CHAPTER IX

TANANA CROSSING TO FORTYMILE AND DOWN THE YUKON--A PATRIARCHAL CHIEF--SWARMING CARIBOU--EAGLE AND FORT EGBERT--CIRCLE CITY AND FORT YUKON

FAIRBANKS was a different place in 1910 from the centre of feverish trade and feverish vice of 1904-5, when the stores were open all day and half the night and the dance-halls and gambling dens all night and half the day; when the Jews cornered all the salt and all the sugar in the camp and the gamblers all the silver and currency; when the curious notion prevailed that in some mysterious way general profligacy was good for business, and the Commercial Club held an indignation meeting upon a threat of closing down the public gaming and refusing liquor licences to the dance-halls, and voted unanimously in favour of an "open town"; when a diamond star was presented to the "chief of police" by the enforced contributions of the prostitutes; when the weekly gold-dust from the clean-ups on the creeks came picturesquely into town escorted by horsemen armed to the teeth. The outward and visible signs of the Wild West are gone; the dance-halls and gambling tables are a thing of the past; the creeks are all connected with Fairbanks by railway and telephone; an early closing movement has prevailed in the shops; and the local choral society is lamenting the customary dearth of tenors for its production of "The Messiah."

Despite the steady decline in the gold output of late years, a drop of from twenty millions down to four or five, there is little visible decay in its trade, and despite stampedes to new diggings all over Alaska, there is no marked visible diminution in its population, though as a matter of fact both must have largely fallen off. The thing that more than any other has sustained the spirits and retained the presence of the business men is the expectation that seems to grow brighter and brighter, of the development of a quartz camp now that the placers are being exhausted. And in that hope lies the chance of Fairbanks to become the one permanent considerable town of interior Alaska. It is a substantial place, with good business houses and many comfortable homes electric-lit, steam-heated, well protected against fire--better than against flood--and, though it does not display the style and luxury of the palmy days of Nome, it has amenities enough to make disinterested visitors and passers-by wish that its hard-rock hopes may be realised.

[Sidenote: FAIRBANKS]

The little log church that is still, as a local artist put it, "the only thing in Fairbanks worth making a picture of," no longer stands open all day and all night as the town's library and reading-room, but has withdrawn into decorous Sabbath use in favour of the commodious public library built by a Philadelphia churchman; the hospital adjoining it, that for two or three years cared for all the sick of the camp, is supplemented by another and a larger across the slough; young birch-trees have been successfully planted all along the principal streets, and the front yards everywhere are ablaze with flowers the summer through. You may eat hot-house lettuce and radishes in March; hot-house strawberries (at about ten cents apiece) in July and August; while common outdoor garden-truck of all kinds is plentiful and good in its short season.

We had another canine misfortune while we lay there. Doc, one of our leaders, got his chain twisted around his foot the night before we were to leave, and, in pulling to free it, stopped the circulation of the blood and the foot froze. It was as hard as wood and sounded like wood when it hit the sidewalks, from which the snow had been cleared, as the dog came limping along. An hour's soaking in cold water drew the frost out of the foot, and we swathed it in cotton saturated with carron oil, upon which it swelled so greatly that it was impossible to tell the extent of the injury or to determine whether or not the dog would ever be of use again. A kindly nurse at the hospital undertook his care, and we left him behind. One does not buy a dog so late in the season, with all the idle summer to feed him through, if any shift can be made to avoid it, and there was a Great Dane pup at the Salchaket, forty miles away, that I might pick up as I passed and perhaps make some use of for the remainder of the winter.

That mission was the next stop on our journey, and we reached it over the level mail trail, the chief winter highway of Alaska, connecting Fairbanks with Valdez on the coast. Three times a week there is a horse stage with mail and passengers passing over this trail each way, together with much other travel. The Alaska Road Commission has lavished large sums of money upon it, and the four hundred miles or thereabout is made in a week.

[Sidenote: THE SALCHAKET]

A day and a half brought us to the Salchaket, one of a chain of missions along the Tanana River, established by the energy and zeal of the Reverend Charles Eugene Betticher, Jr., during his incumbency at Fairbanks, that have already brought a great change for the better in native conditions. Five years had elapsed since last I visited this tribe, a reconnoitring visit on one of the first steamboats that ever went up the Tanana River above Fairbanks, and it was a delight to see the new, clean village with the little gardens round the cabins, and to note the appreciative attitude which the Indians showed. So highly do they value the missionary nurse in charge that however far afield their hunting may lead them, one of their number is sent back every week to see that the mission does not lack wood and water and meat; a simple, docile, kindly people that one's heart warms to.

This mission was our last outpost to the south. My farther journey had for its prime object the visiting of the natives of the upper Tanana as far as the Tanana Crossing, some two hundred and fifty miles beyond the Salchaket, the inquiring into their condition and into the desirability of establishing a post amongst them.

[Sidenote: THE UPPER TANANA]

The upper Tanana is probably one of the most difficult streams in the world to navigate that can by any stretch of the term be called navigable. The great Alaskan range begins to approach the Tanana River so soon as one gets above Fairbanks. Its prominent peaks, ten thousand to twelve thousand feet high, are continually in view from one angle to another as one pursues the river trail, and come constantly nearer and nearer. All the streams that are confluent with the Tanana on its left bank are glacial streams draining the high ice of these mountains. They come down laden thick with silt, at times foaming torrents, at times merely trickling watercourses that seam with numerous small runnels the wide deltas at their mouths. The tributaries of the right bank flow for the most part through heavily wooded country, and come out cleanly into the river. So the glacial waters form shoals and bars, and the woodland waters during freshets pile them high with driftwood. Such is the chief characteristic of the upper Tanana; a multiplicity of swift, narrow channels amidst bars laden with drift. It is subject to sudden rises of great violence; the attempt to stem a freshet on the upper Tanana is a hair-raising experience as the log of the _Pelican_ would show, but does not come within this narrative. Owing to the origin of much of its water, the Tanana is often in flood in dry, hot seasons, when other rivers run meagrely, as well as in times of rain. It cannot be stemmed in flood; its shoals deny passage in drouth; there must be just the right stage of water to permit its navigation, and that stage, "without o'erflowing, full," is not often found of duration to serve the voyage after the month of June.

A river difficult to navigate in summer is usually a river difficult to travel upon in winter, and the upper Tanana is notoriously dangerous and treacherous. Scarce a winter or a summer that it does not claim victims. It is emphatically a "bad river." Therefore, as far as there is any travel to speak of, land trails parallel the river. Past Richardson where the next night is spent, a decayed mining and trading town that dates back to the stampedes of 1905-6 when it was thought the upper Tanana would prove rich in gold, past Tenderfoot Creek on which the discoveries were made, past the mouth of the Big Delta with the great bluff on the opposite shore and the rushing black water at its foot that never entirely closes all the winter, and on the other hand the wide barrens of the Big Delta itself giving the whole fine sweep of the Alaskan range, we came at length to McCarthy's, the last telegraph station on the river,--for the line strikes across country thence to Valdez following the government trail,--and there spent another night, and here we leave the government-made trail and take to the river surface and the wilderness.

Twelve miles through the woods along the left bank of the river brought us to the aptly named Clearwater Creek, a tributary that comes only from the foot-hills and carries no glacial water. This stream by reason of hot springs runs wide open all the winter and must be crossed by a ferry--a raft on a heavy wire. The man who owned the ferry and the house adjacent was gone from home, so we proceeded to cross as best we could. The raft was so small that first we took the dogs across then unloaded the sled and took part of the load, and returned for the remainder and the sled itself. Finally a canoe was loaded on the raft and, when it had been moored on the side we found it, Arthur paddled himself back. It was a strange scene, rafting and paddling a canoe in interior Alaska on the 2d of March, with the thermometer at -15°. Some eight miles farther along the portage trail we came to a little cabin about dusk, but disdaining its dirt and darkness we pitched our tent.

Another eighteen miles the next day is noted in my diary for pleasant woodland travel and for the particular interest of the numerous animal tracks we passed. Here a moose had crossed the trail, ploughing through the snow like a great cart-horse; here for two or three miles a lynx had urgent business in the direction of the Healy River. A lynx will always follow a trail if there be one, and will pick out the best going on the ice or snow in the absence of trail. I once followed a lynx track from the head of the Dall River to its mouth, and, save for turning aside occasionally to investigate a clump of willows or brush, the lynx was an excellent guide. Here were rabbit tracks and every now and then the little sharp tracks of a squirrel. We stopped for lunch under a tall cottonwood-tree, and Arthur pointed out that the trunk, up to a high crotch, was all seamed by bear claws. He said that the black bear climbed the same tree season after season, and told me that, according to the Indians, this was chiefly done when first he came from his winter den,--for the purpose of getting his bearings, as the boy suggested with a chuckle. A fox, a marten, and a weasel had all passed across lately, and of course then came the exclamation that scarce fails from native lips when a fox track is seen: "I wonder if it were a black fox!" A black fox means sudden wealth beyond the dreams of avarice to an Indian, and any fox track may be the track of a black fox.

The end of that portage brought us out on the Tanana River opposite the little trading-post at the mouth of the Healy--the last post of any kind we should see.

[Sidenote: INDIAN TRADERS]

The trader, by whom we were hospitably entertained, had heard of our projected occupation of the upper Tanana, and alert to his own interests, was anxious to know the plans for the establishment of a mission--plans which were yet all to make. He naturally favoured this spot, which it was already plain was quite out of the question, but professed his readiness to move to any place that we might decide upon, and his entire sympathy and co-operation.

The question of the trader, which always arises upon the establishment of a new mission site, is an important and sometimes a vexatious one, for he wields an influence amongst the Indians second only to that of the mission itself, and may be either a great help or a great hindrance. There is a natural desire to secure a man of character for the new post, and at the same time a natural reluctance to disturb vested interests and arouse bitter enmity by diverting trade. The suggestion has often been made that the mission should itself undertake a store in the interest of the natives, but those with most experience in such matters will agree that it is the wisdom of the bishop that sets his face against mission trading. The two offices are so essentially dissimilar as to be almost incompatible with one another; either the person in charge is a missionary first and a trader afterwards, in which case the store suffers, or he is a trader first and a missionary afterwards, in which case he is not a missionary at all. A clean, sober, and honest trader, content to take his time about getting rich, is a blessing to an Indian community. There are some such, one thinks, but they are not numerous. The profits are large, though the turnover is but one a year; the capital required is small; it is a life with much leisure; but in the main it attracts only a certain class of men.

A band of Indians to whom word of our visit had been sent had come down the river this far to meet us and escort us, but dog food was scarce and our arrival was delayed, and they had been compelled to return to their hunting camp whither we must follow them. We were now farther up the Tanana River than either of us had ever been before; the country had the fascination of a new country; every bend of the river held unknown possibilities, and the keenness and elation that only the penetration of a new country brings were upon the boy as well as upon myself.

The river and the mountains were already drawn much closer together, and as we pursued our journey upon the one we had continual fine views of the other. The going was good--too good--for much of it was new ice and spoke of recent overflow, and all too soon we came upon the water. At the mouth of the Johnson River, one of the glacial streams, the whole river was overflowed, and we waded for a mile through water that deepened continually until there was risk of wetting our load. Then we were compelled to take to the woods and to cut a portage around the worst and deepest of it, and so passed beyond it to good ice and to an empty cabin where we spent the night, glad to be sheltered from an exceedingly bitter wind that had blown all day and had taken all the pleasure out of travel.

[Sidenote: THE THERMOS BOTTLES]

It is in such weather particularly that the thermos flasks prove such a boon to the musher. To stop and build a fire in the wind means to get chilled through. There is no pleasure in it at all, and I would rather push on until the day's journey is done. But the native boy must have his lunch, and will build a fire in any sort of weather and make a pot of tea. The thermos bottle, with its boiling-hot cocoa, gives one the stimulation and nourishment that are desired without stopping for more than a few moments. I have carried a pair of these bottles all day at 60° below zero, and, when opened, snow had to be put into the cocoa before it was cool enough to drink. Of course it is perfectly simple--all the astonishing things are--but I never open one of those bottles in the cold weather and pour out its contents without marvelling at it.

We left the river and struck inland towards the foot-hills of the Alaskan range, a long, rough journey over a trail that had been made by the band that came out to the Healy to meet us, and had been travelled no more than by their coming and going. The snow in this region had been as much lighter than usual as the snow in the Koyukuk had been heavier. Through the tangle of prostrate trunks of a burned-over forest and the dense underbrush that follows such a fire, with not enough snow to give smooth passage over the obstacles, we made our toilsome way, the labour of the dogs calling for the continual supplement of the men, one at the gee pole and one at the handle-bars. Some twenty miles, perhaps, a long day's continuous journey, we pushed laboriously into the hills and then pitched our tent; but in a few miles, next morning, we had struck the main Indian trail from the village near the Tanana Crossing, by which the hunting party had come, and what little was left of the journey went easily enough until we reached the considerable native encampment.

The men were all gone after moose save one half-naked, blear-eyed old paralytic, a dreadful creature who shambled and hobbled up asking for tobacco. The women were expecting us, however, and took the encamping out of our hands entirely, setting up the tent, hauling stove wood and splitting it up, making our couch of spruce boughs, starting a fire, and bringing a plentiful present of moose and caribou meat for ourselves and our dogs. Nothing could have been kinder than our reception; the full hospitality of the wilderness was heaped upon us. It was not until dark that the men returned, and we had all the afternoon to get acquainted with the women and children. Already the chief difficulty we had to encounter presented itself. These people did not speak the language of the lower Tanana and middle Yukon--Arthur's language--at all. Their speech had much more affinity with the upper Yukon language, and it dawned upon me that they were not of the migration that had pushed up the Tanana River from the Yukon, as all the natives as far as the Salchaket certainly did, were not of that tribe or that movement at all, but had come across country by the Ketchumstock from the neighbourhood of Eagle--the route we should return to the Yukon by--and were of the Porcupine and Peel River stock. This was certainly a surprise; I had deemed all the Tanana River Indians of the same extraction and tongue, but the stretch of bad water from the Salchaket to the Tanana Crossing was evidently the boundary between two peoples.

[Sidenote: CHIEF ISAAC]

That night we met Chief Isaac and the principal men of his tribe. At first it seemed that such broken English as three or four of them had would be our only medium of intercourse, but later one was discovered who had visited the lower Tanana and the Yukon and who understood Arthur indifferently well, and by the double interpretation, halting and inefficient, but growing somewhat better as we proceeded, it was possible to enter into communication. These preliminaries arranged, the chief made a set speech of dignity and force. He thanked me for coming to them, and regretted he had not been able to wait longer at the Healy River to help us to his camp. When he was a boy he had been across to the Yukon and had seen Bishop Bompas, and had been taught and baptized by him, but he was an old man now and he had forgotten what he had learned. I was the first minister most of his people had ever seen. They heard that Indians in other places had mission and school, and they had felt sorry a long time that no one came to teach them; for they were very ignorant, little children who knew nothing, and when they heard a rumour that a mission and school would be brought to them their hearts were very glad. Wherever we should see fit to "make mission," there he and his people would go, and would help build for us and help us in every way; but he hoped it would be near Lake Mansfield and the Crossing, where most of them lived at present. Farther down the river was not so good for their hunting and fishing, but they would go wherever we said. That was the burden of the chief's speech.

I took a liking to the old man at once. He was evidently a chief that was a chief. The chieftainship here was plainly not the effete and decaying institution it is in many places on the Yukon. He spoke for all his people without hesitation or question, and one felt that what he said was law amongst them.

There followed for two days an almost continuous course of instruction in the elements of the Christian faith and Christian morals, all day long and far into the night, with no more interval than cooking and eating required. In the largest tent of the encampment, packed full of men and women, the children wedged in where they could get, myself seated on a pile of robes and skins, my interpreters at my side, my hearers squatted on the spruce boughs of the floor, the instruction went on. As it proceeded, the interpretation improved, though it was still difficult and clumsy, as speaking through two minds and two mouths must always be. Whenever I stopped there was urgent request to go on, until at last my voice was almost gone with incessant use. Over and over the same things I went; the cardinal facts of religion--the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension; the cardinal laws of morality--the prohibition of murder, adultery, theft, and falsehood; that something definite might be left behind that should not be lost in the vagueness of general recollection, and always with the insistence that this was God's world and not the devil's world, a world in which good should ultimately prevail in spite of all opposition.

[Sidenote: SAVAGE, HEATHEN, PAGAN]

It is at once a high privilege and a solemn responsibility to deal with souls to whom the appeal of the Christian religion had never before been made, as were most of my hearers. One cannot call them "heathen." One never thinks of these Alaskan natives as heathen. "Savage" and "heathen" and "pagan" all meant, of course, in their origin, just country people, and point to some old-time, tremendous superciliousness of the city-bred, long since disappeared, except, perhaps, from such places as Whitechapel and the Bowery. A savage is simply a forest dweller, a heathen a heath dweller, and for a large part of each year I come, etymologically, within the terms myself. But with its ordinary implication of ferocity and bloodthirstiness it is absurd to apply the word "savage" to the mild and gentle Alaskan Indian, and, with its ordinary implication of bowing down to wood and stone, it is misleading to apply the term "heathen" to those who never made any sort of graven image.

Much has been written, and cleverly written, about the Alaskan Indian that is preposterously untrue. Arthur, my half-breed boy, had recently been reading a story by Jack London, dealing with the Indians in the vicinity of Tanana, where he was bred and born, and his indignation at the representation of his people in this story was amusing. The story was called _The Wit of Porportuk_, and it presented a native chief in almost baronial state, with slaves waiting upon him in a large banqueting hall and I know not what accumulated wealth of furs and gold. Such pictures are far more flagrantly untrue to any conditions that ever existed in Alaska than anything Fenimore Cooper wrote about the Five Nations. There were never any slaves in the interior; there was never any wealth amongst the Indians; there was never any state and circumstance of life. And the more one lives amongst them and knows them, the less one believes that they could ever have been a warlike people, despite their own traditions. Sporadic forays, fostered by their ignorant dread of one another or stirred up by rival medicine-men, there may have been between different tribes--and there certainly were between the Indians and the Esquimaux--with ambuscade and slaughter of isolated hunting parties that ventured too far beyond the confines of their own territory; and one such affair would furnish tradition for generations to dilate upon. I have myself found all the men of Nulato gone scouting, or hiding--I could not determine which--in the hills with their guns, upon a rumour that the "Huskies," or Esquimaux, were coming; I have known the Indians of the Yukon and the Tanana, and as far as the Koyukuk, excited and alarmed over the friendly visit of a handful of ragged natives from the Copper River to Nenana at Christmas time, although in either case it must certainly have been fifty years since there was any actual hostile incursion, and probably much longer.

[Sidenote: A GENTLE, TIMID PEOPLE]

They are a very timid people, and an exceedingly peaceable people. Years and years may be spent amongst them without knowledge of a single act of violence between Indian men; they do not quarrel and fight. Bold enough in the chase, willing to face dangers of ice and water and wild beast, they have a dread of anything like personal encounter, and will submit to a surprising amount of imposition and overbearing on the part of a white man without resorting to it. I knew a certain white man who claimed a whole river valley north of the Yukon as his, who warned off hunting parties of Indians who ventured upon it, and made them give up game killed in "his territory." They came to the mission and complained about it, but they never withstood the usurper. It ought to be added that it always appeared more as the making good of a practical joke than as a serious pretension, but the point is--the Indians submitted.

So far as these natives of the interior are concerned they were never idolaters. I cannot find that they had any distinct notion of worship at all. Their religion had root in a certain frantic terror of the unknown, and found expression in ceaseless efforts to propitiate the malign spirits surrounding them on every side. Thus they were given over to the mastery of those amongst them who had the traditional art of such propitiation, and fell more or less completely under that cruellest and most venal of sways, the tyranny of the witch-doctor. It is impossible to doubt, and hard to exaggerate, the grinding and brutal exactions to which this rule led. Anything that a man possessed might be demanded and must be yielded, on pain of disease and death, even to the whole season's catch of fur or the deflowering of a young daughter. The utmost greed and lust that can disgrace humanity found its Indian expression in the lives of some of these medicine-men.

Since every sort of tyranny has its vulnerable spot, since the despotism of Russia was tempered by assassination and of Japan by the effect of public suicide, so melioration of the tyranny of the medicine-man seems to have been found in rivalry amongst members of the craft itself. Oppressed beyond endurance by one practitioner, allegiance would be transferred to some new claimant of occult powers, and the breaking of the monopoly of magic would be followed by a temporary lightening of the burdens. Some of the most lurid of Alaskan legends deal with the thaumaturgic contests of rival medicine-men, and one judges that sleight of hand and even hypnotic suggestion were cultivated to a fine point.

To such minds the Christian teaching comes with glad and one may say instantaneous acceptance. Their attitude is entirely childlike. They are anxious to be told more and more about it, to be told it over and over again. There is never the slightest sign of incredulity. It does not occur to them as possible that a man should be sent all this way to them, should hunt them up and seek them out to tell it to them, unless it were true. And one learns over again how universal is the appeal the Christian religion, and in particular the Life of Our Lord, makes to mankind. I have seen Indians and Esquimaux mixed, hearing for the first time the details of the Passion, stirred to as great indignation as was that barbarian chieftain who laid his hand on his sword and cried, "Would I and my men had been there!" or those Western cowboys, so the story runs, bred in illiteracy and irreligion, to whose children a school-teacher had given an account of the same great events, and who rode up to the schoolhouse the next day with guns and ropes, and asked: "Which way did them blamed Jews go?"

The medicine-man lies low; may himself profess acceptance of the new teaching, may even really accept it (for it is very hard, indeed, to follow and judge all the mental processes of an Indian)--yes, though it expressly sweep all his devils away, out of the sick, out of the wind and storm, from off every grave mound, though it leave him no paltry net-tearing or trap-springing sprite to work upon with his conjurations; yet the old superstition dies hard, often crops up when one had thought it perished, and even sometimes maintains itself, sub rosa, side by side with definite, regular Christian worship.

[Sidenote: THE OLD, OLD STORY]

The arctic explorer Stefanson, a careful and acute observer who has had exceptional opportunities for observation of the intimate life of the Esquimaux, has written much lately of the grafting of Christianity upon native superstition and the existence of both together, as though it were some new thing or newly noticed by himself. Yet every one familiar with the history of Christianity knows that it has characterised the progress of religion in all ages. There was never a people yet that did not in great measure do this thing, nor is it reasonable to suppose that it could have been otherwise. It is impossible to make a _tabula rasa_ of men's minds. It is impossible to uproot customs of immemorial antiquity without leaving some rootlets behind. And what is acquired joins itself insensibly to what is retained, and either the incongruity is hidden beneath a change of nomenclature or is not hidden at all. Our own social life is threaded through and through with customs and practices which go back to a superstitious origin. The matter is such a commonplace of history that it is bootless to labour it here.

A scientist is only a "scientist." How that name tends continually to depreciate itself as the pursuit of physical science is divorced more and more completely from a knowledge of literature, from a knowledge of the humanities! And a scientist is a poor guide to an acquaintance with man, civilised or uncivilised. To come to the study of any race of man, even the most primitive, without some knowledge of all the long history of man, of all the long history of man's thought, man's methods, man's strivings, man's accomplishments, man's failures, is to come so ill equipped that no just conclusions are likely to be reached. Your exclusive "scientist"--and such are most of them to-day--may be competent to deal with circles and triangles, with wheels and levers with cells and glands, with germs and bacilli and micro-organisms generally, with magnetos and dynamos, with all the heavenly host if you like, but he has no equipment to deal with man! Somatic anthropology in particular tends to assume in some quarters such an overimportance that one falls back upon the recollection that the original head measurers were hatters and that all hatters are proverbially mad. The occupation would seem to carry the taint.

It was with much pleasure that I was able to hold out hope to Chief Isaac of the mission and the school he desired so earnestly for his people. It must not be supposed that all of them were in the completely unevangelised state which has been dwelt upon, that to all of them the teaching of those two full days was novel; some of them, like the chief himself, had been across to the Yukon long ago and still bore some trace of the early labours of the Church of England missionaries to whom this region of Alaska that adjoins Canada is so much indebted. Others had once been to the Ketchumstock, upon the occasion of a visit from our missionary at Eagle, and had received instruction from him. But there were many present in that tent who had never seen any missionary, never had any teaching, to whom it was wholly new save as they might have picked up some inkling from those that had been more fortunate.

[Sidenote: TRIBAL CONNECTIONS]

When we left this encampment Isaac sent two of his young men to guide us, with a sled drawn by three or four small dogs, so gaily caparisoned with _tapis_ and ribbons, tinsel, and pompons, that they might have been circus dogs. Here again is evidence of this tribe's affinity with the upper Yukon natives, and so with those of the Mackenzie. I never saw the _tapis_, a broad, bright ornamented cloth that lies upon the dog's back under his harness, on the Middle Yukon. It is characteristic of the Peel River Indians who come across by the Rampart House and La Pierre House.

A few hours' journey brought us to the Tanana River again, which we crossed, and took a portage on the other side that went up a long defile and then along a ridge and then down another long defile until at night we reached the native village at Lake Mansfield; a picturesque spot, for the lake is entirely surrounded by mountains except on the side which opens to the river. Here the Alaskan range and the Tanana River have approached so close that the water almost washes the base of the foot-hills, and the scenery is as fine and bold as any in Alaska. And here, at Lake Mansfield, if only there were navigable connection between the lake and the river into which it drains, would be an admirable place for a mission station.

A couple of hours next day took us the seven remaining miles to the Tanana Crossing. Here, at that time, was a station of the military telegraph connecting Valdez on the coast with Fort Egbert (Eagle) on the Yukon, a line maintained, at enormous expense, purely for military purposes. It passed through an almost entirely uninhabited country in which perhaps scarcely a dozen messages would originate in a year. The telegraph-line and Fort Egbert itself are now abandoned. Strategic considerations constitute a vague and variable quantity.

It was strange to find this little station with two or three men of the signal-corps away out here in the wilderness. Their post was supplied by mule pack-train from Fort Egbert, more than two hundred miles away, and they told me that only ten pounds out of every hundred that left Fort Egbert reached the Crossing, so self-limited is a pack-train through such country. We amused ourselves calculating just how much farther mules and men could go until they ate up _all_ they could carry.

The Tanana Crossing is a central spot for the Indians of this region. Two days' journey up the river was the village of the Tetlin Indians. Two days' journey into the mountain range were the Mantasta Indians. Two days' journey across towards the Yukon were the Ketchumstock Indians. Most of them would congregate at this spot for certain parts of the year, should we plant a mission there, and despite the picturesque situation of Lake Mansfield, it looked as if the Crossing were the best point for building.

[Sidenote: THE TANANA CROSSING]

Our route lay northeast, across country to Fortymile on the Yukon, two hundred and fifty miles away, along the trail for the greater part of the distance by which the mule train reached the Tanana Crossing. The first five miles was all up-hill, a long, stiff, steady climb to the crest of the mountain that rises just behind the Crossing. We had to take it slowly, with frequent stops, so steep was the grade, and every now and then we got tantalising glimpses through the timber of the scene that spread wider and wider below us. Bend after bend of the Tanana River unfolded itself; the Alaskan range gave peak after peak; there lay Lake Mansfield, deep in its amphitheatre of hills, with the Indian village at its head.

At last my impatience for the view that promised made me leave the boys (we still had Isaac's young men) and push on alone to the top. And it was indeed by far the noblest view of the winter, one of the grandest and most extensive panoramas I had ever seen in my life.

Perhaps three miles away, as the crow flies, from the river, and seventeen hundred and fifty feet above it, as the aneroid gave it, we were already on the watershed, and everywhere in the direction we were travelling the wide-flung draws and gullies of the Fortymile River stretched out, so clear and beautiful a display of the beginnings of a great drainage system that my attention was arrested, notwithstanding my eagerness for the sight that awaited my turning around. But it was upon turning around and looking in the direction from which we had come that the grandeur and sublimity entered into the scene. There was, indeed, no one great dominating feature in this prospect as in the view of Denali from the Rampart portage, but the whole background, bounding the vision completely, was one vast wall of lofty white peaks, stretching without a break for a hundred miles. Enormous cloud masses rose and fell about this barrier, now unfolding to reveal dark chasms and glittering glaciers, now enshrouding them again. In the middle distance the Tanana River wound and twisted its firm white line amidst broken patches of snow and timber far away to either hand, and, where glacial affluents discharged into it, were finer, threadlike lines that marked the many mouths. The thick spruce mantling the slope in the foreground gave a sombre contrast to the fields of snow, and the yellow March sunshine was poured over all the wide landscape save where the great clouds contended with the great mountains.

The boys had stopped to build a fire and brew some tea before leaving the timber, and I was glad of it, for it gave me the chance to gaze my fill upon the inspiring and fascinating scene in the pleasant warmth of the mountain top, with the thermometer at 30° in the shade and just 12° higher in the sunshine.

[Sidenote: A NOBLE VIEW]

How grateful I was for the clear bright day! What a disappointment it has been again and again to reach such an eminence and see--nothing! It was the most extensive view of the great Alaskan range I had ever secured--that long line of sharp peaks that stretches and broadens from the coast inland until it culminates in the highest point of the North American continent and then curves its way back to the coast again. Of course, what lay here within the vision was only a small part of one arm of the range; it stopped far short of Denali on the one hand and Mount Sanford on the other, though it included Mount Kimball and Mount Hayes; yet it was the most impressive sight of a mountain chain I had ever beheld. It was a sight to be glad and grateful for, to put high amongst one's joyful remembrances; and with this notable sight we bade farewell to the Tanana valley.

Down the hill we went into Fortymile water and into a rolling country crossed by the military mule trail. If the morning had been glorious the evening was full of penance. Long before night our feet were sore from slipping and sliding into those wretched mule tracks. One cannot take one's eyes from the trail for a moment, every footstep must be watched, and even then one is continually stumbling.

We were able, however, to rig our team with the double hitch that is so much more economical of power than the tandem hitch, whenever the width of the trail permits it. We now carry a convertible rig, so that on narrow trails or in deep snow we can string out the dogs one in front of the other, and when the trail is wide enough can hitch them side by side. "Seal," the Great Dane pup we got at the Salchaket, was a good and strong puller, but he had no coat and no sense. It is bad enough to have no coat in this country, but to have no coat and no sense is fatal--as he found. His feet were continually sore and he had to be specially provided for at night if it were at all cold--a dog utterly unsuited to Alaska.

Thirty miles of such going as has been described is tiring in the extreme, and when we reached the Lone Cabin, behold! fifteen Indians camped about it, for whom, when supper was done, followed two hours of teaching and the baptism of six children. I would have liked to have stayed a day with them, but if we were to spend Palm Sunday at Fortymile and Easter at Eagle as had been promised, the time remaining did no more than serve; and there was a large band of Indians to visit at Ketchumstock.

The next day took us into and across the Ketchumstock Flats, a wide basin surrounded by hills and drained by the Mosquito Fork of the Fortymile. The telegraph-line, supported on tripods against the summer yielding of the marshy soil, cuts straight across country. This basin and the hills around form one of the greatest caribou countries, perhaps, in the world. All day we had passed fragments of the long fences that were in use in times past by the Indians for driving the animals into convenient places for slaughter.

The annual migration of the vast herd that roams the section of Alaska between the Yukon and the Tanana Rivers swarms over this Flat and through these hills, and we were told at the Ketchumstock telegraph station by the signal-corps men that they estimated that upward of one hundred thousand animals crossed the Mosquito Fork the previous October.

[Sidenote: CARIBOU]

The big game of Alaska is not yet seriously diminished, though there was need for the legal protection that has of late years been given. It is probable that more caribou and young moose are killed every year by wolves than by hunters. Only in the neighbourhood of a considerable settlement is there danger of reckless and wasteful slaughter, and some attention is paid by game wardens to the markets of such places. The mountain-sheep stands in greater danger of extermination than either caribou or moose. Its meat, the most delicious mutton in the world, as it has been pronounced by epicures, brings a higher price than other wild meat, and it is easy to destroy a band completely. The sheep on the mountains of the Alaskan range nearest to Fairbanks have, it is said, been very greatly diminished, and that need not be wondered at when one sees sled load after sled load, aggregating several tons of meat, brought in at one shipment. The law protecting the sheep probably needs tightening up.

The big game is a great resource to all the people of the country, white and native. It is no small advantage to be able to take one's gun in the fall and go out in the valleys and kill a moose that will suffice for one man's meat almost the whole winter, or go into the hills and kill four or five caribou that will stock his larder equally well. The fresh, clean meat of the wilds has to most palates far finer flavour than any cold-storage meat that can be brought into the country; and, save at one or two centres of population and distribution, cold-storage meat is not available at all. Without its big game Alaska would be virtually uninhabitable. Therefore most white men are content that the necessary measures be taken to prevent the wasteful slaughter of the game; for the rights of the prospector and trapper and traveller, and the rights of the natives to kill at any time what is necessary for food, are explicitly reserved.

[Sidenote: THE KETCHUMSTOCK]

We reached the village and telegraph post of Ketchumstock for the night only to find all the natives gone hunting; but since they had gone in the direction of Chicken Creek, towards which we were travelling, we were able to catch up with them the next morning without going far out of our way. While we were pitching our tent near their encampment came two or three natives with dog teams, and as the dogs hesitated to pass our dogs, loose on the trail, a voluble string of curses in English fell from the Indian lips. Such is usually the first indication of contact with white men, and in this case it spoke of the proximity of the mining on Chicken Creek. To discover the women chewing tobacco was to add but another evidence of the sophistication of this tribe; a different people from Chief Isaac's tribe, different through many years' familiarity with the whites at these diggings. If the mission to be built at the Crossing tends to keep these Indians on the Tanana River and thus away from the demoralisation of the diggings, it will do them solid service.

In some way foul and profane language falls even more offensively from Indians than from whites; for the same reason, perhaps, that it sounds more offensive and shocking from children than from adults. Sometimes the Indian does not in the least understand the meaning of the words he uses; they are the first English words he ever heard and he hears them over and over again.

So here another day and a half was spent in instruction. There are some forty souls in this tribe and they have had teaching from time to time, though not in the last few years, at the mouths of missionaries from Yukon posts. Most of the adults had been baptized; I baptized sixteen children. One curious feature of my stay was the megaphonic recapitulation of the heads of the instruction, after each session, by an elderly Indian who stood out in the midst of the tents. What on earth this man, with his town-crier voice, was proclaiming at such length, we were at a loss to conjecture, and upon inquiry were informed: "Them women, not much sense; one time tell 'em, quick forget; two time tell 'em, maybe little remember." So when we stopped for dinner and for supper and for bed, each time this brazen-lunged spieler stood forth and reiterated the main points of the discourse "for the _hareem_," as Doughty would say, whose account of the attitude of the Arabs to their women often reminds me of the Alaskan Indians. It was interesting, but I should have preferred to edit the recapitulation.

When all was done for the day and we thought to go to bed came an Indian named "Bum-Eyed-Bob" (these white man's nicknames, however dreadful, are always accepted and used) for a long confabulation about the affairs of the tribe, and I gathered incidentally that gambling at the telegraph station had been the main diversion of the winter. It seems ungracious to insist so much upon the evil influence of the white men--we had been cordially received and entertained at that very place, and our money refused--but there is little doubt that the abandonment of the telegraph-line will be a good thing for these natives. Put two or three young men of no special intellectual resource or ambition down in a lonely spot like this, with no society at all save that of the natives and practically nothing to do, and there is a natural and almost inevitable trend to evil. To the exceptional man with the desire of promotion, with books, and all this leisure, it would be an admirable opportunity, but he would be quite an exceptional man who should rise altogether superior to the temptations to idleness and debauchery. One may have true and deep sympathy with these young men and yet be conscious of the harm they often bring about.

Ten miles or so from the encampment brought us to Chicken Creek, and from that point we took the Fortymile River. The direct trail to Eagle with its exasperating mule tracks was now left, and our journey was on the ice. But so warm was the weather that 16th of March that we were wet-foot all day, and within the space of eight hours that we were travelling we had snow, sleet, rain, and sunshine. Leaving the main river, we turned up Walker Fork and, after a few miles, leaving that, we turned up Jack Wade Creek and pursued it far up towards its head ere we reached the road-house for the night.

[Sidenote: THE FORTYMILE]

We were now on historic ground, so far as gold mining in Alaska is concerned. The "Fortymilers" bear the same pioneer relation to gold mining in the North that the "Fortyniners" bear to gold mining in California. Ever since 1886 placers have been worked in this district, and it still yields gold, though the output and the number of men are alike much reduced. It is interesting to talk with some of the original locators of this camp, who may yet be found here and there in the country, and to learn of the conditions in those early days when a steamboat came up the Yukon once in a season bringing such supplies and mail as the men received for the year. It was here that the problem of working frozen ground was first confronted and solved; here that the first "miner's law" was promulgated, the first "miners' meeting" dealt out justice. Your "old-timer" anywhere is commonly _laudator temporis acti_, but there is good reason to believe that these early, and certainly most adventurous, gold-miners, some of whom forced a way into the country when there were no routes of travel, and subsisted on its resources while they explored and prospected it, were men of a higher stamp than many who have come in since. The extent to which that early prospecting was carried is not generally known, for these men, after the manner of their kind, left no record behind them. There are few creek beds that give any promise at all in the whole of this vast country that have not had some holes sunk in them. Even in districts so remote as the Koyukuk, signs of old prospecting are encountered. When a stampede took place to the Red Mountain or Indian River country of the middle Koyukuk in 1911-12, I was told that there was not a creek in the camp that did not show signs of having been prospected long before, although it had passed altogether out of knowledge that this particular region had ever been visited by prospectors.

[Sidenote: "SNIPING ON THE BARS"]

As the Fortymile is the oldest gold camp in the North, some of its trail making is of the best in Alaska. In particular the trail from the head of Jack Wade Creek down into Steel Creek reminded one of the Alpine roads in its bold, not to say daring, engineering. It drops from bench to bench in great sweeping curves always with a practicable grade, and must descend nigh a thousand feet in a couple of miles. At the mouth of Steel Creek we are on the Fortymile River again, having saved a day's journey by this traverse. And here, on the Fortymile, we passed several men "sniping on the bars," as the very first Alaskan gold-miners did on this same river, and probably on these same bars, twenty-five years ago. One hand moved the "rocker" to and fro and the other poured water into it with the "long Tom"; so was the gold washed out of the gravel taken from just below the ice. It was interesting to see this primitive method still in practice and to learn from the men that they were making "better than wages."

The Fortymile is a very picturesque but most tortuous river. In one place, called appropriately "The Kink," I was able to clamber over a ridge of rocks and reach another bend of the river in six or seven minutes, and then had to wait twenty-five minutes for the dog team, going at a good clip, to come around to me. At length we reached the spot where a vista cut through the timber that clothes both banks, marked the 141st meridian, the international boundary, and passed out of Alaska into British territory. A few miles more brought us to Moose Creek, where a little Canadian custom-house is situated, and there we spent the night.

The next day we reached the Yukon; passing gold dredges laid up for the winter and other signs of still-persisting mining activity, going through the narrow wild cañon of the Fortymile, and so to the little town at its mouth of the same name, where there is a mission of the Church of England and a post of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. I never come into contact with this admirable body of men without wishing that we had a similar body charged with the enforcement of the law in Alaska.

Sunday was spent there officiating for the layman in charge of the mission and in interesting talk with the sergeant of police about the annual winter journey from Dawson to Fort McPherson on the McKenzie, from which he had just returned with a detail of men. The next winter he and his detail lost their way and starved and froze to death on the same journey.

Here at one time was a flourishing Indian mission and school, and here Bishop Bompas, the true "Apostle of the North," lived for some time. The story of this man's forty-five years' single-eyed devotion to the Indians of the Yukon and McKenzie Rivers is one of the brave chapters of missionary history. But the Church of England "does not advertise." Writers about Alaska, even writers about Alaskan missions, carefully collect all the data of the early Russian missions on the coast, but ignore altogether the equally influential and lasting work done along five hundred miles of what is now the American Yukon by the missionary clergy of the English Church before and after the Purchase. Bishop Bompas identified himself so closely with the natives as to become almost one of them in the eyes of the white men, and many curious stories linger amongst the old-timers as to his habits and appearance. It is interesting to know that the bishop was a son of that Sergeant Bompas of the English bar from whom Dickens drew the character of Sergeant Buzfuz, counsel for the plaintiff in the famous suit of "Bardell v. Pickwick."

But the natives have all left Fortymile, some to the large village of Moosehide just below Dawson, some to Eagle. The town, too, like all the upper Yukon towns, is much decayed; the custom-house, the police barracks, the company's store, the road-house, and the little mission embracing nearly all its activities and housing nearly all its population.

There is always some feeling of satisfaction in reaching the broad highway of the Yukon again, even though rough ice make bad going and one of the most notorious, dirty road-houses in the North hold its menace over one all day and amply fulfil it at night. There is indeed so little travel on the river now that it does not pay any one to keep a road-house save as incidental to a steamboat wood camp and summer fishing station. Two short days' travel brought us across the international boundary again to Eagle in Alaska, where at that time Fort Egbert was garrisoned with two companies of soldiers.

[Sidenote: EAGLE]

Eagle and Fort Egbert together, for the one begins where the other ends, have perhaps the finest and most commanding situation of any settlement on the Yukon River. The mountains rise with dignity just across the water and break pleasingly into the valley of Eagle Creek, a few miles up-stream. To the rear of the town an inconsiderable flat does but give space and setting before the mountains rise again; while just below the military post stands the bold and lofty bluff called the Eagle Rock, with Mission Creek winding into the Yukon at its foot. Robert Louis Stevenson said that Edinburgh has the finest situation of any capital in Europe and pays for it by having the worst climate of any city in the world. It would not be just to paraphrase this description with regard to Eagle, for while it is unsurpassed on the Yukon for site, there are spots on that river where still more disagreeable weather prevails; yet it cannot be denied that the position of the place subjects it to exceedingly bitter winds, or that the valley of Eagle Creek, which gives pleasing variety to the prospect, acts also as a channel to convey the full force of the blast. Climate everywhere is a very local thing; topographical considerations often altogether outweigh geographical; and nowhere is this truer than in Alaska. Commanding sites are necessarily exposed sites, and he who would dwell in comfort must build in seclusion.

A native village of eighty or ninety souls, with its church and school, lies three miles up-stream from the town, so that the relative positions of village, town, and military post exactly duplicate those at Tanana. It must at once be stated, however, that this situation has not led to anything like the demoralisation amongst the natives at Eagle that thrusts itself into notice at the other place. Whether it were the longer training in Christian morals that lay behind these people, or better hap in the matter of post commanders (certainly there was never such scandalous irregularity and indifference at Egbert as marked one administration at Gibbon), or the vigilance during a number of consecutive years of an especially active deputy marshal and the wisdom and concern through an even longer period of a commissioner much above the common stamp,[F] or all these causes combined, the natives at Eagle have not suffered from the proximity of soldiers and civilians in the same measure as the natives at Tanana. Drunkenness and debauchery there have been again and again, but they have been severely checked and restrained by both the civil and military authorities.

It was pleasant during Holy Week and Easter to see so many of the enlisted men of the garrison taking part in the services in town; pleasant, especially, to see officers and men singing together in the choir, a tribute to the tact and zeal of the earnest layman in charge of this mission; and it was pleasant at the village to hear the native liturgy again and to see old men and women following the lessons in the native Bible.

[Sidenote: FORT EGBERT ABANDONED]

Fort Egbert is abandoned now, another addition to the melancholy of the Yukon; its extensive buildings, barracks, and officers' quarters, post-exchange and commissariat, hospital, sawmill, and artisans' shops, a spacious, complete gymnasium only recently built, are all vacant and deserted. In the yards lie three thousand cords of dry wood, a year's supply; cut on the hills, awaiting the expected annual contracts, lie as many more--six thousand cords of wood left to rot! Some of us perverse "conservationists," upon whom the unanimous Alaskan press delights to pour scorn, lament the trees more than the troops.

One may write thus and yet have many pleasant personal associations with the post and those who have lived there. A large and varied military acquaintanceship is acquired by regular visits to these Alaskan forts, for the whole command changes every two years. If one stayed in the country long enough one would get to know the whole United States army, as regiment after regiment spent its brief term of "foreign service" in the North. Gazing upon the empty quarters, the occasion of my first visit came back vividly, when there was diphtheria amongst the natives at Circle and none to cope with it save the missionary nurse. The civil codes containing no provision for quarantine, the United States commissioner at Circle could not help, and the Indians grew restive and rebellious, and when Christmas came broke through the restrictions completely. Even some of the whites of the place defied her prohibition and attended native dances and encouraged the Indians in their self-willed folly.

[Sidenote: SOME ARMY OFFICERS]

So I went up the week's journey to Eagle and sought assistance from Major Plummer, the officer commanding the post, who, after telegraphing to Washington, promptly despatched a hospital steward and a couple of soldiers, and placed them entirely at the nurse's disposal. "I don't think we have any law for it," he said, "but we'll bluff it out." And bluff it out they did very effectively until the disease was stamped out, and then they thoroughly disinfected and whitewashed every cabin that had been occupied by the sick. I used to tell that nurse that, so far as I knew, she was the only woman who had ever had command of United States soldiers.

Then there was Captain Langdon of the same regiment, the scholarly soldier, with the account of every great campaign in history at his fingers' ends. I recollect one evening, when we had been talking of the Peninsular War, I ventured to spring on him the ancient schoolboy conundrum: "What lines are those, the most famous ever made by an Englishman, yet that are never quoted?" "Lines?" said he, "lines?" though I don't think he had ever heard the jest. "They must be the Lines of Torres Vedras." How well I remember the musical box that used to arouse me at seven in the morning, however late we had sat talking the night before!

And that young lieutenant, of wealthy New York people, just arrived from West Point, who was sent by another commandant to report upon the condition of the natives at the village and who came back and reported the whole population in utter destitution and recommended the issue of free rations to them all! As a matter of fact, during the administration of this commanding officer, some sixteen or eighteen persons were put upon the list for gratuitous grub, and it took a written protest to get them off. For no one who has the welfare of the natives at heart can tolerate the notion of making them paupers; these who have always fended abundantly for themselves, and can entirely do so yet. With free rations there would be no more hunting, no more trapping, no more fishing; and a hardy, self-supporting race would sink at once to sloth and beggary and forget all that made men of them. If it were designed to destroy the Indian at a blow, here is an easy way to do it. Yet there are some, obsessed with the craze about what is called education, regarding it as an end in itself and not as a means to any end, who recommend this pauperising because it would permit the execution of a compulsory school-attendance law. Or is it a personal delusion of mine that esteems an honest, industrious, self-supporting Indian who cannot read and write English above one who can read and write English--and can do nothing else--and so separates me from many who are working amongst the natives?

These days at the end of March, when the sun shines more than twelve hours in the twenty-four, are too long for the ordinary winter day's twenty-five miles or so, and yet not quite long enough, even if man and dogs could stand it, to double the stage; so that there is much daylight leisure at road-houses. One grows anxious, after four months on the trail, to be done with it; to draw as quickly as may be to one's "thawing-out" place. One even becomes a little impatient of the continual dog talk and mining talk of the road-houses, to which one has listened all the winter. On the other hand, the travelling is very pleasant and the going usually very good, so that one may often ride on the sled for long stretches.

By river and portage--one portage that comes so finely down to the Yukon from a bench that there is pleasure in anticipating the view it affords--in two days we reached the Nation road-house, just below the mouth of the Nation River, a name that has always puzzled me. Here all night long the wolves howling around the carcass of a horse kept our dogs awake, and the whimpering of the dogs kept us awake. The country beyond the Yukon to the northeast, the large area included between the Yukon and the Porcupine, into which the Nation River offers passage, is one of the wildest and least known portions of Alaska, abounding in game and beasts of prey.

[Sidenote: THE GLARE OF THE SUN]

At the Charley River we visited the native village and held service and instruction as well as inadequate interpretation permitted. Round Coal Creek and Woodchopper Creek the scenery becomes bold and attractive, but we found, as usual, that as we pushed farther and farther down the river the snow was deeper and the going not so good. The sun grows very bright upon the snow these days of late March and early April. Even through heavily tinted glasses it inflames the eyes more or less, and a couple of hours without protection would bring snow-blindness. Bright days at this season are the only days in all the year when the camera shutter may be used at its full speed. When the sun comes out after a flurry of new snow in April, the light is many times greater than in midsummer.

We reached Circle in a day and a half from Woodchopper Creek, in time to spend Sunday there. Circle had not changed much in the five years that had elapsed since the first visit to it mentioned in these pages. The slender trellis of the wireless telegraph had added a prominent feature to its river bank; a few more empty cabins had been torn down for fire-wood. Here it was necessary to shoot the Great Dane pup we got at the Salchaket. His feet were still very sore and he quite useless for the next winter, while Doc was returned to me from Fairbanks, not much the worse for his severe frost-bite. Indian after Indian begged for the dog, but I had more regard for him than to turn him over to the tender mercies of an Indian. There are exceptional Indians, but for my