ICE TRAVEL
We stopped that night at the native village of Chinnik, the people of which are looked after by a mission of the Swedish Evangelical Church on Golofnin Bay, which we should cross to-morrow. But the mission is off the trail, and we did not come to an acquaintance with the missionaries of this body until we reached Unalaklík. Next day, climbing and descending considerable grades in warm, misty weather, we reached Golofnin Bay, pursued it some distance, and left it by a very steep, long hill that was close to one thousand feet high, at the foot of which we were once more on the beach of the sound—and at the road-house for the night. From that place the trail no longer hugged the coast but struck out boldly across the ice for a distant headland, Moses' Point, where we lunched, and, that point reached, struck out again for Isaac's Point, most of the travelling during a long day in which we made forty-eight miles being four or five miles from land. The day was clear, and the shore-line of the other side of the sound, which grew nearer as we proceeded, was subject to strange distortions of mirage. The road-house that night nestled picturesquely against a great bluff, and right across the ice lay Texas Point, for which we should make a bee-line to-morrow. Sometimes the traveller must go all round Norton Bay, but at this time the ice was in good condition and our route cut across the mouth of the bay for twenty-two miles straight for the other side. It was like crossing from Dover to Calais on the ice. The passage made, the Alaskan mainland was reached once more, the Seward Peninsula left behind us, and our way lay across desolate,low-lying tundra strewn with driftwood and hollowed out here and there into little lagoons. Evidently the waves sweep clean across it in stormy weather when the sound is open; a salt marsh. In the midst of it reared a sort of lookout tripod of driftwood thirty or forty feet high, lashed and nailed together, with a precarious little platform on top and cleats nailed to one of the uprights for ascent. I essayed the view, but the rusty nails broke under my feet. We deemed it a hunting tower from which water-fowl might be spied in the spring. Sixteen miles of this melancholy waste brought us to the shore again, to a tiny Esquimau village and a tumble-down, half-buried shack of a road-house where we should spend the night, a little schooner lying beached in front of it. If its exterior were uninviting, the scene as we entered was sinister. By the light of a single candle—though it was not yet dark outside—amidst unwashed dishes and general grime, sat an evil-eyed Portuguese or Spaniard, in a red toque, playing poker with three skin-clad Esquimaux. So absorbed were they in the game that they had not heard us arrive nor seen us enter. With a brief, reluctant interval for the preparation of a poor supper, the card playing went on all the evening far into the night. My companion discovered that the chips were worth a dollar apiece and judged it to be "considerable of a game." At last I arose from my bunk and said that we were tired and had come there to sleep, and with an ill grace the playing was shortly abandoned and the natives went off. The arctic shores have their beach-combers as well as the South Sea Islands.
UNALAKLÍK
The next day was Sunday, but I was anxious to spend my day of rest at Unalaklík and most indisposed to spend it here, so we got away with a very early start long before daylight. Six or seven miles of tundra and lagoon travel and the trail crossed abruptly a tongue of land and struck out over the salt-water ice for a cape fifteen miles away. The going was splendid. It was not glare ice, but ice upon which snow had melted and frozen again. It was so smooth that one dog could have drawn the sled, yet not so smooth as to deny good footing. We kept well out to sea, passing close to the mountainous mass of Besborough Island, plainly riven by some ancient convulsion from the sheer bluffs of the mainland. Our only trouble was in keeping the dogs well enough out, for, not being water-spaniels or other marine species, they had a hankering after the land and a continual tendency to edge in to shore.
So from headland to headland we made rapid, easy traverse, thoroughly enjoying the ride, munching chocolate and raisins, speculating about the seasons when it had been possible to cross direct from Nome to Saint Michael on the ice, and exchanging stories we had heard of the disasters and hairbreadth escapes attending such overbold venture. Only this winter three men and a dog team were blown out into Bering Sea by a sudden storm, and lay for four days in their sleeping-bags drifting up and down on an ice cake, until at last they were blown back to the shore ice and made their escape. And there is a fine story of a white man rescued in half-frozen state by his Esquimau wife, and carried for miles on her back to safety.
At last we turned a point and drew in to the shore, and, not seeing the little town till we were almost upon it, arrived at Unalaklík early in the afternoon. We had made the two hundred and forty miles, as it is called, from Nome, in six days. In the last twelve days of travel we had covered five hundred miles, an average of nearly forty-two miles per day, far and away the best travelling of the winter. The preceding five hundred miles had taken twenty-two days.
We were in time to attend the Esquimau services at the mission both afternoon and night, and I found them very much the same as at Kikitaruk, with the exception that the singing was much more advanced and was very good indeed. There was an anthem of the Danks type sung by a choir—the parts well maintained throughout, the attacks good, the voices under excellent control—that it pleased and surprised me to hear, and there was a long discourse most patiently and, as I judged, faithfully interpreted by a bright-looking Esquimau boy. It is well for those who speak much through an interpreter to listen occasionally to similar discourse. Only so may its unavoidable tediousness be appreciated.
GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS
The school next day pleased me still more, and I was glad that I had a school-day at the place. I heard good reading and spelling, saw good writing, and listened with real enjoyment to the fresh young voices raised again and again in song. There was, however, something so curiously exotic that for a moment it seemed irresistibly funny, in "The Old Oaken Bucket," from lips that have difficulty with the vowel sounds of English; from childrenthat never saw a well and never will see one;—and I was irreverent enough to have much the same feeling about "I love thy templed hills," etc., in that patriotic Plymouth Rock song which is so little adapted for universal American use that, in a gibe not without justice, it has been called "Smith's Country, 'tis of Thee." One wonders if they sing it in the Philippine schools; and, so far as these regions are concerned, one wishes that some teacher with a spark of genius would take Goldsmith's hint and write a simple song for Esquimau children that should
"Extol the treasures of their finny seasAnd their long nights of revelry and ease";
the splendour of summer's perpetual sunshine and the weird radiance of the Northern Lights; but prosody is not taught in your "Normal" school. The thing is a vain, artificial attempt to impose a whole body of ideas, notions, standards of comparison, metaphors, similes, and sentiments upon a race to which, in great measure, they must ever be foreign and unintelligible. Here were girls reading in a text-book of so-called physiology, and, as it happened, the lesson that day was on the evils of tight lacing! The reading of that book, I was informed, is imposed by special United States statute, and the teacher must make a separate report that so much of it has been duly gone through each month before the salary can be drawn. Yet none of those girls ever saw a corset or ever will. One is reminded of the dear old lady who used to visit the jails and distribute tracts onThe Evils of Keeping Bad Company.
But these incongruities aside, the school was a good school and well taught, the government appointing the teachers, as I learned, upon the nomination of the mission authorities; the only way that a government school can be successful at any mission station, for the two agencies must work together, as one's right hand works with one's left, to effect any satisfactory result. The hours spent in it were very enjoyable, and one wished one might have had opportunity for further acquaintance with some of the bright-faced, interesting children, both full-bloods and half-breeds.
Unalaklík is a thriving Esquimau community, noted for its native schooner building and its successful seal hunters and fishermen. We were rejoiced to see signs of native prosperity and advance, and we left Unalaklík with high hope for its future.
Here also was real rest and refreshment at a road-house. Road-houses in Alaska are as various in quality as inns are "outside." Our previous night's halt was at one of the worst; this was one of the best. The proprietor was a good cook and he did his best for us, with omelet and pastry, and young, tender reindeer. It has been said that road-house keeping in Alaska is like soliciting life insurance "outside," the last resort of incompetence. Certain it is that a thoroughly lazy and incompetent man may yet make a living keeping a road-house, for there is no rivalry save at the more important points, and travellers are commonly so glad to reach any shelter that they are not disposed to be censorious. None the less, when they find a man who takes a pride in his business and aninterest in the comfort of his guests, they are highly appreciative.
THE KALTAG PORTAGE
We should have only an occasional road-house from now on, but expected to reach some inhabited cabin each night. Our good travelling was over though we did not know it. We knew that the hard snows of the Seward Peninsula and the bare ice of Norton Sound were behind us, but we kept telling ourselves that the travel of all the winter would surely have left a fine trail on the Yukon. We were now about sixty-five miles from Saint Michael, by the coast. But taking the ninety-mile portage from Unalaklík to Kaltag we should reach the Yukon River more than five hundred miles above Saint Michael, so much does that portage cut off. This is the route the military telegraph-line takes, and we should travel along close beside it much of the way until the Yukon was reached.
The soft weather persisted, and we had even doubt about starting out in such a rapid thaw. A visit to the telegraph station informed us that the warm wave was spread all over interior Alaska and that there was general expectation of an early break-up. But if the snow on the portage were indeed rapidly going, that was all the more reason for getting across before it had altogether gone; so we pulled out in the warm, muggy weather, and even as we pulled out it began to rain!
Up the little Unalaklík River, water over the ice everywhere, we went for a few miles and then took to the tundra. All the snow had gone except just the hard snow of the trail, a winding ribbon of white across thebrown moss. The rain changed to sleet and back to rain again, and soon we were wet through and had much trouble in keeping that penetrating, persistent drizzle from wetting our load through the canvas cover. Though not an unique experience, it is rare to be wet with rain on the winter trail—rarer in the interior probably than on the coast. Once since on the Kuskokwim and once on the Fortymile it has happened to me in seven winters' travel. We pushed on for thirty miles, past several little native villages, until we came to Whaleback, a village part Esquimau and part Indian. These were the last Esquimaux we should see, and I was sorry, for I had grown to like very heartily and to respect very sincerely this kindly, gentle, industrious, good-humoured race. Surely they are a people any nation may be proud to have fringing its otherwise uninhabitable coasts, and should be eager to aid and conserve. There comes a feeling of impotent exasperation to me when I realise how many white men there are who speak of them continually with the utmost contempt and see them dwindle with entire complacency. The same thing is true in even more marked degree about the Indians of the interior: nine tenths of the land will never have other inhabitant, of that I am convinced, and the only question is, shall it be an inhabited wilderness or an uninhabited wilderness? Here, lodging with the natives, and, I make no doubt, living off them too, we found a queer, skulking white man whom I had met in several different sections of interior Alaska, known as "Snow-shoe Joe" or "The Frozen Hobo." The arctic regions one would esteem apoor place for the hobo, but this man manages to eke out an existence, if not to flourish, therein. Work he will not under any circumstances, but subsists on the hospitality of the whites until he has entirely worn it out and then removes to the natives, mushing from camp to camp and "bumming" his way as he goes. He was on his way to Saint Michael, he told me with perfect gravity, "to get work."
THE U. S. SIGNAL-CORPS
Before dark we had reached our destination for the night at the Old Woman Mountain, the divide between the waters of the Yukon and the waters of Norton Sound, and were kindly received and well treated at the telegraph station, the only resort on this portage for weary travellers. Here is surely a lonely post. For reasons connected with the maintenance of the wires and the keeping open of communications, it is necessary to have telegraph stations every forty or fifty miles, each with two or three men and a dog team, and shelter cabins about half-way between stations. A wind that blows a tree down in the narrow right-of-way cut through the forest—for we were come to forest again—or a heavy snowfall that loads branches until they fall across the wires, a post that comes up out of its hole as the thawing of spring heaves the ground around it, or the caving of the bank of a stream along which the line passes—any one of a dozen such happenings anywhere along its thousand miles of course, may put the entire inland telegraph system out of operation; and the young men in whose section the interruption occurs—they have a means of determining that—must get out at once, find the seat ofthe trouble and repair it. In all sorts of weather, unless the thermometer be below -40°, out they must go.
It may be doubted if any other army in the world ever constructed and maintained a permanent telegraph line under such arduous conditions. It has been the army's one contribution to Alaska, the one justification for the enormous expense of maintaining army posts in the interior. Indeed it is often said by those who feel keenly the neglect of the territory by the general government that this telegraph system is the one contribution of the United States to Alaska. It is certainly a great public convenience and has assisted very materially in such development as the country has made. The men of the signal-corps deserve great credit for the faithful, dogged way in which they have carried out year after year their difficult and hazardous work, and often and often the weather-stressed traveller has been grateful for the hospitality which their cabins have afforded him.
They have not been an unmixed blessing to the country; soldiers do not usually represent the highest morale of the nation, and though the signal-corps is in some respect a picked corps, yet the men are soldiers, with many of the soldier characteristics. Too often a remote telegraph station has been a little centre of drunkenness, gambling, and debauchery with a little circumference of native men and women, and while some of the officers of the corps have been willing and anxious to do all in their power to suppress this sort of thing in their scattered and difficult commands, others have been jealous only for the technical efficiency of their work.
MORE SNOW
There are many allowances to be made for young men taken from the society of their kind and thrust out hundreds of miles in the wilderness to sit down for a year or two at one of these isolated spots. They may see no women save those amongst a straggling band of Indians for the whole time of their exile; they may see no white man save a mail-carrier—and in many places not even a mail-carrier—for weeks together. Time sometimes hangs very heavily on their hands, for trees are not always blowing down, nor wires snapping through the tension of the cold, and at some stations there will not be a dozen telegraph messages sent the whole winter through. If a young man be at all ambitious of self-improvement, here is splendid opportunity of leisure, but a great many are not at all so disposed. Character, except the most firmly founded, is apt to deteriorate under such circumstances; standards of conduct to be lowered. And what is here written of the young men of the signal-corps may well apply in great measure to a large proportion of all the white men in the country.
The "eighty-mile portage" we had heard of at Nome became ninety miles at Unalaklík, and added another five to itself here, so that although we had travelled forty-two miles that day we were told that there were yet fifty-three ahead before we reached the Yukon.
So we decided not to attempt it in one day and to rest the next night at a "repair cabin" twenty-eight miles farther, making a somewhat late start in view of a short journey. It had been wiser to have started early. During our night at Old Woman Mountain some three inchesof snow fell, and we found as we descended the Yukon slope that all the moisture that had fallen upon us as rain the previous day had fallen on this side as snow. The trail was filled full and buried, and so soft and mushy was it that although snow-shoes were badly needed they were impossible. The snow clung to them and came off the ground with them in heavy, clogging masses every time they were lifted. It clung to the sled, to the harness, to the dogs' feet, to everything that touched it; it gathered in ever-increasing snowballs on the long hair of the dogs. Travelling in warm weather in loose, new snow is most disagreeable work. We plugged along for twenty miles, and then in the dark in an open country with little patches of scattering spruce, had great trouble in finding the trail at all.
At last we could find it no longer, and when there was no hope of reaching the cabin that night we made a camp. We had now no tent or stove with us, so a "Siwash camp" in the open was the best we could do, and a wet, miserable camp it was. By inexcusable carelessness on my part, candles had been altogether forgotten in the replenishing of the supplies, and a little piece an inch long which we found loose in the grub box was all that we possessed. Dogs and men alike exhausted with the long day's sweating struggle through the deep snow, sleep should have come soundly and soon. It did to the rest, but I lay awake the night through. The easy, riding travel of the preceding week had been a poor preparation for to-day's incessant toil, and I was too tired to sleep. In the morning our bedding was covered with a couple of inches ofnew snow. My companion got up at daylight and made a journey of investigation ahead, following the trail better, but not finding the cabin. We had thought ourselves within a mile or two of it, but evidently were farther away. However, when we had eaten a hasty breakfast and hitched up and had gone along the trail that had been broken that morning to its end, ten yards beyond the place where my companion had turned back, we came in sight of the cabin, and there we lay and rested and dried things out all day and spent the next night. During the day there came a team from Kaltag, and once again we enjoyed the delight of receiving, and at the same time conferring, the richest gift and greatest possible benefit to the traveller—a trail.
THE YUKON ONCE MORE
The next evening as it drew towards dark, after another day of soft, warm disagreeable travel, we reached the end of the portage, and the broad white Yukon stretched before us once more. Our hearts leaped up and I think the dogs' hearts leaped up also at the sight. I called to Nanook as we stopped on the bank, "Nanook, there's the good old Yukon again!" and he lifted his voice in that intelligent, significant bark that surely meant that he saw and understood. We had left the Yukon on the 15th of December at Fort Yukon; we reached it again on the 23d of March at Kaltag, more than six hundred miles lower down. We had two hundred and fifty miles of travel on its surface before us, and then close to another two hundred and fifty up the Tanana River to Fairbanks. But alas! for the fine Yukon trail we had promised ourselves! As we lookedout across the broad river there was no narrow, dark line undulating over its surface, nor even a faint, continuous inequality to hint that trail had been, on snow "less hideously serene"; its perfect smoothness and whiteness were unscarred and unsullied. The trail was wiped out and swallowed up by the late snows and winds.
A LEARNED JESUIT
There is little interest in lingering over the long, laborious, monotonous grind up that river on show-shoes. When one has looked forward to pleasant, quick travel, the disappointment at slow, heavy plodding is the keener. The first little bit of trail we had was as we approached Nulato two days later on a Sunday morning, and it was made by the villagers from below going up to church at the Roman Catholic mission. We arrived in time for service, and enjoyed the natives' voices raised in the Latin chants as well as in hymns wisely put into the vernacular. It is historically a little curious to find Roman Catholic natives singing praises in their own tongue, and Protestant missions, like those on the Kobuk and Kotzebue Sound, using a language "not understanded of the people." The day was the Feast of the Annunciation as well as Sunday, and there was some special decorating of the church and perhaps some elaboration of the music. Here for the first and only time I listened to a white man so fluent and vigorous in the native tongue that he gave one the impression of eloquence. Father Jetté of the Society of Jesus is the most distinguished scholar in Alaska. He is the chief authority on the native language, and manners and customs, beliefs and traditions of the Middle Yukon, and has brought to the patient, enthusiasticlabour of years the skill of the trained philologist. It is said by the Indians that he knows more of the Indian language than any one of them does, and this is not hard to believe when it is understood that he has systematically gleaned his knowledge from widely scattered segments of tribes, jotting down in his note-books old forms of speech lingering amongst isolated communities, and legends and folk-lore stories still remembered by the aged but not much repeated nowadays; always keen to add to his store or to verify or disprove some etymological conjecture that has occurred to his fertile mind. His work is recognised by the ethnological societies of Europe, and much of his collected material has been printed in their technical journals.
A man of wide general culture, master of three or four modern, as well as the classic, languages, a mathematician, a writer of beautiful, clear English, although it is not his mother tongue, he carries it with the modesty, the broad-minded tolerance, the easy urbanity that always adorn, though they by no means always accompany, the profession of the scholar; and one is better able to understand after some years' acquaintance with such a man, after falling under the authority of his learning and the charm of his courtesy, the wonderful power which the society he belongs to has wielded in the world. If such devotion to the instruction of the ignorant as was described at the mission on the middle Kobuk be praiseworthy, by how much the more is one moved to admiration at the spectacle of this man, who might fill with credit any one of half a dozen professional chairs at theordinary college, gladly consecrating his life to the teaching of an Indian school!
Hearing an interest expressed in the massacre which took place at Nulato in 1851, Father Jetté offered to accompany us to the site of that occurrence, about a mile away. It stands out prominently in the history of a country that has been singularly free from bloodshed and outrage, and its date is the notable date of the middle river, as the establishment of the post at Fort Yukon by the Hudson Bay Company in 1846 is the notable date of the upper river. They are fixed points in Indian chronology by which it is possible to approximate other dates and to reach an estimate of the ages of old people.
THE NULATO MASSACRE
Much has been written about the Nulato massacre, and the accounts vary in many particulars. The Russian post here was first established by Malakof in 1838. Burned during his absence by the Indians, it was re-established by Lieutenant Zagoskin of the Russian navy in 1842. The extortions and cruelties of his successor, Deerzhavin, complicated by a standing feud between two native tribes, and probably having the rival powers of certain medicine-men as the match to the mine, brought about the destruction of the place and the death of all its inhabitants, white and native, by a sudden treacherous attack of the Koyukuk Indians. It happened that Lieutenant Barnard of the British navy, detached from a war-ship lying at Saint Michael to journey up the river and make inquiries of the Koyukuk natives as to wandering white men, survivors of Sir John Franklin's expedition, who might have been seen or heard of by them,was staying at the post at the time and perished in the general massacre. His grave, with a headboard bearing a Latin inscription, is neatly kept up by the Jesuit priests at Nulato.
In the last few years the river has been invading the bank upon which the old village stood, and as the earth caves in relics of the slaughter and burning come to light. Old copper kettles and samovars, buttons and glass beads, all sorts of metal vessels and implements have been sorted out from charred wood and ashes, together with numerous skulls and quantities of bones. One of the most interesting of these relics was a brass button from an official coat, with the Russian crowned double-headed eagle on the face, and on the back, upon examination with a lens, the word "Birmingham."
Half the day serving for our day of rest this week, we were up and ready to start early the next morning, but so violent a wind was blowing from the southeast that we decided to remain, and the clatter of the corrugated iron roof and the whirling whiteness outside the windows made us glad to be in shelter. As the day advanced the wind increased to almost hurricane force, and the two-story house in which we lay began to rock in such a manner as to make the proprietor alarmed for his dwelling.
There was an "independent" trading-post at this village which seemed to present an object-lesson in rapacity and greed. There was not an article of standard quality in the store; the clothing was the most rascally shoddy, the canned goods of the poorest brands; the whole stock the cheapest stuff that could possibly bebought at bargain prices "outside," yet the prices were higher even than those that prevail in Alaska for the best merchandise. Loud complaints are often made against the commercial corporation which does the great bulk of the business in interior Alaska, yet if the writer had to choose whether he would be in the hands of that company or in the hands of an "independent" trader, he would unhesitatingly cast in his lot with the company. The independent trader makes money, sometimes makes large money, and makes it fairly easily, but the calling seems to appeal mainly, if not wholly, to men of low character and no conscience. There are few things that would redound more to the benefit of the Indian than a great improvement in the character of the men with whom he is compelled to do business.
The wind had subsided by the next morning and had been of benefit rather than injury to us, for it had blown the accumulated new snow off the old trail so that it was possible to perceive and follow it. But what was our surprise to find, with the recollection of that rattling roof and swaying building fresh in our minds, that ten miles away there had been no wind at all! The snow lay undisturbed on every twig and bough from which the gentlest breeze would have dislodged it. One never ceases to wonder at what, for want of a better word, must be called thelocalnessof much of the weather in Alaska—though, for that matter, in all probability it is characteristic of weather in all countries. The habit of continual outdoor travel gives scope as well as edge to one's observation of such things which a life in one place denies.That wind-storm had cut a clean swath across the Yukon valley. Yet it seems strange that so violent a disturbance could take place without affecting and, to some extent, agitating the atmosphere for many miles adjacent.
SNOW GLASSES
So, sometimes in snow-storm, sometimes in wind, always on snow-shoes and often hard put to it to find and follow the trail at all, we struggled on for two or three days more, sleeping one night at a wood-chopper's hut, another in a telegraph cabin crowded with foul-mouthed infantrymen sent out to repair the extensive damage of the recent storm and none too pleased at the detail, we plodded our weary way up that interminable river. At last we met the mail-man, that ever-welcome person on the Alaskan trail, and his track greatly lightened our labour. By his permission we broke into his padlocked cabin that night by the skilful application of an axe-edge to a link of the chain, and were more comfortable than we had been for some time. Past the mouth of the Koyukuk, past Grimcop, past Lowden, past Melozikaket to Kokrine's and Mouse Point, we plugged along, making twenty-two miles one day and thirty another and then dropping again to eighteen. The temperature dropped to zero, and a keen wind made it necessary to keep the nose continually covered. At this time of year the covering of the nose involves a fresh annoyance, for it deflects the breath upward, and the moisture of it continually condenses on the snow glasses, which means continual wiping. A stick of some sort of waxy compound to be rubbed upon the glass, bought in New York as a preventive of the deposit of moisture, proved entirely useless.In this respect the Esquimau snow goggle, which is simply a piece of wood hollowed out into a cup and illuminated by narrow slits, has advantage over any shape or kind of glass protection. A French metal device of the same order that is advertised in the dealer's catalogues was found to fail, perhaps owing to a wrong optical arrangement of the slits. It caused an eye-strain that brought on headache. But if that principle could be scientifically worked out and such a device perfected, it would be a boon to the traveller over sun-lit snow, for it would do away with glass altogether, with its two chief objections—its fragility and its opacity when covered with vapour.
SNOW-BLINDNESS
The indispensability of some eye protection when travelling in the late winter, and the serious consequences that follow its neglect, were once again demonstrated at Mouse Point. The road-house was crowded with "busted" stampeders coming out of the Nowikaket country. There had been a report of a rich "strike" on a creek of the Nowitna, late the previous fall, and a number of men from other camps—some from as far as Nome—had gone in there with "outfits" for the winter. The stampede had been a failure; no gold was found; there was much indignant assertion that no gold everhadbeen found and that the reported "strike" was a "fake," though to what end or profit such a "fake" stampede should be caused, unless by some neighbouring trader, it is hard to understand; and here were the stampeders streaming out again, a ragged, unkempt, sorry-looking crowd in every variety of worn-out arctic toggery, manyof them suffering from acute snow-blindness. It is surprising that even old-timers will go out in the hills for the whole winter without providing themselves with protection against the glare of the sun which they know will inevitably assail their eyes before the spring, yet so it is; and this lack of forethought is not confined to the matter of snow glasses: the first half dozen men we received in Saint Matthew's Hospital at Fairbanks suffering from severely frozen feet were all old-timers grown careless.
Father Ragarou, another Jesuit priest of another type, reached the road-house from the opposite direction about the same time we did, and I was interested in watching his treatment of the inflamed eyes. Upon a disk of lead he folded a little piece of cotton cloth in the shape of a tent, and, setting fire to it, allowed it to burn out completely. Then with a wet camel's-hair brush he gathered up the slight yellow residuum of the combustion and painted it over the eyes, holding the lids open with thumb and finger and drawing the brush through and through. An incredulous spectator, noticing the sacred monogram neatly stamped upon the disk of lead, made some sneering remark to me about "Romish superstition," but remembering the Jesuit's bark, and recalling that I had in my writing-case at that moment a letter I had brought all the way from the Koyukuk addressed to this very priest, begging for a further supply of a pile ointment that had proved efficacious, I held my peace. Whether it be an oxide or a carbonate, or some salt that is formed by the combustion, I am not chemist enough to know, but I saw man after man relieved by this application. Even thescoffer was convinced there was merit in the treatment, though stoutly protesting that "them letters" had nothing to do with it; which nobody took the trouble to argue with him. My own custom—we are all of us doctors of a sort in this country—is to instil a few drops of a five-per-cent solution of cocaine, which gives immediate temporary relief, and then apply frequent washes of boric acid, bandaging up the eyes completely in bad cases by cloths kept wet with the solution. But I do not know that it brings better result than the lead treatment. Certainly it is a matter in which an ounce of any sort of prevention is better than a pound of any sort of cure. The affection is a serious one, being nothing more or less than acute ophthalmia; the pain is very severe, and repeated attacks are said to bring permanent weakness of the eyes. Smoked glasses or goggles,[A]veils of green or blue or black, even a crescent eye-shade cut out of a piece of birch-bark or cardboard and blackened on its under-side with charcoal, will prevent the hours and sometimes days of torture which this distemper entails.
HORSES AND MULES
For a few miles we had the trail of the stampeders, but when that crossed the river we put on our snow-shoes and settled to the steady grind once more. A day's mush brought us to "The Birches," and another to Gold Mountain. Between the two places there was a portage, and the trail thereon, protected by the timber, was good. We longed for the time when all trails in Alaska shall be taken off the rivers and cut in the protecting forest.But we had gone but a mile along this good trail when our hearts sank, for we saw ahead of us a procession of army mules packing supplies from Fort Gibbon to the telegraph repair parties. We pulled out into the snow that the mules might pass, and the soldiers said no word, for they knew just how we felt, until the last soldier leading the last mule was going by, and he turned round and said: "And her name was Maud!" It was in the height of Opper's popularity, his "comic supplements" the chief dependence of the road-houses for wall-paper. The reference was so apposite that we burst into laughter, but there was nothing funny about the devastation that had been wrought. That good trail was all gone—the bottom pounded out of it—and nothing was left but a ploughed lane punched full of sink-holes. We had no trouble following the trail on the river after this encounter, but it had been almost as easy going to have struck out for ourselves in the unbroken snow of the winter. It is hard to make outsiders understand how a man who loves all animals may come to hate horses and mules, particularly mules, in this country. Our travelling is above all a matter of surface. Distance counts and weather counts, but surface counts for more than either. See how fast we came across the Seward Peninsula in the most distressing weather imaginable! A well-used dog trail becomes so hard and smooth that it offers scarce any resistance to the passage of the sled, and for walking or running over in moccasins or mukluks is the most perfect surface imaginable. The more it is used the better it becomes. But put a horse on that trail and in one passageit is ruined. The iron-shod hoofs break through the crust at every step and throw up the broken pieces as they are withdrawn. With mules it is even worse; the holes they punch are deeper and sharper. Neither man nor dog can pass over it again in comfort. One slips and slides about at every step, the leg leaders and ankle sinews are strained, the soles of the feet, though hardened by a thousand miles in moccasins, become sore and inflamed, and at night there is a new sort of weariness that only a horse-ruined trail gives. As a rule, the dog trail is of so little service to the horse or mule that it were as cheap to break out a new one in the snow, and it is this knowledge that exasperates the dog musher. So there is not much love lost between the horse man and the dog man in Alaska.
ARMY POSTS AND NATIVES
At last, after a night at "Old Station," we came in sight of Tanana, where is Fort Gibbon, the one the name of the town and the post-office, the other the name of the military post and the telegraph office. The military authorities refuse to call their post "Fort Tanana" and the postal authorities refuse to allow the town post-office to be called "Fort Gibbon," so there they lie, cheek by jowl, two separate places with a fence between them—a source of endless confusion. A letter addressed to Fort Gibbon is likely to go astray and a telegram addressed to Tanana to be refused. Stretching along a mile and a half of river bank, and beginning to come into view ten miles before they are reached, the military and commercial structures gradually separate themselves. Here to the left are the ugly frame buildings—all painted yellow—barracks,canteen, officers' quarters, hospital, commissariat, and so on. Two clumsy water-towers give height without dignity—a quality denied to military architecture in Alaska. To the right the town begins, and an irregular row of one and two story buildings, stores, warehouses, drinking shops, straggle along the water-front.
Unlike most towns in interior Alaska, Tanana does not depend upon an adjacent mining camp. It owes its existence first to its geographical position as the central point of interior Alaska, at the confluence of the Tanana and Yukon Rivers. Most of the freight and passenger traffic for Fairbanks and the upper river is transshipped at Tanana, and extensive stocks of merchandise are maintained there. The army post is the other important factor in the town's prosperity, and is especially accountable for the number of saloons. Not only the soldiers, but many civilian employees, are supported by the post, and when it is understood that three thousand cords of wood are burned annually in the military reservation, it will be seen that quite a number of men must find work as choppers and haulers for the wood contractors. Setting aside the maintenance of the telegraph service, which has already been referred to, it may be said without unfairness that the salient activities of the army in the interior of Alaska are the consumption of whisky and wood. There is no opportunity for military training—for more than six months in the year it is impossible to drill outdoors—and the officers complain of the retrogression of their men in all soldierly accomplishments during thetwo years' detail in Alaska. Whether the prosperity of the liquor dealer be in any real sense the prosperity of the country, and whether the rapid destruction of the forest be compensated for by the wages paid to its destroyers, may reasonably be doubted.
Three miles away is a considerable native village where the mission of Our Saviour of the Episcopal Church is situated, with an attractive church building and a picturesque graveyard. The evil influence which the town and the army post have exerted upon the Indians finds its ultimate expression in the growth of the graveyard and the dwindling of the village.
This point at the junction of the two rivers was an important place for the inhabitants of interior Alaska ages before the white man reached the country. Tribes from all the middle Yukon, from the lower Yukon, from the Tanana, from the upper Kuskokwim met here for trading and for general festivity. It is impossible nowadays to determine when first the white man's merchandise began to penetrate into this country, but it was long before the white man came himself. Such prized and portable articles as axes and knives passed from hand to hand and from tribe to tribe over many hundreds of miles. Captain Cook, in 1778, found implements of white man's make in the hands of the natives of the great inlet that was named for him after his death, and they pointed to the Far East as the direction whence they had come. He judged that they had been brought from the Hudson Bay factories clean across the continent. There are many Indians still living whoremember when they saw the first white man, and some were well grown at the time, but diligent inquiry has failed to discover one who ever saw a stone axe used, though some old men have been found who declared that their fathers, when young, used that implement. Traces have been discovered of the importation of edge-tools from four directions—from the mouth of the Yukon; from the Lynn Canal, by way of the headwaters of the Yukon; from the Prince William Sound, by way of the headwaters of the Tanana; as well as from the Hudson Bay posts in the Canadian Northwest, by way of the Porcupine River.
When the Russians established themselves at Nulato in 1842, and the Hudson Bay Company put a post at Fort Yukon in 1846, Nuchalawóya, as Tanana was called, became the scene of commercial rivalry, and it is said that by the meeting of the agents and voyageurs of the two companies at this point the identity of the Yukon and Quikpak Rivers was discovered.
The stories that linger with the village ancients of the great numbers of Indians who used to inhabit the country are doubtless based upon recollections of the gathering at old Nuchalawóya, when furs were brought here from far and wide, when there was no other place of merchandise in mid-Alaska. Now almost every Indian village has a trader and a store. That the race has diminished, and in most places is still diminishing, is beyond question, but that it was ever very largely numerous the natural conditions of the country forbid us to believe.
WHISKY-PEDDLERS
During the Reverend Jules Prevost's time at Tanana—andhe was in residence in the year of this journey—from careful vital statistics kept during two periods of five years each, the race seemed barely to be holding its own; but since that time there has been a considerable decline, coincident with the increase of drunkenness and debauchery at the village when Mr. Prevost's firm hand and watchful eye were withdrawn. The situation tends to grow worse, and while one does not give up hope, for that would mean to give up serious effort, the outlook for the Indians at this place seems unfavourable. Two hundred soldiers, six or eight liquor shops,—the number varies from year to year,—three miles off a native village of perhaps one hundred and fifty souls, and dotting those intervening miles cabins chiefly occupied by "bootleggers" and go-betweens—that is the Tanana situation in a nutshell. The men desire the native girls, and the liquor is largely a lure to get them. Tuberculosis and venereal disease are rife, and the two make a terribly fatal combination amongst Indians.
It was good to enjoy Mr. and Mrs. Prevost's hospitality, and it was good to speak through such an admirable interpreter as Paul. Something more than intelligence and knowledge of the languages are required to make a good interpreter; there must be sympathy and the ability to take fire. With such an interpreter, leaping at the speaker's thoughts, carrying himself entirely into his changing moods, rising to vehemence with him and again dropping to gentleness, forgetting himself in his identification with his principal, there is real pleasure in speaking to the natives who hang upon his vicarious lips. Onthe other hand, one of the most intelligent mission interpreters in the country is also so phlegmatic in disposition, so lifeless and monotonous in his speech, and particularly so impassive of countenance, that he reminds one of Napoleon's saying about Talleyrand: that if some one kicked him behind while he was speaking to you his face would give no sign of it at all.