Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled Part 19

[Sidenote: 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 filled with 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, fis.h.i.+ng. 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 2.30 P. 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 s.h.i.+ning, and in a few moments of his un.o.bscured strength all the 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.

[Sidenote: 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 mus.h.i.+ng, 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 6.30 P. 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 of fact, 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.

[Sidenote: 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 closing season 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 pa.s.sages of 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 nine P. 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 portage was 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.

[Sidenote: LAST DAY]

We left Beaver at eleven P. 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 through and 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 nine P. 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' mus.h.i.+ng. It would 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 ash.o.r.e. Seventeen days later the ice was gone out and the Yukon flowing bank full.

FOOTNOTE:

[G] The "claim" on a creek on which gold is first found is called "Discovery"; the claims above are numbered one, two, three, etc., "above" and the claims below, one, two, three, etc., "below."

CHAPTER XI

THE NATIVES OF ALASKA

WHEN one contemplates the native people of the interior of Alaska in the ma.s.s, 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 that tools 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 const.i.tute an interesting people, of whom something has been said in the account of journeys through their country.

[Sidenote: 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 dialectical differences, 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 pa.s.sed 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A DOCILE FOLK, EAGER FOR INSTRUCTION.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MISSION TYPE.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 families only 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 ident.i.ty 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.

[Sidenote: AN INOFFENSIVE PEOPLE]

The Indians of the interior of Alaska are a gentle and kindly and tractable people. They have old traditions of b.l.o.o.d.y tribal warfare that have grown in ferocity, one supposes, with the lapse of time, for it is very difficult for one 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 pa.s.sion, 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 ma.s.sacre 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 support great 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 furnis.h.i.+ngs 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 a.s.surance than the word of any Indian. The Indian is p.r.o.ne to evasion and quibbling rather than to downright lying, though there are many who are utterly unreliable and untrustworthy.

[Sidenote: s.e.xUAL MORALITY]

In the matter of s.e.xual morality the Indian standards are very low, though certainly not any lower than the standards of the average white man in the country. One is forced to this constant comparison; the white man in the country is the only white man the Indian knows anything about. To the Indian a physical act is merely a physical act; all down his generations there has been no moral connotation therewith, and it is hard to change the point of view of ages when it affects personal indulgence so profoundly. The white man has been taught, down as many ages, perhaps, that these physical acts have moral connotation and are illicit when divorced therefrom, yet he is as careless and immoral in this country as the Indian is careless and _un_moral. And the white man's careless and immoral conduct is the chief obstacle which those who would engraft upon the Indian the moral consciousness must contend against.

The Indian woman is not chaste because the Indian man does not demand chast.i.ty of her, does not set any special value upon her chast.i.ty as such. And the example of the chast.i.ty which the white man demands of his women, though he be not chaste himself, is an example with which the native of Alaska has not come much into contact. Too often, in the vicinity of mining camps, the white women who are most in evidence are of another cla.s.s.

[Sidenote: GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS]

The Indian is commonly intelligent and teachable, and in most cases eager to learn and eager that his children may learn. Here it becomes necessary to deal with a difficult and somewhat contentious matter that one would rather let alone. The government has undertaken the education of the Indian, and has set up a bureau charged with the establishment and conduct of native schools.

There are five such schools on the Yukon between Eagle and Tanana, including these two points, amongst Indians all of whom belong to the Episcopal Church, and five more between Tanana and Anvik, amongst natives divided in allegiance between the Episcopal and the Roman Catholic Churches. Below Anvik to the river's mouth the natives are divided between the Roman and the Greek Churches, and they are outside the scope of this book. On the tributaries of the Yukon the only native schools are conducted by the missions of the Episcopal Church, on the Koyukuk and Tanana Rivers, and have no connection with the government.

When, somewhat late in the day, the government set its hand to the education of the natives, mission schools had been conducted for many years at the five stations of the Episcopal Church above Tanana and at the various mission stations below that point. The Bureau of Education professed its earnest purpose of working in harmony with the mission authorities, and upon this profession it secured deeds of gift for government school sites within the mission reservations from the Bishop of Alaska.