Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled
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Title: Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled
Author: Hudson Stuck
Release date: October 12, 2007 [eBook #22965]
Language: English
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TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH A DOG SLED
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE ASCENT OF DENALI (MT. McKINLEY).
A narrative of the first complete ascent of THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN IN
NORTH AMERICA and the most northerly high mountain in the world.
Profusely illustrated. 8vo. $1.75 _net_
"Few climbers have had such good fortune on a
supreme occasion, but few have better deserved
it."
--_London Spectator._
[Illustration: Handwritten: Hudson Stuck.]
TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH
A DOG SLED
A NARRATIVE OF WINTER TRAVEL IN INTERIOR ALASKA
BY
HUDSON STUCK, D.D., F.R.G.S.
ARCHDEACON OF THE YUKON
AUTHOR OF "THE ASCENT OF DENALI (MOUNT McKINLEY)"
ILLUSTRATED
SECOND EDITION
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1916
COPYRIGHT, 1914, 1916, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
TO
GRAFTON BURKE, M.D.
AND
EDGAR WEBB LOOMIS, M.D.
PUPILS, COMRADES, COLLEAGUES,
COMPANIONS ON SOME OF THESE JOURNEYS,
ALWAYS DEAR FRIENDS,
AND TO
THE MOTHER OF THE THREE OF US
SEWANEE
THE COLLEGE ON THE MOUNTAIN-TOP
WHERE THE OLD IDEALS ARE STILL
UNFLINCHINGLY MAINTAINED
THIS VOLUME
IS
AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED
BY
THE AUTHOR
PREFACE
THIS volume deals with a series of journeys taken with a dog team over
the winter trails in the interior of Alaska. The title might have
claimed fourteen or fifteen thousand miles instead of ten, for the book
was projected and the title adopted some years ago, and the journeys
have continued. But ten thousand is a good round titular number, and is
none the worse for being well within the mark.
So far as mere distance is concerned, anyway, there is nothing
noteworthy in this record. There are many men in Alaska who have done
much more. A mail-carrier on one of the longer dog routes will cover
four thousand miles in a winter, while the writer's average is less than
two thousand. But his sled has gone far off the beaten track, across the
arctic wilderness, into many remote corners; wherever, indeed, white men
or natives were to be found in all the great interior.
These journeys were connected primarily with the administration of the
extensive work of the Episcopal Church in the interior of Alaska, under
the bishop of the diocese; but that feature of them has been fully set
forth from time to time in the church publications, and finds only
incidental reference here.
It is a great, wild country, little known save along accustomed routes
of travel; a country with a beauty and a fascination all its own; mere
arctic wilderness, indeed, and nine tenths of it probably destined
always to remain such, yet full of interest and charm.
Common opinion "outside" about Alaska seems to be veering from the view
that it is a land of perpetual snow and ice to the other extreme of
holding it to be a "world's treasure-house" of mineral wealth and
agricultural possibility. The world's treasure is deposited in many
houses, and Alaska has its share; its mineral wealth is very great, and
"hidden doors of opulence" may open at any time, but its agricultural
possibilities, in the ordinary sense in which the phrase is used, are
confined to very small areas in proportion to the enormous whole, and in
very limited degree.
It is no new thing for those who would build railways to write in
high-flown style about the regions they would penetrate, and, indeed, to
speak of "millions of acres waiting for the plough" is not necessarily a
misrepresentation; they are waiting. Nor is it altogether unnatural that
professional agricultural experimenters at the stations established by
the government should make the most of their experiments. When Dean
Stanley spoke disdainfully of dogma, Lord Beaconsfield replied; "Ah! but
you must always remember, no dogmas, no deans."
Besides the physical attractions of this country, it has a gentle
aboriginal population that arouses in many ways the respect and the
sympathy of all kindly people; and it has some of the hardiest and most
adventurous white men in the world. The reader will come into contact
with both in these pages.
So much for the book's scope; a word of its limitations. It is confined
to the interior of Alaska; confined in the main to the great valley of
the Yukon and its tributaries; being a record of sled journeys, it is
confined to the winter.
There is no man living who knows the whole of Alaska or who has any
right to speak about the whole of Alaska. Bishop Rowe knows more about
Alaska, in all probability, than any other living man, and there are
large areas of the country in which he has never set foot. There is
probably no man living, save Bishop Rowe, who has visited even the
localities of all the missions of the Episcopal Church in Alaska. If one
were to travel continuously for a whole year, using the most expeditious
means at his command, and not wasting a day anywhere, it is doubtful
whether, summer and winter, by sea and land, squeezing the last mile out
of the seasons, travelling on the "last ice" and the "first water," he
could even touch at all the mission stations. So, when a man from Nome
speaks of Alaska he means his part of Alaska, the Seward Peninsula. When
a man from Valdez or Cordova speaks of Alaska he means the Prince
William Sound country. When a man from Juneau speaks of Alaska he means
the southeastern coast. Alaska is not one country but many, with
different climates, different resources, different problems, different
populations, different interests; and what is true of one part of it is
often grotesquely untrue of other parts. This is the reason why so many
contradictory things have been written about the country. Not only do
these various parts of Alaska differ radically from one another, but
they are separated from one another by almost insuperable natural
obstacles, so that they are in reality different countries.
When Alaska is spoken of in this book the interior is meant, in which
the writer has travelled almost continuously for the past eight years.
The Seward Peninsula is the only other part of the country that the book
touches. And as regards summer travel and the summer aspect of the
country, there is material for another book should the reception of this
one warrant its preparation.
* * * * *
The problems of the civil government of the country will be found
touched upon somewhat freely as they rise from time to time in the
course of these journeys, and some faint hope is entertained that
drawing attention to evils may hasten a remedy.
Alaska is not now, and never has been, a lawless country in the old,
Wild Western sense of unpunished homicides and crimes of violence. It
has been, on the whole, singularly free from bloodshed--a record due in
no small part to the fact that it is not the custom of the country to
carry pistols, for which again there is climatic and geographic reason;
due also in part to the very peaceable and even timid character of its
native people.
But as regards the stringent laws enacted by Congress for the protection
of these native people, and especially in the essential particular of
protecting them from the fatal effects of intoxicating liquor, the
country is not law-abiding, for these laws are virtually a dead letter.
Justices of the peace who must live wholly upon fees in regions where
fees will not furnish a living, and United States deputy marshals
appointed for political reasons, constitute a very feeble staff against
law-breakers. When it is remembered that on the whole fifteen hundred
miles of the American Yukon there are but six of these deputy marshals,
and that these six men, with another five or six on the tributary
rivers, form all the police of the country, it will be seen that
Congress must do something more than pass stringent laws if those laws
are to be of any effect.
A body of stipendiary magistrates, a police force wholly removed from
politics and modelled somewhat upon the Canadian Northwest Mounted
Police--these are two of the great needs of the country if the liquor
laws are to be enforced and the native people are to survive.
That the danger of the extermination of the natives is a real one all
vital statistics kept at Yukon River points in the last five years show,
and that there are powerful influences in the country opposed to the
execution of the liquor laws some recent trials at Fairbanks would leave
no room for doubt if there had been any room before. Indeed, at this
writing, when the pages of this book are closed and there remains no
place save the preface where the matter can be referred to, an impudent
attempt is on foot, with large commercial backing, to secure the
removal of a zealous and fearless United States district attorney, who
has been too active in prosecuting liquor-peddlers to suit the wholesale
dealers in liquor.
There are, of course, those who view with perfect equanimity the
destruction of the natives that is now going on, and look forward with
complacency to the time when the Alaskan Indian shall have ceased to
exist. But to men of thought and feeling such cynicism is abhorrent, and
the duty of the government towards its simple and kindly wards is clear.
A measure of real protection must be given the native communities
against the low-down whites who seek to intrude into them and build
habitations for convenient resort upon occasions of drunkenness and
debauchery, and some adequate machinery set up for suppressing the
contemptible traffic in adulterated spirits they subsist largely upon.
The licensed liquor-dealers do not themselves sell to Indians, but they
notoriously sell to men who notoriously peddle to Indians, and the
suppression of this illicit commerce would materially reduce the total
sales of liquor.
Some measure of protection, one thinks, must also be afforded against a
predatory class of Indian traders, the back rooms of whose stores are
often barrooms, gambling-dens, and houses of assignation, and
headquarters and harbourage for the white degenerates--even if the
government go the length of setting up co-operative Indian stores in the
interior, as has been done in some places on the coast. This last is a
matter in which the missions are helpless, for there is no wise
combination of religion and trade.
So this book goes forth with a plea in the front of it, which will find
incidental support and expression throughout it, for the natives of
interior Alaska, that they be not wantonly destroyed off the face of the
earth.
HUDSON STUCK.
NEW YORK,
_March, 1914._
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
IT is gratifying to know that a second edition of this book has been
called for and it is interesting to write another preface; it even
proved interesting to do what was set about most reluctantly--the
reading of the book over again after entire avoidance of it for two
years. It was necessary to do it, though one shrank from it, and it is
interesting to know that after this comparatively long and complete
detachment I find little to add and less to correct. Upon a complete
rereading I am content to let the book stand, with two or three
footnotes thrown in, and the correction of the one printer's error it
contained from cover to cover--an error that a score of kind
correspondents pointed out, for it was conspicuous in the title of a
picture.
The tendency to which attention is drawn in the original preface, the
pendulum swing from the old notion that Alaska is a land of polar bears
and icebergs to the new notion that it is a "world's treasure-house of
mineral wealth and unbounded agricultural possibilities" is yet more
marked than it was two years ago. The beginning of the building of the
government railway has given new impetus to the "boosting" writers for
magazines and newspapers. Quite recently it was stated in one such
publication that we need not worry about the destruction of our
forests, for had we not the inexhaustible timber resources of the
interior of Alaska to draw upon?
And in the North itself--though no one there would write about the
timber resources of the interior--in certain shrill journals the man who
does not confidently expect to see the Yukon Flats waving with golden
grain and "the lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea" of the Koyukuk and
the Chandalar is regarded as a traitor to his country and his God. But
it must be remembered that there are a number of journalists in Alaska
who know nothing of the country outside their respective towns, and that
"boosting" grows shriller, as Eugene Field found red paint grow redder,
"the further out West one goes." When they get a newspaper at Cape
Prince of Wales what a clarion it will be!
Truth, however, is not more wont than of old to be found in extremes,
and the author of this book believes that those who desire a sober view
of the country it deals with will find it herein. He claims no more than
that he has had adequate opportunity of forming his opinions and that he
has a right to their expression. It is now twelve years since he began
almost constant travelling, winter and summer, in the interior of
Alaska. He has described nothing that he has not seen; ventured no
judgment that he has not well digested, and has nothing to retract or
even modify; but he would repeat and emphasise a caution of the original
preface. Alaska is not one country but many countries, and so widely do
they differ from one another in almost every respect that no general
statements about Alaska can be true. The present author's knowledge of
the territory is confined in the main to the interior--to the valley of
the Yukon and its tributary rivers, which make up one of the world's
great waterways--and nothing of his writing applies, with his authority,
to other parts.
The matter of the preservation of the native peoples still presses, and
is nearer to the author's heart than any other matter whatever. The
United States Congress, which voted thirty-five millions of dollars for
the government railroad, strikes out year by year the modest additional
score or two of thousands that year by year the Bureau of Education asks
for the establishment of hospital work amongst the Indians of the
interior, and the preventable mortality continues to be very great.
In the last two years, largely as the result of the untiring efforts of
Bishop Rowe on behalf of the natives, two modern, well-equipped
hospitals have been built, with money that he and his clergy have
gathered, on the Yukon River, one at Fort Yukon and one at Tanana; and
these are the only places of any kind, on nearly a thousand miles of the
river, where sick or injured Indians may be received and cared for.
Amongst men of thought and feeling there is noticeable revulsion from
the supercilious attitude that used not to be uncommon toward the little
peoples of the world. It begins to be recognised that it is quite
possible that even the smallest of the little peoples may have some
contribution to make to the welfare and progress of the human race. What
is the Boy Scout movement that is sweeping the country, to the enormous
benefit of the rising generation, but the incorporating into the nurture
of our youth of the things that were the nurture of the Indian youth;
that are a large part of the nurture of the Alaskan Indian youth to-day?
And the camp-fire clubs and woodcraft associations and the whole trend
to the life of the open recognise that the Indian had developed a
technique of wilderness life deserving of preservation for its value to
the white man. While as for the Esquimaux, the author never sees the
extraordinary prevalence amongst them of the art of graphic delineation
displayed in bold etchings of incidents of the chase upon their
implements and weapons (though not upon the articles made by the dozen
for the curio-venders at Nome and Saint Michael) without dreaming that
some day an artist will come from out that singular and most interesting
people who shall teach the world something new about art.
Whatever the future may hold for the interior of Alaska, the author is
convinced that its population will derive very largely from the present
native stocks, and this alone would justify any efforts to prevent
further inroads upon their health and vitality.
April, 1916.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE vii
I. FAIRBANKS TO THE CHANDALAR THROUGH CIRCLE
CITY AND FORT YUKON 3
II. CHANDALAR VILLAGE TO BETTLES, COLDFOOT, AND
THE KOYUKUK 34
III. BETTLES TO THE PACIFIC--THE ALATNA, KOBUK
PORTAGE, KOBUK VILLAGE, KOTZEBUE SOUND 63
IV. THE SEWARD PENINSULA--CANDLE CREEK, COUNCIL,
AND NOME 102
V. NOME TO FAIRBANKS--NORTON SOUND--THE KALTAG
PORTAGE--NULATO--UP THE YUKON TO TANANA 125
VI. THE "FIRST ICE"--AN AUTUMN ADVENTURE ON THE
KOYUKUK 157
VII. THE KOYUKUK TO THE YUKON AND TO TANANA--CHRISTMAS
HOLIDAYS AT SAINT JOHN'S-IN-THE-WILDERNESS 188
VIII. UP THE YUKON TO RAMPART AND ACROSS COUNTRY
TO THE TANANA--ALASKAN AGRICULTURE--THE
GOOD DOG NANOOK--MISS FARTHING'S BOYS AT
NENANA--CHENA AND FAIRBANKS 219
IX. TANANA CROSSING TO FORTYMILE AND DOWN THE
YUKON--A PATRIARCHAL CHIEF--SWARMING
CARIBOU--EAGLE AND FORT EGBERT--CIRCLE
CITY AND FORT YUKON 251
X. FROM THE TANANA RIVER TO THE KUSKOKWIM--THENCE
TO THE IDITAROD MINING CAMP--THENCE
TO THE YUKON, AND UP THAT RIVER
TO FORT YUKON 294
XI. THE NATIVES OF ALASKA 348
XII. PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE ARCTIC 371
XIII. THE NORTHERN LIGHTS 380
XIV. THE ALASKAN DOGS 392
INDEX 413
ILLUSTRATIONS
Hudson Stuck (_photogravure_) _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Sunrise on the Chandalar-Koyukuk portage 36
Coldfoot on the Koyukuk 37
The upper Koyukuk 50
The barren shores of Kotzebue Sound 51
Gold-mining at Nome 122
Pulling the _Pelican_ out with a "Spanish windlass" 123
The start over the "first ice" 164
"Rough going" 165
Arthur and Doctor Burke 178
Saint John's-in-the-Wilderness, Allakaket, Koyukuk River 179
The double interpretation at the Allakaket 186
The wind-swept Yukon within the ramparts 187
A pleasant woodland trail 256
An Alaskan chief and his henchman 257
The Tanana crossing 270
Good going on the Yukon 271
"A portage that comes so finely down to the Yukon that
there is pleasure in anticipating the view it affords" 290
Fort Yukon 291
The rough breaking in of Doctor Loomis, camped on the mail
trail at 50 deg. below zero, unable to reach a road-house for
the deep snow 296
Esquimaux of the upper Kuskokwim 297
"The 'summit' is high above timber-line and the trail
pursues a hogback ridge for a mile and a half at the summit
level" 324
A street in Iditarod City 325
The end of the portage trail 334
Rough ice on the Yukon 335
A docile folk, eager for instruction 350
The mission type 351
Wild and shy 351
The native communicant 360
Raw material 360
An Esquimau youth 361
A half-breed Indian 361
An aged couple 366
Football at the Allakaket, exposure 1-1000 second, April,
after a new light snowfall 367
The sun dogs 388
"Tan," of mixed breed 389
"Muk," a pure malamute 389
Map of the interior of Alaska showing journeys described
in this book _At end of volume_
TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH A DOG SLED
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Three fundamental facts are to be borne constantly in mind by those who
would form any intelligent conception of the Territory of Alaska.
(1) Its area of approximately 590,000 square miles makes it two and a
half times as large as the State of Texas.
(2) But it is not, like Texas, one homogeneous body of land; it is not,
in any geographical sense, one country at all. "Sweeping in a great arc
over sixteen degrees of latitude and fifty-eight degrees of longitude,"
it is no less than four, and some might say five, different countries,
differing from one another in almost every way that one country can
differ from another: in climate, in population, in resources, in
requirements; and--
(3) These different countries are not merely different from one another,
they are _separated_ from one another by formidable natural barriers.
TEN THOUSAND MILES WITH A DOG SLED
CHAPTER I
FAIRBANKS TO THE CHANDALAR THROUGH CIRCLE CITY AND FORT YUKON
THE plan for the winter journey of 1905-6 (my second winter on the
trail) was an ambitious one, for it contemplated a visit to Point Hope,
on the shore of the Arctic Ocean between Kotzebue Sound and Point
Barrow, and a return to Fairbanks. In the summer such a journey would be
practicable only by water: down the Tanana to the Yukon, down the Yukon
to its mouth, and then through the straits of Bering and along the
Arctic coast; in the winter it is possible to make the journey across
country. A desire to visit our most northerly and most inaccessible
mission in Alaska and a desire to become acquainted with general
conditions in the wide country north of the Yukon were equal factors in
the planning of a journey which would carry me through three and a half
degrees of latitude and no less than eighteen degrees of longitude.
The course of winter travel in Alaska follows the frozen waterways so
far as they lead in the general direction desired, leaves them to cross
mountain ranges and divides at the most favourable points, and drops
down into the streams again so soon as streams are available. The
country is notably well watered and the waterways are the natural
highways. The more frequented routes gradually cut out the serpentine
bends of the rivers by land trails, but in the wilder parts of the
country travel sticks to the ice.
Our course, therefore, lay up the Chatanika River and one of its
tributaries until the Tanana-Yukon watershed was reached; then through
the mountains, crossing two steep summits to the Yukon slope, and down
that slope by convenient streams to the Yukon River at Circle City.
[Sidenote: THE GOLD TRAIN]
We set out on the 27th of November with six dogs and a "basket" sled and
about five hundred pounds' weight of load, including tent and stove,
bedding, clothes for the winter, grub box and its equipment, and dog
feed. The dogs were those that I had used the previous winter, with one
exception. The leader had come home lame from the fish camp where he had
been boarded during the summer, and, despite all attentions, the
lameness had persisted; so he must be left behind, and there was much
difficulty in securing another leader. A recent stampede to a new mining
district had advanced the price of dogs and gathered up all the good
ones, so it was necessary to hunt all over Fairbanks and pay a hundred
dollars for a dog that proved very indifferent, after all. "Jimmy" was a
handsome beast, the handsomest I ever owned and the costliest, but, as I
learned later from one who knew his history, had "travelled on his
looks all his life." He earned the name of "Jimmy the Fake."
Midway to Cleary "City," on the chief gold-producing creek of the
district, our first day's run, we encountered the gold train. For some
time previous a lone highwayman had robbed solitary miners on their way
to Fairbanks with gold-dust, and now a posse was organised that went the
rounds of the creeks and gathered up the dust and bore it on mule-back
to the bank, escorted by half a dozen armed and mounted men. Sawed-off
shotguns were the favourite weapons, and one judged them deadly enough
at short range. The heavy "pokes" galled the animals' backs, however
they might be slung, and the little procession wound slowly along, a man
ahead, a man behind, and four clustered round the treasure.
These raw, temporary mining towns are much alike the world over, one
supposes, though perhaps a little worse up here in the far north. It was
late at night when we reached the place, but saloon and dance-hall were
ablaze with light and loud with the raucity of phonographs and the
stamping of feet. Everything was "wide open," and there was not even the
thinnest veneer of respectability. Drinking and gambling and dancing go
on all night long. Drunken men reel out upon the snow; painted faces
leer over muslin curtains as one passes by. Without any government,
without any pretence of municipal organisation, there is no co-operation
for public enterprise. There are no streets, there are no sidewalks
save such as a man may choose to lay in front of his own premises, and
the simplest sanitary precautions are entirely neglected. Nothing but
the cold climate of the north prevents epidemic disease from sweeping
through these places. They rise in a few days wherever gold is found in
quantities, they flourish as the production increases, decline with its
decline, and are left gaunt, dark, and abandoned so soon as the diggings
are exhausted.
The next day we were on the Chatanika River, to which Cleary Creek is
tributary, and were immediately confronted with one of the main troubles
and difficulties of winter travel in this and, as may be supposed, in
any arctic or subarctic country--overflow water.
[Sidenote: OVERFLOW WATER AND ICE]
In the lesser rivers, where deep pools alternate with swift shallows,
the stream freezes solid to the bottom upon the shoals and riffles.
Since the subterranean fountains that supply the river do not cease to
discharge their waters in the winter, however cold it may be, there
comes presently an increasing pressure under the ice above such a
barrier. The pent-up water is strong enough to heave the ice into mounds
and at last to break forth, spreading itself far along the frozen
surface of the river. At times it may be seen gushing out like an
artesian well, rising three or four feet above the surface of the ice,
until the pressure is relieved. Sometimes for many miles at a stretch
the whole river will be covered with a succession of such overflows,
from two or three inches deep to eight or ten, or even twelve; some just
bursting forth, some partially frozen, some resolved into solid "glare"
ice. Thus the surface of the river is continually renewed the whole
winter through, and a section of the ice crust in the spring would show
a series of laminations; here ice upon ice, there ice upon
half-incorporated snow, that mark the successive inundations.
This explanation has been given at length because of the large part that
the phenomenon plays in the difficulty and danger of winter travel, and
because it seems hard to make those who are not familiar with it
understand it. At first sight it would seem that after a week or ten
days of fifty-below-zero weather, for instance, all water everywhere
would be frozen into quiescence for the rest of the winter. Throw a
bucket of water into the air, and it is frozen solid as soon as it
reaches the ground. There would be no more trouble, one would think,
with water. Yet some of the worst trouble the traveller has with
overflow water is during very cold weather, and it is then, of course,
that there is the greatest danger of frost-bite in getting one's feet
wet. Water-proof footwear, therefore, becomes one of the "musher's"
great concerns and difficulties. The best water-proof footwear is the
Esquimau mukluk, not easily obtainable in the interior of Alaska, but
the mukluk is an inconvenient footwear to put snow-shoes on. Rubber
boots or shoes of any kind are most uncomfortable things to travel in.
Nothing equals the moccasin on the trail, nothing is so good to
snow-shoe in. The well-equipped traveller has moccasins for dry trails
and mukluks for wet trails--and even then may sometimes get his feet
wet. Nor are his own feet his only consideration; his dogs' feet are,
collectively, as important as his own. When the dog comes out of water
into snow again the snow collects and freezes between the toes, and if
not removed will soon cause a sore and lameness. Then a dog moccasin
must be put on and the foot continually nursed and doctored. When
several dogs of a team are thus affected, it may be with several feet
each, the labour and trouble of travel are greatly increased.
So, whenever his dogs have been through water, the careful musher will
stop and go all down the line, cleaning out the ice and snow from their
feet with his fingers. Four interdigital spaces per foot make sixteen
per dog, and with a team of six dogs that means ninety-six several
operations with the bare hand (if it be done effectually) every time the
team gets into an overflow. The dogs will do it for themselves if they
are given time, tearing out the lumps of ice with their teeth; but,
inasmuch as they usually feel conscientiously obliged to eat each lump
as they pull it out, it takes much longer, and in a short daylight there
is little time to spare if the day's march is to be made.
[Sidenote: "OVERFLOW" ICE]
We found overflow almost as soon as we reached the Chatanika River, and
in one form or another we encountered it during all the two days and a
half that we were pursuing the river's windings. At times it was covered
with a sheet of new ice that would support the dogs but would not
support the sled, so that the dogs were travelling on one level and the
sled on another, and a man had to walk along in the water between the
dogs and the sled for several hundred yards at a time, breaking down the
overflow ice with his feet.
At other times the thin sheets of overflow ice would sway and bend as
the sled passed quickly over them in a way that gives to ice in such
condition its Alaskan name of "rubber-ice," while for the fifteen or
twenty miles of McManus Creek, the headwaters of the Chatanika, we had
continuous stretches of fine glare ice with enough frost crystals upon
it from condensing moisture to give a "tooth" to the dogs' feet, just as
varnish on a photographic negative gives tooth to the retouching pencil.
Perfectly smooth ice is a very difficult surface for dogs to pass over;
glare ice slightly roughened by frost deposit makes splendid, fast
going.
Eighty-five miles or so from Fairbanks, and just about half-way to
Circle, the watercourse is left and the first summit is the
"Twelve-Mile," as it is called. We tried hard to take our load up at one
trip, but found it impossible to do so, and had to unlash the sled and
take half the load at a time, caching it on the top while we returned
for the other half.
It took us half a day to get our load to the top of the Twelve-Mile
summit, a rise of about one thousand three hundred feet from the creek
bed as the aneroid gave it. In the steeper pitches we had to take the
axe and cut steps, so hard and smooth does the incessant wind at these
heights beat the snow, and on our second trip to the top we were just in
time to rescue a roll of bedding that had been blown from the cache and
was about to descend a gully from which we could hardly have recovered
it.
This summit descended, we were in Birch Creek water, and had we followed
the watercourse would have reached the Yukon; but we would have
travelled hundreds of miles and would have come out below Fort Yukon,
while we were bound for Circle City. So there was another and a yet more
difficult summit to cross before we could descend the Yukon slope. We
were able to hire a man and two dogs to help us over the Eagle summit,
so that the necessity of relaying was avoided. One man ahead continually
calling to the dogs, eight dogs steadily pulling, and two men behind
steadily pushing, foot by foot, with many stoppages as one bench after
another was surmounted, we got the load to the top at last, a rise of
one thousand four hundred feet in less than three miles. A driving
snow-storm cut off all view and would have left us at a loss which way
to proceed but for the stakes that indicated it.
The descent was as anxious and hazardous as the ascent had been
laborious. The dogs were loosed and sent racing down the slope. With a
rope rough-lock around the sled runners, one man took the gee pole and
another the handle-bars and each spread-eagled himself through the loose
deep snow to check the momentum of the sled, until sled and men turned
aside and came to a stop in a drift to avoid a steep, smooth pitch. The
sled extricated, it was poised on the edge of the pitch and turned loose
on the hardened snow, hurtling down three or four hundred feet until it
buried itself in another drift. The dogs were necessary to drag it from
this drift, and one had to go down and bring them up. Then again they
were loosed, and from bench to bench the process was repeated until the
slope grew gentle enough to permit the regulation of the downward
progress by the foot-brake.
[Sidenote: "SUMMITS"]
The Eagle summit is one of the most difficult summits in Alaska. The
wind blows so fiercely that sometimes for days together its passage is
almost impossible. No amount of trail making could be of much help, for
the snow smothers up everything on the lee of the hill, and the end of
every storm presents a new surface and an altered route. A "summit" in
this Alaskan sense is, of course, a saddle between peaks, and in this
case there is no easier pass and no way around. The only way to avoid
the Eagle summit, without going out of the district altogether, would be
to tunnel it.
The summit passed, we found better trails and a more frequented country,
for in this district are a number of creeks that draw supplies from
Circle City, and that had been worked ten years or more.
At the time of the Klondike stampede of 1896-97, Circle City was already
established as a flourishing mining camp and boasted itself the largest
log-cabin town in the world. Before the Klondike drew away its people as
a stronger magnet draws iron filings from a lesser one, Circle had a
population of about three thousand. Take a town of three thousand and
reduce it to thirty or forty, and it is hard to resist the melancholy
impression which entrance upon it in the dusk of the evening brings.
There lay the great white Yukon in the middle distance; beyond it the
Yukon Flats, snow-covered, desolate, stretched away enormously, hedged
here at their beginning by grey, dim hills. Spread out in the foreground
were the little, squat, huddling cabins that belonged to no one, with
never a light in a window or smoke from a chimney, the untrodden snow
drifted against door and porch. It would be hard to imagine a drearier
prospect, and one had the feeling that it was a city of the dead rather
than merely a dead city.
The weather had grown steadily colder since we reached the Yukon slope,
and for two days before reaching Circle the thermometer had stood
between 40 deg. and 50 deg. below zero. It was all right for us to push on, the
trail was good and nearly all down-hill, and there were road-houses
every ten or twelve miles. Freighters, weather-bound, came to the doors
as we passed by with our jangle of bells and would raise a somewhat
chechaco pride in our breasts by remarking: "You don't seem to care what
weather you travel in!" The evil of it was that the perfectly safe
travelling between Eagle Creek and Circle emboldened us to push on from
Circle under totally different conditions, when travelling at such low
temperatures became highly dangerous and brought us into grave
misadventure that might easily have been fatal catastrophe.
Our original start was a week later than had been planned and we had
made no time, but rather lost it, on this first division of the journey.
If we were to reach Bettles on the Koyukuk River for Christmas, there
was no more time to lose, and I was anxious to spend the next Sunday at
Fort Yukon, three days' journey away. So we started for Fort Yukon on
Thursday, the 7th of December, the day after we reached Circle.
[Sidenote: THE YUKON FLATS]
A certain arctic traveller has said that "adventures" always imply
either incompetence or ignorance of local conditions, and there is some
truth in the saying. Our misadventure was the result of a series of
mistakes, no one of which would have been other than discreditable to
men of more experience. Our course lay for seventy-five miles through
the Yukon Flats, which begin at Circle and extend for two hundred and
fifty miles of the river's course below that point. The Flats constitute
the most difficult and dangerous part of the whole length of the Yukon
River, summer or winter, and the section between Circle City and Fort
Yukon is the most difficult and dangerous part of the Flats. Save for a
"portage" or land trail of eighteen or twenty miles out of Circle, the
trail is on the river itself, which is split up into many channels
without salient landmarks. The current is so swift that many stretches
run open water far into the winter, and blow-holes are numerous. There
is little travel on the Flats in winter, and a snow-storm accompanied by
wind may obliterate what trail there is in an hour. The vehicle used in
the Flats is not a sled but a toboggan, and our first mistake was in not
conforming to local usage in this respect. There is always a very good
reason for local usage about snow vehicles. But a toboggan which had
been ordered from a native at Fort Yukon would be waiting for us, and
it seemed not worth while to go to the expense of buying another merely
for three days' journey.
The second mistake was in engaging a boy as guide instead of a man. He
was an attractive youth of about fourteen who had done good service at
the Circle City mission the previous winter, when our nurse-in-charge
was contending single-handed against an epidemic of diphtheria. He was a
pleasant boy, with some English, who wanted to go and professed
knowledge of the route. The greatest mistake of all was starting out
through that lonely waste with the thermometer at 52 deg. below zero. The
old-timers in Alaska have a saying that "travelling at 50 deg. below is all
right as long as it's all right." If there be a good trail, if there be
convenient stopping-places, if nothing go wrong, one may travel without
special risk and with no extraordinary discomfort at 50 deg. below zero and
a good deal lower. I have since that time made a short day's run at 62 deg.
below, and once travelled for two or three hours on a stretch at 65 deg.
below. But there is always more or less chance in travelling at low
temperatures, because a very small thing may necessitate a stop, and a
stop may turn into a serious thing. At such temperatures one must keep
going. No amount of clothing that it is possible to wear on the trail
will keep one warm while standing still. For dogs and men alike,
constant brisk motion is necessary; for dogs as well as men--even though
dogs will sleep outdoors in such cold without harm--for they cannot take
as good care of themselves in the harness as they can when loose. A
trace that needs mending, a broken buckle, a snow-shoe string that must
be replaced, may chill one so that it is impossible to recover one's
warmth again. The bare hand cannot be exposed for many seconds without
beginning to freeze; it is dangerous to breathe the air into the lungs
for any length of time without a muffler over the mouth.
Our troubles began as soon as we started. The trail was a narrow,
winding toboggan track of sixteen or seventeen inches, while our sled
was twenty inches wide, so that one runner was always dragging in the
loose snow, and that meant slow, heavy going.
[Sidenote: SUNRISE AND SUNSET]
The days were nearing the shortest of the year, when, in these
latitudes, the sun does but show himself and withdraw again. But,
especially in very cold weather, which is nearly always very clear
weather, that brief appearance is preceded by a feast of rich, delicate
colour. First a greenish glow on the southern horizon, brightening into
lemon and then into clear primrose, invades the deep purple of the
starry heavens. Then a beautiful circle of blush pink above a circle of
pure amethyst gradually stretches all around the edge of the sky, slowly
brightening while the stars fade out and the heavens change to blue. The
dead white mirror of the snow takes every tint that the skies display
with a faint but exquisite radiance. Then the sun's disk appears with a
flood of yellow light but with no appreciable warmth, and for a little
space his level rays shoot out and gild the tree tops and the distant
hills. The snow springs to life. Dead white no longer, its dry,
crystalline particles glitter in myriads of diamond facets with every
colour of the prism. Then the sun is gone, and the lovely circle of rose
pink over amethyst again stretches round the horizon, slowly fading
until once more the pale primrose glows in the south against the purple
sky with its silver stars. Thus sunrise and sunset form a continuous
spectacle, with a purity of delicate yet splendid colour that only
perfectly dry atmosphere permits. The primrose glow, the heralding
circle, the ball of orange light, the valedictory circle, the primrose
glow again, and a day has come and gone. Air can hold no moisture at all
at these low temperatures, and the skies are cloudless.
[Sidenote: AN ESCAPADE ON THE YUKON]
Moreover, in the wilds at 50 deg. below zero there is the most complete
silence. All animal life is hidden away. Not a rabbit flits across the
trail; in the absolutely still air not a twig moves. A rare raven passes
overhead, and his cry, changed from a hoarse croak to a sweet liquid
note, reverberates like the musical glasses. There is no more delightful
sound in the wilderness than this occasional lapse into music of the
raven. We wound through the scrub spruce and willow and over the
niggerhead swamps, a faint tinkle of bells, a little cloud of steam; for
in the great cold the moisture of the animals' breath hangs over their
heads in the still air, and on looking back it stands awhile along the
course at dogs' height until it is presently deposited on twigs and
tussocks. We wound along, a faint tinkle of bells, a little cloud of
steam, and in the midst of the cloud a tousle of shaggy black-and-white
hair and red-and-white pompons--going out of the dead silence behind
into the dead silence before. The dusk came, and still we plodded and
pushed our weary way, swinging that heavy sled incessantly, by the gee
pole in front and the handle-bars behind, in the vain effort to keep it
on the trail. Two miles an hour was all that we were making. We had come
but thirteen or fourteen miles out of twenty-four, and it was dark; and
it grew colder.
The dogs whined and stopped every few yards, worn out by wallowing in
the snow and the labour of the collar. The long scarfs that wrapped our
mouths and noses had been shifted and shifted, as one part after another
became solid with ice from the breath, until over their whole length
they were stiff as boards. After two more miles of it it was evident
that we could not reach the mail cabin that night. Then I made my last
and worst mistake. We should have stopped and camped then and there. We
had tent and stove and everything requisite. But the native boy insisted
that the cabin was "only little way," and any one who knows the misery
of making camp in extremely cold weather, in the dark, will understand
our reluctance to do so.
I decided to make a cache of the greater part of our load--tent and
stove and supplies generally--and to push on to the cabin with but the
bedding and the grub box, returning for the stuff in the morning. And,
since in the deepest depths of blundering there is a deeper still, by
some one's carelessness, but certainly by my fault, the axe was left
behind in the cache.
With our reduced burden we made better progress, and in a short time
reached the end of the portage and came out on the frozen river, just as
the moon, a day or two past the full, rose above the opposite bank. One
sees many strange distortions of sun and moon in this land, but never
was a stranger seen than this. Her disk, shining through the dense air
of the river bottom, was in shape an almost perfect octagon, regular as
though it had been laid off with dividers and a ruler.
We were soon in doubt about the trail. The mail-carrier had gone down
only two or three times this winter and each time had taken a different
route, as more and more of the river closed and gave him more and more
direct passage. A number of Indians had been hunting, and their tracks
added to the tangle of trails. Presently we entered a thick mist that
even to inexperienced eyes spoke of open water or new ice yet moist. So
heavy was the vapour that to the man at the handle-bars the man at the
gee pole loomed ghostly, and the man ahead of the dogs could not be
distinguished at all. We had gone so much farther than our native boy
had declared we had to go that we began to fear that in the confusion of
trails we had taken the wrong one and had passed the cabin. That is the
tenderfoot's, or, as we say, the chechaco's, fear; it is the one thing
that it may almost be said never happens. But the boy fell down
completely and was frankly at a loss. All we could get out of him was:
"May-be-so we catch cabin bymeby, may-be-so no." If we had passed the
cabin it was twenty odd miles to the next; and it grew colder and the
dogs were utterly weary again, prone upon the trail at every small
excuse for a stop, only to be stirred by the whip, heavily wielded.
Surely never men thrust themselves foolhardily into worse predicament!
Then I made my last mistake. Dimly the bank loomed through the mist, and
I said: "We can't go any farther; I think we've missed the trail and I'm
going across to yon bank to see if there's a place to camp." I had not
gone six steps from the trail when the ice gave way under my feet and I
found myself in water to my hips.
[Sidenote: AN ESCAPADE ON THE YUKON]
Under Providence I owe it to the mukluks I wore, tied tight round my
knees, that I did not lose my life, or at least my feet. The thermometer
at Circle City stood at 60 deg. below zero at dark that day, and down on the
ice it is always about 5 deg. colder than on the bank, because cold air is
heavy air and sinks to the lowest level, and 65 deg. below zero means 97 deg.
below freezing.
My moose-hide breeches froze solid the moment I scrambled out, but not a
drop of water got to my feet. If the water had reached my feet they
would have frozen almost as quickly as the moose hide in that fearful
cold. Thoroughly alarmed now, and realising our perilous situation, we
did the only thing there was to do--we turned the dogs loose and
abandoned the sled and went back along the trail we had followed as fast
as we could. We knew that we could safely retrace our steps and that the
trail would lead us to the bank after a while. We knew not where the
trail would lead us in the other direction. As a matter of fact, it led
to the mail cabin, two miles farther on, and the mail-carrier was at
that time occupying it at the end of his day's run.
The dogs stayed with the sled; dogs will usually stay with their sled;
they seem to recognise their first allegiance to the load they haul,
probably because they know their food forms part of it.
Our cache reached, we made a fire, thawed out the iron-like armour of my
leather breeches, and cutting a spare woollen scarf in two, wrapped the
dry, warm pieces about my numbed thighs. Then we pushed on the eighteen
miles or so to Circle, keeping a steady pace despite the drowsiness that
oppressed us, and that oppressed me particularly owing to the chill of
my ducking. About five in the morning we reached the town, and the
clergyman, the Reverend C. E. Rice, turned out of his warm bed and I
turned in, none the worse in body for the experience, but much humbled
in spirit. My companion, Mr. E. J. Knapp, whose thoughtful care for me I
always look back upon with gratitude, as well as upon Mr. Rice's
kindness, froze his nose and a toe slightly, being somewhat neglectful
of himself in his solicitude for me.
We had been out about twenty hours in a temperature ranging from 52 deg. to
60 deg. below zero, had walked about forty-four miles, labouring incessantly
as well as walking, what time we were with the sled, with nothing to
eat--it was too cold to stop for eating--and, in addition to this, one
of us had been in water to the waist, yet none of us took any harm. It
was a providential overruling of blundering foolhardiness for which we
were deeply thankful.
The next day a native with a fast team and an empty toboggan was sent
down to take our load on to the cabin and bring the dogs back.
Meanwhile, the mail-carrier had passed the spot, had seen the abandoned
sled standing by recently broken ice, and had come on into town while we
slept and none knew of our return, with the news that some one had been
drowned. The mail for Fairbanks did but await the mail from Fort Yukon,
and the town rumour, instantly identifying the abandoned sled, was
carried across to Fairbanks, to my great distress and annoyance. The
echoes of the distorted account of this misadventure which appeared in a
Fairbanks newspaper still reverberate in "patent insides" of the
provincial press of the United States.
[Sidenote: FORT YUKON ]
The next Monday we started again, this time with a toboggan and with a
man instead of a boy for guide, and in three days of only moderate
difficulty we reached Fort Yukon.
Fort Yukon, though it holds no attraction for the ordinary visitor or
the summer tourist on the river, is a place of much interest to those
who know the history of Alaska. While it is purely a native village,
with no white population save the traders and the usual sprinkling of
men that hang around native villages, it is yet the oldest white man's
post on the Yukon River, save the post established by the Russians at
Nulato, five or six hundred miles lower down. The Hudson Bay Company
established itself here in 1846, and that date serves as the year one
in making calculations and determining ages to this day. It is a fixed
point in time that every native knows of. Any old man can tell you
whether he was born before or after that date, and, if before, can pick
out some boy that is about the age he was when the event occurred. The
massacre at Nulato in 1851 serves in a similar way for the lower river.
After the Purchase, and the determination of the longitude of Fort Yukon
by Mr. Raymond in 1869--who made the first steamboat journey up the
Yukon on that errand--the Hudson Bay Company moved three times before
they succeeded in getting east of the 141st meridian, and at the point
reached on the third move, the New Rampart House on the Porcupine River,
only a few hundred yards beyond the boundary-line, they remained until
the gold excitement on the Yukon and the journeying of the natives to
new posts on that river rendered trading unprofitable; then they
withdrew to the Mackenzie. The oldest white men's graves in Alaska,
again with the exception of Nulato, are those in the little Hudson Bay
cemetery near Fort Yukon.
[Sidenote: ARCHDEACON MACDONALD ]
Fort Yukon is also the site of the oldest missionary station on the
river, unless there were earlier visits of Russian priests to the lower
river, of which there seems no record, for in 1862 there was a clergyman
of the Church of England at this place. Archdeacon MacDonald was a
remarkable man. Married to a native wife, he translated the whole Bible
and the Book of Common Prayer into the native tongue, and his
translations are in general use on the upper river to this day. He
reduced the language to writing, extracted its grammar, taught the
Indians to read and write their own tongue, and dignified it by the gift
of the great literature of the sacred books. The language is, of course,
a dying one--English is slowly superseding it--but it seems safe to say
that for a generation or two yet to come it will be the basis of the
common speech of the people and the language of worship. It is chiefly
in matters of trading and handicrafts that English is taking its place,
though here as elsewhere it stands to the discredit of the civilised
race that blackguard English is the first English that is learned.
There seems ground to question whether the substitution of a smattering
of broken English for the flexibility and picturesque expressiveness of
an indigenous tongue, thoroughly understood, carries with it any great
intellectual gain, though to suggest such a doubt is treason to some
minds. The time threatens when all the world will speak two or three
great languages, when all little tongues will be extinct and all little
peoples swallowed up, when all costume will be reduced to a dead level
of blue jeans and shoddy and all strange customs abolished. The world
will be a much less interesting world then; the spice and savour of the
ends of the earth will be gone. Nor does it always appear unquestionable
that the world will be the better or the happier. The advance of
civilisation would be a great thing to work for if we were quite sure
what we meant by it and what its goal is. To the ordinary government
school-teacher in Alaska, with some notable exceptions, it seems to
mean chiefly teaching the Indians to call themselves Mr. and Mrs. and
teaching the women to wear millinery, with a contemptuous attitude
toward the native language and all native customs. The less intelligent
grade of missionary sometimes falls into the same easy rut. So letters
pass through the post-offices addressed: "Mr. Pretty Henry," "Mrs.
Monkey Bill," "Miss Sally Shortandirty"; so, occasionally, the grotesque
spectacle may present itself, to the passengers on a steamer, of a
native woman in a "Merry Widow" hat and a blood-stained parkee gutting
salmon on the river bank.
The nobler ideal, as it seems to some of us, is to labour for
God-fearing, self-respecting Indians rather than imitation white men and
white women. An Indian who is honest, healthy and kindly, skilled in
hunting and trapping, versed in his native Bible and liturgy, even
though he be entirely ignorant of English and have acquired no taste for
canned fruit and know not when Columbus discovered America, may be very
much of a man in that station of life in which it has pleased God to
call him.
Christmas and the Fourth of July are the Indian's great holidays, the
one just after the best moose hunting and the other just before the
salmon run. It may be supposed that there were always great feasts at
the winter and summer solstices, though now he is sufficiently devout at
the one and patriotic at the other. At these seasons, and for weeks
before and after, Fort Yukon gathers a large number of Indians. It is
the native metropolis of the country within a radius of a hundred
miles, and what may be termed its permanent population of one hundred
and fifty is doubled and sometimes trebled by contingents from the
Chandalar, the Porcupine, and the Black Rivers, from that long river
called Birch Creek, and all the intervening country. Many families of
the "uncivilised," self-respecting kind, to which reference has been
made, come in from outlying points, and the contrast between them and
their more sophisticated kinfolk of the town is all in their favour.
[Sidenote: JIMMY]
Such a gathering had already taken place in preparation for the
Christmas holidays when we reached Fort Yukon on the 15th of December.
It would have been pleasant to spend Christmas with them, but we were
due two hundred and fifty miles away, at Bettles, for that feast, if by
any means we could get there. So we lingered but the two days necessary
to equip ourselves. Jimmy had torn our bedding to pieces on the night of
the mishap; it was lashed on the outside of the load, and he had
scratched and clawed it to make a nest for himself until fur from the
robe and feathers from the quilts were all over the trail. The other
dogs, not so warmly coated as he, had been content to sleep in the snow.
Jimmy's character was gradually revealing itself. A well-bred trail dog
will not commit the canine sacrilege of invading the sled. That is a
"Siwash" dog's trick. So there was fresh bedding to manufacture, as well
as supplies for two hundred miles to get together.
A mail once a month went at that time from Fort Yukon to the Koyukuk,
and there was little other travel. The course lay fifty or sixty miles
across country to the Chandalar River, about one hundred miles up that
stream, and then across a divide to the South Fork of the Koyukuk, and
across another to the Middle Fork, on which Coldfoot is situated. It is
not possible to procure any supplies, save sometimes a little fish for
dog food and that not certainly, between Fort Yukon and Coldfoot, so
that provision for the whole journey must be taken.
[Sidenote: THE CHANDALAR]
A new Indian guide had been engaged as far as Coldfoot, and we set
out--three men, two toboggans, and seven dogs; four on the larger
vehicle and three on the smaller, one of the dogs brought by our guide.
Three miles from Fort Yukon we crossed the Porcupine River and then
plunged into the wilderness of lake and swamp and forest that stretches
north of the Yukon. A portage trail, as such a track across country is
called to distinguish it from a river trail, has the advantage of such
protection from storm as its timbered stretches afford. For miles and
miles the route passes through scrub spruce that has been burned over,
with no prospect but a maze of charred poles against the snow, some
upright, others at every angle of inclination. Then comes a lake, with
difficulty in finding the trail on its wind-swept surface and sometimes
much casting about to discover where it leaves the lake again, and then
more small burned timber. Wherever the route is through woods, living or
dead, it is blazed; when it strikes the open, one is often at a loss.
After three or four days of such travel, sometimes reaching an old cabin
for the night, sometimes pitching the tent, one is rejoiced at the
sight of distant mountains and at the intimation they bring that the
inexpressible dreariness of the Yukon Flats is nearly past; and
presently the trail opens suddenly upon the broad Chandalar.
The Hudson Bay voyageurs are responsible for many names in this part of
Alaska, and Chandalar is a corruption of their "Gens de large." The
various native tribes received appellations indicating habitats. A tribe
that differed from most northern Indians, in having no permanent
villages and in living altogether in encampments, was named "Gens de
large," and the river which they frequented took their name.
It is one of the second-rate tributaries of the Yukon, and in general
its waters are swift and shallow, not navigable for light-draught
steamboats for more than one hundred and fifty miles, save at flood, and
not easily navigable at all. It is these swift shallow streams that are
so formidable in winter on account of overflow water, and the Chandalar
is one of the most dreaded.
[Sidenote: DIPHTHERIA]
Ten miles along the river's surface brought us to the Chandalar native
village, a settlement of half a dozen cabins and twenty-five or thirty
souls. The people came out to meet us, and said they were just about to
bury a baby, and asked me to conduct the funeral. Because we had not
done a day's march and were under compulsion to push on at our best
speed, I did not unlash the sled but went just as I was up the hill with
the sorrowful procession to the little graveyard. On the way down I
asked as best I could of what sickness the baby had died, and I felt
some uneasiness when the throat was pointed to as the seat of disease.
When, presently, I was informed that two others were sick, and of the
same complaint, my uneasiness became alarm. I went at once to see them,
and the angry swollen throats patched with white membrane which I
discovered left no room for doubt that we were in the presence of
another outbreak of diphtheria. That disease had scourged the Yukon in
the two preceding years. Twenty-three children died at Fort Yukon in the
summer of 1904, half a dozen at Circle in the following winter, though
that outbreak was grappled with from the first; and all along the river
the loss of life was terrible.
There was no question that we must give up all hope of reaching Bettles
for Christmas and stay and do what we could for these people. So we made
camp on the outskirts of the village, and I went to work swabbing out
the throats with carbolic acid and preparing liquid food from our grub
box. There was nothing to eat in the village but dried fish and a little
dried moose, and these throats like red-hot iron could hardly swallow
liquids. The two patients were a boy of sixteen and a grown woman. It
was evident that unless we could isolate them the disease would probably
pass through the whole village, and, indeed, others might have been
infected already. It was likely that we were in for a siege of it, and
our supply of condensed milk and extract of beef would soon be
exhausted. Moreover, at Fort Yukon was the trained nurse who had coped
with the epidemic there and at Circle, while we had virtually no
experience with the disease at all. It was resolved to send back to Fort
Yukon for supplies and for the nurse.
The next morning Mr. Knapp and the native boy took the dogs and the sled
and started back. With no load save a little grub and bedding, they
could make the journey in two days, a day must be allowed for
preparations, and, with the aid of another dog team, two days more would
bring them back. Five days was the least they could be gone. It was
asking a great deal of this lady to abandon her Christmas festival,
preparations for which had long been making, and to come sixty-five
miles through the frozen wilderness in a toboggan; but I felt sure she
would drop everything and come.
For those five days I was busied in close attention to the patients and
in strenuous though not altogether availing efforts to maintain a
quarantine of the cabin in which they lay. There was little more that I
could do than swab out the throats and administer food every two hours.
As the disease advanced it was increasingly painful to swallow and
exceedingly difficult to induce the sufferers to make the attempt or to
open their mouths for the swabbing. After two or three days the woman
seemed to have passed the crisis of the disease and to be mending, but
the boy, I thought, grew worse. One becomes attached to those to whom
one ministers, and this poor, speechless boy, with his terrible throat
and the agony in his big black eyes, appealed to me very strongly
indeed. It was torture to move his head or to open his mouth, and I had
to torture him continually.
Every night I gathered the people for Divine service. Here was a little
community far off in the wilds that had carefully conserved and handed
on to their children the teaching they had received no less than thirty
years before. The native Bibles and prayer-books and hymnals were
brought out, bearing dates of publication in the seventies; one of their
number acted as leader, and what he read was painfully followed in the
well-thumbed books. They lifted their voices in a weird transformation
of familiar tunes, with quavers and glides that had crept in through
long, uncorrected use, and amongst the prayers said was one for "Our
Sovereign lady Queen Victoria, and Albert Edward, Prince of Wales." I
tried to explain that Queen Victoria was dead, that they were not living
under British rule, and I took a pencil and struck out the prayers for
the royal family from the books. But there was doubt in their minds and
a reluctance to alter in any particular the liturgy that had been taught
them, and it is quite likely that intercessions for a defunct sovereign
of another land still arise from the Chandalar village. One cannot but
feel a deep admiration for the pioneer missionaries of this
region--Bishop Bompas, Archdeacon MacDonald, and the others--whose
teaching was so thorough and so lasting, and who lived and laboured here
long before any gold seeker had thought of Alaska, when the country was
an Indian country exclusively, with none of the comforts and
conveniences that can now be enjoyed. It was to a remote cabin on the
East Fork of this river that Archdeacon MacDonald retired for a year to
make part of his translation of the Bible, according to the Indian
account.
[Sidenote: THE SHORTEST DAY]
At noon on the 21st of December, the shortest day, there is a note in my
diary that I saw the sun's disk shining through the trees. Although
fully half a degree of latitude north of the Arctic Circle, the
refraction is sufficient to lift his whole sphere above the horizon. One
speculates how much farther north it would be possible to see any part
of the sun at noon on the shortest day; but north of here, throughout
Alaska, is broken and mountainous country. We were on the northern edge
of the great flat of the interior.
The fifth day at the village was Christmas Eve. My boy was in a critical
condition, very low and weak, with a temperature that stayed around 101 deg.
and 102 deg.. As night approached I watched with the greatest anxiety for
the party from Fort Yukon, and, just as the last lingering glow of the
long twilight was fading from the south, there was a distant tinkle of
bells on the trail, and faintly once and again a man's voice was raised
in command and I knew that relief was at hand.
The nurse had dropped everything and had come, as I felt sure she would.
Gathering medicines and supplies and hiring a native dog team and
driver, she had left immediately, and the round trip had been made in
the shortest time it was possible to make it. It was a tremendous relief
to see her step out of the rugs and robes of the toboggan and take
charge of the situation in her quiet, competent way. A small, outlying
cabin was selected for a hospital, the family that occupied it bundled
out into a tent, and the two sick persons carefully moved into it, with
whom and the mother of the sick boy the nurse took up her abode. Then
there was the Christmas-tree in the chief's cabin, with little gifts for
the children sent out from the mission at Fort Yukon some time before,
and a dance afterward, for Christmas festivities must go on, whatever
happens, at a native village. I took James's pocket-knife to him after
the celebration was over, and I think he really tried to smile as he
thanked me with his eyes.
The next day after the services, although it was Christmas Day, we set
to work on the disinfecting of the large cabin in which the sick had
lain. Stringing bedclothes and wearing apparel on lines from wall to
wall, and stuffing up every crack and cranny with cotton, we burned
quantities of sulphur, that the nurse had brought with her, all day
long.
A recent article in a stray number of a professional journal picked up
in the office of a medical missionary, devoted column after column to
the uselessness of all known methods of disinfection. Sulphur,
formaldehyde, carbolic acid, permanganate of potash, chloride of lime,
bichloride of mercury--the author knew not which of these "fetiches" to
be most sarcastic about. It may be that the net result of our copious
fumigation was but the bleaching of the coloured garments hung up, but
at least it did no harm. One sometimes wishes that these scientists who
sit up so high in the seat of the scornful would condescend to a little
plain instruction.
The anti-diphtheritic serum is now kept in readiness at all our
missions in Alaska, and the disease seems to have ceased its
depredations; but it has taken terrible toll of the native people.
[Sidenote: THE MISSIONARY NURSE]
We wished to stay with the nurse until the sickness should be done, but
she would not hear of it, and insisted upon the resumption of our
journey. It did not seem right to go off and leave this lonely woman,
sixty-five miles from the nearest white person, to cope with an outbreak
of disease that might not yet have spent itself, although there had been
no new case for a week. "You've done your work here, now leave me to do
mine. You'll not get to Point Hope this winter if you stay much longer."
"Aren't you afraid to stay all by yourself?" I asked, somewhat
fatuously.
"Afraid? Afraid of what? You surely don't mean afraid of the natives?"
I did not know what I meant; it seemed not unnatural that a woman with
such prospect before her should be a little timid, but she was resolute
that we go, and we went.
Not until the next summer did I learn the upshot--both patients
recovered and there was no other case. Six years later, when these words
are written, I have just baptized a son of the boy who lay so ill, who
would have perished, I think, had we not reached the Chandalar village
just in time.
CHAPTER II
CHANDALAR VILLAGE TO BETTLES, COLDFOOT, AND THE KOYUKUK
AT five o'clock in the morning of the 27th of December, hours before any
kind of daylight, while the faint "pit-pat" of all-night dancing still
sounded from the chief's cabin, we dropped down the steep bank to the
river surface and resumed our journey. Ahead was a man with a candle in
a tin can, peering for the faint indications of the trail on the ice;
the other two were at the handle-bars of the toboggans. It is strange
that in this day of invention and improvement in artificial
illumination, a candle in a tin can is still the most dependable light
for the trail. A coal-oil lamp requires a glass which is easily broken,
and the ordinary coal-oil that comes to Alaska freezes at about 40 deg.
below. In very cold weather a coal-oil lantern full of oil will go out
completely from the freezing of its supply. All the various acetylene
lamps are useless because water is required to generate the gas, and
water may not be had without stopping and building a fire and melting
ice or snow. The electric flash-lamp, useful enough round camp, goes out
of operation altogether on the trail, because the "dry" cell that
supplies its current is not a dry cell at all, but a moist cell, and
when its moisture freezes is dead until it thaws out again. No extremity
of cold will stop a candle from burning, and if it be properly sheltered
by the tin can it will stand a great deal of wind. The "folding pocket
lantern," which is nothing but a convenient tin can with mica sides, is
the best equipment for travel, but an empty butter can or lard can is
sometimes easier to come by.
The Chandalar is wide-spread in these parts, with several channels, and
the trail was hard to follow. One track we pursued led us up a bank and
along a portage and presently stopped at a marten trap; and we had to
cut across to the river and cast about hither and thither on its broad
surface to find the mail trail.
[Sidenote: THE CHANDALAR GAP]
All the rivers that are confluent with the Yukon in the Flats enter that
dreary region through gaps in the mountains that bound the broad plain.
These gaps are noted for wind, and the Chandalar Gap, which had loomed
before us since daybreak, is deservedly in especial bad repute. The most
hateful thing in the Arctic regions is the wind. Cold one may protect
one's self against, but there is no adequate protection against wind.
The parkee without opening front or back, that pulls on over the head,
is primarily a windbreak, and when a scarf is wrapped around mouth and
nose, and the fur-edged hood of the parkee is pulled forward over cap
and scarf, the traveller who must face the wind has done all he can to
protect himself from it.
[Illustration: SUNRISE ON THE CHANDALAR-KOYUKUK PORTAGE.]
Unfortunately, in the confusion of striking the tent and packing in the
dark, my scarf had been rolled up in the bedding, and, since the wind
was not bad until we approached the Gap in the evening, I had not
troubled about it. Now, as we drew nearer and nearer, the wind rose
constantly. The thermometer was at 38 deg. below zero, and wind at that
temperature cuts like a knife. But to get my scarf meant stopping the
whole procession and unlashing and unloading the sled, and the man who
unlashed in that wind would almost certainly freeze his fingers. So I
gave up the thought of it, turned my back to the wind while I tied my
pocket handkerchief round mouth and nose, drew the strings of my parkee
hood close, and then faced it again to worry through as best I could.
The ice is always swept clear of snow in the Gap. The river narrows
within its jaws, the ragged rocks rise up to the bluffs on either hand,
and the blue-streaked ice stretches between. We all suffered a good
deal. Against that cruel wind it was impossible to keep warm. The hands,
though enclosed in woollen gloves, and they in blanket-lined moose-hide
mitts, grew numb; the toes, within their protection of caribou sock with
the hair on, strips of blanket wrapping, and mukluks stuffed with hay,
tingled with warning of frost-bite; the whole body was chilled. We all
froze our faces, I think, for the part of the face around and between
the eyes cannot be covered. I froze my cheeks, my nose, and my Adam's
apple, the last a most inconvenient thing to freeze.
[Illustration: COLDFOOT ON THE KOYUKUK.]
[Sidenote: A COLD LODGING]
The cabin was just the other side of the Gap, and it was well that it
was no farther, for we were weary with our thirty-mile run and
dangerously cold with the exposure of the last hour. It was rather a
large cabin as trail cabins go, with a rickety sheet-iron stove in the
middle, burned full of holes, and it was hours before the fire began to
make any impression on the obstinate, sullen cold of that hut. When we
went to bed the frost still stood thick and heavy on the walls all over
the room. A log building, properly constructed, is a warm building, but
slowness in parting with heat means slowness in receiving heat, and a
log cabin that has been unoccupied for a long time in very cold weather
is hard to heat in one evening.
When we started next morning the thermometer stood at 45 deg. below zero,
but we were out of the wind region and did not mind the cold. It is
curious that a few miles on either side of that Gap the air will be
still, while in the Gap itself a gale is blowing. Seven times I have
passed through that Gap and only once without wind. The great Flats were
now behind us, we had passed into the mountains, and for the remainder
of our long journey we should scarce ever be out of sight of mountains
again. Up the river, with its constant trouble of overflow, going around
the open water whenever we could, plunging through it in our mukluks
when it could not be avoided--with the care of the dogs' feet that the
cold weather rendered more than ever necessary when they got wet, and
the added nuisance of throwing the toboggans on their sides and beating
the ice from them with the flat of the axe wherever water had been
passed through--for two days we followed its windings, the thermometer
between -45 deg. and -50 deg., the mountains rising higher and the scenery
growing more picturesque as we advanced. At the end of the second day
from the Gap we were at the mouth of the West Fork of the Chandalar, and
after passing up it for fifteen or sixteen miles we left that
watercourse to cross the mountains to the South Fork of the Koyukuk
River.
Then began hard labour again. A toboggan is not a good vehicle for
crossing summits. Its bottom is perfectly flat and smooth, polished like
glass by the friction of the snow. If the trail be at all "sidling" (and
mountain trails are almost always "sidling"), the toboggan swings off on
the side of the inclination and must be kept on the trail by main force.
The runners of a sled will grip the surface, if there be any
inequalities at all, but a toboggan swings now this way and now that,
like a great pendulum, dragging the near dogs with it. Again and again
we had to hitch both teams to one toboggan to get up a sidling pitch
while all hands kept the vehicle on the trail, and our progress was
painful and slow. In soft snow on a level surface like the river bed or
through the Flat country, generally, the toboggan is much the more
convenient vehicle, for it rides over the snow instead of ploughing
through it, but on hard snow anywhere or on grades the toboggan is a
nuisance. Thus wallowing through the deep snow at the side of the
toboggans to hold them in place we sweated and slaved our way mile after
mile up the gradual ascent until we reached the spot, just under a
shoulder of the summit, where there was dry spruce and green spruce for
camping, the dry for fire and the green for couch, and there we halted
for the night.
[Sidenote: JOHN MUIR]
Next morning we crossed the low pass and dropped down easily into the
wide valley of the Koyukuk South Fork, with a fine prospect of mountains
everywhere as far as the eye could see. I had stood and gazed upon those
same mountains on my journey of the previous winter, my first winter in
Alaska, and had seen a most remarkable sight. As we began the descent
and a turn of the trail gave a new panorama of peaks I did not at first
realise the nature of the peculiar phenomenon I was gazing at. Each peak
had a fine, filmy, fan-shaped cloud stretching straight out from it into
the sky, waving and shimmering as it stretched. The sun was not above
the horizon, but his rays caught these sheer, lawn-like streamers and
played upon them with a most delicate opalescent radiance. Then all at
once came to my mind the recollection of a description in John Muir's
_Mountains of California_ (surely the finest mountain book ever written)
of the snow banners of the Sierra Nevada, and I knew that I was looking
at a similar spectacle. It meant that a storm was raging on high,
although so far we were sheltered from it. It meant that the dry,
sand-like snow of the mountain flanks was driven up those flanks so
fiercely before the wind that it was carried clean over them and beyond
them out into the sky, and still had such pressure behind it that it
continued its course and spread out horizontally, thinning and spreading
for maybe a mile before it lost all coherence and visibility. As far as
I could see mountain peaks I could see the snow banners, all pointing
one way, all waving, all luminous and shimmering in the sun-rays. It was
a very noble sight, and I gazed a long while entranced, not knowing how
ominous it was. When we reached the valley and left the shelter of the
gulch we struck the full force of that fearful gale, and for two days
and nights of incessant blizzard we lay in a hole dug out of a sand-bank
(for we had no tent that year), the trail lost, the grub box nearly
empty, and no fire possible to cook anything with had the grub box been
full.
The valley before us--to resume the narrative--is a high, wind-swept
region of niggerhead and swamp, the catch-basin of the South Fork of the
Koyukuk River. The trail descends one of its southern draws, follows up
the main valley awhile, crosses it, and leaves by one of its northern
draws to pass over the mountains that separate its drainage from the
main fork of the Koyukuk. The cold had given place to wind, and though
the gale did not approach the fierceness of last year's storm, it gave
great trouble in following the track. These high headwater basins are
always windy; the timber is scrubby spruce with many open places, and in
such open places the trail is soon obliterated altogether.
When the light fails this casting about for blazes whenever a clump of
spruce is reached becomes increasingly slow and difficult and at last
becomes hopeless. The general direction determined, it might be thought
that the traveller could ignore the tracks of previous passage and
strike out for himself, but he knows that the trail, however rough, is
at least practicable, whereas an independent course may soon lead to
steep gullies or cut banks, or may entangle him in some thicket that he
must resort to the axe to pass through. Moreover, even two or three
passages through the snow in the winter will give some bottom to a
trail; a bottom that, when the wind-swept areas are passed and the
snow-shoes are resumed, both he and his dogs will be thankful for.
[Sidenote: CAMP MAKING]
So we made a camp as it darkened to night, not far from the spot where I
had "siwashed" with an Indian companion the previous winter, the wind
blowing half a gale at 20 deg. below zero.
Making camp under such circumstances is always a very disagreeable
proceeding. It takes time and care to make a comfortable camp, and time
and care in the wind and the cold involve suffering. Two suitable trees
must be selected between which the tent is to be suspended by the
ridge-rope, and the snow must all be scraped away by the snow-shoes, or,
if it be too deep, beaten down. Then while one man unlashes and unpacks
the sleds, another cuts green spruce and lays it all over the tent
space, thicker and finer where the bed is to be. Then up goes the tent,
its corner ropes and its side strings made fast to boughs, if there be
such, or to stakes, or to logs laid parallel to the sides. Then the
stovepipe is jointed and the stove set up on the edge of green billets
properly shaped. Meanwhile the axe-man, the green boughs cut, has been
felling and splitting a dry tree for stove wood, and the whole
proceedings are rushed and hastened towards getting a fire in that
stove. Sometimes it is a question whether we shall get a fire before we
freeze our fingers or freeze our fingers before we get a fire. The fire
once going, we are safe, for however much more work there is in the
open, and there is always a good deal more, one can go to the tent to
get warm. Enough stove wood must be cut, not only for night and morning,
but for cooking the dog feed. The dog pot, filled with snow, into which
the fish are cut up, is put upon the outdoor fire as soon as man-supper
begins cooking in the tent. When it boils, the rice and tallow must be
added, and when the rice has boiled twenty minutes the whole is set
aside to cool. Meanwhile the two aluminum pots full of snow, replenished
from time to time as it melts, are put upon the stove in the tent as the
necessary preliminary to cooking. Sometimes ice, and more rarely water,
may be had, and then supper is hastened. If we are camped on the river
bank sometimes a steel-pointed rifle-bullet fired straight down into the
ice will penetrate to the water below and allow a little jet to bubble
up. Melting snow is a tedious business at best; but, since three times
out of four when camping it must be done, the aluminum pots are a
treasure. There is still work for every one as well as the cook. Snow
must be banked all round the tent to keep out the wind. Little heaps of
spruce boughs must be cut for the dogs' beds; it is all we can do for
them whatever the weather, and they appreciate it highly. It may be that
dog moccasins must be taken off and strung around the stove to dry, and
before supper is ready the inside ridge-rope of the tent is heavy with
all sorts of drying man-wear: socks, moccasins, scarfs, toques,
mittens. One of the earliest habits a man learns on the trail is to hang
up everything to dry as soon as he takes it off. Why should it be hung
up to dry unless it has got wet? the writer was once asked, in detailing
these operations. Because there is no other way to remove the ice with
which everything becomes incrusted in very cold weather.
[Sidenote: CAMP COOKING]
As his snow melts the cook throws into the pot a few handfuls of
evaporated potatoes, a handful of evaporated onions, and smaller
quantities of evaporated "soup vegetables," and leaves them to soak and
simmer and resume their original size and flavour. By and by he will cut
up the moose meat or the rabbits or birds, or whatever game he may have,
and throw it in, and in an hour or an hour and a half there will be a
savoury stew that, with a pan of biscuits cooked in an aluminum
reflector beside the stove and a big pot of tea, constitutes the
principal meal of the day. Or if the day has been long and sleep seems
more attractive even than grub, he will turn some frozen beans, already
boiled, into a frying-pan with a big lump of butter, and when his meat
is done supper is ready. Beans thus prepared eaten red hot with grated
cheese are delicious to a hungry man. With the stove for a sideboard,
food may always be eaten hot, and that is one advantage of camp fare.
The men satisfied, the dogs remain, and while two of the party wash
dishes and clean up, the third feeds the dogs. Their pot of food has
been cooling for an hour or more. They will not eat it until it is cold
and a mess of rice will hold heat a long time even in the coldest
weather. When it is nearly cold it is dished out with a paddle into the
individual pans and the dogs make short work of it. There are some who
feed straight fish, and, if the fish be king salmon of the best quality,
the dogs do well enough on it. But on any long run it is decidedly
economical to cook for the dogs--not so much from the standpoint of
direct cost as from that of weight and ease of hauling. An hundred
pounds of fish plus an hundred pounds of rice plus fifty pounds of
tallow will go a great deal farther than two hundred and fifty pounds of
fish alone. There is little doubt, too, that in the long run the dogs do
better on cooked food. It is easier of digestion and easier to apportion
in uniform rations. Rice and fish make excellent food. The Japs took
Port Arthur on rice and fish. The tallow answers a demand of the climate
and is increased as the weather grows colder. Man and dog alike require
quantities of fat food in this climate; it is astonishing how much bacon
and butter one can eat. When the dogs have eaten, and each one has made
the rounds of all the other pans to be sure nothing is left, they retire
to their respective nests of spruce bough and curl themselves up with
many turnings round and much rearranging of the litter. Feet and nose
are neatly tucked in, the tail is adjusted carefully over all, the hair
on the body stands straight up, and the dogs have gone to bed and do not
like to be disturbed again.
[Sidenote: DOG-HARNESS]
Therein lies the cruelty of depriving them of their tails, which used
to be the general custom in this country. The old tandem harness almost
required it, as the breath of the dog behind condensed upon the tail of
the dog in front until he was carrying around permanently a mass of ice
that was a burden to him and rendered his tail useless for warmth. But
the rig with a long mid rope, to which the dogs are attached by
single-trees in such manner that they may at will be hitched abreast or
one ahead of the other as the trail is wide or narrow, is superseding
the tandem rig, and one sees more bushy tails amongst the dogs. The
thick, long-haired tail of the dog in this country is indeed his
blanket, and in cold weather the tailless dog is at a great
disadvantage.
It was said that all the dogs retired to the nests of spruce bough; it
should have been all but one. It is Lingo's special charge to guard the
sled and his special privilege to sleep on it. Turning around and
curling up on the softest spot he can find of the unlashed and partly
unloaded toboggan, he will not touch anything it contains nor permit any
other dog to touch it.
The northern skies are clouded the next morning, the first day of the
new year, and there is a ruddy dawn that is glorious to behold. The
white earth gives back a soft rose tint, as an organ pipe gives back a
faint tone to the strong vibration of another pipe in pitch with it. We
shall not see the sun himself any more for many weeks, but we see his
light upon the flanks of the mountains for an hour or so around noon.
The bold, shapely peaks of the South Fork of the Koyukuk turn their
snows to pink fire as his rays slowly descend their sides, and the
whole scene is exquisitely beautiful. What a wonderful thing colour is!
When the skies are overcast this is a dead black-and-white country in
winter, for spruce, the prevailing wood, is black in the mass at a
little distance. Gaze where one will, there is naught but black and
white. The eye becomes tired of the monotony and longs for some warmer
tone. That is surely the reason why all those who live in the country
cherish some gay article of attire, why the natives love brilliant
handkerchiefs, why the white man also will choose a crimson scarf.
Trudging at the handle-bars, I have found pleasure in the red pompons of
the dogs' harness, in the gay beading of mitten and hind-sack. And that
is why a lavish feast of colour such as this dawn stirs one's spirit
with such keen delight. It gives life to a dead world.
But the wind is still bitter and interferes sadly with one's enjoyment.
All through the valley, up the creek by which we leave it, past the twin
lakes on the low summit, the wind grows in force, and when we leave
Slate Creek for the present and make a "portage" over a mountain
shoulder to strike the creek again much lower down, the wind has risen
to a gale that overturns the toboggans and makes the men fight for their
footing. The actual physical labour of it is enormous, and there can be
no rest; it is too bitterly cold in that blast to stop. For a mile or
two we struggle and slave to beat our way around that mountain shoulder
and then drop down to the creek again. The blessed relief it is to get
out of the fury of that wind into the comparative shelter of the creek,
to be done with the ceaseless toil of holding the heavy toboggans from
hurtling down the hillside, to be able to keep one's feet without
continually slipping and falling on the wind-hardened snow, no words can
adequately convey. We are all frozen again a little; this man's nose is
touched, that man's cheeks, and the other man's finger.
[Sidenote: THE KOYUKUK GOLD CAMP]
On the middle fork of the Koyukuk, at the mouth of Slate Creek, Coldfoot
sits within a cirque of rugged mountain peaks, the most northerly postal
town in the interior of Alaska, the most northerly gold-mining town in
the world, as it claims. It sprang into existence in 1900 and flourished
for a season or two with the usual accompaniments of such florification.
In 1906 it was already much decayed, and is now dead. Ever since its
start the Koyukuk camp has steadily produced gold and given occupation
to miners numbering from one hundred and fifty to three hundred, but the
scene of operations, and therefore the depot for supplies, has
continually changed. In 1900 the chief producing creek was Myrtle, which
is a tributary of Slate Creek, and the town at the mouth was in eligible
situation, though much over-built from the first. Then the centre of
interest shifted to Nolan Creek, fifteen miles farther up the river,
which is a tributary of Wiseman Creek, and the town of Wiseman sprang up
at the mouth of that creek. The post-office, the commissioner's office,
and the saloon, the stores and road-houses, migrated to the new spot,
and Coldfoot was abandoned. Now the chief producing creek is the Hammond
River, still farther up the Koyukuk, and if its placer deposits prove
as rich as they promise it is likely that a town will spring up at the
mouth of the Hammond which will supersede Wiseman.
There has never been found a continuous pay-streak in the Koyukuk camp.
It is what is known as a "pocket" camp. Now and again a "spot" is found
which enriches its discoverers, while on the claims above and below that
spot the ground may be too poor to work at a profit; for ground must be
rich to be worked at all in the Koyukuk. It is the most expensive camp
in Alaska, perhaps in the world. This is due to its remoteness and
difficulty of access. Far north of the Arctic Circle, the diggings are
about seventy-five miles above the head of light-draught steamboat
navigation, and more than six hundred miles above the confluence of the
Koyukuk with the Yukon. Transshipped at Nulato to the shoal-water
steamboats that make three or four trips a season up the Koyukuk,
transshipped again at Bettles, the head of any steamboat navigation,
freight must be hauled on horse scows the remaining seventy-five miles
of the journey; and all that handling and hauling means high rates. The
cost of living, the cost of machinery, the general cost of all mining
operations is much higher than on the Yukon or on the other tributaries
of that river. The very smallness of the camp is a factor in the high
prices, for there is not trade enough to induce brisk competition with
the reduction of rates that competition brings.
[Sidenote: MINERS' GENEROSITY]
Yet the smallness and the isolation of the camp have their
compensations. There is more community life, more _esprit de corps_
amongst the Koyukuk miners than will be found in any other camp in
Alaska. Thrown upon their own resources for amusement, social gatherings
are more common and are made more of, and hospitality is universal. Like
all sparsely settled and frontier lands, Alaska is a very hospitable
place in general, but the Koyukuk has earned the name of the most
hospitable camp in Alaska. Since the numbers are small, and each man is
well known to all the others, any sickness or suffering makes an
immediate appeal and brings a generous response. Again and again the
unfortunate victim of accident or disease has been sent outside for
treatment, the considerable money required being quickly raised by
public subscription. There is probably no other gold camp in the world
where it is a common thing for the owner of a good claim to tell a
neighbour who is "broke" to take a pan and go down to the drift and help
himself.
Until my visit of the previous year no minister of religion of any sort
had penetrated to the Koyukuk, and, save for one journey thither by
Bishop Rowe, my annual visits have been the only opportunities for
public worship since. It will suffice for the visit now describing as
well as for all the others to say that the reception was most cordial
and the opportunity much appreciated. We went from creek to creek and
gathered the men and the few women in whatever cabin was most
convenient, and no clergyman could wish for more attentive or interested
congregations.
[Illustration: THE UPPER KOYUKUK.]
Upon our return to Coldfoot from the creek visits the thermometer stood
at 52 deg. below zero, although it had been no lower than 38 deg. below when we
left the last creek, some fifteen miles away. As a general rule, the
temperature on these mountain creeks, which are at some considerable
elevation above the river into which they flow, will read from 10 deg. to
15 deg. higher than on the river, and if one climbed to the top of the peaks
around Coldfoot, the difference then would probably be 20 deg. or 25 deg.. At
the summit road-house between Fairbanks and Cleary City in the Tanana
country in cold weather the thermometer commonly reads 20 deg. above the one
place and 10 deg. or 15 deg. above the other.
[Illustration: THE BARREN SHORES OF KOTZEBUE SOUND.]
[Sidenote: LINGO]
This interesting fact, which surprises a good many people, for we are
used to think of elevated places as cold places, is due to the greater
heaviness of cold air, which sinks to the lowest level it can reach; and
the river bed is the lowest part of the country. It would be interesting
to find out to what extent this rule holds good. The ridges and the
hilltops are always the warmest places in cold weather; would this hold
as regards mountain tops?--as regards high mountain tops? Probably it
would hold in the sunshine, but the rapid radiation of heat in the
rarefied atmosphere of mountain tops would swing the balance the other
way after dark. There is no doubt, however, that the coldest place in
cold weather in Alaska is the river surface, and it is on the river
surface that most of our travelling is done. The night we returned to
Coldfoot we put our toboggan up high on the roof of an outhouse to keep
its skin sides from the teeth of some hungry native dogs, leaving some
of the load that was not required within it, covered by the sled
cloth. Later on I saw by the light of the moon Lingo's silhouetted
figure sitting bolt upright on top of the sled, and he gave his short
double bark as I drew near to make me notice that he was still doing his
duty although under difficulties. The dog had climbed up a wood-pile and
had jumped to the top of the outhouse and so to the sled. I thought of
Kipling's _Men That Fought at Minden_:
"For fatigue it was their pride
And they would _not_ be denied
To clean the cook-house floor."
Here at Coldfoot we came first into contact with that interesting tribe
of wandering inland Esquimaux known as the Kobuks, from their occupation
of the river of that name. The Koyukuk has its own Indian people, but
these enterprising Kobuks have pushed their way farther and farther from
salt water into what used to be exclusive Indian territory.
Representatives of both races were at Coldfoot, and as we lay
weather-bound for a couple of days, I was enabled to renew last year's
acquaintance with them, though without a good interpreter not much
progress was made. The delight of these people at the road-house
phonograph, the first they had ever heard, was some compensation for the
incessant snarl and scream of the instrument itself. It was very funny
to see them sitting on the floor, roaring with laughter at one
particularly silly spoken record of the "Uncle Josh at the World's Fair"
order. Over and over again they would ask for that record, and it never
ceased to convulse them with laughter. "He's been enjoyin' poor health
lately, but this mornin' I heard him complain that he felt a little
better"--how sick and tired we got of this and similar jokes drawled out
a dozen times running! The natives did not understand a word of it; it
was the human voice with its pronounced, unusual inflections that
aroused their merriment. The phonograph is becoming a powerful agency
for disseminating a knowledge of English amongst the natives throughout
Alaska, and one wishes that it were put to better use than the
reproduction of silly and often vulgar monologue and dialogue and trashy
ragtime music. As an index of the taste of those who purchase records,
the selection brought to this country points low.
The third day the thermometer stood at -49 deg. and we were free to leave
without actually breaking the rule we had made after the escapade on the
Yukon. Two other teams were going down the river, so we started with
them on the sixty-five mile journey to Bettles. Twenty miles or so below
Coldfoot the Koyukuk passes for several miles in a narrow channel
between steep rock bluffs, with here and there great detached masses
standing in the middle of the river. One has a grotesque resemblance to
an aged bishop in his vestments and is known as the Bishop Rock; another
a more remote likeness to an Indian woman, and this is known as the
Squaw Rock. This part of the river, which is called the canon of the
Koyukuk, though it is not a true canon, is very picturesque, and because
of frequent overflow, offers glare ice and swift passage to the
traveller when it does not embarrass him with running water. We were
fortunate enough to pass it without getting our dogs' feet wet, and made
the half-way road-house in a brilliant moon that rendered travelling at
night pleasanter than during the day.
[Sidenote: TRAVELLING AT "50 BELOW"]
The next day we started again at near 50 deg. below, but because there was a
good trail and a road-house for noon, the travelling was rather pleasant
than otherwise. If there be a warm house to break the day's march and
eat in, where ice-incrusted scarfs and parkees and caps and mittens may
be dried out, with a warm outhouse where the dogs may rest in comfort,
travelling in such weather is not too risky or too severely trying. The
continual condensation of the moisture from the breath upon everything
about the head and face is a decided inconvenience, and when it
condenses upon the eye-lashes, and the upper and the lower lashes freeze
together, the ice must be removed or it is impossible to open the eyes.
This requires the momentary application of the bare hand, and every time
it goes back into the mitten it carries some moisture with it, so that
after a while mittens are wet as well as head-gear; moreover, there is
always a certain perspiration that condenses. One gets into the habit of
turning the duffel lining of the moose-hide mitts inside out and hanging
them up the moment one gets inside a cabin. Round every road-house stove
there is a rack constructed for just that purpose.
There is no more striking phenomenon of the arctic trail than the
behaviour of smoke in cold weather. As one approaches a road-house, and
to greater degree a village or a town, it is seen enveloped in mist,
although there be no open water to account for it, and the prospect in
every other direction be brilliantly clear. It is not mist at all; it is
merely the smoke from the stovepipes. And the explanation is simple,
although not all at once arrived at. Smoke rises because it is warmer
than the air into which it is discharged; for that and no other reason.
Now, when smoke is discharged into air at a temperature of 50 deg. below
zero, it is deprived of its heat immediately and falls to the ground by
its greater specific gravity. The smoke may be observed just issuing
from the pipe, or rising but a few feet, and then curling downward to be
diffused amidst the air near the ground.
It was to such a smoke-enveloped inn that we pulled up to warm and
refresh ourselves and our team for the twenty miles that remained of the
day's march. We had almost reached the limit of Koyukuk road-houses.
Bettles being the head of navigation, and merchandise late in the season
finding water too shallow for transport to the diggings, there is more
or less freighting with dog teams and horses all the winter. This travel
keeps open the road-houses on the route. From an "outside" point of view
they may appear rough and the fare coarse. The night accommodation is a
double row of bunks on each side of a long room with a great stove in
the middle. Sometimes there is straw in the bunks, sometimes spruce
boughs; in the better class even sometimes hay-stuffed mattresses. But
to the weary traveller, who has battled with the storm or endured the
intense cold for hours at a stretch, they are glad havens of refuge;
they are often even life-saving stations.
[Sidenote: METEOROLOGICAL]
While we lay at the road-house the clear sky clouded and the thermometer
rose. This is an unfailing sequence. Clear, bright weather is cold
weather; cloudy weather is warm weather. The usual explanation, that the
cloud acts as a blanket that checks the radiation of heat from the
earth, is one of those explanations that do not explain. There is no
heat to radiate. The cloud is a mass of moist air, which is warm air,
introducing itself from some milder region. So the cloud brings the
heat; and the lower layers of atmosphere extract it and thereby
discharge the moisture. For an hour or two around noon the thermometer
stood at -35 deg. and there was a light fall of snow; then the skies cleared
because they were discharged of all their moisture, and the thermometer
went down to -50 deg. again. It is a beautifully simple process and
sometimes takes place two or three times a day. Every time the sky
clouds, the thermometer rises; every time the sky clears, the
thermometer falls. And because the barometer gives notice of changes in
the density of the atmosphere, it is valuable in forecasting temperature
in our winters. A steady rise in the barometer means a steady fall in
the thermometer; a fall in the barometer in a time of great cold
infallibly prophesies warmer weather; even such rapid changes as the one
given above are anticipated. So well is this established, that during
"50 deg.-below spells" at Fairbanks, impatient, weather-bound travellers and
freighters would busy the hospital telephone with inquiries about the
barometer, the hospital having the only barometer in the country.
After another long, cold run, on the night of Friday, the 12th of
January, we reached Bettles, the place we had planned to spend Christmas
at. We were unable to stir from Bettles for two solid weeks, for during
the whole of that time the thermometer never rose above 50 deg. below zero.
The long wait at Bettles would have been excessively tedious had it not
been for the kind hospitality of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Grimm, the
Commercial Company's agent and his wife, and this is but one of many
times that I have been under obligation to them for cordial welcome and
entertainment, for needs anticipated, and every sort of assistance
gladly rendered. We had been expected many days; the Christmas
festivities with a gathering of natives of both races had come and gone;
still they looked for us, for in this country one does not give a man up
merely because he is a few weeks behind time, nor hold him to account
for unpunctuality. The natives remained for the most part, and there was
abundant opportunity of intercourse with them and some beginnings of
instruction. As the days passed and all arrangements for our advance
were made, we chafed more and more at the delay, for it was very plain
that the prospect of visiting Point Hope grew less and less; but this is
a great country for teaching patience and resignation.
[Sidenote: PARASELENAE]
Some of the weather during that two weeks' wait was of quite exceptional
severity. One night is fixed for ever in my memory. It is a very rare
thing for the wind to blow in the "strong cold," but that night there
was a wind at 58 deg. below zero. And high up in the heavens was a sight I
had never seen before. The moon, little past her full, had a great ring
around her, faintly prismatic; and equidistant from her, where a line
through her centre parallel with the horizon would cut the ring, were
two other moons, distinct and clear. It was a strangely beautiful thing,
this sight of three moons sailing aloft through the starry sky, as
though the beholder had been suddenly translated to some planet that
enjoys a plurality of satellites, but no living being could stand long
at gaze in that wind and that cold. A perfect paraselene is, I am
convinced, an extremely rare thing, much rarer than a perfect parhelion
("moon-cats" my companion thought the phenomenon should be called,
saving the canine simile for the sun), for in seven years' travel I have
never seen another, and the references to it in literature are few.
The next day at noon, the sun not visible above the distant mountains,
there appeared in the sky a great shining cross of orange light, just
over the sun's position, that held and shone for nigh an hour and only
faded with the twilight. It is not surprising that these appearances
should deeply impress the untutored mind and should be deemed
significant and portentous; they must deeply impress any normal mind,
they are so grand and so strange. The man who has trained his intellect
until it is so stale, and starved his imagination until it is so
shrivelled that he can gaze unmoved at such spectacles, that they are
insignificant to him, has but reduced himself to the level of the dog
upon whom also they make no impression--though even a dog will howl at a
great aurora. Of course we know all about them; any schoolboy can pick
up a primer of physical geography and explain the laws of refraction,
and the ugly and most libellous diagram of circles and angles that shows
just how these lustrous splendours happen; but the mystery beyond is not
by one hair's breadth impaired nor their influence upon the spectator
diminished. In Alaska perhaps more than any other country it is the
heavens that declare the glory of God and the firmament that shows His
handiwork, and the awestruck Indian who comes with timid inquiry of the
import of such phenomena is rightfully and scientifically answered that
the Great Father is setting a sign in the sky that He still rules, that
His laws and commandments shall never lose their force, whether in the
heavens above or on the earth beneath.
[Sidenote: THE STRONG COLD]
The "strong cold" itself is an awe-inspiring thing even to those who
have been familiar with it all their lives; and a dweller in other
climes, endowed with any imagination, may without much difficulty enter
into the feelings of one who experiences it for the first time. It
descends upon the earth in the brief twilight and long darkness of the
dead of winter with an irresistible power and an inflexible menace.
Fifty below, sixty below, even seventy below, the thermometer reads.
Mercury is long since frozen solid and the alcohol grows sluggish. Land
and water are alike iron; utter stillness and silence usually reign.
Bare the hand, and in a few minutes the fingers will turn white and be
frozen to the bone. Stand still, and despite all clothing, all woollens,
all furs, the body will gradually become numb and death stalk upon the
scene. The strong cold brings fear with it. All devices to exclude it,
to conserve the vital heat seem feeble and futile to contend with its
terrible power. It seems to hold all living things in a crushing
relentless grasp, and to tighten and tighten the grip as the temperature
falls.
Yet the very power of it, and the dread that accompanies it, give a
certain fearful and romantic joy to the conquest of it. A man who has
endured it all day, who has endured it day after day, face to face with
it in the open, feels himself somewhat the more man for the experience,
feels himself entered the more fully into human possibilities and
powers, feels an exultation that manhood is stronger even than the
strong cold. But he is a fool if ever he grow to disdain the enemy. It
waits, inexorable, for just such disdain, and has slain many at last who
had long and often withstood it.
On those rare occasions when there is any wind, any movement of the air
at all, there enters another and a different feeling. Into the menace of
a power, irresistible, inflexible, but yet insentient, there seems to
enter a purposeful, vengeful evil. It pursues. The cold itself becomes
merely a condition; the wind a deadly weapon which uses that condition
to deprive its victim of all defence. The warmth which active exercise
stores up, the buckler of the traveller, is borne away. His reserves
are invaded, depleted, destroyed. And then the wind falls upon him with
its sword. Of all of which we were to have instance here on the Koyukuk.
[Sidenote: "FOUND FROZEN"]
In the second week of our stay at Bettles, while Divine service was in
progress in the store building, crowded with whites and natives, the
door opened and, with an inrush of cold air that condensed the moisture
at that end of the room into a cloud and shot along the floor like steam
from an engine exhaust, there entered an Indian covered with rime, his
whole head-gear one mass of white frost, his snow-shoes, just removed,
under his arm, and a beaded moose-skin wallet over his shoulder. Every
eye was at once turned to him as he beat the frost from his parkee hood
and thrust it back, unwrapped fold after fold of the ice-crusted scarf
from his face, and pulled off his mittens. Seeking out the agent, he
moved over to him and whispered something in his ear. It was plain that
the errand was of moment and the message disturbing, and as I had lost
the attention of the congregation and the continuity of my own
discourse, I drew things to a close as quickly as I decently could. That
Indian had come seventy-five miles on snow-shoes in one run, without
stopping at all save to eat two or three times, at a continuous
temperature of 50 deg. below zero or lower, to bring word that he had found
a white man frozen to death on the trail; and on the Koyukuk that feat
will always be counted to Albert the Pilot for righteousness. From the
location and description of the dead man, there was no difficulty in
identifying him. He was a wood-chopper under contract with the company
to cut one hundred cords of steamboat wood against next summer's
navigation at a spot about one hundred miles below Bettles. He had taken
down with him on the "last water" enough grub for about three months,
and was to return to Bettles for Christmas and for fresh supplies. After
a day or two's rest the Indian was sent back with instructions to bring
the body to a native village we should visit, to whipsaw lumber for a
coffin and dig a grave, and we engaged to give the body Christian
burial.
Uneasy at the softening muscles and sinews of this long inaction, I took
snow-shoes and a couple of Kobuks one day and made an ascent of the hill
behind Bettles known as Lookout Mountain, because from its top the smoke
of the eagerly expected first steamboat of the summer may be seen many
miles down the river; being moved to that particular excursion by
dispute among the weather-bound freighters as to the hill's height.
The change of temperature as we climbed the hill was striking. On the
first shoulder we were already out of the dense atmosphere of the valley
and above the smoke gloom of the houses, and as we rose the air grew
milder and milder, until at the top we emerged into the first sunshine
of many weeks and were in an altogether different climate--balmy and
grateful it was to us just come up from the strong cold. The aneroid
showed the altitude about seven hundred feet above Bettles, and I
regretted very much I had not brought the thermometer as well, for its
reading would have been most interesting.
The view from the top was brilliantly clear and far-reaching. The broad
plain across the river was checkered black and white with alternating
spruce thickets and lakes; beyond it and the mountains that bounded it
lay the valley of the south fork which we had crossed fifty or sixty
miles farther up on our journey hither. Right in front of us the middle
fork made its big bend from southwest to south, and to the left, that
is, to the north, the valley of the John River opened up its course
through the sharp white peaks of the Endicott Mountains. It was in this
direction that my eyes lingered longest. I knew that sixty or seventy
miles up this river we could cross the low Anaktuvak Pass into the
Anaktuvak River, which flows into the Colville, and that descending the
Colville we could reach the shores of the Northern Ocean. It was a
journey I had wished to make--and have wished ever since. There are many
bands of Esquimaux on that coast, never visited save by those who make
merchandise of them in one way or another. Please God, some day I should
get there; meanwhile our present hopes lay west, though, indeed, these
grew daily fainter.
CHAPTER III
BETTLES TO THE PACIFIC--THE ALATNA, KOBUK PORTAGE, KOBUK VILLAGE,
KOTZEBUE SOUND
ALL our preparations were long since made. Our Indian guide had been
sent back to Fort Yukon from Coldfoot, and here we engaged a young
Esquimau with his dog team and sled, to go across to Kotzebue Sound with
us. There was also a young Dane who wished to go from the Koyukuk
diggings to the diggings at Candle Creek on the Seward Peninsula, and
him we were willing to feed in return for his assistance on the trail.
The supplies had been carefully calculated for the journey, the
toboggans were already loaded, and we waited but a break in the cold
weather to start.
Our course from Bettles would lead us sixty-five miles farther down the
Koyukuk to the mouth of the Alatna. The visit to the native village and
the burial of the poor fellow frozen to death would take us ten miles
farther down than that, and we would return to the Alatna mouth. Then
the way would lie for fifty miles or so up that stream, and then over a
portage, across to the Kobuk River, which we should descend to its mouth
in Kotzebue Sound; the whole distance being about five hundred miles
through a very little travelled country. We learned indeed, that it had
been travelled but once this winter, and that on the first snow. It was
thought at Bettles that we might possibly procure some supplies at a
newly established mission of the Society of Friends about half-way down
the Kobuk River, but there was no certainty about it, and we must carry
with us enough man-food to take us to salt water. Our supply of dog fish
we might safely count upon replenishing from the natives on the Kobuk.
Another thing that caused some thought was the supply of small money.
There was no silver and no currency except large bills on the Koyukuk,
and we should need money in small sums to buy fish with. So the agent
weighed out a number of little packets of gold-dust carefully sealed up
in stout writing-paper like medicine powders, some worth a dollar, some
worth two dollars, the value written on the face, and we found them
readily accepted by the natives and very convenient. Two years later I
heard of some of those packets, unbroken, still current on the Kobuk.
At last, on the 26th of January, we got away. The thermometer stood only
a few degrees above -50 deg. when we left, but the barometer had been
falling slowly for a couple of days, and I was convinced the cold spell
was over. With our three teams and four men we made quite a little
expedition, but dogs and men were alike soft, and for the first two days
the travel was laborious and slow; then came milder weather and better
going.
[Sidenote: THE KOYUKUK "TOWNS" OF '98]
We passed the two ruined huts of Peavey, the roofs crushed by the
superincumbent snow. In the summer of 1898 a part of the stream of gold
seekers, headed for the Klondike by way of Saint Michael, was deflected
to the Koyukuk River by reports of recent discoveries there. A great
many little steamboat outfits made their way up this river late in the
season, until their excessive draught in the falling water brought them
to a stand. Where they stopped they wintered, building cabins and
starting "towns." In one or two cases the "towns" were electrically lit
from the steamboat's dynamo. The next summer they all left, all save
those who were wrecked by the ice, and the "towns" were abandoned. But
they had got upon the map through some enterprising representative of
the land office, and they figure on some recent maps still. Peavey,
Seaforth, Jimtown, Arctic City, Beaver City, Bergman, are all just names
and nothing else, though at Bergman the Commercial Company had a plant
for a while.
We passed the mouth of the Alatna, where were two or three Indian
cabins, and went on the remaining ten miles to Moses' Village, where the
body of the man frozen to death had been brought. Moses' Village, named
from the chief, was the largest native village on the Koyukuk River, and
we were glad, despite our haste, that we had gone there. The repeated
requests from all the Indians we met for a mission and school on the
Koyukuk River and the neglected condition of the people had moved me the
previous year to take up the matter. This was my first visit, however,
so far down the river.
We found the coffin unmade and the grave undug, and set men vigorously
to work at both. The frozen body had been found fallen forward on hands
and feet, and since to straighten it would be impossible without
several days' thawing in a cabin, the coffin had to be of the size and
shape of a packing-case; of course the ground for the grave had to be
thawed down, for so are all graves dug in Alaska, and that is a slow
business. A fire is kindled on the ground, and when it has burned out,
as much ground as it has thawed is dug, and then another fire is
kindled. We had our own gruesome task. The body should be examined to
make legally sure that death came from natural causes. With difficulty
the clothes were stripped from the poor marble corpse, my companion made
the examination, and as a notary public I swore him to a report for the
nearest United States commissioner. This would furnish legal proof of
death were it ever required; otherwise, since there is no provision for
the travelling expenses of coroners, and the nearest was one hundred and
forty or one hundred and fifty miles away, there would have been no
inquest and no such proof.
[Sidenote: A WILDERNESS TRAGEDY]
The man had delayed his return to Bettles too long. When his food was
exhausted and he had to go, there came on that terrible cold spell. A
little memorandum-book in his pocket told the pitiful story. Day by day
he lingered hoping for a change, and day by day there was entry of the
awful cold. He had no thermometer, but he knew the temperature was -50 deg.
or lower by the cracking noise that his breath made--the old-timer's
test. At last the grub was all gone and he must go or starve. The final
entry read: "All aboard to-morrow, hope to God I get there." The Indians
estimated that he had been walking two days, and had "siwashed it" at
night somewhere beside a fire in the open without bedding. Holes were
burned in his breeches in two places, where, doubtless, he had got too
near the fire. He had nothing whatever to eat with him save a piece of
bacon gnawed to the rind. There were only two matches in his pocket, and
they were mixed up with trash of birch-bark and tobacco, so it is likely
he did not know he had them. He had lit all the fires he could light and
eaten all the food he had to eat. Still he was plugging along towards
the native village nine miles away. Then he lost the trail, probably in
the dark, for it was faint and much drifted, and had taken off his
snow-shoes to feel with his moccasined feet for the hardened snow that
would indicate it. That was almost the end. He had gone across the river
and back again, feeling for the trail, and then, with the deadly
numbness already upon his brain, had wandered in a circle. The date of
his starting in the memorandum-book and the distance travelled made it
almost certain that, at some moment between the time when those three
moons floated in the sky and the time when that cross glared on the
horizon, he had fallen in the snow, never to rise again. Fifty-eight
below zero and a wind blowing!
One supposes that the actual death by freezing is painless, as it is
certainly slow and gradual. The only instance of sudden gelation I ever
heard of is in Longfellow's "Wreck of the Hesperus," where the skipper,
having answered one question, upon being asked another,
"Answered never a word,
For a frozen corpse was he."
But if the actual death be painless, the long conscious fight against it
must be an agony; for a man of any experience must realise the peril he
is in. The tingling in fingers and toes and then in knees and elbows is
a warning he recognises only too well. He knows that, unless he can
restore warmth by restoring the circulation, he is as good as frozen
already. He increases his pace and beats his arms against his breast.
But if his vitality be too much reduced by hunger and fatigue and cold
to make more than a slight response to the stimulation, if the distance
to warmth and shelter be too great for a spurt to carry him there, he is
soon in worse case than before. Then the appalling prospect of perishing
by the cold must rise nakedly before him. The enemy is in the breach,
swarming over the ramparts, advancing to the heart of the fortress, not
to be again repelled. He becomes aware that his hands and feet are
already frozen, and presently there may be a momentary terrible
recognition that his wits begin to wander. Frantically he stumbles on,
thrashing his body with his arms, forcing his gait to the uttermost, a
prey to the terror that hangs over him, until his growing horror and
despair are mercifully swallowed up in the somnolent torpidity that
overwhelms him. All of us who have travelled in cold weather know how
uneasy and apprehensive a man becomes when the fingers grow obstinately
cold and he realises that he is not succeeding in getting them warm
again. It is the beginning of death by freezing.
We buried the body on a bench of the bluff across the river from the
native village, the natives all standing around reverently while the
words of committal were said, and set up a cross marked with
lead-pencil: "R. I. P.--Eric Ericson, found frozen, January, 1906." Two
or three years later a friend sent me a small bronze tablet with the
same legend, and that was affixed to the cross. There are many such
lonely graves in Alaska, for scarce a winter passes that does not claim
its victims in every section of the country. That same winter we heard
of two men frozen on the Seward Peninsula, two on the Yukon, one on the
Tanana, and one on the Valdez trail. This day I recorded a temperature
of 10 deg., the first plus temperature in thirty-nine days, and that
previous rise above zero was the first in twenty days.
[Sidenote: NEGLECTED NATIVES]
That night we gathered all the natives, and after long speech with poor
interpretation I ventured to promise them a mission the next year. Some
of them had been across to the Yukon years before and had visited the
mission at Tanana. Some had been baptized there. Some had never seen a
clergyman or missionary of any sort before, and had never heard the
gospel preached. We were touched by one old blind woman who told of a
visit to a mission on the Yukon, and how she learned to sing a hymn
there. Her son interpreted: "She say every night she sing that hymn for
speak to God." She was encouraged to sing it, and it turned out to be
the alphabet set to a tune! After much pleading and with some
hesitation, I baptized seventeen children, comforting myself with the
assurance of the coming mission, which would undertake their Christian
training and instruction.
Back next day at the mouth of the Alatna, I was again impressed with the
eligibility of that spot as a mission site. It was but ten miles above
the present native village, and, with church and school established, the
whole population would sooner or later move to it. This gives
opportunity for regulating the building of cabins, and the advantage of
a new, clean start. Moreover, the Alatna River is the highway between
the Kobuk and the Koyukuk, and the Esquimaux coming over in increasing
numbers, would be served by a mission at this place as well as the
Indians. I foresaw two villages, perhaps, on the opposite sides of the
river--one clustered about the church and the school, the other a little
lower down--where these ancient hereditary enemies might live side by
side in peace and harmony under the firm yet gentle influence of the
church. So I staked a mission site, and set up notices claiming ground
for that purpose, almost opposite the mouth of the Alatna, which, in the
native tongue, is Allakaket or Allachaket.
[Sidenote: THE INLAND ESQUIMAUX]
There was some trail up the Alatna and we made fair headway on its
surface, stopping two nights at Kobuk huts. We are out of the Indian
country now, and shall see no more Indians until we are back on the
Yukon. The mode of life, the habits, the character of the races are very
different--the first Esquimau habitation we visited proclaiming it.
These inland Esquimaux, though some of the younger ones have never seen
salt water--our guide, Roxy, for one--are still essentially a salt-water
people. Their huts, even in the midst of trees, are half-underground
affairs, for they have not learned log-building; the windows are of
seal gut, and seal oil is a staple article of their diet. Their clothing
is also marine, their parkees of the hair-seal and their mukluks of the
giant seal. Communications are always kept up with the coast, and the
sea products required are brought across. The time for the movement of
the Kobuks back and forth was not quite yet, though we hoped we should
meet some parties and get the benefit of their trail. Just before we
left the Alatna River we stopped at Roxy's fish cache and got some green
fish, hewing them out of the frozen mass with the axe. The young man had
fished here the previous summer, had cached the fish caught too late to
dry in the sun, and they had remained where he left them for four or
five months. Most of them had begun to decay before they froze, but that
did not impair their value as dog food, though it rendered the cooking
of them a disagreeable proceeding to white nostrils. This caching of
food is a common thing amongst both natives and whites, and it is rarely
that a cache is violated except under great stress of hunger, when
violation is recognised as legitimate. Doughty, in his _Arabia Deserta_,
mentions the same custom amongst the Arabs; Sven Hedin amongst the
Tartars. Sparsely peopled waste countries have much the same customs all
over the world. Even the outer garb in the Oriental deserts has much
resemblance to our parkee; both burnoose and parkee are primarily
windbreaks, and it makes little difference whether the wind be charged
with snow or sand.
At midday on the 3d of February we left the Alatna River and took our
way across country for the Kobuk. We had now no trail at all save what
had been made a couple of months before by the only other party that had
crossed the portage this winter, and it was buried under fifteen or
sixteen inches of snow. There was quite a grade to be climbed to reach
the plateau over which our course lay, and the men, with rope over the
shoulder, had to help the dogs hauling at the sled. Indeed, over a good
deal of this portage, from time to time, the men had to do dog work, for
the country is rolling, one ridge succeeding another, and the loose,
deep snow made heavy and slow going. One man must go ahead breaking
trail, and that was generally my task, though when the route grew
doubtful and the indications too faint for white man's eye, Roxy took my
place and I took his gee pole, and slipped his rope around my chest.
Breaking trail would not be so laborious if one could wear the large
snow-shoes that are used for hunting. But the hunting shoe, though it
carries the man without fatigue, does not help the dogs. The small shoe
known as the trail shoe, packs the snow beneath it, and by the time the
trail breaker has gone forward, then back again, and then forward once
more, the snow is usually packed hard enough to give the dogs some
footing. Footing the dog must have or he cannot pull; a dog wallowing in
snow to his belly cannot exert much traction on the vehicle behind him.
The notion of snow-shoeing as a sport always seems strange to us on the
trail, for to us it is a laborious necessity and no sport at all. The
trail breaker thus goes over most of the ground thrice, and when he is
anxious at the same time to get a fairly accurate estimate by the
pedometer of the distance travelled, he must constantly remember to
upend the instrument in his pocket when he retraces his steps, and
restore it to its recording position when he attacks unbroken snow
again. Also he must take himself unawares, so to speak, from time to
time, and check the length of his stride with the tape measure and alter
the step index as the varying surfaces passed over require.
Conscientiously used, with due regard to its limitations, the pedometer
will give a fair approximation of the length of a journey, but a man can
no more tell how far he has gone by merely hanging a pedometer in his
pocket than he can tell the height above sea-level of an inland mountain
by merely carrying an aneroid barometer to the top.
[Sidenote: THE SUNRISE AND THE MOUNTAINS]
It was on this Alatna-Kobuk portage that we saw the most magnificent
sunrise any of us could remember. It had been cloudy for some days with
threat of snow which did not fall. We were camped in a little hollow
between two ridges, and I had been busy packing up the stuff in the tent
preparatory to the start, when I stepped out with a load of bedding in
my arms, right into the midst of the spectacle. It was simple, as the
greatest things are always simple, but so gorgeous and splendid that it
was startling. The whole southeastern sky was filled with great luminous
bands of alternate purple and crimson. At the horizon the bands were
deeper in tone and as they rose they grew lighter, but they maintained
an unmixed purity of contrasting colour throughout. I gazed at it until
the tent was struck and the dogs hitched and it was time to start, and
then I had to turn my back upon it, for our course lay due west, and I
was breaking trail. But on the crest of the rising ground ahead there
burst upon my delighted eyes a still more astonishing prospect. We were
come to the first near view of the Kobuk mountains, and the reflected
light of that gorgeous sunrise was caught by the flanks of a group of
wild and lofty snow peaks, and they stood up incandescent, with a vivid
colour that seemed to come through them as well as from them. To right
and left, mountains out of the direct path of that light gave a soft
dead mauve, but these favoured peaks, bathed from base to summit in
clear crimson effulgence, glowed like molten metal. It was not the
reflected light of the sun, but of the flaming sky, for even as I
looked, a swift change came over them. They passed through the tones of
red to lightest pink, not fading but brightening, and before my
companions reached me the sun's rays sprang upon the mountains from the
horizon, and they were golden.
It seems almost foolish to the writer and may well seem tedious to the
reader, to attempt in words the description of such scenes; yet so deep
is the impression they produce, and so large the place they take in the
memory, that to omit them would be to strike out much of the charm and
zest of these arctic journeys. Again and again in the years that have
passed, the recollection of that pomp of colour on the way to the Kobuk
has come suddenly upon me, and always with a bounding of the spirit. I
can shut my eyes now and see that incomparable sunrise; I can see again
that vision of mountains filling half the sky with their unimaginable
ardency, and I think that this world never presented nobler sight.
Surely for its pageantry of burning, living colour, for purity and depth
and intensity of tint, the Far North with its setting of snow surpasses
all other regions of the earth.
[Sidenote: TRAVELLING KOBUK LADS]
That same day we met a couple of Kobuk youths on their way to the
Koyukuk, and they gave us the greatest gift it was in the power of man
to give us--a trail! There is no finer illustration of the mutual
service of man to man than the meeting of parties going opposite ways
across the unbroken snows. Each is at once conferring and receiving the
greatest of favours, without loss to himself is heaping benefit on the
other; is, it may be--has often been--saving the other, and being
himself saved. No more hunting and peering for blazes, no more casting
about hither and thither when open stretches are crossed; no more three
times back and forth to beat the snow down--twenty miles a day instead
of ten or twelve--the boys' trail meant all that to us. And our trail
meant almost as much to them. So we were rejoiced to see them, sturdy
youths of sixteen or seventeen, making the journey all by themselves. My
heart goes out to these adventurous Kobuks, amiable, light-hearted,
industrious; keen hunters, following the mountain-sheep far up where the
Indian will not go; adepts in all the wilderness arts; heirs of the
uncharted arctic wastes, and occupying their heritage. If I were not a
white man I would far rather be one of these nomadic inland Esquimaux
than any other native I know of.
That same day we crossed two headwater forks of the Kokochatna, as the
Kobuks call it, or the Hogatzitna as the Koyukuks call it, or the Hog
River, as the white men call it, a tributary of the Koyukuk that comes
in about one hundred and fifty miles below the Alatna. As we came down a
steep descent to the little east fork, it showed so picturesque and
attractive, with clumps of fine open timber on an island, that it
remains in my mind one of the many places from the Grand Canon of the
Colorado almost to the Grand Canon of the Noatak, where I should like to
have a lodge in the vast wilderness.
We had but crossed the west fork when we knew that we were close to the
watershed between the Kobuk and the Koyukuk, between the streams that
fall into Kotzebue Sound and those that fall by the Koyukuk and the
Yukon Rivers into Bering Sea; and because it seemed a capital geographic
feature, it was disappointing that it was so inconspicuous. Indeed, we
were not sure which of two ridges was the actual divide. Beyond those
ridges there was no question, for the ground sloped down to Lake
Noyutak, a body of water some three and a half miles in length and of
varying breadth that drains into the Kobuk. Here in a cabin we found
three more young Kobuks, and spent the night, getting our first view of
the Kobuk River next day, not from an eminence, as I had hoped, but only
as we came down a bank through thick timber and opened suddenly upon it.
By the pedometer I made the portage forty-six miles.
[Sidenote: THE KOBUK RIVER]
The upper Kobuk is a picturesque river, the timber being especially
large and handsome for interior Alaska. We reached it just above the
mouth of the Reed River, tributary from the north. The weather was
warm--too warm for good travelling--the thermometer standing at 15--- deg.,
20 deg., and one day even 30 deg. above zero all day long, so that we were all
bareheaded and in our shirt-sleeves. From time to time, as the course of
the river varied, we had distant views of the rocky mountains of the
Endicott Range, or, as it might be written, the Endicott Range of the
Rocky Mountains, for such, in fact, it is--the western and final
extension of the great American cordillera. On the other side of those
mountains was the Noatak River, flowing roughly parallel with the Kobuk,
and discharging into the same arm of the sea.
The division of the labour of camping amongst four gave us all some
leisure at night, and I found time to read through again _The Cloister
and the Hearth_ and _Westward Ho!_ with much pleasure, quite agreeing
with Sir Walter Besant's judgment that the former is one of the best
historical novels ever written. There are few more attractive roysterers
in literature to me than Denys of Burgundy, with his "_Courage,
camarades, le diable est mort!_" This matter of winter reading is a
difficult one, because it is impossible to carry many books. My plan is
to take two or three India-paper volumes of classics that have been read
before, and renew my acquaintance with them. But reading by the light of
one candle, though it sufficed our forefathers, is hard on our
degenerate eyes.
The days were much lengthened now, and the worst of the winter was
done. There would still be cold and storm, but hardly again of the same
intensity and duration. When the traveller gets well into February he
feels that the back of the winter is broken, for nothing can take from
him the advantage of the ever-lengthening days, the ever-climbing sun.
On the afternoon of the third day on the Kobuk we reached a cabin
occupied by two white men, the first we had seen since we left Bettles,
and we were the first white men they had seen all the winter. They were
waiting for the spring, having a prospecting trip in view; simply
spending the winter eating up their grub. There was nothing whatever to
read in the cabin, and they had been there since the freeze-up! They
welcomed us, and we stayed overnight with them, and that night there was
a total eclipse of the moon, of which we had a fine view. We had an
almanac which gave the time of totality at Sitka, and we knew the
approximate longitude of our position, so we were able to set our
watches by it.
The next two days are noted in my diary as two of the pleasantest days
of the whole journey--two of the pleasantest days I ever spent anywhere,
I think. A clear, cloudless sky, brilliant sunshine, white mountain
peaks all about us, gave picture after picture, and the warm, balmy air
made travelling a delight. There are few greater pleasures than that of
penetrating into a new country, with continually changing views of
beauty, under kindly conditions of weather and trail. In the yellow rays
of the early sun, the spruce on the river bank looked like a screen of
carved bronze, while the slender stems of birches in front of the
spruce looked like an inlaying of old ivory upon the bronze, the whole
set upon its pedestal of marble-like snow. The second day we took a
portage of nine or ten miles across a barren flat and struck the river
again just below a remarkable stretch of bank a mile or so in length,
with never a tree or a bush or so much as the smallest shrub growing on
it. Thick timber above suddenly ceased, thick timber below suddenly
began again, and this bare bank reached back through open, barren flat
to a low pass in the mountains. It was a bank of solid ice, so we were
told later, and I remembered to have heard of ice bluffs on the Kobuk,
and wished that the portage had struck the river above this spot instead
of below it, that there might have been opportunity to examine it.
[Sidenote: THE MISSION]
[Sidenote: ENGLISH AND ESQUIMAU]
A little farther down the river and we were at the new mission of the
Society of Friends, where a cordial reception awaited us and, luxury of
luxuries, a warm bath! Again and again the wash-tub was emptied and
fresh water was heated until we all had wallowed to our heart's content.
The rude log buildings of the mission had been begun the previous fall,
and were not yet complete, but they were advanced enough for occupation,
and the work of the mission went actively on. It was in charge of rather
an extraordinary man. He gave us a sketch of his life, which was full of
interest and matter for thought. For many years he was a police officer
and jailer in the West. Then he sailed on a whaler and thus became
acquainted with the Esquimaux. He was converted from a life of
drunkenness and debauchery--though one fancied his character was not
really ever so bad as he painted it--at a "Peniel" mission in a
Californian town. He went in out of mere idle curiosity, just recovered
from a spree, and was so wrought upon that when he came out he was a
different creature, a new man, the old life with its appetite for
vicious indulgence sloughed off and left behind him, and he now
possessed with a burning desire to do some such active service for God
as aforetime he had done for the devil. After three or four months of
some sort of training in an institution maintained by the California
Society of Friends--a body more like the Salvation Army, one judges,
than the old Quakers--he volunteered for service at a branch which the
old-established mission of the Society at the mouth of the Kobuk desired
to plant two hundred miles or so up the river, and had come out and had
plunged at once into his task. So here he was, some six or seven months
installed, teacher, preacher, trader in a small way, and indefatigable
worker in general. Pedagogical training or knowledge of "methods" he had
none at all, but the root of the matter was in him, and surely never was
such an insatiable school-teacher. Morning, noon, and night he was
teaching. While he was cooking he was hearing lessons; while he was
washing the dishes and cleaning the house he was correcting exercises in
simple addition. In the schoolroom he was full of a genial enthusiasm
that seemed to impart instruction by sheer dynamic force. "Boot," the
lesson book said. There was no boot in the schoolroom, all were shod in
mukluks. He dives into his dwelling-house attachment and comes back
holding up a boot. "Boot," he says, and "boot" they all repeat.
Presently the word "tooth" was introduced in the lesson. Withdrawing a
loose artificial tooth of the "pivot" variety from his upper jaw, he
holds it aloft and "tooth!" he cries out, and "toot!" they all cry, and
he claps it back into his head again.
We were present on Sunday at the services. There was hearty singing of
"Pentecostal" hymns with catchy refrains, but we were compelled to
notice again what we had noticed amongst the little bands of these
people on the Koyukuk when we set them to singing, that the English was
unintelligible; and since it conveyed no meaning to us could have had
little for them. This is the inevitable result of ignoring the native
tongue and adopting the easy expedient of teaching the singing of hymns
and the recitation of formulas like the commandments in English. For a
generation or two, at least, the English learned, save by children at a
boarding-school, where nothing but English is spoken, is fragmentary and
of doubtful import in all except the commonest matters of speech. And at
such boarding-schools there is danger of the real misfortune and
drawback of natives growing up to live their lives amongst natives,
ignorant of the native tongue. There is no quick and easy way of
stamping out a language, thank God; there is no quick and easy way of
imparting instruction in a foreign language. By and by all the Alaskan
natives will be more or less bilingual, but the intimate speech and the
most clearly understood speech will still be the mother tongue. The
singing done, there was preaching through an interpreter, and then each
individual present "gave testimony," which consisted for the most part
in the recitation of a text of Scripture. Then there were individual
prayers by one and another of the congregation, and then some more
singing. The only hymn I could find in the book that I knew was the fine
old hymn, "How Firm a Foundation," and that was sung heartily to the
"Adeste Fideles." They are naturally a musical race, picking up airs
with great facility, and they thoroughly enjoy singing.
[Sidenote: THE "DOUBLE STANDARD"]
After the service the missionary confided some of his troubles to me. He
had lately learned through his interpreter that the burden of most of
the individual prayers was that the supplicator might "catch plenty
skins" and be more successful in hunting than his fellows; and though he
had done his best to impress upon them the superior importance of making
request for spiritual benefit, he was afraid they had made no change.
"Our people 'outside,'" he said, "don't understand these folk, and I'm
not sure that I thoroughly understand them myself." "They're all
'converted,'" he said; "they all claim to have experienced a change of
heart, but some of them I know are not living like converted people, and
sometimes I have my doubts about most of them." My sympathy went out to
him in his loneliness and his earnestness and his disappointments. I
pointed out that the emotional response to emotional preaching was
comparatively easy to get from any primitive people, but that to change
their whole lives, to uproot old customs of sensual indulgence, to
engraft new ideas of virtue and chastity was a long, slow process
anywhere in the world. It was chiefly in the matter of sexual morality
that his doubts and difficulties lay, and I was able to assure him that
his experience was but the common experience of all those who had
laboured for the uplifting of savage people. Indeed, how should it be
otherwise? Until quite lately there was almost promiscuous use of women.
A man receiving a traveller in his dwelling overnight proffered his wife
as a part of his hospitality; the temporary interchange of wives was
common; young men and young women gratified themselves without rebuke;
children were valuable however come by, and there was no special
distinction between legitimate and illegitimate offspring. As one
reflects on these conditions and then looks back upon conditions amongst
white people, it would seem that all the civilised races have done is to
set up a double standard of sexual morality as against the single
standard of the savage. It can hardly be claimed that the average white
man is continent, or even much more continent than the average Esquimau,
but he has forced continence upon the greater part of his women,
reserving a dishonoured remnant for his own irresponsible use. And there
are signs that some of those who nowadays inveigh against the white
man's double standard are in reality desirous of substituting, not the
single standard of the Christian ideal, but the single standard of the
savage. In the mining camps the prostitute has a sort of
half-way-recognised social position, and in polite parlance is referred
to as a "sporting lady"--surely the most horribly incongruous phrase
ever coined; she often marries a miner who will tell you that she is as
good as he is, and she is received afterwards by all but a few as a
"respectable married woman."
There had been some trouble of this sort at this mission. The great
northern gold seekers' wave of '97 and '98 threw a numerous band of
prospectors up the Kobuk as well as up the Koyukuk. The wave had receded
and left on the Kobuk but one little pool behind it, a handful of men
who found something better than "pay" on the Shungnak, a few miles away.
And there was much criticism of the missionary's methods amongst them.
Word of the arrival of strangers had brought some of them to Long Beach,
and on Sunday night I had opportunity of addressing them, with a view to
enlisting their sympathy, if possible. What if mistakes were made, what
if some of the methods employed were open to question? Here was a man
who beyond doubt was earnestly labouring in the best way he knew for the
improvement of these natives. Such an effort demanded the co-operation
of every right-feeling man.
[Sidenote: PERSONAL CLEANLINESS]
After all, however grand the physical scenery, the meteorological
phenomena, may be, the people of any country are the most interesting
thing in it, and we found these Esquimaux extraordinarily interesting.
Dirty they certainly are; it is almost impossible for dwellers in the
arctic regions to be clean in the winter, and the winter lasts so long
that the habit of winter becomes the habit of the year. White and native
alike accept a lower standard of personal cleanliness than is tolerated
outside. I remember asking Bishop Rowe, before I came to Alaska: "What
do you do about bathing when you travel in the winter?" To which he
replied laconically: "Do without." It is even so; travellers on the
Alaskan trails as well as natives belong to the "great unwashed." In the
very cold weather the procuring of water in any quantity is a very
difficult thing even for house dwellers. Every drop of it has to be
carried from a water-hole cut far out on the ice, up a steep grade, and
then quite a little distance back to the dwelling--for we do not build
directly upon these eroding banks. The water-hole is continually
freezing up and has to be continually hewed free of ice, and as the
streams dwindle with the progress of winter, new holes must be cut
farther and farther out. On the trail, where snow must usually be melted
for water, it is obvious that bathing is out of the question; even the
water for hands and face is sparingly doled by the cook, and two people
will sometimes use the same water rather than resort to the painful
though efficient expedient of washing with snow. If this be so despite
aluminum pots and a full kit of camp vessels, it is much more so with
the native, whose supply of pots and pans is very limited. I have seen a
white man melt snow in a frying-pan, wash hands and face in it, throw it
out, fry bacon and beans in it, then melt more snow and wash his cup and
plate in it. There is, however, this to be said anent the disuse of the
bath in this country, that in cold weather most men perspire very little
indeed, and the perspiration that is exuded passes through to the outer
garments and is immediately deposited upon them as frost; and there is
this further to be said about dirt in general, that one blessed property
of the cold is to kill all odours.
One grows tolerant of dirt in this country; there is no denying it, and
it is well that it is so; otherwise one would be in a chronic state of
disgust with oneself and every one else. So the dirt of the native,
unless specially prominent and offensive, is accepted as a matter of
course and ignored. This obstacle overcome, the Esquimaux are an
attractive and most interesting race, and compare to advantage with the
Indians in almost every particular. They are a very industrious people.
Go into an Esquimau's hut at almost any time when they are not sleeping,
and you will find every individual occupied at some task. Here is a man
working in wood or bone with the ingenious tools they have evolved; here
are women working in skin or fur, and some of them are admirable
needlewomen; here, perhaps, is another woman chewing mukluks--and many a
white man who has kept his feet dry in overflow water is grateful to the
teeth that do not disdain this most effective way of securing an
intimate union between sole and upper. Even the children are busy: here
is a boy whittling out bow and arrow--and they do great execution
amongst rabbits and ptarmigan with these weapons that entail no cost of
powder and shot; here is a girl beating out threads from sinew with a
couple of flat stones. Some of us, troubled with unconscientious
tailors, wish that a law could be passed requiring all buttons to be
sewn on with sinew--they never come off.
[Sidenote: A LIGHT-HEARTED FOLK]
They are a very light-hearted people, easily amused, bubbling over with
laughter and merriment, romping and skylarking with one another at every
intermission of labour. One of my white travelling companions on this
journey was in the habit of using a little piece of rabbit skin to
protect his nose in cold or windy weather. The care of the nose is
sometimes very troublesome indeed, it freezes more readily than any
other portion of the body; and a little piece of rabbit skin, moistened
and applied to the nose, will stay there and keep it warm and
comfortable all day. But it does not exactly enhance one's personal
attractions.
We had stopped for camp and were all together for the first time in four
or five hours, when Roxy noticed this rabbit-skin nose protector, upon
which the breath had condensed all the afternoon until two long icicles
depended from it, one on each side, reaching down below the mouth; and
he fell straightway into a fit of laughter that grew uncontrollable; he
rolled on the snow and roared. A little annoyed at this exhibition, I
spoke sharply: "What's the matter with you, Roxy; what on earth are you
cutting up like that for?" Checking himself for a moment, he pointed to
my companion and said, "Alleesame _walrus_," and went off into another
paroxysm of laughter, rolling about and roaring. At intervals all the
evening he would break out again, and when we sat down to eat it
overcame him once more and he rushed outside where he could give vent to
his mirth with less offence.
The boy was straightforward and conscientious. We were camped over
Sunday once, and Roxy had noticed many marten tracks in the
neighbourhood. He had brought a few traps along with him to set out as
we went and pick up on his return, and he wanted to know if I thought he
might set some that day, although it was the day of rest. Careful not to
interfere in any way with the religious instruction any native has
received from any source, I told him that was a matter for him to decide
himself; that each man was responsible for his own conduct. The boy
thought awhile--and he did not set his traps. Now that young man had
never received any instruction at a mission; all his teaching had been
from other Esquimaux. This same question of working on Sunday was the
cause of some of the difficulty between the missionary at Long Beach and
the miners at Shungnak. The sluicing or "cleaning-up" season is short,
and mining operators generally consider that they cannot afford to lose
an hour of it. The Kobuks employed by these miners quit their work on
Sunday, and that brought the operations to a standstill. There was
something to be said on the miners' side, but I rejoiced that the
Esquimau boys showed such steadfastness to their teaching. "If you
cannot use them six days in the week, if it has to be seven or none,
then do as the miners on the Yukon side do, consider the country
uninhabited, and make your arrangements as though there were no Kobuks."
That was my advice, and this may be read in connection with Mr.
Stefanson's caustic comments on the same rigidity of observance.
We left Long Beach with a grateful feeling for the hospitality with
which we had been received and with a substantial respect for the
earnest missionary effort that was being put forth there. We were able
to replenish our grub supply and also to exchange our two toboggans for
one large sled, for we were out of the toboggan country again and they
had already become a nuisance, slipping and sliding about on the trail.
Our host was up early with a good breakfast for us, and speeded the
parting guest, which on the trail is certainly an essential part of true
hospitality, with all the honours; the natives lined up on the bank and
the younger ones running along with us for a few hundred yards.
[Sidenote: THE JADE MOUNTAINS]
Soon after we left the mission we went up a series of terraces to a
desolate, barren, wind-swept flat, the portage across which cut off a
great bend of the river and saved us many miles of travel. To our right
rose the Jade Mountains, whence the supply of this stone which used to
be of importance for arrow-heads and other implements was obtained and
carried far and wide. A light crust on the snow broke through at every
step, though the snow was not deep enough and the ground too uneven to
make snow-shoes useful; so we all had more or less sore feet that night
when we regained the river and made our camp near the mouth of the
Ambler, another tributary from the north.
The next day was an exceedingly long, tedious day. The Kobuk River,
which in its upper reaches is a very picturesque stream, began now to be
as monotonous as the lower Yukon. It had grown to considerable size, and
the bends to be great curves of many miles at a stretch, one of which,
a decided bend to the north of the general westerly direction of the
river, we were three full hours in passing down. It was while traversing
this bend that we witnessed a singular mirage that lent to the day all
the enlivenment it had. Before us for ten or twelve miles stretched the
broad white expanse of the river bed, shimmering in the mellow sunlight,
and far beyond, remote but clear, rose the sharp white peaks of the
mountains that divide the almost parallel valleys of the Kobuk and the
Noatak. As we travelled, these distant peaks began to take the most
fantastic shapes. They flattened into a level table-land, and then they
shot up into pinnacles and spires. Then they shrank together in the
middle and spread out on top till they looked like great domed
mushrooms. Then the broad convex tops separated themselves entirely from
their stalk-like bases and hung detached in the sky with daylight
underneath. And then these mushroom tops stretched out laterally and
threw up peaks of their own until there were distinct duplicate ranges,
one on the earth and one in the sky. It was fascinating to watch these
whimsical vagaries of nature that went on for hours. A change in one's
own position, from erect to stooping, caused the most convulsive
contortions, and when once I lay down on the trail that I might view the
scene through the lowest stratum of the agitated air, every peak shot up
suddenly far into the sky like the outspreading of one's fingers, to
subside as suddenly as I rose to my feet again. The psalmist's query
came naturally to the mind, "Why hop ye so ye hills?" and our Kobuk boy
Roxy, whose enjoyment of fine landscapes and strange sights was always
a pleasure to witness, answered the unspoken question. "God make
mountains dance because spring come," he said prettily enough.
Then we crossed another portage and cut off ten miles of river by it,
and when we reached the river again I wanted to stop, for it grew
towards evening and here was good camping-ground. But we had lately met
some travelling Kobuks and they had told Roxy of a cabin "just little
way" farther on, and I yielded to the rest of the company, who would
push on to it and thus avoid the necessity of making camp. That native
"just little way" is worse than the Scotch "mile and a bittock"; indeed,
the natives have poor notion of distance in general, and miles have as
vague meaning to them as kilometres have to the average Anglo-Saxon.
[Sidenote: A BELATED CAMP]
On and on we pushed, mile after mile, and still no cabin. In the
gathering dusk we would continually think we saw it; half-fallen trees
or sloping branches simulating snow-covered gables. At last it grew
quite dark, and when there was general agreement that we must seek the
cabin no longer, but camp, there was no place to camp in. Either the
bank was inaccessible or there was lack of dry timber. We went on thus,
seeking rest and finding none, until seven-thirty, and then made camp by
candle-light, in a poor place at that, having trudged thirty-five miles
that day. A night-made camp is always an uncomfortable camp, and an
uncomfortable camp means a miserable night, which to-morrow must pay
for. We did not get to bed till nearly midnight, and it was
nine-forty-five when we started out next morning, and we made only
fifteen miles that day.
The Kobuk valley continued to open out wider and wider and the mountains
right and left to recede. The Jade Mountains were now dim and distant
behind us, and new ranges were coming into view. The people on this
lower river are very few. It was just about one hundred miles from Long
Beach when we reached the next native village, a miserable collection of
pole dwellings, half underground, with perhaps a score of inhabitants.
Certainly the conditions of life deteriorated as we descended this
river. The country seems to afford nothing but fish; we were amongst the
ichthyophagi pure and simple. Roxy, bred and born on the upper Kobuk and
never so far down before, is very scornful about it. "Me no likee this
country," he says; "no caribou, no ptarmigan, no rabbits, no timber, no
nothin'." The weather had grown raw and cold again, with a constant
disagreeable wind that took all the fun out of travelling. We passed a
place where a white man was pessimistically picking away at a vein of
coal in the river bluff. "Yes, we been here all winter," he said,
"working on the blamed ledge. I always knowed it was goin' to pinch out,
and now it's begun to pinch. My partner's gone to Candle for more grub,
but I told him it weren't no use. It's pinchin' out right now. I knowed
it afore we started work, but the blamed fool wouldn't listen to me.
'It'll pinch out,' I told him a dozen times; 'you mark my word it'll
pinch out,' I told him, and now it's begun to pinch; and I hope he'll be
satisfied." We were reminded of the many coal-mines from time to time
located on the Yukon, in all or nearly all of which the vein has
"pinched out." The deposits on the coast may be all the fancy of the
magazine writer paints, and may hold the "incalculable wealth" that is
attributed to them, but the coal on the interior rivers seems in scant
measure and of inferior quality.
The same night we reached the native village at the mouth of the
Squirrel River, another northern tributary--the Kobuk receives most of
its waters from the north--and we spent the night and the next day,
which was Sunday, in one of the half-underground huts of the place, in
company with twelve other people. Here we found Roxy's brother, dubbed
"Napoleon" by some white man. They had not seen one another for years,
yet all the greeting was a mutual grunt. The Kobuks are not
demonstrative in their affections, but it would not be right to conclude
the affection lacking. I have seen an old Esquimau woman taking part in
a dance the night after her husband was buried, yet it would have been
unjust to have concluded that she was callous and indifferent. It is
very easy to misunderstand a strange people, and very hard to understand
them thoroughly.
[Sidenote: THE CANINE INTRUDER]
The roof of the tent was dome-shaped and it was lit by a seal-gut
skylight. In the morning while I was conducting Divine service and
attempting most lamely by the mouth of a poor interpreter to convey some
instruction, a dog fight outside adjourned to the roof and presently
both combatants came tumbling through the gut window into the midst of
the congregation. They were unceremoniously picked up and flung out of
the door, a few stitches with a needleful of sinew repaired the window,
and the proceedings were resumed. These gut windows have their
convenience as well as their inconvenience. When the hut gets too warm
and close even for Esquimaux, the seal gut is folded back and the outer
air rushes in to the great refreshment of the occupants; when the hut is
cool enough the gut is replaced. A skylight is far and away the best
method of illuminating any single-story structure, and this membrane is
remarkably translucent, while the snow that falls or frost that forms
upon such a skylight is quickly removed by beating the hand upon the
drum-like surface. All glass windows must be double glazed, or else in
the very cold weather they are quickly covered with a thick deposit of
frost from the condensation of the moisture inside the room, and then
they admit much less light than gut does. One of its unpleasant features
is the way the membrane snaps back and forth with a report like a pistol
whenever the door is opened and shut, but on the whole it is a very good
substitute for glass indeed.
[Sidenote: SLEEPING CUSTOMS]
These river Esquimaux vary greatly in physical appearance. While many of
them are somewhat undersized and all have small feet and hands, some are
well-developed specimens of manhood. "Riley Jim," the chief of this
tribe, would be counted a tall, stalwart man anywhere. And while many
have coarse, squat features, here and there is one who is decidedly
attractive in appearance. A sweet smile which is often upon the face,
and small, regular white teeth, greatly help to redeem any countenance.
A youth of about eighteen at the Squirrel River would properly be called
handsome, one thinks--though amongst native people one grows a little
afraid of forgetting standards of comparison; and his wife--for he was
already a husband--was a decidedly pretty girl. A word ought to be said
which applies to all the Esquimaux we met. Although many people live in
one hut and there is no possible privacy, yet we saw no immodesty of any
sort. They sleep entirely nude--probably our own great-grandparents did
the same, at least the people of Defoe and Smollet did, for nightshirts
and pyjamas are very modern things. There is much to be said from an
hygienic point of view in favour of that custom as against turning in
"all standing" as the Indian generally does, or sleeping in the day
underwear as most white men do. But although every one of a dozen people
in cabin after cabin that we stayed at on the Kobuk River above and
below this place, of both sexes and all ages, would thus strip
completely and go to bed, there was never any exposure of the body at
all. It may be, of course, that our presence imposed a greater care in
this respect, but it did not so impress us; it seemed the normal thing.
Another noticeable feature of the lives of all these people was their
devoutness in the matter of thanks before and after meat. Some of them
would not so much as give and receive a drink of cold water without a
long responsive grace.
As we went on down the river the country grew bleaker and drearier and
the few scattered inhabitants were living more and more the life of the
seacoast. The dwellings resembled igloos more than cabins, being
completely covered with snow and approached by underground passages,
with heavy flaps of untanned sealskin to close them. When we passed a
fork of the river we knew that we were entering the delta of the Kobuk,
and that another day would take us to the mission on Kotzebue Sound. It
was a long, hard day, in which we made forty miles, but an interesting
one. With a start at six, we were at the mouth by nine-thirty. The
spruce which had for some time been dwarfing and dwindling gave place to
willows, the willows shrank to shrubs, the shrubs changed to coarse
grass thrusting yellow tassels through the snow. The river banks sank
and flattened out and ceased, and we were on Hotham Inlet with the long
coast-line of the peninsula that forms it stretching away north and
south in the distance. Roxy's bewilderment was amusing. He stopped and
gazed about him and said: "Kobuk River all pechuk!" ("Pechuk" means
"played out.") "What's the matter, no more Kobuk River?" I think his
mind had never really entertained the notion of the river ending, though
of course he must often have heard of its mouth in the salt water. He
was out of his country, his bearings all gone, a feeling of helpless
insecurity taking the place of his usual confidence, and I think he said
no more all that day.
We had to traverse the ice of Hotham Inlet northward to its mouth,
double the end of the peninsula, and then travel south along the coast
to the mission at Kikitaruk, the peninsula being too rugged to cross.
Three considerable rivers drain into Hotham Inlet, roughly parallel in
their east and west courses, the Noatak, the Kobuk, and the Selawik, so
that its waters must be commonly more fresh than salt, for its bounds
are narrow and the extensive delta of its eastern shore would argue its
depth slight. Ahead of us, as we travelled north making a bee-line for
the end of the peninsula, all the afternoon, loomed the rocky promontory
of Krusenstern, one of Kotzebue's capes, and far beyond, stretching up
the dim coast-line, lay the way to Point Hope. It was with a sinking of
the heart that I gazed upon it, for I knew already, though I had not
announced a decision, that the road to Point Hope could not be my road
that year. All day long the thermometer stood between -40 deg. and -30 deg., and
the constant light sea-breeze kept scarfs wrapped closely about mouths
and noses, which always means disagreeable travel. When the company
stopped at noon to eat a little frozen lunch, I was too chilly to cease
my movement and pressed on. The day of that blessed comfort of the
trail, the thermos flask, was not yet. By two-thirty we had reached Pipe
Spit, which still further contracts the narrow entrance of the inlet,
and turning west for a mile or two rounded the point and then turned
south for ten miles along the coast. Just about dark we reached the
mission and stood gazing out over the rough ice of Kotzebue Sound to the
Arctic Ocean, having made the forty miles in ten and a half hours. We
had come about one thousand miles from Fairbanks, all of it on foot and
most of it on snow-shoes.
[Sidenote: THE ARCTIC OCEAN]
So here was my first sight of the Arctic Ocean. All day long I had
anticipated it, and it stirred me,--a dim, grey expanse stretching vast
and vague in the dusk of the evening. The old navigators whose stories I
had read as a boy passed before me in their wonderful, bold sailing
vessels, going in and out uncharted waters that steamships will not
venture to-day--Kotzebue, Beechey, Collinson, McClure--pushing
resolutely northward.
Less happy had been my first sight of the Pacific Ocean, five years
before. I had the ill luck to come upon it by way of that Western Coney
Island, Santa Monica, and from the merry-go-rounds and cheap eating
places Balboa and Magellan and Franky Drake fled away incontinent and
would not be conjured back; though, indeed, the original discoverers
would have had yet further occasion to gaze at one another "with a wild
surmise" if they had seen shrieking companies "shooting the chutes." But
here was vastness, here was desolation, here was silence; jagged ice
masses in the foreground and boundless expanse beyond, solemn and
mysterious. The Arctic Ocean was even as I had pictured it.
The missionary in charge at Kikitaruk had been informed by letter of our
projected journey during the previous summer and had long expected us.
We were received with kindness and hospitality, and after supper began
at once our acquaintance with his work, for there was a service that
night which it was thought we should attend. I spoke for a few minutes
through an excellent interpreter and then spent a couple of hours
nodding over the stove, overcome with sleep, while there was much
singing and "testimony."
[Sidenote: TOTAL-ABSTINENCE ESQUIMAUX]
The Californian Society of Friends, established here a number of years
with branches at other points on Kotzebue Sound, has done an excellent
work amongst the Esquimaux. If they had accomplished nothing else it
would stand to the everlasting credit of the Society's missionaries that
they have succeeded in imbuing the natives under their charge with a
total aversion to all intoxicating liquor. We had come down from the
remotest points to which the influence of these people has extended; we
had met their natives five hundred miles away from their base of
instruction, and everywhere we found the same thing. It was said by the
white men on the Koyukuk that a Kobuk could not be induced to take a
drink of whisky. It seemed to us a pity that the force of this most
wholesome doctrine should be weakened by the unsuccessful attempt to
include tobacco in the same rigorous prohibition. In several cabins
where we stayed there was no sign of smoking until members of our party
produced pipes, whereupon other pipes were furtively produced and the
tobacco that was offered was eagerly accepted. From any rational point
of view the putting of whisky and tobacco in the same category is surely
a folly. There can be few more harmless indulgences to the native than
his pipe, and no one knows the solace of the pipe until he has smoked it
around the camp-fire in the arctic regions after a hard day's journey.
The decision to turn my back on Point Hope was, I think, the most
painful decision I ever made in my life; with all my heart I wanted to
go on. It was only one hundred and sixty or one hundred and seventy
miles away. The journey had been made in three or four days; but we
were now come to a country where travel is impossible in bad weather and
where bad weather prevails; and that journey might quite as likely take
two weeks. I worked over the calendar in my diary, figuring how many
days of travel still remained, allowing reasonable margins, and I could
not see that I had much more than time to get back to Fairbanks before
the break-up, which for sufficient reason I regarded as my first duty.
The day of rest at Kikitaruk was Washington's birthday, the 22d of
February. Eight weeks would bring us to the 19th April, by which time
the trails would be already breaking up. Counting out Sundays, that left
forty-eight days of travelling with something like twelve hundred miles
yet to make without going to Point Hope--an average of about twenty-five
miles a day. I knew that we had made no such average in the distance
already covered, and though I knew also that travelling improved
generally as the season advanced, I did not know how very much better
going there is on the wind-hardened snows of the coast when travelling
is possible at all. Again and again I have regretted that I did not take
the chance and push on, but at the time I decided as I thought I ought
to decide, and one has no real compunctions when that is the case.
[Sidenote: THE RESOLUTION TO TURN SOUTH]
So a first-hand knowledge of our own most interesting work among the
Esquimaux was not for me on that occasion--and there has arisen no
opportunity since. Mr. Knapp, who had planned to spend the rest of the
winter at Point Hope, would get a guide and a team here and turn north
after some days' rest, while I would turn south. Roxy was impatient to
return to Bettles. "Me no likee this country," was all that could be got
out of him. So I paid him his money and made him a present of the .22
repeating rifle with which he had killed so many ptarmigan on the
journey, outfitted him with clothes, grub, and ammunition, and let him
go; saying good-bye with regret, for he was a good boy to us all the
way.
It was late on the night of our single day of rest when I got to bed,
for there had been squaring up of accounts and much writing, and when I
went to bed I did not sleep. Again and again I reviewed the decision I
had come to and fought against it, though such is far from my common
habit. Even as I write, years after, the bitter rebellious reluctance
with which I turned south comes back to me. I wished the hospital at
Fairbanks at the bottom of the deep blue sea. I protested I would go on
and complete my journey, even though it involved "thawing out" at Tanana
and getting to Fairbanks on a steamboat in the summer. I had a free
hand, a kindly and complaisant bishop, and none would call me strictly
to account. Then I realised that it was merely pride of purpose,
self-willed resolution of accomplishing what had been essayed--in a
word, personal gratification for which I was fighting, and with that
realisation came surrender and sleep.
CHAPTER IV
THE SEWARD PENINSULA--CANDLE CREEK, COUNCIL, AND NOME
ONE day's rest was not a great deal after the distance we had come--and
that day fully occupied with business--but since Point Hope was
abandoned some sort of schedule must be made for the Seward Peninsula,
and where Sunday shall be spent is always an important factor in
arranging these itineraries. There was just time to reach Candle for the
next Sunday and it was decided to attempt it. Hans would accompany me as
far as Candle, where he hoped to find work. It meant two days of
forty-five miles each, for it is ninety miles from Kikitaruk to Candle,
but they told us it could be done.
So the reluctant adieus made, letters despatched, some mailed here at
Kikitaruk, some to be carried back to Bettles and mailed there--these
latter getting outside long before the former--we started at seven in
the morning instead of six, as we had planned, on the journey down the
shore of Kotzebue Sound. That hour's delay turned out to be a calamity
for us.
The trail was smooth along the beach until Cape Blossom was reached, and
I had the first riding of the winter, Hans and I alternately running and
jumping on the sled. There was a portage across the cape, and three or
four miles below it was the wreck of the river steamer _Riley_, which
used to make a voyage up the Kobuk with supplies for the miners at the
Shungnak. The thermometer was at -38 deg. when we started, and the same
light but keen breeze was blowing that had annoyed us on the other side
of the peninsula. What a barren, desolate region it is!--low rocks
sinking away to the dead level of the snow-field on the one hand,
nothing but the ice-field on the other.
[Sidenote: A BAD NIGHT]
[Sidenote: CAMPED IN THE OPEN]
We were bound for an igloo forty-five miles from the mission, the only
shelter between Kikitaruk on the peninsula and Kewalik on the mainland,
and we had been warned that the igloo would be easy to miss if it grew
dark as it would be almost indistinguishable from the snow-drifts of the
shore. Some directions from a multitude of counsellors remembered in one
sense by Hans and in another by me, added to our uncertainty as to just
where the igloo lay. The wind increased in force as the evening advanced
and the last time I looked at the thermometer it still registered -38 deg..
The sun set over the sound with another of those curious distortions
which had before proved ominous to us. It was flattened and swollen out
like a pot-bellied Chinese lantern, with a neck to it and an irregular
veining over its surface that completed the resemblance. The wind
increased until the air was full of flying snow and it grew dark, and
still there was no sign of the igloo. Only slowly and with much
difficulty could the trail be followed, and that meant we were soon not
moving fast enough to keep warm in the fierce wind. At last we lost the
trail altogether, and sometimes we found ourselves out on the rough ice
of the sound and sometimes wallowing in a fresh snow-drift on the shore.
I became possessed with the fear that we had passed the igloo. I was
positive that we were told at the mission that we should reach it
_before_ the high bluffs were passed, and we had passed them a long way
and had now but a shallow shelf to mark the coast-line. It is strange
how long that delusion about passing his destination will pursue the
Alaskan traveller. Presently the dogs dropped off a steep bank in the
dark, and only by good fortune we were able to keep the heavy sled from
falling upon them, for they were dead tired and lay where they dropped.
With freezing fingers I unhitched the dogs while Hans held the sled, and
we lowered it safely down. But it was plain that it was dangerous to
proceed. We could not find the trail again and were growing alarmingly
cold. We were "up against it," as they say here, "up against it good and
strong." We had a tent but no means of putting it up, a stove but
nothing to burn in it, a grub box full of food but no way to cook it. So
the first night of coast travel was to show us the full rigour and
inhospitality of the coast and to make us long for the interior again.
Wood can almost always be found there within a few miles, if it be not
immediately at hand, and no one properly appreciates the hospitality of
a clump of spruce-trees until he has spent a night of storm lying out on
this barren coast. We turned the dogs loose and threw them a fish
apiece, unlashed the sled, and got out our bedding. I had been sleeping
in robes, Hans in a shedding caribou-hide sleeping-bag that was my pet
aversion. When he crawled out in the morning he was so covered with hair
that he looked like a caribou, and the miserable hairs were always
getting into the food. We fished them out of the coffee, pulled them out
of the butter, and picked them out of the bread. But now in that
sleeping-bag he had an enormous advantage. We lay side by side on the
snow in the lee of the sled, and, tuck myself up with blanket and robe
as I would, it was impossible to keep the swirling snow from coming in.
I called the dogs to me and made them lie on my feet and up against my
side, and so long as they lay still I could get a little warmth, but
whenever they rose and left me I grew numb again. But Hans in his
sleeping-bag was snoring. The bag is the only bedding on the coast.
Added to the physical discomfort of that sleepless, shivery night was
some mental uneasiness. There was no telling to what height the storm
might rise, nor how long it might continue. Sometimes travellers
overtaken in this way on the coast have to lie in their sleeping-bags
for three days and nights before they can resume their journey. The only
interest the night held was the thought that came to me that as nearly
as I could tell we camped exactly on the Arctic Circle. The long night
dragged its slow length to the dawn at last and the wind moderated a
little at the same time, so with the first streak in the east I awoke
Hans, we gathered our poor dogs together, rolled up the snow-incrusted
bedding, and resumed our journey. Two miles farther on was the igloo!
Our calls awoke some one and we were bidden to enter. Descending a
ladder and crawling through a dark passage we came in to the grateful
warmth and shelter. The chamber was crowded with sleeping Esquimaux and
reeked with seal oil and fish, but Hans said it "looked good and smelled
good to him," and so it did to me also. One has to lie out on that coast
in a storm to appreciate the value of mere shelter. We went at once to
cooking, for we had eaten nothing but a doughnut or two in twenty-four
hours, and surely never meal was more relished than the reindeer steaks
and the coffee we took amongst those still sleeping Esquimaux. I should
have liked to spend the day and the next night there, for they were
friendly and kindly, but the wind had moderated somewhat and there was
still a chance to reach Candle for Sunday. With the offer of a sack of
flour at Kewalik we induced a couple of Esquimaux to accompany us, for I
knew we had to cross the mouth of a bay over the ice to reach the
mainland and I wanted to take no more chances.
Our company, again raised to four, started out about nine, and until the
Choris Peninsula was reached the trail still skirted the shore. It is
strange that Kotzebue, who named this peninsula of a peninsula for the
artist who accompanied his expedition in 1816, should have left the main
peninsula itself unnamed, and that the British expedition which named
Cape Blossom ten years later should have failed to supply the omission.
It still bears no name on the map. We portaged across the Choris
Peninsula and at the end of the portage took a straight course across
the mouth of Escholtz Bay (Escholtz was Kotzebue's surgeon) for Kewalik
on the mainland, passing Chamisso Island, named for Kotzebue's poet
friend. There is something very interesting to me in this voyage of
Kotzebue's, and I have long wished to come across a full narrative of
it. But the bitter wind that swept across that ice-sheet with the
thermometer at -30 deg. brought one's thoughts back to one's own condition.
My hands I could not keep warm with the gear that had sufficed for 50 deg.
and 60 deg. below in the interior, and I was very glad to procure from one
of our native companions a pair of caribou mitts with the hair inside,
an almost invulnerable gauntlet against cold. If that wind had been in
our faces instead of on our sides I am sure we could not have travelled
at all. At last we won across the ice and brought up at a comfortable
road-house at Kewalik, about ten miles from Candle. Here we lay
overnight, taking the opportunity of thawing out and drying the
frost-crusted bedding, leaving the short run into town for the morning.
[Sidenote: CANDLE CREEK]
The diggings on Candle Creek yield to the Koyukuk diggings only as the
most northerly gold mining in the world. Although the general methods
are the same in all Alaskan camps, local circumstances introduce many
differences. In all Alaskan camps the ground is frozen and must be
thawed down. The timber of the interior renders wood the natural fuel
for the production of the steam that thaws the ground, but the scarcity
of wood on the Seward Peninsula substitutes coal. There is coal on the
peninsula itself, but of very inferior quality, mixed with ice. One may
see chunks of coal with veins of ice running through them thrown upon
the fire. The wood of the interior is a great factor in its commercial
and domestic economy, and its absence on the Seward Peninsula makes
great change not only in the natural aspect of the country but in the
whole aspect of its industrial and domestic life also. Wood-chopping for
the stove and the mill, wood-sawing, wood-hauling employ no small
percentage of all the white men in the interior--occupations which do
not exist at all on the peninsula. But its encompassment by the sea, its
peninsularity, is the dominating difference between the Seward Peninsula
and the interior, and does indeed make a different country of it
altogether. All prices are very much lower on the peninsula because
ships can bring merchandise directly from the "outside." Thus amongst
those who have money to spend there is a more lavish scale of living
than in the interior towns, and luxuries may be enjoyed here that are
out of the question there. Perhaps, conversely, it is true that life on
the peninsula is somewhat harder for the poorer class. Whether a railway
from salt water to the mid-Yukon would redress this great difference in
the cost of everything may be doubted. Railways do not usually operate
at less than water-rates. There will probably always be an advantage in
the cost of living and mining in favour of the Seward Peninsula camps.
There had been no public religious service of any sort in Candle, with
its several hundreds of population, in three years, so there was special
satisfaction in having reached the place for Sunday when many miners
were in town from the creeks, and an overflowing congregation was
readily assembled. And there was great pleasure in three days' rest at
the hospitable home of a friend while the temperature remained below
-40 deg., exacerbated by a wind that rendered travelling dangerous.
Moreover, by waiting I had company on the way, and now that I was
without native attendant or white companion, and disposed, if possible,
to make the journey right across the peninsula to Council and then to
Nome without engaging fresh assistance, I was doubly glad of the
opportunity of travelling with two men bound for the same places and
acquainted with the route.
[Sidenote: THE SEWARD PENINSULA]
Travelling, like so many other things, is very different on the Seward
Peninsula. The constant winds beat down and harden the snow until it has
a crust that will carry a man anywhere. There are only two means by
which snow becomes crusted; one is this packing and solidifying by the
wind, and the other is thawing and freezing again. There is much less
wind in the interior than on the coast, and usually much less snowfall,
and the greater part of the surface of the country is protected by
trees; the climate, being continental instead of marine, is not subject
to such great fluctuations of temperature. A thaw sufficiently
pronounced or sufficiently prolonged to put a stout crust on the snow
when freezing is resumed, is a very rare thing in the interior and a
common thing on the coast. So a striking difference in travel at once
manifests itself; in the interior all the snow is soft except on a
beaten trail itself, while in the Seward Peninsula all the snow is alike
hard. The musher is not confined to trails--he can go where he pleases;
and his vehicle is under no necessity of conforming in width to a
general usage of the country--it may be as wide as he pleases. Hence the
hitching of dogs two and three abreast; hence the sleds of twenty-two,
twenty-four, or twenty-six inches in width. My tandem rig aroused the
curiosity of those who saw it. Hence many other differences also.
Hitherto we had not dreamed of watering the dogs since snow fell; now I
found their mouths bloody from their ineffectual attempts to dig up the
hard snow with their teeth, and had to water them night and morning. It
is not the custom on the Seward Peninsula to cook for the dogs, and dog
mushers there argue the needlessness of that trouble. But the true
reason is other and obvious. It is difficult for the traveller to get
enough wood to cook for himself, let alone the dogs. On the Seward
Peninsula skis are extensively used when there is soft snow; the
prevalence of brush almost everywhere in the interior renders them of
little use--and they are, therefore, little used, snow-shoes being
universal.
So, as in nearly all such matters everywhere, local peculiarities, local
differences, local customs, usually arise from local conditions, and the
wise man will commonly conform so soon as he discovers them. There is
almost always a sufficient reason for them.
[Sidenote: A "SIDLING" TRAIL]
The journey from Candle to Council was a surprisingly swift one. We
covered the one hundred and thirty miles in three days, far and away the
best travelling of the winter so far, but the usual time, I found. The
hard snow gives smooth passage though the interior of the peninsula is
rugged and mountainous; two prominent elevations, the Ass's Ears,
standing up as landmarks during the first day of the journey. The route
crossed ridge after ridge with steep grades, and the handling of the
heavy sled alone was too much for me. Again and again it was overturned,
and it was all that I could do, and more than I ought to have done, to
set it up again. The wind continued to blow with violence, and shelter
from it there was none. One hillside struggle I shall always remember.
The trail sloped with the hill and the wind was blowing directly down
it. I could keep no footing on the marble snow and had fallen heavily
again and again, in my frantic efforts to hold sled and dogs and all
from sweeping down into a dark ravine that loomed below, when I
bethought me of the "creepers" in the hind-sack, used on the rivers in
passing over glare ice. With these irons strapped to my feet I was able
to stand upright, but it was only by a hair's breadth once and again
that I got my load safely across. When I was wallowing in a hot bath at
Council two days later I found that my hip and thigh were black and blue
where I had fallen, though at the time, in my anxiety to save the dogs
and the sled, I had not noticed that I had bruised myself. So, judging
great things by little, one understands how a soldier may be sorely
wounded without knowing it in the heat and exaltation of battle.
Then for a while there would be such travel as one sees in the
children's picture-books, where the man sits in the sled and cracks his
whip and is whisked along as gaily as you please--such travel as I had
never had before; but there was no pleasure in it--the wind saw to
that.
On the second day we crossed "Death Valley," so called because two men
were once found frozen in it; a bleak, barren expanse, five or six miles
across, with a great gale blowing right down it, charged not only with
particles of hard snow but with spicules of ice and grains of sand. Our
course was south and the gale blew from the northwest, and the right
side of one's body and the right arm were continually numb from the
incessant beating of the wind. The parkee hood had to be drawn closely
all the time, and the eyes were sore from trying to peer ahead through
the fur edging of the hood. One grows to hate that wind with something
like a personal animosity, so brutal, so malicious does it seem. An
incautious turn of the head and the scarf that protected mouth and nose
was snatched from me and borne far away in an instant, beyond thought of
recovery. It seems to lie in wait, and one fancies a fresh shrill of
glee in its note at every new discomfiture it can inflict. There is
nothing far-fetched in the native superstition that puts a malignant
spirit in the wind; it is the most natural feeling in the world. I said
so that night in camp, and one of my companions mentioned something
about "rude Boreas," and I laughed. The gentle myths of Greece do not
fit this country. The Indian name means "the wind beast," and is
appropriate.
A savage, forbidding country, this whole interior of the Seward
Peninsula, uninhabited and unfit for habitation; a country of naked rock
and bare hillside and desolate, barren valley, without amenities of any
kind and cursed with a perpetual icy blast.
[Sidenote: DEATH VALLEY]
The valley crossed and its ridge surmounted, a still more heart-breaking
experience was in store. We descended the frozen bed of a creek from
which the wind had swept every trace of snow so that the ice was
polished as smooth as glass. The dogs could get no footing and were
continually down on their bellies, moving their legs instinctively but
helplessly, like the flippers of a turtle, while the wind carried dogs
and sled where it pleased. The grade was considerable and in bends the
creek spread out wide. Nothing but the creepers enabled a man to stand
at all, and creepers and brake together could not hold the sled from
careering sideways across the ice, dragging the dogs with it, until the
runners struck some pebble or twig frozen in the ice and the sled would
be violently overturned. Twice with freezing fingers I unlashed that
sled lying on its side, and took out nearly all the load before I could
succeed in getting it upright again, losing some of the lighter articles
each time. The third time was the worst of all. The brake had been
little more than a pivot on which sled and dogs were swung to leeward,
but now the teeth had become so blunt that, though I stood upon it with
all my weight, it would not hold at all nor check the sideways motion
under the impulse of the wind. Right across the creek we went, dragging
the dogs behind, jerking them hither and thither over the glassy
surface. I saw the rocks towards which we were driving, but was
powerless to avert the disaster, and hung on in some hope, I suppose, of
being able to minimise it, till, with a crash that broke two of the
uprights and threw me so hard that I skinned my elbow and hurt my head,
we were once more overturned. Never since I reached manhood, I think,
did I feel so much like sitting down and crying. It seemed hopeless to
think about getting down that creek until the wind stopped, and one
doubts if the wind
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