IDITAROD CITY
We went through "Discovery Otter" and into "Flat City," on Flat Creek, the jealous rival of Iditarod City,and so over the hills to Iditarod City, on the wings of a storm. The wind whirled the snow behind us and drove the sled along almost on top of the dogs. In its bleak situation and its exposure to the full force of the wind, Iditarod City reminds one of Nome or Candle on the Seward Peninsula. The hills and flats that surround it are in the main treeless, and the snow drifts and drives over everything. Almost all the week that we spent in the town it was smothered up in a howling wind-storm, so that it was quite a serious undertaking to walk a block or two along the streets. Deep drifts were piled up on all the corners and on the lee side of all buildings. We reached Iditarod City on Monday, the 13th of March. Until the following Friday morning was no cessation or moderation of the wind-storm; and this, they told us, represented most of the weather since the 1st of January.
Overgrown and overdone in every way, the place presented all the features, sordid and otherwise, of a raw mining town. Prices had risen enormously on all manner of supplies, for everything that was not actually "short" was believed to be "cornered." Bacon was ninety cents a pound; butter one dollar and a half a pound; flour was twenty dollars a hundred pounds, and most things in like ratio. Some said the grub was not in the camp; others that the tradesmen had it cached away waiting for the still higher prices they believed would obtain before fresh supplies could arrive in July. There was a general feeling of disappointment and discouragement, enhanced by discomfort and actual suffering from the terrible stormy weather of the winter and the exorbitantand growing price of provisions. Many men without occupation were living on one meal a day. The saloons and the parasitical classes, male and female, seemed to flourish and to play their usual prominent part in the life of such places. The doings of notorious women whose sobriquets seemed household words, the lavish expenditures of certain men upon them, the presents of diamonds they received, with the amount paid for them, constituted a large part of the general talk.
One is compelled to admire the vigour and enthusiastic enterprise, daunted by no difficulty, that is displayed in the wonderfully rapid upraising of a new mining-camp town. The building goes far ahead of the known wealth of the camp and commonly far ahead of the reasonable expectation. But the element of chance is so important a factor in placer mining that the whole thing partakes more of the nature of gambling than of a commercial venture. Any new camp may suddenly present the world with a new Klondike; with riches abundant and to spare for every one who is fortunate enough to be on the spot. Here was Flat Creek with a surprisingly rich deposit; why should there not be a dozen such amidst the multitudinous creeks of the district? How could any one know that it would be almost the only creek on which pay would be found at all? For there is no law about the distribution of gold deposits; there is not even a general rule that has not its notable exceptions. It is very generally believed by the old prospectors and miners that somewhere in the Bible may be found these words, "Silver occurs in veins, but gold is where you find it," whichof course, is a mere misreading or faulty remembering of a verse in the Book of Job: "Surely there is a vein for the silver and a place for the gold where they fine it" (refine it). But that "gold is where you find it" is about the only law touching auriferous deposits that holds universally good.
Three long parallel streets of one and two story wooden buildings, with cross streets connecting them, made up the town. Because the country is poorly timbered, the usual log construction had yielded in the main to framed buildings, and great quantities of lumber had been brought the previous summer from Fairbanks, and even from Nome and the outside, to supplement the low-grade output of two local mills. But the price of building materials had been very high, and the average dwelling was very small and incommodious. People accustomed to the comparative luxury of the older camps had suffered a good deal from the lack of all domestic conveniences in this new will-o'-the-wisp of an eldorado.
So there the town stretched away, lumber and paper,—the usual tinder-box Alaskan construction—stores slap up against one another, with no alleyways between; in the busiest part of it and along the water-front even an adequate provision of side streets grudged; furnace-heated and kiln-dried and gasoline-lit; waiting for the careless match and the fanning wind and the five minutes' start that should send it all up in smoke. A week after we left it came; as it came to Dawson, as it came to Nome, as it came to Fairbanks, without teaching any lesson or leaving any precautionary regulations on the statutebook to save men from their own competitive greed. Two or three weeks after the fire, however, it was all rebuilt, and a plunging local bank held mortgages on most of the structures for the cost of the new material—and holds them yet.
THOUSANDS WITHOUT CHURCH
With at least a thousand people resident in the town, not to mention the thousands more out upon the creeks and at Flat City and "Discovery[G]Otter," there was no minister of religion of any sort in the whole region, nor had public Divine service been conducted since the occasion of thePelican'svisit the previous summer. Yet there were many in the place who sorely missed the opportunities of worship. Twice on Sunday the largest dancing hall in the town was crowded at service; at night it could have been filled a second time with those unable to get in.
Places like this present very difficult problems to those desirous of providing for their religious need. To occupy them at all they should be occupied at once when yet eligible sites may be had for the staking; if they prosper, to come into them later means buying at a high price. Yet what seventh son of a seventh son shall have foresight enough to tell the fortunes of them? The North is strewn with "cities" of one winter. Nor is the selection of suitable men to minister to such communities a simple matter. Amidst the overthrow of all the usual criteria of conduct, the fading out of the usual dividing lines and the blending into one another of the usualdivisions, it requires a tactful and prudent man "to keep the happy mean between too much stiffness in refusing and to much easiness in admitting" variations from conventional standards. His point of view, if he is to have any influence whatever, must not exclude the point of view of the great majority; he must accept the situation in order to have any chance of improving the situation. And yet in the fundamentals of character and conduct he must be unswerving. And if on any such fundamental the battle gauge is thrown down, he must take it up and fight the quarrel out at whatever cost.
We left Iditarod City on Monday, the 20th of March, the dogs the fatter and fresher for their week's rest, resolved not to return by the Kuskokwim but to take the beaten trail out to the Yukon, and so all the way up that stream to Fort Yukon. The monthly mail had arrived a few days previously—a monthly mail was all that the thousands of men in this camp could secure—and had gone out again the very next morning, before people had time to answer their letters, before the registered mail had even been delivered. So our departure for the Yukon was eagerly seized upon and advertised as a means of despatching probably the last mail that would go outside over the ice. I was sworn in as special carrier, and a heavy sack of first-class mail added to our load as far as Tanana. The first stage of thirty miles led to Dikeman, a town at the headwaters of ordinary steamboat navigation of the Iditarod River, at which the Commercial Company had built a depot and extensive warehouse, since in the main abandoned. Two streets of cabinslined the bank, but forty or fifty souls comprised the population, and almost all of them gathered for Divine service that night.
THE "MOVING OF THE MEAT"
From Dikeman to Dishkaket, on the Innoko River, a distance of some seventy miles, our route lay over one of the dreariest and most dismal regions in all Alaska. It is one succession of lakes and swamps, with narrow, almost knife-edge, ridges between, fringed with stunted spruce. Far as the eye could reach to right and left the country was the same; it is safe to say broadly that all the land between the Iditarod and Innoko Rivers is of this character. We passed over it in mild weather, but it must be a terrible country to cross in storm or through deep snow. For ten miles at a stretch there was scarcely a place where a man might make a decent camp. At a midway road-house was gathered the greatest assemblage of dogs and loaded sleds I had ever seen together at one time, each team with an Indian driver; they must have covered a quarter or a third of a mile. It was a freight train engaged in transporting a whole boat-load of butcher's meat to Iditarod City, the cargo of a steamboat that had frozen in on the Yukon the previous October or early November. All the winter through efforts had been made to get this meat two hundred odd miles overland to its destination; but the weather had been so stormy and the snow so deep that near the end of March most of it was still on the way, and some yet far down the trail towards the Yukon waiting for another trip of the teams.
Dishkaket was merely a native village on the Innoko River two or three years before; but since three newtrails from the Yukon come together here—from Kaltag Nulato, and Lewis's Landing—and in the other directions two trails branch off here, to the Innoko diggings at Ophir and to the Iditarod, a store or two and a couple of road-houses had sprung up.
From Dishkaket, after crossing the Innoko, we took the most northerly of the three trails to the Yukon, the Lewis Cut-Off, a trail of a hundred miles that strikes straight across country and reaches the Yukon eighty miles farther up that stream than the Nulato trail and a hundred and twenty miles farther up than the Kaltag trail. The Kaltag trail is the trail to Nome; the Nulato trail is the mail trail simply because it suits the contractors to throw business to Nulato. The Lewis Cut-Off is the direct route, the shortest by about a hundred miles, but it was cut by the private individual whose name it bears, and leads out to his store and road-house on the Yukon; so a rival road-house was built close by on the river and the prestige and advertisement of the "United States mail route" thrown to the trail that covers one hundred unnecessary miles—for no other reason than to deprive Lewis of the legitimate fruit of his enterprise.
The character of the country changed so soon as the Innoko was crossed; the wide swamps gave place to a broken, light-timbered country of ridges and hollows, and the rough, laborious, horse-ruined trail across it made bad travelling. "Buckskin Bill," with his cayuses, was also engaged in "moving the meat." The measured miles, moreover, gave place to estimated miles, and the nominaltwenty-five we made the first day was probably not much more than twenty.
MILLINERY
The first fifty miles of the country between the Innoko and the Yukon is much the same, and we were climbing and descending ridges for a couple of days. Then we crossed a high ridge and dropped out of Innoko waters into the valley of the Yukatna, a tributary of the Yukon, and passed down this valley for thirty or forty miles, and then across some more broken country to the Yukon. At one of the road-houses a woman was stopping, going in with three or four large sled loads of millinery and "ladies' furnishings." We were told that the merchandise had cost her twelve thousand dollars in Fairbanks, and that she expected to realise thirty thousand dollars by selling it to the "sporting" women of theIditarod, now a whole winter debarred from "the latest imported French fashions." This woman was dressed in overalls, like a man, and the drivers of her teams, two white men and a native, cursed and swore and used filthy language to the dogs in her presence. It always angers me to hear an Indian curse; to hear one curse in the presence of a white woman was particularly disgusting and exasperating; but what could one expect when the white men put no slightest restraint upon themselves and the woman seemed utterly indifferent? I called the Indian aside and spoke very plainly to him, and he ceased his ribaldry; but the white men still poured it out as they struggled to hitch their many dogs. At last I could stand it no longer. "Madam," I said to the woman, "I don't know who you are, save that you are a whitewoman, and as a white woman, if I were you, I would make those blackguards treat me with more respect than to use such language before me." She flushed and made no reply. The men, who heard what I said, scowled and made no reply. Presently dispositions were done and the train moved off, but I did not hear any more foul language. This is set down here chiefly because it was the first and only time in all his travels in Alaska that the writer heard such language in such presence.
The end of the portage trail.The end of the portage trail.
Rough ice on the Yukon.Rough ice on the Yukon.
Another road-house was kept by a man who had been cook upon a recent arctic expedition off the coast of Alaska, and he gave some interesting inside information about an enterprise the published narrative of which had always seemed unsatisfactory. It was just gossip from a drunken scamp, but it filled several gaps in the book.
As we approached the Yukon we passed several meat caches where great quarters of beef sewn up in burlap were piled on the side of the trail. At one of these caches the camp-robbers had been at work industriously. They had stripped the burlap from parts of several quarters, exposing the fat, and had dug out and carried it away little by little until it was all gone. The hard-frozen lean probably defied their best efforts; at any rate, the fat offered less resistance. But where else in the world could men dump quarters of beef beside the road and go off and leave them for weeks with no more danger of depredation than the bills of birds can effect?
A few miles from the river the rival road-house signs began to appear. "Patronise Lewis; he cut this trail at his own expense," pleaded one. "Why go five miles out ofyour way," sneered another. Lewis's road-houseisacross the wide Yukon, and there was no point in crossing the river save one's determination to lend no countenance to the spitefulness of these mail runners. So across the river we went and were glad to be on the Yukon again. The next morning we encountered the same rival signs at the point where the trail from Lewis's joined the "mail trail."
"TREASURE ISLAND"
Most of our travelling was now upon the surface of the Yukon, and four hundred and fifty miles of it stretched ahead of us ere our winter's travel should end at Fort Yukon. Four hours brought us to the military telegraph station at Melozi, and we were able to send word ahead that we were safely out of the Kuskokwim wilderness. Then a portage was crossed and then the river pursued again until with about thirty miles to our credit we made camp. The days were lengthening out now, the weather growing mild, although a keen, cold, down-river breeze was rarely absent, and travel began to be pleasant and camping no hardship. We preferred camping, on several scores, when the day's work had not been too arduous, chief amongst them being that it gave more opportunity and privacy for Walter's schooling. He was readingTreasure Islandaloud, and I was getting as great pleasure from renewing as he from beginning an acquaintance with that prince of all pirate stories. Kokrines and Mouse Point one day, the next The Birches; we passed these well-known Yukon landmarks, camping, after a run of thirty-eight miles, some six miles beyond the last-named place, with a run of forty-four miles before us toTanana. I judged it too much; but the trail was greatly improved and we decided to attempt it in one stage. A misreading of the watch, so that I roused myself and Walter at 3.30a. m.instead of 5.15a. m., and did not realise the mistake until the fire was made and it was not worth while returning to bed, gave us a fine start and we made good progress. Gold Mountain (so called, one supposes, because there is no gold there; there is no other reason), Grant Creek, "Old Station" were passed by, and at length Tanana loomed before us while yet ten miles away. In just eleven hours we ran the forty-four miles, making, with three additional miles out to the mission, forty-seven altogether, by far the longest journey of the winter. We reached Tanana on the 1st of April, just six weeks since we left.
AN UNTRAVELLED RIVER
We spent eight days at Tanana, including two Sundays, Passion Sunday and Palm Sunday, but I was under an old promise to spend Easter there also. Now, Easter, 1911, fell on the 16th of April, and for the three-hundred-mile journey to Fort Yukon a period of ten or twelve days at the least would be necessary, that might easily stretch to two weeks. Travelling on the Yukon ice so late in April as this would involve was not only fraught with great difficulty and discomfort, but also with actual danger, and I had to beg to be absolved of my promise. Some considerable preparation was on foot for the festival, and I was loath to leave, for Tanana was then without any resident minister, but it seemed foolish to take the chances that would have to be taken if we stayed.
Five days of almost ceaseless snow-storm during ourstay at Tanana did not give prospect of good travelling, and, indeed, when we pulled out from the mission on the Monday in Holy Week there was no sign of any trail. From Tanana up to Fort Yukon there is very little travel; since the whole of this long stretch of river was deprived of winter mail a year or two before, no through travel at all. Cabins may usually be found to camp in, but there are no road-houses. What travel still takes place is local.
The journey divided itself into two roughly equal parts, a hundred and fifty miles through the Lower Ramparts, and a hundred and fifty miles through the Yukon Flats, almost all of it on the surface of the river. It was hoped to reach Stephen's Village, a native settlement just within the second half of the journey, for Easter.
Snow does not lie long at rest upon the river within the Ramparts, and particularly within the narrow, cañon-like stretch of seventy-five miles from Tanana to Rampart City. Violent and almost ceaseless down-stream winds sweep the deep defile in the mountains through which the river winds its course. In places the ice is bare of snow; in places the snow is piled in huge, hardened drifts. So strong and so persistent is this wind that it is often possible to skate over an uninterrupted black surface of ice, polished like plate glass, for twenty miles on a down-river journey. To make way over such a surface up-stream, against such wind, is, however, almost impossible. The dogs get no footing and the wind carries the sled where it listeth. The journey so far as Rampart City has been described before; it will suffice now thatit took three days of toilsome battling against wind and bad surface, with nights spent upon the floor of grimy cabins. So cold was the wind that it is noted in my diary with surprise, on the 12th of April, that I had worn fur cap, parkee, and muffler all day, as though it had been the dead of winter instead of three weeks past the vernal equinox.
On Wednesday night there was Divine service at Rampart, and on Maundy Thursday, after four miles upon the river, we took the portage of eleven miles that cuts a chord to the arc of the greatest bend of the river within the Ramparts and so saves nine miles. Three miles more took us to the deserted cabin at the site of the abandoned coal-mine opposite the mouth of the Mike Hess River, here confluent with the Yukon, and in that cabin we spent the night, having had the high, bitter wind in our faces all day. We hated to leave the shelter of the wooded portage and face the blast of the last three miles.
WIND AND SNOW
We woke the next morning to a veritable gale of wind and snow, and lay in the cabin till noon, occupied with the exercises of the solemn anniversary. The wind having then abated somewhat and the snow ceased, we sallied forth, still hopeful of making Stephen's Village for Easter. But when we got down upon the river surface it became doubtful if we could proceed, and as we turned the first bend we encountered a fresh gale that did not fall short of a blizzard. The air was filled with flying snow that stung our faces and blinded us. The dogs' muzzles became incrusted with snow and their eyes filledwith it so that it was hard to keep them facing it. I could not see the boy at all when he was a hundred feet ahead of the team. We struggled along for four miles, and, since it was then evident that we could not go much farther without useless risk, we turned to a spot on the bank where Walter knew another deserted cabin to stand; for he knows every foot of this section of the river and once spent a summer, camped at the coal-mine, fishing. The spot was reached, but the cabin was gone. The fish rack still stood there, but the cabin was burned down. There was nothing for it but to return to the coal-mine cabin; so, for the first and only time in all my journeyings, it was necessary to abandon a day's march that had been entered upon and go back whence we had come. We ran before the gale at great speed and were within the cabin again by 2.30p. m.All the evening and all night the storm raged, and I was in two minds about running back to Rampart before it for Easter, since it was now out of the question to reach Stephen's Village. If the season had not been so far advanced this is what I should have done, but it would set us back three days more on the journey, and on reflection I was not willing to take that chance with the break-up so near.
So on the morning of Easter Eve we sallied up-stream again, snow falling and driving heavily, and the wind still strong but with yesterday's keen edge blunted. By the time we had beaten around the long bend up which we had fought our way the day before, the snow had ceased, and by noon the wind had dropped and the sun was shining, and in a few moments of his unobscured strength allthe loose snow on the sled was melted—a warning of the rapidity with which the general thaw would proceed once the skies were clear. That night saw us in the habitable though dirty, deserted cabin at Salt Creek (so called, one supposes, because the water of it is perfectly fresh) at which we had hoped to lodge the previous night.
ALASKAN "FORTS"
Buoyed by the hope of doing a double stage in a clear, windless day and thus reaching Stephen's Village for service at night, we made a very early start that beautiful Easter morning. But it was not to be. Such trail as there was ran high up on the bank ice—level, doubtless, when it was made much earlier in the season, but now at a slope towards the middle of the river through the falling of the water, and seamed with great cracks. Such a trail, called a "sidling" trail in the vernacular of mushing, is always difficult and laborious to travel, for the sled slips continually off it into the loose snow or the ice cracks, and often for long stretches at a time one man must hold up the nose of the sled while the other toils at the handle-bars. In one place, while thus holding the front of the sled on the trail, Walter slipped into an ugly ice crack concealed by drifted snow, and so wedged his foot that I had difficulty in extricating him. The last two bends of the river within the Ramparts seemed interminable and it was 6.30p. m., with twelve hours' travel behind us, when we reached old Fort Hamlin, on the verge of the Yukon Flats. These "forts," it might be explained, if one chose to pursue the elucidation of Alaskan nomenclature in the same strain, are so called because they never had any defences and never needed any. As a matter offact, in the early days, when the Hudson Bay Company made its first establishments on the upper river, there was supposed to be some need of fortification, and Fort Selkirk and Fort Yukon were stockaded. Fort Selkirk, indeed, was sacked and burned sixty years ago, but not by Yukon Indians. The Chilkats from the coast, indignant at the loss of their middle-man profits by the invasion of the interior, crossed the mountains, descended the river, and destroyed the post. It thus became customary to call a trading-post a "fort," and every little point where a store and a warehouse stood was so dignified. Hence Fort Reliance, Fort Hamlin, Fort Adams.
For years Fort Hamlin had been quite deserted, but now smoke issued from the stovepipe and dogs gave tongue at our approach, and we found a white man with an Esquimau wife from Saint Michael and a half-breed child dwelling there and carrying a few goods for sale. With him we made our lodging, and with him and his family said our evening service of Easter, and so to bed, thoroughly tired.
TRAVELLING BY NIGHT
A mile beyond Fort Hamlin the Ramparts suddenly cease and the wide expanse of the Yukon Flats opens at once. Ten miles or so brought us to Stephen's Village, where we had been long expected and where a very busy day was spent. A number of Indians were gathered and there were children to baptize and couples to marry, as well as the lesson of the season to teach. It was a great disappointment that we had been unable to get here before, and matter of regret that, being here at such labour, only so short a time could be spent. But the closingseason called to us loudly. A mild, warm day set all the banks running with melting snow and made the surface of the river mushy. There was really no time to lose, for the next seventy-five miles was to give us the most difficult and disagreeable travelling of the journey. Here, in the Flats, where is greatest need of travel direction on the whole river, was no trail at all beyond part of the first day's journey. Within the Ramparts the river is confined in one channel; however bad the travelling may be, there is no danger of losing the way; but in the Flats the river divides into many wide channels and these lead off into many more back sloughs, with low, timbered banks and no salient landmarks at all. Behind us were the bluffs of the Ramparts, already growing faint; afar off on the horizon, to the right, were the dim shapes of the Beaver Mountains. All the rest was level for a couple of hundred miles.
A local trail to a neighbouring wood-chopper's took us some twelve miles, and then we were at a loss. The general direction we knew, and previous journeys both in winter and summer gave us some notion of the river bends to follow, but we wallowed and floundered until late at night before we reached the cabin we were bound for, the snow exceeding soft and wet for hours in the middle of the day.
The time had plainly come to change our day travel into night travel, for freezing was resumed each night after the sun was set, and the surface grew hard again. So at this cabin we lay all the next day, with an interesting recluse of these parts who knows many passagesof Shakespeare by heart, and who drew us a chart of our course to the next habitation, marking every bend to be followed and the place where the river must be crossed. But there is always difficulty in getting a new travel schedule under way, and we did not leave until five in the morning instead of at two as we had planned. This gave us insufficient time to make the day's march before the sun softened the snow, and moccasins grew wet, and snow-shoe strings began to stretch, and the webbing underfoot to yield and sag—and we had to content ourselves with half a stage. By ninep. m.we were off again and did pretty well until the night grew so dark that we could no longer distinguish our landmarks. Then we went to the bank and built a big fire and made a pot of tea and sat and dozed around it for a couple of hours or so until the brief darkness of Alaskan spring was overpast, and the dawn began to give light enough to see our way again.
When our course lay on the open river, the snow had crust enough to hold us upon our snow-shoes; but when it took us through little sheltered sloughs, the crust was too thin and we broke through all the time, and that makes slow, painful travel. At last we came to a portage that cuts off a number of miles, but the snow slope by which the top of the bank should be reached had a southern exposure and was entirely melted and gone. The dogs had to be unhitched, the sled to be unloaded, the stuff packed in repeated journeys up the steep bank, and the sled hauled up with a rope. Then came the repacking and reloading and the rehitching; and when the portagewas crossed the same thing had to be done to get down to the river bed again. Twice more on that day the process was gone through, and each time it took nigh an hour to get up the bank, so that it was around noon, and the snow miserably wet and mushy again, when we reached Beaver and went to bed at the only road-house between Fort Yukon and Tanana.
"Beaver City" owes its existence to quartz prospects in the Chandalar, in which men of money and influence in the East were interested. The Alaska Road Commission had built a trail some years before from the Chandalar diggings out to the Yukon, striking the river at this point, and on the opposite side of the river another trail is projected and "swamped out" direct to Fairbanks. The opening up of this route was expected to bring much travel through Beaver, and a town site was staked and many cabins built. But "Chandalar quartz" remains an interesting prospect, and the Chandalar placers have not proved productive, and all but a few of the cabins at "Beaver City" are unoccupied. If "the Chandalar" should ever make good, "Beaver City" will be its river port.
LAST DAY
We left Beaver at elevenp. m.on Friday night, hoping in two long all-night runs to cover the eighty miles and reach Fort Yukon by Sunday morning. Here was the first trail since we left Stephen's Village and the first fairly good trail since we left Tanana, for there had been some recent travel between Fort Yukon and Beaver. Here for the first time we had no need of snow-shoes, and when they have been worn virtually all the winter throughand nigh a couple of thousand miles travelled in them, walking is strange at first in the naked moccasin. It is a blessed relief, however, to be rid of even the lightest of trail snow-shoes. We stepped out gaily into a beautiful clear night, with a sharp tang of frost in the air, and even the dogs rejoiced in the knowledge that the end of the journey was at hand. All night long we made good time and kept it up without a stop until eight o'clock in the morning, when we reached an inhabited but just then unoccupied cabin and ate supper or breakfast as one chooses to call it and went to bed, having covered fully half the distance to Fort Yukon. About noon we were rudely awakened by one of the usual Alaskan accompaniments of approaching summer. The heat of the sun was melting the snow above us, and water came trickling through the dirt roof upon our bed. We moved to a dry part of the cabin and slept again until the evening, and at ninep. m.entered upon what we hoped would be our last run.
But once more our plans to spend Sunday were frustrated. The trail led through dry sloughs from which the advancing thaw had removed the snow in great patches. Sometimes the sled had to be hauled over bare sand; sometimes wide detours had to be made to avoid such sand; sometimes pools of open water covered with only that night's ice lay across our path. By eight o'clock in the morning we estimated that we were not more than seven or eight miles from Fort Yukon. But already the snow grew soft and our feet wet, and the dogs were very weary with the eleven hours' mushing. Itwould take a long time and much toil to plough through slush, even that seven or eight miles. So I gave the word to stop, and we made an open-air camp on a sunny bank, and after breakfast we covered our heads in the blankets from the glare of the sun, and slept till five. Then we ate our last trail meal, and were washed up and packed up and hitched up an hour and more before the snow was frozen enough for travel. A couple of hours' run took us to Fort Yukon, and so ended the winter journey of 1910-11, on the 23d of April, having been started on the 17th of November. We were back none too soon. Every day we should have found travelling decidedly worse. In a few more days the river would have begun to open in places, and only the middle would be safe for travel, with streams of water against either bank and no way of getting ashore. Seventeen days later the ice was gone out and the Yukon flowing bank full.
Whenone contemplates the native people of the interior of Alaska in the mass, when, with the stories told by the old men and old women of the days before they saw the white man in mind, one reconstructs that primitive life, lacking any of the implements, the conveniences, the alleviations of civilisation, the chief feeling that arises is a feeling of admiration and respect.
What a hardy people they must have been! How successfully for untold generations did they pit themselves against the rigour of this most inhospitable climate! With no tool but the stone-axe and the flint knife, with no weapon but the bow and arrow and spear, with no material for fish nets but root fibres, or for fish-hooks or needles but bone, and with no means of fire making save two dry sticks—one wonders at the skill and patient endurance that rendered subsistence possible at all. And there follows quickly upon such wonder a hot flush of indignation that, after so conquering their savage environment or accommodating themselves to it, that they not only held their own but increased throughout the land, they should be threatened with a wanton extermination now that the resources of civilisation are opened to them, now thattools and weapons and the knowledge of easier and more comfortable ways of life are available.
The natives of the interior are of two races, the Indian and the Esquimau. The Indian inhabits the valley of the Yukon down to within three or four hundred miles of its mouth; the Esquimau occupies the lower reaches of the Yukon and the Kuskokwim and the whole of the rivers that drain into the Arctic Ocean west and north. These inland Esquimaux are of the same race as the coast Esquimaux and constitute an interesting people, of whom something has been said in the account of journeys through their country.
THE ATHABASCANS
The Indians of the interior are of one general stock, the Athabascan, as it is called, and of two main languages derived from a common root but differing as much perhaps as Spanish and Portuguese. The language of the upper Yukon (and by this term in these pages is meant the upper American Yukon) is almost identical with the language of the lower Mackenzie, from which region, doubtless, these people came, and with it have always maintained intercourse. The theory of the Asiatic origin of the natives of interior Alaska has always seemed fanciful and far-fetched to the writer. The same translations of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer serve for the lower Mackenzie and the upper Yukon and are in active use to-day through all that wide region, despite minor dialectical variations.
Near the lower ramparts of the Yukon, at Stephen's Village, the language changes and the new tongue maintains itself, though with continually increasing dialecticaldifferences, until the Indians overlap the Esquimaux, six hundred miles farther down.
Fort Yukon is the most populous place on the river, and the last place on the river, where the upper language, or Takhud, is spoken. A stretch of one hundred and fifty miles separates it from the next native village, and the inhabitants of that village are not intelligible to the Fort Yukon Indians—an unintelligibility which seems to speak of long ages of little intercourse.
The history of the migrations of the Indians from the Athabascan or Mackenzie region is impossible to trace now. It is highly probable that the movement was by way of the Porcupine River. And it would seem that there must have been two distinct migrations: one that passed down the Yukon to the Tanana district and spread thence up the Tanana River and up the Koyukuk; and long after, as one supposes, a migration that peopled the upper Yukon. A portion of this last migration must have gone across country to the Ketchumstock and the upper Tanana, for the inhabitants of the upper Tanana do not speak the Tanana tongue, which is the tongue of the Middle Yukon but a variant of the tongue of the upper Yukon.
A docile folk, eager for instruction.A docile folk, eager for instruction.
The mission type.The mission type.
Wild and shy.Wild and shy.
How long ago these migrations took place there is not the slightest knowledge to base even a surmise upon. The natives themselves have no records nor even traditions, and the first point of contact between white men and the natives of the interior is within three quarters of a century ago. It may have been two or three familiesonly which penetrated to this region or to that and settled there, and what pressure started them on their wanderings no one will ever know. Perhaps some venturesome hunter pursuing his game across the highlands that separate the Mackenzie from the Yukon was disabled and compelled to remain until the summer, and then discovered the salmon that made their way up the tributaries of the Porcupine. The Mackenzie has no salmon. Or a local tribal quarrel may have sent fugitives over the divide.
When first the white man came to the upper Yukon, in 1846 and 1847, no one knew that it was the same river at the mouth of which the Russians had built Redoubt Saint Michael ten or twelve years before. The natives of the upper river knew nothing about the lower river. It is an easy matter to float down the Yukon for a thousand miles in a birch-bark canoe, but an exceedingly difficult matter to come up again. It was not until the voyageurs of the Hudson Bay Company, in their adventurous fur-trading expeditions, met at the mouth of the Tanana River the agents of the Russian Fur Company, come up from Nulato on the same quest, that the identity of the Yukon and Kwikpak Rivers was discovered; and that seems to have been well past the middle of the century. In the map of North America that the writer first used at school, the Yukon flowed north into the Arctic Ocean, parallel with the Mackenzie.
AN INOFFENSIVE PEOPLE
The Indians of the interior of Alaska are a gentle and kindly and tractable people. They have old traditions of bloody tribal warfare that have grown in ferocity, one supposes, with the lapse of time, for it is very difficult forone who knows them to believe that so mild a race could ever have been pugnacious or bloodthirsty. Whether it were that the exigencies of subsistence under arctic conditions demanded almost all their energies, or that a realisation of their constant dependence upon one another checked the play of passion, they differ most widely and, it seems certain, always differed most widely in character from the Indians of the American plains. A personal knowledge of the greater part of all the natives of interior Alaska, gained by living amongst them and travelling from village to village during seven or eight years, furnishes but a single instance of an Indian man guilty of any sort of violence against another Indian or against a white man—except under the influence of liquor.
It is true that there are unquestioned murders that have been committed—murders of white men at that; but in the sixty years from the Nulato massacre of 1851, over the whole vast interior, these crimes can be counted on the fingers of one hand. They are not a revengeful people. They do not cherish the memory of injuries and await opportunities of repayment; that trait is foreign to their character. On the contrary, they are exceedingly placable and bear no malice. Moreover, they are very submissive, even to the point of being imposed upon. In fact, they are decidedly a timid people in the matter of personal encounter. In all these characteristics they differ from the North American Indian generally as he appears in history.
They are capable of hard work, though apparently not of continuous hard work; they will cheerfully supportgreat privation and fatigue; but when the immediate necessity is past they enjoy long periods of feasting and leisure. Having no property nor desire of property, save their clothes, their implements and weapons, and the rude furnishings of their cabins, there is no incentive to hard and continuous work.
After all, where is the high and peculiar virtue that lies in the performance of continuous hard work? Why should any one labour incessantly? This is the question the Indian would ask, and one is not always sure that the mills of Massachusetts and the coal-mines of Pennsylvania return an entirely satisfactory answer. As regards thrift, the Indian knows little of it; but the average white man of the country does not know much more. There is little difference as regards thrift between wasting one's substance in a "potlatch," which is a feast for all comers, and wasting it in drunkenness, which is a feast for the liquor sellers, save that one is barbarous and the other civilised, as the terms go.
It would seem that the general timidity of the native character is the reason for a very general untruthfulness, though there one must speak with qualification and exception. There are Indians whose word may be taken as unhesitatingly as the word of any white man, and there are white men in the country whose word carries no more assurance than the word of any Indian. The Indian is prone to evasion and quibbling rather than to downright lying, though there are many who are utterly unreliable and untrustworthy.