CHAPTER X

FROM THE TANANA RIVER TO THE KUSKOKWIM--THENCE TO THE IDITAROD MINING

CAMP--THENCE TO THE YUKON, AND UP THAT RIVER TO FORT YUKON

THE discovery of gold on the Innoko in the winter of 1906-7, and the

"strike" on the Iditarod, a tributary of the Innoko, some three years

later, opened up a new region of Alaska. It is characteristic of a gold

discovery in a new district that it sets men feverishly to work

prospecting all the adjacent country, and sends them as far afield from

it as the new base of supplies will allow them to stretch their tether.

A glance at the map will show that the Innoko and Iditarod country lies

between the two great rivers of Alaska, the Yukon and the Kuskokwim,

much lower down the Yukon than any of the earlier gold discoveries; that

is to say that while the Tanana gold fields lie off the Middle Yukon,

the Circle fields off the upper Yukon, the Iditarod camp belongs to the

lower river. The Innoko workings were not extensive nor very rich, but

they furnished a base for prospecting from which the Iditarod was

reached, and Flat Creek, in the latter district, promised to be

wonderfully rich. Immediately upon the news of this strike reaching the

other camps of the interior, preparations were made far and wide for

migrating thither upon the opening of Yukon navigation, and the early

summer of 1910 saw a wild stampede to the Iditarod. Saloon-keepers,

store-keepers, traders of all kinds, and the rag-tag and bobtail that

always flock to a new camp were on the move so soon as the ice went out.

From Dawson, from the Fortymile, from Circle, from Fairbanks, from the

Koyukuk, and as soon as Bering Sea permitted, from Nome, all sorts of

craft bore all sorts of people to the new Eldorado, while the first

through steamboats from the outside were crowded with people from the

Pacific coast eager to share in the opportunity of wealth. The

sensational magazines had been printing article after article about "The

incalculable riches of Alaska," and here were people hoping to pick some

of it up. Iditarod City sprang into life as the largest "city" of the

interior; the centre of gravity of the population of the interior of

Alaska was shifted a thousand miles in a month.

Iditarod City furnished a new and large base of supplies. Amidst the

heterogeneous mass of humanity that swarmed into the place, though by no

means the largest element in it, were experienced prospectors from every

other district in Alaska. Under the iniquitous law that then prevailed

and has only recently been modified, by which there was no limit at all

to the number of claims in a district which one man could stake for

himself and others, every creek adjacent to Flat Creek, every creek for

many miles in every direction, had long since been tied up by the men

with lead-pencils and hatchets. So the newly arrived prospectors must

spread out yet wider, and they were soon scattered over all the rugged

hundred miles between Iditarod City and the Kuskokwim River. Here and

there they found prospects; and here and there what promised to be

"pay." They started a new town, Georgetown, on the Kuskokwim itself;

another town sprang up on the Takotna, a tributary of the Kuskokwim; and

the great Commercial Company of Alaska, ever alert for new developments,

put a steamboat on the Kuskokwim and built trading-posts at both these

points. Thus the Kuskokwim country, which for long had been one of the

least-known portions of Alaska, was opened up almost at a stroke.

[Sidenote: CAMP AT 50 deg. BELOW]

It was my purpose to visit Iditarod City during the winter of 1910-11,

although, by reason of the distance to be travelled, a journey thither

would involve the omission of the customary winter visit to upper Yukon

points. When the northern trip to the Koyukuk was returned from at

Tanana, a sad journey had to be made to Nenana to bury the body of Miss

Farthing, and Doctor Loomis, missionary physician at Tanana, who

accompanied me on this errand, had almost as rough a breaking-in to the

Alaska trail as we came back to Tanana again as Doctor Burke had in our

journey over the "first ice" of the Koyukuk two years before. Two feet

of new snow lay on the trail, and the thermometer went down to 60 deg. below

zero. We were camped once on the mail trail, unable to reach a

road-house, at 50 deg. below zero.

[Illustration: THE ROUGH BREAKING IN OF DOCTOR LOOMIS, CAMPED ON THE

MAIL TRAIL AT 50 deg. BELOW ZERO, UNABLE TO REACH A ROAD-HOUSE FOR THE DEEP

SNOW.]

[Illustration: ESQUIMAUX OF THE UPPER KUSKOKWIM.]

[Sidenote: THE ROUTE TO THE IDITAROD]

From Tanana the beaten track to the Iditarod lay one hundred and sixty

miles down the Yukon to Lewis's Landing, and then across country by the

Lewis Cut-Off one hundred miles to Dishkaket on the Innoko, and

thence across country another hundred miles to Iditarod City. But I

designed to penetrate to the Iditarod by another route. I had long

desired to visit Lake Minchumina and its little band of Indians, and to

pass through the upper Kuskokwim country. So I had engaged a Minchumina

Indian as a guide, and laid my course up the Tanana River to the

Coschaket, and then due south across country to Lake Minchumina and the

upper Kuskokwim.

The Cosna is a small stream confluent with the Tanana, about thirty

miles above the mouth of that river, and we had hoped to reach it by the

river trail upon the same day we left the mission at Tanana, the 18th of

February, 1911. But the trail was too heavy and the going too slow and

the start too late. When we had reached Fish Creek, about half-way, it

was already growing dark, and we were glad to stop in a native cabin,

where was an old widow woman with a blind daughter. The daughter,

unmarried, had a little baby, and I inquired through Walter who the

father was and whether the girl had willingly received the man or if he

had taken advantage of her blindness. She named an unmarried Indian,

known to me, and declared that she had not been consenting. It seemed a

paltry and contemptible trick to take advantage of a fatherless blind

girl. I baptized the baby and resolved to make the man marry the girl.

The next night we reached the Coschaket, which, following the Indian

rule, means "mouth of the Cosna," and found that our guide, Minchumina

John, had already relayed a load of grub that Walter had previously

brought here from Tanana, one day's march upon our journey. Our course

from the Coschaket left the Tanana River and struck across country by an

old Indian trail that had not been used that winter. Through scrubby

spruce and over frozen lakes and swamps, crossing the Cosna several

times--a narrow little river with high steep banks--the trail went,

until it brought us to a hunting camp of the Indians, about eighteen

miles from the Coschaket. Here our stuff was cached and here we spent

the night, doctoring the sick amongst them as well as we could. My eyes

had been sorely tried this day despite dark smoked glasses, for we were

travelling almost due south, and the sun was now some hours in the sky

and yet low enough to shine right in one's face. So Walter stopped at a

birch-tree, stripped some of the bark, and made an eye-shade that was a

great comfort and relief.

From this place began the slow work of double-tripping. The unbroken

snow was too deep to permit the hauling of our increased load over it

without a preliminary breaking out of a trail on snow-shoes. So camp was

left standing and Walter and John went ahead all day and returned late

at night with eight or nine miles of trail broken, while I stayed in

camp and had dog feed cooked and supper ready. The next day we advanced

the camp so far as the trail was broken. A moose had used the trail for

some distance, however, since the boys left it, and his great plunging

hoofs had torn up the snow worse than a horse would have done.

A driving wind and heavy snowfall had drifted the new trail in the night

so badly, moreover, that we were not able to cover the full stretch

that had been snow-shoed, but camped in the dusk after we had gone eight

miles. Eight miles in two days was certainly very poor travel, and at

this rate our supplies would never take us down to the forks of the

Kuskokwim. Yet there was no other way in which we could proceed. The

weather was exceedingly mild, too mild for comfort--the thermometer

ranging from 20 deg. to 25 deg. above--and the dogs felt the unseasonable

warmth. It took us all that week to make the watershed between the

drainage of the Tanana and the drainage of the Kuskokwim, a point about

half-way to Lake Minchumina. One day trail was broken, the next day the

loads went forward. Tie the dogs as securely as one would, it was not

safe to go off and leave our supplies exposed to the ravages that a

broken chain or a slipped collar might bring, so two went forward and I

sat down in camp. The boys on their return usually brought with them a

few brace of ptarmigan or grouse or spruce hen or, at the least, a

rabbit or so.

[Sidenote: THE CAMP-ROBBERS]

The camp-robbers, to my mind the most interesting of Alaskan birds,

became very friendly and tame on these vigils. They stay in the country

all the winter, when most birds have migrated, like prosperous mine

owners, to less rigorous climates; they turn up everywhere, in the most

mysterious way, so soon as one begins to make any preparation for

camping, and they are bold and fearless and take all sorts of chances.

On this journey more than once they alighted on a moving sled and pecked

at the dried fish that happened to be exposed. Yet they are so alert and

so quick in their movements that it would be difficult to catch them

were they actually under one's hand. One of them, during a long day in

camp, grew so tame that it pecked crumbs off the toe of my moccasin, and

in another day or two would, one feels sure, have eaten out of the hand.

There is a curious belief, strongly intrenched in the Alaskan mind, that

the nest of this most common bird has never been found, and that the

Smithsonian Institution has a standing offer of a large sum of money for

the discovery. They build in the spruce-trees, ten or twelve feet above

the ground, a nest of rough twigs, and lay five very small eggs, grey

spotted with black. This, at any rate, is the description that Walter

gives me of a nest he discovered with the bird sitting upon it, and I

have found the boy's accounts of such matters entirely trustworthy. It

is curious, however, that the nest of a bird so common all over Alaska

as the camp-robber should be so rarely found. At times they are very

mischievous and destructive, and the man who builds a careless cache

will often be heard denouncing them, but to my mind a bird who gives us

his enlivening company throughout the dead of an Alaskan winter deserves

what pickings he can get.

[Sidenote: SOFT WEATHER]

On Saturday, the 25th of February, after climbing a rather stiff hill,

we passed temporarily out of Yukon into Kuskokwim waters, for the

tributaries of these two great drainage systems interlock in these

hills. At the foot of the hill we stopped for lunch, a roaring fire was

soon built, and a great cube of beaten snow impaled upon a stake was set

up before the fire to drip into a pan for tea water, while the boys

roasted rabbits. In a few hours more we were on the banks of one of the

tributaries of the East Fork (properly the North Fork) of the Kuskokwim.

Here, in an unoccupied native cabin, we made our camp and lay over

Sunday, and here began the most remarkable spell of weather I have known

in the interior at this season of the year. The thermometer rose to 37 deg.

and then to 40 deg.; the snow everywhere was thawing, and presently it began

to rain steadily. It was the first time I had seen a decided thaw in

February, let alone rain.

Next day the rain turned to snow, but since the thermometer still stood

around 40 deg., the snow melted as it fell, and we were wet through all day.

The snow underfoot, however, was so much less and so much harder that we

were able to proceed without preliminary trail breaking. But it was a

most disagreeable day and the prelude to a more disagreeable night.

Soft, wet snow clings to everything it touches. The dogs are soon

carrying an additional burden; balls of snow form on all projecting

tufts of hair; masses of snow must continually be beaten off the sled.

Every time a snow-shoe is lifted from the ground it lifts a few pounds

of snow with it. One's moccasins and socks are soon wet through, and the

feet, encased in this sodden cold covering, grow numb and stay so. We

crossed a considerable mountain pass in driving snow, and should never

have found the way without John, for much of it was above timber, and

when it took us through woods the blazes on the trees were so bleached

with age as to be difficult of recognition. The Indians have used this

trail for generations; but few white men have ever passed along it.

Wet snow, wet spruce boughs, wet tent, wet wood, wet clothing make poor

camping. Water-proof equipment is so rarely needed on the winter trail

that one does not bother with it. But the climate of the Kuskokwim

valley is evidently different from that of the rest of the interior, if,

as John said, such weather is not remarkable in these parts at this

season. A third day was of much the same description; thawing and

heavily snowing all day, the thermometer between 36 deg. and 40 deg.. The labour

of going ahead of the teams and breaking trail, on the snow-shoes,

through slush, grew so great that I relinquished it to John and took the

handle-bars of his sled. We were approaching Lake Minchumina, but the

hills that led us into Yukon waters once more and should have given us

views of the lake and the great mountains beyond gave nothing. It is a

keen disappointment to be utterly denied great views, the expectation of

which has been a support through long distances and fatigues.

At noon we built a fire with considerable difficulty, but once it was

started we plied it with fuel till we had a noble, roaring bonfire, and

we hung our wet socks and moccasins and parkees and caps and mitts

around it and stayed there until they were dry, though the resumption of

our journey in the continuous melting snow soon wet everything through

again.

[Sidenote: LAKE MINCHUMINA]

At length, late in the evening of the 28th of February, we descended a

long ridge and came upon the northeastern shore of Lake Minchumina, one

of the most considerable lakes of interior Alaska. It stretched its

broad expanse away into the misty distance, the farther shore quite

invisible, the snow driving slowly over it, and it looked as though we

had stumbled by mistake upon the shores of the Arctic Ocean. There was

no sort of trail upon it and the snow-shoes sank through the melting

snow of its surface into the water that lay upon the ice and brought up

a load of slush at every step; yet the going would have been still worse

without them. The recollection of the six miles we trudged across that

lake is a dismal recollection of utter fatigue, of mechanical lifting

and falling of encumbered feet with the recurring feeling that it would

be impossible to lift them any more. All across that lake I ate snow,

and that and the back-ache legacy of an old strain are my signs of

approaching exhaustion. Four hours passed ere we heard the noise of dogs

and saw the glimmer of a light through the darkness, and the hearts of

men and beasts alike leaped to the expectation of rest and shelter. We

had feared the village might be deserted and were rejoiced that the

Indians were still there.

Never was hospitality more grateful than that we had from the little

remote band of natives at the Minchumina village. They made a pot of tea

and fried some flap-jacks for us, and that was our supper, though I

think the boys ate some boiled moose meat from a pot on the stove. We

had plenty of grub, but were too weary to cook it; we spread our bedding

down on the floor amongst a dozen others and fell almost at once into a

deep sleep. Almost at once; for the arrival of our eight dogs had made a

commotion amongst the canine population of the place, that after

repeated outbreaks of noisy animosity and defiance seemed to turn by

common consent into a friendly and most protracted howling contest in

which my malamute "Muk" plainly outdid all competitors. How much longer

the noise would have kept up it is hard to say--dogs never seem too

tired to howl--but when the limit of Indian patience was reached, an

aged crone rolled out of the bed into which she had rolled "all

standing," seized a staff and went outdoors to lay it impartially upon

the backs of all the disturbers of the peace, domestic and foreign, with

a screech that was as formidable as the blows. The rest was silence.

The next morning a dozen alarm-clocks went off within a few minutes of

each other. Every adult in that cabin owned a separate alarm-clock, and

rose, one supposes, to the summons of no other timepiece. At any rate,

the clocks went off at intervals, and the natives arose one by one and

seemed hugely to enjoy the clatter. Let one purchase a new thing and

every individual in the community must have one also.

But what struck me instantly upon arising was the miraculous

transformation that had taken place outdoors. The sun was shining

brilliantly through a clear sky! I hastened to dress and, not waiting

for breakfast, seized my camera and started out. The chinook was over;

the sharp, welcome tang of frost was in the air; the snow was hard

underfoot. Out upon the gleaming surface of the lake I went for nigh a

mile, resolutely refusing to look behind. I knew what vision awaited me

when I turned around, had, indeed, caught a slight glimpse as I left the

cabin, and I wanted the smooth, open foreground of the lake that I

might see it to the best advantage.

[Sidenote: DENALI AND HIS WIFE]

There is probably no other view of North America's greatest mountain

group comparable to that from Lake Minchumina. From almost every other

coign of vantage in the interior I had seen it and found it more or less

unsatisfying. Only from distant points like the Pedro Dome or the summit

between Rampart and Glen Gulch does the whole mass and uplift of it come

into view with dignity and impressiveness. At close range the peaks seem

stunted and inconspicuous, their rounded, retreating slopes lacking

strong lines and decided character. But from the lake the precipitous

western face of Denali and Denali's Wife rise sheer, revealed by the

level foreground of the snow from base to summit. It was, indeed, a

glorious scene. There stood the master peak, seeming a stupendous

vertical wall of rock rising twenty thousand feet to a splendid sharp

crest perhaps some forty or fifty miles away; there, a little farther to

the south, rose the companion mass, a smaller but still enormous

elevation of equally savage inaccessibility; while between them, near

the base, little sharp peaks stretched like a corridor of ruined arches

from mass to mass. One was struck at once by the simple appropriateness

of the native names for these mountains. The master peak is Denali--the

great one; the lesser peak is Denali's Wife; and the little peaks

between are the children. And my indignation kindled at the substitution

of modern names for these ancient mountain names bestowed immemorially

by the original inhabitants of the land! Is it too late to strike Mount

McKinley and Mount Foraker from the map? The names were given fifteen or

sixteen years ago only, by one who saw them no nearer than a hundred

miles. Is it too late to restore the native names contemptuously

displaced?

The majesty of the scene grew upon me as I gazed, and presently hand

went to camera that some record of it might be attempted. But alas for

the limitations of photography! I knew, even as I made the exposures,

first at one one-hundredth of a second and then at one-fiftieth, that

there was little hope of securing a picture; the air was yet faintly

hazy with thin vapour; the early sun made too acute an angle with the

peaks; and the yellow lens screen was left in the hind-sack of the sled.

It was even as I feared. When developed some months later, the film held

absolutely no trace of the mighty mountains that had risen so proudly

before it. I promised myself that at noon, when the sun had removed to a

greater distance from the mountains and made a more favourable angle

with them, I would return and try again; but by noon had come another

sudden, violent change of the weather, and snow was falling once more.

[Sidenote: THE MINCHUMINA FOLK]

So I got no picture, save the picture indelibly impressed upon my

memory, of the noblest mountain scene I had ever gazed upon which made

memorable this 1st of March; perhaps one of the noblest mountain scenes

in the whole world, for one does not recall another so great uplift from

so low a base. The marshy, flat country that stretches from Minchumina

to the mountains cannot be much more than one thousand feet above the

sea. Those awful precipices dropping thousands of feet at a leap, those

peaks rising serene and everlasting into the highest heaven, the

overwhelming size and strength and solidity of their rocky bulk, all

this sank into my heart, and there sprang up once again the passionate

desire of exploring the bowels of them, of creeping along their glaciers

and up their icy ridges, of penetrating their hidden chambers, inviolate

since the foundation of the world, and maybe scaling their ultimate

summits and looking down upon all the earth even as they look down!

Men, however, and not mountains, made the immediate demand upon one's

interest and attention, and I returned to breakfast and the duties of

the day. The Minchumina people are a very feeble folk, some sixteen all

told at the time of our visit, greatly reduced by the epidemics of the

last decade, living remote from all others on the verge of their race's

habitat. They trade chiefly at Tanana, a hundred and thirty miles or so

away, walking an annual trip thither with their furs, and owning a

nominal allegiance to our mission at that place. It was the first time

that any clergyman had ever visited them, and the whole of the day was

spent with them, discovering what they knew and trying to teach them a

little more. The people sat around on the floor and hung upon the lips

of the interpreter. But what a barrier a difference of language is! An

interpreter is like a mountain pass, a means of access but at the cost

of time and labour. He does not remove the obstruction. The Minchumina

people occupy a fine country that could amply support ten times the

Indian population that now inhabits it. We were, indeed, now entering a

country that has been almost depopulated by successive epidemics of

contagious diseases. The measles in 1900 slew most of them, and

diphtheria in 1906 destroyed all the children and many of the adults

that remained. The chief of this little band wore a hat proudly adorned

with ribbons and plumes, and flew a flag before his dwelling with the

initials of the North American Trading and Transportation Company on

it--a defunct Alaskan corporation. We could not learn the origin

thereof; the flag and the letters were plainly home-made. It was

probably a mere imitation of a flag he had seen years ago at Tanana,

copied without knowledge of the meaning of the letters, as the Esquimaux

often copy into the decoration of their clothing and equipment the

legends from canned foods.

Lake Minchumina drains by a fork of the Kantishna River into the Tanana

and so into the Yukon. Just beyond the southwestern edge of the lake

runs a deep gully for perhaps a mile that leads to another lake called

Tsormina, which drains into Minchumina. And just beyond Tsormina is a

little height of land, on the other side of which lies Lake Sishwoymina,

which drains into the Kuskokwim. So that little height of land is

another watershed between Alaska's two great rivers. Lakes Tsormina and

Sishwoymina are not on any maps; indeed, this region has never been

mapped save very crudely from the distant flanks of Denali upon one of

Alfred Brook's early bold journeys into the interior of Alaska on

behalf of the Geological Survey. Although the Russians had

establishments on the lower Kuskokwim seventy-five years ago, and the

river is the second largest in Alaska and easy of navigation, yet the

white man had penetrated very little into this country until the Innoko

and Iditarod "strikes" of 1908 and 1909 respectively.

It was our plan to follow the main valley of the Kuskokwim until the

confluence of the Takotna with that stream, just below the junction of

the main North and South Forks of the Kuskokwim, and then strike

northwestward across country to the Iditarod.

The snow had passed and the sun was bright and the thermometer around

zero all day when we left Minchumina to pursue our journey. The welcome

change in the weather had brought a still more welcome change in travel.

The decided and continued thaw followed by sharp cold had put a crust on

the snow that would hold up the dogs and the sled and a man on small

trail snow-shoes anywhere. Trail making was no longer necessary, and in

two days we made upward of fifty miles. So much difference does surface

make.

[Sidenote: TALIDA]

Across the end of Lake Minchumina, across Tsormina and Sishwoymina and a

number of lesser lakes we went, following a faint show-shoe trail

towards a distant mountain group to the southwest, the Talida Mountains,

at the foot of which lay the Talida village. On the other hand, to the

east and southeast, we had tantalising glimpses through haze and cloud

of the two great mountains, and presently of the lesser peaks of the

whole Alaskan range, sweeping its proud curve to the coast. For a long

way on the second day we travelled on the flat top of a narrow ridge

that must surely have been a lateral moraine of a glacier, what time the

ice poured down from the heights and stretched far over this

valley--then through scattered timber, increasing in size and thickness

and already displaying character that differed somewhat from the

familiar forests of the Yukon. The show-shoe trail we were following was

made by a messenger despatched by the Minchumina people to invite the

Talida people to a potlatch; for the caches were filled with moose meat

beyond local consumption. Early on the second day we met him returning

and learned that he had gone on to yet another village a day's journey

farther, still on our route.

The people were all gone hunting from the tiny native hamlet of Talida,

but we entered a cabin and made ourselves at home. We had passed into

the region where the Greek Church holds nominal sway, of which the icons

with little candles before them on the walls gave token. No priest ever

visits them, but a native at a village on the south fork where is a

church holds some position analogous to that of a lay reader. The

nearest priest is a half-breed, ill spoken of for irregularity of life,

some two hundred miles farther down the river. The Greek Church is

relaxing its hold in Alaska, perhaps inevitably, and suffers sadly since

the removal of the bishop from Sitka from lack of supervision. Also we

had passed out of Indian country into the land of the Esquimaux, for

these people, far up towards the head of the river as they were, had

yet come at some period from the mouth. We were out of Walter's language

range now, and were glad that the bilingual John of the march country

was with us to serve as interpreter.

Standing proudly up against the wall in one corner of the cabin was a

rather pathetic object to my eyes--an elaborate gilt-handled silk

umbrella. There needed no one to tell its story; it spoke of a visit to

the Yukon with furs to sell and the usual foolish purchase of gay and

glittering trash--novel and quite useless. What easy prey these poor

people are to the wiles of the trader! Said one of them to me recently,

when I asked the purpose of an "annex" to his store with a huge

billiard-table in it--at an exclusive native village--"It's to get their

money; there's no use trying to fool you; if we can't get it one way

we've got to get it another." This gorgeous silk umbrella was concrete

expression of the same sentiment. It was bought outside, it was brought

into the country, it was set on exhibition in the store, because some

trader judged it likely to attract a native eye. No one, white or

native, uses an umbrella in interior Alaska.

We made twenty-five miles the next day through a wide, open country,

well wooded in places with a park-like distribution of trees, unwonted

in our travels and attractive. A new species of spruce threw thick

branches right down to the ground and tapered up to a perfect cone; each

tree apart from the others and surrounded by sward instead of

underbrush. There was a dignity about these trees that the common Yukon

spruce never attains. Rolling hills of small elevation stretched on

either hand and game signs abounded. After eight hours of such travel

we spoke of camping, but presently saw footprints in the snow and pushed

on to the bank of a little river, the Chedolothna, where stood a cabin,

a tent, and several high caches. Here, with two families that occupied

the cabin, we stayed the night.

[Sidenote: MEASLES AND DIPHTHERIA]

Six people at this place, six at Talida, sixteen at Minchumina, make up

all the population of a region perhaps a hundred and fifty miles square.

Yet it is a noble Indian country, one of the most favourable in all the

interior, capable of supporting hundreds of people. Signs, indeed, of a

much larger occupation of it were not wanting, and all accounts speak of

the wholesale destruction of the natives by disease. We were told of a

village a little farther up this stream where every living being, save

one old man, died of diphtheria five years previously, while those who

have heard the stories of the horrors of the epidemic of measles in

1900, usually connected in some way with the stampede to Nome of that

year when the disease seems to have entered the country, will understand

how a region once thickly peopled, for Alaska, has become the most

thinly peopled in all the territory.

A half-breed trader, long resident at a point perhaps two hundred miles

lower down the Kuskokwim, told me of coming back to a populous village

after an absence of a few weeks, to find every person dead and the

starving dogs tearing at the rotting corpses. It is terrible to think

what the irruption of a new disease may mean to these primitive natives.

Even a disease like measles, rarely fatal and not commonly regarded as

serious amongst whites, takes to itself a strange and awful virulence

when it invades this virgin blood. The people know no proper treatment;

maddened by the itching rash that covers the body, they fling off all

cover, rush outdoors naked, whatever the weather, and either roll in the

snow or plunge into the stream; with the result that the disease

"strikes in" and kills them. Such is the description that is given of

its course along the lower Yukon and Kuskokwim. At many a Yukon village

half the people died, despite the aid the few missionaries then on the

river could afford; upon the Kuskokwim the havoc seems to have been

still greater. Six years later, death again stalked through this region

after having visited the Yukon, and this time seized his victims by the

throat. In another chapter has been given some account of an outbreak of

diphtheria on the Chandalar, following a more serious epidemic at Circle

City and Fort Yukon. It was during that same winter the disease raged in

this region, remote from any sort of medical or even intelligent lay

aid, and swept off all the children that had been spared by the measles

or had been born since that time. At our next stopping-place we saw the

graves of nineteen children who died in one day!

[Sidenote: THE INDIAN GUIDE]

We learned that we were now within one day's travel of a road-house, at

or near the junction of the forks of the Kuskokwim, and that a

government trail had been surveyed and staked from the Iditarod to the

Sushitna, passing close to the same point, and that during the present

winter road-houses had sprung up along the western portion of it, so

that we should not have to make camp again on the way to Iditarod City.

All of which Minchumina John had collected from the people in the

cabin, and now presented to me as reason why he should be released from

further service. I was loath to let him go until we were actually _at_

the road-house described, but he wanted to go back to the lake for the

potlatch then preparing, and said that two days' delay would bar him

from the best of the festivities.

So I settled with him, giving him fifty dollars of the sixty dollars

covenanted to the Iditarod, and grub enough to take him back to the

lake, and a rifle, for he was unprovided with firearms, and he went his

way back, richly content, to the gorging of unlimited moose meat that

awaited him, and the boy and I went ours. So far as merely his company

was concerned I was not sorry to lose him. The old saying holds good

upon the trail that "two is company and three is none." He interfered

with my boy's lessons. Since he had scarce any English, and could not be

ignored, the conversation was mainly in Indian. In a word he pulled the

company down to a native level. And I was anxious that Walter's

education should proceed.

This boy had been with me for two years, winter and summer, and it was a

great pleasure to witness his gracious development of body, mind, and

character. Clean-limbed, smooth-skinned, slender, and supple, his Indian

blood showing chiefly in a slight swarth of complexion and aquilinity of

feature, he now approached his twentieth year and began to gain the

strength of his manhood and to give promise of more than the average

stature and physical power. With only one full year's schooling behind

him, the year before he came to me, his active intelligence had made

such quick use of it that there was good foundation to build upon; and

our desultory lessons in camp--reading aloud, writing from dictation,

geography and history in such snippets as circumstances permitted--were

eagerly made the most of, and his mental horizon broadened continually.

Until his sixteenth year he had lived amongst the Indians almost

exclusively and had little English and could not read nor write. He was

adept in all wilderness arts. An axe, a rifle, a flaying knife, a skin

needle with its sinew thread--with all these he was at home; he could

construct a sled or a pair of snow-shoes, going to the woods for his

birch, drying it and steaming it and bending it; and could pitch camp

with all the native comforts and amenities as quickly as anybody I ever

saw. He spoke the naked truth, and was so gentle and unobtrusive in

manner that he was a welcome guest at the table of any mission we

visited. Miss Farthing at Nenana had laid her mark deep upon him in the

one year he was with her.

[Sidenote: THE HALF-BREED]

Before he came to me I had another half-breed for two years, and before

that there had been a series of full-blooded native boys. I found the

half-breed greatly preferable. With full command of the native language,

with such insight into the native mind as few white men ever attain, he

combines the white man's quickness of apprehension and desire for

knowledge; and the companionship had been pleasant and profitable. Both

these boys had picked up quickly and efficiently, without the slightest

previous experience, the running and the care of the four-cylinder

gasoline engine of the mission launch, and took a great and intelligent

interest in all machinery. As an interpreter the half-breed is far

superior to most full-bloods; he takes one's purport immediately; his

mind seems to leap with the speaker's mind, not only to follow

faithfully but to anticipate. And the further his English progresses, so

much the more excellent interpreter does he become.

My heart goes out to the large and rapidly increasing number of these

youths of mixed blood in Alaska. It is common to hear them spoken of

slightingly and contemptuously. There is what my mind always regards as

a damnable epigram current in the country to the effect that the

half-breed inherits the vices of both races and the virtues of neither.

The white man who utters this saying with a chuckle at his second-hand

wit has generally not much virtue to transmit, were virtue heritable.

But to thoughtful men nowadays this talk of the inheritance of virtues

and vices is mere folly. The half-breed in Alaska, as elsewhere, is the

product of his environment. Often without legitimate father--although in

an Indian community, where nothing is secret, his parentage is usually

well known--he is left for some native woman to support with the aid of

her native husband. He is reared with the full-blooded offspring of the

couple in the frankness that knows no reserve and the intimacy that

knows no restraint, of Indian life. The full extent of that frankness

and intimacy shocks even the loosest-living white man when he first

becomes aware of it. Where religion and decency have not been

faithfully inculcated there is no bound to it at all--it is complete.

Presently, as his superior intellectual inheritance begins to manifest

itself, as he grows up into consciousness that he is different from, and

in many ways superior to, the Indians around him, he is naturally drawn

to such white society as comes his way.

[Sidenote: THE LOW-DOWN WHITE]

In this book a good deal has been said, and, it may be thought by the

reader, said with a good deal of asperity, about the whites who frequent

Indian communities and come most into contact with the native people;

yet the more the author sees of this class, the less is he disposed to

modify any of the strictures he has put upon it. "The Low-Down White" is

the subject of one of the most powerful and scathing of Robert Service's

ballads, those most unequal productions with their mixture of strength

and feebleness, of true and forced notes, the best of which should

certainly live amongst the scant literature of the North. And, indeed,

the spectacle of the man of the higher race, with all the age-long

traditions and habits of civilisation behind him, descending below the

level of the savage, corrupting and debauching the savage and making

this corrupting and debauching the sole exercise of his more intelligent

and cultivated mind, is one that has aroused the disgust and indignation

of whites in all quarters of the world. Kipling and Conrad have drawn

him in the East; Robert Louis Stevenson in the South Sea Islands; any

army officer will draw him for you in the Philippines, which lack as yet

their great delineator; Service has not overdrawn him on the Yukon.

Now, it is to this man's society, for lack of other white society open

to him, that the young half-breed who feels his father's blood stirring

within him is drawn and is made welcome. He finds standards even lower,

because more sophisticated, than the standards of the Indians

themselves. He finds that honesty and morality are a sham, religion a

laughing-stock. He finds the chastity of women and the honour of men

sneeringly regarded as non-existent. He is taught to curse and swear, to

talk lewdly, to drink and gamble. He is taught that drunkenness and

sensuality are the only enjoyments worth looking forward to, and he soon

becomes as vile as his preceptors. The back room of the Indian trader's

store is often the scene of this tuition--barroom, assignation house,

gambling hell in one. But let that same youth be taken early in hand by

one who has a care for him and will be at some personal pains to train

him cleanly and uprightly, and he is as amenable to the good influences

as he would be to the bad if they were his sole environment. Conscious

all the time of his equivocal position, shy and timid about asserting

himself amongst whites, he is easy prey to the viciously as he is apt

pupil to the virtuously disposed.

What is said here of the male half-breeds applies _a fortiori_ to the

female. Unless early taken in hand by the missionary, or put under the

protection of some church boarding-school--and sometimes despite all

such care and teaching--the lot of the half-breed girl is a sad one; and

some of the lowest and vilest women of the land are of mixed blood.

The half-breed is assuredly to be reckoned with in the future of Alaska.

He is here to stay. He is here in increasing numbers. He is the natural

leader of the Indian population. There seems little doubt that when he

cares to assert his rights he is already an American citizen, although

judicial decisions are uncertain and conflicting in this matter.

The missions in the interior have recognised, though perhaps somewhat

tardily, the importance of the half-breeds, and have picked them up here

and there along the rivers and become responsible for their decent

rearing. Some, assuredly, of the future leaders of the native people are

now in training at the mission schools. Some, unfortunately, are in

quite as assiduous training by the unscrupulous Indian trader and his

coterie of low-down whites.

The skies had threatened snow since we arose, and when our diminished

expedition was well upon its way the snow began to fall. For thirty-six

hours it fell without cessation. Three days of good travel had put us

forward seventy-five or eighty miles; now once more we were "up against"

deep snow and trail breaking. An old native whom we met on his way to

the potlatch later in the day spread out his hands with a look of

despair and cried: "Good trail all lose'm!" All day we pushed on against

the driving storm, the flakes stinging our faces and striking painfully

against our eyeballs, now following a narrow steep woodland trail, now

awhile along a creek bed, now across open country with increasing

difficulty in finding our way, until it grew dark while yet we were

some miles from our destination, and we made camp; and all night long

the heavy snow continued.

So soon as we had struck our tent, crusted with ice, and had broken up

our wet camp next morning there was trouble about finding the trail.

Wide open spaces with never an indication of direction stretched before

us. Again and again we cast about, the boy to the left, I to the right,

to find some blaze or mark, but much of the course lay across open

country that bore none. And then I sorely regretted having let John go

back. Some miles before we came to a stop the previous evening, we

passed a native encampment with naught but women and children in it--the

men gone hunting. But we could not speak with them or get any

information from them, for our Kuskokwim interpreter was gone. And now

it seemed likely that we should lose our way in this wilderness. At last

we were entirely at a loss, the boy returning on the one side and I on

the other from wide detours, in which we had found no sign at all. The

snow still fell heavily; there lay more than a foot of it upon the late

crust; trail or sign of a trail, on the snow or above it, was not at

all.

[Sidenote: THE DOG GUIDES]

Then occurred one of the most remarkable things I have known in all my

journeyings. Straight ahead in the middle distance I spied two stray

dogs making a direct course towards us; not wandering about, but

evidently going somewhere. Now there are no such things as unattached

dogs in Alaska; any dog entirely detached from human ownership and some

sort of human maintenance would soon be a dead dog. The explanation,

full of hope, sprang at once to the boy's mind. The dogs must belong to

the native encampment some six miles back, and they had been to the

road-house for what scraps they could pick up, and were returning. It

was probably a daily excursion and they had doubtless followed their

accustomed trail. So it turned out. All the way to that road-house,

eight miles farther, we followed the trail left by those dogs, growing

fainter and fainter indeed as the new snow fell upon it, but still

discernible until we had almost reached the road-house. It led across

open swampy wastes, and presently across two considerable lakes, over

which we should never have been able to find our way, for the trail

swung to one hand or the other and did not leave the lake in the same

general direction by which it had reached it. Walter cut a bundle of

boughs and staked the trail out as we pursued it, lest we should return

this way, but from the moment we saw the dogs there was never any

question about the trail; they kept it perfectly. We were four and a

half hours making the eight miles or so to Nicoli's Village and the

road-house, but we might have been days making it but for those dogs.

And at the road-house we learned that the boy's theory of their

movements was the right one. They came across the twelve or fourteen

miles every day for such scraps as they could pick up.

[Sidenote: THE WILDERNESS POET]

So here was our first white man in sixteen days, an intelligent man of

meagre education, with a great bent for versifying. A courteous approval

of one set of verse brought upon us the accumulated output of years in

the wilderness without much opportunity of audience, as one supposes,

and most of the afternoon and evening was thus spent. Amidst the

overwrought sentimentality and faulty scansion which marked most of the

pieces was one simple little poem that struck a true note, said its

little say, and quit--without a superfluous word. Its author set no

store by it at all compared with his more pretentious and meretricious

work; yet it was the one poem in the whole mass. It described the

writing of a letter to his father; he had spent all he had in

prospecting and working a small claim, and had just realised that a

year's labour was gone for naught. His father would worry if he got no

word at all, but there was no use telling the old man he was broke, so

he just wrote that he was well, and that was all. The old man would come

pretty near understanding anyway. In simple lines that scanned and

rhymed naturally, that was what the three or four stanzas said. And it

was so typical of many a man's situation in this country, gave so simply

and well the reason why many men cease writing to their relatives at

all, that it pleased me and seemed of value. That note came from the

heart and from the life's experience.

Nicoli's Village is a very small place with a mere handful of people,

situated on the South Fork of the Kuskokwim some forty miles by river

above the junction of the forks. Before the epidemics devastated it it

had been a considerable native community. A Greek church, which the

natives built entirely themselves, and which boasted a large painted

icon of sorts, was the most important building in the place, and was

served by the lay minister referred to before. Thus far the Kuskokwim

is navigable for vessels of light draught, and a small stern-wheel

steamboat lay wintering upon the bank.

[Sidenote: ROAD-HOUSES]

Our way now left the Kuskokwim and struck across country to a point just

below the junction of the forks, and then across country again to a

tributary of the right bank, the Takotna; with a general northerly

direction. Road-houses there indeed were, in the crudity and discomfort

of their first season, and other evidences of the proximity of the white

man. Here were two men camped, hunting moose for the Iditarod market,

more than a hundred and twenty-five miles away, and here, at the end of

the second day, near the mouth of the Takotna, was the new post of the

Commercial Company in the charge of an old acquaintance who welcomed us

warmly and entertained us most hospitably. After camping and road-house

experience of nearly three weeks, a comfortable bed and well-spread

table, and the general unmistakable menage of a home-making woman are

very highly enjoyed. That night the whole population of the settlement,

fourteen persons, gathered in the store for Divine service.

Sixteen miles farther on was another settlement, the "Upper Takotna"

Post, with a rival company established and some larger population. Here,

also, we spent a night with old Fairbanks acquaintances. We were yet a

hundred miles from Iditarod City, and the trail lay over a very rugged,

hilly country, up one creek to its head, over a divide, and down

another, in the way of the usual cross-country traverse.

There had not been so much snowfall in this section, but the weather

began to be very severe. The thermometer fell to -45 deg. and -50 deg. and -55 deg.

on three successive nights, and all day long rose not above -20 deg., with a

keen wind. The cost of transporting supplies to the road-houses on this

trail justified the high prices charged--one dollar and a half for a

poor meal of rabbits and beans and bacon, or ptarmigan and beans and

bacon, and one dollar for a lunch of coffee, bread and butter, and dried

fruit. But no such exigency could be pleaded to excuse the dirt and

discomfort and lack of the commonest provision of outhouse decency at

most of these places--'twas mere shiftlessness. There is not often much

middle ground in Alaskan road-houses; they are either very good in their

way or very bad; either kept by professional victuallers who take pride

in them or by idle incompetents who make an easy living out of the

necessities of travellers. One wishes that some of the old-time

travellers who used to wax so eloquently indignant over the inns in the

Pyrenees could make a winter journey in the interior of Alaska.

[Illustration: "THE 'SUMMIT' IS HIGH ABOVE TIMBER-LINE AND THE TRAIL

PURSUES A HOGBACK RIDGE FOR A MILE AND A HALF AT THE SUMMIT LEVEL."]

[Illustration: A STREET IN IDITAROD CITY.]

One thing pleased me at these road-houses. The only reading-matter in

any of them consisted of magazines bearing the rubber stamp of Saint

Matthew's Reading-Room at Fairbanks, part of a five-hundred-pound cargo

of magazines which the mission launch _Pelican_ brought to the Iditarod

the previous summer; virtually the only reading-matter in the whole

camp. It was pleasant to know that we had been able to avert the real

calamity of a total absence of anything to read for a whole winter

throughout this wide district. But, although they were brought to the

Iditarod and distributed absolutely free, each of these magazines had

cost the road-house keeper twenty-five cents for carriage over the trail

from Iditarod City, and they had been read to death. Some of them were

so black and greasy from continued handling that the print at the edges

of the pages was almost unreadable.

These creeks swarmed with ptarmigan, and it was well they did, for the

new camp was ill supplied with food, and we found ourselves in a region

of growing scarcity as we approached the Iditarod. The ptarmigan seem to

have supplemented the meagre stocks in the Iditarod during this winter

of 1910-11 as effectively as the rabbits did in the Fairbanks camp in

the scarce winter of 1904-5. In place after place the whole creek

valley, where it was open, was crisscrossed with ptarmigan tracks, and

the birds rose in coveys, uttering their harsh, guttural cry at every

turn of the trail.

The summit between the head of Moose Creek and the head of Bonanza Creek

is again a watershed between the waters of the Kuskokwim and the waters

of the Yukon; for Moose Creek is tributary to the Takotna and Bonanza

Creek is tributary to Otter Creek, which is tributary to the Iditarod

River. The "summit" is high above timber-line, and when the trail has

reached it it does not descend immediately but pursues a hogback ridge

for a mile and a half at about the summit level. We passed over it in

clear, bright weather without difficulty, but it would be a bad passage

in wind or snow or fog. The rugged, broken country, with small, rounded

domes of hills, stretched away in all directions, a maze of little

valleys threading in and out amongst them.

[Sidenote: PLACE-NAMES]

The Bonanza Creek road-house was by far the best of any between the

Kuskokwim and the Iditarod, and showed what can be done for comfort,

even under adverse circumstances, by a couple who care and try. But how

the names of gold-bearing creeks, or creeks that are expected to be

gold-bearing are repeated again and again in every new camp! I once

counted up the following list of mining place-names in Alaska: Bonanza

Creeks, 10; Eldorados and Little Eldorados, 10; Nugget Creeks or

Gulches, 17; Gold Creeks, 12; Gold Runs, 7. Nor is it only in creeks

with auriferous deposit or expectation of auriferous deposit that this

reduplication occurs; there are Bear Creeks, 16; Boulder Creeks, 13;

Moose Creeks, 13; Willow Creeks, 17; Canyon Creeks, 12; Glacier Creeks,

14.

The imagination of the average prospector is not his most active

faculty, but even when his imagination is given play and he names a

place "Twilight," as he did the original settlement at this base of

supplies, the ineradicable prose of trade comes along the next summer

and changes it to "Iditarod City." There must have been some remarkable

personality strong enough to repress the "chamber of commerce" at

Tombstone, Arizona, or the place would have lost its distinctive name so

soon as it grew large enough to have mercantile establishments instead

of stores.

[Sidenote: IDITAROD CITY]

We went through "Discovery Otter" and into "Flat City," on Flat Creek,

the jealous rival of Iditarod City, and so over the hills to Iditarod

City, on the wings of a storm. The wind whirled the snow behind us and

drove the sled along almost on top of the dogs. In its bleak situation

and its exposure to the full force of the wind, Iditarod City reminds

one of Nome or Candle on the Seward Peninsula. The hills and flats that

surround it are in the main treeless, and the snow drifts and drives

over everything. Almost all the week that we spent in the town it was

smothered up in a howling wind-storm, so that it was quite a serious

undertaking to walk a block or two along the streets. Deep drifts were

piled up on all the corners and on the lee side of all buildings. We

reached Iditarod City on Monday, the 13th of March. Until the following

Friday morning was no cessation or moderation of the wind-storm; and

this, they told us, represented most of the weather since the 1st of

January.

Overgrown and overdone in every way, the place presented all the

features, sordid and otherwise, of a raw mining town. Prices had risen

enormously on all manner of supplies, for everything that was not

actually "short" was believed to be "cornered." Bacon was ninety cents a

pound; butter one dollar and a half a pound; flour was twenty dollars a

hundred pounds, and most things in like ratio. Some said the grub was

not in the camp; others that the tradesmen had it cached away waiting

for the still higher prices they believed would obtain before fresh

supplies could arrive in July. There was a general feeling of

disappointment and discouragement, enhanced by discomfort and actual

suffering from the terrible stormy weather of the winter and the

exorbitant and growing price of provisions. Many men without occupation

were living on one meal a day. The saloons and the parasitical classes,

male and female, seemed to flourish and to play their usual prominent

part in the life of such places. The doings of notorious women whose

sobriquets seemed household words, the lavish expenditures of certain

men upon them, the presents of diamonds they received, with the amount

paid for them, constituted a large part of the general talk.

One is compelled to admire the vigour and enthusiastic enterprise,

daunted by no difficulty, that is displayed in the wonderfully rapid

upraising of a new mining-camp town. The building goes far ahead of the

known wealth of the camp and commonly far ahead of the reasonable

expectation. But the element of chance is so important a factor in

placer mining that the whole thing partakes more of the nature of

gambling than of a commercial venture. Any new camp may suddenly present

the world with a new Klondike; with riches abundant and to spare for

every one who is fortunate enough to be on the spot. Here was Flat Creek

with a surprisingly rich deposit; why should there not be a dozen such

amidst the multitudinous creeks of the district? How could any one know

that it would be almost the only creek on which pay would be found at

all? For there is no law about the distribution of gold deposits; there

is not even a general rule that has not its notable exceptions. It is

very generally believed by the old prospectors and miners that somewhere

in the Bible may be found these words, "Silver occurs in veins, but gold

is where you find it," which of course, is a mere misreading or faulty

remembering of a verse in the Book of Job: "Surely there is a vein for

the silver and a place for the gold where they fine it" (refine it). But

that "gold is where you find it" is about the only law touching

auriferous deposits that holds universally good.

Three long parallel streets of one and two story wooden buildings, with

cross streets connecting them, made up the town. Because the country is

poorly timbered, the usual log construction had yielded in the main to

framed buildings, and great quantities of lumber had been brought the

previous summer from Fairbanks, and even from Nome and the outside, to

supplement the low-grade output of two local mills. But the price of

building materials had been very high, and the average dwelling was very

small and incommodious. People accustomed to the comparative luxury of

the older camps had suffered a good deal from the lack of all domestic

conveniences in this new will-o'-the-wisp of an eldorado.

So there the town stretched away, lumber and paper,--the usual

tinder-box Alaskan construction--stores slap up against one another,

with no alleyways between; in the busiest part of it and along the

water-front even an adequate provision of side streets grudged;

furnace-heated and kiln-dried and gasoline-lit; waiting for the careless

match and the fanning wind and the five minutes' start that should send

it all up in smoke. A week after we left it came; as it came to Dawson,

as it came to Nome, as it came to Fairbanks, without teaching any lesson

or leaving any precautionary regulations on the statute book to save

men from their own competitive greed. Two or three weeks after the fire,

however, it was all rebuilt, and a plunging local bank held mortgages on

most of the structures for the cost of the new material--and holds them

yet.

[Sidenote: THOUSANDS WITHOUT CHURCH]

With at least a thousand people resident in the town, not to mention the

thousands more out upon the creeks and at Flat City and "Discovery[G]

Otter," there was no minister of religion of any sort in the whole

region, nor had public Divine service been conducted since the occasion

of the _Pelican's_ visit the previous summer. Yet there were many in the

place who sorely missed the opportunities of worship. Twice on Sunday

the largest dancing hall in the town was crowded at service; at night it

could have been filled a second time with those unable to get in.

Places like this present very difficult problems to those desirous of

providing for their religious need. To occupy them at all they should be

occupied at once when yet eligible sites may be had for the staking; if

they prosper, to come into them later means buying at a high price. Yet

what seventh son of a seventh son shall have foresight enough to tell

the fortunes of them? The North is strewn with "cities" of one winter.

Nor is the selection of suitable men to minister to such communities a

simple matter. Amidst the overthrow of all the usual criteria of

conduct, the fading out of the usual dividing lines and the blending

into one another of the usual divisions, it requires a tactful and

prudent man "to keep the happy mean between too much stiffness in

refusing and to much easiness in admitting" variations from conventional

standards. His point of view, if he is to have any influence whatever,

must not exclude the point of view of the great majority; he must accept

the situation in order to have any chance of improving the situation.

And yet in the fundamentals of character and conduct he must be

unswerving. And if on any such fundamental the battle gauge is thrown

down, he must take it up and fight the quarrel out at whatever cost.

We left Iditarod City on Monday, the 20th of March, the dogs the fatter

and fresher for their week's rest, resolved not to return by the

Kuskokwim but to take the beaten trail out to the Yukon, and so all the

way up that stream to Fort Yukon. The monthly mail had arrived a few

days previously--a monthly mail was all that the thousands of men in

this camp could secure--and had gone out again the very next morning,

before people had time to answer their letters, before the registered

mail had even been delivered. So our departure for the Yukon was eagerly

seized upon and advertised as a means of despatching probably the last

mail that would go outside over the ice. I was sworn in as special

carrier, and a heavy sack of first-class mail added to our load as far

as Tanana. The first stage of thirty miles led to Dikeman, a town at the

headwaters of ordinary steamboat navigation of the Iditarod River, at

which the Commercial Company had built a depot and extensive warehouse,

since in the main abandoned. Two streets of cabins lined the bank, but

forty or fifty souls comprised the population, and almost all of them

gathered for Divine service that night.

[Sidenote: THE "MOVING OF THE MEAT"]

From Dikeman to Dishkaket, on the Innoko River, a distance of some

seventy miles, our route lay over one of the dreariest and most dismal

regions in all Alaska. It is one succession of lakes and swamps, with

narrow, almost knife-edge, ridges between, fringed with stunted spruce.

Far as the eye could reach to right and left the country was the same;

it is safe to say broadly that all the land between the Iditarod and

Innoko Rivers is of this character. We passed over it in mild weather,

but it must be a terrible country to cross in storm or through deep

snow. For ten miles at a stretch there was scarcely a place where a man

might make a decent camp. At a midway road-house was gathered the

greatest assemblage of dogs and loaded sleds I had ever seen together at

one time, each team with an Indian driver; they must have covered a

quarter or a third of a mile. It was a freight train engaged in

transporting a whole boat-load of butcher's meat to Iditarod City, the

cargo of a steamboat that had frozen in on the Yukon the previous

October or early November. All the winter through efforts had been made

to get this meat two hundred odd miles overland to its destination; but

the weather had been so stormy and the snow so deep that near the end of

March most of it was still on the way, and some yet far down the trail

towards the Yukon waiting for another trip of the teams.

Dishkaket was merely a native village on the Innoko River two or three

years before; but since three new trails from the Yukon come together

here--from Kaltag Nulato, and Lewis's Landing--and in the other

directions two trails branch off here, to the Innoko diggings at Ophir

and to the Iditarod, a store or two and a couple of road-houses had

sprung up.

From Dishkaket, after crossing the Innoko, we took the most northerly of

the three trails to the Yukon, the Lewis Cut-Off, a trail of a hundred

miles that strikes straight across country and reaches the Yukon eighty

miles farther up that stream than the Nulato trail and a hundred and

twenty miles farther up than the Kaltag trail. The Kaltag trail is the

trail to Nome; the Nulato trail is the mail trail simply because it

suits the contractors to throw business to Nulato. The Lewis Cut-Off is

the direct route, the shortest by about a hundred miles, but it was cut

by the private individual whose name it bears, and leads out to his

store and road-house on the Yukon; so a rival road-house was built close

by on the river and the prestige and advertisement of the "United States

mail route" thrown to the trail that covers one hundred unnecessary

miles--for no other reason than to deprive Lewis of the legitimate fruit

of his enterprise.

The character of the country changed so soon as the Innoko was crossed;

the wide swamps gave place to a broken, light-timbered country of ridges

and hollows, and the rough, laborious, horse-ruined trail across it made

bad travelling. "Buckskin Bill," with his cayuses, was also engaged in

"moving the meat." The measured miles, moreover, gave place to estimated

miles, and the nominal twenty-five we made the first day was probably

not much more than twenty.

[Sidenote: MILLINERY]

The first fifty miles of the country between the Innoko and the Yukon is

much the same, and we were climbing and descending ridges for a couple

of days. Then we crossed a high ridge and dropped out of Innoko waters

into the valley of the Yukatna, a tributary of the Yukon, and passed

down this valley for thirty or forty miles, and then across some more

broken country to the Yukon. At one of the road-houses a woman was

stopping, going in with three or four large sled loads of millinery and

"ladies' furnishings." We were told that the merchandise had cost her

twelve thousand dollars in Fairbanks, and that she expected to realise

thirty thousand dollars by selling it to the "sporting" women of the

Iditarod, now a whole winter debarred from "the latest imported French

fashions." This woman was dressed in overalls, like a man, and the

drivers of her teams, two white men and a native, cursed and swore and

used filthy language to the dogs in her presence. It always angers me to

hear an Indian curse; to hear one curse in the presence of a white woman

was particularly disgusting and exasperating; but what could one expect

when the white men put no slightest restraint upon themselves and the

woman seemed utterly indifferent? I called the Indian aside and spoke

very plainly to him, and he ceased his ribaldry; but the white men still

poured it out as they struggled to hitch their many dogs. At last I

could stand it no longer. "Madam," I said to the woman, "I don't know

who you are, save that you are a white woman, and as a white woman,

if I were you, I would make those blackguards treat me with more respect

than to use such language before me." She flushed and made no reply. The

men, who heard what I said, scowled and made no reply. Presently

dispositions were done and the train moved off, but I did not hear any

more foul language. This is set down here chiefly because it was the

first and only time in all his travels in Alaska that the writer heard

such language in such presence.

[Illustration: THE END OF THE PORTAGE TRAIL.]

[Illustration: ROUGH ICE ON THE YUKON.]

Another road-house was kept by a man who had been cook upon a recent

arctic expedition off the coast of Alaska, and he gave some interesting

inside information about an enterprise the published narrative of which

had always seemed unsatisfactory. It was just gossip from a drunken

scamp, but it filled several gaps in the book.

As we approached the Yukon we passed several meat caches where great

quarters of beef sewn up in burlap were piled on the side of the trail.

At one of these caches the camp-robbers had been at work industriously.

They had stripped the burlap from parts of several quarters, exposing

the fat, and had dug out and carried it away little by little until it

was all gone. The hard-frozen lean probably defied their best efforts;

at any rate, the fat offered less resistance. But where else in the

world could men dump quarters of beef beside the road and go off and

leave them for weeks with no more danger of depredation than the bills

of birds can effect?

A few miles from the river the rival road-house signs began to appear.

"Patronise Lewis; he cut this trail at his own expense," pleaded one.

"Why go five miles out of your way," sneered another. Lewis's

road-house _is_ across the wide Yukon, and there was no point in

crossing the river save one's determination to lend no countenance to

the spitefulness of these mail runners. So across the river we went and

were glad to be on the Yukon again. The next morning we encountered the

same rival signs at the point where the trail from Lewis's joined the

"mail trail."

[Sidenote: "TREASURE ISLAND"]

Most of our travelling was now upon the surface of the Yukon, and four

hundred and fifty miles of it stretched ahead of us ere our winter's

travel should end at Fort Yukon. Four hours brought us to the military

telegraph station at Melozi, and we were able to send word ahead that we

were safely out of the Kuskokwim wilderness. Then a portage was crossed

and then the river pursued again until with about thirty miles to our

credit we made camp. The days were lengthening out now, the weather

growing mild, although a keen, cold, down-river breeze was rarely

absent, and travel began to be pleasant and camping no hardship. We

preferred camping, on several scores, when the day's work had not been

too arduous, chief amongst them being that it gave more opportunity and

privacy for Walter's schooling. He was reading _Treasure Island_ aloud,

and I was getting as great pleasure from renewing as he from beginning

an acquaintance with that prince of all pirate stories. Kokrines and

Mouse Point one day, the next The Birches; we passed these well-known

Yukon landmarks, camping, after a run of thirty-eight miles, some six

miles beyond the last-named place, with a run of forty-four miles before

us to Tanana. I judged it too much; but the trail was greatly improved

and we decided to attempt it in one stage. A misreading of the watch, so

that I roused myself and Walter at 3.30 A. M. instead of 5.15 A. M., and

did not realise the mistake until the fire was made and it was not worth

while returning to bed, gave us a fine start and we made good progress.

Gold Mountain (so called, one supposes, because there is no gold there;

there is no other reason), Grant Creek, "Old Station" were passed by,

and at length Tanana loomed before us while yet ten miles away. In just

eleven hours we ran the forty-four miles, making, with three additional

miles out to the mission, forty-seven altogether, by far the longest

journey of the winter. We reached Tanana on the 1st of April, just six

weeks since we left.

[Sidenote: AN UNTRAVELLED RIVER]

We spent eight days at Tanana, including two Sundays, Passion Sunday and

Palm Sunday, but I was under an old promise to spend Easter there also.

Now, Easter, 1911, fell on the 16th of April, and for the

three-hundred-mile journey to Fort Yukon a period of ten or twelve days

at the least would be necessary, that might easily stretch to two weeks.

Travelling on the Yukon ice so late in April as this would involve was

not only fraught with great difficulty and discomfort, but also with

actual danger, and I had to beg to be absolved of my promise. Some

considerable preparation was on foot for the festival, and I was loath

to leave, for Tanana was then without any resident minister, but it

seemed foolish to take the chances that would have to be taken if we

stayed.

Five days of almost ceaseless snow-storm during our stay at Tanana did

not give prospect of good travelling, and, indeed, when we pulled out

from the mission on the Monday in Holy Week there was no sign of any

trail. From Tanana up to Fort Yukon there is very little travel; since

the whole of this long stretch of river was deprived of winter mail a

year or two before, no through travel at all. Cabins may usually be

found to camp in, but there are no road-houses. What travel still takes

place is local.

The journey divided itself into two roughly equal parts, a hundred and

fifty miles through the Lower Ramparts, and a hundred and fifty miles

through the Yukon Flats, almost all of it on the surface of the river.

It was hoped to reach Stephen's Village, a native settlement just within

the second half of the journey, for Easter.

Snow does not lie long at rest upon the river within the Ramparts, and

particularly within the narrow, canon-like stretch of seventy-five miles

from Tanana to Rampart City. Violent and almost ceaseless down-stream

winds sweep the deep defile in the mountains through which the river

winds its course. In places the ice is bare of snow; in places the snow

is piled in huge, hardened drifts. So strong and so persistent is this

wind that it is often possible to skate over an uninterrupted black

surface of ice, polished like plate glass, for twenty miles on a

down-river journey. To make way over such a surface up-stream, against

such wind, is, however, almost impossible. The dogs get no footing and

the wind carries the sled where it listeth. The journey so far as

Rampart City has been described before; it will suffice now that it

took three days of toilsome battling against wind and bad surface, with

nights spent upon the floor of grimy cabins. So cold was the wind that

it is noted in my diary with surprise, on the 12th of April, that I had

worn fur cap, parkee, and muffler all day, as though it had been the

dead of winter instead of three weeks past the vernal equinox.

On Wednesday night there was Divine service at Rampart, and on Maundy

Thursday, after four miles upon the river, we took the portage of eleven

miles that cuts a chord to the arc of the greatest bend of the river

within the Ramparts and so saves nine miles. Three miles more took us to

the deserted cabin at the site of the abandoned coal-mine opposite the

mouth of the Mike Hess River, here confluent with the Yukon, and in that

cabin we spent the night, having had the high, bitter wind in our faces

all day. We hated to leave the shelter of the wooded portage and face

the blast of the last three miles.

[Sidenote: WIND AND SNOW]

We woke the next morning to a veritable gale of wind and snow, and lay

in the cabin till noon, occupied with the exercises of the solemn

anniversary. The wind having then abated somewhat and the snow ceased,

we sallied forth, still hopeful of making Stephen's Village for Easter.

But when we got down upon the river surface it became doubtful if we

could proceed, and as we turned the first bend we encountered a fresh

gale that did not fall short of a blizzard. The air was filled with

flying snow that stung our faces and blinded us. The dogs' muzzles

became incrusted with snow and their eyes filled with it so that it was

hard to keep them facing it. I could not see the boy at all when he was

a hundred feet ahead of the team. We struggled along for four miles,

and, since it was then evident that we could not go much farther without

useless risk, we turned to a spot on the bank where Walter knew another

deserted cabin to stand; for he knows every foot of this section of the

river and once spent a summer, camped at the coal-mine, fishing. The

spot was reached, but the cabin was gone. The fish rack still stood

there, but the cabin was burned down. There was nothing for it but to

return to the coal-mine cabin; so, for the first and only time in all my

journeyings, it was necessary to abandon a day's march that had been

entered upon and go back whence we had come. We ran before the gale at

great speed and were within the cabin again by 2.30 P. M. All the

evening and all night the storm raged, and I was in two minds about

running back to Rampart before it for Easter, since it was now out of

the question to reach Stephen's Village. If the season had not been so

far advanced this is what I should have done, but it would set us back

three days more on the journey, and on reflection I was not willing to

take that chance with the break-up so near.

So on the morning of Easter Eve we sallied up-stream again, snow falling

and driving heavily, and the wind still strong but with yesterday's keen

edge blunted. By the time we had beaten around the long bend up which we

had fought our way the day before, the snow had ceased, and by noon the

wind had dropped and the sun was shining, and in a few moments of his

unobscured strength all the loose snow on the sled was melted--a

warning of the rapidity with which the general thaw would proceed once

the skies were clear. That night saw us in the habitable though dirty,

deserted cabin at Salt Creek (so called, one supposes, because the water

of it is perfectly fresh) at which we had hoped to lodge the previous

night.

[Sidenote: ALASKAN "FORTS"]

Buoyed by the hope of doing a double stage in a clear, windless day and

thus reaching Stephen's Village for service at night, we made a very

early start that beautiful Easter morning. But it was not to be. Such

trail as there was ran high up on the bank ice--level, doubtless, when

it was made much earlier in the season, but now at a slope towards the

middle of the river through the falling of the water, and seamed with

great cracks. Such a trail, called a "sidling" trail in the vernacular

of mushing, is always difficult and laborious to travel, for the sled

slips continually off it into the loose snow or the ice cracks, and

often for long stretches at a time one man must hold up the nose of the

sled while the other toils at the handle-bars. In one place, while thus

holding the front of the sled on the trail, Walter slipped into an ugly

ice crack concealed by drifted snow, and so wedged his foot that I had

difficulty in extricating him. The last two bends of the river within

the Ramparts seemed interminable and it was 6.30 P. M., with twelve

hours' travel behind us, when we reached old Fort Hamlin, on the verge

of the Yukon Flats. These "forts," it might be explained, if one chose

to pursue the elucidation of Alaskan nomenclature in the same strain,

are so called because they never had any defences and never needed any.

As a matter of fact, in the early days, when the Hudson Bay Company

made its first establishments on the upper river, there was supposed to

be some need of fortification, and Fort Selkirk and Fort Yukon were

stockaded. Fort Selkirk, indeed, was sacked and burned sixty years ago,

but not by Yukon Indians. The Chilkats from the coast, indignant at the

loss of their middle-man profits by the invasion of the interior,

crossed the mountains, descended the river, and destroyed the post. It

thus became customary to call a trading-post a "fort," and every little

point where a store and a warehouse stood was so dignified. Hence Fort

Reliance, Fort Hamlin, Fort Adams.

For years Fort Hamlin had been quite deserted, but now smoke issued from

the stovepipe and dogs gave tongue at our approach, and we found a white

man with an Esquimau wife from Saint Michael and a half-breed child

dwelling there and carrying a few goods for sale. With him we made our

lodging, and with him and his family said our evening service of Easter,

and so to bed, thoroughly tired.

[Sidenote: TRAVELLING BY NIGHT]

A mile beyond Fort Hamlin the Ramparts suddenly cease and the wide

expanse of the Yukon Flats opens at once. Ten miles or so brought us to

Stephen's Village, where we had been long expected and where a very busy

day was spent. A number of Indians were gathered and there were children

to baptize and couples to marry, as well as the lesson of the season to

teach. It was a great disappointment that we had been unable to get here

before, and matter of regret that, being here at such labour, only so

short a time could be spent. But the closing season called to us

loudly. A mild, warm day set all the banks running with melting snow and

made the surface of the river mushy. There was really no time to lose,

for the next seventy-five miles was to give us the most difficult and

disagreeable travelling of the journey. Here, in the Flats, where is

greatest need of travel direction on the whole river, was no trail at

all beyond part of the first day's journey. Within the Ramparts the

river is confined in one channel; however bad the travelling may be,

there is no danger of losing the way; but in the Flats the river divides

into many wide channels and these lead off into many more back sloughs,

with low, timbered banks and no salient landmarks at all. Behind us were

the bluffs of the Ramparts, already growing faint; afar off on the

horizon, to the right, were the dim shapes of the Beaver Mountains. All

the rest was level for a couple of hundred miles.

A local trail to a neighbouring wood-chopper's took us some twelve

miles, and then we were at a loss. The general direction we knew, and

previous journeys both in winter and summer gave us some notion of the

river bends to follow, but we wallowed and floundered until late at

night before we reached the cabin we were bound for, the snow exceeding

soft and wet for hours in the middle of the day.

The time had plainly come to change our day travel into night travel,

for freezing was resumed each night after the sun was set, and the

surface grew hard again. So at this cabin we lay all the next day, with

an interesting recluse of these parts who knows many passages of

Shakespeare by heart, and who drew us a chart of our course to the next

habitation, marking every bend to be followed and the place where the

river must be crossed. But there is always difficulty in getting a new

travel schedule under way, and we did not leave until five in the

morning instead of at two as we had planned. This gave us insufficient

time to make the day's march before the sun softened the snow, and

moccasins grew wet, and snow-shoe strings began to stretch, and the

webbing underfoot to yield and sag--and we had to content ourselves with

half a stage. By nine P. M. we were off again and did pretty well until

the night grew so dark that we could no longer distinguish our

landmarks. Then we went to the bank and built a big fire and made a pot

of tea and sat and dozed around it for a couple of hours or so until the

brief darkness of Alaskan spring was overpast, and the dawn began to

give light enough to see our way again.

When our course lay on the open river, the snow had crust enough to hold

us upon our snow-shoes; but when it took us through little sheltered

sloughs, the crust was too thin and we broke through all the time, and

that makes slow, painful travel. At last we came to a portage that cuts

off a number of miles, but the snow slope by which the top of the bank

should be reached had a southern exposure and was entirely melted and

gone. The dogs had to be unhitched, the sled to be unloaded, the stuff

packed in repeated journeys up the steep bank, and the sled hauled up

with a rope. Then came the repacking and reloading and the rehitching;

and when the portage was crossed the same thing had to be done to get

down to the river bed again. Twice more on that day the process was gone

through, and each time it took nigh an hour to get up the bank, so that

it was around noon, and the snow miserably wet and mushy again, when we

reached Beaver and went to bed at the only road-house between Fort Yukon

and Tanana.

"Beaver City" owes its existence to quartz prospects in the Chandalar,

in which men of money and influence in the East were interested. The

Alaska Road Commission had built a trail some years before from the

Chandalar diggings out to the Yukon, striking the river at this point,

and on the opposite side of the river another trail is projected and

"swamped out" direct to Fairbanks. The opening up of this route was

expected to bring much travel through Beaver, and a town site was staked

and many cabins built. But "Chandalar quartz" remains an interesting

prospect, and the Chandalar placers have not proved productive, and all

but a few of the cabins at "Beaver City" are unoccupied. If "the

Chandalar" should ever make good, "Beaver City" will be its river port.

[Sidenote: LAST DAY]

We left Beaver at eleven P. M. on Friday night, hoping in two long

all-night runs to cover the eighty miles and reach Fort Yukon by Sunday

morning. Here was the first trail since we left Stephen's Village and

the first fairly good trail since we left Tanana, for there had been

some recent travel between Fort Yukon and Beaver. Here for the first

time we had no need of snow-shoes, and when they have been worn

virtually all the winter through and nigh a couple of thousand miles

travelled in them, walking is strange at first in the naked moccasin. It

is a blessed relief, however, to be rid of even the lightest of trail

snow-shoes. We stepped out gaily into a beautiful clear night, with a

sharp tang of frost in the air, and even the dogs rejoiced in the

knowledge that the end of the journey was at hand. All night long we

made good time and kept it up without a stop until eight o'clock in the

morning, when we reached an inhabited but just then unoccupied cabin and

ate supper or breakfast as one chooses to call it and went to bed,

having covered fully half the distance to Fort Yukon. About noon we were

rudely awakened by one of the usual Alaskan accompaniments of

approaching summer. The heat of the sun was melting the snow above us,

and water came trickling through the dirt roof upon our bed. We moved to

a dry part of the cabin and slept again until the evening, and at nine

P. M. entered upon what we hoped would be our last run.

But once more our plans to spend Sunday were frustrated. The trail led

through dry sloughs from which the advancing thaw had removed the snow

in great patches. Sometimes the sled had to be hauled over bare sand;

sometimes wide detours had to be made to avoid such sand; sometimes

pools of open water covered with only that night's ice lay across our

path. By eight o'clock in the morning we estimated that we were not more

than seven or eight miles from Fort Yukon. But already the snow grew

soft and our feet wet, and the dogs were very weary with the eleven

hours' mushing. It would take a long time and much toil to plough

through slush, even that seven or eight miles. So I gave the word to

stop, and we made an open-air camp on a sunny bank, and after breakfast

we covered our heads in the blankets from the glare of the sun, and

slept till five. Then we ate our last trail meal, and were washed up and

packed up and hitched up an hour and more before the snow was frozen

enough for travel. A couple of hours' run took us to Fort Yukon, and so

ended the winter journey of 1910-11, on the 23d of April, having been

started on the 17th of November. We were back none too soon. Every day

we should have found travelling decidedly worse. In a few more days the

river would have begun to open in places, and only the middle would be

safe for travel, with streams of water against either bank and no way of

getting ashore. Seventeen days later the ice was gone out and the Yukon

flowing bank full.

FOOTNOTE:

[G] The "claim" on a creek on which gold is first found is called

"Discovery"; the claims above are numbered one, two, three, etc.,

"above" and the claims below, one, two, three, etc., "below."