The Boy With the U. S. Survey Part 30

The broad lower reaches of the Cantwell River, the perfect weather, the smoothly flowing current had made the couple of days prior to the finding of the gold almost a pleasure trip and compensated to Roger for the hardship through which he had gone in the rapids above. But one evening, while at supper, one of the men suddenly smacked the top of one hand with the palm of the other, then held it out silently for inspection. On it was a small mosquito such as are seen in thousands during the summer all over America.

"They've come, then," was the only remark, "but it's early for them yet."

"What is it, just a mosquito?" asked Roger.

"Just a mosquito," repeated Gersup, with a curious inflection in his voice, "just a poor innocent mosquito."

"Do you have many of them up here?" asked the boy, struck by the note of satire in the topographer's voice.

"Yes, we do," he replied curtly.

"Many of them?" put in Magee. "Why, a week from now you can wave a pint pot over your head and catch a quart of mosquitoes in it, and a month from now we'll have to cut our way through them with an ax."

"Oh, come off, now," said Roger, laughing.

"Laugh all you want to," continued the Irishman, "but it's a fact. Why, when they were building the Yukon railroad, during the months of July and August as the men went to work, they had to send the snow plow ahead of the gang in the morning in order to break a way through the banks of mosquitoes, and sometimes they had to put two engines behind the plow--make a double-header of it."

"Pretty good yarn, Magee," said the boy, "but if they're no worse than that I guess I can stand it."

Here Rivers broke in. "You will do well if you do stand it," he said, "because Magee is not so very far out. You will hardly believe it, but I would rather face a country of hostile Indians than hostile mosquitoes.

That little mosquito you saw to-night means hundreds to-morrow, thousands the next day, and from that until cold weather hundreds of thousands all the time. Magee isn't exaggerating much, because Baron Munchausen would find it hard to do the Alaskan mosquitoes justice, when they get busy."

"Are they especially venomous, then?" the boy asked, growing serious.

"No, but they are especially numerous. Many a man has gone mad on the trail because he had no protection from them. That, practically, wiped out of existence one of the largest gold-hunting parties that ever came to Alaska."

"Tell us about it, Mr. Rivers," urged Roger.

"Well, I will," the chief replied, "if it is only to give you a due respect for your enemies. This party of which I am speaking had landed on Kotzebue Sound, and having heard of an alleged Indian trail to the Koyukuk, somewhere near the Selawik River, and having found out beside that it was tundra and flat, they thought it would be easy traveling."

Here Magee chuckled audibly at the idea of tundra being easy going.

"It wasn't long," went on the chief, not noticing the interruption, "before they reached the tundra and discovered that it was scarcely as pleasant as they thought. Walking on tundra is like, is like,--tell him what it's like, Magee."

"It's like walking over slippery footb.a.l.l.s half-sunk in slime," said the Irishman promptly.

"Well, that will do," said Rivers. "Any way, they were tramping over this and losing heart fast when the mosquitoes began. They had nothing with them which would serve to keep off the insects, and some of the party were stung so fearfully that a superficial form of blood poisoning set in. Others, unable to endure the torture night and day, killed themselves; others again went insane and became violent; of that large party but two returned to the coast, one who by some freak of nature was immune, and his chum, who had become half-witted by the experience."

"You bet," commented the topographer, "the Alaskan mosquito is a matter to be taken very seriously."

In spite of the general opinion so strongly expressed, Roger felt a little scornful about being bothered with a few pesky mosquitoes, and he was inclined to think it an utterly foolish precaution when he was given an arrangement of netting to put over his head and let it hang down well over his shoulders, but his scorn vanished rapidly. Within an hour his hands, unprotected by gloves, became puffed and swollen from bites, and he found it necessary to put on thick buckskin to preserve him from the bites and to keep his sleeves rolled down. Even then he was not entirely free, for in some mysterious way the insects would work themselves into his clothes, and at night, although the tent was placed on a canvas which fastened to its sides like a floor, so that the mosquitoes could not come up from underneath, a few of them always were to be heard--and felt. So that, before many days had pa.s.sed, Rogers was convinced that the Alaskan mosquito was a very important factor in life on the trail.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ONLY BIT OF ROCK FOR MILES.

A landmark in the vast treeless tundra. The chief of the division drawing in contour.

_Photograph by U.S.G.S._]

Five days after leaving the portage, having covered over one hundred miles of very easy going, the party made camp at Harper's Bend on the Tanana River. So far as buildings went, it was quite an imposing place, no less than nine huts being in evidence, but they were all vacant and deserted and a sense of loneliness and desolation hung over the place.

The sight of human habitation, after so many weeks in the wild, ought to have given a sense of homelikeness, but instead the boy was conscious of an eerie sense of estrangement.

At supper that evening Roger mentioned this feeling, and added:

"Somehow I feel as if this place were haunted. It doesn't so much seem abandoned to nothingness as it does given to some uncanny ghost."

Magee crossed himself.

"Saints preserve us!" he said. "Don't talk like that, or ye'll bring the night-riders here."

"Nonsense, Magee," reproved Rivers, "a man of your experience so superst.i.tious! But the boy might be right, for all that."

"By the power of good luck, why?" asked the Irishman.

"You tell the story, Gersup," replied the chief, "you know more about it than I do."

"Alaska's a pretty new country to be starting a ghost crop," the topographer began, "and, so far as I know, there aren't any here yet; but, if any place ought to have one, it should be Harper's Bend, right where we are now, and in this very house in which we are sitting."

Magee shivered and looked about him apprehensively.

"There was once," Gersup continued, "a trader at this place by the name of Bean, William Bean. He came in the year 1879, and established a post for the purpose of trafficking in the furs of the Tanana Indians. He found the tribes peaceful enough, their furs were of high quality and, as he had no compet.i.tion, he was able to get them cheaply and to make a big profit out of it. The natives seemed to be so friendly and the opportunity for making money was so good that he determined to make it a permanent little settlement; he brought his wife to the place, and made arrangements for other families to follow.

"But it chanced, one day, that some natives from neighboring tribes, who had visited trading posts, came by the Tanana Indian camps, and when they saw how little their allies were getting from Bean for their skins, they suggested either visiting other posts or demanding more from their own trader. But Bean, so far as can be learned, was harsh and arrogant, and instead of offering a little more, which would still yield a handsome profit, he refused to consider the matter at all, and sneeringly pointing out that they were so far from any other post that they would have to come to him, he drove them away with gibes.

"Now the Indian usually has a sense of justice which is peculiar to himself. To us it may at times appear distorted, but it is a sense of justice none the less, and this sense Bean had offended. He made the further mistake of supposing that their quiescence under his sharp rebuff was an evidence either of cowardice or of ignorance of the true values of their furs. So, lulled into a false security by his own conceit, he remained there. One morning, while the whites were at breakfast, a war-party came and attacked the blockhouse, an Indian shooting Mrs. Bean from the doorway. The trader leaped up, seized his small child, and dashed through a rear door to a near-by boat, followed by an Indian servant. Some days later a party came up from the Yukon and buried Mrs. Bean, but the trader never returned.

"The country was not settled enough at that time for any question to be taken up of punishing the Indians for the crime, and there is no doubt of the provocation that the trader had given them. But this single incident in the history of the tribe is all too little to brand them with the reputation of treachery which they have borne ever since."

The following morning the canoes pa.s.sed through a section of the country which, as Rivers pointed out to Roger, could be made the garden spot of Alaska. Well timbered, well watered, with a favorable climate and easy of access by steamer up the Yukon, the lower Tanana could be made a fruitful agricultural country.

"Some day," the chief of the party said, "an enterprising man will start a big farm here, to supply the posts all along the Yukon with provisions, for which they now have to pay big prices on being brought by steamer all the way from Seattle. That man will make ten times as much money as any of the gold mine operators, and besides, will be living in security and comfort."

They halted for the midday stop, a few miles above the junction of the Tanana with the Yukon, and about four o'clock the canoes shot into that great river of the north. Surprised as the boy had been at the size of the Alaskan rivers, he was by no means prepared for the body of water where the Tanana joins the Yukon.

"Why," he said in amaze, "I had no idea it was as big as this."

"Heap big river," commented Harry, who was in the stern.

The chief was in the boat, and hearing the lad's exclamation he turned to him.

"This is the fifth largest river in North America," he said.

"What are the others, Mr. Rivers?" the boy asked. "The Mississippi comes first of course."

"Yes, and then the Mackenzie, the Winnipeg, and the St. Lawrence, in that order. But the Yukon and the St. Lawrence are just about the same size."

"Well," Roger said, "it certainly is big enough."