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.