Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled Part 18

Nicoli's Village is a very small place with a mere handful of people, situated on the South Fork of the Kuskokwim some forty miles by river above the junction of the forks. Before the epidemics devastated it it had been a considerable native community. A Greek church, which the natives built entirely themselves, and which boasted a large painted icon of sorts, was the most important building in the place, and was served by the lay minister referred to before. Thus far the Kuskokwim is navigable for vessels of light draught, and a small stern-wheel steamboat lay wintering upon the bank.

[Sidenote: ROAD-HOUSES]

Our way now left the Kuskokwim and struck across country to a point just below the junction of the forks, and then across country again to a tributary of the right bank, the Takotna; with a general northerly direction. Road-houses there indeed were, in the crudity and discomfort of their first season, and other evidences of the proximity of the white man. Here were two men camped, hunting moose for the Iditarod market, more than a hundred and twenty-five miles away, and here, at the end of the second day, near the mouth of the Takotna, was the new post of the Commercial Company in the charge of an old acquaintance who welcomed us warmly and entertained us most hospitably. After camping and road-house experience of nearly three weeks, a comfortable bed and well-spread table, and the general unmistakable menage of a home-making woman are very highly enjoyed. That night the whole population of the settlement, fourteen persons, gathered in the store for Divine service.

Sixteen miles farther on was another settlement, the "Upper Takotna"

Post, with a rival company established and some larger population. Here, also, we spent a night with old Fairbanks acquaintances. We were yet a hundred miles from Iditarod City, and the trail lay over a very rugged, hilly country, up one creek to its head, over a divide, and down another, in the way of the usual cross-country traverse.

There had not been so much snowfall in this section, but the weather began to be very severe. The thermometer fell to -45 and -50 and -55 on three successive nights, and all day long rose not above -20, with a keen wind. The cost of transporting supplies to the road-houses on this trail justified the high prices charged--one dollar and a half for a poor meal of rabbits and beans and bacon, or ptarmigan and beans and bacon, and one dollar for a lunch of coffee, bread and b.u.t.ter, and dried fruit. But no such exigency could be pleaded to excuse the dirt and discomfort and lack of the commonest provision of outhouse decency at most of these places--'twas mere s.h.i.+ftlessness. There is not often much middle ground in Alaskan road-houses; they are either very good in their way or very bad; either kept by professional victuallers who take pride in them or by idle incompetents who make an easy living out of the necessities of travellers. One wishes that some of the old-time travellers who used to wax so eloquently indignant over the inns in the Pyrenees could make a winter journey in the interior of Alaska.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE 'SUMMIT' IS HIGH ABOVE TIMBER-LINE AND THE TRAIL PURSUES A HOGBACK RIDGE FOR A MILE AND A HALF AT THE SUMMIT LEVEL."]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A STREET IN IDITAROD CITY.]

One thing pleased me at these road-houses. The only reading-matter in any of them consisted of magazines bearing the rubber stamp of Saint Matthew's Reading-Room at Fairbanks, part of a five-hundred-pound cargo of magazines which the mission launch _Pelican_ brought to the Iditarod the previous summer; virtually the only reading-matter in the whole camp. It was pleasant to know that we had been able to avert the real calamity of a total absence of anything to read for a whole winter throughout this wide district. But, although they were brought to the Iditarod and distributed absolutely free, each of these magazines had cost the road-house keeper twenty-five cents for carriage over the trail from Iditarod City, and they had been read to death. Some of them were so black and greasy from continued handling that the print at the edges of the pages was almost unreadable.

These creeks swarmed with ptarmigan, and it was well they did, for the new camp was ill supplied with food, and we found ourselves in a region of growing scarcity as we approached the Iditarod. The ptarmigan seem to have supplemented the meagre stocks in the Iditarod during this winter of 1910-11 as effectively as the rabbits did in the Fairbanks camp in the scarce winter of 1904-5. In place after place the whole creek valley, where it was open, was crisscrossed with ptarmigan tracks, and the birds rose in coveys, uttering their harsh, guttural cry at every turn of the trail.

The summit between the head of Moose Creek and the head of Bonanza Creek is again a watershed between the waters of the Kuskokwim and the waters of the Yukon; for Moose Creek is tributary to the Takotna and Bonanza Creek is tributary to Otter Creek, which is tributary to the Iditarod River. The "summit" is high above timber-line, and when the trail has reached it it does not descend immediately but pursues a hogback ridge for a mile and a half at about the summit level. We pa.s.sed over it in clear, bright weather without difficulty, but it would be a bad pa.s.sage in wind or snow or fog. The rugged, broken country, with small, rounded domes of hills, stretched away in all directions, a maze of little valleys threading in and out amongst them.

[Sidenote: PLACE-NAMES]

The Bonanza Creek road-house was by far the best of any between the Kuskokwim and the Iditarod, and showed what can be done for comfort, even under adverse circ.u.mstances, by a couple who care and try. But how the names of gold-bearing creeks, or creeks that are expected to be gold-bearing are repeated again and again in every new camp! I once counted up the following list of mining place-names in Alaska: Bonanza Creeks, 10; Eldorados and Little Eldorados, 10; Nugget Creeks or Gulches, 17; Gold Creeks, 12; Gold Runs, 7. Nor is it only in creeks with auriferous deposit or expectation of auriferous deposit that this reduplication occurs; there are Bear Creeks, 16; Boulder Creeks, 13; Moose Creeks, 13; Willow Creeks, 17; Canyon Creeks, 12; Glacier Creeks, 14.

The imagination of the average prospector is not his most active faculty, but even when his imagination is given play and he names a place "Twilight," as he did the original settlement at this base of supplies, the ineradicable prose of trade comes along the next summer and changes it to "Iditarod City." There must have been some remarkable personality strong enough to repress the "chamber of commerce" at Tombstone, Arizona, or the place would have lost its distinctive name so soon as it grew large enough to have mercantile establishments instead of stores.

[Sidenote: IDITAROD CITY]

We went through "Discovery Otter" and into "Flat City," on Flat Creek, the jealous rival of Iditarod City, and so over the hills to Iditarod City, on the wings of a storm. The wind whirled the snow behind us and drove the sled along almost on top of the dogs. In its bleak situation and its exposure to the full force of the wind, Iditarod City reminds one of Nome or Candle on the Seward Peninsula. The hills and flats that surround it are in the main treeless, and the snow drifts and drives over everything. Almost all the week that we spent in the town it was smothered up in a howling wind-storm, so that it was quite a serious undertaking to walk a block or two along the streets. Deep drifts were piled up on all the corners and on the lee side of all buildings. We reached Iditarod City on Monday, the 13th of March. Until the following Friday morning was no cessation or moderation of the wind-storm; and this, they told us, represented most of the weather since the 1st of January.

Overgrown and overdone in every way, the place presented all the features, sordid and otherwise, of a raw mining town. Prices had risen enormously on all manner of supplies, for everything that was not actually "short" was believed to be "cornered." Bacon was ninety cents a pound; b.u.t.ter one dollar and a half a pound; flour was twenty dollars a hundred pounds, and most things in like ratio. Some said the grub was not in the camp; others that the tradesmen had it cached away waiting for the still higher prices they believed would obtain before fresh supplies could arrive in July. There was a general feeling of disappointment and discouragement, enhanced by discomfort and actual suffering from the terrible stormy weather of the winter and the exorbitant and growing price of provisions. Many men without occupation were living on one meal a day. The saloons and the parasitical cla.s.ses, male and female, seemed to flourish and to play their usual prominent part in the life of such places. The doings of notorious women whose sobriquets seemed household words, the lavish expenditures of certain men upon them, the presents of diamonds they received, with the amount paid for them, const.i.tuted a large part of the general talk.

One is compelled to admire the vigour and enthusiastic enterprise, daunted by no difficulty, that is displayed in the wonderfully rapid upraising of a new mining-camp town. The building goes far ahead of the known wealth of the camp and commonly far ahead of the reasonable expectation. But the element of chance is so important a factor in placer mining that the whole thing partakes more of the nature of gambling than of a commercial venture. Any new camp may suddenly present the world with a new Klondike; with riches abundant and to spare for every one who is fortunate enough to be on the spot. Here was Flat Creek with a surprisingly rich deposit; why should there not be a dozen such amidst the mult.i.tudinous creeks of the district? How could any one know that it would be almost the only creek on which pay would be found at all? For there is no law about the distribution of gold deposits; there is not even a general rule that has not its notable exceptions. It is very generally believed by the old prospectors and miners that somewhere in the Bible may be found these words, "Silver occurs in veins, but gold is where you find it," which of course, is a mere misreading or faulty remembering of a verse in the Book of Job: "Surely there is a vein for the silver and a place for the gold where they fine it" (refine it). But that "gold is where you find it" is about the only law touching auriferous deposits that holds universally good.

Three long parallel streets of one and two story wooden buildings, with cross streets connecting them, made up the town. Because the country is poorly timbered, the usual log construction had yielded in the main to framed buildings, and great quant.i.ties of lumber had been brought the previous summer from Fairbanks, and even from Nome and the outside, to supplement the low-grade output of two local mills. But the price of building materials had been very high, and the average dwelling was very small and incommodious. People accustomed to the comparative luxury of the older camps had suffered a good deal from the lack of all domestic conveniences in this new will-o'-the-wisp of an eldorado.

So there the town stretched away, lumber and paper,--the usual tinder-box Alaskan construction--stores slap up against one another, with no alleyways between; in the busiest part of it and along the water-front even an adequate provision of side streets grudged; furnace-heated and kiln-dried and gasoline-lit; waiting for the careless match and the fanning wind and the five minutes' start that should send it all up in smoke. A week after we left it came; as it came to Dawson, as it came to Nome, as it came to Fairbanks, without teaching any lesson or leaving any precautionary regulations on the statute book to save men from their own compet.i.tive greed. Two or three weeks after the fire, however, it was all rebuilt, and a plunging local bank held mortgages on most of the structures for the cost of the new material--and holds them yet.

[Sidenote: THOUSANDS WITHOUT CHURCH]

With at least a thousand people resident in the town, not to mention the thousands more out upon the creeks and at Flat City and "Discovery[G]

Otter," there was no minister of religion of any sort in the whole region, nor had public Divine service been conducted since the occasion of the _Pelican's_ visit the previous summer. Yet there were many in the place who sorely missed the opportunities of wors.h.i.+p. Twice on Sunday the largest dancing hall in the town was crowded at service; at night it could have been filled a second time with those unable to get in.

Places like this present very difficult problems to those desirous of providing for their religious need. To occupy them at all they should be occupied at once when yet eligible sites may be had for the staking; if they prosper, to come into them later means buying at a high price. Yet what seventh son of a seventh son shall have foresight enough to tell the fortunes of them? The North is strewn with "cities" of one winter.

Nor is the selection of suitable men to minister to such communities a simple matter. Amidst the overthrow of all the usual criteria of conduct, the fading out of the usual dividing lines and the blending into one another of the usual divisions, it requires a tactful and prudent man "to keep the happy mean between too much stiffness in refusing and to much easiness in admitting" variations from conventional standards. His point of view, if he is to have any influence whatever, must not exclude the point of view of the great majority; he must accept the situation in order to have any chance of improving the situation.

And yet in the fundamentals of character and conduct he must be unswerving. And if on any such fundamental the battle gauge is thrown down, he must take it up and fight the quarrel out at whatever cost.

We left Iditarod City on Monday, the 20th of March, the dogs the fatter and fresher for their week's rest, resolved not to return by the Kuskokwim but to take the beaten trail out to the Yukon, and so all the way up that stream to Fort Yukon. The monthly mail had arrived a few days previously--a monthly mail was all that the thousands of men in this camp could secure--and had gone out again the very next morning, before people had time to answer their letters, before the registered mail had even been delivered. So our departure for the Yukon was eagerly seized upon and advertised as a means of despatching probably the last mail that would go outside over the ice. I was sworn in as special carrier, and a heavy sack of first-cla.s.s mail added to our load as far as Tanana. The first stage of thirty miles led to Dikeman, a town at the headwaters of ordinary steamboat navigation of the Iditarod River, at which the Commercial Company had built a depot and extensive warehouse, since in the main abandoned. Two streets of cabins lined the bank, but forty or fifty souls comprised the population, and almost all of them gathered for Divine service that night.

[Sidenote: THE "MOVING OF THE MEAT"]

From Dikeman to Dishkaket, on the Innoko River, a distance of some seventy miles, our route lay over one of the dreariest and most dismal regions in all Alaska. It is one succession of lakes and swamps, with narrow, almost knife-edge, ridges between, fringed with stunted spruce.

Far as the eye could reach to right and left the country was the same; it is safe to say broadly that all the land between the Iditarod and Innoko Rivers is of this character. We pa.s.sed over it in mild weather, but it must be a terrible country to cross in storm or through deep snow. For ten miles at a stretch there was scarcely a place where a man might make a decent camp. At a midway road-house was gathered the greatest a.s.semblage of dogs and loaded sleds I had ever seen together at one time, each team with an Indian driver; they must have covered a quarter or a third of a mile. It was a freight train engaged in transporting a whole boat-load of butcher's meat to Iditarod City, the cargo of a steamboat that had frozen in on the Yukon the previous October or early November. All the winter through efforts had been made to get this meat two hundred odd miles overland to its destination; but the weather had been so stormy and the snow so deep that near the end of March most of it was still on the way, and some yet far down the trail towards the Yukon waiting for another trip of the teams.

Dishkaket was merely a native village on the Innoko River two or three years before; but since three new trails from the Yukon come together here--from Kaltag Nulato, and Lewis's Landing--and in the other directions two trails branch off here, to the Innoko diggings at Ophir and to the Iditarod, a store or two and a couple of road-houses had sprung up.

From Dishkaket, after crossing the Innoko, we took the most northerly of the three trails to the Yukon, the Lewis Cut-Off, a trail of a hundred miles that strikes straight across country and reaches the Yukon eighty miles farther up that stream than the Nulato trail and a hundred and twenty miles farther up than the Kaltag trail. The Kaltag trail is the trail to Nome; the Nulato trail is the mail trail simply because it suits the contractors to throw business to Nulato. The Lewis Cut-Off is the direct route, the shortest by about a hundred miles, but it was cut by the private individual whose name it bears, and leads out to his store and road-house on the Yukon; so a rival road-house was built close by on the river and the prestige and advertis.e.m.e.nt of the "United States mail route" thrown to the trail that covers one hundred unnecessary miles--for no other reason than to deprive Lewis of the legitimate fruit of his enterprise.

The character of the country changed so soon as the Innoko was crossed; the wide swamps gave place to a broken, light-timbered country of ridges and hollows, and the rough, laborious, horse-ruined trail across it made bad travelling. "Buckskin Bill," with his cayuses, was also engaged in "moving the meat." The measured miles, moreover, gave place to estimated miles, and the nominal twenty-five we made the first day was probably not much more than twenty.

[Sidenote: MILLINERY]

The first fifty miles of the country between the Innoko and the Yukon is much the same, and we were climbing and descending ridges for a couple of days. Then we crossed a high ridge and dropped out of Innoko waters into the valley of the Yukatna, a tributary of the Yukon, and pa.s.sed down this valley for thirty or forty miles, and then across some more broken country to the Yukon. At one of the road-houses a woman was stopping, going in with three or four large sled loads of millinery and "ladies' furnis.h.i.+ngs." We were told that the merchandise had cost her twelve thousand dollars in Fairbanks, and that she expected to realise thirty thousand dollars by selling it to the "sporting" women of the Iditarod, now a whole winter debarred from "the latest imported French fas.h.i.+ons." This woman was dressed in overalls, like a man, and the drivers of her teams, two white men and a native, cursed and swore and used filthy language to the dogs in her presence. It always angers me to hear an Indian curse; to hear one curse in the presence of a white woman was particularly disgusting and exasperating; but what could one expect when the white men put no slightest restraint upon themselves and the woman seemed utterly indifferent? I called the Indian aside and spoke very plainly to him, and he ceased his ribaldry; but the white men still poured it out as they struggled to hitch their many dogs. At last I could stand it no longer. "Madam," I said to the woman, "I don't know who you are, save that you are a white woman, and as a white woman, if I were you, I would make those blackguards treat me with more respect than to use such language before me." She flushed and made no reply. The men, who heard what I said, scowled and made no reply. Presently dispositions were done and the train moved off, but I did not hear any more foul language. This is set down here chiefly because it was the first and only time in all his travels in Alaska that the writer heard such language in such presence.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE END OF THE PORTAGE TRAIL.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROUGH ICE ON THE YUKON.]

Another road-house was kept by a man who had been cook upon a recent arctic expedition off the coast of Alaska, and he gave some interesting inside information about an enterprise the published narrative of which had always seemed unsatisfactory. It was just gossip from a drunken scamp, but it filled several gaps in the book.

As we approached the Yukon we pa.s.sed several meat caches where great quarters of beef sewn up in burlap were piled on the side of the trail.

At one of these caches the camp-robbers had been at work industriously.

They had stripped the burlap from parts of several quarters, exposing the fat, and had dug out and carried it away little by little until it was all gone. The hard-frozen lean probably defied their best efforts; at any rate, the fat offered less resistance. But where else in the world could men dump quarters of beef beside the road and go off and leave them for weeks with no more danger of depredation than the bills of birds can effect?

A few miles from the river the rival road-house signs began to appear.

"Patronise Lewis; he cut this trail at his own expense," pleaded one.

"Why go five miles out of your way," sneered another. Lewis's road-house _is_ across the wide Yukon, and there was no point in crossing the river save one's determination to lend no countenance to the spitefulness of these mail runners. So across the river we went and were glad to be on the Yukon again. The next morning we encountered the same rival signs at the point where the trail from Lewis's joined the "mail trail."

[Sidenote: "TREASURE ISLAND"]

Most of our travelling was now upon the surface of the Yukon, and four hundred and fifty miles of it stretched ahead of us ere our winter's travel should end at Fort Yukon. Four hours brought us to the military telegraph station at Melozi, and we were able to send word ahead that we were safely out of the Kuskokwim wilderness. Then a portage was crossed and then the river pursued again until with about thirty miles to our credit we made camp. The days were lengthening out now, the weather growing mild, although a keen, cold, down-river breeze was rarely absent, and travel began to be pleasant and camping no hards.h.i.+p. We preferred camping, on several scores, when the day's work had not been too arduous, chief amongst them being that it gave more opportunity and privacy for Walter's schooling. He was reading _Treasure Island_ aloud, and I was getting as great pleasure from renewing as he from beginning an acquaintance with that prince of all pirate stories. Kokrines and Mouse Point one day, the next The Birches; we pa.s.sed these well-known Yukon landmarks, camping, after a run of thirty-eight miles, some six miles beyond the last-named place, with a run of forty-four miles before us to Tanana. I judged it too much; but the trail was greatly improved and we decided to attempt it in one stage. A misreading of the watch, so that I roused myself and Walter at 3.30 A. M. instead of 5.15 A. M., and did not realise the mistake until the fire was made and it was not worth while returning to bed, gave us a fine start and we made good progress.

Gold Mountain (so called, one supposes, because there is no gold there; there is no other reason), Grant Creek, "Old Station" were pa.s.sed by, and at length Tanana loomed before us while yet ten miles away. In just eleven hours we ran the forty-four miles, making, with three additional miles out to the mission, forty-seven altogether, by far the longest journey of the winter. We reached Tanana on the 1st of April, just six weeks since we left.

[Sidenote: AN UNTRAVELLED RIVER]

We spent eight days at Tanana, including two Sundays, Pa.s.sion Sunday and Palm Sunday, but I was under an old promise to spend Easter there also.

Now, Easter, 1911, fell on the 16th of April, and for the three-hundred-mile journey to Fort Yukon a period of ten or twelve days at the least would be necessary, that might easily stretch to two weeks.

Travelling on the Yukon ice so late in April as this would involve was not only fraught with great difficulty and discomfort, but also with actual danger, and I had to beg to be absolved of my promise. Some considerable preparation was on foot for the festival, and I was loath to leave, for Tanana was then without any resident minister, but it seemed foolish to take the chances that would have to be taken if we stayed.

Five days of almost ceaseless snow-storm during our stay at Tanana did not give prospect of good travelling, and, indeed, when we pulled out from the mission on the Monday in Holy Week there was no sign of any trail. From Tanana up to Fort Yukon there is very little travel; since the whole of this long stretch of river was deprived of winter mail a year or two before, no through travel at all. Cabins may usually be found to camp in, but there are no road-houses. What travel still takes place is local.

The journey divided itself into two roughly equal parts, a hundred and fifty miles through the Lower Ramparts, and a hundred and fifty miles through the Yukon Flats, almost all of it on the surface of the river.

It was hoped to reach Stephen's Village, a native settlement just within the second half of the journey, for Easter.

Snow does not lie long at rest upon the river within the Ramparts, and particularly within the narrow, canon-like stretch of seventy-five miles from Tanana to Rampart City. Violent and almost ceaseless down-stream winds sweep the deep defile in the mountains through which the river winds its course. In places the ice is bare of snow; in places the snow is piled in huge, hardened drifts. So strong and so persistent is this wind that it is often possible to skate over an uninterrupted black surface of ice, polished like plate gla.s.s, for twenty miles on a down-river journey. To make way over such a surface up-stream, against such wind, is, however, almost impossible. The dogs get no footing and the wind carries the sled where it listeth. The journey so far as Rampart City has been described before; it will suffice now that it took three days of toilsome battling against wind and bad surface, with nights spent upon the floor of grimy cabins. So cold was the wind that it is noted in my diary with surprise, on the 12th of April, that I had worn fur cap, parkee, and m.u.f.fler all day, as though it had been the dead of winter instead of three weeks past the vernal equinox.

On Wednesday night there was Divine service at Rampart, and on Maundy Thursday, after four miles upon the river, we took the portage of eleven miles that cuts a chord to the arc of the greatest bend of the river within the Ramparts and so saves nine miles. Three miles more took us to the deserted cabin at the site of the abandoned coal-mine opposite the mouth of the Mike Hess River, here confluent with the Yukon, and in that cabin we spent the night, having had the high, bitter wind in our faces all day. We hated to leave the shelter of the wooded portage and face the blast of the last three miles.