CHAPTER IX.
N
NOV. 15. 1898.—The boys returned last night very weary. They gave us the news much as the "Flying Dutchman" had. Six of our Upper Penelope boys have started for the Koyukuk with four months' provisions. They are Miller. Foote, Alec, Stevenson, Shafer and Casey. They carry eighteen hundred pounds on two sleds, three men to each sled. Shaul has gone to the Pick River, where "good indications" are reported. That leaves Wilson, McCullough and Farrar at the Upper Camp. Dr. Coffin has little faith in the news. He fears it is an unfounded rumor like many another. Moreover our doctor thinks it foolhardy and dangerous to start on such a trip, and he is anxious about the boys who have gone. None of them have had any experience with cold weather, being California boys. Casey, in fact, was never outside of Los Angeles county, until this trip, and none of the crowd are dressed for severe weather. They have but little fur clothing. However, timber covers most of the country they will cross, and they will, of course, put up a cabin if necessary. You couldn't entice the doctor out on such a trip for all the gold in Alaska. It ranged down to thirty-five degrees below zero while he and the boys were out, and they camped several nights, although at all the camps on the river hospitality reigned. The doctor had one finger frozen. He says he did not suspect it was nipped until he warmed his hands over the camp fire. It is very easy to be frozen without knowing it, even with the thermometer only thirty-five degrees below. But what about sixty below zero?
News has come to us that hundreds of other men are waiting to get to Kotzebue at the earliest possible moment. The gold-hunters up the river are mostly doing nothing, waiting for spring to open so they can go home. A few are sinking shafts in favorable localities, but as yet without success, though there are some "indications," whatever these are. It is a great undertaking to dig a hole in frozen ground. Fires are built and kept burning for some time and then removed, and the thawed dirt and gravel taken out. This process is repeated again and again, and the result is dreadfully slow. Frozen ground is tougher than rock to dig in. McCullough. Wilson and Farrar are starting such a hole at their camp.
Our enthusiasm about the new strike on the Koyukuk is subsiding. We sing no more impromptu songs. But we have six men in that direction, and if they are fortunate enough to get through they will send two men back for provisions.
Meanwhile I am collecting chickadees and redpolls. A couple or three of our leading men, who shall be nameless in this connection, are homesick. Yes, blue. They will be seen in Southern California as soon as they can crawl out of the Kowak country on theirhands and knees. Now, watch and see who they are.
Three of our neighbors started up the river yesterday with a load of eleven hundred pounds on a sled. They started on the smooth ice all right, but five miles north the sand has covered the ice clear across the river. They were stuck there and, after struggling over the sand for a few hours, gave it up and returned. The Iowa boys have not started yet, but are spending more time in making good sleds and fixing skates on their runners. If they start at all, which I doubt, they will certainly have better success than others. Dr. Coffin declares he is going to stay by and in our good, warm cabin the rest of the winter. He is quite pessimistic to-night. He predicts much suffering this winter. He found in his recent travels that open fireplaces are a failure. Cabins heated by them are cold. There is too much draft and the temperature cools off quickly when the fire dies down. We have two stoves, and water never freezes over in the cabin.
Nov. 18.—We just had a dreadful catastrophe. C. C. had set his keg of yeast on the rafters above the stove to keep warm and do its "work." Harry Reynolds had some poles near by across the rafters. The latter gentleman is at work on his new sled and, repairing one of the poles, reached for it rather hastily. As a result the yeast keg turned over. The doctor was sitting beneath, calmly reading some good book, when nearly the entire contents, a gallon of sour yeast, poured on to his unprotected head and down his neck, and spread itself out as if to shield him from any other danger. What a sight, it is impossible for me to portray. Not content with deluging the poor medico, the stuff slopped over everything in the vicinity of two or three yards. Several of us had a dose, but none was so seriously affected as the doctor, who is even now at work on his clothes with warm water and a sponge. The smell of sour dough permeates the atmosphere. Brown remarks that it reminds him of the extremely sour odor which filled the cabin of the "Penelope" the first night out from San Francisco.
For my part I think it convenient to have these little interruptions—when they fall on another man's head. It livens things up.
Scaffold Burial.
Scaffold Burial.
One or two other events have served to liven us up. Last night one of the natives at the Indian village died. It was what we expected, for he has been very sick for a week with pneumonia. This morning at daylight we noticed a smoke across the river and I walked over to investigate the cause. I regretted finding the obsequities closed and the four natives who had officiated just leaving. They had taken the dead man and all his personal belongings over to the bank of the river opposite the village, to a little knoll, where they built a platform on some poles leaned against each other for support. The body was wrapped in tent cloth and laid on this platform, which was about five feet above the ground—as high as the men could conveniently reach. After this the whole was firmly lashed together with walrus thong, so the winds and the dogs cannot tear it down. By the side of the scaffold the dead man's sled was laid upside down, and hung on the willows around were all the personal belongings of the deceased. He was "well-to-do," and these amounted to considerable as the Eskimos valued them. There were two nice reindeer skins, his clothes, mittens, muckluks, handkerchief, tin cup, etc. It seemed too bad to see those two deerskins left to decay in the weather, when the dead man's relatives are in sore need, but this is the invariable custom of these people. No worse than what occurs among Christians, when all available and unavailable funds are used to defray the expenses of an ostentatious funeral, leaving the family in destitution.
Joe Jury and Jack Messing, two of the Hanson Camp boys, spent the day with us and we had a big dinner. This "having company" disturbs the monotony of so much "prospecting," as we are doing these days.
Nov. 20, Sunday, 6 p. m.—To-day has been a very enjoyable one at this camp on theKowak. In fact every day is. The Hanson boys were all up for Sunday services. There were also two men from the Jesse Lou Camp, fifteen miles below us, who are visiting the Hanson Camp. The latter have invited our whole crowd down for Thanksgiving dinner next Thursday. We look forward to a "big spread." for this camp is abundantly supplied with luxuries in the food line, as I can testify, having taken dinner with them twice already. They are well-to-do, educated men, full of spontaneous hilarity, and a great boon to the Penelope Camp. Solsbury is a correspondent of the San Jose "Mercury." He is a lawyer and of course a good talker. He tells stories by the hour.
This afternoon he got started from some cause—a predetermined one. I presume—and talked for two hours. He resembles the newspaper cuts of Mark Twain. It is very entertaining when he tells of his experience in lumbering in the Sierras. His own boys say that he talks so incessantly that they beg him to quit before they get tired of his wit or confiscate it entirely. Everyone grows tiresome to his fellows on a trip like this; it could not be otherwise. Constant association for months brings out a man's faults and traits of character so plainly that those which are of little note glare like tiger's eyes in the dark, and his company becomes disagreeable, living as we do in a little cabin, and looking in each other's faces if we take a stroll, to keep watch for frost bites. It is better to be in a large company than in a small crowd, so one can vary his personal reflections.
Jack Messing is a man one likes to meet. He is a German by birth and the most generous of men by nature. His great fault is generosity, a vice seldom met with in my remembrance, and the boys make him the butt of dozens of jokes. He would give away the last stitch of clothing he owns should a man ask him. He gives the Eskimos all sorts of things and feeds them whenever he can, which is all the time, for these natives know a friend and are faithful to him. He has previously worn a full beard, but to-day he stalked into church with his face shaven clean excepting a long fringe of whiskers left in a circle from ear to ear around under his chin. He wore a belt and pistol, and had a big tin star on his left coat lapel and carried a "she-la-ly." He looked exactly like an Irish policeman, only with the usual recognized attributes of the latter highly accentuated. He stated in Irish dialect that he was after the thief who had stolen a pail of water from a certain camp down the river. As this allusion was in reference to a well-known occurrence of a week ago, it was very disastrous to the serious feeling which should prevail at a religious meeting, and it was some time before the congregation could settle down to the business in hand.
This afternoon we had a regular concert. The violin, autoharp and banjo make fine harmony in this noiseless atmosphere, and we were soon expressing our feelings in jumping and dancing. Two pairs of bones rattled to such of the music as was appropriate, and it was no dull time in the Penelope Camp. Clyde took the pictures of the crowd. I say this afternoon, but I mean to-day: it is light for only about six hours, and at high noon the sun scarcely peeps above the hills to the southward. It appears to be sundown at noon, and the colors of sky and landscape are beautiful.
We have had our first snow, only an inch, but enough to whiten the landscape until the next wind, that is booked for a circus, whisks it all into the hollows and then covers it up with sand, giving it a sharp rap and bidding it "stay there."
This morning we saw a very beautiful mirage. The mountains and trees down the river from us were reflected in the sky above, upside down. Then for another fine display we have the aurora. Last night it appeared in the form of a great bow reaching nearly to the zenith. It consisted of many colored scintillating rays, which brightened and then almost disappeared, only to reappear in different form as if they had left the stage to change their costume. The aurora appears in different form each night. And there is the beautiful moonlight. The moon is above the horizon always now. It reverses the order of the sun and shines all day in winter, scarcely appearing in summer.
How the time flies, to me at least! Before we know it. Spring will tap at the door. The unbearable monotony of an Arctic winter, which some travelers dwell upon so desolately, is unknown to us so far, and I for one will never know it. During the past few weeks I have read. So far have devoured "Last Days of Pompeii." "In His Steps," "Opening of a Chestnut Burr," "The Honorable Peter Sterling," and "Etidorpha." I spent two weeks upon the latter and think it is a wonderful book, coming upon my thoughts here in the Arctics like a great semi-scientific visitor. There are morebooks in the neighborhood than I could read in two winters.
I have been given a new name—"Chickadee Joe." At the Hanson Camp they call me "Little Joe," to distinguish me from "Big Joe." We are very familiar with one another and change very suddenly from a highly intellectual crowd to one of stirring juvenility. We had such an unexpected romp the other day. There was about an inch of snow out on the smooth ice, and it was snowing great flakes still. Three of our boys were playing snowball with several of the Eskimo children, and washing each other's faces and slipping down all over the ice. Two Eskimo "belles" joined us, Kalhak and Aggi-chuck, and they did not hesitate to give us a return snowball or a face full of the same. They were strong, too, and several times I found myself sprawling on the ice and covered with snow, to the great amusement of everyone. After all that may be said of this strange people, they derive a sort of very human satisfaction from their cold and narrow life, and I shall always think of them as finding some happiness in the long winter along with the aurora and the moonlight.
After the Ball.
After the Ball.