Chapter 11

FROM THE TANANA RIVER TO THE KUSKOKWIM--THENCE TO THE IDITAROD MINING CAMP--THENCE TO THE YUKON, AND UP THAT RIVER TO FORT YUKON

THE discovery of gold on the Innoko in the winter of 1906-7, and the "strike" on the Iditarod, a tributary of the Innoko, some three years later, opened up a new region of Alaska. It is characteristic of a gold discovery in a new district that it sets men feverishly to work prospecting all the adjacent country, and sends them as far afield from it as the new base of supplies will allow them to stretch their tether. A glance at the map will show that the Innoko and Iditarod country lies between the two great rivers of Alaska, the Yukon and the Kuskokwim, much lower down the Yukon than any of the earlier gold discoveries; that is to say that while the Tanana gold fields lie off the Middle Yukon, the Circle fields off the upper Yukon, the Iditarod camp belongs to the lower river. The Innoko workings were not extensive nor very rich, but they furnished a base for prospecting from which the Iditarod was reached, and Flat Creek, in the latter district, promised to be wonderfully rich. Immediately upon the news of this strike reaching the other camps of the interior, preparations were made far and wide for migrating thither upon the opening of Yukon navigation, and the early summer of 1910 saw a wild stampede to the Iditarod. Saloon-keepers, store-keepers, traders of all kinds, and the rag-tag and bobtail that always flock to a new camp were on the move so soon as the ice went out. From Dawson, from the Fortymile, from Circle, from Fairbanks, from the Koyukuk, and as soon as Bering Sea permitted, from Nome, all sorts of craft bore all sorts of people to the new Eldorado, while the first through steamboats from the outside were crowded with people from the Pacific coast eager to share in the opportunity of wealth. The sensational magazines had been printing article after article about "The incalculable riches of Alaska," and here were people hoping to pick some of it up. Iditarod City sprang into life as the largest "city" of the interior; the centre of gravity of the population of the interior of Alaska was shifted a thousand miles in a month.

Iditarod City furnished a new and large base of supplies. Amidst the heterogeneous mass of humanity that swarmed into the place, though by no means the largest element in it, were experienced prospectors from every other district in Alaska. Under the iniquitous law that then prevailed and has only recently been modified, by which there was no limit at all to the number of claims in a district which one man could stake for himself and others, every creek adjacent to Flat Creek, every creek for many miles in every direction, had long since been tied up by the men with lead-pencils and hatchets. So the newly arrived prospectors must spread out yet wider, and they were soon scattered over all the rugged hundred miles between Iditarod City and the Kuskokwim River. Here and there they found prospects; and here and there what promised to be "pay." They started a new town, Georgetown, on the Kuskokwim itself; another town sprang up on the Takotna, a tributary of the Kuskokwim; and the great Commercial Company of Alaska, ever alert for new developments, put a steamboat on the Kuskokwim and built trading-posts at both these points. Thus the Kuskokwim country, which for long had been one of the least-known portions of Alaska, was opened up almost at a stroke.

[Sidenote: CAMP AT 50° BELOW]

It was my purpose to visit Iditarod City during the winter of 1910-11, although, by reason of the distance to be travelled, a journey thither would involve the omission of the customary winter visit to upper Yukon points. When the northern trip to the Koyukuk was returned from at Tanana, a sad journey had to be made to Nenana to bury the body of Miss Farthing, and Doctor Loomis, missionary physician at Tanana, who accompanied me on this errand, had almost as rough a breaking-in to the Alaska trail as we came back to Tanana again as Doctor Burke had in our journey over the "first ice" of the Koyukuk two years before. Two feet of new snow lay on the trail, and the thermometer went down to 60° below zero. We were camped once on the mail trail, unable to reach a road-house, at 50° below zero.

[Sidenote: THE ROUTE TO THE IDITAROD]

From Tanana the beaten track to the Iditarod lay one hundred and sixty miles down the Yukon to Lewis's Landing, and then across country by the Lewis Cut-Off one hundred miles to Dishkaket on the Innoko, and thence across country another hundred miles to Iditarod City. But I designed to penetrate to the Iditarod by another route. I had long desired to visit Lake Minchúmina and its little band of Indians, and to pass through the upper Kuskokwim country. So I had engaged a Minchúmina Indian as a guide, and laid my course up the Tanana River to the Coschaket, and then due south across country to Lake Minchúmina and the upper Kuskokwim.

The Cosna is a small stream confluent with the Tanana, about thirty miles above the mouth of that river, and we had hoped to reach it by the river trail upon the same day we left the mission at Tanana, the 18th of February, 1911. But the trail was too heavy and the going too slow and the start too late. When we had reached Fish Creek, about half-way, it was already growing dark, and we were glad to stop in a native cabin, where was an old widow woman with a blind daughter. The daughter, unmarried, had a little baby, and I inquired through Walter who the father was and whether the girl had willingly received the man or if he had taken advantage of her blindness. She named an unmarried Indian, known to me, and declared that she had not been consenting. It seemed a paltry and contemptible trick to take advantage of a fatherless blind girl. I baptized the baby and resolved to make the man marry the girl.

The next night we reached the Coschaket, which, following the Indian rule, means "mouth of the Cosna," and found that our guide, Minchúmina John, had already relayed a load of grub that Walter had previously brought here from Tanana, one day's march upon our journey. Our course from the Coschaket left the Tanana River and struck across country by an old Indian trail that had not been used that winter. Through scrubby spruce and over frozen lakes and swamps, crossing the Cosna several times--a narrow little river with high steep banks--the trail went, until it brought us to a hunting camp of the Indians, about eighteen miles from the Coschaket. Here our stuff was cached and here we spent the night, doctoring the sick amongst them as well as we could. My eyes had been sorely tried this day despite dark smoked glasses, for we were travelling almost due south, and the sun was now some hours in the sky and yet low enough to shine right in one's face. So Walter stopped at a birch-tree, stripped some of the bark, and made an eye-shade that was a great comfort and relief.

From this place began the slow work of double-tripping. The unbroken snow was too deep to permit the hauling of our increased load over it without a preliminary breaking out of a trail on snow-shoes. So camp was left standing and Walter and John went ahead all day and returned late at night with eight or nine miles of trail broken, while I stayed in camp and had dog feed cooked and supper ready. The next day we advanced the camp so far as the trail was broken. A moose had used the trail for some distance, however, since the boys left it, and his great plunging hoofs had torn up the snow worse than a horse would have done.

A driving wind and heavy snowfall had drifted the new trail in the night so badly, moreover, that we were not able to cover the full stretch that had been snow-shoed, but camped in the dusk after we had gone eight miles. Eight miles in two days was certainly very poor travel, and at this rate our supplies would never take us down to the forks of the Kuskokwim. Yet there was no other way in which we could proceed. The weather was exceedingly mild, too mild for comfort--the thermometer ranging from 20° to 25° above--and the dogs felt the unseasonable warmth. It took us all that week to make the watershed between the drainage of the Tanana and the drainage of the Kuskokwim, a point about half-way to Lake Minchúmina. One day trail was broken, the next day the loads went forward. Tie the dogs as securely as one would, it was not safe to go off and leave our supplies exposed to the ravages that a broken chain or a slipped collar might bring, so two went forward and I sat down in camp. The boys on their return usually brought with them a few brace of ptarmigan or grouse or spruce hen or, at the least, a rabbit or so.

[Sidenote: THE CAMP-ROBBERS]

The camp-robbers, to my mind the most interesting of Alaskan birds, became very friendly and tame on these vigils. They stay in the country all the winter, when most birds have migrated, like prosperous mine owners, to less rigorous climates; they turn up everywhere, in the most mysterious way, so soon as one begins to make any preparation for camping, and they are bold and fearless and take all sorts of chances. On this journey more than once they alighted on a moving sled and pecked at the dried fish that happened to be exposed. Yet they are so alert and so quick in their movements that it would be difficult to catch them were they actually under one's hand. One of them, during a long day in camp, grew so tame that it pecked crumbs off the toe of my moccasin, and in another day or two would, one feels sure, have eaten out of the hand. There is a curious belief, strongly intrenched in the Alaskan mind, that the nest of this most common bird has never been found, and that the Smithsonian Institution has a standing offer of a large sum of money for the discovery. They build in the spruce-trees, ten or twelve feet above the ground, a nest of rough twigs, and lay five very small eggs, grey spotted with black. This, at any rate, is the description that Walter gives me of a nest he discovered with the bird sitting upon it, and I have found the boy's accounts of such matters entirely trustworthy. It is curious, however, that the nest of a bird so common all over Alaska as the camp-robber should be so rarely found. At times they are very mischievous and destructive, and the man who builds a careless cache will often be heard denouncing them, but to my mind a bird who gives us his enlivening company throughout the dead of an Alaskan winter deserves what pickings he can get.

[Sidenote: SOFT WEATHER]

On Saturday, the 25th of February, after climbing a rather stiff hill, we passed temporarily out of Yukon into Kuskokwim waters, for the tributaries of these two great drainage systems interlock in these hills. At the foot of the hill we stopped for lunch, a roaring fire was soon built, and a great cube of beaten snow impaled upon a stake was set up before the fire to drip into a pan for tea water, while the boys roasted rabbits. In a few hours more we were on the banks of one of the tributaries of the East Fork (properly the North Fork) of the Kuskokwim. Here, in an unoccupied native cabin, we made our camp and lay over Sunday, and here began the most remarkable spell of weather I have known in the interior at this season of the year. The thermometer rose to 37° and then to 40°; the snow everywhere was thawing, and presently it began to rain steadily. It was the first time I had seen a decided thaw in February, let alone rain.

Next day the rain turned to snow, but since the thermometer still stood around 40°, the snow melted as it fell, and we were wet through all day. The snow underfoot, however, was so much less and so much harder that we were able to proceed without preliminary trail breaking. But it was a most disagreeable day and the prelude to a more disagreeable night. Soft, wet snow clings to everything it touches. The dogs are soon carrying an additional burden; balls of snow form on all projecting tufts of hair; masses of snow must continually be beaten off the sled. Every time a snow-shoe is lifted from the ground it lifts a few pounds of snow with it. One's moccasins and socks are soon wet through, and the feet, encased in this sodden cold covering, grow numb and stay so. We crossed a considerable mountain pass in driving snow, and should never have found the way without John, for much of it was above timber, and when it took us through woods the blazes on the trees were so bleached with age as to be difficult of recognition. The Indians have used this trail for generations; but few white men have ever passed along it.

Wet snow, wet spruce boughs, wet tent, wet wood, wet clothing make poor camping. Water-proof equipment is so rarely needed on the winter trail that one does not bother with it. But the climate of the Kuskokwim valley is evidently different from that of the rest of the interior, if, as John said, such weather is not remarkable in these parts at this season. A third day was of much the same description; thawing and heavily snowing all day, the thermometer between 36° and 40°. The labour of going ahead of the teams and breaking trail, on the snow-shoes, through slush, grew so great that I relinquished it to John and took the handle-bars of his sled. We were approaching Lake Minchúmina, but the hills that led us into Yukon waters once more and should have given us views of the lake and the great mountains beyond gave nothing. It is a keen disappointment to be utterly denied great views, the expectation of which has been a support through long distances and fatigues.

At noon we built a fire with considerable difficulty, but once it was started we plied it with fuel till we had a noble, roaring bonfire, and we hung our wet socks and moccasins and parkees and caps and mitts around it and stayed there until they were dry, though the resumption of our journey in the continuous melting snow soon wet everything through again.

[Sidenote: LAKE MINCHÚMINA]

At length, late in the evening of the 28th of February, we descended a long ridge and came upon the northeastern shore of Lake Minchúmina, one of the most considerable lakes of interior Alaska. It stretched its broad expanse away into the misty distance, the farther shore quite invisible, the snow driving slowly over it, and it looked as though we had stumbled by mistake upon the shores of the Arctic Ocean. There was no sort of trail upon it and the snow-shoes sank through the melting snow of its surface into the water that lay upon the ice and brought up a load of slush at every step; yet the going would have been still worse without them. The recollection of the six miles we trudged across that lake is a dismal recollection of utter fatigue, of mechanical lifting and falling of encumbered feet with the recurring feeling that it would be impossible to lift them any more. All across that lake I ate snow, and that and the back-ache legacy of an old strain are my signs of approaching exhaustion. Four hours passed ere we heard the noise of dogs and saw the glimmer of a light through the darkness, and the hearts of men and beasts alike leaped to the expectation of rest and shelter. We had feared the village might be deserted and were rejoiced that the Indians were still there.

Never was hospitality more grateful than that we had from the little remote band of natives at the Minchúmina village. They made a pot of tea and fried some flap-jacks for us, and that was our supper, though I think the boys ate some boiled moose meat from a pot on the stove. We had plenty of grub, but were too weary to cook it; we spread our bedding down on the floor amongst a dozen others and fell almost at once into a deep sleep. Almost at once; for the arrival of our eight dogs had made a commotion amongst the canine population of the place, that after repeated outbreaks of noisy animosity and defiance seemed to turn by common consent into a friendly and most protracted howling contest in which my malamute "Muk" plainly outdid all competitors. How much longer the noise would have kept up it is hard to say--dogs never seem too tired to howl--but when the limit of Indian patience was reached, an aged crone rolled out of the bed into which she had rolled "all standing," seized a staff and went outdoors to lay it impartially upon the backs of all the disturbers of the peace, domestic and foreign, with a screech that was as formidable as the blows. The rest was silence.

The next morning a dozen alarm-clocks went off within a few minutes of each other. Every adult in that cabin owned a separate alarm-clock, and rose, one supposes, to the summons of no other timepiece. At any rate, the clocks went off at intervals, and the natives arose one by one and seemed hugely to enjoy the clatter. Let one purchase a new thing and every individual in the community must have one also.

But what struck me instantly upon arising was the miraculous transformation that had taken place outdoors. The sun was shining brilliantly through a clear sky! I hastened to dress and, not waiting for breakfast, seized my camera and started out. The chinook was over; the sharp, welcome tang of frost was in the air; the snow was hard underfoot. Out upon the gleaming surface of the lake I went for nigh a mile, resolutely refusing to look behind. I knew what vision awaited me when I turned around, had, indeed, caught a slight glimpse as I left the cabin, and I wanted the smooth, open foreground of the lake that I might see it to the best advantage.

[Sidenote: DENALI AND HIS WIFE]

There is probably no other view of North America's greatest mountain group comparable to that from Lake Minchúmina. From almost every other coign of vantage in the interior I had seen it and found it more or less unsatisfying. Only from distant points like the Pedro Dome or the summit between Rampart and Glen Gulch does the whole mass and uplift of it come into view with dignity and impressiveness. At close range the peaks seem stunted and inconspicuous, their rounded, retreating slopes lacking strong lines and decided character. But from the lake the precipitous western face of Denali and Denali's Wife rise sheer, revealed by the level foreground of the snow from base to summit. It was, indeed, a glorious scene. There stood the master peak, seeming a stupendous vertical wall of rock rising twenty thousand feet to a splendid sharp crest perhaps some forty or fifty miles away; there, a little farther to the south, rose the companion mass, a smaller but still enormous elevation of equally savage inaccessibility; while between them, near the base, little sharp peaks stretched like a corridor of ruined arches from mass to mass. One was struck at once by the simple appropriateness of the native names for these mountains. The master peak is Denali--the great one; the lesser peak is Denali's Wife; and the little peaks between are the children. And my indignation kindled at the substitution of modern names for these ancient mountain names bestowed immemorially by the original inhabitants of the land! Is it too late to strike Mount McKinley and Mount Foraker from the map? The names were given fifteen or sixteen years ago only, by one who saw them no nearer than a hundred miles. Is it too late to restore the native names contemptuously displaced?

The majesty of the scene grew upon me as I gazed, and presently hand went to camera that some record of it might be attempted. But alas for the limitations of photography! I knew, even as I made the exposures, first at one one-hundredth of a second and then at one-fiftieth, that there was little hope of securing a picture; the air was yet faintly hazy with thin vapour; the early sun made too acute an angle with the peaks; and the yellow lens screen was left in the hind-sack of the sled. It was even as I feared. When developed some months later, the film held absolutely no trace of the mighty mountains that had risen so proudly before it. I promised myself that at noon, when the sun had removed to a greater distance from the mountains and made a more favourable angle with them, I would return and try again; but by noon had come another sudden, violent change of the weather, and snow was falling once more.

[Sidenote: THE MINCHÚMINA FOLK]

So I got no picture, save the picture indelibly impressed upon my memory, of the noblest mountain scene I had ever gazed upon which made memorable this 1st of March; perhaps one of the noblest mountain scenes in the whole world, for one does not recall another so great uplift from so low a base. The marshy, flat country that stretches from Minchúmina to the mountains cannot be much more than one thousand feet above the sea. Those awful precipices dropping thousands of feet at a leap, those peaks rising serene and everlasting into the highest heaven, the overwhelming size and strength and solidity of their rocky bulk, all this sank into my heart, and there sprang up once again the passionate desire of exploring the bowels of them, of creeping along their glaciers and up their icy ridges, of penetrating their hidden chambers, inviolate since the foundation of the world, and maybe scaling their ultimate summits and looking down upon all the earth even as they look down!

Men, however, and not mountains, made the immediate demand upon one's interest and attention, and I returned to breakfast and the duties of the day. The Minchúmina people are a very feeble folk, some sixteen all told at the time of our visit, greatly reduced by the epidemics of the last decade, living remote from all others on the verge of their race's habitat. They trade chiefly at Tanana, a hundred and thirty miles or so away, walking an annual trip thither with their furs, and owning a nominal allegiance to our mission at that place. It was the first time that any clergyman had ever visited them, and the whole of the day was spent with them, discovering what they knew and trying to teach them a little more. The people sat around on the floor and hung upon the lips of the interpreter. But what a barrier a difference of language is! An interpreter is like a mountain pass, a means of access but at the cost of time and labour. He does not remove the obstruction. The Minchúmina people occupy a fine country that could amply support ten times the Indian population that now inhabits it. We were, indeed, now entering a country that has been almost depopulated by successive epidemics of contagious diseases. The measles in 1900 slew most of them, and diphtheria in 1906 destroyed all the children and many of the adults that remained. The chief of this little band wore a hat proudly adorned with ribbons and plumes, and flew a flag before his dwelling with the initials of the North American Trading and Transportation Company on it--a defunct Alaskan corporation. We could not learn the origin thereof; the flag and the letters were plainly home-made. It was probably a mere imitation of a flag he had seen years ago at Tanana, copied without knowledge of the meaning of the letters, as the Esquimaux often copy into the decoration of their clothing and equipment the legends from canned foods.

Lake Minchúmina drains by a fork of the Kantishna River into the Tanana and so into the Yukon. Just beyond the southwestern edge of the lake runs a deep gully for perhaps a mile that leads to another lake called Tsórmina, which drains into Minchúmina. And just beyond Tsórmina is a little height of land, on the other side of which lies Lake Sishwóymina, which drains into the Kuskokwim. So that little height of land is another watershed between Alaska's two great rivers. Lakes Tsórmina and Sishwóymina are not on any maps; indeed, this region has never been mapped save very crudely from the distant flanks of Denali upon one of Alfred Brook's early bold journeys into the interior of Alaska on behalf of the Geological Survey. Although the Russians had establishments on the lower Kuskokwim seventy-five years ago, and the river is the second largest in Alaska and easy of navigation, yet the white man had penetrated very little into this country until the Innoko and Iditarod "strikes" of 1908 and 1909 respectively.

It was our plan to follow the main valley of the Kuskokwim until the confluence of the Takotna with that stream, just below the junction of the main North and South Forks of the Kuskokwim, and then strike northwestward across country to the Iditarod.

The snow had passed and the sun was bright and the thermometer around zero all day when we left Minchúmina to pursue our journey. The welcome change in the weather had brought a still more welcome change in travel. The decided and continued thaw followed by sharp cold had put a crust on the snow that would hold up the dogs and the sled and a man on small trail snow-shoes anywhere. Trail making was no longer necessary, and in two days we made upward of fifty miles. So much difference does surface make.

[Sidenote: TALIDA]

Across the end of Lake Minchúmina, across Tsórmina and Sishwóymina and a number of lesser lakes we went, following a faint show-shoe trail towards a distant mountain group to the southwest, the Talida Mountains, at the foot of which lay the Talida village. On the other hand, to the east and southeast, we had tantalising glimpses through haze and cloud of the two great mountains, and presently of the lesser peaks of the whole Alaskan range, sweeping its proud curve to the coast. For a long way on the second day we travelled on the flat top of a narrow ridge that must surely have been a lateral moraine of a glacier, what time the ice poured down from the heights and stretched far over this valley--then through scattered timber, increasing in size and thickness and already displaying character that differed somewhat from the familiar forests of the Yukon. The show-shoe trail we were following was made by a messenger despatched by the Minchúmina people to invite the Talida people to a potlatch; for the caches were filled with moose meat beyond local consumption. Early on the second day we met him returning and learned that he had gone on to yet another village a day's journey farther, still on our route.

The people were all gone hunting from the tiny native hamlet of Talida, but we entered a cabin and made ourselves at home. We had passed into the region where the Greek Church holds nominal sway, of which the icons with little candles before them on the walls gave token. No priest ever visits them, but a native at a village on the south fork where is a church holds some position analogous to that of a lay reader. The nearest priest is a half-breed, ill spoken of for irregularity of life, some two hundred miles farther down the river. The Greek Church is relaxing its hold in Alaska, perhaps inevitably, and suffers sadly since the removal of the bishop from Sitka from lack of supervision. Also we had passed out of Indian country into the land of the Esquimaux, for these people, far up towards the head of the river as they were, had yet come at some period from the mouth. We were out of Walter's language range now, and were glad that the bilingual John of the march country was with us to serve as interpreter.

Standing proudly up against the wall in one corner of the cabin was a rather pathetic object to my eyes--an elaborate gilt-handled silk umbrella. There needed no one to tell its story; it spoke of a visit to the Yukon with furs to sell and the usual foolish purchase of gay and glittering trash--novel and quite useless. What easy prey these poor people are to the wiles of the trader! Said one of them to me recently, when I asked the purpose of an "annex" to his store with a huge billiard-table in it--at an exclusive native village--"It's to get their money; there's no use trying to fool you; if we can't get it one way we've got to get it another." This gorgeous silk umbrella was concrete expression of the same sentiment. It was bought outside, it was brought into the country, it was set on exhibition in the store, because some trader judged it likely to attract a native eye. No one, white or native, uses an umbrella in interior Alaska.

We made twenty-five miles the next day through a wide, open country, well wooded in places with a park-like distribution of trees, unwonted in our travels and attractive. A new species of spruce threw thick branches right down to the ground and tapered up to a perfect cone; each tree apart from the others and surrounded by sward instead of underbrush. There was a dignity about these trees that the common Yukon spruce never attains. Rolling hills of small elevation stretched on either hand and game signs abounded. After eight hours of such travel we spoke of camping, but presently saw footprints in the snow and pushed on to the bank of a little river, the Chedolothna, where stood a cabin, a tent, and several high caches. Here, with two families that occupied the cabin, we stayed the night.

[Sidenote: MEASLES AND DIPHTHERIA]

Six people at this place, six at Talida, sixteen at Minchúmina, make up all the population of a region perhaps a hundred and fifty miles square. Yet it is a noble Indian country, one of the most favourable in all the interior, capable of supporting hundreds of people. Signs, indeed, of a much larger occupation of it were not wanting, and all accounts speak of the wholesale destruction of the natives by disease. We were told of a village a little farther up this stream where every living being, save one old man, died of diphtheria five years previously, while those who have heard the stories of the horrors of the epidemic of measles in 1900, usually connected in some way with the stampede to Nome of that year when the disease seems to have entered the country, will understand how a region once thickly peopled, for Alaska, has become the most thinly peopled in all the territory.

A half-breed trader, long resident at a point perhaps two hundred miles lower down the Kuskokwim, told me of coming back to a populous village after an absence of a few weeks, to find every person dead and the starving dogs tearing at the rotting corpses. It is terrible to think what the irruption of a new disease may mean to these primitive natives. Even a disease like measles, rarely fatal and not commonly regarded as serious amongst whites, takes to itself a strange and awful virulence when it invades this virgin blood. The people know no proper treatment; maddened by the itching rash that covers the body, they fling off all cover, rush outdoors naked, whatever the weather, and either roll in the snow or plunge into the stream; with the result that the disease "strikes in" and kills them. Such is the description that is given of its course along the lower Yukon and Kuskokwim. At many a Yukon village half the people died, despite the aid the few missionaries then on the river could afford; upon the Kuskokwim the havoc seems to have been still greater. Six years later, death again stalked through this region after having visited the Yukon, and this time seized his victims by the throat. In another chapter has been given some account of an outbreak of diphtheria on the Chandalar, following a more serious epidemic at Circle City and Fort Yukon. It was during that same winter the disease raged in this region, remote from any sort of medical or even intelligent lay aid, and swept off all the children that had been spared by the measles or had been born since that time. At our next stopping-place we saw the graves of nineteen children who died in one day!

[Sidenote: THE INDIAN GUIDE]

We learned that we were now within one day's travel of a road-house, at or near the junction of the forks of the Kuskokwim, and that a government trail had been surveyed and staked from the Iditarod to the Sushitna, passing close to the same point, and that during the present winter road-houses had sprung up along the western portion of it, so that we should not have to make camp again on the way to Iditarod City. All of which Minchúmina John had collected from the people in the cabin, and now presented to me as reason why he should be released from further service. I was loath to let him go until we were actually _at_ the road-house described, but he wanted to go back to the lake for the potlatch then preparing, and said that two days' delay would bar him from the best of the festivities.

So I settled with him, giving him fifty dollars of the sixty dollars covenanted to the Iditarod, and grub enough to take him back to the lake, and a rifle, for he was unprovided with firearms, and he went his way back, richly content, to the gorging of unlimited moose meat that awaited him, and the boy and I went ours. So far as merely his company was concerned I was not sorry to lose him. The old saying holds good upon the trail that "two is company and three is none." He interfered with my boy's lessons. Since he had scarce any English, and could not be ignored, the conversation was mainly in Indian. In a word he pulled the company down to a native level. And I was anxious that Walter's education should proceed.

This boy had been with me for two years, winter and summer, and it was a great pleasure to witness his gracious development of body, mind, and character. Clean-limbed, smooth-skinned, slender, and supple, his Indian blood showing chiefly in a slight swarth of complexion and aquilinity of feature, he now approached his twentieth year and began to gain the strength of his manhood and to give promise of more than the average stature and physical power. With only one full year's schooling behind him, the year before he came to me, his active intelligence had made such quick use of it that there was good foundation to build upon; and our desultory lessons in camp--reading aloud, writing from dictation, geography and history in such snippets as circumstances permitted--were eagerly made the most of, and his mental horizon broadened continually. Until his sixteenth year he had lived amongst the Indians almost exclusively and had little English and could not read nor write. He was adept in all wilderness arts. An axe, a rifle, a flaying knife, a skin needle with its sinew thread--with all these he was at home; he could construct a sled or a pair of snow-shoes, going to the woods for his birch, drying it and steaming it and bending it; and could pitch camp with all the native comforts and amenities as quickly as anybody I ever saw. He spoke the naked truth, and was so gentle and unobtrusive in manner that he was a welcome guest at the table of any mission we visited. Miss Farthing at Nenana had laid her mark deep upon him in the one year he was with her.

[Sidenote: THE HALF-BREED]

Before he came to me I had another half-breed for two years, and before that there had been a series of full-blooded native boys. I found the half-breed greatly preferable. With full command of the native language, with such insight into the native mind as few white men ever attain, he combines the white man's quickness of apprehension and desire for knowledge; and the companionship had been pleasant and profitable. Both these boys had picked up quickly and efficiently, without the slightest previous experience, the running and the care of the four-cylinder gasoline engine of the mission launch, and took a great and intelligent interest in all machinery. As an interpreter the half-breed is far superior to most full-bloods; he takes one's purport immediately; his mind seems to leap with the speaker's mind, not only to follow faithfully but to anticipate. And the further his English progresses, so much the more excellent interpreter does he become.

My heart goes out to the large and rapidly increasing number of these youths of mixed blood in Alaska. It is common to hear them spoken of slightingly and contemptuously. There is what my mind always regards as a damnable epigram current in the country to the effect that the half-breed inherits the vices of both races and the virtues of neither. The white man who utters this saying with a chuckle at his second-hand wit has generally not much virtue to transmit, were virtue heritable. But to thoughtful men nowadays this talk of the inheritance of virtues and vices is mere folly. The half-breed in Alaska, as elsewhere, is the product of his environment. Often without legitimate father--although in an Indian community, where nothing is secret, his parentage is usually well known--he is left for some native woman to support with the aid of her native husband. He is reared with the full-blooded offspring of the couple in the frankness that knows no reserve and the intimacy that knows no restraint, of Indian life. The full extent of that frankness and intimacy shocks even the loosest-living white man when he first becomes aware of it. Where religion and decency have not been faithfully inculcated there is no bound to it at all--it is complete. Presently, as his superior intellectual inheritance begins to manifest itself, as he grows up into consciousness that he is different from, and in many ways superior to, the Indians around him, he is naturally drawn to such white society as comes his way.

[Sidenote: THE LOW-DOWN WHITE]

In this book a good deal has been said, and, it may be thought by the reader, said with a good deal of asperity, about the whites who frequent Indian communities and come most into contact with the native people; yet the more the author sees of this class, the less is he disposed to modify any of the strictures he has put upon it. "The Low-Down White" is the subject of one of the most powerful and scathing of Robert Service's ballads, those most unequal productions with their mixture of strength and feebleness, of true and forced notes, the best of which should certainly live amongst the scant literature of the North. And, indeed, the spectacle of the man of the higher race, with all the age-long traditions and habits of civilisation behind him, descending below the level of the savage, corrupting and debauching the savage and making this corrupting and debauching the sole exercise of his more intelligent and cultivated mind, is one that has aroused the disgust and indignation of whites in all quarters of the world. Kipling and Conrad have drawn him in the East; Robert Louis Stevenson in the South Sea Islands; any army officer will draw him for you in the Philippines, which lack as yet their great delineator; Service has not overdrawn him on the Yukon.

Now, it is to this man's society, for lack of other white society open to him, that the young half-breed who feels his father's blood stirring within him is drawn and is made welcome. He finds standards even lower, because more sophisticated, than the standards of the Indians themselves. He finds that honesty and morality are a sham, religion a laughing-stock. He finds the chastity of women and the honour of men sneeringly regarded as non-existent. He is taught to curse and swear, to talk lewdly, to drink and gamble. He is taught that drunkenness and sensuality are the only enjoyments worth looking forward to, and he soon becomes as vile as his preceptors. The back room of the Indian trader's store is often the scene of this tuition--barroom, assignation house, gambling hell in one. But let that same youth be taken early in hand by one who has a care for him and will be at some personal pains to train him cleanly and uprightly, and he is as amenable to the good influences as he would be to the bad if they were his sole environment. Conscious all the time of his equivocal position, shy and timid about asserting himself amongst whites, he is easy prey to the viciously as he is apt pupil to the virtuously disposed.

What is said here of the male half-breeds applies _a fortiori_ to the female. Unless early taken in hand by the missionary, or put under the protection of some church boarding-school--and sometimes despite all such care and teaching--the lot of the half-breed girl is a sad one; and some of the lowest and vilest women of the land are of mixed blood.

The half-breed is assuredly to be reckoned with in the future of Alaska. He is here to stay. He is here in increasing numbers. He is the natural leader of the Indian population. There seems little doubt that when he cares to assert his rights he is already an American citizen, although judicial decisions are uncertain and conflicting in this matter.

The missions in the interior have recognised, though perhaps somewhat tardily, the importance of the half-breeds, and have picked them up here and there along the rivers and become responsible for their decent rearing. Some, assuredly, of the future leaders of the native people are now in training at the mission schools. Some, unfortunately, are in quite as assiduous training by the unscrupulous Indian trader and his coterie of low-down whites.

The skies had threatened snow since we arose, and when our diminished expedition was well upon its way the snow began to fall. For thirty-six hours it fell without cessation. Three days of good travel had put us forward seventy-five or eighty miles; now once more we were "up against" deep snow and trail breaking. An old native whom we met on his way to the potlatch later in the day spread out his hands with a look of despair and cried: "Good trail all lose'm!" All day we pushed on against the driving storm, the flakes stinging our faces and striking painfully against our eyeballs, now following a narrow steep woodland trail, now awhile along a creek bed, now across open country with increasing difficulty in finding our way, until it grew dark while yet we were some miles from our destination, and we made camp; and all night long the heavy snow continued.

So soon as we had struck our tent, crusted with ice, and had broken up our wet camp next morning there was trouble about finding the trail. Wide open spaces with never an indication of direction stretched before us. Again and again we cast about, the boy to the left, I to the right, to find some blaze or mark, but much of the course lay across open country that bore none. And then I sorely regretted having let John go back. Some miles before we came to a stop the previous evening, we passed a native encampment with naught but women and children in it--the men gone hunting. But we could not speak with them or get any information from them, for our Kuskokwim interpreter was gone. And now it seemed likely that we should lose our way in this wilderness. At last we were entirely at a loss, the boy returning on the one side and I on the other from wide detours, in which we had found no sign at all. The snow still fell heavily; there lay more than a foot of it upon the late crust; trail or sign of a trail, on the snow or above it, was not at all.

[Sidenote: THE DOG GUIDES]

Then occurred one of the most remarkable things I have known in all my journeyings. Straight ahead in the middle distance I spied two stray dogs making a direct course towards us; not wandering about, but evidently going somewhere. Now there are no such things as unattached dogs in Alaska; any dog entirely detached from human ownership and some sort of human maintenance would soon be a dead dog. The explanation, full of hope, sprang at once to the boy's mind. The dogs must belong to the native encampment some six miles back, and they had been to the road-house for what scraps they could pick up, and were returning. It was probably a daily excursion and they had doubtless followed their accustomed trail. So it turned out. All the way to that road-house, eight miles farther, we followed the trail left by those dogs, growing fainter and fainter indeed as the new snow fell upon it, but still discernible until we had almost reached the road-house. It led across open swampy wastes, and presently across two considerable lakes, over which we should never have been able to find our way, for the trail swung to one hand or the other and did not leave the lake in the same general direction by which it had reached it. Walter cut a bundle of boughs and staked the trail out as we pursued it, lest we should return this way, but from the moment we saw the dogs there was never any question about the trail; they kept it perfectly. We were four and a half hours making the eight miles or so to Nicoli's Village and the road-house, but we might have been days making it but for those dogs. And at the road-house we learned that the boy's theory of their movements was the right one. They came across the twelve or fourteen miles every day for such scraps as they could pick up.

[Sidenote: THE WILDERNESS POET]

So here was our first white man in sixteen days, an intelligent man of meagre education, with a great bent for versifying. A courteous approval of one set of verse brought upon us the accumulated output of years in the wilderness without much opportunity of audience, as one supposes, and most of the afternoon and evening was thus spent. Amidst the overwrought sentimentality and faulty scansion which marked most of the pieces was one simple little poem that struck a true note, said its little say, and quit--without a superfluous word. Its author set no store by it at all compared with his more pretentious and meretricious work; yet it was the one poem in the whole mass. It described the writing of a letter to his father; he had spent all he had in prospecting and working a small claim, and had just realised that a year's labour was gone for naught. His father would worry if he got no word at all, but there was no use telling the old man he was broke, so he just wrote that he was well, and that was all. The old man would come pretty near understanding anyway. In simple lines that scanned and rhymed naturally, that was what the three or four stanzas said. And it was so typical of many a man's situation in this country, gave so simply and well the reason why many men cease writing to their relatives at all, that it pleased me and seemed of value. That note came from the heart and from the life's experience.

Nicoli's Village is a very small place with a mere handful of people, situated on the South Fork of the Kuskokwim some forty miles by river above the junction of the forks. Before the epidemics devastated it it had been a considerable native community. A Greek church, which the natives built entirely themselves, and which boasted a large painted icon of sorts, was the most important building in the place, and was served by the lay minister referred to before. Thus far the Kuskokwim is navigable for vessels of light draught, and a small stern-wheel steamboat lay wintering upon the bank.

[Sidenote: ROAD-HOUSES]

Our way now left the Kuskokwim and struck across country to a point just below the junction of the forks, and then across country again to a tributary of the right bank, the Takotna; with a general northerly direction. Road-houses there indeed were, in the crudity and discomfort of their first season, and other evidences of the proximity of the white man. Here were two men camped, hunting moose for the Iditarod market, more than a hundred and twenty-five miles away, and here, at the end of the second day, near the mouth of the Takotna, was the new post of the Commercial Company in the charge of an old acquaintance who welcomed us warmly and entertained us most hospitably. After camping and road-house experience of nearly three weeks, a comfortable bed and well-spread table, and the general unmistakable ménage of a home-making woman are very highly enjoyed. That night the whole population of the settlement, fourteen persons, gathered in the store for Divine service.

Sixteen miles farther on was another settlement, the "Upper Takotna" Post, with a rival company established and some larger population. Here, also, we spent a night with old Fairbanks acquaintances. We were yet a hundred miles from Iditarod City, and the trail lay over a very rugged, hilly country, up one creek to its head, over a divide, and down another, in the way of the usual cross-country traverse.

There had not been so much snowfall in this section, but the weather began to be very severe. The thermometer fell to -45° and -50° and -55° on three successive nights, and all day long rose not above -20°, with a keen wind. The cost of transporting supplies to the road-houses on this trail justified the high prices charged--one dollar and a half for a poor meal of rabbits and beans and bacon, or ptarmigan and beans and bacon, and one dollar for a lunch of coffee, bread and butter, and dried fruit. But no such exigency could be pleaded to excuse the dirt and discomfort and lack of the commonest provision of outhouse decency at most of these places--'twas mere shiftlessness. There is not often much middle ground in Alaskan road-houses; they are either very good in their way or very bad; either kept by professional victuallers who take pride in them or by idle incompetents who make an easy living out of the necessities of travellers. One wishes that some of the old-time travellers who used to wax so eloquently indignant over the inns in the Pyrenees could make a winter journey in the interior of Alaska.

One thing pleased me at these road-houses. The only reading-matter in any of them consisted of magazines bearing the rubber stamp of Saint Matthew's Reading-Room at Fairbanks, part of a five-hundred-pound cargo of magazines which the mission launch _Pelican_ brought to the Iditarod the previous summer; virtually the only reading-matter in the whole camp. It was pleasant to know that we had been able to avert the real calamity of a total absence of anything to read for a whole winter throughout this wide district. But, although they were brought to the Iditarod and distributed absolutely free, each of these magazines had cost the road-house keeper twenty-five cents for carriage over the trail from Iditarod City, and they had been read to death. Some of them were so black and greasy from continued handling that the print at the edges of the pages was almost unreadable.

These creeks swarmed with ptarmigan, and it was well they did, for the new camp was ill supplied with food, and we found ourselves in a region of growing scarcity as we approached the Iditarod. The ptarmigan seem to have supplemented the meagre stocks in the Iditarod during this winter of 1910-11 as effectively as the rabbits did in the Fairbanks camp in the scarce winter of 1904-5. In place after place the whole creek valley, where it was open, was crisscrossed with ptarmigan tracks, and the birds rose in coveys, uttering their harsh, guttural cry at every turn of the trail.

The summit between the head of Moose Creek and the head of Bonanza Creek is again a watershed between the waters of the Kuskokwim and the waters of the Yukon; for Moose Creek is tributary to the Takotna and Bonanza Creek is tributary to Otter Creek, which is tributary to the Iditarod River. The "summit" is high above timber-line, and when the trail has reached it it does not descend immediately but pursues a hogback ridge for a mile and a half at about the summit level. We passed over it in clear, bright weather without difficulty, but it would be a bad passage in wind or snow or fog. The rugged, broken country, with small, rounded domes of hills, stretched away in all directions, a maze of little valleys threading in and out amongst them.

[Sidenote: PLACE-NAMES]

The Bonanza Creek road-house was by far the best of any between the Kuskokwim and the Iditarod, and showed what can be done for comfort, even under adverse circumstances, by a couple who care and try. But how the names of gold-bearing creeks, or creeks that are expected to be gold-bearing are repeated again and again in every new camp! I once counted up the following list of mining place-names in Alaska: Bonanza Creeks, 10; Eldorados and Little Eldorados, 10; Nugget Creeks or Gulches, 17; Gold Creeks, 12; Gold Runs, 7. Nor is it only in creeks with auriferous deposit or expectation of auriferous deposit that this reduplication occurs; there are Bear Creeks, 16; Boulder Creeks, 13; Moose Creeks, 13; Willow Creeks, 17; Canyon Creeks, 12; Glacier Creeks, 14.

The imagination of the average prospector is not his most active faculty, but even when his imagination is given play and he names a place "Twilight," as he did the original settlement at this base of supplies, the ineradicable prose of trade comes along the next summer and changes it to "Iditarod City." There must have been some remarkable personality strong enough to repress the "chamber of commerce" at Tombstone, Arizona, or the place would have lost its distinctive name so soon as it grew large enough to have mercantile establishments instead of stores.

[Sidenote: IDITAROD CITY]

We went through "Discovery Otter" and into "Flat City," on Flat Creek, the jealous rival of Iditarod City, and so over the hills to Iditarod City, on the wings of a storm. The wind whirled the snow behind us and drove the sled along almost on top of the dogs. In its bleak situation and its exposure to the full force of the wind, Iditarod City reminds one of Nome or Candle on the Seward Peninsula. The hills and flats that surround it are in the main treeless, and the snow drifts and drives over everything. Almost all the week that we spent in the town it was smothered up in a howling wind-storm, so that it was quite a serious undertaking to walk a block or two along the streets. Deep drifts were piled up on all the corners and on the lee side of all buildings. We reached Iditarod City on Monday, the 13th of March. Until the following Friday morning was no cessation or moderation of the wind-storm; and this, they told us, represented most of the weather since the 1st of January.

Overgrown and overdone in every way, the place presented all the features, sordid and otherwise, of a raw mining town. Prices had risen enormously on all manner of supplies, for everything that was not actually "short" was believed to be "cornered." Bacon was ninety cents a pound; butter one dollar and a half a pound; flour was twenty dollars a hundred pounds, and most things in like ratio. Some said the grub was not in the camp; others that the tradesmen had it cached away waiting for the still higher prices they believed would obtain before fresh supplies could arrive in July. There was a general feeling of disappointment and discouragement, enhanced by discomfort and actual suffering from the terrible stormy weather of the winter and the exorbitant and growing price of provisions. Many men without occupation were living on one meal a day. The saloons and the parasitical classes, male and female, seemed to flourish and to play their usual prominent part in the life of such places. The doings of notorious women whose sobriquets seemed household words, the lavish expenditures of certain men upon them, the presents of diamonds they received, with the amount paid for them, constituted a large part of the general talk.

One is compelled to admire the vigour and enthusiastic enterprise, daunted by no difficulty, that is displayed in the wonderfully rapid upraising of a new mining-camp town. The building goes far ahead of the known wealth of the camp and commonly far ahead of the reasonable expectation. But the element of chance is so important a factor in placer mining that the whole thing partakes more of the nature of gambling than of a commercial venture. Any new camp may suddenly present the world with a new Klondike; with riches abundant and to spare for every one who is fortunate enough to be on the spot. Here was Flat Creek with a surprisingly rich deposit; why should there not be a dozen such amidst the multitudinous creeks of the district? How could any one know that it would be almost the only creek on which pay would be found at all? For there is no law about the distribution of gold deposits; there is not even a general rule that has not its notable exceptions. It is very generally believed by the old prospectors and miners that somewhere in the Bible may be found these words, "Silver occurs in veins, but gold is where you find it," which of course, is a mere misreading or faulty remembering of a verse in the Book of Job: "Surely there is a vein for the silver and a place for the gold where they fine it" (refine it). But that "gold is where you find it" is about the only law touching auriferous deposits that holds universally good.

Three long parallel streets of one and two story wooden buildings, with cross streets connecting them, made up the town. Because the country is poorly timbered, the usual log construction had yielded in the main to framed buildings, and great quantities of lumber had been brought the previous summer from Fairbanks, and even from Nome and the outside, to supplement the low-grade output of two local mills. But the price of building materials had been very high, and the average dwelling was very small and incommodious. People accustomed to the comparative luxury of the older camps had suffered a good deal from the lack of all domestic conveniences in this new will-o'-the-wisp of an eldorado.

So there the town stretched away, lumber and paper,--the usual tinder-box Alaskan construction--stores slap up against one another, with no alleyways between; in the busiest part of it and along the water-front even an adequate provision of side streets grudged; furnace-heated and kiln-dried and gasoline-lit; waiting for the careless match and the fanning wind and the five minutes' start that should send it all up in smoke. A week after we left it came; as it came to Dawson, as it came to Nome, as it came to Fairbanks, without teaching any lesson or leaving any precautionary regulations on the statute book to save men from their own competitive greed. Two or three weeks after the fire, however, it was all rebuilt, and a plunging local bank held mortgages on most of the structures for the cost of the new material--and holds them yet.

[Sidenote: THOUSANDS WITHOUT CHURCH]

With at least a thousand people resident in the town, not to mention the thousands more out upon the creeks and at Flat City and "Discovery[G] Otter," there was no minister of religion of any sort in the whole region, nor had public Divine service been conducted since the occasion of the _Pelican's_ visit the previous summer. Yet there were many in the place who sorely missed the opportunities of worship. Twice on Sunday the largest dancing hall in the town was crowded at service; at night it could have been filled a second time with those unable to get in.

Places like this present very difficult problems to those desirous of providing for their religious need. To occupy them at all they should be occupied at once when yet eligible sites may be had for the staking; if they prosper, to come into them later means buying at a high price. Yet what seventh son of a seventh son shall have foresight enough to tell the fortunes of them? The North is strewn with "cities" of one winter. Nor is the selection of suitable men to minister to such communities a simple matter. Amidst the overthrow of all the usual criteria of conduct, the fading out of the usual dividing lines and the blending into one another of the usual divisions, it requires a tactful and prudent man "to keep the happy mean between too much stiffness in refusing and to much easiness in admitting" variations from conventional standards. His point of view, if he is to have any influence whatever, must not exclude the point of view of the great majority; he must accept the situation in order to have any chance of improving the situation. And yet in the fundamentals of character and conduct he must be unswerving. And if on any such fundamental the battle gauge is thrown down, he must take it up and fight the quarrel out at whatever cost.

We left Iditarod City on Monday, the 20th of March, the dogs the fatter and fresher for their week's rest, resolved not to return by the Kuskokwim but to take the beaten trail out to the Yukon, and so all the way up that stream to Fort Yukon. The monthly mail had arrived a few days previously--a monthly mail was all that the thousands of men in this camp could secure--and had gone out again the very next morning, before people had time to answer their letters, before the registered mail had even been delivered. So our departure for the Yukon was eagerly seized upon and advertised as a means of despatching probably the last mail that would go outside over the ice. I was sworn in as special carrier, and a heavy sack of first-class mail added to our load as far as Tanana. The first stage of thirty miles led to Dikeman, a town at the headwaters of ordinary steamboat navigation of the Iditarod River, at which the Commercial Company had built a depot and extensive warehouse, since in the main abandoned. Two streets of cabins lined the bank, but forty or fifty souls comprised the population, and almost all of them gathered for Divine service that night.

[Sidenote: THE "MOVING OF THE MEAT"]

From Dikeman to Dishkaket, on the Innoko River, a distance of some seventy miles, our route lay over one of the dreariest and most dismal regions in all Alaska. It is one succession of lakes and swamps, with narrow, almost knife-edge, ridges between, fringed with stunted spruce. Far as the eye could reach to right and left the country was the same; it is safe to say broadly that all the land between the Iditarod and Innoko Rivers is of this character. We passed over it in mild weather, but it must be a terrible country to cross in storm or through deep snow. For ten miles at a stretch there was scarcely a place where a man might make a decent camp. At a midway road-house was gathered the greatest assemblage of dogs and loaded sleds I had ever seen together at one time, each team with an Indian driver; they must have covered a quarter or a third of a mile. It was a freight train engaged in transporting a whole boat-load of butcher's meat to Iditarod City, the cargo of a steamboat that had frozen in on the Yukon the previous October or early November. All the winter through efforts had been made to get this meat two hundred odd miles overland to its destination; but the weather had been so stormy and the snow so deep that near the end of March most of it was still on the way, and some yet far down the trail towards the Yukon waiting for another trip of the teams.

Dishkaket was merely a native village on the Innoko River two or three years before; but since three new trails from the Yukon come together here--from Kaltag Nulato, and Lewis's Landing--and in the other directions two trails branch off here, to the Innoko diggings at Ophir and to the Iditarod, a store or two and a couple of road-houses had sprung up.

From Dishkaket, after crossing the Innoko, we took the most northerly of the three trails to the Yukon, the Lewis Cut-Off, a trail of a hundred miles that strikes straight across country and reaches the Yukon eighty miles farther up that stream than the Nulato trail and a hundred and twenty miles farther up than the Kaltag trail. The Kaltag trail is the trail to Nome; the Nulato trail is the mail trail simply because it suits the contractors to throw business to Nulato. The Lewis Cut-Off is the direct route, the shortest by about a hundred miles, but it was cut by the private individual whose name it bears, and leads out to his store and road-house on the Yukon; so a rival road-house was built close by on the river and the prestige and advertisement of the "United States mail route" thrown to the trail that covers one hundred unnecessary miles--for no other reason than to deprive Lewis of the legitimate fruit of his enterprise.

The character of the country changed so soon as the Innoko was crossed; the wide swamps gave place to a broken, light-timbered country of ridges and hollows, and the rough, laborious, horse-ruined trail across it made bad travelling. "Buckskin Bill," with his cayuses, was also engaged in "moving the meat." The measured miles, moreover, gave place to estimated miles, and the nominal twenty-five we made the first day was probably not much more than twenty.

[Sidenote: MILLINERY]

The first fifty miles of the country between the Innoko and the Yukon is much the same, and we were climbing and descending ridges for a couple of days. Then we crossed a high ridge and dropped out of Innoko waters into the valley of the Yukatna, a tributary of the Yukon, and passed down this valley for thirty or forty miles, and then across some more broken country to the Yukon. At one of the road-houses a woman was stopping, going in with three or four large sled loads of millinery and "ladies' furnishings." We were told that the merchandise had cost her twelve thousand dollars in Fairbanks, and that she expected to realise thirty thousand dollars by selling it to the "sporting" women of the Iditarod, now a whole winter debarred from "the latest imported French fashions." This woman was dressed in overalls, like a man, and the drivers of her teams, two white men and a native, cursed and swore and used filthy language to the dogs in her presence. It always angers me to hear an Indian curse; to hear one curse in the presence of a white woman was particularly disgusting and exasperating; but what could one expect when the white men put no slightest restraint upon themselves and the woman seemed utterly indifferent? I called the Indian aside and spoke very plainly to him, and he ceased his ribaldry; but the white men still poured it out as they struggled to hitch their many dogs. At last I could stand it no longer. "Madam," I said to the woman, "I don't know who you are, save that you are a white woman, and as a white woman, if I were you, I would make those blackguards treat me with more respect than to use such language before me." She flushed and made no reply. The men, who heard what I said, scowled and made no reply. Presently dispositions were done and the train moved off, but I did not hear any more foul language. This is set down here chiefly because it was the first and only time in all his travels in Alaska that the writer heard such language in such presence.

Another road-house was kept by a man who had been cook upon a recent arctic expedition off the coast of Alaska, and he gave some interesting inside information about an enterprise the published narrative of which had always seemed unsatisfactory. It was just gossip from a drunken scamp, but it filled several gaps in the book.

As we approached the Yukon we passed several meat caches where great quarters of beef sewn up in burlap were piled on the side of the trail. At one of these caches the camp-robbers had been at work industriously. They had stripped the burlap from parts of several quarters, exposing the fat, and had dug out and carried it away little by little until it was all gone. The hard-frozen lean probably defied their best efforts; at any rate, the fat offered less resistance. But where else in the world could men dump quarters of beef beside the road and go off and leave them for weeks with no more danger of depredation than the bills of birds can effect?

A few miles from the river the rival road-house signs began to appear. "Patronise Lewis; he cut this trail at his own expense," pleaded one. "Why go five miles out of your way," sneered another. Lewis's road-house _is_ across the wide Yukon, and there was no point in crossing the river save one's determination to lend no countenance to the spitefulness of these mail runners. So across the river we went and were glad to be on the Yukon again. The next morning we encountered the same rival signs at the point where the trail from Lewis's joined the "mail trail."

[Sidenote: "TREASURE ISLAND"]

Most of our travelling was now upon the surface of the Yukon, and four hundred and fifty miles of it stretched ahead of us ere our winter's travel should end at Fort Yukon. Four hours brought us to the military telegraph station at Melozi, and we were able to send word ahead that we were safely out of the Kuskokwim wilderness. Then a portage was crossed and then the river pursued again until with about thirty miles to our credit we made camp. The days were lengthening out now, the weather growing mild, although a keen, cold, down-river breeze was rarely absent, and travel began to be pleasant and camping no hardship. We preferred camping, on several scores, when the day's work had not been too arduous, chief amongst them being that it gave more opportunity and privacy for Walter's schooling. He was reading _Treasure Island_ aloud, and I was getting as great pleasure from renewing as he from beginning an acquaintance with that prince of all pirate stories. Kokrines and Mouse Point one day, the next The Birches; we passed these well-known Yukon landmarks, camping, after a run of thirty-eight miles, some six miles beyond the last-named place, with a run of forty-four miles before us to Tanana. I judged it too much; but the trail was greatly improved and we decided to attempt it in one stage. A misreading of the watch, so that I roused myself and Walter at 3.30 A. M. instead of 5.15 A. M., and did not realise the mistake until the fire was made and it was not worth while returning to bed, gave us a fine start and we made good progress. Gold Mountain (so called, one supposes, because there is no gold there; there is no other reason), Grant Creek, "Old Station" were passed by, and at length Tanana loomed before us while yet ten miles away. In just eleven hours we ran the forty-four miles, making, with three additional miles out to the mission, forty-seven altogether, by far the longest journey of the winter. We reached Tanana on the 1st of April, just six weeks since we left.

[Sidenote: AN UNTRAVELLED RIVER]

We spent eight days at Tanana, including two Sundays, Passion Sunday and Palm Sunday, but I was under an old promise to spend Easter there also. Now, Easter, 1911, fell on the 16th of April, and for the three-hundred-mile journey to Fort Yukon a period of ten or twelve days at the least would be necessary, that might easily stretch to two weeks. Travelling on the Yukon ice so late in April as this would involve was not only fraught with great difficulty and discomfort, but also with actual danger, and I had to beg to be absolved of my promise. Some considerable preparation was on foot for the festival, and I was loath to leave, for Tanana was then without any resident minister, but it seemed foolish to take the chances that would have to be taken if we stayed.

Five days of almost ceaseless snow-storm during our stay at Tanana did not give prospect of good travelling, and, indeed, when we pulled out from the mission on the Monday in Holy Week there was no sign of any trail. From Tanana up to Fort Yukon there is very little travel; since the whole of this long stretch of river was deprived of winter mail a year or two before, no through travel at all. Cabins may usually be found to camp in, but there are no road-houses. What travel still takes place is local.

The journey divided itself into two roughly equal parts, a hundred and fifty miles through the Lower Ramparts, and a hundred and fifty miles through the Yukon Flats, almost all of it on the surface of the river. It was hoped to reach Stephen's Village, a native settlement just within the second half of the journey, for Easter.

Snow does not lie long at rest upon the river within the Ramparts, and particularly within the narrow, cañon-like stretch of seventy-five miles from Tanana to Rampart City. Violent and almost ceaseless down-stream winds sweep the deep defile in the mountains through which the river winds its course. In places the ice is bare of snow; in places the snow is piled in huge, hardened drifts. So strong and so persistent is this wind that it is often possible to skate over an uninterrupted black surface of ice, polished like plate glass, for twenty miles on a down-river journey. To make way over such a surface up-stream, against such wind, is, however, almost impossible. The dogs get no footing and the wind carries the sled where it listeth. The journey so far as Rampart City has been described before; it will suffice now that it took three days of toilsome battling against wind and bad surface, with nights spent upon the floor of grimy cabins. So cold was the wind that it is noted in my diary with surprise, on the 12th of April, that I had worn fur cap, parkee, and muffler all day, as though it had been the dead of winter instead of three weeks past the vernal equinox.

On Wednesday night there was Divine service at Rampart, and on Maundy Thursday, after four miles upon the river, we took the portage of eleven miles that cuts a chord to the arc of the greatest bend of the river within the Ramparts and so saves nine miles. Three miles more took us to the deserted cabin at the site of the abandoned coal-mine opposite the mouth of the Mike Hess River, here confluent with the Yukon, and in that cabin we spent the night, having had the high, bitter wind in our faces all day. We hated to leave the shelter of the wooded portage and face the blast of the last three miles.

[Sidenote: WIND AND SNOW]

We woke the next morning to a veritable gale of wind and snow, and lay in the cabin till noon, occupied with the exercises of the solemn anniversary. The wind having then abated somewhat and the snow ceased, we sallied forth, still hopeful of making Stephen's Village for Easter. But when we got down upon the river surface it became doubtful if we could proceed, and as we turned the first bend we encountered a fresh gale that did not fall short of a blizzard. The air was filled with flying snow that stung our faces and blinded us. The dogs' muzzles became incrusted with snow and their eyes filled with it so that it was hard to keep them facing it. I could not see the boy at all when he was a hundred feet ahead of the team. We struggled along for four miles, and, since it was then evident that we could not go much farther without useless risk, we turned to a spot on the bank where Walter knew another deserted cabin to stand; for he knows every foot of this section of the river and once spent a summer, camped at the coal-mine, fishing. The spot was reached, but the cabin was gone. The fish rack still stood there, but the cabin was burned down. There was nothing for it but to return to the coal-mine cabin; so, for the first and only time in all my journeyings, it was necessary to abandon a day's march that had been entered upon and go back whence we had come. We ran before the gale at great speed and were within the cabin again by 2.30 P. M. All the evening and all night the storm raged, and I was in two minds about running back to Rampart before it for Easter, since it was now out of the question to reach Stephen's Village. If the season had not been so far advanced this is what I should have done, but it would set us back three days more on the journey, and on reflection I was not willing to take that chance with the break-up so near.

So on the morning of Easter Eve we sallied up-stream again, snow falling and driving heavily, and the wind still strong but with yesterday's keen edge blunted. By the time we had beaten around the long bend up which we had fought our way the day before, the snow had ceased, and by noon the wind had dropped and the sun was shining, and in a few moments of his unobscured strength all the loose snow on the sled was melted--a warning of the rapidity with which the general thaw would proceed once the skies were clear. That night saw us in the habitable though dirty, deserted cabin at Salt Creek (so called, one supposes, because the water of it is perfectly fresh) at which we had hoped to lodge the previous night.

[Sidenote: ALASKAN "FORTS"]

Buoyed by the hope of doing a double stage in a clear, windless day and thus reaching Stephen's Village for service at night, we made a very early start that beautiful Easter morning. But it was not to be. Such trail as there was ran high up on the bank ice--level, doubtless, when it was made much earlier in the season, but now at a slope towards the middle of the river through the falling of the water, and seamed with great cracks. Such a trail, called a "sidling" trail in the vernacular of mushing, is always difficult and laborious to travel, for the sled slips continually off it into the loose snow or the ice cracks, and often for long stretches at a time one man must hold up the nose of the sled while the other toils at the handle-bars. In one place, while thus holding the front of the sled on the trail, Walter slipped into an ugly ice crack concealed by drifted snow, and so wedged his foot that I had difficulty in extricating him. The last two bends of the river within the Ramparts seemed interminable and it was 6.30 P. M., with twelve hours' travel behind us, when we reached old Fort Hamlin, on the verge of the Yukon Flats. These "forts," it might be explained, if one chose to pursue the elucidation of Alaskan nomenclature in the same strain, are so called because they never had any defences and never needed any. As a matter of fact, in the early days, when the Hudson Bay Company made its first establishments on the upper river, there was supposed to be some need of fortification, and Fort Selkirk and Fort Yukon were stockaded. Fort Selkirk, indeed, was sacked and burned sixty years ago, but not by Yukon Indians. The Chilkats from the coast, indignant at the loss of their middle-man profits by the invasion of the interior, crossed the mountains, descended the river, and destroyed the post. It thus became customary to call a trading-post a "fort," and every little point where a store and a warehouse stood was so dignified. Hence Fort Reliance, Fort Hamlin, Fort Adams.

For years Fort Hamlin had been quite deserted, but now smoke issued from the stovepipe and dogs gave tongue at our approach, and we found a white man with an Esquimau wife from Saint Michael and a half-breed child dwelling there and carrying a few goods for sale. With him we made our lodging, and with him and his family said our evening service of Easter, and so to bed, thoroughly tired.

[Sidenote: TRAVELLING BY NIGHT]

A mile beyond Fort Hamlin the Ramparts suddenly cease and the wide expanse of the Yukon Flats opens at once. Ten miles or so brought us to Stephen's Village, where we had been long expected and where a very busy day was spent. A number of Indians were gathered and there were children to baptize and couples to marry, as well as the lesson of the season to teach. It was a great disappointment that we had been unable to get here before, and matter of regret that, being here at such labour, only so short a time could be spent. But the closing season called to us loudly. A mild, warm day set all the banks running with melting snow and made the surface of the river mushy. There was really no time to lose, for the next seventy-five miles was to give us the most difficult and disagreeable travelling of the journey. Here, in the Flats, where is greatest need of travel direction on the whole river, was no trail at all beyond part of the first day's journey. Within the Ramparts the river is confined in one channel; however bad the travelling may be, there is no danger of losing the way; but in the Flats the river divides into many wide channels and these lead off into many more back sloughs, with low, timbered banks and no salient landmarks at all. Behind us were the bluffs of the Ramparts, already growing faint; afar off on the horizon, to the right, were the dim shapes of the Beaver Mountains. All the rest was level for a couple of hundred miles.

A local trail to a neighbouring wood-chopper's took us some twelve miles, and then we were at a loss. The general direction we knew, and previous journeys both in winter and summer gave us some notion of the river bends to follow, but we wallowed and floundered until late at night before we reached the cabin we were bound for, the snow exceeding soft and wet for hours in the middle of the day.

The time had plainly come to change our day travel into night travel, for freezing was resumed each night after the sun was set, and the surface grew hard again. So at this cabin we lay all the next day, with an interesting recluse of these parts who knows many passages of Shakespeare by heart, and who drew us a chart of our course to the next habitation, marking every bend to be followed and the place where the river must be crossed. But there is always difficulty in getting a new travel schedule under way, and we did not leave until five in the morning instead of at two as we had planned. This gave us insufficient time to make the day's march before the sun softened the snow, and moccasins grew wet, and snow-shoe strings began to stretch, and the webbing underfoot to yield and sag--and we had to content ourselves with half a stage. By nine P. M. we were off again and did pretty well until the night grew so dark that we could no longer distinguish our landmarks. Then we went to the bank and built a big fire and made a pot of tea and sat and dozed around it for a couple of hours or so until the brief darkness of Alaskan spring was overpast, and the dawn began to give light enough to see our way again.

When our course lay on the open river, the snow had crust enough to hold us upon our snow-shoes; but when it took us through little sheltered sloughs, the crust was too thin and we broke through all the time, and that makes slow, painful travel. At last we came to a portage that cuts off a number of miles, but the snow slope by which the top of the bank should be reached had a southern exposure and was entirely melted and gone. The dogs had to be unhitched, the sled to be unloaded, the stuff packed in repeated journeys up the steep bank, and the sled hauled up with a rope. Then came the repacking and reloading and the rehitching; and when the portage was crossed the same thing had to be done to get down to the river bed again. Twice more on that day the process was gone through, and each time it took nigh an hour to get up the bank, so that it was around noon, and the snow miserably wet and mushy again, when we reached Beaver and went to bed at the only road-house between Fort Yukon and Tanana.

"Beaver City" owes its existence to quartz prospects in the Chandalar, in which men of money and influence in the East were interested. The Alaska Road Commission had built a trail some years before from the Chandalar diggings out to the Yukon, striking the river at this point, and on the opposite side of the river another trail is projected and "swamped out" direct to Fairbanks. The opening up of this route was expected to bring much travel through Beaver, and a town site was staked and many cabins built. But "Chandalar quartz" remains an interesting prospect, and the Chandalar placers have not proved productive, and all but a few of the cabins at "Beaver City" are unoccupied. If "the Chandalar" should ever make good, "Beaver City" will be its river port.

[Sidenote: LAST DAY]

We left Beaver at eleven P. M. on Friday night, hoping in two long all-night runs to cover the eighty miles and reach Fort Yukon by Sunday morning. Here was the first trail since we left Stephen's Village and the first fairly good trail since we left Tanana, for there had been some recent travel between Fort Yukon and Beaver. Here for the first time we had no need of snow-shoes, and when they have been worn virtually all the winter through and nigh a couple of thousand miles travelled in them, walking is strange at first in the naked moccasin. It is a blessed relief, however, to be rid of even the lightest of trail snow-shoes. We stepped out gaily into a beautiful clear night, with a sharp tang of frost in the air, and even the dogs rejoiced in the knowledge that the end of the journey was at hand. All night long we made good time and kept it up without a stop until eight o'clock in the morning, when we reached an inhabited but just then unoccupied cabin and ate supper or breakfast as one chooses to call it and went to bed, having covered fully half the distance to Fort Yukon. About noon we were rudely awakened by one of the usual Alaskan accompaniments of approaching summer. The heat of the sun was melting the snow above us, and water came trickling through the dirt roof upon our bed. We moved to a dry part of the cabin and slept again until the evening, and at nine P. M. entered upon what we hoped would be our last run.

But once more our plans to spend Sunday were frustrated. The trail led through dry sloughs from which the advancing thaw had removed the snow in great patches. Sometimes the sled had to be hauled over bare sand; sometimes wide detours had to be made to avoid such sand; sometimes pools of open water covered with only that night's ice lay across our path. By eight o'clock in the morning we estimated that we were not more than seven or eight miles from Fort Yukon. But already the snow grew soft and our feet wet, and the dogs were very weary with the eleven hours' mushing. It would take a long time and much toil to plough through slush, even that seven or eight miles. So I gave the word to stop, and we made an open-air camp on a sunny bank, and after breakfast we covered our heads in the blankets from the glare of the sun, and slept till five. Then we ate our last trail meal, and were washed up and packed up and hitched up an hour and more before the snow was frozen enough for travel. A couple of hours' run took us to Fort Yukon, and so ended the winter journey of 1910-11, on the 23d of April, having been started on the 17th of November. We were back none too soon. Every day we should have found travelling decidedly worse. In a few more days the river would have begun to open in places, and only the middle would be safe for travel, with streams of water against either bank and no way of getting ashore. Seventeen days later the ice was gone out and the Yukon flowing bank full.

FOOTNOTE:

[G] The "claim" on a creek on which gold is first found is called "Discovery"; the claims above are numbered one, two, three, etc., "above" and the claims below, one, two, three, etc., "below."