Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled Part 15

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

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

[Sidenote: THE OLD, OLD STORY]

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

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

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TANANA CROSSING.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: GOOD GOING ON THE YUKON.]

[Sidenote: TRIBAL CONNECTIONS]

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

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

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

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

The Tanana Crossing is a central spot for the Indians of this region.

Two days' journey up the river was the village of the Tetlin Indians.

Two days' journey into the mountain range were the Mantasta Indians. Two days' journey across towards the Yukon were the Ketchumstock Indians.

Most of them would congregate at this spot for certain parts of the year, should we plant a mission there, and despite the picturesque situation of Lake Mansfield, it looked as if the Crossing were the best point for building.

[Sidenote: THE TANANA CROSSING]

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

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

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

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

[Sidenote: A n.o.bLE VIEW]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Sidenote: CARIBOU]

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

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

[Sidenote: THE KETCHUMSTOCK]

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

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

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

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

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

[Sidenote: THE FORTYMILE]

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

[Sidenote: "SNIPING ON THE BARS"]

As the Fortymile is the oldest gold camp in the North, some of its trail making is of the best in Alaska. In particular the trail from the head of Jack Wade Creek down into Steel Creek reminded one of the Alpine roads in its bold, not to say daring, engineering. It drops from bench to bench in great sweeping curves always with a practicable grade, and must descend nigh a thousand feet in a couple of miles. At the mouth of Steel Creek we are on the Fortymile River again, having saved a day's journey by this traverse. And here, on the Fortymile, we pa.s.sed several men "sniping on the bars," as the very first Alaskan gold-miners did on this same river, and probably on these same bars, twenty-five years ago.

One hand moved the "rocker" to and fro and the other poured water into it with the "long Tom"; so was the gold washed out of the gravel taken from just below the ice. It was interesting to see this primitive method still in practice and to learn from the men that they were making "better than wages."

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

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

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

Here at one time was a flourishing Indian mission and school, and here Bishop Bompas, the true "Apostle of the North," lived for some time. The story of this man's forty-five years' single-eyed devotion to the Indians of the Yukon and McKenzie Rivers is one of the brave chapters of missionary history. But the Church of England "does not advertise."

Writers about Alaska, even writers about Alaskan missions, carefully collect all the data of the early Russian missions on the coast, but ignore altogether the equally influential and lasting work done along five hundred miles of what is now the American Yukon by the missionary clergy of the English Church before and after the Purchase. Bishop Bompas identified himself so closely with the natives as to become almost one of them in the eyes of the white men, and many curious stories linger amongst the old-timers as to his habits and appearance.

It is interesting to know that the bishop was a son of that Sergeant Bompas of the English bar from whom d.i.c.kens drew the character of Sergeant Buzfuz, counsel for the plaintiff in the famous suit of "Bardell v. Pickwick."

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

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

[Sidenote: EAGLE]

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