TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH
A DOG SLED

[i]

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

[ii]

[iii]

TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH
A DOG SLED

A NARRATIVE OF WINTER TRAVEL IN INTERIOR ALASKA

BY

HUDSON STUCK, D.D., F.R.G.S.

ARCHDEACON OF THE YUKON

[iv]

[v]

[vi]
[vii]

PREFACE

This volume deals with a series of journeys taken
with a dog team over the winter trails in the interior
of Alaska. The title might have claimed fourteen or
fifteen thousand miles instead of ten, for the book was
projected and the title adopted some years ago, and the
journeys have continued. But ten thousand is a good
round titular number, and is none the worse for being
well within the mark.

So far as mere distance is concerned, anyway, there
is nothing noteworthy in this record. There are many
men in Alaska who have done much more. A mail-carrier
on one of the longer dog routes will cover four
thousand miles in a winter, while the writer’s average is
less than two thousand. But his sled has gone far off
the beaten track, across the arctic wilderness, into many
remote corners; wherever, indeed, white men or natives
were to be found in all the great interior.

These journeys were connected primarily with the
administration of the extensive work of the Episcopal
Church in the interior of Alaska, under the bishop of the
diocese; but that feature of them has been fully set forth
from time to time in the church publications, and finds
only incidental reference here.

It is a great, wild country, little known save along[viii]
accustomed routes of travel; a country with a beauty
and a fascination all its own; mere arctic wilderness, indeed,
and nine tenths of it probably destined always to
remain such, yet full of interest and charm.

Common opinion “outside” about Alaska seems to
be veering from the view that it is a land of perpetual
snow and ice to the other extreme of holding it to be a
“world’s treasure-house” of mineral wealth and agricultural
possibility. The world’s treasure is deposited in
many houses, and Alaska has its share; its mineral
wealth is very great, and “hidden doors of opulence”
may open at any time, but its agricultural possibilities,
in the ordinary sense in which the phrase is used, are
confined to very small areas in proportion to the enormous
whole, and in very limited degree.

It is no new thing for those who would build railways
to write in high-flown style about the regions they
would penetrate, and, indeed, to speak of “millions of
acres waiting for the plough” is not necessarily a misrepresentation;
they are waiting. Nor is it altogether
unnatural that professional agricultural experimenters at
the stations established by the government should make
the most of their experiments. When Dean Stanley
spoke disdainfully of dogma, Lord Beaconsfield replied;
“Ah! but you must always remember, no dogmas, no
deans.”

Besides the physical attractions of this country, it has
a gentle aboriginal population that arouses in many ways
the respect and the sympathy of all kindly people; and
it has some of the hardiest and most adventurous white[ix]
men in the world. The reader will come into contact
with both in these pages.

So much for the book’s scope; a word of its limitations.
It is confined to the interior of Alaska; confined
in the main to the great valley of the Yukon and its
tributaries; being a record of sled journeys, it is confined
to the winter.

There is no man living who knows the whole of
Alaska or who has any right to speak about the whole
of Alaska. Bishop Rowe knows more about Alaska, in
all probability, than any other living man, and there
are large areas of the country in which he has never set
foot. There is probably no man living, save Bishop
Rowe, who has visited even the localities of all the missions
of the Episcopal Church in Alaska. If one were
to travel continuously for a whole year, using the most
expeditious means at his command, and not wasting a
day anywhere, it is doubtful whether, summer and winter,
by sea and land, squeezing the last mile out of the
seasons, travelling on the “last ice” and the “first water,”
he could even touch at all the mission stations. So,
when a man from Nome speaks of Alaska he means his
part of Alaska, the Seward Peninsula. When a man
from Valdez or Cordova speaks of Alaska he means the
Prince William Sound country. When a man from Juneau
speaks of Alaska he means the southeastern coast.
Alaska is not one country but many, with different
climates, different resources, different problems, different
populations, different interests; and what is true of
one part of it is often grotesquely untrue of other parts.[x]
This is the reason why so many contradictory things
have been written about the country. Not only do
these various parts of Alaska differ radically from one
another, but they are separated from one another by
almost insuperable natural obstacles, so that they are in
reality different countries.

When Alaska is spoken of in this book the interior
is meant, in which the writer has travelled almost continuously
for the past eight years. The Seward Peninsula
is the only other part of the country that the book
touches. And as regards summer travel and the summer
aspect of the country, there is material for another book
should the reception of this one warrant its preparation.

The problems of the civil government of the country
will be found touched upon somewhat freely as they rise
from time to time in the course of these journeys, and
some faint hope is entertained that drawing attention
to evils may hasten a remedy.

Alaska is not now, and never has been, a lawless
country in the old, Wild Western sense of unpunished
homicides and crimes of violence. It has been, on the
whole, singularly free from bloodshed—a record due in
no small part to the fact that it is not the custom of
the country to carry pistols, for which again there is
climatic and geographic reason; due also in part to the
very peaceable and even timid character of its native
people.

But as regards the stringent laws enacted by Congress
for the protection of these native people, and especially[xi]
in the essential particular of protecting them from the
fatal effects of intoxicating liquor, the country is not
law-abiding, for these laws are virtually a dead letter.

Justices of the peace who must live wholly upon fees
in regions where fees will not furnish a living, and United
States deputy marshals appointed for political reasons,
constitute a very feeble staff against law-breakers. When
it is remembered that on the whole fifteen hundred miles
of the American Yukon there are but six of these deputy
marshals, and that these six men, with another five or
six on the tributary rivers, form all the police of the
country, it will be seen that Congress must do something
more than pass stringent laws if those laws are to
be of any effect.

A body of stipendiary magistrates, a police force
wholly removed from politics and modelled somewhat
upon the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police—these
are two of the great needs of the country if the liquor
laws are to be enforced and the native people are to
survive.

That the danger of the extermination of the natives
is a real one all vital statistics kept at Yukon River
points in the last five years show, and that there are
powerful influences in the country opposed to the execution
of the liquor laws some recent trials at Fairbanks
would leave no room for doubt if there had been any
room before. Indeed, at this writing, when the pages
of this book are closed and there remains no place save
the preface where the matter can be referred to, an
impudent attempt is on foot, with large commercial[xii]
backing, to secure the removal of a zealous and fearless
United States district attorney, who has been too active
in prosecuting liquor-peddlers to suit the wholesale dealers
in liquor.

There are, of course, those who view with perfect
equanimity the destruction of the natives that is now
going on, and look forward with complacency to the
time when the Alaskan Indian shall have ceased to exist.
But to men of thought and feeling such cynicism is abhorrent,
and the duty of the government towards its
simple and kindly wards is clear.

A measure of real protection must be given the native
communities against the low-down whites who seek
to intrude into them and build habitations for convenient
resort upon occasions of drunkenness and debauchery,
and some adequate machinery set up for suppressing
the contemptible traffic in adulterated spirits they
subsist largely upon. The licensed liquor-dealers do not
themselves sell to Indians, but they notoriously sell to
men who notoriously peddle to Indians, and the suppression
of this illicit commerce would materially reduce the
total sales of liquor.

Some measure of protection, one thinks, must also
be afforded against a predatory class of Indian traders,
the back rooms of whose stores are often barrooms,
gambling-dens, and houses of assignation, and headquarters
and harbourage for the white degenerates—even
if the government go the length of setting up co-operative
Indian stores in the interior, as has been done
in some places on the coast. This last is a matter in[xiii]
which the missions are helpless, for there is no wise
combination of religion and trade.

So this book goes forth with a plea in the front of it,
which will find incidental support and expression throughout
it, for the natives of interior Alaska, that they be
not wantonly destroyed off the face of the earth.

[xv]

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

It is gratifying to know that a second edition of this
book has been called for and it is interesting to write
another preface; it even proved interesting to do what
was set about most reluctantly—the reading of the
book over again after entire avoidance of it for two years.
It was necessary to do it, though one shrank from it,
and it is interesting to know that after this comparatively
long and complete detachment I find little to add
and less to correct. Upon a complete rereading I am
content to let the book stand, with two or three footnotes
thrown in, and the correction of the one printer’s
error it contained from cover to cover—an error that a
score of kind correspondents pointed out, for it was conspicuous
in the title of a picture.

The tendency to which attention is drawn in the
original preface, the pendulum swing from the old notion
that Alaska is a land of polar bears and icebergs to the
new notion that it is a “world’s treasure-house of mineral
wealth and unbounded agricultural possibilities”
is yet more marked than it was two years ago. The
beginning of the building of the government railway has
given new impetus to the “boosting” writers for magazines
and newspapers. Quite recently it was stated in
one such publication that we need not worry about the[xvi]
destruction of our forests, for had we not the inexhaustible
timber resources of the interior of Alaska to
draw upon?

And in the North itself—though no one there would
write about the timber resources of the interior—in
certain shrill journals the man who does not confidently
expect to see the Yukon Flats waving with golden grain
and “the lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea” of the
Koyukuk and the Chandalar is regarded as a traitor to
his country and his God. But it must be remembered
that there are a number of journalists in Alaska who
know nothing of the country outside their respective
towns, and that “boosting” grows shriller, as Eugene
Field found red paint grow redder, “the further out
West one goes.” When they get a newspaper at Cape
Prince of Wales what a clarion it will be!

Truth, however, is not more wont than of old to be
found in extremes, and the author of this book believes
that those who desire a sober view of the country it
deals with will find it herein. He claims no more than
that he has had adequate opportunity of forming his
opinions and that he has a right to their expression. It
is now twelve years since he began almost constant
travelling, winter and summer, in the interior of Alaska.
He has described nothing that he has not seen; ventured
no judgment that he has not well digested, and has
nothing to retract or even modify; but he would repeat
and emphasise a caution of the original preface. Alaska
is not one country but many countries, and so widely
do they differ from one another in almost every respect[xvii]
that no general statements about Alaska can be true.
The present author’s knowledge of the territory is confined
in the main to the interior—to the valley of the
Yukon and its tributary rivers, which make up one of
the world’s great waterways—and nothing of his writing
applies, with his authority, to other parts.

The matter of the preservation of the native peoples
still presses, and is nearer to the author’s heart than any
other matter whatever. The United States Congress,
which voted thirty-five millions of dollars for the government
railroad, strikes out year by year the modest
additional score or two of thousands that year by year
the Bureau of Education asks for the establishment of
hospital work amongst the Indians of the interior, and
the preventable mortality continues to be very great.

In the last two years, largely as the result of the
untiring efforts of Bishop Rowe on behalf of the natives,
two modern, well-equipped hospitals have been built, with
money that he and his clergy have gathered, on the Yukon
River, one at Fort Yukon and one at Tanana; and these
are the only places of any kind, on nearly a thousand
miles of the river, where sick or injured Indians may be
received and cared for.

Amongst men of thought and feeling there is noticeable
revulsion from the supercilious attitude that used
not to be uncommon toward the little peoples of the
world. It begins to be recognised that it is quite possible
that even the smallest of the little peoples may have
some contribution to make to the welfare and progress of
the human race. What is the Boy Scout movement that[xviii]
is sweeping the country, to the enormous benefit of the
rising generation, but the incorporating into the nurture
of our youth of the things that were the nurture of the
Indian youth; that are a large part of the nurture of
the Alaskan Indian youth to-day? And the camp-fire
clubs and woodcraft associations and the whole trend
to the life of the open recognise that the Indian had developed
a technique of wilderness life deserving of preservation
for its value to the white man. While as for
the Esquimaux, the author never sees the extraordinary
prevalence amongst them of the art of graphic delineation
displayed in bold etchings of incidents of the chase
upon their implements and weapons (though not upon
the articles made by the dozen for the curio-venders at
Nome and Saint Michael) without dreaming that some
day an artist will come from out that singular and most
interesting people who shall teach the world something
new about art.

Whatever the future may hold for the interior of
Alaska, the author is convinced that its population will
derive very largely from the present native stocks, and
this alone would justify any efforts to prevent further
inroads upon their health and vitality.

April, 1916.
[xix]

CONTENTS

[xxi]

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]

TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH
A DOG SLED

[2]

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Three fundamental facts are to be borne constantly in
mind by those who would form any intelligent conception of
the Territory of Alaska.

(1) Its area of approximately 590,000 square miles makes
it two and a half times as large as the State of Texas.

(2) But it is not, like Texas, one homogeneous body of land;
it is not, in any geographical sense, one country at all. “Sweeping
in a great arc over sixteen degrees of latitude and fifty-eight degrees
of longitude,” it is no less than four, and some might say
five, different countries, differing from one another in almost
every way that one country can differ from another: in climate,
in population, in resources, in requirements; and—

(3) These different countries are not merely different from
one another, they are separated from one another by formidable
natural barriers.[3]

TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH
A DOG SLED

CHAPTER I

FAIRBANKS TO THE CHANDALAR THROUGH CIRCLE CITY
AND FORT YUKON

The plan for the winter journey of 1905-6 (my
second winter on the trail) was an ambitious one, for
it contemplated a visit to Point Hope, on the shore of
the Arctic Ocean between Kotzebue Sound and Point
Barrow, and a return to Fairbanks. In the summer
such a journey would be practicable only by water:
down the Tanana to the Yukon, down the Yukon to its
mouth, and then through the straits of Bering and along
the Arctic coast; in the winter it is possible to make
the journey across country. A desire to visit our most
northerly and most inaccessible mission in Alaska and
a desire to become acquainted with general conditions
in the wide country north of the Yukon were equal
factors in the planning of a journey which would carry
me through three and a half degrees of latitude and
no less than eighteen degrees of longitude.

The course of winter travel in Alaska follows the
frozen waterways so far as they lead in the general[4]
direction desired, leaves them to cross mountain ranges
and divides at the most favourable points, and drops
down into the streams again so soon as streams are
available. The country is notably well watered and the
waterways are the natural highways. The more frequented
routes gradually cut out the serpentine bends
of the rivers by land trails, but in the wilder parts of
the country travel sticks to the ice.

Our course, therefore, lay up the Chatanika River
and one of its tributaries until the Tanana-Yukon watershed
was reached; then through the mountains, crossing
two steep summits to the Yukon slope, and down
that slope by convenient streams to the Yukon River
at Circle City.

We set out on the 27th of November with six dogs
and a “basket” sled and about five hundred pounds’
weight of load, including tent and stove, bedding, clothes
for the winter, grub box and its equipment, and dog
feed. The dogs were those that I had used the previous
winter, with one exception. The leader had come
home lame from the fish camp where he had been boarded
during the summer, and, despite all attentions, the lameness
had persisted; so he must be left behind, and
there was much difficulty in securing another leader. A
recent stampede to a new mining district had advanced
the price of dogs and gathered up all the good ones, so
it was necessary to hunt all over Fairbanks and pay a
hundred dollars for a dog that proved very indifferent,
after all. “Jimmy” was a handsome beast, the handsomest
I ever owned and the costliest, but, as I learned[5]
later from one who knew his history, had “travelled on
his looks all his life.” He earned the name of “Jimmy
the Fake.”

Midway to Cleary “City,” on the chief gold-producing
creek of the district, our first day’s run, we encountered
the gold train. For some time previous a lone
highwayman had robbed solitary miners on their way
to Fairbanks with gold-dust, and now a posse was organised
that went the rounds of the creeks and gathered
up the dust and bore it on mule-back to the bank, escorted
by half a dozen armed and mounted men. Sawed-off
shotguns were the favourite weapons, and one
judged them deadly enough at short range. The heavy
“pokes” galled the animals’ backs, however they might
be slung, and the little procession wound slowly along,
a man ahead, a man behind, and four clustered round
the treasure.

These raw, temporary mining towns are much alike
the world over, one supposes, though perhaps a little
worse up here in the far north. It was late at night
when we reached the place, but saloon and dance-hall
were ablaze with light and loud with the raucity of
phonographs and the stamping of feet. Everything
was “wide open,” and there was not even the thinnest
veneer of respectability. Drinking and gambling and
dancing go on all night long. Drunken men reel out
upon the snow; painted faces leer over muslin curtains
as one passes by. Without any government, without
any pretence of municipal organisation, there is no co-operation
for public enterprise. There are no streets,[6]
there are no sidewalks save such as a man may choose
to lay in front of his own premises, and the simplest
sanitary precautions are entirely neglected. Nothing
but the cold climate of the north prevents epidemic
disease from sweeping through these places. They rise
in a few days wherever gold is found in quantities, they
flourish as the production increases, decline with its decline,
and are left gaunt, dark, and abandoned so soon
as the diggings are exhausted.

The next day we were on the Chatanika River, to
which Cleary Creek is tributary, and were immediately
confronted with one of the main troubles and difficulties
of winter travel in this and, as may be supposed,
in any arctic or subarctic country—overflow water.

In the lesser rivers, where deep pools alternate with
swift shallows, the stream freezes solid to the bottom
upon the shoals and riffles. Since the subterranean fountains
that supply the river do not cease to discharge
their waters in the winter, however cold it may be,
there comes presently an increasing pressure under the
ice above such a barrier. The pent-up water is strong
enough to heave the ice into mounds and at last to
break forth, spreading itself far along the frozen surface
of the river. At times it may be seen gushing out
like an artesian well, rising three or four feet above the
surface of the ice, until the pressure is relieved. Sometimes
for many miles at a stretch the whole river will
be covered with a succession of such overflows, from
two or three inches deep to eight or ten, or even twelve;
some just bursting forth, some partially frozen, some[7]
resolved into solid “glare” ice. Thus the surface of the
river is continually renewed the whole winter through,
and a section of the ice crust in the spring would show
a series of laminations; here ice upon ice, there ice upon
half-incorporated snow, that mark the successive inundations.

This explanation has been given at length because
of the large part that the phenomenon plays in the difficulty
and danger of winter travel, and because it seems
hard to make those who are not familiar with it understand
it. At first sight it would seem that after a week
or ten days of fifty-below-zero weather, for instance, all
water everywhere would be frozen into quiescence for
the rest of the winter. Throw a bucket of water into
the air, and it is frozen solid as soon as it reaches the
ground. There would be no more trouble, one would
think, with water. Yet some of the worst trouble the
traveller has with overflow water is during very cold
weather, and it is then, of course, that there is the greatest
danger of frost-bite in getting one’s feet wet. Water-proof
footwear, therefore, becomes one of the “musher’s”
great concerns and difficulties. The best water-proof
footwear is the Esquimau mukluk, not easily obtainable
in the interior of Alaska, but the mukluk is an
inconvenient footwear to put snow-shoes on. Rubber
boots or shoes of any kind are most uncomfortable things
to travel in. Nothing equals the moccasin on the trail,
nothing is so good to snow-shoe in. The well-equipped
traveller has moccasins for dry trails and mukluks for
wet trails—and even then may sometimes get his feet[8]
wet. Nor are his own feet his only consideration; his
dogs’ feet are, collectively, as important as his own.
When the dog comes out of water into snow again the
snow collects and freezes between the toes, and if not
removed will soon cause a sore and lameness. Then a
dog moccasin must be put on and the foot continually
nursed and doctored. When several dogs of a team are
thus affected, it may be with several feet each, the labour
and trouble of travel are greatly increased.

So, whenever his dogs have been through water, the
careful musher will stop and go all down the line, cleaning
out the ice and snow from their feet with his fingers.
Four interdigital spaces per foot make sixteen per dog,
and with a team of six dogs that means ninety-six several
operations with the bare hand (if it be done effectually)
every time the team gets into an overflow. The
dogs will do it for themselves if they are given time,
tearing out the lumps of ice with their teeth; but, inasmuch
as they usually feel conscientiously obliged to eat
each lump as they pull it out, it takes much longer, and
in a short daylight there is little time to spare if the
day’s march is to be made.

We found overflow almost as soon as we reached the
Chatanika River, and in one form or another we encountered
it during all the two days and a half that
we were pursuing the river’s windings. At times it
was covered with a sheet of new ice that would support
the dogs but would not support the sled, so that
the dogs were travelling on one level and the sled on
another, and a man had to walk along in the water[9]
between the dogs and the sled for several hundred
yards at a time, breaking down the overflow ice with
his feet.

At other times the thin sheets of overflow ice would
sway and bend as the sled passed quickly over them in
a way that gives to ice in such condition its Alaskan
name of “rubber-ice,” while for the fifteen or twenty
miles of McManus Creek, the headwaters of the Chatanika,
we had continuous stretches of fine glare ice with
enough frost crystals upon it from condensing moisture
to give a “tooth” to the dogs’ feet, just as varnish on
a photographic negative gives tooth to the retouching
pencil. Perfectly smooth ice is a very difficult surface
for dogs to pass over; glare ice slightly roughened by
frost deposit makes splendid, fast going.

Eighty-five miles or so from Fairbanks, and just
about half-way to Circle, the watercourse is left and
the first summit is the “Twelve-Mile,” as it is called.
We tried hard to take our load up at one trip, but found
it impossible to do so, and had to unlash the sled and
take half the load at a time, caching it on the top while
we returned for the other half.

It took us half a day to get our load to the top of
the Twelve-Mile summit, a rise of about one thousand
three hundred feet from the creek bed as the aneroid
gave it. In the steeper pitches we had to take the axe
and cut steps, so hard and smooth does the incessant
wind at these heights beat the snow, and on our second
trip to the top we were just in time to rescue a roll of
bedding that had been blown from the cache and was[10]
about to descend a gully from which we could hardly
have recovered it.

This summit descended, we were in Birch Creek
water, and had we followed the watercourse would have
reached the Yukon; but we would have travelled hundreds
of miles and would have come out below Fort
Yukon, while we were bound for Circle City. So there
was another and a yet more difficult summit to cross
before we could descend the Yukon slope. We were
able to hire a man and two dogs to help us over the
Eagle summit, so that the necessity of relaying was
avoided. One man ahead continually calling to the
dogs, eight dogs steadily pulling, and two men behind
steadily pushing, foot by foot, with many stoppages as
one bench after another was surmounted, we got the
load to the top at last, a rise of one thousand four hundred
feet in less than three miles. A driving snow-storm
cut off all view and would have left us at a loss
which way to proceed but for the stakes that indicated
it.

The descent was as anxious and hazardous as the
ascent had been laborious. The dogs were loosed and
sent racing down the slope. With a rope rough-lock
around the sled runners, one man took the gee pole and
another the handle-bars and each spread-eagled himself
through the loose deep snow to check the momentum of
the sled, until sled and men turned aside and came to a
stop in a drift to avoid a steep, smooth pitch. The sled
extricated, it was poised on the edge of the pitch and
turned loose on the hardened snow, hurtling down three[11]
or four hundred feet until it buried itself in another drift.
The dogs were necessary to drag it from this drift, and
one had to go down and bring them up. Then again
they were loosed, and from bench to bench the process
was repeated until the slope grew gentle enough to permit
the regulation of the downward progress by the
foot-brake.

The Eagle summit is one of the most difficult summits
in Alaska. The wind blows so fiercely that sometimes
for days together its passage is almost impossible.
No amount of trail making could be of much help, for
the snow smothers up everything on the lee of the hill,
and the end of every storm presents a new surface and
an altered route. A “summit” in this Alaskan sense
is, of course, a saddle between peaks, and in this case
there is no easier pass and no way around. The only
way to avoid the Eagle summit, without going out of
the district altogether, would be to tunnel it.

The summit passed, we found better trails and a
more frequented country, for in this district are a number
of creeks that draw supplies from Circle City, and
that had been worked ten years or more.

At the time of the Klondike stampede of 1896-97,
Circle City was already established as a flourishing mining
camp and boasted itself the largest log-cabin town
in the world. Before the Klondike drew away its people
as a stronger magnet draws iron filings from a lesser one,
Circle had a population of about three thousand. Take
a town of three thousand and reduce it to thirty or
forty, and it is hard to resist the melancholy impression[12]
which entrance upon it in the dusk of the evening
brings. There lay the great white Yukon in the
middle distance; beyond it the Yukon Flats, snow-covered,
desolate, stretched away enormously, hedged here
at their beginning by grey, dim hills. Spread out in
the foreground were the little, squat, huddling cabins
that belonged to no one, with never a light in a window
or smoke from a chimney, the untrodden snow drifted
against door and porch. It would be hard to imagine
a drearier prospect, and one had the feeling that it was
a city of the dead rather than merely a dead city.

The weather had grown steadily colder since we
reached the Yukon slope, and for two days before reaching
Circle the thermometer had stood between 40° and
50° below zero. It was all right for us to push on, the
trail was good and nearly all down-hill, and there were
road-houses every ten or twelve miles. Freighters, weather-bound,
came to the doors as we passed by with our
jangle of bells and would raise a somewhat chechaco pride
in our breasts by remarking: “You don’t seem to care
what weather you travel in!” The evil of it was that
the perfectly safe travelling between Eagle Creek and
Circle emboldened us to push on from Circle under
totally different conditions, when travelling at such low
temperatures became highly dangerous and brought us
into grave misadventure that might easily have been
fatal catastrophe.

Our original start was a week later than had been
planned and we had made no time, but rather lost it,
on this first division of the journey. If we were to[13]
reach Bettles on the Koyukuk River for Christmas, there
was no more time to lose, and I was anxious to spend
the next Sunday at Fort Yukon, three days’ journey
away. So we started for Fort Yukon on Thursday, the
7th of December, the day after we reached Circle.

A certain arctic traveller has said that “adventures”
always imply either incompetence or ignorance of local
conditions, and there is some truth in the saying. Our
misadventure was the result of a series of mistakes, no
one of which would have been other than discreditable
to men of more experience. Our course lay for seventy-five
miles through the Yukon Flats, which begin at
Circle and extend for two hundred and fifty miles of the
river’s course below that point. The Flats constitute
the most difficult and dangerous part of the whole
length of the Yukon River, summer or winter, and the
section between Circle City and Fort Yukon is the most
difficult and dangerous part of the Flats. Save for a
“portage” or land trail of eighteen or twenty miles out
of Circle, the trail is on the river itself, which is split
up into many channels without salient landmarks. The
current is so swift that many stretches run open water
far into the winter, and blow-holes are numerous. There
is little travel on the Flats in winter, and a snow-storm
accompanied by wind may obliterate what trail there is
in an hour. The vehicle used in the Flats is not a sled
but a toboggan, and our first mistake was in not conforming
to local usage in this respect. There is always
a very good reason for local usage about snow vehicles.
But a toboggan which had been ordered from a native[14]
at Fort Yukon would be waiting for us, and it seemed
not worth while to go to the expense of buying another
merely for three days’ journey.

The second mistake was in engaging a boy as guide
instead of a man. He was an attractive youth of about
fourteen who had done good service at the Circle City
mission the previous winter, when our nurse-in-charge
was contending single-handed against an epidemic of
diphtheria. He was a pleasant boy, with some English,
who wanted to go and professed knowledge of the route.
The greatest mistake of all was starting out through
that lonely waste with the thermometer at 52° below
zero. The old-timers in Alaska have a saying that
“travelling at 50° below is all right as long as it’s all
right.” If there be a good trail, if there be convenient
stopping-places, if nothing go wrong, one may travel
without special risk and with no extraordinary discomfort
at 50° below zero and a good deal lower. I have
since that time made a short day’s run at 62° below,
and once travelled for two or three hours on a stretch
at 65° below. But there is always more or less chance
in travelling at low temperatures, because a very small
thing may necessitate a stop, and a stop may turn into
a serious thing. At such temperatures one must keep
going. No amount of clothing that it is possible to wear
on the trail will keep one warm while standing still. For
dogs and men alike, constant brisk motion is necessary;
for dogs as well as men—even though dogs will sleep outdoors
in such cold without harm—for they cannot take
as good care of themselves in the harness as they can[15]
when loose. A trace that needs mending, a broken
buckle, a snow-shoe string that must be replaced, may
chill one so that it is impossible to recover one’s warmth
again. The bare hand cannot be exposed for many
seconds without beginning to freeze; it is dangerous to
breathe the air into the lungs for any length of time
without a muffler over the mouth.

Our troubles began as soon as we started. The trail
was a narrow, winding toboggan track of sixteen or seventeen
inches, while our sled was twenty inches wide,
so that one runner was always dragging in the loose
snow, and that meant slow, heavy going.

The days were nearing the shortest of the year, when,
in these latitudes, the sun does but show himself and
withdraw again. But, especially in very cold weather,
which is nearly always very clear weather, that brief
appearance is preceded by a feast of rich, delicate colour.
First a greenish glow on the southern horizon, brightening
into lemon and then into clear primrose, invades
the deep purple of the starry heavens. Then a beautiful
circle of blush pink above a circle of pure amethyst
gradually stretches all around the edge of the sky, slowly
brightening while the stars fade out and the heavens
change to blue. The dead white mirror of the snow
takes every tint that the skies display with a faint but
exquisite radiance. Then the sun’s disk appears with a
flood of yellow light but with no appreciable warmth,
and for a little space his level rays shoot out and gild
the tree tops and the distant hills. The snow springs
to life. Dead white no longer, its dry, crystalline particles[16]
glitter in myriads of diamond facets with every
colour of the prism. Then the sun is gone, and the
lovely circle of rose pink over amethyst again stretches
round the horizon, slowly fading until once more the
pale primrose glows in the south against the purple sky
with its silver stars. Thus sunrise and sunset form a
continuous spectacle, with a purity of delicate yet splendid
colour that only perfectly dry atmosphere permits.
The primrose glow, the heralding circle, the ball of
orange light, the valedictory circle, the primrose glow
again, and a day has come and gone. Air can hold no
moisture at all at these low temperatures, and the skies
are cloudless.

Moreover, in the wilds at 50° below zero there is the
most complete silence. All animal life is hidden away.
Not a rabbit flits across the trail; in the absolutely still
air not a twig moves. A rare raven passes overhead,
and his cry, changed from a hoarse croak to a sweet
liquid note, reverberates like the musical glasses. There
is no more delightful sound in the wilderness than this
occasional lapse into music of the raven. We wound
through the scrub spruce and willow and over the niggerhead
swamps, a faint tinkle of bells, a little cloud of
steam; for in the great cold the moisture of the animals’
breath hangs over their heads in the still air, and
on looking back it stands awhile along the course at
dogs’ height until it is presently deposited on twigs and
tussocks. We wound along, a faint tinkle of bells, a
little cloud of steam, and in the midst of the cloud a
tousle of shaggy black-and-white hair and red-and-white[17]
pompons—going out of the dead silence behind into the
dead silence before. The dusk came, and still we plodded
and pushed our weary way, swinging that heavy sled
incessantly, by the gee pole in front and the handle-bars
behind, in the vain effort to keep it on the trail.
Two miles an hour was all that we were making. We
had come but thirteen or fourteen miles out of twenty-four,
and it was dark; and it grew colder.

The dogs whined and stopped every few yards, worn
out by wallowing in the snow and the labour of the
collar. The long scarfs that wrapped our mouths and
noses had been shifted and shifted, as one part after another
became solid with ice from the breath, until over
their whole length they were stiff as boards. After two
more miles of it it was evident that we could not reach
the mail cabin that night. Then I made my last and
worst mistake. We should have stopped and camped
then and there. We had tent and stove and everything
requisite. But the native boy insisted that the
cabin was “only little way,” and any one who knows
the misery of making camp in extremely cold weather,
in the dark, will understand our reluctance to do so.

I decided to make a cache of the greater part of our
load—tent and stove and supplies generally—and to
push on to the cabin with but the bedding and the
grub box, returning for the stuff in the morning. And,
since in the deepest depths of blundering there is a
deeper still, by some one’s carelessness, but certainly by
my fault, the axe was left behind in the cache.

With our reduced burden we made better progress,[18]
and in a short time reached the end of the portage and
came out on the frozen river, just as the moon, a day
or two past the full, rose above the opposite bank. One
sees many strange distortions of sun and moon in this
land, but never was a stranger seen than this. Her
disk, shining through the dense air of the river bottom,
was in shape an almost perfect octagon, regular
as though it had been laid off with dividers and a
ruler.

We were soon in doubt about the trail. The mail-carrier
had gone down only two or three times this
winter and each time had taken a different route, as
more and more of the river closed and gave him more
and more direct passage. A number of Indians had
been hunting, and their tracks added to the tangle of
trails. Presently we entered a thick mist that even to
inexperienced eyes spoke of open water or new ice yet
moist. So heavy was the vapour that to the man at
the handle-bars the man at the gee pole loomed ghostly,
and the man ahead of the dogs could not be distinguished
at all. We had gone so much farther than our native
boy had declared we had to go that we began to fear
that in the confusion of trails we had taken the wrong
one and had passed the cabin. That is the tenderfoot’s,
or, as we say, the chechaco’s, fear; it is the one thing
that it may almost be said never happens. But the
boy fell down completely and was frankly at a loss. All
we could get out of him was: “May-be-so we catch
cabin bymeby, may-be-so no.” If we had passed the
cabin it was twenty odd miles to the next; and it[19]
grew colder and the dogs were utterly weary again,
prone upon the trail at every small excuse for a stop,
only to be stirred by the whip, heavily wielded. Surely
never men thrust themselves foolhardily into worse predicament!
Then I made my last mistake. Dimly the
bank loomed through the mist, and I said: “We can’t
go any farther; I think we’ve missed the trail and I’m
going across to yon bank to see if there’s a place to
camp.” I had not gone six steps from the trail when
the ice gave way under my feet and I found myself in
water to my hips.

Under Providence I owe it to the mukluks I wore,
tied tight round my knees, that I did not lose my life,
or at least my feet. The thermometer at Circle City
stood at 60° below zero at dark that day, and down on
the ice it is always about 5° colder than on the bank,
because cold air is heavy air and sinks to the lowest
level, and 65° below zero means 97° below freezing.

My moose-hide breeches froze solid the moment I
scrambled out, but not a drop of water got to my feet.
If the water had reached my feet they would have
frozen almost as quickly as the moose hide in that fearful
cold. Thoroughly alarmed now, and realising our
perilous situation, we did the only thing there was to
do—we turned the dogs loose and abandoned the sled and
went back along the trail we had followed as fast as we
could. We knew that we could safely retrace our steps
and that the trail would lead us to the bank after a
while. We knew not where the trail would lead us in
the other direction. As a matter of fact, it led to the[20]
mail cabin, two miles farther on, and the mail-carrier
was at that time occupying it at the end of his day’s
run.

The dogs stayed with the sled; dogs will usually
stay with their sled; they seem to recognise their first
allegiance to the load they haul, probably because they
know their food forms part of it.

Our cache reached, we made a fire, thawed out the
iron-like armour of my leather breeches, and cutting a
spare woollen scarf in two, wrapped the dry, warm
pieces about my numbed thighs. Then we pushed on
the eighteen miles or so to Circle, keeping a steady pace
despite the drowsiness that oppressed us, and that oppressed
me particularly owing to the chill of my ducking.
About five in the morning we reached the town,
and the clergyman, the Reverend C. E. Rice, turned
out of his warm bed and I turned in, none the worse
in body for the experience, but much humbled in spirit.
My companion, Mr. E. J. Knapp, whose thoughtful
care for me I always look back upon with gratitude,
as well as upon Mr. Rice’s kindness, froze his nose and
a toe slightly, being somewhat neglectful of himself in
his solicitude for me.

We had been out about twenty hours in a temperature
ranging from 52° to 60° below zero, had walked
about forty-four miles, labouring incessantly as well as
walking, what time we were with the sled, with nothing to
eat—it was too cold to stop for eating—and, in addition
to this, one of us had been in water to the waist, yet
none of us took any harm. It was a providential overruling[21]
of blundering foolhardiness for which we were
deeply thankful.

The next day a native with a fast team and an empty
toboggan was sent down to take our load on to the
cabin and bring the dogs back. Meanwhile, the mail-carrier
had passed the spot, had seen the abandoned
sled standing by recently broken ice, and had come on
into town while we slept and none knew of our return,
with the news that some one had been drowned. The
mail for Fairbanks did but await the mail from Fort
Yukon, and the town rumour, instantly identifying the
abandoned sled, was carried across to Fairbanks, to my
great distress and annoyance. The echoes of the distorted
account of this misadventure which appeared in a
Fairbanks newspaper still reverberate in “patent insides”
of the provincial press of the United States.

The next Monday we started again, this time with
a toboggan and with a man instead of a boy for guide,
and in three days of only moderate difficulty we reached
Fort Yukon.

Fort Yukon, though it holds no attraction for the
ordinary visitor or the summer tourist on the river, is
a place of much interest to those who know the history
of Alaska. While it is purely a native village, with no
white population save the traders and the usual sprinkling
of men that hang around native villages, it is yet
the oldest white man’s post on the Yukon River, save
the post established by the Russians at Nulato, five or
six hundred miles lower down. The Hudson Bay Company
established itself here in 1846, and that date serves[22]
as the year one in making calculations and determining
ages to this day. It is a fixed point in time that every
native knows of. Any old man can tell you whether
he was born before or after that date, and, if before,
can pick out some boy that is about the age he was
when the event occurred. The massacre at Nulato in
1851 serves in a similar way for the lower river.

After the Purchase, and the determination of the
longitude of Fort Yukon by Mr. Raymond in 1869—who
made the first steamboat journey up the Yukon on
that errand—the Hudson Bay Company moved three
times before they succeeded in getting east of the 141st
meridian, and at the point reached on the third move,
the New Rampart House on the Porcupine River, only
a few hundred yards beyond the boundary-line, they
remained until the gold excitement on the Yukon and
the journeying of the natives to new posts on that river
rendered trading unprofitable; then they withdrew to
the Mackenzie. The oldest white men’s graves in Alaska,
again with the exception of Nulato, are those in the little
Hudson Bay cemetery near Fort Yukon.

Fort Yukon is also the site of the oldest missionary
station on the river, unless there were earlier visits of
Russian priests to the lower river, of which there seems
no record, for in 1862 there was a clergyman of the
Church of England at this place. Archdeacon MacDonald
was a remarkable man. Married to a native
wife, he translated the whole Bible and the Book of
Common Prayer into the native tongue, and his translations
are in general use on the upper river to this day.[23]
He reduced the language to writing, extracted its grammar,
taught the Indians to read and write their own
tongue, and dignified it by the gift of the great literature
of the sacred books. The language is, of course,
a dying one—English is slowly superseding it—but it
seems safe to say that for a generation or two yet to
come it will be the basis of the common speech of the
people and the language of worship. It is chiefly in
matters of trading and handicrafts that English is taking
its place, though here as elsewhere it stands to the discredit
of the civilised race that blackguard English is
the first English that is learned.

There seems ground to question whether the substitution
of a smattering of broken English for the flexibility
and picturesque expressiveness of an indigenous
tongue, thoroughly understood, carries with it any great
intellectual gain, though to suggest such a doubt is
treason to some minds. The time threatens when all
the world will speak two or three great languages, when
all little tongues will be extinct and all little peoples
swallowed up, when all costume will be reduced to a
dead level of blue jeans and shoddy and all strange customs
abolished. The world will be a much less interesting
world then; the spice and savour of the ends of
the earth will be gone. Nor does it always appear unquestionable
that the world will be the better or the
happier. The advance of civilisation would be a great
thing to work for if we were quite sure what we meant
by it and what its goal is. To the ordinary government
school-teacher in Alaska, with some notable exceptions,[24]
it seems to mean chiefly teaching the Indians to call
themselves Mr. and Mrs. and teaching the women to
wear millinery, with a contemptuous attitude toward
the native language and all native customs. The less
intelligent grade of missionary sometimes falls into the
same easy rut. So letters pass through the post-offices
addressed: “Mr. Pretty Henry,” “Mrs. Monkey Bill,”
“Miss Sally Shortandirty”; so, occasionally, the grotesque
spectacle may present itself, to the passengers on
a steamer, of a native woman in a “Merry Widow” hat
and a blood-stained parkee gutting salmon on the river
bank.

The nobler ideal, as it seems to some of us, is to
labour for God-fearing, self-respecting Indians rather
than imitation white men and white women. An Indian
who is honest, healthy and kindly, skilled in hunting
and trapping, versed in his native Bible and liturgy,
even though he be entirely ignorant of English and have
acquired no taste for canned fruit and know not when
Columbus discovered America, may be very much of a
man in that station of life in which it has pleased God
to call him.

Christmas and the Fourth of July are the Indian’s
great holidays, the one just after the best moose hunting
and the other just before the salmon run. It may be supposed
that there were always great feasts at the winter
and summer solstices, though now he is sufficiently devout
at the one and patriotic at the other. At these
seasons, and for weeks before and after, Fort Yukon
gathers a large number of Indians. It is the native[25]
metropolis of the country within a radius of a hundred
miles, and what may be termed its permanent population
of one hundred and fifty is doubled and sometimes
trebled by contingents from the Chandalar, the
Porcupine, and the Black Rivers, from that long river
called Birch Creek, and all the intervening country.
Many families of the “uncivilised,” self-respecting kind,
to which reference has been made, come in from outlying
points, and the contrast between them and their
more sophisticated kinfolk of the town is all in their
favour.

Such a gathering had already taken place in preparation
for the Christmas holidays when we reached Fort
Yukon on the 15th of December. It would have been
pleasant to spend Christmas with them, but we were due
two hundred and fifty miles away, at Bettles, for that
feast, if by any means we could get there. So we lingered
but the two days necessary to equip ourselves.
Jimmy had torn our bedding to pieces on the night
of the mishap; it was lashed on the outside of the load,
and he had scratched and clawed it to make a nest for
himself until fur from the robe and feathers from the
quilts were all over the trail. The other dogs, not so
warmly coated as he, had been content to sleep in the
snow. Jimmy’s character was gradually revealing itself.
A well-bred trail dog will not commit the canine sacrilege
of invading the sled. That is a “Siwash” dog’s
trick. So there was fresh bedding to manufacture, as
well as supplies for two hundred miles to get together.

A mail once a month went at that time from Fort[26]
Yukon to the Koyukuk, and there was little other travel.
The course lay fifty or sixty miles across country to the
Chandalar River, about one hundred miles up that stream,
and then across a divide to the South Fork of the Koyukuk,
and across another to the Middle Fork, on which
Coldfoot is situated. It is not possible to procure any
supplies, save sometimes a little fish for dog food and
that not certainly, between Fort Yukon and Coldfoot,
so that provision for the whole journey must be taken.

A new Indian guide had been engaged as far as Coldfoot,
and we set out—three men, two toboggans, and
seven dogs; four on the larger vehicle and three on the
smaller, one of the dogs brought by our guide. Three
miles from Fort Yukon we crossed the Porcupine River
and then plunged into the wilderness of lake and swamp
and forest that stretches north of the Yukon. A portage
trail, as such a track across country is called to distinguish
it from a river trail, has the advantage of such protection
from storm as its timbered stretches afford. For
miles and miles the route passes through scrub spruce
that has been burned over, with no prospect but a maze
of charred poles against the snow, some upright, others
at every angle of inclination. Then comes a lake, with
difficulty in finding the trail on its wind-swept surface
and sometimes much casting about to discover where it
leaves the lake again, and then more small burned timber.
Wherever the route is through woods, living or
dead, it is blazed; when it strikes the open, one is often
at a loss. After three or four days of such travel, sometimes
reaching an old cabin for the night, sometimes[27]
pitching the tent, one is rejoiced at the sight of distant
mountains and at the intimation they bring that
the inexpressible dreariness of the Yukon Flats is nearly
past; and presently the trail opens suddenly upon the
broad Chandalar.

The Hudson Bay voyageurs are responsible for many
names in this part of Alaska, and Chandalar is a corruption
of their “Gens de large.” The various native
tribes received appellations indicating habitats. A tribe
that differed from most northern Indians, in having no
permanent villages and in living altogether in encampments,
was named “Gens de large,” and the river which
they frequented took their name.

It is one of the second-rate tributaries of the Yukon,
and in general its waters are swift and shallow, not
navigable for light-draught steamboats for more than one
hundred and fifty miles, save at flood, and not easily
navigable at all. It is these swift shallow streams that
are so formidable in winter on account of overflow water,
and the Chandalar is one of the most dreaded.

Ten miles along the river’s surface brought us to
the Chandalar native village, a settlement of half a dozen
cabins and twenty-five or thirty souls. The people came
out to meet us, and said they were just about to bury
a baby, and asked me to conduct the funeral. Because
we had not done a day’s march and were under compulsion
to push on at our best speed, I did not unlash
the sled but went just as I was up the hill with the
sorrowful procession to the little graveyard. On the
way down I asked as best I could of what sickness the[28]
baby had died, and I felt some uneasiness when the
throat was pointed to as the seat of disease. When,
presently, I was informed that two others were sick,
and of the same complaint, my uneasiness became alarm.
I went at once to see them, and the angry swollen throats
patched with white membrane which I discovered left
no room for doubt that we were in the presence of another
outbreak of diphtheria. That disease had scourged
the Yukon in the two preceding years. Twenty-three
children died at Fort Yukon in the summer of 1904,
half a dozen at Circle in the following winter, though
that outbreak was grappled with from the first; and all
along the river the loss of life was terrible.

There was no question that we must give up all
hope of reaching Bettles for Christmas and stay and do
what we could for these people. So we made camp on
the outskirts of the village, and I went to work swabbing
out the throats with carbolic acid and preparing
liquid food from our grub box. There was nothing to
eat in the village but dried fish and a little dried moose,
and these throats like red-hot iron could hardly swallow
liquids. The two patients were a boy of sixteen
and a grown woman. It was evident that unless we
could isolate them the disease would probably pass
through the whole village, and, indeed, others might have
been infected already. It was likely that we were in
for a siege of it, and our supply of condensed milk and
extract of beef would soon be exhausted. Moreover, at
Fort Yukon was the trained nurse who had coped with
the epidemic there and at Circle, while we had virtually[29]
no experience with the disease at all. It was resolved
to send back to Fort Yukon for supplies and for the
nurse.

The next morning Mr. Knapp and the native boy
took the dogs and the sled and started back. With no
load save a little grub and bedding, they could make the
journey in two days, a day must be allowed for preparations,
and, with the aid of another dog team, two days
more would bring them back. Five days was the least
they could be gone. It was asking a great deal of this
lady to abandon her Christmas festival, preparations
for which had long been making, and to come sixty-five
miles through the frozen wilderness in a toboggan;
but I felt sure she would drop everything and come.

For those five days I was busied in close attention
to the patients and in strenuous though not altogether
availing efforts to maintain a quarantine of the cabin
in which they lay. There was little more that I could
do than swab out the throats and administer food every
two hours. As the disease advanced it was increasingly
painful to swallow and exceedingly difficult to induce
the sufferers to make the attempt or to open their
mouths for the swabbing. After two or three days the
woman seemed to have passed the crisis of the disease
and to be mending, but the boy, I thought, grew worse.
One becomes attached to those to whom one ministers,
and this poor, speechless boy, with his terrible throat and
the agony in his big black eyes, appealed to me very
strongly indeed. It was torture to move his head or to
open his mouth, and I had to torture him continually.[30]

Every night I gathered the people for Divine service.
Here was a little community far off in the wilds that
had carefully conserved and handed on to their children
the teaching they had received no less than thirty years
before. The native Bibles and prayer-books and hymnals
were brought out, bearing dates of publication in
the seventies; one of their number acted as leader, and
what he read was painfully followed in the well-thumbed
books. They lifted their voices in a weird transformation
of familiar tunes, with quavers and glides that had
crept in through long, uncorrected use, and amongst the
prayers said was one for “Our Sovereign lady Queen
Victoria, and Albert Edward, Prince of Wales.” I tried
to explain that Queen Victoria was dead, that they
were not living under British rule, and I took a pencil
and struck out the prayers for the royal family from
the books. But there was doubt in their minds and a
reluctance to alter in any particular the liturgy that
had been taught them, and it is quite likely that intercessions
for a defunct sovereign of another land still
arise from the Chandalar village. One cannot but feel
a deep admiration for the pioneer missionaries of this
region—Bishop Bompas, Archdeacon MacDonald, and
the others—whose teaching was so thorough and so lasting,
and who lived and laboured here long before any
gold seeker had thought of Alaska, when the country
was an Indian country exclusively, with none of the
comforts and conveniences that can now be enjoyed.
It was to a remote cabin on the East Fork of this river
that Archdeacon MacDonald retired for a year to make[31]
part of his translation of the Bible, according to the
Indian account.

At noon on the 21st of December, the shortest day,
there is a note in my diary that I saw the sun’s disk
shining through the trees. Although fully half a degree
of latitude north of the Arctic Circle, the refraction is
sufficient to lift his whole sphere above the horizon.
One speculates how much farther north it would be possible
to see any part of the sun at noon on the shortest
day; but north of here, throughout Alaska, is broken
and mountainous country. We were on the northern
edge of the great flat of the interior.

The fifth day at the village was Christmas Eve. My
boy was in a critical condition, very low and weak, with
a temperature that stayed around 101° and 102°. As
night approached I watched with the greatest anxiety
for the party from Fort Yukon, and, just as the last
lingering glow of the long twilight was fading from the
south, there was a distant tinkle of bells on the trail,
and faintly once and again a man’s voice was raised in
command and I knew that relief was at hand.

The nurse had dropped everything and had come,
as I felt sure she would. Gathering medicines and supplies
and hiring a native dog team and driver, she had
left immediately, and the round trip had been made in
the shortest time it was possible to make it. It was a
tremendous relief to see her step out of the rugs and
robes of the toboggan and take charge of the situation
in her quiet, competent way. A small, outlying cabin
was selected for a hospital, the family that occupied it[32]
bundled out into a tent, and the two sick persons carefully
moved into it, with whom and the mother of the
sick boy the nurse took up her abode. Then there was
the Christmas-tree in the chief’s cabin, with little gifts
for the children sent out from the mission at Fort Yukon
some time before, and a dance afterward, for Christmas
festivities must go on, whatever happens, at a native
village. I took James’s pocket-knife to him after the
celebration was over, and I think he really tried to
smile as he thanked me with his eyes.

The next day after the services, although it was
Christmas Day, we set to work on the disinfecting of
the large cabin in which the sick had lain. Stringing
bedclothes and wearing apparel on lines from wall to
wall, and stuffing up every crack and cranny with cotton,
we burned quantities of sulphur, that the nurse had
brought with her, all day long.

A recent article in a stray number of a professional
journal picked up in the office of a medical missionary,
devoted column after column to the uselessness of all
known methods of disinfection. Sulphur, formaldehyde,
carbolic acid, permanganate of potash, chloride of lime,
bichloride of mercury—the author knew not which of
these “fetiches” to be most sarcastic about. It may
be that the net result of our copious fumigation was
but the bleaching of the coloured garments hung up,
but at least it did no harm. One sometimes wishes that
these scientists who sit up so high in the seat of the
scornful would condescend to a little plain instruction.

The anti-diphtheritic serum is now kept in readiness[33]
at all our missions in Alaska, and the disease seems to
have ceased its depredations; but it has taken terrible
toll of the native people.

We wished to stay with the nurse until the sickness
should be done, but she would not hear of it, and insisted
upon the resumption of our journey. It did not
seem right to go off and leave this lonely woman, sixty-five
miles from the nearest white person, to cope with
an outbreak of disease that might not yet have spent
itself, although there had been no new case for a week.
“You’ve done your work here, now leave me to do
mine. You’ll not get to Point Hope this winter if you
stay much longer.”

“Aren’t you afraid to stay all by yourself?” I asked,
somewhat fatuously.

“Afraid? Afraid of what? You surely don’t mean
afraid of the natives?”

I did not know what I meant; it seemed not unnatural
that a woman with such prospect before her should
be a little timid, but she was resolute that we go, and we
went.

Not until the next summer did I learn the upshot—both
patients recovered and there was no other case.
Six years later, when these words are written, I have
just baptized a son of the boy who lay so ill, who would
have perished, I think, had we not reached the Chandalar
village just in time.[34]

CHAPTER II

CHANDALAR VILLAGE TO BETTLES, COLDFOOT,
AND THE KOYUKUK

At five o’clock in the morning of the 27th of December,
hours before any kind of daylight, while the
faint “pit-pat” of all-night dancing still sounded from
the chief’s cabin, we dropped down the steep bank to
the river surface and resumed our journey. Ahead was
a man with a candle in a tin can, peering for the faint
indications of the trail on the ice; the other two were
at the handle-bars of the toboggans. It is strange that
in this day of invention and improvement in artificial
illumination, a candle in a tin can is still the most dependable
light for the trail. A coal-oil lamp requires
a glass which is easily broken, and the ordinary coal-oil
that comes to Alaska freezes at about 40° below.
In very cold weather a coal-oil lantern full of oil will
go out completely from the freezing of its supply. All
the various acetylene lamps are useless because water
is required to generate the gas, and water may not be
had without stopping and building a fire and melting
ice or snow. The electric flash-lamp, useful enough
round camp, goes out of operation altogether on the
trail, because the “dry” cell that supplies its current[35]
is not a dry cell at all, but a moist cell, and when its
moisture freezes is dead until it thaws out again. No
extremity of cold will stop a candle from burning, and
if it be properly sheltered by the tin can it will stand
a great deal of wind. The “folding pocket lantern,”
which is nothing but a convenient tin can with mica
sides, is the best equipment for travel, but an empty
butter can or lard can is sometimes easier to come by.

The Chandalar is wide-spread in these parts, with
several channels, and the trail was hard to follow. One
track we pursued led us up a bank and along a portage
and presently stopped at a marten trap; and we had to
cut across to the river and cast about hither and thither
on its broad surface to find the mail trail.

All the rivers that are confluent with the Yukon in
the Flats enter that dreary region through gaps in the
mountains that bound the broad plain. These gaps are
noted for wind, and the Chandalar Gap, which had
loomed before us since daybreak, is deservedly in especial
bad repute. The most hateful thing in the Arctic regions
is the wind. Cold one may protect one’s self against,
but there is no adequate protection against wind. The
parkee without opening front or back, that pulls on
over the head, is primarily a windbreak, and when a
scarf is wrapped around mouth and nose, and the fur-edged
hood of the parkee is pulled forward over cap
and scarf, the traveller who must face the wind has done
all he can to protect himself from it.

Sunrise on the Chandalar-Koyukuk portage.

Unfortunately, in the confusion of striking the tent
and packing in the dark, my scarf had been rolled up[36]
in the bedding, and, since the wind was not bad until
we approached the Gap in the evening, I had not troubled
about it. Now, as we drew nearer and nearer, the wind
rose constantly. The thermometer was at 38° below
zero, and wind at that temperature cuts like a knife.
But to get my scarf meant stopping the whole procession
and unlashing and unloading the sled, and the man
who unlashed in that wind would almost certainly freeze
his fingers. So I gave up the thought of it, turned
my back to the wind while I tied my pocket handkerchief
round mouth and nose, drew the strings of my
parkee hood close, and then faced it again to worry
through as best I could. The ice is always swept clear
of snow in the Gap. The river narrows within its jaws,
the ragged rocks rise up to the bluffs on either hand,
and the blue-streaked ice stretches between. We all
suffered a good deal. Against that cruel wind it was
impossible to keep warm. The hands, though enclosed
in woollen gloves, and they in blanket-lined moose-hide
mitts, grew numb; the toes, within their protection of
caribou sock with the hair on, strips of blanket wrapping,
and mukluks stuffed with hay, tingled with warning of
frost-bite; the whole body was chilled. We all froze
our faces, I think, for the part of the face around and
between the eyes cannot be covered. I froze my cheeks,
my nose, and my Adam’s apple, the last a most inconvenient
thing to freeze.

Coldfoot on the Koyukuk.

The cabin was just the other side of the Gap, and it
was well that it was no farther, for we were weary with
our thirty-mile run and dangerously cold with the exposure[37]
of the last hour. It was rather a large cabin as
trail cabins go, with a rickety sheet-iron stove in the
middle, burned full of holes, and it was hours before
the fire began to make any impression on the obstinate,
sullen cold of that hut. When we went to bed the
frost still stood thick and heavy on the walls all over
the room. A log building, properly constructed, is a
warm building, but slowness in parting with heat means
slowness in receiving heat, and a log cabin that has been
unoccupied for a long time in very cold weather is hard
to heat in one evening.

When we started next morning the thermometer
stood at 45° below zero, but we were out of the wind
region and did not mind the cold. It is curious that a
few miles on either side of that Gap the air will be still,
while in the Gap itself a gale is blowing. Seven times
I have passed through that Gap and only once without
wind. The great Flats were now behind us, we had
passed into the mountains, and for the remainder of
our long journey we should scarce ever be out of sight
of mountains again. Up the river, with its constant
trouble of overflow, going around the open water whenever
we could, plunging through it in our mukluks
when it could not be avoided—with the care of the
dogs’ feet that the cold weather rendered more than
ever necessary when they got wet, and the added nuisance
of throwing the toboggans on their sides and
beating the ice from them with the flat of the axe wherever
water had been passed through—for two days we
followed its windings, the thermometer between -45°[38]
and -50°, the mountains rising higher and the scenery
growing more picturesque as we advanced. At the end
of the second day from the Gap we were at the mouth
of the West Fork of the Chandalar, and after passing up
it for fifteen or sixteen miles we left that watercourse
to cross the mountains to the South Fork of the Koyukuk
River.

Then began hard labour again. A toboggan is not
a good vehicle for crossing summits. Its bottom is perfectly
flat and smooth, polished like glass by the friction
of the snow. If the trail be at all “sidling” (and
mountain trails are almost always “sidling”), the toboggan
swings off on the side of the inclination and must
be kept on the trail by main force. The runners of a
sled will grip the surface, if there be any inequalities
at all, but a toboggan swings now this way and now
that, like a great pendulum, dragging the near dogs with
it. Again and again we had to hitch both teams to one
toboggan to get up a sidling pitch while all hands kept
the vehicle on the trail, and our progress was painful
and slow. In soft snow on a level surface like the river
bed or through the Flat country, generally, the toboggan
is much the more convenient vehicle, for it rides over
the snow instead of ploughing through it, but on hard
snow anywhere or on grades the toboggan is a nuisance.
Thus wallowing through the deep snow at the side of
the toboggans to hold them in place we sweated and
slaved our way mile after mile up the gradual ascent
until we reached the spot, just under a shoulder of the
summit, where there was dry spruce and green spruce[39]
for camping, the dry for fire and the green for couch,
and there we halted for the night.

Next morning we crossed the low pass and dropped
down easily into the wide valley of the Koyukuk South
Fork, with a fine prospect of mountains everywhere as
far as the eye could see. I had stood and gazed upon
those same mountains on my journey of the previous
winter, my first winter in Alaska, and had seen a most
remarkable sight. As we began the descent and a turn
of the trail gave a new panorama of peaks I did not at
first realise the nature of the peculiar phenomenon I was
gazing at. Each peak had a fine, filmy, fan-shaped cloud
stretching straight out from it into the sky, waving and
shimmering as it stretched. The sun was not above the
horizon, but his rays caught these sheer, lawn-like streamers
and played upon them with a most delicate opalescent
radiance. Then all at once came to my mind the recollection
of a description in John Muir’s Mountains of California
(surely the finest mountain book ever written) of
the snow banners of the Sierra Nevada, and I knew that
I was looking at a similar spectacle. It meant that a
storm was raging on high, although so far we were sheltered
from it. It meant that the dry, sand-like snow of
the mountain flanks was driven up those flanks so fiercely
before the wind that it was carried clean over them and
beyond them out into the sky, and still had such pressure
behind it that it continued its course and spread out
horizontally, thinning and spreading for maybe a mile
before it lost all coherence and visibility. As far as I
could see mountain peaks I could see the snow banners,[40]
all pointing one way, all waving, all luminous and shimmering
in the sun-rays. It was a very noble sight, and
I gazed a long while entranced, not knowing how ominous
it was. When we reached the valley and left the
shelter of the gulch we struck the full force of that fearful
gale, and for two days and nights of incessant blizzard
we lay in a hole dug out of a sand-bank (for we had
no tent that year), the trail lost, the grub box nearly
empty, and no fire possible to cook anything with had
the grub box been full.

The valley before us—to resume the narrative—is a
high, wind-swept region of niggerhead and swamp, the
catch-basin of the South Fork of the Koyukuk River.
The trail descends one of its southern draws, follows up
the main valley awhile, crosses it, and leaves by one of
its northern draws to pass over the mountains that separate
its drainage from the main fork of the Koyukuk.
The cold had given place to wind, and though the gale
did not approach the fierceness of last year’s storm, it
gave great trouble in following the track. These high
headwater basins are always windy; the timber is scrubby
spruce with many open places, and in such open places
the trail is soon obliterated altogether.

When the light fails this casting about for blazes
whenever a clump of spruce is reached becomes increasingly
slow and difficult and at last becomes hopeless.
The general direction determined, it might be thought
that the traveller could ignore the tracks of previous
passage and strike out for himself, but he knows that
the trail, however rough, is at least practicable, whereas[41]
an independent course may soon lead to steep gullies or
cut banks, or may entangle him in some thicket that he
must resort to the axe to pass through. Moreover, even
two or three passages through the snow in the winter
will give some bottom to a trail; a bottom that, when
the wind-swept areas are passed and the snow-shoes are
resumed, both he and his dogs will be thankful for.

So we made a camp as it darkened to night, not far
from the spot where I had “siwashed” with an Indian
companion the previous winter, the wind blowing half
a gale at 20° below zero.

Making camp under such circumstances is always
a very disagreeable proceeding. It takes time and care
to make a comfortable camp, and time and care in the
wind and the cold involve suffering. Two suitable trees
must be selected between which the tent is to be suspended
by the ridge-rope, and the snow must all be
scraped away by the snow-shoes, or, if it be too deep,
beaten down. Then while one man unlashes and unpacks
the sleds, another cuts green spruce and lays it
all over the tent space, thicker and finer where the bed
is to be. Then up goes the tent, its corner ropes and
its side strings made fast to boughs, if there be such, or
to stakes, or to logs laid parallel to the sides. Then the
stovepipe is jointed and the stove set up on the edge
of green billets properly shaped. Meanwhile the axe-man,
the green boughs cut, has been felling and splitting
a dry tree for stove wood, and the whole proceedings
are rushed and hastened towards getting a fire in
that stove. Sometimes it is a question whether we shall[42]
get a fire before we freeze our fingers or freeze our fingers
before we get a fire. The fire once going, we are
safe, for however much more work there is in the open,
and there is always a good deal more, one can go to the
tent to get warm. Enough stove wood must be cut,
not only for night and morning, but for cooking the
dog feed. The dog pot, filled with snow, into which
the fish are cut up, is put upon the outdoor fire as soon
as man-supper begins cooking in the tent. When it
boils, the rice and tallow must be added, and when the
rice has boiled twenty minutes the whole is set aside
to cool. Meanwhile the two aluminum pots full of
snow, replenished from time to time as it melts, are put
upon the stove in the tent as the necessary preliminary
to cooking. Sometimes ice, and more rarely water, may
be had, and then supper is hastened. If we are camped
on the river bank sometimes a steel-pointed rifle-bullet
fired straight down into the ice will penetrate to the
water below and allow a little jet to bubble up. Melting
snow is a tedious business at best; but, since three
times out of four when camping it must be done, the
aluminum pots are a treasure. There is still work
for every one as well as the cook. Snow must be
banked all round the tent to keep out the wind.
Little heaps of spruce boughs must be cut for the
dogs’ beds; it is all we can do for them whatever
the weather, and they appreciate it highly. It may
be that dog moccasins must be taken off and strung
around the stove to dry, and before supper is ready the
inside ridge-rope of the tent is heavy with all sorts of[43]
drying man-wear: socks, moccasins, scarfs, toques, mittens.
One of the earliest habits a man learns on the
trail is to hang up everything to dry as soon as he takes
it off. Why should it be hung up to dry unless it has
got wet? the writer was once asked, in detailing these
operations. Because there is no other way to remove
the ice with which everything becomes incrusted in very
cold weather.

As his snow melts the cook throws into the pot a
few handfuls of evaporated potatoes, a handful of evaporated
onions, and smaller quantities of evaporated
“soup vegetables,” and leaves them to soak and simmer
and resume their original size and flavour. By and by
he will cut up the moose meat or the rabbits or birds,
or whatever game he may have, and throw it in, and
in an hour or an hour and a half there will be a savoury
stew that, with a pan of biscuits cooked in an aluminum
reflector beside the stove and a big pot of tea, constitutes
the principal meal of the day. Or if the day has
been long and sleep seems more attractive even than
grub, he will turn some frozen beans, already boiled,
into a frying-pan with a big lump of butter, and when
his meat is done supper is ready. Beans thus prepared
eaten red hot with grated cheese are delicious to a hungry
man. With the stove for a sideboard, food may
always be eaten hot, and that is one advantage of camp
fare.

The men satisfied, the dogs remain, and while two
of the party wash dishes and clean up, the third feeds
the dogs. Their pot of food has been cooling for an[44]
hour or more. They will not eat it until it is cold and
a mess of rice will hold heat a long time even in the
coldest weather. When it is nearly cold it is dished
out with a paddle into the individual pans and the dogs
make short work of it. There are some who feed straight
fish, and, if the fish be king salmon of the best quality,
the dogs do well enough on it. But on any long run
it is decidedly economical to cook for the dogs—not so
much from the standpoint of direct cost as from that
of weight and ease of hauling. An hundred pounds of
fish plus an hundred pounds of rice plus fifty pounds of
tallow will go a great deal farther than two hundred
and fifty pounds of fish alone. There is little doubt,
too, that in the long run the dogs do better on cooked
food. It is easier of digestion and easier to apportion
in uniform rations. Rice and fish make excellent food.
The Japs took Port Arthur on rice and fish. The tallow
answers a demand of the climate and is increased as the
weather grows colder. Man and dog alike require quantities
of fat food in this climate; it is astonishing how
much bacon and butter one can eat. When the dogs
have eaten, and each one has made the rounds of all
the other pans to be sure nothing is left, they retire to
their respective nests of spruce bough and curl themselves
up with many turnings round and much rearranging
of the litter. Feet and nose are neatly tucked
in, the tail is adjusted carefully over all, the hair on the
body stands straight up, and the dogs have gone to bed
and do not like to be disturbed again.

Therein lies the cruelty of depriving them of their[45]
tails, which used to be the general custom in this country.
The old tandem harness almost required it, as
the breath of the dog behind condensed upon the tail
of the dog in front until he was carrying around permanently
a mass of ice that was a burden to him and rendered
his tail useless for warmth. But the rig with a
long mid rope, to which the dogs are attached by single-trees
in such manner that they may at will be hitched
abreast or one ahead of the other as the trail is wide
or narrow, is superseding the tandem rig, and one sees
more bushy tails amongst the dogs. The thick, long-haired
tail of the dog in this country is indeed his blanket,
and in cold weather the tailless dog is at a great disadvantage.

It was said that all the dogs retired to the nests of
spruce bough; it should have been all but one. It is
Lingo’s special charge to guard the sled and his special
privilege to sleep on it. Turning around and curling
up on the softest spot he can find of the unlashed and
partly unloaded toboggan, he will not touch anything
it contains nor permit any other dog to touch it.

The northern skies are clouded the next morning,
the first day of the new year, and there is a ruddy dawn
that is glorious to behold. The white earth gives back
a soft rose tint, as an organ pipe gives back a faint tone
to the strong vibration of another pipe in pitch with it.
We shall not see the sun himself any more for many
weeks, but we see his light upon the flanks of the mountains
for an hour or so around noon. The bold, shapely
peaks of the South Fork of the Koyukuk turn their snows[46]
to pink fire as his rays slowly descend their sides, and
the whole scene is exquisitely beautiful. What a wonderful
thing colour is! When the skies are overcast this
is a dead black-and-white country in winter, for spruce,
the prevailing wood, is black in the mass at a little distance.
Gaze where one will, there is naught but black
and white. The eye becomes tired of the monotony and
longs for some warmer tone. That is surely the reason
why all those who live in the country cherish some gay
article of attire, why the natives love brilliant handkerchiefs,
why the white man also will choose a crimson scarf.
Trudging at the handle-bars, I have found pleasure in
the red pompons of the dogs’ harness, in the gay beading
of mitten and hind-sack. And that is why a lavish
feast of colour such as this dawn stirs one’s spirit with
such keen delight. It gives life to a dead world.

But the wind is still bitter and interferes sadly with
one’s enjoyment. All through the valley, up the creek
by which we leave it, past the twin lakes on the low
summit, the wind grows in force, and when we leave
Slate Creek for the present and make a “portage” over
a mountain shoulder to strike the creek again much
lower down, the wind has risen to a gale that overturns
the toboggans and makes the men fight for their footing.
The actual physical labour of it is enormous, and
there can be no rest; it is too bitterly cold in that blast
to stop. For a mile or two we struggle and slave to
beat our way around that mountain shoulder and then
drop down to the creek again. The blessed relief it is
to get out of the fury of that wind into the comparative[47]
shelter of the creek, to be done with the ceaseless
toil of holding the heavy toboggans from hurtling down
the hillside, to be able to keep one’s feet without continually
slipping and falling on the wind-hardened snow,
no words can adequately convey. We are all frozen
again a little; this man’s nose is touched, that man’s
cheeks, and the other man’s finger.

On the middle fork of the Koyukuk, at the mouth
of Slate Creek, Coldfoot sits within a cirque of rugged
mountain peaks, the most northerly postal town in the
interior of Alaska, the most northerly gold-mining town
in the world, as it claims. It sprang into existence in
1900 and flourished for a season or two with the usual
accompaniments of such florification. In 1906 it was
already much decayed, and is now dead. Ever since its
start the Koyukuk camp has steadily produced gold and
given occupation to miners numbering from one hundred
and fifty to three hundred, but the scene of operations,
and therefore the depot for supplies, has continually
changed. In 1900 the chief producing creek was Myrtle,
which is a tributary of Slate Creek, and the town at
the mouth was in eligible situation, though much over-built
from the first. Then the centre of interest shifted
to Nolan Creek, fifteen miles farther up the river, which
is a tributary of Wiseman Creek, and the town of Wiseman
sprang up at the mouth of that creek. The post-office,
the commissioner’s office, and the saloon, the
stores and road-houses, migrated to the new spot, and
Coldfoot was abandoned. Now the chief producing
creek is the Hammond River, still farther up the Koyukuk,[48]
and if its placer deposits prove as rich as they
promise it is likely that a town will spring up at the
mouth of the Hammond which will supersede Wiseman.

There has never been found a continuous pay-streak
in the Koyukuk camp. It is what is known as a “pocket”
camp. Now and again a “spot” is found which enriches
its discoverers, while on the claims above and
below that spot the ground may be too poor to work
at a profit; for ground must be rich to be worked at
all in the Koyukuk. It is the most expensive camp in
Alaska, perhaps in the world. This is due to its remoteness
and difficulty of access. Far north of the Arctic
Circle, the diggings are about seventy-five miles above
the head of light-draught steamboat navigation, and
more than six hundred miles above the confluence of
the Koyukuk with the Yukon. Transshipped at Nulato
to the shoal-water steamboats that make three or four
trips a season up the Koyukuk, transshipped again at
Bettles, the head of any steamboat navigation, freight
must be hauled on horse scows the remaining seventy-five
miles of the journey; and all that handling and
hauling means high rates. The cost of living, the cost
of machinery, the general cost of all mining operations
is much higher than on the Yukon or on the other tributaries
of that river. The very smallness of the camp is
a factor in the high prices, for there is not trade enough
to induce brisk competition with the reduction of rates
that competition brings.

Yet the smallness and the isolation of the camp have
their compensations. There is more community life,[49]
more esprit de corps amongst the Koyukuk miners than
will be found in any other camp in Alaska. Thrown
upon their own resources for amusement, social gatherings
are more common and are made more of, and hospitality
is universal. Like all sparsely settled and frontier
lands, Alaska is a very hospitable place in general,
but the Koyukuk has earned the name of the most hospitable
camp in Alaska. Since the numbers are small,
and each man is well known to all the others, any sickness
or suffering makes an immediate appeal and brings
a generous response. Again and again the unfortunate
victim of accident or disease has been sent outside for
treatment, the considerable money required being quickly
raised by public subscription. There is probably no
other gold camp in the world where it is a common
thing for the owner of a good claim to tell a neighbour
who is “broke” to take a pan and go down to the drift
and help himself.

Until my visit of the previous year no minister of
religion of any sort had penetrated to the Koyukuk, and,
save for one journey thither by Bishop Rowe, my annual
visits have been the only opportunities for public
worship since. It will suffice for the visit now describing
as well as for all the others to say that the reception
was most cordial and the opportunity much appreciated.
We went from creek to creek and gathered the men and
the few women in whatever cabin was most convenient,
and no clergyman could wish for more attentive or interested
congregations.

The Upper Koyukuk.

Upon our return to Coldfoot from the creek visits[50]
the thermometer stood at 52° below zero, although it
had been no lower than 38° below when we left the
last creek, some fifteen miles away. As a general rule,
the temperature on these mountain creeks, which are at
some considerable elevation above the river into which
they flow, will read from 10° to 15° higher than on the
river, and if one climbed to the top of the peaks around
Coldfoot, the difference then would probably be 20° or
25°. At the summit road-house between Fairbanks and
Cleary City in the Tanana country in cold weather the
thermometer commonly reads 20° above the one place
and 10° or 15° above the other.

The barren shores of Kotzebue Sound.

This interesting fact, which surprises a good many
people, for we are used to think of elevated places as cold
places, is due to the greater heaviness of cold air, which
sinks to the lowest level it can reach; and the river bed
is the lowest part of the country. It would be interesting
to find out to what extent this rule holds good. The
ridges and the hilltops are always the warmest places in
cold weather; would this hold as regards mountain tops?—as
regards high mountain tops? Probably it would
hold in the sunshine, but the rapid radiation of heat
in the rarefied atmosphere of mountain tops would swing
the balance the other way after dark. There is no doubt,
however, that the coldest place in cold weather in Alaska
is the river surface, and it is on the river surface that
most of our travelling is done. The night we returned
to Coldfoot we put our toboggan up high on the roof
of an outhouse to keep its skin sides from the teeth of
some hungry native dogs, leaving some of the load that[51]
was not required within it, covered by the sled cloth.
Later on I saw by the light of the moon Lingo’s silhouetted
figure sitting bolt upright on top of the sled,
and he gave his short double bark as I drew near to
make me notice that he was still doing his duty although
under difficulties. The dog had climbed up a wood-pile
and had jumped to the top of the outhouse and so to
the sled. I thought of Kipling’s Men That Fought at
Minden:

Here at Coldfoot we came first into contact with
that interesting tribe of wandering inland Esquimaux
known as the Kobuks, from their occupation of the
river of that name. The Koyukuk has its own Indian
people, but these enterprising Kobuks have pushed their
way farther and farther from salt water into what used
to be exclusive Indian territory. Representatives of
both races were at Coldfoot, and as we lay weather-bound
for a couple of days, I was enabled to renew last
year’s acquaintance with them, though without a good
interpreter not much progress was made. The delight
of these people at the road-house phonograph, the first
they had ever heard, was some compensation for the
incessant snarl and scream of the instrument itself. It
was very funny to see them sitting on the floor, roaring
with laughter at one particularly silly spoken record of
the “Uncle Josh at the World’s Fair” order. Over and
over again they would ask for that record, and it never[52]
ceased to convulse them with laughter. “He’s been enjoyin’
poor health lately, but this mornin’ I heard him
complain that he felt a little better”—how sick and tired
we got of this and similar jokes drawled out a dozen
times running! The natives did not understand a word
of it; it was the human voice with its pronounced, unusual
inflections that aroused their merriment. The
phonograph is becoming a powerful agency for disseminating
a knowledge of English amongst the natives
throughout Alaska, and one wishes that it were put to
better use than the reproduction of silly and often vulgar
monologue and dialogue and trashy ragtime music.
As an index of the taste of those who purchase records,
the selection brought to this country points low.

The third day the thermometer stood at -49° and we
were free to leave without actually breaking the rule we
had made after the escapade on the Yukon. Two other
teams were going down the river, so we started with
them on the sixty-five mile journey to Bettles. Twenty
miles or so below Coldfoot the Koyukuk passes for several
miles in a narrow channel between steep rock bluffs,
with here and there great detached masses standing in
the middle of the river. One has a grotesque resemblance
to an aged bishop in his vestments and is known
as the Bishop Rock; another a more remote likeness to
an Indian woman, and this is known as the Squaw
Rock. This part of the river, which is called the cañon
of the Koyukuk, though it is not a true cañon, is very
picturesque, and because of frequent overflow, offers
glare ice and swift passage to the traveller when it does[53]
not embarrass him with running water. We were fortunate
enough to pass it without getting our dogs’ feet
wet, and made the half-way road-house in a brilliant
moon that rendered travelling at night pleasanter than
during the day.

The next day we started again at near 50° below,
but because there was a good trail and a road-house for
noon, the travelling was rather pleasant than otherwise.
If there be a warm house to break the day’s march and
eat in, where ice-incrusted scarfs and parkees and caps
and mittens may be dried out, with a warm outhouse
where the dogs may rest in comfort, travelling in such
weather is not too risky or too severely trying. The
continual condensation of the moisture from the breath
upon everything about the head and face is a decided
inconvenience, and when it condenses upon the eye-lashes,
and the upper and the lower lashes freeze together,
the ice must be removed or it is impossible to
open the eyes. This requires the momentary application
of the bare hand, and every time it goes back into
the mitten it carries some moisture with it, so that after
a while mittens are wet as well as head-gear; moreover,
there is always a certain perspiration that condenses.
One gets into the habit of turning the duffel lining of
the moose-hide mitts inside out and hanging them up the
moment one gets inside a cabin. Round every road-house
stove there is a rack constructed for just that
purpose.

There is no more striking phenomenon of the arctic
trail than the behaviour of smoke in cold weather. As[54]
one approaches a road-house, and to greater degree a
village or a town, it is seen enveloped in mist, although
there be no open water to account for it, and the prospect
in every other direction be brilliantly clear. It is
not mist at all; it is merely the smoke from the stovepipes.
And the explanation is simple, although not all
at once arrived at. Smoke rises because it is warmer
than the air into which it is discharged; for that and
no other reason. Now, when smoke is discharged into
air at a temperature of 50° below zero, it is deprived
of its heat immediately and falls to the ground by its
greater specific gravity. The smoke may be observed
just issuing from the pipe, or rising but a few feet, and
then curling downward to be diffused amidst the air
near the ground.

It was to such a smoke-enveloped inn that we pulled
up to warm and refresh ourselves and our team for the
twenty miles that remained of the day’s march. We
had almost reached the limit of Koyukuk road-houses.
Bettles being the head of navigation, and merchandise
late in the season finding water too shallow for transport
to the diggings, there is more or less freighting with
dog teams and horses all the winter. This travel keeps
open the road-houses on the route. From an “outside”
point of view they may appear rough and the fare coarse.
The night accommodation is a double row of bunks on
each side of a long room with a great stove in the middle.
Sometimes there is straw in the bunks, sometimes
spruce boughs; in the better class even sometimes hay-stuffed
mattresses. But to the weary traveller, who has[55]
battled with the storm or endured the intense cold for
hours at a stretch, they are glad havens of refuge; they
are often even life-saving stations.

While we lay at the road-house the clear sky clouded
and the thermometer rose. This is an unfailing sequence.
Clear, bright weather is cold weather; cloudy weather is
warm weather. The usual explanation, that the cloud
acts as a blanket that checks the radiation of heat from
the earth, is one of those explanations that do not explain.
There is no heat to radiate. The cloud is a mass
of moist air, which is warm air, introducing itself from
some milder region. So the cloud brings the heat; and
the lower layers of atmosphere extract it and thereby discharge
the moisture. For an hour or two around noon
the thermometer stood at -35° and there was a light fall
of snow; then the skies cleared because they were discharged
of all their moisture, and the thermometer went
down to -50° again. It is a beautifully simple process
and sometimes takes place two or three times a day.
Every time the sky clouds, the thermometer rises; every
time the sky clears, the thermometer falls. And because
the barometer gives notice of changes in the density of
the atmosphere, it is valuable in forecasting temperature
in our winters. A steady rise in the barometer
means a steady fall in the thermometer; a fall in the
barometer in a time of great cold infallibly prophesies
warmer weather; even such rapid changes as the one
given above are anticipated. So well is this established,
that during “50°-below spells” at Fairbanks, impatient,
weather-bound travellers and freighters would busy the[56]
hospital telephone with inquiries about the barometer,
the hospital having the only barometer in the country.

After another long, cold run, on the night of Friday,
the 12th of January, we reached Bettles, the place we
had planned to spend Christmas at. We were unable
to stir from Bettles for two solid weeks, for during the
whole of that time the thermometer never rose above
50° below zero.

The long wait at Bettles would have been excessively
tedious had it not been for the kind hospitality of Mr.
and Mrs. Charles Grimm, the Commercial Company’s
agent and his wife, and this is but one of many times
that I have been under obligation to them for cordial
welcome and entertainment, for needs anticipated, and
every sort of assistance gladly rendered. We had been
expected many days; the Christmas festivities with a
gathering of natives of both races had come and gone;
still they looked for us, for in this country one does not
give a man up merely because he is a few weeks behind
time, nor hold him to account for unpunctuality. The
natives remained for the most part, and there was abundant
opportunity of intercourse with them and some beginnings
of instruction. As the days passed and all arrangements
for our advance were made, we chafed more
and more at the delay, for it was very plain that the
prospect of visiting Point Hope grew less and less; but
this is a great country for teaching patience and resignation.

Some of the weather during that two weeks’ wait
was of quite exceptional severity. One night is fixed[57]
for ever in my memory. It is a very rare thing for the
wind to blow in the “strong cold,” but that night there
was a wind at 58° below zero. And high up in the
heavens was a sight I had never seen before. The
moon, little past her full, had a great ring around her,
faintly prismatic; and equidistant from her, where a
line through her centre parallel with the horizon would
cut the ring, were two other moons, distinct and clear.
It was a strangely beautiful thing, this sight of three
moons sailing aloft through the starry sky, as though
the beholder had been suddenly translated to some planet
that enjoys a plurality of satellites, but no living being
could stand long at gaze in that wind and that cold. A
perfect paraselene is, I am convinced, an extremely rare
thing, much rarer than a perfect parhelion (“moon-cats”
my companion thought the phenomenon should be called,
saving the canine simile for the sun), for in seven years’
travel I have never seen another, and the references to
it in literature are few.

The next day at noon, the sun not visible above the
distant mountains, there appeared in the sky a great
shining cross of orange light, just over the sun’s position,
that held and shone for nigh an hour and only faded with
the twilight. It is not surprising that these appearances
should deeply impress the untutored mind and
should be deemed significant and portentous; they must
deeply impress any normal mind, they are so grand and
so strange. The man who has trained his intellect until
it is so stale, and starved his imagination until it is so
shrivelled that he can gaze unmoved at such spectacles,[58]
that they are insignificant to him, has but reduced himself
to the level of the dog upon whom also they make
no impression—though even a dog will howl at a great
aurora. Of course we know all about them; any schoolboy
can pick up a primer of physical geography and
explain the laws of refraction, and the ugly and most
libellous diagram of circles and angles that shows just
how these lustrous splendours happen; but the mystery
beyond is not by one hair’s breadth impaired nor
their influence upon the spectator diminished. In Alaska
perhaps more than any other country it is the heavens
that declare the glory of God and the firmament that
shows His handiwork, and the awestruck Indian who
comes with timid inquiry of the import of such phenomena
is rightfully and scientifically answered that the
Great Father is setting a sign in the sky that He still
rules, that His laws and commandments shall never lose
their force, whether in the heavens above or on the earth
beneath.

The “strong cold” itself is an awe-inspiring thing
even to those who have been familiar with it all their
lives; and a dweller in other climes, endowed with any
imagination, may without much difficulty enter into the
feelings of one who experiences it for the first time. It
descends upon the earth in the brief twilight and long
darkness of the dead of winter with an irresistible power
and an inflexible menace. Fifty below, sixty below, even
seventy below, the thermometer reads. Mercury is long
since frozen solid and the alcohol grows sluggish. Land
and water are alike iron; utter stillness and silence[59]
usually reign. Bare the hand, and in a few minutes the
fingers will turn white and be frozen to the bone. Stand
still, and despite all clothing, all woollens, all furs, the
body will gradually become numb and death stalk upon
the scene. The strong cold brings fear with it. All
devices to exclude it, to conserve the vital heat seem
feeble and futile to contend with its terrible power. It
seems to hold all living things in a crushing relentless
grasp, and to tighten and tighten the grip as the temperature
falls.

Yet the very power of it, and the dread that accompanies
it, give a certain fearful and romantic joy to the
conquest of it. A man who has endured it all day, who
has endured it day after day, face to face with it in the
open, feels himself somewhat the more man for the experience,
feels himself entered the more fully into human
possibilities and powers, feels an exultation that manhood
is stronger even than the strong cold. But he is a fool
if ever he grow to disdain the enemy. It waits, inexorable,
for just such disdain, and has slain many at last
who had long and often withstood it.

On those rare occasions when there is any wind, any
movement of the air at all, there enters another and a
different feeling. Into the menace of a power, irresistible,
inflexible, but yet insentient, there seems to enter
a purposeful, vengeful evil. It pursues. The cold itself
becomes merely a condition; the wind a deadly weapon
which uses that condition to deprive its victim of all
defence. The warmth which active exercise stores up,
the buckler of the traveller, is borne away. His reserves[60]
are invaded, depleted, destroyed. And then the wind
falls upon him with its sword. Of all of which we were
to have instance here on the Koyukuk.

In the second week of our stay at Bettles, while
Divine service was in progress in the store building,
crowded with whites and natives, the door opened and,
with an inrush of cold air that condensed the moisture
at that end of the room into a cloud and shot along the
floor like steam from an engine exhaust, there entered
an Indian covered with rime, his whole head-gear one
mass of white frost, his snow-shoes, just removed, under
his arm, and a beaded moose-skin wallet over his shoulder.
Every eye was at once turned to him as he beat the
frost from his parkee hood and thrust it back, unwrapped
fold after fold of the ice-crusted scarf from his face, and
pulled off his mittens. Seeking out the agent, he moved
over to him and whispered something in his ear. It
was plain that the errand was of moment and the message
disturbing, and as I had lost the attention of the
congregation and the continuity of my own discourse,
I drew things to a close as quickly as I decently could.
That Indian had come seventy-five miles on snow-shoes
in one run, without stopping at all save to eat two or
three times, at a continuous temperature of 50° below zero
or lower, to bring word that he had found a white man
frozen to death on the trail; and on the Koyukuk that
feat will always be counted to Albert the Pilot for righteousness.
From the location and description of the dead
man, there was no difficulty in identifying him. He was
a wood-chopper under contract with the company to cut[61]
one hundred cords of steamboat wood against next summer’s
navigation at a spot about one hundred miles
below Bettles. He had taken down with him on the
“last water” enough grub for about three months, and
was to return to Bettles for Christmas and for fresh
supplies. After a day or two’s rest the Indian was sent
back with instructions to bring the body to a native
village we should visit, to whipsaw lumber for a coffin
and dig a grave, and we engaged to give the body Christian
burial.

Uneasy at the softening muscles and sinews of this
long inaction, I took snow-shoes and a couple of Kobuks
one day and made an ascent of the hill behind Bettles
known as Lookout Mountain, because from its top the
smoke of the eagerly expected first steamboat of the
summer may be seen many miles down the river; being
moved to that particular excursion by dispute among
the weather-bound freighters as to the hill’s height.

The change of temperature as we climbed the hill
was striking. On the first shoulder we were already out
of the dense atmosphere of the valley and above the
smoke gloom of the houses, and as we rose the air grew
milder and milder, until at the top we emerged into the
first sunshine of many weeks and were in an altogether
different climate—balmy and grateful it was to us just
come up from the strong cold. The aneroid showed the
altitude about seven hundred feet above Bettles, and I
regretted very much I had not brought the thermometer
as well, for its reading would have been most interesting.

The view from the top was brilliantly clear and far-reaching.[62]
The broad plain across the river was checkered
black and white with alternating spruce thickets and
lakes; beyond it and the mountains that bounded it lay
the valley of the south fork which we had crossed fifty
or sixty miles farther up on our journey hither. Right
in front of us the middle fork made its big bend from
southwest to south, and to the left, that is, to the north,
the valley of the John River opened up its course through
the sharp white peaks of the Endicott Mountains. It
was in this direction that my eyes lingered longest. I
knew that sixty or seventy miles up this river we could
cross the low Anaktuvak Pass into the Anaktuvak River,
which flows into the Colville, and that descending the
Colville we could reach the shores of the Northern Ocean.
It was a journey I had wished to make—and have wished
ever since. There are many bands of Esquimaux on that
coast, never visited save by those who make merchandise
of them in one way or another. Please God, some
day I should get there; meanwhile our present hopes lay
west, though, indeed, these grew daily fainter.[63]

CHAPTER III

BETTLES TO THE PACIFIC—THE ALATNA, KOBUK PORTAGE,
KOBUK VILLAGE, KOTZEBUE SOUND

All our preparations were long since made. Our
Indian guide had been sent back to Fort Yukon from
Coldfoot, and here we engaged a young Esquimau with
his dog team and sled, to go across to Kotzebue Sound
with us. There was also a young Dane who wished to
go from the Koyukuk diggings to the diggings at Candle
Creek on the Seward Peninsula, and him we were willing
to feed in return for his assistance on the trail. The
supplies had been carefully calculated for the journey,
the toboggans were already loaded, and we waited but
a break in the cold weather to start.

Our course from Bettles would lead us sixty-five miles
farther down the Koyukuk to the mouth of the Alatna.
The visit to the native village and the burial of the poor
fellow frozen to death would take us ten miles farther
down than that, and we would return to the Alatna
mouth. Then the way would lie for fifty miles or so up
that stream, and then over a portage, across to the
Kobuk River, which we should descend to its mouth in
Kotzebue Sound; the whole distance being about five
hundred miles through a very little travelled country.
We learned indeed, that it had been travelled but once[64]
this winter, and that on the first snow. It was thought
at Bettles that we might possibly procure some supplies
at a newly established mission of the Society of Friends
about half-way down the Kobuk River, but there was no
certainty about it, and we must carry with us enough
man-food to take us to salt water. Our supply of dog
fish we might safely count upon replenishing from the
natives on the Kobuk. Another thing that caused some
thought was the supply of small money. There was no
silver and no currency except large bills on the Koyukuk,
and we should need money in small sums to buy
fish with. So the agent weighed out a number of little
packets of gold-dust carefully sealed up in stout writing-paper
like medicine powders, some worth a dollar, some
worth two dollars, the value written on the face, and we
found them readily accepted by the natives and very
convenient. Two years later I heard of some of those
packets, unbroken, still current on the Kobuk.

At last, on the 26th of January, we got away. The
thermometer stood only a few degrees above -50° when
we left, but the barometer had been falling slowly for
a couple of days, and I was convinced the cold spell was
over. With our three teams and four men we made quite
a little expedition, but dogs and men were alike soft, and
for the first two days the travel was laborious and slow;
then came milder weather and better going.

We passed the two ruined huts of Peavey, the roofs
crushed by the superincumbent snow. In the summer
of 1898 a part of the stream of gold seekers, headed for
the Klondike by way of Saint Michael, was deflected to[65]
the Koyukuk River by reports of recent discoveries
there. A great many little steamboat outfits made their
way up this river late in the season, until their excessive
draught in the falling water brought them to a stand.
Where they stopped they wintered, building cabins and
starting “towns.” In one or two cases the “towns”
were electrically lit from the steamboat’s dynamo. The
next summer they all left, all save those who were wrecked
by the ice, and the “towns” were abandoned. But they
had got upon the map through some enterprising representative
of the land office, and they figure on some
recent maps still. Peavey, Seaforth, Jimtown, Arctic
City, Beaver City, Bergman, are all just names and
nothing else, though at Bergman the Commercial Company
had a plant for a while.

We passed the mouth of the Alatna, where were two
or three Indian cabins, and went on the remaining ten
miles to Moses’ Village, where the body of the man frozen
to death had been brought. Moses’ Village, named from
the chief, was the largest native village on the Koyukuk
River, and we were glad, despite our haste, that we had
gone there. The repeated requests from all the Indians
we met for a mission and school on the Koyukuk River
and the neglected condition of the people had moved me
the previous year to take up the matter. This was my
first visit, however, so far down the river.

We found the coffin unmade and the grave undug,
and set men vigorously to work at both. The frozen
body had been found fallen forward on hands and feet,
and since to straighten it would be impossible without[66]
several days’ thawing in a cabin, the coffin had to be
of the size and shape of a packing-case; of course the
ground for the grave had to be thawed down, for so are
all graves dug in Alaska, and that is a slow business. A
fire is kindled on the ground, and when it has burned
out, as much ground as it has thawed is dug, and then
another fire is kindled. We had our own gruesome task.
The body should be examined to make legally sure that
death came from natural causes. With difficulty the
clothes were stripped from the poor marble corpse, my
companion made the examination, and as a notary public
I swore him to a report for the nearest United States
commissioner. This would furnish legal proof of death
were it ever required; otherwise, since there is no provision
for the travelling expenses of coroners, and the
nearest was one hundred and forty or one hundred and
fifty miles away, there would have been no inquest and
no such proof.

The man had delayed his return to Bettles too long.
When his food was exhausted and he had to go, there
came on that terrible cold spell. A little memorandum-book
in his pocket told the pitiful story. Day by day
he lingered hoping for a change, and day by day there
was entry of the awful cold. He had no thermometer,
but he knew the temperature was -50° or lower by the
cracking noise that his breath made—the old-timer’s test.
At last the grub was all gone and he must go or starve.
The final entry read: “All aboard to-morrow, hope to
God I get there.” The Indians estimated that he had
been walking two days, and had “siwashed it” at night[67]
somewhere beside a fire in the open without bedding.
Holes were burned in his breeches in two places, where,
doubtless, he had got too near the fire. He had nothing
whatever to eat with him save a piece of bacon gnawed
to the rind. There were only two matches in his pocket,
and they were mixed up with trash of birch-bark and tobacco,
so it is likely he did not know he had them. He
had lit all the fires he could light and eaten all the food
he had to eat. Still he was plugging along towards the
native village nine miles away. Then he lost the trail,
probably in the dark, for it was faint and much drifted,
and had taken off his snow-shoes to feel with his moccasined
feet for the hardened snow that would indicate it.
That was almost the end. He had gone across the river
and back again, feeling for the trail, and then, with
the deadly numbness already upon his brain, had wandered
in a circle. The date of his starting in the memorandum-book
and the distance travelled made it almost
certain that, at some moment between the time when
those three moons floated in the sky and the time when
that cross glared on the horizon, he had fallen in the
snow, never to rise again. Fifty-eight below zero and a
wind blowing!

One supposes that the actual death by freezing is
painless, as it is certainly slow and gradual. The only
instance of sudden gelation I ever heard of is in Longfellow’s
“Wreck of the Hesperus,” where the skipper,
having answered one question, upon being asked another,

We buried the body on a bench of the bluff across
the river from the native village, the natives all standing[69]
around reverently while the words of committal were
said, and set up a cross marked with lead-pencil: “R.
I. P.—Eric Ericson, found frozen, January, 1906.” Two
or three years later a friend sent me a small bronze tablet
with the same legend, and that was affixed to the
cross. There are many such lonely graves in Alaska,
for scarce a winter passes that does not claim its victims
in every section of the country. That same winter we
heard of two men frozen on the Seward Peninsula, two
on the Yukon, one on the Tanana, and one on the Valdez
trail. This day I recorded a temperature of 10°,
the first plus temperature in thirty-nine days, and that
previous rise above zero was the first in twenty days.

That night we gathered all the natives, and after
long speech with poor interpretation I ventured to promise
them a mission the next year. Some of them had
been across to the Yukon years before and had visited
the mission at Tanana. Some had been baptized there.
Some had never seen a clergyman or missionary of any
sort before, and had never heard the gospel preached.
We were touched by one old blind woman who told of
a visit to a mission on the Yukon, and how she learned
to sing a hymn there. Her son interpreted: “She say
every night she sing that hymn for speak to God.” She
was encouraged to sing it, and it turned out to be the
alphabet set to a tune! After much pleading and with
some hesitation, I baptized seventeen children, comforting
myself with the assurance of the coming mission,
which would undertake their Christian training and instruction.[70]

Back next day at the mouth of the Alatna, I was
again impressed with the eligibility of that spot as a
mission site. It was but ten miles above the present
native village, and, with church and school established,
the whole population would sooner or later move to it.
This gives opportunity for regulating the building of
cabins, and the advantage of a new, clean start. Moreover,
the Alatna River is the highway between the Kobuk
and the Koyukuk, and the Esquimaux coming over in increasing
numbers, would be served by a mission at this
place as well as the Indians. I foresaw two villages,
perhaps, on the opposite sides of the river—one clustered
about the church and the school, the other a little lower
down—where these ancient hereditary enemies might live
side by side in peace and harmony under the firm yet
gentle influence of the church. So I staked a mission
site, and set up notices claiming ground for that purpose,
almost opposite the mouth of the Alatna, which, in
the native tongue, is Allakaket or Allachaket.

There was some trail up the Alatna and we made fair
headway on its surface, stopping two nights at Kobuk
huts. We are out of the Indian country now, and shall
see no more Indians until we are back on the Yukon.
The mode of life, the habits, the character of the races
are very different—the first Esquimau habitation we visited
proclaiming it. These inland Esquimaux, though
some of the younger ones have never seen salt water—our
guide, Roxy, for one—are still essentially a salt-water
people. Their huts, even in the midst of trees, are half-underground
affairs, for they have not learned log-building;[71]
the windows are of seal gut, and seal oil is a staple
article of their diet. Their clothing is also marine, their
parkees of the hair-seal and their mukluks of the giant
seal. Communications are always kept up with the
coast, and the sea products required are brought across.
The time for the movement of the Kobuks back and forth
was not quite yet, though we hoped we should meet
some parties and get the benefit of their trail. Just
before we left the Alatna River we stopped at Roxy’s
fish cache and got some green fish, hewing them out of
the frozen mass with the axe. The young man had
fished here the previous summer, had cached the fish
caught too late to dry in the sun, and they had remained
where he left them for four or five months. Most of
them had begun to decay before they froze, but that did
not impair their value as dog food, though it rendered
the cooking of them a disagreeable proceeding to white
nostrils. This caching of food is a common thing amongst
both natives and whites, and it is rarely that a cache
is violated except under great stress of hunger, when
violation is recognised as legitimate. Doughty, in his
Arabia Deserta, mentions the same custom amongst the
Arabs; Sven Hedin amongst the Tartars. Sparsely peopled
waste countries have much the same customs all over
the world. Even the outer garb in the Oriental deserts
has much resemblance to our parkee; both burnoose and
parkee are primarily windbreaks, and it makes little difference
whether the wind be charged with snow or sand.

At midday on the 3d of February we left the Alatna
River and took our way across country for the Kobuk.[72]
We had now no trail at all save what had been made
a couple of months before by the only other party that
had crossed the portage this winter, and it was buried
under fifteen or sixteen inches of snow. There was quite
a grade to be climbed to reach the plateau over which
our course lay, and the men, with rope over the shoulder,
had to help the dogs hauling at the sled. Indeed, over
a good deal of this portage, from time to time, the
men had to do dog work, for the country is rolling, one
ridge succeeding another, and the loose, deep snow made
heavy and slow going. One man must go ahead breaking
trail, and that was generally my task, though when
the route grew doubtful and the indications too faint
for white man’s eye, Roxy took my place and I took his
gee pole, and slipped his rope around my chest.

Breaking trail would not be so laborious if one
could wear the large snow-shoes that are used for hunting.
But the hunting shoe, though it carries the man
without fatigue, does not help the dogs. The small
shoe known as the trail shoe, packs the snow beneath
it, and by the time the trail breaker has gone forward,
then back again, and then forward once more, the snow
is usually packed hard enough to give the dogs some footing.
Footing the dog must have or he cannot pull; a
dog wallowing in snow to his belly cannot exert much
traction on the vehicle behind him. The notion of snow-shoeing
as a sport always seems strange to us on the
trail, for to us it is a laborious necessity and no sport
at all. The trail breaker thus goes over most of the
ground thrice, and when he is anxious at the same time[73]
to get a fairly accurate estimate by the pedometer of
the distance travelled, he must constantly remember to
upend the instrument in his pocket when he retraces
his steps, and restore it to its recording position when he
attacks unbroken snow again. Also he must take himself
unawares, so to speak, from time to time, and check
the length of his stride with the tape measure and alter
the step index as the varying surfaces passed over require.
Conscientiously used, with due regard to its
limitations, the pedometer will give a fair approximation
of the length of a journey, but a man can no more tell
how far he has gone by merely hanging a pedometer in
his pocket than he can tell the height above sea-level of
an inland mountain by merely carrying an aneroid barometer
to the top.

It was on this Alatna-Kobuk portage that we saw
the most magnificent sunrise any of us could remember.
It had been cloudy for some days with threat of snow
which did not fall. We were camped in a little hollow
between two ridges, and I had been busy packing up the
stuff in the tent preparatory to the start, when I stepped
out with a load of bedding in my arms, right into the
midst of the spectacle. It was simple, as the greatest
things are always simple, but so gorgeous and splendid
that it was startling. The whole southeastern sky
was filled with great luminous bands of alternate purple
and crimson. At the horizon the bands were deeper in
tone and as they rose they grew lighter, but they maintained
an unmixed purity of contrasting colour throughout.
I gazed at it until the tent was struck and the dogs[74]
hitched and it was time to start, and then I had to turn
my back upon it, for our course lay due west, and I was
breaking trail. But on the crest of the rising ground
ahead there burst upon my delighted eyes a still more
astonishing prospect. We were come to the first near
view of the Kobuk mountains, and the reflected light of
that gorgeous sunrise was caught by the flanks of a
group of wild and lofty snow peaks, and they stood up
incandescent, with a vivid colour that seemed to come
through them as well as from them. To right and left,
mountains out of the direct path of that light gave a
soft dead mauve, but these favoured peaks, bathed from
base to summit in clear crimson effulgence, glowed like
molten metal. It was not the reflected light of the sun,
but of the flaming sky, for even as I looked, a swift
change came over them. They passed through the tones
of red to lightest pink, not fading but brightening, and
before my companions reached me the sun’s rays sprang
upon the mountains from the horizon, and they were
golden.

It seems almost foolish to the writer and may well
seem tedious to the reader, to attempt in words the description
of such scenes; yet so deep is the impression
they produce, and so large the place they take in the
memory, that to omit them would be to strike out much
of the charm and zest of these arctic journeys. Again
and again in the years that have passed, the recollection
of that pomp of colour on the way to the Kobuk has
come suddenly upon me, and always with a bounding of
the spirit. I can shut my eyes now and see that incomparable[75]
sunrise; I can see again that vision of mountains
filling half the sky with their unimaginable ardency,
and I think that this world never presented nobler sight.
Surely for its pageantry of burning, living colour, for purity
and depth and intensity of tint, the Far North with its
setting of snow surpasses all other regions of the earth.

That same day we met a couple of Kobuk youths on
their way to the Koyukuk, and they gave us the greatest
gift it was in the power of man to give us—a trail!
There is no finer illustration of the mutual service of
man to man than the meeting of parties going opposite
ways across the unbroken snows. Each is at once conferring
and receiving the greatest of favours, without
loss to himself is heaping benefit on the other; is, it
may be—has often been—saving the other, and being
himself saved. No more hunting and peering for blazes,
no more casting about hither and thither when open
stretches are crossed; no more three times back and forth
to beat the snow down—twenty miles a day instead of
ten or twelve—the boys’ trail meant all that to us. And
our trail meant almost as much to them. So we were
rejoiced to see them, sturdy youths of sixteen or seventeen,
making the journey all by themselves. My heart
goes out to these adventurous Kobuks, amiable, light-hearted,
industrious; keen hunters, following the mountain-sheep
far up where the Indian will not go; adepts
in all the wilderness arts; heirs of the uncharted arctic
wastes, and occupying their heritage. If I were not a
white man I would far rather be one of these nomadic
inland Esquimaux than any other native I know of.[76]

That same day we crossed two headwater forks of
the Kokochatna, as the Kobuks call it, or the Hogatzitna
as the Koyukuks call it, or the Hog River, as the
white men call it, a tributary of the Koyukuk that comes
in about one hundred and fifty miles below the Alatna.
As we came down a steep descent to the little east fork,
it showed so picturesque and attractive, with clumps of
fine open timber on an island, that it remains in my
mind one of the many places from the Grand Cañon
of the Colorado almost to the Grand Cañon of the
Noatak, where I should like to have a lodge in the vast
wilderness.

We had but crossed the west fork when we knew that
we were close to the watershed between the Kobuk and
the Koyukuk, between the streams that fall into Kotzebue
Sound and those that fall by the Koyukuk and the
Yukon Rivers into Bering Sea; and because it seemed a
capital geographic feature, it was disappointing that it
was so inconspicuous. Indeed, we were not sure which
of two ridges was the actual divide. Beyond those ridges
there was no question, for the ground sloped down to
Lake Noyutak, a body of water some three and a half
miles in length and of varying breadth that drains into
the Kobuk. Here in a cabin we found three more young
Kobuks, and spent the night, getting our first view of
the Kobuk River next day, not from an eminence, as I
had hoped, but only as we came down a bank through
thick timber and opened suddenly upon it. By the pedometer
I made the portage forty-six miles.

The upper Kobuk is a picturesque river, the timber[77]
being especially large and handsome for interior Alaska.
We reached it just above the mouth of the Reed River,
tributary from the north. The weather was warm—too
warm for good travelling—the thermometer standing at
15­­­°, 20°, and one day even 30° above zero all day long,
so that we were all bareheaded and in our shirt-sleeves.
From time to time, as the course of the river varied, we
had distant views of the rocky mountains of the Endicott
Range, or, as it might be written, the Endicott
Range of the Rocky Mountains, for such, in fact, it is—the
western and final extension of the great American
cordillera. On the other side of those mountains was
the Noatak River, flowing roughly parallel with the
Kobuk, and discharging into the same arm of the sea.

The division of the labour of camping amongst four
gave us all some leisure at night, and I found time to
read through again The Cloister and the Hearth and
Westward Ho! with much pleasure, quite agreeing with
Sir Walter Besant’s judgment that the former is one of
the best historical novels ever written. There are few
more attractive roysterers in literature to me than Denys
of Burgundy, with his “Courage, camarades, le diable est
mort!” This matter of winter reading is a difficult one,
because it is impossible to carry many books. My plan
is to take two or three India-paper volumes of classics
that have been read before, and renew my acquaintance
with them. But reading by the light of one candle,
though it sufficed our forefathers, is hard on our degenerate
eyes.

The days were much lengthened now, and the worst[78]
of the winter was done. There would still be cold and
storm, but hardly again of the same intensity and duration.
When the traveller gets well into February he
feels that the back of the winter is broken, for nothing
can take from him the advantage of the ever-lengthening
days, the ever-climbing sun.

On the afternoon of the third day on the Kobuk we
reached a cabin occupied by two white men, the first
we had seen since we left Bettles, and we were the first
white men they had seen all the winter. They were
waiting for the spring, having a prospecting trip in view;
simply spending the winter eating up their grub. There
was nothing whatever to read in the cabin, and they
had been there since the freeze-up! They welcomed us,
and we stayed overnight with them, and that night there
was a total eclipse of the moon, of which we had a fine
view. We had an almanac which gave the time of totality
at Sitka, and we knew the approximate longitude
of our position, so we were able to set our watches by it.

The next two days are noted in my diary as two of
the pleasantest days of the whole journey—two of the
pleasantest days I ever spent anywhere, I think. A
clear, cloudless sky, brilliant sunshine, white mountain
peaks all about us, gave picture after picture, and the
warm, balmy air made travelling a delight. There are
few greater pleasures than that of penetrating into a new
country, with continually changing views of beauty, under
kindly conditions of weather and trail. In the yellow
rays of the early sun, the spruce on the river bank looked
like a screen of carved bronze, while the slender stems of[79]
birches in front of the spruce looked like an inlaying of
old ivory upon the bronze, the whole set upon its pedestal
of marble-like snow. The second day we took a portage
of nine or ten miles across a barren flat and struck the
river again just below a remarkable stretch of bank a
mile or so in length, with never a tree or a bush or so
much as the smallest shrub growing on it. Thick timber
above suddenly ceased, thick timber below suddenly
began again, and this bare bank reached back through
open, barren flat to a low pass in the mountains. It was
a bank of solid ice, so we were told later, and I remembered
to have heard of ice bluffs on the Kobuk, and wished
that the portage had struck the river above this spot
instead of below it, that there might have been opportunity
to examine it.

A little farther down the river and we were at the
new mission of the Society of Friends, where a cordial reception
awaited us and, luxury of luxuries, a warm bath!
Again and again the wash-tub was emptied and fresh
water was heated until we all had wallowed to our heart’s
content. The rude log buildings of the mission had
been begun the previous fall, and were not yet complete,
but they were advanced enough for occupation, and the
work of the mission went actively on. It was in charge
of rather an extraordinary man. He gave us a sketch
of his life, which was full of interest and matter for
thought. For many years he was a police officer and
jailer in the West. Then he sailed on a whaler and thus
became acquainted with the Esquimaux. He was converted
from a life of drunkenness and debauchery—though[80]
one fancied his character was not really ever so
bad as he painted it—at a “Peniel” mission in a Californian
town. He went in out of mere idle curiosity,
just recovered from a spree, and was so wrought upon
that when he came out he was a different creature, a
new man, the old life with its appetite for vicious indulgence
sloughed off and left behind him, and he now
possessed with a burning desire to do some such active
service for God as aforetime he had done for the devil.
After three or four months of some sort of training in
an institution maintained by the California Society of
Friends—a body more like the Salvation Army, one
judges, than the old Quakers—he volunteered for service
at a branch which the old-established mission of
the Society at the mouth of the Kobuk desired to plant
two hundred miles or so up the river, and had come out
and had plunged at once into his task. So here he was,
some six or seven months installed, teacher, preacher,
trader in a small way, and indefatigable worker in general.
Pedagogical training or knowledge of “methods”
he had none at all, but the root of the matter was in him,
and surely never was such an insatiable school-teacher.
Morning, noon, and night he was teaching. While he
was cooking he was hearing lessons; while he was washing
the dishes and cleaning the house he was correcting
exercises in simple addition. In the schoolroom he was
full of a genial enthusiasm that seemed to impart instruction
by sheer dynamic force. “Boot,” the lesson book
said. There was no boot in the schoolroom, all were
shod in mukluks. He dives into his dwelling-house[81]
attachment and comes back holding up a boot. “Boot,”
he says, and “boot” they all repeat. Presently the
word “tooth” was introduced in the lesson. Withdrawing
a loose artificial tooth of the “pivot” variety
from his upper jaw, he holds it aloft and “tooth!” he
cries out, and “toot!” they all cry, and he claps it back
into his head again.

We were present on Sunday at the services. There
was hearty singing of “Pentecostal” hymns with catchy
refrains, but we were compelled to notice again what
we had noticed amongst the little bands of these people
on the Koyukuk when we set them to singing, that the
English was unintelligible; and since it conveyed no
meaning to us could have had little for them. This is
the inevitable result of ignoring the native tongue and
adopting the easy expedient of teaching the singing of
hymns and the recitation of formulas like the commandments
in English. For a generation or two, at least, the
English learned, save by children at a boarding-school,
where nothing but English is spoken, is fragmentary
and of doubtful import in all except the commonest matters
of speech. And at such boarding-schools there is
danger of the real misfortune and drawback of natives
growing up to live their lives amongst natives, ignorant
of the native tongue. There is no quick and easy way
of stamping out a language, thank God; there is no quick
and easy way of imparting instruction in a foreign language.
By and by all the Alaskan natives will be more
or less bilingual, but the intimate speech and the most
clearly understood speech will still be the mother tongue.[82]
The singing done, there was preaching through an interpreter,
and then each individual present “gave testimony,”
which consisted for the most part in the recitation
of a text of Scripture. Then there were individual
prayers by one and another of the congregation, and
then some more singing. The only hymn I could find
in the book that I knew was the fine old hymn, “How
Firm a Foundation,” and that was sung heartily to the
“Adeste Fideles.” They are naturally a musical race,
picking up airs with great facility, and they thoroughly
enjoy singing.

After the service the missionary confided some of
his troubles to me. He had lately learned through his
interpreter that the burden of most of the individual
prayers was that the supplicator might “catch plenty
skins” and be more successful in hunting than his fellows;
and though he had done his best to impress upon
them the superior importance of making request for spiritual
benefit, he was afraid they had made no change.
“Our people ‘outside,'” he said, “don’t understand these
folk, and I’m not sure that I thoroughly understand
them myself.” “They’re all ‘converted,'” he said;
“they all claim to have experienced a change of heart,
but some of them I know are not living like converted
people, and sometimes I have my doubts about most of
them.” My sympathy went out to him in his loneliness
and his earnestness and his disappointments. I
pointed out that the emotional response to emotional
preaching was comparatively easy to get from any primitive
people, but that to change their whole lives, to[83]
uproot old customs of sensual indulgence, to engraft
new ideas of virtue and chastity was a long, slow process
anywhere in the world. It was chiefly in the matter
of sexual morality that his doubts and difficulties
lay, and I was able to assure him that his experience was
but the common experience of all those who had laboured
for the uplifting of savage people. Indeed, how should
it be otherwise? Until quite lately there was almost
promiscuous use of women. A man receiving a traveller
in his dwelling overnight proffered his wife as a part of
his hospitality; the temporary interchange of wives was
common; young men and young women gratified themselves
without rebuke; children were valuable however
come by, and there was no special distinction between
legitimate and illegitimate offspring. As one reflects
on these conditions and then looks back upon conditions
amongst white people, it would seem that all the
civilised races have done is to set up a double standard
of sexual morality as against the single standard of
the savage. It can hardly be claimed that the average
white man is continent, or even much more continent
than the average Esquimau, but he has forced continence
upon the greater part of his women, reserving
a dishonoured remnant for his own irresponsible use.
And there are signs that some of those who nowadays
inveigh against the white man’s double standard are in
reality desirous of substituting, not the single standard
of the Christian ideal, but the single standard of the
savage. In the mining camps the prostitute has a sort
of half-way-recognised social position, and in polite parlance[84]
is referred to as a “sporting lady”—surely the
most horribly incongruous phrase ever coined; she
often marries a miner who will tell you that she is as good
as he is, and she is received afterwards by all but a few
as a “respectable married woman.”

There had been some trouble of this sort at this mission.
The great northern gold seekers’ wave of ’97 and
’98 threw a numerous band of prospectors up the Kobuk
as well as up the Koyukuk. The wave had receded and
left on the Kobuk but one little pool behind it, a handful
of men who found something better than “pay” on the
Shungnak, a few miles away. And there was much
criticism of the missionary’s methods amongst them.
Word of the arrival of strangers had brought some of
them to Long Beach, and on Sunday night I had opportunity
of addressing them, with a view to enlisting their
sympathy, if possible. What if mistakes were made,
what if some of the methods employed were open to question?
Here was a man who beyond doubt was earnestly
labouring in the best way he knew for the improvement
of these natives. Such an effort demanded the co-operation
of every right-feeling man.

After all, however grand the physical scenery, the
meteorological phenomena, may be, the people of any
country are the most interesting thing in it, and we
found these Esquimaux extraordinarily interesting. Dirty
they certainly are; it is almost impossible for dwellers
in the arctic regions to be clean in the winter, and the
winter lasts so long that the habit of winter becomes the
habit of the year. White and native alike accept a[85]
lower standard of personal cleanliness than is tolerated
outside. I remember asking Bishop Rowe, before I came
to Alaska: “What do you do about bathing when you
travel in the winter?” To which he replied laconically:
“Do without.” It is even so; travellers on the Alaskan
trails as well as natives belong to the “great unwashed.”
In the very cold weather the procuring of water in any
quantity is a very difficult thing even for house dwellers.
Every drop of it has to be carried from a water-hole cut
far out on the ice, up a steep grade, and then quite a
little distance back to the dwelling—for we do not build
directly upon these eroding banks. The water-hole is
continually freezing up and has to be continually hewed
free of ice, and as the streams dwindle with the progress
of winter, new holes must be cut farther and farther out.
On the trail, where snow must usually be melted for water,
it is obvious that bathing is out of the question; even the
water for hands and face is sparingly doled by the cook,
and two people will sometimes use the same water rather
than resort to the painful though efficient expedient of
washing with snow. If this be so despite aluminum pots
and a full kit of camp vessels, it is much more so with the
native, whose supply of pots and pans is very limited.
I have seen a white man melt snow in a frying-pan, wash
hands and face in it, throw it out, fry bacon and beans
in it, then melt more snow and wash his cup and plate
in it. There is, however, this to be said anent the disuse
of the bath in this country, that in cold weather most
men perspire very little indeed, and the perspiration that
is exuded passes through to the outer garments and is[86]
immediately deposited upon them as frost; and there is
this further to be said about dirt in general, that one
blessed property of the cold is to kill all odours.

One grows tolerant of dirt in this country; there is no
denying it, and it is well that it is so; otherwise one
would be in a chronic state of disgust with oneself and
every one else. So the dirt of the native, unless specially
prominent and offensive, is accepted as a matter of
course and ignored. This obstacle overcome, the Esquimaux
are an attractive and most interesting race,
and compare to advantage with the Indians in almost
every particular. They are a very industrious people. Go
into an Esquimau’s hut at almost any time when they
are not sleeping, and you will find every individual
occupied at some task. Here is a man working in wood
or bone with the ingenious tools they have evolved; here
are women working in skin or fur, and some of them
are admirable needlewomen; here, perhaps, is another
woman chewing mukluks—and many a white man who
has kept his feet dry in overflow water is grateful to the
teeth that do not disdain this most effective way of
securing an intimate union between sole and upper.
Even the children are busy: here is a boy whittling out
bow and arrow—and they do great execution amongst
rabbits and ptarmigan with these weapons that entail
no cost of powder and shot; here is a girl beating out
threads from sinew with a couple of flat stones. Some
of us, troubled with unconscientious tailors, wish that a
law could be passed requiring all buttons to be sewn on
with sinew—they never come off.[87]

They are a very light-hearted people, easily amused,
bubbling over with laughter and merriment, romping
and skylarking with one another at every intermission of
labour. One of my white travelling companions on this
journey was in the habit of using a little piece of rabbit
skin to protect his nose in cold or windy weather. The
care of the nose is sometimes very troublesome indeed,
it freezes more readily than any other portion of the body;
and a little piece of rabbit skin, moistened and applied
to the nose, will stay there and keep it warm and comfortable
all day. But it does not exactly enhance one’s
personal attractions.

We had stopped for camp and were all together for
the first time in four or five hours, when Roxy noticed
this rabbit-skin nose protector, upon which the breath
had condensed all the afternoon until two long icicles
depended from it, one on each side, reaching down below
the mouth; and he fell straightway into a fit of laughter
that grew uncontrollable; he rolled on the snow and
roared. A little annoyed at this exhibition, I spoke
sharply: “What’s the matter with you, Roxy; what on
earth are you cutting up like that for?” Checking himself
for a moment, he pointed to my companion and said,
“Alleesame walrus,” and went off into another paroxysm
of laughter, rolling about and roaring. At intervals all
the evening he would break out again, and when we sat
down to eat it overcame him once more and he rushed
outside where he could give vent to his mirth with less
offence.

The boy was straightforward and conscientious. We[88]
were camped over Sunday once, and Roxy had noticed
many marten tracks in the neighbourhood. He had
brought a few traps along with him to set out as we went
and pick up on his return, and he wanted to know if I
thought he might set some that day, although it was the
day of rest. Careful not to interfere in any way with
the religious instruction any native has received from
any source, I told him that was a matter for him to decide
himself; that each man was responsible for his own conduct.
The boy thought awhile—and he did not set
his traps. Now that young man had never received any
instruction at a mission; all his teaching had been from
other Esquimaux. This same question of working on
Sunday was the cause of some of the difficulty between
the missionary at Long Beach and the miners at Shungnak.
The sluicing or “cleaning-up” season is short, and
mining operators generally consider that they cannot
afford to lose an hour of it. The Kobuks employed by
these miners quit their work on Sunday, and that brought
the operations to a standstill. There was something to
be said on the miners’ side, but I rejoiced that the Esquimau
boys showed such steadfastness to their teaching.
“If you cannot use them six days in the week, if it has
to be seven or none, then do as the miners on the Yukon
side do, consider the country uninhabited, and make
your arrangements as though there were no Kobuks.”
That was my advice, and this may be read in connection
with Mr. Stefanson’s caustic comments on the same
rigidity of observance.

We left Long Beach with a grateful feeling for the[89]
hospitality with which we had been received and with
a substantial respect for the earnest missionary effort
that was being put forth there. We were able to replenish
our grub supply and also to exchange our two
toboggans for one large sled, for we were out of the
toboggan country again and they had already become
a nuisance, slipping and sliding about on the trail. Our
host was up early with a good breakfast for us, and
speeded the parting guest, which on the trail is certainly
an essential part of true hospitality, with all the honours;
the natives lined up on the bank and the younger
ones running along with us for a few hundred yards.

Soon after we left the mission we went up a series of
terraces to a desolate, barren, wind-swept flat, the portage
across which cut off a great bend of the river and
saved us many miles of travel. To our right rose the
Jade Mountains, whence the supply of this stone which
used to be of importance for arrow-heads and other implements
was obtained and carried far and wide. A
light crust on the snow broke through at every step,
though the snow was not deep enough and the ground
too uneven to make snow-shoes useful; so we all had
more or less sore feet that night when we regained the
river and made our camp near the mouth of the Ambler,
another tributary from the north.

The next day was an exceedingly long, tedious day.
The Kobuk River, which in its upper reaches is a very
picturesque stream, began now to be as monotonous as
the lower Yukon. It had grown to considerable size,
and the bends to be great curves of many miles at a[90]
stretch, one of which, a decided bend to the north of
the general westerly direction of the river, we were three
full hours in passing down. It was while traversing this
bend that we witnessed a singular mirage that lent to
the day all the enlivenment it had. Before us for ten
or twelve miles stretched the broad white expanse of
the river bed, shimmering in the mellow sunlight, and
far beyond, remote but clear, rose the sharp white peaks
of the mountains that divide the almost parallel valleys
of the Kobuk and the Noatak. As we travelled, these
distant peaks began to take the most fantastic shapes.
They flattened into a level table-land, and then they shot
up into pinnacles and spires. Then they shrank together
in the middle and spread out on top till they looked
like great domed mushrooms. Then the broad convex
tops separated themselves entirely from their stalk-like
bases and hung detached in the sky with daylight underneath.
And then these mushroom tops stretched out
laterally and threw up peaks of their own until there
were distinct duplicate ranges, one on the earth and one
in the sky. It was fascinating to watch these whimsical
vagaries of nature that went on for hours. A change
in one’s own position, from erect to stooping, caused the
most convulsive contortions, and when once I lay down
on the trail that I might view the scene through the
lowest stratum of the agitated air, every peak shot up
suddenly far into the sky like the outspreading of one’s
fingers, to subside as suddenly as I rose to my feet again.
The psalmist’s query came naturally to the mind, “Why
hop ye so ye hills?” and our Kobuk boy Roxy, whose[91]
enjoyment of fine landscapes and strange sights was
always a pleasure to witness, answered the unspoken
question. “God make mountains dance because spring
come,” he said prettily enough.

Then we crossed another portage and cut off ten miles
of river by it, and when we reached the river again I
wanted to stop, for it grew towards evening and here
was good camping-ground. But we had lately met some
travelling Kobuks and they had told Roxy of a cabin
“just little way” farther on, and I yielded to the rest
of the company, who would push on to it and thus
avoid the necessity of making camp. That native “just
little way” is worse than the Scotch “mile and a bittock”;
indeed, the natives have poor notion of distance in
general, and miles have as vague meaning to them as
kilometres have to the average Anglo-Saxon.

On and on we pushed, mile after mile, and still no
cabin. In the gathering dusk we would continually think
we saw it; half-fallen trees or sloping branches simulating
snow-covered gables. At last it grew quite dark,
and when there was general agreement that we must
seek the cabin no longer, but camp, there was no place to
camp in. Either the bank was inaccessible or there was
lack of dry timber. We went on thus, seeking rest and
finding none, until seven-thirty, and then made camp
by candle-light, in a poor place at that, having trudged
thirty-five miles that day. A night-made camp is always
an uncomfortable camp, and an uncomfortable camp
means a miserable night, which to-morrow must pay for.
We did not get to bed till nearly midnight, and it was[92]
nine-forty-five when we started out next morning, and
we made only fifteen miles that day.

The Kobuk valley continued to open out wider and
wider and the mountains right and left to recede. The
Jade Mountains were now dim and distant behind us,
and new ranges were coming into view. The people on
this lower river are very few. It was just about one
hundred miles from Long Beach when we reached the
next native village, a miserable collection of pole dwellings,
half underground, with perhaps a score of inhabitants.
Certainly the conditions of life deteriorated as we
descended this river. The country seems to afford nothing
but fish; we were amongst the ichthyophagi pure and simple.
Roxy, bred and born on the upper Kobuk and never
so far down before, is very scornful about it. “Me no
likee this country,” he says; “no caribou, no ptarmigan,
no rabbits, no timber, no nothin’.” The weather had
grown raw and cold again, with a constant disagreeable
wind that took all the fun out of travelling. We passed
a place where a white man was pessimistically picking
away at a vein of coal in the river bluff. “Yes, we been
here all winter,” he said, “working on the blamed ledge.
I always knowed it was goin’ to pinch out, and now it’s
begun to pinch. My partner’s gone to Candle for more
grub, but I told him it weren’t no use. It’s pinchin’ out
right now. I knowed it afore we started work, but the
blamed fool wouldn’t listen to me. ‘It’ll pinch out,’ I
told him a dozen times; ‘you mark my word it’ll pinch
out,’ I told him, and now it’s begun to pinch; and I hope
he’ll be satisfied.” We were reminded of the many coal-mines[93]
from time to time located on the Yukon, in all or
nearly all of which the vein has “pinched out.” The
deposits on the coast may be all the fancy of the magazine
writer paints, and may hold the “incalculable
wealth” that is attributed to them, but the coal on the
interior rivers seems in scant measure and of inferior
quality.

The same night we reached the native village at the
mouth of the Squirrel River, another northern tributary—the
Kobuk receives most of its waters from the north—and
we spent the night and the next day, which was
Sunday, in one of the half-underground huts of the place,
in company with twelve other people. Here we found
Roxy’s brother, dubbed “Napoleon” by some white man.
They had not seen one another for years, yet all the
greeting was a mutual grunt. The Kobuks are not
demonstrative in their affections, but it would not be
right to conclude the affection lacking. I have seen an
old Esquimau woman taking part in a dance the night
after her husband was buried, yet it would have been
unjust to have concluded that she was callous and
indifferent. It is very easy to misunderstand a strange
people, and very hard to understand them thoroughly.

The roof of the tent was dome-shaped and it was lit
by a seal-gut skylight. In the morning while I was conducting
Divine service and attempting most lamely by
the mouth of a poor interpreter to convey some instruction,
a dog fight outside adjourned to the roof and presently
both combatants came tumbling through the gut
window into the midst of the congregation. They were[94]
unceremoniously picked up and flung out of the door,
a few stitches with a needleful of sinew repaired the
window, and the proceedings were resumed. These gut
windows have their convenience as well as their inconvenience.
When the hut gets too warm and close even
for Esquimaux, the seal gut is folded back and the outer
air rushes in to the great refreshment of the occupants;
when the hut is cool enough the gut is replaced. A skylight
is far and away the best method of illuminating
any single-story structure, and this membrane is remarkably
translucent, while the snow that falls or frost that
forms upon such a skylight is quickly removed by beating
the hand upon the drum-like surface. All glass windows
must be double glazed, or else in the very cold
weather they are quickly covered with a thick deposit of
frost from the condensation of the moisture inside the
room, and then they admit much less light than gut does.
One of its unpleasant features is the way the membrane
snaps back and forth with a report like a pistol whenever
the door is opened and shut, but on the whole it is a very
good substitute for glass indeed.

These river Esquimaux vary greatly in physical appearance.
While many of them are somewhat undersized
and all have small feet and hands, some are well-developed
specimens of manhood. “Riley Jim,” the
chief of this tribe, would be counted a tall, stalwart man
anywhere. And while many have coarse, squat features,
here and there is one who is decidedly attractive in
appearance. A sweet smile which is often upon the face,
and small, regular white teeth, greatly help to redeem[95]
any countenance. A youth of about eighteen at the
Squirrel River would properly be called handsome, one
thinks—though amongst native people one grows a little
afraid of forgetting standards of comparison; and his
wife—for he was already a husband—was a decidedly
pretty girl. A word ought to be said which applies to
all the Esquimaux we met. Although many people live
in one hut and there is no possible privacy, yet we saw
no immodesty of any sort. They sleep entirely nude—probably
our own great-grandparents did the same, at
least the people of Defoe and Smollet did, for nightshirts
and pyjamas are very modern things. There is
much to be said from an hygienic point of view in favour
of that custom as against turning in “all standing” as
the Indian generally does, or sleeping in the day underwear
as most white men do. But although every one of
a dozen people in cabin after cabin that we stayed at
on the Kobuk River above and below this place, of both
sexes and all ages, would thus strip completely and go
to bed, there was never any exposure of the body at
all. It may be, of course, that our presence imposed a
greater care in this respect, but it did not so impress
us; it seemed the normal thing. Another noticeable
feature of the lives of all these people was their devoutness
in the matter of thanks before and after meat.
Some of them would not so much as give and receive a
drink of cold water without a long responsive grace.

As we went on down the river the country grew bleaker
and drearier and the few scattered inhabitants were living
more and more the life of the seacoast. The dwellings[96]
resembled igloos more than cabins, being completely
covered with snow and approached by underground passages,
with heavy flaps of untanned sealskin to close them.
When we passed a fork of the river we knew that we were
entering the delta of the Kobuk, and that another day
would take us to the mission on Kotzebue Sound. It was
a long, hard day, in which we made forty miles, but an
interesting one. With a start at six, we were at the
mouth by nine-thirty. The spruce which had for some
time been dwarfing and dwindling gave place to willows,
the willows shrank to shrubs, the shrubs changed to
coarse grass thrusting yellow tassels through the snow.
The river banks sank and flattened out and ceased, and
we were on Hotham Inlet with the long coast-line of the
peninsula that forms it stretching away north and south
in the distance. Roxy’s bewilderment was amusing.
He stopped and gazed about him and said: “Kobuk
River all pechuk!” (“Pechuk” means “played out.”)
“What’s the matter, no more Kobuk River?” I think
his mind had never really entertained the notion of the
river ending, though of course he must often have heard
of its mouth in the salt water. He was out of his country,
his bearings all gone, a feeling of helpless insecurity taking
the place of his usual confidence, and I think he said
no more all that day.

We had to traverse the ice of Hotham Inlet northward
to its mouth, double the end of the peninsula, and then
travel south along the coast to the mission at Kikitaruk,
the peninsula being too rugged to cross. Three considerable
rivers drain into Hotham Inlet, roughly parallel in[97]
their east and west courses, the Noatak, the Kobuk, and
the Selawik, so that its waters must be commonly more
fresh than salt, for its bounds are narrow and the extensive
delta of its eastern shore would argue its depth slight.
Ahead of us, as we travelled north making a bee-line for
the end of the peninsula, all the afternoon, loomed the
rocky promontory of Krusenstern, one of Kotzebue’s
capes, and far beyond, stretching up the dim coast-line,
lay the way to Point Hope. It was with a sinking of
the heart that I gazed upon it, for I knew already, though
I had not announced a decision, that the road to Point
Hope could not be my road that year. All day long the
thermometer stood between -40° and -30°, and the constant
light sea-breeze kept scarfs wrapped closely about
mouths and noses, which always means disagreeable
travel. When the company stopped at noon to eat a little
frozen lunch, I was too chilly to cease my movement and
pressed on. The day of that blessed comfort of the trail,
the thermos flask, was not yet. By two-thirty we had
reached Pipe Spit, which still further contracts the narrow
entrance of the inlet, and turning west for a mile or two
rounded the point and then turned south for ten miles
along the coast. Just about dark we reached the mission
and stood gazing out over the rough ice of Kotzebue
Sound to the Arctic Ocean, having made the forty miles
in ten and a half hours. We had come about one thousand
miles from Fairbanks, all of it on foot and most of it
on snow-shoes.

So here was my first sight of the Arctic Ocean. All
day long I had anticipated it, and it stirred me,—a dim,[98]
grey expanse stretching vast and vague in the dusk of
the evening. The old navigators whose stories I had
read as a boy passed before me in their wonderful, bold
sailing vessels, going in and out uncharted waters that
steamships will not venture to-day—Kotzebue, Beechey,
Collinson, McClure—pushing resolutely northward.

Less happy had been my first sight of the Pacific
Ocean, five years before. I had the ill luck to come
upon it by way of that Western Coney Island, Santa
Monica, and from the merry-go-rounds and cheap eating
places Balboa and Magellan and Franky Drake fled
away incontinent and would not be conjured back;
though, indeed, the original discoverers would have had
yet further occasion to gaze at one another “with a wild
surmise” if they had seen shrieking companies “shooting
the chutes.” But here was vastness, here was desolation,
here was silence; jagged ice masses in the foreground
and boundless expanse beyond, solemn and mysterious.
The Arctic Ocean was even as I had pictured it.

The missionary in charge at Kikitaruk had been informed
by letter of our projected journey during the previous
summer and had long expected us. We were received
with kindness and hospitality, and after supper
began at once our acquaintance with his work, for there
was a service that night which it was thought we should
attend. I spoke for a few minutes through an excellent
interpreter and then spent a couple of hours nodding
over the stove, overcome with sleep, while there was much
singing and “testimony.”

The Californian Society of Friends, established here[99]
a number of years with branches at other points on
Kotzebue Sound, has done an excellent work amongst
the Esquimaux. If they had accomplished nothing else
it would stand to the everlasting credit of the Society’s
missionaries that they have succeeded in imbuing the
natives under their charge with a total aversion to all
intoxicating liquor. We had come down from the remotest
points to which the influence of these people has
extended; we had met their natives five hundred miles
away from their base of instruction, and everywhere we
found the same thing. It was said by the white men
on the Koyukuk that a Kobuk could not be induced
to take a drink of whisky. It seemed to us a pity that
the force of this most wholesome doctrine should be
weakened by the unsuccessful attempt to include tobacco
in the same rigorous prohibition. In several cabins
where we stayed there was no sign of smoking until
members of our party produced pipes, whereupon other
pipes were furtively produced and the tobacco that was
offered was eagerly accepted. From any rational point
of view the putting of whisky and tobacco in the same
category is surely a folly. There can be few more harmless
indulgences to the native than his pipe, and no one
knows the solace of the pipe until he has smoked it
around the camp-fire in the arctic regions after a hard
day’s journey.

The decision to turn my back on Point Hope was, I
think, the most painful decision I ever made in my life;
with all my heart I wanted to go on. It was only one
hundred and sixty or one hundred and seventy miles[100]
away. The journey had been made in three or four days;
but we were now come to a country where travel is
impossible in bad weather and where bad weather prevails;
and that journey might quite as likely take two
weeks. I worked over the calendar in my diary, figuring
how many days of travel still remained, allowing reasonable
margins, and I could not see that I had much more
than time to get back to Fairbanks before the break-up,
which for sufficient reason I regarded as my first duty.
The day of rest at Kikitaruk was Washington’s birthday,
the 22d of February. Eight weeks would bring us to the
19th April, by which time the trails would be already
breaking up. Counting out Sundays, that left forty-eight
days of travelling with something like twelve hundred
miles yet to make without going to Point Hope—an average
of about twenty-five miles a day. I knew that we
had made no such average in the distance already covered,
and though I knew also that travelling improved
generally as the season advanced, I did not know how
very much better going there is on the wind-hardened
snows of the coast when travelling is possible at all.
Again and again I have regretted that I did not take the
chance and push on, but at the time I decided as I thought
I ought to decide, and one has no real compunctions when
that is the case.

So a first-hand knowledge of our own most interesting
work among the Esquimaux was not for me on that
occasion—and there has arisen no opportunity since.
Mr. Knapp, who had planned to spend the rest of the
winter at Point Hope, would get a guide and a team here[101]
and turn north after some days’ rest, while I would turn
south. Roxy was impatient to return to Bettles. “Me
no likee this country,” was all that could be got out of
him. So I paid him his money and made him a present
of the .22 repeating rifle with which he had killed so many
ptarmigan on the journey, outfitted him with clothes,
grub, and ammunition, and let him go; saying good-bye
with regret, for he was a good boy to us all the way.

It was late on the night of our single day of rest
when I got to bed, for there had been squaring up of
accounts and much writing, and when I went to bed I
did not sleep. Again and again I reviewed the decision
I had come to and fought against it, though such
is far from my common habit. Even as I write, years
after, the bitter rebellious reluctance with which I turned
south comes back to me. I wished the hospital at Fairbanks
at the bottom of the deep blue sea. I protested
I would go on and complete my journey, even though
it involved “thawing out” at Tanana and getting to
Fairbanks on a steamboat in the summer. I had a
free hand, a kindly and complaisant bishop, and none
would call me strictly to account. Then I realised that
it was merely pride of purpose, self-willed resolution of
accomplishing what had been essayed—in a word, personal
gratification for which I was fighting, and with
that realisation came surrender and sleep.[102]

CHAPTER IV

THE SEWARD PENINSULA—CANDLE CREEK, COUNCIL,
AND NOME

One day’s rest was not a great deal after the distance
we had come—and that day fully occupied with business—but
since Point Hope was abandoned some sort of
schedule must be made for the Seward Peninsula, and
where Sunday shall be spent is always an important
factor in arranging these itineraries. There was just
time to reach Candle for the next Sunday and it was
decided to attempt it. Hans would accompany me as far
as Candle, where he hoped to find work. It meant two
days of forty-five miles each, for it is ninety miles from
Kikitaruk to Candle, but they told us it could be done.

So the reluctant adieus made, letters despatched,
some mailed here at Kikitaruk, some to be carried back
to Bettles and mailed there—these latter getting outside
long before the former—we started at seven in the morning
instead of six, as we had planned, on the journey
down the shore of Kotzebue Sound. That hour’s delay
turned out to be a calamity for us.

The trail was smooth along the beach until Cape
Blossom was reached, and I had the first riding of the
winter, Hans and I alternately running and jumping on
the sled. There was a portage across the cape, and three
or four miles below it was the wreck of the river steamer[103]
Riley, which used to make a voyage up the Kobuk with
supplies for the miners at the Shungnak. The thermometer
was at -38° when we started, and the same light
but keen breeze was blowing that had annoyed us on the
other side of the peninsula. What a barren, desolate
region it is!—low rocks sinking away to the dead level
of the snow-field on the one hand, nothing but the ice-field
on the other.

We were bound for an igloo forty-five miles from the
mission, the only shelter between Kikitaruk on the peninsula
and Kewalik on the mainland, and we had been
warned that the igloo would be easy to miss if it grew
dark as it would be almost indistinguishable from the
snow-drifts of the shore. Some directions from a multitude
of counsellors remembered in one sense by Hans
and in another by me, added to our uncertainty as to
just where the igloo lay. The wind increased in force
as the evening advanced and the last time I looked at
the thermometer it still registered -38°. The sun set
over the sound with another of those curious distortions
which had before proved ominous to us. It was flattened
and swollen out like a pot-bellied Chinese lantern,
with a neck to it and an irregular veining over its surface
that completed the resemblance. The wind increased
until the air was full of flying snow and it grew dark,
and still there was no sign of the igloo. Only slowly and
with much difficulty could the trail be followed, and that
meant we were soon not moving fast enough to keep
warm in the fierce wind. At last we lost the trail altogether,
and sometimes we found ourselves out on the[104]
rough ice of the sound and sometimes wallowing in a
fresh snow-drift on the shore. I became possessed with
the fear that we had passed the igloo. I was positive
that we were told at the mission that we should reach
it before the high bluffs were passed, and we had passed
them a long way and had now but a shallow shelf to
mark the coast-line. It is strange how long that delusion
about passing his destination will pursue the Alaskan
traveller. Presently the dogs dropped off a steep bank
in the dark, and only by good fortune we were able to
keep the heavy sled from falling upon them, for they
were dead tired and lay where they dropped. With
freezing fingers I unhitched the dogs while Hans held
the sled, and we lowered it safely down. But it was
plain that it was dangerous to proceed. We could not
find the trail again and were growing alarmingly cold.
We were “up against it,” as they say here, “up against
it good and strong.” We had a tent but no means of
putting it up, a stove but nothing to burn in it, a grub
box full of food but no way to cook it. So the first
night of coast travel was to show us the full rigour and
inhospitality of the coast and to make us long for the
interior again. Wood can almost always be found there
within a few miles, if it be not immediately at hand,
and no one properly appreciates the hospitality of a
clump of spruce-trees until he has spent a night of storm
lying out on this barren coast. We turned the dogs
loose and threw them a fish apiece, unlashed the sled,
and got out our bedding. I had been sleeping in robes,
Hans in a shedding caribou-hide sleeping-bag that was[105]
my pet aversion. When he crawled out in the morning
he was so covered with hair that he looked like a caribou,
and the miserable hairs were always getting into
the food. We fished them out of the coffee, pulled them
out of the butter, and picked them out of the bread.
But now in that sleeping-bag he had an enormous advantage.
We lay side by side on the snow in the lee of
the sled, and, tuck myself up with blanket and robe as I
would, it was impossible to keep the swirling snow from
coming in. I called the dogs to me and made them lie
on my feet and up against my side, and so long as they
lay still I could get a little warmth, but whenever they
rose and left me I grew numb again. But Hans in his
sleeping-bag was snoring. The bag is the only bedding
on the coast. Added to the physical discomfort of that
sleepless, shivery night was some mental uneasiness.
There was no telling to what height the storm might
rise, nor how long it might continue. Sometimes travellers
overtaken in this way on the coast have to lie
in their sleeping-bags for three days and nights before
they can resume their journey. The only interest the
night held was the thought that came to me that as nearly
as I could tell we camped exactly on the Arctic Circle.
The long night dragged its slow length to the dawn at
last and the wind moderated a little at the same time, so
with the first streak in the east I awoke Hans, we gathered
our poor dogs together, rolled up the snow-incrusted
bedding, and resumed our journey. Two miles farther
on was the igloo! Our calls awoke some one and we were
bidden to enter. Descending a ladder and crawling[106]
through a dark passage we came in to the grateful warmth
and shelter. The chamber was crowded with sleeping
Esquimaux and reeked with seal oil and fish, but Hans
said it “looked good and smelled good to him,” and so
it did to me also. One has to lie out on that coast in a
storm to appreciate the value of mere shelter. We went
at once to cooking, for we had eaten nothing but a doughnut
or two in twenty-four hours, and surely never meal
was more relished than the reindeer steaks and the coffee
we took amongst those still sleeping Esquimaux. I should
have liked to spend the day and the next night there, for
they were friendly and kindly, but the wind had moderated
somewhat and there was still a chance to reach Candle
for Sunday. With the offer of a sack of flour at
Kewalik we induced a couple of Esquimaux to accompany
us, for I knew we had to cross the mouth of a bay over
the ice to reach the mainland and I wanted to take no
more chances.

Our company, again raised to four, started out about
nine, and until the Choris Peninsula was reached the
trail still skirted the shore. It is strange that Kotzebue,
who named this peninsula of a peninsula for the artist
who accompanied his expedition in 1816, should have
left the main peninsula itself unnamed, and that the
British expedition which named Cape Blossom ten years
later should have failed to supply the omission. It still
bears no name on the map. We portaged across the
Choris Peninsula and at the end of the portage took a
straight course across the mouth of Escholtz Bay (Escholtz
was Kotzebue’s surgeon) for Kewalik on the mainland,[107]
passing Chamisso Island, named for Kotzebue’s
poet friend. There is something very interesting to me
in this voyage of Kotzebue’s, and I have long wished to
come across a full narrative of it. But the bitter wind
that swept across that ice-sheet with the thermometer
at -30° brought one’s thoughts back to one’s own condition.
My hands I could not keep warm with the gear
that had sufficed for 50° and 60° below in the interior,
and I was very glad to procure from one of our native
companions a pair of caribou mitts with the hair inside,
an almost invulnerable gauntlet against cold. If that
wind had been in our faces instead of on our sides I am
sure we could not have travelled at all. At last we won
across the ice and brought up at a comfortable road-house
at Kewalik, about ten miles from Candle. Here
we lay overnight, taking the opportunity of thawing out
and drying the frost-crusted bedding, leaving the short
run into town for the morning.

The diggings on Candle Creek yield to the Koyukuk
diggings only as the most northerly gold mining in the
world. Although the general methods are the same in
all Alaskan camps, local circumstances introduce many
differences. In all Alaskan camps the ground is frozen
and must be thawed down. The timber of the interior
renders wood the natural fuel for the production of the
steam that thaws the ground, but the scarcity of wood
on the Seward Peninsula substitutes coal. There is
coal on the peninsula itself, but of very inferior quality,
mixed with ice. One may see chunks of coal with veins
of ice running through them thrown upon the fire. The[108]
wood of the interior is a great factor in its commercial
and domestic economy, and its absence on the Seward
Peninsula makes great change not only in the natural
aspect of the country but in the whole aspect of its industrial
and domestic life also. Wood-chopping for the
stove and the mill, wood-sawing, wood-hauling employ
no small percentage of all the white men in the interior—occupations
which do not exist at all on the peninsula.
But its encompassment by the sea, its peninsularity, is
the dominating difference between the Seward Peninsula
and the interior, and does indeed make a different country
of it altogether. All prices are very much lower on
the peninsula because ships can bring merchandise directly
from the “outside.” Thus amongst those who
have money to spend there is a more lavish scale of living
than in the interior towns, and luxuries may be enjoyed
here that are out of the question there. Perhaps, conversely,
it is true that life on the peninsula is somewhat
harder for the poorer class. Whether a railway from
salt water to the mid-Yukon would redress this great
difference in the cost of everything may be doubted.
Railways do not usually operate at less than water-rates.
There will probably always be an advantage in
the cost of living and mining in favour of the Seward
Peninsula camps.

There had been no public religious service of any
sort in Candle, with its several hundreds of population, in
three years, so there was special satisfaction in having
reached the place for Sunday when many miners were in
town from the creeks, and an overflowing congregation[109]
was readily assembled. And there was great pleasure in
three days’ rest at the hospitable home of a friend while
the temperature remained below -40°, exacerbated by a
wind that rendered travelling dangerous. Moreover, by
waiting I had company on the way, and now that I was
without native attendant or white companion, and disposed,
if possible, to make the journey right across the
peninsula to Council and then to Nome without engaging
fresh assistance, I was doubly glad of the opportunity of
travelling with two men bound for the same places and
acquainted with the route.

Travelling, like so many other things, is very different
on the Seward Peninsula. The constant winds beat down
and harden the snow until it has a crust that will carry
a man anywhere. There are only two means by which
snow becomes crusted; one is this packing and solidifying
by the wind, and the other is thawing and freezing again.
There is much less wind in the interior than on the coast,
and usually much less snowfall, and the greater part of
the surface of the country is protected by trees; the climate,
being continental instead of marine, is not subject
to such great fluctuations of temperature. A thaw
sufficiently pronounced or sufficiently prolonged to put a
stout crust on the snow when freezing is resumed, is a very
rare thing in the interior and a common thing on the
coast. So a striking difference in travel at once manifests
itself; in the interior all the snow is soft except on a
beaten trail itself, while in the Seward Peninsula all the
snow is alike hard. The musher is not confined to trails—he
can go where he pleases; and his vehicle is under no[110]
necessity of conforming in width to a general usage of
the country—it may be as wide as he pleases. Hence
the hitching of dogs two and three abreast; hence the
sleds of twenty-two, twenty-four, or twenty-six inches
in width. My tandem rig aroused the curiosity of those
who saw it. Hence many other differences also. Hitherto
we had not dreamed of watering the dogs since snow fell;
now I found their mouths bloody from their ineffectual
attempts to dig up the hard snow with their teeth, and
had to water them night and morning. It is not the custom
on the Seward Peninsula to cook for the dogs, and
dog mushers there argue the needlessness of that trouble.
But the true reason is other and obvious. It is difficult
for the traveller to get enough wood to cook for himself,
let alone the dogs. On the Seward Peninsula skis are
extensively used when there is soft snow; the prevalence
of brush almost everywhere in the interior renders them
of little use—and they are, therefore, little used, snow-shoes
being universal.

So, as in nearly all such matters everywhere, local
peculiarities, local differences, local customs, usually
arise from local conditions, and the wise man will commonly
conform so soon as he discovers them. There is
almost always a sufficient reason for them.

The journey from Candle to Council was a surprisingly
swift one. We covered the one hundred and thirty miles
in three days, far and away the best travelling of the
winter so far, but the usual time, I found. The hard
snow gives smooth passage though the interior of the
peninsula is rugged and mountainous; two prominent[111]
elevations, the Ass’s Ears, standing up as landmarks
during the first day of the journey. The route crossed
ridge after ridge with steep grades, and the handling of
the heavy sled alone was too much for me. Again and
again it was overturned, and it was all that I could do,
and more than I ought to have done, to set it up again.
The wind continued to blow with violence, and shelter
from it there was none. One hillside struggle I shall
always remember. The trail sloped with the hill and
the wind was blowing directly down it. I could keep no
footing on the marble snow and had fallen heavily again
and again, in my frantic efforts to hold sled and dogs
and all from sweeping down into a dark ravine that
loomed below, when I bethought me of the “creepers”
in the hind-sack, used on the rivers in passing over glare
ice. With these irons strapped to my feet I was able to
stand upright, but it was only by a hair’s breadth once
and again that I got my load safely across. When I
was wallowing in a hot bath at Council two days later
I found that my hip and thigh were black and blue where
I had fallen, though at the time, in my anxiety to save
the dogs and the sled, I had not noticed that I had
bruised myself. So, judging great things by little, one
understands how a soldier may be sorely wounded without
knowing it in the heat and exaltation of battle.

Then for a while there would be such travel as one sees
in the children’s picture-books, where the man sits in the
sled and cracks his whip and is whisked along as gaily
as you please—such travel as I had never had before;
but there was no pleasure in it—the wind saw to that.[112]

On the second day we crossed “Death Valley,” so
called because two men were once found frozen in it; a
bleak, barren expanse, five or six miles across, with a
great gale blowing right down it, charged not only with
particles of hard snow but with spicules of ice and grains
of sand. Our course was south and the gale blew from
the northwest, and the right side of one’s body and the
right arm were continually numb from the incessant
beating of the wind. The parkee hood had to be drawn
closely all the time, and the eyes were sore from trying to
peer ahead through the fur edging of the hood. One
grows to hate that wind with something like a personal
animosity, so brutal, so malicious does it seem. An incautious
turn of the head and the scarf that protected
mouth and nose was snatched from me and borne far
away in an instant, beyond thought of recovery. It
seems to lie in wait, and one fancies a fresh shrill of
glee in its note at every new discomfiture it can inflict.
There is nothing far-fetched in the native superstition
that puts a malignant spirit in the wind; it is the most
natural feeling in the world. I said so that night in
camp, and one of my companions mentioned something
about “rude Boreas,” and I laughed. The gentle myths
of Greece do not fit this country. The Indian name
means “the wind beast,” and is appropriate.

A savage, forbidding country, this whole interior of
the Seward Peninsula, uninhabited and unfit for habitation;
a country of naked rock and bare hillside and desolate,
barren valley, without amenities of any kind and
cursed with a perpetual icy blast.[113]

The valley crossed and its ridge surmounted, a still
more heart-breaking experience was in store. We descended
the frozen bed of a creek from which the wind
had swept every trace of snow so that the ice was polished
as smooth as glass. The dogs could get no footing and
were continually down on their bellies, moving their legs
instinctively but helplessly, like the flippers of a turtle,
while the wind carried dogs and sled where it pleased.
The grade was considerable and in bends the creek spread
out wide. Nothing but the creepers enabled a man to
stand at all, and creepers and brake together could not
hold the sled from careering sideways across the ice,
dragging the dogs with it, until the runners struck some
pebble or twig frozen in the ice and the sled would be
violently overturned. Twice with freezing fingers I unlashed
that sled lying on its side, and took out nearly all
the load before I could succeed in getting it upright
again, losing some of the lighter articles each time. The
third time was the worst of all. The brake had been
little more than a pivot on which sled and dogs were swung
to leeward, but now the teeth had become so blunt that,
though I stood upon it with all my weight, it would not hold
at all nor check the sideways motion under the impulse of
the wind. Right across the creek we went, dragging the
dogs behind, jerking them hither and thither over the
glassy surface. I saw the rocks towards which we were
driving, but was powerless to avert the disaster, and hung
on in some hope, I suppose, of being able to minimise it,
till, with a crash that broke two of the uprights and threw
me so hard that I skinned my elbow and hurt my head,[114]
we were once more overturned. Never since I reached
manhood, I think, did I feel so much like sitting down
and crying. It seemed hopeless to think about getting
down that creek until the wind stopped, and one doubts
if the wind ever does stop in that country. But there
was no good sitting there like a shipwrecked mariner,
nursing sores and misfortunes; presently one would begin
to feel sorry for oneself—that last resort of incompetence.
And the bitter wind is a great stimulus. It will not
permit inaction. So I was up again, fumbling at the
sled lashings as best I could with torpid fingers, when one
of my companions, uneasy at my delay, very kindly made
his way back, and with his assistance I was able to get
the sled upright again without unloading and hold it
somewhat better on its course until another bend or two
brought us to the partial shelter of bluffs and, a little
farther, to the cabin where we were to spend the night.
I understood now why my companions had a sort of
hinged knife-edge fastened to one runner of their sled.
By the pressure of a foot the knife-edge engaged the ice
and held the sled on its course. This is another Seward
Peninsula device.

I have it in my diary that “a Swede named Petersen
was very kind to us at the cabin, cooking for us and giving
us cooked dog feed.” Blessed Swede named Petersen!—there
are hundreds of them in Alaska—and I shall
never forget that particular one’s kindness—the only
man I met in the Seward Peninsula who still persisted in
cooking dog feed whenever he could. He had cooked up
a mess of rice and fish enough to last his three or four[115]
dogs several days while he sojourned at this cabin, and
he gave it all to us and would take nothing for it. His
language was what Truthful James calls “frequent and
painful and free.” I ignored it for a while, loath to take
exception to anything a man said who had been so kind.
But at last I could stand it no longer—it took all the
savour out of his hospitality—and I said: “I hope you
won’t mind my saying it, for I’d hate to give offence to
a man who has been so good to strangers as you have,
but I wish you’d cut out that cursing; it hurts my ears.”
He sat silent a moment looking straight at me, and I was
not sure how he had taken it. Then he said: “Maybe
you been kinder to me saying that, than I been to you.
That’s the first time I ever been call down for cursin’.
I don’t mean nothin’ by it; it’s just foolishness and I
goin’ try to cut it out.”

The dogs had done but ill on the dry fish, accustomed
as they were to cooked food, and they ate ravenously of
their supper. Only the previous night Lingo had betrayed
his trust for the first and last time. Coming out
of the cabin just before turning in, to take a last look
round, I saw Lingo on top of the sled eating something,
and I found that he had dug a slab of bacon out of the
unlashed load and had eaten most of it. I knew he was
hungry, missing the filling, satisfying mess he was used
to, and I did not thrash him, I simply said, “Oh, Lingo!”
and the dog got off the sled and slunk away, the very
picture of conscious, shamefaced guilt. That was the
only time he did such a thing in all the six years I drove
him.[116]

Council was past its prime at the time of this visit,
but just as we entered the town, at the end of the third
day’s run, it seemed in danger of going through all the
stages of decadence with a rush to total destruction out
of hand, for a fire had broken out in a laundry, and with
the high wind still blowing it looked as though every
building was doomed. Of two chemical engines possessed
by the town one refused to work, but the vigour and
promptness of the people in forming two lines down to
the river, and passing buckets with the utmost rapidity,
coped with the outbreak just in time to prevent its spreading
beyond all control. Tired as we were, we all pitched
in and passed buckets until parkees and mitts and mukluks
were incrusted with ice from water that was spilled.
Efficient protection is a matter of great difficulty and
expense in Alaskan towns, and there is not one of them
that has escaped being swept by fire. The buildings
are almost necessarily all of wood, the cost of brick and
stone construction being prohibitive. No one can guarantee
ten years of life to a placer-mining town, and there
would be no warrant for the expenditure of the sums
required for fireproof building even were the capital
available. But the rapidity with which they are rebuilt,
where rebuilding is justified, is even more remarkable
than the rapidity with which they are destroyed.

A Saturday and Sunday were very welcome at Council,
and the courtesy of the Presbyterian minister, who gave
up his church and his congregations to me, Esquimaux in
the morning and white at night, was much appreciated.

In warmer weather, the thermometer no lower than[117]
-5° at the start, but with the same gale blowing that had
blown ever since we left Candle, though it had shifted
towards the northeast, we got away on Monday morning,
bound for Nome, ninety miles away, hoping to reach the
half-way house that night. Five or six hours’ run over
good trails, with no greater inconvenience than the
acceleration of our pace by the wind on down grades,
until the sled frequently overran the dogs with entanglements
and spillings, brought us to the seacoast at Topkok,
and a noble view opened up as we climbed the great
bluff. There Norton Sound spread out before us, its ice
largely cleared away and blown into Bering Sea by the
strong wind that had prevailed for nearly a week, its
waves sparkling and dashing into foam in the March
sunshine; the distant cliffs and mountains of its other
shore just visible in the clear air. It was an exhilarating
sight—the first free water that I had seen since the summer,
and it seemed rejoicing in its freedom, leaping up
with glee to greet the mighty ally that had struck off its
fetters.

But from this point troubles began to grow. We
dropped down presently to the shore and passed along
the glare surface of lagoon after lagoon, the wind doing
what it liked with the sled, for it was impossible to handle
it at all. Sometimes we went along broadside on, sometimes
the sled first and the dogs trailing behind, moving
their silly, helpless paws from side to side as they were
dragged over the ice on their bellies. When we had
passed these lagoons the trail took the beach, running
alongside and just to windward of a telephone-line, with[118]
rough shore ice to the left and bare rocks to the right.
Again and again the already injured sled was smashed
heavily against a telephone pole. I would see the impact
coming and strive my utmost to avert it, but without a
gee pole, and swinging the sled only by the handle-bars,
it was more than I could do to hold the sled on its course
against the beam wind that was forcing it towards the ice
and the telephone poles; and a gee pole could not be used
at the rate we had travelled ever since we left Candle.
Mile after mile we went along in this way. I do not know
how many poles I hit and how many I missed, but every
pole on that stretch of coast was a fresh and separate anxiety
and menace to me. I think I would have been perfectly
willing to have abolished and wiped out the whole
invention of the telephone so I could be rid of those hateful
poles. What were telephone poles doing in the arctic
regions anyway? Telephone poles belonged with electric
cars and interurban trolley-lines, not with dog teams
and sleds.

Then it grew dark and the wind increased. I did
not know it, but I was approaching that stretch of coast
which is notorious as the windiest place in all Alaska,
a place the topography of which makes it a natural
funnel for the outlet of wind should any be blowing anywhere
in the interior of the peninsula. My companions
were far ahead, long since out of sight. I struggled along
a little farther, and, just after a particularly bad collision
and an overturning, I saw a light glimmering in the
snow to my right. It was a little road-house, buried to
the eaves and over the roof in snow-drift, with window[119]
tunnels and a door tunnel excavated in the snow. I was
yet, I learned, five miles from Solomon’s, my destination,
but I hailed this haven as my refuge for the night and
went no farther, more exhausted by the struggle of the
last two or three hours than by many an all-day tramp on
snow-shoes. It was a miserable, dirty little shack, but
it was tight; it meant shelter from that pitiless wind.
That night the thermometer stood at 7°, the first plus
temperature in twenty-two days.

By morning the gale had greatly diminished, and by
the time I reached Solomon’s and rejoined my companions
it was calm, the first calm since we left the middle
Kobuk. We had some rough ice to cross to avoid a long
detour of the coast, and then we were back on the shore
again and it began to snow. The snow was soon done
and the sun shone, but the new coating of dazzling white
gave such a glare that it was necessary to put on the
snow glasses for the first time of the winter—and that is
always a sign winter draws to a close.

On the approach to Nome we had our first encounter
with reindeer, and at once my dog team became unmanageable.
I had had some trouble that morning with a
horse. A new dog I procured at Kikitaruk had never seen
a horse before, and made frantic efforts to get at him,
leaping at his haunches as we passed by. But when they
saw the reindeer the whole team set off at a run, dragging
the heavy sled as if it were nothing. The Esquimau
driving the deer saw the approaching dogs and hastily
drew his equipage off the trail farther inshore, standing
between the deer and the dogs with a heavy whip. What[120]
the result would have been had the dogs reached the deer
it is hard to say. I had kept my stand on the step
behind the sled and managed to check its wild career
with the brake and to throw it over and stop the approach
before the carnivora reached their immemorial prey.
Herein lies one of the difficulties of the domestication of
reindeer in Alaska, a country where so far dogs have
been the only domestic animals. Again, as we entered
the outskirts of Nome the incident was repeated, and
only the hasty driving of the reindeer into a barn prevented
the dogs from seizing the deer that time.

Jimmy was long deposed from his ineffectual leadership
and a little dog named Kewalik—the one I obtained
at Kikitaruk—was at the head of the team. Kewalik
had never seen so many houses before; hitherto almost
every cabin he had reached on his journeys had been a
resting-place, and he wanted to dive into every house we
passed. At Candle and Council both, our stopping-place
had been near the entrance to the little town. But now we
had to pass up one long street after another and I had
continually to drag him and the team he led first from a
yard on this side of the road and then from one on the
other. The dog was perfectly bewildered and out of his
head by the number of people and the number of houses
he saw. We were indeed a sorry, travel-worn, unkempt,
uncivilised band, man and dogs, with an old, battered vehicle,
and we felt our incongruity with the new environment
as we entered the metropolis of the luxury and wealth
of the North. Here we passed a jeweller’s shop, the whole
window aglow with the dull gleam of gold and ivory—the[121]
terrible nugget jewellery so much affected in these
parts and the walrus ivory which is Alaska’s other contribution
of material for the ornamental arts. Here we
passed a veritable department store, its ground-floor
plate-glass window set as a drawing-room, with gilded,
brocaded chairs, marquetry table, and ormolu clock, and
I know not what costliness of rug and curtain. It was
all so strange that it seemed unreal after that long passage
of the savage wilds, that long habitation of huts and
igloos and tents. Hitherto we had often been fortunate
could we buy a little flour and bacon; here the choice comestibles
of the earth were for sale. I looked askance at
my greasy parkee as I passed shops where English broadcloth
and Scotch tweeds were displayed; at my worn,
clumsy mukluks when I saw patent-leather pumps. But
Nome knows how to welcome the wanderer from the wilderness
and to make him altogether at home. There
could be no warmer hospitality than that with which I
was received by the Reverend John White and his wife,
than that which I had at many a home during my
week’s stay.

Nothing in the world could have caused the building
of a city where Nome is built except the thing that caused
it: the finding of gold on the beach itself and in the creeks
immediately behind it. It has no harbour or roadstead,
no shelter or protection of any kind; it is in as bleak and
exposed a position as a man would find if he should set
out to hunt the earth over for ineligible sites.

But Nome is also a fine instance of the way men in
the North conquer local conditions and wring comfort[122]
out of bleakness and desolation by the clever adaptation
of means to ends.

The art of living comfortably in the North had to be
learned, and it has been learned pretty thoroughly. People
live at Nome as well as they do “outside.” One may
sit down to dinners as well cooked, as well furnished, as
well served as any dinners anywhere. The good folk of
Nome delight in spreading their dainty store before the
unjaded appetite of the winter traveller, and it would be
affectation to deny that there is keen relish of enjoyment
in the long-unwonted gleam of wax candle or electrolier
upon perfect appointment of glass, silver, and napery,
in the unobtrusive but vigilant service of white-jacketed
Chinaman or Jap. Nome has a great advantage over
its only rival in the interior, Fairbanks, in the matter of
freight rates. The same merchandise that is landed at
the one place for ten or twelve dollars a ton within ten
or twelve days of its leaving Seattle, costs fifty or sixty
at the other, and takes a month or more to arrive. But
this accessibility in the summer is exactly reversed in
the winter. No practicable route has been discovered
along the uninhabited shores of Bering Sea, and all the
mail for Nome comes from Valdez to Fairbanks and then
down the Yukon and round Norton Sound by dog team.
In winter Fairbanks is within seven or eight days of open
salt water; Nome a full month. After navigation closes
in October, the first mail does not commonly reach the
Seward Peninsula until January. So that, with all its
comforts and luxuries, Nome is a very isolated place for
eight months in the year.

Gold-mining at Nome.

Pulling the “Pelican” out with a “Spanish windlass.”

[123]

We went out with the dog sled to the diggings a few
miles behind the town, and a busy scene we found, enveloped
in steam and smoke. Here an old beach line
had been discovered and was yielding rich reward for the
working. A long line of conical “dumps” marked its
extension roughly parallel with the present shore, and
the buckets that arose from the depths, travelled along a
cable, and at just the right moment upset their contents,
continually added to these heaps. All the winter “pay-dirt”
is thus excavated and stored; in the summer when
the streams run the gold is sluiced out. But that phrase
“when the streams run” covers a world of difficulty and
expense to the miner. In some places in this Seward
Peninsula, ditches thirty and forty miles long have been
constructed to insure the streams running when and where
they are needed.

There was quite a little to do in Nome. A new sled
must be bought, and another dog, and, above all, some
arrangement made about a travelling companion. I was
not willing to hire a native who would have to return
here, and I was resolved never again to travel alone. So
I put an advertisement in the newspaper, desiring communication
with some man who was intending a journey
to Fairbanks immediately, and was fortunate to meet a
sober, reliable man who undertook to accompany and
assist me for the payment of his travelling expenses.

The week wore rapidly away, and I began to be eager
to depart, mindful of the eight hundred odd miles yet to
be covered. Spring seemed already here and summer
treading upon her heels, for the town was all slush and[124]
mud from a decided “soft snap,” the thermometer standing
well above freezing for days in succession.

A visitor to this place is struck by the number of
articles made from walrus ivory exposed for sale, chief
amongst them being cribbage-boards. A walk down the
streets would argue the whole population given over to
the incessant playing of cribbage. The explanation is
found in the difficulty of changing the direction of Esquimau
activity once that direction is established. These
clever artificers were started making cribbage-boards long
ago and it seems impossible to stop them. Every summer
they come in from their winter hunting with fresh
supplies carved during the leisure of the long nights.
The beautiful walrus tusk becomes almost an ugly thing
when it is thus hacked flat and bored full of holes. The
best pieces of Esquimau carving are not these things, made
by the dozen, but the domestic implements made for
their own use, and some of this work is very clever and
tasteful indeed, adorned with fine bold etchings of the
chase of walrus, seal, and polar bear.[125]

CHAPTER V

NOME TO FAIRBANKS—NORTON SOUND—THE KALTAG
PORTAGE—NULATO—UP THE YUKON TO TANANA

We left Nome on the 13th of March, the night before
being taken up by a banquet which the Commercial Club
was kind enough to give me; indeed, the whole stay was
marked by lavish kindness and hospitality, and I left
with the feeling that Nome was one of the most generous
and open-handed places I had ever visited.

The soft weather continued and made sloppy travel.
Our course lay all around Norton Sound to Unalaklík,
and then over the portage to Kaltag on the Yukon; up the
Yukon to the mouth of the Tanana, and then up that
river to Fairbanks. The first day’s run was the retracing
of our steps to Solomon’s, and that was done without
difficulty save for a new trouble with the dogs. It appeared
that we no longer had any leader. All the winter
through my team had been behind another team, and
that constant second place had turned our leaders into
followers. We thought we had two leaders, but neither
one was willing to proceed without some one or something
ahead of him. On such good ice-going as this it was out
of the question for one of us to run ahead of the team
simply to please these leader-perverts, and the whip had
to be wielded heavily on Jimmy’s back ere he could be[126]
induced to fill his proper office—and then he did it ill,
with constant exasperating stoppings and lookings-back.
At Solomon’s I met a man who had spent some years
with Peary in his arctic explorations, and I sat up far
into the night drawing interesting narratives out of him.
So far as Topkok we were still retracing our steps, but
once over the great bluff, which gave no view this time
owing to the mist which accompanies this soft weather,
we were on new ground, our course lying wholly along
the beach.

At Bluff was the most interesting, curious gold mining
I have ever seen, the extraction of gold from the sand of
Norton Sound, two hundred yards or more out from the
beach. There it lies under ten or twelve feet of water
with the ice on top. How shall it be reached? Why,
by the exact converse of the usual Alaskan placer mining;
by freezing down instead of thawing down. The ice is
cut away from the beginning of a shaft, almost but not
quite down to the water, leaving just a thin cake. The
atmospheric cold, penetrating this cake, freezes the water
below it, and presently the hole is chopped down a little
farther, leaving always a thin cake above the water. A
canvas chute is arranged over the shaft, with a head like
a ship’s ventilator that can be turned any way to catch
the wind. Gradually the water is frozen down, and as
it is frozen more and more ice is removed until the bottom
is reached, surrounded and protected by a cylindrical
shaft of ice; then the sand can be removed and the gold it
contains washed out. They told us they were making
good money and their ingenuity certainly deserved it.[127]

We stopped that night at the native village of Chinnik,
the people of which are looked after by a mission of the
Swedish Evangelical Church on Golofnin Bay, which we
should cross to-morrow. But the mission is off the trail,
and we did not come to an acquaintance with the missionaries
of this body until we reached Unalaklík. Next
day, climbing and descending considerable grades in
warm, misty weather, we reached Golofnin Bay, pursued
it some distance, and left it by a very steep, long hill
that was close to one thousand feet high, at the foot of
which we were once more on the beach of the sound—and
at the road-house for the night. From that place
the trail no longer hugged the coast but struck out boldly
across the ice for a distant headland, Moses’ Point, where
we lunched, and, that point reached, struck out again for
Isaac’s Point, most of the travelling during a long day
in which we made forty-eight miles being four or five
miles from land. The day was clear, and the shore-line
of the other side of the sound, which grew nearer as we
proceeded, was subject to strange distortions of mirage.
The road-house that night nestled picturesquely against a
great bluff, and right across the ice lay Texas Point, for
which we should make a bee-line to-morrow. Sometimes
the traveller must go all round Norton Bay, but
at this time the ice was in good condition and our route
cut across the mouth of the bay for twenty-two miles
straight for the other side. It was like crossing from
Dover to Calais on the ice. The passage made, the
Alaskan mainland was reached once more, the Seward
Peninsula left behind us, and our way lay across desolate,[128]
low-lying tundra strewn with driftwood and hollowed
out here and there into little lagoons. Evidently the
waves sweep clean across it in stormy weather when
the sound is open; a salt marsh. In the midst of it
reared a sort of lookout tripod of driftwood thirty or
forty feet high, lashed and nailed together, with a precarious
little platform on top and cleats nailed to one of
the uprights for ascent. I essayed the view, but the
rusty nails broke under my feet. We deemed it a hunting
tower from which water-fowl might be spied in the
spring. Sixteen miles of this melancholy waste brought
us to the shore again, to a tiny Esquimau village and a
tumble-down, half-buried shack of a road-house where we
should spend the night, a little schooner lying beached
in front of it. If its exterior were uninviting, the scene as
we entered was sinister. By the light of a single candle—though
it was not yet dark outside—amidst unwashed
dishes and general grime, sat an evil-eyed Portuguese or
Spaniard, in a red toque, playing poker with three skin-clad
Esquimaux. So absorbed were they in the game that
they had not heard us arrive nor seen us enter. With
a brief, reluctant interval for the preparation of a poor
supper, the card playing went on all the evening far into
the night. My companion discovered that the chips
were worth a dollar apiece and judged it to be “considerable
of a game.” At last I arose from my bunk and said
that we were tired and had come there to sleep, and
with an ill grace the playing was shortly abandoned and
the natives went off. The arctic shores have their beach-combers
as well as the South Sea Islands.[129]

The next day was Sunday, but I was anxious to spend
my day of rest at Unalaklík and most indisposed to spend
it here, so we got away with a very early start long before
daylight. Six or seven miles of tundra and lagoon travel
and the trail crossed abruptly a tongue of land and struck
out over the salt-water ice for a cape fifteen miles away.
The going was splendid. It was not glare ice, but ice
upon which snow had melted and frozen again. It was
so smooth that one dog could have drawn the sled, yet
not so smooth as to deny good footing. We kept well
out to sea, passing close to the mountainous mass of
Besborough Island, plainly riven by some ancient convulsion
from the sheer bluffs of the mainland. Our
only trouble was in keeping the dogs well enough out, for,
not being water-spaniels or other marine species, they
had a hankering after the land and a continual tendency
to edge in to shore.

So from headland to headland we made rapid, easy
traverse, thoroughly enjoying the ride, munching chocolate
and raisins, speculating about the seasons when it had
been possible to cross direct from Nome to Saint Michael
on the ice, and exchanging stories we had heard of the
disasters and hairbreadth escapes attending such overbold
venture. Only this winter three men and a dog team
were blown out into Bering Sea by a sudden storm, and
lay for four days in their sleeping-bags drifting up and
down on an ice cake, until at last they were blown back
to the shore ice and made their escape. And there is a
fine story of a white man rescued in half-frozen state by his
Esquimau wife, and carried for miles on her back to safety.[130]

At last we turned a point and drew in to the shore,
and, not seeing the little town till we were almost upon it,
arrived at Unalaklík early in the afternoon. We had
made the two hundred and forty miles, as it is called,
from Nome, in six days. In the last twelve days of travel
we had covered five hundred miles, an average of nearly
forty-two miles per day, far and away the best travelling
of the winter. The preceding five hundred miles had
taken twenty-two days.

We were in time to attend the Esquimau services at
the mission both afternoon and night, and I found them
very much the same as at Kikitaruk, with the exception
that the singing was much more advanced and was very
good indeed. There was an anthem of the Danks type
sung by a choir—the parts well maintained throughout,
the attacks good, the voices under excellent control—that
it pleased and surprised me to hear, and there was a
long discourse most patiently and, as I judged, faithfully
interpreted by a bright-looking Esquimau boy. It is well
for those who speak much through an interpreter to listen
occasionally to similar discourse. Only so may its
unavoidable tediousness be appreciated.

The school next day pleased me still more, and I was
glad that I had a school-day at the place. I heard good
reading and spelling, saw good writing, and listened with
real enjoyment to the fresh young voices raised again
and again in song. There was, however, something so
curiously exotic that for a moment it seemed irresistibly
funny, in “The Old Oaken Bucket,” from lips that have
difficulty with the vowel sounds of English; from children[131]
that never saw a well and never will see one;—and I
was irreverent enough to have much the same feeling
about “I love thy templed hills,” etc., in that patriotic
Plymouth Rock song which is so little adapted for universal
American use that, in a gibe not without justice,
it has been called “Smith’s Country, ’tis of Thee.” One
wonders if they sing it in the Philippine schools; and,
so far as these regions are concerned, one wishes that
some teacher with a spark of genius would take Goldsmith’s
hint and write a simple song for Esquimau children
that should

the splendour of summer’s perpetual sunshine and the
weird radiance of the Northern Lights; but prosody is
not taught in your “Normal” school. The thing is a
vain, artificial attempt to impose a whole body of ideas,
notions, standards of comparison, metaphors, similes,
and sentiments upon a race to which, in great measure,
they must ever be foreign and unintelligible. Here were
girls reading in a text-book of so-called physiology, and,
as it happened, the lesson that day was on the evils of
tight lacing! The reading of that book, I was informed,
is imposed by special United States statute, and the
teacher must make a separate report that so much of it
has been duly gone through each month before the salary
can be drawn. Yet none of those girls ever saw a
corset or ever will. One is reminded of the dear old
lady who used to visit the jails and distribute tracts on
The Evils of Keeping Bad Company.[132]

But these incongruities aside, the school was a good
school and well taught, the government appointing the
teachers, as I learned, upon the nomination of the mission
authorities; the only way that a government school can
be successful at any mission station, for the two agencies
must work together, as one’s right hand works with one’s
left, to effect any satisfactory result. The hours spent
in it were very enjoyable, and one wished one might
have had opportunity for further acquaintance with
some of the bright-faced, interesting children, both full-bloods
and half-breeds.

Unalaklík is a thriving Esquimau community, noted
for its native schooner building and its successful seal
hunters and fishermen. We were rejoiced to see signs
of native prosperity and advance, and we left Unalaklík
with high hope for its future.

Here also was real rest and refreshment at a road-house.
Road-houses in Alaska are as various in quality
as inns are “outside.” Our previous night’s halt was at
one of the worst; this was one of the best. The proprietor
was a good cook and he did his best for us, with
omelet and pastry, and young, tender reindeer. It has been
said that road-house keeping in Alaska is like soliciting
life insurance “outside,” the last resort of incompetence.
Certain it is that a thoroughly lazy and incompetent man
may yet make a living keeping a road-house, for there is
no rivalry save at the more important points, and travellers
are commonly so glad to reach any shelter that they
are not disposed to be censorious. None the less, when
they find a man who takes a pride in his business and an[133]
interest in the comfort of his guests, they are highly
appreciative.

We should have only an occasional road-house from
now on, but expected to reach some inhabited cabin each
night. Our good travelling was over though we did not
know it. We knew that the hard snows of the Seward
Peninsula and the bare ice of Norton Sound were behind
us, but we kept telling ourselves that the travel of all the
winter would surely have left a fine trail on the Yukon.
We were now about sixty-five miles from Saint Michael,
by the coast. But taking the ninety-mile portage from
Unalaklík to Kaltag we should reach the Yukon River
more than five hundred miles above Saint Michael, so
much does that portage cut off. This is the route the
military telegraph-line takes, and we should travel along
close beside it much of the way until the Yukon was
reached.

The soft weather persisted, and we had even doubt
about starting out in such a rapid thaw. A visit to the
telegraph station informed us that the warm wave was
spread all over interior Alaska and that there was general
expectation of an early break-up. But if the snow
on the portage were indeed rapidly going, that was all
the more reason for getting across before it had altogether
gone; so we pulled out in the warm, muggy weather, and
even as we pulled out it began to rain!

Up the little Unalaklík River, water over the ice
everywhere, we went for a few miles and then took to
the tundra. All the snow had gone except just the hard
snow of the trail, a winding ribbon of white across the[134]
brown moss. The rain changed to sleet and back to
rain again, and soon we were wet through and had much
trouble in keeping that penetrating, persistent drizzle
from wetting our load through the canvas cover. Though
not an unique experience, it is rare to be wet with rain
on the winter trail—rarer in the interior probably than
on the coast. Once since on the Kuskokwim and once
on the Fortymile it has happened to me in seven winters’
travel. We pushed on for thirty miles, past several
little native villages, until we came to Whaleback,
a village part Esquimau and part Indian. These were
the last Esquimaux we should see, and I was sorry, for
I had grown to like very heartily and to respect very
sincerely this kindly, gentle, industrious, good-humoured
race. Surely they are a people any nation may be proud
to have fringing its otherwise uninhabitable coasts, and
should be eager to aid and conserve. There comes a
feeling of impotent exasperation to me when I realise
how many white men there are who speak of them continually
with the utmost contempt and see them dwindle
with entire complacency. The same thing is true in even
more marked degree about the Indians of the interior:
nine tenths of the land will never have other inhabitant,
of that I am convinced, and the only question is, shall
it be an inhabited wilderness or an uninhabited wilderness?
Here, lodging with the natives, and, I make no
doubt, living off them too, we found a queer, skulking
white man whom I had met in several different sections
of interior Alaska, known as “Snow-shoe Joe” or “The
Frozen Hobo.” The arctic regions one would esteem a[135]
poor place for the hobo, but this man manages to eke
out an existence, if not to flourish, therein. Work he
will not under any circumstances, but subsists on the
hospitality of the whites until he has entirely worn it
out and then removes to the natives, mushing from
camp to camp and “bumming” his way as he goes.
He was on his way to Saint Michael, he told me with
perfect gravity, “to get work.”

Before dark we had reached our destination for the
night at the Old Woman Mountain, the divide between
the waters of the Yukon and the waters of Norton Sound,
and were kindly received and well treated at the telegraph
station, the only resort on this portage for weary
travellers. Here is surely a lonely post. For reasons
connected with the maintenance of the wires and the
keeping open of communications, it is necessary to have
telegraph stations every forty or fifty miles, each with
two or three men and a dog team, and shelter cabins
about half-way between stations. A wind that blows a
tree down in the narrow right-of-way cut through the
forest—for we were come to forest again—or a heavy
snowfall that loads branches until they fall across the
wires, a post that comes up out of its hole as the thawing
of spring heaves the ground around it, or the caving of
the bank of a stream along which the line passes—any
one of a dozen such happenings anywhere along its thousand
miles of course, may put the entire inland telegraph
system out of operation; and the young men in whose
section the interruption occurs—they have a means of
determining that—must get out at once, find the seat of[136]
the trouble and repair it. In all sorts of weather, unless
the thermometer be below -40°, out they must go.

It may be doubted if any other army in the world
ever constructed and maintained a permanent telegraph
line under such arduous conditions. It has been the
army’s one contribution to Alaska, the one justification
for the enormous expense of maintaining army posts in
the interior. Indeed it is often said by those who feel
keenly the neglect of the territory by the general government
that this telegraph system is the one contribution
of the United States to Alaska. It is certainly a great
public convenience and has assisted very materially in
such development as the country has made. The men
of the signal-corps deserve great credit for the faithful,
dogged way in which they have carried out year after
year their difficult and hazardous work, and often and
often the weather-stressed traveller has been grateful for
the hospitality which their cabins have afforded him.

They have not been an unmixed blessing to the country;
soldiers do not usually represent the highest morale
of the nation, and though the signal-corps is in some
respect a picked corps, yet the men are soldiers, with
many of the soldier characteristics. Too often a remote
telegraph station has been a little centre of drunkenness,
gambling, and debauchery with a little circumference of
native men and women, and while some of the officers of
the corps have been willing and anxious to do all in their
power to suppress this sort of thing in their scattered
and difficult commands, others have been jealous only
for the technical efficiency of their work.[137]

There are many allowances to be made for young men
taken from the society of their kind and thrust out hundreds
of miles in the wilderness to sit down for a year or
two at one of these isolated spots. They may see no
women save those amongst a straggling band of Indians
for the whole time of their exile; they may see no white
man save a mail-carrier—and in many places not even a
mail-carrier—for weeks together. Time sometimes hangs
very heavily on their hands, for trees are not always
blowing down, nor wires snapping through the tension of
the cold, and at some stations there will not be a dozen
telegraph messages sent the whole winter through. If a
young man be at all ambitious of self-improvement, here
is splendid opportunity of leisure, but a great many are
not at all so disposed. Character, except the most firmly
founded, is apt to deteriorate under such circumstances;
standards of conduct to be lowered. And what is here
written of the young men of the signal-corps may well
apply in great measure to a large proportion of all the
white men in the country.

The “eighty-mile portage” we had heard of at Nome
became ninety miles at Unalaklík, and added another five
to itself here, so that although we had travelled forty-two
miles that day we were told that there were yet fifty-three
ahead before we reached the Yukon.

So we decided not to attempt it in one day and to
rest the next night at a “repair cabin” twenty-eight miles
farther, making a somewhat late start in view of a short
journey. It had been wiser to have started early. During
our night at Old Woman Mountain some three inches[138]
of snow fell, and we found as we descended the Yukon
slope that all the moisture that had fallen upon us as
rain the previous day had fallen on this side as snow.
The trail was filled full and buried, and so soft and mushy
was it that although snow-shoes were badly needed they
were impossible. The snow clung to them and came off
the ground with them in heavy, clogging masses every
time they were lifted. It clung to the sled, to the harness,
to the dogs’ feet, to everything that touched it; it
gathered in ever-increasing snowballs on the long hair
of the dogs. Travelling in warm weather in loose, new
snow is most disagreeable work. We plugged along for
twenty miles, and then in the dark in an open country
with little patches of scattering spruce, had great trouble
in finding the trail at all.

At last we could find it no longer, and when there was
no hope of reaching the cabin that night we made a camp.
We had now no tent or stove with us, so a “Siwash camp”
in the open was the best we could do, and a wet, miserable
camp it was. By inexcusable carelessness on my part,
candles had been altogether forgotten in the replenishing
of the supplies, and a little piece an inch long which we
found loose in the grub box was all that we possessed.
Dogs and men alike exhausted with the long day’s sweating
struggle through the deep snow, sleep should have
come soundly and soon. It did to the rest, but I lay
awake the night through. The easy, riding travel of the
preceding week had been a poor preparation for to-day’s
incessant toil, and I was too tired to sleep. In the morning
our bedding was covered with a couple of inches of[139]
new snow. My companion got up at daylight and made
a journey of investigation ahead, following the trail better,
but not finding the cabin. We had thought ourselves
within a mile or two of it, but evidently were
farther away. However, when we had eaten a hasty
breakfast and hitched up and had gone along the trail
that had been broken that morning to its end, ten yards
beyond the place where my companion had turned back,
we came in sight of the cabin, and there we lay and
rested and dried things out all day and spent the next
night. During the day there came a team from Kaltag,
and once again we enjoyed the delight of receiving, and
at the same time conferring, the richest gift and greatest
possible benefit to the traveller—a trail.

The next evening as it drew towards dark, after another
day of soft, warm disagreeable travel, we reached
the end of the portage, and the broad white Yukon
stretched before us once more. Our hearts leaped up and
I think the dogs’ hearts leaped up also at the sight. I
called to Nanook as we stopped on the bank, “Nanook,
there’s the good old Yukon again!” and he lifted his
voice in that intelligent, significant bark that surely
meant that he saw and understood. We had left the
Yukon on the 15th of December at Fort Yukon; we
reached it again on the 23d of March at Kaltag, more
than six hundred miles lower down. We had two hundred
and fifty miles of travel on its surface before us,
and then close to another two hundred and fifty up the
Tanana River to Fairbanks. But alas! for the fine
Yukon trail we had promised ourselves! As we looked[140]
out across the broad river there was no narrow, dark line
undulating over its surface, nor even a faint, continuous
inequality to hint that trail had been, on snow “less
hideously serene”; its perfect smoothness and whiteness
were unscarred and unsullied. The trail was wiped out
and swallowed up by the late snows and winds.

There is little interest in lingering over the long,
laborious, monotonous grind up that river on show-shoes.
When one has looked forward to pleasant, quick travel,
the disappointment at slow, heavy plodding is the keener.
The first little bit of trail we had was as we approached
Nulato two days later on a Sunday morning, and it was
made by the villagers from below going up to church at
the Roman Catholic mission. We arrived in time for service,
and enjoyed the natives’ voices raised in the Latin
chants as well as in hymns wisely put into the vernacular.
It is historically a little curious to find Roman Catholic
natives singing praises in their own tongue, and Protestant
missions, like those on the Kobuk and Kotzebue
Sound, using a language “not understanded of the people.”
The day was the Feast of the Annunciation as
well as Sunday, and there was some special decorating of
the church and perhaps some elaboration of the music.
Here for the first and only time I listened to a white man so
fluent and vigorous in the native tongue that he gave one
the impression of eloquence. Father Jetté of the Society
of Jesus is the most distinguished scholar in Alaska. He
is the chief authority on the native language, and manners
and customs, beliefs and traditions of the Middle
Yukon, and has brought to the patient, enthusiastic[141]
labour of years the skill of the trained philologist. It is
said by the Indians that he knows more of the Indian
language than any one of them does, and this is not hard
to believe when it is understood that he has systematically
gleaned his knowledge from widely scattered segments of
tribes, jotting down in his note-books old forms of speech
lingering amongst isolated communities, and legends and
folk-lore stories still remembered by the aged but not
much repeated nowadays; always keen to add to his
store or to verify or disprove some etymological conjecture
that has occurred to his fertile mind. His work is recognised
by the ethnological societies of Europe, and much
of his collected material has been printed in their technical
journals.

A man of wide general culture, master of three or four
modern, as well as the classic, languages, a mathematician,
a writer of beautiful, clear English, although it is not his
mother tongue, he carries it with the modesty, the broad-minded
tolerance, the easy urbanity that always adorn,
though they by no means always accompany, the profession
of the scholar; and one is better able to understand
after some years’ acquaintance with such a man,
after falling under the authority of his learning and the
charm of his courtesy, the wonderful power which the
society he belongs to has wielded in the world. If such
devotion to the instruction of the ignorant as was described
at the mission on the middle Kobuk be praiseworthy,
by how much the more is one moved to admiration
at the spectacle of this man, who might fill with
credit any one of half a dozen professional chairs at the[142]
ordinary college, gladly consecrating his life to the teaching
of an Indian school!

Hearing an interest expressed in the massacre which
took place at Nulato in 1851, Father Jetté offered to
accompany us to the site of that occurrence, about a mile
away. It stands out prominently in the history of a
country that has been singularly free from bloodshed and
outrage, and its date is the notable date of the middle
river, as the establishment of the post at Fort Yukon by
the Hudson Bay Company in 1846 is the notable date
of the upper river. They are fixed points in Indian chronology
by which it is possible to approximate other dates
and to reach an estimate of the ages of old people.

Much has been written about the Nulato massacre,
and the accounts vary in many particulars. The Russian
post here was first established by Malakof in 1838.
Burned during his absence by the Indians, it was re-established
by Lieutenant Zagoskin of the Russian navy in
1842. The extortions and cruelties of his successor,
Deerzhavin, complicated by a standing feud between
two native tribes, and probably having the rival powers
of certain medicine-men as the match to the mine,
brought about the destruction of the place and the death
of all its inhabitants, white and native, by a sudden
treacherous attack of the Koyukuk Indians. It happened
that Lieutenant Barnard of the British navy, detached
from a war-ship lying at Saint Michael to journey up the
river and make inquiries of the Koyukuk natives as to
wandering white men, survivors of Sir John Franklin’s
expedition, who might have been seen or heard of by them,[143]
was staying at the post at the time and perished in the
general massacre. His grave, with a headboard bearing
a Latin inscription, is neatly kept up by the Jesuit priests
at Nulato.

In the last few years the river has been invading the
bank upon which the old village stood, and as the earth
caves in relics of the slaughter and burning come to light.
Old copper kettles and samovars, buttons and glass beads,
all sorts of metal vessels and implements have been sorted
out from charred wood and ashes, together with numerous
skulls and quantities of bones. One of the most interesting
of these relics was a brass button from an official
coat, with the Russian crowned double-headed eagle on
the face, and on the back, upon examination with a lens,
the word “Birmingham.”

Half the day serving for our day of rest this week, we
were up and ready to start early the next morning, but
so violent a wind was blowing from the southeast that
we decided to remain, and the clatter of the corrugated
iron roof and the whirling whiteness outside the windows
made us glad to be in shelter. As the day advanced the
wind increased to almost hurricane force, and the two-story
house in which we lay began to rock in such a manner
as to make the proprietor alarmed for his dwelling.

There was an “independent” trading-post at this
village which seemed to present an object-lesson in rapacity
and greed. There was not an article of standard
quality in the store; the clothing was the most rascally
shoddy, the canned goods of the poorest brands; the
whole stock the cheapest stuff that could possibly be[144]
bought at bargain prices “outside,” yet the prices were
higher even than those that prevail in Alaska for the
best merchandise. Loud complaints are often made
against the commercial corporation which does the great
bulk of the business in interior Alaska, yet if the writer
had to choose whether he would be in the hands of that
company or in the hands of an “independent” trader,
he would unhesitatingly cast in his lot with the company.
The independent trader makes money, sometimes
makes large money, and makes it fairly easily, but
the calling seems to appeal mainly, if not wholly, to men
of low character and no conscience. There are few things
that would redound more to the benefit of the Indian
than a great improvement in the character of the men
with whom he is compelled to do business.

The wind had subsided by the next morning and had
been of benefit rather than injury to us, for it had blown
the accumulated new snow off the old trail so that it was
possible to perceive and follow it. But what was our
surprise to find, with the recollection of that rattling roof
and swaying building fresh in our minds, that ten miles
away there had been no wind at all! The snow lay undisturbed
on every twig and bough from which the gentlest
breeze would have dislodged it. One never ceases
to wonder at what, for want of a better word, must be
called the localness of much of the weather in Alaska—though,
for that matter, in all probability it is characteristic
of weather in all countries. The habit of continual
outdoor travel gives scope as well as edge to one’s observation
of such things which a life in one place denies.[145]
That wind-storm had cut a clean swath across the Yukon
valley. Yet it seems strange that so violent a disturbance
could take place without affecting and, to some
extent, agitating the atmosphere for many miles adjacent.

So, sometimes in snow-storm, sometimes in wind,
always on snow-shoes and often hard put to it to find and
follow the trail at all, we struggled on for two or three
days more, sleeping one night at a wood-chopper’s hut,
another in a telegraph cabin crowded with foul-mouthed
infantrymen sent out to repair the extensive damage of
the recent storm and none too pleased at the detail, we
plodded our weary way up that interminable river. At
last we met the mail-man, that ever-welcome person on
the Alaskan trail, and his track greatly lightened our
labour. By his permission we broke into his padlocked
cabin that night by the skilful application of an axe-edge
to a link of the chain, and were more comfortable than
we had been for some time. Past the mouth of the
Koyukuk, past Grimcop, past Lowden, past Melozikaket
to Kokrine’s and Mouse Point, we plugged along, making
twenty-two miles one day and thirty another and then
dropping again to eighteen. The temperature dropped
to zero, and a keen wind made it necessary to keep the
nose continually covered. At this time of year the covering
of the nose involves a fresh annoyance, for it deflects
the breath upward, and the moisture of it continually condenses
on the snow glasses, which means continual wiping.
A stick of some sort of waxy compound to be
rubbed upon the glass, bought in New York as a preventive
of the deposit of moisture, proved entirely useless.[146]
In this respect the Esquimau snow goggle, which is simply
a piece of wood hollowed out into a cup and illuminated
by narrow slits, has advantage over any shape or
kind of glass protection. A French metal device of the
same order that is advertised in the dealer’s catalogues
was found to fail, perhaps owing to a wrong optical arrangement
of the slits. It caused an eye-strain that
brought on headache. But if that principle could be scientifically
worked out and such a device perfected, it
would be a boon to the traveller over sun-lit snow, for
it would do away with glass altogether, with its two chief
objections—its fragility and its opacity when covered
with vapour.

The indispensability of some eye protection when
travelling in the late winter, and the serious consequences
that follow its neglect, were once again demonstrated
at Mouse Point. The road-house was crowded with
“busted” stampeders coming out of the Nowikaket
country. There had been a report of a rich “strike” on
a creek of the Nowitna, late the previous fall, and a number
of men from other camps—some from as far as Nome—had
gone in there with “outfits” for the winter. The
stampede had been a failure; no gold was found; there
was much indignant assertion that no gold ever had
been found and that the reported “strike” was a “fake,”
though to what end or profit such a “fake” stampede
should be caused, unless by some neighbouring trader,
it is hard to understand; and here were the stampeders
streaming out again, a ragged, unkempt, sorry-looking
crowd in every variety of worn-out arctic toggery, many[147]
of them suffering from acute snow-blindness. It is surprising
that even old-timers will go out in the hills for
the whole winter without providing themselves with protection
against the glare of the sun which they know will
inevitably assail their eyes before the spring, yet so it is;
and this lack of forethought is not confined to the matter
of snow glasses: the first half dozen men we received
in Saint Matthew’s Hospital at Fairbanks suffering from
severely frozen feet were all old-timers grown careless.

Father Ragarou, another Jesuit priest of another type,
reached the road-house from the opposite direction about
the same time we did, and I was interested in watching
his treatment of the inflamed eyes. Upon a disk of lead
he folded a little piece of cotton cloth in the shape of a
tent, and, setting fire to it, allowed it to burn out completely.
Then with a wet camel’s-hair brush he gathered
up the slight yellow residuum of the combustion and
painted it over the eyes, holding the lids open with thumb
and finger and drawing the brush through and through.
An incredulous spectator, noticing the sacred monogram
neatly stamped upon the disk of lead, made some sneering
remark to me about “Romish superstition,” but remembering
the Jesuit’s bark, and recalling that I had in my
writing-case at that moment a letter I had brought all
the way from the Koyukuk addressed to this very priest,
begging for a further supply of a pile ointment that had
proved efficacious, I held my peace. Whether it be an
oxide or a carbonate, or some salt that is formed by the
combustion, I am not chemist enough to know, but I
saw man after man relieved by this application. Even the[148]
scoffer was convinced there was merit in the treatment,
though stoutly protesting that “them letters” had nothing
to do with it; which nobody took the trouble to argue
with him. My own custom—we are all of us doctors of
a sort in this country—is to instil a few drops of a five-per-cent
solution of cocaine, which gives immediate temporary
relief, and then apply frequent washes of boric
acid, bandaging up the eyes completely in bad cases by
cloths kept wet with the solution. But I do not know
that it brings better result than the lead treatment.
Certainly it is a matter in which an ounce of any sort of
prevention is better than a pound of any sort of cure.
The affection is a serious one, being nothing more or less
than acute ophthalmia; the pain is very severe, and repeated
attacks are said to bring permanent weakness of
the eyes. Smoked glasses or goggles,[A] veils of green or
blue or black, even a crescent eye-shade cut out of a
piece of birch-bark or cardboard and blackened on its
under-side with charcoal, will prevent the hours and sometimes
days of torture which this distemper entails.

For a few miles we had the trail of the stampeders,
but when that crossed the river we put on our snow-shoes
and settled to the steady grind once more. A day’s
mush brought us to “The Birches,” and another to Gold
Mountain. Between the two places there was a portage,
and the trail thereon, protected by the timber, was good.
We longed for the time when all trails in Alaska shall be
taken off the rivers and cut in the protecting forest.[149]
But we had gone but a mile along this good trail when
our hearts sank, for we saw ahead of us a procession of
army mules packing supplies from Fort Gibbon to the
telegraph repair parties. We pulled out into the snow
that the mules might pass, and the soldiers said no word,
for they knew just how we felt, until the last soldier
leading the last mule was going by, and he turned round
and said: “And her name was Maud!” It was in the
height of Opper’s popularity, his “comic supplements”
the chief dependence of the road-houses for wall-paper.
The reference was so apposite that we burst into laughter,
but there was nothing funny about the devastation that
had been wrought. That good trail was all gone—the
bottom pounded out of it—and nothing was left but a
ploughed lane punched full of sink-holes. We had no
trouble following the trail on the river after this encounter,
but it had been almost as easy going to have
struck out for ourselves in the unbroken snow of the
winter. It is hard to make outsiders understand how a
man who loves all animals may come to hate horses and
mules, particularly mules, in this country. Our travelling
is above all a matter of surface. Distance counts and
weather counts, but surface counts for more than either.
See how fast we came across the Seward Peninsula in the
most distressing weather imaginable! A well-used dog
trail becomes so hard and smooth that it offers scarce any
resistance to the passage of the sled, and for walking or
running over in moccasins or mukluks is the most perfect
surface imaginable. The more it is used the better it
becomes. But put a horse on that trail and in one passage[150]
it is ruined. The iron-shod hoofs break through the
crust at every step and throw up the broken pieces as
they are withdrawn. With mules it is even worse; the
holes they punch are deeper and sharper. Neither man
nor dog can pass over it again in comfort. One slips and
slides about at every step, the leg leaders and ankle
sinews are strained, the soles of the feet, though hardened
by a thousand miles in moccasins, become sore and inflamed,
and at night there is a new sort of weariness that
only a horse-ruined trail gives. As a rule, the dog trail
is of so little service to the horse or mule that it were as
cheap to break out a new one in the snow, and it is this
knowledge that exasperates the dog musher. So there
is not much love lost between the horse man and the
dog man in Alaska.

At last, after a night at “Old Station,” we came in
sight of Tanana, where is Fort Gibbon, the one the name
of the town and the post-office, the other the name of
the military post and the telegraph office. The military
authorities refuse to call their post “Fort Tanana” and
the postal authorities refuse to allow the town post-office
to be called “Fort Gibbon,” so there they lie, cheek by
jowl, two separate places with a fence between them—a
source of endless confusion. A letter addressed to Fort
Gibbon is likely to go astray and a telegram addressed
to Tanana to be refused. Stretching along a mile and a
half of river bank, and beginning to come into view ten
miles before they are reached, the military and commercial
structures gradually separate themselves. Here to
the left are the ugly frame buildings—all painted yellow—barracks,[151]
canteen, officers’ quarters, hospital, commissariat,
and so on. Two clumsy water-towers give height
without dignity—a quality denied to military architecture
in Alaska. To the right the town begins, and an
irregular row of one and two story buildings, stores,
warehouses, drinking shops, straggle along the water-front.

Unlike most towns in interior Alaska, Tanana does
not depend upon an adjacent mining camp. It owes its
existence first to its geographical position as the central
point of interior Alaska, at the confluence of the Tanana
and Yukon Rivers. Most of the freight and passenger
traffic for Fairbanks and the upper river is transshipped at
Tanana, and extensive stocks of merchandise are maintained
there. The army post is the other important
factor in the town’s prosperity, and is especially accountable
for the number of saloons. Not only the soldiers,
but many civilian employees, are supported by the post,
and when it is understood that three thousand cords of
wood are burned annually in the military reservation, it
will be seen that quite a number of men must find work
as choppers and haulers for the wood contractors. Setting
aside the maintenance of the telegraph service, which
has already been referred to, it may be said without unfairness
that the salient activities of the army in the interior
of Alaska are the consumption of whisky and wood.
There is no opportunity for military training—for more
than six months in the year it is impossible to drill outdoors—and
the officers complain of the retrogression of
their men in all soldierly accomplishments during the[152]
two years’ detail in Alaska. Whether the prosperity of
the liquor dealer be in any real sense the prosperity of
the country, and whether the rapid destruction of the
forest be compensated for by the wages paid to its destroyers,
may reasonably be doubted.

Three miles away is a considerable native village
where the mission of Our Saviour of the Episcopal Church
is situated, with an attractive church building and a picturesque
graveyard. The evil influence which the town
and the army post have exerted upon the Indians finds
its ultimate expression in the growth of the graveyard
and the dwindling of the village.

This point at the junction of the two rivers was an
important place for the inhabitants of interior Alaska
ages before the white man reached the country. Tribes
from all the middle Yukon, from the lower Yukon, from
the Tanana, from the upper Kuskokwim met here for
trading and for general festivity. It is impossible nowadays
to determine when first the white man’s merchandise
began to penetrate into this country, but it
was long before the white man came himself. Such
prized and portable articles as axes and knives passed
from hand to hand and from tribe to tribe over many
hundreds of miles. Captain Cook, in 1778, found implements
of white man’s make in the hands of the natives
of the great inlet that was named for him after
his death, and they pointed to the Far East as the direction
whence they had come. He judged that they had
been brought from the Hudson Bay factories clean across
the continent. There are many Indians still living who[153]
remember when they saw the first white man, and some
were well grown at the time, but diligent inquiry has
failed to discover one who ever saw a stone axe used,
though some old men have been found who declared that
their fathers, when young, used that implement. Traces
have been discovered of the importation of edge-tools
from four directions—from the mouth of the Yukon;
from the Lynn Canal, by way of the headwaters of the
Yukon; from the Prince William Sound, by way of the
headwaters of the Tanana; as well as from the Hudson
Bay posts in the Canadian Northwest, by way of the
Porcupine River.

When the Russians established themselves at Nulato
in 1842, and the Hudson Bay Company put a post at
Fort Yukon in 1846, Nuchalawóya, as Tanana was
called, became the scene of commercial rivalry, and it
is said that by the meeting of the agents and voyageurs
of the two companies at this point the identity of the
Yukon and Quikpak Rivers was discovered.

The stories that linger with the village ancients of the
great numbers of Indians who used to inhabit the country
are doubtless based upon recollections of the gathering
at old Nuchalawóya, when furs were brought here from
far and wide, when there was no other place of merchandise
in mid-Alaska. Now almost every Indian village
has a trader and a store. That the race has diminished,
and in most places is still diminishing, is beyond
question, but that it was ever very largely numerous the
natural conditions of the country forbid us to believe.

During the Reverend Jules Prevost’s time at Tanana—and[154]
he was in residence in the year of this journey—from
careful vital statistics kept during two periods of five
years each, the race seemed barely to be holding its own;
but since that time there has been a considerable decline,
coincident with the increase of drunkenness and debauchery
at the village when Mr. Prevost’s firm hand
and watchful eye were withdrawn. The situation tends
to grow worse, and while one does not give up hope, for
that would mean to give up serious effort, the outlook
for the Indians at this place seems unfavourable. Two
hundred soldiers, six or eight liquor shops,—the number
varies from year to year,—three miles off a native
village of perhaps one hundred and fifty souls, and dotting
those intervening miles cabins chiefly occupied by
“bootleggers” and go-betweens—that is the Tanana
situation in a nutshell. The men desire the native girls,
and the liquor is largely a lure to get them. Tuberculosis
and venereal disease are rife, and the two make a
terribly fatal combination amongst Indians.

It was good to enjoy Mr. and Mrs. Prevost’s hospitality,
and it was good to speak through such an admirable
interpreter as Paul. Something more than intelligence
and knowledge of the languages are required to make
a good interpreter; there must be sympathy and the ability
to take fire. With such an interpreter, leaping at the
speaker’s thoughts, carrying himself entirely into his
changing moods, rising to vehemence with him and again
dropping to gentleness, forgetting himself in his identification
with his principal, there is real pleasure in speaking
to the natives who hang upon his vicarious lips. On[155]
the other hand, one of the most intelligent mission interpreters
in the country is also so phlegmatic in disposition,
so lifeless and monotonous in his speech, and particularly
so impassive of countenance, that he reminds one
of Napoleon’s saying about Talleyrand: that if some one
kicked him behind while he was speaking to you his face
would give no sign of it at all.

It is not necessary to write much detail of the two-hundred-mile
journey to Fairbanks up the Tanana River.
The trail was then wholly on the river, but now it has
been taken wholly off, as every Alaskan musher hopes
some day will be done with all trails. The region about
the mouth of the river and for some miles up is one of
the windiest in the country, and there is always troublesome
crossing of bare sand-bars and of ice over which
sand has been blown. The journey hastens to its close;
men and dogs alike realise it, and push on willingly over
longer stages than they had before attempted.

Two days from Tanana we were luxuriating in the
natural hot springs near Baker Creek, wallowing in the
crude wooden vat, when “Daddy Karstner” had shovelled
enough snow in to make entering the water possible, and
emerging ruddy as boiled lobsters. It was a beautiful
and interesting spot then, with noble groves of birch and
the finest grove of cottonwood-trees in Alaska—all cut
down now—all ruined in a plunging and bounding and
quite unsuccessful attempt to make a “Health Resort”
of the place for the “smart set” of Fairbanks. It is a
scurvy trick of Fortune when she gives large wealth to a
man with no feeling for trees. We spent Sunday there[156]
and roamed over the curious domain, snow-free amidst
all the surrounding snow, rank in vegetation amidst the
yet-lingering winter death; and then we wallowed again.

Tolovana, Nenana, and then one long run of fifty-four
miles, the longest and last run of the winter, and—Chena
and Fairbanks. But just before we reached
Chena, as we passed the fish camp where the dogs had
been boarded the previous summer, Nanook stopped the
whole team, looked up at the bank and gave utterance
to his pronounced five barks on the descending scale.
None of the other dogs seemed to notice or recognise
the place, but Nanook said as plainly as if he had uttered
speech: “Well, well! there’s where I spent last summer!”

We reached Fairbanks on the 11th of April, in time
for Good Friday and Easter, after an absence of four
months and a half—with the accumulated mail of all
that period awaiting me. The distance covered was
about twenty-two hundred miles, three fourths of it on
foot, more than half of it on snow-shoes. At Chena I
had called up the hospital at Fairbanks on the telephone,
and the exchange operator had immediately recognised
my voice and bidden me welcome; but when I reached
Fairbanks, a light beard that I had suffered to grow
during the winter made me unrecognisable by those who
knew me best. So effectually does a beard disguise a
man and so surely may his voice identify him.[157]

CHAPTER VI

THE “FIRST ICE”—AN AUTUMN ADVENTURE ON THE
KOYUKUK

It is not attempted in this narrative to give separate
account of all the journeys with which it deals. That
would involve much repetition and tedious detail. Our
long journey has been described from start to finish,
taking the reader far north of the Yukon, then almost to
the extreme west of Alaska, and then round by the Yukon
to mid-Alaska again. It is proposed now to give sketches
of such parts of other journeys as do not cover the same
ground, and they will lie, with one exception, south of
the Yukon. While visiting many of the same points
every winter, it has been within the author’s good fortune
and contrivance to include each year some new
stretch of country, sometimes searching out and visiting
a new tribe of natives, and blazing the way for the establishment
of permanent missionary work amongst
them. To these initial journeys belongs a zest that no
subsequent travels in the same region ever have; there
is a keen interest in what every new turn of a trail shall
bring, every new bend of a river; there is eagerness rising
with one’s rising steps to excitement for the view from a
new mountain pass; above all, there is deep satisfaction
coupled with a sense of solemn responsibility in being[158]
the first to reach some remote band of Indians and
preach to them the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.
There are few men nowadays on the North American
continent to whom that privilege remains.

A period of nearly three years elapses between the
beginning of the journey that has already been described
and the short sketch of a journey that follows. Many
things had happened in those three years. It had been
the happy duty of the writer to return to the Koyukuk
late in the winter of 1906-7, empowered to build the
promised mission for the hitherto neglected natives of
that region. Pitching tent at a spot opposite the mouth
of the Alatna, with the aid of a skilled carpenter and a
couple of axemen brought from the mining district above,
and the labour of the Indians, the little log church and
the mission house were put up and prepared for the two
ladies—a trained nurse and a teacher—who should arrive
on the first steamboat. The steamboat that brought
them in carried him out on its return trip, and the next
year was spent in the States making known the needs of
the work in Alaska and securing funds for its advancement.

On my return I brought with me a young physician,
Doctor Grafton Burke, as a medical missionary, and a
half-breed Alaskan youth, Arthur, who had been at school
in California, as attendant and interpreter. A thirty-two-foot
gasoline launch designed for the Yukon and its
tributaries was also brought and was launched at the
head of Yukon navigation at Whitehouse. The voyages
of the Pelican on almost all the navigable waters of interior[159]
Alaska do not belong to a narrative concerned
solely with winter travel, but her maiden voyage ended
in an unexpected and rather extraordinary journey over
the ice which is perhaps worth describing. After the
voyage down the Yukon, and up and down the Tanana,
it was purposed to take the boat up the Koyukuk to
the new mission at the Allakaket, where dogs and gear
had been left, and put her in winter quarters there.
The delays that associate themselves not unnaturally
with three novices and a four-cylinder gasoline engine,
had brought the date for ascending the Koyukuk a little
too late for safety, though still well within the ordinary
season of open water. The possibility of an early winter
closing the navigation of that stream before the Pelican
reached her destination had been entertained and provided
against, though it seemed remote. Three dogs,
needed anyway to replace superannuated members of the
team, had been bargained for at Tanana and accommodations
for them arranged, and a supply of dog fish
stowed on the after deck of the launch. But when we
went to pay the arranged price and receive the dogs,
the vender’s wife and children set up such a remonstrance
and plaintive to-do that he went back on his bargain
and we did not get the dogs. There was no time to hunt
others, to linger was to invite the very mishap we sought
to guard against, so we pulled out dogless, reached the
mouth of the Koyukuk on the 17th of September and,
having taken on board the supply of gasoline cached
there, turned our bow up the river the next morning.
For five days we pushed up the waters of that great,[160]
lonely river, and by that time we were some twenty-five
miles above Hogatzakaket, three hundred and
twenty-five miles from the mouth and one hundred
and twenty-five miles from the mission, at the camp of
a prospector who had recently poled up from the Yukon.
We woke on board the launch the next morning to find
ice formed all around us and ice running in the river.
The thermometer had gone to zero in the night.

A very brief attempt to make our way against the
running ice showed the danger of doing so, for the thin
cakes had knife-edges and cut the planking of the boat
so that she began to leak. Then there came to me with
some bitterness that I had earnestly desired a thin steel
armour-plating at the water-line, but had allowed myself
to be persuaded out of it by her builders. So again my
forethought had been of no avail—though, of course, lightness
of draught was the first consideration. We put
back to the camp and proceeded to flatten out and cut
up all the empty cans and tinware we could find and nail
it along the water-line of the boat, but the prospector
persuaded us to wait a day or two. He had never seen
a river close with the first little run of ice. He looked
for a soft spell and open water yet. It was foolish to risk
the boat against the ice. So we waited; and night after
night the thermometer fell a little lower and a little lower,
until presently a sheet of ice stretched across the whole
river in the bend where we lay. We were frozen in.
The remote possibility we had feared and sought to guard
against had happened. Navigation had ceased on the
Koyukuk at the earliest date anybody remembered, the[161]
23d of September. Three days more had surely taken us
to the mission where they had long expected us; now we
should have to make our way on foot, without dogs, on
the dangerous “first ice,” as it is called, taking all sorts
of chances, pulling a Yukon sled, with tent and stove,
grub and bedding, “by the back of the face.”

But first there was the launch to pull out and make
snug for the winter and safe against the spring break-up.
A convenient little creek mouth with easy grade offered,
which was one of the reasons I had not pushed on the
few more miles we could have made. Here were eligible
winter quarters; farther on we might have trouble
in putting the boat in safety; here also was a kindly and
capable man willing to assist us.

It was our great good fortune to find this man at this
spot. A steamboat he had signalled as she entered the
mouth of the Koyukuk had passed him by unheeded,
and he had been left to make his way six hundred miles
up to the diggings, with his winter’s outfit in a poling
boat. He had accomplished more than half the task,
and, warned by the approach of winter, had stopped at
this place a few days before we reached it, and had begun
the building of a little cabin; meaning to prospect
the creek, which had taken his eye as having a promising
look. The cabin we helped him finish was the twenty-first
cabin he had built in Alaska, he informed us.

There is something very impressive about the quiet,
self-reliant, unrecorded hardihood of the class of which
this man was an excellent type. We asked him why he
had no partner, and he said he had had several partners,[162]
but they all snored, and he would not live with a man that
snored. He had prospected and mined in many districts
of Alaska during nearly twenty years. Once he had sold
a claim for a few hundred dollars that had yielded many
thousands to the purchaser, and that was as near wealth
as he had ever come. But he had always made a living,
always had enough money at the close of the summer to
buy his winter’s “outfit” and try his luck somewhere else.

Singly, or in pairs, men of this type have wandered
all over this vast country: preceding the government surveys,
preceding the professional explorer, settling down for
a winter on some creek that caught their fancy, building a
cabin, thawing down a few holes to bed-rock, sometimes
taking out a little gold, more often finding nothing, going
in the summer to some old-established camp to work for
wages, or finding employment as deck-hand on a steamboat.

With an axe and an auger they have dotted their
rough habitations all over the country; with a pick and a
shovel and a gold pan they have tested the gravels of
innumerable creeks. They know the drainage slopes
and the practicable mountain passes, the haunts of the
moose and the time and direction of the caribou’s wanderings.
The boats they have built have pushed their
noses to the heads of all navigable streams; the sleds
they have made have furrowed the remotest snows. In
the arts of the wilderness they are the equal of the
native inhabitant; in endurance and enterprise far his
superior. The more one learns by experience and observation
what life of this sort means, and realises the
demands it makes upon a man’s resourcefulness, upon[163]
his physique, upon his good spirits, upon his fortitude,
the more one’s admiration grows for the silent, strong
men who have gone out all over this land and pitted
themselves successfully against its savage wildness. Often
in stress for the necessaries of life, there are yet no men
as a class more free-handed and generous; trained to do
everything for themselves, there are none more willing
to help others.

It is no small task to pull a four-ton boat out of the
water with only such wilderness tackle as we could devise.
We made ways of soft timbers, squaring and smoothing
them; we cut down many trees for rollers; we dug and
graded the beach. Then, having altogether unloaded her
and built a high cache of poles and a platform for her
stuff, and having chopped the ice from all around her, we
rigged a Spanish windlass and wound that boat out of
the water with the half-inch cable she carried, and up
on the ways and well into the mouth of the little creek.
Then we levelled her up and thoroughly braced her and
put her canvas cover all over her, and she lay there until
spring and took no harm at all.

Arthur had meantime been making a sled of birch,
intending to pull it himself while the doctor and I pulled
a Yukon sled borrowed from our friend the prospector.
By the 6th of October all our dispositions were made for
departure, and the ice seemed strong enough to warrant
trusting ourselves to it; but we waited another two days,
the thermometer still reaching a minimum each night
somewhere around zero. When we said good-bye to our
friend Martin Nelson (sometimes one wonders if anywhere[164]
else in the world can be found men as kind and
helpful to strangers) and started on our journey, it soon
appeared that Arthur’s sled was more hindrance than
help. There was no material to iron the runners save
strips of tin can, and these could not be beaten so smooth
that they did not drag and cut on the ice. So the load
was transferred to our sled and the little sled abandoned,
and we took turns at the harness. This was the order of
the journey: one man went ahead with an axe to test the
ice; one man put the rope trace about his shoulders; one
man pushed at the handle-bars which had been affixed to
the sled. It was fortunate that amidst the equipment on
the launch were two pairs of ice-creepers. Without them
any sort of pulling and pushing on the glare ice would
have been impossible.

We soon found that the bend in which we had frozen
was no sort of index of the general condition of the river.
Much of it was still wide open, and every elbow between
bends was piled high with rough ice from pressure jams.
There was shore ice, however, even in the open bends,
along which we were able to creep; and, though the ice-jams
gave considerable trouble, yet we did very well the
first day and camped at dark with eighteen or nineteen
miles to our credit, in the presence of a great, red, smoky
sunset and a glorious alpenglow on a distant snow mountain.

The next day was full of risks and difficulties. We
were to learn more about the varieties and vagaries of ice
on that journey than many winters’ travel on older ice
would teach.

The start over the “first ice.”

“Rough going.”

[165]

At times, for a few hundred yards, the sled would glide
with little effort over smooth, polished ice; then would
come a long sand-bar, the side of which we had to hug
close, and the ice upon it was what is called “shell-ice,”
through several layers of which we broke at every step.
As the river fell, each night had left a thin sheet of ice
underneath the preceding night’s ice, and the foot crashed
through the layers and the sled runners cut through them
down to the gravel and sand at the bottom. Then would
come another smooth stretch on which we made good time.
But as we advanced up the river the current was swifter
and swifter and the ice conditions grew steadily worse.
Here was a steep-cut bank with just about eighteen or
twenty inches of ice adhering to it and the black, rushing
water beyond. We must either get our load along that
shelf or unload the sled and pack everything over the
face of a rocky bluff. Arthur passed over it first, testing
gently with the axe, and found it none too strong. But
the alternative was so toilsome that we resolved to take
the chance. The doctor put the trace over his shoulders,
Arthur took the handle-bars, while I climbed to a ledge
of the rocks and, with a rope made of a pair of camel’s-hair
puttees unwound for the purpose and fastened to
the sled, took all the weight I could and eased the sled
over the worst place where the ice sloped to the water. If
the ice had broken I might have held the sled from sinking
until one of the others came to me, or I might not; the
boys would probably have gone in too. It was a most
risky spot and the sort of chance no one would think of
taking under ordinary circumstances. As it was, the ice[166]
broke under Arthur’s feet, and only by throwing his
weight on the sled did he save himself a ducking. But
we got the load safely across.

A good run of perhaps a mile, and then we had to go
back at least half a mile, for the ice played out altogether
on our side of the river as we reached the Batzakaket, and
there was open water in the middle. To reach the shore
ice that was continuous on the other side, we had to
“double” the open water. With such varying fortune the
day passed, and we camped on the level ice of a little
creek tributary to the right bank, having made perhaps
another nineteen miles.

When I awoke in the morning my heart sank at the
tiny, creeping patter of fine snow on the silk tent. Snow
was one thing I greatly dreaded, for there was not a pair
of snow-shoes amongst us! A little snow would not do
much harm, but if once snow began to fall we might have
a foot or two before it ceased, and then we should be in
bad case. It stopped before noon, but the half-inch that
fell made the sled drag much heavier. The actual force
to be exerted was not the most laborious feature of pulling
that sled; it was the jerk, jerk, jerk on the shoulders. A
dog’s four legs give him much smoother traction than a
man’s two legs give, just as a four-cylinder engine will
turn a propeller with much less vibration than a two-cylinder
engine. Every step forward gave an impulse
that spent itself before the next impulse was given, and
the result was that the shoulders grew sore.

We came that morning to the longest and roughest
ice-jam we had so far encountered. It was as though a[167]
thousand bulls had been turned loose in a mammoth plate-glass
warehouse. Jagged slabs of ice upended everywhere
in the most riotous confusion, and it was impossible
to pick any way amongst them, so a man had to go ahead
and hew a path. It was while thus engaged that the
doctor fell and injured his knee so severely on a sharp ice
point that he hobbled in pain the rest of the trip. This
was a very serious matter to us, for, though he insisted
on still taking his trick at the traces, his effectiveness as
a motive power was much diminished; and we had no
sooner thus hewed and smashed our way through that
jam than we had to hew and smash it across to the other
side again in our search for passage.

Then we came to a place where, in order to cut off a
long sweeping curve of the river with open water and
bad shore ice, we went through a dry slough and had to
drag those iron runners over gravel and stones, where
sometimes it was all the three of us could do to move
the sled a few feet at a time. Yet all along the banks
were willows, and if we had only known then what we
know now we would have cut down and split some saplings
and bound them over the iron, and so have saved
three fourths of that labour.

So the day’s run was short, though the most exhausting
yet, and we were all thoroughly tired out when we pitched
the tent. I have note of a great supper of bear meat
and beans, the meat the spoil of our friend the prospector’s
gun. It is one of the compensations of human nature
that the satisfaction of appetite increases in pleasure in
proportion to the bodily labour that is done. With[168]
food abundant and at choice, I do not like bear meat and
will not eat beans. Yet my diary bears special note of
the delicious meal they furnished on this occasion. Put
any philosopher in the traces, or set him ahead of the dog
team on show-shoes, breaking trail all day, and towards
evening it is odds that his mind is not occupied with deep
speculations about the infinite and the absolute, but
rather with the question of what he will have for supper.
Particularly should the grub be a little short, should fresh
meat give out, or, above all, should sugar be “shy,” it is
astonishing how one’s mind runs on eating and what
elaborate imaginary repasts one partakes of. Yet of all
food that a man ever eats there is none that is so relished
and gives such clear gustatory pleasure as the plain, rough
fare of the camp—provided it be well cooked. Greatly
as we were in need of sleep, we got little, for the doctor’s
knee pained him all night and poor Arthur developed a
raging toothache that did not yield until carbolic acid
had been thrice applied.

Soon after we started the next day, the river narrowed
and swept round a series of mountain bluffs and we began
to have the gloomiest expectations of trouble. It seemed
certain that ice would fail us for passage, and we would
have to pack our sled and its load by slow relays over
the mountain. But to our delight we passed between
the bluffs on good, firm, smooth ice, and it was not until
we emerged on the flat beyond that our difficulty began.
So it is again and again on the trail. Almost always it
is the unexpected that happens; almost always it is something
quite different from what our apprehensions have[169]
dwelt upon that arises to hinder and distress us. A
tongue of level land that struck far out into the water,
a cut mud bank with a current so swift that no ice at all
had formed along it, interposed an obstacle that it took
hours to circumvent. We had to leave the sled and cut
a trail through the brush for half a mile along this peninsula
in order to reach a stretch of the river where the
ice was resumed, and the little snow that had fallen being
quite insufficient to give the sled good passage, we had an
exceedingly arduous job in getting it across.

A mile or two of good going brought us in view of the
smoke of a human habitation. What a blessed sight often
and often this waving column of blue smoke in the distance
is! Sometimes it means life itself to the Alaskan
musher, and it always means warmth, shelter, food, companionship,
assistance; all that one human being can bring
to another. “The bright and the balmy effulgence of
morn” never “breaks on the traveller faint and astray”
with half the rejoicing that comes with the first sight
of mere smoke. “I believe I see smoke,” cried Arthur,
with the quick vision of the native. “Where? Where?”
we eagerly inquired, and the doctor left the handle-bars
and limped forward to the boy ahead with the axe.
“Away yonder on that bank,” pointed Arthur. “I see
it! I see it!” the doctor shouted; “we’re coming to a
house, we’re coming to people!” The trip was a severe
apprenticeship to Alaskan life for a man straight from
the New York hospitals, although before the accident to
his knee I had declared that if only they could be trained
to live on dry fish I thought a team of young doctors[170]
would haul a sled very well. He was delighted at coming
upon the first inhabited house we had seen since we helped
Nelson to build his little cabin—and that was only the
second inhabited house in three hundred miles.

But, perhaps because we grew less cautious in our
excitement, almost immediately after we had spied the
smoke of the cabin we got into one of the worst messes
of the whole trip. Arthur had pushed ahead and we had
followed with a spurt, and almost at the same time all
three of us became aware that we were on dangerous ice.
Arthur cried, “The ice is breaking; go back!” just as we
began to feel it swaying under our feet. I shouted to the
doctor, “Go on to the bank quick!” and pushed with all
my might, and we managed to make a few yards more
towards shallow water, over ice that bent and cracked at
every step, before it gave way and let down the sled and
the men into two feet of water. Arthur had run safely
over the breaking ice and had gained the bank, and as
I write, in my mind’s eye I can see the doctor, who had
been duly instructed in the elementary lessons of the
trail, standing in the water and calling to Arthur: “Make
a fire quick; make a fire. I’m all wet!”

But it was not necessary to make a fire, for the thermometer
was no lower than 10° or 15° above zero, and
the chief trouble was not the wetting of our legs but the
wetting of the contents of the sled. Along the bank was
stronger ice, and we managed, though not without much
difficulty, to get the sled upon it and to make our way to
the Indian cabin.

As soon as old “Atler” (I have never been quite sure[171]
of what white man’s name that is a corruption) knew who
we were, his hospitality, which had been ready enough at
first sight, became most cordial and expansive. While we
pulled off our wet clothing his wife hung it up to dry
and had the kettle on and some tea making, and he and
Arthur got out our wet bedding and festooned it about
the cabin. Most fortunately the things that would have
suffered most from water did not get wet. So there we
lay all the afternoon, having made no more than six
miles, and there we lay all the next day, which was
Sunday.

There was a sort of awful interest that centred upon
one member of this family, a boy of seven or eight years.
The previous spring he had killed his uncle by the accidental
discharge of a .22 rifle, shooting him through the
heart. The gun had been brought in loaded and cocked
and had been set in a corner of the cabin, and the child,
playing with it, had pulled the trigger. The carelessness
of Indians with firearms is the frequent cause of terrible
accidents like this. The child was still too young to realise
what he had done, but one fancies that later it will throw
a gloom on his life.

To my great relief and satisfaction I was able to
arrange here for a young Indian man to accompany us
with his one dog. He was a native of those parts and
knew every bend and turn of the river. We were, indeed,
in great need of help. The doctor’s knee grew worse
rather than better, and Arthur was suffering the return
of an old rheumatism in his leg. I was the only sound
member of the party, and my shoulders were galled by[172]
the rope and my feet tender and sore from continual
wearing of the crampons. We were now not quite half-way—some
sixty miles lay behind us and sixty-five
before—and we had been travelling four days.

Divine service being done on Sunday morning, the
whole of it well interpreted by Arthur to the great satisfaction
of the Indians, he and “One-Eyed William,” our
recruit, started out to survey to-morrow’s route. In this
reconnaissance William broke through some slush ice at
the greatest depth of the river in seeking a safe place to
cross, and, had Arthur not been with him, would almost
certainly have drowned, for the current was very swift
and the man, like most Indians, unable to swim a stroke;—though,
indeed, swimming is of little avail for escape
out of such predicament and is a poor dependence in these
icy waters winter or summer. More beans boiled and a
batch of biscuits baked against our departure, and evening
prayer said and interpreted, we were ready for bed again.

Our visit was a great delight to old Atler. An inflamed
eye was much relieved by the doctor’s ministrations,
and the natural piety which he shares with most
Indians was gratified at the opportunity of worship and
instruction. A good old man, according to his lights, I
take Atler to be, well known for benevolence of disposition
and particularly priding himself on being a friend of
the white man. He told us of one unworthy representative
of that race he had helped a year ago. The man
had come out of the Hogatzitna (Hog River) country,
entirely out of food, himself and a couple of dogs nigh to
starvation, and Atler had taken care of him for several[173]
days while he recuperated and had given him grub and
dog fish enough to get him to Bettles, one hundred and
thirty miles away, where he could purchase supplies.
The old Indian had robbed his own family’s little winter
stock of “white-man’s grub” that this stranger might be
provided, and had never heard a word from him since,
though he had promised to make return when he reached
Bettles.

Unfortunately Alaska’s white population is sprinkled
with men like this, men without heart and without conscience,
and it is precisely such rascals who are loudest
in their contemptuous talk of the Indians. It is such
men who chop down the woodwork of cabins rather than
be troubled to take the axe into the forest a few rods
away, who depart in the morning without making kindling
and shavings, careless how other travellers may fare
so themselves be warm without labour; who make “easy
money” in the summer-time by dropping down the Yukon
with a boat-load of “rot-gut” whisky, leaving drunkenness
and riot at every village they pass; who beget children
of the native women and regard them no more than
a dog does his pups, indifferent that their own flesh and
blood go cold and hungry. They are the curse and disgrace
of Alaska, and they often go long time insolent and
unwhipped because our poor lame law is not nimble
enough to overtake them; “to whom is reserved the blackness
of darkness for ever,” one’s indignation is sometimes
disposed to thunder savagely with Saint Jude; and indeed
there needs a future punishment to redress the balance in
this country.[174]

At break of day our reinforced company was off,
Arthur and “One-Eyed William” going ahead to sound
the ice and pick the way, the dog “Fido” (such a name
for a Siwash dog!) and myself in the traces, the doctor
at the handle-bars. The rest had benefited the doctor’s
knee, but walking was still painful and he needed the support
of the handle-bars all day. What a great difference
that one strong, willing little dog made! His steady pulling
kept the sled in motion and relieved one’s shoulders
of the galling jerk of the rope at every step. The going
was “not too bad,” as they say here, all day, though it
carried one rather severe disappointment. William had
told us of a portage he thought we could take that would
cut off eight or nine miles of the river; but when we
reached it the snow upon it proved insufficient to afford
a passage, for it was a rough niggerhead flat, and we had
to swing around the outer edges of the great curves the
river makes, where alone was ice, with trouble and danger
at every crossing.

The decision as to whether we should halt or go forward,
as to whether ice was safe or unsafe, as to whether
we should cross the river or stay where we were—every
decision that concerned the secure advance of the party—I
put wholly upon William, and would not permit myself
or any other to question his judgment or to argue it with
him. There was no sense in half-measures; this young
man knew the river as none of us did, knew ice as none of
us did, and we must put ourselves entirely in his hands.
The debate that had become usual at every doubtful
course arose at the portage just referred to, but it was at[175]
once suppressed by the announcement that hereafter no
one could have the floor but William, and that when he
had spoken the matter was settled. Day by day I think
we all came to a keener realisation of how very dangerous
a journey we were making; it lay heavily on my mind
that I had brought these two young men—whether by
mishap or mismanagement—into real peril of their lives.
Again and again I blamed myself for the delays that had
deferred our start up the Koyukuk, again and again I
wished that we had waited longer before leaving the
Pelican’s winter quarters. I had even contemplated a
week’s stay at Atler’s, to give the river a chance to get
into better shape, but unless there came a very much
sharper spell than we had had so far a week would not
make much difference, and our grub began to run short
and Atler was none too well supplied. So it seemed best
to push on.

The next day was full of toil and difficulty. There
was no good ice to make fine time over that day. Starting
in the grey dawn, for mile after mile we had to
haul the sled over crumbly shell-ice that broke through
to gravel; and when the shell-ice was done we came to a
new bend where a rapid current washed a steep mud
bank. There was just a little shelf of ice, but the brush
overhung it so that the passage of the sled was not possible.
William and Arthur started with the axes to clear
away the brush, but it seemed to me foolish to do that
unless the ledge held out and led somewhere, for the turn
of the bank threw it out of sight. So they went forward
cautiously along that ledge to the end—and an end they[176]
found, sure enough, so that had we followed the axemen
with the sled we should have had to creep all the way back
again. There was nothing for it but to cut another land
trail on a bench that we could reach where the sled was
stopped but that could not be reached at all farther on.
A long and slow and laborious job it was, that took most
of the morning, to cut that trail and then get the load
over it to ice again.

By noon we were opposite the Red Mountain, one of
the well-known Koyukuk landmarks, and on the site of
an old Indian fishing camp. William and Arthur had
made a great fire when we came up, and we heated some
beans and made some tea and ate lunch. A mile farther
on was the cabin of a white man, and we paid him a
brief visit and got a little tea from him, for ours was
nearly gone. It did me good to hear him sing the praises
of Deaconess Carter, the trained nurse at the mission.
She had taken him in, crippled with rheumatism, and had
cured him. Already the new mission was proving a boon
to whites as well as natives. We made no more than four
or five miles farther when, coming to spruce with no more
in sight for a long distance, we pitched the tent, all very
tired.

That night the thermometer went to 5° below zero,
the coldest weather of the season so far. As a consequence
the next day we had a new and very disagreeable
trouble. The cold weather, by increasing the amount of
running ice in the still open stretches, had brought about
a jam that had raised the level of the water and caused
an overflow of the ice—a very common phenomenon of a[177]
closing river. We picked our way wet-foot much of the
day, and towards evening came to a complete impasse in
the middle of the river, with open water in front and on
one hand, and new thin ice on the other. So we had to
turn round and go back again a long way, the mid-river
being the only traversable place, until, when it seemed
that we should have to go round another bend to reach
a crossing, Arthur proposed that he and William, who
wore mukluks, should carry the doctor and me, who wore
moccasins across the overflow, and then rush the sled
across; and this we did, wetting its contents somewhat,
however. We camped immediately, for we had landed
on impassable gravel.

That night the thermometer went to 20° below zero,
and we took good hope that the cold, which began to
approach the real cold of winter, would put an end to
overflow; but, on the contrary, it only aggravated the
trouble. For the first mile or two there was nothing for
it but to go through it, and at 20° below it is a miserable
business to be wading in moccasins even for an hour. We
had rearranged our load so that it stood up somewhat
higher, but we could not avoid wetting the things on the
bottom of the sled, and the ice formed about it very inconveniently.
Moreover, the little dog, who had a great
dislike to wetting his feet, began to give us a good deal
of trouble, and at one time nothing but the admirable
presence of mind and prompt action of William saved us
from losing our whole load. We had reached a strip of
new, dry ice formed the night before, with black, rushing
water on the left, towards which the slippery surface[178]
sloped. Presently as we advanced we began to encounter
a little overflow water, coming from the bank on the
right, seeping up between the ice and the bank; and that
dog, to avoid wetting his feet in the overflow, deliberately
turned towards the open water and set the sled sliding in
the same direction. Without the crampons, which we
had not used for the past few days, it was impossible to
hold the sled against the dog’s traction, and in another
moment we should have lost everything, for the dog paid
no heed to our voices, when William with a blow of his
axe cut the rope by which the dog pulled, and, grasping
the sled and throwing himself full length on the ice,
managed to stop it on the very brink of the water. It
was a close shave, but once more we were safe; and the
doctor, in the exuberance of his gratitude, said that
night: “If William wants a glass eye I’ll send to New
York to get him one.” But when William learned that
the glass eye was a mere matter of looks and would in
no wise improve his vision, he lost interest in it. Looks
do not count for much amongst the Koyukuk Indians.

Arthur and Doctor Burke.

Saint John’s-in-the-Wilderness, Allakaket, Koyukuk River.

That night was a long way off yet, however; we had
other risks to run, other labours. Here were two islands
in the river, and the current, running like a mill-race and
burdened with ice cakes, swept around the shore of one
of them leaving the passage between them quite dry.
There was no shore ice at all where the channel was, and
it was so ugly-looking a reach that had there been any
there I am sure we should not have ventured it. There
was nothing for it but to drag the sled half a mile over
the gravel, and we did it, the most heart-breaking labour[179]
of the whole trip. It took us exactly an hour to make
that half mile. William did not know the trick of the
split willows either, so we all four of us sweated for our
ignorance. Shortly after, our guide pointed out the spot
where poor Ericson’s frozen body was found, two years
and eight months before.

Near the Kornuchaket (or the mouth of Old Man
Creek), where the Koyukuk receives a considerable tributary,
we approached the most dangerous travelling we
had had yet. The river here is swift and deep, and there
are several islands set in it. Most of its surface was
frozen, but the ice was very thin. William stopped the
procession before we reached the bad stretch and went
hastily over a part of it. Under his single weight we
could see the ice-sheet undulating. It had been our rule
that ice was not safe unless it took three blows of the
axe to bring water, but this ice gave water at a blow.
When William returned he made quite an harangue,
which Arthur interpreted. He thought we could make
it past the mouth of the creek, and if we could we should
find good going to Moses’ Village. But we must go
just as fast as we could travel; we must not let the sled
stop an instant. The ice would bend and crack; but he
thought if we went quickly we could get across. So for
nearly a quarter of a mile we rushed that sled over
“rubber” ice that swayed and cracked and yielded under
our feet and under the sled, until we reached the bank
of one of the islands, and then again we launched her
and ran with her to the shore. Once one of my feet
broke through, and immediately the water welled up all[180]
around—with the steamboat channel underneath—but
without pause we increased our speed and made the
strong shore ice safely at last. No man will ever doubt
the plasticity, the “viscosity” of ice, as it used to be
styled in the old glacier controversies, who has passed
over the “rubber” ice that forms under certain circumstances
and at certain seasons on these rivers.

We would never, I am sure, have attempted that ice
had not William been with us. We would have struck a
blow with the axe and declared it unsafe. Of course, it
was unsafe; the whole journey was unsafe, but I am convinced
that this thin, continuous sheet of ice, cushioned
actually upon the surface of the water out of which it
was growing, was really safer than much of the thicker
but brittle, unsupported ice we had unhesitatingly
come over. Chemists tell us that certain substances in
the act of formation, which they call nascent substances,
are extraordinarily active and potent, and it may be that
ice in the same state has a special tenacity of texture
which belongs to that state alone. I wish that I could
have measured the thickness of that ice. Where my foot
went through I know it was very thin, but its thickness
I will not venture to guess. There was the distinct feeling
that the water was bearing the ice up and when it was
punctured the water welled up with pressure behind it.

Beyond the Kornuchaket much more snow had fallen,
and a few miles brought us to Moses’ Village, called
grandiosely “Arctic City,” since a trader had established
a store and a road-house there. At this spot a new overland
mail trail from Tanana strikes the Koyukuk, and,[181]
although ten or twelve miles remained, we felt that our
journey was done. My sled dogs were there, and, as I
had not seen them for more than a year, that was a joyful
reunion. Nanook’s bark of welcome, which no one but
I ever got with quite the same inflection, was as grateful
to me as all the licking and slobbering of the others, for
Nanook is a very independent beast, reserved in his
demonstrations and not wearing his heart on his sleeve,
so to speak. They were all glad to see me—Old Lingo and
Nig, and even “Jimmy the Fake.” Billy was dead. For
fifteen or sixteen months they had been boarded here,
and, since fish had been very scarce the preceding summer,
their food had been chiefly bacon and rice and tallow,
and there was a bill of close to four hundred dollars
against us! Dogs are very expensive things in this expensive
country. When used the winter through on the trail,
and boarded the summer through at a fish camp, we estimate
that it costs one hundred dollars per head per
annum to feed a dog; so that the maintenance of a team
of five dogs, which is the minimum practicable team, will
cost five hundred dollars per annum for food alone.

When we had eaten a good supper and were reclining
on spring cots in the bunk house, there was not one of
us but confidently expected to be at the mission in the
next forenoon. For a week past the natives had been
going to and fro in three or four hours. The river was
completely closed above here, and there was much more
snow than we found below. So we hitched our own dogs
to our own sled the next morning, when the doctor had
visited a sick person or two, and started out on the last[182]
stretch of the journey. All went well until we had turned
the long bend at the head of which the old, abandoned
post of Bergman is situated, just on the Arctic Circle, but
a mile or two beyond we were wallowing in saturated snow
that stretched all across the river right up to the banks
on either side. An overflow was in progress, the water
running along the surface of the ice and soaking up the
snow so that there was six inches of slush all over it. We
struggled along awhile, though from the first it seemed
hopeless, and then we gave it up and went back to the
road-house. There would be no passing that stretch of
river with the sled until the cold had dealt with the overflow.
It is almost always the unexpected that happens.
The next morning I put on a pair of snow-shoes—Doctor
Burke’s knee forbade him their use—and taking William
with me, mushed up through the slush and the snow to
the mission, leaving the others to come on with the team
so soon as they found it practicable.

A mile before we reached the mission was the new village
built by the Esquimaux—”Kobuk town” they call
it—and right in front of the village the Malamute Riffle,
a noted difficulty of navigation, was still running wide
open, though all the rest of the river was long closed.
Near the riffle the Kobuks had a fish-trap, and some who
were busy getting out fish saw and recognised me, and
the whole population came swarming out for greetings.
It was good to see these kindly, simple people again, to
shake their hands and hear their “I glad I see you,” which
is the general native greeting where there is any English
at all. Every one must shake hands; even the babies on[183]
their mothers’ backs stretch out their little fingers eagerly,
and if they be too small for that, the mother will take the
little hand and hold it out. At the bend we take a portage
and a quarter of a mile brings us to the Allakaket,
to the familiar modest buildings of the mission, with its
new Koyukuk village gradually clustering round it. The
whole scene was growing into almost the exact realisation
of my dream when first I camped on this spot two
years and nine months before. There was a distinct
thrill of pleasure at the sight of the church. Built entirely
of logs with the bark on, there was nothing visible
anywhere about it but spruce bark, save for the gleam
of the gilded cross that surmounted the little belfry.
The roof, its regular construction finished, was covered
with small spruce poles with the bark on, nailed together
at the apex, and where it projected well beyond the
gables its under-side was covered with bark, as well as
the cornice all round that finished it off. Even the
window-frames and the door-panels were covered with
bark. It was of the same tone because of the selfsame
substance as the forest still growing around it, and it
gave at the first glance the satisfied impression of fitness.
It gave the feeling that it belonged where it was
placed. It is ill praising one’s own work, but I had been
keen to see how it would strike me, fresh from the outside,
after a year’s absence, and I was very glad indeed
that it pleased me again.

I had no more than entered upon the warm welcome
that waited at Saint John’s-in-the-Wilderness, and was still
wondering at the homelike cosiness which the mission[184]
house had assumed under the deft hands of the two ladies
who occupied it, when there came an Indian with word of
a white man he had found starving in the wilderness
fifteen miles away. Another native with a dog team and
a supply of immediate food was hastily despatched to
bring the man in, and that night the poor emaciated fellow,
looking like a man of sixty-five or seventy though he
was really no more than forty, crawled out of the sled and
tottered into the house. He had started out from Tanana
two months before with two pack-horses to make his
way across to the Koyukuk diggings, had lost his way and
wandered aimlessly in that vast wilderness; one horse had
been drowned, the other he had killed for meat. He had
made a raft to come down the Kornutna (Old Man Creek)
to the Koyukuk, knowing that there was a trading-post
near its mouth, and had been frozen in and forced to
abandon it. Since that time he had been living on a few
spoonfuls of meal a day, with frozen berries, and once or
twice a ptarmigan, and when Ned found him was at the
last extremity and had given up, intending to die where
he was.

That man’s hunger was tremendous, but Miss Carter,
having knowledge and experience of such cases, was apprehensive
that if any large quantity of food were taken
at a time there would be serious danger to him. So for
a day or two he ate frequently but sparingly. A little
later, as he grew stronger, to such extremes did his hunger
pinch him that he would watch till there was no one looking
and would go into the kitchen and steal food that was
preparing, even taking it out of the frying-pan on the[185]
stove. He would be hungry immediately after having a
full meal. In ten days he was sufficiently recovered to
resume his journey to the diggings, and when I saw him
at Coldfoot two months later I did not recognise him, so
greatly had he changed from the poor shrunken creature
that crept into the mission. We all think we have been
hungry time and again; if ever we have gone a few days
on short rations we are quite sure of it; this man had
sounded the height and depth and stretched the length
and breadth of it, and none of the rest of us really know
what hunger means. I tried to get him to talk about it,
but he said he wanted to forget it. He said he was
ashamed to think of some of the things he had done and
of some of the terrible thoughts that had come to him,
and I pressed him no more. I have always felt that, even
in its last hideousness of cannibalism, only God Himself
can judge starvation.

Here began my first experience of the difficulties of
conducting a mission at the same place for two different
races of natives speaking totally different languages.
Although the Indian language spoken here is the same
as at Tanana, and much of the liturgy, etc., had been put
into that tongue by Mr. Prevost and was therefore available,
yet it was found impracticable to have two sets of
services whenever the church was used, for both races
would always attend anyway. Since the mastery of the
two tongues was out of the question, and there were no
translations at all into the Esquimau, it became a question
of teaching the Esquimaux to take part in an Indian service
or dropping both vernaculars altogether and conducting[186]
the service in English. After much doubt and
experiment the latter was resolved upon, and the whole
service of prayer and praise is in English. When the
lessons are read and the address delivered it is necessary
to use two interpreters; the minister delivers his sentence
in English, then the Koyukuk interpreter puts it
in Indian, and when he is done the Esquimau interpreter
puts it into that tongue.

It is a very tedious business, this double interpretation
and a twenty-minute sermon takes fully an hour to
deliver, but there is no help for it. The singing is hearty
and enthusiastic though the repertory is wisely very
limited; and here, north of the Arctic Circle, is a vested
choir of eight or ten Kobuk and Koyukuk boys who lead
the singing and lead it very well.

Already the influence of the mission and the school
was very marked. Given the native off by himself
like this, in the hands of those in whom he has learned
to place entire confidence, remote from debasing agencies,
and his improvement is evident and his survival
assured.

The double interpretation at the Allakaket.

The wind-swept Yukon within the ramparts.

In two days the doctor and Arthur and the team came
up, and so was brought to a happy conclusion a perilous
journey over the first ice. One is often glad to have
had experiences that one would by no means repeat, and
this is a case in point. We had learned a good deal about
ice; we had taken liberties with ice that none of us had
ever thought before could be taken with impunity; we
had learned to trust ice and at the same time to distrust
it and in some measure to discriminate about it. The[187]
“last ice” is bad, but the “first ice” is much worse, and
all three of us were agreed that we wanted no more
travelling over it and no more pulling of a sled “by the
back of the face.”

Then followed a very happy, busy time of several
weeks while the river ice was consolidating and the land
trails establishing; happy with its manifold evidences of
the rapid advance the natives were making under Miss
Carter’s able and beneficent sway, busy with the instruction
of people eager to learn. It was busy and
happy for Doctor Burke also; busy with the many ailments
he relieved, happy with the beginnings of an attachment
which two years later culminated in his marriage
to Miss Carter’s colleague at this mission.[188]

CHAPTER VII

THE KOYUKUK TO THE YUKON AND TO TANANA—CHRISTMAS
HOLIDAYS AT SAINT JOHN’S-IN-THE-WILDERNESS

Leaving Fort Yukon on the 26th of November, 1909,
and going again over almost the same route we followed
during the first journey described in this volume, we
reached the new mission at the Allakaket on the Koyukuk
River on the 14th of December, after a period of almost
continual cold. The climate of the interior of Alaska
varies as much as any climate. The previous year, continuing
the journey described in “The First Ice,” I had
passed over this same route in the opposite direction, between
the same dates, with the thermometer well above
zero the whole time. This trip the mean of the minimum
reading at night, the noon reading, and the reading at
start and finish of each day’s journey was -38 1/4°.
Many days in that three weeks we travelled all day at
45° and 50° below zero, and we spent one night in camp
at 49° below.

It was the beginning of a severe winter, with much
snow north of the Yukon and long periods of great cold.

The two weeks or so spent at the mission of Saint
John’s-in-the-Wilderness was enjoyed as only a rest is enjoyed
after making such a journey; as only Christmas is[189]
enjoyed at such a native mission. It is the time of the
whole year for the people; they come in from near and far
intent upon the festival in both of its aspects, religious
and social, and they enter so heartily into all that is provided
for them that one does not know which to admire
most, their simple, earnest piety or the whole-hearted
enthusiasm of their sports and pastimes. Right out of
church they go to the frozen river, old men and maidens,
young men and matrons, mothers with babies on their
backs and their skirts tucked up, and they quickly line
up and are kicking the football stuffed with moose hair
and covered with moose hide in the native game that
their forefathers played ages before “Rugby” was invented.[B]
When the church-bell rings, back they all troop
again, to take their places and listen patiently and reverently
to the long, double-interpreted service, the babies
still on their mothers’ backs, sometimes asleep, sometimes
waking up and crying, comforted by slinging them
round and applying their lips to the fountain of nourishment
and solace.

On the nights when there is no church service there is
feasting and dancing. The native dance is a very simple
affair, entirely without any objectionable feature, and
one cannot see any reason in the world for attempting
to suppress it. A man and a woman get out in the middle
of the floor and dance opposite one another without
touching at all. The moccasined toes of an expert man
in this dance move with surprising rapidity, the woman,
with eyes downcast, the picture of demureness, sways[190]
slightly from side to side and moves on her toes in rhythm
to the man’s movement. Presently another man jumps
up and the first man yields his place; then another woman
comes forward and the first woman yields her place, and
so the dance goes on.

For a variety, of late years there is an occasional
“white-man’s dance,” of the quadrille or the waltz kind,
but the natives much prefer their own dancing. Here at
the Allakaket the presence of the Esquimaux adds picturesqueness
and strangeness, and the Esquimau dance,
which consists of a series of jerky attitudinisings, with
every muscle tense, to a curious monotonous chant and
the beating of a drum, is a never-failing source of amusement
to the Indians.

An old man’s funeral in the morning away up on the
high bluff overlooking the mission, a birth in the evening,
a dance the same night—so goes the drama of life in this
little, isolated native world. So soon as these people
make up their minds that one of their number is sick
unto death they make the coffin, for when trees must be
felled and lumber whipsawed from them, it is well to be
forehanded.

There is one old woman living up there yet whose
coffin had been made three times. When it becomes evident
that the unfavourable prognosis was mistaken the
coffin is torn apart and made into shelves or some other
article of household utility. It seems very cold-blooded,
but it is easy to misjudge these people. The emotion of
grief is real with them, I believe, but transient. They
are matter-of-fact and entirely devoid of pretence, and[191]
when once a funeral has taken place and the service is all
over they dismiss the gloomy event from their minds as
soon as possible. The night of old Mesuk’s death, however,
there were fires lighted on all the trails and before
most of the Esquimau cabins, the object of which was
probably to frighten the spirit away from the dwellings
of the living. We shall get the better of these superstitions
by and by, but superstitions die hard, not only
amongst Esquimaux. Moreover, practices like this linger
as traditional practices long after their superstitious content
is dissipated, and men of feeling do not wantonly
lay hands on ancient traditional custom. I think that
if I were an Esquimau and knew that from immemorial
antiquity fires had been lighted on the trails and outside
the doors upon the death of my ancestors, I should be
tempted to kindle them myself upon an occasion, however
firmly I held the Communion of Saints and the Safe Repose
of the Blessed. And I am quite sure that if I were
a Thlinket I should set up a totem-pole despite all the
missionaries in the world. When one comes to think
about it dispassionately, there is really nothing in Christianity
averse to the kindling of corpse fires or the blazoning
of native heraldry. When all the little superstitions
and peculiar picturesque customs are abolished out of
the world it will be a much less interesting world than
it is to-day. If there were any evidence or reason to
believe that morality and religion will be furthered by
the brow-beating or cajoling of the little peoples into a
close similitude of the white race in dress and manners
and customs, all other considerations would, of course,[192]
be swallowed up in a glad welcome of such advance.
But almost the exact opposite is true. The young Indian
or Esquimau, who by much mixing with white men
has been “wised up,” as the expressive phrase goes here,
is commonly one of the least useful, the least attractive,
the least moral of his kind. We have many such on the
Yukon—young men who work on the steamboats in the
summer and do odd jobs and hang around the stores in
winter, and will not condescend to fish any more or to
hunt or trap unless driven by the pinch of hunger.
Show me an Indian who affects the white man in garb,
in speech, in general habits, and external characteristics,
and it will be easy to show an Indian whose death would
be little loss to his community or his race; while the
native woman who aspires to dress herself like a white
woman has very commonly the purpose of attracting
the attention of the white men. I think the young
Indian man I recall as the best dressed, most debonair,
and most completely “civilised,” was living in idleness
upon the bounty of the white trader whom every one
knew to be his wife’s paramour, and was impudently
careless of the general knowledge.

Of all the photographs that illustrate missionary publications—and
I have contributed enough villainous half-tones
to warrant me in a criticism—the ones I dislike
most are of the “Before and After” type. Here is a
group of savages clad in skins, or furs, or feathers, or
palm fibre, or some patient, skilful weave of native wool
or grass; in each case clad congruously with their environment
and out of the products it affords. Set against it is[193]
the same or a similar group clad out of the slop-shop, clad
in hickory shirts and blue-jean trousers, clad so that, if
faces could be changed as easily as clothing, they would
pass for any commonplace group of whites anywhere.
And, as if such change were in itself the symbol and guarantee
of a change from all that is brutal and idolatrous to
all that is gentle and Christian, there follows the triumphant
“Before and After” inscription. All the fitness has
gone, all the individuality, all the clever adaptation of
indigenous material, all the artistic and human interest;
and a self-conscious smirk of superiority radiates over
made-by-the-million factory garments instead. Whenever
I see such contrasting photographs there comes over
me a shamed, perverse recollection of a pair of engravings
by Hogarth, usually suppressed, which a London bookseller
once pulled out of a portfolio in the back room of
his shop and showed me. They bore the same title.

I profess myself a friend of the native tongue because
it is the native tongue—the easy, familiar, natural vehicle
of expression; of the native dress because it is almost
always comfortable and comely; of the native customs,
whenever they are not unhealthy or demoralising, because
they are the distinctive heritage of a people; and
again, of tongue, dress, and customs alike, if you will,
simply because they are dissimilar.

For it has always seemed a trumpery notion that uniformity
in these things has any connection with the
upbuilding of a people, has any ethical relation at all,
and I have always wondered that so trumpery a notion
should have so wide an influence. Moreover, is it not a[194]
little curious that, whereas the trend of biological evolution
on its upward course, as Spencer assures us, is towards
differentiation and dissimilarity, the trend of sociological
evolution should be so marked towards this
bald and barren uniformity? But these be deep matters.

I have never been able to join in the reproach of
superciliousness so often applied to the lines of that
noblest of missionary hymns in which Bishop Heber
asks, “Can we, whose souls are lighted with wisdom from
on high, Can we, to men benighted, the lamp of life
deny?” If that be superciliousness, it is an essential
superciliousness of Christianity itself, for the question
lies at the very core of our religion and will not cease to
be asked so long as the world contains those who believe
with all their hearts, and those who do not believe because
they have not heard. I never listen to that hymn
without emotion, it can still “shake me like a cry Of
trumpets going by.” But the question that seems to
stir the souls of some missionaries and most school-teachers,
“Can we deny to these unfortunate heathen our
millinery, our ‘Old Oaken Bucket,’ our Mr. and our
Mrs.,” leaves me quite cold.

Here was the weekly afternoon routine at this mission,
only the mornings being devoted to books and
classes: On Monday the children brought their soiled
clothes of the week to the schoolroom and washed them;
on Tuesday they were dried and ironed; on Wednesday
they were mended; on Thursday a juvenile “society” did
some sort of work for another mission; on Friday every
child in the village had a hot bath. Now, let a routine of[195]
that sort be kept up, week after week, month after month,
year after year, during the whole school life of a child,
and it is bound to leave its mark; and there is no other
way in which the same mark may be made.

At the Allakaket is fine example of what, I think, is
the best rule in the world for the inferior races—the absolute
rule of a devoted, intelligent, capable gentlewoman.
We are but now writing the indentures of their apprenticeship
to self-government in the elective village councils we
have set up; it is good for them to serve it under this
loving and unquestioned despotism.

During all that Christmas season the temperature was
subject to such violent fluctuations that a chart of them
would look like the picture showing the comparative
heights of mountains, that used to be presented under
“The World in Hemispheres” in the school geographies.
A minimum of 52° below zero and a maximum of 10°
below, was followed by a minimum of 53° below and a
maximum of 18° below, and that by a minimum of 56°
below and a maximum of 14° below, while on Christmas
Day itself we registered a minimum of 58° below zero and
a maximum of 1° above, a range of 59° in less than twelve
hours. At a time of the year when the sun has scarcely
any effect upon the temperature such tremendous changes
point to corresponding atmospheric disturbances, and
each rise was caused by the irruption of clouds upon a
clear sky and was followed by a fall of snow.

It is a beautifully simple process. Driven into these
regions by some compelling current of the upper atmosphere
comes a mass of warm air laden with moisture—a[196]
cloud. As it comes in contact with the cold air of the
region it parts with its heat, and the temperature of the
lower air rises. Having parted with its heat, it can no
longer contain its moisture; and, having parted with its
moisture, it ceases to exist. The cold of the earth and of
its immediate air envelope has seized upon that cloud
and devoured it, and the cold resumes its sway. So have
I opened the door of a crowded cabin, when an Indian
dance or other gathering was in progress, at 50° or 60°
below zero, and the cold, dry air meeting the hot, moist
air has caused an immediate fall of snow on the threshold.

After the abrupt rise in temperature on Christmas
Day, the snow began to fall heavily, with a barometer
continually falling until it reached 27.98 inches, the lowest
point recorded here (at an elevation of about 500 feet
above the sea) in two years and a half—and before the
snow ceased three feet had fallen.

Our winter itinerary called us to leave the Allakaket
immediately after New Year’s Day, and our route lay
overland through a totally uninhabited country for nearly
one hundred and fifty miles, to Tanana on the Yukon.
We knew that it would not greatly interfere with our
plans to lie another week at the Allakaket, and that
would bring our departure after the monthly journey of
the mail-carrier and would thus compel him to break
trail for us through all that snow. That is the way the
mail-carriers in Alaska are usually treated, but Arthur
and I took some pride in keeping as closely as possible
to the announced dates of visitation and in doing such
share of trail breaking as fell to us.[197]

So on Monday, the 3d of January, 1910, we bade
farewell to Deaconess Carter and her colleague and to
the native charges they rule and care for so admirably,
and set out on our journey with an additional boy from
the mission to help us through the heavy snow of the
Koyukuk valley. For ten or twelve miles the way lay
down the river, and the going was slow and toilsome from
the first, although there had been some passage from
Moses’ Village to the mission, and there was, therefore,
some trail. Our start had been late—it is next to impossible
to get an early start from a mission; there is
always some native who must have audience at the last
moment—and after the long repose we were so soft that
the heavy trail had wearied us, and we decided to “call
it a day” when in five and a half hours we came to the
road-house, the last occupied habitation between the
Allakaket and Tanana. Soon after we reached the village
there came trooping down from the mission a number
of the inhabitants gone up for Christmas, who, after
weeping upon our necks, so to speak, at our departure,
had left us to break out that drifted trail for their convenient
return. So will Indians treat a white man almost
always, but I had thought myself an exception and was
vexed to find that so they had treated me.

The next morning we entered the uninhabited wilderness
with three feet of new snow on the trail and no passage
over it since it had fallen. Our first trouble was
finding the trail at all. The previous fall the Alaska
Road Commission had appropriated a sum of money to
stake this trail from Tanana to the Koyukuk River, for[198]
it passes over wind-swept, treeless wastes, where many
men had lost their way. Starting out from Tanana, the
men employed had done their work well until within ten
miles of the Koyukuk River. There it was found that
the labour and cost already expended had exhausted the
appropriation, whereupon the proceedings were immediately
stopped; not another stake was driven, and the
whole party returned to Tanana and mushed two hundred
and fifty miles up the Yukon to spend another little
appropriation upon another trail. That is the unbusinesslike
system in which the money available for such
work in Alaska has been handled.

The first trail breaker goes ahead with a long stick,
which he thrusts continually down through the snow.
The slightly harder surface over which sleds and dogs
have passed reveals itself by offering more resistance to
the penetration of the stick, and that is the only way the
trail can be found. Even with three feet of new snow
upon it, it is well worth while finding, or otherwise there
is no bottom at all and way must be made through all
the snow of the winter. But all Alaskan trails are serpentine,
and it is very difficult to put the new trail right
on top of the old one. Back and forth the second trail
breaker goes between his leader and the sled, and at
intervals the first man comes back and forth also. And
with it all is no path packed solid enough for the dogs to
draw the heavy sled without great difficulty. We should
have had a toboggan, but toboggans are little used on
the Koyukuk, and we had only our sled. In five hours
we made five miles and were worn out. We decided to[199]
pitch our tent and go ahead and break trail for the morrow’s
journey. On the lakes interspersed amongst the
brush we had to break an entirely new trail, for we could
find no trace of the old one.

If five miles in five hours be poor going, what is four
miles in seven and a half hours? That is all we made the
next day despite the snow-shoeing of the previous evening.
The heavy sled was continually getting off the trail, however
wide we show-shoed it. The two of us ahead went
over every step of the distance four or five times, and
sometimes all of us had to go back and forth again and
again before the sled could be brought along at all. It
was from 5° to 10° above zero all day, and at intervals
snow fell heavily. We got at last to the middle
of a little lake and were confronted by open water, the
result of some warm spring, one supposes. Here we must
stop until a laborious journey was made to the bank,
trees were cut and carried, and the open place bridged so
that the sled might be passed over it. Then again our
painful progress was resumed until, as it grew dark,
we reached the bank of the Kornutna, or Old Man
Creek, and here we pitched tent again, and I went forward
upon the bed of the stream to break out a part of
to-morrow’s path. That night two more inches of snow
fell.

For four miles the trail lies along the surface of this
creek, and then takes up a steep gully and over a divide.
That four miles was all we made the next day, back and
forth, back and forth, wearily tramping it to and fro,
dogs and men alike exhausted with the toil. The hatefulness[200]
of dog mushing usually appears under such circumstances;
the whip is constantly plied, the senseless objurgations
rise shriller and fuller. Once the sled is started, it
must by any means be kept going, that as great a distance
as possible may be covered before it stops again. The poor
brutes, sinking almost to their bellies despite the snow-shoeing,
have no purchase for the exercise of their strength
and continually flounder and wallow. Our whip was lost
and I was glad of it, for even as considerate a boy as
Arthur is apt to lose patience and temper when, having
started the sled with much labour by gee pole and rope
about his chest, it goes but a few feet and comes to a
halt again, or slips from the track and turns over in the
deep snow. But it is at such times, too, that one appreciates
at his full value such a noble puller as our wheel
dog Nanook. He spares himself not at all; the one absorbing
occupation of every nerve and muscle of his
body is pulling. His trace is always taut, or, if he lose
footing for a moment and the trace slacken, he is up and
at it again that the sled lose not its momentum if he can
help it. When the lead line is pulled back that the sled
may be started by the jerk of the dogs’ sudden traction,
Nanook lunges forward at the command, “Mush!” and
strains at the collar, mouth open and panting, tongue
dropping moisture, as keen and eager to keep that sled
moving as is the driver himself. All day he labours and
struggles, snatching a mouthful of snow now and then to
cool his overheated body, and he drops in his tracks when
the final halt is made, utterly weary, yet always with
the brave heart in him to give his bark, his five-note characteristic[201]
bark of gladness, that the day’s work is done at
last. It is senseless brutality to whip such a dog, and
most of our dogs were of that mettle, though Nanook was
the strongest and most faithful of the bunch. One’s heart
goes out to them with gratitude and love—old “Lingo,”
“Nig,” “Snowball,” “Wolf,” and “Doc”—as one realises
what loyal, cheerful service they give.

Arthur was so unwell with a violent cold and cough,
that had been growing worse for a couple of days, that I
decided on two things: to leave him in the tent while I
snow-shoed ahead the next day, and to send back the boy
I had brought from the mission to secure a fresh supply
of food; for the back trail was, of course, comparatively
easy. Arthur’s condition threatened pneumonia, to my
notion, and I believe he was saved from an attack of that
disease which is so often fatal in this country by long
rubbing all over the neck and the chest with a remedy
that was new then—a menthol balm. I have used it
again and again since and I am now never without it. A
second application made in the morning, I started out,
show-shoeing up the long hill and then down into the
flat, and so to the mail-carrier’s little hut that is reached
under good conditions of trail the first day from Moses’
Village, and then back again to the tent. That day a tendon
in my right leg behind the knee became increasingly
troublesome, and in climbing the hill on the return was
acutely painful. I recognised it as “mal-de-raquet,” well
known in the Northwest, where the snow is commonly
much deeper than in Alaska, and I found relief in the
application of the same analgesic menthol balm that I[202]
was rejoiced to find had wrought a great improvement in
Arthur’s condition.

Meanwhile the warm weather of the past three or
four days was over and another period of violent fluctuations
of temperature similar to that around Christmastide
was upon us. We went to bed with the thermometer
at 10° below zero and were wakened by the cold at
two in the morning to find it at 40° below, so we had to
keep a fire going the rest of the night; for as soon as the
fire in the stove goes out a tent becomes just as cold as
outdoors.

We moved forward the next morning, but the trail
we had broken was too narrow and had to be widened,
which meant one snow-shoe in the deep snow all the time,
a very fatiguing process that brought into painful play
again the tendon strained with five days’ heavy snow-shoeing.

The temperature was around 40° below all day, and
our progress was so slow that it was not easy to keep
warm, and the dogs whined at the innumerable stops.
Yesterday it had been 10° below, the day before 10°
above, and now, to-day, 40° below. It is hard to dress
for such changeable weather, especially hard to dress the
feet. My own wear, all the winter through, is a pair of
smoke-tanned, moose-hide breeches, tanned on the Yukon
but tailored outside. They are a perfect windbreak, yet
allow ventilation, and they are very warm; but those
who perspire much on exertion cannot wear them. The
amount of covering upon the feet must be varied, in some
measure at least, as the temperature changes. The Esquimau[203]
fur boot, with fur on the inside of the sole and on
the outside of the upper, is my favourite footwear, with
more or less of sock inside it as the weather requires; but
such sudden changes as we were experiencing always find
one or leave one with too much or too little footwear.
By one-thirty we had struggled to the top of the hill, and
it was very evident that the cabin was out of the question
that day; so, since to pass down into the flat was to
pass out of eligible camping timber, we pitched tent on
the brow of the hill.

The cold business of making camp was done, all dispositions
for the night complete, supper for men and
dogs was cooked and ours eating, when we heard a noise
in the distance that set our dogs barking and presently
came the boy I had sent back, accompanied by an Indian
and a fresh team loaded with such a bountiful supply of
food, much of it cooked, that one felt it was worth while
to get into distress to receive such generous and prompt
succour. The ladies at the mission had sat up and cooked
all night and had despatched the fastest team in the village
the next morning to bring their provisions to us and
to help us along. They had thought us at Tanana when
we were not yet at the end of the first day’s stage from
Moses’ Village. It would have been impossible for us to
reach Tanana on the dog food and man food we started
with.

It was so cold and we were so crowded that I arose at
three and made a fire and sat over it the rest of the night,
and after breakfast, although it was Sunday, morning
prayer being said, I started ahead again to break out the[204]
trail deeper and wider, leaving the teams with the distributed
loads to follow. The thermometer stood at 38°
below zero when I left camp, but as I began the descent it
was evident that it grew colder, and at the bottom of the
hill I was sure it was 20° colder at least. Reaching the
cabin, I kindled a fire and started back to meet the teams.
About a mile from the cabin I saw them, for, since the load
was distributed in the two sleds progress was much better;
but by this time it had grown so cold that the dogs were
almost entirely obscured from view by the clouds of steam
that encompassed them. We hurried as best we might
and reached the cabin about eleven, and as soon as we
were arrived I took out the thermometer and let it lie
long enough to get the temperature of the air, and it read
65° below zero. There had been no atmospheric change at
all; it was simply the most marked instance I ever knew
of the influence of altitude upon temperature. We had
descended perhaps three hundred feet, and in that distance
had found a difference of 27° in temperature.

The cabin was a wretched shack without door or window
and full of holes, and in no part of it could one stand
upright. We set ourselves to make things as comfortable
as possible, however, rigging up the canvas sled
cover for an outer door and a blanket for an inner door,
and stopping up the worst of the holes with sacking.
Then we went out and cut fresh spruce boughs to lie upon,
and prospected around quite a while before we found dry
wood nearly a quarter of a mile away. It was quite a
business cutting that wood and packing the heavy sticks
on one’s shoulders, through the brush and up and down[205]
the banks of the little creek where it grew, on snow-shoes,
at 65° below zero.

Our Sabbath day’s journey done, the hut safely
reached and furnished with fuel, we did not linger long
after supper, but, evening prayer said, went to bed as the
most comfortable place in the still cold cabin, thankful
not to be in a tent in such severe weather.

The next day gave us fresh temperature fluctuations.
At nine a. m. it clouded and rose to 35° below, by noon it
had cleared again and the thermometer fell to 55° below,
and at nine p. m. it stood once more at 65° below. The
milder weather of the morning sent all hands out breaking
trail, save myself, for with all our stuff in a cabin without
a door it was not wise to leave it altogether—a dog
might break a chain and work havoc—so I stayed behind
in the little dark hovel, a candle burning all day, and read
some fifty pages of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson
over again. Some such little India-paper classic it is my
habit to carry each winter. Last year I reread Pepys’s
Diary and the year before much of the Decline and Fall.
Certain places are for ever associated in my mind with the
rereading of certain old books. The Chandalar River is
to me as much the scene of Lorna Doone, which I read for
the sixth or seventh time on my first journey along it, as
Exmoor itself; and The Cloister and the Hearth, that noble
historical romance, belongs in my literary geography
to the Alatna-Kobuk portage. So will Boswell always
bring back to me this trip across country from the Koyukuk
to the Yukon through the deep snow.

The boys came back after dark, having broken some[206]
nine miles of trail and having suffered a good deal from
the cold. I had supper cooked, and when that was done
and the dogs fed we fell to reading the Gospels and
Epistles for the Epiphany season, the boys reading aloud
by turns. The all-day fire had warmed the little hut
thoroughly, and despite the cold outside we were snug and
comfortable within.

That night the thermometer touched 70° below zero,
within 2° of the greatest cold I have recorded in seven
years’ winter travel; a greater cold, I believe, than any
arctic expedition has ever recorded, for it is in a continental
climate like Siberia or interior Alaska, and not in the
marine climate around the North Pole, that the thermometer
falls lowest.

Save for an hour or two getting wood, we all lay close
next day, for the temperature at noon was no higher
than 64° below. It is impossible to break trail at such
temperature, or to travel as slowly as we were travelling.
In the strong cold one must travel fast if one travel at all.
Indeed, it is distinctly dangerous to be outdoors. As
soon as one leaves the hut the cold smites one in the face
like a mailed fist. The expiration of the breath makes a
crackling sound, due, one judges, to the sudden congealing
of the moisture that is expelled. From every cranny of
the cabin a stream of smoke-like vapour pours into the
air, giving the appearance that the house is on fire within.
However warmly hands and feet may be clad, one cannot
stand still for a minute without feeling the heat
steadily oozing out and the cold creeping in.

Notwithstanding the weather, that evening the mail[207]
came along, the white man who is the carrier, two tall,
strong natives, and nine dogs. Only since descending
to the flat had they suffered from the cold, for they found
as great a difference as we did in the temperature; and
they were grateful to us for the trail we had broken.
The hut was uncomfortably crowded that night with
seven people in it, but the thermometer stood at -56°
and was rising, and gave us hope that we might move
along to-morrow. Augmented as our party was into
seven men, three sleds, and nineteen or twenty dogs,
trail breaking would not be so arduous and progress
would be much accelerated. There was good hope, moreover,
that the heavy snow was confined to the Koyukuk
valley and that when we passed out of it we should find
better going.

The morning found a temperature of 45° below, and
we sallied forth, quite an expedition. Four, including
myself, went ahead beating down the trail; one was at each
gee pole, our team last, getting advantage of everything
preceding. So far as the trail had been broken we made
good time, covering the nine miles in about four hours.
Another hour of somewhat slower progress took us to
the top of a hill, and here the mail-carrier’s two Indians
had run ahead and built a great, roaring fire and arranged
a wide, commodious couch of spruce boughs, and we
cooked our lunch and took our ease for half an hour.
The sky had clouded again and the temperature had risen
to 28° below.

It is strange how some scenes of the trail linger in the
memory, while others are completely forgotten. This[208]
noon halt I always remember as one of the pleasantest
of all my journeyings. There was not a breath of wind,
and the smoke rose straight into the air instead of volleying
and eddying into one’s face as camp-fires so often do
on whichever side of them one sits. We were all weary
with our five hours’ trudge, and the rest was grateful;
hungry, and the boiled ham they had sent from the mission
was delicious. The warmth of the great fire and
the cosiness of the thick, deep spruce boughs gave solid
comfort, and the pipe after the meal was a luxurious
enjoyment.

From that on the going was heavier and our progress
slower, but we kept at it till dark, and still far into the
night, fortunate in having two Indians who knew every
step of the way, until at last we reached the hut that
marks the end of the second stage from the Koyukuk
River, on the top of a birch hill. We had made nineteen
and a half miles that day and had taken eleven hours
to do it.

If the noon rest be remembered as one of the pleasantest
episodes of the trail, that night in the cabin on the
hill I recall as one of the most miserable in my life. The
hut was still smaller than the previous one, like it without
door and window, and so low that one was bent double all
the time. Walls and roof alike were covered with a
thick coating of frost. The only wood discoverable in
the dark was half-dry birch which would not burn in the
stove but sent out volumes of smoke that blinded us.
When the hut did begin to get a little warm, moisture
from the roof dropped on everything. There we seven[209]
men huddled together, chilly and damp, choked and
weary—a wretched band. There was no room for the
necessary cooking operations; we had to cook and eat
in relays; and how we slept, in what way seven men
managed to pack themselves and stretch themselves in
those narrow quarters, I cannot tell. However, we said
our prayers and went to bed, snow falling heavily. The
Indians were soon snoring, but sleep would not come to
me, tired as I was, and I had not slept at all the previous
night. So presently I took trional, X grs., and
dozed off till morning.

Then we resolved to divide forces rather than subject
ourselves to the miserable inconvenience of overcrowding
these tiny huts, and at this stage of the journey it
was possible to do so without losing a whole day, for
there was a cabin for the noon rest. It was arranged that
the mail-man should start first and make the full day’s
run if possible, while we should “call it a day” at the
half-way hut.

So Bob and his Indians sallied forth while yet my boys
were reading their lessons to me, and when they were
done we hitched up and followed. And as soon as we
were down the hill and started along the bald flat, it was
evident that we were out of the deep snowfall, for the
present at any rate, and we plucked up spirit, for we
were now to cross the wide, open, wind-swept uplands of
the headwaters of the Melozitna and Tozitna, tributaries
of the Yukon—the “Tozi” and “Melozi,” as the white
men call them—where snow never lies deep or long. We
were out of the Koyukuk watershed now and in country[210]
drained by direct tributaries of the Yukon. The going
was now incomparably the best we had had since we left
the mission, the snow was light and we had the mail-carrier’s
trail; but, although the temperature had risen to
21° below, a keen wind put our parkee hoods up and our
scarfs around our faces and made our 60° below clothing
none too warm. In three hours we had reached the
Melozi cabin, although that had included the climbing
of a long, steep hill, and here we stayed for the rest of
the day and night and shot some ptarmigan for supper,
though we could easily have gone on and made the rest
of the run.

The next day I sent the auxiliary sled and team and
driver back to the Allakaket, keeping the mission boy
with me, however, to return with the mail-carrier, who
was already late and must go back as soon as he reached
Tanana. I parted with the Indian regretfully, for he
had been most helpful and always good-natured and
cheerful, and had really begun to learn a little at our
travelling night-school.

A high wind was blowing, with the thermometer at 12°
below, and the mail-man’s trail was already drifted over
and quite indistinguishable in the dark, and we began
to appreciate the recent staking of this trail by the Road
Commission. But for these stakes, set double, a hundred
yards apart, so that they formed a lane, it would have
been difficult if not impossible for us to travel on a day
like this, for here was a stretch of sixteen or seventeen
miles with never a tree and hardly the smallest bush.
The wind blew stronger and stronger directly in our[211]
faces as we rose out of the Melozitna basin on the hill
that is its watershed, and when the summit was reached
and we turned and looked back there was nothing visible
but a white, wind-swept waste. But ahead all the snow
was most beautifully and delicately tinted from the reflection
of the dawn on ragged shredded clouds that
streamed across the southeastern sky. Where the sky
was free of cloud it gave a wonderful clear green that
was almost but not quite the colour of malachite. It was
exactly the colour of the water the propeller of a steamship
churns up where the Atlantic Ocean shallows to the
rocky shore of the north coast of Ireland. The clouds
themselves caught a deep dull red from the sunrise, which
the snow gave back in blush pink. Such an exquisite
colour harmony did the scene compose that the wind,
lulling for a moment on the crest of the hill, seemed
charmed into peace by it.

The feast of colour brought a train of colour memories,
one hard upon the heels of another, as we went down
the hill; the Catbells, this golden with bracken, that purple
with heather, and each doubled in the depths of Derwentwater;
an October morning in the hardwood forests
of the mountains of Tennessee, when for half an hour
every gorgeous tint of red and yellow was lavishly
flaunted—and then the whole pride and splendour of it
wiped out at once by a wind that sprang up; the encircling
and towering reds and pinks of a gigantic amphitheatre
of rock in the Dolomites; a patch of flowers right
against the snow in the high Rockies, so intensely blue
that it seemed the whole vault of heaven could be tinctured[212]
with the pigment that one petal would distil. And,
more inspiring than them all, there came the recollection
of that wonderful sunrise and those blazing mountains of
the Alatna-Kobuk portage. Every land has its glories,
and the sky is everywhere a blank canvas for the display
of splendid colour, but the tints of the arctic sky are of
an infinite purity of individual tone that no other sky
can show.

As we descended the hill into the Tozitna basin the
wind rose again, now charged with heavy, driving snow,
while in the valley the underfoot snow grew deep, so that
it was drawing to dusk when we reached the cabin on a
fork of the Tozitna where Bob the mail-man had spent
the previous night, and there we stayed.

The next day is worthy of record for the sharp contrast
it affords. All the night it had snowed heavily, and
it snowed all the morning and into the afternoon. Some
sixteen or seventeen inches of snow had fallen since Bob
and his party passed, and again we had no trail at all.
Moreover—strange plaint in January in Alaska!—the
weather grew so warm that the snow continually balled
up under the snow-shoes and clung to the sled and the
dogs. At noon the thermometer stood at 17° above zero—and
it was but four days ago that we recorded 70° below!
It will be readily understood how such wide and sudden
ranges of temperature add to the inconvenience and discomfort
of mushing. Parkees, sweaters, shirts are shed
one after the other, the fur cap becomes a nuisance, the
mittens a burden, and still ploughing through the snow
he is bathed in sweat who had forgotten what sweating[213]
felt like. The poor dogs suffer the most, for they have
nothing they can shed and they can perspire only through
the mouth. Their tongues drop water almost in a stream,
they labour for their breath, and their eyes have a look
that comes only with soft weather and a heavy trail. So
constantly do they grab mouthfuls of snow that the operation
becomes quite a check on our progress.

By two o’clock it was growing dusk, and we had but
reached the bank of the other fork of the Tozitna, not
more than eight or nine miles from the cabin where we
spent the night and yet thirteen or fourteen miles from
the cabin we had hoped to reach. Beyond the banks
of the stream was no more timber for a long distance;
was such another stretch of open country as we had
passed the previous day. So here was another disappointment,
for camp must be made now lest there be
no chance to make camp at all. But it was a good and
comfortable camp, amidst the large spruce of the watercourse.
Such disappointments are part of life on the
trail; and supper done there was the more time for the
boys.

The open country was again wind-swept, and being
wind-swept the snow was somewhat hardened, and we
fought our way against a gale, covering the twelve and
three quarter miles in ten hours, Sunday though it was.
At that last stage on the road to Tanana came out a
young man from the mission with a dog team and an
Indian, anxious at our long delay, and Harry Strangman’s
name is written here with grateful recognition of
this kindness and many others. We went joyfully into[214]
town on the morrow, the 17th of January, having taken
fifteen days to make a journey that is normally made in
five.

Half-way on that last day’s mush we met the mail-man
returning to the Koyukuk. So much had he been
delayed that there was danger of a fine and all sorts of
trouble, and the mail had been sent out to meet him at
the noon cabin, together with a supply of grub for the
return trip. But the caterer, whoever he was, forgot
candles, and the mail-man would have had to make his
way back to the Koyukuk without any means of artificial
light, in the shortest days of the year, had we not
been able to supply him with half a dozen candles that
remained to us. It was a disappointment to George,
the boy I had brought from the mission, that he must
turn round and go back also. He had never “seen
Tanana,” which is quite a metropolis to him, and had
looked forward to it keenly all the journey, but the boy
braced up and took his disappointment manfully. A
pitiful procession it was that passed us by and took our
boy away; the poor, wearied dogs that had certainly
earned the few days’ rest they were so badly in need of
left a trail of blood behind them that was sickening to
see. Almost every one of them had sore, frozen feet;
many of them were lame; and when we came to descend
the long hill they had just climbed, right at its brow,
where the stiffest pull had been, was a claw from a dog’s
foot frozen into bloody snow.

So far as there is anything heroic about the Alaskan
trail, the mail-carriers are the real heroes. They must[215]
start out in all weathers, at all temperatures; they have a
certain specified time in which to make their trips and
they must keep within that time or there is trouble.
The bordering country of the Canadian Yukon has a
more humane government than ours. There neither
mail-carrier nor any one else, save in some life-or-death
emergency, with licence from the Northwest Mounted
Police, may take out horse or dogs to start a journey
when the temperature is lower than 45° below zero; but
I have seen a reluctant mail-carrier chased out at 60°
below zero, on pain of losing his job, on the American
side. Moreover, between the seasons, when travel on
the rivers is positively dangerous to life, the mail must
still be despatched and received, although so great is the
known risk to the mail, as well as to the carrier, that no
one will send any letter that he cares at all about reaching
its destination until the trails are established or the
steamboats run. But the virtually empty pouches must
be transported from office to office through the running,
or over the rotting ice, just the same, on pain of the high
displeasure and penalty of a department without brains
and without bowels. I have often wished since I came
to Alaska that I could be postmaster-general for one
week, and so I suppose has almost every other resident
of the country.

The week following my arrival at Tanana was a solid
week of cold weather, the thermometer ranging around
50° and 60° below zero, and that means keeping pretty
close to the house. Even the sentries at the army post
are withdrawn and the protection of the garrison is confided[216]
to a man who watches the grounds from a glass-walled
cupola above the headquarters building. Yet a
week of confinement and inaction grows tiresome after
life in the open.

Sunday is always a busy day here. The mission and
native village are three miles away from the town, and
service must be held at both. The mission at Tanana is
not a happy place to visit for one who has the welfare of
the natives at heart. Despite faithful and devoted effort
to check it, the demoralisation goes on apace and the outlook
is dark.

“Single men in barracks don’t grow into plaster
saints,” we are told; sometimes they seem to grow into
drunken, lustful devils without compassion for childhood,
not to mention any feeling of magnanimity towards a
feebler race. And when a girl who has been rough-handled,
or who has been given drink until she is unable
to resist the multiple outrage practised upon her, is told
to pick out the malefactors from a company of soldiers,
all clean-shaven, all dressed alike, all around the same age,
she generally fails to identify altogether. So the offence
goes unwhipped, and the officer is likely as not to address
a reprimand to the complaining missionary for “preferring
charges you are unable to substantiate.” Yet
an officer who had himself written such a letter told me
once that all Indians looked alike to him. Even should
the girl identify one or more men, they have usually half a
dozen comrades ready to swear an alibi.

Add to the trouble given by the soldiers the constant
operation of the slinking bootleggers of the town, a score[217]
or more of whom are known to make money by this
liquor peddling, and some of whom do nothing else for a
living, yet whom it is next to impossible to convict, owing
to the cumbrous machinery of the law and the attitude
of juries, and it will be seen that the hands of those who
are fighting for the native race are tied.

What has been said about the military does not by
any means apply to all, either officers or men. Some of
the officers have been decent, God-fearing men, conscious
of the evil and zealous to suppress it; some of the men,
indeed in all probability most of the men, quite free from
such offence; some commanding officers have kept such
a well-disciplined post that offences of all kinds have been
greatly reduced. But the commanding officer is changed
every year, and the whole force is changed every two
years, so that there is no continuity of policy at the post,
and an administration that has grown familiar with conditions
and that stands so far as it can for clean living
and sobriety and decency and the protection of the native
people, may be followed by one that is loftily ignorant
of the situation, careless about offences against
morality, and impatient of any complaint.

Off by himself, separate from the demoralising influence
of the low-down white, there is every hope and encouragement
in the effort to elevate and educate the
Indian; set down cheek by jowl with the riffraff of towns
and barracks, his fate seems sealed.

Let these two mission stations, the Allakaket and
Tanana, one hundred and fifty miles or so apart by the
winter trail, represent the two conditions. In six years’[218]
time there has been manifest advance at the one and
decay at the other. The birth-rate is greatly in excess
of the death-rate at the Allakaket, the death-rate greatly
in excess of the birth-rate at Tanana. In the year in
which this journey was made there were thirty-four deaths
and fourteen births at Tanana, and while the difference
was an unusually large one, yet in the six years referred
to there has not been one year in which the number of
births exceeded the number of deaths. One does not
have to be a prophet to foresee the inevitable result, if
the process be not stopped.