of glittering and noisy trash that
+can be imagined, bought at so much a dozen and retailed, usually, at
+about the same price for one. And when the Indian has done his trading
+the trader has most of his money back again.
+
+The news that an Indian has caught a black fox, the most exciting item
+of news that ever flies around a native village, does not give any great
+pleasure to one who is acquainted with native conditions, because he
+knows that it will bring little real benefit to the Indian. There will
+be keen competition, within limits, of course, amongst the traders for
+it; and the fortunate trapper may get three or four hundred dollars in
+trade for a skin that will fetch eight hundred or a thousand in cash on
+the London market; but if his wife get the solid advantage of a new
+cooking-stove or a sewing-machine from it she is doing well.
+
+Food the Indian never buys much beyond his present need, unless it is to
+squander it in feast after feast, to which every one is invited and at
+which there is the greatest lavishness. If a son is born, or a black fox
+is caught, or a member of the family recovers from a severe illness,
+custom permits, if it do not actually demand, that a "potlatch" be
+given, and most Indians are eager, whenever they are able, to be the
+heroes of the prandial hour.
+
+So he, his women, and his children go clad mainly in cotton, and there
+is abundant evidence that the tendency to pulmonary trouble, always
+latent amongst them, is developed by the severe colds which they catch
+through the inadequate covering of their bodies, and is then cherished
+into virulent activity by the close atmosphere of overcrowded,
+overheated cabins.
+
+The missions help the Indians, especially the women and children, in
+this matter of clothing as much as possible. Every year large bales of
+good though left-off under and over wear are secured through church
+organisations outside, and are traded to the natives at nominal prices,
+usually for fish or game or a little labour in sawing wood. And this
+naturally does not ingratiate missions with the trading class. One's
+anger is aroused sometimes at seeing the cotton-flannel underclothes and
+"cotton-filled" blankets and the "all-wool" cotton coats and trousers
+which they pay high prices for at the stores. The Canadian Indians, who
+are their neighbours, buy genuine Hudson Bay blankets and other real
+woollen goods, but the Alaskan Indian can buy nothing but cotton.
+
+But far and away beyond any other cause of the native decline stands the
+curse of the country, whisky. Recognising by its long Indian experience
+the consequences of forming liquor-drinking habits amongst the natives,
+the government has forbidden under penalty the giving or selling of any
+intoxicants to them. A few years ago a new law passed making such giving
+or selling a felony. These laws are largely a dead letter.
+
+[Sidenote: UNPAID COMMISSIONERS]
+
+The country is a very large one, very sparsely populated; the distances
+are enormous, the means of transportation entirely primitive, and the
+police and legal machinery insufficient to the end of suppressing this
+illicit traffic, especially in view of the fact that a considerable part
+of the whole population does not look with favour upon any vigorous
+attempt to suppress it. Great areas of the country are without
+telegraphic communication, and in parts mail is received only once a
+month. One stretch of two hundred and fifty miles of the Yukon receives
+no mail at all during the winter months--more than half the year. In
+that instance, as in many others, the country has gone distinctly
+backward in the past few years. The magistrates--"commissioners" they
+are called, receive no salary, but eke out a precarious and often
+wretched existence on fees, so that it is frequently impossible to get
+men of character and capacity to accept such offices.
+
+One would have supposed that amongst all the legislating that has been
+done for and about Alaska in the last year or two, one crying evil that
+the attention of successive administrations has been called to for
+twenty years past would have been remedied. That evil is the unpaid
+magistrate and the vicious fee system by which he must make a living. It
+is a system that has been abolished in nearly all civilised countries; a
+system that lends itself to all sorts of petty abuse; a system that no
+one pretends to defend. No greater single step in advance could be made
+in the government of Alaska, no measure could be enacted that would tend
+to bring about in greater degree respect for the law than the abolition
+of the unpaid magistracy and the setting up of a body of stipendiaries
+of character and ability.
+
+The anomalies of the present situation are in some cases amusing. At one
+place on the Yukon it is only possible for a man to make a living as
+United States commissioner if he can combine the office of postmaster
+with it. A man who was removed as commissioner still retained the
+post-office, and no one could be found to accept the vacant judgeship.
+In another precinct the commissioner was moving all those whom he
+thought had influence to get him appointed deputy marshal instead of
+commissioner, because the deputy marshal gets a salary of two thousand
+dollars a year and allowances, which was more than the commissionership
+yielded. One is reminded of some comic-opera topsyturvyism when the
+judge tries in vain to get off the bench and be appointed constable. It
+sounds like the _Bab Ballads_. The district court is compelled to wink
+at irregularities of life and conduct in its commissioners because it
+cannot get men of a higher stamp to accept its appointments.
+
+[Sidenote: LIQUOR AND POLITICS]
+
+The only policemen are deputy United States marshals, primarily
+process-servers and not at all fitted in the majority of cases for any
+sort of detective work. Their appointment is often dictated and their
+action often hampered by political considerations. The liquor interest
+is very strong and knows how to bring pressure to bear against a marshal
+who is offensively active. They are responsible only to the United
+States marshal of their district, and he is responsible to the
+attorney-general, the head of the department of justice. But Washington
+is a long way off, and the attorney-general is a very busy man, not
+without his own interest, moreover, in politics. An attempt to get some
+notice taken of a particular case in which it was the general opinion
+that an energetic and vigilant deputy had been removed, and an elderly
+lethargic man substituted, because of too great activity in the
+prosecution of liquor cases, resulted in the conviction that what
+should have been a matter of administrative righteousness only was a
+political matter as well.
+
+The threatened extinction of the Alaskan native was referred to as
+wanton, and the term was used in the sense that there are no necessary
+natural causes fighting against his survival.
+
+Here is no economic pressure of white settlers determined to occupy the
+land, such as drove the Indians of the plains farther and farther west
+until there was no more west to be driven to. If such delusion possess
+any mind as a result of foolish newspaper and magazine writings, let it
+be dismissed at once. No man who has lived in the country and travelled
+in the country will countenance such notion. The white men in Alaska are
+miners and prospectors, trappers and traders, wood-choppers and
+steamboat men. Around a mining camp will be found a few truck-farmers;
+alongside road-houses and wood camps will often be found flourishing
+vegetable gardens, but outside of such agriculture there are, speaking
+broadly, no farmers at all in the interior of Alaska. Probably a
+majority of all the homesteads that have been taken up have been located
+that the trees on them might be cut down and hauled to town to be sold
+for fire-wood. A few miles away from the towns there are no homesteads,
+except perhaps on a well-travelled trail where a man has homesteaded a
+road-house.
+
+[Illustration: AN AGED COUPLE.]
+
+[Illustration: FOOTBALL AT THE ALLAKAKET, EXPOSURE 1-1000 SECOND, APRIL,
+AFTER A NEW LIGHT SNOWFALL.]
+
+All the settlements in the country are on the rivers, save the purely
+mining settlements that die and are abandoned as the placers play out.
+Yet one will travel two hundred and fifty miles up the Porcupine--till
+Canada is reached--and pass not more than three white men's cabins, all
+of them trappers; one will travel three hundred and fifty miles up the
+Koyukuk before the first white man's cabin is reached, and as many miles
+up the Innoko and the Iditarod and find no white men save wood-choppers.
+There are a few more white men on the Tanana than on any other tributary
+of the Yukon, because Fairbanks is on that river and there is more
+steamboat traffic, but they are mainly wood-choppers, while on the
+lesser tributaries of the Yukon, it is safe to say, there are no settled
+white men at all. As soon as one leaves the rivers and starts across
+country one is in the uninhabited wilderness.
+
+The writer is no prophet; he cannot tell what may happen agriculturally
+in Alaska or the rest of the arctic regions when the world outside is
+filled up and all unfrozen lands are under cultivation. Still less is he
+one who would belittle a country he has learned to love or detract in
+any way from its due claims to the attention of mankind. There is in the
+territory a false newspaper sentiment that every one who lives in the
+land should be continually singing extravagant praises of it and
+continually making extravagant claims for it. A man may love Alaska
+because he believes it to have "vast agricultural possibilities,"
+because, in his visions, he sees its barren wilds transformed into
+"waving fields of golden grain." But a man may also love it who regards
+all such visions as delusions.
+
+[Sidenote: FOOD AND FURS]
+
+The game and the fish of Alaska, the natural subsistence of the Indian,
+are virtually undiminished. Vast herds of caribou still wander on the
+hills, and far more are killed every year by wolves than by men. Great
+numbers of moose still roam the lowlands. The rivers still teem with
+salmon and grayling and the lakes with whitefish, ling, and lush. Unless
+the outrage of canneries should be permitted at the mouths of the
+Yukon--and that would threaten the chief subsistence of all the Indians
+of the interior--there seems no danger of permanent failure of the
+salmon run, though, of course, it varies greatly from year to year.
+Furs, though they diminish in number, continually rise in price. There
+are localities, it is true, where the game has been largely killed off
+and the furs trapped out; the Koyukuk country is one of them, though
+perhaps that region never was a very good game country. In this region,
+when a few years ago there was a partial failure of the salmon, there
+was distress amongst the Indians. But the country on the whole is almost
+as good an Indian country as ever it was, and there are few signs that
+it tends otherwise, though things happen so quickly and changes come
+with so little warning in Alaska that one does not like to be too
+confident.
+
+The Indian is the only settled inhabitant of interior Alaska to-day; for
+the prospectors and miners, who constitute the bulk of the white
+population, are not often very long in one place. Many of them might
+rightly be classed as permanent, but very few as settled inhabitants. It
+is the commonest thing to meet men a thousand miles away from the place
+where one met them last. A new "strike" will draw men from every mining
+camp in Alaska. A big strike will shift the centre of gravity of the
+whole white population in a few months. Indeed, a certain restless
+belief in the superior opportunities of some other spot is one of the
+characteristics of the prospector. The tide of white men that has flowed
+into an Indian neighbourhood gradually ebbs away and leaves the Indian
+behind with new habits, with new desires, with new diseases, with new
+vices, and with a varied assortment of illegitimate half-breed children
+to support. The Indian remains, usually in diminished numbers, with
+impaired character, with lowered physique, with the tag-ends of the
+white man's blackguardism as his chief acquirement in English--but he
+remains.
+
+It is unquestionable that the best natives in the country are those that
+have had the least intimacy with the white man, and it follows that the
+most hopeful and promising mission stations are those far up the
+tributary streams, away from mining camps and off the routes of travel,
+difficult of access, winter or summer, never seen by tourists at all;
+seen only of those who seek them with cost and trouble. At such stations
+the improvement of the Indian is manifest and the population increases.
+By reason of their remoteness they are very expensive to equip and
+maintain, but they are well worth while. One such has been described on
+the Koyukuk; another, at this writing, is establishing with equal
+promise at the Tanana Crossing, one of the most difficult points to
+reach in all interior Alaska.
+
+This chapter must not close without a few words about the native
+children. Dirty, of course, they almost always are; children in a state
+of nature will always be dirty, and even those farthest removed from
+that state show a marked tendency to revert to it; but when one has
+become sufficiently used to their dirt to be able to ignore it, they are
+very attractive. Intolerance of dirt is largely an acquired habit
+anyway. In view of their indulgent rearing, for Indian parents are
+perhaps the most indulgent in the world, they are singularly docile;
+they have an affectionate disposition and are quick and eager to learn.
+Many of them are very pretty, with a soft beauty of complexion and a
+delicate moulding of feature that are lost as they grow older. It takes
+some time to overcome their shyness and win their confidence, but when
+friendly relations have been established one grows very fond of them.
+Foregathering with them again is distinctly something to look forward to
+upon the return to a mission, and to see them come running, to have them
+press around, thrusting their little hands into one's own or hanging to
+one's coat, is a delight that compensates for much disappointment with
+the grown ups. In the midst of such a crowd of healthy, vivacious
+youngsters, clear-eyed, clean-limbed, and eager, one positively refuses
+to be hopeless about the race.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE ARCTIC
+
+
+THERE is no country in which an anastigmatic lens is of more use to the
+photographer than Alaska, and every camera with which it is hoped to
+take winter scenes should have this equipment. During two or three
+months in the year it makes the difference in practice between getting
+photographs and getting none. In theory one may always set up a tripod
+and increase length of exposure as light diminishes. But the most
+interesting scenes, the most attractive effects often present themselves
+under the severest conditions of weather, and he must be an enthusiast,
+indeed, who will get his tripod from the sled, pull out its telescoped
+tubes, set it up and adjust it for a picture with the thermometer at 40°
+or 50° below zero; and when he is done he is very likely to be a frozen
+enthusiast.
+
+With an anastigmatic lens working at, say f. 6-3, and with a "speed"
+film (glass plates are utterly out of the question on the trail), it is
+possible to make a snap-shot at one twenty-fifth of a second on a clear
+day, around noon, even in the dead of winter, in any part of Alaska that
+the writer has travelled in. There are those who write that they can
+always hold a camera still enough to get a sharp negative at even one
+tenth of a second. Probably the personal equation counts largely in
+such a matter, and a man of very decided phlegmatic temperament may have
+advantage over his more sanguine and nervous brother. The thing may be
+done; the writer has done it himself; but the point is it cannot be
+depended on; at this speed three out of four of his exposures will be
+blurred, whereas at one twenty-fifth of a second a sharp, clear negative
+may always be secured.
+
+It may be admitted at once that at extremely low temperatures the
+working of any shutter becomes doubtful, and most of them go out of any
+reliable action altogether. After trying and failing completely with
+three or four of the more expensive makes of shutters, the writer has
+for the last few years used a "Volute" with general satisfaction, though
+in the great cold even that shutter (from which all trace of grease or
+oil was carefully removed by the makers) is somewhat slowed up, so that
+a rare exposure at 50° or 60° below zero would be made at an indicated
+speed of one fiftieth rather than at one twenty-fifth, taking the chance
+of an under-exposed rather than a blurred negative. To wish for a
+shutter of absolute correctness and of absolute dependability under all
+circumstances, arranged for exposures of one fifteenth and one twentieth
+as well as one tenth and one twenty-fifth, is probably to wish for the
+unobtainable.
+
+[Sidenote: CARE OF FILMS AND CAMERAS]
+
+The care of the camera and the films, exposed and unexposed, the winter
+through, when travelling on the Alaskan trail, is a very important and
+very simple matter, though not generally learned until many negatives
+have been spoiled and sometimes lenses injured. It may be summed up in
+one general rule--keep instrument and films always outdoors.
+
+One unfamiliar with arctic conditions would not suppose that much
+trouble would be caused by that arch-enemy of all photographic
+preparations and apparatus--damp, in a country where the thermometer
+rarely goes above freezing the winter through; and that is a just
+conclusion provided such things be kept in the natural temperature,
+outdoors. But consider the great range of temperature when the
+thermometer stands at -50° outdoors, and, say, 75° indoors. Here is a
+difference of 125°. Anything wooden or metallic, especially anything
+metallic, brought into the house immediately condenses the moisture with
+which the warm interior atmosphere is laden and becomes in a few moments
+covered with frost. Gradually, as the article assumes the temperature of
+the room, the frost melts, the water is absorbed, and the damage is done
+as surely as though it had been soused in a bucket. If it be necessary
+to take camera and films indoors for an interior view--which one does
+somewhat reluctantly--the films must be taken at once to the stove and
+the camera only very gradually; leaving the latter on the floor, the
+coldest part of the room, for a while and shifting its position nearer
+and nearer until the frost it has accumulated begins to melt, whereupon
+it should be placed close to the heat that the water may evaporate as
+fast as it forms.
+
+Outdoors, camera and films alike are perfectly safe, however intense the
+cold. Indeed, films keep almost indefinitely in the cold and do not
+deteriorate at all. One learns, by and by, to have all films sent
+sealed up in tin cans, _and to put them back and seal them up again when
+exposed_, despite the maker's instructions not to do so. The maker knows
+the rules, but the user learns the exceptions. When films are thus
+protected they may be taken indoors or left out indifferently, as no
+moist air can get to them.
+
+The rule given is one that all men in this country follow with firearms.
+They are always left outdoors, and no iron will rust outdoors in the
+winter. Unless a man intend to take his gun to pieces and clean it
+thoroughly, he never brings it in the house. The writer has on several
+occasions removed an exposed film and inserted a new one outdoors, using
+the loaded sled for a table, at 50° below zero; taking the chance of
+freezing his fingers rather than of ruining the film. It is an
+interesting exercise in dexterity of manipulation. Everything that can
+be done with the mittened hand is done, the material is placed within
+easy reach--then off with the mittens and gloves, and make the change as
+quickly as may be!
+
+There is just one brief season in the year when high speeds of shutters
+may be used: in the month of April, when a new flurry of snow has put a
+mantle of dazzling whiteness upon the earth and the sun mounts
+comparatively high in the heavens. Under such circumstances there is
+almost, if not quite, tropical illumination. Here is a picture of native
+football at the Allakaket, just north of the Arctic Circle, made late in
+April with a Graflex, fitted with a lens working at f. 4.5, at the full
+speed of its focal-plane shutter--one one-thousandth of a second. In
+five years' use that was the only time when that speed was used, or any
+speed above one two-hundred-and-fiftieth. Commonly, even in summer, many
+more exposures are made with it at one fiftieth than at one
+one-hundredth, for this is not a brightly lit country in summer, and
+nearly all visitors and tourists find their negatives much under-timed.
+
+The Graflex, though unapproached in its own sphere, is not a good
+all-round camera, despite confident assertions to the contrary. It is
+too bulky to carry at all in the winter, and its mechanism is apt to
+refuse duty in the cold. The 3A Graflex cannot be turned to make a
+perpendicular photograph, but must always be used with the greatest
+dimension horizontal. Except in brilliant sunshine it is difficult to
+get a sharp focus, and, even though the focus appear sharp on the ground
+glass, the negative may prove blurred. Then the instrument is a great
+dust catcher and seems to have been constructed with a perverse
+ingenuity so as to make it as difficult as possible to clean.
+
+The writer uses his Graflex almost solely for native portraits and
+studies, for which purpose it is admirable, and has enabled him to
+secure negatives that he could not have obtained with any other hand
+camera. Even in the summer, however, he always carries his 3A Folding
+Pocket Kodak as well, and uses it instead of the Graflex for landscapes
+and large groups. If he had to choose between the two instruments and
+confine himself to one, he would unhesitatingly choose the Folding
+Pocket Kodak.
+
+The difficulties of winter photography in Alaska do not end with the
+making of the exposure. All water must be brought up in a bucket from a
+water-hole in the river, and though it be clear water when it is dipped
+up from under the ice, it is chiefly ice by the time it reaches the
+house, during any cold spell. One learns to be very economical of water
+when it is procured with such difficulty, learns to dry prints with
+blotting-paper between the successive washings, which is the best way of
+washing with the minimum of water. Blotting-paper is decidedly cheaper
+than water under some circumstances.
+
+While the rivers run perfectly clear and bright under the ice in the
+winter, in summer the turbid water of nearly all our large streams
+introduces another difficulty, and photographic operation must sometimes
+be deferred for weeks, unless the rain barrels be full or enough ice be
+found in the ice-house, over and above the domestic needs, to serve.
+
+[Sidenote: EFFECT OF COLD ON EMULSIONS]
+
+It seems certain that the speed of the sensitive emulsions with which
+the films are covered is reduced in very cold weather. To determine
+whether or not this was so, the following experiments were resorted to.
+The camera was brought out of the house half an hour before noon, at 50°
+below zero, and an exposure made immediately. Then the camera was left
+in position for an hour and another exposure made. There was little
+difference in the strength of the negatives, and what difference there
+was seemed in favour of the second exposure. Evidently, if the emulsion
+had slowed, the shutter had slowed also; so opportunity was awaited to
+make a more decisive test. When there remained but one exposure on a
+roll of film, the camera was set outdoors at a temperature of 55° below
+zero and left for an hour. Then an exposure was made and the film wound
+up and withdrawn; while a new film, just brought from the house, was as
+quickly as possible inserted in its place and a second exposure made.
+The latter was appreciably stronger. Even this test is, of course, not
+entirely conclusive; one would have to be quite sure that the emulsions
+were identical; but it confirms the writer's impression that extreme
+cold slows the film. It would be an easy matter for the manufacturers to
+settle this point beyond question in a modern laboratory, and it is
+certainly worth doing.
+
+There is much sameness about winter scenes in Alaska, as the reader has
+doubtless already remarked; yet the sameness is more due to a lack of
+alertness in the photographer than to an absence of variety. If the
+traveller had nothing to think about but his camera, if all other
+considerations could be subordinated to the securing of negatives, then,
+here as elsewhere, the average merit of pictures would be greater.
+Sometimes the most interesting scenes occur in the midst of stress of
+difficult travel when there is opportunity for no more than a fleeting
+recognition of their pictorial interest. "Tight places" often make
+attractive pictures, but most commonly do not get made into pictures at
+all. The study of the aspects of nature is likely to languish amidst the
+severe weather of the Northern winter, and the bright, clear, mild day
+gets photographed into undue prominence. Snow is more or less white and
+spruce-trees in the mass are more or less black; one dog team is very
+like another; a native village has to be known very well, indeed, to be
+distinguishable from another native village. Yet there is individuality,
+there is distinction, there is variety, there is contrast, if a man have
+but the grace to recognise them and the zeal to record them. Snow itself
+has infinite variety; trees, all of them, have characters of their own.
+Dogs differ as widely as men and Indians as widely as white men.
+
+[Sidenote: INDIANS AND PHOTOGRAPHS]
+
+The fear of the camera, or the dislike of the camera, that used to
+affect the native mind is gone now, save, perhaps, in certain remote
+quarters, and these interesting people are generally quite willing to
+stand still and be snapped. They ask for a print, and upon one's next
+visit there is clamorous demand for "picter, picter." A famous French
+physician said that his dread of the world to come lay in his
+expectation that the souls he met would reproach him for not having
+cured a certain obstinate malady that he had much repute in dealing
+with; so the travelling amateur in photography sometimes feels his
+conscience heavy under a load of promised pictures that he has forgotten
+or has been unable to make. He feels that his native friends whom he
+shall meet in the world to come will assuredly greet him with "where's
+my picture?" The burden increases all the time, and the Indian never
+forgets. It avails nothing even to explain that the exposure was a
+failure. A picture was promised; no picture has been given; that is as
+far as the native gets. And the making of extra prints, in the cases
+where it is possible to make them, is itself quite a tax upon time and
+material.
+
+Just as it is true that to be well informed on any subject a man must
+read a great deal and be content not to have use for a great deal that
+he reads, so to secure good photographs of spots and scenes of note as
+he travels, he must make many negatives and be content to destroy many.
+The records of a second visit in better weather or at a more favourable
+season will supersede an earlier; typical groups more casual ones. The
+standard that he exacts of himself rises and work he was content with
+contents him no more. Sometimes one is tempted to think that the main
+difference between an unsuccessful and a successful amateur photographer
+is that the former hoards all his negatives while the latter
+relentlessly burns those which do not come up to the mark--if not at
+once, yet assuredly by and by. So the surprise that one feels at many of
+the illustrations in modern books of arctic travel is not that the
+travellers made such poor photographs but that they kept them and used
+them; for there can be no question that poor photographs are worse than
+none at all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE NORTHERN LIGHTS
+
+
+THE Northern Lights are a very common phenomenon of interior Alaska,
+much more common than in the very high latitudes around the North Pole,
+for it has been pretty well determined that there is an auroral pole,
+just as there is a magnetic pole and a pole of cold, none of which
+coincides with the geographical Pole itself. All the arctic explorers
+seem agreed that north of the 80th parallel these appearances are less
+in frequency and brilliance than in the regions ten or fifteen degrees
+farther south. It may be said roundly that it is a rare thing in winter
+for a still, clear night, when there is not much moon, to pass without
+some auroral display in the interior of Alaska. As long as we have any
+night at all in the early summer, and as soon as we begin to have night
+again late in the summer, they may be seen; so that one gains the
+impression that the phenomenon occurs the year round and is merely
+rendered invisible by the perpetual daylight of midsummer.
+
+[Sidenote: A GENERAL AURORA]
+
+The Alaskan auroras seem to divide themselves into two great classes,
+those that occupy the whole heavens on a grand scale and appear to be at
+a great distance above the earth, and those that are smaller and seem
+much closer. Inasmuch as a letter written from Fort Yukon to a town in
+Massachusetts describing one of the former class brought a reply that on
+the same night a brilliant aurora was observed there also, it would seem
+that auroras on the grand scale are visible over a large part of the
+earth's surface at once, whereas the lesser manifestations, though
+sometimes of great brilliance and beauty, give one the impression of
+being local.
+
+One gets, unfortunately, so accustomed to this light in the sky in
+Alaska that it becomes a matter of course and is little noticed unless
+it be extraordinarily vivid. Again, often very splendid displays occur
+in the intensely cold weather, when, no matter how warmly one may be
+clad, it is impossible to stand still long outdoors, and outdoors an
+observer must be to follow the constant movement that accompanies the
+aurora. Moreover, there is something very tantalising in the observing,
+for it is impossible to say at what moment an ordinary waving auroral
+streamer that stretches its greenish milky light across the sky,
+beautiful yet commonplace, may burst forth into a display of the first
+magnitude, or if it will do so at all.
+
+The winter traveller has the best chance for observing this phenomenon,
+because much of his travel is done before daylight, and often much more
+than he desires or deserves is done after daylight; while, if his
+journeys be protracted so long as snow and ice serve for passage at all,
+towards spring he will travel entirely at night instead of by day.
+
+It is intended in this chapter merely to attempt a description of a few
+of the more striking auroral displays that the writer has seen, the
+accounts being transcribed from journals written within a few hours, at
+most, from the time of occurrence, and in the first case written so soon
+as he went indoors.
+
+This was on the 6th of October, 1904, at Fairbanks, a little removed
+from the town itself. When first the heavens were noticed there was one
+clear bow of milky light stretching from the northern to the southern
+horizon, reflected in the broken surface of the river, and glistening on
+the ice cakes that swirled down with the swift current. Then the
+southern end of the bow began to twist on itself until it had produced a
+queer elongated corkscrew appearance half-way up to the zenith, while
+the northern end spread out and bellied from east to west. Then the
+whole display moved rapidly across the sky until it lay low and faint on
+the western horizon, and it seemed to be all over. But before one could
+turn to go indoors a new point of light appeared suddenly high up in the
+sky and burst like a pyrotechnic bomb into a thousand pear-shaped
+globules with a molten centre flung far out to north and south. Then
+began one of the most beautiful celestial exhibitions that the writer
+has ever seen. These globules stretched into ribbon streamers, dividing
+and subdividing until the whole sky was filled with them, and these
+ribbon streamers of greenish opalescent light curved constantly inward
+and outward upon themselves, with a quick jerking movement like the
+cracking of a whip, and every time the ribbons curved, their lower edges
+frayed out, and the fringe was prismatic. The pinks and mauves flashed
+as the ribbon curved and frayed--and were gone. There was no other
+colour in the whole heavens save the milky greenish-white light, but
+every time the streamers thrashed back and forth their under edges
+fringed into the glowing tints of mother-of-pearl. Presently, the whole
+display faded out until it was gone. But, as we turned again to seek the
+warmth of the house, all at once tiny fingers of light appeared all over
+the upper sky, like the flashing of spicules of alum under a microscope
+when a solution has dried to the point of crystallisation, and stretched
+up and down, lengthening and lengthening to the horizon, and gathering
+themselves together at the zenith into a crown. Three times this was
+repeated; each time the light faded gradually but completely from the
+sky and flashed out again instantaneously.
+
+For a full hour, until it was impossible to stand gazing any longer for
+the cold, the fascinating display was watched, and how much longer it
+continued cannot be said. It was a grand general aurora, high in the
+heavens, not vividly coloured save for the prismatic fringes, but of
+brilliant illumination, and remarkable amongst all the auroras observed
+since for its sudden changes and startling climaxes. Draped auroras are
+common in this country, though it has been wrongly stated that they are
+only seen near open seas, but their undulations are generally more
+deliberate and their character maintained; this one flashed on and off
+and changed its nature as though some finger were pressing buttons that
+controlled the electrical discharges of the universe. Yet it was noticed
+that even in its brightest moments the light of the stars could be seen
+through it.
+
+[Sidenote: A LOCAL AURORA]
+
+The next aurora to be described was of a totally different kind. It
+occurred on the 18th of March, 1905. The writer, with an Indian
+attendant, was travelling on the Koyukuk River from Coldfoot to Bettles,
+and, owing to a heavy, drifted trail, night had fallen while yet the
+road-house was far away. There was no moon and the wind-swept trail was
+wholly indistinguishable from the surrounding snow, yet to keep on the
+trail was the only chance of going forward at all, for whenever the
+toboggan slid off into the deep, soft snow it came to a standstill and
+had to be dragged laboriously back again. A good leader would have kept
+the trail, but we had none such amongst our dogs that year. Thus,
+slowly, we went along in the dark, continually missing the trail on this
+side and on that. We did not know on which bank of the river the
+road-house was situated, for it was our first journey in those parts. We
+only knew the trail would take us there could we follow it. All at once
+a light burst forth, seemingly not a hundred yards above our heads, that
+lit up that trail like a search-light and threw our shadows black upon
+the snow. There was nothing faint and fluorescent about that aurora; it
+burned and gleamed like magnesium wire. And by its light we were able to
+see our path distinctly and to make good time along it, until in a mile
+or two we were gladdened by the sight of the candle shining in the
+window of the road-house and were safe for the night.
+
+Now, one does not really know that this was an aurora at all, save that
+there was nothing else it could have been. It was a phenomenon
+altogether apart from the one first described; not occupying the vault
+of heaven, streaming from horizon to zenith; not remote and majestic.
+There was really little opportunity to observe it at all; one's eyes
+were fixed upon the trail it illumined, anxious not to set foot to the
+right or left. Save for an occasional glance upward, we saw only its
+reflected light upon the white expanse beneath. It was simply a streak
+of light right above our heads, holding steadily in position, though
+fluctuating a little in strength--a light to light us home, that is what
+it was to us. And it was the most surprising and opportune example of
+what has been referred to here as the _local_ aurora that eight winters
+have afforded. The most opportune but not the most beautiful; the next
+to be described, though of the local order, was the most striking and
+beautiful manifestation of the Northern Lights the writer has ever seen.
+It was that rare and lovely thing--a coloured aurora--all of one rich
+deep tint.
+
+[Sidenote: A RED AURORA]
+
+It was on the 11th of March, 1907, on the Chandalar River, a day's march
+above the gap by which that stream enters the Yukon Flats and five days
+north of Fort Yukon. A new "strike" had been made on the Chandalar, and
+a new town, "Caro," established;--abandoned since. All day long we had
+been troubled and hindered by overflow water on the ice, saturating the
+snow, an unpleasant feature for which this stream is noted; and when
+night fell and we thought we ought to be approaching the town, it seemed
+yet unaccountably far off. At last, in the darkness, we came to a creek
+that we decided must surely be Flat Creek, near the mouth of which the
+new settlement stood; and at the same time we came to overflow water so
+deep that it covered both ice and snow and looked dangerous. So the dogs
+were halted while the Indian boy went ahead cautiously to see if the
+town were not just around the bend, and the writer sat down, tired, on
+the sled. While sitting there, all at once, from the top of the
+mountainous bluff that marked the mouth of the creek, a clear red light
+sprang up and spread out across the sky, dyeing the snow and gleaming in
+the water, lighting up all the river valley from mountain to mountain
+with a most beautiful carmine of the utmost intensity and depth. In wave
+after wave it came, growing brighter and brighter, as though some
+gigantic hand on that mountain top were flinging out the liquid radiance
+into the night. There was no suggestion of any other colour, it was all
+pure carmine, and it seemed to accumulate in mid-air until all the
+landscape was bathed in its effulgence. And then it gradually died away.
+The native boy was gone just half an hour. It began about five minutes
+after he left and ended about five minutes before he returned, so that
+its whole duration was twenty minutes. There had been no aurora at all
+before; there was nothing after, for his quest had been fruitless, and,
+since we would not venture that water in the dark, we made our camp on
+the bank and were thus two hours or more yet in the open. The boy had
+stopped to look at it himself, "long time," as he said, and declared it
+was the only red aurora he had ever seen in his twenty odd years' life.
+It was a very rare and beautiful sight, and it was hard to resist that
+impression of a gigantic hand flinging liquid red fire from the mountain
+top into the sky. Its source seemed no higher than the mountain
+top--seemed to be the mountain top itself--and its extent seemed
+confined within the river valley.
+
+[Sidenote: A GRAND GENERAL DISPLAY]
+
+There is only one other that shall be described, although there are many
+mentioned with more or less particularity in the diaries of these
+travels. And this last one is of the character of the first and not at
+all of the second and third, for it was on the grand scale, filling all
+the heavens, a phenomenon, one is convinced, of an order distinct and
+different from the local, near-at-hand kind. There was exceptionally
+good opportunity for observing this display, since it occurred during an
+all-night journey, the night of the 6th of April, 1912, with brilliant
+starlight but no moon while we were hastening to reach Eagle for Easter.
+
+We had made a new traverse from the Tanana to the Yukon, through two
+hundred miles of uninhabited country, and had missed the head of the
+creek that would have taken us to the latter river in thirty miles,
+dropping into one that meandered for upward of a hundred before it
+discharged into the great river. It was one o'clock on Good Friday
+morning when we reached a road-house on the Yukon eighty miles from
+Eagle. The only chance to keep the appointment was to travel all the two
+remaining nights. So we cached almost all our load at the road-house,
+for we should retrace our steps when Eagle was visited, and thus were
+able to travel fast.
+
+Both nights were marked by fine auroral displays, so extensive and of
+such apparent height as to give the impression that they must be visible
+over large areas of the earth. Both continued all night long and were
+of the same general description, but the second night's display was
+emphasised in its main features and elaborated in its detail, and was
+the more striking and notable and worthy of description.
+
+It began by an exquisite and delicate weaving of fine, fluorescent
+filaments of light in and out among the stars, until at times a perfect
+network was formed, like lace amidst diamonds, first in one quarter of
+the heavens, then in another, then stretching and weaving its web right
+across the sky. The Yukon runs roughly north and south in these reaches,
+and the general trend of the whole display was parallel with the river's
+course. For an hour or more the ceaseless extension and looping of these
+infinitely elastic threads of light went on, with constant variation in
+their brilliance but no change in their form and never an instant's
+cessation of motion.
+
+[Illustration: Photo by Paul Schultz.
+
+THE SUN DOGS.]
+
+[Illustration: "TAN," OF MIXED BREED.]
+
+[Illustration: "MUK," A PURE MALAMUTE.]
+
+Then the familiar feature of the draped aurora was introduced, always a
+beautiful sight to watch. Slowly and most gracefully issued out of the
+north band after band, band after band of pale-green fire, each curling
+and recurling on itself like the ribbon that carries the motto under a
+shield of arms, and each continually fraying out its lower edge into
+subdued rainbow tints. Then these bands, never for a moment still, were
+gathered up together to the zenith, till from almost all round the
+horizon vibrant meridians of light stretched up to a crown of glory
+almost but not quite directly overhead, so bright that all the waving
+bands that now assumed more the appearance of its rays paled before it.
+Then the crown began to revolve, and as it revolved with constantly
+increasing speed, it gathered all its rays into one gigantic spiral that
+travelled as it spun towards the east until all form was dissipated in a
+nebulous mist that withdrew behind the mountains and glowered there like
+a dawn and left the skies void of all light save the stars. It was a
+fine instance of the stupendous sportiveness of the aurora that
+sometimes seems to have no more law or rule than the gambolling of a
+kitten, and to build up splendid and majestic effects merely to "whelm
+them all in wantonness" a moment later. A particularly fine and striking
+phase of an aurora is very likely to be followed by some such sudden
+whimsical destruction. It was as though that light hidden behind the
+mountains were mocking us.
+
+Then from out the north again appeared one clear belt of light that
+stretched rapidly and steadily all across the heavens until it formed an
+arch that stood there stationary. And from that motionless arch, the
+only motionless manifestation that whole night, there came a gradual
+superb crescendo of light that lit the wide, white river basin from
+mountain top to mountain top and threw the shadows of the dogs and the
+sled sharper and blacker upon the snow,--and in the very moment of its
+climax was gone again utterly while yet the exclamations of wonder were
+on our lips. It was as though, piqued at our admiration, the aurora had
+wiped itself out; and often and often there is precisely that impression
+of wilfulness about it.
+
+All night long the splendour kept up, and all night long, as the dogs
+went at a good clip and one of us rode while the other was at the
+sled's handle-bars, we gazed and marvelled at its infinite variety, at
+its astonishing fertility of effect, at its whimsical vagaries, until
+the true dawn of Easter swallowed up the beauty of the night as we came
+in sight of Eagle. And we wondered with what more lavish advertisement
+the dawn of the first Easter was heralded into the waste places of the
+snow.
+
+[Sidenote: SOUND AND SMELL]
+
+There are men in Alaska, whose statements demand every respect, who
+claim to have heard frequently and unmistakably a swishing sound
+accompanying the movements of the aurora, and there are some who claim
+to have detected an odour accompanying it. Without venturing any opinion
+on the subject in general, the writer would simply say that, though he
+thinks he possesses as good ears and as good a nose as most people, he
+has never heard any sound or smelled any odour that he believed to come
+from the Northern Lights. Indeed, he has often felt that with all the
+light-producing energy and with all the rapid movement of the aurora it
+was mysterious that there should be absolutely no sound. The aurora
+often looks as if it _ought_ to swish, but to his ears it has never done
+it; so much phosphorescent light might naturally be accompanied by some
+chemical odour, but to his nostrils never has been.
+
+Queer, uncertain noises in the silence of an arctic night there often
+are--noises of crackling twigs, perhaps, noises of settling snow, noises
+in the ice itself--but they are to be heard when there is no aurora as
+well as when there is. It is rare to stand on the banks of the Yukon on
+a cold night and not hear some faint crepitating sounds, sometimes
+running back and forth across the frozen river, sometimes resembling the
+ring of distant skates. Without offering any pronouncement upon what is
+a very interesting question, it seems to the writer possible that, to an
+ear intently listening, some such noise coinciding with a decided
+movement of a great auroral streamer might seem to be caused by the
+movement it happened to accompany.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE ALASKAN DOGS
+
+
+[Sidenote: MALAMUTE, HUSKY, AND SIWASH]
+
+THERE are two breeds of native dogs in Alaska, and a third that is
+usually spoken of as such. The malamute is the Esquimau dog; and what
+for want of a better name is called the "Siwash" is the Indian dog. Many
+years ago the Hudson Bay voyageurs bred some selected strains of
+imported dog with the Indian dogs of those parts, or else did no more
+than carefully select the best individuals of the native species and
+bred from them exclusively--it is variously stated--and that is the
+accepted origin of the "husky." The malamute and the husky are the two
+chief sources of the white man's dog teams, though cross-breeding with
+setters and pointers, hounds of various sorts, mastiffs, Saint Bernards,
+and Newfoundlands has resulted in a general admixture of breeds, so that
+the work dogs of Alaska are an heterogeneous lot to-day. It should also
+be stated that the terms "malamute" and "husky" are very generally
+confused and often used interchangeably.
+
+The malamute, the Alaskan Esquimau dog, is precisely the same dog as
+that found amongst the natives of Baffin's Bay and Greenland. Knud
+Rasmunsen and Amundsen together have established the oneness of the
+Esquimaux from the east coast of Greenland all round to Saint Michael;
+they are one people, speaking virtually one language. And the malamute
+dog is one dog. A photograph that Admiral Peary prints of one of the
+Smith Sound dogs that pulled his sled to the North Pole would pass for a
+photograph of one of the present writer's team, bred on the Koyukuk
+River, the parents coming from Kotzebue Sound.
+
+There was never animal better adapted to environment than the malamute
+dog. His coat, while it is not fluffy, nor the hair long, is yet so
+dense and heavy that it affords him a perfect protection against the
+utmost severity of cold. His feet are tough and clean, and do not
+readily accumulate snow between the toes and therefore do not easily get
+sore--which is the great drawback of nearly all "outside" dogs and their
+mixed progeny. He is hardy and thrifty and does well on less food than
+the mixed breeds; and, despite Peary to the contrary, he will eat
+anything. "He will not eat anything but meat," says Peary; "I have tried
+and I know." No dog accustomed to a flesh diet willingly leaves it for
+other food; the dog is a carnivorous animal. But hunger will whet his
+appetite for anything that his bowels can digest. "Muk," the counterpart
+of Peary's "King Malamute," has thriven for years on his daily ration of
+dried fish, tallow, and rice, and eats biscuits and doughnuts whenever
+he can get them. The malamute is affectionate and faithful and likes to
+be made a pet of, but he is very jealous and an incorrigible fighter. He
+has little of the fawning submissiveness of pet dogs "outside," but is
+independent and self-willed and apt to make a troublesome pet. However,
+pets that give little trouble seldom give much pleasure.
+
+His comparative shortness of leg makes him somewhat better adapted to
+the hard, crusted snow of the coast than to the soft snow of the
+interior, but he is a ceaseless and tireless worker who loves to pull.
+His prick ears, always erect, his bushy, graceful tail, carried high
+unless it curl upon the back as is the case with some, his compact coat
+of silver-grey, his sharp muzzle and black nose and quick narrow eyes
+give him an air of keenness and alertness that marks him out amongst
+dogs. When he is in good condition and his coat is taken care of he is a
+handsome fellow, and he will weigh from seventy-five to eighty-five or
+ninety pounds.
+
+The husky is a long, rangy dog, with more body and longer legs than the
+malamute and with a shorter coat. The coat is very thick and dense,
+however, and furnishes a sufficient protection. A good, spirited husky
+will carry his tail erect like a malamute, but the ears are not
+permanently pricked up; they are mobile. He is, perhaps, the general
+preference amongst dog drivers in the interior, but he has not the
+graceful distinction of appearance of the malamute.
+
+The "Siwash" dog is the common Indian dog; generally undersized, uncared
+for, half starved most of the time, and snappish because not handled
+save with roughness. In general appearance he resembles somewhat a small
+malamute, though, indeed, nowadays so mixed have breeds become that he
+may be any cur or mongrel. He is a wonderful little worker, and the
+loads he will pull are astonishing. Sometimes, with it all, he is an
+attractive-looking fellow, especially when there has been a good moose
+or caribou killing and he has gorged upon the refuse and put some flesh
+upon his bones. And if one will take a little trouble to make friends
+with him he likes petting as much as any dog. Most Indian dogs "don't
+sabe white man," and will snap at one's first advances. On the whole, it
+is far better to let them alone; for, encouraged at all, they are
+terrible thieves--what hungry creatures are not?--and make all sorts of
+trouble with one's own team. The pure malamute and the pure husky do not
+bark at all, they howl; barking is a sure sign of an admixture of other
+strains.
+
+[Sidenote: DOG BREEDING]
+
+Here it may be worth while to say a few words about the general belief
+that dogs in Alaska are interbred with wolves. That the dog and the wolf
+have a common origin there can be no doubt, and that they will
+interbreed is equally sure, but diligent inquiry on the part of the
+writer for a number of years, throughout all interior Alaska, amongst
+whites and natives, has failed to educe one authentic instance of
+intentional interbreeding, has failed to discover one man who knows of
+his own knowledge that any living dog is the offspring of such union.
+
+While, therefore, it is not here stated that such cross-breeding has not
+taken place, or even that it does not take place, yet the author is
+satisfied that it is a very rare thing, indeed, and that the common
+stories of dogs that are "half wolf" are fabulous.
+
+Indeed, it seems a rare thing when any sort of pains is taken about the
+breeding of dogs. In a country where dogs are so important, where they
+are indispensable for any sort of travel during six or seven months in
+the year over by far the greater portion of it, one would expect that
+much attention would be paid to dog breeding; but this is not the case.
+Here and there a man who takes pride in a team will carefully mate the
+best available couple and carefully rear their offspring, but for the
+most part breeding seems left to chance. A team all of malamutes or all
+of huskies, a matched team of any sort, is the exception, and excites
+interest and remark.
+
+The market for dogs is so uncertain that it is doubtful if there would
+be any money in scientific breeding for the trail. When a stampede to
+new diggings takes place, the price of dogs rises enormously. Any sort
+of good dog on the spot may be worth a hundred dollars, or a hundred and
+fifty, and the man with a kennel would make a small fortune out of hand.
+But at other times it is hard to get twenty-five dollars for the best of
+dogs.
+
+The cost of maintenance of a dog team is considerable. When the
+mail-routes went all down the Yukon, and dogs were used exclusively, the
+contracting company estimated that it cost seventy-five dollars per head
+per annum to feed its dogs; while to the traveller in remote regions,
+buying dog feed in small parcels here and there, the cost is not less
+than one hundred dollars per head. Of course, a man engaged in dog
+raising would have his own fish-wheel on the Yukon and would catch
+almost all that his dogs would eat. Fish is plentiful in Alaska; it is
+transportation that costs. Dogs not working can do very well on
+straight dried fish, but for the working dog this ration is supplemented
+by rice and tallow or other cereal and fat; not only because the animal
+does better on it, but also because straight dried fish is a very bulky
+food, and weight for weight goes not nearly so far. Cooking for the dogs
+is troublesome, but economical of weight and bulk, and conserves the
+vigour of the team. In the summer-time the dogs are still an expense.
+They must be boarded at some fish camp, at a cost of about five dollars
+per head per month.
+
+The white man found the dog team in use amongst the natives all over the
+interior, but he taught the Indian how to drive dogs. The natives had
+never evolved a "leader." Some fleet stripling always ran ahead, and the
+dogs followed. The leader, guided by the voice, "geeing" and "hawing,"
+stopping and advancing at the word of command, is a white man's
+innovation, though now universally adopted by the natives. So is the dog
+collar. The "Siwash harness" is simply a band that goes round the
+shoulders and over the breast. In the interior the universal "Siwash"
+hitch was tandem, and is yet, but as trails have widened and improved,
+more and more the tendency grows amongst white men to hitch two abreast;
+and the most convenient rig is a lead line to which each dog is attached
+independently by a single-tree, either two abreast, or, by adding a
+further length to the lead line, one behind the other, so that on a
+narrow trail the tandem rig may be quickly resorted to.
+
+[Sidenote: THE DOCKING OF TAILS]
+
+One advantage of the change from single to double rig is the decay of
+the cruel custom of "bobbing" the dogs' tails. When dogs are hitched
+one close behind the other (and the closer the better for pulling) the
+tail of the dog in front becomes heavy with ice from the condensation of
+the breath of the dog behind, until not only is he carrying weight but
+the use of the tail for warmth at night is foregone. So it was the
+universal practice to cut tails short off. But sleeping out in the open,
+as travelling dogs often must do, in all sorts of weather, with the
+thermometer at 50° or 60° below zero sometimes, a thick, bushy tail is a
+great protection to a dog. With it he covers nose and feet and is tucked
+up snug and warm. It is the dog's natural protection for the muzzle and
+the thinly haired extremities. A few years ago almost all work dogs in
+the interior were bobtailed; now the plumes wave over the teams again.
+
+Five dogs are usually considered the minimum team, and seven dogs make a
+good team. A good, quick-travelling load for a dog team is fifty pounds
+to the dog, on ordinary trails. The dogs will pull as much as one
+hundred pounds apiece or more, but that becomes more like freighting
+than travelling. On a good level trail with strong big dogs, men
+sometimes haul two hundred pounds to the dog. These, however, are
+"gee-pole propositions," in the slang of the trail, and the man is doing
+hard work with a band around his chest and the pole in his hand. For
+quick travelling, fifty pounds to the dog is enough.
+
+The most useful "outside" strains that the white man has introduced into
+the dogs of the interior are the pointer and setter and collie. The
+bird-dogs themselves make very fast teams and soon adapt themselves to
+the climate, but their feet will not stand the strain. The collie's
+intelligence would make him a most admirable leader, did he not have so
+pronouncedly the faults of his good qualities; he wants to do all the
+work; he works himself to death. It is the leader's business to keep the
+team strung out; it is not his business to pull the load. But the
+admixture of these strains with the native blood has produced some very
+fine dogs. The Newfoundland and Saint Bernard strains have been perhaps
+the least successful admixtures. They are too heavy and cumbersome and
+always have tender feet; their bodies and the bodies of their mongrel
+progeny are too heavy for their feet.
+
+[Sidenote: DOG LOYALTY]
+
+The last statement, with regard to Newfoundland and Saint Bernard dogs,
+has an interesting exception. There is a dog, not uncommon in Alaska,
+that by a curious inversion of phrase is known as the "one-man-dog."
+What is meant is the "one-dog-man dog," the dog that belongs to the man
+that uses only one dog. Many and many a prospector pulls his whole
+winter grub-stake a hundred miles or more into the hills with the aid of
+one dog. His progress is slow, in bad places or on up grades he must
+relay, and all the time he is doing more work than the dog is, but he
+manages to get his stuff to his cabin or his camp with no other aid than
+one dog can give. It is usually a large heavy dog--speed never being
+asked of him, nor steady continuous winter work--often of one of the
+breeds mentioned, or of its predominant strain. The companionship
+between such a man and such a dog is very close, and the understanding
+complete. Sometimes the dog will be his master's sole society for the
+whole winter.
+
+Indeed, any man of feeling who spends the winters with a dog team must
+grow to a deep sympathy with the animals, and to a keen, sometimes
+almost a poignant, sense of what he owes to them. There is a mystery
+about domestic animals of whatever kind. It is a mystery that man should
+be able to impose his will upon them, change their habits and
+characters, constrain them to his tasks, take up all their lives with
+unnatural toil. And that he should get affection and devotion in return
+makes the mystery yet more mysterious.
+
+The dog gets his food--often of poor quality and scant quantity--and
+that is all he gets. Yet the life of a work dog that has a kind and
+considerate master is not an unhappy one. The dog is as full of the
+canine joy of life as though he had never worn a collar, and not only
+sports and gambols when free, but really seems to like his work and do
+it gladly. He will chafe at inaction; he will come eagerly to the
+harness in the morning; often will come before he is called and ask to
+be harnessed; and if for any reason--lameness or galled neck or sore
+feet--a dog is cut out of the team temporarily, to run loose, he will
+try at every chance to get back into his place and will often attack the
+dog that seems to him to be occupying it; while a dog left behind will
+howl most piteously and make desperate efforts to break his chain and
+rejoin his companions and his labour. And the wonderful and pitiful
+thing about it is that no sort of severity or brutality on his master's
+part will destroy that zealous allegiance. The dog in Alaska is
+absolutely dependent upon man for subsistence, and he seems to realise
+it.
+
+There is a great deal of cruelty and brutality amongst dog drivers in
+Alaska. At times, it is true, most dogs need some punishment. Dogs
+differ as much as men do, and some are lazy and some are self-willed.
+The best of them will develop bad trail habits if they are allowed
+to--habits which will prove hard to break by and by and be a continual
+source of delay and annoyance until broken. But a very slight
+punishment, judicially administered at the moment, will usually suffice
+just as well as a severe one, and the main source of brutality in the
+punishment of dogs is sheer bad temper on the part of the driver, and
+has for its only possible end, not the correction of the animal's fault
+but the satisfaction of its owner's rage. To see some hulking,
+passionate brute lashing a poor little dog with a chain, or beating him
+with a club; to see dogs overworked to utter exhaustion and their
+lagging steps still hastened by a rain of blows, these are the sickening
+sights of the trail--and they are not uncommon. The language of most dog
+drivers to their dogs consists of a mixture of cursing and ribaldry,
+excused by the statement that only by the use of such speech may dogs be
+driven at all. But there is little point in the excuse; such speech is,
+to an extent not far from universal, the speech of the country. Swedes
+who have little and Indians who have none other English will yet be
+volubly profane and obscene; in the latter case often with complete
+ignorance of the meaning of the terms. Yet it must be recorded not
+ungratefully by the impartial observer that the rare presence of a
+decent woman or a clergyman will almost always put a check upon
+blackguardly speech, even that of a dog driver; women and clergymen
+being supposed the only two classes who could have any possible
+objection to foulness of mouth. To refer continually to the excrements
+of the body, to sexual commerce, natural and unnatural, all in the
+grossest terms, and to mix these matters intimately with the sacred
+names, is "manly" speech amongst a large part of the population of
+Alaska.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: REINDEER]
+
+[Sidenote: REINDEER AS DRAUGHT ANIMALS]
+
+It has been claimed with justice that the introduction of the reindeer
+into Alaska has been highly successful; yet there is much misconception
+amongst people "outside" as to the nature of that success. Stimulated by
+the example of the United States Government, and urged thereto by Doctor
+Wilfred Grenfell and others, the Canadian Government is now introducing
+reindeer into Labrador; and the distinguished missionary physician,
+whose recent decoration gives lustre to the royal bestower as well as to
+the recipient, has publicly announced his hope that these domesticated
+herbivora will "eliminate that scourge of the country, the husky dog."
+To announce such a hope, based upon any results in Alaska, is to
+announce misconception of the nature of the success which has attended
+Doctor Sheldon Jackson's "reindeer experiment." There is not a dog the
+less in Alaska because of the reindeer, nor ever will be; in so far as
+similarity of conditions warrant us in expecting similar results, it is
+safe to predict that the reindeer will never "eliminate the husky dog"
+in Labrador.
+
+But before discussing the success of the reindeer experiment and its
+lack of any bearing upon the number or the usefulness of the dog, the
+writer would pause to take strong exception to the description of the
+husky dog as the "scourge" of Labrador, and would insist that any such
+wholesale condemnation is a boomerang that returns upon the head of the
+Labradorian who uses it. For, as the dog is one of the most adaptable of
+all domestic animals, and is, to an amazing extent, what his master
+makes him, to bring a railing accusation against the whole race of dogs
+is in reality to accuse those who breed and rear them.
+
+Why should the dog have richly earned the gratitude and affection of all
+the world except Labrador? Why should he be called the "Friend of Man"
+everywhere except amongst these particular people? Far to the north of
+them the Esquimaux prize and cherish their dogs. Throughout the whole
+wide region to the west and northwest of them the dog is man's
+indispensable ally and faithful servant. The same husky dog has made
+good his claim upon man in Alaska. It is he and his brother, the
+malamute, that have opened up Alaska so far as it has been opened;
+without whom to-day the development of the country would suddenly cease.
+And to the question that is often asked "outside," as to whether the
+Alaskan dog is not a savage beast, it is justly replied: "Not unless he
+happens to belong to a savage beast." Is it really otherwise anywhere?
+Instead of the reindeer eliminating the dog, there is far greater
+likelihood of the dog eliminating the reindeer; and the professed dog
+lover, indignant at the opprobrious term applied to a whole race of
+dogs, may be disposed to echo Lady Macbeth's wish: "May good digestion
+wait on appetite."
+
+So far as substituting another draught animal for the dog is concerned,
+if the whole equine tribe, even down to Manchurian ponies should for
+some strange reason be out of the question, the Canadian Government had
+better import the polar ox or the yak. It is only amongst a nomadic
+people, whose main quest is pasturage, that the reindeer is a
+satisfactory draught animal. When introduced into Alaska there was
+doubtless expectation that he would be generally useful in this
+capacity. For a while certain mail-routes on the Seward Peninsula were
+served by him, and here and there a deluded prospector put his
+grub-stake on a reindeer sled. It is safe to say that no reindeer are so
+employed to-day. They were soon abandoned on the mail trails, and the
+prospector, after one season's experience, slaughtered his reindeer and
+traded its meat and hide for a couple of dogs.
+
+Consider that the reindeer feeds upon one thing alone, the moss that is
+named after him, and that while this moss is very widely distributed
+indeed, throughout Alaska, it is not found at all in the river valleys
+or the forests, but only upon the treeless hills at considerable
+elevation. Now the rivers are the highways. It is on their frozen
+surface, or on "portage" trails through the woods, that the greater part
+of all travelling is done and, in particular, that established routes of
+regular communication are maintained. To leave the trail after a day's
+journey, to wander miles into the hills, to herd the deer while they
+browse from slope to slope, digging the snow away in search of their
+provender, is wholly incompatible with any sustained or regular travel.
+The reindeer is a timid and almost defenceless creature. Wolves and
+lynxes prey upon him. One lynx is thought to have killed upward of
+twenty head in one season out of the herd that was stationed at Tanana,
+leaping upon the backs of the creatures, cutting their throats, sucking
+their blood, and riding them until they dropped and died. A few dogs
+will soon work havoc in a herd. So the reindeer must be constantly
+protected and at the same time must have range over a considerable scope
+of country. The care of reindeer is a business in itself, not a mere
+detail of the business of transportation or travel.
+
+[Sidenote: DOG FOOD]
+
+On the other hand, the dog's ration for many days is carried on the sled
+he hauls. There is a definite limit to it, of course, and knowledge of
+this limit made every experienced dog driver incredulous, from the
+first, of Doctor Cook's claim to have travelled some eleven hundred
+miles, from Etah to the North Pole and back, with a team of dogs hauling
+their own food. It is possible, however, on fair trails, with rigid
+economy, to travel five hundred miles and haul dog food and man food and
+the other indispensables of a long journey; and that is twice as far as
+it is ever necessary to travel in the interior of Alaska without
+reaching a supply point, the northern slope to the Arctic Ocean
+excepted.
+
+Perhaps it would be putting it better to say that a team of seven dogs
+can haul their own and their driver's food and the camp equipment, all,
+of course, carefully reduced to a minimum, for a month. Dog food of one
+sort or another can be bought at any place where anything whatever is
+sold. Almost any Indian village will furnish dried fish, and it is often
+possible, with no other weapon than a .22 rifle, to feed dogs largely on
+the country through which they pass. The writer's team has had many a
+meal of ptarmigan, rabbits, quail, and spruce hen, while to enumerate
+other articles, on which at times and in stress for proper food, his
+dogs have sustained life and strength for travel, would be to enumerate
+all the common human comestibles. Aside from the usual ration of fish,
+tallow, and rice boiled together, corn-meal, beans, flour, oatmeal, sago
+(though that is poor stuff), tapioca, canned meats of all kinds, canned
+salmon, even canned kippered herring from Scotland, seal oil, seal and
+whale flesh, ham and bacon, horse flesh, moose and caribou and
+mountain-sheep flesh, canned "Boston brown bread," canned butter, canned
+milk, dried apples, sugar, cheese, crackers of all kinds, and a score of
+other matters have at times entered into their food. Dogs have been
+"tided over" tight places for days and days on horse oats boiled with
+tallow candles, working the while. Anything that a man can eat, and much
+that even a starving man would scarcely eat, will make food for dogs. At
+the last and worst, dog can be fed to dog and even to man. When a dog
+team reaches a mining camp where supplies of all sorts are scarce--and
+that is not an uncommon experience--it is sometimes an exceedingly
+expensive matter to feed it; but something can always be found that
+will serve to keep it going until the return to a better-stocked region.
+In the winter of 1910-11, when there was such scarcity in the Iditarod,
+it cost the writer thirty-nine dollars and fifty cents to feed seven
+dogs for a week, and he has more than once been at almost a similar
+charge in the Koyukuk. But in all his travels he has never yet been
+unable to procure some sort of food for his dogs. At times they have
+been fed for days on rabbits straight; at times on ptarmigan straight.
+
+[Sidenote: THE REINDEER'S USEFULNESS]
+
+Speaking broadly, the reindeer is a stupid, unwieldy, and intractable
+brute, not comparing for a moment with the dog in intelligence or
+adaptability. The common notion that his name is derived from the use of
+reins in driving him, thus putting him in the class with the horse, is a
+mistake; the word comes from a Norse root which refers to his
+moss-browsing habit. The "rein" with which he is driven is a rope tied
+around one of his horns. He has no cognisance of "gee" and "haw," nor of
+any other vocal direction, but must be yanked hither and thither with
+the rope by main force; while to stop him in his mad career, once he is
+started, it is often necessary to throw him with the rope. In Lapland
+there are doubtless individual deer better trained; the Lap herders tell
+of them with pride; but in the main this is a just description of
+reindeer handling. All the chief herders in Alaska are Laps, brought
+over for their knowledge of the animals, and the writer has repeatedly
+ridden behind some of their best deer.
+
+Wherein, then, lies the success of the reindeer experiment in Alaska?
+Chiefly in the provision of a regular meat supply by which the natives
+and whites in the vicinity of a herd are relieved from the
+precariousness of the chase or the rapacity of the cold-storage butcher
+company. The Esquimau, having served his allotted apprenticeship of five
+years and entered upon possession of a herd, can at any time kill and
+dress a "kid of the flock" for his family or for the market. The price
+of butcher's meat has been kept down all over the Seward Peninsula by
+the competition of the numerous reindeer herds, to the comfort of the
+population and the exasperation of the butcher company, and many an
+Esquimau has become passably rich. The skin of the animal also furnishes
+a warm and much-needed material for clothing and finds a ready sale at a
+good price.
+
+This success is, however, confined so far to the coast. The herds have
+not thriven in the interior and have now all been withdrawn to the
+coast. Beasts of prey killed them; a hoof disease destroyed many; others
+are supposed to have died from eating some poisonous fungus. In five or
+six years the herd at Tanana had not increased at all, but rather
+diminished, and the same is true of the other herds on the Yukon. The
+Indian, moreover, does not take to herding as the Esquimau does, and can
+hardly be induced to the segregation of himself and his family from his
+tribe which reindeer herding involves. The "apprentices" on the Yukon
+were nearly all of them Esquimaux from the coast.
+
+It may be that the salt of the coast region is essential to the
+well-being of the reindeer; it is not so with the caribou--and the
+reindeer is nothing but a domesticated caribou--many herds of which, in
+the interior of Alaska, never visit the coast at all; but all caribou
+herds have their salt-licks, and one wishes that the oft-recommended
+plan of furnishing salt for the herds in the interior had been adopted
+by the government for a season before their removal was determined upon.
+
+Like most other "resources" of Alaska, the imported reindeer, at first
+decried and ridiculed, has now become the slender foundation for
+extravagant speculations of prosperity. The "millions of acres waiting
+for the plough" in the interior have lately been supplemented in this
+visionary treasury by the capitalisation of the vast tundras of the
+coast, the golden wheat-fields of the one finding counterpart in the
+multitudinous herds of the other. The growing dearth of cattle-range in
+the United States offers, it seems, to Alaska the opportunity of
+supplying the American market with meat, and the kindling fancy of the
+enthusiastic "booster" sees trains loaded with frozen reindeer meat
+rolling into Chicago.
+
+While the reindeer will never supersede the dog as a draught animal
+anywhere, the horse is rapidly superseding him on good trails in the
+more settled and peopled regions. In the Fairbanks and Nome districts,
+in the Circle and Koyukuk districts, in the Fortymile and in the
+Iditarod--in all districts where any extensive mining is carried
+on--heavy freights are moved by horses, and this tendency will doubtless
+increase rather than diminish. The dog team cannot compete with the
+horse team when it comes to moving heavy loads over good trails. The
+grain that the horse eats is imported, and in the main will probably
+always be imported, but oats cut green and properly cared for make
+excellent fodder, and the native hay, while not nearly as nutritious as
+the imported timothy, will sufficiently supplement grain.
+
+We hear a great deal nowadays of the benefits which are to come to
+Alaska from the railroad which the United States is expected to build
+from tide-water to the Yukon, and the clamorous voices of the journalist
+and the professional promoter and politician, which seem the only voices
+which ever reach the ear of government, are insistent that this is the
+one great thing that will bring prosperity to the country. Yet the
+writer is confident that he expresses almost the unanimous opinion of
+those who live in the country, outside of the classes mentioned, when he
+says that if the amount of money which this railroad will cost were
+expended upon good highways and trails the benefit would be much
+greater. It is means of intercommunication between the various parts of
+the country that is the great need of Alaska; some of its most promising
+sections are almost inaccessible now or accessible only at great trouble
+and expense. Access to the country itself, for the introduction of
+merchandise, is furnished easily enough during three or four months of
+the year by its incomparable system of waterways. Good highways, well
+engineered and well maintained, over which horse teams could be used
+summer and winter, would remove much of what at present is the almost
+prohibitive cost of distributing that merchandise from river points.
+Such roads would give an enormous stimulus to prospecting, and would
+render it possible to work gold placers all over the country that are of
+too low grade to be worked at the present rates of transportation. A
+_really_ good highway from Valdez to Fairbanks and the making of the
+long-ago begun Valdez-Eagle road; a good highway from Fairbanks to the
+upper Tanana as far as the Nabesna, connecting with the one from the
+Copper River country and the coast; another from the Yukon into the
+Koyukuk and the Chandalar; another from Fairbanks into the Kantishna,
+connecting with one from the lower Kuskokwim and one from the Iditarod;
+a road from Eagle across the almost unknown region (save for the line of
+the 141st meridian) between the Yukon and the Porcupine Rivers; two or
+three roads between the Yukon and the Tanana; a road from the Koyukuk to
+Kotzebue Sound--these would constitute main arteries of travel and would
+open up the country as no trunk railroad will ever do. The expense would
+be great, both of construction and maintenance, but it would probably
+not be greater than the cost of constructing and maintaining the
+proposed railroad. Twenty or thirty ordinary freight trains a year would
+bring in all the goods that Alaska consumes. Before that amount can be
+very greatly increased there must be a large development of the means by
+which it is to be distributed throughout the country.
+
+Some day, perhaps, these roads will be made, and the horse, not the dog,
+will be the draught animal upon them. Yet it would be a rash conclusion
+that even then the time will be at hand when there will be no longer
+use for the work dog in Alaska. Away from these main arteries of travel
+he will still be employed. So long as great part of the land remains a
+noble arctic wilderness; so long as the prospector strikes farther and
+farther into the rugged mountains; so long as quick travel over great
+stretches of country is necessary or desirable; so long as the salmon
+swarm up the rivers to furnish food for the catching; so long as the
+Indian moves from fishing camp to village and from village to hunting
+camp--so long will the dog be hitched to the sled in Alaska; so long
+will his joyful yelp and his plaintive whine be heard in the land; so
+long will his warm tongue seek his master's hand, even the hand that
+strikes him, and his eloquent eyes speak his utter allegiance.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Agriculture, 228, 229, 230, 231, 367
+
+  Alarm-clocks, 304
+
+  Alatna River, 70
+
+  Albert the pilot, 60
+
+  Allakaket, 190-195
+
+  Alphabet, 69
+
+  Amundsen, 292, 392
+
+  Animals, wild, 257, 276, 277, 298, 405
+
+  Anthropologists, 270
+
+  Arctic Ocean, 97, 98
+
+  Army posts: economic value, 151
+    discipline and life, 217
+    frequent changes, 217
+    surgeons, 218
+
+  Arthur, 158, 163
+
+  Athabascan language, 349
+
+  Atler, 170, 171
+
+  Auroras, 46, 380-391
+
+
+  Baker Creek Springs, 155
+
+  Bathing, 85
+
+  Beaver City, 345
+
+  Bering Sea, 129
+
+  Betticher, C. E., 254
+
+  Bettles, 54, 56, 63
+
+  Black fox, 258, 362
+
+  Blizzard, 40
+
+  Blossom Cape, 103, 106
+
+  Blow-holes, 13
+
+  Bluff, 126
+
+  Bompas, Bishop, 283
+
+  Brook, Alfred, 309
+
+  Burke, Dr., 158, 167, 169, 187
+
+
+  Caching, 17, 20, 70, 335
+
+  Camp: making details, 41, 42, 43
+    night made, 91
+    devices, 243
+    in wet snow, 302
+
+  Camp-Robbers, 335, 299, 300
+
+  Candle, 102
+
+  Candles, 108, 109
+
+  Caribou, 107, 409
+
+  Carter, Miss, 184
+
+  Chandalar: River, 26, 27, 35
+    village, 27, 28, 29, 34
+    Gap, 36, 37
+
+  Chatanika River, 4, 6, 8
+
+  Chena, 156, 249, 250
+
+  Chief Isaac, 263
+
+  Chinnik, 127
+
+  Choris Peninsula, 106
+
+  Circle City, 11, 20, 290
+
+  Clearwater Creek, 256
+
+  Clothes: drying, 42, 53
+    moose hide, 202, 203
+    tuberculosis, 306, 362
+    missions, 363
+
+  Coal, 92, 93
+
+  Coldfoot, 47, 48, 49
+
+  Cook, Dr., 405
+
+  Cooking: camp dishes, 43
+    cleanliness, 85
+    bear meat, 168
+    by relays, 209
+    for dog, 397
+
+  Council, 116
+
+  Creepers, 111
+
+  Cribbage, 124
+
+
+  Death Valley, 112, 113
+
+  Denali (Mt. McKinley), 225, 305
+
+  Deputy marshals, 365
+
+  Development schemes, 410, 411
+
+  Diphtheria, 28, 29, 32, 287, 313
+
+  Disease: epidemic, 6; _cf._ diphtheria, measles, tuberculosis
+
+  Dishkaket, 332
+
+  Disinfectants, 32
+
+  Dogs: price of, 4
+    frozen toes, 8
+    sled, 20, 25, 45
+    beds, 42
+    food, 44, 407
+    harness, 45
+    tails, 45
+    fight, 93
+    digging up snow, 110
+    helpless on smooth ice, 113
+    conscience, 115
+    on fish food, 115
+    with reindeer, 119, 120
+    refuse to lead, 125
+    preference for land trails, 129
+    intelligence, 139, 156; _cf._ Nanook
+    strength, 174
+    dislike wet feet, 178
+    cost of boarding, 181
+    in trail making, 200
+    in soft weather, 213
+    suffering on steep trails, 214
+    companionship, 223
+    moccasin leggings, 224
+    houses, 232, 237
+    play, 234
+    intelligence, 234, 237
+    sleeping, 235
+    thieving, 236
+    partners of man, 238
+    working life, 239
+    frozen foot, 253
+    with no coat, 275
+    and Indians, 291
+    howling, 303, 304
+    stray, 320, 321
+    general characteristics, 392-402
+    cost of maintenance, 396
+    ill used by whites, 397
+
+
+  Eagle, 285
+
+  Eagle Summit, 10, 11
+
+  Education: spread of English, 23, 24
+    phonograph, 52
+    scientific, 58
+    novel methods, 80
+    ignorance of native language, 81
+    artificial methods, 131
+    mission, 132, 355
+
+  Egbert Fort, 286
+
+  Endicott Mountains, 62
+
+  Esquimaux: sense of humour, 51, 87
+    isolated, 62
+    huts, 70
+    as hunters, 75
+    prayers, 82
+    music, 82
+    morality, 83
+    industry, 86
+    Sabbatarianism, 88
+    sense of distance, 91
+    fish eating, 92
+    gut windows, 94
+    devoutness, 95
+    sleeping customs, 95
+    undemonstrativeness, 95
+    igloos, 96
+    non-alcoholic, 99
+    tobacco, 99
+    hospitality, 106
+    carving, 124
+    singing, 130
+    attitude of white men toward, 134
+    snow goggles, 146
+    kindly manners, 182
+    antipathy to Indians, 185, 265
+    superstitions, 191, 269
+
+
+  Fairbanks, 156, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 382
+
+  Farthing, Miss, 244, 246, 247, 248
+
+  Fish Creek, 297
+
+  Forts: Alaskan, 342
+
+  Fortymilers, 280
+
+  Fortymile River, 281, 282
+
+
+  Gambling, 279
+
+  Game, 257, 277, 325, 368, 369, 406
+
+  Gold train, 5
+
+  Greek Church, 310, 322
+
+  Grenfell, Dr., 402
+
+  Grimm, Charles, 56
+
+
+  Half-breeds, 315, 316, 318, 319
+
+  Hamlin, Fort, 342
+
+  Hammond River, 47
+
+  Hans, 102, 103, 105
+
+  Hip-ring, 226
+
+  Hobo, the frozen, 134, 135
+
+  Hogatzitna, 76
+
+  Horses, 409, 410, 411
+
+  Hospitality, _cf._ Esquimaux and Indians, 49
+
+  Hot Springs, 227, 228
+
+  Hotham Inlet, 96
+
+  Hudson Bay Company, 21, 22
+
+  Husky, 392
+
+
+  Ice: glare, 9
+    rubber, 9, 179, 180
+    blow-holes, 13
+    bluffs, 79
+    mining, 126, 160, 161
+    jam, 167
+    breaking, 170
+    way to determine holding capacity, 179
+
+  Iditarod City, 294, 295, 296, 297, 327
+
+  Igloo, 96, 106
+
+  Indians: civilized, 24
+    uncivilized, 25
+    religion, 30
+    language, 141
+    trade with, 152, 153
+    diminishing, 153, 154
+    disease, 154
+    relations with whites, 173
+    dancing and sports, 189
+    preparation for death, 190
+    effect of civilization, 192, 193
+    lack of initiative, 197
+    demoralization, 216, 278, 279
+    birth-rate and death-rate, 217, 218
+    best education for, 245
+    women teachers, 246, 247
+    kindliness, 254
+    traders, 258
+    hospitality, 261, 303
+    missions, 263, 279
+    not savages, 264
+    fear of Esquimaux, 265
+    peaceable, 266
+    not idolators, 267
+    Christianity, 268, 270
+    moral character, 285
+    pauperization, 288, 289
+    cruelty to dogs, 291
+    effect of reproof, 292
+    self-government, 293
+    whites, 293
+    epidemics, 308, 312, 313
+    at mercy of traders, 311
+    half-breed, 315
+    and whites, 317, 318
+    meat carriers, 332
+    carving, 334
+    general discussion of, 348-370
+    and photographs, 378
+
+  Interpreters, 154, 155, 186
+
+
+  Jackson, Dr. S., 402
+
+  Jade Mountains, 89
+
+  Jetté, Fr., 140, 141
+
+  John River, 62
+
+  Journalism, 250
+
+
+  Kikitaruk, 98, 102
+
+  Knapp, 100
+
+  Kobuk: River, 63, 76
+    Mountains, 74
+    missionary, 80
+    town, 182
+
+  Kobuks, 51
+
+  Kotzebue, 106, 107
+    Sound, 63, 97, 102
+
+  Koyukuk: River, 39, 40, 48, 52, 65, 384
+    Cañon, 52
+    deserted towns, 65
+    Indians, 158, 142
+    mission, 183
+
+  Krusenstern, 97
+
+  Kuskokwim River, 322, 323
+
+
+  Lamps, 34
+
+  Langdon, Captain, 288
+
+  Launch, motor, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163
+
+  Lewis Cut-Off, 333
+
+  Lingo, 51, 115, 239
+
+  London, Jack, 265
+
+  Long Beach, 84, 88
+
+  Lookout Mountain, 61
+
+  Loomis, Dr., 296
+
+  Lower ramparts, 219
+
+  Lunar: phenomena, 18, 157
+    eclipse, 78
+
+  Lynx, 405
+
+
+  MacDonald, Archdeacon, 22, 23, 30, 31
+
+  Magistrates, 364
+
+  Mail carrying, 215, 331
+
+  Malamute, 392
+
+  Mal-de-raquet, 201
+
+  Mansfield Lake, 271
+
+  Matches, 243
+
+  Measles, 312
+
+  Medicine men, 246, 247, 267, 268
+
+  Melozitna, 209
+
+  Menthol balm, 201
+
+  Meteorological: phenomena, heat radiation, 55
+    rain, rare in winter, 134
+    local weather changes, 144
+    variable climate in Alaska, 188
+    cause of fluctuating temperature readings, 195, 196
+
+  Minchúmina, 307, 308
+    Lake, 303
+
+  Mining: towns and camps, 5, 6, 11, 12, 47, 48, 65, 251, 252
+    town morality, 83, 84, 328, 354
+    luxurious life, 108, 122
+    fires, 116, 330
+    on beach, 123
+    in ice, 126
+    decayed, 221, 222, 223, 284
+    primitive methods, 281, 282
+    claims, 295
+    flimsy buildings, 328
+    morals, 329
+    services in, 330
+    missionaries, 331
+    agriculture, 366
+
+  Mirage, 90
+
+  Mission stations: schools, 355, 358
+    clothing, 363, 369
+    isolated, 369
+
+  Missionary: nurse, 33
+    methods, 69, 81, 84, 194, 195, 307
+
+  Moccasins, 7
+
+  Money, 64
+
+  Moses' Village, 65, 180
+
+  Mountain: sunshine, 61
+    temperature, 61
+
+  Mukluk, 7, 19, 86
+
+  Mush, 200, 214
+
+
+  Nanook, 200, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 240
+
+  Natural religion, 58, 191, 267
+
+  Nelson, 161, 162
+
+  Nenana, 244, 245
+
+  Nicoli's Village, 322
+
+  Noatak, 90
+
+  Nome, 120, 122, 123
+
+  Northern Commercial Company, 241
+
+  Norton: Bay, 127
+    Sound, 117
+
+  Nose protection, 87, 145
+
+  Noyutak Lake, 76
+
+  Nulato, 48, 140
+    massacre, 142, 143
+
+
+  Old Woman Mountain, 135
+
+  One-eyed William, 172, 173, 174
+
+  Overflow: water, 6, 7, 27, 37
+    ice, 9
+
+
+  Paraselene, 57
+
+  Parkee, 35, 71
+
+  Peary, Admiral, 393
+
+  Pedometer, 73
+
+  Petersen, 114, 115
+
+  Photographing, 241, 242
+
+  Photography, 371-379
+
+  Place names, 326
+
+  Point Hope, 3, 56, 97, 99, 100
+
+  Potatoes, 229
+
+  Potlatch, 310, 353
+
+  Prevost, Jules, 154
+
+  Prices, 324, 327, 362
+    trading, 362, 396, 407
+
+  Prospectors: in winter, 78
+    and Esquimaux, 88
+    pinching out, 92
+    ruined, 146
+    self-reliance, 161, 162
+    poet, 322
+    imagination, 326
+    knowledge of Bible, 328
+    dogs, 399
+    visions, 409
+    railways, 410
+
+  Ptarmigan, 325
+
+
+  Quikpak River, 153
+
+
+  Raft, 256
+
+  Ragarou, Fr., 147
+
+  Railroads, 410, 411
+
+  Rampart City, 221, 222, 223, 338, 339
+
+  Rasmunsen, 392
+
+  Reading matter, 77, 205, 324, 325, 336
+
+  Red Mountain, 176
+
+  Reindeer, 119, 120, 402, 405, 407, 409
+
+  Roadhouse accommodation, 34, 324
+    gambling, 128
+    keepers of, 132
+    talk, 289
+    poet, 321, 322
+    reading matter, 324, 325
+    Arctic travel reminiscences, 335
+
+  Roxy, 70, 71, 72, 87, 91, 96, 101
+
+  Russian Alaska, 142, 143: Church of, _cf._ Greek Church
+
+
+  Saint John's-in-the-Wilderness, 188, 195
+
+  Salchaket, 254
+
+  Scientists, 269, 270
+
+  Seasons, 230
+
+  Seward Peninsula, 109, 111, 112, 113
+
+  Signal corps, 135, 136, 137, 220
+
+  Sishwóymina, 309
+
+  Siwashing, 41, 67, 138, 392, 394
+
+  Slate Creek, 46
+
+  Sled: width, 110
+    brake, 113
+    overturning, 113, 114
+    improvised, 164
+    in soft snow, 166
+    use of willow saplings, 167, 179
+    gee pole, 220
+    convertible rig, 275
+    unpacking, 345
+    harness, 397
+    team, 397
+    weight carried, 398
+    dog rations, load, 405
+
+  Sleeping bag, 104, 105
+
+  Smoke, 54
+
+  Snow banners, 39
+    melting, 42
+    glasses, 145, 146
+    blindness, 146, 147, 148, 290
+
+  Snow-shoes, 7, 346
+
+  Society of Friends, 99
+
+  Solar: light, effect on speed-shutters, 374
+    phenomena, 15, 16, 31, 39, 45, 57, 73, 74, 90, 103, 211
+
+  Solomon's, 126
+
+  Speed, 17, 20, 60, 75, 91, 96, 97, 110, 130, 198, 199, 299, 337
+
+  Squirrel River, 93, 94, 95
+
+  Starvation, 184, 185
+
+  Stefanson, 88, 268, 269
+
+  Summit, 11
+
+
+  Takotna, 323
+
+  Tanana, 150, 151, 152, 216, 217, 255, 256, 258, 271, 273, 274, 337, 369
+    River, 155, 255, 256
+
+  Tapis, 271
+
+  Telegraph system, 136
+
+  Temperature: low, travel, 14
+    animal life, 16
+    in river bottoms, 19, 50, 61
+    effect on lamps, 34
+    on parts of the body, 36
+    on log huts, 37
+    condensation, 53
+    smoke, 54
+    clear weather, 55
+    wind, 57
+    emotional power, 59
+    death from freezing, 61, 66, 68
+    cleanliness, 86
+    altitude, effect of, 204
+    greatest cold, effect of, 206
+    fluctuations, 212
+    confinement, 215
+    effect on cameras and films, 372, 374
+    on emulsions, 376, 377
+    and auroras, 381
+    high, 301
+    effect on dirt roof, 346
+    on Yukon River, 347
+
+  Thermos bottle, 261
+
+  Toboggan, 13, 37, 38, 46, 89
+
+  Topkok, 117
+
+  Town crier, 278
+
+  Tozitna, 209, 213
+
+  Trader: anti-monopolist, 241
+    profits, 334
+    missions, 258
+    articles sold to Indians, 361
+
+  Trading monopoly, 144
+
+  Trail: river, 2, 13, 37
+    dry and wet, 7
+    mountain, 10, 38
+    width, 15
+    lost, 18, 19, 67, 104, 320
+    blazed, 26
+    wind-swept, 40
+    in snow, 72, 138
+    breaking, 74, 75
+    exchange, 75
+    with hard crust, 109
+    telephone, 118
+    effect of horses on, 149, 150
+    cutting, 176
+    making, 198
+    always serpentine, 198
+    staked, 198, 210
+    widening, 202
+    stage, 254
+    double tripping, 298
+    in soft snow, 301
+    swampy, 332
+    Yukon, 336
+    in gale, 340
+    "sidling," 341
+    at night, 344
+    in thaw, 346, 347
+    found by aurora, 384
+
+  Tsórmina, 308
+
+  Tuberculosis, 359, 360
+
+  Twelve-Mile Summit, 9
+
+
+  Unalaklík, 132
+
+
+  Walter, 314, 321, 336, 341
+
+  Whiskey, 153, 222, 363
+
+  White, John, 121
+
+  Wind: protection against, 35
+    different local velocities, 37
+    physical labour, 46
+    in extreme cold, 57
+    as a malignant spirit, 112
+    high velocities, 219
+    in The Ramparts, 338
+
+  Wiseman, 47
+
+  Wolf, 395
+
+
+  Yukon, 12, 139, 153, 219, 336, 351
+    Flats, 12, 13, 343
+    Fort, 21, 22, 24, 350
+
+[Illustration: MAP OF THE INTERIOR OF ALASKA, SHOWING JOURNEYS DESCRIBED
+IN THIS BOOK]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
+
+Page 77, "Bergundy" changed to "Burgundy" (of Burgundy, with)
+
+Page 97, "rouch" changed to "rough" (over the rough ice)
+
+Page 306, sidenote "MINCHUMINA" changed to MINCHÚMINA" (THE MINCHÚMINA
+FOLK)
+
+Page 334, "Iditerod" changed to "Iditarod" (Iditarod, now a whole)
+
+Page 361, "satteens" changed to "sateens" (velvets and sateens)
+
+Page 418, "Minchumina" changed to "Minchúmina" (Minchúmina, 307, 308)
+
+Page 420, "Unalaklik" changed to "Unalaklík" (Unalaklík, 132)
+
+For this text version, the w with the grave accent is denoted by ['w].
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled, by Hudson Stuck
+
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+Project Gutenberg's Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled, by Hudson Stuck
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled
+       A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska
+
+Author: Hudson Stuck
+
+Release Date: October 12, 2007 [EBook #22965]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH A DOG SLED ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Lybarger, Brian Janes, Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net and
+the booksmiths at http://www.eBookForge.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH A DOG SLED
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+
+THE ASCENT OF DENALI (MT. McKINLEY).
+
+A narrative of the first complete ascent of THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN IN
+NORTH AMERICA and the most northerly high mountain in the world.
+
+Profusely illustrated. 8vo. $1.75 _net_
+
+        "Few climbers have had such good fortune on a
+        supreme occasion, but few have better deserved
+        it."
+
+        --_London Spectator._
+
+[Illustration: Handwritten: Hudson Stuck.]
+
+
+
+
+        TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH
+        A DOG SLED
+
+        A NARRATIVE OF WINTER TRAVEL IN INTERIOR ALASKA
+
+        BY
+
+        HUDSON STUCK, D.D., F.R.G.S.
+        ARCHDEACON OF THE YUKON
+        AUTHOR OF "THE ASCENT OF DENALI (MOUNT McKINLEY)"
+
+        ILLUSTRATED
+
+        SECOND EDITION
+
+        NEW YORK
+        CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+        1916
+
+
+
+
+        COPYRIGHT, 1914, 1916, BY
+        CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+
+
+
+        TO
+        GRAFTON BURKE, M.D.
+        AND
+        EDGAR WEBB LOOMIS, M.D.
+
+        PUPILS, COMRADES, COLLEAGUES,
+        COMPANIONS ON SOME OF THESE JOURNEYS,
+        ALWAYS DEAR FRIENDS,
+
+        AND TO
+
+        THE MOTHER OF THE THREE OF US
+
+        SEWANEE
+
+        THE COLLEGE ON THE MOUNTAIN-TOP
+        WHERE THE OLD IDEALS ARE STILL
+        UNFLINCHINGLY MAINTAINED
+
+        THIS VOLUME
+        IS
+        AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED
+        BY
+        THE AUTHOR
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+THIS volume deals with a series of journeys taken with a dog team over
+the winter trails in the interior of Alaska. The title might have
+claimed fourteen or fifteen thousand miles instead of ten, for the book
+was projected and the title adopted some years ago, and the journeys
+have continued. But ten thousand is a good round titular number, and is
+none the worse for being well within the mark.
+
+So far as mere distance is concerned, anyway, there is nothing
+noteworthy in this record. There are many men in Alaska who have done
+much more. A mail-carrier on one of the longer dog routes will cover
+four thousand miles in a winter, while the writer's average is less than
+two thousand. But his sled has gone far off the beaten track, across the
+arctic wilderness, into many remote corners; wherever, indeed, white men
+or natives were to be found in all the great interior.
+
+These journeys were connected primarily with the administration of the
+extensive work of the Episcopal Church in the interior of Alaska, under
+the bishop of the diocese; but that feature of them has been fully set
+forth from time to time in the church publications, and finds only
+incidental reference here.
+
+It is a great, wild country, little known save along accustomed routes
+of travel; a country with a beauty and a fascination all its own; mere
+arctic wilderness, indeed, and nine tenths of it probably destined
+always to remain such, yet full of interest and charm.
+
+Common opinion "outside" about Alaska seems to be veering from the view
+that it is a land of perpetual snow and ice to the other extreme of
+holding it to be a "world's treasure-house" of mineral wealth and
+agricultural possibility. The world's treasure is deposited in many
+houses, and Alaska has its share; its mineral wealth is very great, and
+"hidden doors of opulence" may open at any time, but its agricultural
+possibilities, in the ordinary sense in which the phrase is used, are
+confined to very small areas in proportion to the enormous whole, and in
+very limited degree.
+
+It is no new thing for those who would build railways to write in
+high-flown style about the regions they would penetrate, and, indeed, to
+speak of "millions of acres waiting for the plough" is not necessarily a
+misrepresentation; they are waiting. Nor is it altogether unnatural that
+professional agricultural experimenters at the stations established by
+the government should make the most of their experiments. When Dean
+Stanley spoke disdainfully of dogma, Lord Beaconsfield replied; "Ah! but
+you must always remember, no dogmas, no deans."
+
+Besides the physical attractions of this country, it has a gentle
+aboriginal population that arouses in many ways the respect and the
+sympathy of all kindly people; and it has some of the hardiest and most
+adventurous white men in the world. The reader will come into contact
+with both in these pages.
+
+So much for the book's scope; a word of its limitations. It is confined
+to the interior of Alaska; confined in the main to the great valley of
+the Yukon and its tributaries; being a record of sled journeys, it is
+confined to the winter.
+
+There is no man living who knows the whole of Alaska or who has any
+right to speak about the whole of Alaska. Bishop Rowe knows more about
+Alaska, in all probability, than any other living man, and there are
+large areas of the country in which he has never set foot. There is
+probably no man living, save Bishop Rowe, who has visited even the
+localities of all the missions of the Episcopal Church in Alaska. If one
+were to travel continuously for a whole year, using the most expeditious
+means at his command, and not wasting a day anywhere, it is doubtful
+whether, summer and winter, by sea and land, squeezing the last mile out
+of the seasons, travelling on the "last ice" and the "first water," he
+could even touch at all the mission stations. So, when a man from Nome
+speaks of Alaska he means his part of Alaska, the Seward Peninsula. When
+a man from Valdez or Cordova speaks of Alaska he means the Prince
+William Sound country. When a man from Juneau speaks of Alaska he means
+the southeastern coast. Alaska is not one country but many, with
+different climates, different resources, different problems, different
+populations, different interests; and what is true of one part of it is
+often grotesquely untrue of other parts. This is the reason why so many
+contradictory things have been written about the country. Not only do
+these various parts of Alaska differ radically from one another, but
+they are separated from one another by almost insuperable natural
+obstacles, so that they are in reality different countries.
+
+When Alaska is spoken of in this book the interior is meant, in which
+the writer has travelled almost continuously for the past eight years.
+The Seward Peninsula is the only other part of the country that the book
+touches. And as regards summer travel and the summer aspect of the
+country, there is material for another book should the reception of this
+one warrant its preparation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The problems of the civil government of the country will be found
+touched upon somewhat freely as they rise from time to time in the
+course of these journeys, and some faint hope is entertained that
+drawing attention to evils may hasten a remedy.
+
+Alaska is not now, and never has been, a lawless country in the old,
+Wild Western sense of unpunished homicides and crimes of violence. It
+has been, on the whole, singularly free from bloodshed--a record due in
+no small part to the fact that it is not the custom of the country to
+carry pistols, for which again there is climatic and geographic reason;
+due also in part to the very peaceable and even timid character of its
+native people.
+
+But as regards the stringent laws enacted by Congress for the protection
+of these native people, and especially in the essential particular of
+protecting them from the fatal effects of intoxicating liquor, the
+country is not law-abiding, for these laws are virtually a dead letter.
+
+Justices of the peace who must live wholly upon fees in regions where
+fees will not furnish a living, and United States deputy marshals
+appointed for political reasons, constitute a very feeble staff against
+law-breakers. When it is remembered that on the whole fifteen hundred
+miles of the American Yukon there are but six of these deputy marshals,
+and that these six men, with another five or six on the tributary
+rivers, form all the police of the country, it will be seen that
+Congress must do something more than pass stringent laws if those laws
+are to be of any effect.
+
+A body of stipendiary magistrates, a police force wholly removed from
+politics and modelled somewhat upon the Canadian Northwest Mounted
+Police--these are two of the great needs of the country if the liquor
+laws are to be enforced and the native people are to survive.
+
+That the danger of the extermination of the natives is a real one all
+vital statistics kept at Yukon River points in the last five years show,
+and that there are powerful influences in the country opposed to the
+execution of the liquor laws some recent trials at Fairbanks would leave
+no room for doubt if there had been any room before. Indeed, at this
+writing, when the pages of this book are closed and there remains no
+place save the preface where the matter can be referred to, an impudent
+attempt is on foot, with large commercial backing, to secure the
+removal of a zealous and fearless United States district attorney, who
+has been too active in prosecuting liquor-peddlers to suit the wholesale
+dealers in liquor.
+
+There are, of course, those who view with perfect equanimity the
+destruction of the natives that is now going on, and look forward with
+complacency to the time when the Alaskan Indian shall have ceased to
+exist. But to men of thought and feeling such cynicism is abhorrent, and
+the duty of the government towards its simple and kindly wards is clear.
+
+A measure of real protection must be given the native communities
+against the low-down whites who seek to intrude into them and build
+habitations for convenient resort upon occasions of drunkenness and
+debauchery, and some adequate machinery set up for suppressing the
+contemptible traffic in adulterated spirits they subsist largely upon.
+The licensed liquor-dealers do not themselves sell to Indians, but they
+notoriously sell to men who notoriously peddle to Indians, and the
+suppression of this illicit commerce would materially reduce the total
+sales of liquor.
+
+Some measure of protection, one thinks, must also be afforded against a
+predatory class of Indian traders, the back rooms of whose stores are
+often barrooms, gambling-dens, and houses of assignation, and
+headquarters and harbourage for the white degenerates--even if the
+government go the length of setting up co-operative Indian stores in the
+interior, as has been done in some places on the coast. This last is a
+matter in which the missions are helpless, for there is no wise
+combination of religion and trade.
+
+So this book goes forth with a plea in the front of it, which will find
+incidental support and expression throughout it, for the natives of
+interior Alaska, that they be not wantonly destroyed off the face of the
+earth.
+
+        HUDSON STUCK.
+
+        NEW YORK,
+        _March, 1914._
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
+
+
+IT is gratifying to know that a second edition of this book has been
+called for and it is interesting to write another preface; it even
+proved interesting to do what was set about most reluctantly--the
+reading of the book over again after entire avoidance of it for two
+years. It was necessary to do it, though one shrank from it, and it is
+interesting to know that after this comparatively long and complete
+detachment I find little to add and less to correct. Upon a complete
+rereading I am content to let the book stand, with two or three
+footnotes thrown in, and the correction of the one printer's error it
+contained from cover to cover--an error that a score of kind
+correspondents pointed out, for it was conspicuous in the title of a
+picture.
+
+The tendency to which attention is drawn in the original preface, the
+pendulum swing from the old notion that Alaska is a land of polar bears
+and icebergs to the new notion that it is a "world's treasure-house of
+mineral wealth and unbounded agricultural possibilities" is yet more
+marked than it was two years ago. The beginning of the building of the
+government railway has given new impetus to the "boosting" writers for
+magazines and newspapers. Quite recently it was stated in one such
+publication that we need not worry about the destruction of our
+forests, for had we not the inexhaustible timber resources of the
+interior of Alaska to draw upon?
+
+And in the North itself--though no one there would write about the
+timber resources of the interior--in certain shrill journals the man who
+does not confidently expect to see the Yukon Flats waving with golden
+grain and "the lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea" of the Koyukuk and
+the Chandalar is regarded as a traitor to his country and his God. But
+it must be remembered that there are a number of journalists in Alaska
+who know nothing of the country outside their respective towns, and that
+"boosting" grows shriller, as Eugene Field found red paint grow redder,
+"the further out West one goes." When they get a newspaper at Cape
+Prince of Wales what a clarion it will be!
+
+Truth, however, is not more wont than of old to be found in extremes,
+and the author of this book believes that those who desire a sober view
+of the country it deals with will find it herein. He claims no more than
+that he has had adequate opportunity of forming his opinions and that he
+has a right to their expression. It is now twelve years since he began
+almost constant travelling, winter and summer, in the interior of
+Alaska. He has described nothing that he has not seen; ventured no
+judgment that he has not well digested, and has nothing to retract or
+even modify; but he would repeat and emphasise a caution of the original
+preface. Alaska is not one country but many countries, and so widely do
+they differ from one another in almost every respect that no general
+statements about Alaska can be true. The present author's knowledge of
+the territory is confined in the main to the interior--to the valley of
+the Yukon and its tributary rivers, which make up one of the world's
+great waterways--and nothing of his writing applies, with his authority,
+to other parts.
+
+The matter of the preservation of the native peoples still presses, and
+is nearer to the author's heart than any other matter whatever. The
+United States Congress, which voted thirty-five millions of dollars for
+the government railroad, strikes out year by year the modest additional
+score or two of thousands that year by year the Bureau of Education asks
+for the establishment of hospital work amongst the Indians of the
+interior, and the preventable mortality continues to be very great.
+
+In the last two years, largely as the result of the untiring efforts of
+Bishop Rowe on behalf of the natives, two modern, well-equipped
+hospitals have been built, with money that he and his clergy have
+gathered, on the Yukon River, one at Fort Yukon and one at Tanana; and
+these are the only places of any kind, on nearly a thousand miles of the
+river, where sick or injured Indians may be received and cared for.
+
+Amongst men of thought and feeling there is noticeable revulsion from
+the supercilious attitude that used not to be uncommon toward the little
+peoples of the world. It begins to be recognised that it is quite
+possible that even the smallest of the little peoples may have some
+contribution to make to the welfare and progress of the human race. What
+is the Boy Scout movement that is sweeping the country, to the enormous
+benefit of the rising generation, but the incorporating into the nurture
+of our youth of the things that were the nurture of the Indian youth;
+that are a large part of the nurture of the Alaskan Indian youth to-day?
+And the camp-fire clubs and woodcraft associations and the whole trend
+to the life of the open recognise that the Indian had developed a
+technique of wilderness life deserving of preservation for its value to
+the white man. While as for the Esquimaux, the author never sees the
+extraordinary prevalence amongst them of the art of graphic delineation
+displayed in bold etchings of incidents of the chase upon their
+implements and weapons (though not upon the articles made by the dozen
+for the curio-venders at Nome and Saint Michael) without dreaming that
+some day an artist will come from out that singular and most interesting
+people who shall teach the world something new about art.
+
+Whatever the future may hold for the interior of Alaska, the author is
+convinced that its population will derive very largely from the present
+native stocks, and this alone would justify any efforts to prevent
+further inroads upon their health and vitality.
+
+        April, 1916.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                                 PAGE
+
+        PREFACE                                            vii
+
+     I. FAIRBANKS TO THE CHANDALAR THROUGH CIRCLE
+        CITY AND FORT YUKON                                  3
+
+    II. CHANDALAR VILLAGE TO BETTLES, COLDFOOT, AND
+        THE KOYUKUK                                         34
+
+   III. BETTLES TO THE PACIFIC--THE ALATNA, KOBUK
+        PORTAGE, KOBUK VILLAGE, KOTZEBUE SOUND              63
+
+    IV. THE SEWARD PENINSULA--CANDLE CREEK, COUNCIL,
+        AND NOME                                           102
+
+     V. NOME TO FAIRBANKS--NORTON SOUND--THE KALTAG
+        PORTAGE--NULATO--UP THE YUKON TO TANANA            125
+
+    VI. THE "FIRST ICE"--AN AUTUMN ADVENTURE ON THE
+        KOYUKUK                                            157
+
+   VII. THE KOYUKUK TO THE YUKON AND TO TANANA--CHRISTMAS
+        HOLIDAYS AT SAINT JOHN'S-IN-THE-WILDERNESS         188
+
+  VIII. UP THE YUKON TO RAMPART AND ACROSS COUNTRY
+        TO THE TANANA--ALASKAN AGRICULTURE--THE
+        GOOD DOG NANOOK--MISS FARTHING'S BOYS AT
+        NENANA--CHENA AND FAIRBANKS                        219
+
+    IX. TANANA CROSSING TO FORTYMILE AND DOWN THE
+        YUKON--A PATRIARCHAL CHIEF--SWARMING
+        CARIBOU--EAGLE AND FORT EGBERT--CIRCLE
+        CITY AND FORT YUKON                                251
+
+     X. FROM THE TANANA RIVER TO THE KUSKOKWIM--THENCE
+        TO THE IDITAROD MINING CAMP--THENCE
+        TO THE YUKON, AND UP THAT RIVER
+        TO FORT YUKON                                      294
+
+    XI. THE NATIVES OF ALASKA                              348
+
+   XII. PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE ARCTIC                          371
+
+  XIII. THE NORTHERN LIGHTS                                380
+
+   XIV. THE ALASKAN DOGS                                   392
+
+        INDEX                                              413
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  Hudson Stuck (_photogravure_)                        _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                          FACING PAGE
+
+  Sunrise on the Chandalar-Koyukuk portage                         36
+
+  Coldfoot on the Koyukuk                                          37
+
+  The upper Koyukuk                                                50
+
+  The barren shores of Kotzebue Sound                              51
+
+  Gold-mining at Nome                                             122
+
+  Pulling the _Pelican_ out with a "Spanish windlass"             123
+
+  The start over the "first ice"                                  164
+
+  "Rough going"                                                   165
+
+  Arthur and Doctor Burke                                         178
+
+  Saint John's-in-the-Wilderness, Allakaket, Koyukuk River        179
+
+  The double interpretation at the Allakaket                      186
+
+  The wind-swept Yukon within the ramparts                        187
+
+  A pleasant woodland trail                                       256
+
+  An Alaskan chief and his henchman                               257
+
+  The Tanana crossing                                             270
+
+  Good going on the Yukon                                         271
+
+  "A portage that comes so finely down to the Yukon that
+  there is pleasure in anticipating the view it affords"          290
+
+  Fort Yukon                                                      291
+
+  The rough breaking in of Doctor Loomis, camped on the mail
+  trail at 50° below zero, unable to reach a road-house for
+  the deep snow                                                   296
+
+  Esquimaux of the upper Kuskokwim                                297
+
+  "The 'summit' is high above timber-line and the trail
+  pursues a hogback ridge for a mile and a half at the summit
+  level"                                                          324
+
+  A street in Iditarod City                                       325
+
+  The end of the portage trail                                    334
+
+  Rough ice on the Yukon                                          335
+
+  A docile folk, eager for instruction                            350
+
+  The mission type                                                351
+
+  Wild and shy                                                    351
+
+  The native communicant                                          360
+
+  Raw material                                                    360
+
+  An Esquimau youth                                               361
+
+  A half-breed Indian                                             361
+
+  An aged couple                                                  366
+
+  Football at the Allakaket, exposure 1-1000 second, April,
+  after a new light snowfall                                      367
+
+  The sun dogs                                                    388
+
+  "Tan," of mixed breed                                           389
+
+  "Muk," a pure malamute                                          389
+
+  Map of the interior of Alaska showing journeys described
+  in this book                                     _At end of volume_
+
+
+
+
+TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH A DOG SLED
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S NOTE
+
+
+Three fundamental facts are to be borne constantly in mind by those who
+would form any intelligent conception of the Territory of Alaska.
+
+(1) Its area of approximately 590,000 square miles makes it two and a
+half times as large as the State of Texas.
+
+(2) But it is not, like Texas, one homogeneous body of land; it is not,
+in any geographical sense, one country at all. "Sweeping in a great arc
+over sixteen degrees of latitude and fifty-eight degrees of longitude,"
+it is no less than four, and some might say five, different countries,
+differing from one another in almost every way that one country can
+differ from another: in climate, in population, in resources, in
+requirements; and--
+
+(3) These different countries are not merely different from one another,
+they are _separated_ from one another by formidable natural barriers.
+
+
+
+
+TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH A DOG SLED
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+FAIRBANKS TO THE CHANDALAR THROUGH CIRCLE CITY AND FORT YUKON
+
+
+THE plan for the winter journey of 1905-6 (my second winter on the
+trail) was an ambitious one, for it contemplated a visit to Point Hope,
+on the shore of the Arctic Ocean between Kotzebue Sound and Point
+Barrow, and a return to Fairbanks. In the summer such a journey would be
+practicable only by water: down the Tanana to the Yukon, down the Yukon
+to its mouth, and then through the straits of Bering and along the
+Arctic coast; in the winter it is possible to make the journey across
+country. A desire to visit our most northerly and most inaccessible
+mission in Alaska and a desire to become acquainted with general
+conditions in the wide country north of the Yukon were equal factors in
+the planning of a journey which would carry me through three and a half
+degrees of latitude and no less than eighteen degrees of longitude.
+
+The course of winter travel in Alaska follows the frozen waterways so
+far as they lead in the general direction desired, leaves them to cross
+mountain ranges and divides at the most favourable points, and drops
+down into the streams again so soon as streams are available. The
+country is notably well watered and the waterways are the natural
+highways. The more frequented routes gradually cut out the serpentine
+bends of the rivers by land trails, but in the wilder parts of the
+country travel sticks to the ice.
+
+Our course, therefore, lay up the Chatanika River and one of its
+tributaries until the Tanana-Yukon watershed was reached; then through
+the mountains, crossing two steep summits to the Yukon slope, and down
+that slope by convenient streams to the Yukon River at Circle City.
+
+[Sidenote: THE GOLD TRAIN]
+
+We set out on the 27th of November with six dogs and a "basket" sled and
+about five hundred pounds' weight of load, including tent and stove,
+bedding, clothes for the winter, grub box and its equipment, and dog
+feed. The dogs were those that I had used the previous winter, with one
+exception. The leader had come home lame from the fish camp where he had
+been boarded during the summer, and, despite all attentions, the
+lameness had persisted; so he must be left behind, and there was much
+difficulty in securing another leader. A recent stampede to a new mining
+district had advanced the price of dogs and gathered up all the good
+ones, so it was necessary to hunt all over Fairbanks and pay a hundred
+dollars for a dog that proved very indifferent, after all. "Jimmy" was a
+handsome beast, the handsomest I ever owned and the costliest, but, as I
+learned later from one who knew his history, had "travelled on his
+looks all his life." He earned the name of "Jimmy the Fake."
+
+Midway to Cleary "City," on the chief gold-producing creek of the
+district, our first day's run, we encountered the gold train. For some
+time previous a lone highwayman had robbed solitary miners on their way
+to Fairbanks with gold-dust, and now a posse was organised that went the
+rounds of the creeks and gathered up the dust and bore it on mule-back
+to the bank, escorted by half a dozen armed and mounted men. Sawed-off
+shotguns were the favourite weapons, and one judged them deadly enough
+at short range. The heavy "pokes" galled the animals' backs, however
+they might be slung, and the little procession wound slowly along, a man
+ahead, a man behind, and four clustered round the treasure.
+
+These raw, temporary mining towns are much alike the world over, one
+supposes, though perhaps a little worse up here in the far north. It was
+late at night when we reached the place, but saloon and dance-hall were
+ablaze with light and loud with the raucity of phonographs and the
+stamping of feet. Everything was "wide open," and there was not even the
+thinnest veneer of respectability. Drinking and gambling and dancing go
+on all night long. Drunken men reel out upon the snow; painted faces
+leer over muslin curtains as one passes by. Without any government,
+without any pretence of municipal organisation, there is no co-operation
+for public enterprise. There are no streets, there are no sidewalks
+save such as a man may choose to lay in front of his own premises, and
+the simplest sanitary precautions are entirely neglected. Nothing but
+the cold climate of the north prevents epidemic disease from sweeping
+through these places. They rise in a few days wherever gold is found in
+quantities, they flourish as the production increases, decline with its
+decline, and are left gaunt, dark, and abandoned so soon as the diggings
+are exhausted.
+
+The next day we were on the Chatanika River, to which Cleary Creek is
+tributary, and were immediately confronted with one of the main troubles
+and difficulties of winter travel in this and, as may be supposed, in
+any arctic or subarctic country--overflow water.
+
+[Sidenote: OVERFLOW WATER AND ICE]
+
+In the lesser rivers, where deep pools alternate with swift shallows,
+the stream freezes solid to the bottom upon the shoals and riffles.
+Since the subterranean fountains that supply the river do not cease to
+discharge their waters in the winter, however cold it may be, there
+comes presently an increasing pressure under the ice above such a
+barrier. The pent-up water is strong enough to heave the ice into mounds
+and at last to break forth, spreading itself far along the frozen
+surface of the river. At times it may be seen gushing out like an
+artesian well, rising three or four feet above the surface of the ice,
+until the pressure is relieved. Sometimes for many miles at a stretch
+the whole river will be covered with a succession of such overflows,
+from two or three inches deep to eight or ten, or even twelve; some just
+bursting forth, some partially frozen, some resolved into solid "glare"
+ice. Thus the surface of the river is continually renewed the whole
+winter through, and a section of the ice crust in the spring would show
+a series of laminations; here ice upon ice, there ice upon
+half-incorporated snow, that mark the successive inundations.
+
+This explanation has been given at length because of the large part that
+the phenomenon plays in the difficulty and danger of winter travel, and
+because it seems hard to make those who are not familiar with it
+understand it. At first sight it would seem that after a week or ten
+days of fifty-below-zero weather, for instance, all water everywhere
+would be frozen into quiescence for the rest of the winter. Throw a
+bucket of water into the air, and it is frozen solid as soon as it
+reaches the ground. There would be no more trouble, one would think,
+with water. Yet some of the worst trouble the traveller has with
+overflow water is during very cold weather, and it is then, of course,
+that there is the greatest danger of frost-bite in getting one's feet
+wet. Water-proof footwear, therefore, becomes one of the "musher's"
+great concerns and difficulties. The best water-proof footwear is the
+Esquimau mukluk, not easily obtainable in the interior of Alaska, but
+the mukluk is an inconvenient footwear to put snow-shoes on. Rubber
+boots or shoes of any kind are most uncomfortable things to travel in.
+Nothing equals the moccasin on the trail, nothing is so good to
+snow-shoe in. The well-equipped traveller has moccasins for dry trails
+and mukluks for wet trails--and even then may sometimes get his feet
+wet. Nor are his own feet his only consideration; his dogs' feet are,
+collectively, as important as his own. When the dog comes out of water
+into snow again the snow collects and freezes between the toes, and if
+not removed will soon cause a sore and lameness. Then a dog moccasin
+must be put on and the foot continually nursed and doctored. When
+several dogs of a team are thus affected, it may be with several feet
+each, the labour and trouble of travel are greatly increased.
+
+So, whenever his dogs have been through water, the careful musher will
+stop and go all down the line, cleaning out the ice and snow from their
+feet with his fingers. Four interdigital spaces per foot make sixteen
+per dog, and with a team of six dogs that means ninety-six several
+operations with the bare hand (if it be done effectually) every time the
+team gets into an overflow. The dogs will do it for themselves if they
+are given time, tearing out the lumps of ice with their teeth; but,
+inasmuch as they usually feel conscientiously obliged to eat each lump
+as they pull it out, it takes much longer, and in a short daylight there
+is little time to spare if the day's march is to be made.
+
+[Sidenote: "OVERFLOW" ICE]
+
+We found overflow almost as soon as we reached the Chatanika River, and
+in one form or another we encountered it during all the two days and a
+half that we were pursuing the river's windings. At times it was covered
+with a sheet of new ice that would support the dogs but would not
+support the sled, so that the dogs were travelling on one level and the
+sled on another, and a man had to walk along in the water between the
+dogs and the sled for several hundred yards at a time, breaking down the
+overflow ice with his feet.
+
+At other times the thin sheets of overflow ice would sway and bend as
+the sled passed quickly over them in a way that gives to ice in such
+condition its Alaskan name of "rubber-ice," while for the fifteen or
+twenty miles of McManus Creek, the headwaters of the Chatanika, we had
+continuous stretches of fine glare ice with enough frost crystals upon
+it from condensing moisture to give a "tooth" to the dogs' feet, just as
+varnish on a photographic negative gives tooth to the retouching pencil.
+Perfectly smooth ice is a very difficult surface for dogs to pass over;
+glare ice slightly roughened by frost deposit makes splendid, fast
+going.
+
+Eighty-five miles or so from Fairbanks, and just about half-way to
+Circle, the watercourse is left and the first summit is the
+"Twelve-Mile," as it is called. We tried hard to take our load up at one
+trip, but found it impossible to do so, and had to unlash the sled and
+take half the load at a time, caching it on the top while we returned
+for the other half.
+
+It took us half a day to get our load to the top of the Twelve-Mile
+summit, a rise of about one thousand three hundred feet from the creek
+bed as the aneroid gave it. In the steeper pitches we had to take the
+axe and cut steps, so hard and smooth does the incessant wind at these
+heights beat the snow, and on our second trip to the top we were just in
+time to rescue a roll of bedding that had been blown from the cache and
+was about to descend a gully from which we could hardly have recovered
+it.
+
+This summit descended, we were in Birch Creek water, and had we followed
+the watercourse would have reached the Yukon; but we would have
+travelled hundreds of miles and would have come out below Fort Yukon,
+while we were bound for Circle City. So there was another and a yet more
+difficult summit to cross before we could descend the Yukon slope. We
+were able to hire a man and two dogs to help us over the Eagle summit,
+so that the necessity of relaying was avoided. One man ahead continually
+calling to the dogs, eight dogs steadily pulling, and two men behind
+steadily pushing, foot by foot, with many stoppages as one bench after
+another was surmounted, we got the load to the top at last, a rise of
+one thousand four hundred feet in less than three miles. A driving
+snow-storm cut off all view and would have left us at a loss which way
+to proceed but for the stakes that indicated it.
+
+The descent was as anxious and hazardous as the ascent had been
+laborious. The dogs were loosed and sent racing down the slope. With a
+rope rough-lock around the sled runners, one man took the gee pole and
+another the handle-bars and each spread-eagled himself through the loose
+deep snow to check the momentum of the sled, until sled and men turned
+aside and came to a stop in a drift to avoid a steep, smooth pitch. The
+sled extricated, it was poised on the edge of the pitch and turned loose
+on the hardened snow, hurtling down three or four hundred feet until it
+buried itself in another drift. The dogs were necessary to drag it from
+this drift, and one had to go down and bring them up. Then again they
+were loosed, and from bench to bench the process was repeated until the
+slope grew gentle enough to permit the regulation of the downward
+progress by the foot-brake.
+
+[Sidenote: "SUMMITS"]
+
+The Eagle summit is one of the most difficult summits in Alaska. The
+wind blows so fiercely that sometimes for days together its passage is
+almost impossible. No amount of trail making could be of much help, for
+the snow smothers up everything on the lee of the hill, and the end of
+every storm presents a new surface and an altered route. A "summit" in
+this Alaskan sense is, of course, a saddle between peaks, and in this
+case there is no easier pass and no way around. The only way to avoid
+the Eagle summit, without going out of the district altogether, would be
+to tunnel it.
+
+The summit passed, we found better trails and a more frequented country,
+for in this district are a number of creeks that draw supplies from
+Circle City, and that had been worked ten years or more.
+
+At the time of the Klondike stampede of 1896-97, Circle City was already
+established as a flourishing mining camp and boasted itself the largest
+log-cabin town in the world. Before the Klondike drew away its people as
+a stronger magnet draws iron filings from a lesser one, Circle had a
+population of about three thousand. Take a town of three thousand and
+reduce it to thirty or forty, and it is hard to resist the melancholy
+impression which entrance upon it in the dusk of the evening brings.
+There lay the great white Yukon in the middle distance; beyond it the
+Yukon Flats, snow-covered, desolate, stretched away enormously, hedged
+here at their beginning by grey, dim hills. Spread out in the foreground
+were the little, squat, huddling cabins that belonged to no one, with
+never a light in a window or smoke from a chimney, the untrodden snow
+drifted against door and porch. It would be hard to imagine a drearier
+prospect, and one had the feeling that it was a city of the dead rather
+than merely a dead city.
+
+The weather had grown steadily colder since we reached the Yukon slope,
+and for two days before reaching Circle the thermometer had stood
+between 40° and 50° below zero. It was all right for us to push on, the
+trail was good and nearly all down-hill, and there were road-houses
+every ten or twelve miles. Freighters, weather-bound, came to the doors
+as we passed by with our jangle of bells and would raise a somewhat
+chechaco pride in our breasts by remarking: "You don't seem to care what
+weather you travel in!" The evil of it was that the perfectly safe
+travelling between Eagle Creek and Circle emboldened us to push on from
+Circle under totally different conditions, when travelling at such low
+temperatures became highly dangerous and brought us into grave
+misadventure that might easily have been fatal catastrophe.
+
+Our original start was a week later than had been planned and we had
+made no time, but rather lost it, on this first division of the journey.
+If we were to reach Bettles on the Koyukuk River for Christmas, there
+was no more time to lose, and I was anxious to spend the next Sunday at
+Fort Yukon, three days' journey away. So we started for Fort Yukon on
+Thursday, the 7th of December, the day after we reached Circle.
+
+[Sidenote: THE YUKON FLATS]
+
+A certain arctic traveller has said that "adventures" always imply
+either incompetence or ignorance of local conditions, and there is some
+truth in the saying. Our misadventure was the result of a series of
+mistakes, no one of which would have been other than discreditable to
+men of more experience. Our course lay for seventy-five miles through
+the Yukon Flats, which begin at Circle and extend for two hundred and
+fifty miles of the river's course below that point. The Flats constitute
+the most difficult and dangerous part of the whole length of the Yukon
+River, summer or winter, and the section between Circle City and Fort
+Yukon is the most difficult and dangerous part of the Flats. Save for a
+"portage" or land trail of eighteen or twenty miles out of Circle, the
+trail is on the river itself, which is split up into many channels
+without salient landmarks. The current is so swift that many stretches
+run open water far into the winter, and blow-holes are numerous. There
+is little travel on the Flats in winter, and a snow-storm accompanied by
+wind may obliterate what trail there is in an hour. The vehicle used in
+the Flats is not a sled but a toboggan, and our first mistake was in not
+conforming to local usage in this respect. There is always a very good
+reason for local usage about snow vehicles. But a toboggan which had
+been ordered from a native at Fort Yukon would be waiting for us, and
+it seemed not worth while to go to the expense of buying another merely
+for three days' journey.
+
+The second mistake was in engaging a boy as guide instead of a man. He
+was an attractive youth of about fourteen who had done good service at
+the Circle City mission the previous winter, when our nurse-in-charge
+was contending single-handed against an epidemic of diphtheria. He was a
+pleasant boy, with some English, who wanted to go and professed
+knowledge of the route. The greatest mistake of all was starting out
+through that lonely waste with the thermometer at 52° below zero. The
+old-timers in Alaska have a saying that "travelling at 50° below is all
+right as long as it's all right." If there be a good trail, if there be
+convenient stopping-places, if nothing go wrong, one may travel without
+special risk and with no extraordinary discomfort at 50° below zero and
+a good deal lower. I have since that time made a short day's run at 62°
+below, and once travelled for two or three hours on a stretch at 65°
+below. But there is always more or less chance in travelling at low
+temperatures, because a very small thing may necessitate a stop, and a
+stop may turn into a serious thing. At such temperatures one must keep
+going. No amount of clothing that it is possible to wear on the trail
+will keep one warm while standing still. For dogs and men alike,
+constant brisk motion is necessary; for dogs as well as men--even though
+dogs will sleep outdoors in such cold without harm--for they cannot take
+as good care of themselves in the harness as they can when loose. A
+trace that needs mending, a broken buckle, a snow-shoe string that must
+be replaced, may chill one so that it is impossible to recover one's
+warmth again. The bare hand cannot be exposed for many seconds without
+beginning to freeze; it is dangerous to breathe the air into the lungs
+for any length of time without a muffler over the mouth.
+
+Our troubles began as soon as we started. The trail was a narrow,
+winding toboggan track of sixteen or seventeen inches, while our sled
+was twenty inches wide, so that one runner was always dragging in the
+loose snow, and that meant slow, heavy going.
+
+[Sidenote: SUNRISE AND SUNSET]
+
+The days were nearing the shortest of the year, when, in these
+latitudes, the sun does but show himself and withdraw again. But,
+especially in very cold weather, which is nearly always very clear
+weather, that brief appearance is preceded by a feast of rich, delicate
+colour. First a greenish glow on the southern horizon, brightening into
+lemon and then into clear primrose, invades the deep purple of the
+starry heavens. Then a beautiful circle of blush pink above a circle of
+pure amethyst gradually stretches all around the edge of the sky, slowly
+brightening while the stars fade out and the heavens change to blue. The
+dead white mirror of the snow takes every tint that the skies display
+with a faint but exquisite radiance. Then the sun's disk appears with a
+flood of yellow light but with no appreciable warmth, and for a little
+space his level rays shoot out and gild the tree tops and the distant
+hills. The snow springs to life. Dead white no longer, its dry,
+crystalline particles glitter in myriads of diamond facets with every
+colour of the prism. Then the sun is gone, and the lovely circle of rose
+pink over amethyst again stretches round the horizon, slowly fading
+until once more the pale primrose glows in the south against the purple
+sky with its silver stars. Thus sunrise and sunset form a continuous
+spectacle, with a purity of delicate yet splendid colour that only
+perfectly dry atmosphere permits. The primrose glow, the heralding
+circle, the ball of orange light, the valedictory circle, the primrose
+glow again, and a day has come and gone. Air can hold no moisture at all
+at these low temperatures, and the skies are cloudless.
+
+[Sidenote: AN ESCAPADE ON THE YUKON]
+
+Moreover, in the wilds at 50° below zero there is the most complete
+silence. All animal life is hidden away. Not a rabbit flits across the
+trail; in the absolutely still air not a twig moves. A rare raven passes
+overhead, and his cry, changed from a hoarse croak to a sweet liquid
+note, reverberates like the musical glasses. There is no more delightful
+sound in the wilderness than this occasional lapse into music of the
+raven. We wound through the scrub spruce and willow and over the
+niggerhead swamps, a faint tinkle of bells, a little cloud of steam; for
+in the great cold the moisture of the animals' breath hangs over their
+heads in the still air, and on looking back it stands awhile along the
+course at dogs' height until it is presently deposited on twigs and
+tussocks. We wound along, a faint tinkle of bells, a little cloud of
+steam, and in the midst of the cloud a tousle of shaggy black-and-white
+hair and red-and-white pompons--going out of the dead silence behind
+into the dead silence before. The dusk came, and still we plodded and
+pushed our weary way, swinging that heavy sled incessantly, by the gee
+pole in front and the handle-bars behind, in the vain effort to keep it
+on the trail. Two miles an hour was all that we were making. We had come
+but thirteen or fourteen miles out of twenty-four, and it was dark; and
+it grew colder.
+
+The dogs whined and stopped every few yards, worn out by wallowing in
+the snow and the labour of the collar. The long scarfs that wrapped our
+mouths and noses had been shifted and shifted, as one part after another
+became solid with ice from the breath, until over their whole length
+they were stiff as boards. After two more miles of it it was evident
+that we could not reach the mail cabin that night. Then I made my last
+and worst mistake. We should have stopped and camped then and there. We
+had tent and stove and everything requisite. But the native boy insisted
+that the cabin was "only little way," and any one who knows the misery
+of making camp in extremely cold weather, in the dark, will understand
+our reluctance to do so.
+
+I decided to make a cache of the greater part of our load--tent and
+stove and supplies generally--and to push on to the cabin with but the
+bedding and the grub box, returning for the stuff in the morning. And,
+since in the deepest depths of blundering there is a deeper still, by
+some one's carelessness, but certainly by my fault, the axe was left
+behind in the cache.
+
+With our reduced burden we made better progress, and in a short time
+reached the end of the portage and came out on the frozen river, just as
+the moon, a day or two past the full, rose above the opposite bank. One
+sees many strange distortions of sun and moon in this land, but never
+was a stranger seen than this. Her disk, shining through the dense air
+of the river bottom, was in shape an almost perfect octagon, regular as
+though it had been laid off with dividers and a ruler.
+
+We were soon in doubt about the trail. The mail-carrier had gone down
+only two or three times this winter and each time had taken a different
+route, as more and more of the river closed and gave him more and more
+direct passage. A number of Indians had been hunting, and their tracks
+added to the tangle of trails. Presently we entered a thick mist that
+even to inexperienced eyes spoke of open water or new ice yet moist. So
+heavy was the vapour that to the man at the handle-bars the man at the
+gee pole loomed ghostly, and the man ahead of the dogs could not be
+distinguished at all. We had gone so much farther than our native boy
+had declared we had to go that we began to fear that in the confusion of
+trails we had taken the wrong one and had passed the cabin. That is the
+tenderfoot's, or, as we say, the chechaco's, fear; it is the one thing
+that it may almost be said never happens. But the boy fell down
+completely and was frankly at a loss. All we could get out of him was:
+"May-be-so we catch cabin bymeby, may-be-so no." If we had passed the
+cabin it was twenty odd miles to the next; and it grew colder and the
+dogs were utterly weary again, prone upon the trail at every small
+excuse for a stop, only to be stirred by the whip, heavily wielded.
+Surely never men thrust themselves foolhardily into worse predicament!
+Then I made my last mistake. Dimly the bank loomed through the mist, and
+I said: "We can't go any farther; I think we've missed the trail and I'm
+going across to yon bank to see if there's a place to camp." I had not
+gone six steps from the trail when the ice gave way under my feet and I
+found myself in water to my hips.
+
+[Sidenote: AN ESCAPADE ON THE YUKON]
+
+Under Providence I owe it to the mukluks I wore, tied tight round my
+knees, that I did not lose my life, or at least my feet. The thermometer
+at Circle City stood at 60° below zero at dark that day, and down on the
+ice it is always about 5° colder than on the bank, because cold air is
+heavy air and sinks to the lowest level, and 65° below zero means 97°
+below freezing.
+
+My moose-hide breeches froze solid the moment I scrambled out, but not a
+drop of water got to my feet. If the water had reached my feet they
+would have frozen almost as quickly as the moose hide in that fearful
+cold. Thoroughly alarmed now, and realising our perilous situation, we
+did the only thing there was to do--we turned the dogs loose and
+abandoned the sled and went back along the trail we had followed as fast
+as we could. We knew that we could safely retrace our steps and that the
+trail would lead us to the bank after a while. We knew not where the
+trail would lead us in the other direction. As a matter of fact, it led
+to the mail cabin, two miles farther on, and the mail-carrier was at
+that time occupying it at the end of his day's run.
+
+The dogs stayed with the sled; dogs will usually stay with their sled;
+they seem to recognise their first allegiance to the load they haul,
+probably because they know their food forms part of it.
+
+Our cache reached, we made a fire, thawed out the iron-like armour of my
+leather breeches, and cutting a spare woollen scarf in two, wrapped the
+dry, warm pieces about my numbed thighs. Then we pushed on the eighteen
+miles or so to Circle, keeping a steady pace despite the drowsiness that
+oppressed us, and that oppressed me particularly owing to the chill of
+my ducking. About five in the morning we reached the town, and the
+clergyman, the Reverend C. E. Rice, turned out of his warm bed and I
+turned in, none the worse in body for the experience, but much humbled
+in spirit. My companion, Mr. E. J. Knapp, whose thoughtful care for me I
+always look back upon with gratitude, as well as upon Mr. Rice's
+kindness, froze his nose and a toe slightly, being somewhat neglectful
+of himself in his solicitude for me.
+
+We had been out about twenty hours in a temperature ranging from 52° to
+60° below zero, had walked about forty-four miles, labouring incessantly
+as well as walking, what time we were with the sled, with nothing to
+eat--it was too cold to stop for eating--and, in addition to this, one
+of us had been in water to the waist, yet none of us took any harm. It
+was a providential overruling of blundering foolhardiness for which we
+were deeply thankful.
+
+The next day a native with a fast team and an empty toboggan was sent
+down to take our load on to the cabin and bring the dogs back.
+Meanwhile, the mail-carrier had passed the spot, had seen the abandoned
+sled standing by recently broken ice, and had come on into town while we
+slept and none knew of our return, with the news that some one had been
+drowned. The mail for Fairbanks did but await the mail from Fort Yukon,
+and the town rumour, instantly identifying the abandoned sled, was
+carried across to Fairbanks, to my great distress and annoyance. The
+echoes of the distorted account of this misadventure which appeared in a
+Fairbanks newspaper still reverberate in "patent insides" of the
+provincial press of the United States.
+
+[Sidenote: FORT YUKON ]
+
+The next Monday we started again, this time with a toboggan and with a
+man instead of a boy for guide, and in three days of only moderate
+difficulty we reached Fort Yukon.
+
+Fort Yukon, though it holds no attraction for the ordinary visitor or
+the summer tourist on the river, is a place of much interest to those
+who know the history of Alaska. While it is purely a native village,
+with no white population save the traders and the usual sprinkling of
+men that hang around native villages, it is yet the oldest white man's
+post on the Yukon River, save the post established by the Russians at
+Nulato, five or six hundred miles lower down. The Hudson Bay Company
+established itself here in 1846, and that date serves as the year one
+in making calculations and determining ages to this day. It is a fixed
+point in time that every native knows of. Any old man can tell you
+whether he was born before or after that date, and, if before, can pick
+out some boy that is about the age he was when the event occurred. The
+massacre at Nulato in 1851 serves in a similar way for the lower river.
+
+After the Purchase, and the determination of the longitude of Fort Yukon
+by Mr. Raymond in 1869--who made the first steamboat journey up the
+Yukon on that errand--the Hudson Bay Company moved three times before
+they succeeded in getting east of the 141st meridian, and at the point
+reached on the third move, the New Rampart House on the Porcupine River,
+only a few hundred yards beyond the boundary-line, they remained until
+the gold excitement on the Yukon and the journeying of the natives to
+new posts on that river rendered trading unprofitable; then they
+withdrew to the Mackenzie. The oldest white men's graves in Alaska,
+again with the exception of Nulato, are those in the little Hudson Bay
+cemetery near Fort Yukon.
+
+[Sidenote: ARCHDEACON MACDONALD ]
+
+Fort Yukon is also the site of the oldest missionary station on the
+river, unless there were earlier visits of Russian priests to the lower
+river, of which there seems no record, for in 1862 there was a clergyman
+of the Church of England at this place. Archdeacon MacDonald was a
+remarkable man. Married to a native wife, he translated the whole Bible
+and the Book of Common Prayer into the native tongue, and his
+translations are in general use on the upper river to this day. He
+reduced the language to writing, extracted its grammar, taught the
+Indians to read and write their own tongue, and dignified it by the gift
+of the great literature of the sacred books. The language is, of course,
+a dying one--English is slowly superseding it--but it seems safe to say
+that for a generation or two yet to come it will be the basis of the
+common speech of the people and the language of worship. It is chiefly
+in matters of trading and handicrafts that English is taking its place,
+though here as elsewhere it stands to the discredit of the civilised
+race that blackguard English is the first English that is learned.
+
+There seems ground to question whether the substitution of a smattering
+of broken English for the flexibility and picturesque expressiveness of
+an indigenous tongue, thoroughly understood, carries with it any great
+intellectual gain, though to suggest such a doubt is treason to some
+minds. The time threatens when all the world will speak two or three
+great languages, when all little tongues will be extinct and all little
+peoples swallowed up, when all costume will be reduced to a dead level
+of blue jeans and shoddy and all strange customs abolished. The world
+will be a much less interesting world then; the spice and savour of the
+ends of the earth will be gone. Nor does it always appear unquestionable
+that the world will be the better or the happier. The advance of
+civilisation would be a great thing to work for if we were quite sure
+what we meant by it and what its goal is. To the ordinary government
+school-teacher in Alaska, with some notable exceptions, it seems to
+mean chiefly teaching the Indians to call themselves Mr. and Mrs. and
+teaching the women to wear millinery, with a contemptuous attitude
+toward the native language and all native customs. The less intelligent
+grade of missionary sometimes falls into the same easy rut. So letters
+pass through the post-offices addressed: "Mr. Pretty Henry," "Mrs.
+Monkey Bill," "Miss Sally Shortandirty"; so, occasionally, the grotesque
+spectacle may present itself, to the passengers on a steamer, of a
+native woman in a "Merry Widow" hat and a blood-stained parkee gutting
+salmon on the river bank.
+
+The nobler ideal, as it seems to some of us, is to labour for
+God-fearing, self-respecting Indians rather than imitation white men and
+white women. An Indian who is honest, healthy and kindly, skilled in
+hunting and trapping, versed in his native Bible and liturgy, even
+though he be entirely ignorant of English and have acquired no taste for
+canned fruit and know not when Columbus discovered America, may be very
+much of a man in that station of life in which it has pleased God to
+call him.
+
+Christmas and the Fourth of July are the Indian's great holidays, the
+one just after the best moose hunting and the other just before the
+salmon run. It may be supposed that there were always great feasts at
+the winter and summer solstices, though now he is sufficiently devout at
+the one and patriotic at the other. At these seasons, and for weeks
+before and after, Fort Yukon gathers a large number of Indians. It is
+the native metropolis of the country within a radius of a hundred
+miles, and what may be termed its permanent population of one hundred
+and fifty is doubled and sometimes trebled by contingents from the
+Chandalar, the Porcupine, and the Black Rivers, from that long river
+called Birch Creek, and all the intervening country. Many families of
+the "uncivilised," self-respecting kind, to which reference has been
+made, come in from outlying points, and the contrast between them and
+their more sophisticated kinfolk of the town is all in their favour.
+
+[Sidenote: JIMMY]
+
+Such a gathering had already taken place in preparation for the
+Christmas holidays when we reached Fort Yukon on the 15th of December.
+It would have been pleasant to spend Christmas with them, but we were
+due two hundred and fifty miles away, at Bettles, for that feast, if by
+any means we could get there. So we lingered but the two days necessary
+to equip ourselves. Jimmy had torn our bedding to pieces on the night of
+the mishap; it was lashed on the outside of the load, and he had
+scratched and clawed it to make a nest for himself until fur from the
+robe and feathers from the quilts were all over the trail. The other
+dogs, not so warmly coated as he, had been content to sleep in the snow.
+Jimmy's character was gradually revealing itself. A well-bred trail dog
+will not commit the canine sacrilege of invading the sled. That is a
+"Siwash" dog's trick. So there was fresh bedding to manufacture, as well
+as supplies for two hundred miles to get together.
+
+A mail once a month went at that time from Fort Yukon to the Koyukuk,
+and there was little other travel. The course lay fifty or sixty miles
+across country to the Chandalar River, about one hundred miles up that
+stream, and then across a divide to the South Fork of the Koyukuk, and
+across another to the Middle Fork, on which Coldfoot is situated. It is
+not possible to procure any supplies, save sometimes a little fish for
+dog food and that not certainly, between Fort Yukon and Coldfoot, so
+that provision for the whole journey must be taken.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CHANDALAR]
+
+A new Indian guide had been engaged as far as Coldfoot, and we set
+out--three men, two toboggans, and seven dogs; four on the larger
+vehicle and three on the smaller, one of the dogs brought by our guide.
+Three miles from Fort Yukon we crossed the Porcupine River and then
+plunged into the wilderness of lake and swamp and forest that stretches
+north of the Yukon. A portage trail, as such a track across country is
+called to distinguish it from a river trail, has the advantage of such
+protection from storm as its timbered stretches afford. For miles and
+miles the route passes through scrub spruce that has been burned over,
+with no prospect but a maze of charred poles against the snow, some
+upright, others at every angle of inclination. Then comes a lake, with
+difficulty in finding the trail on its wind-swept surface and sometimes
+much casting about to discover where it leaves the lake again, and then
+more small burned timber. Wherever the route is through woods, living or
+dead, it is blazed; when it strikes the open, one is often at a loss.
+After three or four days of such travel, sometimes reaching an old cabin
+for the night, sometimes pitching the tent, one is rejoiced at the
+sight of distant mountains and at the intimation they bring that the
+inexpressible dreariness of the Yukon Flats is nearly past; and
+presently the trail opens suddenly upon the broad Chandalar.
+
+The Hudson Bay voyageurs are responsible for many names in this part of
+Alaska, and Chandalar is a corruption of their "Gens de large." The
+various native tribes received appellations indicating habitats. A tribe
+that differed from most northern Indians, in having no permanent
+villages and in living altogether in encampments, was named "Gens de
+large," and the river which they frequented took their name.
+
+It is one of the second-rate tributaries of the Yukon, and in general
+its waters are swift and shallow, not navigable for light-draught
+steamboats for more than one hundred and fifty miles, save at flood, and
+not easily navigable at all. It is these swift shallow streams that are
+so formidable in winter on account of overflow water, and the Chandalar
+is one of the most dreaded.
+
+[Sidenote: DIPHTHERIA]
+
+Ten miles along the river's surface brought us to the Chandalar native
+village, a settlement of half a dozen cabins and twenty-five or thirty
+souls. The people came out to meet us, and said they were just about to
+bury a baby, and asked me to conduct the funeral. Because we had not
+done a day's march and were under compulsion to push on at our best
+speed, I did not unlash the sled but went just as I was up the hill with
+the sorrowful procession to the little graveyard. On the way down I
+asked as best I could of what sickness the baby had died, and I felt
+some uneasiness when the throat was pointed to as the seat of disease.
+When, presently, I was informed that two others were sick, and of the
+same complaint, my uneasiness became alarm. I went at once to see them,
+and the angry swollen throats patched with white membrane which I
+discovered left no room for doubt that we were in the presence of
+another outbreak of diphtheria. That disease had scourged the Yukon in
+the two preceding years. Twenty-three children died at Fort Yukon in the
+summer of 1904, half a dozen at Circle in the following winter, though
+that outbreak was grappled with from the first; and all along the river
+the loss of life was terrible.
+
+There was no question that we must give up all hope of reaching Bettles
+for Christmas and stay and do what we could for these people. So we made
+camp on the outskirts of the village, and I went to work swabbing out
+the throats with carbolic acid and preparing liquid food from our grub
+box. There was nothing to eat in the village but dried fish and a little
+dried moose, and these throats like red-hot iron could hardly swallow
+liquids. The two patients were a boy of sixteen and a grown woman. It
+was evident that unless we could isolate them the disease would probably
+pass through the whole village, and, indeed, others might have been
+infected already. It was likely that we were in for a siege of it, and
+our supply of condensed milk and extract of beef would soon be
+exhausted. Moreover, at Fort Yukon was the trained nurse who had coped
+with the epidemic there and at Circle, while we had virtually no
+experience with the disease at all. It was resolved to send back to Fort
+Yukon for supplies and for the nurse.
+
+The next morning Mr. Knapp and the native boy took the dogs and the sled
+and started back. With no load save a little grub and bedding, they
+could make the journey in two days, a day must be allowed for
+preparations, and, with the aid of another dog team, two days more would
+bring them back. Five days was the least they could be gone. It was
+asking a great deal of this lady to abandon her Christmas festival,
+preparations for which had long been making, and to come sixty-five
+miles through the frozen wilderness in a toboggan; but I felt sure she
+would drop everything and come.
+
+For those five days I was busied in close attention to the patients and
+in strenuous though not altogether availing efforts to maintain a
+quarantine of the cabin in which they lay. There was little more that I
+could do than swab out the throats and administer food every two hours.
+As the disease advanced it was increasingly painful to swallow and
+exceedingly difficult to induce the sufferers to make the attempt or to
+open their mouths for the swabbing. After two or three days the woman
+seemed to have passed the crisis of the disease and to be mending, but
+the boy, I thought, grew worse. One becomes attached to those to whom
+one ministers, and this poor, speechless boy, with his terrible throat
+and the agony in his big black eyes, appealed to me very strongly
+indeed. It was torture to move his head or to open his mouth, and I had
+to torture him continually.
+
+Every night I gathered the people for Divine service. Here was a little
+community far off in the wilds that had carefully conserved and handed
+on to their children the teaching they had received no less than thirty
+years before. The native Bibles and prayer-books and hymnals were
+brought out, bearing dates of publication in the seventies; one of their
+number acted as leader, and what he read was painfully followed in the
+well-thumbed books. They lifted their voices in a weird transformation
+of familiar tunes, with quavers and glides that had crept in through
+long, uncorrected use, and amongst the prayers said was one for "Our
+Sovereign lady Queen Victoria, and Albert Edward, Prince of Wales." I
+tried to explain that Queen Victoria was dead, that they were not living
+under British rule, and I took a pencil and struck out the prayers for
+the royal family from the books. But there was doubt in their minds and
+a reluctance to alter in any particular the liturgy that had been taught
+them, and it is quite likely that intercessions for a defunct sovereign
+of another land still arise from the Chandalar village. One cannot but
+feel a deep admiration for the pioneer missionaries of this
+region--Bishop Bompas, Archdeacon MacDonald, and the others--whose
+teaching was so thorough and so lasting, and who lived and laboured here
+long before any gold seeker had thought of Alaska, when the country was
+an Indian country exclusively, with none of the comforts and
+conveniences that can now be enjoyed. It was to a remote cabin on the
+East Fork of this river that Archdeacon MacDonald retired for a year to
+make part of his translation of the Bible, according to the Indian
+account.
+
+[Sidenote: THE SHORTEST DAY]
+
+At noon on the 21st of December, the shortest day, there is a note in my
+diary that I saw the sun's disk shining through the trees. Although
+fully half a degree of latitude north of the Arctic Circle, the
+refraction is sufficient to lift his whole sphere above the horizon. One
+speculates how much farther north it would be possible to see any part
+of the sun at noon on the shortest day; but north of here, throughout
+Alaska, is broken and mountainous country. We were on the northern edge
+of the great flat of the interior.
+
+The fifth day at the village was Christmas Eve. My boy was in a critical
+condition, very low and weak, with a temperature that stayed around 101°
+and 102°. As night approached I watched with the greatest anxiety for
+the party from Fort Yukon, and, just as the last lingering glow of the
+long twilight was fading from the south, there was a distant tinkle of
+bells on the trail, and faintly once and again a man's voice was raised
+in command and I knew that relief was at hand.
+
+The nurse had dropped everything and had come, as I felt sure she would.
+Gathering medicines and supplies and hiring a native dog team and
+driver, she had left immediately, and the round trip had been made in
+the shortest time it was possible to make it. It was a tremendous relief
+to see her step out of the rugs and robes of the toboggan and take
+charge of the situation in her quiet, competent way. A small, outlying
+cabin was selected for a hospital, the family that occupied it bundled
+out into a tent, and the two sick persons carefully moved into it, with
+whom and the mother of the sick boy the nurse took up her abode. Then
+there was the Christmas-tree in the chief's cabin, with little gifts for
+the children sent out from the mission at Fort Yukon some time before,
+and a dance afterward, for Christmas festivities must go on, whatever
+happens, at a native village. I took James's pocket-knife to him after
+the celebration was over, and I think he really tried to smile as he
+thanked me with his eyes.
+
+The next day after the services, although it was Christmas Day, we set
+to work on the disinfecting of the large cabin in which the sick had
+lain. Stringing bedclothes and wearing apparel on lines from wall to
+wall, and stuffing up every crack and cranny with cotton, we burned
+quantities of sulphur, that the nurse had brought with her, all day
+long.
+
+A recent article in a stray number of a professional journal picked up
+in the office of a medical missionary, devoted column after column to
+the uselessness of all known methods of disinfection. Sulphur,
+formaldehyde, carbolic acid, permanganate of potash, chloride of lime,
+bichloride of mercury--the author knew not which of these "fetiches" to
+be most sarcastic about. It may be that the net result of our copious
+fumigation was but the bleaching of the coloured garments hung up, but
+at least it did no harm. One sometimes wishes that these scientists who
+sit up so high in the seat of the scornful would condescend to a little
+plain instruction.
+
+The anti-diphtheritic serum is now kept in readiness at all our
+missions in Alaska, and the disease seems to have ceased its
+depredations; but it has taken terrible toll of the native people.
+
+[Sidenote: THE MISSIONARY NURSE]
+
+We wished to stay with the nurse until the sickness should be done, but
+she would not hear of it, and insisted upon the resumption of our
+journey. It did not seem right to go off and leave this lonely woman,
+sixty-five miles from the nearest white person, to cope with an outbreak
+of disease that might not yet have spent itself, although there had been
+no new case for a week. "You've done your work here, now leave me to do
+mine. You'll not get to Point Hope this winter if you stay much longer."
+
+"Aren't you afraid to stay all by yourself?" I asked, somewhat
+fatuously.
+
+"Afraid? Afraid of what? You surely don't mean afraid of the natives?"
+
+I did not know what I meant; it seemed not unnatural that a woman with
+such prospect before her should be a little timid, but she was resolute
+that we go, and we went.
+
+Not until the next summer did I learn the upshot--both patients
+recovered and there was no other case. Six years later, when these words
+are written, I have just baptized a son of the boy who lay so ill, who
+would have perished, I think, had we not reached the Chandalar village
+just in time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+CHANDALAR VILLAGE TO BETTLES, COLDFOOT, AND THE KOYUKUK
+
+
+AT five o'clock in the morning of the 27th of December, hours before any
+kind of daylight, while the faint "pit-pat" of all-night dancing still
+sounded from the chief's cabin, we dropped down the steep bank to the
+river surface and resumed our journey. Ahead was a man with a candle in
+a tin can, peering for the faint indications of the trail on the ice;
+the other two were at the handle-bars of the toboggans. It is strange
+that in this day of invention and improvement in artificial
+illumination, a candle in a tin can is still the most dependable light
+for the trail. A coal-oil lamp requires a glass which is easily broken,
+and the ordinary coal-oil that comes to Alaska freezes at about 40°
+below. In very cold weather a coal-oil lantern full of oil will go out
+completely from the freezing of its supply. All the various acetylene
+lamps are useless because water is required to generate the gas, and
+water may not be had without stopping and building a fire and melting
+ice or snow. The electric flash-lamp, useful enough round camp, goes out
+of operation altogether on the trail, because the "dry" cell that
+supplies its current is not a dry cell at all, but a moist cell, and
+when its moisture freezes is dead until it thaws out again. No extremity
+of cold will stop a candle from burning, and if it be properly sheltered
+by the tin can it will stand a great deal of wind. The "folding pocket
+lantern," which is nothing but a convenient tin can with mica sides, is
+the best equipment for travel, but an empty butter can or lard can is
+sometimes easier to come by.
+
+The Chandalar is wide-spread in these parts, with several channels, and
+the trail was hard to follow. One track we pursued led us up a bank and
+along a portage and presently stopped at a marten trap; and we had to
+cut across to the river and cast about hither and thither on its broad
+surface to find the mail trail.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CHANDALAR GAP]
+
+All the rivers that are confluent with the Yukon in the Flats enter that
+dreary region through gaps in the mountains that bound the broad plain.
+These gaps are noted for wind, and the Chandalar Gap, which had loomed
+before us since daybreak, is deservedly in especial bad repute. The most
+hateful thing in the Arctic regions is the wind. Cold one may protect
+one's self against, but there is no adequate protection against wind.
+The parkee without opening front or back, that pulls on over the head,
+is primarily a windbreak, and when a scarf is wrapped around mouth and
+nose, and the fur-edged hood of the parkee is pulled forward over cap
+and scarf, the traveller who must face the wind has done all he can to
+protect himself from it.
+
+[Illustration: SUNRISE ON THE CHANDALAR-KOYUKUK PORTAGE.]
+
+Unfortunately, in the confusion of striking the tent and packing in the
+dark, my scarf had been rolled up in the bedding, and, since the wind
+was not bad until we approached the Gap in the evening, I had not
+troubled about it. Now, as we drew nearer and nearer, the wind rose
+constantly. The thermometer was at 38° below zero, and wind at that
+temperature cuts like a knife. But to get my scarf meant stopping the
+whole procession and unlashing and unloading the sled, and the man who
+unlashed in that wind would almost certainly freeze his fingers. So I
+gave up the thought of it, turned my back to the wind while I tied my
+pocket handkerchief round mouth and nose, drew the strings of my parkee
+hood close, and then faced it again to worry through as best I could.
+The ice is always swept clear of snow in the Gap. The river narrows
+within its jaws, the ragged rocks rise up to the bluffs on either hand,
+and the blue-streaked ice stretches between. We all suffered a good
+deal. Against that cruel wind it was impossible to keep warm. The hands,
+though enclosed in woollen gloves, and they in blanket-lined moose-hide
+mitts, grew numb; the toes, within their protection of caribou sock with
+the hair on, strips of blanket wrapping, and mukluks stuffed with hay,
+tingled with warning of frost-bite; the whole body was chilled. We all
+froze our faces, I think, for the part of the face around and between
+the eyes cannot be covered. I froze my cheeks, my nose, and my Adam's
+apple, the last a most inconvenient thing to freeze.
+
+[Illustration: COLDFOOT ON THE KOYUKUK.]
+
+[Sidenote: A COLD LODGING]
+
+The cabin was just the other side of the Gap, and it was well that it
+was no farther, for we were weary with our thirty-mile run and
+dangerously cold with the exposure of the last hour. It was rather a
+large cabin as trail cabins go, with a rickety sheet-iron stove in the
+middle, burned full of holes, and it was hours before the fire began to
+make any impression on the obstinate, sullen cold of that hut. When we
+went to bed the frost still stood thick and heavy on the walls all over
+the room. A log building, properly constructed, is a warm building, but
+slowness in parting with heat means slowness in receiving heat, and a
+log cabin that has been unoccupied for a long time in very cold weather
+is hard to heat in one evening.
+
+When we started next morning the thermometer stood at 45° below zero,
+but we were out of the wind region and did not mind the cold. It is
+curious that a few miles on either side of that Gap the air will be
+still, while in the Gap itself a gale is blowing. Seven times I have
+passed through that Gap and only once without wind. The great Flats were
+now behind us, we had passed into the mountains, and for the remainder
+of our long journey we should scarce ever be out of sight of mountains
+again. Up the river, with its constant trouble of overflow, going around
+the open water whenever we could, plunging through it in our mukluks
+when it could not be avoided--with the care of the dogs' feet that the
+cold weather rendered more than ever necessary when they got wet, and
+the added nuisance of throwing the toboggans on their sides and beating
+the ice from them with the flat of the axe wherever water had been
+passed through--for two days we followed its windings, the thermometer
+between -45° and -50°, the mountains rising higher and the scenery
+growing more picturesque as we advanced. At the end of the second day
+from the Gap we were at the mouth of the West Fork of the Chandalar, and
+after passing up it for fifteen or sixteen miles we left that
+watercourse to cross the mountains to the South Fork of the Koyukuk
+River.
+
+Then began hard labour again. A toboggan is not a good vehicle for
+crossing summits. Its bottom is perfectly flat and smooth, polished like
+glass by the friction of the snow. If the trail be at all "sidling" (and
+mountain trails are almost always "sidling"), the toboggan swings off on
+the side of the inclination and must be kept on the trail by main force.
+The runners of a sled will grip the surface, if there be any
+inequalities at all, but a toboggan swings now this way and now that,
+like a great pendulum, dragging the near dogs with it. Again and again
+we had to hitch both teams to one toboggan to get up a sidling pitch
+while all hands kept the vehicle on the trail, and our progress was
+painful and slow. In soft snow on a level surface like the river bed or
+through the Flat country, generally, the toboggan is much the more
+convenient vehicle, for it rides over the snow instead of ploughing
+through it, but on hard snow anywhere or on grades the toboggan is a
+nuisance. Thus wallowing through the deep snow at the side of the
+toboggans to hold them in place we sweated and slaved our way mile after
+mile up the gradual ascent until we reached the spot, just under a
+shoulder of the summit, where there was dry spruce and green spruce for
+camping, the dry for fire and the green for couch, and there we halted
+for the night.
+
+[Sidenote: JOHN MUIR]
+
+Next morning we crossed the low pass and dropped down easily into the
+wide valley of the Koyukuk South Fork, with a fine prospect of mountains
+everywhere as far as the eye could see. I had stood and gazed upon those
+same mountains on my journey of the previous winter, my first winter in
+Alaska, and had seen a most remarkable sight. As we began the descent
+and a turn of the trail gave a new panorama of peaks I did not at first
+realise the nature of the peculiar phenomenon I was gazing at. Each peak
+had a fine, filmy, fan-shaped cloud stretching straight out from it into
+the sky, waving and shimmering as it stretched. The sun was not above
+the horizon, but his rays caught these sheer, lawn-like streamers and
+played upon them with a most delicate opalescent radiance. Then all at
+once came to my mind the recollection of a description in John Muir's
+_Mountains of California_ (surely the finest mountain book ever written)
+of the snow banners of the Sierra Nevada, and I knew that I was looking
+at a similar spectacle. It meant that a storm was raging on high,
+although so far we were sheltered from it. It meant that the dry,
+sand-like snow of the mountain flanks was driven up those flanks so
+fiercely before the wind that it was carried clean over them and beyond
+them out into the sky, and still had such pressure behind it that it
+continued its course and spread out horizontally, thinning and spreading
+for maybe a mile before it lost all coherence and visibility. As far as
+I could see mountain peaks I could see the snow banners, all pointing
+one way, all waving, all luminous and shimmering in the sun-rays. It was
+a very noble sight, and I gazed a long while entranced, not knowing how
+ominous it was. When we reached the valley and left the shelter of the
+gulch we struck the full force of that fearful gale, and for two days
+and nights of incessant blizzard we lay in a hole dug out of a sand-bank
+(for we had no tent that year), the trail lost, the grub box nearly
+empty, and no fire possible to cook anything with had the grub box been
+full.
+
+The valley before us--to resume the narrative--is a high, wind-swept
+region of niggerhead and swamp, the catch-basin of the South Fork of the
+Koyukuk River. The trail descends one of its southern draws, follows up
+the main valley awhile, crosses it, and leaves by one of its northern
+draws to pass over the mountains that separate its drainage from the
+main fork of the Koyukuk. The cold had given place to wind, and though
+the gale did not approach the fierceness of last year's storm, it gave
+great trouble in following the track. These high headwater basins are
+always windy; the timber is scrubby spruce with many open places, and in
+such open places the trail is soon obliterated altogether.
+
+When the light fails this casting about for blazes whenever a clump of
+spruce is reached becomes increasingly slow and difficult and at last
+becomes hopeless. The general direction determined, it might be thought
+that the traveller could ignore the tracks of previous passage and
+strike out for himself, but he knows that the trail, however rough, is
+at least practicable, whereas an independent course may soon lead to
+steep gullies or cut banks, or may entangle him in some thicket that he
+must resort to the axe to pass through. Moreover, even two or three
+passages through the snow in the winter will give some bottom to a
+trail; a bottom that, when the wind-swept areas are passed and the
+snow-shoes are resumed, both he and his dogs will be thankful for.
+
+[Sidenote: CAMP MAKING]
+
+So we made a camp as it darkened to night, not far from the spot where I
+had "siwashed" with an Indian companion the previous winter, the wind
+blowing half a gale at 20° below zero.
+
+Making camp under such circumstances is always a very disagreeable
+proceeding. It takes time and care to make a comfortable camp, and time
+and care in the wind and the cold involve suffering. Two suitable trees
+must be selected between which the tent is to be suspended by the
+ridge-rope, and the snow must all be scraped away by the snow-shoes, or,
+if it be too deep, beaten down. Then while one man unlashes and unpacks
+the sleds, another cuts green spruce and lays it all over the tent
+space, thicker and finer where the bed is to be. Then up goes the tent,
+its corner ropes and its side strings made fast to boughs, if there be
+such, or to stakes, or to logs laid parallel to the sides. Then the
+stovepipe is jointed and the stove set up on the edge of green billets
+properly shaped. Meanwhile the axe-man, the green boughs cut, has been
+felling and splitting a dry tree for stove wood, and the whole
+proceedings are rushed and hastened towards getting a fire in that
+stove. Sometimes it is a question whether we shall get a fire before we
+freeze our fingers or freeze our fingers before we get a fire. The fire
+once going, we are safe, for however much more work there is in the
+open, and there is always a good deal more, one can go to the tent to
+get warm. Enough stove wood must be cut, not only for night and morning,
+but for cooking the dog feed. The dog pot, filled with snow, into which
+the fish are cut up, is put upon the outdoor fire as soon as man-supper
+begins cooking in the tent. When it boils, the rice and tallow must be
+added, and when the rice has boiled twenty minutes the whole is set
+aside to cool. Meanwhile the two aluminum pots full of snow, replenished
+from time to time as it melts, are put upon the stove in the tent as the
+necessary preliminary to cooking. Sometimes ice, and more rarely water,
+may be had, and then supper is hastened. If we are camped on the river
+bank sometimes a steel-pointed rifle-bullet fired straight down into the
+ice will penetrate to the water below and allow a little jet to bubble
+up. Melting snow is a tedious business at best; but, since three times
+out of four when camping it must be done, the aluminum pots are a
+treasure. There is still work for every one as well as the cook. Snow
+must be banked all round the tent to keep out the wind. Little heaps of
+spruce boughs must be cut for the dogs' beds; it is all we can do for
+them whatever the weather, and they appreciate it highly. It may be that
+dog moccasins must be taken off and strung around the stove to dry, and
+before supper is ready the inside ridge-rope of the tent is heavy with
+all sorts of drying man-wear: socks, moccasins, scarfs, toques,
+mittens. One of the earliest habits a man learns on the trail is to hang
+up everything to dry as soon as he takes it off. Why should it be hung
+up to dry unless it has got wet? the writer was once asked, in detailing
+these operations. Because there is no other way to remove the ice with
+which everything becomes incrusted in very cold weather.
+
+[Sidenote: CAMP COOKING]
+
+As his snow melts the cook throws into the pot a few handfuls of
+evaporated potatoes, a handful of evaporated onions, and smaller
+quantities of evaporated "soup vegetables," and leaves them to soak and
+simmer and resume their original size and flavour. By and by he will cut
+up the moose meat or the rabbits or birds, or whatever game he may have,
+and throw it in, and in an hour or an hour and a half there will be a
+savoury stew that, with a pan of biscuits cooked in an aluminum
+reflector beside the stove and a big pot of tea, constitutes the
+principal meal of the day. Or if the day has been long and sleep seems
+more attractive even than grub, he will turn some frozen beans, already
+boiled, into a frying-pan with a big lump of butter, and when his meat
+is done supper is ready. Beans thus prepared eaten red hot with grated
+cheese are delicious to a hungry man. With the stove for a sideboard,
+food may always be eaten hot, and that is one advantage of camp fare.
+
+The men satisfied, the dogs remain, and while two of the party wash
+dishes and clean up, the third feeds the dogs. Their pot of food has
+been cooling for an hour or more. They will not eat it until it is cold
+and a mess of rice will hold heat a long time even in the coldest
+weather. When it is nearly cold it is dished out with a paddle into the
+individual pans and the dogs make short work of it. There are some who
+feed straight fish, and, if the fish be king salmon of the best quality,
+the dogs do well enough on it. But on any long run it is decidedly
+economical to cook for the dogs--not so much from the standpoint of
+direct cost as from that of weight and ease of hauling. An hundred
+pounds of fish plus an hundred pounds of rice plus fifty pounds of
+tallow will go a great deal farther than two hundred and fifty pounds of
+fish alone. There is little doubt, too, that in the long run the dogs do
+better on cooked food. It is easier of digestion and easier to apportion
+in uniform rations. Rice and fish make excellent food. The Japs took
+Port Arthur on rice and fish. The tallow answers a demand of the climate
+and is increased as the weather grows colder. Man and dog alike require
+quantities of fat food in this climate; it is astonishing how much bacon
+and butter one can eat. When the dogs have eaten, and each one has made
+the rounds of all the other pans to be sure nothing is left, they retire
+to their respective nests of spruce bough and curl themselves up with
+many turnings round and much rearranging of the litter. Feet and nose
+are neatly tucked in, the tail is adjusted carefully over all, the hair
+on the body stands straight up, and the dogs have gone to bed and do not
+like to be disturbed again.
+
+[Sidenote: DOG-HARNESS]
+
+Therein lies the cruelty of depriving them of their tails, which used
+to be the general custom in this country. The old tandem harness almost
+required it, as the breath of the dog behind condensed upon the tail of
+the dog in front until he was carrying around permanently a mass of ice
+that was a burden to him and rendered his tail useless for warmth. But
+the rig with a long mid rope, to which the dogs are attached by
+single-trees in such manner that they may at will be hitched abreast or
+one ahead of the other as the trail is wide or narrow, is superseding
+the tandem rig, and one sees more bushy tails amongst the dogs. The
+thick, long-haired tail of the dog in this country is indeed his
+blanket, and in cold weather the tailless dog is at a great
+disadvantage.
+
+It was said that all the dogs retired to the nests of spruce bough; it
+should have been all but one. It is Lingo's special charge to guard the
+sled and his special privilege to sleep on it. Turning around and
+curling up on the softest spot he can find of the unlashed and partly
+unloaded toboggan, he will not touch anything it contains nor permit any
+other dog to touch it.
+
+The northern skies are clouded the next morning, the first day of the
+new year, and there is a ruddy dawn that is glorious to behold. The
+white earth gives back a soft rose tint, as an organ pipe gives back a
+faint tone to the strong vibration of another pipe in pitch with it. We
+shall not see the sun himself any more for many weeks, but we see his
+light upon the flanks of the mountains for an hour or so around noon.
+The bold, shapely peaks of the South Fork of the Koyukuk turn their
+snows to pink fire as his rays slowly descend their sides, and the
+whole scene is exquisitely beautiful. What a wonderful thing colour is!
+When the skies are overcast this is a dead black-and-white country in
+winter, for spruce, the prevailing wood, is black in the mass at a
+little distance. Gaze where one will, there is naught but black and
+white. The eye becomes tired of the monotony and longs for some warmer
+tone. That is surely the reason why all those who live in the country
+cherish some gay article of attire, why the natives love brilliant
+handkerchiefs, why the white man also will choose a crimson scarf.
+Trudging at the handle-bars, I have found pleasure in the red pompons of
+the dogs' harness, in the gay beading of mitten and hind-sack. And that
+is why a lavish feast of colour such as this dawn stirs one's spirit
+with such keen delight. It gives life to a dead world.
+
+But the wind is still bitter and interferes sadly with one's enjoyment.
+All through the valley, up the creek by which we leave it, past the twin
+lakes on the low summit, the wind grows in force, and when we leave
+Slate Creek for the present and make a "portage" over a mountain
+shoulder to strike the creek again much lower down, the wind has risen
+to a gale that overturns the toboggans and makes the men fight for their
+footing. The actual physical labour of it is enormous, and there can be
+no rest; it is too bitterly cold in that blast to stop. For a mile or
+two we struggle and slave to beat our way around that mountain shoulder
+and then drop down to the creek again. The blessed relief it is to get
+out of the fury of that wind into the comparative shelter of the creek,
+to be done with the ceaseless toil of holding the heavy toboggans from
+hurtling down the hillside, to be able to keep one's feet without
+continually slipping and falling on the wind-hardened snow, no words can
+adequately convey. We are all frozen again a little; this man's nose is
+touched, that man's cheeks, and the other man's finger.
+
+[Sidenote: THE KOYUKUK GOLD CAMP]
+
+On the middle fork of the Koyukuk, at the mouth of Slate Creek, Coldfoot
+sits within a cirque of rugged mountain peaks, the most northerly postal
+town in the interior of Alaska, the most northerly gold-mining town in
+the world, as it claims. It sprang into existence in 1900 and flourished
+for a season or two with the usual accompaniments of such florification.
+In 1906 it was already much decayed, and is now dead. Ever since its
+start the Koyukuk camp has steadily produced gold and given occupation
+to miners numbering from one hundred and fifty to three hundred, but the
+scene of operations, and therefore the depot for supplies, has
+continually changed. In 1900 the chief producing creek was Myrtle, which
+is a tributary of Slate Creek, and the town at the mouth was in eligible
+situation, though much over-built from the first. Then the centre of
+interest shifted to Nolan Creek, fifteen miles farther up the river,
+which is a tributary of Wiseman Creek, and the town of Wiseman sprang up
+at the mouth of that creek. The post-office, the commissioner's office,
+and the saloon, the stores and road-houses, migrated to the new spot,
+and Coldfoot was abandoned. Now the chief producing creek is the Hammond
+River, still farther up the Koyukuk, and if its placer deposits prove
+as rich as they promise it is likely that a town will spring up at the
+mouth of the Hammond which will supersede Wiseman.
+
+There has never been found a continuous pay-streak in the Koyukuk camp.
+It is what is known as a "pocket" camp. Now and again a "spot" is found
+which enriches its discoverers, while on the claims above and below that
+spot the ground may be too poor to work at a profit; for ground must be
+rich to be worked at all in the Koyukuk. It is the most expensive camp
+in Alaska, perhaps in the world. This is due to its remoteness and
+difficulty of access. Far north of the Arctic Circle, the diggings are
+about seventy-five miles above the head of light-draught steamboat
+navigation, and more than six hundred miles above the confluence of the
+Koyukuk with the Yukon. Transshipped at Nulato to the shoal-water
+steamboats that make three or four trips a season up the Koyukuk,
+transshipped again at Bettles, the head of any steamboat navigation,
+freight must be hauled on horse scows the remaining seventy-five miles
+of the journey; and all that handling and hauling means high rates. The
+cost of living, the cost of machinery, the general cost of all mining
+operations is much higher than on the Yukon or on the other tributaries
+of that river. The very smallness of the camp is a factor in the high
+prices, for there is not trade enough to induce brisk competition with
+the reduction of rates that competition brings.
+
+[Sidenote: MINERS' GENEROSITY]
+
+Yet the smallness and the isolation of the camp have their
+compensations. There is more community life, more _esprit de corps_
+amongst the Koyukuk miners than will be found in any other camp in
+Alaska. Thrown upon their own resources for amusement, social gatherings
+are more common and are made more of, and hospitality is universal. Like
+all sparsely settled and frontier lands, Alaska is a very hospitable
+place in general, but the Koyukuk has earned the name of the most
+hospitable camp in Alaska. Since the numbers are small, and each man is
+well known to all the others, any sickness or suffering makes an
+immediate appeal and brings a generous response. Again and again the
+unfortunate victim of accident or disease has been sent outside for
+treatment, the considerable money required being quickly raised by
+public subscription. There is probably no other gold camp in the world
+where it is a common thing for the owner of a good claim to tell a
+neighbour who is "broke" to take a pan and go down to the drift and help
+himself.
+
+Until my visit of the previous year no minister of religion of any sort
+had penetrated to the Koyukuk, and, save for one journey thither by
+Bishop Rowe, my annual visits have been the only opportunities for
+public worship since. It will suffice for the visit now describing as
+well as for all the others to say that the reception was most cordial
+and the opportunity much appreciated. We went from creek to creek and
+gathered the men and the few women in whatever cabin was most
+convenient, and no clergyman could wish for more attentive or interested
+congregations.
+
+[Illustration: THE UPPER KOYUKUK.]
+
+Upon our return to Coldfoot from the creek visits the thermometer stood
+at 52° below zero, although it had been no lower than 38° below when we
+left the last creek, some fifteen miles away. As a general rule, the
+temperature on these mountain creeks, which are at some considerable
+elevation above the river into which they flow, will read from 10° to
+15° higher than on the river, and if one climbed to the top of the peaks
+around Coldfoot, the difference then would probably be 20° or 25°. At
+the summit road-house between Fairbanks and Cleary City in the Tanana
+country in cold weather the thermometer commonly reads 20° above the one
+place and 10° or 15° above the other.
+
+[Illustration: THE BARREN SHORES OF KOTZEBUE SOUND.]
+
+[Sidenote: LINGO]
+
+This interesting fact, which surprises a good many people, for we are
+used to think of elevated places as cold places, is due to the greater
+heaviness of cold air, which sinks to the lowest level it can reach; and
+the river bed is the lowest part of the country. It would be interesting
+to find out to what extent this rule holds good. The ridges and the
+hilltops are always the warmest places in cold weather; would this hold
+as regards mountain tops?--as regards high mountain tops? Probably it
+would hold in the sunshine, but the rapid radiation of heat in the
+rarefied atmosphere of mountain tops would swing the balance the other
+way after dark. There is no doubt, however, that the coldest place in
+cold weather in Alaska is the river surface, and it is on the river
+surface that most of our travelling is done. The night we returned to
+Coldfoot we put our toboggan up high on the roof of an outhouse to keep
+its skin sides from the teeth of some hungry native dogs, leaving some
+of the load that was not required within it, covered by the sled
+cloth. Later on I saw by the light of the moon Lingo's silhouetted
+figure sitting bolt upright on top of the sled, and he gave his short
+double bark as I drew near to make me notice that he was still doing his
+duty although under difficulties. The dog had climbed up a wood-pile and
+had jumped to the top of the outhouse and so to the sled. I thought of
+Kipling's _Men That Fought at Minden_:
+
+        "For fatigue it was their pride
+         And they would _not_ be denied
+         To clean the cook-house floor."
+
+Here at Coldfoot we came first into contact with that interesting tribe
+of wandering inland Esquimaux known as the Kobuks, from their occupation
+of the river of that name. The Koyukuk has its own Indian people, but
+these enterprising Kobuks have pushed their way farther and farther from
+salt water into what used to be exclusive Indian territory.
+Representatives of both races were at Coldfoot, and as we lay
+weather-bound for a couple of days, I was enabled to renew last year's
+acquaintance with them, though without a good interpreter not much
+progress was made. The delight of these people at the road-house
+phonograph, the first they had ever heard, was some compensation for the
+incessant snarl and scream of the instrument itself. It was very funny
+to see them sitting on the floor, roaring with laughter at one
+particularly silly spoken record of the "Uncle Josh at the World's Fair"
+order. Over and over again they would ask for that record, and it never
+ceased to convulse them with laughter. "He's been enjoyin' poor health
+lately, but this mornin' I heard him complain that he felt a little
+better"--how sick and tired we got of this and similar jokes drawled out
+a dozen times running! The natives did not understand a word of it; it
+was the human voice with its pronounced, unusual inflections that
+aroused their merriment. The phonograph is becoming a powerful agency
+for disseminating a knowledge of English amongst the natives throughout
+Alaska, and one wishes that it were put to better use than the
+reproduction of silly and often vulgar monologue and dialogue and trashy
+ragtime music. As an index of the taste of those who purchase records,
+the selection brought to this country points low.
+
+The third day the thermometer stood at -49° and we were free to leave
+without actually breaking the rule we had made after the escapade on the
+Yukon. Two other teams were going down the river, so we started with
+them on the sixty-five mile journey to Bettles. Twenty miles or so below
+Coldfoot the Koyukuk passes for several miles in a narrow channel
+between steep rock bluffs, with here and there great detached masses
+standing in the middle of the river. One has a grotesque resemblance to
+an aged bishop in his vestments and is known as the Bishop Rock; another
+a more remote likeness to an Indian woman, and this is known as the
+Squaw Rock. This part of the river, which is called the cañon of the
+Koyukuk, though it is not a true cañon, is very picturesque, and because
+of frequent overflow, offers glare ice and swift passage to the
+traveller when it does not embarrass him with running water. We were
+fortunate enough to pass it without getting our dogs' feet wet, and made
+the half-way road-house in a brilliant moon that rendered travelling at
+night pleasanter than during the day.
+
+[Sidenote: TRAVELLING AT "50 BELOW"]
+
+The next day we started again at near 50° below, but because there was a
+good trail and a road-house for noon, the travelling was rather pleasant
+than otherwise. If there be a warm house to break the day's march and
+eat in, where ice-incrusted scarfs and parkees and caps and mittens may
+be dried out, with a warm outhouse where the dogs may rest in comfort,
+travelling in such weather is not too risky or too severely trying. The
+continual condensation of the moisture from the breath upon everything
+about the head and face is a decided inconvenience, and when it
+condenses upon the eye-lashes, and the upper and the lower lashes freeze
+together, the ice must be removed or it is impossible to open the eyes.
+This requires the momentary application of the bare hand, and every time
+it goes back into the mitten it carries some moisture with it, so that
+after a while mittens are wet as well as head-gear; moreover, there is
+always a certain perspiration that condenses. One gets into the habit of
+turning the duffel lining of the moose-hide mitts inside out and hanging
+them up the moment one gets inside a cabin. Round every road-house stove
+there is a rack constructed for just that purpose.
+
+There is no more striking phenomenon of the arctic trail than the
+behaviour of smoke in cold weather. As one approaches a road-house, and
+to greater degree a village or a town, it is seen enveloped in mist,
+although there be no open water to account for it, and the prospect in
+every other direction be brilliantly clear. It is not mist at all; it is
+merely the smoke from the stovepipes. And the explanation is simple,
+although not all at once arrived at. Smoke rises because it is warmer
+than the air into which it is discharged; for that and no other reason.
+Now, when smoke is discharged into air at a temperature of 50° below
+zero, it is deprived of its heat immediately and falls to the ground by
+its greater specific gravity. The smoke may be observed just issuing
+from the pipe, or rising but a few feet, and then curling downward to be
+diffused amidst the air near the ground.
+
+It was to such a smoke-enveloped inn that we pulled up to warm and
+refresh ourselves and our team for the twenty miles that remained of the
+day's march. We had almost reached the limit of Koyukuk road-houses.
+Bettles being the head of navigation, and merchandise late in the season
+finding water too shallow for transport to the diggings, there is more
+or less freighting with dog teams and horses all the winter. This travel
+keeps open the road-houses on the route. From an "outside" point of view
+they may appear rough and the fare coarse. The night accommodation is a
+double row of bunks on each side of a long room with a great stove in
+the middle. Sometimes there is straw in the bunks, sometimes spruce
+boughs; in the better class even sometimes hay-stuffed mattresses. But
+to the weary traveller, who has battled with the storm or endured the
+intense cold for hours at a stretch, they are glad havens of refuge;
+they are often even life-saving stations.
+
+[Sidenote: METEOROLOGICAL]
+
+While we lay at the road-house the clear sky clouded and the thermometer
+rose. This is an unfailing sequence. Clear, bright weather is cold
+weather; cloudy weather is warm weather. The usual explanation, that the
+cloud acts as a blanket that checks the radiation of heat from the
+earth, is one of those explanations that do not explain. There is no
+heat to radiate. The cloud is a mass of moist air, which is warm air,
+introducing itself from some milder region. So the cloud brings the
+heat; and the lower layers of atmosphere extract it and thereby
+discharge the moisture. For an hour or two around noon the thermometer
+stood at -35° and there was a light fall of snow; then the skies cleared
+because they were discharged of all their moisture, and the thermometer
+went down to -50° again. It is a beautifully simple process and
+sometimes takes place two or three times a day. Every time the sky
+clouds, the thermometer rises; every time the sky clears, the
+thermometer falls. And because the barometer gives notice of changes in
+the density of the atmosphere, it is valuable in forecasting temperature
+in our winters. A steady rise in the barometer means a steady fall in
+the thermometer; a fall in the barometer in a time of great cold
+infallibly prophesies warmer weather; even such rapid changes as the one
+given above are anticipated. So well is this established, that during
+"50°-below spells" at Fairbanks, impatient, weather-bound travellers and
+freighters would busy the hospital telephone with inquiries about the
+barometer, the hospital having the only barometer in the country.
+
+After another long, cold run, on the night of Friday, the 12th of
+January, we reached Bettles, the place we had planned to spend Christmas
+at. We were unable to stir from Bettles for two solid weeks, for during
+the whole of that time the thermometer never rose above 50° below zero.
+
+The long wait at Bettles would have been excessively tedious had it not
+been for the kind hospitality of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Grimm, the
+Commercial Company's agent and his wife, and this is but one of many
+times that I have been under obligation to them for cordial welcome and
+entertainment, for needs anticipated, and every sort of assistance
+gladly rendered. We had been expected many days; the Christmas
+festivities with a gathering of natives of both races had come and gone;
+still they looked for us, for in this country one does not give a man up
+merely because he is a few weeks behind time, nor hold him to account
+for unpunctuality. The natives remained for the most part, and there was
+abundant opportunity of intercourse with them and some beginnings of
+instruction. As the days passed and all arrangements for our advance
+were made, we chafed more and more at the delay, for it was very plain
+that the prospect of visiting Point Hope grew less and less; but this is
+a great country for teaching patience and resignation.
+
+[Sidenote: PARASELENÆ]
+
+Some of the weather during that two weeks' wait was of quite exceptional
+severity. One night is fixed for ever in my memory. It is a very rare
+thing for the wind to blow in the "strong cold," but that night there
+was a wind at 58° below zero. And high up in the heavens was a sight I
+had never seen before. The moon, little past her full, had a great ring
+around her, faintly prismatic; and equidistant from her, where a line
+through her centre parallel with the horizon would cut the ring, were
+two other moons, distinct and clear. It was a strangely beautiful thing,
+this sight of three moons sailing aloft through the starry sky, as
+though the beholder had been suddenly translated to some planet that
+enjoys a plurality of satellites, but no living being could stand long
+at gaze in that wind and that cold. A perfect paraselene is, I am
+convinced, an extremely rare thing, much rarer than a perfect parhelion
+("moon-cats" my companion thought the phenomenon should be called,
+saving the canine simile for the sun), for in seven years' travel I have
+never seen another, and the references to it in literature are few.
+
+The next day at noon, the sun not visible above the distant mountains,
+there appeared in the sky a great shining cross of orange light, just
+over the sun's position, that held and shone for nigh an hour and only
+faded with the twilight. It is not surprising that these appearances
+should deeply impress the untutored mind and should be deemed
+significant and portentous; they must deeply impress any normal mind,
+they are so grand and so strange. The man who has trained his intellect
+until it is so stale, and starved his imagination until it is so
+shrivelled that he can gaze unmoved at such spectacles, that they are
+insignificant to him, has but reduced himself to the level of the dog
+upon whom also they make no impression--though even a dog will howl at a
+great aurora. Of course we know all about them; any schoolboy can pick
+up a primer of physical geography and explain the laws of refraction,
+and the ugly and most libellous diagram of circles and angles that shows
+just how these lustrous splendours happen; but the mystery beyond is not
+by one hair's breadth impaired nor their influence upon the spectator
+diminished. In Alaska perhaps more than any other country it is the
+heavens that declare the glory of God and the firmament that shows His
+handiwork, and the awestruck Indian who comes with timid inquiry of the
+import of such phenomena is rightfully and scientifically answered that
+the Great Father is setting a sign in the sky that He still rules, that
+His laws and commandments shall never lose their force, whether in the
+heavens above or on the earth beneath.
+
+[Sidenote: THE STRONG COLD]
+
+The "strong cold" itself is an awe-inspiring thing even to those who
+have been familiar with it all their lives; and a dweller in other
+climes, endowed with any imagination, may without much difficulty enter
+into the feelings of one who experiences it for the first time. It
+descends upon the earth in the brief twilight and long darkness of the
+dead of winter with an irresistible power and an inflexible menace.
+Fifty below, sixty below, even seventy below, the thermometer reads.
+Mercury is long since frozen solid and the alcohol grows sluggish. Land
+and water are alike iron; utter stillness and silence usually reign.
+Bare the hand, and in a few minutes the fingers will turn white and be
+frozen to the bone. Stand still, and despite all clothing, all woollens,
+all furs, the body will gradually become numb and death stalk upon the
+scene. The strong cold brings fear with it. All devices to exclude it,
+to conserve the vital heat seem feeble and futile to contend with its
+terrible power. It seems to hold all living things in a crushing
+relentless grasp, and to tighten and tighten the grip as the temperature
+falls.
+
+Yet the very power of it, and the dread that accompanies it, give a
+certain fearful and romantic joy to the conquest of it. A man who has
+endured it all day, who has endured it day after day, face to face with
+it in the open, feels himself somewhat the more man for the experience,
+feels himself entered the more fully into human possibilities and
+powers, feels an exultation that manhood is stronger even than the
+strong cold. But he is a fool if ever he grow to disdain the enemy. It
+waits, inexorable, for just such disdain, and has slain many at last who
+had long and often withstood it.
+
+On those rare occasions when there is any wind, any movement of the air
+at all, there enters another and a different feeling. Into the menace of
+a power, irresistible, inflexible, but yet insentient, there seems to
+enter a purposeful, vengeful evil. It pursues. The cold itself becomes
+merely a condition; the wind a deadly weapon which uses that condition
+to deprive its victim of all defence. The warmth which active exercise
+stores up, the buckler of the traveller, is borne away. His reserves
+are invaded, depleted, destroyed. And then the wind falls upon him with
+its sword. Of all of which we were to have instance here on the Koyukuk.
+
+[Sidenote: "FOUND FROZEN"]
+
+In the second week of our stay at Bettles, while Divine service was in
+progress in the store building, crowded with whites and natives, the
+door opened and, with an inrush of cold air that condensed the moisture
+at that end of the room into a cloud and shot along the floor like steam
+from an engine exhaust, there entered an Indian covered with rime, his
+whole head-gear one mass of white frost, his snow-shoes, just removed,
+under his arm, and a beaded moose-skin wallet over his shoulder. Every
+eye was at once turned to him as he beat the frost from his parkee hood
+and thrust it back, unwrapped fold after fold of the ice-crusted scarf
+from his face, and pulled off his mittens. Seeking out the agent, he
+moved over to him and whispered something in his ear. It was plain that
+the errand was of moment and the message disturbing, and as I had lost
+the attention of the congregation and the continuity of my own
+discourse, I drew things to a close as quickly as I decently could. That
+Indian had come seventy-five miles on snow-shoes in one run, without
+stopping at all save to eat two or three times, at a continuous
+temperature of 50° below zero or lower, to bring word that he had found
+a white man frozen to death on the trail; and on the Koyukuk that feat
+will always be counted to Albert the Pilot for righteousness. From the
+location and description of the dead man, there was no difficulty in
+identifying him. He was a wood-chopper under contract with the company
+to cut one hundred cords of steamboat wood against next summer's
+navigation at a spot about one hundred miles below Bettles. He had taken
+down with him on the "last water" enough grub for about three months,
+and was to return to Bettles for Christmas and for fresh supplies. After
+a day or two's rest the Indian was sent back with instructions to bring
+the body to a native village we should visit, to whipsaw lumber for a
+coffin and dig a grave, and we engaged to give the body Christian
+burial.
+
+Uneasy at the softening muscles and sinews of this long inaction, I took
+snow-shoes and a couple of Kobuks one day and made an ascent of the hill
+behind Bettles known as Lookout Mountain, because from its top the smoke
+of the eagerly expected first steamboat of the summer may be seen many
+miles down the river; being moved to that particular excursion by
+dispute among the weather-bound freighters as to the hill's height.
+
+The change of temperature as we climbed the hill was striking. On the
+first shoulder we were already out of the dense atmosphere of the valley
+and above the smoke gloom of the houses, and as we rose the air grew
+milder and milder, until at the top we emerged into the first sunshine
+of many weeks and were in an altogether different climate--balmy and
+grateful it was to us just come up from the strong cold. The aneroid
+showed the altitude about seven hundred feet above Bettles, and I
+regretted very much I had not brought the thermometer as well, for its
+reading would have been most interesting.
+
+The view from the top was brilliantly clear and far-reaching. The broad
+plain across the river was checkered black and white with alternating
+spruce thickets and lakes; beyond it and the mountains that bounded it
+lay the valley of the south fork which we had crossed fifty or sixty
+miles farther up on our journey hither. Right in front of us the middle
+fork made its big bend from southwest to south, and to the left, that
+is, to the north, the valley of the John River opened up its course
+through the sharp white peaks of the Endicott Mountains. It was in this
+direction that my eyes lingered longest. I knew that sixty or seventy
+miles up this river we could cross the low Anaktuvak Pass into the
+Anaktuvak River, which flows into the Colville, and that descending the
+Colville we could reach the shores of the Northern Ocean. It was a
+journey I had wished to make--and have wished ever since. There are many
+bands of Esquimaux on that coast, never visited save by those who make
+merchandise of them in one way or another. Please God, some day I should
+get there; meanwhile our present hopes lay west, though, indeed, these
+grew daily fainter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+BETTLES TO THE PACIFIC--THE ALATNA, KOBUK PORTAGE, KOBUK VILLAGE,
+KOTZEBUE SOUND
+
+
+ALL our preparations were long since made. Our Indian guide had been
+sent back to Fort Yukon from Coldfoot, and here we engaged a young
+Esquimau with his dog team and sled, to go across to Kotzebue Sound with
+us. There was also a young Dane who wished to go from the Koyukuk
+diggings to the diggings at Candle Creek on the Seward Peninsula, and
+him we were willing to feed in return for his assistance on the trail.
+The supplies had been carefully calculated for the journey, the
+toboggans were already loaded, and we waited but a break in the cold
+weather to start.
+
+Our course from Bettles would lead us sixty-five miles farther down the
+Koyukuk to the mouth of the Alatna. The visit to the native village and
+the burial of the poor fellow frozen to death would take us ten miles
+farther down than that, and we would return to the Alatna mouth. Then
+the way would lie for fifty miles or so up that stream, and then over a
+portage, across to the Kobuk River, which we should descend to its mouth
+in Kotzebue Sound; the whole distance being about five hundred miles
+through a very little travelled country. We learned indeed, that it had
+been travelled but once this winter, and that on the first snow. It was
+thought at Bettles that we might possibly procure some supplies at a
+newly established mission of the Society of Friends about half-way down
+the Kobuk River, but there was no certainty about it, and we must carry
+with us enough man-food to take us to salt water. Our supply of dog fish
+we might safely count upon replenishing from the natives on the Kobuk.
+Another thing that caused some thought was the supply of small money.
+There was no silver and no currency except large bills on the Koyukuk,
+and we should need money in small sums to buy fish with. So the agent
+weighed out a number of little packets of gold-dust carefully sealed up
+in stout writing-paper like medicine powders, some worth a dollar, some
+worth two dollars, the value written on the face, and we found them
+readily accepted by the natives and very convenient. Two years later I
+heard of some of those packets, unbroken, still current on the Kobuk.
+
+At last, on the 26th of January, we got away. The thermometer stood only
+a few degrees above -50° when we left, but the barometer had been
+falling slowly for a couple of days, and I was convinced the cold spell
+was over. With our three teams and four men we made quite a little
+expedition, but dogs and men were alike soft, and for the first two days
+the travel was laborious and slow; then came milder weather and better
+going.
+
+[Sidenote: THE KOYUKUK "TOWNS" OF '98]
+
+We passed the two ruined huts of Peavey, the roofs crushed by the
+superincumbent snow. In the summer of 1898 a part of the stream of gold
+seekers, headed for the Klondike by way of Saint Michael, was deflected
+to the Koyukuk River by reports of recent discoveries there. A great
+many little steamboat outfits made their way up this river late in the
+season, until their excessive draught in the falling water brought them
+to a stand. Where they stopped they wintered, building cabins and
+starting "towns." In one or two cases the "towns" were electrically lit
+from the steamboat's dynamo. The next summer they all left, all save
+those who were wrecked by the ice, and the "towns" were abandoned. But
+they had got upon the map through some enterprising representative of
+the land office, and they figure on some recent maps still. Peavey,
+Seaforth, Jimtown, Arctic City, Beaver City, Bergman, are all just names
+and nothing else, though at Bergman the Commercial Company had a plant
+for a while.
+
+We passed the mouth of the Alatna, where were two or three Indian
+cabins, and went on the remaining ten miles to Moses' Village, where the
+body of the man frozen to death had been brought. Moses' Village, named
+from the chief, was the largest native village on the Koyukuk River, and
+we were glad, despite our haste, that we had gone there. The repeated
+requests from all the Indians we met for a mission and school on the
+Koyukuk River and the neglected condition of the people had moved me the
+previous year to take up the matter. This was my first visit, however,
+so far down the river.
+
+We found the coffin unmade and the grave undug, and set men vigorously
+to work at both. The frozen body had been found fallen forward on hands
+and feet, and since to straighten it would be impossible without
+several days' thawing in a cabin, the coffin had to be of the size and
+shape of a packing-case; of course the ground for the grave had to be
+thawed down, for so are all graves dug in Alaska, and that is a slow
+business. A fire is kindled on the ground, and when it has burned out,
+as much ground as it has thawed is dug, and then another fire is
+kindled. We had our own gruesome task. The body should be examined to
+make legally sure that death came from natural causes. With difficulty
+the clothes were stripped from the poor marble corpse, my companion made
+the examination, and as a notary public I swore him to a report for the
+nearest United States commissioner. This would furnish legal proof of
+death were it ever required; otherwise, since there is no provision for
+the travelling expenses of coroners, and the nearest was one hundred and
+forty or one hundred and fifty miles away, there would have been no
+inquest and no such proof.
+
+[Sidenote: A WILDERNESS TRAGEDY]
+
+The man had delayed his return to Bettles too long. When his food was
+exhausted and he had to go, there came on that terrible cold spell. A
+little memorandum-book in his pocket told the pitiful story. Day by day
+he lingered hoping for a change, and day by day there was entry of the
+awful cold. He had no thermometer, but he knew the temperature was -50°
+or lower by the cracking noise that his breath made--the old-timer's
+test. At last the grub was all gone and he must go or starve. The final
+entry read: "All aboard to-morrow, hope to God I get there." The Indians
+estimated that he had been walking two days, and had "siwashed it" at
+night somewhere beside a fire in the open without bedding. Holes were
+burned in his breeches in two places, where, doubtless, he had got too
+near the fire. He had nothing whatever to eat with him save a piece of
+bacon gnawed to the rind. There were only two matches in his pocket, and
+they were mixed up with trash of birch-bark and tobacco, so it is likely
+he did not know he had them. He had lit all the fires he could light and
+eaten all the food he had to eat. Still he was plugging along towards
+the native village nine miles away. Then he lost the trail, probably in
+the dark, for it was faint and much drifted, and had taken off his
+snow-shoes to feel with his moccasined feet for the hardened snow that
+would indicate it. That was almost the end. He had gone across the river
+and back again, feeling for the trail, and then, with the deadly
+numbness already upon his brain, had wandered in a circle. The date of
+his starting in the memorandum-book and the distance travelled made it
+almost certain that, at some moment between the time when those three
+moons floated in the sky and the time when that cross glared on the
+horizon, he had fallen in the snow, never to rise again. Fifty-eight
+below zero and a wind blowing!
+
+One supposes that the actual death by freezing is painless, as it is
+certainly slow and gradual. The only instance of sudden gelation I ever
+heard of is in Longfellow's "Wreck of the Hesperus," where the skipper,
+having answered one question, upon being asked another,
+
+        "Answered never a word,
+         For a frozen corpse was he."
+
+But if the actual death be painless, the long conscious fight against it
+must be an agony; for a man of any experience must realise the peril he
+is in. The tingling in fingers and toes and then in knees and elbows is
+a warning he recognises only too well. He knows that, unless he can
+restore warmth by restoring the circulation, he is as good as frozen
+already. He increases his pace and beats his arms against his breast.
+But if his vitality be too much reduced by hunger and fatigue and cold
+to make more than a slight response to the stimulation, if the distance
+to warmth and shelter be too great for a spurt to carry him there, he is
+soon in worse case than before. Then the appalling prospect of perishing
+by the cold must rise nakedly before him. The enemy is in the breach,
+swarming over the ramparts, advancing to the heart of the fortress, not
+to be again repelled. He becomes aware that his hands and feet are
+already frozen, and presently there may be a momentary terrible
+recognition that his wits begin to wander. Frantically he stumbles on,
+thrashing his body with his arms, forcing his gait to the uttermost, a
+prey to the terror that hangs over him, until his growing horror and
+despair are mercifully swallowed up in the somnolent torpidity that
+overwhelms him. All of us who have travelled in cold weather know how
+uneasy and apprehensive a man becomes when the fingers grow obstinately
+cold and he realises that he is not succeeding in getting them warm
+again. It is the beginning of death by freezing.
+
+We buried the body on a bench of the bluff across the river from the
+native village, the natives all standing around reverently while the
+words of committal were said, and set up a cross marked with
+lead-pencil: "R. I. P.--Eric Ericson, found frozen, January, 1906." Two
+or three years later a friend sent me a small bronze tablet with the
+same legend, and that was affixed to the cross. There are many such
+lonely graves in Alaska, for scarce a winter passes that does not claim
+its victims in every section of the country. That same winter we heard
+of two men frozen on the Seward Peninsula, two on the Yukon, one on the
+Tanana, and one on the Valdez trail. This day I recorded a temperature
+of 10°, the first plus temperature in thirty-nine days, and that
+previous rise above zero was the first in twenty days.
+
+[Sidenote: NEGLECTED NATIVES]
+
+That night we gathered all the natives, and after long speech with poor
+interpretation I ventured to promise them a mission the next year. Some
+of them had been across to the Yukon years before and had visited the
+mission at Tanana. Some had been baptized there. Some had never seen a
+clergyman or missionary of any sort before, and had never heard the
+gospel preached. We were touched by one old blind woman who told of a
+visit to a mission on the Yukon, and how she learned to sing a hymn
+there. Her son interpreted: "She say every night she sing that hymn for
+speak to God." She was encouraged to sing it, and it turned out to be
+the alphabet set to a tune! After much pleading and with some
+hesitation, I baptized seventeen children, comforting myself with the
+assurance of the coming mission, which would undertake their Christian
+training and instruction.
+
+Back next day at the mouth of the Alatna, I was again impressed with the
+eligibility of that spot as a mission site. It was but ten miles above
+the present native village, and, with church and school established, the
+whole population would sooner or later move to it. This gives
+opportunity for regulating the building of cabins, and the advantage of
+a new, clean start. Moreover, the Alatna River is the highway between
+the Kobuk and the Koyukuk, and the Esquimaux coming over in increasing
+numbers, would be served by a mission at this place as well as the
+Indians. I foresaw two villages, perhaps, on the opposite sides of the
+river--one clustered about the church and the school, the other a little
+lower down--where these ancient hereditary enemies might live side by
+side in peace and harmony under the firm yet gentle influence of the
+church. So I staked a mission site, and set up notices claiming ground
+for that purpose, almost opposite the mouth of the Alatna, which, in the
+native tongue, is Allakaket or Allachaket.
+
+[Sidenote: THE INLAND ESQUIMAUX]
+
+There was some trail up the Alatna and we made fair headway on its
+surface, stopping two nights at Kobuk huts. We are out of the Indian
+country now, and shall see no more Indians until we are back on the
+Yukon. The mode of life, the habits, the character of the races are very
+different--the first Esquimau habitation we visited proclaiming it.
+These inland Esquimaux, though some of the younger ones have never seen
+salt water--our guide, Roxy, for one--are still essentially a salt-water
+people. Their huts, even in the midst of trees, are half-underground
+affairs, for they have not learned log-building; the windows are of
+seal gut, and seal oil is a staple article of their diet. Their clothing
+is also marine, their parkees of the hair-seal and their mukluks of the
+giant seal. Communications are always kept up with the coast, and the
+sea products required are brought across. The time for the movement of
+the Kobuks back and forth was not quite yet, though we hoped we should
+meet some parties and get the benefit of their trail. Just before we
+left the Alatna River we stopped at Roxy's fish cache and got some green
+fish, hewing them out of the frozen mass with the axe. The young man had
+fished here the previous summer, had cached the fish caught too late to
+dry in the sun, and they had remained where he left them for four or
+five months. Most of them had begun to decay before they froze, but that
+did not impair their value as dog food, though it rendered the cooking
+of them a disagreeable proceeding to white nostrils. This caching of
+food is a common thing amongst both natives and whites, and it is rarely
+that a cache is violated except under great stress of hunger, when
+violation is recognised as legitimate. Doughty, in his _Arabia Deserta_,
+mentions the same custom amongst the Arabs; Sven Hedin amongst the
+Tartars. Sparsely peopled waste countries have much the same customs all
+over the world. Even the outer garb in the Oriental deserts has much
+resemblance to our parkee; both burnoose and parkee are primarily
+windbreaks, and it makes little difference whether the wind be charged
+with snow or sand.
+
+At midday on the 3d of February we left the Alatna River and took our
+way across country for the Kobuk. We had now no trail at all save what
+had been made a couple of months before by the only other party that had
+crossed the portage this winter, and it was buried under fifteen or
+sixteen inches of snow. There was quite a grade to be climbed to reach
+the plateau over which our course lay, and the men, with rope over the
+shoulder, had to help the dogs hauling at the sled. Indeed, over a good
+deal of this portage, from time to time, the men had to do dog work, for
+the country is rolling, one ridge succeeding another, and the loose,
+deep snow made heavy and slow going. One man must go ahead breaking
+trail, and that was generally my task, though when the route grew
+doubtful and the indications too faint for white man's eye, Roxy took my
+place and I took his gee pole, and slipped his rope around my chest.
+
+Breaking trail would not be so laborious if one could wear the large
+snow-shoes that are used for hunting. But the hunting shoe, though it
+carries the man without fatigue, does not help the dogs. The small shoe
+known as the trail shoe, packs the snow beneath it, and by the time the
+trail breaker has gone forward, then back again, and then forward once
+more, the snow is usually packed hard enough to give the dogs some
+footing. Footing the dog must have or he cannot pull; a dog wallowing in
+snow to his belly cannot exert much traction on the vehicle behind him.
+The notion of snow-shoeing as a sport always seems strange to us on the
+trail, for to us it is a laborious necessity and no sport at all. The
+trail breaker thus goes over most of the ground thrice, and when he is
+anxious at the same time to get a fairly accurate estimate by the
+pedometer of the distance travelled, he must constantly remember to
+upend the instrument in his pocket when he retraces his steps, and
+restore it to its recording position when he attacks unbroken snow
+again. Also he must take himself unawares, so to speak, from time to
+time, and check the length of his stride with the tape measure and alter
+the step index as the varying surfaces passed over require.
+Conscientiously used, with due regard to its limitations, the pedometer
+will give a fair approximation of the length of a journey, but a man can
+no more tell how far he has gone by merely hanging a pedometer in his
+pocket than he can tell the height above sea-level of an inland mountain
+by merely carrying an aneroid barometer to the top.
+
+[Sidenote: THE SUNRISE AND THE MOUNTAINS]
+
+It was on this Alatna-Kobuk portage that we saw the most magnificent
+sunrise any of us could remember. It had been cloudy for some days with
+threat of snow which did not fall. We were camped in a little hollow
+between two ridges, and I had been busy packing up the stuff in the tent
+preparatory to the start, when I stepped out with a load of bedding in
+my arms, right into the midst of the spectacle. It was simple, as the
+greatest things are always simple, but so gorgeous and splendid that it
+was startling. The whole southeastern sky was filled with great luminous
+bands of alternate purple and crimson. At the horizon the bands were
+deeper in tone and as they rose they grew lighter, but they maintained
+an unmixed purity of contrasting colour throughout. I gazed at it until
+the tent was struck and the dogs hitched and it was time to start, and
+then I had to turn my back upon it, for our course lay due west, and I
+was breaking trail. But on the crest of the rising ground ahead there
+burst upon my delighted eyes a still more astonishing prospect. We were
+come to the first near view of the Kobuk mountains, and the reflected
+light of that gorgeous sunrise was caught by the flanks of a group of
+wild and lofty snow peaks, and they stood up incandescent, with a vivid
+colour that seemed to come through them as well as from them. To right
+and left, mountains out of the direct path of that light gave a soft
+dead mauve, but these favoured peaks, bathed from base to summit in
+clear crimson effulgence, glowed like molten metal. It was not the
+reflected light of the sun, but of the flaming sky, for even as I
+looked, a swift change came over them. They passed through the tones of
+red to lightest pink, not fading but brightening, and before my
+companions reached me the sun's rays sprang upon the mountains from the
+horizon, and they were golden.
+
+It seems almost foolish to the writer and may well seem tedious to the
+reader, to attempt in words the description of such scenes; yet so deep
+is the impression they produce, and so large the place they take in the
+memory, that to omit them would be to strike out much of the charm and
+zest of these arctic journeys. Again and again in the years that have
+passed, the recollection of that pomp of colour on the way to the Kobuk
+has come suddenly upon me, and always with a bounding of the spirit. I
+can shut my eyes now and see that incomparable sunrise; I can see again
+that vision of mountains filling half the sky with their unimaginable
+ardency, and I think that this world never presented nobler sight.
+Surely for its pageantry of burning, living colour, for purity and depth
+and intensity of tint, the Far North with its setting of snow surpasses
+all other regions of the earth.
+
+[Sidenote: TRAVELLING KOBUK LADS]
+
+That same day we met a couple of Kobuk youths on their way to the
+Koyukuk, and they gave us the greatest gift it was in the power of man
+to give us--a trail! There is no finer illustration of the mutual
+service of man to man than the meeting of parties going opposite ways
+across the unbroken snows. Each is at once conferring and receiving the
+greatest of favours, without loss to himself is heaping benefit on the
+other; is, it may be--has often been--saving the other, and being
+himself saved. No more hunting and peering for blazes, no more casting
+about hither and thither when open stretches are crossed; no more three
+times back and forth to beat the snow down--twenty miles a day instead
+of ten or twelve--the boys' trail meant all that to us. And our trail
+meant almost as much to them. So we were rejoiced to see them, sturdy
+youths of sixteen or seventeen, making the journey all by themselves. My
+heart goes out to these adventurous Kobuks, amiable, light-hearted,
+industrious; keen hunters, following the mountain-sheep far up where the
+Indian will not go; adepts in all the wilderness arts; heirs of the
+uncharted arctic wastes, and occupying their heritage. If I were not a
+white man I would far rather be one of these nomadic inland Esquimaux
+than any other native I know of.
+
+That same day we crossed two headwater forks of the Kokochatna, as the
+Kobuks call it, or the Hogatzitna as the Koyukuks call it, or the Hog
+River, as the white men call it, a tributary of the Koyukuk that comes
+in about one hundred and fifty miles below the Alatna. As we came down a
+steep descent to the little east fork, it showed so picturesque and
+attractive, with clumps of fine open timber on an island, that it
+remains in my mind one of the many places from the Grand Cañon of the
+Colorado almost to the Grand Cañon of the Noatak, where I should like to
+have a lodge in the vast wilderness.
+
+We had but crossed the west fork when we knew that we were close to the
+watershed between the Kobuk and the Koyukuk, between the streams that
+fall into Kotzebue Sound and those that fall by the Koyukuk and the
+Yukon Rivers into Bering Sea; and because it seemed a capital geographic
+feature, it was disappointing that it was so inconspicuous. Indeed, we
+were not sure which of two ridges was the actual divide. Beyond those
+ridges there was no question, for the ground sloped down to Lake
+Noyutak, a body of water some three and a half miles in length and of
+varying breadth that drains into the Kobuk. Here in a cabin we found
+three more young Kobuks, and spent the night, getting our first view of
+the Kobuk River next day, not from an eminence, as I had hoped, but only
+as we came down a bank through thick timber and opened suddenly upon it.
+By the pedometer I made the portage forty-six miles.
+
+[Sidenote: THE KOBUK RIVER]
+
+The upper Kobuk is a picturesque river, the timber being especially
+large and handsome for interior Alaska. We reached it just above the
+mouth of the Reed River, tributary from the north. The weather was
+warm--too warm for good travelling--the thermometer standing at 15­­­°,
+20°, and one day even 30° above zero all day long, so that we were all
+bareheaded and in our shirt-sleeves. From time to time, as the course of
+the river varied, we had distant views of the rocky mountains of the
+Endicott Range, or, as it might be written, the Endicott Range of the
+Rocky Mountains, for such, in fact, it is--the western and final
+extension of the great American cordillera. On the other side of those
+mountains was the Noatak River, flowing roughly parallel with the Kobuk,
+and discharging into the same arm of the sea.
+
+The division of the labour of camping amongst four gave us all some
+leisure at night, and I found time to read through again _The Cloister
+and the Hearth_ and _Westward Ho!_ with much pleasure, quite agreeing
+with Sir Walter Besant's judgment that the former is one of the best
+historical novels ever written. There are few more attractive roysterers
+in literature to me than Denys of Burgundy, with his "_Courage,
+camarades, le diable est mort!_" This matter of winter reading is a
+difficult one, because it is impossible to carry many books. My plan is
+to take two or three India-paper volumes of classics that have been read
+before, and renew my acquaintance with them. But reading by the light of
+one candle, though it sufficed our forefathers, is hard on our
+degenerate eyes.
+
+The days were much lengthened now, and the worst of the winter was
+done. There would still be cold and storm, but hardly again of the same
+intensity and duration. When the traveller gets well into February he
+feels that the back of the winter is broken, for nothing can take from
+him the advantage of the ever-lengthening days, the ever-climbing sun.
+
+On the afternoon of the third day on the Kobuk we reached a cabin
+occupied by two white men, the first we had seen since we left Bettles,
+and we were the first white men they had seen all the winter. They were
+waiting for the spring, having a prospecting trip in view; simply
+spending the winter eating up their grub. There was nothing whatever to
+read in the cabin, and they had been there since the freeze-up! They
+welcomed us, and we stayed overnight with them, and that night there was
+a total eclipse of the moon, of which we had a fine view. We had an
+almanac which gave the time of totality at Sitka, and we knew the
+approximate longitude of our position, so we were able to set our
+watches by it.
+
+The next two days are noted in my diary as two of the pleasantest days
+of the whole journey--two of the pleasantest days I ever spent anywhere,
+I think. A clear, cloudless sky, brilliant sunshine, white mountain
+peaks all about us, gave picture after picture, and the warm, balmy air
+made travelling a delight. There are few greater pleasures than that of
+penetrating into a new country, with continually changing views of
+beauty, under kindly conditions of weather and trail. In the yellow rays
+of the early sun, the spruce on the river bank looked like a screen of
+carved bronze, while the slender stems of birches in front of the
+spruce looked like an inlaying of old ivory upon the bronze, the whole
+set upon its pedestal of marble-like snow. The second day we took a
+portage of nine or ten miles across a barren flat and struck the river
+again just below a remarkable stretch of bank a mile or so in length,
+with never a tree or a bush or so much as the smallest shrub growing on
+it. Thick timber above suddenly ceased, thick timber below suddenly
+began again, and this bare bank reached back through open, barren flat
+to a low pass in the mountains. It was a bank of solid ice, so we were
+told later, and I remembered to have heard of ice bluffs on the Kobuk,
+and wished that the portage had struck the river above this spot instead
+of below it, that there might have been opportunity to examine it.
+
+[Sidenote: THE MISSION]
+
+[Sidenote: ENGLISH AND ESQUIMAU]
+
+A little farther down the river and we were at the new mission of the
+Society of Friends, where a cordial reception awaited us and, luxury of
+luxuries, a warm bath! Again and again the wash-tub was emptied and
+fresh water was heated until we all had wallowed to our heart's content.
+The rude log buildings of the mission had been begun the previous fall,
+and were not yet complete, but they were advanced enough for occupation,
+and the work of the mission went actively on. It was in charge of rather
+an extraordinary man. He gave us a sketch of his life, which was full of
+interest and matter for thought. For many years he was a police officer
+and jailer in the West. Then he sailed on a whaler and thus became
+acquainted with the Esquimaux. He was converted from a life of
+drunkenness and debauchery--though one fancied his character was not
+really ever so bad as he painted it--at a "Peniel" mission in a
+Californian town. He went in out of mere idle curiosity, just recovered
+from a spree, and was so wrought upon that when he came out he was a
+different creature, a new man, the old life with its appetite for
+vicious indulgence sloughed off and left behind him, and he now
+possessed with a burning desire to do some such active service for God
+as aforetime he had done for the devil. After three or four months of
+some sort of training in an institution maintained by the California
+Society of Friends--a body more like the Salvation Army, one judges,
+than the old Quakers--he volunteered for service at a branch which the
+old-established mission of the Society at the mouth of the Kobuk desired
+to plant two hundred miles or so up the river, and had come out and had
+plunged at once into his task. So here he was, some six or seven months
+installed, teacher, preacher, trader in a small way, and indefatigable
+worker in general. Pedagogical training or knowledge of "methods" he had
+none at all, but the root of the matter was in him, and surely never was
+such an insatiable school-teacher. Morning, noon, and night he was
+teaching. While he was cooking he was hearing lessons; while he was
+washing the dishes and cleaning the house he was correcting exercises in
+simple addition. In the schoolroom he was full of a genial enthusiasm
+that seemed to impart instruction by sheer dynamic force. "Boot," the
+lesson book said. There was no boot in the schoolroom, all were shod in
+mukluks. He dives into his dwelling-house attachment and comes back
+holding up a boot. "Boot," he says, and "boot" they all repeat.
+Presently the word "tooth" was introduced in the lesson. Withdrawing a
+loose artificial tooth of the "pivot" variety from his upper jaw, he
+holds it aloft and "tooth!" he cries out, and "toot!" they all cry, and
+he claps it back into his head again.
+
+We were present on Sunday at the services. There was hearty singing of
+"Pentecostal" hymns with catchy refrains, but we were compelled to
+notice again what we had noticed amongst the little bands of these
+people on the Koyukuk when we set them to singing, that the English was
+unintelligible; and since it conveyed no meaning to us could have had
+little for them. This is the inevitable result of ignoring the native
+tongue and adopting the easy expedient of teaching the singing of hymns
+and the recitation of formulas like the commandments in English. For a
+generation or two, at least, the English learned, save by children at a
+boarding-school, where nothing but English is spoken, is fragmentary and
+of doubtful import in all except the commonest matters of speech. And at
+such boarding-schools there is danger of the real misfortune and
+drawback of natives growing up to live their lives amongst natives,
+ignorant of the native tongue. There is no quick and easy way of
+stamping out a language, thank God; there is no quick and easy way of
+imparting instruction in a foreign language. By and by all the Alaskan
+natives will be more or less bilingual, but the intimate speech and the
+most clearly understood speech will still be the mother tongue. The
+singing done, there was preaching through an interpreter, and then each
+individual present "gave testimony," which consisted for the most part
+in the recitation of a text of Scripture. Then there were individual
+prayers by one and another of the congregation, and then some more
+singing. The only hymn I could find in the book that I knew was the fine
+old hymn, "How Firm a Foundation," and that was sung heartily to the
+"Adeste Fideles." They are naturally a musical race, picking up airs
+with great facility, and they thoroughly enjoy singing.
+
+[Sidenote: THE "DOUBLE STANDARD"]
+
+After the service the missionary confided some of his troubles to me. He
+had lately learned through his interpreter that the burden of most of
+the individual prayers was that the supplicator might "catch plenty
+skins" and be more successful in hunting than his fellows; and though he
+had done his best to impress upon them the superior importance of making
+request for spiritual benefit, he was afraid they had made no change.
+"Our people 'outside,'" he said, "don't understand these folk, and I'm
+not sure that I thoroughly understand them myself." "They're all
+'converted,'" he said; "they all claim to have experienced a change of
+heart, but some of them I know are not living like converted people, and
+sometimes I have my doubts about most of them." My sympathy went out to
+him in his loneliness and his earnestness and his disappointments. I
+pointed out that the emotional response to emotional preaching was
+comparatively easy to get from any primitive people, but that to change
+their whole lives, to uproot old customs of sensual indulgence, to
+engraft new ideas of virtue and chastity was a long, slow process
+anywhere in the world. It was chiefly in the matter of sexual morality
+that his doubts and difficulties lay, and I was able to assure him that
+his experience was but the common experience of all those who had
+laboured for the uplifting of savage people. Indeed, how should it be
+otherwise? Until quite lately there was almost promiscuous use of women.
+A man receiving a traveller in his dwelling overnight proffered his wife
+as a part of his hospitality; the temporary interchange of wives was
+common; young men and young women gratified themselves without rebuke;
+children were valuable however come by, and there was no special
+distinction between legitimate and illegitimate offspring. As one
+reflects on these conditions and then looks back upon conditions amongst
+white people, it would seem that all the civilised races have done is to
+set up a double standard of sexual morality as against the single
+standard of the savage. It can hardly be claimed that the average white
+man is continent, or even much more continent than the average Esquimau,
+but he has forced continence upon the greater part of his women,
+reserving a dishonoured remnant for his own irresponsible use. And there
+are signs that some of those who nowadays inveigh against the white
+man's double standard are in reality desirous of substituting, not the
+single standard of the Christian ideal, but the single standard of the
+savage. In the mining camps the prostitute has a sort of
+half-way-recognised social position, and in polite parlance is referred
+to as a "sporting lady"--surely the most horribly incongruous phrase
+ever coined; she often marries a miner who will tell you that she is as
+good as he is, and she is received afterwards by all but a few as a
+"respectable married woman."
+
+There had been some trouble of this sort at this mission. The great
+northern gold seekers' wave of '97 and '98 threw a numerous band of
+prospectors up the Kobuk as well as up the Koyukuk. The wave had receded
+and left on the Kobuk but one little pool behind it, a handful of men
+who found something better than "pay" on the Shungnak, a few miles away.
+And there was much criticism of the missionary's methods amongst them.
+Word of the arrival of strangers had brought some of them to Long Beach,
+and on Sunday night I had opportunity of addressing them, with a view to
+enlisting their sympathy, if possible. What if mistakes were made, what
+if some of the methods employed were open to question? Here was a man
+who beyond doubt was earnestly labouring in the best way he knew for the
+improvement of these natives. Such an effort demanded the co-operation
+of every right-feeling man.
+
+[Sidenote: PERSONAL CLEANLINESS]
+
+After all, however grand the physical scenery, the meteorological
+phenomena, may be, the people of any country are the most interesting
+thing in it, and we found these Esquimaux extraordinarily interesting.
+Dirty they certainly are; it is almost impossible for dwellers in the
+arctic regions to be clean in the winter, and the winter lasts so long
+that the habit of winter becomes the habit of the year. White and native
+alike accept a lower standard of personal cleanliness than is tolerated
+outside. I remember asking Bishop Rowe, before I came to Alaska: "What
+do you do about bathing when you travel in the winter?" To which he
+replied laconically: "Do without." It is even so; travellers on the
+Alaskan trails as well as natives belong to the "great unwashed." In the
+very cold weather the procuring of water in any quantity is a very
+difficult thing even for house dwellers. Every drop of it has to be
+carried from a water-hole cut far out on the ice, up a steep grade, and
+then quite a little distance back to the dwelling--for we do not build
+directly upon these eroding banks. The water-hole is continually
+freezing up and has to be continually hewed free of ice, and as the
+streams dwindle with the progress of winter, new holes must be cut
+farther and farther out. On the trail, where snow must usually be melted
+for water, it is obvious that bathing is out of the question; even the
+water for hands and face is sparingly doled by the cook, and two people
+will sometimes use the same water rather than resort to the painful
+though efficient expedient of washing with snow. If this be so despite
+aluminum pots and a full kit of camp vessels, it is much more so with
+the native, whose supply of pots and pans is very limited. I have seen a
+white man melt snow in a frying-pan, wash hands and face in it, throw it
+out, fry bacon and beans in it, then melt more snow and wash his cup and
+plate in it. There is, however, this to be said anent the disuse of the
+bath in this country, that in cold weather most men perspire very little
+indeed, and the perspiration that is exuded passes through to the outer
+garments and is immediately deposited upon them as frost; and there is
+this further to be said about dirt in general, that one blessed property
+of the cold is to kill all odours.
+
+One grows tolerant of dirt in this country; there is no denying it, and
+it is well that it is so; otherwise one would be in a chronic state of
+disgust with oneself and every one else. So the dirt of the native,
+unless specially prominent and offensive, is accepted as a matter of
+course and ignored. This obstacle overcome, the Esquimaux are an
+attractive and most interesting race, and compare to advantage with the
+Indians in almost every particular. They are a very industrious people.
+Go into an Esquimau's hut at almost any time when they are not sleeping,
+and you will find every individual occupied at some task. Here is a man
+working in wood or bone with the ingenious tools they have evolved; here
+are women working in skin or fur, and some of them are admirable
+needlewomen; here, perhaps, is another woman chewing mukluks--and many a
+white man who has kept his feet dry in overflow water is grateful to the
+teeth that do not disdain this most effective way of securing an
+intimate union between sole and upper. Even the children are busy: here
+is a boy whittling out bow and arrow--and they do great execution
+amongst rabbits and ptarmigan with these weapons that entail no cost of
+powder and shot; here is a girl beating out threads from sinew with a
+couple of flat stones. Some of us, troubled with unconscientious
+tailors, wish that a law could be passed requiring all buttons to be
+sewn on with sinew--they never come off.
+
+[Sidenote: A LIGHT-HEARTED FOLK]
+
+They are a very light-hearted people, easily amused, bubbling over with
+laughter and merriment, romping and skylarking with one another at every
+intermission of labour. One of my white travelling companions on this
+journey was in the habit of using a little piece of rabbit skin to
+protect his nose in cold or windy weather. The care of the nose is
+sometimes very troublesome indeed, it freezes more readily than any
+other portion of the body; and a little piece of rabbit skin, moistened
+and applied to the nose, will stay there and keep it warm and
+comfortable all day. But it does not exactly enhance one's personal
+attractions.
+
+We had stopped for camp and were all together for the first time in four
+or five hours, when Roxy noticed this rabbit-skin nose protector, upon
+which the breath had condensed all the afternoon until two long icicles
+depended from it, one on each side, reaching down below the mouth; and
+he fell straightway into a fit of laughter that grew uncontrollable; he
+rolled on the snow and roared. A little annoyed at this exhibition, I
+spoke sharply: "What's the matter with you, Roxy; what on earth are you
+cutting up like that for?" Checking himself for a moment, he pointed to
+my companion and said, "Alleesame _walrus_," and went off into another
+paroxysm of laughter, rolling about and roaring. At intervals all the
+evening he would break out again, and when we sat down to eat it
+overcame him once more and he rushed outside where he could give vent to
+his mirth with less offence.
+
+The boy was straightforward and conscientious. We were camped over
+Sunday once, and Roxy had noticed many marten tracks in the
+neighbourhood. He had brought a few traps along with him to set out as
+we went and pick up on his return, and he wanted to know if I thought he
+might set some that day, although it was the day of rest. Careful not to
+interfere in any way with the religious instruction any native has
+received from any source, I told him that was a matter for him to decide
+himself; that each man was responsible for his own conduct. The boy
+thought awhile--and he did not set his traps. Now that young man had
+never received any instruction at a mission; all his teaching had been
+from other Esquimaux. This same question of working on Sunday was the
+cause of some of the difficulty between the missionary at Long Beach and
+the miners at Shungnak. The sluicing or "cleaning-up" season is short,
+and mining operators generally consider that they cannot afford to lose
+an hour of it. The Kobuks employed by these miners quit their work on
+Sunday, and that brought the operations to a standstill. There was
+something to be said on the miners' side, but I rejoiced that the
+Esquimau boys showed such steadfastness to their teaching. "If you
+cannot use them six days in the week, if it has to be seven or none,
+then do as the miners on the Yukon side do, consider the country
+uninhabited, and make your arrangements as though there were no Kobuks."
+That was my advice, and this may be read in connection with Mr.
+Stefanson's caustic comments on the same rigidity of observance.
+
+We left Long Beach with a grateful feeling for the hospitality with
+which we had been received and with a substantial respect for the
+earnest missionary effort that was being put forth there. We were able
+to replenish our grub supply and also to exchange our two toboggans for
+one large sled, for we were out of the toboggan country again and they
+had already become a nuisance, slipping and sliding about on the trail.
+Our host was up early with a good breakfast for us, and speeded the
+parting guest, which on the trail is certainly an essential part of true
+hospitality, with all the honours; the natives lined up on the bank and
+the younger ones running along with us for a few hundred yards.
+
+[Sidenote: THE JADE MOUNTAINS]
+
+Soon after we left the mission we went up a series of terraces to a
+desolate, barren, wind-swept flat, the portage across which cut off a
+great bend of the river and saved us many miles of travel. To our right
+rose the Jade Mountains, whence the supply of this stone which used to
+be of importance for arrow-heads and other implements was obtained and
+carried far and wide. A light crust on the snow broke through at every
+step, though the snow was not deep enough and the ground too uneven to
+make snow-shoes useful; so we all had more or less sore feet that night
+when we regained the river and made our camp near the mouth of the
+Ambler, another tributary from the north.
+
+The next day was an exceedingly long, tedious day. The Kobuk River,
+which in its upper reaches is a very picturesque stream, began now to be
+as monotonous as the lower Yukon. It had grown to considerable size, and
+the bends to be great curves of many miles at a stretch, one of which,
+a decided bend to the north of the general westerly direction of the
+river, we were three full hours in passing down. It was while traversing
+this bend that we witnessed a singular mirage that lent to the day all
+the enlivenment it had. Before us for ten or twelve miles stretched the
+broad white expanse of the river bed, shimmering in the mellow sunlight,
+and far beyond, remote but clear, rose the sharp white peaks of the
+mountains that divide the almost parallel valleys of the Kobuk and the
+Noatak. As we travelled, these distant peaks began to take the most
+fantastic shapes. They flattened into a level table-land, and then they
+shot up into pinnacles and spires. Then they shrank together in the
+middle and spread out on top till they looked like great domed
+mushrooms. Then the broad convex tops separated themselves entirely from
+their stalk-like bases and hung detached in the sky with daylight
+underneath. And then these mushroom tops stretched out laterally and
+threw up peaks of their own until there were distinct duplicate ranges,
+one on the earth and one in the sky. It was fascinating to watch these
+whimsical vagaries of nature that went on for hours. A change in one's
+own position, from erect to stooping, caused the most convulsive
+contortions, and when once I lay down on the trail that I might view the
+scene through the lowest stratum of the agitated air, every peak shot up
+suddenly far into the sky like the outspreading of one's fingers, to
+subside as suddenly as I rose to my feet again. The psalmist's query
+came naturally to the mind, "Why hop ye so ye hills?" and our Kobuk boy
+Roxy, whose enjoyment of fine landscapes and strange sights was always
+a pleasure to witness, answered the unspoken question. "God make
+mountains dance because spring come," he said prettily enough.
+
+Then we crossed another portage and cut off ten miles of river by it,
+and when we reached the river again I wanted to stop, for it grew
+towards evening and here was good camping-ground. But we had lately met
+some travelling Kobuks and they had told Roxy of a cabin "just little
+way" farther on, and I yielded to the rest of the company, who would
+push on to it and thus avoid the necessity of making camp. That native
+"just little way" is worse than the Scotch "mile and a bittock"; indeed,
+the natives have poor notion of distance in general, and miles have as
+vague meaning to them as kilometres have to the average Anglo-Saxon.
+
+[Sidenote: A BELATED CAMP]
+
+On and on we pushed, mile after mile, and still no cabin. In the
+gathering dusk we would continually think we saw it; half-fallen trees
+or sloping branches simulating snow-covered gables. At last it grew
+quite dark, and when there was general agreement that we must seek the
+cabin no longer, but camp, there was no place to camp in. Either the
+bank was inaccessible or there was lack of dry timber. We went on thus,
+seeking rest and finding none, until seven-thirty, and then made camp by
+candle-light, in a poor place at that, having trudged thirty-five miles
+that day. A night-made camp is always an uncomfortable camp, and an
+uncomfortable camp means a miserable night, which to-morrow must pay
+for. We did not get to bed till nearly midnight, and it was
+nine-forty-five when we started out next morning, and we made only
+fifteen miles that day.
+
+The Kobuk valley continued to open out wider and wider and the mountains
+right and left to recede. The Jade Mountains were now dim and distant
+behind us, and new ranges were coming into view. The people on this
+lower river are very few. It was just about one hundred miles from Long
+Beach when we reached the next native village, a miserable collection of
+pole dwellings, half underground, with perhaps a score of inhabitants.
+Certainly the conditions of life deteriorated as we descended this
+river. The country seems to afford nothing but fish; we were amongst the
+ichthyophagi pure and simple. Roxy, bred and born on the upper Kobuk and
+never so far down before, is very scornful about it. "Me no likee this
+country," he says; "no caribou, no ptarmigan, no rabbits, no timber, no
+nothin'." The weather had grown raw and cold again, with a constant
+disagreeable wind that took all the fun out of travelling. We passed a
+place where a white man was pessimistically picking away at a vein of
+coal in the river bluff. "Yes, we been here all winter," he said,
+"working on the blamed ledge. I always knowed it was goin' to pinch out,
+and now it's begun to pinch. My partner's gone to Candle for more grub,
+but I told him it weren't no use. It's pinchin' out right now. I knowed
+it afore we started work, but the blamed fool wouldn't listen to me.
+'It'll pinch out,' I told him a dozen times; 'you mark my word it'll
+pinch out,' I told him, and now it's begun to pinch; and I hope he'll be
+satisfied." We were reminded of the many coal-mines from time to time
+located on the Yukon, in all or nearly all of which the vein has
+"pinched out." The deposits on the coast may be all the fancy of the
+magazine writer paints, and may hold the "incalculable wealth" that is
+attributed to them, but the coal on the interior rivers seems in scant
+measure and of inferior quality.
+
+The same night we reached the native village at the mouth of the
+Squirrel River, another northern tributary--the Kobuk receives most of
+its waters from the north--and we spent the night and the next day,
+which was Sunday, in one of the half-underground huts of the place, in
+company with twelve other people. Here we found Roxy's brother, dubbed
+"Napoleon" by some white man. They had not seen one another for years,
+yet all the greeting was a mutual grunt. The Kobuks are not
+demonstrative in their affections, but it would not be right to conclude
+the affection lacking. I have seen an old Esquimau woman taking part in
+a dance the night after her husband was buried, yet it would have been
+unjust to have concluded that she was callous and indifferent. It is
+very easy to misunderstand a strange people, and very hard to understand
+them thoroughly.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CANINE INTRUDER]
+
+The roof of the tent was dome-shaped and it was lit by a seal-gut
+skylight. In the morning while I was conducting Divine service and
+attempting most lamely by the mouth of a poor interpreter to convey some
+instruction, a dog fight outside adjourned to the roof and presently
+both combatants came tumbling through the gut window into the midst of
+the congregation. They were unceremoniously picked up and flung out of
+the door, a few stitches with a needleful of sinew repaired the window,
+and the proceedings were resumed. These gut windows have their
+convenience as well as their inconvenience. When the hut gets too warm
+and close even for Esquimaux, the seal gut is folded back and the outer
+air rushes in to the great refreshment of the occupants; when the hut is
+cool enough the gut is replaced. A skylight is far and away the best
+method of illuminating any single-story structure, and this membrane is
+remarkably translucent, while the snow that falls or frost that forms
+upon such a skylight is quickly removed by beating the hand upon the
+drum-like surface. All glass windows must be double glazed, or else in
+the very cold weather they are quickly covered with a thick deposit of
+frost from the condensation of the moisture inside the room, and then
+they admit much less light than gut does. One of its unpleasant features
+is the way the membrane snaps back and forth with a report like a pistol
+whenever the door is opened and shut, but on the whole it is a very good
+substitute for glass indeed.
+
+[Sidenote: SLEEPING CUSTOMS]
+
+These river Esquimaux vary greatly in physical appearance. While many of
+them are somewhat undersized and all have small feet and hands, some are
+well-developed specimens of manhood. "Riley Jim," the chief of this
+tribe, would be counted a tall, stalwart man anywhere. And while many
+have coarse, squat features, here and there is one who is decidedly
+attractive in appearance. A sweet smile which is often upon the face,
+and small, regular white teeth, greatly help to redeem any countenance.
+A youth of about eighteen at the Squirrel River would properly be called
+handsome, one thinks--though amongst native people one grows a little
+afraid of forgetting standards of comparison; and his wife--for he was
+already a husband--was a decidedly pretty girl. A word ought to be said
+which applies to all the Esquimaux we met. Although many people live in
+one hut and there is no possible privacy, yet we saw no immodesty of any
+sort. They sleep entirely nude--probably our own great-grandparents did
+the same, at least the people of Defoe and Smollet did, for nightshirts
+and pyjamas are very modern things. There is much to be said from an
+hygienic point of view in favour of that custom as against turning in
+"all standing" as the Indian generally does, or sleeping in the day
+underwear as most white men do. But although every one of a dozen people
+in cabin after cabin that we stayed at on the Kobuk River above and
+below this place, of both sexes and all ages, would thus strip
+completely and go to bed, there was never any exposure of the body at
+all. It may be, of course, that our presence imposed a greater care in
+this respect, but it did not so impress us; it seemed the normal thing.
+Another noticeable feature of the lives of all these people was their
+devoutness in the matter of thanks before and after meat. Some of them
+would not so much as give and receive a drink of cold water without a
+long responsive grace.
+
+As we went on down the river the country grew bleaker and drearier and
+the few scattered inhabitants were living more and more the life of the
+seacoast. The dwellings resembled igloos more than cabins, being
+completely covered with snow and approached by underground passages,
+with heavy flaps of untanned sealskin to close them. When we passed a
+fork of the river we knew that we were entering the delta of the Kobuk,
+and that another day would take us to the mission on Kotzebue Sound. It
+was a long, hard day, in which we made forty miles, but an interesting
+one. With a start at six, we were at the mouth by nine-thirty. The
+spruce which had for some time been dwarfing and dwindling gave place to
+willows, the willows shrank to shrubs, the shrubs changed to coarse
+grass thrusting yellow tassels through the snow. The river banks sank
+and flattened out and ceased, and we were on Hotham Inlet with the long
+coast-line of the peninsula that forms it stretching away north and
+south in the distance. Roxy's bewilderment was amusing. He stopped and
+gazed about him and said: "Kobuk River all pechuk!" ("Pechuk" means
+"played out.") "What's the matter, no more Kobuk River?" I think his
+mind had never really entertained the notion of the river ending, though
+of course he must often have heard of its mouth in the salt water. He
+was out of his country, his bearings all gone, a feeling of helpless
+insecurity taking the place of his usual confidence, and I think he said
+no more all that day.
+
+We had to traverse the ice of Hotham Inlet northward to its mouth,
+double the end of the peninsula, and then travel south along the coast
+to the mission at Kikitaruk, the peninsula being too rugged to cross.
+Three considerable rivers drain into Hotham Inlet, roughly parallel in
+their east and west courses, the Noatak, the Kobuk, and the Selawik, so
+that its waters must be commonly more fresh than salt, for its bounds
+are narrow and the extensive delta of its eastern shore would argue its
+depth slight. Ahead of us, as we travelled north making a bee-line for
+the end of the peninsula, all the afternoon, loomed the rocky promontory
+of Krusenstern, one of Kotzebue's capes, and far beyond, stretching up
+the dim coast-line, lay the way to Point Hope. It was with a sinking of
+the heart that I gazed upon it, for I knew already, though I had not
+announced a decision, that the road to Point Hope could not be my road
+that year. All day long the thermometer stood between -40° and -30°, and
+the constant light sea-breeze kept scarfs wrapped closely about mouths
+and noses, which always means disagreeable travel. When the company
+stopped at noon to eat a little frozen lunch, I was too chilly to cease
+my movement and pressed on. The day of that blessed comfort of the
+trail, the thermos flask, was not yet. By two-thirty we had reached Pipe
+Spit, which still further contracts the narrow entrance of the inlet,
+and turning west for a mile or two rounded the point and then turned
+south for ten miles along the coast. Just about dark we reached the
+mission and stood gazing out over the rough ice of Kotzebue Sound to the
+Arctic Ocean, having made the forty miles in ten and a half hours. We
+had come about one thousand miles from Fairbanks, all of it on foot and
+most of it on snow-shoes.
+
+[Sidenote: THE ARCTIC OCEAN]
+
+So here was my first sight of the Arctic Ocean. All day long I had
+anticipated it, and it stirred me,--a dim, grey expanse stretching vast
+and vague in the dusk of the evening. The old navigators whose stories I
+had read as a boy passed before me in their wonderful, bold sailing
+vessels, going in and out uncharted waters that steamships will not
+venture to-day--Kotzebue, Beechey, Collinson, McClure--pushing
+resolutely northward.
+
+Less happy had been my first sight of the Pacific Ocean, five years
+before. I had the ill luck to come upon it by way of that Western Coney
+Island, Santa Monica, and from the merry-go-rounds and cheap eating
+places Balboa and Magellan and Franky Drake fled away incontinent and
+would not be conjured back; though, indeed, the original discoverers
+would have had yet further occasion to gaze at one another "with a wild
+surmise" if they had seen shrieking companies "shooting the chutes." But
+here was vastness, here was desolation, here was silence; jagged ice
+masses in the foreground and boundless expanse beyond, solemn and
+mysterious. The Arctic Ocean was even as I had pictured it.
+
+The missionary in charge at Kikitaruk had been informed by letter of our
+projected journey during the previous summer and had long expected us.
+We were received with kindness and hospitality, and after supper began
+at once our acquaintance with his work, for there was a service that
+night which it was thought we should attend. I spoke for a few minutes
+through an excellent interpreter and then spent a couple of hours
+nodding over the stove, overcome with sleep, while there was much
+singing and "testimony."
+
+[Sidenote: TOTAL-ABSTINENCE ESQUIMAUX]
+
+The Californian Society of Friends, established here a number of years
+with branches at other points on Kotzebue Sound, has done an excellent
+work amongst the Esquimaux. If they had accomplished nothing else it
+would stand to the everlasting credit of the Society's missionaries that
+they have succeeded in imbuing the natives under their charge with a
+total aversion to all intoxicating liquor. We had come down from the
+remotest points to which the influence of these people has extended; we
+had met their natives five hundred miles away from their base of
+instruction, and everywhere we found the same thing. It was said by the
+white men on the Koyukuk that a Kobuk could not be induced to take a
+drink of whisky. It seemed to us a pity that the force of this most
+wholesome doctrine should be weakened by the unsuccessful attempt to
+include tobacco in the same rigorous prohibition. In several cabins
+where we stayed there was no sign of smoking until members of our party
+produced pipes, whereupon other pipes were furtively produced and the
+tobacco that was offered was eagerly accepted. From any rational point
+of view the putting of whisky and tobacco in the same category is surely
+a folly. There can be few more harmless indulgences to the native than
+his pipe, and no one knows the solace of the pipe until he has smoked it
+around the camp-fire in the arctic regions after a hard day's journey.
+
+The decision to turn my back on Point Hope was, I think, the most
+painful decision I ever made in my life; with all my heart I wanted to
+go on. It was only one hundred and sixty or one hundred and seventy
+miles away. The journey had been made in three or four days; but we
+were now come to a country where travel is impossible in bad weather and
+where bad weather prevails; and that journey might quite as likely take
+two weeks. I worked over the calendar in my diary, figuring how many
+days of travel still remained, allowing reasonable margins, and I could
+not see that I had much more than time to get back to Fairbanks before
+the break-up, which for sufficient reason I regarded as my first duty.
+The day of rest at Kikitaruk was Washington's birthday, the 22d of
+February. Eight weeks would bring us to the 19th April, by which time
+the trails would be already breaking up. Counting out Sundays, that left
+forty-eight days of travelling with something like twelve hundred miles
+yet to make without going to Point Hope--an average of about twenty-five
+miles a day. I knew that we had made no such average in the distance
+already covered, and though I knew also that travelling improved
+generally as the season advanced, I did not know how very much better
+going there is on the wind-hardened snows of the coast when travelling
+is possible at all. Again and again I have regretted that I did not take
+the chance and push on, but at the time I decided as I thought I ought
+to decide, and one has no real compunctions when that is the case.
+
+[Sidenote: THE RESOLUTION TO TURN SOUTH]
+
+So a first-hand knowledge of our own most interesting work among the
+Esquimaux was not for me on that occasion--and there has arisen no
+opportunity since. Mr. Knapp, who had planned to spend the rest of the
+winter at Point Hope, would get a guide and a team here and turn north
+after some days' rest, while I would turn south. Roxy was impatient to
+return to Bettles. "Me no likee this country," was all that could be got
+out of him. So I paid him his money and made him a present of the .22
+repeating rifle with which he had killed so many ptarmigan on the
+journey, outfitted him with clothes, grub, and ammunition, and let him
+go; saying good-bye with regret, for he was a good boy to us all the
+way.
+
+It was late on the night of our single day of rest when I got to bed,
+for there had been squaring up of accounts and much writing, and when I
+went to bed I did not sleep. Again and again I reviewed the decision I
+had come to and fought against it, though such is far from my common
+habit. Even as I write, years after, the bitter rebellious reluctance
+with which I turned south comes back to me. I wished the hospital at
+Fairbanks at the bottom of the deep blue sea. I protested I would go on
+and complete my journey, even though it involved "thawing out" at Tanana
+and getting to Fairbanks on a steamboat in the summer. I had a free
+hand, a kindly and complaisant bishop, and none would call me strictly
+to account. Then I realised that it was merely pride of purpose,
+self-willed resolution of accomplishing what had been essayed--in a
+word, personal gratification for which I was fighting, and with that
+realisation came surrender and sleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE SEWARD PENINSULA--CANDLE CREEK, COUNCIL, AND NOME
+
+
+ONE day's rest was not a great deal after the distance we had come--and
+that day fully occupied with business--but since Point Hope was
+abandoned some sort of schedule must be made for the Seward Peninsula,
+and where Sunday shall be spent is always an important factor in
+arranging these itineraries. There was just time to reach Candle for the
+next Sunday and it was decided to attempt it. Hans would accompany me as
+far as Candle, where he hoped to find work. It meant two days of
+forty-five miles each, for it is ninety miles from Kikitaruk to Candle,
+but they told us it could be done.
+
+So the reluctant adieus made, letters despatched, some mailed here at
+Kikitaruk, some to be carried back to Bettles and mailed there--these
+latter getting outside long before the former--we started at seven in
+the morning instead of six, as we had planned, on the journey down the
+shore of Kotzebue Sound. That hour's delay turned out to be a calamity
+for us.
+
+The trail was smooth along the beach until Cape Blossom was reached, and
+I had the first riding of the winter, Hans and I alternately running and
+jumping on the sled. There was a portage across the cape, and three or
+four miles below it was the wreck of the river steamer _Riley_, which
+used to make a voyage up the Kobuk with supplies for the miners at the
+Shungnak. The thermometer was at -38° when we started, and the same
+light but keen breeze was blowing that had annoyed us on the other side
+of the peninsula. What a barren, desolate region it is!--low rocks
+sinking away to the dead level of the snow-field on the one hand,
+nothing but the ice-field on the other.
+
+[Sidenote: A BAD NIGHT]
+
+[Sidenote: CAMPED IN THE OPEN]
+
+We were bound for an igloo forty-five miles from the mission, the only
+shelter between Kikitaruk on the peninsula and Kewalik on the mainland,
+and we had been warned that the igloo would be easy to miss if it grew
+dark as it would be almost indistinguishable from the snow-drifts of the
+shore. Some directions from a multitude of counsellors remembered in one
+sense by Hans and in another by me, added to our uncertainty as to just
+where the igloo lay. The wind increased in force as the evening advanced
+and the last time I looked at the thermometer it still registered -38°.
+The sun set over the sound with another of those curious distortions
+which had before proved ominous to us. It was flattened and swollen out
+like a pot-bellied Chinese lantern, with a neck to it and an irregular
+veining over its surface that completed the resemblance. The wind
+increased until the air was full of flying snow and it grew dark, and
+still there was no sign of the igloo. Only slowly and with much
+difficulty could the trail be followed, and that meant we were soon not
+moving fast enough to keep warm in the fierce wind. At last we lost the
+trail altogether, and sometimes we found ourselves out on the rough ice
+of the sound and sometimes wallowing in a fresh snow-drift on the shore.
+I became possessed with the fear that we had passed the igloo. I was
+positive that we were told at the mission that we should reach it
+_before_ the high bluffs were passed, and we had passed them a long way
+and had now but a shallow shelf to mark the coast-line. It is strange
+how long that delusion about passing his destination will pursue the
+Alaskan traveller. Presently the dogs dropped off a steep bank in the
+dark, and only by good fortune we were able to keep the heavy sled from
+falling upon them, for they were dead tired and lay where they dropped.
+With freezing fingers I unhitched the dogs while Hans held the sled, and
+we lowered it safely down. But it was plain that it was dangerous to
+proceed. We could not find the trail again and were growing alarmingly
+cold. We were "up against it," as they say here, "up against it good and
+strong." We had a tent but no means of putting it up, a stove but
+nothing to burn in it, a grub box full of food but no way to cook it. So
+the first night of coast travel was to show us the full rigour and
+inhospitality of the coast and to make us long for the interior again.
+Wood can almost always be found there within a few miles, if it be not
+immediately at hand, and no one properly appreciates the hospitality of
+a clump of spruce-trees until he has spent a night of storm lying out on
+this barren coast. We turned the dogs loose and threw them a fish
+apiece, unlashed the sled, and got out our bedding. I had been sleeping
+in robes, Hans in a shedding caribou-hide sleeping-bag that was my pet
+aversion. When he crawled out in the morning he was so covered with hair
+that he looked like a caribou, and the miserable hairs were always
+getting into the food. We fished them out of the coffee, pulled them out
+of the butter, and picked them out of the bread. But now in that
+sleeping-bag he had an enormous advantage. We lay side by side on the
+snow in the lee of the sled, and, tuck myself up with blanket and robe
+as I would, it was impossible to keep the swirling snow from coming in.
+I called the dogs to me and made them lie on my feet and up against my
+side, and so long as they lay still I could get a little warmth, but
+whenever they rose and left me I grew numb again. But Hans in his
+sleeping-bag was snoring. The bag is the only bedding on the coast.
+Added to the physical discomfort of that sleepless, shivery night was
+some mental uneasiness. There was no telling to what height the storm
+might rise, nor how long it might continue. Sometimes travellers
+overtaken in this way on the coast have to lie in their sleeping-bags
+for three days and nights before they can resume their journey. The only
+interest the night held was the thought that came to me that as nearly
+as I could tell we camped exactly on the Arctic Circle. The long night
+dragged its slow length to the dawn at last and the wind moderated a
+little at the same time, so with the first streak in the east I awoke
+Hans, we gathered our poor dogs together, rolled up the snow-incrusted
+bedding, and resumed our journey. Two miles farther on was the igloo!
+Our calls awoke some one and we were bidden to enter. Descending a
+ladder and crawling through a dark passage we came in to the grateful
+warmth and shelter. The chamber was crowded with sleeping Esquimaux and
+reeked with seal oil and fish, but Hans said it "looked good and smelled
+good to him," and so it did to me also. One has to lie out on that coast
+in a storm to appreciate the value of mere shelter. We went at once to
+cooking, for we had eaten nothing but a doughnut or two in twenty-four
+hours, and surely never meal was more relished than the reindeer steaks
+and the coffee we took amongst those still sleeping Esquimaux. I should
+have liked to spend the day and the next night there, for they were
+friendly and kindly, but the wind had moderated somewhat and there was
+still a chance to reach Candle for Sunday. With the offer of a sack of
+flour at Kewalik we induced a couple of Esquimaux to accompany us, for I
+knew we had to cross the mouth of a bay over the ice to reach the
+mainland and I wanted to take no more chances.
+
+Our company, again raised to four, started out about nine, and until the
+Choris Peninsula was reached the trail still skirted the shore. It is
+strange that Kotzebue, who named this peninsula of a peninsula for the
+artist who accompanied his expedition in 1816, should have left the main
+peninsula itself unnamed, and that the British expedition which named
+Cape Blossom ten years later should have failed to supply the omission.
+It still bears no name on the map. We portaged across the Choris
+Peninsula and at the end of the portage took a straight course across
+the mouth of Escholtz Bay (Escholtz was Kotzebue's surgeon) for Kewalik
+on the mainland, passing Chamisso Island, named for Kotzebue's poet
+friend. There is something very interesting to me in this voyage of
+Kotzebue's, and I have long wished to come across a full narrative of
+it. But the bitter wind that swept across that ice-sheet with the
+thermometer at -30° brought one's thoughts back to one's own condition.
+My hands I could not keep warm with the gear that had sufficed for 50°
+and 60° below in the interior, and I was very glad to procure from one
+of our native companions a pair of caribou mitts with the hair inside,
+an almost invulnerable gauntlet against cold. If that wind had been in
+our faces instead of on our sides I am sure we could not have travelled
+at all. At last we won across the ice and brought up at a comfortable
+road-house at Kewalik, about ten miles from Candle. Here we lay
+overnight, taking the opportunity of thawing out and drying the
+frost-crusted bedding, leaving the short run into town for the morning.
+
+[Sidenote: CANDLE CREEK]
+
+The diggings on Candle Creek yield to the Koyukuk diggings only as the
+most northerly gold mining in the world. Although the general methods
+are the same in all Alaskan camps, local circumstances introduce many
+differences. In all Alaskan camps the ground is frozen and must be
+thawed down. The timber of the interior renders wood the natural fuel
+for the production of the steam that thaws the ground, but the scarcity
+of wood on the Seward Peninsula substitutes coal. There is coal on the
+peninsula itself, but of very inferior quality, mixed with ice. One may
+see chunks of coal with veins of ice running through them thrown upon
+the fire. The wood of the interior is a great factor in its commercial
+and domestic economy, and its absence on the Seward Peninsula makes
+great change not only in the natural aspect of the country but in the
+whole aspect of its industrial and domestic life also. Wood-chopping for
+the stove and the mill, wood-sawing, wood-hauling employ no small
+percentage of all the white men in the interior--occupations which do
+not exist at all on the peninsula. But its encompassment by the sea, its
+peninsularity, is the dominating difference between the Seward Peninsula
+and the interior, and does indeed make a different country of it
+altogether. All prices are very much lower on the peninsula because
+ships can bring merchandise directly from the "outside." Thus amongst
+those who have money to spend there is a more lavish scale of living
+than in the interior towns, and luxuries may be enjoyed here that are
+out of the question there. Perhaps, conversely, it is true that life on
+the peninsula is somewhat harder for the poorer class. Whether a railway
+from salt water to the mid-Yukon would redress this great difference in
+the cost of everything may be doubted. Railways do not usually operate
+at less than water-rates. There will probably always be an advantage in
+the cost of living and mining in favour of the Seward Peninsula camps.
+
+There had been no public religious service of any sort in Candle, with
+its several hundreds of population, in three years, so there was special
+satisfaction in having reached the place for Sunday when many miners
+were in town from the creeks, and an overflowing congregation was
+readily assembled. And there was great pleasure in three days' rest at
+the hospitable home of a friend while the temperature remained below
+-40°, exacerbated by a wind that rendered travelling dangerous.
+Moreover, by waiting I had company on the way, and now that I was
+without native attendant or white companion, and disposed, if possible,
+to make the journey right across the peninsula to Council and then to
+Nome without engaging fresh assistance, I was doubly glad of the
+opportunity of travelling with two men bound for the same places and
+acquainted with the route.
+
+[Sidenote: THE SEWARD PENINSULA]
+
+Travelling, like so many other things, is very different on the Seward
+Peninsula. The constant winds beat down and harden the snow until it has
+a crust that will carry a man anywhere. There are only two means by
+which snow becomes crusted; one is this packing and solidifying by the
+wind, and the other is thawing and freezing again. There is much less
+wind in the interior than on the coast, and usually much less snowfall,
+and the greater part of the surface of the country is protected by
+trees; the climate, being continental instead of marine, is not subject
+to such great fluctuations of temperature. A thaw sufficiently
+pronounced or sufficiently prolonged to put a stout crust on the snow
+when freezing is resumed, is a very rare thing in the interior and a
+common thing on the coast. So a striking difference in travel at once
+manifests itself; in the interior all the snow is soft except on a
+beaten trail itself, while in the Seward Peninsula all the snow is alike
+hard. The musher is not confined to trails--he can go where he pleases;
+and his vehicle is under no necessity of conforming in width to a
+general usage of the country--it may be as wide as he pleases. Hence the
+hitching of dogs two and three abreast; hence the sleds of twenty-two,
+twenty-four, or twenty-six inches in width. My tandem rig aroused the
+curiosity of those who saw it. Hence many other differences also.
+Hitherto we had not dreamed of watering the dogs since snow fell; now I
+found their mouths bloody from their ineffectual attempts to dig up the
+hard snow with their teeth, and had to water them night and morning. It
+is not the custom on the Seward Peninsula to cook for the dogs, and dog
+mushers there argue the needlessness of that trouble. But the true
+reason is other and obvious. It is difficult for the traveller to get
+enough wood to cook for himself, let alone the dogs. On the Seward
+Peninsula skis are extensively used when there is soft snow; the
+prevalence of brush almost everywhere in the interior renders them of
+little use--and they are, therefore, little used, snow-shoes being
+universal.
+
+So, as in nearly all such matters everywhere, local peculiarities, local
+differences, local customs, usually arise from local conditions, and the
+wise man will commonly conform so soon as he discovers them. There is
+almost always a sufficient reason for them.
+
+[Sidenote: A "SIDLING" TRAIL]
+
+The journey from Candle to Council was a surprisingly swift one. We
+covered the one hundred and thirty miles in three days, far and away the
+best travelling of the winter so far, but the usual time, I found. The
+hard snow gives smooth passage though the interior of the peninsula is
+rugged and mountainous; two prominent elevations, the Ass's Ears,
+standing up as landmarks during the first day of the journey. The route
+crossed ridge after ridge with steep grades, and the handling of the
+heavy sled alone was too much for me. Again and again it was overturned,
+and it was all that I could do, and more than I ought to have done, to
+set it up again. The wind continued to blow with violence, and shelter
+from it there was none. One hillside struggle I shall always remember.
+The trail sloped with the hill and the wind was blowing directly down
+it. I could keep no footing on the marble snow and had fallen heavily
+again and again, in my frantic efforts to hold sled and dogs and all
+from sweeping down into a dark ravine that loomed below, when I
+bethought me of the "creepers" in the hind-sack, used on the rivers in
+passing over glare ice. With these irons strapped to my feet I was able
+to stand upright, but it was only by a hair's breadth once and again
+that I got my load safely across. When I was wallowing in a hot bath at
+Council two days later I found that my hip and thigh were black and blue
+where I had fallen, though at the time, in my anxiety to save the dogs
+and the sled, I had not noticed that I had bruised myself. So, judging
+great things by little, one understands how a soldier may be sorely
+wounded without knowing it in the heat and exaltation of battle.
+
+Then for a while there would be such travel as one sees in the
+children's picture-books, where the man sits in the sled and cracks his
+whip and is whisked along as gaily as you please--such travel as I had
+never had before; but there was no pleasure in it--the wind saw to
+that.
+
+On the second day we crossed "Death Valley," so called because two men
+were once found frozen in it; a bleak, barren expanse, five or six miles
+across, with a great gale blowing right down it, charged not only with
+particles of hard snow but with spicules of ice and grains of sand. Our
+course was south and the gale blew from the northwest, and the right
+side of one's body and the right arm were continually numb from the
+incessant beating of the wind. The parkee hood had to be drawn closely
+all the time, and the eyes were sore from trying to peer ahead through
+the fur edging of the hood. One grows to hate that wind with something
+like a personal animosity, so brutal, so malicious does it seem. An
+incautious turn of the head and the scarf that protected mouth and nose
+was snatched from me and borne far away in an instant, beyond thought of
+recovery. It seems to lie in wait, and one fancies a fresh shrill of
+glee in its note at every new discomfiture it can inflict. There is
+nothing far-fetched in the native superstition that puts a malignant
+spirit in the wind; it is the most natural feeling in the world. I said
+so that night in camp, and one of my companions mentioned something
+about "rude Boreas," and I laughed. The gentle myths of Greece do not
+fit this country. The Indian name means "the wind beast," and is
+appropriate.
+
+A savage, forbidding country, this whole interior of the Seward
+Peninsula, uninhabited and unfit for habitation; a country of naked rock
+and bare hillside and desolate, barren valley, without amenities of any
+kind and cursed with a perpetual icy blast.
+
+[Sidenote: DEATH VALLEY]
+
+The valley crossed and its ridge surmounted, a still more heart-breaking
+experience was in store. We descended the frozen bed of a creek from
+which the wind had swept every trace of snow so that the ice was
+polished as smooth as glass. The dogs could get no footing and were
+continually down on their bellies, moving their legs instinctively but
+helplessly, like the flippers of a turtle, while the wind carried dogs
+and sled where it pleased. The grade was considerable and in bends the
+creek spread out wide. Nothing but the creepers enabled a man to stand
+at all, and creepers and brake together could not hold the sled from
+careering sideways across the ice, dragging the dogs with it, until the
+runners struck some pebble or twig frozen in the ice and the sled would
+be violently overturned. Twice with freezing fingers I unlashed that
+sled lying on its side, and took out nearly all the load before I could
+succeed in getting it upright again, losing some of the lighter articles
+each time. The third time was the worst of all. The brake had been
+little more than a pivot on which sled and dogs were swung to leeward,
+but now the teeth had become so blunt that, though I stood upon it with
+all my weight, it would not hold at all nor check the sideways motion
+under the impulse of the wind. Right across the creek we went, dragging
+the dogs behind, jerking them hither and thither over the glassy
+surface. I saw the rocks towards which we were driving, but was
+powerless to avert the disaster, and hung on in some hope, I suppose, of
+being able to minimise it, till, with a crash that broke two of the
+uprights and threw me so hard that I skinned my elbow and hurt my head,
+we were once more overturned. Never since I reached manhood, I think,
+did I feel so much like sitting down and crying. It seemed hopeless to
+think about getting down that creek until the wind stopped, and one
+doubts if the wind ever does stop in that country. But there was no good
+sitting there like a shipwrecked mariner, nursing sores and misfortunes;
+presently one would begin to feel sorry for oneself--that last resort of
+incompetence. And the bitter wind is a great stimulus. It will not
+permit inaction. So I was up again, fumbling at the sled lashings as
+best I could with torpid fingers, when one of my companions, uneasy at
+my delay, very kindly made his way back, and with his assistance I was
+able to get the sled upright again without unloading and hold it
+somewhat better on its course until another bend or two brought us to
+the partial shelter of bluffs and, a little farther, to the cabin where
+we were to spend the night. I understood now why my companions had a
+sort of hinged knife-edge fastened to one runner of their sled. By the
+pressure of a foot the knife-edge engaged the ice and held the sled on
+its course. This is another Seward Peninsula device.
+
+[Sidenote: THE KINDLY SWEDE]
+
+I have it in my diary that "a Swede named Petersen was very kind to us
+at the cabin, cooking for us and giving us cooked dog feed." Blessed
+Swede named Petersen!--there are hundreds of them in Alaska--and I shall
+never forget that particular one's kindness--the only man I met in the
+Seward Peninsula who still persisted in cooking dog feed whenever he
+could. He had cooked up a mess of rice and fish enough to last his three
+or four dogs several days while he sojourned at this cabin, and he gave
+it all to us and would take nothing for it. His language was what
+Truthful James calls "frequent and painful and free." I ignored it for a
+while, loath to take exception to anything a man said who had been so
+kind. But at last I could stand it no longer--it took all the savour out
+of his hospitality--and I said: "I hope you won't mind my saying it, for
+I'd hate to give offence to a man who has been so good to strangers as
+you have, but I wish you'd cut out that cursing; it hurts my ears." He
+sat silent a moment looking straight at me, and I was not sure how he
+had taken it. Then he said: "Maybe you been kinder to me saying that,
+than I been to you. That's the first time I ever been call down for
+cursin'. I don't mean nothin' by it; it's just foolishness and I goin'
+try to cut it out."
+
+The dogs had done but ill on the dry fish, accustomed as they were to
+cooked food, and they ate ravenously of their supper. Only the previous
+night Lingo had betrayed his trust for the first and last time. Coming
+out of the cabin just before turning in, to take a last look round, I
+saw Lingo on top of the sled eating something, and I found that he had
+dug a slab of bacon out of the unlashed load and had eaten most of it. I
+knew he was hungry, missing the filling, satisfying mess he was used to,
+and I did not thrash him, I simply said, "Oh, Lingo!" and the dog got
+off the sled and slunk away, the very picture of conscious, shamefaced
+guilt. That was the only time he did such a thing in all the six years I
+drove him.
+
+Council was past its prime at the time of this visit, but just as we
+entered the town, at the end of the third day's run, it seemed in danger
+of going through all the stages of decadence with a rush to total
+destruction out of hand, for a fire had broken out in a laundry, and
+with the high wind still blowing it looked as though every building was
+doomed. Of two chemical engines possessed by the town one refused to
+work, but the vigour and promptness of the people in forming two lines
+down to the river, and passing buckets with the utmost rapidity, coped
+with the outbreak just in time to prevent its spreading beyond all
+control. Tired as we were, we all pitched in and passed buckets until
+parkees and mitts and mukluks were incrusted with ice from water that
+was spilled. Efficient protection is a matter of great difficulty and
+expense in Alaskan towns, and there is not one of them that has escaped
+being swept by fire. The buildings are almost necessarily all of wood,
+the cost of brick and stone construction being prohibitive. No one can
+guarantee ten years of life to a placer-mining town, and there would be
+no warrant for the expenditure of the sums required for fireproof
+building even were the capital available. But the rapidity with which
+they are rebuilt, where rebuilding is justified, is even more remarkable
+than the rapidity with which they are destroyed.
+
+A Saturday and Sunday were very welcome at Council, and the courtesy of
+the Presbyterian minister, who gave up his church and his congregations
+to me, Esquimaux in the morning and white at night, was much
+appreciated.
+
+[Sidenote: NORTON SOUND]
+
+In warmer weather, the thermometer no lower than -5° at the start, but
+with the same gale blowing that had blown ever since we left Candle,
+though it had shifted towards the northeast, we got away on Monday
+morning, bound for Nome, ninety miles away, hoping to reach the half-way
+house that night. Five or six hours' run over good trails, with no
+greater inconvenience than the acceleration of our pace by the wind on
+down grades, until the sled frequently overran the dogs with
+entanglements and spillings, brought us to the seacoast at Topkok, and a
+noble view opened up as we climbed the great bluff. There Norton Sound
+spread out before us, its ice largely cleared away and blown into Bering
+Sea by the strong wind that had prevailed for nearly a week, its waves
+sparkling and dashing into foam in the March sunshine; the distant
+cliffs and mountains of its other shore just visible in the clear air.
+It was an exhilarating sight--the first free water that I had seen since
+the summer, and it seemed rejoicing in its freedom, leaping up with glee
+to greet the mighty ally that had struck off its fetters.
+
+But from this point troubles began to grow. We dropped down presently to
+the shore and passed along the glare surface of lagoon after lagoon, the
+wind doing what it liked with the sled, for it was impossible to handle
+it at all. Sometimes we went along broadside on, sometimes the sled
+first and the dogs trailing behind, moving their silly, helpless paws
+from side to side as they were dragged over the ice on their bellies.
+When we had passed these lagoons the trail took the beach, running
+alongside and just to windward of a telephone-line, with rough shore
+ice to the left and bare rocks to the right. Again and again the already
+injured sled was smashed heavily against a telephone pole. I would see
+the impact coming and strive my utmost to avert it, but without a gee
+pole, and swinging the sled only by the handle-bars, it was more than I
+could do to hold the sled on its course against the beam wind that was
+forcing it towards the ice and the telephone poles; and a gee pole could
+not be used at the rate we had travelled ever since we left Candle. Mile
+after mile we went along in this way. I do not know how many poles I hit
+and how many I missed, but every pole on that stretch of coast was a
+fresh and separate anxiety and menace to me. I think I would have been
+perfectly willing to have abolished and wiped out the whole invention of
+the telephone so I could be rid of those hateful poles. What were
+telephone poles doing in the arctic regions anyway? Telephone poles
+belonged with electric cars and interurban trolley-lines, not with dog
+teams and sleds.
+
+Then it grew dark and the wind increased. I did not know it, but I was
+approaching that stretch of coast which is notorious as the windiest
+place in all Alaska, a place the topography of which makes it a natural
+funnel for the outlet of wind should any be blowing anywhere in the
+interior of the peninsula. My companions were far ahead, long since out
+of sight. I struggled along a little farther, and, just after a
+particularly bad collision and an overturning, I saw a light glimmering
+in the snow to my right. It was a little road-house, buried to the eaves
+and over the roof in snow-drift, with window tunnels and a door tunnel
+excavated in the snow. I was yet, I learned, five miles from Solomon's,
+my destination, but I hailed this haven as my refuge for the night and
+went no farther, more exhausted by the struggle of the last two or three
+hours than by many an all-day tramp on snow-shoes. It was a miserable,
+dirty little shack, but it was tight; it meant shelter from that
+pitiless wind. That night the thermometer stood at 7°, the first plus
+temperature in twenty-two days.
+
+By morning the gale had greatly diminished, and by the time I reached
+Solomon's and rejoined my companions it was calm, the first calm since
+we left the middle Kobuk. We had some rough ice to cross to avoid a long
+detour of the coast, and then we were back on the shore again and it
+began to snow. The snow was soon done and the sun shone, but the new
+coating of dazzling white gave such a glare that it was necessary to put
+on the snow glasses for the first time of the winter--and that is always
+a sign winter draws to a close.
+
+[Sidenote: DOGS AND REINDEER]
+
+On the approach to Nome we had our first encounter with reindeer, and at
+once my dog team became unmanageable. I had had some trouble that
+morning with a horse. A new dog I procured at Kikitaruk had never seen a
+horse before, and made frantic efforts to get at him, leaping at his
+haunches as we passed by. But when they saw the reindeer the whole team
+set off at a run, dragging the heavy sled as if it were nothing. The
+Esquimau driving the deer saw the approaching dogs and hastily drew his
+equipage off the trail farther inshore, standing between the deer and
+the dogs with a heavy whip. What the result would have been had the
+dogs reached the deer it is hard to say. I had kept my stand on the step
+behind the sled and managed to check its wild career with the brake and
+to throw it over and stop the approach before the carnivora reached
+their immemorial prey. Herein lies one of the difficulties of the
+domestication of reindeer in Alaska, a country where so far dogs have
+been the only domestic animals. Again, as we entered the outskirts of
+Nome the incident was repeated, and only the hasty driving of the
+reindeer into a barn prevented the dogs from seizing the deer that time.
+
+[Sidenote: NOME]
+
+Jimmy was long deposed from his ineffectual leadership and a little dog
+named Kewalik--the one I obtained at Kikitaruk--was at the head of the
+team. Kewalik had never seen so many houses before; hitherto almost
+every cabin he had reached on his journeys had been a resting-place, and
+he wanted to dive into every house we passed. At Candle and Council
+both, our stopping-place had been near the entrance to the little town.
+But now we had to pass up one long street after another and I had
+continually to drag him and the team he led first from a yard on this
+side of the road and then from one on the other. The dog was perfectly
+bewildered and out of his head by the number of people and the number of
+houses he saw. We were indeed a sorry, travel-worn, unkempt, uncivilised
+band, man and dogs, with an old, battered vehicle, and we felt our
+incongruity with the new environment as we entered the metropolis of the
+luxury and wealth of the North. Here we passed a jeweller's shop, the
+whole window aglow with the dull gleam of gold and ivory--the terrible
+nugget jewellery so much affected in these parts and the walrus ivory
+which is Alaska's other contribution of material for the ornamental
+arts. Here we passed a veritable department store, its ground-floor
+plate-glass window set as a drawing-room, with gilded, brocaded chairs,
+marquetry table, and ormolu clock, and I know not what costliness of rug
+and curtain. It was all so strange that it seemed unreal after that long
+passage of the savage wilds, that long habitation of huts and igloos and
+tents. Hitherto we had often been fortunate could we buy a little flour
+and bacon; here the choice comestibles of the earth were for sale. I
+looked askance at my greasy parkee as I passed shops where English
+broadcloth and Scotch tweeds were displayed; at my worn, clumsy mukluks
+when I saw patent-leather pumps. But Nome knows how to welcome the
+wanderer from the wilderness and to make him altogether at home. There
+could be no warmer hospitality than that with which I was received by
+the Reverend John White and his wife, than that which I had at many a
+home during my week's stay.
+
+Nothing in the world could have caused the building of a city where Nome
+is built except the thing that caused it: the finding of gold on the
+beach itself and in the creeks immediately behind it. It has no harbour
+or roadstead, no shelter or protection of any kind; it is in as bleak
+and exposed a position as a man would find if he should set out to hunt
+the earth over for ineligible sites.
+
+But Nome is also a fine instance of the way men in the North conquer
+local conditions and wring comfort out of bleakness and desolation by
+the clever adaptation of means to ends.
+
+The art of living comfortably in the North had to be learned, and it has
+been learned pretty thoroughly. People live at Nome as well as they do
+"outside." One may sit down to dinners as well cooked, as well
+furnished, as well served as any dinners anywhere. The good folk of Nome
+delight in spreading their dainty store before the unjaded appetite of
+the winter traveller, and it would be affectation to deny that there is
+keen relish of enjoyment in the long-unwonted gleam of wax candle or
+electrolier upon perfect appointment of glass, silver, and napery, in
+the unobtrusive but vigilant service of white-jacketed Chinaman or Jap.
+Nome has a great advantage over its only rival in the interior,
+Fairbanks, in the matter of freight rates. The same merchandise that is
+landed at the one place for ten or twelve dollars a ton within ten or
+twelve days of its leaving Seattle, costs fifty or sixty at the other,
+and takes a month or more to arrive. But this accessibility in the
+summer is exactly reversed in the winter. No practicable route has been
+discovered along the uninhabited shores of Bering Sea, and all the mail
+for Nome comes from Valdez to Fairbanks and then down the Yukon and
+round Norton Sound by dog team. In winter Fairbanks is within seven or
+eight days of open salt water; Nome a full month. After navigation
+closes in October, the first mail does not commonly reach the Seward
+Peninsula until January. So that, with all its comforts and luxuries,
+Nome is a very isolated place for eight months in the year.
+
+[Illustration: GOLD-MINING AT NOME.]
+
+[Illustration: PULLING THE "PELICAN" OUT WITH A "SPANISH WINDLASS."]
+
+[Sidenote: MINING AT NOME]
+
+We went out with the dog sled to the diggings a few miles behind the
+town, and a busy scene we found, enveloped in steam and smoke. Here an
+old beach line had been discovered and was yielding rich reward for the
+working. A long line of conical "dumps" marked its extension roughly
+parallel with the present shore, and the buckets that arose from the
+depths, travelled along a cable, and at just the right moment upset
+their contents, continually added to these heaps. All the winter
+"pay-dirt" is thus excavated and stored; in the summer when the streams
+run the gold is sluiced out. But that phrase "when the streams run"
+covers a world of difficulty and expense to the miner. In some places in
+this Seward Peninsula, ditches thirty and forty miles long have been
+constructed to insure the streams running when and where they are
+needed.
+
+There was quite a little to do in Nome. A new sled must be bought, and
+another dog, and, above all, some arrangement made about a travelling
+companion. I was not willing to hire a native who would have to return
+here, and I was resolved never again to travel alone. So I put an
+advertisement in the newspaper, desiring communication with some man who
+was intending a journey to Fairbanks immediately, and was fortunate to
+meet a sober, reliable man who undertook to accompany and assist me for
+the payment of his travelling expenses.
+
+The week wore rapidly away, and I began to be eager to depart, mindful
+of the eight hundred odd miles yet to be covered. Spring seemed already
+here and summer treading upon her heels, for the town was all slush and
+mud from a decided "soft snap," the thermometer standing well above
+freezing for days in succession.
+
+A visitor to this place is struck by the number of articles made from
+walrus ivory exposed for sale, chief amongst them being cribbage-boards.
+A walk down the streets would argue the whole population given over to
+the incessant playing of cribbage. The explanation is found in the
+difficulty of changing the direction of Esquimau activity once that
+direction is established. These clever artificers were started making
+cribbage-boards long ago and it seems impossible to stop them. Every
+summer they come in from their winter hunting with fresh supplies carved
+during the leisure of the long nights. The beautiful walrus tusk becomes
+almost an ugly thing when it is thus hacked flat and bored full of
+holes. The best pieces of Esquimau carving are not these things, made by
+the dozen, but the domestic implements made for their own use, and some
+of this work is very clever and tasteful indeed, adorned with fine bold
+etchings of the chase of walrus, seal, and polar bear.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+NOME TO FAIRBANKS--NORTON SOUND--THE KALTAG PORTAGE--NULATO--UP THE
+YUKON TO TANANA
+
+
+WE left Nome on the 13th of March, the night before being taken up by a
+banquet which the Commercial Club was kind enough to give me; indeed,
+the whole stay was marked by lavish kindness and hospitality, and I left
+with the feeling that Nome was one of the most generous and open-handed
+places I had ever visited.
+
+The soft weather continued and made sloppy travel. Our course lay all
+around Norton Sound to Unalaklík, and then over the portage to Kaltag on
+the Yukon; up the Yukon to the mouth of the Tanana, and then up that
+river to Fairbanks. The first day's run was the retracing of our steps
+to Solomon's, and that was done without difficulty save for a new
+trouble with the dogs. It appeared that we no longer had any leader. All
+the winter through my team had been behind another team, and that
+constant second place had turned our leaders into followers. We thought
+we had two leaders, but neither one was willing to proceed without some
+one or something ahead of him. On such good ice-going as this it was out
+of the question for one of us to run ahead of the team simply to please
+these leader-perverts, and the whip had to be wielded heavily on Jimmy's
+back ere he could be induced to fill his proper office--and then he did
+it ill, with constant exasperating stoppings and lookings-back. At
+Solomon's I met a man who had spent some years with Peary in his arctic
+explorations, and I sat up far into the night drawing interesting
+narratives out of him. So far as Topkok we were still retracing our
+steps, but once over the great bluff, which gave no view this time owing
+to the mist which accompanies this soft weather, we were on new ground,
+our course lying wholly along the beach.
+
+At Bluff was the most interesting, curious gold mining I have ever seen,
+the extraction of gold from the sand of Norton Sound, two hundred yards
+or more out from the beach. There it lies under ten or twelve feet of
+water with the ice on top. How shall it be reached? Why, by the exact
+converse of the usual Alaskan placer mining; by freezing down instead of
+thawing down. The ice is cut away from the beginning of a shaft, almost
+but not quite down to the water, leaving just a thin cake. The
+atmospheric cold, penetrating this cake, freezes the water below it, and
+presently the hole is chopped down a little farther, leaving always a
+thin cake above the water. A canvas chute is arranged over the shaft,
+with a head like a ship's ventilator that can be turned any way to catch
+the wind. Gradually the water is frozen down, and as it is frozen more
+and more ice is removed until the bottom is reached, surrounded and
+protected by a cylindrical shaft of ice; then the sand can be removed
+and the gold it contains washed out. They told us they were making good
+money and their ingenuity certainly deserved it.
+
+[Sidenote: ICE TRAVEL]
+
+We stopped that night at the native village of Chinnik, the people of
+which are looked after by a mission of the Swedish Evangelical Church on
+Golofnin Bay, which we should cross to-morrow. But the mission is off
+the trail, and we did not come to an acquaintance with the missionaries
+of this body until we reached Unalaklík. Next day, climbing and
+descending considerable grades in warm, misty weather, we reached
+Golofnin Bay, pursued it some distance, and left it by a very steep,
+long hill that was close to one thousand feet high, at the foot of which
+we were once more on the beach of the sound--and at the road-house for
+the night. From that place the trail no longer hugged the coast but
+struck out boldly across the ice for a distant headland, Moses' Point,
+where we lunched, and, that point reached, struck out again for Isaac's
+Point, most of the travelling during a long day in which we made
+forty-eight miles being four or five miles from land. The day was clear,
+and the shore-line of the other side of the sound, which grew nearer as
+we proceeded, was subject to strange distortions of mirage. The
+road-house that night nestled picturesquely against a great bluff, and
+right across the ice lay Texas Point, for which we should make a
+bee-line to-morrow. Sometimes the traveller must go all round Norton
+Bay, but at this time the ice was in good condition and our route cut
+across the mouth of the bay for twenty-two miles straight for the other
+side. It was like crossing from Dover to Calais on the ice. The passage
+made, the Alaskan mainland was reached once more, the Seward Peninsula
+left behind us, and our way lay across desolate, low-lying tundra
+strewn with driftwood and hollowed out here and there into little
+lagoons. Evidently the waves sweep clean across it in stormy weather
+when the sound is open; a salt marsh. In the midst of it reared a sort
+of lookout tripod of driftwood thirty or forty feet high, lashed and
+nailed together, with a precarious little platform on top and cleats
+nailed to one of the uprights for ascent. I essayed the view, but the
+rusty nails broke under my feet. We deemed it a hunting tower from which
+water-fowl might be spied in the spring. Sixteen miles of this
+melancholy waste brought us to the shore again, to a tiny Esquimau
+village and a tumble-down, half-buried shack of a road-house where we
+should spend the night, a little schooner lying beached in front of it.
+If its exterior were uninviting, the scene as we entered was sinister.
+By the light of a single candle--though it was not yet dark
+outside--amidst unwashed dishes and general grime, sat an evil-eyed
+Portuguese or Spaniard, in a red toque, playing poker with three
+skin-clad Esquimaux. So absorbed were they in the game that they had not
+heard us arrive nor seen us enter. With a brief, reluctant interval for
+the preparation of a poor supper, the card playing went on all the
+evening far into the night. My companion discovered that the chips were
+worth a dollar apiece and judged it to be "considerable of a game." At
+last I arose from my bunk and said that we were tired and had come there
+to sleep, and with an ill grace the playing was shortly abandoned and
+the natives went off. The arctic shores have their beach-combers as well
+as the South Sea Islands.
+
+[Sidenote: UNALAKLÍK]
+
+The next day was Sunday, but I was anxious to spend my day of rest at
+Unalaklík and most indisposed to spend it here, so we got away with a
+very early start long before daylight. Six or seven miles of tundra and
+lagoon travel and the trail crossed abruptly a tongue of land and struck
+out over the salt-water ice for a cape fifteen miles away. The going was
+splendid. It was not glare ice, but ice upon which snow had melted and
+frozen again. It was so smooth that one dog could have drawn the sled,
+yet not so smooth as to deny good footing. We kept well out to sea,
+passing close to the mountainous mass of Besborough Island, plainly
+riven by some ancient convulsion from the sheer bluffs of the mainland.
+Our only trouble was in keeping the dogs well enough out, for, not being
+water-spaniels or other marine species, they had a hankering after the
+land and a continual tendency to edge in to shore.
+
+So from headland to headland we made rapid, easy traverse, thoroughly
+enjoying the ride, munching chocolate and raisins, speculating about the
+seasons when it had been possible to cross direct from Nome to Saint
+Michael on the ice, and exchanging stories we had heard of the disasters
+and hairbreadth escapes attending such overbold venture. Only this
+winter three men and a dog team were blown out into Bering Sea by a
+sudden storm, and lay for four days in their sleeping-bags drifting up
+and down on an ice cake, until at last they were blown back to the shore
+ice and made their escape. And there is a fine story of a white man
+rescued in half-frozen state by his Esquimau wife, and carried for miles
+on her back to safety.
+
+At last we turned a point and drew in to the shore, and, not seeing the
+little town till we were almost upon it, arrived at Unalaklík early in
+the afternoon. We had made the two hundred and forty miles, as it is
+called, from Nome, in six days. In the last twelve days of travel we had
+covered five hundred miles, an average of nearly forty-two miles per
+day, far and away the best travelling of the winter. The preceding five
+hundred miles had taken twenty-two days.
+
+We were in time to attend the Esquimau services at the mission both
+afternoon and night, and I found them very much the same as at
+Kikitaruk, with the exception that the singing was much more advanced
+and was very good indeed. There was an anthem of the Danks type sung by
+a choir--the parts well maintained throughout, the attacks good, the
+voices under excellent control--that it pleased and surprised me to
+hear, and there was a long discourse most patiently and, as I judged,
+faithfully interpreted by a bright-looking Esquimau boy. It is well for
+those who speak much through an interpreter to listen occasionally to
+similar discourse. Only so may its unavoidable tediousness be
+appreciated.
+
+[Sidenote: GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS]
+
+The school next day pleased me still more, and I was glad that I had a
+school-day at the place. I heard good reading and spelling, saw good
+writing, and listened with real enjoyment to the fresh young voices
+raised again and again in song. There was, however, something so
+curiously exotic that for a moment it seemed irresistibly funny, in "The
+Old Oaken Bucket," from lips that have difficulty with the vowel sounds
+of English; from children that never saw a well and never will see
+one;--and I was irreverent enough to have much the same feeling about "I
+love thy templed hills," etc., in that patriotic Plymouth Rock song
+which is so little adapted for universal American use that, in a gibe
+not without justice, it has been called "Smith's Country, 'tis of Thee."
+One wonders if they sing it in the Philippine schools; and, so far as
+these regions are concerned, one wishes that some teacher with a spark
+of genius would take Goldsmith's hint and write a simple song for
+Esquimau children that should
+
+        "Extol the treasures of their finny seas
+         And their long nights of revelry and ease";
+
+the splendour of summer's perpetual sunshine and the weird radiance of
+the Northern Lights; but prosody is not taught in your "Normal" school.
+The thing is a vain, artificial attempt to impose a whole body of ideas,
+notions, standards of comparison, metaphors, similes, and sentiments
+upon a race to which, in great measure, they must ever be foreign and
+unintelligible. Here were girls reading in a text-book of so-called
+physiology, and, as it happened, the lesson that day was on the evils of
+tight lacing! The reading of that book, I was informed, is imposed by
+special United States statute, and the teacher must make a separate
+report that so much of it has been duly gone through each month before
+the salary can be drawn. Yet none of those girls ever saw a corset or
+ever will. One is reminded of the dear old lady who used to visit the
+jails and distribute tracts on _The Evils of Keeping Bad Company_.
+
+But these incongruities aside, the school was a good school and well
+taught, the government appointing the teachers, as I learned, upon the
+nomination of the mission authorities; the only way that a government
+school can be successful at any mission station, for the two agencies
+must work together, as one's right hand works with one's left, to effect
+any satisfactory result. The hours spent in it were very enjoyable, and
+one wished one might have had opportunity for further acquaintance with
+some of the bright-faced, interesting children, both full-bloods and
+half-breeds.
+
+Unalaklík is a thriving Esquimau community, noted for its native
+schooner building and its successful seal hunters and fishermen. We were
+rejoiced to see signs of native prosperity and advance, and we left
+Unalaklík with high hope for its future.
+
+Here also was real rest and refreshment at a road-house. Road-houses in
+Alaska are as various in quality as inns are "outside." Our previous
+night's halt was at one of the worst; this was one of the best. The
+proprietor was a good cook and he did his best for us, with omelet and
+pastry, and young, tender reindeer. It has been said that road-house
+keeping in Alaska is like soliciting life insurance "outside," the last
+resort of incompetence. Certain it is that a thoroughly lazy and
+incompetent man may yet make a living keeping a road-house, for there is
+no rivalry save at the more important points, and travellers are
+commonly so glad to reach any shelter that they are not disposed to be
+censorious. None the less, when they find a man who takes a pride in his
+business and an interest in the comfort of his guests, they are highly
+appreciative.
+
+[Sidenote: THE KALTAG PORTAGE]
+
+We should have only an occasional road-house from now on, but expected
+to reach some inhabited cabin each night. Our good travelling was over
+though we did not know it. We knew that the hard snows of the Seward
+Peninsula and the bare ice of Norton Sound were behind us, but we kept
+telling ourselves that the travel of all the winter would surely have
+left a fine trail on the Yukon. We were now about sixty-five miles from
+Saint Michael, by the coast. But taking the ninety-mile portage from
+Unalaklík to Kaltag we should reach the Yukon River more than five
+hundred miles above Saint Michael, so much does that portage cut off.
+This is the route the military telegraph-line takes, and we should
+travel along close beside it much of the way until the Yukon was
+reached.
+
+The soft weather persisted, and we had even doubt about starting out in
+such a rapid thaw. A visit to the telegraph station informed us that the
+warm wave was spread all over interior Alaska and that there was general
+expectation of an early break-up. But if the snow on the portage were
+indeed rapidly going, that was all the more reason for getting across
+before it had altogether gone; so we pulled out in the warm, muggy
+weather, and even as we pulled out it began to rain!
+
+Up the little Unalaklík River, water over the ice everywhere, we went
+for a few miles and then took to the tundra. All the snow had gone
+except just the hard snow of the trail, a winding ribbon of white across
+the brown moss. The rain changed to sleet and back to rain again, and
+soon we were wet through and had much trouble in keeping that
+penetrating, persistent drizzle from wetting our load through the canvas
+cover. Though not an unique experience, it is rare to be wet with rain
+on the winter trail--rarer in the interior probably than on the coast.
+Once since on the Kuskokwim and once on the Fortymile it has happened to
+me in seven winters' travel. We pushed on for thirty miles, past several
+little native villages, until we came to Whaleback, a village part
+Esquimau and part Indian. These were the last Esquimaux we should see,
+and I was sorry, for I had grown to like very heartily and to respect
+very sincerely this kindly, gentle, industrious, good-humoured race.
+Surely they are a people any nation may be proud to have fringing its
+otherwise uninhabitable coasts, and should be eager to aid and conserve.
+There comes a feeling of impotent exasperation to me when I realise how
+many white men there are who speak of them continually with the utmost
+contempt and see them dwindle with entire complacency. The same thing is
+true in even more marked degree about the Indians of the interior: nine
+tenths of the land will never have other inhabitant, of that I am
+convinced, and the only question is, shall it be an inhabited wilderness
+or an uninhabited wilderness? Here, lodging with the natives, and, I
+make no doubt, living off them too, we found a queer, skulking white man
+whom I had met in several different sections of interior Alaska, known
+as "Snow-shoe Joe" or "The Frozen Hobo." The arctic regions one would
+esteem a poor place for the hobo, but this man manages to eke out an
+existence, if not to flourish, therein. Work he will not under any
+circumstances, but subsists on the hospitality of the whites until he
+has entirely worn it out and then removes to the natives, mushing from
+camp to camp and "bumming" his way as he goes. He was on his way to
+Saint Michael, he told me with perfect gravity, "to get work."
+
+[Sidenote: THE U. S. SIGNAL-CORPS]
+
+Before dark we had reached our destination for the night at the Old
+Woman Mountain, the divide between the waters of the Yukon and the
+waters of Norton Sound, and were kindly received and well treated at the
+telegraph station, the only resort on this portage for weary travellers.
+Here is surely a lonely post. For reasons connected with the maintenance
+of the wires and the keeping open of communications, it is necessary to
+have telegraph stations every forty or fifty miles, each with two or
+three men and a dog team, and shelter cabins about half-way between
+stations. A wind that blows a tree down in the narrow right-of-way cut
+through the forest--for we were come to forest again--or a heavy
+snowfall that loads branches until they fall across the wires, a post
+that comes up out of its hole as the thawing of spring heaves the ground
+around it, or the caving of the bank of a stream along which the line
+passes--any one of a dozen such happenings anywhere along its thousand
+miles of course, may put the entire inland telegraph system out of
+operation; and the young men in whose section the interruption
+occurs--they have a means of determining that--must get out at once,
+find the seat of the trouble and repair it. In all sorts of weather,
+unless the thermometer be below -40°, out they must go.
+
+It may be doubted if any other army in the world ever constructed and
+maintained a permanent telegraph line under such arduous conditions. It
+has been the army's one contribution to Alaska, the one justification
+for the enormous expense of maintaining army posts in the interior.
+Indeed it is often said by those who feel keenly the neglect of the
+territory by the general government that this telegraph system is the
+one contribution of the United States to Alaska. It is certainly a great
+public convenience and has assisted very materially in such development
+as the country has made. The men of the signal-corps deserve great
+credit for the faithful, dogged way in which they have carried out year
+after year their difficult and hazardous work, and often and often the
+weather-stressed traveller has been grateful for the hospitality which
+their cabins have afforded him.
+
+They have not been an unmixed blessing to the country; soldiers do not
+usually represent the highest morale of the nation, and though the
+signal-corps is in some respect a picked corps, yet the men are
+soldiers, with many of the soldier characteristics. Too often a remote
+telegraph station has been a little centre of drunkenness, gambling, and
+debauchery with a little circumference of native men and women, and
+while some of the officers of the corps have been willing and anxious to
+do all in their power to suppress this sort of thing in their scattered
+and difficult commands, others have been jealous only for the technical
+efficiency of their work.
+
+[Sidenote: MORE SNOW]
+
+There are many allowances to be made for young men taken from the
+society of their kind and thrust out hundreds of miles in the wilderness
+to sit down for a year or two at one of these isolated spots. They may
+see no women save those amongst a straggling band of Indians for the
+whole time of their exile; they may see no white man save a
+mail-carrier--and in many places not even a mail-carrier--for weeks
+together. Time sometimes hangs very heavily on their hands, for trees
+are not always blowing down, nor wires snapping through the tension of
+the cold, and at some stations there will not be a dozen telegraph
+messages sent the whole winter through. If a young man be at all
+ambitious of self-improvement, here is splendid opportunity of leisure,
+but a great many are not at all so disposed. Character, except the most
+firmly founded, is apt to deteriorate under such circumstances;
+standards of conduct to be lowered. And what is here written of the
+young men of the signal-corps may well apply in great measure to a large
+proportion of all the white men in the country.
+
+The "eighty-mile portage" we had heard of at Nome became ninety miles at
+Unalaklík, and added another five to itself here, so that although we
+had travelled forty-two miles that day we were told that there were yet
+fifty-three ahead before we reached the Yukon.
+
+So we decided not to attempt it in one day and to rest the next night at
+a "repair cabin" twenty-eight miles farther, making a somewhat late
+start in view of a short journey. It had been wiser to have started
+early. During our night at Old Woman Mountain some three inches of snow
+fell, and we found as we descended the Yukon slope that all the moisture
+that had fallen upon us as rain the previous day had fallen on this side
+as snow. The trail was filled full and buried, and so soft and mushy was
+it that although snow-shoes were badly needed they were impossible. The
+snow clung to them and came off the ground with them in heavy, clogging
+masses every time they were lifted. It clung to the sled, to the
+harness, to the dogs' feet, to everything that touched it; it gathered
+in ever-increasing snowballs on the long hair of the dogs. Travelling in
+warm weather in loose, new snow is most disagreeable work. We plugged
+along for twenty miles, and then in the dark in an open country with
+little patches of scattering spruce, had great trouble in finding the
+trail at all.
+
+At last we could find it no longer, and when there was no hope of
+reaching the cabin that night we made a camp. We had now no tent or
+stove with us, so a "Siwash camp" in the open was the best we could do,
+and a wet, miserable camp it was. By inexcusable carelessness on my
+part, candles had been altogether forgotten in the replenishing of the
+supplies, and a little piece an inch long which we found loose in the
+grub box was all that we possessed. Dogs and men alike exhausted with
+the long day's sweating struggle through the deep snow, sleep should
+have come soundly and soon. It did to the rest, but I lay awake the
+night through. The easy, riding travel of the preceding week had been a
+poor preparation for to-day's incessant toil, and I was too tired to
+sleep. In the morning our bedding was covered with a couple of inches
+of new snow. My companion got up at daylight and made a journey of
+investigation ahead, following the trail better, but not finding the
+cabin. We had thought ourselves within a mile or two of it, but
+evidently were farther away. However, when we had eaten a hasty
+breakfast and hitched up and had gone along the trail that had been
+broken that morning to its end, ten yards beyond the place where my
+companion had turned back, we came in sight of the cabin, and there we
+lay and rested and dried things out all day and spent the next night.
+During the day there came a team from Kaltag, and once again we enjoyed
+the delight of receiving, and at the same time conferring, the richest
+gift and greatest possible benefit to the traveller--a trail.
+
+[Sidenote: THE YUKON ONCE MORE]
+
+The next evening as it drew towards dark, after another day of soft,
+warm disagreeable travel, we reached the end of the portage, and the
+broad white Yukon stretched before us once more. Our hearts leaped up
+and I think the dogs' hearts leaped up also at the sight. I called to
+Nanook as we stopped on the bank, "Nanook, there's the good old Yukon
+again!" and he lifted his voice in that intelligent, significant bark
+that surely meant that he saw and understood. We had left the Yukon on
+the 15th of December at Fort Yukon; we reached it again on the 23d of
+March at Kaltag, more than six hundred miles lower down. We had two
+hundred and fifty miles of travel on its surface before us, and then
+close to another two hundred and fifty up the Tanana River to Fairbanks.
+But alas! for the fine Yukon trail we had promised ourselves! As we
+looked out across the broad river there was no narrow, dark line
+undulating over its surface, nor even a faint, continuous inequality to
+hint that trail had been, on snow "less hideously serene"; its perfect
+smoothness and whiteness were unscarred and unsullied. The trail was
+wiped out and swallowed up by the late snows and winds.
+
+[Sidenote: A LEARNED JESUIT]
+
+There is little interest in lingering over the long, laborious,
+monotonous grind up that river on show-shoes. When one has looked
+forward to pleasant, quick travel, the disappointment at slow, heavy
+plodding is the keener. The first little bit of trail we had was as we
+approached Nulato two days later on a Sunday morning, and it was made by
+the villagers from below going up to church at the Roman Catholic
+mission. We arrived in time for service, and enjoyed the natives' voices
+raised in the Latin chants as well as in hymns wisely put into the
+vernacular. It is historically a little curious to find Roman Catholic
+natives singing praises in their own tongue, and Protestant missions,
+like those on the Kobuk and Kotzebue Sound, using a language "not
+understanded of the people." The day was the Feast of the Annunciation
+as well as Sunday, and there was some special decorating of the church
+and perhaps some elaboration of the music. Here for the first and only
+time I listened to a white man so fluent and vigorous in the native
+tongue that he gave one the impression of eloquence. Father Jetté of the
+Society of Jesus is the most distinguished scholar in Alaska. He is the
+chief authority on the native language, and manners and customs, beliefs
+and traditions of the Middle Yukon, and has brought to the patient,
+enthusiastic labour of years the skill of the trained philologist. It
+is said by the Indians that he knows more of the Indian language than
+any one of them does, and this is not hard to believe when it is
+understood that he has systematically gleaned his knowledge from widely
+scattered segments of tribes, jotting down in his note-books old forms
+of speech lingering amongst isolated communities, and legends and
+folk-lore stories still remembered by the aged but not much repeated
+nowadays; always keen to add to his store or to verify or disprove some
+etymological conjecture that has occurred to his fertile mind. His work
+is recognised by the ethnological societies of Europe, and much of his
+collected material has been printed in their technical journals.
+
+A man of wide general culture, master of three or four modern, as well
+as the classic, languages, a mathematician, a writer of beautiful, clear
+English, although it is not his mother tongue, he carries it with the
+modesty, the broad-minded tolerance, the easy urbanity that always
+adorn, though they by no means always accompany, the profession of the
+scholar; and one is better able to understand after some years'
+acquaintance with such a man, after falling under the authority of his
+learning and the charm of his courtesy, the wonderful power which the
+society he belongs to has wielded in the world. If such devotion to the
+instruction of the ignorant as was described at the mission on the
+middle Kobuk be praiseworthy, by how much the more is one moved to
+admiration at the spectacle of this man, who might fill with credit any
+one of half a dozen professional chairs at the ordinary college, gladly
+consecrating his life to the teaching of an Indian school!
+
+Hearing an interest expressed in the massacre which took place at Nulato
+in 1851, Father Jetté offered to accompany us to the site of that
+occurrence, about a mile away. It stands out prominently in the history
+of a country that has been singularly free from bloodshed and outrage,
+and its date is the notable date of the middle river, as the
+establishment of the post at Fort Yukon by the Hudson Bay Company in
+1846 is the notable date of the upper river. They are fixed points in
+Indian chronology by which it is possible to approximate other dates and
+to reach an estimate of the ages of old people.
+
+[Sidenote: THE NULATO MASSACRE]
+
+Much has been written about the Nulato massacre, and the accounts vary
+in many particulars. The Russian post here was first established by
+Malakof in 1838. Burned during his absence by the Indians, it was
+re-established by Lieutenant Zagoskin of the Russian navy in 1842. The
+extortions and cruelties of his successor, Deerzhavin, complicated by a
+standing feud between two native tribes, and probably having the rival
+powers of certain medicine-men as the match to the mine, brought about
+the destruction of the place and the death of all its inhabitants, white
+and native, by a sudden treacherous attack of the Koyukuk Indians. It
+happened that Lieutenant Barnard of the British navy, detached from a
+war-ship lying at Saint Michael to journey up the river and make
+inquiries of the Koyukuk natives as to wandering white men, survivors of
+Sir John Franklin's expedition, who might have been seen or heard of by
+them, was staying at the post at the time and perished in the general
+massacre. His grave, with a headboard bearing a Latin inscription, is
+neatly kept up by the Jesuit priests at Nulato.
+
+In the last few years the river has been invading the bank upon which
+the old village stood, and as the earth caves in relics of the slaughter
+and burning come to light. Old copper kettles and samovars, buttons and
+glass beads, all sorts of metal vessels and implements have been sorted
+out from charred wood and ashes, together with numerous skulls and
+quantities of bones. One of the most interesting of these relics was a
+brass button from an official coat, with the Russian crowned
+double-headed eagle on the face, and on the back, upon examination with
+a lens, the word "Birmingham."
+
+Half the day serving for our day of rest this week, we were up and ready
+to start early the next morning, but so violent a wind was blowing from
+the southeast that we decided to remain, and the clatter of the
+corrugated iron roof and the whirling whiteness outside the windows made
+us glad to be in shelter. As the day advanced the wind increased to
+almost hurricane force, and the two-story house in which we lay began to
+rock in such a manner as to make the proprietor alarmed for his
+dwelling.
+
+There was an "independent" trading-post at this village which seemed to
+present an object-lesson in rapacity and greed. There was not an article
+of standard quality in the store; the clothing was the most rascally
+shoddy, the canned goods of the poorest brands; the whole stock the
+cheapest stuff that could possibly be bought at bargain prices
+"outside," yet the prices were higher even than those that prevail in
+Alaska for the best merchandise. Loud complaints are often made against
+the commercial corporation which does the great bulk of the business in
+interior Alaska, yet if the writer had to choose whether he would be in
+the hands of that company or in the hands of an "independent" trader, he
+would unhesitatingly cast in his lot with the company. The independent
+trader makes money, sometimes makes large money, and makes it fairly
+easily, but the calling seems to appeal mainly, if not wholly, to men of
+low character and no conscience. There are few things that would redound
+more to the benefit of the Indian than a great improvement in the
+character of the men with whom he is compelled to do business.
+
+The wind had subsided by the next morning and had been of benefit rather
+than injury to us, for it had blown the accumulated new snow off the old
+trail so that it was possible to perceive and follow it. But what was
+our surprise to find, with the recollection of that rattling roof and
+swaying building fresh in our minds, that ten miles away there had been
+no wind at all! The snow lay undisturbed on every twig and bough from
+which the gentlest breeze would have dislodged it. One never ceases to
+wonder at what, for want of a better word, must be called the
+_localness_ of much of the weather in Alaska--though, for that matter,
+in all probability it is characteristic of weather in all countries. The
+habit of continual outdoor travel gives scope as well as edge to one's
+observation of such things which a life in one place denies. That
+wind-storm had cut a clean swath across the Yukon valley. Yet it seems
+strange that so violent a disturbance could take place without affecting
+and, to some extent, agitating the atmosphere for many miles adjacent.
+
+[Sidenote: SNOW GLASSES]
+
+So, sometimes in snow-storm, sometimes in wind, always on snow-shoes and
+often hard put to it to find and follow the trail at all, we struggled
+on for two or three days more, sleeping one night at a wood-chopper's
+hut, another in a telegraph cabin crowded with foul-mouthed infantrymen
+sent out to repair the extensive damage of the recent storm and none too
+pleased at the detail, we plodded our weary way up that interminable
+river. At last we met the mail-man, that ever-welcome person on the
+Alaskan trail, and his track greatly lightened our labour. By his
+permission we broke into his padlocked cabin that night by the skilful
+application of an axe-edge to a link of the chain, and were more
+comfortable than we had been for some time. Past the mouth of the
+Koyukuk, past Grimcop, past Lowden, past Melozikaket to Kokrine's and
+Mouse Point, we plugged along, making twenty-two miles one day and
+thirty another and then dropping again to eighteen. The temperature
+dropped to zero, and a keen wind made it necessary to keep the nose
+continually covered. At this time of year the covering of the nose
+involves a fresh annoyance, for it deflects the breath upward, and the
+moisture of it continually condenses on the snow glasses, which means
+continual wiping. A stick of some sort of waxy compound to be rubbed
+upon the glass, bought in New York as a preventive of the deposit of
+moisture, proved entirely useless. In this respect the Esquimau snow
+goggle, which is simply a piece of wood hollowed out into a cup and
+illuminated by narrow slits, has advantage over any shape or kind of
+glass protection. A French metal device of the same order that is
+advertised in the dealer's catalogues was found to fail, perhaps owing
+to a wrong optical arrangement of the slits. It caused an eye-strain
+that brought on headache. But if that principle could be scientifically
+worked out and such a device perfected, it would be a boon to the
+traveller over sun-lit snow, for it would do away with glass altogether,
+with its two chief objections--its fragility and its opacity when
+covered with vapour.
+
+[Sidenote: SNOW-BLINDNESS]
+
+The indispensability of some eye protection when travelling in the late
+winter, and the serious consequences that follow its neglect, were once
+again demonstrated at Mouse Point. The road-house was crowded with
+"busted" stampeders coming out of the Nowikaket country. There had been
+a report of a rich "strike" on a creek of the Nowitna, late the previous
+fall, and a number of men from other camps--some from as far as
+Nome--had gone in there with "outfits" for the winter. The stampede had
+been a failure; no gold was found; there was much indignant assertion
+that no gold ever _had_ been found and that the reported "strike" was a
+"fake," though to what end or profit such a "fake" stampede should be
+caused, unless by some neighbouring trader, it is hard to understand;
+and here were the stampeders streaming out again, a ragged, unkempt,
+sorry-looking crowd in every variety of worn-out arctic toggery, many
+of them suffering from acute snow-blindness. It is surprising that even
+old-timers will go out in the hills for the whole winter without
+providing themselves with protection against the glare of the sun which
+they know will inevitably assail their eyes before the spring, yet so it
+is; and this lack of forethought is not confined to the matter of snow
+glasses: the first half dozen men we received in Saint Matthew's
+Hospital at Fairbanks suffering from severely frozen feet were all
+old-timers grown careless.
+
+Father Ragarou, another Jesuit priest of another type, reached the
+road-house from the opposite direction about the same time we did, and I
+was interested in watching his treatment of the inflamed eyes. Upon a
+disk of lead he folded a little piece of cotton cloth in the shape of a
+tent, and, setting fire to it, allowed it to burn out completely. Then
+with a wet camel's-hair brush he gathered up the slight yellow residuum
+of the combustion and painted it over the eyes, holding the lids open
+with thumb and finger and drawing the brush through and through. An
+incredulous spectator, noticing the sacred monogram neatly stamped upon
+the disk of lead, made some sneering remark to me about "Romish
+superstition," but remembering the Jesuit's bark, and recalling that I
+had in my writing-case at that moment a letter I had brought all the way
+from the Koyukuk addressed to this very priest, begging for a further
+supply of a pile ointment that had proved efficacious, I held my peace.
+Whether it be an oxide or a carbonate, or some salt that is formed by
+the combustion, I am not chemist enough to know, but I saw man after man
+relieved by this application. Even the scoffer was convinced there was
+merit in the treatment, though stoutly protesting that "them letters"
+had nothing to do with it; which nobody took the trouble to argue with
+him. My own custom--we are all of us doctors of a sort in this
+country--is to instil a few drops of a five-per-cent solution of
+cocaine, which gives immediate temporary relief, and then apply frequent
+washes of boric acid, bandaging up the eyes completely in bad cases by
+cloths kept wet with the solution. But I do not know that it brings
+better result than the lead treatment. Certainly it is a matter in which
+an ounce of any sort of prevention is better than a pound of any sort of
+cure. The affection is a serious one, being nothing more or less than
+acute ophthalmia; the pain is very severe, and repeated attacks are said
+to bring permanent weakness of the eyes. Smoked glasses or goggles,[A]
+veils of green or blue or black, even a crescent eye-shade cut out of a
+piece of birch-bark or cardboard and blackened on its under-side with
+charcoal, will prevent the hours and sometimes days of torture which
+this distemper entails.
+
+[Sidenote: HORSES AND MULES]
+
+For a few miles we had the trail of the stampeders, but when that
+crossed the river we put on our snow-shoes and settled to the steady
+grind once more. A day's mush brought us to "The Birches," and another
+to Gold Mountain. Between the two places there was a portage, and the
+trail thereon, protected by the timber, was good. We longed for the time
+when all trails in Alaska shall be taken off the rivers and cut in the
+protecting forest. But we had gone but a mile along this good trail
+when our hearts sank, for we saw ahead of us a procession of army mules
+packing supplies from Fort Gibbon to the telegraph repair parties. We
+pulled out into the snow that the mules might pass, and the soldiers
+said no word, for they knew just how we felt, until the last soldier
+leading the last mule was going by, and he turned round and said: "And
+her name was Maud!" It was in the height of Opper's popularity, his
+"comic supplements" the chief dependence of the road-houses for
+wall-paper. The reference was so apposite that we burst into laughter,
+but there was nothing funny about the devastation that had been wrought.
+That good trail was all gone--the bottom pounded out of it--and nothing
+was left but a ploughed lane punched full of sink-holes. We had no
+trouble following the trail on the river after this encounter, but it
+had been almost as easy going to have struck out for ourselves in the
+unbroken snow of the winter. It is hard to make outsiders understand how
+a man who loves all animals may come to hate horses and mules,
+particularly mules, in this country. Our travelling is above all a
+matter of surface. Distance counts and weather counts, but surface
+counts for more than either. See how fast we came across the Seward
+Peninsula in the most distressing weather imaginable! A well-used dog
+trail becomes so hard and smooth that it offers scarce any resistance to
+the passage of the sled, and for walking or running over in moccasins or
+mukluks is the most perfect surface imaginable. The more it is used the
+better it becomes. But put a horse on that trail and in one passage it
+is ruined. The iron-shod hoofs break through the crust at every step and
+throw up the broken pieces as they are withdrawn. With mules it is even
+worse; the holes they punch are deeper and sharper. Neither man nor dog
+can pass over it again in comfort. One slips and slides about at every
+step, the leg leaders and ankle sinews are strained, the soles of the
+feet, though hardened by a thousand miles in moccasins, become sore and
+inflamed, and at night there is a new sort of weariness that only a
+horse-ruined trail gives. As a rule, the dog trail is of so little
+service to the horse or mule that it were as cheap to break out a new
+one in the snow, and it is this knowledge that exasperates the dog
+musher. So there is not much love lost between the horse man and the dog
+man in Alaska.
+
+[Sidenote: ARMY POSTS AND NATIVES]
+
+At last, after a night at "Old Station," we came in sight of Tanana,
+where is Fort Gibbon, the one the name of the town and the post-office,
+the other the name of the military post and the telegraph office. The
+military authorities refuse to call their post "Fort Tanana" and the
+postal authorities refuse to allow the town post-office to be called
+"Fort Gibbon," so there they lie, cheek by jowl, two separate places
+with a fence between them--a source of endless confusion. A letter
+addressed to Fort Gibbon is likely to go astray and a telegram addressed
+to Tanana to be refused. Stretching along a mile and a half of river
+bank, and beginning to come into view ten miles before they are reached,
+the military and commercial structures gradually separate themselves.
+Here to the left are the ugly frame buildings--all painted
+yellow--barracks, canteen, officers' quarters, hospital, commissariat,
+and so on. Two clumsy water-towers give height without dignity--a
+quality denied to military architecture in Alaska. To the right the town
+begins, and an irregular row of one and two story buildings, stores,
+warehouses, drinking shops, straggle along the water-front.
+
+Unlike most towns in interior Alaska, Tanana does not depend upon an
+adjacent mining camp. It owes its existence first to its geographical
+position as the central point of interior Alaska, at the confluence of
+the Tanana and Yukon Rivers. Most of the freight and passenger traffic
+for Fairbanks and the upper river is transshipped at Tanana, and
+extensive stocks of merchandise are maintained there. The army post is
+the other important factor in the town's prosperity, and is especially
+accountable for the number of saloons. Not only the soldiers, but many
+civilian employees, are supported by the post, and when it is understood
+that three thousand cords of wood are burned annually in the military
+reservation, it will be seen that quite a number of men must find work
+as choppers and haulers for the wood contractors. Setting aside the
+maintenance of the telegraph service, which has already been referred
+to, it may be said without unfairness that the salient activities of the
+army in the interior of Alaska are the consumption of whisky and wood.
+There is no opportunity for military training--for more than six months
+in the year it is impossible to drill outdoors--and the officers
+complain of the retrogression of their men in all soldierly
+accomplishments during the two years' detail in Alaska. Whether the
+prosperity of the liquor dealer be in any real sense the prosperity of
+the country, and whether the rapid destruction of the forest be
+compensated for by the wages paid to its destroyers, may reasonably be
+doubted.
+
+Three miles away is a considerable native village where the mission of
+Our Saviour of the Episcopal Church is situated, with an attractive
+church building and a picturesque graveyard. The evil influence which
+the town and the army post have exerted upon the Indians finds its
+ultimate expression in the growth of the graveyard and the dwindling of
+the village.
+
+This point at the junction of the two rivers was an important place for
+the inhabitants of interior Alaska ages before the white man reached the
+country. Tribes from all the middle Yukon, from the lower Yukon, from
+the Tanana, from the upper Kuskokwim met here for trading and for
+general festivity. It is impossible nowadays to determine when first the
+white man's merchandise began to penetrate into this country, but it was
+long before the white man came himself. Such prized and portable
+articles as axes and knives passed from hand to hand and from tribe to
+tribe over many hundreds of miles. Captain Cook, in 1778, found
+implements of white man's make in the hands of the natives of the great
+inlet that was named for him after his death, and they pointed to the
+Far East as the direction whence they had come. He judged that they had
+been brought from the Hudson Bay factories clean across the continent.
+There are many Indians still living who remember when they saw the
+first white man, and some were well grown at the time, but diligent
+inquiry has failed to discover one who ever saw a stone axe used, though
+some old men have been found who declared that their fathers, when
+young, used that implement. Traces have been discovered of the
+importation of edge-tools from four directions--from the mouth of the
+Yukon; from the Lynn Canal, by way of the headwaters of the Yukon; from
+the Prince William Sound, by way of the headwaters of the Tanana; as
+well as from the Hudson Bay posts in the Canadian Northwest, by way of
+the Porcupine River.
+
+When the Russians established themselves at Nulato in 1842, and the
+Hudson Bay Company put a post at Fort Yukon in 1846, Nuchalawóya, as
+Tanana was called, became the scene of commercial rivalry, and it is
+said that by the meeting of the agents and voyageurs of the two
+companies at this point the identity of the Yukon and Quikpak Rivers was
+discovered.
+
+The stories that linger with the village ancients of the great numbers
+of Indians who used to inhabit the country are doubtless based upon
+recollections of the gathering at old Nuchalawóya, when furs were
+brought here from far and wide, when there was no other place of
+merchandise in mid-Alaska. Now almost every Indian village has a trader
+and a store. That the race has diminished, and in most places is still
+diminishing, is beyond question, but that it was ever very largely
+numerous the natural conditions of the country forbid us to believe.
+
+[Sidenote: WHISKY-PEDDLERS]
+
+During the Reverend Jules Prevost's time at Tanana--and he was in
+residence in the year of this journey--from careful vital statistics
+kept during two periods of five years each, the race seemed barely to be
+holding its own; but since that time there has been a considerable
+decline, coincident with the increase of drunkenness and debauchery at
+the village when Mr. Prevost's firm hand and watchful eye were
+withdrawn. The situation tends to grow worse, and while one does not
+give up hope, for that would mean to give up serious effort, the outlook
+for the Indians at this place seems unfavourable. Two hundred soldiers,
+six or eight liquor shops,--the number varies from year to year,--three
+miles off a native village of perhaps one hundred and fifty souls, and
+dotting those intervening miles cabins chiefly occupied by "bootleggers"
+and go-betweens--that is the Tanana situation in a nutshell. The men
+desire the native girls, and the liquor is largely a lure to get them.
+Tuberculosis and venereal disease are rife, and the two make a terribly
+fatal combination amongst Indians.
+
+It was good to enjoy Mr. and Mrs. Prevost's hospitality, and it was good
+to speak through such an admirable interpreter as Paul. Something more
+than intelligence and knowledge of the languages are required to make a
+good interpreter; there must be sympathy and the ability to take fire.
+With such an interpreter, leaping at the speaker's thoughts, carrying
+himself entirely into his changing moods, rising to vehemence with him
+and again dropping to gentleness, forgetting himself in his
+identification with his principal, there is real pleasure in speaking to
+the natives who hang upon his vicarious lips. On the other hand, one of
+the most intelligent mission interpreters in the country is also so
+phlegmatic in disposition, so lifeless and monotonous in his speech, and
+particularly so impassive of countenance, that he reminds one of
+Napoleon's saying about Talleyrand: that if some one kicked him behind
+while he was speaking to you his face would give no sign of it at all.
+
+[Sidenote: CHENA AND FAIRBANKS]
+
+It is not necessary to write much detail of the two-hundred-mile journey
+to Fairbanks up the Tanana River. The trail was then wholly on the
+river, but now it has been taken wholly off, as every Alaskan musher
+hopes some day will be done with all trails. The region about the mouth
+of the river and for some miles up is one of the windiest in the
+country, and there is always troublesome crossing of bare sand-bars and
+of ice over which sand has been blown. The journey hastens to its close;
+men and dogs alike realise it, and push on willingly over longer stages
+than they had before attempted.
+
+Two days from Tanana we were luxuriating in the natural hot springs near
+Baker Creek, wallowing in the crude wooden vat, when "Daddy Karstner"
+had shovelled enough snow in to make entering the water possible, and
+emerging ruddy as boiled lobsters. It was a beautiful and interesting
+spot then, with noble groves of birch and the finest grove of
+cottonwood-trees in Alaska--all cut down now--all ruined in a plunging
+and bounding and quite unsuccessful attempt to make a "Health Resort" of
+the place for the "smart set" of Fairbanks. It is a scurvy trick of
+Fortune when she gives large wealth to a man with no feeling for trees.
+We spent Sunday there and roamed over the curious domain, snow-free
+amidst all the surrounding snow, rank in vegetation amidst the
+yet-lingering winter death; and then we wallowed again.
+
+Tolovana, Nenana, and then one long run of fifty-four miles, the longest
+and last run of the winter, and--Chena and Fairbanks. But just before we
+reached Chena, as we passed the fish camp where the dogs had been
+boarded the previous summer, Nanook stopped the whole team, looked up at
+the bank and gave utterance to his pronounced five barks on the
+descending scale. None of the other dogs seemed to notice or recognise
+the place, but Nanook said as plainly as if he had uttered speech:
+"Well, well! there's where I spent last summer!"
+
+We reached Fairbanks on the 11th of April, in time for Good Friday and
+Easter, after an absence of four months and a half--with the accumulated
+mail of all that period awaiting me. The distance covered was about
+twenty-two hundred miles, three fourths of it on foot, more than half of
+it on snow-shoes. At Chena I had called up the hospital at Fairbanks on
+the telephone, and the exchange operator had immediately recognised my
+voice and bidden me welcome; but when I reached Fairbanks, a light beard
+that I had suffered to grow during the winter made me unrecognisable by
+those who knew me best. So effectually does a beard disguise a man and
+so surely may his voice identify him.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[A] This was written before the writer learned the superior protection
+afforded by _amber_ glass.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE "FIRST ICE"--AN AUTUMN ADVENTURE ON THE KOYUKUK
+
+
+IT is not attempted in this narrative to give separate account of all
+the journeys with which it deals. That would involve much repetition and
+tedious detail. Our long journey has been described from start to
+finish, taking the reader far north of the Yukon, then almost to the
+extreme west of Alaska, and then round by the Yukon to mid-Alaska again.
+It is proposed now to give sketches of such parts of other journeys as
+do not cover the same ground, and they will lie, with one exception,
+south of the Yukon. While visiting many of the same points every winter,
+it has been within the author's good fortune and contrivance to include
+each year some new stretch of country, sometimes searching out and
+visiting a new tribe of natives, and blazing the way for the
+establishment of permanent missionary work amongst them. To these
+initial journeys belongs a zest that no subsequent travels in the same
+region ever have; there is a keen interest in what every new turn of a
+trail shall bring, every new bend of a river; there is eagerness rising
+with one's rising steps to excitement for the view from a new mountain
+pass; above all, there is deep satisfaction coupled with a sense of
+solemn responsibility in being the first to reach some remote band of
+Indians and preach to them the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. There
+are few men nowadays on the North American continent to whom that
+privilege remains.
+
+A period of nearly three years elapses between the beginning of the
+journey that has already been described and the short sketch of a
+journey that follows. Many things had happened in those three years. It
+had been the happy duty of the writer to return to the Koyukuk late in
+the winter of 1906-7, empowered to build the promised mission for the
+hitherto neglected natives of that region. Pitching tent at a spot
+opposite the mouth of the Alatna, with the aid of a skilled carpenter
+and a couple of axemen brought from the mining district above, and the
+labour of the Indians, the little log church and the mission house were
+put up and prepared for the two ladies--a trained nurse and a
+teacher--who should arrive on the first steamboat. The steamboat that
+brought them in carried him out on its return trip, and the next year
+was spent in the States making known the needs of the work in Alaska and
+securing funds for its advancement.
+
+[Sidenote: DOCTOR GRAFTON BURKE]
+
+On my return I brought with me a young physician, Doctor Grafton Burke,
+as a medical missionary, and a half-breed Alaskan youth, Arthur, who had
+been at school in California, as attendant and interpreter. A
+thirty-two-foot gasoline launch designed for the Yukon and its
+tributaries was also brought and was launched at the head of Yukon
+navigation at Whitehouse. The voyages of the _Pelican_ on almost all the
+navigable waters of interior Alaska do not belong to a narrative
+concerned solely with winter travel, but her maiden voyage ended in an
+unexpected and rather extraordinary journey over the ice which is
+perhaps worth describing. After the voyage down the Yukon, and up and
+down the Tanana, it was purposed to take the boat up the Koyukuk to the
+new mission at the Allakaket, where dogs and gear had been left, and put
+her in winter quarters there. The delays that associate themselves not
+unnaturally with three novices and a four-cylinder gasoline engine, had
+brought the date for ascending the Koyukuk a little too late for safety,
+though still well within the ordinary season of open water. The
+possibility of an early winter closing the navigation of that stream
+before the _Pelican_ reached her destination had been entertained and
+provided against, though it seemed remote. Three dogs, needed anyway to
+replace superannuated members of the team, had been bargained for at
+Tanana and accommodations for them arranged, and a supply of dog fish
+stowed on the after deck of the launch. But when we went to pay the
+arranged price and receive the dogs, the vender's wife and children set
+up such a remonstrance and plaintive to-do that he went back on his
+bargain and we did not get the dogs. There was no time to hunt others,
+to linger was to invite the very mishap we sought to guard against, so
+we pulled out dogless, reached the mouth of the Koyukuk on the 17th of
+September and, having taken on board the supply of gasoline cached
+there, turned our bow up the river the next morning. For five days we
+pushed up the waters of that great, lonely river, and by that time we
+were some twenty-five miles above Hogatzakaket, three hundred and
+twenty-five miles from the mouth and one hundred and twenty-five miles
+from the mission, at the camp of a prospector who had recently poled up
+from the Yukon. We woke on board the launch the next morning to find ice
+formed all around us and ice running in the river. The thermometer had
+gone to zero in the night.
+
+[Sidenote: THE RUNNING ICE]
+
+A very brief attempt to make our way against the running ice showed the
+danger of doing so, for the thin cakes had knife-edges and cut the
+planking of the boat so that she began to leak. Then there came to me
+with some bitterness that I had earnestly desired a thin steel
+armour-plating at the water-line, but had allowed myself to be persuaded
+out of it by her builders. So again my forethought had been of no
+avail--though, of course, lightness of draught _was_ the first
+consideration. We put back to the camp and proceeded to flatten out and
+cut up all the empty cans and tinware we could find and nail it along
+the water-line of the boat, but the prospector persuaded us to wait a
+day or two. He had never seen a river close with the first little run of
+ice. He looked for a soft spell and open water yet. It was foolish to
+risk the boat against the ice. So we waited; and night after night the
+thermometer fell a little lower and a little lower, until presently a
+sheet of ice stretched across the whole river in the bend where we lay.
+We were frozen in. The remote possibility we had feared and sought to
+guard against had happened. Navigation had ceased on the Koyukuk at the
+earliest date anybody remembered, the 23d of September. Three days more
+had surely taken us to the mission where they had long expected us; now
+we should have to make our way on foot, without dogs, on the dangerous
+"first ice," as it is called, taking all sorts of chances, pulling a
+Yukon sled, with tent and stove, grub and bedding, "by the back of the
+face."
+
+But first there was the launch to pull out and make snug for the winter
+and safe against the spring break-up. A convenient little creek mouth
+with easy grade offered, which was one of the reasons I had not pushed
+on the few more miles we could have made. Here were eligible winter
+quarters; farther on we might have trouble in putting the boat in
+safety; here also was a kindly and capable man willing to assist us.
+
+It was our great good fortune to find this man at this spot. A steamboat
+he had signalled as she entered the mouth of the Koyukuk had passed him
+by unheeded, and he had been left to make his way six hundred miles up
+to the diggings, with his winter's outfit in a poling boat. He had
+accomplished more than half the task, and, warned by the approach of
+winter, had stopped at this place a few days before we reached it, and
+had begun the building of a little cabin; meaning to prospect the creek,
+which had taken his eye as having a promising look. The cabin we helped
+him finish was the twenty-first cabin he had built in Alaska, he
+informed us.
+
+There is something very impressive about the quiet, self-reliant,
+unrecorded hardihood of the class of which this man was an excellent
+type. We asked him why he had no partner, and he said he had had several
+partners, but they all snored, and he would not live with a man that
+snored. He had prospected and mined in many districts of Alaska during
+nearly twenty years. Once he had sold a claim for a few hundred dollars
+that had yielded many thousands to the purchaser, and that was as near
+wealth as he had ever come. But he had always made a living, always had
+enough money at the close of the summer to buy his winter's "outfit" and
+try his luck somewhere else.
+
+[Sidenote: THE PROSPECTOR]
+
+Singly, or in pairs, men of this type have wandered all over this vast
+country: preceding the government surveys, preceding the professional
+explorer, settling down for a winter on some creek that caught their
+fancy, building a cabin, thawing down a few holes to bed-rock, sometimes
+taking out a little gold, more often finding nothing, going in the
+summer to some old-established camp to work for wages, or finding
+employment as deck-hand on a steamboat.
+
+With an axe and an auger they have dotted their rough habitations all
+over the country; with a pick and a shovel and a gold pan they have
+tested the gravels of innumerable creeks. They know the drainage slopes
+and the practicable mountain passes, the haunts of the moose and the
+time and direction of the caribou's wanderings. The boats they have
+built have pushed their noses to the heads of all navigable streams; the
+sleds they have made have furrowed the remotest snows. In the arts of
+the wilderness they are the equal of the native inhabitant; in endurance
+and enterprise far his superior. The more one learns by experience and
+observation what life of this sort means, and realises the demands it
+makes upon a man's resourcefulness, upon his physique, upon his good
+spirits, upon his fortitude, the more one's admiration grows for the
+silent, strong men who have gone out all over this land and pitted
+themselves successfully against its savage wildness. Often in stress for
+the necessaries of life, there are yet no men as a class more
+free-handed and generous; trained to do everything for themselves, there
+are none more willing to help others.
+
+It is no small task to pull a four-ton boat out of the water with only
+such wilderness tackle as we could devise. We made ways of soft timbers,
+squaring and smoothing them; we cut down many trees for rollers; we dug
+and graded the beach. Then, having altogether unloaded her and built a
+high cache of poles and a platform for her stuff, and having chopped the
+ice from all around her, we rigged a Spanish windlass and wound that
+boat out of the water with the half-inch cable she carried, and up on
+the ways and well into the mouth of the little creek. Then we levelled
+her up and thoroughly braced her and put her canvas cover all over her,
+and she lay there until spring and took no harm at all.
+
+Arthur had meantime been making a sled of birch, intending to pull it
+himself while the doctor and I pulled a Yukon sled borrowed from our
+friend the prospector. By the 6th of October all our dispositions were
+made for departure, and the ice seemed strong enough to warrant trusting
+ourselves to it; but we waited another two days, the thermometer still
+reaching a minimum each night somewhere around zero. When we said
+good-bye to our friend Martin Nelson (sometimes one wonders if anywhere
+else in the world can be found men as kind and helpful to strangers) and
+started on our journey, it soon appeared that Arthur's sled was more
+hindrance than help. There was no material to iron the runners save
+strips of tin can, and these could not be beaten so smooth that they did
+not drag and cut on the ice. So the load was transferred to our sled and
+the little sled abandoned, and we took turns at the harness. This was
+the order of the journey: one man went ahead with an axe to test the
+ice; one man put the rope trace about his shoulders; one man pushed at
+the handle-bars which had been affixed to the sled. It was fortunate
+that amidst the equipment on the launch were two pairs of ice-creepers.
+Without them any sort of pulling and pushing on the glare ice would have
+been impossible.
+
+We soon found that the bend in which we had frozen was no sort of index
+of the general condition of the river. Much of it was still wide open,
+and every elbow between bends was piled high with rough ice from
+pressure jams. There was shore ice, however, even in the open bends,
+along which we were able to creep; and, though the ice-jams gave
+considerable trouble, yet we did very well the first day and camped at
+dark with eighteen or nineteen miles to our credit, in the presence of a
+great, red, smoky sunset and a glorious alpenglow on a distant snow
+mountain.
+
+The next day was full of risks and difficulties. We were to learn more
+about the varieties and vagaries of ice on that journey than many
+winters' travel on older ice would teach.
+
+[Illustration: THE START OVER THE "FIRST ICE."]
+
+[Illustration: "ROUGH GOING."]
+
+[Sidenote: THE START]
+
+At times, for a few hundred yards, the sled would glide with little
+effort over smooth, polished ice; then would come a long sand-bar, the
+side of which we had to hug close, and the ice upon it was what is
+called "shell-ice," through several layers of which we broke at every
+step. As the river fell, each night had left a thin sheet of ice
+underneath the preceding night's ice, and the foot crashed through the
+layers and the sled runners cut through them down to the gravel and sand
+at the bottom. Then would come another smooth stretch on which we made
+good time. But as we advanced up the river the current was swifter and
+swifter and the ice conditions grew steadily worse. Here was a steep-cut
+bank with just about eighteen or twenty inches of ice adhering to it and
+the black, rushing water beyond. We must either get our load along that
+shelf or unload the sled and pack everything over the face of a rocky
+bluff. Arthur passed over it first, testing gently with the axe, and
+found it none too strong. But the alternative was so toilsome that we
+resolved to take the chance. The doctor put the trace over his
+shoulders, Arthur took the handle-bars, while I climbed to a ledge of
+the rocks and, with a rope made of a pair of camel's-hair puttees
+unwound for the purpose and fastened to the sled, took all the weight I
+could and eased the sled over the worst place where the ice sloped to
+the water. If the ice had broken I might have held the sled from sinking
+until one of the others came to me, or I might not; the boys would
+probably have gone in too. It was a most risky spot and the sort of
+chance no one would think of taking under ordinary circumstances. As it
+was, the ice broke under Arthur's feet, and only by throwing his weight
+on the sled did he save himself a ducking. But we got the load safely
+across.
+
+A good run of perhaps a mile, and then we had to go back at least half a
+mile, for the ice played out altogether on our side of the river as we
+reached the Batzakaket, and there was open water in the middle. To reach
+the shore ice that was continuous on the other side, we had to "double"
+the open water. With such varying fortune the day passed, and we camped
+on the level ice of a little creek tributary to the right bank, having
+made perhaps another nineteen miles.
+
+When I awoke in the morning my heart sank at the tiny, creeping patter
+of fine snow on the silk tent. Snow was one thing I greatly dreaded, for
+there was not a pair of snow-shoes amongst us! A little snow would not
+do much harm, but if once snow began to fall we might have a foot or two
+before it ceased, and then we should be in bad case. It stopped before
+noon, but the half-inch that fell made the sled drag much heavier. The
+actual force to be exerted was not the most laborious feature of pulling
+that sled; it was the jerk, jerk, jerk on the shoulders. A dog's four
+legs give him much smoother traction than a man's two legs give, just as
+a four-cylinder engine will turn a propeller with much less vibration
+than a two-cylinder engine. Every step forward gave an impulse that
+spent itself before the next impulse was given, and the result was that
+the shoulders grew sore.
+
+We came that morning to the longest and roughest ice-jam we had so far
+encountered. It was as though a thousand bulls had been turned loose in
+a mammoth plate-glass warehouse. Jagged slabs of ice upended everywhere
+in the most riotous confusion, and it was impossible to pick any way
+amongst them, so a man had to go ahead and hew a path. It was while thus
+engaged that the doctor fell and injured his knee so severely on a sharp
+ice point that he hobbled in pain the rest of the trip. This was a very
+serious matter to us, for, though he insisted on still taking his trick
+at the traces, his effectiveness as a motive power was much diminished;
+and we had no sooner thus hewed and smashed our way through that jam
+than we had to hew and smash it across to the other side again in our
+search for passage.
+
+[Sidenote: "BY THE BACK OF THE FACE"]
+
+Then we came to a place where, in order to cut off a long sweeping curve
+of the river with open water and bad shore ice, we went through a dry
+slough and had to drag those iron runners over gravel and stones, where
+sometimes it was all the three of us could do to move the sled a few
+feet at a time. Yet all along the banks were willows, and if we had only
+known then what we know now we would have cut down and split some
+saplings and bound them over the iron, and so have saved three fourths
+of that labour.
+
+[Sidenote: BEAR MEAT AND BEANS]
+
+So the day's run was short, though the most exhausting yet, and we were
+all thoroughly tired out when we pitched the tent. I have note of a
+great supper of bear meat and beans, the meat the spoil of our friend
+the prospector's gun. It is one of the compensations of human nature
+that the satisfaction of appetite increases in pleasure in proportion to
+the bodily labour that is done. With food abundant and at choice, I do
+not like bear meat and will not eat beans. Yet my diary bears special
+note of the delicious meal they furnished on this occasion. Put any
+philosopher in the traces, or set him ahead of the dog team on
+show-shoes, breaking trail all day, and towards evening it is odds that
+his mind is not occupied with deep speculations about the infinite and
+the absolute, but rather with the question of what he will have for
+supper. Particularly should the grub be a little short, should fresh
+meat give out, or, above all, should sugar be "shy," it is astonishing
+how one's mind runs on eating and what elaborate imaginary repasts one
+partakes of. Yet of all food that a man ever eats there is none that is
+so relished and gives such clear gustatory pleasure as the plain, rough
+fare of the camp--provided it be well cooked. Greatly as we were in need
+of sleep, we got little, for the doctor's knee pained him all night and
+poor Arthur developed a raging toothache that did not yield until
+carbolic acid had been thrice applied.
+
+Soon after we started the next day, the river narrowed and swept round a
+series of mountain bluffs and we began to have the gloomiest
+expectations of trouble. It seemed certain that ice would fail us for
+passage, and we would have to pack our sled and its load by slow relays
+over the mountain. But to our delight we passed between the bluffs on
+good, firm, smooth ice, and it was not until we emerged on the flat
+beyond that our difficulty began. So it is again and again on the trail.
+Almost always it is the unexpected that happens; almost always it is
+something quite different from what our apprehensions have dwelt upon
+that arises to hinder and distress us. A tongue of level land that
+struck far out into the water, a cut mud bank with a current so swift
+that no ice at all had formed along it, interposed an obstacle that it
+took hours to circumvent. We had to leave the sled and cut a trail
+through the brush for half a mile along this peninsula in order to reach
+a stretch of the river where the ice was resumed, and the little snow
+that had fallen being quite insufficient to give the sled good passage,
+we had an exceedingly arduous job in getting it across.
+
+A mile or two of good going brought us in view of the smoke of a human
+habitation. What a blessed sight often and often this waving column of
+blue smoke in the distance is! Sometimes it means life itself to the
+Alaskan musher, and it always means warmth, shelter, food,
+companionship, assistance; all that one human being can bring to
+another. "The bright and the balmy effulgence of morn" never "breaks on
+the traveller faint and astray" with half the rejoicing that comes with
+the first sight of mere smoke. "I believe I see smoke," cried Arthur,
+with the quick vision of the native. "Where? Where?" we eagerly
+inquired, and the doctor left the handle-bars and limped forward to the
+boy ahead with the axe. "Away yonder on that bank," pointed Arthur. "I
+see it! I see it!" the doctor shouted; "we're coming to a house, we're
+coming to people!" The trip was a severe apprenticeship to Alaskan life
+for a man straight from the New York hospitals, although before the
+accident to his knee I had declared that if only they could be trained
+to live on dry fish I thought a team of young doctors would haul a sled
+very well. He was delighted at coming upon the first inhabited house we
+had seen since we helped Nelson to build his little cabin--and _that_
+was only the second inhabited house in three hundred miles.
+
+[Sidenote: BREAKING THROUGH]
+
+But, perhaps because we grew less cautious in our excitement, almost
+immediately after we had spied the smoke of the cabin we got into one of
+the worst messes of the whole trip. Arthur had pushed ahead and we had
+followed with a spurt, and almost at the same time all three of us
+became aware that we were on dangerous ice. Arthur cried, "The ice is
+breaking; go back!" just as we began to feel it swaying under our feet.
+I shouted to the doctor, "Go _on_ to the bank quick!" and pushed with
+all my might, and we managed to make a few yards more towards shallow
+water, over ice that bent and cracked at every step, before it gave way
+and let down the sled and the men into two feet of water. Arthur had run
+safely over the breaking ice and had gained the bank, and as I write, in
+my mind's eye I can see the doctor, who had been duly instructed in the
+elementary lessons of the trail, standing in the water and calling to
+Arthur: "Make a fire quick; make a fire. I'm all wet!"
+
+But it was not necessary to make a fire, for the thermometer was no
+lower than 10° or 15° above zero, and the chief trouble was not the
+wetting of our legs but the wetting of the contents of the sled. Along
+the bank was stronger ice, and we managed, though not without much
+difficulty, to get the sled upon it and to make our way to the Indian
+cabin.
+
+As soon as old "Atler" (I have never been quite sure of what white
+man's name that is a corruption) knew who we were, his hospitality,
+which had been ready enough at first sight, became most cordial and
+expansive. While we pulled off our wet clothing his wife hung it up to
+dry and had the kettle on and some tea making, and he and Arthur got out
+our wet bedding and festooned it about the cabin. Most fortunately the
+things that would have suffered most from water did not get wet. So
+there we lay all the afternoon, having made no more than six miles, and
+there we lay all the next day, which was Sunday.
+
+There was a sort of awful interest that centred upon one member of this
+family, a boy of seven or eight years. The previous spring he had killed
+his uncle by the accidental discharge of a .22 rifle, shooting him
+through the heart. The gun had been brought in loaded and cocked and had
+been set in a corner of the cabin, and the child, playing with it, had
+pulled the trigger. The carelessness of Indians with firearms is the
+frequent cause of terrible accidents like this. The child was still too
+young to realise what he had done, but one fancies that later it will
+throw a gloom on his life.
+
+To my great relief and satisfaction I was able to arrange here for a
+young Indian man to accompany us with his one dog. He was a native of
+those parts and knew every bend and turn of the river. We were, indeed,
+in great need of help. The doctor's knee grew worse rather than better,
+and Arthur was suffering the return of an old rheumatism in his leg. I
+was the only sound member of the party, and my shoulders were galled by
+the rope and my feet tender and sore from continual wearing of the
+crampons. We were now not quite half-way--some sixty miles lay behind us
+and sixty-five before--and we had been travelling four days.
+
+[Sidenote: "ONE-EYED WILLIAM"]
+
+Divine service being done on Sunday morning, the whole of it well
+interpreted by Arthur to the great satisfaction of the Indians, he and
+"One-Eyed William," our recruit, started out to survey to-morrow's
+route. In this reconnaissance William broke through some slush ice at
+the greatest depth of the river in seeking a safe place to cross, and,
+had Arthur not been with him, would almost certainly have drowned, for
+the current was very swift and the man, like most Indians, unable to
+swim a stroke;--though, indeed, swimming is of little avail for escape
+out of such predicament and is a poor dependence in these icy waters
+winter or summer. More beans boiled and a batch of biscuits baked
+against our departure, and evening prayer said and interpreted, we were
+ready for bed again.
+
+Our visit was a great delight to old Atler. An inflamed eye was much
+relieved by the doctor's ministrations, and the natural piety which he
+shares with most Indians was gratified at the opportunity of worship and
+instruction. A good old man, according to his lights, I take Atler to
+be, well known for benevolence of disposition and particularly priding
+himself on being a friend of the white man. He told us of one unworthy
+representative of that race he had helped a year ago. The man had come
+out of the Hogatzitna (Hog River) country, entirely out of food, himself
+and a couple of dogs nigh to starvation, and Atler had taken care of him
+for several days while he recuperated and had given him grub and dog
+fish enough to get him to Bettles, one hundred and thirty miles away,
+where he could purchase supplies. The old Indian had robbed his own
+family's little winter stock of "white-man's grub" that this stranger
+might be provided, and had never heard a word from him since, though he
+had promised to make return when he reached Bettles.
+
+Unfortunately Alaska's white population is sprinkled with men like this,
+men without heart and without conscience, and it is precisely such
+rascals who are loudest in their contemptuous talk of the Indians. It is
+such men who chop down the woodwork of cabins rather than be troubled to
+take the axe into the forest a few rods away, who depart in the morning
+without making kindling and shavings, careless how other travellers may
+fare so themselves be warm without labour; who make "easy money" in the
+summer-time by dropping down the Yukon with a boat-load of "rot-gut"
+whisky, leaving drunkenness and riot at every village they pass; who
+beget children of the native women and regard them no more than a dog
+does his pups, indifferent that their own flesh and blood go cold and
+hungry. They are the curse and disgrace of Alaska, and they often go
+long time insolent and unwhipped because our poor lame law is not nimble
+enough to overtake them; "to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness
+for ever," one's indignation is sometimes disposed to thunder savagely
+with Saint Jude; and indeed there needs a future punishment to redress
+the balance in this country.
+
+[Sidenote: FIDO]
+
+At break of day our reinforced company was off, Arthur and "One-Eyed
+William" going ahead to sound the ice and pick the way, the dog "Fido"
+(such a name for a Siwash dog!) and myself in the traces, the doctor at
+the handle-bars. The rest had benefited the doctor's knee, but walking
+was still painful and he needed the support of the handle-bars all day.
+What a great difference that one strong, willing little dog made! His
+steady pulling kept the sled in motion and relieved one's shoulders of
+the galling jerk of the rope at every step. The going was "not too bad,"
+as they say here, all day, though it carried one rather severe
+disappointment. William had told us of a portage he thought we could
+take that would cut off eight or nine miles of the river; but when we
+reached it the snow upon it proved insufficient to afford a passage, for
+it was a rough niggerhead flat, and we had to swing around the outer
+edges of the great curves the river makes, where alone was ice, with
+trouble and danger at every crossing.
+
+The decision as to whether we should halt or go forward, as to whether
+ice was safe or unsafe, as to whether we should cross the river or stay
+where we were--every decision that concerned the secure advance of the
+party--I put wholly upon William, and would not permit myself or any
+other to question his judgment or to argue it with him. There was no
+sense in half-measures; this young man knew the river as none of us did,
+knew ice as none of us did, and we must put ourselves entirely in his
+hands. The debate that had become usual at every doubtful course arose
+at the portage just referred to, but it was at once suppressed by the
+announcement that hereafter no one could have the floor but William, and
+that when he had spoken the matter was settled. Day by day I think we
+all came to a keener realisation of how very dangerous a journey we were
+making; it lay heavily on my mind that I had brought these two young
+men--whether by mishap or mismanagement--into real peril of their lives.
+Again and again I blamed myself for the delays that had deferred our
+start up the Koyukuk, again and again I wished that we had waited longer
+before leaving the _Pelican's_ winter quarters. I had even contemplated
+a week's stay at Atler's, to give the river a chance to get into better
+shape, but unless there came a very much sharper spell than we had had
+so far a week would not make much difference, and our grub began to run
+short and Atler was none too well supplied. So it seemed best to push
+on.
+
+The next day was full of toil and difficulty. There was no good ice to
+make fine time over that day. Starting in the grey dawn, for mile after
+mile we had to haul the sled over crumbly shell-ice that broke through
+to gravel; and when the shell-ice was done we came to a new bend where a
+rapid current washed a steep mud bank. There was just a little shelf of
+ice, but the brush overhung it so that the passage of the sled was not
+possible. William and Arthur started with the axes to clear away the
+brush, but it seemed to me foolish to do that unless the ledge held out
+and led somewhere, for the turn of the bank threw it out of sight. So
+they went forward cautiously along that ledge to the end--and an end
+they found, sure enough, so that had we followed the axemen with the
+sled we should have had to creep all the way back again. There was
+nothing for it but to cut another land trail on a bench that we could
+reach where the sled was stopped but that could not be reached at all
+farther on. A long and slow and laborious job it was, that took most of
+the morning, to cut that trail and then get the load over it to ice
+again.
+
+By noon we were opposite the Red Mountain, one of the well-known Koyukuk
+landmarks, and on the site of an old Indian fishing camp. William and
+Arthur had made a great fire when we came up, and we heated some beans
+and made some tea and ate lunch. A mile farther on was the cabin of a
+white man, and we paid him a brief visit and got a little tea from him,
+for ours was nearly gone. It did me good to hear him sing the praises of
+Deaconess Carter, the trained nurse at the mission. She had taken him
+in, crippled with rheumatism, and had cured him. Already the new mission
+was proving a boon to whites as well as natives. We made no more than
+four or five miles farther when, coming to spruce with no more in sight
+for a long distance, we pitched the tent, all very tired.
+
+That night the thermometer went to 5° below zero, the coldest weather of
+the season so far. As a consequence the next day we had a new and very
+disagreeable trouble. The cold weather, by increasing the amount of
+running ice in the still open stretches, had brought about a jam that
+had raised the level of the water and caused an overflow of the ice--a
+very common phenomenon of a closing river. We picked our way wet-foot
+much of the day, and towards evening came to a complete _impasse_ in the
+middle of the river, with open water in front and on one hand, and new
+thin ice on the other. So we had to turn round and go back again a long
+way, the mid-river being the only traversable place, until, when it
+seemed that we should have to go round another bend to reach a crossing,
+Arthur proposed that he and William, who wore mukluks, should carry the
+doctor and me, who wore moccasins across the overflow, and then rush the
+sled across; and this we did, wetting its contents somewhat, however. We
+camped immediately, for we had landed on impassable gravel.
+
+[Sidenote: THE RED MOUNTAIN]
+
+That night the thermometer went to 20° below zero, and we took good hope
+that the cold, which began to approach the real cold of winter, would
+put an end to overflow; but, on the contrary, it only aggravated the
+trouble. For the first mile or two there was nothing for it but to go
+through it, and at 20° below it is a miserable business to be wading in
+moccasins even for an hour. We had rearranged our load so that it stood
+up somewhat higher, but we could not avoid wetting the things on the
+bottom of the sled, and the ice formed about it very inconveniently.
+Moreover, the little dog, who had a great dislike to wetting his feet,
+began to give us a good deal of trouble, and at one time nothing but the
+admirable presence of mind and prompt action of William saved us from
+losing our whole load. We had reached a strip of new, dry ice formed the
+night before, with black, rushing water on the left, towards which the
+slippery surface sloped. Presently as we advanced we began to encounter
+a little overflow water, coming from the bank on the right, seeping up
+between the ice and the bank; and that dog, to avoid wetting his feet in
+the overflow, deliberately turned towards the open water and set the
+sled sliding in the same direction. Without the crampons, which we had
+not used for the past few days, it was impossible to hold the sled
+against the dog's traction, and in another moment we should have lost
+everything, for the dog paid no heed to our voices, when William with a
+blow of his axe cut the rope by which the dog pulled, and, grasping the
+sled and throwing himself full length on the ice, managed to stop it on
+the very brink of the water. It was a close shave, but once more we were
+safe; and the doctor, in the exuberance of his gratitude, said that
+night: "If William wants a glass eye I'll send to New York to get him
+one." But when William learned that the glass eye was a mere matter of
+looks and would in no wise improve his vision, he lost interest in it.
+Looks do not count for much amongst the Koyukuk Indians.
+
+[Illustration: ARTHUR AND DOCTOR BURKE.]
+
+[Illustration: SAINT JOHN'S-IN-THE-WILDERNESS, ALLAKAKET, KOYUKUK
+RIVER.]
+
+That night was a long way off yet, however; we had other risks to run,
+other labours. Here were two islands in the river, and the current,
+running like a mill-race and burdened with ice cakes, swept around the
+shore of one of them leaving the passage between them quite dry. There
+was no shore ice at all where the channel was, and it was so
+ugly-looking a reach that had there been any there I am sure we should
+not have ventured it. There was nothing for it but to drag the sled half
+a mile over the gravel, and we did it, the most heart-breaking labour
+of the whole trip. It took us exactly an hour to make that half mile.
+William did not know the trick of the split willows either, so we all
+four of us sweated for our ignorance. Shortly after, our guide pointed
+out the spot where poor Ericson's frozen body was found, two years and
+eight months before.
+
+[Sidenote: A NARROW ESCAPE]
+
+[Sidenote: RUBBER ICE]
+
+Near the Kornuchaket (or the mouth of Old Man Creek), where the Koyukuk
+receives a considerable tributary, we approached the most dangerous
+travelling we had had yet. The river here is swift and deep, and there
+are several islands set in it. Most of its surface was frozen, but the
+ice was very thin. William stopped the procession before we reached the
+bad stretch and went hastily over a part of it. Under his single weight
+we could see the ice-sheet undulating. It had been our rule that ice was
+not safe unless it took three blows of the axe to bring water, but this
+ice gave water at a blow. When William returned he made quite an
+harangue, which Arthur interpreted. He thought we could make it past the
+mouth of the creek, and if we could we should find good going to Moses'
+Village. But we must go just as fast as we could travel; we must not let
+the sled stop an instant. The ice would bend and crack; but he thought
+if we went quickly we could get across. So for nearly a quarter of a
+mile we rushed that sled over "rubber" ice that swayed and cracked and
+yielded under our feet and under the sled, until we reached the bank of
+one of the islands, and then again we launched her and ran with her to
+the shore. Once one of my feet broke through, and immediately the water
+welled up all around--with the steamboat channel underneath--but
+without pause we increased our speed and made the strong shore ice
+safely at last. No man will ever doubt the plasticity, the "viscosity"
+of ice, as it used to be styled in the old glacier controversies, who
+has passed over the "rubber" ice that forms under certain circumstances
+and at certain seasons on these rivers.
+
+We would never, I am sure, have attempted that ice had not William been
+with us. We would have struck a blow with the axe and declared it
+unsafe. Of course, it was unsafe; the whole journey was unsafe, but I am
+convinced that this thin, continuous sheet of ice, cushioned actually
+upon the surface of the water out of which it was growing, was really
+safer than much of the thicker but brittle, unsupported ice we had
+unhesitatingly come over. Chemists tell us that certain substances in
+the act of formation, which they call nascent substances, are
+extraordinarily active and potent, and it may be that ice in the same
+state has a special tenacity of texture which belongs to that state
+alone. I wish that I could have measured the thickness of that ice.
+Where my foot went through I know it was very thin, but its thickness I
+will not venture to guess. There was the distinct feeling that the water
+was bearing the ice up and when it was punctured the water welled up
+with pressure behind it.
+
+Beyond the Kornuchaket much more snow had fallen, and a few miles
+brought us to Moses' Village, called grandiosely "Arctic City," since a
+trader had established a store and a road-house there. At this spot a
+new overland mail trail from Tanana strikes the Koyukuk, and, although
+ten or twelve miles remained, we felt that our journey was done. My sled
+dogs were there, and, as I had not seen them for more than a year, that
+was a joyful reunion. Nanook's bark of welcome, which no one but I ever
+got with quite the same inflection, was as grateful to me as all the
+licking and slobbering of the others, for Nanook is a very independent
+beast, reserved in his demonstrations and not wearing his heart on his
+sleeve, so to speak. They were all glad to see me--Old Lingo and Nig,
+and even "Jimmy the Fake." Billy was dead. For fifteen or sixteen months
+they had been boarded here, and, since fish had been very scarce the
+preceding summer, their food had been chiefly bacon and rice and tallow,
+and there was a bill of close to four hundred dollars against us! Dogs
+are very expensive things in this expensive country. When used the
+winter through on the trail, and boarded the summer through at a fish
+camp, we estimate that it costs one hundred dollars per head per annum
+to feed a dog; so that the maintenance of a team of five dogs, which is
+the minimum practicable team, will cost five hundred dollars per annum
+for food alone.
+
+[Sidenote: SATURATED SNOW]
+
+When we had eaten a good supper and were reclining on spring cots in the
+bunk house, there was not one of us but confidently expected to be at
+the mission in the next forenoon. For a week past the natives had been
+going to and fro in three or four hours. The river was completely closed
+above here, and there was much more snow than we found below. So we
+hitched our own dogs to our own sled the next morning, when the doctor
+had visited a sick person or two, and started out on the last stretch
+of the journey. All went well until we had turned the long bend at the
+head of which the old, abandoned post of Bergman is situated, just on
+the Arctic Circle, but a mile or two beyond we were wallowing in
+saturated snow that stretched all across the river right up to the banks
+on either side. An overflow was in progress, the water running along the
+surface of the ice and soaking up the snow so that there was six inches
+of slush all over it. We struggled along awhile, though from the first
+it seemed hopeless, and then we gave it up and went back to the
+road-house. There would be no passing that stretch of river with the
+sled until the cold had dealt with the overflow. It is almost always the
+unexpected that happens. The next morning I put on a pair of
+snow-shoes--Doctor Burke's knee forbade him their use--and taking
+William with me, mushed up through the slush and the snow to the
+mission, leaving the others to come on with the team so soon as they
+found it practicable.
+
+A mile before we reached the mission was the new village built by the
+Esquimaux--"Kobuk town" they call it--and right in front of the village
+the Malamute Riffle, a noted difficulty of navigation, was still running
+wide open, though all the rest of the river was long closed. Near the
+riffle the Kobuks had a fish-trap, and some who were busy getting out
+fish saw and recognised me, and the whole population came swarming out
+for greetings. It was good to see these kindly, simple people again, to
+shake their hands and hear their "I glad I see you," which is the
+general native greeting where there is any English at all. Every one
+must shake hands; even the babies on their mothers' backs stretch out
+their little fingers eagerly, and if they be too small for that, the
+mother will take the little hand and hold it out. At the bend we take a
+portage and a quarter of a mile brings us to the Allakaket, to the
+familiar modest buildings of the mission, with its new Koyukuk village
+gradually clustering round it. The whole scene was growing into almost
+the exact realisation of my dream when first I camped on this spot two
+years and nine months before. There was a distinct thrill of pleasure at
+the sight of the church. Built entirely of logs with the bark on, there
+was nothing visible anywhere about it but spruce bark, save for the
+gleam of the gilded cross that surmounted the little belfry. The roof,
+its regular construction finished, was covered with small spruce poles
+with the bark on, nailed together at the apex, and where it projected
+well beyond the gables its under-side was covered with bark, as well as
+the cornice all round that finished it off. Even the window-frames and
+the door-panels were covered with bark. It was of the same tone because
+of the selfsame substance as the forest still growing around it, and it
+gave at the first glance the satisfied impression of fitness. It gave
+the feeling that it belonged where it was placed. It is ill praising
+one's own work, but I had been keen to see how it would strike me, fresh
+from the outside, after a year's absence, and I was very glad indeed
+that it pleased me again.
+
+[Sidenote: A STARVING WHITE MAN]
+
+I had no more than entered upon the warm welcome that waited at Saint
+John's-in-the-Wilderness, and was still wondering at the homelike
+cosiness which the mission house had assumed under the deft hands of
+the two ladies who occupied it, when there came an Indian with word of a
+white man he had found starving in the wilderness fifteen miles away.
+Another native with a dog team and a supply of immediate food was
+hastily despatched to bring the man in, and that night the poor
+emaciated fellow, looking like a man of sixty-five or seventy though he
+was really no more than forty, crawled out of the sled and tottered into
+the house. He had started out from Tanana two months before with two
+pack-horses to make his way across to the Koyukuk diggings, had lost his
+way and wandered aimlessly in that vast wilderness; one horse had been
+drowned, the other he had killed for meat. He had made a raft to come
+down the Kornutna (Old Man Creek) to the Koyukuk, knowing that there was
+a trading-post near its mouth, and had been frozen in and forced to
+abandon it. Since that time he had been living on a few spoonfuls of
+meal a day, with frozen berries, and once or twice a ptarmigan, and when
+Ned found him was at the last extremity and had given up, intending to
+die where he was.
+
+That man's hunger was tremendous, but Miss Carter, having knowledge and
+experience of such cases, was apprehensive that if any large quantity of
+food were taken at a time there would be serious danger to him. So for a
+day or two he ate frequently but sparingly. A little later, as he grew
+stronger, to such extremes did his hunger pinch him that he would watch
+till there was no one looking and would go into the kitchen and steal
+food that was preparing, even taking it out of the frying-pan on the
+stove. He would be hungry immediately after having a full meal. In ten
+days he was sufficiently recovered to resume his journey to the
+diggings, and when I saw him at Coldfoot two months later I did not
+recognise him, so greatly had he changed from the poor shrunken creature
+that crept into the mission. We all think we have been hungry time and
+again; if ever we have gone a few days on short rations we are quite
+sure of it; this man had sounded the height and depth and stretched the
+length and breadth of it, and none of the rest of us really know what
+hunger means. I tried to get him to talk about it, but he said he wanted
+to forget it. He said he was ashamed to think of some of the things he
+had done and of some of the terrible thoughts that had come to him, and
+I pressed him no more. I have always felt that, even in its last
+hideousness of cannibalism, only God Himself can judge starvation.
+
+[Sidenote: TWO INTERPRETERS]
+
+Here began my first experience of the difficulties of conducting a
+mission at the same place for two different races of natives speaking
+totally different languages. Although the Indian language spoken here is
+the same as at Tanana, and much of the liturgy, etc., had been put into
+that tongue by Mr. Prevost and was therefore available, yet it was found
+impracticable to have two sets of services whenever the church was used,
+for both races would always attend anyway. Since the mastery of the two
+tongues was out of the question, and there were no translations at all
+into the Esquimau, it became a question of teaching the Esquimaux to
+take part in an Indian service or dropping both vernaculars altogether
+and conducting the service in English. After much doubt and experiment
+the latter was resolved upon, and the whole service of prayer and praise
+is in English. When the lessons are read and the address delivered it is
+necessary to use two interpreters; the minister delivers his sentence in
+English, then the Koyukuk interpreter puts it in Indian, and when he is
+done the Esquimau interpreter puts it into that tongue.
+
+It is a very tedious business, this double interpretation and a
+twenty-minute sermon takes fully an hour to deliver, but there is no
+help for it. The singing is hearty and enthusiastic though the repertory
+is wisely very limited; and here, north of the Arctic Circle, is a
+vested choir of eight or ten Kobuk and Koyukuk boys who lead the singing
+and lead it very well.
+
+Already the influence of the mission and the school was very marked.
+Given the native off by himself like this, in the hands of those in whom
+he has learned to place entire confidence, remote from debasing
+agencies, and his improvement is evident and his survival assured.
+
+[Illustration: THE DOUBLE INTERPRETATION AT THE ALLAKAKET.]
+
+[Illustration: THE WIND-SWEPT YUKON WITHIN THE RAMPARTS.]
+
+In two days the doctor and Arthur and the team came up, and so was
+brought to a happy conclusion a perilous journey over the first ice. One
+is often glad to have had experiences that one would by no means repeat,
+and this is a case in point. We had learned a good deal about ice; we
+had taken liberties with ice that none of us had ever thought before
+could be taken with impunity; we had learned to trust ice and at the
+same time to distrust it and in some measure to discriminate about it.
+The "last ice" is bad, but the "first ice" is much worse, and all
+three of us were agreed that we wanted no more travelling over it and no
+more pulling of a sled "by the back of the face."
+
+Then followed a very happy, busy time of several weeks while the river
+ice was consolidating and the land trails establishing; happy with its
+manifold evidences of the rapid advance the natives were making under
+Miss Carter's able and beneficent sway, busy with the instruction of
+people eager to learn. It was busy and happy for Doctor Burke also; busy
+with the many ailments he relieved, happy with the beginnings of an
+attachment which two years later culminated in his marriage to Miss
+Carter's colleague at this mission.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE KOYUKUK TO THE YUKON AND TO TANANA--CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS AT SAINT
+JOHN'S-IN-THE-WILDERNESS
+
+
+LEAVING Fort Yukon on the 26th of November, 1909, and going again over
+almost the same route we followed during the first journey described in
+this volume, we reached the new mission at the Allakaket on the Koyukuk
+River on the 14th of December, after a period of almost continual cold.
+The climate of the interior of Alaska varies as much as any climate. The
+previous year, continuing the journey described in "The First Ice," I
+had passed over this same route in the opposite direction, between the
+same dates, with the thermometer well above zero the whole time. This
+trip the _mean_ of the minimum reading at night, the noon reading, and
+the reading at start and finish of each day's journey was -38 1/4°. Many
+days in that three weeks we travelled all day at 45° and 50° below zero,
+and we spent one night in camp at 49° below.
+
+It was the beginning of a severe winter, with much snow north of the
+Yukon and long periods of great cold.
+
+[Sidenote: BIRTH, BURIAL, AND DANCING]
+
+The two weeks or so spent at the mission of Saint
+John's-in-the-Wilderness was enjoyed as only a rest is enjoyed after
+making such a journey; as only Christmas is enjoyed at such a native
+mission. It is the time of the whole year for the people; they come in
+from near and far intent upon the festival in both of its aspects,
+religious and social, and they enter so heartily into all that is
+provided for them that one does not know which to admire most, their
+simple, earnest piety or the whole-hearted enthusiasm of their sports
+and pastimes. Right out of church they go to the frozen river, old men
+and maidens, young men and matrons, mothers with babies on their backs
+and their skirts tucked up, and they quickly line up and are kicking the
+football stuffed with moose hair and covered with moose hide in the
+native game that their forefathers played ages before "Rugby" was
+invented.[B] When the church-bell rings, back they all troop again, to
+take their places and listen patiently and reverently to the long,
+double-interpreted service, the babies still on their mothers' backs,
+sometimes asleep, sometimes waking up and crying, comforted by slinging
+them round and applying their lips to the fountain of nourishment and
+solace.
+
+On the nights when there is no church service there is feasting and
+dancing. The native dance is a very simple affair, entirely without any
+objectionable feature, and one cannot see any reason in the world for
+attempting to suppress it. A man and a woman get out in the middle of
+the floor and dance opposite one another without touching at all. The
+moccasined toes of an expert man in this dance move with surprising
+rapidity, the woman, with eyes downcast, the picture of demureness,
+sways slightly from side to side and moves on her toes in rhythm to the
+man's movement. Presently another man jumps up and the first man yields
+his place; then another woman comes forward and the first woman yields
+her place, and so the dance goes on.
+
+For a variety, of late years there is an occasional "white-man's dance,"
+of the quadrille or the waltz kind, but the natives much prefer their
+own dancing. Here at the Allakaket the presence of the Esquimaux adds
+picturesqueness and strangeness, and the Esquimau dance, which consists
+of a series of jerky attitudinisings, with every muscle tense, to a
+curious monotonous chant and the beating of a drum, is a never-failing
+source of amusement to the Indians.
+
+An old man's funeral in the morning away up on the high bluff
+overlooking the mission, a birth in the evening, a dance the same
+night--so goes the drama of life in this little, isolated native world.
+So soon as these people make up their minds that one of their number is
+sick unto death they make the coffin, for when trees must be felled and
+lumber whipsawed from them, it is well to be forehanded.
+
+[Sidenote: "BEFORE" AND "AFTER"]
+
+There is one old woman living up there yet whose coffin had been made
+three times. When it becomes evident that the unfavourable prognosis was
+mistaken the coffin is torn apart and made into shelves or some other
+article of household utility. It seems very cold-blooded, but it is easy
+to misjudge these people. The emotion of grief is real with them, I
+believe, but transient. They are matter-of-fact and entirely devoid of
+pretence, and when once a funeral has taken place and the service is
+all over they dismiss the gloomy event from their minds as soon as
+possible. The night of old Mesuk's death, however, there were fires
+lighted on all the trails and before most of the Esquimau cabins, the
+object of which was probably to frighten the spirit away from the
+dwellings of the living. We shall get the better of these superstitions
+by and by, but superstitions die hard, not only amongst Esquimaux.
+Moreover, practices like this linger as traditional practices long after
+their superstitious content is dissipated, and men of feeling do not
+wantonly lay hands on ancient traditional custom. I think that if I were
+an Esquimau and knew that from immemorial antiquity fires had been
+lighted on the trails and outside the doors upon the death of my
+ancestors, I should be tempted to kindle them myself upon an occasion,
+however firmly I held the Communion of Saints and the Safe Repose of the
+Blessed. And I am quite sure that if I were a Thlinket I should set up a
+totem-pole despite all the missionaries in the world. When one comes to
+think about it dispassionately, there is really nothing in Christianity
+averse to the kindling of corpse fires or the blazoning of native
+heraldry. When all the little superstitions and peculiar picturesque
+customs are abolished out of the world it will be a much less
+interesting world than it is to-day. If there were any evidence or
+reason to believe that morality and religion will be furthered by the
+brow-beating or cajoling of the little peoples into a close similitude
+of the white race in dress and manners and customs, all other
+considerations would, of course, be swallowed up in a glad welcome of
+such advance. But almost the exact opposite is true. The young Indian or
+Esquimau, who by much mixing with white men has been "wised up," as the
+expressive phrase goes here, is commonly one of the least useful, the
+least attractive, the least moral of his kind. We have many such on the
+Yukon--young men who work on the steamboats in the summer and do odd
+jobs and hang around the stores in winter, and will not condescend to
+fish any more or to hunt or trap unless driven by the pinch of hunger.
+Show me an Indian who affects the white man in garb, in speech, in
+general habits, and external characteristics, and it will be easy to
+show an Indian whose death would be little loss to his community or his
+race; while the native woman who aspires to dress herself like a white
+woman has very commonly the purpose of attracting the attention of the
+white men. I think the young Indian man I recall as the best dressed,
+most debonair, and most completely "civilised," was living in idleness
+upon the bounty of the white trader whom every one knew to be his wife's
+paramour, and was impudently careless of the general knowledge.
+
+Of all the photographs that illustrate missionary publications--and I
+have contributed enough villainous half-tones to warrant me in a
+criticism--the ones I dislike most are of the "Before and After" type.
+Here is a group of savages clad in skins, or furs, or feathers, or palm
+fibre, or some patient, skilful weave of native wool or grass; in each
+case clad congruously with their environment and out of the products it
+affords. Set against it is the same or a similar group clad out of the
+slop-shop, clad in hickory shirts and blue-jean trousers, clad so that,
+if faces could be changed as easily as clothing, they would pass for any
+commonplace group of whites anywhere. And, as if such change were in
+itself the symbol and guarantee of a change from all that is brutal and
+idolatrous to all that is gentle and Christian, there follows the
+triumphant "Before and After" inscription. All the fitness has gone, all
+the individuality, all the clever adaptation of indigenous material, all
+the artistic and human interest; and a self-conscious smirk of
+superiority radiates over made-by-the-million factory garments instead.
+Whenever I see such contrasting photographs there comes over me a
+shamed, perverse recollection of a pair of engravings by Hogarth,
+usually suppressed, which a London bookseller once pulled out of a
+portfolio in the back room of his shop and showed me. They bore the same
+title.
+
+I profess myself a friend of the native tongue because it is the native
+tongue--the easy, familiar, natural vehicle of expression; of the native
+dress because it is almost always comfortable and comely; of the native
+customs, whenever they are not unhealthy or demoralising, because they
+are the distinctive heritage of a people; and again, of tongue, dress,
+and customs alike, if you will, simply because they are dissimilar.
+
+[Sidenote: A BARREN UNIFORMITY]
+
+For it has always seemed a trumpery notion that uniformity in these
+things has any connection with the upbuilding of a people, has any
+ethical relation at all, and I have always wondered that so trumpery a
+notion should have so wide an influence. Moreover, is it not a little
+curious that, whereas the trend of biological evolution on its upward
+course, as Spencer assures us, is towards differentiation and
+dissimilarity, the trend of sociological evolution should be so marked
+towards this bald and barren uniformity? But these be deep matters.
+
+I have never been able to join in the reproach of superciliousness so
+often applied to the lines of that noblest of missionary hymns in which
+Bishop Heber asks, "Can we, whose souls are lighted with wisdom from on
+high, Can we, to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?" If that be
+superciliousness, it is an essential superciliousness of Christianity
+itself, for the question lies at the very core of our religion and will
+not cease to be asked so long as the world contains those who believe
+with all their hearts, and those who do not believe because they have
+not heard. I never listen to that hymn without emotion, it can still
+"shake me like a cry Of trumpets going by." But the question that seems
+to stir the souls of some missionaries and most school-teachers, "Can we
+deny to these unfortunate heathen our millinery, our 'Old Oaken Bucket,'
+our Mr. and our Mrs.," leaves me quite cold.
+
+Here was the weekly afternoon routine at this mission, only the mornings
+being devoted to books and classes: On Monday the children brought their
+soiled clothes of the week to the schoolroom and washed them; on Tuesday
+they were dried and ironed; on Wednesday they were mended; on Thursday a
+juvenile "society" did some sort of work for another mission; on Friday
+every child in the village had a hot bath. Now, let a routine of that
+sort be kept up, week after week, month after month, year after year,
+during the whole school life of a child, and it is bound to leave its
+mark; and there is no other way in which the same mark may be made.
+
+At the Allakaket is fine example of what, I think, is the best rule in
+the world for the inferior races--the absolute rule of a devoted,
+intelligent, capable gentlewoman. We are but now writing the indentures
+of their apprenticeship to self-government in the elective village
+councils we have set up; it is good for them to serve it under this
+loving and unquestioned despotism.
+
+[Sidenote: MATTERS METEOROLOGICAL]
+
+During all that Christmas season the temperature was subject to such
+violent fluctuations that a chart of them would look like the picture
+showing the comparative heights of mountains, that used to be presented
+under "The World in Hemispheres" in the school geographies. A minimum of
+52° below zero and a maximum of 10° below, was followed by a minimum of
+53° below and a maximum of 18° below, and that by a minimum of 56° below
+and a maximum of 14° below, while on Christmas Day itself we registered
+a minimum of 58° below zero and a maximum of 1° above, a range of 59° in
+less than twelve hours. At a time of the year when the sun has scarcely
+any effect upon the temperature such tremendous changes point to
+corresponding atmospheric disturbances, and each rise was caused by the
+irruption of clouds upon a clear sky and was followed by a fall of snow.
+
+It is a beautifully simple process. Driven into these regions by some
+compelling current of the upper atmosphere comes a mass of warm air
+laden with moisture--a cloud. As it comes in contact with the cold air
+of the region it parts with its heat, and the temperature of the lower
+air rises. Having parted with its heat, it can no longer contain its
+moisture; and, having parted with its moisture, it ceases to exist. The
+cold of the earth and of its immediate air envelope has seized upon that
+cloud and devoured it, and the cold resumes its sway. So have I opened
+the door of a crowded cabin, when an Indian dance or other gathering was
+in progress, at 50° or 60° below zero, and the cold, dry air meeting the
+hot, moist air has caused an immediate fall of snow on the threshold.
+
+After the abrupt rise in temperature on Christmas Day, the snow began to
+fall heavily, with a barometer continually falling until it reached
+27.98 inches, the lowest point recorded here (at an elevation of about
+500 feet above the sea) in two years and a half--and before the snow
+ceased three feet had fallen.
+
+Our winter itinerary called us to leave the Allakaket immediately after
+New Year's Day, and our route lay overland through a totally uninhabited
+country for nearly one hundred and fifty miles, to Tanana on the Yukon.
+We knew that it would not greatly interfere with our plans to lie
+another week at the Allakaket, and that would bring our departure after
+the monthly journey of the mail-carrier and would thus compel him to
+break trail for us through all that snow. That is the way the
+mail-carriers in Alaska are usually treated, but Arthur and I took some
+pride in keeping as closely as possible to the announced dates of
+visitation and in doing such share of trail breaking as fell to us.
+
+[Sidenote: TRAIL BREAKING]
+
+So on Monday, the 3d of January, 1910, we bade farewell to Deaconess
+Carter and her colleague and to the native charges they rule and care
+for so admirably, and set out on our journey with an additional boy from
+the mission to help us through the heavy snow of the Koyukuk valley. For
+ten or twelve miles the way lay down the river, and the going was slow
+and toilsome from the first, although there had been some passage from
+Moses' Village to the mission, and there was, therefore, some trail. Our
+start had been late--it is next to impossible to get an early start from
+a mission; there is always some native who must have audience at the
+last moment--and after the long repose we were so soft that the heavy
+trail had wearied us, and we decided to "call it a day" when in five and
+a half hours we came to the road-house, the last occupied habitation
+between the Allakaket and Tanana. Soon after we reached the village
+there came trooping down from the mission a number of the inhabitants
+gone up for Christmas, who, after weeping upon our necks, so to speak,
+at our departure, had left us to break out that drifted trail for their
+convenient return. So will Indians treat a white man almost always, but
+I had thought myself an exception and was vexed to find that so they had
+treated me.
+
+The next morning we entered the uninhabited wilderness with three feet
+of new snow on the trail and no passage over it since it had fallen. Our
+first trouble was finding the trail at all. The previous fall the Alaska
+Road Commission had appropriated a sum of money to stake this trail from
+Tanana to the Koyukuk River, for it passes over wind-swept, treeless
+wastes, where many men had lost their way. Starting out from Tanana, the
+men employed had done their work well until within ten miles of the
+Koyukuk River. There it was found that the labour and cost already
+expended had exhausted the appropriation, whereupon the proceedings were
+immediately stopped; not another stake was driven, and the whole party
+returned to Tanana and mushed two hundred and fifty miles up the Yukon
+to spend another little appropriation upon another trail. That is the
+unbusinesslike system in which the money available for such work in
+Alaska has been handled.
+
+The first trail breaker goes ahead with a long stick, which he thrusts
+continually down through the snow. The slightly harder surface over
+which sleds and dogs have passed reveals itself by offering more
+resistance to the penetration of the stick, and that is the only way the
+trail can be found. Even with three feet of new snow upon it, it is well
+worth while finding, or otherwise there is no bottom at all and way must
+be made through all the snow of the winter. But all Alaskan trails are
+serpentine, and it is very difficult to put the new trail right on top
+of the old one. Back and forth the second trail breaker goes between his
+leader and the sled, and at intervals the first man comes back and forth
+also. And with it all is no path packed solid enough for the dogs to
+draw the heavy sled without great difficulty. We should have had a
+toboggan, but toboggans are little used on the Koyukuk, and we had only
+our sled. In five hours we made five miles and were worn out. We decided
+to pitch our tent and go ahead and break trail for the morrow's
+journey. On the lakes interspersed amongst the brush we had to break an
+entirely new trail, for we could find no trace of the old one.
+
+If five miles in five hours be poor going, what is four miles in seven
+and a half hours? That is all we made the next day despite the
+snow-shoeing of the previous evening. The heavy sled was continually
+getting off the trail, however wide we show-shoed it. The two of us
+ahead went over every step of the distance four or five times, and
+sometimes all of us had to go back and forth again and again before the
+sled could be brought along at all. It was from 5° to 10° above zero all
+day, and at intervals snow fell heavily. We got at last to the middle of
+a little lake and were confronted by open water, the result of some warm
+spring, one supposes. Here we must stop until a laborious journey was
+made to the bank, trees were cut and carried, and the open place bridged
+so that the sled might be passed over it. Then again our painful
+progress was resumed until, as it grew dark, we reached the bank of the
+Kornutna, or Old Man Creek, and here we pitched tent again, and I went
+forward upon the bed of the stream to break out a part of to-morrow's
+path. That night two more inches of snow fell.
+
+[Sidenote: DOG DRIVING]
+
+For four miles the trail lies along the surface of this creek, and then
+takes up a steep gully and over a divide. That four miles was all we
+made the next day, back and forth, back and forth, wearily tramping it
+to and fro, dogs and men alike exhausted with the toil. The hatefulness
+of dog mushing usually appears under such circumstances; the whip is
+constantly plied, the senseless objurgations rise shriller and fuller.
+Once the sled is started, it must by any means be kept going, that as
+great a distance as possible may be covered before it stops again. The
+poor brutes, sinking almost to their bellies despite the snow-shoeing,
+have no purchase for the exercise of their strength and continually
+flounder and wallow. Our whip was lost and I was glad of it, for even as
+considerate a boy as Arthur is apt to lose patience and temper when,
+having started the sled with much labour by gee pole and rope about his
+chest, it goes but a few feet and comes to a halt again, or slips from
+the track and turns over in the deep snow. But it is at such times, too,
+that one appreciates at his full value such a noble puller as our wheel
+dog Nanook. He spares himself not at all; the one absorbing occupation
+of every nerve and muscle of his body is pulling. His trace is always
+taut, or, if he lose footing for a moment and the trace slacken, he is
+up and at it again that the sled lose not its momentum if he can help
+it. When the lead line is pulled back that the sled may be started by
+the jerk of the dogs' sudden traction, Nanook lunges forward at the
+command, "Mush!" and strains at the collar, mouth open and panting,
+tongue dropping moisture, as keen and eager to keep that sled moving as
+is the driver himself. All day he labours and struggles, snatching a
+mouthful of snow now and then to cool his overheated body, and he drops
+in his tracks when the final halt is made, utterly weary, yet always
+with the brave heart in him to give his bark, his five-note
+characteristic bark of gladness, that the day's work is done at last.
+It is senseless brutality to whip such a dog, and most of our dogs were
+of that mettle, though Nanook was the strongest and most faithful of the
+bunch. One's heart goes out to them with gratitude and love--old
+"Lingo," "Nig," "Snowball," "Wolf," and "Doc"--as one realises what
+loyal, cheerful service they give.
+
+[Sidenote: VIOLENT FLUCTUATIONS]
+
+Arthur was so unwell with a violent cold and cough, that had been
+growing worse for a couple of days, that I decided on two things: to
+leave him in the tent while I snow-shoed ahead the next day, and to send
+back the boy I had brought from the mission to secure a fresh supply of
+food; for the back trail was, of course, comparatively easy. Arthur's
+condition threatened pneumonia, to my notion, and I believe he was saved
+from an attack of that disease which is so often fatal in this country
+by long rubbing all over the neck and the chest with a remedy that was
+new then--a menthol balm. I have used it again and again since and I am
+now never without it. A second application made in the morning, I
+started out, show-shoeing up the long hill and then down into the flat,
+and so to the mail-carrier's little hut that is reached under good
+conditions of trail the first day from Moses' Village, and then back
+again to the tent. That day a tendon in my right leg behind the knee
+became increasingly troublesome, and in climbing the hill on the return
+was acutely painful. I recognised it as "mal-de-raquet," well known in
+the Northwest, where the snow is commonly much deeper than in Alaska,
+and I found relief in the application of the same analgesic menthol balm
+that I was rejoiced to find had wrought a great improvement in Arthur's
+condition.
+
+Meanwhile the warm weather of the past three or four days was over and
+another period of violent fluctuations of temperature similar to that
+around Christmastide was upon us. We went to bed with the thermometer at
+10° below zero and were wakened by the cold at two in the morning to
+find it at 40° below, so we had to keep a fire going the rest of the
+night; for as soon as the fire in the stove goes out a tent becomes just
+as cold as outdoors.
+
+We moved forward the next morning, but the trail we had broken was too
+narrow and had to be widened, which meant one snow-shoe in the deep snow
+all the time, a very fatiguing process that brought into painful play
+again the tendon strained with five days' heavy snow-shoeing.
+
+The temperature was around 40° below all day, and our progress was so
+slow that it was not easy to keep warm, and the dogs whined at the
+innumerable stops. Yesterday it had been 10° below, the day before 10°
+above, and now, to-day, 40° below. It is hard to dress for such
+changeable weather, especially hard to dress the feet. My own wear, all
+the winter through, is a pair of smoke-tanned, moose-hide breeches,
+tanned on the Yukon but tailored outside. They are a perfect windbreak,
+yet allow ventilation, and they are very warm; but those who perspire
+much on exertion cannot wear them. The amount of covering upon the feet
+must be varied, in some measure at least, as the temperature changes.
+The Esquimau fur boot, with fur on the inside of the sole and on the
+outside of the upper, is my favourite footwear, with more or less of
+sock inside it as the weather requires; but such sudden changes as we
+were experiencing always find one or leave one with too much or too
+little footwear. By one-thirty we had struggled to the top of the hill,
+and it was very evident that the cabin was out of the question that day;
+so, since to pass down into the flat was to pass out of eligible camping
+timber, we pitched tent on the brow of the hill.
+
+The cold business of making camp was done, all dispositions for the
+night complete, supper for men and dogs was cooked and ours eating, when
+we heard a noise in the distance that set our dogs barking and presently
+came the boy I had sent back, accompanied by an Indian and a fresh team
+loaded with such a bountiful supply of food, much of it cooked, that one
+felt it was worth while to get into distress to receive such generous
+and prompt succour. The ladies at the mission had sat up and cooked all
+night and had despatched the fastest team in the village the next
+morning to bring their provisions to us and to help us along. They had
+thought us at Tanana when we were not yet at the end of the first day's
+stage from Moses' Village. It would have been impossible for us to reach
+Tanana on the dog food and man food we started with.
+
+[Sidenote: SIXTY-FIVE BELOW ZERO]
+
+It was so cold and we were so crowded that I arose at three and made a
+fire and sat over it the rest of the night, and after breakfast,
+although it was Sunday, morning prayer being said, I started ahead again
+to break out the trail deeper and wider, leaving the teams with the
+distributed loads to follow. The thermometer stood at 38° below zero
+when I left camp, but as I began the descent it was evident that it grew
+colder, and at the bottom of the hill I was sure it was 20° colder at
+least. Reaching the cabin, I kindled a fire and started back to meet the
+teams. About a mile from the cabin I saw them, for, since the load was
+distributed in the two sleds progress was much better; but by this time
+it had grown so cold that the dogs were almost entirely obscured from
+view by the clouds of steam that encompassed them. We hurried as best we
+might and reached the cabin about eleven, and as soon as we were arrived
+I took out the thermometer and let it lie long enough to get the
+temperature of the air, and it read 65° below zero. There had been no
+atmospheric change at all; it was simply the most marked instance I ever
+knew of the influence of altitude upon temperature. We had descended
+perhaps three hundred feet, and in that distance had found a difference
+of 27° in temperature.
+
+The cabin was a wretched shack without door or window and full of holes,
+and in no part of it could one stand upright. We set ourselves to make
+things as comfortable as possible, however, rigging up the canvas sled
+cover for an outer door and a blanket for an inner door, and stopping up
+the worst of the holes with sacking. Then we went out and cut fresh
+spruce boughs to lie upon, and prospected around quite a while before we
+found dry wood nearly a quarter of a mile away. It was quite a business
+cutting that wood and packing the heavy sticks on one's shoulders,
+through the brush and up and down the banks of the little creek where
+it grew, on snow-shoes, at 65° below zero.
+
+Our Sabbath day's journey done, the hut safely reached and furnished
+with fuel, we did not linger long after supper, but, evening prayer
+said, went to bed as the most comfortable place in the still cold cabin,
+thankful not to be in a tent in such severe weather.
+
+The next day gave us fresh temperature fluctuations. At nine A. M. it
+clouded and rose to 35° below, by noon it had cleared again and the
+thermometer fell to 55° below, and at nine P. M. it stood once more at
+65° below. The milder weather of the morning sent all hands out breaking
+trail, save myself, for with all our stuff in a cabin without a door it
+was not wise to leave it altogether--a dog might break a chain and work
+havoc--so I stayed behind in the little dark hovel, a candle burning all
+day, and read some fifty pages of Boswell's _Life of Samuel Johnson_
+over again. Some such little India-paper classic it is my habit to carry
+each winter. Last year I reread Pepys's _Diary_ and the year before much
+of the _Decline and Fall_. Certain places are for ever associated in my
+mind with the rereading of certain old books. The Chandalar River is to
+me as much the scene of _Lorna Doone_, which I read for the sixth or
+seventh time on my first journey along it, as Exmoor itself; and _The
+Cloister and the Hearth_, that noble historical romance, belongs in my
+literary geography to the Alatna-Kobuk portage. So will Boswell always
+bring back to me this trip across country from the Koyukuk to the Yukon
+through the deep snow.
+
+The boys came back after dark, having broken some nine miles of trail
+and having suffered a good deal from the cold. I had supper cooked, and
+when that was done and the dogs fed we fell to reading the Gospels and
+Epistles for the Epiphany season, the boys reading aloud by turns. The
+all-day fire had warmed the little hut thoroughly, and despite the cold
+outside we were snug and comfortable within.
+
+[Sidenote: SEVENTY BELOW ZERO]
+
+That night the thermometer touched 70° below zero, within 2° of the
+greatest cold I have recorded in seven years' winter travel; a greater
+cold, I believe, than any arctic expedition has ever recorded, for it is
+in a continental climate like Siberia or interior Alaska, and not in the
+marine climate around the North Pole, that the thermometer falls lowest.
+
+Save for an hour or two getting wood, we all lay close next day, for the
+temperature at noon was no higher than 64° below. It is impossible to
+break trail at such temperature, or to travel as slowly as we were
+travelling. In the strong cold one must travel fast if one travel at
+all. Indeed, it is distinctly dangerous to be outdoors. As soon as one
+leaves the hut the cold smites one in the face like a mailed fist. The
+expiration of the breath makes a crackling sound, due, one judges, to
+the sudden congealing of the moisture that is expelled. From every
+cranny of the cabin a stream of smoke-like vapour pours into the air,
+giving the appearance that the house is on fire within. However warmly
+hands and feet may be clad, one cannot stand still for a minute without
+feeling the heat steadily oozing out and the cold creeping in.
+
+Notwithstanding the weather, that evening the mail came along, the
+white man who is the carrier, two tall, strong natives, and nine dogs.
+Only since descending to the flat had they suffered from the cold, for
+they found as great a difference as we did in the temperature; and they
+were grateful to us for the trail we had broken. The hut was
+uncomfortably crowded that night with seven people in it, but the
+thermometer stood at -56° and was rising, and gave us hope that we might
+move along to-morrow. Augmented as our party was into seven men, three
+sleds, and nineteen or twenty dogs, trail breaking would not be so
+arduous and progress would be much accelerated. There was good hope,
+moreover, that the heavy snow was confined to the Koyukuk valley and
+that when we passed out of it we should find better going.
+
+The morning found a temperature of 45° below, and we sallied forth,
+quite an expedition. Four, including myself, went ahead beating down the
+trail; one was at each gee pole, our team last, getting advantage of
+everything preceding. So far as the trail had been broken we made good
+time, covering the nine miles in about four hours. Another hour of
+somewhat slower progress took us to the top of a hill, and here the
+mail-carrier's two Indians had run ahead and built a great, roaring fire
+and arranged a wide, commodious couch of spruce boughs, and we cooked
+our lunch and took our ease for half an hour. The sky had clouded again
+and the temperature had risen to 28° below.
+
+[Sidenote: CLOSE QUARTERS]
+
+It is strange how some scenes of the trail linger in the memory, while
+others are completely forgotten. This noon halt I always remember as
+one of the pleasantest of all my journeyings. There was not a breath of
+wind, and the smoke rose straight into the air instead of volleying and
+eddying into one's face as camp-fires so often do on whichever side of
+them one sits. We were all weary with our five hours' trudge, and the
+rest was grateful; hungry, and the boiled ham they had sent from the
+mission was delicious. The warmth of the great fire and the cosiness of
+the thick, deep spruce boughs gave solid comfort, and the pipe after the
+meal was a luxurious enjoyment.
+
+From that on the going was heavier and our progress slower, but we kept
+at it till dark, and still far into the night, fortunate in having two
+Indians who knew every step of the way, until at last we reached the hut
+that marks the end of the second stage from the Koyukuk River, on the
+top of a birch hill. We had made nineteen and a half miles that day and
+had taken eleven hours to do it.
+
+If the noon rest be remembered as one of the pleasantest episodes of the
+trail, that night in the cabin on the hill I recall as one of the most
+miserable in my life. The hut was still smaller than the previous one,
+like it without door and window, and so low that one was bent double all
+the time. Walls and roof alike were covered with a thick coating of
+frost. The only wood discoverable in the dark was half-dry birch which
+would not burn in the stove but sent out volumes of smoke that blinded
+us. When the hut did begin to get a little warm, moisture from the roof
+dropped on everything. There we seven men huddled together, chilly and
+damp, choked and weary--a wretched band. There was no room for the
+necessary cooking operations; we had to cook and eat in relays; and how
+we slept, in what way seven men managed to pack themselves and stretch
+themselves in those narrow quarters, I cannot tell. However, we said our
+prayers and went to bed, snow falling heavily. The Indians were soon
+snoring, but sleep would not come to me, tired as I was, and I had not
+slept at all the previous night. So presently I took trional, X grs.,
+and dozed off till morning.
+
+Then we resolved to divide forces rather than subject ourselves to the
+miserable inconvenience of overcrowding these tiny huts, and at this
+stage of the journey it was possible to do so without losing a whole
+day, for there was a cabin for the noon rest. It was arranged that the
+mail-man should start first and make the full day's run if possible,
+while we should "call it a day" at the half-way hut.
+
+So Bob and his Indians sallied forth while yet my boys were reading
+their lessons to me, and when they were done we hitched up and followed.
+And as soon as we were down the hill and started along the bald flat, it
+was evident that we were out of the deep snowfall, for the present at
+any rate, and we plucked up spirit, for we were now to cross the wide,
+open, wind-swept uplands of the headwaters of the Melozitna and Tozitna,
+tributaries of the Yukon--the "Tozi" and "Melozi," as the white men call
+them--where snow never lies deep or long. We were out of the Koyukuk
+watershed now and in country drained by direct tributaries of the
+Yukon. The going was now incomparably the best we had had since we left
+the mission, the snow was light and we had the mail-carrier's trail;
+but, although the temperature had risen to 21° below, a keen wind put
+our parkee hoods up and our scarfs around our faces and made our 60°
+below clothing none too warm. In three hours we had reached the Melozi
+cabin, although that had included the climbing of a long, steep hill,
+and here we stayed for the rest of the day and night and shot some
+ptarmigan for supper, though we could easily have gone on and made the
+rest of the run.
+
+The next day I sent the auxiliary sled and team and driver back to the
+Allakaket, keeping the mission boy with me, however, to return with the
+mail-carrier, who was already late and must go back as soon as he
+reached Tanana. I parted with the Indian regretfully, for he had been
+most helpful and always good-natured and cheerful, and had really begun
+to learn a little at our travelling night-school.
+
+[Sidenote: THE STAKED TRAIL]
+
+[Sidenote: THE ARCTIC SKIES]
+
+A high wind was blowing, with the thermometer at 12° below, and the
+mail-man's trail was already drifted over and quite indistinguishable in
+the dark, and we began to appreciate the recent staking of this trail by
+the Road Commission. But for these stakes, set double, a hundred yards
+apart, so that they formed a lane, it would have been difficult if not
+impossible for us to travel on a day like this, for here was a stretch
+of sixteen or seventeen miles with never a tree and hardly the smallest
+bush. The wind blew stronger and stronger directly in our faces as we
+rose out of the Melozitna basin on the hill that is its watershed, and
+when the summit was reached and we turned and looked back there was
+nothing visible but a white, wind-swept waste. But ahead all the snow
+was most beautifully and delicately tinted from the reflection of the
+dawn on ragged shredded clouds that streamed across the southeastern
+sky. Where the sky was free of cloud it gave a wonderful clear green
+that was almost but not quite the colour of malachite. It was exactly
+the colour of the water the propeller of a steamship churns up where the
+Atlantic Ocean shallows to the rocky shore of the north coast of
+Ireland. The clouds themselves caught a deep dull red from the sunrise,
+which the snow gave back in blush pink. Such an exquisite colour harmony
+did the scene compose that the wind, lulling for a moment on the crest
+of the hill, seemed charmed into peace by it.
+
+The feast of colour brought a train of colour memories, one hard upon
+the heels of another, as we went down the hill; the Catbells, this
+golden with bracken, that purple with heather, and each doubled in the
+depths of Derwentwater; an October morning in the hardwood forests of
+the mountains of Tennessee, when for half an hour every gorgeous tint of
+red and yellow was lavishly flaunted--and then the whole pride and
+splendour of it wiped out at once by a wind that sprang up; the
+encircling and towering reds and pinks of a gigantic amphitheatre of
+rock in the Dolomites; a patch of flowers right against the snow in the
+high Rockies, so intensely blue that it seemed the whole vault of heaven
+could be tinctured with the pigment that one petal would distil. And,
+more inspiring than them all, there came the recollection of that
+wonderful sunrise and those blazing mountains of the Alatna-Kobuk
+portage. Every land has its glories, and the sky is everywhere a blank
+canvas for the display of splendid colour, but the tints of the arctic
+sky are of an infinite purity of individual tone that no other sky can
+show.
+
+As we descended the hill into the Tozitna basin the wind rose again, now
+charged with heavy, driving snow, while in the valley the underfoot snow
+grew deep, so that it was drawing to dusk when we reached the cabin on a
+fork of the Tozitna where Bob the mail-man had spent the previous night,
+and there we stayed.
+
+The next day is worthy of record for the sharp contrast it affords. All
+the night it had snowed heavily, and it snowed all the morning and into
+the afternoon. Some sixteen or seventeen inches of snow had fallen since
+Bob and his party passed, and again we had no trail at all.
+Moreover--strange plaint in January in Alaska!--the weather grew so warm
+that the snow continually balled up under the snow-shoes and clung to
+the sled and the dogs. At noon the thermometer stood at 17° above
+zero--and it was but four days ago that we recorded 70° below! It will
+be readily understood how such wide and sudden ranges of temperature add
+to the inconvenience and discomfort of mushing. Parkees, sweaters,
+shirts are shed one after the other, the fur cap becomes a nuisance, the
+mittens a burden, and still ploughing through the snow he is bathed in
+sweat who had forgotten what sweating felt like. The poor dogs suffer
+the most, for they have nothing they can shed and they can perspire only
+through the mouth. Their tongues drop water almost in a stream, they
+labour for their breath, and their eyes have a look that comes only with
+soft weather and a heavy trail. So constantly do they grab mouthfuls of
+snow that the operation becomes quite a check on our progress.
+
+By two o'clock it was growing dusk, and we had but reached the bank of
+the other fork of the Tozitna, not more than eight or nine miles from
+the cabin where we spent the night and yet thirteen or fourteen miles
+from the cabin we had hoped to reach. Beyond the banks of the stream was
+no more timber for a long distance; was such another stretch of open
+country as we had passed the previous day. So here was another
+disappointment, for camp must be made now lest there be no chance to
+make camp at all. But it was a good and comfortable camp, amidst the
+large spruce of the watercourse. Such disappointments are part of life
+on the trail; and supper done there was the more time for the boys.
+
+The open country was again wind-swept, and being wind-swept the snow was
+somewhat hardened, and we fought our way against a gale, covering the
+twelve and three quarter miles in ten hours, Sunday though it was. At
+that last stage on the road to Tanana came out a young man from the
+mission with a dog team and an Indian, anxious at our long delay, and
+Harry Strangman's name is written here with grateful recognition of this
+kindness and many others. We went joyfully into town on the morrow, the
+17th of January, having taken fifteen days to make a journey that is
+normally made in five.
+
+[Sidenote: THE MAIL-CARRIER]
+
+Half-way on that last day's mush we met the mail-man returning to the
+Koyukuk. So much had he been delayed that there was danger of a fine and
+all sorts of trouble, and the mail had been sent out to meet him at the
+noon cabin, together with a supply of grub for the return trip. But the
+caterer, whoever he was, forgot candles, and the mail-man would have had
+to make his way back to the Koyukuk without any means of artificial
+light, in the shortest days of the year, had we not been able to supply
+him with half a dozen candles that remained to us. It was a
+disappointment to George, the boy I had brought from the mission, that
+he must turn round and go back also. He had never "seen Tanana," which
+is quite a metropolis to him, and had looked forward to it keenly all
+the journey, but the boy braced up and took his disappointment manfully.
+A pitiful procession it was that passed us by and took our boy away; the
+poor, wearied dogs that had certainly earned the few days' rest they
+were so badly in need of left a trail of blood behind them that was
+sickening to see. Almost every one of them had sore, frozen feet; many
+of them were lame; and when we came to descend the long hill they had
+just climbed, right at its brow, where the stiffest pull had been, was a
+claw from a dog's foot frozen into bloody snow.
+
+So far as there is anything heroic about the Alaskan trail, the
+mail-carriers are the real heroes. They must start out in all weathers,
+at all temperatures; they have a certain specified time in which to make
+their trips and they must keep within that time or there is trouble. The
+bordering country of the Canadian Yukon has a more humane government
+than ours. There neither mail-carrier nor any one else, save in some
+life-or-death emergency, with licence from the Northwest Mounted Police,
+may take out horse or dogs to start a journey when the temperature is
+lower than 45° below zero; but I have seen a reluctant mail-carrier
+chased out at 60° below zero, on pain of losing his job, on the American
+side. Moreover, between the seasons, when travel on the rivers is
+positively dangerous to life, the mail must still be despatched and
+received, although so great is the known risk to the mail, as well as to
+the carrier, that no one will send any letter that he cares at all about
+reaching its destination until the trails are established or the
+steamboats run. But the virtually empty pouches must be transported from
+office to office through the running, or over the rotting ice, just the
+same, on pain of the high displeasure and penalty of a department
+without brains and without bowels. I have often wished since I came to
+Alaska that I could be postmaster-general for one week, and so I suppose
+has almost every other resident of the country.
+
+The week following my arrival at Tanana was a solid week of cold
+weather, the thermometer ranging around 50° and 60° below zero, and that
+means keeping pretty close to the house. Even the sentries at the army
+post are withdrawn and the protection of the garrison is confided to a
+man who watches the grounds from a glass-walled cupola above the
+headquarters building. Yet a week of confinement and inaction grows
+tiresome after life in the open.
+
+Sunday is always a busy day here. The mission and native village are
+three miles away from the town, and service must be held at both. The
+mission at Tanana is not a happy place to visit for one who has the
+welfare of the natives at heart. Despite faithful and devoted effort to
+check it, the demoralisation goes on apace and the outlook is dark.
+
+[Sidenote: SINGLE MEN IN BARRACKS]
+
+"Single men in barracks don't grow into plaster saints," we are told;
+sometimes they seem to grow into drunken, lustful devils without
+compassion for childhood, not to mention any feeling of magnanimity
+towards a feebler race. And when a girl who has been rough-handled, or
+who has been given drink until she is unable to resist the multiple
+outrage practised upon her, is told to pick out the malefactors from a
+company of soldiers, all clean-shaven, all dressed alike, all around the
+same age, she generally fails to identify altogether. So the offence
+goes unwhipped, and the officer is likely as not to address a reprimand
+to the complaining missionary for "preferring charges you are unable to
+substantiate." Yet an officer who had himself written such a letter told
+me once that all Indians looked alike to him. Even should the girl
+identify one or more men, they have usually half a dozen comrades ready
+to swear an alibi.
+
+Add to the trouble given by the soldiers the constant operation of the
+slinking bootleggers of the town, a score or more of whom are known to
+make money by this liquor peddling, and some of whom do nothing else for
+a living, yet whom it is next to impossible to convict, owing to the
+cumbrous machinery of the law and the attitude of juries, and it will be
+seen that the hands of those who are fighting for the native race are
+tied.
+
+What has been said about the military does not by any means apply to
+all, either officers or men. Some of the officers have been decent,
+God-fearing men, conscious of the evil and zealous to suppress it; some
+of the men, indeed in all probability most of the men, quite free from
+such offence; some commanding officers have kept such a well-disciplined
+post that offences of all kinds have been greatly reduced. But the
+commanding officer is changed every year, and the whole force is changed
+every two years, so that there is no continuity of policy at the post,
+and an administration that has grown familiar with conditions and that
+stands so far as it can for clean living and sobriety and decency and
+the protection of the native people, may be followed by one that is
+loftily ignorant of the situation, careless about offences against
+morality, and impatient of any complaint.
+
+Off by himself, separate from the demoralising influence of the low-down
+white, there is every hope and encouragement in the effort to elevate
+and educate the Indian; set down cheek by jowl with the riffraff of
+towns and barracks, his fate seems sealed.
+
+[Sidenote: DEATH-RATE AND BIRTH-RATE]
+
+Let these two mission stations, the Allakaket and Tanana, one hundred
+and fifty miles or so apart by the winter trail, represent the two
+conditions. In six years' time there has been manifest advance at the
+one and decay at the other. The birth-rate is greatly in excess of the
+death-rate at the Allakaket, the death-rate greatly in excess of the
+birth-rate at Tanana. In the year in which this journey was made there
+were thirty-four deaths and fourteen births at Tanana, and while the
+difference was an unusually large one, yet in the six years referred to
+there has not been one year in which the number of births exceeded the
+number of deaths. One does not have to be a prophet to foresee the
+inevitable result, if the process be not stopped.
+
+A tribute should be paid to the zeal, now of one, now of another army
+surgeon at Fort Gibbon in tending the native sick, three miles away,
+when we have been unable to procure a physician of our own for the
+place. The missionary nurse, for five years last past Miss Florence
+Langdon, has been greatly helped in her almost desperate efforts here by
+the willing co-operation of these medical officers of the army.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[B] See illustration, p. 374.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+UP THE YUKON TO RAMPART AND ACROSS COUNTRY TO THE TANANA--ALASKAN
+AGRICULTURE--THE GOOD DOG NANOOK--MISS FARTHING'S BOYS AT NENANA--CHENA
+AND FAIRBANKS
+
+
+OUR course from Tanana did not lie directly up the Tanana River, but up
+the Yukon to Rampart and then across country to the Hot Springs on the
+Tanana River. The seventy-five miles up the Yukon was through the Lower
+Ramparts, one of the most picturesque portions of this great river. The
+stream is confined in one deep channel by lofty mountains on both banks,
+and the scenery at times is very bold and wild. But its topography makes
+it the natural wind course of the country--a down-river wind in winter,
+an up-river wind in summer blows almost continually. It was no colder
+than 5° below zero when we started on the trip, but the wind made the
+travelling unpleasant. The second day it had increased to a gale, and
+every mile we travelled it grew stronger. We travelled three hours, and
+the last hour we made scarcely a mile. So thickly charged with flying
+snow was the wind and so dead ahead that despite parkee hoods it blinded
+us, and the dogs could hardly be forced to keep their heads towards it.
+Their faces were so coated with crusted snow that they looked curiously
+like the face of harlequin in the pantomime. It did become literally
+intolerable, and when Arthur said that he knew there was a cabin right
+across the river, we made our way thither and shortly found it and lay
+there the rest of the day, the gale blowing incessantly. This was
+disappointing, because it meant that I could not reach Rampart for the
+Sunday I had appointed.
+
+Next day the wind had ceased and the thermometer went down to 30° below
+zero. In places the ice was blown clear of snow; in other places it was
+heavily drifted. By midday we had reached the lonely telegraph station
+at "The Rapids," and were very kindly received by the signal-corps men
+in charge. They gave us to eat and to drink and would take no money.
+There is little travel on this part of the river nowadays, and the
+telegraph men are glad to see any one who may chance to pass by. We
+pushed on heavily again, and had to stop and cut a gee pole presently,
+for it was hard to handle the sled without it; but the gee pole always
+means laborious travel. The cold was welcome; it meant no wind; and we
+were glad to see the thermometer drop lower than 50° below zero that
+night at the old mail cabin. The mail goes no longer on the Yukon River
+from Fort Yukon to Tanana, and, barring this point, Rampart, towards
+which we were travelling, which is supplied across country from the Hot
+Springs, over the route we should traverse, no spot on that three
+hundred and fifty miles of river receives any mail at all. The
+population is small and scattered, it is true; on the same grounds
+Alaska might be denied any mail at all. There has been much resentment
+at this abandonment of the Yukon River by the post-office and several
+petitions for its restoration, but it has not been restored.
+
+[Sidenote: THE WIND-SWEPT YUKON]
+
+We travelled all the next day at 50° below zero, and it was one of the
+pleasantest days of the winter. There was not a breath of wind, the
+going steadily improved, and, best of all, for three hours we were
+travelling in the sunshine for the first time this winter. Only those
+who have been deprived of the sun can really understand how joyful and
+grateful his return is. There was no heat in his rays, this last day of
+January; the thermometer stood at 49° below at noon, and had risen but
+5° since our start in the morning; but the mere sight of him glowing in
+the south, where a great bend of the river gave him to us through a gap
+in the mountains, was cheerful and invigorating after two months in
+which we had seen no more than his gilding of the high snows. The sun
+gives life to the dead landscape, colour to the oppressive monotony of
+white and black, and man's heart leaps to the change as jubilantly as
+does the face of nature.
+
+[Sidenote: RAMPART AND ITS SALOON]
+
+Rampart City differs from Circle City, the other decayed mining town of
+the Yukon River, only in that the process is further advanced. Year by
+year there are a few less men on the creeks behind it, a few less
+residents in the town itself. Its long, straggling water-front consists
+in the main of empty buildings, the windows boarded up, the snow drifted
+high about the doors. One store now serves all ends of trade, one liquor
+shop serves all the desire for drink of the whites, and slops over
+through the agency of two or three dissolute squaw men and half-breeds
+to the natives up and down the river.[C]
+
+Rampart had one fat year, 1898, when many hundreds of gold seekers,
+approaching the Klondike by Saint Michael and the lower Yukon were
+attracted and halted by the gold discoveries on Big and Little Minook,
+and spent the winter here. The next spring news was brought of the rich
+discoveries on Anvil Creek, behind Cape Nome, and an exodus began which
+grew into a veritable stampede in 1900, when the gold discoveries in the
+beach itself were made. Rampart's large population faded away as surely
+and as quickly to Nome as Circle City's population did to the Klondike.
+The Indians are almost all gone from their village a mile above the
+town; they dwindled away with the dwindling prosperity, some to Tanana,
+some to other points down the river; and what used to be the worst small
+native community in the interior of Alaska has almost ceased to exist.
+Most of the little band of white folks still remaining were gathered
+together at night, and appreciated, I thought, their semiannual
+opportunity for Divine service.
+
+[Sidenote: "DEVELOPED"]
+
+There is no resisting the melancholy that hangs over a place like this.
+As one treads the crazy, treacherous board sidewalks, full of holes and
+rotten planks, now rising a step or two, now falling, and reads the
+dimmed and dirty signs that once flaunted their gold and colours,
+"Golden North," "Pioneer," "Reception," "The Senate" (why should every
+town in Alaska have a "Senate" saloon and not one a "House of
+Representatives"?), one conjures up the scenes of rude revelry these
+drinking places witnessed a few years ago. How high the hopes of sudden
+riches burned in the breasts of the men who went in and out of them,
+doomed to utter disappointment in the vast majority! What a rapscallion
+crew, male and female, followed this great mob of gold seekers, and grew
+richer as their victims grew poorer! What earned and borrowed and saved
+and begged and stolen moneys were frittered away and flung away that
+winter; what health and character were undermined! How the ribaldry and
+valiant, stupid blasphemy rang out in these tumbling-down shanties! Go
+out on the creeks and see the hills denuded of their timber, the
+stream-beds punched with innumerable holes, filled up or filling up, the
+cabins and sluice-boxes rotting into the moss, here and there a broken
+pick and shovel, here and there a rusting boiler, and take notice that
+this region has been "developed."
+
+When the debit and credit sides of the ledger are balanced, what remains
+to Alaska of all these thousands of men, of all the many hundreds of
+thousands of dollars they brought with them? Those creeks, stripped,
+gutted, and deserted; this town, waiting for a kindly fire with a
+favouring breeze to wipe out its useless emptiness; a few half-breed
+children at mission schools; a hardy native tribe, sophisticated,
+diseased, demoralised, and largely dead--that seems the net result.
+
+The portage trail from Rampart to the Tanana River goes up Minook Creek
+and follows the valley to its head, then crosses a summit and passes
+down through several small mining settlements to the Hot Springs. The
+trail saves traversing two sides of the triangle which it makes with the
+two rivers.
+
+The dogs' feet and legs had suffered so much from the deep snow and the
+heavy labour of the journey out of the Koyukuk and the rough ice of the
+Yukon that I was compelled to have not merely moccasins but moose-hide
+leggings made here, coming right up to the belly and tying over the
+back. All the hair was worn away from the back of the legs and the skin
+was in many places raw.
+
+We had thought to cover the twenty-five or thirty miles up the valley
+and over the summit to a road-house just beyond its foot, but rough
+drifted trails and a high wind held us back until it was dark before the
+ascent was reached, and we pitched our tent and reserved the climb for
+the morrow.
+
+It was a hard grind owing to the drifted snow and the wind that still
+disputed our passage, but the view from the summit, nearly eighteen
+hundred feet above last night's camp, was compensation enough, for it
+gave us the great mountain, Denali, or, as the map makers and some
+white men call it, Mount McKinley. Perhaps an hundred and fifty miles
+away, as the crow flies, it rose up and filled all the angle of vision
+to the southwest. It is not a peak, it is a region, a great soaring of
+the earth's crust, rising twenty thousand feet high; so enormous in its
+mass, in its snow-fields and glaciers, its buttresses, its flanking
+spurs, its far-flung terraces of foot-hills and approaches, that it
+completely dominates the view whenever it is seen at all. I have heard
+people say they thought they had seen Denali, as I have heard travellers
+say they thought they had seen Mount Everest from Darjiling; but no one
+ever thought he saw Denali if he saw it at all. There is no possible
+question about it, once the mountain has risen before the eyes; and
+although Mount Everest is but the highest of a number of great peaks,
+while Denali stands alone in unapproached predominance, yet I think the
+man who has really looked upon the loftiest mountain in the world could
+have no doubt about it ever after.
+
+How my heart burns within me whenever I get view of this great monarch
+of the North! There it stood, revealed from base to summit in all its
+stupendous size, all its glistening majesty. I would far rather climb
+that mountain than own the richest gold-mine in Alaska. Yet how its
+apparent nearness mocks one; what time and cost and labour are involved
+even in approaching its base with food and equipment for an attempt to
+reach its summit! How many schemes I have pondered and dreamed these
+seven years past for climbing it! Some day time and opportunity and
+resource may serve, please God, and I may have that one of my heart's
+desires; if not, still it is good to have seen it from many different
+coigns of vantage, from this side and from that; to have felt the awe of
+its vast swelling bulk, the superb dignity of its firm-seated,
+broad-based uplift to the skies with a whole continent for a pedestal;
+to have gazed eagerly and longingly at its serene, untrodden summit, far
+above the eagle's flight, above even the most daring airman's venture,
+and to have desired and hoped to reach it; to desire and hope to reach
+it still.[D]
+
+Plunging down the steep descent we went for four miles, and then after a
+hearty dinner at the road-house, essayed to make twenty-one miles more
+to the Hot Springs. But night fell again with a number of miles yet to
+come, the recent storm had furrowed the trail diagonally with hard
+windrows of snow that overturned the sled repeatedly and formed an
+hindrance that grew greater and greater, and again we made camp in the
+dark, short of our expected goal.
+
+Of late I had been carrying an hip ring, a rubber ring inflated by the
+breath that is the best substitute for a mattress. The ring had been
+left behind at Rampart, and so dependent does one grow on the little
+luxuries and ameliorations one permits oneself that these two nights in
+camp were almost sleepless for lack of it.
+
+[Sidenote: THE HOT SPRINGS]
+
+Three hours more brought us to the spacious hotel, with its forty empty
+rooms, that had been put up, out of all sense or keeping, in a wild,
+plunging attempt to "exploit" the Hot Springs and make a great "health
+resort" of the place. The hot water had been piped a quarter of a mile
+or so to spacious swimming-baths in the hotel; all sorts of expense had
+been lavished on the place; but it had been a failure from the first,
+and has since been closed and has fallen into dilapidation. The bottoms
+have dropped out of the cement baths, the paper hangs drooping from the
+damp walls, the unsubstantial foundations have yielded until the floors
+are heaved like the waves of the sea.[E] But at this time the hotel was
+still maintained and we stayed there, and its wide entrance-hall and
+lobby formed an excellent place to gather the inhabitants of the little
+town for Divine service--again the only opportunity in the year.
+
+What a curious phenomenon thermal springs constitute in these parts!
+Here is a series of patches of ground, free from snow, while all the
+country has been covered two or three feet deep these four months; green
+with vegetation, while all living things elsewhere are wrapped in winter
+sleep. Here is open, rushing water, throwing up clouds of steam that
+settles upon everything as dense hoar frost, while all other water is
+held in the adamantine fetters of the ice. Where does that constant
+unfailing stream of water at 110° Fahrenheit come from? Where does it
+get its heat? I know of half a dozen such thermal springs in
+Alaska,--one far away above the Arctic Circle between the upper courses
+of the Kobuk and the Noatak Rivers, that I have heard strange tales
+about from the Esquimaux and that I have always wanted to visit.
+
+Whenever I see this gush of hot water in the very midst of the ice and
+the snow, I am reminded of my surprise on the top of Mount Tacoma. We
+had climbed some eight thousand feet of snow and were shivering in a
+bitter wind on the summit, yet when the hand was thrust in a cleft of
+the rock it had to be withdrawn by reason of the heat. One knows about
+the internal fire of some portion of the earth's mass, of course, but
+such striking manifestations of it, such bold irruption of heat in the
+midst of the kingdom of the cold, must always bring a certain
+astonishment except to those who take everything as a matter of course.
+
+It is evident that this hot water, capable of distribution over a
+considerable area of land, makes an exceedingly favourable condition for
+subarctic agriculture, and a great deal of ground has been put under
+cultivation with large yield of potatoes and cabbage and other
+vegetables. But the limitations of Alaskan conditions have shorn all
+profit from the enterprise. There is no considerable market nearer than
+Fairbanks, almost two hundred miles away by the river. If the potatoes
+are allowed to remain in the ground until they are mature, there is the
+greatest danger of the whole crop freezing while on the way to market,
+and in any case the truck-farmers around Fairbanks find that their
+proximity to the consumer more than offsets the advantage of the Hot
+Springs.
+
+[Sidenote: ARCTIC AGRICULTURE]
+
+When the great initial difficulties of farming in Alaska are overcome,
+when the moss is removed and the ground, frozen solidly to bedrock, is
+broken and thawed, when its natural acidity is counteracted by the
+application of some alkali, and its reeking surface moisture is drained
+away; when after three or four years' cultivation it begins to make some
+adequate return of roots and greens, there remains the constant
+difficulty of a market. Around the mining settlements and during the
+uncertain life of the mining settlements, truck-farming pays very well,
+but it could easily be overdone so that prices would fall below the
+point of any profit at all. Transportation is expensive, and rates for a
+short haul on the rivers are high, out of all proportion to rates for
+the long haul from the outside, so that potatoes from the Pacific coast
+are brought in and sold in competition with the native-grown. And
+despite the protestations of the agricultural experimental stations, the
+outside or "chechaco" potato has the advantage of far better quality
+than that grown in Alaska. Tastes differ, and a man may speak only as he
+finds. For my part, I have eaten native potatoes raised in almost every
+section of interior Alaska, and have been glad to get them, but I have
+never eaten a native potato that compared favourably with any good
+"outside" potato. The native potato is commonly wet and waxy; I have
+never seen a native potato that would burst into a glistening mass of
+white flour, or that had the flavour of a really good potato.
+
+There has been much misconception about the interior of Alaska that
+obtains yet in some quarters, although there is no excuse for it now.
+Not only the interior of Alaska, but all land at or near sea-level in
+the arctic regions that is not under glacial ice-caps, is snow free and
+surface-thawed in the summer and has a luxuriant vegetation. The polar
+ox (Sverdrup's protest against the term "musk-ox" should surely prevail)
+ranges in great bands north of the 80th parallel and must secure
+abundant food; and when Peary determined the insularity of Greenland he
+found its most northerly point a mass of verdure and flowers.
+
+No doubt potatoes and turnips, lettuce and cabbage, could be raised
+anywhere in those regions; the intensity of the season compensates for
+its shortness; the sun is in the heavens twenty-four hours in the day,
+and all living things sprout and grow with amazing rankness and celerity
+under the strong compulsion of his continuous rays. Spring comes
+literally with a shout and a rush here in Alaska, and must cry even
+louder and stride even faster in the "ultimate climes of the pole." If
+the possibility of raising garden-truck and tubers constitutes a
+"farming country," then all the arctic regions not actually under
+glacial ice may be so classed.
+
+Any one who visits the Koyukuk may see monster turnips and cabbages
+raised at Coldfoot, near the 68th parallel; from Sir William Parry's
+description we may feel quite sure that vegetables of size and
+excellence might be raised at the head of Bushnan's Cove of Melville
+Island, on the 75th parallel; he called it "an arctic paradise"; Greely
+reported "grass twenty-four inches high and many butterflies" in the
+interior of Grinnell Land under the 82d parallel; and if gold were ever
+discovered on the north coast of Greenland one might quite expect to
+hear that some enterprising Swede was growing turnips and cabbages at
+Cape Morris Jessup above the 83d parallel, and getting a dollar a pound
+for them.
+
+In favourable seasons and in favourable spots of interior Alaska certain
+early varieties of Siberian oats and rye have been matured, and it
+stands to the credit of the Experiment Station at Rampart that a little
+wheat was once ripened there, though it took thirteen months from the
+sowing to the ripening. When the rest of the world fills up so that
+economic pressure demands the utilisation of all earth that will produce
+any sort of food, it may be that large tracts in Alaska will be put
+under the plough; but it is hard to believe that nine tenths of all this
+vast country will ever be other than wild waste land. At present the
+farming population is strictly an appendage of the mining population,
+and the mining population rather diminishes than increases.
+
+Your health resort that no one will resort to is a dull place at best
+and a poor dependence for merchandising, so that the little town of Hot
+Springs is fortunate in having some mining country around it to fall
+back upon for its trade. We lay an extra day there, waiting for the
+stage from Fairbanks to break trail for us through the heavy, drifted
+snow, having had enough of trail breaking for a while. At midnight the
+stage came, two days late, and its coming caused me as keen a sorrow and
+as great a loss as I have had since I came to Alaska.
+
+[Sidenote: NANOOK'S DEATH]
+
+We knew naught of it until the next morning, when, breakfast done and
+the sled lashed, we were ready to hitch the dogs and depart. They had
+been put in the horse stable for there was no dog house; the health
+resorter, actual or prospective, is not likely to be a dog man one
+supposes; but they were loose in the morning and came to the call, all
+but one--Nanook. Him we sought high and low, and at last Arthur found
+him, but in what pitiful case! He dragged himself slowly and painfully
+along, his poor bowels hanging down in the outer hide of his belly,
+fearfully injured internally, done for and killed already. It was not
+difficult to account for it. When the horses came in at midnight, one of
+them had kicked the dog and ruptured his whole abdomen.
+
+There was no use in inquiring whose fault it was. The dogs should have
+been chained; so much was our fault. But it was hard to resist some
+bitter recollection that before this "exploitation" of the springs, when
+there was a modest road-house instead of a mammoth hotel, there had been
+kennels for dogs instead of nothing but stables for horses.
+
+I doubt if all the veterinary surgeons in the world could have saved the
+dog, but there was none to try; and there was only one thing to do, hate
+it as we might. Arthur and I were grateful that neither of us had to do
+it, for the driver of the mail stage, who had some compunctions of
+conscience, I think, volunteered to save us the painful duty. "I know
+how you feel," he said slowly and kindly; "I've got a dog I think a heap
+of myself, but that dog ain't nothin' to me an' I'll do it for you."
+
+Nanook knew perfectly well that it was all over with him. Head and tail
+down, the picture of resigned dejection, he stood like a petrified dog.
+And when I put my face down to his and said "Good-bye," he licked me for
+the first time in his life. In the six years I had owned him and driven
+him I had never felt his tongue before, though I had always loved him
+best of the bunch. He was not the licking kind.
+
+We hitched up our diminished team and pulled out, for we had thirty
+miles to make in the short daylight and we had lost time already; and as
+we crossed the bridge over the steaming slough we saw the man going
+slowly down to the river with the dog, the chain in one hand, a gun in
+the other. My eyes filled with tears; I could not look at Arthur nor he
+at me as I passed forward to run ahead of the team, and I was glad when
+I realised that we had drawn out of ear-shot.
+
+All day as I trudged or trotted now on snow-shoes and now off, as the
+trail varied in badness, that dog was in my mind and his loss upon my
+heart, the feel of his tongue upon my cheek. It takes the close
+companionship between a man and his dogs in this country, travelling all
+the winter long, winter after winter, through the bitter cold and the
+storm and darkness, through the long, pleasant days of the warm sunshine
+of approaching spring, sharing labour and sharing ease, sharing
+privation and sharing plenty; it takes this close companionship to make
+a man appreciate a dog. As I reckoned it up, Nanook had fallen just
+short of pulling my sled ten thousand miles. If he had finished this
+season with me he would have done fully that, and I had intended to
+pension him after this winter, to provide that so long as he lived he
+should have his fish and rice every day. Some doubt I had had of old
+Lingo lasting through the winter, but none of Nanook, and they were the
+only survivors of my original team.
+
+[Sidenote: THE TALKING DOG]
+
+Nanook was in as good spirits as ever I knew him that last night, coming
+to me and plumping his huge fore paws down on my moccasins, challenging
+me to play the game of toe treading that he loved; and whenever he beat
+me at it he would seize my ankle in his jaws and make me hop around on
+one foot, to his great delight. He was my talking dog. He had more
+different tones in his bark than any other dog I ever knew. He never
+came to the collar in the morning, he never was released from it at
+night, without a cheery "bow-wow-wow." And we never stopped finally to
+make camp but he lifted up his voice. There was something curious about
+that. Only two nights before, when we had been unable to reach the
+health resort owing to wind-hardened drifts right across the trail that
+overturned the heavy sled again and again, swing the gee pole as one
+would, and had stopped several times in the growing dusk to inspect a
+spot that seemed to promise a camping place, Arthur had remarked that
+Nanook never spoke until the spot was reached on which we decided to
+pitch the tent. What faculty he had of recognising a good place, of
+seeing that both green spruce and dry spruce were there in sufficient
+quantity, I do not know--or whether he got his cue from the tones of our
+voice--but he never failed to give tongue when the stop was final and
+never opened his mouth when it was but tentative.
+
+I could almost tell the nature of any disturbance that arose from the
+tone of Nanook's bark. Was it some stray Indian dog prowling round the
+camp; was it the distant howling of wolves; was it the approach of some
+belated traveller--there was a distinct difference in the way he
+announced each. I well remember the new note that came into his
+passionate protest when he was chained to a stump at the reindeer camp,
+and the foolish creatures streamed all over the camping-ground that
+night. To have them right beside him and yet be unable to reach them, to
+have them brushing him with their antlers while he strained helplessly
+at the chain, was adding insult to injury. And he kept me awake over it
+all night and told me about it at intervals all next day.
+
+The coat that dog had was the heaviest and thickest I ever saw. On his
+back the long hair parted in the middle, and underneath the hair was fur
+and underneath the fur was wool. He was an outdoors dog strictly. It was
+only in the last year or two that he could be induced voluntarily to
+enter a house; he seemed, like Mowgli, to have a suspicion of houses.
+And if he did come in he had no respect for the house at all. When first
+I had him he would dig and scratch out of a dog-house on the coldest
+night, if he could, and lay himself down comfortably on the snow. Cold
+meant little to him. Fifty, sixty, seventy below zero, all night long at
+such temperatures he would sleep quite contentedly. The only difference
+I could see that these low temperatures made to him was an increasing
+dislike to be disturbed. When he had carefully tucked his nose between
+his paws and adjusted his tail over all, he had gone to bed, and to make
+him take his nose out of its nest and uncurl himself was like throwing
+the clothes off a sleeping man. He never dug a hole for himself in the
+snow. I never saw a dog do that yet. In my opinion that is one of the
+nature-faker's stories. A dog lies in snow just as he lies in sand, with
+the same preliminary turn-round-three-times that has been so much
+speculated about. We always make a bed for them, when it is very cold,
+by cutting and stripping a few spruce boughs, and they highly appreciate
+such a couch and will growl and fight if another dog try to take it.
+They need more food and particularly they need more fat when they lie
+out at extreme low temperatures, and we seek to increase that element in
+their rations by adding tallow or bacon or bear's-grease--or seal
+oil--or whatever oleaginous substance we can come by.
+
+[Sidenote: CANINE CHARACTER]
+
+He was a most independent dog was Nanook, a thoroughly bad dog, as one
+would say in some use of that term--a thief who had no shame in his
+thievery but rather gloried in it. If you left anything edible within
+his ingenious and comprehensive reach he regarded it as a challenge.
+There comes to me a ludicrous incident that concerned a companion of one
+winter journey. He had carefully prepared a lunch and had wrapped it
+neatly in paper, and he placed it for a moment on the sled while he
+turned to put his scarf about him. But in that moment Nanook saw it and
+it was gone. Through the snow, over the brush, in and out amongst the
+stumps the chase proceeded, until Nanook was finally caught and my
+companion recovered most of the paper, for the dog had wolfed the grub
+as he ran. He would stand and take any licking you offered and never
+utter a sound but give a bark of defiance when you were done, and he
+would bear you no ill will in the world and repeat his offence at the
+next opportunity. Yet so absurdly sensitive was he in other matters of
+his person that the simple operation of clipping the hair from between
+his toes, to prevent the "balling-up" of the snow, took two men to
+perform, one to sit on the dog and the other to ply the scissors, and
+was accompanied always with such howls and squeals as would make a
+hearer think we were flaying him alive.
+
+Nanook's acquaintance with horses began in Fairbanks the first season I
+owned him, before I had had the harness upon him, when he was rising two
+years old. The dogs and I were staying at the hospital we had just
+established--because in those days there was nowhere else to
+stay--waiting for the winter. One of the mining magnates of the infancy
+of the camp (broken and dead long since; Bret Harte's lines, "Busted
+himself in White Pine and blew out his brains down in 'Frisco," often
+occur to me as the sordid histories of to-day repeat those of fifty
+years ago) had imported a saddle-horse and, as the mild days of that
+charming autumn still deferred the snow, he used to ride out past the
+hospital for a canter.
+
+The dog had learned to lift the latch of the gate of the hospital yard
+with his nose and get out, and when I put a wedge above the latch for
+greater security he learned also to circumvent that precaution. And
+whenever the horse and his rider passed, Nanook would open the gate and
+lead the whole pack in a noisy pursuit that changed the canter to a run
+and brought us natural but mortifying remonstrance.
+
+The rider had just passed and the dogs had pursued as usual, and I had
+rushed out and recalled them with difficulty. Nanook I had by the
+collar. Dragging him into the yard, shutting the gate, and putting in
+the wedge, I picked up a stick and gave him a few sharp blows with it.
+Then flinging him off, I said: "Now, you stay in here; I'll give you a
+sound thrashing if you do that again!" I was just getting acquainted
+with him then. The moment I loosed his collar the dog went deliberately
+to the gate, stood on his hind legs while he pulled out the wedge with
+his teeth, lifted the latch with his nose and swung open the gate, and
+standing in the midst turned round and said to me: "Bow-_wow_-wow-wow-wow-_wow_!"
+It was so pointed that a passer-by, who had paused to see the
+proceedings and was leaning on the fence, said to me: "Well, you know
+where _you_ can go to. That's the doggonedest dog I ever seen!"
+
+[Sidenote: PARTNERS]
+
+It was a pleasure to come back to Nanook after any long absence--a
+pleasure I was used to look forward to. There was no special fawning or
+demonstration of affection; he was not that kind; that I might have from
+any of the others; but from none but Nanook the bark of welcome with my
+particular inflection in it that no one else ever got. "Well, well;
+here's the boss again; glad to see you back"; that was about all it
+said. For he was a most independent dog and took to himself an air of
+partnership rather than subjection. Any man can make friends with any
+dog if he will, there is no question about that, but it takes a long
+time and mutual trust and mutual forbearance and mutual appreciation to
+make a partnership. Not every dog is fit to be partner with a man; nor
+every man, I think, fit to be partner with a dog.
+
+Well, that long partnership was dissolved by the horse's hoof and I was
+sore for its dissolution. There was none left now that could remember
+the old days of the team save Lingo, and he grew crusty and somewhat
+crabbed. He was still the guardian of the sled, still the insatiable
+hand-shaker, but he grew more and more unsocial with his mates, and we
+heard his short, sharp, angry double bark at night more frequently than
+we used to. He reminded me of the complaining owl in Gray's "Elegy." He
+resented any dog even approaching the sled, resented the dogs moving
+about at all to disturb his "ancient solitary reign."
+
+His work was well-nigh done, and old Lingo had honestly earned his rest.
+With the end of this winter he would enter upon the easy old age that I
+had designed for both of them. Lingo had never failed me; never let his
+traces slack if he could keep them taut, never in his life had whip laid
+on his back to make him pull; a faithful old work dog for whom I had a
+hearty respect and regard. But he never found his way to my heart as
+Nanook did. I loved Nanook, and had lost something personal out of my
+life in losing him. There are other dogs that I am fond of--better dogs
+in some ways that either Nanook or Lingo, swifter certainly--but I think
+I shall never have two dogs again that have meant as much to me as these
+two. All the other dogs were of the last two years and thought they
+belonged to Arthur, who fed them and handled them most. But Nanook and
+Lingo had seen boys come and boys go, and they knew better.
+
+Six years is not very much of a man's life, but it is all a dog's life;
+all his effective working life. Nanook had given it all to me,
+willingly, gladly. He pulled so freely because he loved to pull. He
+delighted in the winter, in the snow and the cold; rejoiced to be on the
+trail, rejoiced to work. When we made ready to depart after a few days
+at a mission or in a town, Nanook was beside himself with joy. He would
+burst forth into song as he saw the preparations in hand, would run all
+up and down the gamut of his singular flexible voice, would tell as
+plainly to all around as though he spoke it in English and Indian and
+Esquimau that the inaction had irked him, that he was eager to be gone
+again.
+
+Well, he was dead; as fine a dog as ever lived; as faithful and
+intelligent a creature as any man ever had, not of human race, for
+servant, companion, and friend. And I thought the more of myself that he
+had put his tongue to my cheek when I said good-bye to him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: THE AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER]
+
+Here on the Tanana was one of the most interesting original characters
+of the many in the land: an old inhabitant of Alaska and of the
+Northwest who had followed many avocations and was now settled down on
+the river bank, with a steamboat wood-yard, a road-house for the
+entertainment of occasional travellers, and a little stock of trade
+goods chiefly for Indians of the vicinity. A round, fat, pursy man he
+was, past the middle life, with a twinkling eye and a bristling
+moustache, and a most amazing knack of picking up new words and using
+them incorrectly. He had fallen out with the great trading company of
+Alaska and did almost all his purchasing from a "mail-order house" in
+Chicago, the enormous quarto catalogue on the flimsiest thin paper
+issued by that establishment being his chief book of reference and his
+choice continual reading. He would declaim by the hour on the iniquitous
+prices that prevail in the interior and had the quotations of prices of
+every conceivable merchandise from his _vade mecum_ at his fingers'
+ends.
+
+But his chief passion of the past two or three years was photography, in
+the which he had made but little progress, despite considerable
+expenditures; and he had come to the conclusion about the time of our
+visit that what he needed was a fine lens, although, as a matter of
+fact, he had never learned to use his cheap one. He had recently become
+acquainted with sensitive film and had ordered a supply. By a
+transposition of letters, which the nature of the substance doubtless
+confirmed in his mind when it arrived, he always spoke of these
+convenient strips of celluloid as "flims," and was just now most
+eloquently indignant that, although he had broken utterly with the
+Northern Commercial Company and refused to trade with them at all, the
+supply of "flims" he had received from the mail-order house were
+labelled "N. C." "Them blamed monopolists has cornered the flims," he
+exclaimed, and was hardly persuaded that the letters signified
+"non-curling" and did not darkly hint at a conspiracy in restraint of
+trade.
+
+He produced and displayed a number of pieces of apparatus of a generally
+useless kind which he had ordered on the strength of their much
+advertising, and he observed sententiously, "We _armatures_ get badly
+imposed upon." Here were patent gimcrack printing devices, although he
+had scarce anything worth printing; all sorts of atrocious fancy borders
+with which he sought in vain to embellish out-of-focus under-exposures;
+orthochromatic filters and colour screens with which he was eliminating
+undesirable rays, although the chief thing his negatives lacked was
+light of any kind. His soiled and stained development trays were
+scattered about a large table amidst dirty cups and saucers and plates
+and dishes, while at the other end of the table, surmounting a pile of
+thumbed and greasy magazines and newspapers, lay the monstrous
+mail-order catalogue with pencilled indications of further apparatus to
+be purchased.
+
+But his zeal and enthusiasm and resolute riding of his hobby were very
+attractive. If he ever gets out of his head the notion that success
+depends upon apparatus he will doubtless become a photographer of sorts.
+Enthusiasm of any kind other than mining and "mushing" enthusiasm is so
+rare in this land that it is welcome even when it seems wasted. He had
+recently discovered the wax match in his catalogue, and as a parting
+gift he presented me with a box of "them there wax _vespers_ which beats
+the sulphur match all to thunder."
+
+[Sidenote: THE SULPHUR MATCH]
+
+But they do not. Nothing in this country can take the place of the
+old-fashioned sulphur match, long since banished from civilised
+communities, and the sulphur match is the only match a man upon the
+trail will employ. Manufactured from blocks of wood without complete
+severance, so that the ends of the matches are still held together at
+the bottom in one solid mass, it is easy to strip one off at need and
+strike it upon the block. A block of a hundred such matches will take up
+much less space than fifty of any other kind of match, and the blocks
+may be freely carried in any as they are commonly carried in every
+pocket without fear of accidental ignition. The only fire producer that
+it is worth while supplementing the sulphur match with is the even
+older-fashioned flint and steel, which to a man who smokes is a
+convenience in a wind. All the modern alcohol and gasoline pocket
+devices are extinguished by the lightest puff of wind, but the tinder,
+once ignited, burns the fiercer for the blast. With dry, shredded
+birch-bark I have made a fire upon occasion from the flint and steel.
+One resource may here be mentioned, since we are on the subject, which
+is always carried in the hind-sack of my sled against difficulty in fire
+making. It is a tin tobacco-box filled with strips of cotton cloth cut
+to the size of the box and the whole saturated with kerosene. One or two
+of these strips will help very greatly in kindling a fire when damp
+twigs or shavings are all that are at hand. A few camphor balls (the
+ordinary "moth balls") will serve equally well; and there may come a
+time, on any long journey, when the forethought that has provided such
+aid will be looked back upon with very great satisfaction.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The mail trail from Tanana to Fairbanks touches the Tanana River only at
+one point, a few miles beyond the Hot Springs; but, as we wished to
+visit Nenana, we had to leave the mail trail after two days more of
+uneventful travel and strike out to the river and over its surface for
+seventeen or eighteen miles.
+
+[Sidenote: A NOTABLE GENTLEWOMAN]
+
+Nenana is a native village situated on the left bank of the Tanana, a
+little above the confluence of the Nenana River with that stream, and we
+have established an important and flourishing school there which
+receives its forty pupils from many points on the Yukon and Tanana
+Rivers. None but thoroughly sound and healthy children of promise, full
+natives or half-breeds, are received at the school, and we seek to give
+both boys and girls opportunity for the cultivation of the native arts
+and for some of the white man's industrial training, in addition to the
+ordinary work of the schoolroom. The school was started and had the good
+fortune of its first four years' life under the care of a notable
+gentlewoman, Miss Annie Cragg Farthing, who was yet at its head at the
+time of this visit, but who died suddenly, a martyr to her devotion to
+the children, a year later; and a great Celtic cross in concrete,
+standing high on the bluff across the river, now marks the spot of her
+own selection--a spot that gives a fine view of Denali--where her body
+rests, and also the Alaskan mission's sense of the extraordinary value
+of her life.
+
+It would be easy to give striking instances of the potency and stretch
+of this remarkable woman's influence amongst the native people, an
+influence--strange as it may sound to those who deem any half-educated,
+under-bred white woman competent to take charge of an Indian school--due
+as much to her wide culture, her perfect dignity and self-possession,
+her high breeding, as to the love and consecrated enthusiasm of her
+character. It is no exaggeration to say that Miss Farthing's work has
+left a mark broad and deep upon the Indian race of this whole region
+that will never be wiped out.
+
+There is no greater pleasure than to spend a few days at this school; to
+foregather again with so many of the hopeful young scamps that one has
+oneself selected here and there and brought to the place; to mark the
+improvement in them, the taming and gentling, the drawing out of the
+sweet side of the nature that is commonly buried to the casual observer
+in the rudeness and shyness of savage childhood. To romp with them, to
+tell them tales and jingles, to get insensibly back into their familiar
+confidence again, to say the evening prayers with them, to join with
+their clear, fresh voices in the hymns and chants, is indeed to
+rejuvenate oneself. And to go away believing that real strength of
+character is developing, that real preparation is making for an Indian
+race that shall be a better Indian race and not an imitation white race,
+is the cure for the discouragement that must sometimes come to all those
+who are committed heart and soul to the cause of the Alaskan native.
+School-teachers, it would seem, ought never to grow old; they should
+suck in new youth continually from the young life around them; and
+children are far and away the most interesting things in the world, more
+interesting even than dogs and great mountains.
+
+[Sidenote: CHIVALROUS INDIAN YOUTH]
+
+All the boys in the school, I think, swarmed across the river with us
+when we started away early in the morning, and the elder ones ran with
+the sled along the portage, mile after mile, until I turned them back
+lest they be late for school.
+
+But when they were gone, still I saw them, saw them gathered round the
+grey-haired lady I had left, fawning upon her with their eyes, their
+hearts filled with as true chivalry as ever animated knight or champion
+of the olden time. Tall, upstanding fellows of sixteen or seventeen,
+clean-limbed and broad-shouldered, wild-run all their lives; hunters,
+with a tale of big game to the credit of some of them would make an
+English sportsman envious; unaccustomed to any restraint at all and
+prone to chafe at the slightest; unaccustomed to any respect for women,
+to any of the courtesies of life, I saw them fly at a word, at a look,
+to do her bidding, saw cap snatched from head if they encountered her
+about the buildings, saw them jump up and hold open the door if she
+moved to pass out of a room, saw the eager devotion that would have
+served her upon bended knee had they thought it would please her. It was
+wonderful, the only thing of quite its kind I had ever seen in my life.
+
+When early in the school's history an old medicine-man at Nenana had
+been roused to animosity by her refusal to countenance an offensive
+Indian custom touching the adolescent girls, and had defiantly announced
+his intention to make medicine against her, I can see her now, her staff
+in her hand, attended by two or three of her devoted youths, invading
+the midnight pavilion of the conjurer, in the very midst of his
+conjurations, tossing his paraphernalia outside, laying her staff
+smartly across the shoulders of the trembling shaman, and driving the
+gaping crew helter-skelter before her, their awe of the witchcraft
+overawed by her commanding presence. I make no apology that I thought of
+the scourge of small cords that was used on an occasion in the temple at
+Jerusalem, when I heard of it. It gave a shrewder blow to the lingering
+tyrannical superstition of the medicine-man than decades of preaching
+and reasoning would have done. No man living could have done the thing
+with like effect, nor any woman save one of her complete self-possession
+and natural authority. The younger villagers chuckle over the jest of it
+to this day, and the old witch-doctor himself was crouching at her feet
+and, as one may say, eating out of her hand, within the year.
+
+I saw these boys again, in my mind's eye, gone back to their homes here
+and there on the Yukon and the Tanana after their two or three years at
+this school, carrying with them some better ideal of human life than
+they could ever get from the elders of the tribe, from the little sordid
+village trader, from most of the whites they would be thrown with,
+keeping something of the vision of gentle womanhood, something of the
+"unbought grace of life," something of the keen sense of truth and
+honour, of the nobility of service, something deeper and stronger than
+mere words of the love of God, which they had learned of her whom they
+all revered; each one, however much overflowed again by the surrounding
+waters of mere animal living, tending a little shrine of sweeter and
+better things in his heart.
+
+[Sidenote: LONG-REMEMBERED TEACHING]
+
+Here, three years after the visit and the journey narrated, when these
+words are written with diaries and letters and memoranda around me, I am
+just come from a long native powwow, a meeting of all the Indians of a
+village for the annual election of a village council, important in the
+evolution of that self-government we covet for these people, but
+undeniably tedious. And, because at our missions we seek to associate
+with us every force that looks to the betterment of the natives, we had
+invited the new government teacher, a lady of long experience in Indian
+schools, to be present. She had sat patiently through the protracted
+meeting, and at its close, when she rose to go, a young Indian man
+jumped up and held her fur cloak for her and put it gently about her
+shoulders. When she had thanked him she asked with a smile: "Where did
+you learn to be so polite?" A gleam came into the fellow's eyes, then he
+dropped them and replied, "Miss Farthing taught me."
+
+Two days before, returning from a journey, I had spent the night at a
+road-house kept by a white man married to an Indian woman. There was
+excellent yeast bread on the table, and good bread is a rare thing in
+Alaska. "Where did you learn to make such good bread?" I inquired of the
+woman. There came the same light to her eyes and the same answer to her
+lips. Yet it was nine years ago, long before the school at Nenana was
+started, that this Indian boy and girl had been under Miss Farthing's
+teaching at Circle City.
+
+They tell us there is no longer much place or use for gentility in the
+world, for men and women nurtured and refined above the common level;
+tell us in particular that woman is only now emancipating herself from
+centuries of ineffectual nonage, only now entering upon her active
+career.
+
+Yet I am of opinion, from such opportunities to observe and compare as
+my constant travel has given me, that the quiet work of this gracious
+woman of the old school, with her dignity that nothing ever invaded and
+her poise that nothing ever disturbed, is perhaps the most powerful
+single influence that has come into the lives of the natives of interior
+Alaska.
+
+Two days brought us past the little native village and mission at Chena
+(which is pronounced Shen-a['w]), past the little white town of the same
+name, to Fairbanks, the chief town of interior Alaska. Chena is at the
+virtual head of the navigation of the Tanana River and is quite as near
+to the gold-producing creeks as Fairbanks, which latter place is not on
+the Tanana River at all but on a slough, impracticable for almost any
+craft at low water. For every topographical reason, from every
+consideration of natural advantage, Chena should have been the river
+port and town of these gold-fields. But Chena was so sure of her
+manifold natural advantages that she became unduly confident and
+grasping. When the traders at Fairbanks offered to remove to Chena at
+the beginning of the camp, if the traders at Chena would provide a site,
+the offer was scornfully rejected. "They would have to come, anyway, or
+go out of business." But they did not come; rather they put their backs
+up and fought. And because Fairbanks was enterprising and far-sighted,
+while Chena was avaricious and narrow, because Fairbanks offered free
+sites and Chena charged enormously for water-front, business went the
+ten miles up the often unnavigable slough and settled there, and by and
+by built a little railway that it might be independent of the uncertain
+boat service. The company came, the courts came, the hospital came, the
+churches came, and Chena woke up from its dreams of easy wealth to find
+itself and its manifold natural advantages passed by and ignored and the
+big town firmly established elsewhere.
+
+How well I remember the virulent little newspaper published at Chena in
+those days and the bitterness and vituperation it used to pour out week
+by week! One wishes a file of it had been preserved. Alaskan journalism
+has presented many amusing curiosities that no one has had leisure to
+collect, but nothing more amusing than the frenzy of impotent wrath
+Chena vented when it saw its cherished prospects and opportunities
+slipping out of its grasp for ever.
+
+        "If of all words on tongue or pen,
+         The saddest are 'it might have been,'
+         Full sad are those we often see,
+         It is, but it hadn't ought to be."
+
+It takes Bret Harte to strike the note for such rivalry and such
+disappointment.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[C] In December, 1912, a determined effort was made by the better
+element of the little handful of white people in this town to secure the
+withdrawal of the licence of this saloon. The justice of the peace, the
+government school-teacher, the postmaster, and others went up to
+Fairbanks (a week's journey over the trail) and opposed the granting of
+the licence in court. It was shown that the white men of the locality
+were so reduced in numbers that the business could not be carried on at
+a profit unless liquor was sold, directly or indirectly, to the Indians.
+But because by hook and by crook the names of a majority of one or two
+of all the white residents of the precinct were secured for a petition
+in favour of the licence (two or three were secured by telegraph at the
+last moment) the judge held that he had no option under the law but to
+grant the licence. So, on the one hand, it is a felony to sell liquor to
+Indians, and annually thousands of dollars are expended in trying to
+suppress such sale, while, on the other hand, a man is licenced to sell
+liquor when it is shown that he cannot make a living unless he sells to
+Indians; that is to say he is virtually granted a licence to sell to
+Indians. This note is not intended to reflect upon the judge who granted
+the licence, although all his predecessors have not put that
+construction upon the law, but upon a law open to that construction.
+
+[D] This was written some two years before the opportunity came. On the
+7th of June, 1913, the writer and three companions reached the summit of
+Denali. ("The Ascent of Denali," Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914.)
+
+[E] In 1913 it was finally destroyed by fire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+TANANA CROSSING TO FORTYMILE AND DOWN THE YUKON--A PATRIARCHAL
+CHIEF--SWARMING CARIBOU--EAGLE AND FORT EGBERT--CIRCLE CITY AND FORT
+YUKON
+
+
+FAIRBANKS was a different place in 1910 from the centre of feverish
+trade and feverish vice of 1904-5, when the stores were open all day and
+half the night and the dance-halls and gambling dens all night and half
+the day; when the Jews cornered all the salt and all the sugar in the
+camp and the gamblers all the silver and currency; when the curious
+notion prevailed that in some mysterious way general profligacy was good
+for business, and the Commercial Club held an indignation meeting upon a
+threat of closing down the public gaming and refusing liquor licences to
+the dance-halls, and voted unanimously in favour of an "open town"; when
+a diamond star was presented to the "chief of police" by the enforced
+contributions of the prostitutes; when the weekly gold-dust from the
+clean-ups on the creeks came picturesquely into town escorted by
+horsemen armed to the teeth. The outward and visible signs of the Wild
+West are gone; the dance-halls and gambling tables are a thing of the
+past; the creeks are all connected with Fairbanks by railway and
+telephone; an early closing movement has prevailed in the shops; and
+the local choral society is lamenting the customary dearth of tenors for
+its production of "The Messiah."
+
+Despite the steady decline in the gold output of late years, a drop of
+from twenty millions down to four or five, there is little visible decay
+in its trade, and despite stampedes to new diggings all over Alaska,
+there is no marked visible diminution in its population, though as a
+matter of fact both must have largely fallen off. The thing that more
+than any other has sustained the spirits and retained the presence of
+the business men is the expectation that seems to grow brighter and
+brighter, of the development of a quartz camp now that the placers are
+being exhausted. And in that hope lies the chance of Fairbanks to become
+the one permanent considerable town of interior Alaska. It is a
+substantial place, with good business houses and many comfortable homes
+electric-lit, steam-heated, well protected against fire--better than
+against flood--and, though it does not display the style and luxury of
+the palmy days of Nome, it has amenities enough to make disinterested
+visitors and passers-by wish that its hard-rock hopes may be realised.
+
+[Sidenote: FAIRBANKS]
+
+The little log church that is still, as a local artist put it, "the only
+thing in Fairbanks worth making a picture of," no longer stands open all
+day and all night as the town's library and reading-room, but has
+withdrawn into decorous Sabbath use in favour of the commodious public
+library built by a Philadelphia churchman; the hospital adjoining it,
+that for two or three years cared for all the sick of the camp, is
+supplemented by another and a larger across the slough; young
+birch-trees have been successfully planted all along the principal
+streets, and the front yards everywhere are ablaze with flowers the
+summer through. You may eat hot-house lettuce and radishes in March;
+hot-house strawberries (at about ten cents apiece) in July and August;
+while common outdoor garden-truck of all kinds is plentiful and good in
+its short season.
+
+We had another canine misfortune while we lay there. Doc, one of our
+leaders, got his chain twisted around his foot the night before we were
+to leave, and, in pulling to free it, stopped the circulation of the
+blood and the foot froze. It was as hard as wood and sounded like wood
+when it hit the sidewalks, from which the snow had been cleared, as the
+dog came limping along. An hour's soaking in cold water drew the frost
+out of the foot, and we swathed it in cotton saturated with carron oil,
+upon which it swelled so greatly that it was impossible to tell the
+extent of the injury or to determine whether or not the dog would ever
+be of use again. A kindly nurse at the hospital undertook his care, and
+we left him behind. One does not buy a dog so late in the season, with
+all the idle summer to feed him through, if any shift can be made to
+avoid it, and there was a Great Dane pup at the Salchaket, forty miles
+away, that I might pick up as I passed and perhaps make some use of for
+the remainder of the winter.
+
+That mission was the next stop on our journey, and we reached it over
+the level mail trail, the chief winter highway of Alaska, connecting
+Fairbanks with Valdez on the coast. Three times a week there is a horse
+stage with mail and passengers passing over this trail each way,
+together with much other travel. The Alaska Road Commission has lavished
+large sums of money upon it, and the four hundred miles or thereabout is
+made in a week.
+
+[Sidenote: THE SALCHAKET]
+
+A day and a half brought us to the Salchaket, one of a chain of missions
+along the Tanana River, established by the energy and zeal of the
+Reverend Charles Eugene Betticher, Jr., during his incumbency at
+Fairbanks, that have already brought a great change for the better in
+native conditions. Five years had elapsed since last I visited this
+tribe, a reconnoitring visit on one of the first steamboats that ever
+went up the Tanana River above Fairbanks, and it was a delight to see
+the new, clean village with the little gardens round the cabins, and to
+note the appreciative attitude which the Indians showed. So highly do
+they value the missionary nurse in charge that however far afield their
+hunting may lead them, one of their number is sent back every week to
+see that the mission does not lack wood and water and meat; a simple,
+docile, kindly people that one's heart warms to.
+
+This mission was our last outpost to the south. My farther journey had
+for its prime object the visiting of the natives of the upper Tanana as
+far as the Tanana Crossing, some two hundred and fifty miles beyond the
+Salchaket, the inquiring into their condition and into the desirability
+of establishing a post amongst them.
+
+[Sidenote: THE UPPER TANANA]
+
+The upper Tanana is probably one of the most difficult streams in the
+world to navigate that can by any stretch of the term be called
+navigable. The great Alaskan range begins to approach the Tanana River
+so soon as one gets above Fairbanks. Its prominent peaks, ten thousand
+to twelve thousand feet high, are continually in view from one angle to
+another as one pursues the river trail, and come constantly nearer and
+nearer. All the streams that are confluent with the Tanana on its left
+bank are glacial streams draining the high ice of these mountains. They
+come down laden thick with silt, at times foaming torrents, at times
+merely trickling watercourses that seam with numerous small runnels the
+wide deltas at their mouths. The tributaries of the right bank flow for
+the most part through heavily wooded country, and come out cleanly into
+the river. So the glacial waters form shoals and bars, and the woodland
+waters during freshets pile them high with driftwood. Such is the chief
+characteristic of the upper Tanana; a multiplicity of swift, narrow
+channels amidst bars laden with drift. It is subject to sudden rises of
+great violence; the attempt to stem a freshet on the upper Tanana is a
+hair-raising experience as the log of the _Pelican_ would show, but does
+not come within this narrative. Owing to the origin of much of its
+water, the Tanana is often in flood in dry, hot seasons, when other
+rivers run meagrely, as well as in times of rain. It cannot be stemmed
+in flood; its shoals deny passage in drouth; there must be just the
+right stage of water to permit its navigation, and that stage, "without
+o'erflowing, full," is not often found of duration to serve the voyage
+after the month of June.
+
+A river difficult to navigate in summer is usually a river difficult to
+travel upon in winter, and the upper Tanana is notoriously dangerous and
+treacherous. Scarce a winter or a summer that it does not claim victims.
+It is emphatically a "bad river." Therefore, as far as there is any
+travel to speak of, land trails parallel the river. Past Richardson
+where the next night is spent, a decayed mining and trading town that
+dates back to the stampedes of 1905-6 when it was thought the upper
+Tanana would prove rich in gold, past Tenderfoot Creek on which the
+discoveries were made, past the mouth of the Big Delta with the great
+bluff on the opposite shore and the rushing black water at its foot that
+never entirely closes all the winter, and on the other hand the wide
+barrens of the Big Delta itself giving the whole fine sweep of the
+Alaskan range, we came at length to McCarthy's, the last telegraph
+station on the river,--for the line strikes across country thence to
+Valdez following the government trail,--and there spent another night,
+and here we leave the government-made trail and take to the river
+surface and the wilderness.
+
+[Illustration: A PLEASANT WOODLAND TRAIL.]
+
+[Illustration: AN ALASKAN CHIEF AND HIS HENCHMAN.]
+
+Twelve miles through the woods along the left bank of the river brought
+us to the aptly named Clearwater Creek, a tributary that comes only from
+the foot-hills and carries no glacial water. This stream by reason of
+hot springs runs wide open all the winter and must be crossed by a
+ferry--a raft on a heavy wire. The man who owned the ferry and the house
+adjacent was gone from home, so we proceeded to cross as best we could.
+The raft was so small that first we took the dogs across then unloaded
+the sled and took part of the load, and returned for the remainder
+and the sled itself. Finally a canoe was loaded on the raft and, when it
+had been moored on the side we found it, Arthur paddled himself back. It
+was a strange scene, rafting and paddling a canoe in interior Alaska on
+the 2d of March, with the thermometer at -15°. Some eight miles farther
+along the portage trail we came to a little cabin about dusk, but
+disdaining its dirt and darkness we pitched our tent.
+
+Another eighteen miles the next day is noted in my diary for pleasant
+woodland travel and for the particular interest of the numerous animal
+tracks we passed. Here a moose had crossed the trail, ploughing through
+the snow like a great cart-horse; here for two or three miles a lynx had
+urgent business in the direction of the Healy River. A lynx will always
+follow a trail if there be one, and will pick out the best going on the
+ice or snow in the absence of trail. I once followed a lynx track from
+the head of the Dall River to its mouth, and, save for turning aside
+occasionally to investigate a clump of willows or brush, the lynx was an
+excellent guide. Here were rabbit tracks and every now and then the
+little sharp tracks of a squirrel. We stopped for lunch under a tall
+cottonwood-tree, and Arthur pointed out that the trunk, up to a high
+crotch, was all seamed by bear claws. He said that the black bear
+climbed the same tree season after season, and told me that, according
+to the Indians, this was chiefly done when first he came from his winter
+den,--for the purpose of getting his bearings, as the boy suggested with
+a chuckle. A fox, a marten, and a weasel had all passed across lately,
+and of course then came the exclamation that scarce fails from native
+lips when a fox track is seen: "I wonder if it were a black fox!" A
+black fox means sudden wealth beyond the dreams of avarice to an Indian,
+and any fox track may be the track of a black fox.
+
+The end of that portage brought us out on the Tanana River opposite the
+little trading-post at the mouth of the Healy--the last post of any kind
+we should see.
+
+[Sidenote: INDIAN TRADERS]
+
+The trader, by whom we were hospitably entertained, had heard of our
+projected occupation of the upper Tanana, and alert to his own
+interests, was anxious to know the plans for the establishment of a
+mission--plans which were yet all to make. He naturally favoured this
+spot, which it was already plain was quite out of the question, but
+professed his readiness to move to any place that we might decide upon,
+and his entire sympathy and co-operation.
+
+The question of the trader, which always arises upon the establishment
+of a new mission site, is an important and sometimes a vexatious one,
+for he wields an influence amongst the Indians second only to that of
+the mission itself, and may be either a great help or a great hindrance.
+There is a natural desire to secure a man of character for the new post,
+and at the same time a natural reluctance to disturb vested interests
+and arouse bitter enmity by diverting trade. The suggestion has often
+been made that the mission should itself undertake a store in the
+interest of the natives, but those with most experience in such matters
+will agree that it is the wisdom of the bishop that sets his face
+against mission trading. The two offices are so essentially dissimilar
+as to be almost incompatible with one another; either the person in
+charge is a missionary first and a trader afterwards, in which case the
+store suffers, or he is a trader first and a missionary afterwards, in
+which case he is not a missionary at all. A clean, sober, and honest
+trader, content to take his time about getting rich, is a blessing to an
+Indian community. There are some such, one thinks, but they are not
+numerous. The profits are large, though the turnover is but one a year;
+the capital required is small; it is a life with much leisure; but in
+the main it attracts only a certain class of men.
+
+A band of Indians to whom word of our visit had been sent had come down
+the river this far to meet us and escort us, but dog food was scarce and
+our arrival was delayed, and they had been compelled to return to their
+hunting camp whither we must follow them. We were now farther up the
+Tanana River than either of us had ever been before; the country had the
+fascination of a new country; every bend of the river held unknown
+possibilities, and the keenness and elation that only the penetration of
+a new country brings were upon the boy as well as upon myself.
+
+The river and the mountains were already drawn much closer together, and
+as we pursued our journey upon the one we had continual fine views of
+the other. The going was good--too good--for much of it was new ice and
+spoke of recent overflow, and all too soon we came upon the water. At
+the mouth of the Johnson River, one of the glacial streams, the whole
+river was overflowed, and we waded for a mile through water that
+deepened continually until there was risk of wetting our load. Then we
+were compelled to take to the woods and to cut a portage around the
+worst and deepest of it, and so passed beyond it to good ice and to an
+empty cabin where we spent the night, glad to be sheltered from an
+exceedingly bitter wind that had blown all day and had taken all the
+pleasure out of travel.
+
+[Sidenote: THE THERMOS BOTTLES]
+
+It is in such weather particularly that the thermos flasks prove such a
+boon to the musher. To stop and build a fire in the wind means to get
+chilled through. There is no pleasure in it at all, and I would rather
+push on until the day's journey is done. But the native boy must have
+his lunch, and will build a fire in any sort of weather and make a pot
+of tea. The thermos bottle, with its boiling-hot cocoa, gives one the
+stimulation and nourishment that are desired without stopping for more
+than a few moments. I have carried a pair of these bottles all day at
+60° below zero, and, when opened, snow had to be put into the cocoa
+before it was cool enough to drink. Of course it is perfectly
+simple--all the astonishing things are--but I never open one of those
+bottles in the cold weather and pour out its contents without marvelling
+at it.
+
+We left the river and struck inland towards the foot-hills of the
+Alaskan range, a long, rough journey over a trail that had been made by
+the band that came out to the Healy to meet us, and had been travelled
+no more than by their coming and going. The snow in this region had been
+as much lighter than usual as the snow in the Koyukuk had been heavier.
+Through the tangle of prostrate trunks of a burned-over forest and the
+dense underbrush that follows such a fire, with not enough snow to give
+smooth passage over the obstacles, we made our toilsome way, the labour
+of the dogs calling for the continual supplement of the men, one at the
+gee pole and one at the handle-bars. Some twenty miles, perhaps, a long
+day's continuous journey, we pushed laboriously into the hills and then
+pitched our tent; but in a few miles, next morning, we had struck the
+main Indian trail from the village near the Tanana Crossing, by which
+the hunting party had come, and what little was left of the journey went
+easily enough until we reached the considerable native encampment.
+
+The men were all gone after moose save one half-naked, blear-eyed old
+paralytic, a dreadful creature who shambled and hobbled up asking for
+tobacco. The women were expecting us, however, and took the encamping
+out of our hands entirely, setting up the tent, hauling stove wood and
+splitting it up, making our couch of spruce boughs, starting a fire, and
+bringing a plentiful present of moose and caribou meat for ourselves and
+our dogs. Nothing could have been kinder than our reception; the full
+hospitality of the wilderness was heaped upon us. It was not until dark
+that the men returned, and we had all the afternoon to get acquainted
+with the women and children. Already the chief difficulty we had to
+encounter presented itself. These people did not speak the language of
+the lower Tanana and middle Yukon--Arthur's language--at all. Their
+speech had much more affinity with the upper Yukon language, and it
+dawned upon me that they were not of the migration that had pushed up
+the Tanana River from the Yukon, as all the natives as far as the
+Salchaket certainly did, were not of that tribe or that movement at all,
+but had come across country by the Ketchumstock from the neighbourhood
+of Eagle--the route we should return to the Yukon by--and were of the
+Porcupine and Peel River stock. This was certainly a surprise; I had
+deemed all the Tanana River Indians of the same extraction and tongue,
+but the stretch of bad water from the Salchaket to the Tanana Crossing
+was evidently the boundary between two peoples.
+
+[Sidenote: CHIEF ISAAC]
+
+That night we met Chief Isaac and the principal men of his tribe. At
+first it seemed that such broken English as three or four of them had
+would be our only medium of intercourse, but later one was discovered
+who had visited the lower Tanana and the Yukon and who understood Arthur
+indifferently well, and by the double interpretation, halting and
+inefficient, but growing somewhat better as we proceeded, it was
+possible to enter into communication. These preliminaries arranged, the
+chief made a set speech of dignity and force. He thanked me for coming
+to them, and regretted he had not been able to wait longer at the Healy
+River to help us to his camp. When he was a boy he had been across to
+the Yukon and had seen Bishop Bompas, and had been taught and baptized
+by him, but he was an old man now and he had forgotten what he had
+learned. I was the first minister most of his people had ever seen. They
+heard that Indians in other places had mission and school, and they had
+felt sorry a long time that no one came to teach them; for they were
+very ignorant, little children who knew nothing, and when they heard a
+rumour that a mission and school would be brought to them their hearts
+were very glad. Wherever we should see fit to "make mission," there he
+and his people would go, and would help build for us and help us in
+every way; but he hoped it would be near Lake Mansfield and the
+Crossing, where most of them lived at present. Farther down the river
+was not so good for their hunting and fishing, but they would go
+wherever we said. That was the burden of the chief's speech.
+
+I took a liking to the old man at once. He was evidently a chief that
+was a chief. The chieftainship here was plainly not the effete and
+decaying institution it is in many places on the Yukon. He spoke for all
+his people without hesitation or question, and one felt that what he
+said was law amongst them.
+
+There followed for two days an almost continuous course of instruction
+in the elements of the Christian faith and Christian morals, all day
+long and far into the night, with no more interval than cooking and
+eating required. In the largest tent of the encampment, packed full of
+men and women, the children wedged in where they could get, myself
+seated on a pile of robes and skins, my interpreters at my side, my
+hearers squatted on the spruce boughs of the floor, the instruction went
+on. As it proceeded, the interpretation improved, though it was still
+difficult and clumsy, as speaking through two minds and two mouths must
+always be. Whenever I stopped there was urgent request to go on, until
+at last my voice was almost gone with incessant use. Over and over the
+same things I went; the cardinal facts of religion--the Incarnation, the
+Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension; the cardinal laws of
+morality--the prohibition of murder, adultery, theft, and falsehood;
+that something definite might be left behind that should not be lost in
+the vagueness of general recollection, and always with the insistence
+that this was God's world and not the devil's world, a world in which
+good should ultimately prevail in spite of all opposition.
+
+[Sidenote: SAVAGE, HEATHEN, PAGAN]
+
+It is at once a high privilege and a solemn responsibility to deal with
+souls to whom the appeal of the Christian religion had never before been
+made, as were most of my hearers. One cannot call them "heathen." One
+never thinks of these Alaskan natives as heathen. "Savage" and "heathen"
+and "pagan" all meant, of course, in their origin, just country people,
+and point to some old-time, tremendous superciliousness of the
+city-bred, long since disappeared, except, perhaps, from such places as
+Whitechapel and the Bowery. A savage is simply a forest dweller, a
+heathen a heath dweller, and for a large part of each year I come,
+etymologically, within the terms myself. But with its ordinary
+implication of ferocity and bloodthirstiness it is absurd to apply the
+word "savage" to the mild and gentle Alaskan Indian, and, with its
+ordinary implication of bowing down to wood and stone, it is misleading
+to apply the term "heathen" to those who never made any sort of graven
+image.
+
+Much has been written, and cleverly written, about the Alaskan Indian
+that is preposterously untrue. Arthur, my half-breed boy, had recently
+been reading a story by Jack London, dealing with the Indians in the
+vicinity of Tanana, where he was bred and born, and his indignation at
+the representation of his people in this story was amusing. The story
+was called _The Wit of Porportuk_, and it presented a native chief in
+almost baronial state, with slaves waiting upon him in a large
+banqueting hall and I know not what accumulated wealth of furs and gold.
+Such pictures are far more flagrantly untrue to any conditions that ever
+existed in Alaska than anything Fenimore Cooper wrote about the Five
+Nations. There were never any slaves in the interior; there was never
+any wealth amongst the Indians; there was never any state and
+circumstance of life. And the more one lives amongst them and knows
+them, the less one believes that they could ever have been a warlike
+people, despite their own traditions. Sporadic forays, fostered by their
+ignorant dread of one another or stirred up by rival medicine-men, there
+may have been between different tribes--and there certainly were between
+the Indians and the Esquimaux--with ambuscade and slaughter of isolated
+hunting parties that ventured too far beyond the confines of their own
+territory; and one such affair would furnish tradition for generations
+to dilate upon. I have myself found all the men of Nulato gone scouting,
+or hiding--I could not determine which--in the hills with their guns,
+upon a rumour that the "Huskies," or Esquimaux, were coming; I have
+known the Indians of the Yukon and the Tanana, and as far as the
+Koyukuk, excited and alarmed over the friendly visit of a handful of
+ragged natives from the Copper River to Nenana at Christmas time,
+although in either case it must certainly have been fifty years since
+there was any actual hostile incursion, and probably much longer.
+
+[Sidenote: A GENTLE, TIMID PEOPLE]
+
+They are a very timid people, and an exceedingly peaceable people. Years
+and years may be spent amongst them without knowledge of a single act of
+violence between Indian men; they do not quarrel and fight. Bold enough
+in the chase, willing to face dangers of ice and water and wild beast,
+they have a dread of anything like personal encounter, and will submit
+to a surprising amount of imposition and overbearing on the part of a
+white man without resorting to it. I knew a certain white man who
+claimed a whole river valley north of the Yukon as his, who warned off
+hunting parties of Indians who ventured upon it, and made them give up
+game killed in "his territory." They came to the mission and complained
+about it, but they never withstood the usurper. It ought to be added
+that it always appeared more as the making good of a practical joke than
+as a serious pretension, but the point is--the Indians submitted.
+
+So far as these natives of the interior are concerned they were never
+idolaters. I cannot find that they had any distinct notion of worship at
+all. Their religion had root in a certain frantic terror of the unknown,
+and found expression in ceaseless efforts to propitiate the malign
+spirits surrounding them on every side. Thus they were given over to the
+mastery of those amongst them who had the traditional art of such
+propitiation, and fell more or less completely under that cruellest and
+most venal of sways, the tyranny of the witch-doctor. It is impossible
+to doubt, and hard to exaggerate, the grinding and brutal exactions to
+which this rule led. Anything that a man possessed might be demanded and
+must be yielded, on pain of disease and death, even to the whole
+season's catch of fur or the deflowering of a young daughter. The utmost
+greed and lust that can disgrace humanity found its Indian expression in
+the lives of some of these medicine-men.
+
+Since every sort of tyranny has its vulnerable spot, since the despotism
+of Russia was tempered by assassination and of Japan by the effect of
+public suicide, so melioration of the tyranny of the medicine-man seems
+to have been found in rivalry amongst members of the craft itself.
+Oppressed beyond endurance by one practitioner, allegiance would be
+transferred to some new claimant of occult powers, and the breaking of
+the monopoly of magic would be followed by a temporary lightening of the
+burdens. Some of the most lurid of Alaskan legends deal with the
+thaumaturgic contests of rival medicine-men, and one judges that sleight
+of hand and even hypnotic suggestion were cultivated to a fine point.
+
+To such minds the Christian teaching comes with glad and one may say
+instantaneous acceptance. Their attitude is entirely childlike. They are
+anxious to be told more and more about it, to be told it over and over
+again. There is never the slightest sign of incredulity. It does not
+occur to them as possible that a man should be sent all this way to
+them, should hunt them up and seek them out to tell it to them, unless
+it were true. And one learns over again how universal is the appeal the
+Christian religion, and in particular the Life of Our Lord, makes to
+mankind. I have seen Indians and Esquimaux mixed, hearing for the first
+time the details of the Passion, stirred to as great indignation as was
+that barbarian chieftain who laid his hand on his sword and cried,
+"Would I and my men had been there!" or those Western cowboys, so the
+story runs, bred in illiteracy and irreligion, to whose children a
+school-teacher had given an account of the same great events, and who
+rode up to the schoolhouse the next day with guns and ropes, and asked:
+"Which way did them blamed Jews go?"
+
+The medicine-man lies low; may himself profess acceptance of the new
+teaching, may even really accept it (for it is very hard, indeed, to
+follow and judge all the mental processes of an Indian)--yes, though it
+expressly sweep all his devils away, out of the sick, out of the wind
+and storm, from off every grave mound, though it leave him no paltry
+net-tearing or trap-springing sprite to work upon with his conjurations;
+yet the old superstition dies hard, often crops up when one had thought
+it perished, and even sometimes maintains itself, sub rosa, side by side
+with definite, regular Christian worship.
+
+[Sidenote: THE OLD, OLD STORY]
+
+The arctic explorer Stefanson, a careful and acute observer who has had
+exceptional opportunities for observation of the intimate life of the
+Esquimaux, has written much lately of the grafting of Christianity upon
+native superstition and the existence of both together, as though it
+were some new thing or newly noticed by himself. Yet every one familiar
+with the history of Christianity knows that it has characterised the
+progress of religion in all ages. There was never a people yet that did
+not in great measure do this thing, nor is it reasonable to suppose that
+it could have been otherwise. It is impossible to make a _tabula rasa_
+of men's minds. It is impossible to uproot customs of immemorial
+antiquity without leaving some rootlets behind. And what is acquired
+joins itself insensibly to what is retained, and either the incongruity
+is hidden beneath a change of nomenclature or is not hidden at all. Our
+own social life is threaded through and through with customs and
+practices which go back to a superstitious origin. The matter is such a
+commonplace of history that it is bootless to labour it here.
+
+A scientist is only a "scientist." How that name tends continually to
+depreciate itself as the pursuit of physical science is divorced more
+and more completely from a knowledge of literature, from a knowledge of
+the humanities! And a scientist is a poor guide to an acquaintance with
+man, civilised or uncivilised. To come to the study of any race of man,
+even the most primitive, without some knowledge of all the long history
+of man, of all the long history of man's thought, man's methods, man's
+strivings, man's accomplishments, man's failures, is to come so ill
+equipped that no just conclusions are likely to be reached. Your
+exclusive "scientist"--and such are most of them to-day--may be
+competent to deal with circles and triangles, with wheels and levers
+with cells and glands, with germs and bacilli and micro-organisms
+generally, with magnetos and dynamos, with all the heavenly host if you
+like, but he has no equipment to deal with man! Somatic anthropology in
+particular tends to assume in some quarters such an overimportance that
+one falls back upon the recollection that the original head measurers
+were hatters and that all hatters are proverbially mad. The occupation
+would seem to carry the taint.
+
+It was with much pleasure that I was able to hold out hope to Chief
+Isaac of the mission and the school he desired so earnestly for his
+people. It must not be supposed that all of them were in the completely
+unevangelised state which has been dwelt upon, that to all of them the
+teaching of those two full days was novel; some of them, like the chief
+himself, had been across to the Yukon long ago and still bore some trace
+of the early labours of the Church of England missionaries to whom this
+region of Alaska that adjoins Canada is so much indebted. Others had
+once been to the Ketchumstock, upon the occasion of a visit from our
+missionary at Eagle, and had received instruction from him. But there
+were many present in that tent who had never seen any missionary, never
+had any teaching, to whom it was wholly new save as they might have
+picked up some inkling from those that had been more fortunate.
+
+[Illustration: THE TANANA CROSSING.]
+
+[Illustration: GOOD GOING ON THE YUKON.]
+
+[Sidenote: TRIBAL CONNECTIONS]
+
+When we left this encampment Isaac sent two of his young men to guide
+us, with a sled drawn by three or four small dogs, so gaily caparisoned
+with _tapis_ and ribbons, tinsel, and pompons, that they might have
+been circus dogs. Here again is evidence of this tribe's affinity
+with the upper Yukon natives, and so with those of the Mackenzie. I
+never saw the _tapis_, a broad, bright ornamented cloth that lies upon
+the dog's back under his harness, on the Middle Yukon. It is
+characteristic of the Peel River Indians who come across by the Rampart
+House and La Pierre House.
+
+A few hours' journey brought us to the Tanana River again, which we
+crossed, and took a portage on the other side that went up a long defile
+and then along a ridge and then down another long defile until at night
+we reached the native village at Lake Mansfield; a picturesque spot, for
+the lake is entirely surrounded by mountains except on the side which
+opens to the river. Here the Alaskan range and the Tanana River have
+approached so close that the water almost washes the base of the
+foot-hills, and the scenery is as fine and bold as any in Alaska. And
+here, at Lake Mansfield, if only there were navigable connection between
+the lake and the river into which it drains, would be an admirable place
+for a mission station.
+
+A couple of hours next day took us the seven remaining miles to the
+Tanana Crossing. Here, at that time, was a station of the military
+telegraph connecting Valdez on the coast with Fort Egbert (Eagle) on the
+Yukon, a line maintained, at enormous expense, purely for military
+purposes. It passed through an almost entirely uninhabited country in
+which perhaps scarcely a dozen messages would originate in a year. The
+telegraph-line and Fort Egbert itself are now abandoned. Strategic
+considerations constitute a vague and variable quantity.
+
+It was strange to find this little station with two or three men of the
+signal-corps away out here in the wilderness. Their post was supplied by
+mule pack-train from Fort Egbert, more than two hundred miles away, and
+they told me that only ten pounds out of every hundred that left Fort
+Egbert reached the Crossing, so self-limited is a pack-train through
+such country. We amused ourselves calculating just how much farther
+mules and men could go until they ate up _all_ they could carry.
+
+The Tanana Crossing is a central spot for the Indians of this region.
+Two days' journey up the river was the village of the Tetlin Indians.
+Two days' journey into the mountain range were the Mantasta Indians. Two
+days' journey across towards the Yukon were the Ketchumstock Indians.
+Most of them would congregate at this spot for certain parts of the
+year, should we plant a mission there, and despite the picturesque
+situation of Lake Mansfield, it looked as if the Crossing were the best
+point for building.
+
+[Sidenote: THE TANANA CROSSING]
+
+Our route lay northeast, across country to Fortymile on the Yukon, two
+hundred and fifty miles away, along the trail for the greater part of
+the distance by which the mule train reached the Tanana Crossing. The
+first five miles was all up-hill, a long, stiff, steady climb to the
+crest of the mountain that rises just behind the Crossing. We had to
+take it slowly, with frequent stops, so steep was the grade, and every
+now and then we got tantalising glimpses through the timber of the scene
+that spread wider and wider below us. Bend after bend of the Tanana
+River unfolded itself; the Alaskan range gave peak after peak; there
+lay Lake Mansfield, deep in its amphitheatre of hills, with the Indian
+village at its head.
+
+At last my impatience for the view that promised made me leave the boys
+(we still had Isaac's young men) and push on alone to the top. And it
+was indeed by far the noblest view of the winter, one of the grandest
+and most extensive panoramas I had ever seen in my life.
+
+Perhaps three miles away, as the crow flies, from the river, and
+seventeen hundred and fifty feet above it, as the aneroid gave it, we
+were already on the watershed, and everywhere in the direction we were
+travelling the wide-flung draws and gullies of the Fortymile River
+stretched out, so clear and beautiful a display of the beginnings of a
+great drainage system that my attention was arrested, notwithstanding my
+eagerness for the sight that awaited my turning around. But it was upon
+turning around and looking in the direction from which we had come that
+the grandeur and sublimity entered into the scene. There was, indeed, no
+one great dominating feature in this prospect as in the view of Denali
+from the Rampart portage, but the whole background, bounding the vision
+completely, was one vast wall of lofty white peaks, stretching without a
+break for a hundred miles. Enormous cloud masses rose and fell about
+this barrier, now unfolding to reveal dark chasms and glittering
+glaciers, now enshrouding them again. In the middle distance the Tanana
+River wound and twisted its firm white line amidst broken patches of
+snow and timber far away to either hand, and, where glacial affluents
+discharged into it, were finer, threadlike lines that marked the many
+mouths. The thick spruce mantling the slope in the foreground gave a
+sombre contrast to the fields of snow, and the yellow March sunshine was
+poured over all the wide landscape save where the great clouds contended
+with the great mountains.
+
+The boys had stopped to build a fire and brew some tea before leaving
+the timber, and I was glad of it, for it gave me the chance to gaze my
+fill upon the inspiring and fascinating scene in the pleasant warmth of
+the mountain top, with the thermometer at 30° in the shade and just 12°
+higher in the sunshine.
+
+[Sidenote: A NOBLE VIEW]
+
+How grateful I was for the clear bright day! What a disappointment it
+has been again and again to reach such an eminence and see--nothing! It
+was the most extensive view of the great Alaskan range I had ever
+secured--that long line of sharp peaks that stretches and broadens from
+the coast inland until it culminates in the highest point of the North
+American continent and then curves its way back to the coast again. Of
+course, what lay here within the vision was only a small part of one arm
+of the range; it stopped far short of Denali on the one hand and Mount
+Sanford on the other, though it included Mount Kimball and Mount Hayes;
+yet it was the most impressive sight of a mountain chain I had ever
+beheld. It was a sight to be glad and grateful for, to put high amongst
+one's joyful remembrances; and with this notable sight we bade farewell
+to the Tanana valley.
+
+Down the hill we went into Fortymile water and into a rolling country
+crossed by the military mule trail. If the morning had been glorious the
+evening was full of penance. Long before night our feet were sore from
+slipping and sliding into those wretched mule tracks. One cannot take
+one's eyes from the trail for a moment, every footstep must be watched,
+and even then one is continually stumbling.
+
+We were able, however, to rig our team with the double hitch that is so
+much more economical of power than the tandem hitch, whenever the width
+of the trail permits it. We now carry a convertible rig, so that on
+narrow trails or in deep snow we can string out the dogs one in front of
+the other, and when the trail is wide enough can hitch them side by
+side. "Seal," the Great Dane pup we got at the Salchaket, was a good and
+strong puller, but he had no coat and no sense. It is bad enough to have
+no coat in this country, but to have no coat and no sense is fatal--as
+he found. His feet were continually sore and he had to be specially
+provided for at night if it were at all cold--a dog utterly unsuited to
+Alaska.
+
+Thirty miles of such going as has been described is tiring in the
+extreme, and when we reached the Lone Cabin, behold! fifteen Indians
+camped about it, for whom, when supper was done, followed two hours of
+teaching and the baptism of six children. I would have liked to have
+stayed a day with them, but if we were to spend Palm Sunday at Fortymile
+and Easter at Eagle as had been promised, the time remaining did no more
+than serve; and there was a large band of Indians to visit at
+Ketchumstock.
+
+The next day took us into and across the Ketchumstock Flats, a wide
+basin surrounded by hills and drained by the Mosquito Fork of the
+Fortymile. The telegraph-line, supported on tripods against the summer
+yielding of the marshy soil, cuts straight across country. This basin
+and the hills around form one of the greatest caribou countries,
+perhaps, in the world. All day we had passed fragments of the long
+fences that were in use in times past by the Indians for driving the
+animals into convenient places for slaughter.
+
+The annual migration of the vast herd that roams the section of Alaska
+between the Yukon and the Tanana Rivers swarms over this Flat and
+through these hills, and we were told at the Ketchumstock telegraph
+station by the signal-corps men that they estimated that upward of one
+hundred thousand animals crossed the Mosquito Fork the previous October.
+
+[Sidenote: CARIBOU]
+
+The big game of Alaska is not yet seriously diminished, though there was
+need for the legal protection that has of late years been given. It is
+probable that more caribou and young moose are killed every year by
+wolves than by hunters. Only in the neighbourhood of a considerable
+settlement is there danger of reckless and wasteful slaughter, and some
+attention is paid by game wardens to the markets of such places. The
+mountain-sheep stands in greater danger of extermination than either
+caribou or moose. Its meat, the most delicious mutton in the world, as
+it has been pronounced by epicures, brings a higher price than other
+wild meat, and it is easy to destroy a band completely. The sheep on the
+mountains of the Alaskan range nearest to Fairbanks have, it is said,
+been very greatly diminished, and that need not be wondered at when one
+sees sled load after sled load, aggregating several tons of meat,
+brought in at one shipment. The law protecting the sheep probably needs
+tightening up.
+
+The big game is a great resource to all the people of the country, white
+and native. It is no small advantage to be able to take one's gun in the
+fall and go out in the valleys and kill a moose that will suffice for
+one man's meat almost the whole winter, or go into the hills and kill
+four or five caribou that will stock his larder equally well. The fresh,
+clean meat of the wilds has to most palates far finer flavour than any
+cold-storage meat that can be brought into the country; and, save at one
+or two centres of population and distribution, cold-storage meat is not
+available at all. Without its big game Alaska would be virtually
+uninhabitable. Therefore most white men are content that the necessary
+measures be taken to prevent the wasteful slaughter of the game; for the
+rights of the prospector and trapper and traveller, and the rights of
+the natives to kill at any time what is necessary for food, are
+explicitly reserved.
+
+[Sidenote: THE KETCHUMSTOCK]
+
+We reached the village and telegraph post of Ketchumstock for the night
+only to find all the natives gone hunting; but since they had gone in
+the direction of Chicken Creek, towards which we were travelling, we
+were able to catch up with them the next morning without going far out
+of our way. While we were pitching our tent near their encampment came
+two or three natives with dog teams, and as the dogs hesitated to pass
+our dogs, loose on the trail, a voluble string of curses in English fell
+from the Indian lips. Such is usually the first indication of contact
+with white men, and in this case it spoke of the proximity of the mining
+on Chicken Creek. To discover the women chewing tobacco was to add but
+another evidence of the sophistication of this tribe; a different people
+from Chief Isaac's tribe, different through many years' familiarity with
+the whites at these diggings. If the mission to be built at the Crossing
+tends to keep these Indians on the Tanana River and thus away from the
+demoralisation of the diggings, it will do them solid service.
+
+In some way foul and profane language falls even more offensively from
+Indians than from whites; for the same reason, perhaps, that it sounds
+more offensive and shocking from children than from adults. Sometimes
+the Indian does not in the least understand the meaning of the words he
+uses; they are the first English words he ever heard and he hears them
+over and over again.
+
+So here another day and a half was spent in instruction. There are some
+forty souls in this tribe and they have had teaching from time to time,
+though not in the last few years, at the mouths of missionaries from
+Yukon posts. Most of the adults had been baptized; I baptized sixteen
+children. One curious feature of my stay was the megaphonic
+recapitulation of the heads of the instruction, after each session, by
+an elderly Indian who stood out in the midst of the tents. What on earth
+this man, with his town-crier voice, was proclaiming at such length, we
+were at a loss to conjecture, and upon inquiry were informed: "Them
+women, not much sense; one time tell 'em, quick forget; two time tell
+'em, maybe little remember." So when we stopped for dinner and for
+supper and for bed, each time this brazen-lunged spieler stood forth and
+reiterated the main points of the discourse "for the _hareem_," as
+Doughty would say, whose account of the attitude of the Arabs to their
+women often reminds me of the Alaskan Indians. It was interesting, but I
+should have preferred to edit the recapitulation.
+
+When all was done for the day and we thought to go to bed came an Indian
+named "Bum-Eyed-Bob" (these white man's nicknames, however dreadful, are
+always accepted and used) for a long confabulation about the affairs of
+the tribe, and I gathered incidentally that gambling at the telegraph
+station had been the main diversion of the winter. It seems ungracious
+to insist so much upon the evil influence of the white men--we had been
+cordially received and entertained at that very place, and our money
+refused--but there is little doubt that the abandonment of the
+telegraph-line will be a good thing for these natives. Put two or three
+young men of no special intellectual resource or ambition down in a
+lonely spot like this, with no society at all save that of the natives
+and practically nothing to do, and there is a natural and almost
+inevitable trend to evil. To the exceptional man with the desire of
+promotion, with books, and all this leisure, it would be an admirable
+opportunity, but he would be quite an exceptional man who should rise
+altogether superior to the temptations to idleness and debauchery. One
+may have true and deep sympathy with these young men and yet be
+conscious of the harm they often bring about.
+
+Ten miles or so from the encampment brought us to Chicken Creek, and
+from that point we took the Fortymile River. The direct trail to Eagle
+with its exasperating mule tracks was now left, and our journey was on
+the ice. But so warm was the weather that 16th of March that we were
+wet-foot all day, and within the space of eight hours that we were
+travelling we had snow, sleet, rain, and sunshine. Leaving the main
+river, we turned up Walker Fork and, after a few miles, leaving that, we
+turned up Jack Wade Creek and pursued it far up towards its head ere we
+reached the road-house for the night.
+
+[Sidenote: THE FORTYMILE]
+
+We were now on historic ground, so far as gold mining in Alaska is
+concerned. The "Fortymilers" bear the same pioneer relation to gold
+mining in the North that the "Fortyniners" bear to gold mining in
+California. Ever since 1886 placers have been worked in this district,
+and it still yields gold, though the output and the number of men are
+alike much reduced. It is interesting to talk with some of the original
+locators of this camp, who may yet be found here and there in the
+country, and to learn of the conditions in those early days when a
+steamboat came up the Yukon once in a season bringing such supplies and
+mail as the men received for the year. It was here that the problem of
+working frozen ground was first confronted and solved; here that the
+first "miner's law" was promulgated, the first "miners' meeting" dealt
+out justice. Your "old-timer" anywhere is commonly _laudator temporis
+acti_, but there is good reason to believe that these early, and
+certainly most adventurous, gold-miners, some of whom forced a way into
+the country when there were no routes of travel, and subsisted on its
+resources while they explored and prospected it, were men of a higher
+stamp than many who have come in since. The extent to which that early
+prospecting was carried is not generally known, for these men, after the
+manner of their kind, left no record behind them. There are few creek
+beds that give any promise at all in the whole of this vast country that
+have not had some holes sunk in them. Even in districts so remote as the
+Koyukuk, signs of old prospecting are encountered. When a stampede took
+place to the Red Mountain or Indian River country of the middle Koyukuk
+in 1911-12, I was told that there was not a creek in the camp that did
+not show signs of having been prospected long before, although it had
+passed altogether out of knowledge that this particular region had ever
+been visited by prospectors.
+
+[Sidenote: "SNIPING ON THE BARS"]
+
+As the Fortymile is the oldest gold camp in the North, some of its trail
+making is of the best in Alaska. In particular the trail from the head
+of Jack Wade Creek down into Steel Creek reminded one of the Alpine
+roads in its bold, not to say daring, engineering. It drops from bench
+to bench in great sweeping curves always with a practicable grade, and
+must descend nigh a thousand feet in a couple of miles. At the mouth of
+Steel Creek we are on the Fortymile River again, having saved a day's
+journey by this traverse. And here, on the Fortymile, we passed several
+men "sniping on the bars," as the very first Alaskan gold-miners did on
+this same river, and probably on these same bars, twenty-five years ago.
+One hand moved the "rocker" to and fro and the other poured water into
+it with the "long Tom"; so was the gold washed out of the gravel taken
+from just below the ice. It was interesting to see this primitive method
+still in practice and to learn from the men that they were making
+"better than wages."
+
+The Fortymile is a very picturesque but most tortuous river. In one
+place, called appropriately "The Kink," I was able to clamber over a
+ridge of rocks and reach another bend of the river in six or seven
+minutes, and then had to wait twenty-five minutes for the dog team,
+going at a good clip, to come around to me. At length we reached the
+spot where a vista cut through the timber that clothes both banks,
+marked the 141st meridian, the international boundary, and passed out of
+Alaska into British territory. A few miles more brought us to Moose
+Creek, where a little Canadian custom-house is situated, and there we
+spent the night.
+
+The next day we reached the Yukon; passing gold dredges laid up for the
+winter and other signs of still-persisting mining activity, going
+through the narrow wild cañon of the Fortymile, and so to the little
+town at its mouth of the same name, where there is a mission of the
+Church of England and a post of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. I
+never come into contact with this admirable body of men without wishing
+that we had a similar body charged with the enforcement of the law in
+Alaska.
+
+Sunday was spent there officiating for the layman in charge of the
+mission and in interesting talk with the sergeant of police about the
+annual winter journey from Dawson to Fort McPherson on the McKenzie,
+from which he had just returned with a detail of men. The next winter he
+and his detail lost their way and starved and froze to death on the same
+journey.
+
+Here at one time was a flourishing Indian mission and school, and here
+Bishop Bompas, the true "Apostle of the North," lived for some time. The
+story of this man's forty-five years' single-eyed devotion to the
+Indians of the Yukon and McKenzie Rivers is one of the brave chapters of
+missionary history. But the Church of England "does not advertise."
+Writers about Alaska, even writers about Alaskan missions, carefully
+collect all the data of the early Russian missions on the coast, but
+ignore altogether the equally influential and lasting work done along
+five hundred miles of what is now the American Yukon by the missionary
+clergy of the English Church before and after the Purchase. Bishop
+Bompas identified himself so closely with the natives as to become
+almost one of them in the eyes of the white men, and many curious
+stories linger amongst the old-timers as to his habits and appearance.
+It is interesting to know that the bishop was a son of that Sergeant
+Bompas of the English bar from whom Dickens drew the character of
+Sergeant Buzfuz, counsel for the plaintiff in the famous suit of
+"Bardell v. Pickwick."
+
+But the natives have all left Fortymile, some to the large village of
+Moosehide just below Dawson, some to Eagle. The town, too, like all the
+upper Yukon towns, is much decayed; the custom-house, the police
+barracks, the company's store, the road-house, and the little mission
+embracing nearly all its activities and housing nearly all its
+population.
+
+There is always some feeling of satisfaction in reaching the broad
+highway of the Yukon again, even though rough ice make bad going and one
+of the most notorious, dirty road-houses in the North hold its menace
+over one all day and amply fulfil it at night. There is indeed so little
+travel on the river now that it does not pay any one to keep a
+road-house save as incidental to a steamboat wood camp and summer
+fishing station. Two short days' travel brought us across the
+international boundary again to Eagle in Alaska, where at that time Fort
+Egbert was garrisoned with two companies of soldiers.
+
+[Sidenote: EAGLE]
+
+Eagle and Fort Egbert together, for the one begins where the other ends,
+have perhaps the finest and most commanding situation of any settlement
+on the Yukon River. The mountains rise with dignity just across the
+water and break pleasingly into the valley of Eagle Creek, a few miles
+up-stream. To the rear of the town an inconsiderable flat does but give
+space and setting before the mountains rise again; while just below the
+military post stands the bold and lofty bluff called the Eagle Rock,
+with Mission Creek winding into the Yukon at its foot. Robert Louis
+Stevenson said that Edinburgh has the finest situation of any capital
+in Europe and pays for it by having the worst climate of any city in the
+world. It would not be just to paraphrase this description with regard
+to Eagle, for while it is unsurpassed on the Yukon for site, there are
+spots on that river where still more disagreeable weather prevails; yet
+it cannot be denied that the position of the place subjects it to
+exceedingly bitter winds, or that the valley of Eagle Creek, which gives
+pleasing variety to the prospect, acts also as a channel to convey the
+full force of the blast. Climate everywhere is a very local thing;
+topographical considerations often altogether outweigh geographical; and
+nowhere is this truer than in Alaska. Commanding sites are necessarily
+exposed sites, and he who would dwell in comfort must build in
+seclusion.
+
+A native village of eighty or ninety souls, with its church and school,
+lies three miles up-stream from the town, so that the relative positions
+of village, town, and military post exactly duplicate those at Tanana.
+It must at once be stated, however, that this situation has not led to
+anything like the demoralisation amongst the natives at Eagle that
+thrusts itself into notice at the other place. Whether it were the
+longer training in Christian morals that lay behind these people, or
+better hap in the matter of post commanders (certainly there was never
+such scandalous irregularity and indifference at Egbert as marked one
+administration at Gibbon), or the vigilance during a number of
+consecutive years of an especially active deputy marshal and the wisdom
+and concern through an even longer period of a commissioner much above
+the common stamp,[F] or all these causes combined, the natives at Eagle
+have not suffered from the proximity of soldiers and civilians in the
+same measure as the natives at Tanana. Drunkenness and debauchery there
+have been again and again, but they have been severely checked and
+restrained by both the civil and military authorities.
+
+It was pleasant during Holy Week and Easter to see so many of the
+enlisted men of the garrison taking part in the services in town;
+pleasant, especially, to see officers and men singing together in the
+choir, a tribute to the tact and zeal of the earnest layman in charge of
+this mission; and it was pleasant at the village to hear the native
+liturgy again and to see old men and women following the lessons in the
+native Bible.
+
+[Sidenote: FORT EGBERT ABANDONED]
+
+Fort Egbert is abandoned now, another addition to the melancholy of the
+Yukon; its extensive buildings, barracks, and officers' quarters,
+post-exchange and commissariat, hospital, sawmill, and artisans' shops,
+a spacious, complete gymnasium only recently built, are all vacant and
+deserted. In the yards lie three thousand cords of dry wood, a year's
+supply; cut on the hills, awaiting the expected annual contracts, lie as
+many more--six thousand cords of wood left to rot! Some of us perverse
+"conservationists," upon whom the unanimous Alaskan press delights to
+pour scorn, lament the trees more than the troops.
+
+One may write thus and yet have many pleasant personal associations
+with the post and those who have lived there. A large and varied
+military acquaintanceship is acquired by regular visits to these Alaskan
+forts, for the whole command changes every two years. If one stayed in
+the country long enough one would get to know the whole United States
+army, as regiment after regiment spent its brief term of "foreign
+service" in the North. Gazing upon the empty quarters, the occasion of
+my first visit came back vividly, when there was diphtheria amongst the
+natives at Circle and none to cope with it save the missionary nurse.
+The civil codes containing no provision for quarantine, the United
+States commissioner at Circle could not help, and the Indians grew
+restive and rebellious, and when Christmas came broke through the
+restrictions completely. Even some of the whites of the place defied her
+prohibition and attended native dances and encouraged the Indians in
+their self-willed folly.
+
+[Sidenote: SOME ARMY OFFICERS]
+
+So I went up the week's journey to Eagle and sought assistance from
+Major Plummer, the officer commanding the post, who, after telegraphing
+to Washington, promptly despatched a hospital steward and a couple of
+soldiers, and placed them entirely at the nurse's disposal. "I don't
+think we have any law for it," he said, "but we'll bluff it out." And
+bluff it out they did very effectively until the disease was stamped
+out, and then they thoroughly disinfected and whitewashed every cabin
+that had been occupied by the sick. I used to tell that nurse that, so
+far as I knew, she was the only woman who had ever had command of United
+States soldiers.
+
+Then there was Captain Langdon of the same regiment, the scholarly
+soldier, with the account of every great campaign in history at his
+fingers' ends. I recollect one evening, when we had been talking of the
+Peninsular War, I ventured to spring on him the ancient schoolboy
+conundrum: "What lines are those, the most famous ever made by an
+Englishman, yet that are never quoted?" "Lines?" said he, "lines?"
+though I don't think he had ever heard the jest. "They must be the Lines
+of Torres Vedras." How well I remember the musical box that used to
+arouse me at seven in the morning, however late we had sat talking the
+night before!
+
+And that young lieutenant, of wealthy New York people, just arrived from
+West Point, who was sent by another commandant to report upon the
+condition of the natives at the village and who came back and reported
+the whole population in utter destitution and recommended the issue of
+free rations to them all! As a matter of fact, during the administration
+of this commanding officer, some sixteen or eighteen persons were put
+upon the list for gratuitous grub, and it took a written protest to get
+them off. For no one who has the welfare of the natives at heart can
+tolerate the notion of making them paupers; these who have always fended
+abundantly for themselves, and can entirely do so yet. With free rations
+there would be no more hunting, no more trapping, no more fishing; and a
+hardy, self-supporting race would sink at once to sloth and beggary and
+forget all that made men of them. If it were designed to destroy the
+Indian at a blow, here is an easy way to do it. Yet there are some,
+obsessed with the craze about what is called education, regarding it as
+an end in itself and not as a means to any end, who recommend this
+pauperising because it would permit the execution of a compulsory
+school-attendance law. Or is it a personal delusion of mine that esteems
+an honest, industrious, self-supporting Indian who cannot read and write
+English above one who can read and write English--and can do nothing
+else--and so separates me from many who are working amongst the natives?
+
+These days at the end of March, when the sun shines more than twelve
+hours in the twenty-four, are too long for the ordinary winter day's
+twenty-five miles or so, and yet not quite long enough, even if man and
+dogs could stand it, to double the stage; so that there is much daylight
+leisure at road-houses. One grows anxious, after four months on the
+trail, to be done with it; to draw as quickly as may be to one's
+"thawing-out" place. One even becomes a little impatient of the
+continual dog talk and mining talk of the road-houses, to which one has
+listened all the winter. On the other hand, the travelling is very
+pleasant and the going usually very good, so that one may often ride on
+the sled for long stretches.
+
+By river and portage--one portage that comes so finely down to the Yukon
+from a bench that there is pleasure in anticipating the view it
+affords--in two days we reached the Nation road-house, just below the
+mouth of the Nation River, a name that has always puzzled me. Here all
+night long the wolves howling around the carcass of a horse kept our
+dogs awake, and the whimpering of the dogs kept us awake. The country
+beyond the Yukon to the northeast, the large area included between the
+Yukon and the Porcupine, into which the Nation River offers passage, is
+one of the wildest and least known portions of Alaska, abounding in game
+and beasts of prey.
+
+[Sidenote: THE GLARE OF THE SUN]
+
+At the Charley River we visited the native village and held service and
+instruction as well as inadequate interpretation permitted. Round Coal
+Creek and Woodchopper Creek the scenery becomes bold and attractive, but
+we found, as usual, that as we pushed farther and farther down the river
+the snow was deeper and the going not so good. The sun grows very bright
+upon the snow these days of late March and early April. Even through
+heavily tinted glasses it inflames the eyes more or less, and a couple
+of hours without protection would bring snow-blindness. Bright days at
+this season are the only days in all the year when the camera shutter
+may be used at its full speed. When the sun comes out after a flurry of
+new snow in April, the light is many times greater than in midsummer.
+
+[Illustration: "A PORTAGE THAT COMES SO FINELY DOWN TO THE YUKON THAT
+THERE IS PLEASURE IN ANTICIPATING THE VIEW IT AFFORDS."]
+
+[Illustration: FORT YUKON.]
+
+We reached Circle in a day and a half from Woodchopper Creek, in time to
+spend Sunday there. Circle had not changed much in the five years that
+had elapsed since the first visit to it mentioned in these pages. The
+slender trellis of the wireless telegraph had added a prominent feature
+to its river bank; a few more empty cabins had been torn down for
+fire-wood. Here it was necessary to shoot the Great Dane pup we got at
+the Salchaket. His feet were still very sore and he quite useless for
+the next winter, while Doc was returned to me from Fairbanks, not
+much the worse for his severe frost-bite. Indian after Indian begged for
+the dog, but I had more regard for him than to turn him over to the
+tender mercies of an Indian. There are exceptional Indians, but for my
+part I would rather be a dead dog than an ordinary Indian's dog--so he
+died.
+
+There remained the seventy-five or eighty miles through the Yukon Flats
+to Fort Yukon--always the most dangerous stretch of the river, and at
+this season, when the winter's trail was beginning to break up,
+particularly so. It would be entirely practicable to cut a land trail
+that should not touch the river at all, or not at more than one point,
+between Circle and Fort Yukon, and such a portage besides removing all
+the danger would save perhaps twenty miles. In many places it was
+necessary for one of us to go ahead with an axe, constantly sounding and
+testing the ice. Here and there we made a circuit around open water into
+which the ice that bore the trail had collapsed bodily--one of them a
+particularly ugly place, with black water twenty feet deep running at
+six or seven miles an hour. I never pass this stretch of river without a
+feeling of gratitude that I am safely over it once more.
+
+[Sidenote: CAPTAIN AMUNDSEN]
+
+As we left the Halfway Island we passed an Indian from Fort Yukon going
+up the river with dogs and toboggan, and I chuckled, as I returned his
+very polite salutation and shook hands with him, at the success of the
+way he had been dealt with the previous fall, for he had been a
+particularly churlish fellow with an insolent manner. Six or seven
+years before he had been taken by Captain Amundsen, of the _Gjoa_, as
+guide along this stretch of the river. It will be remembered that when
+that skilful and fortunate navigator had reached Herschell Island from
+the east, he left his ship in winter quarters and made a rapid journey
+with Esquimaux across country to Fort Yukon expecting to find a
+telegraph station there from which he could send word of his success.
+But to his disappointment he found it necessary to go two hundred and
+thirty miles farther up the river to Eagle, before he could despatch his
+message. So he left his Esquimaux at Fort Yukon and took this Indian as
+guide. And in his modest and most interesting book he mentions the man's
+surliness and says he was glad to get rid of him at Circle.
+
+Some new outbreak of insolence for which he had been flung out of a
+store decided that he must be dealt with, and I sent for him, for the
+chief, the native minister, and the interpreter. With these assessors
+beside me, and Captain Amundsen's book open on the table, I spoke to the
+man of his general conduct and reputation. I read the derogatory remark
+about him in the book "printed for all the world to read," and told him
+that of all the people, white and native, the captain had met on his
+journeys, only one was spoken of harshly and he was the one. It made a
+great impression on the man. The chief and the native minister followed
+it up with their harangues, and the net result was a thorough change in
+his whole attitude and demeanour. He told us he felt the shame of being
+held up to the world as rude and impudent and would try to amend. He has
+tried so successfully that he is now one of the politest and most
+courteous Indians in the village, for which, if this should ever chance
+to reach Captain Amundsen's eye, I trust he will accept our thanks.
+
+Fort Yukon, where the headquarters of the archdeaconry of the Yukon are
+now fixed, grows in native population and importance. A new and sightly
+church, a new schoolhouse, a new two-story mission house, a medical
+missionary and a nurse in residence, as well as a native clergyman, mark
+the Indian metropolis of this region and perhaps of all interior Alaska.
+Self-government is fostered amongst the people by a village council
+elected annually, that settles native troubles and disputes and takes
+charge of movements for the general good, and of the relief of native
+poverty. The resident physician has been appointed justice of the peace
+and there is effort to enforce the law of the land at a place where
+every man has been a law unto himself. But it is a very slow and
+difficult matter to enforce law in this country at all, and more
+particularly at these remote points; and the class of white men who are
+to be found around native villages, many of whom "fear not God neither
+regard man," pursue their debauchery and deviltry long time unwhipped.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[F] I take pleasure in naming Mr. U. G. Myers as the United States
+commissioner in question and Mr. Jack Robinson as the deputy United
+States marshal, and I mention their names the more readily because Mr.
+Myers, after his long and excellent service, has just been removed for
+political reasons. (May, 1916.)
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+FROM THE TANANA RIVER TO THE KUSKOKWIM--THENCE TO THE IDITAROD MINING
+CAMP--THENCE TO THE YUKON, AND UP THAT RIVER TO FORT YUKON
+
+
+THE discovery of gold on the Innoko in the winter of 1906-7, and the
+"strike" on the Iditarod, a tributary of the Innoko, some three years
+later, opened up a new region of Alaska. It is characteristic of a gold
+discovery in a new district that it sets men feverishly to work
+prospecting all the adjacent country, and sends them as far afield from
+it as the new base of supplies will allow them to stretch their tether.
+A glance at the map will show that the Innoko and Iditarod country lies
+between the two great rivers of Alaska, the Yukon and the Kuskokwim,
+much lower down the Yukon than any of the earlier gold discoveries; that
+is to say that while the Tanana gold fields lie off the Middle Yukon,
+the Circle fields off the upper Yukon, the Iditarod camp belongs to the
+lower river. The Innoko workings were not extensive nor very rich, but
+they furnished a base for prospecting from which the Iditarod was
+reached, and Flat Creek, in the latter district, promised to be
+wonderfully rich. Immediately upon the news of this strike reaching the
+other camps of the interior, preparations were made far and wide for
+migrating thither upon the opening of Yukon navigation, and the early
+summer of 1910 saw a wild stampede to the Iditarod. Saloon-keepers,
+store-keepers, traders of all kinds, and the rag-tag and bobtail that
+always flock to a new camp were on the move so soon as the ice went out.
+From Dawson, from the Fortymile, from Circle, from Fairbanks, from the
+Koyukuk, and as soon as Bering Sea permitted, from Nome, all sorts of
+craft bore all sorts of people to the new Eldorado, while the first
+through steamboats from the outside were crowded with people from the
+Pacific coast eager to share in the opportunity of wealth. The
+sensational magazines had been printing article after article about "The
+incalculable riches of Alaska," and here were people hoping to pick some
+of it up. Iditarod City sprang into life as the largest "city" of the
+interior; the centre of gravity of the population of the interior of
+Alaska was shifted a thousand miles in a month.
+
+Iditarod City furnished a new and large base of supplies. Amidst the
+heterogeneous mass of humanity that swarmed into the place, though by no
+means the largest element in it, were experienced prospectors from every
+other district in Alaska. Under the iniquitous law that then prevailed
+and has only recently been modified, by which there was no limit at all
+to the number of claims in a district which one man could stake for
+himself and others, every creek adjacent to Flat Creek, every creek for
+many miles in every direction, had long since been tied up by the men
+with lead-pencils and hatchets. So the newly arrived prospectors must
+spread out yet wider, and they were soon scattered over all the rugged
+hundred miles between Iditarod City and the Kuskokwim River. Here and
+there they found prospects; and here and there what promised to be
+"pay." They started a new town, Georgetown, on the Kuskokwim itself;
+another town sprang up on the Takotna, a tributary of the Kuskokwim; and
+the great Commercial Company of Alaska, ever alert for new developments,
+put a steamboat on the Kuskokwim and built trading-posts at both these
+points. Thus the Kuskokwim country, which for long had been one of the
+least-known portions of Alaska, was opened up almost at a stroke.
+
+[Sidenote: CAMP AT 50° BELOW]
+
+It was my purpose to visit Iditarod City during the winter of 1910-11,
+although, by reason of the distance to be travelled, a journey thither
+would involve the omission of the customary winter visit to upper Yukon
+points. When the northern trip to the Koyukuk was returned from at
+Tanana, a sad journey had to be made to Nenana to bury the body of Miss
+Farthing, and Doctor Loomis, missionary physician at Tanana, who
+accompanied me on this errand, had almost as rough a breaking-in to the
+Alaska trail as we came back to Tanana again as Doctor Burke had in our
+journey over the "first ice" of the Koyukuk two years before. Two feet
+of new snow lay on the trail, and the thermometer went down to 60° below
+zero. We were camped once on the mail trail, unable to reach a
+road-house, at 50° below zero.
+
+[Illustration: THE ROUGH BREAKING IN OF DOCTOR LOOMIS, CAMPED ON THE
+MAIL TRAIL AT 50° BELOW ZERO, UNABLE TO REACH A ROAD-HOUSE FOR THE DEEP
+SNOW.]
+
+[Illustration: ESQUIMAUX OF THE UPPER KUSKOKWIM.]
+
+[Sidenote: THE ROUTE TO THE IDITAROD]
+
+From Tanana the beaten track to the Iditarod lay one hundred and sixty
+miles down the Yukon to Lewis's Landing, and then across country by the
+Lewis Cut-Off one hundred miles to Dishkaket on the Innoko, and
+thence across country another hundred miles to Iditarod City. But I
+designed to penetrate to the Iditarod by another route. I had long
+desired to visit Lake Minchúmina and its little band of Indians, and to
+pass through the upper Kuskokwim country. So I had engaged a Minchúmina
+Indian as a guide, and laid my course up the Tanana River to the
+Coschaket, and then due south across country to Lake Minchúmina and the
+upper Kuskokwim.
+
+The Cosna is a small stream confluent with the Tanana, about thirty
+miles above the mouth of that river, and we had hoped to reach it by the
+river trail upon the same day we left the mission at Tanana, the 18th of
+February, 1911. But the trail was too heavy and the going too slow and
+the start too late. When we had reached Fish Creek, about half-way, it
+was already growing dark, and we were glad to stop in a native cabin,
+where was an old widow woman with a blind daughter. The daughter,
+unmarried, had a little baby, and I inquired through Walter who the
+father was and whether the girl had willingly received the man or if he
+had taken advantage of her blindness. She named an unmarried Indian,
+known to me, and declared that she had not been consenting. It seemed a
+paltry and contemptible trick to take advantage of a fatherless blind
+girl. I baptized the baby and resolved to make the man marry the girl.
+
+The next night we reached the Coschaket, which, following the Indian
+rule, means "mouth of the Cosna," and found that our guide, Minchúmina
+John, had already relayed a load of grub that Walter had previously
+brought here from Tanana, one day's march upon our journey. Our course
+from the Coschaket left the Tanana River and struck across country by an
+old Indian trail that had not been used that winter. Through scrubby
+spruce and over frozen lakes and swamps, crossing the Cosna several
+times--a narrow little river with high steep banks--the trail went,
+until it brought us to a hunting camp of the Indians, about eighteen
+miles from the Coschaket. Here our stuff was cached and here we spent
+the night, doctoring the sick amongst them as well as we could. My eyes
+had been sorely tried this day despite dark smoked glasses, for we were
+travelling almost due south, and the sun was now some hours in the sky
+and yet low enough to shine right in one's face. So Walter stopped at a
+birch-tree, stripped some of the bark, and made an eye-shade that was a
+great comfort and relief.
+
+From this place began the slow work of double-tripping. The unbroken
+snow was too deep to permit the hauling of our increased load over it
+without a preliminary breaking out of a trail on snow-shoes. So camp was
+left standing and Walter and John went ahead all day and returned late
+at night with eight or nine miles of trail broken, while I stayed in
+camp and had dog feed cooked and supper ready. The next day we advanced
+the camp so far as the trail was broken. A moose had used the trail for
+some distance, however, since the boys left it, and his great plunging
+hoofs had torn up the snow worse than a horse would have done.
+
+A driving wind and heavy snowfall had drifted the new trail in the night
+so badly, moreover, that we were not able to cover the full stretch
+that had been snow-shoed, but camped in the dusk after we had gone eight
+miles. Eight miles in two days was certainly very poor travel, and at
+this rate our supplies would never take us down to the forks of the
+Kuskokwim. Yet there was no other way in which we could proceed. The
+weather was exceedingly mild, too mild for comfort--the thermometer
+ranging from 20° to 25° above--and the dogs felt the unseasonable
+warmth. It took us all that week to make the watershed between the
+drainage of the Tanana and the drainage of the Kuskokwim, a point about
+half-way to Lake Minchúmina. One day trail was broken, the next day the
+loads went forward. Tie the dogs as securely as one would, it was not
+safe to go off and leave our supplies exposed to the ravages that a
+broken chain or a slipped collar might bring, so two went forward and I
+sat down in camp. The boys on their return usually brought with them a
+few brace of ptarmigan or grouse or spruce hen or, at the least, a
+rabbit or so.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CAMP-ROBBERS]
+
+The camp-robbers, to my mind the most interesting of Alaskan birds,
+became very friendly and tame on these vigils. They stay in the country
+all the winter, when most birds have migrated, like prosperous mine
+owners, to less rigorous climates; they turn up everywhere, in the most
+mysterious way, so soon as one begins to make any preparation for
+camping, and they are bold and fearless and take all sorts of chances.
+On this journey more than once they alighted on a moving sled and pecked
+at the dried fish that happened to be exposed. Yet they are so alert and
+so quick in their movements that it would be difficult to catch them
+were they actually under one's hand. One of them, during a long day in
+camp, grew so tame that it pecked crumbs off the toe of my moccasin, and
+in another day or two would, one feels sure, have eaten out of the hand.
+There is a curious belief, strongly intrenched in the Alaskan mind, that
+the nest of this most common bird has never been found, and that the
+Smithsonian Institution has a standing offer of a large sum of money for
+the discovery. They build in the spruce-trees, ten or twelve feet above
+the ground, a nest of rough twigs, and lay five very small eggs, grey
+spotted with black. This, at any rate, is the description that Walter
+gives me of a nest he discovered with the bird sitting upon it, and I
+have found the boy's accounts of such matters entirely trustworthy. It
+is curious, however, that the nest of a bird so common all over Alaska
+as the camp-robber should be so rarely found. At times they are very
+mischievous and destructive, and the man who builds a careless cache
+will often be heard denouncing them, but to my mind a bird who gives us
+his enlivening company throughout the dead of an Alaskan winter deserves
+what pickings he can get.
+
+[Sidenote: SOFT WEATHER]
+
+On Saturday, the 25th of February, after climbing a rather stiff hill,
+we passed temporarily out of Yukon into Kuskokwim waters, for the
+tributaries of these two great drainage systems interlock in these
+hills. At the foot of the hill we stopped for lunch, a roaring fire was
+soon built, and a great cube of beaten snow impaled upon a stake was set
+up before the fire to drip into a pan for tea water, while the boys
+roasted rabbits. In a few hours more we were on the banks of one of the
+tributaries of the East Fork (properly the North Fork) of the Kuskokwim.
+Here, in an unoccupied native cabin, we made our camp and lay over
+Sunday, and here began the most remarkable spell of weather I have known
+in the interior at this season of the year. The thermometer rose to 37°
+and then to 40°; the snow everywhere was thawing, and presently it began
+to rain steadily. It was the first time I had seen a decided thaw in
+February, let alone rain.
+
+Next day the rain turned to snow, but since the thermometer still stood
+around 40°, the snow melted as it fell, and we were wet through all day.
+The snow underfoot, however, was so much less and so much harder that we
+were able to proceed without preliminary trail breaking. But it was a
+most disagreeable day and the prelude to a more disagreeable night.
+Soft, wet snow clings to everything it touches. The dogs are soon
+carrying an additional burden; balls of snow form on all projecting
+tufts of hair; masses of snow must continually be beaten off the sled.
+Every time a snow-shoe is lifted from the ground it lifts a few pounds
+of snow with it. One's moccasins and socks are soon wet through, and the
+feet, encased in this sodden cold covering, grow numb and stay so. We
+crossed a considerable mountain pass in driving snow, and should never
+have found the way without John, for much of it was above timber, and
+when it took us through woods the blazes on the trees were so bleached
+with age as to be difficult of recognition. The Indians have used this
+trail for generations; but few white men have ever passed along it.
+
+Wet snow, wet spruce boughs, wet tent, wet wood, wet clothing make poor
+camping. Water-proof equipment is so rarely needed on the winter trail
+that one does not bother with it. But the climate of the Kuskokwim
+valley is evidently different from that of the rest of the interior, if,
+as John said, such weather is not remarkable in these parts at this
+season. A third day was of much the same description; thawing and
+heavily snowing all day, the thermometer between 36° and 40°. The labour
+of going ahead of the teams and breaking trail, on the snow-shoes,
+through slush, grew so great that I relinquished it to John and took the
+handle-bars of his sled. We were approaching Lake Minchúmina, but the
+hills that led us into Yukon waters once more and should have given us
+views of the lake and the great mountains beyond gave nothing. It is a
+keen disappointment to be utterly denied great views, the expectation of
+which has been a support through long distances and fatigues.
+
+At noon we built a fire with considerable difficulty, but once it was
+started we plied it with fuel till we had a noble, roaring bonfire, and
+we hung our wet socks and moccasins and parkees and caps and mitts
+around it and stayed there until they were dry, though the resumption of
+our journey in the continuous melting snow soon wet everything through
+again.
+
+[Sidenote: LAKE MINCHÚMINA]
+
+At length, late in the evening of the 28th of February, we descended a
+long ridge and came upon the northeastern shore of Lake Minchúmina, one
+of the most considerable lakes of interior Alaska. It stretched its
+broad expanse away into the misty distance, the farther shore quite
+invisible, the snow driving slowly over it, and it looked as though we
+had stumbled by mistake upon the shores of the Arctic Ocean. There was
+no sort of trail upon it and the snow-shoes sank through the melting
+snow of its surface into the water that lay upon the ice and brought up
+a load of slush at every step; yet the going would have been still worse
+without them. The recollection of the six miles we trudged across that
+lake is a dismal recollection of utter fatigue, of mechanical lifting
+and falling of encumbered feet with the recurring feeling that it would
+be impossible to lift them any more. All across that lake I ate snow,
+and that and the back-ache legacy of an old strain are my signs of
+approaching exhaustion. Four hours passed ere we heard the noise of dogs
+and saw the glimmer of a light through the darkness, and the hearts of
+men and beasts alike leaped to the expectation of rest and shelter. We
+had feared the village might be deserted and were rejoiced that the
+Indians were still there.
+
+Never was hospitality more grateful than that we had from the little
+remote band of natives at the Minchúmina village. They made a pot of tea
+and fried some flap-jacks for us, and that was our supper, though I
+think the boys ate some boiled moose meat from a pot on the stove. We
+had plenty of grub, but were too weary to cook it; we spread our bedding
+down on the floor amongst a dozen others and fell almost at once into a
+deep sleep. Almost at once; for the arrival of our eight dogs had made a
+commotion amongst the canine population of the place, that after
+repeated outbreaks of noisy animosity and defiance seemed to turn by
+common consent into a friendly and most protracted howling contest in
+which my malamute "Muk" plainly outdid all competitors. How much longer
+the noise would have kept up it is hard to say--dogs never seem too
+tired to howl--but when the limit of Indian patience was reached, an
+aged crone rolled out of the bed into which she had rolled "all
+standing," seized a staff and went outdoors to lay it impartially upon
+the backs of all the disturbers of the peace, domestic and foreign, with
+a screech that was as formidable as the blows. The rest was silence.
+
+The next morning a dozen alarm-clocks went off within a few minutes of
+each other. Every adult in that cabin owned a separate alarm-clock, and
+rose, one supposes, to the summons of no other timepiece. At any rate,
+the clocks went off at intervals, and the natives arose one by one and
+seemed hugely to enjoy the clatter. Let one purchase a new thing and
+every individual in the community must have one also.
+
+But what struck me instantly upon arising was the miraculous
+transformation that had taken place outdoors. The sun was shining
+brilliantly through a clear sky! I hastened to dress and, not waiting
+for breakfast, seized my camera and started out. The chinook was over;
+the sharp, welcome tang of frost was in the air; the snow was hard
+underfoot. Out upon the gleaming surface of the lake I went for nigh a
+mile, resolutely refusing to look behind. I knew what vision awaited me
+when I turned around, had, indeed, caught a slight glimpse as I left the
+cabin, and I wanted the smooth, open foreground of the lake that I
+might see it to the best advantage.
+
+[Sidenote: DENALI AND HIS WIFE]
+
+There is probably no other view of North America's greatest mountain
+group comparable to that from Lake Minchúmina. From almost every other
+coign of vantage in the interior I had seen it and found it more or less
+unsatisfying. Only from distant points like the Pedro Dome or the summit
+between Rampart and Glen Gulch does the whole mass and uplift of it come
+into view with dignity and impressiveness. At close range the peaks seem
+stunted and inconspicuous, their rounded, retreating slopes lacking
+strong lines and decided character. But from the lake the precipitous
+western face of Denali and Denali's Wife rise sheer, revealed by the
+level foreground of the snow from base to summit. It was, indeed, a
+glorious scene. There stood the master peak, seeming a stupendous
+vertical wall of rock rising twenty thousand feet to a splendid sharp
+crest perhaps some forty or fifty miles away; there, a little farther to
+the south, rose the companion mass, a smaller but still enormous
+elevation of equally savage inaccessibility; while between them, near
+the base, little sharp peaks stretched like a corridor of ruined arches
+from mass to mass. One was struck at once by the simple appropriateness
+of the native names for these mountains. The master peak is Denali--the
+great one; the lesser peak is Denali's Wife; and the little peaks
+between are the children. And my indignation kindled at the substitution
+of modern names for these ancient mountain names bestowed immemorially
+by the original inhabitants of the land! Is it too late to strike Mount
+McKinley and Mount Foraker from the map? The names were given fifteen or
+sixteen years ago only, by one who saw them no nearer than a hundred
+miles. Is it too late to restore the native names contemptuously
+displaced?
+
+The majesty of the scene grew upon me as I gazed, and presently hand
+went to camera that some record of it might be attempted. But alas for
+the limitations of photography! I knew, even as I made the exposures,
+first at one one-hundredth of a second and then at one-fiftieth, that
+there was little hope of securing a picture; the air was yet faintly
+hazy with thin vapour; the early sun made too acute an angle with the
+peaks; and the yellow lens screen was left in the hind-sack of the sled.
+It was even as I feared. When developed some months later, the film held
+absolutely no trace of the mighty mountains that had risen so proudly
+before it. I promised myself that at noon, when the sun had removed to a
+greater distance from the mountains and made a more favourable angle
+with them, I would return and try again; but by noon had come another
+sudden, violent change of the weather, and snow was falling once more.
+
+[Sidenote: THE MINCHÚMINA FOLK]
+
+So I got no picture, save the picture indelibly impressed upon my
+memory, of the noblest mountain scene I had ever gazed upon which made
+memorable this 1st of March; perhaps one of the noblest mountain scenes
+in the whole world, for one does not recall another so great uplift from
+so low a base. The marshy, flat country that stretches from Minchúmina
+to the mountains cannot be much more than one thousand feet above the
+sea. Those awful precipices dropping thousands of feet at a leap, those
+peaks rising serene and everlasting into the highest heaven, the
+overwhelming size and strength and solidity of their rocky bulk, all
+this sank into my heart, and there sprang up once again the passionate
+desire of exploring the bowels of them, of creeping along their glaciers
+and up their icy ridges, of penetrating their hidden chambers, inviolate
+since the foundation of the world, and maybe scaling their ultimate
+summits and looking down upon all the earth even as they look down!
+
+Men, however, and not mountains, made the immediate demand upon one's
+interest and attention, and I returned to breakfast and the duties of
+the day. The Minchúmina people are a very feeble folk, some sixteen all
+told at the time of our visit, greatly reduced by the epidemics of the
+last decade, living remote from all others on the verge of their race's
+habitat. They trade chiefly at Tanana, a hundred and thirty miles or so
+away, walking an annual trip thither with their furs, and owning a
+nominal allegiance to our mission at that place. It was the first time
+that any clergyman had ever visited them, and the whole of the day was
+spent with them, discovering what they knew and trying to teach them a
+little more. The people sat around on the floor and hung upon the lips
+of the interpreter. But what a barrier a difference of language is! An
+interpreter is like a mountain pass, a means of access but at the cost
+of time and labour. He does not remove the obstruction. The Minchúmina
+people occupy a fine country that could amply support ten times the
+Indian population that now inhabits it. We were, indeed, now entering a
+country that has been almost depopulated by successive epidemics of
+contagious diseases. The measles in 1900 slew most of them, and
+diphtheria in 1906 destroyed all the children and many of the adults
+that remained. The chief of this little band wore a hat proudly adorned
+with ribbons and plumes, and flew a flag before his dwelling with the
+initials of the North American Trading and Transportation Company on
+it--a defunct Alaskan corporation. We could not learn the origin
+thereof; the flag and the letters were plainly home-made. It was
+probably a mere imitation of a flag he had seen years ago at Tanana,
+copied without knowledge of the meaning of the letters, as the Esquimaux
+often copy into the decoration of their clothing and equipment the
+legends from canned foods.
+
+Lake Minchúmina drains by a fork of the Kantishna River into the Tanana
+and so into the Yukon. Just beyond the southwestern edge of the lake
+runs a deep gully for perhaps a mile that leads to another lake called
+Tsórmina, which drains into Minchúmina. And just beyond Tsórmina is a
+little height of land, on the other side of which lies Lake Sishwóymina,
+which drains into the Kuskokwim. So that little height of land is
+another watershed between Alaska's two great rivers. Lakes Tsórmina and
+Sishwóymina are not on any maps; indeed, this region has never been
+mapped save very crudely from the distant flanks of Denali upon one of
+Alfred Brook's early bold journeys into the interior of Alaska on
+behalf of the Geological Survey. Although the Russians had
+establishments on the lower Kuskokwim seventy-five years ago, and the
+river is the second largest in Alaska and easy of navigation, yet the
+white man had penetrated very little into this country until the Innoko
+and Iditarod "strikes" of 1908 and 1909 respectively.
+
+It was our plan to follow the main valley of the Kuskokwim until the
+confluence of the Takotna with that stream, just below the junction of
+the main North and South Forks of the Kuskokwim, and then strike
+northwestward across country to the Iditarod.
+
+The snow had passed and the sun was bright and the thermometer around
+zero all day when we left Minchúmina to pursue our journey. The welcome
+change in the weather had brought a still more welcome change in travel.
+The decided and continued thaw followed by sharp cold had put a crust on
+the snow that would hold up the dogs and the sled and a man on small
+trail snow-shoes anywhere. Trail making was no longer necessary, and in
+two days we made upward of fifty miles. So much difference does surface
+make.
+
+[Sidenote: TALIDA]
+
+Across the end of Lake Minchúmina, across Tsórmina and Sishwóymina and a
+number of lesser lakes we went, following a faint show-shoe trail
+towards a distant mountain group to the southwest, the Talida Mountains,
+at the foot of which lay the Talida village. On the other hand, to the
+east and southeast, we had tantalising glimpses through haze and cloud
+of the two great mountains, and presently of the lesser peaks of the
+whole Alaskan range, sweeping its proud curve to the coast. For a long
+way on the second day we travelled on the flat top of a narrow ridge
+that must surely have been a lateral moraine of a glacier, what time the
+ice poured down from the heights and stretched far over this
+valley--then through scattered timber, increasing in size and thickness
+and already displaying character that differed somewhat from the
+familiar forests of the Yukon. The show-shoe trail we were following was
+made by a messenger despatched by the Minchúmina people to invite the
+Talida people to a potlatch; for the caches were filled with moose meat
+beyond local consumption. Early on the second day we met him returning
+and learned that he had gone on to yet another village a day's journey
+farther, still on our route.
+
+The people were all gone hunting from the tiny native hamlet of Talida,
+but we entered a cabin and made ourselves at home. We had passed into
+the region where the Greek Church holds nominal sway, of which the icons
+with little candles before them on the walls gave token. No priest ever
+visits them, but a native at a village on the south fork where is a
+church holds some position analogous to that of a lay reader. The
+nearest priest is a half-breed, ill spoken of for irregularity of life,
+some two hundred miles farther down the river. The Greek Church is
+relaxing its hold in Alaska, perhaps inevitably, and suffers sadly since
+the removal of the bishop from Sitka from lack of supervision. Also we
+had passed out of Indian country into the land of the Esquimaux, for
+these people, far up towards the head of the river as they were, had
+yet come at some period from the mouth. We were out of Walter's language
+range now, and were glad that the bilingual John of the march country
+was with us to serve as interpreter.
+
+Standing proudly up against the wall in one corner of the cabin was a
+rather pathetic object to my eyes--an elaborate gilt-handled silk
+umbrella. There needed no one to tell its story; it spoke of a visit to
+the Yukon with furs to sell and the usual foolish purchase of gay and
+glittering trash--novel and quite useless. What easy prey these poor
+people are to the wiles of the trader! Said one of them to me recently,
+when I asked the purpose of an "annex" to his store with a huge
+billiard-table in it--at an exclusive native village--"It's to get their
+money; there's no use trying to fool you; if we can't get it one way
+we've got to get it another." This gorgeous silk umbrella was concrete
+expression of the same sentiment. It was bought outside, it was brought
+into the country, it was set on exhibition in the store, because some
+trader judged it likely to attract a native eye. No one, white or
+native, uses an umbrella in interior Alaska.
+
+We made twenty-five miles the next day through a wide, open country,
+well wooded in places with a park-like distribution of trees, unwonted
+in our travels and attractive. A new species of spruce threw thick
+branches right down to the ground and tapered up to a perfect cone; each
+tree apart from the others and surrounded by sward instead of
+underbrush. There was a dignity about these trees that the common Yukon
+spruce never attains. Rolling hills of small elevation stretched on
+either hand and game signs abounded. After eight hours of such travel
+we spoke of camping, but presently saw footprints in the snow and pushed
+on to the bank of a little river, the Chedolothna, where stood a cabin,
+a tent, and several high caches. Here, with two families that occupied
+the cabin, we stayed the night.
+
+[Sidenote: MEASLES AND DIPHTHERIA]
+
+Six people at this place, six at Talida, sixteen at Minchúmina, make up
+all the population of a region perhaps a hundred and fifty miles square.
+Yet it is a noble Indian country, one of the most favourable in all the
+interior, capable of supporting hundreds of people. Signs, indeed, of a
+much larger occupation of it were not wanting, and all accounts speak of
+the wholesale destruction of the natives by disease. We were told of a
+village a little farther up this stream where every living being, save
+one old man, died of diphtheria five years previously, while those who
+have heard the stories of the horrors of the epidemic of measles in
+1900, usually connected in some way with the stampede to Nome of that
+year when the disease seems to have entered the country, will understand
+how a region once thickly peopled, for Alaska, has become the most
+thinly peopled in all the territory.
+
+A half-breed trader, long resident at a point perhaps two hundred miles
+lower down the Kuskokwim, told me of coming back to a populous village
+after an absence of a few weeks, to find every person dead and the
+starving dogs tearing at the rotting corpses. It is terrible to think
+what the irruption of a new disease may mean to these primitive natives.
+Even a disease like measles, rarely fatal and not commonly regarded as
+serious amongst whites, takes to itself a strange and awful virulence
+when it invades this virgin blood. The people know no proper treatment;
+maddened by the itching rash that covers the body, they fling off all
+cover, rush outdoors naked, whatever the weather, and either roll in the
+snow or plunge into the stream; with the result that the disease
+"strikes in" and kills them. Such is the description that is given of
+its course along the lower Yukon and Kuskokwim. At many a Yukon village
+half the people died, despite the aid the few missionaries then on the
+river could afford; upon the Kuskokwim the havoc seems to have been
+still greater. Six years later, death again stalked through this region
+after having visited the Yukon, and this time seized his victims by the
+throat. In another chapter has been given some account of an outbreak of
+diphtheria on the Chandalar, following a more serious epidemic at Circle
+City and Fort Yukon. It was during that same winter the disease raged in
+this region, remote from any sort of medical or even intelligent lay
+aid, and swept off all the children that had been spared by the measles
+or had been born since that time. At our next stopping-place we saw the
+graves of nineteen children who died in one day!
+
+[Sidenote: THE INDIAN GUIDE]
+
+We learned that we were now within one day's travel of a road-house, at
+or near the junction of the forks of the Kuskokwim, and that a
+government trail had been surveyed and staked from the Iditarod to the
+Sushitna, passing close to the same point, and that during the present
+winter road-houses had sprung up along the western portion of it, so
+that we should not have to make camp again on the way to Iditarod City.
+All of which Minchúmina John had collected from the people in the
+cabin, and now presented to me as reason why he should be released from
+further service. I was loath to let him go until we were actually _at_
+the road-house described, but he wanted to go back to the lake for the
+potlatch then preparing, and said that two days' delay would bar him
+from the best of the festivities.
+
+So I settled with him, giving him fifty dollars of the sixty dollars
+covenanted to the Iditarod, and grub enough to take him back to the
+lake, and a rifle, for he was unprovided with firearms, and he went his
+way back, richly content, to the gorging of unlimited moose meat that
+awaited him, and the boy and I went ours. So far as merely his company
+was concerned I was not sorry to lose him. The old saying holds good
+upon the trail that "two is company and three is none." He interfered
+with my boy's lessons. Since he had scarce any English, and could not be
+ignored, the conversation was mainly in Indian. In a word he pulled the
+company down to a native level. And I was anxious that Walter's
+education should proceed.
+
+This boy had been with me for two years, winter and summer, and it was a
+great pleasure to witness his gracious development of body, mind, and
+character. Clean-limbed, smooth-skinned, slender, and supple, his Indian
+blood showing chiefly in a slight swarth of complexion and aquilinity of
+feature, he now approached his twentieth year and began to gain the
+strength of his manhood and to give promise of more than the average
+stature and physical power. With only one full year's schooling behind
+him, the year before he came to me, his active intelligence had made
+such quick use of it that there was good foundation to build upon; and
+our desultory lessons in camp--reading aloud, writing from dictation,
+geography and history in such snippets as circumstances permitted--were
+eagerly made the most of, and his mental horizon broadened continually.
+Until his sixteenth year he had lived amongst the Indians almost
+exclusively and had little English and could not read nor write. He was
+adept in all wilderness arts. An axe, a rifle, a flaying knife, a skin
+needle with its sinew thread--with all these he was at home; he could
+construct a sled or a pair of snow-shoes, going to the woods for his
+birch, drying it and steaming it and bending it; and could pitch camp
+with all the native comforts and amenities as quickly as anybody I ever
+saw. He spoke the naked truth, and was so gentle and unobtrusive in
+manner that he was a welcome guest at the table of any mission we
+visited. Miss Farthing at Nenana had laid her mark deep upon him in the
+one year he was with her.
+
+[Sidenote: THE HALF-BREED]
+
+Before he came to me I had another half-breed for two years, and before
+that there had been a series of full-blooded native boys. I found the
+half-breed greatly preferable. With full command of the native language,
+with such insight into the native mind as few white men ever attain, he
+combines the white man's quickness of apprehension and desire for
+knowledge; and the companionship had been pleasant and profitable. Both
+these boys had picked up quickly and efficiently, without the slightest
+previous experience, the running and the care of the four-cylinder
+gasoline engine of the mission launch, and took a great and intelligent
+interest in all machinery. As an interpreter the half-breed is far
+superior to most full-bloods; he takes one's purport immediately; his
+mind seems to leap with the speaker's mind, not only to follow
+faithfully but to anticipate. And the further his English progresses, so
+much the more excellent interpreter does he become.
+
+My heart goes out to the large and rapidly increasing number of these
+youths of mixed blood in Alaska. It is common to hear them spoken of
+slightingly and contemptuously. There is what my mind always regards as
+a damnable epigram current in the country to the effect that the
+half-breed inherits the vices of both races and the virtues of neither.
+The white man who utters this saying with a chuckle at his second-hand
+wit has generally not much virtue to transmit, were virtue heritable.
+But to thoughtful men nowadays this talk of the inheritance of virtues
+and vices is mere folly. The half-breed in Alaska, as elsewhere, is the
+product of his environment. Often without legitimate father--although in
+an Indian community, where nothing is secret, his parentage is usually
+well known--he is left for some native woman to support with the aid of
+her native husband. He is reared with the full-blooded offspring of the
+couple in the frankness that knows no reserve and the intimacy that
+knows no restraint, of Indian life. The full extent of that frankness
+and intimacy shocks even the loosest-living white man when he first
+becomes aware of it. Where religion and decency have not been
+faithfully inculcated there is no bound to it at all--it is complete.
+Presently, as his superior intellectual inheritance begins to manifest
+itself, as he grows up into consciousness that he is different from, and
+in many ways superior to, the Indians around him, he is naturally drawn
+to such white society as comes his way.
+
+[Sidenote: THE LOW-DOWN WHITE]
+
+In this book a good deal has been said, and, it may be thought by the
+reader, said with a good deal of asperity, about the whites who frequent
+Indian communities and come most into contact with the native people;
+yet the more the author sees of this class, the less is he disposed to
+modify any of the strictures he has put upon it. "The Low-Down White" is
+the subject of one of the most powerful and scathing of Robert Service's
+ballads, those most unequal productions with their mixture of strength
+and feebleness, of true and forced notes, the best of which should
+certainly live amongst the scant literature of the North. And, indeed,
+the spectacle of the man of the higher race, with all the age-long
+traditions and habits of civilisation behind him, descending below the
+level of the savage, corrupting and debauching the savage and making
+this corrupting and debauching the sole exercise of his more intelligent
+and cultivated mind, is one that has aroused the disgust and indignation
+of whites in all quarters of the world. Kipling and Conrad have drawn
+him in the East; Robert Louis Stevenson in the South Sea Islands; any
+army officer will draw him for you in the Philippines, which lack as yet
+their great delineator; Service has not overdrawn him on the Yukon.
+
+Now, it is to this man's society, for lack of other white society open
+to him, that the young half-breed who feels his father's blood stirring
+within him is drawn and is made welcome. He finds standards even lower,
+because more sophisticated, than the standards of the Indians
+themselves. He finds that honesty and morality are a sham, religion a
+laughing-stock. He finds the chastity of women and the honour of men
+sneeringly regarded as non-existent. He is taught to curse and swear, to
+talk lewdly, to drink and gamble. He is taught that drunkenness and
+sensuality are the only enjoyments worth looking forward to, and he soon
+becomes as vile as his preceptors. The back room of the Indian trader's
+store is often the scene of this tuition--barroom, assignation house,
+gambling hell in one. But let that same youth be taken early in hand by
+one who has a care for him and will be at some personal pains to train
+him cleanly and uprightly, and he is as amenable to the good influences
+as he would be to the bad if they were his sole environment. Conscious
+all the time of his equivocal position, shy and timid about asserting
+himself amongst whites, he is easy prey to the viciously as he is apt
+pupil to the virtuously disposed.
+
+What is said here of the male half-breeds applies _a fortiori_ to the
+female. Unless early taken in hand by the missionary, or put under the
+protection of some church boarding-school--and sometimes despite all
+such care and teaching--the lot of the half-breed girl is a sad one; and
+some of the lowest and vilest women of the land are of mixed blood.
+
+The half-breed is assuredly to be reckoned with in the future of Alaska.
+He is here to stay. He is here in increasing numbers. He is the natural
+leader of the Indian population. There seems little doubt that when he
+cares to assert his rights he is already an American citizen, although
+judicial decisions are uncertain and conflicting in this matter.
+
+The missions in the interior have recognised, though perhaps somewhat
+tardily, the importance of the half-breeds, and have picked them up here
+and there along the rivers and become responsible for their decent
+rearing. Some, assuredly, of the future leaders of the native people are
+now in training at the mission schools. Some, unfortunately, are in
+quite as assiduous training by the unscrupulous Indian trader and his
+coterie of low-down whites.
+
+The skies had threatened snow since we arose, and when our diminished
+expedition was well upon its way the snow began to fall. For thirty-six
+hours it fell without cessation. Three days of good travel had put us
+forward seventy-five or eighty miles; now once more we were "up against"
+deep snow and trail breaking. An old native whom we met on his way to
+the potlatch later in the day spread out his hands with a look of
+despair and cried: "Good trail all lose'm!" All day we pushed on against
+the driving storm, the flakes stinging our faces and striking painfully
+against our eyeballs, now following a narrow steep woodland trail, now
+awhile along a creek bed, now across open country with increasing
+difficulty in finding our way, until it grew dark while yet we were
+some miles from our destination, and we made camp; and all night long
+the heavy snow continued.
+
+So soon as we had struck our tent, crusted with ice, and had broken up
+our wet camp next morning there was trouble about finding the trail.
+Wide open spaces with never an indication of direction stretched before
+us. Again and again we cast about, the boy to the left, I to the right,
+to find some blaze or mark, but much of the course lay across open
+country that bore none. And then I sorely regretted having let John go
+back. Some miles before we came to a stop the previous evening, we
+passed a native encampment with naught but women and children in it--the
+men gone hunting. But we could not speak with them or get any
+information from them, for our Kuskokwim interpreter was gone. And now
+it seemed likely that we should lose our way in this wilderness. At last
+we were entirely at a loss, the boy returning on the one side and I on
+the other from wide detours, in which we had found no sign at all. The
+snow still fell heavily; there lay more than a foot of it upon the late
+crust; trail or sign of a trail, on the snow or above it, was not at
+all.
+
+[Sidenote: THE DOG GUIDES]
+
+Then occurred one of the most remarkable things I have known in all my
+journeyings. Straight ahead in the middle distance I spied two stray
+dogs making a direct course towards us; not wandering about, but
+evidently going somewhere. Now there are no such things as unattached
+dogs in Alaska; any dog entirely detached from human ownership and some
+sort of human maintenance would soon be a dead dog. The explanation,
+full of hope, sprang at once to the boy's mind. The dogs must belong to
+the native encampment some six miles back, and they had been to the
+road-house for what scraps they could pick up, and were returning. It
+was probably a daily excursion and they had doubtless followed their
+accustomed trail. So it turned out. All the way to that road-house,
+eight miles farther, we followed the trail left by those dogs, growing
+fainter and fainter indeed as the new snow fell upon it, but still
+discernible until we had almost reached the road-house. It led across
+open swampy wastes, and presently across two considerable lakes, over
+which we should never have been able to find our way, for the trail
+swung to one hand or the other and did not leave the lake in the same
+general direction by which it had reached it. Walter cut a bundle of
+boughs and staked the trail out as we pursued it, lest we should return
+this way, but from the moment we saw the dogs there was never any
+question about the trail; they kept it perfectly. We were four and a
+half hours making the eight miles or so to Nicoli's Village and the
+road-house, but we might have been days making it but for those dogs.
+And at the road-house we learned that the boy's theory of their
+movements was the right one. They came across the twelve or fourteen
+miles every day for such scraps as they could pick up.
+
+[Sidenote: THE WILDERNESS POET]
+
+So here was our first white man in sixteen days, an intelligent man of
+meagre education, with a great bent for versifying. A courteous approval
+of one set of verse brought upon us the accumulated output of years in
+the wilderness without much opportunity of audience, as one supposes,
+and most of the afternoon and evening was thus spent. Amidst the
+overwrought sentimentality and faulty scansion which marked most of the
+pieces was one simple little poem that struck a true note, said its
+little say, and quit--without a superfluous word. Its author set no
+store by it at all compared with his more pretentious and meretricious
+work; yet it was the one poem in the whole mass. It described the
+writing of a letter to his father; he had spent all he had in
+prospecting and working a small claim, and had just realised that a
+year's labour was gone for naught. His father would worry if he got no
+word at all, but there was no use telling the old man he was broke, so
+he just wrote that he was well, and that was all. The old man would come
+pretty near understanding anyway. In simple lines that scanned and
+rhymed naturally, that was what the three or four stanzas said. And it
+was so typical of many a man's situation in this country, gave so simply
+and well the reason why many men cease writing to their relatives at
+all, that it pleased me and seemed of value. That note came from the
+heart and from the life's experience.
+
+Nicoli's Village is a very small place with a mere handful of people,
+situated on the South Fork of the Kuskokwim some forty miles by river
+above the junction of the forks. Before the epidemics devastated it it
+had been a considerable native community. A Greek church, which the
+natives built entirely themselves, and which boasted a large painted
+icon of sorts, was the most important building in the place, and was
+served by the lay minister referred to before. Thus far the Kuskokwim
+is navigable for vessels of light draught, and a small stern-wheel
+steamboat lay wintering upon the bank.
+
+[Sidenote: ROAD-HOUSES]
+
+Our way now left the Kuskokwim and struck across country to a point just
+below the junction of the forks, and then across country again to a
+tributary of the right bank, the Takotna; with a general northerly
+direction. Road-houses there indeed were, in the crudity and discomfort
+of their first season, and other evidences of the proximity of the white
+man. Here were two men camped, hunting moose for the Iditarod market,
+more than a hundred and twenty-five miles away, and here, at the end of
+the second day, near the mouth of the Takotna, was the new post of the
+Commercial Company in the charge of an old acquaintance who welcomed us
+warmly and entertained us most hospitably. After camping and road-house
+experience of nearly three weeks, a comfortable bed and well-spread
+table, and the general unmistakable ménage of a home-making woman are
+very highly enjoyed. That night the whole population of the settlement,
+fourteen persons, gathered in the store for Divine service.
+
+Sixteen miles farther on was another settlement, the "Upper Takotna"
+Post, with a rival company established and some larger population. Here,
+also, we spent a night with old Fairbanks acquaintances. We were yet a
+hundred miles from Iditarod City, and the trail lay over a very rugged,
+hilly country, up one creek to its head, over a divide, and down
+another, in the way of the usual cross-country traverse.
+
+There had not been so much snowfall in this section, but the weather
+began to be very severe. The thermometer fell to -45° and -50° and -55°
+on three successive nights, and all day long rose not above -20°, with a
+keen wind. The cost of transporting supplies to the road-houses on this
+trail justified the high prices charged--one dollar and a half for a
+poor meal of rabbits and beans and bacon, or ptarmigan and beans and
+bacon, and one dollar for a lunch of coffee, bread and butter, and dried
+fruit. But no such exigency could be pleaded to excuse the dirt and
+discomfort and lack of the commonest provision of outhouse decency at
+most of these places--'twas mere shiftlessness. There is not often much
+middle ground in Alaskan road-houses; they are either very good in their
+way or very bad; either kept by professional victuallers who take pride
+in them or by idle incompetents who make an easy living out of the
+necessities of travellers. One wishes that some of the old-time
+travellers who used to wax so eloquently indignant over the inns in the
+Pyrenees could make a winter journey in the interior of Alaska.
+
+[Illustration: "THE 'SUMMIT' IS HIGH ABOVE TIMBER-LINE AND THE TRAIL
+PURSUES A HOGBACK RIDGE FOR A MILE AND A HALF AT THE SUMMIT LEVEL."]
+
+[Illustration: A STREET IN IDITAROD CITY.]
+
+One thing pleased me at these road-houses. The only reading-matter in
+any of them consisted of magazines bearing the rubber stamp of Saint
+Matthew's Reading-Room at Fairbanks, part of a five-hundred-pound cargo
+of magazines which the mission launch _Pelican_ brought to the Iditarod
+the previous summer; virtually the only reading-matter in the whole
+camp. It was pleasant to know that we had been able to avert the real
+calamity of a total absence of anything to read for a whole winter
+throughout this wide district. But, although they were brought to the
+Iditarod and distributed absolutely free, each of these magazines had
+cost the road-house keeper twenty-five cents for carriage over the trail
+from Iditarod City, and they had been read to death. Some of them were
+so black and greasy from continued handling that the print at the edges
+of the pages was almost unreadable.
+
+These creeks swarmed with ptarmigan, and it was well they did, for the
+new camp was ill supplied with food, and we found ourselves in a region
+of growing scarcity as we approached the Iditarod. The ptarmigan seem to
+have supplemented the meagre stocks in the Iditarod during this winter
+of 1910-11 as effectively as the rabbits did in the Fairbanks camp in
+the scarce winter of 1904-5. In place after place the whole creek
+valley, where it was open, was crisscrossed with ptarmigan tracks, and
+the birds rose in coveys, uttering their harsh, guttural cry at every
+turn of the trail.
+
+The summit between the head of Moose Creek and the head of Bonanza Creek
+is again a watershed between the waters of the Kuskokwim and the waters
+of the Yukon; for Moose Creek is tributary to the Takotna and Bonanza
+Creek is tributary to Otter Creek, which is tributary to the Iditarod
+River. The "summit" is high above timber-line, and when the trail has
+reached it it does not descend immediately but pursues a hogback ridge
+for a mile and a half at about the summit level. We passed over it in
+clear, bright weather without difficulty, but it would be a bad passage
+in wind or snow or fog. The rugged, broken country, with small, rounded
+domes of hills, stretched away in all directions, a maze of little
+valleys threading in and out amongst them.
+
+[Sidenote: PLACE-NAMES]
+
+The Bonanza Creek road-house was by far the best of any between the
+Kuskokwim and the Iditarod, and showed what can be done for comfort,
+even under adverse circumstances, by a couple who care and try. But how
+the names of gold-bearing creeks, or creeks that are expected to be
+gold-bearing are repeated again and again in every new camp! I once
+counted up the following list of mining place-names in Alaska: Bonanza
+Creeks, 10; Eldorados and Little Eldorados, 10; Nugget Creeks or
+Gulches, 17; Gold Creeks, 12; Gold Runs, 7. Nor is it only in creeks
+with auriferous deposit or expectation of auriferous deposit that this
+reduplication occurs; there are Bear Creeks, 16; Boulder Creeks, 13;
+Moose Creeks, 13; Willow Creeks, 17; Canyon Creeks, 12; Glacier Creeks,
+14.
+
+The imagination of the average prospector is not his most active
+faculty, but even when his imagination is given play and he names a
+place "Twilight," as he did the original settlement at this base of
+supplies, the ineradicable prose of trade comes along the next summer
+and changes it to "Iditarod City." There must have been some remarkable
+personality strong enough to repress the "chamber of commerce" at
+Tombstone, Arizona, or the place would have lost its distinctive name so
+soon as it grew large enough to have mercantile establishments instead
+of stores.
+
+[Sidenote: IDITAROD CITY]
+
+We went through "Discovery Otter" and into "Flat City," on Flat Creek,
+the jealous rival of Iditarod City, and so over the hills to Iditarod
+City, on the wings of a storm. The wind whirled the snow behind us and
+drove the sled along almost on top of the dogs. In its bleak situation
+and its exposure to the full force of the wind, Iditarod City reminds
+one of Nome or Candle on the Seward Peninsula. The hills and flats that
+surround it are in the main treeless, and the snow drifts and drives
+over everything. Almost all the week that we spent in the town it was
+smothered up in a howling wind-storm, so that it was quite a serious
+undertaking to walk a block or two along the streets. Deep drifts were
+piled up on all the corners and on the lee side of all buildings. We
+reached Iditarod City on Monday, the 13th of March. Until the following
+Friday morning was no cessation or moderation of the wind-storm; and
+this, they told us, represented most of the weather since the 1st of
+January.
+
+Overgrown and overdone in every way, the place presented all the
+features, sordid and otherwise, of a raw mining town. Prices had risen
+enormously on all manner of supplies, for everything that was not
+actually "short" was believed to be "cornered." Bacon was ninety cents a
+pound; butter one dollar and a half a pound; flour was twenty dollars a
+hundred pounds, and most things in like ratio. Some said the grub was
+not in the camp; others that the tradesmen had it cached away waiting
+for the still higher prices they believed would obtain before fresh
+supplies could arrive in July. There was a general feeling of
+disappointment and discouragement, enhanced by discomfort and actual
+suffering from the terrible stormy weather of the winter and the
+exorbitant and growing price of provisions. Many men without occupation
+were living on one meal a day. The saloons and the parasitical classes,
+male and female, seemed to flourish and to play their usual prominent
+part in the life of such places. The doings of notorious women whose
+sobriquets seemed household words, the lavish expenditures of certain
+men upon them, the presents of diamonds they received, with the amount
+paid for them, constituted a large part of the general talk.
+
+One is compelled to admire the vigour and enthusiastic enterprise,
+daunted by no difficulty, that is displayed in the wonderfully rapid
+upraising of a new mining-camp town. The building goes far ahead of the
+known wealth of the camp and commonly far ahead of the reasonable
+expectation. But the element of chance is so important a factor in
+placer mining that the whole thing partakes more of the nature of
+gambling than of a commercial venture. Any new camp may suddenly present
+the world with a new Klondike; with riches abundant and to spare for
+every one who is fortunate enough to be on the spot. Here was Flat Creek
+with a surprisingly rich deposit; why should there not be a dozen such
+amidst the multitudinous creeks of the district? How could any one know
+that it would be almost the only creek on which pay would be found at
+all? For there is no law about the distribution of gold deposits; there
+is not even a general rule that has not its notable exceptions. It is
+very generally believed by the old prospectors and miners that somewhere
+in the Bible may be found these words, "Silver occurs in veins, but gold
+is where you find it," which of course, is a mere misreading or faulty
+remembering of a verse in the Book of Job: "Surely there is a vein for
+the silver and a place for the gold where they fine it" (refine it). But
+that "gold is where you find it" is about the only law touching
+auriferous deposits that holds universally good.
+
+Three long parallel streets of one and two story wooden buildings, with
+cross streets connecting them, made up the town. Because the country is
+poorly timbered, the usual log construction had yielded in the main to
+framed buildings, and great quantities of lumber had been brought the
+previous summer from Fairbanks, and even from Nome and the outside, to
+supplement the low-grade output of two local mills. But the price of
+building materials had been very high, and the average dwelling was very
+small and incommodious. People accustomed to the comparative luxury of
+the older camps had suffered a good deal from the lack of all domestic
+conveniences in this new will-o'-the-wisp of an eldorado.
+
+So there the town stretched away, lumber and paper,--the usual
+tinder-box Alaskan construction--stores slap up against one another,
+with no alleyways between; in the busiest part of it and along the
+water-front even an adequate provision of side streets grudged;
+furnace-heated and kiln-dried and gasoline-lit; waiting for the careless
+match and the fanning wind and the five minutes' start that should send
+it all up in smoke. A week after we left it came; as it came to Dawson,
+as it came to Nome, as it came to Fairbanks, without teaching any lesson
+or leaving any precautionary regulations on the statute book to save
+men from their own competitive greed. Two or three weeks after the fire,
+however, it was all rebuilt, and a plunging local bank held mortgages on
+most of the structures for the cost of the new material--and holds them
+yet.
+
+[Sidenote: THOUSANDS WITHOUT CHURCH]
+
+With at least a thousand people resident in the town, not to mention the
+thousands more out upon the creeks and at Flat City and "Discovery[G]
+Otter," there was no minister of religion of any sort in the whole
+region, nor had public Divine service been conducted since the occasion
+of the _Pelican's_ visit the previous summer. Yet there were many in the
+place who sorely missed the opportunities of worship. Twice on Sunday
+the largest dancing hall in the town was crowded at service; at night it
+could have been filled a second time with those unable to get in.
+
+Places like this present very difficult problems to those desirous of
+providing for their religious need. To occupy them at all they should be
+occupied at once when yet eligible sites may be had for the staking; if
+they prosper, to come into them later means buying at a high price. Yet
+what seventh son of a seventh son shall have foresight enough to tell
+the fortunes of them? The North is strewn with "cities" of one winter.
+Nor is the selection of suitable men to minister to such communities a
+simple matter. Amidst the overthrow of all the usual criteria of
+conduct, the fading out of the usual dividing lines and the blending
+into one another of the usual divisions, it requires a tactful and
+prudent man "to keep the happy mean between too much stiffness in
+refusing and to much easiness in admitting" variations from conventional
+standards. His point of view, if he is to have any influence whatever,
+must not exclude the point of view of the great majority; he must accept
+the situation in order to have any chance of improving the situation.
+And yet in the fundamentals of character and conduct he must be
+unswerving. And if on any such fundamental the battle gauge is thrown
+down, he must take it up and fight the quarrel out at whatever cost.
+
+We left Iditarod City on Monday, the 20th of March, the dogs the fatter
+and fresher for their week's rest, resolved not to return by the
+Kuskokwim but to take the beaten trail out to the Yukon, and so all the
+way up that stream to Fort Yukon. The monthly mail had arrived a few
+days previously--a monthly mail was all that the thousands of men in
+this camp could secure--and had gone out again the very next morning,
+before people had time to answer their letters, before the registered
+mail had even been delivered. So our departure for the Yukon was eagerly
+seized upon and advertised as a means of despatching probably the last
+mail that would go outside over the ice. I was sworn in as special
+carrier, and a heavy sack of first-class mail added to our load as far
+as Tanana. The first stage of thirty miles led to Dikeman, a town at the
+headwaters of ordinary steamboat navigation of the Iditarod River, at
+which the Commercial Company had built a depot and extensive warehouse,
+since in the main abandoned. Two streets of cabins lined the bank, but
+forty or fifty souls comprised the population, and almost all of them
+gathered for Divine service that night.
+
+[Sidenote: THE "MOVING OF THE MEAT"]
+
+From Dikeman to Dishkaket, on the Innoko River, a distance of some
+seventy miles, our route lay over one of the dreariest and most dismal
+regions in all Alaska. It is one succession of lakes and swamps, with
+narrow, almost knife-edge, ridges between, fringed with stunted spruce.
+Far as the eye could reach to right and left the country was the same;
+it is safe to say broadly that all the land between the Iditarod and
+Innoko Rivers is of this character. We passed over it in mild weather,
+but it must be a terrible country to cross in storm or through deep
+snow. For ten miles at a stretch there was scarcely a place where a man
+might make a decent camp. At a midway road-house was gathered the
+greatest assemblage of dogs and loaded sleds I had ever seen together at
+one time, each team with an Indian driver; they must have covered a
+quarter or a third of a mile. It was a freight train engaged in
+transporting a whole boat-load of butcher's meat to Iditarod City, the
+cargo of a steamboat that had frozen in on the Yukon the previous
+October or early November. All the winter through efforts had been made
+to get this meat two hundred odd miles overland to its destination; but
+the weather had been so stormy and the snow so deep that near the end of
+March most of it was still on the way, and some yet far down the trail
+towards the Yukon waiting for another trip of the teams.
+
+Dishkaket was merely a native village on the Innoko River two or three
+years before; but since three new trails from the Yukon come together
+here--from Kaltag Nulato, and Lewis's Landing--and in the other
+directions two trails branch off here, to the Innoko diggings at Ophir
+and to the Iditarod, a store or two and a couple of road-houses had
+sprung up.
+
+From Dishkaket, after crossing the Innoko, we took the most northerly of
+the three trails to the Yukon, the Lewis Cut-Off, a trail of a hundred
+miles that strikes straight across country and reaches the Yukon eighty
+miles farther up that stream than the Nulato trail and a hundred and
+twenty miles farther up than the Kaltag trail. The Kaltag trail is the
+trail to Nome; the Nulato trail is the mail trail simply because it
+suits the contractors to throw business to Nulato. The Lewis Cut-Off is
+the direct route, the shortest by about a hundred miles, but it was cut
+by the private individual whose name it bears, and leads out to his
+store and road-house on the Yukon; so a rival road-house was built close
+by on the river and the prestige and advertisement of the "United States
+mail route" thrown to the trail that covers one hundred unnecessary
+miles--for no other reason than to deprive Lewis of the legitimate fruit
+of his enterprise.
+
+The character of the country changed so soon as the Innoko was crossed;
+the wide swamps gave place to a broken, light-timbered country of ridges
+and hollows, and the rough, laborious, horse-ruined trail across it made
+bad travelling. "Buckskin Bill," with his cayuses, was also engaged in
+"moving the meat." The measured miles, moreover, gave place to estimated
+miles, and the nominal twenty-five we made the first day was probably
+not much more than twenty.
+
+[Sidenote: MILLINERY]
+
+The first fifty miles of the country between the Innoko and the Yukon is
+much the same, and we were climbing and descending ridges for a couple
+of days. Then we crossed a high ridge and dropped out of Innoko waters
+into the valley of the Yukatna, a tributary of the Yukon, and passed
+down this valley for thirty or forty miles, and then across some more
+broken country to the Yukon. At one of the road-houses a woman was
+stopping, going in with three or four large sled loads of millinery and
+"ladies' furnishings." We were told that the merchandise had cost her
+twelve thousand dollars in Fairbanks, and that she expected to realise
+thirty thousand dollars by selling it to the "sporting" women of the
+Iditarod, now a whole winter debarred from "the latest imported French
+fashions." This woman was dressed in overalls, like a man, and the
+drivers of her teams, two white men and a native, cursed and swore and
+used filthy language to the dogs in her presence. It always angers me to
+hear an Indian curse; to hear one curse in the presence of a white woman
+was particularly disgusting and exasperating; but what could one expect
+when the white men put no slightest restraint upon themselves and the
+woman seemed utterly indifferent? I called the Indian aside and spoke
+very plainly to him, and he ceased his ribaldry; but the white men still
+poured it out as they struggled to hitch their many dogs. At last I
+could stand it no longer. "Madam," I said to the woman, "I don't know
+who you are, save that you are a white woman, and as a white woman,
+if I were you, I would make those blackguards treat me with more respect
+than to use such language before me." She flushed and made no reply. The
+men, who heard what I said, scowled and made no reply. Presently
+dispositions were done and the train moved off, but I did not hear any
+more foul language. This is set down here chiefly because it was the
+first and only time in all his travels in Alaska that the writer heard
+such language in such presence.
+
+[Illustration: THE END OF THE PORTAGE TRAIL.]
+
+[Illustration: ROUGH ICE ON THE YUKON.]
+
+Another road-house was kept by a man who had been cook upon a recent
+arctic expedition off the coast of Alaska, and he gave some interesting
+inside information about an enterprise the published narrative of which
+had always seemed unsatisfactory. It was just gossip from a drunken
+scamp, but it filled several gaps in the book.
+
+As we approached the Yukon we passed several meat caches where great
+quarters of beef sewn up in burlap were piled on the side of the trail.
+At one of these caches the camp-robbers had been at work industriously.
+They had stripped the burlap from parts of several quarters, exposing
+the fat, and had dug out and carried it away little by little until it
+was all gone. The hard-frozen lean probably defied their best efforts;
+at any rate, the fat offered less resistance. But where else in the
+world could men dump quarters of beef beside the road and go off and
+leave them for weeks with no more danger of depredation than the bills
+of birds can effect?
+
+A few miles from the river the rival road-house signs began to appear.
+"Patronise Lewis; he cut this trail at his own expense," pleaded one.
+"Why go five miles out of your way," sneered another. Lewis's
+road-house _is_ across the wide Yukon, and there was no point in
+crossing the river save one's determination to lend no countenance to
+the spitefulness of these mail runners. So across the river we went and
+were glad to be on the Yukon again. The next morning we encountered the
+same rival signs at the point where the trail from Lewis's joined the
+"mail trail."
+
+[Sidenote: "TREASURE ISLAND"]
+
+Most of our travelling was now upon the surface of the Yukon, and four
+hundred and fifty miles of it stretched ahead of us ere our winter's
+travel should end at Fort Yukon. Four hours brought us to the military
+telegraph station at Melozi, and we were able to send word ahead that we
+were safely out of the Kuskokwim wilderness. Then a portage was crossed
+and then the river pursued again until with about thirty miles to our
+credit we made camp. The days were lengthening out now, the weather
+growing mild, although a keen, cold, down-river breeze was rarely
+absent, and travel began to be pleasant and camping no hardship. We
+preferred camping, on several scores, when the day's work had not been
+too arduous, chief amongst them being that it gave more opportunity and
+privacy for Walter's schooling. He was reading _Treasure Island_ aloud,
+and I was getting as great pleasure from renewing as he from beginning
+an acquaintance with that prince of all pirate stories. Kokrines and
+Mouse Point one day, the next The Birches; we passed these well-known
+Yukon landmarks, camping, after a run of thirty-eight miles, some six
+miles beyond the last-named place, with a run of forty-four miles before
+us to Tanana. I judged it too much; but the trail was greatly improved
+and we decided to attempt it in one stage. A misreading of the watch, so
+that I roused myself and Walter at 3.30 A. M. instead of 5.15 A. M., and
+did not realise the mistake until the fire was made and it was not worth
+while returning to bed, gave us a fine start and we made good progress.
+Gold Mountain (so called, one supposes, because there is no gold there;
+there is no other reason), Grant Creek, "Old Station" were passed by,
+and at length Tanana loomed before us while yet ten miles away. In just
+eleven hours we ran the forty-four miles, making, with three additional
+miles out to the mission, forty-seven altogether, by far the longest
+journey of the winter. We reached Tanana on the 1st of April, just six
+weeks since we left.
+
+[Sidenote: AN UNTRAVELLED RIVER]
+
+We spent eight days at Tanana, including two Sundays, Passion Sunday and
+Palm Sunday, but I was under an old promise to spend Easter there also.
+Now, Easter, 1911, fell on the 16th of April, and for the
+three-hundred-mile journey to Fort Yukon a period of ten or twelve days
+at the least would be necessary, that might easily stretch to two weeks.
+Travelling on the Yukon ice so late in April as this would involve was
+not only fraught with great difficulty and discomfort, but also with
+actual danger, and I had to beg to be absolved of my promise. Some
+considerable preparation was on foot for the festival, and I was loath
+to leave, for Tanana was then without any resident minister, but it
+seemed foolish to take the chances that would have to be taken if we
+stayed.
+
+Five days of almost ceaseless snow-storm during our stay at Tanana did
+not give prospect of good travelling, and, indeed, when we pulled out
+from the mission on the Monday in Holy Week there was no sign of any
+trail. From Tanana up to Fort Yukon there is very little travel; since
+the whole of this long stretch of river was deprived of winter mail a
+year or two before, no through travel at all. Cabins may usually be
+found to camp in, but there are no road-houses. What travel still takes
+place is local.
+
+The journey divided itself into two roughly equal parts, a hundred and
+fifty miles through the Lower Ramparts, and a hundred and fifty miles
+through the Yukon Flats, almost all of it on the surface of the river.
+It was hoped to reach Stephen's Village, a native settlement just within
+the second half of the journey, for Easter.
+
+Snow does not lie long at rest upon the river within the Ramparts, and
+particularly within the narrow, cañon-like stretch of seventy-five miles
+from Tanana to Rampart City. Violent and almost ceaseless down-stream
+winds sweep the deep defile in the mountains through which the river
+winds its course. In places the ice is bare of snow; in places the snow
+is piled in huge, hardened drifts. So strong and so persistent is this
+wind that it is often possible to skate over an uninterrupted black
+surface of ice, polished like plate glass, for twenty miles on a
+down-river journey. To make way over such a surface up-stream, against
+such wind, is, however, almost impossible. The dogs get no footing and
+the wind carries the sled where it listeth. The journey so far as
+Rampart City has been described before; it will suffice now that it
+took three days of toilsome battling against wind and bad surface, with
+nights spent upon the floor of grimy cabins. So cold was the wind that
+it is noted in my diary with surprise, on the 12th of April, that I had
+worn fur cap, parkee, and muffler all day, as though it had been the
+dead of winter instead of three weeks past the vernal equinox.
+
+On Wednesday night there was Divine service at Rampart, and on Maundy
+Thursday, after four miles upon the river, we took the portage of eleven
+miles that cuts a chord to the arc of the greatest bend of the river
+within the Ramparts and so saves nine miles. Three miles more took us to
+the deserted cabin at the site of the abandoned coal-mine opposite the
+mouth of the Mike Hess River, here confluent with the Yukon, and in that
+cabin we spent the night, having had the high, bitter wind in our faces
+all day. We hated to leave the shelter of the wooded portage and face
+the blast of the last three miles.
+
+[Sidenote: WIND AND SNOW]
+
+We woke the next morning to a veritable gale of wind and snow, and lay
+in the cabin till noon, occupied with the exercises of the solemn
+anniversary. The wind having then abated somewhat and the snow ceased,
+we sallied forth, still hopeful of making Stephen's Village for Easter.
+But when we got down upon the river surface it became doubtful if we
+could proceed, and as we turned the first bend we encountered a fresh
+gale that did not fall short of a blizzard. The air was filled with
+flying snow that stung our faces and blinded us. The dogs' muzzles
+became incrusted with snow and their eyes filled with it so that it was
+hard to keep them facing it. I could not see the boy at all when he was
+a hundred feet ahead of the team. We struggled along for four miles,
+and, since it was then evident that we could not go much farther without
+useless risk, we turned to a spot on the bank where Walter knew another
+deserted cabin to stand; for he knows every foot of this section of the
+river and once spent a summer, camped at the coal-mine, fishing. The
+spot was reached, but the cabin was gone. The fish rack still stood
+there, but the cabin was burned down. There was nothing for it but to
+return to the coal-mine cabin; so, for the first and only time in all my
+journeyings, it was necessary to abandon a day's march that had been
+entered upon and go back whence we had come. We ran before the gale at
+great speed and were within the cabin again by 2.30 P. M. All the
+evening and all night the storm raged, and I was in two minds about
+running back to Rampart before it for Easter, since it was now out of
+the question to reach Stephen's Village. If the season had not been so
+far advanced this is what I should have done, but it would set us back
+three days more on the journey, and on reflection I was not willing to
+take that chance with the break-up so near.
+
+So on the morning of Easter Eve we sallied up-stream again, snow falling
+and driving heavily, and the wind still strong but with yesterday's keen
+edge blunted. By the time we had beaten around the long bend up which we
+had fought our way the day before, the snow had ceased, and by noon the
+wind had dropped and the sun was shining, and in a few moments of his
+unobscured strength all the loose snow on the sled was melted--a
+warning of the rapidity with which the general thaw would proceed once
+the skies were clear. That night saw us in the habitable though dirty,
+deserted cabin at Salt Creek (so called, one supposes, because the water
+of it is perfectly fresh) at which we had hoped to lodge the previous
+night.
+
+[Sidenote: ALASKAN "FORTS"]
+
+Buoyed by the hope of doing a double stage in a clear, windless day and
+thus reaching Stephen's Village for service at night, we made a very
+early start that beautiful Easter morning. But it was not to be. Such
+trail as there was ran high up on the bank ice--level, doubtless, when
+it was made much earlier in the season, but now at a slope towards the
+middle of the river through the falling of the water, and seamed with
+great cracks. Such a trail, called a "sidling" trail in the vernacular
+of mushing, is always difficult and laborious to travel, for the sled
+slips continually off it into the loose snow or the ice cracks, and
+often for long stretches at a time one man must hold up the nose of the
+sled while the other toils at the handle-bars. In one place, while thus
+holding the front of the sled on the trail, Walter slipped into an ugly
+ice crack concealed by drifted snow, and so wedged his foot that I had
+difficulty in extricating him. The last two bends of the river within
+the Ramparts seemed interminable and it was 6.30 P. M., with twelve
+hours' travel behind us, when we reached old Fort Hamlin, on the verge
+of the Yukon Flats. These "forts," it might be explained, if one chose
+to pursue the elucidation of Alaskan nomenclature in the same strain,
+are so called because they never had any defences and never needed any.
+As a matter of fact, in the early days, when the Hudson Bay Company
+made its first establishments on the upper river, there was supposed to
+be some need of fortification, and Fort Selkirk and Fort Yukon were
+stockaded. Fort Selkirk, indeed, was sacked and burned sixty years ago,
+but not by Yukon Indians. The Chilkats from the coast, indignant at the
+loss of their middle-man profits by the invasion of the interior,
+crossed the mountains, descended the river, and destroyed the post. It
+thus became customary to call a trading-post a "fort," and every little
+point where a store and a warehouse stood was so dignified. Hence Fort
+Reliance, Fort Hamlin, Fort Adams.
+
+For years Fort Hamlin had been quite deserted, but now smoke issued from
+the stovepipe and dogs gave tongue at our approach, and we found a white
+man with an Esquimau wife from Saint Michael and a half-breed child
+dwelling there and carrying a few goods for sale. With him we made our
+lodging, and with him and his family said our evening service of Easter,
+and so to bed, thoroughly tired.
+
+[Sidenote: TRAVELLING BY NIGHT]
+
+A mile beyond Fort Hamlin the Ramparts suddenly cease and the wide
+expanse of the Yukon Flats opens at once. Ten miles or so brought us to
+Stephen's Village, where we had been long expected and where a very busy
+day was spent. A number of Indians were gathered and there were children
+to baptize and couples to marry, as well as the lesson of the season to
+teach. It was a great disappointment that we had been unable to get here
+before, and matter of regret that, being here at such labour, only so
+short a time could be spent. But the closing season called to us
+loudly. A mild, warm day set all the banks running with melting snow and
+made the surface of the river mushy. There was really no time to lose,
+for the next seventy-five miles was to give us the most difficult and
+disagreeable travelling of the journey. Here, in the Flats, where is
+greatest need of travel direction on the whole river, was no trail at
+all beyond part of the first day's journey. Within the Ramparts the
+river is confined in one channel; however bad the travelling may be,
+there is no danger of losing the way; but in the Flats the river divides
+into many wide channels and these lead off into many more back sloughs,
+with low, timbered banks and no salient landmarks at all. Behind us were
+the bluffs of the Ramparts, already growing faint; afar off on the
+horizon, to the right, were the dim shapes of the Beaver Mountains. All
+the rest was level for a couple of hundred miles.
+
+A local trail to a neighbouring wood-chopper's took us some twelve
+miles, and then we were at a loss. The general direction we knew, and
+previous journeys both in winter and summer gave us some notion of the
+river bends to follow, but we wallowed and floundered until late at
+night before we reached the cabin we were bound for, the snow exceeding
+soft and wet for hours in the middle of the day.
+
+The time had plainly come to change our day travel into night travel,
+for freezing was resumed each night after the sun was set, and the
+surface grew hard again. So at this cabin we lay all the next day, with
+an interesting recluse of these parts who knows many passages of
+Shakespeare by heart, and who drew us a chart of our course to the next
+habitation, marking every bend to be followed and the place where the
+river must be crossed. But there is always difficulty in getting a new
+travel schedule under way, and we did not leave until five in the
+morning instead of at two as we had planned. This gave us insufficient
+time to make the day's march before the sun softened the snow, and
+moccasins grew wet, and snow-shoe strings began to stretch, and the
+webbing underfoot to yield and sag--and we had to content ourselves with
+half a stage. By nine P. M. we were off again and did pretty well until
+the night grew so dark that we could no longer distinguish our
+landmarks. Then we went to the bank and built a big fire and made a pot
+of tea and sat and dozed around it for a couple of hours or so until the
+brief darkness of Alaskan spring was overpast, and the dawn began to
+give light enough to see our way again.
+
+When our course lay on the open river, the snow had crust enough to hold
+us upon our snow-shoes; but when it took us through little sheltered
+sloughs, the crust was too thin and we broke through all the time, and
+that makes slow, painful travel. At last we came to a portage that cuts
+off a number of miles, but the snow slope by which the top of the bank
+should be reached had a southern exposure and was entirely melted and
+gone. The dogs had to be unhitched, the sled to be unloaded, the stuff
+packed in repeated journeys up the steep bank, and the sled hauled up
+with a rope. Then came the repacking and reloading and the rehitching;
+and when the portage was crossed the same thing had to be done to get
+down to the river bed again. Twice more on that day the process was gone
+through, and each time it took nigh an hour to get up the bank, so that
+it was around noon, and the snow miserably wet and mushy again, when we
+reached Beaver and went to bed at the only road-house between Fort Yukon
+and Tanana.
+
+"Beaver City" owes its existence to quartz prospects in the Chandalar,
+in which men of money and influence in the East were interested. The
+Alaska Road Commission had built a trail some years before from the
+Chandalar diggings out to the Yukon, striking the river at this point,
+and on the opposite side of the river another trail is projected and
+"swamped out" direct to Fairbanks. The opening up of this route was
+expected to bring much travel through Beaver, and a town site was staked
+and many cabins built. But "Chandalar quartz" remains an interesting
+prospect, and the Chandalar placers have not proved productive, and all
+but a few of the cabins at "Beaver City" are unoccupied. If "the
+Chandalar" should ever make good, "Beaver City" will be its river port.
+
+[Sidenote: LAST DAY]
+
+We left Beaver at eleven P. M. on Friday night, hoping in two long
+all-night runs to cover the eighty miles and reach Fort Yukon by Sunday
+morning. Here was the first trail since we left Stephen's Village and
+the first fairly good trail since we left Tanana, for there had been
+some recent travel between Fort Yukon and Beaver. Here for the first
+time we had no need of snow-shoes, and when they have been worn
+virtually all the winter through and nigh a couple of thousand miles
+travelled in them, walking is strange at first in the naked moccasin. It
+is a blessed relief, however, to be rid of even the lightest of trail
+snow-shoes. We stepped out gaily into a beautiful clear night, with a
+sharp tang of frost in the air, and even the dogs rejoiced in the
+knowledge that the end of the journey was at hand. All night long we
+made good time and kept it up without a stop until eight o'clock in the
+morning, when we reached an inhabited but just then unoccupied cabin and
+ate supper or breakfast as one chooses to call it and went to bed,
+having covered fully half the distance to Fort Yukon. About noon we were
+rudely awakened by one of the usual Alaskan accompaniments of
+approaching summer. The heat of the sun was melting the snow above us,
+and water came trickling through the dirt roof upon our bed. We moved to
+a dry part of the cabin and slept again until the evening, and at nine
+P. M. entered upon what we hoped would be our last run.
+
+But once more our plans to spend Sunday were frustrated. The trail led
+through dry sloughs from which the advancing thaw had removed the snow
+in great patches. Sometimes the sled had to be hauled over bare sand;
+sometimes wide detours had to be made to avoid such sand; sometimes
+pools of open water covered with only that night's ice lay across our
+path. By eight o'clock in the morning we estimated that we were not more
+than seven or eight miles from Fort Yukon. But already the snow grew
+soft and our feet wet, and the dogs were very weary with the eleven
+hours' mushing. It would take a long time and much toil to plough
+through slush, even that seven or eight miles. So I gave the word to
+stop, and we made an open-air camp on a sunny bank, and after breakfast
+we covered our heads in the blankets from the glare of the sun, and
+slept till five. Then we ate our last trail meal, and were washed up and
+packed up and hitched up an hour and more before the snow was frozen
+enough for travel. A couple of hours' run took us to Fort Yukon, and so
+ended the winter journey of 1910-11, on the 23d of April, having been
+started on the 17th of November. We were back none too soon. Every day
+we should have found travelling decidedly worse. In a few more days the
+river would have begun to open in places, and only the middle would be
+safe for travel, with streams of water against either bank and no way of
+getting ashore. Seventeen days later the ice was gone out and the Yukon
+flowing bank full.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[G] The "claim" on a creek on which gold is first found is called
+"Discovery"; the claims above are numbered one, two, three, etc.,
+"above" and the claims below, one, two, three, etc., "below."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE NATIVES OF ALASKA
+
+
+WHEN one contemplates the native people of the interior of Alaska in the
+mass, when, with the stories told by the old men and old women of the
+days before they saw the white man in mind, one reconstructs that
+primitive life, lacking any of the implements, the conveniences, the
+alleviations of civilisation, the chief feeling that arises is a feeling
+of admiration and respect.
+
+What a hardy people they must have been! How successfully for untold
+generations did they pit themselves against the rigour of this most
+inhospitable climate! With no tool but the stone-axe and the flint
+knife, with no weapon but the bow and arrow and spear, with no material
+for fish nets but root fibres, or for fish-hooks or needles but bone,
+and with no means of fire making save two dry sticks--one wonders at the
+skill and patient endurance that rendered subsistence possible at all.
+And there follows quickly upon such wonder a hot flush of indignation
+that, after so conquering their savage environment or accommodating
+themselves to it, that they not only held their own but increased
+throughout the land, they should be threatened with a wanton
+extermination now that the resources of civilisation are opened to them,
+now that tools and weapons and the knowledge of easier and more
+comfortable ways of life are available.
+
+The natives of the interior are of two races, the Indian and the
+Esquimau. The Indian inhabits the valley of the Yukon down to within
+three or four hundred miles of its mouth; the Esquimau occupies the
+lower reaches of the Yukon and the Kuskokwim and the whole of the rivers
+that drain into the Arctic Ocean west and north. These inland Esquimaux
+are of the same race as the coast Esquimaux and constitute an
+interesting people, of whom something has been said in the account of
+journeys through their country.
+
+[Sidenote: THE ATHABASCANS]
+
+The Indians of the interior are of one general stock, the Athabascan, as
+it is called, and of two main languages derived from a common root but
+differing as much perhaps as Spanish and Portuguese. The language of the
+upper Yukon (and by this term in these pages is meant the upper American
+Yukon) is almost identical with the language of the lower Mackenzie,
+from which region, doubtless, these people came, and with it have always
+maintained intercourse. The theory of the Asiatic origin of the natives
+of interior Alaska has always seemed fanciful and far-fetched to the
+writer. The same translations of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer
+serve for the lower Mackenzie and the upper Yukon and are in active use
+to-day through all that wide region, despite minor dialectical
+variations.
+
+Near the lower ramparts of the Yukon, at Stephen's Village, the language
+changes and the new tongue maintains itself, though with continually
+increasing dialectical differences, until the Indians overlap the
+Esquimaux, six hundred miles farther down.
+
+Fort Yukon is the most populous place on the river, and the last place
+on the river, where the upper language, or Takhud, is spoken. A stretch
+of one hundred and fifty miles separates it from the next native
+village, and the inhabitants of that village are not intelligible to the
+Fort Yukon Indians--an unintelligibility which seems to speak of long
+ages of little intercourse.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The history of the migrations of the Indians from the Athabascan or
+Mackenzie region is impossible to trace now. It is highly probable that
+the movement was by way of the Porcupine River. And it would seem that
+there must have been two distinct migrations: one that passed down the
+Yukon to the Tanana district and spread thence up the Tanana River and
+up the Koyukuk; and long after, as one supposes, a migration that
+peopled the upper Yukon. A portion of this last migration must have gone
+across country to the Ketchumstock and the upper Tanana, for the
+inhabitants of the upper Tanana do not speak the Tanana tongue, which is
+the tongue of the Middle Yukon but a variant of the tongue of the upper
+Yukon.
+
+[Illustration: A DOCILE FOLK, EAGER FOR INSTRUCTION.]
+
+[Illustration: THE MISSION TYPE.]
+
+[Illustration: WILD AND SHY.]
+
+How long ago these migrations took place there is not the slightest
+knowledge to base even a surmise upon. The natives themselves have no
+records nor even traditions, and the first point of contact between
+white men and the natives of the interior is within three quarters of a
+century ago. It may have been two or three families only which
+penetrated to this region or to that and settled there, and what
+pressure started them on their wanderings no one will ever know. Perhaps
+some venturesome hunter pursuing his game across the highlands that
+separate the Mackenzie from the Yukon was disabled and compelled to
+remain until the summer, and then discovered the salmon that made their
+way up the tributaries of the Porcupine. The Mackenzie has no salmon. Or
+a local tribal quarrel may have sent fugitives over the divide.
+
+When first the white man came to the upper Yukon, in 1846 and 1847, no
+one knew that it was the same river at the mouth of which the Russians
+had built Redoubt Saint Michael ten or twelve years before. The natives
+of the upper river knew nothing about the lower river. It is an easy
+matter to float down the Yukon for a thousand miles in a birch-bark
+canoe, but an exceedingly difficult matter to come up again. It was not
+until the voyageurs of the Hudson Bay Company, in their adventurous
+fur-trading expeditions, met at the mouth of the Tanana River the agents
+of the Russian Fur Company, come up from Nulato on the same quest, that
+the identity of the Yukon and Kwikpak Rivers was discovered; and that
+seems to have been well past the middle of the century. In the map of
+North America that the writer first used at school, the Yukon flowed
+north into the Arctic Ocean, parallel with the Mackenzie.
+
+[Sidenote: AN INOFFENSIVE PEOPLE]
+
+The Indians of the interior of Alaska are a gentle and kindly and
+tractable people. They have old traditions of bloody tribal warfare that
+have grown in ferocity, one supposes, with the lapse of time, for it is
+very difficult for one who knows them to believe that so mild a race
+could ever have been pugnacious or bloodthirsty. Whether it were that
+the exigencies of subsistence under arctic conditions demanded almost
+all their energies, or that a realisation of their constant dependence
+upon one another checked the play of passion, they differ most widely
+and, it seems certain, always differed most widely in character from the
+Indians of the American plains. A personal knowledge of the greater part
+of all the natives of interior Alaska, gained by living amongst them and
+travelling from village to village during seven or eight years,
+furnishes but a single instance of an Indian man guilty of any sort of
+violence against another Indian or against a white man--except under the
+influence of liquor.
+
+It is true that there are unquestioned murders that have been
+committed--murders of white men at that; but in the sixty years from the
+Nulato massacre of 1851, over the whole vast interior, these crimes can
+be counted on the fingers of one hand. They are not a revengeful people.
+They do not cherish the memory of injuries and await opportunities of
+repayment; that trait is foreign to their character. On the contrary,
+they are exceedingly placable and bear no malice. Moreover, they are
+very submissive, even to the point of being imposed upon. In fact, they
+are decidedly a timid people in the matter of personal encounter. In all
+these characteristics they differ from the North American Indian
+generally as he appears in history.
+
+They are capable of hard work, though apparently not of continuous hard
+work; they will cheerfully support great privation and fatigue; but
+when the immediate necessity is past they enjoy long periods of feasting
+and leisure. Having no property nor desire of property, save their
+clothes, their implements and weapons, and the rude furnishings of their
+cabins, there is no incentive to hard and continuous work.
+
+After all, where is the high and peculiar virtue that lies in the
+performance of continuous hard work? Why should any one labour
+incessantly? This is the question the Indian would ask, and one is not
+always sure that the mills of Massachusetts and the coal-mines of
+Pennsylvania return an entirely satisfactory answer. As regards thrift,
+the Indian knows little of it; but the average white man of the country
+does not know much more. There is little difference as regards thrift
+between wasting one's substance in a "potlatch," which is a feast for
+all comers, and wasting it in drunkenness, which is a feast for the
+liquor sellers, save that one is barbarous and the other civilised, as
+the terms go.
+
+It would seem that the general timidity of the native character is the
+reason for a very general untruthfulness, though there one must speak
+with qualification and exception. There are Indians whose word may be
+taken as unhesitatingly as the word of any white man, and there are
+white men in the country whose word carries no more assurance than the
+word of any Indian. The Indian is prone to evasion and quibbling rather
+than to downright lying, though there are many who are utterly
+unreliable and untrustworthy.
+
+[Sidenote: SEXUAL MORALITY]
+
+In the matter of sexual morality the Indian standards are very low,
+though certainly not any lower than the standards of the average white
+man in the country. One is forced to this constant comparison; the white
+man in the country is the only white man the Indian knows anything
+about. To the Indian a physical act is merely a physical act; all down
+his generations there has been no moral connotation therewith, and it is
+hard to change the point of view of ages when it affects personal
+indulgence so profoundly. The white man has been taught, down as many
+ages, perhaps, that these physical acts have moral connotation and are
+illicit when divorced therefrom, yet he is as careless and immoral in
+this country as the Indian is careless and _un_moral. And the white
+man's careless and immoral conduct is the chief obstacle which those who
+would engraft upon the Indian the moral consciousness must contend
+against.
+
+The Indian woman is not chaste because the Indian man does not demand
+chastity of her, does not set any special value upon her chastity as
+such. And the example of the chastity which the white man demands of his
+women, though he be not chaste himself, is an example with which the
+native of Alaska has not come much into contact. Too often, in the
+vicinity of mining camps, the white women who are most in evidence are
+of another class.
+
+[Sidenote: GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS]
+
+The Indian is commonly intelligent and teachable, and in most cases
+eager to learn and eager that his children may learn. Here it becomes
+necessary to deal with a difficult and somewhat contentious matter that
+one would rather let alone. The government has undertaken the education
+of the Indian, and has set up a bureau charged with the establishment
+and conduct of native schools.
+
+There are five such schools on the Yukon between Eagle and Tanana,
+including these two points, amongst Indians all of whom belong to the
+Episcopal Church, and five more between Tanana and Anvik, amongst
+natives divided in allegiance between the Episcopal and the Roman
+Catholic Churches. Below Anvik to the river's mouth the natives are
+divided between the Roman and the Greek Churches, and they are outside
+the scope of this book. On the tributaries of the Yukon the only native
+schools are conducted by the missions of the Episcopal Church, on the
+Koyukuk and Tanana Rivers, and have no connection with the government.
+
+When, somewhat late in the day, the government set its hand to the
+education of the natives, mission schools had been conducted for many
+years at the five stations of the Episcopal Church above Tanana and at
+the various mission stations below that point. The Bureau of Education
+professed its earnest purpose of working in harmony with the mission
+authorities, and upon this profession it secured deeds of gift for
+government school sites within the mission reservations from the Bishop
+of Alaska.
+
+It cannot be stated, upon a survey of the last five or six years, that
+this profession has been carried out. The administration of the Bureau
+of Education has shared too much the common fault of other departments
+of the government in a detached and lofty, not to say supercilious,
+attitude. Things are not necessarily right because a government bureau
+orders them, nor are government officials invested with superior wisdom
+merely by reason of their connection with Washington. It is just as
+important for a government school as for a mission school to be in
+harmony with its environment, to adapt itself to the needs of the people
+it designs to serve; and that harmony and adaptation may only be secured
+by a single-minded study of the situation and of the habits and
+character, the occupations and resources of the people.
+
+To keep a school in session when the population of a village is gone on
+its necessary occasions of hunting or trapping, and to have the annual
+recess when all the population is returned again, is folly, whoever
+orders it, in accord with what time-honoured routine soever, and this
+has not infrequently been done. Moreover, it is folly to fail to
+recognise that the apprenticeship of an Indian boy to the arts by which
+he must make a living, the arts of hunting and trapping, is more
+important than schooling, however important the latter may be, and that
+any talk--and there has been loud talk--of a compulsory education law
+which shall compel such boys to be in school at times when they should
+be off in the wilds with their parents, is worse than mere folly, and
+would, if carried out, be a fatal blunder. If such boys grow up
+incompetent to make a living out of the surrounding wilderness, whence
+shall their living come?
+
+The next step would be the issuing of rations, and that would mean the
+ultimate degradation and extinction of the natives. When the question is
+stated in its baldest terms, is the writer perverse and barbarous and
+uncivilised if he avow his belief that a race of hardy, peaceful,
+independent, self-supporting illiterates is of more value and worthy of
+more respect than a race of literate paupers? Be it remembered also that
+many of these "illiterates" can read the Bible in their own tongue and
+can make written communication with one another in the same--very
+scornful as the officials of the bureau have been about such attainment.
+One grows a little impatient sometimes when a high official at
+Washington writes in response to a request for permission to use a
+school building _after_ school hours, for a class of instruction in the
+native Bible, that the law requires that all instruction in the school
+be in the English language, and that it is against the policy of
+Congress to use public money for religious instruction! When the
+thermometer drops to 50° below zero and stays there for a couple of
+weeks, it is an expensive matter to heat a church for a Bible class
+three times a week--and the schoolhouse is already cosy and warm.
+
+But the question does not reduce itself to the bald terms referred to
+above; by proper advantage of times and seasons the Indian boy may have
+all the English education that will be of any service to him, and may
+yet serve his apprenticeship in the indispensable wilderness arts. And,
+given a kindly and competent teacher, there is no need of any sort of
+compulsion to bring Indian boys and girls to school when they are within
+reach of it.
+
+The Indian school problem is not an easy one in the sense that it can be
+solved by issuing rules and regulations at Washington, but it can be
+solved by sympathetic study and by the careful selection of intelligent,
+cultured teachers.
+
+After all, this last is the most important requisite. Too often it is
+assumed that any one can teach ignorant youth: and women with no culture
+at all, or with none beyond the bald "pedagogy" of a low-grade
+schoolroom, have been sent to Alaska. There have, indeed, been notable
+exceptions; there have been some very valuable and capable teachers, and
+with such there has never been friction at the missions, but glad
+co-operation.
+
+The situation shows signs of improvement; there are signs of withdrawal
+from its detached and supercilious attitude on the part of the bureau,
+signs which are very welcome to those connected with the missions. For
+the best interest of the native demands that the two agencies at work
+for his good work heartily and sympathetically together. The missions
+can do without the government--did do without it for many years, though
+glad of the government's aid in carrying the burden of the schools--but
+the government cannot do without the missions; and if the missions were
+forced to the re-establishment of their own schools, there would be
+empty benches in the schools of the government.
+
+[Sidenote: THE THREAT OF EXTINCTION]
+
+That the Indian race of interior Alaska is threatened with extinction,
+there is unhappily little room to doubt; and that the threat may be
+averted is the hope and labour of the missionaries amongst them. At most
+places where vital statistics are kept the death-rate exceeds the
+birth-rate, though it is sometimes very difficult to secure accurate
+statistics and to be sure that they always cover the same ground. The
+natives wander; within certain territorial limits they wander widely.
+Whenever a child is born it is certain that if it lives long enough it
+will be brought to a mission to be baptized, but a death often occurs at
+some isolated camp that is not reported till long after, and may escape
+registration altogether.
+
+Certain diseases that have played havoc in the past are not much feared
+now. For the last seven years supplies of the diphtheritic antitoxin
+have been kept at all the missions of the Episcopal Church, and in the
+summer of 1911, when there was an outbreak of smallpox at Porcupine
+River, almost every Indian of interior Alaska was vaccinated, mainly by
+the mission staffs. Diphtheria has been a dreadful scourge. The valley
+of the upper Kuskokwim was almost depopulated by it in 1906. A disease
+resembling measles took half the population of the lower Yukon villages
+in 1900. In the last few years there have been no serious epidemics; but
+epidemic disease does not constitute the chief danger that threatens the
+native.
+
+[Sidenote: DWELLING AND CLOTHING]
+
+That chief danger looms from two things: tuberculosis and whisky.
+Whether tuberculosis is a disease indigenous to these parts, or whether
+it was introduced with the white man, has been disputed and would be
+difficult of determination. Probably it was always present amongst the
+natives; the old ones declare that it was; but the changed conditions of
+their lives have certainly much aggravated it. They lived much more in
+the open when they had no tree-felling tool but a stone-axe and did not
+build cabins. The winter residence in those days was, it is true, a
+dark, half-underground hut covered with earth and poles, but the time of
+residence therein was much shorter; the skin tent sheltered them most of
+the year. Indeed, some tribes, such as the Chandalar, lived in their
+skin tents the year round. Now an ill-ventilated and very commonly
+overcrowded cabin shelters them most of the year. It is true that the
+cabins are constantly improving and the standard of living within them
+is constantly rising. The process is slow, despite all urgings and
+warnings, and overcrowding and lack of ventilation still prevail.
+
+[Illustration: THE NATIVE COMMUNICANT.]
+
+[Illustration: RAW MATERIAL.]
+
+Perhaps as great a cause of the spread of tuberculosis is the change in
+clothing. The original native was clad in skins, which are the warmest
+clothing in the world. Moose hide or caribou hide garments, tanned and
+smoked, are impervious to the wind, and a parkee of muskrat or squirrel,
+or, as was not uncommon in the old days, of marten, or one of caribou
+tanned with the hair on, with boots of this last material, give all the
+warmth that exposure to the coldest weather requires. Nowadays fur
+garments of any sort are not usual amongst the natives. There is a
+market, at an ever-growing price, for all the furs they can procure. A
+law has, indeed, gone recently into effect prohibiting the sale of
+beaver for a term of years, and already beaver coats and caps begin to
+appear again amongst the people. It would be an excellent, wise thing,
+worthy of a government that takes a fatherly interest in very childlike
+folks, to make this law permanent. If it were fit to prohibit the
+sale of beaver pelts for a term of years to protect the beaver, surely
+it would be proper to perpetuate the enactment to protect the Indian. It
+would mean warm clothing for man, woman, and child.
+
+[Illustration: AN ESQUIMAU YOUTH.]
+
+[Illustration: A HALF-BREED INDIAN.]
+
+[Sidenote: THE INDIAN TRADER]
+
+The Indian usually sells all his furs and then turns round and buys
+manufactured clothing from the trader at a fancy price. That clothing is
+almost always cotton and shoddy. Genuine woollens are not to be found in
+the Indian trader's stock at all, and in whatever guise it may
+masquerade, and by whatever alias it may pass, the native wear is
+cotton. Yet there is no country in the world where it is more
+imperative, for the preservation of health, that wool be worn.
+
+However much fur the Indian may catch and sell, he is always poor. He is
+paid in trade, not in cash; and when the merchant has bought the
+Indian's catch of fur he straightway spreads out before him an alluring
+display of goods specially manufactured for native trade. Here are
+brilliant cotton velvets and sateens and tinselled muslins and gay
+ribbons that take the eye of his women folk; here are trays of Brummagem
+knickknacks, brass watches, and rings set with coloured glass, gorgeous
+celluloid hair combs, mirrors with elaborate, gilded frames, and brass
+lamps with "hand-painted" shades and dangling lustres; here are German
+accordions and mouth-organs and all sorts of pocket-knives and
+alarm-clocks--the greatest collection of glittering and noisy trash that
+can be imagined, bought at so much a dozen and retailed, usually, at
+about the same price for one. And when the Indian has done his trading
+the trader has most of his money back again.
+
+The news that an Indian has caught a black fox, the most exciting item
+of news that ever flies around a native village, does not give any great
+pleasure to one who is acquainted with native conditions, because he
+knows that it will bring little real benefit to the Indian. There will
+be keen competition, within limits, of course, amongst the traders for
+it; and the fortunate trapper may get three or four hundred dollars in
+trade for a skin that will fetch eight hundred or a thousand in cash on
+the London market; but if his wife get the solid advantage of a new
+cooking-stove or a sewing-machine from it she is doing well.
+
+Food the Indian never buys much beyond his present need, unless it is to
+squander it in feast after feast, to which every one is invited and at
+which there is the greatest lavishness. If a son is born, or a black fox
+is caught, or a member of the family recovers from a severe illness,
+custom permits, if it do not actually demand, that a "potlatch" be
+given, and most Indians are eager, whenever they are able, to be the
+heroes of the prandial hour.
+
+So he, his women, and his children go clad mainly in cotton, and there
+is abundant evidence that the tendency to pulmonary trouble, always
+latent amongst them, is developed by the severe colds which they catch
+through the inadequate covering of their bodies, and is then cherished
+into virulent activity by the close atmosphere of overcrowded,
+overheated cabins.
+
+The missions help the Indians, especially the women and children, in
+this matter of clothing as much as possible. Every year large bales of
+good though left-off under and over wear are secured through church
+organisations outside, and are traded to the natives at nominal prices,
+usually for fish or game or a little labour in sawing wood. And this
+naturally does not ingratiate missions with the trading class. One's
+anger is aroused sometimes at seeing the cotton-flannel underclothes and
+"cotton-filled" blankets and the "all-wool" cotton coats and trousers
+which they pay high prices for at the stores. The Canadian Indians, who
+are their neighbours, buy genuine Hudson Bay blankets and other real
+woollen goods, but the Alaskan Indian can buy nothing but cotton.
+
+But far and away beyond any other cause of the native decline stands the
+curse of the country, whisky. Recognising by its long Indian experience
+the consequences of forming liquor-drinking habits amongst the natives,
+the government has forbidden under penalty the giving or selling of any
+intoxicants to them. A few years ago a new law passed making such giving
+or selling a felony. These laws are largely a dead letter.
+
+[Sidenote: UNPAID COMMISSIONERS]
+
+The country is a very large one, very sparsely populated; the distances
+are enormous, the means of transportation entirely primitive, and the
+police and legal machinery insufficient to the end of suppressing this
+illicit traffic, especially in view of the fact that a considerable part
+of the whole population does not look with favour upon any vigorous
+attempt to suppress it. Great areas of the country are without
+telegraphic communication, and in parts mail is received only once a
+month. One stretch of two hundred and fifty miles of the Yukon receives
+no mail at all during the winter months--more than half the year. In
+that instance, as in many others, the country has gone distinctly
+backward in the past few years. The magistrates--"commissioners" they
+are called, receive no salary, but eke out a precarious and often
+wretched existence on fees, so that it is frequently impossible to get
+men of character and capacity to accept such offices.
+
+One would have supposed that amongst all the legislating that has been
+done for and about Alaska in the last year or two, one crying evil that
+the attention of successive administrations has been called to for
+twenty years past would have been remedied. That evil is the unpaid
+magistrate and the vicious fee system by which he must make a living. It
+is a system that has been abolished in nearly all civilised countries; a
+system that lends itself to all sorts of petty abuse; a system that no
+one pretends to defend. No greater single step in advance could be made
+in the government of Alaska, no measure could be enacted that would tend
+to bring about in greater degree respect for the law than the abolition
+of the unpaid magistracy and the setting up of a body of stipendiaries
+of character and ability.
+
+The anomalies of the present situation are in some cases amusing. At one
+place on the Yukon it is only possible for a man to make a living as
+United States commissioner if he can combine the office of postmaster
+with it. A man who was removed as commissioner still retained the
+post-office, and no one could be found to accept the vacant judgeship.
+In another precinct the commissioner was moving all those whom he
+thought had influence to get him appointed deputy marshal instead of
+commissioner, because the deputy marshal gets a salary of two thousand
+dollars a year and allowances, which was more than the commissionership
+yielded. One is reminded of some comic-opera topsyturvyism when the
+judge tries in vain to get off the bench and be appointed constable. It
+sounds like the _Bab Ballads_. The district court is compelled to wink
+at irregularities of life and conduct in its commissioners because it
+cannot get men of a higher stamp to accept its appointments.
+
+[Sidenote: LIQUOR AND POLITICS]
+
+The only policemen are deputy United States marshals, primarily
+process-servers and not at all fitted in the majority of cases for any
+sort of detective work. Their appointment is often dictated and their
+action often hampered by political considerations. The liquor interest
+is very strong and knows how to bring pressure to bear against a marshal
+who is offensively active. They are responsible only to the United
+States marshal of their district, and he is responsible to the
+attorney-general, the head of the department of justice. But Washington
+is a long way off, and the attorney-general is a very busy man, not
+without his own interest, moreover, in politics. An attempt to get some
+notice taken of a particular case in which it was the general opinion
+that an energetic and vigilant deputy had been removed, and an elderly
+lethargic man substituted, because of too great activity in the
+prosecution of liquor cases, resulted in the conviction that what
+should have been a matter of administrative righteousness only was a
+political matter as well.
+
+The threatened extinction of the Alaskan native was referred to as
+wanton, and the term was used in the sense that there are no necessary
+natural causes fighting against his survival.
+
+Here is no economic pressure of white settlers determined to occupy the
+land, such as drove the Indians of the plains farther and farther west
+until there was no more west to be driven to. If such delusion possess
+any mind as a result of foolish newspaper and magazine writings, let it
+be dismissed at once. No man who has lived in the country and travelled
+in the country will countenance such notion. The white men in Alaska are
+miners and prospectors, trappers and traders, wood-choppers and
+steamboat men. Around a mining camp will be found a few truck-farmers;
+alongside road-houses and wood camps will often be found flourishing
+vegetable gardens, but outside of such agriculture there are, speaking
+broadly, no farmers at all in the interior of Alaska. Probably a
+majority of all the homesteads that have been taken up have been located
+that the trees on them might be cut down and hauled to town to be sold
+for fire-wood. A few miles away from the towns there are no homesteads,
+except perhaps on a well-travelled trail where a man has homesteaded a
+road-house.
+
+[Illustration: AN AGED COUPLE.]
+
+[Illustration: FOOTBALL AT THE ALLAKAKET, EXPOSURE 1-1000 SECOND, APRIL,
+AFTER A NEW LIGHT SNOWFALL.]
+
+All the settlements in the country are on the rivers, save the purely
+mining settlements that die and are abandoned as the placers play out.
+Yet one will travel two hundred and fifty miles up the Porcupine--till
+Canada is reached--and pass not more than three white men's cabins, all
+of them trappers; one will travel three hundred and fifty miles up the
+Koyukuk before the first white man's cabin is reached, and as many miles
+up the Innoko and the Iditarod and find no white men save wood-choppers.
+There are a few more white men on the Tanana than on any other tributary
+of the Yukon, because Fairbanks is on that river and there is more
+steamboat traffic, but they are mainly wood-choppers, while on the
+lesser tributaries of the Yukon, it is safe to say, there are no settled
+white men at all. As soon as one leaves the rivers and starts across
+country one is in the uninhabited wilderness.
+
+The writer is no prophet; he cannot tell what may happen agriculturally
+in Alaska or the rest of the arctic regions when the world outside is
+filled up and all unfrozen lands are under cultivation. Still less is he
+one who would belittle a country he has learned to love or detract in
+any way from its due claims to the attention of mankind. There is in the
+territory a false newspaper sentiment that every one who lives in the
+land should be continually singing extravagant praises of it and
+continually making extravagant claims for it. A man may love Alaska
+because he believes it to have "vast agricultural possibilities,"
+because, in his visions, he sees its barren wilds transformed into
+"waving fields of golden grain." But a man may also love it who regards
+all such visions as delusions.
+
+[Sidenote: FOOD AND FURS]
+
+The game and the fish of Alaska, the natural subsistence of the Indian,
+are virtually undiminished. Vast herds of caribou still wander on the
+hills, and far more are killed every year by wolves than by men. Great
+numbers of moose still roam the lowlands. The rivers still teem with
+salmon and grayling and the lakes with whitefish, ling, and lush. Unless
+the outrage of canneries should be permitted at the mouths of the
+Yukon--and that would threaten the chief subsistence of all the Indians
+of the interior--there seems no danger of permanent failure of the
+salmon run, though, of course, it varies greatly from year to year.
+Furs, though they diminish in number, continually rise in price. There
+are localities, it is true, where the game has been largely killed off
+and the furs trapped out; the Koyukuk country is one of them, though
+perhaps that region never was a very good game country. In this region,
+when a few years ago there was a partial failure of the salmon, there
+was distress amongst the Indians. But the country on the whole is almost
+as good an Indian country as ever it was, and there are few signs that
+it tends otherwise, though things happen so quickly and changes come
+with so little warning in Alaska that one does not like to be too
+confident.
+
+The Indian is the only settled inhabitant of interior Alaska to-day; for
+the prospectors and miners, who constitute the bulk of the white
+population, are not often very long in one place. Many of them might
+rightly be classed as permanent, but very few as settled inhabitants. It
+is the commonest thing to meet men a thousand miles away from the place
+where one met them last. A new "strike" will draw men from every mining
+camp in Alaska. A big strike will shift the centre of gravity of the
+whole white population in a few months. Indeed, a certain restless
+belief in the superior opportunities of some other spot is one of the
+characteristics of the prospector. The tide of white men that has flowed
+into an Indian neighbourhood gradually ebbs away and leaves the Indian
+behind with new habits, with new desires, with new diseases, with new
+vices, and with a varied assortment of illegitimate half-breed children
+to support. The Indian remains, usually in diminished numbers, with
+impaired character, with lowered physique, with the tag-ends of the
+white man's blackguardism as his chief acquirement in English--but he
+remains.
+
+It is unquestionable that the best natives in the country are those that
+have had the least intimacy with the white man, and it follows that the
+most hopeful and promising mission stations are those far up the
+tributary streams, away from mining camps and off the routes of travel,
+difficult of access, winter or summer, never seen by tourists at all;
+seen only of those who seek them with cost and trouble. At such stations
+the improvement of the Indian is manifest and the population increases.
+By reason of their remoteness they are very expensive to equip and
+maintain, but they are well worth while. One such has been described on
+the Koyukuk; another, at this writing, is establishing with equal
+promise at the Tanana Crossing, one of the most difficult points to
+reach in all interior Alaska.
+
+This chapter must not close without a few words about the native
+children. Dirty, of course, they almost always are; children in a state
+of nature will always be dirty, and even those farthest removed from
+that state show a marked tendency to revert to it; but when one has
+become sufficiently used to their dirt to be able to ignore it, they are
+very attractive. Intolerance of dirt is largely an acquired habit
+anyway. In view of their indulgent rearing, for Indian parents are
+perhaps the most indulgent in the world, they are singularly docile;
+they have an affectionate disposition and are quick and eager to learn.
+Many of them are very pretty, with a soft beauty of complexion and a
+delicate moulding of feature that are lost as they grow older. It takes
+some time to overcome their shyness and win their confidence, but when
+friendly relations have been established one grows very fond of them.
+Foregathering with them again is distinctly something to look forward to
+upon the return to a mission, and to see them come running, to have them
+press around, thrusting their little hands into one's own or hanging to
+one's coat, is a delight that compensates for much disappointment with
+the grown ups. In the midst of such a crowd of healthy, vivacious
+youngsters, clear-eyed, clean-limbed, and eager, one positively refuses
+to be hopeless about the race.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE ARCTIC
+
+
+THERE is no country in which an anastigmatic lens is of more use to the
+photographer than Alaska, and every camera with which it is hoped to
+take winter scenes should have this equipment. During two or three
+months in the year it makes the difference in practice between getting
+photographs and getting none. In theory one may always set up a tripod
+and increase length of exposure as light diminishes. But the most
+interesting scenes, the most attractive effects often present themselves
+under the severest conditions of weather, and he must be an enthusiast,
+indeed, who will get his tripod from the sled, pull out its telescoped
+tubes, set it up and adjust it for a picture with the thermometer at 40°
+or 50° below zero; and when he is done he is very likely to be a frozen
+enthusiast.
+
+With an anastigmatic lens working at, say f. 6-3, and with a "speed"
+film (glass plates are utterly out of the question on the trail), it is
+possible to make a snap-shot at one twenty-fifth of a second on a clear
+day, around noon, even in the dead of winter, in any part of Alaska that
+the writer has travelled in. There are those who write that they can
+always hold a camera still enough to get a sharp negative at even one
+tenth of a second. Probably the personal equation counts largely in
+such a matter, and a man of very decided phlegmatic temperament may have
+advantage over his more sanguine and nervous brother. The thing may be
+done; the writer has done it himself; but the point is it cannot be
+depended on; at this speed three out of four of his exposures will be
+blurred, whereas at one twenty-fifth of a second a sharp, clear negative
+may always be secured.
+
+It may be admitted at once that at extremely low temperatures the
+working of any shutter becomes doubtful, and most of them go out of any
+reliable action altogether. After trying and failing completely with
+three or four of the more expensive makes of shutters, the writer has
+for the last few years used a "Volute" with general satisfaction, though
+in the great cold even that shutter (from which all trace of grease or
+oil was carefully removed by the makers) is somewhat slowed up, so that
+a rare exposure at 50° or 60° below zero would be made at an indicated
+speed of one fiftieth rather than at one twenty-fifth, taking the chance
+of an under-exposed rather than a blurred negative. To wish for a
+shutter of absolute correctness and of absolute dependability under all
+circumstances, arranged for exposures of one fifteenth and one twentieth
+as well as one tenth and one twenty-fifth, is probably to wish for the
+unobtainable.
+
+[Sidenote: CARE OF FILMS AND CAMERAS]
+
+The care of the camera and the films, exposed and unexposed, the winter
+through, when travelling on the Alaskan trail, is a very important and
+very simple matter, though not generally learned until many negatives
+have been spoiled and sometimes lenses injured. It may be summed up in
+one general rule--keep instrument and films always outdoors.
+
+One unfamiliar with arctic conditions would not suppose that much
+trouble would be caused by that arch-enemy of all photographic
+preparations and apparatus--damp, in a country where the thermometer
+rarely goes above freezing the winter through; and that is a just
+conclusion provided such things be kept in the natural temperature,
+outdoors. But consider the great range of temperature when the
+thermometer stands at -50° outdoors, and, say, 75° indoors. Here is a
+difference of 125°. Anything wooden or metallic, especially anything
+metallic, brought into the house immediately condenses the moisture with
+which the warm interior atmosphere is laden and becomes in a few moments
+covered with frost. Gradually, as the article assumes the temperature of
+the room, the frost melts, the water is absorbed, and the damage is done
+as surely as though it had been soused in a bucket. If it be necessary
+to take camera and films indoors for an interior view--which one does
+somewhat reluctantly--the films must be taken at once to the stove and
+the camera only very gradually; leaving the latter on the floor, the
+coldest part of the room, for a while and shifting its position nearer
+and nearer until the frost it has accumulated begins to melt, whereupon
+it should be placed close to the heat that the water may evaporate as
+fast as it forms.
+
+Outdoors, camera and films alike are perfectly safe, however intense the
+cold. Indeed, films keep almost indefinitely in the cold and do not
+deteriorate at all. One learns, by and by, to have all films sent
+sealed up in tin cans, _and to put them back and seal them up again when
+exposed_, despite the maker's instructions not to do so. The maker knows
+the rules, but the user learns the exceptions. When films are thus
+protected they may be taken indoors or left out indifferently, as no
+moist air can get to them.
+
+The rule given is one that all men in this country follow with firearms.
+They are always left outdoors, and no iron will rust outdoors in the
+winter. Unless a man intend to take his gun to pieces and clean it
+thoroughly, he never brings it in the house. The writer has on several
+occasions removed an exposed film and inserted a new one outdoors, using
+the loaded sled for a table, at 50° below zero; taking the chance of
+freezing his fingers rather than of ruining the film. It is an
+interesting exercise in dexterity of manipulation. Everything that can
+be done with the mittened hand is done, the material is placed within
+easy reach--then off with the mittens and gloves, and make the change as
+quickly as may be!
+
+There is just one brief season in the year when high speeds of shutters
+may be used: in the month of April, when a new flurry of snow has put a
+mantle of dazzling whiteness upon the earth and the sun mounts
+comparatively high in the heavens. Under such circumstances there is
+almost, if not quite, tropical illumination. Here is a picture of native
+football at the Allakaket, just north of the Arctic Circle, made late in
+April with a Graflex, fitted with a lens working at f. 4.5, at the full
+speed of its focal-plane shutter--one one-thousandth of a second. In
+five years' use that was the only time when that speed was used, or any
+speed above one two-hundred-and-fiftieth. Commonly, even in summer, many
+more exposures are made with it at one fiftieth than at one
+one-hundredth, for this is not a brightly lit country in summer, and
+nearly all visitors and tourists find their negatives much under-timed.
+
+The Graflex, though unapproached in its own sphere, is not a good
+all-round camera, despite confident assertions to the contrary. It is
+too bulky to carry at all in the winter, and its mechanism is apt to
+refuse duty in the cold. The 3A Graflex cannot be turned to make a
+perpendicular photograph, but must always be used with the greatest
+dimension horizontal. Except in brilliant sunshine it is difficult to
+get a sharp focus, and, even though the focus appear sharp on the ground
+glass, the negative may prove blurred. Then the instrument is a great
+dust catcher and seems to have been constructed with a perverse
+ingenuity so as to make it as difficult as possible to clean.
+
+The writer uses his Graflex almost solely for native portraits and
+studies, for which purpose it is admirable, and has enabled him to
+secure negatives that he could not have obtained with any other hand
+camera. Even in the summer, however, he always carries his 3A Folding
+Pocket Kodak as well, and uses it instead of the Graflex for landscapes
+and large groups. If he had to choose between the two instruments and
+confine himself to one, he would unhesitatingly choose the Folding
+Pocket Kodak.
+
+The difficulties of winter photography in Alaska do not end with the
+making of the exposure. All water must be brought up in a bucket from a
+water-hole in the river, and though it be clear water when it is dipped
+up from under the ice, it is chiefly ice by the time it reaches the
+house, during any cold spell. One learns to be very economical of water
+when it is procured with such difficulty, learns to dry prints with
+blotting-paper between the successive washings, which is the best way of
+washing with the minimum of water. Blotting-paper is decidedly cheaper
+than water under some circumstances.
+
+While the rivers run perfectly clear and bright under the ice in the
+winter, in summer the turbid water of nearly all our large streams
+introduces another difficulty, and photographic operation must sometimes
+be deferred for weeks, unless the rain barrels be full or enough ice be
+found in the ice-house, over and above the domestic needs, to serve.
+
+[Sidenote: EFFECT OF COLD ON EMULSIONS]
+
+It seems certain that the speed of the sensitive emulsions with which
+the films are covered is reduced in very cold weather. To determine
+whether or not this was so, the following experiments were resorted to.
+The camera was brought out of the house half an hour before noon, at 50°
+below zero, and an exposure made immediately. Then the camera was left
+in position for an hour and another exposure made. There was little
+difference in the strength of the negatives, and what difference there
+was seemed in favour of the second exposure. Evidently, if the emulsion
+had slowed, the shutter had slowed also; so opportunity was awaited to
+make a more decisive test. When there remained but one exposure on a
+roll of film, the camera was set outdoors at a temperature of 55° below
+zero and left for an hour. Then an exposure was made and the film wound
+up and withdrawn; while a new film, just brought from the house, was as
+quickly as possible inserted in its place and a second exposure made.
+The latter was appreciably stronger. Even this test is, of course, not
+entirely conclusive; one would have to be quite sure that the emulsions
+were identical; but it confirms the writer's impression that extreme
+cold slows the film. It would be an easy matter for the manufacturers to
+settle this point beyond question in a modern laboratory, and it is
+certainly worth doing.
+
+There is much sameness about winter scenes in Alaska, as the reader has
+doubtless already remarked; yet the sameness is more due to a lack of
+alertness in the photographer than to an absence of variety. If the
+traveller had nothing to think about but his camera, if all other
+considerations could be subordinated to the securing of negatives, then,
+here as elsewhere, the average merit of pictures would be greater.
+Sometimes the most interesting scenes occur in the midst of stress of
+difficult travel when there is opportunity for no more than a fleeting
+recognition of their pictorial interest. "Tight places" often make
+attractive pictures, but most commonly do not get made into pictures at
+all. The study of the aspects of nature is likely to languish amidst the
+severe weather of the Northern winter, and the bright, clear, mild day
+gets photographed into undue prominence. Snow is more or less white and
+spruce-trees in the mass are more or less black; one dog team is very
+like another; a native village has to be known very well, indeed, to be
+distinguishable from another native village. Yet there is individuality,
+there is distinction, there is variety, there is contrast, if a man have
+but the grace to recognise them and the zeal to record them. Snow itself
+has infinite variety; trees, all of them, have characters of their own.
+Dogs differ as widely as men and Indians as widely as white men.
+
+[Sidenote: INDIANS AND PHOTOGRAPHS]
+
+The fear of the camera, or the dislike of the camera, that used to
+affect the native mind is gone now, save, perhaps, in certain remote
+quarters, and these interesting people are generally quite willing to
+stand still and be snapped. They ask for a print, and upon one's next
+visit there is clamorous demand for "picter, picter." A famous French
+physician said that his dread of the world to come lay in his
+expectation that the souls he met would reproach him for not having
+cured a certain obstinate malady that he had much repute in dealing
+with; so the travelling amateur in photography sometimes feels his
+conscience heavy under a load of promised pictures that he has forgotten
+or has been unable to make. He feels that his native friends whom he
+shall meet in the world to come will assuredly greet him with "where's
+my picture?" The burden increases all the time, and the Indian never
+forgets. It avails nothing even to explain that the exposure was a
+failure. A picture was promised; no picture has been given; that is as
+far as the native gets. And the making of extra prints, in the cases
+where it is possible to make them, is itself quite a tax upon time and
+material.
+
+Just as it is true that to be well informed on any subject a man must
+read a great deal and be content not to have use for a great deal that
+he reads, so to secure good photographs of spots and scenes of note as
+he travels, he must make many negatives and be content to destroy many.
+The records of a second visit in better weather or at a more favourable
+season will supersede an earlier; typical groups more casual ones. The
+standard that he exacts of himself rises and work he was content with
+contents him no more. Sometimes one is tempted to think that the main
+difference between an unsuccessful and a successful amateur photographer
+is that the former hoards all his negatives while the latter
+relentlessly burns those which do not come up to the mark--if not at
+once, yet assuredly by and by. So the surprise that one feels at many of
+the illustrations in modern books of arctic travel is not that the
+travellers made such poor photographs but that they kept them and used
+them; for there can be no question that poor photographs are worse than
+none at all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE NORTHERN LIGHTS
+
+
+THE Northern Lights are a very common phenomenon of interior Alaska,
+much more common than in the very high latitudes around the North Pole,
+for it has been pretty well determined that there is an auroral pole,
+just as there is a magnetic pole and a pole of cold, none of which
+coincides with the geographical Pole itself. All the arctic explorers
+seem agreed that north of the 80th parallel these appearances are less
+in frequency and brilliance than in the regions ten or fifteen degrees
+farther south. It may be said roundly that it is a rare thing in winter
+for a still, clear night, when there is not much moon, to pass without
+some auroral display in the interior of Alaska. As long as we have any
+night at all in the early summer, and as soon as we begin to have night
+again late in the summer, they may be seen; so that one gains the
+impression that the phenomenon occurs the year round and is merely
+rendered invisible by the perpetual daylight of midsummer.
+
+[Sidenote: A GENERAL AURORA]
+
+The Alaskan auroras seem to divide themselves into two great classes,
+those that occupy the whole heavens on a grand scale and appear to be at
+a great distance above the earth, and those that are smaller and seem
+much closer. Inasmuch as a letter written from Fort Yukon to a town in
+Massachusetts describing one of the former class brought a reply that on
+the same night a brilliant aurora was observed there also, it would seem
+that auroras on the grand scale are visible over a large part of the
+earth's surface at once, whereas the lesser manifestations, though
+sometimes of great brilliance and beauty, give one the impression of
+being local.
+
+One gets, unfortunately, so accustomed to this light in the sky in
+Alaska that it becomes a matter of course and is little noticed unless
+it be extraordinarily vivid. Again, often very splendid displays occur
+in the intensely cold weather, when, no matter how warmly one may be
+clad, it is impossible to stand still long outdoors, and outdoors an
+observer must be to follow the constant movement that accompanies the
+aurora. Moreover, there is something very tantalising in the observing,
+for it is impossible to say at what moment an ordinary waving auroral
+streamer that stretches its greenish milky light across the sky,
+beautiful yet commonplace, may burst forth into a display of the first
+magnitude, or if it will do so at all.
+
+The winter traveller has the best chance for observing this phenomenon,
+because much of his travel is done before daylight, and often much more
+than he desires or deserves is done after daylight; while, if his
+journeys be protracted so long as snow and ice serve for passage at all,
+towards spring he will travel entirely at night instead of by day.
+
+It is intended in this chapter merely to attempt a description of a few
+of the more striking auroral displays that the writer has seen, the
+accounts being transcribed from journals written within a few hours, at
+most, from the time of occurrence, and in the first case written so soon
+as he went indoors.
+
+This was on the 6th of October, 1904, at Fairbanks, a little removed
+from the town itself. When first the heavens were noticed there was one
+clear bow of milky light stretching from the northern to the southern
+horizon, reflected in the broken surface of the river, and glistening on
+the ice cakes that swirled down with the swift current. Then the
+southern end of the bow began to twist on itself until it had produced a
+queer elongated corkscrew appearance half-way up to the zenith, while
+the northern end spread out and bellied from east to west. Then the
+whole display moved rapidly across the sky until it lay low and faint on
+the western horizon, and it seemed to be all over. But before one could
+turn to go indoors a new point of light appeared suddenly high up in the
+sky and burst like a pyrotechnic bomb into a thousand pear-shaped
+globules with a molten centre flung far out to north and south. Then
+began one of the most beautiful celestial exhibitions that the writer
+has ever seen. These globules stretched into ribbon streamers, dividing
+and subdividing until the whole sky was filled with them, and these
+ribbon streamers of greenish opalescent light curved constantly inward
+and outward upon themselves, with a quick jerking movement like the
+cracking of a whip, and every time the ribbons curved, their lower edges
+frayed out, and the fringe was prismatic. The pinks and mauves flashed
+as the ribbon curved and frayed--and were gone. There was no other
+colour in the whole heavens save the milky greenish-white light, but
+every time the streamers thrashed back and forth their under edges
+fringed into the glowing tints of mother-of-pearl. Presently, the whole
+display faded out until it was gone. But, as we turned again to seek the
+warmth of the house, all at once tiny fingers of light appeared all over
+the upper sky, like the flashing of spicules of alum under a microscope
+when a solution has dried to the point of crystallisation, and stretched
+up and down, lengthening and lengthening to the horizon, and gathering
+themselves together at the zenith into a crown. Three times this was
+repeated; each time the light faded gradually but completely from the
+sky and flashed out again instantaneously.
+
+For a full hour, until it was impossible to stand gazing any longer for
+the cold, the fascinating display was watched, and how much longer it
+continued cannot be said. It was a grand general aurora, high in the
+heavens, not vividly coloured save for the prismatic fringes, but of
+brilliant illumination, and remarkable amongst all the auroras observed
+since for its sudden changes and startling climaxes. Draped auroras are
+common in this country, though it has been wrongly stated that they are
+only seen near open seas, but their undulations are generally more
+deliberate and their character maintained; this one flashed on and off
+and changed its nature as though some finger were pressing buttons that
+controlled the electrical discharges of the universe. Yet it was noticed
+that even in its brightest moments the light of the stars could be seen
+through it.
+
+[Sidenote: A LOCAL AURORA]
+
+The next aurora to be described was of a totally different kind. It
+occurred on the 18th of March, 1905. The writer, with an Indian
+attendant, was travelling on the Koyukuk River from Coldfoot to Bettles,
+and, owing to a heavy, drifted trail, night had fallen while yet the
+road-house was far away. There was no moon and the wind-swept trail was
+wholly indistinguishable from the surrounding snow, yet to keep on the
+trail was the only chance of going forward at all, for whenever the
+toboggan slid off into the deep, soft snow it came to a standstill and
+had to be dragged laboriously back again. A good leader would have kept
+the trail, but we had none such amongst our dogs that year. Thus,
+slowly, we went along in the dark, continually missing the trail on this
+side and on that. We did not know on which bank of the river the
+road-house was situated, for it was our first journey in those parts. We
+only knew the trail would take us there could we follow it. All at once
+a light burst forth, seemingly not a hundred yards above our heads, that
+lit up that trail like a search-light and threw our shadows black upon
+the snow. There was nothing faint and fluorescent about that aurora; it
+burned and gleamed like magnesium wire. And by its light we were able to
+see our path distinctly and to make good time along it, until in a mile
+or two we were gladdened by the sight of the candle shining in the
+window of the road-house and were safe for the night.
+
+Now, one does not really know that this was an aurora at all, save that
+there was nothing else it could have been. It was a phenomenon
+altogether apart from the one first described; not occupying the vault
+of heaven, streaming from horizon to zenith; not remote and majestic.
+There was really little opportunity to observe it at all; one's eyes
+were fixed upon the trail it illumined, anxious not to set foot to the
+right or left. Save for an occasional glance upward, we saw only its
+reflected light upon the white expanse beneath. It was simply a streak
+of light right above our heads, holding steadily in position, though
+fluctuating a little in strength--a light to light us home, that is what
+it was to us. And it was the most surprising and opportune example of
+what has been referred to here as the _local_ aurora that eight winters
+have afforded. The most opportune but not the most beautiful; the next
+to be described, though of the local order, was the most striking and
+beautiful manifestation of the Northern Lights the writer has ever seen.
+It was that rare and lovely thing--a coloured aurora--all of one rich
+deep tint.
+
+[Sidenote: A RED AURORA]
+
+It was on the 11th of March, 1907, on the Chandalar River, a day's march
+above the gap by which that stream enters the Yukon Flats and five days
+north of Fort Yukon. A new "strike" had been made on the Chandalar, and
+a new town, "Caro," established;--abandoned since. All day long we had
+been troubled and hindered by overflow water on the ice, saturating the
+snow, an unpleasant feature for which this stream is noted; and when
+night fell and we thought we ought to be approaching the town, it seemed
+yet unaccountably far off. At last, in the darkness, we came to a creek
+that we decided must surely be Flat Creek, near the mouth of which the
+new settlement stood; and at the same time we came to overflow water so
+deep that it covered both ice and snow and looked dangerous. So the dogs
+were halted while the Indian boy went ahead cautiously to see if the
+town were not just around the bend, and the writer sat down, tired, on
+the sled. While sitting there, all at once, from the top of the
+mountainous bluff that marked the mouth of the creek, a clear red light
+sprang up and spread out across the sky, dyeing the snow and gleaming in
+the water, lighting up all the river valley from mountain to mountain
+with a most beautiful carmine of the utmost intensity and depth. In wave
+after wave it came, growing brighter and brighter, as though some
+gigantic hand on that mountain top were flinging out the liquid radiance
+into the night. There was no suggestion of any other colour, it was all
+pure carmine, and it seemed to accumulate in mid-air until all the
+landscape was bathed in its effulgence. And then it gradually died away.
+The native boy was gone just half an hour. It began about five minutes
+after he left and ended about five minutes before he returned, so that
+its whole duration was twenty minutes. There had been no aurora at all
+before; there was nothing after, for his quest had been fruitless, and,
+since we would not venture that water in the dark, we made our camp on
+the bank and were thus two hours or more yet in the open. The boy had
+stopped to look at it himself, "long time," as he said, and declared it
+was the only red aurora he had ever seen in his twenty odd years' life.
+It was a very rare and beautiful sight, and it was hard to resist that
+impression of a gigantic hand flinging liquid red fire from the mountain
+top into the sky. Its source seemed no higher than the mountain
+top--seemed to be the mountain top itself--and its extent seemed
+confined within the river valley.
+
+[Sidenote: A GRAND GENERAL DISPLAY]
+
+There is only one other that shall be described, although there are many
+mentioned with more or less particularity in the diaries of these
+travels. And this last one is of the character of the first and not at
+all of the second and third, for it was on the grand scale, filling all
+the heavens, a phenomenon, one is convinced, of an order distinct and
+different from the local, near-at-hand kind. There was exceptionally
+good opportunity for observing this display, since it occurred during an
+all-night journey, the night of the 6th of April, 1912, with brilliant
+starlight but no moon while we were hastening to reach Eagle for Easter.
+
+We had made a new traverse from the Tanana to the Yukon, through two
+hundred miles of uninhabited country, and had missed the head of the
+creek that would have taken us to the latter river in thirty miles,
+dropping into one that meandered for upward of a hundred before it
+discharged into the great river. It was one o'clock on Good Friday
+morning when we reached a road-house on the Yukon eighty miles from
+Eagle. The only chance to keep the appointment was to travel all the two
+remaining nights. So we cached almost all our load at the road-house,
+for we should retrace our steps when Eagle was visited, and thus were
+able to travel fast.
+
+Both nights were marked by fine auroral displays, so extensive and of
+such apparent height as to give the impression that they must be visible
+over large areas of the earth. Both continued all night long and were
+of the same general description, but the second night's display was
+emphasised in its main features and elaborated in its detail, and was
+the more striking and notable and worthy of description.
+
+It began by an exquisite and delicate weaving of fine, fluorescent
+filaments of light in and out among the stars, until at times a perfect
+network was formed, like lace amidst diamonds, first in one quarter of
+the heavens, then in another, then stretching and weaving its web right
+across the sky. The Yukon runs roughly north and south in these reaches,
+and the general trend of the whole display was parallel with the river's
+course. For an hour or more the ceaseless extension and looping of these
+infinitely elastic threads of light went on, with constant variation in
+their brilliance but no change in their form and never an instant's
+cessation of motion.
+
+[Illustration: Photo by Paul Schultz.
+
+THE SUN DOGS.]
+
+[Illustration: "TAN," OF MIXED BREED.]
+
+[Illustration: "MUK," A PURE MALAMUTE.]
+
+Then the familiar feature of the draped aurora was introduced, always a
+beautiful sight to watch. Slowly and most gracefully issued out of the
+north band after band, band after band of pale-green fire, each curling
+and recurling on itself like the ribbon that carries the motto under a
+shield of arms, and each continually fraying out its lower edge into
+subdued rainbow tints. Then these bands, never for a moment still, were
+gathered up together to the zenith, till from almost all round the
+horizon vibrant meridians of light stretched up to a crown of glory
+almost but not quite directly overhead, so bright that all the waving
+bands that now assumed more the appearance of its rays paled before it.
+Then the crown began to revolve, and as it revolved with constantly
+increasing speed, it gathered all its rays into one gigantic spiral that
+travelled as it spun towards the east until all form was dissipated in a
+nebulous mist that withdrew behind the mountains and glowered there like
+a dawn and left the skies void of all light save the stars. It was a
+fine instance of the stupendous sportiveness of the aurora that
+sometimes seems to have no more law or rule than the gambolling of a
+kitten, and to build up splendid and majestic effects merely to "whelm
+them all in wantonness" a moment later. A particularly fine and striking
+phase of an aurora is very likely to be followed by some such sudden
+whimsical destruction. It was as though that light hidden behind the
+mountains were mocking us.
+
+Then from out the north again appeared one clear belt of light that
+stretched rapidly and steadily all across the heavens until it formed an
+arch that stood there stationary. And from that motionless arch, the
+only motionless manifestation that whole night, there came a gradual
+superb crescendo of light that lit the wide, white river basin from
+mountain top to mountain top and threw the shadows of the dogs and the
+sled sharper and blacker upon the snow,--and in the very moment of its
+climax was gone again utterly while yet the exclamations of wonder were
+on our lips. It was as though, piqued at our admiration, the aurora had
+wiped itself out; and often and often there is precisely that impression
+of wilfulness about it.
+
+All night long the splendour kept up, and all night long, as the dogs
+went at a good clip and one of us rode while the other was at the
+sled's handle-bars, we gazed and marvelled at its infinite variety, at
+its astonishing fertility of effect, at its whimsical vagaries, until
+the true dawn of Easter swallowed up the beauty of the night as we came
+in sight of Eagle. And we wondered with what more lavish advertisement
+the dawn of the first Easter was heralded into the waste places of the
+snow.
+
+[Sidenote: SOUND AND SMELL]
+
+There are men in Alaska, whose statements demand every respect, who
+claim to have heard frequently and unmistakably a swishing sound
+accompanying the movements of the aurora, and there are some who claim
+to have detected an odour accompanying it. Without venturing any opinion
+on the subject in general, the writer would simply say that, though he
+thinks he possesses as good ears and as good a nose as most people, he
+has never heard any sound or smelled any odour that he believed to come
+from the Northern Lights. Indeed, he has often felt that with all the
+light-producing energy and with all the rapid movement of the aurora it
+was mysterious that there should be absolutely no sound. The aurora
+often looks as if it _ought_ to swish, but to his ears it has never done
+it; so much phosphorescent light might naturally be accompanied by some
+chemical odour, but to his nostrils never has been.
+
+Queer, uncertain noises in the silence of an arctic night there often
+are--noises of crackling twigs, perhaps, noises of settling snow, noises
+in the ice itself--but they are to be heard when there is no aurora as
+well as when there is. It is rare to stand on the banks of the Yukon on
+a cold night and not hear some faint crepitating sounds, sometimes
+running back and forth across the frozen river, sometimes resembling the
+ring of distant skates. Without offering any pronouncement upon what is
+a very interesting question, it seems to the writer possible that, to an
+ear intently listening, some such noise coinciding with a decided
+movement of a great auroral streamer might seem to be caused by the
+movement it happened to accompany.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE ALASKAN DOGS
+
+
+[Sidenote: MALAMUTE, HUSKY, AND SIWASH]
+
+THERE are two breeds of native dogs in Alaska, and a third that is
+usually spoken of as such. The malamute is the Esquimau dog; and what
+for want of a better name is called the "Siwash" is the Indian dog. Many
+years ago the Hudson Bay voyageurs bred some selected strains of
+imported dog with the Indian dogs of those parts, or else did no more
+than carefully select the best individuals of the native species and
+bred from them exclusively--it is variously stated--and that is the
+accepted origin of the "husky." The malamute and the husky are the two
+chief sources of the white man's dog teams, though cross-breeding with
+setters and pointers, hounds of various sorts, mastiffs, Saint Bernards,
+and Newfoundlands has resulted in a general admixture of breeds, so that
+the work dogs of Alaska are an heterogeneous lot to-day. It should also
+be stated that the terms "malamute" and "husky" are very generally
+confused and often used interchangeably.
+
+The malamute, the Alaskan Esquimau dog, is precisely the same dog as
+that found amongst the natives of Baffin's Bay and Greenland. Knud
+Rasmunsen and Amundsen together have established the oneness of the
+Esquimaux from the east coast of Greenland all round to Saint Michael;
+they are one people, speaking virtually one language. And the malamute
+dog is one dog. A photograph that Admiral Peary prints of one of the
+Smith Sound dogs that pulled his sled to the North Pole would pass for a
+photograph of one of the present writer's team, bred on the Koyukuk
+River, the parents coming from Kotzebue Sound.
+
+There was never animal better adapted to environment than the malamute
+dog. His coat, while it is not fluffy, nor the hair long, is yet so
+dense and heavy that it affords him a perfect protection against the
+utmost severity of cold. His feet are tough and clean, and do not
+readily accumulate snow between the toes and therefore do not easily get
+sore--which is the great drawback of nearly all "outside" dogs and their
+mixed progeny. He is hardy and thrifty and does well on less food than
+the mixed breeds; and, despite Peary to the contrary, he will eat
+anything. "He will not eat anything but meat," says Peary; "I have tried
+and I know." No dog accustomed to a flesh diet willingly leaves it for
+other food; the dog is a carnivorous animal. But hunger will whet his
+appetite for anything that his bowels can digest. "Muk," the counterpart
+of Peary's "King Malamute," has thriven for years on his daily ration of
+dried fish, tallow, and rice, and eats biscuits and doughnuts whenever
+he can get them. The malamute is affectionate and faithful and likes to
+be made a pet of, but he is very jealous and an incorrigible fighter. He
+has little of the fawning submissiveness of pet dogs "outside," but is
+independent and self-willed and apt to make a troublesome pet. However,
+pets that give little trouble seldom give much pleasure.
+
+His comparative shortness of leg makes him somewhat better adapted to
+the hard, crusted snow of the coast than to the soft snow of the
+interior, but he is a ceaseless and tireless worker who loves to pull.
+His prick ears, always erect, his bushy, graceful tail, carried high
+unless it curl upon the back as is the case with some, his compact coat
+of silver-grey, his sharp muzzle and black nose and quick narrow eyes
+give him an air of keenness and alertness that marks him out amongst
+dogs. When he is in good condition and his coat is taken care of he is a
+handsome fellow, and he will weigh from seventy-five to eighty-five or
+ninety pounds.
+
+The husky is a long, rangy dog, with more body and longer legs than the
+malamute and with a shorter coat. The coat is very thick and dense,
+however, and furnishes a sufficient protection. A good, spirited husky
+will carry his tail erect like a malamute, but the ears are not
+permanently pricked up; they are mobile. He is, perhaps, the general
+preference amongst dog drivers in the interior, but he has not the
+graceful distinction of appearance of the malamute.
+
+The "Siwash" dog is the common Indian dog; generally undersized, uncared
+for, half starved most of the time, and snappish because not handled
+save with roughness. In general appearance he resembles somewhat a small
+malamute, though, indeed, nowadays so mixed have breeds become that he
+may be any cur or mongrel. He is a wonderful little worker, and the
+loads he will pull are astonishing. Sometimes, with it all, he is an
+attractive-looking fellow, especially when there has been a good moose
+or caribou killing and he has gorged upon the refuse and put some flesh
+upon his bones. And if one will take a little trouble to make friends
+with him he likes petting as much as any dog. Most Indian dogs "don't
+sabe white man," and will snap at one's first advances. On the whole, it
+is far better to let them alone; for, encouraged at all, they are
+terrible thieves--what hungry creatures are not?--and make all sorts of
+trouble with one's own team. The pure malamute and the pure husky do not
+bark at all, they howl; barking is a sure sign of an admixture of other
+strains.
+
+[Sidenote: DOG BREEDING]
+
+Here it may be worth while to say a few words about the general belief
+that dogs in Alaska are interbred with wolves. That the dog and the wolf
+have a common origin there can be no doubt, and that they will
+interbreed is equally sure, but diligent inquiry on the part of the
+writer for a number of years, throughout all interior Alaska, amongst
+whites and natives, has failed to educe one authentic instance of
+intentional interbreeding, has failed to discover one man who knows of
+his own knowledge that any living dog is the offspring of such union.
+
+While, therefore, it is not here stated that such cross-breeding has not
+taken place, or even that it does not take place, yet the author is
+satisfied that it is a very rare thing, indeed, and that the common
+stories of dogs that are "half wolf" are fabulous.
+
+Indeed, it seems a rare thing when any sort of pains is taken about the
+breeding of dogs. In a country where dogs are so important, where they
+are indispensable for any sort of travel during six or seven months in
+the year over by far the greater portion of it, one would expect that
+much attention would be paid to dog breeding; but this is not the case.
+Here and there a man who takes pride in a team will carefully mate the
+best available couple and carefully rear their offspring, but for the
+most part breeding seems left to chance. A team all of malamutes or all
+of huskies, a matched team of any sort, is the exception, and excites
+interest and remark.
+
+The market for dogs is so uncertain that it is doubtful if there would
+be any money in scientific breeding for the trail. When a stampede to
+new diggings takes place, the price of dogs rises enormously. Any sort
+of good dog on the spot may be worth a hundred dollars, or a hundred and
+fifty, and the man with a kennel would make a small fortune out of hand.
+But at other times it is hard to get twenty-five dollars for the best of
+dogs.
+
+The cost of maintenance of a dog team is considerable. When the
+mail-routes went all down the Yukon, and dogs were used exclusively, the
+contracting company estimated that it cost seventy-five dollars per head
+per annum to feed its dogs; while to the traveller in remote regions,
+buying dog feed in small parcels here and there, the cost is not less
+than one hundred dollars per head. Of course, a man engaged in dog
+raising would have his own fish-wheel on the Yukon and would catch
+almost all that his dogs would eat. Fish is plentiful in Alaska; it is
+transportation that costs. Dogs not working can do very well on
+straight dried fish, but for the working dog this ration is supplemented
+by rice and tallow or other cereal and fat; not only because the animal
+does better on it, but also because straight dried fish is a very bulky
+food, and weight for weight goes not nearly so far. Cooking for the dogs
+is troublesome, but economical of weight and bulk, and conserves the
+vigour of the team. In the summer-time the dogs are still an expense.
+They must be boarded at some fish camp, at a cost of about five dollars
+per head per month.
+
+The white man found the dog team in use amongst the natives all over the
+interior, but he taught the Indian how to drive dogs. The natives had
+never evolved a "leader." Some fleet stripling always ran ahead, and the
+dogs followed. The leader, guided by the voice, "geeing" and "hawing,"
+stopping and advancing at the word of command, is a white man's
+innovation, though now universally adopted by the natives. So is the dog
+collar. The "Siwash harness" is simply a band that goes round the
+shoulders and over the breast. In the interior the universal "Siwash"
+hitch was tandem, and is yet, but as trails have widened and improved,
+more and more the tendency grows amongst white men to hitch two abreast;
+and the most convenient rig is a lead line to which each dog is attached
+independently by a single-tree, either two abreast, or, by adding a
+further length to the lead line, one behind the other, so that on a
+narrow trail the tandem rig may be quickly resorted to.
+
+[Sidenote: THE DOCKING OF TAILS]
+
+One advantage of the change from single to double rig is the decay of
+the cruel custom of "bobbing" the dogs' tails. When dogs are hitched
+one close behind the other (and the closer the better for pulling) the
+tail of the dog in front becomes heavy with ice from the condensation of
+the breath of the dog behind, until not only is he carrying weight but
+the use of the tail for warmth at night is foregone. So it was the
+universal practice to cut tails short off. But sleeping out in the open,
+as travelling dogs often must do, in all sorts of weather, with the
+thermometer at 50° or 60° below zero sometimes, a thick, bushy tail is a
+great protection to a dog. With it he covers nose and feet and is tucked
+up snug and warm. It is the dog's natural protection for the muzzle and
+the thinly haired extremities. A few years ago almost all work dogs in
+the interior were bobtailed; now the plumes wave over the teams again.
+
+Five dogs are usually considered the minimum team, and seven dogs make a
+good team. A good, quick-travelling load for a dog team is fifty pounds
+to the dog, on ordinary trails. The dogs will pull as much as one
+hundred pounds apiece or more, but that becomes more like freighting
+than travelling. On a good level trail with strong big dogs, men
+sometimes haul two hundred pounds to the dog. These, however, are
+"gee-pole propositions," in the slang of the trail, and the man is doing
+hard work with a band around his chest and the pole in his hand. For
+quick travelling, fifty pounds to the dog is enough.
+
+The most useful "outside" strains that the white man has introduced into
+the dogs of the interior are the pointer and setter and collie. The
+bird-dogs themselves make very fast teams and soon adapt themselves to
+the climate, but their feet will not stand the strain. The collie's
+intelligence would make him a most admirable leader, did he not have so
+pronouncedly the faults of his good qualities; he wants to do all the
+work; he works himself to death. It is the leader's business to keep the
+team strung out; it is not his business to pull the load. But the
+admixture of these strains with the native blood has produced some very
+fine dogs. The Newfoundland and Saint Bernard strains have been perhaps
+the least successful admixtures. They are too heavy and cumbersome and
+always have tender feet; their bodies and the bodies of their mongrel
+progeny are too heavy for their feet.
+
+[Sidenote: DOG LOYALTY]
+
+The last statement, with regard to Newfoundland and Saint Bernard dogs,
+has an interesting exception. There is a dog, not uncommon in Alaska,
+that by a curious inversion of phrase is known as the "one-man-dog."
+What is meant is the "one-dog-man dog," the dog that belongs to the man
+that uses only one dog. Many and many a prospector pulls his whole
+winter grub-stake a hundred miles or more into the hills with the aid of
+one dog. His progress is slow, in bad places or on up grades he must
+relay, and all the time he is doing more work than the dog is, but he
+manages to get his stuff to his cabin or his camp with no other aid than
+one dog can give. It is usually a large heavy dog--speed never being
+asked of him, nor steady continuous winter work--often of one of the
+breeds mentioned, or of its predominant strain. The companionship
+between such a man and such a dog is very close, and the understanding
+complete. Sometimes the dog will be his master's sole society for the
+whole winter.
+
+Indeed, any man of feeling who spends the winters with a dog team must
+grow to a deep sympathy with the animals, and to a keen, sometimes
+almost a poignant, sense of what he owes to them. There is a mystery
+about domestic animals of whatever kind. It is a mystery that man should
+be able to impose his will upon them, change their habits and
+characters, constrain them to his tasks, take up all their lives with
+unnatural toil. And that he should get affection and devotion in return
+makes the mystery yet more mysterious.
+
+The dog gets his food--often of poor quality and scant quantity--and
+that is all he gets. Yet the life of a work dog that has a kind and
+considerate master is not an unhappy one. The dog is as full of the
+canine joy of life as though he had never worn a collar, and not only
+sports and gambols when free, but really seems to like his work and do
+it gladly. He will chafe at inaction; he will come eagerly to the
+harness in the morning; often will come before he is called and ask to
+be harnessed; and if for any reason--lameness or galled neck or sore
+feet--a dog is cut out of the team temporarily, to run loose, he will
+try at every chance to get back into his place and will often attack the
+dog that seems to him to be occupying it; while a dog left behind will
+howl most piteously and make desperate efforts to break his chain and
+rejoin his companions and his labour. And the wonderful and pitiful
+thing about it is that no sort of severity or brutality on his master's
+part will destroy that zealous allegiance. The dog in Alaska is
+absolutely dependent upon man for subsistence, and he seems to realise
+it.
+
+There is a great deal of cruelty and brutality amongst dog drivers in
+Alaska. At times, it is true, most dogs need some punishment. Dogs
+differ as much as men do, and some are lazy and some are self-willed.
+The best of them will develop bad trail habits if they are allowed
+to--habits which will prove hard to break by and by and be a continual
+source of delay and annoyance until broken. But a very slight
+punishment, judicially administered at the moment, will usually suffice
+just as well as a severe one, and the main source of brutality in the
+punishment of dogs is sheer bad temper on the part of the driver, and
+has for its only possible end, not the correction of the animal's fault
+but the satisfaction of its owner's rage. To see some hulking,
+passionate brute lashing a poor little dog with a chain, or beating him
+with a club; to see dogs overworked to utter exhaustion and their
+lagging steps still hastened by a rain of blows, these are the sickening
+sights of the trail--and they are not uncommon. The language of most dog
+drivers to their dogs consists of a mixture of cursing and ribaldry,
+excused by the statement that only by the use of such speech may dogs be
+driven at all. But there is little point in the excuse; such speech is,
+to an extent not far from universal, the speech of the country. Swedes
+who have little and Indians who have none other English will yet be
+volubly profane and obscene; in the latter case often with complete
+ignorance of the meaning of the terms. Yet it must be recorded not
+ungratefully by the impartial observer that the rare presence of a
+decent woman or a clergyman will almost always put a check upon
+blackguardly speech, even that of a dog driver; women and clergymen
+being supposed the only two classes who could have any possible
+objection to foulness of mouth. To refer continually to the excrements
+of the body, to sexual commerce, natural and unnatural, all in the
+grossest terms, and to mix these matters intimately with the sacred
+names, is "manly" speech amongst a large part of the population of
+Alaska.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: REINDEER]
+
+[Sidenote: REINDEER AS DRAUGHT ANIMALS]
+
+It has been claimed with justice that the introduction of the reindeer
+into Alaska has been highly successful; yet there is much misconception
+amongst people "outside" as to the nature of that success. Stimulated by
+the example of the United States Government, and urged thereto by Doctor
+Wilfred Grenfell and others, the Canadian Government is now introducing
+reindeer into Labrador; and the distinguished missionary physician,
+whose recent decoration gives lustre to the royal bestower as well as to
+the recipient, has publicly announced his hope that these domesticated
+herbivora will "eliminate that scourge of the country, the husky dog."
+To announce such a hope, based upon any results in Alaska, is to
+announce misconception of the nature of the success which has attended
+Doctor Sheldon Jackson's "reindeer experiment." There is not a dog the
+less in Alaska because of the reindeer, nor ever will be; in so far as
+similarity of conditions warrant us in expecting similar results, it is
+safe to predict that the reindeer will never "eliminate the husky dog"
+in Labrador.
+
+But before discussing the success of the reindeer experiment and its
+lack of any bearing upon the number or the usefulness of the dog, the
+writer would pause to take strong exception to the description of the
+husky dog as the "scourge" of Labrador, and would insist that any such
+wholesale condemnation is a boomerang that returns upon the head of the
+Labradorian who uses it. For, as the dog is one of the most adaptable of
+all domestic animals, and is, to an amazing extent, what his master
+makes him, to bring a railing accusation against the whole race of dogs
+is in reality to accuse those who breed and rear them.
+
+Why should the dog have richly earned the gratitude and affection of all
+the world except Labrador? Why should he be called the "Friend of Man"
+everywhere except amongst these particular people? Far to the north of
+them the Esquimaux prize and cherish their dogs. Throughout the whole
+wide region to the west and northwest of them the dog is man's
+indispensable ally and faithful servant. The same husky dog has made
+good his claim upon man in Alaska. It is he and his brother, the
+malamute, that have opened up Alaska so far as it has been opened;
+without whom to-day the development of the country would suddenly cease.
+And to the question that is often asked "outside," as to whether the
+Alaskan dog is not a savage beast, it is justly replied: "Not unless he
+happens to belong to a savage beast." Is it really otherwise anywhere?
+Instead of the reindeer eliminating the dog, there is far greater
+likelihood of the dog eliminating the reindeer; and the professed dog
+lover, indignant at the opprobrious term applied to a whole race of
+dogs, may be disposed to echo Lady Macbeth's wish: "May good digestion
+wait on appetite."
+
+So far as substituting another draught animal for the dog is concerned,
+if the whole equine tribe, even down to Manchurian ponies should for
+some strange reason be out of the question, the Canadian Government had
+better import the polar ox or the yak. It is only amongst a nomadic
+people, whose main quest is pasturage, that the reindeer is a
+satisfactory draught animal. When introduced into Alaska there was
+doubtless expectation that he would be generally useful in this
+capacity. For a while certain mail-routes on the Seward Peninsula were
+served by him, and here and there a deluded prospector put his
+grub-stake on a reindeer sled. It is safe to say that no reindeer are so
+employed to-day. They were soon abandoned on the mail trails, and the
+prospector, after one season's experience, slaughtered his reindeer and
+traded its meat and hide for a couple of dogs.
+
+Consider that the reindeer feeds upon one thing alone, the moss that is
+named after him, and that while this moss is very widely distributed
+indeed, throughout Alaska, it is not found at all in the river valleys
+or the forests, but only upon the treeless hills at considerable
+elevation. Now the rivers are the highways. It is on their frozen
+surface, or on "portage" trails through the woods, that the greater part
+of all travelling is done and, in particular, that established routes of
+regular communication are maintained. To leave the trail after a day's
+journey, to wander miles into the hills, to herd the deer while they
+browse from slope to slope, digging the snow away in search of their
+provender, is wholly incompatible with any sustained or regular travel.
+The reindeer is a timid and almost defenceless creature. Wolves and
+lynxes prey upon him. One lynx is thought to have killed upward of
+twenty head in one season out of the herd that was stationed at Tanana,
+leaping upon the backs of the creatures, cutting their throats, sucking
+their blood, and riding them until they dropped and died. A few dogs
+will soon work havoc in a herd. So the reindeer must be constantly
+protected and at the same time must have range over a considerable scope
+of country. The care of reindeer is a business in itself, not a mere
+detail of the business of transportation or travel.
+
+[Sidenote: DOG FOOD]
+
+On the other hand, the dog's ration for many days is carried on the sled
+he hauls. There is a definite limit to it, of course, and knowledge of
+this limit made every experienced dog driver incredulous, from the
+first, of Doctor Cook's claim to have travelled some eleven hundred
+miles, from Etah to the North Pole and back, with a team of dogs hauling
+their own food. It is possible, however, on fair trails, with rigid
+economy, to travel five hundred miles and haul dog food and man food and
+the other indispensables of a long journey; and that is twice as far as
+it is ever necessary to travel in the interior of Alaska without
+reaching a supply point, the northern slope to the Arctic Ocean
+excepted.
+
+Perhaps it would be putting it better to say that a team of seven dogs
+can haul their own and their driver's food and the camp equipment, all,
+of course, carefully reduced to a minimum, for a month. Dog food of one
+sort or another can be bought at any place where anything whatever is
+sold. Almost any Indian village will furnish dried fish, and it is often
+possible, with no other weapon than a .22 rifle, to feed dogs largely on
+the country through which they pass. The writer's team has had many a
+meal of ptarmigan, rabbits, quail, and spruce hen, while to enumerate
+other articles, on which at times and in stress for proper food, his
+dogs have sustained life and strength for travel, would be to enumerate
+all the common human comestibles. Aside from the usual ration of fish,
+tallow, and rice boiled together, corn-meal, beans, flour, oatmeal, sago
+(though that is poor stuff), tapioca, canned meats of all kinds, canned
+salmon, even canned kippered herring from Scotland, seal oil, seal and
+whale flesh, ham and bacon, horse flesh, moose and caribou and
+mountain-sheep flesh, canned "Boston brown bread," canned butter, canned
+milk, dried apples, sugar, cheese, crackers of all kinds, and a score of
+other matters have at times entered into their food. Dogs have been
+"tided over" tight places for days and days on horse oats boiled with
+tallow candles, working the while. Anything that a man can eat, and much
+that even a starving man would scarcely eat, will make food for dogs. At
+the last and worst, dog can be fed to dog and even to man. When a dog
+team reaches a mining camp where supplies of all sorts are scarce--and
+that is not an uncommon experience--it is sometimes an exceedingly
+expensive matter to feed it; but something can always be found that
+will serve to keep it going until the return to a better-stocked region.
+In the winter of 1910-11, when there was such scarcity in the Iditarod,
+it cost the writer thirty-nine dollars and fifty cents to feed seven
+dogs for a week, and he has more than once been at almost a similar
+charge in the Koyukuk. But in all his travels he has never yet been
+unable to procure some sort of food for his dogs. At times they have
+been fed for days on rabbits straight; at times on ptarmigan straight.
+
+[Sidenote: THE REINDEER'S USEFULNESS]
+
+Speaking broadly, the reindeer is a stupid, unwieldy, and intractable
+brute, not comparing for a moment with the dog in intelligence or
+adaptability. The common notion that his name is derived from the use of
+reins in driving him, thus putting him in the class with the horse, is a
+mistake; the word comes from a Norse root which refers to his
+moss-browsing habit. The "rein" with which he is driven is a rope tied
+around one of his horns. He has no cognisance of "gee" and "haw," nor of
+any other vocal direction, but must be yanked hither and thither with
+the rope by main force; while to stop him in his mad career, once he is
+started, it is often necessary to throw him with the rope. In Lapland
+there are doubtless individual deer better trained; the Lap herders tell
+of them with pride; but in the main this is a just description of
+reindeer handling. All the chief herders in Alaska are Laps, brought
+over for their knowledge of the animals, and the writer has repeatedly
+ridden behind some of their best deer.
+
+Wherein, then, lies the success of the reindeer experiment in Alaska?
+Chiefly in the provision of a regular meat supply by which the natives
+and whites in the vicinity of a herd are relieved from the
+precariousness of the chase or the rapacity of the cold-storage butcher
+company. The Esquimau, having served his allotted apprenticeship of five
+years and entered upon possession of a herd, can at any time kill and
+dress a "kid of the flock" for his family or for the market. The price
+of butcher's meat has been kept down all over the Seward Peninsula by
+the competition of the numerous reindeer herds, to the comfort of the
+population and the exasperation of the butcher company, and many an
+Esquimau has become passably rich. The skin of the animal also furnishes
+a warm and much-needed material for clothing and finds a ready sale at a
+good price.
+
+This success is, however, confined so far to the coast. The herds have
+not thriven in the interior and have now all been withdrawn to the
+coast. Beasts of prey killed them; a hoof disease destroyed many; others
+are supposed to have died from eating some poisonous fungus. In five or
+six years the herd at Tanana had not increased at all, but rather
+diminished, and the same is true of the other herds on the Yukon. The
+Indian, moreover, does not take to herding as the Esquimau does, and can
+hardly be induced to the segregation of himself and his family from his
+tribe which reindeer herding involves. The "apprentices" on the Yukon
+were nearly all of them Esquimaux from the coast.
+
+It may be that the salt of the coast region is essential to the
+well-being of the reindeer; it is not so with the caribou--and the
+reindeer is nothing but a domesticated caribou--many herds of which, in
+the interior of Alaska, never visit the coast at all; but all caribou
+herds have their salt-licks, and one wishes that the oft-recommended
+plan of furnishing salt for the herds in the interior had been adopted
+by the government for a season before their removal was determined upon.
+
+Like most other "resources" of Alaska, the imported reindeer, at first
+decried and ridiculed, has now become the slender foundation for
+extravagant speculations of prosperity. The "millions of acres waiting
+for the plough" in the interior have lately been supplemented in this
+visionary treasury by the capitalisation of the vast tundras of the
+coast, the golden wheat-fields of the one finding counterpart in the
+multitudinous herds of the other. The growing dearth of cattle-range in
+the United States offers, it seems, to Alaska the opportunity of
+supplying the American market with meat, and the kindling fancy of the
+enthusiastic "booster" sees trains loaded with frozen reindeer meat
+rolling into Chicago.
+
+While the reindeer will never supersede the dog as a draught animal
+anywhere, the horse is rapidly superseding him on good trails in the
+more settled and peopled regions. In the Fairbanks and Nome districts,
+in the Circle and Koyukuk districts, in the Fortymile and in the
+Iditarod--in all districts where any extensive mining is carried
+on--heavy freights are moved by horses, and this tendency will doubtless
+increase rather than diminish. The dog team cannot compete with the
+horse team when it comes to moving heavy loads over good trails. The
+grain that the horse eats is imported, and in the main will probably
+always be imported, but oats cut green and properly cared for make
+excellent fodder, and the native hay, while not nearly as nutritious as
+the imported timothy, will sufficiently supplement grain.
+
+We hear a great deal nowadays of the benefits which are to come to
+Alaska from the railroad which the United States is expected to build
+from tide-water to the Yukon, and the clamorous voices of the journalist
+and the professional promoter and politician, which seem the only voices
+which ever reach the ear of government, are insistent that this is the
+one great thing that will bring prosperity to the country. Yet the
+writer is confident that he expresses almost the unanimous opinion of
+those who live in the country, outside of the classes mentioned, when he
+says that if the amount of money which this railroad will cost were
+expended upon good highways and trails the benefit would be much
+greater. It is means of intercommunication between the various parts of
+the country that is the great need of Alaska; some of its most promising
+sections are almost inaccessible now or accessible only at great trouble
+and expense. Access to the country itself, for the introduction of
+merchandise, is furnished easily enough during three or four months of
+the year by its incomparable system of waterways. Good highways, well
+engineered and well maintained, over which horse teams could be used
+summer and winter, would remove much of what at present is the almost
+prohibitive cost of distributing that merchandise from river points.
+Such roads would give an enormous stimulus to prospecting, and would
+render it possible to work gold placers all over the country that are of
+too low grade to be worked at the present rates of transportation. A
+_really_ good highway from Valdez to Fairbanks and the making of the
+long-ago begun Valdez-Eagle road; a good highway from Fairbanks to the
+upper Tanana as far as the Nabesna, connecting with the one from the
+Copper River country and the coast; another from the Yukon into the
+Koyukuk and the Chandalar; another from Fairbanks into the Kantishna,
+connecting with one from the lower Kuskokwim and one from the Iditarod;
+a road from Eagle across the almost unknown region (save for the line of
+the 141st meridian) between the Yukon and the Porcupine Rivers; two or
+three roads between the Yukon and the Tanana; a road from the Koyukuk to
+Kotzebue Sound--these would constitute main arteries of travel and would
+open up the country as no trunk railroad will ever do. The expense would
+be great, both of construction and maintenance, but it would probably
+not be greater than the cost of constructing and maintaining the
+proposed railroad. Twenty or thirty ordinary freight trains a year would
+bring in all the goods that Alaska consumes. Before that amount can be
+very greatly increased there must be a large development of the means by
+which it is to be distributed throughout the country.
+
+Some day, perhaps, these roads will be made, and the horse, not the dog,
+will be the draught animal upon them. Yet it would be a rash conclusion
+that even then the time will be at hand when there will be no longer
+use for the work dog in Alaska. Away from these main arteries of travel
+he will still be employed. So long as great part of the land remains a
+noble arctic wilderness; so long as the prospector strikes farther and
+farther into the rugged mountains; so long as quick travel over great
+stretches of country is necessary or desirable; so long as the salmon
+swarm up the rivers to furnish food for the catching; so long as the
+Indian moves from fishing camp to village and from village to hunting
+camp--so long will the dog be hitched to the sled in Alaska; so long
+will his joyful yelp and his plaintive whine be heard in the land; so
+long will his warm tongue seek his master's hand, even the hand that
+strikes him, and his eloquent eyes speak his utter allegiance.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Agriculture, 228, 229, 230, 231, 367
+
+  Alarm-clocks, 304
+
+  Alatna River, 70
+
+  Albert the pilot, 60
+
+  Allakaket, 190-195
+
+  Alphabet, 69
+
+  Amundsen, 292, 392
+
+  Animals, wild, 257, 276, 277, 298, 405
+
+  Anthropologists, 270
+
+  Arctic Ocean, 97, 98
+
+  Army posts: economic value, 151
+    discipline and life, 217
+    frequent changes, 217
+    surgeons, 218
+
+  Arthur, 158, 163
+
+  Athabascan language, 349
+
+  Atler, 170, 171
+
+  Auroras, 46, 380-391
+
+
+  Baker Creek Springs, 155
+
+  Bathing, 85
+
+  Beaver City, 345
+
+  Bering Sea, 129
+
+  Betticher, C. E., 254
+
+  Bettles, 54, 56, 63
+
+  Black fox, 258, 362
+
+  Blizzard, 40
+
+  Blossom Cape, 103, 106
+
+  Blow-holes, 13
+
+  Bluff, 126
+
+  Bompas, Bishop, 283
+
+  Brook, Alfred, 309
+
+  Burke, Dr., 158, 167, 169, 187
+
+
+  Caching, 17, 20, 70, 335
+
+  Camp: making details, 41, 42, 43
+    night made, 91
+    devices, 243
+    in wet snow, 302
+
+  Camp-Robbers, 335, 299, 300
+
+  Candle, 102
+
+  Candles, 108, 109
+
+  Caribou, 107, 409
+
+  Carter, Miss, 184
+
+  Chandalar: River, 26, 27, 35
+    village, 27, 28, 29, 34
+    Gap, 36, 37
+
+  Chatanika River, 4, 6, 8
+
+  Chena, 156, 249, 250
+
+  Chief Isaac, 263
+
+  Chinnik, 127
+
+  Choris Peninsula, 106
+
+  Circle City, 11, 20, 290
+
+  Clearwater Creek, 256
+
+  Clothes: drying, 42, 53
+    moose hide, 202, 203
+    tuberculosis, 306, 362
+    missions, 363
+
+  Coal, 92, 93
+
+  Coldfoot, 47, 48, 49
+
+  Cook, Dr., 405
+
+  Cooking: camp dishes, 43
+    cleanliness, 85
+    bear meat, 168
+    by relays, 209
+    for dog, 397
+
+  Council, 116
+
+  Creepers, 111
+
+  Cribbage, 124
+
+
+  Death Valley, 112, 113
+
+  Denali (Mt. McKinley), 225, 305
+
+  Deputy marshals, 365
+
+  Development schemes, 410, 411
+
+  Diphtheria, 28, 29, 32, 287, 313
+
+  Disease: epidemic, 6; _cf._ diphtheria, measles, tuberculosis
+
+  Dishkaket, 332
+
+  Disinfectants, 32
+
+  Dogs: price of, 4
+    frozen toes, 8
+    sled, 20, 25, 45
+    beds, 42
+    food, 44, 407
+    harness, 45
+    tails, 45
+    fight, 93
+    digging up snow, 110
+    helpless on smooth ice, 113
+    conscience, 115
+    on fish food, 115
+    with reindeer, 119, 120
+    refuse to lead, 125
+    preference for land trails, 129
+    intelligence, 139, 156; _cf._ Nanook
+    strength, 174
+    dislike wet feet, 178
+    cost of boarding, 181
+    in trail making, 200
+    in soft weather, 213
+    suffering on steep trails, 214
+    companionship, 223
+    moccasin leggings, 224
+    houses, 232, 237
+    play, 234
+    intelligence, 234, 237
+    sleeping, 235
+    thieving, 236
+    partners of man, 238
+    working life, 239
+    frozen foot, 253
+    with no coat, 275
+    and Indians, 291
+    howling, 303, 304
+    stray, 320, 321
+    general characteristics, 392-402
+    cost of maintenance, 396
+    ill used by whites, 397
+
+
+  Eagle, 285
+
+  Eagle Summit, 10, 11
+
+  Education: spread of English, 23, 24
+    phonograph, 52
+    scientific, 58
+    novel methods, 80
+    ignorance of native language, 81
+    artificial methods, 131
+    mission, 132, 355
+
+  Egbert Fort, 286
+
+  Endicott Mountains, 62
+
+  Esquimaux: sense of humour, 51, 87
+    isolated, 62
+    huts, 70
+    as hunters, 75
+    prayers, 82
+    music, 82
+    morality, 83
+    industry, 86
+    Sabbatarianism, 88
+    sense of distance, 91
+    fish eating, 92
+    gut windows, 94
+    devoutness, 95
+    sleeping customs, 95
+    undemonstrativeness, 95
+    igloos, 96
+    non-alcoholic, 99
+    tobacco, 99
+    hospitality, 106
+    carving, 124
+    singing, 130
+    attitude of white men toward, 134
+    snow goggles, 146
+    kindly manners, 182
+    antipathy to Indians, 185, 265
+    superstitions, 191, 269
+
+
+  Fairbanks, 156, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 382
+
+  Farthing, Miss, 244, 246, 247, 248
+
+  Fish Creek, 297
+
+  Forts: Alaskan, 342
+
+  Fortymilers, 280
+
+  Fortymile River, 281, 282
+
+
+  Gambling, 279
+
+  Game, 257, 277, 325, 368, 369, 406
+
+  Gold train, 5
+
+  Greek Church, 310, 322
+
+  Grenfell, Dr., 402
+
+  Grimm, Charles, 56
+
+
+  Half-breeds, 315, 316, 318, 319
+
+  Hamlin, Fort, 342
+
+  Hammond River, 47
+
+  Hans, 102, 103, 105
+
+  Hip-ring, 226
+
+  Hobo, the frozen, 134, 135
+
+  Hogatzitna, 76
+
+  Horses, 409, 410, 411
+
+  Hospitality, _cf._ Esquimaux and Indians, 49
+
+  Hot Springs, 227, 228
+
+  Hotham Inlet, 96
+
+  Hudson Bay Company, 21, 22
+
+  Husky, 392
+
+
+  Ice: glare, 9
+    rubber, 9, 179, 180
+    blow-holes, 13
+    bluffs, 79
+    mining, 126, 160, 161
+    jam, 167
+    breaking, 170
+    way to determine holding capacity, 179
+
+  Iditarod City, 294, 295, 296, 297, 327
+
+  Igloo, 96, 106
+
+  Indians: civilized, 24
+    uncivilized, 25
+    religion, 30
+    language, 141
+    trade with, 152, 153
+    diminishing, 153, 154
+    disease, 154
+    relations with whites, 173
+    dancing and sports, 189
+    preparation for death, 190
+    effect of civilization, 192, 193
+    lack of initiative, 197
+    demoralization, 216, 278, 279
+    birth-rate and death-rate, 217, 218
+    best education for, 245
+    women teachers, 246, 247
+    kindliness, 254
+    traders, 258
+    hospitality, 261, 303
+    missions, 263, 279
+    not savages, 264
+    fear of Esquimaux, 265
+    peaceable, 266
+    not idolators, 267
+    Christianity, 268, 270
+    moral character, 285
+    pauperization, 288, 289
+    cruelty to dogs, 291
+    effect of reproof, 292
+    self-government, 293
+    whites, 293
+    epidemics, 308, 312, 313
+    at mercy of traders, 311
+    half-breed, 315
+    and whites, 317, 318
+    meat carriers, 332
+    carving, 334
+    general discussion of, 348-370
+    and photographs, 378
+
+  Interpreters, 154, 155, 186
+
+
+  Jackson, Dr. S., 402
+
+  Jade Mountains, 89
+
+  Jetté, Fr., 140, 141
+
+  John River, 62
+
+  Journalism, 250
+
+
+  Kikitaruk, 98, 102
+
+  Knapp, 100
+
+  Kobuk: River, 63, 76
+    Mountains, 74
+    missionary, 80
+    town, 182
+
+  Kobuks, 51
+
+  Kotzebue, 106, 107
+    Sound, 63, 97, 102
+
+  Koyukuk: River, 39, 40, 48, 52, 65, 384
+    Cañon, 52
+    deserted towns, 65
+    Indians, 158, 142
+    mission, 183
+
+  Krusenstern, 97
+
+  Kuskokwim River, 322, 323
+
+
+  Lamps, 34
+
+  Langdon, Captain, 288
+
+  Launch, motor, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163
+
+  Lewis Cut-Off, 333
+
+  Lingo, 51, 115, 239
+
+  London, Jack, 265
+
+  Long Beach, 84, 88
+
+  Lookout Mountain, 61
+
+  Loomis, Dr., 296
+
+  Lower ramparts, 219
+
+  Lunar: phenomena, 18, 157
+    eclipse, 78
+
+  Lynx, 405
+
+
+  MacDonald, Archdeacon, 22, 23, 30, 31
+
+  Magistrates, 364
+
+  Mail carrying, 215, 331
+
+  Malamute, 392
+
+  Mal-de-raquet, 201
+
+  Mansfield Lake, 271
+
+  Matches, 243
+
+  Measles, 312
+
+  Medicine men, 246, 247, 267, 268
+
+  Melozitna, 209
+
+  Menthol balm, 201
+
+  Meteorological: phenomena, heat radiation, 55
+    rain, rare in winter, 134
+    local weather changes, 144
+    variable climate in Alaska, 188
+    cause of fluctuating temperature readings, 195, 196
+
+  Minchúmina, 307, 308
+    Lake, 303
+
+  Mining: towns and camps, 5, 6, 11, 12, 47, 48, 65, 251, 252
+    town morality, 83, 84, 328, 354
+    luxurious life, 108, 122
+    fires, 116, 330
+    on beach, 123
+    in ice, 126
+    decayed, 221, 222, 223, 284
+    primitive methods, 281, 282
+    claims, 295
+    flimsy buildings, 328
+    morals, 329
+    services in, 330
+    missionaries, 331
+    agriculture, 366
+
+  Mirage, 90
+
+  Mission stations: schools, 355, 358
+    clothing, 363, 369
+    isolated, 369
+
+  Missionary: nurse, 33
+    methods, 69, 81, 84, 194, 195, 307
+
+  Moccasins, 7
+
+  Money, 64
+
+  Moses' Village, 65, 180
+
+  Mountain: sunshine, 61
+    temperature, 61
+
+  Mukluk, 7, 19, 86
+
+  Mush, 200, 214
+
+
+  Nanook, 200, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 240
+
+  Natural religion, 58, 191, 267
+
+  Nelson, 161, 162
+
+  Nenana, 244, 245
+
+  Nicoli's Village, 322
+
+  Noatak, 90
+
+  Nome, 120, 122, 123
+
+  Northern Commercial Company, 241
+
+  Norton: Bay, 127
+    Sound, 117
+
+  Nose protection, 87, 145
+
+  Noyutak Lake, 76
+
+  Nulato, 48, 140
+    massacre, 142, 143
+
+
+  Old Woman Mountain, 135
+
+  One-eyed William, 172, 173, 174
+
+  Overflow: water, 6, 7, 27, 37
+    ice, 9
+
+
+  Paraselene, 57
+
+  Parkee, 35, 71
+
+  Peary, Admiral, 393
+
+  Pedometer, 73
+
+  Petersen, 114, 115
+
+  Photographing, 241, 242
+
+  Photography, 371-379
+
+  Place names, 326
+
+  Point Hope, 3, 56, 97, 99, 100
+
+  Potatoes, 229
+
+  Potlatch, 310, 353
+
+  Prevost, Jules, 154
+
+  Prices, 324, 327, 362
+    trading, 362, 396, 407
+
+  Prospectors: in winter, 78
+    and Esquimaux, 88
+    pinching out, 92
+    ruined, 146
+    self-reliance, 161, 162
+    poet, 322
+    imagination, 326
+    knowledge of Bible, 328
+    dogs, 399
+    visions, 409
+    railways, 410
+
+  Ptarmigan, 325
+
+
+  Quikpak River, 153
+
+
+  Raft, 256
+
+  Ragarou, Fr., 147
+
+  Railroads, 410, 411
+
+  Rampart City, 221, 222, 223, 338, 339
+
+  Rasmunsen, 392
+
+  Reading matter, 77, 205, 324, 325, 336
+
+  Red Mountain, 176
+
+  Reindeer, 119, 120, 402, 405, 407, 409
+
+  Roadhouse accommodation, 34, 324
+    gambling, 128
+    keepers of, 132
+    talk, 289
+    poet, 321, 322
+    reading matter, 324, 325
+    Arctic travel reminiscences, 335
+
+  Roxy, 70, 71, 72, 87, 91, 96, 101
+
+  Russian Alaska, 142, 143: Church of, _cf._ Greek Church
+
+
+  Saint John's-in-the-Wilderness, 188, 195
+
+  Salchaket, 254
+
+  Scientists, 269, 270
+
+  Seasons, 230
+
+  Seward Peninsula, 109, 111, 112, 113
+
+  Signal corps, 135, 136, 137, 220
+
+  Sishwóymina, 309
+
+  Siwashing, 41, 67, 138, 392, 394
+
+  Slate Creek, 46
+
+  Sled: width, 110
+    brake, 113
+    overturning, 113, 114
+    improvised, 164
+    in soft snow, 166
+    use of willow saplings, 167, 179
+    gee pole, 220
+    convertible rig, 275
+    unpacking, 345
+    harness, 397
+    team, 397
+    weight carried, 398
+    dog rations, load, 405
+
+  Sleeping bag, 104, 105
+
+  Smoke, 54
+
+  Snow banners, 39
+    melting, 42
+    glasses, 145, 146
+    blindness, 146, 147, 148, 290
+
+  Snow-shoes, 7, 346
+
+  Society of Friends, 99
+
+  Solar: light, effect on speed-shutters, 374
+    phenomena, 15, 16, 31, 39, 45, 57, 73, 74, 90, 103, 211
+
+  Solomon's, 126
+
+  Speed, 17, 20, 60, 75, 91, 96, 97, 110, 130, 198, 199, 299, 337
+
+  Squirrel River, 93, 94, 95
+
+  Starvation, 184, 185
+
+  Stefanson, 88, 268, 269
+
+  Summit, 11
+
+
+  Takotna, 323
+
+  Tanana, 150, 151, 152, 216, 217, 255, 256, 258, 271, 273, 274, 337, 369
+    River, 155, 255, 256
+
+  Tapis, 271
+
+  Telegraph system, 136
+
+  Temperature: low, travel, 14
+    animal life, 16
+    in river bottoms, 19, 50, 61
+    effect on lamps, 34
+    on parts of the body, 36
+    on log huts, 37
+    condensation, 53
+    smoke, 54
+    clear weather, 55
+    wind, 57
+    emotional power, 59
+    death from freezing, 61, 66, 68
+    cleanliness, 86
+    altitude, effect of, 204
+    greatest cold, effect of, 206
+    fluctuations, 212
+    confinement, 215
+    effect on cameras and films, 372, 374
+    on emulsions, 376, 377
+    and auroras, 381
+    high, 301
+    effect on dirt roof, 346
+    on Yukon River, 347
+
+  Thermos bottle, 261
+
+  Toboggan, 13, 37, 38, 46, 89
+
+  Topkok, 117
+
+  Town crier, 278
+
+  Tozitna, 209, 213
+
+  Trader: anti-monopolist, 241
+    profits, 334
+    missions, 258
+    articles sold to Indians, 361
+
+  Trading monopoly, 144
+
+  Trail: river, 2, 13, 37
+    dry and wet, 7
+    mountain, 10, 38
+    width, 15
+    lost, 18, 19, 67, 104, 320
+    blazed, 26
+    wind-swept, 40
+    in snow, 72, 138
+    breaking, 74, 75
+    exchange, 75
+    with hard crust, 109
+    telephone, 118
+    effect of horses on, 149, 150
+    cutting, 176
+    making, 198
+    always serpentine, 198
+    staked, 198, 210
+    widening, 202
+    stage, 254
+    double tripping, 298
+    in soft snow, 301
+    swampy, 332
+    Yukon, 336
+    in gale, 340
+    "sidling," 341
+    at night, 344
+    in thaw, 346, 347
+    found by aurora, 384
+
+  Tsórmina, 308
+
+  Tuberculosis, 359, 360
+
+  Twelve-Mile Summit, 9
+
+
+  Unalaklík, 132
+
+
+  Walter, 314, 321, 336, 341
+
+  Whiskey, 153, 222, 363
+
+  White, John, 121
+
+  Wind: protection against, 35
+    different local velocities, 37
+    physical labour, 46
+    in extreme cold, 57
+    as a malignant spirit, 112
+    high velocities, 219
+    in The Ramparts, 338
+
+  Wiseman, 47
+
+  Wolf, 395
+
+
+  Yukon, 12, 139, 153, 219, 336, 351
+    Flats, 12, 13, 343
+    Fort, 21, 22, 24, 350
+
+[Illustration: MAP OF THE INTERIOR OF ALASKA, SHOWING JOURNEYS DESCRIBED
+IN THIS BOOK]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
+
+Page 77, "Bergundy" changed to "Burgundy" (of Burgundy, with)
+
+Page 97, "rouch" changed to "rough" (over the rough ice)
+
+Page 306, sidenote "MINCHUMINA" changed to MINCHÚMINA" (THE MINCHÚMINA
+FOLK)
+
+Page 334, "Iditerod" changed to "Iditarod" (Iditarod, now a whole)
+
+Page 361, "satteens" changed to "sateens" (velvets and sateens)
+
+Page 418, "Minchumina" changed to "Minchúmina" (Minchúmina, 307, 308)
+
+Page 420, "Unalaklik" changed to "Unalaklík" (Unalaklík, 132)
+
+For this text version, the w with the grave accent is denoted by ['w].
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled, by Hudson Stuck
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled, by Hudson Stuck
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled
+       A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska
+
+Author: Hudson Stuck
+
+Release Date: October 12, 2007 [EBook #22965]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH A DOG SLED ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Lybarger, Brian Janes, Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net and
+the booksmiths at http://www.eBookForge.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1>TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH<br />
+A DOG SLED</h1>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_i" id="Page_i"></a><a href="images/i.png">[i]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3>BY THE SAME AUTHOR</h3>
+
+
+<div class='center'><b>THE ASCENT OF DENALI (MT. McKINLEY).</b></div>
+
+<div class='blockquot2'>A narrative of the first complete ascent of <span class="smcap">The Highest
+Mountain in North America</span> and the most northerly
+high mountain in the world.</div>
+
+<div class='center'>Profusely illustrated. 8vo. $1.75 <i>net</i></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot2"><p>"Few climbers have had such good fortune on a supreme
+occasion, but few have better deserved it."</p>
+<div class='right'>
+&mdash;<i>London Spectator.</i><br /></div></div>
+<p>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ii" id="Page_ii"></a><a href="images/ii.png">[ii]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 258px;">
+<a href="images/gs003.jpg"><img src="images/gs003_th.jpg" width="258" height="446" alt="Handwritten: Hudson Stuck." title="Handwritten: Hudson Stuck." /></a></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii"></a><a href="images/iii.png">[iii]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>
+TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH<br />
+A DOG SLED<br />
+</h1>
+<h3>A NARRATIVE OF WINTER TRAVEL IN INTERIOR ALASKA<br />
+<br />
+BY<br />
+</h3>
+<h2>HUDSON STUCK, D.D., F.R.G.S.<br /></h2>
+<h4>ARCHDEACON OF THE YUKON</h4>
+<div class='center'><small>AUTHOR OF "THE ASCENT OF DENALI (MOUNT McKINLEY)"</small><br />
+<br /><br /><br />
+ILLUSTRATED<br />
+<br /><br /><br />
+SECOND EDITION<br />
+<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+NEW YORK<br />
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS<br />
+1916<br /></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv"></a><a href="images/iv.png">[iv]</a></span></p>
+<div class='center'>
+<span class="smcap"><small>Copyright, 1914, 1916, by</small></span><br />
+<small>CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</small><br /></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v"></a><a href="images/v.png">[v]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<b>TO</b><br />
+GRAFTON BURKE, M.D.<br />
+<small>AND</small><br />
+EDGAR WEBB LOOMIS, M.D.<br />
+<br />
+<small>PUPILS, COMRADES, COLLEAGUES,</small><br />
+<small>COMPANIONS ON SOME OF THESE JOURNEYS,</small><br />
+<small>ALWAYS DEAR FRIENDS,</small><br />
+<br />
+<small>AND TO</small><br />
+<br />
+THE MOTHER OF THE THREE OF US<br />
+<br />
+<big>SEWANEE</big><br />
+<br />
+<small>THE COLLEGE ON THE MOUNTAIN-TOP</small><br />
+<small>WHERE THE OLD IDEALS ARE STILL</small><br />
+<small>UNFLINCHINGLY MAINTAINED</small><br />
+<br />
+THIS VOLUME<br />
+<small>IS</small><br />
+AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED<br />
+<small>BY</small><br />
+THE AUTHOR<br /></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi"></a><a href="images/vi.png">[vi]</a></span><br /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii"></a><a href="images/vii.png">[vii]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">This</span> volume deals with a series of journeys taken
+with a dog team over the winter trails in the interior
+of Alaska. The title might have claimed fourteen or
+fifteen thousand miles instead of ten, for the book was
+projected and the title adopted some years ago, and the
+journeys have continued. But ten thousand is a good
+round titular number, and is none the worse for being
+well within the mark.</p>
+
+<p>So far as mere distance is concerned, anyway, there
+is nothing noteworthy in this record. There are many
+men in Alaska who have done much more. A mail-carrier
+on one of the longer dog routes will cover four
+thousand miles in a winter, while the writer's average is
+less than two thousand. But his sled has gone far off
+the beaten track, across the arctic wilderness, into many
+remote corners; wherever, indeed, white men or natives
+were to be found in all the great interior.</p>
+
+<p>These journeys were connected primarily with the
+administration of the extensive work of the Episcopal
+Church in the interior of Alaska, under the bishop of the
+diocese; but that feature of them has been fully set forth
+from time to time in the church publications, and finds
+only incidental reference here.</p>
+
+<p>It is a great, wild country, little known save along<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii"></a><a href="images/viii.png">[viii]</a></span>
+accustomed routes of travel; a country with a beauty
+and a fascination all its own; mere arctic wilderness, indeed,
+and nine tenths of it probably destined always to
+remain such, yet full of interest and charm.</p>
+
+<p>Common opinion "outside" about Alaska seems to
+be veering from the view that it is a land of perpetual
+snow and ice to the other extreme of holding it to be a
+"world's treasure-house" of mineral wealth and agricultural
+possibility. The world's treasure is deposited in
+many houses, and Alaska has its share; its mineral
+wealth is very great, and "hidden doors of opulence"
+may open at any time, but its agricultural possibilities,
+in the ordinary sense in which the phrase is used, are
+confined to very small areas in proportion to the enormous
+whole, and in very limited degree.</p>
+
+<p>It is no new thing for those who would build railways
+to write in high-flown style about the regions they
+would penetrate, and, indeed, to speak of "millions of
+acres waiting for the plough" is not necessarily a misrepresentation;
+they are waiting. Nor is it altogether
+unnatural that professional agricultural experimenters at
+the stations established by the government should make
+the most of their experiments. When Dean Stanley
+spoke disdainfully of dogma, Lord Beaconsfield replied;
+"Ah! but you must always remember, no dogmas, no
+deans."</p>
+
+<p>Besides the physical attractions of this country, it has
+a gentle aboriginal population that arouses in many ways
+the respect and the sympathy of all kindly people; and
+it has some of the hardiest and most adventurous white<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix"></a><a href="images/ix.png">[ix]</a></span>
+men in the world. The reader will come into contact
+with both in these pages.</p>
+
+<p>So much for the book's scope; a word of its limitations.
+It is confined to the interior of Alaska; confined
+in the main to the great valley of the Yukon and its
+tributaries; being a record of sled journeys, it is confined
+to the winter.</p>
+
+<p>There is no man living who knows the whole of
+Alaska or who has any right to speak about the whole
+of Alaska. Bishop Rowe knows more about Alaska, in
+all probability, than any other living man, and there
+are large areas of the country in which he has never set
+foot. There is probably no man living, save Bishop
+Rowe, who has visited even the localities of all the missions
+of the Episcopal Church in Alaska. If one were
+to travel continuously for a whole year, using the most
+expeditious means at his command, and not wasting a
+day anywhere, it is doubtful whether, summer and winter,
+by sea and land, squeezing the last mile out of the
+seasons, travelling on the "last ice" and the "first water,"
+he could even touch at all the mission stations. So,
+when a man from Nome speaks of Alaska he means his
+part of Alaska, the Seward Peninsula. When a man
+from Valdez or Cordova speaks of Alaska he means the
+Prince William Sound country. When a man from Juneau
+speaks of Alaska he means the southeastern coast.
+Alaska is not one country but many, with different
+climates, different resources, different problems, different
+populations, different interests; and what is true of
+one part of it is often grotesquely untrue of other parts.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x"></a><a href="images/x.png">[x]</a></span>
+This is the reason why so many contradictory things
+have been written about the country. Not only do
+these various parts of Alaska differ radically from one
+another, but they are separated from one another by
+almost insuperable natural obstacles, so that they are in
+reality different countries.</p>
+
+<p>When Alaska is spoken of in this book the interior
+is meant, in which the writer has travelled almost continuously
+for the past eight years. The Seward Peninsula
+is the only other part of the country that the book
+touches. And as regards summer travel and the summer
+aspect of the country, there is material for another book
+should the reception of this one warrant its preparation.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The problems of the civil government of the country
+will be found touched upon somewhat freely as they rise
+from time to time in the course of these journeys, and
+some faint hope is entertained that drawing attention
+to evils may hasten a remedy.</p>
+
+<p>Alaska is not now, and never has been, a lawless
+country in the old, Wild Western sense of unpunished
+homicides and crimes of violence. It has been, on the
+whole, singularly free from bloodshed&mdash;a record due in
+no small part to the fact that it is not the custom of
+the country to carry pistols, for which again there is
+climatic and geographic reason; due also in part to the
+very peaceable and even timid character of its native
+people.</p>
+
+<p>But as regards the stringent laws enacted by Congress
+for the protection of these native people, and especially<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi"></a><a href="images/xi.png">[xi]</a></span>
+in the essential particular of protecting them from the
+fatal effects of intoxicating liquor, the country is not
+law-abiding, for these laws are virtually a dead letter.</p>
+
+<p>Justices of the peace who must live wholly upon fees
+in regions where fees will not furnish a living, and United
+States deputy marshals appointed for political reasons,
+constitute a very feeble staff against law-breakers. When
+it is remembered that on the whole fifteen hundred miles
+of the American Yukon there are but six of these deputy
+marshals, and that these six men, with another five or
+six on the tributary rivers, form all the police of the
+country, it will be seen that Congress must do something
+more than pass stringent laws if those laws are to
+be of any effect.</p>
+
+<p>A body of stipendiary magistrates, a police force
+wholly removed from politics and modelled somewhat
+upon the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police&mdash;these
+are two of the great needs of the country if the liquor
+laws are to be enforced and the native people are to
+survive.</p>
+
+<p>That the danger of the extermination of the natives
+is a real one all vital statistics kept at Yukon River
+points in the last five years show, and that there are
+powerful influences in the country opposed to the execution
+of the liquor laws some recent trials at Fairbanks
+would leave no room for doubt if there had been any
+room before. Indeed, at this writing, when the pages
+of this book are closed and there remains no place save
+the preface where the matter can be referred to, an
+impudent attempt is on foot, with large commercial<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii"></a><a href="images/xii.png">[xii]</a></span>
+backing, to secure the removal of a zealous and fearless
+United States district attorney, who has been too active
+in prosecuting liquor-peddlers to suit the wholesale dealers
+in liquor.</p>
+
+<p>There are, of course, those who view with perfect
+equanimity the destruction of the natives that is now
+going on, and look forward with complacency to the
+time when the Alaskan Indian shall have ceased to exist.
+But to men of thought and feeling such cynicism is abhorrent,
+and the duty of the government towards its
+simple and kindly wards is clear.</p>
+
+<p>A measure of real protection must be given the native
+communities against the low-down whites who seek
+to intrude into them and build habitations for convenient
+resort upon occasions of drunkenness and debauchery,
+and some adequate machinery set up for suppressing
+the contemptible traffic in adulterated spirits they
+subsist largely upon. The licensed liquor-dealers do not
+themselves sell to Indians, but they notoriously sell to
+men who notoriously peddle to Indians, and the suppression
+of this illicit commerce would materially reduce the
+total sales of liquor.</p>
+
+<p>Some measure of protection, one thinks, must also
+be afforded against a predatory class of Indian traders,
+the back rooms of whose stores are often barrooms,
+gambling-dens, and houses of assignation, and headquarters
+and harbourage for the white degenerates&mdash;even
+if the government go the length of setting up co-operative
+Indian stores in the interior, as has been done
+in some places on the coast. This last is a matter in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii"></a><a href="images/xiii.png">[xiii]</a></span>
+which the missions are helpless, for there is no wise
+combination of religion and trade.</p>
+
+<p>So this book goes forth with a plea in the front of it,
+which will find incidental support and expression throughout
+it, for the natives of interior Alaska, that they be
+not wantonly destroyed off the face of the earth.</p>
+
+<div class='right'>
+<span class="smcap">Hudson Stuck.</span><br /></div>
+<div>
+<span class="smcap">New York</span>,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>March</i>, 1914.</span><br /></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xv" id="Page_xv"></a><a href="images/xv.png">[xv]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is gratifying to know that a second edition of this
+book has been called for and it is interesting to write
+another preface; it even proved interesting to do what
+was set about most reluctantly&mdash;the reading of the
+book over again after entire avoidance of it for two years.
+It was necessary to do it, though one shrank from it,
+and it is interesting to know that after this comparatively
+long and complete detachment I find little to add
+and less to correct. Upon a complete rereading I am
+content to let the book stand, with two or three footnotes
+thrown in, and the correction of the one printer's
+error it contained from cover to cover&mdash;an error that a
+score of kind correspondents pointed out, for it was conspicuous
+in the title of a picture.</p>
+
+<p>The tendency to which attention is drawn in the
+original preface, the pendulum swing from the old notion
+that Alaska is a land of polar bears and icebergs to the
+new notion that it is a "world's treasure-house of mineral
+wealth and unbounded agricultural possibilities"
+is yet more marked than it was two years ago. The
+beginning of the building of the government railway has
+given new impetus to the "boosting" writers for magazines
+and newspapers. Quite recently it was stated in
+one such publication that we need not worry about the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xvi" id="Page_xvi"></a><a href="images/xvi.png">[xvi]</a></span>
+destruction of our forests, for had we not the inexhaustible
+timber resources of the interior of Alaska to
+draw upon?</p>
+
+<p>And in the North itself&mdash;though no one there would
+write about the timber resources of the interior&mdash;in
+certain shrill journals the man who does not confidently
+expect to see the Yukon Flats waving with golden grain
+and "the lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea" of the
+Koyukuk and the Chandalar is regarded as a traitor to
+his country and his God. But it must be remembered
+that there are a number of journalists in Alaska who
+know nothing of the country outside their respective
+towns, and that "boosting" grows shriller, as Eugene
+Field found red paint grow redder, "the further out
+West one goes." When they get a newspaper at Cape
+Prince of Wales what a clarion it will be!</p>
+
+<p>Truth, however, is not more wont than of old to be
+found in extremes, and the author of this book believes
+that those who desire a sober view of the country it
+deals with will find it herein. He claims no more than
+that he has had adequate opportunity of forming his
+opinions and that he has a right to their expression. It
+is now twelve years since he began almost constant
+travelling, winter and summer, in the interior of Alaska.
+He has described nothing that he has not seen; ventured
+no judgment that he has not well digested, and has
+nothing to retract or even modify; but he would repeat
+and emphasise a caution of the original preface. Alaska
+is not one country but many countries, and so widely
+do they differ from one another in almost every respect<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xvii" id="Page_xvii"></a><a href="images/xvii.png">[xvii]</a></span>
+that no general statements about Alaska can be true.
+The present author's knowledge of the territory is confined
+in the main to the interior&mdash;to the valley of the
+Yukon and its tributary rivers, which make up one of
+the world's great waterways&mdash;and nothing of his writing
+applies, with his authority, to other parts.</p>
+
+<p>The matter of the preservation of the native peoples
+still presses, and is nearer to the author's heart than any
+other matter whatever. The United States Congress,
+which voted thirty-five millions of dollars for the government
+railroad, strikes out year by year the modest
+additional score or two of thousands that year by year
+the Bureau of Education asks for the establishment of
+hospital work amongst the Indians of the interior, and
+the preventable mortality continues to be very great.</p>
+
+<p>In the last two years, largely as the result of the
+untiring efforts of Bishop Rowe on behalf of the natives,
+two modern, well-equipped hospitals have been built, with
+money that he and his clergy have gathered, on the Yukon
+River, one at Fort Yukon and one at Tanana; and these
+are the only places of any kind, on nearly a thousand
+miles of the river, where sick or injured Indians may be
+received and cared for.</p>
+
+<p>Amongst men of thought and feeling there is noticeable
+revulsion from the supercilious attitude that used
+not to be uncommon toward the little peoples of the
+world. It begins to be recognised that it is quite possible
+that even the smallest of the little peoples may have
+some contribution to make to the welfare and progress of
+the human race. What is the Boy Scout movement that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xviii" id="Page_xviii"></a><a href="images/xviii.png">[xviii]</a></span>
+is sweeping the country, to the enormous benefit of the
+rising generation, but the incorporating into the nurture
+of our youth of the things that were the nurture of the
+Indian youth; that are a large part of the nurture of
+the Alaskan Indian youth to-day? And the camp-fire
+clubs and woodcraft associations and the whole trend
+to the life of the open recognise that the Indian had developed
+a technique of wilderness life deserving of preservation
+for its value to the white man. While as for
+the Esquimaux, the author never sees the extraordinary
+prevalence amongst them of the art of graphic delineation
+displayed in bold etchings of incidents of the chase
+upon their implements and weapons (though not upon
+the articles made by the dozen for the curio-venders at
+Nome and Saint Michael) without dreaming that some
+day an artist will come from out that singular and most
+interesting people who shall teach the world something
+new about art.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever the future may hold for the interior of
+Alaska, the author is convinced that its population will
+derive very largely from the present native stocks, and
+this alone would justify any efforts to prevent further
+inroads upon their health and vitality.</p>
+
+<p>
+April, 1916.<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xix" id="Page_xix"></a><a href="images/xix.png">[xix]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="Contents">
+<tr><td align='left' colspan='2'><small>CHAPTER</small></td><td align='center'><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Preface</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_vii">vii</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>I.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Fairbanks to the Chandalar Through Circle City and Fort Yukon</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>II.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Chandalar Village to Bettles, Coldfoot, and the Koyukuk</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_34">34</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>III.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Bettles to the Pacific&mdash;The Alatna, Kobuk Portage, Kobuk Village, Kotzebue Sound</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_63">63</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>IV.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">The Seward Peninsula&mdash;Candle Creek, Council, and Nome</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_102">102</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>V.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Nome to Fairbanks&mdash;Norton Sound&mdash;The Kaltag Portage&mdash;Nulato&mdash;Up the Yukon to Tanana</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_125">125</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>VI.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">The "First Ice"&mdash;An Autumn Adventure on the Koyukuk</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_157">157</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>VII.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">The Koyukuk to the Yukon and to Tanana&mdash;Christmas Holidays at Saint John's-in-the-Wilderness</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_188">188</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>VIII.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Up the Yukon to Rampart and Across Country to the Tanana&mdash;Alaskan Agriculture&mdash;The Good Dog Nanook&mdash;Miss Farthing's Boys at Nenana&mdash;Chena and Fairbanks</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_219">219</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>IX.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Tanana Crossing to Fortymile and Down the Yukon&mdash;A Patriarchal Chief&mdash;Swarming Caribou&mdash;Eagle and Fort Egbert&mdash;Circle City and Fort Yukon</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_251">251</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xx" id="Page_xx"></a><a href="images/xx.png">[xx]</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>X.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">From the Tanana River to the Kuskokwim&mdash;Thence to the Iditarod Mining Camp&mdash;Thence to the Yukon, and Up That River to Fort Yukon</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_294">294</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XI.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">The Natives of Alaska</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_348">348</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XII.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Photography in the Arctic</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_371">371</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XIII.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">The Northern Lights</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_380">380</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XIV.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">The Alaskan Dogs</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_392">392</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>&nbsp;</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Index</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_413">413</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxi" id="Page_xxi"></a><a href="images/xxi.png">[xxi]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="List of Illustrations">
+<tr><td align='left'>Hudson Stuck (<i>photogravure</i>)</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_ii"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;</td><td align='right'><span class="smcap"><small>Facing Page</small></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Sunrise on the Chandalar-Koyukuk portage</td><td align='right'><a href="#sunrise">36</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Coldfoot on the Koyukuk</td><td align='right'><a href="#coldfoot">37</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The upper Koyukuk</td><td align='right'><a href="#upper">50</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The barren shores of Kotzebue Sound</td><td align='right'><a href="#barren">51</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Gold-mining at Nome</td><td align='right'><a href="#gold">122</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Pulling the <i>Pelican</i> out with a "Spanish windlass"</td><td align='right'><a href="#pulling">123</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The start over the "first ice"</td><td align='right'><a href="#start">164</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>"Rough going"</td><td align='right'><a href="#rough">165</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Arthur and Doctor Burke</td><td align='right'><a href="#arthur">178</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Saint John's-in-the-Wilderness, Allakaket, Koyukuk River</td><td align='right'><a href="#saint">179</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The double interpretation at the Allakaket</td><td align='right'><a href="#double">186</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The wind-swept Yukon within the ramparts</td><td align='right'><a href="#wind">187</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>A pleasant woodland trail</td><td align='right'><a href="#pleasant">256</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>An Alaskan chief and his henchman</td><td align='right'><a href="#alaskan">257</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The Tanana crossing</td><td align='right'><a href="#tanana">270</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Good going on the Yukon</td><td align='right'><a href="#good">271</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>"A portage that comes so finely down to the Yukon that there is pleasure in anticipating the view it affords"</td><td align='right'><a href="#portage">290</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Fort Yukon</td><td align='right'><a href="#fort">291</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The rough breaking in of Doctor Loomis, camped on the mail trail at 50&deg; below zero, unable to reach a road-house for the deep snow</td><td align='right'><a href="#breaking">296</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxii" id="Page_xxii"></a><a href="images/xxii.png">[xxii]</a></span>Esquimaux of the upper Kuskokwim</td><td align='right'><a href="#esquimauxpic">297</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>"The 'summit' is high above timber-line and the trail pursues a hogback ridge for a mile and a half at the summit level"</td><td align='right'><a href="#summit">324</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>A street in Iditarod City</td><td align='right'><a href="#street">325</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The end of the portage trail</td><td align='right'><a href="#portagetrail">334</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Rough ice on the Yukon</td><td align='right'><a href="#ice">335</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>A docile folk, eager for instruction</td><td align='right'><a href="#docile">350</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The mission type</td><td align='right'><a href="#mission">351</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Wild and shy</td><td align='right'><a href="#wild">351</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The native communicant</td><td align='right'><a href="#native">360</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Raw material</td><td align='right'><a href="#raw">360</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>An Esquimau youth</td><td align='right'><a href="#esquimau">361</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>A half-breed Indian</td><td align='right'><a href="#half">361</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>An aged couple</td><td align='right'><a href="#aged">366</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Football at the Allakaket, exposure 1-1000 second, April, after a new light snowfall</td><td align='right'><a href="#football">367</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The sun dogs</td><td align='right'><a href="#sun">388</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>"Tan," of mixed breed</td><td align='right'><a href="#tan">389</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>"Muk," a pure malamute</td><td align='right'><a href="#muk">389</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Map of the interior of Alaska showing journeys described in this book</td><td align='right' colspan='2'><a href="#end"><i>At end of volume</i></a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1"></a><a href="images/1.png">[1]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH<br />
+A DOG SLED</h2>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2"></a><a href="images/2.png">[2]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>AUTHOR'S NOTE</h2>
+
+
+<p>Three fundamental facts are to be borne constantly in
+mind by those who would form any intelligent conception of
+the Territory of Alaska.</p>
+
+<p>(1) Its area of approximately 590,000 square miles makes
+it two and a half times as large as the State of Texas.</p>
+
+<p>(2) But it is not, like Texas, one homogeneous body of land;
+it is not, in any geographical sense, one country at all. "Sweeping
+in a great arc over sixteen degrees of latitude and fifty-eight degrees
+of longitude," it is no less than four, and some might say
+five, different countries, differing from one another in almost
+every way that one country can differ from another: in climate,
+in population, in resources, in requirements; and&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>(3) These different countries are not merely different from
+one another, they are <i>separated</i> from one another by formidable
+natural barriers.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3"></a><a href="images/3.png">[3]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH<br />
+A DOG SLED</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>FAIRBANKS TO THE CHANDALAR THROUGH CIRCLE CITY
+AND FORT YUKON</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> plan for the winter journey of 1905-6 (my
+second winter on the trail) was an ambitious one, for
+it contemplated a visit to Point Hope, on the shore of
+the Arctic Ocean between Kotzebue Sound and Point
+Barrow, and a return to Fairbanks. In the summer
+such a journey would be practicable only by water:
+down the Tanana to the Yukon, down the Yukon to its
+mouth, and then through the straits of Bering and along
+the Arctic coast; in the winter it is possible to make
+the journey across country. A desire to visit our most
+northerly and most inaccessible mission in Alaska and
+a desire to become acquainted with general conditions
+in the wide country north of the Yukon were equal
+factors in the planning of a journey which would carry
+me through three and a half degrees of latitude and
+no less than eighteen degrees of longitude.</p>
+
+<p>The course of winter travel in Alaska follows the
+frozen waterways so far as they lead in the general<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4"></a><a href="images/4.png">[4]</a></span>
+direction desired, leaves them to cross mountain ranges
+and divides at the most favourable points, and drops
+down into the streams again so soon as streams are
+available. The country is notably well watered and the
+waterways are the natural highways. The more frequented
+routes gradually cut out the serpentine bends
+of the rivers by land trails, but in the wilder parts of
+the country travel sticks to the ice.</p>
+
+<p>Our course, therefore, lay up the Chatanika River
+and one of its tributaries until the Tanana-Yukon watershed
+was reached; then through the mountains, crossing
+two steep summits to the Yukon slope, and down
+that slope by convenient streams to the Yukon River
+at Circle City.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE GOLD TRAIN</div>
+
+<p>We set out on the 27th of November with six dogs
+and a "basket" sled and about five hundred pounds'
+weight of load, including tent and stove, bedding, clothes
+for the winter, grub box and its equipment, and dog
+feed. The dogs were those that I had used the previous
+winter, with one exception. The leader had come
+home lame from the fish camp where he had been boarded
+during the summer, and, despite all attentions, the lameness
+had persisted; so he must be left behind, and
+there was much difficulty in securing another leader. A
+recent stampede to a new mining district had advanced
+the price of dogs and gathered up all the good ones, so
+it was necessary to hunt all over Fairbanks and pay a
+hundred dollars for a dog that proved very indifferent,
+after all. "Jimmy" was a handsome beast, the handsomest
+I ever owned and the costliest, but, as I learned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5"></a><a href="images/5.png">[5]</a></span>
+later from one who knew his history, had "travelled on
+his looks all his life." He earned the name of "Jimmy
+the Fake."</p>
+
+<p>Midway to Cleary "City," on the chief gold-producing
+creek of the district, our first day's run, we encountered
+the gold train. For some time previous a lone
+highwayman had robbed solitary miners on their way
+to Fairbanks with gold-dust, and now a posse was organised
+that went the rounds of the creeks and gathered
+up the dust and bore it on mule-back to the bank, escorted
+by half a dozen armed and mounted men. Sawed-off
+shotguns were the favourite weapons, and one
+judged them deadly enough at short range. The heavy
+"pokes" galled the animals' backs, however they might
+be slung, and the little procession wound slowly along,
+a man ahead, a man behind, and four clustered round
+the treasure.</p>
+
+<p>These raw, temporary mining towns are much alike
+the world over, one supposes, though perhaps a little
+worse up here in the far north. It was late at night
+when we reached the place, but saloon and dance-hall
+were ablaze with light and loud with the raucity of
+phonographs and the stamping of feet. Everything
+was "wide open," and there was not even the thinnest
+veneer of respectability. Drinking and gambling and
+dancing go on all night long. Drunken men reel out
+upon the snow; painted faces leer over muslin curtains
+as one passes by. Without any government, without
+any pretence of municipal organisation, there is no co-operation
+for public enterprise. There are no streets,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6"></a><a href="images/6.png">[6]</a></span>
+there are no sidewalks save such as a man may choose
+to lay in front of his own premises, and the simplest
+sanitary precautions are entirely neglected. Nothing
+but the cold climate of the north prevents epidemic
+disease from sweeping through these places. They rise
+in a few days wherever gold is found in quantities, they
+flourish as the production increases, decline with its decline,
+and are left gaunt, dark, and abandoned so soon
+as the diggings are exhausted.</p>
+
+<p>The next day we were on the Chatanika River, to
+which Cleary Creek is tributary, and were immediately
+confronted with one of the main troubles and difficulties
+of winter travel in this and, as may be supposed,
+in any arctic or subarctic country&mdash;overflow water.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">OVERFLOW WATER AND ICE</div>
+
+<p>In the lesser rivers, where deep pools alternate with
+swift shallows, the stream freezes solid to the bottom
+upon the shoals and riffles. Since the subterranean fountains
+that supply the river do not cease to discharge
+their waters in the winter, however cold it may be,
+there comes presently an increasing pressure under the
+ice above such a barrier. The pent-up water is strong
+enough to heave the ice into mounds and at last to
+break forth, spreading itself far along the frozen surface
+of the river. At times it may be seen gushing out
+like an artesian well, rising three or four feet above the
+surface of the ice, until the pressure is relieved. Sometimes
+for many miles at a stretch the whole river will
+be covered with a succession of such overflows, from
+two or three inches deep to eight or ten, or even twelve;
+some just bursting forth, some partially frozen, some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7"></a><a href="images/7.png">[7]</a></span>
+resolved into solid "glare" ice. Thus the surface of the
+river is continually renewed the whole winter through,
+and a section of the ice crust in the spring would show
+a series of laminations; here ice upon ice, there ice upon
+half-incorporated snow, that mark the successive inundations.</p>
+
+<p>This explanation has been given at length because
+of the large part that the phenomenon plays in the difficulty
+and danger of winter travel, and because it seems
+hard to make those who are not familiar with it understand
+it. At first sight it would seem that after a week
+or ten days of fifty-below-zero weather, for instance, all
+water everywhere would be frozen into quiescence for
+the rest of the winter. Throw a bucket of water into
+the air, and it is frozen solid as soon as it reaches the
+ground. There would be no more trouble, one would
+think, with water. Yet some of the worst trouble the
+traveller has with overflow water is during very cold
+weather, and it is then, of course, that there is the greatest
+danger of frost-bite in getting one's feet wet. Water-proof
+footwear, therefore, becomes one of the "musher's"
+great concerns and difficulties. The best water-proof
+footwear is the Esquimau mukluk, not easily obtainable
+in the interior of Alaska, but the mukluk is an
+inconvenient footwear to put snow-shoes on. Rubber
+boots or shoes of any kind are most uncomfortable things
+to travel in. Nothing equals the moccasin on the trail,
+nothing is so good to snow-shoe in. The well-equipped
+traveller has moccasins for dry trails and mukluks for
+wet trails&mdash;and even then may sometimes get his feet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8"></a><a href="images/8.png">[8]</a></span>
+wet. Nor are his own feet his only consideration; his
+dogs' feet are, collectively, as important as his own.
+When the dog comes out of water into snow again the
+snow collects and freezes between the toes, and if not
+removed will soon cause a sore and lameness. Then a
+dog moccasin must be put on and the foot continually
+nursed and doctored. When several dogs of a team are
+thus affected, it may be with several feet each, the labour
+and trouble of travel are greatly increased.</p>
+
+<p>So, whenever his dogs have been through water, the
+careful musher will stop and go all down the line, cleaning
+out the ice and snow from their feet with his fingers.
+Four interdigital spaces per foot make sixteen per dog,
+and with a team of six dogs that means ninety-six several
+operations with the bare hand (if it be done effectually)
+every time the team gets into an overflow. The
+dogs will do it for themselves if they are given time,
+tearing out the lumps of ice with their teeth; but, inasmuch
+as they usually feel conscientiously obliged to eat
+each lump as they pull it out, it takes much longer, and
+in a short daylight there is little time to spare if the
+day's march is to be made.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">"OVERFLOW" ICE</div>
+
+<p>We found overflow almost as soon as we reached the
+Chatanika River, and in one form or another we encountered
+it during all the two days and a half that
+we were pursuing the river's windings. At times it
+was covered with a sheet of new ice that would support
+the dogs but would not support the sled, so that
+the dogs were travelling on one level and the sled on
+another, and a man had to walk along in the water<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9"></a><a href="images/9.png">[9]</a></span>
+between the dogs and the sled for several hundred
+yards at a time, breaking down the overflow ice with
+his feet.</p>
+
+<p>At other times the thin sheets of overflow ice would
+sway and bend as the sled passed quickly over them in
+a way that gives to ice in such condition its Alaskan
+name of "rubber-ice," while for the fifteen or twenty
+miles of McManus Creek, the headwaters of the Chatanika,
+we had continuous stretches of fine glare ice with
+enough frost crystals upon it from condensing moisture
+to give a "tooth" to the dogs' feet, just as varnish on
+a photographic negative gives tooth to the retouching
+pencil. Perfectly smooth ice is a very difficult surface
+for dogs to pass over; glare ice slightly roughened by
+frost deposit makes splendid, fast going.</p>
+
+<p>Eighty-five miles or so from Fairbanks, and just
+about half-way to Circle, the watercourse is left and
+the first summit is the "Twelve-Mile," as it is called.
+We tried hard to take our load up at one trip, but found
+it impossible to do so, and had to unlash the sled and
+take half the load at a time, caching it on the top while
+we returned for the other half.</p>
+
+<p>It took us half a day to get our load to the top of
+the Twelve-Mile summit, a rise of about one thousand
+three hundred feet from the creek bed as the aneroid
+gave it. In the steeper pitches we had to take the axe
+and cut steps, so hard and smooth does the incessant
+wind at these heights beat the snow, and on our second
+trip to the top we were just in time to rescue a roll of
+bedding that had been blown from the cache and was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10"></a><a href="images/10.png">[10]</a></span>
+about to descend a gully from which we could hardly
+have recovered it.</p>
+
+<p>This summit descended, we were in Birch Creek
+water, and had we followed the watercourse would have
+reached the Yukon; but we would have travelled hundreds
+of miles and would have come out below Fort
+Yukon, while we were bound for Circle City. So there
+was another and a yet more difficult summit to cross
+before we could descend the Yukon slope. We were
+able to hire a man and two dogs to help us over the
+Eagle summit, so that the necessity of relaying was
+avoided. One man ahead continually calling to the
+dogs, eight dogs steadily pulling, and two men behind
+steadily pushing, foot by foot, with many stoppages as
+one bench after another was surmounted, we got the
+load to the top at last, a rise of one thousand four hundred
+feet in less than three miles. A driving snow-storm
+cut off all view and would have left us at a loss
+which way to proceed but for the stakes that indicated
+it.</p>
+
+<p>The descent was as anxious and hazardous as the
+ascent had been laborious. The dogs were loosed and
+sent racing down the slope. With a rope rough-lock
+around the sled runners, one man took the gee pole and
+another the handle-bars and each spread-eagled himself
+through the loose deep snow to check the momentum of
+the sled, until sled and men turned aside and came to a
+stop in a drift to avoid a steep, smooth pitch. The sled
+extricated, it was poised on the edge of the pitch and
+turned loose on the hardened snow, hurtling down three<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11"></a><a href="images/11.png">[11]</a></span>
+or four hundred feet until it buried itself in another drift.
+The dogs were necessary to drag it from this drift, and
+one had to go down and bring them up. Then again
+they were loosed, and from bench to bench the process
+was repeated until the slope grew gentle enough to permit
+the regulation of the downward progress by the
+foot-brake.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">"SUMMITS"</div>
+
+<p>The Eagle summit is one of the most difficult summits
+in Alaska. The wind blows so fiercely that sometimes
+for days together its passage is almost impossible.
+No amount of trail making could be of much help, for
+the snow smothers up everything on the lee of the hill,
+and the end of every storm presents a new surface and
+an altered route. A "summit" in this Alaskan sense
+is, of course, a saddle between peaks, and in this case
+there is no easier pass and no way around. The only
+way to avoid the Eagle summit, without going out of
+the district altogether, would be to tunnel it.</p>
+
+<p>The summit passed, we found better trails and a
+more frequented country, for in this district are a number
+of creeks that draw supplies from Circle City, and
+that had been worked ten years or more.</p>
+
+<p>At the time of the Klondike stampede of 1896-97,
+Circle City was already established as a flourishing mining
+camp and boasted itself the largest log-cabin town
+in the world. Before the Klondike drew away its people
+as a stronger magnet draws iron filings from a lesser one,
+Circle had a population of about three thousand. Take
+a town of three thousand and reduce it to thirty or
+forty, and it is hard to resist the melancholy impression<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12"></a><a href="images/12.png">[12]</a></span>
+which entrance upon it in the dusk of the evening
+brings. There lay the great white Yukon in the
+middle distance; beyond it the Yukon Flats, snow-covered,
+desolate, stretched away enormously, hedged here
+at their beginning by grey, dim hills. Spread out in
+the foreground were the little, squat, huddling cabins
+that belonged to no one, with never a light in a window
+or smoke from a chimney, the untrodden snow drifted
+against door and porch. It would be hard to imagine
+a drearier prospect, and one had the feeling that it was
+a city of the dead rather than merely a dead city.</p>
+
+<p>The weather had grown steadily colder since we
+reached the Yukon slope, and for two days before reaching
+Circle the thermometer had stood between 40&deg; and
+50&deg; below zero. It was all right for us to push on, the
+trail was good and nearly all down-hill, and there were
+road-houses every ten or twelve miles. Freighters, weather-bound,
+came to the doors as we passed by with our
+jangle of bells and would raise a somewhat chechaco pride
+in our breasts by remarking: "You don't seem to care
+what weather you travel in!" The evil of it was that
+the perfectly safe travelling between Eagle Creek and
+Circle emboldened us to push on from Circle under
+totally different conditions, when travelling at such low
+temperatures became highly dangerous and brought us
+into grave misadventure that might easily have been
+fatal catastrophe.</p>
+
+<p>Our original start was a week later than had been
+planned and we had made no time, but rather lost it,
+on this first division of the journey. If we were to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13"></a><a href="images/13.png">[13]</a></span>
+reach Bettles on the Koyukuk River for Christmas, there
+was no more time to lose, and I was anxious to spend
+the next Sunday at Fort Yukon, three days' journey
+away. So we started for Fort Yukon on Thursday, the
+7th of December, the day after we reached Circle.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE YUKON FLATS</div>
+
+<p>A certain arctic traveller has said that "adventures"
+always imply either incompetence or ignorance of local
+conditions, and there is some truth in the saying. Our
+misadventure was the result of a series of mistakes, no
+one of which would have been other than discreditable
+to men of more experience. Our course lay for seventy-five
+miles through the Yukon Flats, which begin at
+Circle and extend for two hundred and fifty miles of the
+river's course below that point. The Flats constitute
+the most difficult and dangerous part of the whole
+length of the Yukon River, summer or winter, and the
+section between Circle City and Fort Yukon is the most
+difficult and dangerous part of the Flats. Save for a
+"portage" or land trail of eighteen or twenty miles out
+of Circle, the trail is on the river itself, which is split
+up into many channels without salient landmarks. The
+current is so swift that many stretches run open water
+far into the winter, and blow-holes are numerous. There
+is little travel on the Flats in winter, and a snow-storm
+accompanied by wind may obliterate what trail there is
+in an hour. The vehicle used in the Flats is not a sled
+but a toboggan, and our first mistake was in not conforming
+to local usage in this respect. There is always
+a very good reason for local usage about snow vehicles.
+But a toboggan which had been ordered from a native<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14"></a><a href="images/14.png">[14]</a></span>
+at Fort Yukon would be waiting for us, and it seemed
+not worth while to go to the expense of buying another
+merely for three days' journey.</p>
+
+<p>The second mistake was in engaging a boy as guide
+instead of a man. He was an attractive youth of about
+fourteen who had done good service at the Circle City
+mission the previous winter, when our nurse-in-charge
+was contending single-handed against an epidemic of
+diphtheria. He was a pleasant boy, with some English,
+who wanted to go and professed knowledge of the route.
+The greatest mistake of all was starting out through
+that lonely waste with the thermometer at 52&deg; below
+zero. The old-timers in Alaska have a saying that
+"travelling at 50&deg; below is all right as long as it's all
+right." If there be a good trail, if there be convenient
+stopping-places, if nothing go wrong, one may travel
+without special risk and with no extraordinary discomfort
+at 50&deg; below zero and a good deal lower. I have
+since that time made a short day's run at 62&deg; below,
+and once travelled for two or three hours on a stretch
+at 65&deg; below. But there is always more or less chance
+in travelling at low temperatures, because a very small
+thing may necessitate a stop, and a stop may turn into
+a serious thing. At such temperatures one must keep
+going. No amount of clothing that it is possible to wear
+on the trail will keep one warm while standing still. For
+dogs and men alike, constant brisk motion is necessary;
+for dogs as well as men&mdash;even though dogs will sleep outdoors
+in such cold without harm&mdash;for they cannot take
+as good care of themselves in the harness as they can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15"></a><a href="images/15.png">[15]</a></span>
+when loose. A trace that needs mending, a broken
+buckle, a snow-shoe string that must be replaced, may
+chill one so that it is impossible to recover one's warmth
+again. The bare hand cannot be exposed for many
+seconds without beginning to freeze; it is dangerous to
+breathe the air into the lungs for any length of time
+without a muffler over the mouth.</p>
+
+<p>Our troubles began as soon as we started. The trail
+was a narrow, winding toboggan track of sixteen or seventeen
+inches, while our sled was twenty inches wide,
+so that one runner was always dragging in the loose
+snow, and that meant slow, heavy going.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SUNRISE AND SUNSET</div>
+
+<p>The days were nearing the shortest of the year, when,
+in these latitudes, the sun does but show himself and
+withdraw again. But, especially in very cold weather,
+which is nearly always very clear weather, that brief
+appearance is preceded by a feast of rich, delicate colour.
+First a greenish glow on the southern horizon, brightening
+into lemon and then into clear primrose, invades
+the deep purple of the starry heavens. Then a beautiful
+circle of blush pink above a circle of pure amethyst
+gradually stretches all around the edge of the sky, slowly
+brightening while the stars fade out and the heavens
+change to blue. The dead white mirror of the snow
+takes every tint that the skies display with a faint but
+exquisite radiance. Then the sun's disk appears with a
+flood of yellow light but with no appreciable warmth,
+and for a little space his level rays shoot out and gild
+the tree tops and the distant hills. The snow springs
+to life. Dead white no longer, its dry, crystalline particles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16"></a><a href="images/16.png">[16]</a></span>
+glitter in myriads of diamond facets with every
+colour of the prism. Then the sun is gone, and the
+lovely circle of rose pink over amethyst again stretches
+round the horizon, slowly fading until once more the
+pale primrose glows in the south against the purple sky
+with its silver stars. Thus sunrise and sunset form a
+continuous spectacle, with a purity of delicate yet splendid
+colour that only perfectly dry atmosphere permits.
+The primrose glow, the heralding circle, the ball of
+orange light, the valedictory circle, the primrose glow
+again, and a day has come and gone. Air can hold no
+moisture at all at these low temperatures, and the skies
+are cloudless.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">AN ESCAPADE ON THE YUKON</div>
+
+<p>Moreover, in the wilds at 50&deg; below zero there is the
+most complete silence. All animal life is hidden away.
+Not a rabbit flits across the trail; in the absolutely still
+air not a twig moves. A rare raven passes overhead,
+and his cry, changed from a hoarse croak to a sweet
+liquid note, reverberates like the musical glasses. There
+is no more delightful sound in the wilderness than this
+occasional lapse into music of the raven. We wound
+through the scrub spruce and willow and over the niggerhead
+swamps, a faint tinkle of bells, a little cloud of
+steam; for in the great cold the moisture of the animals'
+breath hangs over their heads in the still air, and
+on looking back it stands awhile along the course at
+dogs' height until it is presently deposited on twigs and
+tussocks. We wound along, a faint tinkle of bells, a
+little cloud of steam, and in the midst of the cloud a
+tousle of shaggy black-and-white hair and red-and-white<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17"></a><a href="images/17.png">[17]</a></span>
+pompons&mdash;going out of the dead silence behind into the
+dead silence before. The dusk came, and still we plodded
+and pushed our weary way, swinging that heavy sled
+incessantly, by the gee pole in front and the handle-bars
+behind, in the vain effort to keep it on the trail.
+Two miles an hour was all that we were making. We
+had come but thirteen or fourteen miles out of twenty-four,
+and it was dark; and it grew colder.</p>
+
+<p>The dogs whined and stopped every few yards, worn
+out by wallowing in the snow and the labour of the
+collar. The long scarfs that wrapped our mouths and
+noses had been shifted and shifted, as one part after another
+became solid with ice from the breath, until over
+their whole length they were stiff as boards. After two
+more miles of it it was evident that we could not reach
+the mail cabin that night. Then I made my last and
+worst mistake. We should have stopped and camped
+then and there. We had tent and stove and everything
+requisite. But the native boy insisted that the
+cabin was "only little way," and any one who knows
+the misery of making camp in extremely cold weather,
+in the dark, will understand our reluctance to do so.</p>
+
+<p>I decided to make a cache of the greater part of our
+load&mdash;tent and stove and supplies generally&mdash;and to
+push on to the cabin with but the bedding and the
+grub box, returning for the stuff in the morning. And,
+since in the deepest depths of blundering there is a
+deeper still, by some one's carelessness, but certainly by
+my fault, the axe was left behind in the cache.</p>
+
+<p>With our reduced burden we made better progress,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18"></a><a href="images/18.png">[18]</a></span>
+and in a short time reached the end of the portage and
+came out on the frozen river, just as the moon, a day
+or two past the full, rose above the opposite bank. One
+sees many strange distortions of sun and moon in this
+land, but never was a stranger seen than this. Her
+disk, shining through the dense air of the river bottom,
+was in shape an almost perfect octagon, regular
+as though it had been laid off with dividers and a
+ruler.</p>
+
+<p>We were soon in doubt about the trail. The mail-carrier
+had gone down only two or three times this
+winter and each time had taken a different route, as
+more and more of the river closed and gave him more
+and more direct passage. A number of Indians had
+been hunting, and their tracks added to the tangle of
+trails. Presently we entered a thick mist that even to
+inexperienced eyes spoke of open water or new ice yet
+moist. So heavy was the vapour that to the man at
+the handle-bars the man at the gee pole loomed ghostly,
+and the man ahead of the dogs could not be distinguished
+at all. We had gone so much farther than our native
+boy had declared we had to go that we began to fear
+that in the confusion of trails we had taken the wrong
+one and had passed the cabin. That is the tenderfoot's,
+or, as we say, the chechaco's, fear; it is the one thing
+that it may almost be said never happens. But the
+boy fell down completely and was frankly at a loss. All
+we could get out of him was: "May-be-so we catch
+cabin bymeby, may-be-so no." If we had passed the
+cabin it was twenty odd miles to the next; and it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19"></a><a href="images/19.png">[19]</a></span>
+grew colder and the dogs were utterly weary again,
+prone upon the trail at every small excuse for a stop,
+only to be stirred by the whip, heavily wielded. Surely
+never men thrust themselves foolhardily into worse predicament!
+Then I made my last mistake. Dimly the
+bank loomed through the mist, and I said: "We can't
+go any farther; I think we've missed the trail and I'm
+going across to yon bank to see if there's a place to
+camp." I had not gone six steps from the trail when
+the ice gave way under my feet and I found myself in
+water to my hips.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">AN ESCAPADE ON THE YUKON</div>
+
+<p>Under Providence I owe it to the mukluks I wore,
+tied tight round my knees, that I did not lose my life,
+or at least my feet. The thermometer at Circle City
+stood at 60&deg; below zero at dark that day, and down on
+the ice it is always about 5&deg; colder than on the bank,
+because cold air is heavy air and sinks to the lowest
+level, and 65&deg; below zero means 97&deg; below freezing.</p>
+
+<p>My moose-hide breeches froze solid the moment I
+scrambled out, but not a drop of water got to my feet.
+If the water had reached my feet they would have
+frozen almost as quickly as the moose hide in that fearful
+cold. Thoroughly alarmed now, and realising our
+perilous situation, we did the only thing there was to
+do&mdash;we turned the dogs loose and abandoned the sled and
+went back along the trail we had followed as fast as we
+could. We knew that we could safely retrace our steps
+and that the trail would lead us to the bank after a
+while. We knew not where the trail would lead us in
+the other direction. As a matter of fact, it led to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20"></a><a href="images/20.png">[20]</a></span>
+mail cabin, two miles farther on, and the mail-carrier
+was at that time occupying it at the end of his day's
+run.</p>
+
+<p>The dogs stayed with the sled; dogs will usually
+stay with their sled; they seem to recognise their first
+allegiance to the load they haul, probably because they
+know their food forms part of it.</p>
+
+<p>Our cache reached, we made a fire, thawed out the
+iron-like armour of my leather breeches, and cutting a
+spare woollen scarf in two, wrapped the dry, warm
+pieces about my numbed thighs. Then we pushed on
+the eighteen miles or so to Circle, keeping a steady pace
+despite the drowsiness that oppressed us, and that oppressed
+me particularly owing to the chill of my ducking.
+About five in the morning we reached the town,
+and the clergyman, the Reverend C. E. Rice, turned
+out of his warm bed and I turned in, none the worse
+in body for the experience, but much humbled in spirit.
+My companion, Mr. E. J. Knapp, whose thoughtful
+care for me I always look back upon with gratitude,
+as well as upon Mr. Rice's kindness, froze his nose and
+a toe slightly, being somewhat neglectful of himself in
+his solicitude for me.</p>
+
+<p>We had been out about twenty hours in a temperature
+ranging from 52&deg; to 60&deg; below zero, had walked
+about forty-four miles, labouring incessantly as well as
+walking, what time we were with the sled, with nothing to
+eat&mdash;it was too cold to stop for eating&mdash;and, in addition
+to this, one of us had been in water to the waist, yet
+none of us took any harm. It was a providential overruling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21"></a><a href="images/21.png">[21]</a></span>
+of blundering foolhardiness for which we were
+deeply thankful.</p>
+
+<p>The next day a native with a fast team and an empty
+toboggan was sent down to take our load on to the
+cabin and bring the dogs back. Meanwhile, the mail-carrier
+had passed the spot, had seen the abandoned
+sled standing by recently broken ice, and had come on
+into town while we slept and none knew of our return,
+with the news that some one had been drowned. The
+mail for Fairbanks did but await the mail from Fort
+Yukon, and the town rumour, instantly identifying the
+abandoned sled, was carried across to Fairbanks, to my
+great distress and annoyance. The echoes of the distorted
+account of this misadventure which appeared in a
+Fairbanks newspaper still reverberate in "patent insides"
+of the provincial press of the United States.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">FORT YUKON </div>
+
+<p>The next Monday we started again, this time with
+a toboggan and with a man instead of a boy for guide,
+and in three days of only moderate difficulty we reached
+Fort Yukon.</p>
+
+<p>Fort Yukon, though it holds no attraction for the
+ordinary visitor or the summer tourist on the river, is
+a place of much interest to those who know the history
+of Alaska. While it is purely a native village, with no
+white population save the traders and the usual sprinkling
+of men that hang around native villages, it is yet
+the oldest white man's post on the Yukon River, save
+the post established by the Russians at Nulato, five or
+six hundred miles lower down. The Hudson Bay Company
+established itself here in 1846, and that date serves<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22"></a><a href="images/22.png">[22]</a></span>
+as the year one in making calculations and determining
+ages to this day. It is a fixed point in time that every
+native knows of. Any old man can tell you whether
+he was born before or after that date, and, if before,
+can pick out some boy that is about the age he was
+when the event occurred. The massacre at Nulato in
+1851 serves in a similar way for the lower river.</p>
+
+<p>After the Purchase, and the determination of the
+longitude of Fort Yukon by Mr. Raymond in 1869&mdash;who
+made the first steamboat journey up the Yukon on
+that errand&mdash;the Hudson Bay Company moved three
+times before they succeeded in getting east of the 141st
+meridian, and at the point reached on the third move,
+the New Rampart House on the Porcupine River, only
+a few hundred yards beyond the boundary-line, they
+remained until the gold excitement on the Yukon and
+the journeying of the natives to new posts on that river
+rendered trading unprofitable; then they withdrew to
+the Mackenzie. The oldest white men's graves in Alaska,
+again with the exception of Nulato, are those in the little
+Hudson Bay cemetery near Fort Yukon.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">ARCHDEACON MACDONALD </div>
+
+<p>Fort Yukon is also the site of the oldest missionary
+station on the river, unless there were earlier visits of
+Russian priests to the lower river, of which there seems
+no record, for in 1862 there was a clergyman of the
+Church of England at this place. Archdeacon MacDonald
+was a remarkable man. Married to a native
+wife, he translated the whole Bible and the Book of
+Common Prayer into the native tongue, and his translations
+are in general use on the upper river to this day.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23"></a><a href="images/23.png">[23]</a></span>
+He reduced the language to writing, extracted its grammar,
+taught the Indians to read and write their own
+tongue, and dignified it by the gift of the great literature
+of the sacred books. The language is, of course,
+a dying one&mdash;English is slowly superseding it&mdash;but it
+seems safe to say that for a generation or two yet to
+come it will be the basis of the common speech of the
+people and the language of worship. It is chiefly in
+matters of trading and handicrafts that English is taking
+its place, though here as elsewhere it stands to the discredit
+of the civilised race that blackguard English is
+the first English that is learned.</p>
+
+<p>There seems ground to question whether the substitution
+of a smattering of broken English for the flexibility
+and picturesque expressiveness of an indigenous
+tongue, thoroughly understood, carries with it any great
+intellectual gain, though to suggest such a doubt is
+treason to some minds. The time threatens when all
+the world will speak two or three great languages, when
+all little tongues will be extinct and all little peoples
+swallowed up, when all costume will be reduced to a
+dead level of blue jeans and shoddy and all strange customs
+abolished. The world will be a much less interesting
+world then; the spice and savour of the ends of
+the earth will be gone. Nor does it always appear unquestionable
+that the world will be the better or the
+happier. The advance of civilisation would be a great
+thing to work for if we were quite sure what we meant
+by it and what its goal is. To the ordinary government
+school-teacher in Alaska, with some notable exceptions,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24"></a><a href="images/24.png">[24]</a></span>
+it seems to mean chiefly teaching the Indians to call
+themselves Mr. and Mrs. and teaching the women to
+wear millinery, with a contemptuous attitude toward
+the native language and all native customs. The less
+intelligent grade of missionary sometimes falls into the
+same easy rut. So letters pass through the post-offices
+addressed: "Mr. Pretty Henry," "Mrs. Monkey Bill,"
+"Miss Sally Shortandirty"; so, occasionally, the grotesque
+spectacle may present itself, to the passengers on
+a steamer, of a native woman in a "Merry Widow" hat
+and a blood-stained parkee gutting salmon on the river
+bank.</p>
+
+<p>The nobler ideal, as it seems to some of us, is to
+labour for God-fearing, self-respecting Indians rather
+than imitation white men and white women. An Indian
+who is honest, healthy and kindly, skilled in hunting
+and trapping, versed in his native Bible and liturgy,
+even though he be entirely ignorant of English and have
+acquired no taste for canned fruit and know not when
+Columbus discovered America, may be very much of a
+man in that station of life in which it has pleased God
+to call him.</p>
+
+<p>Christmas and the Fourth of July are the Indian's
+great holidays, the one just after the best moose hunting
+and the other just before the salmon run. It may be supposed
+that there were always great feasts at the winter
+and summer solstices, though now he is sufficiently devout
+at the one and patriotic at the other. At these
+seasons, and for weeks before and after, Fort Yukon
+gathers a large number of Indians. It is the native<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25"></a><a href="images/25.png">[25]</a></span>
+metropolis of the country within a radius of a hundred
+miles, and what may be termed its permanent population
+of one hundred and fifty is doubled and sometimes
+trebled by contingents from the Chandalar, the
+Porcupine, and the Black Rivers, from that long river
+called Birch Creek, and all the intervening country.
+Many families of the "uncivilised," self-respecting kind,
+to which reference has been made, come in from outlying
+points, and the contrast between them and their
+more sophisticated kinfolk of the town is all in their
+favour.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">JIMMY</div>
+
+<p>Such a gathering had already taken place in preparation
+for the Christmas holidays when we reached Fort
+Yukon on the 15th of December. It would have been
+pleasant to spend Christmas with them, but we were due
+two hundred and fifty miles away, at Bettles, for that
+feast, if by any means we could get there. So we lingered
+but the two days necessary to equip ourselves.
+Jimmy had torn our bedding to pieces on the night
+of the mishap; it was lashed on the outside of the load,
+and he had scratched and clawed it to make a nest for
+himself until fur from the robe and feathers from the
+quilts were all over the trail. The other dogs, not so
+warmly coated as he, had been content to sleep in the
+snow. Jimmy's character was gradually revealing itself.
+A well-bred trail dog will not commit the canine sacrilege
+of invading the sled. That is a "Siwash" dog's
+trick. So there was fresh bedding to manufacture, as
+well as supplies for two hundred miles to get together.</p>
+
+<p>A mail once a month went at that time from Fort<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26"></a><a href="images/26.png">[26]</a></span>
+Yukon to the Koyukuk, and there was little other travel.
+The course lay fifty or sixty miles across country to the
+Chandalar River, about one hundred miles up that stream,
+and then across a divide to the South Fork of the Koyukuk,
+and across another to the Middle Fork, on which
+Coldfoot is situated. It is not possible to procure any
+supplies, save sometimes a little fish for dog food and
+that not certainly, between Fort Yukon and Coldfoot,
+so that provision for the whole journey must be taken.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE CHANDALAR</div>
+
+<p>A new Indian guide had been engaged as far as Coldfoot,
+and we set out&mdash;three men, two toboggans, and
+seven dogs; four on the larger vehicle and three on the
+smaller, one of the dogs brought by our guide. Three
+miles from Fort Yukon we crossed the Porcupine River
+and then plunged into the wilderness of lake and swamp
+and forest that stretches north of the Yukon. A portage
+trail, as such a track across country is called to distinguish
+it from a river trail, has the advantage of such protection
+from storm as its timbered stretches afford. For
+miles and miles the route passes through scrub spruce
+that has been burned over, with no prospect but a maze
+of charred poles against the snow, some upright, others
+at every angle of inclination. Then comes a lake, with
+difficulty in finding the trail on its wind-swept surface
+and sometimes much casting about to discover where it
+leaves the lake again, and then more small burned timber.
+Wherever the route is through woods, living or
+dead, it is blazed; when it strikes the open, one is often
+at a loss. After three or four days of such travel, sometimes
+reaching an old cabin for the night, sometimes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27"></a><a href="images/27.png">[27]</a></span>
+pitching the tent, one is rejoiced at the sight of distant
+mountains and at the intimation they bring that
+the inexpressible dreariness of the Yukon Flats is nearly
+past; and presently the trail opens suddenly upon the
+broad Chandalar.</p>
+
+<p>The Hudson Bay voyageurs are responsible for many
+names in this part of Alaska, and Chandalar is a corruption
+of their "Gens de large." The various native
+tribes received appellations indicating habitats. A tribe
+that differed from most northern Indians, in having no
+permanent villages and in living altogether in encampments,
+was named "Gens de large," and the river which
+they frequented took their name.</p>
+
+<p>It is one of the second-rate tributaries of the Yukon,
+and in general its waters are swift and shallow, not
+navigable for light-draught steamboats for more than one
+hundred and fifty miles, save at flood, and not easily
+navigable at all. It is these swift shallow streams that
+are so formidable in winter on account of overflow water,
+and the Chandalar is one of the most dreaded.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">DIPHTHERIA</div>
+
+<p>Ten miles along the river's surface brought us to
+the Chandalar native village, a settlement of half a dozen
+cabins and twenty-five or thirty souls. The people came
+out to meet us, and said they were just about to bury
+a baby, and asked me to conduct the funeral. Because
+we had not done a day's march and were under compulsion
+to push on at our best speed, I did not unlash
+the sled but went just as I was up the hill with the
+sorrowful procession to the little graveyard. On the
+way down I asked as best I could of what sickness the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28"></a><a href="images/28.png">[28]</a></span>
+baby had died, and I felt some uneasiness when the
+throat was pointed to as the seat of disease. When,
+presently, I was informed that two others were sick,
+and of the same complaint, my uneasiness became alarm.
+I went at once to see them, and the angry swollen throats
+patched with white membrane which I discovered left
+no room for doubt that we were in the presence of another
+outbreak of diphtheria. That disease had scourged
+the Yukon in the two preceding years. Twenty-three
+children died at Fort Yukon in the summer of 1904,
+half a dozen at Circle in the following winter, though
+that outbreak was grappled with from the first; and all
+along the river the loss of life was terrible.</p>
+
+<p>There was no question that we must give up all
+hope of reaching Bettles for Christmas and stay and do
+what we could for these people. So we made camp on
+the outskirts of the village, and I went to work swabbing
+out the throats with carbolic acid and preparing
+liquid food from our grub box. There was nothing to
+eat in the village but dried fish and a little dried moose,
+and these throats like red-hot iron could hardly swallow
+liquids. The two patients were a boy of sixteen
+and a grown woman. It was evident that unless we
+could isolate them the disease would probably pass
+through the whole village, and, indeed, others might have
+been infected already. It was likely that we were in
+for a siege of it, and our supply of condensed milk and
+extract of beef would soon be exhausted. Moreover, at
+Fort Yukon was the trained nurse who had coped with
+the epidemic there and at Circle, while we had virtually<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29"></a><a href="images/29.png">[29]</a></span>
+no experience with the disease at all. It was resolved
+to send back to Fort Yukon for supplies and for the
+nurse.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning Mr. Knapp and the native boy
+took the dogs and the sled and started back. With no
+load save a little grub and bedding, they could make the
+journey in two days, a day must be allowed for preparations,
+and, with the aid of another dog team, two days
+more would bring them back. Five days was the least
+they could be gone. It was asking a great deal of this
+lady to abandon her Christmas festival, preparations
+for which had long been making, and to come sixty-five
+miles through the frozen wilderness in a toboggan;
+but I felt sure she would drop everything and come.</p>
+
+<p>For those five days I was busied in close attention
+to the patients and in strenuous though not altogether
+availing efforts to maintain a quarantine of the cabin
+in which they lay. There was little more that I could
+do than swab out the throats and administer food every
+two hours. As the disease advanced it was increasingly
+painful to swallow and exceedingly difficult to induce
+the sufferers to make the attempt or to open their
+mouths for the swabbing. After two or three days the
+woman seemed to have passed the crisis of the disease
+and to be mending, but the boy, I thought, grew worse.
+One becomes attached to those to whom one ministers,
+and this poor, speechless boy, with his terrible throat and
+the agony in his big black eyes, appealed to me very
+strongly indeed. It was torture to move his head or to
+open his mouth, and I had to torture him continually.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30"></a><a href="images/30.png">[30]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Every night I gathered the people for Divine service.
+Here was a little community far off in the wilds that
+had carefully conserved and handed on to their children
+the teaching they had received no less than thirty years
+before. The native Bibles and prayer-books and hymnals
+were brought out, bearing dates of publication in
+the seventies; one of their number acted as leader, and
+what he read was painfully followed in the well-thumbed
+books. They lifted their voices in a weird transformation
+of familiar tunes, with quavers and glides that had
+crept in through long, uncorrected use, and amongst the
+prayers said was one for "Our Sovereign lady Queen
+Victoria, and Albert Edward, Prince of Wales." I tried
+to explain that Queen Victoria was dead, that they
+were not living under British rule, and I took a pencil
+and struck out the prayers for the royal family from
+the books. But there was doubt in their minds and a
+reluctance to alter in any particular the liturgy that
+had been taught them, and it is quite likely that intercessions
+for a defunct sovereign of another land still
+arise from the Chandalar village. One cannot but feel
+a deep admiration for the pioneer missionaries of this
+region&mdash;Bishop Bompas, Archdeacon MacDonald, and
+the others&mdash;whose teaching was so thorough and so lasting,
+and who lived and laboured here long before any
+gold seeker had thought of Alaska, when the country
+was an Indian country exclusively, with none of the
+comforts and conveniences that can now be enjoyed.
+It was to a remote cabin on the East Fork of this river
+that Archdeacon MacDonald retired for a year to make<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31"></a><a href="images/31.png">[31]</a></span>
+part of his translation of the Bible, according to the
+Indian account.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE SHORTEST DAY</div>
+
+<p>At noon on the 21st of December, the shortest day,
+there is a note in my diary that I saw the sun's disk
+shining through the trees. Although fully half a degree
+of latitude north of the Arctic Circle, the refraction is
+sufficient to lift his whole sphere above the horizon.
+One speculates how much farther north it would be possible
+to see any part of the sun at noon on the shortest
+day; but north of here, throughout Alaska, is broken
+and mountainous country. We were on the northern
+edge of the great flat of the interior.</p>
+
+<p>The fifth day at the village was Christmas Eve. My
+boy was in a critical condition, very low and weak, with
+a temperature that stayed around 101&deg; and 102&deg;. As
+night approached I watched with the greatest anxiety
+for the party from Fort Yukon, and, just as the last
+lingering glow of the long twilight was fading from the
+south, there was a distant tinkle of bells on the trail,
+and faintly once and again a man's voice was raised in
+command and I knew that relief was at hand.</p>
+
+<p>The nurse had dropped everything and had come,
+as I felt sure she would. Gathering medicines and supplies
+and hiring a native dog team and driver, she had
+left immediately, and the round trip had been made in
+the shortest time it was possible to make it. It was a
+tremendous relief to see her step out of the rugs and
+robes of the toboggan and take charge of the situation
+in her quiet, competent way. A small, outlying cabin
+was selected for a hospital, the family that occupied it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32"></a><a href="images/32.png">[32]</a></span>
+bundled out into a tent, and the two sick persons carefully
+moved into it, with whom and the mother of the
+sick boy the nurse took up her abode. Then there was
+the Christmas-tree in the chief's cabin, with little gifts
+for the children sent out from the mission at Fort Yukon
+some time before, and a dance afterward, for Christmas
+festivities must go on, whatever happens, at a native
+village. I took James's pocket-knife to him after the
+celebration was over, and I think he really tried to
+smile as he thanked me with his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>The next day after the services, although it was
+Christmas Day, we set to work on the disinfecting of
+the large cabin in which the sick had lain. Stringing
+bedclothes and wearing apparel on lines from wall to
+wall, and stuffing up every crack and cranny with cotton,
+we burned quantities of sulphur, that the nurse had
+brought with her, all day long.</p>
+
+<p>A recent article in a stray number of a professional
+journal picked up in the office of a medical missionary,
+devoted column after column to the uselessness of all
+known methods of disinfection. Sulphur, formaldehyde,
+carbolic acid, permanganate of potash, chloride of lime,
+bichloride of mercury&mdash;the author knew not which of
+these "fetiches" to be most sarcastic about. It may
+be that the net result of our copious fumigation was
+but the bleaching of the coloured garments hung up,
+but at least it did no harm. One sometimes wishes that
+these scientists who sit up so high in the seat of the
+scornful would condescend to a little plain instruction.</p>
+
+<p>The anti-diphtheritic serum is now kept in readiness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33"></a><a href="images/33.png">[33]</a></span>
+at all our missions in Alaska, and the disease seems to
+have ceased its depredations; but it has taken terrible
+toll of the native people.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE MISSIONARY NURSE</div>
+
+<p>We wished to stay with the nurse until the sickness
+should be done, but she would not hear of it, and insisted
+upon the resumption of our journey. It did not
+seem right to go off and leave this lonely woman, sixty-five
+miles from the nearest white person, to cope with
+an outbreak of disease that might not yet have spent
+itself, although there had been no new case for a week.
+"You've done your work here, now leave me to do
+mine. You'll not get to Point Hope this winter if you
+stay much longer."</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't you afraid to stay all by yourself?" I asked,
+somewhat fatuously.</p>
+
+<p>"Afraid? Afraid of what? You surely don't mean
+afraid of the natives?"</p>
+
+<p>I did not know what I meant; it seemed not unnatural
+that a woman with such prospect before her should
+be a little timid, but she was resolute that we go, and we
+went.</p>
+
+<p>Not until the next summer did I learn the upshot&mdash;both
+patients recovered and there was no other case.
+Six years later, when these words are written, I have
+just baptized a son of the boy who lay so ill, who would
+have perished, I think, had we not reached the Chandalar
+village just in time.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34"></a><a href="images/34.png">[34]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3>CHANDALAR VILLAGE TO BETTLES, COLDFOOT,
+AND THE KOYUKUK</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">At</span> five o'clock in the morning of the 27th of December,
+hours before any kind of daylight, while the
+faint "pit-pat" of all-night dancing still sounded from
+the chief's cabin, we dropped down the steep bank to
+the river surface and resumed our journey. Ahead was
+a man with a candle in a tin can, peering for the faint
+indications of the trail on the ice; the other two were
+at the handle-bars of the toboggans. It is strange that
+in this day of invention and improvement in artificial
+illumination, a candle in a tin can is still the most dependable
+light for the trail. A coal-oil lamp requires
+a glass which is easily broken, and the ordinary coal-oil
+that comes to Alaska freezes at about 40&deg; below.
+In very cold weather a coal-oil lantern full of oil will
+go out completely from the freezing of its supply. All
+the various acetylene lamps are useless because water
+is required to generate the gas, and water may not be
+had without stopping and building a fire and melting
+ice or snow. The electric flash-lamp, useful enough
+round camp, goes out of operation altogether on the
+trail, because the "dry" cell that supplies its current<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35"></a><a href="images/35.png">[35]</a></span>
+is not a dry cell at all, but a moist cell, and when its
+moisture freezes is dead until it thaws out again. No
+extremity of cold will stop a candle from burning, and
+if it be properly sheltered by the tin can it will stand
+a great deal of wind. The "folding pocket lantern,"
+which is nothing but a convenient tin can with mica
+sides, is the best equipment for travel, but an empty
+butter can or lard can is sometimes easier to come by.</p>
+
+<p>The Chandalar is wide-spread in these parts, with
+several channels, and the trail was hard to follow. One
+track we pursued led us up a bank and along a portage
+and presently stopped at a marten trap; and we had to
+cut across to the river and cast about hither and thither
+on its broad surface to find the mail trail.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE CHANDALAR GAP</div>
+
+<p>All the rivers that are confluent with the Yukon in
+the Flats enter that dreary region through gaps in the
+mountains that bound the broad plain. These gaps are
+noted for wind, and the Chandalar Gap, which had
+loomed before us since daybreak, is deservedly in especial
+bad repute. The most hateful thing in the Arctic regions
+is the wind. Cold one may protect one's self against,
+but there is no adequate protection against wind. The
+parkee without opening front or back, that pulls on
+over the head, is primarily a windbreak, and when a
+scarf is wrapped around mouth and nose, and the fur-edged
+hood of the parkee is pulled forward over cap
+and scarf, the traveller who must face the wind has done
+all he can to protect himself from it.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="sunrise" id="sunrise"></a><a href="images/gs060.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs060_th.jpg" width="500" height="320" alt="Sunrise on the Chandalar-Koyukuk portage." title="Sunrise on the Chandalar-Koyukuk portage." />
+</a><span class="caption">Sunrise on the Chandalar-Koyukuk portage.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Unfortunately, in the confusion of striking the tent
+and packing in the dark, my scarf had been rolled up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36"></a><a href="images/36.png">[36]</a></span>
+in the bedding, and, since the wind was not bad until
+we approached the Gap in the evening, I had not troubled
+about it. Now, as we drew nearer and nearer, the wind
+rose constantly. The thermometer was at 38&deg; below
+zero, and wind at that temperature cuts like a knife.
+But to get my scarf meant stopping the whole procession
+and unlashing and unloading the sled, and the man
+who unlashed in that wind would almost certainly freeze
+his fingers. So I gave up the thought of it, turned
+my back to the wind while I tied my pocket handkerchief
+round mouth and nose, drew the strings of my
+parkee hood close, and then faced it again to worry
+through as best I could. The ice is always swept clear
+of snow in the Gap. The river narrows within its jaws,
+the ragged rocks rise up to the bluffs on either hand,
+and the blue-streaked ice stretches between. We all
+suffered a good deal. Against that cruel wind it was
+impossible to keep warm. The hands, though enclosed
+in woollen gloves, and they in blanket-lined moose-hide
+mitts, grew numb; the toes, within their protection of
+caribou sock with the hair on, strips of blanket wrapping,
+and mukluks stuffed with hay, tingled with warning of
+frost-bite; the whole body was chilled. We all froze
+our faces, I think, for the part of the face around and
+between the eyes cannot be covered. I froze my cheeks,
+my nose, and my Adam's apple, the last a most inconvenient
+thing to freeze.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="coldfoot" id="coldfoot"></a><a href="images/gs061.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs061_th.jpg" width="500" height="314" alt="Coldfoot on the Koyukuk." title="Coldfoot on the Koyukuk." />
+</a><span class="caption">Coldfoot on the Koyukuk.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="sidenote">A COLD LODGING</div>
+
+<p>The cabin was just the other side of the Gap, and it
+was well that it was no farther, for we were weary with
+our thirty-mile run and dangerously cold with the exposure<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37"></a><a href="images/37.png">[37]</a></span>
+of the last hour. It was rather a large cabin as
+trail cabins go, with a rickety sheet-iron stove in the
+middle, burned full of holes, and it was hours before
+the fire began to make any impression on the obstinate,
+sullen cold of that hut. When we went to bed the
+frost still stood thick and heavy on the walls all over
+the room. A log building, properly constructed, is a
+warm building, but slowness in parting with heat means
+slowness in receiving heat, and a log cabin that has been
+unoccupied for a long time in very cold weather is hard
+to heat in one evening.</p>
+
+<p>When we started next morning the thermometer
+stood at 45&deg; below zero, but we were out of the wind
+region and did not mind the cold. It is curious that a
+few miles on either side of that Gap the air will be still,
+while in the Gap itself a gale is blowing. Seven times
+I have passed through that Gap and only once without
+wind. The great Flats were now behind us, we had
+passed into the mountains, and for the remainder of
+our long journey we should scarce ever be out of sight
+of mountains again. Up the river, with its constant
+trouble of overflow, going around the open water whenever
+we could, plunging through it in our mukluks
+when it could not be avoided&mdash;with the care of the
+dogs' feet that the cold weather rendered more than
+ever necessary when they got wet, and the added nuisance
+of throwing the toboggans on their sides and
+beating the ice from them with the flat of the axe wherever
+water had been passed through&mdash;for two days we
+followed its windings, the thermometer between -45&deg;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38"></a><a href="images/38.png">[38]</a></span>
+and -50&deg;, the mountains rising higher and the scenery
+growing more picturesque as we advanced. At the end
+of the second day from the Gap we were at the mouth
+of the West Fork of the Chandalar, and after passing up
+it for fifteen or sixteen miles we left that watercourse
+to cross the mountains to the South Fork of the Koyukuk
+River.</p>
+
+<p>Then began hard labour again. A toboggan is not
+a good vehicle for crossing summits. Its bottom is perfectly
+flat and smooth, polished like glass by the friction
+of the snow. If the trail be at all "sidling" (and
+mountain trails are almost always "sidling"), the toboggan
+swings off on the side of the inclination and must
+be kept on the trail by main force. The runners of a
+sled will grip the surface, if there be any inequalities
+at all, but a toboggan swings now this way and now
+that, like a great pendulum, dragging the near dogs with
+it. Again and again we had to hitch both teams to one
+toboggan to get up a sidling pitch while all hands kept
+the vehicle on the trail, and our progress was painful
+and slow. In soft snow on a level surface like the river
+bed or through the Flat country, generally, the toboggan
+is much the more convenient vehicle, for it rides over
+the snow instead of ploughing through it, but on hard
+snow anywhere or on grades the toboggan is a nuisance.
+Thus wallowing through the deep snow at the side of
+the toboggans to hold them in place we sweated and
+slaved our way mile after mile up the gradual ascent
+until we reached the spot, just under a shoulder of the
+summit, where there was dry spruce and green spruce<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39"></a><a href="images/39.png">[39]</a></span>
+for camping, the dry for fire and the green for couch,
+and there we halted for the night.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">JOHN MUIR</div>
+
+<p>Next morning we crossed the low pass and dropped
+down easily into the wide valley of the Koyukuk South
+Fork, with a fine prospect of mountains everywhere as
+far as the eye could see. I had stood and gazed upon
+those same mountains on my journey of the previous
+winter, my first winter in Alaska, and had seen a most
+remarkable sight. As we began the descent and a turn
+of the trail gave a new panorama of peaks I did not at
+first realise the nature of the peculiar phenomenon I was
+gazing at. Each peak had a fine, filmy, fan-shaped cloud
+stretching straight out from it into the sky, waving and
+shimmering as it stretched. The sun was not above the
+horizon, but his rays caught these sheer, lawn-like streamers
+and played upon them with a most delicate opalescent
+radiance. Then all at once came to my mind the recollection
+of a description in John Muir's <i>Mountains of California</i>
+(surely the finest mountain book ever written) of
+the snow banners of the Sierra Nevada, and I knew that
+I was looking at a similar spectacle. It meant that a
+storm was raging on high, although so far we were sheltered
+from it. It meant that the dry, sand-like snow of
+the mountain flanks was driven up those flanks so fiercely
+before the wind that it was carried clean over them and
+beyond them out into the sky, and still had such pressure
+behind it that it continued its course and spread out
+horizontally, thinning and spreading for maybe a mile
+before it lost all coherence and visibility. As far as I
+could see mountain peaks I could see the snow banners,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40"></a><a href="images/40.png">[40]</a></span>
+all pointing one way, all waving, all luminous and shimmering
+in the sun-rays. It was a very noble sight, and
+I gazed a long while entranced, not knowing how ominous
+it was. When we reached the valley and left the
+shelter of the gulch we struck the full force of that fearful
+gale, and for two days and nights of incessant blizzard
+we lay in a hole dug out of a sand-bank (for we had
+no tent that year), the trail lost, the grub box nearly
+empty, and no fire possible to cook anything with had
+the grub box been full.</p>
+
+<p>The valley before us&mdash;to resume the narrative&mdash;is a
+high, wind-swept region of niggerhead and swamp, the
+catch-basin of the South Fork of the Koyukuk River.
+The trail descends one of its southern draws, follows up
+the main valley awhile, crosses it, and leaves by one of
+its northern draws to pass over the mountains that separate
+its drainage from the main fork of the Koyukuk.
+The cold had given place to wind, and though the gale
+did not approach the fierceness of last year's storm, it
+gave great trouble in following the track. These high
+headwater basins are always windy; the timber is scrubby
+spruce with many open places, and in such open places
+the trail is soon obliterated altogether.</p>
+
+<p>When the light fails this casting about for blazes
+whenever a clump of spruce is reached becomes increasingly
+slow and difficult and at last becomes hopeless.
+The general direction determined, it might be thought
+that the traveller could ignore the tracks of previous
+passage and strike out for himself, but he knows that
+the trail, however rough, is at least practicable, whereas<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41"></a><a href="images/41.png">[41]</a></span>
+an independent course may soon lead to steep gullies or
+cut banks, or may entangle him in some thicket that he
+must resort to the axe to pass through. Moreover, even
+two or three passages through the snow in the winter
+will give some bottom to a trail; a bottom that, when
+the wind-swept areas are passed and the snow-shoes are
+resumed, both he and his dogs will be thankful for.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">CAMP MAKING</div>
+
+<p>So we made a camp as it darkened to night, not far
+from the spot where I had "siwashed" with an Indian
+companion the previous winter, the wind blowing half
+a gale at 20&deg; below zero.</p>
+
+<p>Making camp under such circumstances is always
+a very disagreeable proceeding. It takes time and care
+to make a comfortable camp, and time and care in the
+wind and the cold involve suffering. Two suitable trees
+must be selected between which the tent is to be suspended
+by the ridge-rope, and the snow must all be
+scraped away by the snow-shoes, or, if it be too deep,
+beaten down. Then while one man unlashes and unpacks
+the sleds, another cuts green spruce and lays it
+all over the tent space, thicker and finer where the bed
+is to be. Then up goes the tent, its corner ropes and
+its side strings made fast to boughs, if there be such, or
+to stakes, or to logs laid parallel to the sides. Then the
+stovepipe is jointed and the stove set up on the edge
+of green billets properly shaped. Meanwhile the axe-man,
+the green boughs cut, has been felling and splitting
+a dry tree for stove wood, and the whole proceedings
+are rushed and hastened towards getting a fire in
+that stove. Sometimes it is a question whether we shall<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42"></a><a href="images/42.png">[42]</a></span>
+get a fire before we freeze our fingers or freeze our fingers
+before we get a fire. The fire once going, we are
+safe, for however much more work there is in the open,
+and there is always a good deal more, one can go to the
+tent to get warm. Enough stove wood must be cut,
+not only for night and morning, but for cooking the
+dog feed. The dog pot, filled with snow, into which
+the fish are cut up, is put upon the outdoor fire as soon
+as man-supper begins cooking in the tent. When it
+boils, the rice and tallow must be added, and when the
+rice has boiled twenty minutes the whole is set aside
+to cool. Meanwhile the two aluminum pots full of
+snow, replenished from time to time as it melts, are put
+upon the stove in the tent as the necessary preliminary
+to cooking. Sometimes ice, and more rarely water, may
+be had, and then supper is hastened. If we are camped
+on the river bank sometimes a steel-pointed rifle-bullet
+fired straight down into the ice will penetrate to the
+water below and allow a little jet to bubble up. Melting
+snow is a tedious business at best; but, since three
+times out of four when camping it must be done, the
+aluminum pots are a treasure. There is still work
+for every one as well as the cook. Snow must be
+banked all round the tent to keep out the wind.
+Little heaps of spruce boughs must be cut for the
+dogs' beds; it is all we can do for them whatever
+the weather, and they appreciate it highly. It may
+be that dog moccasins must be taken off and strung
+around the stove to dry, and before supper is ready the
+inside ridge-rope of the tent is heavy with all sorts of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43"></a><a href="images/43.png">[43]</a></span>
+drying man-wear: socks, moccasins, scarfs, toques, mittens.
+One of the earliest habits a man learns on the
+trail is to hang up everything to dry as soon as he takes
+it off. Why should it be hung up to dry unless it has
+got wet? the writer was once asked, in detailing these
+operations. Because there is no other way to remove
+the ice with which everything becomes incrusted in very
+cold weather.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">CAMP COOKING</div>
+
+<p>As his snow melts the cook throws into the pot a
+few handfuls of evaporated potatoes, a handful of evaporated
+onions, and smaller quantities of evaporated
+"soup vegetables," and leaves them to soak and simmer
+and resume their original size and flavour. By and by
+he will cut up the moose meat or the rabbits or birds,
+or whatever game he may have, and throw it in, and
+in an hour or an hour and a half there will be a savoury
+stew that, with a pan of biscuits cooked in an aluminum
+reflector beside the stove and a big pot of tea, constitutes
+the principal meal of the day. Or if the day has
+been long and sleep seems more attractive even than
+grub, he will turn some frozen beans, already boiled,
+into a frying-pan with a big lump of butter, and when
+his meat is done supper is ready. Beans thus prepared
+eaten red hot with grated cheese are delicious to a hungry
+man. With the stove for a sideboard, food may
+always be eaten hot, and that is one advantage of camp
+fare.</p>
+
+<p>The men satisfied, the dogs remain, and while two
+of the party wash dishes and clean up, the third feeds
+the dogs. Their pot of food has been cooling for an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44"></a><a href="images/44.png">[44]</a></span>
+hour or more. They will not eat it until it is cold and
+a mess of rice will hold heat a long time even in the
+coldest weather. When it is nearly cold it is dished
+out with a paddle into the individual pans and the dogs
+make short work of it. There are some who feed straight
+fish, and, if the fish be king salmon of the best quality,
+the dogs do well enough on it. But on any long run
+it is decidedly economical to cook for the dogs&mdash;not so
+much from the standpoint of direct cost as from that
+of weight and ease of hauling. An hundred pounds of
+fish plus an hundred pounds of rice plus fifty pounds of
+tallow will go a great deal farther than two hundred
+and fifty pounds of fish alone. There is little doubt,
+too, that in the long run the dogs do better on cooked
+food. It is easier of digestion and easier to apportion
+in uniform rations. Rice and fish make excellent food.
+The Japs took Port Arthur on rice and fish. The tallow
+answers a demand of the climate and is increased as the
+weather grows colder. Man and dog alike require quantities
+of fat food in this climate; it is astonishing how
+much bacon and butter one can eat. When the dogs
+have eaten, and each one has made the rounds of all
+the other pans to be sure nothing is left, they retire to
+their respective nests of spruce bough and curl themselves
+up with many turnings round and much rearranging
+of the litter. Feet and nose are neatly tucked
+in, the tail is adjusted carefully over all, the hair on the
+body stands straight up, and the dogs have gone to bed
+and do not like to be disturbed again.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">DOG-HARNESS</div>
+
+<p>Therein lies the cruelty of depriving them of their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45"></a><a href="images/45.png">[45]</a></span>
+tails, which used to be the general custom in this country.
+The old tandem harness almost required it, as
+the breath of the dog behind condensed upon the tail
+of the dog in front until he was carrying around permanently
+a mass of ice that was a burden to him and rendered
+his tail useless for warmth. But the rig with a
+long mid rope, to which the dogs are attached by single-trees
+in such manner that they may at will be hitched
+abreast or one ahead of the other as the trail is wide
+or narrow, is superseding the tandem rig, and one sees
+more bushy tails amongst the dogs. The thick, long-haired
+tail of the dog in this country is indeed his blanket,
+and in cold weather the tailless dog is at a great disadvantage.</p>
+
+<p>It was said that all the dogs retired to the nests of
+spruce bough; it should have been all but one. It is
+Lingo's special charge to guard the sled and his special
+privilege to sleep on it. Turning around and curling
+up on the softest spot he can find of the unlashed and
+partly unloaded toboggan, he will not touch anything
+it contains nor permit any other dog to touch it.</p>
+
+<p>The northern skies are clouded the next morning,
+the first day of the new year, and there is a ruddy dawn
+that is glorious to behold. The white earth gives back
+a soft rose tint, as an organ pipe gives back a faint tone
+to the strong vibration of another pipe in pitch with it.
+We shall not see the sun himself any more for many
+weeks, but we see his light upon the flanks of the mountains
+for an hour or so around noon. The bold, shapely
+peaks of the South Fork of the Koyukuk turn their snows<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46"></a><a href="images/46.png">[46]</a></span>
+to pink fire as his rays slowly descend their sides, and
+the whole scene is exquisitely beautiful. What a wonderful
+thing colour is! When the skies are overcast this
+is a dead black-and-white country in winter, for spruce,
+the prevailing wood, is black in the mass at a little distance.
+Gaze where one will, there is naught but black
+and white. The eye becomes tired of the monotony and
+longs for some warmer tone. That is surely the reason
+why all those who live in the country cherish some gay
+article of attire, why the natives love brilliant handkerchiefs,
+why the white man also will choose a crimson scarf.
+Trudging at the handle-bars, I have found pleasure in
+the red pompons of the dogs' harness, in the gay beading
+of mitten and hind-sack. And that is why a lavish
+feast of colour such as this dawn stirs one's spirit with
+such keen delight. It gives life to a dead world.</p>
+
+<p>But the wind is still bitter and interferes sadly with
+one's enjoyment. All through the valley, up the creek
+by which we leave it, past the twin lakes on the low
+summit, the wind grows in force, and when we leave
+Slate Creek for the present and make a "portage" over
+a mountain shoulder to strike the creek again much
+lower down, the wind has risen to a gale that overturns
+the toboggans and makes the men fight for their footing.
+The actual physical labour of it is enormous, and
+there can be no rest; it is too bitterly cold in that blast
+to stop. For a mile or two we struggle and slave to
+beat our way around that mountain shoulder and then
+drop down to the creek again. The blessed relief it is
+to get out of the fury of that wind into the comparative<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47"></a><a href="images/47.png">[47]</a></span>
+shelter of the creek, to be done with the ceaseless
+toil of holding the heavy toboggans from hurtling down
+the hillside, to be able to keep one's feet without continually
+slipping and falling on the wind-hardened snow,
+no words can adequately convey. We are all frozen
+again a little; this man's nose is touched, that man's
+cheeks, and the other man's finger.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE KOYUKUK GOLD CAMP</div>
+
+<p>On the middle fork of the Koyukuk, at the mouth
+of Slate Creek, Coldfoot sits within a cirque of rugged
+mountain peaks, the most northerly postal town in the
+interior of Alaska, the most northerly gold-mining town
+in the world, as it claims. It sprang into existence in
+1900 and flourished for a season or two with the usual
+accompaniments of such florification. In 1906 it was
+already much decayed, and is now dead. Ever since its
+start the Koyukuk camp has steadily produced gold and
+given occupation to miners numbering from one hundred
+and fifty to three hundred, but the scene of operations,
+and therefore the depot for supplies, has continually
+changed. In 1900 the chief producing creek was Myrtle,
+which is a tributary of Slate Creek, and the town at
+the mouth was in eligible situation, though much over-built
+from the first. Then the centre of interest shifted
+to Nolan Creek, fifteen miles farther up the river, which
+is a tributary of Wiseman Creek, and the town of Wiseman
+sprang up at the mouth of that creek. The post-office,
+the commissioner's office, and the saloon, the
+stores and road-houses, migrated to the new spot, and
+Coldfoot was abandoned. Now the chief producing
+creek is the Hammond River, still farther up the Koyukuk,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48"></a><a href="images/48.png">[48]</a></span>
+and if its placer deposits prove as rich as they
+promise it is likely that a town will spring up at the
+mouth of the Hammond which will supersede Wiseman.</p>
+
+<p>There has never been found a continuous pay-streak
+in the Koyukuk camp. It is what is known as a "pocket"
+camp. Now and again a "spot" is found which enriches
+its discoverers, while on the claims above and
+below that spot the ground may be too poor to work
+at a profit; for ground must be rich to be worked at
+all in the Koyukuk. It is the most expensive camp in
+Alaska, perhaps in the world. This is due to its remoteness
+and difficulty of access. Far north of the Arctic
+Circle, the diggings are about seventy-five miles above
+the head of light-draught steamboat navigation, and
+more than six hundred miles above the confluence of
+the Koyukuk with the Yukon. Transshipped at Nulato
+to the shoal-water steamboats that make three or four
+trips a season up the Koyukuk, transshipped again at
+Bettles, the head of any steamboat navigation, freight
+must be hauled on horse scows the remaining seventy-five
+miles of the journey; and all that handling and
+hauling means high rates. The cost of living, the cost
+of machinery, the general cost of all mining operations
+is much higher than on the Yukon or on the other tributaries
+of that river. The very smallness of the camp is
+a factor in the high prices, for there is not trade enough
+to induce brisk competition with the reduction of rates
+that competition brings.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">MINERS' GENEROSITY</div>
+
+<p>Yet the smallness and the isolation of the camp have
+their compensations. There is more community life,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49"></a><a href="images/49.png">[49]</a></span>
+more <i>esprit de corps</i> amongst the Koyukuk miners than
+will be found in any other camp in Alaska. Thrown
+upon their own resources for amusement, social gatherings
+are more common and are made more of, and hospitality
+is universal. Like all sparsely settled and frontier
+lands, Alaska is a very hospitable place in general,
+but the Koyukuk has earned the name of the most hospitable
+camp in Alaska. Since the numbers are small,
+and each man is well known to all the others, any sickness
+or suffering makes an immediate appeal and brings
+a generous response. Again and again the unfortunate
+victim of accident or disease has been sent outside for
+treatment, the considerable money required being quickly
+raised by public subscription. There is probably no
+other gold camp in the world where it is a common
+thing for the owner of a good claim to tell a neighbour
+who is "broke" to take a pan and go down to the drift
+and help himself.</p>
+
+<p>Until my visit of the previous year no minister of
+religion of any sort had penetrated to the Koyukuk, and,
+save for one journey thither by Bishop Rowe, my annual
+visits have been the only opportunities for public
+worship since. It will suffice for the visit now describing
+as well as for all the others to say that the reception
+was most cordial and the opportunity much appreciated.
+We went from creek to creek and gathered the men and
+the few women in whatever cabin was most convenient,
+and no clergyman could wish for more attentive or interested
+congregations.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="upper" id="upper"></a><a href="images/gs076.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs076_th.jpg" width="500" height="321" alt="The Upper Koyukuk." title="The Upper Koyukuk." />
+</a><span class="caption">The Upper Koyukuk.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Upon our return to Coldfoot from the creek visits<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50"></a><a href="images/50.png">[50]</a></span>
+the thermometer stood at 52&deg; below zero, although it
+had been no lower than 38&deg; below when we left the
+last creek, some fifteen miles away. As a general rule,
+the temperature on these mountain creeks, which are at
+some considerable elevation above the river into which
+they flow, will read from 10&deg; to 15&deg; higher than on the
+river, and if one climbed to the top of the peaks around
+Coldfoot, the difference then would probably be 20&deg; or
+25&deg;. At the summit road-house between Fairbanks and
+Cleary City in the Tanana country in cold weather the
+thermometer commonly reads 20&deg; above the one place
+and 10&deg; or 15&deg; above the other.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="barren" id="barren"></a><a href="images/gs077.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs077_th.jpg" width="500" height="320" alt="The barren shores of Kotzebue Sound." title="The barren shores of Kotzebue Sound." />
+</a><span class="caption">The barren shores of Kotzebue Sound.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="sidenote">LINGO</div>
+
+<p>This interesting fact, which surprises a good many
+people, for we are used to think of elevated places as cold
+places, is due to the greater heaviness of cold air, which
+sinks to the lowest level it can reach; and the river bed
+is the lowest part of the country. It would be interesting
+to find out to what extent this rule holds good. The
+ridges and the hilltops are always the warmest places in
+cold weather; would this hold as regards mountain tops?&mdash;as
+regards high mountain tops? Probably it would
+hold in the sunshine, but the rapid radiation of heat
+in the rarefied atmosphere of mountain tops would swing
+the balance the other way after dark. There is no doubt,
+however, that the coldest place in cold weather in Alaska
+is the river surface, and it is on the river surface that
+most of our travelling is done. The night we returned
+to Coldfoot we put our toboggan up high on the roof
+of an outhouse to keep its skin sides from the teeth of
+some hungry native dogs, leaving some of the load that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51"></a><a href="images/51.png">[51]</a></span>
+was not required within it, covered by the sled cloth.
+Later on I saw by the light of the moon Lingo's silhouetted
+figure sitting bolt upright on top of the sled,
+and he gave his short double bark as I drew near to
+make me notice that he was still doing his duty although
+under difficulties. The dog had climbed up a wood-pile
+and had jumped to the top of the outhouse and so to
+the sled. I thought of Kipling's <i>Men That Fought at
+Minden</i>:</p>
+
+<div class='poem'>
+"For fatigue it was their pride<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And they would <i>not</i> be denied</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">To clean the cook-house floor."</span><br />
+</div>
+
+<p>Here at Coldfoot we came first into contact with
+that interesting tribe of wandering inland Esquimaux
+known as the Kobuks, from their occupation of the
+river of that name. The Koyukuk has its own Indian
+people, but these enterprising Kobuks have pushed their
+way farther and farther from salt water into what used
+to be exclusive Indian territory. Representatives of
+both races were at Coldfoot, and as we lay weather-bound
+for a couple of days, I was enabled to renew last
+year's acquaintance with them, though without a good
+interpreter not much progress was made. The delight
+of these people at the road-house phonograph, the first
+they had ever heard, was some compensation for the
+incessant snarl and scream of the instrument itself. It
+was very funny to see them sitting on the floor, roaring
+with laughter at one particularly silly spoken record of
+the "Uncle Josh at the World's Fair" order. Over and
+over again they would ask for that record, and it never<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52"></a><a href="images/52.png">[52]</a></span>
+ceased to convulse them with laughter. "He's been enjoyin'
+poor health lately, but this mornin' I heard him
+complain that he felt a little better"&mdash;how sick and tired
+we got of this and similar jokes drawled out a dozen
+times running! The natives did not understand a word
+of it; it was the human voice with its pronounced, unusual
+inflections that aroused their merriment. The
+phonograph is becoming a powerful agency for disseminating
+a knowledge of English amongst the natives
+throughout Alaska, and one wishes that it were put to
+better use than the reproduction of silly and often vulgar
+monologue and dialogue and trashy ragtime music.
+As an index of the taste of those who purchase records,
+the selection brought to this country points low.</p>
+
+<p>The third day the thermometer stood at -49&deg; and we
+were free to leave without actually breaking the rule we
+had made after the escapade on the Yukon. Two other
+teams were going down the river, so we started with
+them on the sixty-five mile journey to Bettles. Twenty
+miles or so below Coldfoot the Koyukuk passes for several
+miles in a narrow channel between steep rock bluffs,
+with here and there great detached masses standing in
+the middle of the river. One has a grotesque resemblance
+to an aged bishop in his vestments and is known
+as the Bishop Rock; another a more remote likeness to
+an Indian woman, and this is known as the Squaw
+Rock. This part of the river, which is called the ca&ntilde;on
+of the Koyukuk, though it is not a true ca&ntilde;on, is very
+picturesque, and because of frequent overflow, offers
+glare ice and swift passage to the traveller when it does<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53"></a><a href="images/53.png">[53]</a></span>
+not embarrass him with running water. We were fortunate
+enough to pass it without getting our dogs' feet
+wet, and made the half-way road-house in a brilliant
+moon that rendered travelling at night pleasanter than
+during the day.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">TRAVELLING AT "50 BELOW"</div>
+
+<p>The next day we started again at near 50&deg; below,
+but because there was a good trail and a road-house for
+noon, the travelling was rather pleasant than otherwise.
+If there be a warm house to break the day's march and
+eat in, where ice-incrusted scarfs and parkees and caps
+and mittens may be dried out, with a warm outhouse
+where the dogs may rest in comfort, travelling in such
+weather is not too risky or too severely trying. The
+continual condensation of the moisture from the breath
+upon everything about the head and face is a decided
+inconvenience, and when it condenses upon the eye-lashes,
+and the upper and the lower lashes freeze together,
+the ice must be removed or it is impossible to
+open the eyes. This requires the momentary application
+of the bare hand, and every time it goes back into
+the mitten it carries some moisture with it, so that after
+a while mittens are wet as well as head-gear; moreover,
+there is always a certain perspiration that condenses.
+One gets into the habit of turning the duffel lining of
+the moose-hide mitts inside out and hanging them up the
+moment one gets inside a cabin. Round every road-house
+stove there is a rack constructed for just that
+purpose.</p>
+
+<p>There is no more striking phenomenon of the arctic
+trail than the behaviour of smoke in cold weather. As<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54"></a><a href="images/54.png">[54]</a></span>
+one approaches a road-house, and to greater degree a
+village or a town, it is seen enveloped in mist, although
+there be no open water to account for it, and the prospect
+in every other direction be brilliantly clear. It is
+not mist at all; it is merely the smoke from the stovepipes.
+And the explanation is simple, although not all
+at once arrived at. Smoke rises because it is warmer
+than the air into which it is discharged; for that and
+no other reason. Now, when smoke is discharged into
+air at a temperature of 50&deg; below zero, it is deprived
+of its heat immediately and falls to the ground by its
+greater specific gravity. The smoke may be observed
+just issuing from the pipe, or rising but a few feet, and
+then curling downward to be diffused amidst the air
+near the ground.</p>
+
+<p>It was to such a smoke-enveloped inn that we pulled
+up to warm and refresh ourselves and our team for the
+twenty miles that remained of the day's march. We
+had almost reached the limit of Koyukuk road-houses.
+Bettles being the head of navigation, and merchandise
+late in the season finding water too shallow for transport
+to the diggings, there is more or less freighting with
+dog teams and horses all the winter. This travel keeps
+open the road-houses on the route. From an "outside"
+point of view they may appear rough and the fare coarse.
+The night accommodation is a double row of bunks on
+each side of a long room with a great stove in the middle.
+Sometimes there is straw in the bunks, sometimes
+spruce boughs; in the better class even sometimes hay-stuffed
+mattresses. But to the weary traveller, who has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55"></a><a href="images/55.png">[55]</a></span>
+battled with the storm or endured the intense cold for
+hours at a stretch, they are glad havens of refuge; they
+are often even life-saving stations.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">METEOROLOGICAL</div>
+
+<p>While we lay at the road-house the clear sky clouded
+and the thermometer rose. This is an unfailing sequence.
+Clear, bright weather is cold weather; cloudy weather is
+warm weather. The usual explanation, that the cloud
+acts as a blanket that checks the radiation of heat from
+the earth, is one of those explanations that do not explain.
+There is no heat to radiate. The cloud is a mass
+of moist air, which is warm air, introducing itself from
+some milder region. So the cloud brings the heat; and
+the lower layers of atmosphere extract it and thereby discharge
+the moisture. For an hour or two around noon
+the thermometer stood at -35&deg; and there was a light fall
+of snow; then the skies cleared because they were discharged
+of all their moisture, and the thermometer went
+down to -50&deg; again. It is a beautifully simple process
+and sometimes takes place two or three times a day.
+Every time the sky clouds, the thermometer rises; every
+time the sky clears, the thermometer falls. And because
+the barometer gives notice of changes in the density of
+the atmosphere, it is valuable in forecasting temperature
+in our winters. A steady rise in the barometer
+means a steady fall in the thermometer; a fall in the
+barometer in a time of great cold infallibly prophesies
+warmer weather; even such rapid changes as the one
+given above are anticipated. So well is this established,
+that during "50&deg;-below spells" at Fairbanks, impatient,
+weather-bound travellers and freighters would busy the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56"></a><a href="images/56.png">[56]</a></span>
+hospital telephone with inquiries about the barometer,
+the hospital having the only barometer in the country.</p>
+
+<p>After another long, cold run, on the night of Friday,
+the 12th of January, we reached Bettles, the place we
+had planned to spend Christmas at. We were unable
+to stir from Bettles for two solid weeks, for during the
+whole of that time the thermometer never rose above
+50&deg; below zero.</p>
+
+<p>The long wait at Bettles would have been excessively
+tedious had it not been for the kind hospitality of Mr.
+and Mrs. Charles Grimm, the Commercial Company's
+agent and his wife, and this is but one of many times
+that I have been under obligation to them for cordial
+welcome and entertainment, for needs anticipated, and
+every sort of assistance gladly rendered. We had been
+expected many days; the Christmas festivities with a
+gathering of natives of both races had come and gone;
+still they looked for us, for in this country one does not
+give a man up merely because he is a few weeks behind
+time, nor hold him to account for unpunctuality. The
+natives remained for the most part, and there was abundant
+opportunity of intercourse with them and some beginnings
+of instruction. As the days passed and all arrangements
+for our advance were made, we chafed more
+and more at the delay, for it was very plain that the
+prospect of visiting Point Hope grew less and less; but
+this is a great country for teaching patience and resignation.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">PARASELEN&AElig;</div>
+
+<p>Some of the weather during that two weeks' wait
+was of quite exceptional severity. One night is fixed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57"></a><a href="images/57.png">[57]</a></span>
+for ever in my memory. It is a very rare thing for the
+wind to blow in the "strong cold," but that night there
+was a wind at 58&deg; below zero. And high up in the
+heavens was a sight I had never seen before. The
+moon, little past her full, had a great ring around her,
+faintly prismatic; and equidistant from her, where a
+line through her centre parallel with the horizon would
+cut the ring, were two other moons, distinct and clear.
+It was a strangely beautiful thing, this sight of three
+moons sailing aloft through the starry sky, as though
+the beholder had been suddenly translated to some planet
+that enjoys a plurality of satellites, but no living being
+could stand long at gaze in that wind and that cold. A
+perfect paraselene is, I am convinced, an extremely rare
+thing, much rarer than a perfect parhelion ("moon-cats"
+my companion thought the phenomenon should be called,
+saving the canine simile for the sun), for in seven years'
+travel I have never seen another, and the references to
+it in literature are few.</p>
+
+<p>The next day at noon, the sun not visible above the
+distant mountains, there appeared in the sky a great
+shining cross of orange light, just over the sun's position,
+that held and shone for nigh an hour and only faded with
+the twilight. It is not surprising that these appearances
+should deeply impress the untutored mind and
+should be deemed significant and portentous; they must
+deeply impress any normal mind, they are so grand and
+so strange. The man who has trained his intellect until
+it is so stale, and starved his imagination until it is so
+shrivelled that he can gaze unmoved at such spectacles,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58"></a><a href="images/58.png">[58]</a></span>
+that they are insignificant to him, has but reduced himself
+to the level of the dog upon whom also they make
+no impression&mdash;though even a dog will howl at a great
+aurora. Of course we know all about them; any schoolboy
+can pick up a primer of physical geography and
+explain the laws of refraction, and the ugly and most
+libellous diagram of circles and angles that shows just
+how these lustrous splendours happen; but the mystery
+beyond is not by one hair's breadth impaired nor
+their influence upon the spectator diminished. In Alaska
+perhaps more than any other country it is the heavens
+that declare the glory of God and the firmament that
+shows His handiwork, and the awestruck Indian who
+comes with timid inquiry of the import of such phenomena
+is rightfully and scientifically answered that the
+Great Father is setting a sign in the sky that He still
+rules, that His laws and commandments shall never lose
+their force, whether in the heavens above or on the earth
+beneath.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE STRONG COLD</div>
+
+<p>The "strong cold" itself is an awe-inspiring thing
+even to those who have been familiar with it all their
+lives; and a dweller in other climes, endowed with any
+imagination, may without much difficulty enter into the
+feelings of one who experiences it for the first time. It
+descends upon the earth in the brief twilight and long
+darkness of the dead of winter with an irresistible power
+and an inflexible menace. Fifty below, sixty below, even
+seventy below, the thermometer reads. Mercury is long
+since frozen solid and the alcohol grows sluggish. Land
+and water are alike iron; utter stillness and silence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59"></a><a href="images/59.png">[59]</a></span>
+usually reign. Bare the hand, and in a few minutes the
+fingers will turn white and be frozen to the bone. Stand
+still, and despite all clothing, all woollens, all furs, the
+body will gradually become numb and death stalk upon
+the scene. The strong cold brings fear with it. All
+devices to exclude it, to conserve the vital heat seem
+feeble and futile to contend with its terrible power. It
+seems to hold all living things in a crushing relentless
+grasp, and to tighten and tighten the grip as the temperature
+falls.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the very power of it, and the dread that accompanies
+it, give a certain fearful and romantic joy to the
+conquest of it. A man who has endured it all day, who
+has endured it day after day, face to face with it in the
+open, feels himself somewhat the more man for the experience,
+feels himself entered the more fully into human
+possibilities and powers, feels an exultation that manhood
+is stronger even than the strong cold. But he is a fool
+if ever he grow to disdain the enemy. It waits, inexorable,
+for just such disdain, and has slain many at last
+who had long and often withstood it.</p>
+
+<p>On those rare occasions when there is any wind, any
+movement of the air at all, there enters another and a
+different feeling. Into the menace of a power, irresistible,
+inflexible, but yet insentient, there seems to enter
+a purposeful, vengeful evil. It pursues. The cold itself
+becomes merely a condition; the wind a deadly weapon
+which uses that condition to deprive its victim of all
+defence. The warmth which active exercise stores up,
+the buckler of the traveller, is borne away. His reserves<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60"></a><a href="images/60.png">[60]</a></span>
+are invaded, depleted, destroyed. And then the wind
+falls upon him with its sword. Of all of which we were
+to have instance here on the Koyukuk.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">"FOUND FROZEN"</div>
+
+<p>In the second week of our stay at Bettles, while
+Divine service was in progress in the store building,
+crowded with whites and natives, the door opened and,
+with an inrush of cold air that condensed the moisture
+at that end of the room into a cloud and shot along the
+floor like steam from an engine exhaust, there entered
+an Indian covered with rime, his whole head-gear one
+mass of white frost, his snow-shoes, just removed, under
+his arm, and a beaded moose-skin wallet over his shoulder.
+Every eye was at once turned to him as he beat the
+frost from his parkee hood and thrust it back, unwrapped
+fold after fold of the ice-crusted scarf from his face, and
+pulled off his mittens. Seeking out the agent, he moved
+over to him and whispered something in his ear. It
+was plain that the errand was of moment and the message
+disturbing, and as I had lost the attention of the
+congregation and the continuity of my own discourse,
+I drew things to a close as quickly as I decently could.
+That Indian had come seventy-five miles on snow-shoes
+in one run, without stopping at all save to eat two or
+three times, at a continuous temperature of 50&deg; below zero
+or lower, to bring word that he had found a white man
+frozen to death on the trail; and on the Koyukuk that
+feat will always be counted to Albert the Pilot for righteousness.
+From the location and description of the dead
+man, there was no difficulty in identifying him. He was
+a wood-chopper under contract with the company to cut<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61"></a><a href="images/61.png">[61]</a></span>
+one hundred cords of steamboat wood against next summer's
+navigation at a spot about one hundred miles
+below Bettles. He had taken down with him on the
+"last water" enough grub for about three months, and
+was to return to Bettles for Christmas and for fresh
+supplies. After a day or two's rest the Indian was sent
+back with instructions to bring the body to a native
+village we should visit, to whipsaw lumber for a coffin
+and dig a grave, and we engaged to give the body Christian
+burial.</p>
+
+<p>Uneasy at the softening muscles and sinews of this
+long inaction, I took snow-shoes and a couple of Kobuks
+one day and made an ascent of the hill behind Bettles
+known as Lookout Mountain, because from its top the
+smoke of the eagerly expected first steamboat of the
+summer may be seen many miles down the river; being
+moved to that particular excursion by dispute among
+the weather-bound freighters as to the hill's height.</p>
+
+<p>The change of temperature as we climbed the hill
+was striking. On the first shoulder we were already out
+of the dense atmosphere of the valley and above the
+smoke gloom of the houses, and as we rose the air grew
+milder and milder, until at the top we emerged into the
+first sunshine of many weeks and were in an altogether
+different climate&mdash;balmy and grateful it was to us just
+come up from the strong cold. The aneroid showed the
+altitude about seven hundred feet above Bettles, and I
+regretted very much I had not brought the thermometer
+as well, for its reading would have been most interesting.</p>
+
+<p>The view from the top was brilliantly clear and far-reaching.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62"></a><a href="images/62.png">[62]</a></span>
+The broad plain across the river was checkered
+black and white with alternating spruce thickets and
+lakes; beyond it and the mountains that bounded it lay
+the valley of the south fork which we had crossed fifty
+or sixty miles farther up on our journey hither. Right
+in front of us the middle fork made its big bend from
+southwest to south, and to the left, that is, to the north,
+the valley of the John River opened up its course through
+the sharp white peaks of the Endicott Mountains. It
+was in this direction that my eyes lingered longest. I
+knew that sixty or seventy miles up this river we could
+cross the low Anaktuvak Pass into the Anaktuvak River,
+which flows into the Colville, and that descending the
+Colville we could reach the shores of the Northern Ocean.
+It was a journey I had wished to make&mdash;and have wished
+ever since. There are many bands of Esquimaux on that
+coast, never visited save by those who make merchandise
+of them in one way or another. Please God, some
+day I should get there; meanwhile our present hopes lay
+west, though, indeed, these grew daily fainter.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63"></a><a href="images/63.png">[63]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3>BETTLES TO THE PACIFIC&mdash;THE ALATNA, KOBUK PORTAGE,
+KOBUK VILLAGE, KOTZEBUE SOUND</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">All</span> our preparations were long since made. Our
+Indian guide had been sent back to Fort Yukon from
+Coldfoot, and here we engaged a young Esquimau with
+his dog team and sled, to go across to Kotzebue Sound
+with us. There was also a young Dane who wished to
+go from the Koyukuk diggings to the diggings at Candle
+Creek on the Seward Peninsula, and him we were willing
+to feed in return for his assistance on the trail. The
+supplies had been carefully calculated for the journey,
+the toboggans were already loaded, and we waited but
+a break in the cold weather to start.</p>
+
+<p>Our course from Bettles would lead us sixty-five miles
+farther down the Koyukuk to the mouth of the Alatna.
+The visit to the native village and the burial of the poor
+fellow frozen to death would take us ten miles farther
+down than that, and we would return to the Alatna
+mouth. Then the way would lie for fifty miles or so up
+that stream, and then over a portage, across to the
+Kobuk River, which we should descend to its mouth in
+Kotzebue Sound; the whole distance being about five
+hundred miles through a very little travelled country.
+We learned indeed, that it had been travelled but once<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64"></a><a href="images/64.png">[64]</a></span>
+this winter, and that on the first snow. It was thought
+at Bettles that we might possibly procure some supplies
+at a newly established mission of the Society of Friends
+about half-way down the Kobuk River, but there was no
+certainty about it, and we must carry with us enough
+man-food to take us to salt water. Our supply of dog
+fish we might safely count upon replenishing from the
+natives on the Kobuk. Another thing that caused some
+thought was the supply of small money. There was no
+silver and no currency except large bills on the Koyukuk,
+and we should need money in small sums to buy
+fish with. So the agent weighed out a number of little
+packets of gold-dust carefully sealed up in stout writing-paper
+like medicine powders, some worth a dollar, some
+worth two dollars, the value written on the face, and we
+found them readily accepted by the natives and very
+convenient. Two years later I heard of some of those
+packets, unbroken, still current on the Kobuk.</p>
+
+<p>At last, on the 26th of January, we got away. The
+thermometer stood only a few degrees above -50&deg; when
+we left, but the barometer had been falling slowly for
+a couple of days, and I was convinced the cold spell was
+over. With our three teams and four men we made quite
+a little expedition, but dogs and men were alike soft, and
+for the first two days the travel was laborious and slow;
+then came milder weather and better going.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE KOYUKUK "TOWNS" OF '98</div>
+
+<p>We passed the two ruined huts of Peavey, the roofs
+crushed by the superincumbent snow. In the summer
+of 1898 a part of the stream of gold seekers, headed for
+the Klondike by way of Saint Michael, was deflected to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65"></a><a href="images/65.png">[65]</a></span>
+the Koyukuk River by reports of recent discoveries
+there. A great many little steamboat outfits made their
+way up this river late in the season, until their excessive
+draught in the falling water brought them to a stand.
+Where they stopped they wintered, building cabins and
+starting "towns." In one or two cases the "towns"
+were electrically lit from the steamboat's dynamo. The
+next summer they all left, all save those who were wrecked
+by the ice, and the "towns" were abandoned. But they
+had got upon the map through some enterprising representative
+of the land office, and they figure on some
+recent maps still. Peavey, Seaforth, Jimtown, Arctic
+City, Beaver City, Bergman, are all just names and
+nothing else, though at Bergman the Commercial Company
+had a plant for a while.</p>
+
+<p>We passed the mouth of the Alatna, where were two
+or three Indian cabins, and went on the remaining ten
+miles to Moses' Village, where the body of the man frozen
+to death had been brought. Moses' Village, named from
+the chief, was the largest native village on the Koyukuk
+River, and we were glad, despite our haste, that we had
+gone there. The repeated requests from all the Indians
+we met for a mission and school on the Koyukuk River
+and the neglected condition of the people had moved me
+the previous year to take up the matter. This was my
+first visit, however, so far down the river.</p>
+
+<p>We found the coffin unmade and the grave undug,
+and set men vigorously to work at both. The frozen
+body had been found fallen forward on hands and feet,
+and since to straighten it would be impossible without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66"></a><a href="images/66.png">[66]</a></span>
+several days' thawing in a cabin, the coffin had to be
+of the size and shape of a packing-case; of course the
+ground for the grave had to be thawed down, for so are
+all graves dug in Alaska, and that is a slow business. A
+fire is kindled on the ground, and when it has burned
+out, as much ground as it has thawed is dug, and then
+another fire is kindled. We had our own gruesome task.
+The body should be examined to make legally sure that
+death came from natural causes. With difficulty the
+clothes were stripped from the poor marble corpse, my
+companion made the examination, and as a notary public
+I swore him to a report for the nearest United States
+commissioner. This would furnish legal proof of death
+were it ever required; otherwise, since there is no provision
+for the travelling expenses of coroners, and the
+nearest was one hundred and forty or one hundred and
+fifty miles away, there would have been no inquest and
+no such proof.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">A WILDERNESS TRAGEDY</div>
+
+<p>The man had delayed his return to Bettles too long.
+When his food was exhausted and he had to go, there
+came on that terrible cold spell. A little memorandum-book
+in his pocket told the pitiful story. Day by day
+he lingered hoping for a change, and day by day there
+was entry of the awful cold. He had no thermometer,
+but he knew the temperature was -50&deg; or lower by the
+cracking noise that his breath made&mdash;the old-timer's test.
+At last the grub was all gone and he must go or starve.
+The final entry read: "All aboard to-morrow, hope to
+God I get there." The Indians estimated that he had
+been walking two days, and had "siwashed it" at night<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67"></a><a href="images/67.png">[67]</a></span>
+somewhere beside a fire in the open without bedding.
+Holes were burned in his breeches in two places, where,
+doubtless, he had got too near the fire. He had nothing
+whatever to eat with him save a piece of bacon gnawed
+to the rind. There were only two matches in his pocket,
+and they were mixed up with trash of birch-bark and tobacco,
+so it is likely he did not know he had them. He
+had lit all the fires he could light and eaten all the food
+he had to eat. Still he was plugging along towards the
+native village nine miles away. Then he lost the trail,
+probably in the dark, for it was faint and much drifted,
+and had taken off his snow-shoes to feel with his moccasined
+feet for the hardened snow that would indicate it.
+That was almost the end. He had gone across the river
+and back again, feeling for the trail, and then, with
+the deadly numbness already upon his brain, had wandered
+in a circle. The date of his starting in the memorandum-book
+and the distance travelled made it almost
+certain that, at some moment between the time when
+those three moons floated in the sky and the time when
+that cross glared on the horizon, he had fallen in the
+snow, never to rise again. Fifty-eight below zero and a
+wind blowing!</p>
+
+<p>One supposes that the actual death by freezing is
+painless, as it is certainly slow and gradual. The only
+instance of sudden gelation I ever heard of is in Longfellow's
+"Wreck of the Hesperus," where the skipper,
+having answered one question, upon being asked another,</p>
+
+<div class='poem'>
+"Answered never a word,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">For a frozen corpse was he."</span><br /></div>
+
+
+<div class='unindent'><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68"></a><a href="images/68.png">[68]</a></span>But if the actual death be painless, the long conscious
+fight against it must be an agony; for a man of any
+experience must realise the peril he is in. The tingling
+in fingers and toes and then in knees and elbows is a
+warning he recognises only too well. He knows that,
+unless he can restore warmth by restoring the circulation,
+he is as good as frozen already. He increases his
+pace and beats his arms against his breast. But if his
+vitality be too much reduced by hunger and fatigue and
+cold to make more than a slight response to the stimulation,
+if the distance to warmth and shelter be too
+great for a spurt to carry him there, he is soon in worse
+case than before. Then the appalling prospect of perishing
+by the cold must rise nakedly before him. The
+enemy is in the breach, swarming over the ramparts,
+advancing to the heart of the fortress, not to be again repelled.
+He becomes aware that his hands and feet are
+already frozen, and presently there may be a momentary
+terrible recognition that his wits begin to wander. Frantically
+he stumbles on, thrashing his body with his arms,
+forcing his gait to the uttermost, a prey to the terror
+that hangs over him, until his growing horror and despair
+are mercifully swallowed up in the somnolent torpidity
+that overwhelms him. All of us who have travelled
+in cold weather know how uneasy and apprehensive a
+man becomes when the fingers grow obstinately cold and
+he realises that he is not succeeding in getting them
+warm again. It is the beginning of death by freezing.</div>
+
+<p>We buried the body on a bench of the bluff across
+the river from the native village, the natives all standing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69"></a><a href="images/69.png">[69]</a></span>
+around reverently while the words of committal were
+said, and set up a cross marked with lead-pencil: "R.
+I. P.&mdash;Eric Ericson, found frozen, January, 1906." Two
+or three years later a friend sent me a small bronze tablet
+with the same legend, and that was affixed to the
+cross. There are many such lonely graves in Alaska,
+for scarce a winter passes that does not claim its victims
+in every section of the country. That same winter we
+heard of two men frozen on the Seward Peninsula, two
+on the Yukon, one on the Tanana, and one on the Valdez
+trail. This day I recorded a temperature of 10&deg;,
+the first plus temperature in thirty-nine days, and that
+previous rise above zero was the first in twenty days.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">NEGLECTED NATIVES</div>
+
+<p>That night we gathered all the natives, and after
+long speech with poor interpretation I ventured to promise
+them a mission the next year. Some of them had
+been across to the Yukon years before and had visited
+the mission at Tanana. Some had been baptized there.
+Some had never seen a clergyman or missionary of any
+sort before, and had never heard the gospel preached.
+We were touched by one old blind woman who told of
+a visit to a mission on the Yukon, and how she learned
+to sing a hymn there. Her son interpreted: "She say
+every night she sing that hymn for speak to God." She
+was encouraged to sing it, and it turned out to be the
+alphabet set to a tune! After much pleading and with
+some hesitation, I baptized seventeen children, comforting
+myself with the assurance of the coming mission,
+which would undertake their Christian training and instruction.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70"></a><a href="images/70.png">[70]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Back next day at the mouth of the Alatna, I was
+again impressed with the eligibility of that spot as a
+mission site. It was but ten miles above the present
+native village, and, with church and school established,
+the whole population would sooner or later move to it.
+This gives opportunity for regulating the building of
+cabins, and the advantage of a new, clean start. Moreover,
+the Alatna River is the highway between the Kobuk
+and the Koyukuk, and the Esquimaux coming over in increasing
+numbers, would be served by a mission at this
+place as well as the Indians. I foresaw two villages,
+perhaps, on the opposite sides of the river&mdash;one clustered
+about the church and the school, the other a little lower
+down&mdash;where these ancient hereditary enemies might live
+side by side in peace and harmony under the firm yet
+gentle influence of the church. So I staked a mission
+site, and set up notices claiming ground for that purpose,
+almost opposite the mouth of the Alatna, which, in
+the native tongue, is Allakaket or Allachaket.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE INLAND ESQUIMAUX</div>
+
+<p>There was some trail up the Alatna and we made fair
+headway on its surface, stopping two nights at Kobuk
+huts. We are out of the Indian country now, and shall
+see no more Indians until we are back on the Yukon.
+The mode of life, the habits, the character of the races
+are very different&mdash;the first Esquimau habitation we visited
+proclaiming it. These inland Esquimaux, though
+some of the younger ones have never seen salt water&mdash;our
+guide, Roxy, for one&mdash;are still essentially a salt-water
+people. Their huts, even in the midst of trees, are half-underground
+affairs, for they have not learned log-building;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71"></a><a href="images/71.png">[71]</a></span>
+the windows are of seal gut, and seal oil is a staple
+article of their diet. Their clothing is also marine, their
+parkees of the hair-seal and their mukluks of the giant
+seal. Communications are always kept up with the
+coast, and the sea products required are brought across.
+The time for the movement of the Kobuks back and forth
+was not quite yet, though we hoped we should meet
+some parties and get the benefit of their trail. Just
+before we left the Alatna River we stopped at Roxy's
+fish cache and got some green fish, hewing them out of
+the frozen mass with the axe. The young man had
+fished here the previous summer, had cached the fish
+caught too late to dry in the sun, and they had remained
+where he left them for four or five months. Most of
+them had begun to decay before they froze, but that did
+not impair their value as dog food, though it rendered
+the cooking of them a disagreeable proceeding to white
+nostrils. This caching of food is a common thing amongst
+both natives and whites, and it is rarely that a cache
+is violated except under great stress of hunger, when
+violation is recognised as legitimate. Doughty, in his
+<i>Arabia Deserta</i>, mentions the same custom amongst the
+Arabs; Sven Hedin amongst the Tartars. Sparsely peopled
+waste countries have much the same customs all over
+the world. Even the outer garb in the Oriental deserts
+has much resemblance to our parkee; both burnoose and
+parkee are primarily windbreaks, and it makes little difference
+whether the wind be charged with snow or sand.</p>
+
+<p>At midday on the 3d of February we left the Alatna
+River and took our way across country for the Kobuk.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72"></a><a href="images/72.png">[72]</a></span>
+We had now no trail at all save what had been made
+a couple of months before by the only other party that
+had crossed the portage this winter, and it was buried
+under fifteen or sixteen inches of snow. There was quite
+a grade to be climbed to reach the plateau over which
+our course lay, and the men, with rope over the shoulder,
+had to help the dogs hauling at the sled. Indeed, over
+a good deal of this portage, from time to time, the
+men had to do dog work, for the country is rolling, one
+ridge succeeding another, and the loose, deep snow made
+heavy and slow going. One man must go ahead breaking
+trail, and that was generally my task, though when
+the route grew doubtful and the indications too faint
+for white man's eye, Roxy took my place and I took his
+gee pole, and slipped his rope around my chest.</p>
+
+<p>Breaking trail would not be so laborious if one
+could wear the large snow-shoes that are used for hunting.
+But the hunting shoe, though it carries the man
+without fatigue, does not help the dogs. The small
+shoe known as the trail shoe, packs the snow beneath
+it, and by the time the trail breaker has gone forward,
+then back again, and then forward once more, the snow
+is usually packed hard enough to give the dogs some footing.
+Footing the dog must have or he cannot pull; a
+dog wallowing in snow to his belly cannot exert much
+traction on the vehicle behind him. The notion of snow-shoeing
+as a sport always seems strange to us on the
+trail, for to us it is a laborious necessity and no sport
+at all. The trail breaker thus goes over most of the
+ground thrice, and when he is anxious at the same time<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73"></a><a href="images/73.png">[73]</a></span>
+to get a fairly accurate estimate by the pedometer of
+the distance travelled, he must constantly remember to
+upend the instrument in his pocket when he retraces
+his steps, and restore it to its recording position when he
+attacks unbroken snow again. Also he must take himself
+unawares, so to speak, from time to time, and check
+the length of his stride with the tape measure and alter
+the step index as the varying surfaces passed over require.
+Conscientiously used, with due regard to its
+limitations, the pedometer will give a fair approximation
+of the length of a journey, but a man can no more tell
+how far he has gone by merely hanging a pedometer in
+his pocket than he can tell the height above sea-level of
+an inland mountain by merely carrying an aneroid barometer
+to the top.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE SUNRISE AND THE MOUNTAINS</div>
+
+<p>It was on this Alatna-Kobuk portage that we saw
+the most magnificent sunrise any of us could remember.
+It had been cloudy for some days with threat of snow
+which did not fall. We were camped in a little hollow
+between two ridges, and I had been busy packing up the
+stuff in the tent preparatory to the start, when I stepped
+out with a load of bedding in my arms, right into the
+midst of the spectacle. It was simple, as the greatest
+things are always simple, but so gorgeous and splendid
+that it was startling. The whole southeastern sky
+was filled with great luminous bands of alternate purple
+and crimson. At the horizon the bands were deeper in
+tone and as they rose they grew lighter, but they maintained
+an unmixed purity of contrasting colour throughout.
+I gazed at it until the tent was struck and the dogs<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74"></a><a href="images/74.png">[74]</a></span>
+hitched and it was time to start, and then I had to turn
+my back upon it, for our course lay due west, and I was
+breaking trail. But on the crest of the rising ground
+ahead there burst upon my delighted eyes a still more
+astonishing prospect. We were come to the first near
+view of the Kobuk mountains, and the reflected light of
+that gorgeous sunrise was caught by the flanks of a
+group of wild and lofty snow peaks, and they stood up
+incandescent, with a vivid colour that seemed to come
+through them as well as from them. To right and left,
+mountains out of the direct path of that light gave a
+soft dead mauve, but these favoured peaks, bathed from
+base to summit in clear crimson effulgence, glowed like
+molten metal. It was not the reflected light of the sun,
+but of the flaming sky, for even as I looked, a swift
+change came over them. They passed through the tones
+of red to lightest pink, not fading but brightening, and
+before my companions reached me the sun's rays sprang
+upon the mountains from the horizon, and they were
+golden.</p>
+
+<p>It seems almost foolish to the writer and may well
+seem tedious to the reader, to attempt in words the description
+of such scenes; yet so deep is the impression
+they produce, and so large the place they take in the
+memory, that to omit them would be to strike out much
+of the charm and zest of these arctic journeys. Again
+and again in the years that have passed, the recollection
+of that pomp of colour on the way to the Kobuk has
+come suddenly upon me, and always with a bounding of
+the spirit. I can shut my eyes now and see that incomparable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75"></a><a href="images/75.png">[75]</a></span>
+sunrise; I can see again that vision of mountains
+filling half the sky with their unimaginable ardency,
+and I think that this world never presented nobler sight.
+Surely for its pageantry of burning, living colour, for purity
+and depth and intensity of tint, the Far North with its
+setting of snow surpasses all other regions of the earth.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">TRAVELLING KOBUK LADS</div>
+
+<p>That same day we met a couple of Kobuk youths on
+their way to the Koyukuk, and they gave us the greatest
+gift it was in the power of man to give us&mdash;a trail!
+There is no finer illustration of the mutual service of
+man to man than the meeting of parties going opposite
+ways across the unbroken snows. Each is at once conferring
+and receiving the greatest of favours, without
+loss to himself is heaping benefit on the other; is, it
+may be&mdash;has often been&mdash;saving the other, and being
+himself saved. No more hunting and peering for blazes,
+no more casting about hither and thither when open
+stretches are crossed; no more three times back and forth
+to beat the snow down&mdash;twenty miles a day instead of
+ten or twelve&mdash;the boys' trail meant all that to us. And
+our trail meant almost as much to them. So we were
+rejoiced to see them, sturdy youths of sixteen or seventeen,
+making the journey all by themselves. My heart
+goes out to these adventurous Kobuks, amiable, light-hearted,
+industrious; keen hunters, following the mountain-sheep
+far up where the Indian will not go; adepts
+in all the wilderness arts; heirs of the uncharted arctic
+wastes, and occupying their heritage. If I were not a
+white man I would far rather be one of these nomadic
+inland Esquimaux than any other native I know of.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76"></a><a href="images/76.png">[76]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>That same day we crossed two headwater forks of
+the Kokochatna, as the Kobuks call it, or the Hogatzitna
+as the Koyukuks call it, or the Hog River, as the
+white men call it, a tributary of the Koyukuk that comes
+in about one hundred and fifty miles below the Alatna.
+As we came down a steep descent to the little east fork,
+it showed so picturesque and attractive, with clumps of
+fine open timber on an island, that it remains in my
+mind one of the many places from the Grand Ca&ntilde;on
+of the Colorado almost to the Grand Ca&ntilde;on of the
+Noatak, where I should like to have a lodge in the vast
+wilderness.</p>
+
+<p>We had but crossed the west fork when we knew that
+we were close to the watershed between the Kobuk and
+the Koyukuk, between the streams that fall into Kotzebue
+Sound and those that fall by the Koyukuk and the
+Yukon Rivers into Bering Sea; and because it seemed a
+capital geographic feature, it was disappointing that it
+was so inconspicuous. Indeed, we were not sure which
+of two ridges was the actual divide. Beyond those ridges
+there was no question, for the ground sloped down to
+Lake Noyutak, a body of water some three and a half
+miles in length and of varying breadth that drains into
+the Kobuk. Here in a cabin we found three more young
+Kobuks, and spent the night, getting our first view of
+the Kobuk River next day, not from an eminence, as I
+had hoped, but only as we came down a bank through
+thick timber and opened suddenly upon it. By the pedometer
+I made the portage forty-six miles.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE KOBUK RIVER</div>
+
+<p>The upper Kobuk is a picturesque river, the timber<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77"></a><a href="images/77.png">[77]</a></span>
+being especially large and handsome for interior Alaska.
+We reached it just above the mouth of the Reed River,
+tributary from the north. The weather was warm&mdash;too
+warm for good travelling&mdash;the thermometer standing at
+15&shy;&shy;&shy;&deg;, 20&deg;, and one day even 30&deg; above zero all day long,
+so that we were all bareheaded and in our shirt-sleeves.
+From time to time, as the course of the river varied, we
+had distant views of the rocky mountains of the Endicott
+Range, or, as it might be written, the Endicott
+Range of the Rocky Mountains, for such, in fact, it is&mdash;the
+western and final extension of the great American
+cordillera. On the other side of those mountains was
+the Noatak River, flowing roughly parallel with the
+Kobuk, and discharging into the same arm of the sea.</p>
+
+<p>The division of the labour of camping amongst four
+gave us all some leisure at night, and I found time to
+read through again <i>The Cloister and the Hearth</i> and
+<i>Westward Ho!</i> with much pleasure, quite agreeing with
+Sir Walter Besant's judgment that the former is one of
+the best historical novels ever written. There are few
+more attractive roysterers in literature to me than Denys
+of <ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Bergundy'">Burgundy</ins>, with his "<i>Courage, camarades, le diable est
+mort!</i>" This matter of winter reading is a difficult one,
+because it is impossible to carry many books. My plan
+is to take two or three India-paper volumes of classics
+that have been read before, and renew my acquaintance
+with them. But reading by the light of one candle,
+though it sufficed our forefathers, is hard on our degenerate
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>The days were much lengthened now, and the worst<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78"></a><a href="images/78.png">[78]</a></span>
+of the winter was done. There would still be cold and
+storm, but hardly again of the same intensity and duration.
+When the traveller gets well into February he
+feels that the back of the winter is broken, for nothing
+can take from him the advantage of the ever-lengthening
+days, the ever-climbing sun.</p>
+
+<p>On the afternoon of the third day on the Kobuk we
+reached a cabin occupied by two white men, the first
+we had seen since we left Bettles, and we were the first
+white men they had seen all the winter. They were
+waiting for the spring, having a prospecting trip in view;
+simply spending the winter eating up their grub. There
+was nothing whatever to read in the cabin, and they
+had been there since the freeze-up! They welcomed us,
+and we stayed overnight with them, and that night there
+was a total eclipse of the moon, of which we had a fine
+view. We had an almanac which gave the time of totality
+at Sitka, and we knew the approximate longitude
+of our position, so we were able to set our watches by it.</p>
+
+<p>The next two days are noted in my diary as two of
+the pleasantest days of the whole journey&mdash;two of the
+pleasantest days I ever spent anywhere, I think. A
+clear, cloudless sky, brilliant sunshine, white mountain
+peaks all about us, gave picture after picture, and the
+warm, balmy air made travelling a delight. There are
+few greater pleasures than that of penetrating into a new
+country, with continually changing views of beauty, under
+kindly conditions of weather and trail. In the yellow
+rays of the early sun, the spruce on the river bank looked
+like a screen of carved bronze, while the slender stems of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79"></a><a href="images/79.png">[79]</a></span>
+birches in front of the spruce looked like an inlaying of
+old ivory upon the bronze, the whole set upon its pedestal
+of marble-like snow. The second day we took a portage
+of nine or ten miles across a barren flat and struck the
+river again just below a remarkable stretch of bank a
+mile or so in length, with never a tree or a bush or so
+much as the smallest shrub growing on it. Thick timber
+above suddenly ceased, thick timber below suddenly
+began again, and this bare bank reached back through
+open, barren flat to a low pass in the mountains. It was
+a bank of solid ice, so we were told later, and I remembered
+to have heard of ice bluffs on the Kobuk, and wished
+that the portage had struck the river above this spot
+instead of below it, that there might have been opportunity
+to examine it.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE MISSION</div>
+
+<div class="sidenote">ENGLISH AND ESQUIMAU</div>
+
+<p>A little farther down the river and we were at the
+new mission of the Society of Friends, where a cordial reception
+awaited us and, luxury of luxuries, a warm bath!
+Again and again the wash-tub was emptied and fresh
+water was heated until we all had wallowed to our heart's
+content. The rude log buildings of the mission had
+been begun the previous fall, and were not yet complete,
+but they were advanced enough for occupation, and the
+work of the mission went actively on. It was in charge
+of rather an extraordinary man. He gave us a sketch
+of his life, which was full of interest and matter for
+thought. For many years he was a police officer and
+jailer in the West. Then he sailed on a whaler and thus
+became acquainted with the Esquimaux. He was converted
+from a life of drunkenness and debauchery&mdash;though<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80"></a><a href="images/80.png">[80]</a></span>
+one fancied his character was not really ever so
+bad as he painted it&mdash;at a "Peniel" mission in a Californian
+town. He went in out of mere idle curiosity,
+just recovered from a spree, and was so wrought upon
+that when he came out he was a different creature, a
+new man, the old life with its appetite for vicious indulgence
+sloughed off and left behind him, and he now
+possessed with a burning desire to do some such active
+service for God as aforetime he had done for the devil.
+After three or four months of some sort of training in
+an institution maintained by the California Society of
+Friends&mdash;a body more like the Salvation Army, one
+judges, than the old Quakers&mdash;he volunteered for service
+at a branch which the old-established mission of
+the Society at the mouth of the Kobuk desired to plant
+two hundred miles or so up the river, and had come out
+and had plunged at once into his task. So here he was,
+some six or seven months installed, teacher, preacher,
+trader in a small way, and indefatigable worker in general.
+Pedagogical training or knowledge of "methods"
+he had none at all, but the root of the matter was in him,
+and surely never was such an insatiable school-teacher.
+Morning, noon, and night he was teaching. While he
+was cooking he was hearing lessons; while he was washing
+the dishes and cleaning the house he was correcting
+exercises in simple addition. In the schoolroom he was
+full of a genial enthusiasm that seemed to impart instruction
+by sheer dynamic force. "Boot," the lesson book
+said. There was no boot in the schoolroom, all were
+shod in mukluks. He dives into his dwelling-house<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81"></a><a href="images/81.png">[81]</a></span>
+attachment and comes back holding up a boot. "Boot,"
+he says, and "boot" they all repeat. Presently the
+word "tooth" was introduced in the lesson. Withdrawing
+a loose artificial tooth of the "pivot" variety
+from his upper jaw, he holds it aloft and "tooth!" he
+cries out, and "toot!" they all cry, and he claps it back
+into his head again.</p>
+
+<p>We were present on Sunday at the services. There
+was hearty singing of "Pentecostal" hymns with catchy
+refrains, but we were compelled to notice again what
+we had noticed amongst the little bands of these people
+on the Koyukuk when we set them to singing, that the
+English was unintelligible; and since it conveyed no
+meaning to us could have had little for them. This is
+the inevitable result of ignoring the native tongue and
+adopting the easy expedient of teaching the singing of
+hymns and the recitation of formulas like the commandments
+in English. For a generation or two, at least, the
+English learned, save by children at a boarding-school,
+where nothing but English is spoken, is fragmentary
+and of doubtful import in all except the commonest matters
+of speech. And at such boarding-schools there is
+danger of the real misfortune and drawback of natives
+growing up to live their lives amongst natives, ignorant
+of the native tongue. There is no quick and easy way
+of stamping out a language, thank God; there is no quick
+and easy way of imparting instruction in a foreign language.
+By and by all the Alaskan natives will be more
+or less bilingual, but the intimate speech and the most
+clearly understood speech will still be the mother tongue.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82"></a><a href="images/82.png">[82]</a></span>
+The singing done, there was preaching through an interpreter,
+and then each individual present "gave testimony,"
+which consisted for the most part in the recitation
+of a text of Scripture. Then there were individual
+prayers by one and another of the congregation, and
+then some more singing. The only hymn I could find
+in the book that I knew was the fine old hymn, "How
+Firm a Foundation," and that was sung heartily to the
+"Adeste Fideles." They are naturally a musical race,
+picking up airs with great facility, and they thoroughly
+enjoy singing.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE "DOUBLE STANDARD"</div>
+
+<p>After the service the missionary confided some of
+his troubles to me. He had lately learned through his
+interpreter that the burden of most of the individual
+prayers was that the supplicator might "catch plenty
+skins" and be more successful in hunting than his fellows;
+and though he had done his best to impress upon
+them the superior importance of making request for spiritual
+benefit, he was afraid they had made no change.
+"Our people 'outside,'" he said, "don't understand these
+folk, and I'm not sure that I thoroughly understand
+them myself." "They're all 'converted,'" he said;
+"they all claim to have experienced a change of heart,
+but some of them I know are not living like converted
+people, and sometimes I have my doubts about most of
+them." My sympathy went out to him in his loneliness
+and his earnestness and his disappointments. I
+pointed out that the emotional response to emotional
+preaching was comparatively easy to get from any primitive
+people, but that to change their whole lives, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83"></a><a href="images/83.png">[83]</a></span>
+uproot old customs of sensual indulgence, to engraft
+new ideas of virtue and chastity was a long, slow process
+anywhere in the world. It was chiefly in the matter
+of sexual morality that his doubts and difficulties
+lay, and I was able to assure him that his experience was
+but the common experience of all those who had laboured
+for the uplifting of savage people. Indeed, how should
+it be otherwise? Until quite lately there was almost
+promiscuous use of women. A man receiving a traveller
+in his dwelling overnight proffered his wife as a part of
+his hospitality; the temporary interchange of wives was
+common; young men and young women gratified themselves
+without rebuke; children were valuable however
+come by, and there was no special distinction between
+legitimate and illegitimate offspring. As one reflects
+on these conditions and then looks back upon conditions
+amongst white people, it would seem that all the
+civilised races have done is to set up a double standard
+of sexual morality as against the single standard of
+the savage. It can hardly be claimed that the average
+white man is continent, or even much more continent
+than the average Esquimau, but he has forced continence
+upon the greater part of his women, reserving
+a dishonoured remnant for his own irresponsible use.
+And there are signs that some of those who nowadays
+inveigh against the white man's double standard are in
+reality desirous of substituting, not the single standard
+of the Christian ideal, but the single standard of the
+savage. In the mining camps the prostitute has a sort
+of half-way-recognised social position, and in polite parlance<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84"></a><a href="images/84.png">[84]</a></span>
+is referred to as a "sporting lady"&mdash;surely the
+most horribly incongruous phrase ever coined; she
+often marries a miner who will tell you that she is as good
+as he is, and she is received afterwards by all but a few
+as a "respectable married woman."</p>
+
+<p>There had been some trouble of this sort at this mission.
+The great northern gold seekers' wave of '97 and
+'98 threw a numerous band of prospectors up the Kobuk
+as well as up the Koyukuk. The wave had receded and
+left on the Kobuk but one little pool behind it, a handful
+of men who found something better than "pay" on the
+Shungnak, a few miles away. And there was much
+criticism of the missionary's methods amongst them.
+Word of the arrival of strangers had brought some of
+them to Long Beach, and on Sunday night I had opportunity
+of addressing them, with a view to enlisting their
+sympathy, if possible. What if mistakes were made,
+what if some of the methods employed were open to question?
+Here was a man who beyond doubt was earnestly
+labouring in the best way he knew for the improvement
+of these natives. Such an effort demanded the co-operation
+of every right-feeling man.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">PERSONAL CLEANLINESS</div>
+
+<p>After all, however grand the physical scenery, the
+meteorological phenomena, may be, the people of any
+country are the most interesting thing in it, and we
+found these Esquimaux extraordinarily interesting. Dirty
+they certainly are; it is almost impossible for dwellers
+in the arctic regions to be clean in the winter, and the
+winter lasts so long that the habit of winter becomes the
+habit of the year. White and native alike accept a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85"></a><a href="images/85.png">[85]</a></span>
+lower standard of personal cleanliness than is tolerated
+outside. I remember asking Bishop Rowe, before I came
+to Alaska: "What do you do about bathing when you
+travel in the winter?" To which he replied laconically:
+"Do without." It is even so; travellers on the Alaskan
+trails as well as natives belong to the "great unwashed."
+In the very cold weather the procuring of water in any
+quantity is a very difficult thing even for house dwellers.
+Every drop of it has to be carried from a water-hole cut
+far out on the ice, up a steep grade, and then quite a
+little distance back to the dwelling&mdash;for we do not build
+directly upon these eroding banks. The water-hole is
+continually freezing up and has to be continually hewed
+free of ice, and as the streams dwindle with the progress
+of winter, new holes must be cut farther and farther out.
+On the trail, where snow must usually be melted for water,
+it is obvious that bathing is out of the question; even the
+water for hands and face is sparingly doled by the cook,
+and two people will sometimes use the same water rather
+than resort to the painful though efficient expedient of
+washing with snow. If this be so despite aluminum pots
+and a full kit of camp vessels, it is much more so with the
+native, whose supply of pots and pans is very limited.
+I have seen a white man melt snow in a frying-pan, wash
+hands and face in it, throw it out, fry bacon and beans
+in it, then melt more snow and wash his cup and plate
+in it. There is, however, this to be said anent the disuse
+of the bath in this country, that in cold weather most
+men perspire very little indeed, and the perspiration that
+is exuded passes through to the outer garments and is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86"></a><a href="images/86.png">[86]</a></span>
+immediately deposited upon them as frost; and there is
+this further to be said about dirt in general, that one
+blessed property of the cold is to kill all odours.</p>
+
+<p>One grows tolerant of dirt in this country; there is no
+denying it, and it is well that it is so; otherwise one
+would be in a chronic state of disgust with oneself and
+every one else. So the dirt of the native, unless specially
+prominent and offensive, is accepted as a matter of
+course and ignored. This obstacle overcome, the Esquimaux
+are an attractive and most interesting race,
+and compare to advantage with the Indians in almost
+every particular. They are a very industrious people. Go
+into an Esquimau's hut at almost any time when they
+are not sleeping, and you will find every individual
+occupied at some task. Here is a man working in wood
+or bone with the ingenious tools they have evolved; here
+are women working in skin or fur, and some of them
+are admirable needlewomen; here, perhaps, is another
+woman chewing mukluks&mdash;and many a white man who
+has kept his feet dry in overflow water is grateful to the
+teeth that do not disdain this most effective way of
+securing an intimate union between sole and upper.
+Even the children are busy: here is a boy whittling out
+bow and arrow&mdash;and they do great execution amongst
+rabbits and ptarmigan with these weapons that entail
+no cost of powder and shot; here is a girl beating out
+threads from sinew with a couple of flat stones. Some
+of us, troubled with unconscientious tailors, wish that a
+law could be passed requiring all buttons to be sewn on
+with sinew&mdash;they never come off.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87"></a><a href="images/87.png">[87]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">A LIGHT-HEARTED FOLK</div>
+
+<p>They are a very light-hearted people, easily amused,
+bubbling over with laughter and merriment, romping
+and skylarking with one another at every intermission of
+labour. One of my white travelling companions on this
+journey was in the habit of using a little piece of rabbit
+skin to protect his nose in cold or windy weather. The
+care of the nose is sometimes very troublesome indeed,
+it freezes more readily than any other portion of the body;
+and a little piece of rabbit skin, moistened and applied
+to the nose, will stay there and keep it warm and comfortable
+all day. But it does not exactly enhance one's
+personal attractions.</p>
+
+<p>We had stopped for camp and were all together for
+the first time in four or five hours, when Roxy noticed
+this rabbit-skin nose protector, upon which the breath
+had condensed all the afternoon until two long icicles
+depended from it, one on each side, reaching down below
+the mouth; and he fell straightway into a fit of laughter
+that grew uncontrollable; he rolled on the snow and
+roared. A little annoyed at this exhibition, I spoke
+sharply: "What's the matter with you, Roxy; what on
+earth are you cutting up like that for?" Checking himself
+for a moment, he pointed to my companion and said,
+"Alleesame <i>walrus</i>," and went off into another paroxysm
+of laughter, rolling about and roaring. At intervals all
+the evening he would break out again, and when we sat
+down to eat it overcame him once more and he rushed
+outside where he could give vent to his mirth with less
+offence.</p>
+
+<p>The boy was straightforward and conscientious. We<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88"></a><a href="images/88.png">[88]</a></span>
+were camped over Sunday once, and Roxy had noticed
+many marten tracks in the neighbourhood. He had
+brought a few traps along with him to set out as we went
+and pick up on his return, and he wanted to know if I
+thought he might set some that day, although it was the
+day of rest. Careful not to interfere in any way with
+the religious instruction any native has received from
+any source, I told him that was a matter for him to decide
+himself; that each man was responsible for his own conduct.
+The boy thought awhile&mdash;and he did not set
+his traps. Now that young man had never received any
+instruction at a mission; all his teaching had been from
+other Esquimaux. This same question of working on
+Sunday was the cause of some of the difficulty between
+the missionary at Long Beach and the miners at Shungnak.
+The sluicing or "cleaning-up" season is short, and
+mining operators generally consider that they cannot
+afford to lose an hour of it. The Kobuks employed by
+these miners quit their work on Sunday, and that brought
+the operations to a standstill. There was something to
+be said on the miners' side, but I rejoiced that the Esquimau
+boys showed such steadfastness to their teaching.
+"If you cannot use them six days in the week, if it has
+to be seven or none, then do as the miners on the Yukon
+side do, consider the country uninhabited, and make
+your arrangements as though there were no Kobuks."
+That was my advice, and this may be read in connection
+with Mr. Stefanson's caustic comments on the same
+rigidity of observance.</p>
+
+<p>We left Long Beach with a grateful feeling for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89"></a><a href="images/89.png">[89]</a></span>
+hospitality with which we had been received and with
+a substantial respect for the earnest missionary effort
+that was being put forth there. We were able to replenish
+our grub supply and also to exchange our two
+toboggans for one large sled, for we were out of the
+toboggan country again and they had already become
+a nuisance, slipping and sliding about on the trail. Our
+host was up early with a good breakfast for us, and
+speeded the parting guest, which on the trail is certainly
+an essential part of true hospitality, with all the honours;
+the natives lined up on the bank and the younger
+ones running along with us for a few hundred yards.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE JADE MOUNTAINS</div>
+
+<p>Soon after we left the mission we went up a series of
+terraces to a desolate, barren, wind-swept flat, the portage
+across which cut off a great bend of the river and
+saved us many miles of travel. To our right rose the
+Jade Mountains, whence the supply of this stone which
+used to be of importance for arrow-heads and other implements
+was obtained and carried far and wide. A
+light crust on the snow broke through at every step,
+though the snow was not deep enough and the ground
+too uneven to make snow-shoes useful; so we all had
+more or less sore feet that night when we regained the
+river and made our camp near the mouth of the Ambler,
+another tributary from the north.</p>
+
+<p>The next day was an exceedingly long, tedious day.
+The Kobuk River, which in its upper reaches is a very
+picturesque stream, began now to be as monotonous as
+the lower Yukon. It had grown to considerable size,
+and the bends to be great curves of many miles at a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90"></a><a href="images/90.png">[90]</a></span>
+stretch, one of which, a decided bend to the north of
+the general westerly direction of the river, we were three
+full hours in passing down. It was while traversing this
+bend that we witnessed a singular mirage that lent to
+the day all the enlivenment it had. Before us for ten
+or twelve miles stretched the broad white expanse of
+the river bed, shimmering in the mellow sunlight, and
+far beyond, remote but clear, rose the sharp white peaks
+of the mountains that divide the almost parallel valleys
+of the Kobuk and the Noatak. As we travelled, these
+distant peaks began to take the most fantastic shapes.
+They flattened into a level table-land, and then they shot
+up into pinnacles and spires. Then they shrank together
+in the middle and spread out on top till they looked
+like great domed mushrooms. Then the broad convex
+tops separated themselves entirely from their stalk-like
+bases and hung detached in the sky with daylight underneath.
+And then these mushroom tops stretched out
+laterally and threw up peaks of their own until there
+were distinct duplicate ranges, one on the earth and one
+in the sky. It was fascinating to watch these whimsical
+vagaries of nature that went on for hours. A change
+in one's own position, from erect to stooping, caused the
+most convulsive contortions, and when once I lay down
+on the trail that I might view the scene through the
+lowest stratum of the agitated air, every peak shot up
+suddenly far into the sky like the outspreading of one's
+fingers, to subside as suddenly as I rose to my feet again.
+The psalmist's query came naturally to the mind, "Why
+hop ye so ye hills?" and our Kobuk boy Roxy, whose<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91"></a><a href="images/91.png">[91]</a></span>
+enjoyment of fine landscapes and strange sights was
+always a pleasure to witness, answered the unspoken
+question. "God make mountains dance because spring
+come," he said prettily enough.</p>
+
+<p>Then we crossed another portage and cut off ten miles
+of river by it, and when we reached the river again I
+wanted to stop, for it grew towards evening and here
+was good camping-ground. But we had lately met some
+travelling Kobuks and they had told Roxy of a cabin
+"just little way" farther on, and I yielded to the rest
+of the company, who would push on to it and thus
+avoid the necessity of making camp. That native "just
+little way" is worse than the Scotch "mile and a bittock";
+indeed, the natives have poor notion of distance in
+general, and miles have as vague meaning to them as
+kilometres have to the average Anglo-Saxon.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">A BELATED CAMP</div>
+
+<p>On and on we pushed, mile after mile, and still no
+cabin. In the gathering dusk we would continually think
+we saw it; half-fallen trees or sloping branches simulating
+snow-covered gables. At last it grew quite dark,
+and when there was general agreement that we must
+seek the cabin no longer, but camp, there was no place to
+camp in. Either the bank was inaccessible or there was
+lack of dry timber. We went on thus, seeking rest and
+finding none, until seven-thirty, and then made camp
+by candle-light, in a poor place at that, having trudged
+thirty-five miles that day. A night-made camp is always
+an uncomfortable camp, and an uncomfortable camp
+means a miserable night, which to-morrow must pay for.
+We did not get to bed till nearly midnight, and it was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92"></a><a href="images/92.png">[92]</a></span>
+nine-forty-five when we started out next morning, and
+we made only fifteen miles that day.</p>
+
+<p>The Kobuk valley continued to open out wider and
+wider and the mountains right and left to recede. The
+Jade Mountains were now dim and distant behind us,
+and new ranges were coming into view. The people on
+this lower river are very few. It was just about one
+hundred miles from Long Beach when we reached the
+next native village, a miserable collection of pole dwellings,
+half underground, with perhaps a score of inhabitants.
+Certainly the conditions of life deteriorated as we
+descended this river. The country seems to afford nothing
+but fish; we were amongst the ichthyophagi pure and simple.
+Roxy, bred and born on the upper Kobuk and never
+so far down before, is very scornful about it. "Me no
+likee this country," he says; "no caribou, no ptarmigan,
+no rabbits, no timber, no nothin'." The weather had
+grown raw and cold again, with a constant disagreeable
+wind that took all the fun out of travelling. We passed
+a place where a white man was pessimistically picking
+away at a vein of coal in the river bluff. "Yes, we been
+here all winter," he said, "working on the blamed ledge.
+I always knowed it was goin' to pinch out, and now it's
+begun to pinch. My partner's gone to Candle for more
+grub, but I told him it weren't no use. It's pinchin' out
+right now. I knowed it afore we started work, but the
+blamed fool wouldn't listen to me. 'It'll pinch out,' I
+told him a dozen times; 'you mark my word it'll pinch
+out,' I told him, and now it's begun to pinch; and I hope
+he'll be satisfied." We were reminded of the many coal-mines<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93"></a><a href="images/93.png">[93]</a></span>
+from time to time located on the Yukon, in all or
+nearly all of which the vein has "pinched out." The
+deposits on the coast may be all the fancy of the magazine
+writer paints, and may hold the "incalculable
+wealth" that is attributed to them, but the coal on the
+interior rivers seems in scant measure and of inferior
+quality.</p>
+
+<p>The same night we reached the native village at the
+mouth of the Squirrel River, another northern tributary&mdash;the
+Kobuk receives most of its waters from the north&mdash;and
+we spent the night and the next day, which was
+Sunday, in one of the half-underground huts of the place,
+in company with twelve other people. Here we found
+Roxy's brother, dubbed "Napoleon" by some white man.
+They had not seen one another for years, yet all the
+greeting was a mutual grunt. The Kobuks are not
+demonstrative in their affections, but it would not be
+right to conclude the affection lacking. I have seen an
+old Esquimau woman taking part in a dance the night
+after her husband was buried, yet it would have been
+unjust to have concluded that she was callous and
+indifferent. It is very easy to misunderstand a strange
+people, and very hard to understand them thoroughly.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE CANINE INTRUDER</div>
+
+<p>The roof of the tent was dome-shaped and it was lit
+by a seal-gut skylight. In the morning while I was conducting
+Divine service and attempting most lamely by
+the mouth of a poor interpreter to convey some instruction,
+a dog fight outside adjourned to the roof and presently
+both combatants came tumbling through the gut
+window into the midst of the congregation. They were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94"></a><a href="images/94.png">[94]</a></span>
+unceremoniously picked up and flung out of the door,
+a few stitches with a needleful of sinew repaired the
+window, and the proceedings were resumed. These gut
+windows have their convenience as well as their inconvenience.
+When the hut gets too warm and close even
+for Esquimaux, the seal gut is folded back and the outer
+air rushes in to the great refreshment of the occupants;
+when the hut is cool enough the gut is replaced. A skylight
+is far and away the best method of illuminating
+any single-story structure, and this membrane is remarkably
+translucent, while the snow that falls or frost that
+forms upon such a skylight is quickly removed by beating
+the hand upon the drum-like surface. All glass windows
+must be double glazed, or else in the very cold
+weather they are quickly covered with a thick deposit of
+frost from the condensation of the moisture inside the
+room, and then they admit much less light than gut does.
+One of its unpleasant features is the way the membrane
+snaps back and forth with a report like a pistol whenever
+the door is opened and shut, but on the whole it is a very
+good substitute for glass indeed.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SLEEPING CUSTOMS</div>
+
+<p>These river Esquimaux vary greatly in physical appearance.
+While many of them are somewhat undersized
+and all have small feet and hands, some are well-developed
+specimens of manhood. "Riley Jim," the
+chief of this tribe, would be counted a tall, stalwart man
+anywhere. And while many have coarse, squat features,
+here and there is one who is decidedly attractive in
+appearance. A sweet smile which is often upon the face,
+and small, regular white teeth, greatly help to redeem<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95"></a><a href="images/95.png">[95]</a></span>
+any countenance. A youth of about eighteen at the
+Squirrel River would properly be called handsome, one
+thinks&mdash;though amongst native people one grows a little
+afraid of forgetting standards of comparison; and his
+wife&mdash;for he was already a husband&mdash;was a decidedly
+pretty girl. A word ought to be said which applies to
+all the Esquimaux we met. Although many people live
+in one hut and there is no possible privacy, yet we saw
+no immodesty of any sort. They sleep entirely nude&mdash;probably
+our own great-grandparents did the same, at
+least the people of Defoe and Smollet did, for nightshirts
+and pyjamas are very modern things. There is
+much to be said from an hygienic point of view in favour
+of that custom as against turning in "all standing" as
+the Indian generally does, or sleeping in the day underwear
+as most white men do. But although every one of
+a dozen people in cabin after cabin that we stayed at
+on the Kobuk River above and below this place, of both
+sexes and all ages, would thus strip completely and go
+to bed, there was never any exposure of the body at
+all. It may be, of course, that our presence imposed a
+greater care in this respect, but it did not so impress
+us; it seemed the normal thing. Another noticeable
+feature of the lives of all these people was their devoutness
+in the matter of thanks before and after meat.
+Some of them would not so much as give and receive a
+drink of cold water without a long responsive grace.</p>
+
+<p>As we went on down the river the country grew bleaker
+and drearier and the few scattered inhabitants were living
+more and more the life of the seacoast. The dwellings<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96"></a><a href="images/96.png">[96]</a></span>
+resembled igloos more than cabins, being completely
+covered with snow and approached by underground passages,
+with heavy flaps of untanned sealskin to close them.
+When we passed a fork of the river we knew that we were
+entering the delta of the Kobuk, and that another day
+would take us to the mission on Kotzebue Sound. It was
+a long, hard day, in which we made forty miles, but an
+interesting one. With a start at six, we were at the
+mouth by nine-thirty. The spruce which had for some
+time been dwarfing and dwindling gave place to willows,
+the willows shrank to shrubs, the shrubs changed to
+coarse grass thrusting yellow tassels through the snow.
+The river banks sank and flattened out and ceased, and
+we were on Hotham Inlet with the long coast-line of the
+peninsula that forms it stretching away north and south
+in the distance. Roxy's bewilderment was amusing.
+He stopped and gazed about him and said: "Kobuk
+River all pechuk!" ("Pechuk" means "played out.")
+"What's the matter, no more Kobuk River?" I think
+his mind had never really entertained the notion of the
+river ending, though of course he must often have heard
+of its mouth in the salt water. He was out of his country,
+his bearings all gone, a feeling of helpless insecurity taking
+the place of his usual confidence, and I think he said
+no more all that day.</p>
+
+<p>We had to traverse the ice of Hotham Inlet northward
+to its mouth, double the end of the peninsula, and then
+travel south along the coast to the mission at Kikitaruk,
+the peninsula being too rugged to cross. Three considerable
+rivers drain into Hotham Inlet, roughly parallel in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97"></a><a href="images/97.png">[97]</a></span>
+their east and west courses, the Noatak, the Kobuk, and
+the Selawik, so that its waters must be commonly more
+fresh than salt, for its bounds are narrow and the extensive
+delta of its eastern shore would argue its depth slight.
+Ahead of us, as we travelled north making a bee-line for
+the end of the peninsula, all the afternoon, loomed the
+rocky promontory of Krusenstern, one of Kotzebue's
+capes, and far beyond, stretching up the dim coast-line,
+lay the way to Point Hope. It was with a sinking of
+the heart that I gazed upon it, for I knew already, though
+I had not announced a decision, that the road to Point
+Hope could not be my road that year. All day long the
+thermometer stood between -40&deg; and -30&deg;, and the constant
+light sea-breeze kept scarfs wrapped closely about
+mouths and noses, which always means disagreeable
+travel. When the company stopped at noon to eat a little
+frozen lunch, I was too chilly to cease my movement and
+pressed on. The day of that blessed comfort of the trail,
+the thermos flask, was not yet. By two-thirty we had
+reached Pipe Spit, which still further contracts the narrow
+entrance of the inlet, and turning west for a mile or two
+rounded the point and then turned south for ten miles
+along the coast. Just about dark we reached the mission
+and stood gazing out over the <ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'rouch'">rough</ins> ice of Kotzebue
+Sound to the Arctic Ocean, having made the forty miles
+in ten and a half hours. We had come about one thousand
+miles from Fairbanks, all of it on foot and most of it
+on snow-shoes.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE ARCTIC OCEAN</div>
+
+<p>So here was my first sight of the Arctic Ocean. All
+day long I had anticipated it, and it stirred me,&mdash;a dim,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98"></a><a href="images/98.png">[98]</a></span>
+grey expanse stretching vast and vague in the dusk of
+the evening. The old navigators whose stories I had
+read as a boy passed before me in their wonderful, bold
+sailing vessels, going in and out uncharted waters that
+steamships will not venture to-day&mdash;Kotzebue, Beechey,
+Collinson, McClure&mdash;pushing resolutely northward.</p>
+
+<p>Less happy had been my first sight of the Pacific
+Ocean, five years before. I had the ill luck to come
+upon it by way of that Western Coney Island, Santa
+Monica, and from the merry-go-rounds and cheap eating
+places Balboa and Magellan and Franky Drake fled
+away incontinent and would not be conjured back;
+though, indeed, the original discoverers would have had
+yet further occasion to gaze at one another "with a wild
+surmise" if they had seen shrieking companies "shooting
+the chutes." But here was vastness, here was desolation,
+here was silence; jagged ice masses in the foreground
+and boundless expanse beyond, solemn and mysterious.
+The Arctic Ocean was even as I had pictured it.</p>
+
+<p>The missionary in charge at Kikitaruk had been informed
+by letter of our projected journey during the previous
+summer and had long expected us. We were received
+with kindness and hospitality, and after supper
+began at once our acquaintance with his work, for there
+was a service that night which it was thought we should
+attend. I spoke for a few minutes through an excellent
+interpreter and then spent a couple of hours nodding
+over the stove, overcome with sleep, while there was much
+singing and "testimony."</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">TOTAL-ABSTINENCE ESQUIMAUX</div>
+
+<p>The Californian Society of Friends, established here<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99"></a><a href="images/99.png">[99]</a></span>
+a number of years with branches at other points on
+Kotzebue Sound, has done an excellent work amongst
+the Esquimaux. If they had accomplished nothing else
+it would stand to the everlasting credit of the Society's
+missionaries that they have succeeded in imbuing the
+natives under their charge with a total aversion to all
+intoxicating liquor. We had come down from the remotest
+points to which the influence of these people has
+extended; we had met their natives five hundred miles
+away from their base of instruction, and everywhere we
+found the same thing. It was said by the white men
+on the Koyukuk that a Kobuk could not be induced
+to take a drink of whisky. It seemed to us a pity that
+the force of this most wholesome doctrine should be
+weakened by the unsuccessful attempt to include tobacco
+in the same rigorous prohibition. In several cabins
+where we stayed there was no sign of smoking until
+members of our party produced pipes, whereupon other
+pipes were furtively produced and the tobacco that was
+offered was eagerly accepted. From any rational point
+of view the putting of whisky and tobacco in the same
+category is surely a folly. There can be few more harmless
+indulgences to the native than his pipe, and no one
+knows the solace of the pipe until he has smoked it
+around the camp-fire in the arctic regions after a hard
+day's journey.</p>
+
+<p>The decision to turn my back on Point Hope was, I
+think, the most painful decision I ever made in my life;
+with all my heart I wanted to go on. It was only one
+hundred and sixty or one hundred and seventy miles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100"></a><a href="images/100.png">[100]</a></span>
+away. The journey had been made in three or four days;
+but we were now come to a country where travel is
+impossible in bad weather and where bad weather prevails;
+and that journey might quite as likely take two
+weeks. I worked over the calendar in my diary, figuring
+how many days of travel still remained, allowing reasonable
+margins, and I could not see that I had much more
+than time to get back to Fairbanks before the break-up,
+which for sufficient reason I regarded as my first duty.
+The day of rest at Kikitaruk was Washington's birthday,
+the 22d of February. Eight weeks would bring us to the
+19th April, by which time the trails would be already
+breaking up. Counting out Sundays, that left forty-eight
+days of travelling with something like twelve hundred
+miles yet to make without going to Point Hope&mdash;an average
+of about twenty-five miles a day. I knew that we
+had made no such average in the distance already covered,
+and though I knew also that travelling improved
+generally as the season advanced, I did not know how
+very much better going there is on the wind-hardened
+snows of the coast when travelling is possible at all.
+Again and again I have regretted that I did not take the
+chance and push on, but at the time I decided as I thought
+I ought to decide, and one has no real compunctions when
+that is the case.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE RESOLUTION TO TURN SOUTH</div>
+
+<p>So a first-hand knowledge of our own most interesting
+work among the Esquimaux was not for me on that
+occasion&mdash;and there has arisen no opportunity since.
+Mr. Knapp, who had planned to spend the rest of the
+winter at Point Hope, would get a guide and a team here<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101"></a><a href="images/101.png">[101]</a></span>
+and turn north after some days' rest, while I would turn
+south. Roxy was impatient to return to Bettles. "Me
+no likee this country," was all that could be got out of
+him. So I paid him his money and made him a present
+of the .22 repeating rifle with which he had killed so many
+ptarmigan on the journey, outfitted him with clothes,
+grub, and ammunition, and let him go; saying good-bye
+with regret, for he was a good boy to us all the way.</p>
+
+<p>It was late on the night of our single day of rest
+when I got to bed, for there had been squaring up of
+accounts and much writing, and when I went to bed I
+did not sleep. Again and again I reviewed the decision
+I had come to and fought against it, though such
+is far from my common habit. Even as I write, years
+after, the bitter rebellious reluctance with which I turned
+south comes back to me. I wished the hospital at Fairbanks
+at the bottom of the deep blue sea. I protested
+I would go on and complete my journey, even though
+it involved "thawing out" at Tanana and getting to
+Fairbanks on a steamboat in the summer. I had a
+free hand, a kindly and complaisant bishop, and none
+would call me strictly to account. Then I realised that
+it was merely pride of purpose, self-willed resolution of
+accomplishing what had been essayed&mdash;in a word, personal
+gratification for which I was fighting, and with
+that realisation came surrender and sleep.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102"></a><a href="images/102.png">[102]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SEWARD PENINSULA&mdash;CANDLE CREEK, COUNCIL,
+AND NOME</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">One</span> day's rest was not a great deal after the distance
+we had come&mdash;and that day fully occupied with business&mdash;but
+since Point Hope was abandoned some sort of
+schedule must be made for the Seward Peninsula, and
+where Sunday shall be spent is always an important
+factor in arranging these itineraries. There was just
+time to reach Candle for the next Sunday and it was
+decided to attempt it. Hans would accompany me as far
+as Candle, where he hoped to find work. It meant two
+days of forty-five miles each, for it is ninety miles from
+Kikitaruk to Candle, but they told us it could be done.</p>
+
+<p>So the reluctant adieus made, letters despatched,
+some mailed here at Kikitaruk, some to be carried back
+to Bettles and mailed there&mdash;these latter getting outside
+long before the former&mdash;we started at seven in the morning
+instead of six, as we had planned, on the journey
+down the shore of Kotzebue Sound. That hour's delay
+turned out to be a calamity for us.</p>
+
+<p>The trail was smooth along the beach until Cape
+Blossom was reached, and I had the first riding of the
+winter, Hans and I alternately running and jumping on
+the sled. There was a portage across the cape, and three
+or four miles below it was the wreck of the river steamer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103"></a><a href="images/103.png">[103]</a></span>
+<i>Riley</i>, which used to make a voyage up the Kobuk with
+supplies for the miners at the Shungnak. The thermometer
+was at -38&deg; when we started, and the same light
+but keen breeze was blowing that had annoyed us on the
+other side of the peninsula. What a barren, desolate
+region it is!&mdash;low rocks sinking away to the dead level
+of the snow-field on the one hand, nothing but the ice-field
+on the other.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">A BAD NIGHT</div>
+
+<div class="sidenote">CAMPED IN THE OPEN</div>
+
+<p>We were bound for an igloo forty-five miles from the
+mission, the only shelter between Kikitaruk on the peninsula
+and Kewalik on the mainland, and we had been
+warned that the igloo would be easy to miss if it grew
+dark as it would be almost indistinguishable from the
+snow-drifts of the shore. Some directions from a multitude
+of counsellors remembered in one sense by Hans
+and in another by me, added to our uncertainty as to
+just where the igloo lay. The wind increased in force
+as the evening advanced and the last time I looked at
+the thermometer it still registered -38&deg;. The sun set
+over the sound with another of those curious distortions
+which had before proved ominous to us. It was flattened
+and swollen out like a pot-bellied Chinese lantern,
+with a neck to it and an irregular veining over its surface
+that completed the resemblance. The wind increased
+until the air was full of flying snow and it grew dark,
+and still there was no sign of the igloo. Only slowly and
+with much difficulty could the trail be followed, and that
+meant we were soon not moving fast enough to keep
+warm in the fierce wind. At last we lost the trail altogether,
+and sometimes we found ourselves out on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104"></a><a href="images/104.png">[104]</a></span>
+rough ice of the sound and sometimes wallowing in a
+fresh snow-drift on the shore. I became possessed with
+the fear that we had passed the igloo. I was positive
+that we were told at the mission that we should reach
+it <i>before</i> the high bluffs were passed, and we had passed
+them a long way and had now but a shallow shelf to
+mark the coast-line. It is strange how long that delusion
+about passing his destination will pursue the Alaskan
+traveller. Presently the dogs dropped off a steep bank
+in the dark, and only by good fortune we were able to
+keep the heavy sled from falling upon them, for they
+were dead tired and lay where they dropped. With
+freezing fingers I unhitched the dogs while Hans held
+the sled, and we lowered it safely down. But it was
+plain that it was dangerous to proceed. We could not
+find the trail again and were growing alarmingly cold.
+We were "up against it," as they say here, "up against
+it good and strong." We had a tent but no means of
+putting it up, a stove but nothing to burn in it, a grub
+box full of food but no way to cook it. So the first
+night of coast travel was to show us the full rigour and
+inhospitality of the coast and to make us long for the
+interior again. Wood can almost always be found there
+within a few miles, if it be not immediately at hand,
+and no one properly appreciates the hospitality of a
+clump of spruce-trees until he has spent a night of storm
+lying out on this barren coast. We turned the dogs
+loose and threw them a fish apiece, unlashed the sled,
+and got out our bedding. I had been sleeping in robes,
+Hans in a shedding caribou-hide sleeping-bag that was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105"></a><a href="images/105.png">[105]</a></span>
+my pet aversion. When he crawled out in the morning
+he was so covered with hair that he looked like a caribou,
+and the miserable hairs were always getting into
+the food. We fished them out of the coffee, pulled them
+out of the butter, and picked them out of the bread.
+But now in that sleeping-bag he had an enormous advantage.
+We lay side by side on the snow in the lee of
+the sled, and, tuck myself up with blanket and robe as I
+would, it was impossible to keep the swirling snow from
+coming in. I called the dogs to me and made them lie
+on my feet and up against my side, and so long as they
+lay still I could get a little warmth, but whenever they
+rose and left me I grew numb again. But Hans in his
+sleeping-bag was snoring. The bag is the only bedding
+on the coast. Added to the physical discomfort of that
+sleepless, shivery night was some mental uneasiness.
+There was no telling to what height the storm might
+rise, nor how long it might continue. Sometimes travellers
+overtaken in this way on the coast have to lie
+in their sleeping-bags for three days and nights before
+they can resume their journey. The only interest the
+night held was the thought that came to me that as nearly
+as I could tell we camped exactly on the Arctic Circle.
+The long night dragged its slow length to the dawn at
+last and the wind moderated a little at the same time, so
+with the first streak in the east I awoke Hans, we gathered
+our poor dogs together, rolled up the snow-incrusted
+bedding, and resumed our journey. Two miles farther
+on was the igloo! Our calls awoke some one and we were
+bidden to enter. Descending a ladder and crawling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106"></a><a href="images/106.png">[106]</a></span>
+through a dark passage we came in to the grateful warmth
+and shelter. The chamber was crowded with sleeping
+Esquimaux and reeked with seal oil and fish, but Hans
+said it "looked good and smelled good to him," and so
+it did to me also. One has to lie out on that coast in a
+storm to appreciate the value of mere shelter. We went
+at once to cooking, for we had eaten nothing but a doughnut
+or two in twenty-four hours, and surely never meal
+was more relished than the reindeer steaks and the coffee
+we took amongst those still sleeping Esquimaux. I should
+have liked to spend the day and the next night there, for
+they were friendly and kindly, but the wind had moderated
+somewhat and there was still a chance to reach Candle
+for Sunday. With the offer of a sack of flour at
+Kewalik we induced a couple of Esquimaux to accompany
+us, for I knew we had to cross the mouth of a bay over
+the ice to reach the mainland and I wanted to take no
+more chances.</p>
+
+<p>Our company, again raised to four, started out about
+nine, and until the Choris Peninsula was reached the
+trail still skirted the shore. It is strange that Kotzebue,
+who named this peninsula of a peninsula for the artist
+who accompanied his expedition in 1816, should have
+left the main peninsula itself unnamed, and that the
+British expedition which named Cape Blossom ten years
+later should have failed to supply the omission. It still
+bears no name on the map. We portaged across the
+Choris Peninsula and at the end of the portage took a
+straight course across the mouth of Escholtz Bay (Escholtz
+was Kotzebue's surgeon) for Kewalik on the mainland,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107"></a><a href="images/107.png">[107]</a></span>
+passing Chamisso Island, named for Kotzebue's
+poet friend. There is something very interesting to me
+in this voyage of Kotzebue's, and I have long wished to
+come across a full narrative of it. But the bitter wind
+that swept across that ice-sheet with the thermometer
+at -30&deg; brought one's thoughts back to one's own condition.
+My hands I could not keep warm with the gear
+that had sufficed for 50&deg; and 60&deg; below in the interior,
+and I was very glad to procure from one of our native
+companions a pair of caribou mitts with the hair inside,
+an almost invulnerable gauntlet against cold. If that
+wind had been in our faces instead of on our sides I am
+sure we could not have travelled at all. At last we won
+across the ice and brought up at a comfortable road-house
+at Kewalik, about ten miles from Candle. Here
+we lay overnight, taking the opportunity of thawing out
+and drying the frost-crusted bedding, leaving the short
+run into town for the morning.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">CANDLE CREEK</div>
+
+<p>The diggings on Candle Creek yield to the Koyukuk
+diggings only as the most northerly gold mining in the
+world. Although the general methods are the same in
+all Alaskan camps, local circumstances introduce many
+differences. In all Alaskan camps the ground is frozen
+and must be thawed down. The timber of the interior
+renders wood the natural fuel for the production of the
+steam that thaws the ground, but the scarcity of wood
+on the Seward Peninsula substitutes coal. There is
+coal on the peninsula itself, but of very inferior quality,
+mixed with ice. One may see chunks of coal with veins
+of ice running through them thrown upon the fire. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108"></a><a href="images/108.png">[108]</a></span>
+wood of the interior is a great factor in its commercial
+and domestic economy, and its absence on the Seward
+Peninsula makes great change not only in the natural
+aspect of the country but in the whole aspect of its industrial
+and domestic life also. Wood-chopping for the
+stove and the mill, wood-sawing, wood-hauling employ
+no small percentage of all the white men in the interior&mdash;occupations
+which do not exist at all on the peninsula.
+But its encompassment by the sea, its peninsularity, is
+the dominating difference between the Seward Peninsula
+and the interior, and does indeed make a different country
+of it altogether. All prices are very much lower on
+the peninsula because ships can bring merchandise directly
+from the "outside." Thus amongst those who
+have money to spend there is a more lavish scale of living
+than in the interior towns, and luxuries may be enjoyed
+here that are out of the question there. Perhaps, conversely,
+it is true that life on the peninsula is somewhat
+harder for the poorer class. Whether a railway from
+salt water to the mid-Yukon would redress this great
+difference in the cost of everything may be doubted.
+Railways do not usually operate at less than water-rates.
+There will probably always be an advantage in
+the cost of living and mining in favour of the Seward
+Peninsula camps.</p>
+
+<p>There had been no public religious service of any
+sort in Candle, with its several hundreds of population, in
+three years, so there was special satisfaction in having
+reached the place for Sunday when many miners were in
+town from the creeks, and an overflowing congregation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109"></a><a href="images/109.png">[109]</a></span>
+was readily assembled. And there was great pleasure in
+three days' rest at the hospitable home of a friend while
+the temperature remained below -40&deg;, exacerbated by a
+wind that rendered travelling dangerous. Moreover, by
+waiting I had company on the way, and now that I was
+without native attendant or white companion, and disposed,
+if possible, to make the journey right across the
+peninsula to Council and then to Nome without engaging
+fresh assistance, I was doubly glad of the opportunity of
+travelling with two men bound for the same places and
+acquainted with the route.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE SEWARD PENINSULA</div>
+
+<p>Travelling, like so many other things, is very different
+on the Seward Peninsula. The constant winds beat down
+and harden the snow until it has a crust that will carry
+a man anywhere. There are only two means by which
+snow becomes crusted; one is this packing and solidifying
+by the wind, and the other is thawing and freezing again.
+There is much less wind in the interior than on the coast,
+and usually much less snowfall, and the greater part of
+the surface of the country is protected by trees; the climate,
+being continental instead of marine, is not subject
+to such great fluctuations of temperature. A thaw
+sufficiently pronounced or sufficiently prolonged to put a
+stout crust on the snow when freezing is resumed, is a very
+rare thing in the interior and a common thing on the
+coast. So a striking difference in travel at once manifests
+itself; in the interior all the snow is soft except on a
+beaten trail itself, while in the Seward Peninsula all the
+snow is alike hard. The musher is not confined to trails&mdash;he
+can go where he pleases; and his vehicle is under no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110"></a><a href="images/110.png">[110]</a></span>
+necessity of conforming in width to a general usage of
+the country&mdash;it may be as wide as he pleases. Hence
+the hitching of dogs two and three abreast; hence the
+sleds of twenty-two, twenty-four, or twenty-six inches
+in width. My tandem rig aroused the curiosity of those
+who saw it. Hence many other differences also. Hitherto
+we had not dreamed of watering the dogs since snow fell;
+now I found their mouths bloody from their ineffectual
+attempts to dig up the hard snow with their teeth, and
+had to water them night and morning. It is not the custom
+on the Seward Peninsula to cook for the dogs, and
+dog mushers there argue the needlessness of that trouble.
+But the true reason is other and obvious. It is difficult
+for the traveller to get enough wood to cook for himself,
+let alone the dogs. On the Seward Peninsula skis are
+extensively used when there is soft snow; the prevalence
+of brush almost everywhere in the interior renders them
+of little use&mdash;and they are, therefore, little used, snow-shoes
+being universal.</p>
+
+<p>So, as in nearly all such matters everywhere, local
+peculiarities, local differences, local customs, usually
+arise from local conditions, and the wise man will commonly
+conform so soon as he discovers them. There is
+almost always a sufficient reason for them.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">A "SIDLING" TRAIL</div>
+
+<p>The journey from Candle to Council was a surprisingly
+swift one. We covered the one hundred and thirty miles
+in three days, far and away the best travelling of the
+winter so far, but the usual time, I found. The hard
+snow gives smooth passage though the interior of the
+peninsula is rugged and mountainous; two prominent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111"></a><a href="images/111.png">[111]</a></span>
+elevations, the Ass's Ears, standing up as landmarks
+during the first day of the journey. The route crossed
+ridge after ridge with steep grades, and the handling of
+the heavy sled alone was too much for me. Again and
+again it was overturned, and it was all that I could do,
+and more than I ought to have done, to set it up again.
+The wind continued to blow with violence, and shelter
+from it there was none. One hillside struggle I shall
+always remember. The trail sloped with the hill and
+the wind was blowing directly down it. I could keep no
+footing on the marble snow and had fallen heavily again
+and again, in my frantic efforts to hold sled and dogs
+and all from sweeping down into a dark ravine that
+loomed below, when I bethought me of the "creepers"
+in the hind-sack, used on the rivers in passing over glare
+ice. With these irons strapped to my feet I was able to
+stand upright, but it was only by a hair's breadth once
+and again that I got my load safely across. When I
+was wallowing in a hot bath at Council two days later
+I found that my hip and thigh were black and blue where
+I had fallen, though at the time, in my anxiety to save
+the dogs and the sled, I had not noticed that I had
+bruised myself. So, judging great things by little, one
+understands how a soldier may be sorely wounded without
+knowing it in the heat and exaltation of battle.</p>
+
+<p>Then for a while there would be such travel as one sees
+in the children's picture-books, where the man sits in the
+sled and cracks his whip and is whisked along as gaily
+as you please&mdash;such travel as I had never had before;
+but there was no pleasure in it&mdash;the wind saw to that.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112"></a><a href="images/112.png">[112]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>On the second day we crossed "Death Valley," so
+called because two men were once found frozen in it; a
+bleak, barren expanse, five or six miles across, with a
+great gale blowing right down it, charged not only with
+particles of hard snow but with spicules of ice and grains
+of sand. Our course was south and the gale blew from
+the northwest, and the right side of one's body and the
+right arm were continually numb from the incessant
+beating of the wind. The parkee hood had to be drawn
+closely all the time, and the eyes were sore from trying to
+peer ahead through the fur edging of the hood. One
+grows to hate that wind with something like a personal
+animosity, so brutal, so malicious does it seem. An incautious
+turn of the head and the scarf that protected
+mouth and nose was snatched from me and borne far
+away in an instant, beyond thought of recovery. It
+seems to lie in wait, and one fancies a fresh shrill of
+glee in its note at every new discomfiture it can inflict.
+There is nothing far-fetched in the native superstition
+that puts a malignant spirit in the wind; it is the most
+natural feeling in the world. I said so that night in
+camp, and one of my companions mentioned something
+about "rude Boreas," and I laughed. The gentle myths
+of Greece do not fit this country. The Indian name
+means "the wind beast," and is appropriate.</p>
+
+<p>A savage, forbidding country, this whole interior of
+the Seward Peninsula, uninhabited and unfit for habitation;
+a country of naked rock and bare hillside and desolate,
+barren valley, without amenities of any kind and
+cursed with a perpetual icy blast.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113"></a><a href="images/113.png">[113]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">DEATH VALLEY</div>
+
+<p>The valley crossed and its ridge surmounted, a still
+more heart-breaking experience was in store. We descended
+the frozen bed of a creek from which the wind
+had swept every trace of snow so that the ice was polished
+as smooth as glass. The dogs could get no footing and
+were continually down on their bellies, moving their legs
+instinctively but helplessly, like the flippers of a turtle,
+while the wind carried dogs and sled where it pleased.
+The grade was considerable and in bends the creek spread
+out wide. Nothing but the creepers enabled a man to
+stand at all, and creepers and brake together could not
+hold the sled from careering sideways across the ice,
+dragging the dogs with it, until the runners struck some
+pebble or twig frozen in the ice and the sled would be
+violently overturned. Twice with freezing fingers I unlashed
+that sled lying on its side, and took out nearly all
+the load before I could succeed in getting it upright
+again, losing some of the lighter articles each time. The
+third time was the worst of all. The brake had been
+little more than a pivot on which sled and dogs were swung
+to leeward, but now the teeth had become so blunt that,
+though I stood upon it with all my weight, it would not hold
+at all nor check the sideways motion under the impulse of
+the wind. Right across the creek we went, dragging the
+dogs behind, jerking them hither and thither over the
+glassy surface. I saw the rocks towards which we were
+driving, but was powerless to avert the disaster, and hung
+on in some hope, I suppose, of being able to minimise it,
+till, with a crash that broke two of the uprights and threw
+me so hard that I skinned my elbow and hurt my head,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114"></a><a href="images/114.png">[114]</a></span>
+we were once more overturned. Never since I reached
+manhood, I think, did I feel so much like sitting down
+and crying. It seemed hopeless to think about getting
+down that creek until the wind stopped, and one doubts
+if the wind ever does stop in that country. But there
+was no good sitting there like a shipwrecked mariner,
+nursing sores and misfortunes; presently one would begin
+to feel sorry for oneself&mdash;that last resort of incompetence.
+And the bitter wind is a great stimulus. It will not
+permit inaction. So I was up again, fumbling at the
+sled lashings as best I could with torpid fingers, when one
+of my companions, uneasy at my delay, very kindly made
+his way back, and with his assistance I was able to get
+the sled upright again without unloading and hold it
+somewhat better on its course until another bend or two
+brought us to the partial shelter of bluffs and, a little
+farther, to the cabin where we were to spend the night.
+I understood now why my companions had a sort of
+hinged knife-edge fastened to one runner of their sled.
+By the pressure of a foot the knife-edge engaged the ice
+and held the sled on its course. This is another Seward
+Peninsula device.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE KINDLY SWEDE</div>
+
+<p>I have it in my diary that "a Swede named Petersen
+was very kind to us at the cabin, cooking for us and giving
+us cooked dog feed." Blessed Swede named Petersen!&mdash;there
+are hundreds of them in Alaska&mdash;and I shall
+never forget that particular one's kindness&mdash;the only
+man I met in the Seward Peninsula who still persisted in
+cooking dog feed whenever he could. He had cooked up
+a mess of rice and fish enough to last his three or four<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115"></a><a href="images/115.png">[115]</a></span>
+dogs several days while he sojourned at this cabin, and
+he gave it all to us and would take nothing for it. His
+language was what Truthful James calls "frequent and
+painful and free." I ignored it for a while, loath to take
+exception to anything a man said who had been so kind.
+But at last I could stand it no longer&mdash;it took all the
+savour out of his hospitality&mdash;and I said: "I hope you
+won't mind my saying it, for I'd hate to give offence to
+a man who has been so good to strangers as you have,
+but I wish you'd cut out that cursing; it hurts my ears."
+He sat silent a moment looking straight at me, and I was
+not sure how he had taken it. Then he said: "Maybe
+you been kinder to me saying that, than I been to you.
+That's the first time I ever been call down for cursin'.
+I don't mean nothin' by it; it's just foolishness and I
+goin' try to cut it out."</p>
+
+<p>The dogs had done but ill on the dry fish, accustomed
+as they were to cooked food, and they ate ravenously of
+their supper. Only the previous night Lingo had betrayed
+his trust for the first and last time. Coming out
+of the cabin just before turning in, to take a last look
+round, I saw Lingo on top of the sled eating something,
+and I found that he had dug a slab of bacon out of the
+unlashed load and had eaten most of it. I knew he was
+hungry, missing the filling, satisfying mess he was used
+to, and I did not thrash him, I simply said, "Oh, Lingo!"
+and the dog got off the sled and slunk away, the very
+picture of conscious, shamefaced guilt. That was the
+only time he did such a thing in all the six years I drove
+him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116"></a><a href="images/116.png">[116]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Council was past its prime at the time of this visit,
+but just as we entered the town, at the end of the third
+day's run, it seemed in danger of going through all the
+stages of decadence with a rush to total destruction out
+of hand, for a fire had broken out in a laundry, and with
+the high wind still blowing it looked as though every
+building was doomed. Of two chemical engines possessed
+by the town one refused to work, but the vigour and
+promptness of the people in forming two lines down to
+the river, and passing buckets with the utmost rapidity,
+coped with the outbreak just in time to prevent its spreading
+beyond all control. Tired as we were, we all pitched
+in and passed buckets until parkees and mitts and mukluks
+were incrusted with ice from water that was spilled.
+Efficient protection is a matter of great difficulty and
+expense in Alaskan towns, and there is not one of them
+that has escaped being swept by fire. The buildings
+are almost necessarily all of wood, the cost of brick and
+stone construction being prohibitive. No one can guarantee
+ten years of life to a placer-mining town, and there
+would be no warrant for the expenditure of the sums
+required for fireproof building even were the capital
+available. But the rapidity with which they are rebuilt,
+where rebuilding is justified, is even more remarkable
+than the rapidity with which they are destroyed.</p>
+
+<p>A Saturday and Sunday were very welcome at Council,
+and the courtesy of the Presbyterian minister, who gave
+up his church and his congregations to me, Esquimaux in
+the morning and white at night, was much appreciated.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">NORTON SOUND</div>
+
+<p>In warmer weather, the thermometer no lower than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117"></a><a href="images/117.png">[117]</a></span>
+-5&deg; at the start, but with the same gale blowing that had
+blown ever since we left Candle, though it had shifted
+towards the northeast, we got away on Monday morning,
+bound for Nome, ninety miles away, hoping to reach the
+half-way house that night. Five or six hours' run over
+good trails, with no greater inconvenience than the
+acceleration of our pace by the wind on down grades,
+until the sled frequently overran the dogs with entanglements
+and spillings, brought us to the seacoast at Topkok,
+and a noble view opened up as we climbed the great
+bluff. There Norton Sound spread out before us, its ice
+largely cleared away and blown into Bering Sea by the
+strong wind that had prevailed for nearly a week, its
+waves sparkling and dashing into foam in the March
+sunshine; the distant cliffs and mountains of its other
+shore just visible in the clear air. It was an exhilarating
+sight&mdash;the first free water that I had seen since the summer,
+and it seemed rejoicing in its freedom, leaping up
+with glee to greet the mighty ally that had struck off its
+fetters.</p>
+
+<p>But from this point troubles began to grow. We
+dropped down presently to the shore and passed along
+the glare surface of lagoon after lagoon, the wind doing
+what it liked with the sled, for it was impossible to handle
+it at all. Sometimes we went along broadside on, sometimes
+the sled first and the dogs trailing behind, moving
+their silly, helpless paws from side to side as they were
+dragged over the ice on their bellies. When we had
+passed these lagoons the trail took the beach, running
+alongside and just to windward of a telephone-line, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118"></a><a href="images/118.png">[118]</a></span>
+rough shore ice to the left and bare rocks to the right.
+Again and again the already injured sled was smashed
+heavily against a telephone pole. I would see the impact
+coming and strive my utmost to avert it, but without a
+gee pole, and swinging the sled only by the handle-bars,
+it was more than I could do to hold the sled on its course
+against the beam wind that was forcing it towards the ice
+and the telephone poles; and a gee pole could not be used
+at the rate we had travelled ever since we left Candle.
+Mile after mile we went along in this way. I do not know
+how many poles I hit and how many I missed, but every
+pole on that stretch of coast was a fresh and separate anxiety
+and menace to me. I think I would have been perfectly
+willing to have abolished and wiped out the whole
+invention of the telephone so I could be rid of those hateful
+poles. What were telephone poles doing in the arctic
+regions anyway? Telephone poles belonged with electric
+cars and interurban trolley-lines, not with dog teams
+and sleds.</p>
+
+<p>Then it grew dark and the wind increased. I did
+not know it, but I was approaching that stretch of coast
+which is notorious as the windiest place in all Alaska,
+a place the topography of which makes it a natural
+funnel for the outlet of wind should any be blowing anywhere
+in the interior of the peninsula. My companions
+were far ahead, long since out of sight. I struggled along
+a little farther, and, just after a particularly bad collision
+and an overturning, I saw a light glimmering in the
+snow to my right. It was a little road-house, buried to
+the eaves and over the roof in snow-drift, with window<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119"></a><a href="images/119.png">[119]</a></span>
+tunnels and a door tunnel excavated in the snow. I was
+yet, I learned, five miles from Solomon's, my destination,
+but I hailed this haven as my refuge for the night and
+went no farther, more exhausted by the struggle of the
+last two or three hours than by many an all-day tramp on
+snow-shoes. It was a miserable, dirty little shack, but
+it was tight; it meant shelter from that pitiless wind.
+That night the thermometer stood at 7&deg;, the first plus
+temperature in twenty-two days.</p>
+
+<p>By morning the gale had greatly diminished, and by
+the time I reached Solomon's and rejoined my companions
+it was calm, the first calm since we left the middle
+Kobuk. We had some rough ice to cross to avoid a long
+detour of the coast, and then we were back on the shore
+again and it began to snow. The snow was soon done
+and the sun shone, but the new coating of dazzling white
+gave such a glare that it was necessary to put on the
+snow glasses for the first time of the winter&mdash;and that is
+always a sign winter draws to a close.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">DOGS AND REINDEER</div>
+
+<p>On the approach to Nome we had our first encounter
+with reindeer, and at once my dog team became unmanageable.
+I had had some trouble that morning with a
+horse. A new dog I procured at Kikitaruk had never seen
+a horse before, and made frantic efforts to get at him,
+leaping at his haunches as we passed by. But when they
+saw the reindeer the whole team set off at a run, dragging
+the heavy sled as if it were nothing. The Esquimau
+driving the deer saw the approaching dogs and hastily
+drew his equipage off the trail farther inshore, standing
+between the deer and the dogs with a heavy whip. What<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120"></a><a href="images/120.png">[120]</a></span>
+the result would have been had the dogs reached the deer
+it is hard to say. I had kept my stand on the step
+behind the sled and managed to check its wild career
+with the brake and to throw it over and stop the approach
+before the carnivora reached their immemorial prey.
+Herein lies one of the difficulties of the domestication of
+reindeer in Alaska, a country where so far dogs have
+been the only domestic animals. Again, as we entered
+the outskirts of Nome the incident was repeated, and
+only the hasty driving of the reindeer into a barn prevented
+the dogs from seizing the deer that time.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">NOME</div>
+
+<p>Jimmy was long deposed from his ineffectual leadership
+and a little dog named Kewalik&mdash;the one I obtained
+at Kikitaruk&mdash;was at the head of the team. Kewalik
+had never seen so many houses before; hitherto almost
+every cabin he had reached on his journeys had been a
+resting-place, and he wanted to dive into every house we
+passed. At Candle and Council both, our stopping-place
+had been near the entrance to the little town. But now we
+had to pass up one long street after another and I had
+continually to drag him and the team he led first from a
+yard on this side of the road and then from one on the
+other. The dog was perfectly bewildered and out of his
+head by the number of people and the number of houses
+he saw. We were indeed a sorry, travel-worn, unkempt,
+uncivilised band, man and dogs, with an old, battered vehicle,
+and we felt our incongruity with the new environment
+as we entered the metropolis of the luxury and wealth
+of the North. Here we passed a jeweller's shop, the whole
+window aglow with the dull gleam of gold and ivory&mdash;the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121"></a><a href="images/121.png">[121]</a></span>
+terrible nugget jewellery so much affected in these
+parts and the walrus ivory which is Alaska's other contribution
+of material for the ornamental arts. Here we
+passed a veritable department store, its ground-floor
+plate-glass window set as a drawing-room, with gilded,
+brocaded chairs, marquetry table, and ormolu clock, and
+I know not what costliness of rug and curtain. It was
+all so strange that it seemed unreal after that long passage
+of the savage wilds, that long habitation of huts and
+igloos and tents. Hitherto we had often been fortunate
+could we buy a little flour and bacon; here the choice comestibles
+of the earth were for sale. I looked askance at
+my greasy parkee as I passed shops where English broadcloth
+and Scotch tweeds were displayed; at my worn,
+clumsy mukluks when I saw patent-leather pumps. But
+Nome knows how to welcome the wanderer from the wilderness
+and to make him altogether at home. There
+could be no warmer hospitality than that with which I
+was received by the Reverend John White and his wife,
+than that which I had at many a home during my
+week's stay.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing in the world could have caused the building
+of a city where Nome is built except the thing that caused
+it: the finding of gold on the beach itself and in the creeks
+immediately behind it. It has no harbour or roadstead,
+no shelter or protection of any kind; it is in as bleak and
+exposed a position as a man would find if he should set
+out to hunt the earth over for ineligible sites.</p>
+
+<p>But Nome is also a fine instance of the way men in
+the North conquer local conditions and wring comfort<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122"></a><a href="images/122.png">[122]</a></span>
+out of bleakness and desolation by the clever adaptation
+of means to ends.</p>
+
+<p>The art of living comfortably in the North had to be
+learned, and it has been learned pretty thoroughly. People
+live at Nome as well as they do "outside." One may
+sit down to dinners as well cooked, as well furnished, as
+well served as any dinners anywhere. The good folk of
+Nome delight in spreading their dainty store before the
+unjaded appetite of the winter traveller, and it would be
+affectation to deny that there is keen relish of enjoyment
+in the long-unwonted gleam of wax candle or electrolier
+upon perfect appointment of glass, silver, and napery,
+in the unobtrusive but vigilant service of white-jacketed
+Chinaman or Jap. Nome has a great advantage over
+its only rival in the interior, Fairbanks, in the matter of
+freight rates. The same merchandise that is landed at
+the one place for ten or twelve dollars a ton within ten
+or twelve days of its leaving Seattle, costs fifty or sixty
+at the other, and takes a month or more to arrive. But
+this accessibility in the summer is exactly reversed in
+the winter. No practicable route has been discovered
+along the uninhabited shores of Bering Sea, and all the
+mail for Nome comes from Valdez to Fairbanks and then
+down the Yukon and round Norton Sound by dog team.
+In winter Fairbanks is within seven or eight days of open
+salt water; Nome a full month. After navigation closes
+in October, the first mail does not commonly reach the
+Seward Peninsula until January. So that, with all its
+comforts and luxuries, Nome is a very isolated place for
+eight months in the year.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="gold" id="gold"></a><a href="images/gs150.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs150_th.jpg" width="500" height="316" alt="Gold-mining at Nome." title="Gold-mining at Nome." />
+</a><span class="caption">Gold-mining at Nome.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="pulling" id="pulling"></a><a href="images/gs151.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs151_th.jpg" width="500" height="319" alt="Pulling the &quot;Pelican&quot; out with a &quot;Spanish windlass.&quot;" title="Pulling the &quot;Pelican&quot; out with a &quot;Spanish windlass.&quot;" />
+</a><span class="caption">Pulling the &quot;Pelican&quot; out with a &quot;Spanish windlass.&quot;</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123"></a><a href="images/123.png">[123]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">MINING AT NOME</div>
+
+<p>We went out with the dog sled to the diggings a few
+miles behind the town, and a busy scene we found, enveloped
+in steam and smoke. Here an old beach line
+had been discovered and was yielding rich reward for the
+working. A long line of conical "dumps" marked its
+extension roughly parallel with the present shore, and
+the buckets that arose from the depths, travelled along a
+cable, and at just the right moment upset their contents,
+continually added to these heaps. All the winter "pay-dirt"
+is thus excavated and stored; in the summer when
+the streams run the gold is sluiced out. But that phrase
+"when the streams run" covers a world of difficulty and
+expense to the miner. In some places in this Seward
+Peninsula, ditches thirty and forty miles long have been
+constructed to insure the streams running when and where
+they are needed.</p>
+
+<p>There was quite a little to do in Nome. A new sled
+must be bought, and another dog, and, above all, some
+arrangement made about a travelling companion. I was
+not willing to hire a native who would have to return
+here, and I was resolved never again to travel alone. So
+I put an advertisement in the newspaper, desiring communication
+with some man who was intending a journey
+to Fairbanks immediately, and was fortunate to meet a
+sober, reliable man who undertook to accompany and
+assist me for the payment of his travelling expenses.</p>
+
+<p>The week wore rapidly away, and I began to be eager
+to depart, mindful of the eight hundred odd miles yet to
+be covered. Spring seemed already here and summer
+treading upon her heels, for the town was all slush and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124"></a><a href="images/124.png">[124]</a></span>
+mud from a decided "soft snap," the thermometer standing
+well above freezing for days in succession.</p>
+
+<p>A visitor to this place is struck by the number of
+articles made from walrus ivory exposed for sale, chief
+amongst them being cribbage-boards. A walk down the
+streets would argue the whole population given over to
+the incessant playing of cribbage. The explanation is
+found in the difficulty of changing the direction of Esquimau
+activity once that direction is established. These
+clever artificers were started making cribbage-boards long
+ago and it seems impossible to stop them. Every summer
+they come in from their winter hunting with fresh
+supplies carved during the leisure of the long nights.
+The beautiful walrus tusk becomes almost an ugly thing
+when it is thus hacked flat and bored full of holes. The
+best pieces of Esquimau carving are not these things, made
+by the dozen, but the domestic implements made for
+their own use, and some of this work is very clever and
+tasteful indeed, adorned with fine bold etchings of the
+chase of walrus, seal, and polar bear.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125"></a><a href="images/125.png">[125]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h3>NOME TO FAIRBANKS&mdash;NORTON SOUND&mdash;THE KALTAG
+PORTAGE&mdash;NULATO&mdash;UP THE YUKON TO TANANA</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">We</span> left Nome on the 13th of March, the night before
+being taken up by a banquet which the Commercial Club
+was kind enough to give me; indeed, the whole stay was
+marked by lavish kindness and hospitality, and I left
+with the feeling that Nome was one of the most generous
+and open-handed places I had ever visited.</p>
+
+<p>The soft weather continued and made sloppy travel.
+Our course lay all around Norton Sound to Unalakl&iacute;k,
+and then over the portage to Kaltag on the Yukon; up the
+Yukon to the mouth of the Tanana, and then up that
+river to Fairbanks. The first day's run was the retracing
+of our steps to Solomon's, and that was done without
+difficulty save for a new trouble with the dogs. It appeared
+that we no longer had any leader. All the winter
+through my team had been behind another team, and
+that constant second place had turned our leaders into
+followers. We thought we had two leaders, but neither
+one was willing to proceed without some one or something
+ahead of him. On such good ice-going as this it was out
+of the question for one of us to run ahead of the team
+simply to please these leader-perverts, and the whip had
+to be wielded heavily on Jimmy's back ere he could be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126"></a><a href="images/126.png">[126]</a></span>
+induced to fill his proper office&mdash;and then he did it ill,
+with constant exasperating stoppings and lookings-back.
+At Solomon's I met a man who had spent some years
+with Peary in his arctic explorations, and I sat up far
+into the night drawing interesting narratives out of him.
+So far as Topkok we were still retracing our steps, but
+once over the great bluff, which gave no view this time
+owing to the mist which accompanies this soft weather,
+we were on new ground, our course lying wholly along
+the beach.</p>
+
+<p>At Bluff was the most interesting, curious gold mining
+I have ever seen, the extraction of gold from the sand of
+Norton Sound, two hundred yards or more out from the
+beach. There it lies under ten or twelve feet of water
+with the ice on top. How shall it be reached? Why,
+by the exact converse of the usual Alaskan placer mining;
+by freezing down instead of thawing down. The ice is
+cut away from the beginning of a shaft, almost but not
+quite down to the water, leaving just a thin cake. The
+atmospheric cold, penetrating this cake, freezes the water
+below it, and presently the hole is chopped down a little
+farther, leaving always a thin cake above the water. A
+canvas chute is arranged over the shaft, with a head like
+a ship's ventilator that can be turned any way to catch
+the wind. Gradually the water is frozen down, and as
+it is frozen more and more ice is removed until the bottom
+is reached, surrounded and protected by a cylindrical
+shaft of ice; then the sand can be removed and the gold it
+contains washed out. They told us they were making
+good money and their ingenuity certainly deserved it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127"></a><a href="images/127.png">[127]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">ICE TRAVEL</div>
+
+<p>We stopped that night at the native village of Chinnik,
+the people of which are looked after by a mission of the
+Swedish Evangelical Church on Golofnin Bay, which we
+should cross to-morrow. But the mission is off the trail,
+and we did not come to an acquaintance with the missionaries
+of this body until we reached Unalakl&iacute;k. Next
+day, climbing and descending considerable grades in
+warm, misty weather, we reached Golofnin Bay, pursued
+it some distance, and left it by a very steep, long hill
+that was close to one thousand feet high, at the foot of
+which we were once more on the beach of the sound&mdash;and
+at the road-house for the night. From that place
+the trail no longer hugged the coast but struck out boldly
+across the ice for a distant headland, Moses' Point, where
+we lunched, and, that point reached, struck out again for
+Isaac's Point, most of the travelling during a long day
+in which we made forty-eight miles being four or five
+miles from land. The day was clear, and the shore-line
+of the other side of the sound, which grew nearer as we
+proceeded, was subject to strange distortions of mirage.
+The road-house that night nestled picturesquely against a
+great bluff, and right across the ice lay Texas Point, for
+which we should make a bee-line to-morrow. Sometimes
+the traveller must go all round Norton Bay, but
+at this time the ice was in good condition and our route
+cut across the mouth of the bay for twenty-two miles
+straight for the other side. It was like crossing from
+Dover to Calais on the ice. The passage made, the
+Alaskan mainland was reached once more, the Seward
+Peninsula left behind us, and our way lay across desolate,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128"></a><a href="images/128.png">[128]</a></span>
+low-lying tundra strewn with driftwood and hollowed
+out here and there into little lagoons. Evidently the
+waves sweep clean across it in stormy weather when
+the sound is open; a salt marsh. In the midst of it
+reared a sort of lookout tripod of driftwood thirty or
+forty feet high, lashed and nailed together, with a precarious
+little platform on top and cleats nailed to one of
+the uprights for ascent. I essayed the view, but the
+rusty nails broke under my feet. We deemed it a hunting
+tower from which water-fowl might be spied in the
+spring. Sixteen miles of this melancholy waste brought
+us to the shore again, to a tiny Esquimau village and a
+tumble-down, half-buried shack of a road-house where we
+should spend the night, a little schooner lying beached
+in front of it. If its exterior were uninviting, the scene as
+we entered was sinister. By the light of a single candle&mdash;though
+it was not yet dark outside&mdash;amidst unwashed
+dishes and general grime, sat an evil-eyed Portuguese or
+Spaniard, in a red toque, playing poker with three skin-clad
+Esquimaux. So absorbed were they in the game that
+they had not heard us arrive nor seen us enter. With
+a brief, reluctant interval for the preparation of a poor
+supper, the card playing went on all the evening far into
+the night. My companion discovered that the chips
+were worth a dollar apiece and judged it to be "considerable
+of a game." At last I arose from my bunk and said
+that we were tired and had come there to sleep, and
+with an ill grace the playing was shortly abandoned and
+the natives went off. The arctic shores have their beach-combers
+as well as the South Sea Islands.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129"></a><a href="images/129.png">[129]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">UNALAKL&Iacute;K</div>
+
+<p>The next day was Sunday, but I was anxious to spend
+my day of rest at Unalakl&iacute;k and most indisposed to spend
+it here, so we got away with a very early start long before
+daylight. Six or seven miles of tundra and lagoon travel
+and the trail crossed abruptly a tongue of land and struck
+out over the salt-water ice for a cape fifteen miles away.
+The going was splendid. It was not glare ice, but ice
+upon which snow had melted and frozen again. It was
+so smooth that one dog could have drawn the sled, yet
+not so smooth as to deny good footing. We kept well
+out to sea, passing close to the mountainous mass of
+Besborough Island, plainly riven by some ancient convulsion
+from the sheer bluffs of the mainland. Our
+only trouble was in keeping the dogs well enough out, for,
+not being water-spaniels or other marine species, they
+had a hankering after the land and a continual tendency
+to edge in to shore.</p>
+
+<p>So from headland to headland we made rapid, easy
+traverse, thoroughly enjoying the ride, munching chocolate
+and raisins, speculating about the seasons when it had
+been possible to cross direct from Nome to Saint Michael
+on the ice, and exchanging stories we had heard of the
+disasters and hairbreadth escapes attending such overbold
+venture. Only this winter three men and a dog team
+were blown out into Bering Sea by a sudden storm, and
+lay for four days in their sleeping-bags drifting up and
+down on an ice cake, until at last they were blown back
+to the shore ice and made their escape. And there is a
+fine story of a white man rescued in half-frozen state by his
+Esquimau wife, and carried for miles on her back to safety.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130"></a><a href="images/130.png">[130]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At last we turned a point and drew in to the shore,
+and, not seeing the little town till we were almost upon it,
+arrived at Unalakl&iacute;k early in the afternoon. We had
+made the two hundred and forty miles, as it is called,
+from Nome, in six days. In the last twelve days of travel
+we had covered five hundred miles, an average of nearly
+forty-two miles per day, far and away the best travelling
+of the winter. The preceding five hundred miles had
+taken twenty-two days.</p>
+
+<p>We were in time to attend the Esquimau services at
+the mission both afternoon and night, and I found them
+very much the same as at Kikitaruk, with the exception
+that the singing was much more advanced and was very
+good indeed. There was an anthem of the Danks type
+sung by a choir&mdash;the parts well maintained throughout,
+the attacks good, the voices under excellent control&mdash;that
+it pleased and surprised me to hear, and there was a
+long discourse most patiently and, as I judged, faithfully
+interpreted by a bright-looking Esquimau boy. It is well
+for those who speak much through an interpreter to listen
+occasionally to similar discourse. Only so may its
+unavoidable tediousness be appreciated.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS</div>
+
+<p>The school next day pleased me still more, and I was
+glad that I had a school-day at the place. I heard good
+reading and spelling, saw good writing, and listened with
+real enjoyment to the fresh young voices raised again
+and again in song. There was, however, something so
+curiously exotic that for a moment it seemed irresistibly
+funny, in "The Old Oaken Bucket," from lips that have
+difficulty with the vowel sounds of English; from children<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131"></a><a href="images/131.png">[131]</a></span>
+that never saw a well and never will see one;&mdash;and I
+was irreverent enough to have much the same feeling
+about "I love thy templed hills," etc., in that patriotic
+Plymouth Rock song which is so little adapted for universal
+American use that, in a gibe not without justice,
+it has been called "Smith's Country, 'tis of Thee." One
+wonders if they sing it in the Philippine schools; and,
+so far as these regions are concerned, one wishes that
+some teacher with a spark of genius would take Goldsmith's
+hint and write a simple song for Esquimau children
+that should</p>
+
+<div class='poem'>
+"Extol the treasures of their finny seas<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And their long nights of revelry and ease";</span><br />
+</div>
+
+<p>the splendour of summer's perpetual sunshine and the
+weird radiance of the Northern Lights; but prosody is
+not taught in your "Normal" school. The thing is a
+vain, artificial attempt to impose a whole body of ideas,
+notions, standards of comparison, metaphors, similes,
+and sentiments upon a race to which, in great measure,
+they must ever be foreign and unintelligible. Here were
+girls reading in a text-book of so-called physiology, and,
+as it happened, the lesson that day was on the evils of
+tight lacing! The reading of that book, I was informed,
+is imposed by special United States statute, and the
+teacher must make a separate report that so much of it
+has been duly gone through each month before the salary
+can be drawn. Yet none of those girls ever saw a
+corset or ever will. One is reminded of the dear old
+lady who used to visit the jails and distribute tracts on
+<i>The Evils of Keeping Bad Company</i>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132"></a><a href="images/132.png">[132]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But these incongruities aside, the school was a good
+school and well taught, the government appointing the
+teachers, as I learned, upon the nomination of the mission
+authorities; the only way that a government school can
+be successful at any mission station, for the two agencies
+must work together, as one's right hand works with one's
+left, to effect any satisfactory result. The hours spent
+in it were very enjoyable, and one wished one might
+have had opportunity for further acquaintance with
+some of the bright-faced, interesting children, both full-bloods
+and half-breeds.</p>
+
+<p>Unalakl&iacute;k is a thriving Esquimau community, noted
+for its native schooner building and its successful seal
+hunters and fishermen. We were rejoiced to see signs
+of native prosperity and advance, and we left Unalakl&iacute;k
+with high hope for its future.</p>
+
+<p>Here also was real rest and refreshment at a road-house.
+Road-houses in Alaska are as various in quality
+as inns are "outside." Our previous night's halt was at
+one of the worst; this was one of the best. The proprietor
+was a good cook and he did his best for us, with
+omelet and pastry, and young, tender reindeer. It has been
+said that road-house keeping in Alaska is like soliciting
+life insurance "outside," the last resort of incompetence.
+Certain it is that a thoroughly lazy and incompetent man
+may yet make a living keeping a road-house, for there is
+no rivalry save at the more important points, and travellers
+are commonly so glad to reach any shelter that they
+are not disposed to be censorious. None the less, when
+they find a man who takes a pride in his business and an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133"></a><a href="images/133.png">[133]</a></span>
+interest in the comfort of his guests, they are highly
+appreciative.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE KALTAG PORTAGE</div>
+
+<p>We should have only an occasional road-house from
+now on, but expected to reach some inhabited cabin each
+night. Our good travelling was over though we did not
+know it. We knew that the hard snows of the Seward
+Peninsula and the bare ice of Norton Sound were behind
+us, but we kept telling ourselves that the travel of all the
+winter would surely have left a fine trail on the Yukon.
+We were now about sixty-five miles from Saint Michael,
+by the coast. But taking the ninety-mile portage from
+Unalakl&iacute;k to Kaltag we should reach the Yukon River
+more than five hundred miles above Saint Michael, so
+much does that portage cut off. This is the route the
+military telegraph-line takes, and we should travel along
+close beside it much of the way until the Yukon was
+reached.</p>
+
+<p>The soft weather persisted, and we had even doubt
+about starting out in such a rapid thaw. A visit to the
+telegraph station informed us that the warm wave was
+spread all over interior Alaska and that there was general
+expectation of an early break-up. But if the snow
+on the portage were indeed rapidly going, that was all
+the more reason for getting across before it had altogether
+gone; so we pulled out in the warm, muggy weather, and
+even as we pulled out it began to rain!</p>
+
+<p>Up the little Unalakl&iacute;k River, water over the ice
+everywhere, we went for a few miles and then took to
+the tundra. All the snow had gone except just the hard
+snow of the trail, a winding ribbon of white across the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134"></a><a href="images/134.png">[134]</a></span>
+brown moss. The rain changed to sleet and back to
+rain again, and soon we were wet through and had much
+trouble in keeping that penetrating, persistent drizzle
+from wetting our load through the canvas cover. Though
+not an unique experience, it is rare to be wet with rain
+on the winter trail&mdash;rarer in the interior probably than
+on the coast. Once since on the Kuskokwim and once
+on the Fortymile it has happened to me in seven winters'
+travel. We pushed on for thirty miles, past several
+little native villages, until we came to Whaleback,
+a village part Esquimau and part Indian. These were
+the last Esquimaux we should see, and I was sorry, for
+I had grown to like very heartily and to respect very
+sincerely this kindly, gentle, industrious, good-humoured
+race. Surely they are a people any nation may be proud
+to have fringing its otherwise uninhabitable coasts, and
+should be eager to aid and conserve. There comes a
+feeling of impotent exasperation to me when I realise
+how many white men there are who speak of them continually
+with the utmost contempt and see them dwindle
+with entire complacency. The same thing is true in even
+more marked degree about the Indians of the interior:
+nine tenths of the land will never have other inhabitant,
+of that I am convinced, and the only question is, shall
+it be an inhabited wilderness or an uninhabited wilderness?
+Here, lodging with the natives, and, I make no
+doubt, living off them too, we found a queer, skulking
+white man whom I had met in several different sections
+of interior Alaska, known as "Snow-shoe Joe" or "The
+Frozen Hobo." The arctic regions one would esteem a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135"></a><a href="images/135.png">[135]</a></span>
+poor place for the hobo, but this man manages to eke
+out an existence, if not to flourish, therein. Work he
+will not under any circumstances, but subsists on the
+hospitality of the whites until he has entirely worn it
+out and then removes to the natives, mushing from
+camp to camp and "bumming" his way as he goes.
+He was on his way to Saint Michael, he told me with
+perfect gravity, "to get work."</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE U. S. SIGNAL-CORPS</div>
+
+<p>Before dark we had reached our destination for the
+night at the Old Woman Mountain, the divide between
+the waters of the Yukon and the waters of Norton Sound,
+and were kindly received and well treated at the telegraph
+station, the only resort on this portage for weary
+travellers. Here is surely a lonely post. For reasons
+connected with the maintenance of the wires and the
+keeping open of communications, it is necessary to have
+telegraph stations every forty or fifty miles, each with
+two or three men and a dog team, and shelter cabins
+about half-way between stations. A wind that blows a
+tree down in the narrow right-of-way cut through the
+forest&mdash;for we were come to forest again&mdash;or a heavy
+snowfall that loads branches until they fall across the
+wires, a post that comes up out of its hole as the thawing
+of spring heaves the ground around it, or the caving of
+the bank of a stream along which the line passes&mdash;any
+one of a dozen such happenings anywhere along its thousand
+miles of course, may put the entire inland telegraph
+system out of operation; and the young men in whose
+section the interruption occurs&mdash;they have a means of
+determining that&mdash;must get out at once, find the seat of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136"></a><a href="images/136.png">[136]</a></span>
+the trouble and repair it. In all sorts of weather, unless
+the thermometer be below -40&deg;, out they must go.</p>
+
+<p>It may be doubted if any other army in the world
+ever constructed and maintained a permanent telegraph
+line under such arduous conditions. It has been the
+army's one contribution to Alaska, the one justification
+for the enormous expense of maintaining army posts in
+the interior. Indeed it is often said by those who feel
+keenly the neglect of the territory by the general government
+that this telegraph system is the one contribution
+of the United States to Alaska. It is certainly a great
+public convenience and has assisted very materially in
+such development as the country has made. The men
+of the signal-corps deserve great credit for the faithful,
+dogged way in which they have carried out year after
+year their difficult and hazardous work, and often and
+often the weather-stressed traveller has been grateful for
+the hospitality which their cabins have afforded him.</p>
+
+<p>They have not been an unmixed blessing to the country;
+soldiers do not usually represent the highest morale
+of the nation, and though the signal-corps is in some
+respect a picked corps, yet the men are soldiers, with
+many of the soldier characteristics. Too often a remote
+telegraph station has been a little centre of drunkenness,
+gambling, and debauchery with a little circumference of
+native men and women, and while some of the officers of
+the corps have been willing and anxious to do all in their
+power to suppress this sort of thing in their scattered
+and difficult commands, others have been jealous only
+for the technical efficiency of their work.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137"></a><a href="images/137.png">[137]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">MORE SNOW</div>
+
+<p>There are many allowances to be made for young men
+taken from the society of their kind and thrust out hundreds
+of miles in the wilderness to sit down for a year or
+two at one of these isolated spots. They may see no
+women save those amongst a straggling band of Indians
+for the whole time of their exile; they may see no white
+man save a mail-carrier&mdash;and in many places not even a
+mail-carrier&mdash;for weeks together. Time sometimes hangs
+very heavily on their hands, for trees are not always
+blowing down, nor wires snapping through the tension of
+the cold, and at some stations there will not be a dozen
+telegraph messages sent the whole winter through. If a
+young man be at all ambitious of self-improvement, here
+is splendid opportunity of leisure, but a great many are
+not at all so disposed. Character, except the most firmly
+founded, is apt to deteriorate under such circumstances;
+standards of conduct to be lowered. And what is here
+written of the young men of the signal-corps may well
+apply in great measure to a large proportion of all the
+white men in the country.</p>
+
+<p>The "eighty-mile portage" we had heard of at Nome
+became ninety miles at Unalakl&iacute;k, and added another five
+to itself here, so that although we had travelled forty-two
+miles that day we were told that there were yet fifty-three
+ahead before we reached the Yukon.</p>
+
+<p>So we decided not to attempt it in one day and to
+rest the next night at a "repair cabin" twenty-eight miles
+farther, making a somewhat late start in view of a short
+journey. It had been wiser to have started early. During
+our night at Old Woman Mountain some three inches<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138"></a><a href="images/138.png">[138]</a></span>
+of snow fell, and we found as we descended the Yukon
+slope that all the moisture that had fallen upon us as
+rain the previous day had fallen on this side as snow.
+The trail was filled full and buried, and so soft and mushy
+was it that although snow-shoes were badly needed they
+were impossible. The snow clung to them and came off
+the ground with them in heavy, clogging masses every
+time they were lifted. It clung to the sled, to the harness,
+to the dogs' feet, to everything that touched it; it
+gathered in ever-increasing snowballs on the long hair
+of the dogs. Travelling in warm weather in loose, new
+snow is most disagreeable work. We plugged along for
+twenty miles, and then in the dark in an open country
+with little patches of scattering spruce, had great trouble
+in finding the trail at all.</p>
+
+<p>At last we could find it no longer, and when there was
+no hope of reaching the cabin that night we made a camp.
+We had now no tent or stove with us, so a "Siwash camp"
+in the open was the best we could do, and a wet, miserable
+camp it was. By inexcusable carelessness on my part,
+candles had been altogether forgotten in the replenishing
+of the supplies, and a little piece an inch long which we
+found loose in the grub box was all that we possessed.
+Dogs and men alike exhausted with the long day's sweating
+struggle through the deep snow, sleep should have
+come soundly and soon. It did to the rest, but I lay
+awake the night through. The easy, riding travel of the
+preceding week had been a poor preparation for to-day's
+incessant toil, and I was too tired to sleep. In the morning
+our bedding was covered with a couple of inches of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139"></a><a href="images/139.png">[139]</a></span>
+new snow. My companion got up at daylight and made
+a journey of investigation ahead, following the trail better,
+but not finding the cabin. We had thought ourselves
+within a mile or two of it, but evidently were
+farther away. However, when we had eaten a hasty
+breakfast and hitched up and had gone along the trail
+that had been broken that morning to its end, ten yards
+beyond the place where my companion had turned back,
+we came in sight of the cabin, and there we lay and
+rested and dried things out all day and spent the next
+night. During the day there came a team from Kaltag,
+and once again we enjoyed the delight of receiving, and
+at the same time conferring, the richest gift and greatest
+possible benefit to the traveller&mdash;a trail.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE YUKON ONCE MORE</div>
+
+<p>The next evening as it drew towards dark, after another
+day of soft, warm disagreeable travel, we reached
+the end of the portage, and the broad white Yukon
+stretched before us once more. Our hearts leaped up and
+I think the dogs' hearts leaped up also at the sight. I
+called to Nanook as we stopped on the bank, "Nanook,
+there's the good old Yukon again!" and he lifted his
+voice in that intelligent, significant bark that surely
+meant that he saw and understood. We had left the
+Yukon on the 15th of December at Fort Yukon; we
+reached it again on the 23d of March at Kaltag, more
+than six hundred miles lower down. We had two hundred
+and fifty miles of travel on its surface before us,
+and then close to another two hundred and fifty up the
+Tanana River to Fairbanks. But alas! for the fine
+Yukon trail we had promised ourselves! As we looked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140"></a><a href="images/140.png">[140]</a></span>
+out across the broad river there was no narrow, dark line
+undulating over its surface, nor even a faint, continuous
+inequality to hint that trail had been, on snow "less
+hideously serene"; its perfect smoothness and whiteness
+were unscarred and unsullied. The trail was wiped out
+and swallowed up by the late snows and winds.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">A LEARNED JESUIT</div>
+
+<p>There is little interest in lingering over the long,
+laborious, monotonous grind up that river on show-shoes.
+When one has looked forward to pleasant, quick travel,
+the disappointment at slow, heavy plodding is the keener.
+The first little bit of trail we had was as we approached
+Nulato two days later on a Sunday morning, and it was
+made by the villagers from below going up to church at
+the Roman Catholic mission. We arrived in time for service,
+and enjoyed the natives' voices raised in the Latin
+chants as well as in hymns wisely put into the vernacular.
+It is historically a little curious to find Roman Catholic
+natives singing praises in their own tongue, and Protestant
+missions, like those on the Kobuk and Kotzebue
+Sound, using a language "not understanded of the people."
+The day was the Feast of the Annunciation as
+well as Sunday, and there was some special decorating of
+the church and perhaps some elaboration of the music.
+Here for the first and only time I listened to a white man so
+fluent and vigorous in the native tongue that he gave one
+the impression of eloquence. Father Jett&eacute; of the Society
+of Jesus is the most distinguished scholar in Alaska. He
+is the chief authority on the native language, and manners
+and customs, beliefs and traditions of the Middle
+Yukon, and has brought to the patient, enthusiastic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141"></a><a href="images/141.png">[141]</a></span>
+labour of years the skill of the trained philologist. It is
+said by the Indians that he knows more of the Indian
+language than any one of them does, and this is not hard
+to believe when it is understood that he has systematically
+gleaned his knowledge from widely scattered segments of
+tribes, jotting down in his note-books old forms of speech
+lingering amongst isolated communities, and legends and
+folk-lore stories still remembered by the aged but not
+much repeated nowadays; always keen to add to his
+store or to verify or disprove some etymological conjecture
+that has occurred to his fertile mind. His work is recognised
+by the ethnological societies of Europe, and much
+of his collected material has been printed in their technical
+journals.</p>
+
+<p>A man of wide general culture, master of three or four
+modern, as well as the classic, languages, a mathematician,
+a writer of beautiful, clear English, although it is not his
+mother tongue, he carries it with the modesty, the broad-minded
+tolerance, the easy urbanity that always adorn,
+though they by no means always accompany, the profession
+of the scholar; and one is better able to understand
+after some years' acquaintance with such a man,
+after falling under the authority of his learning and the
+charm of his courtesy, the wonderful power which the
+society he belongs to has wielded in the world. If such
+devotion to the instruction of the ignorant as was described
+at the mission on the middle Kobuk be praiseworthy,
+by how much the more is one moved to admiration
+at the spectacle of this man, who might fill with
+credit any one of half a dozen professional chairs at the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142"></a><a href="images/142.png">[142]</a></span>
+ordinary college, gladly consecrating his life to the teaching
+of an Indian school!</p>
+
+<p>Hearing an interest expressed in the massacre which
+took place at Nulato in 1851, Father Jett&eacute; offered to
+accompany us to the site of that occurrence, about a mile
+away. It stands out prominently in the history of a
+country that has been singularly free from bloodshed and
+outrage, and its date is the notable date of the middle
+river, as the establishment of the post at Fort Yukon by
+the Hudson Bay Company in 1846 is the notable date
+of the upper river. They are fixed points in Indian chronology
+by which it is possible to approximate other dates
+and to reach an estimate of the ages of old people.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE NULATO MASSACRE</div>
+
+<p>Much has been written about the Nulato massacre,
+and the accounts vary in many particulars. The Russian
+post here was first established by Malakof in 1838.
+Burned during his absence by the Indians, it was re-established
+by Lieutenant Zagoskin of the Russian navy in
+1842. The extortions and cruelties of his successor,
+Deerzhavin, complicated by a standing feud between
+two native tribes, and probably having the rival powers
+of certain medicine-men as the match to the mine,
+brought about the destruction of the place and the death
+of all its inhabitants, white and native, by a sudden
+treacherous attack of the Koyukuk Indians. It happened
+that Lieutenant Barnard of the British navy, detached
+from a war-ship lying at Saint Michael to journey up the
+river and make inquiries of the Koyukuk natives as to
+wandering white men, survivors of Sir John Franklin's
+expedition, who might have been seen or heard of by them,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143"></a><a href="images/143.png">[143]</a></span>
+was staying at the post at the time and perished in the
+general massacre. His grave, with a headboard bearing
+a Latin inscription, is neatly kept up by the Jesuit priests
+at Nulato.</p>
+
+<p>In the last few years the river has been invading the
+bank upon which the old village stood, and as the earth
+caves in relics of the slaughter and burning come to light.
+Old copper kettles and samovars, buttons and glass beads,
+all sorts of metal vessels and implements have been sorted
+out from charred wood and ashes, together with numerous
+skulls and quantities of bones. One of the most interesting
+of these relics was a brass button from an official
+coat, with the Russian crowned double-headed eagle on
+the face, and on the back, upon examination with a lens,
+the word "Birmingham."</p>
+
+<p>Half the day serving for our day of rest this week, we
+were up and ready to start early the next morning, but
+so violent a wind was blowing from the southeast that
+we decided to remain, and the clatter of the corrugated
+iron roof and the whirling whiteness outside the windows
+made us glad to be in shelter. As the day advanced the
+wind increased to almost hurricane force, and the two-story
+house in which we lay began to rock in such a manner
+as to make the proprietor alarmed for his dwelling.</p>
+
+<p>There was an "independent" trading-post at this
+village which seemed to present an object-lesson in rapacity
+and greed. There was not an article of standard
+quality in the store; the clothing was the most rascally
+shoddy, the canned goods of the poorest brands; the
+whole stock the cheapest stuff that could possibly be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144"></a><a href="images/144.png">[144]</a></span>
+bought at bargain prices "outside," yet the prices were
+higher even than those that prevail in Alaska for the
+best merchandise. Loud complaints are often made
+against the commercial corporation which does the great
+bulk of the business in interior Alaska, yet if the writer
+had to choose whether he would be in the hands of that
+company or in the hands of an "independent" trader,
+he would unhesitatingly cast in his lot with the company.
+The independent trader makes money, sometimes
+makes large money, and makes it fairly easily, but
+the calling seems to appeal mainly, if not wholly, to men
+of low character and no conscience. There are few things
+that would redound more to the benefit of the Indian
+than a great improvement in the character of the men
+with whom he is compelled to do business.</p>
+
+<p>The wind had subsided by the next morning and had
+been of benefit rather than injury to us, for it had blown
+the accumulated new snow off the old trail so that it was
+possible to perceive and follow it. But what was our
+surprise to find, with the recollection of that rattling roof
+and swaying building fresh in our minds, that ten miles
+away there had been no wind at all! The snow lay undisturbed
+on every twig and bough from which the gentlest
+breeze would have dislodged it. One never ceases
+to wonder at what, for want of a better word, must be
+called the <i>localness</i> of much of the weather in Alaska&mdash;though,
+for that matter, in all probability it is characteristic
+of weather in all countries. The habit of continual
+outdoor travel gives scope as well as edge to one's observation
+of such things which a life in one place denies.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145"></a><a href="images/145.png">[145]</a></span>
+That wind-storm had cut a clean swath across the Yukon
+valley. Yet it seems strange that so violent a disturbance
+could take place without affecting and, to some
+extent, agitating the atmosphere for many miles adjacent.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SNOW GLASSES</div>
+
+<p>So, sometimes in snow-storm, sometimes in wind,
+always on snow-shoes and often hard put to it to find and
+follow the trail at all, we struggled on for two or three
+days more, sleeping one night at a wood-chopper's hut,
+another in a telegraph cabin crowded with foul-mouthed
+infantrymen sent out to repair the extensive damage of
+the recent storm and none too pleased at the detail, we
+plodded our weary way up that interminable river. At
+last we met the mail-man, that ever-welcome person on
+the Alaskan trail, and his track greatly lightened our
+labour. By his permission we broke into his padlocked
+cabin that night by the skilful application of an axe-edge
+to a link of the chain, and were more comfortable than
+we had been for some time. Past the mouth of the
+Koyukuk, past Grimcop, past Lowden, past Melozikaket
+to Kokrine's and Mouse Point, we plugged along, making
+twenty-two miles one day and thirty another and then
+dropping again to eighteen. The temperature dropped
+to zero, and a keen wind made it necessary to keep the
+nose continually covered. At this time of year the covering
+of the nose involves a fresh annoyance, for it deflects
+the breath upward, and the moisture of it continually condenses
+on the snow glasses, which means continual wiping.
+A stick of some sort of waxy compound to be
+rubbed upon the glass, bought in New York as a preventive
+of the deposit of moisture, proved entirely useless.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146"></a><a href="images/146.png">[146]</a></span>
+In this respect the Esquimau snow goggle, which is simply
+a piece of wood hollowed out into a cup and illuminated
+by narrow slits, has advantage over any shape or
+kind of glass protection. A French metal device of the
+same order that is advertised in the dealer's catalogues
+was found to fail, perhaps owing to a wrong optical arrangement
+of the slits. It caused an eye-strain that
+brought on headache. But if that principle could be scientifically
+worked out and such a device perfected, it
+would be a boon to the traveller over sun-lit snow, for
+it would do away with glass altogether, with its two chief
+objections&mdash;its fragility and its opacity when covered
+with vapour.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SNOW-BLINDNESS</div>
+
+<p>The indispensability of some eye protection when
+travelling in the late winter, and the serious consequences
+that follow its neglect, were once again demonstrated
+at Mouse Point. The road-house was crowded with
+"busted" stampeders coming out of the Nowikaket
+country. There had been a report of a rich "strike" on
+a creek of the Nowitna, late the previous fall, and a number
+of men from other camps&mdash;some from as far as Nome&mdash;had
+gone in there with "outfits" for the winter. The
+stampede had been a failure; no gold was found; there
+was much indignant assertion that no gold ever <i>had</i>
+been found and that the reported "strike" was a "fake,"
+though to what end or profit such a "fake" stampede
+should be caused, unless by some neighbouring trader,
+it is hard to understand; and here were the stampeders
+streaming out again, a ragged, unkempt, sorry-looking
+crowd in every variety of worn-out arctic toggery, many<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147"></a><a href="images/147.png">[147]</a></span>
+of them suffering from acute snow-blindness. It is surprising
+that even old-timers will go out in the hills for
+the whole winter without providing themselves with protection
+against the glare of the sun which they know will
+inevitably assail their eyes before the spring, yet so it is;
+and this lack of forethought is not confined to the matter
+of snow glasses: the first half dozen men we received
+in Saint Matthew's Hospital at Fairbanks suffering from
+severely frozen feet were all old-timers grown careless.</p>
+
+<p>Father Ragarou, another Jesuit priest of another type,
+reached the road-house from the opposite direction about
+the same time we did, and I was interested in watching
+his treatment of the inflamed eyes. Upon a disk of lead
+he folded a little piece of cotton cloth in the shape of a
+tent, and, setting fire to it, allowed it to burn out completely.
+Then with a wet camel's-hair brush he gathered
+up the slight yellow residuum of the combustion and
+painted it over the eyes, holding the lids open with thumb
+and finger and drawing the brush through and through.
+An incredulous spectator, noticing the sacred monogram
+neatly stamped upon the disk of lead, made some sneering
+remark to me about "Romish superstition," but remembering
+the Jesuit's bark, and recalling that I had in my
+writing-case at that moment a letter I had brought all
+the way from the Koyukuk addressed to this very priest,
+begging for a further supply of a pile ointment that had
+proved efficacious, I held my peace. Whether it be an
+oxide or a carbonate, or some salt that is formed by the
+combustion, I am not chemist enough to know, but I
+saw man after man relieved by this application. Even the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148"></a><a href="images/148.png">[148]</a></span>
+scoffer was convinced there was merit in the treatment,
+though stoutly protesting that "them letters" had nothing
+to do with it; which nobody took the trouble to argue
+with him. My own custom&mdash;we are all of us doctors of
+a sort in this country&mdash;is to instil a few drops of a five-per-cent
+solution of cocaine, which gives immediate temporary
+relief, and then apply frequent washes of boric
+acid, bandaging up the eyes completely in bad cases by
+cloths kept wet with the solution. But I do not know
+that it brings better result than the lead treatment.
+Certainly it is a matter in which an ounce of any sort of
+prevention is better than a pound of any sort of cure.
+The affection is a serious one, being nothing more or less
+than acute ophthalmia; the pain is very severe, and repeated
+attacks are said to bring permanent weakness of
+the eyes. Smoked glasses or goggles,<a name="FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</a> veils of green or
+blue or black, even a crescent eye-shade cut out of a
+piece of birch-bark or cardboard and blackened on its
+under-side with charcoal, will prevent the hours and sometimes
+days of torture which this distemper entails.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">HORSES AND MULES</div>
+
+<p>For a few miles we had the trail of the stampeders,
+but when that crossed the river we put on our snow-shoes
+and settled to the steady grind once more. A day's
+mush brought us to "The Birches," and another to Gold
+Mountain. Between the two places there was a portage,
+and the trail thereon, protected by the timber, was good.
+We longed for the time when all trails in Alaska shall be
+taken off the rivers and cut in the protecting forest.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149"></a><a href="images/149.png">[149]</a></span>
+But we had gone but a mile along this good trail when
+our hearts sank, for we saw ahead of us a procession of
+army mules packing supplies from Fort Gibbon to the
+telegraph repair parties. We pulled out into the snow
+that the mules might pass, and the soldiers said no word,
+for they knew just how we felt, until the last soldier
+leading the last mule was going by, and he turned round
+and said: "And her name was Maud!" It was in the
+height of Opper's popularity, his "comic supplements"
+the chief dependence of the road-houses for wall-paper.
+The reference was so apposite that we burst into laughter,
+but there was nothing funny about the devastation that
+had been wrought. That good trail was all gone&mdash;the
+bottom pounded out of it&mdash;and nothing was left but a
+ploughed lane punched full of sink-holes. We had no
+trouble following the trail on the river after this encounter,
+but it had been almost as easy going to have
+struck out for ourselves in the unbroken snow of the
+winter. It is hard to make outsiders understand how a
+man who loves all animals may come to hate horses and
+mules, particularly mules, in this country. Our travelling
+is above all a matter of surface. Distance counts and
+weather counts, but surface counts for more than either.
+See how fast we came across the Seward Peninsula in the
+most distressing weather imaginable! A well-used dog
+trail becomes so hard and smooth that it offers scarce any
+resistance to the passage of the sled, and for walking or
+running over in moccasins or mukluks is the most perfect
+surface imaginable. The more it is used the better it
+becomes. But put a horse on that trail and in one passage<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150"></a><a href="images/150.png">[150]</a></span>
+it is ruined. The iron-shod hoofs break through the
+crust at every step and throw up the broken pieces as
+they are withdrawn. With mules it is even worse; the
+holes they punch are deeper and sharper. Neither man
+nor dog can pass over it again in comfort. One slips and
+slides about at every step, the leg leaders and ankle
+sinews are strained, the soles of the feet, though hardened
+by a thousand miles in moccasins, become sore and inflamed,
+and at night there is a new sort of weariness that
+only a horse-ruined trail gives. As a rule, the dog trail
+is of so little service to the horse or mule that it were as
+cheap to break out a new one in the snow, and it is this
+knowledge that exasperates the dog musher. So there
+is not much love lost between the horse man and the
+dog man in Alaska.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">ARMY POSTS AND NATIVES</div>
+
+<p>At last, after a night at "Old Station," we came in
+sight of Tanana, where is Fort Gibbon, the one the name
+of the town and the post-office, the other the name of
+the military post and the telegraph office. The military
+authorities refuse to call their post "Fort Tanana" and
+the postal authorities refuse to allow the town post-office
+to be called "Fort Gibbon," so there they lie, cheek by
+jowl, two separate places with a fence between them&mdash;a
+source of endless confusion. A letter addressed to Fort
+Gibbon is likely to go astray and a telegram addressed
+to Tanana to be refused. Stretching along a mile and a
+half of river bank, and beginning to come into view ten
+miles before they are reached, the military and commercial
+structures gradually separate themselves. Here to
+the left are the ugly frame buildings&mdash;all painted yellow&mdash;barracks,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151"></a><a href="images/151.png">[151]</a></span>
+canteen, officers' quarters, hospital, commissariat,
+and so on. Two clumsy water-towers give height
+without dignity&mdash;a quality denied to military architecture
+in Alaska. To the right the town begins, and an
+irregular row of one and two story buildings, stores,
+warehouses, drinking shops, straggle along the water-front.</p>
+
+<p>Unlike most towns in interior Alaska, Tanana does
+not depend upon an adjacent mining camp. It owes its
+existence first to its geographical position as the central
+point of interior Alaska, at the confluence of the Tanana
+and Yukon Rivers. Most of the freight and passenger
+traffic for Fairbanks and the upper river is transshipped at
+Tanana, and extensive stocks of merchandise are maintained
+there. The army post is the other important
+factor in the town's prosperity, and is especially accountable
+for the number of saloons. Not only the soldiers,
+but many civilian employees, are supported by the post,
+and when it is understood that three thousand cords of
+wood are burned annually in the military reservation, it
+will be seen that quite a number of men must find work
+as choppers and haulers for the wood contractors. Setting
+aside the maintenance of the telegraph service, which
+has already been referred to, it may be said without unfairness
+that the salient activities of the army in the interior
+of Alaska are the consumption of whisky and wood.
+There is no opportunity for military training&mdash;for more
+than six months in the year it is impossible to drill outdoors&mdash;and
+the officers complain of the retrogression of
+their men in all soldierly accomplishments during the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152"></a><a href="images/152.png">[152]</a></span>
+two years' detail in Alaska. Whether the prosperity of
+the liquor dealer be in any real sense the prosperity of
+the country, and whether the rapid destruction of the
+forest be compensated for by the wages paid to its destroyers,
+may reasonably be doubted.</p>
+
+<p>Three miles away is a considerable native village
+where the mission of Our Saviour of the Episcopal Church
+is situated, with an attractive church building and a picturesque
+graveyard. The evil influence which the town
+and the army post have exerted upon the Indians finds
+its ultimate expression in the growth of the graveyard
+and the dwindling of the village.</p>
+
+<p>This point at the junction of the two rivers was an
+important place for the inhabitants of interior Alaska
+ages before the white man reached the country. Tribes
+from all the middle Yukon, from the lower Yukon, from
+the Tanana, from the upper Kuskokwim met here for
+trading and for general festivity. It is impossible nowadays
+to determine when first the white man's merchandise
+began to penetrate into this country, but it
+was long before the white man came himself. Such
+prized and portable articles as axes and knives passed
+from hand to hand and from tribe to tribe over many
+hundreds of miles. Captain Cook, in 1778, found implements
+of white man's make in the hands of the natives
+of the great inlet that was named for him after
+his death, and they pointed to the Far East as the direction
+whence they had come. He judged that they had
+been brought from the Hudson Bay factories clean across
+the continent. There are many Indians still living who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153"></a><a href="images/153.png">[153]</a></span>
+remember when they saw the first white man, and some
+were well grown at the time, but diligent inquiry has
+failed to discover one who ever saw a stone axe used,
+though some old men have been found who declared that
+their fathers, when young, used that implement. Traces
+have been discovered of the importation of edge-tools
+from four directions&mdash;from the mouth of the Yukon;
+from the Lynn Canal, by way of the headwaters of the
+Yukon; from the Prince William Sound, by way of the
+headwaters of the Tanana; as well as from the Hudson
+Bay posts in the Canadian Northwest, by way of the
+Porcupine River.</p>
+
+<p>When the Russians established themselves at Nulato
+in 1842, and the Hudson Bay Company put a post at
+Fort Yukon in 1846, Nuchalaw&oacute;ya, as Tanana was
+called, became the scene of commercial rivalry, and it
+is said that by the meeting of the agents and voyageurs
+of the two companies at this point the identity of the
+Yukon and Quikpak Rivers was discovered.</p>
+
+<p>The stories that linger with the village ancients of the
+great numbers of Indians who used to inhabit the country
+are doubtless based upon recollections of the gathering
+at old Nuchalaw&oacute;ya, when furs were brought here from
+far and wide, when there was no other place of merchandise
+in mid-Alaska. Now almost every Indian village
+has a trader and a store. That the race has diminished,
+and in most places is still diminishing, is beyond
+question, but that it was ever very largely numerous the
+natural conditions of the country forbid us to believe.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">WHISKY-PEDDLERS</div>
+
+<p>During the Reverend Jules Prevost's time at Tanana&mdash;and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154"></a><a href="images/154.png">[154]</a></span>
+he was in residence in the year of this journey&mdash;from
+careful vital statistics kept during two periods of five
+years each, the race seemed barely to be holding its own;
+but since that time there has been a considerable decline,
+coincident with the increase of drunkenness and debauchery
+at the village when Mr. Prevost's firm hand
+and watchful eye were withdrawn. The situation tends
+to grow worse, and while one does not give up hope, for
+that would mean to give up serious effort, the outlook
+for the Indians at this place seems unfavourable. Two
+hundred soldiers, six or eight liquor shops,&mdash;the number
+varies from year to year,&mdash;three miles off a native
+village of perhaps one hundred and fifty souls, and dotting
+those intervening miles cabins chiefly occupied by
+"bootleggers" and go-betweens&mdash;that is the Tanana
+situation in a nutshell. The men desire the native girls,
+and the liquor is largely a lure to get them. Tuberculosis
+and venereal disease are rife, and the two make a
+terribly fatal combination amongst Indians.</p>
+
+<p>It was good to enjoy Mr. and Mrs. Prevost's hospitality,
+and it was good to speak through such an admirable
+interpreter as Paul. Something more than intelligence
+and knowledge of the languages are required to make
+a good interpreter; there must be sympathy and the ability
+to take fire. With such an interpreter, leaping at the
+speaker's thoughts, carrying himself entirely into his
+changing moods, rising to vehemence with him and again
+dropping to gentleness, forgetting himself in his identification
+with his principal, there is real pleasure in speaking
+to the natives who hang upon his vicarious lips. On<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155"></a><a href="images/155.png">[155]</a></span>
+the other hand, one of the most intelligent mission interpreters
+in the country is also so phlegmatic in disposition,
+so lifeless and monotonous in his speech, and particularly
+so impassive of countenance, that he reminds one
+of Napoleon's saying about Talleyrand: that if some one
+kicked him behind while he was speaking to you his face
+would give no sign of it at all.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">CHENA AND FAIRBANKS</div>
+
+<p>It is not necessary to write much detail of the two-hundred-mile
+journey to Fairbanks up the Tanana River.
+The trail was then wholly on the river, but now it has
+been taken wholly off, as every Alaskan musher hopes
+some day will be done with all trails. The region about
+the mouth of the river and for some miles up is one of
+the windiest in the country, and there is always troublesome
+crossing of bare sand-bars and of ice over which
+sand has been blown. The journey hastens to its close;
+men and dogs alike realise it, and push on willingly over
+longer stages than they had before attempted.</p>
+
+<p>Two days from Tanana we were luxuriating in the
+natural hot springs near Baker Creek, wallowing in the
+crude wooden vat, when "Daddy Karstner" had shovelled
+enough snow in to make entering the water possible, and
+emerging ruddy as boiled lobsters. It was a beautiful
+and interesting spot then, with noble groves of birch and
+the finest grove of cottonwood-trees in Alaska&mdash;all cut
+down now&mdash;all ruined in a plunging and bounding and
+quite unsuccessful attempt to make a "Health Resort"
+of the place for the "smart set" of Fairbanks. It is a
+scurvy trick of Fortune when she gives large wealth to a
+man with no feeling for trees. We spent Sunday there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156"></a><a href="images/156.png">[156]</a></span>
+and roamed over the curious domain, snow-free amidst
+all the surrounding snow, rank in vegetation amidst the
+yet-lingering winter death; and then we wallowed again.</p>
+
+<p>Tolovana, Nenana, and then one long run of fifty-four
+miles, the longest and last run of the winter, and&mdash;Chena
+and Fairbanks. But just before we reached
+Chena, as we passed the fish camp where the dogs had
+been boarded the previous summer, Nanook stopped the
+whole team, looked up at the bank and gave utterance
+to his pronounced five barks on the descending scale.
+None of the other dogs seemed to notice or recognise
+the place, but Nanook said as plainly as if he had uttered
+speech: "Well, well! there's where I spent last summer!"</p>
+
+<p>We reached Fairbanks on the 11th of April, in time
+for Good Friday and Easter, after an absence of four
+months and a half&mdash;with the accumulated mail of all
+that period awaiting me. The distance covered was
+about twenty-two hundred miles, three fourths of it on
+foot, more than half of it on snow-shoes. At Chena I
+had called up the hospital at Fairbanks on the telephone,
+and the exchange operator had immediately recognised
+my voice and bidden me welcome; but when I reached
+Fairbanks, a light beard that I had suffered to grow
+during the winter made me unrecognisable by those who
+knew me best. So effectually does a beard disguise a
+man and so surely may his voice identify him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157"></a><a href="images/157.png">[157]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE "FIRST ICE"&mdash;AN AUTUMN ADVENTURE ON THE
+KOYUKUK</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is not attempted in this narrative to give separate
+account of all the journeys with which it deals. That
+would involve much repetition and tedious detail. Our
+long journey has been described from start to finish,
+taking the reader far north of the Yukon, then almost to
+the extreme west of Alaska, and then round by the Yukon
+to mid-Alaska again. It is proposed now to give sketches
+of such parts of other journeys as do not cover the same
+ground, and they will lie, with one exception, south of
+the Yukon. While visiting many of the same points
+every winter, it has been within the author's good fortune
+and contrivance to include each year some new
+stretch of country, sometimes searching out and visiting
+a new tribe of natives, and blazing the way for the establishment
+of permanent missionary work amongst
+them. To these initial journeys belongs a zest that no
+subsequent travels in the same region ever have; there
+is a keen interest in what every new turn of a trail shall
+bring, every new bend of a river; there is eagerness rising
+with one's rising steps to excitement for the view from a
+new mountain pass; above all, there is deep satisfaction
+coupled with a sense of solemn responsibility in being<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158"></a><a href="images/158.png">[158]</a></span>
+the first to reach some remote band of Indians and
+preach to them the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.
+There are few men nowadays on the North American
+continent to whom that privilege remains.</p>
+
+<p>A period of nearly three years elapses between the
+beginning of the journey that has already been described
+and the short sketch of a journey that follows. Many
+things had happened in those three years. It had been
+the happy duty of the writer to return to the Koyukuk
+late in the winter of 1906-7, empowered to build the
+promised mission for the hitherto neglected natives of
+that region. Pitching tent at a spot opposite the mouth
+of the Alatna, with the aid of a skilled carpenter and a
+couple of axemen brought from the mining district above,
+and the labour of the Indians, the little log church and
+the mission house were put up and prepared for the two
+ladies&mdash;a trained nurse and a teacher&mdash;who should arrive
+on the first steamboat. The steamboat that brought
+them in carried him out on its return trip, and the next
+year was spent in the States making known the needs of
+the work in Alaska and securing funds for its advancement.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">DOCTOR GRAFTON BURKE</div>
+
+<p>On my return I brought with me a young physician,
+Doctor Grafton Burke, as a medical missionary, and a
+half-breed Alaskan youth, Arthur, who had been at school
+in California, as attendant and interpreter. A thirty-two-foot
+gasoline launch designed for the Yukon and its
+tributaries was also brought and was launched at the
+head of Yukon navigation at Whitehouse. The voyages
+of the <i>Pelican</i> on almost all the navigable waters of interior<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159"></a><a href="images/159.png">[159]</a></span>
+Alaska do not belong to a narrative concerned
+solely with winter travel, but her maiden voyage ended
+in an unexpected and rather extraordinary journey over
+the ice which is perhaps worth describing. After the
+voyage down the Yukon, and up and down the Tanana,
+it was purposed to take the boat up the Koyukuk to
+the new mission at the Allakaket, where dogs and gear
+had been left, and put her in winter quarters there.
+The delays that associate themselves not unnaturally
+with three novices and a four-cylinder gasoline engine,
+had brought the date for ascending the Koyukuk a little
+too late for safety, though still well within the ordinary
+season of open water. The possibility of an early winter
+closing the navigation of that stream before the <i>Pelican</i>
+reached her destination had been entertained and provided
+against, though it seemed remote. Three dogs,
+needed anyway to replace superannuated members of the
+team, had been bargained for at Tanana and accommodations
+for them arranged, and a supply of dog fish
+stowed on the after deck of the launch. But when we
+went to pay the arranged price and receive the dogs,
+the vender's wife and children set up such a remonstrance
+and plaintive to-do that he went back on his bargain
+and we did not get the dogs. There was no time to hunt
+others, to linger was to invite the very mishap we sought
+to guard against, so we pulled out dogless, reached the
+mouth of the Koyukuk on the 17th of September and,
+having taken on board the supply of gasoline cached
+there, turned our bow up the river the next morning.
+For five days we pushed up the waters of that great,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160"></a><a href="images/160.png">[160]</a></span>
+lonely river, and by that time we were some twenty-five
+miles above Hogatzakaket, three hundred and
+twenty-five miles from the mouth and one hundred
+and twenty-five miles from the mission, at the camp of
+a prospector who had recently poled up from the Yukon.
+We woke on board the launch the next morning to find
+ice formed all around us and ice running in the river.
+The thermometer had gone to zero in the night.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE RUNNING ICE</div>
+
+<p>A very brief attempt to make our way against the
+running ice showed the danger of doing so, for the thin
+cakes had knife-edges and cut the planking of the boat
+so that she began to leak. Then there came to me with
+some bitterness that I had earnestly desired a thin steel
+armour-plating at the water-line, but had allowed myself
+to be persuaded out of it by her builders. So again my
+forethought had been of no avail&mdash;though, of course, lightness
+of draught <i>was</i> the first consideration. We put
+back to the camp and proceeded to flatten out and cut
+up all the empty cans and tinware we could find and nail
+it along the water-line of the boat, but the prospector
+persuaded us to wait a day or two. He had never seen
+a river close with the first little run of ice. He looked
+for a soft spell and open water yet. It was foolish to risk
+the boat against the ice. So we waited; and night after
+night the thermometer fell a little lower and a little lower,
+until presently a sheet of ice stretched across the whole
+river in the bend where we lay. We were frozen in.
+The remote possibility we had feared and sought to guard
+against had happened. Navigation had ceased on the
+Koyukuk at the earliest date anybody remembered, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161"></a><a href="images/161.png">[161]</a></span>
+23d of September. Three days more had surely taken us
+to the mission where they had long expected us; now we
+should have to make our way on foot, without dogs, on
+the dangerous "first ice," as it is called, taking all sorts
+of chances, pulling a Yukon sled, with tent and stove,
+grub and bedding, "by the back of the face."</p>
+
+<p>But first there was the launch to pull out and make
+snug for the winter and safe against the spring break-up.
+A convenient little creek mouth with easy grade offered,
+which was one of the reasons I had not pushed on the
+few more miles we could have made. Here were eligible
+winter quarters; farther on we might have trouble
+in putting the boat in safety; here also was a kindly and
+capable man willing to assist us.</p>
+
+<p>It was our great good fortune to find this man at this
+spot. A steamboat he had signalled as she entered the
+mouth of the Koyukuk had passed him by unheeded,
+and he had been left to make his way six hundred miles
+up to the diggings, with his winter's outfit in a poling
+boat. He had accomplished more than half the task,
+and, warned by the approach of winter, had stopped at
+this place a few days before we reached it, and had begun
+the building of a little cabin; meaning to prospect
+the creek, which had taken his eye as having a promising
+look. The cabin we helped him finish was the twenty-first
+cabin he had built in Alaska, he informed us.</p>
+
+<p>There is something very impressive about the quiet,
+self-reliant, unrecorded hardihood of the class of which
+this man was an excellent type. We asked him why he
+had no partner, and he said he had had several partners,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162"></a><a href="images/162.png">[162]</a></span>
+but they all snored, and he would not live with a man that
+snored. He had prospected and mined in many districts
+of Alaska during nearly twenty years. Once he had sold
+a claim for a few hundred dollars that had yielded many
+thousands to the purchaser, and that was as near wealth
+as he had ever come. But he had always made a living,
+always had enough money at the close of the summer to
+buy his winter's "outfit" and try his luck somewhere else.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE PROSPECTOR</div>
+
+<p>Singly, or in pairs, men of this type have wandered
+all over this vast country: preceding the government surveys,
+preceding the professional explorer, settling down for
+a winter on some creek that caught their fancy, building a
+cabin, thawing down a few holes to bed-rock, sometimes
+taking out a little gold, more often finding nothing, going
+in the summer to some old-established camp to work for
+wages, or finding employment as deck-hand on a steamboat.</p>
+
+<p>With an axe and an auger they have dotted their
+rough habitations all over the country; with a pick and a
+shovel and a gold pan they have tested the gravels of
+innumerable creeks. They know the drainage slopes
+and the practicable mountain passes, the haunts of the
+moose and the time and direction of the caribou's wanderings.
+The boats they have built have pushed their
+noses to the heads of all navigable streams; the sleds
+they have made have furrowed the remotest snows. In
+the arts of the wilderness they are the equal of the
+native inhabitant; in endurance and enterprise far his
+superior. The more one learns by experience and observation
+what life of this sort means, and realises the
+demands it makes upon a man's resourcefulness, upon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163"></a><a href="images/163.png">[163]</a></span>
+his physique, upon his good spirits, upon his fortitude,
+the more one's admiration grows for the silent, strong
+men who have gone out all over this land and pitted
+themselves successfully against its savage wildness. Often
+in stress for the necessaries of life, there are yet no men
+as a class more free-handed and generous; trained to do
+everything for themselves, there are none more willing
+to help others.</p>
+
+<p>It is no small task to pull a four-ton boat out of the
+water with only such wilderness tackle as we could devise.
+We made ways of soft timbers, squaring and smoothing
+them; we cut down many trees for rollers; we dug and
+graded the beach. Then, having altogether unloaded her
+and built a high cache of poles and a platform for her
+stuff, and having chopped the ice from all around her, we
+rigged a Spanish windlass and wound that boat out of
+the water with the half-inch cable she carried, and up
+on the ways and well into the mouth of the little creek.
+Then we levelled her up and thoroughly braced her and
+put her canvas cover all over her, and she lay there until
+spring and took no harm at all.</p>
+
+<p>Arthur had meantime been making a sled of birch,
+intending to pull it himself while the doctor and I pulled
+a Yukon sled borrowed from our friend the prospector.
+By the 6th of October all our dispositions were made for
+departure, and the ice seemed strong enough to warrant
+trusting ourselves to it; but we waited another two days,
+the thermometer still reaching a minimum each night
+somewhere around zero. When we said good-bye to our
+friend Martin Nelson (sometimes one wonders if anywhere<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164"></a><a href="images/164.png">[164]</a></span>
+else in the world can be found men as kind and
+helpful to strangers) and started on our journey, it soon
+appeared that Arthur's sled was more hindrance than
+help. There was no material to iron the runners save
+strips of tin can, and these could not be beaten so smooth
+that they did not drag and cut on the ice. So the load
+was transferred to our sled and the little sled abandoned,
+and we took turns at the harness. This was the order of
+the journey: one man went ahead with an axe to test the
+ice; one man put the rope trace about his shoulders; one
+man pushed at the handle-bars which had been affixed to
+the sled. It was fortunate that amidst the equipment on
+the launch were two pairs of ice-creepers. Without them
+any sort of pulling and pushing on the glare ice would
+have been impossible.</p>
+
+<p>We soon found that the bend in which we had frozen
+was no sort of index of the general condition of the river.
+Much of it was still wide open, and every elbow between
+bends was piled high with rough ice from pressure jams.
+There was shore ice, however, even in the open bends,
+along which we were able to creep; and, though the ice-jams
+gave considerable trouble, yet we did very well the
+first day and camped at dark with eighteen or nineteen
+miles to our credit, in the presence of a great, red, smoky
+sunset and a glorious alpenglow on a distant snow mountain.</p>
+
+<p>The next day was full of risks and difficulties. We
+were to learn more about the varieties and vagaries of ice
+on that journey than many winters' travel on older ice
+would teach.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="start" id="start"></a><a href="images/gs194.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs194_th.jpg" width="500" height="314" alt="The start over the &quot;first ice.&quot;" title="The start over the &quot;first ice.&quot;" />
+</a><span class="caption">The start over the &quot;first ice.&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="rough" id="rough"></a><a href="images/gs195.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs195_th.jpg" width="500" height="320" alt="&quot;Rough going.&quot;" title="&quot;Rough going.&quot;" />
+</a><span class="caption">&quot;Rough going.&quot;</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165"></a><a href="images/165.png">[165]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE START</div>
+
+<p>At times, for a few hundred yards, the sled would glide
+with little effort over smooth, polished ice; then would
+come a long sand-bar, the side of which we had to hug
+close, and the ice upon it was what is called "shell-ice,"
+through several layers of which we broke at every step.
+As the river fell, each night had left a thin sheet of ice
+underneath the preceding night's ice, and the foot crashed
+through the layers and the sled runners cut through them
+down to the gravel and sand at the bottom. Then would
+come another smooth stretch on which we made good time.
+But as we advanced up the river the current was swifter
+and swifter and the ice conditions grew steadily worse.
+Here was a steep-cut bank with just about eighteen or
+twenty inches of ice adhering to it and the black, rushing
+water beyond. We must either get our load along that
+shelf or unload the sled and pack everything over the
+face of a rocky bluff. Arthur passed over it first, testing
+gently with the axe, and found it none too strong. But
+the alternative was so toilsome that we resolved to take
+the chance. The doctor put the trace over his shoulders,
+Arthur took the handle-bars, while I climbed to a ledge
+of the rocks and, with a rope made of a pair of camel's-hair
+puttees unwound for the purpose and fastened to
+the sled, took all the weight I could and eased the sled
+over the worst place where the ice sloped to the water. If
+the ice had broken I might have held the sled from sinking
+until one of the others came to me, or I might not; the
+boys would probably have gone in too. It was a most
+risky spot and the sort of chance no one would think of
+taking under ordinary circumstances. As it was, the ice<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166"></a><a href="images/166.png">[166]</a></span>
+broke under Arthur's feet, and only by throwing his
+weight on the sled did he save himself a ducking. But
+we got the load safely across.</p>
+
+<p>A good run of perhaps a mile, and then we had to go
+back at least half a mile, for the ice played out altogether
+on our side of the river as we reached the Batzakaket, and
+there was open water in the middle. To reach the shore
+ice that was continuous on the other side, we had to
+"double" the open water. With such varying fortune the
+day passed, and we camped on the level ice of a little
+creek tributary to the right bank, having made perhaps
+another nineteen miles.</p>
+
+<p>When I awoke in the morning my heart sank at the
+tiny, creeping patter of fine snow on the silk tent. Snow
+was one thing I greatly dreaded, for there was not a pair
+of snow-shoes amongst us! A little snow would not do
+much harm, but if once snow began to fall we might have
+a foot or two before it ceased, and then we should be in
+bad case. It stopped before noon, but the half-inch that
+fell made the sled drag much heavier. The actual force
+to be exerted was not the most laborious feature of pulling
+that sled; it was the jerk, jerk, jerk on the shoulders. A
+dog's four legs give him much smoother traction than a
+man's two legs give, just as a four-cylinder engine will
+turn a propeller with much less vibration than a two-cylinder
+engine. Every step forward gave an impulse
+that spent itself before the next impulse was given, and
+the result was that the shoulders grew sore.</p>
+
+<p>We came that morning to the longest and roughest
+ice-jam we had so far encountered. It was as though a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167"></a><a href="images/167.png">[167]</a></span>
+thousand bulls had been turned loose in a mammoth plate-glass
+warehouse. Jagged slabs of ice upended everywhere
+in the most riotous confusion, and it was impossible
+to pick any way amongst them, so a man had to go ahead
+and hew a path. It was while thus engaged that the
+doctor fell and injured his knee so severely on a sharp ice
+point that he hobbled in pain the rest of the trip. This
+was a very serious matter to us, for, though he insisted
+on still taking his trick at the traces, his effectiveness as
+a motive power was much diminished; and we had no
+sooner thus hewed and smashed our way through that
+jam than we had to hew and smash it across to the other
+side again in our search for passage.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">"BY THE BACK OF THE FACE"</div>
+
+<p>Then we came to a place where, in order to cut off a
+long sweeping curve of the river with open water and
+bad shore ice, we went through a dry slough and had to
+drag those iron runners over gravel and stones, where
+sometimes it was all the three of us could do to move
+the sled a few feet at a time. Yet all along the banks
+were willows, and if we had only known then what we
+know now we would have cut down and split some saplings
+and bound them over the iron, and so have saved
+three fourths of that labour.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">BEAR MEAT AND BEANS</div>
+
+<p>So the day's run was short, though the most exhausting
+yet, and we were all thoroughly tired out when we pitched
+the tent. I have note of a great supper of bear meat
+and beans, the meat the spoil of our friend the prospector's
+gun. It is one of the compensations of human nature
+that the satisfaction of appetite increases in pleasure in
+proportion to the bodily labour that is done. With<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168"></a><a href="images/168.png">[168]</a></span>
+food abundant and at choice, I do not like bear meat and
+will not eat beans. Yet my diary bears special note of
+the delicious meal they furnished on this occasion. Put
+any philosopher in the traces, or set him ahead of the dog
+team on show-shoes, breaking trail all day, and towards
+evening it is odds that his mind is not occupied with deep
+speculations about the infinite and the absolute, but
+rather with the question of what he will have for supper.
+Particularly should the grub be a little short, should fresh
+meat give out, or, above all, should sugar be "shy," it is
+astonishing how one's mind runs on eating and what
+elaborate imaginary repasts one partakes of. Yet of all
+food that a man ever eats there is none that is so relished
+and gives such clear gustatory pleasure as the plain, rough
+fare of the camp&mdash;provided it be well cooked. Greatly
+as we were in need of sleep, we got little, for the doctor's
+knee pained him all night and poor Arthur developed a
+raging toothache that did not yield until carbolic acid
+had been thrice applied.</p>
+
+<p>Soon after we started the next day, the river narrowed
+and swept round a series of mountain bluffs and we began
+to have the gloomiest expectations of trouble. It seemed
+certain that ice would fail us for passage, and we would
+have to pack our sled and its load by slow relays over
+the mountain. But to our delight we passed between
+the bluffs on good, firm, smooth ice, and it was not until
+we emerged on the flat beyond that our difficulty began.
+So it is again and again on the trail. Almost always it
+is the unexpected that happens; almost always it is something
+quite different from what our apprehensions have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169"></a><a href="images/169.png">[169]</a></span>
+dwelt upon that arises to hinder and distress us. A
+tongue of level land that struck far out into the water,
+a cut mud bank with a current so swift that no ice at all
+had formed along it, interposed an obstacle that it took
+hours to circumvent. We had to leave the sled and cut
+a trail through the brush for half a mile along this peninsula
+in order to reach a stretch of the river where the
+ice was resumed, and the little snow that had fallen being
+quite insufficient to give the sled good passage, we had an
+exceedingly arduous job in getting it across.</p>
+
+<p>A mile or two of good going brought us in view of the
+smoke of a human habitation. What a blessed sight often
+and often this waving column of blue smoke in the distance
+is! Sometimes it means life itself to the Alaskan
+musher, and it always means warmth, shelter, food, companionship,
+assistance; all that one human being can bring
+to another. "The bright and the balmy effulgence of
+morn" never "breaks on the traveller faint and astray"
+with half the rejoicing that comes with the first sight
+of mere smoke. "I believe I see smoke," cried Arthur,
+with the quick vision of the native. "Where? Where?"
+we eagerly inquired, and the doctor left the handle-bars
+and limped forward to the boy ahead with the axe.
+"Away yonder on that bank," pointed Arthur. "I see
+it! I see it!" the doctor shouted; "we're coming to a
+house, we're coming to people!" The trip was a severe
+apprenticeship to Alaskan life for a man straight from
+the New York hospitals, although before the accident to
+his knee I had declared that if only they could be trained
+to live on dry fish I thought a team of young doctors<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170"></a><a href="images/170.png">[170]</a></span>
+would haul a sled very well. He was delighted at coming
+upon the first inhabited house we had seen since we helped
+Nelson to build his little cabin&mdash;and <i>that</i> was only the
+second inhabited house in three hundred miles.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">BREAKING THROUGH</div>
+
+<p>But, perhaps because we grew less cautious in our
+excitement, almost immediately after we had spied the
+smoke of the cabin we got into one of the worst messes
+of the whole trip. Arthur had pushed ahead and we had
+followed with a spurt, and almost at the same time all
+three of us became aware that we were on dangerous ice.
+Arthur cried, "The ice is breaking; go back!" just as we
+began to feel it swaying under our feet. I shouted to the
+doctor, "Go <i>on</i> to the bank quick!" and pushed with all
+my might, and we managed to make a few yards more
+towards shallow water, over ice that bent and cracked at
+every step, before it gave way and let down the sled and
+the men into two feet of water. Arthur had run safely
+over the breaking ice and had gained the bank, and as
+I write, in my mind's eye I can see the doctor, who had
+been duly instructed in the elementary lessons of the
+trail, standing in the water and calling to Arthur: "Make
+a fire quick; make a fire. I'm all wet!"</p>
+
+<p>But it was not necessary to make a fire, for the thermometer
+was no lower than 10&deg; or 15&deg; above zero, and
+the chief trouble was not the wetting of our legs but the
+wetting of the contents of the sled. Along the bank was
+stronger ice, and we managed, though not without much
+difficulty, to get the sled upon it and to make our way to
+the Indian cabin.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as old "Atler" (I have never been quite sure<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171"></a><a href="images/171.png">[171]</a></span>
+of what white man's name that is a corruption) knew who
+we were, his hospitality, which had been ready enough at
+first sight, became most cordial and expansive. While we
+pulled off our wet clothing his wife hung it up to dry
+and had the kettle on and some tea making, and he and
+Arthur got out our wet bedding and festooned it about
+the cabin. Most fortunately the things that would have
+suffered most from water did not get wet. So there we
+lay all the afternoon, having made no more than six
+miles, and there we lay all the next day, which was
+Sunday.</p>
+
+<p>There was a sort of awful interest that centred upon
+one member of this family, a boy of seven or eight years.
+The previous spring he had killed his uncle by the accidental
+discharge of a .22 rifle, shooting him through the
+heart. The gun had been brought in loaded and cocked
+and had been set in a corner of the cabin, and the child,
+playing with it, had pulled the trigger. The carelessness
+of Indians with firearms is the frequent cause of terrible
+accidents like this. The child was still too young to realise
+what he had done, but one fancies that later it will throw
+a gloom on his life.</p>
+
+<p>To my great relief and satisfaction I was able to
+arrange here for a young Indian man to accompany us
+with his one dog. He was a native of those parts and
+knew every bend and turn of the river. We were, indeed,
+in great need of help. The doctor's knee grew worse
+rather than better, and Arthur was suffering the return
+of an old rheumatism in his leg. I was the only sound
+member of the party, and my shoulders were galled by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172"></a><a href="images/172.png">[172]</a></span>
+the rope and my feet tender and sore from continual
+wearing of the crampons. We were now not quite half-way&mdash;some
+sixty miles lay behind us and sixty-five
+before&mdash;and we had been travelling four days.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">"ONE-EYED WILLIAM"</div>
+
+<p>Divine service being done on Sunday morning, the
+whole of it well interpreted by Arthur to the great satisfaction
+of the Indians, he and "One-Eyed William," our
+recruit, started out to survey to-morrow's route. In this
+reconnaissance William broke through some slush ice at
+the greatest depth of the river in seeking a safe place to
+cross, and, had Arthur not been with him, would almost
+certainly have drowned, for the current was very swift
+and the man, like most Indians, unable to swim a stroke;&mdash;though,
+indeed, swimming is of little avail for escape
+out of such predicament and is a poor dependence in these
+icy waters winter or summer. More beans boiled and a
+batch of biscuits baked against our departure, and evening
+prayer said and interpreted, we were ready for bed again.</p>
+
+<p>Our visit was a great delight to old Atler. An inflamed
+eye was much relieved by the doctor's ministrations,
+and the natural piety which he shares with most
+Indians was gratified at the opportunity of worship and
+instruction. A good old man, according to his lights, I
+take Atler to be, well known for benevolence of disposition
+and particularly priding himself on being a friend of
+the white man. He told us of one unworthy representative
+of that race he had helped a year ago. The man
+had come out of the Hogatzitna (Hog River) country,
+entirely out of food, himself and a couple of dogs nigh to
+starvation, and Atler had taken care of him for several<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173"></a><a href="images/173.png">[173]</a></span>
+days while he recuperated and had given him grub and
+dog fish enough to get him to Bettles, one hundred and
+thirty miles away, where he could purchase supplies.
+The old Indian had robbed his own family's little winter
+stock of "white-man's grub" that this stranger might be
+provided, and had never heard a word from him since,
+though he had promised to make return when he reached
+Bettles.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately Alaska's white population is sprinkled
+with men like this, men without heart and without conscience,
+and it is precisely such rascals who are loudest
+in their contemptuous talk of the Indians. It is such
+men who chop down the woodwork of cabins rather than
+be troubled to take the axe into the forest a few rods
+away, who depart in the morning without making kindling
+and shavings, careless how other travellers may fare
+so themselves be warm without labour; who make "easy
+money" in the summer-time by dropping down the Yukon
+with a boat-load of "rot-gut" whisky, leaving drunkenness
+and riot at every village they pass; who beget children
+of the native women and regard them no more than
+a dog does his pups, indifferent that their own flesh and
+blood go cold and hungry. They are the curse and disgrace
+of Alaska, and they often go long time insolent and
+unwhipped because our poor lame law is not nimble
+enough to overtake them; "to whom is reserved the blackness
+of darkness for ever," one's indignation is sometimes
+disposed to thunder savagely with Saint Jude; and indeed
+there needs a future punishment to redress the balance in
+this country.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174"></a><a href="images/174.png">[174]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">FIDO</div>
+
+<p>At break of day our reinforced company was off,
+Arthur and "One-Eyed William" going ahead to sound
+the ice and pick the way, the dog "Fido" (such a name
+for a Siwash dog!) and myself in the traces, the doctor
+at the handle-bars. The rest had benefited the doctor's
+knee, but walking was still painful and he needed the support
+of the handle-bars all day. What a great difference
+that one strong, willing little dog made! His steady pulling
+kept the sled in motion and relieved one's shoulders
+of the galling jerk of the rope at every step. The going
+was "not too bad," as they say here, all day, though it
+carried one rather severe disappointment. William had
+told us of a portage he thought we could take that would
+cut off eight or nine miles of the river; but when we
+reached it the snow upon it proved insufficient to afford
+a passage, for it was a rough niggerhead flat, and we had
+to swing around the outer edges of the great curves the
+river makes, where alone was ice, with trouble and danger
+at every crossing.</p>
+
+<p>The decision as to whether we should halt or go forward,
+as to whether ice was safe or unsafe, as to whether
+we should cross the river or stay where we were&mdash;every
+decision that concerned the secure advance of the party&mdash;I
+put wholly upon William, and would not permit myself
+or any other to question his judgment or to argue it with
+him. There was no sense in half-measures; this young
+man knew the river as none of us did, knew ice as none of
+us did, and we must put ourselves entirely in his hands.
+The debate that had become usual at every doubtful
+course arose at the portage just referred to, but it was at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175"></a><a href="images/175.png">[175]</a></span>
+once suppressed by the announcement that hereafter no
+one could have the floor but William, and that when he
+had spoken the matter was settled. Day by day I think
+we all came to a keener realisation of how very dangerous
+a journey we were making; it lay heavily on my mind
+that I had brought these two young men&mdash;whether by
+mishap or mismanagement&mdash;into real peril of their lives.
+Again and again I blamed myself for the delays that had
+deferred our start up the Koyukuk, again and again I
+wished that we had waited longer before leaving the
+<i>Pelican's</i> winter quarters. I had even contemplated a
+week's stay at Atler's, to give the river a chance to get
+into better shape, but unless there came a very much
+sharper spell than we had had so far a week would not
+make much difference, and our grub began to run short
+and Atler was none too well supplied. So it seemed best
+to push on.</p>
+
+<p>The next day was full of toil and difficulty. There
+was no good ice to make fine time over that day. Starting
+in the grey dawn, for mile after mile we had to
+haul the sled over crumbly shell-ice that broke through
+to gravel; and when the shell-ice was done we came to a
+new bend where a rapid current washed a steep mud
+bank. There was just a little shelf of ice, but the brush
+overhung it so that the passage of the sled was not possible.
+William and Arthur started with the axes to clear
+away the brush, but it seemed to me foolish to do that
+unless the ledge held out and led somewhere, for the turn
+of the bank threw it out of sight. So they went forward
+cautiously along that ledge to the end&mdash;and an end they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176"></a><a href="images/176.png">[176]</a></span>
+found, sure enough, so that had we followed the axemen
+with the sled we should have had to creep all the way back
+again. There was nothing for it but to cut another land
+trail on a bench that we could reach where the sled was
+stopped but that could not be reached at all farther on.
+A long and slow and laborious job it was, that took most
+of the morning, to cut that trail and then get the load
+over it to ice again.</p>
+
+<p>By noon we were opposite the Red Mountain, one of
+the well-known Koyukuk landmarks, and on the site of
+an old Indian fishing camp. William and Arthur had
+made a great fire when we came up, and we heated some
+beans and made some tea and ate lunch. A mile farther
+on was the cabin of a white man, and we paid him a
+brief visit and got a little tea from him, for ours was
+nearly gone. It did me good to hear him sing the praises
+of Deaconess Carter, the trained nurse at the mission.
+She had taken him in, crippled with rheumatism, and had
+cured him. Already the new mission was proving a boon
+to whites as well as natives. We made no more than four
+or five miles farther when, coming to spruce with no more
+in sight for a long distance, we pitched the tent, all very
+tired.</p>
+
+<p>That night the thermometer went to 5&deg; below zero,
+the coldest weather of the season so far. As a consequence
+the next day we had a new and very disagreeable
+trouble. The cold weather, by increasing the amount of
+running ice in the still open stretches, had brought about
+a jam that had raised the level of the water and caused
+an overflow of the ice&mdash;a very common phenomenon of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177"></a><a href="images/177.png">[177]</a></span>
+closing river. We picked our way wet-foot much of the
+day, and towards evening came to a complete <i>impasse</i> in
+the middle of the river, with open water in front and on
+one hand, and new thin ice on the other. So we had to
+turn round and go back again a long way, the mid-river
+being the only traversable place, until, when it seemed
+that we should have to go round another bend to reach
+a crossing, Arthur proposed that he and William, who
+wore mukluks, should carry the doctor and me, who wore
+moccasins across the overflow, and then rush the sled
+across; and this we did, wetting its contents somewhat,
+however. We camped immediately, for we had landed
+on impassable gravel.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE RED MOUNTAIN</div>
+
+<p>That night the thermometer went to 20&deg; below zero,
+and we took good hope that the cold, which began to
+approach the real cold of winter, would put an end to
+overflow; but, on the contrary, it only aggravated the
+trouble. For the first mile or two there was nothing for
+it but to go through it, and at 20&deg; below it is a miserable
+business to be wading in moccasins even for an hour. We
+had rearranged our load so that it stood up somewhat
+higher, but we could not avoid wetting the things on the
+bottom of the sled, and the ice formed about it very inconveniently.
+Moreover, the little dog, who had a great
+dislike to wetting his feet, began to give us a good deal
+of trouble, and at one time nothing but the admirable
+presence of mind and prompt action of William saved us
+from losing our whole load. We had reached a strip of
+new, dry ice formed the night before, with black, rushing
+water on the left, towards which the slippery surface<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178"></a><a href="images/178.png">[178]</a></span>
+sloped. Presently as we advanced we began to encounter
+a little overflow water, coming from the bank on the
+right, seeping up between the ice and the bank; and that
+dog, to avoid wetting his feet in the overflow, deliberately
+turned towards the open water and set the sled sliding in
+the same direction. Without the crampons, which we
+had not used for the past few days, it was impossible to
+hold the sled against the dog's traction, and in another
+moment we should have lost everything, for the dog paid
+no heed to our voices, when William with a blow of his
+axe cut the rope by which the dog pulled, and, grasping
+the sled and throwing himself full length on the ice,
+managed to stop it on the very brink of the water. It
+was a close shave, but once more we were safe; and the
+doctor, in the exuberance of his gratitude, said that
+night: "If William wants a glass eye I'll send to New
+York to get him one." But when William learned that
+the glass eye was a mere matter of looks and would in
+no wise improve his vision, he lost interest in it. Looks
+do not count for much amongst the Koyukuk Indians.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="arthur" id="arthur"></a><a href="images/gs210.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs210_th.jpg" width="500" height="339" alt="Arthur and Doctor Burke." title="Arthur and Doctor Burke." />
+</a><span class="caption">Arthur and Doctor Burke.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="saint" id="saint"></a><a href="images/gs211.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs211_th.jpg" width="500" height="306" alt="Saint John&#39;s-in-the-Wilderness, Allakaket, Koyukuk River." title="Saint John&#39;s-in-the-Wilderness, Allakaket, Koyukuk River." />
+</a><span class="caption">Saint John&#39;s-in-the-Wilderness, Allakaket, Koyukuk River.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>That night was a long way off yet, however; we had
+other risks to run, other labours. Here were two islands
+in the river, and the current, running like a mill-race and
+burdened with ice cakes, swept around the shore of one
+of them leaving the passage between them quite dry.
+There was no shore ice at all where the channel was, and
+it was so ugly-looking a reach that had there been any
+there I am sure we should not have ventured it. There
+was nothing for it but to drag the sled half a mile over
+the gravel, and we did it, the most heart-breaking labour<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179"></a><a href="images/179.png">[179]</a></span>
+of the whole trip. It took us exactly an hour to make
+that half mile. William did not know the trick of the
+split willows either, so we all four of us sweated for our
+ignorance. Shortly after, our guide pointed out the spot
+where poor Ericson's frozen body was found, two years
+and eight months before.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">A NARROW ESCAPE</div>
+
+<div class="sidenote">RUBBER ICE</div>
+
+<p>Near the Kornuchaket (or the mouth of Old Man
+Creek), where the Koyukuk receives a considerable tributary,
+we approached the most dangerous travelling we
+had had yet. The river here is swift and deep, and there
+are several islands set in it. Most of its surface was
+frozen, but the ice was very thin. William stopped the
+procession before we reached the bad stretch and went
+hastily over a part of it. Under his single weight we
+could see the ice-sheet undulating. It had been our rule
+that ice was not safe unless it took three blows of the
+axe to bring water, but this ice gave water at a blow.
+When William returned he made quite an harangue,
+which Arthur interpreted. He thought we could make
+it past the mouth of the creek, and if we could we should
+find good going to Moses' Village. But we must go
+just as fast as we could travel; we must not let the sled
+stop an instant. The ice would bend and crack; but he
+thought if we went quickly we could get across. So for
+nearly a quarter of a mile we rushed that sled over
+"rubber" ice that swayed and cracked and yielded under
+our feet and under the sled, until we reached the bank
+of one of the islands, and then again we launched her
+and ran with her to the shore. Once one of my feet
+broke through, and immediately the water welled up all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180"></a><a href="images/180.png">[180]</a></span>
+around&mdash;with the steamboat channel underneath&mdash;but
+without pause we increased our speed and made the
+strong shore ice safely at last. No man will ever doubt
+the plasticity, the "viscosity" of ice, as it used to be
+styled in the old glacier controversies, who has passed
+over the "rubber" ice that forms under certain circumstances
+and at certain seasons on these rivers.</p>
+
+<p>We would never, I am sure, have attempted that ice
+had not William been with us. We would have struck a
+blow with the axe and declared it unsafe. Of course, it
+was unsafe; the whole journey was unsafe, but I am convinced
+that this thin, continuous sheet of ice, cushioned
+actually upon the surface of the water out of which it
+was growing, was really safer than much of the thicker
+but brittle, unsupported ice we had unhesitatingly
+come over. Chemists tell us that certain substances in
+the act of formation, which they call nascent substances,
+are extraordinarily active and potent, and it may be that
+ice in the same state has a special tenacity of texture
+which belongs to that state alone. I wish that I could
+have measured the thickness of that ice. Where my foot
+went through I know it was very thin, but its thickness
+I will not venture to guess. There was the distinct feeling
+that the water was bearing the ice up and when it was
+punctured the water welled up with pressure behind it.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond the Kornuchaket much more snow had fallen,
+and a few miles brought us to Moses' Village, called
+grandiosely "Arctic City," since a trader had established
+a store and a road-house there. At this spot a new overland
+mail trail from Tanana strikes the Koyukuk, and,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181"></a><a href="images/181.png">[181]</a></span>
+although ten or twelve miles remained, we felt that our
+journey was done. My sled dogs were there, and, as I
+had not seen them for more than a year, that was a joyful
+reunion. Nanook's bark of welcome, which no one but
+I ever got with quite the same inflection, was as grateful
+to me as all the licking and slobbering of the others, for
+Nanook is a very independent beast, reserved in his
+demonstrations and not wearing his heart on his sleeve,
+so to speak. They were all glad to see me&mdash;Old Lingo and
+Nig, and even "Jimmy the Fake." Billy was dead. For
+fifteen or sixteen months they had been boarded here,
+and, since fish had been very scarce the preceding summer,
+their food had been chiefly bacon and rice and tallow,
+and there was a bill of close to four hundred dollars
+against us! Dogs are very expensive things in this expensive
+country. When used the winter through on the trail,
+and boarded the summer through at a fish camp, we estimate
+that it costs one hundred dollars per head per
+annum to feed a dog; so that the maintenance of a team
+of five dogs, which is the minimum practicable team, will
+cost five hundred dollars per annum for food alone.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SATURATED SNOW</div>
+
+<p>When we had eaten a good supper and were reclining
+on spring cots in the bunk house, there was not one of
+us but confidently expected to be at the mission in the
+next forenoon. For a week past the natives had been
+going to and fro in three or four hours. The river was
+completely closed above here, and there was much more
+snow than we found below. So we hitched our own dogs
+to our own sled the next morning, when the doctor had
+visited a sick person or two, and started out on the last<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182"></a><a href="images/182.png">[182]</a></span>
+stretch of the journey. All went well until we had turned
+the long bend at the head of which the old, abandoned
+post of Bergman is situated, just on the Arctic Circle, but
+a mile or two beyond we were wallowing in saturated snow
+that stretched all across the river right up to the banks
+on either side. An overflow was in progress, the water
+running along the surface of the ice and soaking up the
+snow so that there was six inches of slush all over it. We
+struggled along awhile, though from the first it seemed
+hopeless, and then we gave it up and went back to the
+road-house. There would be no passing that stretch of
+river with the sled until the cold had dealt with the overflow.
+It is almost always the unexpected that happens.
+The next morning I put on a pair of snow-shoes&mdash;Doctor
+Burke's knee forbade him their use&mdash;and taking William
+with me, mushed up through the slush and the snow to
+the mission, leaving the others to come on with the team
+so soon as they found it practicable.</p>
+
+<p>A mile before we reached the mission was the new village
+built by the Esquimaux&mdash;"Kobuk town" they call
+it&mdash;and right in front of the village the Malamute Riffle,
+a noted difficulty of navigation, was still running wide
+open, though all the rest of the river was long closed.
+Near the riffle the Kobuks had a fish-trap, and some who
+were busy getting out fish saw and recognised me, and
+the whole population came swarming out for greetings.
+It was good to see these kindly, simple people again, to
+shake their hands and hear their "I glad I see you," which
+is the general native greeting where there is any English
+at all. Every one must shake hands; even the babies on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183"></a><a href="images/183.png">[183]</a></span>
+their mothers' backs stretch out their little fingers eagerly,
+and if they be too small for that, the mother will take the
+little hand and hold it out. At the bend we take a portage
+and a quarter of a mile brings us to the Allakaket,
+to the familiar modest buildings of the mission, with its
+new Koyukuk village gradually clustering round it. The
+whole scene was growing into almost the exact realisation
+of my dream when first I camped on this spot two
+years and nine months before. There was a distinct
+thrill of pleasure at the sight of the church. Built entirely
+of logs with the bark on, there was nothing visible
+anywhere about it but spruce bark, save for the gleam
+of the gilded cross that surmounted the little belfry.
+The roof, its regular construction finished, was covered
+with small spruce poles with the bark on, nailed together
+at the apex, and where it projected well beyond the
+gables its under-side was covered with bark, as well as
+the cornice all round that finished it off. Even the
+window-frames and the door-panels were covered with
+bark. It was of the same tone because of the selfsame
+substance as the forest still growing around it, and it
+gave at the first glance the satisfied impression of fitness.
+It gave the feeling that it belonged where it was
+placed. It is ill praising one's own work, but I had been
+keen to see how it would strike me, fresh from the outside,
+after a year's absence, and I was very glad indeed
+that it pleased me again.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">A STARVING WHITE MAN</div>
+
+<p>I had no more than entered upon the warm welcome
+that waited at Saint John's-in-the-Wilderness, and was still
+wondering at the homelike cosiness which the mission<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184"></a><a href="images/184.png">[184]</a></span>
+house had assumed under the deft hands of the two ladies
+who occupied it, when there came an Indian with word of
+a white man he had found starving in the wilderness
+fifteen miles away. Another native with a dog team and
+a supply of immediate food was hastily despatched to
+bring the man in, and that night the poor emaciated fellow,
+looking like a man of sixty-five or seventy though he
+was really no more than forty, crawled out of the sled and
+tottered into the house. He had started out from Tanana
+two months before with two pack-horses to make his
+way across to the Koyukuk diggings, had lost his way and
+wandered aimlessly in that vast wilderness; one horse had
+been drowned, the other he had killed for meat. He had
+made a raft to come down the Kornutna (Old Man Creek)
+to the Koyukuk, knowing that there was a trading-post
+near its mouth, and had been frozen in and forced to
+abandon it. Since that time he had been living on a few
+spoonfuls of meal a day, with frozen berries, and once or
+twice a ptarmigan, and when Ned found him was at the
+last extremity and had given up, intending to die where
+he was.</p>
+
+<p>That man's hunger was tremendous, but Miss Carter,
+having knowledge and experience of such cases, was apprehensive
+that if any large quantity of food were taken
+at a time there would be serious danger to him. So for
+a day or two he ate frequently but sparingly. A little
+later, as he grew stronger, to such extremes did his hunger
+pinch him that he would watch till there was no one looking
+and would go into the kitchen and steal food that was
+preparing, even taking it out of the frying-pan on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185"></a><a href="images/185.png">[185]</a></span>
+stove. He would be hungry immediately after having a
+full meal. In ten days he was sufficiently recovered to
+resume his journey to the diggings, and when I saw him
+at Coldfoot two months later I did not recognise him, so
+greatly had he changed from the poor shrunken creature
+that crept into the mission. We all think we have been
+hungry time and again; if ever we have gone a few days
+on short rations we are quite sure of it; this man had
+sounded the height and depth and stretched the length
+and breadth of it, and none of the rest of us really know
+what hunger means. I tried to get him to talk about it,
+but he said he wanted to forget it. He said he was
+ashamed to think of some of the things he had done and
+of some of the terrible thoughts that had come to him,
+and I pressed him no more. I have always felt that, even
+in its last hideousness of cannibalism, only God Himself
+can judge starvation.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">TWO INTERPRETERS</div>
+
+<p>Here began my first experience of the difficulties of
+conducting a mission at the same place for two different
+races of natives speaking totally different languages.
+Although the Indian language spoken here is the same
+as at Tanana, and much of the liturgy, etc., had been put
+into that tongue by Mr. Prevost and was therefore available,
+yet it was found impracticable to have two sets of
+services whenever the church was used, for both races
+would always attend anyway. Since the mastery of the
+two tongues was out of the question, and there were no
+translations at all into the Esquimau, it became a question
+of teaching the Esquimaux to take part in an Indian service
+or dropping both vernaculars altogether and conducting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186"></a><a href="images/186.png">[186]</a></span>
+the service in English. After much doubt and
+experiment the latter was resolved upon, and the whole
+service of prayer and praise is in English. When the
+lessons are read and the address delivered it is necessary
+to use two interpreters; the minister delivers his sentence
+in English, then the Koyukuk interpreter puts it
+in Indian, and when he is done the Esquimau interpreter
+puts it into that tongue.</p>
+
+<p>It is a very tedious business, this double interpretation
+and a twenty-minute sermon takes fully an hour to
+deliver, but there is no help for it. The singing is hearty
+and enthusiastic though the repertory is wisely very
+limited; and here, north of the Arctic Circle, is a vested
+choir of eight or ten Kobuk and Koyukuk boys who lead
+the singing and lead it very well.</p>
+
+<p>Already the influence of the mission and the school
+was very marked. Given the native off by himself
+like this, in the hands of those in whom he has learned
+to place entire confidence, remote from debasing agencies,
+and his improvement is evident and his survival
+assured.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="double" id="double"></a><a href="images/gs220.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs220_th.jpg" width="500" height="293" alt="The double interpretation at the Allakaket." title="The double interpretation at the Allakaket." />
+</a><span class="caption">The double interpretation at the Allakaket.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="wind" id="wind"></a><a href="images/gs221.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs221_th.jpg" width="500" height="306" alt="The wind-swept Yukon within the ramparts." title="The wind-swept Yukon within the ramparts." />
+</a><span class="caption">The wind-swept Yukon within the ramparts.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>In two days the doctor and Arthur and the team came
+up, and so was brought to a happy conclusion a perilous
+journey over the first ice. One is often glad to have
+had experiences that one would by no means repeat, and
+this is a case in point. We had learned a good deal about
+ice; we had taken liberties with ice that none of us had
+ever thought before could be taken with impunity; we
+had learned to trust ice and at the same time to distrust
+it and in some measure to discriminate about it. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187"></a><a href="images/187.png">[187]</a></span>
+"last ice" is bad, but the "first ice" is much worse, and
+all three of us were agreed that we wanted no more
+travelling over it and no more pulling of a sled "by the
+back of the face."</p>
+
+<p>Then followed a very happy, busy time of several
+weeks while the river ice was consolidating and the land
+trails establishing; happy with its manifold evidences of
+the rapid advance the natives were making under Miss
+Carter's able and beneficent sway, busy with the instruction
+of people eager to learn. It was busy and
+happy for Doctor Burke also; busy with the many ailments
+he relieved, happy with the beginnings of an attachment
+which two years later culminated in his marriage
+to Miss Carter's colleague at this mission.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188"></a><a href="images/188.png">[188]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE KOYUKUK TO THE YUKON AND TO TANANA&mdash;CHRISTMAS
+HOLIDAYS AT SAINT JOHN'S-IN-THE-WILDERNESS</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leaving</span> Fort Yukon on the 26th of November, 1909,
+and going again over almost the same route we followed
+during the first journey described in this volume, we
+reached the new mission at the Allakaket on the Koyukuk
+River on the 14th of December, after a period of almost
+continual cold. The climate of the interior of Alaska
+varies as much as any climate. The previous year, continuing
+the journey described in "The First Ice," I had
+passed over this same route in the opposite direction, between
+the same dates, with the thermometer well above
+zero the whole time. This trip the <i>mean</i> of the minimum
+reading at night, the noon reading, and the reading at
+start and finish of each day's journey was -38&nbsp;1/4&deg;.
+Many days in that three weeks we travelled all day at
+45&deg; and 50&deg; below zero, and we spent one night in camp
+at 49&deg; below.</p>
+
+<p>It was the beginning of a severe winter, with much
+snow north of the Yukon and long periods of great cold.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">BIRTH, BURIAL, AND DANCING</div>
+
+<p>The two weeks or so spent at the mission of Saint
+John's-in-the-Wilderness was enjoyed as only a rest is enjoyed
+after making such a journey; as only Christmas is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189"></a><a href="images/189.png">[189]</a></span>
+enjoyed at such a native mission. It is the time of the
+whole year for the people; they come in from near and far
+intent upon the festival in both of its aspects, religious
+and social, and they enter so heartily into all that is provided
+for them that one does not know which to admire
+most, their simple, earnest piety or the whole-hearted
+enthusiasm of their sports and pastimes. Right out of
+church they go to the frozen river, old men and maidens,
+young men and matrons, mothers with babies on their
+backs and their skirts tucked up, and they quickly line
+up and are kicking the football stuffed with moose hair
+and covered with moose hide in the native game that
+their forefathers played ages before "Rugby" was invented.<a name="FNanchor_B_2" id="FNanchor_B_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_B_2" class="fnanchor">[B]</a>
+When the church-bell rings, back they all troop
+again, to take their places and listen patiently and reverently
+to the long, double-interpreted service, the babies
+still on their mothers' backs, sometimes asleep, sometimes
+waking up and crying, comforted by slinging them
+round and applying their lips to the fountain of nourishment
+and solace.</p>
+
+<p>On the nights when there is no church service there is
+feasting and dancing. The native dance is a very simple
+affair, entirely without any objectionable feature, and
+one cannot see any reason in the world for attempting
+to suppress it. A man and a woman get out in the middle
+of the floor and dance opposite one another without
+touching at all. The moccasined toes of an expert man
+in this dance move with surprising rapidity, the woman,
+with eyes downcast, the picture of demureness, sways<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190"></a><a href="images/190.png">[190]</a></span>
+slightly from side to side and moves on her toes in rhythm
+to the man's movement. Presently another man jumps
+up and the first man yields his place; then another woman
+comes forward and the first woman yields her place, and
+so the dance goes on.</p>
+
+<p>For a variety, of late years there is an occasional
+"white-man's dance," of the quadrille or the waltz kind,
+but the natives much prefer their own dancing. Here at
+the Allakaket the presence of the Esquimaux adds picturesqueness
+and strangeness, and the Esquimau dance,
+which consists of a series of jerky attitudinisings, with
+every muscle tense, to a curious monotonous chant and
+the beating of a drum, is a never-failing source of amusement
+to the Indians.</p>
+
+<p>An old man's funeral in the morning away up on the
+high bluff overlooking the mission, a birth in the evening,
+a dance the same night&mdash;so goes the drama of life in this
+little, isolated native world. So soon as these people
+make up their minds that one of their number is sick
+unto death they make the coffin, for when trees must be
+felled and lumber whipsawed from them, it is well to be
+forehanded.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">"BEFORE" AND "AFTER"</div>
+
+<p>There is one old woman living up there yet whose
+coffin had been made three times. When it becomes evident
+that the unfavourable prognosis was mistaken the
+coffin is torn apart and made into shelves or some other
+article of household utility. It seems very cold-blooded,
+but it is easy to misjudge these people. The emotion of
+grief is real with them, I believe, but transient. They
+are matter-of-fact and entirely devoid of pretence, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191"></a><a href="images/191.png">[191]</a></span>
+when once a funeral has taken place and the service is all
+over they dismiss the gloomy event from their minds as
+soon as possible. The night of old Mesuk's death, however,
+there were fires lighted on all the trails and before
+most of the Esquimau cabins, the object of which was
+probably to frighten the spirit away from the dwellings
+of the living. We shall get the better of these superstitions
+by and by, but superstitions die hard, not only
+amongst Esquimaux. Moreover, practices like this linger
+as traditional practices long after their superstitious content
+is dissipated, and men of feeling do not wantonly
+lay hands on ancient traditional custom. I think that
+if I were an Esquimau and knew that from immemorial
+antiquity fires had been lighted on the trails and outside
+the doors upon the death of my ancestors, I should be
+tempted to kindle them myself upon an occasion, however
+firmly I held the Communion of Saints and the Safe Repose
+of the Blessed. And I am quite sure that if I were
+a Thlinket I should set up a totem-pole despite all the
+missionaries in the world. When one comes to think
+about it dispassionately, there is really nothing in Christianity
+averse to the kindling of corpse fires or the blazoning
+of native heraldry. When all the little superstitions
+and peculiar picturesque customs are abolished out of
+the world it will be a much less interesting world than
+it is to-day. If there were any evidence or reason to
+believe that morality and religion will be furthered by
+the brow-beating or cajoling of the little peoples into a
+close similitude of the white race in dress and manners
+and customs, all other considerations would, of course,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192"></a><a href="images/192.png">[192]</a></span>
+be swallowed up in a glad welcome of such advance.
+But almost the exact opposite is true. The young Indian
+or Esquimau, who by much mixing with white men
+has been "wised up," as the expressive phrase goes here,
+is commonly one of the least useful, the least attractive,
+the least moral of his kind. We have many such on the
+Yukon&mdash;young men who work on the steamboats in the
+summer and do odd jobs and hang around the stores in
+winter, and will not condescend to fish any more or to
+hunt or trap unless driven by the pinch of hunger.
+Show me an Indian who affects the white man in garb,
+in speech, in general habits, and external characteristics,
+and it will be easy to show an Indian whose death would
+be little loss to his community or his race; while the
+native woman who aspires to dress herself like a white
+woman has very commonly the purpose of attracting
+the attention of the white men. I think the young
+Indian man I recall as the best dressed, most debonair,
+and most completely "civilised," was living in idleness
+upon the bounty of the white trader whom every one
+knew to be his wife's paramour, and was impudently
+careless of the general knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Of all the photographs that illustrate missionary publications&mdash;and
+I have contributed enough villainous half-tones
+to warrant me in a criticism&mdash;the ones I dislike
+most are of the "Before and After" type. Here is a
+group of savages clad in skins, or furs, or feathers, or
+palm fibre, or some patient, skilful weave of native wool
+or grass; in each case clad congruously with their environment
+and out of the products it affords. Set against it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193"></a><a href="images/193.png">[193]</a></span>
+the same or a similar group clad out of the slop-shop, clad
+in hickory shirts and blue-jean trousers, clad so that, if
+faces could be changed as easily as clothing, they would
+pass for any commonplace group of whites anywhere.
+And, as if such change were in itself the symbol and guarantee
+of a change from all that is brutal and idolatrous to
+all that is gentle and Christian, there follows the triumphant
+"Before and After" inscription. All the fitness has
+gone, all the individuality, all the clever adaptation of
+indigenous material, all the artistic and human interest;
+and a self-conscious smirk of superiority radiates over
+made-by-the-million factory garments instead. Whenever
+I see such contrasting photographs there comes over
+me a shamed, perverse recollection of a pair of engravings
+by Hogarth, usually suppressed, which a London bookseller
+once pulled out of a portfolio in the back room of
+his shop and showed me. They bore the same title.</p>
+
+<p>I profess myself a friend of the native tongue because
+it is the native tongue&mdash;the easy, familiar, natural vehicle
+of expression; of the native dress because it is almost
+always comfortable and comely; of the native customs,
+whenever they are not unhealthy or demoralising, because
+they are the distinctive heritage of a people; and
+again, of tongue, dress, and customs alike, if you will,
+simply because they are dissimilar.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">A BARREN UNIFORMITY</div>
+
+<p>For it has always seemed a trumpery notion that uniformity
+in these things has any connection with the
+upbuilding of a people, has any ethical relation at all,
+and I have always wondered that so trumpery a notion
+should have so wide an influence. Moreover, is it not a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194"></a><a href="images/194.png">[194]</a></span>
+little curious that, whereas the trend of biological evolution
+on its upward course, as Spencer assures us, is towards
+differentiation and dissimilarity, the trend of sociological
+evolution should be so marked towards this
+bald and barren uniformity? But these be deep matters.</p>
+
+<p>I have never been able to join in the reproach of
+superciliousness so often applied to the lines of that
+noblest of missionary hymns in which Bishop Heber
+asks, "Can we, whose souls are lighted with wisdom from
+on high, Can we, to men benighted, the lamp of life
+deny?" If that be superciliousness, it is an essential
+superciliousness of Christianity itself, for the question
+lies at the very core of our religion and will not cease to
+be asked so long as the world contains those who believe
+with all their hearts, and those who do not believe because
+they have not heard. I never listen to that hymn
+without emotion, it can still "shake me like a cry Of
+trumpets going by." But the question that seems to
+stir the souls of some missionaries and most school-teachers,
+"Can we deny to these unfortunate heathen our
+millinery, our 'Old Oaken Bucket,' our Mr. and our
+Mrs.," leaves me quite cold.</p>
+
+<p>Here was the weekly afternoon routine at this mission,
+only the mornings being devoted to books and
+classes: On Monday the children brought their soiled
+clothes of the week to the schoolroom and washed them;
+on Tuesday they were dried and ironed; on Wednesday
+they were mended; on Thursday a juvenile "society" did
+some sort of work for another mission; on Friday every
+child in the village had a hot bath. Now, let a routine of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195"></a><a href="images/195.png">[195]</a></span>
+that sort be kept up, week after week, month after month,
+year after year, during the whole school life of a child,
+and it is bound to leave its mark; and there is no other
+way in which the same mark may be made.</p>
+
+<p>At the Allakaket is fine example of what, I think, is
+the best rule in the world for the inferior races&mdash;the absolute
+rule of a devoted, intelligent, capable gentlewoman.
+We are but now writing the indentures of their apprenticeship
+to self-government in the elective village councils we
+have set up; it is good for them to serve it under this
+loving and unquestioned despotism.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">MATTERS METEOROLOGICAL</div>
+
+<p>During all that Christmas season the temperature was
+subject to such violent fluctuations that a chart of them
+would look like the picture showing the comparative
+heights of mountains, that used to be presented under
+"The World in Hemispheres" in the school geographies.
+A minimum of 52&deg; below zero and a maximum of 10&deg;
+below, was followed by a minimum of 53&deg; below and a
+maximum of 18&deg; below, and that by a minimum of 56&deg;
+below and a maximum of 14&deg; below, while on Christmas
+Day itself we registered a minimum of 58&deg; below zero and
+a maximum of 1&deg; above, a range of 59&deg; in less than twelve
+hours. At a time of the year when the sun has scarcely
+any effect upon the temperature such tremendous changes
+point to corresponding atmospheric disturbances, and
+each rise was caused by the irruption of clouds upon a
+clear sky and was followed by a fall of snow.</p>
+
+<p>It is a beautifully simple process. Driven into these
+regions by some compelling current of the upper atmosphere
+comes a mass of warm air laden with moisture&mdash;a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196"></a><a href="images/196.png">[196]</a></span>
+cloud. As it comes in contact with the cold air of the
+region it parts with its heat, and the temperature of the
+lower air rises. Having parted with its heat, it can no
+longer contain its moisture; and, having parted with its
+moisture, it ceases to exist. The cold of the earth and of
+its immediate air envelope has seized upon that cloud
+and devoured it, and the cold resumes its sway. So have
+I opened the door of a crowded cabin, when an Indian
+dance or other gathering was in progress, at 50&deg; or 60&deg;
+below zero, and the cold, dry air meeting the hot, moist
+air has caused an immediate fall of snow on the threshold.</p>
+
+<p>After the abrupt rise in temperature on Christmas
+Day, the snow began to fall heavily, with a barometer
+continually falling until it reached 27.98 inches, the lowest
+point recorded here (at an elevation of about 500 feet
+above the sea) in two years and a half&mdash;and before the
+snow ceased three feet had fallen.</p>
+
+<p>Our winter itinerary called us to leave the Allakaket
+immediately after New Year's Day, and our route lay
+overland through a totally uninhabited country for nearly
+one hundred and fifty miles, to Tanana on the Yukon.
+We knew that it would not greatly interfere with our
+plans to lie another week at the Allakaket, and that
+would bring our departure after the monthly journey of
+the mail-carrier and would thus compel him to break
+trail for us through all that snow. That is the way the
+mail-carriers in Alaska are usually treated, but Arthur
+and I took some pride in keeping as closely as possible
+to the announced dates of visitation and in doing such
+share of trail breaking as fell to us.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197"></a><a href="images/197.png">[197]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">TRAIL BREAKING</div>
+
+<p>So on Monday, the 3d of January, 1910, we bade
+farewell to Deaconess Carter and her colleague and to
+the native charges they rule and care for so admirably,
+and set out on our journey with an additional boy from
+the mission to help us through the heavy snow of the
+Koyukuk valley. For ten or twelve miles the way lay
+down the river, and the going was slow and toilsome from
+the first, although there had been some passage from
+Moses' Village to the mission, and there was, therefore,
+some trail. Our start had been late&mdash;it is next to impossible
+to get an early start from a mission; there is
+always some native who must have audience at the last
+moment&mdash;and after the long repose we were so soft that
+the heavy trail had wearied us, and we decided to "call
+it a day" when in five and a half hours we came to the
+road-house, the last occupied habitation between the
+Allakaket and Tanana. Soon after we reached the village
+there came trooping down from the mission a number
+of the inhabitants gone up for Christmas, who, after
+weeping upon our necks, so to speak, at our departure,
+had left us to break out that drifted trail for their convenient
+return. So will Indians treat a white man almost
+always, but I had thought myself an exception and was
+vexed to find that so they had treated me.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning we entered the uninhabited wilderness
+with three feet of new snow on the trail and no passage
+over it since it had fallen. Our first trouble was
+finding the trail at all. The previous fall the Alaska
+Road Commission had appropriated a sum of money to
+stake this trail from Tanana to the Koyukuk River, for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198"></a><a href="images/198.png">[198]</a></span>
+it passes over wind-swept, treeless wastes, where many
+men had lost their way. Starting out from Tanana, the
+men employed had done their work well until within ten
+miles of the Koyukuk River. There it was found that
+the labour and cost already expended had exhausted the
+appropriation, whereupon the proceedings were immediately
+stopped; not another stake was driven, and the
+whole party returned to Tanana and mushed two hundred
+and fifty miles up the Yukon to spend another little
+appropriation upon another trail. That is the unbusinesslike
+system in which the money available for such
+work in Alaska has been handled.</p>
+
+<p>The first trail breaker goes ahead with a long stick,
+which he thrusts continually down through the snow.
+The slightly harder surface over which sleds and dogs
+have passed reveals itself by offering more resistance to
+the penetration of the stick, and that is the only way the
+trail can be found. Even with three feet of new snow
+upon it, it is well worth while finding, or otherwise there
+is no bottom at all and way must be made through all
+the snow of the winter. But all Alaskan trails are serpentine,
+and it is very difficult to put the new trail right
+on top of the old one. Back and forth the second trail
+breaker goes between his leader and the sled, and at
+intervals the first man comes back and forth also. And
+with it all is no path packed solid enough for the dogs to
+draw the heavy sled without great difficulty. We should
+have had a toboggan, but toboggans are little used on
+the Koyukuk, and we had only our sled. In five hours
+we made five miles and were worn out. We decided to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199"></a><a href="images/199.png">[199]</a></span>
+pitch our tent and go ahead and break trail for the morrow's
+journey. On the lakes interspersed amongst the
+brush we had to break an entirely new trail, for we could
+find no trace of the old one.</p>
+
+<p>If five miles in five hours be poor going, what is four
+miles in seven and a half hours? That is all we made the
+next day despite the snow-shoeing of the previous evening.
+The heavy sled was continually getting off the trail, however
+wide we show-shoed it. The two of us ahead went
+over every step of the distance four or five times, and
+sometimes all of us had to go back and forth again and
+again before the sled could be brought along at all. It
+was from 5&deg; to 10&deg; above zero all day, and at intervals
+snow fell heavily. We got at last to the middle
+of a little lake and were confronted by open water, the
+result of some warm spring, one supposes. Here we must
+stop until a laborious journey was made to the bank,
+trees were cut and carried, and the open place bridged so
+that the sled might be passed over it. Then again our
+painful progress was resumed until, as it grew dark,
+we reached the bank of the Kornutna, or Old Man
+Creek, and here we pitched tent again, and I went forward
+upon the bed of the stream to break out a part of
+to-morrow's path. That night two more inches of snow
+fell.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">DOG DRIVING</div>
+
+<p>For four miles the trail lies along the surface of this
+creek, and then takes up a steep gully and over a divide.
+That four miles was all we made the next day, back and
+forth, back and forth, wearily tramping it to and fro,
+dogs and men alike exhausted with the toil. The hatefulness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200"></a><a href="images/200.png">[200]</a></span>
+of dog mushing usually appears under such circumstances;
+the whip is constantly plied, the senseless objurgations
+rise shriller and fuller. Once the sled is started, it
+must by any means be kept going, that as great a distance
+as possible may be covered before it stops again. The poor
+brutes, sinking almost to their bellies despite the snow-shoeing,
+have no purchase for the exercise of their strength
+and continually flounder and wallow. Our whip was lost
+and I was glad of it, for even as considerate a boy as
+Arthur is apt to lose patience and temper when, having
+started the sled with much labour by gee pole and rope
+about his chest, it goes but a few feet and comes to a
+halt again, or slips from the track and turns over in the
+deep snow. But it is at such times, too, that one appreciates
+at his full value such a noble puller as our wheel
+dog Nanook. He spares himself not at all; the one absorbing
+occupation of every nerve and muscle of his
+body is pulling. His trace is always taut, or, if he lose
+footing for a moment and the trace slacken, he is up and
+at it again that the sled lose not its momentum if he can
+help it. When the lead line is pulled back that the sled
+may be started by the jerk of the dogs' sudden traction,
+Nanook lunges forward at the command, "Mush!" and
+strains at the collar, mouth open and panting, tongue
+dropping moisture, as keen and eager to keep that sled
+moving as is the driver himself. All day he labours and
+struggles, snatching a mouthful of snow now and then to
+cool his overheated body, and he drops in his tracks when
+the final halt is made, utterly weary, yet always with
+the brave heart in him to give his bark, his five-note characteristic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201"></a><a href="images/201.png">[201]</a></span>
+bark of gladness, that the day's work is done at
+last. It is senseless brutality to whip such a dog, and
+most of our dogs were of that mettle, though Nanook was
+the strongest and most faithful of the bunch. One's heart
+goes out to them with gratitude and love&mdash;old "Lingo,"
+"Nig," "Snowball," "Wolf," and "Doc"&mdash;as one realises
+what loyal, cheerful service they give.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">VIOLENT FLUCTUATIONS</div>
+
+<p>Arthur was so unwell with a violent cold and cough,
+that had been growing worse for a couple of days, that I
+decided on two things: to leave him in the tent while I
+snow-shoed ahead the next day, and to send back the boy
+I had brought from the mission to secure a fresh supply
+of food; for the back trail was, of course, comparatively
+easy. Arthur's condition threatened pneumonia, to my
+notion, and I believe he was saved from an attack of that
+disease which is so often fatal in this country by long
+rubbing all over the neck and the chest with a remedy
+that was new then&mdash;a menthol balm. I have used it
+again and again since and I am now never without it. A
+second application made in the morning, I started out,
+show-shoeing up the long hill and then down into the
+flat, and so to the mail-carrier's little hut that is reached
+under good conditions of trail the first day from Moses'
+Village, and then back again to the tent. That day a tendon
+in my right leg behind the knee became increasingly
+troublesome, and in climbing the hill on the return was
+acutely painful. I recognised it as "mal-de-raquet," well
+known in the Northwest, where the snow is commonly
+much deeper than in Alaska, and I found relief in the
+application of the same analgesic menthol balm that I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202"></a><a href="images/202.png">[202]</a></span>
+was rejoiced to find had wrought a great improvement in
+Arthur's condition.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the warm weather of the past three or
+four days was over and another period of violent fluctuations
+of temperature similar to that around Christmastide
+was upon us. We went to bed with the thermometer
+at 10&deg; below zero and were wakened by the cold at
+two in the morning to find it at 40&deg; below, so we had to
+keep a fire going the rest of the night; for as soon as the
+fire in the stove goes out a tent becomes just as cold as
+outdoors.</p>
+
+<p>We moved forward the next morning, but the trail
+we had broken was too narrow and had to be widened,
+which meant one snow-shoe in the deep snow all the time,
+a very fatiguing process that brought into painful play
+again the tendon strained with five days' heavy snow-shoeing.</p>
+
+<p>The temperature was around 40&deg; below all day, and
+our progress was so slow that it was not easy to keep
+warm, and the dogs whined at the innumerable stops.
+Yesterday it had been 10&deg; below, the day before 10&deg;
+above, and now, to-day, 40&deg; below. It is hard to dress
+for such changeable weather, especially hard to dress the
+feet. My own wear, all the winter through, is a pair of
+smoke-tanned, moose-hide breeches, tanned on the Yukon
+but tailored outside. They are a perfect windbreak, yet
+allow ventilation, and they are very warm; but those
+who perspire much on exertion cannot wear them. The
+amount of covering upon the feet must be varied, in some
+measure at least, as the temperature changes. The Esquimau<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203"></a><a href="images/203.png">[203]</a></span>
+fur boot, with fur on the inside of the sole and on
+the outside of the upper, is my favourite footwear, with
+more or less of sock inside it as the weather requires; but
+such sudden changes as we were experiencing always find
+one or leave one with too much or too little footwear.
+By one-thirty we had struggled to the top of the hill, and
+it was very evident that the cabin was out of the question
+that day; so, since to pass down into the flat was to
+pass out of eligible camping timber, we pitched tent on
+the brow of the hill.</p>
+
+<p>The cold business of making camp was done, all dispositions
+for the night complete, supper for men and
+dogs was cooked and ours eating, when we heard a noise
+in the distance that set our dogs barking and presently
+came the boy I had sent back, accompanied by an Indian
+and a fresh team loaded with such a bountiful supply of
+food, much of it cooked, that one felt it was worth while
+to get into distress to receive such generous and prompt
+succour. The ladies at the mission had sat up and cooked
+all night and had despatched the fastest team in the village
+the next morning to bring their provisions to us and
+to help us along. They had thought us at Tanana when
+we were not yet at the end of the first day's stage from
+Moses' Village. It would have been impossible for us to
+reach Tanana on the dog food and man food we started
+with.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SIXTY-FIVE BELOW ZERO</div>
+
+<p>It was so cold and we were so crowded that I arose at
+three and made a fire and sat over it the rest of the night,
+and after breakfast, although it was Sunday, morning
+prayer being said, I started ahead again to break out the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204"></a><a href="images/204.png">[204]</a></span>
+trail deeper and wider, leaving the teams with the distributed
+loads to follow. The thermometer stood at 38&deg;
+below zero when I left camp, but as I began the descent it
+was evident that it grew colder, and at the bottom of the
+hill I was sure it was 20&deg; colder at least. Reaching the
+cabin, I kindled a fire and started back to meet the teams.
+About a mile from the cabin I saw them, for, since the load
+was distributed in the two sleds progress was much better;
+but by this time it had grown so cold that the dogs were
+almost entirely obscured from view by the clouds of steam
+that encompassed them. We hurried as best we might
+and reached the cabin about eleven, and as soon as we
+were arrived I took out the thermometer and let it lie
+long enough to get the temperature of the air, and it read
+65&deg; below zero. There had been no atmospheric change at
+all; it was simply the most marked instance I ever knew
+of the influence of altitude upon temperature. We had
+descended perhaps three hundred feet, and in that distance
+had found a difference of 27&deg; in temperature.</p>
+
+<p>The cabin was a wretched shack without door or window
+and full of holes, and in no part of it could one stand
+upright. We set ourselves to make things as comfortable
+as possible, however, rigging up the canvas sled
+cover for an outer door and a blanket for an inner door,
+and stopping up the worst of the holes with sacking.
+Then we went out and cut fresh spruce boughs to lie upon,
+and prospected around quite a while before we found dry
+wood nearly a quarter of a mile away. It was quite a
+business cutting that wood and packing the heavy sticks
+on one's shoulders, through the brush and up and down<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205"></a><a href="images/205.png">[205]</a></span>
+the banks of the little creek where it grew, on snow-shoes,
+at 65&deg; below zero.</p>
+
+<p>Our Sabbath day's journey done, the hut safely
+reached and furnished with fuel, we did not linger long
+after supper, but, evening prayer said, went to bed as the
+most comfortable place in the still cold cabin, thankful
+not to be in a tent in such severe weather.</p>
+
+<p>The next day gave us fresh temperature fluctuations.
+At nine <span class="smcap">a. m.</span> it clouded and rose to 35&deg; below, by noon it
+had cleared again and the thermometer fell to 55&deg; below,
+and at nine <span class="smcap">p. m.</span> it stood once more at 65&deg; below. The
+milder weather of the morning sent all hands out breaking
+trail, save myself, for with all our stuff in a cabin without
+a door it was not wise to leave it altogether&mdash;a dog
+might break a chain and work havoc&mdash;so I stayed behind
+in the little dark hovel, a candle burning all day, and read
+some fifty pages of Boswell's <i>Life of Samuel Johnson</i>
+over again. Some such little India-paper classic it is my
+habit to carry each winter. Last year I reread Pepys's
+<i>Diary</i> and the year before much of the <i>Decline and Fall</i>.
+Certain places are for ever associated in my mind with the
+rereading of certain old books. The Chandalar River is
+to me as much the scene of <i>Lorna Doone</i>, which I read for
+the sixth or seventh time on my first journey along it, as
+Exmoor itself; and <i>The Cloister and the Hearth</i>, that noble
+historical romance, belongs in my literary geography
+to the Alatna-Kobuk portage. So will Boswell always
+bring back to me this trip across country from the Koyukuk
+to the Yukon through the deep snow.</p>
+
+<p>The boys came back after dark, having broken some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206"></a><a href="images/206.png">[206]</a></span>
+nine miles of trail and having suffered a good deal from
+the cold. I had supper cooked, and when that was done
+and the dogs fed we fell to reading the Gospels and
+Epistles for the Epiphany season, the boys reading aloud
+by turns. The all-day fire had warmed the little hut
+thoroughly, and despite the cold outside we were snug and
+comfortable within.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SEVENTY BELOW ZERO</div>
+
+<p>That night the thermometer touched 70&deg; below zero,
+within 2&deg; of the greatest cold I have recorded in seven
+years' winter travel; a greater cold, I believe, than any
+arctic expedition has ever recorded, for it is in a continental
+climate like Siberia or interior Alaska, and not in the
+marine climate around the North Pole, that the thermometer
+falls lowest.</p>
+
+<p>Save for an hour or two getting wood, we all lay close
+next day, for the temperature at noon was no higher
+than 64&deg; below. It is impossible to break trail at such
+temperature, or to travel as slowly as we were travelling.
+In the strong cold one must travel fast if one travel at all.
+Indeed, it is distinctly dangerous to be outdoors. As
+soon as one leaves the hut the cold smites one in the face
+like a mailed fist. The expiration of the breath makes a
+crackling sound, due, one judges, to the sudden congealing
+of the moisture that is expelled. From every cranny of
+the cabin a stream of smoke-like vapour pours into the
+air, giving the appearance that the house is on fire within.
+However warmly hands and feet may be clad, one cannot
+stand still for a minute without feeling the heat
+steadily oozing out and the cold creeping in.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding the weather, that evening the mail<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207"></a><a href="images/207.png">[207]</a></span>
+came along, the white man who is the carrier, two tall,
+strong natives, and nine dogs. Only since descending
+to the flat had they suffered from the cold, for they found
+as great a difference as we did in the temperature; and
+they were grateful to us for the trail we had broken.
+The hut was uncomfortably crowded that night with
+seven people in it, but the thermometer stood at -56&deg;
+and was rising, and gave us hope that we might move
+along to-morrow. Augmented as our party was into
+seven men, three sleds, and nineteen or twenty dogs,
+trail breaking would not be so arduous and progress
+would be much accelerated. There was good hope, moreover,
+that the heavy snow was confined to the Koyukuk
+valley and that when we passed out of it we should find
+better going.</p>
+
+<p>The morning found a temperature of 45&deg; below, and
+we sallied forth, quite an expedition. Four, including
+myself, went ahead beating down the trail; one was at each
+gee pole, our team last, getting advantage of everything
+preceding. So far as the trail had been broken we made
+good time, covering the nine miles in about four hours.
+Another hour of somewhat slower progress took us to
+the top of a hill, and here the mail-carrier's two Indians
+had run ahead and built a great, roaring fire and arranged
+a wide, commodious couch of spruce boughs, and we
+cooked our lunch and took our ease for half an hour.
+The sky had clouded again and the temperature had risen
+to 28&deg; below.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">CLOSE QUARTERS</div>
+
+<p>It is strange how some scenes of the trail linger in the
+memory, while others are completely forgotten. This<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208"></a><a href="images/208.png">[208]</a></span>
+noon halt I always remember as one of the pleasantest
+of all my journeyings. There was not a breath of wind,
+and the smoke rose straight into the air instead of volleying
+and eddying into one's face as camp-fires so often do
+on whichever side of them one sits. We were all weary
+with our five hours' trudge, and the rest was grateful;
+hungry, and the boiled ham they had sent from the mission
+was delicious. The warmth of the great fire and
+the cosiness of the thick, deep spruce boughs gave solid
+comfort, and the pipe after the meal was a luxurious
+enjoyment.</p>
+
+<p>From that on the going was heavier and our progress
+slower, but we kept at it till dark, and still far into the
+night, fortunate in having two Indians who knew every
+step of the way, until at last we reached the hut that
+marks the end of the second stage from the Koyukuk
+River, on the top of a birch hill. We had made nineteen
+and a half miles that day and had taken eleven hours
+to do it.</p>
+
+<p>If the noon rest be remembered as one of the pleasantest
+episodes of the trail, that night in the cabin on the
+hill I recall as one of the most miserable in my life. The
+hut was still smaller than the previous one, like it without
+door and window, and so low that one was bent double all
+the time. Walls and roof alike were covered with a
+thick coating of frost. The only wood discoverable in
+the dark was half-dry birch which would not burn in the
+stove but sent out volumes of smoke that blinded us.
+When the hut did begin to get a little warm, moisture
+from the roof dropped on everything. There we seven<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209"></a><a href="images/209.png">[209]</a></span>
+men huddled together, chilly and damp, choked and
+weary&mdash;a wretched band. There was no room for the
+necessary cooking operations; we had to cook and eat
+in relays; and how we slept, in what way seven men
+managed to pack themselves and stretch themselves in
+those narrow quarters, I cannot tell. However, we said
+our prayers and went to bed, snow falling heavily. The
+Indians were soon snoring, but sleep would not come to
+me, tired as I was, and I had not slept at all the previous
+night. So presently I took trional, X grs., and
+dozed off till morning.</p>
+
+<p>Then we resolved to divide forces rather than subject
+ourselves to the miserable inconvenience of overcrowding
+these tiny huts, and at this stage of the journey it
+was possible to do so without losing a whole day, for
+there was a cabin for the noon rest. It was arranged that
+the mail-man should start first and make the full day's
+run if possible, while we should "call it a day" at the
+half-way hut.</p>
+
+<p>So Bob and his Indians sallied forth while yet my boys
+were reading their lessons to me, and when they were
+done we hitched up and followed. And as soon as we
+were down the hill and started along the bald flat, it was
+evident that we were out of the deep snowfall, for the
+present at any rate, and we plucked up spirit, for we
+were now to cross the wide, open, wind-swept uplands of
+the headwaters of the Melozitna and Tozitna, tributaries
+of the Yukon&mdash;the "Tozi" and "Melozi," as the white
+men call them&mdash;where snow never lies deep or long. We
+were out of the Koyukuk watershed now and in country<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210"></a><a href="images/210.png">[210]</a></span>
+drained by direct tributaries of the Yukon. The going
+was now incomparably the best we had had since we left
+the mission, the snow was light and we had the mail-carrier's
+trail; but, although the temperature had risen to
+21&deg; below, a keen wind put our parkee hoods up and our
+scarfs around our faces and made our 60&deg; below clothing
+none too warm. In three hours we had reached the
+Melozi cabin, although that had included the climbing
+of a long, steep hill, and here we stayed for the rest of
+the day and night and shot some ptarmigan for supper,
+though we could easily have gone on and made the rest
+of the run.</p>
+
+<p>The next day I sent the auxiliary sled and team and
+driver back to the Allakaket, keeping the mission boy
+with me, however, to return with the mail-carrier, who
+was already late and must go back as soon as he reached
+Tanana. I parted with the Indian regretfully, for he
+had been most helpful and always good-natured and
+cheerful, and had really begun to learn a little at our
+travelling night-school.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE STAKED TRAIL</div>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE ARCTIC SKIES</div>
+
+<p>A high wind was blowing, with the thermometer at 12&deg;
+below, and the mail-man's trail was already drifted over
+and quite indistinguishable in the dark, and we began
+to appreciate the recent staking of this trail by the Road
+Commission. But for these stakes, set double, a hundred
+yards apart, so that they formed a lane, it would have
+been difficult if not impossible for us to travel on a day
+like this, for here was a stretch of sixteen or seventeen
+miles with never a tree and hardly the smallest bush.
+The wind blew stronger and stronger directly in our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211"></a><a href="images/211.png">[211]</a></span>
+faces as we rose out of the Melozitna basin on the hill
+that is its watershed, and when the summit was reached
+and we turned and looked back there was nothing visible
+but a white, wind-swept waste. But ahead all the snow
+was most beautifully and delicately tinted from the reflection
+of the dawn on ragged shredded clouds that
+streamed across the southeastern sky. Where the sky
+was free of cloud it gave a wonderful clear green that
+was almost but not quite the colour of malachite. It was
+exactly the colour of the water the propeller of a steamship
+churns up where the Atlantic Ocean shallows to the
+rocky shore of the north coast of Ireland. The clouds
+themselves caught a deep dull red from the sunrise, which
+the snow gave back in blush pink. Such an exquisite
+colour harmony did the scene compose that the wind,
+lulling for a moment on the crest of the hill, seemed
+charmed into peace by it.</p>
+
+<p>The feast of colour brought a train of colour memories,
+one hard upon the heels of another, as we went down
+the hill; the Catbells, this golden with bracken, that purple
+with heather, and each doubled in the depths of Derwentwater;
+an October morning in the hardwood forests
+of the mountains of Tennessee, when for half an hour
+every gorgeous tint of red and yellow was lavishly
+flaunted&mdash;and then the whole pride and splendour of it
+wiped out at once by a wind that sprang up; the encircling
+and towering reds and pinks of a gigantic amphitheatre
+of rock in the Dolomites; a patch of flowers right
+against the snow in the high Rockies, so intensely blue
+that it seemed the whole vault of heaven could be tinctured<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212"></a><a href="images/212.png">[212]</a></span>
+with the pigment that one petal would distil. And,
+more inspiring than them all, there came the recollection
+of that wonderful sunrise and those blazing mountains of
+the Alatna-Kobuk portage. Every land has its glories,
+and the sky is everywhere a blank canvas for the display
+of splendid colour, but the tints of the arctic sky are of
+an infinite purity of individual tone that no other sky
+can show.</p>
+
+<p>As we descended the hill into the Tozitna basin the
+wind rose again, now charged with heavy, driving snow,
+while in the valley the underfoot snow grew deep, so that
+it was drawing to dusk when we reached the cabin on a
+fork of the Tozitna where Bob the mail-man had spent
+the previous night, and there we stayed.</p>
+
+<p>The next day is worthy of record for the sharp contrast
+it affords. All the night it had snowed heavily, and
+it snowed all the morning and into the afternoon. Some
+sixteen or seventeen inches of snow had fallen since Bob
+and his party passed, and again we had no trail at all.
+Moreover&mdash;strange plaint in January in Alaska!&mdash;the
+weather grew so warm that the snow continually balled
+up under the snow-shoes and clung to the sled and the
+dogs. At noon the thermometer stood at 17&deg; above zero&mdash;and
+it was but four days ago that we recorded 70&deg; below!
+It will be readily understood how such wide and sudden
+ranges of temperature add to the inconvenience and discomfort
+of mushing. Parkees, sweaters, shirts are shed
+one after the other, the fur cap becomes a nuisance, the
+mittens a burden, and still ploughing through the snow
+he is bathed in sweat who had forgotten what sweating<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213"></a><a href="images/213.png">[213]</a></span>
+felt like. The poor dogs suffer the most, for they have
+nothing they can shed and they can perspire only through
+the mouth. Their tongues drop water almost in a stream,
+they labour for their breath, and their eyes have a look
+that comes only with soft weather and a heavy trail. So
+constantly do they grab mouthfuls of snow that the operation
+becomes quite a check on our progress.</p>
+
+<p>By two o'clock it was growing dusk, and we had but
+reached the bank of the other fork of the Tozitna, not
+more than eight or nine miles from the cabin where we
+spent the night and yet thirteen or fourteen miles from
+the cabin we had hoped to reach. Beyond the banks
+of the stream was no more timber for a long distance;
+was such another stretch of open country as we had
+passed the previous day. So here was another disappointment,
+for camp must be made now lest there be
+no chance to make camp at all. But it was a good and
+comfortable camp, amidst the large spruce of the watercourse.
+Such disappointments are part of life on the
+trail; and supper done there was the more time for the
+boys.</p>
+
+<p>The open country was again wind-swept, and being
+wind-swept the snow was somewhat hardened, and we
+fought our way against a gale, covering the twelve and
+three quarter miles in ten hours, Sunday though it was.
+At that last stage on the road to Tanana came out a
+young man from the mission with a dog team and an
+Indian, anxious at our long delay, and Harry Strangman's
+name is written here with grateful recognition of
+this kindness and many others. We went joyfully into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214"></a><a href="images/214.png">[214]</a></span>
+town on the morrow, the 17th of January, having taken
+fifteen days to make a journey that is normally made in
+five.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE MAIL-CARRIER</div>
+
+<p>Half-way on that last day's mush we met the mail-man
+returning to the Koyukuk. So much had he been
+delayed that there was danger of a fine and all sorts of
+trouble, and the mail had been sent out to meet him at
+the noon cabin, together with a supply of grub for the
+return trip. But the caterer, whoever he was, forgot
+candles, and the mail-man would have had to make his
+way back to the Koyukuk without any means of artificial
+light, in the shortest days of the year, had we not
+been able to supply him with half a dozen candles that
+remained to us. It was a disappointment to George,
+the boy I had brought from the mission, that he must
+turn round and go back also. He had never "seen
+Tanana," which is quite a metropolis to him, and had
+looked forward to it keenly all the journey, but the boy
+braced up and took his disappointment manfully. A
+pitiful procession it was that passed us by and took our
+boy away; the poor, wearied dogs that had certainly
+earned the few days' rest they were so badly in need of
+left a trail of blood behind them that was sickening to
+see. Almost every one of them had sore, frozen feet;
+many of them were lame; and when we came to descend
+the long hill they had just climbed, right at its brow,
+where the stiffest pull had been, was a claw from a dog's
+foot frozen into bloody snow.</p>
+
+<p>So far as there is anything heroic about the Alaskan
+trail, the mail-carriers are the real heroes. They must<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215"></a><a href="images/215.png">[215]</a></span>
+start out in all weathers, at all temperatures; they have a
+certain specified time in which to make their trips and
+they must keep within that time or there is trouble.
+The bordering country of the Canadian Yukon has a
+more humane government than ours. There neither
+mail-carrier nor any one else, save in some life-or-death
+emergency, with licence from the Northwest Mounted
+Police, may take out horse or dogs to start a journey
+when the temperature is lower than 45&deg; below zero; but
+I have seen a reluctant mail-carrier chased out at 60&deg;
+below zero, on pain of losing his job, on the American
+side. Moreover, between the seasons, when travel on
+the rivers is positively dangerous to life, the mail must
+still be despatched and received, although so great is the
+known risk to the mail, as well as to the carrier, that no
+one will send any letter that he cares at all about reaching
+its destination until the trails are established or the
+steamboats run. But the virtually empty pouches must
+be transported from office to office through the running,
+or over the rotting ice, just the same, on pain of the high
+displeasure and penalty of a department without brains
+and without bowels. I have often wished since I came
+to Alaska that I could be postmaster-general for one
+week, and so I suppose has almost every other resident
+of the country.</p>
+
+<p>The week following my arrival at Tanana was a solid
+week of cold weather, the thermometer ranging around
+50&deg; and 60&deg; below zero, and that means keeping pretty
+close to the house. Even the sentries at the army post
+are withdrawn and the protection of the garrison is confided<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216"></a><a href="images/216.png">[216]</a></span>
+to a man who watches the grounds from a glass-walled
+cupola above the headquarters building. Yet a
+week of confinement and inaction grows tiresome after
+life in the open.</p>
+
+<p>Sunday is always a busy day here. The mission and
+native village are three miles away from the town, and
+service must be held at both. The mission at Tanana is
+not a happy place to visit for one who has the welfare of
+the natives at heart. Despite faithful and devoted effort
+to check it, the demoralisation goes on apace and the outlook
+is dark.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SINGLE MEN IN BARRACKS</div>
+
+<p>"Single men in barracks don't grow into plaster
+saints," we are told; sometimes they seem to grow into
+drunken, lustful devils without compassion for childhood,
+not to mention any feeling of magnanimity towards a
+feebler race. And when a girl who has been rough-handled,
+or who has been given drink until she is unable
+to resist the multiple outrage practised upon her, is told
+to pick out the malefactors from a company of soldiers,
+all clean-shaven, all dressed alike, all around the same age,
+she generally fails to identify altogether. So the offence
+goes unwhipped, and the officer is likely as not to address
+a reprimand to the complaining missionary for "preferring
+charges you are unable to substantiate." Yet
+an officer who had himself written such a letter told me
+once that all Indians looked alike to him. Even should
+the girl identify one or more men, they have usually half a
+dozen comrades ready to swear an alibi.</p>
+
+<p>Add to the trouble given by the soldiers the constant
+operation of the slinking bootleggers of the town, a score<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217"></a><a href="images/217.png">[217]</a></span>
+or more of whom are known to make money by this
+liquor peddling, and some of whom do nothing else for a
+living, yet whom it is next to impossible to convict, owing
+to the cumbrous machinery of the law and the attitude
+of juries, and it will be seen that the hands of those who
+are fighting for the native race are tied.</p>
+
+<p>What has been said about the military does not by
+any means apply to all, either officers or men. Some of
+the officers have been decent, God-fearing men, conscious
+of the evil and zealous to suppress it; some of the men,
+indeed in all probability most of the men, quite free from
+such offence; some commanding officers have kept such
+a well-disciplined post that offences of all kinds have been
+greatly reduced. But the commanding officer is changed
+every year, and the whole force is changed every two
+years, so that there is no continuity of policy at the post,
+and an administration that has grown familiar with conditions
+and that stands so far as it can for clean living
+and sobriety and decency and the protection of the native
+people, may be followed by one that is loftily ignorant
+of the situation, careless about offences against
+morality, and impatient of any complaint.</p>
+
+<p>Off by himself, separate from the demoralising influence
+of the low-down white, there is every hope and encouragement
+in the effort to elevate and educate the
+Indian; set down cheek by jowl with the riffraff of towns
+and barracks, his fate seems sealed.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">DEATH-RATE AND BIRTH-RATE</div>
+
+<p>Let these two mission stations, the Allakaket and
+Tanana, one hundred and fifty miles or so apart by the
+winter trail, represent the two conditions. In six years'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218"></a><a href="images/218.png">[218]</a></span>
+time there has been manifest advance at the one and
+decay at the other. The birth-rate is greatly in excess
+of the death-rate at the Allakaket, the death-rate greatly
+in excess of the birth-rate at Tanana. In the year in
+which this journey was made there were thirty-four deaths
+and fourteen births at Tanana, and while the difference
+was an unusually large one, yet in the six years referred
+to there has not been one year in which the number of
+births exceeded the number of deaths. One does not
+have to be a prophet to foresee the inevitable result, if
+the process be not stopped.</p>
+
+<p>A tribute should be paid to the zeal, now of one, now
+of another army surgeon at Fort Gibbon in tending the
+native sick, three miles away, when we have been unable
+to procure a physician of our own for the place.
+The missionary nurse, for five years last past Miss Florence
+Langdon, has been greatly helped in her almost
+desperate efforts here by the willing co-operation of these
+medical officers of the army.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219"></a><a href="images/219.png">[219]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>UP THE YUKON TO RAMPART AND ACROSS COUNTRY TO
+THE TANANA&mdash;ALASKAN AGRICULTURE&mdash;THE GOOD
+DOG NANOOK&mdash;MISS FARTHING'S BOYS AT
+NENANA&mdash;CHENA AND FAIRBANKS</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Our</span> course from Tanana did not lie directly up the
+Tanana River, but up the Yukon to Rampart and then
+across country to the Hot Springs on the Tanana River.
+The seventy-five miles up the Yukon was through the
+Lower Ramparts, one of the most picturesque portions of
+this great river. The stream is confined in one deep
+channel by lofty mountains on both banks, and the
+scenery at times is very bold and wild. But its topography
+makes it the natural wind course of the country&mdash;a
+down-river wind in winter, an up-river wind in summer
+blows almost continually. It was no colder than 5&deg;
+below zero when we started on the trip, but the wind made
+the travelling unpleasant. The second day it had increased
+to a gale, and every mile we travelled it grew
+stronger. We travelled three hours, and the last hour
+we made scarcely a mile. So thickly charged with flying
+snow was the wind and so dead ahead that despite
+parkee hoods it blinded us, and the dogs could hardly be
+forced to keep their heads towards it. Their faces were
+so coated with crusted snow that they looked curiously<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220"></a><a href="images/220.png">[220]</a></span>
+like the face of harlequin in the pantomime. It did become
+literally intolerable, and when Arthur said that he
+knew there was a cabin right across the river, we made
+our way thither and shortly found it and lay there the
+rest of the day, the gale blowing incessantly. This was
+disappointing, because it meant that I could not reach
+Rampart for the Sunday I had appointed.</p>
+
+<p>Next day the wind had ceased and the thermometer
+went down to 30&deg; below zero. In places the ice was
+blown clear of snow; in other places it was heavily drifted.
+By midday we had reached the lonely telegraph station
+at "The Rapids," and were very kindly received by the
+signal-corps men in charge. They gave us to eat and
+to drink and would take no money. There is little travel
+on this part of the river nowadays, and the telegraph
+men are glad to see any one who may chance to pass by.
+We pushed on heavily again, and had to stop and cut a
+gee pole presently, for it was hard to handle the sled
+without it; but the gee pole always means laborious travel.
+The cold was welcome; it meant no wind; and we were
+glad to see the thermometer drop lower than 50&deg; below
+zero that night at the old mail cabin. The mail goes no
+longer on the Yukon River from Fort Yukon to Tanana,
+and, barring this point, Rampart, towards which we were
+travelling, which is supplied across country from the Hot
+Springs, over the route we should traverse, no spot on
+that three hundred and fifty miles of river receives any
+mail at all. The population is small and scattered, it is
+true; on the same grounds Alaska might be denied any
+mail at all. There has been much resentment at this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221"></a><a href="images/221.png">[221]</a></span>
+abandonment of the Yukon River by the post-office and
+several petitions for its restoration, but it has not been
+restored.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE WIND-SWEPT YUKON</div>
+
+<p>We travelled all the next day at 50&deg; below zero, and
+it was one of the pleasantest days of the winter. There
+was not a breath of wind, the going steadily improved,
+and, best of all, for three hours we were travelling in the
+sunshine for the first time this winter. Only those who
+have been deprived of the sun can really understand how
+joyful and grateful his return is. There was no heat in
+his rays, this last day of January; the thermometer
+stood at 49&deg; below at noon, and had risen but 5&deg; since
+our start in the morning; but the mere sight of him
+glowing in the south, where a great bend of the river
+gave him to us through a gap in the mountains, was
+cheerful and invigorating after two months in which
+we had seen no more than his gilding of the high snows.
+The sun gives life to the dead landscape, colour to
+the oppressive monotony of white and black, and man's
+heart leaps to the change as jubilantly as does the face
+of nature.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">RAMPART AND ITS SALOON</div>
+
+<p>Rampart City differs from Circle City, the other decayed
+mining town of the Yukon River, only in that the
+process is further advanced. Year by year there are a
+few less men on the creeks behind it, a few less residents
+in the town itself. Its long, straggling water-front consists
+in the main of empty buildings, the windows boarded
+up, the snow drifted high about the doors. One store
+now serves all ends of trade, one liquor shop serves all
+the desire for drink of the whites, and slops over through<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222"></a><a href="images/222.png">[222]</a></span>
+the agency of two or three dissolute squaw men and half-breeds
+to the natives up and down the river.<a name="FNanchor_C_3" id="FNanchor_C_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_C_3" class="fnanchor">[C]</a></p>
+
+<p>Rampart had one fat year, 1898, when many hundreds
+of gold seekers, approaching the Klondike by Saint Michael
+and the lower Yukon were attracted and halted by the
+gold discoveries on Big and Little Minook, and spent
+the winter here. The next spring news was brought of
+the rich discoveries on Anvil Creek, behind Cape Nome,
+and an exodus began which grew into a veritable stampede
+in 1900, when the gold discoveries in the beach itself
+were made. Rampart's large population faded away as
+surely and as quickly to Nome as Circle City's population
+did to the Klondike. The Indians are almost all gone
+from their village a mile above the town; they dwindled
+away with the dwindling prosperity, some to Tanana,
+some to other points down the river; and what used to
+be the worst small native community in the interior of
+Alaska has almost ceased to exist. Most of the little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223"></a><a href="images/223.png">[223]</a></span>
+band of white folks still remaining were gathered together
+at night, and appreciated, I thought, their semiannual
+opportunity for Divine service.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">"DEVELOPED"</div>
+
+<p>There is no resisting the melancholy that hangs over
+a place like this. As one treads the crazy, treacherous
+board sidewalks, full of holes and rotten planks, now
+rising a step or two, now falling, and reads the dimmed
+and dirty signs that once flaunted their gold and colours,
+"Golden North," "Pioneer," "Reception," "The Senate"
+(why should every town in Alaska have a "Senate"
+saloon and not one a "House of Representatives"?), one
+conjures up the scenes of rude revelry these drinking
+places witnessed a few years ago. How high the hopes
+of sudden riches burned in the breasts of the men who
+went in and out of them, doomed to utter disappointment
+in the vast majority! What a rapscallion crew,
+male and female, followed this great mob of gold seekers,
+and grew richer as their victims grew poorer! What
+earned and borrowed and saved and begged and stolen
+moneys were frittered away and flung away that winter;
+what health and character were undermined! How the
+ribaldry and valiant, stupid blasphemy rang out in these
+tumbling-down shanties! Go out on the creeks and see
+the hills denuded of their timber, the stream-beds punched
+with innumerable holes, filled up or filling up, the cabins
+and sluice-boxes rotting into the moss, here and there a
+broken pick and shovel, here and there a rusting boiler,
+and take notice that this region has been "developed."</p>
+
+<p>When the debit and credit sides of the ledger are balanced,
+what remains to Alaska of all these thousands of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224"></a><a href="images/224.png">[224]</a></span>
+men, of all the many hundreds of thousands of dollars
+they brought with them? Those creeks, stripped, gutted,
+and deserted; this town, waiting for a kindly fire
+with a favouring breeze to wipe out its useless emptiness;
+a few half-breed children at mission schools; a hardy
+native tribe, sophisticated, diseased, demoralised, and
+largely dead&mdash;that seems the net result.</p>
+
+<p>The portage trail from Rampart to the Tanana River
+goes up Minook Creek and follows the valley to its head,
+then crosses a summit and passes down through several
+small mining settlements to the Hot Springs. The trail
+saves traversing two sides of the triangle which it makes
+with the two rivers.</p>
+
+<p>The dogs' feet and legs had suffered so much from the
+deep snow and the heavy labour of the journey out of
+the Koyukuk and the rough ice of the Yukon that I
+was compelled to have not merely moccasins but moose-hide
+leggings made here, coming right up to the belly and
+tying over the back. All the hair was worn away from
+the back of the legs and the skin was in many places raw.</p>
+
+<p>We had thought to cover the twenty-five or thirty
+miles up the valley and over the summit to a road-house
+just beyond its foot, but rough drifted trails and a high
+wind held us back until it was dark before the ascent
+was reached, and we pitched our tent and reserved the
+climb for the morrow.</p>
+
+<p>It was a hard grind owing to the drifted snow and the
+wind that still disputed our passage, but the view from
+the summit, nearly eighteen hundred feet above last
+night's camp, was compensation enough, for it gave us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225"></a><a href="images/225.png">[225]</a></span>
+the great mountain, Denali, or, as the map makers and
+some white men call it, Mount McKinley. Perhaps an
+hundred and fifty miles away, as the crow flies, it rose
+up and filled all the angle of vision to the southwest. It
+is not a peak, it is a region, a great soaring of the earth's
+crust, rising twenty thousand feet high; so enormous in
+its mass, in its snow-fields and glaciers, its buttresses, its
+flanking spurs, its far-flung terraces of foot-hills and approaches,
+that it completely dominates the view whenever
+it is seen at all. I have heard people say they thought
+they had seen Denali, as I have heard travellers say they
+thought they had seen Mount Everest from Darjiling;
+but no one ever thought he saw Denali if he saw it at all.
+There is no possible question about it, once the mountain
+has risen before the eyes; and although Mount Everest is
+but the highest of a number of great peaks, while Denali
+stands alone in unapproached predominance, yet I think
+the man who has really looked upon the loftiest mountain
+in the world could have no doubt about it ever after.</p>
+
+<p>How my heart burns within me whenever I get view
+of this great monarch of the North! There it stood,
+revealed from base to summit in all its stupendous size,
+all its glistening majesty. I would far rather climb
+that mountain than own the richest gold-mine in Alaska.
+Yet how its apparent nearness mocks one; what time
+and cost and labour are involved even in approaching its
+base with food and equipment for an attempt to reach
+its summit! How many schemes I have pondered and
+dreamed these seven years past for climbing it! Some
+day time and opportunity and resource may serve, please<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226"></a><a href="images/226.png">[226]</a></span>
+God, and I may have that one of my heart's desires; if
+not, still it is good to have seen it from many different
+coigns of vantage, from this side and from that; to have
+felt the awe of its vast swelling bulk, the superb dignity
+of its firm-seated, broad-based uplift to the skies with a
+whole continent for a pedestal; to have gazed eagerly
+and longingly at its serene, untrodden summit, far above
+the eagle's flight, above even the most daring airman's
+venture, and to have desired and hoped to reach it; to
+desire and hope to reach it still.<a name="FNanchor_D_4" id="FNanchor_D_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_D_4" class="fnanchor">[D]</a></p>
+
+<p>Plunging down the steep descent we went for four
+miles, and then after a hearty dinner at the road-house,
+essayed to make twenty-one miles more to the Hot
+Springs. But night fell again with a number of miles
+yet to come, the recent storm had furrowed the trail
+diagonally with hard windrows of snow that overturned
+the sled repeatedly and formed an hindrance that grew
+greater and greater, and again we made camp in the dark,
+short of our expected goal.</p>
+
+<p>Of late I had been carrying an hip ring, a rubber ring
+inflated by the breath that is the best substitute for a
+mattress. The ring had been left behind at Rampart,
+and so dependent does one grow on the little luxuries and
+ameliorations one permits oneself that these two nights
+in camp were almost sleepless for lack of it.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE HOT SPRINGS</div>
+
+<p>Three hours more brought us to the spacious hotel,
+with its forty empty rooms, that had been put up, out of
+all sense or keeping, in a wild, plunging attempt to "exploit"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227"></a><a href="images/227.png">[227]</a></span>
+the Hot Springs and make a great "health resort"
+of the place. The hot water had been piped a quarter of
+a mile or so to spacious swimming-baths in the hotel; all
+sorts of expense had been lavished on the place; but it
+had been a failure from the first, and has since been closed
+and has fallen into dilapidation. The bottoms have
+dropped out of the cement baths, the paper hangs drooping
+from the damp walls, the unsubstantial foundations
+have yielded until the floors are heaved like the waves
+of the sea.<a name="FNanchor_E_5" id="FNanchor_E_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_E_5" class="fnanchor">[E]</a> But at this time the hotel was still maintained
+and we stayed there, and its wide entrance-hall
+and lobby formed an excellent place to gather the inhabitants
+of the little town for Divine service&mdash;again the
+only opportunity in the year.</p>
+
+<p>What a curious phenomenon thermal springs constitute
+in these parts! Here is a series of patches of ground,
+free from snow, while all the country has been covered
+two or three feet deep these four months; green with
+vegetation, while all living things elsewhere are wrapped
+in winter sleep. Here is open, rushing water, throwing
+up clouds of steam that settles upon everything as dense
+hoar frost, while all other water is held in the adamantine
+fetters of the ice. Where does that constant unfailing
+stream of water at 110&deg; Fahrenheit come from? Where
+does it get its heat? I know of half a dozen such thermal
+springs in Alaska,&mdash;one far away above the Arctic Circle
+between the upper courses of the Kobuk and the Noatak
+Rivers, that I have heard strange tales about from the
+Esquimaux and that I have always wanted to visit.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228"></a><a href="images/228.png">[228]</a></span></p>
+<p>Whenever I see this gush of hot water in the very midst
+of the ice and the snow, I am reminded of my surprise on
+the top of Mount Tacoma. We had climbed some eight
+thousand feet of snow and were shivering in a bitter wind
+on the summit, yet when the hand was thrust in a cleft
+of the rock it had to be withdrawn by reason of the heat.
+One knows about the internal fire of some portion of the
+earth's mass, of course, but such striking manifestations
+of it, such bold irruption of heat in the midst of the
+kingdom of the cold, must always bring a certain astonishment
+except to those who take everything as a matter
+of course.</p>
+
+<p>It is evident that this hot water, capable of distribution
+over a considerable area of land, makes an exceedingly
+favourable condition for subarctic agriculture, and
+a great deal of ground has been put under cultivation with
+large yield of potatoes and cabbage and other vegetables.
+But the limitations of Alaskan conditions have shorn all
+profit from the enterprise. There is no considerable market
+nearer than Fairbanks, almost two hundred miles
+away by the river. If the potatoes are allowed to remain
+in the ground until they are mature, there is the greatest
+danger of the whole crop freezing while on the way to
+market, and in any case the truck-farmers around Fairbanks
+find that their proximity to the consumer more
+than offsets the advantage of the Hot Springs.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">ARCTIC AGRICULTURE</div>
+
+<p>When the great initial difficulties of farming in Alaska
+are overcome, when the moss is removed and the ground,
+frozen solidly to bedrock, is broken and thawed, when its
+natural acidity is counteracted by the application of some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229"></a><a href="images/229.png">[229]</a></span>
+alkali, and its reeking surface moisture is drained away;
+when after three or four years' cultivation it begins to
+make some adequate return of roots and greens, there
+remains the constant difficulty of a market. Around
+the mining settlements and during the uncertain life of
+the mining settlements, truck-farming pays very well,
+but it could easily be overdone so that prices would fall
+below the point of any profit at all. Transportation is
+expensive, and rates for a short haul on the rivers are
+high, out of all proportion to rates for the long haul
+from the outside, so that potatoes from the Pacific coast
+are brought in and sold in competition with the native-grown.
+And despite the protestations of the agricultural
+experimental stations, the outside or "chechaco"
+potato has the advantage of far better quality than that
+grown in Alaska. Tastes differ, and a man may speak
+only as he finds. For my part, I have eaten native
+potatoes raised in almost every section of interior Alaska,
+and have been glad to get them, but I have never eaten
+a native potato that compared favourably with any good
+"outside" potato. The native potato is commonly wet
+and waxy; I have never seen a native potato that would
+burst into a glistening mass of white flour, or that had
+the flavour of a really good potato.</p>
+
+<p>There has been much misconception about the interior
+of Alaska that obtains yet in some quarters, although
+there is no excuse for it now. Not only the
+interior of Alaska, but all land at or near sea-level in
+the arctic regions that is not under glacial ice-caps, is
+snow free and surface-thawed in the summer and has a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230"></a><a href="images/230.png">[230]</a></span>
+luxuriant vegetation. The polar ox (Sverdrup's protest
+against the term "musk-ox" should surely prevail) ranges
+in great bands north of the 80th parallel and must secure
+abundant food; and when Peary determined the
+insularity of Greenland he found its most northerly point
+a mass of verdure and flowers.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt potatoes and turnips, lettuce and cabbage,
+could be raised anywhere in those regions; the intensity
+of the season compensates for its shortness; the sun is in
+the heavens twenty-four hours in the day, and all living
+things sprout and grow with amazing rankness and
+celerity under the strong compulsion of his continuous
+rays. Spring comes literally with a shout and a rush here
+in Alaska, and must cry even louder and stride even
+faster in the "ultimate climes of the pole." If the possibility
+of raising garden-truck and tubers constitutes a
+"farming country," then all the arctic regions not actually
+under glacial ice may be so classed.</p>
+
+<p>Any one who visits the Koyukuk may see monster
+turnips and cabbages raised at Coldfoot, near the 68th
+parallel; from Sir William Parry's description we may
+feel quite sure that vegetables of size and excellence
+might be raised at the head of Bushnan's Cove of Melville
+Island, on the 75th parallel; he called it "an arctic paradise";
+Greely reported "grass twenty-four inches high
+and many butterflies" in the interior of Grinnell Land
+under the 82d parallel; and if gold were ever discovered
+on the north coast of Greenland one might quite expect
+to hear that some enterprising Swede was growing turnips
+and cabbages at Cape Morris Jessup above the 83d
+parallel, and getting a dollar a pound for them.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231"></a><a href="images/231.png">[231]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In favourable seasons and in favourable spots of interior
+Alaska certain early varieties of Siberian oats and rye
+have been matured, and it stands to the credit of the
+Experiment Station at Rampart that a little wheat was
+once ripened there, though it took thirteen months from
+the sowing to the ripening. When the rest of the world
+fills up so that economic pressure demands the utilisation
+of all earth that will produce any sort of food, it
+may be that large tracts in Alaska will be put under the
+plough; but it is hard to believe that nine tenths of all
+this vast country will ever be other than wild waste land.
+At present the farming population is strictly an appendage
+of the mining population, and the mining population
+rather diminishes than increases.</p>
+
+<p>Your health resort that no one will resort to is a dull
+place at best and a poor dependence for merchandising,
+so that the little town of Hot Springs is fortunate in
+having some mining country around it to fall back upon
+for its trade. We lay an extra day there, waiting for
+the stage from Fairbanks to break trail for us through
+the heavy, drifted snow, having had enough of trail breaking
+for a while. At midnight the stage came, two days
+late, and its coming caused me as keen a sorrow and as
+great a loss as I have had since I came to Alaska.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">NANOOK'S DEATH</div>
+
+<p>We knew naught of it until the next morning, when,
+breakfast done and the sled lashed, we were ready to
+hitch the dogs and depart. They had been put in the
+horse stable for there was no dog house; the health
+resorter, actual or prospective, is not likely to be a dog
+man one supposes; but they were loose in the morning
+and came to the call, all but one&mdash;Nanook. Him we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232"></a><a href="images/232.png">[232]</a></span>
+sought high and low, and at last Arthur found him, but
+in what pitiful case! He dragged himself slowly and
+painfully along, his poor bowels hanging down in the
+outer hide of his belly, fearfully injured internally, done
+for and killed already. It was not difficult to account for
+it. When the horses came in at midnight, one of them
+had kicked the dog and ruptured his whole abdomen.</p>
+
+<p>There was no use in inquiring whose fault it was. The
+dogs should have been chained; so much was our fault.
+But it was hard to resist some bitter recollection that before
+this "exploitation" of the springs, when there was a modest
+road-house instead of a mammoth hotel, there had been
+kennels for dogs instead of nothing but stables for horses.</p>
+
+<p>I doubt if all the veterinary surgeons in the world
+could have saved the dog, but there was none to try;
+and there was only one thing to do, hate it as we might.
+Arthur and I were grateful that neither of us had to do
+it, for the driver of the mail stage, who had some compunctions
+of conscience, I think, volunteered to save us
+the painful duty. "I know how you feel," he said slowly
+and kindly; "I've got a dog I think a heap of myself,
+but that dog ain't nothin' to me an' I'll do it for you."</p>
+
+<p>Nanook knew perfectly well that it was all over
+with him. Head and tail down, the picture of resigned
+dejection, he stood like a petrified dog. And when I
+put my face down to his and said "Good-bye," he licked
+me for the first time in his life. In the six years I had
+owned him and driven him I had never felt his tongue
+before, though I had always loved him best of the bunch.
+He was not the licking kind.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233"></a><a href="images/233.png">[233]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We hitched up our diminished team and pulled out,
+for we had thirty miles to make in the short daylight and
+we had lost time already; and as we crossed the bridge
+over the steaming slough we saw the man going slowly
+down to the river with the dog, the chain in one hand, a
+gun in the other. My eyes filled with tears; I could not
+look at Arthur nor he at me as I passed forward to run
+ahead of the team, and I was glad when I realised that
+we had drawn out of ear-shot.</p>
+
+<p>All day as I trudged or trotted now on snow-shoes and
+now off, as the trail varied in badness, that dog was in
+my mind and his loss upon my heart, the feel of his tongue
+upon my cheek. It takes the close companionship between
+a man and his dogs in this country, travelling all
+the winter long, winter after winter, through the bitter
+cold and the storm and darkness, through the long, pleasant
+days of the warm sunshine of approaching spring,
+sharing labour and sharing ease, sharing privation and
+sharing plenty; it takes this close companionship to make
+a man appreciate a dog. As I reckoned it up, Nanook
+had fallen just short of pulling my sled ten thousand miles.
+If he had finished this season with me he would have
+done fully that, and I had intended to pension him after
+this winter, to provide that so long as he lived he should
+have his fish and rice every day. Some doubt I had
+had of old Lingo lasting through the winter, but none of
+Nanook, and they were the only survivors of my original
+team.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE TALKING DOG</div>
+
+<p>Nanook was in as good spirits as ever I knew him that
+last night, coming to me and plumping his huge fore paws<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234"></a><a href="images/234.png">[234]</a></span>
+down on my moccasins, challenging me to play the game
+of toe treading that he loved; and whenever he beat
+me at it he would seize my ankle in his jaws and make
+me hop around on one foot, to his great delight. He
+was my talking dog. He had more different tones in his
+bark than any other dog I ever knew. He never came
+to the collar in the morning, he never was released from
+it at night, without a cheery "bow-wow-wow." And
+we never stopped finally to make camp but he lifted up
+his voice. There was something curious about that.
+Only two nights before, when we had been unable to
+reach the health resort owing to wind-hardened drifts
+right across the trail that overturned the heavy sled again
+and again, swing the gee pole as one would, and had
+stopped several times in the growing dusk to inspect a
+spot that seemed to promise a camping place, Arthur
+had remarked that Nanook never spoke until the spot
+was reached on which we decided to pitch the tent.
+What faculty he had of recognising a good place, of seeing
+that both green spruce and dry spruce were there in
+sufficient quantity, I do not know&mdash;or whether he got his
+cue from the tones of our voice&mdash;but he never failed to
+give tongue when the stop was final and never opened
+his mouth when it was but tentative.</p>
+
+<p>I could almost tell the nature of any disturbance that
+arose from the tone of Nanook's bark. Was it some stray
+Indian dog prowling round the camp; was it the distant
+howling of wolves; was it the approach of some belated
+traveller&mdash;there was a distinct difference in the way he
+announced each. I well remember the new note that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235"></a><a href="images/235.png">[235]</a></span>
+came into his passionate protest when he was chained
+to a stump at the reindeer camp, and the foolish creatures
+streamed all over the camping-ground that night. To
+have them right beside him and yet be unable to reach
+them, to have them brushing him with their antlers while
+he strained helplessly at the chain, was adding insult to
+injury. And he kept me awake over it all night and told
+me about it at intervals all next day.</p>
+
+<p>The coat that dog had was the heaviest and thickest
+I ever saw. On his back the long hair parted in the middle,
+and underneath the hair was fur and underneath the
+fur was wool. He was an outdoors dog strictly. It was
+only in the last year or two that he could be induced voluntarily
+to enter a house; he seemed, like Mowgli, to
+have a suspicion of houses. And if he did come in he had
+no respect for the house at all. When first I had him he
+would dig and scratch out of a dog-house on the coldest
+night, if he could, and lay himself down comfortably on
+the snow. Cold meant little to him. Fifty, sixty, seventy
+below zero, all night long at such temperatures he
+would sleep quite contentedly. The only difference I
+could see that these low temperatures made to him was
+an increasing dislike to be disturbed. When he had
+carefully tucked his nose between his paws and adjusted
+his tail over all, he had gone to bed, and to make him
+take his nose out of its nest and uncurl himself was like
+throwing the clothes off a sleeping man. He never dug
+a hole for himself in the snow. I never saw a dog do
+that yet. In my opinion that is one of the nature-faker's
+stories. A dog lies in snow just as he lies in sand, with the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236"></a><a href="images/236.png">[236]</a></span>
+same preliminary turn-round-three-times that has been
+so much speculated about. We always make a bed for
+them, when it is very cold, by cutting and stripping a few
+spruce boughs, and they highly appreciate such a couch
+and will growl and fight if another dog try to take it.
+They need more food and particularly they need more
+fat when they lie out at extreme low temperatures, and
+we seek to increase that element in their rations by adding
+tallow or bacon or bear's-grease&mdash;or seal oil&mdash;or whatever
+oleaginous substance we can come by.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">CANINE CHARACTER</div>
+
+<p>He was a most independent dog was Nanook, a thoroughly
+bad dog, as one would say in some use of that
+term&mdash;a thief who had no shame in his thievery but
+rather gloried in it. If you left anything edible within his
+ingenious and comprehensive reach he regarded it as a
+challenge. There comes to me a ludicrous incident that
+concerned a companion of one winter journey. He had
+carefully prepared a lunch and had wrapped it neatly in
+paper, and he placed it for a moment on the sled while he
+turned to put his scarf about him. But in that moment
+Nanook saw it and it was gone. Through the snow, over
+the brush, in and out amongst the stumps the chase proceeded,
+until Nanook was finally caught and my companion
+recovered most of the paper, for the dog had
+wolfed the grub as he ran. He would stand and take
+any licking you offered and never utter a sound but give
+a bark of defiance when you were done, and he would
+bear you no ill will in the world and repeat his offence
+at the next opportunity. Yet so absurdly sensitive was
+he in other matters of his person that the simple operation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237"></a><a href="images/237.png">[237]</a></span>
+of clipping the hair from between his toes, to prevent the
+"balling-up" of the snow, took two men to perform, one
+to sit on the dog and the other to ply the scissors, and
+was accompanied always with such howls and squeals as
+would make a hearer think we were flaying him alive.</p>
+
+<p>Nanook's acquaintance with horses began in Fairbanks
+the first season I owned him, before I had had the
+harness upon him, when he was rising two years old.
+The dogs and I were staying at the hospital we had just
+established&mdash;because in those days there was nowhere
+else to stay&mdash;waiting for the winter. One of the mining
+magnates of the infancy of the camp (broken and dead
+long since; Bret Harte's lines, "Busted himself in White
+Pine and blew out his brains down in 'Frisco," often
+occur to me as the sordid histories of to-day repeat those
+of fifty years ago) had imported a saddle-horse and, as
+the mild days of that charming autumn still deferred the
+snow, he used to ride out past the hospital for a canter.</p>
+
+<p>The dog had learned to lift the latch of the gate of the
+hospital yard with his nose and get out, and when I put a
+wedge above the latch for greater security he learned also
+to circumvent that precaution. And whenever the horse
+and his rider passed, Nanook would open the gate and
+lead the whole pack in a noisy pursuit that changed the
+canter to a run and brought us natural but mortifying
+remonstrance.</p>
+
+<p>The rider had just passed and the dogs had pursued
+as usual, and I had rushed out and recalled them with
+difficulty. Nanook I had by the collar. Dragging him
+into the yard, shutting the gate, and putting in the wedge,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238"></a><a href="images/238.png">[238]</a></span>
+I picked up a stick and gave him a few sharp blows with
+it. Then flinging him off, I said: "Now, you stay in here;
+I'll give you a sound thrashing if you do that again!" I
+was just getting acquainted with him then. The moment
+I loosed his collar the dog went deliberately to the gate,
+stood on his hind legs while he pulled out the wedge with
+his teeth, lifted the latch with his nose and swung open
+the gate, and standing in the midst turned round and
+said to me: "Bow-<i>wow</i>-wow-wow-wow-<i>wow</i>!" It was
+so pointed that a passer-by, who had paused to see the
+proceedings and was leaning on the fence, said to me:
+"Well, you know where <i>you</i> can go to. That's the doggonedest
+dog I ever seen!"</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">PARTNERS</div>
+
+<p>It was a pleasure to come back to Nanook after any
+long absence&mdash;a pleasure I was used to look forward to.
+There was no special fawning or demonstration of affection;
+he was not that kind; that I might have from any
+of the others; but from none but Nanook the bark of
+welcome with my particular inflection in it that no one
+else ever got. "Well, well; here's the boss again; glad to
+see you back"; that was about all it said. For he was
+a most independent dog and took to himself an air of
+partnership rather than subjection. Any man can make
+friends with any dog if he will, there is no question
+about that, but it takes a long time and mutual trust
+and mutual forbearance and mutual appreciation to
+make a partnership. Not every dog is fit to be partner
+with a man; nor every man, I think, fit to be partner
+with a dog.</p>
+
+<p>Well, that long partnership was dissolved by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239"></a><a href="images/239.png">[239]</a></span>
+horse's hoof and I was sore for its dissolution. There was
+none left now that could remember the old days of the
+team save Lingo, and he grew crusty and somewhat
+crabbed. He was still the guardian of the sled, still the
+insatiable hand-shaker, but he grew more and more unsocial
+with his mates, and we heard his short, sharp, angry
+double bark at night more frequently than we used to. He
+reminded me of the complaining owl in Gray's "Elegy."
+He resented any dog even approaching the sled, resented
+the dogs moving about at all to disturb his "ancient solitary
+reign."</p>
+
+<p>His work was well-nigh done, and old Lingo had honestly
+earned his rest. With the end of this winter he would
+enter upon the easy old age that I had designed for both
+of them. Lingo had never failed me; never let his traces
+slack if he could keep them taut, never in his life had whip
+laid on his back to make him pull; a faithful old work
+dog for whom I had a hearty respect and regard. But
+he never found his way to my heart as Nanook did. I
+loved Nanook, and had lost something personal out of my
+life in losing him. There are other dogs that I am fond
+of&mdash;better dogs in some ways that either Nanook or
+Lingo, swifter certainly&mdash;but I think I shall never have
+two dogs again that have meant as much to me as these
+two. All the other dogs were of the last two years and
+thought they belonged to Arthur, who fed them and
+handled them most. But Nanook and Lingo had seen
+boys come and boys go, and they knew better.</p>
+
+<p>Six years is not very much of a man's life, but it is
+all a dog's life; all his effective working life. Nanook had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240"></a><a href="images/240.png">[240]</a></span>
+given it all to me, willingly, gladly. He pulled so freely
+because he loved to pull. He delighted in the winter, in
+the snow and the cold; rejoiced to be on the trail, rejoiced
+to work. When we made ready to depart after
+a few days at a mission or in a town, Nanook was beside
+himself with joy. He would burst forth into song as he
+saw the preparations in hand, would run all up and down
+the gamut of his singular flexible voice, would tell as
+plainly to all around as though he spoke it in English and
+Indian and Esquimau that the inaction had irked him,
+that he was eager to be gone again.</p>
+
+<p>Well, he was dead; as fine a dog as ever lived; as
+faithful and intelligent a creature as any man ever had,
+not of human race, for servant, companion, and friend.
+And I thought the more of myself that he had put his
+tongue to my cheek when I said good-bye to him.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER</div>
+
+<p>Here on the Tanana was one of the most interesting
+original characters of the many in the land: an old inhabitant
+of Alaska and of the Northwest who had followed
+many avocations and was now settled down on the
+river bank, with a steamboat wood-yard, a road-house
+for the entertainment of occasional travellers, and a little
+stock of trade goods chiefly for Indians of the vicinity.
+A round, fat, pursy man he was, past the middle life,
+with a twinkling eye and a bristling moustache, and a
+most amazing knack of picking up new words and using
+them incorrectly. He had fallen out with the great
+trading company of Alaska and did almost all his purchasing
+from a "mail-order house" in Chicago, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241"></a><a href="images/241.png">[241]</a></span>
+enormous quarto catalogue on the flimsiest thin paper
+issued by that establishment being his chief book of
+reference and his choice continual reading. He would
+declaim by the hour on the iniquitous prices that prevail
+in the interior and had the quotations of prices of every
+conceivable merchandise from his <i>vade mecum</i> at his
+fingers' ends.</p>
+
+<p>But his chief passion of the past two or three years
+was photography, in the which he had made but little
+progress, despite considerable expenditures; and he had
+come to the conclusion about the time of our visit that
+what he needed was a fine lens, although, as a matter of
+fact, he had never learned to use his cheap one. He
+had recently become acquainted with sensitive film and
+had ordered a supply. By a transposition of letters,
+which the nature of the substance doubtless confirmed
+in his mind when it arrived, he always spoke of these
+convenient strips of celluloid as "flims," and was just
+now most eloquently indignant that, although he had
+broken utterly with the Northern Commercial Company
+and refused to trade with them at all, the supply of
+"flims" he had received from the mail-order house were
+labelled "N. C." "Them blamed monopolists has
+cornered the flims," he exclaimed, and was hardly persuaded
+that the letters signified "non-curling" and did
+not darkly hint at a conspiracy in restraint of trade.</p>
+
+<p>He produced and displayed a number of pieces of apparatus
+of a generally useless kind which he had ordered
+on the strength of their much advertising, and he observed
+sententiously, "We <i>armatures</i> get badly imposed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242"></a><a href="images/242.png">[242]</a></span>
+upon." Here were patent gimcrack printing devices,
+although he had scarce anything worth printing; all
+sorts of atrocious fancy borders with which he sought in
+vain to embellish out-of-focus under-exposures; orthochromatic
+filters and colour screens with which he was
+eliminating undesirable rays, although the chief thing
+his negatives lacked was light of any kind. His soiled
+and stained development trays were scattered about a
+large table amidst dirty cups and saucers and plates and
+dishes, while at the other end of the table, surmounting
+a pile of thumbed and greasy magazines and newspapers,
+lay the monstrous mail-order catalogue with pencilled
+indications of further apparatus to be purchased.</p>
+
+<p>But his zeal and enthusiasm and resolute riding of his
+hobby were very attractive. If he ever gets out of his
+head the notion that success depends upon apparatus he
+will doubtless become a photographer of sorts. Enthusiasm
+of any kind other than mining and "mushing"
+enthusiasm is so rare in this land that it is welcome
+even when it seems wasted. He had recently
+discovered the wax match in his catalogue, and as a
+parting gift he presented me with a box of "them
+there wax <i>vespers</i> which beats the sulphur match all to
+thunder."</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE SULPHUR MATCH</div>
+
+<p>But they do not. Nothing in this country can take
+the place of the old-fashioned sulphur match, long since
+banished from civilised communities, and the sulphur
+match is the only match a man upon the trail will employ.
+Manufactured from blocks of wood without complete
+severance, so that the ends of the matches are still held<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243"></a><a href="images/243.png">[243]</a></span>
+together at the bottom in one solid mass, it is easy to
+strip one off at need and strike it upon the block. A
+block of a hundred such matches will take up much less
+space than fifty of any other kind of match, and the
+blocks may be freely carried in any as they are commonly
+carried in every pocket without fear of accidental ignition.
+The only fire producer that it is worth while supplementing
+the sulphur match with is the even older-fashioned
+flint and steel, which to a man who smokes
+is a convenience in a wind. All the modern alcohol and
+gasoline pocket devices are extinguished by the lightest
+puff of wind, but the tinder, once ignited, burns the
+fiercer for the blast. With dry, shredded birch-bark I
+have made a fire upon occasion from the flint and steel.
+One resource may here be mentioned, since we are on
+the subject, which is always carried in the hind-sack of
+my sled against difficulty in fire making. It is a tin
+tobacco-box filled with strips of cotton cloth cut to the
+size of the box and the whole saturated with kerosene.
+One or two of these strips will help very greatly in kindling
+a fire when damp twigs or shavings are all that are at
+hand. A few camphor balls (the ordinary "moth balls")
+will serve equally well; and there may come a time, on
+any long journey, when the forethought that has provided
+such aid will be looked back upon with very great
+satisfaction.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The mail trail from Tanana to Fairbanks touches the
+Tanana River only at one point, a few miles beyond the
+Hot Springs; but, as we wished to visit Nenana, we had to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244"></a><a href="images/244.png">[244]</a></span>
+leave the mail trail after two days more of uneventful
+travel and strike out to the river and over its surface for
+seventeen or eighteen miles.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">A NOTABLE GENTLEWOMAN</div>
+
+<p>Nenana is a native village situated on the left bank of
+the Tanana, a little above the confluence of the Nenana
+River with that stream, and we have established an
+important and flourishing school there which receives its
+forty pupils from many points on the Yukon and Tanana
+Rivers. None but thoroughly sound and healthy children
+of promise, full natives or half-breeds, are received
+at the school, and we seek to give both boys and girls
+opportunity for the cultivation of the native arts and
+for some of the white man's industrial training, in addition
+to the ordinary work of the schoolroom. The school
+was started and had the good fortune of its first four
+years' life under the care of a notable gentlewoman,
+Miss Annie Cragg Farthing, who was yet at its head at
+the time of this visit, but who died suddenly, a martyr
+to her devotion to the children, a year later; and a great
+Celtic cross in concrete, standing high on the bluff across
+the river, now marks the spot of her own selection&mdash;a
+spot that gives a fine view of Denali&mdash;where her body
+rests, and also the Alaskan mission's sense of the extraordinary
+value of her life.</p>
+
+<p>It would be easy to give striking instances of the potency
+and stretch of this remarkable woman's influence
+amongst the native people, an influence&mdash;strange as it
+may sound to those who deem any half-educated, under-bred
+white woman competent to take charge of an Indian
+school&mdash;due as much to her wide culture, her perfect dignity<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245"></a><a href="images/245.png">[245]</a></span>
+and self-possession, her high breeding, as to the love
+and consecrated enthusiasm of her character. It is no
+exaggeration to say that Miss Farthing's work has left
+a mark broad and deep upon the Indian race of this whole
+region that will never be wiped out.</p>
+
+<p>There is no greater pleasure than to spend a few days
+at this school; to foregather again with so many of the
+hopeful young scamps that one has oneself selected here
+and there and brought to the place; to mark the improvement
+in them, the taming and gentling, the drawing out
+of the sweet side of the nature that is commonly buried
+to the casual observer in the rudeness and shyness of savage
+childhood. To romp with them, to tell them tales
+and jingles, to get insensibly back into their familiar confidence
+again, to say the evening prayers with them, to
+join with their clear, fresh voices in the hymns and chants,
+is indeed to rejuvenate oneself. And to go away believing
+that real strength of character is developing, that
+real preparation is making for an Indian race that shall
+be a better Indian race and not an imitation white race,
+is the cure for the discouragement that must sometimes
+come to all those who are committed heart and soul to
+the cause of the Alaskan native. School-teachers, it
+would seem, ought never to grow old; they should suck
+in new youth continually from the young life around
+them; and children are far and away the most interesting
+things in the world, more interesting even than dogs and
+great mountains.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">CHIVALROUS INDIAN YOUTH</div>
+
+<p>All the boys in the school, I think, swarmed across the
+river with us when we started away early in the morning,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246"></a><a href="images/246.png">[246]</a></span>
+and the elder ones ran with the sled along the portage,
+mile after mile, until I turned them back lest they be late
+for school.</p>
+
+<p>But when they were gone, still I saw them, saw them
+gathered round the grey-haired lady I had left, fawning
+upon her with their eyes, their hearts filled with as true
+chivalry as ever animated knight or champion of the olden
+time. Tall, upstanding fellows of sixteen or seventeen,
+clean-limbed and broad-shouldered, wild-run all their
+lives; hunters, with a tale of big game to the credit of
+some of them would make an English sportsman envious;
+unaccustomed to any restraint at all and prone to chafe
+at the slightest; unaccustomed to any respect for women,
+to any of the courtesies of life, I saw them fly at a word,
+at a look, to do her bidding, saw cap snatched from head
+if they encountered her about the buildings, saw them
+jump up and hold open the door if she moved to pass out
+of a room, saw the eager devotion that would have served
+her upon bended knee had they thought it would please
+her. It was wonderful, the only thing of quite its kind
+I had ever seen in my life.</p>
+
+<p>When early in the school's history an old medicine-man
+at Nenana had been roused to animosity by her
+refusal to countenance an offensive Indian custom touching
+the adolescent girls, and had defiantly announced his
+intention to make medicine against her, I can see her
+now, her staff in her hand, attended by two or three of
+her devoted youths, invading the midnight pavilion of
+the conjurer, in the very midst of his conjurations, tossing
+his paraphernalia outside, laying her staff smartly across<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247"></a><a href="images/247.png">[247]</a></span>
+the shoulders of the trembling shaman, and driving the
+gaping crew helter-skelter before her, their awe of the
+witchcraft overawed by her commanding presence. I
+make no apology that I thought of the scourge of small
+cords that was used on an occasion in the temple at
+Jerusalem, when I heard of it. It gave a shrewder blow
+to the lingering tyrannical superstition of the medicine-man
+than decades of preaching and reasoning would have
+done. No man living could have done the thing with
+like effect, nor any woman save one of her complete self-possession
+and natural authority. The younger villagers
+chuckle over the jest of it to this day, and the old witch-doctor
+himself was crouching at her feet and, as one may
+say, eating out of her hand, within the year.</p>
+
+<p>I saw these boys again, in my mind's eye, gone back
+to their homes here and there on the Yukon and the
+Tanana after their two or three years at this school,
+carrying with them some better ideal of human life than
+they could ever get from the elders of the tribe, from the
+little sordid village trader, from most of the whites they
+would be thrown with, keeping something of the vision of
+gentle womanhood, something of the "unbought grace of
+life," something of the keen sense of truth and honour,
+of the nobility of service, something deeper and stronger
+than mere words of the love of God, which they had
+learned of her whom they all revered; each one, however
+much overflowed again by the surrounding waters of
+mere animal living, tending a little shrine of sweeter and
+better things in his heart.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">LONG-REMEMBERED TEACHING</div>
+
+<p>Here, three years after the visit and the journey narrated,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248"></a><a href="images/248.png">[248]</a></span>
+when these words are written with diaries and letters
+and memoranda around me, I am just come from
+a long native powwow, a meeting of all the Indians of a
+village for the annual election of a village council, important
+in the evolution of that self-government we covet for
+these people, but undeniably tedious. And, because at
+our missions we seek to associate with us every force that
+looks to the betterment of the natives, we had invited
+the new government teacher, a lady of long experience in
+Indian schools, to be present. She had sat patiently
+through the protracted meeting, and at its close, when
+she rose to go, a young Indian man jumped up and held
+her fur cloak for her and put it gently about her shoulders.
+When she had thanked him she asked with a smile:
+"Where did you learn to be so polite?" A gleam came
+into the fellow's eyes, then he dropped them and replied,
+"Miss Farthing taught me."</p>
+
+<p>Two days before, returning from a journey, I had
+spent the night at a road-house kept by a white man
+married to an Indian woman. There was excellent yeast
+bread on the table, and good bread is a rare thing in
+Alaska. "Where did you learn to make such good
+bread?" I inquired of the woman. There came the
+same light to her eyes and the same answer to her lips.
+Yet it was nine years ago, long before the school at
+Nenana was started, that this Indian boy and girl had
+been under Miss Farthing's teaching at Circle City.</p>
+
+<p>They tell us there is no longer much place or use for
+gentility in the world, for men and women nurtured and
+refined above the common level; tell us in particular<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249"></a><a href="images/249.png">[249]</a></span>
+that woman is only now emancipating herself from centuries
+of ineffectual nonage, only now entering upon her
+active career.</p>
+
+<p>Yet I am of opinion, from such opportunities to observe
+and compare as my constant travel has given me,
+that the quiet work of this gracious woman of the old
+school, with her dignity that nothing ever invaded and
+her poise that nothing ever disturbed, is perhaps the
+most powerful single influence that has come into the
+lives of the natives of interior Alaska.</p>
+
+<p>Two days brought us past the little native village and
+mission at Chena (which is pronounced Shen-a&#7809;), past the
+little white town of the same name, to Fairbanks, the chief
+town of interior Alaska. Chena is at the virtual head of
+the navigation of the Tanana River and is quite as near
+to the gold-producing creeks as Fairbanks, which latter
+place is not on the Tanana River at all but on a slough,
+impracticable for almost any craft at low water. For
+every topographical reason, from every consideration of
+natural advantage, Chena should have been the river
+port and town of these gold-fields. But Chena was so
+sure of her manifold natural advantages that she became
+unduly confident and grasping. When the traders at
+Fairbanks offered to remove to Chena at the beginning
+of the camp, if the traders at Chena would provide a site,
+the offer was scornfully rejected. "They would have to
+come, anyway, or go out of business." But they did not
+come; rather they put their backs up and fought. And
+because Fairbanks was enterprising and far-sighted, while
+Chena was avaricious and narrow, because Fairbanks<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250"></a><a href="images/250.png">[250]</a></span>
+offered free sites and Chena charged enormously for
+water-front, business went the ten miles up the often
+unnavigable slough and settled there, and by and by built
+a little railway that it might be independent of the uncertain
+boat service. The company came, the courts came,
+the hospital came, the churches came, and Chena woke
+up from its dreams of easy wealth to find itself and its
+manifold natural advantages passed by and ignored and
+the big town firmly established elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>How well I remember the virulent little newspaper
+published at Chena in those days and the bitterness and
+vituperation it used to pour out week by week! One
+wishes a file of it had been preserved. Alaskan journalism
+has presented many amusing curiosities that no one has
+had leisure to collect, but nothing more amusing than
+the frenzy of impotent wrath Chena vented when it saw
+its cherished prospects and opportunities slipping out of
+its grasp for ever.</p>
+
+<div class='poem'>
+"If of all words on tongue or pen,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">The saddest are 'it might have been,'</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Full sad are those we often see,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">It is, but it hadn't ought to be."</span><br />
+</div>
+
+<p>It takes Bret Harte to strike the note for such rivalry
+and such disappointment.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251"></a><a href="images/251.png">[251]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<h3>TANANA CROSSING TO FORTYMILE AND DOWN THE
+YUKON&mdash;A PATRIARCHAL CHIEF&mdash;SWARMING CARIBOU&mdash;EAGLE
+AND FORT EGBERT&mdash;CIRCLE
+CITY AND FORT YUKON</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Fairbanks</span> was a different place in 1910 from the
+centre of feverish trade and feverish vice of 1904-5, when
+the stores were open all day and half the night and the
+dance-halls and gambling dens all night and half the day;
+when the Jews cornered all the salt and all the sugar in
+the camp and the gamblers all the silver and currency;
+when the curious notion prevailed that in some mysterious
+way general profligacy was good for business, and the
+Commercial Club held an indignation meeting upon a
+threat of closing down the public gaming and refusing
+liquor licences to the dance-halls, and voted unanimously
+in favour of an "open town"; when a diamond star was
+presented to the "chief of police" by the enforced contributions
+of the prostitutes; when the weekly gold-dust
+from the clean-ups on the creeks came picturesquely into
+town escorted by horsemen armed to the teeth. The outward
+and visible signs of the Wild West are gone; the
+dance-halls and gambling tables are a thing of the past;
+the creeks are all connected with Fairbanks by railway
+and telephone; an early closing movement has prevailed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252"></a><a href="images/252.png">[252]</a></span>
+in the shops; and the local choral society is lamenting
+the customary dearth of tenors for its production of
+"The Messiah."</p>
+
+<p>Despite the steady decline in the gold output of late
+years, a drop of from twenty millions down to four or five,
+there is little visible decay in its trade, and despite
+stampedes to new diggings all over Alaska, there is no
+marked visible diminution in its population, though as a
+matter of fact both must have largely fallen off. The
+thing that more than any other has sustained the spirits
+and retained the presence of the business men is the
+expectation that seems to grow brighter and brighter, of
+the development of a quartz camp now that the placers
+are being exhausted. And in that hope lies the chance of
+Fairbanks to become the one permanent considerable
+town of interior Alaska. It is a substantial place, with
+good business houses and many comfortable homes electric-lit,
+steam-heated, well protected against fire&mdash;better
+than against flood&mdash;and, though it does not display the
+style and luxury of the palmy days of Nome, it has amenities
+enough to make disinterested visitors and passers-by
+wish that its hard-rock hopes may be realised.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">FAIRBANKS</div>
+
+<p>The little log church that is still, as a local artist
+put it, "the only thing in Fairbanks worth making a
+picture of," no longer stands open all day and all night
+as the town's library and reading-room, but has withdrawn
+into decorous Sabbath use in favour of the commodious
+public library built by a Philadelphia churchman;
+the hospital adjoining it, that for two or three years cared
+for all the sick of the camp, is supplemented by another<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253"></a><a href="images/253.png">[253]</a></span>
+and a larger across the slough; young birch-trees have been
+successfully planted all along the principal streets, and
+the front yards everywhere are ablaze with flowers the
+summer through. You may eat hot-house lettuce and
+radishes in March; hot-house strawberries (at about ten
+cents apiece) in July and August; while common outdoor
+garden-truck of all kinds is plentiful and good in its short
+season.</p>
+
+<p>We had another canine misfortune while we lay there.
+Doc, one of our leaders, got his chain twisted around
+his foot the night before we were to leave, and, in pulling
+to free it, stopped the circulation of the blood and the
+foot froze. It was as hard as wood and sounded like
+wood when it hit the sidewalks, from which the snow had
+been cleared, as the dog came limping along. An hour's
+soaking in cold water drew the frost out of the foot, and
+we swathed it in cotton saturated with carron oil, upon
+which it swelled so greatly that it was impossible to tell
+the extent of the injury or to determine whether or not
+the dog would ever be of use again. A kindly nurse at
+the hospital undertook his care, and we left him behind.
+One does not buy a dog so late in the season, with all the
+idle summer to feed him through, if any shift can be
+made to avoid it, and there was a Great Dane pup at
+the Salchaket, forty miles away, that I might pick up
+as I passed and perhaps make some use of for the remainder
+of the winter.</p>
+
+<p>That mission was the next stop on our journey, and
+we reached it over the level mail trail, the chief winter
+highway of Alaska, connecting Fairbanks with Valdez<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254"></a><a href="images/254.png">[254]</a></span>
+on the coast. Three times a week there is a horse stage
+with mail and passengers passing over this trail each way,
+together with much other travel. The Alaska Road
+Commission has lavished large sums of money upon it,
+and the four hundred miles or thereabout is made in a
+week.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE SALCHAKET</div>
+
+<p>A day and a half brought us to the Salchaket, one of
+a chain of missions along the Tanana River, established by
+the energy and zeal of the Reverend Charles Eugene Betticher,
+Jr., during his incumbency at Fairbanks, that have
+already brought a great change for the better in native
+conditions. Five years had elapsed since last I visited
+this tribe, a reconnoitring visit on one of the first steamboats
+that ever went up the Tanana River above Fairbanks,
+and it was a delight to see the new, clean village
+with the little gardens round the cabins, and to note the
+appreciative attitude which the Indians showed. So
+highly do they value the missionary nurse in charge that
+however far afield their hunting may lead them, one of
+their number is sent back every week to see that the
+mission does not lack wood and water and meat; a simple,
+docile, kindly people that one's heart warms to.</p>
+
+<p>This mission was our last outpost to the south. My
+farther journey had for its prime object the visiting of
+the natives of the upper Tanana as far as the Tanana
+Crossing, some two hundred and fifty miles beyond the
+Salchaket, the inquiring into their condition and into
+the desirability of establishing a post amongst them.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE UPPER TANANA</div>
+
+<p>The upper Tanana is probably one of the most difficult
+streams in the world to navigate that can by any stretch<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255"></a><a href="images/255.png">[255]</a></span>
+of the term be called navigable. The great Alaskan
+range begins to approach the Tanana River so soon as
+one gets above Fairbanks. Its prominent peaks, ten
+thousand to twelve thousand feet high, are continually
+in view from one angle to another as one pursues the
+river trail, and come constantly nearer and nearer. All
+the streams that are confluent with the Tanana on its left
+bank are glacial streams draining the high ice of these
+mountains. They come down laden thick with silt, at
+times foaming torrents, at times merely trickling watercourses
+that seam with numerous small runnels the wide
+deltas at their mouths. The tributaries of the right
+bank flow for the most part through heavily wooded
+country, and come out cleanly into the river. So the
+glacial waters form shoals and bars, and the woodland
+waters during freshets pile them high with driftwood.
+Such is the chief characteristic of the upper Tanana; a
+multiplicity of swift, narrow channels amidst bars laden
+with drift. It is subject to sudden rises of great violence;
+the attempt to stem a freshet on the upper Tanana is a
+hair-raising experience as the log of the <i>Pelican</i> would
+show, but does not come within this narrative. Owing
+to the origin of much of its water, the Tanana is often in
+flood in dry, hot seasons, when other rivers run meagrely,
+as well as in times of rain. It cannot be stemmed in
+flood; its shoals deny passage in drouth; there must be
+just the right stage of water to permit its navigation, and
+that stage, "without o'erflowing, full," is not often found
+of duration to serve the voyage after the month of June.</p>
+
+<p>A river difficult to navigate in summer is usually a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256"></a><a href="images/256.png">[256]</a></span>
+river difficult to travel upon in winter, and the upper
+Tanana is notoriously dangerous and treacherous. Scarce
+a winter or a summer that it does not claim victims. It
+is emphatically a "bad river." Therefore, as far as there
+is any travel to speak of, land trails parallel the river.
+Past Richardson where the next night is spent, a decayed
+mining and trading town that dates back to the stampedes
+of 1905-6 when it was thought the upper Tanana would
+prove rich in gold, past Tenderfoot Creek on which the
+discoveries were made, past the mouth of the Big Delta
+with the great bluff on the opposite shore and the rushing
+black water at its foot that never entirely closes all the
+winter, and on the other hand the wide barrens of the
+Big Delta itself giving the whole fine sweep of the Alaskan
+range, we came at length to McCarthy's, the last telegraph
+station on the river,&mdash;for the line strikes across
+country thence to Valdez following the government trail,&mdash;and
+there spent another night, and here we leave the
+government-made trail and take to the river surface and
+the wilderness.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="pleasant" id="pleasant"></a><a href="images/gs292.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs292_th.jpg" width="500" height="341" alt="A pleasant woodland trail." title="A pleasant woodland trail." />
+</a><span class="caption">A pleasant woodland trail.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 312px;"><a name="alaskan" id="alaskan"></a><a href="images/gs293.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs293_th.jpg" width="312" height="500" alt="An Alaskan chief and his henchman." title="An Alaskan chief and his henchman." />
+</a><span class="caption">An Alaskan chief and his henchman.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Twelve miles through the woods along the left bank
+of the river brought us to the aptly named Clearwater
+Creek, a tributary that comes only from the foot-hills
+and carries no glacial water. This stream by reason of
+hot springs runs wide open all the winter and must be
+crossed by a ferry&mdash;a raft on a heavy wire. The man
+who owned the ferry and the house adjacent was gone
+from home, so we proceeded to cross as best we could.
+The raft was so small that first we took the dogs across
+then unloaded the sled and took part of the load, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257"></a><a href="images/257.png">[257]</a></span>
+returned for the remainder and the sled itself. Finally
+a canoe was loaded on the raft and, when it had been
+moored on the side we found it, Arthur paddled himself
+back. It was a strange scene, rafting and paddling a
+canoe in interior Alaska on the 2d of March, with the
+thermometer at -15&deg;. Some eight miles farther along
+the portage trail we came to a little cabin about dusk,
+but disdaining its dirt and darkness we pitched our tent.</p>
+
+<p>Another eighteen miles the next day is noted in my
+diary for pleasant woodland travel and for the particular
+interest of the numerous animal tracks we passed. Here
+a moose had crossed the trail, ploughing through the
+snow like a great cart-horse; here for two or three miles
+a lynx had urgent business in the direction of the Healy
+River. A lynx will always follow a trail if there be one,
+and will pick out the best going on the ice or snow in the
+absence of trail. I once followed a lynx track from the
+head of the Dall River to its mouth, and, save for turning
+aside occasionally to investigate a clump of willows or
+brush, the lynx was an excellent guide. Here were rabbit
+tracks and every now and then the little sharp tracks
+of a squirrel. We stopped for lunch under a tall cottonwood-tree,
+and Arthur pointed out that the trunk, up to
+a high crotch, was all seamed by bear claws. He said
+that the black bear climbed the same tree season after
+season, and told me that, according to the Indians, this
+was chiefly done when first he came from his winter den,&mdash;for
+the purpose of getting his bearings, as the boy suggested
+with a chuckle. A fox, a marten, and a weasel
+had all passed across lately, and of course then came the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258"></a><a href="images/258.png">[258]</a></span>
+exclamation that scarce fails from native lips when a fox
+track is seen: "I wonder if it were a black fox!" A black
+fox means sudden wealth beyond the dreams of avarice
+to an Indian, and any fox track may be the track of a
+black fox.</p>
+
+<p>The end of that portage brought us out on the Tanana
+River opposite the little trading-post at the mouth of
+the Healy&mdash;the last post of any kind we should see.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">INDIAN TRADERS</div>
+
+<p>The trader, by whom we were hospitably entertained,
+had heard of our projected occupation of the upper
+Tanana, and alert to his own interests, was anxious to
+know the plans for the establishment of a mission&mdash;plans
+which were yet all to make. He naturally favoured this
+spot, which it was already plain was quite out of the
+question, but professed his readiness to move to any
+place that we might decide upon, and his entire sympathy
+and co-operation.</p>
+
+<p>The question of the trader, which always arises upon
+the establishment of a new mission site, is an important
+and sometimes a vexatious one, for he wields an influence
+amongst the Indians second only to that of the mission
+itself, and may be either a great help or a great hindrance.
+There is a natural desire to secure a man of character
+for the new post, and at the same time a natural reluctance
+to disturb vested interests and arouse bitter enmity by
+diverting trade. The suggestion has often been made
+that the mission should itself undertake a store in the
+interest of the natives, but those with most experience
+in such matters will agree that it is the wisdom of the
+bishop that sets his face against mission trading. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259"></a><a href="images/259.png">[259]</a></span>
+two offices are so essentially dissimilar as to be almost incompatible
+with one another; either the person in charge
+is a missionary first and a trader afterwards, in which case
+the store suffers, or he is a trader first and a missionary
+afterwards, in which case he is not a missionary at all.
+A clean, sober, and honest trader, content to take his
+time about getting rich, is a blessing to an Indian community.
+There are some such, one thinks, but they are
+not numerous. The profits are large, though the turnover
+is but one a year; the capital required is small; it is a life
+with much leisure; but in the main it attracts only a
+certain class of men.</p>
+
+<p>A band of Indians to whom word of our visit had been
+sent had come down the river this far to meet us and
+escort us, but dog food was scarce and our arrival was
+delayed, and they had been compelled to return to their
+hunting camp whither we must follow them. We were
+now farther up the Tanana River than either of us had
+ever been before; the country had the fascination of a
+new country; every bend of the river held unknown
+possibilities, and the keenness and elation that only the
+penetration of a new country brings were upon the boy
+as well as upon myself.</p>
+
+<p>The river and the mountains were already drawn much
+closer together, and as we pursued our journey upon the
+one we had continual fine views of the other. The going
+was good&mdash;too good&mdash;for much of it was new ice and
+spoke of recent overflow, and all too soon we came upon
+the water. At the mouth of the Johnson River, one of
+the glacial streams, the whole river was overflowed, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260"></a><a href="images/260.png">[260]</a></span>
+we waded for a mile through water that deepened continually
+until there was risk of wetting our load. Then
+we were compelled to take to the woods and to cut a
+portage around the worst and deepest of it, and so passed
+beyond it to good ice and to an empty cabin where we
+spent the night, glad to be sheltered from an exceedingly
+bitter wind that had blown all day and had taken all the
+pleasure out of travel.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE THERMOS BOTTLES</div>
+
+<p>It is in such weather particularly that the thermos
+flasks prove such a boon to the musher. To stop and
+build a fire in the wind means to get chilled through.
+There is no pleasure in it at all, and I would rather push
+on until the day's journey is done. But the native boy
+must have his lunch, and will build a fire in any sort of
+weather and make a pot of tea. The thermos bottle,
+with its boiling-hot cocoa, gives one the stimulation and
+nourishment that are desired without stopping for more
+than a few moments. I have carried a pair of these bottles
+all day at 60&deg; below zero, and, when opened, snow
+had to be put into the cocoa before it was cool enough to
+drink. Of course it is perfectly simple&mdash;all the astonishing
+things are&mdash;but I never open one of those bottles in
+the cold weather and pour out its contents without marvelling
+at it.</p>
+
+<p>We left the river and struck inland towards the foot-hills
+of the Alaskan range, a long, rough journey over a
+trail that had been made by the band that came out to
+the Healy to meet us, and had been travelled no more
+than by their coming and going. The snow in this region
+had been as much lighter than usual as the snow in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261"></a><a href="images/261.png">[261]</a></span>
+the Koyukuk had been heavier. Through the tangle of
+prostrate trunks of a burned-over forest and the dense
+underbrush that follows such a fire, with not enough
+snow to give smooth passage over the obstacles, we made
+our toilsome way, the labour of the dogs calling for the
+continual supplement of the men, one at the gee pole
+and one at the handle-bars. Some twenty miles, perhaps,
+a long day's continuous journey, we pushed laboriously
+into the hills and then pitched our tent; but in a few miles,
+next morning, we had struck the main Indian trail from
+the village near the Tanana Crossing, by which the hunting
+party had come, and what little was left of the journey
+went easily enough until we reached the considerable
+native encampment.</p>
+
+<p>The men were all gone after moose save one half-naked,
+blear-eyed old paralytic, a dreadful creature who
+shambled and hobbled up asking for tobacco. The women
+were expecting us, however, and took the encamping out
+of our hands entirely, setting up the tent, hauling stove
+wood and splitting it up, making our couch of spruce
+boughs, starting a fire, and bringing a plentiful present
+of moose and caribou meat for ourselves and our dogs.
+Nothing could have been kinder than our reception; the
+full hospitality of the wilderness was heaped upon us.
+It was not until dark that the men returned, and we had
+all the afternoon to get acquainted with the women and
+children. Already the chief difficulty we had to encounter
+presented itself. These people did not speak the language
+of the lower Tanana and middle Yukon&mdash;Arthur's
+language&mdash;at all. Their speech had much more affinity<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262"></a><a href="images/262.png">[262]</a></span>
+with the upper Yukon language, and it dawned upon me
+that they were not of the migration that had pushed up
+the Tanana River from the Yukon, as all the natives as
+far as the Salchaket certainly did, were not of that tribe or
+that movement at all, but had come across country by
+the Ketchumstock from the neighbourhood of Eagle&mdash;the
+route we should return to the Yukon by&mdash;and were of the
+Porcupine and Peel River stock. This was certainly a
+surprise; I had deemed all the Tanana River Indians of
+the same extraction and tongue, but the stretch of bad
+water from the Salchaket to the Tanana Crossing was
+evidently the boundary between two peoples.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">CHIEF ISAAC</div>
+
+<p>That night we met Chief Isaac and the principal men
+of his tribe. At first it seemed that such broken English
+as three or four of them had would be our only medium
+of intercourse, but later one was discovered who had
+visited the lower Tanana and the Yukon and who understood
+Arthur indifferently well, and by the double interpretation,
+halting and inefficient, but growing somewhat
+better as we proceeded, it was possible to enter into
+communication. These preliminaries arranged, the chief
+made a set speech of dignity and force. He thanked me
+for coming to them, and regretted he had not been able
+to wait longer at the Healy River to help us to his camp.
+When he was a boy he had been across to the Yukon and
+had seen Bishop Bompas, and had been taught and baptized
+by him, but he was an old man now and he had forgotten
+what he had learned. I was the first minister most
+of his people had ever seen. They heard that Indians
+in other places had mission and school, and they had felt<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263"></a><a href="images/263.png">[263]</a></span>
+sorry a long time that no one came to teach them; for
+they were very ignorant, little children who knew nothing,
+and when they heard a rumour that a mission and school
+would be brought to them their hearts were very glad.
+Wherever we should see fit to "make mission," there he
+and his people would go, and would help build for us and
+help us in every way; but he hoped it would be near Lake
+Mansfield and the Crossing, where most of them lived at
+present. Farther down the river was not so good for
+their hunting and fishing, but they would go wherever
+we said. That was the burden of the chief's speech.</p>
+
+<p>I took a liking to the old man at once. He was evidently
+a chief that was a chief. The chieftainship here
+was plainly not the effete and decaying institution it is
+in many places on the Yukon. He spoke for all his people
+without hesitation or question, and one felt that what
+he said was law amongst them.</p>
+
+<p>There followed for two days an almost continuous
+course of instruction in the elements of the Christian faith
+and Christian morals, all day long and far into the night,
+with no more interval than cooking and eating required.
+In the largest tent of the encampment, packed full of
+men and women, the children wedged in where they could
+get, myself seated on a pile of robes and skins, my interpreters
+at my side, my hearers squatted on the spruce
+boughs of the floor, the instruction went on. As it proceeded,
+the interpretation improved, though it was still
+difficult and clumsy, as speaking through two minds and
+two mouths must always be. Whenever I stopped there
+was urgent request to go on, until at last my voice was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264"></a><a href="images/264.png">[264]</a></span>
+almost gone with incessant use. Over and over the same
+things I went; the cardinal facts of religion&mdash;the Incarnation,
+the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension;
+the cardinal laws of morality&mdash;the prohibition of murder,
+adultery, theft, and falsehood; that something definite
+might be left behind that should not be lost in the vagueness
+of general recollection, and always with the insistence
+that this was God's world and not the devil's world,
+a world in which good should ultimately prevail in spite
+of all opposition.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SAVAGE, HEATHEN, PAGAN</div>
+
+<p>It is at once a high privilege and a solemn responsibility
+to deal with souls to whom the appeal of the Christian
+religion had never before been made, as were most
+of my hearers. One cannot call them "heathen." One
+never thinks of these Alaskan natives as heathen. "Savage"
+and "heathen" and "pagan" all meant, of course,
+in their origin, just country people, and point to some
+old-time, tremendous superciliousness of the city-bred,
+long since disappeared, except, perhaps, from such places
+as Whitechapel and the Bowery. A savage is simply a
+forest dweller, a heathen a heath dweller, and for a large
+part of each year I come, etymologically, within the terms
+myself. But with its ordinary implication of ferocity
+and bloodthirstiness it is absurd to apply the word
+"savage" to the mild and gentle Alaskan Indian, and,
+with its ordinary implication of bowing down to
+wood and stone, it is misleading to apply the term
+"heathen" to those who never made any sort of graven
+image.</p>
+
+<p>Much has been written, and cleverly written, about<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265"></a><a href="images/265.png">[265]</a></span>
+the Alaskan Indian that is preposterously untrue.
+Arthur, my half-breed boy, had recently been reading a
+story by Jack London, dealing with the Indians in the
+vicinity of Tanana, where he was bred and born, and
+his indignation at the representation of his people in
+this story was amusing. The story was called <i>The Wit
+of Porportuk</i>, and it presented a native chief in almost
+baronial state, with slaves waiting upon him in a large
+banqueting hall and I know not what accumulated wealth
+of furs and gold. Such pictures are far more flagrantly
+untrue to any conditions that ever existed in Alaska than
+anything Fenimore Cooper wrote about the Five Nations.
+There were never any slaves in the interior; there
+was never any wealth amongst the Indians; there was
+never any state and circumstance of life. And the more
+one lives amongst them and knows them, the less one believes
+that they could ever have been a warlike people,
+despite their own traditions. Sporadic forays, fostered
+by their ignorant dread of one another or stirred up by
+rival medicine-men, there may have been between different
+tribes&mdash;and there certainly were between the Indians
+and the Esquimaux&mdash;with ambuscade and slaughter of
+isolated hunting parties that ventured too far beyond the
+confines of their own territory; and one such affair would
+furnish tradition for generations to dilate upon. I have
+myself found all the men of Nulato gone scouting, or
+hiding&mdash;I could not determine which&mdash;in the hills with
+their guns, upon a rumour that the "Huskies," or Esquimaux,
+were coming; I have known the Indians of the
+Yukon and the Tanana, and as far as the Koyukuk, excited<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266"></a><a href="images/266.png">[266]</a></span>
+and alarmed over the friendly visit of a handful of
+ragged natives from the Copper River to Nenana at
+Christmas time, although in either case it must certainly
+have been fifty years since there was any actual hostile
+incursion, and probably much longer.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">A GENTLE, TIMID PEOPLE</div>
+
+<p>They are a very timid people, and an exceedingly
+peaceable people. Years and years may be spent amongst
+them without knowledge of a single act of violence between
+Indian men; they do not quarrel and fight. Bold
+enough in the chase, willing to face dangers of ice and
+water and wild beast, they have a dread of anything like
+personal encounter, and will submit to a surprising amount
+of imposition and overbearing on the part of a white man
+without resorting to it. I knew a certain white man
+who claimed a whole river valley north of the Yukon as
+his, who warned off hunting parties of Indians who ventured
+upon it, and made them give up game killed in
+"his territory." They came to the mission and complained
+about it, but they never withstood the usurper.
+It ought to be added that it always appeared more as
+the making good of a practical joke than as a serious pretension,
+but the point is&mdash;the Indians submitted.</p>
+
+<p>So far as these natives of the interior are concerned
+they were never idolaters. I cannot find that they had
+any distinct notion of worship at all. Their religion had
+root in a certain frantic terror of the unknown, and found
+expression in ceaseless efforts to propitiate the malign
+spirits surrounding them on every side. Thus they were
+given over to the mastery of those amongst them who
+had the traditional art of such propitiation, and fell more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267"></a><a href="images/267.png">[267]</a></span>
+or less completely under that cruellest and most venal of
+sways, the tyranny of the witch-doctor. It is impossible
+to doubt, and hard to exaggerate, the grinding and brutal
+exactions to which this rule led. Anything that a man
+possessed might be demanded and must be yielded, on
+pain of disease and death, even to the whole season's
+catch of fur or the deflowering of a young daughter. The
+utmost greed and lust that can disgrace humanity found
+its Indian expression in the lives of some of these medicine-men.</p>
+
+<p>Since every sort of tyranny has its vulnerable spot,
+since the despotism of Russia was tempered by assassination
+and of Japan by the effect of public suicide, so
+melioration of the tyranny of the medicine-man seems
+to have been found in rivalry amongst members of the
+craft itself. Oppressed beyond endurance by one practitioner,
+allegiance would be transferred to some new
+claimant of occult powers, and the breaking of the
+monopoly of magic would be followed by a temporary
+lightening of the burdens. Some of the most lurid of
+Alaskan legends deal with the thaumaturgic contests of
+rival medicine-men, and one judges that sleight of hand
+and even hypnotic suggestion were cultivated to a fine
+point.</p>
+
+<p>To such minds the Christian teaching comes with
+glad and one may say instantaneous acceptance. Their
+attitude is entirely childlike. They are anxious to be
+told more and more about it, to be told it over and over
+again. There is never the slightest sign of incredulity.
+It does not occur to them as possible that a man should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268"></a><a href="images/268.png">[268]</a></span>
+be sent all this way to them, should hunt them up and
+seek them out to tell it to them, unless it were true. And
+one learns over again how universal is the appeal the
+Christian religion, and in particular the Life of Our Lord,
+makes to mankind. I have seen Indians and Esquimaux
+mixed, hearing for the first time the details of the Passion,
+stirred to as great indignation as was that barbarian
+chieftain who laid his hand on his sword and cried,
+"Would I and my men had been there!" or those Western
+cowboys, so the story runs, bred in illiteracy and irreligion,
+to whose children a school-teacher had given an
+account of the same great events, and who rode up to the
+schoolhouse the next day with guns and ropes, and asked:
+"Which way did them blamed Jews go?"</p>
+
+<p>The medicine-man lies low; may himself profess acceptance
+of the new teaching, may even really accept it
+(for it is very hard, indeed, to follow and judge all the
+mental processes of an Indian)&mdash;yes, though it expressly
+sweep all his devils away, out of the sick, out of the wind
+and storm, from off every grave mound, though it leave
+him no paltry net-tearing or trap-springing sprite to
+work upon with his conjurations; yet the old superstition
+dies hard, often crops up when one had thought it
+perished, and even sometimes maintains itself, sub rosa,
+side by side with definite, regular Christian worship.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE OLD, OLD STORY</div>
+
+<p>The arctic explorer Stefanson, a careful and acute
+observer who has had exceptional opportunities for observation
+of the intimate life of the Esquimaux, has
+written much lately of the grafting of Christianity upon
+native superstition and the existence of both together,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269"></a><a href="images/269.png">[269]</a></span>
+as though it were some new thing or newly noticed by
+himself. Yet every one familiar with the history of
+Christianity knows that it has characterised the progress
+of religion in all ages. There was never a people yet
+that did not in great measure do this thing, nor is it
+reasonable to suppose that it could have been otherwise.
+It is impossible to make a <i>tabula rasa</i> of men's minds.
+It is impossible to uproot customs of immemorial antiquity
+without leaving some rootlets behind. And what
+is acquired joins itself insensibly to what is retained,
+and either the incongruity is hidden beneath a change
+of nomenclature or is not hidden at all. Our own social
+life is threaded through and through with customs and
+practices which go back to a superstitious origin. The
+matter is such a commonplace of history that it is bootless
+to labour it here.</p>
+
+<p>A scientist is only a "scientist." How that name
+tends continually to depreciate itself as the pursuit of
+physical science is divorced more and more completely
+from a knowledge of literature, from a knowledge of the
+humanities! And a scientist is a poor guide to an acquaintance
+with man, civilised or uncivilised. To come
+to the study of any race of man, even the most primitive,
+without some knowledge of all the long history of
+man, of all the long history of man's thought, man's
+methods, man's strivings, man's accomplishments, man's
+failures, is to come so ill equipped that no just conclusions
+are likely to be reached. Your exclusive "scientist"&mdash;and
+such are most of them to-day&mdash;may be competent
+to deal with circles and triangles, with wheels and levers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270"></a><a href="images/270.png">[270]</a></span>
+with cells and glands, with germs and bacilli and micro-organisms
+generally, with magnetos and dynamos, with
+all the heavenly host if you like, but he has no equipment
+to deal with man! Somatic anthropology in particular
+tends to assume in some quarters such an overimportance
+that one falls back upon the recollection that the
+original head measurers were hatters and that all hatters
+are proverbially mad. The occupation would seem to
+carry the taint.</p>
+
+<p>It was with much pleasure that I was able to hold
+out hope to Chief Isaac of the mission and the school he
+desired so earnestly for his people. It must not be supposed
+that all of them were in the completely unevangelised
+state which has been dwelt upon, that to all of
+them the teaching of those two full days was novel; some
+of them, like the chief himself, had been across to the
+Yukon long ago and still bore some trace of the early labours
+of the Church of England missionaries to whom this
+region of Alaska that adjoins Canada is so much indebted.
+Others had once been to the Ketchumstock, upon the
+occasion of a visit from our missionary at Eagle, and
+had received instruction from him. But there were
+many present in that tent who had never seen any missionary,
+never had any teaching, to whom it was wholly
+new save as they might have picked up some inkling from
+those that had been more fortunate.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="tanana" id="tanana"></a><a href="images/gs308.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs308_th.jpg" width="500" height="309" alt="The Tanana crossing." title="The Tanana crossing." />
+</a><span class="caption">The Tanana crossing.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="good" id="good"></a><a href="images/gs309.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs309_th.jpg" width="500" height="316" alt="Good going on the Yukon." title="Good going on the Yukon." />
+</a><span class="caption">Good going on the Yukon.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="sidenote">TRIBAL CONNECTIONS</div>
+
+<p>When we left this encampment Isaac sent two of his
+young men to guide us, with a sled drawn by three or
+four small dogs, so gaily caparisoned with <i>tapis</i> and ribbons,
+tinsel, and pompons, that they might have been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271"></a><a href="images/271.png">[271]</a></span>
+circus dogs. Here again is evidence of this tribe's affinity
+with the upper Yukon natives, and so with those of
+the Mackenzie. I never saw the <i>tapis</i>, a broad, bright
+ornamented cloth that lies upon the dog's back under his
+harness, on the Middle Yukon. It is characteristic of
+the Peel River Indians who come across by the Rampart
+House and La Pierre House.</p>
+
+<p>A few hours' journey brought us to the Tanana River
+again, which we crossed, and took a portage on the other
+side that went up a long defile and then along a ridge and
+then down another long defile until at night we reached
+the native village at Lake Mansfield; a picturesque spot,
+for the lake is entirely surrounded by mountains except
+on the side which opens to the river. Here the Alaskan
+range and the Tanana River have approached so close
+that the water almost washes the base of the foot-hills,
+and the scenery is as fine and bold as any in Alaska. And
+here, at Lake Mansfield, if only there were navigable connection
+between the lake and the river into which it
+drains, would be an admirable place for a mission station.</p>
+
+<p>A couple of hours next day took us the seven remaining
+miles to the Tanana Crossing. Here, at that time,
+was a station of the military telegraph connecting Valdez
+on the coast with Fort Egbert (Eagle) on the Yukon, a
+line maintained, at enormous expense, purely for military
+purposes. It passed through an almost entirely uninhabited
+country in which perhaps scarcely a dozen messages
+would originate in a year. The telegraph-line and
+Fort Egbert itself are now abandoned. Strategic considerations
+constitute a vague and variable quantity.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272"></a><a href="images/272.png">[272]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was strange to find this little station with two or
+three men of the signal-corps away out here in the wilderness.
+Their post was supplied by mule pack-train from
+Fort Egbert, more than two hundred miles away, and
+they told me that only ten pounds out of every hundred
+that left Fort Egbert reached the Crossing, so self-limited
+is a pack-train through such country. We amused ourselves
+calculating just how much farther mules and men
+could go until they ate up <i>all</i> they could carry.</p>
+
+<p>The Tanana Crossing is a central spot for the Indians
+of this region. Two days' journey up the river was the
+village of the Tetlin Indians. Two days' journey into
+the mountain range were the Mantasta Indians. Two
+days' journey across towards the Yukon were the Ketchumstock
+Indians. Most of them would congregate at
+this spot for certain parts of the year, should we plant a
+mission there, and despite the picturesque situation of
+Lake Mansfield, it looked as if the Crossing were the best
+point for building.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE TANANA CROSSING</div>
+
+<p>Our route lay northeast, across country to Fortymile
+on the Yukon, two hundred and fifty miles away, along
+the trail for the greater part of the distance by which
+the mule train reached the Tanana Crossing. The first
+five miles was all up-hill, a long, stiff, steady climb to
+the crest of the mountain that rises just behind the Crossing.
+We had to take it slowly, with frequent stops, so
+steep was the grade, and every now and then we got tantalising
+glimpses through the timber of the scene that
+spread wider and wider below us. Bend after bend of
+the Tanana River unfolded itself; the Alaskan range<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273"></a><a href="images/273.png">[273]</a></span>
+gave peak after peak; there lay Lake Mansfield, deep in
+its amphitheatre of hills, with the Indian village at its
+head.</p>
+
+<p>At last my impatience for the view that promised
+made me leave the boys (we still had Isaac's young men)
+and push on alone to the top. And it was indeed by far
+the noblest view of the winter, one of the grandest and
+most extensive panoramas I had ever seen in my life.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps three miles away, as the crow flies, from the
+river, and seventeen hundred and fifty feet above it, as
+the aneroid gave it, we were already on the watershed,
+and everywhere in the direction we were travelling the
+wide-flung draws and gullies of the Fortymile River
+stretched out, so clear and beautiful a display of the beginnings
+of a great drainage system that my attention
+was arrested, notwithstanding my eagerness for the sight
+that awaited my turning around. But it was upon turning
+around and looking in the direction from which we
+had come that the grandeur and sublimity entered into
+the scene. There was, indeed, no one great dominating
+feature in this prospect as in the view of Denali from the
+Rampart portage, but the whole background, bounding
+the vision completely, was one vast wall of lofty white
+peaks, stretching without a break for a hundred miles.
+Enormous cloud masses rose and fell about this barrier,
+now unfolding to reveal dark chasms and glittering glaciers,
+now enshrouding them again. In the middle distance
+the Tanana River wound and twisted its firm white
+line amidst broken patches of snow and timber far away
+to either hand, and, where glacial affluents discharged<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274"></a><a href="images/274.png">[274]</a></span>
+into it, were finer, threadlike lines that marked the many
+mouths. The thick spruce mantling the slope in the
+foreground gave a sombre contrast to the fields of snow,
+and the yellow March sunshine was poured over all the
+wide landscape save where the great clouds contended
+with the great mountains.</p>
+
+<p>The boys had stopped to build a fire and brew some
+tea before leaving the timber, and I was glad of it, for it
+gave me the chance to gaze my fill upon the inspiring
+and fascinating scene in the pleasant warmth of the
+mountain top, with the thermometer at 30&deg; in the shade
+and just 12&deg; higher in the sunshine.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">A NOBLE VIEW</div>
+
+<p>How grateful I was for the clear bright day! What a
+disappointment it has been again and again to reach
+such an eminence and see&mdash;nothing! It was the most
+extensive view of the great Alaskan range I had ever
+secured&mdash;that long line of sharp peaks that stretches and
+broadens from the coast inland until it culminates in the
+highest point of the North American continent and then
+curves its way back to the coast again. Of course, what
+lay here within the vision was only a small part of one
+arm of the range; it stopped far short of Denali on the
+one hand and Mount Sanford on the other, though it
+included Mount Kimball and Mount Hayes; yet it was
+the most impressive sight of a mountain chain I had
+ever beheld. It was a sight to be glad and grateful
+for, to put high amongst one's joyful remembrances;
+and with this notable sight we bade farewell to the
+Tanana valley.</p>
+
+<p>Down the hill we went into Fortymile water and into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275"></a><a href="images/275.png">[275]</a></span>
+a rolling country crossed by the military mule trail. If
+the morning had been glorious the evening was full of
+penance. Long before night our feet were sore from
+slipping and sliding into those wretched mule tracks.
+One cannot take one's eyes from the trail for a moment,
+every footstep must be watched, and even then one is
+continually stumbling.</p>
+
+<p>We were able, however, to rig our team with the double
+hitch that is so much more economical of power than the
+tandem hitch, whenever the width of the trail permits it.
+We now carry a convertible rig, so that on narrow trails
+or in deep snow we can string out the dogs one in front
+of the other, and when the trail is wide enough can hitch
+them side by side. "Seal," the Great Dane pup we got
+at the Salchaket, was a good and strong puller, but he
+had no coat and no sense. It is bad enough to have no
+coat in this country, but to have no coat and no sense
+is fatal&mdash;as he found. His feet were continually sore
+and he had to be specially provided for at night if it
+were at all cold&mdash;a dog utterly unsuited to Alaska.</p>
+
+<p>Thirty miles of such going as has been described is
+tiring in the extreme, and when we reached the Lone
+Cabin, behold! fifteen Indians camped about it, for whom,
+when supper was done, followed two hours of teaching and
+the baptism of six children. I would have liked to have
+stayed a day with them, but if we were to spend Palm
+Sunday at Fortymile and Easter at Eagle as had been
+promised, the time remaining did no more than serve;
+and there was a large band of Indians to visit at Ketchumstock.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276"></a><a href="images/276.png">[276]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The next day took us into and across the Ketchumstock
+Flats, a wide basin surrounded by hills and drained
+by the Mosquito Fork of the Fortymile. The telegraph-line,
+supported on tripods against the summer yielding
+of the marshy soil, cuts straight across country. This
+basin and the hills around form one of the greatest caribou
+countries, perhaps, in the world. All day we had
+passed fragments of the long fences that were in use in
+times past by the Indians for driving the animals into
+convenient places for slaughter.</p>
+
+<p>The annual migration of the vast herd that roams the
+section of Alaska between the Yukon and the Tanana
+Rivers swarms over this Flat and through these hills,
+and we were told at the Ketchumstock telegraph station
+by the signal-corps men that they estimated that upward
+of one hundred thousand animals crossed the Mosquito
+Fork the previous October.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">CARIBOU</div>
+
+<p>The big game of Alaska is not yet seriously diminished,
+though there was need for the legal protection that has
+of late years been given. It is probable that more caribou
+and young moose are killed every year by wolves
+than by hunters. Only in the neighbourhood of a considerable
+settlement is there danger of reckless and wasteful
+slaughter, and some attention is paid by game wardens
+to the markets of such places. The mountain-sheep
+stands in greater danger of extermination than either
+caribou or moose. Its meat, the most delicious mutton
+in the world, as it has been pronounced by epicures,
+brings a higher price than other wild meat, and it is easy
+to destroy a band completely. The sheep on the mountains<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277"></a><a href="images/277.png">[277]</a></span>
+of the Alaskan range nearest to Fairbanks have, it
+is said, been very greatly diminished, and that need not
+be wondered at when one sees sled load after sled load,
+aggregating several tons of meat, brought in at one shipment.
+The law protecting the sheep probably needs
+tightening up.</p>
+
+<p>The big game is a great resource to all the people of
+the country, white and native. It is no small advantage
+to be able to take one's gun in the fall and go out in the
+valleys and kill a moose that will suffice for one man's
+meat almost the whole winter, or go into the hills and
+kill four or five caribou that will stock his larder equally
+well. The fresh, clean meat of the wilds has to most
+palates far finer flavour than any cold-storage meat that
+can be brought into the country; and, save at one or two
+centres of population and distribution, cold-storage meat
+is not available at all. Without its big game Alaska
+would be virtually uninhabitable. Therefore most white
+men are content that the necessary measures be taken to
+prevent the wasteful slaughter of the game; for the rights
+of the prospector and trapper and traveller, and the
+rights of the natives to kill at any time what is necessary
+for food, are explicitly reserved.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE KETCHUMSTOCK</div>
+
+<p>We reached the village and telegraph post of Ketchumstock
+for the night only to find all the natives gone hunting;
+but since they had gone in the direction of Chicken
+Creek, towards which we were travelling, we were able
+to catch up with them the next morning without going
+far out of our way. While we were pitching our tent
+near their encampment came two or three natives with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278"></a><a href="images/278.png">[278]</a></span>
+dog teams, and as the dogs hesitated to pass our dogs,
+loose on the trail, a voluble string of curses in English
+fell from the Indian lips. Such is usually the first indication
+of contact with white men, and in this case it
+spoke of the proximity of the mining on Chicken Creek.
+To discover the women chewing tobacco was to add but
+another evidence of the sophistication of this tribe; a
+different people from Chief Isaac's tribe, different through
+many years' familiarity with the whites at these diggings.
+If the mission to be built at the Crossing tends to keep
+these Indians on the Tanana River and thus away from
+the demoralisation of the diggings, it will do them solid
+service.</p>
+
+<p>In some way foul and profane language falls even more
+offensively from Indians than from whites; for the same
+reason, perhaps, that it sounds more offensive and shocking
+from children than from adults. Sometimes the
+Indian does not in the least understand the meaning of
+the words he uses; they are the first English words he
+ever heard and he hears them over and over again.</p>
+
+<p>So here another day and a half was spent in instruction.
+There are some forty souls in this tribe and they
+have had teaching from time to time, though not in the
+last few years, at the mouths of missionaries from Yukon
+posts. Most of the adults had been baptized; I baptized
+sixteen children. One curious feature of my stay was
+the megaphonic recapitulation of the heads of the instruction,
+after each session, by an elderly Indian who
+stood out in the midst of the tents. What on earth this
+man, with his town-crier voice, was proclaiming at such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279"></a><a href="images/279.png">[279]</a></span>
+length, we were at a loss to conjecture, and upon inquiry
+were informed: "Them women, not much sense; one time
+tell 'em, quick forget; two time tell 'em, maybe little
+remember." So when we stopped for dinner and for
+supper and for bed, each time this brazen-lunged spieler
+stood forth and reiterated the main points of the discourse
+"for the <i>hareem</i>," as Doughty would say, whose
+account of the attitude of the Arabs to their women often
+reminds me of the Alaskan Indians. It was interesting,
+but I should have preferred to edit the recapitulation.</p>
+
+<p>When all was done for the day and we thought to go
+to bed came an Indian named "Bum-Eyed-Bob" (these
+white man's nicknames, however dreadful, are always accepted
+and used) for a long confabulation about the affairs
+of the tribe, and I gathered incidentally that gambling
+at the telegraph station had been the main diversion of
+the winter. It seems ungracious to insist so much upon
+the evil influence of the white men&mdash;we had been cordially
+received and entertained at that very place, and our
+money refused&mdash;but there is little doubt that the abandonment
+of the telegraph-line will be a good thing for
+these natives. Put two or three young men of no special
+intellectual resource or ambition down in a lonely spot like
+this, with no society at all save that of the natives and
+practically nothing to do, and there is a natural and almost
+inevitable trend to evil. To the exceptional man with
+the desire of promotion, with books, and all this leisure,
+it would be an admirable opportunity, but he would be
+quite an exceptional man who should rise altogether
+superior to the temptations to idleness and debauchery.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280"></a><a href="images/280.png">[280]</a></span>
+One may have true and deep sympathy with these young
+men and yet be conscious of the harm they often bring
+about.</p>
+
+<p>Ten miles or so from the encampment brought us to
+Chicken Creek, and from that point we took the Fortymile
+River. The direct trail to Eagle with its exasperating
+mule tracks was now left, and our journey was on
+the ice. But so warm was the weather that 16th of
+March that we were wet-foot all day, and within the
+space of eight hours that we were travelling we had snow,
+sleet, rain, and sunshine. Leaving the main river, we
+turned up Walker Fork and, after a few miles, leaving
+that, we turned up Jack Wade Creek and pursued it far up
+towards its head ere we reached the road-house for the
+night.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE FORTYMILE</div>
+
+<p>We were now on historic ground, so far as gold mining
+in Alaska is concerned. The "Fortymilers" bear the
+same pioneer relation to gold mining in the North that
+the "Fortyniners" bear to gold mining in California.
+Ever since 1886 placers have been worked in this district,
+and it still yields gold, though the output and the
+number of men are alike much reduced. It is interesting
+to talk with some of the original locators of this camp,
+who may yet be found here and there in the country, and
+to learn of the conditions in those early days when a
+steamboat came up the Yukon once in a season bringing
+such supplies and mail as the men received for the year.
+It was here that the problem of working frozen ground
+was first confronted and solved; here that the first
+"miner's law" was promulgated, the first "miners' meeting"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281"></a><a href="images/281.png">[281]</a></span>
+dealt out justice. Your "old-timer" anywhere is
+commonly <i>laudator temporis acti</i>, but there is good reason
+to believe that these early, and certainly most adventurous,
+gold-miners, some of whom forced a way into the
+country when there were no routes of travel, and subsisted
+on its resources while they explored and prospected
+it, were men of a higher stamp than many who have come
+in since. The extent to which that early prospecting was
+carried is not generally known, for these men, after the
+manner of their kind, left no record behind them. There
+are few creek beds that give any promise at all in the
+whole of this vast country that have not had some holes
+sunk in them. Even in districts so remote as the Koyukuk,
+signs of old prospecting are encountered. When a
+stampede took place to the Red Mountain or Indian
+River country of the middle Koyukuk in 1911-12, I
+was told that there was not a creek in the camp that did
+not show signs of having been prospected long before,
+although it had passed altogether out of knowledge that
+this particular region had ever been visited by prospectors.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">"SNIPING ON THE BARS"</div>
+
+<p>As the Fortymile is the oldest gold camp in the North,
+some of its trail making is of the best in Alaska. In
+particular the trail from the head of Jack Wade Creek
+down into Steel Creek reminded one of the Alpine roads
+in its bold, not to say daring, engineering. It drops from
+bench to bench in great sweeping curves always with a
+practicable grade, and must descend nigh a thousand feet
+in a couple of miles. At the mouth of Steel Creek we
+are on the Fortymile River again, having saved a day's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282"></a><a href="images/282.png">[282]</a></span>
+journey by this traverse. And here, on the Fortymile,
+we passed several men "sniping on the bars," as the very
+first Alaskan gold-miners did on this same river, and
+probably on these same bars, twenty-five years ago.
+One hand moved the "rocker" to and fro and the other
+poured water into it with the "long Tom"; so was the
+gold washed out of the gravel taken from just below the
+ice. It was interesting to see this primitive method still
+in practice and to learn from the men that they were
+making "better than wages."</p>
+
+<p>The Fortymile is a very picturesque but most tortuous
+river. In one place, called appropriately "The Kink," I
+was able to clamber over a ridge of rocks and reach another
+bend of the river in six or seven minutes, and then
+had to wait twenty-five minutes for the dog team, going
+at a good clip, to come around to me. At length we
+reached the spot where a vista cut through the timber
+that clothes both banks, marked the 141st meridian, the
+international boundary, and passed out of Alaska into
+British territory. A few miles more brought us to Moose
+Creek, where a little Canadian custom-house is situated,
+and there we spent the night.</p>
+
+<p>The next day we reached the Yukon; passing gold
+dredges laid up for the winter and other signs of still-persisting
+mining activity, going through the narrow wild
+ca&ntilde;on of the Fortymile, and so to the little town at its
+mouth of the same name, where there is a mission of the
+Church of England and a post of the Royal Northwest
+Mounted Police. I never come into contact with this
+admirable body of men without wishing that we had a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283"></a><a href="images/283.png">[283]</a></span>
+similar body charged with the enforcement of the law
+in Alaska.</p>
+
+<p>Sunday was spent there officiating for the layman in
+charge of the mission and in interesting talk with the
+sergeant of police about the annual winter journey from
+Dawson to Fort McPherson on the McKenzie, from which
+he had just returned with a detail of men. The next
+winter he and his detail lost their way and starved and
+froze to death on the same journey.</p>
+
+<p>Here at one time was a flourishing Indian mission and
+school, and here Bishop Bompas, the true "Apostle of the
+North," lived for some time. The story of this man's
+forty-five years' single-eyed devotion to the Indians of the
+Yukon and McKenzie Rivers is one of the brave chapters
+of missionary history. But the Church of England "does
+not advertise." Writers about Alaska, even writers
+about Alaskan missions, carefully collect all the data of
+the early Russian missions on the coast, but ignore altogether
+the equally influential and lasting work done along
+five hundred miles of what is now the American Yukon
+by the missionary clergy of the English Church before
+and after the Purchase. Bishop Bompas identified himself
+so closely with the natives as to become almost one
+of them in the eyes of the white men, and many curious
+stories linger amongst the old-timers as to his habits and
+appearance. It is interesting to know that the bishop
+was a son of that Sergeant Bompas of the English bar
+from whom Dickens drew the character of Sergeant
+Buzfuz, counsel for the plaintiff in the famous suit of
+"Bardell v. Pickwick."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284"></a><a href="images/284.png">[284]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But the natives have all left Fortymile, some to the
+large village of Moosehide just below Dawson, some to
+Eagle. The town, too, like all the upper Yukon towns, is
+much decayed; the custom-house, the police barracks,
+the company's store, the road-house, and the little mission
+embracing nearly all its activities and housing nearly
+all its population.</p>
+
+<p>There is always some feeling of satisfaction in reaching
+the broad highway of the Yukon again, even though
+rough ice make bad going and one of the most notorious,
+dirty road-houses in the North hold its menace over one
+all day and amply fulfil it at night. There is indeed so
+little travel on the river now that it does not pay any
+one to keep a road-house save as incidental to a steamboat
+wood camp and summer fishing station. Two
+short days' travel brought us across the international
+boundary again to Eagle in Alaska, where at that time
+Fort Egbert was garrisoned with two companies of
+soldiers.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">EAGLE</div>
+
+<p>Eagle and Fort Egbert together, for the one begins
+where the other ends, have perhaps the finest and most
+commanding situation of any settlement on the Yukon
+River. The mountains rise with dignity just across the
+water and break pleasingly into the valley of Eagle Creek,
+a few miles up-stream. To the rear of the town an inconsiderable
+flat does but give space and setting before
+the mountains rise again; while just below the military
+post stands the bold and lofty bluff called the Eagle
+Rock, with Mission Creek winding into the Yukon at its
+foot. Robert Louis Stevenson said that Edinburgh has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285"></a><a href="images/285.png">[285]</a></span>
+the finest situation of any capital in Europe and pays
+for it by having the worst climate of any city in the world.
+It would not be just to paraphrase this description with
+regard to Eagle, for while it is unsurpassed on the Yukon
+for site, there are spots on that river where still more
+disagreeable weather prevails; yet it cannot be denied
+that the position of the place subjects it to exceedingly
+bitter winds, or that the valley of Eagle Creek, which
+gives pleasing variety to the prospect, acts also as a channel
+to convey the full force of the blast. Climate everywhere
+is a very local thing; topographical considerations
+often altogether outweigh geographical; and nowhere is
+this truer than in Alaska. Commanding sites are necessarily
+exposed sites, and he who would dwell in comfort
+must build in seclusion.</p>
+
+<p>A native village of eighty or ninety souls, with its
+church and school, lies three miles up-stream from the
+town, so that the relative positions of village, town, and
+military post exactly duplicate those at Tanana. It
+must at once be stated, however, that this situation has
+not led to anything like the demoralisation amongst the
+natives at Eagle that thrusts itself into notice at the
+other place. Whether it were the longer training in
+Christian morals that lay behind these people, or better
+hap in the matter of post commanders (certainly there
+was never such scandalous irregularity and indifference
+at Egbert as marked one administration at Gibbon), or
+the vigilance during a number of consecutive years of an
+especially active deputy marshal and the wisdom and
+concern through an even longer period of a commissioner<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286"></a><a href="images/286.png">[286]</a></span>
+much above the common stamp,<a name="FNanchor_F_6" id="FNanchor_F_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_F_6" class="fnanchor">[F]</a> or all these causes combined,
+the natives at Eagle have not suffered from the
+proximity of soldiers and civilians in the same measure
+as the natives at Tanana. Drunkenness and debauchery
+there have been again and again, but they have been
+severely checked and restrained by both the civil and
+military authorities.</p>
+
+<p>It was pleasant during Holy Week and Easter to see
+so many of the enlisted men of the garrison taking part
+in the services in town; pleasant, especially, to see officers
+and men singing together in the choir, a tribute to the
+tact and zeal of the earnest layman in charge of this
+mission; and it was pleasant at the village to hear the
+native liturgy again and to see old men and women following
+the lessons in the native Bible.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">FORT EGBERT ABANDONED</div>
+
+<p>Fort Egbert is abandoned now, another addition to
+the melancholy of the Yukon; its extensive buildings, barracks,
+and officers' quarters, post-exchange and commissariat,
+hospital, sawmill, and artisans' shops, a spacious,
+complete gymnasium only recently built, are all vacant
+and deserted. In the yards lie three thousand cords of dry
+wood, a year's supply; cut on the hills, awaiting the expected
+annual contracts, lie as many more&mdash;six thousand
+cords of wood left to rot! Some of us perverse "conservationists,"
+upon whom the unanimous Alaskan press delights
+to pour scorn, lament the trees more than the troops.</p>
+
+<p>One may write thus and yet have many pleasant personal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287"></a><a href="images/287.png">[287]</a></span>
+associations with the post and those who have lived
+there. A large and varied military acquaintanceship is
+acquired by regular visits to these Alaskan forts, for the
+whole command changes every two years. If one stayed
+in the country long enough one would get to know the
+whole United States army, as regiment after regiment
+spent its brief term of "foreign service" in the North.
+Gazing upon the empty quarters, the occasion of my
+first visit came back vividly, when there was diphtheria
+amongst the natives at Circle and none to cope with it
+save the missionary nurse. The civil codes containing
+no provision for quarantine, the United States commissioner
+at Circle could not help, and the Indians grew
+restive and rebellious, and when Christmas came broke
+through the restrictions completely. Even some of the
+whites of the place defied her prohibition and attended
+native dances and encouraged the Indians in their self-willed
+folly.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SOME ARMY OFFICERS</div>
+
+<p>So I went up the week's journey to Eagle and sought
+assistance from Major Plummer, the officer commanding
+the post, who, after telegraphing to Washington, promptly
+despatched a hospital steward and a couple of soldiers,
+and placed them entirely at the nurse's disposal. "I
+don't think we have any law for it," he said, "but we'll
+bluff it out." And bluff it out they did very effectively
+until the disease was stamped out, and then they thoroughly
+disinfected and whitewashed every cabin that
+had been occupied by the sick. I used to tell that
+nurse that, so far as I knew, she was the only woman
+who had ever had command of United States soldiers.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288"></a><a href="images/288.png">[288]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then there was Captain Langdon of the same regiment,
+the scholarly soldier, with the account of every
+great campaign in history at his fingers' ends. I recollect
+one evening, when we had been talking of the Peninsular
+War, I ventured to spring on him the ancient schoolboy
+conundrum: "What lines are those, the most famous ever
+made by an Englishman, yet that are never quoted?"
+"Lines?" said he, "lines?" though I don't think he had
+ever heard the jest. "They must be the Lines of Torres
+Vedras." How well I remember the musical box that
+used to arouse me at seven in the morning, however
+late we had sat talking the night before!</p>
+
+<p>And that young lieutenant, of wealthy New York
+people, just arrived from West Point, who was sent by
+another commandant to report upon the condition of the
+natives at the village and who came back and reported
+the whole population in utter destitution and recommended
+the issue of free rations to them all! As a matter
+of fact, during the administration of this commanding
+officer, some sixteen or eighteen persons were put
+upon the list for gratuitous grub, and it took a written
+protest to get them off. For no one who has the welfare
+of the natives at heart can tolerate the notion of making
+them paupers; these who have always fended abundantly
+for themselves, and can entirely do so yet. With free
+rations there would be no more hunting, no more trapping,
+no more fishing; and a hardy, self-supporting race
+would sink at once to sloth and beggary and forget all
+that made men of them. If it were designed to destroy
+the Indian at a blow, here is an easy way to do it. Yet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289"></a><a href="images/289.png">[289]</a></span>
+there are some, obsessed with the craze about what is
+called education, regarding it as an end in itself and not
+as a means to any end, who recommend this pauperising
+because it would permit the execution of a compulsory
+school-attendance law. Or is it a personal delusion of
+mine that esteems an honest, industrious, self-supporting
+Indian who cannot read and write English above
+one who can read and write English&mdash;and can do nothing
+else&mdash;and so separates me from many who are working
+amongst the natives?</p>
+
+<p>These days at the end of March, when the sun shines
+more than twelve hours in the twenty-four, are too long
+for the ordinary winter day's twenty-five miles or so, and
+yet not quite long enough, even if man and dogs could
+stand it, to double the stage; so that there is much daylight
+leisure at road-houses. One grows anxious, after
+four months on the trail, to be done with it; to draw as
+quickly as may be to one's "thawing-out" place. One
+even becomes a little impatient of the continual dog
+talk and mining talk of the road-houses, to which one
+has listened all the winter. On the other hand, the
+travelling is very pleasant and the going usually very
+good, so that one may often ride on the sled for long
+stretches.</p>
+
+<p>By river and portage&mdash;one portage that comes so finely
+down to the Yukon from a bench that there is pleasure in
+anticipating the view it affords&mdash;in two days we reached
+the Nation road-house, just below the mouth of the Nation
+River, a name that has always puzzled me. Here all night
+long the wolves howling around the carcass of a horse kept<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290"></a><a href="images/290.png">[290]</a></span>
+our dogs awake, and the whimpering of the dogs kept us
+awake. The country beyond the Yukon to the northeast,
+the large area included between the Yukon and the Porcupine,
+into which the Nation River offers passage, is
+one of the wildest and least known portions of Alaska,
+abounding in game and beasts of prey.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE GLARE OF THE SUN</div>
+
+<p>At the Charley River we visited the native village and
+held service and instruction as well as inadequate interpretation
+permitted. Round Coal Creek and Woodchopper
+Creek the scenery becomes bold and attractive,
+but we found, as usual, that as we pushed farther and
+farther down the river the snow was deeper and the going
+not so good. The sun grows very bright upon the snow
+these days of late March and early April. Even through
+heavily tinted glasses it inflames the eyes more or less,
+and a couple of hours without protection would bring
+snow-blindness. Bright days at this season are the only
+days in all the year when the camera shutter may be
+used at its full speed. When the sun comes out after a
+flurry of new snow in April, the light is many times
+greater than in midsummer.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="portage" id="portage"></a><a href="images/gs330.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs330_th.jpg" width="500" height="333" alt="&quot;A portage that comes so finely down to the Yukon that there is pleasure in anticipating the view it affords.&quot;" title="&quot;A portage that comes so finely down to the Yukon that there is pleasure in anticipating the view it affords.&quot;" />
+</a><span class="caption">&quot;A portage that comes so finely down to the Yukon that there is pleasure in anticipating the view it affords.&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="fort" id="fort"></a><a href="images/gs331.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs331_th.jpg" width="500" height="322" alt="Fort Yukon." title="Fort Yukon." />
+</a><span class="caption">Fort Yukon.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>We reached Circle in a day and a half from Woodchopper
+Creek, in time to spend Sunday there. Circle
+had not changed much in the five years that had elapsed
+since the first visit to it mentioned in these pages. The
+slender trellis of the wireless telegraph had added a prominent
+feature to its river bank; a few more empty cabins
+had been torn down for fire-wood. Here it was necessary
+to shoot the Great Dane pup we got at the Salchaket.
+His feet were still very sore and he quite useless for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291"></a><a href="images/291.png">[291]</a></span>
+next winter, while Doc was returned to me from Fairbanks,
+not much the worse for his severe frost-bite.
+Indian after Indian begged for the dog, but I had more
+regard for him than to turn him over to the tender
+mercies of an Indian. There are exceptional Indians, but
+for my part I would rather be a dead dog than an ordinary
+Indian's dog&mdash;so he died.</p>
+
+<p>There remained the seventy-five or eighty miles
+through the Yukon Flats to Fort Yukon&mdash;always the
+most dangerous stretch of the river, and at this season,
+when the winter's trail was beginning to break up, particularly
+so. It would be entirely practicable to cut a
+land trail that should not touch the river at all, or
+not at more than one point, between Circle and Fort
+Yukon, and such a portage besides removing all the danger
+would save perhaps twenty miles. In many places
+it was necessary for one of us to go ahead with an axe,
+constantly sounding and testing the ice. Here and there
+we made a circuit around open water into which the ice
+that bore the trail had collapsed bodily&mdash;one of them a
+particularly ugly place, with black water twenty feet
+deep running at six or seven miles an hour. I never pass
+this stretch of river without a feeling of gratitude that
+I am safely over it once more.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">CAPTAIN AMUNDSEN</div>
+
+<p>As we left the Halfway Island we passed an Indian
+from Fort Yukon going up the river with dogs and toboggan,
+and I chuckled, as I returned his very polite
+salutation and shook hands with him, at the success of
+the way he had been dealt with the previous fall, for he
+had been a particularly churlish fellow with an insolent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292"></a><a href="images/292.png">[292]</a></span>
+manner. Six or seven years before he had been taken
+by Captain Amundsen, of the <i>Gjoa</i>, as guide along this
+stretch of the river. It will be remembered that when
+that skilful and fortunate navigator had reached Herschell
+Island from the east, he left his ship in winter quarters
+and made a rapid journey with Esquimaux across country
+to Fort Yukon expecting to find a telegraph station there
+from which he could send word of his success. But to his
+disappointment he found it necessary to go two hundred
+and thirty miles farther up the river to Eagle, before he
+could despatch his message. So he left his Esquimaux
+at Fort Yukon and took this Indian as guide. And in his
+modest and most interesting book he mentions the man's
+surliness and says he was glad to get rid of him at Circle.</p>
+
+<p>Some new outbreak of insolence for which he had been
+flung out of a store decided that he must be dealt with,
+and I sent for him, for the chief, the native minister, and
+the interpreter. With these assessors beside me, and
+Captain Amundsen's book open on the table, I spoke
+to the man of his general conduct and reputation. I
+read the derogatory remark about him in the book
+"printed for all the world to read," and told him that
+of all the people, white and native, the captain had
+met on his journeys, only one was spoken of harshly
+and he was the one. It made a great impression on the
+man. The chief and the native minister followed it up
+with their harangues, and the net result was a thorough
+change in his whole attitude and demeanour. He told
+us he felt the shame of being held up to the world as rude
+and impudent and would try to amend. He has tried so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293"></a><a href="images/293.png">[293]</a></span>
+successfully that he is now one of the politest and most
+courteous Indians in the village, for which, if this should
+ever chance to reach Captain Amundsen's eye, I trust
+he will accept our thanks.</p>
+
+<p>Fort Yukon, where the headquarters of the archdeaconry
+of the Yukon are now fixed, grows in native
+population and importance. A new and sightly church,
+a new schoolhouse, a new two-story mission house, a medical
+missionary and a nurse in residence, as well as a native
+clergyman, mark the Indian metropolis of this region
+and perhaps of all interior Alaska. Self-government is
+fostered amongst the people by a village council elected
+annually, that settles native troubles and disputes and
+takes charge of movements for the general good, and of
+the relief of native poverty. The resident physician has
+been appointed justice of the peace and there is effort to
+enforce the law of the land at a place where every man
+has been a law unto himself. But it is a very slow and
+difficult matter to enforce law in this country at all, and
+more particularly at these remote points; and the class of
+white men who are to be found around native villages,
+many of whom "fear not God neither regard man,"
+pursue their debauchery and deviltry long time unwhipped.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294"></a><a href="images/294.png">[294]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h3>FROM THE TANANA RIVER TO THE KUSKOKWIM&mdash;THENCE TO
+THE IDITAROD MINING CAMP&mdash;THENCE TO THE YUKON,
+AND UP THAT RIVER TO FORT YUKON</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> discovery of gold on the Innoko in the winter of
+1906-7, and the "strike" on the Iditarod, a tributary of
+the Innoko, some three years later, opened up a new
+region of Alaska. It is characteristic of a gold discovery
+in a new district that it sets men feverishly to work prospecting
+all the adjacent country, and sends them as far
+afield from it as the new base of supplies will allow them
+to stretch their tether. A glance at the map will show
+that the Innoko and Iditarod country lies between the
+two great rivers of Alaska, the Yukon and the Kuskokwim,
+much lower down the Yukon than any of the earlier
+gold discoveries; that is to say that while the Tanana
+gold fields lie off the Middle Yukon, the Circle fields off
+the upper Yukon, the Iditarod camp belongs to the
+lower river. The Innoko workings were not extensive
+nor very rich, but they furnished a base for prospecting
+from which the Iditarod was reached, and Flat Creek, in
+the latter district, promised to be wonderfully rich.
+Immediately upon the news of this strike reaching the
+other camps of the interior, preparations were made far
+and wide for migrating thither upon the opening of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295"></a><a href="images/295.png">[295]</a></span>
+Yukon navigation, and the early summer of 1910 saw a
+wild stampede to the Iditarod. Saloon-keepers, store-keepers,
+traders of all kinds, and the rag-tag and bobtail
+that always flock to a new camp were on the move
+so soon as the ice went out. From Dawson, from the
+Fortymile, from Circle, from Fairbanks, from the Koyukuk,
+and as soon as Bering Sea permitted, from Nome,
+all sorts of craft bore all sorts of people to the new
+Eldorado, while the first through steamboats from the
+outside were crowded with people from the Pacific coast
+eager to share in the opportunity of wealth. The sensational
+magazines had been printing article after article
+about "The incalculable riches of Alaska," and here were
+people hoping to pick some of it up. Iditarod City
+sprang into life as the largest "city" of the interior; the
+centre of gravity of the population of the interior of
+Alaska was shifted a thousand miles in a month.</p>
+
+<p>Iditarod City furnished a new and large base of supplies.
+Amidst the heterogeneous mass of humanity that
+swarmed into the place, though by no means the largest
+element in it, were experienced prospectors from every
+other district in Alaska. Under the iniquitous law that
+then prevailed and has only recently been modified, by
+which there was no limit at all to the number of claims in
+a district which one man could stake for himself and
+others, every creek adjacent to Flat Creek, every creek
+for many miles in every direction, had long since been tied
+up by the men with lead-pencils and hatchets. So the
+newly arrived prospectors must spread out yet wider, and
+they were soon scattered over all the rugged hundred<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296"></a><a href="images/296.png">[296]</a></span>
+miles between Iditarod City and the Kuskokwim River.
+Here and there they found prospects; and here and there
+what promised to be "pay." They started a new town,
+Georgetown, on the Kuskokwim itself; another town
+sprang up on the Takotna, a tributary of the Kuskokwim;
+and the great Commercial Company of Alaska, ever alert
+for new developments, put a steamboat on the Kuskokwim
+and built trading-posts at both these points. Thus
+the Kuskokwim country, which for long had been one of
+the least-known portions of Alaska, was opened up almost
+at a stroke.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">CAMP AT 50&deg; BELOW</div>
+
+<p>It was my purpose to visit Iditarod City during the
+winter of 1910-11, although, by reason of the distance to
+be travelled, a journey thither would involve the omission
+of the customary winter visit to upper Yukon points.
+When the northern trip to the Koyukuk was returned
+from at Tanana, a sad journey had to be made to Nenana
+to bury the body of Miss Farthing, and Doctor Loomis,
+missionary physician at Tanana, who accompanied me
+on this errand, had almost as rough a breaking-in to the
+Alaska trail as we came back to Tanana again as Doctor
+Burke had in our journey over the "first ice" of the
+Koyukuk two years before. Two feet of new snow lay
+on the trail, and the thermometer went down to 60&deg;
+below zero. We were camped once on the mail trail,
+unable to reach a road-house, at 50&deg; below zero.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="breaking" id="breaking"></a><a href="images/gs338.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs338_th.jpg" width="500" height="304" alt="The rough breaking in of Doctor Loomis, camped on the mail trail at 50&deg; below zero, unable to reach a road-house for the deep snow." title="The rough breaking in of Doctor Loomis, camped on the mail trail at 50&deg; below zero, unable to reach a road-house for the deep snow." />
+</a><span class="caption">The rough breaking in of Doctor Loomis, camped on the mail trail at 50&deg; below zero, unable to reach a road-house for the deep snow.</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="esquimauxpic" id="esquimauxpic"></a><a href="images/gs339.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs339_th.jpg" width="500" height="288" alt="Esquimaux of the Upper Kuskokwim." title="Esquimaux of the Upper Kuskokwim." />
+</a><span class="caption">Esquimaux of the Upper Kuskokwim.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE ROUTE TO THE IDITAROD</div>
+
+<p>From Tanana the beaten track to the Iditarod lay
+one hundred and sixty miles down the Yukon to Lewis's
+Landing, and then across country by the Lewis Cut-Off
+one hundred miles to Dishkaket on the Innoko, and thence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297"></a><a href="images/297.png">[297]</a></span>
+across country another hundred miles to Iditarod City.
+But I designed to penetrate to the Iditarod by another
+route. I had long desired to visit Lake Minch&uacute;mina and
+its little band of Indians, and to pass through the upper
+Kuskokwim country. So I had engaged a Minch&uacute;mina
+Indian as a guide, and laid my course up the Tanana
+River to the Coschaket, and then due south across country
+to Lake Minch&uacute;mina and the upper Kuskokwim.</p>
+
+<p>The Cosna is a small stream confluent with the Tanana,
+about thirty miles above the mouth of that river, and we
+had hoped to reach it by the river trail upon the same
+day we left the mission at Tanana, the 18th of February,
+1911. But the trail was too heavy and the going too
+slow and the start too late. When we had reached Fish
+Creek, about half-way, it was already growing dark, and
+we were glad to stop in a native cabin, where was an old
+widow woman with a blind daughter. The daughter,
+unmarried, had a little baby, and I inquired through
+Walter who the father was and whether the girl had
+willingly received the man or if he had taken advantage
+of her blindness. She named an unmarried Indian,
+known to me, and declared that she had not been
+consenting. It seemed a paltry and contemptible trick
+to take advantage of a fatherless blind girl. I baptized
+the baby and resolved to make the man marry
+the girl.</p>
+
+<p>The next night we reached the Coschaket, which,
+following the Indian rule, means "mouth of the Cosna,"
+and found that our guide, Minch&uacute;mina John, had already
+relayed a load of grub that Walter had previously brought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298"></a><a href="images/298.png">[298]</a></span>
+here from Tanana, one day's march upon our journey.
+Our course from the Coschaket left the Tanana River
+and struck across country by an old Indian trail that had
+not been used that winter. Through scrubby spruce and
+over frozen lakes and swamps, crossing the Cosna several
+times&mdash;a narrow little river with high steep banks&mdash;the
+trail went, until it brought us to a hunting camp of
+the Indians, about eighteen miles from the Coschaket.
+Here our stuff was cached and here we spent the night,
+doctoring the sick amongst them as well as we could.
+My eyes had been sorely tried this day despite dark
+smoked glasses, for we were travelling almost due south,
+and the sun was now some hours in the sky and yet low
+enough to shine right in one's face. So Walter stopped
+at a birch-tree, stripped some of the bark, and made an
+eye-shade that was a great comfort and relief.</p>
+
+<p>From this place began the slow work of double-tripping.
+The unbroken snow was too deep to permit the
+hauling of our increased load over it without a preliminary
+breaking out of a trail on snow-shoes. So camp was
+left standing and Walter and John went ahead all day
+and returned late at night with eight or nine miles of
+trail broken, while I stayed in camp and had dog feed
+cooked and supper ready. The next day we advanced
+the camp so far as the trail was broken. A moose had
+used the trail for some distance, however, since the boys
+left it, and his great plunging hoofs had torn up the snow
+worse than a horse would have done.</p>
+
+<p>A driving wind and heavy snowfall had drifted the
+new trail in the night so badly, moreover, that we were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299"></a><a href="images/299.png">[299]</a></span>
+not able to cover the full stretch that had been snow-shoed,
+but camped in the dusk after we had gone eight miles.
+Eight miles in two days was certainly very poor travel,
+and at this rate our supplies would never take us down
+to the forks of the Kuskokwim. Yet there was no other
+way in which we could proceed. The weather was exceedingly
+mild, too mild for comfort&mdash;the thermometer
+ranging from 20&deg; to 25&deg; above&mdash;and the dogs felt the unseasonable
+warmth. It took us all that week to make
+the watershed between the drainage of the Tanana and
+the drainage of the Kuskokwim, a point about half-way
+to Lake Minch&uacute;mina. One day trail was broken, the
+next day the loads went forward. Tie the dogs as securely
+as one would, it was not safe to go off and leave our supplies
+exposed to the ravages that a broken chain or a
+slipped collar might bring, so two went forward and I sat
+down in camp. The boys on their return usually brought
+with them a few brace of ptarmigan or grouse or spruce
+hen or, at the least, a rabbit or so.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE CAMP-ROBBERS</div>
+
+<p>The camp-robbers, to my mind the most interesting
+of Alaskan birds, became very friendly and tame on these
+vigils. They stay in the country all the winter, when
+most birds have migrated, like prosperous mine owners,
+to less rigorous climates; they turn up everywhere, in
+the most mysterious way, so soon as one begins to make
+any preparation for camping, and they are bold and
+fearless and take all sorts of chances. On this journey
+more than once they alighted on a moving sled and
+pecked at the dried fish that happened to be exposed.
+Yet they are so alert and so quick in their movements<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300"></a><a href="images/300.png">[300]</a></span>
+that it would be difficult to catch them were they actually
+under one's hand. One of them, during a long day in
+camp, grew so tame that it pecked crumbs off the toe of
+my moccasin, and in another day or two would, one feels
+sure, have eaten out of the hand. There is a curious
+belief, strongly intrenched in the Alaskan mind, that the
+nest of this most common bird has never been found, and
+that the Smithsonian Institution has a standing offer of a
+large sum of money for the discovery. They build in the
+spruce-trees, ten or twelve feet above the ground, a nest
+of rough twigs, and lay five very small eggs, grey spotted
+with black. This, at any rate, is the description that
+Walter gives me of a nest he discovered with the bird
+sitting upon it, and I have found the boy's accounts of
+such matters entirely trustworthy. It is curious, however,
+that the nest of a bird so common all over Alaska
+as the camp-robber should be so rarely found. At times
+they are very mischievous and destructive, and the man
+who builds a careless cache will often be heard denouncing
+them, but to my mind a bird who gives us his enlivening
+company throughout the dead of an Alaskan winter deserves
+what pickings he can get.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SOFT WEATHER</div>
+
+<p>On Saturday, the 25th of February, after climbing a
+rather stiff hill, we passed temporarily out of Yukon into
+Kuskokwim waters, for the tributaries of these two great
+drainage systems interlock in these hills. At the foot of
+the hill we stopped for lunch, a roaring fire was soon built,
+and a great cube of beaten snow impaled upon a stake
+was set up before the fire to drip into a pan for tea water,
+while the boys roasted rabbits. In a few hours more we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301"></a><a href="images/301.png">[301]</a></span>
+were on the banks of one of the tributaries of the East
+Fork (properly the North Fork) of the Kuskokwim.
+Here, in an unoccupied native cabin, we made our camp
+and lay over Sunday, and here began the most remarkable
+spell of weather I have known in the interior at this season
+of the year. The thermometer rose to 37&deg; and then to
+40&deg;; the snow everywhere was thawing, and presently it
+began to rain steadily. It was the first time I had seen a
+decided thaw in February, let alone rain.</p>
+
+<p>Next day the rain turned to snow, but since the thermometer
+still stood around 40&deg;, the snow melted as it fell,
+and we were wet through all day. The snow underfoot,
+however, was so much less and so much harder that we
+were able to proceed without preliminary trail breaking.
+But it was a most disagreeable day and the prelude to
+a more disagreeable night. Soft, wet snow clings to everything
+it touches. The dogs are soon carrying an additional
+burden; balls of snow form on all projecting tufts
+of hair; masses of snow must continually be beaten off
+the sled. Every time a snow-shoe is lifted from the
+ground it lifts a few pounds of snow with it. One's
+moccasins and socks are soon wet through, and the feet,
+encased in this sodden cold covering, grow numb and
+stay so. We crossed a considerable mountain pass in
+driving snow, and should never have found the way without
+John, for much of it was above timber, and when it
+took us through woods the blazes on the trees were so
+bleached with age as to be difficult of recognition. The
+Indians have used this trail for generations; but few
+white men have ever passed along it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302"></a><a href="images/302.png">[302]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Wet snow, wet spruce boughs, wet tent, wet wood, wet
+clothing make poor camping. Water-proof equipment is
+so rarely needed on the winter trail that one does not
+bother with it. But the climate of the Kuskokwim valley
+is evidently different from that of the rest of the interior,
+if, as John said, such weather is not remarkable in these
+parts at this season. A third day was of much the same
+description; thawing and heavily snowing all day, the
+thermometer between 36&deg; and 40&deg;. The labour of going
+ahead of the teams and breaking trail, on the snow-shoes,
+through slush, grew so great that I relinquished it to John
+and took the handle-bars of his sled. We were approaching
+Lake Minch&uacute;mina, but the hills that led us into
+Yukon waters once more and should have given us views
+of the lake and the great mountains beyond gave nothing.
+It is a keen disappointment to be utterly denied
+great views, the expectation of which has been a support
+through long distances and fatigues.</p>
+
+<p>At noon we built a fire with considerable difficulty,
+but once it was started we plied it with fuel till we had a
+noble, roaring bonfire, and we hung our wet socks and
+moccasins and parkees and caps and mitts around it and
+stayed there until they were dry, though the resumption
+of our journey in the continuous melting snow soon wet
+everything through again.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">LAKE MINCH&Uacute;MINA</div>
+
+<p>At length, late in the evening of the 28th of February,
+we descended a long ridge and came upon the northeastern
+shore of Lake Minch&uacute;mina, one of the most considerable
+lakes of interior Alaska. It stretched its broad
+expanse away into the misty distance, the farther shore<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303"></a><a href="images/303.png">[303]</a></span>
+quite invisible, the snow driving slowly over it, and it
+looked as though we had stumbled by mistake upon the
+shores of the Arctic Ocean. There was no sort of trail
+upon it and the snow-shoes sank through the melting
+snow of its surface into the water that lay upon the ice
+and brought up a load of slush at every step; yet the
+going would have been still worse without them. The
+recollection of the six miles we trudged across that lake
+is a dismal recollection of utter fatigue, of mechanical
+lifting and falling of encumbered feet with the recurring
+feeling that it would be impossible to lift them any more.
+All across that lake I ate snow, and that and the back-ache
+legacy of an old strain are my signs of approaching
+exhaustion. Four hours passed ere we heard the noise
+of dogs and saw the glimmer of a light through the darkness,
+and the hearts of men and beasts alike leaped to the
+expectation of rest and shelter. We had feared the village
+might be deserted and were rejoiced that the Indians
+were still there.</p>
+
+<p>Never was hospitality more grateful than that we had
+from the little remote band of natives at the Minch&uacute;mina
+village. They made a pot of tea and fried some flap-jacks
+for us, and that was our supper, though I think the
+boys ate some boiled moose meat from a pot on the stove.
+We had plenty of grub, but were too weary to cook it;
+we spread our bedding down on the floor amongst a dozen
+others and fell almost at once into a deep sleep. Almost
+at once; for the arrival of our eight dogs had made a
+commotion amongst the canine population of the place,
+that after repeated outbreaks of noisy animosity and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304"></a><a href="images/304.png">[304]</a></span>
+defiance seemed to turn by common consent into a
+friendly and most protracted howling contest in which
+my malamute "Muk" plainly outdid all competitors.
+How much longer the noise would have kept up it is hard
+to say&mdash;dogs never seem too tired to howl&mdash;but when
+the limit of Indian patience was reached, an aged crone
+rolled out of the bed into which she had rolled "all standing,"
+seized a staff and went outdoors to lay it impartially
+upon the backs of all the disturbers of the peace,
+domestic and foreign, with a screech that was as formidable
+as the blows. The rest was silence.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning a dozen alarm-clocks went off within
+a few minutes of each other. Every adult in that cabin
+owned a separate alarm-clock, and rose, one supposes,
+to the summons of no other timepiece. At any rate, the
+clocks went off at intervals, and the natives arose one by
+one and seemed hugely to enjoy the clatter. Let one
+purchase a new thing and every individual in the community
+must have one also.</p>
+
+<p>But what struck me instantly upon arising was the
+miraculous transformation that had taken place outdoors.
+The sun was shining brilliantly through a clear
+sky! I hastened to dress and, not waiting for breakfast,
+seized my camera and started out. The chinook was
+over; the sharp, welcome tang of frost was in the air; the
+snow was hard underfoot. Out upon the gleaming surface
+of the lake I went for nigh a mile, resolutely refusing
+to look behind. I knew what vision awaited me when I
+turned around, had, indeed, caught a slight glimpse as I
+left the cabin, and I wanted the smooth, open foreground<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305"></a><a href="images/305.png">[305]</a></span>
+of the lake that I might see it to the best
+advantage.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">DENALI AND HIS WIFE</div>
+
+<p>There is probably no other view of North America's
+greatest mountain group comparable to that from Lake
+Minch&uacute;mina. From almost every other coign of vantage
+in the interior I had seen it and found it more or less
+unsatisfying. Only from distant points like the Pedro
+Dome or the summit between Rampart and Glen Gulch
+does the whole mass and uplift of it come into view with
+dignity and impressiveness. At close range the peaks
+seem stunted and inconspicuous, their rounded, retreating
+slopes lacking strong lines and decided character.
+But from the lake the precipitous western face of Denali
+and Denali's Wife rise sheer, revealed by the level foreground
+of the snow from base to summit. It was, indeed,
+a glorious scene. There stood the master peak, seeming
+a stupendous vertical wall of rock rising twenty thousand
+feet to a splendid sharp crest perhaps some forty or
+fifty miles away; there, a little farther to the south, rose
+the companion mass, a smaller but still enormous elevation
+of equally savage inaccessibility; while between them,
+near the base, little sharp peaks stretched like a corridor
+of ruined arches from mass to mass. One was struck at
+once by the simple appropriateness of the native names
+for these mountains. The master peak is Denali&mdash;the
+great one; the lesser peak is Denali's Wife; and the little
+peaks between are the children. And my indignation
+kindled at the substitution of modern names for these
+ancient mountain names bestowed immemorially by the
+original inhabitants of the land! Is it too late to strike<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306"></a><a href="images/306.png">[306]</a></span>
+Mount McKinley and Mount Foraker from the map?
+The names were given fifteen or sixteen years ago only,
+by one who saw them no nearer than a hundred miles.
+Is it too late to restore the native names contemptuously
+displaced?</p>
+
+<p>The majesty of the scene grew upon me as I gazed,
+and presently hand went to camera that some record of
+it might be attempted. But alas for the limitations of
+photography! I knew, even as I made the exposures,
+first at one one-hundredth of a second and then at one-fiftieth,
+that there was little hope of securing a picture;
+the air was yet faintly hazy with thin vapour; the early
+sun made too acute an angle with the peaks; and the
+yellow lens screen was left in the hind-sack of the sled.
+It was even as I feared. When developed some months
+later, the film held absolutely no trace of the mighty
+mountains that had risen so proudly before it. I promised
+myself that at noon, when the sun had removed
+to a greater distance from the mountains and made a
+more favourable angle with them, I would return and
+try again; but by noon had come another sudden, violent
+change of the weather, and snow was falling once
+more.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE <ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'MINCHUMINA'">MINCH&Uacute;MINA</ins> FOLK</div>
+
+<p>So I got no picture, save the picture indelibly impressed
+upon my memory, of the noblest mountain scene
+I had ever gazed upon which made memorable this 1st
+of March; perhaps one of the noblest mountain scenes
+in the whole world, for one does not recall another so
+great uplift from so low a base. The marshy, flat country
+that stretches from Minch&uacute;mina to the mountains<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307"></a><a href="images/307.png">[307]</a></span>
+cannot be much more than one thousand feet above
+the sea. Those awful precipices dropping thousands of
+feet at a leap, those peaks rising serene and everlasting
+into the highest heaven, the overwhelming size and
+strength and solidity of their rocky bulk, all this sank
+into my heart, and there sprang up once again the passionate
+desire of exploring the bowels of them, of creeping
+along their glaciers and up their icy ridges, of penetrating
+their hidden chambers, inviolate since the foundation
+of the world, and maybe scaling their ultimate summits
+and looking down upon all the earth even as they look
+down!</p>
+
+<p>Men, however, and not mountains, made the immediate
+demand upon one's interest and attention, and
+I returned to breakfast and the duties of the day. The
+Minch&uacute;mina people are a very feeble folk, some sixteen
+all told at the time of our visit, greatly reduced by the
+epidemics of the last decade, living remote from all
+others on the verge of their race's habitat. They trade
+chiefly at Tanana, a hundred and thirty miles or so
+away, walking an annual trip thither with their furs,
+and owning a nominal allegiance to our mission at that
+place. It was the first time that any clergyman had ever
+visited them, and the whole of the day was spent with
+them, discovering what they knew and trying to teach
+them a little more. The people sat around on the floor
+and hung upon the lips of the interpreter. But what a
+barrier a difference of language is! An interpreter is
+like a mountain pass, a means of access but at the cost
+of time and labour. He does not remove the obstruction.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308"></a><a href="images/308.png">[308]</a></span>
+The Minch&uacute;mina people occupy a fine country
+that could amply support ten times the Indian population
+that now inhabits it. We were, indeed, now entering
+a country that has been almost depopulated by
+successive epidemics of contagious diseases. The measles
+in 1900 slew most of them, and diphtheria in 1906 destroyed
+all the children and many of the adults that
+remained. The chief of this little band wore a hat
+proudly adorned with ribbons and plumes, and flew a
+flag before his dwelling with the initials of the North
+American Trading and Transportation Company on it&mdash;a
+defunct Alaskan corporation. We could not learn
+the origin thereof; the flag and the letters were plainly
+home-made. It was probably a mere imitation of a
+flag he had seen years ago at Tanana, copied without
+knowledge of the meaning of the letters, as the Esquimaux
+often copy into the decoration of their clothing
+and equipment the legends from canned foods.</p>
+
+<p>Lake Minch&uacute;mina drains by a fork of the Kantishna
+River into the Tanana and so into the Yukon. Just
+beyond the southwestern edge of the lake runs a deep
+gully for perhaps a mile that leads to another lake called
+Ts&oacute;rmina, which drains into Minch&uacute;mina. And just
+beyond Ts&oacute;rmina is a little height of land, on the other
+side of which lies Lake Sishw&oacute;ymina, which drains into
+the Kuskokwim. So that little height of land is another
+watershed between Alaska's two great rivers. Lakes
+Ts&oacute;rmina and Sishw&oacute;ymina are not on any maps; indeed,
+this region has never been mapped save very crudely
+from the distant flanks of Denali upon one of Alfred<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309"></a><a href="images/309.png">[309]</a></span>
+Brook's early bold journeys into the interior of Alaska on
+behalf of the Geological Survey. Although the Russians
+had establishments on the lower Kuskokwim seventy-five
+years ago, and the river is the second largest in
+Alaska and easy of navigation, yet the white man had
+penetrated very little into this country until the Innoko
+and Iditarod "strikes" of 1908 and 1909 respectively.</p>
+
+<p>It was our plan to follow the main valley of the Kuskokwim
+until the confluence of the Takotna with that
+stream, just below the junction of the main North and
+South Forks of the Kuskokwim, and then strike northwestward
+across country to the Iditarod.</p>
+
+<p>The snow had passed and the sun was bright and the
+thermometer around zero all day when we left Minch&uacute;mina
+to pursue our journey. The welcome change in
+the weather had brought a still more welcome change in
+travel. The decided and continued thaw followed by
+sharp cold had put a crust on the snow that would hold
+up the dogs and the sled and a man on small trail snow-shoes
+anywhere. Trail making was no longer necessary,
+and in two days we made upward of fifty miles. So
+much difference does surface make.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">TALIDA</div>
+
+<p>Across the end of Lake Minch&uacute;mina, across Ts&oacute;rmina
+and Sishw&oacute;ymina and a number of lesser lakes we went,
+following a faint show-shoe trail towards a distant mountain
+group to the southwest, the Talida Mountains, at
+the foot of which lay the Talida village. On the other
+hand, to the east and southeast, we had tantalising
+glimpses through haze and cloud of the two great mountains,
+and presently of the lesser peaks of the whole<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310"></a><a href="images/310.png">[310]</a></span>
+Alaskan range, sweeping its proud curve to the coast.
+For a long way on the second day we travelled on the
+flat top of a narrow ridge that must surely have been a
+lateral moraine of a glacier, what time the ice poured
+down from the heights and stretched far over this valley&mdash;then
+through scattered timber, increasing in size and
+thickness and already displaying character that differed
+somewhat from the familiar forests of the Yukon. The
+show-shoe trail we were following was made by a messenger
+despatched by the Minch&uacute;mina people to invite the
+Talida people to a potlatch; for the caches were filled
+with moose meat beyond local consumption. Early on
+the second day we met him returning and learned that he
+had gone on to yet another village a day's journey farther,
+still on our route.</p>
+
+<p>The people were all gone hunting from the tiny native
+hamlet of Talida, but we entered a cabin and made ourselves
+at home. We had passed into the region where
+the Greek Church holds nominal sway, of which the icons
+with little candles before them on the walls gave token.
+No priest ever visits them, but a native at a village on
+the south fork where is a church holds some position
+analogous to that of a lay reader. The nearest priest is
+a half-breed, ill spoken of for irregularity of life, some
+two hundred miles farther down the river. The Greek
+Church is relaxing its hold in Alaska, perhaps inevitably,
+and suffers sadly since the removal of the bishop from
+Sitka from lack of supervision. Also we had passed out
+of Indian country into the land of the Esquimaux, for
+these people, far up towards the head of the river as they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311"></a><a href="images/311.png">[311]</a></span>
+were, had yet come at some period from the mouth. We
+were out of Walter's language range now, and were glad
+that the bilingual John of the march country was with
+us to serve as interpreter.</p>
+
+<p>Standing proudly up against the wall in one corner
+of the cabin was a rather pathetic object to my eyes&mdash;an
+elaborate gilt-handled silk umbrella. There needed no
+one to tell its story; it spoke of a visit to the Yukon with
+furs to sell and the usual foolish purchase of gay and
+glittering trash&mdash;novel and quite useless. What easy
+prey these poor people are to the wiles of the trader!
+Said one of them to me recently, when I asked the purpose
+of an "annex" to his store with a huge billiard-table
+in it&mdash;at an exclusive native village&mdash;"It's to get their
+money; there's no use trying to fool you; if we can't get
+it one way we've got to get it another." This gorgeous
+silk umbrella was concrete expression of the same sentiment.
+It was bought outside, it was brought into the
+country, it was set on exhibition in the store, because
+some trader judged it likely to attract a native eye. No
+one, white or native, uses an umbrella in interior Alaska.</p>
+
+<p>We made twenty-five miles the next day through a
+wide, open country, well wooded in places with a park-like
+distribution of trees, unwonted in our travels and
+attractive. A new species of spruce threw thick branches
+right down to the ground and tapered up to a perfect
+cone; each tree apart from the others and surrounded by
+sward instead of underbrush. There was a dignity about
+these trees that the common Yukon spruce never attains.
+Rolling hills of small elevation stretched on either hand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312"></a><a href="images/312.png">[312]</a></span>
+and game signs abounded. After eight hours of such
+travel we spoke of camping, but presently saw footprints
+in the snow and pushed on to the bank of a little river,
+the Chedolothna, where stood a cabin, a tent, and several
+high caches. Here, with two families that occupied the
+cabin, we stayed the night.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">MEASLES AND DIPHTHERIA</div>
+
+<p>Six people at this place, six at Talida, sixteen at
+Minch&uacute;mina, make up all the population of a region perhaps
+a hundred and fifty miles square. Yet it is a
+noble Indian country, one of the most favourable in all
+the interior, capable of supporting hundreds of people.
+Signs, indeed, of a much larger occupation of it were not
+wanting, and all accounts speak of the wholesale destruction
+of the natives by disease. We were told of a village
+a little farther up this stream where every living being,
+save one old man, died of diphtheria five years previously,
+while those who have heard the stories of the horrors of
+the epidemic of measles in 1900, usually connected in some
+way with the stampede to Nome of that year when the
+disease seems to have entered the country, will understand
+how a region once thickly peopled, for Alaska, has
+become the most thinly peopled in all the territory.</p>
+
+<p>A half-breed trader, long resident at a point perhaps
+two hundred miles lower down the Kuskokwim, told me
+of coming back to a populous village after an absence of
+a few weeks, to find every person dead and the starving
+dogs tearing at the rotting corpses. It is terrible to think
+what the irruption of a new disease may mean to these
+primitive natives. Even a disease like measles, rarely
+fatal and not commonly regarded as serious amongst<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313"></a><a href="images/313.png">[313]</a></span>
+whites, takes to itself a strange and awful virulence when
+it invades this virgin blood. The people know no proper
+treatment; maddened by the itching rash that covers the
+body, they fling off all cover, rush outdoors naked, whatever
+the weather, and either roll in the snow or plunge
+into the stream; with the result that the disease "strikes
+in" and kills them. Such is the description that is given
+of its course along the lower Yukon and Kuskokwim. At
+many a Yukon village half the people died, despite the
+aid the few missionaries then on the river could afford;
+upon the Kuskokwim the havoc seems to have been still
+greater. Six years later, death again stalked through this
+region after having visited the Yukon, and this time seized
+his victims by the throat. In another chapter has been
+given some account of an outbreak of diphtheria on the
+Chandalar, following a more serious epidemic at Circle
+City and Fort Yukon. It was during that same winter
+the disease raged in this region, remote from any sort of
+medical or even intelligent lay aid, and swept off all the
+children that had been spared by the measles or had been
+born since that time. At our next stopping-place we
+saw the graves of nineteen children who died in one day!</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE INDIAN GUIDE</div>
+
+<p>We learned that we were now within one day's travel
+of a road-house, at or near the junction of the forks of
+the Kuskokwim, and that a government trail had been
+surveyed and staked from the Iditarod to the Sushitna,
+passing close to the same point, and that during the present
+winter road-houses had sprung up along the western
+portion of it, so that we should not have to make camp
+again on the way to Iditarod City. All of which Minch&uacute;mina<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314"></a><a href="images/314.png">[314]</a></span>
+John had collected from the people in the cabin,
+and now presented to me as reason why he should be
+released from further service. I was loath to let him go
+until we were actually <i>at</i> the road-house described, but
+he wanted to go back to the lake for the potlatch then
+preparing, and said that two days' delay would bar him
+from the best of the festivities.</p>
+
+<p>So I settled with him, giving him fifty dollars of the
+sixty dollars covenanted to the Iditarod, and grub enough
+to take him back to the lake, and a rifle, for he was unprovided
+with firearms, and he went his way back, richly
+content, to the gorging of unlimited moose meat that
+awaited him, and the boy and I went ours. So far as
+merely his company was concerned I was not sorry to
+lose him. The old saying holds good upon the trail that
+"two is company and three is none." He interfered with
+my boy's lessons. Since he had scarce any English, and
+could not be ignored, the conversation was mainly in
+Indian. In a word he pulled the company down to a
+native level. And I was anxious that Walter's education
+should proceed.</p>
+
+<p>This boy had been with me for two years, winter and
+summer, and it was a great pleasure to witness his gracious
+development of body, mind, and character. Clean-limbed,
+smooth-skinned, slender, and supple, his Indian
+blood showing chiefly in a slight swarth of complexion
+and aquilinity of feature, he now approached his twentieth
+year and began to gain the strength of his manhood
+and to give promise of more than the average stature and
+physical power. With only one full year's schooling behind<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315"></a><a href="images/315.png">[315]</a></span>
+him, the year before he came to me, his active
+intelligence had made such quick use of it that there was
+good foundation to build upon; and our desultory lessons
+in camp&mdash;reading aloud, writing from dictation, geography
+and history in such snippets as circumstances permitted&mdash;were
+eagerly made the most of, and his mental
+horizon broadened continually. Until his sixteenth year
+he had lived amongst the Indians almost exclusively and
+had little English and could not read nor write. He was
+adept in all wilderness arts. An axe, a rifle, a flaying
+knife, a skin needle with its sinew thread&mdash;with all these
+he was at home; he could construct a sled or a pair of
+snow-shoes, going to the woods for his birch, drying it and
+steaming it and bending it; and could pitch camp with all
+the native comforts and amenities as quickly as anybody
+I ever saw. He spoke the naked truth, and was so gentle
+and unobtrusive in manner that he was a welcome guest
+at the table of any mission we visited. Miss Farthing at
+Nenana had laid her mark deep upon him in the one
+year he was with her.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE HALF-BREED</div>
+
+<p>Before he came to me I had another half-breed for
+two years, and before that there had been a series of full-blooded
+native boys. I found the half-breed greatly
+preferable. With full command of the native language,
+with such insight into the native mind as few white men
+ever attain, he combines the white man's quickness of
+apprehension and desire for knowledge; and the companionship
+had been pleasant and profitable. Both these
+boys had picked up quickly and efficiently, without the
+slightest previous experience, the running and the care<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316"></a><a href="images/316.png">[316]</a></span>
+of the four-cylinder gasoline engine of the mission launch,
+and took a great and intelligent interest in all machinery.
+As an interpreter the half-breed is far superior to most
+full-bloods; he takes one's purport immediately; his mind
+seems to leap with the speaker's mind, not only to follow
+faithfully but to anticipate. And the further his English
+progresses, so much the more excellent interpreter
+does he become.</p>
+
+<p>My heart goes out to the large and rapidly increasing
+number of these youths of mixed blood in Alaska. It
+is common to hear them spoken of slightingly and contemptuously.
+There is what my mind always regards
+as a damnable epigram current in the country to the
+effect that the half-breed inherits the vices of both races
+and the virtues of neither. The white man who utters
+this saying with a chuckle at his second-hand wit has
+generally not much virtue to transmit, were virtue heritable.
+But to thoughtful men nowadays this talk of
+the inheritance of virtues and vices is mere folly. The
+half-breed in Alaska, as elsewhere, is the product of
+his environment. Often without legitimate father&mdash;although
+in an Indian community, where nothing is
+secret, his parentage is usually well known&mdash;he is left
+for some native woman to support with the aid of her
+native husband. He is reared with the full-blooded offspring
+of the couple in the frankness that knows no reserve
+and the intimacy that knows no restraint, of Indian
+life. The full extent of that frankness and intimacy shocks
+even the loosest-living white man when he first becomes
+aware of it. Where religion and decency have not been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317"></a><a href="images/317.png">[317]</a></span>
+faithfully inculcated there is no bound to it at all&mdash;it is
+complete. Presently, as his superior intellectual inheritance
+begins to manifest itself, as he grows up into consciousness
+that he is different from, and in many ways
+superior to, the Indians around him, he is naturally
+drawn to such white society as comes his way.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE LOW-DOWN WHITE</div>
+
+<p>In this book a good deal has been said, and, it may be
+thought by the reader, said with a good deal of asperity,
+about the whites who frequent Indian communities and
+come most into contact with the native people; yet the
+more the author sees of this class, the less is he disposed
+to modify any of the strictures he has put upon it. "The
+Low-Down White" is the subject of one of the most
+powerful and scathing of Robert Service's ballads, those
+most unequal productions with their mixture of strength
+and feebleness, of true and forced notes, the best of
+which should certainly live amongst the scant literature
+of the North. And, indeed, the spectacle of the man
+of the higher race, with all the age-long traditions and
+habits of civilisation behind him, descending below the
+level of the savage, corrupting and debauching the savage
+and making this corrupting and debauching the sole
+exercise of his more intelligent and cultivated mind, is
+one that has aroused the disgust and indignation of
+whites in all quarters of the world. Kipling and Conrad
+have drawn him in the East; Robert Louis Stevenson in
+the South Sea Islands; any army officer will draw him
+for you in the Philippines, which lack as yet their
+great delineator; Service has not overdrawn him on the
+Yukon.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318"></a><a href="images/318.png">[318]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Now, it is to this man's society, for lack of other white
+society open to him, that the young half-breed who feels
+his father's blood stirring within him is drawn and is
+made welcome. He finds standards even lower, because
+more sophisticated, than the standards of the Indians
+themselves. He finds that honesty and morality are a
+sham, religion a laughing-stock. He finds the chastity
+of women and the honour of men sneeringly regarded as
+non-existent. He is taught to curse and swear, to talk
+lewdly, to drink and gamble. He is taught that drunkenness
+and sensuality are the only enjoyments worth
+looking forward to, and he soon becomes as vile as his
+preceptors. The back room of the Indian trader's store
+is often the scene of this tuition&mdash;barroom, assignation
+house, gambling hell in one. But let that same youth be
+taken early in hand by one who has a care for him and
+will be at some personal pains to train him cleanly and
+uprightly, and he is as amenable to the good influences
+as he would be to the bad if they were his sole environment.
+Conscious all the time of his equivocal position,
+shy and timid about asserting himself amongst whites,
+he is easy prey to the viciously as he is apt pupil to
+the virtuously disposed.</p>
+
+<p>What is said here of the male half-breeds applies <i>a
+fortiori</i> to the female. Unless early taken in hand by
+the missionary, or put under the protection of some
+church boarding-school&mdash;and sometimes despite all such
+care and teaching&mdash;the lot of the half-breed girl is a sad
+one; and some of the lowest and vilest women of the land
+are of mixed blood.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319"></a><a href="images/319.png">[319]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The half-breed is assuredly to be reckoned with in the
+future of Alaska. He is here to stay. He is here in
+increasing numbers. He is the natural leader of the
+Indian population. There seems little doubt that when
+he cares to assert his rights he is already an American
+citizen, although judicial decisions are uncertain and
+conflicting in this matter.</p>
+
+<p>The missions in the interior have recognised, though
+perhaps somewhat tardily, the importance of the half-breeds,
+and have picked them up here and there along
+the rivers and become responsible for their decent rearing.
+Some, assuredly, of the future leaders of the native people
+are now in training at the mission schools. Some,
+unfortunately, are in quite as assiduous training by the
+unscrupulous Indian trader and his coterie of low-down
+whites.</p>
+
+<p>The skies had threatened snow since we arose, and
+when our diminished expedition was well upon its way
+the snow began to fall. For thirty-six hours it fell without
+cessation. Three days of good travel had put us forward
+seventy-five or eighty miles; now once more we were
+"up against" deep snow and trail breaking. An old
+native whom we met on his way to the potlatch later in
+the day spread out his hands with a look of despair
+and cried: "Good trail all lose'm!" All day we pushed
+on against the driving storm, the flakes stinging our faces
+and striking painfully against our eyeballs, now following
+a narrow steep woodland trail, now awhile along a
+creek bed, now across open country with increasing difficulty
+in finding our way, until it grew dark while yet we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320"></a><a href="images/320.png">[320]</a></span>
+were some miles from our destination, and we made camp;
+and all night long the heavy snow continued.</p>
+
+<p>So soon as we had struck our tent, crusted with ice,
+and had broken up our wet camp next morning there was
+trouble about finding the trail. Wide open spaces with
+never an indication of direction stretched before us. Again
+and again we cast about, the boy to the left, I to the right,
+to find some blaze or mark, but much of the course lay
+across open country that bore none. And then I sorely
+regretted having let John go back. Some miles before
+we came to a stop the previous evening, we passed a native
+encampment with naught but women and children
+in it&mdash;the men gone hunting. But we could not speak
+with them or get any information from them, for our
+Kuskokwim interpreter was gone. And now it seemed
+likely that we should lose our way in this wilderness.
+At last we were entirely at a loss, the boy returning on
+the one side and I on the other from wide detours, in
+which we had found no sign at all. The snow still fell
+heavily; there lay more than a foot of it upon the late
+crust; trail or sign of a trail, on the snow or above it,
+was not at all.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE DOG GUIDES</div>
+
+<p>Then occurred one of the most remarkable things I
+have known in all my journeyings. Straight ahead in
+the middle distance I spied two stray dogs making a direct
+course towards us; not wandering about, but evidently
+going somewhere. Now there are no such things as unattached
+dogs in Alaska; any dog entirely detached from
+human ownership and some sort of human maintenance
+would soon be a dead dog. The explanation, full of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321"></a><a href="images/321.png">[321]</a></span>
+hope, sprang at once to the boy's mind. The dogs must
+belong to the native encampment some six miles back,
+and they had been to the road-house for what scraps they
+could pick up, and were returning. It was probably a
+daily excursion and they had doubtless followed their
+accustomed trail. So it turned out. All the way to
+that road-house, eight miles farther, we followed the
+trail left by those dogs, growing fainter and fainter indeed
+as the new snow fell upon it, but still discernible until
+we had almost reached the road-house. It led across open
+swampy wastes, and presently across two considerable
+lakes, over which we should never have been able to find
+our way, for the trail swung to one hand or the other and
+did not leave the lake in the same general direction by
+which it had reached it. Walter cut a bundle of boughs
+and staked the trail out as we pursued it, lest we should
+return this way, but from the moment we saw the dogs
+there was never any question about the trail; they kept
+it perfectly. We were four and a half hours making the
+eight miles or so to Nicoli's Village and the road-house,
+but we might have been days making it but for those dogs.
+And at the road-house we learned that the boy's theory
+of their movements was the right one. They came
+across the twelve or fourteen miles every day for such
+scraps as they could pick up.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE WILDERNESS POET</div>
+
+<p>So here was our first white man in sixteen days, an
+intelligent man of meagre education, with a great bent
+for versifying. A courteous approval of one set of verse
+brought upon us the accumulated output of years in the
+wilderness without much opportunity of audience, as one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322"></a><a href="images/322.png">[322]</a></span>
+supposes, and most of the afternoon and evening was
+thus spent. Amidst the overwrought sentimentality
+and faulty scansion which marked most of the pieces
+was one simple little poem that struck a true note, said
+its little say, and quit&mdash;without a superfluous word. Its
+author set no store by it at all compared with his more
+pretentious and meretricious work; yet it was the one
+poem in the whole mass. It described the writing of a
+letter to his father; he had spent all he had in prospecting
+and working a small claim, and had just realised that a
+year's labour was gone for naught. His father would
+worry if he got no word at all, but there was no use telling
+the old man he was broke, so he just wrote that he was
+well, and that was all. The old man would come pretty
+near understanding anyway. In simple lines that scanned
+and rhymed naturally, that was what the three or four
+stanzas said. And it was so typical of many a man's
+situation in this country, gave so simply and well the
+reason why many men cease writing to their relatives
+at all, that it pleased me and seemed of value. That
+note came from the heart and from the life's experience.</p>
+
+<p>Nicoli's Village is a very small place with a mere
+handful of people, situated on the South Fork of the
+Kuskokwim some forty miles by river above the junction
+of the forks. Before the epidemics devastated it it
+had been a considerable native community. A Greek
+church, which the natives built entirely themselves, and
+which boasted a large painted icon of sorts, was the most
+important building in the place, and was served by the
+lay minister referred to before. Thus far the Kuskokwim<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323"></a><a href="images/323.png">[323]</a></span>
+is navigable for vessels of light draught, and a small
+stern-wheel steamboat lay wintering upon the bank.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">ROAD-HOUSES</div>
+
+<p>Our way now left the Kuskokwim and struck across
+country to a point just below the junction of the forks,
+and then across country again to a tributary of the right
+bank, the Takotna; with a general northerly direction.
+Road-houses there indeed were, in the crudity and discomfort
+of their first season, and other evidences of the
+proximity of the white man. Here were two men
+camped, hunting moose for the Iditarod market, more
+than a hundred and twenty-five miles away, and here,
+at the end of the second day, near the mouth of the
+Takotna, was the new post of the Commercial Company
+in the charge of an old acquaintance who welcomed us
+warmly and entertained us most hospitably. After camping
+and road-house experience of nearly three weeks,
+a comfortable bed and well-spread table, and the general
+unmistakable m&eacute;nage of a home-making woman are
+very highly enjoyed. That night the whole population
+of the settlement, fourteen persons, gathered in the store
+for Divine service.</p>
+
+<p>Sixteen miles farther on was another settlement, the
+"Upper Takotna" Post, with a rival company established
+and some larger population. Here, also, we spent a night
+with old Fairbanks acquaintances. We were yet a hundred
+miles from Iditarod City, and the trail lay over a
+very rugged, hilly country, up one creek to its head, over
+a divide, and down another, in the way of the usual cross-country
+traverse.</p>
+
+<p>There had not been so much snowfall in this section,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324"></a><a href="images/324.png">[324]</a></span>
+but the weather began to be very severe. The thermometer
+fell to -45&deg; and -50&deg; and -55&deg; on three successive
+nights, and all day long rose not above -20&deg;, with a keen
+wind. The cost of transporting supplies to the road-houses
+on this trail justified the high prices charged&mdash;one
+dollar and a half for a poor meal of rabbits and beans
+and bacon, or ptarmigan and beans and bacon, and one
+dollar for a lunch of coffee, bread and butter, and dried
+fruit. But no such exigency could be pleaded to excuse
+the dirt and discomfort and lack of the commonest provision
+of outhouse decency at most of these places&mdash;'twas
+mere shiftlessness. There is not often much middle
+ground in Alaskan road-houses; they are either very good
+in their way or very bad; either kept by professional
+victuallers who take pride in them or by idle incompetents
+who make an easy living out of the necessities of
+travellers. One wishes that some of the old-time travellers
+who used to wax so eloquently indignant over the
+inns in the Pyrenees could make a winter journey in the
+interior of Alaska.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="summit" id="summit"></a><a href="images/gs368.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs368_th.jpg" width="500" height="333" alt="&quot;The &#39;summit&#39; is high above timber-line and the trail pursues a hogback ridge for a mile and a half at the summit level.&quot;" title="&quot;The &#39;summit&#39; is high above timber-line and the trail pursues a hogback ridge for a mile and a half at the summit level.&quot;" />
+</a><span class="caption">&quot;The &#39;summit&#39; is high above timber-line and the trail pursues a hogback ridge for a mile and a half at the summit level.&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="street" id="street"></a><a href="images/gs369.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs369_th.jpg" width="500" height="281" alt="A street in Iditarod City." title="A street in Iditarod City." />
+</a><span class="caption">A street in Iditarod City.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>One thing pleased me at these road-houses. The only
+reading-matter in any of them consisted of magazines
+bearing the rubber stamp of Saint Matthew's Reading-Room
+at Fairbanks, part of a five-hundred-pound cargo
+of magazines which the mission launch <i>Pelican</i> brought
+to the Iditarod the previous summer; virtually the only
+reading-matter in the whole camp. It was pleasant to
+know that we had been able to avert the real calamity
+of a total absence of anything to read for a whole winter
+throughout this wide district. But, although they were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325"></a><a href="images/325.png">[325]</a></span>
+brought to the Iditarod and distributed absolutely free,
+each of these magazines had cost the road-house keeper
+twenty-five cents for carriage over the trail from Iditarod
+City, and they had been read to death. Some of them
+were so black and greasy from continued handling that
+the print at the edges of the pages was almost unreadable.</p>
+
+<p>These creeks swarmed with ptarmigan, and it was
+well they did, for the new camp was ill supplied with
+food, and we found ourselves in a region of growing
+scarcity as we approached the Iditarod. The ptarmigan
+seem to have supplemented the meagre stocks in the
+Iditarod during this winter of 1910-11 as effectively as
+the rabbits did in the Fairbanks camp in the scarce winter
+of 1904-5. In place after place the whole creek valley,
+where it was open, was crisscrossed with ptarmigan
+tracks, and the birds rose in coveys, uttering their harsh,
+guttural cry at every turn of the trail.</p>
+
+<p>The summit between the head of Moose Creek and
+the head of Bonanza Creek is again a watershed between
+the waters of the Kuskokwim and the waters of the
+Yukon; for Moose Creek is tributary to the Takotna and
+Bonanza Creek is tributary to Otter Creek, which is
+tributary to the Iditarod River. The "summit" is high
+above timber-line, and when the trail has reached it
+it does not descend immediately but pursues a hogback
+ridge for a mile and a half at about the summit level.
+We passed over it in clear, bright weather without difficulty,
+but it would be a bad passage in wind or snow or
+fog. The rugged, broken country, with small, rounded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326"></a><a href="images/326.png">[326]</a></span>
+domes of hills, stretched away in all directions, a maze of
+little valleys threading in and out amongst them.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">PLACE-NAMES</div>
+
+<p>The Bonanza Creek road-house was by far the best
+of any between the Kuskokwim and the Iditarod, and
+showed what can be done for comfort, even under adverse
+circumstances, by a couple who care and try. But how
+the names of gold-bearing creeks, or creeks that are expected
+to be gold-bearing are repeated again and again
+in every new camp! I once counted up the following
+list of mining place-names in Alaska: Bonanza Creeks,
+10; Eldorados and Little Eldorados, 10; Nugget Creeks
+or Gulches, 17; Gold Creeks, 12; Gold Runs, 7. Nor
+is it only in creeks with auriferous deposit or expectation
+of auriferous deposit that this reduplication occurs;
+there are Bear Creeks, 16; Boulder Creeks, 13; Moose
+Creeks, 13; Willow Creeks, 17; Canyon Creeks, 12;
+Glacier Creeks, 14.</p>
+
+<p>The imagination of the average prospector is not his
+most active faculty, but even when his imagination is
+given play and he names a place "Twilight," as he did
+the original settlement at this base of supplies, the
+ineradicable prose of trade comes along the next summer
+and changes it to "Iditarod City." There must
+have been some remarkable personality strong enough
+to repress the "chamber of commerce" at Tombstone,
+Arizona, or the place would have lost its distinctive name
+so soon as it grew large enough to have mercantile establishments
+instead of stores.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">IDITAROD CITY</div>
+
+<p>We went through "Discovery Otter" and into "Flat
+City," on Flat Creek, the jealous rival of Iditarod City,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327"></a><a href="images/327.png">[327]</a></span>
+and so over the hills to Iditarod City, on the wings of a
+storm. The wind whirled the snow behind us and drove
+the sled along almost on top of the dogs. In its bleak
+situation and its exposure to the full force of the wind,
+Iditarod City reminds one of Nome or Candle on the
+Seward Peninsula. The hills and flats that surround it
+are in the main treeless, and the snow drifts and drives
+over everything. Almost all the week that we spent in
+the town it was smothered up in a howling wind-storm, so
+that it was quite a serious undertaking to walk a block
+or two along the streets. Deep drifts were piled up on
+all the corners and on the lee side of all buildings. We
+reached Iditarod City on Monday, the 13th of March.
+Until the following Friday morning was no cessation or
+moderation of the wind-storm; and this, they told us,
+represented most of the weather since the 1st of January.</p>
+
+<p>Overgrown and overdone in every way, the place presented
+all the features, sordid and otherwise, of a raw
+mining town. Prices had risen enormously on all manner
+of supplies, for everything that was not actually "short"
+was believed to be "cornered." Bacon was ninety cents
+a pound; butter one dollar and a half a pound; flour was
+twenty dollars a hundred pounds, and most things in
+like ratio. Some said the grub was not in the camp;
+others that the tradesmen had it cached away waiting
+for the still higher prices they believed would obtain
+before fresh supplies could arrive in July. There was a
+general feeling of disappointment and discouragement,
+enhanced by discomfort and actual suffering from the
+terrible stormy weather of the winter and the exorbitant<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328"></a><a href="images/328.png">[328]</a></span>
+and growing price of provisions. Many men without
+occupation were living on one meal a day. The saloons
+and the parasitical classes, male and female, seemed to
+flourish and to play their usual prominent part in the
+life of such places. The doings of notorious women
+whose sobriquets seemed household words, the lavish
+expenditures of certain men upon them, the presents
+of diamonds they received, with the amount paid for
+them, constituted a large part of the general talk.</p>
+
+<p>One is compelled to admire the vigour and enthusiastic
+enterprise, daunted by no difficulty, that is displayed in
+the wonderfully rapid upraising of a new mining-camp
+town. The building goes far ahead of the known wealth
+of the camp and commonly far ahead of the reasonable
+expectation. But the element of chance is so important
+a factor in placer mining that the whole thing partakes
+more of the nature of gambling than of a commercial
+venture. Any new camp may suddenly present the world
+with a new Klondike; with riches abundant and to spare
+for every one who is fortunate enough to be on the spot.
+Here was Flat Creek with a surprisingly rich deposit;
+why should there not be a dozen such amidst the multitudinous
+creeks of the district? How could any one
+know that it would be almost the only creek on which
+pay would be found at all? For there is no law about the
+distribution of gold deposits; there is not even a general
+rule that has not its notable exceptions. It is very generally
+believed by the old prospectors and miners that
+somewhere in the Bible may be found these words, "Silver
+occurs in veins, but gold is where you find it," which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329"></a><a href="images/329.png">[329]</a></span>
+of course, is a mere misreading or faulty remembering of
+a verse in the Book of Job: "Surely there is a vein for the
+silver and a place for the gold where they fine it" (refine
+it). But that "gold is where you find it" is about the
+only law touching auriferous deposits that holds universally
+good.</p>
+
+<p>Three long parallel streets of one and two story wooden
+buildings, with cross streets connecting them, made up
+the town. Because the country is poorly timbered, the
+usual log construction had yielded in the main to framed
+buildings, and great quantities of lumber had been brought
+the previous summer from Fairbanks, and even from
+Nome and the outside, to supplement the low-grade output
+of two local mills. But the price of building materials
+had been very high, and the average dwelling was very
+small and incommodious. People accustomed to the
+comparative luxury of the older camps had suffered a
+good deal from the lack of all domestic conveniences in
+this new will-o'-the-wisp of an eldorado.</p>
+
+<p>So there the town stretched away, lumber and paper,&mdash;the
+usual tinder-box Alaskan construction&mdash;stores slap
+up against one another, with no alleyways between; in
+the busiest part of it and along the water-front even an adequate
+provision of side streets grudged; furnace-heated
+and kiln-dried and gasoline-lit; waiting for the careless
+match and the fanning wind and the five minutes' start
+that should send it all up in smoke. A week after we
+left it came; as it came to Dawson, as it came to Nome,
+as it came to Fairbanks, without teaching any lesson or
+leaving any precautionary regulations on the statute<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330"></a><a href="images/330.png">[330]</a></span>
+book to save men from their own competitive greed.
+Two or three weeks after the fire, however, it was all rebuilt,
+and a plunging local bank held mortgages on most
+of the structures for the cost of the new material&mdash;and
+holds them yet.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THOUSANDS WITHOUT CHURCH</div>
+
+<p>With at least a thousand people resident in the town,
+not to mention the thousands more out upon the creeks
+and at Flat City and "Discovery<a name="FNanchor_G_7" id="FNanchor_G_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_G_7" class="fnanchor">[G]</a> Otter," there was no
+minister of religion of any sort in the whole region, nor
+had public Divine service been conducted since the occasion
+of the <i>Pelican's</i> visit the previous summer. Yet there
+were many in the place who sorely missed the opportunities
+of worship. Twice on Sunday the largest dancing
+hall in the town was crowded at service; at night it could
+have been filled a second time with those unable to get in.</p>
+
+<p>Places like this present very difficult problems to
+those desirous of providing for their religious need. To
+occupy them at all they should be occupied at once when
+yet eligible sites may be had for the staking; if they
+prosper, to come into them later means buying at a high
+price. Yet what seventh son of a seventh son shall have
+foresight enough to tell the fortunes of them? The
+North is strewn with "cities" of one winter. Nor is the
+selection of suitable men to minister to such communities
+a simple matter. Amidst the overthrow of all the usual
+criteria of conduct, the fading out of the usual dividing
+lines and the blending into one another of the usual<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331"></a><a href="images/331.png">[331]</a></span>
+divisions, it requires a tactful and prudent man "to keep
+the happy mean between too much stiffness in refusing
+and to much easiness in admitting" variations from conventional
+standards. His point of view, if he is to have
+any influence whatever, must not exclude the point of
+view of the great majority; he must accept the situation
+in order to have any chance of improving the situation.
+And yet in the fundamentals of character and conduct
+he must be unswerving. And if on any such fundamental
+the battle gauge is thrown down, he must take it up and
+fight the quarrel out at whatever cost.</p>
+
+<p>We left Iditarod City on Monday, the 20th of March,
+the dogs the fatter and fresher for their week's rest,
+resolved not to return by the Kuskokwim but to take the
+beaten trail out to the Yukon, and so all the way up
+that stream to Fort Yukon. The monthly mail had arrived
+a few days previously&mdash;a monthly mail was all that
+the thousands of men in this camp could secure&mdash;and had
+gone out again the very next morning, before people had
+time to answer their letters, before the registered mail
+had even been delivered. So our departure for the Yukon
+was eagerly seized upon and advertised as a means of
+despatching probably the last mail that would go outside
+over the ice. I was sworn in as special carrier, and a
+heavy sack of first-class mail added to our load as far
+as Tanana. The first stage of thirty miles led to Dikeman,
+a town at the headwaters of ordinary steamboat
+navigation of the Iditarod River, at which the Commercial
+Company had built a depot and extensive warehouse,
+since in the main abandoned. Two streets of cabins<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332"></a><a href="images/332.png">[332]</a></span>
+lined the bank, but forty or fifty souls comprised the population,
+and almost all of them gathered for Divine service
+that night.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE "MOVING OF THE MEAT"</div>
+
+<p>From Dikeman to Dishkaket, on the Innoko River, a
+distance of some seventy miles, our route lay over one of
+the dreariest and most dismal regions in all Alaska. It is
+one succession of lakes and swamps, with narrow, almost
+knife-edge, ridges between, fringed with stunted spruce.
+Far as the eye could reach to right and left the country
+was the same; it is safe to say broadly that all the land
+between the Iditarod and Innoko Rivers is of this character.
+We passed over it in mild weather, but it must be
+a terrible country to cross in storm or through deep snow.
+For ten miles at a stretch there was scarcely a place where
+a man might make a decent camp. At a midway road-house
+was gathered the greatest assemblage of dogs and
+loaded sleds I had ever seen together at one time, each
+team with an Indian driver; they must have covered a
+quarter or a third of a mile. It was a freight train engaged
+in transporting a whole boat-load of butcher's meat to
+Iditarod City, the cargo of a steamboat that had frozen
+in on the Yukon the previous October or early November.
+All the winter through efforts had been made to
+get this meat two hundred odd miles overland to its destination;
+but the weather had been so stormy and the
+snow so deep that near the end of March most of it was
+still on the way, and some yet far down the trail towards
+the Yukon waiting for another trip of the teams.</p>
+
+<p>Dishkaket was merely a native village on the Innoko
+River two or three years before; but since three new<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333"></a><a href="images/333.png">[333]</a></span>
+trails from the Yukon come together here&mdash;from Kaltag
+Nulato, and Lewis's Landing&mdash;and in the other directions
+two trails branch off here, to the Innoko diggings at Ophir
+and to the Iditarod, a store or two and a couple of road-houses
+had sprung up.</p>
+
+<p>From Dishkaket, after crossing the Innoko, we took
+the most northerly of the three trails to the Yukon, the
+Lewis Cut-Off, a trail of a hundred miles that strikes
+straight across country and reaches the Yukon eighty
+miles farther up that stream than the Nulato trail and
+a hundred and twenty miles farther up than the Kaltag
+trail. The Kaltag trail is the trail to Nome; the Nulato
+trail is the mail trail simply because it suits the contractors
+to throw business to Nulato. The Lewis Cut-Off
+is the direct route, the shortest by about a hundred
+miles, but it was cut by the private individual whose
+name it bears, and leads out to his store and road-house
+on the Yukon; so a rival road-house was built close by
+on the river and the prestige and advertisement of the
+"United States mail route" thrown to the trail that
+covers one hundred unnecessary miles&mdash;for no other reason
+than to deprive Lewis of the legitimate fruit of his
+enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>The character of the country changed so soon as the
+Innoko was crossed; the wide swamps gave place to a
+broken, light-timbered country of ridges and hollows, and
+the rough, laborious, horse-ruined trail across it made bad
+travelling. "Buckskin Bill," with his cayuses, was also
+engaged in "moving the meat." The measured miles,
+moreover, gave place to estimated miles, and the nominal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334"></a><a href="images/334.png">[334]</a></span>
+twenty-five we made the first day was probably not much
+more than twenty.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">MILLINERY</div>
+
+<p>The first fifty miles of the country between the
+Innoko and the Yukon is much the same, and we were
+climbing and descending ridges for a couple of days.
+Then we crossed a high ridge and dropped out of Innoko
+waters into the valley of the Yukatna, a tributary of the
+Yukon, and passed down this valley for thirty or forty
+miles, and then across some more broken country to the
+Yukon. At one of the road-houses a woman was stopping,
+going in with three or four large sled loads of millinery
+and "ladies' furnishings." We were told that the
+merchandise had cost her twelve thousand dollars in
+Fairbanks, and that she expected to realise thirty thousand
+dollars by selling it to the "sporting" women of the
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Iditerod'">Iditarod</ins>, now a whole winter debarred from "the latest
+imported French fashions." This woman was dressed in
+overalls, like a man, and the drivers of her teams, two
+white men and a native, cursed and swore and used filthy
+language to the dogs in her presence. It always angers
+me to hear an Indian curse; to hear one curse in the presence
+of a white woman was particularly disgusting and
+exasperating; but what could one expect when the white
+men put no slightest restraint upon themselves and the
+woman seemed utterly indifferent? I called the Indian
+aside and spoke very plainly to him, and he ceased his
+ribaldry; but the white men still poured it out as they
+struggled to hitch their many dogs. At last I could
+stand it no longer. "Madam," I said to the woman, "I
+don't know who you are, save that you are a white<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335"></a><a href="images/335.png">[335]</a></span>
+woman, and as a white woman, if I were you, I would
+make those blackguards treat me with more respect than
+to use such language before me." She flushed and made
+no reply. The men, who heard what I said, scowled and
+made no reply. Presently dispositions were done and
+the train moved off, but I did not hear any more foul
+language. This is set down here chiefly because it was
+the first and only time in all his travels in Alaska that the
+writer heard such language in such presence.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="portagetrail" id="portagetrail"></a><a href="images/gs380.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs380_th.jpg" width="500" height="332" alt="The end of the portage trail." title="The end of the portage trail." />
+</a><span class="caption">The end of the portage trail.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ice" id="ice"></a><a href="images/gs381.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs381_th.jpg" width="500" height="330" alt="Rough ice on the Yukon." title="Rough ice on the Yukon." />
+</a><span class="caption">Rough ice on the Yukon.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Another road-house was kept by a man who had been
+cook upon a recent arctic expedition off the coast of
+Alaska, and he gave some interesting inside information
+about an enterprise the published narrative of which had
+always seemed unsatisfactory. It was just gossip from a
+drunken scamp, but it filled several gaps in the book.</p>
+
+<p>As we approached the Yukon we passed several meat
+caches where great quarters of beef sewn up in burlap
+were piled on the side of the trail. At one of these caches
+the camp-robbers had been at work industriously. They
+had stripped the burlap from parts of several quarters,
+exposing the fat, and had dug out and carried it away
+little by little until it was all gone. The hard-frozen lean
+probably defied their best efforts; at any rate, the fat
+offered less resistance. But where else in the world
+could men dump quarters of beef beside the road and go
+off and leave them for weeks with no more danger of
+depredation than the bills of birds can effect?</p>
+
+<p>A few miles from the river the rival road-house signs
+began to appear. "Patronise Lewis; he cut this trail at
+his own expense," pleaded one. "Why go five miles out of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336"></a><a href="images/336.png">[336]</a></span>
+your way," sneered another. Lewis's road-house <i>is</i> across
+the wide Yukon, and there was no point in crossing the
+river save one's determination to lend no countenance to
+the spitefulness of these mail runners. So across the river
+we went and were glad to be on the Yukon again. The
+next morning we encountered the same rival signs at the
+point where the trail from Lewis's joined the "mail
+trail."</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">"TREASURE ISLAND"</div>
+
+<p>Most of our travelling was now upon the surface of
+the Yukon, and four hundred and fifty miles of it stretched
+ahead of us ere our winter's travel should end at Fort
+Yukon. Four hours brought us to the military telegraph
+station at Melozi, and we were able to send word ahead
+that we were safely out of the Kuskokwim wilderness.
+Then a portage was crossed and then the river pursued
+again until with about thirty miles to our credit we made
+camp. The days were lengthening out now, the weather
+growing mild, although a keen, cold, down-river breeze
+was rarely absent, and travel began to be pleasant and
+camping no hardship. We preferred camping, on several
+scores, when the day's work had not been too arduous,
+chief amongst them being that it gave more opportunity
+and privacy for Walter's schooling. He was reading
+<i>Treasure Island</i> aloud, and I was getting as great pleasure
+from renewing as he from beginning an acquaintance
+with that prince of all pirate stories. Kokrines and
+Mouse Point one day, the next The Birches; we passed
+these well-known Yukon landmarks, camping, after a run
+of thirty-eight miles, some six miles beyond the last-named
+place, with a run of forty-four miles before us to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337"></a><a href="images/337.png">[337]</a></span>
+Tanana. I judged it too much; but the trail was greatly
+improved and we decided to attempt it in one stage. A
+misreading of the watch, so that I roused myself and Walter
+at 3.30 <span class="smcap">a. m.</span> instead of 5.15 <span class="smcap">a. m.</span>, and did not realise
+the mistake until the fire was made and it was not worth
+while returning to bed, gave us a fine start and we made
+good progress. Gold Mountain (so called, one supposes,
+because there is no gold there; there is no other reason),
+Grant Creek, "Old Station" were passed by, and at
+length Tanana loomed before us while yet ten miles away.
+In just eleven hours we ran the forty-four miles, making,
+with three additional miles out to the mission, forty-seven
+altogether, by far the longest journey of the winter. We
+reached Tanana on the 1st of April, just six weeks since
+we left.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">AN UNTRAVELLED RIVER</div>
+
+<p>We spent eight days at Tanana, including two Sundays,
+Passion Sunday and Palm Sunday, but I was under
+an old promise to spend Easter there also. Now, Easter,
+1911, fell on the 16th of April, and for the three-hundred-mile
+journey to Fort Yukon a period of ten or twelve days
+at the least would be necessary, that might easily stretch
+to two weeks. Travelling on the Yukon ice so late in
+April as this would involve was not only fraught with
+great difficulty and discomfort, but also with actual danger,
+and I had to beg to be absolved of my promise. Some
+considerable preparation was on foot for the festival,
+and I was loath to leave, for Tanana was then without
+any resident minister, but it seemed foolish to take the
+chances that would have to be taken if we stayed.</p>
+
+<p>Five days of almost ceaseless snow-storm during our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338"></a><a href="images/338.png">[338]</a></span>
+stay at Tanana did not give prospect of good travelling,
+and, indeed, when we pulled out from the mission on the
+Monday in Holy Week there was no sign of any trail.
+From Tanana up to Fort Yukon there is very little travel;
+since the whole of this long stretch of river was deprived
+of winter mail a year or two before, no through travel at
+all. Cabins may usually be found to camp in, but there
+are no road-houses. What travel still takes place is local.</p>
+
+<p>The journey divided itself into two roughly equal
+parts, a hundred and fifty miles through the Lower
+Ramparts, and a hundred and fifty miles through the
+Yukon Flats, almost all of it on the surface of the river.
+It was hoped to reach Stephen's Village, a native settlement
+just within the second half of the journey, for
+Easter.</p>
+
+<p>Snow does not lie long at rest upon the river within
+the Ramparts, and particularly within the narrow, ca&ntilde;on-like
+stretch of seventy-five miles from Tanana to
+Rampart City. Violent and almost ceaseless down-stream
+winds sweep the deep defile in the mountains through
+which the river winds its course. In places the ice is
+bare of snow; in places the snow is piled in huge, hardened
+drifts. So strong and so persistent is this wind that it
+is often possible to skate over an uninterrupted black surface
+of ice, polished like plate glass, for twenty miles on a
+down-river journey. To make way over such a surface
+up-stream, against such wind, is, however, almost impossible.
+The dogs get no footing and the wind carries the
+sled where it listeth. The journey so far as Rampart
+City has been described before; it will suffice now that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339"></a><a href="images/339.png">[339]</a></span>
+it took three days of toilsome battling against wind and
+bad surface, with nights spent upon the floor of grimy
+cabins. So cold was the wind that it is noted in my
+diary with surprise, on the 12th of April, that I had
+worn fur cap, parkee, and muffler all day, as though it
+had been the dead of winter instead of three weeks past
+the vernal equinox.</p>
+
+<p>On Wednesday night there was Divine service at
+Rampart, and on Maundy Thursday, after four miles
+upon the river, we took the portage of eleven miles that
+cuts a chord to the arc of the greatest bend of the river
+within the Ramparts and so saves nine miles. Three
+miles more took us to the deserted cabin at the site of the
+abandoned coal-mine opposite the mouth of the Mike
+Hess River, here confluent with the Yukon, and in that
+cabin we spent the night, having had the high, bitter
+wind in our faces all day. We hated to leave the shelter
+of the wooded portage and face the blast of the last
+three miles.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">WIND AND SNOW</div>
+
+<p>We woke the next morning to a veritable gale of wind
+and snow, and lay in the cabin till noon, occupied with
+the exercises of the solemn anniversary. The wind
+having then abated somewhat and the snow ceased, we
+sallied forth, still hopeful of making Stephen's Village for
+Easter. But when we got down upon the river surface
+it became doubtful if we could proceed, and as we turned
+the first bend we encountered a fresh gale that did not
+fall short of a blizzard. The air was filled with flying
+snow that stung our faces and blinded us. The dogs'
+muzzles became incrusted with snow and their eyes filled<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340"></a><a href="images/340.png">[340]</a></span>
+with it so that it was hard to keep them facing it. I
+could not see the boy at all when he was a hundred feet
+ahead of the team. We struggled along for four miles,
+and, since it was then evident that we could not go much
+farther without useless risk, we turned to a spot on the
+bank where Walter knew another deserted cabin to stand;
+for he knows every foot of this section of the river and
+once spent a summer, camped at the coal-mine, fishing.
+The spot was reached, but the cabin was gone. The fish
+rack still stood there, but the cabin was burned down.
+There was nothing for it but to return to the coal-mine
+cabin; so, for the first and only time in all my journeyings,
+it was necessary to abandon a day's march that had
+been entered upon and go back whence we had come. We
+ran before the gale at great speed and were within the
+cabin again by 2.30 <span class="smcap">p. m.</span> All the evening and all night
+the storm raged, and I was in two minds about running
+back to Rampart before it for Easter, since it was now
+out of the question to reach Stephen's Village. If the
+season had not been so far advanced this is what I should
+have done, but it would set us back three days more on
+the journey, and on reflection I was not willing to take
+that chance with the break-up so near.</p>
+
+<p>So on the morning of Easter Eve we sallied up-stream
+again, snow falling and driving heavily, and the wind still
+strong but with yesterday's keen edge blunted. By the
+time we had beaten around the long bend up which we
+had fought our way the day before, the snow had ceased,
+and by noon the wind had dropped and the sun was shining,
+and in a few moments of his unobscured strength all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341"></a><a href="images/341.png">[341]</a></span>
+the loose snow on the sled was melted&mdash;a warning of the
+rapidity with which the general thaw would proceed once
+the skies were clear. That night saw us in the habitable
+though dirty, deserted cabin at Salt Creek (so called, one
+supposes, because the water of it is perfectly fresh) at
+which we had hoped to lodge the previous night.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">ALASKAN "FORTS"</div>
+
+<p>Buoyed by the hope of doing a double stage in a clear,
+windless day and thus reaching Stephen's Village for
+service at night, we made a very early start that beautiful
+Easter morning. But it was not to be. Such trail as
+there was ran high up on the bank ice&mdash;level, doubtless,
+when it was made much earlier in the season, but now at a
+slope towards the middle of the river through the falling
+of the water, and seamed with great cracks. Such a trail,
+called a "sidling" trail in the vernacular of mushing, is
+always difficult and laborious to travel, for the sled slips
+continually off it into the loose snow or the ice cracks, and
+often for long stretches at a time one man must hold up
+the nose of the sled while the other toils at the handle-bars.
+In one place, while thus holding the front of the
+sled on the trail, Walter slipped into an ugly ice crack
+concealed by drifted snow, and so wedged his foot that
+I had difficulty in extricating him. The last two bends
+of the river within the Ramparts seemed interminable
+and it was 6.30 <span class="smcap">p. m.</span>, with twelve hours' travel behind us,
+when we reached old Fort Hamlin, on the verge of the
+Yukon Flats. These "forts," it might be explained, if
+one chose to pursue the elucidation of Alaskan nomenclature
+in the same strain, are so called because they never
+had any defences and never needed any. As a matter of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342"></a><a href="images/342.png">[342]</a></span>
+fact, in the early days, when the Hudson Bay Company
+made its first establishments on the upper river, there was
+supposed to be some need of fortification, and Fort Selkirk
+and Fort Yukon were stockaded. Fort Selkirk, indeed,
+was sacked and burned sixty years ago, but not by
+Yukon Indians. The Chilkats from the coast, indignant
+at the loss of their middle-man profits by the invasion of
+the interior, crossed the mountains, descended the river,
+and destroyed the post. It thus became customary to
+call a trading-post a "fort," and every little point where
+a store and a warehouse stood was so dignified. Hence
+Fort Reliance, Fort Hamlin, Fort Adams.</p>
+
+<p>For years Fort Hamlin had been quite deserted, but
+now smoke issued from the stovepipe and dogs gave
+tongue at our approach, and we found a white man with
+an Esquimau wife from Saint Michael and a half-breed
+child dwelling there and carrying a few goods for sale.
+With him we made our lodging, and with him and his
+family said our evening service of Easter, and so to bed,
+thoroughly tired.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">TRAVELLING BY NIGHT</div>
+
+<p>A mile beyond Fort Hamlin the Ramparts suddenly
+cease and the wide expanse of the Yukon Flats opens at
+once. Ten miles or so brought us to Stephen's Village,
+where we had been long expected and where a very busy
+day was spent. A number of Indians were gathered and
+there were children to baptize and couples to marry, as
+well as the lesson of the season to teach. It was a great
+disappointment that we had been unable to get here before,
+and matter of regret that, being here at such labour,
+only so short a time could be spent. But the closing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343"></a><a href="images/343.png">[343]</a></span>
+season called to us loudly. A mild, warm day set all the
+banks running with melting snow and made the surface
+of the river mushy. There was really no time to lose,
+for the next seventy-five miles was to give us the most
+difficult and disagreeable travelling of the journey. Here,
+in the Flats, where is greatest need of travel direction on
+the whole river, was no trail at all beyond part of the first
+day's journey. Within the Ramparts the river is confined
+in one channel; however bad the travelling may be,
+there is no danger of losing the way; but in the Flats
+the river divides into many wide channels and these lead
+off into many more back sloughs, with low, timbered
+banks and no salient landmarks at all. Behind us were
+the bluffs of the Ramparts, already growing faint; afar
+off on the horizon, to the right, were the dim shapes of
+the Beaver Mountains. All the rest was level for a
+couple of hundred miles.</p>
+
+<p>A local trail to a neighbouring wood-chopper's took us
+some twelve miles, and then we were at a loss. The general
+direction we knew, and previous journeys both in
+winter and summer gave us some notion of the river
+bends to follow, but we wallowed and floundered until
+late at night before we reached the cabin we were bound
+for, the snow exceeding soft and wet for hours in the
+middle of the day.</p>
+
+<p>The time had plainly come to change our day travel
+into night travel, for freezing was resumed each night
+after the sun was set, and the surface grew hard again.
+So at this cabin we lay all the next day, with an interesting
+recluse of these parts who knows many passages<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344"></a><a href="images/344.png">[344]</a></span>
+of Shakespeare by heart, and who drew us a chart of
+our course to the next habitation, marking every bend
+to be followed and the place where the river must be
+crossed. But there is always difficulty in getting a
+new travel schedule under way, and we did not leave
+until five in the morning instead of at two as we had
+planned. This gave us insufficient time to make the
+day's march before the sun softened the snow, and moccasins
+grew wet, and snow-shoe strings began to stretch,
+and the webbing underfoot to yield and sag&mdash;and we
+had to content ourselves with half a stage. By nine <span class="smcap">p. m.</span>
+we were off again and did pretty well until the night grew
+so dark that we could no longer distinguish our landmarks.
+Then we went to the bank and built a big fire
+and made a pot of tea and sat and dozed around it for a
+couple of hours or so until the brief darkness of Alaskan
+spring was overpast, and the dawn began to give light
+enough to see our way again.</p>
+
+<p>When our course lay on the open river, the snow had
+crust enough to hold us upon our snow-shoes; but when it
+took us through little sheltered sloughs, the crust was too
+thin and we broke through all the time, and that makes
+slow, painful travel. At last we came to a portage that
+cuts off a number of miles, but the snow slope by which
+the top of the bank should be reached had a southern
+exposure and was entirely melted and gone. The dogs
+had to be unhitched, the sled to be unloaded, the stuff
+packed in repeated journeys up the steep bank, and the
+sled hauled up with a rope. Then came the repacking
+and reloading and the rehitching; and when the portage<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345"></a><a href="images/345.png">[345]</a></span>
+was crossed the same thing had to be done to get down
+to the river bed again. Twice more on that day the process
+was gone through, and each time it took nigh an hour
+to get up the bank, so that it was around noon, and the
+snow miserably wet and mushy again, when we reached
+Beaver and went to bed at the only road-house between
+Fort Yukon and Tanana.</p>
+
+<p>"Beaver City" owes its existence to quartz prospects
+in the Chandalar, in which men of money and influence
+in the East were interested. The Alaska Road Commission
+had built a trail some years before from the
+Chandalar diggings out to the Yukon, striking the
+river at this point, and on the opposite side of the river
+another trail is projected and "swamped out" direct
+to Fairbanks. The opening up of this route was expected
+to bring much travel through Beaver, and a
+town site was staked and many cabins built. But
+"Chandalar quartz" remains an interesting prospect,
+and the Chandalar placers have not proved productive,
+and all but a few of the cabins at "Beaver City" are unoccupied.
+If "the Chandalar" should ever make good,
+"Beaver City" will be its river port.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">LAST DAY</div>
+
+<p>We left Beaver at eleven <span class="smcap">p. m.</span> on Friday night, hoping
+in two long all-night runs to cover the eighty miles and
+reach Fort Yukon by Sunday morning. Here was the
+first trail since we left Stephen's Village and the first
+fairly good trail since we left Tanana, for there had been
+some recent travel between Fort Yukon and Beaver.
+Here for the first time we had no need of snow-shoes, and
+when they have been worn virtually all the winter through<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346"></a><a href="images/346.png">[346]</a></span>
+and nigh a couple of thousand miles travelled in them,
+walking is strange at first in the naked moccasin. It is a
+blessed relief, however, to be rid of even the lightest of
+trail snow-shoes. We stepped out gaily into a beautiful
+clear night, with a sharp tang of frost in the air, and even
+the dogs rejoiced in the knowledge that the end of the
+journey was at hand. All night long we made good time
+and kept it up without a stop until eight o'clock in the
+morning, when we reached an inhabited but just then
+unoccupied cabin and ate supper or breakfast as one
+chooses to call it and went to bed, having covered fully
+half the distance to Fort Yukon. About noon we were
+rudely awakened by one of the usual Alaskan accompaniments
+of approaching summer. The heat of the sun was
+melting the snow above us, and water came trickling
+through the dirt roof upon our bed. We moved to a
+dry part of the cabin and slept again until the evening,
+and at nine <span class="smcap">p. m.</span> entered upon what we hoped would
+be our last run.</p>
+
+<p>But once more our plans to spend Sunday were frustrated.
+The trail led through dry sloughs from which
+the advancing thaw had removed the snow in great
+patches. Sometimes the sled had to be hauled over bare
+sand; sometimes wide detours had to be made to avoid
+such sand; sometimes pools of open water covered with
+only that night's ice lay across our path. By eight
+o'clock in the morning we estimated that we were not
+more than seven or eight miles from Fort Yukon. But
+already the snow grew soft and our feet wet, and the dogs
+were very weary with the eleven hours' mushing. It<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347"></a><a href="images/347.png">[347]</a></span>
+would take a long time and much toil to plough through
+slush, even that seven or eight miles. So I gave the word
+to stop, and we made an open-air camp on a sunny bank,
+and after breakfast we covered our heads in the blankets
+from the glare of the sun, and slept till five. Then we
+ate our last trail meal, and were washed up and packed
+up and hitched up an hour and more before the snow
+was frozen enough for travel. A couple of hours'
+run took us to Fort Yukon, and so ended the winter
+journey of 1910-11, on the 23d of April, having been
+started on the 17th of November. We were back none
+too soon. Every day we should have found travelling
+decidedly worse. In a few more days the river would
+have begun to open in places, and only the middle would
+be safe for travel, with streams of water against either
+bank and no way of getting ashore. Seventeen days later
+the ice was gone out and the Yukon flowing bank full.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348"></a><a href="images/348.png">[348]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE NATIVES OF ALASKA</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">When</span> one contemplates the native people of the
+interior of Alaska in the mass, when, with the stories told
+by the old men and old women of the days before they
+saw the white man in mind, one reconstructs that primitive
+life, lacking any of the implements, the conveniences,
+the alleviations of civilisation, the chief feeling that arises
+is a feeling of admiration and respect.</p>
+
+<p>What a hardy people they must have been! How
+successfully for untold generations did they pit themselves
+against the rigour of this most inhospitable climate!
+With no tool but the stone-axe and the flint knife, with no
+weapon but the bow and arrow and spear, with no material
+for fish nets but root fibres, or for fish-hooks or needles
+but bone, and with no means of fire making save two dry
+sticks&mdash;one wonders at the skill and patient endurance
+that rendered subsistence possible at all. And there follows
+quickly upon such wonder a hot flush of indignation
+that, after so conquering their savage environment or
+accommodating themselves to it, that they not only held
+their own but increased throughout the land, they should
+be threatened with a wanton extermination now that
+the resources of civilisation are opened to them, now that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349"></a><a href="images/349.png">[349]</a></span>
+tools and weapons and the knowledge of easier and more
+comfortable ways of life are available.</p>
+
+<p>The natives of the interior are of two races, the Indian
+and the Esquimau. The Indian inhabits the valley of
+the Yukon down to within three or four hundred miles of
+its mouth; the Esquimau occupies the lower reaches
+of the Yukon and the Kuskokwim and the whole of the
+rivers that drain into the Arctic Ocean west and north.
+These inland Esquimaux are of the same race as the
+coast Esquimaux and constitute an interesting people,
+of whom something has been said in the account of journeys
+through their country.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE ATHABASCANS</div>
+
+<p>The Indians of the interior are of one general stock,
+the Athabascan, as it is called, and of two main languages
+derived from a common root but differing as much perhaps
+as Spanish and Portuguese. The language of the
+upper Yukon (and by this term in these pages is meant
+the upper American Yukon) is almost identical with the
+language of the lower Mackenzie, from which region,
+doubtless, these people came, and with it have always
+maintained intercourse. The theory of the Asiatic
+origin of the natives of interior Alaska has always seemed
+fanciful and far-fetched to the writer. The same translations
+of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer
+serve for the lower Mackenzie and the upper Yukon and
+are in active use to-day through all that wide region,
+despite minor dialectical variations.</p>
+
+<p>Near the lower ramparts of the Yukon, at Stephen's
+Village, the language changes and the new tongue maintains
+itself, though with continually increasing dialectical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350"></a><a href="images/350.png">[350]</a></span>
+differences, until the Indians overlap the Esquimaux, six
+hundred miles farther down.</p>
+
+<p>Fort Yukon is the most populous place on the river,
+and the last place on the river, where the upper language,
+or Takhud, is spoken. A stretch of one hundred and fifty
+miles separates it from the next native village, and the
+inhabitants of that village are not intelligible to the Fort
+Yukon Indians&mdash;an unintelligibility which seems to speak
+of long ages of little intercourse.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The history of the migrations of the Indians from the
+Athabascan or Mackenzie region is impossible to trace
+now. It is highly probable that the movement was by
+way of the Porcupine River. And it would seem that
+there must have been two distinct migrations: one that
+passed down the Yukon to the Tanana district and
+spread thence up the Tanana River and up the Koyukuk;
+and long after, as one supposes, a migration that peopled
+the upper Yukon. A portion of this last migration must
+have gone across country to the Ketchumstock and the
+upper Tanana, for the inhabitants of the upper Tanana
+do not speak the Tanana tongue, which is the tongue of
+the Middle Yukon but a variant of the tongue of the
+upper Yukon.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="docile" id="docile"></a><a href="images/gs398.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs398_th.jpg" width="500" height="327" alt="A docile folk, eager for instruction." title="A docile folk, eager for instruction." />
+</a><span class="caption">A docile folk, eager for instruction.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 250px;"><a name="mission" id="mission"></a><a href="images/gs399a.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs399a_th.jpg" width="250" height="259" alt="The mission type." title="The mission type." />
+</a><span class="caption">The mission type.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 300px;"><a name="wild" id="wild"></a><a href="images/gs399b.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs399b_th.jpg" width="300" height="197" alt="Wild and shy." title="Wild and shy." />
+</a><span class="caption">Wild and shy.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>How long ago these migrations took place there is
+not the slightest knowledge to base even a surmise upon.
+The natives themselves have no records nor even traditions,
+and the first point of contact between white men
+and the natives of the interior is within three quarters of
+a century ago. It may have been two or three families<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351"></a><a href="images/351.png">[351]</a></span>
+only which penetrated to this region or to that and settled
+there, and what pressure started them on their wanderings
+no one will ever know. Perhaps some venturesome
+hunter pursuing his game across the highlands that separate
+the Mackenzie from the Yukon was disabled and
+compelled to remain until the summer, and then discovered
+the salmon that made their way up the tributaries
+of the Porcupine. The Mackenzie has no salmon. Or a
+local tribal quarrel may have sent fugitives over the divide.</p>
+
+<p>When first the white man came to the upper Yukon,
+in 1846 and 1847, no one knew that it was the same river
+at the mouth of which the Russians had built Redoubt
+Saint Michael ten or twelve years before. The natives of
+the upper river knew nothing about the lower river. It
+is an easy matter to float down the Yukon for a thousand
+miles in a birch-bark canoe, but an exceedingly difficult
+matter to come up again. It was not until the voyageurs
+of the Hudson Bay Company, in their adventurous fur-trading
+expeditions, met at the mouth of the Tanana
+River the agents of the Russian Fur Company, come up
+from Nulato on the same quest, that the identity of the
+Yukon and Kwikpak Rivers was discovered; and that
+seems to have been well past the middle of the century.
+In the map of North America that the writer first used
+at school, the Yukon flowed north into the Arctic Ocean,
+parallel with the Mackenzie.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">AN INOFFENSIVE PEOPLE</div>
+
+<p>The Indians of the interior of Alaska are a gentle and
+kindly and tractable people. They have old traditions
+of bloody tribal warfare that have grown in ferocity, one
+supposes, with the lapse of time, for it is very difficult for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352"></a><a href="images/352.png">[352]</a></span>
+one who knows them to believe that so mild a race could
+ever have been pugnacious or bloodthirsty. Whether it
+were that the exigencies of subsistence under arctic conditions
+demanded almost all their energies, or that a realisation
+of their constant dependence upon one another
+checked the play of passion, they differ most widely and,
+it seems certain, always differed most widely in character
+from the Indians of the American plains. A personal
+knowledge of the greater part of all the natives of interior
+Alaska, gained by living amongst them and travelling from
+village to village during seven or eight years, furnishes but
+a single instance of an Indian man guilty of any sort of
+violence against another Indian or against a white man&mdash;except
+under the influence of liquor.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that there are unquestioned murders that
+have been committed&mdash;murders of white men at that;
+but in the sixty years from the Nulato massacre of 1851,
+over the whole vast interior, these crimes can be counted
+on the fingers of one hand. They are not a revengeful
+people. They do not cherish the memory of injuries and
+await opportunities of repayment; that trait is foreign to
+their character. On the contrary, they are exceedingly
+placable and bear no malice. Moreover, they are very
+submissive, even to the point of being imposed upon.
+In fact, they are decidedly a timid people in the matter of
+personal encounter. In all these characteristics they
+differ from the North American Indian generally as he
+appears in history.</p>
+
+<p>They are capable of hard work, though apparently
+not of continuous hard work; they will cheerfully support<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353"></a><a href="images/353.png">[353]</a></span>
+great privation and fatigue; but when the immediate
+necessity is past they enjoy long periods of feasting and
+leisure. Having no property nor desire of property, save
+their clothes, their implements and weapons, and the rude
+furnishings of their cabins, there is no incentive to hard
+and continuous work.</p>
+
+<p>After all, where is the high and peculiar virtue that
+lies in the performance of continuous hard work? Why
+should any one labour incessantly? This is the question
+the Indian would ask, and one is not always sure that
+the mills of Massachusetts and the coal-mines of Pennsylvania
+return an entirely satisfactory answer. As regards
+thrift, the Indian knows little of it; but the average
+white man of the country does not know much more.
+There is little difference as regards thrift between wasting
+one's substance in a "potlatch," which is a feast for all
+comers, and wasting it in drunkenness, which is a feast
+for the liquor sellers, save that one is barbarous and the
+other civilised, as the terms go.</p>
+
+<p>It would seem that the general timidity of the native
+character is the reason for a very general untruthfulness,
+though there one must speak with qualification and exception.
+There are Indians whose word may be taken as
+unhesitatingly as the word of any white man, and there
+are white men in the country whose word carries no more
+assurance than the word of any Indian. The Indian is
+prone to evasion and quibbling rather than to downright
+lying, though there are many who are utterly unreliable
+and untrustworthy.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SEXUAL MORALITY</div>
+
+<p>In the matter of sexual morality the Indian standards<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354"></a><a href="images/354.png">[354]</a></span>
+are very low, though certainly not any lower than the
+standards of the average white man in the country. One
+is forced to this constant comparison; the white man in
+the country is the only white man the Indian knows anything
+about. To the Indian a physical act is merely a
+physical act; all down his generations there has been no
+moral connotation therewith, and it is hard to change the
+point of view of ages when it affects personal indulgence
+so profoundly. The white man has been taught, down as
+many ages, perhaps, that these physical acts have moral
+connotation and are illicit when divorced therefrom, yet
+he is as careless and immoral in this country as the Indian
+is careless and <i>un</i>moral. And the white man's careless
+and immoral conduct is the chief obstacle which those
+who would engraft upon the Indian the moral consciousness
+must contend against.</p>
+
+<p>The Indian woman is not chaste because the Indian
+man does not demand chastity of her, does not set any
+special value upon her chastity as such. And the example
+of the chastity which the white man demands of
+his women, though he be not chaste himself, is an example
+with which the native of Alaska has not come much
+into contact. Too often, in the vicinity of mining camps,
+the white women who are most in evidence are of another
+class.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS</div>
+
+<p>The Indian is commonly intelligent and teachable, and
+in most cases eager to learn and eager that his children
+may learn. Here it becomes necessary to deal with a
+difficult and somewhat contentious matter that one would
+rather let alone. The government has undertaken the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355"></a><a href="images/355.png">[355]</a></span>
+education of the Indian, and has set up a bureau charged
+with the establishment and conduct of native schools.</p>
+
+<p>There are five such schools on the Yukon between
+Eagle and Tanana, including these two points, amongst
+Indians all of whom belong to the Episcopal Church, and
+five more between Tanana and Anvik, amongst natives
+divided in allegiance between the Episcopal and the
+Roman Catholic Churches. Below Anvik to the river's
+mouth the natives are divided between the Roman and
+the Greek Churches, and they are outside the scope of this
+book. On the tributaries of the Yukon the only native
+schools are conducted by the missions of the Episcopal
+Church, on the Koyukuk and Tanana Rivers, and have
+no connection with the government.</p>
+
+<p>When, somewhat late in the day, the government set
+its hand to the education of the natives, mission schools
+had been conducted for many years at the five stations of
+the Episcopal Church above Tanana and at the various
+mission stations below that point. The Bureau of Education
+professed its earnest purpose of working in harmony
+with the mission authorities, and upon this profession it
+secured deeds of gift for government school sites within
+the mission reservations from the Bishop of Alaska.</p>
+
+<p>It cannot be stated, upon a survey of the last five or
+six years, that this profession has been carried out.
+The administration of the Bureau of Education has
+shared too much the common fault of other departments
+of the government in a detached and lofty, not to say
+supercilious, attitude. Things are not necessarily right
+because a government bureau orders them, nor are government<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356"></a><a href="images/356.png">[356]</a></span>
+officials invested with superior wisdom merely
+by reason of their connection with Washington. It is
+just as important for a government school as for a mission
+school to be in harmony with its environment, to
+adapt itself to the needs of the people it designs to serve;
+and that harmony and adaptation may only be secured
+by a single-minded study of the situation and of the
+habits and character, the occupations and resources of
+the people.</p>
+
+<p>To keep a school in session when the population of a
+village is gone on its necessary occasions of hunting or
+trapping, and to have the annual recess when all the
+population is returned again, is folly, whoever orders it,
+in accord with what time-honoured routine soever, and
+this has not infrequently been done. Moreover, it is
+folly to fail to recognise that the apprenticeship of an
+Indian boy to the arts by which he must make a living,
+the arts of hunting and trapping, is more important than
+schooling, however important the latter may be, and that
+any talk&mdash;and there has been loud talk&mdash;of a compulsory
+education law which shall compel such boys to be
+in school at times when they should be off in the wilds
+with their parents, is worse than mere folly, and would,
+if carried out, be a fatal blunder. If such boys grow up
+incompetent to make a living out of the surrounding
+wilderness, whence shall their living come?</p>
+
+<p>The next step would be the issuing of rations, and
+that would mean the ultimate degradation and extinction
+of the natives. When the question is stated in its
+baldest terms, is the writer perverse and barbarous and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357"></a><a href="images/357.png">[357]</a></span>
+uncivilised if he avow his belief that a race of hardy,
+peaceful, independent, self-supporting illiterates is of more
+value and worthy of more respect than a race of literate
+paupers? Be it remembered also that many of these
+"illiterates" can read the Bible in their own tongue and
+can make written communication with one another in
+the same&mdash;very scornful as the officials of the bureau
+have been about such attainment. One grows a little
+impatient sometimes when a high official at Washington
+writes in response to a request for permission to use a
+school building <i>after</i> school hours, for a class of instruction
+in the native Bible, that the law requires that all
+instruction in the school be in the English language, and
+that it is against the policy of Congress to use public
+money for religious instruction! When the thermometer
+drops to 50&deg; below zero and stays there for a couple
+of weeks, it is an expensive matter to heat a church for
+a Bible class three times a week&mdash;and the schoolhouse
+is already cosy and warm.</p>
+
+<p>But the question does not reduce itself to the bald
+terms referred to above; by proper advantage of times
+and seasons the Indian boy may have all the English
+education that will be of any service to him, and may
+yet serve his apprenticeship in the indispensable wilderness
+arts. And, given a kindly and competent teacher,
+there is no need of any sort of compulsion to bring Indian
+boys and girls to school when they are within reach
+of it.</p>
+
+<p>The Indian school problem is not an easy one in the
+sense that it can be solved by issuing rules and regulations<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358"></a><a href="images/358.png">[358]</a></span>
+at Washington, but it can be solved by sympathetic
+study and by the careful selection of intelligent, cultured
+teachers.</p>
+
+<p>After all, this last is the most important requisite.
+Too often it is assumed that any one can teach ignorant
+youth: and women with no culture at all, or with none
+beyond the bald "pedagogy" of a low-grade schoolroom,
+have been sent to Alaska. There have, indeed, been
+notable exceptions; there have been some very valuable
+and capable teachers, and with such there has never
+been friction at the missions, but glad co-operation.</p>
+
+<p>The situation shows signs of improvement; there
+are signs of withdrawal from its detached and supercilious
+attitude on the part of the bureau, signs which
+are very welcome to those connected with the missions.
+For the best interest of the native demands that the two
+agencies at work for his good work heartily and sympathetically
+together. The missions can do without the
+government&mdash;did do without it for many years, though
+glad of the government's aid in carrying the burden of
+the schools&mdash;but the government cannot do without the
+missions; and if the missions were forced to the re-establishment
+of their own schools, there would be empty
+benches in the schools of the government.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE THREAT OF EXTINCTION</div>
+
+<p>That the Indian race of interior Alaska is threatened
+with extinction, there is unhappily little room to doubt;
+and that the threat may be averted is the hope and
+labour of the missionaries amongst them. At most
+places where vital statistics are kept the death-rate exceeds
+the birth-rate, though it is sometimes very difficult<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359"></a><a href="images/359.png">[359]</a></span>
+to secure accurate statistics and to be sure that they
+always cover the same ground. The natives wander;
+within certain territorial limits they wander widely.
+Whenever a child is born it is certain that if it lives long
+enough it will be brought to a mission to be baptized,
+but a death often occurs at some isolated camp that is
+not reported till long after, and may escape registration
+altogether.</p>
+
+<p>Certain diseases that have played havoc in the past
+are not much feared now. For the last seven years supplies
+of the diphtheritic antitoxin have been kept at all
+the missions of the Episcopal Church, and in the summer
+of 1911, when there was an outbreak of smallpox at
+Porcupine River, almost every Indian of interior Alaska
+was vaccinated, mainly by the mission staffs. Diphtheria
+has been a dreadful scourge. The valley of the
+upper Kuskokwim was almost depopulated by it in 1906.
+A disease resembling measles took half the population
+of the lower Yukon villages in 1900. In the last few
+years there have been no serious epidemics; but epidemic
+disease does not constitute the chief danger that
+threatens the native.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">DWELLING AND CLOTHING</div>
+
+<p>That chief danger looms from two things: tuberculosis
+and whisky. Whether tuberculosis is a disease
+indigenous to these parts, or whether it was introduced
+with the white man, has been disputed and would be
+difficult of determination. Probably it was always present
+amongst the natives; the old ones declare that it was;
+but the changed conditions of their lives have certainly
+much aggravated it. They lived much more in the open<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360"></a><a href="images/360.png">[360]</a></span>
+when they had no tree-felling tool but a stone-axe and
+did not build cabins. The winter residence in those days
+was, it is true, a dark, half-underground hut covered
+with earth and poles, but the time of residence therein
+was much shorter; the skin tent sheltered them most of
+the year. Indeed, some tribes, such as the Chandalar,
+lived in their skin tents the year round. Now an ill-ventilated
+and very commonly overcrowded cabin shelters
+them most of the year. It is true that the cabins are
+constantly improving and the standard of living within
+them is constantly rising. The process is slow, despite
+all urgings and warnings, and overcrowding and lack of
+ventilation still prevail.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 213px;"><a name="native" id="native"></a><a href="images/gs410a.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs410a_th.jpg" width="213" height="300" alt="The Native communicant." title="The Native communicant." />
+</a><span class="caption">The Native communicant.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 215px;"><a name="raw" id="raw"></a><a href="images/gs410b.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs410b_th.jpg" width="215" height="300" alt="Raw material." title="Raw material." />
+</a><span class="caption">Raw material.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Perhaps as great a cause of the spread of tuberculosis
+is the change in clothing. The original native was clad
+in skins, which are the warmest clothing in the world.
+Moose hide or caribou hide garments, tanned and smoked,
+are impervious to the wind, and a parkee of muskrat or
+squirrel, or, as was not uncommon in the old days, of
+marten, or one of caribou tanned with the hair on, with
+boots of this last material, give all the warmth that exposure
+to the coldest weather requires. Nowadays fur
+garments of any sort are not usual amongst the natives.
+There is a market, at an ever-growing price, for all the
+furs they can procure. A law has, indeed, gone recently
+into effect prohibiting the sale of beaver for a term of
+years, and already beaver coats and caps begin to appear
+again amongst the people. It would be an excellent, wise
+thing, worthy of a government that takes a fatherly
+interest in very childlike folks, to make this law permanent.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361"></a><a href="images/361.png">[361]</a></span>
+If it were fit to prohibit the sale of beaver pelts
+for a term of years to protect the beaver, surely it would
+be proper to perpetuate the enactment to protect the
+Indian. It would mean warm clothing for man, woman,
+and child.</p>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE INDIAN TRADER</div>
+
+<p>The Indian usually sells all his furs and then turns
+round and buys manufactured clothing from the trader
+at a fancy price. That clothing is almost always cotton
+and shoddy. Genuine woollens are not to be found in
+the Indian trader's stock at all, and in whatever guise it
+may masquerade, and by whatever alias it may pass, the
+native wear is cotton. Yet there is no country in the
+world where it is more imperative, for the preservation
+of health, that wool be worn.</p>
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 250px;"><a name="esquimau" id="esquimau"></a><a href="images/gs411a.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs411a_th.jpg" width="250" height="220" alt="An Esquimau youth." title="An Esquimau youth." />
+</a><span class="caption">An Esquimau youth.</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>However much fur the Indian may catch and sell, he
+is always poor. He is paid in trade, not in cash; and
+when the merchant has bought the Indian's catch of fur
+he straightway spreads out before him an alluring display
+of goods specially manufactured for native trade.
+Here are brilliant cotton velvets and <ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'satteens'">sateens</ins> and tinselled
+muslins and gay ribbons that take the eye of his
+women folk; here are trays of Brummagem knickknacks,
+brass watches, and rings set with coloured glass, gorgeous
+celluloid hair combs, mirrors with elaborate, gilded frames,
+and brass lamps with "hand-painted" shades and dangling
+lustres; here are German accordions and mouth-organs
+and all sorts of pocket-knives and alarm-clocks&mdash;the
+greatest collection of glittering and noisy trash that
+can be imagined, bought at so much a dozen and retailed,
+usually, at about the same price for one. And when the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362"></a><a href="images/362.png">[362]</a></span>
+Indian has done his trading the trader has most of his
+money back again.</p>
+
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 300px;"><a name="half" id="half"></a><a href="images/gs411b.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs411b_th.jpg" width="300" height="236" alt="A half-breed Indian." title="A half-breed Indian." />
+</a><span class="caption">A half-breed Indian.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The news that an Indian has caught a black fox, the
+most exciting item of news that ever flies around a native
+village, does not give any great pleasure to one who is
+acquainted with native conditions, because he knows
+that it will bring little real benefit to the Indian. There
+will be keen competition, within limits, of course, amongst
+the traders for it; and the fortunate trapper may get
+three or four hundred dollars in trade for a skin that will
+fetch eight hundred or a thousand in cash on the London
+market; but if his wife get the solid advantage of a new
+cooking-stove or a sewing-machine from it she is doing
+well.</p>
+
+<p>Food the Indian never buys much beyond his present
+need, unless it is to squander it in feast after feast, to
+which every one is invited and at which there is the greatest
+lavishness. If a son is born, or a black fox is caught,
+or a member of the family recovers from a severe illness,
+custom permits, if it do not actually demand, that a
+"potlatch" be given, and most Indians are eager, whenever
+they are able, to be the heroes of the prandial hour.</p>
+
+<p>So he, his women, and his children go clad mainly in
+cotton, and there is abundant evidence that the tendency
+to pulmonary trouble, always latent amongst them, is
+developed by the severe colds which they catch through
+the inadequate covering of their bodies, and is then cherished
+into virulent activity by the close atmosphere of
+overcrowded, overheated cabins.</p>
+
+<p>The missions help the Indians, especially the women<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363"></a><a href="images/363.png">[363]</a></span>
+and children, in this matter of clothing as much as possible.
+Every year large bales of good though left-off
+under and over wear are secured through church organisations
+outside, and are traded to the natives at nominal
+prices, usually for fish or game or a little labour in sawing
+wood. And this naturally does not ingratiate missions
+with the trading class. One's anger is aroused sometimes
+at seeing the cotton-flannel underclothes and "cotton-filled"
+blankets and the "all-wool" cotton coats and
+trousers which they pay high prices for at the stores.
+The Canadian Indians, who are their neighbours, buy
+genuine Hudson Bay blankets and other real woollen
+goods, but the Alaskan Indian can buy nothing but cotton.</p>
+
+<p>But far and away beyond any other cause of the native
+decline stands the curse of the country, whisky. Recognising
+by its long Indian experience the consequences of
+forming liquor-drinking habits amongst the natives, the
+government has forbidden under penalty the giving or
+selling of any intoxicants to them. A few years ago a
+new law passed making such giving or selling a felony.
+These laws are largely a dead letter.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">UNPAID COMMISSIONERS</div>
+
+<p>The country is a very large one, very sparsely populated;
+the distances are enormous, the means of transportation
+entirely primitive, and the police and legal
+machinery insufficient to the end of suppressing this illicit
+traffic, especially in view of the fact that a considerable
+part of the whole population does not look with favour
+upon any vigorous attempt to suppress it. Great areas
+of the country are without telegraphic communication,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364"></a><a href="images/364.png">[364]</a></span>
+and in parts mail is received only once a month. One
+stretch of two hundred and fifty miles of the Yukon
+receives no mail at all during the winter months&mdash;more
+than half the year. In that instance, as in many others,
+the country has gone distinctly backward in the past
+few years. The magistrates&mdash;"commissioners" they are
+called, receive no salary, but eke out a precarious and
+often wretched existence on fees, so that it is frequently
+impossible to get men of character and capacity to accept
+such offices.</p>
+
+<p>One would have supposed that amongst all the legislating
+that has been done for and about Alaska in the
+last year or two, one crying evil that the attention of
+successive administrations has been called to for twenty
+years past would have been remedied. That evil is the
+unpaid magistrate and the vicious fee system by which
+he must make a living. It is a system that has been abolished
+in nearly all civilised countries; a system that lends
+itself to all sorts of petty abuse; a system that no one pretends
+to defend. No greater single step in advance could
+be made in the government of Alaska, no measure could
+be enacted that would tend to bring about in greater
+degree respect for the law than the abolition of the unpaid
+magistracy and the setting up of a body of stipendiaries
+of character and ability.</p>
+
+<p>The anomalies of the present situation are in some
+cases amusing. At one place on the Yukon it is only
+possible for a man to make a living as United States commissioner
+if he can combine the office of postmaster with
+it. A man who was removed as commissioner still retained<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365"></a><a href="images/365.png">[365]</a></span>
+the post-office, and no one could be found to accept
+the vacant judgeship. In another precinct the commissioner
+was moving all those whom he thought had influence
+to get him appointed deputy marshal instead of
+commissioner, because the deputy marshal gets a salary
+of two thousand dollars a year and allowances, which was
+more than the commissionership yielded. One is reminded
+of some comic-opera topsyturvyism when the
+judge tries in vain to get off the bench and be appointed
+constable. It sounds like the <i>Bab Ballads</i>. The district
+court is compelled to wink at irregularities of life and
+conduct in its commissioners because it cannot get men
+of a higher stamp to accept its appointments.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">LIQUOR AND POLITICS</div>
+
+<p>The only policemen are deputy United States marshals,
+primarily process-servers and not at all fitted in the
+majority of cases for any sort of detective work. Their
+appointment is often dictated and their action often
+hampered by political considerations. The liquor interest
+is very strong and knows how to bring pressure
+to bear against a marshal who is offensively active.
+They are responsible only to the United States marshal
+of their district, and he is responsible to the attorney-general,
+the head of the department of justice. But
+Washington is a long way off, and the attorney-general is
+a very busy man, not without his own interest, moreover,
+in politics. An attempt to get some notice taken of a
+particular case in which it was the general opinion that
+an energetic and vigilant deputy had been removed, and
+an elderly lethargic man substituted, because of too great
+activity in the prosecution of liquor cases, resulted in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366"></a><a href="images/366.png">[366]</a></span>
+conviction that what should have been a matter of administrative
+righteousness only was a political matter as
+well.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 294px;"><a name="aged" id="aged"></a><a href="images/gs418.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs418_th.jpg" width="294" height="500" alt="An aged couple." title="An aged couple." />
+</a><span class="caption">An aged couple.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The threatened extinction of the Alaskan native was
+referred to as wanton, and the term was used in the sense
+that there are no necessary natural causes fighting against
+his survival.</p>
+
+<p>Here is no economic pressure of white settlers determined
+to occupy the land, such as drove the Indians of
+the plains farther and farther west until there was no
+more west to be driven to. If such delusion possess any
+mind as a result of foolish newspaper and magazine writings,
+let it be dismissed at once. No man who has lived
+in the country and travelled in the country will countenance
+such notion. The white men in Alaska are miners
+and prospectors, trappers and traders, wood-choppers
+and steamboat men. Around a mining camp will be
+found a few truck-farmers; alongside road-houses and
+wood camps will often be found flourishing vegetable
+gardens, but outside of such agriculture there are, speaking
+broadly, no farmers at all in the interior of Alaska.
+Probably a majority of all the homesteads that have been
+taken up have been located that the trees on them might
+be cut down and hauled to town to be sold for fire-wood.
+A few miles away from the towns there are no homesteads,
+except perhaps on a well-travelled trail where a man has
+homesteaded a road-house.</p>
+
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="football" id="football"></a><a href="images/gs419.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs419_th.jpg" width="500" height="315" alt="Football at the Allakaket, exposure 1-1000 second, April, after a new light snowfall." title="Football at the Allakaket, exposure 1-1000 second, April, after a new light snowfall." />
+</a><span class="caption">Football at the Allakaket, exposure 1-1000 second, April, after a new light snowfall.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>All the settlements in the country are on the rivers,
+save the purely mining settlements that die and are
+abandoned as the placers play out. Yet one will travel<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367"></a><a href="images/367.png">[367]</a></span>
+two hundred and fifty miles up the Porcupine&mdash;till
+Canada is reached&mdash;and pass not more than three white
+men's cabins, all of them trappers; one will travel three
+hundred and fifty miles up the Koyukuk before the first
+white man's cabin is reached, and as many miles up the
+Innoko and the Iditarod and find no white men save
+wood-choppers. There are a few more white men on
+the Tanana than on any other tributary of the Yukon,
+because Fairbanks is on that river and there is more
+steamboat traffic, but they are mainly wood-choppers,
+while on the lesser tributaries of the Yukon, it is safe to
+say, there are no settled white men at all. As soon as one
+leaves the rivers and starts across country one is in the
+uninhabited wilderness.</p>
+
+<p>The writer is no prophet; he cannot tell what may
+happen agriculturally in Alaska or the rest of the arctic
+regions when the world outside is filled up and all unfrozen
+lands are under cultivation. Still less is he one
+who would belittle a country he has learned to love or detract
+in any way from its due claims to the attention of
+mankind. There is in the territory a false newspaper sentiment
+that every one who lives in the land should be continually
+singing extravagant praises of it and continually
+making extravagant claims for it. A man may love Alaska
+because he believes it to have "vast agricultural possibilities,"
+because, in his visions, he sees its barren wilds transformed
+into "waving fields of golden grain." But a man
+may also love it who regards all such visions as delusions.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">FOOD AND FURS</div>
+
+<p>The game and the fish of Alaska, the natural subsistence
+of the Indian, are virtually undiminished. Vast<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368"></a><a href="images/368.png">[368]</a></span>
+herds of caribou still wander on the hills, and far more are
+killed every year by wolves than by men. Great numbers
+of moose still roam the lowlands. The rivers still
+teem with salmon and grayling and the lakes with whitefish,
+ling, and lush. Unless the outrage of canneries
+should be permitted at the mouths of the Yukon&mdash;and
+that would threaten the chief subsistence of all the
+Indians of the interior&mdash;there seems no danger of permanent
+failure of the salmon run, though, of course, it
+varies greatly from year to year. Furs, though they
+diminish in number, continually rise in price. There
+are localities, it is true, where the game has been largely
+killed off and the furs trapped out; the Koyukuk country
+is one of them, though perhaps that region never was
+a very good game country. In this region, when a few
+years ago there was a partial failure of the salmon, there
+was distress amongst the Indians. But the country on
+the whole is almost as good an Indian country as ever it
+was, and there are few signs that it tends otherwise,
+though things happen so quickly and changes come with
+so little warning in Alaska that one does not like to be
+too confident.</p>
+
+<p>The Indian is the only settled inhabitant of interior
+Alaska to-day; for the prospectors and miners, who
+constitute the bulk of the white population, are not often
+very long in one place. Many of them might rightly
+be classed as permanent, but very few as settled inhabitants.
+It is the commonest thing to meet men a
+thousand miles away from the place where one met
+them last. A new "strike" will draw men from every<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369"></a><a href="images/369.png">[369]</a></span>
+mining camp in Alaska. A big strike will shift the
+centre of gravity of the whole white population in a
+few months. Indeed, a certain restless belief in the
+superior opportunities of some other spot is one of the
+characteristics of the prospector. The tide of white
+men that has flowed into an Indian neighbourhood
+gradually ebbs away and leaves the Indian behind with
+new habits, with new desires, with new diseases, with
+new vices, and with a varied assortment of illegitimate
+half-breed children to support. The Indian remains,
+usually in diminished numbers, with impaired
+character, with lowered physique, with the tag-ends of
+the white man's blackguardism as his chief acquirement
+in English&mdash;but he remains.</p>
+
+<p>It is unquestionable that the best natives in the country
+are those that have had the least intimacy with the
+white man, and it follows that the most hopeful and promising
+mission stations are those far up the tributary
+streams, away from mining camps and off the routes of
+travel, difficult of access, winter or summer, never seen
+by tourists at all; seen only of those who seek them with
+cost and trouble. At such stations the improvement of
+the Indian is manifest and the population increases. By
+reason of their remoteness they are very expensive to
+equip and maintain, but they are well worth while. One
+such has been described on the Koyukuk; another, at
+this writing, is establishing with equal promise at the
+Tanana Crossing, one of the most difficult points to reach
+in all interior Alaska.</p>
+
+<p>This chapter must not close without a few words<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370"></a><a href="images/370.png">[370]</a></span>
+about the native children. Dirty, of course, they almost
+always are; children in a state of nature will always be
+dirty, and even those farthest removed from that state
+show a marked tendency to revert to it; but when one has
+become sufficiently used to their dirt to be able to ignore
+it, they are very attractive. Intolerance of dirt is largely
+an acquired habit anyway. In view of their indulgent
+rearing, for Indian parents are perhaps the most indulgent
+in the world, they are singularly docile; they have an
+affectionate disposition and are quick and eager to learn.
+Many of them are very pretty, with a soft beauty of complexion
+and a delicate moulding of feature that are lost
+as they grow older. It takes some time to overcome
+their shyness and win their confidence, but when friendly
+relations have been established one grows very fond
+of them. Foregathering with them again is distinctly
+something to look forward to upon the return to a mission,
+and to see them come running, to have them press
+around, thrusting their little hands into one's own or
+hanging to one's coat, is a delight that compensates for
+much disappointment with the grown ups. In the midst
+of such a crowd of healthy, vivacious youngsters, clear-eyed,
+clean-limbed, and eager, one positively refuses to be
+hopeless about the race.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371"></a><a href="images/371.png">[371]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<h3>PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE ARCTIC</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">There</span> is no country in which an anastigmatic lens is
+of more use to the photographer than Alaska, and every
+camera with which it is hoped to take winter scenes should
+have this equipment. During two or three months in the
+year it makes the difference in practice between getting
+photographs and getting none. In theory one may always
+set up a tripod and increase length of exposure as light
+diminishes. But the most interesting scenes, the most
+attractive effects often present themselves under the
+severest conditions of weather, and he must be an enthusiast,
+indeed, who will get his tripod from the sled, pull
+out its telescoped tubes, set it up and adjust it for a
+picture with the thermometer at 40&deg; or 50&deg; below zero;
+and when he is done he is very likely to be a frozen
+enthusiast.</p>
+
+<p>With an anastigmatic lens working at, say f. 6-3, and
+with a "speed" film (glass plates are utterly out of the
+question on the trail), it is possible to make a snap-shot at
+one twenty-fifth of a second on a clear day, around noon,
+even in the dead of winter, in any part of Alaska that
+the writer has travelled in. There are those who write
+that they can always hold a camera still enough to get a
+sharp negative at even one tenth of a second. Probably<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372"></a><a href="images/372.png">[372]</a></span>
+the personal equation counts largely in such a matter,
+and a man of very decided phlegmatic temperament may
+have advantage over his more sanguine and nervous
+brother. The thing may be done; the writer has done
+it himself; but the point is it cannot be depended on;
+at this speed three out of four of his exposures will be
+blurred, whereas at one twenty-fifth of a second a sharp,
+clear negative may always be secured.</p>
+
+<p>It may be admitted at once that at extremely low
+temperatures the working of any shutter becomes doubtful,
+and most of them go out of any reliable action altogether.
+After trying and failing completely with three or
+four of the more expensive makes of shutters, the writer
+has for the last few years used a "Volute" with general
+satisfaction, though in the great cold even that shutter
+(from which all trace of grease or oil was carefully removed
+by the makers) is somewhat slowed up, so that a rare exposure
+at 50&deg; or 60&deg; below zero would be made at an indicated
+speed of one fiftieth rather than at one twenty-fifth,
+taking the chance of an under-exposed rather than a
+blurred negative. To wish for a shutter of absolute correctness
+and of absolute dependability under all circumstances,
+arranged for exposures of one fifteenth and one
+twentieth as well as one tenth and one twenty-fifth, is
+probably to wish for the unobtainable.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">CARE OF FILMS AND CAMERAS</div>
+
+<p>The care of the camera and the films, exposed and
+unexposed, the winter through, when travelling on the
+Alaskan trail, is a very important and very simple matter,
+though not generally learned until many negatives
+have been spoiled and sometimes lenses injured. It may<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373"></a><a href="images/373.png">[373]</a></span>
+be summed up in one general rule&mdash;keep instrument and
+films always outdoors.</p>
+
+<p>One unfamiliar with arctic conditions would not suppose
+that much trouble would be caused by that arch-enemy
+of all photographic preparations and apparatus&mdash;damp,
+in a country where the thermometer rarely goes
+above freezing the winter through; and that is a just conclusion
+provided such things be kept in the natural temperature,
+outdoors. But consider the great range of
+temperature when the thermometer stands at -50&deg; outdoors,
+and, say, 75&deg; indoors. Here is a difference of 125&deg;.
+Anything wooden or metallic, especially anything metallic,
+brought into the house immediately condenses the
+moisture with which the warm interior atmosphere is
+laden and becomes in a few moments covered with frost.
+Gradually, as the article assumes the temperature of the
+room, the frost melts, the water is absorbed, and the
+damage is done as surely as though it had been soused in
+a bucket. If it be necessary to take camera and films
+indoors for an interior view&mdash;which one does somewhat
+reluctantly&mdash;the films must be taken at once to the stove
+and the camera only very gradually; leaving the latter on
+the floor, the coldest part of the room, for a while and
+shifting its position nearer and nearer until the frost it
+has accumulated begins to melt, whereupon it should be
+placed close to the heat that the water may evaporate as
+fast as it forms.</p>
+
+<p>Outdoors, camera and films alike are perfectly safe,
+however intense the cold. Indeed, films keep almost
+indefinitely in the cold and do not deteriorate at all.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374"></a><a href="images/374.png">[374]</a></span>
+One learns, by and by, to have all films sent sealed up in
+tin cans, <i>and to put them back and seal them up again when
+exposed</i>, despite the maker's instructions not to do so.
+The maker knows the rules, but the user learns the exceptions.
+When films are thus protected they may be taken
+indoors or left out indifferently, as no moist air can get
+to them.</p>
+
+<p>The rule given is one that all men in this country follow
+with firearms. They are always left outdoors, and
+no iron will rust outdoors in the winter. Unless a man
+intend to take his gun to pieces and clean it thoroughly,
+he never brings it in the house. The writer has on several
+occasions removed an exposed film and inserted a new
+one outdoors, using the loaded sled for a table, at 50&deg;
+below zero; taking the chance of freezing his fingers
+rather than of ruining the film. It is an interesting exercise
+in dexterity of manipulation. Everything that can
+be done with the mittened hand is done, the material is
+placed within easy reach&mdash;then off with the mittens and
+gloves, and make the change as quickly as may be!</p>
+
+<p>There is just one brief season in the year when high
+speeds of shutters may be used: in the month of April,
+when a new flurry of snow has put a mantle of dazzling
+whiteness upon the earth and the sun mounts comparatively
+high in the heavens. Under such circumstances
+there is almost, if not quite, tropical illumination. Here is
+a picture of native football at the Allakaket, just north of
+the Arctic Circle, made late in April with a Graflex, fitted
+with a lens working at f. 4.5, at the full speed of its
+focal-plane shutter&mdash;one one-thousandth of a second. In<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375"></a><a href="images/375.png">[375]</a></span>
+five years' use that was the only time when that speed was
+used, or any speed above one two-hundred-and-fiftieth.
+Commonly, even in summer, many more exposures are
+made with it at one fiftieth than at one one-hundredth,
+for this is not a brightly lit country in summer, and nearly
+all visitors and tourists find their negatives much under-timed.</p>
+
+<p>The Graflex, though unapproached in its own sphere,
+is not a good all-round camera, despite confident assertions
+to the contrary. It is too bulky to carry at all in
+the winter, and its mechanism is apt to refuse duty in the
+cold. The 3A Graflex cannot be turned to make a perpendicular
+photograph, but must always be used with the
+greatest dimension horizontal. Except in brilliant sunshine
+it is difficult to get a sharp focus, and, even though
+the focus appear sharp on the ground glass, the negative
+may prove blurred. Then the instrument is a great dust
+catcher and seems to have been constructed with a perverse
+ingenuity so as to make it as difficult as possible to
+clean.</p>
+
+<p>The writer uses his Graflex almost solely for native
+portraits and studies, for which purpose it is admirable,
+and has enabled him to secure negatives that he could
+not have obtained with any other hand camera. Even
+in the summer, however, he always carries his 3A Folding
+Pocket Kodak as well, and uses it instead of the Graflex
+for landscapes and large groups. If he had to choose
+between the two instruments and confine himself to one,
+he would unhesitatingly choose the Folding Pocket Kodak.</p>
+
+<p>The difficulties of winter photography in Alaska do<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376"></a><a href="images/376.png">[376]</a></span>
+not end with the making of the exposure. All water
+must be brought up in a bucket from a water-hole in
+the river, and though it be clear water when it is dipped
+up from under the ice, it is chiefly ice by the time it
+reaches the house, during any cold spell. One learns to
+be very economical of water when it is procured with such
+difficulty, learns to dry prints with blotting-paper between
+the successive washings, which is the best way of
+washing with the minimum of water. Blotting-paper is
+decidedly cheaper than water under some circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>While the rivers run perfectly clear and bright under
+the ice in the winter, in summer the turbid water of
+nearly all our large streams introduces another difficulty,
+and photographic operation must sometimes be deferred
+for weeks, unless the rain barrels be full or enough ice
+be found in the ice-house, over and above the domestic
+needs, to serve.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">EFFECT OF COLD ON EMULSIONS</div>
+
+<p>It seems certain that the speed of the sensitive emulsions
+with which the films are covered is reduced in very
+cold weather. To determine whether or not this was so,
+the following experiments were resorted to. The camera
+was brought out of the house half an hour before noon,
+at 50&deg; below zero, and an exposure made immediately.
+Then the camera was left in position for an hour and another
+exposure made. There was little difference in the
+strength of the negatives, and what difference there was
+seemed in favour of the second exposure. Evidently, if
+the emulsion had slowed, the shutter had slowed also; so
+opportunity was awaited to make a more decisive test.
+When there remained but one exposure on a roll of film,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377"></a><a href="images/377.png">[377]</a></span>
+the camera was set outdoors at a temperature of 55&deg;
+below zero and left for an hour. Then an exposure was
+made and the film wound up and withdrawn; while a
+new film, just brought from the house, was as quickly as
+possible inserted in its place and a second exposure made.
+The latter was appreciably stronger. Even this test is,
+of course, not entirely conclusive; one would have to be
+quite sure that the emulsions were identical; but it confirms
+the writer's impression that extreme cold slows the
+film. It would be an easy matter for the manufacturers
+to settle this point beyond question in a modern laboratory,
+and it is certainly worth doing.</p>
+
+<p>There is much sameness about winter scenes in Alaska,
+as the reader has doubtless already remarked; yet the
+sameness is more due to a lack of alertness in the photographer
+than to an absence of variety. If the traveller
+had nothing to think about but his camera, if all other
+considerations could be subordinated to the securing of
+negatives, then, here as elsewhere, the average merit of
+pictures would be greater. Sometimes the most interesting
+scenes occur in the midst of stress of difficult travel
+when there is opportunity for no more than a fleeting
+recognition of their pictorial interest. "Tight places"
+often make attractive pictures, but most commonly do
+not get made into pictures at all. The study of the aspects
+of nature is likely to languish amidst the severe
+weather of the Northern winter, and the bright, clear, mild
+day gets photographed into undue prominence. Snow is
+more or less white and spruce-trees in the mass are more
+or less black; one dog team is very like another; a native<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378"></a><a href="images/378.png">[378]</a></span>
+village has to be known very well, indeed, to be distinguishable
+from another native village. Yet there is individuality,
+there is distinction, there is variety, there is contrast,
+if a man have but the grace to recognise them and the
+zeal to record them. Snow itself has infinite variety;
+trees, all of them, have characters of their own. Dogs
+differ as widely as men and Indians as widely as white
+men.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">INDIANS AND PHOTOGRAPHS</div>
+
+<p>The fear of the camera, or the dislike of the camera,
+that used to affect the native mind is gone now, save,
+perhaps, in certain remote quarters, and these interesting
+people are generally quite willing to stand still and be
+snapped. They ask for a print, and upon one's next
+visit there is clamorous demand for "picter, picter." A
+famous French physician said that his dread of the world
+to come lay in his expectation that the souls he met would
+reproach him for not having cured a certain obstinate
+malady that he had much repute in dealing with; so the
+travelling amateur in photography sometimes feels his
+conscience heavy under a load of promised pictures that
+he has forgotten or has been unable to make. He feels
+that his native friends whom he shall meet in the world
+to come will assuredly greet him with "where's my
+picture?" The burden increases all the time, and the
+Indian never forgets. It avails nothing even to explain
+that the exposure was a failure. A picture was promised;
+no picture has been given; that is as far as the native gets.
+And the making of extra prints, in the cases where it is
+possible to make them, is itself quite a tax upon time and
+material.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379"></a><a href="images/379.png">[379]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Just as it is true that to be well informed on any
+subject a man must read a great deal and be content not
+to have use for a great deal that he reads, so to secure
+good photographs of spots and scenes of note as he
+travels, he must make many negatives and be content
+to destroy many. The records of a second visit in better
+weather or at a more favourable season will supersede
+an earlier; typical groups more casual ones. The standard
+that he exacts of himself rises and work he was content
+with contents him no more. Sometimes one is
+tempted to think that the main difference between an
+unsuccessful and a successful amateur photographer is
+that the former hoards all his negatives while the latter
+relentlessly burns those which do not come up to the
+mark&mdash;if not at once, yet assuredly by and by. So the
+surprise that one feels at many of the illustrations in
+modern books of arctic travel is not that the travellers
+made such poor photographs but that they kept them
+and used them; for there can be no question that poor
+photographs are worse than none at all.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380"></a><a href="images/380.png">[380]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE NORTHERN LIGHTS</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> Northern Lights are a very common phenomenon
+of interior Alaska, much more common than in the very
+high latitudes around the North Pole, for it has been
+pretty well determined that there is an auroral pole, just
+as there is a magnetic pole and a pole of cold, none of
+which coincides with the geographical Pole itself. All the
+arctic explorers seem agreed that north of the 80th parallel
+these appearances are less in frequency and brilliance
+than in the regions ten or fifteen degrees farther
+south. It may be said roundly that it is a rare thing in
+winter for a still, clear night, when there is not much moon,
+to pass without some auroral display in the interior of
+Alaska. As long as we have any night at all in the early
+summer, and as soon as we begin to have night again late
+in the summer, they may be seen; so that one gains the
+impression that the phenomenon occurs the year round
+and is merely rendered invisible by the perpetual daylight
+of midsummer.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">A GENERAL AURORA</div>
+
+<p>The Alaskan auroras seem to divide themselves into
+two great classes, those that occupy the whole heavens
+on a grand scale and appear to be at a great distance
+above the earth, and those that are smaller and seem
+much closer. Inasmuch as a letter written from Fort<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381"></a><a href="images/381.png">[381]</a></span>
+Yukon to a town in Massachusetts describing one of the
+former class brought a reply that on the same night a
+brilliant aurora was observed there also, it would seem
+that auroras on the grand scale are visible over a large
+part of the earth's surface at once, whereas the lesser
+manifestations, though sometimes of great brilliance and
+beauty, give one the impression of being local.</p>
+
+<p>One gets, unfortunately, so accustomed to this light in
+the sky in Alaska that it becomes a matter of course and
+is little noticed unless it be extraordinarily vivid. Again,
+often very splendid displays occur in the intensely cold
+weather, when, no matter how warmly one may be clad,
+it is impossible to stand still long outdoors, and outdoors
+an observer must be to follow the constant movement
+that accompanies the aurora. Moreover, there is something
+very tantalising in the observing, for it is impossible
+to say at what moment an ordinary waving auroral
+streamer that stretches its greenish milky light across the
+sky, beautiful yet commonplace, may burst forth into a
+display of the first magnitude, or if it will do so at all.</p>
+
+<p>The winter traveller has the best chance for observing
+this phenomenon, because much of his travel is done
+before daylight, and often much more than he desires or
+deserves is done after daylight; while, if his journeys be
+protracted so long as snow and ice serve for passage at
+all, towards spring he will travel entirely at night instead
+of by day.</p>
+
+<p>It is intended in this chapter merely to attempt a
+description of a few of the more striking auroral displays
+that the writer has seen, the accounts being transcribed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382"></a><a href="images/382.png">[382]</a></span>
+from journals written within a few hours, at most, from
+the time of occurrence, and in the first case written so
+soon as he went indoors.</p>
+
+<p>This was on the 6th of October, 1904, at Fairbanks, a
+little removed from the town itself. When first the
+heavens were noticed there was one clear bow of milky
+light stretching from the northern to the southern horizon,
+reflected in the broken surface of the river, and glistening
+on the ice cakes that swirled down with the swift current.
+Then the southern end of the bow began to twist
+on itself until it had produced a queer elongated corkscrew
+appearance half-way up to the zenith, while the
+northern end spread out and bellied from east to west.
+Then the whole display moved rapidly across the sky
+until it lay low and faint on the western horizon, and it
+seemed to be all over. But before one could turn to
+go indoors a new point of light appeared suddenly high
+up in the sky and burst like a pyrotechnic bomb into
+a thousand pear-shaped globules with a molten centre
+flung far out to north and south. Then began one of
+the most beautiful celestial exhibitions that the writer
+has ever seen. These globules stretched into ribbon
+streamers, dividing and subdividing until the whole sky
+was filled with them, and these ribbon streamers of
+greenish opalescent light curved constantly inward and
+outward upon themselves, with a quick jerking movement
+like the cracking of a whip, and every time the ribbons
+curved, their lower edges frayed out, and the fringe was
+prismatic. The pinks and mauves flashed as the ribbon
+curved and frayed&mdash;and were gone. There was no other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383"></a><a href="images/383.png">[383]</a></span>
+colour in the whole heavens save the milky greenish-white
+light, but every time the streamers thrashed back and
+forth their under edges fringed into the glowing tints of
+mother-of-pearl. Presently, the whole display faded out
+until it was gone. But, as we turned again to seek the
+warmth of the house, all at once tiny fingers of light appeared
+all over the upper sky, like the flashing of spicules
+of alum under a microscope when a solution has dried to
+the point of crystallisation, and stretched up and down,
+lengthening and lengthening to the horizon, and gathering
+themselves together at the zenith into a crown.
+Three times this was repeated; each time the light faded
+gradually but completely from the sky and flashed out
+again instantaneously.</p>
+
+<p>For a full hour, until it was impossible to stand gazing
+any longer for the cold, the fascinating display was
+watched, and how much longer it continued cannot be
+said. It was a grand general aurora, high in the heavens,
+not vividly coloured save for the prismatic fringes, but of
+brilliant illumination, and remarkable amongst all the
+auroras observed since for its sudden changes and startling
+climaxes. Draped auroras are common in this country,
+though it has been wrongly stated that they are only
+seen near open seas, but their undulations are generally
+more deliberate and their character maintained; this one
+flashed on and off and changed its nature as though some
+finger were pressing buttons that controlled the electrical
+discharges of the universe. Yet it was noticed that even
+in its brightest moments the light of the stars could be
+seen through it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384"></a><a href="images/384.png">[384]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">A LOCAL AURORA</div>
+
+<p>The next aurora to be described was of a totally different
+kind. It occurred on the 18th of March, 1905.
+The writer, with an Indian attendant, was travelling on
+the Koyukuk River from Coldfoot to Bettles, and, owing
+to a heavy, drifted trail, night had fallen while yet the
+road-house was far away. There was no moon and the
+wind-swept trail was wholly indistinguishable from the
+surrounding snow, yet to keep on the trail was the only
+chance of going forward at all, for whenever the toboggan
+slid off into the deep, soft snow it came to a standstill
+and had to be dragged laboriously back again. A good
+leader would have kept the trail, but we had none such
+amongst our dogs that year. Thus, slowly, we went along
+in the dark, continually missing the trail on this side and
+on that. We did not know on which bank of the river the
+road-house was situated, for it was our first journey in
+those parts. We only knew the trail would take us there
+could we follow it. All at once a light burst forth, seemingly
+not a hundred yards above our heads, that lit up
+that trail like a search-light and threw our shadows black
+upon the snow. There was nothing faint and fluorescent
+about that aurora; it burned and gleamed like magnesium
+wire. And by its light we were able to see our path distinctly
+and to make good time along it, until in a mile or
+two we were gladdened by the sight of the candle shining
+in the window of the road-house and were safe for the
+night.</p>
+
+<p>Now, one does not really know that this was an aurora
+at all, save that there was nothing else it could have been.
+It was a phenomenon altogether apart from the one first<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385"></a><a href="images/385.png">[385]</a></span>
+described; not occupying the vault of heaven, streaming
+from horizon to zenith; not remote and majestic. There
+was really little opportunity to observe it at all; one's
+eyes were fixed upon the trail it illumined, anxious not to
+set foot to the right or left. Save for an occasional glance
+upward, we saw only its reflected light upon the white
+expanse beneath. It was simply a streak of light right
+above our heads, holding steadily in position, though
+fluctuating a little in strength&mdash;a light to light us home,
+that is what it was to us. And it was the most surprising
+and opportune example of what has been referred to here
+as the <i>local</i> aurora that eight winters have afforded.
+The most opportune but not the most beautiful; the
+next to be described, though of the local order, was the
+most striking and beautiful manifestation of the Northern
+Lights the writer has ever seen. It was that rare and
+lovely thing&mdash;a coloured aurora&mdash;all of one rich deep tint.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">A RED AURORA</div>
+
+<p>It was on the 11th of March, 1907, on the Chandalar
+River, a day's march above the gap by which that stream
+enters the Yukon Flats and five days north of Fort
+Yukon. A new "strike" had been made on the Chandalar,
+and a new town, "Caro," established;&mdash;abandoned
+since. All day long we had been troubled and hindered
+by overflow water on the ice, saturating the snow, an
+unpleasant feature for which this stream is noted; and
+when night fell and we thought we ought to be approaching
+the town, it seemed yet unaccountably far off. At
+last, in the darkness, we came to a creek that we decided
+must surely be Flat Creek, near the mouth of which the
+new settlement stood; and at the same time we came to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386"></a><a href="images/386.png">[386]</a></span>
+overflow water so deep that it covered both ice and snow
+and looked dangerous. So the dogs were halted while
+the Indian boy went ahead cautiously to see if the town
+were not just around the bend, and the writer sat down,
+tired, on the sled. While sitting there, all at once, from
+the top of the mountainous bluff that marked the mouth
+of the creek, a clear red light sprang up and spread out
+across the sky, dyeing the snow and gleaming in the water,
+lighting up all the river valley from mountain to mountain
+with a most beautiful carmine of the utmost intensity
+and depth. In wave after wave it came, growing brighter
+and brighter, as though some gigantic hand on that
+mountain top were flinging out the liquid radiance into
+the night. There was no suggestion of any other colour,
+it was all pure carmine, and it seemed to accumulate in
+mid-air until all the landscape was bathed in its effulgence.
+And then it gradually died away. The native boy was
+gone just half an hour. It began about five minutes after
+he left and ended about five minutes before he returned,
+so that its whole duration was twenty minutes. There
+had been no aurora at all before; there was nothing after,
+for his quest had been fruitless, and, since we would not
+venture that water in the dark, we made our camp on
+the bank and were thus two hours or more yet in the
+open. The boy had stopped to look at it himself, "long
+time," as he said, and declared it was the only red aurora
+he had ever seen in his twenty odd years' life. It was a
+very rare and beautiful sight, and it was hard to resist
+that impression of a gigantic hand flinging liquid red
+fire from the mountain top into the sky. Its source<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387"></a><a href="images/387.png">[387]</a></span>
+seemed no higher than the mountain top&mdash;seemed to be
+the mountain top itself&mdash;and its extent seemed confined
+within the river valley.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">A GRAND GENERAL DISPLAY</div>
+
+<p>There is only one other that shall be described,
+although there are many mentioned with more or less
+particularity in the diaries of these travels. And this
+last one is of the character of the first and not at all of
+the second and third, for it was on the grand scale, filling
+all the heavens, a phenomenon, one is convinced, of an
+order distinct and different from the local, near-at-hand
+kind. There was exceptionally good opportunity for
+observing this display, since it occurred during an all-night
+journey, the night of the 6th of April, 1912, with
+brilliant starlight but no moon while we were hastening
+to reach Eagle for Easter.</p>
+
+<p>We had made a new traverse from the Tanana to the
+Yukon, through two hundred miles of uninhabited country,
+and had missed the head of the creek that would have
+taken us to the latter river in thirty miles, dropping into
+one that meandered for upward of a hundred before it
+discharged into the great river. It was one o'clock on
+Good Friday morning when we reached a road-house on
+the Yukon eighty miles from Eagle. The only chance to
+keep the appointment was to travel all the two remaining
+nights. So we cached almost all our load at the road-house,
+for we should retrace our steps when Eagle was
+visited, and thus were able to travel fast.</p>
+
+<p>Both nights were marked by fine auroral displays, so
+extensive and of such apparent height as to give the
+impression that they must be visible over large areas of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388"></a><a href="images/388.png">[388]</a></span>
+the earth. Both continued all night long and were of
+the same general description, but the second night's display
+was emphasised in its main features and elaborated
+in its detail, and was the more striking and notable and
+worthy of description.</p>
+
+<p>It began by an exquisite and delicate weaving of fine,
+fluorescent filaments of light in and out among the stars,
+until at times a perfect network was formed, like lace
+amidst diamonds, first in one quarter of the heavens,
+then in another, then stretching and weaving its web
+right across the sky. The Yukon runs roughly north
+and south in these reaches, and the general trend of the
+whole display was parallel with the river's course. For
+an hour or more the ceaseless extension and looping of
+these infinitely elastic threads of light went on, with constant
+variation in their brilliance but no change in their
+form and never an instant's cessation of motion.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="sun" id="sun"></a><a href="images/gs442.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs442_th.jpg" width="500" height="160" alt="Photo by Paul Schultz. The sun dogs." title="Photo by Paul Schultz. The sun dogs." />
+</a>Photo by Paul Schultz.<br />
+<span class="caption">The sun dogs.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 230px;"><a name="tan" id="tan"></a><a href="images/gs443a.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs443a_th.jpg" width="230" height="300" alt="&quot;Tan,&quot; of mixed breed." title="&quot;Tan,&quot; of mixed breed." />
+</a><span class="caption">&quot;Tan,&quot; of mixed breed.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 228px;"><a name="muk" id="muk"></a><a href="images/gs443b.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs443b_th.jpg" width="228" height="300" alt="&quot;Muk,&quot; a pure malamute." title="&quot;Muk,&quot; a pure malamute." />
+</a><span class="caption">&quot;Muk,&quot; a pure malamute.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Then the familiar feature of the draped aurora was
+introduced, always a beautiful sight to watch. Slowly
+and most gracefully issued out of the north band after
+band, band after band of pale-green fire, each curling and
+recurling on itself like the ribbon that carries the motto
+under a shield of arms, and each continually fraying out
+its lower edge into subdued rainbow tints. Then these
+bands, never for a moment still, were gathered up together
+to the zenith, till from almost all round the horizon vibrant
+meridians of light stretched up to a crown of glory
+almost but not quite directly overhead, so bright that all
+the waving bands that now assumed more the appearance
+of its rays paled before it. Then the crown began<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389"></a><a href="images/389.png">[389]</a></span>
+to revolve, and as it revolved with constantly increasing
+speed, it gathered all its rays into one gigantic spiral that
+travelled as it spun towards the east until all form was
+dissipated in a nebulous mist that withdrew behind the
+mountains and glowered there like a dawn and left the
+skies void of all light save the stars. It was a fine instance
+of the stupendous sportiveness of the aurora that
+sometimes seems to have no more law or rule than the
+gambolling of a kitten, and to build up splendid and majestic
+effects merely to "whelm them all in wantonness"
+a moment later. A particularly fine and striking phase
+of an aurora is very likely to be followed by some such
+sudden whimsical destruction. It was as though that
+light hidden behind the mountains were mocking us.</p>
+
+<p>Then from out the north again appeared one clear
+belt of light that stretched rapidly and steadily all across
+the heavens until it formed an arch that stood there
+stationary. And from that motionless arch, the only
+motionless manifestation that whole night, there came a
+gradual superb crescendo of light that lit the wide, white
+river basin from mountain top to mountain top and
+threw the shadows of the dogs and the sled sharper and
+blacker upon the snow,&mdash;and in the very moment of its
+climax was gone again utterly while yet the exclamations
+of wonder were on our lips. It was as though, piqued
+at our admiration, the aurora had wiped itself out; and
+often and often there is precisely that impression of wilfulness
+about it.</p>
+
+<p>All night long the splendour kept up, and all night
+long, as the dogs went at a good clip and one of us rode<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390"></a><a href="images/390.png">[390]</a></span>
+while the other was at the sled's handle-bars, we gazed
+and marvelled at its infinite variety, at its astonishing
+fertility of effect, at its whimsical vagaries, until the true
+dawn of Easter swallowed up the beauty of the night as
+we came in sight of Eagle. And we wondered with what
+more lavish advertisement the dawn of the first Easter
+was heralded into the waste places of the snow.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SOUND AND SMELL</div>
+
+<p>There are men in Alaska, whose statements demand
+every respect, who claim to have heard frequently and
+unmistakably a swishing sound accompanying the movements
+of the aurora, and there are some who claim
+to have detected an odour accompanying it. Without
+venturing any opinion on the subject in general, the
+writer would simply say that, though he thinks he possesses
+as good ears and as good a nose as most people,
+he has never heard any sound or smelled any odour
+that he believed to come from the Northern Lights.
+Indeed, he has often felt that with all the light-producing
+energy and with all the rapid movement of the aurora
+it was mysterious that there should be absolutely no
+sound. The aurora often looks as if it <i>ought</i> to swish, but
+to his ears it has never done it; so much phosphorescent
+light might naturally be accompanied by some chemical
+odour, but to his nostrils never has been.</p>
+
+<p>Queer, uncertain noises in the silence of an arctic
+night there often are&mdash;noises of crackling twigs, perhaps,
+noises of settling snow, noises in the ice itself&mdash;but they
+are to be heard when there is no aurora as well as when
+there is. It is rare to stand on the banks of the Yukon
+on a cold night and not hear some faint crepitating<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391"></a><a href="images/391.png">[391]</a></span>
+sounds, sometimes running back and forth across the
+frozen river, sometimes resembling the ring of distant
+skates. Without offering any pronouncement upon what
+is a very interesting question, it seems to the writer
+possible that, to an ear intently listening, some such noise
+coinciding with a decided movement of a great auroral
+streamer might seem to be caused by the movement it
+happened to accompany.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392"></a><a href="images/392.png">[392]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE ALASKAN DOGS</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">MALAMUTE, HUSKY, AND SIWASH</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">There</span> are two breeds of native dogs in Alaska, and a
+third that is usually spoken of as such. The malamute is
+the Esquimau dog; and what for want of a better name
+is called the "Siwash" is the Indian dog. Many years
+ago the Hudson Bay voyageurs bred some selected strains
+of imported dog with the Indian dogs of those parts, or
+else did no more than carefully select the best individuals
+of the native species and bred from them exclusively&mdash;it
+is variously stated&mdash;and that is the accepted origin of
+the "husky." The malamute and the husky are the
+two chief sources of the white man's dog teams, though
+cross-breeding with setters and pointers, hounds of various
+sorts, mastiffs, Saint Bernards, and Newfoundlands
+has resulted in a general admixture of breeds, so that
+the work dogs of Alaska are an heterogeneous lot to-day.
+It should also be stated that the terms "malamute" and
+"husky" are very generally confused and often used
+interchangeably.</p>
+
+<p>The malamute, the Alaskan Esquimau dog, is precisely
+the same dog as that found amongst the natives of Baffin's
+Bay and Greenland. Knud Rasmunsen and Amundsen
+together have established the oneness of the Esquimaux
+from the east coast of Greenland all round to Saint<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393"></a><a href="images/393.png">[393]</a></span>
+Michael; they are one people, speaking virtually one
+language. And the malamute dog is one dog. A photograph
+that Admiral Peary prints of one of the Smith
+Sound dogs that pulled his sled to the North Pole would
+pass for a photograph of one of the present writer's team,
+bred on the Koyukuk River, the parents coming from
+Kotzebue Sound.</p>
+
+<p>There was never animal better adapted to environment
+than the malamute dog. His coat, while it is not
+fluffy, nor the hair long, is yet so dense and heavy that
+it affords him a perfect protection against the utmost
+severity of cold. His feet are tough and clean, and do
+not readily accumulate snow between the toes and therefore
+do not easily get sore&mdash;which is the great drawback
+of nearly all "outside" dogs and their mixed progeny.
+He is hardy and thrifty and does well on less food than the
+mixed breeds; and, despite Peary to the contrary, he will
+eat anything. "He will not eat anything but meat," says
+Peary; "I have tried and I know." No dog accustomed
+to a flesh diet willingly leaves it for other food; the dog
+is a carnivorous animal. But hunger will whet his appetite
+for anything that his bowels can digest. "Muk," the
+counterpart of Peary's "King Malamute," has thriven
+for years on his daily ration of dried fish, tallow, and
+rice, and eats biscuits and doughnuts whenever he can
+get them. The malamute is affectionate and faithful
+and likes to be made a pet of, but he is very jealous and
+an incorrigible fighter. He has little of the fawning
+submissiveness of pet dogs "outside," but is independent
+and self-willed and apt to make a troublesome pet.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394"></a><a href="images/394.png">[394]</a></span>
+However, pets that give little trouble seldom give much
+pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>His comparative shortness of leg makes him somewhat
+better adapted to the hard, crusted snow of the coast than
+to the soft snow of the interior, but he is a ceaseless and
+tireless worker who loves to pull. His prick ears, always
+erect, his bushy, graceful tail, carried high unless it curl
+upon the back as is the case with some, his compact coat
+of silver-grey, his sharp muzzle and black nose and quick
+narrow eyes give him an air of keenness and alertness
+that marks him out amongst dogs. When he is in good
+condition and his coat is taken care of he is a handsome
+fellow, and he will weigh from seventy-five to eighty-five
+or ninety pounds.</p>
+
+<p>The husky is a long, rangy dog, with more body and
+longer legs than the malamute and with a shorter coat.
+The coat is very thick and dense, however, and furnishes
+a sufficient protection. A good, spirited husky will carry
+his tail erect like a malamute, but the ears are not permanently
+pricked up; they are mobile. He is, perhaps,
+the general preference amongst dog drivers in the interior,
+but he has not the graceful distinction of appearance of
+the malamute.</p>
+
+<p>The "Siwash" dog is the common Indian dog; generally
+undersized, uncared for, half starved most of the
+time, and snappish because not handled save with roughness.
+In general appearance he resembles somewhat a
+small malamute, though, indeed, nowadays so mixed have
+breeds become that he may be any cur or mongrel. He
+is a wonderful little worker, and the loads he will pull are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395"></a><a href="images/395.png">[395]</a></span>
+astonishing. Sometimes, with it all, he is an attractive-looking
+fellow, especially when there has been a good
+moose or caribou killing and he has gorged upon the
+refuse and put some flesh upon his bones. And if one
+will take a little trouble to make friends with him he likes
+petting as much as any dog. Most Indian dogs "don't
+sabe white man," and will snap at one's first advances.
+On the whole, it is far better to let them alone; for, encouraged
+at all, they are terrible thieves&mdash;what hungry
+creatures are not?&mdash;and make all sorts of trouble with
+one's own team. The pure malamute and the pure husky
+do not bark at all, they howl; barking is a sure sign of an
+admixture of other strains.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">DOG BREEDING</div>
+
+<p>Here it may be worth while to say a few words about
+the general belief that dogs in Alaska are interbred with
+wolves. That the dog and the wolf have a common
+origin there can be no doubt, and that they will interbreed
+is equally sure, but diligent inquiry on the part of
+the writer for a number of years, throughout all interior
+Alaska, amongst whites and natives, has failed to educe
+one authentic instance of intentional interbreeding, has
+failed to discover one man who knows of his own knowledge
+that any living dog is the offspring of such union.</p>
+
+<p>While, therefore, it is not here stated that such cross-breeding
+has not taken place, or even that it does not take
+place, yet the author is satisfied that it is a very rare thing,
+indeed, and that the common stories of dogs that are
+"half wolf" are fabulous.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, it seems a rare thing when any sort of pains
+is taken about the breeding of dogs. In a country where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396"></a><a href="images/396.png">[396]</a></span>
+dogs are so important, where they are indispensable for
+any sort of travel during six or seven months in the year
+over by far the greater portion of it, one would expect
+that much attention would be paid to dog breeding; but
+this is not the case. Here and there a man who takes
+pride in a team will carefully mate the best available
+couple and carefully rear their offspring, but for the most
+part breeding seems left to chance. A team all of
+malamutes or all of huskies, a matched team of any
+sort, is the exception, and excites interest and remark.</p>
+
+<p>The market for dogs is so uncertain that it is doubtful
+if there would be any money in scientific breeding for
+the trail. When a stampede to new diggings takes
+place, the price of dogs rises enormously. Any sort of
+good dog on the spot may be worth a hundred dollars,
+or a hundred and fifty, and the man with a kennel
+would make a small fortune out of hand. But at other
+times it is hard to get twenty-five dollars for the best
+of dogs.</p>
+
+<p>The cost of maintenance of a dog team is considerable.
+When the mail-routes went all down the Yukon, and dogs
+were used exclusively, the contracting company estimated
+that it cost seventy-five dollars per head per annum to
+feed its dogs; while to the traveller in remote regions,
+buying dog feed in small parcels here and there, the cost
+is not less than one hundred dollars per head. Of course,
+a man engaged in dog raising would have his own fish-wheel
+on the Yukon and would catch almost all that his
+dogs would eat. Fish is plentiful in Alaska; it is transportation
+that costs. Dogs not working can do very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397"></a><a href="images/397.png">[397]</a></span>
+well on straight dried fish, but for the working dog this
+ration is supplemented by rice and tallow or other cereal
+and fat; not only because the animal does better on it,
+but also because straight dried fish is a very bulky food,
+and weight for weight goes not nearly so far. Cooking
+for the dogs is troublesome, but economical of weight
+and bulk, and conserves the vigour of the team. In the
+summer-time the dogs are still an expense. They must
+be boarded at some fish camp, at a cost of about five
+dollars per head per month.</p>
+
+<p>The white man found the dog team in use amongst
+the natives all over the interior, but he taught the Indian
+how to drive dogs. The natives had never evolved a
+"leader." Some fleet stripling always ran ahead, and
+the dogs followed. The leader, guided by the voice,
+"geeing" and "hawing," stopping and advancing at the
+word of command, is a white man's innovation, though
+now universally adopted by the natives. So is the dog
+collar. The "Siwash harness" is simply a band that
+goes round the shoulders and over the breast. In the
+interior the universal "Siwash" hitch was tandem, and
+is yet, but as trails have widened and improved, more
+and more the tendency grows amongst white men to hitch
+two abreast; and the most convenient rig is a lead line
+to which each dog is attached independently by a single-tree,
+either two abreast, or, by adding a further length
+to the lead line, one behind the other, so that on a narrow
+trail the tandem rig may be quickly resorted to.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE DOCKING OF TAILS</div>
+
+<p>One advantage of the change from single to double
+rig is the decay of the cruel custom of "bobbing" the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398"></a><a href="images/398.png">[398]</a></span>
+dogs' tails. When dogs are hitched one close behind the
+other (and the closer the better for pulling) the tail of
+the dog in front becomes heavy with ice from the condensation
+of the breath of the dog behind, until not only
+is he carrying weight but the use of the tail for warmth
+at night is foregone. So it was the universal practice to
+cut tails short off. But sleeping out in the open, as travelling
+dogs often must do, in all sorts of weather, with the
+thermometer at 50&deg; or 60&deg; below zero sometimes, a thick,
+bushy tail is a great protection to a dog. With it he
+covers nose and feet and is tucked up snug and warm.
+It is the dog's natural protection for the muzzle and the
+thinly haired extremities. A few years ago almost all
+work dogs in the interior were bobtailed; now the plumes
+wave over the teams again.</p>
+
+<p>Five dogs are usually considered the minimum team,
+and seven dogs make a good team. A good, quick-travelling
+load for a dog team is fifty pounds to the dog, on
+ordinary trails. The dogs will pull as much as one hundred
+pounds apiece or more, but that becomes more like
+freighting than travelling. On a good level trail with
+strong big dogs, men sometimes haul two hundred
+pounds to the dog. These, however, are "gee-pole propositions,"
+in the slang of the trail, and the man is doing
+hard work with a band around his chest and the pole in
+his hand. For quick travelling, fifty pounds to the dog
+is enough.</p>
+
+<p>The most useful "outside" strains that the white
+man has introduced into the dogs of the interior are the
+pointer and setter and collie. The bird-dogs themselves<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399"></a><a href="images/399.png">[399]</a></span>
+make very fast teams and soon adapt themselves to the
+climate, but their feet will not stand the strain. The
+collie's intelligence would make him a most admirable
+leader, did he not have so pronouncedly the faults of his
+good qualities; he wants to do all the work; he works
+himself to death. It is the leader's business to keep the
+team strung out; it is not his business to pull the load.
+But the admixture of these strains with the native blood
+has produced some very fine dogs. The Newfoundland
+and Saint Bernard strains have been perhaps the least
+successful admixtures. They are too heavy and cumbersome
+and always have tender feet; their bodies and the
+bodies of their mongrel progeny are too heavy for their
+feet.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">DOG LOYALTY</div>
+
+<p>The last statement, with regard to Newfoundland and
+Saint Bernard dogs, has an interesting exception. There
+is a dog, not uncommon in Alaska, that by a curious inversion
+of phrase is known as the "one-man-dog." What
+is meant is the "one-dog-man dog," the dog that belongs
+to the man that uses only one dog. Many and many a
+prospector pulls his whole winter grub-stake a hundred
+miles or more into the hills with the aid of one dog. His
+progress is slow, in bad places or on up grades he must
+relay, and all the time he is doing more work than the
+dog is, but he manages to get his stuff to his cabin or his
+camp with no other aid than one dog can give. It is usually
+a large heavy dog&mdash;speed never being asked of him,
+nor steady continuous winter work&mdash;often of one of the
+breeds mentioned, or of its predominant strain. The
+companionship between such a man and such a dog is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400"></a><a href="images/400.png">[400]</a></span>
+very close, and the understanding complete. Sometimes
+the dog will be his master's sole society for the whole
+winter.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, any man of feeling who spends the winters
+with a dog team must grow to a deep sympathy with the
+animals, and to a keen, sometimes almost a poignant,
+sense of what he owes to them. There is a mystery about
+domestic animals of whatever kind. It is a mystery that
+man should be able to impose his will upon them, change
+their habits and characters, constrain them to his tasks,
+take up all their lives with unnatural toil. And that he
+should get affection and devotion in return makes the
+mystery yet more mysterious.</p>
+
+<p>The dog gets his food&mdash;often of poor quality and
+scant quantity&mdash;and that is all he gets. Yet the life of a
+work dog that has a kind and considerate master is not
+an unhappy one. The dog is as full of the canine joy of
+life as though he had never worn a collar, and not only
+sports and gambols when free, but really seems to like his
+work and do it gladly. He will chafe at inaction; he will
+come eagerly to the harness in the morning; often will
+come before he is called and ask to be harnessed; and if
+for any reason&mdash;lameness or galled neck or sore feet&mdash;a
+dog is cut out of the team temporarily, to run loose, he
+will try at every chance to get back into his place and
+will often attack the dog that seems to him to be occupying
+it; while a dog left behind will howl most piteously
+and make desperate efforts to break his chain and rejoin
+his companions and his labour. And the wonderful and
+pitiful thing about it is that no sort of severity or brutality<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401"></a><a href="images/401.png">[401]</a></span>
+on his master's part will destroy that zealous allegiance.
+The dog in Alaska is absolutely dependent upon man for
+subsistence, and he seems to realise it.</p>
+
+<p>There is a great deal of cruelty and brutality amongst
+dog drivers in Alaska. At times, it is true, most dogs
+need some punishment. Dogs differ as much as men
+do, and some are lazy and some are self-willed. The best
+of them will develop bad trail habits if they are allowed
+to&mdash;habits which will prove hard to break by and by and
+be a continual source of delay and annoyance until
+broken. But a very slight punishment, judicially administered
+at the moment, will usually suffice just as well as
+a severe one, and the main source of brutality in the punishment
+of dogs is sheer bad temper on the part of the
+driver, and has for its only possible end, not the correction
+of the animal's fault but the satisfaction of its owner's
+rage. To see some hulking, passionate brute lashing a
+poor little dog with a chain, or beating him with a club;
+to see dogs overworked to utter exhaustion and their
+lagging steps still hastened by a rain of blows, these are
+the sickening sights of the trail&mdash;and they are not uncommon.
+The language of most dog drivers to their
+dogs consists of a mixture of cursing and ribaldry,
+excused by the statement that only by the use of such
+speech may dogs be driven at all. But there is little
+point in the excuse; such speech is, to an extent not far
+from universal, the speech of the country. Swedes who
+have little and Indians who have none other English will
+yet be volubly profane and obscene; in the latter case
+often with complete ignorance of the meaning of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402"></a><a href="images/402.png">[402]</a></span>
+terms. Yet it must be recorded not ungratefully by the
+impartial observer that the rare presence of a decent
+woman or a clergyman will almost always put a check
+upon blackguardly speech, even that of a dog driver;
+women and clergymen being supposed the only two
+classes who could have any possible objection to foulness
+of mouth. To refer continually to the excrements of
+the body, to sexual commerce, natural and unnatural,
+all in the grossest terms, and to mix these matters intimately
+with the sacred names, is "manly" speech
+amongst a large part of the population of Alaska.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote">REINDEER</div>
+
+<div class="sidenote">REINDEER AS DRAUGHT ANIMALS</div>
+
+<p>It has been claimed with justice that the introduction
+of the reindeer into Alaska has been highly successful; yet
+there is much misconception amongst people "outside" as
+to the nature of that success. Stimulated by the example
+of the United States Government, and urged thereto
+by Doctor Wilfred Grenfell and others, the Canadian
+Government is now introducing reindeer into Labrador;
+and the distinguished missionary physician, whose recent
+decoration gives lustre to the royal bestower as well as to
+the recipient, has publicly announced his hope that these
+domesticated herbivora will "eliminate that scourge of
+the country, the husky dog." To announce such a hope,
+based upon any results in Alaska, is to announce misconception
+of the nature of the success which has attended
+Doctor Sheldon Jackson's "reindeer experiment."
+There is not a dog the less in Alaska because of the reindeer,
+nor ever will be; in so far as similarity of conditions
+warrant us in expecting similar results, it is safe to predict<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403"></a><a href="images/403.png">[403]</a></span>
+that the reindeer will never "eliminate the husky dog"
+in Labrador.</p>
+
+<p>But before discussing the success of the reindeer experiment
+and its lack of any bearing upon the number or
+the usefulness of the dog, the writer would pause to take
+strong exception to the description of the husky dog as
+the "scourge" of Labrador, and would insist that any such
+wholesale condemnation is a boomerang that returns
+upon the head of the Labradorian who uses it. For, as
+the dog is one of the most adaptable of all domestic animals,
+and is, to an amazing extent, what his master makes
+him, to bring a railing accusation against the whole race
+of dogs is in reality to accuse those who breed and rear
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Why should the dog have richly earned the gratitude
+and affection of all the world except Labrador? Why
+should he be called the "Friend of Man" everywhere
+except amongst these particular people? Far to the
+north of them the Esquimaux prize and cherish their
+dogs. Throughout the whole wide region to the west
+and northwest of them the dog is man's indispensable
+ally and faithful servant. The same husky dog has
+made good his claim upon man in Alaska. It is he and
+his brother, the malamute, that have opened up Alaska
+so far as it has been opened; without whom to-day the development
+of the country would suddenly cease. And to
+the question that is often asked "outside," as to whether
+the Alaskan dog is not a savage beast, it is justly replied:
+"Not unless he happens to belong to a savage beast." Is
+it really otherwise anywhere? Instead of the reindeer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404"></a><a href="images/404.png">[404]</a></span>
+eliminating the dog, there is far greater likelihood of the
+dog eliminating the reindeer; and the professed dog lover,
+indignant at the opprobrious term applied to a whole
+race of dogs, may be disposed to echo Lady Macbeth's
+wish: "May good digestion wait on appetite."</p>
+
+<p>So far as substituting another draught animal for the
+dog is concerned, if the whole equine tribe, even down to
+Manchurian ponies should for some strange reason be out
+of the question, the Canadian Government had better import
+the polar ox or the yak. It is only amongst a nomadic
+people, whose main quest is pasturage, that the
+reindeer is a satisfactory draught animal. When introduced
+into Alaska there was doubtless expectation that
+he would be generally useful in this capacity. For a while
+certain mail-routes on the Seward Peninsula were served
+by him, and here and there a deluded prospector put his
+grub-stake on a reindeer sled. It is safe to say that no
+reindeer are so employed to-day. They were soon abandoned
+on the mail trails, and the prospector, after one
+season's experience, slaughtered his reindeer and traded
+its meat and hide for a couple of dogs.</p>
+
+<p>Consider that the reindeer feeds upon one thing alone,
+the moss that is named after him, and that while this
+moss is very widely distributed indeed, throughout
+Alaska, it is not found at all in the river valleys or the
+forests, but only upon the treeless hills at considerable
+elevation. Now the rivers are the highways. It is on
+their frozen surface, or on "portage" trails through the
+woods, that the greater part of all travelling is done and,
+in particular, that established routes of regular communication<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405"></a><a href="images/405.png">[405]</a></span>
+are maintained. To leave the trail after a
+day's journey, to wander miles into the hills, to herd the
+deer while they browse from slope to slope, digging the
+snow away in search of their provender, is wholly incompatible
+with any sustained or regular travel. The reindeer
+is a timid and almost defenceless creature. Wolves
+and lynxes prey upon him. One lynx is thought to have
+killed upward of twenty head in one season out of the
+herd that was stationed at Tanana, leaping upon the
+backs of the creatures, cutting their throats, sucking their
+blood, and riding them until they dropped and died. A
+few dogs will soon work havoc in a herd. So the reindeer
+must be constantly protected and at the same time
+must have range over a considerable scope of country.
+The care of reindeer is a business in itself, not a mere
+detail of the business of transportation or travel.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">DOG FOOD</div>
+
+<p>On the other hand, the dog's ration for many days is
+carried on the sled he hauls. There is a definite limit to
+it, of course, and knowledge of this limit made every
+experienced dog driver incredulous, from the first, of
+Doctor Cook's claim to have travelled some eleven hundred
+miles, from Etah to the North Pole and back, with a
+team of dogs hauling their own food. It is possible, however,
+on fair trails, with rigid economy, to travel five
+hundred miles and haul dog food and man food and the
+other indispensables of a long journey; and that is twice
+as far as it is ever necessary to travel in the interior of
+Alaska without reaching a supply point, the northern
+slope to the Arctic Ocean excepted.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it would be putting it better to say that a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406"></a><a href="images/406.png">[406]</a></span>
+team of seven dogs can haul their own and their driver's
+food and the camp equipment, all, of course, carefully
+reduced to a minimum, for a month. Dog food of one
+sort or another can be bought at any place where anything
+whatever is sold. Almost any Indian village will furnish
+dried fish, and it is often possible, with no other weapon
+than a .22 rifle, to feed dogs largely on the country through
+which they pass. The writer's team has had many a
+meal of ptarmigan, rabbits, quail, and spruce hen, while
+to enumerate other articles, on which at times and in
+stress for proper food, his dogs have sustained life and
+strength for travel, would be to enumerate all the common
+human comestibles. Aside from the usual ration of
+fish, tallow, and rice boiled together, corn-meal, beans,
+flour, oatmeal, sago (though that is poor stuff), tapioca,
+canned meats of all kinds, canned salmon, even canned
+kippered herring from Scotland, seal oil, seal and whale
+flesh, ham and bacon, horse flesh, moose and caribou and
+mountain-sheep flesh, canned "Boston brown bread,"
+canned butter, canned milk, dried apples, sugar, cheese,
+crackers of all kinds, and a score of other matters have at
+times entered into their food. Dogs have been "tided
+over" tight places for days and days on horse oats boiled
+with tallow candles, working the while. Anything that
+a man can eat, and much that even a starving man would
+scarcely eat, will make food for dogs. At the last and
+worst, dog can be fed to dog and even to man. When
+a dog team reaches a mining camp where supplies of all
+sorts are scarce&mdash;and that is not an uncommon experience&mdash;it
+is sometimes an exceedingly expensive matter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407"></a><a href="images/407.png">[407]</a></span>
+to feed it; but something can always be found that will
+serve to keep it going until the return to a better-stocked
+region. In the winter of 1910-11, when there was such
+scarcity in the Iditarod, it cost the writer thirty-nine dollars
+and fifty cents to feed seven dogs for a week, and he
+has more than once been at almost a similar charge in
+the Koyukuk. But in all his travels he has never yet
+been unable to procure some sort of food for his dogs. At
+times they have been fed for days on rabbits straight; at
+times on ptarmigan straight.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE REINDEER'S USEFULNESS</div>
+
+<p>Speaking broadly, the reindeer is a stupid, unwieldy,
+and intractable brute, not comparing for a moment with
+the dog in intelligence or adaptability. The common
+notion that his name is derived from the use of reins in
+driving him, thus putting him in the class with the horse,
+is a mistake; the word comes from a Norse root which
+refers to his moss-browsing habit. The "rein" with
+which he is driven is a rope tied around one of his horns.
+He has no cognisance of "gee" and "haw," nor of any
+other vocal direction, but must be yanked hither and
+thither with the rope by main force; while to stop him
+in his mad career, once he is started, it is often necessary
+to throw him with the rope. In Lapland there are doubtless
+individual deer better trained; the Lap herders tell
+of them with pride; but in the main this is a just description
+of reindeer handling. All the chief herders in
+Alaska are Laps, brought over for their knowledge of the
+animals, and the writer has repeatedly ridden behind
+some of their best deer.</p>
+
+<p>Wherein, then, lies the success of the reindeer experiment<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408"></a><a href="images/408.png">[408]</a></span>
+in Alaska? Chiefly in the provision of a regular
+meat supply by which the natives and whites in the vicinity
+of a herd are relieved from the precariousness of the
+chase or the rapacity of the cold-storage butcher company.
+The Esquimau, having served his allotted apprenticeship
+of five years and entered upon possession of
+a herd, can at any time kill and dress a "kid of the flock"
+for his family or for the market. The price of butcher's
+meat has been kept down all over the Seward Peninsula
+by the competition of the numerous reindeer herds, to
+the comfort of the population and the exasperation of the
+butcher company, and many an Esquimau has become
+passably rich. The skin of the animal also furnishes a
+warm and much-needed material for clothing and finds a
+ready sale at a good price.</p>
+
+<p>This success is, however, confined so far to the coast.
+The herds have not thriven in the interior and have now
+all been withdrawn to the coast. Beasts of prey killed
+them; a hoof disease destroyed many; others are supposed
+to have died from eating some poisonous fungus. In five
+or six years the herd at Tanana had not increased at
+all, but rather diminished, and the same is true of the
+other herds on the Yukon. The Indian, moreover, does
+not take to herding as the Esquimau does, and can hardly
+be induced to the segregation of himself and his family
+from his tribe which reindeer herding involves. The
+"apprentices" on the Yukon were nearly all of them Esquimaux
+from the coast.</p>
+
+<p>It may be that the salt of the coast region is essential
+to the well-being of the reindeer; it is not so with the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409"></a><a href="images/409.png">[409]</a></span>
+caribou&mdash;and the reindeer is nothing but a domesticated
+caribou&mdash;many herds of which, in the interior of Alaska,
+never visit the coast at all; but all caribou herds have their
+salt-licks, and one wishes that the oft-recommended plan
+of furnishing salt for the herds in the interior had been
+adopted by the government for a season before their
+removal was determined upon.</p>
+
+<p>Like most other "resources" of Alaska, the imported
+reindeer, at first decried and ridiculed, has now become
+the slender foundation for extravagant speculations of
+prosperity. The "millions of acres waiting for the
+plough" in the interior have lately been supplemented in
+this visionary treasury by the capitalisation of the vast
+tundras of the coast, the golden wheat-fields of the one
+finding counterpart in the multitudinous herds of the
+other. The growing dearth of cattle-range in the United
+States offers, it seems, to Alaska the opportunity of supplying
+the American market with meat, and the kindling
+fancy of the enthusiastic "booster" sees trains loaded
+with frozen reindeer meat rolling into Chicago.</p>
+
+<p>While the reindeer will never supersede the dog as a
+draught animal anywhere, the horse is rapidly superseding
+him on good trails in the more settled and peopled
+regions. In the Fairbanks and Nome districts, in the
+Circle and Koyukuk districts, in the Fortymile and in
+the Iditarod&mdash;in all districts where any extensive mining
+is carried on&mdash;heavy freights are moved by horses, and this
+tendency will doubtless increase rather than diminish.
+The dog team cannot compete with the horse team when
+it comes to moving heavy loads over good trails. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410"></a><a href="images/410.png">[410]</a></span>
+grain that the horse eats is imported, and in the main will
+probably always be imported, but oats cut green and
+properly cared for make excellent fodder, and the native
+hay, while not nearly as nutritious as the imported timothy,
+will sufficiently supplement grain.</p>
+
+<p>We hear a great deal nowadays of the benefits which
+are to come to Alaska from the railroad which the United
+States is expected to build from tide-water to the Yukon,
+and the clamorous voices of the journalist and the professional
+promoter and politician, which seem the only
+voices which ever reach the ear of government, are insistent
+that this is the one great thing that will bring
+prosperity to the country. Yet the writer is confident
+that he expresses almost the unanimous opinion of those
+who live in the country, outside of the classes mentioned,
+when he says that if the amount of money which this
+railroad will cost were expended upon good highways
+and trails the benefit would be much greater. It is
+means of intercommunication between the various parts
+of the country that is the great need of Alaska; some of
+its most promising sections are almost inaccessible now or
+accessible only at great trouble and expense. Access to
+the country itself, for the introduction of merchandise,
+is furnished easily enough during three or four months
+of the year by its incomparable system of waterways.
+Good highways, well engineered and well maintained,
+over which horse teams could be used summer and winter,
+would remove much of what at present is the almost
+prohibitive cost of distributing that merchandise from
+river points. Such roads would give an enormous stimulus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411"></a><a href="images/411.png">[411]</a></span>
+to prospecting, and would render it possible to work
+gold placers all over the country that are of too low grade
+to be worked at the present rates of transportation. A
+<i>really</i> good highway from Valdez to Fairbanks and the
+making of the long-ago begun Valdez-Eagle road; a good
+highway from Fairbanks to the upper Tanana as far as
+the Nabesna, connecting with the one from the Copper
+River country and the coast; another from the Yukon
+into the Koyukuk and the Chandalar; another from Fairbanks
+into the Kantishna, connecting with one from the
+lower Kuskokwim and one from the Iditarod; a road from
+Eagle across the almost unknown region (save for the line
+of the 141st meridian) between the Yukon and the Porcupine
+Rivers; two or three roads between the Yukon and
+the Tanana; a road from the Koyukuk to Kotzebue
+Sound&mdash;these would constitute main arteries of travel
+and would open up the country as no trunk railroad will
+ever do. The expense would be great, both of construction
+and maintenance, but it would probably not be
+greater than the cost of constructing and maintaining
+the proposed railroad. Twenty or thirty ordinary freight
+trains a year would bring in all the goods that Alaska
+consumes. Before that amount can be very greatly
+increased there must be a large development of the
+means by which it is to be distributed throughout the
+country.</p>
+
+<p>Some day, perhaps, these roads will be made, and the
+horse, not the dog, will be the draught animal upon
+them. Yet it would be a rash conclusion that even then
+the time will be at hand when there will be no longer use<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412"></a><a href="images/412.png">[412]</a></span>
+for the work dog in Alaska. Away from these main arteries
+of travel he will still be employed. So long as great
+part of the land remains a noble arctic wilderness; so long
+as the prospector strikes farther and farther into the
+rugged mountains; so long as quick travel over great
+stretches of country is necessary or desirable; so long as
+the salmon swarm up the rivers to furnish food for the
+catching; so long as the Indian moves from fishing camp
+to village and from village to hunting camp&mdash;so long will
+the dog be hitched to the sled in Alaska; so long will his
+joyful yelp and his plaintive whine be heard in the land;
+so long will his warm tongue seek his master's hand, even
+the hand that strikes him, and his eloquent eyes speak
+his utter allegiance.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413"></a><a href="images/413.png">[413]</a></span><br /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414"></a><a href="images/414.png">[414]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415"></a><a href="images/415.png">[415]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>INDEX</h2>
+
+
+<div>
+Agriculture, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>, <a href="#Page_367">367</a><br />
+<br />
+Alarm-clocks, <a href="#Page_304">304</a><br />
+<br />
+Alatna River, <a href="#Page_70">70</a><br />
+<br />
+Albert the pilot, <a href="#Page_60">60</a><br />
+<br />
+Allakaket, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>-<a href="#Page_195">195</a><br />
+<br />
+Alphabet, <a href="#Page_69">69</a><br />
+<br />
+Amundsen, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>, <a href="#Page_392">392</a><br />
+<br />
+Animals, wild, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>, <a href="#Page_405">405</a><br />
+<br />
+Anthropologists, <a href="#Page_270">270</a><br />
+<br />
+Arctic Ocean, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a><br />
+<br />
+Army posts: economic value, <a href="#Page_151">151</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">discipline and life, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">frequent changes, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">surgeons, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Arthur, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a><br />
+<br />
+Athabascan language, <a href="#Page_349">349</a><br />
+<br />
+Atler, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a><br />
+<br />
+Auroras, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>-<a href="#Page_391">391</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Baker Creek Springs, <a href="#Page_155">155</a><br />
+<br />
+Bathing, <a href="#Page_85">85</a><br />
+<br />
+Beaver City, <a href="#Page_345">345</a><br />
+<br />
+Bering Sea, <a href="#Page_129">129</a><br />
+<br />
+Betticher, C. E., <a href="#Page_254">254</a><br />
+<br />
+Bettles, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a><br />
+<br />
+Black fox, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_362">362</a><br />
+<br />
+Blizzard, <a href="#Page_40">40</a><br />
+<br />
+Blossom Cape, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a><br />
+<br />
+Blow-holes, <a href="#Page_13">13</a><br />
+<br />
+Bluff, <a href="#Page_126">126</a><br />
+<br />
+Bompas, Bishop, <a href="#Page_283">283</a><br />
+<br />
+Brook, Alfred, <a href="#Page_309">309</a><br />
+<br />
+Burke, Dr., <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Caching, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a><br />
+<br />
+Camp: making details, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">night made, <a href="#Page_91">91</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">devices, <a href="#Page_243">243</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in wet snow, <a href="#Page_302">302</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Camp-Robbers, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_300">300</a><br />
+<br />
+Candle, <a href="#Page_102">102</a><br />
+<br />
+Candles, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a><br />
+<br />
+Caribou, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_409">409</a><br />
+<br />
+Carter, Miss, <a href="#Page_184">184</a><br />
+<br />
+Chandalar: River, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">village, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Gap, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Chatanika River, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a><br />
+<br />
+Chena, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a><br />
+<br />
+Chief Isaac, <a href="#Page_263">263</a><br />
+<br />
+Chinnik, <a href="#Page_127">127</a><br />
+<br />
+Choris Peninsula, <a href="#Page_106">106</a><br />
+<br />
+Circle City, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a><br />
+<br />
+Clearwater Creek, <a href="#Page_256">256</a><br />
+<br />
+Clothes: drying, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">moose hide, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">tuberculosis, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>, <a href="#Page_362">362</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">missions, <a href="#Page_363">363</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Coal, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a><br />
+<br />
+Coldfoot, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a><br />
+<br />
+Cook, Dr., <a href="#Page_405">405</a><br />
+<br />
+Cooking: camp dishes, <a href="#Page_43">43</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cleanliness, <a href="#Page_85">85</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">bear meat, <a href="#Page_168">168</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">by relays, <a href="#Page_209">209</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">for dog, <a href="#Page_397">397</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Council, <a href="#Page_116">116</a><br />
+<br />
+Creepers, <a href="#Page_111">111</a><br />
+<br />
+Cribbage, <a href="#Page_124">124</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Death Valley, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a><br />
+<br />
+Denali (Mt. McKinley), <a href="#Page_225">225</a>, <a href="#Page_305">305</a><br />
+<br />
+Deputy marshals, <a href="#Page_365">365</a><br />
+<br />
+Development schemes, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>, <a href="#Page_411">411</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="diphtheria" id="diphtheria"></a>Diphtheria, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br />
+<br />
+Disease: epidemic, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>; <i>cf.</i> <a href="#diphtheria">diphtheria</a>, <a href="#measles">measles</a>, <a href="#tuberculosis">tuberculosis</a><br />
+<br />
+Dishkaket, <a href="#Page_332">332</a><br />
+<br />
+Disinfectants, <a href="#Page_32">32</a><br />
+<br />
+Dogs: price of, <a href="#Page_4">4</a><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416"></a><a href="images/416.png">[416]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">frozen toes, <a href="#Page_8">8</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sled, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">beds, <a href="#Page_42">42</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">food, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">harness, <a href="#Page_45">45</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">tails, <a href="#Page_45">45</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">fight, <a href="#Page_93">93</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">digging up snow, <a href="#Page_110">110</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">helpless on smooth ice, <a href="#Page_113">113</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">conscience, <a href="#Page_115">115</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on fish food, <a href="#Page_115">115</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">with reindeer, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">refuse to lead, <a href="#Page_125">125</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">preference for land trails, <a href="#Page_129">129</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">intelligence, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>; <i>cf.</i> <a href="#Nanook">Nanook</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">strength, <a href="#Page_174">174</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">dislike wet feet, <a href="#Page_178">178</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cost of boarding, <a href="#Page_181">181</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in trail making, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in soft weather, <a href="#Page_213">213</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">suffering on steep trails, <a href="#Page_214">214</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">companionship, <a href="#Page_223">223</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">moccasin leggings, <a href="#Page_224">224</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">houses, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">play, <a href="#Page_234">234</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">intelligence, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sleeping, <a href="#Page_235">235</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">thieving, <a href="#Page_236">236</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">partners of man, <a href="#Page_238">238</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">working life, <a href="#Page_239">239</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">frozen foot, <a href="#Page_253">253</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">with no coat, <a href="#Page_275">275</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Indians, <a href="#Page_291">291</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">howling, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>, <a href="#Page_304">304</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">stray, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>, <a href="#Page_321">321</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">general characteristics, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>-<a href="#Page_402">402</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cost of maintenance, <a href="#Page_396">396</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ill used by whites, <a href="#Page_397">397</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Eagle, <a href="#Page_285">285</a><br />
+<br />
+Eagle Summit, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a><br />
+<br />
+Education: spread of English, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">phonograph, <a href="#Page_52">52</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">scientific, <a href="#Page_58">58</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">novel methods, <a href="#Page_80">80</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ignorance of native language, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">artificial methods, <a href="#Page_131">131</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mission, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_355">355</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Egbert Fort, <a href="#Page_286">286</a><br />
+<br />
+Endicott Mountains, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Esquimaux" id="Esquimaux"></a>Esquimaux: sense of humour, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">isolated, <a href="#Page_62">62</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">huts, <a href="#Page_70">70</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as hunters, <a href="#Page_75">75</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">prayers, <a href="#Page_82">82</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">music, <a href="#Page_82">82</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">morality, <a href="#Page_83">83</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">industry, <a href="#Page_86">86</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sabbatarianism, <a href="#Page_88">88</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sense of distance, <a href="#Page_91">91</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">fish eating, <a href="#Page_92">92</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">gut windows, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">devoutness, <a href="#Page_95">95</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sleeping customs, <a href="#Page_95">95</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">undemonstrativeness, <a href="#Page_95">95</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">igloos, <a href="#Page_96">96</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">non-alcoholic, <a href="#Page_99">99</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">tobacco, <a href="#Page_99">99</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">hospitality, <a href="#Page_106">106</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">carving, <a href="#Page_124">124</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">singing, <a href="#Page_130">130</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">attitude of white men toward, <a href="#Page_134">134</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">snow goggles, <a href="#Page_146">146</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">kindly manners, <a href="#Page_182">182</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">antipathy to Indians, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">superstitions, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Fairbanks, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_382">382</a><br />
+<br />
+Farthing, Miss, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a><br />
+<br />
+Fish Creek, <a href="#Page_297">297</a><br />
+<br />
+Forts: Alaskan, <a href="#Page_342">342</a><br />
+<br />
+Fortymilers, <a href="#Page_280">280</a><br />
+<br />
+Fortymile River, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Gambling, <a href="#Page_279">279</a><br />
+<br />
+Game, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a>, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Gold train, <a href="#Page_5">5</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Greek" id="Greek"></a>Greek Church, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_322">322</a><br />
+<br />
+Grenfell, Dr., <a href="#Page_402">402</a><br />
+<br />
+Grimm, Charles, <a href="#Page_56">56</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Half-breeds, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a href="#Page_319">319</a><br />
+<br />
+Hamlin, Fort, <a href="#Page_342">342</a><br />
+<br />
+Hammond River, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br />
+<br />
+Hans, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a><br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417"></a><a href="images/417.png">[417]</a></span>Hip-ring, <a href="#Page_226">226</a><br />
+<br />
+Hobo, the frozen, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a><br />
+<br />
+Hogatzitna, <a href="#Page_76">76</a><br />
+<br />
+Horses, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>, <a href="#Page_411">411</a><br />
+<br />
+Hospitality, <i>cf.</i> <a href="#Esquimaux">Esquimaux</a> and <a href="#Indians">Indians</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a><br />
+<br />
+Hot Springs, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a><br />
+<br />
+Hotham Inlet, <a href="#Page_96">96</a><br />
+<br />
+Hudson Bay Company, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a><br />
+<br />
+Husky, <a href="#Page_392">392</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Ice: glare, <a href="#Page_9">9</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">rubber, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">blow-holes, <a href="#Page_13">13</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">bluffs, <a href="#Page_79">79</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mining, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">jam, <a href="#Page_167">167</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">breaking, <a href="#Page_170">170</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">way to determine holding capacity, <a href="#Page_179">179</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Iditarod City, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_327">327</a><br />
+<br />
+Igloo, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Indians" id="Indians"></a>Indians: civilized, <a href="#Page_24">24</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">uncivilized, <a href="#Page_25">25</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">religion, <a href="#Page_30">30</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">language, <a href="#Page_141">141</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">trade with, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">diminishing, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">disease, <a href="#Page_154">154</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">relations with whites, <a href="#Page_173">173</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">dancing and sports, <a href="#Page_189">189</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">preparation for death, <a href="#Page_190">190</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of civilization, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">lack of initiative, <a href="#Page_197">197</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">demoralization, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_279">279</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">birth-rate and death-rate, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">best education for, <a href="#Page_245">245</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">women teachers, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">kindliness, <a href="#Page_254">254</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">traders, <a href="#Page_258">258</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">hospitality, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">missions, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_279">279</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">not savages, <a href="#Page_264">264</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">fear of Esquimaux, <a href="#Page_265">265</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">peaceable, <a href="#Page_266">266</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">not idolators, <a href="#Page_267">267</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Christianity, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_270">270</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">moral character, <a href="#Page_285">285</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">pauperization, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cruelty to dogs, <a href="#Page_291">291</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of reproof, <a href="#Page_292">292</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">self-government, <a href="#Page_293">293</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">whites, <a href="#Page_293">293</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">epidemics, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">at mercy of traders, <a href="#Page_311">311</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">half-breed, <a href="#Page_315">315</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and whites, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">meat carriers, <a href="#Page_332">332</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">carving, <a href="#Page_334">334</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">general discussion of, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>-<a href="#Page_370">370</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and photographs, <a href="#Page_378">378</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Interpreters, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Jackson, Dr. S., <a href="#Page_402">402</a><br />
+<br />
+Jade Mountains, <a href="#Page_89">89</a><br />
+<br />
+Jett&eacute;, Fr., <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a><br />
+<br />
+John River, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br />
+<br />
+Journalism, <a href="#Page_250">250</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Kikitaruk, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a><br />
+<br />
+Knapp, <a href="#Page_100">100</a><br />
+<br />
+Kobuk: River, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mountains, <a href="#Page_74">74</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">missionary, <a href="#Page_80">80</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">town, <a href="#Page_182">182</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Kobuks, <a href="#Page_51">51</a><br />
+<br />
+Kotzebue, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sound, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Koyukuk: River, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_384">384</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ca&ntilde;on, <a href="#Page_52">52</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">deserted towns, <a href="#Page_65">65</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Indians, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mission, <a href="#Page_183">183</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Krusenstern, <a href="#Page_97">97</a><br />
+<br />
+Kuskokwim River, <a href="#Page_322">322</a>, <a href="#Page_323">323</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Lamps, <a href="#Page_34">34</a><br />
+<br />
+Langdon, Captain, <a href="#Page_288">288</a><br />
+<br />
+Launch, motor, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a><br />
+<br />
+Lewis Cut-Off, <a href="#Page_333">333</a><br />
+<br />
+Lingo, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a><br />
+<br />
+London, Jack, <a href="#Page_265">265</a><br />
+<br />
+Long Beach, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a><br />
+<br />
+Lookout Mountain, <a href="#Page_61">61</a><br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418"></a><a href="images/418.png">[418]</a></span>Loomis, Dr., <a href="#Page_296">296</a><br />
+<br />
+Lower ramparts, <a href="#Page_219">219</a><br />
+<br />
+Lunar: phenomena, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">eclipse, <a href="#Page_78">78</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Lynx, <a href="#Page_405">405</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+MacDonald, Archdeacon, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a><br />
+<br />
+Magistrates, <a href="#Page_364">364</a><br />
+<br />
+Mail carrying, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a><br />
+<br />
+Malamute, <a href="#Page_392">392</a><br />
+<br />
+Mal-de-raquet, <a href="#Page_201">201</a><br />
+<br />
+Mansfield Lake, <a href="#Page_271">271</a><br />
+<br />
+Matches, <a href="#Page_243">243</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="measles" id="measles"></a>Measles, <a href="#Page_312">312</a><br />
+<br />
+Medicine men, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a><br />
+<br />
+Melozitna, <a href="#Page_209">209</a><br />
+<br />
+Menthol balm, <a href="#Page_201">201</a><br />
+<br />
+Meteorological: phenomena, heat radiation, <a href="#Page_55">55</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">rain, rare in winter, <a href="#Page_134">134</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">local weather changes, <a href="#Page_144">144</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">variable climate in Alaska, <a href="#Page_188">188</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cause of fluctuating temperature readings, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Minchumina'">Minch&uacute;mina</ins>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_308">308</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lake, <a href="#Page_303">303</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Mining: towns and camps, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">town morality, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>, <a href="#Page_354">354</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">luxurious life, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">fires, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on beach, <a href="#Page_123">123</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in ice, <a href="#Page_126">126</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">decayed, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">primitive methods, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">claims, <a href="#Page_295">295</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">flimsy buildings, <a href="#Page_328">328</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">morals, <a href="#Page_329">329</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">services in, <a href="#Page_330">330</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">missionaries, <a href="#Page_331">331</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">agriculture, <a href="#Page_366">366</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Mirage, <a href="#Page_90">90</a><br />
+<br />
+Mission stations: schools, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>, <a href="#Page_358">358</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">clothing, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>, <a href="#Page_369">369</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">isolated, <a href="#Page_369">369</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Missionary: nurse, <a href="#Page_33">33</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">methods, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Moccasins, <a href="#Page_7">7</a><br />
+<br />
+Money, <a href="#Page_64">64</a><br />
+<br />
+Moses' Village, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a><br />
+<br />
+Mountain: sunshine, <a href="#Page_61">61</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">temperature, <a href="#Page_61">61</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Mukluk, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a><br />
+<br />
+Mush, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Nanook" id="Nanook"></a>Nanook, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a><br />
+<br />
+Natural religion, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a><br />
+<br />
+Nelson, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a><br />
+<br />
+Nenana, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a><br />
+<br />
+Nicoli's Village, <a href="#Page_322">322</a><br />
+<br />
+Noatak, <a href="#Page_90">90</a><br />
+<br />
+Nome, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a><br />
+<br />
+Northern Commercial Company, <a href="#Page_241">241</a><br />
+<br />
+Norton: Bay, <a href="#Page_127">127</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sound, <a href="#Page_117">117</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Nose protection, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a><br />
+<br />
+Noyutak Lake, <a href="#Page_76">76</a><br />
+<br />
+Nulato, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">massacre, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Old Woman Mountain, <a href="#Page_135">135</a><br />
+<br />
+One-eyed William, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a><br />
+<br />
+Overflow: water, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ice, <a href="#Page_9">9</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Paraselene, <a href="#Page_57">57</a><br />
+<br />
+Parkee, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a><br />
+<br />
+Peary, Admiral, <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+Pedometer, <a href="#Page_73">73</a><br />
+<br />
+Petersen, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a><br />
+<br />
+Photographing, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242</a><br />
+<br />
+Photography, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>-<a href="#Page_379">379</a><br />
+<br />
+Place names, <a href="#Page_326">326</a><br />
+<br />
+Point Hope, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a><br />
+<br />
+Potatoes, <a href="#Page_229">229</a><br />
+<br />
+Potlatch, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_353">353</a><br />
+<br />
+Prevost, Jules, <a href="#Page_154">154</a><br />
+<br />
+Prices, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>, <a href="#Page_362">362</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">trading, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Prospectors: in winter, <a href="#Page_78">78</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Esquimaux, <a href="#Page_88">88</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">pinching out, <a href="#Page_92">92</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ruined, <a href="#Page_146">146</a></span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419"></a><a href="images/419.png">[419]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">self-reliance, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">poet, <a href="#Page_322">322</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">imagination, <a href="#Page_326">326</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">knowledge of Bible, <a href="#Page_328">328</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">dogs, <a href="#Page_399">399</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">visions, <a href="#Page_409">409</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">railways, <a href="#Page_410">410</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Ptarmigan, <a href="#Page_325">325</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Quikpak River, <a href="#Page_153">153</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Raft, <a href="#Page_256">256</a><br />
+<br />
+Ragarou, Fr., <a href="#Page_147">147</a><br />
+<br />
+Railroads, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>, <a href="#Page_411">411</a><br />
+<br />
+Rampart City, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>, <a href="#Page_338">338</a>, <a href="#Page_339">339</a><br />
+<br />
+Rasmunsen, <a href="#Page_392">392</a><br />
+<br />
+Reading matter, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>, <a href="#Page_336">336</a><br />
+<br />
+Red Mountain, <a href="#Page_176">176</a><br />
+<br />
+Reindeer, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>, <a href="#Page_409">409</a><br />
+<br />
+Roadhouse accommodation, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">gambling, <a href="#Page_128">128</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">keepers of, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">talk, <a href="#Page_289">289</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">poet, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>, <a href="#Page_322">322</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reading matter, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>, <a href="#Page_325">325</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Arctic travel reminiscences, <a href="#Page_335">335</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Roxy, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a><br />
+<br />
+Russian Alaska, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>: Church of, <i>cf.</i> <a href="#Greek">Greek Church</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Saint John's-in-the-Wilderness, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a><br />
+<br />
+Salchaket, <a href="#Page_254">254</a><br />
+<br />
+Scientists, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>, <a href="#Page_270">270</a><br />
+<br />
+Seasons, <a href="#Page_230">230</a><br />
+<br />
+Seward Peninsula, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a><br />
+<br />
+Signal corps, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a><br />
+<br />
+Sishw&oacute;ymina, <a href="#Page_309">309</a><br />
+<br />
+Siwashing, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>, <a href="#Page_394">394</a><br />
+<br />
+Slate Creek, <a href="#Page_46">46</a><br />
+<br />
+Sled: width, <a href="#Page_110">110</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">brake, <a href="#Page_113">113</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">overturning, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">improvised, <a href="#Page_164">164</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in soft snow, <a href="#Page_166">166</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">use of willow saplings, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">gee pole, <a href="#Page_220">220</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">convertible rig, <a href="#Page_275">275</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">unpacking, <a href="#Page_345">345</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">harness, <a href="#Page_397">397</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">team, <a href="#Page_397">397</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">weight carried, <a href="#Page_398">398</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">dog rations, load, <a href="#Page_405">405</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Sleeping bag, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a><br />
+<br />
+Smoke, <a href="#Page_54">54</a><br />
+<br />
+Snow banners, <a href="#Page_39">39</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">melting, <a href="#Page_42">42</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">glasses, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">blindness, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Snow-shoes, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_346">346</a><br />
+<br />
+Society of Friends, <a href="#Page_99">99</a><br />
+<br />
+Solar: light, effect on speed-shutters, <a href="#Page_374">374</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">phenomena, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Solomon's, <a href="#Page_126">126</a><br />
+<br />
+Speed, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a><br />
+<br />
+Squirrel River, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a><br />
+<br />
+Starvation, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a><br />
+<br />
+Stefanson, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a><br />
+<br />
+Summit, <a href="#Page_11">11</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Takotna, <a href="#Page_323">323</a><br />
+<br />
+Tanana, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>, <a href="#Page_369">369</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">River, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Tapis, <a href="#Page_271">271</a><br />
+<br />
+Telegraph system, <a href="#Page_136">136</a><br />
+<br />
+Temperature: low, travel, <a href="#Page_14">14</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">animal life, <a href="#Page_16">16</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in river bottoms, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect on lamps, <a href="#Page_34">34</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on parts of the body, <a href="#Page_36">36</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on log huts, <a href="#Page_37">37</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">condensation, <a href="#Page_53">53</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">smoke, <a href="#Page_54">54</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">clear weather, <a href="#Page_55">55</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">wind, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">emotional power, <a href="#Page_59">59</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">death from freezing, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cleanliness, <a href="#Page_86">86</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">altitude, effect of, <a href="#Page_204">204</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">greatest cold, effect of, <a href="#Page_206">206</a></span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420"></a><a href="images/420.png">[420]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">fluctuations, <a href="#Page_212">212</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">confinement, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect on cameras and films, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on emulsions, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_377">377</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and auroras, <a href="#Page_381">381</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">high, <a href="#Page_301">301</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect on dirt roof, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Yukon River, <a href="#Page_347">347</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Thermos bottle, <a href="#Page_261">261</a><br />
+<br />
+Toboggan, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a><br />
+<br />
+Topkok, <a href="#Page_117">117</a><br />
+<br />
+Town crier, <a href="#Page_278">278</a><br />
+<br />
+Tozitna, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a><br />
+<br />
+Trader: anti-monopolist, <a href="#Page_241">241</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">profits, <a href="#Page_334">334</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">missions, <a href="#Page_258">258</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">articles sold to Indians, <a href="#Page_361">361</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Trading monopoly, <a href="#Page_144">144</a><br />
+<br />
+Trail: river, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">dry and wet, <a href="#Page_7">7</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mountain, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">width, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">lost, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_320">320</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">blazed, <a href="#Page_26">26</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">wind-swept, <a href="#Page_40">40</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in snow, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">breaking, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">exchange, <a href="#Page_75">75</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">with hard crust, <a href="#Page_109">109</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">telephone, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of horses on, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cutting, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">making, <a href="#Page_198">198</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">always serpentine, <a href="#Page_198">198</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">staked, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">widening, <a href="#Page_202">202</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">stage, <a href="#Page_254">254</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">double tripping, <a href="#Page_298">298</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in soft snow, <a href="#Page_301">301</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">swampy, <a href="#Page_332">332</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Yukon, <a href="#Page_336">336</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in gale, <a href="#Page_340">340</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"sidling," 341</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">at night, <a href="#Page_344">344</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in thaw, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>, <a href="#Page_347">347</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">found by aurora, <a href="#Page_384">384</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Ts&oacute;rmina, <a href="#Page_308">308</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="tuberculosis" id="tuberculosis"></a>Tuberculosis, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a><br />
+<br />
+Twelve-Mile Summit, <a href="#Page_9">9</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Unalaklik'">Unalakl&iacute;k</ins>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Walter, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a><br />
+<br />
+Whiskey, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_363">363</a><br />
+<br />
+White, John, <a href="#Page_121">121</a><br />
+<br />
+Wind: protection against, <a href="#Page_35">35</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">different local velocities, <a href="#Page_37">37</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">physical labour, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in extreme cold, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as a malignant spirit, <a href="#Page_112">112</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">high velocities, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in The Ramparts, <a href="#Page_338">338</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Wiseman, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br />
+<br />
+Wolf, <a href="#Page_395">395</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Yukon, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>, <a href="#Page_351">351</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Flats, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_343">343</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Fort, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_350">350</a></span><br />
+</div>
+
+<p><a name="end" id="end"></a></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><a href="images/map2000.jpg">
+<img src="images/map200.jpg" width="200" height="112" alt="Map of the Interior of Alaska, Showing Journeys Described in this Book" title="Map of the Interior of Alaska, Showing Journeys Described in this Book" />
+</a><span class="caption">Map of the Interior of Alaska, Showing Journeys Described in this Book</span>
+</div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_A_1"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> This was written before the writer learned the superior protection
+afforded by <i>amber</i> glass.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_B_2" id="Footnote_B_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_B_2"><span class="label">[B]</span></a> See illustration, p. 374.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_C_3" id="Footnote_C_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_C_3"><span class="label">[C]</span></a> In December, , a determined effort was made by the better element
+of the little handful of white people in this town to secure the withdrawal
+of the licence of this saloon. The justice of the peace, the government school-teacher,
+the postmaster, and others went up to Fairbanks (a week's journey
+over the trail) and opposed the granting of the licence in court. It was shown
+that the white men of the locality were so reduced in numbers that the business
+could not be carried on at a profit unless liquor was sold, directly or
+indirectly, to the Indians. But because by hook and by crook the names of
+a majority of one or two of all the white residents of the precinct were secured
+for a petition in favour of the licence (two or three were secured by telegraph
+at the last moment) the judge held that he had no option under the law but
+to grant the licence. So, on the one hand, it is a felony to sell liquor to
+Indians, and annually thousands of dollars are expended in trying to suppress
+such sale, while, on the other hand, a man is licenced to sell liquor when
+it is shown that he cannot make a living unless he sells to Indians; that is to
+say he is virtually granted a licence to sell to Indians. This note is not
+intended to reflect upon the judge who granted the licence, although all his
+predecessors have not put that construction upon the law, but upon a law
+open to that construction.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_D_4" id="Footnote_D_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_D_4"><span class="label">[D]</span></a> This was written some two years before the opportunity came. On
+the 7th of June, 1913, the writer and three companions reached the summit
+of Denali. ("The Ascent of Denali," Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_E_5" id="Footnote_E_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_E_5"><span class="label">[E]</span></a> In 1913 it was finally destroyed by fire.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_F_6" id="Footnote_F_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_F_6"><span class="label">[F]</span></a> I take pleasure in naming Mr. U. G. Myers as the United States commissioner
+in question and Mr. Jack Robinson as the deputy United States
+marshal, and I mention their names the more readily because Mr. Myers,
+after his long and excellent service, has just been removed for political
+reasons. (May, 1916.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_G_7" id="Footnote_G_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_G_7"><span class="label">[G]</span></a> The "claim" on a creek on which gold is first found is called "Discovery";
+the claims above are numbered one, two, three, etc., "above" and the
+claims below, one, two, three, etc., "below."</p></div></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;' />
+
+<div class='tnote'><h3>Transcriber's Notes:</h3>
+<p>Obvious punctuation errors repaired.</p>
+<p>To aid the reader in finding the illustrations and not interrupt the flow
+of the text, the List of Illustrations links to the illustration itself instead
+of the page listed.</p>
+<p>The remaining corrections made are indicated by dotted lines under the corrections. Scroll the mouse over the word and the original text will <ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'apprear'">appear</ins>.</p></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled, by Hudson Stuck
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@@ -0,0 +1,12518 @@
+Project Gutenberg's Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled, by Hudson Stuck
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled
+       A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska
+
+Author: Hudson Stuck
+
+Release Date: October 12, 2007 [EBook #22965]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH A DOG SLED ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Lybarger, Brian Janes, Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net and
+the booksmiths at http://www.eBookForge.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH A DOG SLED
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+
+THE ASCENT OF DENALI (MT. McKINLEY).
+
+A narrative of the first complete ascent of THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN IN
+NORTH AMERICA and the most northerly high mountain in the world.
+
+Profusely illustrated. 8vo. $1.75 _net_
+
+        "Few climbers have had such good fortune on a
+        supreme occasion, but few have better deserved
+        it."
+
+        --_London Spectator._
+
+[Illustration: Handwritten: Hudson Stuck.]
+
+
+
+
+        TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH
+        A DOG SLED
+
+        A NARRATIVE OF WINTER TRAVEL IN INTERIOR ALASKA
+
+        BY
+
+        HUDSON STUCK, D.D., F.R.G.S.
+        ARCHDEACON OF THE YUKON
+        AUTHOR OF "THE ASCENT OF DENALI (MOUNT McKINLEY)"
+
+        ILLUSTRATED
+
+        SECOND EDITION
+
+        NEW YORK
+        CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+        1916
+
+
+
+
+        COPYRIGHT, 1914, 1916, BY
+        CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+
+
+
+        TO
+        GRAFTON BURKE, M.D.
+        AND
+        EDGAR WEBB LOOMIS, M.D.
+
+        PUPILS, COMRADES, COLLEAGUES,
+        COMPANIONS ON SOME OF THESE JOURNEYS,
+        ALWAYS DEAR FRIENDS,
+
+        AND TO
+
+        THE MOTHER OF THE THREE OF US
+
+        SEWANEE
+
+        THE COLLEGE ON THE MOUNTAIN-TOP
+        WHERE THE OLD IDEALS ARE STILL
+        UNFLINCHINGLY MAINTAINED
+
+        THIS VOLUME
+        IS
+        AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED
+        BY
+        THE AUTHOR
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+THIS volume deals with a series of journeys taken with a dog team over
+the winter trails in the interior of Alaska. The title might have
+claimed fourteen or fifteen thousand miles instead of ten, for the book
+was projected and the title adopted some years ago, and the journeys
+have continued. But ten thousand is a good round titular number, and is
+none the worse for being well within the mark.
+
+So far as mere distance is concerned, anyway, there is nothing
+noteworthy in this record. There are many men in Alaska who have done
+much more. A mail-carrier on one of the longer dog routes will cover
+four thousand miles in a winter, while the writer's average is less than
+two thousand. But his sled has gone far off the beaten track, across the
+arctic wilderness, into many remote corners; wherever, indeed, white men
+or natives were to be found in all the great interior.
+
+These journeys were connected primarily with the administration of the
+extensive work of the Episcopal Church in the interior of Alaska, under
+the bishop of the diocese; but that feature of them has been fully set
+forth from time to time in the church publications, and finds only
+incidental reference here.
+
+It is a great, wild country, little known save along accustomed routes
+of travel; a country with a beauty and a fascination all its own; mere
+arctic wilderness, indeed, and nine tenths of it probably destined
+always to remain such, yet full of interest and charm.
+
+Common opinion "outside" about Alaska seems to be veering from the view
+that it is a land of perpetual snow and ice to the other extreme of
+holding it to be a "world's treasure-house" of mineral wealth and
+agricultural possibility. The world's treasure is deposited in many
+houses, and Alaska has its share; its mineral wealth is very great, and
+"hidden doors of opulence" may open at any time, but its agricultural
+possibilities, in the ordinary sense in which the phrase is used, are
+confined to very small areas in proportion to the enormous whole, and in
+very limited degree.
+
+It is no new thing for those who would build railways to write in
+high-flown style about the regions they would penetrate, and, indeed, to
+speak of "millions of acres waiting for the plough" is not necessarily a
+misrepresentation; they are waiting. Nor is it altogether unnatural that
+professional agricultural experimenters at the stations established by
+the government should make the most of their experiments. When Dean
+Stanley spoke disdainfully of dogma, Lord Beaconsfield replied; "Ah! but
+you must always remember, no dogmas, no deans."
+
+Besides the physical attractions of this country, it has a gentle
+aboriginal population that arouses in many ways the respect and the
+sympathy of all kindly people; and it has some of the hardiest and most
+adventurous white men in the world. The reader will come into contact
+with both in these pages.
+
+So much for the book's scope; a word of its limitations. It is confined
+to the interior of Alaska; confined in the main to the great valley of
+the Yukon and its tributaries; being a record of sled journeys, it is
+confined to the winter.
+
+There is no man living who knows the whole of Alaska or who has any
+right to speak about the whole of Alaska. Bishop Rowe knows more about
+Alaska, in all probability, than any other living man, and there are
+large areas of the country in which he has never set foot. There is
+probably no man living, save Bishop Rowe, who has visited even the
+localities of all the missions of the Episcopal Church in Alaska. If one
+were to travel continuously for a whole year, using the most expeditious
+means at his command, and not wasting a day anywhere, it is doubtful
+whether, summer and winter, by sea and land, squeezing the last mile out
+of the seasons, travelling on the "last ice" and the "first water," he
+could even touch at all the mission stations. So, when a man from Nome
+speaks of Alaska he means his part of Alaska, the Seward Peninsula. When
+a man from Valdez or Cordova speaks of Alaska he means the Prince
+William Sound country. When a man from Juneau speaks of Alaska he means
+the southeastern coast. Alaska is not one country but many, with
+different climates, different resources, different problems, different
+populations, different interests; and what is true of one part of it is
+often grotesquely untrue of other parts. This is the reason why so many
+contradictory things have been written about the country. Not only do
+these various parts of Alaska differ radically from one another, but
+they are separated from one another by almost insuperable natural
+obstacles, so that they are in reality different countries.
+
+When Alaska is spoken of in this book the interior is meant, in which
+the writer has travelled almost continuously for the past eight years.
+The Seward Peninsula is the only other part of the country that the book
+touches. And as regards summer travel and the summer aspect of the
+country, there is material for another book should the reception of this
+one warrant its preparation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The problems of the civil government of the country will be found
+touched upon somewhat freely as they rise from time to time in the
+course of these journeys, and some faint hope is entertained that
+drawing attention to evils may hasten a remedy.
+
+Alaska is not now, and never has been, a lawless country in the old,
+Wild Western sense of unpunished homicides and crimes of violence. It
+has been, on the whole, singularly free from bloodshed--a record due in
+no small part to the fact that it is not the custom of the country to
+carry pistols, for which again there is climatic and geographic reason;
+due also in part to the very peaceable and even timid character of its
+native people.
+
+But as regards the stringent laws enacted by Congress for the protection
+of these native people, and especially in the essential particular of
+protecting them from the fatal effects of intoxicating liquor, the
+country is not law-abiding, for these laws are virtually a dead letter.
+
+Justices of the peace who must live wholly upon fees in regions where
+fees will not furnish a living, and United States deputy marshals
+appointed for political reasons, constitute a very feeble staff against
+law-breakers. When it is remembered that on the whole fifteen hundred
+miles of the American Yukon there are but six of these deputy marshals,
+and that these six men, with another five or six on the tributary
+rivers, form all the police of the country, it will be seen that
+Congress must do something more than pass stringent laws if those laws
+are to be of any effect.
+
+A body of stipendiary magistrates, a police force wholly removed from
+politics and modelled somewhat upon the Canadian Northwest Mounted
+Police--these are two of the great needs of the country if the liquor
+laws are to be enforced and the native people are to survive.
+
+That the danger of the extermination of the natives is a real one all
+vital statistics kept at Yukon River points in the last five years show,
+and that there are powerful influences in the country opposed to the
+execution of the liquor laws some recent trials at Fairbanks would leave
+no room for doubt if there had been any room before. Indeed, at this
+writing, when the pages of this book are closed and there remains no
+place save the preface where the matter can be referred to, an impudent
+attempt is on foot, with large commercial backing, to secure the
+removal of a zealous and fearless United States district attorney, who
+has been too active in prosecuting liquor-peddlers to suit the wholesale
+dealers in liquor.
+
+There are, of course, those who view with perfect equanimity the
+destruction of the natives that is now going on, and look forward with
+complacency to the time when the Alaskan Indian shall have ceased to
+exist. But to men of thought and feeling such cynicism is abhorrent, and
+the duty of the government towards its simple and kindly wards is clear.
+
+A measure of real protection must be given the native communities
+against the low-down whites who seek to intrude into them and build
+habitations for convenient resort upon occasions of drunkenness and
+debauchery, and some adequate machinery set up for suppressing the
+contemptible traffic in adulterated spirits they subsist largely upon.
+The licensed liquor-dealers do not themselves sell to Indians, but they
+notoriously sell to men who notoriously peddle to Indians, and the
+suppression of this illicit commerce would materially reduce the total
+sales of liquor.
+
+Some measure of protection, one thinks, must also be afforded against a
+predatory class of Indian traders, the back rooms of whose stores are
+often barrooms, gambling-dens, and houses of assignation, and
+headquarters and harbourage for the white degenerates--even if the
+government go the length of setting up co-operative Indian stores in the
+interior, as has been done in some places on the coast. This last is a
+matter in which the missions are helpless, for there is no wise
+combination of religion and trade.
+
+So this book goes forth with a plea in the front of it, which will find
+incidental support and expression throughout it, for the natives of
+interior Alaska, that they be not wantonly destroyed off the face of the
+earth.
+
+        HUDSON STUCK.
+
+        NEW YORK,
+        _March, 1914._
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
+
+
+IT is gratifying to know that a second edition of this book has been
+called for and it is interesting to write another preface; it even
+proved interesting to do what was set about most reluctantly--the
+reading of the book over again after entire avoidance of it for two
+years. It was necessary to do it, though one shrank from it, and it is
+interesting to know that after this comparatively long and complete
+detachment I find little to add and less to correct. Upon a complete
+rereading I am content to let the book stand, with two or three
+footnotes thrown in, and the correction of the one printer's error it
+contained from cover to cover--an error that a score of kind
+correspondents pointed out, for it was conspicuous in the title of a
+picture.
+
+The tendency to which attention is drawn in the original preface, the
+pendulum swing from the old notion that Alaska is a land of polar bears
+and icebergs to the new notion that it is a "world's treasure-house of
+mineral wealth and unbounded agricultural possibilities" is yet more
+marked than it was two years ago. The beginning of the building of the
+government railway has given new impetus to the "boosting" writers for
+magazines and newspapers. Quite recently it was stated in one such
+publication that we need not worry about the destruction of our
+forests, for had we not the inexhaustible timber resources of the
+interior of Alaska to draw upon?
+
+And in the North itself--though no one there would write about the
+timber resources of the interior--in certain shrill journals the man who
+does not confidently expect to see the Yukon Flats waving with golden
+grain and "the lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea" of the Koyukuk and
+the Chandalar is regarded as a traitor to his country and his God. But
+it must be remembered that there are a number of journalists in Alaska
+who know nothing of the country outside their respective towns, and that
+"boosting" grows shriller, as Eugene Field found red paint grow redder,
+"the further out West one goes." When they get a newspaper at Cape
+Prince of Wales what a clarion it will be!
+
+Truth, however, is not more wont than of old to be found in extremes,
+and the author of this book believes that those who desire a sober view
+of the country it deals with will find it herein. He claims no more than
+that he has had adequate opportunity of forming his opinions and that he
+has a right to their expression. It is now twelve years since he began
+almost constant travelling, winter and summer, in the interior of
+Alaska. He has described nothing that he has not seen; ventured no
+judgment that he has not well digested, and has nothing to retract or
+even modify; but he would repeat and emphasise a caution of the original
+preface. Alaska is not one country but many countries, and so widely do
+they differ from one another in almost every respect that no general
+statements about Alaska can be true. The present author's knowledge of
+the territory is confined in the main to the interior--to the valley of
+the Yukon and its tributary rivers, which make up one of the world's
+great waterways--and nothing of his writing applies, with his authority,
+to other parts.
+
+The matter of the preservation of the native peoples still presses, and
+is nearer to the author's heart than any other matter whatever. The
+United States Congress, which voted thirty-five millions of dollars for
+the government railroad, strikes out year by year the modest additional
+score or two of thousands that year by year the Bureau of Education asks
+for the establishment of hospital work amongst the Indians of the
+interior, and the preventable mortality continues to be very great.
+
+In the last two years, largely as the result of the untiring efforts of
+Bishop Rowe on behalf of the natives, two modern, well-equipped
+hospitals have been built, with money that he and his clergy have
+gathered, on the Yukon River, one at Fort Yukon and one at Tanana; and
+these are the only places of any kind, on nearly a thousand miles of the
+river, where sick or injured Indians may be received and cared for.
+
+Amongst men of thought and feeling there is noticeable revulsion from
+the supercilious attitude that used not to be uncommon toward the little
+peoples of the world. It begins to be recognised that it is quite
+possible that even the smallest of the little peoples may have some
+contribution to make to the welfare and progress of the human race. What
+is the Boy Scout movement that is sweeping the country, to the enormous
+benefit of the rising generation, but the incorporating into the nurture
+of our youth of the things that were the nurture of the Indian youth;
+that are a large part of the nurture of the Alaskan Indian youth to-day?
+And the camp-fire clubs and woodcraft associations and the whole trend
+to the life of the open recognise that the Indian had developed a
+technique of wilderness life deserving of preservation for its value to
+the white man. While as for the Esquimaux, the author never sees the
+extraordinary prevalence amongst them of the art of graphic delineation
+displayed in bold etchings of incidents of the chase upon their
+implements and weapons (though not upon the articles made by the dozen
+for the curio-venders at Nome and Saint Michael) without dreaming that
+some day an artist will come from out that singular and most interesting
+people who shall teach the world something new about art.
+
+Whatever the future may hold for the interior of Alaska, the author is
+convinced that its population will derive very largely from the present
+native stocks, and this alone would justify any efforts to prevent
+further inroads upon their health and vitality.
+
+        April, 1916.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                                 PAGE
+
+        PREFACE                                            vii
+
+     I. FAIRBANKS TO THE CHANDALAR THROUGH CIRCLE
+        CITY AND FORT YUKON                                  3
+
+    II. CHANDALAR VILLAGE TO BETTLES, COLDFOOT, AND
+        THE KOYUKUK                                         34
+
+   III. BETTLES TO THE PACIFIC--THE ALATNA, KOBUK
+        PORTAGE, KOBUK VILLAGE, KOTZEBUE SOUND              63
+
+    IV. THE SEWARD PENINSULA--CANDLE CREEK, COUNCIL,
+        AND NOME                                           102
+
+     V. NOME TO FAIRBANKS--NORTON SOUND--THE KALTAG
+        PORTAGE--NULATO--UP THE YUKON TO TANANA            125
+
+    VI. THE "FIRST ICE"--AN AUTUMN ADVENTURE ON THE
+        KOYUKUK                                            157
+
+   VII. THE KOYUKUK TO THE YUKON AND TO TANANA--CHRISTMAS
+        HOLIDAYS AT SAINT JOHN'S-IN-THE-WILDERNESS         188
+
+  VIII. UP THE YUKON TO RAMPART AND ACROSS COUNTRY
+        TO THE TANANA--ALASKAN AGRICULTURE--THE
+        GOOD DOG NANOOK--MISS FARTHING'S BOYS AT
+        NENANA--CHENA AND FAIRBANKS                        219
+
+    IX. TANANA CROSSING TO FORTYMILE AND DOWN THE
+        YUKON--A PATRIARCHAL CHIEF--SWARMING
+        CARIBOU--EAGLE AND FORT EGBERT--CIRCLE
+        CITY AND FORT YUKON                                251
+
+     X. FROM THE TANANA RIVER TO THE KUSKOKWIM--THENCE
+        TO THE IDITAROD MINING CAMP--THENCE
+        TO THE YUKON, AND UP THAT RIVER
+        TO FORT YUKON                                      294
+
+    XI. THE NATIVES OF ALASKA                              348
+
+   XII. PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE ARCTIC                          371
+
+  XIII. THE NORTHERN LIGHTS                                380
+
+   XIV. THE ALASKAN DOGS                                   392
+
+        INDEX                                              413
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  Hudson Stuck (_photogravure_)                        _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                          FACING PAGE
+
+  Sunrise on the Chandalar-Koyukuk portage                         36
+
+  Coldfoot on the Koyukuk                                          37
+
+  The upper Koyukuk                                                50
+
+  The barren shores of Kotzebue Sound                              51
+
+  Gold-mining at Nome                                             122
+
+  Pulling the _Pelican_ out with a "Spanish windlass"             123
+
+  The start over the "first ice"                                  164
+
+  "Rough going"                                                   165
+
+  Arthur and Doctor Burke                                         178
+
+  Saint John's-in-the-Wilderness, Allakaket, Koyukuk River        179
+
+  The double interpretation at the Allakaket                      186
+
+  The wind-swept Yukon within the ramparts                        187
+
+  A pleasant woodland trail                                       256
+
+  An Alaskan chief and his henchman                               257
+
+  The Tanana crossing                                             270
+
+  Good going on the Yukon                                         271
+
+  "A portage that comes so finely down to the Yukon that
+  there is pleasure in anticipating the view it affords"          290
+
+  Fort Yukon                                                      291
+
+  The rough breaking in of Doctor Loomis, camped on the mail
+  trail at 50 deg. below zero, unable to reach a road-house for
+  the deep snow                                                   296
+
+  Esquimaux of the upper Kuskokwim                                297
+
+  "The 'summit' is high above timber-line and the trail
+  pursues a hogback ridge for a mile and a half at the summit
+  level"                                                          324
+
+  A street in Iditarod City                                       325
+
+  The end of the portage trail                                    334
+
+  Rough ice on the Yukon                                          335
+
+  A docile folk, eager for instruction                            350
+
+  The mission type                                                351
+
+  Wild and shy                                                    351
+
+  The native communicant                                          360
+
+  Raw material                                                    360
+
+  An Esquimau youth                                               361
+
+  A half-breed Indian                                             361
+
+  An aged couple                                                  366
+
+  Football at the Allakaket, exposure 1-1000 second, April,
+  after a new light snowfall                                      367
+
+  The sun dogs                                                    388
+
+  "Tan," of mixed breed                                           389
+
+  "Muk," a pure malamute                                          389
+
+  Map of the interior of Alaska showing journeys described
+  in this book                                     _At end of volume_
+
+
+
+
+TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH A DOG SLED
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S NOTE
+
+
+Three fundamental facts are to be borne constantly in mind by those who
+would form any intelligent conception of the Territory of Alaska.
+
+(1) Its area of approximately 590,000 square miles makes it two and a
+half times as large as the State of Texas.
+
+(2) But it is not, like Texas, one homogeneous body of land; it is not,
+in any geographical sense, one country at all. "Sweeping in a great arc
+over sixteen degrees of latitude and fifty-eight degrees of longitude,"
+it is no less than four, and some might say five, different countries,
+differing from one another in almost every way that one country can
+differ from another: in climate, in population, in resources, in
+requirements; and--
+
+(3) These different countries are not merely different from one another,
+they are _separated_ from one another by formidable natural barriers.
+
+
+
+
+TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH A DOG SLED
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+FAIRBANKS TO THE CHANDALAR THROUGH CIRCLE CITY AND FORT YUKON
+
+
+THE plan for the winter journey of 1905-6 (my second winter on the
+trail) was an ambitious one, for it contemplated a visit to Point Hope,
+on the shore of the Arctic Ocean between Kotzebue Sound and Point
+Barrow, and a return to Fairbanks. In the summer such a journey would be
+practicable only by water: down the Tanana to the Yukon, down the Yukon
+to its mouth, and then through the straits of Bering and along the
+Arctic coast; in the winter it is possible to make the journey across
+country. A desire to visit our most northerly and most inaccessible
+mission in Alaska and a desire to become acquainted with general
+conditions in the wide country north of the Yukon were equal factors in
+the planning of a journey which would carry me through three and a half
+degrees of latitude and no less than eighteen degrees of longitude.
+
+The course of winter travel in Alaska follows the frozen waterways so
+far as they lead in the general direction desired, leaves them to cross
+mountain ranges and divides at the most favourable points, and drops
+down into the streams again so soon as streams are available. The
+country is notably well watered and the waterways are the natural
+highways. The more frequented routes gradually cut out the serpentine
+bends of the rivers by land trails, but in the wilder parts of the
+country travel sticks to the ice.
+
+Our course, therefore, lay up the Chatanika River and one of its
+tributaries until the Tanana-Yukon watershed was reached; then through
+the mountains, crossing two steep summits to the Yukon slope, and down
+that slope by convenient streams to the Yukon River at Circle City.
+
+[Sidenote: THE GOLD TRAIN]
+
+We set out on the 27th of November with six dogs and a "basket" sled and
+about five hundred pounds' weight of load, including tent and stove,
+bedding, clothes for the winter, grub box and its equipment, and dog
+feed. The dogs were those that I had used the previous winter, with one
+exception. The leader had come home lame from the fish camp where he had
+been boarded during the summer, and, despite all attentions, the
+lameness had persisted; so he must be left behind, and there was much
+difficulty in securing another leader. A recent stampede to a new mining
+district had advanced the price of dogs and gathered up all the good
+ones, so it was necessary to hunt all over Fairbanks and pay a hundred
+dollars for a dog that proved very indifferent, after all. "Jimmy" was a
+handsome beast, the handsomest I ever owned and the costliest, but, as I
+learned later from one who knew his history, had "travelled on his
+looks all his life." He earned the name of "Jimmy the Fake."
+
+Midway to Cleary "City," on the chief gold-producing creek of the
+district, our first day's run, we encountered the gold train. For some
+time previous a lone highwayman had robbed solitary miners on their way
+to Fairbanks with gold-dust, and now a posse was organised that went the
+rounds of the creeks and gathered up the dust and bore it on mule-back
+to the bank, escorted by half a dozen armed and mounted men. Sawed-off
+shotguns were the favourite weapons, and one judged them deadly enough
+at short range. The heavy "pokes" galled the animals' backs, however
+they might be slung, and the little procession wound slowly along, a man
+ahead, a man behind, and four clustered round the treasure.
+
+These raw, temporary mining towns are much alike the world over, one
+supposes, though perhaps a little worse up here in the far north. It was
+late at night when we reached the place, but saloon and dance-hall were
+ablaze with light and loud with the raucity of phonographs and the
+stamping of feet. Everything was "wide open," and there was not even the
+thinnest veneer of respectability. Drinking and gambling and dancing go
+on all night long. Drunken men reel out upon the snow; painted faces
+leer over muslin curtains as one passes by. Without any government,
+without any pretence of municipal organisation, there is no co-operation
+for public enterprise. There are no streets, there are no sidewalks
+save such as a man may choose to lay in front of his own premises, and
+the simplest sanitary precautions are entirely neglected. Nothing but
+the cold climate of the north prevents epidemic disease from sweeping
+through these places. They rise in a few days wherever gold is found in
+quantities, they flourish as the production increases, decline with its
+decline, and are left gaunt, dark, and abandoned so soon as the diggings
+are exhausted.
+
+The next day we were on the Chatanika River, to which Cleary Creek is
+tributary, and were immediately confronted with one of the main troubles
+and difficulties of winter travel in this and, as may be supposed, in
+any arctic or subarctic country--overflow water.
+
+[Sidenote: OVERFLOW WATER AND ICE]
+
+In the lesser rivers, where deep pools alternate with swift shallows,
+the stream freezes solid to the bottom upon the shoals and riffles.
+Since the subterranean fountains that supply the river do not cease to
+discharge their waters in the winter, however cold it may be, there
+comes presently an increasing pressure under the ice above such a
+barrier. The pent-up water is strong enough to heave the ice into mounds
+and at last to break forth, spreading itself far along the frozen
+surface of the river. At times it may be seen gushing out like an
+artesian well, rising three or four feet above the surface of the ice,
+until the pressure is relieved. Sometimes for many miles at a stretch
+the whole river will be covered with a succession of such overflows,
+from two or three inches deep to eight or ten, or even twelve; some just
+bursting forth, some partially frozen, some resolved into solid "glare"
+ice. Thus the surface of the river is continually renewed the whole
+winter through, and a section of the ice crust in the spring would show
+a series of laminations; here ice upon ice, there ice upon
+half-incorporated snow, that mark the successive inundations.
+
+This explanation has been given at length because of the large part that
+the phenomenon plays in the difficulty and danger of winter travel, and
+because it seems hard to make those who are not familiar with it
+understand it. At first sight it would seem that after a week or ten
+days of fifty-below-zero weather, for instance, all water everywhere
+would be frozen into quiescence for the rest of the winter. Throw a
+bucket of water into the air, and it is frozen solid as soon as it
+reaches the ground. There would be no more trouble, one would think,
+with water. Yet some of the worst trouble the traveller has with
+overflow water is during very cold weather, and it is then, of course,
+that there is the greatest danger of frost-bite in getting one's feet
+wet. Water-proof footwear, therefore, becomes one of the "musher's"
+great concerns and difficulties. The best water-proof footwear is the
+Esquimau mukluk, not easily obtainable in the interior of Alaska, but
+the mukluk is an inconvenient footwear to put snow-shoes on. Rubber
+boots or shoes of any kind are most uncomfortable things to travel in.
+Nothing equals the moccasin on the trail, nothing is so good to
+snow-shoe in. The well-equipped traveller has moccasins for dry trails
+and mukluks for wet trails--and even then may sometimes get his feet
+wet. Nor are his own feet his only consideration; his dogs' feet are,
+collectively, as important as his own. When the dog comes out of water
+into snow again the snow collects and freezes between the toes, and if
+not removed will soon cause a sore and lameness. Then a dog moccasin
+must be put on and the foot continually nursed and doctored. When
+several dogs of a team are thus affected, it may be with several feet
+each, the labour and trouble of travel are greatly increased.
+
+So, whenever his dogs have been through water, the careful musher will
+stop and go all down the line, cleaning out the ice and snow from their
+feet with his fingers. Four interdigital spaces per foot make sixteen
+per dog, and with a team of six dogs that means ninety-six several
+operations with the bare hand (if it be done effectually) every time the
+team gets into an overflow. The dogs will do it for themselves if they
+are given time, tearing out the lumps of ice with their teeth; but,
+inasmuch as they usually feel conscientiously obliged to eat each lump
+as they pull it out, it takes much longer, and in a short daylight there
+is little time to spare if the day's march is to be made.
+
+[Sidenote: "OVERFLOW" ICE]
+
+We found overflow almost as soon as we reached the Chatanika River, and
+in one form or another we encountered it during all the two days and a
+half that we were pursuing the river's windings. At times it was covered
+with a sheet of new ice that would support the dogs but would not
+support the sled, so that the dogs were travelling on one level and the
+sled on another, and a man had to walk along in the water between the
+dogs and the sled for several hundred yards at a time, breaking down the
+overflow ice with his feet.
+
+At other times the thin sheets of overflow ice would sway and bend as
+the sled passed quickly over them in a way that gives to ice in such
+condition its Alaskan name of "rubber-ice," while for the fifteen or
+twenty miles of McManus Creek, the headwaters of the Chatanika, we had
+continuous stretches of fine glare ice with enough frost crystals upon
+it from condensing moisture to give a "tooth" to the dogs' feet, just as
+varnish on a photographic negative gives tooth to the retouching pencil.
+Perfectly smooth ice is a very difficult surface for dogs to pass over;
+glare ice slightly roughened by frost deposit makes splendid, fast
+going.
+
+Eighty-five miles or so from Fairbanks, and just about half-way to
+Circle, the watercourse is left and the first summit is the
+"Twelve-Mile," as it is called. We tried hard to take our load up at one
+trip, but found it impossible to do so, and had to unlash the sled and
+take half the load at a time, caching it on the top while we returned
+for the other half.
+
+It took us half a day to get our load to the top of the Twelve-Mile
+summit, a rise of about one thousand three hundred feet from the creek
+bed as the aneroid gave it. In the steeper pitches we had to take the
+axe and cut steps, so hard and smooth does the incessant wind at these
+heights beat the snow, and on our second trip to the top we were just in
+time to rescue a roll of bedding that had been blown from the cache and
+was about to descend a gully from which we could hardly have recovered
+it.
+
+This summit descended, we were in Birch Creek water, and had we followed
+the watercourse would have reached the Yukon; but we would have
+travelled hundreds of miles and would have come out below Fort Yukon,
+while we were bound for Circle City. So there was another and a yet more
+difficult summit to cross before we could descend the Yukon slope. We
+were able to hire a man and two dogs to help us over the Eagle summit,
+so that the necessity of relaying was avoided. One man ahead continually
+calling to the dogs, eight dogs steadily pulling, and two men behind
+steadily pushing, foot by foot, with many stoppages as one bench after
+another was surmounted, we got the load to the top at last, a rise of
+one thousand four hundred feet in less than three miles. A driving
+snow-storm cut off all view and would have left us at a loss which way
+to proceed but for the stakes that indicated it.
+
+The descent was as anxious and hazardous as the ascent had been
+laborious. The dogs were loosed and sent racing down the slope. With a
+rope rough-lock around the sled runners, one man took the gee pole and
+another the handle-bars and each spread-eagled himself through the loose
+deep snow to check the momentum of the sled, until sled and men turned
+aside and came to a stop in a drift to avoid a steep, smooth pitch. The
+sled extricated, it was poised on the edge of the pitch and turned loose
+on the hardened snow, hurtling down three or four hundred feet until it
+buried itself in another drift. The dogs were necessary to drag it from
+this drift, and one had to go down and bring them up. Then again they
+were loosed, and from bench to bench the process was repeated until the
+slope grew gentle enough to permit the regulation of the downward
+progress by the foot-brake.
+
+[Sidenote: "SUMMITS"]
+
+The Eagle summit is one of the most difficult summits in Alaska. The
+wind blows so fiercely that sometimes for days together its passage is
+almost impossible. No amount of trail making could be of much help, for
+the snow smothers up everything on the lee of the hill, and the end of
+every storm presents a new surface and an altered route. A "summit" in
+this Alaskan sense is, of course, a saddle between peaks, and in this
+case there is no easier pass and no way around. The only way to avoid
+the Eagle summit, without going out of the district altogether, would be
+to tunnel it.
+
+The summit passed, we found better trails and a more frequented country,
+for in this district are a number of creeks that draw supplies from
+Circle City, and that had been worked ten years or more.
+
+At the time of the Klondike stampede of 1896-97, Circle City was already
+established as a flourishing mining camp and boasted itself the largest
+log-cabin town in the world. Before the Klondike drew away its people as
+a stronger magnet draws iron filings from a lesser one, Circle had a
+population of about three thousand. Take a town of three thousand and
+reduce it to thirty or forty, and it is hard to resist the melancholy
+impression which entrance upon it in the dusk of the evening brings.
+There lay the great white Yukon in the middle distance; beyond it the
+Yukon Flats, snow-covered, desolate, stretched away enormously, hedged
+here at their beginning by grey, dim hills. Spread out in the foreground
+were the little, squat, huddling cabins that belonged to no one, with
+never a light in a window or smoke from a chimney, the untrodden snow
+drifted against door and porch. It would be hard to imagine a drearier
+prospect, and one had the feeling that it was a city of the dead rather
+than merely a dead city.
+
+The weather had grown steadily colder since we reached the Yukon slope,
+and for two days before reaching Circle the thermometer had stood
+between 40 deg. and 50 deg. below zero. It was all right for us to push on, the
+trail was good and nearly all down-hill, and there were road-houses
+every ten or twelve miles. Freighters, weather-bound, came to the doors
+as we passed by with our jangle of bells and would raise a somewhat
+chechaco pride in our breasts by remarking: "You don't seem to care what
+weather you travel in!" The evil of it was that the perfectly safe
+travelling between Eagle Creek and Circle emboldened us to push on from
+Circle under totally different conditions, when travelling at such low
+temperatures became highly dangerous and brought us into grave
+misadventure that might easily have been fatal catastrophe.
+
+Our original start was a week later than had been planned and we had
+made no time, but rather lost it, on this first division of the journey.
+If we were to reach Bettles on the Koyukuk River for Christmas, there
+was no more time to lose, and I was anxious to spend the next Sunday at
+Fort Yukon, three days' journey away. So we started for Fort Yukon on
+Thursday, the 7th of December, the day after we reached Circle.
+
+[Sidenote: THE YUKON FLATS]
+
+A certain arctic traveller has said that "adventures" always imply
+either incompetence or ignorance of local conditions, and there is some
+truth in the saying. Our misadventure was the result of a series of
+mistakes, no one of which would have been other than discreditable to
+men of more experience. Our course lay for seventy-five miles through
+the Yukon Flats, which begin at Circle and extend for two hundred and
+fifty miles of the river's course below that point. The Flats constitute
+the most difficult and dangerous part of the whole length of the Yukon
+River, summer or winter, and the section between Circle City and Fort
+Yukon is the most difficult and dangerous part of the Flats. Save for a
+"portage" or land trail of eighteen or twenty miles out of Circle, the
+trail is on the river itself, which is split up into many channels
+without salient landmarks. The current is so swift that many stretches
+run open water far into the winter, and blow-holes are numerous. There
+is little travel on the Flats in winter, and a snow-storm accompanied by
+wind may obliterate what trail there is in an hour. The vehicle used in
+the Flats is not a sled but a toboggan, and our first mistake was in not
+conforming to local usage in this respect. There is always a very good
+reason for local usage about snow vehicles. But a toboggan which had
+been ordered from a native at Fort Yukon would be waiting for us, and
+it seemed not worth while to go to the expense of buying another merely
+for three days' journey.
+
+The second mistake was in engaging a boy as guide instead of a man. He
+was an attractive youth of about fourteen who had done good service at
+the Circle City mission the previous winter, when our nurse-in-charge
+was contending single-handed against an epidemic of diphtheria. He was a
+pleasant boy, with some English, who wanted to go and professed
+knowledge of the route. The greatest mistake of all was starting out
+through that lonely waste with the thermometer at 52 deg. below zero. The
+old-timers in Alaska have a saying that "travelling at 50 deg. below is all
+right as long as it's all right." If there be a good trail, if there be
+convenient stopping-places, if nothing go wrong, one may travel without
+special risk and with no extraordinary discomfort at 50 deg. below zero and
+a good deal lower. I have since that time made a short day's run at 62 deg.
+below, and once travelled for two or three hours on a stretch at 65 deg.
+below. But there is always more or less chance in travelling at low
+temperatures, because a very small thing may necessitate a stop, and a
+stop may turn into a serious thing. At such temperatures one must keep
+going. No amount of clothing that it is possible to wear on the trail
+will keep one warm while standing still. For dogs and men alike,
+constant brisk motion is necessary; for dogs as well as men--even though
+dogs will sleep outdoors in such cold without harm--for they cannot take
+as good care of themselves in the harness as they can when loose. A
+trace that needs mending, a broken buckle, a snow-shoe string that must
+be replaced, may chill one so that it is impossible to recover one's
+warmth again. The bare hand cannot be exposed for many seconds without
+beginning to freeze; it is dangerous to breathe the air into the lungs
+for any length of time without a muffler over the mouth.
+
+Our troubles began as soon as we started. The trail was a narrow,
+winding toboggan track of sixteen or seventeen inches, while our sled
+was twenty inches wide, so that one runner was always dragging in the
+loose snow, and that meant slow, heavy going.
+
+[Sidenote: SUNRISE AND SUNSET]
+
+The days were nearing the shortest of the year, when, in these
+latitudes, the sun does but show himself and withdraw again. But,
+especially in very cold weather, which is nearly always very clear
+weather, that brief appearance is preceded by a feast of rich, delicate
+colour. First a greenish glow on the southern horizon, brightening into
+lemon and then into clear primrose, invades the deep purple of the
+starry heavens. Then a beautiful circle of blush pink above a circle of
+pure amethyst gradually stretches all around the edge of the sky, slowly
+brightening while the stars fade out and the heavens change to blue. The
+dead white mirror of the snow takes every tint that the skies display
+with a faint but exquisite radiance. Then the sun's disk appears with a
+flood of yellow light but with no appreciable warmth, and for a little
+space his level rays shoot out and gild the tree tops and the distant
+hills. The snow springs to life. Dead white no longer, its dry,
+crystalline particles glitter in myriads of diamond facets with every
+colour of the prism. Then the sun is gone, and the lovely circle of rose
+pink over amethyst again stretches round the horizon, slowly fading
+until once more the pale primrose glows in the south against the purple
+sky with its silver stars. Thus sunrise and sunset form a continuous
+spectacle, with a purity of delicate yet splendid colour that only
+perfectly dry atmosphere permits. The primrose glow, the heralding
+circle, the ball of orange light, the valedictory circle, the primrose
+glow again, and a day has come and gone. Air can hold no moisture at all
+at these low temperatures, and the skies are cloudless.
+
+[Sidenote: AN ESCAPADE ON THE YUKON]
+
+Moreover, in the wilds at 50 deg. below zero there is the most complete
+silence. All animal life is hidden away. Not a rabbit flits across the
+trail; in the absolutely still air not a twig moves. A rare raven passes
+overhead, and his cry, changed from a hoarse croak to a sweet liquid
+note, reverberates like the musical glasses. There is no more delightful
+sound in the wilderness than this occasional lapse into music of the
+raven. We wound through the scrub spruce and willow and over the
+niggerhead swamps, a faint tinkle of bells, a little cloud of steam; for
+in the great cold the moisture of the animals' breath hangs over their
+heads in the still air, and on looking back it stands awhile along the
+course at dogs' height until it is presently deposited on twigs and
+tussocks. We wound along, a faint tinkle of bells, a little cloud of
+steam, and in the midst of the cloud a tousle of shaggy black-and-white
+hair and red-and-white pompons--going out of the dead silence behind
+into the dead silence before. The dusk came, and still we plodded and
+pushed our weary way, swinging that heavy sled incessantly, by the gee
+pole in front and the handle-bars behind, in the vain effort to keep it
+on the trail. Two miles an hour was all that we were making. We had come
+but thirteen or fourteen miles out of twenty-four, and it was dark; and
+it grew colder.
+
+The dogs whined and stopped every few yards, worn out by wallowing in
+the snow and the labour of the collar. The long scarfs that wrapped our
+mouths and noses had been shifted and shifted, as one part after another
+became solid with ice from the breath, until over their whole length
+they were stiff as boards. After two more miles of it it was evident
+that we could not reach the mail cabin that night. Then I made my last
+and worst mistake. We should have stopped and camped then and there. We
+had tent and stove and everything requisite. But the native boy insisted
+that the cabin was "only little way," and any one who knows the misery
+of making camp in extremely cold weather, in the dark, will understand
+our reluctance to do so.
+
+I decided to make a cache of the greater part of our load--tent and
+stove and supplies generally--and to push on to the cabin with but the
+bedding and the grub box, returning for the stuff in the morning. And,
+since in the deepest depths of blundering there is a deeper still, by
+some one's carelessness, but certainly by my fault, the axe was left
+behind in the cache.
+
+With our reduced burden we made better progress, and in a short time
+reached the end of the portage and came out on the frozen river, just as
+the moon, a day or two past the full, rose above the opposite bank. One
+sees many strange distortions of sun and moon in this land, but never
+was a stranger seen than this. Her disk, shining through the dense air
+of the river bottom, was in shape an almost perfect octagon, regular as
+though it had been laid off with dividers and a ruler.
+
+We were soon in doubt about the trail. The mail-carrier had gone down
+only two or three times this winter and each time had taken a different
+route, as more and more of the river closed and gave him more and more
+direct passage. A number of Indians had been hunting, and their tracks
+added to the tangle of trails. Presently we entered a thick mist that
+even to inexperienced eyes spoke of open water or new ice yet moist. So
+heavy was the vapour that to the man at the handle-bars the man at the
+gee pole loomed ghostly, and the man ahead of the dogs could not be
+distinguished at all. We had gone so much farther than our native boy
+had declared we had to go that we began to fear that in the confusion of
+trails we had taken the wrong one and had passed the cabin. That is the
+tenderfoot's, or, as we say, the chechaco's, fear; it is the one thing
+that it may almost be said never happens. But the boy fell down
+completely and was frankly at a loss. All we could get out of him was:
+"May-be-so we catch cabin bymeby, may-be-so no." If we had passed the
+cabin it was twenty odd miles to the next; and it grew colder and the
+dogs were utterly weary again, prone upon the trail at every small
+excuse for a stop, only to be stirred by the whip, heavily wielded.
+Surely never men thrust themselves foolhardily into worse predicament!
+Then I made my last mistake. Dimly the bank loomed through the mist, and
+I said: "We can't go any farther; I think we've missed the trail and I'm
+going across to yon bank to see if there's a place to camp." I had not
+gone six steps from the trail when the ice gave way under my feet and I
+found myself in water to my hips.
+
+[Sidenote: AN ESCAPADE ON THE YUKON]
+
+Under Providence I owe it to the mukluks I wore, tied tight round my
+knees, that I did not lose my life, or at least my feet. The thermometer
+at Circle City stood at 60 deg. below zero at dark that day, and down on the
+ice it is always about 5 deg. colder than on the bank, because cold air is
+heavy air and sinks to the lowest level, and 65 deg. below zero means 97 deg.
+below freezing.
+
+My moose-hide breeches froze solid the moment I scrambled out, but not a
+drop of water got to my feet. If the water had reached my feet they
+would have frozen almost as quickly as the moose hide in that fearful
+cold. Thoroughly alarmed now, and realising our perilous situation, we
+did the only thing there was to do--we turned the dogs loose and
+abandoned the sled and went back along the trail we had followed as fast
+as we could. We knew that we could safely retrace our steps and that the
+trail would lead us to the bank after a while. We knew not where the
+trail would lead us in the other direction. As a matter of fact, it led
+to the mail cabin, two miles farther on, and the mail-carrier was at
+that time occupying it at the end of his day's run.
+
+The dogs stayed with the sled; dogs will usually stay with their sled;
+they seem to recognise their first allegiance to the load they haul,
+probably because they know their food forms part of it.
+
+Our cache reached, we made a fire, thawed out the iron-like armour of my
+leather breeches, and cutting a spare woollen scarf in two, wrapped the
+dry, warm pieces about my numbed thighs. Then we pushed on the eighteen
+miles or so to Circle, keeping a steady pace despite the drowsiness that
+oppressed us, and that oppressed me particularly owing to the chill of
+my ducking. About five in the morning we reached the town, and the
+clergyman, the Reverend C. E. Rice, turned out of his warm bed and I
+turned in, none the worse in body for the experience, but much humbled
+in spirit. My companion, Mr. E. J. Knapp, whose thoughtful care for me I
+always look back upon with gratitude, as well as upon Mr. Rice's
+kindness, froze his nose and a toe slightly, being somewhat neglectful
+of himself in his solicitude for me.
+
+We had been out about twenty hours in a temperature ranging from 52 deg. to
+60 deg. below zero, had walked about forty-four miles, labouring incessantly
+as well as walking, what time we were with the sled, with nothing to
+eat--it was too cold to stop for eating--and, in addition to this, one
+of us had been in water to the waist, yet none of us took any harm. It
+was a providential overruling of blundering foolhardiness for which we
+were deeply thankful.
+
+The next day a native with a fast team and an empty toboggan was sent
+down to take our load on to the cabin and bring the dogs back.
+Meanwhile, the mail-carrier had passed the spot, had seen the abandoned
+sled standing by recently broken ice, and had come on into town while we
+slept and none knew of our return, with the news that some one had been
+drowned. The mail for Fairbanks did but await the mail from Fort Yukon,
+and the town rumour, instantly identifying the abandoned sled, was
+carried across to Fairbanks, to my great distress and annoyance. The
+echoes of the distorted account of this misadventure which appeared in a
+Fairbanks newspaper still reverberate in "patent insides" of the
+provincial press of the United States.
+
+[Sidenote: FORT YUKON ]
+
+The next Monday we started again, this time with a toboggan and with a
+man instead of a boy for guide, and in three days of only moderate
+difficulty we reached Fort Yukon.
+
+Fort Yukon, though it holds no attraction for the ordinary visitor or
+the summer tourist on the river, is a place of much interest to those
+who know the history of Alaska. While it is purely a native village,
+with no white population save the traders and the usual sprinkling of
+men that hang around native villages, it is yet the oldest white man's
+post on the Yukon River, save the post established by the Russians at
+Nulato, five or six hundred miles lower down. The Hudson Bay Company
+established itself here in 1846, and that date serves as the year one
+in making calculations and determining ages to this day. It is a fixed
+point in time that every native knows of. Any old man can tell you
+whether he was born before or after that date, and, if before, can pick
+out some boy that is about the age he was when the event occurred. The
+massacre at Nulato in 1851 serves in a similar way for the lower river.
+
+After the Purchase, and the determination of the longitude of Fort Yukon
+by Mr. Raymond in 1869--who made the first steamboat journey up the
+Yukon on that errand--the Hudson Bay Company moved three times before
+they succeeded in getting east of the 141st meridian, and at the point
+reached on the third move, the New Rampart House on the Porcupine River,
+only a few hundred yards beyond the boundary-line, they remained until
+the gold excitement on the Yukon and the journeying of the natives to
+new posts on that river rendered trading unprofitable; then they
+withdrew to the Mackenzie. The oldest white men's graves in Alaska,
+again with the exception of Nulato, are those in the little Hudson Bay
+cemetery near Fort Yukon.
+
+[Sidenote: ARCHDEACON MACDONALD ]
+
+Fort Yukon is also the site of the oldest missionary station on the
+river, unless there were earlier visits of Russian priests to the lower
+river, of which there seems no record, for in 1862 there was a clergyman
+of the Church of England at this place. Archdeacon MacDonald was a
+remarkable man. Married to a native wife, he translated the whole Bible
+and the Book of Common Prayer into the native tongue, and his
+translations are in general use on the upper river to this day. He
+reduced the language to writing, extracted its grammar, taught the
+Indians to read and write their own tongue, and dignified it by the gift
+of the great literature of the sacred books. The language is, of course,
+a dying one--English is slowly superseding it--but it seems safe to say
+that for a generation or two yet to come it will be the basis of the
+common speech of the people and the language of worship. It is chiefly
+in matters of trading and handicrafts that English is taking its place,
+though here as elsewhere it stands to the discredit of the civilised
+race that blackguard English is the first English that is learned.
+
+There seems ground to question whether the substitution of a smattering
+of broken English for the flexibility and picturesque expressiveness of
+an indigenous tongue, thoroughly understood, carries with it any great
+intellectual gain, though to suggest such a doubt is treason to some
+minds. The time threatens when all the world will speak two or three
+great languages, when all little tongues will be extinct and all little
+peoples swallowed up, when all costume will be reduced to a dead level
+of blue jeans and shoddy and all strange customs abolished. The world
+will be a much less interesting world then; the spice and savour of the
+ends of the earth will be gone. Nor does it always appear unquestionable
+that the world will be the better or the happier. The advance of
+civilisation would be a great thing to work for if we were quite sure
+what we meant by it and what its goal is. To the ordinary government
+school-teacher in Alaska, with some notable exceptions, it seems to
+mean chiefly teaching the Indians to call themselves Mr. and Mrs. and
+teaching the women to wear millinery, with a contemptuous attitude
+toward the native language and all native customs. The less intelligent
+grade of missionary sometimes falls into the same easy rut. So letters
+pass through the post-offices addressed: "Mr. Pretty Henry," "Mrs.
+Monkey Bill," "Miss Sally Shortandirty"; so, occasionally, the grotesque
+spectacle may present itself, to the passengers on a steamer, of a
+native woman in a "Merry Widow" hat and a blood-stained parkee gutting
+salmon on the river bank.
+
+The nobler ideal, as it seems to some of us, is to labour for
+God-fearing, self-respecting Indians rather than imitation white men and
+white women. An Indian who is honest, healthy and kindly, skilled in
+hunting and trapping, versed in his native Bible and liturgy, even
+though he be entirely ignorant of English and have acquired no taste for
+canned fruit and know not when Columbus discovered America, may be very
+much of a man in that station of life in which it has pleased God to
+call him.
+
+Christmas and the Fourth of July are the Indian's great holidays, the
+one just after the best moose hunting and the other just before the
+salmon run. It may be supposed that there were always great feasts at
+the winter and summer solstices, though now he is sufficiently devout at
+the one and patriotic at the other. At these seasons, and for weeks
+before and after, Fort Yukon gathers a large number of Indians. It is
+the native metropolis of the country within a radius of a hundred
+miles, and what may be termed its permanent population of one hundred
+and fifty is doubled and sometimes trebled by contingents from the
+Chandalar, the Porcupine, and the Black Rivers, from that long river
+called Birch Creek, and all the intervening country. Many families of
+the "uncivilised," self-respecting kind, to which reference has been
+made, come in from outlying points, and the contrast between them and
+their more sophisticated kinfolk of the town is all in their favour.
+
+[Sidenote: JIMMY]
+
+Such a gathering had already taken place in preparation for the
+Christmas holidays when we reached Fort Yukon on the 15th of December.
+It would have been pleasant to spend Christmas with them, but we were
+due two hundred and fifty miles away, at Bettles, for that feast, if by
+any means we could get there. So we lingered but the two days necessary
+to equip ourselves. Jimmy had torn our bedding to pieces on the night of
+the mishap; it was lashed on the outside of the load, and he had
+scratched and clawed it to make a nest for himself until fur from the
+robe and feathers from the quilts were all over the trail. The other
+dogs, not so warmly coated as he, had been content to sleep in the snow.
+Jimmy's character was gradually revealing itself. A well-bred trail dog
+will not commit the canine sacrilege of invading the sled. That is a
+"Siwash" dog's trick. So there was fresh bedding to manufacture, as well
+as supplies for two hundred miles to get together.
+
+A mail once a month went at that time from Fort Yukon to the Koyukuk,
+and there was little other travel. The course lay fifty or sixty miles
+across country to the Chandalar River, about one hundred miles up that
+stream, and then across a divide to the South Fork of the Koyukuk, and
+across another to the Middle Fork, on which Coldfoot is situated. It is
+not possible to procure any supplies, save sometimes a little fish for
+dog food and that not certainly, between Fort Yukon and Coldfoot, so
+that provision for the whole journey must be taken.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CHANDALAR]
+
+A new Indian guide had been engaged as far as Coldfoot, and we set
+out--three men, two toboggans, and seven dogs; four on the larger
+vehicle and three on the smaller, one of the dogs brought by our guide.
+Three miles from Fort Yukon we crossed the Porcupine River and then
+plunged into the wilderness of lake and swamp and forest that stretches
+north of the Yukon. A portage trail, as such a track across country is
+called to distinguish it from a river trail, has the advantage of such
+protection from storm as its timbered stretches afford. For miles and
+miles the route passes through scrub spruce that has been burned over,
+with no prospect but a maze of charred poles against the snow, some
+upright, others at every angle of inclination. Then comes a lake, with
+difficulty in finding the trail on its wind-swept surface and sometimes
+much casting about to discover where it leaves the lake again, and then
+more small burned timber. Wherever the route is through woods, living or
+dead, it is blazed; when it strikes the open, one is often at a loss.
+After three or four days of such travel, sometimes reaching an old cabin
+for the night, sometimes pitching the tent, one is rejoiced at the
+sight of distant mountains and at the intimation they bring that the
+inexpressible dreariness of the Yukon Flats is nearly past; and
+presently the trail opens suddenly upon the broad Chandalar.
+
+The Hudson Bay voyageurs are responsible for many names in this part of
+Alaska, and Chandalar is a corruption of their "Gens de large." The
+various native tribes received appellations indicating habitats. A tribe
+that differed from most northern Indians, in having no permanent
+villages and in living altogether in encampments, was named "Gens de
+large," and the river which they frequented took their name.
+
+It is one of the second-rate tributaries of the Yukon, and in general
+its waters are swift and shallow, not navigable for light-draught
+steamboats for more than one hundred and fifty miles, save at flood, and
+not easily navigable at all. It is these swift shallow streams that are
+so formidable in winter on account of overflow water, and the Chandalar
+is one of the most dreaded.
+
+[Sidenote: DIPHTHERIA]
+
+Ten miles along the river's surface brought us to the Chandalar native
+village, a settlement of half a dozen cabins and twenty-five or thirty
+souls. The people came out to meet us, and said they were just about to
+bury a baby, and asked me to conduct the funeral. Because we had not
+done a day's march and were under compulsion to push on at our best
+speed, I did not unlash the sled but went just as I was up the hill with
+the sorrowful procession to the little graveyard. On the way down I
+asked as best I could of what sickness the baby had died, and I felt
+some uneasiness when the throat was pointed to as the seat of disease.
+When, presently, I was informed that two others were sick, and of the
+same complaint, my uneasiness became alarm. I went at once to see them,
+and the angry swollen throats patched with white membrane which I
+discovered left no room for doubt that we were in the presence of
+another outbreak of diphtheria. That disease had scourged the Yukon in
+the two preceding years. Twenty-three children died at Fort Yukon in the
+summer of 1904, half a dozen at Circle in the following winter, though
+that outbreak was grappled with from the first; and all along the river
+the loss of life was terrible.
+
+There was no question that we must give up all hope of reaching Bettles
+for Christmas and stay and do what we could for these people. So we made
+camp on the outskirts of the village, and I went to work swabbing out
+the throats with carbolic acid and preparing liquid food from our grub
+box. There was nothing to eat in the village but dried fish and a little
+dried moose, and these throats like red-hot iron could hardly swallow
+liquids. The two patients were a boy of sixteen and a grown woman. It
+was evident that unless we could isolate them the disease would probably
+pass through the whole village, and, indeed, others might have been
+infected already. It was likely that we were in for a siege of it, and
+our supply of condensed milk and extract of beef would soon be
+exhausted. Moreover, at Fort Yukon was the trained nurse who had coped
+with the epidemic there and at Circle, while we had virtually no
+experience with the disease at all. It was resolved to send back to Fort
+Yukon for supplies and for the nurse.
+
+The next morning Mr. Knapp and the native boy took the dogs and the sled
+and started back. With no load save a little grub and bedding, they
+could make the journey in two days, a day must be allowed for
+preparations, and, with the aid of another dog team, two days more would
+bring them back. Five days was the least they could be gone. It was
+asking a great deal of this lady to abandon her Christmas festival,
+preparations for which had long been making, and to come sixty-five
+miles through the frozen wilderness in a toboggan; but I felt sure she
+would drop everything and come.
+
+For those five days I was busied in close attention to the patients and
+in strenuous though not altogether availing efforts to maintain a
+quarantine of the cabin in which they lay. There was little more that I
+could do than swab out the throats and administer food every two hours.
+As the disease advanced it was increasingly painful to swallow and
+exceedingly difficult to induce the sufferers to make the attempt or to
+open their mouths for the swabbing. After two or three days the woman
+seemed to have passed the crisis of the disease and to be mending, but
+the boy, I thought, grew worse. One becomes attached to those to whom
+one ministers, and this poor, speechless boy, with his terrible throat
+and the agony in his big black eyes, appealed to me very strongly
+indeed. It was torture to move his head or to open his mouth, and I had
+to torture him continually.
+
+Every night I gathered the people for Divine service. Here was a little
+community far off in the wilds that had carefully conserved and handed
+on to their children the teaching they had received no less than thirty
+years before. The native Bibles and prayer-books and hymnals were
+brought out, bearing dates of publication in the seventies; one of their
+number acted as leader, and what he read was painfully followed in the
+well-thumbed books. They lifted their voices in a weird transformation
+of familiar tunes, with quavers and glides that had crept in through
+long, uncorrected use, and amongst the prayers said was one for "Our
+Sovereign lady Queen Victoria, and Albert Edward, Prince of Wales." I
+tried to explain that Queen Victoria was dead, that they were not living
+under British rule, and I took a pencil and struck out the prayers for
+the royal family from the books. But there was doubt in their minds and
+a reluctance to alter in any particular the liturgy that had been taught
+them, and it is quite likely that intercessions for a defunct sovereign
+of another land still arise from the Chandalar village. One cannot but
+feel a deep admiration for the pioneer missionaries of this
+region--Bishop Bompas, Archdeacon MacDonald, and the others--whose
+teaching was so thorough and so lasting, and who lived and laboured here
+long before any gold seeker had thought of Alaska, when the country was
+an Indian country exclusively, with none of the comforts and
+conveniences that can now be enjoyed. It was to a remote cabin on the
+East Fork of this river that Archdeacon MacDonald retired for a year to
+make part of his translation of the Bible, according to the Indian
+account.
+
+[Sidenote: THE SHORTEST DAY]
+
+At noon on the 21st of December, the shortest day, there is a note in my
+diary that I saw the sun's disk shining through the trees. Although
+fully half a degree of latitude north of the Arctic Circle, the
+refraction is sufficient to lift his whole sphere above the horizon. One
+speculates how much farther north it would be possible to see any part
+of the sun at noon on the shortest day; but north of here, throughout
+Alaska, is broken and mountainous country. We were on the northern edge
+of the great flat of the interior.
+
+The fifth day at the village was Christmas Eve. My boy was in a critical
+condition, very low and weak, with a temperature that stayed around 101 deg.
+and 102 deg.. As night approached I watched with the greatest anxiety for
+the party from Fort Yukon, and, just as the last lingering glow of the
+long twilight was fading from the south, there was a distant tinkle of
+bells on the trail, and faintly once and again a man's voice was raised
+in command and I knew that relief was at hand.
+
+The nurse had dropped everything and had come, as I felt sure she would.
+Gathering medicines and supplies and hiring a native dog team and
+driver, she had left immediately, and the round trip had been made in
+the shortest time it was possible to make it. It was a tremendous relief
+to see her step out of the rugs and robes of the toboggan and take
+charge of the situation in her quiet, competent way. A small, outlying
+cabin was selected for a hospital, the family that occupied it bundled
+out into a tent, and the two sick persons carefully moved into it, with
+whom and the mother of the sick boy the nurse took up her abode. Then
+there was the Christmas-tree in the chief's cabin, with little gifts for
+the children sent out from the mission at Fort Yukon some time before,
+and a dance afterward, for Christmas festivities must go on, whatever
+happens, at a native village. I took James's pocket-knife to him after
+the celebration was over, and I think he really tried to smile as he
+thanked me with his eyes.
+
+The next day after the services, although it was Christmas Day, we set
+to work on the disinfecting of the large cabin in which the sick had
+lain. Stringing bedclothes and wearing apparel on lines from wall to
+wall, and stuffing up every crack and cranny with cotton, we burned
+quantities of sulphur, that the nurse had brought with her, all day
+long.
+
+A recent article in a stray number of a professional journal picked up
+in the office of a medical missionary, devoted column after column to
+the uselessness of all known methods of disinfection. Sulphur,
+formaldehyde, carbolic acid, permanganate of potash, chloride of lime,
+bichloride of mercury--the author knew not which of these "fetiches" to
+be most sarcastic about. It may be that the net result of our copious
+fumigation was but the bleaching of the coloured garments hung up, but
+at least it did no harm. One sometimes wishes that these scientists who
+sit up so high in the seat of the scornful would condescend to a little
+plain instruction.
+
+The anti-diphtheritic serum is now kept in readiness at all our
+missions in Alaska, and the disease seems to have ceased its
+depredations; but it has taken terrible toll of the native people.
+
+[Sidenote: THE MISSIONARY NURSE]
+
+We wished to stay with the nurse until the sickness should be done, but
+she would not hear of it, and insisted upon the resumption of our
+journey. It did not seem right to go off and leave this lonely woman,
+sixty-five miles from the nearest white person, to cope with an outbreak
+of disease that might not yet have spent itself, although there had been
+no new case for a week. "You've done your work here, now leave me to do
+mine. You'll not get to Point Hope this winter if you stay much longer."
+
+"Aren't you afraid to stay all by yourself?" I asked, somewhat
+fatuously.
+
+"Afraid? Afraid of what? You surely don't mean afraid of the natives?"
+
+I did not know what I meant; it seemed not unnatural that a woman with
+such prospect before her should be a little timid, but she was resolute
+that we go, and we went.
+
+Not until the next summer did I learn the upshot--both patients
+recovered and there was no other case. Six years later, when these words
+are written, I have just baptized a son of the boy who lay so ill, who
+would have perished, I think, had we not reached the Chandalar village
+just in time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+CHANDALAR VILLAGE TO BETTLES, COLDFOOT, AND THE KOYUKUK
+
+
+AT five o'clock in the morning of the 27th of December, hours before any
+kind of daylight, while the faint "pit-pat" of all-night dancing still
+sounded from the chief's cabin, we dropped down the steep bank to the
+river surface and resumed our journey. Ahead was a man with a candle in
+a tin can, peering for the faint indications of the trail on the ice;
+the other two were at the handle-bars of the toboggans. It is strange
+that in this day of invention and improvement in artificial
+illumination, a candle in a tin can is still the most dependable light
+for the trail. A coal-oil lamp requires a glass which is easily broken,
+and the ordinary coal-oil that comes to Alaska freezes at about 40 deg.
+below. In very cold weather a coal-oil lantern full of oil will go out
+completely from the freezing of its supply. All the various acetylene
+lamps are useless because water is required to generate the gas, and
+water may not be had without stopping and building a fire and melting
+ice or snow. The electric flash-lamp, useful enough round camp, goes out
+of operation altogether on the trail, because the "dry" cell that
+supplies its current is not a dry cell at all, but a moist cell, and
+when its moisture freezes is dead until it thaws out again. No extremity
+of cold will stop a candle from burning, and if it be properly sheltered
+by the tin can it will stand a great deal of wind. The "folding pocket
+lantern," which is nothing but a convenient tin can with mica sides, is
+the best equipment for travel, but an empty butter can or lard can is
+sometimes easier to come by.
+
+The Chandalar is wide-spread in these parts, with several channels, and
+the trail was hard to follow. One track we pursued led us up a bank and
+along a portage and presently stopped at a marten trap; and we had to
+cut across to the river and cast about hither and thither on its broad
+surface to find the mail trail.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CHANDALAR GAP]
+
+All the rivers that are confluent with the Yukon in the Flats enter that
+dreary region through gaps in the mountains that bound the broad plain.
+These gaps are noted for wind, and the Chandalar Gap, which had loomed
+before us since daybreak, is deservedly in especial bad repute. The most
+hateful thing in the Arctic regions is the wind. Cold one may protect
+one's self against, but there is no adequate protection against wind.
+The parkee without opening front or back, that pulls on over the head,
+is primarily a windbreak, and when a scarf is wrapped around mouth and
+nose, and the fur-edged hood of the parkee is pulled forward over cap
+and scarf, the traveller who must face the wind has done all he can to
+protect himself from it.
+
+[Illustration: SUNRISE ON THE CHANDALAR-KOYUKUK PORTAGE.]
+
+Unfortunately, in the confusion of striking the tent and packing in the
+dark, my scarf had been rolled up in the bedding, and, since the wind
+was not bad until we approached the Gap in the evening, I had not
+troubled about it. Now, as we drew nearer and nearer, the wind rose
+constantly. The thermometer was at 38 deg. below zero, and wind at that
+temperature cuts like a knife. But to get my scarf meant stopping the
+whole procession and unlashing and unloading the sled, and the man who
+unlashed in that wind would almost certainly freeze his fingers. So I
+gave up the thought of it, turned my back to the wind while I tied my
+pocket handkerchief round mouth and nose, drew the strings of my parkee
+hood close, and then faced it again to worry through as best I could.
+The ice is always swept clear of snow in the Gap. The river narrows
+within its jaws, the ragged rocks rise up to the bluffs on either hand,
+and the blue-streaked ice stretches between. We all suffered a good
+deal. Against that cruel wind it was impossible to keep warm. The hands,
+though enclosed in woollen gloves, and they in blanket-lined moose-hide
+mitts, grew numb; the toes, within their protection of caribou sock with
+the hair on, strips of blanket wrapping, and mukluks stuffed with hay,
+tingled with warning of frost-bite; the whole body was chilled. We all
+froze our faces, I think, for the part of the face around and between
+the eyes cannot be covered. I froze my cheeks, my nose, and my Adam's
+apple, the last a most inconvenient thing to freeze.
+
+[Illustration: COLDFOOT ON THE KOYUKUK.]
+
+[Sidenote: A COLD LODGING]
+
+The cabin was just the other side of the Gap, and it was well that it
+was no farther, for we were weary with our thirty-mile run and
+dangerously cold with the exposure of the last hour. It was rather a
+large cabin as trail cabins go, with a rickety sheet-iron stove in the
+middle, burned full of holes, and it was hours before the fire began to
+make any impression on the obstinate, sullen cold of that hut. When we
+went to bed the frost still stood thick and heavy on the walls all over
+the room. A log building, properly constructed, is a warm building, but
+slowness in parting with heat means slowness in receiving heat, and a
+log cabin that has been unoccupied for a long time in very cold weather
+is hard to heat in one evening.
+
+When we started next morning the thermometer stood at 45 deg. below zero,
+but we were out of the wind region and did not mind the cold. It is
+curious that a few miles on either side of that Gap the air will be
+still, while in the Gap itself a gale is blowing. Seven times I have
+passed through that Gap and only once without wind. The great Flats were
+now behind us, we had passed into the mountains, and for the remainder
+of our long journey we should scarce ever be out of sight of mountains
+again. Up the river, with its constant trouble of overflow, going around
+the open water whenever we could, plunging through it in our mukluks
+when it could not be avoided--with the care of the dogs' feet that the
+cold weather rendered more than ever necessary when they got wet, and
+the added nuisance of throwing the toboggans on their sides and beating
+the ice from them with the flat of the axe wherever water had been
+passed through--for two days we followed its windings, the thermometer
+between -45 deg. and -50 deg., the mountains rising higher and the scenery
+growing more picturesque as we advanced. At the end of the second day
+from the Gap we were at the mouth of the West Fork of the Chandalar, and
+after passing up it for fifteen or sixteen miles we left that
+watercourse to cross the mountains to the South Fork of the Koyukuk
+River.
+
+Then began hard labour again. A toboggan is not a good vehicle for
+crossing summits. Its bottom is perfectly flat and smooth, polished like
+glass by the friction of the snow. If the trail be at all "sidling" (and
+mountain trails are almost always "sidling"), the toboggan swings off on
+the side of the inclination and must be kept on the trail by main force.
+The runners of a sled will grip the surface, if there be any
+inequalities at all, but a toboggan swings now this way and now that,
+like a great pendulum, dragging the near dogs with it. Again and again
+we had to hitch both teams to one toboggan to get up a sidling pitch
+while all hands kept the vehicle on the trail, and our progress was
+painful and slow. In soft snow on a level surface like the river bed or
+through the Flat country, generally, the toboggan is much the more
+convenient vehicle, for it rides over the snow instead of ploughing
+through it, but on hard snow anywhere or on grades the toboggan is a
+nuisance. Thus wallowing through the deep snow at the side of the
+toboggans to hold them in place we sweated and slaved our way mile after
+mile up the gradual ascent until we reached the spot, just under a
+shoulder of the summit, where there was dry spruce and green spruce for
+camping, the dry for fire and the green for couch, and there we halted
+for the night.
+
+[Sidenote: JOHN MUIR]
+
+Next morning we crossed the low pass and dropped down easily into the
+wide valley of the Koyukuk South Fork, with a fine prospect of mountains
+everywhere as far as the eye could see. I had stood and gazed upon those
+same mountains on my journey of the previous winter, my first winter in
+Alaska, and had seen a most remarkable sight. As we began the descent
+and a turn of the trail gave a new panorama of peaks I did not at first
+realise the nature of the peculiar phenomenon I was gazing at. Each peak
+had a fine, filmy, fan-shaped cloud stretching straight out from it into
+the sky, waving and shimmering as it stretched. The sun was not above
+the horizon, but his rays caught these sheer, lawn-like streamers and
+played upon them with a most delicate opalescent radiance. Then all at
+once came to my mind the recollection of a description in John Muir's
+_Mountains of California_ (surely the finest mountain book ever written)
+of the snow banners of the Sierra Nevada, and I knew that I was looking
+at a similar spectacle. It meant that a storm was raging on high,
+although so far we were sheltered from it. It meant that the dry,
+sand-like snow of the mountain flanks was driven up those flanks so
+fiercely before the wind that it was carried clean over them and beyond
+them out into the sky, and still had such pressure behind it that it
+continued its course and spread out horizontally, thinning and spreading
+for maybe a mile before it lost all coherence and visibility. As far as
+I could see mountain peaks I could see the snow banners, all pointing
+one way, all waving, all luminous and shimmering in the sun-rays. It was
+a very noble sight, and I gazed a long while entranced, not knowing how
+ominous it was. When we reached the valley and left the shelter of the
+gulch we struck the full force of that fearful gale, and for two days
+and nights of incessant blizzard we lay in a hole dug out of a sand-bank
+(for we had no tent that year), the trail lost, the grub box nearly
+empty, and no fire possible to cook anything with had the grub box been
+full.
+
+The valley before us--to resume the narrative--is a high, wind-swept
+region of niggerhead and swamp, the catch-basin of the South Fork of the
+Koyukuk River. The trail descends one of its southern draws, follows up
+the main valley awhile, crosses it, and leaves by one of its northern
+draws to pass over the mountains that separate its drainage from the
+main fork of the Koyukuk. The cold had given place to wind, and though
+the gale did not approach the fierceness of last year's storm, it gave
+great trouble in following the track. These high headwater basins are
+always windy; the timber is scrubby spruce with many open places, and in
+such open places the trail is soon obliterated altogether.
+
+When the light fails this casting about for blazes whenever a clump of
+spruce is reached becomes increasingly slow and difficult and at last
+becomes hopeless. The general direction determined, it might be thought
+that the traveller could ignore the tracks of previous passage and
+strike out for himself, but he knows that the trail, however rough, is
+at least practicable, whereas an independent course may soon lead to
+steep gullies or cut banks, or may entangle him in some thicket that he
+must resort to the axe to pass through. Moreover, even two or three
+passages through the snow in the winter will give some bottom to a
+trail; a bottom that, when the wind-swept areas are passed and the
+snow-shoes are resumed, both he and his dogs will be thankful for.
+
+[Sidenote: CAMP MAKING]
+
+So we made a camp as it darkened to night, not far from the spot where I
+had "siwashed" with an Indian companion the previous winter, the wind
+blowing half a gale at 20 deg. below zero.
+
+Making camp under such circumstances is always a very disagreeable
+proceeding. It takes time and care to make a comfortable camp, and time
+and care in the wind and the cold involve suffering. Two suitable trees
+must be selected between which the tent is to be suspended by the
+ridge-rope, and the snow must all be scraped away by the snow-shoes, or,
+if it be too deep, beaten down. Then while one man unlashes and unpacks
+the sleds, another cuts green spruce and lays it all over the tent
+space, thicker and finer where the bed is to be. Then up goes the tent,
+its corner ropes and its side strings made fast to boughs, if there be
+such, or to stakes, or to logs laid parallel to the sides. Then the
+stovepipe is jointed and the stove set up on the edge of green billets
+properly shaped. Meanwhile the axe-man, the green boughs cut, has been
+felling and splitting a dry tree for stove wood, and the whole
+proceedings are rushed and hastened towards getting a fire in that
+stove. Sometimes it is a question whether we shall get a fire before we
+freeze our fingers or freeze our fingers before we get a fire. The fire
+once going, we are safe, for however much more work there is in the
+open, and there is always a good deal more, one can go to the tent to
+get warm. Enough stove wood must be cut, not only for night and morning,
+but for cooking the dog feed. The dog pot, filled with snow, into which
+the fish are cut up, is put upon the outdoor fire as soon as man-supper
+begins cooking in the tent. When it boils, the rice and tallow must be
+added, and when the rice has boiled twenty minutes the whole is set
+aside to cool. Meanwhile the two aluminum pots full of snow, replenished
+from time to time as it melts, are put upon the stove in the tent as the
+necessary preliminary to cooking. Sometimes ice, and more rarely water,
+may be had, and then supper is hastened. If we are camped on the river
+bank sometimes a steel-pointed rifle-bullet fired straight down into the
+ice will penetrate to the water below and allow a little jet to bubble
+up. Melting snow is a tedious business at best; but, since three times
+out of four when camping it must be done, the aluminum pots are a
+treasure. There is still work for every one as well as the cook. Snow
+must be banked all round the tent to keep out the wind. Little heaps of
+spruce boughs must be cut for the dogs' beds; it is all we can do for
+them whatever the weather, and they appreciate it highly. It may be that
+dog moccasins must be taken off and strung around the stove to dry, and
+before supper is ready the inside ridge-rope of the tent is heavy with
+all sorts of drying man-wear: socks, moccasins, scarfs, toques,
+mittens. One of the earliest habits a man learns on the trail is to hang
+up everything to dry as soon as he takes it off. Why should it be hung
+up to dry unless it has got wet? the writer was once asked, in detailing
+these operations. Because there is no other way to remove the ice with
+which everything becomes incrusted in very cold weather.
+
+[Sidenote: CAMP COOKING]
+
+As his snow melts the cook throws into the pot a few handfuls of
+evaporated potatoes, a handful of evaporated onions, and smaller
+quantities of evaporated "soup vegetables," and leaves them to soak and
+simmer and resume their original size and flavour. By and by he will cut
+up the moose meat or the rabbits or birds, or whatever game he may have,
+and throw it in, and in an hour or an hour and a half there will be a
+savoury stew that, with a pan of biscuits cooked in an aluminum
+reflector beside the stove and a big pot of tea, constitutes the
+principal meal of the day. Or if the day has been long and sleep seems
+more attractive even than grub, he will turn some frozen beans, already
+boiled, into a frying-pan with a big lump of butter, and when his meat
+is done supper is ready. Beans thus prepared eaten red hot with grated
+cheese are delicious to a hungry man. With the stove for a sideboard,
+food may always be eaten hot, and that is one advantage of camp fare.
+
+The men satisfied, the dogs remain, and while two of the party wash
+dishes and clean up, the third feeds the dogs. Their pot of food has
+been cooling for an hour or more. They will not eat it until it is cold
+and a mess of rice will hold heat a long time even in the coldest
+weather. When it is nearly cold it is dished out with a paddle into the
+individual pans and the dogs make short work of it. There are some who
+feed straight fish, and, if the fish be king salmon of the best quality,
+the dogs do well enough on it. But on any long run it is decidedly
+economical to cook for the dogs--not so much from the standpoint of
+direct cost as from that of weight and ease of hauling. An hundred
+pounds of fish plus an hundred pounds of rice plus fifty pounds of
+tallow will go a great deal farther than two hundred and fifty pounds of
+fish alone. There is little doubt, too, that in the long run the dogs do
+better on cooked food. It is easier of digestion and easier to apportion
+in uniform rations. Rice and fish make excellent food. The Japs took
+Port Arthur on rice and fish. The tallow answers a demand of the climate
+and is increased as the weather grows colder. Man and dog alike require
+quantities of fat food in this climate; it is astonishing how much bacon
+and butter one can eat. When the dogs have eaten, and each one has made
+the rounds of all the other pans to be sure nothing is left, they retire
+to their respective nests of spruce bough and curl themselves up with
+many turnings round and much rearranging of the litter. Feet and nose
+are neatly tucked in, the tail is adjusted carefully over all, the hair
+on the body stands straight up, and the dogs have gone to bed and do not
+like to be disturbed again.
+
+[Sidenote: DOG-HARNESS]
+
+Therein lies the cruelty of depriving them of their tails, which used
+to be the general custom in this country. The old tandem harness almost
+required it, as the breath of the dog behind condensed upon the tail of
+the dog in front until he was carrying around permanently a mass of ice
+that was a burden to him and rendered his tail useless for warmth. But
+the rig with a long mid rope, to which the dogs are attached by
+single-trees in such manner that they may at will be hitched abreast or
+one ahead of the other as the trail is wide or narrow, is superseding
+the tandem rig, and one sees more bushy tails amongst the dogs. The
+thick, long-haired tail of the dog in this country is indeed his
+blanket, and in cold weather the tailless dog is at a great
+disadvantage.
+
+It was said that all the dogs retired to the nests of spruce bough; it
+should have been all but one. It is Lingo's special charge to guard the
+sled and his special privilege to sleep on it. Turning around and
+curling up on the softest spot he can find of the unlashed and partly
+unloaded toboggan, he will not touch anything it contains nor permit any
+other dog to touch it.
+
+The northern skies are clouded the next morning, the first day of the
+new year, and there is a ruddy dawn that is glorious to behold. The
+white earth gives back a soft rose tint, as an organ pipe gives back a
+faint tone to the strong vibration of another pipe in pitch with it. We
+shall not see the sun himself any more for many weeks, but we see his
+light upon the flanks of the mountains for an hour or so around noon.
+The bold, shapely peaks of the South Fork of the Koyukuk turn their
+snows to pink fire as his rays slowly descend their sides, and the
+whole scene is exquisitely beautiful. What a wonderful thing colour is!
+When the skies are overcast this is a dead black-and-white country in
+winter, for spruce, the prevailing wood, is black in the mass at a
+little distance. Gaze where one will, there is naught but black and
+white. The eye becomes tired of the monotony and longs for some warmer
+tone. That is surely the reason why all those who live in the country
+cherish some gay article of attire, why the natives love brilliant
+handkerchiefs, why the white man also will choose a crimson scarf.
+Trudging at the handle-bars, I have found pleasure in the red pompons of
+the dogs' harness, in the gay beading of mitten and hind-sack. And that
+is why a lavish feast of colour such as this dawn stirs one's spirit
+with such keen delight. It gives life to a dead world.
+
+But the wind is still bitter and interferes sadly with one's enjoyment.
+All through the valley, up the creek by which we leave it, past the twin
+lakes on the low summit, the wind grows in force, and when we leave
+Slate Creek for the present and make a "portage" over a mountain
+shoulder to strike the creek again much lower down, the wind has risen
+to a gale that overturns the toboggans and makes the men fight for their
+footing. The actual physical labour of it is enormous, and there can be
+no rest; it is too bitterly cold in that blast to stop. For a mile or
+two we struggle and slave to beat our way around that mountain shoulder
+and then drop down to the creek again. The blessed relief it is to get
+out of the fury of that wind into the comparative shelter of the creek,
+to be done with the ceaseless toil of holding the heavy toboggans from
+hurtling down the hillside, to be able to keep one's feet without
+continually slipping and falling on the wind-hardened snow, no words can
+adequately convey. We are all frozen again a little; this man's nose is
+touched, that man's cheeks, and the other man's finger.
+
+[Sidenote: THE KOYUKUK GOLD CAMP]
+
+On the middle fork of the Koyukuk, at the mouth of Slate Creek, Coldfoot
+sits within a cirque of rugged mountain peaks, the most northerly postal
+town in the interior of Alaska, the most northerly gold-mining town in
+the world, as it claims. It sprang into existence in 1900 and flourished
+for a season or two with the usual accompaniments of such florification.
+In 1906 it was already much decayed, and is now dead. Ever since its
+start the Koyukuk camp has steadily produced gold and given occupation
+to miners numbering from one hundred and fifty to three hundred, but the
+scene of operations, and therefore the depot for supplies, has
+continually changed. In 1900 the chief producing creek was Myrtle, which
+is a tributary of Slate Creek, and the town at the mouth was in eligible
+situation, though much over-built from the first. Then the centre of
+interest shifted to Nolan Creek, fifteen miles farther up the river,
+which is a tributary of Wiseman Creek, and the town of Wiseman sprang up
+at the mouth of that creek. The post-office, the commissioner's office,
+and the saloon, the stores and road-houses, migrated to the new spot,
+and Coldfoot was abandoned. Now the chief producing creek is the Hammond
+River, still farther up the Koyukuk, and if its placer deposits prove
+as rich as they promise it is likely that a town will spring up at the
+mouth of the Hammond which will supersede Wiseman.
+
+There has never been found a continuous pay-streak in the Koyukuk camp.
+It is what is known as a "pocket" camp. Now and again a "spot" is found
+which enriches its discoverers, while on the claims above and below that
+spot the ground may be too poor to work at a profit; for ground must be
+rich to be worked at all in the Koyukuk. It is the most expensive camp
+in Alaska, perhaps in the world. This is due to its remoteness and
+difficulty of access. Far north of the Arctic Circle, the diggings are
+about seventy-five miles above the head of light-draught steamboat
+navigation, and more than six hundred miles above the confluence of the
+Koyukuk with the Yukon. Transshipped at Nulato to the shoal-water
+steamboats that make three or four trips a season up the Koyukuk,
+transshipped again at Bettles, the head of any steamboat navigation,
+freight must be hauled on horse scows the remaining seventy-five miles
+of the journey; and all that handling and hauling means high rates. The
+cost of living, the cost of machinery, the general cost of all mining
+operations is much higher than on the Yukon or on the other tributaries
+of that river. The very smallness of the camp is a factor in the high
+prices, for there is not trade enough to induce brisk competition with
+the reduction of rates that competition brings.
+
+[Sidenote: MINERS' GENEROSITY]
+
+Yet the smallness and the isolation of the camp have their
+compensations. There is more community life, more _esprit de corps_
+amongst the Koyukuk miners than will be found in any other camp in
+Alaska. Thrown upon their own resources for amusement, social gatherings
+are more common and are made more of, and hospitality is universal. Like
+all sparsely settled and frontier lands, Alaska is a very hospitable
+place in general, but the Koyukuk has earned the name of the most
+hospitable camp in Alaska. Since the numbers are small, and each man is
+well known to all the others, any sickness or suffering makes an
+immediate appeal and brings a generous response. Again and again the
+unfortunate victim of accident or disease has been sent outside for
+treatment, the considerable money required being quickly raised by
+public subscription. There is probably no other gold camp in the world
+where it is a common thing for the owner of a good claim to tell a
+neighbour who is "broke" to take a pan and go down to the drift and help
+himself.
+
+Until my visit of the previous year no minister of religion of any sort
+had penetrated to the Koyukuk, and, save for one journey thither by
+Bishop Rowe, my annual visits have been the only opportunities for
+public worship since. It will suffice for the visit now describing as
+well as for all the others to say that the reception was most cordial
+and the opportunity much appreciated. We went from creek to creek and
+gathered the men and the few women in whatever cabin was most
+convenient, and no clergyman could wish for more attentive or interested
+congregations.
+
+[Illustration: THE UPPER KOYUKUK.]
+
+Upon our return to Coldfoot from the creek visits the thermometer stood
+at 52 deg. below zero, although it had been no lower than 38 deg. below when we
+left the last creek, some fifteen miles away. As a general rule, the
+temperature on these mountain creeks, which are at some considerable
+elevation above the river into which they flow, will read from 10 deg. to
+15 deg. higher than on the river, and if one climbed to the top of the peaks
+around Coldfoot, the difference then would probably be 20 deg. or 25 deg.. At
+the summit road-house between Fairbanks and Cleary City in the Tanana
+country in cold weather the thermometer commonly reads 20 deg. above the one
+place and 10 deg. or 15 deg. above the other.
+
+[Illustration: THE BARREN SHORES OF KOTZEBUE SOUND.]
+
+[Sidenote: LINGO]
+
+This interesting fact, which surprises a good many people, for we are
+used to think of elevated places as cold places, is due to the greater
+heaviness of cold air, which sinks to the lowest level it can reach; and
+the river bed is the lowest part of the country. It would be interesting
+to find out to what extent this rule holds good. The ridges and the
+hilltops are always the warmest places in cold weather; would this hold
+as regards mountain tops?--as regards high mountain tops? Probably it
+would hold in the sunshine, but the rapid radiation of heat in the
+rarefied atmosphere of mountain tops would swing the balance the other
+way after dark. There is no doubt, however, that the coldest place in
+cold weather in Alaska is the river surface, and it is on the river
+surface that most of our travelling is done. The night we returned to
+Coldfoot we put our toboggan up high on the roof of an outhouse to keep
+its skin sides from the teeth of some hungry native dogs, leaving some
+of the load that was not required within it, covered by the sled
+cloth. Later on I saw by the light of the moon Lingo's silhouetted
+figure sitting bolt upright on top of the sled, and he gave his short
+double bark as I drew near to make me notice that he was still doing his
+duty although under difficulties. The dog had climbed up a wood-pile and
+had jumped to the top of the outhouse and so to the sled. I thought of
+Kipling's _Men That Fought at Minden_:
+
+        "For fatigue it was their pride
+         And they would _not_ be denied
+         To clean the cook-house floor."
+
+Here at Coldfoot we came first into contact with that interesting tribe
+of wandering inland Esquimaux known as the Kobuks, from their occupation
+of the river of that name. The Koyukuk has its own Indian people, but
+these enterprising Kobuks have pushed their way farther and farther from
+salt water into what used to be exclusive Indian territory.
+Representatives of both races were at Coldfoot, and as we lay
+weather-bound for a couple of days, I was enabled to renew last year's
+acquaintance with them, though without a good interpreter not much
+progress was made. The delight of these people at the road-house
+phonograph, the first they had ever heard, was some compensation for the
+incessant snarl and scream of the instrument itself. It was very funny
+to see them sitting on the floor, roaring with laughter at one
+particularly silly spoken record of the "Uncle Josh at the World's Fair"
+order. Over and over again they would ask for that record, and it never
+ceased to convulse them with laughter. "He's been enjoyin' poor health
+lately, but this mornin' I heard him complain that he felt a little
+better"--how sick and tired we got of this and similar jokes drawled out
+a dozen times running! The natives did not understand a word of it; it
+was the human voice with its pronounced, unusual inflections that
+aroused their merriment. The phonograph is becoming a powerful agency
+for disseminating a knowledge of English amongst the natives throughout
+Alaska, and one wishes that it were put to better use than the
+reproduction of silly and often vulgar monologue and dialogue and trashy
+ragtime music. As an index of the taste of those who purchase records,
+the selection brought to this country points low.
+
+The third day the thermometer stood at -49 deg. and we were free to leave
+without actually breaking the rule we had made after the escapade on the
+Yukon. Two other teams were going down the river, so we started with
+them on the sixty-five mile journey to Bettles. Twenty miles or so below
+Coldfoot the Koyukuk passes for several miles in a narrow channel
+between steep rock bluffs, with here and there great detached masses
+standing in the middle of the river. One has a grotesque resemblance to
+an aged bishop in his vestments and is known as the Bishop Rock; another
+a more remote likeness to an Indian woman, and this is known as the
+Squaw Rock. This part of the river, which is called the canon of the
+Koyukuk, though it is not a true canon, is very picturesque, and because
+of frequent overflow, offers glare ice and swift passage to the
+traveller when it does not embarrass him with running water. We were
+fortunate enough to pass it without getting our dogs' feet wet, and made
+the half-way road-house in a brilliant moon that rendered travelling at
+night pleasanter than during the day.
+
+[Sidenote: TRAVELLING AT "50 BELOW"]
+
+The next day we started again at near 50 deg. below, but because there was a
+good trail and a road-house for noon, the travelling was rather pleasant
+than otherwise. If there be a warm house to break the day's march and
+eat in, where ice-incrusted scarfs and parkees and caps and mittens may
+be dried out, with a warm outhouse where the dogs may rest in comfort,
+travelling in such weather is not too risky or too severely trying. The
+continual condensation of the moisture from the breath upon everything
+about the head and face is a decided inconvenience, and when it
+condenses upon the eye-lashes, and the upper and the lower lashes freeze
+together, the ice must be removed or it is impossible to open the eyes.
+This requires the momentary application of the bare hand, and every time
+it goes back into the mitten it carries some moisture with it, so that
+after a while mittens are wet as well as head-gear; moreover, there is
+always a certain perspiration that condenses. One gets into the habit of
+turning the duffel lining of the moose-hide mitts inside out and hanging
+them up the moment one gets inside a cabin. Round every road-house stove
+there is a rack constructed for just that purpose.
+
+There is no more striking phenomenon of the arctic trail than the
+behaviour of smoke in cold weather. As one approaches a road-house, and
+to greater degree a village or a town, it is seen enveloped in mist,
+although there be no open water to account for it, and the prospect in
+every other direction be brilliantly clear. It is not mist at all; it is
+merely the smoke from the stovepipes. And the explanation is simple,
+although not all at once arrived at. Smoke rises because it is warmer
+than the air into which it is discharged; for that and no other reason.
+Now, when smoke is discharged into air at a temperature of 50 deg. below
+zero, it is deprived of its heat immediately and falls to the ground by
+its greater specific gravity. The smoke may be observed just issuing
+from the pipe, or rising but a few feet, and then curling downward to be
+diffused amidst the air near the ground.
+
+It was to such a smoke-enveloped inn that we pulled up to warm and
+refresh ourselves and our team for the twenty miles that remained of the
+day's march. We had almost reached the limit of Koyukuk road-houses.
+Bettles being the head of navigation, and merchandise late in the season
+finding water too shallow for transport to the diggings, there is more
+or less freighting with dog teams and horses all the winter. This travel
+keeps open the road-houses on the route. From an "outside" point of view
+they may appear rough and the fare coarse. The night accommodation is a
+double row of bunks on each side of a long room with a great stove in
+the middle. Sometimes there is straw in the bunks, sometimes spruce
+boughs; in the better class even sometimes hay-stuffed mattresses. But
+to the weary traveller, who has battled with the storm or endured the
+intense cold for hours at a stretch, they are glad havens of refuge;
+they are often even life-saving stations.
+
+[Sidenote: METEOROLOGICAL]
+
+While we lay at the road-house the clear sky clouded and the thermometer
+rose. This is an unfailing sequence. Clear, bright weather is cold
+weather; cloudy weather is warm weather. The usual explanation, that the
+cloud acts as a blanket that checks the radiation of heat from the
+earth, is one of those explanations that do not explain. There is no
+heat to radiate. The cloud is a mass of moist air, which is warm air,
+introducing itself from some milder region. So the cloud brings the
+heat; and the lower layers of atmosphere extract it and thereby
+discharge the moisture. For an hour or two around noon the thermometer
+stood at -35 deg. and there was a light fall of snow; then the skies cleared
+because they were discharged of all their moisture, and the thermometer
+went down to -50 deg. again. It is a beautifully simple process and
+sometimes takes place two or three times a day. Every time the sky
+clouds, the thermometer rises; every time the sky clears, the
+thermometer falls. And because the barometer gives notice of changes in
+the density of the atmosphere, it is valuable in forecasting temperature
+in our winters. A steady rise in the barometer means a steady fall in
+the thermometer; a fall in the barometer in a time of great cold
+infallibly prophesies warmer weather; even such rapid changes as the one
+given above are anticipated. So well is this established, that during
+"50 deg.-below spells" at Fairbanks, impatient, weather-bound travellers and
+freighters would busy the hospital telephone with inquiries about the
+barometer, the hospital having the only barometer in the country.
+
+After another long, cold run, on the night of Friday, the 12th of
+January, we reached Bettles, the place we had planned to spend Christmas
+at. We were unable to stir from Bettles for two solid weeks, for during
+the whole of that time the thermometer never rose above 50 deg. below zero.
+
+The long wait at Bettles would have been excessively tedious had it not
+been for the kind hospitality of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Grimm, the
+Commercial Company's agent and his wife, and this is but one of many
+times that I have been under obligation to them for cordial welcome and
+entertainment, for needs anticipated, and every sort of assistance
+gladly rendered. We had been expected many days; the Christmas
+festivities with a gathering of natives of both races had come and gone;
+still they looked for us, for in this country one does not give a man up
+merely because he is a few weeks behind time, nor hold him to account
+for unpunctuality. The natives remained for the most part, and there was
+abundant opportunity of intercourse with them and some beginnings of
+instruction. As the days passed and all arrangements for our advance
+were made, we chafed more and more at the delay, for it was very plain
+that the prospect of visiting Point Hope grew less and less; but this is
+a great country for teaching patience and resignation.
+
+[Sidenote: PARASELENAE]
+
+Some of the weather during that two weeks' wait was of quite exceptional
+severity. One night is fixed for ever in my memory. It is a very rare
+thing for the wind to blow in the "strong cold," but that night there
+was a wind at 58 deg. below zero. And high up in the heavens was a sight I
+had never seen before. The moon, little past her full, had a great ring
+around her, faintly prismatic; and equidistant from her, where a line
+through her centre parallel with the horizon would cut the ring, were
+two other moons, distinct and clear. It was a strangely beautiful thing,
+this sight of three moons sailing aloft through the starry sky, as
+though the beholder had been suddenly translated to some planet that
+enjoys a plurality of satellites, but no living being could stand long
+at gaze in that wind and that cold. A perfect paraselene is, I am
+convinced, an extremely rare thing, much rarer than a perfect parhelion
+("moon-cats" my companion thought the phenomenon should be called,
+saving the canine simile for the sun), for in seven years' travel I have
+never seen another, and the references to it in literature are few.
+
+The next day at noon, the sun not visible above the distant mountains,
+there appeared in the sky a great shining cross of orange light, just
+over the sun's position, that held and shone for nigh an hour and only
+faded with the twilight. It is not surprising that these appearances
+should deeply impress the untutored mind and should be deemed
+significant and portentous; they must deeply impress any normal mind,
+they are so grand and so strange. The man who has trained his intellect
+until it is so stale, and starved his imagination until it is so
+shrivelled that he can gaze unmoved at such spectacles, that they are
+insignificant to him, has but reduced himself to the level of the dog
+upon whom also they make no impression--though even a dog will howl at a
+great aurora. Of course we know all about them; any schoolboy can pick
+up a primer of physical geography and explain the laws of refraction,
+and the ugly and most libellous diagram of circles and angles that shows
+just how these lustrous splendours happen; but the mystery beyond is not
+by one hair's breadth impaired nor their influence upon the spectator
+diminished. In Alaska perhaps more than any other country it is the
+heavens that declare the glory of God and the firmament that shows His
+handiwork, and the awestruck Indian who comes with timid inquiry of the
+import of such phenomena is rightfully and scientifically answered that
+the Great Father is setting a sign in the sky that He still rules, that
+His laws and commandments shall never lose their force, whether in the
+heavens above or on the earth beneath.
+
+[Sidenote: THE STRONG COLD]
+
+The "strong cold" itself is an awe-inspiring thing even to those who
+have been familiar with it all their lives; and a dweller in other
+climes, endowed with any imagination, may without much difficulty enter
+into the feelings of one who experiences it for the first time. It
+descends upon the earth in the brief twilight and long darkness of the
+dead of winter with an irresistible power and an inflexible menace.
+Fifty below, sixty below, even seventy below, the thermometer reads.
+Mercury is long since frozen solid and the alcohol grows sluggish. Land
+and water are alike iron; utter stillness and silence usually reign.
+Bare the hand, and in a few minutes the fingers will turn white and be
+frozen to the bone. Stand still, and despite all clothing, all woollens,
+all furs, the body will gradually become numb and death stalk upon the
+scene. The strong cold brings fear with it. All devices to exclude it,
+to conserve the vital heat seem feeble and futile to contend with its
+terrible power. It seems to hold all living things in a crushing
+relentless grasp, and to tighten and tighten the grip as the temperature
+falls.
+
+Yet the very power of it, and the dread that accompanies it, give a
+certain fearful and romantic joy to the conquest of it. A man who has
+endured it all day, who has endured it day after day, face to face with
+it in the open, feels himself somewhat the more man for the experience,
+feels himself entered the more fully into human possibilities and
+powers, feels an exultation that manhood is stronger even than the
+strong cold. But he is a fool if ever he grow to disdain the enemy. It
+waits, inexorable, for just such disdain, and has slain many at last who
+had long and often withstood it.
+
+On those rare occasions when there is any wind, any movement of the air
+at all, there enters another and a different feeling. Into the menace of
+a power, irresistible, inflexible, but yet insentient, there seems to
+enter a purposeful, vengeful evil. It pursues. The cold itself becomes
+merely a condition; the wind a deadly weapon which uses that condition
+to deprive its victim of all defence. The warmth which active exercise
+stores up, the buckler of the traveller, is borne away. His reserves
+are invaded, depleted, destroyed. And then the wind falls upon him with
+its sword. Of all of which we were to have instance here on the Koyukuk.
+
+[Sidenote: "FOUND FROZEN"]
+
+In the second week of our stay at Bettles, while Divine service was in
+progress in the store building, crowded with whites and natives, the
+door opened and, with an inrush of cold air that condensed the moisture
+at that end of the room into a cloud and shot along the floor like steam
+from an engine exhaust, there entered an Indian covered with rime, his
+whole head-gear one mass of white frost, his snow-shoes, just removed,
+under his arm, and a beaded moose-skin wallet over his shoulder. Every
+eye was at once turned to him as he beat the frost from his parkee hood
+and thrust it back, unwrapped fold after fold of the ice-crusted scarf
+from his face, and pulled off his mittens. Seeking out the agent, he
+moved over to him and whispered something in his ear. It was plain that
+the errand was of moment and the message disturbing, and as I had lost
+the attention of the congregation and the continuity of my own
+discourse, I drew things to a close as quickly as I decently could. That
+Indian had come seventy-five miles on snow-shoes in one run, without
+stopping at all save to eat two or three times, at a continuous
+temperature of 50 deg. below zero or lower, to bring word that he had found
+a white man frozen to death on the trail; and on the Koyukuk that feat
+will always be counted to Albert the Pilot for righteousness. From the
+location and description of the dead man, there was no difficulty in
+identifying him. He was a wood-chopper under contract with the company
+to cut one hundred cords of steamboat wood against next summer's
+navigation at a spot about one hundred miles below Bettles. He had taken
+down with him on the "last water" enough grub for about three months,
+and was to return to Bettles for Christmas and for fresh supplies. After
+a day or two's rest the Indian was sent back with instructions to bring
+the body to a native village we should visit, to whipsaw lumber for a
+coffin and dig a grave, and we engaged to give the body Christian
+burial.
+
+Uneasy at the softening muscles and sinews of this long inaction, I took
+snow-shoes and a couple of Kobuks one day and made an ascent of the hill
+behind Bettles known as Lookout Mountain, because from its top the smoke
+of the eagerly expected first steamboat of the summer may be seen many
+miles down the river; being moved to that particular excursion by
+dispute among the weather-bound freighters as to the hill's height.
+
+The change of temperature as we climbed the hill was striking. On the
+first shoulder we were already out of the dense atmosphere of the valley
+and above the smoke gloom of the houses, and as we rose the air grew
+milder and milder, until at the top we emerged into the first sunshine
+of many weeks and were in an altogether different climate--balmy and
+grateful it was to us just come up from the strong cold. The aneroid
+showed the altitude about seven hundred feet above Bettles, and I
+regretted very much I had not brought the thermometer as well, for its
+reading would have been most interesting.
+
+The view from the top was brilliantly clear and far-reaching. The broad
+plain across the river was checkered black and white with alternating
+spruce thickets and lakes; beyond it and the mountains that bounded it
+lay the valley of the south fork which we had crossed fifty or sixty
+miles farther up on our journey hither. Right in front of us the middle
+fork made its big bend from southwest to south, and to the left, that
+is, to the north, the valley of the John River opened up its course
+through the sharp white peaks of the Endicott Mountains. It was in this
+direction that my eyes lingered longest. I knew that sixty or seventy
+miles up this river we could cross the low Anaktuvak Pass into the
+Anaktuvak River, which flows into the Colville, and that descending the
+Colville we could reach the shores of the Northern Ocean. It was a
+journey I had wished to make--and have wished ever since. There are many
+bands of Esquimaux on that coast, never visited save by those who make
+merchandise of them in one way or another. Please God, some day I should
+get there; meanwhile our present hopes lay west, though, indeed, these
+grew daily fainter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+BETTLES TO THE PACIFIC--THE ALATNA, KOBUK PORTAGE, KOBUK VILLAGE,
+KOTZEBUE SOUND
+
+
+ALL our preparations were long since made. Our Indian guide had been
+sent back to Fort Yukon from Coldfoot, and here we engaged a young
+Esquimau with his dog team and sled, to go across to Kotzebue Sound with
+us. There was also a young Dane who wished to go from the Koyukuk
+diggings to the diggings at Candle Creek on the Seward Peninsula, and
+him we were willing to feed in return for his assistance on the trail.
+The supplies had been carefully calculated for the journey, the
+toboggans were already loaded, and we waited but a break in the cold
+weather to start.
+
+Our course from Bettles would lead us sixty-five miles farther down the
+Koyukuk to the mouth of the Alatna. The visit to the native village and
+the burial of the poor fellow frozen to death would take us ten miles
+farther down than that, and we would return to the Alatna mouth. Then
+the way would lie for fifty miles or so up that stream, and then over a
+portage, across to the Kobuk River, which we should descend to its mouth
+in Kotzebue Sound; the whole distance being about five hundred miles
+through a very little travelled country. We learned indeed, that it had
+been travelled but once this winter, and that on the first snow. It was
+thought at Bettles that we might possibly procure some supplies at a
+newly established mission of the Society of Friends about half-way down
+the Kobuk River, but there was no certainty about it, and we must carry
+with us enough man-food to take us to salt water. Our supply of dog fish
+we might safely count upon replenishing from the natives on the Kobuk.
+Another thing that caused some thought was the supply of small money.
+There was no silver and no currency except large bills on the Koyukuk,
+and we should need money in small sums to buy fish with. So the agent
+weighed out a number of little packets of gold-dust carefully sealed up
+in stout writing-paper like medicine powders, some worth a dollar, some
+worth two dollars, the value written on the face, and we found them
+readily accepted by the natives and very convenient. Two years later I
+heard of some of those packets, unbroken, still current on the Kobuk.
+
+At last, on the 26th of January, we got away. The thermometer stood only
+a few degrees above -50 deg. when we left, but the barometer had been
+falling slowly for a couple of days, and I was convinced the cold spell
+was over. With our three teams and four men we made quite a little
+expedition, but dogs and men were alike soft, and for the first two days
+the travel was laborious and slow; then came milder weather and better
+going.
+
+[Sidenote: THE KOYUKUK "TOWNS" OF '98]
+
+We passed the two ruined huts of Peavey, the roofs crushed by the
+superincumbent snow. In the summer of 1898 a part of the stream of gold
+seekers, headed for the Klondike by way of Saint Michael, was deflected
+to the Koyukuk River by reports of recent discoveries there. A great
+many little steamboat outfits made their way up this river late in the
+season, until their excessive draught in the falling water brought them
+to a stand. Where they stopped they wintered, building cabins and
+starting "towns." In one or two cases the "towns" were electrically lit
+from the steamboat's dynamo. The next summer they all left, all save
+those who were wrecked by the ice, and the "towns" were abandoned. But
+they had got upon the map through some enterprising representative of
+the land office, and they figure on some recent maps still. Peavey,
+Seaforth, Jimtown, Arctic City, Beaver City, Bergman, are all just names
+and nothing else, though at Bergman the Commercial Company had a plant
+for a while.
+
+We passed the mouth of the Alatna, where were two or three Indian
+cabins, and went on the remaining ten miles to Moses' Village, where the
+body of the man frozen to death had been brought. Moses' Village, named
+from the chief, was the largest native village on the Koyukuk River, and
+we were glad, despite our haste, that we had gone there. The repeated
+requests from all the Indians we met for a mission and school on the
+Koyukuk River and the neglected condition of the people had moved me the
+previous year to take up the matter. This was my first visit, however,
+so far down the river.
+
+We found the coffin unmade and the grave undug, and set men vigorously
+to work at both. The frozen body had been found fallen forward on hands
+and feet, and since to straighten it would be impossible without
+several days' thawing in a cabin, the coffin had to be of the size and
+shape of a packing-case; of course the ground for the grave had to be
+thawed down, for so are all graves dug in Alaska, and that is a slow
+business. A fire is kindled on the ground, and when it has burned out,
+as much ground as it has thawed is dug, and then another fire is
+kindled. We had our own gruesome task. The body should be examined to
+make legally sure that death came from natural causes. With difficulty
+the clothes were stripped from the poor marble corpse, my companion made
+the examination, and as a notary public I swore him to a report for the
+nearest United States commissioner. This would furnish legal proof of
+death were it ever required; otherwise, since there is no provision for
+the travelling expenses of coroners, and the nearest was one hundred and
+forty or one hundred and fifty miles away, there would have been no
+inquest and no such proof.
+
+[Sidenote: A WILDERNESS TRAGEDY]
+
+The man had delayed his return to Bettles too long. When his food was
+exhausted and he had to go, there came on that terrible cold spell. A
+little memorandum-book in his pocket told the pitiful story. Day by day
+he lingered hoping for a change, and day by day there was entry of the
+awful cold. He had no thermometer, but he knew the temperature was -50 deg.
+or lower by the cracking noise that his breath made--the old-timer's
+test. At last the grub was all gone and he must go or starve. The final
+entry read: "All aboard to-morrow, hope to God I get there." The Indians
+estimated that he had been walking two days, and had "siwashed it" at
+night somewhere beside a fire in the open without bedding. Holes were
+burned in his breeches in two places, where, doubtless, he had got too
+near the fire. He had nothing whatever to eat with him save a piece of
+bacon gnawed to the rind. There were only two matches in his pocket, and
+they were mixed up with trash of birch-bark and tobacco, so it is likely
+he did not know he had them. He had lit all the fires he could light and
+eaten all the food he had to eat. Still he was plugging along towards
+the native village nine miles away. Then he lost the trail, probably in
+the dark, for it was faint and much drifted, and had taken off his
+snow-shoes to feel with his moccasined feet for the hardened snow that
+would indicate it. That was almost the end. He had gone across the river
+and back again, feeling for the trail, and then, with the deadly
+numbness already upon his brain, had wandered in a circle. The date of
+his starting in the memorandum-book and the distance travelled made it
+almost certain that, at some moment between the time when those three
+moons floated in the sky and the time when that cross glared on the
+horizon, he had fallen in the snow, never to rise again. Fifty-eight
+below zero and a wind blowing!
+
+One supposes that the actual death by freezing is painless, as it is
+certainly slow and gradual. The only instance of sudden gelation I ever
+heard of is in Longfellow's "Wreck of the Hesperus," where the skipper,
+having answered one question, upon being asked another,
+
+        "Answered never a word,
+         For a frozen corpse was he."
+
+But if the actual death be painless, the long conscious fight against it
+must be an agony; for a man of any experience must realise the peril he
+is in. The tingling in fingers and toes and then in knees and elbows is
+a warning he recognises only too well. He knows that, unless he can
+restore warmth by restoring the circulation, he is as good as frozen
+already. He increases his pace and beats his arms against his breast.
+But if his vitality be too much reduced by hunger and fatigue and cold
+to make more than a slight response to the stimulation, if the distance
+to warmth and shelter be too great for a spurt to carry him there, he is
+soon in worse case than before. Then the appalling prospect of perishing
+by the cold must rise nakedly before him. The enemy is in the breach,
+swarming over the ramparts, advancing to the heart of the fortress, not
+to be again repelled. He becomes aware that his hands and feet are
+already frozen, and presently there may be a momentary terrible
+recognition that his wits begin to wander. Frantically he stumbles on,
+thrashing his body with his arms, forcing his gait to the uttermost, a
+prey to the terror that hangs over him, until his growing horror and
+despair are mercifully swallowed up in the somnolent torpidity that
+overwhelms him. All of us who have travelled in cold weather know how
+uneasy and apprehensive a man becomes when the fingers grow obstinately
+cold and he realises that he is not succeeding in getting them warm
+again. It is the beginning of death by freezing.
+
+We buried the body on a bench of the bluff across the river from the
+native village, the natives all standing around reverently while the
+words of committal were said, and set up a cross marked with
+lead-pencil: "R. I. P.--Eric Ericson, found frozen, January, 1906." Two
+or three years later a friend sent me a small bronze tablet with the
+same legend, and that was affixed to the cross. There are many such
+lonely graves in Alaska, for scarce a winter passes that does not claim
+its victims in every section of the country. That same winter we heard
+of two men frozen on the Seward Peninsula, two on the Yukon, one on the
+Tanana, and one on the Valdez trail. This day I recorded a temperature
+of 10 deg., the first plus temperature in thirty-nine days, and that
+previous rise above zero was the first in twenty days.
+
+[Sidenote: NEGLECTED NATIVES]
+
+That night we gathered all the natives, and after long speech with poor
+interpretation I ventured to promise them a mission the next year. Some
+of them had been across to the Yukon years before and had visited the
+mission at Tanana. Some had been baptized there. Some had never seen a
+clergyman or missionary of any sort before, and had never heard the
+gospel preached. We were touched by one old blind woman who told of a
+visit to a mission on the Yukon, and how she learned to sing a hymn
+there. Her son interpreted: "She say every night she sing that hymn for
+speak to God." She was encouraged to sing it, and it turned out to be
+the alphabet set to a tune! After much pleading and with some
+hesitation, I baptized seventeen children, comforting myself with the
+assurance of the coming mission, which would undertake their Christian
+training and instruction.
+
+Back next day at the mouth of the Alatna, I was again impressed with the
+eligibility of that spot as a mission site. It was but ten miles above
+the present native village, and, with church and school established, the
+whole population would sooner or later move to it. This gives
+opportunity for regulating the building of cabins, and the advantage of
+a new, clean start. Moreover, the Alatna River is the highway between
+the Kobuk and the Koyukuk, and the Esquimaux coming over in increasing
+numbers, would be served by a mission at this place as well as the
+Indians. I foresaw two villages, perhaps, on the opposite sides of the
+river--one clustered about the church and the school, the other a little
+lower down--where these ancient hereditary enemies might live side by
+side in peace and harmony under the firm yet gentle influence of the
+church. So I staked a mission site, and set up notices claiming ground
+for that purpose, almost opposite the mouth of the Alatna, which, in the
+native tongue, is Allakaket or Allachaket.
+
+[Sidenote: THE INLAND ESQUIMAUX]
+
+There was some trail up the Alatna and we made fair headway on its
+surface, stopping two nights at Kobuk huts. We are out of the Indian
+country now, and shall see no more Indians until we are back on the
+Yukon. The mode of life, the habits, the character of the races are very
+different--the first Esquimau habitation we visited proclaiming it.
+These inland Esquimaux, though some of the younger ones have never seen
+salt water--our guide, Roxy, for one--are still essentially a salt-water
+people. Their huts, even in the midst of trees, are half-underground
+affairs, for they have not learned log-building; the windows are of
+seal gut, and seal oil is a staple article of their diet. Their clothing
+is also marine, their parkees of the hair-seal and their mukluks of the
+giant seal. Communications are always kept up with the coast, and the
+sea products required are brought across. The time for the movement of
+the Kobuks back and forth was not quite yet, though we hoped we should
+meet some parties and get the benefit of their trail. Just before we
+left the Alatna River we stopped at Roxy's fish cache and got some green
+fish, hewing them out of the frozen mass with the axe. The young man had
+fished here the previous summer, had cached the fish caught too late to
+dry in the sun, and they had remained where he left them for four or
+five months. Most of them had begun to decay before they froze, but that
+did not impair their value as dog food, though it rendered the cooking
+of them a disagreeable proceeding to white nostrils. This caching of
+food is a common thing amongst both natives and whites, and it is rarely
+that a cache is violated except under great stress of hunger, when
+violation is recognised as legitimate. Doughty, in his _Arabia Deserta_,
+mentions the same custom amongst the Arabs; Sven Hedin amongst the
+Tartars. Sparsely peopled waste countries have much the same customs all
+over the world. Even the outer garb in the Oriental deserts has much
+resemblance to our parkee; both burnoose and parkee are primarily
+windbreaks, and it makes little difference whether the wind be charged
+with snow or sand.
+
+At midday on the 3d of February we left the Alatna River and took our
+way across country for the Kobuk. We had now no trail at all save what
+had been made a couple of months before by the only other party that had
+crossed the portage this winter, and it was buried under fifteen or
+sixteen inches of snow. There was quite a grade to be climbed to reach
+the plateau over which our course lay, and the men, with rope over the
+shoulder, had to help the dogs hauling at the sled. Indeed, over a good
+deal of this portage, from time to time, the men had to do dog work, for
+the country is rolling, one ridge succeeding another, and the loose,
+deep snow made heavy and slow going. One man must go ahead breaking
+trail, and that was generally my task, though when the route grew
+doubtful and the indications too faint for white man's eye, Roxy took my
+place and I took his gee pole, and slipped his rope around my chest.
+
+Breaking trail would not be so laborious if one could wear the large
+snow-shoes that are used for hunting. But the hunting shoe, though it
+carries the man without fatigue, does not help the dogs. The small shoe
+known as the trail shoe, packs the snow beneath it, and by the time the
+trail breaker has gone forward, then back again, and then forward once
+more, the snow is usually packed hard enough to give the dogs some
+footing. Footing the dog must have or he cannot pull; a dog wallowing in
+snow to his belly cannot exert much traction on the vehicle behind him.
+The notion of snow-shoeing as a sport always seems strange to us on the
+trail, for to us it is a laborious necessity and no sport at all. The
+trail breaker thus goes over most of the ground thrice, and when he is
+anxious at the same time to get a fairly accurate estimate by the
+pedometer of the distance travelled, he must constantly remember to
+upend the instrument in his pocket when he retraces his steps, and
+restore it to its recording position when he attacks unbroken snow
+again. Also he must take himself unawares, so to speak, from time to
+time, and check the length of his stride with the tape measure and alter
+the step index as the varying surfaces passed over require.
+Conscientiously used, with due regard to its limitations, the pedometer
+will give a fair approximation of the length of a journey, but a man can
+no more tell how far he has gone by merely hanging a pedometer in his
+pocket than he can tell the height above sea-level of an inland mountain
+by merely carrying an aneroid barometer to the top.
+
+[Sidenote: THE SUNRISE AND THE MOUNTAINS]
+
+It was on this Alatna-Kobuk portage that we saw the most magnificent
+sunrise any of us could remember. It had been cloudy for some days with
+threat of snow which did not fall. We were camped in a little hollow
+between two ridges, and I had been busy packing up the stuff in the tent
+preparatory to the start, when I stepped out with a load of bedding in
+my arms, right into the midst of the spectacle. It was simple, as the
+greatest things are always simple, but so gorgeous and splendid that it
+was startling. The whole southeastern sky was filled with great luminous
+bands of alternate purple and crimson. At the horizon the bands were
+deeper in tone and as they rose they grew lighter, but they maintained
+an unmixed purity of contrasting colour throughout. I gazed at it until
+the tent was struck and the dogs hitched and it was time to start, and
+then I had to turn my back upon it, for our course lay due west, and I
+was breaking trail. But on the crest of the rising ground ahead there
+burst upon my delighted eyes a still more astonishing prospect. We were
+come to the first near view of the Kobuk mountains, and the reflected
+light of that gorgeous sunrise was caught by the flanks of a group of
+wild and lofty snow peaks, and they stood up incandescent, with a vivid
+colour that seemed to come through them as well as from them. To right
+and left, mountains out of the direct path of that light gave a soft
+dead mauve, but these favoured peaks, bathed from base to summit in
+clear crimson effulgence, glowed like molten metal. It was not the
+reflected light of the sun, but of the flaming sky, for even as I
+looked, a swift change came over them. They passed through the tones of
+red to lightest pink, not fading but brightening, and before my
+companions reached me the sun's rays sprang upon the mountains from the
+horizon, and they were golden.
+
+It seems almost foolish to the writer and may well seem tedious to the
+reader, to attempt in words the description of such scenes; yet so deep
+is the impression they produce, and so large the place they take in the
+memory, that to omit them would be to strike out much of the charm and
+zest of these arctic journeys. Again and again in the years that have
+passed, the recollection of that pomp of colour on the way to the Kobuk
+has come suddenly upon me, and always with a bounding of the spirit. I
+can shut my eyes now and see that incomparable sunrise; I can see again
+that vision of mountains filling half the sky with their unimaginable
+ardency, and I think that this world never presented nobler sight.
+Surely for its pageantry of burning, living colour, for purity and depth
+and intensity of tint, the Far North with its setting of snow surpasses
+all other regions of the earth.
+
+[Sidenote: TRAVELLING KOBUK LADS]
+
+That same day we met a couple of Kobuk youths on their way to the
+Koyukuk, and they gave us the greatest gift it was in the power of man
+to give us--a trail! There is no finer illustration of the mutual
+service of man to man than the meeting of parties going opposite ways
+across the unbroken snows. Each is at once conferring and receiving the
+greatest of favours, without loss to himself is heaping benefit on the
+other; is, it may be--has often been--saving the other, and being
+himself saved. No more hunting and peering for blazes, no more casting
+about hither and thither when open stretches are crossed; no more three
+times back and forth to beat the snow down--twenty miles a day instead
+of ten or twelve--the boys' trail meant all that to us. And our trail
+meant almost as much to them. So we were rejoiced to see them, sturdy
+youths of sixteen or seventeen, making the journey all by themselves. My
+heart goes out to these adventurous Kobuks, amiable, light-hearted,
+industrious; keen hunters, following the mountain-sheep far up where the
+Indian will not go; adepts in all the wilderness arts; heirs of the
+uncharted arctic wastes, and occupying their heritage. If I were not a
+white man I would far rather be one of these nomadic inland Esquimaux
+than any other native I know of.
+
+That same day we crossed two headwater forks of the Kokochatna, as the
+Kobuks call it, or the Hogatzitna as the Koyukuks call it, or the Hog
+River, as the white men call it, a tributary of the Koyukuk that comes
+in about one hundred and fifty miles below the Alatna. As we came down a
+steep descent to the little east fork, it showed so picturesque and
+attractive, with clumps of fine open timber on an island, that it
+remains in my mind one of the many places from the Grand Canon of the
+Colorado almost to the Grand Canon of the Noatak, where I should like to
+have a lodge in the vast wilderness.
+
+We had but crossed the west fork when we knew that we were close to the
+watershed between the Kobuk and the Koyukuk, between the streams that
+fall into Kotzebue Sound and those that fall by the Koyukuk and the
+Yukon Rivers into Bering Sea; and because it seemed a capital geographic
+feature, it was disappointing that it was so inconspicuous. Indeed, we
+were not sure which of two ridges was the actual divide. Beyond those
+ridges there was no question, for the ground sloped down to Lake
+Noyutak, a body of water some three and a half miles in length and of
+varying breadth that drains into the Kobuk. Here in a cabin we found
+three more young Kobuks, and spent the night, getting our first view of
+the Kobuk River next day, not from an eminence, as I had hoped, but only
+as we came down a bank through thick timber and opened suddenly upon it.
+By the pedometer I made the portage forty-six miles.
+
+[Sidenote: THE KOBUK RIVER]
+
+The upper Kobuk is a picturesque river, the timber being especially
+large and handsome for interior Alaska. We reached it just above the
+mouth of the Reed River, tributary from the north. The weather was
+warm--too warm for good travelling--the thermometer standing at 15--- deg.,
+20 deg., and one day even 30 deg. above zero all day long, so that we were all
+bareheaded and in our shirt-sleeves. From time to time, as the course of
+the river varied, we had distant views of the rocky mountains of the
+Endicott Range, or, as it might be written, the Endicott Range of the
+Rocky Mountains, for such, in fact, it is--the western and final
+extension of the great American cordillera. On the other side of those
+mountains was the Noatak River, flowing roughly parallel with the Kobuk,
+and discharging into the same arm of the sea.
+
+The division of the labour of camping amongst four gave us all some
+leisure at night, and I found time to read through again _The Cloister
+and the Hearth_ and _Westward Ho!_ with much pleasure, quite agreeing
+with Sir Walter Besant's judgment that the former is one of the best
+historical novels ever written. There are few more attractive roysterers
+in literature to me than Denys of Burgundy, with his "_Courage,
+camarades, le diable est mort!_" This matter of winter reading is a
+difficult one, because it is impossible to carry many books. My plan is
+to take two or three India-paper volumes of classics that have been read
+before, and renew my acquaintance with them. But reading by the light of
+one candle, though it sufficed our forefathers, is hard on our
+degenerate eyes.
+
+The days were much lengthened now, and the worst of the winter was
+done. There would still be cold and storm, but hardly again of the same
+intensity and duration. When the traveller gets well into February he
+feels that the back of the winter is broken, for nothing can take from
+him the advantage of the ever-lengthening days, the ever-climbing sun.
+
+On the afternoon of the third day on the Kobuk we reached a cabin
+occupied by two white men, the first we had seen since we left Bettles,
+and we were the first white men they had seen all the winter. They were
+waiting for the spring, having a prospecting trip in view; simply
+spending the winter eating up their grub. There was nothing whatever to
+read in the cabin, and they had been there since the freeze-up! They
+welcomed us, and we stayed overnight with them, and that night there was
+a total eclipse of the moon, of which we had a fine view. We had an
+almanac which gave the time of totality at Sitka, and we knew the
+approximate longitude of our position, so we were able to set our
+watches by it.
+
+The next two days are noted in my diary as two of the pleasantest days
+of the whole journey--two of the pleasantest days I ever spent anywhere,
+I think. A clear, cloudless sky, brilliant sunshine, white mountain
+peaks all about us, gave picture after picture, and the warm, balmy air
+made travelling a delight. There are few greater pleasures than that of
+penetrating into a new country, with continually changing views of
+beauty, under kindly conditions of weather and trail. In the yellow rays
+of the early sun, the spruce on the river bank looked like a screen of
+carved bronze, while the slender stems of birches in front of the
+spruce looked like an inlaying of old ivory upon the bronze, the whole
+set upon its pedestal of marble-like snow. The second day we took a
+portage of nine or ten miles across a barren flat and struck the river
+again just below a remarkable stretch of bank a mile or so in length,
+with never a tree or a bush or so much as the smallest shrub growing on
+it. Thick timber above suddenly ceased, thick timber below suddenly
+began again, and this bare bank reached back through open, barren flat
+to a low pass in the mountains. It was a bank of solid ice, so we were
+told later, and I remembered to have heard of ice bluffs on the Kobuk,
+and wished that the portage had struck the river above this spot instead
+of below it, that there might have been opportunity to examine it.
+
+[Sidenote: THE MISSION]
+
+[Sidenote: ENGLISH AND ESQUIMAU]
+
+A little farther down the river and we were at the new mission of the
+Society of Friends, where a cordial reception awaited us and, luxury of
+luxuries, a warm bath! Again and again the wash-tub was emptied and
+fresh water was heated until we all had wallowed to our heart's content.
+The rude log buildings of the mission had been begun the previous fall,
+and were not yet complete, but they were advanced enough for occupation,
+and the work of the mission went actively on. It was in charge of rather
+an extraordinary man. He gave us a sketch of his life, which was full of
+interest and matter for thought. For many years he was a police officer
+and jailer in the West. Then he sailed on a whaler and thus became
+acquainted with the Esquimaux. He was converted from a life of
+drunkenness and debauchery--though one fancied his character was not
+really ever so bad as he painted it--at a "Peniel" mission in a
+Californian town. He went in out of mere idle curiosity, just recovered
+from a spree, and was so wrought upon that when he came out he was a
+different creature, a new man, the old life with its appetite for
+vicious indulgence sloughed off and left behind him, and he now
+possessed with a burning desire to do some such active service for God
+as aforetime he had done for the devil. After three or four months of
+some sort of training in an institution maintained by the California
+Society of Friends--a body more like the Salvation Army, one judges,
+than the old Quakers--he volunteered for service at a branch which the
+old-established mission of the Society at the mouth of the Kobuk desired
+to plant two hundred miles or so up the river, and had come out and had
+plunged at once into his task. So here he was, some six or seven months
+installed, teacher, preacher, trader in a small way, and indefatigable
+worker in general. Pedagogical training or knowledge of "methods" he had
+none at all, but the root of the matter was in him, and surely never was
+such an insatiable school-teacher. Morning, noon, and night he was
+teaching. While he was cooking he was hearing lessons; while he was
+washing the dishes and cleaning the house he was correcting exercises in
+simple addition. In the schoolroom he was full of a genial enthusiasm
+that seemed to impart instruction by sheer dynamic force. "Boot," the
+lesson book said. There was no boot in the schoolroom, all were shod in
+mukluks. He dives into his dwelling-house attachment and comes back
+holding up a boot. "Boot," he says, and "boot" they all repeat.
+Presently the word "tooth" was introduced in the lesson. Withdrawing a
+loose artificial tooth of the "pivot" variety from his upper jaw, he
+holds it aloft and "tooth!" he cries out, and "toot!" they all cry, and
+he claps it back into his head again.
+
+We were present on Sunday at the services. There was hearty singing of
+"Pentecostal" hymns with catchy refrains, but we were compelled to
+notice again what we had noticed amongst the little bands of these
+people on the Koyukuk when we set them to singing, that the English was
+unintelligible; and since it conveyed no meaning to us could have had
+little for them. This is the inevitable result of ignoring the native
+tongue and adopting the easy expedient of teaching the singing of hymns
+and the recitation of formulas like the commandments in English. For a
+generation or two, at least, the English learned, save by children at a
+boarding-school, where nothing but English is spoken, is fragmentary and
+of doubtful import in all except the commonest matters of speech. And at
+such boarding-schools there is danger of the real misfortune and
+drawback of natives growing up to live their lives amongst natives,
+ignorant of the native tongue. There is no quick and easy way of
+stamping out a language, thank God; there is no quick and easy way of
+imparting instruction in a foreign language. By and by all the Alaskan
+natives will be more or less bilingual, but the intimate speech and the
+most clearly understood speech will still be the mother tongue. The
+singing done, there was preaching through an interpreter, and then each
+individual present "gave testimony," which consisted for the most part
+in the recitation of a text of Scripture. Then there were individual
+prayers by one and another of the congregation, and then some more
+singing. The only hymn I could find in the book that I knew was the fine
+old hymn, "How Firm a Foundation," and that was sung heartily to the
+"Adeste Fideles." They are naturally a musical race, picking up airs
+with great facility, and they thoroughly enjoy singing.
+
+[Sidenote: THE "DOUBLE STANDARD"]
+
+After the service the missionary confided some of his troubles to me. He
+had lately learned through his interpreter that the burden of most of
+the individual prayers was that the supplicator might "catch plenty
+skins" and be more successful in hunting than his fellows; and though he
+had done his best to impress upon them the superior importance of making
+request for spiritual benefit, he was afraid they had made no change.
+"Our people 'outside,'" he said, "don't understand these folk, and I'm
+not sure that I thoroughly understand them myself." "They're all
+'converted,'" he said; "they all claim to have experienced a change of
+heart, but some of them I know are not living like converted people, and
+sometimes I have my doubts about most of them." My sympathy went out to
+him in his loneliness and his earnestness and his disappointments. I
+pointed out that the emotional response to emotional preaching was
+comparatively easy to get from any primitive people, but that to change
+their whole lives, to uproot old customs of sensual indulgence, to
+engraft new ideas of virtue and chastity was a long, slow process
+anywhere in the world. It was chiefly in the matter of sexual morality
+that his doubts and difficulties lay, and I was able to assure him that
+his experience was but the common experience of all those who had
+laboured for the uplifting of savage people. Indeed, how should it be
+otherwise? Until quite lately there was almost promiscuous use of women.
+A man receiving a traveller in his dwelling overnight proffered his wife
+as a part of his hospitality; the temporary interchange of wives was
+common; young men and young women gratified themselves without rebuke;
+children were valuable however come by, and there was no special
+distinction between legitimate and illegitimate offspring. As one
+reflects on these conditions and then looks back upon conditions amongst
+white people, it would seem that all the civilised races have done is to
+set up a double standard of sexual morality as against the single
+standard of the savage. It can hardly be claimed that the average white
+man is continent, or even much more continent than the average Esquimau,
+but he has forced continence upon the greater part of his women,
+reserving a dishonoured remnant for his own irresponsible use. And there
+are signs that some of those who nowadays inveigh against the white
+man's double standard are in reality desirous of substituting, not the
+single standard of the Christian ideal, but the single standard of the
+savage. In the mining camps the prostitute has a sort of
+half-way-recognised social position, and in polite parlance is referred
+to as a "sporting lady"--surely the most horribly incongruous phrase
+ever coined; she often marries a miner who will tell you that she is as
+good as he is, and she is received afterwards by all but a few as a
+"respectable married woman."
+
+There had been some trouble of this sort at this mission. The great
+northern gold seekers' wave of '97 and '98 threw a numerous band of
+prospectors up the Kobuk as well as up the Koyukuk. The wave had receded
+and left on the Kobuk but one little pool behind it, a handful of men
+who found something better than "pay" on the Shungnak, a few miles away.
+And there was much criticism of the missionary's methods amongst them.
+Word of the arrival of strangers had brought some of them to Long Beach,
+and on Sunday night I had opportunity of addressing them, with a view to
+enlisting their sympathy, if possible. What if mistakes were made, what
+if some of the methods employed were open to question? Here was a man
+who beyond doubt was earnestly labouring in the best way he knew for the
+improvement of these natives. Such an effort demanded the co-operation
+of every right-feeling man.
+
+[Sidenote: PERSONAL CLEANLINESS]
+
+After all, however grand the physical scenery, the meteorological
+phenomena, may be, the people of any country are the most interesting
+thing in it, and we found these Esquimaux extraordinarily interesting.
+Dirty they certainly are; it is almost impossible for dwellers in the
+arctic regions to be clean in the winter, and the winter lasts so long
+that the habit of winter becomes the habit of the year. White and native
+alike accept a lower standard of personal cleanliness than is tolerated
+outside. I remember asking Bishop Rowe, before I came to Alaska: "What
+do you do about bathing when you travel in the winter?" To which he
+replied laconically: "Do without." It is even so; travellers on the
+Alaskan trails as well as natives belong to the "great unwashed." In the
+very cold weather the procuring of water in any quantity is a very
+difficult thing even for house dwellers. Every drop of it has to be
+carried from a water-hole cut far out on the ice, up a steep grade, and
+then quite a little distance back to the dwelling--for we do not build
+directly upon these eroding banks. The water-hole is continually
+freezing up and has to be continually hewed free of ice, and as the
+streams dwindle with the progress of winter, new holes must be cut
+farther and farther out. On the trail, where snow must usually be melted
+for water, it is obvious that bathing is out of the question; even the
+water for hands and face is sparingly doled by the cook, and two people
+will sometimes use the same water rather than resort to the painful
+though efficient expedient of washing with snow. If this be so despite
+aluminum pots and a full kit of camp vessels, it is much more so with
+the native, whose supply of pots and pans is very limited. I have seen a
+white man melt snow in a frying-pan, wash hands and face in it, throw it
+out, fry bacon and beans in it, then melt more snow and wash his cup and
+plate in it. There is, however, this to be said anent the disuse of the
+bath in this country, that in cold weather most men perspire very little
+indeed, and the perspiration that is exuded passes through to the outer
+garments and is immediately deposited upon them as frost; and there is
+this further to be said about dirt in general, that one blessed property
+of the cold is to kill all odours.
+
+One grows tolerant of dirt in this country; there is no denying it, and
+it is well that it is so; otherwise one would be in a chronic state of
+disgust with oneself and every one else. So the dirt of the native,
+unless specially prominent and offensive, is accepted as a matter of
+course and ignored. This obstacle overcome, the Esquimaux are an
+attractive and most interesting race, and compare to advantage with the
+Indians in almost every particular. They are a very industrious people.
+Go into an Esquimau's hut at almost any time when they are not sleeping,
+and you will find every individual occupied at some task. Here is a man
+working in wood or bone with the ingenious tools they have evolved; here
+are women working in skin or fur, and some of them are admirable
+needlewomen; here, perhaps, is another woman chewing mukluks--and many a
+white man who has kept his feet dry in overflow water is grateful to the
+teeth that do not disdain this most effective way of securing an
+intimate union between sole and upper. Even the children are busy: here
+is a boy whittling out bow and arrow--and they do great execution
+amongst rabbits and ptarmigan with these weapons that entail no cost of
+powder and shot; here is a girl beating out threads from sinew with a
+couple of flat stones. Some of us, troubled with unconscientious
+tailors, wish that a law could be passed requiring all buttons to be
+sewn on with sinew--they never come off.
+
+[Sidenote: A LIGHT-HEARTED FOLK]
+
+They are a very light-hearted people, easily amused, bubbling over with
+laughter and merriment, romping and skylarking with one another at every
+intermission of labour. One of my white travelling companions on this
+journey was in the habit of using a little piece of rabbit skin to
+protect his nose in cold or windy weather. The care of the nose is
+sometimes very troublesome indeed, it freezes more readily than any
+other portion of the body; and a little piece of rabbit skin, moistened
+and applied to the nose, will stay there and keep it warm and
+comfortable all day. But it does not exactly enhance one's personal
+attractions.
+
+We had stopped for camp and were all together for the first time in four
+or five hours, when Roxy noticed this rabbit-skin nose protector, upon
+which the breath had condensed all the afternoon until two long icicles
+depended from it, one on each side, reaching down below the mouth; and
+he fell straightway into a fit of laughter that grew uncontrollable; he
+rolled on the snow and roared. A little annoyed at this exhibition, I
+spoke sharply: "What's the matter with you, Roxy; what on earth are you
+cutting up like that for?" Checking himself for a moment, he pointed to
+my companion and said, "Alleesame _walrus_," and went off into another
+paroxysm of laughter, rolling about and roaring. At intervals all the
+evening he would break out again, and when we sat down to eat it
+overcame him once more and he rushed outside where he could give vent to
+his mirth with less offence.
+
+The boy was straightforward and conscientious. We were camped over
+Sunday once, and Roxy had noticed many marten tracks in the
+neighbourhood. He had brought a few traps along with him to set out as
+we went and pick up on his return, and he wanted to know if I thought he
+might set some that day, although it was the day of rest. Careful not to
+interfere in any way with the religious instruction any native has
+received from any source, I told him that was a matter for him to decide
+himself; that each man was responsible for his own conduct. The boy
+thought awhile--and he did not set his traps. Now that young man had
+never received any instruction at a mission; all his teaching had been
+from other Esquimaux. This same question of working on Sunday was the
+cause of some of the difficulty between the missionary at Long Beach and
+the miners at Shungnak. The sluicing or "cleaning-up" season is short,
+and mining operators generally consider that they cannot afford to lose
+an hour of it. The Kobuks employed by these miners quit their work on
+Sunday, and that brought the operations to a standstill. There was
+something to be said on the miners' side, but I rejoiced that the
+Esquimau boys showed such steadfastness to their teaching. "If you
+cannot use them six days in the week, if it has to be seven or none,
+then do as the miners on the Yukon side do, consider the country
+uninhabited, and make your arrangements as though there were no Kobuks."
+That was my advice, and this may be read in connection with Mr.
+Stefanson's caustic comments on the same rigidity of observance.
+
+We left Long Beach with a grateful feeling for the hospitality with
+which we had been received and with a substantial respect for the
+earnest missionary effort that was being put forth there. We were able
+to replenish our grub supply and also to exchange our two toboggans for
+one large sled, for we were out of the toboggan country again and they
+had already become a nuisance, slipping and sliding about on the trail.
+Our host was up early with a good breakfast for us, and speeded the
+parting guest, which on the trail is certainly an essential part of true
+hospitality, with all the honours; the natives lined up on the bank and
+the younger ones running along with us for a few hundred yards.
+
+[Sidenote: THE JADE MOUNTAINS]
+
+Soon after we left the mission we went up a series of terraces to a
+desolate, barren, wind-swept flat, the portage across which cut off a
+great bend of the river and saved us many miles of travel. To our right
+rose the Jade Mountains, whence the supply of this stone which used to
+be of importance for arrow-heads and other implements was obtained and
+carried far and wide. A light crust on the snow broke through at every
+step, though the snow was not deep enough and the ground too uneven to
+make snow-shoes useful; so we all had more or less sore feet that night
+when we regained the river and made our camp near the mouth of the
+Ambler, another tributary from the north.
+
+The next day was an exceedingly long, tedious day. The Kobuk River,
+which in its upper reaches is a very picturesque stream, began now to be
+as monotonous as the lower Yukon. It had grown to considerable size, and
+the bends to be great curves of many miles at a stretch, one of which,
+a decided bend to the north of the general westerly direction of the
+river, we were three full hours in passing down. It was while traversing
+this bend that we witnessed a singular mirage that lent to the day all
+the enlivenment it had. Before us for ten or twelve miles stretched the
+broad white expanse of the river bed, shimmering in the mellow sunlight,
+and far beyond, remote but clear, rose the sharp white peaks of the
+mountains that divide the almost parallel valleys of the Kobuk and the
+Noatak. As we travelled, these distant peaks began to take the most
+fantastic shapes. They flattened into a level table-land, and then they
+shot up into pinnacles and spires. Then they shrank together in the
+middle and spread out on top till they looked like great domed
+mushrooms. Then the broad convex tops separated themselves entirely from
+their stalk-like bases and hung detached in the sky with daylight
+underneath. And then these mushroom tops stretched out laterally and
+threw up peaks of their own until there were distinct duplicate ranges,
+one on the earth and one in the sky. It was fascinating to watch these
+whimsical vagaries of nature that went on for hours. A change in one's
+own position, from erect to stooping, caused the most convulsive
+contortions, and when once I lay down on the trail that I might view the
+scene through the lowest stratum of the agitated air, every peak shot up
+suddenly far into the sky like the outspreading of one's fingers, to
+subside as suddenly as I rose to my feet again. The psalmist's query
+came naturally to the mind, "Why hop ye so ye hills?" and our Kobuk boy
+Roxy, whose enjoyment of fine landscapes and strange sights was always
+a pleasure to witness, answered the unspoken question. "God make
+mountains dance because spring come," he said prettily enough.
+
+Then we crossed another portage and cut off ten miles of river by it,
+and when we reached the river again I wanted to stop, for it grew
+towards evening and here was good camping-ground. But we had lately met
+some travelling Kobuks and they had told Roxy of a cabin "just little
+way" farther on, and I yielded to the rest of the company, who would
+push on to it and thus avoid the necessity of making camp. That native
+"just little way" is worse than the Scotch "mile and a bittock"; indeed,
+the natives have poor notion of distance in general, and miles have as
+vague meaning to them as kilometres have to the average Anglo-Saxon.
+
+[Sidenote: A BELATED CAMP]
+
+On and on we pushed, mile after mile, and still no cabin. In the
+gathering dusk we would continually think we saw it; half-fallen trees
+or sloping branches simulating snow-covered gables. At last it grew
+quite dark, and when there was general agreement that we must seek the
+cabin no longer, but camp, there was no place to camp in. Either the
+bank was inaccessible or there was lack of dry timber. We went on thus,
+seeking rest and finding none, until seven-thirty, and then made camp by
+candle-light, in a poor place at that, having trudged thirty-five miles
+that day. A night-made camp is always an uncomfortable camp, and an
+uncomfortable camp means a miserable night, which to-morrow must pay
+for. We did not get to bed till nearly midnight, and it was
+nine-forty-five when we started out next morning, and we made only
+fifteen miles that day.
+
+The Kobuk valley continued to open out wider and wider and the mountains
+right and left to recede. The Jade Mountains were now dim and distant
+behind us, and new ranges were coming into view. The people on this
+lower river are very few. It was just about one hundred miles from Long
+Beach when we reached the next native village, a miserable collection of
+pole dwellings, half underground, with perhaps a score of inhabitants.
+Certainly the conditions of life deteriorated as we descended this
+river. The country seems to afford nothing but fish; we were amongst the
+ichthyophagi pure and simple. Roxy, bred and born on the upper Kobuk and
+never so far down before, is very scornful about it. "Me no likee this
+country," he says; "no caribou, no ptarmigan, no rabbits, no timber, no
+nothin'." The weather had grown raw and cold again, with a constant
+disagreeable wind that took all the fun out of travelling. We passed a
+place where a white man was pessimistically picking away at a vein of
+coal in the river bluff. "Yes, we been here all winter," he said,
+"working on the blamed ledge. I always knowed it was goin' to pinch out,
+and now it's begun to pinch. My partner's gone to Candle for more grub,
+but I told him it weren't no use. It's pinchin' out right now. I knowed
+it afore we started work, but the blamed fool wouldn't listen to me.
+'It'll pinch out,' I told him a dozen times; 'you mark my word it'll
+pinch out,' I told him, and now it's begun to pinch; and I hope he'll be
+satisfied." We were reminded of the many coal-mines from time to time
+located on the Yukon, in all or nearly all of which the vein has
+"pinched out." The deposits on the coast may be all the fancy of the
+magazine writer paints, and may hold the "incalculable wealth" that is
+attributed to them, but the coal on the interior rivers seems in scant
+measure and of inferior quality.
+
+The same night we reached the native village at the mouth of the
+Squirrel River, another northern tributary--the Kobuk receives most of
+its waters from the north--and we spent the night and the next day,
+which was Sunday, in one of the half-underground huts of the place, in
+company with twelve other people. Here we found Roxy's brother, dubbed
+"Napoleon" by some white man. They had not seen one another for years,
+yet all the greeting was a mutual grunt. The Kobuks are not
+demonstrative in their affections, but it would not be right to conclude
+the affection lacking. I have seen an old Esquimau woman taking part in
+a dance the night after her husband was buried, yet it would have been
+unjust to have concluded that she was callous and indifferent. It is
+very easy to misunderstand a strange people, and very hard to understand
+them thoroughly.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CANINE INTRUDER]
+
+The roof of the tent was dome-shaped and it was lit by a seal-gut
+skylight. In the morning while I was conducting Divine service and
+attempting most lamely by the mouth of a poor interpreter to convey some
+instruction, a dog fight outside adjourned to the roof and presently
+both combatants came tumbling through the gut window into the midst of
+the congregation. They were unceremoniously picked up and flung out of
+the door, a few stitches with a needleful of sinew repaired the window,
+and the proceedings were resumed. These gut windows have their
+convenience as well as their inconvenience. When the hut gets too warm
+and close even for Esquimaux, the seal gut is folded back and the outer
+air rushes in to the great refreshment of the occupants; when the hut is
+cool enough the gut is replaced. A skylight is far and away the best
+method of illuminating any single-story structure, and this membrane is
+remarkably translucent, while the snow that falls or frost that forms
+upon such a skylight is quickly removed by beating the hand upon the
+drum-like surface. All glass windows must be double glazed, or else in
+the very cold weather they are quickly covered with a thick deposit of
+frost from the condensation of the moisture inside the room, and then
+they admit much less light than gut does. One of its unpleasant features
+is the way the membrane snaps back and forth with a report like a pistol
+whenever the door is opened and shut, but on the whole it is a very good
+substitute for glass indeed.
+
+[Sidenote: SLEEPING CUSTOMS]
+
+These river Esquimaux vary greatly in physical appearance. While many of
+them are somewhat undersized and all have small feet and hands, some are
+well-developed specimens of manhood. "Riley Jim," the chief of this
+tribe, would be counted a tall, stalwart man anywhere. And while many
+have coarse, squat features, here and there is one who is decidedly
+attractive in appearance. A sweet smile which is often upon the face,
+and small, regular white teeth, greatly help to redeem any countenance.
+A youth of about eighteen at the Squirrel River would properly be called
+handsome, one thinks--though amongst native people one grows a little
+afraid of forgetting standards of comparison; and his wife--for he was
+already a husband--was a decidedly pretty girl. A word ought to be said
+which applies to all the Esquimaux we met. Although many people live in
+one hut and there is no possible privacy, yet we saw no immodesty of any
+sort. They sleep entirely nude--probably our own great-grandparents did
+the same, at least the people of Defoe and Smollet did, for nightshirts
+and pyjamas are very modern things. There is much to be said from an
+hygienic point of view in favour of that custom as against turning in
+"all standing" as the Indian generally does, or sleeping in the day
+underwear as most white men do. But although every one of a dozen people
+in cabin after cabin that we stayed at on the Kobuk River above and
+below this place, of both sexes and all ages, would thus strip
+completely and go to bed, there was never any exposure of the body at
+all. It may be, of course, that our presence imposed a greater care in
+this respect, but it did not so impress us; it seemed the normal thing.
+Another noticeable feature of the lives of all these people was their
+devoutness in the matter of thanks before and after meat. Some of them
+would not so much as give and receive a drink of cold water without a
+long responsive grace.
+
+As we went on down the river the country grew bleaker and drearier and
+the few scattered inhabitants were living more and more the life of the
+seacoast. The dwellings resembled igloos more than cabins, being
+completely covered with snow and approached by underground passages,
+with heavy flaps of untanned sealskin to close them. When we passed a
+fork of the river we knew that we were entering the delta of the Kobuk,
+and that another day would take us to the mission on Kotzebue Sound. It
+was a long, hard day, in which we made forty miles, but an interesting
+one. With a start at six, we were at the mouth by nine-thirty. The
+spruce which had for some time been dwarfing and dwindling gave place to
+willows, the willows shrank to shrubs, the shrubs changed to coarse
+grass thrusting yellow tassels through the snow. The river banks sank
+and flattened out and ceased, and we were on Hotham Inlet with the long
+coast-line of the peninsula that forms it stretching away north and
+south in the distance. Roxy's bewilderment was amusing. He stopped and
+gazed about him and said: "Kobuk River all pechuk!" ("Pechuk" means
+"played out.") "What's the matter, no more Kobuk River?" I think his
+mind had never really entertained the notion of the river ending, though
+of course he must often have heard of its mouth in the salt water. He
+was out of his country, his bearings all gone, a feeling of helpless
+insecurity taking the place of his usual confidence, and I think he said
+no more all that day.
+
+We had to traverse the ice of Hotham Inlet northward to its mouth,
+double the end of the peninsula, and then travel south along the coast
+to the mission at Kikitaruk, the peninsula being too rugged to cross.
+Three considerable rivers drain into Hotham Inlet, roughly parallel in
+their east and west courses, the Noatak, the Kobuk, and the Selawik, so
+that its waters must be commonly more fresh than salt, for its bounds
+are narrow and the extensive delta of its eastern shore would argue its
+depth slight. Ahead of us, as we travelled north making a bee-line for
+the end of the peninsula, all the afternoon, loomed the rocky promontory
+of Krusenstern, one of Kotzebue's capes, and far beyond, stretching up
+the dim coast-line, lay the way to Point Hope. It was with a sinking of
+the heart that I gazed upon it, for I knew already, though I had not
+announced a decision, that the road to Point Hope could not be my road
+that year. All day long the thermometer stood between -40 deg. and -30 deg., and
+the constant light sea-breeze kept scarfs wrapped closely about mouths
+and noses, which always means disagreeable travel. When the company
+stopped at noon to eat a little frozen lunch, I was too chilly to cease
+my movement and pressed on. The day of that blessed comfort of the
+trail, the thermos flask, was not yet. By two-thirty we had reached Pipe
+Spit, which still further contracts the narrow entrance of the inlet,
+and turning west for a mile or two rounded the point and then turned
+south for ten miles along the coast. Just about dark we reached the
+mission and stood gazing out over the rough ice of Kotzebue Sound to the
+Arctic Ocean, having made the forty miles in ten and a half hours. We
+had come about one thousand miles from Fairbanks, all of it on foot and
+most of it on snow-shoes.
+
+[Sidenote: THE ARCTIC OCEAN]
+
+So here was my first sight of the Arctic Ocean. All day long I had
+anticipated it, and it stirred me,--a dim, grey expanse stretching vast
+and vague in the dusk of the evening. The old navigators whose stories I
+had read as a boy passed before me in their wonderful, bold sailing
+vessels, going in and out uncharted waters that steamships will not
+venture to-day--Kotzebue, Beechey, Collinson, McClure--pushing
+resolutely northward.
+
+Less happy had been my first sight of the Pacific Ocean, five years
+before. I had the ill luck to come upon it by way of that Western Coney
+Island, Santa Monica, and from the merry-go-rounds and cheap eating
+places Balboa and Magellan and Franky Drake fled away incontinent and
+would not be conjured back; though, indeed, the original discoverers
+would have had yet further occasion to gaze at one another "with a wild
+surmise" if they had seen shrieking companies "shooting the chutes." But
+here was vastness, here was desolation, here was silence; jagged ice
+masses in the foreground and boundless expanse beyond, solemn and
+mysterious. The Arctic Ocean was even as I had pictured it.
+
+The missionary in charge at Kikitaruk had been informed by letter of our
+projected journey during the previous summer and had long expected us.
+We were received with kindness and hospitality, and after supper began
+at once our acquaintance with his work, for there was a service that
+night which it was thought we should attend. I spoke for a few minutes
+through an excellent interpreter and then spent a couple of hours
+nodding over the stove, overcome with sleep, while there was much
+singing and "testimony."
+
+[Sidenote: TOTAL-ABSTINENCE ESQUIMAUX]
+
+The Californian Society of Friends, established here a number of years
+with branches at other points on Kotzebue Sound, has done an excellent
+work amongst the Esquimaux. If they had accomplished nothing else it
+would stand to the everlasting credit of the Society's missionaries that
+they have succeeded in imbuing the natives under their charge with a
+total aversion to all intoxicating liquor. We had come down from the
+remotest points to which the influence of these people has extended; we
+had met their natives five hundred miles away from their base of
+instruction, and everywhere we found the same thing. It was said by the
+white men on the Koyukuk that a Kobuk could not be induced to take a
+drink of whisky. It seemed to us a pity that the force of this most
+wholesome doctrine should be weakened by the unsuccessful attempt to
+include tobacco in the same rigorous prohibition. In several cabins
+where we stayed there was no sign of smoking until members of our party
+produced pipes, whereupon other pipes were furtively produced and the
+tobacco that was offered was eagerly accepted. From any rational point
+of view the putting of whisky and tobacco in the same category is surely
+a folly. There can be few more harmless indulgences to the native than
+his pipe, and no one knows the solace of the pipe until he has smoked it
+around the camp-fire in the arctic regions after a hard day's journey.
+
+The decision to turn my back on Point Hope was, I think, the most
+painful decision I ever made in my life; with all my heart I wanted to
+go on. It was only one hundred and sixty or one hundred and seventy
+miles away. The journey had been made in three or four days; but we
+were now come to a country where travel is impossible in bad weather and
+where bad weather prevails; and that journey might quite as likely take
+two weeks. I worked over the calendar in my diary, figuring how many
+days of travel still remained, allowing reasonable margins, and I could
+not see that I had much more than time to get back to Fairbanks before
+the break-up, which for sufficient reason I regarded as my first duty.
+The day of rest at Kikitaruk was Washington's birthday, the 22d of
+February. Eight weeks would bring us to the 19th April, by which time
+the trails would be already breaking up. Counting out Sundays, that left
+forty-eight days of travelling with something like twelve hundred miles
+yet to make without going to Point Hope--an average of about twenty-five
+miles a day. I knew that we had made no such average in the distance
+already covered, and though I knew also that travelling improved
+generally as the season advanced, I did not know how very much better
+going there is on the wind-hardened snows of the coast when travelling
+is possible at all. Again and again I have regretted that I did not take
+the chance and push on, but at the time I decided as I thought I ought
+to decide, and one has no real compunctions when that is the case.
+
+[Sidenote: THE RESOLUTION TO TURN SOUTH]
+
+So a first-hand knowledge of our own most interesting work among the
+Esquimaux was not for me on that occasion--and there has arisen no
+opportunity since. Mr. Knapp, who had planned to spend the rest of the
+winter at Point Hope, would get a guide and a team here and turn north
+after some days' rest, while I would turn south. Roxy was impatient to
+return to Bettles. "Me no likee this country," was all that could be got
+out of him. So I paid him his money and made him a present of the .22
+repeating rifle with which he had killed so many ptarmigan on the
+journey, outfitted him with clothes, grub, and ammunition, and let him
+go; saying good-bye with regret, for he was a good boy to us all the
+way.
+
+It was late on the night of our single day of rest when I got to bed,
+for there had been squaring up of accounts and much writing, and when I
+went to bed I did not sleep. Again and again I reviewed the decision I
+had come to and fought against it, though such is far from my common
+habit. Even as I write, years after, the bitter rebellious reluctance
+with which I turned south comes back to me. I wished the hospital at
+Fairbanks at the bottom of the deep blue sea. I protested I would go on
+and complete my journey, even though it involved "thawing out" at Tanana
+and getting to Fairbanks on a steamboat in the summer. I had a free
+hand, a kindly and complaisant bishop, and none would call me strictly
+to account. Then I realised that it was merely pride of purpose,
+self-willed resolution of accomplishing what had been essayed--in a
+word, personal gratification for which I was fighting, and with that
+realisation came surrender and sleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE SEWARD PENINSULA--CANDLE CREEK, COUNCIL, AND NOME
+
+
+ONE day's rest was not a great deal after the distance we had come--and
+that day fully occupied with business--but since Point Hope was
+abandoned some sort of schedule must be made for the Seward Peninsula,
+and where Sunday shall be spent is always an important factor in
+arranging these itineraries. There was just time to reach Candle for the
+next Sunday and it was decided to attempt it. Hans would accompany me as
+far as Candle, where he hoped to find work. It meant two days of
+forty-five miles each, for it is ninety miles from Kikitaruk to Candle,
+but they told us it could be done.
+
+So the reluctant adieus made, letters despatched, some mailed here at
+Kikitaruk, some to be carried back to Bettles and mailed there--these
+latter getting outside long before the former--we started at seven in
+the morning instead of six, as we had planned, on the journey down the
+shore of Kotzebue Sound. That hour's delay turned out to be a calamity
+for us.
+
+The trail was smooth along the beach until Cape Blossom was reached, and
+I had the first riding of the winter, Hans and I alternately running and
+jumping on the sled. There was a portage across the cape, and three or
+four miles below it was the wreck of the river steamer _Riley_, which
+used to make a voyage up the Kobuk with supplies for the miners at the
+Shungnak. The thermometer was at -38 deg. when we started, and the same
+light but keen breeze was blowing that had annoyed us on the other side
+of the peninsula. What a barren, desolate region it is!--low rocks
+sinking away to the dead level of the snow-field on the one hand,
+nothing but the ice-field on the other.
+
+[Sidenote: A BAD NIGHT]
+
+[Sidenote: CAMPED IN THE OPEN]
+
+We were bound for an igloo forty-five miles from the mission, the only
+shelter between Kikitaruk on the peninsula and Kewalik on the mainland,
+and we had been warned that the igloo would be easy to miss if it grew
+dark as it would be almost indistinguishable from the snow-drifts of the
+shore. Some directions from a multitude of counsellors remembered in one
+sense by Hans and in another by me, added to our uncertainty as to just
+where the igloo lay. The wind increased in force as the evening advanced
+and the last time I looked at the thermometer it still registered -38 deg..
+The sun set over the sound with another of those curious distortions
+which had before proved ominous to us. It was flattened and swollen out
+like a pot-bellied Chinese lantern, with a neck to it and an irregular
+veining over its surface that completed the resemblance. The wind
+increased until the air was full of flying snow and it grew dark, and
+still there was no sign of the igloo. Only slowly and with much
+difficulty could the trail be followed, and that meant we were soon not
+moving fast enough to keep warm in the fierce wind. At last we lost the
+trail altogether, and sometimes we found ourselves out on the rough ice
+of the sound and sometimes wallowing in a fresh snow-drift on the shore.
+I became possessed with the fear that we had passed the igloo. I was
+positive that we were told at the mission that we should reach it
+_before_ the high bluffs were passed, and we had passed them a long way
+and had now but a shallow shelf to mark the coast-line. It is strange
+how long that delusion about passing his destination will pursue the
+Alaskan traveller. Presently the dogs dropped off a steep bank in the
+dark, and only by good fortune we were able to keep the heavy sled from
+falling upon them, for they were dead tired and lay where they dropped.
+With freezing fingers I unhitched the dogs while Hans held the sled, and
+we lowered it safely down. But it was plain that it was dangerous to
+proceed. We could not find the trail again and were growing alarmingly
+cold. We were "up against it," as they say here, "up against it good and
+strong." We had a tent but no means of putting it up, a stove but
+nothing to burn in it, a grub box full of food but no way to cook it. So
+the first night of coast travel was to show us the full rigour and
+inhospitality of the coast and to make us long for the interior again.
+Wood can almost always be found there within a few miles, if it be not
+immediately at hand, and no one properly appreciates the hospitality of
+a clump of spruce-trees until he has spent a night of storm lying out on
+this barren coast. We turned the dogs loose and threw them a fish
+apiece, unlashed the sled, and got out our bedding. I had been sleeping
+in robes, Hans in a shedding caribou-hide sleeping-bag that was my pet
+aversion. When he crawled out in the morning he was so covered with hair
+that he looked like a caribou, and the miserable hairs were always
+getting into the food. We fished them out of the coffee, pulled them out
+of the butter, and picked them out of the bread. But now in that
+sleeping-bag he had an enormous advantage. We lay side by side on the
+snow in the lee of the sled, and, tuck myself up with blanket and robe
+as I would, it was impossible to keep the swirling snow from coming in.
+I called the dogs to me and made them lie on my feet and up against my
+side, and so long as they lay still I could get a little warmth, but
+whenever they rose and left me I grew numb again. But Hans in his
+sleeping-bag was snoring. The bag is the only bedding on the coast.
+Added to the physical discomfort of that sleepless, shivery night was
+some mental uneasiness. There was no telling to what height the storm
+might rise, nor how long it might continue. Sometimes travellers
+overtaken in this way on the coast have to lie in their sleeping-bags
+for three days and nights before they can resume their journey. The only
+interest the night held was the thought that came to me that as nearly
+as I could tell we camped exactly on the Arctic Circle. The long night
+dragged its slow length to the dawn at last and the wind moderated a
+little at the same time, so with the first streak in the east I awoke
+Hans, we gathered our poor dogs together, rolled up the snow-incrusted
+bedding, and resumed our journey. Two miles farther on was the igloo!
+Our calls awoke some one and we were bidden to enter. Descending a
+ladder and crawling through a dark passage we came in to the grateful
+warmth and shelter. The chamber was crowded with sleeping Esquimaux and
+reeked with seal oil and fish, but Hans said it "looked good and smelled
+good to him," and so it did to me also. One has to lie out on that coast
+in a storm to appreciate the value of mere shelter. We went at once to
+cooking, for we had eaten nothing but a doughnut or two in twenty-four
+hours, and surely never meal was more relished than the reindeer steaks
+and the coffee we took amongst those still sleeping Esquimaux. I should
+have liked to spend the day and the next night there, for they were
+friendly and kindly, but the wind had moderated somewhat and there was
+still a chance to reach Candle for Sunday. With the offer of a sack of
+flour at Kewalik we induced a couple of Esquimaux to accompany us, for I
+knew we had to cross the mouth of a bay over the ice to reach the
+mainland and I wanted to take no more chances.
+
+Our company, again raised to four, started out about nine, and until the
+Choris Peninsula was reached the trail still skirted the shore. It is
+strange that Kotzebue, who named this peninsula of a peninsula for the
+artist who accompanied his expedition in 1816, should have left the main
+peninsula itself unnamed, and that the British expedition which named
+Cape Blossom ten years later should have failed to supply the omission.
+It still bears no name on the map. We portaged across the Choris
+Peninsula and at the end of the portage took a straight course across
+the mouth of Escholtz Bay (Escholtz was Kotzebue's surgeon) for Kewalik
+on the mainland, passing Chamisso Island, named for Kotzebue's poet
+friend. There is something very interesting to me in this voyage of
+Kotzebue's, and I have long wished to come across a full narrative of
+it. But the bitter wind that swept across that ice-sheet with the
+thermometer at -30 deg. brought one's thoughts back to one's own condition.
+My hands I could not keep warm with the gear that had sufficed for 50 deg.
+and 60 deg. below in the interior, and I was very glad to procure from one
+of our native companions a pair of caribou mitts with the hair inside,
+an almost invulnerable gauntlet against cold. If that wind had been in
+our faces instead of on our sides I am sure we could not have travelled
+at all. At last we won across the ice and brought up at a comfortable
+road-house at Kewalik, about ten miles from Candle. Here we lay
+overnight, taking the opportunity of thawing out and drying the
+frost-crusted bedding, leaving the short run into town for the morning.
+
+[Sidenote: CANDLE CREEK]
+
+The diggings on Candle Creek yield to the Koyukuk diggings only as the
+most northerly gold mining in the world. Although the general methods
+are the same in all Alaskan camps, local circumstances introduce many
+differences. In all Alaskan camps the ground is frozen and must be
+thawed down. The timber of the interior renders wood the natural fuel
+for the production of the steam that thaws the ground, but the scarcity
+of wood on the Seward Peninsula substitutes coal. There is coal on the
+peninsula itself, but of very inferior quality, mixed with ice. One may
+see chunks of coal with veins of ice running through them thrown upon
+the fire. The wood of the interior is a great factor in its commercial
+and domestic economy, and its absence on the Seward Peninsula makes
+great change not only in the natural aspect of the country but in the
+whole aspect of its industrial and domestic life also. Wood-chopping for
+the stove and the mill, wood-sawing, wood-hauling employ no small
+percentage of all the white men in the interior--occupations which do
+not exist at all on the peninsula. But its encompassment by the sea, its
+peninsularity, is the dominating difference between the Seward Peninsula
+and the interior, and does indeed make a different country of it
+altogether. All prices are very much lower on the peninsula because
+ships can bring merchandise directly from the "outside." Thus amongst
+those who have money to spend there is a more lavish scale of living
+than in the interior towns, and luxuries may be enjoyed here that are
+out of the question there. Perhaps, conversely, it is true that life on
+the peninsula is somewhat harder for the poorer class. Whether a railway
+from salt water to the mid-Yukon would redress this great difference in
+the cost of everything may be doubted. Railways do not usually operate
+at less than water-rates. There will probably always be an advantage in
+the cost of living and mining in favour of the Seward Peninsula camps.
+
+There had been no public religious service of any sort in Candle, with
+its several hundreds of population, in three years, so there was special
+satisfaction in having reached the place for Sunday when many miners
+were in town from the creeks, and an overflowing congregation was
+readily assembled. And there was great pleasure in three days' rest at
+the hospitable home of a friend while the temperature remained below
+-40 deg., exacerbated by a wind that rendered travelling dangerous.
+Moreover, by waiting I had company on the way, and now that I was
+without native attendant or white companion, and disposed, if possible,
+to make the journey right across the peninsula to Council and then to
+Nome without engaging fresh assistance, I was doubly glad of the
+opportunity of travelling with two men bound for the same places and
+acquainted with the route.
+
+[Sidenote: THE SEWARD PENINSULA]
+
+Travelling, like so many other things, is very different on the Seward
+Peninsula. The constant winds beat down and harden the snow until it has
+a crust that will carry a man anywhere. There are only two means by
+which snow becomes crusted; one is this packing and solidifying by the
+wind, and the other is thawing and freezing again. There is much less
+wind in the interior than on the coast, and usually much less snowfall,
+and the greater part of the surface of the country is protected by
+trees; the climate, being continental instead of marine, is not subject
+to such great fluctuations of temperature. A thaw sufficiently
+pronounced or sufficiently prolonged to put a stout crust on the snow
+when freezing is resumed, is a very rare thing in the interior and a
+common thing on the coast. So a striking difference in travel at once
+manifests itself; in the interior all the snow is soft except on a
+beaten trail itself, while in the Seward Peninsula all the snow is alike
+hard. The musher is not confined to trails--he can go where he pleases;
+and his vehicle is under no necessity of conforming in width to a
+general usage of the country--it may be as wide as he pleases. Hence the
+hitching of dogs two and three abreast; hence the sleds of twenty-two,
+twenty-four, or twenty-six inches in width. My tandem rig aroused the
+curiosity of those who saw it. Hence many other differences also.
+Hitherto we had not dreamed of watering the dogs since snow fell; now I
+found their mouths bloody from their ineffectual attempts to dig up the
+hard snow with their teeth, and had to water them night and morning. It
+is not the custom on the Seward Peninsula to cook for the dogs, and dog
+mushers there argue the needlessness of that trouble. But the true
+reason is other and obvious. It is difficult for the traveller to get
+enough wood to cook for himself, let alone the dogs. On the Seward
+Peninsula skis are extensively used when there is soft snow; the
+prevalence of brush almost everywhere in the interior renders them of
+little use--and they are, therefore, little used, snow-shoes being
+universal.
+
+So, as in nearly all such matters everywhere, local peculiarities, local
+differences, local customs, usually arise from local conditions, and the
+wise man will commonly conform so soon as he discovers them. There is
+almost always a sufficient reason for them.
+
+[Sidenote: A "SIDLING" TRAIL]
+
+The journey from Candle to Council was a surprisingly swift one. We
+covered the one hundred and thirty miles in three days, far and away the
+best travelling of the winter so far, but the usual time, I found. The
+hard snow gives smooth passage though the interior of the peninsula is
+rugged and mountainous; two prominent elevations, the Ass's Ears,
+standing up as landmarks during the first day of the journey. The route
+crossed ridge after ridge with steep grades, and the handling of the
+heavy sled alone was too much for me. Again and again it was overturned,
+and it was all that I could do, and more than I ought to have done, to
+set it up again. The wind continued to blow with violence, and shelter
+from it there was none. One hillside struggle I shall always remember.
+The trail sloped with the hill and the wind was blowing directly down
+it. I could keep no footing on the marble snow and had fallen heavily
+again and again, in my frantic efforts to hold sled and dogs and all
+from sweeping down into a dark ravine that loomed below, when I
+bethought me of the "creepers" in the hind-sack, used on the rivers in
+passing over glare ice. With these irons strapped to my feet I was able
+to stand upright, but it was only by a hair's breadth once and again
+that I got my load safely across. When I was wallowing in a hot bath at
+Council two days later I found that my hip and thigh were black and blue
+where I had fallen, though at the time, in my anxiety to save the dogs
+and the sled, I had not noticed that I had bruised myself. So, judging
+great things by little, one understands how a soldier may be sorely
+wounded without knowing it in the heat and exaltation of battle.
+
+Then for a while there would be such travel as one sees in the
+children's picture-books, where the man sits in the sled and cracks his
+whip and is whisked along as gaily as you please--such travel as I had
+never had before; but there was no pleasure in it--the wind saw to
+that.
+
+On the second day we crossed "Death Valley," so called because two men
+were once found frozen in it; a bleak, barren expanse, five or six miles
+across, with a great gale blowing right down it, charged not only with
+particles of hard snow but with spicules of ice and grains of sand. Our
+course was south and the gale blew from the northwest, and the right
+side of one's body and the right arm were continually numb from the
+incessant beating of the wind. The parkee hood had to be drawn closely
+all the time, and the eyes were sore from trying to peer ahead through
+the fur edging of the hood. One grows to hate that wind with something
+like a personal animosity, so brutal, so malicious does it seem. An
+incautious turn of the head and the scarf that protected mouth and nose
+was snatched from me and borne far away in an instant, beyond thought of
+recovery. It seems to lie in wait, and one fancies a fresh shrill of
+glee in its note at every new discomfiture it can inflict. There is
+nothing far-fetched in the native superstition that puts a malignant
+spirit in the wind; it is the most natural feeling in the world. I said
+so that night in camp, and one of my companions mentioned something
+about "rude Boreas," and I laughed. The gentle myths of Greece do not
+fit this country. The Indian name means "the wind beast," and is
+appropriate.
+
+A savage, forbidding country, this whole interior of the Seward
+Peninsula, uninhabited and unfit for habitation; a country of naked rock
+and bare hillside and desolate, barren valley, without amenities of any
+kind and cursed with a perpetual icy blast.
+
+[Sidenote: DEATH VALLEY]
+
+The valley crossed and its ridge surmounted, a still more heart-breaking
+experience was in store. We descended the frozen bed of a creek from
+which the wind had swept every trace of snow so that the ice was
+polished as smooth as glass. The dogs could get no footing and were
+continually down on their bellies, moving their legs instinctively but
+helplessly, like the flippers of a turtle, while the wind carried dogs
+and sled where it pleased. The grade was considerable and in bends the
+creek spread out wide. Nothing but the creepers enabled a man to stand
+at all, and creepers and brake together could not hold the sled from
+careering sideways across the ice, dragging the dogs with it, until the
+runners struck some pebble or twig frozen in the ice and the sled would
+be violently overturned. Twice with freezing fingers I unlashed that
+sled lying on its side, and took out nearly all the load before I could
+succeed in getting it upright again, losing some of the lighter articles
+each time. The third time was the worst of all. The brake had been
+little more than a pivot on which sled and dogs were swung to leeward,
+but now the teeth had become so blunt that, though I stood upon it with
+all my weight, it would not hold at all nor check the sideways motion
+under the impulse of the wind. Right across the creek we went, dragging
+the dogs behind, jerking them hither and thither over the glassy
+surface. I saw the rocks towards which we were driving, but was
+powerless to avert the disaster, and hung on in some hope, I suppose, of
+being able to minimise it, till, with a crash that broke two of the
+uprights and threw me so hard that I skinned my elbow and hurt my head,
+we were once more overturned. Never since I reached manhood, I think,
+did I feel so much like sitting down and crying. It seemed hopeless to
+think about getting down that creek until the wind stopped, and one
+doubts if the wind ever does stop in that country. But there was no good
+sitting there like a shipwrecked mariner, nursing sores and misfortunes;
+presently one would begin to feel sorry for oneself--that last resort of
+incompetence. And the bitter wind is a great stimulus. It will not
+permit inaction. So I was up again, fumbling at the sled lashings as
+best I could with torpid fingers, when one of my companions, uneasy at
+my delay, very kindly made his way back, and with his assistance I was
+able to get the sled upright again without unloading and hold it
+somewhat better on its course until another bend or two brought us to
+the partial shelter of bluffs and, a little farther, to the cabin where
+we were to spend the night. I understood now why my companions had a
+sort of hinged knife-edge fastened to one runner of their sled. By the
+pressure of a foot the knife-edge engaged the ice and held the sled on
+its course. This is another Seward Peninsula device.
+
+[Sidenote: THE KINDLY SWEDE]
+
+I have it in my diary that "a Swede named Petersen was very kind to us
+at the cabin, cooking for us and giving us cooked dog feed." Blessed
+Swede named Petersen!--there are hundreds of them in Alaska--and I shall
+never forget that particular one's kindness--the only man I met in the
+Seward Peninsula who still persisted in cooking dog feed whenever he
+could. He had cooked up a mess of rice and fish enough to last his three
+or four dogs several days while he sojourned at this cabin, and he gave
+it all to us and would take nothing for it. His language was what
+Truthful James calls "frequent and painful and free." I ignored it for a
+while, loath to take exception to anything a man said who had been so
+kind. But at last I could stand it no longer--it took all the savour out
+of his hospitality--and I said: "I hope you won't mind my saying it, for
+I'd hate to give offence to a man who has been so good to strangers as
+you have, but I wish you'd cut out that cursing; it hurts my ears." He
+sat silent a moment looking straight at me, and I was not sure how he
+had taken it. Then he said: "Maybe you been kinder to me saying that,
+than I been to you. That's the first time I ever been call down for
+cursin'. I don't mean nothin' by it; it's just foolishness and I goin'
+try to cut it out."
+
+The dogs had done but ill on the dry fish, accustomed as they were to
+cooked food, and they ate ravenously of their supper. Only the previous
+night Lingo had betrayed his trust for the first and last time. Coming
+out of the cabin just before turning in, to take a last look round, I
+saw Lingo on top of the sled eating something, and I found that he had
+dug a slab of bacon out of the unlashed load and had eaten most of it. I
+knew he was hungry, missing the filling, satisfying mess he was used to,
+and I did not thrash him, I simply said, "Oh, Lingo!" and the dog got
+off the sled and slunk away, the very picture of conscious, shamefaced
+guilt. That was the only time he did such a thing in all the six years I
+drove him.
+
+Council was past its prime at the time of this visit, but just as we
+entered the town, at the end of the third day's run, it seemed in danger
+of going through all the stages of decadence with a rush to total
+destruction out of hand, for a fire had broken out in a laundry, and
+with the high wind still blowing it looked as though every building was
+doomed. Of two chemical engines possessed by the town one refused to
+work, but the vigour and promptness of the people in forming two lines
+down to the river, and passing buckets with the utmost rapidity, coped
+with the outbreak just in time to prevent its spreading beyond all
+control. Tired as we were, we all pitched in and passed buckets until
+parkees and mitts and mukluks were incrusted with ice from water that
+was spilled. Efficient protection is a matter of great difficulty and
+expense in Alaskan towns, and there is not one of them that has escaped
+being swept by fire. The buildings are almost necessarily all of wood,
+the cost of brick and stone construction being prohibitive. No one can
+guarantee ten years of life to a placer-mining town, and there would be
+no warrant for the expenditure of the sums required for fireproof
+building even were the capital available. But the rapidity with which
+they are rebuilt, where rebuilding is justified, is even more remarkable
+than the rapidity with which they are destroyed.
+
+A Saturday and Sunday were very welcome at Council, and the courtesy of
+the Presbyterian minister, who gave up his church and his congregations
+to me, Esquimaux in the morning and white at night, was much
+appreciated.
+
+[Sidenote: NORTON SOUND]
+
+In warmer weather, the thermometer no lower than -5 deg. at the start, but
+with the same gale blowing that had blown ever since we left Candle,
+though it had shifted towards the northeast, we got away on Monday
+morning, bound for Nome, ninety miles away, hoping to reach the half-way
+house that night. Five or six hours' run over good trails, with no
+greater inconvenience than the acceleration of our pace by the wind on
+down grades, until the sled frequently overran the dogs with
+entanglements and spillings, brought us to the seacoast at Topkok, and a
+noble view opened up as we climbed the great bluff. There Norton Sound
+spread out before us, its ice largely cleared away and blown into Bering
+Sea by the strong wind that had prevailed for nearly a week, its waves
+sparkling and dashing into foam in the March sunshine; the distant
+cliffs and mountains of its other shore just visible in the clear air.
+It was an exhilarating sight--the first free water that I had seen since
+the summer, and it seemed rejoicing in its freedom, leaping up with glee
+to greet the mighty ally that had struck off its fetters.
+
+But from this point troubles began to grow. We dropped down presently to
+the shore and passed along the glare surface of lagoon after lagoon, the
+wind doing what it liked with the sled, for it was impossible to handle
+it at all. Sometimes we went along broadside on, sometimes the sled
+first and the dogs trailing behind, moving their silly, helpless paws
+from side to side as they were dragged over the ice on their bellies.
+When we had passed these lagoons the trail took the beach, running
+alongside and just to windward of a telephone-line, with rough shore
+ice to the left and bare rocks to the right. Again and again the already
+injured sled was smashed heavily against a telephone pole. I would see
+the impact coming and strive my utmost to avert it, but without a gee
+pole, and swinging the sled only by the handle-bars, it was more than I
+could do to hold the sled on its course against the beam wind that was
+forcing it towards the ice and the telephone poles; and a gee pole could
+not be used at the rate we had travelled ever since we left Candle. Mile
+after mile we went along in this way. I do not know how many poles I hit
+and how many I missed, but every pole on that stretch of coast was a
+fresh and separate anxiety and menace to me. I think I would have been
+perfectly willing to have abolished and wiped out the whole invention of
+the telephone so I could be rid of those hateful poles. What were
+telephone poles doing in the arctic regions anyway? Telephone poles
+belonged with electric cars and interurban trolley-lines, not with dog
+teams and sleds.
+
+Then it grew dark and the wind increased. I did not know it, but I was
+approaching that stretch of coast which is notorious as the windiest
+place in all Alaska, a place the topography of which makes it a natural
+funnel for the outlet of wind should any be blowing anywhere in the
+interior of the peninsula. My companions were far ahead, long since out
+of sight. I struggled along a little farther, and, just after a
+particularly bad collision and an overturning, I saw a light glimmering
+in the snow to my right. It was a little road-house, buried to the eaves
+and over the roof in snow-drift, with window tunnels and a door tunnel
+excavated in the snow. I was yet, I learned, five miles from Solomon's,
+my destination, but I hailed this haven as my refuge for the night and
+went no farther, more exhausted by the struggle of the last two or three
+hours than by many an all-day tramp on snow-shoes. It was a miserable,
+dirty little shack, but it was tight; it meant shelter from that
+pitiless wind. That night the thermometer stood at 7 deg., the first plus
+temperature in twenty-two days.
+
+By morning the gale had greatly diminished, and by the time I reached
+Solomon's and rejoined my companions it was calm, the first calm since
+we left the middle Kobuk. We had some rough ice to cross to avoid a long
+detour of the coast, and then we were back on the shore again and it
+began to snow. The snow was soon done and the sun shone, but the new
+coating of dazzling white gave such a glare that it was necessary to put
+on the snow glasses for the first time of the winter--and that is always
+a sign winter draws to a close.
+
+[Sidenote: DOGS AND REINDEER]
+
+On the approach to Nome we had our first encounter with reindeer, and at
+once my dog team became unmanageable. I had had some trouble that
+morning with a horse. A new dog I procured at Kikitaruk had never seen a
+horse before, and made frantic efforts to get at him, leaping at his
+haunches as we passed by. But when they saw the reindeer the whole team
+set off at a run, dragging the heavy sled as if it were nothing. The
+Esquimau driving the deer saw the approaching dogs and hastily drew his
+equipage off the trail farther inshore, standing between the deer and
+the dogs with a heavy whip. What the result would have been had the
+dogs reached the deer it is hard to say. I had kept my stand on the step
+behind the sled and managed to check its wild career with the brake and
+to throw it over and stop the approach before the carnivora reached
+their immemorial prey. Herein lies one of the difficulties of the
+domestication of reindeer in Alaska, a country where so far dogs have
+been the only domestic animals. Again, as we entered the outskirts of
+Nome the incident was repeated, and only the hasty driving of the
+reindeer into a barn prevented the dogs from seizing the deer that time.
+
+[Sidenote: NOME]
+
+Jimmy was long deposed from his ineffectual leadership and a little dog
+named Kewalik--the one I obtained at Kikitaruk--was at the head of the
+team. Kewalik had never seen so many houses before; hitherto almost
+every cabin he had reached on his journeys had been a resting-place, and
+he wanted to dive into every house we passed. At Candle and Council
+both, our stopping-place had been near the entrance to the little town.
+But now we had to pass up one long street after another and I had
+continually to drag him and the team he led first from a yard on this
+side of the road and then from one on the other. The dog was perfectly
+bewildered and out of his head by the number of people and the number of
+houses he saw. We were indeed a sorry, travel-worn, unkempt, uncivilised
+band, man and dogs, with an old, battered vehicle, and we felt our
+incongruity with the new environment as we entered the metropolis of the
+luxury and wealth of the North. Here we passed a jeweller's shop, the
+whole window aglow with the dull gleam of gold and ivory--the terrible
+nugget jewellery so much affected in these parts and the walrus ivory
+which is Alaska's other contribution of material for the ornamental
+arts. Here we passed a veritable department store, its ground-floor
+plate-glass window set as a drawing-room, with gilded, brocaded chairs,
+marquetry table, and ormolu clock, and I know not what costliness of rug
+and curtain. It was all so strange that it seemed unreal after that long
+passage of the savage wilds, that long habitation of huts and igloos and
+tents. Hitherto we had often been fortunate could we buy a little flour
+and bacon; here the choice comestibles of the earth were for sale. I
+looked askance at my greasy parkee as I passed shops where English
+broadcloth and Scotch tweeds were displayed; at my worn, clumsy mukluks
+when I saw patent-leather pumps. But Nome knows how to welcome the
+wanderer from the wilderness and to make him altogether at home. There
+could be no warmer hospitality than that with which I was received by
+the Reverend John White and his wife, than that which I had at many a
+home during my week's stay.
+
+Nothing in the world could have caused the building of a city where Nome
+is built except the thing that caused it: the finding of gold on the
+beach itself and in the creeks immediately behind it. It has no harbour
+or roadstead, no shelter or protection of any kind; it is in as bleak
+and exposed a position as a man would find if he should set out to hunt
+the earth over for ineligible sites.
+
+But Nome is also a fine instance of the way men in the North conquer
+local conditions and wring comfort out of bleakness and desolation by
+the clever adaptation of means to ends.
+
+The art of living comfortably in the North had to be learned, and it has
+been learned pretty thoroughly. People live at Nome as well as they do
+"outside." One may sit down to dinners as well cooked, as well
+furnished, as well served as any dinners anywhere. The good folk of Nome
+delight in spreading their dainty store before the unjaded appetite of
+the winter traveller, and it would be affectation to deny that there is
+keen relish of enjoyment in the long-unwonted gleam of wax candle or
+electrolier upon perfect appointment of glass, silver, and napery, in
+the unobtrusive but vigilant service of white-jacketed Chinaman or Jap.
+Nome has a great advantage over its only rival in the interior,
+Fairbanks, in the matter of freight rates. The same merchandise that is
+landed at the one place for ten or twelve dollars a ton within ten or
+twelve days of its leaving Seattle, costs fifty or sixty at the other,
+and takes a month or more to arrive. But this accessibility in the
+summer is exactly reversed in the winter. No practicable route has been
+discovered along the uninhabited shores of Bering Sea, and all the mail
+for Nome comes from Valdez to Fairbanks and then down the Yukon and
+round Norton Sound by dog team. In winter Fairbanks is within seven or
+eight days of open salt water; Nome a full month. After navigation
+closes in October, the first mail does not commonly reach the Seward
+Peninsula until January. So that, with all its comforts and luxuries,
+Nome is a very isolated place for eight months in the year.
+
+[Illustration: GOLD-MINING AT NOME.]
+
+[Illustration: PULLING THE "PELICAN" OUT WITH A "SPANISH WINDLASS."]
+
+[Sidenote: MINING AT NOME]
+
+We went out with the dog sled to the diggings a few miles behind the
+town, and a busy scene we found, enveloped in steam and smoke. Here an
+old beach line had been discovered and was yielding rich reward for the
+working. A long line of conical "dumps" marked its extension roughly
+parallel with the present shore, and the buckets that arose from the
+depths, travelled along a cable, and at just the right moment upset
+their contents, continually added to these heaps. All the winter
+"pay-dirt" is thus excavated and stored; in the summer when the streams
+run the gold is sluiced out. But that phrase "when the streams run"
+covers a world of difficulty and expense to the miner. In some places in
+this Seward Peninsula, ditches thirty and forty miles long have been
+constructed to insure the streams running when and where they are
+needed.
+
+There was quite a little to do in Nome. A new sled must be bought, and
+another dog, and, above all, some arrangement made about a travelling
+companion. I was not willing to hire a native who would have to return
+here, and I was resolved never again to travel alone. So I put an
+advertisement in the newspaper, desiring communication with some man who
+was intending a journey to Fairbanks immediately, and was fortunate to
+meet a sober, reliable man who undertook to accompany and assist me for
+the payment of his travelling expenses.
+
+The week wore rapidly away, and I began to be eager to depart, mindful
+of the eight hundred odd miles yet to be covered. Spring seemed already
+here and summer treading upon her heels, for the town was all slush and
+mud from a decided "soft snap," the thermometer standing well above
+freezing for days in succession.
+
+A visitor to this place is struck by the number of articles made from
+walrus ivory exposed for sale, chief amongst them being cribbage-boards.
+A walk down the streets would argue the whole population given over to
+the incessant playing of cribbage. The explanation is found in the
+difficulty of changing the direction of Esquimau activity once that
+direction is established. These clever artificers were started making
+cribbage-boards long ago and it seems impossible to stop them. Every
+summer they come in from their winter hunting with fresh supplies carved
+during the leisure of the long nights. The beautiful walrus tusk becomes
+almost an ugly thing when it is thus hacked flat and bored full of
+holes. The best pieces of Esquimau carving are not these things, made by
+the dozen, but the domestic implements made for their own use, and some
+of this work is very clever and tasteful indeed, adorned with fine bold
+etchings of the chase of walrus, seal, and polar bear.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+NOME TO FAIRBANKS--NORTON SOUND--THE KALTAG PORTAGE--NULATO--UP THE
+YUKON TO TANANA
+
+
+WE left Nome on the 13th of March, the night before being taken up by a
+banquet which the Commercial Club was kind enough to give me; indeed,
+the whole stay was marked by lavish kindness and hospitality, and I left
+with the feeling that Nome was one of the most generous and open-handed
+places I had ever visited.
+
+The soft weather continued and made sloppy travel. Our course lay all
+around Norton Sound to Unalaklik, and then over the portage to Kaltag on
+the Yukon; up the Yukon to the mouth of the Tanana, and then up that
+river to Fairbanks. The first day's run was the retracing of our steps
+to Solomon's, and that was done without difficulty save for a new
+trouble with the dogs. It appeared that we no longer had any leader. All
+the winter through my team had been behind another team, and that
+constant second place had turned our leaders into followers. We thought
+we had two leaders, but neither one was willing to proceed without some
+one or something ahead of him. On such good ice-going as this it was out
+of the question for one of us to run ahead of the team simply to please
+these leader-perverts, and the whip had to be wielded heavily on Jimmy's
+back ere he could be induced to fill his proper office--and then he did
+it ill, with constant exasperating stoppings and lookings-back. At
+Solomon's I met a man who had spent some years with Peary in his arctic
+explorations, and I sat up far into the night drawing interesting
+narratives out of him. So far as Topkok we were still retracing our
+steps, but once over the great bluff, which gave no view this time owing
+to the mist which accompanies this soft weather, we were on new ground,
+our course lying wholly along the beach.
+
+At Bluff was the most interesting, curious gold mining I have ever seen,
+the extraction of gold from the sand of Norton Sound, two hundred yards
+or more out from the beach. There it lies under ten or twelve feet of
+water with the ice on top. How shall it be reached? Why, by the exact
+converse of the usual Alaskan placer mining; by freezing down instead of
+thawing down. The ice is cut away from the beginning of a shaft, almost
+but not quite down to the water, leaving just a thin cake. The
+atmospheric cold, penetrating this cake, freezes the water below it, and
+presently the hole is chopped down a little farther, leaving always a
+thin cake above the water. A canvas chute is arranged over the shaft,
+with a head like a ship's ventilator that can be turned any way to catch
+the wind. Gradually the water is frozen down, and as it is frozen more
+and more ice is removed until the bottom is reached, surrounded and
+protected by a cylindrical shaft of ice; then the sand can be removed
+and the gold it contains washed out. They told us they were making good
+money and their ingenuity certainly deserved it.
+
+[Sidenote: ICE TRAVEL]
+
+We stopped that night at the native village of Chinnik, the people of
+which are looked after by a mission of the Swedish Evangelical Church on
+Golofnin Bay, which we should cross to-morrow. But the mission is off
+the trail, and we did not come to an acquaintance with the missionaries
+of this body until we reached Unalaklik. Next day, climbing and
+descending considerable grades in warm, misty weather, we reached
+Golofnin Bay, pursued it some distance, and left it by a very steep,
+long hill that was close to one thousand feet high, at the foot of which
+we were once more on the beach of the sound--and at the road-house for
+the night. From that place the trail no longer hugged the coast but
+struck out boldly across the ice for a distant headland, Moses' Point,
+where we lunched, and, that point reached, struck out again for Isaac's
+Point, most of the travelling during a long day in which we made
+forty-eight miles being four or five miles from land. The day was clear,
+and the shore-line of the other side of the sound, which grew nearer as
+we proceeded, was subject to strange distortions of mirage. The
+road-house that night nestled picturesquely against a great bluff, and
+right across the ice lay Texas Point, for which we should make a
+bee-line to-morrow. Sometimes the traveller must go all round Norton
+Bay, but at this time the ice was in good condition and our route cut
+across the mouth of the bay for twenty-two miles straight for the other
+side. It was like crossing from Dover to Calais on the ice. The passage
+made, the Alaskan mainland was reached once more, the Seward Peninsula
+left behind us, and our way lay across desolate, low-lying tundra
+strewn with driftwood and hollowed out here and there into little
+lagoons. Evidently the waves sweep clean across it in stormy weather
+when the sound is open; a salt marsh. In the midst of it reared a sort
+of lookout tripod of driftwood thirty or forty feet high, lashed and
+nailed together, with a precarious little platform on top and cleats
+nailed to one of the uprights for ascent. I essayed the view, but the
+rusty nails broke under my feet. We deemed it a hunting tower from which
+water-fowl might be spied in the spring. Sixteen miles of this
+melancholy waste brought us to the shore again, to a tiny Esquimau
+village and a tumble-down, half-buried shack of a road-house where we
+should spend the night, a little schooner lying beached in front of it.
+If its exterior were uninviting, the scene as we entered was sinister.
+By the light of a single candle--though it was not yet dark
+outside--amidst unwashed dishes and general grime, sat an evil-eyed
+Portuguese or Spaniard, in a red toque, playing poker with three
+skin-clad Esquimaux. So absorbed were they in the game that they had not
+heard us arrive nor seen us enter. With a brief, reluctant interval for
+the preparation of a poor supper, the card playing went on all the
+evening far into the night. My companion discovered that the chips were
+worth a dollar apiece and judged it to be "considerable of a game." At
+last I arose from my bunk and said that we were tired and had come there
+to sleep, and with an ill grace the playing was shortly abandoned and
+the natives went off. The arctic shores have their beach-combers as well
+as the South Sea Islands.
+
+[Sidenote: UNALAKLIK]
+
+The next day was Sunday, but I was anxious to spend my day of rest at
+Unalaklik and most indisposed to spend it here, so we got away with a
+very early start long before daylight. Six or seven miles of tundra and
+lagoon travel and the trail crossed abruptly a tongue of land and struck
+out over the salt-water ice for a cape fifteen miles away. The going was
+splendid. It was not glare ice, but ice upon which snow had melted and
+frozen again. It was so smooth that one dog could have drawn the sled,
+yet not so smooth as to deny good footing. We kept well out to sea,
+passing close to the mountainous mass of Besborough Island, plainly
+riven by some ancient convulsion from the sheer bluffs of the mainland.
+Our only trouble was in keeping the dogs well enough out, for, not being
+water-spaniels or other marine species, they had a hankering after the
+land and a continual tendency to edge in to shore.
+
+So from headland to headland we made rapid, easy traverse, thoroughly
+enjoying the ride, munching chocolate and raisins, speculating about the
+seasons when it had been possible to cross direct from Nome to Saint
+Michael on the ice, and exchanging stories we had heard of the disasters
+and hairbreadth escapes attending such overbold venture. Only this
+winter three men and a dog team were blown out into Bering Sea by a
+sudden storm, and lay for four days in their sleeping-bags drifting up
+and down on an ice cake, until at last they were blown back to the shore
+ice and made their escape. And there is a fine story of a white man
+rescued in half-frozen state by his Esquimau wife, and carried for miles
+on her back to safety.
+
+At last we turned a point and drew in to the shore, and, not seeing the
+little town till we were almost upon it, arrived at Unalaklik early in
+the afternoon. We had made the two hundred and forty miles, as it is
+called, from Nome, in six days. In the last twelve days of travel we had
+covered five hundred miles, an average of nearly forty-two miles per
+day, far and away the best travelling of the winter. The preceding five
+hundred miles had taken twenty-two days.
+
+We were in time to attend the Esquimau services at the mission both
+afternoon and night, and I found them very much the same as at
+Kikitaruk, with the exception that the singing was much more advanced
+and was very good indeed. There was an anthem of the Danks type sung by
+a choir--the parts well maintained throughout, the attacks good, the
+voices under excellent control--that it pleased and surprised me to
+hear, and there was a long discourse most patiently and, as I judged,
+faithfully interpreted by a bright-looking Esquimau boy. It is well for
+those who speak much through an interpreter to listen occasionally to
+similar discourse. Only so may its unavoidable tediousness be
+appreciated.
+
+[Sidenote: GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS]
+
+The school next day pleased me still more, and I was glad that I had a
+school-day at the place. I heard good reading and spelling, saw good
+writing, and listened with real enjoyment to the fresh young voices
+raised again and again in song. There was, however, something so
+curiously exotic that for a moment it seemed irresistibly funny, in "The
+Old Oaken Bucket," from lips that have difficulty with the vowel sounds
+of English; from children that never saw a well and never will see
+one;--and I was irreverent enough to have much the same feeling about "I
+love thy templed hills," etc., in that patriotic Plymouth Rock song
+which is so little adapted for universal American use that, in a gibe
+not without justice, it has been called "Smith's Country, 'tis of Thee."
+One wonders if they sing it in the Philippine schools; and, so far as
+these regions are concerned, one wishes that some teacher with a spark
+of genius would take Goldsmith's hint and write a simple song for
+Esquimau children that should
+
+        "Extol the treasures of their finny seas
+         And their long nights of revelry and ease";
+
+the splendour of summer's perpetual sunshine and the weird radiance of
+the Northern Lights; but prosody is not taught in your "Normal" school.
+The thing is a vain, artificial attempt to impose a whole body of ideas,
+notions, standards of comparison, metaphors, similes, and sentiments
+upon a race to which, in great measure, they must ever be foreign and
+unintelligible. Here were girls reading in a text-book of so-called
+physiology, and, as it happened, the lesson that day was on the evils of
+tight lacing! The reading of that book, I was informed, is imposed by
+special United States statute, and the teacher must make a separate
+report that so much of it has been duly gone through each month before
+the salary can be drawn. Yet none of those girls ever saw a corset or
+ever will. One is reminded of the dear old lady who used to visit the
+jails and distribute tracts on _The Evils of Keeping Bad Company_.
+
+But these incongruities aside, the school was a good school and well
+taught, the government appointing the teachers, as I learned, upon the
+nomination of the mission authorities; the only way that a government
+school can be successful at any mission station, for the two agencies
+must work together, as one's right hand works with one's left, to effect
+any satisfactory result. The hours spent in it were very enjoyable, and
+one wished one might have had opportunity for further acquaintance with
+some of the bright-faced, interesting children, both full-bloods and
+half-breeds.
+
+Unalaklik is a thriving Esquimau community, noted for its native
+schooner building and its successful seal hunters and fishermen. We were
+rejoiced to see signs of native prosperity and advance, and we left
+Unalaklik with high hope for its future.
+
+Here also was real rest and refreshment at a road-house. Road-houses in
+Alaska are as various in quality as inns are "outside." Our previous
+night's halt was at one of the worst; this was one of the best. The
+proprietor was a good cook and he did his best for us, with omelet and
+pastry, and young, tender reindeer. It has been said that road-house
+keeping in Alaska is like soliciting life insurance "outside," the last
+resort of incompetence. Certain it is that a thoroughly lazy and
+incompetent man may yet make a living keeping a road-house, for there is
+no rivalry save at the more important points, and travellers are
+commonly so glad to reach any shelter that they are not disposed to be
+censorious. None the less, when they find a man who takes a pride in his
+business and an interest in the comfort of his guests, they are highly
+appreciative.
+
+[Sidenote: THE KALTAG PORTAGE]
+
+We should have only an occasional road-house from now on, but expected
+to reach some inhabited cabin each night. Our good travelling was over
+though we did not know it. We knew that the hard snows of the Seward
+Peninsula and the bare ice of Norton Sound were behind us, but we kept
+telling ourselves that the travel of all the winter would surely have
+left a fine trail on the Yukon. We were now about sixty-five miles from
+Saint Michael, by the coast. But taking the ninety-mile portage from
+Unalaklik to Kaltag we should reach the Yukon River more than five
+hundred miles above Saint Michael, so much does that portage cut off.
+This is the route the military telegraph-line takes, and we should
+travel along close beside it much of the way until the Yukon was
+reached.
+
+The soft weather persisted, and we had even doubt about starting out in
+such a rapid thaw. A visit to the telegraph station informed us that the
+warm wave was spread all over interior Alaska and that there was general
+expectation of an early break-up. But if the snow on the portage were
+indeed rapidly going, that was all the more reason for getting across
+before it had altogether gone; so we pulled out in the warm, muggy
+weather, and even as we pulled out it began to rain!
+
+Up the little Unalaklik River, water over the ice everywhere, we went
+for a few miles and then took to the tundra. All the snow had gone
+except just the hard snow of the trail, a winding ribbon of white across
+the brown moss. The rain changed to sleet and back to rain again, and
+soon we were wet through and had much trouble in keeping that
+penetrating, persistent drizzle from wetting our load through the canvas
+cover. Though not an unique experience, it is rare to be wet with rain
+on the winter trail--rarer in the interior probably than on the coast.
+Once since on the Kuskokwim and once on the Fortymile it has happened to
+me in seven winters' travel. We pushed on for thirty miles, past several
+little native villages, until we came to Whaleback, a village part
+Esquimau and part Indian. These were the last Esquimaux we should see,
+and I was sorry, for I had grown to like very heartily and to respect
+very sincerely this kindly, gentle, industrious, good-humoured race.
+Surely they are a people any nation may be proud to have fringing its
+otherwise uninhabitable coasts, and should be eager to aid and conserve.
+There comes a feeling of impotent exasperation to me when I realise how
+many white men there are who speak of them continually with the utmost
+contempt and see them dwindle with entire complacency. The same thing is
+true in even more marked degree about the Indians of the interior: nine
+tenths of the land will never have other inhabitant, of that I am
+convinced, and the only question is, shall it be an inhabited wilderness
+or an uninhabited wilderness? Here, lodging with the natives, and, I
+make no doubt, living off them too, we found a queer, skulking white man
+whom I had met in several different sections of interior Alaska, known
+as "Snow-shoe Joe" or "The Frozen Hobo." The arctic regions one would
+esteem a poor place for the hobo, but this man manages to eke out an
+existence, if not to flourish, therein. Work he will not under any
+circumstances, but subsists on the hospitality of the whites until he
+has entirely worn it out and then removes to the natives, mushing from
+camp to camp and "bumming" his way as he goes. He was on his way to
+Saint Michael, he told me with perfect gravity, "to get work."
+
+[Sidenote: THE U. S. SIGNAL-CORPS]
+
+Before dark we had reached our destination for the night at the Old
+Woman Mountain, the divide between the waters of the Yukon and the
+waters of Norton Sound, and were kindly received and well treated at the
+telegraph station, the only resort on this portage for weary travellers.
+Here is surely a lonely post. For reasons connected with the maintenance
+of the wires and the keeping open of communications, it is necessary to
+have telegraph stations every forty or fifty miles, each with two or
+three men and a dog team, and shelter cabins about half-way between
+stations. A wind that blows a tree down in the narrow right-of-way cut
+through the forest--for we were come to forest again--or a heavy
+snowfall that loads branches until they fall across the wires, a post
+that comes up out of its hole as the thawing of spring heaves the ground
+around it, or the caving of the bank of a stream along which the line
+passes--any one of a dozen such happenings anywhere along its thousand
+miles of course, may put the entire inland telegraph system out of
+operation; and the young men in whose section the interruption
+occurs--they have a means of determining that--must get out at once,
+find the seat of the trouble and repair it. In all sorts of weather,
+unless the thermometer be below -40 deg., out they must go.
+
+It may be doubted if any other army in the world ever constructed and
+maintained a permanent telegraph line under such arduous conditions. It
+has been the army's one contribution to Alaska, the one justification
+for the enormous expense of maintaining army posts in the interior.
+Indeed it is often said by those who feel keenly the neglect of the
+territory by the general government that this telegraph system is the
+one contribution of the United States to Alaska. It is certainly a great
+public convenience and has assisted very materially in such development
+as the country has made. The men of the signal-corps deserve great
+credit for the faithful, dogged way in which they have carried out year
+after year their difficult and hazardous work, and often and often the
+weather-stressed traveller has been grateful for the hospitality which
+their cabins have afforded him.
+
+They have not been an unmixed blessing to the country; soldiers do not
+usually represent the highest morale of the nation, and though the
+signal-corps is in some respect a picked corps, yet the men are
+soldiers, with many of the soldier characteristics. Too often a remote
+telegraph station has been a little centre of drunkenness, gambling, and
+debauchery with a little circumference of native men and women, and
+while some of the officers of the corps have been willing and anxious to
+do all in their power to suppress this sort of thing in their scattered
+and difficult commands, others have been jealous only for the technical
+efficiency of their work.
+
+[Sidenote: MORE SNOW]
+
+There are many allowances to be made for young men taken from the
+society of their kind and thrust out hundreds of miles in the wilderness
+to sit down for a year or two at one of these isolated spots. They may
+see no women save those amongst a straggling band of Indians for the
+whole time of their exile; they may see no white man save a
+mail-carrier--and in many places not even a mail-carrier--for weeks
+together. Time sometimes hangs very heavily on their hands, for trees
+are not always blowing down, nor wires snapping through the tension of
+the cold, and at some stations there will not be a dozen telegraph
+messages sent the whole winter through. If a young man be at all
+ambitious of self-improvement, here is splendid opportunity of leisure,
+but a great many are not at all so disposed. Character, except the most
+firmly founded, is apt to deteriorate under such circumstances;
+standards of conduct to be lowered. And what is here written of the
+young men of the signal-corps may well apply in great measure to a large
+proportion of all the white men in the country.
+
+The "eighty-mile portage" we had heard of at Nome became ninety miles at
+Unalaklik, and added another five to itself here, so that although we
+had travelled forty-two miles that day we were told that there were yet
+fifty-three ahead before we reached the Yukon.
+
+So we decided not to attempt it in one day and to rest the next night at
+a "repair cabin" twenty-eight miles farther, making a somewhat late
+start in view of a short journey. It had been wiser to have started
+early. During our night at Old Woman Mountain some three inches of snow
+fell, and we found as we descended the Yukon slope that all the moisture
+that had fallen upon us as rain the previous day had fallen on this side
+as snow. The trail was filled full and buried, and so soft and mushy was
+it that although snow-shoes were badly needed they were impossible. The
+snow clung to them and came off the ground with them in heavy, clogging
+masses every time they were lifted. It clung to the sled, to the
+harness, to the dogs' feet, to everything that touched it; it gathered
+in ever-increasing snowballs on the long hair of the dogs. Travelling in
+warm weather in loose, new snow is most disagreeable work. We plugged
+along for twenty miles, and then in the dark in an open country with
+little patches of scattering spruce, had great trouble in finding the
+trail at all.
+
+At last we could find it no longer, and when there was no hope of
+reaching the cabin that night we made a camp. We had now no tent or
+stove with us, so a "Siwash camp" in the open was the best we could do,
+and a wet, miserable camp it was. By inexcusable carelessness on my
+part, candles had been altogether forgotten in the replenishing of the
+supplies, and a little piece an inch long which we found loose in the
+grub box was all that we possessed. Dogs and men alike exhausted with
+the long day's sweating struggle through the deep snow, sleep should
+have come soundly and soon. It did to the rest, but I lay awake the
+night through. The easy, riding travel of the preceding week had been a
+poor preparation for to-day's incessant toil, and I was too tired to
+sleep. In the morning our bedding was covered with a couple of inches
+of new snow. My companion got up at daylight and made a journey of
+investigation ahead, following the trail better, but not finding the
+cabin. We had thought ourselves within a mile or two of it, but
+evidently were farther away. However, when we had eaten a hasty
+breakfast and hitched up and had gone along the trail that had been
+broken that morning to its end, ten yards beyond the place where my
+companion had turned back, we came in sight of the cabin, and there we
+lay and rested and dried things out all day and spent the next night.
+During the day there came a team from Kaltag, and once again we enjoyed
+the delight of receiving, and at the same time conferring, the richest
+gift and greatest possible benefit to the traveller--a trail.
+
+[Sidenote: THE YUKON ONCE MORE]
+
+The next evening as it drew towards dark, after another day of soft,
+warm disagreeable travel, we reached the end of the portage, and the
+broad white Yukon stretched before us once more. Our hearts leaped up
+and I think the dogs' hearts leaped up also at the sight. I called to
+Nanook as we stopped on the bank, "Nanook, there's the good old Yukon
+again!" and he lifted his voice in that intelligent, significant bark
+that surely meant that he saw and understood. We had left the Yukon on
+the 15th of December at Fort Yukon; we reached it again on the 23d of
+March at Kaltag, more than six hundred miles lower down. We had two
+hundred and fifty miles of travel on its surface before us, and then
+close to another two hundred and fifty up the Tanana River to Fairbanks.
+But alas! for the fine Yukon trail we had promised ourselves! As we
+looked out across the broad river there was no narrow, dark line
+undulating over its surface, nor even a faint, continuous inequality to
+hint that trail had been, on snow "less hideously serene"; its perfect
+smoothness and whiteness were unscarred and unsullied. The trail was
+wiped out and swallowed up by the late snows and winds.
+
+[Sidenote: A LEARNED JESUIT]
+
+There is little interest in lingering over the long, laborious,
+monotonous grind up that river on show-shoes. When one has looked
+forward to pleasant, quick travel, the disappointment at slow, heavy
+plodding is the keener. The first little bit of trail we had was as we
+approached Nulato two days later on a Sunday morning, and it was made by
+the villagers from below going up to church at the Roman Catholic
+mission. We arrived in time for service, and enjoyed the natives' voices
+raised in the Latin chants as well as in hymns wisely put into the
+vernacular. It is historically a little curious to find Roman Catholic
+natives singing praises in their own tongue, and Protestant missions,
+like those on the Kobuk and Kotzebue Sound, using a language "not
+understanded of the people." The day was the Feast of the Annunciation
+as well as Sunday, and there was some special decorating of the church
+and perhaps some elaboration of the music. Here for the first and only
+time I listened to a white man so fluent and vigorous in the native
+tongue that he gave one the impression of eloquence. Father Jette of the
+Society of Jesus is the most distinguished scholar in Alaska. He is the
+chief authority on the native language, and manners and customs, beliefs
+and traditions of the Middle Yukon, and has brought to the patient,
+enthusiastic labour of years the skill of the trained philologist. It
+is said by the Indians that he knows more of the Indian language than
+any one of them does, and this is not hard to believe when it is
+understood that he has systematically gleaned his knowledge from widely
+scattered segments of tribes, jotting down in his note-books old forms
+of speech lingering amongst isolated communities, and legends and
+folk-lore stories still remembered by the aged but not much repeated
+nowadays; always keen to add to his store or to verify or disprove some
+etymological conjecture that has occurred to his fertile mind. His work
+is recognised by the ethnological societies of Europe, and much of his
+collected material has been printed in their technical journals.
+
+A man of wide general culture, master of three or four modern, as well
+as the classic, languages, a mathematician, a writer of beautiful, clear
+English, although it is not his mother tongue, he carries it with the
+modesty, the broad-minded tolerance, the easy urbanity that always
+adorn, though they by no means always accompany, the profession of the
+scholar; and one is better able to understand after some years'
+acquaintance with such a man, after falling under the authority of his
+learning and the charm of his courtesy, the wonderful power which the
+society he belongs to has wielded in the world. If such devotion to the
+instruction of the ignorant as was described at the mission on the
+middle Kobuk be praiseworthy, by how much the more is one moved to
+admiration at the spectacle of this man, who might fill with credit any
+one of half a dozen professional chairs at the ordinary college, gladly
+consecrating his life to the teaching of an Indian school!
+
+Hearing an interest expressed in the massacre which took place at Nulato
+in 1851, Father Jette offered to accompany us to the site of that
+occurrence, about a mile away. It stands out prominently in the history
+of a country that has been singularly free from bloodshed and outrage,
+and its date is the notable date of the middle river, as the
+establishment of the post at Fort Yukon by the Hudson Bay Company in
+1846 is the notable date of the upper river. They are fixed points in
+Indian chronology by which it is possible to approximate other dates and
+to reach an estimate of the ages of old people.
+
+[Sidenote: THE NULATO MASSACRE]
+
+Much has been written about the Nulato massacre, and the accounts vary
+in many particulars. The Russian post here was first established by
+Malakof in 1838. Burned during his absence by the Indians, it was
+re-established by Lieutenant Zagoskin of the Russian navy in 1842. The
+extortions and cruelties of his successor, Deerzhavin, complicated by a
+standing feud between two native tribes, and probably having the rival
+powers of certain medicine-men as the match to the mine, brought about
+the destruction of the place and the death of all its inhabitants, white
+and native, by a sudden treacherous attack of the Koyukuk Indians. It
+happened that Lieutenant Barnard of the British navy, detached from a
+war-ship lying at Saint Michael to journey up the river and make
+inquiries of the Koyukuk natives as to wandering white men, survivors of
+Sir John Franklin's expedition, who might have been seen or heard of by
+them, was staying at the post at the time and perished in the general
+massacre. His grave, with a headboard bearing a Latin inscription, is
+neatly kept up by the Jesuit priests at Nulato.
+
+In the last few years the river has been invading the bank upon which
+the old village stood, and as the earth caves in relics of the slaughter
+and burning come to light. Old copper kettles and samovars, buttons and
+glass beads, all sorts of metal vessels and implements have been sorted
+out from charred wood and ashes, together with numerous skulls and
+quantities of bones. One of the most interesting of these relics was a
+brass button from an official coat, with the Russian crowned
+double-headed eagle on the face, and on the back, upon examination with
+a lens, the word "Birmingham."
+
+Half the day serving for our day of rest this week, we were up and ready
+to start early the next morning, but so violent a wind was blowing from
+the southeast that we decided to remain, and the clatter of the
+corrugated iron roof and the whirling whiteness outside the windows made
+us glad to be in shelter. As the day advanced the wind increased to
+almost hurricane force, and the two-story house in which we lay began to
+rock in such a manner as to make the proprietor alarmed for his
+dwelling.
+
+There was an "independent" trading-post at this village which seemed to
+present an object-lesson in rapacity and greed. There was not an article
+of standard quality in the store; the clothing was the most rascally
+shoddy, the canned goods of the poorest brands; the whole stock the
+cheapest stuff that could possibly be bought at bargain prices
+"outside," yet the prices were higher even than those that prevail in
+Alaska for the best merchandise. Loud complaints are often made against
+the commercial corporation which does the great bulk of the business in
+interior Alaska, yet if the writer had to choose whether he would be in
+the hands of that company or in the hands of an "independent" trader, he
+would unhesitatingly cast in his lot with the company. The independent
+trader makes money, sometimes makes large money, and makes it fairly
+easily, but the calling seems to appeal mainly, if not wholly, to men of
+low character and no conscience. There are few things that would redound
+more to the benefit of the Indian than a great improvement in the
+character of the men with whom he is compelled to do business.
+
+The wind had subsided by the next morning and had been of benefit rather
+than injury to us, for it had blown the accumulated new snow off the old
+trail so that it was possible to perceive and follow it. But what was
+our surprise to find, with the recollection of that rattling roof and
+swaying building fresh in our minds, that ten miles away there had been
+no wind at all! The snow lay undisturbed on every twig and bough from
+which the gentlest breeze would have dislodged it. One never ceases to
+wonder at what, for want of a better word, must be called the
+_localness_ of much of the weather in Alaska--though, for that matter,
+in all probability it is characteristic of weather in all countries. The
+habit of continual outdoor travel gives scope as well as edge to one's
+observation of such things which a life in one place denies. That
+wind-storm had cut a clean swath across the Yukon valley. Yet it seems
+strange that so violent a disturbance could take place without affecting
+and, to some extent, agitating the atmosphere for many miles adjacent.
+
+[Sidenote: SNOW GLASSES]
+
+So, sometimes in snow-storm, sometimes in wind, always on snow-shoes and
+often hard put to it to find and follow the trail at all, we struggled
+on for two or three days more, sleeping one night at a wood-chopper's
+hut, another in a telegraph cabin crowded with foul-mouthed infantrymen
+sent out to repair the extensive damage of the recent storm and none too
+pleased at the detail, we plodded our weary way up that interminable
+river. At last we met the mail-man, that ever-welcome person on the
+Alaskan trail, and his track greatly lightened our labour. By his
+permission we broke into his padlocked cabin that night by the skilful
+application of an axe-edge to a link of the chain, and were more
+comfortable than we had been for some time. Past the mouth of the
+Koyukuk, past Grimcop, past Lowden, past Melozikaket to Kokrine's and
+Mouse Point, we plugged along, making twenty-two miles one day and
+thirty another and then dropping again to eighteen. The temperature
+dropped to zero, and a keen wind made it necessary to keep the nose
+continually covered. At this time of year the covering of the nose
+involves a fresh annoyance, for it deflects the breath upward, and the
+moisture of it continually condenses on the snow glasses, which means
+continual wiping. A stick of some sort of waxy compound to be rubbed
+upon the glass, bought in New York as a preventive of the deposit of
+moisture, proved entirely useless. In this respect the Esquimau snow
+goggle, which is simply a piece of wood hollowed out into a cup and
+illuminated by narrow slits, has advantage over any shape or kind of
+glass protection. A French metal device of the same order that is
+advertised in the dealer's catalogues was found to fail, perhaps owing
+to a wrong optical arrangement of the slits. It caused an eye-strain
+that brought on headache. But if that principle could be scientifically
+worked out and such a device perfected, it would be a boon to the
+traveller over sun-lit snow, for it would do away with glass altogether,
+with its two chief objections--its fragility and its opacity when
+covered with vapour.
+
+[Sidenote: SNOW-BLINDNESS]
+
+The indispensability of some eye protection when travelling in the late
+winter, and the serious consequences that follow its neglect, were once
+again demonstrated at Mouse Point. The road-house was crowded with
+"busted" stampeders coming out of the Nowikaket country. There had been
+a report of a rich "strike" on a creek of the Nowitna, late the previous
+fall, and a number of men from other camps--some from as far as
+Nome--had gone in there with "outfits" for the winter. The stampede had
+been a failure; no gold was found; there was much indignant assertion
+that no gold ever _had_ been found and that the reported "strike" was a
+"fake," though to what end or profit such a "fake" stampede should be
+caused, unless by some neighbouring trader, it is hard to understand;
+and here were the stampeders streaming out again, a ragged, unkempt,
+sorry-looking crowd in every variety of worn-out arctic toggery, many
+of them suffering from acute snow-blindness. It is surprising that even
+old-timers will go out in the hills for the whole winter without
+providing themselves with protection against the glare of the sun which
+they know will inevitably assail their eyes before the spring, yet so it
+is; and this lack of forethought is not confined to the matter of snow
+glasses: the first half dozen men we received in Saint Matthew's
+Hospital at Fairbanks suffering from severely frozen feet were all
+old-timers grown careless.
+
+Father Ragarou, another Jesuit priest of another type, reached the
+road-house from the opposite direction about the same time we did, and I
+was interested in watching his treatment of the inflamed eyes. Upon a
+disk of lead he folded a little piece of cotton cloth in the shape of a
+tent, and, setting fire to it, allowed it to burn out completely. Then
+with a wet camel's-hair brush he gathered up the slight yellow residuum
+of the combustion and painted it over the eyes, holding the lids open
+with thumb and finger and drawing the brush through and through. An
+incredulous spectator, noticing the sacred monogram neatly stamped upon
+the disk of lead, made some sneering remark to me about "Romish
+superstition," but remembering the Jesuit's bark, and recalling that I
+had in my writing-case at that moment a letter I had brought all the way
+from the Koyukuk addressed to this very priest, begging for a further
+supply of a pile ointment that had proved efficacious, I held my peace.
+Whether it be an oxide or a carbonate, or some salt that is formed by
+the combustion, I am not chemist enough to know, but I saw man after man
+relieved by this application. Even the scoffer was convinced there was
+merit in the treatment, though stoutly protesting that "them letters"
+had nothing to do with it; which nobody took the trouble to argue with
+him. My own custom--we are all of us doctors of a sort in this
+country--is to instil a few drops of a five-per-cent solution of
+cocaine, which gives immediate temporary relief, and then apply frequent
+washes of boric acid, bandaging up the eyes completely in bad cases by
+cloths kept wet with the solution. But I do not know that it brings
+better result than the lead treatment. Certainly it is a matter in which
+an ounce of any sort of prevention is better than a pound of any sort of
+cure. The affection is a serious one, being nothing more or less than
+acute ophthalmia; the pain is very severe, and repeated attacks are said
+to bring permanent weakness of the eyes. Smoked glasses or goggles,[A]
+veils of green or blue or black, even a crescent eye-shade cut out of a
+piece of birch-bark or cardboard and blackened on its under-side with
+charcoal, will prevent the hours and sometimes days of torture which
+this distemper entails.
+
+[Sidenote: HORSES AND MULES]
+
+For a few miles we had the trail of the stampeders, but when that
+crossed the river we put on our snow-shoes and settled to the steady
+grind once more. A day's mush brought us to "The Birches," and another
+to Gold Mountain. Between the two places there was a portage, and the
+trail thereon, protected by the timber, was good. We longed for the time
+when all trails in Alaska shall be taken off the rivers and cut in the
+protecting forest. But we had gone but a mile along this good trail
+when our hearts sank, for we saw ahead of us a procession of army mules
+packing supplies from Fort Gibbon to the telegraph repair parties. We
+pulled out into the snow that the mules might pass, and the soldiers
+said no word, for they knew just how we felt, until the last soldier
+leading the last mule was going by, and he turned round and said: "And
+her name was Maud!" It was in the height of Opper's popularity, his
+"comic supplements" the chief dependence of the road-houses for
+wall-paper. The reference was so apposite that we burst into laughter,
+but there was nothing funny about the devastation that had been wrought.
+That good trail was all gone--the bottom pounded out of it--and nothing
+was left but a ploughed lane punched full of sink-holes. We had no
+trouble following the trail on the river after this encounter, but it
+had been almost as easy going to have struck out for ourselves in the
+unbroken snow of the winter. It is hard to make outsiders understand how
+a man who loves all animals may come to hate horses and mules,
+particularly mules, in this country. Our travelling is above all a
+matter of surface. Distance counts and weather counts, but surface
+counts for more than either. See how fast we came across the Seward
+Peninsula in the most distressing weather imaginable! A well-used dog
+trail becomes so hard and smooth that it offers scarce any resistance to
+the passage of the sled, and for walking or running over in moccasins or
+mukluks is the most perfect surface imaginable. The more it is used the
+better it becomes. But put a horse on that trail and in one passage it
+is ruined. The iron-shod hoofs break through the crust at every step and
+throw up the broken pieces as they are withdrawn. With mules it is even
+worse; the holes they punch are deeper and sharper. Neither man nor dog
+can pass over it again in comfort. One slips and slides about at every
+step, the leg leaders and ankle sinews are strained, the soles of the
+feet, though hardened by a thousand miles in moccasins, become sore and
+inflamed, and at night there is a new sort of weariness that only a
+horse-ruined trail gives. As a rule, the dog trail is of so little
+service to the horse or mule that it were as cheap to break out a new
+one in the snow, and it is this knowledge that exasperates the dog
+musher. So there is not much love lost between the horse man and the dog
+man in Alaska.
+
+[Sidenote: ARMY POSTS AND NATIVES]
+
+At last, after a night at "Old Station," we came in sight of Tanana,
+where is Fort Gibbon, the one the name of the town and the post-office,
+the other the name of the military post and the telegraph office. The
+military authorities refuse to call their post "Fort Tanana" and the
+postal authorities refuse to allow the town post-office to be called
+"Fort Gibbon," so there they lie, cheek by jowl, two separate places
+with a fence between them--a source of endless confusion. A letter
+addressed to Fort Gibbon is likely to go astray and a telegram addressed
+to Tanana to be refused. Stretching along a mile and a half of river
+bank, and beginning to come into view ten miles before they are reached,
+the military and commercial structures gradually separate themselves.
+Here to the left are the ugly frame buildings--all painted
+yellow--barracks, canteen, officers' quarters, hospital, commissariat,
+and so on. Two clumsy water-towers give height without dignity--a
+quality denied to military architecture in Alaska. To the right the town
+begins, and an irregular row of one and two story buildings, stores,
+warehouses, drinking shops, straggle along the water-front.
+
+Unlike most towns in interior Alaska, Tanana does not depend upon an
+adjacent mining camp. It owes its existence first to its geographical
+position as the central point of interior Alaska, at the confluence of
+the Tanana and Yukon Rivers. Most of the freight and passenger traffic
+for Fairbanks and the upper river is transshipped at Tanana, and
+extensive stocks of merchandise are maintained there. The army post is
+the other important factor in the town's prosperity, and is especially
+accountable for the number of saloons. Not only the soldiers, but many
+civilian employees, are supported by the post, and when it is understood
+that three thousand cords of wood are burned annually in the military
+reservation, it will be seen that quite a number of men must find work
+as choppers and haulers for the wood contractors. Setting aside the
+maintenance of the telegraph service, which has already been referred
+to, it may be said without unfairness that the salient activities of the
+army in the interior of Alaska are the consumption of whisky and wood.
+There is no opportunity for military training--for more than six months
+in the year it is impossible to drill outdoors--and the officers
+complain of the retrogression of their men in all soldierly
+accomplishments during the two years' detail in Alaska. Whether the
+prosperity of the liquor dealer be in any real sense the prosperity of
+the country, and whether the rapid destruction of the forest be
+compensated for by the wages paid to its destroyers, may reasonably be
+doubted.
+
+Three miles away is a considerable native village where the mission of
+Our Saviour of the Episcopal Church is situated, with an attractive
+church building and a picturesque graveyard. The evil influence which
+the town and the army post have exerted upon the Indians finds its
+ultimate expression in the growth of the graveyard and the dwindling of
+the village.
+
+This point at the junction of the two rivers was an important place for
+the inhabitants of interior Alaska ages before the white man reached the
+country. Tribes from all the middle Yukon, from the lower Yukon, from
+the Tanana, from the upper Kuskokwim met here for trading and for
+general festivity. It is impossible nowadays to determine when first the
+white man's merchandise began to penetrate into this country, but it was
+long before the white man came himself. Such prized and portable
+articles as axes and knives passed from hand to hand and from tribe to
+tribe over many hundreds of miles. Captain Cook, in 1778, found
+implements of white man's make in the hands of the natives of the great
+inlet that was named for him after his death, and they pointed to the
+Far East as the direction whence they had come. He judged that they had
+been brought from the Hudson Bay factories clean across the continent.
+There are many Indians still living who remember when they saw the
+first white man, and some were well grown at the time, but diligent
+inquiry has failed to discover one who ever saw a stone axe used, though
+some old men have been found who declared that their fathers, when
+young, used that implement. Traces have been discovered of the
+importation of edge-tools from four directions--from the mouth of the
+Yukon; from the Lynn Canal, by way of the headwaters of the Yukon; from
+the Prince William Sound, by way of the headwaters of the Tanana; as
+well as from the Hudson Bay posts in the Canadian Northwest, by way of
+the Porcupine River.
+
+When the Russians established themselves at Nulato in 1842, and the
+Hudson Bay Company put a post at Fort Yukon in 1846, Nuchalawoya, as
+Tanana was called, became the scene of commercial rivalry, and it is
+said that by the meeting of the agents and voyageurs of the two
+companies at this point the identity of the Yukon and Quikpak Rivers was
+discovered.
+
+The stories that linger with the village ancients of the great numbers
+of Indians who used to inhabit the country are doubtless based upon
+recollections of the gathering at old Nuchalawoya, when furs were
+brought here from far and wide, when there was no other place of
+merchandise in mid-Alaska. Now almost every Indian village has a trader
+and a store. That the race has diminished, and in most places is still
+diminishing, is beyond question, but that it was ever very largely
+numerous the natural conditions of the country forbid us to believe.
+
+[Sidenote: WHISKY-PEDDLERS]
+
+During the Reverend Jules Prevost's time at Tanana--and he was in
+residence in the year of this journey--from careful vital statistics
+kept during two periods of five years each, the race seemed barely to be
+holding its own; but since that time there has been a considerable
+decline, coincident with the increase of drunkenness and debauchery at
+the village when Mr. Prevost's firm hand and watchful eye were
+withdrawn. The situation tends to grow worse, and while one does not
+give up hope, for that would mean to give up serious effort, the outlook
+for the Indians at this place seems unfavourable. Two hundred soldiers,
+six or eight liquor shops,--the number varies from year to year,--three
+miles off a native village of perhaps one hundred and fifty souls, and
+dotting those intervening miles cabins chiefly occupied by "bootleggers"
+and go-betweens--that is the Tanana situation in a nutshell. The men
+desire the native girls, and the liquor is largely a lure to get them.
+Tuberculosis and venereal disease are rife, and the two make a terribly
+fatal combination amongst Indians.
+
+It was good to enjoy Mr. and Mrs. Prevost's hospitality, and it was good
+to speak through such an admirable interpreter as Paul. Something more
+than intelligence and knowledge of the languages are required to make a
+good interpreter; there must be sympathy and the ability to take fire.
+With such an interpreter, leaping at the speaker's thoughts, carrying
+himself entirely into his changing moods, rising to vehemence with him
+and again dropping to gentleness, forgetting himself in his
+identification with his principal, there is real pleasure in speaking to
+the natives who hang upon his vicarious lips. On the other hand, one of
+the most intelligent mission interpreters in the country is also so
+phlegmatic in disposition, so lifeless and monotonous in his speech, and
+particularly so impassive of countenance, that he reminds one of
+Napoleon's saying about Talleyrand: that if some one kicked him behind
+while he was speaking to you his face would give no sign of it at all.
+
+[Sidenote: CHENA AND FAIRBANKS]
+
+It is not necessary to write much detail of the two-hundred-mile journey
+to Fairbanks up the Tanana River. The trail was then wholly on the
+river, but now it has been taken wholly off, as every Alaskan musher
+hopes some day will be done with all trails. The region about the mouth
+of the river and for some miles up is one of the windiest in the
+country, and there is always troublesome crossing of bare sand-bars and
+of ice over which sand has been blown. The journey hastens to its close;
+men and dogs alike realise it, and push on willingly over longer stages
+than they had before attempted.
+
+Two days from Tanana we were luxuriating in the natural hot springs near
+Baker Creek, wallowing in the crude wooden vat, when "Daddy Karstner"
+had shovelled enough snow in to make entering the water possible, and
+emerging ruddy as boiled lobsters. It was a beautiful and interesting
+spot then, with noble groves of birch and the finest grove of
+cottonwood-trees in Alaska--all cut down now--all ruined in a plunging
+and bounding and quite unsuccessful attempt to make a "Health Resort" of
+the place for the "smart set" of Fairbanks. It is a scurvy trick of
+Fortune when she gives large wealth to a man with no feeling for trees.
+We spent Sunday there and roamed over the curious domain, snow-free
+amidst all the surrounding snow, rank in vegetation amidst the
+yet-lingering winter death; and then we wallowed again.
+
+Tolovana, Nenana, and then one long run of fifty-four miles, the longest
+and last run of the winter, and--Chena and Fairbanks. But just before we
+reached Chena, as we passed the fish camp where the dogs had been
+boarded the previous summer, Nanook stopped the whole team, looked up at
+the bank and gave utterance to his pronounced five barks on the
+descending scale. None of the other dogs seemed to notice or recognise
+the place, but Nanook said as plainly as if he had uttered speech:
+"Well, well! there's where I spent last summer!"
+
+We reached Fairbanks on the 11th of April, in time for Good Friday and
+Easter, after an absence of four months and a half--with the accumulated
+mail of all that period awaiting me. The distance covered was about
+twenty-two hundred miles, three fourths of it on foot, more than half of
+it on snow-shoes. At Chena I had called up the hospital at Fairbanks on
+the telephone, and the exchange operator had immediately recognised my
+voice and bidden me welcome; but when I reached Fairbanks, a light beard
+that I had suffered to grow during the winter made me unrecognisable by
+those who knew me best. So effectually does a beard disguise a man and
+so surely may his voice identify him.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[A] This was written before the writer learned the superior protection
+afforded by _amber_ glass.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE "FIRST ICE"--AN AUTUMN ADVENTURE ON THE KOYUKUK
+
+
+IT is not attempted in this narrative to give separate account of all
+the journeys with which it deals. That would involve much repetition and
+tedious detail. Our long journey has been described from start to
+finish, taking the reader far north of the Yukon, then almost to the
+extreme west of Alaska, and then round by the Yukon to mid-Alaska again.
+It is proposed now to give sketches of such parts of other journeys as
+do not cover the same ground, and they will lie, with one exception,
+south of the Yukon. While visiting many of the same points every winter,
+it has been within the author's good fortune and contrivance to include
+each year some new stretch of country, sometimes searching out and
+visiting a new tribe of natives, and blazing the way for the
+establishment of permanent missionary work amongst them. To these
+initial journeys belongs a zest that no subsequent travels in the same
+region ever have; there is a keen interest in what every new turn of a
+trail shall bring, every new bend of a river; there is eagerness rising
+with one's rising steps to excitement for the view from a new mountain
+pass; above all, there is deep satisfaction coupled with a sense of
+solemn responsibility in being the first to reach some remote band of
+Indians and preach to them the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. There
+are few men nowadays on the North American continent to whom that
+privilege remains.
+
+A period of nearly three years elapses between the beginning of the
+journey that has already been described and the short sketch of a
+journey that follows. Many things had happened in those three years. It
+had been the happy duty of the writer to return to the Koyukuk late in
+the winter of 1906-7, empowered to build the promised mission for the
+hitherto neglected natives of that region. Pitching tent at a spot
+opposite the mouth of the Alatna, with the aid of a skilled carpenter
+and a couple of axemen brought from the mining district above, and the
+labour of the Indians, the little log church and the mission house were
+put up and prepared for the two ladies--a trained nurse and a
+teacher--who should arrive on the first steamboat. The steamboat that
+brought them in carried him out on its return trip, and the next year
+was spent in the States making known the needs of the work in Alaska and
+securing funds for its advancement.
+
+[Sidenote: DOCTOR GRAFTON BURKE]
+
+On my return I brought with me a young physician, Doctor Grafton Burke,
+as a medical missionary, and a half-breed Alaskan youth, Arthur, who had
+been at school in California, as attendant and interpreter. A
+thirty-two-foot gasoline launch designed for the Yukon and its
+tributaries was also brought and was launched at the head of Yukon
+navigation at Whitehouse. The voyages of the _Pelican_ on almost all the
+navigable waters of interior Alaska do not belong to a narrative
+concerned solely with winter travel, but her maiden voyage ended in an
+unexpected and rather extraordinary journey over the ice which is
+perhaps worth describing. After the voyage down the Yukon, and up and
+down the Tanana, it was purposed to take the boat up the Koyukuk to the
+new mission at the Allakaket, where dogs and gear had been left, and put
+her in winter quarters there. The delays that associate themselves not
+unnaturally with three novices and a four-cylinder gasoline engine, had
+brought the date for ascending the Koyukuk a little too late for safety,
+though still well within the ordinary season of open water. The
+possibility of an early winter closing the navigation of that stream
+before the _Pelican_ reached her destination had been entertained and
+provided against, though it seemed remote. Three dogs, needed anyway to
+replace superannuated members of the team, had been bargained for at
+Tanana and accommodations for them arranged, and a supply of dog fish
+stowed on the after deck of the launch. But when we went to pay the
+arranged price and receive the dogs, the vender's wife and children set
+up such a remonstrance and plaintive to-do that he went back on his
+bargain and we did not get the dogs. There was no time to hunt others,
+to linger was to invite the very mishap we sought to guard against, so
+we pulled out dogless, reached the mouth of the Koyukuk on the 17th of
+September and, having taken on board the supply of gasoline cached
+there, turned our bow up the river the next morning. For five days we
+pushed up the waters of that great, lonely river, and by that time we
+were some twenty-five miles above Hogatzakaket, three hundred and
+twenty-five miles from the mouth and one hundred and twenty-five miles
+from the mission, at the camp of a prospector who had recently poled up
+from the Yukon. We woke on board the launch the next morning to find ice
+formed all around us and ice running in the river. The thermometer had
+gone to zero in the night.
+
+[Sidenote: THE RUNNING ICE]
+
+A very brief attempt to make our way against the running ice showed the
+danger of doing so, for the thin cakes had knife-edges and cut the
+planking of the boat so that she began to leak. Then there came to me
+with some bitterness that I had earnestly desired a thin steel
+armour-plating at the water-line, but had allowed myself to be persuaded
+out of it by her builders. So again my forethought had been of no
+avail--though, of course, lightness of draught _was_ the first
+consideration. We put back to the camp and proceeded to flatten out and
+cut up all the empty cans and tinware we could find and nail it along
+the water-line of the boat, but the prospector persuaded us to wait a
+day or two. He had never seen a river close with the first little run of
+ice. He looked for a soft spell and open water yet. It was foolish to
+risk the boat against the ice. So we waited; and night after night the
+thermometer fell a little lower and a little lower, until presently a
+sheet of ice stretched across the whole river in the bend where we lay.
+We were frozen in. The remote possibility we had feared and sought to
+guard against had happened. Navigation had ceased on the Koyukuk at the
+earliest date anybody remembered, the 23d of September. Three days more
+had surely taken us to the mission where they had long expected us; now
+we should have to make our way on foot, without dogs, on the dangerous
+"first ice," as it is called, taking all sorts of chances, pulling a
+Yukon sled, with tent and stove, grub and bedding, "by the back of the
+face."
+
+But first there was the launch to pull out and make snug for the winter
+and safe against the spring break-up. A convenient little creek mouth
+with easy grade offered, which was one of the reasons I had not pushed
+on the few more miles we could have made. Here were eligible winter
+quarters; farther on we might have trouble in putting the boat in
+safety; here also was a kindly and capable man willing to assist us.
+
+It was our great good fortune to find this man at this spot. A steamboat
+he had signalled as she entered the mouth of the Koyukuk had passed him
+by unheeded, and he had been left to make his way six hundred miles up
+to the diggings, with his winter's outfit in a poling boat. He had
+accomplished more than half the task, and, warned by the approach of
+winter, had stopped at this place a few days before we reached it, and
+had begun the building of a little cabin; meaning to prospect the creek,
+which had taken his eye as having a promising look. The cabin we helped
+him finish was the twenty-first cabin he had built in Alaska, he
+informed us.
+
+There is something very impressive about the quiet, self-reliant,
+unrecorded hardihood of the class of which this man was an excellent
+type. We asked him why he had no partner, and he said he had had several
+partners, but they all snored, and he would not live with a man that
+snored. He had prospected and mined in many districts of Alaska during
+nearly twenty years. Once he had sold a claim for a few hundred dollars
+that had yielded many thousands to the purchaser, and that was as near
+wealth as he had ever come. But he had always made a living, always had
+enough money at the close of the summer to buy his winter's "outfit" and
+try his luck somewhere else.
+
+[Sidenote: THE PROSPECTOR]
+
+Singly, or in pairs, men of this type have wandered all over this vast
+country: preceding the government surveys, preceding the professional
+explorer, settling down for a winter on some creek that caught their
+fancy, building a cabin, thawing down a few holes to bed-rock, sometimes
+taking out a little gold, more often finding nothing, going in the
+summer to some old-established camp to work for wages, or finding
+employment as deck-hand on a steamboat.
+
+With an axe and an auger they have dotted their rough habitations all
+over the country; with a pick and a shovel and a gold pan they have
+tested the gravels of innumerable creeks. They know the drainage slopes
+and the practicable mountain passes, the haunts of the moose and the
+time and direction of the caribou's wanderings. The boats they have
+built have pushed their noses to the heads of all navigable streams; the
+sleds they have made have furrowed the remotest snows. In the arts of
+the wilderness they are the equal of the native inhabitant; in endurance
+and enterprise far his superior. The more one learns by experience and
+observation what life of this sort means, and realises the demands it
+makes upon a man's resourcefulness, upon his physique, upon his good
+spirits, upon his fortitude, the more one's admiration grows for the
+silent, strong men who have gone out all over this land and pitted
+themselves successfully against its savage wildness. Often in stress for
+the necessaries of life, there are yet no men as a class more
+free-handed and generous; trained to do everything for themselves, there
+are none more willing to help others.
+
+It is no small task to pull a four-ton boat out of the water with only
+such wilderness tackle as we could devise. We made ways of soft timbers,
+squaring and smoothing them; we cut down many trees for rollers; we dug
+and graded the beach. Then, having altogether unloaded her and built a
+high cache of poles and a platform for her stuff, and having chopped the
+ice from all around her, we rigged a Spanish windlass and wound that
+boat out of the water with the half-inch cable she carried, and up on
+the ways and well into the mouth of the little creek. Then we levelled
+her up and thoroughly braced her and put her canvas cover all over her,
+and she lay there until spring and took no harm at all.
+
+Arthur had meantime been making a sled of birch, intending to pull it
+himself while the doctor and I pulled a Yukon sled borrowed from our
+friend the prospector. By the 6th of October all our dispositions were
+made for departure, and the ice seemed strong enough to warrant trusting
+ourselves to it; but we waited another two days, the thermometer still
+reaching a minimum each night somewhere around zero. When we said
+good-bye to our friend Martin Nelson (sometimes one wonders if anywhere
+else in the world can be found men as kind and helpful to strangers) and
+started on our journey, it soon appeared that Arthur's sled was more
+hindrance than help. There was no material to iron the runners save
+strips of tin can, and these could not be beaten so smooth that they did
+not drag and cut on the ice. So the load was transferred to our sled and
+the little sled abandoned, and we took turns at the harness. This was
+the order of the journey: one man went ahead with an axe to test the
+ice; one man put the rope trace about his shoulders; one man pushed at
+the handle-bars which had been affixed to the sled. It was fortunate
+that amidst the equipment on the launch were two pairs of ice-creepers.
+Without them any sort of pulling and pushing on the glare ice would have
+been impossible.
+
+We soon found that the bend in which we had frozen was no sort of index
+of the general condition of the river. Much of it was still wide open,
+and every elbow between bends was piled high with rough ice from
+pressure jams. There was shore ice, however, even in the open bends,
+along which we were able to creep; and, though the ice-jams gave
+considerable trouble, yet we did very well the first day and camped at
+dark with eighteen or nineteen miles to our credit, in the presence of a
+great, red, smoky sunset and a glorious alpenglow on a distant snow
+mountain.
+
+The next day was full of risks and difficulties. We were to learn more
+about the varieties and vagaries of ice on that journey than many
+winters' travel on older ice would teach.
+
+[Illustration: THE START OVER THE "FIRST ICE."]
+
+[Illustration: "ROUGH GOING."]
+
+[Sidenote: THE START]
+
+At times, for a few hundred yards, the sled would glide with little
+effort over smooth, polished ice; then would come a long sand-bar, the
+side of which we had to hug close, and the ice upon it was what is
+called "shell-ice," through several layers of which we broke at every
+step. As the river fell, each night had left a thin sheet of ice
+underneath the preceding night's ice, and the foot crashed through the
+layers and the sled runners cut through them down to the gravel and sand
+at the bottom. Then would come another smooth stretch on which we made
+good time. But as we advanced up the river the current was swifter and
+swifter and the ice conditions grew steadily worse. Here was a steep-cut
+bank with just about eighteen or twenty inches of ice adhering to it and
+the black, rushing water beyond. We must either get our load along that
+shelf or unload the sled and pack everything over the face of a rocky
+bluff. Arthur passed over it first, testing gently with the axe, and
+found it none too strong. But the alternative was so toilsome that we
+resolved to take the chance. The doctor put the trace over his
+shoulders, Arthur took the handle-bars, while I climbed to a ledge of
+the rocks and, with a rope made of a pair of camel's-hair puttees
+unwound for the purpose and fastened to the sled, took all the weight I
+could and eased the sled over the worst place where the ice sloped to
+the water. If the ice had broken I might have held the sled from sinking
+until one of the others came to me, or I might not; the boys would
+probably have gone in too. It was a most risky spot and the sort of
+chance no one would think of taking under ordinary circumstances. As it
+was, the ice broke under Arthur's feet, and only by throwing his weight
+on the sled did he save himself a ducking. But we got the load safely
+across.
+
+A good run of perhaps a mile, and then we had to go back at least half a
+mile, for the ice played out altogether on our side of the river as we
+reached the Batzakaket, and there was open water in the middle. To reach
+the shore ice that was continuous on the other side, we had to "double"
+the open water. With such varying fortune the day passed, and we camped
+on the level ice of a little creek tributary to the right bank, having
+made perhaps another nineteen miles.
+
+When I awoke in the morning my heart sank at the tiny, creeping patter
+of fine snow on the silk tent. Snow was one thing I greatly dreaded, for
+there was not a pair of snow-shoes amongst us! A little snow would not
+do much harm, but if once snow began to fall we might have a foot or two
+before it ceased, and then we should be in bad case. It stopped before
+noon, but the half-inch that fell made the sled drag much heavier. The
+actual force to be exerted was not the most laborious feature of pulling
+that sled; it was the jerk, jerk, jerk on the shoulders. A dog's four
+legs give him much smoother traction than a man's two legs give, just as
+a four-cylinder engine will turn a propeller with much less vibration
+than a two-cylinder engine. Every step forward gave an impulse that
+spent itself before the next impulse was given, and the result was that
+the shoulders grew sore.
+
+We came that morning to the longest and roughest ice-jam we had so far
+encountered. It was as though a thousand bulls had been turned loose in
+a mammoth plate-glass warehouse. Jagged slabs of ice upended everywhere
+in the most riotous confusion, and it was impossible to pick any way
+amongst them, so a man had to go ahead and hew a path. It was while thus
+engaged that the doctor fell and injured his knee so severely on a sharp
+ice point that he hobbled in pain the rest of the trip. This was a very
+serious matter to us, for, though he insisted on still taking his trick
+at the traces, his effectiveness as a motive power was much diminished;
+and we had no sooner thus hewed and smashed our way through that jam
+than we had to hew and smash it across to the other side again in our
+search for passage.
+
+[Sidenote: "BY THE BACK OF THE FACE"]
+
+Then we came to a place where, in order to cut off a long sweeping curve
+of the river with open water and bad shore ice, we went through a dry
+slough and had to drag those iron runners over gravel and stones, where
+sometimes it was all the three of us could do to move the sled a few
+feet at a time. Yet all along the banks were willows, and if we had only
+known then what we know now we would have cut down and split some
+saplings and bound them over the iron, and so have saved three fourths
+of that labour.
+
+[Sidenote: BEAR MEAT AND BEANS]
+
+So the day's run was short, though the most exhausting yet, and we were
+all thoroughly tired out when we pitched the tent. I have note of a
+great supper of bear meat and beans, the meat the spoil of our friend
+the prospector's gun. It is one of the compensations of human nature
+that the satisfaction of appetite increases in pleasure in proportion to
+the bodily labour that is done. With food abundant and at choice, I do
+not like bear meat and will not eat beans. Yet my diary bears special
+note of the delicious meal they furnished on this occasion. Put any
+philosopher in the traces, or set him ahead of the dog team on
+show-shoes, breaking trail all day, and towards evening it is odds that
+his mind is not occupied with deep speculations about the infinite and
+the absolute, but rather with the question of what he will have for
+supper. Particularly should the grub be a little short, should fresh
+meat give out, or, above all, should sugar be "shy," it is astonishing
+how one's mind runs on eating and what elaborate imaginary repasts one
+partakes of. Yet of all food that a man ever eats there is none that is
+so relished and gives such clear gustatory pleasure as the plain, rough
+fare of the camp--provided it be well cooked. Greatly as we were in need
+of sleep, we got little, for the doctor's knee pained him all night and
+poor Arthur developed a raging toothache that did not yield until
+carbolic acid had been thrice applied.
+
+Soon after we started the next day, the river narrowed and swept round a
+series of mountain bluffs and we began to have the gloomiest
+expectations of trouble. It seemed certain that ice would fail us for
+passage, and we would have to pack our sled and its load by slow relays
+over the mountain. But to our delight we passed between the bluffs on
+good, firm, smooth ice, and it was not until we emerged on the flat
+beyond that our difficulty began. So it is again and again on the trail.
+Almost always it is the unexpected that happens; almost always it is
+something quite different from what our apprehensions have dwelt upon
+that arises to hinder and distress us. A tongue of level land that
+struck far out into the water, a cut mud bank with a current so swift
+that no ice at all had formed along it, interposed an obstacle that it
+took hours to circumvent. We had to leave the sled and cut a trail
+through the brush for half a mile along this peninsula in order to reach
+a stretch of the river where the ice was resumed, and the little snow
+that had fallen being quite insufficient to give the sled good passage,
+we had an exceedingly arduous job in getting it across.
+
+A mile or two of good going brought us in view of the smoke of a human
+habitation. What a blessed sight often and often this waving column of
+blue smoke in the distance is! Sometimes it means life itself to the
+Alaskan musher, and it always means warmth, shelter, food,
+companionship, assistance; all that one human being can bring to
+another. "The bright and the balmy effulgence of morn" never "breaks on
+the traveller faint and astray" with half the rejoicing that comes with
+the first sight of mere smoke. "I believe I see smoke," cried Arthur,
+with the quick vision of the native. "Where? Where?" we eagerly
+inquired, and the doctor left the handle-bars and limped forward to the
+boy ahead with the axe. "Away yonder on that bank," pointed Arthur. "I
+see it! I see it!" the doctor shouted; "we're coming to a house, we're
+coming to people!" The trip was a severe apprenticeship to Alaskan life
+for a man straight from the New York hospitals, although before the
+accident to his knee I had declared that if only they could be trained
+to live on dry fish I thought a team of young doctors would haul a sled
+very well. He was delighted at coming upon the first inhabited house we
+had seen since we helped Nelson to build his little cabin--and _that_
+was only the second inhabited house in three hundred miles.
+
+[Sidenote: BREAKING THROUGH]
+
+But, perhaps because we grew less cautious in our excitement, almost
+immediately after we had spied the smoke of the cabin we got into one of
+the worst messes of the whole trip. Arthur had pushed ahead and we had
+followed with a spurt, and almost at the same time all three of us
+became aware that we were on dangerous ice. Arthur cried, "The ice is
+breaking; go back!" just as we began to feel it swaying under our feet.
+I shouted to the doctor, "Go _on_ to the bank quick!" and pushed with
+all my might, and we managed to make a few yards more towards shallow
+water, over ice that bent and cracked at every step, before it gave way
+and let down the sled and the men into two feet of water. Arthur had run
+safely over the breaking ice and had gained the bank, and as I write, in
+my mind's eye I can see the doctor, who had been duly instructed in the
+elementary lessons of the trail, standing in the water and calling to
+Arthur: "Make a fire quick; make a fire. I'm all wet!"
+
+But it was not necessary to make a fire, for the thermometer was no
+lower than 10 deg. or 15 deg. above zero, and the chief trouble was not the
+wetting of our legs but the wetting of the contents of the sled. Along
+the bank was stronger ice, and we managed, though not without much
+difficulty, to get the sled upon it and to make our way to the Indian
+cabin.
+
+As soon as old "Atler" (I have never been quite sure of what white
+man's name that is a corruption) knew who we were, his hospitality,
+which had been ready enough at first sight, became most cordial and
+expansive. While we pulled off our wet clothing his wife hung it up to
+dry and had the kettle on and some tea making, and he and Arthur got out
+our wet bedding and festooned it about the cabin. Most fortunately the
+things that would have suffered most from water did not get wet. So
+there we lay all the afternoon, having made no more than six miles, and
+there we lay all the next day, which was Sunday.
+
+There was a sort of awful interest that centred upon one member of this
+family, a boy of seven or eight years. The previous spring he had killed
+his uncle by the accidental discharge of a .22 rifle, shooting him
+through the heart. The gun had been brought in loaded and cocked and had
+been set in a corner of the cabin, and the child, playing with it, had
+pulled the trigger. The carelessness of Indians with firearms is the
+frequent cause of terrible accidents like this. The child was still too
+young to realise what he had done, but one fancies that later it will
+throw a gloom on his life.
+
+To my great relief and satisfaction I was able to arrange here for a
+young Indian man to accompany us with his one dog. He was a native of
+those parts and knew every bend and turn of the river. We were, indeed,
+in great need of help. The doctor's knee grew worse rather than better,
+and Arthur was suffering the return of an old rheumatism in his leg. I
+was the only sound member of the party, and my shoulders were galled by
+the rope and my feet tender and sore from continual wearing of the
+crampons. We were now not quite half-way--some sixty miles lay behind us
+and sixty-five before--and we had been travelling four days.
+
+[Sidenote: "ONE-EYED WILLIAM"]
+
+Divine service being done on Sunday morning, the whole of it well
+interpreted by Arthur to the great satisfaction of the Indians, he and
+"One-Eyed William," our recruit, started out to survey to-morrow's
+route. In this reconnaissance William broke through some slush ice at
+the greatest depth of the river in seeking a safe place to cross, and,
+had Arthur not been with him, would almost certainly have drowned, for
+the current was very swift and the man, like most Indians, unable to
+swim a stroke;--though, indeed, swimming is of little avail for escape
+out of such predicament and is a poor dependence in these icy waters
+winter or summer. More beans boiled and a batch of biscuits baked
+against our departure, and evening prayer said and interpreted, we were
+ready for bed again.
+
+Our visit was a great delight to old Atler. An inflamed eye was much
+relieved by the doctor's ministrations, and the natural piety which he
+shares with most Indians was gratified at the opportunity of worship and
+instruction. A good old man, according to his lights, I take Atler to
+be, well known for benevolence of disposition and particularly priding
+himself on being a friend of the white man. He told us of one unworthy
+representative of that race he had helped a year ago. The man had come
+out of the Hogatzitna (Hog River) country, entirely out of food, himself
+and a couple of dogs nigh to starvation, and Atler had taken care of him
+for several days while he recuperated and had given him grub and dog
+fish enough to get him to Bettles, one hundred and thirty miles away,
+where he could purchase supplies. The old Indian had robbed his own
+family's little winter stock of "white-man's grub" that this stranger
+might be provided, and had never heard a word from him since, though he
+had promised to make return when he reached Bettles.
+
+Unfortunately Alaska's white population is sprinkled with men like this,
+men without heart and without conscience, and it is precisely such
+rascals who are loudest in their contemptuous talk of the Indians. It is
+such men who chop down the woodwork of cabins rather than be troubled to
+take the axe into the forest a few rods away, who depart in the morning
+without making kindling and shavings, careless how other travellers may
+fare so themselves be warm without labour; who make "easy money" in the
+summer-time by dropping down the Yukon with a boat-load of "rot-gut"
+whisky, leaving drunkenness and riot at every village they pass; who
+beget children of the native women and regard them no more than a dog
+does his pups, indifferent that their own flesh and blood go cold and
+hungry. They are the curse and disgrace of Alaska, and they often go
+long time insolent and unwhipped because our poor lame law is not nimble
+enough to overtake them; "to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness
+for ever," one's indignation is sometimes disposed to thunder savagely
+with Saint Jude; and indeed there needs a future punishment to redress
+the balance in this country.
+
+[Sidenote: FIDO]
+
+At break of day our reinforced company was off, Arthur and "One-Eyed
+William" going ahead to sound the ice and pick the way, the dog "Fido"
+(such a name for a Siwash dog!) and myself in the traces, the doctor at
+the handle-bars. The rest had benefited the doctor's knee, but walking
+was still painful and he needed the support of the handle-bars all day.
+What a great difference that one strong, willing little dog made! His
+steady pulling kept the sled in motion and relieved one's shoulders of
+the galling jerk of the rope at every step. The going was "not too bad,"
+as they say here, all day, though it carried one rather severe
+disappointment. William had told us of a portage he thought we could
+take that would cut off eight or nine miles of the river; but when we
+reached it the snow upon it proved insufficient to afford a passage, for
+it was a rough niggerhead flat, and we had to swing around the outer
+edges of the great curves the river makes, where alone was ice, with
+trouble and danger at every crossing.
+
+The decision as to whether we should halt or go forward, as to whether
+ice was safe or unsafe, as to whether we should cross the river or stay
+where we were--every decision that concerned the secure advance of the
+party--I put wholly upon William, and would not permit myself or any
+other to question his judgment or to argue it with him. There was no
+sense in half-measures; this young man knew the river as none of us did,
+knew ice as none of us did, and we must put ourselves entirely in his
+hands. The debate that had become usual at every doubtful course arose
+at the portage just referred to, but it was at once suppressed by the
+announcement that hereafter no one could have the floor but William, and
+that when he had spoken the matter was settled. Day by day I think we
+all came to a keener realisation of how very dangerous a journey we were
+making; it lay heavily on my mind that I had brought these two young
+men--whether by mishap or mismanagement--into real peril of their lives.
+Again and again I blamed myself for the delays that had deferred our
+start up the Koyukuk, again and again I wished that we had waited longer
+before leaving the _Pelican's_ winter quarters. I had even contemplated
+a week's stay at Atler's, to give the river a chance to get into better
+shape, but unless there came a very much sharper spell than we had had
+so far a week would not make much difference, and our grub began to run
+short and Atler was none too well supplied. So it seemed best to push
+on.
+
+The next day was full of toil and difficulty. There was no good ice to
+make fine time over that day. Starting in the grey dawn, for mile after
+mile we had to haul the sled over crumbly shell-ice that broke through
+to gravel; and when the shell-ice was done we came to a new bend where a
+rapid current washed a steep mud bank. There was just a little shelf of
+ice, but the brush overhung it so that the passage of the sled was not
+possible. William and Arthur started with the axes to clear away the
+brush, but it seemed to me foolish to do that unless the ledge held out
+and led somewhere, for the turn of the bank threw it out of sight. So
+they went forward cautiously along that ledge to the end--and an end
+they found, sure enough, so that had we followed the axemen with the
+sled we should have had to creep all the way back again. There was
+nothing for it but to cut another land trail on a bench that we could
+reach where the sled was stopped but that could not be reached at all
+farther on. A long and slow and laborious job it was, that took most of
+the morning, to cut that trail and then get the load over it to ice
+again.
+
+By noon we were opposite the Red Mountain, one of the well-known Koyukuk
+landmarks, and on the site of an old Indian fishing camp. William and
+Arthur had made a great fire when we came up, and we heated some beans
+and made some tea and ate lunch. A mile farther on was the cabin of a
+white man, and we paid him a brief visit and got a little tea from him,
+for ours was nearly gone. It did me good to hear him sing the praises of
+Deaconess Carter, the trained nurse at the mission. She had taken him
+in, crippled with rheumatism, and had cured him. Already the new mission
+was proving a boon to whites as well as natives. We made no more than
+four or five miles farther when, coming to spruce with no more in sight
+for a long distance, we pitched the tent, all very tired.
+
+That night the thermometer went to 5 deg. below zero, the coldest weather of
+the season so far. As a consequence the next day we had a new and very
+disagreeable trouble. The cold weather, by increasing the amount of
+running ice in the still open stretches, had brought about a jam that
+had raised the level of the water and caused an overflow of the ice--a
+very common phenomenon of a closing river. We picked our way wet-foot
+much of the day, and towards evening came to a complete _impasse_ in the
+middle of the river, with open water in front and on one hand, and new
+thin ice on the other. So we had to turn round and go back again a long
+way, the mid-river being the only traversable place, until, when it
+seemed that we should have to go round another bend to reach a crossing,
+Arthur proposed that he and William, who wore mukluks, should carry the
+doctor and me, who wore moccasins across the overflow, and then rush the
+sled across; and this we did, wetting its contents somewhat, however. We
+camped immediately, for we had landed on impassable gravel.
+
+[Sidenote: THE RED MOUNTAIN]
+
+That night the thermometer went to 20 deg. below zero, and we took good hope
+that the cold, which began to approach the real cold of winter, would
+put an end to overflow; but, on the contrary, it only aggravated the
+trouble. For the first mile or two there was nothing for it but to go
+through it, and at 20 deg. below it is a miserable business to be wading in
+moccasins even for an hour. We had rearranged our load so that it stood
+up somewhat higher, but we could not avoid wetting the things on the
+bottom of the sled, and the ice formed about it very inconveniently.
+Moreover, the little dog, who had a great dislike to wetting his feet,
+began to give us a good deal of trouble, and at one time nothing but the
+admirable presence of mind and prompt action of William saved us from
+losing our whole load. We had reached a strip of new, dry ice formed the
+night before, with black, rushing water on the left, towards which the
+slippery surface sloped. Presently as we advanced we began to encounter
+a little overflow water, coming from the bank on the right, seeping up
+between the ice and the bank; and that dog, to avoid wetting his feet in
+the overflow, deliberately turned towards the open water and set the
+sled sliding in the same direction. Without the crampons, which we had
+not used for the past few days, it was impossible to hold the sled
+against the dog's traction, and in another moment we should have lost
+everything, for the dog paid no heed to our voices, when William with a
+blow of his axe cut the rope by which the dog pulled, and, grasping the
+sled and throwing himself full length on the ice, managed to stop it on
+the very brink of the water. It was a close shave, but once more we were
+safe; and the doctor, in the exuberance of his gratitude, said that
+night: "If William wants a glass eye I'll send to New York to get him
+one." But when William learned that the glass eye was a mere matter of
+looks and would in no wise improve his vision, he lost interest in it.
+Looks do not count for much amongst the Koyukuk Indians.
+
+[Illustration: ARTHUR AND DOCTOR BURKE.]
+
+[Illustration: SAINT JOHN'S-IN-THE-WILDERNESS, ALLAKAKET, KOYUKUK
+RIVER.]
+
+That night was a long way off yet, however; we had other risks to run,
+other labours. Here were two islands in the river, and the current,
+running like a mill-race and burdened with ice cakes, swept around the
+shore of one of them leaving the passage between them quite dry. There
+was no shore ice at all where the channel was, and it was so
+ugly-looking a reach that had there been any there I am sure we should
+not have ventured it. There was nothing for it but to drag the sled half
+a mile over the gravel, and we did it, the most heart-breaking labour
+of the whole trip. It took us exactly an hour to make that half mile.
+William did not know the trick of the split willows either, so we all
+four of us sweated for our ignorance. Shortly after, our guide pointed
+out the spot where poor Ericson's frozen body was found, two years and
+eight months before.
+
+[Sidenote: A NARROW ESCAPE]
+
+[Sidenote: RUBBER ICE]
+
+Near the Kornuchaket (or the mouth of Old Man Creek), where the Koyukuk
+receives a considerable tributary, we approached the most dangerous
+travelling we had had yet. The river here is swift and deep, and there
+are several islands set in it. Most of its surface was frozen, but the
+ice was very thin. William stopped the procession before we reached the
+bad stretch and went hastily over a part of it. Under his single weight
+we could see the ice-sheet undulating. It had been our rule that ice was
+not safe unless it took three blows of the axe to bring water, but this
+ice gave water at a blow. When William returned he made quite an
+harangue, which Arthur interpreted. He thought we could make it past the
+mouth of the creek, and if we could we should find good going to Moses'
+Village. But we must go just as fast as we could travel; we must not let
+the sled stop an instant. The ice would bend and crack; but he thought
+if we went quickly we could get across. So for nearly a quarter of a
+mile we rushed that sled over "rubber" ice that swayed and cracked and
+yielded under our feet and under the sled, until we reached the bank of
+one of the islands, and then again we launched her and ran with her to
+the shore. Once one of my feet broke through, and immediately the water
+welled up all around--with the steamboat channel underneath--but
+without pause we increased our speed and made the strong shore ice
+safely at last. No man will ever doubt the plasticity, the "viscosity"
+of ice, as it used to be styled in the old glacier controversies, who
+has passed over the "rubber" ice that forms under certain circumstances
+and at certain seasons on these rivers.
+
+We would never, I am sure, have attempted that ice had not William been
+with us. We would have struck a blow with the axe and declared it
+unsafe. Of course, it was unsafe; the whole journey was unsafe, but I am
+convinced that this thin, continuous sheet of ice, cushioned actually
+upon the surface of the water out of which it was growing, was really
+safer than much of the thicker but brittle, unsupported ice we had
+unhesitatingly come over. Chemists tell us that certain substances in
+the act of formation, which they call nascent substances, are
+extraordinarily active and potent, and it may be that ice in the same
+state has a special tenacity of texture which belongs to that state
+alone. I wish that I could have measured the thickness of that ice.
+Where my foot went through I know it was very thin, but its thickness I
+will not venture to guess. There was the distinct feeling that the water
+was bearing the ice up and when it was punctured the water welled up
+with pressure behind it.
+
+Beyond the Kornuchaket much more snow had fallen, and a few miles
+brought us to Moses' Village, called grandiosely "Arctic City," since a
+trader had established a store and a road-house there. At this spot a
+new overland mail trail from Tanana strikes the Koyukuk, and, although
+ten or twelve miles remained, we felt that our journey was done. My sled
+dogs were there, and, as I had not seen them for more than a year, that
+was a joyful reunion. Nanook's bark of welcome, which no one but I ever
+got with quite the same inflection, was as grateful to me as all the
+licking and slobbering of the others, for Nanook is a very independent
+beast, reserved in his demonstrations and not wearing his heart on his
+sleeve, so to speak. They were all glad to see me--Old Lingo and Nig,
+and even "Jimmy the Fake." Billy was dead. For fifteen or sixteen months
+they had been boarded here, and, since fish had been very scarce the
+preceding summer, their food had been chiefly bacon and rice and tallow,
+and there was a bill of close to four hundred dollars against us! Dogs
+are very expensive things in this expensive country. When used the
+winter through on the trail, and boarded the summer through at a fish
+camp, we estimate that it costs one hundred dollars per head per annum
+to feed a dog; so that the maintenance of a team of five dogs, which is
+the minimum practicable team, will cost five hundred dollars per annum
+for food alone.
+
+[Sidenote: SATURATED SNOW]
+
+When we had eaten a good supper and were reclining on spring cots in the
+bunk house, there was not one of us but confidently expected to be at
+the mission in the next forenoon. For a week past the natives had been
+going to and fro in three or four hours. The river was completely closed
+above here, and there was much more snow than we found below. So we
+hitched our own dogs to our own sled the next morning, when the doctor
+had visited a sick person or two, and started out on the last stretch
+of the journey. All went well until we had turned the long bend at the
+head of which the old, abandoned post of Bergman is situated, just on
+the Arctic Circle, but a mile or two beyond we were wallowing in
+saturated snow that stretched all across the river right up to the banks
+on either side. An overflow was in progress, the water running along the
+surface of the ice and soaking up the snow so that there was six inches
+of slush all over it. We struggled along awhile, though from the first
+it seemed hopeless, and then we gave it up and went back to the
+road-house. There would be no passing that stretch of river with the
+sled until the cold had dealt with the overflow. It is almost always the
+unexpected that happens. The next morning I put on a pair of
+snow-shoes--Doctor Burke's knee forbade him their use--and taking
+William with me, mushed up through the slush and the snow to the
+mission, leaving the others to come on with the team so soon as they
+found it practicable.
+
+A mile before we reached the mission was the new village built by the
+Esquimaux--"Kobuk town" they call it--and right in front of the village
+the Malamute Riffle, a noted difficulty of navigation, was still running
+wide open, though all the rest of the river was long closed. Near the
+riffle the Kobuks had a fish-trap, and some who were busy getting out
+fish saw and recognised me, and the whole population came swarming out
+for greetings. It was good to see these kindly, simple people again, to
+shake their hands and hear their "I glad I see you," which is the
+general native greeting where there is any English at all. Every one
+must shake hands; even the babies on their mothers' backs stretch out
+their little fingers eagerly, and if they be too small for that, the
+mother will take the little hand and hold it out. At the bend we take a
+portage and a quarter of a mile brings us to the Allakaket, to the
+familiar modest buildings of the mission, with its new Koyukuk village
+gradually clustering round it. The whole scene was growing into almost
+the exact realisation of my dream when first I camped on this spot two
+years and nine months before. There was a distinct thrill of pleasure at
+the sight of the church. Built entirely of logs with the bark on, there
+was nothing visible anywhere about it but spruce bark, save for the
+gleam of the gilded cross that surmounted the little belfry. The roof,
+its regular construction finished, was covered with small spruce poles
+with the bark on, nailed together at the apex, and where it projected
+well beyond the gables its under-side was covered with bark, as well as
+the cornice all round that finished it off. Even the window-frames and
+the door-panels were covered with bark. It was of the same tone because
+of the selfsame substance as the forest still growing around it, and it
+gave at the first glance the satisfied impression of fitness. It gave
+the feeling that it belonged where it was placed. It is ill praising
+one's own work, but I had been keen to see how it would strike me, fresh
+from the outside, after a year's absence, and I was very glad indeed
+that it pleased me again.
+
+[Sidenote: A STARVING WHITE MAN]
+
+I had no more than entered upon the warm welcome that waited at Saint
+John's-in-the-Wilderness, and was still wondering at the homelike
+cosiness which the mission house had assumed under the deft hands of
+the two ladies who occupied it, when there came an Indian with word of a
+white man he had found starving in the wilderness fifteen miles away.
+Another native with a dog team and a supply of immediate food was
+hastily despatched to bring the man in, and that night the poor
+emaciated fellow, looking like a man of sixty-five or seventy though he
+was really no more than forty, crawled out of the sled and tottered into
+the house. He had started out from Tanana two months before with two
+pack-horses to make his way across to the Koyukuk diggings, had lost his
+way and wandered aimlessly in that vast wilderness; one horse had been
+drowned, the other he had killed for meat. He had made a raft to come
+down the Kornutna (Old Man Creek) to the Koyukuk, knowing that there was
+a trading-post near its mouth, and had been frozen in and forced to
+abandon it. Since that time he had been living on a few spoonfuls of
+meal a day, with frozen berries, and once or twice a ptarmigan, and when
+Ned found him was at the last extremity and had given up, intending to
+die where he was.
+
+That man's hunger was tremendous, but Miss Carter, having knowledge and
+experience of such cases, was apprehensive that if any large quantity of
+food were taken at a time there would be serious danger to him. So for a
+day or two he ate frequently but sparingly. A little later, as he grew
+stronger, to such extremes did his hunger pinch him that he would watch
+till there was no one looking and would go into the kitchen and steal
+food that was preparing, even taking it out of the frying-pan on the
+stove. He would be hungry immediately after having a full meal. In ten
+days he was sufficiently recovered to resume his journey to the
+diggings, and when I saw him at Coldfoot two months later I did not
+recognise him, so greatly had he changed from the poor shrunken creature
+that crept into the mission. We all think we have been hungry time and
+again; if ever we have gone a few days on short rations we are quite
+sure of it; this man had sounded the height and depth and stretched the
+length and breadth of it, and none of the rest of us really know what
+hunger means. I tried to get him to talk about it, but he said he wanted
+to forget it. He said he was ashamed to think of some of the things he
+had done and of some of the terrible thoughts that had come to him, and
+I pressed him no more. I have always felt that, even in its last
+hideousness of cannibalism, only God Himself can judge starvation.
+
+[Sidenote: TWO INTERPRETERS]
+
+Here began my first experience of the difficulties of conducting a
+mission at the same place for two different races of natives speaking
+totally different languages. Although the Indian language spoken here is
+the same as at Tanana, and much of the liturgy, etc., had been put into
+that tongue by Mr. Prevost and was therefore available, yet it was found
+impracticable to have two sets of services whenever the church was used,
+for both races would always attend anyway. Since the mastery of the two
+tongues was out of the question, and there were no translations at all
+into the Esquimau, it became a question of teaching the Esquimaux to
+take part in an Indian service or dropping both vernaculars altogether
+and conducting the service in English. After much doubt and experiment
+the latter was resolved upon, and the whole service of prayer and praise
+is in English. When the lessons are read and the address delivered it is
+necessary to use two interpreters; the minister delivers his sentence in
+English, then the Koyukuk interpreter puts it in Indian, and when he is
+done the Esquimau interpreter puts it into that tongue.
+
+It is a very tedious business, this double interpretation and a
+twenty-minute sermon takes fully an hour to deliver, but there is no
+help for it. The singing is hearty and enthusiastic though the repertory
+is wisely very limited; and here, north of the Arctic Circle, is a
+vested choir of eight or ten Kobuk and Koyukuk boys who lead the singing
+and lead it very well.
+
+Already the influence of the mission and the school was very marked.
+Given the native off by himself like this, in the hands of those in whom
+he has learned to place entire confidence, remote from debasing
+agencies, and his improvement is evident and his survival assured.
+
+[Illustration: THE DOUBLE INTERPRETATION AT THE ALLAKAKET.]
+
+[Illustration: THE WIND-SWEPT YUKON WITHIN THE RAMPARTS.]
+
+In two days the doctor and Arthur and the team came up, and so was
+brought to a happy conclusion a perilous journey over the first ice. One
+is often glad to have had experiences that one would by no means repeat,
+and this is a case in point. We had learned a good deal about ice; we
+had taken liberties with ice that none of us had ever thought before
+could be taken with impunity; we had learned to trust ice and at the
+same time to distrust it and in some measure to discriminate about it.
+The "last ice" is bad, but the "first ice" is much worse, and all
+three of us were agreed that we wanted no more travelling over it and no
+more pulling of a sled "by the back of the face."
+
+Then followed a very happy, busy time of several weeks while the river
+ice was consolidating and the land trails establishing; happy with its
+manifold evidences of the rapid advance the natives were making under
+Miss Carter's able and beneficent sway, busy with the instruction of
+people eager to learn. It was busy and happy for Doctor Burke also; busy
+with the many ailments he relieved, happy with the beginnings of an
+attachment which two years later culminated in his marriage to Miss
+Carter's colleague at this mission.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE KOYUKUK TO THE YUKON AND TO TANANA--CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS AT SAINT
+JOHN'S-IN-THE-WILDERNESS
+
+
+LEAVING Fort Yukon on the 26th of November, 1909, and going again over
+almost the same route we followed during the first journey described in
+this volume, we reached the new mission at the Allakaket on the Koyukuk
+River on the 14th of December, after a period of almost continual cold.
+The climate of the interior of Alaska varies as much as any climate. The
+previous year, continuing the journey described in "The First Ice," I
+had passed over this same route in the opposite direction, between the
+same dates, with the thermometer well above zero the whole time. This
+trip the _mean_ of the minimum reading at night, the noon reading, and
+the reading at start and finish of each day's journey was -38 1/4 deg.. Many
+days in that three weeks we travelled all day at 45 deg. and 50 deg. below zero,
+and we spent one night in camp at 49 deg. below.
+
+It was the beginning of a severe winter, with much snow north of the
+Yukon and long periods of great cold.
+
+[Sidenote: BIRTH, BURIAL, AND DANCING]
+
+The two weeks or so spent at the mission of Saint
+John's-in-the-Wilderness was enjoyed as only a rest is enjoyed after
+making such a journey; as only Christmas is enjoyed at such a native
+mission. It is the time of the whole year for the people; they come in
+from near and far intent upon the festival in both of its aspects,
+religious and social, and they enter so heartily into all that is
+provided for them that one does not know which to admire most, their
+simple, earnest piety or the whole-hearted enthusiasm of their sports
+and pastimes. Right out of church they go to the frozen river, old men
+and maidens, young men and matrons, mothers with babies on their backs
+and their skirts tucked up, and they quickly line up and are kicking the
+football stuffed with moose hair and covered with moose hide in the
+native game that their forefathers played ages before "Rugby" was
+invented.[B] When the church-bell rings, back they all troop again, to
+take their places and listen patiently and reverently to the long,
+double-interpreted service, the babies still on their mothers' backs,
+sometimes asleep, sometimes waking up and crying, comforted by slinging
+them round and applying their lips to the fountain of nourishment and
+solace.
+
+On the nights when there is no church service there is feasting and
+dancing. The native dance is a very simple affair, entirely without any
+objectionable feature, and one cannot see any reason in the world for
+attempting to suppress it. A man and a woman get out in the middle of
+the floor and dance opposite one another without touching at all. The
+moccasined toes of an expert man in this dance move with surprising
+rapidity, the woman, with eyes downcast, the picture of demureness,
+sways slightly from side to side and moves on her toes in rhythm to the
+man's movement. Presently another man jumps up and the first man yields
+his place; then another woman comes forward and the first woman yields
+her place, and so the dance goes on.
+
+For a variety, of late years there is an occasional "white-man's dance,"
+of the quadrille or the waltz kind, but the natives much prefer their
+own dancing. Here at the Allakaket the presence of the Esquimaux adds
+picturesqueness and strangeness, and the Esquimau dance, which consists
+of a series of jerky attitudinisings, with every muscle tense, to a
+curious monotonous chant and the beating of a drum, is a never-failing
+source of amusement to the Indians.
+
+An old man's funeral in the morning away up on the high bluff
+overlooking the mission, a birth in the evening, a dance the same
+night--so goes the drama of life in this little, isolated native world.
+So soon as these people make up their minds that one of their number is
+sick unto death they make the coffin, for when trees must be felled and
+lumber whipsawed from them, it is well to be forehanded.
+
+[Sidenote: "BEFORE" AND "AFTER"]
+
+There is one old woman living up there yet whose coffin had been made
+three times. When it becomes evident that the unfavourable prognosis was
+mistaken the coffin is torn apart and made into shelves or some other
+article of household utility. It seems very cold-blooded, but it is easy
+to misjudge these people. The emotion of grief is real with them, I
+believe, but transient. They are matter-of-fact and entirely devoid of
+pretence, and when once a funeral has taken place and the service is
+all over they dismiss the gloomy event from their minds as soon as
+possible. The night of old Mesuk's death, however, there were fires
+lighted on all the trails and before most of the Esquimau cabins, the
+object of which was probably to frighten the spirit away from the
+dwellings of the living. We shall get the better of these superstitions
+by and by, but superstitions die hard, not only amongst Esquimaux.
+Moreover, practices like this linger as traditional practices long after
+their superstitious content is dissipated, and men of feeling do not
+wantonly lay hands on ancient traditional custom. I think that if I were
+an Esquimau and knew that from immemorial antiquity fires had been
+lighted on the trails and outside the doors upon the death of my
+ancestors, I should be tempted to kindle them myself upon an occasion,
+however firmly I held the Communion of Saints and the Safe Repose of the
+Blessed. And I am quite sure that if I were a Thlinket I should set up a
+totem-pole despite all the missionaries in the world. When one comes to
+think about it dispassionately, there is really nothing in Christianity
+averse to the kindling of corpse fires or the blazoning of native
+heraldry. When all the little superstitions and peculiar picturesque
+customs are abolished out of the world it will be a much less
+interesting world than it is to-day. If there were any evidence or
+reason to believe that morality and religion will be furthered by the
+brow-beating or cajoling of the little peoples into a close similitude
+of the white race in dress and manners and customs, all other
+considerations would, of course, be swallowed up in a glad welcome of
+such advance. But almost the exact opposite is true. The young Indian or
+Esquimau, who by much mixing with white men has been "wised up," as the
+expressive phrase goes here, is commonly one of the least useful, the
+least attractive, the least moral of his kind. We have many such on the
+Yukon--young men who work on the steamboats in the summer and do odd
+jobs and hang around the stores in winter, and will not condescend to
+fish any more or to hunt or trap unless driven by the pinch of hunger.
+Show me an Indian who affects the white man in garb, in speech, in
+general habits, and external characteristics, and it will be easy to
+show an Indian whose death would be little loss to his community or his
+race; while the native woman who aspires to dress herself like a white
+woman has very commonly the purpose of attracting the attention of the
+white men. I think the young Indian man I recall as the best dressed,
+most debonair, and most completely "civilised," was living in idleness
+upon the bounty of the white trader whom every one knew to be his wife's
+paramour, and was impudently careless of the general knowledge.
+
+Of all the photographs that illustrate missionary publications--and I
+have contributed enough villainous half-tones to warrant me in a
+criticism--the ones I dislike most are of the "Before and After" type.
+Here is a group of savages clad in skins, or furs, or feathers, or palm
+fibre, or some patient, skilful weave of native wool or grass; in each
+case clad congruously with their environment and out of the products it
+affords. Set against it is the same or a similar group clad out of the
+slop-shop, clad in hickory shirts and blue-jean trousers, clad so that,
+if faces could be changed as easily as clothing, they would pass for any
+commonplace group of whites anywhere. And, as if such change were in
+itself the symbol and guarantee of a change from all that is brutal and
+idolatrous to all that is gentle and Christian, there follows the
+triumphant "Before and After" inscription. All the fitness has gone, all
+the individuality, all the clever adaptation of indigenous material, all
+the artistic and human interest; and a self-conscious smirk of
+superiority radiates over made-by-the-million factory garments instead.
+Whenever I see such contrasting photographs there comes over me a
+shamed, perverse recollection of a pair of engravings by Hogarth,
+usually suppressed, which a London bookseller once pulled out of a
+portfolio in the back room of his shop and showed me. They bore the same
+title.
+
+I profess myself a friend of the native tongue because it is the native
+tongue--the easy, familiar, natural vehicle of expression; of the native
+dress because it is almost always comfortable and comely; of the native
+customs, whenever they are not unhealthy or demoralising, because they
+are the distinctive heritage of a people; and again, of tongue, dress,
+and customs alike, if you will, simply because they are dissimilar.
+
+[Sidenote: A BARREN UNIFORMITY]
+
+For it has always seemed a trumpery notion that uniformity in these
+things has any connection with the upbuilding of a people, has any
+ethical relation at all, and I have always wondered that so trumpery a
+notion should have so wide an influence. Moreover, is it not a little
+curious that, whereas the trend of biological evolution on its upward
+course, as Spencer assures us, is towards differentiation and
+dissimilarity, the trend of sociological evolution should be so marked
+towards this bald and barren uniformity? But these be deep matters.
+
+I have never been able to join in the reproach of superciliousness so
+often applied to the lines of that noblest of missionary hymns in which
+Bishop Heber asks, "Can we, whose souls are lighted with wisdom from on
+high, Can we, to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?" If that be
+superciliousness, it is an essential superciliousness of Christianity
+itself, for the question lies at the very core of our religion and will
+not cease to be asked so long as the world contains those who believe
+with all their hearts, and those who do not believe because they have
+not heard. I never listen to that hymn without emotion, it can still
+"shake me like a cry Of trumpets going by." But the question that seems
+to stir the souls of some missionaries and most school-teachers, "Can we
+deny to these unfortunate heathen our millinery, our 'Old Oaken Bucket,'
+our Mr. and our Mrs.," leaves me quite cold.
+
+Here was the weekly afternoon routine at this mission, only the mornings
+being devoted to books and classes: On Monday the children brought their
+soiled clothes of the week to the schoolroom and washed them; on Tuesday
+they were dried and ironed; on Wednesday they were mended; on Thursday a
+juvenile "society" did some sort of work for another mission; on Friday
+every child in the village had a hot bath. Now, let a routine of that
+sort be kept up, week after week, month after month, year after year,
+during the whole school life of a child, and it is bound to leave its
+mark; and there is no other way in which the same mark may be made.
+
+At the Allakaket is fine example of what, I think, is the best rule in
+the world for the inferior races--the absolute rule of a devoted,
+intelligent, capable gentlewoman. We are but now writing the indentures
+of their apprenticeship to self-government in the elective village
+councils we have set up; it is good for them to serve it under this
+loving and unquestioned despotism.
+
+[Sidenote: MATTERS METEOROLOGICAL]
+
+During all that Christmas season the temperature was subject to such
+violent fluctuations that a chart of them would look like the picture
+showing the comparative heights of mountains, that used to be presented
+under "The World in Hemispheres" in the school geographies. A minimum of
+52 deg. below zero and a maximum of 10 deg. below, was followed by a minimum of
+53 deg. below and a maximum of 18 deg. below, and that by a minimum of 56 deg. below
+and a maximum of 14 deg. below, while on Christmas Day itself we registered
+a minimum of 58 deg. below zero and a maximum of 1 deg. above, a range of 59 deg. in
+less than twelve hours. At a time of the year when the sun has scarcely
+any effect upon the temperature such tremendous changes point to
+corresponding atmospheric disturbances, and each rise was caused by the
+irruption of clouds upon a clear sky and was followed by a fall of snow.
+
+It is a beautifully simple process. Driven into these regions by some
+compelling current of the upper atmosphere comes a mass of warm air
+laden with moisture--a cloud. As it comes in contact with the cold air
+of the region it parts with its heat, and the temperature of the lower
+air rises. Having parted with its heat, it can no longer contain its
+moisture; and, having parted with its moisture, it ceases to exist. The
+cold of the earth and of its immediate air envelope has seized upon that
+cloud and devoured it, and the cold resumes its sway. So have I opened
+the door of a crowded cabin, when an Indian dance or other gathering was
+in progress, at 50 deg. or 60 deg. below zero, and the cold, dry air meeting the
+hot, moist air has caused an immediate fall of snow on the threshold.
+
+After the abrupt rise in temperature on Christmas Day, the snow began to
+fall heavily, with a barometer continually falling until it reached
+27.98 inches, the lowest point recorded here (at an elevation of about
+500 feet above the sea) in two years and a half--and before the snow
+ceased three feet had fallen.
+
+Our winter itinerary called us to leave the Allakaket immediately after
+New Year's Day, and our route lay overland through a totally uninhabited
+country for nearly one hundred and fifty miles, to Tanana on the Yukon.
+We knew that it would not greatly interfere with our plans to lie
+another week at the Allakaket, and that would bring our departure after
+the monthly journey of the mail-carrier and would thus compel him to
+break trail for us through all that snow. That is the way the
+mail-carriers in Alaska are usually treated, but Arthur and I took some
+pride in keeping as closely as possible to the announced dates of
+visitation and in doing such share of trail breaking as fell to us.
+
+[Sidenote: TRAIL BREAKING]
+
+So on Monday, the 3d of January, 1910, we bade farewell to Deaconess
+Carter and her colleague and to the native charges they rule and care
+for so admirably, and set out on our journey with an additional boy from
+the mission to help us through the heavy snow of the Koyukuk valley. For
+ten or twelve miles the way lay down the river, and the going was slow
+and toilsome from the first, although there had been some passage from
+Moses' Village to the mission, and there was, therefore, some trail. Our
+start had been late--it is next to impossible to get an early start from
+a mission; there is always some native who must have audience at the
+last moment--and after the long repose we were so soft that the heavy
+trail had wearied us, and we decided to "call it a day" when in five and
+a half hours we came to the road-house, the last occupied habitation
+between the Allakaket and Tanana. Soon after we reached the village
+there came trooping down from the mission a number of the inhabitants
+gone up for Christmas, who, after weeping upon our necks, so to speak,
+at our departure, had left us to break out that drifted trail for their
+convenient return. So will Indians treat a white man almost always, but
+I had thought myself an exception and was vexed to find that so they had
+treated me.
+
+The next morning we entered the uninhabited wilderness with three feet
+of new snow on the trail and no passage over it since it had fallen. Our
+first trouble was finding the trail at all. The previous fall the Alaska
+Road Commission had appropriated a sum of money to stake this trail from
+Tanana to the Koyukuk River, for it passes over wind-swept, treeless
+wastes, where many men had lost their way. Starting out from Tanana, the
+men employed had done their work well until within ten miles of the
+Koyukuk River. There it was found that the labour and cost already
+expended had exhausted the appropriation, whereupon the proceedings were
+immediately stopped; not another stake was driven, and the whole party
+returned to Tanana and mushed two hundred and fifty miles up the Yukon
+to spend another little appropriation upon another trail. That is the
+unbusinesslike system in which the money available for such work in
+Alaska has been handled.
+
+The first trail breaker goes ahead with a long stick, which he thrusts
+continually down through the snow. The slightly harder surface over
+which sleds and dogs have passed reveals itself by offering more
+resistance to the penetration of the stick, and that is the only way the
+trail can be found. Even with three feet of new snow upon it, it is well
+worth while finding, or otherwise there is no bottom at all and way must
+be made through all the snow of the winter. But all Alaskan trails are
+serpentine, and it is very difficult to put the new trail right on top
+of the old one. Back and forth the second trail breaker goes between his
+leader and the sled, and at intervals the first man comes back and forth
+also. And with it all is no path packed solid enough for the dogs to
+draw the heavy sled without great difficulty. We should have had a
+toboggan, but toboggans are little used on the Koyukuk, and we had only
+our sled. In five hours we made five miles and were worn out. We decided
+to pitch our tent and go ahead and break trail for the morrow's
+journey. On the lakes interspersed amongst the brush we had to break an
+entirely new trail, for we could find no trace of the old one.
+
+If five miles in five hours be poor going, what is four miles in seven
+and a half hours? That is all we made the next day despite the
+snow-shoeing of the previous evening. The heavy sled was continually
+getting off the trail, however wide we show-shoed it. The two of us
+ahead went over every step of the distance four or five times, and
+sometimes all of us had to go back and forth again and again before the
+sled could be brought along at all. It was from 5 deg. to 10 deg. above zero all
+day, and at intervals snow fell heavily. We got at last to the middle of
+a little lake and were confronted by open water, the result of some warm
+spring, one supposes. Here we must stop until a laborious journey was
+made to the bank, trees were cut and carried, and the open place bridged
+so that the sled might be passed over it. Then again our painful
+progress was resumed until, as it grew dark, we reached the bank of the
+Kornutna, or Old Man Creek, and here we pitched tent again, and I went
+forward upon the bed of the stream to break out a part of to-morrow's
+path. That night two more inches of snow fell.
+
+[Sidenote: DOG DRIVING]
+
+For four miles the trail lies along the surface of this creek, and then
+takes up a steep gully and over a divide. That four miles was all we
+made the next day, back and forth, back and forth, wearily tramping it
+to and fro, dogs and men alike exhausted with the toil. The hatefulness
+of dog mushing usually appears under such circumstances; the whip is
+constantly plied, the senseless objurgations rise shriller and fuller.
+Once the sled is started, it must by any means be kept going, that as
+great a distance as possible may be covered before it stops again. The
+poor brutes, sinking almost to their bellies despite the snow-shoeing,
+have no purchase for the exercise of their strength and continually
+flounder and wallow. Our whip was lost and I was glad of it, for even as
+considerate a boy as Arthur is apt to lose patience and temper when,
+having started the sled with much labour by gee pole and rope about his
+chest, it goes but a few feet and comes to a halt again, or slips from
+the track and turns over in the deep snow. But it is at such times, too,
+that one appreciates at his full value such a noble puller as our wheel
+dog Nanook. He spares himself not at all; the one absorbing occupation
+of every nerve and muscle of his body is pulling. His trace is always
+taut, or, if he lose footing for a moment and the trace slacken, he is
+up and at it again that the sled lose not its momentum if he can help
+it. When the lead line is pulled back that the sled may be started by
+the jerk of the dogs' sudden traction, Nanook lunges forward at the
+command, "Mush!" and strains at the collar, mouth open and panting,
+tongue dropping moisture, as keen and eager to keep that sled moving as
+is the driver himself. All day he labours and struggles, snatching a
+mouthful of snow now and then to cool his overheated body, and he drops
+in his tracks when the final halt is made, utterly weary, yet always
+with the brave heart in him to give his bark, his five-note
+characteristic bark of gladness, that the day's work is done at last.
+It is senseless brutality to whip such a dog, and most of our dogs were
+of that mettle, though Nanook was the strongest and most faithful of the
+bunch. One's heart goes out to them with gratitude and love--old
+"Lingo," "Nig," "Snowball," "Wolf," and "Doc"--as one realises what
+loyal, cheerful service they give.
+
+[Sidenote: VIOLENT FLUCTUATIONS]
+
+Arthur was so unwell with a violent cold and cough, that had been
+growing worse for a couple of days, that I decided on two things: to
+leave him in the tent while I snow-shoed ahead the next day, and to send
+back the boy I had brought from the mission to secure a fresh supply of
+food; for the back trail was, of course, comparatively easy. Arthur's
+condition threatened pneumonia, to my notion, and I believe he was saved
+from an attack of that disease which is so often fatal in this country
+by long rubbing all over the neck and the chest with a remedy that was
+new then--a menthol balm. I have used it again and again since and I am
+now never without it. A second application made in the morning, I
+started out, show-shoeing up the long hill and then down into the flat,
+and so to the mail-carrier's little hut that is reached under good
+conditions of trail the first day from Moses' Village, and then back
+again to the tent. That day a tendon in my right leg behind the knee
+became increasingly troublesome, and in climbing the hill on the return
+was acutely painful. I recognised it as "mal-de-raquet," well known in
+the Northwest, where the snow is commonly much deeper than in Alaska,
+and I found relief in the application of the same analgesic menthol balm
+that I was rejoiced to find had wrought a great improvement in Arthur's
+condition.
+
+Meanwhile the warm weather of the past three or four days was over and
+another period of violent fluctuations of temperature similar to that
+around Christmastide was upon us. We went to bed with the thermometer at
+10 deg. below zero and were wakened by the cold at two in the morning to
+find it at 40 deg. below, so we had to keep a fire going the rest of the
+night; for as soon as the fire in the stove goes out a tent becomes just
+as cold as outdoors.
+
+We moved forward the next morning, but the trail we had broken was too
+narrow and had to be widened, which meant one snow-shoe in the deep snow
+all the time, a very fatiguing process that brought into painful play
+again the tendon strained with five days' heavy snow-shoeing.
+
+The temperature was around 40 deg. below all day, and our progress was so
+slow that it was not easy to keep warm, and the dogs whined at the
+innumerable stops. Yesterday it had been 10 deg. below, the day before 10 deg.
+above, and now, to-day, 40 deg. below. It is hard to dress for such
+changeable weather, especially hard to dress the feet. My own wear, all
+the winter through, is a pair of smoke-tanned, moose-hide breeches,
+tanned on the Yukon but tailored outside. They are a perfect windbreak,
+yet allow ventilation, and they are very warm; but those who perspire
+much on exertion cannot wear them. The amount of covering upon the feet
+must be varied, in some measure at least, as the temperature changes.
+The Esquimau fur boot, with fur on the inside of the sole and on the
+outside of the upper, is my favourite footwear, with more or less of
+sock inside it as the weather requires; but such sudden changes as we
+were experiencing always find one or leave one with too much or too
+little footwear. By one-thirty we had struggled to the top of the hill,
+and it was very evident that the cabin was out of the question that day;
+so, since to pass down into the flat was to pass out of eligible camping
+timber, we pitched tent on the brow of the hill.
+
+The cold business of making camp was done, all dispositions for the
+night complete, supper for men and dogs was cooked and ours eating, when
+we heard a noise in the distance that set our dogs barking and presently
+came the boy I had sent back, accompanied by an Indian and a fresh team
+loaded with such a bountiful supply of food, much of it cooked, that one
+felt it was worth while to get into distress to receive such generous
+and prompt succour. The ladies at the mission had sat up and cooked all
+night and had despatched the fastest team in the village the next
+morning to bring their provisions to us and to help us along. They had
+thought us at Tanana when we were not yet at the end of the first day's
+stage from Moses' Village. It would have been impossible for us to reach
+Tanana on the dog food and man food we started with.
+
+[Sidenote: SIXTY-FIVE BELOW ZERO]
+
+It was so cold and we were so crowded that I arose at three and made a
+fire and sat over it the rest of the night, and after breakfast,
+although it was Sunday, morning prayer being said, I started ahead again
+to break out the trail deeper and wider, leaving the teams with the
+distributed loads to follow. The thermometer stood at 38 deg. below zero
+when I left camp, but as I began the descent it was evident that it grew
+colder, and at the bottom of the hill I was sure it was 20 deg. colder at
+least. Reaching the cabin, I kindled a fire and started back to meet the
+teams. About a mile from the cabin I saw them, for, since the load was
+distributed in the two sleds progress was much better; but by this time
+it had grown so cold that the dogs were almost entirely obscured from
+view by the clouds of steam that encompassed them. We hurried as best we
+might and reached the cabin about eleven, and as soon as we were arrived
+I took out the thermometer and let it lie long enough to get the
+temperature of the air, and it read 65 deg. below zero. There had been no
+atmospheric change at all; it was simply the most marked instance I ever
+knew of the influence of altitude upon temperature. We had descended
+perhaps three hundred feet, and in that distance had found a difference
+of 27 deg. in temperature.
+
+The cabin was a wretched shack without door or window and full of holes,
+and in no part of it could one stand upright. We set ourselves to make
+things as comfortable as possible, however, rigging up the canvas sled
+cover for an outer door and a blanket for an inner door, and stopping up
+the worst of the holes with sacking. Then we went out and cut fresh
+spruce boughs to lie upon, and prospected around quite a while before we
+found dry wood nearly a quarter of a mile away. It was quite a business
+cutting that wood and packing the heavy sticks on one's shoulders,
+through the brush and up and down the banks of the little creek where
+it grew, on snow-shoes, at 65 deg. below zero.
+
+Our Sabbath day's journey done, the hut safely reached and furnished
+with fuel, we did not linger long after supper, but, evening prayer
+said, went to bed as the most comfortable place in the still cold cabin,
+thankful not to be in a tent in such severe weather.
+
+The next day gave us fresh temperature fluctuations. At nine A. M. it
+clouded and rose to 35 deg. below, by noon it had cleared again and the
+thermometer fell to 55 deg. below, and at nine P. M. it stood once more at
+65 deg. below. The milder weather of the morning sent all hands out breaking
+trail, save myself, for with all our stuff in a cabin without a door it
+was not wise to leave it altogether--a dog might break a chain and work
+havoc--so I stayed behind in the little dark hovel, a candle burning all
+day, and read some fifty pages of Boswell's _Life of Samuel Johnson_
+over again. Some such little India-paper classic it is my habit to carry
+each winter. Last year I reread Pepys's _Diary_ and the year before much
+of the _Decline and Fall_. Certain places are for ever associated in my
+mind with the rereading of certain old books. The Chandalar River is to
+me as much the scene of _Lorna Doone_, which I read for the sixth or
+seventh time on my first journey along it, as Exmoor itself; and _The
+Cloister and the Hearth_, that noble historical romance, belongs in my
+literary geography to the Alatna-Kobuk portage. So will Boswell always
+bring back to me this trip across country from the Koyukuk to the Yukon
+through the deep snow.
+
+The boys came back after dark, having broken some nine miles of trail
+and having suffered a good deal from the cold. I had supper cooked, and
+when that was done and the dogs fed we fell to reading the Gospels and
+Epistles for the Epiphany season, the boys reading aloud by turns. The
+all-day fire had warmed the little hut thoroughly, and despite the cold
+outside we were snug and comfortable within.
+
+[Sidenote: SEVENTY BELOW ZERO]
+
+That night the thermometer touched 70 deg. below zero, within 2 deg. of the
+greatest cold I have recorded in seven years' winter travel; a greater
+cold, I believe, than any arctic expedition has ever recorded, for it is
+in a continental climate like Siberia or interior Alaska, and not in the
+marine climate around the North Pole, that the thermometer falls lowest.
+
+Save for an hour or two getting wood, we all lay close next day, for the
+temperature at noon was no higher than 64 deg. below. It is impossible to
+break trail at such temperature, or to travel as slowly as we were
+travelling. In the strong cold one must travel fast if one travel at
+all. Indeed, it is distinctly dangerous to be outdoors. As soon as one
+leaves the hut the cold smites one in the face like a mailed fist. The
+expiration of the breath makes a crackling sound, due, one judges, to
+the sudden congealing of the moisture that is expelled. From every
+cranny of the cabin a stream of smoke-like vapour pours into the air,
+giving the appearance that the house is on fire within. However warmly
+hands and feet may be clad, one cannot stand still for a minute without
+feeling the heat steadily oozing out and the cold creeping in.
+
+Notwithstanding the weather, that evening the mail came along, the
+white man who is the carrier, two tall, strong natives, and nine dogs.
+Only since descending to the flat had they suffered from the cold, for
+they found as great a difference as we did in the temperature; and they
+were grateful to us for the trail we had broken. The hut was
+uncomfortably crowded that night with seven people in it, but the
+thermometer stood at -56 deg. and was rising, and gave us hope that we might
+move along to-morrow. Augmented as our party was into seven men, three
+sleds, and nineteen or twenty dogs, trail breaking would not be so
+arduous and progress would be much accelerated. There was good hope,
+moreover, that the heavy snow was confined to the Koyukuk valley and
+that when we passed out of it we should find better going.
+
+The morning found a temperature of 45 deg. below, and we sallied forth,
+quite an expedition. Four, including myself, went ahead beating down the
+trail; one was at each gee pole, our team last, getting advantage of
+everything preceding. So far as the trail had been broken we made good
+time, covering the nine miles in about four hours. Another hour of
+somewhat slower progress took us to the top of a hill, and here the
+mail-carrier's two Indians had run ahead and built a great, roaring fire
+and arranged a wide, commodious couch of spruce boughs, and we cooked
+our lunch and took our ease for half an hour. The sky had clouded again
+and the temperature had risen to 28 deg. below.
+
+[Sidenote: CLOSE QUARTERS]
+
+It is strange how some scenes of the trail linger in the memory, while
+others are completely forgotten. This noon halt I always remember as
+one of the pleasantest of all my journeyings. There was not a breath of
+wind, and the smoke rose straight into the air instead of volleying and
+eddying into one's face as camp-fires so often do on whichever side of
+them one sits. We were all weary with our five hours' trudge, and the
+rest was grateful; hungry, and the boiled ham they had sent from the
+mission was delicious. The warmth of the great fire and the cosiness of
+the thick, deep spruce boughs gave solid comfort, and the pipe after the
+meal was a luxurious enjoyment.
+
+From that on the going was heavier and our progress slower, but we kept
+at it till dark, and still far into the night, fortunate in having two
+Indians who knew every step of the way, until at last we reached the hut
+that marks the end of the second stage from the Koyukuk River, on the
+top of a birch hill. We had made nineteen and a half miles that day and
+had taken eleven hours to do it.
+
+If the noon rest be remembered as one of the pleasantest episodes of the
+trail, that night in the cabin on the hill I recall as one of the most
+miserable in my life. The hut was still smaller than the previous one,
+like it without door and window, and so low that one was bent double all
+the time. Walls and roof alike were covered with a thick coating of
+frost. The only wood discoverable in the dark was half-dry birch which
+would not burn in the stove but sent out volumes of smoke that blinded
+us. When the hut did begin to get a little warm, moisture from the roof
+dropped on everything. There we seven men huddled together, chilly and
+damp, choked and weary--a wretched band. There was no room for the
+necessary cooking operations; we had to cook and eat in relays; and how
+we slept, in what way seven men managed to pack themselves and stretch
+themselves in those narrow quarters, I cannot tell. However, we said our
+prayers and went to bed, snow falling heavily. The Indians were soon
+snoring, but sleep would not come to me, tired as I was, and I had not
+slept at all the previous night. So presently I took trional, X grs.,
+and dozed off till morning.
+
+Then we resolved to divide forces rather than subject ourselves to the
+miserable inconvenience of overcrowding these tiny huts, and at this
+stage of the journey it was possible to do so without losing a whole
+day, for there was a cabin for the noon rest. It was arranged that the
+mail-man should start first and make the full day's run if possible,
+while we should "call it a day" at the half-way hut.
+
+So Bob and his Indians sallied forth while yet my boys were reading
+their lessons to me, and when they were done we hitched up and followed.
+And as soon as we were down the hill and started along the bald flat, it
+was evident that we were out of the deep snowfall, for the present at
+any rate, and we plucked up spirit, for we were now to cross the wide,
+open, wind-swept uplands of the headwaters of the Melozitna and Tozitna,
+tributaries of the Yukon--the "Tozi" and "Melozi," as the white men call
+them--where snow never lies deep or long. We were out of the Koyukuk
+watershed now and in country drained by direct tributaries of the
+Yukon. The going was now incomparably the best we had had since we left
+the mission, the snow was light and we had the mail-carrier's trail;
+but, although the temperature had risen to 21 deg. below, a keen wind put
+our parkee hoods up and our scarfs around our faces and made our 60 deg.
+below clothing none too warm. In three hours we had reached the Melozi
+cabin, although that had included the climbing of a long, steep hill,
+and here we stayed for the rest of the day and night and shot some
+ptarmigan for supper, though we could easily have gone on and made the
+rest of the run.
+
+The next day I sent the auxiliary sled and team and driver back to the
+Allakaket, keeping the mission boy with me, however, to return with the
+mail-carrier, who was already late and must go back as soon as he
+reached Tanana. I parted with the Indian regretfully, for he had been
+most helpful and always good-natured and cheerful, and had really begun
+to learn a little at our travelling night-school.
+
+[Sidenote: THE STAKED TRAIL]
+
+[Sidenote: THE ARCTIC SKIES]
+
+A high wind was blowing, with the thermometer at 12 deg. below, and the
+mail-man's trail was already drifted over and quite indistinguishable in
+the dark, and we began to appreciate the recent staking of this trail by
+the Road Commission. But for these stakes, set double, a hundred yards
+apart, so that they formed a lane, it would have been difficult if not
+impossible for us to travel on a day like this, for here was a stretch
+of sixteen or seventeen miles with never a tree and hardly the smallest
+bush. The wind blew stronger and stronger directly in our faces as we
+rose out of the Melozitna basin on the hill that is its watershed, and
+when the summit was reached and we turned and looked back there was
+nothing visible but a white, wind-swept waste. But ahead all the snow
+was most beautifully and delicately tinted from the reflection of the
+dawn on ragged shredded clouds that streamed across the southeastern
+sky. Where the sky was free of cloud it gave a wonderful clear green
+that was almost but not quite the colour of malachite. It was exactly
+the colour of the water the propeller of a steamship churns up where the
+Atlantic Ocean shallows to the rocky shore of the north coast of
+Ireland. The clouds themselves caught a deep dull red from the sunrise,
+which the snow gave back in blush pink. Such an exquisite colour harmony
+did the scene compose that the wind, lulling for a moment on the crest
+of the hill, seemed charmed into peace by it.
+
+The feast of colour brought a train of colour memories, one hard upon
+the heels of another, as we went down the hill; the Catbells, this
+golden with bracken, that purple with heather, and each doubled in the
+depths of Derwentwater; an October morning in the hardwood forests of
+the mountains of Tennessee, when for half an hour every gorgeous tint of
+red and yellow was lavishly flaunted--and then the whole pride and
+splendour of it wiped out at once by a wind that sprang up; the
+encircling and towering reds and pinks of a gigantic amphitheatre of
+rock in the Dolomites; a patch of flowers right against the snow in the
+high Rockies, so intensely blue that it seemed the whole vault of heaven
+could be tinctured with the pigment that one petal would distil. And,
+more inspiring than them all, there came the recollection of that
+wonderful sunrise and those blazing mountains of the Alatna-Kobuk
+portage. Every land has its glories, and the sky is everywhere a blank
+canvas for the display of splendid colour, but the tints of the arctic
+sky are of an infinite purity of individual tone that no other sky can
+show.
+
+As we descended the hill into the Tozitna basin the wind rose again, now
+charged with heavy, driving snow, while in the valley the underfoot snow
+grew deep, so that it was drawing to dusk when we reached the cabin on a
+fork of the Tozitna where Bob the mail-man had spent the previous night,
+and there we stayed.
+
+The next day is worthy of record for the sharp contrast it affords. All
+the night it had snowed heavily, and it snowed all the morning and into
+the afternoon. Some sixteen or seventeen inches of snow had fallen since
+Bob and his party passed, and again we had no trail at all.
+Moreover--strange plaint in January in Alaska!--the weather grew so warm
+that the snow continually balled up under the snow-shoes and clung to
+the sled and the dogs. At noon the thermometer stood at 17 deg. above
+zero--and it was but four days ago that we recorded 70 deg. below! It will
+be readily understood how such wide and sudden ranges of temperature add
+to the inconvenience and discomfort of mushing. Parkees, sweaters,
+shirts are shed one after the other, the fur cap becomes a nuisance, the
+mittens a burden, and still ploughing through the snow he is bathed in
+sweat who had forgotten what sweating felt like. The poor dogs suffer
+the most, for they have nothing they can shed and they can perspire only
+through the mouth. Their tongues drop water almost in a stream, they
+labour for their breath, and their eyes have a look that comes only with
+soft weather and a heavy trail. So constantly do they grab mouthfuls of
+snow that the operation becomes quite a check on our progress.
+
+By two o'clock it was growing dusk, and we had but reached the bank of
+the other fork of the Tozitna, not more than eight or nine miles from
+the cabin where we spent the night and yet thirteen or fourteen miles
+from the cabin we had hoped to reach. Beyond the banks of the stream was
+no more timber for a long distance; was such another stretch of open
+country as we had passed the previous day. So here was another
+disappointment, for camp must be made now lest there be no chance to
+make camp at all. But it was a good and comfortable camp, amidst the
+large spruce of the watercourse. Such disappointments are part of life
+on the trail; and supper done there was the more time for the boys.
+
+The open country was again wind-swept, and being wind-swept the snow was
+somewhat hardened, and we fought our way against a gale, covering the
+twelve and three quarter miles in ten hours, Sunday though it was. At
+that last stage on the road to Tanana came out a young man from the
+mission with a dog team and an Indian, anxious at our long delay, and
+Harry Strangman's name is written here with grateful recognition of this
+kindness and many others. We went joyfully into town on the morrow, the
+17th of January, having taken fifteen days to make a journey that is
+normally made in five.
+
+[Sidenote: THE MAIL-CARRIER]
+
+Half-way on that last day's mush we met the mail-man returning to the
+Koyukuk. So much had he been delayed that there was danger of a fine and
+all sorts of trouble, and the mail had been sent out to meet him at the
+noon cabin, together with a supply of grub for the return trip. But the
+caterer, whoever he was, forgot candles, and the mail-man would have had
+to make his way back to the Koyukuk without any means of artificial
+light, in the shortest days of the year, had we not been able to supply
+him with half a dozen candles that remained to us. It was a
+disappointment to George, the boy I had brought from the mission, that
+he must turn round and go back also. He had never "seen Tanana," which
+is quite a metropolis to him, and had looked forward to it keenly all
+the journey, but the boy braced up and took his disappointment manfully.
+A pitiful procession it was that passed us by and took our boy away; the
+poor, wearied dogs that had certainly earned the few days' rest they
+were so badly in need of left a trail of blood behind them that was
+sickening to see. Almost every one of them had sore, frozen feet; many
+of them were lame; and when we came to descend the long hill they had
+just climbed, right at its brow, where the stiffest pull had been, was a
+claw from a dog's foot frozen into bloody snow.
+
+So far as there is anything heroic about the Alaskan trail, the
+mail-carriers are the real heroes. They must start out in all weathers,
+at all temperatures; they have a certain specified time in which to make
+their trips and they must keep within that time or there is trouble. The
+bordering country of the Canadian Yukon has a more humane government
+than ours. There neither mail-carrier nor any one else, save in some
+life-or-death emergency, with licence from the Northwest Mounted Police,
+may take out horse or dogs to start a journey when the temperature is
+lower than 45 deg. below zero; but I have seen a reluctant mail-carrier
+chased out at 60 deg. below zero, on pain of losing his job, on the American
+side. Moreover, between the seasons, when travel on the rivers is
+positively dangerous to life, the mail must still be despatched and
+received, although so great is the known risk to the mail, as well as to
+the carrier, that no one will send any letter that he cares at all about
+reaching its destination until the trails are established or the
+steamboats run. But the virtually empty pouches must be transported from
+office to office through the running, or over the rotting ice, just the
+same, on pain of the high displeasure and penalty of a department
+without brains and without bowels. I have often wished since I came to
+Alaska that I could be postmaster-general for one week, and so I suppose
+has almost every other resident of the country.
+
+The week following my arrival at Tanana was a solid week of cold
+weather, the thermometer ranging around 50 deg. and 60 deg. below zero, and that
+means keeping pretty close to the house. Even the sentries at the army
+post are withdrawn and the protection of the garrison is confided to a
+man who watches the grounds from a glass-walled cupola above the
+headquarters building. Yet a week of confinement and inaction grows
+tiresome after life in the open.
+
+Sunday is always a busy day here. The mission and native village are
+three miles away from the town, and service must be held at both. The
+mission at Tanana is not a happy place to visit for one who has the
+welfare of the natives at heart. Despite faithful and devoted effort to
+check it, the demoralisation goes on apace and the outlook is dark.
+
+[Sidenote: SINGLE MEN IN BARRACKS]
+
+"Single men in barracks don't grow into plaster saints," we are told;
+sometimes they seem to grow into drunken, lustful devils without
+compassion for childhood, not to mention any feeling of magnanimity
+towards a feebler race. And when a girl who has been rough-handled, or
+who has been given drink until she is unable to resist the multiple
+outrage practised upon her, is told to pick out the malefactors from a
+company of soldiers, all clean-shaven, all dressed alike, all around the
+same age, she generally fails to identify altogether. So the offence
+goes unwhipped, and the officer is likely as not to address a reprimand
+to the complaining missionary for "preferring charges you are unable to
+substantiate." Yet an officer who had himself written such a letter told
+me once that all Indians looked alike to him. Even should the girl
+identify one or more men, they have usually half a dozen comrades ready
+to swear an alibi.
+
+Add to the trouble given by the soldiers the constant operation of the
+slinking bootleggers of the town, a score or more of whom are known to
+make money by this liquor peddling, and some of whom do nothing else for
+a living, yet whom it is next to impossible to convict, owing to the
+cumbrous machinery of the law and the attitude of juries, and it will be
+seen that the hands of those who are fighting for the native race are
+tied.
+
+What has been said about the military does not by any means apply to
+all, either officers or men. Some of the officers have been decent,
+God-fearing men, conscious of the evil and zealous to suppress it; some
+of the men, indeed in all probability most of the men, quite free from
+such offence; some commanding officers have kept such a well-disciplined
+post that offences of all kinds have been greatly reduced. But the
+commanding officer is changed every year, and the whole force is changed
+every two years, so that there is no continuity of policy at the post,
+and an administration that has grown familiar with conditions and that
+stands so far as it can for clean living and sobriety and decency and
+the protection of the native people, may be followed by one that is
+loftily ignorant of the situation, careless about offences against
+morality, and impatient of any complaint.
+
+Off by himself, separate from the demoralising influence of the low-down
+white, there is every hope and encouragement in the effort to elevate
+and educate the Indian; set down cheek by jowl with the riffraff of
+towns and barracks, his fate seems sealed.
+
+[Sidenote: DEATH-RATE AND BIRTH-RATE]
+
+Let these two mission stations, the Allakaket and Tanana, one hundred
+and fifty miles or so apart by the winter trail, represent the two
+conditions. In six years' time there has been manifest advance at the
+one and decay at the other. The birth-rate is greatly in excess of the
+death-rate at the Allakaket, the death-rate greatly in excess of the
+birth-rate at Tanana. In the year in which this journey was made there
+were thirty-four deaths and fourteen births at Tanana, and while the
+difference was an unusually large one, yet in the six years referred to
+there has not been one year in which the number of births exceeded the
+number of deaths. One does not have to be a prophet to foresee the
+inevitable result, if the process be not stopped.
+
+A tribute should be paid to the zeal, now of one, now of another army
+surgeon at Fort Gibbon in tending the native sick, three miles away,
+when we have been unable to procure a physician of our own for the
+place. The missionary nurse, for five years last past Miss Florence
+Langdon, has been greatly helped in her almost desperate efforts here by
+the willing co-operation of these medical officers of the army.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[B] See illustration, p. 374.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+UP THE YUKON TO RAMPART AND ACROSS COUNTRY TO THE TANANA--ALASKAN
+AGRICULTURE--THE GOOD DOG NANOOK--MISS FARTHING'S BOYS AT NENANA--CHENA
+AND FAIRBANKS
+
+
+OUR course from Tanana did not lie directly up the Tanana River, but up
+the Yukon to Rampart and then across country to the Hot Springs on the
+Tanana River. The seventy-five miles up the Yukon was through the Lower
+Ramparts, one of the most picturesque portions of this great river. The
+stream is confined in one deep channel by lofty mountains on both banks,
+and the scenery at times is very bold and wild. But its topography makes
+it the natural wind course of the country--a down-river wind in winter,
+an up-river wind in summer blows almost continually. It was no colder
+than 5 deg. below zero when we started on the trip, but the wind made the
+travelling unpleasant. The second day it had increased to a gale, and
+every mile we travelled it grew stronger. We travelled three hours, and
+the last hour we made scarcely a mile. So thickly charged with flying
+snow was the wind and so dead ahead that despite parkee hoods it blinded
+us, and the dogs could hardly be forced to keep their heads towards it.
+Their faces were so coated with crusted snow that they looked curiously
+like the face of harlequin in the pantomime. It did become literally
+intolerable, and when Arthur said that he knew there was a cabin right
+across the river, we made our way thither and shortly found it and lay
+there the rest of the day, the gale blowing incessantly. This was
+disappointing, because it meant that I could not reach Rampart for the
+Sunday I had appointed.
+
+Next day the wind had ceased and the thermometer went down to 30 deg. below
+zero. In places the ice was blown clear of snow; in other places it was
+heavily drifted. By midday we had reached the lonely telegraph station
+at "The Rapids," and were very kindly received by the signal-corps men
+in charge. They gave us to eat and to drink and would take no money.
+There is little travel on this part of the river nowadays, and the
+telegraph men are glad to see any one who may chance to pass by. We
+pushed on heavily again, and had to stop and cut a gee pole presently,
+for it was hard to handle the sled without it; but the gee pole always
+means laborious travel. The cold was welcome; it meant no wind; and we
+were glad to see the thermometer drop lower than 50 deg. below zero that
+night at the old mail cabin. The mail goes no longer on the Yukon River
+from Fort Yukon to Tanana, and, barring this point, Rampart, towards
+which we were travelling, which is supplied across country from the Hot
+Springs, over the route we should traverse, no spot on that three
+hundred and fifty miles of river receives any mail at all. The
+population is small and scattered, it is true; on the same grounds
+Alaska might be denied any mail at all. There has been much resentment
+at this abandonment of the Yukon River by the post-office and several
+petitions for its restoration, but it has not been restored.
+
+[Sidenote: THE WIND-SWEPT YUKON]
+
+We travelled all the next day at 50 deg. below zero, and it was one of the
+pleasantest days of the winter. There was not a breath of wind, the
+going steadily improved, and, best of all, for three hours we were
+travelling in the sunshine for the first time this winter. Only those
+who have been deprived of the sun can really understand how joyful and
+grateful his return is. There was no heat in his rays, this last day of
+January; the thermometer stood at 49 deg. below at noon, and had risen but
+5 deg. since our start in the morning; but the mere sight of him glowing in
+the south, where a great bend of the river gave him to us through a gap
+in the mountains, was cheerful and invigorating after two months in
+which we had seen no more than his gilding of the high snows. The sun
+gives life to the dead landscape, colour to the oppressive monotony of
+white and black, and man's heart leaps to the change as jubilantly as
+does the face of nature.
+
+[Sidenote: RAMPART AND ITS SALOON]
+
+Rampart City differs from Circle City, the other decayed mining town of
+the Yukon River, only in that the process is further advanced. Year by
+year there are a few less men on the creeks behind it, a few less
+residents in the town itself. Its long, straggling water-front consists
+in the main of empty buildings, the windows boarded up, the snow drifted
+high about the doors. One store now serves all ends of trade, one liquor
+shop serves all the desire for drink of the whites, and slops over
+through the agency of two or three dissolute squaw men and half-breeds
+to the natives up and down the river.[C]
+
+Rampart had one fat year, 1898, when many hundreds of gold seekers,
+approaching the Klondike by Saint Michael and the lower Yukon were
+attracted and halted by the gold discoveries on Big and Little Minook,
+and spent the winter here. The next spring news was brought of the rich
+discoveries on Anvil Creek, behind Cape Nome, and an exodus began which
+grew into a veritable stampede in 1900, when the gold discoveries in the
+beach itself were made. Rampart's large population faded away as surely
+and as quickly to Nome as Circle City's population did to the Klondike.
+The Indians are almost all gone from their village a mile above the
+town; they dwindled away with the dwindling prosperity, some to Tanana,
+some to other points down the river; and what used to be the worst small
+native community in the interior of Alaska has almost ceased to exist.
+Most of the little band of white folks still remaining were gathered
+together at night, and appreciated, I thought, their semiannual
+opportunity for Divine service.
+
+[Sidenote: "DEVELOPED"]
+
+There is no resisting the melancholy that hangs over a place like this.
+As one treads the crazy, treacherous board sidewalks, full of holes and
+rotten planks, now rising a step or two, now falling, and reads the
+dimmed and dirty signs that once flaunted their gold and colours,
+"Golden North," "Pioneer," "Reception," "The Senate" (why should every
+town in Alaska have a "Senate" saloon and not one a "House of
+Representatives"?), one conjures up the scenes of rude revelry these
+drinking places witnessed a few years ago. How high the hopes of sudden
+riches burned in the breasts of the men who went in and out of them,
+doomed to utter disappointment in the vast majority! What a rapscallion
+crew, male and female, followed this great mob of gold seekers, and grew
+richer as their victims grew poorer! What earned and borrowed and saved
+and begged and stolen moneys were frittered away and flung away that
+winter; what health and character were undermined! How the ribaldry and
+valiant, stupid blasphemy rang out in these tumbling-down shanties! Go
+out on the creeks and see the hills denuded of their timber, the
+stream-beds punched with innumerable holes, filled up or filling up, the
+cabins and sluice-boxes rotting into the moss, here and there a broken
+pick and shovel, here and there a rusting boiler, and take notice that
+this region has been "developed."
+
+When the debit and credit sides of the ledger are balanced, what remains
+to Alaska of all these thousands of men, of all the many hundreds of
+thousands of dollars they brought with them? Those creeks, stripped,
+gutted, and deserted; this town, waiting for a kindly fire with a
+favouring breeze to wipe out its useless emptiness; a few half-breed
+children at mission schools; a hardy native tribe, sophisticated,
+diseased, demoralised, and largely dead--that seems the net result.
+
+The portage trail from Rampart to the Tanana River goes up Minook Creek
+and follows the valley to its head, then crosses a summit and passes
+down through several small mining settlements to the Hot Springs. The
+trail saves traversing two sides of the triangle which it makes with the
+two rivers.
+
+The dogs' feet and legs had suffered so much from the deep snow and the
+heavy labour of the journey out of the Koyukuk and the rough ice of the
+Yukon that I was compelled to have not merely moccasins but moose-hide
+leggings made here, coming right up to the belly and tying over the
+back. All the hair was worn away from the back of the legs and the skin
+was in many places raw.
+
+We had thought to cover the twenty-five or thirty miles up the valley
+and over the summit to a road-house just beyond its foot, but rough
+drifted trails and a high wind held us back until it was dark before the
+ascent was reached, and we pitched our tent and reserved the climb for
+the morrow.
+
+It was a hard grind owing to the drifted snow and the wind that still
+disputed our passage, but the view from the summit, nearly eighteen
+hundred feet above last night's camp, was compensation enough, for it
+gave us the great mountain, Denali, or, as the map makers and some
+white men call it, Mount McKinley. Perhaps an hundred and fifty miles
+away, as the crow flies, it rose up and filled all the angle of vision
+to the southwest. It is not a peak, it is a region, a great soaring of
+the earth's crust, rising twenty thousand feet high; so enormous in its
+mass, in its snow-fields and glaciers, its buttresses, its flanking
+spurs, its far-flung terraces of foot-hills and approaches, that it
+completely dominates the view whenever it is seen at all. I have heard
+people say they thought they had seen Denali, as I have heard travellers
+say they thought they had seen Mount Everest from Darjiling; but no one
+ever thought he saw Denali if he saw it at all. There is no possible
+question about it, once the mountain has risen before the eyes; and
+although Mount Everest is but the highest of a number of great peaks,
+while Denali stands alone in unapproached predominance, yet I think the
+man who has really looked upon the loftiest mountain in the world could
+have no doubt about it ever after.
+
+How my heart burns within me whenever I get view of this great monarch
+of the North! There it stood, revealed from base to summit in all its
+stupendous size, all its glistening majesty. I would far rather climb
+that mountain than own the richest gold-mine in Alaska. Yet how its
+apparent nearness mocks one; what time and cost and labour are involved
+even in approaching its base with food and equipment for an attempt to
+reach its summit! How many schemes I have pondered and dreamed these
+seven years past for climbing it! Some day time and opportunity and
+resource may serve, please God, and I may have that one of my heart's
+desires; if not, still it is good to have seen it from many different
+coigns of vantage, from this side and from that; to have felt the awe of
+its vast swelling bulk, the superb dignity of its firm-seated,
+broad-based uplift to the skies with a whole continent for a pedestal;
+to have gazed eagerly and longingly at its serene, untrodden summit, far
+above the eagle's flight, above even the most daring airman's venture,
+and to have desired and hoped to reach it; to desire and hope to reach
+it still.[D]
+
+Plunging down the steep descent we went for four miles, and then after a
+hearty dinner at the road-house, essayed to make twenty-one miles more
+to the Hot Springs. But night fell again with a number of miles yet to
+come, the recent storm had furrowed the trail diagonally with hard
+windrows of snow that overturned the sled repeatedly and formed an
+hindrance that grew greater and greater, and again we made camp in the
+dark, short of our expected goal.
+
+Of late I had been carrying an hip ring, a rubber ring inflated by the
+breath that is the best substitute for a mattress. The ring had been
+left behind at Rampart, and so dependent does one grow on the little
+luxuries and ameliorations one permits oneself that these two nights in
+camp were almost sleepless for lack of it.
+
+[Sidenote: THE HOT SPRINGS]
+
+Three hours more brought us to the spacious hotel, with its forty empty
+rooms, that had been put up, out of all sense or keeping, in a wild,
+plunging attempt to "exploit" the Hot Springs and make a great "health
+resort" of the place. The hot water had been piped a quarter of a mile
+or so to spacious swimming-baths in the hotel; all sorts of expense had
+been lavished on the place; but it had been a failure from the first,
+and has since been closed and has fallen into dilapidation. The bottoms
+have dropped out of the cement baths, the paper hangs drooping from the
+damp walls, the unsubstantial foundations have yielded until the floors
+are heaved like the waves of the sea.[E] But at this time the hotel was
+still maintained and we stayed there, and its wide entrance-hall and
+lobby formed an excellent place to gather the inhabitants of the little
+town for Divine service--again the only opportunity in the year.
+
+What a curious phenomenon thermal springs constitute in these parts!
+Here is a series of patches of ground, free from snow, while all the
+country has been covered two or three feet deep these four months; green
+with vegetation, while all living things elsewhere are wrapped in winter
+sleep. Here is open, rushing water, throwing up clouds of steam that
+settles upon everything as dense hoar frost, while all other water is
+held in the adamantine fetters of the ice. Where does that constant
+unfailing stream of water at 110 deg. Fahrenheit come from? Where does it
+get its heat? I know of half a dozen such thermal springs in
+Alaska,--one far away above the Arctic Circle between the upper courses
+of the Kobuk and the Noatak Rivers, that I have heard strange tales
+about from the Esquimaux and that I have always wanted to visit.
+
+Whenever I see this gush of hot water in the very midst of the ice and
+the snow, I am reminded of my surprise on the top of Mount Tacoma. We
+had climbed some eight thousand feet of snow and were shivering in a
+bitter wind on the summit, yet when the hand was thrust in a cleft of
+the rock it had to be withdrawn by reason of the heat. One knows about
+the internal fire of some portion of the earth's mass, of course, but
+such striking manifestations of it, such bold irruption of heat in the
+midst of the kingdom of the cold, must always bring a certain
+astonishment except to those who take everything as a matter of course.
+
+It is evident that this hot water, capable of distribution over a
+considerable area of land, makes an exceedingly favourable condition for
+subarctic agriculture, and a great deal of ground has been put under
+cultivation with large yield of potatoes and cabbage and other
+vegetables. But the limitations of Alaskan conditions have shorn all
+profit from the enterprise. There is no considerable market nearer than
+Fairbanks, almost two hundred miles away by the river. If the potatoes
+are allowed to remain in the ground until they are mature, there is the
+greatest danger of the whole crop freezing while on the way to market,
+and in any case the truck-farmers around Fairbanks find that their
+proximity to the consumer more than offsets the advantage of the Hot
+Springs.
+
+[Sidenote: ARCTIC AGRICULTURE]
+
+When the great initial difficulties of farming in Alaska are overcome,
+when the moss is removed and the ground, frozen solidly to bedrock, is
+broken and thawed, when its natural acidity is counteracted by the
+application of some alkali, and its reeking surface moisture is drained
+away; when after three or four years' cultivation it begins to make some
+adequate return of roots and greens, there remains the constant
+difficulty of a market. Around the mining settlements and during the
+uncertain life of the mining settlements, truck-farming pays very well,
+but it could easily be overdone so that prices would fall below the
+point of any profit at all. Transportation is expensive, and rates for a
+short haul on the rivers are high, out of all proportion to rates for
+the long haul from the outside, so that potatoes from the Pacific coast
+are brought in and sold in competition with the native-grown. And
+despite the protestations of the agricultural experimental stations, the
+outside or "chechaco" potato has the advantage of far better quality
+than that grown in Alaska. Tastes differ, and a man may speak only as he
+finds. For my part, I have eaten native potatoes raised in almost every
+section of interior Alaska, and have been glad to get them, but I have
+never eaten a native potato that compared favourably with any good
+"outside" potato. The native potato is commonly wet and waxy; I have
+never seen a native potato that would burst into a glistening mass of
+white flour, or that had the flavour of a really good potato.
+
+There has been much misconception about the interior of Alaska that
+obtains yet in some quarters, although there is no excuse for it now.
+Not only the interior of Alaska, but all land at or near sea-level in
+the arctic regions that is not under glacial ice-caps, is snow free and
+surface-thawed in the summer and has a luxuriant vegetation. The polar
+ox (Sverdrup's protest against the term "musk-ox" should surely prevail)
+ranges in great bands north of the 80th parallel and must secure
+abundant food; and when Peary determined the insularity of Greenland he
+found its most northerly point a mass of verdure and flowers.
+
+No doubt potatoes and turnips, lettuce and cabbage, could be raised
+anywhere in those regions; the intensity of the season compensates for
+its shortness; the sun is in the heavens twenty-four hours in the day,
+and all living things sprout and grow with amazing rankness and celerity
+under the strong compulsion of his continuous rays. Spring comes
+literally with a shout and a rush here in Alaska, and must cry even
+louder and stride even faster in the "ultimate climes of the pole." If
+the possibility of raising garden-truck and tubers constitutes a
+"farming country," then all the arctic regions not actually under
+glacial ice may be so classed.
+
+Any one who visits the Koyukuk may see monster turnips and cabbages
+raised at Coldfoot, near the 68th parallel; from Sir William Parry's
+description we may feel quite sure that vegetables of size and
+excellence might be raised at the head of Bushnan's Cove of Melville
+Island, on the 75th parallel; he called it "an arctic paradise"; Greely
+reported "grass twenty-four inches high and many butterflies" in the
+interior of Grinnell Land under the 82d parallel; and if gold were ever
+discovered on the north coast of Greenland one might quite expect to
+hear that some enterprising Swede was growing turnips and cabbages at
+Cape Morris Jessup above the 83d parallel, and getting a dollar a pound
+for them.
+
+In favourable seasons and in favourable spots of interior Alaska certain
+early varieties of Siberian oats and rye have been matured, and it
+stands to the credit of the Experiment Station at Rampart that a little
+wheat was once ripened there, though it took thirteen months from the
+sowing to the ripening. When the rest of the world fills up so that
+economic pressure demands the utilisation of all earth that will produce
+any sort of food, it may be that large tracts in Alaska will be put
+under the plough; but it is hard to believe that nine tenths of all this
+vast country will ever be other than wild waste land. At present the
+farming population is strictly an appendage of the mining population,
+and the mining population rather diminishes than increases.
+
+Your health resort that no one will resort to is a dull place at best
+and a poor dependence for merchandising, so that the little town of Hot
+Springs is fortunate in having some mining country around it to fall
+back upon for its trade. We lay an extra day there, waiting for the
+stage from Fairbanks to break trail for us through the heavy, drifted
+snow, having had enough of trail breaking for a while. At midnight the
+stage came, two days late, and its coming caused me as keen a sorrow and
+as great a loss as I have had since I came to Alaska.
+
+[Sidenote: NANOOK'S DEATH]
+
+We knew naught of it until the next morning, when, breakfast done and
+the sled lashed, we were ready to hitch the dogs and depart. They had
+been put in the horse stable for there was no dog house; the health
+resorter, actual or prospective, is not likely to be a dog man one
+supposes; but they were loose in the morning and came to the call, all
+but one--Nanook. Him we sought high and low, and at last Arthur found
+him, but in what pitiful case! He dragged himself slowly and painfully
+along, his poor bowels hanging down in the outer hide of his belly,
+fearfully injured internally, done for and killed already. It was not
+difficult to account for it. When the horses came in at midnight, one of
+them had kicked the dog and ruptured his whole abdomen.
+
+There was no use in inquiring whose fault it was. The dogs should have
+been chained; so much was our fault. But it was hard to resist some
+bitter recollection that before this "exploitation" of the springs, when
+there was a modest road-house instead of a mammoth hotel, there had been
+kennels for dogs instead of nothing but stables for horses.
+
+I doubt if all the veterinary surgeons in the world could have saved the
+dog, but there was none to try; and there was only one thing to do, hate
+it as we might. Arthur and I were grateful that neither of us had to do
+it, for the driver of the mail stage, who had some compunctions of
+conscience, I think, volunteered to save us the painful duty. "I know
+how you feel," he said slowly and kindly; "I've got a dog I think a heap
+of myself, but that dog ain't nothin' to me an' I'll do it for you."
+
+Nanook knew perfectly well that it was all over with him. Head and tail
+down, the picture of resigned dejection, he stood like a petrified dog.
+And when I put my face down to his and said "Good-bye," he licked me for
+the first time in his life. In the six years I had owned him and driven
+him I had never felt his tongue before, though I had always loved him
+best of the bunch. He was not the licking kind.
+
+We hitched up our diminished team and pulled out, for we had thirty
+miles to make in the short daylight and we had lost time already; and as
+we crossed the bridge over the steaming slough we saw the man going
+slowly down to the river with the dog, the chain in one hand, a gun in
+the other. My eyes filled with tears; I could not look at Arthur nor he
+at me as I passed forward to run ahead of the team, and I was glad when
+I realised that we had drawn out of ear-shot.
+
+All day as I trudged or trotted now on snow-shoes and now off, as the
+trail varied in badness, that dog was in my mind and his loss upon my
+heart, the feel of his tongue upon my cheek. It takes the close
+companionship between a man and his dogs in this country, travelling all
+the winter long, winter after winter, through the bitter cold and the
+storm and darkness, through the long, pleasant days of the warm sunshine
+of approaching spring, sharing labour and sharing ease, sharing
+privation and sharing plenty; it takes this close companionship to make
+a man appreciate a dog. As I reckoned it up, Nanook had fallen just
+short of pulling my sled ten thousand miles. If he had finished this
+season with me he would have done fully that, and I had intended to
+pension him after this winter, to provide that so long as he lived he
+should have his fish and rice every day. Some doubt I had had of old
+Lingo lasting through the winter, but none of Nanook, and they were the
+only survivors of my original team.
+
+[Sidenote: THE TALKING DOG]
+
+Nanook was in as good spirits as ever I knew him that last night, coming
+to me and plumping his huge fore paws down on my moccasins, challenging
+me to play the game of toe treading that he loved; and whenever he beat
+me at it he would seize my ankle in his jaws and make me hop around on
+one foot, to his great delight. He was my talking dog. He had more
+different tones in his bark than any other dog I ever knew. He never
+came to the collar in the morning, he never was released from it at
+night, without a cheery "bow-wow-wow." And we never stopped finally to
+make camp but he lifted up his voice. There was something curious about
+that. Only two nights before, when we had been unable to reach the
+health resort owing to wind-hardened drifts right across the trail that
+overturned the heavy sled again and again, swing the gee pole as one
+would, and had stopped several times in the growing dusk to inspect a
+spot that seemed to promise a camping place, Arthur had remarked that
+Nanook never spoke until the spot was reached on which we decided to
+pitch the tent. What faculty he had of recognising a good place, of
+seeing that both green spruce and dry spruce were there in sufficient
+quantity, I do not know--or whether he got his cue from the tones of our
+voice--but he never failed to give tongue when the stop was final and
+never opened his mouth when it was but tentative.
+
+I could almost tell the nature of any disturbance that arose from the
+tone of Nanook's bark. Was it some stray Indian dog prowling round the
+camp; was it the distant howling of wolves; was it the approach of some
+belated traveller--there was a distinct difference in the way he
+announced each. I well remember the new note that came into his
+passionate protest when he was chained to a stump at the reindeer camp,
+and the foolish creatures streamed all over the camping-ground that
+night. To have them right beside him and yet be unable to reach them, to
+have them brushing him with their antlers while he strained helplessly
+at the chain, was adding insult to injury. And he kept me awake over it
+all night and told me about it at intervals all next day.
+
+The coat that dog had was the heaviest and thickest I ever saw. On his
+back the long hair parted in the middle, and underneath the hair was fur
+and underneath the fur was wool. He was an outdoors dog strictly. It was
+only in the last year or two that he could be induced voluntarily to
+enter a house; he seemed, like Mowgli, to have a suspicion of houses.
+And if he did come in he had no respect for the house at all. When first
+I had him he would dig and scratch out of a dog-house on the coldest
+night, if he could, and lay himself down comfortably on the snow. Cold
+meant little to him. Fifty, sixty, seventy below zero, all night long at
+such temperatures he would sleep quite contentedly. The only difference
+I could see that these low temperatures made to him was an increasing
+dislike to be disturbed. When he had carefully tucked his nose between
+his paws and adjusted his tail over all, he had gone to bed, and to make
+him take his nose out of its nest and uncurl himself was like throwing
+the clothes off a sleeping man. He never dug a hole for himself in the
+snow. I never saw a dog do that yet. In my opinion that is one of the
+nature-faker's stories. A dog lies in snow just as he lies in sand, with
+the same preliminary turn-round-three-times that has been so much
+speculated about. We always make a bed for them, when it is very cold,
+by cutting and stripping a few spruce boughs, and they highly appreciate
+such a couch and will growl and fight if another dog try to take it.
+They need more food and particularly they need more fat when they lie
+out at extreme low temperatures, and we seek to increase that element in
+their rations by adding tallow or bacon or bear's-grease--or seal
+oil--or whatever oleaginous substance we can come by.
+
+[Sidenote: CANINE CHARACTER]
+
+He was a most independent dog was Nanook, a thoroughly bad dog, as one
+would say in some use of that term--a thief who had no shame in his
+thievery but rather gloried in it. If you left anything edible within
+his ingenious and comprehensive reach he regarded it as a challenge.
+There comes to me a ludicrous incident that concerned a companion of one
+winter journey. He had carefully prepared a lunch and had wrapped it
+neatly in paper, and he placed it for a moment on the sled while he
+turned to put his scarf about him. But in that moment Nanook saw it and
+it was gone. Through the snow, over the brush, in and out amongst the
+stumps the chase proceeded, until Nanook was finally caught and my
+companion recovered most of the paper, for the dog had wolfed the grub
+as he ran. He would stand and take any licking you offered and never
+utter a sound but give a bark of defiance when you were done, and he
+would bear you no ill will in the world and repeat his offence at the
+next opportunity. Yet so absurdly sensitive was he in other matters of
+his person that the simple operation of clipping the hair from between
+his toes, to prevent the "balling-up" of the snow, took two men to
+perform, one to sit on the dog and the other to ply the scissors, and
+was accompanied always with such howls and squeals as would make a
+hearer think we were flaying him alive.
+
+Nanook's acquaintance with horses began in Fairbanks the first season I
+owned him, before I had had the harness upon him, when he was rising two
+years old. The dogs and I were staying at the hospital we had just
+established--because in those days there was nowhere else to
+stay--waiting for the winter. One of the mining magnates of the infancy
+of the camp (broken and dead long since; Bret Harte's lines, "Busted
+himself in White Pine and blew out his brains down in 'Frisco," often
+occur to me as the sordid histories of to-day repeat those of fifty
+years ago) had imported a saddle-horse and, as the mild days of that
+charming autumn still deferred the snow, he used to ride out past the
+hospital for a canter.
+
+The dog had learned to lift the latch of the gate of the hospital yard
+with his nose and get out, and when I put a wedge above the latch for
+greater security he learned also to circumvent that precaution. And
+whenever the horse and his rider passed, Nanook would open the gate and
+lead the whole pack in a noisy pursuit that changed the canter to a run
+and brought us natural but mortifying remonstrance.
+
+The rider had just passed and the dogs had pursued as usual, and I had
+rushed out and recalled them with difficulty. Nanook I had by the
+collar. Dragging him into the yard, shutting the gate, and putting in
+the wedge, I picked up a stick and gave him a few sharp blows with it.
+Then flinging him off, I said: "Now, you stay in here; I'll give you a
+sound thrashing if you do that again!" I was just getting acquainted
+with him then. The moment I loosed his collar the dog went deliberately
+to the gate, stood on his hind legs while he pulled out the wedge with
+his teeth, lifted the latch with his nose and swung open the gate, and
+standing in the midst turned round and said to me: "Bow-_wow_-wow-wow-wow-_wow_!"
+It was so pointed that a passer-by, who had paused to see the
+proceedings and was leaning on the fence, said to me: "Well, you know
+where _you_ can go to. That's the doggonedest dog I ever seen!"
+
+[Sidenote: PARTNERS]
+
+It was a pleasure to come back to Nanook after any long absence--a
+pleasure I was used to look forward to. There was no special fawning or
+demonstration of affection; he was not that kind; that I might have from
+any of the others; but from none but Nanook the bark of welcome with my
+particular inflection in it that no one else ever got. "Well, well;
+here's the boss again; glad to see you back"; that was about all it
+said. For he was a most independent dog and took to himself an air of
+partnership rather than subjection. Any man can make friends with any
+dog if he will, there is no question about that, but it takes a long
+time and mutual trust and mutual forbearance and mutual appreciation to
+make a partnership. Not every dog is fit to be partner with a man; nor
+every man, I think, fit to be partner with a dog.
+
+Well, that long partnership was dissolved by the horse's hoof and I was
+sore for its dissolution. There was none left now that could remember
+the old days of the team save Lingo, and he grew crusty and somewhat
+crabbed. He was still the guardian of the sled, still the insatiable
+hand-shaker, but he grew more and more unsocial with his mates, and we
+heard his short, sharp, angry double bark at night more frequently than
+we used to. He reminded me of the complaining owl in Gray's "Elegy." He
+resented any dog even approaching the sled, resented the dogs moving
+about at all to disturb his "ancient solitary reign."
+
+His work was well-nigh done, and old Lingo had honestly earned his rest.
+With the end of this winter he would enter upon the easy old age that I
+had designed for both of them. Lingo had never failed me; never let his
+traces slack if he could keep them taut, never in his life had whip laid
+on his back to make him pull; a faithful old work dog for whom I had a
+hearty respect and regard. But he never found his way to my heart as
+Nanook did. I loved Nanook, and had lost something personal out of my
+life in losing him. There are other dogs that I am fond of--better dogs
+in some ways that either Nanook or Lingo, swifter certainly--but I think
+I shall never have two dogs again that have meant as much to me as these
+two. All the other dogs were of the last two years and thought they
+belonged to Arthur, who fed them and handled them most. But Nanook and
+Lingo had seen boys come and boys go, and they knew better.
+
+Six years is not very much of a man's life, but it is all a dog's life;
+all his effective working life. Nanook had given it all to me,
+willingly, gladly. He pulled so freely because he loved to pull. He
+delighted in the winter, in the snow and the cold; rejoiced to be on the
+trail, rejoiced to work. When we made ready to depart after a few days
+at a mission or in a town, Nanook was beside himself with joy. He would
+burst forth into song as he saw the preparations in hand, would run all
+up and down the gamut of his singular flexible voice, would tell as
+plainly to all around as though he spoke it in English and Indian and
+Esquimau that the inaction had irked him, that he was eager to be gone
+again.
+
+Well, he was dead; as fine a dog as ever lived; as faithful and
+intelligent a creature as any man ever had, not of human race, for
+servant, companion, and friend. And I thought the more of myself that he
+had put his tongue to my cheek when I said good-bye to him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: THE AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER]
+
+Here on the Tanana was one of the most interesting original characters
+of the many in the land: an old inhabitant of Alaska and of the
+Northwest who had followed many avocations and was now settled down on
+the river bank, with a steamboat wood-yard, a road-house for the
+entertainment of occasional travellers, and a little stock of trade
+goods chiefly for Indians of the vicinity. A round, fat, pursy man he
+was, past the middle life, with a twinkling eye and a bristling
+moustache, and a most amazing knack of picking up new words and using
+them incorrectly. He had fallen out with the great trading company of
+Alaska and did almost all his purchasing from a "mail-order house" in
+Chicago, the enormous quarto catalogue on the flimsiest thin paper
+issued by that establishment being his chief book of reference and his
+choice continual reading. He would declaim by the hour on the iniquitous
+prices that prevail in the interior and had the quotations of prices of
+every conceivable merchandise from his _vade mecum_ at his fingers'
+ends.
+
+But his chief passion of the past two or three years was photography, in
+the which he had made but little progress, despite considerable
+expenditures; and he had come to the conclusion about the time of our
+visit that what he needed was a fine lens, although, as a matter of
+fact, he had never learned to use his cheap one. He had recently become
+acquainted with sensitive film and had ordered a supply. By a
+transposition of letters, which the nature of the substance doubtless
+confirmed in his mind when it arrived, he always spoke of these
+convenient strips of celluloid as "flims," and was just now most
+eloquently indignant that, although he had broken utterly with the
+Northern Commercial Company and refused to trade with them at all, the
+supply of "flims" he had received from the mail-order house were
+labelled "N. C." "Them blamed monopolists has cornered the flims," he
+exclaimed, and was hardly persuaded that the letters signified
+"non-curling" and did not darkly hint at a conspiracy in restraint of
+trade.
+
+He produced and displayed a number of pieces of apparatus of a generally
+useless kind which he had ordered on the strength of their much
+advertising, and he observed sententiously, "We _armatures_ get badly
+imposed upon." Here were patent gimcrack printing devices, although he
+had scarce anything worth printing; all sorts of atrocious fancy borders
+with which he sought in vain to embellish out-of-focus under-exposures;
+orthochromatic filters and colour screens with which he was eliminating
+undesirable rays, although the chief thing his negatives lacked was
+light of any kind. His soiled and stained development trays were
+scattered about a large table amidst dirty cups and saucers and plates
+and dishes, while at the other end of the table, surmounting a pile of
+thumbed and greasy magazines and newspapers, lay the monstrous
+mail-order catalogue with pencilled indications of further apparatus to
+be purchased.
+
+But his zeal and enthusiasm and resolute riding of his hobby were very
+attractive. If he ever gets out of his head the notion that success
+depends upon apparatus he will doubtless become a photographer of sorts.
+Enthusiasm of any kind other than mining and "mushing" enthusiasm is so
+rare in this land that it is welcome even when it seems wasted. He had
+recently discovered the wax match in his catalogue, and as a parting
+gift he presented me with a box of "them there wax _vespers_ which beats
+the sulphur match all to thunder."
+
+[Sidenote: THE SULPHUR MATCH]
+
+But they do not. Nothing in this country can take the place of the
+old-fashioned sulphur match, long since banished from civilised
+communities, and the sulphur match is the only match a man upon the
+trail will employ. Manufactured from blocks of wood without complete
+severance, so that the ends of the matches are still held together at
+the bottom in one solid mass, it is easy to strip one off at need and
+strike it upon the block. A block of a hundred such matches will take up
+much less space than fifty of any other kind of match, and the blocks
+may be freely carried in any as they are commonly carried in every
+pocket without fear of accidental ignition. The only fire producer that
+it is worth while supplementing the sulphur match with is the even
+older-fashioned flint and steel, which to a man who smokes is a
+convenience in a wind. All the modern alcohol and gasoline pocket
+devices are extinguished by the lightest puff of wind, but the tinder,
+once ignited, burns the fiercer for the blast. With dry, shredded
+birch-bark I have made a fire upon occasion from the flint and steel.
+One resource may here be mentioned, since we are on the subject, which
+is always carried in the hind-sack of my sled against difficulty in fire
+making. It is a tin tobacco-box filled with strips of cotton cloth cut
+to the size of the box and the whole saturated with kerosene. One or two
+of these strips will help very greatly in kindling a fire when damp
+twigs or shavings are all that are at hand. A few camphor balls (the
+ordinary "moth balls") will serve equally well; and there may come a
+time, on any long journey, when the forethought that has provided such
+aid will be looked back upon with very great satisfaction.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The mail trail from Tanana to Fairbanks touches the Tanana River only at
+one point, a few miles beyond the Hot Springs; but, as we wished to
+visit Nenana, we had to leave the mail trail after two days more of
+uneventful travel and strike out to the river and over its surface for
+seventeen or eighteen miles.
+
+[Sidenote: A NOTABLE GENTLEWOMAN]
+
+Nenana is a native village situated on the left bank of the Tanana, a
+little above the confluence of the Nenana River with that stream, and we
+have established an important and flourishing school there which
+receives its forty pupils from many points on the Yukon and Tanana
+Rivers. None but thoroughly sound and healthy children of promise, full
+natives or half-breeds, are received at the school, and we seek to give
+both boys and girls opportunity for the cultivation of the native arts
+and for some of the white man's industrial training, in addition to the
+ordinary work of the schoolroom. The school was started and had the good
+fortune of its first four years' life under the care of a notable
+gentlewoman, Miss Annie Cragg Farthing, who was yet at its head at the
+time of this visit, but who died suddenly, a martyr to her devotion to
+the children, a year later; and a great Celtic cross in concrete,
+standing high on the bluff across the river, now marks the spot of her
+own selection--a spot that gives a fine view of Denali--where her body
+rests, and also the Alaskan mission's sense of the extraordinary value
+of her life.
+
+It would be easy to give striking instances of the potency and stretch
+of this remarkable woman's influence amongst the native people, an
+influence--strange as it may sound to those who deem any half-educated,
+under-bred white woman competent to take charge of an Indian school--due
+as much to her wide culture, her perfect dignity and self-possession,
+her high breeding, as to the love and consecrated enthusiasm of her
+character. It is no exaggeration to say that Miss Farthing's work has
+left a mark broad and deep upon the Indian race of this whole region
+that will never be wiped out.
+
+There is no greater pleasure than to spend a few days at this school; to
+foregather again with so many of the hopeful young scamps that one has
+oneself selected here and there and brought to the place; to mark the
+improvement in them, the taming and gentling, the drawing out of the
+sweet side of the nature that is commonly buried to the casual observer
+in the rudeness and shyness of savage childhood. To romp with them, to
+tell them tales and jingles, to get insensibly back into their familiar
+confidence again, to say the evening prayers with them, to join with
+their clear, fresh voices in the hymns and chants, is indeed to
+rejuvenate oneself. And to go away believing that real strength of
+character is developing, that real preparation is making for an Indian
+race that shall be a better Indian race and not an imitation white race,
+is the cure for the discouragement that must sometimes come to all those
+who are committed heart and soul to the cause of the Alaskan native.
+School-teachers, it would seem, ought never to grow old; they should
+suck in new youth continually from the young life around them; and
+children are far and away the most interesting things in the world, more
+interesting even than dogs and great mountains.
+
+[Sidenote: CHIVALROUS INDIAN YOUTH]
+
+All the boys in the school, I think, swarmed across the river with us
+when we started away early in the morning, and the elder ones ran with
+the sled along the portage, mile after mile, until I turned them back
+lest they be late for school.
+
+But when they were gone, still I saw them, saw them gathered round the
+grey-haired lady I had left, fawning upon her with their eyes, their
+hearts filled with as true chivalry as ever animated knight or champion
+of the olden time. Tall, upstanding fellows of sixteen or seventeen,
+clean-limbed and broad-shouldered, wild-run all their lives; hunters,
+with a tale of big game to the credit of some of them would make an
+English sportsman envious; unaccustomed to any restraint at all and
+prone to chafe at the slightest; unaccustomed to any respect for women,
+to any of the courtesies of life, I saw them fly at a word, at a look,
+to do her bidding, saw cap snatched from head if they encountered her
+about the buildings, saw them jump up and hold open the door if she
+moved to pass out of a room, saw the eager devotion that would have
+served her upon bended knee had they thought it would please her. It was
+wonderful, the only thing of quite its kind I had ever seen in my life.
+
+When early in the school's history an old medicine-man at Nenana had
+been roused to animosity by her refusal to countenance an offensive
+Indian custom touching the adolescent girls, and had defiantly announced
+his intention to make medicine against her, I can see her now, her staff
+in her hand, attended by two or three of her devoted youths, invading
+the midnight pavilion of the conjurer, in the very midst of his
+conjurations, tossing his paraphernalia outside, laying her staff
+smartly across the shoulders of the trembling shaman, and driving the
+gaping crew helter-skelter before her, their awe of the witchcraft
+overawed by her commanding presence. I make no apology that I thought of
+the scourge of small cords that was used on an occasion in the temple at
+Jerusalem, when I heard of it. It gave a shrewder blow to the lingering
+tyrannical superstition of the medicine-man than decades of preaching
+and reasoning would have done. No man living could have done the thing
+with like effect, nor any woman save one of her complete self-possession
+and natural authority. The younger villagers chuckle over the jest of it
+to this day, and the old witch-doctor himself was crouching at her feet
+and, as one may say, eating out of her hand, within the year.
+
+I saw these boys again, in my mind's eye, gone back to their homes here
+and there on the Yukon and the Tanana after their two or three years at
+this school, carrying with them some better ideal of human life than
+they could ever get from the elders of the tribe, from the little sordid
+village trader, from most of the whites they would be thrown with,
+keeping something of the vision of gentle womanhood, something of the
+"unbought grace of life," something of the keen sense of truth and
+honour, of the nobility of service, something deeper and stronger than
+mere words of the love of God, which they had learned of her whom they
+all revered; each one, however much overflowed again by the surrounding
+waters of mere animal living, tending a little shrine of sweeter and
+better things in his heart.
+
+[Sidenote: LONG-REMEMBERED TEACHING]
+
+Here, three years after the visit and the journey narrated, when these
+words are written with diaries and letters and memoranda around me, I am
+just come from a long native powwow, a meeting of all the Indians of a
+village for the annual election of a village council, important in the
+evolution of that self-government we covet for these people, but
+undeniably tedious. And, because at our missions we seek to associate
+with us every force that looks to the betterment of the natives, we had
+invited the new government teacher, a lady of long experience in Indian
+schools, to be present. She had sat patiently through the protracted
+meeting, and at its close, when she rose to go, a young Indian man
+jumped up and held her fur cloak for her and put it gently about her
+shoulders. When she had thanked him she asked with a smile: "Where did
+you learn to be so polite?" A gleam came into the fellow's eyes, then he
+dropped them and replied, "Miss Farthing taught me."
+
+Two days before, returning from a journey, I had spent the night at a
+road-house kept by a white man married to an Indian woman. There was
+excellent yeast bread on the table, and good bread is a rare thing in
+Alaska. "Where did you learn to make such good bread?" I inquired of the
+woman. There came the same light to her eyes and the same answer to her
+lips. Yet it was nine years ago, long before the school at Nenana was
+started, that this Indian boy and girl had been under Miss Farthing's
+teaching at Circle City.
+
+They tell us there is no longer much place or use for gentility in the
+world, for men and women nurtured and refined above the common level;
+tell us in particular that woman is only now emancipating herself from
+centuries of ineffectual nonage, only now entering upon her active
+career.
+
+Yet I am of opinion, from such opportunities to observe and compare as
+my constant travel has given me, that the quiet work of this gracious
+woman of the old school, with her dignity that nothing ever invaded and
+her poise that nothing ever disturbed, is perhaps the most powerful
+single influence that has come into the lives of the natives of interior
+Alaska.
+
+Two days brought us past the little native village and mission at Chena
+(which is pronounced Shen-a['w]), past the little white town of the same
+name, to Fairbanks, the chief town of interior Alaska. Chena is at the
+virtual head of the navigation of the Tanana River and is quite as near
+to the gold-producing creeks as Fairbanks, which latter place is not on
+the Tanana River at all but on a slough, impracticable for almost any
+craft at low water. For every topographical reason, from every
+consideration of natural advantage, Chena should have been the river
+port and town of these gold-fields. But Chena was so sure of her
+manifold natural advantages that she became unduly confident and
+grasping. When the traders at Fairbanks offered to remove to Chena at
+the beginning of the camp, if the traders at Chena would provide a site,
+the offer was scornfully rejected. "They would have to come, anyway, or
+go out of business." But they did not come; rather they put their backs
+up and fought. And because Fairbanks was enterprising and far-sighted,
+while Chena was avaricious and narrow, because Fairbanks offered free
+sites and Chena charged enormously for water-front, business went the
+ten miles up the often unnavigable slough and settled there, and by and
+by built a little railway that it might be independent of the uncertain
+boat service. The company came, the courts came, the hospital came, the
+churches came, and Chena woke up from its dreams of easy wealth to find
+itself and its manifold natural advantages passed by and ignored and the
+big town firmly established elsewhere.
+
+How well I remember the virulent little newspaper published at Chena in
+those days and the bitterness and vituperation it used to pour out week
+by week! One wishes a file of it had been preserved. Alaskan journalism
+has presented many amusing curiosities that no one has had leisure to
+collect, but nothing more amusing than the frenzy of impotent wrath
+Chena vented when it saw its cherished prospects and opportunities
+slipping out of its grasp for ever.
+
+        "If of all words on tongue or pen,
+         The saddest are 'it might have been,'
+         Full sad are those we often see,
+         It is, but it hadn't ought to be."
+
+It takes Bret Harte to strike the note for such rivalry and such
+disappointment.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[C] In December, 1912, a determined effort was made by the better
+element of the little handful of white people in this town to secure the
+withdrawal of the licence of this saloon. The justice of the peace, the
+government school-teacher, the postmaster, and others went up to
+Fairbanks (a week's journey over the trail) and opposed the granting of
+the licence in court. It was shown that the white men of the locality
+were so reduced in numbers that the business could not be carried on at
+a profit unless liquor was sold, directly or indirectly, to the Indians.
+But because by hook and by crook the names of a majority of one or two
+of all the white residents of the precinct were secured for a petition
+in favour of the licence (two or three were secured by telegraph at the
+last moment) the judge held that he had no option under the law but to
+grant the licence. So, on the one hand, it is a felony to sell liquor to
+Indians, and annually thousands of dollars are expended in trying to
+suppress such sale, while, on the other hand, a man is licenced to sell
+liquor when it is shown that he cannot make a living unless he sells to
+Indians; that is to say he is virtually granted a licence to sell to
+Indians. This note is not intended to reflect upon the judge who granted
+the licence, although all his predecessors have not put that
+construction upon the law, but upon a law open to that construction.
+
+[D] This was written some two years before the opportunity came. On the
+7th of June, 1913, the writer and three companions reached the summit of
+Denali. ("The Ascent of Denali," Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914.)
+
+[E] In 1913 it was finally destroyed by fire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+TANANA CROSSING TO FORTYMILE AND DOWN THE YUKON--A PATRIARCHAL
+CHIEF--SWARMING CARIBOU--EAGLE AND FORT EGBERT--CIRCLE CITY AND FORT
+YUKON
+
+
+FAIRBANKS was a different place in 1910 from the centre of feverish
+trade and feverish vice of 1904-5, when the stores were open all day and
+half the night and the dance-halls and gambling dens all night and half
+the day; when the Jews cornered all the salt and all the sugar in the
+camp and the gamblers all the silver and currency; when the curious
+notion prevailed that in some mysterious way general profligacy was good
+for business, and the Commercial Club held an indignation meeting upon a
+threat of closing down the public gaming and refusing liquor licences to
+the dance-halls, and voted unanimously in favour of an "open town"; when
+a diamond star was presented to the "chief of police" by the enforced
+contributions of the prostitutes; when the weekly gold-dust from the
+clean-ups on the creeks came picturesquely into town escorted by
+horsemen armed to the teeth. The outward and visible signs of the Wild
+West are gone; the dance-halls and gambling tables are a thing of the
+past; the creeks are all connected with Fairbanks by railway and
+telephone; an early closing movement has prevailed in the shops; and
+the local choral society is lamenting the customary dearth of tenors for
+its production of "The Messiah."
+
+Despite the steady decline in the gold output of late years, a drop of
+from twenty millions down to four or five, there is little visible decay
+in its trade, and despite stampedes to new diggings all over Alaska,
+there is no marked visible diminution in its population, though as a
+matter of fact both must have largely fallen off. The thing that more
+than any other has sustained the spirits and retained the presence of
+the business men is the expectation that seems to grow brighter and
+brighter, of the development of a quartz camp now that the placers are
+being exhausted. And in that hope lies the chance of Fairbanks to become
+the one permanent considerable town of interior Alaska. It is a
+substantial place, with good business houses and many comfortable homes
+electric-lit, steam-heated, well protected against fire--better than
+against flood--and, though it does not display the style and luxury of
+the palmy days of Nome, it has amenities enough to make disinterested
+visitors and passers-by wish that its hard-rock hopes may be realised.
+
+[Sidenote: FAIRBANKS]
+
+The little log church that is still, as a local artist put it, "the only
+thing in Fairbanks worth making a picture of," no longer stands open all
+day and all night as the town's library and reading-room, but has
+withdrawn into decorous Sabbath use in favour of the commodious public
+library built by a Philadelphia churchman; the hospital adjoining it,
+that for two or three years cared for all the sick of the camp, is
+supplemented by another and a larger across the slough; young
+birch-trees have been successfully planted all along the principal
+streets, and the front yards everywhere are ablaze with flowers the
+summer through. You may eat hot-house lettuce and radishes in March;
+hot-house strawberries (at about ten cents apiece) in July and August;
+while common outdoor garden-truck of all kinds is plentiful and good in
+its short season.
+
+We had another canine misfortune while we lay there. Doc, one of our
+leaders, got his chain twisted around his foot the night before we were
+to leave, and, in pulling to free it, stopped the circulation of the
+blood and the foot froze. It was as hard as wood and sounded like wood
+when it hit the sidewalks, from which the snow had been cleared, as the
+dog came limping along. An hour's soaking in cold water drew the frost
+out of the foot, and we swathed it in cotton saturated with carron oil,
+upon which it swelled so greatly that it was impossible to tell the
+extent of the injury or to determine whether or not the dog would ever
+be of use again. A kindly nurse at the hospital undertook his care, and
+we left him behind. One does not buy a dog so late in the season, with
+all the idle summer to feed him through, if any shift can be made to
+avoid it, and there was a Great Dane pup at the Salchaket, forty miles
+away, that I might pick up as I passed and perhaps make some use of for
+the remainder of the winter.
+
+That mission was the next stop on our journey, and we reached it over
+the level mail trail, the chief winter highway of Alaska, connecting
+Fairbanks with Valdez on the coast. Three times a week there is a horse
+stage with mail and passengers passing over this trail each way,
+together with much other travel. The Alaska Road Commission has lavished
+large sums of money upon it, and the four hundred miles or thereabout is
+made in a week.
+
+[Sidenote: THE SALCHAKET]
+
+A day and a half brought us to the Salchaket, one of a chain of missions
+along the Tanana River, established by the energy and zeal of the
+Reverend Charles Eugene Betticher, Jr., during his incumbency at
+Fairbanks, that have already brought a great change for the better in
+native conditions. Five years had elapsed since last I visited this
+tribe, a reconnoitring visit on one of the first steamboats that ever
+went up the Tanana River above Fairbanks, and it was a delight to see
+the new, clean village with the little gardens round the cabins, and to
+note the appreciative attitude which the Indians showed. So highly do
+they value the missionary nurse in charge that however far afield their
+hunting may lead them, one of their number is sent back every week to
+see that the mission does not lack wood and water and meat; a simple,
+docile, kindly people that one's heart warms to.
+
+This mission was our last outpost to the south. My farther journey had
+for its prime object the visiting of the natives of the upper Tanana as
+far as the Tanana Crossing, some two hundred and fifty miles beyond the
+Salchaket, the inquiring into their condition and into the desirability
+of establishing a post amongst them.
+
+[Sidenote: THE UPPER TANANA]
+
+The upper Tanana is probably one of the most difficult streams in the
+world to navigate that can by any stretch of the term be called
+navigable. The great Alaskan range begins to approach the Tanana River
+so soon as one gets above Fairbanks. Its prominent peaks, ten thousand
+to twelve thousand feet high, are continually in view from one angle to
+another as one pursues the river trail, and come constantly nearer and
+nearer. All the streams that are confluent with the Tanana on its left
+bank are glacial streams draining the high ice of these mountains. They
+come down laden thick with silt, at times foaming torrents, at times
+merely trickling watercourses that seam with numerous small runnels the
+wide deltas at their mouths. The tributaries of the right bank flow for
+the most part through heavily wooded country, and come out cleanly into
+the river. So the glacial waters form shoals and bars, and the woodland
+waters during freshets pile them high with driftwood. Such is the chief
+characteristic of the upper Tanana; a multiplicity of swift, narrow
+channels amidst bars laden with drift. It is subject to sudden rises of
+great violence; the attempt to stem a freshet on the upper Tanana is a
+hair-raising experience as the log of the _Pelican_ would show, but does
+not come within this narrative. Owing to the origin of much of its
+water, the Tanana is often in flood in dry, hot seasons, when other
+rivers run meagrely, as well as in times of rain. It cannot be stemmed
+in flood; its shoals deny passage in drouth; there must be just the
+right stage of water to permit its navigation, and that stage, "without
+o'erflowing, full," is not often found of duration to serve the voyage
+after the month of June.
+
+A river difficult to navigate in summer is usually a river difficult to
+travel upon in winter, and the upper Tanana is notoriously dangerous and
+treacherous. Scarce a winter or a summer that it does not claim victims.
+It is emphatically a "bad river." Therefore, as far as there is any
+travel to speak of, land trails parallel the river. Past Richardson
+where the next night is spent, a decayed mining and trading town that
+dates back to the stampedes of 1905-6 when it was thought the upper
+Tanana would prove rich in gold, past Tenderfoot Creek on which the
+discoveries were made, past the mouth of the Big Delta with the great
+bluff on the opposite shore and the rushing black water at its foot that
+never entirely closes all the winter, and on the other hand the wide
+barrens of the Big Delta itself giving the whole fine sweep of the
+Alaskan range, we came at length to McCarthy's, the last telegraph
+station on the river,--for the line strikes across country thence to
+Valdez following the government trail,--and there spent another night,
+and here we leave the government-made trail and take to the river
+surface and the wilderness.
+
+[Illustration: A PLEASANT WOODLAND TRAIL.]
+
+[Illustration: AN ALASKAN CHIEF AND HIS HENCHMAN.]
+
+Twelve miles through the woods along the left bank of the river brought
+us to the aptly named Clearwater Creek, a tributary that comes only from
+the foot-hills and carries no glacial water. This stream by reason of
+hot springs runs wide open all the winter and must be crossed by a
+ferry--a raft on a heavy wire. The man who owned the ferry and the house
+adjacent was gone from home, so we proceeded to cross as best we could.
+The raft was so small that first we took the dogs across then unloaded
+the sled and took part of the load, and returned for the remainder
+and the sled itself. Finally a canoe was loaded on the raft and, when it
+had been moored on the side we found it, Arthur paddled himself back. It
+was a strange scene, rafting and paddling a canoe in interior Alaska on
+the 2d of March, with the thermometer at -15 deg.. Some eight miles farther
+along the portage trail we came to a little cabin about dusk, but
+disdaining its dirt and darkness we pitched our tent.
+
+Another eighteen miles the next day is noted in my diary for pleasant
+woodland travel and for the particular interest of the numerous animal
+tracks we passed. Here a moose had crossed the trail, ploughing through
+the snow like a great cart-horse; here for two or three miles a lynx had
+urgent business in the direction of the Healy River. A lynx will always
+follow a trail if there be one, and will pick out the best going on the
+ice or snow in the absence of trail. I once followed a lynx track from
+the head of the Dall River to its mouth, and, save for turning aside
+occasionally to investigate a clump of willows or brush, the lynx was an
+excellent guide. Here were rabbit tracks and every now and then the
+little sharp tracks of a squirrel. We stopped for lunch under a tall
+cottonwood-tree, and Arthur pointed out that the trunk, up to a high
+crotch, was all seamed by bear claws. He said that the black bear
+climbed the same tree season after season, and told me that, according
+to the Indians, this was chiefly done when first he came from his winter
+den,--for the purpose of getting his bearings, as the boy suggested with
+a chuckle. A fox, a marten, and a weasel had all passed across lately,
+and of course then came the exclamation that scarce fails from native
+lips when a fox track is seen: "I wonder if it were a black fox!" A
+black fox means sudden wealth beyond the dreams of avarice to an Indian,
+and any fox track may be the track of a black fox.
+
+The end of that portage brought us out on the Tanana River opposite the
+little trading-post at the mouth of the Healy--the last post of any kind
+we should see.
+
+[Sidenote: INDIAN TRADERS]
+
+The trader, by whom we were hospitably entertained, had heard of our
+projected occupation of the upper Tanana, and alert to his own
+interests, was anxious to know the plans for the establishment of a
+mission--plans which were yet all to make. He naturally favoured this
+spot, which it was already plain was quite out of the question, but
+professed his readiness to move to any place that we might decide upon,
+and his entire sympathy and co-operation.
+
+The question of the trader, which always arises upon the establishment
+of a new mission site, is an important and sometimes a vexatious one,
+for he wields an influence amongst the Indians second only to that of
+the mission itself, and may be either a great help or a great hindrance.
+There is a natural desire to secure a man of character for the new post,
+and at the same time a natural reluctance to disturb vested interests
+and arouse bitter enmity by diverting trade. The suggestion has often
+been made that the mission should itself undertake a store in the
+interest of the natives, but those with most experience in such matters
+will agree that it is the wisdom of the bishop that sets his face
+against mission trading. The two offices are so essentially dissimilar
+as to be almost incompatible with one another; either the person in
+charge is a missionary first and a trader afterwards, in which case the
+store suffers, or he is a trader first and a missionary afterwards, in
+which case he is not a missionary at all. A clean, sober, and honest
+trader, content to take his time about getting rich, is a blessing to an
+Indian community. There are some such, one thinks, but they are not
+numerous. The profits are large, though the turnover is but one a year;
+the capital required is small; it is a life with much leisure; but in
+the main it attracts only a certain class of men.
+
+A band of Indians to whom word of our visit had been sent had come down
+the river this far to meet us and escort us, but dog food was scarce and
+our arrival was delayed, and they had been compelled to return to their
+hunting camp whither we must follow them. We were now farther up the
+Tanana River than either of us had ever been before; the country had the
+fascination of a new country; every bend of the river held unknown
+possibilities, and the keenness and elation that only the penetration of
+a new country brings were upon the boy as well as upon myself.
+
+The river and the mountains were already drawn much closer together, and
+as we pursued our journey upon the one we had continual fine views of
+the other. The going was good--too good--for much of it was new ice and
+spoke of recent overflow, and all too soon we came upon the water. At
+the mouth of the Johnson River, one of the glacial streams, the whole
+river was overflowed, and we waded for a mile through water that
+deepened continually until there was risk of wetting our load. Then we
+were compelled to take to the woods and to cut a portage around the
+worst and deepest of it, and so passed beyond it to good ice and to an
+empty cabin where we spent the night, glad to be sheltered from an
+exceedingly bitter wind that had blown all day and had taken all the
+pleasure out of travel.
+
+[Sidenote: THE THERMOS BOTTLES]
+
+It is in such weather particularly that the thermos flasks prove such a
+boon to the musher. To stop and build a fire in the wind means to get
+chilled through. There is no pleasure in it at all, and I would rather
+push on until the day's journey is done. But the native boy must have
+his lunch, and will build a fire in any sort of weather and make a pot
+of tea. The thermos bottle, with its boiling-hot cocoa, gives one the
+stimulation and nourishment that are desired without stopping for more
+than a few moments. I have carried a pair of these bottles all day at
+60 deg. below zero, and, when opened, snow had to be put into the cocoa
+before it was cool enough to drink. Of course it is perfectly
+simple--all the astonishing things are--but I never open one of those
+bottles in the cold weather and pour out its contents without marvelling
+at it.
+
+We left the river and struck inland towards the foot-hills of the
+Alaskan range, a long, rough journey over a trail that had been made by
+the band that came out to the Healy to meet us, and had been travelled
+no more than by their coming and going. The snow in this region had been
+as much lighter than usual as the snow in the Koyukuk had been heavier.
+Through the tangle of prostrate trunks of a burned-over forest and the
+dense underbrush that follows such a fire, with not enough snow to give
+smooth passage over the obstacles, we made our toilsome way, the labour
+of the dogs calling for the continual supplement of the men, one at the
+gee pole and one at the handle-bars. Some twenty miles, perhaps, a long
+day's continuous journey, we pushed laboriously into the hills and then
+pitched our tent; but in a few miles, next morning, we had struck the
+main Indian trail from the village near the Tanana Crossing, by which
+the hunting party had come, and what little was left of the journey went
+easily enough until we reached the considerable native encampment.
+
+The men were all gone after moose save one half-naked, blear-eyed old
+paralytic, a dreadful creature who shambled and hobbled up asking for
+tobacco. The women were expecting us, however, and took the encamping
+out of our hands entirely, setting up the tent, hauling stove wood and
+splitting it up, making our couch of spruce boughs, starting a fire, and
+bringing a plentiful present of moose and caribou meat for ourselves and
+our dogs. Nothing could have been kinder than our reception; the full
+hospitality of the wilderness was heaped upon us. It was not until dark
+that the men returned, and we had all the afternoon to get acquainted
+with the women and children. Already the chief difficulty we had to
+encounter presented itself. These people did not speak the language of
+the lower Tanana and middle Yukon--Arthur's language--at all. Their
+speech had much more affinity with the upper Yukon language, and it
+dawned upon me that they were not of the migration that had pushed up
+the Tanana River from the Yukon, as all the natives as far as the
+Salchaket certainly did, were not of that tribe or that movement at all,
+but had come across country by the Ketchumstock from the neighbourhood
+of Eagle--the route we should return to the Yukon by--and were of the
+Porcupine and Peel River stock. This was certainly a surprise; I had
+deemed all the Tanana River Indians of the same extraction and tongue,
+but the stretch of bad water from the Salchaket to the Tanana Crossing
+was evidently the boundary between two peoples.
+
+[Sidenote: CHIEF ISAAC]
+
+That night we met Chief Isaac and the principal men of his tribe. At
+first it seemed that such broken English as three or four of them had
+would be our only medium of intercourse, but later one was discovered
+who had visited the lower Tanana and the Yukon and who understood Arthur
+indifferently well, and by the double interpretation, halting and
+inefficient, but growing somewhat better as we proceeded, it was
+possible to enter into communication. These preliminaries arranged, the
+chief made a set speech of dignity and force. He thanked me for coming
+to them, and regretted he had not been able to wait longer at the Healy
+River to help us to his camp. When he was a boy he had been across to
+the Yukon and had seen Bishop Bompas, and had been taught and baptized
+by him, but he was an old man now and he had forgotten what he had
+learned. I was the first minister most of his people had ever seen. They
+heard that Indians in other places had mission and school, and they had
+felt sorry a long time that no one came to teach them; for they were
+very ignorant, little children who knew nothing, and when they heard a
+rumour that a mission and school would be brought to them their hearts
+were very glad. Wherever we should see fit to "make mission," there he
+and his people would go, and would help build for us and help us in
+every way; but he hoped it would be near Lake Mansfield and the
+Crossing, where most of them lived at present. Farther down the river
+was not so good for their hunting and fishing, but they would go
+wherever we said. That was the burden of the chief's speech.
+
+I took a liking to the old man at once. He was evidently a chief that
+was a chief. The chieftainship here was plainly not the effete and
+decaying institution it is in many places on the Yukon. He spoke for all
+his people without hesitation or question, and one felt that what he
+said was law amongst them.
+
+There followed for two days an almost continuous course of instruction
+in the elements of the Christian faith and Christian morals, all day
+long and far into the night, with no more interval than cooking and
+eating required. In the largest tent of the encampment, packed full of
+men and women, the children wedged in where they could get, myself
+seated on a pile of robes and skins, my interpreters at my side, my
+hearers squatted on the spruce boughs of the floor, the instruction went
+on. As it proceeded, the interpretation improved, though it was still
+difficult and clumsy, as speaking through two minds and two mouths must
+always be. Whenever I stopped there was urgent request to go on, until
+at last my voice was almost gone with incessant use. Over and over the
+same things I went; the cardinal facts of religion--the Incarnation, the
+Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension; the cardinal laws of
+morality--the prohibition of murder, adultery, theft, and falsehood;
+that something definite might be left behind that should not be lost in
+the vagueness of general recollection, and always with the insistence
+that this was God's world and not the devil's world, a world in which
+good should ultimately prevail in spite of all opposition.
+
+[Sidenote: SAVAGE, HEATHEN, PAGAN]
+
+It is at once a high privilege and a solemn responsibility to deal with
+souls to whom the appeal of the Christian religion had never before been
+made, as were most of my hearers. One cannot call them "heathen." One
+never thinks of these Alaskan natives as heathen. "Savage" and "heathen"
+and "pagan" all meant, of course, in their origin, just country people,
+and point to some old-time, tremendous superciliousness of the
+city-bred, long since disappeared, except, perhaps, from such places as
+Whitechapel and the Bowery. A savage is simply a forest dweller, a
+heathen a heath dweller, and for a large part of each year I come,
+etymologically, within the terms myself. But with its ordinary
+implication of ferocity and bloodthirstiness it is absurd to apply the
+word "savage" to the mild and gentle Alaskan Indian, and, with its
+ordinary implication of bowing down to wood and stone, it is misleading
+to apply the term "heathen" to those who never made any sort of graven
+image.
+
+Much has been written, and cleverly written, about the Alaskan Indian
+that is preposterously untrue. Arthur, my half-breed boy, had recently
+been reading a story by Jack London, dealing with the Indians in the
+vicinity of Tanana, where he was bred and born, and his indignation at
+the representation of his people in this story was amusing. The story
+was called _The Wit of Porportuk_, and it presented a native chief in
+almost baronial state, with slaves waiting upon him in a large
+banqueting hall and I know not what accumulated wealth of furs and gold.
+Such pictures are far more flagrantly untrue to any conditions that ever
+existed in Alaska than anything Fenimore Cooper wrote about the Five
+Nations. There were never any slaves in the interior; there was never
+any wealth amongst the Indians; there was never any state and
+circumstance of life. And the more one lives amongst them and knows
+them, the less one believes that they could ever have been a warlike
+people, despite their own traditions. Sporadic forays, fostered by their
+ignorant dread of one another or stirred up by rival medicine-men, there
+may have been between different tribes--and there certainly were between
+the Indians and the Esquimaux--with ambuscade and slaughter of isolated
+hunting parties that ventured too far beyond the confines of their own
+territory; and one such affair would furnish tradition for generations
+to dilate upon. I have myself found all the men of Nulato gone scouting,
+or hiding--I could not determine which--in the hills with their guns,
+upon a rumour that the "Huskies," or Esquimaux, were coming; I have
+known the Indians of the Yukon and the Tanana, and as far as the
+Koyukuk, excited and alarmed over the friendly visit of a handful of
+ragged natives from the Copper River to Nenana at Christmas time,
+although in either case it must certainly have been fifty years since
+there was any actual hostile incursion, and probably much longer.
+
+[Sidenote: A GENTLE, TIMID PEOPLE]
+
+They are a very timid people, and an exceedingly peaceable people. Years
+and years may be spent amongst them without knowledge of a single act of
+violence between Indian men; they do not quarrel and fight. Bold enough
+in the chase, willing to face dangers of ice and water and wild beast,
+they have a dread of anything like personal encounter, and will submit
+to a surprising amount of imposition and overbearing on the part of a
+white man without resorting to it. I knew a certain white man who
+claimed a whole river valley north of the Yukon as his, who warned off
+hunting parties of Indians who ventured upon it, and made them give up
+game killed in "his territory." They came to the mission and complained
+about it, but they never withstood the usurper. It ought to be added
+that it always appeared more as the making good of a practical joke than
+as a serious pretension, but the point is--the Indians submitted.
+
+So far as these natives of the interior are concerned they were never
+idolaters. I cannot find that they had any distinct notion of worship at
+all. Their religion had root in a certain frantic terror of the unknown,
+and found expression in ceaseless efforts to propitiate the malign
+spirits surrounding them on every side. Thus they were given over to the
+mastery of those amongst them who had the traditional art of such
+propitiation, and fell more or less completely under that cruellest and
+most venal of sways, the tyranny of the witch-doctor. It is impossible
+to doubt, and hard to exaggerate, the grinding and brutal exactions to
+which this rule led. Anything that a man possessed might be demanded and
+must be yielded, on pain of disease and death, even to the whole
+season's catch of fur or the deflowering of a young daughter. The utmost
+greed and lust that can disgrace humanity found its Indian expression in
+the lives of some of these medicine-men.
+
+Since every sort of tyranny has its vulnerable spot, since the despotism
+of Russia was tempered by assassination and of Japan by the effect of
+public suicide, so melioration of the tyranny of the medicine-man seems
+to have been found in rivalry amongst members of the craft itself.
+Oppressed beyond endurance by one practitioner, allegiance would be
+transferred to some new claimant of occult powers, and the breaking of
+the monopoly of magic would be followed by a temporary lightening of the
+burdens. Some of the most lurid of Alaskan legends deal with the
+thaumaturgic contests of rival medicine-men, and one judges that sleight
+of hand and even hypnotic suggestion were cultivated to a fine point.
+
+To such minds the Christian teaching comes with glad and one may say
+instantaneous acceptance. Their attitude is entirely childlike. They are
+anxious to be told more and more about it, to be told it over and over
+again. There is never the slightest sign of incredulity. It does not
+occur to them as possible that a man should be sent all this way to
+them, should hunt them up and seek them out to tell it to them, unless
+it were true. And one learns over again how universal is the appeal the
+Christian religion, and in particular the Life of Our Lord, makes to
+mankind. I have seen Indians and Esquimaux mixed, hearing for the first
+time the details of the Passion, stirred to as great indignation as was
+that barbarian chieftain who laid his hand on his sword and cried,
+"Would I and my men had been there!" or those Western cowboys, so the
+story runs, bred in illiteracy and irreligion, to whose children a
+school-teacher had given an account of the same great events, and who
+rode up to the schoolhouse the next day with guns and ropes, and asked:
+"Which way did them blamed Jews go?"
+
+The medicine-man lies low; may himself profess acceptance of the new
+teaching, may even really accept it (for it is very hard, indeed, to
+follow and judge all the mental processes of an Indian)--yes, though it
+expressly sweep all his devils away, out of the sick, out of the wind
+and storm, from off every grave mound, though it leave him no paltry
+net-tearing or trap-springing sprite to work upon with his conjurations;
+yet the old superstition dies hard, often crops up when one had thought
+it perished, and even sometimes maintains itself, sub rosa, side by side
+with definite, regular Christian worship.
+
+[Sidenote: THE OLD, OLD STORY]
+
+The arctic explorer Stefanson, a careful and acute observer who has had
+exceptional opportunities for observation of the intimate life of the
+Esquimaux, has written much lately of the grafting of Christianity upon
+native superstition and the existence of both together, as though it
+were some new thing or newly noticed by himself. Yet every one familiar
+with the history of Christianity knows that it has characterised the
+progress of religion in all ages. There was never a people yet that did
+not in great measure do this thing, nor is it reasonable to suppose that
+it could have been otherwise. It is impossible to make a _tabula rasa_
+of men's minds. It is impossible to uproot customs of immemorial
+antiquity without leaving some rootlets behind. And what is acquired
+joins itself insensibly to what is retained, and either the incongruity
+is hidden beneath a change of nomenclature or is not hidden at all. Our
+own social life is threaded through and through with customs and
+practices which go back to a superstitious origin. The matter is such a
+commonplace of history that it is bootless to labour it here.
+
+A scientist is only a "scientist." How that name tends continually to
+depreciate itself as the pursuit of physical science is divorced more
+and more completely from a knowledge of literature, from a knowledge of
+the humanities! And a scientist is a poor guide to an acquaintance with
+man, civilised or uncivilised. To come to the study of any race of man,
+even the most primitive, without some knowledge of all the long history
+of man, of all the long history of man's thought, man's methods, man's
+strivings, man's accomplishments, man's failures, is to come so ill
+equipped that no just conclusions are likely to be reached. Your
+exclusive "scientist"--and such are most of them to-day--may be
+competent to deal with circles and triangles, with wheels and levers
+with cells and glands, with germs and bacilli and micro-organisms
+generally, with magnetos and dynamos, with all the heavenly host if you
+like, but he has no equipment to deal with man! Somatic anthropology in
+particular tends to assume in some quarters such an overimportance that
+one falls back upon the recollection that the original head measurers
+were hatters and that all hatters are proverbially mad. The occupation
+would seem to carry the taint.
+
+It was with much pleasure that I was able to hold out hope to Chief
+Isaac of the mission and the school he desired so earnestly for his
+people. It must not be supposed that all of them were in the completely
+unevangelised state which has been dwelt upon, that to all of them the
+teaching of those two full days was novel; some of them, like the chief
+himself, had been across to the Yukon long ago and still bore some trace
+of the early labours of the Church of England missionaries to whom this
+region of Alaska that adjoins Canada is so much indebted. Others had
+once been to the Ketchumstock, upon the occasion of a visit from our
+missionary at Eagle, and had received instruction from him. But there
+were many present in that tent who had never seen any missionary, never
+had any teaching, to whom it was wholly new save as they might have
+picked up some inkling from those that had been more fortunate.
+
+[Illustration: THE TANANA CROSSING.]
+
+[Illustration: GOOD GOING ON THE YUKON.]
+
+[Sidenote: TRIBAL CONNECTIONS]
+
+When we left this encampment Isaac sent two of his young men to guide
+us, with a sled drawn by three or four small dogs, so gaily caparisoned
+with _tapis_ and ribbons, tinsel, and pompons, that they might have
+been circus dogs. Here again is evidence of this tribe's affinity
+with the upper Yukon natives, and so with those of the Mackenzie. I
+never saw the _tapis_, a broad, bright ornamented cloth that lies upon
+the dog's back under his harness, on the Middle Yukon. It is
+characteristic of the Peel River Indians who come across by the Rampart
+House and La Pierre House.
+
+A few hours' journey brought us to the Tanana River again, which we
+crossed, and took a portage on the other side that went up a long defile
+and then along a ridge and then down another long defile until at night
+we reached the native village at Lake Mansfield; a picturesque spot, for
+the lake is entirely surrounded by mountains except on the side which
+opens to the river. Here the Alaskan range and the Tanana River have
+approached so close that the water almost washes the base of the
+foot-hills, and the scenery is as fine and bold as any in Alaska. And
+here, at Lake Mansfield, if only there were navigable connection between
+the lake and the river into which it drains, would be an admirable place
+for a mission station.
+
+A couple of hours next day took us the seven remaining miles to the
+Tanana Crossing. Here, at that time, was a station of the military
+telegraph connecting Valdez on the coast with Fort Egbert (Eagle) on the
+Yukon, a line maintained, at enormous expense, purely for military
+purposes. It passed through an almost entirely uninhabited country in
+which perhaps scarcely a dozen messages would originate in a year. The
+telegraph-line and Fort Egbert itself are now abandoned. Strategic
+considerations constitute a vague and variable quantity.
+
+It was strange to find this little station with two or three men of the
+signal-corps away out here in the wilderness. Their post was supplied by
+mule pack-train from Fort Egbert, more than two hundred miles away, and
+they told me that only ten pounds out of every hundred that left Fort
+Egbert reached the Crossing, so self-limited is a pack-train through
+such country. We amused ourselves calculating just how much farther
+mules and men could go until they ate up _all_ they could carry.
+
+The Tanana Crossing is a central spot for the Indians of this region.
+Two days' journey up the river was the village of the Tetlin Indians.
+Two days' journey into the mountain range were the Mantasta Indians. Two
+days' journey across towards the Yukon were the Ketchumstock Indians.
+Most of them would congregate at this spot for certain parts of the
+year, should we plant a mission there, and despite the picturesque
+situation of Lake Mansfield, it looked as if the Crossing were the best
+point for building.
+
+[Sidenote: THE TANANA CROSSING]
+
+Our route lay northeast, across country to Fortymile on the Yukon, two
+hundred and fifty miles away, along the trail for the greater part of
+the distance by which the mule train reached the Tanana Crossing. The
+first five miles was all up-hill, a long, stiff, steady climb to the
+crest of the mountain that rises just behind the Crossing. We had to
+take it slowly, with frequent stops, so steep was the grade, and every
+now and then we got tantalising glimpses through the timber of the scene
+that spread wider and wider below us. Bend after bend of the Tanana
+River unfolded itself; the Alaskan range gave peak after peak; there
+lay Lake Mansfield, deep in its amphitheatre of hills, with the Indian
+village at its head.
+
+At last my impatience for the view that promised made me leave the boys
+(we still had Isaac's young men) and push on alone to the top. And it
+was indeed by far the noblest view of the winter, one of the grandest
+and most extensive panoramas I had ever seen in my life.
+
+Perhaps three miles away, as the crow flies, from the river, and
+seventeen hundred and fifty feet above it, as the aneroid gave it, we
+were already on the watershed, and everywhere in the direction we were
+travelling the wide-flung draws and gullies of the Fortymile River
+stretched out, so clear and beautiful a display of the beginnings of a
+great drainage system that my attention was arrested, notwithstanding my
+eagerness for the sight that awaited my turning around. But it was upon
+turning around and looking in the direction from which we had come that
+the grandeur and sublimity entered into the scene. There was, indeed, no
+one great dominating feature in this prospect as in the view of Denali
+from the Rampart portage, but the whole background, bounding the vision
+completely, was one vast wall of lofty white peaks, stretching without a
+break for a hundred miles. Enormous cloud masses rose and fell about
+this barrier, now unfolding to reveal dark chasms and glittering
+glaciers, now enshrouding them again. In the middle distance the Tanana
+River wound and twisted its firm white line amidst broken patches of
+snow and timber far away to either hand, and, where glacial affluents
+discharged into it, were finer, threadlike lines that marked the many
+mouths. The thick spruce mantling the slope in the foreground gave a
+sombre contrast to the fields of snow, and the yellow March sunshine was
+poured over all the wide landscape save where the great clouds contended
+with the great mountains.
+
+The boys had stopped to build a fire and brew some tea before leaving
+the timber, and I was glad of it, for it gave me the chance to gaze my
+fill upon the inspiring and fascinating scene in the pleasant warmth of
+the mountain top, with the thermometer at 30 deg. in the shade and just 12 deg.
+higher in the sunshine.
+
+[Sidenote: A NOBLE VIEW]
+
+How grateful I was for the clear bright day! What a disappointment it
+has been again and again to reach such an eminence and see--nothing! It
+was the most extensive view of the great Alaskan range I had ever
+secured--that long line of sharp peaks that stretches and broadens from
+the coast inland until it culminates in the highest point of the North
+American continent and then curves its way back to the coast again. Of
+course, what lay here within the vision was only a small part of one arm
+of the range; it stopped far short of Denali on the one hand and Mount
+Sanford on the other, though it included Mount Kimball and Mount Hayes;
+yet it was the most impressive sight of a mountain chain I had ever
+beheld. It was a sight to be glad and grateful for, to put high amongst
+one's joyful remembrances; and with this notable sight we bade farewell
+to the Tanana valley.
+
+Down the hill we went into Fortymile water and into a rolling country
+crossed by the military mule trail. If the morning had been glorious the
+evening was full of penance. Long before night our feet were sore from
+slipping and sliding into those wretched mule tracks. One cannot take
+one's eyes from the trail for a moment, every footstep must be watched,
+and even then one is continually stumbling.
+
+We were able, however, to rig our team with the double hitch that is so
+much more economical of power than the tandem hitch, whenever the width
+of the trail permits it. We now carry a convertible rig, so that on
+narrow trails or in deep snow we can string out the dogs one in front of
+the other, and when the trail is wide enough can hitch them side by
+side. "Seal," the Great Dane pup we got at the Salchaket, was a good and
+strong puller, but he had no coat and no sense. It is bad enough to have
+no coat in this country, but to have no coat and no sense is fatal--as
+he found. His feet were continually sore and he had to be specially
+provided for at night if it were at all cold--a dog utterly unsuited to
+Alaska.
+
+Thirty miles of such going as has been described is tiring in the
+extreme, and when we reached the Lone Cabin, behold! fifteen Indians
+camped about it, for whom, when supper was done, followed two hours of
+teaching and the baptism of six children. I would have liked to have
+stayed a day with them, but if we were to spend Palm Sunday at Fortymile
+and Easter at Eagle as had been promised, the time remaining did no more
+than serve; and there was a large band of Indians to visit at
+Ketchumstock.
+
+The next day took us into and across the Ketchumstock Flats, a wide
+basin surrounded by hills and drained by the Mosquito Fork of the
+Fortymile. The telegraph-line, supported on tripods against the summer
+yielding of the marshy soil, cuts straight across country. This basin
+and the hills around form one of the greatest caribou countries,
+perhaps, in the world. All day we had passed fragments of the long
+fences that were in use in times past by the Indians for driving the
+animals into convenient places for slaughter.
+
+The annual migration of the vast herd that roams the section of Alaska
+between the Yukon and the Tanana Rivers swarms over this Flat and
+through these hills, and we were told at the Ketchumstock telegraph
+station by the signal-corps men that they estimated that upward of one
+hundred thousand animals crossed the Mosquito Fork the previous October.
+
+[Sidenote: CARIBOU]
+
+The big game of Alaska is not yet seriously diminished, though there was
+need for the legal protection that has of late years been given. It is
+probable that more caribou and young moose are killed every year by
+wolves than by hunters. Only in the neighbourhood of a considerable
+settlement is there danger of reckless and wasteful slaughter, and some
+attention is paid by game wardens to the markets of such places. The
+mountain-sheep stands in greater danger of extermination than either
+caribou or moose. Its meat, the most delicious mutton in the world, as
+it has been pronounced by epicures, brings a higher price than other
+wild meat, and it is easy to destroy a band completely. The sheep on the
+mountains of the Alaskan range nearest to Fairbanks have, it is said,
+been very greatly diminished, and that need not be wondered at when one
+sees sled load after sled load, aggregating several tons of meat,
+brought in at one shipment. The law protecting the sheep probably needs
+tightening up.
+
+The big game is a great resource to all the people of the country, white
+and native. It is no small advantage to be able to take one's gun in the
+fall and go out in the valleys and kill a moose that will suffice for
+one man's meat almost the whole winter, or go into the hills and kill
+four or five caribou that will stock his larder equally well. The fresh,
+clean meat of the wilds has to most palates far finer flavour than any
+cold-storage meat that can be brought into the country; and, save at one
+or two centres of population and distribution, cold-storage meat is not
+available at all. Without its big game Alaska would be virtually
+uninhabitable. Therefore most white men are content that the necessary
+measures be taken to prevent the wasteful slaughter of the game; for the
+rights of the prospector and trapper and traveller, and the rights of
+the natives to kill at any time what is necessary for food, are
+explicitly reserved.
+
+[Sidenote: THE KETCHUMSTOCK]
+
+We reached the village and telegraph post of Ketchumstock for the night
+only to find all the natives gone hunting; but since they had gone in
+the direction of Chicken Creek, towards which we were travelling, we
+were able to catch up with them the next morning without going far out
+of our way. While we were pitching our tent near their encampment came
+two or three natives with dog teams, and as the dogs hesitated to pass
+our dogs, loose on the trail, a voluble string of curses in English fell
+from the Indian lips. Such is usually the first indication of contact
+with white men, and in this case it spoke of the proximity of the mining
+on Chicken Creek. To discover the women chewing tobacco was to add but
+another evidence of the sophistication of this tribe; a different people
+from Chief Isaac's tribe, different through many years' familiarity with
+the whites at these diggings. If the mission to be built at the Crossing
+tends to keep these Indians on the Tanana River and thus away from the
+demoralisation of the diggings, it will do them solid service.
+
+In some way foul and profane language falls even more offensively from
+Indians than from whites; for the same reason, perhaps, that it sounds
+more offensive and shocking from children than from adults. Sometimes
+the Indian does not in the least understand the meaning of the words he
+uses; they are the first English words he ever heard and he hears them
+over and over again.
+
+So here another day and a half was spent in instruction. There are some
+forty souls in this tribe and they have had teaching from time to time,
+though not in the last few years, at the mouths of missionaries from
+Yukon posts. Most of the adults had been baptized; I baptized sixteen
+children. One curious feature of my stay was the megaphonic
+recapitulation of the heads of the instruction, after each session, by
+an elderly Indian who stood out in the midst of the tents. What on earth
+this man, with his town-crier voice, was proclaiming at such length, we
+were at a loss to conjecture, and upon inquiry were informed: "Them
+women, not much sense; one time tell 'em, quick forget; two time tell
+'em, maybe little remember." So when we stopped for dinner and for
+supper and for bed, each time this brazen-lunged spieler stood forth and
+reiterated the main points of the discourse "for the _hareem_," as
+Doughty would say, whose account of the attitude of the Arabs to their
+women often reminds me of the Alaskan Indians. It was interesting, but I
+should have preferred to edit the recapitulation.
+
+When all was done for the day and we thought to go to bed came an Indian
+named "Bum-Eyed-Bob" (these white man's nicknames, however dreadful, are
+always accepted and used) for a long confabulation about the affairs of
+the tribe, and I gathered incidentally that gambling at the telegraph
+station had been the main diversion of the winter. It seems ungracious
+to insist so much upon the evil influence of the white men--we had been
+cordially received and entertained at that very place, and our money
+refused--but there is little doubt that the abandonment of the
+telegraph-line will be a good thing for these natives. Put two or three
+young men of no special intellectual resource or ambition down in a
+lonely spot like this, with no society at all save that of the natives
+and practically nothing to do, and there is a natural and almost
+inevitable trend to evil. To the exceptional man with the desire of
+promotion, with books, and all this leisure, it would be an admirable
+opportunity, but he would be quite an exceptional man who should rise
+altogether superior to the temptations to idleness and debauchery. One
+may have true and deep sympathy with these young men and yet be
+conscious of the harm they often bring about.
+
+Ten miles or so from the encampment brought us to Chicken Creek, and
+from that point we took the Fortymile River. The direct trail to Eagle
+with its exasperating mule tracks was now left, and our journey was on
+the ice. But so warm was the weather that 16th of March that we were
+wet-foot all day, and within the space of eight hours that we were
+travelling we had snow, sleet, rain, and sunshine. Leaving the main
+river, we turned up Walker Fork and, after a few miles, leaving that, we
+turned up Jack Wade Creek and pursued it far up towards its head ere we
+reached the road-house for the night.
+
+[Sidenote: THE FORTYMILE]
+
+We were now on historic ground, so far as gold mining in Alaska is
+concerned. The "Fortymilers" bear the same pioneer relation to gold
+mining in the North that the "Fortyniners" bear to gold mining in
+California. Ever since 1886 placers have been worked in this district,
+and it still yields gold, though the output and the number of men are
+alike much reduced. It is interesting to talk with some of the original
+locators of this camp, who may yet be found here and there in the
+country, and to learn of the conditions in those early days when a
+steamboat came up the Yukon once in a season bringing such supplies and
+mail as the men received for the year. It was here that the problem of
+working frozen ground was first confronted and solved; here that the
+first "miner's law" was promulgated, the first "miners' meeting" dealt
+out justice. Your "old-timer" anywhere is commonly _laudator temporis
+acti_, but there is good reason to believe that these early, and
+certainly most adventurous, gold-miners, some of whom forced a way into
+the country when there were no routes of travel, and subsisted on its
+resources while they explored and prospected it, were men of a higher
+stamp than many who have come in since. The extent to which that early
+prospecting was carried is not generally known, for these men, after the
+manner of their kind, left no record behind them. There are few creek
+beds that give any promise at all in the whole of this vast country that
+have not had some holes sunk in them. Even in districts so remote as the
+Koyukuk, signs of old prospecting are encountered. When a stampede took
+place to the Red Mountain or Indian River country of the middle Koyukuk
+in 1911-12, I was told that there was not a creek in the camp that did
+not show signs of having been prospected long before, although it had
+passed altogether out of knowledge that this particular region had ever
+been visited by prospectors.
+
+[Sidenote: "SNIPING ON THE BARS"]
+
+As the Fortymile is the oldest gold camp in the North, some of its trail
+making is of the best in Alaska. In particular the trail from the head
+of Jack Wade Creek down into Steel Creek reminded one of the Alpine
+roads in its bold, not to say daring, engineering. It drops from bench
+to bench in great sweeping curves always with a practicable grade, and
+must descend nigh a thousand feet in a couple of miles. At the mouth of
+Steel Creek we are on the Fortymile River again, having saved a day's
+journey by this traverse. And here, on the Fortymile, we passed several
+men "sniping on the bars," as the very first Alaskan gold-miners did on
+this same river, and probably on these same bars, twenty-five years ago.
+One hand moved the "rocker" to and fro and the other poured water into
+it with the "long Tom"; so was the gold washed out of the gravel taken
+from just below the ice. It was interesting to see this primitive method
+still in practice and to learn from the men that they were making
+"better than wages."
+
+The Fortymile is a very picturesque but most tortuous river. In one
+place, called appropriately "The Kink," I was able to clamber over a
+ridge of rocks and reach another bend of the river in six or seven
+minutes, and then had to wait twenty-five minutes for the dog team,
+going at a good clip, to come around to me. At length we reached the
+spot where a vista cut through the timber that clothes both banks,
+marked the 141st meridian, the international boundary, and passed out of
+Alaska into British territory. A few miles more brought us to Moose
+Creek, where a little Canadian custom-house is situated, and there we
+spent the night.
+
+The next day we reached the Yukon; passing gold dredges laid up for the
+winter and other signs of still-persisting mining activity, going
+through the narrow wild canon of the Fortymile, and so to the little
+town at its mouth of the same name, where there is a mission of the
+Church of England and a post of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. I
+never come into contact with this admirable body of men without wishing
+that we had a similar body charged with the enforcement of the law in
+Alaska.
+
+Sunday was spent there officiating for the layman in charge of the
+mission and in interesting talk with the sergeant of police about the
+annual winter journey from Dawson to Fort McPherson on the McKenzie,
+from which he had just returned with a detail of men. The next winter he
+and his detail lost their way and starved and froze to death on the same
+journey.
+
+Here at one time was a flourishing Indian mission and school, and here
+Bishop Bompas, the true "Apostle of the North," lived for some time. The
+story of this man's forty-five years' single-eyed devotion to the
+Indians of the Yukon and McKenzie Rivers is one of the brave chapters of
+missionary history. But the Church of England "does not advertise."
+Writers about Alaska, even writers about Alaskan missions, carefully
+collect all the data of the early Russian missions on the coast, but
+ignore altogether the equally influential and lasting work done along
+five hundred miles of what is now the American Yukon by the missionary
+clergy of the English Church before and after the Purchase. Bishop
+Bompas identified himself so closely with the natives as to become
+almost one of them in the eyes of the white men, and many curious
+stories linger amongst the old-timers as to his habits and appearance.
+It is interesting to know that the bishop was a son of that Sergeant
+Bompas of the English bar from whom Dickens drew the character of
+Sergeant Buzfuz, counsel for the plaintiff in the famous suit of
+"Bardell v. Pickwick."
+
+But the natives have all left Fortymile, some to the large village of
+Moosehide just below Dawson, some to Eagle. The town, too, like all the
+upper Yukon towns, is much decayed; the custom-house, the police
+barracks, the company's store, the road-house, and the little mission
+embracing nearly all its activities and housing nearly all its
+population.
+
+There is always some feeling of satisfaction in reaching the broad
+highway of the Yukon again, even though rough ice make bad going and one
+of the most notorious, dirty road-houses in the North hold its menace
+over one all day and amply fulfil it at night. There is indeed so little
+travel on the river now that it does not pay any one to keep a
+road-house save as incidental to a steamboat wood camp and summer
+fishing station. Two short days' travel brought us across the
+international boundary again to Eagle in Alaska, where at that time Fort
+Egbert was garrisoned with two companies of soldiers.
+
+[Sidenote: EAGLE]
+
+Eagle and Fort Egbert together, for the one begins where the other ends,
+have perhaps the finest and most commanding situation of any settlement
+on the Yukon River. The mountains rise with dignity just across the
+water and break pleasingly into the valley of Eagle Creek, a few miles
+up-stream. To the rear of the town an inconsiderable flat does but give
+space and setting before the mountains rise again; while just below the
+military post stands the bold and lofty bluff called the Eagle Rock,
+with Mission Creek winding into the Yukon at its foot. Robert Louis
+Stevenson said that Edinburgh has the finest situation of any capital
+in Europe and pays for it by having the worst climate of any city in the
+world. It would not be just to paraphrase this description with regard
+to Eagle, for while it is unsurpassed on the Yukon for site, there are
+spots on that river where still more disagreeable weather prevails; yet
+it cannot be denied that the position of the place subjects it to
+exceedingly bitter winds, or that the valley of Eagle Creek, which gives
+pleasing variety to the prospect, acts also as a channel to convey the
+full force of the blast. Climate everywhere is a very local thing;
+topographical considerations often altogether outweigh geographical; and
+nowhere is this truer than in Alaska. Commanding sites are necessarily
+exposed sites, and he who would dwell in comfort must build in
+seclusion.
+
+A native village of eighty or ninety souls, with its church and school,
+lies three miles up-stream from the town, so that the relative positions
+of village, town, and military post exactly duplicate those at Tanana.
+It must at once be stated, however, that this situation has not led to
+anything like the demoralisation amongst the natives at Eagle that
+thrusts itself into notice at the other place. Whether it were the
+longer training in Christian morals that lay behind these people, or
+better hap in the matter of post commanders (certainly there was never
+such scandalous irregularity and indifference at Egbert as marked one
+administration at Gibbon), or the vigilance during a number of
+consecutive years of an especially active deputy marshal and the wisdom
+and concern through an even longer period of a commissioner much above
+the common stamp,[F] or all these causes combined, the natives at Eagle
+have not suffered from the proximity of soldiers and civilians in the
+same measure as the natives at Tanana. Drunkenness and debauchery there
+have been again and again, but they have been severely checked and
+restrained by both the civil and military authorities.
+
+It was pleasant during Holy Week and Easter to see so many of the
+enlisted men of the garrison taking part in the services in town;
+pleasant, especially, to see officers and men singing together in the
+choir, a tribute to the tact and zeal of the earnest layman in charge of
+this mission; and it was pleasant at the village to hear the native
+liturgy again and to see old men and women following the lessons in the
+native Bible.
+
+[Sidenote: FORT EGBERT ABANDONED]
+
+Fort Egbert is abandoned now, another addition to the melancholy of the
+Yukon; its extensive buildings, barracks, and officers' quarters,
+post-exchange and commissariat, hospital, sawmill, and artisans' shops,
+a spacious, complete gymnasium only recently built, are all vacant and
+deserted. In the yards lie three thousand cords of dry wood, a year's
+supply; cut on the hills, awaiting the expected annual contracts, lie as
+many more--six thousand cords of wood left to rot! Some of us perverse
+"conservationists," upon whom the unanimous Alaskan press delights to
+pour scorn, lament the trees more than the troops.
+
+One may write thus and yet have many pleasant personal associations
+with the post and those who have lived there. A large and varied
+military acquaintanceship is acquired by regular visits to these Alaskan
+forts, for the whole command changes every two years. If one stayed in
+the country long enough one would get to know the whole United States
+army, as regiment after regiment spent its brief term of "foreign
+service" in the North. Gazing upon the empty quarters, the occasion of
+my first visit came back vividly, when there was diphtheria amongst the
+natives at Circle and none to cope with it save the missionary nurse.
+The civil codes containing no provision for quarantine, the United
+States commissioner at Circle could not help, and the Indians grew
+restive and rebellious, and when Christmas came broke through the
+restrictions completely. Even some of the whites of the place defied her
+prohibition and attended native dances and encouraged the Indians in
+their self-willed folly.
+
+[Sidenote: SOME ARMY OFFICERS]
+
+So I went up the week's journey to Eagle and sought assistance from
+Major Plummer, the officer commanding the post, who, after telegraphing
+to Washington, promptly despatched a hospital steward and a couple of
+soldiers, and placed them entirely at the nurse's disposal. "I don't
+think we have any law for it," he said, "but we'll bluff it out." And
+bluff it out they did very effectively until the disease was stamped
+out, and then they thoroughly disinfected and whitewashed every cabin
+that had been occupied by the sick. I used to tell that nurse that, so
+far as I knew, she was the only woman who had ever had command of United
+States soldiers.
+
+Then there was Captain Langdon of the same regiment, the scholarly
+soldier, with the account of every great campaign in history at his
+fingers' ends. I recollect one evening, when we had been talking of the
+Peninsular War, I ventured to spring on him the ancient schoolboy
+conundrum: "What lines are those, the most famous ever made by an
+Englishman, yet that are never quoted?" "Lines?" said he, "lines?"
+though I don't think he had ever heard the jest. "They must be the Lines
+of Torres Vedras." How well I remember the musical box that used to
+arouse me at seven in the morning, however late we had sat talking the
+night before!
+
+And that young lieutenant, of wealthy New York people, just arrived from
+West Point, who was sent by another commandant to report upon the
+condition of the natives at the village and who came back and reported
+the whole population in utter destitution and recommended the issue of
+free rations to them all! As a matter of fact, during the administration
+of this commanding officer, some sixteen or eighteen persons were put
+upon the list for gratuitous grub, and it took a written protest to get
+them off. For no one who has the welfare of the natives at heart can
+tolerate the notion of making them paupers; these who have always fended
+abundantly for themselves, and can entirely do so yet. With free rations
+there would be no more hunting, no more trapping, no more fishing; and a
+hardy, self-supporting race would sink at once to sloth and beggary and
+forget all that made men of them. If it were designed to destroy the
+Indian at a blow, here is an easy way to do it. Yet there are some,
+obsessed with the craze about what is called education, regarding it as
+an end in itself and not as a means to any end, who recommend this
+pauperising because it would permit the execution of a compulsory
+school-attendance law. Or is it a personal delusion of mine that esteems
+an honest, industrious, self-supporting Indian who cannot read and write
+English above one who can read and write English--and can do nothing
+else--and so separates me from many who are working amongst the natives?
+
+These days at the end of March, when the sun shines more than twelve
+hours in the twenty-four, are too long for the ordinary winter day's
+twenty-five miles or so, and yet not quite long enough, even if man and
+dogs could stand it, to double the stage; so that there is much daylight
+leisure at road-houses. One grows anxious, after four months on the
+trail, to be done with it; to draw as quickly as may be to one's
+"thawing-out" place. One even becomes a little impatient of the
+continual dog talk and mining talk of the road-houses, to which one has
+listened all the winter. On the other hand, the travelling is very
+pleasant and the going usually very good, so that one may often ride on
+the sled for long stretches.
+
+By river and portage--one portage that comes so finely down to the Yukon
+from a bench that there is pleasure in anticipating the view it
+affords--in two days we reached the Nation road-house, just below the
+mouth of the Nation River, a name that has always puzzled me. Here all
+night long the wolves howling around the carcass of a horse kept our
+dogs awake, and the whimpering of the dogs kept us awake. The country
+beyond the Yukon to the northeast, the large area included between the
+Yukon and the Porcupine, into which the Nation River offers passage, is
+one of the wildest and least known portions of Alaska, abounding in game
+and beasts of prey.
+
+[Sidenote: THE GLARE OF THE SUN]
+
+At the Charley River we visited the native village and held service and
+instruction as well as inadequate interpretation permitted. Round Coal
+Creek and Woodchopper Creek the scenery becomes bold and attractive, but
+we found, as usual, that as we pushed farther and farther down the river
+the snow was deeper and the going not so good. The sun grows very bright
+upon the snow these days of late March and early April. Even through
+heavily tinted glasses it inflames the eyes more or less, and a couple
+of hours without protection would bring snow-blindness. Bright days at
+this season are the only days in all the year when the camera shutter
+may be used at its full speed. When the sun comes out after a flurry of
+new snow in April, the light is many times greater than in midsummer.
+
+[Illustration: "A PORTAGE THAT COMES SO FINELY DOWN TO THE YUKON THAT
+THERE IS PLEASURE IN ANTICIPATING THE VIEW IT AFFORDS."]
+
+[Illustration: FORT YUKON.]
+
+We reached Circle in a day and a half from Woodchopper Creek, in time to
+spend Sunday there. Circle had not changed much in the five years that
+had elapsed since the first visit to it mentioned in these pages. The
+slender trellis of the wireless telegraph had added a prominent feature
+to its river bank; a few more empty cabins had been torn down for
+fire-wood. Here it was necessary to shoot the Great Dane pup we got at
+the Salchaket. His feet were still very sore and he quite useless for
+the next winter, while Doc was returned to me from Fairbanks, not
+much the worse for his severe frost-bite. Indian after Indian begged for
+the dog, but I had more regard for him than to turn him over to the
+tender mercies of an Indian. There are exceptional Indians, but for my
+part I would rather be a dead dog than an ordinary Indian's dog--so he
+died.
+
+There remained the seventy-five or eighty miles through the Yukon Flats
+to Fort Yukon--always the most dangerous stretch of the river, and at
+this season, when the winter's trail was beginning to break up,
+particularly so. It would be entirely practicable to cut a land trail
+that should not touch the river at all, or not at more than one point,
+between Circle and Fort Yukon, and such a portage besides removing all
+the danger would save perhaps twenty miles. In many places it was
+necessary for one of us to go ahead with an axe, constantly sounding and
+testing the ice. Here and there we made a circuit around open water into
+which the ice that bore the trail had collapsed bodily--one of them a
+particularly ugly place, with black water twenty feet deep running at
+six or seven miles an hour. I never pass this stretch of river without a
+feeling of gratitude that I am safely over it once more.
+
+[Sidenote: CAPTAIN AMUNDSEN]
+
+As we left the Halfway Island we passed an Indian from Fort Yukon going
+up the river with dogs and toboggan, and I chuckled, as I returned his
+very polite salutation and shook hands with him, at the success of the
+way he had been dealt with the previous fall, for he had been a
+particularly churlish fellow with an insolent manner. Six or seven
+years before he had been taken by Captain Amundsen, of the _Gjoa_, as
+guide along this stretch of the river. It will be remembered that when
+that skilful and fortunate navigator had reached Herschell Island from
+the east, he left his ship in winter quarters and made a rapid journey
+with Esquimaux across country to Fort Yukon expecting to find a
+telegraph station there from which he could send word of his success.
+But to his disappointment he found it necessary to go two hundred and
+thirty miles farther up the river to Eagle, before he could despatch his
+message. So he left his Esquimaux at Fort Yukon and took this Indian as
+guide. And in his modest and most interesting book he mentions the man's
+surliness and says he was glad to get rid of him at Circle.
+
+Some new outbreak of insolence for which he had been flung out of a
+store decided that he must be dealt with, and I sent for him, for the
+chief, the native minister, and the interpreter. With these assessors
+beside me, and Captain Amundsen's book open on the table, I spoke to the
+man of his general conduct and reputation. I read the derogatory remark
+about him in the book "printed for all the world to read," and told him
+that of all the people, white and native, the captain had met on his
+journeys, only one was spoken of harshly and he was the one. It made a
+great impression on the man. The chief and the native minister followed
+it up with their harangues, and the net result was a thorough change in
+his whole attitude and demeanour. He told us he felt the shame of being
+held up to the world as rude and impudent and would try to amend. He has
+tried so successfully that he is now one of the politest and most
+courteous Indians in the village, for which, if this should ever chance
+to reach Captain Amundsen's eye, I trust he will accept our thanks.
+
+Fort Yukon, where the headquarters of the archdeaconry of the Yukon are
+now fixed, grows in native population and importance. A new and sightly
+church, a new schoolhouse, a new two-story mission house, a medical
+missionary and a nurse in residence, as well as a native clergyman, mark
+the Indian metropolis of this region and perhaps of all interior Alaska.
+Self-government is fostered amongst the people by a village council
+elected annually, that settles native troubles and disputes and takes
+charge of movements for the general good, and of the relief of native
+poverty. The resident physician has been appointed justice of the peace
+and there is effort to enforce the law of the land at a place where
+every man has been a law unto himself. But it is a very slow and
+difficult matter to enforce law in this country at all, and more
+particularly at these remote points; and the class of white men who are
+to be found around native villages, many of whom "fear not God neither
+regard man," pursue their debauchery and deviltry long time unwhipped.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[F] I take pleasure in naming Mr. U. G. Myers as the United States
+commissioner in question and Mr. Jack Robinson as the deputy United
+States marshal, and I mention their names the more readily because Mr.
+Myers, after his long and excellent service, has just been removed for
+political reasons. (May, 1916.)
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+FROM THE TANANA RIVER TO THE KUSKOKWIM--THENCE TO THE IDITAROD MINING
+CAMP--THENCE TO THE YUKON, AND UP THAT RIVER TO FORT YUKON
+
+
+THE discovery of gold on the Innoko in the winter of 1906-7, and the
+"strike" on the Iditarod, a tributary of the Innoko, some three years
+later, opened up a new region of Alaska. It is characteristic of a gold
+discovery in a new district that it sets men feverishly to work
+prospecting all the adjacent country, and sends them as far afield from
+it as the new base of supplies will allow them to stretch their tether.
+A glance at the map will show that the Innoko and Iditarod country lies
+between the two great rivers of Alaska, the Yukon and the Kuskokwim,
+much lower down the Yukon than any of the earlier gold discoveries; that
+is to say that while the Tanana gold fields lie off the Middle Yukon,
+the Circle fields off the upper Yukon, the Iditarod camp belongs to the
+lower river. The Innoko workings were not extensive nor very rich, but
+they furnished a base for prospecting from which the Iditarod was
+reached, and Flat Creek, in the latter district, promised to be
+wonderfully rich. Immediately upon the news of this strike reaching the
+other camps of the interior, preparations were made far and wide for
+migrating thither upon the opening of Yukon navigation, and the early
+summer of 1910 saw a wild stampede to the Iditarod. Saloon-keepers,
+store-keepers, traders of all kinds, and the rag-tag and bobtail that
+always flock to a new camp were on the move so soon as the ice went out.
+From Dawson, from the Fortymile, from Circle, from Fairbanks, from the
+Koyukuk, and as soon as Bering Sea permitted, from Nome, all sorts of
+craft bore all sorts of people to the new Eldorado, while the first
+through steamboats from the outside were crowded with people from the
+Pacific coast eager to share in the opportunity of wealth. The
+sensational magazines had been printing article after article about "The
+incalculable riches of Alaska," and here were people hoping to pick some
+of it up. Iditarod City sprang into life as the largest "city" of the
+interior; the centre of gravity of the population of the interior of
+Alaska was shifted a thousand miles in a month.
+
+Iditarod City furnished a new and large base of supplies. Amidst the
+heterogeneous mass of humanity that swarmed into the place, though by no
+means the largest element in it, were experienced prospectors from every
+other district in Alaska. Under the iniquitous law that then prevailed
+and has only recently been modified, by which there was no limit at all
+to the number of claims in a district which one man could stake for
+himself and others, every creek adjacent to Flat Creek, every creek for
+many miles in every direction, had long since been tied up by the men
+with lead-pencils and hatchets. So the newly arrived prospectors must
+spread out yet wider, and they were soon scattered over all the rugged
+hundred miles between Iditarod City and the Kuskokwim River. Here and
+there they found prospects; and here and there what promised to be
+"pay." They started a new town, Georgetown, on the Kuskokwim itself;
+another town sprang up on the Takotna, a tributary of the Kuskokwim; and
+the great Commercial Company of Alaska, ever alert for new developments,
+put a steamboat on the Kuskokwim and built trading-posts at both these
+points. Thus the Kuskokwim country, which for long had been one of the
+least-known portions of Alaska, was opened up almost at a stroke.
+
+[Sidenote: CAMP AT 50 deg. BELOW]
+
+It was my purpose to visit Iditarod City during the winter of 1910-11,
+although, by reason of the distance to be travelled, a journey thither
+would involve the omission of the customary winter visit to upper Yukon
+points. When the northern trip to the Koyukuk was returned from at
+Tanana, a sad journey had to be made to Nenana to bury the body of Miss
+Farthing, and Doctor Loomis, missionary physician at Tanana, who
+accompanied me on this errand, had almost as rough a breaking-in to the
+Alaska trail as we came back to Tanana again as Doctor Burke had in our
+journey over the "first ice" of the Koyukuk two years before. Two feet
+of new snow lay on the trail, and the thermometer went down to 60 deg. below
+zero. We were camped once on the mail trail, unable to reach a
+road-house, at 50 deg. below zero.
+
+[Illustration: THE ROUGH BREAKING IN OF DOCTOR LOOMIS, CAMPED ON THE
+MAIL TRAIL AT 50 deg. BELOW ZERO, UNABLE TO REACH A ROAD-HOUSE FOR THE DEEP
+SNOW.]
+
+[Illustration: ESQUIMAUX OF THE UPPER KUSKOKWIM.]
+
+[Sidenote: THE ROUTE TO THE IDITAROD]
+
+From Tanana the beaten track to the Iditarod lay one hundred and sixty
+miles down the Yukon to Lewis's Landing, and then across country by the
+Lewis Cut-Off one hundred miles to Dishkaket on the Innoko, and
+thence across country another hundred miles to Iditarod City. But I
+designed to penetrate to the Iditarod by another route. I had long
+desired to visit Lake Minchumina and its little band of Indians, and to
+pass through the upper Kuskokwim country. So I had engaged a Minchumina
+Indian as a guide, and laid my course up the Tanana River to the
+Coschaket, and then due south across country to Lake Minchumina and the
+upper Kuskokwim.
+
+The Cosna is a small stream confluent with the Tanana, about thirty
+miles above the mouth of that river, and we had hoped to reach it by the
+river trail upon the same day we left the mission at Tanana, the 18th of
+February, 1911. But the trail was too heavy and the going too slow and
+the start too late. When we had reached Fish Creek, about half-way, it
+was already growing dark, and we were glad to stop in a native cabin,
+where was an old widow woman with a blind daughter. The daughter,
+unmarried, had a little baby, and I inquired through Walter who the
+father was and whether the girl had willingly received the man or if he
+had taken advantage of her blindness. She named an unmarried Indian,
+known to me, and declared that she had not been consenting. It seemed a
+paltry and contemptible trick to take advantage of a fatherless blind
+girl. I baptized the baby and resolved to make the man marry the girl.
+
+The next night we reached the Coschaket, which, following the Indian
+rule, means "mouth of the Cosna," and found that our guide, Minchumina
+John, had already relayed a load of grub that Walter had previously
+brought here from Tanana, one day's march upon our journey. Our course
+from the Coschaket left the Tanana River and struck across country by an
+old Indian trail that had not been used that winter. Through scrubby
+spruce and over frozen lakes and swamps, crossing the Cosna several
+times--a narrow little river with high steep banks--the trail went,
+until it brought us to a hunting camp of the Indians, about eighteen
+miles from the Coschaket. Here our stuff was cached and here we spent
+the night, doctoring the sick amongst them as well as we could. My eyes
+had been sorely tried this day despite dark smoked glasses, for we were
+travelling almost due south, and the sun was now some hours in the sky
+and yet low enough to shine right in one's face. So Walter stopped at a
+birch-tree, stripped some of the bark, and made an eye-shade that was a
+great comfort and relief.
+
+From this place began the slow work of double-tripping. The unbroken
+snow was too deep to permit the hauling of our increased load over it
+without a preliminary breaking out of a trail on snow-shoes. So camp was
+left standing and Walter and John went ahead all day and returned late
+at night with eight or nine miles of trail broken, while I stayed in
+camp and had dog feed cooked and supper ready. The next day we advanced
+the camp so far as the trail was broken. A moose had used the trail for
+some distance, however, since the boys left it, and his great plunging
+hoofs had torn up the snow worse than a horse would have done.
+
+A driving wind and heavy snowfall had drifted the new trail in the night
+so badly, moreover, that we were not able to cover the full stretch
+that had been snow-shoed, but camped in the dusk after we had gone eight
+miles. Eight miles in two days was certainly very poor travel, and at
+this rate our supplies would never take us down to the forks of the
+Kuskokwim. Yet there was no other way in which we could proceed. The
+weather was exceedingly mild, too mild for comfort--the thermometer
+ranging from 20 deg. to 25 deg. above--and the dogs felt the unseasonable
+warmth. It took us all that week to make the watershed between the
+drainage of the Tanana and the drainage of the Kuskokwim, a point about
+half-way to Lake Minchumina. One day trail was broken, the next day the
+loads went forward. Tie the dogs as securely as one would, it was not
+safe to go off and leave our supplies exposed to the ravages that a
+broken chain or a slipped collar might bring, so two went forward and I
+sat down in camp. The boys on their return usually brought with them a
+few brace of ptarmigan or grouse or spruce hen or, at the least, a
+rabbit or so.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CAMP-ROBBERS]
+
+The camp-robbers, to my mind the most interesting of Alaskan birds,
+became very friendly and tame on these vigils. They stay in the country
+all the winter, when most birds have migrated, like prosperous mine
+owners, to less rigorous climates; they turn up everywhere, in the most
+mysterious way, so soon as one begins to make any preparation for
+camping, and they are bold and fearless and take all sorts of chances.
+On this journey more than once they alighted on a moving sled and pecked
+at the dried fish that happened to be exposed. Yet they are so alert and
+so quick in their movements that it would be difficult to catch them
+were they actually under one's hand. One of them, during a long day in
+camp, grew so tame that it pecked crumbs off the toe of my moccasin, and
+in another day or two would, one feels sure, have eaten out of the hand.
+There is a curious belief, strongly intrenched in the Alaskan mind, that
+the nest of this most common bird has never been found, and that the
+Smithsonian Institution has a standing offer of a large sum of money for
+the discovery. They build in the spruce-trees, ten or twelve feet above
+the ground, a nest of rough twigs, and lay five very small eggs, grey
+spotted with black. This, at any rate, is the description that Walter
+gives me of a nest he discovered with the bird sitting upon it, and I
+have found the boy's accounts of such matters entirely trustworthy. It
+is curious, however, that the nest of a bird so common all over Alaska
+as the camp-robber should be so rarely found. At times they are very
+mischievous and destructive, and the man who builds a careless cache
+will often be heard denouncing them, but to my mind a bird who gives us
+his enlivening company throughout the dead of an Alaskan winter deserves
+what pickings he can get.
+
+[Sidenote: SOFT WEATHER]
+
+On Saturday, the 25th of February, after climbing a rather stiff hill,
+we passed temporarily out of Yukon into Kuskokwim waters, for the
+tributaries of these two great drainage systems interlock in these
+hills. At the foot of the hill we stopped for lunch, a roaring fire was
+soon built, and a great cube of beaten snow impaled upon a stake was set
+up before the fire to drip into a pan for tea water, while the boys
+roasted rabbits. In a few hours more we were on the banks of one of the
+tributaries of the East Fork (properly the North Fork) of the Kuskokwim.
+Here, in an unoccupied native cabin, we made our camp and lay over
+Sunday, and here began the most remarkable spell of weather I have known
+in the interior at this season of the year. The thermometer rose to 37 deg.
+and then to 40 deg.; the snow everywhere was thawing, and presently it began
+to rain steadily. It was the first time I had seen a decided thaw in
+February, let alone rain.
+
+Next day the rain turned to snow, but since the thermometer still stood
+around 40 deg., the snow melted as it fell, and we were wet through all day.
+The snow underfoot, however, was so much less and so much harder that we
+were able to proceed without preliminary trail breaking. But it was a
+most disagreeable day and the prelude to a more disagreeable night.
+Soft, wet snow clings to everything it touches. The dogs are soon
+carrying an additional burden; balls of snow form on all projecting
+tufts of hair; masses of snow must continually be beaten off the sled.
+Every time a snow-shoe is lifted from the ground it lifts a few pounds
+of snow with it. One's moccasins and socks are soon wet through, and the
+feet, encased in this sodden cold covering, grow numb and stay so. We
+crossed a considerable mountain pass in driving snow, and should never
+have found the way without John, for much of it was above timber, and
+when it took us through woods the blazes on the trees were so bleached
+with age as to be difficult of recognition. The Indians have used this
+trail for generations; but few white men have ever passed along it.
+
+Wet snow, wet spruce boughs, wet tent, wet wood, wet clothing make poor
+camping. Water-proof equipment is so rarely needed on the winter trail
+that one does not bother with it. But the climate of the Kuskokwim
+valley is evidently different from that of the rest of the interior, if,
+as John said, such weather is not remarkable in these parts at this
+season. A third day was of much the same description; thawing and
+heavily snowing all day, the thermometer between 36 deg. and 40 deg.. The labour
+of going ahead of the teams and breaking trail, on the snow-shoes,
+through slush, grew so great that I relinquished it to John and took the
+handle-bars of his sled. We were approaching Lake Minchumina, but the
+hills that led us into Yukon waters once more and should have given us
+views of the lake and the great mountains beyond gave nothing. It is a
+keen disappointment to be utterly denied great views, the expectation of
+which has been a support through long distances and fatigues.
+
+At noon we built a fire with considerable difficulty, but once it was
+started we plied it with fuel till we had a noble, roaring bonfire, and
+we hung our wet socks and moccasins and parkees and caps and mitts
+around it and stayed there until they were dry, though the resumption of
+our journey in the continuous melting snow soon wet everything through
+again.
+
+[Sidenote: LAKE MINCHUMINA]
+
+At length, late in the evening of the 28th of February, we descended a
+long ridge and came upon the northeastern shore of Lake Minchumina, one
+of the most considerable lakes of interior Alaska. It stretched its
+broad expanse away into the misty distance, the farther shore quite
+invisible, the snow driving slowly over it, and it looked as though we
+had stumbled by mistake upon the shores of the Arctic Ocean. There was
+no sort of trail upon it and the snow-shoes sank through the melting
+snow of its surface into the water that lay upon the ice and brought up
+a load of slush at every step; yet the going would have been still worse
+without them. The recollection of the six miles we trudged across that
+lake is a dismal recollection of utter fatigue, of mechanical lifting
+and falling of encumbered feet with the recurring feeling that it would
+be impossible to lift them any more. All across that lake I ate snow,
+and that and the back-ache legacy of an old strain are my signs of
+approaching exhaustion. Four hours passed ere we heard the noise of dogs
+and saw the glimmer of a light through the darkness, and the hearts of
+men and beasts alike leaped to the expectation of rest and shelter. We
+had feared the village might be deserted and were rejoiced that the
+Indians were still there.
+
+Never was hospitality more grateful than that we had from the little
+remote band of natives at the Minchumina village. They made a pot of tea
+and fried some flap-jacks for us, and that was our supper, though I
+think the boys ate some boiled moose meat from a pot on the stove. We
+had plenty of grub, but were too weary to cook it; we spread our bedding
+down on the floor amongst a dozen others and fell almost at once into a
+deep sleep. Almost at once; for the arrival of our eight dogs had made a
+commotion amongst the canine population of the place, that after
+repeated outbreaks of noisy animosity and defiance seemed to turn by
+common consent into a friendly and most protracted howling contest in
+which my malamute "Muk" plainly outdid all competitors. How much longer
+the noise would have kept up it is hard to say--dogs never seem too
+tired to howl--but when the limit of Indian patience was reached, an
+aged crone rolled out of the bed into which she had rolled "all
+standing," seized a staff and went outdoors to lay it impartially upon
+the backs of all the disturbers of the peace, domestic and foreign, with
+a screech that was as formidable as the blows. The rest was silence.
+
+The next morning a dozen alarm-clocks went off within a few minutes of
+each other. Every adult in that cabin owned a separate alarm-clock, and
+rose, one supposes, to the summons of no other timepiece. At any rate,
+the clocks went off at intervals, and the natives arose one by one and
+seemed hugely to enjoy the clatter. Let one purchase a new thing and
+every individual in the community must have one also.
+
+But what struck me instantly upon arising was the miraculous
+transformation that had taken place outdoors. The sun was shining
+brilliantly through a clear sky! I hastened to dress and, not waiting
+for breakfast, seized my camera and started out. The chinook was over;
+the sharp, welcome tang of frost was in the air; the snow was hard
+underfoot. Out upon the gleaming surface of the lake I went for nigh a
+mile, resolutely refusing to look behind. I knew what vision awaited me
+when I turned around, had, indeed, caught a slight glimpse as I left the
+cabin, and I wanted the smooth, open foreground of the lake that I
+might see it to the best advantage.
+
+[Sidenote: DENALI AND HIS WIFE]
+
+There is probably no other view of North America's greatest mountain
+group comparable to that from Lake Minchumina. From almost every other
+coign of vantage in the interior I had seen it and found it more or less
+unsatisfying. Only from distant points like the Pedro Dome or the summit
+between Rampart and Glen Gulch does the whole mass and uplift of it come
+into view with dignity and impressiveness. At close range the peaks seem
+stunted and inconspicuous, their rounded, retreating slopes lacking
+strong lines and decided character. But from the lake the precipitous
+western face of Denali and Denali's Wife rise sheer, revealed by the
+level foreground of the snow from base to summit. It was, indeed, a
+glorious scene. There stood the master peak, seeming a stupendous
+vertical wall of rock rising twenty thousand feet to a splendid sharp
+crest perhaps some forty or fifty miles away; there, a little farther to
+the south, rose the companion mass, a smaller but still enormous
+elevation of equally savage inaccessibility; while between them, near
+the base, little sharp peaks stretched like a corridor of ruined arches
+from mass to mass. One was struck at once by the simple appropriateness
+of the native names for these mountains. The master peak is Denali--the
+great one; the lesser peak is Denali's Wife; and the little peaks
+between are the children. And my indignation kindled at the substitution
+of modern names for these ancient mountain names bestowed immemorially
+by the original inhabitants of the land! Is it too late to strike Mount
+McKinley and Mount Foraker from the map? The names were given fifteen or
+sixteen years ago only, by one who saw them no nearer than a hundred
+miles. Is it too late to restore the native names contemptuously
+displaced?
+
+The majesty of the scene grew upon me as I gazed, and presently hand
+went to camera that some record of it might be attempted. But alas for
+the limitations of photography! I knew, even as I made the exposures,
+first at one one-hundredth of a second and then at one-fiftieth, that
+there was little hope of securing a picture; the air was yet faintly
+hazy with thin vapour; the early sun made too acute an angle with the
+peaks; and the yellow lens screen was left in the hind-sack of the sled.
+It was even as I feared. When developed some months later, the film held
+absolutely no trace of the mighty mountains that had risen so proudly
+before it. I promised myself that at noon, when the sun had removed to a
+greater distance from the mountains and made a more favourable angle
+with them, I would return and try again; but by noon had come another
+sudden, violent change of the weather, and snow was falling once more.
+
+[Sidenote: THE MINCHUMINA FOLK]
+
+So I got no picture, save the picture indelibly impressed upon my
+memory, of the noblest mountain scene I had ever gazed upon which made
+memorable this 1st of March; perhaps one of the noblest mountain scenes
+in the whole world, for one does not recall another so great uplift from
+so low a base. The marshy, flat country that stretches from Minchumina
+to the mountains cannot be much more than one thousand feet above the
+sea. Those awful precipices dropping thousands of feet at a leap, those
+peaks rising serene and everlasting into the highest heaven, the
+overwhelming size and strength and solidity of their rocky bulk, all
+this sank into my heart, and there sprang up once again the passionate
+desire of exploring the bowels of them, of creeping along their glaciers
+and up their icy ridges, of penetrating their hidden chambers, inviolate
+since the foundation of the world, and maybe scaling their ultimate
+summits and looking down upon all the earth even as they look down!
+
+Men, however, and not mountains, made the immediate demand upon one's
+interest and attention, and I returned to breakfast and the duties of
+the day. The Minchumina people are a very feeble folk, some sixteen all
+told at the time of our visit, greatly reduced by the epidemics of the
+last decade, living remote from all others on the verge of their race's
+habitat. They trade chiefly at Tanana, a hundred and thirty miles or so
+away, walking an annual trip thither with their furs, and owning a
+nominal allegiance to our mission at that place. It was the first time
+that any clergyman had ever visited them, and the whole of the day was
+spent with them, discovering what they knew and trying to teach them a
+little more. The people sat around on the floor and hung upon the lips
+of the interpreter. But what a barrier a difference of language is! An
+interpreter is like a mountain pass, a means of access but at the cost
+of time and labour. He does not remove the obstruction. The Minchumina
+people occupy a fine country that could amply support ten times the
+Indian population that now inhabits it. We were, indeed, now entering a
+country that has been almost depopulated by successive epidemics of
+contagious diseases. The measles in 1900 slew most of them, and
+diphtheria in 1906 destroyed all the children and many of the adults
+that remained. The chief of this little band wore a hat proudly adorned
+with ribbons and plumes, and flew a flag before his dwelling with the
+initials of the North American Trading and Transportation Company on
+it--a defunct Alaskan corporation. We could not learn the origin
+thereof; the flag and the letters were plainly home-made. It was
+probably a mere imitation of a flag he had seen years ago at Tanana,
+copied without knowledge of the meaning of the letters, as the Esquimaux
+often copy into the decoration of their clothing and equipment the
+legends from canned foods.
+
+Lake Minchumina drains by a fork of the Kantishna River into the Tanana
+and so into the Yukon. Just beyond the southwestern edge of the lake
+runs a deep gully for perhaps a mile that leads to another lake called
+Tsormina, which drains into Minchumina. And just beyond Tsormina is a
+little height of land, on the other side of which lies Lake Sishwoymina,
+which drains into the Kuskokwim. So that little height of land is
+another watershed between Alaska's two great rivers. Lakes Tsormina and
+Sishwoymina are not on any maps; indeed, this region has never been
+mapped save very crudely from the distant flanks of Denali upon one of
+Alfred Brook's early bold journeys into the interior of Alaska on
+behalf of the Geological Survey. Although the Russians had
+establishments on the lower Kuskokwim seventy-five years ago, and the
+river is the second largest in Alaska and easy of navigation, yet the
+white man had penetrated very little into this country until the Innoko
+and Iditarod "strikes" of 1908 and 1909 respectively.
+
+It was our plan to follow the main valley of the Kuskokwim until the
+confluence of the Takotna with that stream, just below the junction of
+the main North and South Forks of the Kuskokwim, and then strike
+northwestward across country to the Iditarod.
+
+The snow had passed and the sun was bright and the thermometer around
+zero all day when we left Minchumina to pursue our journey. The welcome
+change in the weather had brought a still more welcome change in travel.
+The decided and continued thaw followed by sharp cold had put a crust on
+the snow that would hold up the dogs and the sled and a man on small
+trail snow-shoes anywhere. Trail making was no longer necessary, and in
+two days we made upward of fifty miles. So much difference does surface
+make.
+
+[Sidenote: TALIDA]
+
+Across the end of Lake Minchumina, across Tsormina and Sishwoymina and a
+number of lesser lakes we went, following a faint show-shoe trail
+towards a distant mountain group to the southwest, the Talida Mountains,
+at the foot of which lay the Talida village. On the other hand, to the
+east and southeast, we had tantalising glimpses through haze and cloud
+of the two great mountains, and presently of the lesser peaks of the
+whole Alaskan range, sweeping its proud curve to the coast. For a long
+way on the second day we travelled on the flat top of a narrow ridge
+that must surely have been a lateral moraine of a glacier, what time the
+ice poured down from the heights and stretched far over this
+valley--then through scattered timber, increasing in size and thickness
+and already displaying character that differed somewhat from the
+familiar forests of the Yukon. The show-shoe trail we were following was
+made by a messenger despatched by the Minchumina people to invite the
+Talida people to a potlatch; for the caches were filled with moose meat
+beyond local consumption. Early on the second day we met him returning
+and learned that he had gone on to yet another village a day's journey
+farther, still on our route.
+
+The people were all gone hunting from the tiny native hamlet of Talida,
+but we entered a cabin and made ourselves at home. We had passed into
+the region where the Greek Church holds nominal sway, of which the icons
+with little candles before them on the walls gave token. No priest ever
+visits them, but a native at a village on the south fork where is a
+church holds some position analogous to that of a lay reader. The
+nearest priest is a half-breed, ill spoken of for irregularity of life,
+some two hundred miles farther down the river. The Greek Church is
+relaxing its hold in Alaska, perhaps inevitably, and suffers sadly since
+the removal of the bishop from Sitka from lack of supervision. Also we
+had passed out of Indian country into the land of the Esquimaux, for
+these people, far up towards the head of the river as they were, had
+yet come at some period from the mouth. We were out of Walter's language
+range now, and were glad that the bilingual John of the march country
+was with us to serve as interpreter.
+
+Standing proudly up against the wall in one corner of the cabin was a
+rather pathetic object to my eyes--an elaborate gilt-handled silk
+umbrella. There needed no one to tell its story; it spoke of a visit to
+the Yukon with furs to sell and the usual foolish purchase of gay and
+glittering trash--novel and quite useless. What easy prey these poor
+people are to the wiles of the trader! Said one of them to me recently,
+when I asked the purpose of an "annex" to his store with a huge
+billiard-table in it--at an exclusive native village--"It's to get their
+money; there's no use trying to fool you; if we can't get it one way
+we've got to get it another." This gorgeous silk umbrella was concrete
+expression of the same sentiment. It was bought outside, it was brought
+into the country, it was set on exhibition in the store, because some
+trader judged it likely to attract a native eye. No one, white or
+native, uses an umbrella in interior Alaska.
+
+We made twenty-five miles the next day through a wide, open country,
+well wooded in places with a park-like distribution of trees, unwonted
+in our travels and attractive. A new species of spruce threw thick
+branches right down to the ground and tapered up to a perfect cone; each
+tree apart from the others and surrounded by sward instead of
+underbrush. There was a dignity about these trees that the common Yukon
+spruce never attains. Rolling hills of small elevation stretched on
+either hand and game signs abounded. After eight hours of such travel
+we spoke of camping, but presently saw footprints in the snow and pushed
+on to the bank of a little river, the Chedolothna, where stood a cabin,
+a tent, and several high caches. Here, with two families that occupied
+the cabin, we stayed the night.
+
+[Sidenote: MEASLES AND DIPHTHERIA]
+
+Six people at this place, six at Talida, sixteen at Minchumina, make up
+all the population of a region perhaps a hundred and fifty miles square.
+Yet it is a noble Indian country, one of the most favourable in all the
+interior, capable of supporting hundreds of people. Signs, indeed, of a
+much larger occupation of it were not wanting, and all accounts speak of
+the wholesale destruction of the natives by disease. We were told of a
+village a little farther up this stream where every living being, save
+one old man, died of diphtheria five years previously, while those who
+have heard the stories of the horrors of the epidemic of measles in
+1900, usually connected in some way with the stampede to Nome of that
+year when the disease seems to have entered the country, will understand
+how a region once thickly peopled, for Alaska, has become the most
+thinly peopled in all the territory.
+
+A half-breed trader, long resident at a point perhaps two hundred miles
+lower down the Kuskokwim, told me of coming back to a populous village
+after an absence of a few weeks, to find every person dead and the
+starving dogs tearing at the rotting corpses. It is terrible to think
+what the irruption of a new disease may mean to these primitive natives.
+Even a disease like measles, rarely fatal and not commonly regarded as
+serious amongst whites, takes to itself a strange and awful virulence
+when it invades this virgin blood. The people know no proper treatment;
+maddened by the itching rash that covers the body, they fling off all
+cover, rush outdoors naked, whatever the weather, and either roll in the
+snow or plunge into the stream; with the result that the disease
+"strikes in" and kills them. Such is the description that is given of
+its course along the lower Yukon and Kuskokwim. At many a Yukon village
+half the people died, despite the aid the few missionaries then on the
+river could afford; upon the Kuskokwim the havoc seems to have been
+still greater. Six years later, death again stalked through this region
+after having visited the Yukon, and this time seized his victims by the
+throat. In another chapter has been given some account of an outbreak of
+diphtheria on the Chandalar, following a more serious epidemic at Circle
+City and Fort Yukon. It was during that same winter the disease raged in
+this region, remote from any sort of medical or even intelligent lay
+aid, and swept off all the children that had been spared by the measles
+or had been born since that time. At our next stopping-place we saw the
+graves of nineteen children who died in one day!
+
+[Sidenote: THE INDIAN GUIDE]
+
+We learned that we were now within one day's travel of a road-house, at
+or near the junction of the forks of the Kuskokwim, and that a
+government trail had been surveyed and staked from the Iditarod to the
+Sushitna, passing close to the same point, and that during the present
+winter road-houses had sprung up along the western portion of it, so
+that we should not have to make camp again on the way to Iditarod City.
+All of which Minchumina John had collected from the people in the
+cabin, and now presented to me as reason why he should be released from
+further service. I was loath to let him go until we were actually _at_
+the road-house described, but he wanted to go back to the lake for the
+potlatch then preparing, and said that two days' delay would bar him
+from the best of the festivities.
+
+So I settled with him, giving him fifty dollars of the sixty dollars
+covenanted to the Iditarod, and grub enough to take him back to the
+lake, and a rifle, for he was unprovided with firearms, and he went his
+way back, richly content, to the gorging of unlimited moose meat that
+awaited him, and the boy and I went ours. So far as merely his company
+was concerned I was not sorry to lose him. The old saying holds good
+upon the trail that "two is company and three is none." He interfered
+with my boy's lessons. Since he had scarce any English, and could not be
+ignored, the conversation was mainly in Indian. In a word he pulled the
+company down to a native level. And I was anxious that Walter's
+education should proceed.
+
+This boy had been with me for two years, winter and summer, and it was a
+great pleasure to witness his gracious development of body, mind, and
+character. Clean-limbed, smooth-skinned, slender, and supple, his Indian
+blood showing chiefly in a slight swarth of complexion and aquilinity of
+feature, he now approached his twentieth year and began to gain the
+strength of his manhood and to give promise of more than the average
+stature and physical power. With only one full year's schooling behind
+him, the year before he came to me, his active intelligence had made
+such quick use of it that there was good foundation to build upon; and
+our desultory lessons in camp--reading aloud, writing from dictation,
+geography and history in such snippets as circumstances permitted--were
+eagerly made the most of, and his mental horizon broadened continually.
+Until his sixteenth year he had lived amongst the Indians almost
+exclusively and had little English and could not read nor write. He was
+adept in all wilderness arts. An axe, a rifle, a flaying knife, a skin
+needle with its sinew thread--with all these he was at home; he could
+construct a sled or a pair of snow-shoes, going to the woods for his
+birch, drying it and steaming it and bending it; and could pitch camp
+with all the native comforts and amenities as quickly as anybody I ever
+saw. He spoke the naked truth, and was so gentle and unobtrusive in
+manner that he was a welcome guest at the table of any mission we
+visited. Miss Farthing at Nenana had laid her mark deep upon him in the
+one year he was with her.
+
+[Sidenote: THE HALF-BREED]
+
+Before he came to me I had another half-breed for two years, and before
+that there had been a series of full-blooded native boys. I found the
+half-breed greatly preferable. With full command of the native language,
+with such insight into the native mind as few white men ever attain, he
+combines the white man's quickness of apprehension and desire for
+knowledge; and the companionship had been pleasant and profitable. Both
+these boys had picked up quickly and efficiently, without the slightest
+previous experience, the running and the care of the four-cylinder
+gasoline engine of the mission launch, and took a great and intelligent
+interest in all machinery. As an interpreter the half-breed is far
+superior to most full-bloods; he takes one's purport immediately; his
+mind seems to leap with the speaker's mind, not only to follow
+faithfully but to anticipate. And the further his English progresses, so
+much the more excellent interpreter does he become.
+
+My heart goes out to the large and rapidly increasing number of these
+youths of mixed blood in Alaska. It is common to hear them spoken of
+slightingly and contemptuously. There is what my mind always regards as
+a damnable epigram current in the country to the effect that the
+half-breed inherits the vices of both races and the virtues of neither.
+The white man who utters this saying with a chuckle at his second-hand
+wit has generally not much virtue to transmit, were virtue heritable.
+But to thoughtful men nowadays this talk of the inheritance of virtues
+and vices is mere folly. The half-breed in Alaska, as elsewhere, is the
+product of his environment. Often without legitimate father--although in
+an Indian community, where nothing is secret, his parentage is usually
+well known--he is left for some native woman to support with the aid of
+her native husband. He is reared with the full-blooded offspring of the
+couple in the frankness that knows no reserve and the intimacy that
+knows no restraint, of Indian life. The full extent of that frankness
+and intimacy shocks even the loosest-living white man when he first
+becomes aware of it. Where religion and decency have not been
+faithfully inculcated there is no bound to it at all--it is complete.
+Presently, as his superior intellectual inheritance begins to manifest
+itself, as he grows up into consciousness that he is different from, and
+in many ways superior to, the Indians around him, he is naturally drawn
+to such white society as comes his way.
+
+[Sidenote: THE LOW-DOWN WHITE]
+
+In this book a good deal has been said, and, it may be thought by the
+reader, said with a good deal of asperity, about the whites who frequent
+Indian communities and come most into contact with the native people;
+yet the more the author sees of this class, the less is he disposed to
+modify any of the strictures he has put upon it. "The Low-Down White" is
+the subject of one of the most powerful and scathing of Robert Service's
+ballads, those most unequal productions with their mixture of strength
+and feebleness, of true and forced notes, the best of which should
+certainly live amongst the scant literature of the North. And, indeed,
+the spectacle of the man of the higher race, with all the age-long
+traditions and habits of civilisation behind him, descending below the
+level of the savage, corrupting and debauching the savage and making
+this corrupting and debauching the sole exercise of his more intelligent
+and cultivated mind, is one that has aroused the disgust and indignation
+of whites in all quarters of the world. Kipling and Conrad have drawn
+him in the East; Robert Louis Stevenson in the South Sea Islands; any
+army officer will draw him for you in the Philippines, which lack as yet
+their great delineator; Service has not overdrawn him on the Yukon.
+
+Now, it is to this man's society, for lack of other white society open
+to him, that the young half-breed who feels his father's blood stirring
+within him is drawn and is made welcome. He finds standards even lower,
+because more sophisticated, than the standards of the Indians
+themselves. He finds that honesty and morality are a sham, religion a
+laughing-stock. He finds the chastity of women and the honour of men
+sneeringly regarded as non-existent. He is taught to curse and swear, to
+talk lewdly, to drink and gamble. He is taught that drunkenness and
+sensuality are the only enjoyments worth looking forward to, and he soon
+becomes as vile as his preceptors. The back room of the Indian trader's
+store is often the scene of this tuition--barroom, assignation house,
+gambling hell in one. But let that same youth be taken early in hand by
+one who has a care for him and will be at some personal pains to train
+him cleanly and uprightly, and he is as amenable to the good influences
+as he would be to the bad if they were his sole environment. Conscious
+all the time of his equivocal position, shy and timid about asserting
+himself amongst whites, he is easy prey to the viciously as he is apt
+pupil to the virtuously disposed.
+
+What is said here of the male half-breeds applies _a fortiori_ to the
+female. Unless early taken in hand by the missionary, or put under the
+protection of some church boarding-school--and sometimes despite all
+such care and teaching--the lot of the half-breed girl is a sad one; and
+some of the lowest and vilest women of the land are of mixed blood.
+
+The half-breed is assuredly to be reckoned with in the future of Alaska.
+He is here to stay. He is here in increasing numbers. He is the natural
+leader of the Indian population. There seems little doubt that when he
+cares to assert his rights he is already an American citizen, although
+judicial decisions are uncertain and conflicting in this matter.
+
+The missions in the interior have recognised, though perhaps somewhat
+tardily, the importance of the half-breeds, and have picked them up here
+and there along the rivers and become responsible for their decent
+rearing. Some, assuredly, of the future leaders of the native people are
+now in training at the mission schools. Some, unfortunately, are in
+quite as assiduous training by the unscrupulous Indian trader and his
+coterie of low-down whites.
+
+The skies had threatened snow since we arose, and when our diminished
+expedition was well upon its way the snow began to fall. For thirty-six
+hours it fell without cessation. Three days of good travel had put us
+forward seventy-five or eighty miles; now once more we were "up against"
+deep snow and trail breaking. An old native whom we met on his way to
+the potlatch later in the day spread out his hands with a look of
+despair and cried: "Good trail all lose'm!" All day we pushed on against
+the driving storm, the flakes stinging our faces and striking painfully
+against our eyeballs, now following a narrow steep woodland trail, now
+awhile along a creek bed, now across open country with increasing
+difficulty in finding our way, until it grew dark while yet we were
+some miles from our destination, and we made camp; and all night long
+the heavy snow continued.
+
+So soon as we had struck our tent, crusted with ice, and had broken up
+our wet camp next morning there was trouble about finding the trail.
+Wide open spaces with never an indication of direction stretched before
+us. Again and again we cast about, the boy to the left, I to the right,
+to find some blaze or mark, but much of the course lay across open
+country that bore none. And then I sorely regretted having let John go
+back. Some miles before we came to a stop the previous evening, we
+passed a native encampment with naught but women and children in it--the
+men gone hunting. But we could not speak with them or get any
+information from them, for our Kuskokwim interpreter was gone. And now
+it seemed likely that we should lose our way in this wilderness. At last
+we were entirely at a loss, the boy returning on the one side and I on
+the other from wide detours, in which we had found no sign at all. The
+snow still fell heavily; there lay more than a foot of it upon the late
+crust; trail or sign of a trail, on the snow or above it, was not at
+all.
+
+[Sidenote: THE DOG GUIDES]
+
+Then occurred one of the most remarkable things I have known in all my
+journeyings. Straight ahead in the middle distance I spied two stray
+dogs making a direct course towards us; not wandering about, but
+evidently going somewhere. Now there are no such things as unattached
+dogs in Alaska; any dog entirely detached from human ownership and some
+sort of human maintenance would soon be a dead dog. The explanation,
+full of hope, sprang at once to the boy's mind. The dogs must belong to
+the native encampment some six miles back, and they had been to the
+road-house for what scraps they could pick up, and were returning. It
+was probably a daily excursion and they had doubtless followed their
+accustomed trail. So it turned out. All the way to that road-house,
+eight miles farther, we followed the trail left by those dogs, growing
+fainter and fainter indeed as the new snow fell upon it, but still
+discernible until we had almost reached the road-house. It led across
+open swampy wastes, and presently across two considerable lakes, over
+which we should never have been able to find our way, for the trail
+swung to one hand or the other and did not leave the lake in the same
+general direction by which it had reached it. Walter cut a bundle of
+boughs and staked the trail out as we pursued it, lest we should return
+this way, but from the moment we saw the dogs there was never any
+question about the trail; they kept it perfectly. We were four and a
+half hours making the eight miles or so to Nicoli's Village and the
+road-house, but we might have been days making it but for those dogs.
+And at the road-house we learned that the boy's theory of their
+movements was the right one. They came across the twelve or fourteen
+miles every day for such scraps as they could pick up.
+
+[Sidenote: THE WILDERNESS POET]
+
+So here was our first white man in sixteen days, an intelligent man of
+meagre education, with a great bent for versifying. A courteous approval
+of one set of verse brought upon us the accumulated output of years in
+the wilderness without much opportunity of audience, as one supposes,
+and most of the afternoon and evening was thus spent. Amidst the
+overwrought sentimentality and faulty scansion which marked most of the
+pieces was one simple little poem that struck a true note, said its
+little say, and quit--without a superfluous word. Its author set no
+store by it at all compared with his more pretentious and meretricious
+work; yet it was the one poem in the whole mass. It described the
+writing of a letter to his father; he had spent all he had in
+prospecting and working a small claim, and had just realised that a
+year's labour was gone for naught. His father would worry if he got no
+word at all, but there was no use telling the old man he was broke, so
+he just wrote that he was well, and that was all. The old man would come
+pretty near understanding anyway. In simple lines that scanned and
+rhymed naturally, that was what the three or four stanzas said. And it
+was so typical of many a man's situation in this country, gave so simply
+and well the reason why many men cease writing to their relatives at
+all, that it pleased me and seemed of value. That note came from the
+heart and from the life's experience.
+
+Nicoli's Village is a very small place with a mere handful of people,
+situated on the South Fork of the Kuskokwim some forty miles by river
+above the junction of the forks. Before the epidemics devastated it it
+had been a considerable native community. A Greek church, which the
+natives built entirely themselves, and which boasted a large painted
+icon of sorts, was the most important building in the place, and was
+served by the lay minister referred to before. Thus far the Kuskokwim
+is navigable for vessels of light draught, and a small stern-wheel
+steamboat lay wintering upon the bank.
+
+[Sidenote: ROAD-HOUSES]
+
+Our way now left the Kuskokwim and struck across country to a point just
+below the junction of the forks, and then across country again to a
+tributary of the right bank, the Takotna; with a general northerly
+direction. Road-houses there indeed were, in the crudity and discomfort
+of their first season, and other evidences of the proximity of the white
+man. Here were two men camped, hunting moose for the Iditarod market,
+more than a hundred and twenty-five miles away, and here, at the end of
+the second day, near the mouth of the Takotna, was the new post of the
+Commercial Company in the charge of an old acquaintance who welcomed us
+warmly and entertained us most hospitably. After camping and road-house
+experience of nearly three weeks, a comfortable bed and well-spread
+table, and the general unmistakable menage of a home-making woman are
+very highly enjoyed. That night the whole population of the settlement,
+fourteen persons, gathered in the store for Divine service.
+
+Sixteen miles farther on was another settlement, the "Upper Takotna"
+Post, with a rival company established and some larger population. Here,
+also, we spent a night with old Fairbanks acquaintances. We were yet a
+hundred miles from Iditarod City, and the trail lay over a very rugged,
+hilly country, up one creek to its head, over a divide, and down
+another, in the way of the usual cross-country traverse.
+
+There had not been so much snowfall in this section, but the weather
+began to be very severe. The thermometer fell to -45 deg. and -50 deg. and -55 deg.
+on three successive nights, and all day long rose not above -20 deg., with a
+keen wind. The cost of transporting supplies to the road-houses on this
+trail justified the high prices charged--one dollar and a half for a
+poor meal of rabbits and beans and bacon, or ptarmigan and beans and
+bacon, and one dollar for a lunch of coffee, bread and butter, and dried
+fruit. But no such exigency could be pleaded to excuse the dirt and
+discomfort and lack of the commonest provision of outhouse decency at
+most of these places--'twas mere shiftlessness. There is not often much
+middle ground in Alaskan road-houses; they are either very good in their
+way or very bad; either kept by professional victuallers who take pride
+in them or by idle incompetents who make an easy living out of the
+necessities of travellers. One wishes that some of the old-time
+travellers who used to wax so eloquently indignant over the inns in the
+Pyrenees could make a winter journey in the interior of Alaska.
+
+[Illustration: "THE 'SUMMIT' IS HIGH ABOVE TIMBER-LINE AND THE TRAIL
+PURSUES A HOGBACK RIDGE FOR A MILE AND A HALF AT THE SUMMIT LEVEL."]
+
+[Illustration: A STREET IN IDITAROD CITY.]
+
+One thing pleased me at these road-houses. The only reading-matter in
+any of them consisted of magazines bearing the rubber stamp of Saint
+Matthew's Reading-Room at Fairbanks, part of a five-hundred-pound cargo
+of magazines which the mission launch _Pelican_ brought to the Iditarod
+the previous summer; virtually the only reading-matter in the whole
+camp. It was pleasant to know that we had been able to avert the real
+calamity of a total absence of anything to read for a whole winter
+throughout this wide district. But, although they were brought to the
+Iditarod and distributed absolutely free, each of these magazines had
+cost the road-house keeper twenty-five cents for carriage over the trail
+from Iditarod City, and they had been read to death. Some of them were
+so black and greasy from continued handling that the print at the edges
+of the pages was almost unreadable.
+
+These creeks swarmed with ptarmigan, and it was well they did, for the
+new camp was ill supplied with food, and we found ourselves in a region
+of growing scarcity as we approached the Iditarod. The ptarmigan seem to
+have supplemented the meagre stocks in the Iditarod during this winter
+of 1910-11 as effectively as the rabbits did in the Fairbanks camp in
+the scarce winter of 1904-5. In place after place the whole creek
+valley, where it was open, was crisscrossed with ptarmigan tracks, and
+the birds rose in coveys, uttering their harsh, guttural cry at every
+turn of the trail.
+
+The summit between the head of Moose Creek and the head of Bonanza Creek
+is again a watershed between the waters of the Kuskokwim and the waters
+of the Yukon; for Moose Creek is tributary to the Takotna and Bonanza
+Creek is tributary to Otter Creek, which is tributary to the Iditarod
+River. The "summit" is high above timber-line, and when the trail has
+reached it it does not descend immediately but pursues a hogback ridge
+for a mile and a half at about the summit level. We passed over it in
+clear, bright weather without difficulty, but it would be a bad passage
+in wind or snow or fog. The rugged, broken country, with small, rounded
+domes of hills, stretched away in all directions, a maze of little
+valleys threading in and out amongst them.
+
+[Sidenote: PLACE-NAMES]
+
+The Bonanza Creek road-house was by far the best of any between the
+Kuskokwim and the Iditarod, and showed what can be done for comfort,
+even under adverse circumstances, by a couple who care and try. But how
+the names of gold-bearing creeks, or creeks that are expected to be
+gold-bearing are repeated again and again in every new camp! I once
+counted up the following list of mining place-names in Alaska: Bonanza
+Creeks, 10; Eldorados and Little Eldorados, 10; Nugget Creeks or
+Gulches, 17; Gold Creeks, 12; Gold Runs, 7. Nor is it only in creeks
+with auriferous deposit or expectation of auriferous deposit that this
+reduplication occurs; there are Bear Creeks, 16; Boulder Creeks, 13;
+Moose Creeks, 13; Willow Creeks, 17; Canyon Creeks, 12; Glacier Creeks,
+14.
+
+The imagination of the average prospector is not his most active
+faculty, but even when his imagination is given play and he names a
+place "Twilight," as he did the original settlement at this base of
+supplies, the ineradicable prose of trade comes along the next summer
+and changes it to "Iditarod City." There must have been some remarkable
+personality strong enough to repress the "chamber of commerce" at
+Tombstone, Arizona, or the place would have lost its distinctive name so
+soon as it grew large enough to have mercantile establishments instead
+of stores.
+
+[Sidenote: IDITAROD CITY]
+
+We went through "Discovery Otter" and into "Flat City," on Flat Creek,
+the jealous rival of Iditarod City, and so over the hills to Iditarod
+City, on the wings of a storm. The wind whirled the snow behind us and
+drove the sled along almost on top of the dogs. In its bleak situation
+and its exposure to the full force of the wind, Iditarod City reminds
+one of Nome or Candle on the Seward Peninsula. The hills and flats that
+surround it are in the main treeless, and the snow drifts and drives
+over everything. Almost all the week that we spent in the town it was
+smothered up in a howling wind-storm, so that it was quite a serious
+undertaking to walk a block or two along the streets. Deep drifts were
+piled up on all the corners and on the lee side of all buildings. We
+reached Iditarod City on Monday, the 13th of March. Until the following
+Friday morning was no cessation or moderation of the wind-storm; and
+this, they told us, represented most of the weather since the 1st of
+January.
+
+Overgrown and overdone in every way, the place presented all the
+features, sordid and otherwise, of a raw mining town. Prices had risen
+enormously on all manner of supplies, for everything that was not
+actually "short" was believed to be "cornered." Bacon was ninety cents a
+pound; butter one dollar and a half a pound; flour was twenty dollars a
+hundred pounds, and most things in like ratio. Some said the grub was
+not in the camp; others that the tradesmen had it cached away waiting
+for the still higher prices they believed would obtain before fresh
+supplies could arrive in July. There was a general feeling of
+disappointment and discouragement, enhanced by discomfort and actual
+suffering from the terrible stormy weather of the winter and the
+exorbitant and growing price of provisions. Many men without occupation
+were living on one meal a day. The saloons and the parasitical classes,
+male and female, seemed to flourish and to play their usual prominent
+part in the life of such places. The doings of notorious women whose
+sobriquets seemed household words, the lavish expenditures of certain
+men upon them, the presents of diamonds they received, with the amount
+paid for them, constituted a large part of the general talk.
+
+One is compelled to admire the vigour and enthusiastic enterprise,
+daunted by no difficulty, that is displayed in the wonderfully rapid
+upraising of a new mining-camp town. The building goes far ahead of the
+known wealth of the camp and commonly far ahead of the reasonable
+expectation. But the element of chance is so important a factor in
+placer mining that the whole thing partakes more of the nature of
+gambling than of a commercial venture. Any new camp may suddenly present
+the world with a new Klondike; with riches abundant and to spare for
+every one who is fortunate enough to be on the spot. Here was Flat Creek
+with a surprisingly rich deposit; why should there not be a dozen such
+amidst the multitudinous creeks of the district? How could any one know
+that it would be almost the only creek on which pay would be found at
+all? For there is no law about the distribution of gold deposits; there
+is not even a general rule that has not its notable exceptions. It is
+very generally believed by the old prospectors and miners that somewhere
+in the Bible may be found these words, "Silver occurs in veins, but gold
+is where you find it," which of course, is a mere misreading or faulty
+remembering of a verse in the Book of Job: "Surely there is a vein for
+the silver and a place for the gold where they fine it" (refine it). But
+that "gold is where you find it" is about the only law touching
+auriferous deposits that holds universally good.
+
+Three long parallel streets of one and two story wooden buildings, with
+cross streets connecting them, made up the town. Because the country is
+poorly timbered, the usual log construction had yielded in the main to
+framed buildings, and great quantities of lumber had been brought the
+previous summer from Fairbanks, and even from Nome and the outside, to
+supplement the low-grade output of two local mills. But the price of
+building materials had been very high, and the average dwelling was very
+small and incommodious. People accustomed to the comparative luxury of
+the older camps had suffered a good deal from the lack of all domestic
+conveniences in this new will-o'-the-wisp of an eldorado.
+
+So there the town stretched away, lumber and paper,--the usual
+tinder-box Alaskan construction--stores slap up against one another,
+with no alleyways between; in the busiest part of it and along the
+water-front even an adequate provision of side streets grudged;
+furnace-heated and kiln-dried and gasoline-lit; waiting for the careless
+match and the fanning wind and the five minutes' start that should send
+it all up in smoke. A week after we left it came; as it came to Dawson,
+as it came to Nome, as it came to Fairbanks, without teaching any lesson
+or leaving any precautionary regulations on the statute book to save
+men from their own competitive greed. Two or three weeks after the fire,
+however, it was all rebuilt, and a plunging local bank held mortgages on
+most of the structures for the cost of the new material--and holds them
+yet.
+
+[Sidenote: THOUSANDS WITHOUT CHURCH]
+
+With at least a thousand people resident in the town, not to mention the
+thousands more out upon the creeks and at Flat City and "Discovery[G]
+Otter," there was no minister of religion of any sort in the whole
+region, nor had public Divine service been conducted since the occasion
+of the _Pelican's_ visit the previous summer. Yet there were many in the
+place who sorely missed the opportunities of worship. Twice on Sunday
+the largest dancing hall in the town was crowded at service; at night it
+could have been filled a second time with those unable to get in.
+
+Places like this present very difficult problems to those desirous of
+providing for their religious need. To occupy them at all they should be
+occupied at once when yet eligible sites may be had for the staking; if
+they prosper, to come into them later means buying at a high price. Yet
+what seventh son of a seventh son shall have foresight enough to tell
+the fortunes of them? The North is strewn with "cities" of one winter.
+Nor is the selection of suitable men to minister to such communities a
+simple matter. Amidst the overthrow of all the usual criteria of
+conduct, the fading out of the usual dividing lines and the blending
+into one another of the usual divisions, it requires a tactful and
+prudent man "to keep the happy mean between too much stiffness in
+refusing and to much easiness in admitting" variations from conventional
+standards. His point of view, if he is to have any influence whatever,
+must not exclude the point of view of the great majority; he must accept
+the situation in order to have any chance of improving the situation.
+And yet in the fundamentals of character and conduct he must be
+unswerving. And if on any such fundamental the battle gauge is thrown
+down, he must take it up and fight the quarrel out at whatever cost.
+
+We left Iditarod City on Monday, the 20th of March, the dogs the fatter
+and fresher for their week's rest, resolved not to return by the
+Kuskokwim but to take the beaten trail out to the Yukon, and so all the
+way up that stream to Fort Yukon. The monthly mail had arrived a few
+days previously--a monthly mail was all that the thousands of men in
+this camp could secure--and had gone out again the very next morning,
+before people had time to answer their letters, before the registered
+mail had even been delivered. So our departure for the Yukon was eagerly
+seized upon and advertised as a means of despatching probably the last
+mail that would go outside over the ice. I was sworn in as special
+carrier, and a heavy sack of first-class mail added to our load as far
+as Tanana. The first stage of thirty miles led to Dikeman, a town at the
+headwaters of ordinary steamboat navigation of the Iditarod River, at
+which the Commercial Company had built a depot and extensive warehouse,
+since in the main abandoned. Two streets of cabins lined the bank, but
+forty or fifty souls comprised the population, and almost all of them
+gathered for Divine service that night.
+
+[Sidenote: THE "MOVING OF THE MEAT"]
+
+From Dikeman to Dishkaket, on the Innoko River, a distance of some
+seventy miles, our route lay over one of the dreariest and most dismal
+regions in all Alaska. It is one succession of lakes and swamps, with
+narrow, almost knife-edge, ridges between, fringed with stunted spruce.
+Far as the eye could reach to right and left the country was the same;
+it is safe to say broadly that all the land between the Iditarod and
+Innoko Rivers is of this character. We passed over it in mild weather,
+but it must be a terrible country to cross in storm or through deep
+snow. For ten miles at a stretch there was scarcely a place where a man
+might make a decent camp. At a midway road-house was gathered the
+greatest assemblage of dogs and loaded sleds I had ever seen together at
+one time, each team with an Indian driver; they must have covered a
+quarter or a third of a mile. It was a freight train engaged in
+transporting a whole boat-load of butcher's meat to Iditarod City, the
+cargo of a steamboat that had frozen in on the Yukon the previous
+October or early November. All the winter through efforts had been made
+to get this meat two hundred odd miles overland to its destination; but
+the weather had been so stormy and the snow so deep that near the end of
+March most of it was still on the way, and some yet far down the trail
+towards the Yukon waiting for another trip of the teams.
+
+Dishkaket was merely a native village on the Innoko River two or three
+years before; but since three new trails from the Yukon come together
+here--from Kaltag Nulato, and Lewis's Landing--and in the other
+directions two trails branch off here, to the Innoko diggings at Ophir
+and to the Iditarod, a store or two and a couple of road-houses had
+sprung up.
+
+From Dishkaket, after crossing the Innoko, we took the most northerly of
+the three trails to the Yukon, the Lewis Cut-Off, a trail of a hundred
+miles that strikes straight across country and reaches the Yukon eighty
+miles farther up that stream than the Nulato trail and a hundred and
+twenty miles farther up than the Kaltag trail. The Kaltag trail is the
+trail to Nome; the Nulato trail is the mail trail simply because it
+suits the contractors to throw business to Nulato. The Lewis Cut-Off is
+the direct route, the shortest by about a hundred miles, but it was cut
+by the private individual whose name it bears, and leads out to his
+store and road-house on the Yukon; so a rival road-house was built close
+by on the river and the prestige and advertisement of the "United States
+mail route" thrown to the trail that covers one hundred unnecessary
+miles--for no other reason than to deprive Lewis of the legitimate fruit
+of his enterprise.
+
+The character of the country changed so soon as the Innoko was crossed;
+the wide swamps gave place to a broken, light-timbered country of ridges
+and hollows, and the rough, laborious, horse-ruined trail across it made
+bad travelling. "Buckskin Bill," with his cayuses, was also engaged in
+"moving the meat." The measured miles, moreover, gave place to estimated
+miles, and the nominal twenty-five we made the first day was probably
+not much more than twenty.
+
+[Sidenote: MILLINERY]
+
+The first fifty miles of the country between the Innoko and the Yukon is
+much the same, and we were climbing and descending ridges for a couple
+of days. Then we crossed a high ridge and dropped out of Innoko waters
+into the valley of the Yukatna, a tributary of the Yukon, and passed
+down this valley for thirty or forty miles, and then across some more
+broken country to the Yukon. At one of the road-houses a woman was
+stopping, going in with three or four large sled loads of millinery and
+"ladies' furnishings." We were told that the merchandise had cost her
+twelve thousand dollars in Fairbanks, and that she expected to realise
+thirty thousand dollars by selling it to the "sporting" women of the
+Iditarod, now a whole winter debarred from "the latest imported French
+fashions." This woman was dressed in overalls, like a man, and the
+drivers of her teams, two white men and a native, cursed and swore and
+used filthy language to the dogs in her presence. It always angers me to
+hear an Indian curse; to hear one curse in the presence of a white woman
+was particularly disgusting and exasperating; but what could one expect
+when the white men put no slightest restraint upon themselves and the
+woman seemed utterly indifferent? I called the Indian aside and spoke
+very plainly to him, and he ceased his ribaldry; but the white men still
+poured it out as they struggled to hitch their many dogs. At last I
+could stand it no longer. "Madam," I said to the woman, "I don't know
+who you are, save that you are a white woman, and as a white woman,
+if I were you, I would make those blackguards treat me with more respect
+than to use such language before me." She flushed and made no reply. The
+men, who heard what I said, scowled and made no reply. Presently
+dispositions were done and the train moved off, but I did not hear any
+more foul language. This is set down here chiefly because it was the
+first and only time in all his travels in Alaska that the writer heard
+such language in such presence.
+
+[Illustration: THE END OF THE PORTAGE TRAIL.]
+
+[Illustration: ROUGH ICE ON THE YUKON.]
+
+Another road-house was kept by a man who had been cook upon a recent
+arctic expedition off the coast of Alaska, and he gave some interesting
+inside information about an enterprise the published narrative of which
+had always seemed unsatisfactory. It was just gossip from a drunken
+scamp, but it filled several gaps in the book.
+
+As we approached the Yukon we passed several meat caches where great
+quarters of beef sewn up in burlap were piled on the side of the trail.
+At one of these caches the camp-robbers had been at work industriously.
+They had stripped the burlap from parts of several quarters, exposing
+the fat, and had dug out and carried it away little by little until it
+was all gone. The hard-frozen lean probably defied their best efforts;
+at any rate, the fat offered less resistance. But where else in the
+world could men dump quarters of beef beside the road and go off and
+leave them for weeks with no more danger of depredation than the bills
+of birds can effect?
+
+A few miles from the river the rival road-house signs began to appear.
+"Patronise Lewis; he cut this trail at his own expense," pleaded one.
+"Why go five miles out of your way," sneered another. Lewis's
+road-house _is_ across the wide Yukon, and there was no point in
+crossing the river save one's determination to lend no countenance to
+the spitefulness of these mail runners. So across the river we went and
+were glad to be on the Yukon again. The next morning we encountered the
+same rival signs at the point where the trail from Lewis's joined the
+"mail trail."
+
+[Sidenote: "TREASURE ISLAND"]
+
+Most of our travelling was now upon the surface of the Yukon, and four
+hundred and fifty miles of it stretched ahead of us ere our winter's
+travel should end at Fort Yukon. Four hours brought us to the military
+telegraph station at Melozi, and we were able to send word ahead that we
+were safely out of the Kuskokwim wilderness. Then a portage was crossed
+and then the river pursued again until with about thirty miles to our
+credit we made camp. The days were lengthening out now, the weather
+growing mild, although a keen, cold, down-river breeze was rarely
+absent, and travel began to be pleasant and camping no hardship. We
+preferred camping, on several scores, when the day's work had not been
+too arduous, chief amongst them being that it gave more opportunity and
+privacy for Walter's schooling. He was reading _Treasure Island_ aloud,
+and I was getting as great pleasure from renewing as he from beginning
+an acquaintance with that prince of all pirate stories. Kokrines and
+Mouse Point one day, the next The Birches; we passed these well-known
+Yukon landmarks, camping, after a run of thirty-eight miles, some six
+miles beyond the last-named place, with a run of forty-four miles before
+us to Tanana. I judged it too much; but the trail was greatly improved
+and we decided to attempt it in one stage. A misreading of the watch, so
+that I roused myself and Walter at 3.30 A. M. instead of 5.15 A. M., and
+did not realise the mistake until the fire was made and it was not worth
+while returning to bed, gave us a fine start and we made good progress.
+Gold Mountain (so called, one supposes, because there is no gold there;
+there is no other reason), Grant Creek, "Old Station" were passed by,
+and at length Tanana loomed before us while yet ten miles away. In just
+eleven hours we ran the forty-four miles, making, with three additional
+miles out to the mission, forty-seven altogether, by far the longest
+journey of the winter. We reached Tanana on the 1st of April, just six
+weeks since we left.
+
+[Sidenote: AN UNTRAVELLED RIVER]
+
+We spent eight days at Tanana, including two Sundays, Passion Sunday and
+Palm Sunday, but I was under an old promise to spend Easter there also.
+Now, Easter, 1911, fell on the 16th of April, and for the
+three-hundred-mile journey to Fort Yukon a period of ten or twelve days
+at the least would be necessary, that might easily stretch to two weeks.
+Travelling on the Yukon ice so late in April as this would involve was
+not only fraught with great difficulty and discomfort, but also with
+actual danger, and I had to beg to be absolved of my promise. Some
+considerable preparation was on foot for the festival, and I was loath
+to leave, for Tanana was then without any resident minister, but it
+seemed foolish to take the chances that would have to be taken if we
+stayed.
+
+Five days of almost ceaseless snow-storm during our stay at Tanana did
+not give prospect of good travelling, and, indeed, when we pulled out
+from the mission on the Monday in Holy Week there was no sign of any
+trail. From Tanana up to Fort Yukon there is very little travel; since
+the whole of this long stretch of river was deprived of winter mail a
+year or two before, no through travel at all. Cabins may usually be
+found to camp in, but there are no road-houses. What travel still takes
+place is local.
+
+The journey divided itself into two roughly equal parts, a hundred and
+fifty miles through the Lower Ramparts, and a hundred and fifty miles
+through the Yukon Flats, almost all of it on the surface of the river.
+It was hoped to reach Stephen's Village, a native settlement just within
+the second half of the journey, for Easter.
+
+Snow does not lie long at rest upon the river within the Ramparts, and
+particularly within the narrow, canon-like stretch of seventy-five miles
+from Tanana to Rampart City. Violent and almost ceaseless down-stream
+winds sweep the deep defile in the mountains through which the river
+winds its course. In places the ice is bare of snow; in places the snow
+is piled in huge, hardened drifts. So strong and so persistent is this
+wind that it is often possible to skate over an uninterrupted black
+surface of ice, polished like plate glass, for twenty miles on a
+down-river journey. To make way over such a surface up-stream, against
+such wind, is, however, almost impossible. The dogs get no footing and
+the wind carries the sled where it listeth. The journey so far as
+Rampart City has been described before; it will suffice now that it
+took three days of toilsome battling against wind and bad surface, with
+nights spent upon the floor of grimy cabins. So cold was the wind that
+it is noted in my diary with surprise, on the 12th of April, that I had
+worn fur cap, parkee, and muffler all day, as though it had been the
+dead of winter instead of three weeks past the vernal equinox.
+
+On Wednesday night there was Divine service at Rampart, and on Maundy
+Thursday, after four miles upon the river, we took the portage of eleven
+miles that cuts a chord to the arc of the greatest bend of the river
+within the Ramparts and so saves nine miles. Three miles more took us to
+the deserted cabin at the site of the abandoned coal-mine opposite the
+mouth of the Mike Hess River, here confluent with the Yukon, and in that
+cabin we spent the night, having had the high, bitter wind in our faces
+all day. We hated to leave the shelter of the wooded portage and face
+the blast of the last three miles.
+
+[Sidenote: WIND AND SNOW]
+
+We woke the next morning to a veritable gale of wind and snow, and lay
+in the cabin till noon, occupied with the exercises of the solemn
+anniversary. The wind having then abated somewhat and the snow ceased,
+we sallied forth, still hopeful of making Stephen's Village for Easter.
+But when we got down upon the river surface it became doubtful if we
+could proceed, and as we turned the first bend we encountered a fresh
+gale that did not fall short of a blizzard. The air was filled with
+flying snow that stung our faces and blinded us. The dogs' muzzles
+became incrusted with snow and their eyes filled with it so that it was
+hard to keep them facing it. I could not see the boy at all when he was
+a hundred feet ahead of the team. We struggled along for four miles,
+and, since it was then evident that we could not go much farther without
+useless risk, we turned to a spot on the bank where Walter knew another
+deserted cabin to stand; for he knows every foot of this section of the
+river and once spent a summer, camped at the coal-mine, fishing. The
+spot was reached, but the cabin was gone. The fish rack still stood
+there, but the cabin was burned down. There was nothing for it but to
+return to the coal-mine cabin; so, for the first and only time in all my
+journeyings, it was necessary to abandon a day's march that had been
+entered upon and go back whence we had come. We ran before the gale at
+great speed and were within the cabin again by 2.30 P. M. All the
+evening and all night the storm raged, and I was in two minds about
+running back to Rampart before it for Easter, since it was now out of
+the question to reach Stephen's Village. If the season had not been so
+far advanced this is what I should have done, but it would set us back
+three days more on the journey, and on reflection I was not willing to
+take that chance with the break-up so near.
+
+So on the morning of Easter Eve we sallied up-stream again, snow falling
+and driving heavily, and the wind still strong but with yesterday's keen
+edge blunted. By the time we had beaten around the long bend up which we
+had fought our way the day before, the snow had ceased, and by noon the
+wind had dropped and the sun was shining, and in a few moments of his
+unobscured strength all the loose snow on the sled was melted--a
+warning of the rapidity with which the general thaw would proceed once
+the skies were clear. That night saw us in the habitable though dirty,
+deserted cabin at Salt Creek (so called, one supposes, because the water
+of it is perfectly fresh) at which we had hoped to lodge the previous
+night.
+
+[Sidenote: ALASKAN "FORTS"]
+
+Buoyed by the hope of doing a double stage in a clear, windless day and
+thus reaching Stephen's Village for service at night, we made a very
+early start that beautiful Easter morning. But it was not to be. Such
+trail as there was ran high up on the bank ice--level, doubtless, when
+it was made much earlier in the season, but now at a slope towards the
+middle of the river through the falling of the water, and seamed with
+great cracks. Such a trail, called a "sidling" trail in the vernacular
+of mushing, is always difficult and laborious to travel, for the sled
+slips continually off it into the loose snow or the ice cracks, and
+often for long stretches at a time one man must hold up the nose of the
+sled while the other toils at the handle-bars. In one place, while thus
+holding the front of the sled on the trail, Walter slipped into an ugly
+ice crack concealed by drifted snow, and so wedged his foot that I had
+difficulty in extricating him. The last two bends of the river within
+the Ramparts seemed interminable and it was 6.30 P. M., with twelve
+hours' travel behind us, when we reached old Fort Hamlin, on the verge
+of the Yukon Flats. These "forts," it might be explained, if one chose
+to pursue the elucidation of Alaskan nomenclature in the same strain,
+are so called because they never had any defences and never needed any.
+As a matter of fact, in the early days, when the Hudson Bay Company
+made its first establishments on the upper river, there was supposed to
+be some need of fortification, and Fort Selkirk and Fort Yukon were
+stockaded. Fort Selkirk, indeed, was sacked and burned sixty years ago,
+but not by Yukon Indians. The Chilkats from the coast, indignant at the
+loss of their middle-man profits by the invasion of the interior,
+crossed the mountains, descended the river, and destroyed the post. It
+thus became customary to call a trading-post a "fort," and every little
+point where a store and a warehouse stood was so dignified. Hence Fort
+Reliance, Fort Hamlin, Fort Adams.
+
+For years Fort Hamlin had been quite deserted, but now smoke issued from
+the stovepipe and dogs gave tongue at our approach, and we found a white
+man with an Esquimau wife from Saint Michael and a half-breed child
+dwelling there and carrying a few goods for sale. With him we made our
+lodging, and with him and his family said our evening service of Easter,
+and so to bed, thoroughly tired.
+
+[Sidenote: TRAVELLING BY NIGHT]
+
+A mile beyond Fort Hamlin the Ramparts suddenly cease and the wide
+expanse of the Yukon Flats opens at once. Ten miles or so brought us to
+Stephen's Village, where we had been long expected and where a very busy
+day was spent. A number of Indians were gathered and there were children
+to baptize and couples to marry, as well as the lesson of the season to
+teach. It was a great disappointment that we had been unable to get here
+before, and matter of regret that, being here at such labour, only so
+short a time could be spent. But the closing season called to us
+loudly. A mild, warm day set all the banks running with melting snow and
+made the surface of the river mushy. There was really no time to lose,
+for the next seventy-five miles was to give us the most difficult and
+disagreeable travelling of the journey. Here, in the Flats, where is
+greatest need of travel direction on the whole river, was no trail at
+all beyond part of the first day's journey. Within the Ramparts the
+river is confined in one channel; however bad the travelling may be,
+there is no danger of losing the way; but in the Flats the river divides
+into many wide channels and these lead off into many more back sloughs,
+with low, timbered banks and no salient landmarks at all. Behind us were
+the bluffs of the Ramparts, already growing faint; afar off on the
+horizon, to the right, were the dim shapes of the Beaver Mountains. All
+the rest was level for a couple of hundred miles.
+
+A local trail to a neighbouring wood-chopper's took us some twelve
+miles, and then we were at a loss. The general direction we knew, and
+previous journeys both in winter and summer gave us some notion of the
+river bends to follow, but we wallowed and floundered until late at
+night before we reached the cabin we were bound for, the snow exceeding
+soft and wet for hours in the middle of the day.
+
+The time had plainly come to change our day travel into night travel,
+for freezing was resumed each night after the sun was set, and the
+surface grew hard again. So at this cabin we lay all the next day, with
+an interesting recluse of these parts who knows many passages of
+Shakespeare by heart, and who drew us a chart of our course to the next
+habitation, marking every bend to be followed and the place where the
+river must be crossed. But there is always difficulty in getting a new
+travel schedule under way, and we did not leave until five in the
+morning instead of at two as we had planned. This gave us insufficient
+time to make the day's march before the sun softened the snow, and
+moccasins grew wet, and snow-shoe strings began to stretch, and the
+webbing underfoot to yield and sag--and we had to content ourselves with
+half a stage. By nine P. M. we were off again and did pretty well until
+the night grew so dark that we could no longer distinguish our
+landmarks. Then we went to the bank and built a big fire and made a pot
+of tea and sat and dozed around it for a couple of hours or so until the
+brief darkness of Alaskan spring was overpast, and the dawn began to
+give light enough to see our way again.
+
+When our course lay on the open river, the snow had crust enough to hold
+us upon our snow-shoes; but when it took us through little sheltered
+sloughs, the crust was too thin and we broke through all the time, and
+that makes slow, painful travel. At last we came to a portage that cuts
+off a number of miles, but the snow slope by which the top of the bank
+should be reached had a southern exposure and was entirely melted and
+gone. The dogs had to be unhitched, the sled to be unloaded, the stuff
+packed in repeated journeys up the steep bank, and the sled hauled up
+with a rope. Then came the repacking and reloading and the rehitching;
+and when the portage was crossed the same thing had to be done to get
+down to the river bed again. Twice more on that day the process was gone
+through, and each time it took nigh an hour to get up the bank, so that
+it was around noon, and the snow miserably wet and mushy again, when we
+reached Beaver and went to bed at the only road-house between Fort Yukon
+and Tanana.
+
+"Beaver City" owes its existence to quartz prospects in the Chandalar,
+in which men of money and influence in the East were interested. The
+Alaska Road Commission had built a trail some years before from the
+Chandalar diggings out to the Yukon, striking the river at this point,
+and on the opposite side of the river another trail is projected and
+"swamped out" direct to Fairbanks. The opening up of this route was
+expected to bring much travel through Beaver, and a town site was staked
+and many cabins built. But "Chandalar quartz" remains an interesting
+prospect, and the Chandalar placers have not proved productive, and all
+but a few of the cabins at "Beaver City" are unoccupied. If "the
+Chandalar" should ever make good, "Beaver City" will be its river port.
+
+[Sidenote: LAST DAY]
+
+We left Beaver at eleven P. M. on Friday night, hoping in two long
+all-night runs to cover the eighty miles and reach Fort Yukon by Sunday
+morning. Here was the first trail since we left Stephen's Village and
+the first fairly good trail since we left Tanana, for there had been
+some recent travel between Fort Yukon and Beaver. Here for the first
+time we had no need of snow-shoes, and when they have been worn
+virtually all the winter through and nigh a couple of thousand miles
+travelled in them, walking is strange at first in the naked moccasin. It
+is a blessed relief, however, to be rid of even the lightest of trail
+snow-shoes. We stepped out gaily into a beautiful clear night, with a
+sharp tang of frost in the air, and even the dogs rejoiced in the
+knowledge that the end of the journey was at hand. All night long we
+made good time and kept it up without a stop until eight o'clock in the
+morning, when we reached an inhabited but just then unoccupied cabin and
+ate supper or breakfast as one chooses to call it and went to bed,
+having covered fully half the distance to Fort Yukon. About noon we were
+rudely awakened by one of the usual Alaskan accompaniments of
+approaching summer. The heat of the sun was melting the snow above us,
+and water came trickling through the dirt roof upon our bed. We moved to
+a dry part of the cabin and slept again until the evening, and at nine
+P. M. entered upon what we hoped would be our last run.
+
+But once more our plans to spend Sunday were frustrated. The trail led
+through dry sloughs from which the advancing thaw had removed the snow
+in great patches. Sometimes the sled had to be hauled over bare sand;
+sometimes wide detours had to be made to avoid such sand; sometimes
+pools of open water covered with only that night's ice lay across our
+path. By eight o'clock in the morning we estimated that we were not more
+than seven or eight miles from Fort Yukon. But already the snow grew
+soft and our feet wet, and the dogs were very weary with the eleven
+hours' mushing. It would take a long time and much toil to plough
+through slush, even that seven or eight miles. So I gave the word to
+stop, and we made an open-air camp on a sunny bank, and after breakfast
+we covered our heads in the blankets from the glare of the sun, and
+slept till five. Then we ate our last trail meal, and were washed up and
+packed up and hitched up an hour and more before the snow was frozen
+enough for travel. A couple of hours' run took us to Fort Yukon, and so
+ended the winter journey of 1910-11, on the 23d of April, having been
+started on the 17th of November. We were back none too soon. Every day
+we should have found travelling decidedly worse. In a few more days the
+river would have begun to open in places, and only the middle would be
+safe for travel, with streams of water against either bank and no way of
+getting ashore. Seventeen days later the ice was gone out and the Yukon
+flowing bank full.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[G] The "claim" on a creek on which gold is first found is called
+"Discovery"; the claims above are numbered one, two, three, etc.,
+"above" and the claims below, one, two, three, etc., "below."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE NATIVES OF ALASKA
+
+
+WHEN one contemplates the native people of the interior of Alaska in the
+mass, when, with the stories told by the old men and old women of the
+days before they saw the white man in mind, one reconstructs that
+primitive life, lacking any of the implements, the conveniences, the
+alleviations of civilisation, the chief feeling that arises is a feeling
+of admiration and respect.
+
+What a hardy people they must have been! How successfully for untold
+generations did they pit themselves against the rigour of this most
+inhospitable climate! With no tool but the stone-axe and the flint
+knife, with no weapon but the bow and arrow and spear, with no material
+for fish nets but root fibres, or for fish-hooks or needles but bone,
+and with no means of fire making save two dry sticks--one wonders at the
+skill and patient endurance that rendered subsistence possible at all.
+And there follows quickly upon such wonder a hot flush of indignation
+that, after so conquering their savage environment or accommodating
+themselves to it, that they not only held their own but increased
+throughout the land, they should be threatened with a wanton
+extermination now that the resources of civilisation are opened to them,
+now that tools and weapons and the knowledge of easier and more
+comfortable ways of life are available.
+
+The natives of the interior are of two races, the Indian and the
+Esquimau. The Indian inhabits the valley of the Yukon down to within
+three or four hundred miles of its mouth; the Esquimau occupies the
+lower reaches of the Yukon and the Kuskokwim and the whole of the rivers
+that drain into the Arctic Ocean west and north. These inland Esquimaux
+are of the same race as the coast Esquimaux and constitute an
+interesting people, of whom something has been said in the account of
+journeys through their country.
+
+[Sidenote: THE ATHABASCANS]
+
+The Indians of the interior are of one general stock, the Athabascan, as
+it is called, and of two main languages derived from a common root but
+differing as much perhaps as Spanish and Portuguese. The language of the
+upper Yukon (and by this term in these pages is meant the upper American
+Yukon) is almost identical with the language of the lower Mackenzie,
+from which region, doubtless, these people came, and with it have always
+maintained intercourse. The theory of the Asiatic origin of the natives
+of interior Alaska has always seemed fanciful and far-fetched to the
+writer. The same translations of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer
+serve for the lower Mackenzie and the upper Yukon and are in active use
+to-day through all that wide region, despite minor dialectical
+variations.
+
+Near the lower ramparts of the Yukon, at Stephen's Village, the language
+changes and the new tongue maintains itself, though with continually
+increasing dialectical differences, until the Indians overlap the
+Esquimaux, six hundred miles farther down.
+
+Fort Yukon is the most populous place on the river, and the last place
+on the river, where the upper language, or Takhud, is spoken. A stretch
+of one hundred and fifty miles separates it from the next native
+village, and the inhabitants of that village are not intelligible to the
+Fort Yukon Indians--an unintelligibility which seems to speak of long
+ages of little intercourse.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The history of the migrations of the Indians from the Athabascan or
+Mackenzie region is impossible to trace now. It is highly probable that
+the movement was by way of the Porcupine River. And it would seem that
+there must have been two distinct migrations: one that passed down the
+Yukon to the Tanana district and spread thence up the Tanana River and
+up the Koyukuk; and long after, as one supposes, a migration that
+peopled the upper Yukon. A portion of this last migration must have gone
+across country to the Ketchumstock and the upper Tanana, for the
+inhabitants of the upper Tanana do not speak the Tanana tongue, which is
+the tongue of the Middle Yukon but a variant of the tongue of the upper
+Yukon.
+
+[Illustration: A DOCILE FOLK, EAGER FOR INSTRUCTION.]
+
+[Illustration: THE MISSION TYPE.]
+
+[Illustration: WILD AND SHY.]
+
+How long ago these migrations took place there is not the slightest
+knowledge to base even a surmise upon. The natives themselves have no
+records nor even traditions, and the first point of contact between
+white men and the natives of the interior is within three quarters of a
+century ago. It may have been two or three families only which
+penetrated to this region or to that and settled there, and what
+pressure started them on their wanderings no one will ever know. Perhaps
+some venturesome hunter pursuing his game across the highlands that
+separate the Mackenzie from the Yukon was disabled and compelled to
+remain until the summer, and then discovered the salmon that made their
+way up the tributaries of the Porcupine. The Mackenzie has no salmon. Or
+a local tribal quarrel may have sent fugitives over the divide.
+
+When first the white man came to the upper Yukon, in 1846 and 1847, no
+one knew that it was the same river at the mouth of which the Russians
+had built Redoubt Saint Michael ten or twelve years before. The natives
+of the upper river knew nothing about the lower river. It is an easy
+matter to float down the Yukon for a thousand miles in a birch-bark
+canoe, but an exceedingly difficult matter to come up again. It was not
+until the voyageurs of the Hudson Bay Company, in their adventurous
+fur-trading expeditions, met at the mouth of the Tanana River the agents
+of the Russian Fur Company, come up from Nulato on the same quest, that
+the identity of the Yukon and Kwikpak Rivers was discovered; and that
+seems to have been well past the middle of the century. In the map of
+North America that the writer first used at school, the Yukon flowed
+north into the Arctic Ocean, parallel with the Mackenzie.
+
+[Sidenote: AN INOFFENSIVE PEOPLE]
+
+The Indians of the interior of Alaska are a gentle and kindly and
+tractable people. They have old traditions of bloody tribal warfare that
+have grown in ferocity, one supposes, with the lapse of time, for it is
+very difficult for one who knows them to believe that so mild a race
+could ever have been pugnacious or bloodthirsty. Whether it were that
+the exigencies of subsistence under arctic conditions demanded almost
+all their energies, or that a realisation of their constant dependence
+upon one another checked the play of passion, they differ most widely
+and, it seems certain, always differed most widely in character from the
+Indians of the American plains. A personal knowledge of the greater part
+of all the natives of interior Alaska, gained by living amongst them and
+travelling from village to village during seven or eight years,
+furnishes but a single instance of an Indian man guilty of any sort of
+violence against another Indian or against a white man--except under the
+influence of liquor.
+
+It is true that there are unquestioned murders that have been
+committed--murders of white men at that; but in the sixty years from the
+Nulato massacre of 1851, over the whole vast interior, these crimes can
+be counted on the fingers of one hand. They are not a revengeful people.
+They do not cherish the memory of injuries and await opportunities of
+repayment; that trait is foreign to their character. On the contrary,
+they are exceedingly placable and bear no malice. Moreover, they are
+very submissive, even to the point of being imposed upon. In fact, they
+are decidedly a timid people in the matter of personal encounter. In all
+these characteristics they differ from the North American Indian
+generally as he appears in history.
+
+They are capable of hard work, though apparently not of continuous hard
+work; they will cheerfully support great privation and fatigue; but
+when the immediate necessity is past they enjoy long periods of feasting
+and leisure. Having no property nor desire of property, save their
+clothes, their implements and weapons, and the rude furnishings of their
+cabins, there is no incentive to hard and continuous work.
+
+After all, where is the high and peculiar virtue that lies in the
+performance of continuous hard work? Why should any one labour
+incessantly? This is the question the Indian would ask, and one is not
+always sure that the mills of Massachusetts and the coal-mines of
+Pennsylvania return an entirely satisfactory answer. As regards thrift,
+the Indian knows little of it; but the average white man of the country
+does not know much more. There is little difference as regards thrift
+between wasting one's substance in a "potlatch," which is a feast for
+all comers, and wasting it in drunkenness, which is a feast for the
+liquor sellers, save that one is barbarous and the other civilised, as
+the terms go.
+
+It would seem that the general timidity of the native character is the
+reason for a very general untruthfulness, though there one must speak
+with qualification and exception. There are Indians whose word may be
+taken as unhesitatingly as the word of any white man, and there are
+white men in the country whose word carries no more assurance than the
+word of any Indian. The Indian is prone to evasion and quibbling rather
+than to downright lying, though there are many who are utterly
+unreliable and untrustworthy.
+
+[Sidenote: SEXUAL MORALITY]
+
+In the matter of sexual morality the Indian standards are very low,
+though certainly not any lower than the standards of the average white
+man in the country. One is forced to this constant comparison; the white
+man in the country is the only white man the Indian knows anything
+about. To the Indian a physical act is merely a physical act; all down
+his generations there has been no moral connotation therewith, and it is
+hard to change the point of view of ages when it affects personal
+indulgence so profoundly. The white man has been taught, down as many
+ages, perhaps, that these physical acts have moral connotation and are
+illicit when divorced therefrom, yet he is as careless and immoral in
+this country as the Indian is careless and _un_moral. And the white
+man's careless and immoral conduct is the chief obstacle which those who
+would engraft upon the Indian the moral consciousness must contend
+against.
+
+The Indian woman is not chaste because the Indian man does not demand
+chastity of her, does not set any special value upon her chastity as
+such. And the example of the chastity which the white man demands of his
+women, though he be not chaste himself, is an example with which the
+native of Alaska has not come much into contact. Too often, in the
+vicinity of mining camps, the white women who are most in evidence are
+of another class.
+
+[Sidenote: GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS]
+
+The Indian is commonly intelligent and teachable, and in most cases
+eager to learn and eager that his children may learn. Here it becomes
+necessary to deal with a difficult and somewhat contentious matter that
+one would rather let alone. The government has undertaken the education
+of the Indian, and has set up a bureau charged with the establishment
+and conduct of native schools.
+
+There are five such schools on the Yukon between Eagle and Tanana,
+including these two points, amongst Indians all of whom belong to the
+Episcopal Church, and five more between Tanana and Anvik, amongst
+natives divided in allegiance between the Episcopal and the Roman
+Catholic Churches. Below Anvik to the river's mouth the natives are
+divided between the Roman and the Greek Churches, and they are outside
+the scope of this book. On the tributaries of the Yukon the only native
+schools are conducted by the missions of the Episcopal Church, on the
+Koyukuk and Tanana Rivers, and have no connection with the government.
+
+When, somewhat late in the day, the government set its hand to the
+education of the natives, mission schools had been conducted for many
+years at the five stations of the Episcopal Church above Tanana and at
+the various mission stations below that point. The Bureau of Education
+professed its earnest purpose of working in harmony with the mission
+authorities, and upon this profession it secured deeds of gift for
+government school sites within the mission reservations from the Bishop
+of Alaska.
+
+It cannot be stated, upon a survey of the last five or six years, that
+this profession has been carried out. The administration of the Bureau
+of Education has shared too much the common fault of other departments
+of the government in a detached and lofty, not to say supercilious,
+attitude. Things are not necessarily right because a government bureau
+orders them, nor are government officials invested with superior wisdom
+merely by reason of their connection with Washington. It is just as
+important for a government school as for a mission school to be in
+harmony with its environment, to adapt itself to the needs of the people
+it designs to serve; and that harmony and adaptation may only be secured
+by a single-minded study of the situation and of the habits and
+character, the occupations and resources of the people.
+
+To keep a school in session when the population of a village is gone on
+its necessary occasions of hunting or trapping, and to have the annual
+recess when all the population is returned again, is folly, whoever
+orders it, in accord with what time-honoured routine soever, and this
+has not infrequently been done. Moreover, it is folly to fail to
+recognise that the apprenticeship of an Indian boy to the arts by which
+he must make a living, the arts of hunting and trapping, is more
+important than schooling, however important the latter may be, and that
+any talk--and there has been loud talk--of a compulsory education law
+which shall compel such boys to be in school at times when they should
+be off in the wilds with their parents, is worse than mere folly, and
+would, if carried out, be a fatal blunder. If such boys grow up
+incompetent to make a living out of the surrounding wilderness, whence
+shall their living come?
+
+The next step would be the issuing of rations, and that would mean the
+ultimate degradation and extinction of the natives. When the question is
+stated in its baldest terms, is the writer perverse and barbarous and
+uncivilised if he avow his belief that a race of hardy, peaceful,
+independent, self-supporting illiterates is of more value and worthy of
+more respect than a race of literate paupers? Be it remembered also that
+many of these "illiterates" can read the Bible in their own tongue and
+can make written communication with one another in the same--very
+scornful as the officials of the bureau have been about such attainment.
+One grows a little impatient sometimes when a high official at
+Washington writes in response to a request for permission to use a
+school building _after_ school hours, for a class of instruction in the
+native Bible, that the law requires that all instruction in the school
+be in the English language, and that it is against the policy of
+Congress to use public money for religious instruction! When the
+thermometer drops to 50 deg. below zero and stays there for a couple of
+weeks, it is an expensive matter to heat a church for a Bible class
+three times a week--and the schoolhouse is already cosy and warm.
+
+But the question does not reduce itself to the bald terms referred to
+above; by proper advantage of times and seasons the Indian boy may have
+all the English education that will be of any service to him, and may
+yet serve his apprenticeship in the indispensable wilderness arts. And,
+given a kindly and competent teacher, there is no need of any sort of
+compulsion to bring Indian boys and girls to school when they are within
+reach of it.
+
+The Indian school problem is not an easy one in the sense that it can be
+solved by issuing rules and regulations at Washington, but it can be
+solved by sympathetic study and by the careful selection of intelligent,
+cultured teachers.
+
+After all, this last is the most important requisite. Too often it is
+assumed that any one can teach ignorant youth: and women with no culture
+at all, or with none beyond the bald "pedagogy" of a low-grade
+schoolroom, have been sent to Alaska. There have, indeed, been notable
+exceptions; there have been some very valuable and capable teachers, and
+with such there has never been friction at the missions, but glad
+co-operation.
+
+The situation shows signs of improvement; there are signs of withdrawal
+from its detached and supercilious attitude on the part of the bureau,
+signs which are very welcome to those connected with the missions. For
+the best interest of the native demands that the two agencies at work
+for his good work heartily and sympathetically together. The missions
+can do without the government--did do without it for many years, though
+glad of the government's aid in carrying the burden of the schools--but
+the government cannot do without the missions; and if the missions were
+forced to the re-establishment of their own schools, there would be
+empty benches in the schools of the government.
+
+[Sidenote: THE THREAT OF EXTINCTION]
+
+That the Indian race of interior Alaska is threatened with extinction,
+there is unhappily little room to doubt; and that the threat may be
+averted is the hope and labour of the missionaries amongst them. At most
+places where vital statistics are kept the death-rate exceeds the
+birth-rate, though it is sometimes very difficult to secure accurate
+statistics and to be sure that they always cover the same ground. The
+natives wander; within certain territorial limits they wander widely.
+Whenever a child is born it is certain that if it lives long enough it
+will be brought to a mission to be baptized, but a death often occurs at
+some isolated camp that is not reported till long after, and may escape
+registration altogether.
+
+Certain diseases that have played havoc in the past are not much feared
+now. For the last seven years supplies of the diphtheritic antitoxin
+have been kept at all the missions of the Episcopal Church, and in the
+summer of 1911, when there was an outbreak of smallpox at Porcupine
+River, almost every Indian of interior Alaska was vaccinated, mainly by
+the mission staffs. Diphtheria has been a dreadful scourge. The valley
+of the upper Kuskokwim was almost depopulated by it in 1906. A disease
+resembling measles took half the population of the lower Yukon villages
+in 1900. In the last few years there have been no serious epidemics; but
+epidemic disease does not constitute the chief danger that threatens the
+native.
+
+[Sidenote: DWELLING AND CLOTHING]
+
+That chief danger looms from two things: tuberculosis and whisky.
+Whether tuberculosis is a disease indigenous to these parts, or whether
+it was introduced with the white man, has been disputed and would be
+difficult of determination. Probably it was always present amongst the
+natives; the old ones declare that it was; but the changed conditions of
+their lives have certainly much aggravated it. They lived much more in
+the open when they had no tree-felling tool but a stone-axe and did not
+build cabins. The winter residence in those days was, it is true, a
+dark, half-underground hut covered with earth and poles, but the time of
+residence therein was much shorter; the skin tent sheltered them most of
+the year. Indeed, some tribes, such as the Chandalar, lived in their
+skin tents the year round. Now an ill-ventilated and very commonly
+overcrowded cabin shelters them most of the year. It is true that the
+cabins are constantly improving and the standard of living within them
+is constantly rising. The process is slow, despite all urgings and
+warnings, and overcrowding and lack of ventilation still prevail.
+
+[Illustration: THE NATIVE COMMUNICANT.]
+
+[Illustration: RAW MATERIAL.]
+
+Perhaps as great a cause of the spread of tuberculosis is the change in
+clothing. The original native was clad in skins, which are the warmest
+clothing in the world. Moose hide or caribou hide garments, tanned and
+smoked, are impervious to the wind, and a parkee of muskrat or squirrel,
+or, as was not uncommon in the old days, of marten, or one of caribou
+tanned with the hair on, with boots of this last material, give all the
+warmth that exposure to the coldest weather requires. Nowadays fur
+garments of any sort are not usual amongst the natives. There is a
+market, at an ever-growing price, for all the furs they can procure. A
+law has, indeed, gone recently into effect prohibiting the sale of
+beaver for a term of years, and already beaver coats and caps begin to
+appear again amongst the people. It would be an excellent, wise thing,
+worthy of a government that takes a fatherly interest in very childlike
+folks, to make this law permanent. If it were fit to prohibit the
+sale of beaver pelts for a term of years to protect the beaver, surely
+it would be proper to perpetuate the enactment to protect the Indian. It
+would mean warm clothing for man, woman, and child.
+
+[Illustration: AN ESQUIMAU YOUTH.]
+
+[Illustration: A HALF-BREED INDIAN.]
+
+[Sidenote: THE INDIAN TRADER]
+
+The Indian usually sells all his furs and then turns round and buys
+manufactured clothing from the trader at a fancy price. That clothing is
+almost always cotton and shoddy. Genuine woollens are not to be found in
+the Indian trader's stock at all, and in whatever guise it may
+masquerade, and by whatever alias it may pass, the native wear is
+cotton. Yet there is no country in the world where it is more
+imperative, for the preservation of health, that wool be worn.
+
+However much fur the Indian may catch and sell, he is always poor. He is
+paid in trade, not in cash; and when the merchant has bought the
+Indian's catch of fur he straightway spreads out before him an alluring
+display of goods specially manufactured for native trade. Here are
+brilliant cotton velvets and sateens and tinselled muslins and gay
+ribbons that take the eye of his women folk; here are trays of Brummagem
+knickknacks, brass watches, and rings set with coloured glass, gorgeous
+celluloid hair combs, mirrors with elaborate, gilded frames, and brass
+lamps with "hand-painted" shades and dangling lustres; here are German
+accordions and mouth-organs and all sorts of pocket-knives and
+alarm-clocks--the greatest collection of glittering and noisy trash that
+can be imagined, bought at so much a dozen and retailed, usually, at
+about the same price for one. And when the Indian has done his trading
+the trader has most of his money back again.
+
+The news that an Indian has caught a black fox, the most exciting item
+of news that ever flies around a native village, does not give any great
+pleasure to one who is acquainted with native conditions, because he
+knows that it will bring little real benefit to the Indian. There will
+be keen competition, within limits, of course, amongst the traders for
+it; and the fortunate trapper may get three or four hundred dollars in
+trade for a skin that will fetch eight hundred or a thousand in cash on
+the London market; but if his wife get the solid advantage of a new
+cooking-stove or a sewing-machine from it she is doing well.
+
+Food the Indian never buys much beyond his present need, unless it is to
+squander it in feast after feast, to which every one is invited and at
+which there is the greatest lavishness. If a son is born, or a black fox
+is caught, or a member of the family recovers from a severe illness,
+custom permits, if it do not actually demand, that a "potlatch" be
+given, and most Indians are eager, whenever they are able, to be the
+heroes of the prandial hour.
+
+So he, his women, and his children go clad mainly in cotton, and there
+is abundant evidence that the tendency to pulmonary trouble, always
+latent amongst them, is developed by the severe colds which they catch
+through the inadequate covering of their bodies, and is then cherished
+into virulent activity by the close atmosphere of overcrowded,
+overheated cabins.
+
+The missions help the Indians, especially the women and children, in
+this matter of clothing as much as possible. Every year large bales of
+good though left-off under and over wear are secured through church
+organisations outside, and are traded to the natives at nominal prices,
+usually for fish or game or a little labour in sawing wood. And this
+naturally does not ingratiate missions with the trading class. One's
+anger is aroused sometimes at seeing the cotton-flannel underclothes and
+"cotton-filled" blankets and the "all-wool" cotton coats and trousers
+which they pay high prices for at the stores. The Canadian Indians, who
+are their neighbours, buy genuine Hudson Bay blankets and other real
+woollen goods, but the Alaskan Indian can buy nothing but cotton.
+
+But far and away beyond any other cause of the native decline stands the
+curse of the country, whisky. Recognising by its long Indian experience
+the consequences of forming liquor-drinking habits amongst the natives,
+the government has forbidden under penalty the giving or selling of any
+intoxicants to them. A few years ago a new law passed making such giving
+or selling a felony. These laws are largely a dead letter.
+
+[Sidenote: UNPAID COMMISSIONERS]
+
+The country is a very large one, very sparsely populated; the distances
+are enormous, the means of transportation entirely primitive, and the
+police and legal machinery insufficient to the end of suppressing this
+illicit traffic, especially in view of the fact that a considerable part
+of the whole population does not look with favour upon any vigorous
+attempt to suppress it. Great areas of the country are without
+telegraphic communication, and in parts mail is received only once a
+month. One stretch of two hundred and fifty miles of the Yukon receives
+no mail at all during the winter months--more than half the year. In
+that instance, as in many others, the country has gone distinctly
+backward in the past few years. The magistrates--"commissioners" they
+are called, receive no salary, but eke out a precarious and often
+wretched existence on fees, so that it is frequently impossible to get
+men of character and capacity to accept such offices.
+
+One would have supposed that amongst all the legislating that has been
+done for and about Alaska in the last year or two, one crying evil that
+the attention of successive administrations has been called to for
+twenty years past would have been remedied. That evil is the unpaid
+magistrate and the vicious fee system by which he must make a living. It
+is a system that has been abolished in nearly all civilised countries; a
+system that lends itself to all sorts of petty abuse; a system that no
+one pretends to defend. No greater single step in advance could be made
+in the government of Alaska, no measure could be enacted that would tend
+to bring about in greater degree respect for the law than the abolition
+of the unpaid magistracy and the setting up of a body of stipendiaries
+of character and ability.
+
+The anomalies of the present situation are in some cases amusing. At one
+place on the Yukon it is only possible for a man to make a living as
+United States commissioner if he can combine the office of postmaster
+with it. A man who was removed as commissioner still retained the
+post-office, and no one could be found to accept the vacant judgeship.
+In another precinct the commissioner was moving all those whom he
+thought had influence to get him appointed deputy marshal instead of
+commissioner, because the deputy marshal gets a salary of two thousand
+dollars a year and allowances, which was more than the commissionership
+yielded. One is reminded of some comic-opera topsyturvyism when the
+judge tries in vain to get off the bench and be appointed constable. It
+sounds like the _Bab Ballads_. The district court is compelled to wink
+at irregularities of life and conduct in its commissioners because it
+cannot get men of a higher stamp to accept its appointments.
+
+[Sidenote: LIQUOR AND POLITICS]
+
+The only policemen are deputy United States marshals, primarily
+process-servers and not at all fitted in the majority of cases for any
+sort of detective work. Their appointment is often dictated and their
+action often hampered by political considerations. The liquor interest
+is very strong and knows how to bring pressure to bear against a marshal
+who is offensively active. They are responsible only to the United
+States marshal of their district, and he is responsible to the
+attorney-general, the head of the department of justice. But Washington
+is a long way off, and the attorney-general is a very busy man, not
+without his own interest, moreover, in politics. An attempt to get some
+notice taken of a particular case in which it was the general opinion
+that an energetic and vigilant deputy had been removed, and an elderly
+lethargic man substituted, because of too great activity in the
+prosecution of liquor cases, resulted in the conviction that what
+should have been a matter of administrative righteousness only was a
+political matter as well.
+
+The threatened extinction of the Alaskan native was referred to as
+wanton, and the term was used in the sense that there are no necessary
+natural causes fighting against his survival.
+
+Here is no economic pressure of white settlers determined to occupy the
+land, such as drove the Indians of the plains farther and farther west
+until there was no more west to be driven to. If such delusion possess
+any mind as a result of foolish newspaper and magazine writings, let it
+be dismissed at once. No man who has lived in the country and travelled
+in the country will countenance such notion. The white men in Alaska are
+miners and prospectors, trappers and traders, wood-choppers and
+steamboat men. Around a mining camp will be found a few truck-farmers;
+alongside road-houses and wood camps will often be found flourishing
+vegetable gardens, but outside of such agriculture there are, speaking
+broadly, no farmers at all in the interior of Alaska. Probably a
+majority of all the homesteads that have been taken up have been located
+that the trees on them might be cut down and hauled to town to be sold
+for fire-wood. A few miles away from the towns there are no homesteads,
+except perhaps on a well-travelled trail where a man has homesteaded a
+road-house.
+
+[Illustration: AN AGED COUPLE.]
+
+[Illustration: FOOTBALL AT THE ALLAKAKET, EXPOSURE 1-1000 SECOND, APRIL,
+AFTER A NEW LIGHT SNOWFALL.]
+
+All the settlements in the country are on the rivers, save the purely
+mining settlements that die and are abandoned as the placers play out.
+Yet one will travel two hundred and fifty miles up the Porcupine--till
+Canada is reached--and pass not more than three white men's cabins, all
+of them trappers; one will travel three hundred and fifty miles up the
+Koyukuk before the first white man's cabin is reached, and as many miles
+up the Innoko and the Iditarod and find no white men save wood-choppers.
+There are a few more white men on the Tanana than on any other tributary
+of the Yukon, because Fairbanks is on that river and there is more
+steamboat traffic, but they are mainly wood-choppers, while on the
+lesser tributaries of the Yukon, it is safe to say, there are no settled
+white men at all. As soon as one leaves the rivers and starts across
+country one is in the uninhabited wilderness.
+
+The writer is no prophet; he cannot tell what may happen agriculturally
+in Alaska or the rest of the arctic regions when the world outside is
+filled up and all unfrozen lands are under cultivation. Still less is he
+one who would belittle a country he has learned to love or detract in
+any way from its due claims to the attention of mankind. There is in the
+territory a false newspaper sentiment that every one who lives in the
+land should be continually singing extravagant praises of it and
+continually making extravagant claims for it. A man may love Alaska
+because he believes it to have "vast agricultural possibilities,"
+because, in his visions, he sees its barren wilds transformed into
+"waving fields of golden grain." But a man may also love it who regards
+all such visions as delusions.
+
+[Sidenote: FOOD AND FURS]
+
+The game and the fish of Alaska, the natural subsistence of the Indian,
+are virtually undiminished. Vast herds of caribou still wander on the
+hills, and far more are killed every year by wolves than by men. Great
+numbers of moose still roam the lowlands. The rivers still teem with
+salmon and grayling and the lakes with whitefish, ling, and lush. Unless
+the outrage of canneries should be permitted at the mouths of the
+Yukon--and that would threaten the chief subsistence of all the Indians
+of the interior--there seems no danger of permanent failure of the
+salmon run, though, of course, it varies greatly from year to year.
+Furs, though they diminish in number, continually rise in price. There
+are localities, it is true, where the game has been largely killed off
+and the furs trapped out; the Koyukuk country is one of them, though
+perhaps that region never was a very good game country. In this region,
+when a few years ago there was a partial failure of the salmon, there
+was distress amongst the Indians. But the country on the whole is almost
+as good an Indian country as ever it was, and there are few signs that
+it tends otherwise, though things happen so quickly and changes come
+with so little warning in Alaska that one does not like to be too
+confident.
+
+The Indian is the only settled inhabitant of interior Alaska to-day; for
+the prospectors and miners, who constitute the bulk of the white
+population, are not often very long in one place. Many of them might
+rightly be classed as permanent, but very few as settled inhabitants. It
+is the commonest thing to meet men a thousand miles away from the place
+where one met them last. A new "strike" will draw men from every mining
+camp in Alaska. A big strike will shift the centre of gravity of the
+whole white population in a few months. Indeed, a certain restless
+belief in the superior opportunities of some other spot is one of the
+characteristics of the prospector. The tide of white men that has flowed
+into an Indian neighbourhood gradually ebbs away and leaves the Indian
+behind with new habits, with new desires, with new diseases, with new
+vices, and with a varied assortment of illegitimate half-breed children
+to support. The Indian remains, usually in diminished numbers, with
+impaired character, with lowered physique, with the tag-ends of the
+white man's blackguardism as his chief acquirement in English--but he
+remains.
+
+It is unquestionable that the best natives in the country are those that
+have had the least intimacy with the white man, and it follows that the
+most hopeful and promising mission stations are those far up the
+tributary streams, away from mining camps and off the routes of travel,
+difficult of access, winter or summer, never seen by tourists at all;
+seen only of those who seek them with cost and trouble. At such stations
+the improvement of the Indian is manifest and the population increases.
+By reason of their remoteness they are very expensive to equip and
+maintain, but they are well worth while. One such has been described on
+the Koyukuk; another, at this writing, is establishing with equal
+promise at the Tanana Crossing, one of the most difficult points to
+reach in all interior Alaska.
+
+This chapter must not close without a few words about the native
+children. Dirty, of course, they almost always are; children in a state
+of nature will always be dirty, and even those farthest removed from
+that state show a marked tendency to revert to it; but when one has
+become sufficiently used to their dirt to be able to ignore it, they are
+very attractive. Intolerance of dirt is largely an acquired habit
+anyway. In view of their indulgent rearing, for Indian parents are
+perhaps the most indulgent in the world, they are singularly docile;
+they have an affectionate disposition and are quick and eager to learn.
+Many of them are very pretty, with a soft beauty of complexion and a
+delicate moulding of feature that are lost as they grow older. It takes
+some time to overcome their shyness and win their confidence, but when
+friendly relations have been established one grows very fond of them.
+Foregathering with them again is distinctly something to look forward to
+upon the return to a mission, and to see them come running, to have them
+press around, thrusting their little hands into one's own or hanging to
+one's coat, is a delight that compensates for much disappointment with
+the grown ups. In the midst of such a crowd of healthy, vivacious
+youngsters, clear-eyed, clean-limbed, and eager, one positively refuses
+to be hopeless about the race.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE ARCTIC
+
+
+THERE is no country in which an anastigmatic lens is of more use to the
+photographer than Alaska, and every camera with which it is hoped to
+take winter scenes should have this equipment. During two or three
+months in the year it makes the difference in practice between getting
+photographs and getting none. In theory one may always set up a tripod
+and increase length of exposure as light diminishes. But the most
+interesting scenes, the most attractive effects often present themselves
+under the severest conditions of weather, and he must be an enthusiast,
+indeed, who will get his tripod from the sled, pull out its telescoped
+tubes, set it up and adjust it for a picture with the thermometer at 40 deg.
+or 50 deg. below zero; and when he is done he is very likely to be a frozen
+enthusiast.
+
+With an anastigmatic lens working at, say f. 6-3, and with a "speed"
+film (glass plates are utterly out of the question on the trail), it is
+possible to make a snap-shot at one twenty-fifth of a second on a clear
+day, around noon, even in the dead of winter, in any part of Alaska that
+the writer has travelled in. There are those who write that they can
+always hold a camera still enough to get a sharp negative at even one
+tenth of a second. Probably the personal equation counts largely in
+such a matter, and a man of very decided phlegmatic temperament may have
+advantage over his more sanguine and nervous brother. The thing may be
+done; the writer has done it himself; but the point is it cannot be
+depended on; at this speed three out of four of his exposures will be
+blurred, whereas at one twenty-fifth of a second a sharp, clear negative
+may always be secured.
+
+It may be admitted at once that at extremely low temperatures the
+working of any shutter becomes doubtful, and most of them go out of any
+reliable action altogether. After trying and failing completely with
+three or four of the more expensive makes of shutters, the writer has
+for the last few years used a "Volute" with general satisfaction, though
+in the great cold even that shutter (from which all trace of grease or
+oil was carefully removed by the makers) is somewhat slowed up, so that
+a rare exposure at 50 deg. or 60 deg. below zero would be made at an indicated
+speed of one fiftieth rather than at one twenty-fifth, taking the chance
+of an under-exposed rather than a blurred negative. To wish for a
+shutter of absolute correctness and of absolute dependability under all
+circumstances, arranged for exposures of one fifteenth and one twentieth
+as well as one tenth and one twenty-fifth, is probably to wish for the
+unobtainable.
+
+[Sidenote: CARE OF FILMS AND CAMERAS]
+
+The care of the camera and the films, exposed and unexposed, the winter
+through, when travelling on the Alaskan trail, is a very important and
+very simple matter, though not generally learned until many negatives
+have been spoiled and sometimes lenses injured. It may be summed up in
+one general rule--keep instrument and films always outdoors.
+
+One unfamiliar with arctic conditions would not suppose that much
+trouble would be caused by that arch-enemy of all photographic
+preparations and apparatus--damp, in a country where the thermometer
+rarely goes above freezing the winter through; and that is a just
+conclusion provided such things be kept in the natural temperature,
+outdoors. But consider the great range of temperature when the
+thermometer stands at -50 deg. outdoors, and, say, 75 deg. indoors. Here is a
+difference of 125 deg.. Anything wooden or metallic, especially anything
+metallic, brought into the house immediately condenses the moisture with
+which the warm interior atmosphere is laden and becomes in a few moments
+covered with frost. Gradually, as the article assumes the temperature of
+the room, the frost melts, the water is absorbed, and the damage is done
+as surely as though it had been soused in a bucket. If it be necessary
+to take camera and films indoors for an interior view--which one does
+somewhat reluctantly--the films must be taken at once to the stove and
+the camera only very gradually; leaving the latter on the floor, the
+coldest part of the room, for a while and shifting its position nearer
+and nearer until the frost it has accumulated begins to melt, whereupon
+it should be placed close to the heat that the water may evaporate as
+fast as it forms.
+
+Outdoors, camera and films alike are perfectly safe, however intense the
+cold. Indeed, films keep almost indefinitely in the cold and do not
+deteriorate at all. One learns, by and by, to have all films sent
+sealed up in tin cans, _and to put them back and seal them up again when
+exposed_, despite the maker's instructions not to do so. The maker knows
+the rules, but the user learns the exceptions. When films are thus
+protected they may be taken indoors or left out indifferently, as no
+moist air can get to them.
+
+The rule given is one that all men in this country follow with firearms.
+They are always left outdoors, and no iron will rust outdoors in the
+winter. Unless a man intend to take his gun to pieces and clean it
+thoroughly, he never brings it in the house. The writer has on several
+occasions removed an exposed film and inserted a new one outdoors, using
+the loaded sled for a table, at 50 deg. below zero; taking the chance of
+freezing his fingers rather than of ruining the film. It is an
+interesting exercise in dexterity of manipulation. Everything that can
+be done with the mittened hand is done, the material is placed within
+easy reach--then off with the mittens and gloves, and make the change as
+quickly as may be!
+
+There is just one brief season in the year when high speeds of shutters
+may be used: in the month of April, when a new flurry of snow has put a
+mantle of dazzling whiteness upon the earth and the sun mounts
+comparatively high in the heavens. Under such circumstances there is
+almost, if not quite, tropical illumination. Here is a picture of native
+football at the Allakaket, just north of the Arctic Circle, made late in
+April with a Graflex, fitted with a lens working at f. 4.5, at the full
+speed of its focal-plane shutter--one one-thousandth of a second. In
+five years' use that was the only time when that speed was used, or any
+speed above one two-hundred-and-fiftieth. Commonly, even in summer, many
+more exposures are made with it at one fiftieth than at one
+one-hundredth, for this is not a brightly lit country in summer, and
+nearly all visitors and tourists find their negatives much under-timed.
+
+The Graflex, though unapproached in its own sphere, is not a good
+all-round camera, despite confident assertions to the contrary. It is
+too bulky to carry at all in the winter, and its mechanism is apt to
+refuse duty in the cold. The 3A Graflex cannot be turned to make a
+perpendicular photograph, but must always be used with the greatest
+dimension horizontal. Except in brilliant sunshine it is difficult to
+get a sharp focus, and, even though the focus appear sharp on the ground
+glass, the negative may prove blurred. Then the instrument is a great
+dust catcher and seems to have been constructed with a perverse
+ingenuity so as to make it as difficult as possible to clean.
+
+The writer uses his Graflex almost solely for native portraits and
+studies, for which purpose it is admirable, and has enabled him to
+secure negatives that he could not have obtained with any other hand
+camera. Even in the summer, however, he always carries his 3A Folding
+Pocket Kodak as well, and uses it instead of the Graflex for landscapes
+and large groups. If he had to choose between the two instruments and
+confine himself to one, he would unhesitatingly choose the Folding
+Pocket Kodak.
+
+The difficulties of winter photography in Alaska do not end with the
+making of the exposure. All water must be brought up in a bucket from a
+water-hole in the river, and though it be clear water when it is dipped
+up from under the ice, it is chiefly ice by the time it reaches the
+house, during any cold spell. One learns to be very economical of water
+when it is procured with such difficulty, learns to dry prints with
+blotting-paper between the successive washings, which is the best way of
+washing with the minimum of water. Blotting-paper is decidedly cheaper
+than water under some circumstances.
+
+While the rivers run perfectly clear and bright under the ice in the
+winter, in summer the turbid water of nearly all our large streams
+introduces another difficulty, and photographic operation must sometimes
+be deferred for weeks, unless the rain barrels be full or enough ice be
+found in the ice-house, over and above the domestic needs, to serve.
+
+[Sidenote: EFFECT OF COLD ON EMULSIONS]
+
+It seems certain that the speed of the sensitive emulsions with which
+the films are covered is reduced in very cold weather. To determine
+whether or not this was so, the following experiments were resorted to.
+The camera was brought out of the house half an hour before noon, at 50 deg.
+below zero, and an exposure made immediately. Then the camera was left
+in position for an hour and another exposure made. There was little
+difference in the strength of the negatives, and what difference there
+was seemed in favour of the second exposure. Evidently, if the emulsion
+had slowed, the shutter had slowed also; so opportunity was awaited to
+make a more decisive test. When there remained but one exposure on a
+roll of film, the camera was set outdoors at a temperature of 55 deg. below
+zero and left for an hour. Then an exposure was made and the film wound
+up and withdrawn; while a new film, just brought from the house, was as
+quickly as possible inserted in its place and a second exposure made.
+The latter was appreciably stronger. Even this test is, of course, not
+entirely conclusive; one would have to be quite sure that the emulsions
+were identical; but it confirms the writer's impression that extreme
+cold slows the film. It would be an easy matter for the manufacturers to
+settle this point beyond question in a modern laboratory, and it is
+certainly worth doing.
+
+There is much sameness about winter scenes in Alaska, as the reader has
+doubtless already remarked; yet the sameness is more due to a lack of
+alertness in the photographer than to an absence of variety. If the
+traveller had nothing to think about but his camera, if all other
+considerations could be subordinated to the securing of negatives, then,
+here as elsewhere, the average merit of pictures would be greater.
+Sometimes the most interesting scenes occur in the midst of stress of
+difficult travel when there is opportunity for no more than a fleeting
+recognition of their pictorial interest. "Tight places" often make
+attractive pictures, but most commonly do not get made into pictures at
+all. The study of the aspects of nature is likely to languish amidst the
+severe weather of the Northern winter, and the bright, clear, mild day
+gets photographed into undue prominence. Snow is more or less white and
+spruce-trees in the mass are more or less black; one dog team is very
+like another; a native village has to be known very well, indeed, to be
+distinguishable from another native village. Yet there is individuality,
+there is distinction, there is variety, there is contrast, if a man have
+but the grace to recognise them and the zeal to record them. Snow itself
+has infinite variety; trees, all of them, have characters of their own.
+Dogs differ as widely as men and Indians as widely as white men.
+
+[Sidenote: INDIANS AND PHOTOGRAPHS]
+
+The fear of the camera, or the dislike of the camera, that used to
+affect the native mind is gone now, save, perhaps, in certain remote
+quarters, and these interesting people are generally quite willing to
+stand still and be snapped. They ask for a print, and upon one's next
+visit there is clamorous demand for "picter, picter." A famous French
+physician said that his dread of the world to come lay in his
+expectation that the souls he met would reproach him for not having
+cured a certain obstinate malady that he had much repute in dealing
+with; so the travelling amateur in photography sometimes feels his
+conscience heavy under a load of promised pictures that he has forgotten
+or has been unable to make. He feels that his native friends whom he
+shall meet in the world to come will assuredly greet him with "where's
+my picture?" The burden increases all the time, and the Indian never
+forgets. It avails nothing even to explain that the exposure was a
+failure. A picture was promised; no picture has been given; that is as
+far as the native gets. And the making of extra prints, in the cases
+where it is possible to make them, is itself quite a tax upon time and
+material.
+
+Just as it is true that to be well informed on any subject a man must
+read a great deal and be content not to have use for a great deal that
+he reads, so to secure good photographs of spots and scenes of note as
+he travels, he must make many negatives and be content to destroy many.
+The records of a second visit in better weather or at a more favourable
+season will supersede an earlier; typical groups more casual ones. The
+standard that he exacts of himself rises and work he was content with
+contents him no more. Sometimes one is tempted to think that the main
+difference between an unsuccessful and a successful amateur photographer
+is that the former hoards all his negatives while the latter
+relentlessly burns those which do not come up to the mark--if not at
+once, yet assuredly by and by. So the surprise that one feels at many of
+the illustrations in modern books of arctic travel is not that the
+travellers made such poor photographs but that they kept them and used
+them; for there can be no question that poor photographs are worse than
+none at all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE NORTHERN LIGHTS
+
+
+THE Northern Lights are a very common phenomenon of interior Alaska,
+much more common than in the very high latitudes around the North Pole,
+for it has been pretty well determined that there is an auroral pole,
+just as there is a magnetic pole and a pole of cold, none of which
+coincides with the geographical Pole itself. All the arctic explorers
+seem agreed that north of the 80th parallel these appearances are less
+in frequency and brilliance than in the regions ten or fifteen degrees
+farther south. It may be said roundly that it is a rare thing in winter
+for a still, clear night, when there is not much moon, to pass without
+some auroral display in the interior of Alaska. As long as we have any
+night at all in the early summer, and as soon as we begin to have night
+again late in the summer, they may be seen; so that one gains the
+impression that the phenomenon occurs the year round and is merely
+rendered invisible by the perpetual daylight of midsummer.
+
+[Sidenote: A GENERAL AURORA]
+
+The Alaskan auroras seem to divide themselves into two great classes,
+those that occupy the whole heavens on a grand scale and appear to be at
+a great distance above the earth, and those that are smaller and seem
+much closer. Inasmuch as a letter written from Fort Yukon to a town in
+Massachusetts describing one of the former class brought a reply that on
+the same night a brilliant aurora was observed there also, it would seem
+that auroras on the grand scale are visible over a large part of the
+earth's surface at once, whereas the lesser manifestations, though
+sometimes of great brilliance and beauty, give one the impression of
+being local.
+
+One gets, unfortunately, so accustomed to this light in the sky in
+Alaska that it becomes a matter of course and is little noticed unless
+it be extraordinarily vivid. Again, often very splendid displays occur
+in the intensely cold weather, when, no matter how warmly one may be
+clad, it is impossible to stand still long outdoors, and outdoors an
+observer must be to follow the constant movement that accompanies the
+aurora. Moreover, there is something very tantalising in the observing,
+for it is impossible to say at what moment an ordinary waving auroral
+streamer that stretches its greenish milky light across the sky,
+beautiful yet commonplace, may burst forth into a display of the first
+magnitude, or if it will do so at all.
+
+The winter traveller has the best chance for observing this phenomenon,
+because much of his travel is done before daylight, and often much more
+than he desires or deserves is done after daylight; while, if his
+journeys be protracted so long as snow and ice serve for passage at all,
+towards spring he will travel entirely at night instead of by day.
+
+It is intended in this chapter merely to attempt a description of a few
+of the more striking auroral displays that the writer has seen, the
+accounts being transcribed from journals written within a few hours, at
+most, from the time of occurrence, and in the first case written so soon
+as he went indoors.
+
+This was on the 6th of October, 1904, at Fairbanks, a little removed
+from the town itself. When first the heavens were noticed there was one
+clear bow of milky light stretching from the northern to the southern
+horizon, reflected in the broken surface of the river, and glistening on
+the ice cakes that swirled down with the swift current. Then the
+southern end of the bow began to twist on itself until it had produced a
+queer elongated corkscrew appearance half-way up to the zenith, while
+the northern end spread out and bellied from east to west. Then the
+whole display moved rapidly across the sky until it lay low and faint on
+the western horizon, and it seemed to be all over. But before one could
+turn to go indoors a new point of light appeared suddenly high up in the
+sky and burst like a pyrotechnic bomb into a thousand pear-shaped
+globules with a molten centre flung far out to north and south. Then
+began one of the most beautiful celestial exhibitions that the writer
+has ever seen. These globules stretched into ribbon streamers, dividing
+and subdividing until the whole sky was filled with them, and these
+ribbon streamers of greenish opalescent light curved constantly inward
+and outward upon themselves, with a quick jerking movement like the
+cracking of a whip, and every time the ribbons curved, their lower edges
+frayed out, and the fringe was prismatic. The pinks and mauves flashed
+as the ribbon curved and frayed--and were gone. There was no other
+colour in the whole heavens save the milky greenish-white light, but
+every time the streamers thrashed back and forth their under edges
+fringed into the glowing tints of mother-of-pearl. Presently, the whole
+display faded out until it was gone. But, as we turned again to seek the
+warmth of the house, all at once tiny fingers of light appeared all over
+the upper sky, like the flashing of spicules of alum under a microscope
+when a solution has dried to the point of crystallisation, and stretched
+up and down, lengthening and lengthening to the horizon, and gathering
+themselves together at the zenith into a crown. Three times this was
+repeated; each time the light faded gradually but completely from the
+sky and flashed out again instantaneously.
+
+For a full hour, until it was impossible to stand gazing any longer for
+the cold, the fascinating display was watched, and how much longer it
+continued cannot be said. It was a grand general aurora, high in the
+heavens, not vividly coloured save for the prismatic fringes, but of
+brilliant illumination, and remarkable amongst all the auroras observed
+since for its sudden changes and startling climaxes. Draped auroras are
+common in this country, though it has been wrongly stated that they are
+only seen near open seas, but their undulations are generally more
+deliberate and their character maintained; this one flashed on and off
+and changed its nature as though some finger were pressing buttons that
+controlled the electrical discharges of the universe. Yet it was noticed
+that even in its brightest moments the light of the stars could be seen
+through it.
+
+[Sidenote: A LOCAL AURORA]
+
+The next aurora to be described was of a totally different kind. It
+occurred on the 18th of March, 1905. The writer, with an Indian
+attendant, was travelling on the Koyukuk River from Coldfoot to Bettles,
+and, owing to a heavy, drifted trail, night had fallen while yet the
+road-house was far away. There was no moon and the wind-swept trail was
+wholly indistinguishable from the surrounding snow, yet to keep on the
+trail was the only chance of going forward at all, for whenever the
+toboggan slid off into the deep, soft snow it came to a standstill and
+had to be dragged laboriously back again. A good leader would have kept
+the trail, but we had none such amongst our dogs that year. Thus,
+slowly, we went along in the dark, continually missing the trail on this
+side and on that. We did not know on which bank of the river the
+road-house was situated, for it was our first journey in those parts. We
+only knew the trail would take us there could we follow it. All at once
+a light burst forth, seemingly not a hundred yards above our heads, that
+lit up that trail like a search-light and threw our shadows black upon
+the snow. There was nothing faint and fluorescent about that aurora; it
+burned and gleamed like magnesium wire. And by its light we were able to
+see our path distinctly and to make good time along it, until in a mile
+or two we were gladdened by the sight of the candle shining in the
+window of the road-house and were safe for the night.
+
+Now, one does not really know that this was an aurora at all, save that
+there was nothing else it could have been. It was a phenomenon
+altogether apart from the one first described; not occupying the vault
+of heaven, streaming from horizon to zenith; not remote and majestic.
+There was really little opportunity to observe it at all; one's eyes
+were fixed upon the trail it illumined, anxious not to set foot to the
+right or left. Save for an occasional glance upward, we saw only its
+reflected light upon the white expanse beneath. It was simply a streak
+of light right above our heads, holding steadily in position, though
+fluctuating a little in strength--a light to light us home, that is what
+it was to us. And it was the most surprising and opportune example of
+what has been referred to here as the _local_ aurora that eight winters
+have afforded. The most opportune but not the most beautiful; the next
+to be described, though of the local order, was the most striking and
+beautiful manifestation of the Northern Lights the writer has ever seen.
+It was that rare and lovely thing--a coloured aurora--all of one rich
+deep tint.
+
+[Sidenote: A RED AURORA]
+
+It was on the 11th of March, 1907, on the Chandalar River, a day's march
+above the gap by which that stream enters the Yukon Flats and five days
+north of Fort Yukon. A new "strike" had been made on the Chandalar, and
+a new town, "Caro," established;--abandoned since. All day long we had
+been troubled and hindered by overflow water on the ice, saturating the
+snow, an unpleasant feature for which this stream is noted; and when
+night fell and we thought we ought to be approaching the town, it seemed
+yet unaccountably far off. At last, in the darkness, we came to a creek
+that we decided must surely be Flat Creek, near the mouth of which the
+new settlement stood; and at the same time we came to overflow water so
+deep that it covered both ice and snow and looked dangerous. So the dogs
+were halted while the Indian boy went ahead cautiously to see if the
+town were not just around the bend, and the writer sat down, tired, on
+the sled. While sitting there, all at once, from the top of the
+mountainous bluff that marked the mouth of the creek, a clear red light
+sprang up and spread out across the sky, dyeing the snow and gleaming in
+the water, lighting up all the river valley from mountain to mountain
+with a most beautiful carmine of the utmost intensity and depth. In wave
+after wave it came, growing brighter and brighter, as though some
+gigantic hand on that mountain top were flinging out the liquid radiance
+into the night. There was no suggestion of any other colour, it was all
+pure carmine, and it seemed to accumulate in mid-air until all the
+landscape was bathed in its effulgence. And then it gradually died away.
+The native boy was gone just half an hour. It began about five minutes
+after he left and ended about five minutes before he returned, so that
+its whole duration was twenty minutes. There had been no aurora at all
+before; there was nothing after, for his quest had been fruitless, and,
+since we would not venture that water in the dark, we made our camp on
+the bank and were thus two hours or more yet in the open. The boy had
+stopped to look at it himself, "long time," as he said, and declared it
+was the only red aurora he had ever seen in his twenty odd years' life.
+It was a very rare and beautiful sight, and it was hard to resist that
+impression of a gigantic hand flinging liquid red fire from the mountain
+top into the sky. Its source seemed no higher than the mountain
+top--seemed to be the mountain top itself--and its extent seemed
+confined within the river valley.
+
+[Sidenote: A GRAND GENERAL DISPLAY]
+
+There is only one other that shall be described, although there are many
+mentioned with more or less particularity in the diaries of these
+travels. And this last one is of the character of the first and not at
+all of the second and third, for it was on the grand scale, filling all
+the heavens, a phenomenon, one is convinced, of an order distinct and
+different from the local, near-at-hand kind. There was exceptionally
+good opportunity for observing this display, since it occurred during an
+all-night journey, the night of the 6th of April, 1912, with brilliant
+starlight but no moon while we were hastening to reach Eagle for Easter.
+
+We had made a new traverse from the Tanana to the Yukon, through two
+hundred miles of uninhabited country, and had missed the head of the
+creek that would have taken us to the latter river in thirty miles,
+dropping into one that meandered for upward of a hundred before it
+discharged into the great river. It was one o'clock on Good Friday
+morning when we reached a road-house on the Yukon eighty miles from
+Eagle. The only chance to keep the appointment was to travel all the two
+remaining nights. So we cached almost all our load at the road-house,
+for we should retrace our steps when Eagle was visited, and thus were
+able to travel fast.
+
+Both nights were marked by fine auroral displays, so extensive and of
+such apparent height as to give the impression that they must be visible
+over large areas of the earth. Both continued all night long and were
+of the same general description, but the second night's display was
+emphasised in its main features and elaborated in its detail, and was
+the more striking and notable and worthy of description.
+
+It began by an exquisite and delicate weaving of fine, fluorescent
+filaments of light in and out among the stars, until at times a perfect
+network was formed, like lace amidst diamonds, first in one quarter of
+the heavens, then in another, then stretching and weaving its web right
+across the sky. The Yukon runs roughly north and south in these reaches,
+and the general trend of the whole display was parallel with the river's
+course. For an hour or more the ceaseless extension and looping of these
+infinitely elastic threads of light went on, with constant variation in
+their brilliance but no change in their form and never an instant's
+cessation of motion.
+
+[Illustration: Photo by Paul Schultz.
+
+THE SUN DOGS.]
+
+[Illustration: "TAN," OF MIXED BREED.]
+
+[Illustration: "MUK," A PURE MALAMUTE.]
+
+Then the familiar feature of the draped aurora was introduced, always a
+beautiful sight to watch. Slowly and most gracefully issued out of the
+north band after band, band after band of pale-green fire, each curling
+and recurling on itself like the ribbon that carries the motto under a
+shield of arms, and each continually fraying out its lower edge into
+subdued rainbow tints. Then these bands, never for a moment still, were
+gathered up together to the zenith, till from almost all round the
+horizon vibrant meridians of light stretched up to a crown of glory
+almost but not quite directly overhead, so bright that all the waving
+bands that now assumed more the appearance of its rays paled before it.
+Then the crown began to revolve, and as it revolved with constantly
+increasing speed, it gathered all its rays into one gigantic spiral that
+travelled as it spun towards the east until all form was dissipated in a
+nebulous mist that withdrew behind the mountains and glowered there like
+a dawn and left the skies void of all light save the stars. It was a
+fine instance of the stupendous sportiveness of the aurora that
+sometimes seems to have no more law or rule than the gambolling of a
+kitten, and to build up splendid and majestic effects merely to "whelm
+them all in wantonness" a moment later. A particularly fine and striking
+phase of an aurora is very likely to be followed by some such sudden
+whimsical destruction. It was as though that light hidden behind the
+mountains were mocking us.
+
+Then from out the north again appeared one clear belt of light that
+stretched rapidly and steadily all across the heavens until it formed an
+arch that stood there stationary. And from that motionless arch, the
+only motionless manifestation that whole night, there came a gradual
+superb crescendo of light that lit the wide, white river basin from
+mountain top to mountain top and threw the shadows of the dogs and the
+sled sharper and blacker upon the snow,--and in the very moment of its
+climax was gone again utterly while yet the exclamations of wonder were
+on our lips. It was as though, piqued at our admiration, the aurora had
+wiped itself out; and often and often there is precisely that impression
+of wilfulness about it.
+
+All night long the splendour kept up, and all night long, as the dogs
+went at a good clip and one of us rode while the other was at the
+sled's handle-bars, we gazed and marvelled at its infinite variety, at
+its astonishing fertility of effect, at its whimsical vagaries, until
+the true dawn of Easter swallowed up the beauty of the night as we came
+in sight of Eagle. And we wondered with what more lavish advertisement
+the dawn of the first Easter was heralded into the waste places of the
+snow.
+
+[Sidenote: SOUND AND SMELL]
+
+There are men in Alaska, whose statements demand every respect, who
+claim to have heard frequently and unmistakably a swishing sound
+accompanying the movements of the aurora, and there are some who claim
+to have detected an odour accompanying it. Without venturing any opinion
+on the subject in general, the writer would simply say that, though he
+thinks he possesses as good ears and as good a nose as most people, he
+has never heard any sound or smelled any odour that he believed to come
+from the Northern Lights. Indeed, he has often felt that with all the
+light-producing energy and with all the rapid movement of the aurora it
+was mysterious that there should be absolutely no sound. The aurora
+often looks as if it _ought_ to swish, but to his ears it has never done
+it; so much phosphorescent light might naturally be accompanied by some
+chemical odour, but to his nostrils never has been.
+
+Queer, uncertain noises in the silence of an arctic night there often
+are--noises of crackling twigs, perhaps, noises of settling snow, noises
+in the ice itself--but they are to be heard when there is no aurora as
+well as when there is. It is rare to stand on the banks of the Yukon on
+a cold night and not hear some faint crepitating sounds, sometimes
+running back and forth across the frozen river, sometimes resembling the
+ring of distant skates. Without offering any pronouncement upon what is
+a very interesting question, it seems to the writer possible that, to an
+ear intently listening, some such noise coinciding with a decided
+movement of a great auroral streamer might seem to be caused by the
+movement it happened to accompany.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE ALASKAN DOGS
+
+
+[Sidenote: MALAMUTE, HUSKY, AND SIWASH]
+
+THERE are two breeds of native dogs in Alaska, and a third that is
+usually spoken of as such. The malamute is the Esquimau dog; and what
+for want of a better name is called the "Siwash" is the Indian dog. Many
+years ago the Hudson Bay voyageurs bred some selected strains of
+imported dog with the Indian dogs of those parts, or else did no more
+than carefully select the best individuals of the native species and
+bred from them exclusively--it is variously stated--and that is the
+accepted origin of the "husky." The malamute and the husky are the two
+chief sources of the white man's dog teams, though cross-breeding with
+setters and pointers, hounds of various sorts, mastiffs, Saint Bernards,
+and Newfoundlands has resulted in a general admixture of breeds, so that
+the work dogs of Alaska are an heterogeneous lot to-day. It should also
+be stated that the terms "malamute" and "husky" are very generally
+confused and often used interchangeably.
+
+The malamute, the Alaskan Esquimau dog, is precisely the same dog as
+that found amongst the natives of Baffin's Bay and Greenland. Knud
+Rasmunsen and Amundsen together have established the oneness of the
+Esquimaux from the east coast of Greenland all round to Saint Michael;
+they are one people, speaking virtually one language. And the malamute
+dog is one dog. A photograph that Admiral Peary prints of one of the
+Smith Sound dogs that pulled his sled to the North Pole would pass for a
+photograph of one of the present writer's team, bred on the Koyukuk
+River, the parents coming from Kotzebue Sound.
+
+There was never animal better adapted to environment than the malamute
+dog. His coat, while it is not fluffy, nor the hair long, is yet so
+dense and heavy that it affords him a perfect protection against the
+utmost severity of cold. His feet are tough and clean, and do not
+readily accumulate snow between the toes and therefore do not easily get
+sore--which is the great drawback of nearly all "outside" dogs and their
+mixed progeny. He is hardy and thrifty and does well on less food than
+the mixed breeds; and, despite Peary to the contrary, he will eat
+anything. "He will not eat anything but meat," says Peary; "I have tried
+and I know." No dog accustomed to a flesh diet willingly leaves it for
+other food; the dog is a carnivorous animal. But hunger will whet his
+appetite for anything that his bowels can digest. "Muk," the counterpart
+of Peary's "King Malamute," has thriven for years on his daily ration of
+dried fish, tallow, and rice, and eats biscuits and doughnuts whenever
+he can get them. The malamute is affectionate and faithful and likes to
+be made a pet of, but he is very jealous and an incorrigible fighter. He
+has little of the fawning submissiveness of pet dogs "outside," but is
+independent and self-willed and apt to make a troublesome pet. However,
+pets that give little trouble seldom give much pleasure.
+
+His comparative shortness of leg makes him somewhat better adapted to
+the hard, crusted snow of the coast than to the soft snow of the
+interior, but he is a ceaseless and tireless worker who loves to pull.
+His prick ears, always erect, his bushy, graceful tail, carried high
+unless it curl upon the back as is the case with some, his compact coat
+of silver-grey, his sharp muzzle and black nose and quick narrow eyes
+give him an air of keenness and alertness that marks him out amongst
+dogs. When he is in good condition and his coat is taken care of he is a
+handsome fellow, and he will weigh from seventy-five to eighty-five or
+ninety pounds.
+
+The husky is a long, rangy dog, with more body and longer legs than the
+malamute and with a shorter coat. The coat is very thick and dense,
+however, and furnishes a sufficient protection. A good, spirited husky
+will carry his tail erect like a malamute, but the ears are not
+permanently pricked up; they are mobile. He is, perhaps, the general
+preference amongst dog drivers in the interior, but he has not the
+graceful distinction of appearance of the malamute.
+
+The "Siwash" dog is the common Indian dog; generally undersized, uncared
+for, half starved most of the time, and snappish because not handled
+save with roughness. In general appearance he resembles somewhat a small
+malamute, though, indeed, nowadays so mixed have breeds become that he
+may be any cur or mongrel. He is a wonderful little worker, and the
+loads he will pull are astonishing. Sometimes, with it all, he is an
+attractive-looking fellow, especially when there has been a good moose
+or caribou killing and he has gorged upon the refuse and put some flesh
+upon his bones. And if one will take a little trouble to make friends
+with him he likes petting as much as any dog. Most Indian dogs "don't
+sabe white man," and will snap at one's first advances. On the whole, it
+is far better to let them alone; for, encouraged at all, they are
+terrible thieves--what hungry creatures are not?--and make all sorts of
+trouble with one's own team. The pure malamute and the pure husky do not
+bark at all, they howl; barking is a sure sign of an admixture of other
+strains.
+
+[Sidenote: DOG BREEDING]
+
+Here it may be worth while to say a few words about the general belief
+that dogs in Alaska are interbred with wolves. That the dog and the wolf
+have a common origin there can be no doubt, and that they will
+interbreed is equally sure, but diligent inquiry on the part of the
+writer for a number of years, throughout all interior Alaska, amongst
+whites and natives, has failed to educe one authentic instance of
+intentional interbreeding, has failed to discover one man who knows of
+his own knowledge that any living dog is the offspring of such union.
+
+While, therefore, it is not here stated that such cross-breeding has not
+taken place, or even that it does not take place, yet the author is
+satisfied that it is a very rare thing, indeed, and that the common
+stories of dogs that are "half wolf" are fabulous.
+
+Indeed, it seems a rare thing when any sort of pains is taken about the
+breeding of dogs. In a country where dogs are so important, where they
+are indispensable for any sort of travel during six or seven months in
+the year over by far the greater portion of it, one would expect that
+much attention would be paid to dog breeding; but this is not the case.
+Here and there a man who takes pride in a team will carefully mate the
+best available couple and carefully rear their offspring, but for the
+most part breeding seems left to chance. A team all of malamutes or all
+of huskies, a matched team of any sort, is the exception, and excites
+interest and remark.
+
+The market for dogs is so uncertain that it is doubtful if there would
+be any money in scientific breeding for the trail. When a stampede to
+new diggings takes place, the price of dogs rises enormously. Any sort
+of good dog on the spot may be worth a hundred dollars, or a hundred and
+fifty, and the man with a kennel would make a small fortune out of hand.
+But at other times it is hard to get twenty-five dollars for the best of
+dogs.
+
+The cost of maintenance of a dog team is considerable. When the
+mail-routes went all down the Yukon, and dogs were used exclusively, the
+contracting company estimated that it cost seventy-five dollars per head
+per annum to feed its dogs; while to the traveller in remote regions,
+buying dog feed in small parcels here and there, the cost is not less
+than one hundred dollars per head. Of course, a man engaged in dog
+raising would have his own fish-wheel on the Yukon and would catch
+almost all that his dogs would eat. Fish is plentiful in Alaska; it is
+transportation that costs. Dogs not working can do very well on
+straight dried fish, but for the working dog this ration is supplemented
+by rice and tallow or other cereal and fat; not only because the animal
+does better on it, but also because straight dried fish is a very bulky
+food, and weight for weight goes not nearly so far. Cooking for the dogs
+is troublesome, but economical of weight and bulk, and conserves the
+vigour of the team. In the summer-time the dogs are still an expense.
+They must be boarded at some fish camp, at a cost of about five dollars
+per head per month.
+
+The white man found the dog team in use amongst the natives all over the
+interior, but he taught the Indian how to drive dogs. The natives had
+never evolved a "leader." Some fleet stripling always ran ahead, and the
+dogs followed. The leader, guided by the voice, "geeing" and "hawing,"
+stopping and advancing at the word of command, is a white man's
+innovation, though now universally adopted by the natives. So is the dog
+collar. The "Siwash harness" is simply a band that goes round the
+shoulders and over the breast. In the interior the universal "Siwash"
+hitch was tandem, and is yet, but as trails have widened and improved,
+more and more the tendency grows amongst white men to hitch two abreast;
+and the most convenient rig is a lead line to which each dog is attached
+independently by a single-tree, either two abreast, or, by adding a
+further length to the lead line, one behind the other, so that on a
+narrow trail the tandem rig may be quickly resorted to.
+
+[Sidenote: THE DOCKING OF TAILS]
+
+One advantage of the change from single to double rig is the decay of
+the cruel custom of "bobbing" the dogs' tails. When dogs are hitched
+one close behind the other (and the closer the better for pulling) the
+tail of the dog in front becomes heavy with ice from the condensation of
+the breath of the dog behind, until not only is he carrying weight but
+the use of the tail for warmth at night is foregone. So it was the
+universal practice to cut tails short off. But sleeping out in the open,
+as travelling dogs often must do, in all sorts of weather, with the
+thermometer at 50 deg. or 60 deg. below zero sometimes, a thick, bushy tail is a
+great protection to a dog. With it he covers nose and feet and is tucked
+up snug and warm. It is the dog's natural protection for the muzzle and
+the thinly haired extremities. A few years ago almost all work dogs in
+the interior were bobtailed; now the plumes wave over the teams again.
+
+Five dogs are usually considered the minimum team, and seven dogs make a
+good team. A good, quick-travelling load for a dog team is fifty pounds
+to the dog, on ordinary trails. The dogs will pull as much as one
+hundred pounds apiece or more, but that becomes more like freighting
+than travelling. On a good level trail with strong big dogs, men
+sometimes haul two hundred pounds to the dog. These, however, are
+"gee-pole propositions," in the slang of the trail, and the man is doing
+hard work with a band around his chest and the pole in his hand. For
+quick travelling, fifty pounds to the dog is enough.
+
+The most useful "outside" strains that the white man has introduced into
+the dogs of the interior are the pointer and setter and collie. The
+bird-dogs themselves make very fast teams and soon adapt themselves to
+the climate, but their feet will not stand the strain. The collie's
+intelligence would make him a most admirable leader, did he not have so
+pronouncedly the faults of his good qualities; he wants to do all the
+work; he works himself to death. It is the leader's business to keep the
+team strung out; it is not his business to pull the load. But the
+admixture of these strains with the native blood has produced some very
+fine dogs. The Newfoundland and Saint Bernard strains have been perhaps
+the least successful admixtures. They are too heavy and cumbersome and
+always have tender feet; their bodies and the bodies of their mongrel
+progeny are too heavy for their feet.
+
+[Sidenote: DOG LOYALTY]
+
+The last statement, with regard to Newfoundland and Saint Bernard dogs,
+has an interesting exception. There is a dog, not uncommon in Alaska,
+that by a curious inversion of phrase is known as the "one-man-dog."
+What is meant is the "one-dog-man dog," the dog that belongs to the man
+that uses only one dog. Many and many a prospector pulls his whole
+winter grub-stake a hundred miles or more into the hills with the aid of
+one dog. His progress is slow, in bad places or on up grades he must
+relay, and all the time he is doing more work than the dog is, but he
+manages to get his stuff to his cabin or his camp with no other aid than
+one dog can give. It is usually a large heavy dog--speed never being
+asked of him, nor steady continuous winter work--often of one of the
+breeds mentioned, or of its predominant strain. The companionship
+between such a man and such a dog is very close, and the understanding
+complete. Sometimes the dog will be his master's sole society for the
+whole winter.
+
+Indeed, any man of feeling who spends the winters with a dog team must
+grow to a deep sympathy with the animals, and to a keen, sometimes
+almost a poignant, sense of what he owes to them. There is a mystery
+about domestic animals of whatever kind. It is a mystery that man should
+be able to impose his will upon them, change their habits and
+characters, constrain them to his tasks, take up all their lives with
+unnatural toil. And that he should get affection and devotion in return
+makes the mystery yet more mysterious.
+
+The dog gets his food--often of poor quality and scant quantity--and
+that is all he gets. Yet the life of a work dog that has a kind and
+considerate master is not an unhappy one. The dog is as full of the
+canine joy of life as though he had never worn a collar, and not only
+sports and gambols when free, but really seems to like his work and do
+it gladly. He will chafe at inaction; he will come eagerly to the
+harness in the morning; often will come before he is called and ask to
+be harnessed; and if for any reason--lameness or galled neck or sore
+feet--a dog is cut out of the team temporarily, to run loose, he will
+try at every chance to get back into his place and will often attack the
+dog that seems to him to be occupying it; while a dog left behind will
+howl most piteously and make desperate efforts to break his chain and
+rejoin his companions and his labour. And the wonderful and pitiful
+thing about it is that no sort of severity or brutality on his master's
+part will destroy that zealous allegiance. The dog in Alaska is
+absolutely dependent upon man for subsistence, and he seems to realise
+it.
+
+There is a great deal of cruelty and brutality amongst dog drivers in
+Alaska. At times, it is true, most dogs need some punishment. Dogs
+differ as much as men do, and some are lazy and some are self-willed.
+The best of them will develop bad trail habits if they are allowed
+to--habits which will prove hard to break by and by and be a continual
+source of delay and annoyance until broken. But a very slight
+punishment, judicially administered at the moment, will usually suffice
+just as well as a severe one, and the main source of brutality in the
+punishment of dogs is sheer bad temper on the part of the driver, and
+has for its only possible end, not the correction of the animal's fault
+but the satisfaction of its owner's rage. To see some hulking,
+passionate brute lashing a poor little dog with a chain, or beating him
+with a club; to see dogs overworked to utter exhaustion and their
+lagging steps still hastened by a rain of blows, these are the sickening
+sights of the trail--and they are not uncommon. The language of most dog
+drivers to their dogs consists of a mixture of cursing and ribaldry,
+excused by the statement that only by the use of such speech may dogs be
+driven at all. But there is little point in the excuse; such speech is,
+to an extent not far from universal, the speech of the country. Swedes
+who have little and Indians who have none other English will yet be
+volubly profane and obscene; in the latter case often with complete
+ignorance of the meaning of the terms. Yet it must be recorded not
+ungratefully by the impartial observer that the rare presence of a
+decent woman or a clergyman will almost always put a check upon
+blackguardly speech, even that of a dog driver; women and clergymen
+being supposed the only two classes who could have any possible
+objection to foulness of mouth. To refer continually to the excrements
+of the body, to sexual commerce, natural and unnatural, all in the
+grossest terms, and to mix these matters intimately with the sacred
+names, is "manly" speech amongst a large part of the population of
+Alaska.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: REINDEER]
+
+[Sidenote: REINDEER AS DRAUGHT ANIMALS]
+
+It has been claimed with justice that the introduction of the reindeer
+into Alaska has been highly successful; yet there is much misconception
+amongst people "outside" as to the nature of that success. Stimulated by
+the example of the United States Government, and urged thereto by Doctor
+Wilfred Grenfell and others, the Canadian Government is now introducing
+reindeer into Labrador; and the distinguished missionary physician,
+whose recent decoration gives lustre to the royal bestower as well as to
+the recipient, has publicly announced his hope that these domesticated
+herbivora will "eliminate that scourge of the country, the husky dog."
+To announce such a hope, based upon any results in Alaska, is to
+announce misconception of the nature of the success which has attended
+Doctor Sheldon Jackson's "reindeer experiment." There is not a dog the
+less in Alaska because of the reindeer, nor ever will be; in so far as
+similarity of conditions warrant us in expecting similar results, it is
+safe to predict that the reindeer will never "eliminate the husky dog"
+in Labrador.
+
+But before discussing the success of the reindeer experiment and its
+lack of any bearing upon the number or the usefulness of the dog, the
+writer would pause to take strong exception to the description of the
+husky dog as the "scourge" of Labrador, and would insist that any such
+wholesale condemnation is a boomerang that returns upon the head of the
+Labradorian who uses it. For, as the dog is one of the most adaptable of
+all domestic animals, and is, to an amazing extent, what his master
+makes him, to bring a railing accusation against the whole race of dogs
+is in reality to accuse those who breed and rear them.
+
+Why should the dog have richly earned the gratitude and affection of all
+the world except Labrador? Why should he be called the "Friend of Man"
+everywhere except amongst these particular people? Far to the north of
+them the Esquimaux prize and cherish their dogs. Throughout the whole
+wide region to the west and northwest of them the dog is man's
+indispensable ally and faithful servant. The same husky dog has made
+good his claim upon man in Alaska. It is he and his brother, the
+malamute, that have opened up Alaska so far as it has been opened;
+without whom to-day the development of the country would suddenly cease.
+And to the question that is often asked "outside," as to whether the
+Alaskan dog is not a savage beast, it is justly replied: "Not unless he
+happens to belong to a savage beast." Is it really otherwise anywhere?
+Instead of the reindeer eliminating the dog, there is far greater
+likelihood of the dog eliminating the reindeer; and the professed dog
+lover, indignant at the opprobrious term applied to a whole race of
+dogs, may be disposed to echo Lady Macbeth's wish: "May good digestion
+wait on appetite."
+
+So far as substituting another draught animal for the dog is concerned,
+if the whole equine tribe, even down to Manchurian ponies should for
+some strange reason be out of the question, the Canadian Government had
+better import the polar ox or the yak. It is only amongst a nomadic
+people, whose main quest is pasturage, that the reindeer is a
+satisfactory draught animal. When introduced into Alaska there was
+doubtless expectation that he would be generally useful in this
+capacity. For a while certain mail-routes on the Seward Peninsula were
+served by him, and here and there a deluded prospector put his
+grub-stake on a reindeer sled. It is safe to say that no reindeer are so
+employed to-day. They were soon abandoned on the mail trails, and the
+prospector, after one season's experience, slaughtered his reindeer and
+traded its meat and hide for a couple of dogs.
+
+Consider that the reindeer feeds upon one thing alone, the moss that is
+named after him, and that while this moss is very widely distributed
+indeed, throughout Alaska, it is not found at all in the river valleys
+or the forests, but only upon the treeless hills at considerable
+elevation. Now the rivers are the highways. It is on their frozen
+surface, or on "portage" trails through the woods, that the greater part
+of all travelling is done and, in particular, that established routes of
+regular communication are maintained. To leave the trail after a day's
+journey, to wander miles into the hills, to herd the deer while they
+browse from slope to slope, digging the snow away in search of their
+provender, is wholly incompatible with any sustained or regular travel.
+The reindeer is a timid and almost defenceless creature. Wolves and
+lynxes prey upon him. One lynx is thought to have killed upward of
+twenty head in one season out of the herd that was stationed at Tanana,
+leaping upon the backs of the creatures, cutting their throats, sucking
+their blood, and riding them until they dropped and died. A few dogs
+will soon work havoc in a herd. So the reindeer must be constantly
+protected and at the same time must have range over a considerable scope
+of country. The care of reindeer is a business in itself, not a mere
+detail of the business of transportation or travel.
+
+[Sidenote: DOG FOOD]
+
+On the other hand, the dog's ration for many days is carried on the sled
+he hauls. There is a definite limit to it, of course, and knowledge of
+this limit made every experienced dog driver incredulous, from the
+first, of Doctor Cook's claim to have travelled some eleven hundred
+miles, from Etah to the North Pole and back, with a team of dogs hauling
+their own food. It is possible, however, on fair trails, with rigid
+economy, to travel five hundred miles and haul dog food and man food and
+the other indispensables of a long journey; and that is twice as far as
+it is ever necessary to travel in the interior of Alaska without
+reaching a supply point, the northern slope to the Arctic Ocean
+excepted.
+
+Perhaps it would be putting it better to say that a team of seven dogs
+can haul their own and their driver's food and the camp equipment, all,
+of course, carefully reduced to a minimum, for a month. Dog food of one
+sort or another can be bought at any place where anything whatever is
+sold. Almost any Indian village will furnish dried fish, and it is often
+possible, with no other weapon than a .22 rifle, to feed dogs largely on
+the country through which they pass. The writer's team has had many a
+meal of ptarmigan, rabbits, quail, and spruce hen, while to enumerate
+other articles, on which at times and in stress for proper food, his
+dogs have sustained life and strength for travel, would be to enumerate
+all the common human comestibles. Aside from the usual ration of fish,
+tallow, and rice boiled together, corn-meal, beans, flour, oatmeal, sago
+(though that is poor stuff), tapioca, canned meats of all kinds, canned
+salmon, even canned kippered herring from Scotland, seal oil, seal and
+whale flesh, ham and bacon, horse flesh, moose and caribou and
+mountain-sheep flesh, canned "Boston brown bread," canned butter, canned
+milk, dried apples, sugar, cheese, crackers of all kinds, and a score of
+other matters have at times entered into their food. Dogs have been
+"tided over" tight places for days and days on horse oats boiled with
+tallow candles, working the while. Anything that a man can eat, and much
+that even a starving man would scarcely eat, will make food for dogs. At
+the last and worst, dog can be fed to dog and even to man. When a dog
+team reaches a mining camp where supplies of all sorts are scarce--and
+that is not an uncommon experience--it is sometimes an exceedingly
+expensive matter to feed it; but something can always be found that
+will serve to keep it going until the return to a better-stocked region.
+In the winter of 1910-11, when there was such scarcity in the Iditarod,
+it cost the writer thirty-nine dollars and fifty cents to feed seven
+dogs for a week, and he has more than once been at almost a similar
+charge in the Koyukuk. But in all his travels he has never yet been
+unable to procure some sort of food for his dogs. At times they have
+been fed for days on rabbits straight; at times on ptarmigan straight.
+
+[Sidenote: THE REINDEER'S USEFULNESS]
+
+Speaking broadly, the reindeer is a stupid, unwieldy, and intractable
+brute, not comparing for a moment with the dog in intelligence or
+adaptability. The common notion that his name is derived from the use of
+reins in driving him, thus putting him in the class with the horse, is a
+mistake; the word comes from a Norse root which refers to his
+moss-browsing habit. The "rein" with which he is driven is a rope tied
+around one of his horns. He has no cognisance of "gee" and "haw," nor of
+any other vocal direction, but must be yanked hither and thither with
+the rope by main force; while to stop him in his mad career, once he is
+started, it is often necessary to throw him with the rope. In Lapland
+there are doubtless individual deer better trained; the Lap herders tell
+of them with pride; but in the main this is a just description of
+reindeer handling. All the chief herders in Alaska are Laps, brought
+over for their knowledge of the animals, and the writer has repeatedly
+ridden behind some of their best deer.
+
+Wherein, then, lies the success of the reindeer experiment in Alaska?
+Chiefly in the provision of a regular meat supply by which the natives
+and whites in the vicinity of a herd are relieved from the
+precariousness of the chase or the rapacity of the cold-storage butcher
+company. The Esquimau, having served his allotted apprenticeship of five
+years and entered upon possession of a herd, can at any time kill and
+dress a "kid of the flock" for his family or for the market. The price
+of butcher's meat has been kept down all over the Seward Peninsula by
+the competition of the numerous reindeer herds, to the comfort of the
+population and the exasperation of the butcher company, and many an
+Esquimau has become passably rich. The skin of the animal also furnishes
+a warm and much-needed material for clothing and finds a ready sale at a
+good price.
+
+This success is, however, confined so far to the coast. The herds have
+not thriven in the interior and have now all been withdrawn to the
+coast. Beasts of prey killed them; a hoof disease destroyed many; others
+are supposed to have died from eating some poisonous fungus. In five or
+six years the herd at Tanana had not increased at all, but rather
+diminished, and the same is true of the other herds on the Yukon. The
+Indian, moreover, does not take to herding as the Esquimau does, and can
+hardly be induced to the segregation of himself and his family from his
+tribe which reindeer herding involves. The "apprentices" on the Yukon
+were nearly all of them Esquimaux from the coast.
+
+It may be that the salt of the coast region is essential to the
+well-being of the reindeer; it is not so with the caribou--and the
+reindeer is nothing but a domesticated caribou--many herds of which, in
+the interior of Alaska, never visit the coast at all; but all caribou
+herds have their salt-licks, and one wishes that the oft-recommended
+plan of furnishing salt for the herds in the interior had been adopted
+by the government for a season before their removal was determined upon.
+
+Like most other "resources" of Alaska, the imported reindeer, at first
+decried and ridiculed, has now become the slender foundation for
+extravagant speculations of prosperity. The "millions of acres waiting
+for the plough" in the interior have lately been supplemented in this
+visionary treasury by the capitalisation of the vast tundras of the
+coast, the golden wheat-fields of the one finding counterpart in the
+multitudinous herds of the other. The growing dearth of cattle-range in
+the United States offers, it seems, to Alaska the opportunity of
+supplying the American market with meat, and the kindling fancy of the
+enthusiastic "booster" sees trains loaded with frozen reindeer meat
+rolling into Chicago.
+
+While the reindeer will never supersede the dog as a draught animal
+anywhere, the horse is rapidly superseding him on good trails in the
+more settled and peopled regions. In the Fairbanks and Nome districts,
+in the Circle and Koyukuk districts, in the Fortymile and in the
+Iditarod--in all districts where any extensive mining is carried
+on--heavy freights are moved by horses, and this tendency will doubtless
+increase rather than diminish. The dog team cannot compete with the
+horse team when it comes to moving heavy loads over good trails. The
+grain that the horse eats is imported, and in the main will probably
+always be imported, but oats cut green and properly cared for make
+excellent fodder, and the native hay, while not nearly as nutritious as
+the imported timothy, will sufficiently supplement grain.
+
+We hear a great deal nowadays of the benefits which are to come to
+Alaska from the railroad which the United States is expected to build
+from tide-water to the Yukon, and the clamorous voices of the journalist
+and the professional promoter and politician, which seem the only voices
+which ever reach the ear of government, are insistent that this is the
+one great thing that will bring prosperity to the country. Yet the
+writer is confident that he expresses almost the unanimous opinion of
+those who live in the country, outside of the classes mentioned, when he
+says that if the amount of money which this railroad will cost were
+expended upon good highways and trails the benefit would be much
+greater. It is means of intercommunication between the various parts of
+the country that is the great need of Alaska; some of its most promising
+sections are almost inaccessible now or accessible only at great trouble
+and expense. Access to the country itself, for the introduction of
+merchandise, is furnished easily enough during three or four months of
+the year by its incomparable system of waterways. Good highways, well
+engineered and well maintained, over which horse teams could be used
+summer and winter, would remove much of what at present is the almost
+prohibitive cost of distributing that merchandise from river points.
+Such roads would give an enormous stimulus to prospecting, and would
+render it possible to work gold placers all over the country that are of
+too low grade to be worked at the present rates of transportation. A
+_really_ good highway from Valdez to Fairbanks and the making of the
+long-ago begun Valdez-Eagle road; a good highway from Fairbanks to the
+upper Tanana as far as the Nabesna, connecting with the one from the
+Copper River country and the coast; another from the Yukon into the
+Koyukuk and the Chandalar; another from Fairbanks into the Kantishna,
+connecting with one from the lower Kuskokwim and one from the Iditarod;
+a road from Eagle across the almost unknown region (save for the line of
+the 141st meridian) between the Yukon and the Porcupine Rivers; two or
+three roads between the Yukon and the Tanana; a road from the Koyukuk to
+Kotzebue Sound--these would constitute main arteries of travel and would
+open up the country as no trunk railroad will ever do. The expense would
+be great, both of construction and maintenance, but it would probably
+not be greater than the cost of constructing and maintaining the
+proposed railroad. Twenty or thirty ordinary freight trains a year would
+bring in all the goods that Alaska consumes. Before that amount can be
+very greatly increased there must be a large development of the means by
+which it is to be distributed throughout the country.
+
+Some day, perhaps, these roads will be made, and the horse, not the dog,
+will be the draught animal upon them. Yet it would be a rash conclusion
+that even then the time will be at hand when there will be no longer
+use for the work dog in Alaska. Away from these main arteries of travel
+he will still be employed. So long as great part of the land remains a
+noble arctic wilderness; so long as the prospector strikes farther and
+farther into the rugged mountains; so long as quick travel over great
+stretches of country is necessary or desirable; so long as the salmon
+swarm up the rivers to furnish food for the catching; so long as the
+Indian moves from fishing camp to village and from village to hunting
+camp--so long will the dog be hitched to the sled in Alaska; so long
+will his joyful yelp and his plaintive whine be heard in the land; so
+long will his warm tongue seek his master's hand, even the hand that
+strikes him, and his eloquent eyes speak his utter allegiance.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Agriculture, 228, 229, 230, 231, 367
+
+  Alarm-clocks, 304
+
+  Alatna River, 70
+
+  Albert the pilot, 60
+
+  Allakaket, 190-195
+
+  Alphabet, 69
+
+  Amundsen, 292, 392
+
+  Animals, wild, 257, 276, 277, 298, 405
+
+  Anthropologists, 270
+
+  Arctic Ocean, 97, 98
+
+  Army posts: economic value, 151
+    discipline and life, 217
+    frequent changes, 217
+    surgeons, 218
+
+  Arthur, 158, 163
+
+  Athabascan language, 349
+
+  Atler, 170, 171
+
+  Auroras, 46, 380-391
+
+
+  Baker Creek Springs, 155
+
+  Bathing, 85
+
+  Beaver City, 345
+
+  Bering Sea, 129
+
+  Betticher, C. E., 254
+
+  Bettles, 54, 56, 63
+
+  Black fox, 258, 362
+
+  Blizzard, 40
+
+  Blossom Cape, 103, 106
+
+  Blow-holes, 13
+
+  Bluff, 126
+
+  Bompas, Bishop, 283
+
+  Brook, Alfred, 309
+
+  Burke, Dr., 158, 167, 169, 187
+
+
+  Caching, 17, 20, 70, 335
+
+  Camp: making details, 41, 42, 43
+    night made, 91
+    devices, 243
+    in wet snow, 302
+
+  Camp-Robbers, 335, 299, 300
+
+  Candle, 102
+
+  Candles, 108, 109
+
+  Caribou, 107, 409
+
+  Carter, Miss, 184
+
+  Chandalar: River, 26, 27, 35
+    village, 27, 28, 29, 34
+    Gap, 36, 37
+
+  Chatanika River, 4, 6, 8
+
+  Chena, 156, 249, 250
+
+  Chief Isaac, 263
+
+  Chinnik, 127
+
+  Choris Peninsula, 106
+
+  Circle City, 11, 20, 290
+
+  Clearwater Creek, 256
+
+  Clothes: drying, 42, 53
+    moose hide, 202, 203
+    tuberculosis, 306, 362
+    missions, 363
+
+  Coal, 92, 93
+
+  Coldfoot, 47, 48, 49
+
+  Cook, Dr., 405
+
+  Cooking: camp dishes, 43
+    cleanliness, 85
+    bear meat, 168
+    by relays, 209
+    for dog, 397
+
+  Council, 116
+
+  Creepers, 111
+
+  Cribbage, 124
+
+
+  Death Valley, 112, 113
+
+  Denali (Mt. McKinley), 225, 305
+
+  Deputy marshals, 365
+
+  Development schemes, 410, 411
+
+  Diphtheria, 28, 29, 32, 287, 313
+
+  Disease: epidemic, 6; _cf._ diphtheria, measles, tuberculosis
+
+  Dishkaket, 332
+
+  Disinfectants, 32
+
+  Dogs: price of, 4
+    frozen toes, 8
+    sled, 20, 25, 45
+    beds, 42
+    food, 44, 407
+    harness, 45
+    tails, 45
+    fight, 93
+    digging up snow, 110
+    helpless on smooth ice, 113
+    conscience, 115
+    on fish food, 115
+    with reindeer, 119, 120
+    refuse to lead, 125
+    preference for land trails, 129
+    intelligence, 139, 156; _cf._ Nanook
+    strength, 174
+    dislike wet feet, 178
+    cost of boarding, 181
+    in trail making, 200
+    in soft weather, 213
+    suffering on steep trails, 214
+    companionship, 223
+    moccasin leggings, 224
+    houses, 232, 237
+    play, 234
+    intelligence, 234, 237
+    sleeping, 235
+    thieving, 236
+    partners of man, 238
+    working life, 239
+    frozen foot, 253
+    with no coat, 275
+    and Indians, 291
+    howling, 303, 304
+    stray, 320, 321
+    general characteristics, 392-402
+    cost of maintenance, 396
+    ill used by whites, 397
+
+
+  Eagle, 285
+
+  Eagle Summit, 10, 11
+
+  Education: spread of English, 23, 24
+    phonograph, 52
+    scientific, 58
+    novel methods, 80
+    ignorance of native language, 81
+    artificial methods, 131
+    mission, 132, 355
+
+  Egbert Fort, 286
+
+  Endicott Mountains, 62
+
+  Esquimaux: sense of humour, 51, 87
+    isolated, 62
+    huts, 70
+    as hunters, 75
+    prayers, 82
+    music, 82
+    morality, 83
+    industry, 86
+    Sabbatarianism, 88
+    sense of distance, 91
+    fish eating, 92
+    gut windows, 94
+    devoutness, 95
+    sleeping customs, 95
+    undemonstrativeness, 95
+    igloos, 96
+    non-alcoholic, 99
+    tobacco, 99
+    hospitality, 106
+    carving, 124
+    singing, 130
+    attitude of white men toward, 134
+    snow goggles, 146
+    kindly manners, 182
+    antipathy to Indians, 185, 265
+    superstitions, 191, 269
+
+
+  Fairbanks, 156, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 382
+
+  Farthing, Miss, 244, 246, 247, 248
+
+  Fish Creek, 297
+
+  Forts: Alaskan, 342
+
+  Fortymilers, 280
+
+  Fortymile River, 281, 282
+
+
+  Gambling, 279
+
+  Game, 257, 277, 325, 368, 369, 406
+
+  Gold train, 5
+
+  Greek Church, 310, 322
+
+  Grenfell, Dr., 402
+
+  Grimm, Charles, 56
+
+
+  Half-breeds, 315, 316, 318, 319
+
+  Hamlin, Fort, 342
+
+  Hammond River, 47
+
+  Hans, 102, 103, 105
+
+  Hip-ring, 226
+
+  Hobo, the frozen, 134, 135
+
+  Hogatzitna, 76
+
+  Horses, 409, 410, 411
+
+  Hospitality, _cf._ Esquimaux and Indians, 49
+
+  Hot Springs, 227, 228
+
+  Hotham Inlet, 96
+
+  Hudson Bay Company, 21, 22
+
+  Husky, 392
+
+
+  Ice: glare, 9
+    rubber, 9, 179, 180
+    blow-holes, 13
+    bluffs, 79
+    mining, 126, 160, 161
+    jam, 167
+    breaking, 170
+    way to determine holding capacity, 179
+
+  Iditarod City, 294, 295, 296, 297, 327
+
+  Igloo, 96, 106
+
+  Indians: civilized, 24
+    uncivilized, 25
+    religion, 30
+    language, 141
+    trade with, 152, 153
+    diminishing, 153, 154
+    disease, 154
+    relations with whites, 173
+    dancing and sports, 189
+    preparation for death, 190
+    effect of civilization, 192, 193
+    lack of initiative, 197
+    demoralization, 216, 278, 279
+    birth-rate and death-rate, 217, 218
+    best education for, 245
+    women teachers, 246, 247
+    kindliness, 254
+    traders, 258
+    hospitality, 261, 303
+    missions, 263, 279
+    not savages, 264
+    fear of Esquimaux, 265
+    peaceable, 266
+    not idolators, 267
+    Christianity, 268, 270
+    moral character, 285
+    pauperization, 288, 289
+    cruelty to dogs, 291
+    effect of reproof, 292
+    self-government, 293
+    whites, 293
+    epidemics, 308, 312, 313
+    at mercy of traders, 311
+    half-breed, 315
+    and whites, 317, 318
+    meat carriers, 332
+    carving, 334
+    general discussion of, 348-370
+    and photographs, 378
+
+  Interpreters, 154, 155, 186
+
+
+  Jackson, Dr. S., 402
+
+  Jade Mountains, 89
+
+  Jette, Fr., 140, 141
+
+  John River, 62
+
+  Journalism, 250
+
+
+  Kikitaruk, 98, 102
+
+  Knapp, 100
+
+  Kobuk: River, 63, 76
+    Mountains, 74
+    missionary, 80
+    town, 182
+
+  Kobuks, 51
+
+  Kotzebue, 106, 107
+    Sound, 63, 97, 102
+
+  Koyukuk: River, 39, 40, 48, 52, 65, 384
+    Canon, 52
+    deserted towns, 65
+    Indians, 158, 142
+    mission, 183
+
+  Krusenstern, 97
+
+  Kuskokwim River, 322, 323
+
+
+  Lamps, 34
+
+  Langdon, Captain, 288
+
+  Launch, motor, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163
+
+  Lewis Cut-Off, 333
+
+  Lingo, 51, 115, 239
+
+  London, Jack, 265
+
+  Long Beach, 84, 88
+
+  Lookout Mountain, 61
+
+  Loomis, Dr., 296
+
+  Lower ramparts, 219
+
+  Lunar: phenomena, 18, 157
+    eclipse, 78
+
+  Lynx, 405
+
+
+  MacDonald, Archdeacon, 22, 23, 30, 31
+
+  Magistrates, 364
+
+  Mail carrying, 215, 331
+
+  Malamute, 392
+
+  Mal-de-raquet, 201
+
+  Mansfield Lake, 271
+
+  Matches, 243
+
+  Measles, 312
+
+  Medicine men, 246, 247, 267, 268
+
+  Melozitna, 209
+
+  Menthol balm, 201
+
+  Meteorological: phenomena, heat radiation, 55
+    rain, rare in winter, 134
+    local weather changes, 144
+    variable climate in Alaska, 188
+    cause of fluctuating temperature readings, 195, 196
+
+  Minchumina, 307, 308
+    Lake, 303
+
+  Mining: towns and camps, 5, 6, 11, 12, 47, 48, 65, 251, 252
+    town morality, 83, 84, 328, 354
+    luxurious life, 108, 122
+    fires, 116, 330
+    on beach, 123
+    in ice, 126
+    decayed, 221, 222, 223, 284
+    primitive methods, 281, 282
+    claims, 295
+    flimsy buildings, 328
+    morals, 329
+    services in, 330
+    missionaries, 331
+    agriculture, 366
+
+  Mirage, 90
+
+  Mission stations: schools, 355, 358
+    clothing, 363, 369
+    isolated, 369
+
+  Missionary: nurse, 33
+    methods, 69, 81, 84, 194, 195, 307
+
+  Moccasins, 7
+
+  Money, 64
+
+  Moses' Village, 65, 180
+
+  Mountain: sunshine, 61
+    temperature, 61
+
+  Mukluk, 7, 19, 86
+
+  Mush, 200, 214
+
+
+  Nanook, 200, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 240
+
+  Natural religion, 58, 191, 267
+
+  Nelson, 161, 162
+
+  Nenana, 244, 245
+
+  Nicoli's Village, 322
+
+  Noatak, 90
+
+  Nome, 120, 122, 123
+
+  Northern Commercial Company, 241
+
+  Norton: Bay, 127
+    Sound, 117
+
+  Nose protection, 87, 145
+
+  Noyutak Lake, 76
+
+  Nulato, 48, 140
+    massacre, 142, 143
+
+
+  Old Woman Mountain, 135
+
+  One-eyed William, 172, 173, 174
+
+  Overflow: water, 6, 7, 27, 37
+    ice, 9
+
+
+  Paraselene, 57
+
+  Parkee, 35, 71
+
+  Peary, Admiral, 393
+
+  Pedometer, 73
+
+  Petersen, 114, 115
+
+  Photographing, 241, 242
+
+  Photography, 371-379
+
+  Place names, 326
+
+  Point Hope, 3, 56, 97, 99, 100
+
+  Potatoes, 229
+
+  Potlatch, 310, 353
+
+  Prevost, Jules, 154
+
+  Prices, 324, 327, 362
+    trading, 362, 396, 407
+
+  Prospectors: in winter, 78
+    and Esquimaux, 88
+    pinching out, 92
+    ruined, 146
+    self-reliance, 161, 162
+    poet, 322
+    imagination, 326
+    knowledge of Bible, 328
+    dogs, 399
+    visions, 409
+    railways, 410
+
+  Ptarmigan, 325
+
+
+  Quikpak River, 153
+
+
+  Raft, 256
+
+  Ragarou, Fr., 147
+
+  Railroads, 410, 411
+
+  Rampart City, 221, 222, 223, 338, 339
+
+  Rasmunsen, 392
+
+  Reading matter, 77, 205, 324, 325, 336
+
+  Red Mountain, 176
+
+  Reindeer, 119, 120, 402, 405, 407, 409
+
+  Roadhouse accommodation, 34, 324
+    gambling, 128
+    keepers of, 132
+    talk, 289
+    poet, 321, 322
+    reading matter, 324, 325
+    Arctic travel reminiscences, 335
+
+  Roxy, 70, 71, 72, 87, 91, 96, 101
+
+  Russian Alaska, 142, 143: Church of, _cf._ Greek Church
+
+
+  Saint John's-in-the-Wilderness, 188, 195
+
+  Salchaket, 254
+
+  Scientists, 269, 270
+
+  Seasons, 230
+
+  Seward Peninsula, 109, 111, 112, 113
+
+  Signal corps, 135, 136, 137, 220
+
+  Sishwoymina, 309
+
+  Siwashing, 41, 67, 138, 392, 394
+
+  Slate Creek, 46
+
+  Sled: width, 110
+    brake, 113
+    overturning, 113, 114
+    improvised, 164
+    in soft snow, 166
+    use of willow saplings, 167, 179
+    gee pole, 220
+    convertible rig, 275
+    unpacking, 345
+    harness, 397
+    team, 397
+    weight carried, 398
+    dog rations, load, 405
+
+  Sleeping bag, 104, 105
+
+  Smoke, 54
+
+  Snow banners, 39
+    melting, 42
+    glasses, 145, 146
+    blindness, 146, 147, 148, 290
+
+  Snow-shoes, 7, 346
+
+  Society of Friends, 99
+
+  Solar: light, effect on speed-shutters, 374
+    phenomena, 15, 16, 31, 39, 45, 57, 73, 74, 90, 103, 211
+
+  Solomon's, 126
+
+  Speed, 17, 20, 60, 75, 91, 96, 97, 110, 130, 198, 199, 299, 337
+
+  Squirrel River, 93, 94, 95
+
+  Starvation, 184, 185
+
+  Stefanson, 88, 268, 269
+
+  Summit, 11
+
+
+  Takotna, 323
+
+  Tanana, 150, 151, 152, 216, 217, 255, 256, 258, 271, 273, 274, 337, 369
+    River, 155, 255, 256
+
+  Tapis, 271
+
+  Telegraph system, 136
+
+  Temperature: low, travel, 14
+    animal life, 16
+    in river bottoms, 19, 50, 61
+    effect on lamps, 34
+    on parts of the body, 36
+    on log huts, 37
+    condensation, 53
+    smoke, 54
+    clear weather, 55
+    wind, 57
+    emotional power, 59
+    death from freezing, 61, 66, 68
+    cleanliness, 86
+    altitude, effect of, 204
+    greatest cold, effect of, 206
+    fluctuations, 212
+    confinement, 215
+    effect on cameras and films, 372, 374
+    on emulsions, 376, 377
+    and auroras, 381
+    high, 301
+    effect on dirt roof, 346
+    on Yukon River, 347
+
+  Thermos bottle, 261
+
+  Toboggan, 13, 37, 38, 46, 89
+
+  Topkok, 117
+
+  Town crier, 278
+
+  Tozitna, 209, 213
+
+  Trader: anti-monopolist, 241
+    profits, 334
+    missions, 258
+    articles sold to Indians, 361
+
+  Trading monopoly, 144
+
+  Trail: river, 2, 13, 37
+    dry and wet, 7
+    mountain, 10, 38
+    width, 15
+    lost, 18, 19, 67, 104, 320
+    blazed, 26
+    wind-swept, 40
+    in snow, 72, 138
+    breaking, 74, 75
+    exchange, 75
+    with hard crust, 109
+    telephone, 118
+    effect of horses on, 149, 150
+    cutting, 176
+    making, 198
+    always serpentine, 198
+    staked, 198, 210
+    widening, 202
+    stage, 254
+    double tripping, 298
+    in soft snow, 301
+    swampy, 332
+    Yukon, 336
+    in gale, 340
+    "sidling," 341
+    at night, 344
+    in thaw, 346, 347
+    found by aurora, 384
+
+  Tsormina, 308
+
+  Tuberculosis, 359, 360
+
+  Twelve-Mile Summit, 9
+
+
+  Unalaklik, 132
+
+
+  Walter, 314, 321, 336, 341
+
+  Whiskey, 153, 222, 363
+
+  White, John, 121
+
+  Wind: protection against, 35
+    different local velocities, 37
+    physical labour, 46
+    in extreme cold, 57
+    as a malignant spirit, 112
+    high velocities, 219
+    in The Ramparts, 338
+
+  Wiseman, 47
+
+  Wolf, 395
+
+
+  Yukon, 12, 139, 153, 219, 336, 351
+    Flats, 12, 13, 343
+    Fort, 21, 22, 24, 350
+
+[Illustration: MAP OF THE INTERIOR OF ALASKA, SHOWING JOURNEYS DESCRIBED
+IN THIS BOOK]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
+
+Page 77, "Bergundy" changed to "Burgundy" (of Burgundy, with)
+
+Page 97, "rouch" changed to "rough" (over the rough ice)
+
+Page 306, sidenote "MINCHUMINA" changed to MINCHUMINA" (THE MINCHUMINA
+FOLK)
+
+Page 334, "Iditerod" changed to "Iditarod" (Iditarod, now a whole)
+
+Page 361, "satteens" changed to "sateens" (velvets and sateens)
+
+Page 418, "Minchumina" changed to "Minchumina" (Minchumina, 307, 308)
+
+Page 420, "Unalaklik" changed to "Unalaklik" (Unalaklik, 132)
+
+For this text version, the w with the grave accent is denoted by ['w].
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled, by Hudson Stuck
+
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