CHAPTER XLVIII

At Tanana our party was enlarged by a party of four gentlemen, headed by Governor Wilford B. Hoggatt, of Juneau, who was on a tour of inspection of the country he serves.

Our steamer, too, underwent a change while we were ashore. We now learned why its bow was square and wide. It was that it might push barges up and down the Yukon; and it now proceeded, under our astonished eyes, to push four, each of which was nearly as large as itself. All the days of my life, as Mr. Pepys would say, I have never beheld such an object floating upon the water. The barges were fastened in front of us and on both sides of us; two were flat and uncovered, one was covered, but open on the sides, while the fourth was a kind of boat and was crowned with a real pilot-house, in which was a real wheel.

We viewed them in open and hostile dismay, not yet recognizing them as blessings in disguise; we then laughed till we wept, over our amazing appearance as we went sweeping, bebarged, down to the sea. Four barges to one steamboat! One barge would have seemed like an insult, but four were perfectly ridiculous. The governor was told that they constituted his escort of honor, but he would not smile. He was in haste to get to Nome; and barges meant delay.

We swept down the Yukon like a huge bird with wide wings outspread; and those of us who did not care whether we went upon a sand-bar or not soon became infatuated with barges. Straight in front of our steamer we had, on one barge, a low, clean promenade a hundred feet long by fifty wide; on the others were shady, secluded nooks, where one might lie on rugs and cushions, reading or dreaming, ever and anon catching glimpses of native settlements--tents and cabins; thousands of coral-red salmon drying on frames; groups of howling dogs; dozens of silent dark people sitting or standing motionless, staring at their whiter and more fortunate brothers sweeping past them on the rushing river.

Poor, lonely, dark people! As lonely and as mysterious, as little known and as little understood, as the mighty river on whose shores their few and hard days are spent. Little we know of them, and less we care for them. The hopeless tragedy of their race is in their long, yearning gaze; but we read it not. We look at them in idle curiosity as we flash past them; and each year, as we return, we find them fewer, lonelier,--more like dark sphinxes on the river's banks. As the years pass and their numbers diminish, the mournfulness deepens in their gaze; it becomes more questioning, more haunting. The day will come when they will all be gone, when no longer dark figures will people those lonely shores; and then we will look at one another in useless remorse and cry:--

"Why did they not complain? Why did they not ask us to help them? Why did they sit and starve for everything, staring at us and making no sign?"

Alas! when that day comes, we will learn--too late!--that there is no appeal so poignant and so haunting as that which lies in the silence and in the asking eyes of these dark and vanishing people.

Below Rampart the hills withdraw gradually until they become but blue blurs on the horizon line during the last miles of the river's course. It is now the lower river and becomes beautifully channelled and islanded. Across these low, wooded, and watered plains the sunset burns like a maze of thistle-down touched with ruby fire--burns down, at last, into the rose of dawn; and the rose into emerald, beryl, and pearl.

Not far above Nulato the Koyukuk pours its tawny flood into the Yukon. For many years the Koyukuk has given evidences of great richness in gold, but high prices of freight and labor have retarded its progress. During the past winter, however, discoveries have been made which promise one of the greatest stampedes ever known. Louis Olson, after several seasons in the district, experienced a gambler's "hunch" that there "was pay on Nolan Creek." He and his associates started to sink, and the first bucket they got off bedrock netted seven dollars; the bedrock, a slate, pitched to one side of the hole, and when they had followed it down and struck a level bedrock, they got two hundred and sixty dollars.

"Our biggest pan," said Mr. Olson, telling the story when he came out, one of the richest men in Alaska, "was eighteen hundred dollars. You can see the gold lying in sight."

Captain E. W. Johnson, of Nome, who had grub-staked two men in the Koyukuk, "fell into it," as miners say. They struck great richness on bedrock, and Captain Johnson promptly celebrated the strike by opening fifteen hundred dollars' worth of champagne to the camp.

Within ten days three pans of a thousand dollars each were washed out. Coldfoot, Bettles, Bergman, and Koyukuk are the leading settlements of this region, the first two lying within the Arctic Circle. Interest has revived in the Chandelar country which adjoins on the east.

Really, Seward's "land of icebergs, polar bears, and walrus," his "worthless, God-forsaken region," is doing fairly well, as countries go.

Nulato, nearly three hundred miles below Tanana, is one of the most historic places on the Yukon, and has the most sanguinary history. It was founded in 1838 by a Russian half-breed named Malakoff, who built a trading post. During the following winter, owing to scarcity of provisions, he was compelled to return to St. Michael, and the buildings were burned by natives who were jealous of the advance of white people up the river. The following year the post was reestablished and was again destroyed. In 1841 Derabin erected a fort at this point, and for ten years the settlement flourished. In 1851, however, Lieutenant Bernard, of the British ship _Enterprise_, arrived in search of information as to the fate of Sir John Franklin. Unfortunately, he remarked that he intended to "send for" the principal chief of the Koyukuks. This was considered an insult by the haughty chief, and it led to an assault upon the fort, which was destroyed. Derabin, Bernard and his companions, and all other white people at the fort were brutally murdered, as well as many resident Indians. The atrocity was never avenged.

Nulato is now one of the largest and most prosperous Indian settlements on the river. A large herd of reindeer is quartered there. There was, as every one interested in Alaska knows, a grave scandal connected with the reindeer industry a few years ago. Many of the animals imported by the government from Siberia at great expense, for the benefit of needy natives and miners, were appropriated by missionaries without authority; but after an investigation by a special agent of the government there was an entire reorganization of the system. In all, Congress appropriated more than two hundred and twenty thousand dollars, with which twelve hundred reindeer have, at various times, been imported. There are now about twelve thousand head in Alaska, of which the government owns not more than twenty-five hundred. There are also stations at Bethel, Beetles, Iliamna, Kotzebue, St. Lawrence Island, Golovnin, Teller, Cape Prince of Wales, Point Barrow, and at several other points. They are used for sledding purposes and for their meat and hides, really beautiful parkas and mukluks--the latter a kind of skin boot--being made of the hides.

A native woman named Mary Andrewuk has a large herd, is quite wealthy, and is known as the "Reindeer Queen."

We reached Anvik at seven in the evening. Anvik is like Uyak on Kadiak Island, and I longed for the frank Swedish sailor who had so luminously described Uyak. If there be anything worth seeing at Anvik--and they say there is a graveyard!--they must first kill the mosquitoes; else, so far as I am concerned, it will forever remain unseen. Under a rocky bluff two dozen Eskimo, men and women, sat fighting mosquitoes and trying to sell wares so poorly made that no one desired them. Eskimo dolls and toy parkas were the only things that tempted us; and hastily paying for them, we fled on board to our big, comfortable stateroom, whose window was securely netted from the pests which made the very air black.

We left Anvik at midnight. We were to arrive at Holy Cross Mission at four o'clock the same morning. Expecting the _Campbell_ to arrive later in the day, the priest and sisters had arranged a reception for the governor, in which the children of the mission were to take part. Thinking of the disappointment of the children, the governor decided to go ashore, even at that unearthly hour, and we were invited to accompany him. We were awakened at three o'clock.

The dawn was bleak and cheerless; it was raining slightly, and the mosquitoes were as thick and as hungry as they had been at the Grand Canyon. Of all the passengers that had planned to go ashore, there appeared upon the sloppy deck only four--the governor, a gentleman who was travelling with him, my friend, and myself. We looked at one another silently through rain and mosquitoes, and before we could muster up smiles and exchange greetings, an officer of the boat called out:--

"Governor, if it wasn't for those damn disappointed children, I'd advise you not to go ashore."

We all smiled then, for the man had put the thought of each of us into most forcible English.

We were landed upon the wet sand and we waded through the tall wet grasses of the beach to the mission. At every step fresh swarms of mosquitoes rose from the grass and assailed us. A gentleman had sent us his mosquito hats. These were simply broad-brimmed felt hats, with the netting gathered about the crowns and a kind of harness fastening around the waist.

The governor had no protection; and never, I am sure, did any governor go forth to a reception and a "programme" in his honor in such a frame of mind and with such an expression of torture as went that morning the governor of "the great country." It was a silent and dismal procession that moved up the flower-bordered walk to the mission--a procession of waving arms and flapping handkerchiefs. At a distance it must have resembled a procession of windmills in operation, rather than of human beings on their way to a reception in the vicinity of the Arctic Circle.

So ceaseless and so ferocious were the attacks of the mosquitoes that before the sleeping children were aroused and ready for their programme, my friend and I, notwithstanding the protection of the hats, yielded in sheer exhaustion, and, without apology or farewell, left the unfortunate governor to pay the penalty of greatness; left him to his reception and his programme; to the earnest priests, the smiling, sweet-faced sisters, and the little solemn-eyed Eskimo children.

This mission is cared for by the order of Jesuits. Two priests and several brothers and sisters reside there. Fifty or more children are cared for yearly,--educated and guided in ways of thrift, cleanliness, industry, and morality. They are instructed in all kinds of useful work. About forty acres of land are in cultivation; the flowers and vegetables which we saw would attract admiration and wonder in any climate. The buildings were of logs, but were substantially built and attractive, each in its setting of brilliant bloom. How these sisters, these gentle and refined women, whose faces and manner unconsciously reveal superior breeding and position, can endure the daily and nightly tortures of the mosquitoes is inconceivable.

"They are not worth notice now," one said, with her sweet and patient smile. "Oh, no! You should come earlier if you would see mosquitoes."

"Our religion, you know," another said gently, "helps us to bear all things that are not pleasant. In time one does not mind."

In time one does not mind! It is another of the lessons of the Yukon; and reading, one stands ashamed. There those saintly beings spend their lives in God's service. Nothing save a divine faith could sustain a delicate woman to endure such ceaseless torment for three months in every year; and yet, like the lone woman at Nation, their faces tell us that we, rather than they, are for pity. The stars upon their brows are the white and blessed stars of peace.

The steamer lands at neither Russian Mission nor Andreaofsky; but at both may be seen, on grassy slopes, beautiful Greek churches, with green, pale blue, and yellow roofs, domes and bell-towers, chimes and glittering crosses.

Down where the mouth of the Yukon attains a width of sixty miles we ran upon a sand-bar early in the afternoon, and there we remained until nearly midnight. It was a weird experience. Dozens of natives in bidarkas surrounded our steamer, boarded our barges, and offered their inferior work for sale. The brown lads in reindeer parkas were bright-eyed and amiable. Cookies and gum sweetened the way to their little wild hearts, and they would hold our hands, cling to our skirts, and beg for "more."

A splendid, stormy sunset burned over those miles of water-threaded lowlands at evening. Rose and lavender mists rolled in from the sea, parted, and drifted away into the distances stretching on all sides; they huddled upon islands, covering them for a few moments, and then, withdrawing, leaving them drenched in sparkling emerald beauty in the vivid light; they coiled along the horizon, like peaks of rosy pearl; and they went sailing, like elfin shallops, down poppy-tinted water-ways. Everywhere overhead geese drew dark lines through the brilliant atmosphere, their mournful cries filling the upper air with the weird and lonely music of the great spaces. Up and down the water-ways slid the bidarkas noiselessly; and along the shores the brown women moved among the willows and sedges, or stood motionless, staring out at their white sisters on the stranded boat. There were times when every one of the millions of sedges on island and shore seemed to flash out alone and apart, like a dazzling emerald lance quivering to strike.

They are dull of soul and dull of imagination who complain of monotony on the Yukon Flats. There is beauty for all that have eyes wherewith to see. It is the beauty of the desert; the beauty and the lure of wonderful distances, of marvellous lights and low skies, of dawns that are like blown roses, and as perfumed, and sunsets whose mists are as burning dust. When there is no color anywhere, there is still the haunting, compelling beauty that lies in distance alone. Vast spaces are majestic and awesome; the eye goes into them as the thought goes into the realm of eternity--only to return, wearied out with the beauty and the immensity that forever end in the fathomless mist that lies on the far horizon's rim. It is a mist that nothing can pierce; vision and thought return from it upon themselves, only to go out again upon that mute and trembling quest which ceases not until life itself ceases.

The northernmost mouth of the Yukon has been called the Aphoon or Uphoon, ever since the advent of the Russians, and is the channel usually selected by steamers, the Kwikhpak lying next to it on the south. By sea-coast measurement the most northerly mouth is nearly a hundred miles from the most southerly, and five others between them assist in carrying the Yukon's gray, dull yellow, or rose-colored floods out into Behring Sea, whose shallow waters they make fresh for a long distance. It is not without hazard that the flat-bottomed river boats make the run to St. Michael; and the pilots of steamers crossing out anxiously scan the sea and relax not in vigilance until the port is entered.