Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled Part 2

[Sidenote: ARCHDEACON MACDONALD ]

Fort Yukon is also the site of the oldest missionary station on the river, unless there were earlier visits of Russian priests to the lower river, of which there seems no record, for in 1862 there was a clergyman of the Church of England at this place. Archdeacon MacDonald was a remarkable man. Married to a native wife, he translated the whole Bible and the Book of Common Prayer into the native tongue, and his translations are in general use on the upper river to this day. He reduced the language to writing, extracted its grammar, taught the Indians to read and write their own tongue, and dignified it by the gift of the great literature of the sacred books. The language is, of course, a dying one--English is slowly superseding it--but it seems safe to say that for a generation or two yet to come it will be the basis of the common speech of the people and the language of wors.h.i.+p. It is chiefly in matters of trading and handicrafts that English is taking its place, though here as elsewhere it stands to the discredit of the civilised race that blackguard English is the first English that is learned.

There seems ground to question whether the subst.i.tution of a smattering of broken English for the flexibility and picturesque expressiveness of an indigenous tongue, thoroughly understood, carries with it any great intellectual gain, though to suggest such a doubt is treason to some minds. The time threatens when all the world will speak two or three great languages, when all little tongues will be extinct and all little peoples swallowed up, when all costume will be reduced to a dead level of blue jeans and shoddy and all strange customs abolished. The world will be a much less interesting world then; the spice and savour of the ends of the earth will be gone. Nor does it always appear unquestionable that the world will be the better or the happier. The advance of civilisation would be a great thing to work for if we were quite sure what we meant by it and what its goal is. To the ordinary government school-teacher in Alaska, with some notable exceptions, it seems to mean chiefly teaching the Indians to call themselves Mr. and Mrs. and teaching the women to wear millinery, with a contemptuous att.i.tude toward the native language and all native customs. The less intelligent grade of missionary sometimes falls into the same easy rut. So letters pa.s.s through the post-offices addressed: "Mr. Pretty Henry," "Mrs.

Monkey Bill," "Miss Sally Shortandirty"; so, occasionally, the grotesque spectacle may present itself, to the pa.s.sengers on a steamer, of a native woman in a "Merry Widow" hat and a blood-stained parkee gutting salmon on the river bank.

The n.o.bler ideal, as it seems to some of us, is to labour for G.o.d-fearing, self-respecting Indians rather than imitation white men and white women. An Indian who is honest, healthy and kindly, skilled in hunting and trapping, versed in his native Bible and liturgy, even though he be entirely ignorant of English and have acquired no taste for canned fruit and know not when Columbus discovered America, may be very much of a man in that station of life in which it has pleased G.o.d to call him.

Christmas and the Fourth of July are the Indian's great holidays, the one just after the best moose hunting and the other just before the salmon run. It may be supposed that there were always great feasts at the winter and summer solstices, though now he is sufficiently devout at the one and patriotic at the other. At these seasons, and for weeks before and after, Fort Yukon gathers a large number of Indians. It is the native metropolis of the country within a radius of a hundred miles, and what may be termed its permanent population of one hundred and fifty is doubled and sometimes trebled by contingents from the Chandalar, the Porcupine, and the Black Rivers, from that long river called Birch Creek, and all the intervening country. Many families of the "uncivilised," self-respecting kind, to which reference has been made, come in from outlying points, and the contrast between them and their more sophisticated kinfolk of the town is all in their favour.

[Sidenote: JIMMY]

Such a gathering had already taken place in preparation for the Christmas holidays when we reached Fort Yukon on the 15th of December.

It would have been pleasant to spend Christmas with them, but we were due two hundred and fifty miles away, at Bettles, for that feast, if by any means we could get there. So we lingered but the two days necessary to equip ourselves. Jimmy had torn our bedding to pieces on the night of the mishap; it was lashed on the outside of the load, and he had scratched and clawed it to make a nest for himself until fur from the robe and feathers from the quilts were all over the trail. The other dogs, not so warmly coated as he, had been content to sleep in the snow.

Jimmy's character was gradually revealing itself. A well-bred trail dog will not commit the canine sacrilege of invading the sled. That is a "Siwash" dog's trick. So there was fresh bedding to manufacture, as well as supplies for two hundred miles to get together.

A mail once a month went at that time from Fort Yukon to the Koyukuk, and there was little other travel. The course lay fifty or sixty miles across country to the Chandalar River, about one hundred miles up that stream, and then across a divide to the South Fork of the Koyukuk, and across another to the Middle Fork, on which Coldfoot is situated. It is not possible to procure any supplies, save sometimes a little fish for dog food and that not certainly, between Fort Yukon and Coldfoot, so that provision for the whole journey must be taken.

[Sidenote: THE CHANDALAR]

A new Indian guide had been engaged as far as Coldfoot, and we set out--three men, two toboggans, and seven dogs; four on the larger vehicle and three on the smaller, one of the dogs brought by our guide.

Three miles from Fort Yukon we crossed the Porcupine River and then plunged into the wilderness of lake and swamp and forest that stretches north of the Yukon. A portage trail, as such a track across country is called to distinguish it from a river trail, has the advantage of such protection from storm as its timbered stretches afford. For miles and miles the route pa.s.ses through scrub spruce that has been burned over, with no prospect but a maze of charred poles against the snow, some upright, others at every angle of inclination. Then comes a lake, with difficulty in finding the trail on its wind-swept surface and sometimes much casting about to discover where it leaves the lake again, and then more small burned timber. Wherever the route is through woods, living or dead, it is blazed; when it strikes the open, one is often at a loss.

After three or four days of such travel, sometimes reaching an old cabin for the night, sometimes pitching the tent, one is rejoiced at the sight of distant mountains and at the intimation they bring that the inexpressible dreariness of the Yukon Flats is nearly past; and presently the trail opens suddenly upon the broad Chandalar.

The Hudson Bay voyageurs are responsible for many names in this part of Alaska, and Chandalar is a corruption of their "Gens de large." The various native tribes received appellations indicating habitats. A tribe that differed from most northern Indians, in having no permanent villages and in living altogether in encampments, was named "Gens de large," and the river which they frequented took their name.

It is one of the second-rate tributaries of the Yukon, and in general its waters are swift and shallow, not navigable for light-draught steamboats for more than one hundred and fifty miles, save at flood, and not easily navigable at all. It is these swift shallow streams that are so formidable in winter on account of overflow water, and the Chandalar is one of the most dreaded.

[Sidenote: DIPHTHERIA]

Ten miles along the river's surface brought us to the Chandalar native village, a settlement of half a dozen cabins and twenty-five or thirty souls. The people came out to meet us, and said they were just about to bury a baby, and asked me to conduct the funeral. Because we had not done a day's march and were under compulsion to push on at our best speed, I did not unlash the sled but went just as I was up the hill with the sorrowful procession to the little graveyard. On the way down I asked as best I could of what sickness the baby had died, and I felt some uneasiness when the throat was pointed to as the seat of disease.

When, presently, I was informed that two others were sick, and of the same complaint, my uneasiness became alarm. I went at once to see them, and the angry swollen throats patched with white membrane which I discovered left no room for doubt that we were in the presence of another outbreak of diphtheria. That disease had scourged the Yukon in the two preceding years. Twenty-three children died at Fort Yukon in the summer of 1904, half a dozen at Circle in the following winter, though that outbreak was grappled with from the first; and all along the river the loss of life was terrible.

There was no question that we must give up all hope of reaching Bettles for Christmas and stay and do what we could for these people. So we made camp on the outskirts of the village, and I went to work swabbing out the throats with carbolic acid and preparing liquid food from our grub box. There was nothing to eat in the village but dried fish and a little dried moose, and these throats like red-hot iron could hardly swallow liquids. The two patients were a boy of sixteen and a grown woman. It was evident that unless we could isolate them the disease would probably pa.s.s through the whole village, and, indeed, others might have been infected already. It was likely that we were in for a siege of it, and our supply of condensed milk and extract of beef would soon be exhausted. Moreover, at Fort Yukon was the trained nurse who had coped with the epidemic there and at Circle, while we had virtually no experience with the disease at all. It was resolved to send back to Fort Yukon for supplies and for the nurse.

The next morning Mr. Knapp and the native boy took the dogs and the sled and started back. With no load save a little grub and bedding, they could make the journey in two days, a day must be allowed for preparations, and, with the aid of another dog team, two days more would bring them back. Five days was the least they could be gone. It was asking a great deal of this lady to abandon her Christmas festival, preparations for which had long been making, and to come sixty-five miles through the frozen wilderness in a toboggan; but I felt sure she would drop everything and come.

For those five days I was busied in close attention to the patients and in strenuous though not altogether availing efforts to maintain a quarantine of the cabin in which they lay. There was little more that I could do than swab out the throats and administer food every two hours.

As the disease advanced it was increasingly painful to swallow and exceedingly difficult to induce the sufferers to make the attempt or to open their mouths for the swabbing. After two or three days the woman seemed to have pa.s.sed the crisis of the disease and to be mending, but the boy, I thought, grew worse. One becomes attached to those to whom one ministers, and this poor, speechless boy, with his terrible throat and the agony in his big black eyes, appealed to me very strongly indeed. It was torture to move his head or to open his mouth, and I had to torture him continually.

Every night I gathered the people for Divine service. Here was a little community far off in the wilds that had carefully conserved and handed on to their children the teaching they had received no less than thirty years before. The native Bibles and prayer-books and hymnals were brought out, bearing dates of publication in the seventies; one of their number acted as leader, and what he read was painfully followed in the well-thumbed books. They lifted their voices in a weird transformation of familiar tunes, with quavers and glides that had crept in through long, uncorrected use, and amongst the prayers said was one for "Our Sovereign lady Queen Victoria, and Albert Edward, Prince of Wales." I tried to explain that Queen Victoria was dead, that they were not living under British rule, and I took a pencil and struck out the prayers for the royal family from the books. But there was doubt in their minds and a reluctance to alter in any particular the liturgy that had been taught them, and it is quite likely that intercessions for a defunct sovereign of another land still arise from the Chandalar village. One cannot but feel a deep admiration for the pioneer missionaries of this region--Bishop Bompas, Archdeacon MacDonald, and the others--whose teaching was so thorough and so lasting, and who lived and laboured here long before any gold seeker had thought of Alaska, when the country was an Indian country exclusively, with none of the comforts and conveniences that can now be enjoyed. It was to a remote cabin on the East Fork of this river that Archdeacon MacDonald retired for a year to make part of his translation of the Bible, according to the Indian account.

[Sidenote: THE SHORTEST DAY]

At noon on the 21st of December, the shortest day, there is a note in my diary that I saw the sun's disk s.h.i.+ning through the trees. Although fully half a degree of lat.i.tude north of the Arctic Circle, the refraction is sufficient to lift his whole sphere above the horizon. One speculates how much farther north it would be possible to see any part of the sun at noon on the shortest day; but north of here, throughout Alaska, is broken and mountainous country. We were on the northern edge of the great flat of the interior.

The fifth day at the village was Christmas Eve. My boy was in a critical condition, very low and weak, with a temperature that stayed around 101 and 102. As night approached I watched with the greatest anxiety for the party from Fort Yukon, and, just as the last lingering glow of the long twilight was fading from the south, there was a distant tinkle of bells on the trail, and faintly once and again a man's voice was raised in command and I knew that relief was at hand.

The nurse had dropped everything and had come, as I felt sure she would.

Gathering medicines and supplies and hiring a native dog team and driver, she had left immediately, and the round trip had been made in the shortest time it was possible to make it. It was a tremendous relief to see her step out of the rugs and robes of the toboggan and take charge of the situation in her quiet, competent way. A small, outlying cabin was selected for a hospital, the family that occupied it bundled out into a tent, and the two sick persons carefully moved into it, with whom and the mother of the sick boy the nurse took up her abode. Then there was the Christmas-tree in the chief's cabin, with little gifts for the children sent out from the mission at Fort Yukon some time before, and a dance afterward, for Christmas festivities must go on, whatever happens, at a native village. I took James's pocket-knife to him after the celebration was over, and I think he really tried to smile as he thanked me with his eyes.

The next day after the services, although it was Christmas Day, we set to work on the disinfecting of the large cabin in which the sick had lain. Stringing bedclothes and wearing apparel on lines from wall to wall, and stuffing up every crack and cranny with cotton, we burned quant.i.ties of sulphur, that the nurse had brought with her, all day long.

A recent article in a stray number of a professional journal picked up in the office of a medical missionary, devoted column after column to the uselessness of all known methods of disinfection. Sulphur, formaldehyde, carbolic acid, permanganate of potash, chloride of lime, b.i.+.c.hloride of mercury--the author knew not which of these "fetiches" to be most sarcastic about. It may be that the net result of our copious fumigation was but the bleaching of the coloured garments hung up, but at least it did no harm. One sometimes wishes that these scientists who sit up so high in the seat of the scornful would condescend to a little plain instruction.

The anti-diphtheritic serum is now kept in readiness at all our missions in Alaska, and the disease seems to have ceased its depredations; but it has taken terrible toll of the native people.

[Sidenote: THE MISSIONARY NURSE]

We wished to stay with the nurse until the sickness should be done, but she would not hear of it, and insisted upon the resumption of our journey. It did not seem right to go off and leave this lonely woman, sixty-five miles from the nearest white person, to cope with an outbreak of disease that might not yet have spent itself, although there had been no new case for a week. "You've done your work here, now leave me to do mine. You'll not get to Point Hope this winter if you stay much longer."

"Aren't you afraid to stay all by yourself?" I asked, somewhat fatuously.

"Afraid? Afraid of what? You surely don't mean afraid of the natives?"

I did not know what I meant; it seemed not unnatural that a woman with such prospect before her should be a little timid, but she was resolute that we go, and we went.

Not until the next summer did I learn the upshot--both patients recovered and there was no other case. Six years later, when these words are written, I have just baptized a son of the boy who lay so ill, who would have perished, I think, had we not reached the Chandalar village just in time.

CHAPTER II

CHANDALAR VILLAGE TO BETTLES, COLDFOOT, AND THE KOYUKUK

AT five o'clock in the morning of the 27th of December, hours before any kind of daylight, while the faint "pit-pat" of all-night dancing still sounded from the chief's cabin, we dropped down the steep bank to the river surface and resumed our journey. Ahead was a man with a candle in a tin can, peering for the faint indications of the trail on the ice; the other two were at the handle-bars of the toboggans. It is strange that in this day of invention and improvement in artificial illumination, a candle in a tin can is still the most dependable light for the trail. A coal-oil lamp requires a gla.s.s which is easily broken, and the ordinary coal-oil that comes to Alaska freezes at about 40 below. In very cold weather a coal-oil lantern full of oil will go out completely from the freezing of its supply. All the various acetylene lamps are useless because water is required to generate the gas, and water may not be had without stopping and building a fire and melting ice or snow. The electric flash-lamp, useful enough round camp, goes out of operation altogether on the trail, because the "dry" cell that supplies its current is not a dry cell at all, but a moist cell, and when its moisture freezes is dead until it thaws out again. No extremity of cold will stop a candle from burning, and if it be properly sheltered by the tin can it will stand a great deal of wind. The "folding pocket lantern," which is nothing but a convenient tin can with mica sides, is the best equipment for travel, but an empty b.u.t.ter can or lard can is sometimes easier to come by.

The Chandalar is wide-spread in these parts, with several channels, and the trail was hard to follow. One track we pursued led us up a bank and along a portage and presently stopped at a marten trap; and we had to cut across to the river and cast about hither and thither on its broad surface to find the mail trail.

[Sidenote: THE CHANDALAR GAP]

All the rivers that are confluent with the Yukon in the Flats enter that dreary region through gaps in the mountains that bound the broad plain.

These gaps are noted for wind, and the Chandalar Gap, which had loomed before us since daybreak, is deservedly in especial bad repute. The most hateful thing in the Arctic regions is the wind. Cold one may protect one's self against, but there is no adequate protection against wind.

The parkee without opening front or back, that pulls on over the head, is primarily a windbreak, and when a scarf is wrapped around mouth and nose, and the fur-edged hood of the parkee is pulled forward over cap and scarf, the traveller who must face the wind has done all he can to protect himself from it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SUNRISE ON THE CHANDALAR-KOYUKUK PORTAGE.]

Unfortunately, in the confusion of striking the tent and packing in the dark, my scarf had been rolled up in the bedding, and, since the wind was not bad until we approached the Gap in the evening, I had not troubled about it. Now, as we drew nearer and nearer, the wind rose constantly. The thermometer was at 38 below zero, and wind at that temperature cuts like a knife. But to get my scarf meant stopping the whole procession and unlas.h.i.+ng and unloading the sled, and the man who unlashed in that wind would almost certainly freeze his fingers. So I gave up the thought of it, turned my back to the wind while I tied my pocket handkerchief round mouth and nose, drew the strings of my parkee hood close, and then faced it again to worry through as best I could.

The ice is always swept clear of snow in the Gap. The river narrows within its jaws, the ragged rocks rise up to the bluffs on either hand, and the blue-streaked ice stretches between. We all suffered a good deal. Against that cruel wind it was impossible to keep warm. The hands, though enclosed in woollen gloves, and they in blanket-lined moose-hide mitts, grew numb; the toes, within their protection of caribou sock with the hair on, strips of blanket wrapping, and mukluks stuffed with hay, tingled with warning of frost-bite; the whole body was chilled. We all froze our faces, I think, for the part of the face around and between the eyes cannot be covered. I froze my cheeks, my nose, and my Adam's apple, the last a most inconvenient thing to freeze.

[Ill.u.s.tration: COLDFOOT ON THE KOYUKUK.]

[Sidenote: A COLD LODGING]

The cabin was just the other side of the Gap, and it was well that it was no farther, for we were weary with our thirty-mile run and dangerously cold with the exposure of the last hour. It was rather a large cabin as trail cabins go, with a rickety sheet-iron stove in the middle, burned full of holes, and it was hours before the fire began to make any impression on the obstinate, sullen cold of that hut. When we went to bed the frost still stood thick and heavy on the walls all over the room. A log building, properly constructed, is a warm building, but slowness in parting with heat means slowness in receiving heat, and a log cabin that has been unoccupied for a long time in very cold weather is hard to heat in one evening.