Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled Part 12

Add to the trouble given by the soldiers the constant operation of the slinking bootleggers of the town, a score or more of whom are known to make money by this liquor peddling, and some of whom do nothing else for a living, yet whom it is next to impossible to convict, owing to the c.u.mbrous machinery of the law and the att.i.tude of juries, and it will be seen that the hands of those who are fighting for the native race are tied.

What has been said about the military does not by any means apply to all, either officers or men. Some of the officers have been decent, G.o.d-fearing men, conscious of the evil and zealous to suppress it; some of the men, indeed in all probability most of the men, quite free from such offence; some commanding officers have kept such a well-disciplined post that offences of all kinds have been greatly reduced. But the commanding officer is changed every year, and the whole force is changed every two years, so that there is no continuity of policy at the post, and an administration that has grown familiar with conditions and that stands so far as it can for clean living and sobriety and decency and the protection of the native people, may be followed by one that is loftily ignorant of the situation, careless about offences against morality, and impatient of any complaint.

Off by himself, separate from the demoralising influence of the low-down white, there is every hope and encouragement in the effort to elevate and educate the Indian; set down cheek by jowl with the riffraff of towns and barracks, his fate seems sealed.

[Sidenote: DEATH-RATE AND BIRTH-RATE]

Let these two mission stations, the Allakaket and Tanana, one hundred and fifty miles or so apart by the winter trail, represent the two conditions. In six years' time there has been manifest advance at the one and decay at the other. The birth-rate is greatly in excess of the death-rate at the Allakaket, the death-rate greatly in excess of the birth-rate at Tanana. In the year in which this journey was made there were thirty-four deaths and fourteen births at Tanana, and while the difference was an unusually large one, yet in the six years referred to there has not been one year in which the number of births exceeded the number of deaths. One does not have to be a prophet to foresee the inevitable result, if the process be not stopped.

A tribute should be paid to the zeal, now of one, now of another army surgeon at Fort Gibbon in tending the native sick, three miles away, when we have been unable to procure a physician of our own for the place. The missionary nurse, for five years last past Miss Florence Langdon, has been greatly helped in her almost desperate efforts here by the willing co-operation of these medical officers of the army.

FOOTNOTE:

[B] See ill.u.s.tration, p. 374.

CHAPTER VIII

UP THE YUKON TO RAMPART AND ACROSS COUNTRY TO THE TANANA--ALASKAN AGRICULTURE--THE GOOD DOG NANOOK--MISS FARTHING'S BOYS AT NENANA--CHENA AND FAIRBANKS

OUR course from Tanana did not lie directly up the Tanana River, but up the Yukon to Rampart and then across country to the Hot Springs on the Tanana River. The seventy-five miles up the Yukon was through the Lower Ramparts, one of the most picturesque portions of this great river. The stream is confined in one deep channel by lofty mountains on both banks, and the scenery at times is very bold and wild. But its topography makes it the natural wind course of the country--a down-river wind in winter, an up-river wind in summer blows almost continually. It was no colder than 5 below zero when we started on the trip, but the wind made the travelling unpleasant. The second day it had increased to a gale, and every mile we travelled it grew stronger. We travelled three hours, and the last hour we made scarcely a mile. So thickly charged with flying snow was the wind and so dead ahead that despite parkee hoods it blinded us, and the dogs could hardly be forced to keep their heads towards it.

Their faces were so coated with crusted snow that they looked curiously like the face of harlequin in the pantomime. It did become literally intolerable, and when Arthur said that he knew there was a cabin right across the river, we made our way thither and shortly found it and lay there the rest of the day, the gale blowing incessantly. This was disappointing, because it meant that I could not reach Rampart for the Sunday I had appointed.

Next day the wind had ceased and the thermometer went down to 30 below zero. In places the ice was blown clear of snow; in other places it was heavily drifted. By midday we had reached the lonely telegraph station at "The Rapids," and were very kindly received by the signal-corps men in charge. They gave us to eat and to drink and would take no money.

There is little travel on this part of the river nowadays, and the telegraph men are glad to see any one who may chance to pa.s.s by. We pushed on heavily again, and had to stop and cut a gee pole presently, for it was hard to handle the sled without it; but the gee pole always means laborious travel. The cold was welcome; it meant no wind; and we were glad to see the thermometer drop lower than 50 below zero that night at the old mail cabin. The mail goes no longer on the Yukon River from Fort Yukon to Tanana, and, barring this point, Rampart, towards which we were travelling, which is supplied across country from the Hot Springs, over the route we should traverse, no spot on that three hundred and fifty miles of river receives any mail at all. The population is small and scattered, it is true; on the same grounds Alaska might be denied any mail at all. There has been much resentment at this abandonment of the Yukon River by the post-office and several pet.i.tions for its restoration, but it has not been restored.

[Sidenote: THE WIND-SWEPT YUKON]

We travelled all the next day at 50 below zero, and it was one of the pleasantest days of the winter. There was not a breath of wind, the going steadily improved, and, best of all, for three hours we were travelling in the suns.h.i.+ne for the first time this winter. Only those who have been deprived of the sun can really understand how joyful and grateful his return is. There was no heat in his rays, this last day of January; the thermometer stood at 49 below at noon, and had risen but 5 since our start in the morning; but the mere sight of him glowing in the south, where a great bend of the river gave him to us through a gap in the mountains, was cheerful and invigorating after two months in which we had seen no more than his gilding of the high snows. The sun gives life to the dead landscape, colour to the oppressive monotony of white and black, and man's heart leaps to the change as jubilantly as does the face of nature.

[Sidenote: RAMPART AND ITS SALOON]

Rampart City differs from Circle City, the other decayed mining town of the Yukon River, only in that the process is further advanced. Year by year there are a few less men on the creeks behind it, a few less residents in the town itself. Its long, straggling water-front consists in the main of empty buildings, the windows boarded up, the snow drifted high about the doors. One store now serves all ends of trade, one liquor shop serves all the desire for drink of the whites, and slops over through the agency of two or three dissolute squaw men and half-breeds to the natives up and down the river.[C]

Rampart had one fat year, 1898, when many hundreds of gold seekers, approaching the Klondike by Saint Michael and the lower Yukon were attracted and halted by the gold discoveries on Big and Little Minook, and spent the winter here. The next spring news was brought of the rich discoveries on Anvil Creek, behind Cape Nome, and an exodus began which grew into a veritable stampede in 1900, when the gold discoveries in the beach itself were made. Rampart's large population faded away as surely and as quickly to Nome as Circle City's population did to the Klondike.

The Indians are almost all gone from their village a mile above the town; they dwindled away with the dwindling prosperity, some to Tanana, some to other points down the river; and what used to be the worst small native community in the interior of Alaska has almost ceased to exist.

Most of the little band of white folks still remaining were gathered together at night, and appreciated, I thought, their semiannual opportunity for Divine service.

[Sidenote: "DEVELOPED"]

There is no resisting the melancholy that hangs over a place like this.

As one treads the crazy, treacherous board sidewalks, full of holes and rotten planks, now rising a step or two, now falling, and reads the dimmed and dirty signs that once flaunted their gold and colours, "Golden North," "Pioneer," "Reception," "The Senate" (why should every town in Alaska have a "Senate" saloon and not one a "House of Representatives"?), one conjures up the scenes of rude revelry these drinking places witnessed a few years ago. How high the hopes of sudden riches burned in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the men who went in and out of them, doomed to utter disappointment in the vast majority! What a rapscallion crew, male and female, followed this great mob of gold seekers, and grew richer as their victims grew poorer! What earned and borrowed and saved and begged and stolen moneys were frittered away and flung away that winter; what health and character were undermined! How the ribaldry and valiant, stupid blasphemy rang out in these tumbling-down shanties! Go out on the creeks and see the hills denuded of their timber, the stream-beds punched with innumerable holes, filled up or filling up, the cabins and sluice-boxes rotting into the moss, here and there a broken pick and shovel, here and there a rusting boiler, and take notice that this region has been "developed."

When the debit and credit sides of the ledger are balanced, what remains to Alaska of all these thousands of men, of all the many hundreds of thousands of dollars they brought with them? Those creeks, stripped, gutted, and deserted; this town, waiting for a kindly fire with a favouring breeze to wipe out its useless emptiness; a few half-breed children at mission schools; a hardy native tribe, sophisticated, diseased, demoralised, and largely dead--that seems the net result.

The portage trail from Rampart to the Tanana River goes up Minook Creek and follows the valley to its head, then crosses a summit and pa.s.ses down through several small mining settlements to the Hot Springs. The trail saves traversing two sides of the triangle which it makes with the two rivers.

The dogs' feet and legs had suffered so much from the deep snow and the heavy labour of the journey out of the Koyukuk and the rough ice of the Yukon that I was compelled to have not merely moccasins but moose-hide leggings made here, coming right up to the belly and tying over the back. All the hair was worn away from the back of the legs and the skin was in many places raw.

We had thought to cover the twenty-five or thirty miles up the valley and over the summit to a road-house just beyond its foot, but rough drifted trails and a high wind held us back until it was dark before the ascent was reached, and we pitched our tent and reserved the climb for the morrow.

It was a hard grind owing to the drifted snow and the wind that still disputed our pa.s.sage, but the view from the summit, nearly eighteen hundred feet above last night's camp, was compensation enough, for it gave us the great mountain, Denali, or, as the map makers and some white men call it, Mount McKinley. Perhaps an hundred and fifty miles away, as the crow flies, it rose up and filled all the angle of vision to the southwest. It is not a peak, it is a region, a great soaring of the earth's crust, rising twenty thousand feet high; so enormous in its ma.s.s, in its snow-fields and glaciers, its b.u.t.tresses, its flanking spurs, its far-flung terraces of foot-hills and approaches, that it completely dominates the view whenever it is seen at all. I have heard people say they thought they had seen Denali, as I have heard travellers say they thought they had seen Mount Everest from Darjiling; but no one ever thought he saw Denali if he saw it at all. There is no possible question about it, once the mountain has risen before the eyes; and although Mount Everest is but the highest of a number of great peaks, while Denali stands alone in unapproached predominance, yet I think the man who has really looked upon the loftiest mountain in the world could have no doubt about it ever after.

How my heart burns within me whenever I get view of this great monarch of the North! There it stood, revealed from base to summit in all its stupendous size, all its glistening majesty. I would far rather climb that mountain than own the richest gold-mine in Alaska. Yet how its apparent nearness mocks one; what time and cost and labour are involved even in approaching its base with food and equipment for an attempt to reach its summit! How many schemes I have pondered and dreamed these seven years past for climbing it! Some day time and opportunity and resource may serve, please G.o.d, and I may have that one of my heart's desires; if not, still it is good to have seen it from many different coigns of vantage, from this side and from that; to have felt the awe of its vast swelling bulk, the superb dignity of its firm-seated, broad-based uplift to the skies with a whole continent for a pedestal; to have gazed eagerly and longingly at its serene, untrodden summit, far above the eagle's flight, above even the most daring airman's venture, and to have desired and hoped to reach it; to desire and hope to reach it still.[D]

Plunging down the steep descent we went for four miles, and then after a hearty dinner at the road-house, essayed to make twenty-one miles more to the Hot Springs. But night fell again with a number of miles yet to come, the recent storm had furrowed the trail diagonally with hard windrows of snow that overturned the sled repeatedly and formed an hindrance that grew greater and greater, and again we made camp in the dark, short of our expected goal.

Of late I had been carrying an hip ring, a rubber ring inflated by the breath that is the best subst.i.tute for a mattress. The ring had been left behind at Rampart, and so dependent does one grow on the little luxuries and ameliorations one permits oneself that these two nights in camp were almost sleepless for lack of it.

[Sidenote: THE HOT SPRINGS]

Three hours more brought us to the s.p.a.cious hotel, with its forty empty rooms, that had been put up, out of all sense or keeping, in a wild, plunging attempt to "exploit" the Hot Springs and make a great "health resort" of the place. The hot water had been piped a quarter of a mile or so to s.p.a.cious swimming-baths in the hotel; all sorts of expense had been lavished on the place; but it had been a failure from the first, and has since been closed and has fallen into dilapidation. The bottoms have dropped out of the cement baths, the paper hangs drooping from the damp walls, the unsubstantial foundations have yielded until the floors are heaved like the waves of the sea.[E] But at this time the hotel was still maintained and we stayed there, and its wide entrance-hall and lobby formed an excellent place to gather the inhabitants of the little town for Divine service--again the only opportunity in the year.

What a curious phenomenon thermal springs const.i.tute in these parts!

Here is a series of patches of ground, free from snow, while all the country has been covered two or three feet deep these four months; green with vegetation, while all living things elsewhere are wrapped in winter sleep. Here is open, rus.h.i.+ng water, throwing up clouds of steam that settles upon everything as dense h.o.a.r frost, while all other water is held in the adamantine fetters of the ice. Where does that constant unfailing stream of water at 110 Fahrenheit come from? Where does it get its heat? I know of half a dozen such thermal springs in Alaska,--one far away above the Arctic Circle between the upper courses of the Kobuk and the Noatak Rivers, that I have heard strange tales about from the Esquimaux and that I have always wanted to visit.

Whenever I see this gush of hot water in the very midst of the ice and the snow, I am reminded of my surprise on the top of Mount Tacoma. We had climbed some eight thousand feet of snow and were s.h.i.+vering in a bitter wind on the summit, yet when the hand was thrust in a cleft of the rock it had to be withdrawn by reason of the heat. One knows about the internal fire of some portion of the earth's ma.s.s, of course, but such striking manifestations of it, such bold irruption of heat in the midst of the kingdom of the cold, must always bring a certain astonishment except to those who take everything as a matter of course.

It is evident that this hot water, capable of distribution over a considerable area of land, makes an exceedingly favourable condition for subarctic agriculture, and a great deal of ground has been put under cultivation with large yield of potatoes and cabbage and other vegetables. But the limitations of Alaskan conditions have shorn all profit from the enterprise. There is no considerable market nearer than Fairbanks, almost two hundred miles away by the river. If the potatoes are allowed to remain in the ground until they are mature, there is the greatest danger of the whole crop freezing while on the way to market, and in any case the truck-farmers around Fairbanks find that their proximity to the consumer more than offsets the advantage of the Hot Springs.

[Sidenote: ARCTIC AGRICULTURE]

When the great initial difficulties of farming in Alaska are overcome, when the moss is removed and the ground, frozen solidly to bedrock, is broken and thawed, when its natural acidity is counteracted by the application of some alkali, and its reeking surface moisture is drained away; when after three or four years' cultivation it begins to make some adequate return of roots and greens, there remains the constant difficulty of a market. Around the mining settlements and during the uncertain life of the mining settlements, truck-farming pays very well, but it could easily be overdone so that prices would fall below the point of any profit at all. Transportation is expensive, and rates for a short haul on the rivers are high, out of all proportion to rates for the long haul from the outside, so that potatoes from the Pacific coast are brought in and sold in compet.i.tion with the native-grown. And despite the protestations of the agricultural experimental stations, the outside or "chechaco" potato has the advantage of far better quality than that grown in Alaska. Tastes differ, and a man may speak only as he finds. For my part, I have eaten native potatoes raised in almost every section of interior Alaska, and have been glad to get them, but I have never eaten a native potato that compared favourably with any good "outside" potato. The native potato is commonly wet and waxy; I have never seen a native potato that would burst into a glistening ma.s.s of white flour, or that had the flavour of a really good potato.

There has been much misconception about the interior of Alaska that obtains yet in some quarters, although there is no excuse for it now.

Not only the interior of Alaska, but all land at or near sea-level in the arctic regions that is not under glacial ice-caps, is snow free and surface-thawed in the summer and has a luxuriant vegetation. The polar ox (Sverdrup's protest against the term "musk-ox" should surely prevail) ranges in great bands north of the 80th parallel and must secure abundant food; and when Peary determined the insularity of Greenland he found its most northerly point a ma.s.s of verdure and flowers.

No doubt potatoes and turnips, lettuce and cabbage, could be raised anywhere in those regions; the intensity of the season compensates for its shortness; the sun is in the heavens twenty-four hours in the day, and all living things sprout and grow with amazing rankness and celerity under the strong compulsion of his continuous rays. Spring comes literally with a shout and a rush here in Alaska, and must cry even louder and stride even faster in the "ultimate climes of the pole." If the possibility of raising garden-truck and tubers const.i.tutes a "farming country," then all the arctic regions not actually under glacial ice may be so cla.s.sed.

Any one who visits the Koyukuk may see monster turnips and cabbages raised at Coldfoot, near the 68th parallel; from Sir William Parry's description we may feel quite sure that vegetables of size and excellence might be raised at the head of Bushnan's Cove of Melville Island, on the 75th parallel; he called it "an arctic paradise"; Greely reported "gra.s.s twenty-four inches high and many b.u.t.terflies" in the interior of Grinnell Land under the 82d parallel; and if gold were ever discovered on the north coast of Greenland one might quite expect to hear that some enterprising Swede was growing turnips and cabbages at Cape Morris Jessup above the 83d parallel, and getting a dollar a pound for them.

In favourable seasons and in favourable spots of interior Alaska certain early varieties of Siberian oats and rye have been matured, and it stands to the credit of the Experiment Station at Rampart that a little wheat was once ripened there, though it took thirteen months from the sowing to the ripening. When the rest of the world fills up so that economic pressure demands the utilisation of all earth that will produce any sort of food, it may be that large tracts in Alaska will be put under the plough; but it is hard to believe that nine tenths of all this vast country will ever be other than wild waste land. At present the farming population is strictly an appendage of the mining population, and the mining population rather diminishes than increases.

Your health resort that no one will resort to is a dull place at best and a poor dependence for merchandising, so that the little town of Hot Springs is fortunate in having some mining country around it to fall back upon for its trade. We lay an extra day there, waiting for the stage from Fairbanks to break trail for us through the heavy, drifted snow, having had enough of trail breaking for a while. At midnight the stage came, two days late, and its coming caused me as keen a sorrow and as great a loss as I have had since I came to Alaska.

[Sidenote: NANOOK'S DEATH]

We knew naught of it until the next morning, when, breakfast done and the sled lashed, we were ready to hitch the dogs and depart. They had been put in the horse stable for there was no dog house; the health resorter, actual or prospective, is not likely to be a dog man one supposes; but they were loose in the morning and came to the call, all but one--Nanook. Him we sought high and low, and at last Arthur found him, but in what pitiful case! He dragged himself slowly and painfully along, his poor bowels hanging down in the outer hide of his belly, fearfully injured internally, done for and killed already. It was not difficult to account for it. When the horses came in at midnight, one of them had kicked the dog and ruptured his whole abdomen.

There was no use in inquiring whose fault it was. The dogs should have been chained; so much was our fault. But it was hard to resist some bitter recollection that before this "exploitation" of the springs, when there was a modest road-house instead of a mammoth hotel, there had been kennels for dogs instead of nothing but stables for horses.

I doubt if all the veterinary surgeons in the world could have saved the dog, but there was none to try; and there was only one thing to do, hate it as we might. Arthur and I were grateful that neither of us had to do it, for the driver of the mail stage, who had some compunctions of conscience, I think, volunteered to save us the painful duty. "I know how you feel," he said slowly and kindly; "I've got a dog I think a heap of myself, but that dog ain't nothin' to me an' I'll do it for you."

Nanook knew perfectly well that it was all over with him. Head and tail down, the picture of resigned dejection, he stood like a petrified dog.

And when I put my face down to his and said "Good-bye," he licked me for the first time in his life. In the six years I had owned him and driven him I had never felt his tongue before, though I had always loved him best of the bunch. He was not the licking kind.