Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled Part 14

It takes Bret Harte to strike the note for such rivalry and such disappointment.

FOOTNOTES:

[C] In December, 1912, a determined effort was made by the better element of the little handful of white people in this town to secure the withdrawal of the licence of this saloon. The justice of the peace, the government school-teacher, the postmaster, and others went up to Fairbanks (a week's journey over the trail) and opposed the granting of the licence in court. It was shown that the white men of the locality were so reduced in numbers that the business could not be carried on at a profit unless liquor was sold, directly or indirectly, to the Indians.

But because by hook and by crook the names of a majority of one or two of all the white residents of the precinct were secured for a pet.i.tion in favour of the licence (two or three were secured by telegraph at the last moment) the judge held that he had no option under the law but to grant the licence. So, on the one hand, it is a felony to sell liquor to Indians, and annually thousands of dollars are expended in trying to suppress such sale, while, on the other hand, a man is licenced to sell liquor when it is shown that he cannot make a living unless he sells to Indians; that is to say he is virtually granted a licence to sell to Indians. This note is not intended to reflect upon the judge who granted the licence, although all his predecessors have not put that construction upon the law, but upon a law open to that construction.

[D] This was written some two years before the opportunity came. On the 7th of June, 1913, the writer and three companions reached the summit of Denali. ("The Ascent of Denali," Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914.)

[E] In 1913 it was finally destroyed by fire.

CHAPTER IX

TANANA CROSSING TO FORTYMILE AND DOWN THE YUKON--A PATRIARCHAL CHIEF--SWARMING CARIBOU--EAGLE AND FORT EGBERT--CIRCLE CITY AND FORT YUKON

FAIRBANKS was a different place in 1910 from the centre of feverish trade and feverish vice of 1904-5, when the stores were open all day and half the night and the dance-halls and gambling dens all night and half the day; when the Jews cornered all the salt and all the sugar in the camp and the gamblers all the silver and currency; when the curious notion prevailed that in some mysterious way general profligacy was good for business, and the Commercial Club held an indignation meeting upon a threat of closing down the public gaming and refusing liquor licences to the dance-halls, and voted unanimously in favour of an "open town"; when a diamond star was presented to the "chief of police" by the enforced contributions of the prost.i.tutes; when the weekly gold-dust from the clean-ups on the creeks came picturesquely into town escorted by hors.e.m.e.n armed to the teeth. The outward and visible signs of the Wild West are gone; the dance-halls and gambling tables are a thing of the past; the creeks are all connected with Fairbanks by railway and telephone; an early closing movement has prevailed in the shops; and the local choral society is lamenting the customary dearth of tenors for its production of "The Messiah."

Despite the steady decline in the gold output of late years, a drop of from twenty millions down to four or five, there is little visible decay in its trade, and despite stampedes to new diggings all over Alaska, there is no marked visible diminution in its population, though as a matter of fact both must have largely fallen off. The thing that more than any other has sustained the spirits and retained the presence of the business men is the expectation that seems to grow brighter and brighter, of the development of a quartz camp now that the placers are being exhausted. And in that hope lies the chance of Fairbanks to become the one permanent considerable town of interior Alaska. It is a substantial place, with good business houses and many comfortable homes electric-lit, steam-heated, well protected against fire--better than against flood--and, though it does not display the style and luxury of the palmy days of Nome, it has amenities enough to make disinterested visitors and pa.s.sers-by wish that its hard-rock hopes may be realised.

[Sidenote: FAIRBANKS]

The little log church that is still, as a local artist put it, "the only thing in Fairbanks worth making a picture of," no longer stands open all day and all night as the town's library and reading-room, but has withdrawn into decorous Sabbath use in favour of the commodious public library built by a Philadelphia churchman; the hospital adjoining it, that for two or three years cared for all the sick of the camp, is supplemented by another and a larger across the slough; young birch-trees have been successfully planted all along the princ.i.p.al streets, and the front yards everywhere are ablaze with flowers the summer through. You may eat hot-house lettuce and radishes in March; hot-house strawberries (at about ten cents apiece) in July and August; while common outdoor garden-truck of all kinds is plentiful and good in its short season.

We had another canine misfortune while we lay there. Doc, one of our leaders, got his chain twisted around his foot the night before we were to leave, and, in pulling to free it, stopped the circulation of the blood and the foot froze. It was as hard as wood and sounded like wood when it hit the sidewalks, from which the snow had been cleared, as the dog came limping along. An hour's soaking in cold water drew the frost out of the foot, and we swathed it in cotton saturated with carron oil, upon which it swelled so greatly that it was impossible to tell the extent of the injury or to determine whether or not the dog would ever be of use again. A kindly nurse at the hospital undertook his care, and we left him behind. One does not buy a dog so late in the season, with all the idle summer to feed him through, if any s.h.i.+ft can be made to avoid it, and there was a Great Dane pup at the Salchaket, forty miles away, that I might pick up as I pa.s.sed and perhaps make some use of for the remainder of the winter.

That mission was the next stop on our journey, and we reached it over the level mail trail, the chief winter highway of Alaska, connecting Fairbanks with Valdez on the coast. Three times a week there is a horse stage with mail and pa.s.sengers pa.s.sing over this trail each way, together with much other travel. The Alaska Road Commission has lavished large sums of money upon it, and the four hundred miles or thereabout is made in a week.

[Sidenote: THE SALCHAKET]

A day and a half brought us to the Salchaket, one of a chain of missions along the Tanana River, established by the energy and zeal of the Reverend Charles Eugene Betticher, Jr., during his inc.u.mbency at Fairbanks, that have already brought a great change for the better in native conditions. Five years had elapsed since last I visited this tribe, a reconnoitring visit on one of the first steamboats that ever went up the Tanana River above Fairbanks, and it was a delight to see the new, clean village with the little gardens round the cabins, and to note the appreciative att.i.tude which the Indians showed. So highly do they value the missionary nurse in charge that however far afield their hunting may lead them, one of their number is sent back every week to see that the mission does not lack wood and water and meat; a simple, docile, kindly people that one's heart warms to.

This mission was our last outpost to the south. My farther journey had for its prime object the visiting of the natives of the upper Tanana as far as the Tanana Crossing, some two hundred and fifty miles beyond the Salchaket, the inquiring into their condition and into the desirability of establis.h.i.+ng a post amongst them.

[Sidenote: THE UPPER TANANA]

The upper Tanana is probably one of the most difficult streams in the world to navigate that can by any stretch of the term be called navigable. The great Alaskan range begins to approach the Tanana River so soon as one gets above Fairbanks. Its prominent peaks, ten thousand to twelve thousand feet high, are continually in view from one angle to another as one pursues the river trail, and come constantly nearer and nearer. All the streams that are confluent with the Tanana on its left bank are glacial streams draining the high ice of these mountains. They come down laden thick with silt, at times foaming torrents, at times merely trickling watercourses that seam with numerous small runnels the wide deltas at their mouths. The tributaries of the right bank flow for the most part through heavily wooded country, and come out cleanly into the river. So the glacial waters form shoals and bars, and the woodland waters during freshets pile them high with driftwood. Such is the chief characteristic of the upper Tanana; a multiplicity of swift, narrow channels amidst bars laden with drift. It is subject to sudden rises of great violence; the attempt to stem a freshet on the upper Tanana is a hair-raising experience as the log of the _Pelican_ would show, but does not come within this narrative. Owing to the origin of much of its water, the Tanana is often in flood in dry, hot seasons, when other rivers run meagrely, as well as in times of rain. It cannot be stemmed in flood; its shoals deny pa.s.sage in drouth; there must be just the right stage of water to permit its navigation, and that stage, "without o'erflowing, full," is not often found of duration to serve the voyage after the month of June.

A river difficult to navigate in summer is usually a river difficult to travel upon in winter, and the upper Tanana is notoriously dangerous and treacherous. Scarce a winter or a summer that it does not claim victims.

It is emphatically a "bad river." Therefore, as far as there is any travel to speak of, land trails parallel the river. Past Richardson where the next night is spent, a decayed mining and trading town that dates back to the stampedes of 1905-6 when it was thought the upper Tanana would prove rich in gold, past Tenderfoot Creek on which the discoveries were made, past the mouth of the Big Delta with the great bluff on the opposite sh.o.r.e and the rus.h.i.+ng black water at its foot that never entirely closes all the winter, and on the other hand the wide barrens of the Big Delta itself giving the whole fine sweep of the Alaskan range, we came at length to McCarthy's, the last telegraph station on the river,--for the line strikes across country thence to Valdez following the government trail,--and there spent another night, and here we leave the government-made trail and take to the river surface and the wilderness.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A PLEASANT WOODLAND TRAIL.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN ALASKAN CHIEF AND HIS HENCHMAN.]

Twelve miles through the woods along the left bank of the river brought us to the aptly named Clearwater Creek, a tributary that comes only from the foot-hills and carries no glacial water. This stream by reason of hot springs runs wide open all the winter and must be crossed by a ferry--a raft on a heavy wire. The man who owned the ferry and the house adjacent was gone from home, so we proceeded to cross as best we could.

The raft was so small that first we took the dogs across then unloaded the sled and took part of the load, and returned for the remainder and the sled itself. Finally a canoe was loaded on the raft and, when it had been moored on the side we found it, Arthur paddled himself back. It was a strange scene, rafting and paddling a canoe in interior Alaska on the 2d of March, with the thermometer at -15. Some eight miles farther along the portage trail we came to a little cabin about dusk, but disdaining its dirt and darkness we pitched our tent.

Another eighteen miles the next day is noted in my diary for pleasant woodland travel and for the particular interest of the numerous animal tracks we pa.s.sed. Here a moose had crossed the trail, ploughing through the snow like a great cart-horse; here for two or three miles a lynx had urgent business in the direction of the Healy River. A lynx will always follow a trail if there be one, and will pick out the best going on the ice or snow in the absence of trail. I once followed a lynx track from the head of the Dall River to its mouth, and, save for turning aside occasionally to investigate a clump of willows or brush, the lynx was an excellent guide. Here were rabbit tracks and every now and then the little sharp tracks of a squirrel. We stopped for lunch under a tall cottonwood-tree, and Arthur pointed out that the trunk, up to a high crotch, was all seamed by bear claws. He said that the black bear climbed the same tree season after season, and told me that, according to the Indians, this was chiefly done when first he came from his winter den,--for the purpose of getting his bearings, as the boy suggested with a chuckle. A fox, a marten, and a weasel had all pa.s.sed across lately, and of course then came the exclamation that scarce fails from native lips when a fox track is seen: "I wonder if it were a black fox!" A black fox means sudden wealth beyond the dreams of avarice to an Indian, and any fox track may be the track of a black fox.

The end of that portage brought us out on the Tanana River opposite the little trading-post at the mouth of the Healy--the last post of any kind we should see.

[Sidenote: INDIAN TRADERS]

The trader, by whom we were hospitably entertained, had heard of our projected occupation of the upper Tanana, and alert to his own interests, was anxious to know the plans for the establishment of a mission--plans which were yet all to make. He naturally favoured this spot, which it was already plain was quite out of the question, but professed his readiness to move to any place that we might decide upon, and his entire sympathy and co-operation.

The question of the trader, which always arises upon the establishment of a new mission site, is an important and sometimes a vexatious one, for he wields an influence amongst the Indians second only to that of the mission itself, and may be either a great help or a great hindrance.

There is a natural desire to secure a man of character for the new post, and at the same time a natural reluctance to disturb vested interests and arouse bitter enmity by diverting trade. The suggestion has often been made that the mission should itself undertake a store in the interest of the natives, but those with most experience in such matters will agree that it is the wisdom of the bishop that sets his face against mission trading. The two offices are so essentially dissimilar as to be almost incompatible with one another; either the person in charge is a missionary first and a trader afterwards, in which case the store suffers, or he is a trader first and a missionary afterwards, in which case he is not a missionary at all. A clean, sober, and honest trader, content to take his time about getting rich, is a blessing to an Indian community. There are some such, one thinks, but they are not numerous. The profits are large, though the turnover is but one a year; the capital required is small; it is a life with much leisure; but in the main it attracts only a certain cla.s.s of men.

A band of Indians to whom word of our visit had been sent had come down the river this far to meet us and escort us, but dog food was scarce and our arrival was delayed, and they had been compelled to return to their hunting camp whither we must follow them. We were now farther up the Tanana River than either of us had ever been before; the country had the fascination of a new country; every bend of the river held unknown possibilities, and the keenness and elation that only the penetration of a new country brings were upon the boy as well as upon myself.

The river and the mountains were already drawn much closer together, and as we pursued our journey upon the one we had continual fine views of the other. The going was good--too good--for much of it was new ice and spoke of recent overflow, and all too soon we came upon the water. At the mouth of the Johnson River, one of the glacial streams, the whole river was overflowed, and we waded for a mile through water that deepened continually until there was risk of wetting our load. Then we were compelled to take to the woods and to cut a portage around the worst and deepest of it, and so pa.s.sed beyond it to good ice and to an empty cabin where we spent the night, glad to be sheltered from an exceedingly bitter wind that had blown all day and had taken all the pleasure out of travel.

[Sidenote: THE THERMOS BOTTLES]

It is in such weather particularly that the thermos flasks prove such a boon to the musher. To stop and build a fire in the wind means to get chilled through. There is no pleasure in it at all, and I would rather push on until the day's journey is done. But the native boy must have his lunch, and will build a fire in any sort of weather and make a pot of tea. The thermos bottle, with its boiling-hot cocoa, gives one the stimulation and nourishment that are desired without stopping for more than a few moments. I have carried a pair of these bottles all day at 60 below zero, and, when opened, snow had to be put into the cocoa before it was cool enough to drink. Of course it is perfectly simple--all the astonis.h.i.+ng things are--but I never open one of those bottles in the cold weather and pour out its contents without marvelling at it.

We left the river and struck inland towards the foot-hills of the Alaskan range, a long, rough journey over a trail that had been made by the band that came out to the Healy to meet us, and had been travelled no more than by their coming and going. The snow in this region had been as much lighter than usual as the snow in the Koyukuk had been heavier.

Through the tangle of prostrate trunks of a burned-over forest and the dense underbrush that follows such a fire, with not enough snow to give smooth pa.s.sage over the obstacles, we made our toilsome way, the labour of the dogs calling for the continual supplement of the men, one at the gee pole and one at the handle-bars. Some twenty miles, perhaps, a long day's continuous journey, we pushed laboriously into the hills and then pitched our tent; but in a few miles, next morning, we had struck the main Indian trail from the village near the Tanana Crossing, by which the hunting party had come, and what little was left of the journey went easily enough until we reached the considerable native encampment.

The men were all gone after moose save one half-naked, blear-eyed old paralytic, a dreadful creature who shambled and hobbled up asking for tobacco. The women were expecting us, however, and took the encamping out of our hands entirely, setting up the tent, hauling stove wood and splitting it up, making our couch of spruce boughs, starting a fire, and bringing a plentiful present of moose and caribou meat for ourselves and our dogs. Nothing could have been kinder than our reception; the full hospitality of the wilderness was heaped upon us. It was not until dark that the men returned, and we had all the afternoon to get acquainted with the women and children. Already the chief difficulty we had to encounter presented itself. These people did not speak the language of the lower Tanana and middle Yukon--Arthur's language--at all. Their speech had much more affinity with the upper Yukon language, and it dawned upon me that they were not of the migration that had pushed up the Tanana River from the Yukon, as all the natives as far as the Salchaket certainly did, were not of that tribe or that movement at all, but had come across country by the Ketchumstock from the neighbourhood of Eagle--the route we should return to the Yukon by--and were of the Porcupine and Peel River stock. This was certainly a surprise; I had deemed all the Tanana River Indians of the same extraction and tongue, but the stretch of bad water from the Salchaket to the Tanana Crossing was evidently the boundary between two peoples.

[Sidenote: CHIEF ISAAC]

That night we met Chief Isaac and the princ.i.p.al men of his tribe. At first it seemed that such broken English as three or four of them had would be our only medium of intercourse, but later one was discovered who had visited the lower Tanana and the Yukon and who understood Arthur indifferently well, and by the double interpretation, halting and inefficient, but growing somewhat better as we proceeded, it was possible to enter into communication. These preliminaries arranged, the chief made a set speech of dignity and force. He thanked me for coming to them, and regretted he had not been able to wait longer at the Healy River to help us to his camp. When he was a boy he had been across to the Yukon and had seen Bishop Bompas, and had been taught and baptized by him, but he was an old man now and he had forgotten what he had learned. I was the first minister most of his people had ever seen. They heard that Indians in other places had mission and school, and they had felt sorry a long time that no one came to teach them; for they were very ignorant, little children who knew nothing, and when they heard a rumour that a mission and school would be brought to them their hearts were very glad. Wherever we should see fit to "make mission," there he and his people would go, and would help build for us and help us in every way; but he hoped it would be near Lake Mansfield and the Crossing, where most of them lived at present. Farther down the river was not so good for their hunting and fis.h.i.+ng, but they would go wherever we said. That was the burden of the chief's speech.

I took a liking to the old man at once. He was evidently a chief that was a chief. The chieftains.h.i.+p here was plainly not the effete and decaying inst.i.tution it is in many places on the Yukon. He spoke for all his people without hesitation or question, and one felt that what he said was law amongst them.

There followed for two days an almost continuous course of instruction in the elements of the Christian faith and Christian morals, all day long and far into the night, with no more interval than cooking and eating required. In the largest tent of the encampment, packed full of men and women, the children wedged in where they could get, myself seated on a pile of robes and skins, my interpreters at my side, my hearers squatted on the spruce boughs of the floor, the instruction went on. As it proceeded, the interpretation improved, though it was still difficult and clumsy, as speaking through two minds and two mouths must always be. Whenever I stopped there was urgent request to go on, until at last my voice was almost gone with incessant use. Over and over the same things I went; the cardinal facts of religion--the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension; the cardinal laws of morality--the prohibition of murder, adultery, theft, and falsehood; that something definite might be left behind that should not be lost in the vagueness of general recollection, and always with the insistence that this was G.o.d's world and not the devil's world, a world in which good should ultimately prevail in spite of all opposition.

[Sidenote: SAVAGE, HEATHEN, PAGAN]

It is at once a high privilege and a solemn responsibility to deal with souls to whom the appeal of the Christian religion had never before been made, as were most of my hearers. One cannot call them "heathen." One never thinks of these Alaskan natives as heathen. "Savage" and "heathen"

and "pagan" all meant, of course, in their origin, just country people, and point to some old-time, tremendous superciliousness of the city-bred, long since disappeared, except, perhaps, from such places as Whitechapel and the Bowery. A savage is simply a forest dweller, a heathen a heath dweller, and for a large part of each year I come, etymologically, within the terms myself. But with its ordinary implication of ferocity and bloodthirstiness it is absurd to apply the word "savage" to the mild and gentle Alaskan Indian, and, with its ordinary implication of bowing down to wood and stone, it is misleading to apply the term "heathen" to those who never made any sort of graven image.

Much has been written, and cleverly written, about the Alaskan Indian that is preposterously untrue. Arthur, my half-breed boy, had recently been reading a story by Jack London, dealing with the Indians in the vicinity of Tanana, where he was bred and born, and his indignation at the representation of his people in this story was amusing. The story was called _The Wit of Porportuk_, and it presented a native chief in almost baronial state, with slaves waiting upon him in a large banqueting hall and I know not what acc.u.mulated wealth of furs and gold.

Such pictures are far more flagrantly untrue to any conditions that ever existed in Alaska than anything Fenimore Cooper wrote about the Five Nations. There were never any slaves in the interior; there was never any wealth amongst the Indians; there was never any state and circ.u.mstance of life. And the more one lives amongst them and knows them, the less one believes that they could ever have been a warlike people, despite their own traditions. Sporadic forays, fostered by their ignorant dread of one another or stirred up by rival medicine-men, there may have been between different tribes--and there certainly were between the Indians and the Esquimaux--with ambuscade and slaughter of isolated hunting parties that ventured too far beyond the confines of their own territory; and one such affair would furnish tradition for generations to dilate upon. I have myself found all the men of Nulato gone scouting, or hiding--I could not determine which--in the hills with their guns, upon a rumour that the "Huskies," or Esquimaux, were coming; I have known the Indians of the Yukon and the Tanana, and as far as the Koyukuk, excited and alarmed over the friendly visit of a handful of ragged natives from the Copper River to Nenana at Christmas time, although in either case it must certainly have been fifty years since there was any actual hostile incursion, and probably much longer.

[Sidenote: A GENTLE, TIMID PEOPLE]

They are a very timid people, and an exceedingly peaceable people. Years and years may be spent amongst them without knowledge of a single act of violence between Indian men; they do not quarrel and fight. Bold enough in the chase, willing to face dangers of ice and water and wild beast, they have a dread of anything like personal encounter, and will submit to a surprising amount of imposition and overbearing on the part of a white man without resorting to it. I knew a certain white man who claimed a whole river valley north of the Yukon as his, who warned off hunting parties of Indians who ventured upon it, and made them give up game killed in "his territory." They came to the mission and complained about it, but they never withstood the usurper. It ought to be added that it always appeared more as the making good of a practical joke than as a serious pretension, but the point is--the Indians submitted.

So far as these natives of the interior are concerned they were never idolaters. I cannot find that they had any distinct notion of wors.h.i.+p at all. Their religion had root in a certain frantic terror of the unknown, and found expression in ceaseless efforts to propitiate the malign spirits surrounding them on every side. Thus they were given over to the mastery of those amongst them who had the traditional art of such propitiation, and fell more or less completely under that cruellest and most venal of sways, the tyranny of the witch-doctor. It is impossible to doubt, and hard to exaggerate, the grinding and brutal exactions to which this rule led. Anything that a man possessed might be demanded and must be yielded, on pain of disease and death, even to the whole season's catch of fur or the deflowering of a young daughter. The utmost greed and l.u.s.t that can disgrace humanity found its Indian expression in the lives of some of these medicine-men.

Since every sort of tyranny has its vulnerable spot, since the despotism of Russia was tempered by a.s.sa.s.sination and of j.a.pan by the effect of public suicide, so melioration of the tyranny of the medicine-man seems to have been found in rivalry amongst members of the craft itself.

Oppressed beyond endurance by one pract.i.tioner, allegiance would be transferred to some new claimant of occult powers, and the breaking of the monopoly of magic would be followed by a temporary lightening of the burdens. Some of the most lurid of Alaskan legends deal with the thaumaturgic contests of rival medicine-men, and one judges that sleight of hand and even hypnotic suggestion were cultivated to a fine point.