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.